SHORT STORIES

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30739, 1 May 1965, Page 4

SHORT STORIES

Winter’s Tales 10. Edited by A. D. Maclean. Macmillan. 216 pp. This is a collection sure to be remembered for its nonfiction, not because it is the first time in 10 years that factual writing has been included but because of the quality of the piece itself. The anonymous author of the piece is “Zeno,” an occupant of a British prison who won a 1963 Arthur Koestler award for literature. It is a thrilling story thrillingly told. The author, a member of the British Ist Airborne Division during the Second World War, was anchored by his foot and a static-line to the American Dakota that dropped him over the English Midlands. There he was, alive, high above the earth, being dragged along in the slipstream at 200 miles an hour. Titled “Suspense of Judgment,” the account he gives of his perilous predicament and miraculous rescue deals with his physical reactions to pain and terror, and his en route thoughts concerning past, present and future. It is remarkable writing. Unfortunately this reviewer cannot say he is as impressed with the remainder of the collection as he was with Winter’s Tales 9. Kevin Casey’s “The Holy Ground,” a study of an Irish island fishing community that circumvents a journalist wanting to make play of its poverty, Alan Siilitoe’s “Guzman, Go Home,” the curious story of an ex-German Nazi in Spain haunted by guilt, and Frank Tuohy’s “Fingers in the Door,” treating of a cruel mother-daughter combination against the father, are the most impressive, though the Sillitoe selection seems to tarry before getting to the meat.

But one wonders about the worth of devoting 32 pages to the erotic humour (if humour it is?) of Gordon Meyer’s “The Gorgon’s Head.” It takes all those pages to show how a long-suffering Argentinian wife cures her promiscuous husband by doping with a medicine that kills reality and converts his desires into mirages which he pursues but can never attain.