Fast Company

THE LOST CITY by John Gunther. 594 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

For a brash young Chicago Daily News correspondent named John Gunther, Vienna in the early '30s was about the most exciting assignment on earth. The city was charmed and doomed, as elegant, perverse and scandal loving as an aging archduchess. Though tiny post-Versailles Austria (pop. 6,760,000) teetered perennially on the edge of bankruptcy, the ancient Hapsburg capital was still the political and financial nerve center of the Balkans. As Europe slid into the chaos of depression and approaching war, the Viennese reveled in the musicmaking of Richard Strauss, Lotte Lehman and Bruno Walter; they entrusted their psyches to Sigmund Freud and his rivals, and indefatigably dissected Stefan Zweig's novels or Joseph Schumpeter's economics in the city's celebrated cafes, fueling the endless talkfest with the best beer and coffee in the world.

Golden Age. For Gunther, who arrived there in 1930, it also meant some pretty fast journalistic company. Such famed Vienna hands and visiting correspondents as Vincent Sheean, William L. Shirer, the New York Evening Post's roving Dorothy Thompson and its resident Balkanologist M. W. ("Mike") Fodor, I.N.S.'s H. R. Knickerbocker, the Chicago Daily News's Negley Farson--and many other now-legendary figures--were Gunther's cablehead competitors and constant cafe companions. Together, they zestfully created the profession and the mystique of the U.S. foreign correspondent, and built the by-lined reputations that made that era a golden age of American reporting from abroad. Now, three decades and two dozen books later, Gunther returns to those glamorous years in nostalgic fiction. It is an Inside job.

The hero of the novel answers to the name of Mason Jarrett, but he strongly resembles guntherized Gunther. A rumpled bear of a man, working for a Chicago paper, he covers all southeastern Europe from Istanbul to Prague. Jarrett also has Gunther's herculean capacity for hard work, his shrewd journalistic intuition, the same flair for intimate background stories about nations and their leaders; and he is in on every major event from Austria's abortive 1931 attempt to form a customs union with Germany to its four-day civil war in February 1934, when the fascist Heitnwehr militia crushed the socialists. Despite Gunther's insistence that all his characters are imaginary, readers are sure to be chewing for some time over the strong resemblances between Mason Jarrett's colleagues and Gunther's own. What is clearly not at all fictional is the authentic flavor and loving detail of the city, the times, and the correspondent's life.

Shoveled Cream. If Gunther had left it at that, his book would be a fascinating fictionalized reminiscence. Unfortunately, he succumbs to the Viennese weakness for whipped cream, mountains of it, wherever possible. After a connubial kiss on page 20--"Bending over and with his hand cupped like a trowel he lifted her chin"--Jarrett's hand more often resembles a shovel. His amatory adventures are mawkish, his professional exploits downright unbelievable: before the book's end he has even manned a machine gun to help fight off the Heimwehr.

Journalist Gunther, who wrote two best-forgotten novels when he was Mason Jarrett's age, has yearned for years to bring off a fictional tour de force. This is not it, though it is sometimes absorbing when it approaches the factual memoir of vintage Vienna that he might have written instead--and still should. As Gunther himself put it some years ago, "How can you write about boy meets girl when you had Hitler and Mussolini next door?"

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