Six Dime Novels

SIX GREAT MODERN SHORT NOVELS (448 pp.)--James Joyce, Herman Melville, Katherine Anne Porter, Nikolai Gogol, Glenway Wescott, William Faulkner--Dell (paperback, 50-c-).

The unwary drugstore customer who picks up a shiny paperback called Six Great Modern Short Novels may be disconcerted to discover that it actually contains six great modern short novels. Ordinarily, he may be no more likely to buy the hard-cover editions of these works than he would be to go shopping for a pack of otter hounds or a brocade waistcoat. But if he reads this volume, undeterred by the crepitation of bursting glue from the spine, he will have exposed himself to more first-class writing than can be found on the entire 1954 fiction list of U.S. and British publishers.

The word modern does not mean in publishing what it means in the used-car business. Some of these novels are definitely vintage models which first startled the highbrow highways more than a quarter century ago. Nor do they necessarily provide a joy ride. In Joyce's The Dead, the reader will find a depressing Christmas party in lace-curtain Dublin; in Melville's Billy Budd, Foretopman, the hanging of a sailor aboard a British man-of-war of the Hornblower period; in Porter's Noon Wine, the madness and death of a farmhand and the suicide of a farmer in horse-and-buggy Texas; in Gogol's The Overcoat, the acquisition and loss of an overcoat by a clerk somewhere in pre-revolutionary Russia; in Wescott's The Pilgrim Hawk, the liberation and recovery of a hunting falcon in the garden of an expatriate lady somewhere in France; and in Faulkner's The Bear, the pursuit of an unusually large bear in the boondocks of post-bellum Mississippi.

Certain objections may occur to the reader. The Irish are a pretty dismal lot, to hear Joyce tell it, and Faulkner's hunting story doubles on its tracks even more than necessary to follow a slow-footed beast. It is no longer news that Russians (then or now) have trouble getting overcoats, and rich characters who keep predatory birds about the house are perhaps a bit too special to care much about. However, the reader will also sense that in all six stories something more important than bears, hawks and overcoats is being talked about. His feelings may focus on the sea story, Billy Budd. If he has seen the film The Caine Mutiny and read the novel, he may become aware that both stories are about the same sort of thing, but that Billy is a tragedy while The Caine Mutiny is a tempest in a large and interesting teapot. Billy Budd carries echoes of the vocabulary of Lincoln and of a time when the great issues were debated at the top of men's voices, in the richest words at their command. And Billy Budd's themes, often thought to be peculiarly modern--the individual and the state, innocence and authority--are far better expressed in the moral, oratorical, Biblical jargon of Melville than in the journeyman prose of Herman Wouk.

All six novels--a bargain at less than a dime each--meet not on the bestseller list, but on literature's highest common denominator. Their authors worked the same line of rugged country defined by Faulkner as "the human heart in conflict with itself ... the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.