The Lady & the Tramp

IT HAD BEEN A MILD, DELICATE NIGHT (126 pp.)--Tom Kaye--Abelard-Schuman ($3.50).

This startling first novel is a sinuous pagan rite. Faith is a sort of classic nymph, but instead of trees, rivers and mountains, she haunts galleries, fine restaurants and her tasteful London house. Jacques is an ageless satyr, but instead of tootling the pipes of Pan in some mythic glade, he rummages in London garbage cans and beds down on park benches. He is human dirt, but of a kind that makes the earth earthy. She is refined past the point of passion, yet curiously unawakened, nervously expectant. In the hands of a less urbane stylist, a sexual encounter between Faith and Jacques could be a coarse joke. But British Novelist Tom Kaye omits four-letter words; he is celebrating a four-letter god, Eros, the deity he believes makes the world go round.

Opiate Art. The story starts innocently enough. For Jacques, the sun trumpets reveille in a park. For Faith, the day begins at the dressing table, in a mood of ambiguous relief: her nice, ineffectual doctor husband has just left town for a convention. She trots off to a museum, where the novel develops one of its subthemes, that art is the opiate of the upper middle classes, a device for sampling life at one remove, just as a zoo permits a safe sampling of raw nature.

But there is plenty of raw nature later on, in Faith's shocked first view of Jacques, hirsute, leering and shamelessly voiding in the gutter. As the summer day becomes more oppressive, his face and form become obsessive--at a tea-shop window, in a doorway, clomping along with his crippled leg like an ogre in a bad dream. Jacques' deformity, of course, is in the eye of the beholder; as Author Kaye sees it, the tramp is whole and the world is emotionally crippled.

Future Novel. Author Kaye seems a little self-conscious about his aims--the setting up of organic v. organization man, authentic v. inauthentic life. As a neo-pagan body cultist, he is forced to deny the claims of mind and spirit and reduce the variety of human relationships to that of hunter and prey. What Author Kaye has to offer that is new is not his message but his fictional mode. The realistic novel is gradually going bankrupt. It has mapped out the geography of the environment from battlefront to suburban home front from Main Street to Madison Avenue. And the inner man has been heavily depth-probed by Proust, Joyce & Co. Novelist Kaye's book suggests that the novel of the future may take the path of myth and mystery, allegory and fable. For too long, the true has been confused with the real or the merely realistic. In its deceptively unpretentious way, Kaye's book is an emancipation proclamation for the nonrealistic novel.

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