The Short Story Changes
By ANGUS WILSON IN a recent article in The •Times literary Supplement a critic quotes Miss Elizabeth Bowen as saying that the short story is ' in its use of action . . . nearer to the drama than to the novel,' and then comments, ' if in some, cases it is nearer to the drama than the novel, in others it is nearer to the poem.' This careful separation of the short story from the novel has, I suspect, been very influential among the more serious short story writers for the last twenty or so years. It has, of course, certain truths in it, but in searching for the more subtle aspects of form, it seems to me wilfully to disregard the obvious. Of course it is true that short stories like plays must be compressed in statement and depend for their aesthetic impact upon climax, surprise and other directly artful methods of presentation. The Very tightness of form, too, means that the short story writer must make use of allusion, symbol and overtone to convey his meaning in a way that brings him closer to the poet than the novelist. Indeed some of the best short stories of today remind me directly of those combinations of drama and poetry we find in Browning's Men and Women. Given the change of moral mood, there is much in the stories, for example, of Miss Jean Stafford* and Miss Margaret Lane,* in their prepossession with the psychological significance of incidents and their sug- gestions of general moral truth by the peculiar or the macabre that recalls Bishop Blougram, or Holy Cross Dax, or the Statue and the Bust. It is the moral atmosphere that is stressed and the significant moment that is caught to convey it. Neverthe- less, for all these affinities between short stories, poetry and drama, the plain truth is that the development of the short story in this century has followed that of the novel. The Classic short story of Mr. Maugham's era, with its emphasis on narrative and surprise, proved too tight to convey the flow of sensitivity which to Katharine Mansfield was tile essence both of art and life. By injecting greater subtlety of mood and deeper levels of consciousness, she almost succeeded in destroy- ing the form and reducing short stories to ' sketches.' Short story writers for the last fifteen years have been trying to tie the two threads together again. The history of the novel has not been dissimilar and, on the whole, the short story writers have been more successful than the novelists in restoring shape Without losing subtlety. It would not be unfair, I think, to say that the success of the stories under review is in direct ratio to their power of maintaining form without losing sug- gestion and overtone.
In this respect, I think, Miss Lane comes off worst. She never writes badly and she often sees subtly and feels deeply, but, at her most sensitive, as in ' Conversation in Venice' or 'No Future in It,' her craft deserts her and we wander on Without satisfaction of climax or surprise. ' The Festive Amazon,' on the other hand. a carefully shaped story of the legacy of an aunt's parrot, does not rise above poorish magazine level in content. I do not know that Miss Jean Stafford is really a cleverer or better writer than Miss Lane. She has however the advantage of being an American. The interest in short stories in the United States, the highly paid market provided for good short stories in American magazines have, of course, their defects in stereotype and limitation of range, but they have enforced a discipline which demands and gets competence of the highest order. None of Miss Stafford's stories, except ' The Homo Front,' straggles, yet their form is never empty. Perhaps the subtlety occasionally strays into that sophistication, to whose metallic twang American ears so often seem insensitive, but real subtlety is also there. ' The Maiden,' a perfect story, says more about the Nazi element in the German character than the whole of Mr. Forester's collection The Nightmare* which is devoted to the subject. The title story, ' Children are Bored on Sunday,' is the most delicate and telling expose of that neurotic ennui of New York which the short story writers of the New Yorker have made their forte. Miss Stafford, how- eVer, falls into another trap which lies beneath the feet of every modern short story writer—the morbid and the macabre. There is nothing more satisfactory, as I know from experience, than writing a macabre or a morbid short story. The over- tones, the symbols, the climax, all are there ready to hand, sensitivity is heightened without the loss of drama. At its best, too, the macabre story can be very good, its effect upon the reader very powerful. Unfortunately, however,. it can easily stray into the purely clinical—as in Miss Stafford's study in physical pain ` The Interior Castle,' or it can somehow cheat the reader's conviction by the unwelcome intrusion of insanity as in The Echo and the Nemesis.' The trouble with such studies in mania or morbidity is, of course, that they are stimulants whose effect upon 'the reader decreases with each dose.
Miss Antonia White's brilliant collection Strangers* is, alas !, not without this defect. ` The Exile ' is a remarkable character study of that sort of hearty, emotionally undeveloped female convert to Catholicism whose self-centred vagaries must be a sore trial to every parish priest; the scattiness, the dottiness are all in place, and yet, somehow, this intrusion of the insane prevents the story from being more than a sketch. So, too, in ` The Rich Woman,' a wonderful picture of a sexually unsatisfied woman whose frustration has been canalised into an hysterical use of power, the supernatural element is perfectly satisfactory so long as it remains a phoney ' element in the projection of her personality; but when, at the end of the story, a real element of supernatural evil is suggested the climax is weakened. ` The Moment of Truth,' however, seems to me an almost perfect story. Miss Antonia White's collection illustrates another point. The individual stories are not, per- haps, uniformly as competent as Miss Stafford's, but, as a collection, it is much more rewarding. The reason, I am sure, is that Miss White writes very consciously as a Roman Catholic. I am not in sympathy with her faith, but a Catholic writing in a non-Catholic country has a considerable advantage in surprise and paradox, but, above all—Catholic, Communist or vegetarian—an all-pervasive faith has a unifying effect upon a collection of short stories which saves it from one of its gravest dangers—the random impression that comes from the reading of subtle, personal impressions that were designed as individual aesthetic convictions and are now served together with no greater unity of design than personal flavour.'
It is this unity of design which makes Mr. Auchincloss's collection the best book of those under review. The Romantic Egoists* has a strict social framework and a convinced social standpoint. Once again I find the creed most distasteful. Mr. Auchincloss is an arrogant neo-aristocrat and his convictions make him, I think, cocksure, lacking in compassion, and, on occasion, deficient in good taste. Nevertheless, he is a very clever and subtle student of human social behaviour in the widest sense and one is led from one story to another by the unity of mood and viewpoint to a very rewarding total effect which goes far deeper than any subtle momentary flash or exact recapture of evanescent sensibility. Mr. Forester's book of stories, too, has unity; it is, how- ever, more unity of subject than of approach. He has recon- structed, as he says in his preface, a series of stories about Nazi Germany any of which, except the last, might have happened. I do not dispute his desire to remind us of the depths to which human beings sank in that time, nor to honour the heroism to which other human beings rose. He is intelli- gent, compassionate, liberal-minded; his writing, if never vivid, is competent; he has—a rare gift in these days—a great power in describing action. And yet something in these stories always seemed lacking. It was only when 1 got to the last one—the one that could not have happened—that I got an inkling of what was wrong. No one, I think, of any subtlety would have included this bathetic story of Eva Braun and Hitler roaming the roads of the United States in madness and exile.
* Strangers. 'By Antonia White. (Harvill Press. 10s. 6d.) The Romantic Egoists. By Louis Auchincloss. (Gollancz. 10s. 6d.)
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