Once upon a Time

THE BEARS' FAMOUS INVASION OF SICILY (147 pp.)--Dino Buzzati, translated by Frances Lobb-- Pantheon ($2.75).

Leander was no ordinary monarch. He was King of the bears of Sicily. Thirteen years ago, he had led them down from the mountains, defeated the Grand Duke's army of mere men and captured the capital. Leander had ruled well, but traffic with human beings had corrupted his kindly, naive bears. They took to wearing clothes, learned to steal and gamble and to stage bacchanalian orgies. Now the King had been shot by his own chamberlain. On his deathbed, the King spoke slowly:

"Go back to the mountains. Leave this city, where you have found riches but not peace of mind. Take off those ridiculous human clothes. Throw away your gold. Abandon your cannon, your rifles, and all the other devilish contraptions that men have shown you. Return to what you were before."

Next day, "without taking so much as a pin with them," the bears went back to the mountains.

Out of Italy, which gave the world Pinocchio, has come a new and fine children's story, the kind that grownups borrow from kids. It was written, half in prose and half in verse, by Dino Buzzati, 41, a wrinkly-eyed Italian newspaperman and novelist.

Buzzati has illustrated The Bears himself, with drawings as gravely whimsical as his text. He drew some of them many years ago to amuse his nieces, drew more and wrote the story around them in Milan during the tedious evenings of the German occupation. Last year, when the book was published in Italy, many Italian readers decided that the bears of the story were Sicily's U.S. invaders, and read meanings into it that the author never intended, since he had conceived the idea long before.

Last week Buzzati, who is an editor of Milan's Corriere delta Sera, got a letter from his U.S. publisher telling him that "a group of elderly ladies influential in children's education circles has discovered militaristic tendencies in your book," and that some U.S. bookstores refused to handle The Bears. Said Buzzati: "I am dumfounded. The whole point of the book is that conquest finally corrupts."

The elderly ladies are not the only U.S. opposition Buzzati's kindly bears face. Like any proper once-upon-a-timer, The Bears has an ogre and a necromancer, and good routs evil with the help of magic wands. It has other things which some readers may decide are strong meat for youngsters: gambling, drunkenness, assassination and ghosts. Buzzati handles these matters with such disarming candor and good sense that only the most squeamish parent will fear for childish innocence. And he has also, in his book, tried to answer people who say that children should not hear ghost stories.

"First of all, ghosts, always supposing they exist, have never done children any harm, in fact they have never done anyone any harm, it is simply that people insist on getting frightened. Ghosts and spirits, if they exist (and today they have almost vanished off the face of the earth), are natural and innocent things like the wind, or the rain, or shadows of trees, or the voice of the cuckoo in the evening. . . . Secondly, Demon Castle does not exist any more . . . there are no more bears in Sicily, and the whole story is now so remote that there is no cause for alarm. Thirdly, that is how the story was, and we cannot alter it."

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