Books: Short Notices: Mar. 18, 1966

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MY BROTHER BRENDAN by Dominic Behan. 159 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

The late Irish playwright Brendan Behan (The Hostage) and his younger, less successful playwright brother Dominic (Posterity Be Damned) were once described as the most alarming combination since assault and battery. In this graceless little memoir Dominic sets out to recount some of the escapades that gave them their reputation. Although he sometimes strikes a rollicking note by writing in an Irish dialect as heavy as Kilkenny dew, all Dominic proves is that 1) Brendan, who died in 1964, was especially unattractive and unmanageable when in his cups; and 2) drunks seldom are very funny except to those who are sharing the same bottle.

TELL THE TIME TO NONE by Helen Hudson. 249 pages. Duffon. $4.95.

Cowardice, pride, propriety, fear of fame—there are many reasons why writers choose to hide behind noms de plume. The author of this clean-cut gem of a first novel clearly was motivated by prudence. "Helen Hudson" displays such knowledge of faculty politics and makes the ambitions and jealousies of her professors and their wives so sadly true that it is obvious she occupies, or once occupied, her own glade in the groves of academe.

DE GAULLE by Francois Mauriac. 229 pages. Doubleday. $4.50.

French Academician Francois Mauriac, Nobel Prize novelist (Therese), biographer (Life of Jesus), political polemicist and poet, first became aware of Charles de Gaulle during the long night of German occupation. Unlike many of his countrymen, Mauriac has kept his vision of De Gaulle shining ever since. In this odd book—neither a biography nor a wholly accurate account of De Gaulle's politics but a kind of personal political devotional—Mauriac, 80, tries to explain just what it is about De Gaulle that commands his fealty. He attests that he is not obsessed with De Gaulle, but, unhappily, this does not prove to be true: Mau-riac's quivering admiration simply is too great to be contained. The reader never really grasps what lies behind the De Gaulle mystique; he is merely reassured in passage after adulatory passage that it is there like a towering, providential Alp, and that De Gaulle is correct when he states with "calm certainty that he is the State and, it may not be too much to say, France herself."