Know Thy Children

RACHEL WEEPING (213 pp.)--Shelley Smith--Harper ($3.50).

One of the hardest of all literary doors to force is the one that leads into the world of childhood. It is only fitting that the latest writer to try it is a mystery novelist. Shelley Smith's U.S. publisher is devoted to keeping her identity a mystery. But Mrs. Nancy Bodington does not mind identifying herself. She is a lady in her 40s who has used the pseudonym Shelley Smith for "mysteries because she wanted to save her real name for "the kind of books I wanted to write, such as Rachel Weeping." On the strength of this book, the more remarkable because she has no children, she is almost ready to use her own name. If it does not unravel completely the mysteries of extreme youth that it poses, it at least has the power to make adults shudder at the unwitting wrongs they can do the very young.

Not even Mrs. Bodington would pretend that these three long stories make happy reading. They are all deeply tragic, and not even the slickness that shows occasionally as the result of her training in whodunits can damage the soundness of her insights. As one teen-age character says of his parents: "They really are quite decent, when one considers how incredibly dense and selfish grownups are." But decency in these stories turns out to be not quite enough.

P:In An Idyll, a nine-year-old girl is picked up by a charming psychopath who has escaped from a mental hospital. Why would a youngster living in a peaceful English village with devoted, decent parents find such an acquaintance rewarding? The answer lies in a bracketed look at 1) the parents' possessive dullness, 2) the child's imagination and romantic thirst for life, brought into play for the first time when the madman's own imagination reaches out in sympathy and need. Conventionally, this ominous encounter ends well after a long spell of breath-holding on the part of the reader as well as the parents. But its bitterly ironic aftertaste lies in the fact that the parents' agony is not enough to induce forgiveness for their failure to know their own child. P:Tho' the Pleasant Life Is Dancing Round tries to show how even exterior happiness may fail to reconcile a brilliant teen-age boy to the tragic quota of life. Loved and even coddled by his suburban parents, he does not ask what's-in-it-for-me but what-does-it-have-to-offer-for-anyone? After a fearful tour of the lower depths of London, he has his answer: nothing. His suicide will seem improbable only to grownups who have forgotten the questionings of their own youth. P:In The Climate of the Lost, a 14-year-old daughter of divorced parents falls victim to the selfish misunderstanding of her mother. Unfolded in a sensuous South of France setting, it is a harrowing case history in which innocent young love is turned into a crushing, puzzling sin by adults whose sensual greeds have corrupted them to the point of monstrousness.

Author Shelley Smith has a peculiar difficulty in her first serious book. She writes so easily that she may not be taken seriously. But her three stories will trouble any adult who can remember the major agonies of childhood, any parent who has ever been guilty of inflicting or ignoring them.

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