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GOD MADE SUNDAY AND OTHER STORIES by Walter Macken. (Macmillan.)

THE NON-EXISTENT KNIGHT and THE CLOVEN VISCOUNT by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun. (Collins.)

TALES FROM THE CALENDAR by Bertold Brecht, translated by Yvonne Kapp and Michael Hamburger. (Methuen.)

Playing the game of literary derivations is to cheat a little, especially when we know our authors to be Irish, Italian and German respectively. Still, to open God Made Sunday and Other Stories is to sense the robuster, latter-day rays of the Celtic Twilight. In fact the author’s motto, to his long title-story in particular, might have been the Yeatsian permission: ‘The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please him best.’

     Irish threads, of course, make the best Irish garments, and weave them Mr Macken proceeds to do. And first into the virtuoso autobiography of Colmain Fury, after letting his first-person hero warn us with typical Irish modesty that he is inarticulate. ‘I have not the words, I am a simple man,’ says Colmain, when asked by a rolling stone of a ‘professional’ writer to tell him why he believes, and what makes him believe, there is a God. Simple, perhaps, but not lacking in words, surely, as once embarked upon his narrative he shows by dividing it into six days of the week. (He has heard of Chapters, of course, but he has no skill in ‘that sort of confusion’. On the other hand, he remembers that the old people have a ‘telling’ that everything happens to a man on a working day, since God made Sunday for peace and rest.)

     For a moment we are struck by the fear that this kind of Celtic idiosyncrasy will cost Mr Macken his readers before the trickle of Colmain’s rhetoric is allowed to develop into its elemental flow. Fortunately, the author is also aware of the danger of over-vernacularization. And so he readjusts the tuning while gradually turning up the volume. This time the language is true and clear. Colmain Fury, son of islanders off the West Coast of Ireland, fighting a losing battle with the sea, is orphaned on a Monday, saved from drowning on a Tuesday, married on a Wednesday, loses his hope of progeny on a Thursday, saves his neighbour’s children from fire on a Friday and finds peace again with his wife, and on Saturday ventures out on a terrible sea so as to bring help to a woman in childbed. Sunday, of course, remains unwritten. The professional writer may not have had the answer he expected. And yet.

     This non-dhoul and non-faerie phase of the Celtic Twilight is still very much with us. But Italo Calvino’s sortie into the chivalric world of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is a guess best left to our ancestors spotting literary derivations in Harington’s translation which, we are reminded, has been out of date since 1627. Even Italian readers are liable to be foxed by Calvino’s excesses with the stylistic time-machine. His explanation may or may not satisfy us. It appears that he considers his attitude today towards his earlier models like Hemingway or Malraux to be analogous to that of Ariosto towards the late medieval writers of chivalry, whom he treated with irony, yet with a respect for basic and vanishing virtues. And now it seems that Calvino, at the end of another literary epoch of chivalry, can only translate his sympathy for them into a language like Ariosto’s, ‘of rhythm and colour’.

     He asks whether it is escapism for an Italian to like Ariosto nowadays. No, he answers, for Ariosto shows ‘how the intelligence lives on imagination, on irony, on accuracy of detail not as ends in themselves . . . how these can be used to evaluate virtues and vices better. Such lessons are both actual and necessary today, in the era of electronic brains and space flights. . . .’ In short, The Non-Existent Knight, with its hero, a suit of immaculate white armour inhabited only by will-power and faith in Charlemagne’s Christian cause, is intended as a post-Ariosto allegory evaluating virtues and vices in the world today. That it fails to do this makes it no less enjoyable as a chivalric extravaganza, its occasional modern allusions serving to heighten the general surrealist effect. Its companion piece, an over-long fable called The Cloven Viscount, is concerned no less fantastically with a case of schizophrenia complicated by two self-determining halves of a split body as well as a split mind. Here invention, brilliant to start off with, flags long before the story is over. The final reintegration, however, is cunningly contrived.

     Brecht’s Tales from the Calendar also recall a less complicated age. They refer to the kind of peasant calendars popular in Germany, particularly before 1848, which offered entertainment and instruction in their mixture of satirical tales, fables, anecdotes and descriptions of recent or historical events. Like the contributions to the original calendars, Brecht’s were not intended for particularly sophisticated readers, and the prose tales, purposely undistinguished, make their points plainly enough. Even a seemingly involved ‘double-take’ like Caesar and his Legionary runs up a couple of unavoidable morals. The poems, however, while remaining suitably deadpan, are superior Brecht, particularly the Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao Tzu’s Way into Exile. For this alone, as well as for the economic and astringent Anecdotes of Mr Keuner, the book deserves, indeed requires, repeated reading.