New Fiction
Pick of Today's Short Stories. Edited by John Pudney. (Putnam.
- 10s. 6d.) Collected Stories. By James Hanley. (Macdonald. 15s.) The Ever-Interesting Topic. By William Cooper. (Cape. 12s. 6d.)
READING collections of short stories—and there are three of them among this week's books—is like eating potato crisps. I dislike crisps individually ; 1 detest them en masse. Yet put them in front of me at a bar and I will go through them, munch by soggy, salty, fatty, unsatisfying munch, until the tinted glass bowl's empty and I sit back In shamed and sickened repletion.
The image isn't all that precious. There's so little to a crisp that it can't either be very bad or very good. The short story, apart from its use by a few masters like Maupassant, Lawrence, Kipling and so on, is, above all, the form which leads to mediocrity. It's difficult to write a really bad short story ; it's even more difficult to write a really good one. And the more short stories I read the more I feel that the form has lost its direction, that I am getting involved with something as craftily tasty but as fundamentally nauseating as a potato crisp.
I picked at John Pudney's selected bowl in a fairly disciplined way to' begin with. Two or three were fine : I enjoyed the tight Bates dialogue and the cheery matiness of Leonard Kendall and Allan Pryor. But, as usual, I began to gobble and the taste cloyed. Torn Hopkinson seemed to have been re-reading Wells pretty closely and Robin Maugham, Aldous Huxley. The stories began to blend into each other and I was unable, as the blurb had faithfully promised me I would, to " snap the book shut with a satisfied chuckle." If this is the Pick of Today's Short Stories then something's happened to the short story while I was out of the room. No, of course I'm not being fair. But whereas most of the stories would stand up perfectly well in a magazine, packed together in one volume they give an over- all impression• of genuine,, craftsmanlike ordinariness, which is even more depressing than an anthology of undergraduate verse. I: suppose that this kind of middle-brow selection, well-designed and reasonably priced, is a good business proposition ; it is, as it says, " handpicked to entertain "—like the turns in Variety Bandbox. It would be better, one feels, if they were picked (why handpicked ?) because they were the best short stories available.
I don't know Mr. Humphrey, an American, whose volume The Last Husband contains ten stories. He has a clean eye for the shape of a character and manages to avoid, most of the time, that oblique, from-the-eyes-of-a-neurotic-child approach to distant-summers-in- New-England-farm-houses which has been running through the root- stock of American short story writers like a phylloxera New Yorker- iensis. More, he's got a sense of irony that flickers over the most carefully-written, carefully-thought parts of his stories and stops them from becoming pretentious. I was impressed by the title story and by " In Sickness and Health," and " Quail for Mr. Forester ". Mr. Humphrey is at work on a novel ; make a note not to miss it.
James Hanley needs, as they'say, no introduction to British readers. This is a useful collection in that it brings together into one volume the twenty or so stories that he thinks are his best. Most of them you'll have read before. There's enough feeling here for half-a-dozen books and occasional complete success comes when the writing catches up with the feeling. But most of the time the gnarled, Bays- water-Gothic involutions of character and circumstance seem to strain against the short, bitter words, edging them away from the truth, cracking them sometimes, sometimes breaking through them into the outer air of nonsense. For me, for example, " The Sea " is a failure ; the dialect just won't carry the weight of what's meant ; and in forcing it to communicate too much in a phrase like ; " Yon 'ot-pot's cowld now," the words become affected jargon. Yet in " Another World " or " Mr. Ponge " the words move to the feeling in a fresh and simple way which has great human dignity. Mr. Hanley, like a lot of other people, is at his best when he's telling a story about people he's warm towards ; his knowledge of and his comf,assion for people are deep ; and at his best he's a considerable writer.
That Mr. Cooper should be beginning to enjoy something of a vogue is another demonstration of the dearth of satirical writers. His latest novel The Ever-Interesting Topic deals with most of the masters and a few of the boys in an undistinguished but extremely snobbish public school. A new headmaster, drearily unconventional and determinedly modern, introduces sex-education ; the common- room unites—for varying motives—to destroy him. Another head- master arrives, all prayer and eyebrows, to stamp out sin. He too is destroyed through his own inflexibility and one of the senior house- masters, who 's trimmed his sails to suit the two storms, leads the school into harbour and a future of compromise and no nonsense. The characterisation is at a superficial level throughout, of a piece with the clock-work plot and the smooth, deft cogging of the sub-plots. Mr. Cooper doesn't pretend to be a great writer ; but he will keep on telling us that he's manipulating everything very neatly. His intru- sions, so knowing, so much in command, become irritating. Why he has to keep poking his puppet-master's nose in I don't know. For he is an extremely able light writer. His words are precise and quick ; his eye for mannerisms sure and caustic ; his lack of faith in human nature refreshing and candid. The Ever-Interesting Topic could have been, with all the natural equipment that Mr. Cooper brings to it a little classic. And yet it remains—when you've finished it and are rolling the after-taste of it in your mouth—saccharine rather than sugar, synthetic in a way it's hard to trace at first. Perhaps it is that, in the author's refusal to be inside his book, an ambivalence of reaction towards the characters is created that makes for non-. acceptance. Perhaps it's just that you. feel Mr. Cooper enjoys hig own jokes too much. Perhaps you remember Decline and Fall andj magnifique this may be, but ce n'est pas La Waugh.
JOHN ME ICA
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