Celtic Twilight

By Paul Gray

FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND OTHER STORIES by SEAN O'FAOLAIN 226 pages. Atlantic Monthly--Little, Brown. $8.95.

A fatuous young writer asks a doctor friend for material for a short story, something that will "out-Maupassant Maupassant." The friend responds with an experience from his youth, a naggingly inexplicable encounter with a senior boy at an English boarding school. As the tale is told, the listener grows restive: the narrative is replete with hidden motives, loose ends and awkward, tag-along sequels. "There is too much in it," the writer finally declares. He cannot possibly turn such a shapeless bundle of facts into a proper short story.

While he fails, Irish Author Sean O'Faolain succeeds--by making the doctor's story a haunting reminiscence. His title for this exercise, How to Write a Short Story, is both a gentle spoof of the rule-ridden writer manque and a bit of well-earned boasting. O'Faolain is one of the few remaining men of let ters; in his 75 years he has been novelist, playwright, travel writer, critic, translator, biographer and journalist. His earliest short story was published nearly 50 years ago and he has lost no affection for his first love.

Part of this remarkable endurance stems from a refusal to treat the short story as a wind sprint. Instead, O'Faolain saunters like a troubadour, chatting with artful casualness about the scenery and weather, the dwellings and garb of his people. Yet he is more than a local colorist. His art disguises artifice. He knows exactly how much to explain and when to remain silent. "Who was it," one of his characters wonders, "said the last missing bit of every jig saw is God?"

Drastic Love. Most of the stories here revolve around fussy, aging bachelors. The men are, as one tart-tongued female claims, typically Irish victims of "the whole monstrous regiment of wom en from Old Mother Hubbard, and Old Mother Goose, and Holy Mum the Church, down to Mother Ireland and your own dear departed and long-suffering Mother Machree." Thus in Mur der at Cobbler's Hulk, a retired travel agent lives in fastidious loneliness near a remote village. A woman attacks his prim self-sufficiency. "No love. No drink. No friends. No wife. No children. Happy man! Nothing to betray you." She is proved wrong, for O'Faolain shows him capable of a drastic act of love.

Even comic characters show surprising inner resources. In The Inside-Out-side Complex, a lonely antique dealer falls in love with the cozy scene and an attractive woman he observes through a bungalow window. He insinuates his wares and himself into the woman's dwelling and finally marries her. Gradually the view through that window to the world outside comes to seem irresistibly attractive. This turnabout is slapstick, but the problem behind it is not belittled by O'Faolain. Both the dealer and his new wife learn something about the treachery of fulfilled desires before their struggle is over.

O'Faolain is unfailingly gentle with his characters. The most realistic ex changes have a soft blur of Celtic twi light around them. The price, of course, is a certain lack of intensity; the stories charm but they rarely rivet. That is sim ply the underside of a virtue. Charm is never in such abundant supply that it can be discarded, and O'Faolain's variety is achieved through wisdom as well as sympathy. "Youth should idealize," he once wrote, "and dammit, so should old age." The young idealist still smiles through these polished stories. Paul Gray

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