Current & Various

YESTERDAY IS TOMORROW by Malvina Hoffman. 378 pages. Crown. $7.50.

"You have the damned American facility for making sketches," growled Sculptor Auguste Rodin. She also had a facility for making friends, so Malvina Hoffman, daughter of English-born Pianist Richard Hoffman, combined both, carved herself a career as a fashionable sculptor. Rodin, Gutzon Borglum, Ivan Mestrovic were her teachers; Mrs. E. H. Harriman was a patroness; and some of her best friends were subjects: Pianist-Statesman Ignace Paderewski, Dancer Anna Pavlova, Surgeon Harvey Cushing, Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. In addition to portraits of the wealthy and the famous, the indefatigable Malvina accepted commissions for the monument to English-American friendship at Bush House, London; 104 life-size studies for the Races of Man series at Chicago's Natural History Museum; the American War Memorial at Epinal, France; a flagpole for IBM; a road marker for Milliken Mills. Now 80, she tells all about everything in this book of leisurely, ladylike reminiscences. To judge from the illustrations, the style of her sculpture is public monument modern. To judge from this book, Author Hoffman thinks that her life as a Murray Hill bohemian has been interesting and imagines that everyone else will find it so.

THE SEAT OF POWER by James D. Horan. 438 pages. Crown. $5.95.

Now assistant managing editor of Hearst's New York Journal-American, James D. Horan has spent much of his 35-year newspaper career as an investigative reporter or "digger." In this labyrinthine novel, he describes the city's seamy side vividly, if repetitiously: the sticky-fingered cops who protect the numbers racket; the Mafia-type Italians in East Harlem who run it, along with sundry other unsavory businesses; and bought judges who sanction it all. With other specimens of the "inside" novel genre, this one has several characters whose real-life models are familiar --the rabble-rousing, white-hating black fanatic named the Prophet, the Italian rackets czar named Vito, the acquisitive, balance-sheet-conscious newspaper owner. Horan is best at sketching in the details of corruption. It is a picture so shocking that it would strain credulity--were it not for the fact that most of the scandals he telescopes into a brief winter in the mid-1960s happened, over a longer period, in New York City. In Koran's book, however, the scandals get solved and the villains get caught.

A MAN'S WORLD by William Camp. 191 pages. Lyle Stuart. $3.

It was some time ago that Hester Prynne elevated suburban adultery to a community sport in the U.S. The British, as Author Camp tells it, still have not quite got the hang of the game. Sarah Hewitt is the "scarlet woman of Bickerton" in the London exurbs, squired everywhere by the hearty Derek while her husband puts his life into his work in the City. Things are not what they seem: Sarah has not earned her letter at all, but is merely a bench-warmer wrestling around in the raw without ever quite coming to the point. Even when Sarah moves on to a more serious infatuation with impecunious Old Boy Stephen Hunter, their long awaited red-letter day turns out to be a nightmare: Stephen is impotent except when he is asleep. The result is that everybody suffers the penalties of adulterous anguish without ever tasting any of its furtive thrills in this drab, oddly flat, moral tale, and Camp's followers to the end are left to sigh with Sarah's spouse: "The world would be a far happier place if people weren't always analyzing their motives and ventilating their complexes."

PINKTOES by Chester Himes. 256 pages. Putnam-Stein & Day. $5.

This latest morsel from the previously published-only-in-Paris works of Olympia Press will disappoint smut lovers everywhere. It is at best a poor scraping from the bottom of the Candy barrel. Mamie Mason, Harlem hostess with the mostest, sets out to solve the Race Problem in her own forthright fashion by aiding and abetting two-tone cohabitation as widely and as often as possible among her vast collage of acquaintances. As a single, running, off-color joke, the novel turns out to be neither very funny nor very dirty. The level of its humor is set by Negro Author Chester Himes in a laboriously arch preface that explains that "pinktoes is a term of indulgent affection applied to white women by Negro men, and sometimes conversely by Negro women to white men, but never adversely by either." Sample line: "Her moments of tender intimacy with a big fine white man, if all were put together, would make a fine Swiss watch." Man!

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