Slot Machine; Peephole

ACTOR'S BLOOD -- Ben Hecht -- Covici, Friede ($2).

THE WHITE HORSES OF VIENNA--Kay Boyle--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Like peep shows, short stories may give a knothole glimpse of real life or a nickel's worth of artifice. Authors Ben Hecht and Kay Boyle are as different as slot machine and peephole. Readers who like their money's worth of entertainment will drop their nickel in Author Hecht; those who want life in the psychological raw will squint through the fence at Author Boyle's queer back yard.

From the point of view of vitality, Ben Hecht's stories are only mildly, Kay Boyle's bitterly, alive. A theatrical, rococo writer, Showman Hecht spreads hokum and verbiage with a lavish hand. Most effective in this swollen vein when he writes about the greasepaint dramatics of Broadway or the alcoholic hilarities of fabulous newshawks, at his middling worst he seems a dim shadow of O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe. Best story in the book (Snowfall in Childhood) stands out like Shirley Temple on the stage of the Grand Guignol: a simply written reminiscence of first love. Some others:

P: An old ham actor, finding his actress daughter dead by her own hand, fakes her murder; then at a dinner of suspects, just as he seems on the point of accusing someone, turns out the lights and fakes his own.

P: A Broadway lawyer who has accidentally killed his mistress sets to work to cover up his tracks. So smart is he that he turns the tables on himself.

P: Two Hollywood tycoons come to grips over the possession of a boy-actor; the one with the more childish psychology wins him.

The Author. Ben Hecht, "Pagliacci of the Fire Escape," is that rare type, a bohemian who made good on Broadway. Manhattan-born (1894), he staked his first claims to fame in Chicago, whither, after spurning college and joining a road-show as an acrobat, he went intending to be a violinist, turned newshawk instead. A vehement, ironic and imaginative talker, a writer of the generously promissory sort, he was taken seriously enough by the longhaired to be printed in Margaret Anderson's late Little Review. A collaborator of parts, he wrote several plays with Maxwell Bodenheim, then quarrelled with him resoundingly. In Charles MacArthur he found his perfect complement: together they produced the 1928 smash hit, The

Front Page, went hand in hand to Hollywood, and now run their own producing company on Long Island. They wrote the book for Jumbo, current Manhattan hit. Author Hecht lives with his second wife at Nyack, near Manhattan.

Title-story of Kay Boyle's The White Horses of Vienna won the 1935 0. Henry Short Story Award, shows how geography alters cases. Author Boyle's heroic hero is a Nazi, but in Austria. Critics of Kay Boyle think she takes a perverse, malicious interest in abnormal people, and most of the denizens of her back yard are indeed a queer lot. Most normal seem blood relations to characters out of D. H. Lawrence or Katherine Mansfield. Her stories are glimpses of people rather than peep shows of action, and often do not "make sense." Yet even her slyest grotesques are recognizably, though often cruelly, human. Some of them:

P: An old English couple, stranded on the Riviera, go spookily senile. A self-styled inventor, he arranges elaborate booby-traps for duns; she collects cats. When the landlord sniffs a rat he finds the old man has been dead for days, the old woman pretending not to notice.

P: A schoolteacher, brimming with idealism and love, inadvertently gives his favorite pupil the bright idea of murder.

P: A U. S. woman falls in love with a stiff British landowner; he is killed soon after their first meeting, but death makes no difference to their courtship.

P: Two old spinsters and their old brother starve slowly and primly in their Manhattan mansion while he labors on the magnum opus that is to restore their fortunes. When they see at last it is no go, they primly turn on the gas.

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