Short Stories
THOSE of us who failed in childhood to acquire a taste for cautionary tales need not be discouraged by the title given the collection of four seventeenth-century Chinese stories translated by Harold Acton and Lee Yi-Hsieh. They are, as Dr. Waley points out in his preface, designed to amuse rather than instruct ; yet, while amusing in the most charming and dignified manner possible, they do manage at the same time to demonstrate that virtue receives a higher reward than vice. Indeed, in the last story vice—in the shape of a young lecher whose amorous adventures with a group of nuns leads him to die of exhaustion—meets with altogether too harsh a fate. The English of the translators is simple, pleasing and devoid of those attempts at period and local colour that often make translated stories unreadable. Dr. Waley, in his preface, gives us from his vast store of knowledge some notes on the author Feng Meng-lung and the nature of the Chinese short story.
Anyone who can remember the predictions of coming greatness uttered over Mr. Manhood's first volume of short stories mar, on glancing through the forty-four self-selected from his published work, reflect that the critic's job is a precarious one and it is not only his newly-discovered swan that may turn out to be a goose. Mr. Manhood, of course, is no goose, but he has proved no swan either. Having overcome an early preoccupation with "Evil," he now turns out competent anecdotes full of verbal conceits, gothic humour and the sort of self-conscious virility that ruder folk describe as "fruity." In these anecdotes the point of the story, kept to the end, is the thing. The characters are conventions tricked out with this or that typical quality, as children in a charade indicate a part by carrying a fan or wearing a toy sword. We recognise them at once : Female Opera Singer (temperamental, greedy), Sea Captain (jovial, kindly), Genius (struggling, eccentric, bad-mannered), Beauty (mean, moody, mag- nificent), Brute (brutal) and the Village Idiot, the Country Comic, the Cockney and the Wild Irish themselves talkin' a kind o'poetry like. The characters all being established with no more ado than that, Mr. Manhood often gives considerable space to the building ap of a situation, but all is brought to an abrupt stop once the point is made. A village idiot dismantles two hundred bicycles left outside a church, and from a piece of each makes a new bicycle which, to settle the question of its ownership, is raffled by the priest ; a young man has been drowned, and each of his parents imagines that the other one believes the boy to be still alive ; a brutal dog-trainer whips a small boy and the children of the neighbourhood take revenge on him—such slightness of plot would be no cause for complaint were it combined with emotional profundity, originality of outlook or any attempt to draw a three-dimensional human-being. Here, being all, it is insufficient. Taken separately the stories are entertaining in a superficial way, but forty-four of them leave one jaded as though after a long session with the bar-room raconteur.
Mr. Henry Treece, whose short stories are collected under the title I cannot Go Hunting To-morrow, was in the early war days one of a group of poets who described themselves as the New Apocalyptics. In an essay on the "theory of the movement," Mr. G. S. Fraser tells us that Mr. Treece's writing derives from Donne, Webster and Shakespeare. To a less charitable critic this may seem like suggesting that a tallow wick derives from the glory of the wrath of God, but one may say that this writer, if in nothing else, resembles Webster in his interest in the macabre. Horror, without Webster's poetry of horror, is the theme of most of these stories, each written in imitation of some better-known modern author. Children are assailed by insane, imbecile or murderous old men, a marrow oozes blood, a woman unwittingly lets half her house to a pack of certified lunatics, the Man in Black whispers darkly to a murderer, a dying man has a nightmare about death, &c. Even the few saner stories tend to conclude on a shrill, hysterical note. The result is a painful sense of effort and a straining after unusual situations and sitnilies that leave the reader unaffected by anything but irritation. Mr. Treece is most successful when he is least harried by the apocalyptic urge to portray "totality of experience" (an ideal this present book is far from realising). He can tell a story, and perhaps when he discovers the virtue of simplicity and sincerity he may tell one well.
OLIVIA MANNING.
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