THE HISTORY OF THE SHORT STORY Leonard R. N. Ashley English Teaching Division Bureau a Educational and Cultu ral Affairs U.S. Information Agéncy Washington, Do. 20547 *i. UL Iv. Vv. VI. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE BEGINNINGS THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN SHORT STORY THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FROM LOCAL COLOR TO INTERNATIONAL FAME THE MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORY THE MODERN BRITISH SHORT STORY ‘THE FUTURE OF THE SHORT STORY Reprinted by permission of Arista Corp., Concord, California PageINTRODUCTION A burly truck dispatcher, clipboard in hand and pencil tucked behind an ear, barks at 2 driver who has just rumbled into the yard with his huge trailer: “What's the story on that shipment?” The telephone clangs harshly on the desk of the city editor. He picks up the receiver, listens intently for a moment, whirls around abruptly to a man typing nearby, and rasps out a command: “George, get over to Towbridge Hall! The transit strike’s on! I want the whole story!” A grim-faced teacher of English, listening skeptically to a boy sheepishly explain why he has come late to class, cuts in sharply “That's quite a story, Henry! You really belong in our creative writing class.” . Judging from the way each of the speakers used the word story, it Would seem that the term is highly flexible and that it can be applied to many diverse situations. Indeed, almost any retelling of a happening—whether fact or fiction, whether in the form of poetry, prose, or drama—can be called a story. It becomes necessary, there- fore, to arrive at some definition of terms before attempting to trace the origins of the short story as we know it today. As we have noted, a story can take many forms: it can be as short as a truck driver’s report, as factual as a newspaper reporter's ac- count, as fictional as a student's tall tale. It can also be a bit of fan- tasy invented by daddy at bedtime, a movie producer's script based upon a person's life, an episode in a television series, a full length novel, a diary of an explorer’s trip to Antarctica—and many more things as well. The general term story has no specificity, practically no limitations. The short story, on the other hapd, has certain characteristics of length, structure, and style. It is prose ‘fiction, sometimes based on truth, but always a deliberate fabrication meant to be recognized as a work of art and not to be taken literally, It is a piece of literature, drawn from life perhaps, but not life itself, The matter of length is 3something else again. To say that a short story must run somewhere between two thousand and ten thousand words is merely arbitrary, and often inaccurate. The better way is to assert that, however short a novel may be, the short story is shorter. We will deal with struc- ture and style in some detail in later pages, but the important point to establish here is that the short story is a literary form, as distinct in itself as is poetry, drama, or the essay. Actually, then, were we to confine ourselves to the literary form, we would have to begin our survey somewhere in the nineteenth century. However, for proper historical perspective, we will want to examine the contributions made to the short story by a great variety of literary forms, regardless of the narrative style in which they were told or written. If we go back to antiquity, therefore, and talk about epics, fables, metrical romances, and novellas;we are not, strictly speaking, dealing with, the short story put with influences that ulti- mately led to the form.I. THE BEGINNINGS The Epics In all ages, people have listened and thrilled to what Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy (1595), called “a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corer.” Fictional narratives were handed down by oral tradition for centuries before men began to record them in longhand or print. Among the very earliest narratives were long poems presenting highborn characters engaged in various adventures. These long poems gained their unity by their relationship to some central heroic figure, and they were further identified with the aspirations of a nation or race. These stories are called epics and the classical epics have certain charac- teristics in common—including beginning in the midst of things (in medias res); calling upon the muse for inspiration; and stating an epic purpose—the structure having largely been influenced by Vergil, whose Aeneid is still being read by students today. The oldest epics were in reality collections of bits and pieces left by unknown poets who had added to the basic stories as they went about telling their tales, It is for this reason that some critics believe that The Iliad and The Odyssey, two of the best known classical epics, were not created by Homer alone, but that he might have gathered together the work of a group of bards. Other famous epics worth mentioning are the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the East Indian Mahabharata, the Spanish Cid, the Finnish Kalevala, the French Song of Roland, and the German Niebelungenlied. There were art epics, too; that is, those that could be definitely attributed to a single writer, like Dante’s Divine Com- edy, Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, all of which came much later, of course. In their stress upon scenes of vio- lent conflict, settings delineated in concrete details, moods influenced by the supernatural, and language enriched by figures of speech (particularly the simile), these great, sweeping stories left a fruitful literary heritage for future writefs. + The husband returning in disguise, which is so much a part of the fabric of The Odyssey, appears also in the Veda, the most an- cient religious scriptures still held sacred. These writings date back 5at least fifteen hundred years before Christ to the Aryans who in- vaded northwestern India and laid the foundations of Hindu culture. The Rig-Veda, the oldest of the four Samhita (collections) in the Vedic language (the ancestor of Sanskrit), contains many even older tales, just as the drama of the ancient Greeks draws on myths far older than itself. In Sanskrit, these tales were more or less artistically handled as literature and were brought together by various authors who transmuted the folklore into fiction. One of these was Somadeva, collector (or author) of the Katha Sarit Sagara, which translates as The Ocean of the Streams of Story. Many stories from ancient India were clearly adopted and adapted, along with others of Persian or similar origin, to make the series strung together as The Arabian Nights. “this series was sup- posedly related by Scheherazade, wife of Schariar, legendary ruler of Samarkand, in order to preserve her life by fascinating her lord and master for a thousand and one nights. Freely rendered into French by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1711, these ingenious Moslem tales have, especially in the unexpurgated versions of Sir Richard Burton (published in sixteen volumes between 1885 and 1888), captivated audiences in the West, and “Scheherazade” lives still through the power of an imaginative tale well told. Every civili- zation has had its legends and most literatures begin with epics, many of which have lasted long after the peoples who gave them birth. Medieval Romances In the twelfth century agnew type of story of adventure appeared. Its origin is not entirely clear, although it does seem to have derived from Old French literature. It became known as the romance and it soon became even more popular than the epic. The romance differed significantly from the older form characters were knightly figures rather than national heroes; the tone was relatively lighthearted, often mysterious and fantastic rather than solemn and majest adventures were inclined to be rambling and often included love themes, whereas the epic featured a tightly-structured series of nota- ble achievements serious in purpose. Most of the earlier romances were in verse (probably to make the telling easier to remember) and were referred to as “metrical romances”; later ones also appeared in prose. Probably the first of these dealt with Charlemagne and his peerless paladins, hence the general category of the “matter of France.” Adaptations of the writings provided by Homer and Vergil 6resulted in the “matter of Greece and Rome.” The “matter of Eng- land” featured such English and Germanic heroes as King Horn, Havelock the Dane, and stalwarts of the briefer “Breton lays” like Sir Orfeo (Orpheus of classical myth transformed into a Celtic knight). The “matter of Britain” centered on King Arthur and the knights of his Round Table. From Layamon’s Brut (where Arthur, in the thirteenth century, first appeared in English), through the best of the Middle English Arthurian romances (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), to the monumental Morte d’Arthur (both the alliterative verse version of about 1360 and the more famous prose version of Sir Thomas Mal- ory, completed in prison in 1469 and published by William Caxton, the earliest English printer, in 1485), the “matter of Britain” and particularly the Arthurian romance were not only great achievements in themselves but they have had a permanent and important in- fluence. Professor Rhys, in Studies in the Arthurian Legend, said that there were really two Arthurs, a Celtic god and a historical dux bel- lorum (chieftan or general) who actually lived in the fifth or sixth century. In any case, today, when archaeologists are digging for the remains of the castle of the “real” Arthur, the literary Arthur is still alive, In operas such as Tristan und Isolde, in musical comedies like Camelot, in stained glass windows depicting the search for the Holy Grail, in Tennyson’s poetic Idylls of the King, and in children’s story- books, Arthur and Merlin, Launcelot and Guinevere, Sir Galahad and the rest hold their fascination. The old stories are thus told and retold for succeeding generations Religious Tales of the Middle Ages Religion vied with myth in the Middle Ages. There was no reason for the Devil to possess all of the best stories! Medieval literature is full of lively accounts of saints and the little moral tales called ex- empla. In Old English, Cynewulf and others, most of them anony- mous, had told in verse the stories of The Fates of the Apostles, the martyrdom of Juliana, the legend of St. Helena (mother of the Emperor Constantine), the finding of the True Cross, and many other pious stories, even fables in bestiaries. The tale of Beowulf was the great epic masterpiece of the Old English period. It was to be ex- pected that in the Middle Ages, WithBritish literature in three Jan- guages (the native English, the invader's French, and the Church's Latin), there would be even more religious stories. For example, The Golden Legend, c. 1483, was an English translation of much 7older Latin legenda (readings). It contains among its many hagi- ographies (or lives of saints) the biography of the “hooly blisful martir” St. Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which has been retold in our time in such works as Anouilh’s Becket, and Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. The most famous collection of exempla in prose is the Gesta Romanorum, a varied group of tales (originally in Latin) to which “moralities” (allegorical interpretations) are at- tached. Here Chaucer found his “Pardoner’s Tale.” Here, too, schol- ars have found analogues for ancient Buddhist tales—one of which also appears, whether from either of these sources or some other, no one can say, as a subplot (the caskets of gold, silver, and lead) in Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. The Decameron and Its influence Florence was ravaged by the plague in 1348 and, to escape it, seven young ladies and three young men fled the city for neighbor- ing villas, There they were safe, but time hung heavy on their hands They decided to spend ten days (whence the name Decameron) telling each other stories, one a day for each of those present. Within this little framework, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), the Floren- tine storyteller, poet, and humanist, organized one hundred of the world’s most famous stories. This collection of bright and bawdy tales of man, “sensual, tender, cruel, weak, self-seeking, and ludi- crous,” is in sharp contrast with the horror of the Black Death the storytellers were fleeing. Seldom has any modern writer of stories shown such a range in his work as Boccaccio did. Of those who followed Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348-1353), one was the Englishman William Painter (1540?-1594) who, “out of divers good and commendable authors,” the ancients Herodotus and Livy and the medieval ltalians Boccaccio and Bandello (some of whose work Shakespeare borrowed), made a collection of “pleasant histories and excellent novels” called The Palace of Pleasure (1566- 1567). The most famous writer in the Boccaccio tradition, however, was born two centuries before Painter. He was Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), On missions for the English king, Chaucer traveled to Cenoa and Florence—where he perhaps met Boccaccio and the great poet Petrarch—and to France and Flanders and elsewhere; and wherever he went, at home or abroad, he observed mankind with a sly but sympathetic eye. And he took time from his important offices of state to write in prose and verse of human life in its many moods. 8His most famous work is a collection of stories—~The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer knew that a good tale is timeless, and he col- lected many old stories from many sources for his picture of the “sondry folk” on their pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales. The work was begun about 1387 and, though unfinished, it runs to about 17,000 lines. This great master of English literature used the device of the journey to weld together a company and an anthology of medieval stories. Only twenty-four of the contemplated one hun- dred and twenty stories? are related by twenty-three pilgrims— there are some thirty in the assembly—but there is a magnificent variety: fabliau and chivalric romance, ribald jest and pious conte dévot (devotional story), hagiography and folk tale, legend and de casibus story (of men “yfallen out of high degree”), moral exemplum and fairy tale, lai (short romantic tale), and so on. Chaucer's sources ranged from his contemporaries to the Vedabbha Jataka (a collec- tion of Buddhist tales), from Boccaccio to Livy and the Roman de la Rose. (The Romance of the Rose was a dream allegory in French by Guillaume de Lorris, continued as a satire on society and religion by Jean de Meun, partly translated and adapted by Chaucer in an- other long poem, The Romaunt of the Rose, nearly 8,000 lines in couplets. ) When Chaucer is called upon in his Canterbury Tales to partici- pate in the storytelling of the travelers who are whiling away the tedious hours of the trip to the shrine of St. Thomas & Becket at Canterbury, he winds up, amusingly, by recounting “a moral tale yertuous,” The Tale of Melibee. It turns out to be a long and ex- tremely boring disputation between Melibeus and his wife Prudence, but fortunately for literature Chaucer in real life was neither tedious nor dull, Whether he is having a nun relate, in elaborate rhyme royal, a story of St. Cecilia (from The Golden Legend of Jacobus da Vara- gine) or a ribald miller, in vigorous verse, tell the remarkably bawdy story of a dastardly deception, Chaucer commands the storyteller’s art with verve and variety. Perhaps only Shakespeare surpasses him in our literature, * The total might have been one hundred and twenty-four, if we include the contributions of the Canon's Yeomanwho overtakes the travelers after they have agreed to host Harry Bailly’s suggestfon that, to pass the time on the way to and from the shrine at Canterbury, each pilgrim shall tell two tales on the way there and two on the sixty-mile journey back to London, the winner to be given a free supper at the Tabard Inn. 9Fairy Tales and Fables Better known, it may be, than Shakespeare himself are the short stories which have been handed down, in one form or another, through countless generations in the nursery, and which were printed in 1697.in Paris and Amsterdam by Charles Perrault as Histotres ow Contes du Temps Passé (Tales or Stories of Past Times). They are sprightly and often insightful fairy tales couched in simple language and enforcing clear moral and practical lessons. Perrault’s fairy stories have become part of the cultural heritage of the West, as have those of many of his followers, such as the Comtesse d’Aulnoy. ‘The scientific and Teutonically precise collection and interpretation of fairy tales dates from the brothers Grimm, the first edition of whose Kinder- und Haus-Mdrchen for children appeared in Ger- many in 1812. The Grimms conceived and ifiaugurated the great German dictionary which, begun in 1854, took a century to complete in sixteen volumes, but they will probably be remembered longest not for their studies in philology but for the way they encouraged the study of folklore through the publication of these Volk-Méarchen. (folk tales, contes populaires in French) derived from various Indo- European sources. Some of these stories have ancient histories: Jack and the Beanstalk, known to most European and American children in some form or other, resembles stories of the North American Indians and the natives of South Africa. Shakespeare in King Lear quotes the “Fie, foh, and fum,/T smell the blood of a British man” from the old nursery tale of Childe Rowland (in an ancient Scottish ballad, the son of King Arthur). Scholars have traced the interrela- tionships between the myths and tales of European and non-Euro- pean origins, between ancient epics and sagas and modem stories, between Jack’s beanstalléand the Yggdrasill of northern mythology (from which our maypole and our Christmas tree are said to derive ), between some Bantu tale and the Kalevala of the Finns, between Cinderella and age-old Indian tales of metamorphosis, between the mad song of Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust and a Scottish ballad “erooned by an old East-Lothian nurse.” In fables (often in prose) and fabliaux (in verse), certain brief allegories have been tald through the ages for satiric and moral purposes. Since Aesop (said to have been a slave on the island of Samos in the sixth century before Christ), and even earlier, animals have talked and acted like people in these little moral tales. Almost as ancient as Aesop (whose work has come down to us through such ancients as Babrius, Phaedrus, and Planudes Maximus) are the Panchatantra (literally “Five Treatises”), the beast fables of San- 10skrit literature dating back to the sixth century of our era. These were derived from earlier Buddhist sources and were said to have been composed by Bidpai. Scholars trace them from Buddhist sources to Sanskirt, from Sanskrit to Pahlavi, thence into Syriac, ‘Arabic, and English. A good story with a sharp point, as La Fon- taine and Lessing, Dryden and John Gay, among others, discovered, can have a fabulously long life! Some modern short stories draw heavily on the tradition of the fable. Most readers have no doubt some knowledge of George Orwell's fable in novel form, Animal Farm (1945). The satiric spirit of the bawdy fabliaux of the Middle Ages, even of Petronius Arbiter (died c. A.D. 66) in the fragments left to us of his Satyricon, lives in modern times. From scraps of Egyptian papyrus dating back to the earliest recorded times to mil- lions of copies of paperback books being published today, the desire to tell a story that makes a point, and the desire to hear one, is clear. The Beginnings of the Novel The compact and realistic novella of the Italians and the poetic and romantic French roman (related to “roman but today the French word for “novel”) both developed along separate but related lines from the desire to tell a story, a desire already old when, two or three millennia before Christ, papyri recorded the pleasure that the sons of Cheops gave their father with their little narratives. Sir Edmund Gosse traced the modern novel at least as far back as Aristides who, two centuries before Christ, wrote a kind of Wines- burg, Ohio collection about his hometown, Miletus, called the Milesiaka. Then followed pastoral tales and the Syrian Helidorus’ Aethiopica and the Greek love story of Daphnis and Chloé and The Golden Ass of Apuleius in Latin. By the Middle Ages, the cycles of romance that we have mentioned and many other forms of stories were adding to the development of fiction, both short and long. The tale, somewhere in length between a novel and a short story, was particularly interesting in Italy, and novellas were collected not only by Boccaccio but by Sacchetti (Trecente Novelle), Fiorentino (Il Pecorone), Masuccio (Novellino), and Bandello, who gave us the story of Romeo and Juliet, among others. In Spain short tales of the picaro (vagabond) were more or less loosely connected in such milestones of the development of the novel as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and the masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605, 1615). The sustained*prose narrative made further advances in the Gargantua (1532) of Rabeldis and the romances of Madame de Scudéry (1607-1701). By the mid-seventeenth century, uwhen the Comtesse de La Fayette wrote the very famous La Prin- cesse de Cléves, the French novel was firmly established. By 1731 the French could boast both Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne and the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, today best known to lovers of opera. The English, who had been recording stories in their chronicles and elsewhere from the earliest times, had triumphs of style in John Lyly’s novel Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit (1579), of the pas- toral in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (in which verse was mingled with Italian novella and medieval romance, 1590), of the picaresque in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilion (the first historical novel in English, 1594). In the sev- enteenth century came Mrs. Aphra Behn’s stirring adventure Oroon- oko (1688) and John Bunyan's allegory Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684). By the eighteenth century, with Darifel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) and Jonathan Swift’s Gul- liver's Travels (1726), the tale and the story had given birth to the novel in a century which saw such masters as Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Horace Wal- pole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Fanny Bur- ney, and many others. The story, though overshadowed in im- portance by the novel, did not perish; it was closely related to the informal essays of Addison and Steele in The Spectator and The Tatler, famous journals of the period, Episodes in the “Sir Roger de Coverley Papers” and “The Vision of Mirzah” by Addison had many characteristics of modern short stories. 12ll. THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN SHORT STORY A New Genre Though the novel had come to the fore, there continued, as there always had in both the Occident and the Orient, a prose narrative briefer than the novel or the novella, more restricted in theme, more condensed in plot, more economical in effects, indeed more often concerned with a single effect than resembling the multiple marvels of the picaresque novel or the extravagant romance. This form con- centrated very often on a single character, unlike the novel with its broader canvas, and traced a single important change in personality altered or revealed by a single important crisis. In the nineteenth century in the hands of Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Nathan- iel Hawthome, Edgar Allan Poe, Prosper Mérimée, Honoré de Bal- zac, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Guy de Maupassant, An- ton Chekhov, E. T. A. Hoffman, and many others, the short story can be said to have come at last into its own as a distinct literary genre, a separate type or class of narrative, a new art form. We have seen how various and how ancient its background was. Critics can argue whether the short story as we know it today emerged with Daniel Defoe’s “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal” at the beginning of the eighteenth century or with something like Sir Walter Scott's “Wandering Willie’s Tale” at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But most critics agree that the short story as we now define it began with the concentration, in France with Mérimée and his contemporaries and in America with Poe and his, on deliberate economy and the stress on those singular effects which are demanded and emphasized by the form. Some- thing as pointed as the jest and the anecdote and as important as the novella and the novel had arrived. It was the modern short story. The German Romantics ya More attention in connection with the development of the short story should be paid to the contributions of the German Romantics, 13Seen eee especially the work of the great master of the Gothic tale, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822). In grotesque tales of madness, imagination, and the supernatural (Fantasiestiicken, “fan- tastic pieces,” he called them), Hoffmann showed a power and a direction which have been influential even in the twentieth century. Today he is remembered, however, chiefly for only three stories that Offenbach used in his opera The Tales of Hoffmann, a fact which Hoffmann himself, both writer and musician, might have deplored and which, as a lawyer, he might well have found unjust. ‘The Germans have achieved great distinction in two literary genres: the lyric and what they call the novelle (a prose tale dealing with supernatural elements). In the last century and a half they have produced Goethe, Kleist, Tieck, Stifter, Keller, Meyer, Haupt- mann, Schnitzler, Hesse, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many novelle and short story writers of great importance, all following (or radi- cally reacting to) the grand philosophies of thé form so ponderously i ! discussed by Goethe. In his Unterhaléungen deutscher Ausgewan- derter (Conversations of German Emigrés), a collection of tales with a pendantic framework, Goethe laid down the rules for the novelle. Further highly organized theorizing occupied the Schlegel brothers, Tieck, Heyse, and other Professoren of literature, all summed up in Johannes Klein’s monumental study in which, when he eventually arrives at the verbs, a great deal of distinction is ob- vious (or at least argued) among the short tales in the Kalenderges- chichten and the Grimm fairy tales and the sketch and the anec- dote and the short narrative and the short long narrative and the long short narrative und so weiter, and so on, and so on. Some of the “rules” have been continually and triumphantly broken not only by the best German writers but by all modern mas- ters of the short story, the novelle, and the novella. (You can see that distinctions are diffi€ult to preserve.) Not everyone writes like Hoffmann of “unheard-of events.” Not everyone has a “turning point” in his story, Not everyone confines himself to “a single event” and embraces the dictum that there is not room enough to discuss “character” and its development. But, rules or no rules, the German short story had high points in the time of the Romantics and has gone on to later successes too. Whether we read an extremely brief story by Heinrich von Kleist (famous for “Michael Kohlhaas” and “The Marquise of O—) such as “Anekdote aus dem Preussischen Kreige” (a one-page anecdote of the Prussian War) or a very long story by Thomas Mann such as Tonio Kréger or Death in Venice, we see that the German story seems to have developed its power, pre- cision, and psychological penetration more because of the genius of its practitioners than the talent of its theoreticians. 14“The One Pre-Established Design” One theory, though, does seem to have done more than anything else to create the modern short story: that the short story should con- centrate if it is to etch deep. As we have seen, the fables of the an- cients and the romances of the Middle Ages and even the earliest novels are all related to the short piece of prose fiction we call the short story. The short story can be realistic, or a fairy tale. It can have a moral attached to it, or not. It can, in fact, cover the events of a moment or chronicle not only the episodes but the meaning of an entire life, as in Gustave Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple,” the com- plete story of “a simple heart” It may be an anecdote or an ex: tended allegory, a story of atmosphere or of adventure, mood or message. But, above all, it cannot be merely descriptive. It must create what Coleridge called in another context “the willing sus- pension of disbelief”: to one extent or another, it must draw us into its action and involve us in its plot or passion. And it cannot ramble or be diffuse—though it be as philosophical as the contes (tales) of Voltaire, it must not only be brief but to the point It was Poe's theory of the overwhelming importance of economy and directness, of concentration and effect, that is said to have fa- thered the modem short story. In his youth, Nathaniel Hawthorne (a contemporary of Poe's) began to write moral and allegorical tales of the corrosive power of guilt and the specter of Calvinism that haunted Puritan New England, Hawthorne published many of these tales in The Token, a gift book printed.in Boston, and in 1837 he reprinted them as Twice-Told Tales (an enlarged edition appeared in 1842). It was in reviewing Hawthorne's collection (which included “The Minister's Black Veil” and other stories) that Poe enunciated his theory of economy and effect in these often- quoted lines: A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single cffect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents-he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency is not to the one pre-established design r rhe, es 4 ‘This is not the only way to write a short story, and not all modern stories resemble those of Hawthorne and Poe, any more than all modem detective stories are exact copies of Poe’s pioneering “tales 15I of ratiocination” like “The Gold Bug” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” But Poe’s advice does stress the important fact that a short story is, after all, short; that space limitations ought to encourage economy; that planning for a single effect and bending every effort to the task of achieving it is likely to produce organization and, per- haps, good results. His advice, appearing in Graham's Magazine for May 1842, was sound then and is today, whatever kind of short story one decides to write. The Impact of the Magazine Market Nowadays publishers seem to want novels, not short stories, as producers on Broadway want full-length plays, not one-acters. But the market for American writers was rather different in Poe's day. Writers were not slow to see that Poe had hit upon a formula for the 4 4 brief narratives that were so popular in gift books such as The Token and magazines such a8 Craham’s. Washington Irving’s The Skeich Book (1819, 1820) had demonstrated the appeal of short tales and the fact that German Romanticism could be adapted for the Ameri- can market. Who would imagine that “Rip Van Winkle” was a char- acter out of Hoffmann’s Gothic tales? Moreover, the market was not especially good for American novels. “In the four quarters of the globe,” asked the Reverend Sydney Smith in 1820, “who reads an American book?” American works of long fiction were not welcome in England. Walter Savage Landor, the poet, wrote to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate: “I detest the American character as much as you do.” And English works were too welcome in America: international copyright, or the lack of it, made it cheaper for Ameri- can publishers to pirate English novels than to pay Americans to imitate them. But there wére many American magazines, all demand- ing (and willing to reward handsomely, in writers’ terms) brief pieces of interesting fiction, Also, the money came in readily, as it seldom did to any author of a novel. So, once Poe had outlined the “philosophy of composition” of short stories, the stories were tuned out promptly and profusely in this country. Washington Irving We have already had occasion to mention Washington Irving (1783-1859). He created in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” one of the most remarkable pieces of nineteenth-century fiction and in “Rip Van Winkle” one of its most enduring characters. With polish, senti- ment, humor, and a knack for clever assimilation and adaptation, he 16became the “Father of American Letters.” His fellows in Salmagundi, a magazine he helped to found (1807), had this view of life: “We are Jaughing philosophers, and truly of the opinion that wisdom, true wisdom, is a plump, jolly dame, who sits in her armchair, laughs right merrily at the farce of life-and takes the world as it goes.” Still Irving had an undercurrent of seriousness and a critical eye as well, for he had been a sophisticated traveler both in this country and abroad, so there is a certain salt that preserves his best work. From the folk tales of Germany and the American Indian folklore of the Catskill Mountains of New York, he constructed “Rip Van Win. kle.” the most famous of the stories in The Sketch Book and probably the first great American story. In his preface to Tales of a Traveler (1824), subtitled Strange Stories by @ Nervous Gentleman, living revealed at least one of the aspects of the genre he helped to es- tablish: “If the tales I have furnished should prove to be bad, they will at least be found short. . ..” Nathaniel Hawthorne Striking in his contrast to Irving was Nathaniel Hawthome (1804— 1864), a reclusive and sad man whom even an idyllic marriage could not make joyful. Brought up in a hushed and shuttered house presided over by the gray spirits of his witch-burning, Puritan an- cestors and imbued with the “strong traits of their nature,” Haw- thorne developed what he called “cursed habits of solitude” which led him to brood on man’s depravity and guilt, Like his character in “Wakefield,” he ran away from life—“I have not lived,” he con- fessed at one point, “but only dreamed about living’—and he spun his dreams into his allegorical Twice-Told Tales. Though his tales had, he admitted, “the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade,” their genius was (as we have noted) immediately recognized by Poe, and Hawthorne's somber significance in such stories as “The Minister's Black Veil—A Parable” and “Dr. Heideg- ger’s Experiment” instantly brought a new profundity into Ameri- can writing that the more polished and popular tales of Irving had lacked. Irving had done something to make Europe sit up and take notice of what St. John Crévecoeur hailed as “the American, this new man” in the field of fiction, but it was Hawthorne's intensity and insight into timeless moral problems that drew the somewhat reluctant praise of Englishmen. Matthew Afnold; himself eminent in poetry and the essay, heralded the genius of Hawthosne in the short story and the novel: “Hawthorne's literary talent is of the frst order the finest, I think, which America has yet produced—finer, by much, 17— ’ than Emerson’s.” Largely with the short story, the simple “tale” given popular appeal and intellectual weight, Irving and Hawthorne had put American letters “on the map.” Edgar Allan Poe Then Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) appeared on the scene. He lacked a few of the qualities of personality and mind that had been admired in Irving and Hawthorne, but he discovered some salient and highly commercial facts: a poetic style, unlike clarity, could cover a multitude of sins, and objects look larger shrouded in fog. Moreover, he knew the great law of literature which in our time the superb English short story writer, W. Somerset Maugham, stated as “stick to the point like grim death.” Poe subordinated everything to a single, electrifying, climactic effect. His appeal was more tog emotion than to intellect. Having read them, who can forget the® thrill of the classic “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the fantastic coloring of “The Masque of the Red Death,” the lyrical “Ligeia,” the provocative “The Imp of the Perverse,” the simple (and simply grip- ping) “The Black Cat,” “The Telltale Heart,” “The Cask of Amon- tillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum”? Poe’s death-obsessed mind created dark fantasies in which every- thing—plot, character, setting, message, all the concerns of other short story writers of the time—was subordinated to the “precon- ceived totality of effect.” The intellectual power of the man, who very nearly single-handedly invented the detective story, was tre- mendous when it was firmly fixed upon an object. Though often be- littled in America, Poe was both admired and imitated by writers in Russia and France. Poe’s influence on Charles Baudelaire is well- known; his effect on Guy de Maupassant’s unforgettable vignettes (short sketches) was no less great Bret Harte Where Poe emphasized mood and madness, Francis Bret Harte (1836-1902) dealt in facts and sentiment. As a teen-ager he had responded to the lure of the West and, after a number of odd jobs, found his métier as a reporter in San Francisco. {n 1868 that most colorful of all American cities decided that it needed a magazine to be The Atlantic of the Pacific, and The Overland Monthly was founded, with Bret Harte as one of its editors. The second issue car- ried his classic story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” and with it was founded not only his career but the vogue of all the local colorists 18,who depicted the peculiar and quaint customs and traditions, ap- pearances and ideas, of this rambunctious and kaleidoscopic coun- try. Clinched with “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “Tennessee's Partner,” Bret Harte’s reputation spread nationwide, and his ap- proach—to limn “characteristic American life, with absolute knowl- edge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its methods’—became famous. That he did not confess that all his sketches were (as the Victorians noticed in England) carefully hand-colored with senti- mental wash until sometimes the “real” characters, incidents, and scenery were all but obliterated, is probably the reason that he was hailed as a realist—and often badly imitated by some of his well- meaning followers who fondly imagined that “local color” meant verity instead of a highly artificial verisimilitude. The influence of Bret Harte—and of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883), trans- lations of whose Russian works gained immense popularity in Amer- ica in the 1870's—got at least some of the American “realists” very much confused, particularly those who were deaf to delicacy and lacking in the ability to detect the subtle shadings and, above all, the humor that made all the difference between a report and a work of art. Nothing that is merely factual has any place in literature, especially in the short story, which has no time for trifles. “Mark Twain” One of the greatest writers ever to snap up such unconsidered trifles as facts and to transform them into enduring literature was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), known to the world by the pseudonym he took from a Mississippi River cry that indicated two fathoms: “Mark ‘fwain.” The vivid facts of his boyhood in Han- nibal, Missouri, “a loafing, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Missis- sippi town,” were only the raw materials of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The great frontier ability to spin a whopping lie was at the heart of Twain’s genius, and American exaggeration and broad humor inform all of his greatest work, from an anecdote like “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to the tragi- comic story of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” The tellers of tall tales had a lot to teach the writers of the short story, and Mark ‘Twain, an amused and amazed reporter on the human condition who was not above embroidering the truth, learned all the Jessons. “There is no one who does not exaggerate,” said old Ralph Waldo Emerson so pompously. There yvas no one who did it as well as Mark Twain, so delightedly and delightfully. In the later years of his life he was dour and melancholy, as many humorists are, but the legacy he left is one of joy and laughter 19ill. THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FROM LOCAL COLOR TO INTERNATIONAL FAME The Local Colorists Combining the local color of Bret Harte with hearty Ameri- can folk humor (of which the tall tale and the blatant exaggeration were only two weapons in a large arsenal), the short story in the United States took én a tang of its own, All literature, of course, reflects the locale in which it is created, but after the Civil War the nation looked at its reunited states with a certain nostalgia for the past (real or imagined) and an abiding interest in customs, cos- tumes, dialects, and differences. In France couleur locale had been exploited by Victor Hugo and Prosper Mérimée (the creator of Carmen), and American writers borrowed from’ them to combine romanticism and realism. Moreover, Americans had been influenced by the national and racial biases of another Frenchman, the historian Taine, who preached that history was concerned with the entire social life of any nation, thus placing a premium on detail. It was in the short story that Americans made the most lavish and most successful use of details and local color, once Bret Harte had blazed the trail. With a vast country whose boundaries were extending so far and so fast that they seemed to be responding to a “manifest destiny,” American local colorists had plenty of scope. Literary Ladies and Local Color Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) not only wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the novel which President Lincoln said “caused the great war,” but she sketched lively Yankee portraits in Sam Latwson’s Fireside Stories (1871) and other works. Sarah Ore Jewett (1849— 1909), beginning when she was only nineteen, re-created the “Deep- haven” of her Maine girlhood in a series of stories and novels, includ- ing The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). She influenced Willa Cather (1873-1947), who wrote memorably about the West and the 20 1Middle West. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) depicted New England rural life in short tales in which she characterized her people very sharply, principally through dialect. Her best work, as is not uncommon in American literature, was her earliest, the collec- tions A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891) Also writing of rural New England was the Connecticut short story writer Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892) in whose work, says James D. Hart in The Oxford Companion to American Literature, “one may trace the development of the short story [over fifty years] in America, from unlocalized, leisurely, sentimental tales to simple histories of commonplace people set in a real locale.” Down South As Mark Twain had written about California and the Mississippi, so Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922) gave up his career as a lawyer to write not only social studies in The Old South (1892), Social Life in Old Virginia (1897), and The Old Dominion (1908), but also a life of Robert E. Lee, novels, and short stories of local color in In Ole Virginia (1887) and of the Southern character in Bred in the Bone (1904). What Page did for Virginia, Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) did even better for Georgia, creating in the person of Uncle Remus one of the three or four most famous characters in American literature. With simple humor and authentic Negro dialect, Harris painted a superb picture, if not exactly a reliable one, of plantation life. He wrote a great many stories based on native legends, beginning with those collected in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881). The mountaineers of the Cumberland Range appear in the novel- ettes and stories of John Willian Fox, Jr. (1863-1919), the local colorist of Kentucky. “Charles Egbert Craddock”. (actually Miss Mary Noailles Murfree, 1850-1922) gained national attention for her state with novels and short stories that were marvelous combina- tions of romantic plots and authentic details of life in the mountains of Tennessee. She even managed a few stories about the Cherokees and life in the great Southwest, never betraying the fact that she was a frail, crippled spinster who hardly ventured out of Tennessee. Kate Chopin (1851-1904) married a Creole, lived in New Orleans (which also fascinated Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Lafcadio Hearn, and others), and presided over a Louisiana cotton plantation She wrote of Creole and Cajun characters in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). But she never approached the importance aL ih it i | | iof George Washington Cable (1844-1925). Though his works are more sketches than stories, he achieved lasting fame with his tales of Old Creole Days (1879), the novelette (a short novel or a long short story) Madame Delphine, and other works, despite the fact that his view of the Creoles was vehemently attacked by one of them, Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette (under the pseudonym “E. Junius”) in A Critical Dialogue Between Aboo and Caboo (1880). Much as Cable and Rouquette disagreed on the subject of the Creoles, both held unpopular views on slavery and were driven out of the South, Cable to New England and Rouquette to missionary work among the Choctaw Indians. The local colorist has not always had an easy time in American letters, not even in the South, from which so many of the best ones come. Many people are not flattered when they see their customs portrayed as quaint or their beliefs exposed as peculiar Impressionism, Naturalism, Realism “Instead of painting a tree,” said Lewis Mumford of the French Impressionists (such as Manet and Monet, Renoir and Degas), they painted “the effect of a tree.” In literature some writers also were impressionists, describing things as they struck the viewer, at a cer- tain moment in time, from a certain point of view, rather than as they were, objectively. Some wrote, or tried to write, with objectivity, as naturalists, applying the precise principles of scientific determin- ism to literature. Some were less extreme but still opposed to roman- ticism; dedicated as William Dean Howells said to “the truthful treatment” of the commontman and the commonplace, they followed the English novelist “George Eliot” (Mary Ann Evans Cross) in the literary, moral, philosophical, and political paths of realism. All these attitudes and styles were evident as the American short story came to world prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies, though realism, even hard-bitten realism, is what most foreign- ers think of when they consider the American story. The Americans conquered the West, but the Middle West con- quered America, at least insofar as its impact on literary style was concerned. It may have been the flat, plain country that influenced these writers’ flat, plain statements. Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) was one of the early significant realists, a “veritist” writing of farm jife on the “middle border.” The region was also to feature in the works of Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It was from the vast dust bowl of the plains that the 22“Okies” of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Crapes of Wrath (1939) tnigrated to California in the best-known work of John Steinbeck (born 1902). From mid-America as well have core many moving stories, such as those by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (bor 1909) collected in The Watchful Gods (1950). These are only a few of the many American writers, now known internationally, who have helped to create the impression (not altogether accurate, we need hardly say) that the typical American story has a bourgeois theme and setting, an optimistic and pragmatic philosophy, a democratic view of politics, and an unsentimental view of life, Supposedly, too, it is set among “standard” Americans of the Middle West and writ- ten in the realistic way for which William Dean Howells, in Criti- cism and Fiction (1891), and others battled so hard in the face of other, just as typical, American strivings for sentiment, significance, and symbolism. Even the impressionists, of course, were dealing with the actual. From Poe’s insistence upon effect, from the realists with their fasci- nation for physical details and particular conditions, from the local colorists with their stress on details and circumstances too (even in the most romantically exotic settings), came a school of American impressionists. They attempted to bring “sense objects” vividly be- fore the mind’s eye. They were simply trying to get across another kind of “reality.” They used precise details, but they fréighted them with symbolic significance as they attempted to present what the object meant to them, rather than a mere photograph of the object. (The naturalists were photographing—without even aiming the cam- era lest they destroy objectivity, some of them claimed.) The impres- sionists were pushing objective character, action, and setting into the background, but the reality was still there. The work of all the best writers had this in common, whatever their theory or practice: they were all coming to grips with life. Lost Generations from Bierce to Hemingway Two writers who began to attract attention abroad were Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) and Stephen Crane (1871-1900). Beginning as “Dod Grile,” the journalist, Bierce published a number of short stories in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), of which the remarkable “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Byidge” is still the most praised and imitated. His work, however, was bitter and disillusioned; although his surprise endings were much copied, his‘ sardonic tone proved unpopular, To Bierce, who disappeared into the “good, kind dark- 23ness” of revolutionary Mexico to escape both letters and life, popu- larity did not matter. He fled what he considered the vulgar and sick American civilization and was never seen again. Popularity counted more for Stephen Crane and it accounted for the worst of his incredibly awkward potboilers. At the same time he earned and received popular acclaim for the immensely successful and artistically praiseworthy stories “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel” and the great novel to come out of the Civil War (written by a man too young to have experienced it), The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The novel sounded like naturalism, but it really was impressionism; it appeared to be rezorded, but it was in fact imagined. If nothing else, this novel taught the American writers of the short story that “realism” can be attained through imagination rather than reportage and that it is most valuable’when applied not to dull physical surroundings but to intense psychological states of mind. Some critics have remarked that Bierce and Crane were born out of due time and really should have been contemporary with two other prominent American writers who moved from journalism to grander pursuits: William Faulkner (1897-1962) and Ernest Hem- ingway (1899-1961), both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature and both in reality impressionist writers much praised for their “realism.” Faulkner has often been discussed in terms of his realistic portrayal of the Old South (represented by his mythical Yoknapa- tawpha County, in Mississippi) in such masterpieces as “A Rose for Emily,” but he was not a traditional realist. Rather, in some respects, he was in his most characteristic work the inheritor of the horror story tradition, the master of modern Gothic. He often reminds us of Poe. Hemingway, for all the hard-boiled manliness of his boxers, athletes, and soldiers, shares some of Poe's moodiness and, in his admiration for bullfighters and big-game hunters, Poe's obsession with death. Bierce and Crane were no less, despite their dates, members in spirit than was Hemingway in actuality of what Gertrude Stein dubbed the “lost generation” of the desolate and disillusioned. These emotions made Bierce sardonic and Crane sentimental. They made Faulkner often rhetorical but a sound stylist. Hemingway, too, was essentially a stylist—for even simplicity can be a pose—and it would seem that he has influenced a whole generation of writers and cap- tured a whole generation of readers with what has come to be one of the most characteristic ways of speaking in modern American liter- ature: the hair-on-the-chest, tough-guy talk in which the upper lip is kept so stiff that no emotion is shown and the words are spit out of the corner of the mouth.From “O, Henry” to The New Yorker Ending Slickness, too, is part of the American short story. Perhaps equally as popular as Hemingway with the common reader, if his time, was William Sidney Porter (1862-1910) who called himself “O. Henry.” As a stylist he was as self-conscious as Hemingway. His work has been called sentimental, his view of life somewhat superficial, and, not to make the catalogue too long, he has been accused of using joumalistic clichés and tattered scraps of borrowed finery. But he knew a great secret: the force of form, the importance of plot. Several French writers also showed the way. Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), before he went insane (1891), turned out a staggering number of short stories and other writings, Obviously he had more working for him than the strong influence of the socially conscious Emile Zola (1840-1902) and the precise though evocative psycho- logical realism of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), author of Three Tales (1877). He had, not to make it sound too mechanical, a for- mula for the short story, and it included a highly developed and dev- astatingly effective surprise ending, the feature always noted in the works of O. Henry. Maupassant’s work came to America through Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855-1896), who not only imitated Maupas- sant in light tales of New York like Short Sixes (1891) but rewrote him for American consumption in Made in France (1893). Bunner is forgotten today, but O. Henry is remembered because he perfected the trick ending, giving new meaning to Poe’s suggestion that an effective story has to be written backwards. In most of Maupassant’s three hundred stories (of which “The Dia- mond Necklace” and “The Jewels of M. Lantin” are representative gems), he kept his distance from his characters throughout. He never interfered or evaluated as the details “came out’—they hardly seem to have been “thought up’—and so he could present the most sordid facts without feeling obliged to click his tongue (or lick his lips) over them. Then he could suddenly materialize at the conclusion of a story and make it affect the reader exactly as he wished. O. Henry’s version of the trick ending was often copied, in the end too often. In comparatively recent times there has been a reac- tion. The surprise ending is now largely confined to certain kinds of science fiction stories and television scripts, although one of the best- known stories of our time (Shirley Jackson's * 's “The Lottery”) depends on a sort of surprise and John Collier’s‘tiny‘masterpiece “The Chaser” shows what really can be done when subtlety is mbt subordinated to “significance.” Since 1925, the stories in The New Yorker Magazine have revealed 25the tendency of modern writers to avoid the trick ending. The “walk away” ending has taken over, as a device, from the “clincher.” That is to say, instead of there being a cleverly manipulated resolution of the central conflict, many short stories today contain no clearly de- fined conclusion, Nothing happens to set everything “right.” Instead, the reader is left to meditate on the implications of the author's view of a situation and just work his own way toward some conclusion. It would be inaccurate, however, to say that “The New Yorker story” leans in one stylistic direction only. The magazine has defied rigid classification over the years by offering a broad spectrum of the kind of short story being written in America. The various volumes of Short Stories from The New Yorker contain such diverse talents as James Thurber, E. B, White, Dorothy Parker, Sally Benson, Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, John O'Hara, John Colliér, Joseph Mitchell, Kay Boyle, Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Robert M. Coates, and Nancy Hale. When a single literary magazine can have published talents as varied and notable as these~and others—we may say that the American short story has arrived, in all its delightful diversity.IV. THE MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORY Romanticism Disguised as Realism Writers have demonstrated the fact that in literature things are not always what they seem. Fiction requires a kind of duplicity: the work of art must not too obviously wear an identifying bell, like a leper. To avoid the stereotype, some writers may adopt an approach to their material which departs from the traditional paths established by predecessors. However, close inspection may reveal that the intent was there but the execution fell short. A good example of “literary disguise” can be found in the work of Frank Norris (1870-1902). He appeared to deal with “real life” realistically. He copied both the subjective realism of Rudyard Kipling and the objective natural- ism of Emile Zola and yet constructed highly individual pictures of brawling American life in such collections of stories as A. Deal in Wheat (1903). Actually, he was a thoroughgoing romantic journal- ist, like Jack London (1876-1916), the author of South Sea Tales (1911) and other adventure yarns. Norris only pretended to be a realist and a modemist. His swashbuckling “men, strong, brutal men, with red-hot blood in them” were drawn less from life than from the oldest clichés of romantic fiction. There has been a good deal of this in the American short story since his time, too. True Realism Actually there is less realism in the works of Frank Norris than in those of Edith Wharton (1862-1937). She described from the inside the elegant and genteel society at the tum of the century and mi- nutely analyzed, like her friend and mentor, the expatriate Henry James (1843-1916), the subtleties of social intercourse and the moral complexities of modem life, Mrs. Wharton's story “Roman Fever” is an American classic, probing deep into problems of psycho- logy and class. * What Mrs. Wharton did for fashionabie society, Ring Lardner (1885-1933) did even more mercilessly for the common man, whom aThe presented with a cruel and exact ear for his lingo in such master- pieces as “Haireut” and “The Golden Honeymoon.” Fis was an age of cynical (or coldly realistic) debunkers and of sincere searchers for truth like Sherwood Anderson. Anderson saw the pity as well as the tawdriness of small-town life, and in Winesburg, Ohio he de- picted the “grotesques” that narrow-mindedness and outworn con- ventions could make of little people who took partial truths, called them their truth, and tried to live their lives by them until the truth they embraced “became a falsehood.” Subsequent studies in the short story form—of reality and appearance, lives and values, masks and faces-chave been among the best things in our literature Character The American’s penchant for realism and his interest in human values, operative both in outward action and inner turmoil, has led modern writers of the short story to a strong emphasis on character and psychology in the tradition of James, the “biographer of fine consciences.” The Great War brought values and character into sharp focus; it dislocated and disillusioned a whole generation of ‘American writers and gave them only despair or hedonism to replace their ruined values and tarnished ideals. In those years of melancholy Bohemianism and aesthetic expatriation, the “little magazines” brought to the intellectually daring public the questionings of Hem- ingway and the microscopic examinations of Joyce. Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the glamorous playboy of the Jazz ‘Age, created not only storigs but a legend in The Saturday Evening Post and Scribner’s magazines and cast into doubt the very glamour of the life he depicted and led. Other writers kept less in the public eye and yet won serious attention with their refined styles and deep psychological insights. Perhaps the greatest of these was Katherine ‘Anne Porter (born 1890). Her collection Flowering Judas (1930) was an immense and immediate success and, by her personal exam- ple and teaching as well as by her finely-chiseled work, she has in- fluenced a whole generation of American writers. The works of these authors made way for greater and greater penetration into character. Realism came to mean psychological realism, as we can see in such profound studies as “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Impulse” by Conrad Aiken (born 1889). No- where has this dominant tendency of modern American fiction been more evident than in the Southem Gothic of Faulkner and the highly 28symbolic studies of the grotesque of Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. Eudora Welty (born 1909) lives in her native Mississippi and writes with verve and sly humor of the highly individual characters of the Delta; Truman Capote (born 1924) writes with consummate skill and poetic fancy of the fragile outcasts of society; Carson McCullers (1917-1967) deals with the lonely and the sensitive; and Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) treats the inverted and macabre. Structure Sensitivity and psychological insight have not completely blinded the modern short story writers’ view of structure. Most competent authors agree that form is important, although they may disagree as to what its outline should be. Some critics insist that trick stories such as “The Lady, or The Tiger?” by Frank R. Stockton (1834- 1902) and even J. M. Witherow’s “The Test” have had their day, despite John Collier's “The Chaser” and the short stories in the form of television programs presented by Alfred Hitchcock and other specialists in suspense and surprise. Others say that “Scribbled se- cret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for my own joy” belong more to psychiatry than to literature—that we need more craft. Tru- man Capote has said about the “writing” of such moderns as Jack Kerouac: “It’s not writing, it’s typing.” “When seriously explored,” says Capote, “the short story seems to me the most difficult and dis- ciplining form of prose writing extant.” From this view, mere scrib- bling of introspective reactions to a hostile world may contribute. to social protest, but the absence of design and purpose may destroy the material as a work of art. There must be at least the desire of Douglas Woolf for “some kind of balance.” Psychology, which may be able to explain some of the effusions of those who have abandoned or ignored form, seems to offer a better promise for modem fiction than sociology has done recently. It will Jead to new forms, new directions; there are all kinds of short stories possible. As Amnold Bennett says, everything counts: “Style counts, plot counts, originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters. . And that “convincingness” seems % be, these days the special achievement, if not the exclusive possession, of careful stylists, dedi- cated craftsmen, and serious writers who boast a perceptive eye and an analytic mind, not a camera and a tape recorder. 29Piot — and After This is not to say that short story writing is all carpentry or to agree with popular standards that plot is the paramount feature of American short stories today. There was a time when “Marjorie Daw” by Thomas Bailey Al- drich (1836-1907) was thought, because of its unusual narrative pattern, to be the epitome of the form. Although imitators have robbed the story of much of its novelty, it is still worth studying as an example of what can be done with plot design. Many of the mod- em short story writers, however, are not overly concerned with placing undue stress on plot, as can be noted in such American standards as Lionel Trilling’s “Of This Time, Of That Place,” Robert Penn Warren's “Blackberry Winter,” George P. Elliott’s “Among the Dangs,” Irwin Shaw's “ in Their Summer Dresses,” James Purdy’s “The Color of Darkness,” William Carlos Williams’ “The Use of Force,” Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays,” J. F. Powers’ “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel,” and J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé, With Love and Squalor.” Writers seem to be increasingly concerned with philosophical problems, psychological states, and subjective approaches, more than with the carefully constructed story of a craftsman like Wilbur Dan- iel Steele (born 1886) whose “Footfalls” is well-known. Modern writers tend to be more experimental, like Nelson Algren and Wil- liam Saroyan and William Burroughs. These men may lack the skill in exposition that made “Paul's Case” and “The Sculptor’s Fu- neral” by Willa Cather so remarkable, but they are daringly seeking insight into personal psychplogy and understanding of the clash of cultural values demonstrated in these two stories. They are seeking to re-create and interpret rather than merely to refer to or describe the human condition, to make the reading of a story the momentary experience of what it is all about, to make even fantasies and alle- gories, myths and dreams, solid, apprehendable, more striking and more meaningful than life itself. Style Fach writer of value attempts to do this in his own way. As H. L. Mencken said in another connection, “He must produce the effects with whatever tools will work. If pills fail, he gets out his saw” and operates on the patient. “If the saw won't cut, he seizes a club.” Many American writers do a great deal of their work with style, 30though sometimes apologetically, for there is a misconception abroad in this country that direct speech is best for complete communica- tion, that even Henry James, the patriarch of the psychological novel, as his pragmatic brother William James averred, should have learned to “spit it out.” The ideal, as poet Marianne Moore would say, is to write “in plain American which cats and dogs can read.” John O'Hara (born 1905), an outstanding professional novelist and also a deft short story writer, feels obliged to use a great deal of art to conceal his art, to go to great pains to hide the fact that he has a style at all. Some of the most promising of the younger American writers—John Updike (born 1932), for example—are frowned upon because they do not strive to hide the fact that what they write is brilliant. It has been said that, in the modern American short story, lack of organization too often passes for verisimilitude, clumsiness for spontaneity or inspiration, lack of point for honesty or fairness, lack of precision for titillating “ambiguity,” and lack of style in gen- eral for sincerity. Still, there are enough writers of talent today in America that we need not fear, however difficult it may be for the stylist to gain adequate appreciation at this time, that the genre’s long history will end, as did the famous Roman road, in a mire. 31V. THE MODERN BRITISH SHORT STORY The “Amateurs” The question of style is only one of the points on which the Amer- ican short story writer may be compared and contrasted with the British, who have been less suspicious of a glittering surface, less prone to believe that polish conceals defects. As they can produce a Ronald Firbank among novelists, so among short story writers there have been those who might almost be called amateurs, were their work not so exquisite: H. H. Munro (1870-1916), journalist, whose first collection of stories, Reginald, was published under the pseudo- nym “Saki” in 1904; Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), educa- tor, archaeologist, antiquary, and master of the arcane ghost story in “The Mezzotint” and “Casting the Runes”; Richard Garnett (1835- 1906), librarian, cynical philosopher and shrewd humorist in the stories collected in The Twilight of the Gods (1888); C. E. Monta- gue (1867-1928), journalist, clever purveyor of a subtle mixture of irony and pathos in Fiery Particles (1923); st Bramah [Smith] (1869-1942), numismatist, creator of the sophisticated celestial Kai Lung, “a wandering Chinese storyteller who manages to extricate himself from dangerous predicaments by his unparalleled skill in relating the legends to his cbuntry”; and even W. W. Jacobs (1863- 1943), whose stark and exciting handling of the supernatural in “The Monkey's Paw” has made it one of the most famous stories of all time. These stories are not “deep”; none of these authors could be called profound, but Oscar Wilde, a superb stylist, may have been right: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” Stevenson and Conan Doyle Wilde also said some interesting things about the exceptional earnestness of the Victorians, and he made fun of their preference for soppy “three-volume” novels. But many of the leading writers of the Victorian period—Dickens, Meredith, and Hardy among 32them—also tried their hand at short fiction, and some of their stories were as commendable as Charles Dickens’ “The Signal Man.” It was not until Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), however, that the short stories appearing in the numerous periodicals of nine- teenth-century England (which even published novels in install- ments) began to take a significant new turn. Stevenson’s interest in the romantic and the picturesque led him into impressionism with such contributions to Temple Bar Magazine as “A Lodging for the Night” and “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door.” Morality was always Stevenson’s “veiled mistress,” and, though influences on him were largely French, he reminds us of Hawthorne's concem with moral and ethical problems when we read such stories as “Markheim” and the “detective romance,” The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which was published in 1886. The next year saw the appear- ance of the most famous of all detectives: Sherlock Holmes. Holmes made his debut in A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), then a poor young graduate of Edinburgh Uni- versity practicing medicine at Southsea and desperately sending stories to magazines. When he hit upon the idea of exploiting scien- tific criminology and of modeling his hero after a sharp-eyed Dr. Bell whom he had known in Edinburgh, Conan Doyles career be- gan. The English publishers bought complete rights to A Study in Scarlet for only £25, but Lippincott’s Magazine in America paid better for The Sign of Four, and, after these short novels, Sherlock Holmes (who bears the names of a prominent cricketer and the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes) appeared in many short stories such as those collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). So popular was Holmes that when his creator tired of him and “killed him off” in a story, the Great Detective had to be resur- rected by popular demand. Today “218 Baker Street” is probably the best-known fictional address in the world. Not Professor Challenger of The Lost World or any of the characters in Conan Doyle’s ambi- tious historical novels can hold a candle to “that tall ascetic figure” of Holmes once “the game is afoot.” We have spoken of “amateur” writers of distinction: the Sherlock Holmes stories represent the triumph of the professional turning out with apparent ease the thoroughly commercial, eminently salable product. Rudyard Kipling 7 A tmuly great name in the history of the modern British short story must surely be that of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). He is usually remembered as the starry-eyed drummer boy of Empire in the days 33of the british raj (rule) in India, but his best work lay largely in stories of the supernatural, such as “The Mark of the Beast” and “The Wish House.” In “They,” which some regard as far better than the better-known “The Man Who Would Be King,” Kipling may indeed have written one of the greatest short stories published in the English language. Today it is fashionable to disparage Kipling, to say with Lionel Trilling that he taught us to admire “the illiterate and shiftless parts of humanity,” to agree with Sir Max Beerbohm about his “essentially feminine point of view,” to be shocked by his sadism and embarrassed by his politics. But generations of writers have profited from the careful study of his works, even the least of his journalism. Like O. Henry, he could “tell a story,” no mean ac- complishment, and that prompted this praise from W. Somerset Maugham: Rudyard Kipling isthe only writer of short stories our country has i produced who can stand comparison with Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov. He is our greatest story writer. I can’t believe he will ever be equalled. I am sure he can never be excelled. Short Fiction of the Novelists Many masters of the modern short story since Kipling (who wrote such novels as The Light that Failed, 1890, and Kim, 1901) have been novelists who also found advantages in the shorter form: Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Huxley, Bowen, Greene, Wilson, and such excellent but lesser-known writers as Christopher Isherwood and William Sansom, who ruminate not on the probabili- ties but on the possibilities,of human behavior. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) did not write English as his mother tongue—he was born a Pole—but he began to manipulate it at the age of forty to create vivid detail and to achieve poetic suggestive- ness, sometimes “a sinister resonance,” as in “The Lagoon.” Conrad’s famous novel Lord Jim (1900) grew from a short story: “But, seri- ously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought was of a short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode; nothing more.” He interrupted its composition to write two of his best-liked novel- ettes, Youth and The Heart of Darkness, elaborating them from single episodes by dint of great imagination and “a feat of memory.” Their single-mindedness, contrasted with the episodic nature of the novel Lord Jim, speaks volumes about the forcefulness and unity of shorter fiction. E. M. Forster (born 1879) has not only succeeded in the symbolic 34 iinovel of manners, but he has also brought the mordant ironies, wit, and evocativeness of his novel A Passage to India (1924), a classic of modern fiction, into his short allegories of the humanist tradition, such as the title story of The Celestial Omnibus (1911). He casts in doubt Anthony Trollope’s judgment that fiction is not inspiration but simply a high form of craftsmanship. James Joyce (1882-1941) and Virginia Woolf (also 1882-1941) experimented with the stream of consciousness technique and brought meticulous craftsmanship to what T. S. Eliot has called the “wrestle” with words, Mrs. Woolf demonstrated amazing interior knowledge of idiosyncratic character in such stories as “The Duchess and the Jeweler.” Joyce ingeniously structured in his collection The Dubliners (1914) a linked series of spiritual revelations (which he called “epiphanies”). His methods have undeniably affected the course of the modern short story, especially his emphasis on the sym- bolic structure of character and his technique of particularizing general experience, as, for example, in “Araby.” Less intellectualized was the short story in the hands of D, H. Lawrence (1885-1930), who probed with “passionate eagerness for life” and dedication to art what Aldous Huxley has called “the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind.” Most of his works have an underlying sexuality and they comment, as does the much-debated “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” on some of the basic drives and primordial fears of man. In contrast, Huxley (1894-1963) was the analyst of exterior hu- manity, though in such stories as “Young Archimedes” he presented not only brilliantly observed surfaces and appearances but also shrewd estimates of the forces and reasons behind them. His under- standing of children is shared by Elizabeth Bowen (bom 1899), renowned as a novelist, but who began as a writer of short stories (reissued in Early Stories, 1951). She remains a somewhat cynical but fundamentally sympathetic delineator of the remnants of child- ish innocence in adult behavior, The concer of her fine novels is reflected in her story of “The Colonel's Daughter,” which touches upon such central themes of British fiction as the sensitivities of the decayed gentry and the problems of shabby gentility. Graham Greene (bom 1904) has written not only serious novels and mere “entertainments” but dazzling short stories like “The Hint of an Explanation,” a title which may be said to comment on his approach. His concern is to explore, avith ,“a strong sense of pity,” what he likes to seek out in labyrinthine ‘psychological ways: “the humanity in the apparently inhuman character.” As a film (The Fallen Idol, directed by Sir Carol Reed) Creene’s story of “The 35Basement Room” became very widely known. John Atkins wrote that the “conviction that one emotionally charged incident in child hood can leave its mark on the whole of-later development is the moral basis of the story.” It is the basis of many other moder stories as well. With merciless irony and hardly any pity whatever, on the other hand, Angus Wilson (born 1913) spitefully pursues “darling dodos” and fascinating eccentrics of almost Dickensizn persuasion, people who have distorted themselves in an attempt at dehumanization so that they can appear to control the tidy and terrible situations in which they find themselves. “Realpolitik” is but one of the minor masterpieces of Wilson. He says he turned to writing as “a good way of diversifying my time”: I never wrote anything—except for the school,.magazine—until No- " vember 1946. Then I wrote a short story one week end—“Raspberry i Jam”—and followed ‘that up by writing a short story every week end for twelve weeks. 1 was then thirty-three. My writing started as a hobby: that seems a funny word to use—but, yes, hobby. That British “amateur spirit” again: a “hobby” of the short story has been enjoyed by many masters of other genres, from novelists like Sylvia Townsend Warner to poets like Dylan Thomas. But the form has also had its own aficionados, talents as vigorous and diver- gent in the British tradition as, for example, A. E. Coppard and Nadine Gordimer, H. G. Wells and Hubert Crackanthorpe, V. 8 Pritchett and Algernon Blackwood, Samuel Beckett (who writes in French, to discipline his style) and John Lennon (whose style is as individual and, to some, as undisciplined as the music of The Beatles, of which group he is a member). Ireland, too, has producgd short story writers of the very first rank. Take Frank O'Connor (Michael O'Donovan, 1903-1966), for in- stance. “O’Connor is doing for Ireland,” said William Butler Yeats, “what Chekhov did for Russia.” And, in The Lonely Voice: A Study in the Short Story, O'Connor wrote one of the finest analyses of the . form and revealed many of the secrets of short fiction and the vig- nettes which made him famous. Katherine Mansfield Probably the modern British writer who has done most, as Eliza- beth Bowen says, “to alter for good and all our idea of what goes to make a story,” was a native of New Zealand who wrote eighty- eight stories, twenty-six of which were left unfinished at the time 36 SSee of her tragically early death from tuberculosis. Katherine Mansfield (née Beauchamp, 1888-1923) was established as a major writer with the stories collected in Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party (1922). It has been claimed that her subjectivity was limiting, that her tech- nique threatened to become febrile, but even Conrad Aiken, review- ing The Garden Party and complaining that “one cannot dine on the iridescent,” noticed “the evidence, luminous, colorful, and re- sonant everywhere, of a tactilism extraordinarily acute and individ- ual.” In her journal Katherine Mansfield was equally critical of herself: Take the case of K. M. She has led, ever since she can remember, a very typically false life, Yet, through it all, there have been mo- ments, instants, gleams, when she felt the possibility of something quite other, “The stories are more than moments, instants, gleams,” writes Miss Bowen; “she has given them touches of eternity. The dauntless artist accomplished, if less than she hoped, more than she knew.” W. Somerset Maugham Appealing to a wider public than was reached by the oblique nar- ratives and psychological complexities of Katherine Mansfield was another artist, not yet fully appreciated, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). His Collected Stories contain masterpieces like “The Outstation” and “The Letter,” which will probably outlast all the modern critics who dismiss Maugham as merely competent. Maugham wrote for a huge public, not only in such great novels as Of Human Bondage (1915) and The Razor's Edge (1944), but in more than one hundred stories, He never quailed before the critics. He said to them what every dedicated artist says: “You can take it or leave it.” He quoted Chekhov: Critics are like horseflies which prevent the horse from ploughing. For over twenty years I have read criticisms of my stories, and I do not remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once Skabichevsky wrote Something which made an im- pression on me. He said 1 would die in a ditch, drunk. The time will come when Maugham will have his revenge. Then some fledgling Doctor of Philosophy vill struggle to explain how a | man with one of the rarest of all delightful talents, the ability to | spin a yarn well, wrote “Miss Thompson” or “Rain” from this outline he serawled in a notebook: 37A prostitute, flying from Honolulu after a raid, lands at Pago Pago. There lands there also a missionary and his wife. Also the narrator. All are obliged to stay there owing to an outbreak of measles. The missionary finding out her profession persecutes her. He reduces her to misery, shame, and repentance; he has no mercy on her. He in- duces the Governor to order her return to Honolulu. One moming he is found with his throat cut by his own hand and she is once more radiant and self-possessed. She looks at men and scornfully explains: dirty pigs. Read this, and then the story of Sadie Thompson. You will see why Maugham can legitimately be regarded among the great British storytellers, a group which he very generously said was headed by Kipling, another writer now out of fashion. The Concerns of the British Short Story While American short fiction has reflected the changing values of a nation on the rise to greatness, developing dynamically and variously and concemed with such probiems as the role of the in- dividual in an increasingly organized and mechanized society and the status of the minority group (whether locally or racially defined ), the British short story has more often chronicled “the dissolution of the British Empire” abroad and the rise of the “proles” at home. The rush of events has precipitated a reappraisal of values in devaluated Britain. She has been faced with questions of rights and revolution, traditions of decency and the demands of new necessities, social classes and social responsibilities, exhaustion and vitality. Less keenly conscientious about formfand structure, perhaps, than the American and French writers, the “British have seemed to specialize in char- acter and tone in an age when slickness and symbolism have been in the forefront. 38VL THE FUTURE OF THE SHORT STORY Symbolism and Sense The techniques of the symbolic story, though they may have been significantly developed in the tales of Hawthorne and Mel- ville, today seer to hold one of the keys to the understanding of new directions in the short story. They were largely rediscovered in modern literature by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), whose greatest works (The Trial, The Castle, Amerika) were not published until after his death. Today they can be seen influencing the Brazilian stories of La trama celeste (1948) by Adolfo Bioy Casares! Both write of impossible dreamworlds, yet we realize (in Rossetti’s words): “I have been here before,/But when or how I cannot tell.” Kafka-set the style of describing the chaos and nihilism of a universe of Angst, the nameless dread of the “mute, marching, pushed and shoved souls,” In enigmatic stories such as “A Country Doctor” and “A Hun- ger-Artist,” Kafka was able to make the reader not only accept the incredible, nightmare worlds as real but to see in them a strange and pristine reality, the other side of the moon. In fact, Herman Melville (1819-1891), who had long been dismissed in American literature as “the man who lived among the cannibals” and whose Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) had come to overshadow his magnificent “black book” Moby Dick (1851), found a new and more appreciative audience as a result of the Kafka vogue. Kafka’s bizarre and yet meaning-packed dream-visions generated a post- humous popularity not only for himself but also for Melville’s Piazza Tales (1856), especially the haunting “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno.” Kafka’s fame had repercussions on all aspects of modern fiction, and he did at least as much for (or to) the modem short story as did Sigmund Freud. ‘The modem short story has moved from mere pictures or sketches, as Johann Ludwig Tieck called his tales (Die Gemalde, collected at the beginning of the nineteenth century ), to psychdlogical portraiture. As early as Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), au- 39thors were claiming that they wrote of the terrors “not of Germany, but of the soul.” Kafka and his numerous imitators worked in a venerable tradition. It has not yet been exhausted. “tt ls Strange How Things Happen in Life” Icis striking that the genre of the short story took so distinct a turn in America, France, and Russia, all at the same time in the early 1830's. In this brief survey we have been compelled to concentrate primarily on short fiction in English, paying less than complete attention to many other rich literatures in foreign languages. Here we must say, however, that while Poe and Hawthorne were laying the foundations of a new American fiction, and while British writers were neglecting the short story and the drama for the novel and poetry, in Russia great strides were being made in short fiction. Aleksandr Pushkin aritl Nikolai Gogol were opening new fron- tiers. They marshaled their powers and turned their attention to details of ordinary life, away from fairy romances like Russlan and Ludmilla (1820), expansive dramas and novels (Eugene Onegin, in verse, 1825-1831), and the fantasy and eccentric exoticism of Germans like Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffman. Pushkin (1799-1837) published Tales by Belkin (anonymous, 1831) and his prose master- work The Queen of Spades (1834), while Gogol (1809-1852) moved from romantic tales set in his native Ukraine (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, 1831-1832) to realistic caricatures of life in St. Petersburg. The best of these, “The Overcoat,” was published in 1842 and from it, said a later master of the short story, “we all come.” There may be writers of today who likewise will give a new direction to the story of the future. ' . From Gogol’s picaresque novel Dead Souls (1842) and its inven- tive handling of the details of everyday existence came A Sports- man’s Sketches (1852) and other stories of peasant life by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883). “It is strange how things happen in life,” remarked a character in Turgenev’s “The District Doctor,” and the author then went on to show with uncanny vividness and penetration how every level of society in the feudal hierarchy of Imperial Russia, every denizen of the silent forests and the bleak steppes of southwest Russia, can be trapped into “blurting out all his intimate secrets.” The modern writer has learned to make the inarticulate little man speak, and he has discovered that “insignificant people” often have great significance. “I’m a man who,” says Bernard Malamud’s Yakov Bok, “although not much, is stil] much more than nothing.” 40Capturing Character The aim of the short story after Turgenev became his own: the capturing of the form and pressure of life, not devised and ingeni- ously ordered, but observed and honestly recorded. In France, Mérimée, Balzac, and Gautier offered their tranche de vie (“slice of life”) based on unblinking observation, unflinching veracity, and unwavering objectivity. The search for le mot juste, the “exact word” that would fix quick life in the amber of art, led Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) literally to roll around on the rug in frustration. As the modern short story writer experiments with ever more successful methods of communication, he might well consider the economy and precision of Flaubert’s best works. To catch a perfect likeness of a character, each line must be exactly right. The emphasis in modem stories has definitely swung from mood or melodrama to character and psychology. Poe would start with an idea and eventually come to embody it in, say, the twin characters of Roderick and Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This built tremendous melodramatic climaxes into the stories and led to Maupassant’s emphasis on action and outcome. But Turgenev, for example, tried to observe or to visualize a character so clearly that he could follow his gradual revelation and make that unfolding the plot of the story, the action, the reason for and the determinant of the situation. Turgeney was one of the founders of the school of Chekhov, a realist who rejected fantasy and melodrama in favor of the far more startling realities of fact and the drama of everyday life. As Chekhoy pointed out, people do not go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs; they go home to their families and eat cabbage soup. So he rejected contrived plots, straightforward development of action, obvious climaxes. He wrote often of tedium and stagnation, but that did not mean that his stories were boring or uneventful or even despondent. His realistic outlook did not deprive him of human sympathy or even of hope, and his tales—like “Slander,” “The Bet,” “Sergeant Prishibeyev’—are both comic and tragic, just as his plays, like The Cherry Orchard, receive their action from the juxtaposition of pathos and farce. Irony is found with isolation, loneliness with an ability to laugh at what cannot be remedied. “Chekhov's narrative art,” wrote Thomas Mann, “is unsurpassed in European literature.” Chekhov's time (1860-1904) splits the whole history of modern fiction into pre-Chekhovian and post-Chekhovian phases, for his genius was able to realize in art the basic principles 6f another master, Henry James, elucidated in The Art of Fiction (1884): “What is character but determination of incident? What is incident but the 4illustration of character?” That structure embodies meaning, that sub- ject dictates form, that the work of art, however artificial, is organic —these are the lessons that moderns have learned and will continue to apply. The Present Situation In modern literature these principles endure, for they have been discovered, not devised, and they lie deeper than fashions, inherent in the short story form. With such writers as Katherine Mansfield and Katherine Anne Porter, for example, there was established a fruitful trend toward the symbolic use of personal situation, but meth- ods of delineating character and situation have not changed. There has been a vogue of fealism and something of a revival of the fanciful and the grotesque, for to many (Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus among them) only these techniques can mirror the existential reality, the ludicrousness of individual incidents in a modern world which itself has:-become a “Theatre of the Absurd.” When the world is mad, art itself may seem to be mad. But—“There is only one differ- ence between a madman and me,” said the painter Salvador Dali. “Lam not mad.” Some writers of today are producing work which many of the public call “crazy.” Some have turned to bitter though boisterous black comedy to celebrate the fact that they think it is, as critic Cyril Connolly has proclaimed, “closing time in the gardens of the West.” Others are distinguished by the resonance of their solitude or the quality of their despair. Some are whistling in the dark. Her- bert Gold and Nelson Aléren and James Baldwin, among others, offer solutions to the social problems of America. In France, Alain Robbe- Grillet, who sees a story as a scenario, a series of incidents, not an event, creates a mere peg on which we are invited to hang any inter- pretation of our own, Today's younger writers, inheritors of a great tradition, cannot deny the influences of their illustrious predecessors, but many of them have elected to go on from there and have taken new directions in art, or fashion. It is in many cases difficult to see which experiments will fail and which are succeeding now. Time will tell. “Art produces ugly things which frequently become beau- tiful with time,” Jean Cocteau tells us. “Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” Alberto Moravia, Tommaso Landolfi, and Luigi Pirandello of Italy, to mention only that cultural center of the Old World, have made their impact with new ideas. Jorge Luis Borges, the leading 42short story writer of South America, for another, has shown the vigor of the New World. In the emerging nations of Africa and all around the globe, modern fiction is healthy and daring. The past is prologue Great changes are now taking place, particularly in relation to plot, which was once confidently asserted to be the particular prov- ince and principal structural element of the pithy short narrative. Now “passions spin the plot” to a greater extent than even George Meredith, who wrote that phrase in the nineteenth century, could ever have imagined. Moreover, the Victorians who inevitably created and piously hunted the “moral” of every story, venturing to imagine that “all great art is propaganda,” might be astonished to read mod- ern fiction in which, as H. G. Wells said, there is not so much interest in a “pot of message.” Once it was thought that the sole purpose of fiction was to embroider the truth, to invent the fabrication that is “truer than true,” and to teach, “delightfully” they often added, sometimes rather abashed that that should appear necessary. Today there is less didacticism in fiction, more of the personal nightmare in what Robert Penn Warren has called “the publicly available day- dream” of literature, at least as much doubt and disorganization, accident and confusion as there is in life itself. A recapitulation of some of the more interesting modern departures from the more or less standard structural patterns of the short story should prove helpful: “CLASSIC” DESIGN RECENT VARIATIONS PLOT. Relatively tight knit, with Loosely structured, often clearly defined beginning, with a “walk away” end- middle, and ending, the ing that leaves it to the latter of the “clincher” reader to determine the type, whether “trick,” “sur- author's purpose; mood prise,” or logically conclu- pieces, existential ap- sive proaches, and metaphys- ical _probings not uncom- mon SETTING Briefly but concretely es- Sometimes indeterminate, tablished, usually realistjc- ally conceived and effect- ively influencing the story's progress especially when the story “oncentrates on introspec- tive affalysis; does not necessarily affect plot structure 43“CLASSIC” DESIGN RECENT VARIATIONS CONFLICT Quite evident, whether against external or internal forces; almost always re- solved at the end Not so much a struggle against something or some- one as a depiction of “the way things are,” often with no resolution offered by the writer CHARACTER- IZATION Basically, concentration on a single character, with stress on change influenced by circumstance or inner conflict May present situations in- volving groups or multiple characters, with little or no individual focus THEME Mainly directed toward one person's problem, with peripheral universal im- plications Pripanily derived from the human condition, with ob- viously broad application, even though implied rather than directly stated STYLE Clarity of major concern, with variety in texture from the plain to the overly rich; occasionally deriva- tive or consciously de- signed for language ef- fects Inclined to be self-con- scious, often intentionally obscure, striving for rich- ness of imagery or com- plication of thought rather than clarity of narrative sequence EFFECT POINT OF VIEW Historically single in pur- pose, thereby limiting plot and/or setting detail Generally confined to first person, “author —omnis- tient,” or third person- single character (major or minor) Perhaps even more closely confined, representing a distillation of impact in a narrower scope; occasion- ally diffuse “Stream of consciousness,’ naturalism, and impres- sionism in stylistic patterns create psychoanalytical views of emotional reac- tions MOOD, TONE Runs the gamut from the darkly psychological or ironic to the lightly comic or satiric Defiant, angry, savagely critical, even hopeless; rarely aimed at uncompli- cated humor or simple “local color” revelation. What will happen to the short story is hard to predict. The wise man does not prognosticate, for if he guesses right, no one remem- bers—and if he guesses wrong, no one will forget. Anyone who ven- 44tures to prophesy will certainly not fail to make something of the effect of the other post-Gutenberg media on the printed story and to consider the pronunciamentos of Marshall McLuhan, especially in relation to the television tape and the cinema film, possibly the two most promising and threatening media today. It may be that art as we know it will disappear. It may be that we shall go forward, or back, It may be that a genre as difficult as the short story will be effectively abandoned or metamorphosed out of all recognition. It may be that its very difficulty will prove an increasing attraction. It may be that we shall forget how to read and that watching pictures move will alter the ordinary man’s methods of perception to the extent that he can no longer get either “message” or “massage” from the printed short story, at least as written heretofore. Or he may fly to the conventional short fiction for relief! Perhaps we should bear in mind that literature tends in the direc- tion from which it came—toward poetry. Next to poetry, as William Faulkner testified, the short story is “the most demanding form.” It is hard to believe that man will willingly abandon anything so re- wardingly and so fascinatingly difficult to do, or to do superbly, as the short story. For the time being, until poetry becomes more nar- rative or narratives become more poetic, until the genre is lost in the merging of old genres or the emergence of wholly new ones, the short story, with its myriad delights and glorious tradition, is (as one of its most interesting new practitioners, John Cheever, recently pointed out on a television panel) a useful corrective and a necessary bridge. It curbs on the one hand the tendency to ramble, which is the bugbear of the modem novel; the short story has traditionally placed emphasis on concision, concreteness, construction. Also, the short story keeps modern poetry, which is tending to become more therapy than art, more self-expression than artistic expression, “ mettle” by stressing that before a thing can have rich significance, it must first have simple existence: it must be said before it can mean. All prose and poetry may perish, though the whole history of man- kind would seem to argue that literature is essential. Still the short story may remain. Men have always told little tales and, as Somerset Maugham said, “If you are small, death may quite likely overlook you,