LOVER MAN (177 pp.)—Alston Anderson—Doubleday ($3.75).
Only rarely does a new author's first book of short stories announce much besides one more young lady who had a sheltered adolescence or one more young gentleman who did not. An exception was William Saroyan's The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, which created such a stir in the '30s. Lover Man, by Alston Anderson, 35, may not come up to Saroyan's Daring Voting Man, but at least it occupies the same ballpark. With this series Anderson introduces himself not only as a first-class writer, but also as an observer who aims to talk only about life as it is lived by people who are not professionally sensitized to it. To the reader's delight, there is hardly a nuance in the book.
Like Saroyan's Armenians, Anderson's people are one of the few lingering groups of exotics still maintaining cultural autonomy before the melting pot gets them —the small-town Negroes of the South. Anderson himself was a Southern Negro, but not until he was 14. Born in Panama of Jamaican parents, he went to school in Kingston before going to Oxford, N.C., where he lived until he was drafted into the Army in 1943. A master sergeant at war's end, Anderson took the G.I. bill through North Carolina College ('47), went on to study at Columbia University and the Sorbonne, concentrating on 18th century German metaphysics. Then he set out to travel and write. Perhaps it is this kind of distance that removes Lover Man from the mountain of angry-Negro stories. Anderson is not mad at anyone. He is fascinated by the South, by what he has seen, and by what he has heard, and he manages to re-create that fascination for his reader.
All-Seeing "I." The 15 short stories are almost entirely in the first person. Anderson's "I" can be any member of the Jessup family, around which most of the stories are woven, or any of their friends, and there are moments of confusion, when it is difficult to be sure just who is who. Yet the device gives full play to Anderson's strongest talent: his grasp of the speech rhythm and idiom of his people. More clearly than in much fiction, it is in the telling that the truth of the tale emerges.
That truth is largely concerned with the growth to maturity of all the different people called "I," who live in a small, unnamed Southern town—and occasionally travel out from it. Their various roads to maturity are those of the whole world: love and labor, passion and violence are part of the process; so are dreams of the past, dreams of the future and dreams induced by marijuana and stronger "mainline" stuff. Many of the stories deal with the eternal masculine tension between sex and love. Writes Anderson in "Signifying," a tale of a pretty young Philadelphia schoolteacher who has come to teach in a small southern town where the "mens . . . ain't wolves, Jackson, them is werewolves": "I think you know how a man feels in a situation like that. You be sitting right close to a nice-looking woman, and she gets to telling you how some man done her wrong. You get to feeling sorry for her. But because she look so good you get to feeling strong, too. Then you get to feeling wrong about being strong. Then after a while you don't feel wrong no more. All you feel is strong!"