Short Bites

THE MAN WHO WAS LOVED (234 pp.) --James Stern--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

In Britain, where craftsmanlike novelists are almost as common as rooks at a mowing, careful readers watch for a rarer bird--the writer of first-rate short stories. In 1932 a fine specimen came along. James Stern, a young Irishman, published some stories about South Africa, where he had lived for a while, in a book called The Heartless Land. In 1938 he brought out another collection, Something Wrong. British critics had high praise for both volumes; only the first was published in the U.S., in a small edition. Said Author Christopher Isherwood: "James Stern is, as far as I know, the most unjustly neglected writer of short stories now alive."

In The Man Who Was Loved, U.S. readers can savor seven of the best tales from Stern's earlier books, and five new ones. The flavors are keen, and of many sorts.

In Our Father, a young German recalls how his father came home from the World War I battlefront to find the mother having an affair with another man; the figures move and blur in the depths of his memory like shapes under water. Two Men is a stark outline of boredom on a lonely African station; the climax is a blood spree that is somehow more ghastly because its victims are not people, but ducks, geese and flamingos.

Perhaps the most effective story is one that crosses satire and pitilessness in almost equal parts. In Under the Beech Tree, a mannish countrywoman who cares for nothing but the chase is suddenly confronted with the fresh carcass of a vixen. She imagines that the precious creature--the might-have-been mother of countless foxes--has been wantonly shot by her young nephew, and she collapses in a paroxysm of rage and grief.

The stories are written in a firm, never brilliant, always individual style. In the sudden bite of his insights, Storyteller Stern somewhat suggests Chekhov, but Chekhov with his back teeth pulled. He bites, but he doesn't chew his ideas as fine as they deserve.

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