THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLISH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22540, 3 October 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLISH

A Notable Literary Form By PROFESSOR \V. A. SEWELC AYOUXG critic once remarked that the true short story is to be foind only in French and Russian literature, never in English. And it 'is tuie that except for O. Henry, for whom the short story became very of! en a formula, and Ivathevine Mansfield, whose achievement was uniorunately so short-lived the art of tie short story has not been developed so self-consciously in / English as in these other languages. Even to-day, we have left it to an American, Mr. E. J. O'Brien, to become tl:e special protector and encourager of this art in his admiiable collections of English and American short stories. The English short story is, indeed, handicapped in many ways, lhe market for it welcomes only stories of an orthodox pattern and is suspicious of any attempt ;o leave the beaten track. Stories by well-known authors arc handsomely paid for, but these authors are usually novelists and their technique is as foreign to the technique of the short stories as the method of the theatre is foreign to the cinema. Ihe result is thai, many of the stories in our magazines are nothing more than incidents that have been rejected from the writer's list novel. Tho young critic was wrong, nevertheless. The short story in English is a notable form; and, for the moment I will not speak of the army of modern serious story-writers over whom Mr. O'Brien matches with almost paternal care. In a literature which contains the stories of Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Kutherine Mansfield, and, to go further back, Poe and Meredith, there is enough of the story art to make a fair comparison with the literatures th.it contain tho work cf Do Maupassant and Tchekov. "Sheer, Living Instant" I do not, however, want to appraise the English si: orb story. 1 want to say somo'tliing-abo it it as an art-form. The distinguishing mark of the short story is just that —that it is" short. Its "shortness makes it what it is and determines what it can do. As a story loses* the dimensions of the novel, it changes its quality. The novelist lias space to enrich his background with detail, 'to describe dress and manner end thought; .ve forgive him a digression and we hive faith that it is part of a larger scheme. As we look back on a novel wo have read, there are incidents and iaets enough in it to engage ' our minds and we confirm our memory by relcrence to the book. We do not ask to jc left free to speculate. The short-story writer has no space in which to move and he must make a virtue out of lack of space. Every thing must bo needed, every word, every detail, every image. The short-story writer must bo ever aware of a grim sub-editor with a. thick, blue pencil. He must be his own sub-editor. In the short- story —and it may be shorty to the extent of 500 words or as long to the extent of 10,000 words life narrows down- to a Birjgle point of consciousness; we draw inferences from the "sheer, living instant." And this "living instant" may be of three kir ds. First of all, it may be a moment captured in the life of one of the characters, a moment of change or a moment -in which much is revealed which had else lain hidden. > When a Spell Is Broken In Katherine Mansfield's story, "Tho Daughters of t'ae Late Colonel," there is a moment ir, the lives of these two pitiful old maids, when with courage they could have turned to the sun. But the courage hacl been dried out of their lives and they do not, they cannot turn to the sun. There is a story by "Q," "Colonel Baigent's Christmas," in which Colonel Baigent goes back to his old school at Christmas time. In the town is an old invalid spinster who has cared for his memory for forty years, who has watched his career and, in a sense, made him one of her own—and all because as a boy he picked up her basket when it had fallen into the mud. Foe all of them, for the invalid, for the colonch for the little girl who has been to a Christmas party, this strange impersonal devotion, discovered after so many years, brings a grand warmth into what for the colonel would have been'a solitary Christmas, and for the old lady a hungry Christmas.

r j / This article is the first of a short j series in which Professor Scwell ; will Write of literature in its • various form and describe the I special pleasures that should be de- : rioed from each.

I suppose that there are moments in our lives, when grief flickers its last, when decisions aro made we know not why, 'when we see ourselves as others see us and are the worse or the better for it,' when a spell is broken. Tho short story may express the intensity of such a moment. Secondly, tho moment revealed may tie a moment of vision in the writer himself. Not in words, or in the fragments of half-formed phrases, the writer feels or "intuits" a certain quality of life, an atmosphere, or a single complex of local colour: arid ho makes his story to body forth the intuition. In Tcihekov's stories, the very unity of the story is always given in such a moment of intuition. He sees a spot of grease on a priest's black coat and ho has hit upon an image of tho very life of Russia. All that remains is to develop the image. Short stories of this kind are akin to poetry for they deal in images. ' Minimum oi Words And you will find that a major part of the art of the short-story writer is a gift' of words whereby a sensuous experience may he wholly conveyed in the minimum oj' words. Kiplmg had that gift as richly as De Maupassant. The third kind of short story is the kind in which t ie writer narrows down the consciousness of bin reader to a single' moment of expectation, in which all the faculties of tho reader aro alert as he waits for tho end: or else, for the most part i;ho reader is not wideawake but pays only a desultory halfattention right up to tho very last paragraph, when a trick or surprise will startle him into complete attention. « This looks at first to bo an inferior kind of art to those others that I have mentioned; and it is true that in the.-Se stories art more easily degenerates into a formula and tho artist can more easily repeat himself without being found out. At its best, however, it can be as tho verse epigram. It is a pretty conceit, not in words, but in incident or character. It lends itself to mystery and horror and it plays on that insatiable love of bafflement and disco--cry, so cleverly capitalised by Mr. Edgar Wallace and tho inventor of tho cross-word puzzle. 0. Iloriry stereotyped the trick of it. With iplffips Dorothy Bayers and Mr. A. J. has bejome a high intellectual