Summer Reverie

A SOUVENIR FROM QAM by Marc Connelly. 192 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.50.

The honored guest of Sajjid, King of Suruk, is Newton Bemis, a 29-year-old biophysicist. "You are know who to be are all those peoples on horses, Misser Bemis?" asks the king in a transport of hospitality, as they ride through ranks of uniformed troops prancing on the road to Qam, the capital city. "Soldiers men. All guns do been shooted for say hello. Soldiers do raising Lord Harry to be like saying, 'Happy welcome of Suruk, Misser Bemis!' "

Untidy Muse. This book makes no more sense than the king's English, but it projects the same fey charm. It is no longer than a summer's reverie in an aluminum chaise longue, where it was clearly designed to be read. Its gossamer plot drifts like a cloud; its characters have all the substantiality of that scarlet flash in the lilac bush that may have been a hummingbird. What delicate diplomatic mission has brought Bemis to Suruk? Why does Sajjid offer him $1,000,000 to come, and why does Bemis refuse the fee? For what reason has Farha, the king's nubile 19-year-old niece, educated in "Sfeezerlaunt," stowed away on Bemis' homebound plane? And why, in heaven's name, do they play chess en route?

The world will not stop spinning to hear the answers. It had better not, because Author Connelly's untidy muse has not bothered to tie up every loose end. Characters muster on whim, and for the same reason dissolve like smoke; promising bends in the plot lead nowhere at all, like garden paths. This should bother no one but the literal-minded reader, who is seldom found in a chaise longue anyway.

What Became Of? At 74, Marc Connelly has no reputation as a novelist, never having written a novel before. Connelly is the man who wrote The Green Pastures, an unforgettable delight that opened on Broadway 35 years ago, ran for 640 performances there and 1,002 more on the road. Its Negro cast spoke in outrageous dialect: "Gangway for de Lawd!" Black angels held fish fries in Heaven and dispensed 10-c- seegars to newcomers. It might jar contemporary liberals, but Pastures in its day had all the impact of a Negro spiritual; it won the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Before Pastures, Connelly collaborated with George S. Kaufman on such hits as Dulcy and Merton of the Movies. Since then he has sojourned for ten years in Hollywood, writing and doctoring movie scripts (Captains Courageous, I Married a Witch), and has contributed short stories and humor to The New Yorker--a magazine he helped found. He has also produced and directed Broadway shows (Everywhere 1 Roam, Having Wonderful

Time), played the narrator in Our Town in Manhattan and London donned a judge's robes for courtroom scenes in TV's The Defenders. For the future, Connelly's publisher has set the greenest writer in his stable to producing another novel, this one to take place on a South Pacific isle too small to make the maps.

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