Rerun for Gulley

A FINE MADNESS by Elliott Baker. 319 pages. Putnam. $4.95.

A comic novel succeeds if it is funnier than its own dust jacket, and Elliott Baker's A Fine Madness meets this difficult test nicely. It is not likely that the publishers will be sent into receivership by losses suffered making good the guarantee. Yet, for the worst of reasons, it is impossible to praise this likable first novel without hedging.

The book is intended to make the rebellious heart leap up. A poet is betrayed into the hands of poetry's blood enemies, the psychiatrists. The reader's heart leaps up, all right, but unfortunately, so does his memory. Baker's hero,

Sampson Shillitoe, poet, souse, womanizer and pratfalling Prometheus, might be the worshipful nephew of Joyce Gary's artist-as-an-old-grog, Gulley Jimson. The resemblance extends to the knockabout plot, kept in motion by Shillitoe's talent for anarchy, his tropism for cops and his tendency to rant at strangers. Even at the end, when Shillitoe is strapped to the operating table while the lobotomist's needle probes to discover whether truth is beauty, his plight is reminiscent of Jimson clinging to his wall and painting his soaring mural while the walls threaten to fall down about him.

In such cases, critics customarily use the word "derivative," which is a libel proof way of saying that the author's best skill is burglary. But there is no intentional theft here. Baker's book is his own; its mistakes and its successes have edges too rough to have been cut by imitation. The author is in the ridiculous position of a man who, in all good faith, has written a good, sound, playable five act tragedy about a Scandinavian prince whose father has just been murdered by his uncle.

Nevertheless, much of the book hangs gaily in the mind like a nightie waving from a rosebush, and the reader looks hopefully to Baker's next novel.

Prepublication endorsements, incidentally, are a neglected art form, and Putnam's collection for Baker's dust jacket is one of the better samplings: > "God almighty what a cool book! This baby is red hot!"--Richard Bissell, The Pajama Game man. Translation: "They'll know I'm kidding."

>"Very good fun throughout"--Poet Richard Wilbur. Translation: "There you are, my good man, although I don't approve of tipping."

>"It's an exciting novel, full of surprises, knowledge of the world, and fine proportions"--Norman Mailer. Translation: "I could outwrite him with crayons."

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