Secular Grace

By Stefan Kanfer

SHORT STORIES: FIVE DECADES by Irwin Shaw Delacorte; 756 pages; $14.95

In the introduction to his collected stories John Cheever recalls a crusty, idiosyncratic editor at The New Yorker. But, adds the author, "since the men he encouraged ranged as widely as Irwin Shaw and Vladimir Nabokov, he seems to have done more good than anything else." Cheever may be the only person in the world who would mention these writers in the same sentence. There are many who would not mention Shaw at all. Alfred Kazin's massive study of American fiction, On Native Grounds, has no room for the author. Edmund Wilson's definitive survey, Classics and Commercials, gives space to only one Shaw: George Bernard Today the Irwin Shaw Show means more than the Irwin Shaw books: Rich Man, Poor Man has eclipsed his previous works and further diminished his literary reputation. That is a mixed curse: the TV miniseries was comic-book melodrama; yet, without its success, this out-of-print collection of collections would probably not have been issued, and a short-story master might have been missed.

All of which is fine with the author, who shuttles between Switzerland and New York. At 65, he cherishes few illusions. "I am," he says simply, "a product of my times." Shaw spent five decades writing big movies and novels (The Young Lions, Lucy Crown) and unprofitable short fiction, because "in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned."

Or ignored. In the '30s Shaw sang a chant of social significance; the tales are filled with laborers and struggling families indistinguishable from Clifford Odets or Arthur Miller characters. But by the '40s he had found his own voice, a Shavian mix of irony and poignance. Since then the supple prose has been, like Cheever's, dominated by sexual themes and by the attempt to lend common experiences and ordinary people a secular grace.

In The Girls in Their Summer Dresses a womanizer's roving eye finally set ties on the most beautiful legs in the room: his wife's--a comment on male sexuality that says more than any behaviorist manual. Act of Faith, in which a Jewish soldier trades in a pistol to treat his Christian buddies to drinks, is an explanation of the Masada complex that remains undated. Mixed Doubles, the story of a couple whose on-court skirmishes reveal a betrayed trust, seems doubly acute in a time of Inner Tennis.

Unfortunately, these 63 polished works tend to turn self-mockery up to full volume: "Present it in a pitiful light. Three combat-scarred veterans, who fought their way from Omaha Beach to-- what was the name of the town we fought our way to?" Or: "What sort of poetry do you write?" "Lyric, elegiac, and athletic In praise of youth, death, and anarchy. Very good for tearing."

It is Shaw's typical mode, and one that too many critics and readers have taken literally. A revision is overdue. The experience of going through these resonant tales, remembers the author, was some thing like what is supposed to happen when a man is drowning, as scene after scene of his life passes before his eyes. If the drowning man is devout, it can be imagined that in those final moments he examines the scenes to determine the balance between his sins and his virtues with a view toward eventual salvation. Since l am not particularly devout, my chances for salvation lie in a place sometime in the future on a library shelf."

Short Stories: Five Decades speak exclusively in the past tense. Because of them, Irwin Shaw's claims for redemption can be written in the future definite. --Stefan Kanfer

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.