22 Lasting Stories

THE SCRIBNER TREASURY: 22 CLASSIC TALES (689 pp.)--Scribner ($5).

This book contains some of the best reading likely to be published all summer. Most of its 22 stories were written before 1910.

The 107-year-old house of Scribner says that it has no special thesis in assembling them in one volume. Scribner simply searched through its files for classics and picked 22 written between 1881 and 1931. All the stories in the Scribner Treasury "won immediate public favor" when they first appeared, however, and the demand for them "has never ceased." Among the storytellers in the collection: Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy, Thomas Nelson Page, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, Ring Lardner and Sir James Barrie. Among the other Scribner storytellers notably passed over: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway.

In Edith Wharton's Madame de Treymes, a French woman who is not as bad as she seems undoes an American who is almost too good to be true. In Galsworthy's The Apple Tree, a middle-aged Englishman remembers a long-ago love affair and the dead Welsh girl who was too innocent-hearted for his propriety. In Page's The Burial of the Guns, the men of a Confederate battery decide what they must do after they hear the news of Appomattox. In Mary Andrews' The Perfect Tribute, Abraham Lincoln learns from a dying Southern captain that his speech at Gettysburg was not, after all, a failure. In tone, the stories range from Ring Lardner's deadpan barbershop talk in Haircut to the old-school nourishes of New Orleans' George W. Cable in Madame Delphine: "She was just passing 17--that beautiful year when the heart of the maiden still beats quickly with the surprise of her new dominion, while with gentle dignity her brow accepts the holy coronation of womanhood."

Scribner denies thesis but admits that the stories show something about writers and readers, at least up to the '30s: "They . . . believed firmly in standards of behavior, in right and wrong, in law and its opposite, disorder. They might differ in particulars, but the great ends of living were common in their thinking; and they were assured that literature, to have meaning, must offer not only a slice of life but a criticism of it."

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