The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  After the turn of the twentieth century, many and perhaps most of the best authors who published in journals found it possible to put together a volume for sale by a publisher. It is, inevitably, largely from these authors that the compiler of an anthology of this sort will find himself drawing. These collections would carry on supplying some kind of income to the author, and no doubt satisfy some authors in their sense of preserving their short fiction, as well as their novels, for the benefit of posterity. This was a possibility available to a good number of authors; according to the lists compiled at the time by Edward J. O’Brien, the editor of an annual ‘Best Short Stories’ volume between the wars, over a hundred collections by UK authors were published in the UK almost every year between 1925 and 1936. Publishers, however, were much more cautious than magazine editors, and often offered very small advances and limited royalty terms. H. E. Bates received £20 for a 1931 collection, and even a very successful writer like E. M. Delafield or Walter de la Mare might only receive £150 or £200 – about the same that could be raised by a single well-syndicated short story in the magazines. There was a strong belief among publishers that ‘we reckon’, as Victor Gollancz put it, ‘that short stories [in collections] sell between a quarter and a sixth of an established author’s novels – but with a very rigid maximum of about 4,000’.7 The collection of stories, which is the way in which we read an author’s work, was for most authors for most of this period a useful and prestigious, but not very profitable, addition to initial publication. The primary income, and the most exciting appearance of each work, came with the first publication, in magazines and journals.

  Posterity has on the whole acted as it was supposed to, and kept an interest only in the short-story writers who stretched to published collections. Although only quite rare and aesthetically minded authors published their short fiction primarily in volume form in preference to journal publication of individual stories – George Egerton in the 1890s, Dorothy Edwards in the 1920s – this is the form in which the short story is invariably considered, and the way in which its history has come down to us. But to read the short story not in much later collections but as it first appeared is to gain a much more detailed sense of how it developed, and what it actually meant. Of course, it is beyond human capacity to read more than a few of the principal journals that published short fiction in the last quarter-millennium – Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was brought out between 1832 and 1956, and to read all the fiction it published is a major undertaking with doubtful reward. Moreover, the publisher taking a punt on an author who has made a splash in periodical form turns out to be quite an efficient filter of talent. In putting together this anthology, I have nevertheless tried to go beyond the oeuvres of celebrated and once-celebrated authors brought out in collected and selected form by mainstream publishers. In reading through a dozen or so journals, I have tried to gain a sense of how short stories initially appeared to the people they were written for, as well as looking for the occasional excellent story by an author who never quite attained the body of work or the popularity a publisher would need in order to bring out a Collected Stories. In this anthology, examples of fine stories that had, as far as I can tell, no life beyond first publication are those by T. Baron Russell and Jack Common – it may not be a coincidence that many such stories I read were by working-class writers. Occasionally, a story might be taken up by a well-meaning anthologist, such as Edward J. O’Brien’s excellent Best Short Stories annual volumes during the 1920s and 1930s, giving a second wind, for instance, to the terrifying and heartrending short story by Leslie Halward I include here – Halward, in fact, did not include, or did not have an opportunity to include, this masterly vignette in his one excellent collection of stories, To Tea on Sunday (1936).

  A key further point, certainly neglected by literary historians, is that single stories in journals by unestablished writers could be very much stranger and more experimental than stories in a collection for a mainstream publisher. This might seem to go against conventional wisdom, which suggests that a story written for a commercial magazine could only be conventional in type and execution. Certainly that could be true for many authors, and I grew to dread, in the 1930s and 1940s, the appearance of an H. E. Bates short story with its regular Stanley Baldwinesque allusions to a nightingale singing in the orchards. But the spread of financial and aesthetic risk could also encourage innovation and even wild eccentricity. A journal could find space for a single story about an underground kingdom peopled by unattached body parts and organs (1850s), or a talking dachshund (1930s), an unexplained dream sequence of locked rooms and female virginity (1870s), or a truly startling Calvino anticipation by Walter Besant in the 1890s. A distinguished author dabbling in fantasy could set off any number of bizarre imitations in journals – E. M. Forster’s ‘The Celestial Omnibus’ (1911) inspired a good number of collisions between public transport and supernatural powers, such as Evelyne Buxton’s ‘You Change at Clapham Junction’, published in Blackwood’s in 1920. A journal would hardly lose anything if it didn’t work, as most didn’t; a publisher of a similarly outré collection might lose a good deal of money.

  Short stories were not, mostly, read in the dignity of established authorship, but alongside some often sensational or comically inept illustrations. Successful authors found themselves being published, like Conan Doyle’s later Sherlock Holmes stories, immediately adjacent to slavish imitations, of which (in the case of Conan Doyle in The Strand) the best are some ingenious but not very original detective stories by Grant Allen. Few journals were entirely devoted to literature, and the reader of what now seems a great late Victorian classic may turn the page to find a startlingly detailed and thoroughly researched article entitled ‘Muzzles for Women’. The intricate level of interest in the facts of the world that many great short-story writers possess appeals, it becomes evident, to the same sort of reader that wants to find out curious and grotesque facts about the world’s cultures, animal kingdoms and oddities of individual and mass behaviour, a reader whom the editors of many journals were happy to satisfy.

  Even in the more aesthetically high-minded and literary journals, such as the Yellow Book (1894–7) or The Adelphi (1922–55), which supply two of the high points of the form, an immediate and vivid ebb and flow is apparent. You can see the writers of short fiction responding to each other, teasing, developing in response, and writers emerging in fits and spurts – the moment when the ‘Eric Arthur Blair’ who has been publishing fairly weak poetry in the pages of Adelphi suddenly emerges as ‘George Orwell’ is a thrilling one to experience in the reading rooms of the London Library. John Buchan and an ‘Enoch Arnold Bennett’ appear in the very unexpected aesthetic pages of the Yellow Book for the first time, and we feel the shock of interest as a reader must have, discovering a major talent. Most strikingly, reading the British short story in the pages of the journals that first published them makes one appreciate the most powerful feature of the short story as a form: its capacity for topicality.

  3

  While I was in the latter stages of preparing this anthology, the novelist Hilary Mantel published a short story in the Guardian, and immediately afterwards a volume, entitled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. In it, a middle-class housewife gives sanctuary to a working-class sniper in 1984, who after a long conversation shoots and kills the then prime minister from a window. It was not a very accomplished piece of work, and would probably have been passed over were it not for the substantial following Mantel’s historical novels had acquired. It caused a definite stir of protest and disgust, some of which focused on the undeniable fact that its subject had indeed been the target of an assassination attempt around the time of Mantel’s story, and had behaved with notable bravery. A number of friends and colleagues, including spouses blameless for government policy, had been killed in the (real-life) assassination attempt or had been crippled for life. Others defended Mantel and amusingly described her as ‘brave’ for taking on such a subject. />
  What unified detractors and supporters of Mantel in this sorry episode was a sense that a writer of fiction, and perhaps especially a writer of short stories, would not normally be expected to address a subject as controversial and lively as Mrs Thatcher’s reputation, even thirty years on. Even though the story and its author had carefully waited until Thatcher had died before engaging with the reading public, it still seemed brave, shocking and above all, surprising to see a short story about (more or less) contemporary politics.

  It is fair to say that this attitude would have greatly surprised previous generations. One of the very striking aspects of the British short story, as revealed by the experience of reading through weekly news-oriented journals, was its capacity to react immediately to the news of the most public order. Novels seem to take a few years to ruminate over events, to develop the impact of social changes or dramatic public events on lives – the great novels of Napoleonic upheaval are written between thirty and fifty years after his defeat at Waterloo. Short stories, on the other hand, may in some circumstances be written quickly, in the heat of the moment, responding with utter immediacy to a mere facet of a huge situation as it unfolds.

  A large number of the best short stories are written as a sort of commentary on a changing social situation, as a writer thinks him- or herself into a new situation. Many of the stories in the Yellow Book, for instance, explore the new situation of women as independent-minded and perhaps even gainfully employed. From very early on, short-story writers saw the possibility for writers of fiction of the railway, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, railways are being exploited for all sorts of non-modern reasons, such as a hallucinatory ghost story – there is a good, standard example, ‘Going Through the Tunnel’ in Chambers’s Journal.8 Many of William Trevor’s most interesting stories from the 1960s and 1970s are specifically about the human impact of social changes – wife-swapping parties in ‘Angels at the Ritz’ and Samuel Selvon – just as Elizabeth Taylor found the short story the best and swiftest medium to write about the impact of immigration in Britain in ‘Tall Boy’ and ‘Knock on Wood’. In this anthology, one fine example of immediate response to events is a story by Adam Mars-Jones on an aspect of the AIDS crisis, written less than half a decade after the diagnosis of the first patient. To show how very swift this response could be, it’s necessary to look at the impact of a huge public event on the pages of a fiction journal.

  The Second World War quickly inspired a large body of first-rate short fiction, including Alun Lewis’s marvellous accounts of the lives of ordinary soldiers, and there was no hesitation or delay between event and fictional rendering. In the first instance, full-scale novels of the conflict were either prophetic, written before anything had taken place, like Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts, written in the 1930s about a speculative air raid on Southampton, or out of date before they were published, like Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, whose subject was the phoney war but which had to be published as thousands were being killed in the London Blitz. The short story was much quicker and could more reliably speak to participants in a current situation. Mollie Panter-Downes, one of a number of British women writers whom the New Yorker has always supported, published the first of many short stories on wartime themes a mere fortnight after the outbreak of war in 1939 – its subject the outbreak of war itself.

  This swiftness of response in the form of fiction now strikes us as surprising, and perhaps even indecorous. In a recent biography, the writer Adam Begley expressed some surprise that the American short-story writer John Updike regularly took real-life events from the very recent past and transformed them, as if transcribing, into saleable short fiction. There is no way of knowing how swiftly other short-story writers translated private, real-life experiences into imaginary prose, but we can see that when a public event occurred, its fictional representations in short fiction were never far behind. The First World War broke out in August 1914. At the earliest possible opportunity, in its September 1914 issue, Blackwood’s Magazine published a story about a battle in the Great War, realistically written and edited almost before anyone had experienced one (‘Five-Four-Eight’, by Jeffery E. Jeffery). These responses to events were not automatically populist: another very early response in Blackwood’s to the war, ‘The Old Junker’ by Charles Oliver, published in February 1915, goes to some length to expound the figure of the idealistic, kindly German, before ‘he had taken the Moloch form that he wears today’. Such immediate responses have not gone away entirely. One of Graham Greene’s last stories was a horrified warning against the imminent opening of a Channel Tunnel, first published in the Independent newspaper. But the effective separation of paying journal and practising short-story writer in recent years has diminished this important aspect of the British short story, and when it turns up, we are often rather shocked.

  4

  The possibilities for the writer of short stories have narrowed significantly in recent years. Where once there was any number of paying journals and magazines offering handsome sums for first serial rights, now the principal outlet for many writers of short stories is not publication but competitions. With no intention of mockery, I quote the acknowledgements page of a recent collection of short stories, published by a small press, the work of a writer who says she has been publishing short stories for twenty years.

  Placed 2nd in round 6 of The Whitaker Prize 2012; placed 1st in the live Write-Invite Competition 28th January 2012; placed 3rd in The Meridian Summer Competition 2012; 4th place in A Very Short Story Competition September 2011; shortlisted in Five Stop Story Competition 2012; one of twelve shortlisted in The Knock On Effect Competition 2012; shortlisted in the Erewash Writers’ Short Story Competition; shortlisted in the Writers’ Forum Competition July 2012; won second prize in the Greenacre Writers’ Short Story Competition; placed 1st in the Word Hut Number 3 Short Story Competition; shortlisted in the Wells Short Story Competition 2000; longlisted in The Fish Short Story Prize 2011; specially commended in the Infanca Helene James Short Story Competition 2012 …

  And so on. These competitions sometimes offer reasonable prizes – the Fish short story competition, for instance, offers a first prize of 2,000 Euros plus 1,000 Euros travelling expenses. Sometimes there are rather thinner rewards on offer. The Word Hut Prize offers only £70 for first prize. These prizes are funded by the eager contestants paying to enter – the Fish competition demands 22 Euros from entrants, and the Word Hut only £4. The possibility that anyone might pay in order to read these short stories seems hardly to be envisaged. But what alternative is there?

  One Sunday newspaper offers an annual lavishly funded prize for the short story, culminating in a dinner for 150 or so and a first prize of £30,000. The winner is subsequently printed in the newspaper. The year that I went, the chair of the judges, a retired don, congratulated himself and his fellow judges for having produced a shortlist which contained no short story set in Britain, before handing over the cheque to an utterly routine piece of work by an American author about a tragically dead rock star and a terminal illness. It was, of course, in the approved present tense. There seemed no point in suggesting that with the same money, the newspaper could develop any number of short-story talents by, for instance, commissioning and running a short story every week for £1,000. Similarly, the BBC’s annual short-story competition much prefers handing over £20,000 in prize money to paying writers properly to write stories for broadcast. I inquired about the fees payable by BBC Radio 4’s short-story slot, Afternoon Reading. Enough to say that it would not pay for my weekly laundry bill. The sort of relationship, too, between magazine and author that existed in the past, permitting Adelphi to help to contribute towards the development of Jack Common as a writer and editor, or Horizon towards that wayward, fascinating experimentalist Anna Kavan, has completely disappeared.

  There are very few outlets still able to pay a writer for a short story in a way that could encourage a writer to persist, and with the s
ort of editorial investment that will enable a writer to develop. Most of them are in the United States. The New Yorker has, happily, been able to develop the short-story writing careers of two of the best short-story writers now at work, Tessa Hadley and Zadie Smith. There is no British journal that would have published Hadley’s stories, as the New Yorker has, twenty-one times, and paid properly for them. Granta very occasionally publishes a British short story; some newspapers, notably the Guardian, sometimes publish a short story by a very firmly established and celebrated ‘name’; some popular magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, do still take short stories; others develop short, fervent periods of enthusiasm for short fiction before abandoning it again. The New Statesman is currently in such a fit of enthusiasm, publishing a short story every two months by, admittedly, very well-established authors. The stories now published by British outlets are, it must be pointed out, very rarely more than 2,000 words, which is at the very lower limit of the form’s usual scale. If there is a paying British outlet for the classical short story of 7,000 words or so, I have not been able to discover it. The writer of short stories is largely reduced to persuading publishers to publish whole volumes in exchange for minuscule advances, making stories available for nothing or very little in niche journals whose editorial expertise may be uncertain and whose circulation is certainly tiny, or entering competitions. The result is a definite shift in the quality of short stories over the last fifteen years or so.