Bookends: Sep. 28, 1987

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THE MAKING OF THE AFRICAN QUEEN

by Katharine Hepburn

Knopf; 131 pages; $15.95

Katharine Hepburn writes like this -- with lots of dashes. Fragmented sentences too. Exclamations! Asides. Reading her is like listening to her -- one imagines. She suggests -- in a meandering subtitle -- that she almost lost her mind while shooting on location in 1951 in what was then the Belgian Congo. But of course she did not. Found a good, perhaps unsuspected, part of it, actually. As she says, among all her movies and plays, The African Queen is the one that remains vividly in memory. For good reason. Tough shoot -- they don't come any tougher. Heat. Bugs. Snakes. Minimum crew, equipment. Maximum heightening of the senses deep in exotic country. Sensitive descriptions of people, landscape. Plus. Bogart a total pro -- on time, lines letter-perfect, hating his hairpiece. John Huston an elusive macho sprite -- flitting through the jungle dropping big game, occasional shrewd directorial insights (gave Hepburn Eleanor Roosevelt as role model).

Our heroine? Practical. Idealistic. Self-deprecating. Humorous anecdotes about both her intestinal troubles and her intestinal fortitude inconveniencing everyone. One thinks -- as long as Kate Hepburn lives, so does the spirit of 19th century New England. Odd -- nice -- it took unlikely root in show biz. Physically her book is like her -- slender, handsome (many good pictures), irresistible. "Glory be," as she says.

BLUEBEARD

by Kurt Vonnegut

Delacorte; 298 pages; $17.95

Those who feel that writing should be a matter of opening a vein and bleeding have never entirely approved of Kurt Vonnegut, whose murmurous style seems as easily achieved as respiration. If the man simply breathes his stuff out, can he be producing anything substantial? He can, of course. Vonnegut's rueful, wondering satire in Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano and half a dozen other books says "Goodbye, better luck next time" to human society in the late 20th century. That said, however, an admirer must admit that Vonnegut's novelizing occasionally ticks on reflexively when there seems to be nothing in particular on his mind. So with Bluebeard, whose hero is a wealthy, one-eyed old man named Rabo Karabekian, a magazine illustrator in his youth, then a soldier during World War II, then, briefly, an acclaimed abstract expressionist painter. There is a random quality to this history: Why one- eyed? Why a painter and not a cellist? Rabo's recollections are wistful and charming, but vaporous. The graceful pages are a gifted author's daydreams, but they never coalesce into a novel.

SAVAGES

by Shirley Conran

Simon & Schuster; 587 pages; $19.95