Old Masters' New Stories

...Rembrandt's Hat By Bernard Malamud Farrar, Straus & Giroux...

...268 pp...

...Unfortunately, the audience for these efforts is not large and the work appears, for the most part, in literary magazines and quarterlies whose main subscribers are libraries and whose main readers are the writers themselves...

...204 pp...

...Often associated with a college or university, these journals print thousands of stories each year, although that amounts to only a fraction of the short fiction being written...

...One doctor said cancer...

...The Nabokov is the most curious of the lot, for several of the stories have been previously collected and remain available...

...6.95...

...But Thompson and Sorrentino are not (yet...

...With his large heart, Malamud lets his characters make their own jokes...

...But the loss brings with it a sad hope: "Since I had invented Olga, couldn't I invent others ?dark-eyed blondes, vivacious redheads with marbly skin, melancholy brunettes, dancers, women who sang, lonely housewives...

...Such people are wiser than Cheever's, the sad world better for them...

...Only two of the 14 stories, written over more than half a century, have previously seen print...

...Of the heart,' the old man said bitterly...

...In "The Other Boat" it is between a white officer and a native: "Then he confronted the magic that had been worrying him on and off the whole evening and had made him inattentive at cards...

...His characters are desperately lonely, living in a shallow and terrible world, a place "where a man was wealthy and esteemed for having written a book about turds...

...Different doctors said different things, held different theories...

...Cheever's is a domain without redemption...

...Malamud's love for his characters, failures and all, is genuine and they do not become the butts of artistic jokes...

...Unless it is excitement, and of that I am afraid...

...When he was ready he shook off old Cocoanut, who was now climbing about like a monkey, and put him where he had to be, and manhandled him, gently, for he feared his own strength and was always gentle, and closed on him, and they did what they both wanted to do...

...And Vithobai had laid in it gladly-too gladly and too long-and had extinguished the lamp...

...Here, in the title story, the love is between a white missionary and the tribal chief he hopes to convert...

...And a valuable volume it is, not only to scholars but to readers generally...

...In Forster, the bodies are gentle, but never the minds...

...Eight dollars, under the circumstances, seems a rather stiff price...

...Tall women, short women, sad women, women whose burnished hair flowed to their waists, sloe-eyed, squint-eyed, violet-eyed beauties of all kinds and ages could be mine...

...Two recent stories come to mind that are as well-wrought and moving as anything I have read: Marilyn Thompson's "A Woman's Story," which appeared in Seneca Review and was subsequently collected in Best Little Magazine Fiction 1971, and Gilbert Sorrentino's "The Moon in its Flight," in New American Review 13...

...The Forster collection corresponds to volume eight of the Abinger Edition of the author's works...

...There was talk of an exploratory operation but they thought it might kill him...

...Nabokov's elaborate literacy often reminds me of an abandoned cathedral, and I find myself more interested in the parishioners fleeing through the alley than in the fine architecture they have left behind...

...At the end of the title story, a sculptor regards himself in a mirror in the white cap he had ceased to wear after being told by an art historian that it resembles Rembrandt's hat: "He wore it like a crown of failure and hope...

...His least ambitious endeavors satisfy me most, such as "Breaking the News," in which neighbors must telt an elderly widow that her son is dead...

...The Silver Crown" begins in Malamud's purest vein: "Gans, the father, lay dying in a hospital bed...

...I don't even know what is real, so how can I know what is love...

...What distinguishes Malamud's fiction is that characters are transformed, if not in their relationship to the world, then by our attitude toward them...

...Thompson and Sorrentino may have delighted me in part because I didn't know who they were or where they came from...

...And God alone saw them after that...

...fixtures in the literary household, nor are Andre Dubus, M. F. Beal, or the others who consistently produce top-quality short fiction...

...Four Quarters gets a thousand pieces a year...

...The homosexual relationship in these fictions is depicted with gentleness, though resolved with violence...

...Crown" is the essential word in the sentence, the very word Cheever would not have used...

...In each story, guilt leads to violence and death...

...Before someone insists that few of these stories deserve publication, let me suggest a look at one of the annual anthologies-martha Foley's Best A merican Short Stories, for example, or the O. Henry Award collection, or Best Little Magazine Fiction...

...These descriptions serve a purpose, which is to explore the spiritual and psychological consequences of the act...

...The editor of the North American Review receives 150 manuscripts a month...

...Why the duplication...

...A tang of sweat spread as he stripped and a muscle thickened up out of gold...

...I think the reader will discover that the quality of fiction in these volumes is very high, and as impressive as the quantity...

...There is no maliciousness in him...

...In "The Chimera," my favorite story in the book, a man with a terrible marriage-his wife even steals his egg rolls at dinner-falls in love with a chimera, Olga, whom he finally loses...

...The hero of "Artemis, the Honest Well Digger," moves from an amusing and brief affair with a client to a love affair while on vacation in Russia ("One of his limitations as a lover was that, at the most sublime moment, he usually shouted 'Ouch, ouch, ouch.'") to a confrontation with the State Department, before ending as he began, waiting for "the healing sound of rain...

...The short story is alive and probably in the mail...

...Malamud's is the best of the books under consideration, and the stories in it continue to show that he is not afraid of narrative experimentation: "The Letter" and "My Son the Murderer" are gems of their kind...

...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, stort-story writer Despite some current discussion about the decline of the short story, the country has never had so many people writing and publishing so many stories...

...The best were restricted to circulation among a few friends and, like the posthumous novel Maurice, deal with homosexuality...

...Written originally in Russian in the 1920s-30s, these pieces will please the author's enthusiasts, among whom I am not to be numbered...

...A Russian Beauty and Other Stories By Vladimir Nabokov McGraw-Hill...

...Mightn't Olga's going only mean that she was making room for someone else...

...Nabokov, Cheever, Malamud, and Forster, on the other hand, are tested commodities, and to approach their new collections is, with some thankful exceptions, merely to rediscover what their previous books have alerted us to look for...

...When John Cheever is in top form his wit combines humor and acerbity...

...One can't get farther from the physical detail of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn than this: "And he saw how intelligent the boy was and how handsome, and determining to win him there and then imprinted a kiss on his forehead and drew him to Abraham's bosom...

...If the lack of reputation keeps these writers out of the pages of Esquire and The New Yorker, still, relative anonymity can be something of a blessing, since one reads the work of an unknown with no preconceptions...