Books : Touching ‘50s-Style Novel of a Man, Women He Loves

Loving Women by Pete Hamill (Random House: $18.95; 414 pages)

“Loving Women” is aptly sub-titled “A Novel of the Fifties,” and more than anything else it is that. Written by a self-styled old guy, this is a thoughtful and touching recollection of the days around the Korean War and what it was like to be a youth in those days; to yearn above all to know how to be cool ; to know about Bird and Dizzy--to have saved your pennies to hear Art Tatum for one last time before his death, to go out (again, just as a kid, a timid little white kid, to some black club in the farthest Southern Boondocks) and hear a weird black guy (our own, dear, famous Little Richard) sing--for the first, first time in the author’s consciousness--the magically evocative “ Awop-Bop-a-Loo-Mop Alop-Bam-Boom !”

Really, “Loving Women” is several novels at once. At its most accessible, it’s a chest-beating, masculinist, How-I-got-to-be-the-guy-I-am narrative, with literary ancestors as disparate as Norman Mailer’s “The Deer Park” and “An American Dream,” Horace McCoy’s “Scalpel,” Irwin Shaw’s “Two Weeks in Another Town” and ‘50s cult-classics like Wirt Williams’ “Love in a Windy Space,” and Gene D’Olive’s “Chiara.” In all these novels, the hero-narrators feel blue as they edge into a perceived, dry, middle age, but they are, in one way or another, saved by the love of a “bad” woman, a woman of uninhibited flesh who physically nudges them back to life. (Hamill’s novel follows this paradigm perfectly, with the pleasing side effect that these sex scenes prove beyond a doubt that he, Hamill, really does know about “loving women” and that Norman Mailer is still just a timid Girl Scout in this particular area.)

But--if I read correctly--I don’t think that’s what this book is really about. “Loving Women” really may be about loving women , an unlikely subject for a real he-man novel. At the beginning of this narrative, Mike Devlin, a burnt-out news-photographer, is locked into a supremely irritating relationship with his third wife, a New York feminist who insists on “intimacy,” asking him how many women he’s had. When he tells her the number comes to about 1,200 over a period of 30 years she can’t stand the truth and has a four-star tantrum. (Reviewer’s note: I’d bet the family property that the original number here was 12,000. One new woman every 8 1/2 weeks seems awfully low for an authentic hard-boiled journalist who grew up in the ‘50s. Devlin would have been stripped of his photographer’s jacket for a figure in the wimpy hundreds, considering it’s a period as long as 30 years.)

Anyway. Devlin’s third wife leaves him. And, in a funk, Devlin tries to remember if he ever loved anyone. Yes. The first. A woman in the South named Eden Santana. A woman he met as a green Navy recruit when he served at Ellyson Field near Pensacola, Fla. Flash back to the year 1953, when Devlin, 17 and still a virgin, voyages away from a stark, unloving, austere Catholic childhood in Brooklyn to the experiences that will make him into a “man.”

At first, Mike is so sexually preoccupied he can only see sex, feel sex, breathe sex. And, along with his horny longings, he meets handfuls of other recruits who could have come from a World War II movie: An Italian, a Jew, a dreadful creep named Red Cannon who has a dreadful reason for his creepiness. But beyond these expected characters, Mike encounters a nice guy who’s gay and terribly tormented, and a black musician who’s fought in Korea, and a woman 14 years older than Mike, who teaches him to love women, shows him what a loving woman should be.

This lady, Eden Santana, is a creature of layered mysteries whose secrets shouldn’t be given away here. But the main thing is that she’s believable, unashamed, a little goofy, and though she withholds the truth, she’s never afraid of it. By the end of this novel, Mike Devlin has received a double education in his first six months away from home--to feel or not to feel, to love or not to love; to accept the man’s world (all the reasons, for instance, for the Navy’s authoritarianism), or to decide to live his life intuitively, to be alive. If I read the last page here correctly, this is an amazing book. If I don’t, it’s still a touching, nostalgic, affectionate embrace of a novel.