[Tracy is a English novelist and travel writer. In the following essay, she provides a mixed review of Not for Publication.]

There is no living writer of short stories more interesting, varied and fertile than Miss Gordimer at her best. In this new collection, however, she does not always come up to her standard. The lyrical freshness is dulled, as so often in the works of maturity: now and again, humanity degenerates into motherliness; and several pieces are too long for their weight. This may be due to their being written in the first place for American magazines, for American editors love stories to be "extended," either from a simple respect for quantity as such or from the need to lure their readers through the jungle of advertisement. But whatever the reason for it, some of the work included here [in Not For Publication] would have a finer shape and a keener bite with the help of pruning.

The opening story, "Not for Publication," is not merely too long but reads as if the writer were tired. There are too frequent lapses into what is death to any story, a bold, lazy summarizing where all should be illumined and made manifest. Much is admirable in this tale of a brilliant African beggar boy, discovered by a benevolent English-woman, educated by an Anglican priest, destined for great things by both, who then slips quietly back to his former life on the eve of a vital exam. Miss Gordimer understands the muddled emotions of the philanthropist, "the will to love pacing behind the bars of her glance," adopting her African tribe as another lonely woman might an orphan or a stray dog. She sees the egotism of the missionary spirit, even at its most apparently selfless, and she is alive to the hysteria of the African mind. But instead of weaving these strands artfully together, she raps out a series of brisk little messages, makes a number of informative little points. Her people are cases concerning whom she feels bound to instruct us.

With "The African Magician," she is back to her own superb form. The story tells of a boatload of Belgian colonialists travelling up the Congo river a couple of months before the country's independence. They are a bunch of typical mediocrities, from the ship's Bore with his confidential growl and pally wink to the bright policeman's wife with her "They are just like monkeys, you know. We've taught them a few tricks." On each side is the vast mysterious African bush: natives flock to the landingstages to sell ivory trinkets and bawl slogans. A shipboard entertainment is announced, with absurdly high rates of admission, and turns out to be a mere half-hour of stale, tedious conjuring-tricks. The next day—a beautifully true and engaging touch—there is a repeat performance: the travellers are to see the weary old turns all over again at the same ridiculous fee. But the canny Belgians protest, they want their money's worth, there has to be more. Two of the African crew argue with the conjuror, urge something on him, while the uncomprehending audience stares: he argues back, refuses, is adamant, then suddenly shrugs and proceeds to give a dazzling, terrifying display of African magic, mesmerizing and utterly dominating first a Congolese youth and then a Belgian girl.

Afterwards the narrator sees the wizard go ashore, looking like any young black clerk with his quiet clothes and attaché case, and brings her story to a perfect ending: "All Africa carries an attaché case now; and what I knew was in that one might not be more extraordinary than what might be in some of the others."

The story is memorable for the unity of feeling, the brilliant use of background in the heightening of mood and the honesty. The Belgians are dull and dreadful but they can and do run the Congo. The woman is mean to compare Africans to monkeys, but she is also right: the little conjuror trotting out his white man's tricks, bewildered and hurt by the white man's reaction, is the chimpanzee on the motor-bicycle. But then, dramatically, Miss Gordimer shows us that this is not all, that the African is monkeyish only when he apes the white man whom he cannot understand, and that he possesses a rich resource of his own, equally beyond the white man's power of comprehension; and in so doing demonstrates that artistic integrity packs a better punch than all the facile liberal clichés put together.

She succeeds again, beautifully, with "A Company of Laughing Faces," where a young girl is taken by her jolly commonplace mother to a seaside resort full of similar people. "A wonderful place for youngsters . . . the kids really enjoy themselves there. . . . " For Kathy, being young is to be vulnerable, isolated, lost, often desperate, but she struggles to enjoy herself as her mother would wish. Mrs. Hack has not the least idea of what her daughter is like: a permanent gulf yawns between them. Kathy sees a little boy she has talked to on the beach lying drowned on the seabed, and begs to be taken home. Mrs.

Hack is loath to cut the holiday short but sees in this sensitivity something socially superior that they ought not to forego. In fact—and once again the ending is perfect—"the sight, there, was the one real happening of the holiday, the one truth and the one beauty," and the author's triumph is to make us realize that this was so.

I should mention "Message In a Bottle," a tour de force concerned with the haphazard cruelty of life, told with apparent inconsequence and deeply moving; and "Tenants of the Last Tree-House," dealing once more with the world of adolescence and the failure of communication between children and parents. "There was a math test on Thursday and I got 61 percent. . . ." In this vein Cavada writes her weekly letter home: but in a nursery cupboard among the outgrown clothes her mother finds a diary with an entry: "I love Peter—and adore him—and need him—for ever and ever," stands a little while thinking, then carefully hides the book away again. It is often in her simplest moments that Miss Gordimer is most poignant.