Small but perfectly formed

I have been browsing on recent train journeys through the Oxford Book of Short Stories, edited by V S Pritchett.  I am a great admirer of the genre, which can range much more widely than the novel – some things can be sustained over a handful or a score of pages which would impossible over 300 – the bitter morality tales of Saki, for example, and the gymnastics of the imagination that Borges uses to light our darkness.  But a good short story is a hard thing to write: it must be complete in itself, taut and well constructed, and must satisfy without leaving us feel short changed.  How hard that is, is demonstrated by the vast number of poor short stories.

This collection is wide ranging in space and time – five continents and two centuries (the short story is even younger than the novel) – and is engagingly mixed of old favourites and less well known work.  I am far from bowled over by everything in it, but have enjoyed much.  The anthology has 40 stories from Walter Scott to John Updike, but perhaps these few examples will stand for the whole;  and no, none of them are are perfectly formed - but some are very good indeed.

At the familiar end is Saki’s Sredni Vashtar, chilling story of an unloved boy whose ferret kills his guardian, while he – essentially innocent, one feels – enjoys more lavishly buttered toast.  Saki is a wonderful writer, but his stories can have a sense of sameness about them – this is a little different, perfectly observed as always, but with a savagery and bitterness in the soul which is rarely this explicit.   New to me was Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, a tale of four men in a boat after a shipwreck, stupefied by fatigue and perhaps by fear, making their way nearer and nearer to a coast which seems alternately unattainable and imminently close.  They play different roles in the boat, always cooperating and calm, but  - in spite of the best efforts of the leader and of the strongest man – they don’t all make it alive to shore.  A bleak, sad tale, which achieves its effects without bathos or any extravagance of description – but one which would have lost impact over a wider spread of pages.

There is a sad, angry tale of Henry James’, Paste, about jewels which might or might not be real, and about honesty and pride.  And there is Thrawn Janet, a tremendous moody Scottish story of a young cleric and the Devil by Robert Louis Stevenson, full of glorious language.  And I came across a new writer for me, A E Coppard (1878-1957), whose The Field of Mustard was a strangely moving story of three old women collecting firewood, and stopping to gossip – finding out about infidelity and lost love from each other, and yearning desperately for what they do not have.  The final sentence is “Clouds were borne frantically across the heavens, as if in a rout of battle, and the lovely earth seemed to sigh in grief at some calamity all unknown to men”.

O’Henry is an author I must have tried too young and found indigestible – but Telemachus, Friend was smartly written and very amusing.  Finally, I should mention a Kipling story I didn’t know (and that such a thing existed surprised me), The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot, a vigorous honest tale of a slum woman who was a saint in the dark, and of the rough loves and deaths of the London slums. 

Comments

[glo]

I think I'll try to check on Stenvenson's story and compare it to the two short stories about clerics of Alphonse Daudet in 'Les lettres de mon moulin'.
Daudet is a writer from South of France (Provence). One of the stories takes place on Christmas Eve. Servants are being preparing the delicious dishes in the kitchen for the Christmas evening dinner. The priest is supposed to give three masses for Christmas but of course his mind is lured by the nice food...

[Peter the flautist]

Let me strongly recommend a recently published collection of short stories by ZZ Packer "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere". It is a stunning debut collection (the stories were I think first published in The New Yorker and Harpers) and the author recently won the Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 2005.

Sharply and subtly observed comments on human nature, a world full of misfits, of racial and cultural tensions, and self-examination.

I hope you give them a go, I am glad I did.

Dark Puss

[Harriet]

I've read all of Saki, though more years ago than I care to say, and am reading what I suppose is a short story by Henry James right now -- The Lesson of the Master. I would probably find lots to enjoy in this collection, and it strikes me that I am much more likely to read an anthology of stories by a number of writers than to pick up a one-author edition. In fact, though you have me down as a short story hater, I edited a collection myself some years ago -- 19th century women's short stories, it was, and jolly good some of them were, too.