Chimney-Corner Tales

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES by Robert Graves. 323 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

Robert Graves has published 90 books, including scholarly works, novels and collections of poetry. He has also written scores of short stories, and this first collection of them demonstrates that Graves can do almost anything well--or at least, skillfully. The stories I are largely autobiographical, and range in locale from the field of Flanders (where Graves was so badly wounded in World War I that he was listed "killed in action") to the small Majorcan village where he has lived the majority of the time since.

Christmas Truce is Graves's ironic account of the private cease-fire negotiated by a battalion of the North Wessex Regiment with the Germans in the trenches opposite them on Christmas, 1914. It went on for two days and was broken up by the practical French on the Wessex right flank, who opened a murderously unexpected fire with machine guns. But then, adds Philosopher Graves, "the French go in for New Year celebrations more than Christmas."

Earth to Earth is about the wartime couple who become so dedicated to the victory garden they are raising that they take to adding the bodies of airraid victims to their compost heap. Splendid eccentrics abound. There is the young Spanish nobleman who must be sewn into his clothes as a precaution against his sole aberration: a tendency to undress while attending Mass. There is the Count of Deia, an aged recluse who likes to disguise himself--as gypsy, drunkard, peddler or peasant --and roam through the town trying to defraud the local merchants.

Most of his stories, claims Graves, are true: "Pure fiction is beyond my imaginative range." Perhaps, but in these rambling, chimney-corner tales it scarcely matters. True or not, they have the quality that Graves himself admires in the Spaniards on Majorca--a sense of astonishment, controlled and observed.

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