Mixed Fiction

THE TWELVE PICTURES, by Edith Simon (367 pp.; Putnam; $3.95), is bathed in eerie, sth century Teutonic mists as British Novelist Simon (The Golden Hand) retells the dark, doom-laden Nibelungenlied. The events in it are drawn from somewhat different sources from the ones Wagner used in his familiar brooding operas. Siegfried, hero of the Rhine, jilts Brunhilde and marries a princess of Burgundy named Kriemhild. Brunhilde, a kind of earth-mother goddess, carries a torch for her lost love, but Hagen, the One-eyed, who believes the pagan gods have been flouted by this turn of affairs, pries from Kriemhild the secret of Siegfried's sole weakness. In slaying the sacred dragon of the Dwarf people, Siegfried has been drenched in the monster's en chanted blood except for one spot where a leaf stuck to his back. Hagen hurls his long spear through the mortal skin, Brunhilde impales herself on Siegfried's grave, and Kriemhild swears undying revenge. She gets it by marrying Attila the Hun and luring Hagen and his cohorts to a Hunland banquet that becomes a blood bath. Rich with omens and enchantments, brimming with the life, dress and manners of the time, The Twelve Pictures also breathes life into a profounder theme--the last-ditch war of the pagan spirit v. the Christian faith. Author Simon writes a slightly cramped neo-archaic prose, but few living writers can dip a reader's mind so wholly and fascinatingly in a sense of the past.

NOT HONOUR MORE, by Joyce Cary (309 pp.; Harper; $3.50), winds up a trilogy, kills off three of its main charac ters and, as usual, leaves the readers of British Novelist Gary oddly moved and vaguely irritated. In Volume I, Prisoner of Grace, Heroine Nina Latter told her story -- that of a woman who obviously needed two husbands, behaved outrageously with both, but was so genuinely lovable that neither could live without her, and all three wound up living to gether. In Volume II, Except the Lord, her first husband, Liberal Politician Ches ter Nimmo, had his say and explained how a willful, lusty moralist used his wife, his brains and his political savvy to rise from a small-town spellbinder to the peerage and a Cabinet post. In Not Honour More, Husband No. 2, Jim Latter, gets his chance to speak up. A simple man of good will, he tells how he gets so fed up with the devious politics of Husband No. 1, and his not-so-devious attentions to the woman they both love, that he finds it morally essential to murder his wife. Author Gary is a first-rate hand at first-person storytelling. A great actor in fiction, he made a compassionate Nina, a volatile Nimmo and now makes a tortured, badly tried Jim Latter.

At the height of Britain's 1926 general strike, Jim discovers that Nina has helped Nimmo in a way that also helps the Communists, and decides to kill her as a lesson in political and personal morality for the England he loves. After that, it's the gallows for Jim Latter (Chester Nimmo has already died of a heart attack). Only a novelist of Gary's power could have brought off this unlikely tale. This last third of the trilogy is also last in merit. But like the rest, it has move and go and a life of its own. Too bad that Nina, Nimmo and Latter had to die. They were good company.

THE YOUNG LOVERS, by Julian Halevy (313 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $3.50), plants the seed of love on the sidewalks of Manhattan and watches it sprout amid the chewing-gum wrappers like a blade of grass between slabs of city concrete. Eddie Slocum and Pamela Oldenburg are waiflike 20-year-olds who meet in the subway. Eddie is a college student who shares a Greenwich Village walk-up with a couple of buddies and goes through a local education factory as mechanically as if he were an IBM card being punched for semester credits. Nicknamed "The Groper," Eddie has a case of moral acne, and itches with integrity in a world he thinks the phonies have defiled. Pam, too, is alone and afraid, caroming between stuffy upper-East-Side guardians, a gorgon of an absentee mother and private nightmares of despair.

No less lyrical than it is sensual, Pam and The Groper's love-making has a vernal, childlike candor about it that soars above the sordid. Pam's pregnancy and a call from the draft board break the spell but weld the couple in marriage and newfound maturity. Next of kin in mood, manner and appeal to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, The Young Lovers uses a breezy class-of-'55 lingo to shine up the ancient story of boy-mates-girl. Author Halevy, a 35-year-old New Yorker, scores his first-novel romance with a bustling big-city sound track. Subway doors snap shut like guillotines, shreds of dirty newspapers swirl along the avenues instead of autumn leaves, a joyless Village party gets high on marijuana and low on clothes; and all the time the two lovers sleepwalk their poignant way between the steel-and-glass monuments and the human ruins.

THE SECRET RIVER, by Marjorie Kinnan Rowlings (55 pp.; Scribner; $2.50). This little Florida fairy tale for children, the only finished work found among Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' papers after she died 18 months ago, tells about a little girl named Calpurnia. Once upon a bad old time, when nobody could catch any fish, Calpurnia turned hard times into soft times by finding a secret river crammed with succulent catfish. Evidently, Author Rawlings never published the story because she hoped some day to dream it up to novel-size. It is reminiscent of the same cracker-filled scrub forests and 'gator-filled streams of northern Florida's wild St. Johns River country that the novelist described almost two decades ago in The Yearling. A charmingly illustrated idyl, with just the right mixture of fish story and black-water magic, The Secret River is well worth exploring if it leads youngsters--and those who read to them too--back to The Yearling, still a modern classic that can put TV picture tubes in the dark.

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