SHORT STORIES

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28471, 28 December 1957, Page 3

SHORT STORIES

Tip on a Dead Jockey, and other stories. By Irwin Shaw. Jonathan Cape. 256 pp.

In a recent interview with John Wain for the ‘‘Observer,’’ the American critic and novelist Lionel Trilling said: “Thinking of the presentation of ideas, directly or otherwise, reminds me of the peculiar conditions that obtain here in America. There’s no sophisticated class: None of that interaction ot the social and educational systems, that produces a milieu in which basic problems are never discussed, simply because it’s assumed that everyone is too advanced to need to go back over them. That wave of the. hand which conveys, Oh, that question: It’s all settled—it’s almost unknown here. It’s largely because the generations don’t carry on from one another.”

WAIN: “If there isn’t a sophisticated class, what do you have instead? The£e must be some group within the total population who feel themselves to be accessible to ideas, whether by means of art or not.”

TRILLING: ‘‘Well, of course, the ‘New Yorker,’ is at work almost single-handed on the task of creating a group round which something can be built. ...”

The work of both Robert M. Coates and Irwin Shaw form a most distinctive and distinguished part within this group. Both are “accessible to ideas” and both are capable < of presenting those ideas with a freshness which is a very soothing substitute for sophistication in its jaded, worldweary form. If Mr Shaw’s voice says, in an ‘‘autumnal whisper, it will never be like this again,” he has a “double ability to enjoy a moment with the immediacy of youth and the reflective melancholy of age . . . the gift of instantaneous nostalgia.” His observation of his fellow Americans is acute: “America,” says one of his few English characters, “the only place left where people can afford to act in an old-fashioned manner.” The stories in this present volume (it is Mr Shaw’s fifth collection of short stories)’ are mostly of Americans in Europe. The title story has a true sense of the dramatic—it is apparently being filmed—and it is understandable that it should be taken as the dominant theme, but the title is misleading if it implies that this is a book of which an elderly aunt would disapprove. Many elderly aunts would welcome and enjoy this humour, humanity, insight, and keen sense of situation.

Accident at the Inn, and Other Stories. By'Robert M. Coates. Gollancz. 216 pp. Mr Coates is the art critic of “The New Yorker” and the author of “Wisteria Cottage” and “Darkness of the Day.” He is used to considering “the whole problem of the purpose of pictorial representation”; and this is. apparent in his writing of fiction, in his appreciation of atmosphere ol place as well as of person—a combination of the matter-of-fact and the mystical. In the story “Rendezvous,” a bank manager, Fred Barclay, decamps with fifty thousand or so of the bank’s dollars, having, while in the employ oi the bank, carefully built up a personality completely alien to his real nature. But in the end he was drawn into his adopted pattern and betrayed by it. The author asks: “Was it fate, as we think of fate—something preordained”—or Fred’s own contriving? To the reviewer’s mind, it was largely the latter, and the only thing preordained was the practical impossibility of his escaping from the course he had embarked on when he decided to rob the bank at home. Life does imitate art. In a sense, it has tp. for though life is the. source of art, art is more persuasive, and its patterns are more convincing; it is simpler and more straightforward. Most of all, perhaps, art is more planned, and so the man in real life, living fumblingly day by day, is inevitably led, for his own reassurance, to fall back on the loriger-range plans of his counterparts in fiction. There is perception and compassion in Mr Coates’s writing, and much of the supernatural, and though his characters belong to the American scene they have a universality: one of the best stories in the book, “The Reward,” is of a cantankerous and contrary old man who might just as easily be found in Central Otago as in New England.