Six -from Camus

EXILE AND THE KINGDOM (213 pp.) --Albert Camus--Knopf ($3.50).

Nobel Prizewinner Albert Camus is a writer without small talk. His themes--life, love, death, man, God, time--are large and universal. He returns to them in this collection of six short stories, but the net effect--after his brilliant novel The Fall--is oddly anticlimactic. The trouble seems to lie in the triumph of symbol over substance. He offers a series of intellectual puzzlers in which the clues are elusive, though the humanistic passion that runs through them is strong and clear, reflecting Camus' vision of art as a moral inquiry into man's fate.

The lead-off story, The Adulterous Woman, might have been titled Death of a Salesman's Wife. Janine is a plumpish, childless French housewife in North Africa; for 25 years her marriage has been nourished on the bread-crumb rations of the need to be needed. Accompanying her salesman husband on a tour of his selling territory, Janine is struck by the stoic dignity of the Arabs, and by the cruel yet sensuous landscape. One night she steals out to the desert's edge to be laved by "the water of night ... in wave after wave, rising up even to her mouth full of moans." In this moment of platonically adulterous ecstasy, Janine discovers not the devil in the flesh but the genie of natural instinct, long stoppered by grubbing convention. But it is too late for her to do more than weep over love's labor lost.

The Renegade features a fanatical Christian missionary who goes out to convert a barbarous tribe dwelling in a dread-provoking "city of salt." The natives promptly cut out his tongue and convert him into a devoted slave of their fetish-god. A turnabout ending suggests that man can drink deeply of neither good nor evil without finding its opposite mocking him from the bottom of the glass.

The book's best story, The Artist at Work, is a corrosively witty account of the rise and fall of a minor talent. Gilbert Jonas is a modest Parisian painter who trusts his "star." A dealer discovers him and he is beset by fame. New friends while away his afternoons "begging Jonas to go on working . . . for they weren't Philistines and knew the value of an artist's time." Disciples appear, but not to learn anything ("one became a disciple for the disinterested pleasure of teaching one's master").

At the height of his fame, poor Jonas poses for a portrait of the artist at work, but he himself no longer has the time or spirit to paint. Cognac consoles him with the illusion of creativity, and girls with the illusion of vitality. After that, Jonas' decline is swift, sure and touching. Dying, he scribbles one word on a blank canvas, but no one can be sure "whether it should be read solitary or solidary" (i.e., at one with society). Moral: wooing the Muse is not half so important, or difficult, as staying married to her.

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