Blood and Orgies

THE SOUND OF AN AMERICAN--David Ormsbee--Dutton ($2.50).

David Ormsbee is a new name in U.S. fiction, but he is not. As Henri Weiner and Paul Haggard he has written detective stories. As Stephen Longstreet he has written an amusing travelogue (Last Man Around the World, TIME, Sept. 1, 1941).

The Sound of an American has already stirred up considerable cacophony. The book, a sequence of bedroom scenes staged before and during the fall of France, has been compared to the work of Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Tolstoy. It has also been called clumsily vulgar and inept.

Author Ormsbee's hero is Abner Coe, an American who is forced to join the French in the Maginot Line through the accident of having been born in Paris. In civilian days Abner was a music critic, bedding down when the whim took him with a lady newspaper correspondent.

Says she: "I had a good childhood . . . girlhood . . . virginhood. . . . The Long Island Sound under moonlight, the waves playing music against the shore . . . the taste of warm tomatoes eaten from the garden. . . . The bustle of Christmas, the taut joy of gifts . . . bare feet on wet dawn lawns. . . ."

Hero Coe left her for a flawlessly lovely pianist, with a mouth "well-shaped and bee-blown and neatly outlined in some wet red unguent." Her name was Roxane. When she began to romp with Abner, Roxane neglected to mention that she had married his best friend. So after Abner went to war, he spent his furloughs pursuing her through the back streets of married love. The U.S. State Department in Paris decided Abner should be given U.S. papers. He made his way to safety in America, while Roxane and her husband died as hostages before a Nazi firing squad.

Author Ormsbee loves life in the raw. As a youth, his hero tore around in a flivver, bootleg poison in his veins and "a big Polish girl on my lap and her breasts smelling of rich cigars." He was temperamental, even with the delicate Roxane: "I knocked her down on to the bed. She got up and I knocked her down again. . . . She wept. 'That's twice you've hit me. But I can't help it. I love Jon.' " So Abner picked her up tenderly and treated her "discolored eye."

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