Harry & Leckie

ADRIFT IN SOHO (229 pp.]--Colin Wilson--Houqhfon Mifflin ($3.50).

THE GREATER IMPORTUNE (191 pp.)--Rayner Heppenstall--New Directions ($3.75).

Enter a new kind of English hero. He is young but not angry. He couldn't care less about whether there is room at the top. He is a vague and vagrant first person singular who drifts through a colloid of far-out characters that are his (and his plot's) only visible means of support. His mate is a dim, dumb, sensible girl, who pulls up his socks from time to time and does her best to dry his tears of existential anguish.

Authors Colin Wilson and Rayner Heppenstall are an improbable two-piano team. Wilson, 30, is the lank young man who scored five years ago with a precocious, philosophicallow book of criticism called The Outsider, and has produced three non-scores since. Heppenstall, 50. is a respected British critic (The Fourfold Tradition) and novelist (The Blaze of Noon) whose writing style has a precise elegance. But in these two books they are hammering away at the same theme. The music is not much; the main difference is that Heppenstall can really play.

Bourgeois Animal. Wilson's Adrift in Soho is about Harry, who felt like "a trapped animal" in his Midlands town. So he came to London with about -L-25, a cardboard suitcase and a haversack full of books to practice his trade of being a poet and philosopher. Almost immediately he meets his mate, a New Zealander named Doreen, and his mentor, a sometime actor named Charles Compton Street. Charles introduces him to the fine art of living without working--cadging food and drink, stealing an occasional rare book, sleeping on suburban trains or on somebody's floor. Charles also introduces him to a series of Soho oddballs whose rhythmic appearance and disappearance constitute what there is of a story line. In the end, Harry and Doreen move into a house in Ladbroke

Road run by a painter so suspicious of success that he jumps out the window and runs for it when rich art patrons come to buy his paintings. Here Harry has his moment of selfdiscovery: "For better or worse, I am a bourgeois. Doreen made some tea. Presumably, she had known it all along.

A Pig at Christmas. Heppenstall's The Greater Infortune concerns a Scot named A. W. Leckie who goes bankrupt, settles in London with his incredibly cheerful wife Alison, and begins to subsist on handouts from a rich homosexual. He goes partying with a congeries of unlovable eccentrics, such as the frail and balding Gabriel Fantl, who was "reputed to have more women by the month than any known man,'' elderly Effie, who had three ghosts (a poltergeist, Thomas De Quincey, and a half-man, half-beast), and Flora Massingham, "as fat and pink as a pig at Christmas," who took him to see a magic show where a young woman was really sawed in half. "I said: 'Well, what's the explanation?' Flora Massingham said: 'there isn't any explanation. He just saws them in two. He has a different young woman every week.' Someone screamed and was told to shut up. Flora Massingham said: 'Come on, we'd better go. You're not supposed to hang about afterwards.' "

After experiencing a well-earned nervous breakdown. Leckie is brought round to his bourgeois salvation by the advent of Alison's baby and World War II. Registering for military service, he wondered what to put down as his profession. "I thought to put 'gentleman,' but decided that I did not look the part. 'Bankrupt?' Accurate, but liable to cause prejudice. By what had I kept myself alive for the greater part of my adult life? By faith. Faith and appeal to motherly instinct in the middle-aged . . . Evidently I had no profession."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.