Pierrot Penseroso

ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN--F. Scott Fitzgerald--Scribner's ($2). The preciosity that glittered in the work of young Mr. Fitzgerald when he used to write exclusively about petting and orange-juice, has acquired a deepening stain of understanding. Princeton's Pierrot, aging, holds Columbine at arm's length and weeps for the world. Sometimes Columbine is not even present.

One of these short stories, The Rich Boy, enters the Yale club of Manhattan and defines, with grave prescience, the tragedy of a man whose life began where many a life finishes, on a spiritually desert island. It compresses to 53 pages a wad of truth large enough for a thumping big novel.

When, in The Baby Party, two young fathers grapple savagely, the reader's laugh is sobered by a glimpse of the combatants' real motive, the ache for immortality.

Absolution is the most astonishing piece in the collection. Imagine Booth Tarkington suddenly endowed with a real sense of beauty and a Slavic flair for psychology. Rudolph Miller, aged eleven, has enormous, intense blue eyes and a private name for himself, "Blatchford Sarnemington." By lying at the Catholic confessional and observing the effect upon his puny father and the sex-starved priest, he discovers the difference between himself and his "official" soul.

There are six other stories, including Rags Martin-Jones and the Prince of Wales, a joyous, fantastic assurance that Author Fitzgerald, however thoughtful these days, has sprouted no lugubrious grey chin-wisps.