Thirteen Deaths

AWAKE AND REHEARSE--Louis Bromfield--Stokes ($2.50).

Essence of the Midwest was Author Bromfield's best book (The Green Bay Tree). Accurately New England was his Pulitzer Prize novel (Early Autumn). Awake and Rehearse includes a third sort of American, the Henry James-Edith Wharton expatriate variety. Bubbling over with abundance of "material," Author Bromfield has been praised for having much to say, blamed for saying it hastily in slovenly prose. This time he says less, says it better. Awake and Rehearse is a macabre title for a group of 13 stories (four are new; nine have appeared in magazines), each of which concerns death in the form of a corpse, or a jar of human ashes, or eyes with the light gone out of them. Approximating novels in manner and matter two of the longest represent the author at his best. The first, "The Cat That Lived at the Ritz," is a shrewd and rather cruel story of an American spinster whose corpse, lying in the Paris Ritz, is robbed by her fake-duchess friend and guarded by her lifelong enemy, "the cat that lived at the Ritz." The final tale, "The Apothecary," is a grim parable of the vulgar and aging rich who gather around them impoverished Parisians with cheap titles and cheaper morals. In a "quaint" apartment over an apothecary's shop in the Faubourg St. Germain, a noisy female parasite gives a dinner to consolidate her waning position. To jaded guests she offers, as entertainment and prey, a virginal American heiress, Anne. A curious decadent odor hangs over the affair, waves of sickening smell choke the perverted conversation. Anne, suffocating, escapes from the room. Downstairs she clatters into something that jangles dismally. It is a metal funeral wreath of painted violets and roses. A door opens and in the dim light Anne sees three women clucking over the apothecary's bloated corpse. Overwhelmed again by the curious decadent odor, Anne recognizes it at last--the odor of Death.