Of Innocence & Experience

INNOCENTS (204 pp.]--A. L.Barker--Scribner ($2.50). SILENT CHILDREN (189 pp.)--Mai Mai Sze --Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

In two books out this week, children are painted without the scrubbed sweetness their faces habitually wear on the covers of ladies' magazines.

The first is a collection of short stories which won the -L-500 Somerset Maugham Award in England. Under the terms laid down by Donor Maugham, the British government permits the winner to spend his prize money in foreign travel -- and that privilege, in currency-tight England, is a prize in itself. Novelist Evelyn Waugh acidly predicted that "elderly" writers would compete even if it meant "forging of birth certificates, dyeing of whiskers and lifting of faces. To what parodies of experimental styles will we not push our experienced pens!"

A. L. Barker (29), the first Maugham Award winner, is no experimental stylist. And even "elderly" Evelyn Waugh (44) might have had a hard time getting the prize away from a book of short stories as original and good as her Innocents.

Cocoons of Delusion. Most of the innocents are children who are suddenly shocked by experience into the realization that people have unexpected reservoirs of sordidness and evil. But even more exposed, and perhaps more deeply hurt, are the adult innocents, who have sat out their lives in habitual disappointment or in cocoons of selfdelusion. In one of the best stories, the instrument of evil is a young schoolboy who hates his naive schoolmaster and takes a vicious delight in helping to wreck his life. Adult readers who take it for granted that a child's mind is an uncomplicated, open book may find themselves appalled by Miss Barker's chilling expose of little Richard Tustin's craftiness under a surface of bland innocence, his greed for power and his contempt for weak grownups.

Like Richard Hughes's famed A High Wind in Jamaica, Miss Barker's Innocents takes the mental world of children with unsentimental seriousness. Storyteller Barker works surely from within the child's range of comprehension, accurately describes the forging of a child's protective armor.

British Critics V. S. Pritchett and C. Day Lewis made no mistake when they gave Miss Barker the Maugham Award. Nor did the London Daily Mail's Peter Quennell, when he praised her for writing of people "she seems to know and feel for --from the soles of their erring feet to the crowns of their shining heads."

Cornered Children. The second book, Silent Children, is a novel by China's Mai Mai Sze (pronounced roughly may may she), daughter of a former Chinese Ambassador to Washington. It cannot claim to rank with Innocents. But its strength lies in its dramatic presentation of an appalling contemporary problem--the "dispossessed children" of World War II. While Author Barker's juveniles lose their innocence in relatively peaceful country areas of wartime England, Author Sze's homeless ragamuffins live in a camp on the mud flats of an Eastern river, and make sorties into a nearby city for the food which barely keeps them alive.

Shrewd and tough beyond their years, always in danger of being beaten to death by the police and the angry citizens, these "little rats" act in much the same way as cornered adults.

Their child boss is a cool, foresighted "premier," whose methodical plans for organized robbery are constantly upset by romantic little upstarts who think it is heroic to disregard orders and rules, to thieve when & where they will. At the premier's elbow is a sage elder statesman (aged 12) who acts as moderator between the boss and the upstarts. The rest of the camp is composed of a passive majority, a child-mother, and a deaf mute.

Author Sze does a good job of describing the sallies, bickerings and clumsy esprit de corps of her "little rats." Without distorting the naturalness of children's behavior, she leads the reader to envision the camp on the mud flats as a nation struggling to live. And Author Sze's ironical conclusion drives home a sharp point: it is not agents of civilized law & order who at last break up the camp, but an outraged black-marketeer with a Tommy gun, who regards the little thieves as a menace to the sanctity of his property.

Boring Adults. Silent Children might have packed as much punch as the Italian movie on a somewhat similar subject, Shoeshine (TIME, Sept. 8), if Author Sze had been content to present the stark facts of her matter. As it is, she pads out her story by bringing refugee adults into the camp--boring adults who try to explain, in the hackneyed, childish language of pseudo-philosophy, the desperate situation which the children have already expressed with such matureness.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.