It remains to try to see what constitutes (in any permanent sense) the
underlying norm of the “good short story.”
A curious distinction between the successful tale and the successful
novel at once presents itself. It is safe to say (since the surest
way of measuring achievement in art is by survival) that the test of
the novel is that its people should be _alive_. No subject in itself,
however fruitful, appears to be able to keep a novel alive; only the
characters in it can. Of the short story the same cannot be said.
Some of the greatest short stories owe their vitality entirely to the
dramatic rendering of a situation. Undoubtedly the characters engaged
must be a little more than puppets; but apparently, also, they may be
a little less than individual human beings. In this respect the short
story, rather than the novel, might be called the direct descendant
of the old epic or ballad--of those earlier forms of fiction in all
of which action was the chief affair, and the characters, if they did
not remain mere puppets, seldom or never became more than types--such
as the people, for instance, in Molière. The reason of the difference
is obvious. Type, general character, may be set forth in a few
strokes, but the progression, the unfolding of personality, of which
the reader instinctively feels the need if the actors in the tale are
to retain their individuality for him through a succession of changing
circumstances--this slow but continuous growth requires space, and
therefore belongs by definition to a larger, a symphonic plan.
The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel
may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main
concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows
that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely
on its form, or presentation. Even more--yes, and much more--than
in the construction of the novel, the impression of vividness, of
_presentness_, in the affair narrated, has to be sought, and made sure
of beforehand, by that careful artifice which is the real carelessness
of art. The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to
present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must
understand just _why_ that particular angle and no other is the right
one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked
around it, so to speak, and applied to it those laws of perspective
which Paolo Uccello called “so beautiful,” before it can be offered to
the reader as a natural unembellished fragment of experience, detached
like a ripe fruit from the tree.
The moment the writer begins to grope in the tangle of his “material,”
to hesitate between one and another of the points that any actual
happening thrusts up in such disorderly abundance, the reader feels
a corresponding hesitancy, and the illusion of reality vanishes. The
non-observance of the optics of the printed page results in the same
failure to make the subject “carry” as the non-observance of the optics
of the stage in presenting a play. By all means let the writer of short
stories reduce the technical trick to its minimum--as the cleverest
actresses put on the least paint; but let him always bear in mind
that the surviving minimum is the only bridge between the reader’s
imagination and his.
V
Nietzsche said that it took genius to “make an end”--that is, to give
the touch of inevitableness to the conclusion of any work of art. In
the art of fiction this is peculiarly true of the novel, that slowly
built-up monument in which every stone has its particular weight and
thrust to carry and of which the foundations must be laid with a view
to the proportions of the highest tower. Of the short story, on the
contrary, it might be said that the writer’s first care should be to
know how to make a beginning.
That an inadequate or unreal ending diminishes the short tale in value
as much as the novel need hardly be added, since it is proved with
depressing regularity by the machine-made “magazine story” to which one
or the other of half-a-dozen “standardized” endings is automatically
adjusted at the four-thousand-five-hundredth word of whatsoever has
been narrated. Obviously, as every subject contains its own dimensions,
so is its conclusion _ab ovo_; and the failure to end a tale in
accordance with its own deepest sense must deprive it of meaning.
None the less, the short-story writer’s first concern, once he has
mastered his subject, is to study what musicians call the “attack.” The
rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the
whole is even more applicable to the short story, because in the latter
case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide.
Benvenuto Cellini relates in his Autobiography that one day, as a
child, while he sat by the hearth with his father, they both saw a
salamander in the fire. Even then the sight must have been unusual,
for the father instantly boxed his son’s ears so that he should never
forget what he had seen.
This anecdote might serve as an apothegm for the writer of short
stories. If his first stroke be vivid and telling the reader’s
attention will be instantly won. The “‘Hell,’ said the Duchess as she
lit her cigar” with which an Eton boy is said to have begun a tale for
his school magazine, in days when Duchesses less commonly smoked and
swore, would undoubtedly have carried his narrative to posterity if
what followed had been at the same level.
This leads to another point: it is useless to box your reader’s ear
unless you have a salamander to show him. If the heart of your little
blaze is not animated by a living, moving _something_ no shouting and
shaking will fix the anecdote in your reader’s memory. The salamander
stands for that fundamental significance that made the story worth
telling.
The arrest of attention by a vivid opening should be something more
than a trick. It should mean that the narrator has so brooded on this
subject that it has become his indeed, so made over and synthesized
within him that, as a great draughtsman gives the essentials of a face
or landscape in a half-a-dozen strokes, the narrator can “situate”
his tale in an opening passage which shall be a clue to all the detail
eliminated.
The clue given, the writer has only to follow. But his grasp must be
firm; he must never for an instant forget what he wants to tell, or
why it seemed worth telling. And this intensity of hold on his subject
presupposes, before the telling of even a short story, a good deal of
thinking over. Just because the limits of the form selected prevent
his producing the semblance of reality by elaborating his characters,
is the short-story writer the more bound to make real the adventure in
itself. A well-known French confectioner in New York was once asked why
his chocolate, good as it was, was not equal to that made in Paris. He
replied: “Because, on account of the expense, we cannot _work it over_
as many times as the French confectioner can.” Other homely analogies
confirm the lesson: the seemingly simplest sauces are those that have
been most cunningly combined and then most completely blent, the
simplest-looking dresses those that require most study to design.
The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience
which, if it be not genius, must be one of genius’s chief reliances
in communicating itself. On this point repetition and insistence are
excusable: the shorter the story, the more stripped of detail and
“cleared for action,” the more it depends for its effect not only on
the choice of what is kept when the superfluous has been jettisoned,
but on the order in which these essentials are set forth.