Notable

YOU'RE WELCOME TO ULSTER by Menna Gallie. 256 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

A beautifully written, cleanly unsentimental love story is cause enough for celebration. But Author Gallie has done more. She has skillfully used as background the divided heart of present-day Northern Ireland.

Welsh-born Sarah Thomas is a middle-aged widow working in Cambridge, England. Threatened by breast cancer, she seeks a "last" holiday in Ulster with two close Catholic friends, Caroline and Colum Moore, and a former lover, a Protestant left-wing journalist named James McNeil.

Her sentimental journey creates more chill than charm. She is unsettled to find Belfast decorated for the festival of July 12--the date in 1690 of the Battle of the Boyne which "ensured the preservation of the true Protestant Christian faith against the Whore of Rome."

Once arrived at the Moores' house in County Down, Sarah finds the family rife with potential martyrs: Colum Moore, an English professor trying to resist public political involvement; his devout, naively nationalistic wife, carrying their eighth child and breeding vulnerability; her sister, Una, an angry activist spouting Marx and Marcuse who lives like a nun among grotesque religious relics. Even Sarah's old lover has become a marked man as a Protestant journalist championing the Catholic cause.

Like her heroine, Author Gallie is Welsh-born. But she has got the Gaelic in her, and in the country of the word she is no stranger.

ROOTS OF INVOLVEMENT: THE U.S. IN ASIA 1784-1971 by Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel. 336 pages. Norton. $8.95.

Even your more informed dove is unlikely to remember that the debate over policy toward the Philippines around 1900 sounded very much like the contemporary argument over Viet Nam. Or that Dean Acheson himself once acknowledged that back during the Truman Administration, Washington's approach to Indochina was a "muddled hodgepodge/'

One accomplishment of Roots of Involvement is to record, in cool temper and spare style, how that hodgepodge developed into the Viet Nam War. The authors are Marvin Kalb, CBS diplomatic correspondent, and Elie Abel, his former NBC rival, now dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. They have combined scholarship legwork to construct this useful chronology. They also offer a thesis: that the Viet Nam War is not an aberration but part of the "inexorable progression" of past misconceptions and blunders, including the desire to bolster France, the general goal of containing Communism, and finally a specific fear of the Chinese.

Still, as Kalb and Abel also demonstrate, the war that no President wanted might have been averted. There were moments in all the post-World War II Administrations when some official wisdom might have saved Lyndon Johnson --not to mention the U.S. and Vietnamese peoples--from the results of the decision to intervene with combat divisions in 1965.

UNDER THE COLORS by Milovan Djilas. 557 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $9.75.

Seldom has the compulsion to go to war been better portrayed than in this novel by Yugoslavia's most celebrated warrior-ideologue. Milovan Djilas wrote Under the Colors while serving a prison sentence for criticizing Tito's regime. But the book is not concerned with contemporary events. It re-creates the clash between Serbian and Moslem in Djilas' native Montenegro in the late 19th century. Djilas lost much of his own family in this incessant warfare; he grew up on legends of heroism and endurance.

Djilas depicts everyday life on both sides: slender Turkish girls enveloped in soft shadows and sly glances, the insistent murmur of garden streams in the background: hearty Serbs bathed in the rich sunlight that pours copiously on gleaming mountains. But the book's cumulative power lies in appalling battle details. Heads sail briskly from necks and are hoisted on pikes. A Montenegrin grabs a Turk's horse and tries frantically to kick a severed leg out of the stirrup. During a lunch break between bashing feet and smashing kidneys, an unforgettable father-son torture team laments the passing of the good old days when they did not have to worry about leaving scars.

Djilas is too flinty a Montenegrin to offer much in the way of redemption for such suffering. Men die bravely for a cause that is elusive, not to say parochial. Still, they manage to wrest from the din of battle a selflessness that frees them, if only for moments, from their world of pain.

WORD PEOPLE by Nancy Caldwell Sorel. Illustrated by Edward Sorel. 304 pages. American Heritage. $6.95.

With pungent caricatures and brisk capsule biographies, Word People profiles a collection of men and women whose proper names have become part of the English language.

Some of the chosen eponyms are familiar: the sandwich was once an earl; the pompadour a king's mistress; sadism originated with the Marquis de Sade. Many more are likely to surprise: maud lin is the old vernacular form of (Mary) Magdalene, usually pictured weeping: Jules Leotard was a 19th century trapeze artist; mausoleum derives from the tomb of "the wily satrap" Mausolus, in Turkey; and tawdry comes from the cheap souvenirs sold at the shrine of a 7th century Anglo-Saxon princess who was called St. Audrey.

One hesitates to be philippic (thank you, Philip of Macedonia), but there is much that fails to mesmerize (see Mes-mer's magnetic theory). In contrast to her husband's illustrations, Nancy Sorel treats her subjects blandly. "Lord Cardigan (of sweater fame) took as his third wife the beautiful Adeline de Horsey. They lived happily together until he died at the age of 71 of injuries he received when he fell from his horse." Too bad as well that the writers bypass the kind of speculation that occurs to the reader immediately. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch might just as easily have given us sacherism as masochism.

So useful a book should certainly not be boycotted. In fact, as Mrs. Malaprop, that endearing eponymous personage might have said, "The authors have led the way and the pillologists and parrotists shall have pun preceding."

ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner. 569 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

Wallace Stegner shares with Willa Gather what Edmund Wilson once called "two currents of profound feeling--one for the beauty of those lives lived out between the sky and the prairie; the other for the pathos of the human spirit making the effort to send down its roots and to flower in that barren soil." In this book, Stegner rides both currents.

His protagonist is Lyman Ward, a writer-historian with a crippling bone disease. His wife has long since left him. Ward describes his son as "Paul Goodman out of Margaret Mead," and between father and son there exists not so much gap as "gulf." Believing "in life chronological rather than in life ex istential," Ward seeks to re-create the frontier past from his grandfather's relics and the prolific papers and sketches of his artist grandmother.

He learns that his grandparents' marriage had a tragic crisis and nearly fell apart. But its center held for sixty years --once the couple finally found their angle of repose, a term Stegner borrows from geology to describe the degree of slope at which falling rocks stabilize and cease to roll.

Sadly, Ward compares their marriage to his own and predictably concludes that modern marital combinations get too little help from society in finding any angle of repose whatever. Even Victorian inhibition seems less destructive than the free-flow orgiastic analysis that drowns so many modern marriages in sexual debate and self-indulgence.

Loss is what the novel is about. The author conveys the most private sense of it, with refreshing reticence about body logistics and bedroom scenery. By not telling all, Stegner illuminates experience and provides insights that are "like dark water under sunlit ice."

THE GRANDEES by Stephen Birmingham. 368 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

Our Crowd, Stephen Birmingham's chronicle of New York's "Great Jewish Families," led him to The Right People, a history of "the American Social Establishment." Now comes The Grandees, grandson of Our Crowd. It might be retitled Their Crowd, for Birmingham's latest is a history of a rather special group--"America's Sephardic Elite"--which was previously given short shrift by the author.

In 1654, the Saint Charles, a ship since dubbed "the Jewish Mayflower," arrived in what is now New York Harbor with 23 Jews aboard. They were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. It is their descendants--including the Nathan, Gratz, Seixas, Franks and Lopez families--that Birmingham examines. They consider themselves the nobility of American Jewry because their heritage can be traced back to medieval Spain and Portugal, where their ancestors lived as grandees--Spanish or Portuguese noblemen of the first rank.

Birmingham quickly skips from Spain to the Sephardim's arrival in the New World. Despite Peter Stuyvesant, who considered them "godless rascals," they were soon slave-trading with the best people and prospering. In a familiar pattern, the book alternates scandals with successes. Benjamin Cardozo replaced Oliver Wendell Holmes on the Supreme Court. Annie Nathan Meyer founded Barnard College at age 22. The Revolution would have been fought, but almost certainly not won, without Sephardic money. Then there was Uriah Levy. He fought anti-Semitism in the U.S. Navy, kept a mezuzah outside his cabin door, and finally, when he was advanced to the rank of commander in 1837, whimsically painted the guns on his ship a bright blue.

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