Grotesque & Sublime

LAST TALES (341 pp.)--Isak Dinesen--Random House ($4).

The dozen stories in this new collection may be the literary testament of one of the most skilled but least prolific writers of the 20th century. Isak Dinesen is the pen name of Danish-born Baroness Karen Blixen, who has produced only four other books (Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa, Winter's Tales, The Angelic Avengers) in her 72 years. She works, for the most part, in the narrow and demanding field of the Gothic story--a romantic form requiring a controlled mixture of the grotesque and the sublime, where plot tragically turns on the concept of honor, and the whole is shadowed by a sense of the supernatural.

Duels at Dawn. In Author Dinesen's stories--recalling E.T.A. Hoffmann and the famed Tales of Hoffmann -- Judas Iscariot can be met jingling his silver in a igth century Neapolitan tenement; drunken officers duel at dawn and an artist dies nobly before a firing squad; a king and a poet argue the night through while a bored prostitute awaits their attention. The intricate plots are played out against lovingly evoked backgrounds --fur-blanketed sleds race over the midnight snow of Copenhagen; the golden sun of Italy flashes from white villa to blue sea.

Of the twelve stories. The Cardinal's Third Tale makes its Gothic point with perhaps the neatest and most ironic flourish. Lady Flora Gordon, a handsome Scotswoman of giant size, impressive intellect and unassailable chastity, meets in Rome a gentle, saintly priest who tries desperately to root out "her utter disbelief and her utter contempt of Heaven and Earth.'' When arguments fail, he finally confronts her with the brooding, majestic statue of St. Peter in the Vatican, a figure so noble in size and concept that it dwarfs even Lady Flora's proud body and arrogant mind. She comes daily to stand in communion with the statue and watch the devout worshipers kiss St. Peter's foot. One day a rude man of the people catches her attention because "he stood still so long with his mouth against St. Peter's foot." When he moves on. Lady Flora is impelled to kiss the saintly toe as well. Her reward, however, is not faith but syphilis.

Fallen Figures. In most of the stories there is no either-or solution but only a questioning maybe. God is ambivalent, man contorted both in soul and action, and evil often wears the face of good. Thus, in Copenhagen Season, the very strength of a soldier's love loses him the prize he wants; in A Country Tale, a proud nobleman is forced to his knees at the foot of a murderer who mysteriously may be his alter ego; in Echoes, a prima donna finds her lost voice only to lose all hope of using it. The characters are large, heroic figures and they are brought to earth with a resounding crash. Such men and women are rare in contemporary fiction; the art to make them live vitally --as Author Dinesen does--is rarer still.

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