Nom de Plume

By JAY COCKS

COLD IRON by Robert Stone Pryor. 145 pages. McCall. $5.50.

Certainly sounds familiar. Listen: "O'Leary jumped around, thrusting his body at the crowd, throwing his hair back and reacting to the stinging high notes of the guitar with long, snaky shudders of his whole body. When he swung back to the mike, O'Leary had a red flower tucked into his pants, dangling over his fly like the nose bobble on an angler fish. O'Leary wailed into the mike 'Teach you how to ride, little girl, little girl.' " Later on, O'Leary plucks the flower from his pants and unzips himself, to the astonished edification of the teeny-boppers milling around the stage.

Any resemblance to this incident and the Jim Morrison and The Doors hassle over a similar scene last year in Miami is probably a good deal more than coincidental. Cold Iron is a cool little novel about the rock scene, one of the few written with an obvious insider's authority and a fan's elan.

Jim O'Leary is the wild-eyed, stoned-out leader of Cold Iron, a West Coast rock group. Trying to avoid a bust for obscene behavior, O'Leary holes up at the Malibu home of his screenwriter girl friend, Woody Hagen, whose house is kind of an intimate crash pad for the neighborhood freaks. Not a good deal happens after O'Leary's arrival, except that the gang gives a spying nark a tough time and both O'Leary and Woody stand to go to jail for a while. But they figure out a method to coast all the way: "If you go in," O'Leary says, "I'll keep you stoned the whole time, and you do the same for me."

A good deal more could have been done in the way of such niceties as plot and character, but the atmosphere can hardly be faulted. That is not surprising, considering that Robert Stone Pryor is a pseudonym for Cecilia Holland, at 26 the well-known author of four well-wrought and successful works of romantic historical fiction: The Firedrake, 1966; Rakossy, 1967; The Kings in Winter, 1968; Until the Sun Fails, 1969; and most recently Antichrist, released this spring at almost the same time as Cold Iron. A former graduate student in medieval history at Columbia and a onetime clerk at Brentano's Manhattan bookstore, Miss Holland recently moved to a commune in Pasadena, Calif., having become deeply involved with the world of West Coast rock. Her former publisher, Atheneum, refused to publish Cold Iron, because the company felt the book's seamier sides would damage the author's standing with her regular readership. She then offered it to McCall, which brought it out under a nom de plume concocted from the name of her agent, Roberta Pryor.

The rock scene is an odd setting for a writer whose previous books have tried to bring to life Norman England and Hungary in the 16th century, as well as for a girl who grew up reading Gregory of Tours as a teen-ager and still holds a grudge against Gibbon for leaving the footnotes to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in Latin. "Call it wish fulfillment" she insists, talking of Cold Iron, "call it fantasy, but don't call it autobiography." The book took a year and a half to write and required 15 new versions. "Writing about history is easier," explains Robert Stone Pryor. "You know what the results are. All you have to do is think back."

. Jay Cocks

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