13 JANUARY 1950, Page 24

Short Stories

The Alabaster Hand and Other Ghost Stories. By A. N. L. Munby. (Dobson. Ss. 6d.) IF the present-day short story is less uniformly defined than it was when Chekhov, Maupassant, 0. Henry and Poe were its non-British exemplars, it is also less consciously wrought into a curve or a deliberate flatland. To judge by these and other recent specimens it is, for the most part, taking a spontaneous course, avoiding preciosity and telling a tale. Plainness, provided it misses dullness, is a healthy symptom ; for technical devices should, after all, be a means to an end, not a substitute for one. In spite of this present freedom of each writer from obstructive models, Mr. Derek Patmore's idea of an undergraduate collection is not altogether happy. No sort of an Oxford movement is discernible. Mr. Patmore, acting as compere in a heavily-earnest introduction that is itself no model for aspirants, does not find any reason for his venture. It looks a little like a stunt. (And why .no women ? Were there none to pass a test so moderate ?) - Several of these authors have already published fiction. Most of them were in the Services. Such a story as Hugo Charteris's Liberation in Bali—one of the most mature and incisive—owes much to material knowledge, although this too may fail without keen literary judgement, as it does when Alan Beesley's Pink Slippers turns from a study in gentle irony to the savagery of a negro lynch- ing. In that brief restricted space the two moods clash. The clash of event could happen in life, but it is arbitrary, and shows why plot can never be the touchstone even of this form of art ; con- tinuity of colour, mood and tempo come before it, and mere veri- similitude blocks the path to verity. In Mona, Francis King, With a time-worn moral achieves a quivering sentiment that holds its balance on the safer sides of pathos. Derek Lindsay's long excursion into condemnatory satire has, however, been over-

praised ; both fantasy and irony need a finer point. ;

The Welsh and the Manx cadences may do more for a story- teller than the _composite Oxford accent ; but neither Mr. Rhys Davies nor Mr. Nigel Kneale owes his success to them entirely, customary as it is to command a regional writer (whether he be William Barnes or Arnold Bennett) to stay put. Mr. Davies is a Welshman looking at the universe—and watching Welshmen looking at it too. His range is powerful. It extends not only from Wales to England, from the richly comic, as in the story of Canute, to the grave and anxious, but over psychological levels varying between a hearty coarse reaction and the plaintive whinnying of souls per- plexed. Though each piece tells a story, it is shaped by the aware- ness of those who live it, even where only a spinster with delusions holds the field. Sex is often a disturbing factor. Thus both the title story and One of Norah's Early Days wind through funnels of adolescent neurosis, in the girl's case opening on new possibilities with new fears, but in the boy's to hopeless infertility and decay. The satirical humour that edges its healthy way into many a situation Is by no means at odds with a poetic wraith in the middle distance. No derivations need be sought for Mr. Davies's work ; it gives the effect of self-generation on a virile scale.

Mr Kneale has a very similar talent with less intensity and a more conscious trimming of his work for salesmanship. He, too, leaps from his Isle of Man to the larger island, and performs on many notes with rarely a false one. The flexibility and variety of both these authors keep the reader hopping alongside in expectation. This, curiously, is where Mr. Munby's ghost train fails ; not because all his tales are of the occult—that as a rule calls up a ghoulish appetite—but because his spirits drift in from no land of shivering strangeness, but belong to the set-and-varnished tradition of literary Gothic. The learned author, who is a college librarian, has done just what he intended in these period pieces. But they should be read separately, at intervals ; the pattern in the carpet repeats and repeats itself until both pattern and expectancy wear thin.

SYLVA NORMAN.