Short stories
Lewis Jones
T wish I were a 13-year-old girl; if I were I I should not be sickened by Sylvia Towns- end Warner (or, even better, a 13-year-old boy; then I should not feel guilty about it); for nothing is more shaming than to be sickened by what one recognises as whole- some and virtuous. S. T. Warner is ob- viously aware of the problem: in the first of these 'Stories' (the title is deceptive: they are more or less fictional memoirs) she sets out to convince her readers that she was not, as a child, a Goodie (her term); later she claims not to be an adult Goodie and boasts that she would not give up smoking. But she protests too much, and I do not believe her; no-one but a Goodie could write like this:
The tarpaulin rugs would be spread out for the children to sit on, and white enamel plates and mugs would be un- packed from the basket, with sandwich boxes and cake tins and bottles of milk and the large white enamel tea pot and the spirit lamp.
The book is mainly about her Edwardian childhood as the daughter of a Harrow schoolmaster. It is written under headings like these: 'My Father, My Mother, the Butler, the Poodle, and I', 'Fried Eggs are Mediterranean' and 'My Mother Won the War'. The anecdotes are very whimsical and often involve animals (cow chases donkey, cows chase Nannic, dog bites man from V&A, dog frightens vicar, and so on); there are characters like Mr Pigeon, the mailcarrier.
When she reaches her adulthood, the style improves, and the stories grow less winsome; clearly the problem is childhood, which she terms 'Eden'. She writes at one stage that 'children do not recognise oddity their pride, on which they depend for their standing in the world, forbids it . . . '; as an adult S. T. Warner recognises little else, and her memories reek of the charm- ingly eccentric.
Perhaps imaginative failure is inherent in the form: this semi-fiction is a poor creature (though Laurie Lee, for all his sentimentali- ty, is perfectly successful at it). Or perhaps it is just her attitude towards it, which com- pounds the compromise: she writes that 'No-one will believe this, and no import- ance attaches to anyone's belief or disbelief. But it is true.' One is at a loss. In fiction such a statement might be an accept- able device; in an autobiography it would be otiose; here one is simply puzzled and annoyed at this apparent contempt for one's credence.
Sean O'Faolain writes proper stories, and most of them meet his excellent criterion: 'As I see it, a Short Story, if it is a good story, is like a child's kite, a small wonder, a brief, bright moment.'
Many of them are about the cruelties and beauties of memory. He sees growing up as a painful realisation that the world is an illusion and suggests, paradoxically but sen- sibly, that our solace must be to embrace illusion, which 'saves us from having to admit that beauty and goodness exist here only for as long as we create and nourish them by the force of our dreams.' This Jesuitical twist is typical: the stories are about Ireland, bogs, pubs, IRA and all, and through them runs the skein of the Roman faith. There are stories about theological jokes, pilgrimage, humbug, miracles, atheism and conversion; like the kite they soar in the face of heaven and swoop to earth. Mr O'Faolain's prose is playful and vivid like the kite and can describe, with equal facility, the aching sensuality of asceticism or a woman looking out of a win- dow: . . . her eyes opened and narrowed like a fish's gills as if they were sucking something in from the blue sky outside.'
Winter's Tales is an annual anthology of a dozen stories by old and new writers. Like all anthologies it is a curate's egg; I liked most of it, particularly 'Chemistry' by Graham Swift, about a ghostly conspiracy across the generations, which takes the reader to the brink and then floats beyond it; it creates in a few pages that vertiginous dimension of Arne over which Proust laboured so endlessly. I also liked 'Safe Wintering' by Terence Wheeler: a jolly tar's tale, very salty (`They were large girls with sallow skin and reddish hair, and they both seemed to go in for small men when they were young. They didn't exactly look like horses, but people used to say if you wanted to tell them apart the best way was to look at the jockey.').
`A Mouthful of Gold' by John Brunner, is worthy of Saki and refreshingly old- fashioned, like a mahogany sideboard; and there is a masterly 'anti-trick' story by V. S. Pritchett. There are some splendid failures, notably M. John Harrison's 'Egnaro', a very sharp and seedy Manchester story, which does not quite come off but cleverly uses its weakness as a defence, and a few or- dinary ones. There is a cold, grisly, misogynous story by Harold Acton and, to balance it, I assume, a feeble feminist one by Fay Weldon.
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