Notable

THE SPAWNING RUN by William Humphrey. 79 pages. Knopf. $4.50.

If there is anything in nature more single-minded than a salmon making its way through a thousand miles of water to the precise runnel where it was born, it is the fisherman--especially a British fisherman--bent on interrupting that journey with rod and line. In this deft and funny account of a stay at a Welsh fishing hotel, originally written as an Esquire piece, Novelist (Home from the Hill) William Humphrey encourages the reader to savor the eccentricities of both men and fish. His characters include an admiral whose refusal to clutter his memory with such matters as his children's names enables him to recall the exact conditions (water temperature, wind direction, barometric pressure, tackle, fly, etc.) under which he killed every salmon for 42 years. Another is a man called Holloway, who more than adequately compensates for his regular failure on the stream with success pursuing an array of clean-run salmon widows. A tantalizingly small book, but an authentic classic.

THE WALTER SYNDROME by Richard Neely. 207 pages. McCall. $5.95.

Mystery writers get an undeserved dividend from critical custom, which forbids reviewers to reveal the plot or the gimmick to readers even if it is threadbare or an insult to ordinary intelligence.

Since a splendid gimmick is about all there is to The Walter Syndrome, there is little to say about the book beyond the fact that the ploy is notably audacious and that it works. The time is the late Depression era. The place, of all places, is the classified-ad department of a New York daily, and the prime instrument for working evil is the telephone. Neely's notion of atmosphere is to cram his pages with nostalgic nouns from the '30s--the Manhattan Room, Vincent Lopez, Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Milliard. However, the Jack the Ripper-style murders have been luridly updated to include quite nasty details of sexual mutilation. As was the case with The Anderson Tapes last year, the book is just seedy enough to seem realistic and just brash enough to hold common sense at bay for 200 pages. For most addicts that is enough. The publisher's promotion department thoughtfully circulated--as a teaser ad in New York papers--the supposed number (212-679-2730) of the murderer. More than 115,000 gullible people tried to phone him.

THE HOUSE ON JEFFERSON STREET by Horace Gregory. 276 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $6.95.

It has been Horace Gregory's particular misfortune to be a merely good poet born into a generation of geniuses. His six volumes of dry Eliotic verse won considerable honor, but they have often been roasted by the brighter young critics--or consigned to the honorable unmentioned shelf along with volumes by Leonie Adams, Stanley Kunitz, Babette Deutsch and Mark Van Doren.

At 72, Gregory has written a memoir of the first half of his life. His account of growing up in a comfortable, mildly eccentric Milwaukee clan, drifting into radical politics in the '20s and discovering the depth of his commitment to poetry is sometimes a near hypnotized surrender to a series of rather static reveries.

The method often works, though, because Gregory is both meticulous about tone and texture and dryly amusing in his recollections of Eliot, Yeats, Edward Hopper and Dorothy Richardson.

OTHER THINGS AND THE AARDVARK by Eugene McCarthy. 81 pages. Doubleday. $8.

Eugene McCarthy isn't running any more, and if he has promises to keep they are to himself. In this first collection of poems, the hawks finally lie down with the doves to make room for the aardvark and the heron. But in the process the ex-candidate's lines show off backward glances, once and future visions, and a loner's sigh of relief to be out of it all.

McCarthy clearly finds in poetry an order and tranquillity absent from the world in which he achieved recognition. His meter, diction and rhetoric are traditional enough, as are his subjects: nature, religion, aging, death, love. They reveal a man with an abiding desire to be isolated, unclocked, unshackled by the limelight. At times this shows directly: "Beyond the coffin confines of telephone booths, my arms stretch to read, in vain." At times it appears obliquely: "Poor fish who knew the sea why did you dare the net?"

It is a pity that McCarthy's poems will be denied the autonomy of anonymity. Many have wit, candor, grace, style and the nicest sort of sentiment. As the poet says, "Do not look long on a harbor from which all ships are gone."

THE THRONE OF SATURN by Allen Drury. 588 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

A reader of only moderate paranoid tendencies might easily persuade himself that this pop-lit fantasy about a NASA Mars flight sabotaged by left-wing skul-duggers is a deliberate attack by Author Drury on the vital fluids of his audience.

The difficulty is not so much that Drury has borrowed Little Orphan Annie's politics, but that he did not sign up Punjab, the Asp and Sandy, too. Given a day or two to learn their lines, they could have substituted with much improvement in subtlety of characterization for the cereal-box astronauts and Comsymp Eastern Establishment journalists who snooze about Drury's stage. An astronaut at play: "There are astronauts," he said, "and sometimes there are astronaughties."

It is the book's thesis that Russia and the U.S. are racing to blast off for Mars, and that virtually the entire American press, babbling about the nation's social needs, is trying to block the U.S. effort. An American labor leader turns out to be a Soviet agent, and a neurotic black astronaut who has not made his peace with the white world (an attitude the author finds entirely outrageous) goes mental while in moon orbit. The loudest noise to be heard is Drury rubbing his hands together as he exposes the pinko thinking of all those fluoridating reporters. "It was good to be engaged in a campaign against the government once more," a magazine journalist named Percy Mercy reflects. "It made a man feel right to be blackguarding his own country again."

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