Short Stories

Kneel to the Rising Sun. By Erskine Caldwell. (Seeker. 7s. Bd.) The Trouble I've Seen. By Martha Ce'thorn. (Putnam. 7s. 6c1.) The World Over. By Edith Wharton. (Appleton-Century. Is. fid.) 0. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1933. (Heine. mann. 7s. 43d.) IT is a humble, amiable trait in human nature to seek

authority, and perhaps the last remnant of a religious impulse is working in the attention some of us pay to the committees of the Prix Goncourt, of the Book Society, the Haathornden, the Femina-Vie Heureuse and the 0. Henry Memorial. But the divine should remain the inscrutable, and it is with rather mistaken frankness that the last-named

committee publish not only the stories from which they have made their final- choice but their reports as well. There is something pleasantly naive in the action, -some-

thing reminiscent of the American hick face the films have made familiar, something incredibly frank, open, high- cheekboned and a little shiny. This committee at any rate, we feel, has nothing in common with the visiting cards, the intrigue, the lobbying which are said to precede the Goncourt award. Yet the innocence in the American nature upsets the cart every time, and the shady Gallic decisions of the Old World produce the better results.

The American first prize has been awarded on points to Miss Kay Boyle for a glossy and arty little piece about Austrian politics which should be treated less superficially or not at all : the second prize goes to a long, worthy tale of the depression, tiring in its lack of selection. Among

the dozen or so other stories there is none by Mr. Faulkner or Miss Katherine--Anne Porter, none by the other American authors on this list, by Mr. Caldwell, Miss Gellhorn or even by Mrs. Wharton; whose ivave, well-bred tales in -her latest volume are technically very expert, though in the essential triviality of her anecdotes it is hard to recognise the author of The Children or that superb horror story, A Bottle of

Perrier. Perhaps the 0. Henry judges were . not allowed a very interesting range of choice, but their remarks on the stories they have dealt with seem sometimes a little curious : remarks like that of Mr. Jackson, a San Francisco literary

editor,; who praises the original material of a tough tale by Mr. Upton Terrell : " William Wister Haines's stuff is

high tension lines, and this is telephone work."

Kneel to the Rising Sun has this immense superiority to the stories in the 0. Henry Memorial : it has moral background. Mr. Caldwell's toughness is not the toughness of Hemingway or his imitators, a mannerism, a self-dramatisation, a mere literary device : it comes from a sense of unbearable suffering: it is the brutal reaction to a brutal world ; and reading these

tales of cruelty and stupidity, one wonders what the future will make of the civilisation of which they are honest evidence. Belief in Mr. Beacheroft's evidence and Miss Gellhorn's may be qualified : these writers are politically-minded, the conditions they describe may, in part, be ascribed to temporary things, to financial depressions and the capitalist system, but Mr. Caldwell is not political. He is expressing his horror of human nature, of the unchanging brutality of

men, and there is something of Blake in the bareness of his presentation. The infant's cry, the midnight harlot's curse : these are Mr. Caldwell's subjects too, and, like the old nude prophet, he sometimes stands on the edge of absurdity accord- ing to this world's standards. The girl raped by the speakeasy proprietor, the old man eaten by hogs, the man who shot his child because she was hungry : they are presented with the bareness of legend, like characters in a morality.

Mr. Beachcroft is likely to become, after Mr. H. E. Bates, the most distinguished short-story writer in this country. He is an imaginative realist very nearly of the first order.

As a realist he gives almost as satisfactory a sense of saturation in the lives of his characters, lorry driver, tramp, boxer, carpenter, stoker, labour agitator, as Mr. Leslie Haiward, whose first book was recently reviewed here (not quite, for Mr. Beachcroft is outside the class of which he writes and there is occasionally a note of patronage in his simple dialogue), but the stories have more poetic value than Mr. Halward's. I refer less to his imagery, his wit, in the seventeenth-century sense of dexterity of thought (from the merely decorative, the sunflowers with 'their yellow-bearded negro faces " to the emotive, " suffering that no longer hurt, like dead and dried corpses of small forest animals"), than to the passionatelyfelt idea behind the stories, an idea as simple as Comitcfs : the mental integrity of the dispossessed, the loyalty of class, the friendship and tenderness which exist outside the law. And though the idea is a little cramped by political implications, so that we feel Mr. Beachcroft's inspiration Would find it hard to adjust itself to a world in which his side had proved victorious, it gives his stories the strength-of a common passion.

Miss Gellhorn's book is more explicitly "poll tical. She has gained her material as a worker in the Federal Emergency

Relief Administration, but the occasion, The material, does not explain the admirable art with which she presents her charac- ters. Her stories are quite amazingly unteininine. In Joe and Pete, for example, the heart-breaking tale of a union organiser whose strike faits and who has to wet& 'the:gradual disappearance of-hii-comrades1 -confidence- not only in himself but in the idea of unity, ,it is quite impossible to detect that a woman is writing. She has none of the female Vices of un-

balanced pity or factitious violence; her masculine characters are presented as convincingly as her female, and her writing is hard and clear :

"The larger factories lie on a narrow low strip of land beside the river. The Minton soup factory is the biggest. In common with most big factories it hesitates in appearance between a hospital and a prison. It seems to have grown by some curious elementary process of nature: like the amoeba perhaps, dividing and multiplying. Parts are old, ramshackle, clinging to the new bricks and concrete. Runways span the street, the buildings weave and sprawl, dim, unshakeable. Doors, like mouseholes, unreasonably pierce the walls anywhere . . ."

GRAHAM GREENE.