Mixed Fiction

RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP, by Commander Edward L. Beach, U.S.N. (364 pp.; Holt; $3.95). President Eisenhower's naval aide, 36, topflight submariner and author of the best account to date of undersea combat (Submarine!), has now written his first novel. It is a war novel, with a vengeance. Ed Richardson runs into just about every heart-stopping jam that a Medal-of-Honor-winning pigboat skipper can get into and out of in the battle against Japan. While ripping up shipping all around the Western Pacific, he tangles with "Bungo Pete," the cunning old Japanese ex-submariner whose beaten-up destroyer guards the southern approaches to Japan's Inland Sea. Though Commander Richardson's Walrus blows a whole Japanese convoy apart, a shell from Bungo Pete cracks Richardson's leg. After sweating out the hospital and a stretch of shore duty in Hawaii, he learns that Bungo Pete has sunk the Walrus, skippered by his former executive officer. With a fury worthy of Melville's Captain Ahab, Richardson takes another submarine straight to Bungo Pete's lair. One stormy night he lures Pete out, torpedoes Pete's tincan and his sucker-bait freighter, and to make vengeance dead sure, rams and sinks all lifeboats. Even when the yarn runs right away with him, Author Beach keeps jamming in the authentic details, the tingling stress, the sweaty crush, of the submariners' war. This is he-man's, seaman's, reading, with only a dash of home-base romance.

AN IMPOSSIBLE MARRIAGE, by Pamela Hansford Johnson (344 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; ($3.75) is as feminine as a tearoom at high noon. The yatter is about 1) love, 2) men, 3) women, and 4) the fixes 2 and 3 get themselves into over 1. Christine Jackson, the first-person British heroine of the story, is 18, lonely and romantic.

After a few stray kiss-and-cuddle sessions with boys her own age, she meets 32-year-old Ned Skelton ("He's a man's man--brrr! Poona and all that"). Ned is brutal; she takes it for masculinity. He hates her friends; she takes that for judgment. They have ugly little quarrels; she takes them for tiffs of true love. To Christine, marriage is a kind of exclusive club for grownups, and she is willing to pay any fee to join. With Ned, the fees come high, for he turns out to be a slack-spined, hapless sort who has to be propped up by his family whenever the going gets rough. By the time they call it quits, Christine can admit her romantic error: "It is only when we are mature that we ask nothing of love, when love is itself the far country that is also home." Versatile Novelist Johnson--who is also a critic, a playwright and the wife of British Novelist C. P. (The New Men) Snow--sketches her woman's world, from perennial vamps to bone-weary matrons, with authority and skill. The book may not be everybody's cup of tea, but at least it is the strong-flavored, real thing--not some substitute out of a literary tea bag.

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