Short Stories
London, Geoffrey Cumberlege. 24.s.)
Tomato Cain. By Nigel Kneale. (Collins. Ss. 6d.)
The Leonard Merrick Omnibus. (Cassell. i is.) The Black Dog. By A. E. Coppard. (Cape. 9s. 6d.)
THE Pulitzer-Prize-winner, Paul Green, has published a great deal— novels, plays and essays—and his publishers do not hesitate to proclaim him a " great " writer. I can only say that, not having read his work before, I found the superlative, even allowing for " blurb-enthusiasm," puzzling. Mr. Green writes angrily in his third collection of short stories ; his characters are angry, at war with themselves and society. He also writes sincerely, but shows a curious lack of vitality. The repetition of anger, the hysterical and, in places, lushly pretentious dialogue, the overstatement, defeat themselves. It is like the remembered upheavals of childhood ; in retrospect it is the ridiculous and not the' agony that we remember. His compatriots writing in the same medium—John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw, Jerome Weidman, Dorothy Parker and the early Steinbeck and Saroyan—have said their pieces and said them better. As with Steinbeck, Green's sympathies are with the underdog—most of the stories collected here are concerned with the negro and " poor- white " populations of the rural South—but his anger, unlike Stein- beck's, swamps his compassion. He does not seem able to control his characters. They move slowly along familiar roads ; the destination—a dead-end—is always in sight. These outcasts, negro and white alike, share some sort of companionship, but hope is never present. In one story only, Chair Endowed, did I feel that M r. Green knew every inch of the way and passed on the information.
Mr. Nigel Kneale's Tomato Cain, his first collection of short stories, was published last year, and its worth has already been recognised by an Atlantic Award: He is a young writer, still in his twenties, and he has more than the germ of promise. He writes with certainty ; he is original without being clever ; he makes his points without the beating of any worn-out literary drum. Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty, Curphey's Follower and The Photograph— this last as good and as haunting as Graham Greene's The Innocent—are stories that I shall remember. Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty tells with nostalgic tenderness and pure horror how an R.A.F. clerk stumbled across a tomb in the desert and found there the legendary palace of stone—courtiers, scullions, dogs and, of course, the princess. But Mr. Kneale is not content to re-tell
an old fable ; he introduces his own particular brand of ironic humour, and m doing so evokes images that most of us, in not-so- distant dreams, have lingered over. Enderby treads where we are envious to follow—but with surprising and disturbing results.
The Leonard Merrick Omnibus contains sixty-one of his stories, and is cheap at the price. Here is a collection that demands com- parison with 0. Henry, which is not—despite a current tendency to dismiss the late Mr. Porter's particular genius as " altogether too slick and magaziny "—a compariso-1 to be ashamed of. Merrick had the first essential of the story-teller ; he could command atten- tion. He was a cosmopolitan ; his scene changed between London and New York, France and Italy, and he seemed equally at home in all four. It is true, of course, that he was writing of a world that no longer exists—a world that did not revolve round entry visas and exit permits, a world where, if they wished, young men could entertain their mistresses with champagne without becoming politically embarrassed and where love was not yet synonymous with neurosis. There are no queues at the psycho-analyst's door in Merrick's stories ; his young men and women, to say nothing of those not so young, fall in and out of love with commendable vigour and abandon. The remembrance of things past is, in this case, the remembrance of things, for the most part, gay. Sadness is there, too, of course, but it is a healthy sadness ; its roots spring from soil that is far from exhausted.
The last collection is a reprint of A. E. Coppard's The Black Dog. Coppard is, I should say, a collector's author ; his style is perhaps a little too leisurely for everybody's taste, but it is a pure style, consistent and beautifully moulded to suit his subjects. Passior4 if sometimes unconsummated in Mr. Coppard's world, burn none the less dangerously ; his heroines, if unyielding, bewitch, tantalise and destroy. There is a general air of stillness about these stories— the sort of stillness that goes before the worst kind of storm.
BRYAN FORBES.
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