Stories by the Doc

MAKE LIGHT OF IT (342 pp.]--William Carlos Williams -- Random House ($3.50).

One of the standard mistakes a young writer can make is to hole up in the country, or in a neat little university town, with the notion that he will find more time to write. After an autobiographical novel or two, he often finds he has plenty of time, but nothing much he cares to write about. This mistake is one that 67-year-old William Carlos Williams, poet and pediatrician, has never made. Delivering babies and wrestling with rashes in

Rutherford, N.J. for the past 40 years has kept jumpy, impressionable Doc Williams close to the ordinary U.S. small-towner and his day-to-day experience.

Writer Williams is primarily a poet, and last March he won the National Book Award for poetry with his avant-garde Paterson, Book III and Selected Poems. But over the years he has turned out a good many short stories too. Make Light of It brings together 51 of them (13 of them new), and though they lack the verbal crackle of his best poems, they are good enough to earn Williams an honorable mention among U.S. prose writers. The stories have another virtue: they can be understood at first reading, which is more than can be said for a lot of Dr. Williams' poems.

The earliest stories, full of erotic tangles and tangents, now seem Williams' apprentice exercises. Sharp little sketches, as hard as fruit pits, they are obviously patterned after the writing of the early and still intelligible Gertrude Stein. But they are hardly more than quick snapshots compared to the scenes in depth that Williams produces out of his experience as a depression-era doctor with immigrant laborers and their wives, spunky adolescents, wisecracking interns. Jean Beicke is a sternly underwritten .portrait of a dying child who arouses the pity of helpless doctors and nurses. A Night in June is the story of the delivery of a baby to an Italian woman who doesn't need English to let the doctor know how profoundly satisfied she feels.

Best of all is the objectivity with which Williams reports himself griping about having to get up at 4 a.m. for a house call, but getting up just the same, blowing off steam at thickheaded patients and then discovering that he has become fond of them. Whenever Williams is at the center of his stories--irascible, tender, impatient and loving all at once--they have something of the quality of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg stories. Unlike a lot of his literary contemporaries, Williams knows people and likes them.

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