Mixed Fiction

THE LEATHERSTOCKING SAGA, by James Fenimore Cooper, edited by Allan Nevins (833 pp.; Pantheon; $8.50). In a heroic effort to save one of his favorite authors from the oblivion of an unread classic. Columbia University's versatile Historian Allan Nevins has undertaken to streamline Fenimore Cooper for moderns. A lifelong Cooper fan who played make-believe Deerslayer as an Illinois farmboy, Nevins has taken the five Leatherstocking tales--The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie--shorn away the interminable love passages and faded humor, deftly stitched the rest together to fit into one handsome volume. Modern readers may smile at some of Cooper's dialogue, written in the days before Mark Twain cleared the air ("Manifest no distrust," says their escort to two beautiful girls wandering through Indian-infested forests, "or you may invite the danger you appear to apprehend"). Cooper still stands out as master of action--Indian wars, deer hunts, sleigh rides, combat with wild beasts, the spring run of bass--action in which the great American wilderness is always a majestic participant. There is the bold Delaware brave Chingachgook, father of Uncas. Above all, there is Natty Bumppo. Shooting out a turkey's eye at 100 yards and escaping from the Iroquois beside Glimmerglass, showing a pioneer's contempt for newcomers who "strip the airth of its lawful covering," and at last retreating to die proudly on the unvexed prairie, he stalks again as one of the epic heroes of American writing.

ONLY FADE AWAY, by Bruce Marshall (303 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $3.50), shows how an Episcopal Scotsman can hopscotch his engaging way through a comic novel as if he were the hero of a minor Greek tragedy. The hero is Strang Nairne Methuen. As a young lieutenant, he is full of wide-eyed piety, but a shapely dish can stir up his belief in "tart for tart's sake." As a brigadier, he wears a monocle, but is intelligent enough to look at the world with both eyes open. His nemesis takes the repulsive form of Claude Hermiston, a bully, a cad and a craven. It is Strang's destiny to be deviled by Hermiston in school, on dates, in the army, and even in his marriage. On the front in 1917, Hermiston tricks Strang into being tried-for cowardice, and it takes Strang another war to prove his courage. When he finally does, rifle and bayonet in hand, the irony of Fate--and of military life--turns his act of bravery into his undoing: the generals consider him a bad commander for dashing about the battlefield "like a private." Even after the army has bowler-hatted him, human and humorous Scotsman Strang clings to his belief in the Many-Splendoured Thing--his phrase for honor, decency and civilization. British Author Marshall (The White Rabbit, Father Malachy's Miracle) keeps his story moving almost too fast. But he has a great ear for the speech of Scottish chorus girls, schoolboys, sergeants and generals. He also has a winking eye for such social ironies as the marriage of an Episcopalian to a Roman Catholic in Scotland ("As Methuen had not made his submission to Rome, the ceremony was bare, although . . . the Bishop Auxiliary allowed a bit of extra-liturgical cheeterybung on the organ"). One of Author Marshall's most hilarious scenes: the shy young hero, out on a date, is prevented from doing what he desperately has to do because the unwitting girl defeats all his pretexts to get away for a moment, unable to imagine why the boy seems to be positively jiggling with impatience.

SWAMI AND FRIENDS AND THE BACHELOR OF ARTS, by R. K. Narayan (345 pp.; Michigan State College Press; $3.95). These two novels, published under one cover, get inside India by getting inside Indians. Both focus on sleepy little Malgudi, an imaginary town in southern India, and are as placid as one of the town's half-deserted streets. Swami deals with middle-class Malgudi small fry, a variety of moppets with an unmistakable curry flavor, but very much like their noisy, exasperating, attractive American counterparts. Swami himself is barely higher than a doorknob, no braver than he need be, and no smarter than his friends. In a series of sketches he is led through a season of boyhood, reaching a peak of uncontained ecstasy when school ends and, by way of celebration, he spontaneously pours a bottle of ink over his head. The Bachelor of Arts moves up in the Malgudi school system to college, where Chandran, a local intellectual, flouts custom and proves himself a brilliantly inept cynic. But after Chandran gets his degree he realizes that he is not unique, after all: "You lived in the college, thinking you were the first and the last of your kind the college would ever see, and you ended as a group photo." Soon, like so many college rebels before him, he settles into the pattern of orthodoxy his parents lay out for him. Indian Novelist Narayan observes the comedy of life with gentle irony and gives the reader the pleasant illusion that he is visiting in Malgudi, a place not unlike home.

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