Mud Pie

THE TRIUMPHANT CLAY (252 pp.)--Rupert Hughes--House-Warven ($3.50).

"You are beautiful."

"Nah, nah!"

"You are wonderful."

"Nah, nah."

"I'm crazy about you!"

"I am crazy about zhoo."

"You are very beautiful."

"I am ogly. I don't know nossingk."

"You know everything."

"Nah, nah."

Dazzled by such repartee, Aniela, the Polish hired girl, soon said yah.

Not everyone will be so easily impressed. In The Triumphant Clay, Rupert Hughes--who has written more than a score of popular novels and a three-volume biography of Washington--has hurled at his public a great soft pie of semipornographic muck.

Aniela, it develops, "was miraculous in the dark . . . Her great arms clutched about him in a frenzy. She made uncouth noises." Nevertheless David, "a brilliant young architect [who] had done a few big things bigly," is soon rolling in a snowbank with somebody else, "a pink avalanche of loveliness" named Mary. "There . . . with her sables and his great coat for blankets, David wooed a wintry Tsarina swathed in sables . . . The snow gave the deed the absolution of its own purity."

Next on David's schedule of seduction comes Hazel, a puritanical priss who flirts with him "sanctimoniously, as a missionary flirts with her prey." Befuddled by the shot of Scripture in her sex potion, David is converted to marriage, and lives unhappily ever after--"a fitting and logical punishment," according to the publisher.

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