Fiction
IN the remote-seeming days of leisurely and somewhat gluttonous Christmas holidays it was an easy reviewer's gambit to commend volumes of short stories as a mild intellectual indulgence not too disruptive of the traditional dolce far niente. But this year we may offer them with more muscular excuse, as incursions upon actuality which can be as brief as conscience decides and which may relax imagination variously without undue engrossment upon curtailed hours of laziness.
Mr. Bates is a serious and deliberate artist in the short story ; Mr. Beachcroft approaches it with less certainty, and indeed, while allowing himself some lapses, he has moments of great sensibility, and at his best is lucid and restrained with an ease which makes one marvel at his failure to criticise and blue-pencil his work, but which also makes it clear that, although he does not work hard enough, he works in his own own right medium. No one of the stories in his new collection, with the exception of His Fortieth Birthday, has the wholeness or the strongly indivi- dualised ring which Mr. Bates imposes upon his work ; but all have a tenderness which is true, and is manifested by the author's clear unwillingness to manipulate first apprehensions so as to fit a formula. Where he attempts too much adjustment of an idea—as in the very touching story, The Erne From The Coast, the reader feels some of his uneasiness, and is not fully satisfied. In this book's eponymous story, too, it appears to me that a beautifully stated emotion is not resolved with sufficient austerity ; the author seems to fumble for a generalisation at the last minute, as if losing courage before the personal truth. The author's trouble seems, curiously, to be a kind of last-minute diffidence, as if he said to some platitudinous critic: " I see what you mean ; very likely you're right "—thus forsaking passion and inevitably losing interest. But none of this uncertainty is anywhere in His Fortieth Birthday, which is a delicate small vessel of truth and love.
Mr. Bates writes much more firmly and successfully, looking inward always to his own conviction. Since his stories have a great variety of. shape and mood not all will equally please any one reader, but nearly all have the quality of memorability. To praise them somewhat flatfootedly, all are stories which one desires to discuss after reading. For instance, The Loved One. Having reflected upon it, one reader is at a loss to explain why the bright and poignant climb to a necessary excitement ends in fact in resentment of the given climax, in a sense of disbelief and disappointment ; yet the story stays in the mind, vividly pointed, its physical features significant and clear. In another way The Little jeweller disappoints ; it is presented with attack, and it holds the attention throughout—but it is not resolved according to promise; it becomes merely touching when we expected it to be a harder thing—interpretative. This is not true of The Bridge, which is technically perhaps the best story in the book, and which is emotionally very fine and firm in conclusion. It is courageously conceived ; to give the narration of this painful story of two sisters into the hands of the younger, the temporarily, ironically, victofious one, to keep the telling thus entirely within the egoistic and provincial limits of one feminine mind and yet to thicken the whole fabric with its own inherent symbolism, its relation to scene and season, and to reveal in full the marked character of the victim-sister—both are victims—is a triumphant display of control. The Bridge is without question a masterly short story, full in itself, yet always contained, in its place, and leaving a great sense of painful life before and after its chosen statement.
Other stories in this collection give variously, ingeniously, this sense of being the hazarded moment of a particular life on which the author's searchlight happened to fall. In the story called The Beauty Of The Dead, this happens to be a moment of conclusion, and so—giving us with great skill a whole married life of increasing sordidness and eccentricity—Mr. Bates, invoking the silence of snow and night and loneliness, gives us, with per- missible, grave lyricism, the end of a life and a relationship, and the sum of two characters. And there is a story called Quartette, catching a hidden situation at its flood and hardly stating it, which, for precision of illuminatory detail combining with fluidity of feeling and the sense of troubled life beyond the selected enunciation, could not easily be over-praised.
Mr. Martin Armstrong's very efficient, bright stories do not attempt more than brief entertainment, and within their clearly bound limits they are very readable, amusing and vivid. Miss Stella Gibbons' collection is quite entertaining also, in softer, feminine vein, but it was perhaps a pity to revisit Cold Comfort Farm even for a Christmas laugh. A very good joke needs no
Previous page
