Times Square Thoreau

ONCE AROUND THE SUN [376 pp.)--Brooks Atkinson--Harcourt, Brace ($4).

Most New Yorkers don't know it, but there are chickadees in Manhattan. J. (for Justin) Brooks Atkinson, 56, a transplanted New Englander, can hear one above the roar of the traffic at two blocks, he says, and run it down by ear.

Bird-Watcher Atkinson is better known for other distinctions. As the influential theater critic of the New York Times, he has as much to do with a Broadway play's success or failure as any living man. He has been a foreign correspondent in China, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his dispatches from Moscow. But like one of his own intellectual heroes, Henry Thoreau, Atkinson is happiest close to nature or working with his hands. Ask his religion and he answers: "Transcendentalist."

Revive the Dead. Once Around the Sun, Critic Atkinson's new book, deals only infrequently with politics and the theater. Its 365 random essays, one for each day of the year, touch on everything from New York's subways ("Hogs get better care in transit") to tax collectors ("We have submitted to the despotism of contrivers, bullies, informers and crooks") ; from Times Square ("This slovenly canyon") to Russian drama and literature ("Stalin's success in destroying them is one of his mightiest achievements. No man of ordinary strength could wreck so much national genius").

Author Atkinson has, in fact, readably revived an all but dead literary exercise, the informal essay. Like Thoreau, he can write quietly and with an admirable minimum of whimsy about his dearest enthusiasms. Like the Thoreau who wrote Civil Disobedience, he abhors Government poking-around in his affairs:

"I put Congress and the Supreme Court on notice not to inquire into my private opinions, which are dangerous because I believe in America. I also warn them not to send me to jail. I should be more dangerous incommunicado there than I am here at my writing-table, where I can speak my mind freely and defiantly and contribute copiously to the normal boredom of society."

His next day's essay is on the blackpoll warbler.

Trust Mark Twain. Atkinson writes about the theater with a level eye and uncommon candor: "Basically, the Broadway theater is not an art, but an unsuccessful form of high-pressure huckstering ... It is not developing playwrights, actors or directors. It is doing the best it can to commit suicide." And on Broadway first-nighters: "They bring nothing into the theater except shallow, distracted minds and tired emotions . . . they have nothing to give. They are the unburied dead, brushed, combed, richly dressed, and expensively embalmed."

On the positive side, he keeps his credo short and sharp: "Trust only the men who laugh with relish. I trust Shakespeare more than Corneille, Mark Twain more than Henry James, Robert Frost more than T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway more than Thomas Mann. They do not expect to vanquish folly from the world overnight."

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