Old Truth, New Shine

SPRING SONG AND OTHER STORIES (285 pp.)--Joyce Gary--Harper ($3.95).

As a novelist and storyteller, the late Joyce Gary knew the neatest trick of all: from first to last, be sure to talk about people. He looked at them with love, which is bound to make a modern writer a little unfashionable, but the main thing is that he looked at them, sensing that each one was different from all the others.

By being happily human, he was able to write well and perhaps importantly (The Horse's Mouth, Mister Johnson) without borrowing from the jargon of psychiatrists or social workers, without trying to change the world or tinkering with the essential nature of man.

Not all the stories in this collection are first-rate, and in one or two cases triteness successfully holds out against insight. But they all build on the constants in human experience. In Success Story, for instance, an ancient fellow approaches a park bench. "Then he turned himself carefully round; bringing into the spring sunlight, pale as a primrose, his dun face, hollow-cheeked and dry; the great orbits of his sunk eyes; the long nose fallen at the tip; his white mustache, of thin separate hairs like glass threads . . . A string of muscle jerked in the shadow of the cheekbone." His success is twofold. In the first place a child of three takes an incomprehensible fancy to him and for a few glorious minutes they play. Then the old boy experiences an even greater triumph: he is able to rise from the bench, regain his feet and totter on. "He had done it again."

And Gary has done it again. In four swift, sure, moving pages he has confronted youth with old age, invoked the spectrum of life from cradle to grave, underscored the sad truth that there comes a time when just to be able to rise and walk is a cause for self-congratulation.

His stories of men at war seem simple to the point of casualness. But in Umaru he conveys in five short pages a deep feeling for Africa and for the ever-present officer-enlisted man relationship. His touch with children is just as sure; their cruelties, independence and singlemindedness are as transparent to him as they are incomprehensible to most adults. And the ironies of middle age hold no mysteries for him, either. The Breakout is an almost classic story of what happens to the poor devil who knows that neither his wife nor children really need him. When the victim tries to do what seems to him the intelli gent thing, Gary's knowledge of people is used to truss him up like a sacrifice.

In all but a few of these stories, it is Gary's reliance on sharply observed everyday truths that makes the unremarkable glow remarkably. Here, as in his novels, nothing seems to be made up and everything seems worth hearing about.

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