Bargain

THE NOBEL PRIZE TREASURY (612 pp.)--Edited by Marshall McClintock -- Doubleday ($4).

Few books should encourage a beginning writer as much as this one. An anthology of the best writing of the 42 Nobel Prizewinners*--from 1901 through 1947-- should theoretically be a cross section of the 20th Century's best world literature. But the fact is, these masterpieces of the recent past, placed together in one compact volume, seem extremely uneven. This book contains such material as Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire, excerpts from Andre Gide's Journals. It contains masterpieces like Ivan Bunin's Gentleman from San Francisco and unfamiliar stories like Roger Martin Du Card's smoldering Confidence Africaine. Examples of the work of writers unknown in the U.S. (e.g., Chilean Poetess Gabriela Mistral and Finnish Novelist Frans Eemil Sillanpaeae) are alone enough to make it a valuable book.

Nevertheless, the most accomplished novelists are sometimes guilty of amateurish passages, exaggerated humor, forced sprightliness, pompous philosophizing, misty sentimentality. Conventional poetry can be glaringly revealed in translation.

Much of the writing is dated. The gloomy opening scenes of Desire Under the Elms read like a Ring Lardner parody of Russian drama. Sinclair Lewis' The Man Who Knew Coolidge seems a more imaginative creation 20 years after publication; but he also seems as unreal as the specters who haunted the castles of Gothic novelists.

The biggest surprise in the book is the durable quality of the writing of John Galsworthy. Placed alongside the other prizewinners, the story of Swithin Forsyte, from Caravan (1925), is fast, matter-of-fact and honestly funny.

The Nobel award is still the world's outstanding literary prize, and the only one of true international importance. Some critics have complained that the awards have concentrated on authors of distinction in small countries and have overemphasized a kind of contemporary fiction purporting to show simple peasants living close to the soil.

The Nobel Prize committee passed over Mark Twain, Ibsen, Hardy, Gorky, Chekhov, Conrad, Henry James, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Arnold Bennett, Willa Gather, Swinburne, George Meredith, Zola, Proust, Joyce, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke. Its greatest oversight: although it was established in 1901, and Tolstoy did not die until 1910, it never gave an award to the greatest novelist of them all.

* Bernard Shaw is the only one not represented: "No more anthologies for me, thank you," he wrote to Editor McClintock. "People who want to read my works must buy my own editions."

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