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By R.Z. Sheppard

THE JEALOUS EAR by ROBERT EARLY 207 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

Perhaps it has something to do with that old Southern blend of agrarian ide alism and the-18th century romance with the noble savage. Or maybe it is just all that ambling through the tall grass. In any case, Southern writers have had a particular weakness for seeing beauty and naked truth through the eye of the innocent. Robert Early, 34, a North Carolinian and former Benedic tine monk, uses the other senses as well.

The Jealous Ear, his first novel, is about a boy's attempt to piece together his past and future from glimpses through door cracks, snatches of overheard conversations, strange odors and intimate brushes with the flesh.

Unlike the hero of Truman Capote's The Grass Harp, Egan Fletcher Jr. does not live in a tree house. Home is what passes for a mansion in Kornelius-Above-the-Shoals, the Southern town where his grandfather owns the cotton mill. Egan lives there on the eve of World War II with his mother and sister, a 14-year-old in itchy jodhpurs.

Grandfather DeWhit, a Dionysian Scattergood Baines, is not only the commu nity's pillar but its lingam as well. Hints of his sexual reconnaissance on both sides of the color line are rampant.

Grandmother De specializes in winding her 15 clocks and never let ting Egan's mother forget that she mar ried beneath herself. The truth is that outside the hermetic DeWhit family, Egan Fletcher Sr. is a famous professional baseball player. He plays some unspecified position with a club known as the Washington Teutonians, but he is also an overpowering utility father figure. Returning for a stay with his family, he reignites his wife's banked passions and her family's recriminations. Grandfather dies, Egan's sister runs off with the first boy to find the but tons on her jodhpurs, and Grandmother spouts puritan pieties about everyone's troubles with their "bottom parts."

Early has a smooth way with the familiar Southern surfaces. But his story of a boy's awakening lifts his novel above the ordinary Southern tale of lo cal "unforgettable" characters. Both young Egan's body and mind seem to bud together. Defining, then trying to name new experiences in his own way, lead to his first steps as a poet. Art, it ap pears, must provide him with the security and faith that an absent father-hero never did. It is a promising theme, particularly when suggested by the work of an author who left a religious order to write fiction. . R.Z. Sheppard

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