Talking of books
Long shorts
Uenny Green
Most authors will tell you that when an idea reveals itself to them, it arrives with its own length implicit in its own theme, which means that if the author knows his artistic business he Will conform to that length no matter what. Two fragments of evidence among many are sufficient to make the point:
A short story of 7,000 words is simple, and a novelette of 30,000 too, but this in-between length is trying. (P. GWodehouse)
,Ef2len Phillpotts, who has just finished a novel, told me is Publisher Was moaning about the length of it. He said he had cut a lot out of the typewritten copy and should probably cut more from the proofs. He Ppeared to see nothing extraordinary in this. To me It Was very extraordinary. The notion that anything can be taken from a finished work of art without leaving a gap seems to me monstrous. (Arnold Bennett)
Wodehouse's observation is particularly aPposite to the business at hand this week, Which is The Bodley Head Book of Longer Short Stories (E3.50), because it so happens that in the modern era, of all the unsaleable literary Properties, short stories are the most hopeless,. and that of all the hopeless short stories, those of between ten and twenty thousand words are the most hopeless of all. Which means that the Rodley Head anthology is a useful excuse for Pondering the merit of the longer short story and trying to decide what, if anything, we might be missing by eliminating the form from our publishing life. The fact that I am not particularly enchanted by James Michie's selections means nothing more than that I am not James Michie, so I will resist the temptation to put in a good word for absent friends like 'Enoch Soames' from Beerbohm's Seven Men, H. G. Wells's extraordinary little pearl, A Slip Under the Microscope, and any of Bennett's own Five Towns tales. Why, I will even resist the chance to draw attention to Wolf Mankowitz's Laugh Till You Cry, a tale of some originality whose Stevensonian overtones may come as a surprise to those who regard its author merely as the producer of Mr Pickwick. Instead I will review what Mr Michie has given us, and explain why, out of twelve stories, the unqualified admiration of at least one constant reader can only be extended to three of them.
W. H. Hudson's El Ombu seems to me a failure for reasons predictable enough to anyone familiar with his South American fiction. (Except of course for Green Mansions, which is not a fiction but a fantasy.) El Ombu is not really a story at all so much as a pageant of catastrophe so protracted that long before the ultimate bloodletting the reader's reaction has slithered down from the high moral tone and compassion which Hudson hoped for, to something not very far from risibility. This has something to do with Hudson's narrative method, a detached commentary retailing shocking events in a resolutely unshockable style. But Hudson's fiction depends for its uniqueness neither on the casual pagan savagery of his South American characters, nor the excessively modest prose of his Sussex birdwatching persona, but the incongruity with which the first is described in terms of the second. It is one of the great ironies of English Literature that this chronicler of South American mayhem should have ended up as the scrupulous scrutineer of life in the Hertfordshire hedgerows, and all El Ombu illustrates is the extent to which a short story needs a story. Walter de la Mare's The Almond Tree, is exquisitely wrought, naturally, but tiresome, and in the end irritating, even distasteful, for we are asked to accept the fact that our narrator, after exhibiting powers of observation and description almost superhuman, should just happen to forget to tell us that his mother, at the very apex of the action, is two stones heavier than usual because she is about to give birth. In addition, the top and tail of The Almond Tree have nothing to do with the story, unless you are prepared to accept the author's suggestion that there is something mysterious, unusual and altogether breathtaking in a man having a brother. But at least The Almond Tree flatters to deceive, whereas D. H. Lawrence's The Man Who Loved Islands doesn't even flatter. It is a spiteful silly tale written by a man who patently loathes anyone likely to read it. Huxley's Little Mexican is not really about people at all but about the market value of paintings, Maugham's The Hairless Mexican is a priceless little tale but surely too readily accessible to need anthologising? William Sansom's story of a non-romance at Gastein is so overwritten that it becomes overwrought. The content of War and Peace might just conceivably justify such anguished imagery, but as the tale is really no more than a tiny incident, the reader's spleen soon rises. Graham Greene and William Trevor, with May We Borrow Your Husband? and The Grass Widows have, by an entirely honorable coincidence, written the same story, and if I had to choose, I would go for Trevor, because unlike Greene he has not thrust the narrator's emotions into the foreground. A. E. Coppard's The Black Dog is really a tour-de-force of agricultural purple prose, magnificently written but rather flattering to a tale that is slight indeed. Why then is the anthology worth its price? Because of James Joyce's The Dead, a literally perfect story whose only possible disqualification would be its availability in Dubliners. Because of a wonderfully handled tale of transvestism by George Moore called Albert Nobbs. Above all because of Conrad's The Secret Sharer. I can take Conrad or leave him, his humourlessness and his inability to imagine a woman made of flesh and blood being two failings about which I find it hard to be charitable. But what a. marvellous story is The Secret Sharer, so perfectly conceived, so faultlessly executed that if you did an Eden Phillpotts and excised even one sentence, the bottom would fall out of the finished work. I think that is what Mr Michie and Wodehouse and Bennett are on about, and they are right to be on about it.
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