Easy Reading

POST STORIES OF 1937--Little, Brown ($2.50).

When the late Charles Flandrau (Viva Mexico!) was a star Saturday Evening Post contributor 40 years ago, one thing mightily depressed him. That was the changes that took place in his stories when they appeared in print. If he gave one of his characters a highball, the drink became a glass of lemonade. In those days a Post character might kill Indians, but he could not smoke a cigaret. Last week a collection of 22 stories chosen from the 234 published in last year's Saturday Evening Post revealed how greatly they had changed since that genteel period. Post characters in 1937 not only drank, smoked and swindled, but in one story (George Sessions Perry's Edgar and the Dank Morass) a backwoods sweetheart behaved with almost Erskine Caldwell abandon, although her behavior was suggested rather than described.

Despite this greater candor, critics are not likely to describe Saturday Evening Post stories as very strong meat. Of the 22 in Post Stories of 1937, seven follow its classic pattern of a happy ending with marriage or its promise, and three others salute the beginnings of romance in their last sentences. The favorite story of Post writers is that of an inconspicuous worthy who is pushed around at first, finally comes out on top, usually triumphing over some flashier rival in the process. They tell it expertly, with no waste motions, sometimes with humor, frequently with a good deal of technical information thrown in--about steel mills, prize fights, greyhound racing, navigation. Except for Thomas Wolfe's story of racial conflict, The Child by Tiger, and Walter Edmonds' tale of a white woman captured by Indians, Delia Borst, the stories that tackle weighty subjects bog deep in sentimentality, occasionally, as in Jacland Marmur's A Woman of His Own, sink almost out of sight.

Minus the smooth illustrations, the Post stories that hold up best are those in which the authors throw probability to the winds, along with romance and deep thoughts, and go in for straight, oldfashioned, O. Henry farce. Except for the humorous stories and the tales of Thomas Wolfe and Walter Edmonds, main impression communicated by Post Stories of 1937 is one of uniformity, as if the 22 stories and the 479 closely-printed pages had all been cut to pattern by the same expert, precise, unexcited writer.

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