Seasons of the Heart

By Christopher Porterfield

WAYS OF LOVING

by BRENDAN GILL 305 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $7.95.

The middle-aged lover sits on the edge of the bed, considering. The young girl wants him to underwrite their new affair with counterfeit emotion, the play money of compliments, declarations, vows. For once in his life he refuses. "Truth in a relationship," he insists to himself. "Surely it is a greater thing than kindness?" Greater, perhaps, but more painful: both he and the girl realize without saying so that their fling is already over.

Thus, in End of an Exceptionally Short Affair, the opening story of this well-wrought collection, Brendan Gill consciously gives his game away. All the relationships he examines are, as his title indicates, loving ones. The term is humanely extended to include not only lovers but also sexual partners, parents and children, employers and employees, and even masters and pets. In each, Gill searches out a truth that is greater than kindness. Usually it turns out to be the painful truth that lies, betrayal, jealousy and sometimes violence not only co-exist with love, but also grow imperceptibly out of it.

In The Knife, a freshly widowed father slips a much prayed-for knife under his small son's pillow to encourage him in the belief that prayers can be answered. Then, in anguish, he realizes that the boy is hopefully petitioning God for the return of his dead mother. In Something You Just Don't Do in a Club, a lawyer's starchy presumption of friendship and honor among his fellows sets him up to be cheerfully bilked by the club deadbeat. In Last Things, the longest and most affecting piece in the book, the indomitably optimistic and innocent scion of a New York banking family prevails over financial ruin, dislocation, infidelity and the murder of a friend by simply outlasting them.

All these tales share a kindred urbanity, as might be expected from a longtime contributor of fiction and criticism to The New Yorker. (Gill's present post there is Broadway theater critic.) Many of the characters--clubmen, wealthy matrons, genteel spinsters --could well be the literary grandchildren of Edith Wharton's characters. Gill's narrative voice evokes the kind of man who might be found in one of his own fictional clubs or parlors--a wryly observant uncle or older brother who has moved in wide enough circles to be able to recount a homosexual killing or an old maids' tea party with equal sympathy and equanimity.

The result is a sort of literary custom tailoring: quality goods cut along traditional lines. It does not go in much for surprises or profundities. But it wears very well.

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