Sailor at Sea

.A PRIVATE STAIR (183 pp.)--David Loughlin--Harper ($2.50).

Southeast Asia is old Joseph Conrad country. There are still a few stories to be picked up out that way, and young (29) Novelist David Loughlin is just the man to try. His hero, DeCarlo, ship's electrician of the Nicaragua Victory, shows how much, and how little, times have changed.

DeCarlo was the kind of sailor who would have given Conrad a Bronx cheer; that is, if DeCarlo had read books. He had sailed a lot, but had really "never traveled." He had "America lashed onto him like a rucksack and he spread it out in the handiest spot." He had smuggled 1,700 cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes aboard ship, and he was going to spread them out on the Bangkok black market. His modest objective: enough cash to start a used-car business back in the States and quit the sea for good.

But, sure enough, there was something about Bangkok that made DeCarlo turn introspective before he had been in town 48 hours. It started simply enough: DeCarlo made his black-market deal, and set out with a shipmate to make a night of it. He picked up a native girl and they had some drinks. Then they ran into Gratz, the rundown American beachcomber, with his talk about the pull of the East.

DeCarlo began to think hard. He really didn't know his son, a 17-year-old who was taking a correspondence course in television. His wife didn't mind his long absences; she used their Christmas Club savings to buy fancy burial plots on the installment plan. Past 40, he saw nothing to go back to. The native girl seemed worth staying for. DeCarlo stayed.

Author Loughlin's first novel, Helix, was a highly original sea story about engine-room hands (TIME, June 9, 1947). A Private Stair sails into deeper fictional water and for most of the passage keeps way on. The writing is taut, perhaps too spare to make DeCarlo's sudden switch entirely credible, and sometimes there is a smart-alecky playing with words and dialogue. But Loughlin has the good novelist's knack of suggesting more than he says and keeping his story moving with an air of inevitability. He is one young writer who owes a lot to Ernest Hemingway, but won't have far to go before he's out of debt.

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