In Praise of Love

DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY LOVE (287 pp.)--Nicholas Monsarrat--Knopf ($2.75).

In these three novelettes, a young Englishman has fashioned pleasantly simple one-thread stories about love and the contrasting ways in which it is expressed.

The most ambitious of the three is the worst. Leave Cancelled is written as the private letter of an English army officer in which he recalls to his wife all the intimate details of their last 24 hours together. It is dreadfully sincere--and dreadfully embarrassing. By writing the story in the first person singular, Monsarrat deprives himself of whatever ironic distance he might otherwise have been able to establish and identifies himself with all the coy, callow and cuddly sentimentalities with which his hero's letter drips. Leave Cancelled leaves the uncomfortable feeling that someone's privacy has been violated.

Another of the stories is a neat though conventional sketch of a naval captain's obstinate and ultimately successful struggle to bring a torpedoed vessel back to port. The third is a first-rate portrait of a middle-aged man, veteran of World War I, who volunteers for "heavy rescue" work in London. Finding in his new job a pride he had lost during "the arid, desolate years between the wars," he achieves anonymous heroic stature by surrendering his life in a futile attempt to save a trapped man. This is certainly one of the best war stories written in England.

Monsarrat commands two literary skills: he uses the English language with quiet, respectful competence, and he describes most vividly the processes of skilled work--how a ship is run, how a blitzed house is scoured for survivors. But the emotional patterns of human relationships are as yet beyond his grasp. Monsarrat's may seem a rather small talent, but this book gives evidence that he may yet do some fine things.

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