Short Stories
FRANK O'CONNOR defines his latest collection of short stories as an attempt at " something for which he has secretly always longed, the Perfect Book " and his publishers, admiringly quote Yeats- " O'Connor is doing for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia." All this should arouse the highest expectations ; human nature being as it is, the reader will more probably feel, a little grudgingly, that Mr. O'Connor has given himself a good deal to live up to. In fact these stories, five of them new and twenty-two old, stand the test, up to a point, almost defiantly well. The domestic details of Irish provincial life, the ferocious, serio-comic family conflicts, the familiar characters of this narrow world—heroically talkative drunks, priests, uncompromising, hard-working women, clumsy middle-aged men on the look-out for wives, two Trappist monks who in silence read the racing papers—provide the material ; the narrative has a direct and wholly characteristic vitality, an authoritative ear for dialogue and a sustained, vigorous compassion. Mr. O'Connor claims that he rewrites, on occasion, " twenty, ,thirty, even fifty times " ; what most forcibly strikes one, though, is the artful immediacy, at his best the almost effortless fluency, of the stories. Several of the most successful (" My Oedipus Complex," " The Old Fellows," " The Pretender," " Babes in the Wood ") deal variously with children or, rather, with a child's view of an unaccountable adult world : here Mr. O'Connor can scarcely go wrong. Where he may sometimes seem to fall short is in poetic awareness, the sense of imaginative tension and surprise. The masterly " Bridal Night " certainly achieves it ; " In the Train " nearly does ; in a few of the more serious stories, though, one feels that some final quality is lacking. The Chekhov comparison, inevitably, puts Mr. O'Connor at a rather unfair disadvantage : he is a most accomplished writer, and yet his very Irishness of accent perhaps makes him appear as almost too adroit an entertainer.
John Cheever is a New Yorker writer, with most of the qualities implied, by that useful label ; professional, remarkably sure in obtaining his effects, urban in tone, relentlessly observant of the pretentious and the commonplace. Most of the fourteen stories in this book dig down into the cracks of middle-class metropolitan society ; boredom, disillusionment, recurrent crises in married life, the laboriously painful wearing-down of ambition. In the title story, " The Enormous Radio," a pleasant, conventional young couple switch on their new radio to find themselves inadvertently listening in to conversation from all the surrounding flats—a dismal record of greed, bitterness and hypocrisy. The rest of Mr. Cheever's stories might almost be regarded as a commentary on this disenchant- ing discovery. He has perhaps a slight tendency to overwork an undoubted talent for the macabre, or to rely arbitrarily on sudden violence (in a story such as " The Hartleys," for instance, where he brusquely kills off a child to underline tension between a married couple) as a means of jabbing at the nerves. But, though Mr. Cheever may be felt to owe something to John O'Hara, and also possibly to Irwin Shaw, these stories, written in a deliberately flat, controlled style, are distinguished by an authentic and distinctive imagination. He has something of the technical finesse of a dentist operating a drill, and one never quite knows when the shock will come. Uys Krige, a South African of Dutch descent, writes in The Dream and the Desert mainly about family life in South Africa and about the war in the desert and in Italy. His stories, serious and at times almost portentous in tone, seldom quite rise to the emotional tempera- ture they seem to be attempting. " All Roads Lead to Rome," a short play concerned with Italy in defeat, betrays a too facile accept- ance of sentimentality ; and the longest and most ambitious story, " The Dream," about a small boy's reactions to the birth and death of his brother, develops as a slow, painstaking, but ultimately rather inconclusive exploration of childhood. Mr. Krige is at his best in a conscientiously savage piece of war reportage, " Two Daumiers," written with a directness scarcely present in the other stories.
The short story which does well enough in a magazine will not always stand up to reprinting in book form, and the sixteen stories in John Moore's Tiger, Tiger, appear for the most part more than a little flimsy and anaemic. On his accustomed ground, when surveying the battlefield of English rural life, Mr. Moore intermittently enter- tains ; but when he ventures abroad, as in " Tiger, Tiger " or " In Gorgeous Technicolor," one becomes conscious mainly of a lack of imaginative response.
PENELOPE HOUSTON
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