Swede on a Tightrope

THE ETERNAL SMILE & OTHER STORIES (389 pp.)--Par Lagerkvist--Random House ($4.50).

Once upon a time a multitude of souls, sick & tired of living in eternity, decided to visit God and demand a showdown.

Hundreds of years passed before they found Him--"an old man sawing wood" by the light of a dim lantern. "We are the life which you have brought forth," said the deputies. "We are all the living who have struggled and struggled, who have suffered and suffered, who have doubted and believed . . . What have you meant by us?" God "passed his hand through his lank gray hair" and answered meekly: "I am a simple man." "We can see that," said the deputies indignantly.

"I didn't intend life as anything remarkable," said God.

"Nothing remarkable!" they shouted angrily, and began to rain questions on the old man. "You have let us languish, despair, perish. Why, why? . . . You have given us sun and gladness, you have let us be drunk with the loveliness of life . . .

Why? . . . You must have meant something . . . We must demand a complete understanding of everything." At last, forced to be more specific, God muttered: "I only intended that you need never be content with nothing." "God's" answer is the answer of Sweden's Par Lagerkvist in his story The Eternal Smile. Winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize for literature, Lagerkvist (age 63) is the author of more than 35 books, including the novels Bar abbas and The Dwarf, and scores of plays, essays and poems. His tone ranges from near-ecstasy to heavy gloom, but in one matter he is always consistent--the conviction that a world that is filled to bursting with pain, joy, bewilderment and dissatisfaction is just what God intended.

This volume is a cross section of Lager-kvist's short stories and fables from 1920 to 1935. Each sample illustrates in its own way the Lagerkvist habit of walking with one foot firmly on the ground, the other in the clouds. They include: P: The Lift That Went Down into Hell, a grim little tale in which a lover and his mistress, their lips "moist with wine," step unsuspectingly into a hotel elevator.

While it is going down, they mull over their contempt for the lady's dull husband ("He hasn't a scrap of poetry in him"). The lover has just whispered: "Let us make love tonight--as never before," when he notices that the elevator is going "down and down interminably." It does not stop until the Devil ("stylishly dressed in tails that hung on [his] hairy top vertebra as on a rusty nail") opens the grille and leads the lovers into a hellish hotel bedroom. Wine is brought them by a very "stern, very grave" waiter with a bullet hole in his temple: he is the lady's husband, who has just committed suicide. "I hope you've been comfortable," says the Devil, when the anguished lovers scuttle back to the elevator. "Hell is nothing to complain of ... We've had everything modernized . . . It's only the soul that suffers nowadays ..." "He might have told me," says the lady indignantly, as the lovers go up into life again.

"Then I'd have stayed [at home]. We could have gone out another evening instead." P:Father and 7 is a touching, affectionate story about a boy who goes for a walk on the railroad tracks with his father, a railroad employee. Father always recognizes every passing train, always hails every driver, always receives a smile and a wave in acknowledgment. But this time, as darkness falls, "a black train" hurtles down the tracks, "All the lights in the carriages were out, and it was going at frantic speed." "Strange, what train was that?" asks Father. "And I didn't recognize the driver." But the boy guesses that the "train" represents "the unknown, all that Father knew nothing about," and that its destination is the world of a new generation that every child must grow up to face alone.

P:The Children's Campaign, an antitotalitarian parable in the form of Swiftian satire, is a chilling comment on the brutalization of youth under Naziism and Communism. It tells of a regimented state with a children's army, an elite corps of youngsters all under 14, armed to their baby teeth and trained to spit-and-polish perfection. On a trumped-up ultimatum, this army of "Little Fiends," as it is fondly known, is sicked on an unoffending neighbor state. Despite grim losses, the children gobble up the enemy's territory like candy. The "glaring pointlessness of it all" makes the enemy apathetic.

"But the little ones did not react like this. Children are really more fitted for war and take more pleasure in it, while grown-ups tire of it after a while and think it is boring." One little fellow does burst into tears on Christmas Eve when a Christmas tree is lighted in the trenches, but his hard-boiled buddies promptly court-martial and shoot him.

P:The Hangman is set in a tavern, where the executioner, "big and powerful in his blood-red dress," sits brooding over a pot of beer. Whores, cobblers, soldiers, playboys and other specimens of mankind come in for a drink, swap stories about their lives, poke fun at the silent, melancholy hangman. At last the hangman rises to tell his own life story. "Since the dawn of the ages I have performed my task . . . Nations rise up, and nations vanish ... but I remain ..." Only once he says, did there seem to be a chance for him to give up his horrible job--when he was told to crucify a man who called himself the Son of God. But God, much to the hangman's surprise, refused to'intervene. His Son "belonged to mankind, and there was nothing remarkable in their having treated him as they do treat their own." It is clear, concludes the hangman, that mankind has succeeded in convincing God that it will recognize only one savior--the hangman himself.

Lagerkvist tells all his stories in simple, austere prose--a style that enables him' as Andre Gide said, "to maintain his balance on a tightrope which stretches between the world of reality and the world of faith." They are not works of genius' some are so subdued as to be flat. But at their best they do just the job for which they were intended--they leave readers with a feeling that there is a ghost walking just behind them.

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