Texas & Berlin

Texas & Berlin THE LEANING TOWER AND OTHER STORIES -- Katharine Anne Porter -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES (1944) -- Edited by Martha Foley --Houghton, Mifflin ($2.75).

Grandmother Sophia Jane had raised eleven children. "She wore a stiffly starched white chambray bonnet, with a round crown buttoned on a narrow brim." When the cling-peach tree bloomed in her Kentucky garden, she mused: "I have planted five orchards in three States, and now I see only one tree in bloom." Her numerous descendants and her aged servants thought she was the most wonderful, most terrifyingly efficient person alive.

Nannie, born into slavery, had lived all her life with Grandmother Sophia Jane. At 85 she retired to a little cabin, wrapped a blue bandanna about her head, smoked a corncob for the first time and thought about the 13 children she had borne (eleven had died). Sometimes she worried over what God would say when he saw her black skin. "Nonsense!" snapped Grand mother Sophia Jane. "He sees only souls. . . . Of course you're going to Heaven."

Uncle Jimbilly was Nannie's husband and Grandmother's odd-job man. He liked to carve miniature tombstones in wood, but he got angry when asked to inscribe "Safe in Heaven" over the tomb of the children's pet jackrabbit. Children goggled and thrilled when Uncle Jimbilly casually remarked that he would cut off their ears, skin them alive and nail their skins to the barn door.

The grandchildren lived on the out skirts of the old peoples' world, watching with awe the unchanging routine and deep-set beliefs of Grandmother, Nannie and Uncle Jimbilly. But away from this dying world they danced with the freedom of the new generation around the family graves that Grandmother had arranged among the cypresses.

Cake Crumbs from Childhood. Six of the nine short stories in The Leaning Tower are crumbs from this cake of childhood--gentle, affectionate epitaphs for a dead world, which read more like a continuous record of nostalgic memories than like separate short stories. They spring from the grass roots as clearly as their author does. Katherine Anne Porter has become one of the intelligentsia's most admired short-story writers. She has lived in most of the intelligentsia's favorite prewar haunts: Paris, Majorca, Berlin, Vienna and Mexico. But she was born in Texas and schooled in Louisiana convents, now lives on a farm near Saratoga Springs.

Some readers may be more impressed by The Leaning Tower's long (100 pages) title story, set in the Berlin of 1931, than by its vignettes of Texas. The elements of this story are a few dingy streets, a beerhouse, a room filled with "the winter day like dirty water," and five principal characters: a gawky young Texas artist; an aristocratic student from Heidelberg with a freshly gashed dueling scar on his cheek; a wolfish but pathetic landlady; Polish pianist; a browbeaten, impecunious professor of mathematics. Out of these Author Porter has carefully built a somber, horrifying picture of a country on the verge of tragedy -- a leaning tower ready to fall at the touch of a strong hand.

Sense without Sensibility. Martha Foley, onetime editor of Story magazine, has edited the perennial Best Short Stories since the death of Editor Edward J. O'Brien in 1941. The 30 stories in her 1944 collection (mostly written by relatively unknown authors) rate pretty high on common sense, low on imagination and passion. Most impressive: Of This Time, of That Place, by Biographer-Critic Lionel Trilling (Matthew Arnold; E. M. Forster), a Columbia University English instructor. Author Trilling's caustic, moving account of the clash between a kindly but red-taped professor and a brilliant but irrational student is calculated to make almost any pedagogue squirm.

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