When Edward J. O'Brien asked me to cooperate with him in choosing each
year's best English short stories, to be published as a companion
volume to his annual selection of the best American short stories, I
had not realized that at the end of my arduous task, which has involved
the reading of many hundreds of stories in the English magazines of an
entire year, I should find myself asking the simple question: What is a
short story?
I do not suppose that a hundred years ago such a question could have
occurred to any one. Then all that a story was and could be was implied
in the simple phrase: "Tell me a story...." We all know what that
means. How many stories published today would stand this simple if
final test of being told by word of mouth? I doubt whether fifty per
cent would. Surely the universality of the printing press and the
linotype machine have done something to alter the character of
literature, just as the train and the telephone have done not a little
to abolish polite correspondence. Most stories of today are to be read,
not told. Hence great importance must be attached to the manner of
writing; in some instances, the whole effect of a modern tale is
dependent on the manner of presentation. Henry James is, possibly, an
extreme example. Has any one ever attempted to tell a tale in the Henry
James manner by word of mouth, even when the manner pretends to be
conversational? I, for one, have yet to experience this pleasure,
though I have listened to a good many able and experienced tale-tellers
in my time.
Now, there is a great connection between the manner or method of a
writer and the matter upon which he works his manner or method. Henry
James was not an accident. Life, as he found it, was full of
trivialities and polite surfaces; and a great deal of manner--style, if
you like--is needful to give life and meaning to trivial things.
And James was, by no means, an isolated phenomenon. In Russia Chekhov
was creating an artistic significance out of the uneventful lives of
the petty bourgeoisie, whose hitherto small numbers had vastly
increased with the advent of machinery and the industrialization of the
country; as the villages became towns, the last vestiges of the
"romantic" and "heroic" elements seemed to have departed from
contemporary Russian literature. As widely divergent as the two writers
were in their choice of materials and methods of expression, they yet
met on common ground in their devotion to form, their painstaking
perfecting of their expressions; and this tense effort alone was often
enough the very life and soul of their adventure. They were like
magicians creating marvels with the flimsiest of materials; they did
not complain of the poverty of life, but as often as not created bricks
without straw. Not for them Herman Melville's dictum, to be found in
_Moby Dick_: "To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme."
Roughly, then, there are two schools of creative literature, and round
them there have grown up two schools of criticism. The one maintains
that form is everything, that not only is perfect form essential, and
interesting material non-essential, but that actually interesting
material is a deterrent to perfect expression, inasmuch as material
from life, inherently imaginative, fantastic or romantic, is likely to
make an author lazy and negligent and cause him to throw his whole
dependence on objective facts rather than on his ingenuity in creating
an individual atmosphere and vibrant patterns of his own making. The
other school maintains with equal emphasis that form is not enough,
that it wants a real and exciting story, that where a man's materials
are rich and "big" the necessity for perfection is obviated; indeed,
"rough edges" are a virtue. As one English novelist tersely put it to
me: "I don't care for the carving of orange pips. All I ask of a writer
is that his stuff should be big." Undoubtedly, some people prefer a
cultivated garden, others nature in all her wildness. Nature, it is
true, may exercise no selection; unfortunately it is too often
forgotten that she is all art in the wealth and minuteness of her
detail.
It seems to me that both theories are equally fallacious. I do not see
how either can be wholly satisfying. There is no reason at all why a
story should not contain both form and matter, a form, I should say,
suited to the matter. Among the painters Vermeer is admittedly perfect;
has then Rembrandt no art? Among the writers Turgenev is perfect.
George Moore has compared his perfection to that of the Greeks; is it
then justifiable to call Dostoevsky journalese, as some have called
him? Indeed, it takes a great artist to write about great things,
though, it is true, a great artist is often pardoned for lapses in
style, where a minor artist can afford no such lapses. It was in such a
light, with the true honesty and humility of a fine artist, that
Flaubert, than whom none sought greater perfection, regarded himself
before the towering Shakespeare.
This preamble is no digression, but is quite pertinent to any
consideration of the contemporary short story, for I must admit that
however fallacious is either of the prevalent theories which I have
outlined, in practice both work out with an appalling accuracy. Of the
hundreds of stories which I have had to read the number possessing a
sense of form is relatively small, and of these only a few are rich in
content; strictly speaking, most of them stick to the facts of everyday
life, to the intimate realities of urban and suburban existence. Other
stories, and these are more numerous, possibly as a reaction and in
response to the human craving for the fairy tale, are concerned with
the most impossible adventure and fantastic unreality, Romance with the
capital R. They are often attractive in plot, able in construction,
happy in invention, and their general tendency may be to fall within
the definition of "life's little ironies"; yet, in spite of these
admirable qualifications, the majority of these stories are
unconvincing, lacking in balance, in plausibility, in that virtue which
may be defined as "the writer's imagination," whose lack is something
more than careless writing. How often one puts down a story with the
feeling that it would take little to make it a "rattling good tale,"
but alas, that little is everything. A story-teller's craft depends not
only on a sense of style, that is, form and good writing, but also on
the creation of an atmosphere, shall we say hypnotic in effect, and
capable of persuading the reader that he is a temporary inhabitant of
the world the writer is describing, however remote in time or space
that world may be from the world of the reader's own experience. And
the more enlightened and culturally emotional the reader, the greater
the power of seduction is a writer called upon to exercise. For it is
obvious that all these hundreds of crude Arabian Nights tales and
jungle tales and all sorts of tales of impossible adventure appearing
in the pages of our periodicals would not be written if they were not
in demand by the large public.
The question arises: Why is it that authors who deal with the intimate
realities of our dull, everyday life are, on the whole, so much better
as writers than those who attempt to portray the more glamorous
existence of the East, of the jungle, of, so to speak, other worlds? I
have a theory of my own to offer in explanation, and it is this:
_A_, let us say, is a writer who has stayed at home. Let us suppose
that his experience has been largely limited to London, or still more
precisely, to the East End of London. He has either lived or spent a
great deal of time here, and without having actively participated in
the lives of the natives and denizens of the district has observed them
to good purpose and saturated himself with their atmosphere. He has, in
an intimate sense, secured not only his scene, but also, either
actually or potentially, his characters. English--of a sort--is the
language of his community; and the temper of this community, except in
petty externals, is, after all, but little different from his own. He
has lost no time in either travelling or in learning another's
language, he has had a great deal of time for developing his technique.
He has, indeed, spent the greater part of his time in working out his
form. He is, as you may guess, anything but a superlative genius;
certainly, we may venture to assume that he is, at all events, a fine
talent, a careful observer, a painstaking worker, possessed of
inventive powers within limitations. He knows his genre and his milieu,
and he knows his job. He observes his people with an artistic sympathy.
He is an etcher, loving his line, rather than a photographer. Vast
mural decorations are beyond him.
Then there is _B_. _B_ is a traveller, something of an adventurer too.
His _wanderlust_, or possibly his occupation as a minor government
official, journalist, or representative for some commercial firm, has
taken him East. He has spent some time in Shanghai or Hong Kong, in
Calcutta or Rangoon, in Tokyo or Nagasaki. He has lived chiefly in the
foreign quarter and occasionally sallied out to seek adventure in the
native habitat. He has secured a smattering of the native tongue, and
has even taken unto himself a temporary native wife. A bold man, he
has, in his way, lived dangerously and intensely. He has besides heard
men of his own race living in the quarter tell weird tales of romantic
nature, perhaps of a white girl who came out East, or of a native girl
who had won the heart of an Englishman to his undoing. At last _B_ has
had enough of it, and has come home to the old country, his England,
and sits down to his new job, the exploitation of his knowledge and
experience of the East. Possibly a few friends who had listened to his
tales urged him to set them down on paper, and _B_, who had not thought
of it before, thinks it is not such a bad idea, and getting a supply of
paper and a typewriter launches forth on a career as a writer. He is
intent on turning out a good tale, and does remarkably well for a
novice, but his inexperience as a writer, his lack of form and
technique and deliberateness will hinder his progress, though now and
then he will turn out a tolerable tale by sheer accident. The really
great man will, of course, break through the double barrier, and then
you have a Conrad: that is to say, you have a man who has lived
abundantly and has been able to apply an abundance of art to his
abundance of material. But that is, indeed, rare nowadays, and the
whole moral of the little parable of _A_ and _B_ is that in our own
time it is given but to few men to do both. The one has specialized in
writing, the other in living. And the comparison may be applied, of
course, to the two writers who have stayed at home, even in the same
district. _A_ hasn't much to say, but what he says he says well,
because writing means to him something as a thing in itself; he finds
compensation in the quality of his writings for his lack of rich
material; the whole content of his art is in his form, and that, if not
wholly satisfying, is surely no mean achievement. _B_, on the other
hand, may have a great deal to say, and says it badly. He thinks his
material will carry him through. He does not understand that the
function of art is to crystallize; synthesize the materials at hand, to
distil the essences of life, to formalize natural shapes. There should
be no confusing of nature and art. A mountain is nature, a pyramid is
art. We have no man in the short story today who has synthesized his
age, who has thrown a light on the peculiar many-sided adventure of
modernity, who has achieved a sense of universality. Maupassant came
near to it in his own time. Never before have men had such
opportunities for knowing the world, never before has it been so easy
to cover space, our means of communication have never been so rapid;
yet there is an almost maddening contradiction in the fact that every
man who writes is content in describing but a single facet of the great
adventure of life. Our age is an age of specialization, and many a man
spends a life in trying to visualize for us a fragment of existence in
multitudinous variations. An Empire may be said to stand for a
universalizing tendency, yet the extraordinary fact about the mass of
English stories today is that, far from being expressive of any
tendency to unity, they are mostly concerned with presenting the
specialized atmospheres of so many individual localities and vocations.
We have writers who do not go beyond Dartmoor, or Park Lane, or the
East End of London; we have writers of sea stories, jungle stories,
detective stories, lost jewel stories, slum stories, and we have
writers who seldom stray from the cricket field or the prize ring, or
Freudian complexes.
Yet, in putting on record these individual tendencies of the short
story, I should be overdrawing the picture if I did not call attention
to what general tendencies are in the ascendent. The supernatural
element is prominent among these. Stories of ghosts, spiritualism and
reincarnation are becoming increasingly popular with authors,
especially with the type I have described as _A_. This is interesting,
since it evinces a healthy desire to get away from the banal facts of
one's standardized atmosphere, the atmosphere of suburbia. It may be
both a reaction and an escape, and may express a desire for a more
spiritual life than is vouchsafed us. The love of adventure and the
love of love will, of course, remain with us as long as men live and
love a tale, and nine tenths of the stories still deal with the favored
hero and the inevitable girl.
This book is to be an annual venture and its object is the same as that
of Mr. O'Brien's annual selection of American stories. It is to gather
and save from obscurity every year those tales by English authors which
are published in English and American periodicals and are worth
preserving in permanent form. It is well known that short-story writers
in Anglo-Saxon countries have not the same chance of publishing their
wares in book form as their more fortunate colleagues, the novelists.
This prejudice against the publication of short stories in book form is
not to be justified, and it does not exist on the Continent. Most of
the fine fiction, for example, published in Russia since Chekhov made
the form popular, took precisely the form of the short story. It is a
good form and should be encouraged. It is also the object of this
volume to call attention to new writers who show promise and to help to
create a demand for their work by publishing their efforts side by side
with those already accepted and established.
It has been the custom to dedicate Mr. O'Brien's annual selection of
American stories to some author who has distinguished himself in the
particular year by his valuable contribution to the art of the short
story. We propose to adopt it with regard to our English selections. We
are glad of the opportunity to associate this year's collection with
the name of Stacy Aumonier. As for the stories selected for this
volume, that is to some degree a matter of personal judgement; it is
quite possible that other editors would, in some instances, have made a
different choice.