SHORT STORIES ;

Dinosaur Tracks. -By Benedict Thielen. (Seeker and Warburg. 7s. 6d.) The Earliest Dreams. By Nancy Hale. (Lovat Dickson. 75. 6d.) The Gay and Melancholy Flux. By William Saroyan. (Faber. 7s. 6d.) The Only Rose. By Sarah Ome Jewett. (The Travellers' Library : Cape. 33. 6d.) The White Farm. By Geraint Goodwin. (Cape. 75. 6d.) Ninepenny Flute. By A. E. Coppard. (Macmillan. 7s. 6d.) Mr. and Mrs. North. By Richard Lockiidge. (Michael Joseph. 7s. 6d.)

SINCE the death of Dorothy Edwards England has not possessed

a short-story writer who ranks with the best from America, although if John Pudney writes some more as good as The Sin

She Could Not Confess he will invalidate this statement. The three American books which I have put first on the list have a humanity and depth which make stories by Englishmen like

Messrs. Beachcroft and Halward seem, though skilful, sincere and fresh, a little flat and childlike, because unable to render up further richness on a second reading. Mr. Thielen's "Young Country," one of the present volume, may at first sight look like a merely brilliant exercise in the macabre; but a second reading brings out not only the irony of certain passages on which the climax, when known, throws a backward light, but also the fact that it expresses the inextricable tangle of life's good and evil : the way in which decency and generous feeling are beset by pitfalls from which nothing but good luck, some- times aided by sound intuition, will save them. As so often in contemporary American fiction, the persons portrayed are inarticulate, the contacts are instinctive, there is little, if any, consciousness of self. In "Souvenirs of Arizona" a man and his wife on a motoring -tour stop at an eating-house which is also

a store selling Indian products. The impact of the speechless Navajo-Indian aspon the -woman who is turning over turquoise jewellery is admirably and economically conveyed.- Without a

shred' of false sentiment, 'dignity and self-respect are contrasted with the " jollying " shallowness of her husband. It is a high tribute to Mr. Thielen that, judging by this story, and although

• it-introduces an-'Indian,--D; H Lawrence might- never &ilk

- existed. Lawrence was-in some ways a- great writer, -but his influence on other writers (as opposed to his influence on thought in general) has not been beneficial ; his method of

approach has hPrnme a facile literary _convention. But there is no literary convention in Dinosaur Tracks exceptMr. Thielen's own. In the title -story, Which isdomiiiatéd by grim humour,

the narrator is only 'dimlY conscious of the grimness inherent in the incident he relates, and only after it is '-over, conscious of the humour. Perhaps the opening sentences. from it may give a hint of this writer's quality : •

- It was almost noon when we got near Old Dad's place . . . People used to ask me where he got the name Old Dad _fnxn. I never did know, but there were some mountains near there that they call the Old Dad mountains, and maybe he was the one who discovered them. .He almost might be. Not that he was so old. But :he always looked the same and never seemed to change from one year to the next. - I always Sort of had the feeling that he'd still be there' brig 'after I itopped driving -a- truck across- the Mojave desert, juit "like" the "mountains. • - In this paragraph, by means of the *old ", used," the story is set back into the past, is initially removed from the Status of anecdote to that of reminiscence;' the scene. is set ; and not

only is Old Dad described, but the sensibility of the narrator is indicated by his perceptions concerning Old Dad. Mr.

Thielen's graces are inherent in his narrative, not knobs applied to the surface. • -Very rarely does an image protrude even as much as when,-from an approaching ship, "bells-rang out'on board with a clear polished sound." But grace' is there, and

force, and insight.

Like Mr. Thielen, Miss -4 Taney Hale, author of The Earliest

D;;Iams, is most interested in situations involving unself- conscious people. "The Great Grandmother" tells of an old woman on her death-bed, wandering frightened in the maze of her remote past. Her daughter, whom she does not recog- nise, is helpless to comfort her, and sometimes almost frightened, too. But the little boy playing in the garden is drawn into the house by her cries and, not unduly distressed,- takes her words at their face vilue, and she iS soothed. How easy to senti- mentalise a contact such' al this ! The slightest tremor of personal pity in the writer's tone would falsify the impersonal acceptance of the objective situation. There is in Miss Hale's tone nn such faltering. She is, moreover, an extremely vivid writer. In " Midsummer " the atmosphere of outward sultry heat and inward tormented adolescence is wonderfully pure and intense, and so is the feeling of inward rottenness and outward decay in "To the Invader," which shows a Northern girl trapped by marriage among Southerners. In this story there is the added quality of wit, and that sense of the cruelty

of humans, :especially when they are consolidated in a group, which inspires "Mr. Britton.' In the-Iatter, cruelty is asso-

ciated with social brightness, in "To the Invader" with crass respectability : in both the non-conforming individual is trodden down with utter ruthlessness. The stories named, and several others in The Earliest Dreams, are worth reading many times. Such volumes as this, and Dinosaur Tracks, and The Gay and Melancholy Flux, should be possessed to be savoured. They are too good to be rushed through, as we all rush through volumes of short stories, with the result that they blur into each other and their separate qualities are lost.

Nobody who enjoyed Mr. Saroyan's first book will need this advice. His subject-matter is the large one of being alive and being conscious of being alive. "There are two regions," he says in "The Great Unwritten American Novel." "One is on the surface and the other is elsewhere, perhaps everywhere . . . It is breathing. It is the region of things and the region of

things not seen. . . It has always been with us and always been ignored. It is seeing. It is being. It is knowing." In " Life " he writes of" the glory of perception," and in "Panorama Unmerciful" of" wanting-to get into prose the magnificence of

beineable' to taste a peach." He has a passion for life and sensation, which he succeeds in- expressing in many different

ways. At the e.nd of "-As of die Sun " he says : • It is ceriainly easier to write a novel than to live one. Almost anybody can write a bad novel, but hardly anyone can live even a bad novel. It takes all sorts of centuries to produce one man who can -fiVe a second-rate novel.

If this sounds nonsense to any reader, I would remind him of what Keats says in his letter to his brother, dated February 54th, 1819:

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figura- tive—Shakespeare led such a life of Allegory : his works are the comments on it.

The poet prefaces this dictum with the remark that "they are very shallow people who take everything literally." Mr. Saroyan often reminds us of Keats' letters, not only because of "his intense gusto, but because he is not afraid to contradict himself,

he possesses "negative capability," which Keats defined as the capability of "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." When Mr. Saroyan, who like other fertile writers has his moments of silliness, says that "a style is necessary only when one has nothing to say," he is obviously thinking of undue artifice, of the too-chiselled outline. As many pages of The Gay and Melancholy Flux witness, he has himself a style :

In the midst of such visions and remembrances would come and go the gay and tragic moods of my own small life, from its beginnings in recent years, the day I first knew of the earth and the universe, and fixed myself in a place in its vastness, on the grass, by -the eucalyptus tree, in the -morning,. under the sun ; and the moment once, at night, when I saw the world end ; and the evening I walked alone over an empty road through the &until' and was lost in the world and could not cry; and the times I laughed.

I am not sure that anything here is quite as complete and moving as a whole as the story in The Daring Young Man called "Sleep in Unheavenly Peace," but that fnay be heal-Ise I have not yet read every word of every' page of the present volume. I do

know that there are passages of truth and beauty, that detach- ment from self balances enthusiasm, that a writer of humour and a rich imagination here expresses his relation with the universe.

The Only Rose is a reprint of Sarah Jewett's New England tales, quiet, well-observed, less moving than Miss Rebecca West's Introduction suggests. z The White Farm has Wales and the Marches for setting ; unfortunately Mr. Goodwin has fallen heavily under the Lawrence yoke. The appearance of Ninepenny Flute should be noted by Coppard fans, of whom I am not one. The content of his tales does not compensate me for his Irish bogus-good-humoured manner. Mr. Lockridge is another American. His sketches all concern one married pair and incidents of daily life, done in a subtle, apparently

' casual way which is delightful.- - E. B. C. JONES.