AND ANOTHER THING
A danger of tales left untold
PAUL JOHNSON
One of life's most agreeable pleasures, now in danger of disappearing, is reading a skilfully turned-out, highly professional short story. It is an art form in itself and mastering the short story form is, for a writ- er, a wonderful education in plotting, char- acter-sketching and, most of all, economy in the use of words. When I was teaching myself to write, round about 1950, it was the short story I practised most. I must have written scores of them. Hardly any were published but I felt I was learning and making progress. Moreover, just the act of writing them was a keen pleasure.
Sixty or seventy years ago, great writers were still producing magical tales, varying from 1,500 words to six or seven thousand. There was Kipling, for instance, the master of them all, cunningly serving up a mixture of comic dialogue and the bleakly sinister. The young Hemingway was just getting into his stride. Then there was Somerset Maugham, for my money the most consis- tently entertaining, if a little heartless. Has anyone ever written a neater tale than 'The Colonel's Lady'? G.K Chesterton could be relied upon for ingenuity and cerebral sur- prise, James Thurber for maniacal comedy: nothing has ever made me laugh so much as The Night the Bed Fell on Father'. The range of tales available was prodigious, from Raymond Chandler's powerful crime stories, originally written for the pulp trade, to the dockside tales of W.W. Jacobs. I picked up an old anthology of Jacobs the other day and was deeply impressed by his fertility of invention and the scampering pace at which he keeps the plot bowling along. There were dozens of second-rank professionals like him, turning out reliable stuff to order, keeping us entertained.
What made me try my hand at the stories was, of course, rumours of the fabulous sums to be earned in the magazine market, especially in the United States. There was the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's and the Lady's Home Journal, with a constant demand for 5,000-word stories. These mag- azines had huge sales and would pay a dol- lar a word, sometimes more. They were mighty choosy, though, and could take their pick of the best writers. Somewhat more up-market, and even choosier, was the New Yorker, happily still publishing high-quality short fiction even today. Britain was much less well provided, the Strand, the greatest story magazine of them all, being on its last legs (it closed in 1950). But there were still plenty of outlets, including the women's weeklies, which also had huge sales in those days and actually published rather higher- quality stories and serials than their critics would allow. There were, too, quirky little papers like Lilliput, which was both discern- ing and generous, as well as the highbrow publications, Penguin New Writing and Hori4on (that, too, folded in 1950). Even newspaper editors would occasionally run short stories: the old London Evening News had, I seem to recall, one every weekday: very short — 1,000 words or less — but often beautifully contrived.
As these markets contracted or disap- peared, fiction writers ceased to be able to make a living from short-story writing alone. That is what happened to Angus Wilson, the most gifted man in the genre since Maugham, whose The Wrong Set (1949) is one of the most scintillating col- lections of tales ever published. He had to turn to novels, in which he never shone to the same degree. Some writers continued to practise the craft, come what might. V.S. Pritchett, for instance, produced an annual quota of high-quality tales until quite recently. I have read, too, outstanding col- lections by such highly professional women writers as Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Man- ning, Doris Lessing and Edna O'Brien.
'I promised to vote Labour, but you know what election promises are like . . When I was an editor, I usually ran a short story or two at Christmas-time, often pro- vided by Graham Greene, who loved writ- ing them. But it is significant that a top writer of fiction like Evelyn Waugh, who produced some splendid tales in the 1930s, wrote very few in the last third of his life.
The case for the short story is twofold. From the reader's point of view, there is much to be said for a tale of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, which will happily while away a train journey or a lazy weekend afternoon. A magazine fits more easily than a novel into a briefcase. More important, however, there are many first-class fictional ideas which come off beautifully when briefly told but cannot be expanded into novel length. Hemingway's The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber', told with superb economy of means and tensile strength, is the perfect tale but would be a frightful bore — indeed, would simply not work at all — as the plot of a 75,000-word novel. Kipling was a natural short-story writer who was not at ease with the novel form and length: The Light That Failed is powerfully conceived but there is some- thing wrong with it. Somerset Maugham wrote some highly successful novels but his stories are in an altogether higher range of art: indeed the best of them, Cakes and Ale, might be described as a very long short story.
I suppose writers will always produce tales, but the skills honed so carefully and zealously in the century 1850-1950 will sim- ply not be there, and the rich feasts we enjoyed will not be available, if publishers and editors fail to provide regular, remu- nerative markets. I believe the demand is still there, and the expertise to supply it will still be available for a few more years yet, but it will gradually disappear unless some of those who wield power in publishing make a conscious effort to keep the art alive. Why don't the colour magazines pub- lish short stories? Why do we so rarely get the chance to read them in the up-market broadsheets? I would like to see regular fic-
tion in the middle range, too: the Daily Mail, the Sunday Express, the Mail on Sun- day. It might be an excellent idea for edi-
tors who care about our literature to set aside, each year, a sum of money for the commissioning of high-grade short fiction. It would be an investment for the future in the Kiplings, Hemingways and Maugh- ams of the 21st century.
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