31 MARCH 1944, Page 18

English Story. Edited by Woodrow Wyatt. (Collins. 75. 6c1.) SHORT

stories are enjoying a mild boom ; with the rush of war and scarcity of papa they are becoming more widely written and easier to publish. This is all to the good, but it has resulted in the appear- ance of many stories which reveal no urgent reason why they are written at all. This, as George Orwell and H. E. Bates have declared, is the deadly sin besetting this art form, and there are signs of it in the present collection. This does not apply to Alun Lewis's soldier dying in Burma, nor to Elizabeth Berridge's story of a maternity hospital isolated in the snow—the best I have read by that author. James Hanky has a saroyanish tale of a sailor's evening in a pub, and Willy Goldman another semi-rueful, semi-autobiographical story of thwarted love amongst the East End "Sweatshops," which somehow reminds one of Charlie Chaplin. H. E. Bates' sketch of a Polish pilot is slight but endearing, and Mrs. Mikleson has had the ingenious :dea of describing a Roman Saturnalia from the angle of the British prisoners who were unwillingly present. The other stories are unremarkable.