Broken Butterflies

AFTER SUCH PLEASURES -- Dorothy Parker--Viking ($2.25). Dorothy Parker has no compunction about breaking a butterfly upon a wheel. In fact it is the best thing she does, and her exhibitions in this kind are greeted with applause and cries for more. Like other first-rate comedians, however, she cannot always be content to raise a laugh. Though she cannot refrain from tearing her butterflies apart, sometimes she does it with a savagely sentimental reluctance. The stories in her latest collection illustrate both tendencies. Some of them: A horse-faced trained nurse keeps her long upper lip brightly firm while she takes contemptuous kindness as if it were not contempt. A cast-off inamorata soliloquizes in a taxi. Friends of the family are puzzled when a Perfect Couple, long married, split up for the valid but private reasons that he cannot stand her long fingernails, she his audible yawns. A wife from whose life the glory has departed clings to her faith in the glamour of actresses--and then meets one. Neatest job of the lot: "Here We Are," a dialog between bride and groom just after the wedding; few experienced husbands or wives will be able to restrain their shouts over this one.

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