A Din of Demanding Voices THE DEATH OF METHUSELAH AND OTHER STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 244 pages; $17.95

By Paul Gray

The 1982 publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Collected Stories prompted critical applause, commercial success and a nagging uneasiness among the author's devoted readers. Might this summing-up of a life's work, coming from a man whose career had already been decorated with a Nobel Prize, be an indication that Singer, then 74, was thinking of slowing down? In retrospect, ! of course, it would have made more sense and wasted less time to be concerned that birds would stop singing or the world suddenly grow sensible and dull. Forces of nature do not stop voluntarily. Sure enough, a book of 22 new Singer stories appeared in 1985, and now here come 20 more in The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories. In the space of six years, while moving into his ninth decade, the author has managed to render his earlier collection decidedly incomplete.

But hardly obsolete. All of Singer's short fiction, from long-established classics like Gimpel the Fool to the latest story, hot off the presses, is amazingly of a piece. Three basic formulas are constantly repeated. Unrest stirs a rural Polish village, thanks to the mischief of its inhabitants and their attendant demons. An aspiring young author passes his time in Warsaw visiting the Yiddish Writers' Club and storing up everything he hears and does. An older incarnation of the same man, expatriated from Poland and living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, submits willingly to readers and strangers who come to his door bearing strange tales. From these premises, Singer continues to construct an apparently inexhaustible supply of variations.

Hence, in this volume, The Jew from Babylon tells of an itinerant sorcerer and healer who travels to a remote village and falls victim to the dark powers that have supported him in his trade. The House Friend features a young man in a Warsaw cafe listening to an older man recount his amorous adventures with married women. The Smuggler describes a visitor with some books to be autographed who pays a call on a writer in his New York City apartment and reveals, with hardly any prodding at all, some secrets.

These three types of Singer stories share a sharp urgency, a sense that time is too precious to waste on flowery descriptions or circumlocutions. One character commands another, "Speak simple Yiddish," the language in which all these tales were originally written, and the English translations by the author and others do their best to obey the spirit of this injunction. Storytellers appear suddenly, with scant preamble, and seem eager to get off the page as soon as possible. They punctuate their narratives with such remarks as "To make it short . . ." and "Why drag it out?" The Trap involves yet another caller at the writer's apartment, a woman on crutches who announces, "I'm not going to bother you with too many details. I'll come right to the point."

She is as good as her word, but her parsimonious expenditure of language does not imply a poverty of experience. On the contrary, she tells of her early years as a chambermaid at an Adirondacks hotel and her unexpected marriage to one of the guests, a rich but supernally dull stock trader: "I read some time ago that they're building robots that think. If such robots are built they'll be just like Boris." Next comes the surprising turn in which Boris introduces his handsome young nephew into their lives, obviously engineering his wife's adultery. It works, and that is followed by her leap out of a window and failed suicide. What does she make of all this? "I came to tell you," she informs her host, "only one thing: that of all the hopes a human being can have, the most splendid is death." At roughly 16 pages, this story is by Singer's standards a trifle long-winded.

The author aims most effectively for the mind's ear; his fiction is filled with exuberant noise, the din of voices demanding attention, explaining themselves, complaining about the way the world has treated them. "Man has no more freedom than a bedbug," insists one. "In this respect, Spinoza was right." Another tells how jealousy drove him crazy: "I now hated all women. Lifting my hands to heaven, I swore never to marry." The narrator asks, "Did you keep your word?" The laconic response: "I have six grandchildren." Singer's people seldom shy away from expounding on the mysteries of existence: "People often say that one cannot understand the ways of the Almighty. Yet the ways of human beings can be just as perplexing."

A cranky contrariness enlivens these and all Singer stories. Even the Methuselah of the title story, aged 969 years and impatient for death, can be stirred back to sexual life. In A Peephole in the Gate, a man laments that his advanced years have not brought the serenity he expected: "I reckoned that after 70 a person stops musing about all petty things. But the head does not know how old it is. It remains young and full of the same foolishness as at 20." The prospect of such protracted turmoil may not please everyone, but the news is conveyed in these vibrant stories with unforgettable, irresistible energy.