Mixed Fiction

THE MEMOIRS OF A CROSS-EYED MAN, by James Wellard (246 pp.; St. Martin's Press: $3). Hulking British Schoolmaster Thomas Ashe was a flop as a ladies' man, and knew it. His nose was bulbous, his mustache like a thicket, and his eyes were crossed. But when he is crowding 49, they suddenly blaze with fresh fervor at the sight of an 18-year-old ballerina named Shala Delisle. He sees in her "the meaning and import of my life, my un-climbed peak, my terra incognita, my uncharted sea, my route to the Blessed Isles." Ignited with a Galahad-pure flame of romance. Ashe chucks everything to pursue "the most beautiful woman in the world."

This dedicated quest for the quail leads Ashe to a strange world. In a Hollywood encampment in Tunisia, where Cosmic International is filming The Queen of Carthage, he finds the lovely Shala up to her violet eyes in swains. Her "little shock of incredulity" on seeing him for the first time yields to ever greater shocks as Ashe clanks through her admiring herd, disconcerting the urbane and unhorsing the sophisticated by sheer force of his awkward ardor. He pokes an oil princeling in the snoot, almost drowns the handsome son of the grand vizier. In a final melodramatic bid for Shala's heart. he parachutes into the Sahara Desert to engage a rival in mortal combat. Caught up in his exuberant campaign, he scarcely notices that his love has run off to another man.

As a wryly witty narrator of his own adventure, Ashe is allowed enough self-knowledge to be ingratiating, enough self-deception to touch the fun lightly with pathos. Memoirs is small beer, but it keeps its tang.

THE CROSSING, by Jean Reverzy (256 pp.; Pantheon; $3.50). The French eye is quick to see beauty, even quicker to see the fatal corruption that lies beneath. This disquieting first novel by a French physician has such a theme: it tells of Palabaud, who has spent sunlit years in Tahiti and has now come home to the bourgeois grey of France to die of an enormously swollen liver.

Palabaud has seen the swift ruin of so much beauty that death holds no terror. He remembers how quickly the lovely bronzed Polynesians fade, how at 30 their "faces become shrivelled and deformed . . . and bodies which were formerly shapely either swell or collapse into meagreness." His beautiful Tahitian mistress had come home with him, but in European clothes her soft body loses form and boldness, her sandaled feet seem flat and ugly. Palabaud dies peacefully in a hospital bed, his mind awash with memories of the sea he had always loved. A few shreds of his corpse are sent to the laboratory, where, under the microscope, "an unfamiliar aspect of Palabaud would be revealed: patterns of polygonal cells, sections of vessels appearing as small circles, granular clusters, trusses of tangled fibrils. And that would be the last aspect left to mankind of the timid vagabond of islands and oceans.'' Mortal beauty and even mortal existence, Author Reverzy suggests, are never more than a bright buckler for mortal decay. But a courageous death, a first act of spirit, can give meaning to the most trifling life.

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