A PRIVATE STAIR

by David Loughlin '43.Harper and Bros., 1950, 183 pp., $2.50.

This book is not what you might guess from looking at it: a clever yarn about a Yankee sailor and a dark-skinned girl in Bangkok. When you read it you find there is too much coarse violence incident to selling the smuggled cigarets, and the companion sailor gets stupefied with liquor too easily, and the American they find in Bangkok is too disgustingly a beachcomber. You may hastily decide that it is realistic and that the love affair is light and charming in the hard-boiled way.

But if you decide anything so simple, you will miss the point. Instead it is a concrete account of an experience which includes not only superior sagacity in handling a shady deal and outwitting oriental sharpers, but also a rare kind of confidence and love. The man said he wanted only to have a woman for a night. But he—and we—discover that he really wanted love. And he is able to recognize, despite her imperfect speech, that—re-markably—he can have it.

You miss the book—as several reviewers and readers have missed it—if you don't understand his staying behind, as he watches the skiff disappear with the man with whom he had intended to open a used-car station in Bridgeport. The author couldn't bear to oversimplify or fully explain. He knew deep changes would never be explained to the fellow sailor. And the lover and his half Siamese girl lacked the vocabulary.

X suppose we'll have to say he didn't explain enough. But we'll be glad for a writer who sticks so close to facts, and dares to include the exceptional fact of imperfect but realistic love.