Mixed Fiction

THE LONG NIGHT, by Julian Mayfield (156 pp.; Vanguard; $3.50), puts a ten-year-old Negro boy through a Harlem wringer during one long night and shows him at dawn emotionally dry behind the ears. The kid's name is Frederick Brown, but he prefers to be called by his gang name: Steely. He is a 2nd lieutenant in the Junior Comanche Raiders, reads Superman comics and numbers Jackie Robinson among his heroes.

When The Long Night begins for Steely, his father has walked out on his family. But on this day, Mamma has hit it lucky playing the numbers game. When she sends Steely to collect her $27, she warns him: "And if you lose that money, boy, don't you come back at all." He doesn't lose it; bigger boys of his own gang take it away from him. The rest of The Long Night tells how Steely tries to beg, borrow or steal $27. No one will let him work for it. The Harlem fancy man for whom he has done odd jobs offers a single dollar. In desperation Steely snatches a woman's purse only to wind up with $2. When he steals a bicycle, planning to sell it, it is in turn stolen from him by a rival gang. When he decides to throw away the last of his father's carefully instilled ideals and roll a drunk, Steely's childish anguish reaches its pitch--and Author Mayfield reaches for the help of the long hand of coincidence. Up to that point. The Long Night is a simple, touching story that fuses the night world of Harlem and the frenzied world of a child's fear.

THE MOUNTAIN Is YOUNG, by Han Suy!n (51 I pp.; Putnam; $4.95), is characterized by numerous passages such as this: "And then she felt hot all over, going molten and weak, liquid fire rising under her skin, the pure excruciating gooseflesh, for he was there ... He stood in front of her and she caught the warmth of his body and the faint smell of leather and sandalwood."

Thus East (Unni Menon, a mystical engineer) meets West (Anne Ford, the new English teacher at a Khatmandu girls' school) in Author Han (A Many-Splendored Thing) Suyin's new novel. And why was it that critics denounced Kipling?

VENUS IN SPARTA, by Louis Auchincloss (280 pp.; Houghfon Mifflin; $3.50), is about a kind of hidebound Dr. Jekyll whose double life eventually destroys him. At 45, Michael Parish is a member of all the right New York clubs, a trustee of his Grotonesque prep school, and in line for the presidency of a Wall Street bank. He has always tried to measure up to the principles he learned at his mother's knee --live on the right side of the park, and never attend matinees. But a series of rude intrusions disrupt his neat, parklike existence. First, it turns out that his wife likes the wrong kind of matinee: one afternoon Michael peeks into her bedroom and sees her with one of his junior trust officers. He finds some consolation in a second marriage, but a sordid financial squeeze play threatens his castle in the conditioned air of Wall Street. Finally Michael decides that he has "waited all his life for a madness of the blood," and indulges it with his stepdaughter. In his desire "to become a man, as other men, to become an animal, as other animals, he had, quite simply, destroyed himself."

Michael Parish may be weak and a little foolish, a man fixed by his background and fleeced by his women. But Lawyer-Novelist Auchincloss (The Great World and Timothy Colt, Sybil) pleads his case effectively. He also secures his own expanding niche in American letters, where he suavely dissects the outwardly successful failures and where, in the Fitzgerald tradition, the rich boy never gets off Scott free.

ANECDOTES OF DESTINY, by Isak Dinesen (244 pp.; Random House; $3.75), tells how, once upon a time, there was a theological student of Shiraz who thought highly of angels--so highly that he made himself wings and got all set for flight to the angelic spheres. But the Shiraz authorities, who disapproved of high-flown ideas, dressed up a beautiful dancer to look like an angel and planted her on the roof of the student's house, where he studied the skies. By next morning the happy student had reached two important conclusions: that angelic conduct is by no means so spiritual as most people imagine, and that the surest way to reach the heights of angelic bliss is to keep strictly down to earth.

Five such parables constitute this new book by Isak Dinesen (real name: Baroness Karen Blixen). All are pleasant, intriguing, and in the trollish Scandinavian vein of Danish Author Dinesen's Winter's

Tales and Last Tales (TIME, Nov. 4). In Babette's Feast, a French cook wins a small fortune in a lottery and spends every penny of it showing her staid, stingy Norse employers what a real meal can be. In Tempests, the actress who is to play Ariel in The Tempest gets caught in a real storm at sea and becomes a heroine by behaving as Shakespeare has taught her to behave.

Like much of aging (73) Author Dinesen's fiction, some of these Anecdotes are too fey or too coy for popular consumption. But they have a place of their own in that special realm that authors never tire of exploring--the realm in which artistry, be it Shakespeare's or a cook's, seems more real than reality itself.

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