Matchless Malice

By John Skow

THE JOHN COLLIER READER by JOHN COLLIER 571 pages. Knopf. $10.

Among the reasons that the shuddery miniatures of British short-storyist John Collier are so satisfactory is that his fine talent is given direction by an equally splendid gift of malice. He does not much like man and his works, and is even less fond of woman and hers. He also has a deep and evident distaste for the dreary stuff that silts up lives and is called Reality. Collier's fictional method is to spit neatly into Reality's eye, and then watch mockingly as Reality fishes for its soiled handkerchief. To the reader, the spectacle can seem wondrously funny.

One of Collier's themes is Beating the Game. In his Season of Mists, a rotter named Bert goes girl hunting at a seaside resort. His manner is sleazy, his person shopworn, and in August, as he knows, he would not have stood much chance. But it is November, the bitter end of the season, and the girls still to be found will settle for less, which is to say for Bert. He worms his way to the good side of a gorgeous and lonely barmaid named Bella, only to find that she has an identical twin named Nellie. How to capitalize on this embarrassment of wenches? Bert invents his own identical twin, Fred, who shares the special job with him and thus can only appear when he, Bert, is at work. He marries both barmaids, and then achieves quadruple bliss byas Fred-seducing Bert's wife, and-as Bert-reversing the outrage. But now, he realizes, he is doubly cuckolded (by himself, but never mind). This is intolerable, so he leaves separate notes in which Fred and Bert threaten to drown each other. He makes it appear that their bodies have been lost at sea, after which, he reports, "there was just time to get the train for B-, and it was there that I met Mrs. Wilkinson."

Another recurrent Collier theme is Not Quite Beating the Game. In Bottle Party, a fool named Frank becomes the owner of two bottles, one containing a clever genie and the other imprisoning the most beautiful girl in the world. Frank uses the genie and enjoys the girl, who is also loving and compliant, but he is disquieted when he notices that whenever the girl emerges from the bottle, she wears a look of heavy-lidded satiation. He is jealous, and the genie, who is very clever indeed, leads him on by observing that there is more room in bottles than one would think.

Frank dives in for a look, and the genie stops up the bottle, returns it to the dusty store from which it came, and prepares to entertain the most beautiful girl himself. "In the end," writes Collier wickedly, "some sailors happened to drift into the shop, and, hearing that this bottle contained the most beautiful girl in the world, they bought it up by general subscription of the fo'c'sle. When they unstoppered him at sea and found it was only poor Frank, their disappointment knew no bounds, and they used him with the utmost severity."

Collier's language is economical and stinging and his standards of malevolence are consistently high. Three or four of these 47 stories might well have been omitted from the collection, but the rest are matchless. The sly and funny short novel, His Monkey Wife, is also included, a model of prose technique and misogyny. A bottle of your very best girl, waiter, for the editor who had the happy inspiration to collect the work of this master. "JohnSkow

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