Writer's Luck

MY PLACE IN THS BAZAAR (233 pp.) --Alec Waugh-- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.95).

Author Alec Waugh, 62, has had a literary career more frustrating than most. He wrote his first novel at 17, but when it appeared to glowing reviews, young Alec was a British lieutenant busy dodging enemy shells in France. By the time he got home to London, via a German prison camp, the novel was virtually forgotten. Back in civvies, Alec Waugh soon found himself laboring manfully in the shadow of his more gifted and glamorous younger brother, Evelyn, now 57, who vaulted quickly to fame with a succession of esoterically savage novels, from Decline and Fall to The Loved One.

The short stories of this collection are told in the first person and appear in chronological order. As such, they are links in Alec Waugh's own footloose life, beginning with his callow saunterings through Soho restaurants and Mayfair drawing rooms and ending with surprise encounters in tropic seas. As Alec Waugh sojourns from Malayan rice fields to Levantine hospitals, from German opera houses to sleepy islands in the Indian Ocean, his plots rise happily out of the travelogue prose. In The Last Chukka, the British manager of a Siamese lumber camp imagines that he has leprosy and goes jungle-crazy; in "Tahiti Waits," a young man avoids marrying the girl he loves by plunging into a passionate affair with a vahine; in The Wicked Baronet, a mystery that began on a slow train through Wessex is resolved on a sun-dappled veranda in the Virgin Islands. The sea change caused by these junketings around the globe is generally favorable to Waugh's writing. In his 1926 The Making of a Matron, he needed 17 pages to dissect the not-too-complex character of a London deb; in 1942, when writing Bien Sur, he required only six pages to tell infinitely more about a charming, pliant Lebanese girl whose good sense and good nature made war agreeable to Allied soldiers.

Author Waugh's aim, reflected in his title, is to be the kind of storyteller he has encountered in the bazaars of Baghdad and Marrakech, surrounded by an absorbed audience squatting on their haunches. His own modest place in the literary bazaar seems assured so long as readers want to hear about far places where men are sorely tested by extreme situations, all told in simple sentences and short paragraphs.

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