Short Stories
ANY work of literature which too vehemently proclaims its form is perilously near failure. The writer of the short story must be Constantly wary of this danger; there is something so treacherously neat about his chosen form. 'That would make a good short story,' he is tempted to think, observing some incident which has taken his attention; too often he forgets that the material of a story dictates its own form, and the short story is not a shape to be filled with apparently suitable subject-matter any more than a poem is Perhaps the scarcity in English literature of the continental nouvelle or long short story is responsible for the too sharp distinction made here between the novel and the short story. The novel has, in a sense, come to mean freedom for the writer, the short story, limitation. There has been nothing produced in this country at all resembling Mann's Death in Venice or Gide's Pastoral Symphony, to take but two random examples from modern continental literature.
These thoughts are prompted by John Pudney's Pick of To-day's Short Stories 7. There are far too many 'trick' stories here, stories with contrived or surprise endings which bear little relation to human behaviour. The pieces by Marghanita Laski and R. C. Hutchinson are particularly guilty iii this respect. Even William Sansom's 'A Visit to the Dentist,' which gives an account of a middle-aged man's first visit to an espresso bar, lacks veracity. People just do not behave like this. Frank O'Connor's 'Masculine Protest' is too cosily pleased with itself to carry conviction, while Arthur Calder-Marshall's 'Never Say Die,' a story about a very old woman who lives for her betting on horses, is little more than a too-prolonged joke. The only story in this collection which tries to be honest about human experience is Kingsley Amis's 'Interesting Things,' but even this is unsatisfactory simply because the writer has refused, perhaps deliberately, to probe far into the motives of his main character, the girl Gloria.
The new World's Classic, Modern English Short Stories: Second Series, selected by Derek Hudson, is a much more worth-while book. It represents most of the best qualities to be found in this genre in England. It should perhaps be mentioned, though, that unlike Mr. Pudney, who draws only on one year of writing for his collection, Mr. Hudson has taken his stories from every avail- able source.
There is only one story in the World's Classic which fails because it is merely a superficially-examined incident, and that is Fred Urquhart's 'Man about the House.' In all the other stories, various as they are in style and treatment, there is evident a notable honesty about and compassion for human behaviour and emotion. The best stories, in my opinion, are V. S. Pritchett's 'The Voice,' a marvellous study in fear, Graham Greene's now well-known 'The Basement Room,' an account, at once detached and involved, of the betrayal of innocence, and Elizabeth Bowen's 'Maria,' a story in which this writer's delicacy and malice work together to produce one of the funniest pieces in the book. But I also liked very much Nigel Kneale's 'The Putting Away of Uncle Quaggin,' Christopher Sykes's 'The Sacred and the Profane' and Rosamond Lehmann's 'A Dream of Winter,' an impressionist story in which the sensuality of nature and the seasons is con- trasted with the dead atmosphere of a sick-room. There is also a tine contribution, 'The Kite,' from Somerset Maugham, who has surely written more good short stories than any other living
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