Short Notices

THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED by William S. Burroughs. 217 pages. Grove Press. $5.

The works of William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, Nova Express) have been taken seriously, even solemnly, by some literary types, including Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. Actually, Burroughs' work adds up to the world's pluperfect put-on. The publisher's blurb on the dust jacket attempts to legitimize his latest effusion thus: "Through winds of time, in strange beds, past silent obsidian temples, William Burroughs once again shuttles us back and forth between lunar worlds and the wired electric maze of the city. He presents us with a universe threatened with complete control of communications by the Nova Mob."

This reference to a vaguely defined crew of galactic pirates makes the book sound entertaining--a sort of avant-garde James Bond adventure. It is nothing of the kind. The Ticket That Exploded, revised since it was first published in France five years ago, is a nightmare of pornography, disjointed prose,* spaceships powered by copulation, frog people, hangings, and "Sex Skins," which devour people in what apparently is the ultimate ecstasy of death.

The result must be wholly pleasing to an author who is currently working on a book written in a new "art form" wherein pages of prose by two different writers are split down the middle, pasted together, and their sentences merged to form one great nonstory. In Ticket he has simply experimented by splicing tapes from two or three recorders. "Any number can play," he says. "Why stop there? Why stop anywhere?" Why?

BLASTING AND BOMBARDIERING by Wync/ham Lewis. 343 pages. University of California. $7.50.

He reminded Edith Sitwell of "cer tain brave men at the very moment of their rescue after six months spent among the polar wastes and the blubber." To Hemingway, he had "the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist." The object of these calumnies was Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957), British critic, novelist, painter, polemicist, gadfly and editor of the short-lived and incendiary artistic magazine, Blast. This partial autobiography, written in 1937 and now reissued, proves that Lewis could give as good as he got. His book bristles on almost every page with his endless resources for insult. Ezra Pound, after a first impression, was "a cowboy songster"; T. S. Eliot was "a Prufrock who would 'dare' all right 'to eat a peach'--provided he was quite sure that he possessed the correct European table-technique for that ticklish operation."

Lewis scarcely nods toward the more prosaic functions of autobiography. He comes onstage at 30, blithely, without mention of past or parents or education. Much of the book is devoted to his encounters with writers, government figures, Mayfair snobs and rich art patronesses. There are adequate but curiously distant sections on World War I and its aftermath. But it was the war of words, in which he could choose the issues and the weapons, that Lewis relished most. So will his readers.

INISH by Bernard Share. 148 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

It is a perfect early insular evening. In my garden which enjoys quiet seclusion there is a magnificent display of choice hysterias, glowing hydrants. From the kitchen and pantry comes the evocative aroma of curmudgeon cooked in its own juice with a leaf of spandrel and a pinch of rime.

The sentences might come from one of Joyce's notebooks for Finnegans Wake. He felt that words, not dreams, were the royal road to the unconscious, and Bernard Share, a 37-year-old Dubliner, shares the master's obsessions with them. Inish (Gaelic for "island" or "tell") consists mainly of a couple of dozen phrases and sentences as they are endlessly reworked in the heads of three frustrated men: Allen, Ecks and Jacet.

Much of the book takes place in Shenanagan's Lounge Bar, where the three men sit around after work, drinking and listening to passages from the book of pornography that Jacet is writing in his spare time. He has at home a "nicer wife, nicer children and nicer au pair girl." It is the au pair girl (later Nicer O'Pair) who, like Earwicker's sleeping daughter in Finnegans Wake, stirs the men's fantasies of commingled lust and guilt. At other times they worry about work, dream about traveling; sometimes timetables rip like trains through Ecks's brain.

Author Share has set himself a virtuoso's task, but he is no Joyce. He occasionally gives evidence that he writes well enough to go straight, and it would be nicer to have a novel of his that is less obtusely experimental.

* Example: "The Orchid Girl fades into memory picture on outhouse skin forgotten--Green Tony the last invisible shadow--Call the Old Doctor twice on last errand?--caught in the door of Panic, Mr. & Mrs. D.--last round over--a street boy's morning sky--flesh tape ebbing from centuries--Remember i was movie played you a long last goodnight."

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