Current & Various

PADDY ON SUNDAYS by Edward Caddick. 245 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.

Anyone who embarks on this first novel is likely to stay with it to the end. The story is kept tautly suspended by a narrative skill that holds the reader even after he has begun to suspect, and rightly, that the structure is not as secure as it seemed. Len Price, a stubborn, unhappy British boy of poor and neglectful parents, lives out a fantasy life on Sundays at the London zoo. There his friend is a dotty old woman who calls him Paddy and firmly believes that his parents are both wealthy and solicitous. Len's castles crumble to make the author's point: that no one understands, or even really wants to, the dream world of a troubled child. Author Caddick does not fully understand either: through the gaps in Len's little-boy disguise peeks a much older man. Paddy on Sundays is a promissory note signed by a talent that should surely grow.

THE MARBLE FAUN AND A GREEN BOUGH by William Faulkner. 118 pages. Random House. $4.75.

Great men sometimes have idiot children. Novelist William Faulkner, for instance, produced two volumes of verse. Republished under one cover after being out of print for several decades, they made an arrestingly gruesome twosome. The Marble Faun, written when Faulkner was 21, is a dollop of schoolboyish Shelley-shallying in which Pan and Philomel pipe and warble, and every other word is ah or ye or 'neath or hark. A Green Bough, published when he was 36 and should have known better, seems on the contrary the work of a village Eliot.

Will you have more tea? Cigarettes? No? I thank her, waiting for her to go.

Clearly, verse was not Faulkner's form; but talent will out. Here and there beneath these slight conventional measures, the primeval force that fills the novels flexes disturbingly, like an anaconda in organdy.

On every hill battalioned trees March skyward on unmoving knees, And like a spider on a veil Climbs the moon. A nightingale, Lost in the trees against the sky, Loudly repeats its jewelled cry.

A GIFT OF LAUGHTER by Allan Sherman. 335 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

Allan Sherman decided early that he had to laugh. His father was an automobile mechanic and inventor who belted down bourbon by the glassful and disappeared when Allan was six. His mother was a fun-loving flapper who had four husbands and bought books with jackets to harmonize with her draperies. Sherman grew up in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and New York. After 21 public schools and the University of Illinois, he packed up a suitcase full of his songs, settled down in New York for seven lean years as a starving television gagwriter. Then one day he and a friend thought up the idea for I've Got a Secret, and he settled down for seven fat years as a Madison Avenue television producer. He insists that it was a nightmare. Transferred to the Coast, he lost his job producing the Steve Allen Show, and was picking up relief checks when he cut My Son, the Folk Singer; he has been rolling in record royalties and showbiz success jobs ever since. In this garrulously ingratiating book, Sherman appears as a half-crass, half-crushed victim of his own success. "You've got to run very fast to stay where you are," he says, borrowing inspiration from Lewis Carroll. He insists that he hates it.

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