Short Stories
English Country Stories. Introduction by Ronald Lewin. (Paul Elek. 12s. 6d.) - Fancy Free. Edited by W. G. Bebtafiagton. (Allen & Unwin. 6s.)
THE modern short story at the higher level is apt to be a bit pointless so far as plot goes. It tends to concentrate on conveying to the 'reader a certain mood or atmosphere, the whole thing turning upon ,thsignificant incident, with a change of voice at the end to touch t off. There is no reason why it should not do this, and, provided e author has imagination and a.-strict sense of what is relevant to his purpose, the story will be successful. Miss Dorothy Haynes likes stories which have a twist of the uneasy about them—witchcraft, unkindness to children (a much favoured theme fraught with peril for the sentimentalist who identifies himself tdc, often with the suffering child), cruelty to prisoners, the cruelty of galloping time to a woman who grows bitter waiting for her lover to come back—the old fiddling beggar, and when he does he is lucky not to recognise her. These painful uneasy matters are worked with skill and deep feeling. This author gives herself up wholeheartedly to her own fears, cultivating them with shrewd care, and the result is a collection of stories which will be enjoyed by all who have similar leanings. And what a rich field of enjoyment lies in our fears. One should really keep them up.
Ernest Dowson's poems are more distinguished than his prose, though he thought otherwise himself. Rescued from a soft obscurity and introduced by Dr. Mark Longaker (his foreword is the best part of the book), these stories are worth a glance if only to remind one that he existed and wrote poems. There is no touch about them of that timeless quality which overrides the parochiality of period. "For once. in a dream he had seen, as they were flowers de luce, the blue lakes of her eyes," and "he sought her through countless windings of the forest, for many moons." The archaisms of the 'nineties, especially when they have this irritating grammatical ambiguity, are not easy to put up with. Nothing dates more quickly than affectation. One can imagine an editor of the period with these stories in his hands-,, editor of a rather " good " commercial magazine, The Idler, perhaps : "I'd like to get one in. But no. The directors would never stand for it." Time puts us on the side of the directors.
There remain the anthologies. English Country Short Stories combs the classics—Kipling, Galsworthy, Machen, Nevinson. Among the moderns, Miss Rosamund Lehmann (a charming story about taking bees out ot the chimney), Coppard, Williamson, Quiller- Couch, T. H. White. What is Kipling's secret ? The social implica- tions of An Habitation Enforced, the irritating near biblical language, here as elsewhere in his writings, antagonise. As a matter of fact this particular story made Arnold Bennett feel sick ; one sees why. Yet there is the tension, the drawing-on quality, the eye that holds while it repels. Is after all the gift of story-telling something, like life itself, to be recognised but not defined ?
In Fancy Free—anrexcellent title—the anthologist Mr. W. G. Bebbington has picked fewer stories but picked with brilliance., These stories are uncanny, but unlike Miss Haynes's they are also cheerful. One never .grows tired of Pyecraft. How beautifully Wells has pickled this fine specimen of the bore ! There is no douht about Pyecraft for the,,Parnassus Stakes. Others in the field—and it's not much of a 4eld for a sporting nutter, with no long-priced outsiders—are Lord Dunsany's How 7embu Played for Cambridge, E. M. Forster's The Celestial Omnibus (another instance of the child as enlightened sufferer), Eric Linidater's tale of a foot-on-the-ground family who become very happily and finally foot-off-the-ground (The Dancers), John- Pudney's Uncle Arthur (an elephant), a dear old steady in W. W. Jacob's Over the Side, a Bierce at slightly longer odds, and Richard Middleton's The Ghost Ship. It is just the book to put beside that excruciating mattress in the spare room.
STEVIE SMITH.
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