A Power of Talk

THE OLD MAN'S BOY GROWS OLDER (302 pp.)--Robert Ruark--Holt, Rme-hart & Winston ($4.95).

A first-class barroom talker, which Robert Ruark is, needs a knockabout past, a creative memory, sufficient humor to see the vanity of his inventions, and a delivery good enough to shield from his listeners the gravy stains on material, memory and wit. With this equipment, a talker who happens to be, say, a journalist, can Jang out a newspaper column for years in an average daily elapsed time of eleven minutes (so Newspaperman Ruark has coasted; one suspects the creative memory is an aid in recounting the feat). Or he can put together two volumes of yarns about his boyhood and overgrown-boyhood that have the virtues, and all of the faults, of good, whiskyish, late-evening reminiscence.

Ruark learned to read, mind his manners and hunt quail under the guidance of his grandfather, a leathery old Southport, N.C., Socrates who, in his literary reincar nation in The Old Man and the Boy, was good company but perhaps a little too fond of saying such things as "children ain't nothin' but puppies anyhow." This second book is more of the same, with a few of Ruark's African adventures thrown in. Like the first, it is written in sloppy, shoes-off language, and the fact that the author now buys his shoes for pounds sterling in London does not prevent him from typing "ain'ts" into his copy. "Know" is translated "reckon," "a lot" becomes "a power," g's are dropped conscientiously, and "God," sorrily enough, becomes "the boss weather-maker."

The charm of ^--dropping has its limits, but Ruark rambles entertainingly about hunting, about shipping out on a rust-bucket freighter, and about the Old Man's tactful peace overtures to a Boy who has run away and who wishes his pride allowed him to run home again. It may occur to the reader that what the author has preserved is not merely leaf pressings of his own boyhood. The time has passed already, for instance, when most boys in the U.S. dreamed for three months a year of the opening of quail season. For that matter, the time has passed already when an African safari was something more than a long bus ride. It is well known that reminiscence disarrays the wits, and that the old days were by no means as good as the present ones. But city boys and city men who read Ruark's book may find it hard not to forgive him his artfully mussed diction and his sentimentality. They may even forgive him for telling of the same tiger shoot three times in 300 pages.

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