One Bird Too Many

IN THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS (243 pp.)--Hortense Calisher--Liifle, Brown ($3).

Every writer has to look for the bluebird of his own true style, but most of them cage a mockingbird first--and it warbles shamelessly in the accents of others. Hortense Calisher is in the rare situation of having both birds in the cage at once: her first volume of short stories, In the Absence of Angels, gives the impression of being an anthology of compositions by disciples of Marcel Proust, George Orwell and Elizabeth Bowen--and one seriously talented writer named Hortense Calisher.

The pseudo-Proust is, all inadvertently, the funniest of Author Calisher's impersonations. In Point of Departure, a double soliloquy conducted by the two members of a love affair, the interminable sentences curl so concentrically and wearily that they come to sound like a playback on a run-down phonograph. The Bowenism is a sight more readable. Letitia, Emeritus, the story of a "backward" girl whose seduction by a prurient old teacher topples a domino-row of calamities, is managed with the firm Bowen wrist and the sure fingering of details. Yet, somehow, though Author Calisher has fingered her characters, she has not felt them, and does not make a reader feel them.

The title story is a bucketful of political satire hauled up from the deep old Orwell. Here, in a prison barracks in suburban New York, on a black night somewhere this side of 1984, sits a U.S. liberal jailed by the Russian conquerors, and remembers how indifferent she was to a poor, underfed little girl back in grammar school ; the girl has grown up to be Comrade Hilda Kantrowitz, the public prosecutor.

Such a story, riding pickaback on issues of the moment, is carried more by its contemporaneity than by any strength in the author. That strength emerges only in the last six stories in the book, six strong, quiet stories of Jewish family life in the U.S. Here, for the first time, Author Calisher seems really sure of her people and places, and what she feels about them. In the last and best of the stories, The Middle Drawer, she searches into the need of a grownup daughter to be reconciled at last to her unsympathetic mother, before the mother dies of cancer. In these, Author Calisher shows that she has more than just a pretty talent for diverting imitations.

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