Books: Highbrow Smorgasbord

STORIES IN THE MODERN MANNER (282 pp.)—Edited by Philip Rahv and William Phillips—Avon (35¢).

The publishers of Avon Books (price range: 25¢ to 35¢) sell more than 20 million, copies a year, chiefly by serving up westerns, whodunits and the kind of boy-meets-girl story that can be illustrated by a ripe cheesecake jacket. Occasionally, however, Avon offers a change of diet, and its latest, Stories in the Modern Manner, is an adventure in highbrow smorgasbord: 14 short stories and a one-act play from the literary bimonthly, Partisan Review. The editors never explain what the tag “modern manner” means, but most of these stories do have one thing in common: they are about the end of something—love, life, adolescence or illusion.

Crossing Paris, the first and longest tale, is by Marcel Ayme, a deft ironist who likes to pare the French mind and character like an apple. This time, in a story which takes place during the German occupation, he cuts a little deeper. Two thugs, Martin and Grandgil, are hired by a black-marketeer to tote four valises filled with meat across the city. Grandgil, a newcomer to the racket, is supposed to take orders from Martin, but right from the start he shows a shocking lack of honor. By threatening to expose the black-marketeer, he gets 5,000 francs instead of the agreed 450 for doing the job. As they move across town he tries to sell the meat piecemeal, picks fights in bistros, knocks a gendarme out cold and pockets his whistle. Irked by his incautious partner, Martin tries to pound some sense into Grandgil only to be tossed around like an Apache dancer. Thoroughly cowed, Martin agrees to rest for a few minutes in Grandgil’s flat.

To his surprise, it turns out to be a studio hung with canvases. Grandgil, the arch-tough, is a painter. When his girl friend phones, and he tells her, “I disguised myself as a gangster . . . it’s very easy, too easy,” Martin turns blue-mad, says, “I know how to amuse myself with other people’s work, too.” and slashes a painting. When Grandgil leaps for him, he gets a knife in the belly. To the arresting police Martin says philosophically,

“We don’t do what we wish to do, believe me.”

Into Sunny Honeymoon Italy’s Alberto Moravia pours the heady wine of love and politics. Married two days and honeymooning on Capri, an increasingly testy husband finds his Communist bride continually fending him off. Worse still, she shows an easy sense of comradeship with a fellow party worker they meet on the island. Just when the unhappy husband has decided that he and his wife are politically incompatible, a helpful bolt of summer lightning melts her lovingly in his arms.

In George, Novelist Isaac Rosenfeld tells a memorable story of psychological exhibitionists at a Greenwich Village drinking party. When one of them, a girl named Gloria, turns into a physical exhibitionist by doffing all her clothes, good old George, the steadiest character in the room, saves what is left of decorum by making a circus-style departure that shakes even Gloria out of her pose.

And so it goes. The stories are a good sample of what Partisan Review has been offering to its choosy 5,800 subscribers since the war, and this in itself amounts to a certificate of modernity. For the drugstore trade, Avon has decorously dropped all cheesecake, jacketed the book in black.