Exotic Voyager

RUN-THROUGH

by JOHN HOUSEMAN

507 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

By the age of four, John House man (then Jacques Haussmann) had spent two birthdays on the Simplon-Orient Express. It is an image with which to connect the 70 years that have gone into this urbane, fascinating and graceful memoir. Houseman was and is a restless, slightly exotic voy ager through life and drama.

Born of a Jewish Alsatian father and a British mother of Welsh-Irish descent, he spoke four languages at five.

At 25 he was a transplanted American versed in the babel of the Chicago commodity exchange, a merchant prince in wheat. Black Thursday reduced him to a bankrupt husk.

In the early '30s he drifted into the theater, a diffident moth seeking the flame of dramatic imagination. He found it in the 19-year-old Orson Welles, a pillar of fire to make the physicists in the sands of Alamogordo blanch. Together they founded the Mercury Theatre, which in 1938 staged four brilliant hits in a single season.

The Welles-Houseman partnership ended badly, with Welles hurling blazing Sterno heaters at Producer Houseman and howling anathemas at him in that voice of Zeus.

Welles is the star, but the walk-on players—from Saroyan to Stravinsky, Hepburn to Hemingway, Cocteau to Kazan—are not bad. Houseman invites the reader to an opening-night party of the cultivated mind, and he is the perfect host. · T.E. Kalem