Apples of Paradise and Other Stories by Frederick Manfred (review)

Reviews Apples of Paradise and OtherStories. By Frederick Manfred.(New York: Trident Press, 1968. 285 pages.$5.95.) Apples of Paradise consists of nine stories written between 1939 and 1967 and printed in the reverse order of their composition. The setting is, generally, Manfred's well-known Siouxland, but the time varies from frontier days to the contemporaneous. Such facts suggest a rumage-publication, the act of an established novelist who pulls out some old things and revises them a bit and calls it a book; but, suspicious facts notwithstanding, Manfred’s collection is a strikingly unified work that makes enjoyable reading. “The Mink Coat” is about an affluent couple caught up in the smiling parties and furtive sex of what we who are around today call contemporary life. The characters are real, you care about them, the story absorbs your interest, and it is this sure hand of vitalitywhich is Manfred’s strong point. You are made to feel both the demandingattractiveness and the unsettling repulsiveness, both the power and the pathos, of Manfred’s natty little seducer. The joke-resolution of the story is too much like one of O. Henry’s trick endings, but the joke predicts the central theme of the collection:man’s energies have anobjective and mindless status, with incidental relations to the teachings of civilization, born ontologically where the animals of the fields and the powers of nature are given their existence; and these energies do not belong only to certain types or tribes, only to certain times or places. The ancient story of the sun and the earth is the story of all men. The same essential energy drives or short-circuits the artist, the businessman,thetrapper, the frontier farmer. To betray this energy in the name of lustorprudery 158 Western American Literature or good manners or good management is to distort our most fundamental being beyond the corrective powers of the modern gods of moneyed morality. In the title story, the Catholic rule against sex for any purpose other than the creation of life is the villain. In “The Wild Land” it is an unnatural notion of the moral lady which distorts the fulfillment of natural energies. In “Blood Will Tell” it is race prejudice, appearing in a quarter-breed trapper who denies his primitive sources and beats his Indian wife for being an Indian. In “Goodhearted Man” it is a societal notion of goodness which constitutes a hypocritical and impossible standard of behavior, even for a slightly deformed and terribly kind musician. In “Treehouse” the source of distortion is man’s theory of the solid citizen (plus a wife’s fear of what is probably the biggest phallic symbol in the history of literature), and, reversing it, in “High Tenor” it is latent homosexuality which causes the hero to reject the “apples of paradise” offered to him by his luscious bride. “Boys Will be Boys” returns the reader to a comic version of the theme, the sentimental morality of he-man girl-chasers and prize fighters who are, despite their prowess, little boys after all, left in silent bluster when their little-boy-father brings home as their new “mother” one of the conquests they had bragged about, guffawing and poking ribs. In the concluding story, “Footsteps in the Alfalfa,” the tone is ominous, as Manfred concludes with a cosmic version of the type of oppression Hamlin Garland treats sociologically in “Under the Lion’s Paw.” Subjected to the reviewer’s summarizing machine, Manfred’s stories may seem routine; we have all read a good deal about earth mothers, the relation between the fertility of the earth and the fertility of woman; and we have read at least some about the need to attack with love, to assault with respect, and the fatal cost of betrayal. What distinguishes Manfred’s handling of ancient themes is the comic and stubborn constancy with which he intermingles the primordial and the contemporary, the energy of the earth and the escapist drone of a soap opera, the power of the sun and the hot patience of a traveling salesman bent on seduction. The fault—and a reviewer must find fault where it is or...