OF MISSPENT YOUTH, VITUPERATION, AND OTHER LIFE'S WORK

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, May 24, 1998

Page: M4

Section: Books

There are some people (John Updike is certainly one of them) whose lives are pretty much synonymous with their lives' work, who can use the expression ``my life's work'' without producing a look either of blankness or of pity in faces around them. There is also, among all the multitudes of the earth, a large group who would like to use this expression, but who are aware that in their own cases it is what a philosopher might call ``a false concept.'' In their youths, such people -- such people as your faithful correspondent -- might have walked out of Eisenstein movies to keep engagements with seedy persons in pothouses -- when, that is, they made it to the movies at all, instead of hunkering down, as so often they did, with ``The Carpetbaggers'' or ``Little Dorrit.''

These characters, now well past the age of promise and entering the age of miracles, read about the lives and work of others with an eye toward auspicious signs: Penelope Fitzgerald's not having published a novel until she was in her 60s is, for instance, a particularly gratifying piece of information. We also have an eager appetite for descriptions of a certain species of failing in the successful: dithering and indecision, faltering resolve, desultory tailings off, and ignominious retreats from demanding tasks are meat and potatoes, as it were, for the underachiever's soul. Geoff Dyer's ``Out of Sheer Rage'' (North Point Press, $23) is just the book, and a very funny one, too, for people who are possessed by this morbid craving.

For years the author had wanted to write a book on D. H. Lawrence. It was to be a work of huge seriousness involving a good deal of reading, research, and the overcoming of obstacles. For one, Dyer didn't want to read Lawrence's novels again. That was out. On the other hand, he did want to read the ``Collected Letters''; but he didn't want to finish them, for fear of losing interest in the subject. Also, the momentousness of his project demanded an ideal place to work, and while he knew of a number, they all had one thing in common: He'd never got any work done in them. In any case, he had too much time: ``I had,'' he explains, ``nothing to keep me from writing my study of Lawrence, and so I never buckled down to it.'' Perhaps a job was required? Ensconced in Rome, he reports that ``I began to think I would love a life in England, working a nice part-time job and then watching telly in the evenings and, if the urge took me, doing some work on my study of Lawrence which, instead of being this daunting undertaking, would assume the status of a hobby, something I could get on with at odd moments, when there was nothing on telly.''

How familiar this sounds; uncannily so in that he even muses on John Updike's enviable and laudable union of life and work. And so, though I find D. H. Lawrence kind of silly, it is most encouraging to discern a kinship with Dyer, a great procrastinator and, as the book jacket announces, ``the author of five books.''

I often wonder how much the greatness of certain truly great writers rests on their being monstrous individuals. Does their lives' work demand that they be nasty pieces of work as persons? Certainly, a large number of poseurs excuse themselves from conventional decencies on these grounds, but what about Evelyn Waugh, perhaps the greatest English writer of the 20th century? It's a question more to be dwelt on than answered, and I dwelt on it powerfully as I read Waugh's eldest son Auberon's entertainingly gruesome autobiography, ``Will This Do?'' (Carroll and Graf, $24). On the other hand, it's not only Waugh pere who strikes me as savage -- though, goodness, he was something -- but the whole woadish tribe of would-be-gentry, upper-scribbling-class persons. They inhabit a world of taboos (don't say ``spare room''), fetishes (``The Furry Object,'' a slipper for the administration of beatings), and rituals (bullying) -- a primitive world as under the sway of freakish custom as that of any islander Captain Cook ever ran into.

Is it any wonder, then, that one such as Auberon Waugh found his metier in vituperation? One might say that his life's work has been the perfection of this great art. ``Vituperation,'' he explains here, is ``part of life's rich pageant, and in the right hands, a happy part of life's pageant, a salutary tool. It redresses some of the forces of deference which bolster the conceit of the second-rate; it also prevents the first-rate from going mad with conceit.'' This is a high calling in my view, but you have to be able to take it as well as dish it out; and one was hoping for something more pleasant.

The ideal of life and work making up an agreeable union achieved extravagant, if fleeting, expression in the careers of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Co. ``Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey and the Last Great Showbiz Party'' by Shawn Levy (Doubleday, $23.95) shows how seductive this was not only to the exemplars, the boys themselves, shall we say, but to the American people (well, make that white men) from 1959 to 1963. They were ``every middle-aged salaryman's fantasy,'' and ``carried on as if they were alone and the audience had paid to see what they were really like.'' Life and work could not be more integrated -- except, of course, that both were false and corrupt.

This is an excellent book, not only in its descriptions of the Pack's carryings-on -- of which, naturally, one cannot get enough -- but in its portrayal of the dark turns that each life took: the betrayals, snubbings, disappointments, oversteppings, excesses, and descents into private and public hells. Levy is a great summoner of character and atmosphere. His book evokes the time in question with the power of a novel, as well as James Ellroy's ``American Tabloid,'' and better by far than Don DeLillo's ``Underworld.''

Beyond that, of course, the book is as timely as can be, now that Frank's life's work is done.