Short Stories
Honeymoon. By Malachi Whitaker. (Cape. 7s. &I.) Ricochets. By Andre Maurois. (Cassell. _Ss.) - THE trouble about short stories is that one is continually beginning -again : a snatch of pity, of cynicism, of satire, of
horror. One misses, unless the stories arc the expression of a writer of great personality, the drive, the accumulative effect, of a novel. A book of short stories, -if it is to leave any clear impression, must be planned as a structural whole with a consistent point of view. Mrs. Whitaker is a pro- fessional short-story writer ; she is not a novelist on holiday ; and one is the more disappointed at the unsatisfactory total
effect of her -volume. Nearly all her stories are well worth reading ; they are small, realistic studies, precise and economical, but they are quite without a common mental
background to stamp them as Whitaker. One doesn't— Heaven forbid—want any outpouring of cheap pity in Miss Mansfield's manner ; compassion is a quality which has been overworked in the short story ; but there is nothing here at all to hold the stories. together.
One misses too a point of view in M. Maurois' elegant valueless and vain little volume. Most of the twenty-five
'tiny stories, without characterization and.with the polish One associates with French- chalk, express a rather patronizing sexual cynicism ; and even this not very important or subtle point of view, if it had been genuine, might have lent the volume drive. But this attitude is contradicted time and • again by a sentimentality of the deepest kind. One retains at the end an impression (certainly unfair to M. Maurois, the biographer) of a writer who has cut himself off from any valuable material ; these are the anecdotes of a rather knowing diner-out at the 'best (socially speaking) houses, a tattoo of titles and impeccable (again socially speaking) small talk. 7 M. Maurois belongs to the school of beauty doctors, those writers whom Mr. Wyndham Lewis describes in Men Without Art as heightening the more agreeable effects and showing their subjects in a rather noble or graceful light.'
It is also the school of Miss Wright, who has written an eighteenth-century novelette about a beautiful widow, a young artist, and a small negro slave, one of those essentially trivial books which are so often praised for beauty of style, though the smooth, anonymous and affected writing really, I believe, only disguises an inability to write contemporary English. There are writers who 'genuinely find themselves more at ease in another century, for whom scholarship takes the place of imagination, but Miss Wright is not one of these. or her Celia Throclunorton, a young actress, would not have been presented as earning five pounds a week at Drury Lane, a sum nearly equal to that received by Mrs. Oldfield herself, and at the very time when the Drury Lane Theatre-was closed owing to its patentee's trouble with the Lord Chamberlain. But Slicer Collar Boy should be seen, even if not read, for the sake of Mr. Rex Whistler's illustrations.
Neither M. Maurois nor Miss Wright -make one 'doubt the truth of Mr. Wyndham Lewis's assertion that " any artist in the least resembling a beauty doctor has disappeared from the scene altogether—or he plays such a discredited and paltry part upon it that he may be regarded as no logger present, for all practical purposes. Do not look for that sort of art— you will not find it today, anywhere except in the museums. There it remains, a record of the personal vanity of the animal, man." It certainly will not be found in Miss Sharp's .delight- MI short story, Sophy Cassmajor. There is no sense of pastiche in Miss Sharp's Regency story of a girl's voyage out to India to marry her almost unknoWn betrothed her style, quick. feline and malicious-is admirably contemporary. This is light satire of the best kind, and illustrated by.110tiss Zinkeisen it makes a very " safe " Christmas card.
This is obviously the publisher's purpose in issuing Mr. Walpole's and Mr. de la Mare's short stories in very pleasant type and binding at half a crown. Mr. Walpole's is really an extract from " work in progress " ; it is the Polchester Mr. Walpole at his best, almost too suitably dressed for Christmas, so that one is quite unfairly reminded of robins and yule logs. Mr. de la Mare's grim story belongs to a different Christmas tradition. One is reminded of how Henry James, " asked for something seasonable by the promoters of a periodical dealing in the time-honoured Christmas-tide toy," produced The Turn of the Screw. Mr. de la Mare's style is Jacobean, the horror of A Froward Child is Jacobean, the dreadful moment in the cold shaded railway carriage (" She knew now—as if the retching flavour of the hot black draught was all over her 'mouth— what blackmail actually meant ") is Jacobean, but' James's style is interestingly adapted to Mr. de la Mare's individual purpose. These long sentences, approaching and withdrawing from their subject, like the antennae of an- insect, are not employed, as James employed them, to define his meaning exactly, to allow no significance to be lost ; Mr. de In Marc uses them to evade, to escape. Mr. de la Mareia sometimes a prose writer of genius, but moral and aesthetic criticisnis can- not be entirely separated, and one notices with regret that this fine artist always finally avoids the complete revelation which James had the courage to accept. But his story is the only one here which is completely " written."
But I had forgotten Mr. Jorkens, as one forgets in any dis7 cussion of the short story .Mr.- Wodehouse's company of in; spired lunatics. I can make no handsomer amends than by suggesting tentatively. that -Mr.- Jcirkens, quite as absurdly funny a raconteur, may ealtlive`the great Milliner, who depends for some of his effect on an idiom which must, alas, inevitably
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