Wuthering Depths

RADCLIFFE by David Storey. 376 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

The love that dare not speak its name has become the neurosis that does not know when to shut up, and the reader may be forgiven for receiving glumly the news that still another fictional treatment of homosexualism has been published. And, in the case of Radcliffe, despite a fitful display of considerable writing skill by young British Novelist David Storey, the gloom is justified.

Radcliffe is a "big" novel of the kind which, in English literature, at least, has been turned out almost exclusively by U.S. writers since World War II. Weighty issues are mentioned weightily, and the kettledrums are almost never silent. Before Storey is through, he has confronted the reader with the alienation of the individual, the decline of the aristocratic tradition, the nastiness of the mass, the calamitous Christian duality of soul and body, and almost everything else that could be considered a factor in the decline of the West. Given a Norman Mailer of their own after years of Kingsley Amis, many British critics praised Storey wildly, some of them using the dread word "major."

Leonard Radcliffe, the novel's hero, is a frail, foul, moonstruck young man, the son of a troubled aristocrat who has taken a job as caretaker of his decaying family's decaying mansion. From his childhood it has been clear that Leonard is brilliant and in some way blighted. For several chapters, the best of the book, it seems that Storey intends to revive that abandoned form, the psychological novel. His dry, astringent description of Leonard's decline into adulthood is drawn from that curious middle ground between detachment and involvement that Dostoevsky used.

But the novelist loses control when Leonard falls under the influence of Victor Tolson, a muscular, mindless working-class homosexual who lives in the housing project that surrounds the Radcliffe mansion. Tolson lurks about the shrubbery like the hound of the Baskervilles, and sexual symbols parade through the paragraphs wearing sandwich signs. Superfluous minor characters become infected with the author's garrulity, deliver portentous sermons, and then drift off to irresolution. The dry prose becomes dewy. There are long, dare-taking sex scenes of the kind that, in he-she form, would seem overwritten in a Frank Yerby novel. Storey's tactic is not to ask the reader to tolerate homosexualism intellectually, but to acquiesce emotionally, thus merely increasing the reader's impatience.

What is left when the scenery stops falling? Well, the book can be seen to be an enormous, lavender metaphor: Leonard is soul, Victor is body, opposed in unnatural self-division. The most pompous piffler since Colin Wilson takes 376 pages to plumb this irrelevancy to its wuthering depths. One vote for Mailer.

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