Mixed Fiction

THE SELF-BETRAYED, by Joseph Wechsberg (301 pp.; Knopf; $3.95). Czech-born Author Wechsberg often patrols the same prose beat as Tyrolean-born Ludwig Bemelmans; on it the major misdemeanors are underdone Wiener Schnitzel and overdone Central European whimsy. Wechsberg strays off his favorite beat in his second novel, a somber, loose-jointed documentary on the rise and fall of a big party wheel in Communist Czechoslovakia. Wechsberg's Communist hero-heel is named Bruno Stern, but his career closely parallels that of the late Rudolf Slansky, powerful, Moscow-trained secretary general of the Czech Communist Party who was purged in a 1952 show trial. In explaining how Slansky-Stern went bad, Author-Journalist Wechsberg offers a somewhat oversimplified ugly-duckling theory. Bruno Stern's first experience of being unwanted is an east European pogrom in which his mother dies of a heart attack. He gets the back of society's hand again on his first day in school in a Czech mining town, when the class brutally shuns him as a new boy. Lonely, arrogant. Stern curls up with Das Kapital. When his father begs him to take an interest in the family department store, Stern tonguelashes him about the exploitation of the workers. After that, the moves are inexorable and a little pat: Commie cell organizer, a training stint in Moscow, the Cominform, the return to Prague as the party's dreaded "Grey Eminence." He has a direct line to the Kremlin, until the line is ruthlessly twisted around his neck. For long stretches. Author Wechsberg takes his eyes off Slansky-Stern to sketch in personal memories of how the easygoing Kaffeeklatsch world of his youth was laced into the straitjacket of Red tyranny. The book is good reporting. There is only one bone to pick with Wechsberg's theme--other and better novelists have already picked its bones.

CONSTANCE, by Herve Bazln (216 pp.; Crown; $3). French Author Bazin's novels (Viper in the Fist, Head Against the Walls) are as alive, cynical and human as the Paris Flea Market, but like that fascinating catchall, they end by suggesting that the props of life, and finally life itself, add up to a shabby bargain. In this work. Heroine Constance, hopelessly crippled in a World War II bombing, has no intention of divorcing herself from the world. Transformed from a good-looking, athletic girl into an object of pity, she determines to live through other people. Flip, shrewdly cynical and bossy, she helps care for a crippled child, tries to manipulate the thinking and affairs of a beautiful nymphomaniac, a black-marketeer, a Protestant minister. Aunt Mathilde, who earns a pathetic living for herself and Constance, is appalled. "A crippled child, and now, a whore! With your mania for rubbing up against humanity, you're apt to force almost anyone on us." Constance drives, insults and cracks the whip over her human menagerie. When her creatures eventually go their own ways, she has nothing left, not even God, "who gets all the credit for our good deeds, while we are credited only with the bad." By the time she dies, she has not accomplished much, but she has given her friends a jolt by exposing briefly their crimped personalities and petty goals.

Author Bazin exhibits almost shockingly sharp insights into human nature and more sympathy for the human race than he has shown before. But he seems satisfied with a single tour through the market of humanity. Given the same characters and the same idea, Dostoevsky or Dickens would have turned them into a permanent exhibit of the human condition.

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