Worth the Money

NEW SHORT NOVELS (188 pp.)--Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Etnier, Clyde Miller, Shelby Foote--Ballantine (cloth $2.75, paper 35-c-).

The most preoccupying subject in the U.S. book trade just now is the future of paperbacks--and the chance of finding a big market for paperback originals as well as for reprints. But in all the chatter, few ask the question: How good is the stuff being published? The talk runs, instead, to sales and distribution problems, to authors turning from established publishers to the better royalty deals and bigger circulation promised by the paperback newcomers.

The simple fact is that while reprints have been aiming at generally higher quality, paperback originals worth reading have been extremely rare. No first-rate U.S. novelist has yet left the conventional publishers, and all the paper publishers together have not turned up a promising newcomer.

The news this week is that writing of a pretty high level has at last shown up between the covers of a 35-c- book. No old-line publisher need have been ashamed to sponsor New Short Novels between boards, though it is doubtful that he would have got back his investment from bookstore sales. If the book succeeds at the newsstands and in the drugstores, it will be the first real sign that U.S. readers are as hungry for good new writing at a fair price as some in the trade believe.

New Short Novels contains only four long stories, and it gets off to a shaky start. Ride Out, by Mississippi Novelist Shelby Foote, is actually an elongation of a Satevepost story about the tragic end of a dedicated Negro jazz trumpeter. Sincere, but derivative and commonplace, it probably should not have been included in the first place. But the other three provide a session of good reading for less than the price of a light breakfast.

Elizabeth Etnier's The Willow is a cleanly written story of a Maine coast tragedy. Like a lot of people, young Maud and Dave Higgens were enchanted by the idea of escaping dull jobs in New York and going to live on a lovely island. Actually, they were misfits, "artistic" without being artists, totally unable to cope with life. At first, life on the island was the idyl they had dreamed, but when their money ran out and children came, the cruel business of earning a living in a hard country turned romance into a poverty-draped nightmare. With charity, economy, and a nice sense of fictional pace. Author Etnier generates complete sympathy for weaklings who learn too late that the price of calculated romanticism comes high.

In The Gentle Season, young (27) University of Florida Librarian Clyde Miller writes simply about a Southern tragedy that would have tempted most of his Southern contemporaries into pure bathos. An attractive, selfish woman gradually breaks down a man's spirit by refusing her love. Her teen-age nephew tells the story, and because he admires Captain Traill, the tragedy seems all the deeper. Unlike most sensitive boys of Southern fiction, young Joshua understands enough of an adult situation, but not so much that the tale appears incredible. At the start of his career, Author Miller already knows that what is left out is sometimes what makes the story effective.

Most disturbing of the three is Jean Stafford's expertly written A Winter's Tale. With its prewar Heidelberg setting (where Author Stafford was once a student), its subtle mixture of Nazi erosion, false piety and neurotic love, this is not a story for those who want happy endings. Domineering Frau Professor Gait is hated not only by her husband and her young American visitor, but by her young lover as well. To the American girl who takes the lover away briefly before he goes on military maneuvers, he seems at once preoccupied, cruel and dead inside. Not until their last fling does she discover that he is a Jew, that sadistic Frau Gait has held on to him by holding his secret over his head.

None of these stories is cheerful, but none of them lays on tragedy for false or startling effects. All of them have several good things in common: genuine sympathy for the human condition, writing that is lucid and individual, artfulness without artiness, and that rapidly declining virtue, the knack of telling a story.

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