Fiction
Shorts
Peter Ackroyd
The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories (Jonathan Cape £2.95)
Winter's Tales edited by A. D. Maclean (Macmillan £3.95) Black Faces, White Faces Jane Gardam (Hamish Hamilton £3.25) Selected Stories Nadine Gordimer (Jonathan Cape £3.95)
Plays have their reviewers, novels have their academics, poems have other poets. But short stories have never found their appropriate critic. They have survived, in England at least, stubbornly but inexplicably with a literary role that is always assumed without ever having been investigated. And now I suppose it's too late; the name itself suggests the highly conventional limits of the form, condemned to the more obvious techniques of the linear narrative and to the perpetual invention of 'stories'. And so they appeal to the more conventional literary emotions: suspense, reassurance, and in the case of the Times anthology of 'ghost' stories, fright.
None of the writers in the book have really tackled the problem of the conventionality of the form they're using, and so they write with a certain facility combined with a certain predictability. Francis King goes a little way towards freedom in 'A Scent of Mimosa' by effectively yoking lyricism with terror but this story — of a ghost at a prizegiving — is a lonely effort. The winning entry in the Times competition (from which these stories were taken), 'A Doll Called Silvio' is, for example, a neat but stereotypical exercise in horror. Other stories, such as Penelope Fitzgerald's 'The Axe', about the unfortunate effects of a summary sacking, and Paul Theroux's 'Dengue Fever', concerning a tree with bad memories can only ring a few changes on Lady Cynthia Asquith's favourite sport. Most of the writers are reduced to the frame of the 'ghost story'; none of them manage to break it.
In any case the short story, whether ghost or plain, is a difficult form to use effectively. Its brevity makes it seem much easier than in fact it is, and can very often lead to self-indulgence and to a general slackness of intent. Winter's Tales has some evidence of this. The first story, for example, 'A Value' by Jeremy Brooks, has an interesting theme in the inner life of a 'mad bomber' but it is marred by occasional passages of overwriting. A good short story must take advantage of its shortness by being elliptical, or at least to the point. It cannot allow for much development, whether of character or of plot — Celia Dale's story, 'The Better Part of Valour,' concerning a sudden end to a very long affair, comes off very well by observing these conventions. But since short narratives give such little room for manoeuvre, and since any character must necessarily be well developed from the first page, short stories will tend to give a somewhat static — not to say simplistic — view of the world. It needs a major feat of imagination to prevent them from seeming slight and inconsequential. But, again, there is the constant danger of trying to say too much (I am beginning to wonder how any good short stories ever get written). In 'Sir Cecil's Ride', Shirley Hazzard has managed an impressive evocation of place, but she has tried to include too many tones within the same context and as a result her story becomes cluttered. So, the line of a good short story is a fine one; in this Winter's Tales, Muriel Spark has found it with 'The First Years of My Life', a tiny story which doesn't miss a trick, and Brian Glanville has found it with 'Footballers Don't Cry', a story which has Mr Glanville's usual mixture of tough guy content and sentimental theme. It works very well.
But even he, I imagine, might find something original in Jane Gardam, whose Black Faces White Faces strikes me as a very accomplished book. She has a simple and easy prose which artfully masks some cunning observations and a nice line in wit. All of the stories are set in Jamaica, and they all have a combination of brilliant surface colour and interior tension which is characteristic of that island which is neither one thing nor the other. In the first of them, 'Baby Jude' Mrs Filling ("From Barnes, actually") sees something nasty in the midday sun, in a glade where nobody stays. It makes a far more eerie story than practically anything in the Times anthology. 'The Weeping Child' is another ghost story, but it is told by Mrs Ingham — "A keen girl guide until early sixty" — and is about "the ghost of someone who is still alive". Jane Gardam has that highly sophisticated gift of writing simply; and you can sometimes see a universe in a grain of sand, especially in Jamaica. In 'Saul Alone', a rich old man, paralysed down one side of his body, eavesdrops on his wife's shrill talk. Simplicity, it seems, can be the most revealing tone of all. Black Faces, White Faces is actually called a collection of 'incidents', since the same characters appear and reappear within different frames, but in fact Jane Gardam has taken the form of the short story as close to art as it is ever likely to reach and in doing so has joined the company of such writers as William Trevor and Ian McEwan.
And also, of course, of Nadine Gordimer. On the surface, she is a most unsuitable writer of short stories since her prose is a generally . abstract and abstracted one of description and of analysis. But all of her stories have the toughness of 'felt life' about them. In her case, it is the life of South Africa which possesses her, and she writes very well those powerful but generally unacknowledged emotions between blacks and whites. One of her first stories, for example, 'Ah Woe Is Me' is a flat, sad account of the suffering which must — because of the divide between the two races — necessarily go unnoticed. But Gordimer has a much wider range than a mere racial theme. In 'A Bit of Young Life', she manages an impressive range of moods and tones, as a lovely young girl dupes a holiday hotel with the "cunning of her passion". In 'Not For Publication', the education of a black boy — which to him is tantamount to a kind of mental slavery — is charted with sympathy and tact. The last sentence of the story has its own kind of simplicity — "The young woman remarked, 'Maybe he's with those boys who sleep in the old empty cars there in town — you know? There by the beer hall?'" This is a good example of Gordimer's elliptical methods, her ability to convey by suggestion as much as by statement, and of the way in which her imagination seizes upon small tones and nuances. No wonder she writes short stories so well.
Previous page
