Skeptic on the Loose

SATAN IN THE SUBURBS AND OTHER STORIES (148 pp.)--Bertrand Russell--Simon & Schuster ($3).

Penelope's papa was a Church of England clergyman "of a type now nearly extinct, low church, bigoted, and opposed to every kind of enjoyment." Ecclesiastes was his Bible; when Penelope spoke to a stranger, her father rebuked her in his own didactic paraphrases, saying: "If thy daughter be shameless, keep her in straitly." He refused her a piano ("Wine and music will rejoice the heart, but the love of wisdom is above them both") and kept her from the village fair ("Who so taketh pleasure in wickedness shall be condemned").

But one day the local squire's American wife smuggled dowdy Penelope into a beauty parlor. When the poor girl saw what a ravishing creature she really was, she popped an ad in The Matrimonial News: "Young woman of great beauty and impeccable virtue . . . wishes to meet young man . . . No clergy need apply." Like an arrow came the answer: "Dear Miss P . . . Few women would have the nerve to claim great beauty, and only a small proportion of these would at the same time claim impeccable virtue ... I am consumed with curiosity . . ."

When they met, secretly, it was love at first sight for Penelope and Philip. But what about father's consent? Penelope advised Philip to dress up as a curate. He did, and looked the part to perfection. What's more, he completely won over the crusty parent by quoting yards of Ecclesiastes.

They honeymooned in Paris. On their first morning back in England, Philip donned his clerical disguise. When Penelope raised wondering eyebrows, he confessed: "I can no longer conceal from you that I am a curate ... I have basely deceived you . . . My only excuse is the greatness of my love." At which Penelope sprang from her bed, screaming, "I shall never forgive you! ... I will make you rue the day that you treated a poor girl in this infamous manner. I will make you, and as many as possible of your clerical accomplices, as much of a laughing stock as you have made me."

Philosopher to Fictioneer. Penelope's subsequent running fight with the Church of England (only to be recaptured by her husband in the end) makes up the remainder of Benefit of Clergy, the best of the five short stories in this collection. But Penelope's astonishment at finding her husband a clergyman is as nothing compared to the reader's at finding Philosopher Bertrand Russell a short-story writer. Even Russell himself cannot explain why, in his 80s, he has suddenly turned fictioneer: "For some reason entirely unknown to me I suddenly wished to write the stories in this volume, although I had never before thought of doing such a thing."

The result is engaging. The sardonic, good-humored tone is what might be expected from Britain's dean of skeptics. The easy, unhurried prose and the fantastic nature of the plots are those of a man who was growing up when Robert Louis Stevenson was writing New Arabian Nights. Indeed, much of the five stories might have sprung from three of Stevenson's epigrams: "Everyone lives by selling something"; "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy"; "Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords."

. Stricken Fish. In Satan in the Suburbs, the Devil shows that the road to Hell is paved with the grey concrete of self-righteousness and lit by the glint of hard cash. In The Corsican Ordeal of Miss X, a bumbling professor's efficient secretary becomes the tool of Corsican anarchists, and discovers something she never learned in secretarial college--"that Pitman's was but the gateway to the gallows." In The Infra-Redioscope, gullible consumers are convinced by press lords and admen that if they buy a recommended gadget they will be able to detect the presence of invading Martians. In The Guardians of Parnassus, dons of "Oxbridge" are shown acting upon "that stern devotion to moral principles which enables men to inflict torture without compunction."

Author Russell uses live bait and barbed hooks, tickles out many a specimen of his lifelong enemies in suburbia, the church and the academy. His weakness is that he has no notion how to land his stricken fish. His stories start briskly, proceed confidently, then tend to peter out halfheartedly. This is all right in the field of skeptical philosophy, but fiction, which is essentially an act of faith, needs something more conclusive.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.