SHORT STORIES

The Faber Book of Modern Stories. Edited by Elizabeth Bowen. (Faber. 8s. 6d.) Pavements at Anderby. By Winifred Holtby. (Collins. 7s. 6d.)

THAT list 'takes some getting down : 185 short stories—it's more like work than entertainment. The only volumes I've read completely are the first four on my list : then the spirit flagged—I picked here and there, possibly unfairly. Out of this underbrush I got little fun, but, like Wordsworth, a few reflections.

Winifred Holtby : an ardent social worker, she obviously had a commanding genius for friendship, but her friends are doing her no service by setting her up as a literary figure.

Second-rate writers are as common as gooseberries : why not have left her with her rarer quality ? These sentences from her title story (written as late as 1934) are from an earnest fantasy of past and future ; they are a horrifying example of committee room fiction : She flung herself down on the grass crying, " Ah, my love ! we'll be so happy here." But no southern prospect would restore to him his work as Chairman of the World Distributive Textile Council, and no calm country life make him forget . her sacrifice in abandoning the administration of Area 9876 to follow him.

Vincent Sheean : a not unfavourable example of the species known as magazine writer—contributor to Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, &c. This means he is more competent

than Miss Holtby—he knows the tricks. The trouble is we know the tricks too. There's one agreeable satirical tale about the reunion of a college fraternity and the clerk who spends the whole of a legacy on impressing, during one evening, the other members of the Chi Nu Rho—otherwise one's left amazed at the awful effort required to read stories written purely for entertainment.

And so we work our way towards Mr. O'Brien's thicket.

It's a little less dense than this time last year—thanks, I suspect, to the death of that dim little magazine New Stories. The an- thology is still much too long. The good writers get lost in the mass of high-minded serious incompetence. There's never any doubt, hewing our way through, that this is work. One grasps desperately among the English writers at Miss Elizabeth Bowen, who contributes far the best story—a little scene in Regent's Park : a child who cannot control his tear-ducts : " a mother of sons," an R.A.F. widow stern and disgusted : an elbowy sympathetic bangled working girl who had known another like him. With admiration and relief one watches how this story lifts out of its plot :

She had the afternoon, as she had no work. She saw George's face lifted-abjectly from his arms on a table, blotchy over his clerk's collar. The eyes of George and Frederick seemed to her to be wounds in the world's surface, through which its inner, terrible, unassuageable, necessary sorrow constantly bled away and as con- stantly welled up.

One notes too with relief one funny story, the grotesque anecdote by Mr. William Plomer. Among the Americans Mr.

Hemingway gives himself—most interestingly—away in a sentimental self-pitying tale of a tough writer dying of gangrene in Africa, and there are two admirable stories by Mr. Paul Horgan and Mr. Morley Callaghan. But the less distinguished writers in this anthology remind us as usual that comr vsion is not enough. Dim slumming figures, they follow Miss Katherine Mansfield's vanishing reticule down mean streets. Lots of stories begin more or less like this :

When she heard Abb's footsteps approaching the door, she knew, without having to see or hear him, that it had been the same as yesterday and all the days before, since he had been fired from the job he had held as watchman for the office building.

A sense of social guilt doesn't make a writer, and these contri- butors could take a lesson from the objective unpitying manner of Mr. Farrell. I daresay they will. His enormous book, Fellow Countrymen, will probably supply material for com- passion to any number of less-informed writers.

With Miss Meynell we get into clearer air : she's very literary, as literary as Mrs. Wharton—these writers share a rather superb ignorance of other people's routine lives (a London reporter earns £3 3s. a week)—but she has produced the only really comic story among the 185—" Mr. Enos, Coloured Clergyman "—and there's another story, " Half of a Bargain," about a scared lonely woman who tries to strike a bargain with her busy husband to be home at six when her baby always begins to cry, which deserves inclusion in Miss Bowen's anthology—for the dreadful sense of isolation, the mother unable to understand the child or communicate her fear to her husband. Miss Meynell has wit and compression, a pleasant gift of phrase when she describes the terrified woman : " The fashionable sweep of her hair looked like an idea that must have been decided on in quite other circum- stances."

Ghosts : what gives a ghost story its thrill ? First I think its physical sense, and here Mrs. Wharton fails (except in " A Bottle of Perrier "—to drink water from a well in which a friend's body is rotting, aware only of an odd smell, an unpleasant taste, is an idea which certainly graduates in horror) ; secondly, a moral twist. Mrs. Wharton, following her master Henry James, is good at this, but he could convey the physical as well (who can forget the appearance of Peter Quint ?). And so Mrs. Wharton seems a little tame com- pared with M. R. James, a less accomplished writer who - never failed at the lineaments of horror.

Next Mr.- Saroyan's new collection; full of agile pathos. I did not care for Mr. Saroyan's first book : it was too Armenian for my taste : cunning and flashy, his work, one felt, might take the same road as Mr. Arlen's, but Little

Children is an immense advance. His stories, unlike Miss Bowen's, never quite lift—they roar melodramatically along the turf : " Here is man ; here is the poor agonised body of

the ancient slave, undernourished, overworked . . . " It's a failure of dramatisation : Mr. Saroyan speaking rhetorically in his own person. But the humour of these tales is often delightful :

Jesus, Pete said, read the names. Is my uncle killed ? Is my poor uncle Kyros killed in the earthquake ?

It don't give the names, Pete, I said. Where does your uncle Kyros live ?

He lives in Athens, Pete said.

He wasn't killed then I said. This earthquake was in Salonika. Sure, Pete said, Salonika, but my- poor uncle Kyrcrs maybe he went to Salonika.

Last, a bird's-eye view of the contemporary short story. Miss Bowen's anthology (in any review of the short story we have to come back to Miss Bowen sooner or later) is pleasantly arbitrary : it hasn't the deadness of most "representative " collections: Her preface—sometimes a little disingenuous and obscure as when she is explaining the absence of Mr. H. E. Bates—demands quotation. I doubt if anyone has written more exactly of Maupassant : " Maupassant was the born popular writer, battered by Flaubert into austerity. His themes were simple : lust, cruelty, money and that sort of rose-pink fancy that has such a charnel underneath." She sets her aim well away from the New Stories type—" Why should anyone tolerate lax, unconvincing or arty work—work whose idiom too often shows a touch of high-hat com- placency ? " In spite of this she includes Miss Malachi Whitaker—but otherwise I only want to quarrel with her examples of Mr. Maugham and Mr. de la Mare, with her failure to include Mr. Wodehouse, and—her publishers are responsible—with the particular example of her own work which surely belongs to the order of the " condensed novel," the head under which she oddly and unfairly classifies James's