Books: Home-Grown Exotics

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THE QUIET ENEMY by Cecil Dawkins. 214 pages. Atheneum. $4.50.

BY THE NORTH GATE by Joyce Carol Oates. 253 pages. Vanguard. $4.50.

One trouble with the short story is that it is short. Brevity is not respected by today's reading public, which tends to suspect that something that takes less than 350,000 words to say can hardly be worth saying. Despite this, a few persistent practitioners of the art of the brief tale carry on, though there are fewer and fewer magazines that will pay them more than prestige.

Those who persist tend to be young, female, and in love with a special region or a special time, often the time of their own adolescence. Their subject matter tends toward an interest in nature, animals, or those of lower social standing than themselves. The style tends to be obtrusively simple, as in amateur wood carving.

Cecil Dawkins, a handsome 36-year-old woman graduate of the University of Alabama, falls within most of these categories. Her special region is the inland South and the primitive or recessive social types of the trans-Appalachian Piedmont. Within her limits, she is very good indeed.

Her seven longish stories have the special power, which usually belongs to poetry, of haunting the mind. They concern simple people—old Negroes, religious cranks, illiterate feudists, solitary operators of no-hope junkyards, and the quietly desperate people who hope to sell hamburgers by luring stray tourists with a caged eagle, a chained raccoon and a stuffed rattlesnake.

There is an unavoidable air of patronage in this, as there is in even a good documentary film about Eskimo customs or shaman cultists of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Miss Dawkins is clearly a more highly civilized woman than the people she writes about. However, she bridges the distance between herself and her creatures with pity and a decently reined imagination. Mere realism would have made them caricatures, or the gothic grotesques popular with the school-of-the-South. Even her first story, which begins with that old stock bit of scenery, the scrubbed cabin porch, convinces in the end that the genuine fabulist's art is involved. An old, blind Negro woman signs her land away for a federal project and is conned out of her money by a young opportunist of her own race. Is he the devil? The reader comes to think so and to share the dark fears of a superstitious old woman's spell-weaving mind.

Altogether brisker, and written with a far more expert journalistic surface, are the stories of Joyce Carol Oates, a 25-year-old Detroit University teacher from upstate New York. Her 14 tales belong to the old, lively tradition of American regionalism and the word-of-mouth folklore of any village. There is a good sense of place and dialect. Perhaps she lacks a touch of the Dawkins magic, but together, the well-worked art of these two women serves as a reminder that if and when the short story dies, it will be a heavy loss.