Mixed Fiction

THE GOLDEN PRINCESS, by Alexander Baron (378 pp.; Ives Washburn; $3.95), is a novel of high adventure telling how Hernando Cortes conquered Mexico with the aid of his Indian mistress. Skeptics to the contrary, English Author Baron is dealing no joker from the historical deck; it really happened that way. Malinali, or Marina, as the Spaniards christened her, emerges as a tawny tidbit just turned 18 and just about Cortes' first Mexican conquest. Intelligent and fearless, she soon comes to share his council as well as his bed. On the long, fierce road to the golden halls of Montezuma, Cortes relies on her as his eyes, ears and translating tongue. Faithful Marina also bears Cortes a son. Yet Novelist Baron never allows her to blot out the challenging figure of the great conquistador. His Cortes is a hypnotic leader who can inspire lukewarm, greedy fighters to swashbuckle down to their job. Exploring the inner man as well, Author Baron describes Cortes as a Byron turning Napoleonic, as a would-be servant of God becoming the Devil's disciple, slaughtering some 250,000 Aztecs in the famed siege of Tenochtitlan. Remembered for a superior World War II novel (From the City, from the Plough), Novelist Baron has switched easily from Sten guns to harquebuses, splashes his pages with just the right mixture of bravery and bravura. But beyond that, he captures what few historical novelists even pursue--the moment of impact between two cultures, Western man of the high Renaissance forcing his Faustian will on the passive, hieratic Aztec civilization as it muses in "a trance of centuries."

HOMECOMING, by Jiro Osaragi (303 pp.; Knopf; $3.75). Billed as a major achievement of Japan's postwar literature, the novel at its best is an unblinking account of the high cost of survival in a defeated country. At its worst, Homecoming plays the old tearjerking Enoch Arden plot to the accompaniment of samisens instead of violins. Kyogo Moriya is a fiftyish Japanese ex-naval officer who sits out the first part of World War II in self-exile in Singapore because of a youthful gambling scandal. There a svelte adventuress two-times him into jail. Back in Japan after war's end, he sedulously avoids his wife, who has remarried in the meantime, and his grown-up daughter. He gets caught up with a whole series of characters who are more representative than real: a serious painter who stays alive by strumming a guitar in a sleazy cabaret, an ex-admiral who checks shipments at a soap factory, a black-marketeering student with a nose for yen and a yen for such un-Japanese customs as holding hands and kissing. Like identical beads, these characters are threaded on the same theme another Japanese novelist, Kikou Yamata, recently used in her spare and superior novel, Lady of Beauty (TIME, Aug. 30). The theme: Japan isn't what it used to be. In traditional Japanese style. Author Osaragi frequently confuses his writing hand with the long arm of coincidence. He arranges no happy ending, but he does fashion a moving confrontation between Kyogo and his daughter and a sex-sizzling finale with the double-crossing adventuress.

THE BLACK PRINCE, by Shirley Ann Grau (294 pp.; Knopf; $3.50), is the most impressive U.S. short story debut between hard covers since J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories (1953). Only 25, daughter of an old New Orleans family, Author Grau describes herself as "a thoroughly ordinary sort of person." Her book proves she. is not, at least not when she settles down before her typewriter. Sticking to what she knows, she tells of Southerners, black and white, of their problems and of the ordinary pressures of common experience. But Author Grau makes ordinariness seem pressing. At least three of these nine stories are unsuccessful, but the remaining ones cover a variety of emotion and background that are remarkable in the work of a young author. The title story tells of a love affair between young Negroes in the dreariest and poorest part of a southern state, where the main recreations are boozing and fighting. Against this squalid background the affair has first the quality of a simple idyl, but after its bloody, tragic ending it takes on the shape of legend. In Joshua, which takes place during World War II, an imaginative Negro youngster proves his courage by doing what the Bayou fishermen, including his father, do not dare do: he paddles down to the Gulf where surfaced German subs have fired at the fishing boats. One Summer is a beautifully effective story about a young white boy's first experience with death. Author Grau is short on plot, long on intuition, and lyrical without stumbling into sentimentality. Her ambition is "to write an even dozen novels." These stories suggest that it would be a fine thing for U.S. readers if she did.

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