The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  The problem with relying on competitions as a means of developing talent, rather than the response of a paying public, is that they reward what they think ought to be good, and not what contains any real energy. Repeatedly, reading short stories rewarded by competitions, I was struck by present-tense solitary reflections, often with characters lying on their beds affectlessly pondering; major historical events were considered gravely; social media were dutifully brought in to indicate an eye on the contemporary without disturbing the safely solitary nature of the character. Pondering preceded, by a very long way, the social interaction which is the proper subject of fiction. There was nothing there at all, apart from a fervent desire to win £30,000.

  The insistence that short stories should be serious in theme, with an underlying contempt for anything not about major issues of public policy, and yet not permitting the short story of contemporary public events either, is nothing new. Lena Milman in the 1890s wrote that ‘The contempt for the short story prevalent in England, but unknown elsewhere, is surely as traceable to Puritan influence as the destruction of the Mary Altar at Ely, and the shrine of St Thomas; for, insisting, as it has become our English bent to do, upon some serious side-purpose in art, we are not content with a beautiful suggestion, with a sketch be it never so masterly; the narrative must illustrate a principle, the picture, a fact.’9 Not until the rise of literary competitions in the second half of the twentieth century, however, did the British hit upon a method ingeniously devised to suppress everything that had previously been good about a literary form.

  The system of competitions replacing a system of commissions, payments, circulation and readers looks tempting as a guarantee of literary quality; no one, however, ever invited, or required Conan Doyle or V. S. Pritchett or Kipling or P. G. Wodehouse to put on a dinner jacket and shake the hand of a retired academic before they could receive a cheque for a short story. They might even have considered the idea somewhat humiliating. Moreover, no competition will ever produce or reward a ‘Silver Blaze’, a ‘When My Girl Comes Home’, a ‘Wireless’, or a ‘Fiery Wooing of Mordred’. It is perhaps no accident that the dullest short stories I read from the last fifteen years were winners of competitions: a lot of the most exciting and interesting short stories, on the other hand, were science fiction, fantasy and horror. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, from the early 1980s, spawned a very engaged and argumentative readership which in turn created some brilliantly inventive writers – China Miéville, Neil Gaiman and Adam Marek are possible through a readership, a system of circulation, and not through the rewards offered by the conventional tastes of prize committees. If an ordinary newspaper took to publishing, once a week, a short story and paying the same that it currently pays for the celebrity interview that fills the same space, then the short story in all its forms would soon return to the energy and inventiveness that it possessed until recently. In the meantime, we can only be grateful for the British writers who are still nurtured by generous American magazines, the ones who can persist in writing collections of short stories for publishers for the same small advances that publishers always offered for collections, and the ones who are lucky enough to work in a field with an engaged and passionate readership.

  5

  With some embarrassment and some self-consciousness, I set out to suggest some of the qualities that distinguish the British short story in the last three hundred years, and make it worth reading.

  In the 1990s, A. S. Byatt edited a groundbreaking and inspiring Oxford Book of the English Short Story. It was based on a principle which, curiously, had never been put into practice before: limiting its grounds to authors of English nationality. Byatt confessed to some doubt about setting out on such an endeavour, on the grounds that ‘I feared that the great short-story writers were indeed from elsewhere … I feared being marooned amongst buffers and buffoons, bucolics, butties and Blimps.’ In the event, her anthology was a revelation of quality and a particular range of expertise. It came as such a revelation because the English, and perhaps the British too, qua British, are not accustomed to think of their own literary qualities. There is always a risk, in case some claim of supremacy starts rearing its head from the dark ages. It is as if the particular quality of writing from these islands cannot be considered because, inevitably, it will lead to distasteful claims of superiority that we signed away in 1947 with the end of Empire. Anthologies of English short stories, apart from Byatt’s, tend to conflate ‘writing in the English language’ with ‘writing by the English’, as Byatt herself pointed out. Even Malcolm Bradbury’s interesting Penguin Book of the Modern British Short Story mysteriously included a story by Samuel Beckett.

  Not everyone shrinks away from national pride in this area, I wincingly discover. In fact, the practice of the short story appears to be, for much of the world, an opportunity for such jingoistic sentiments that one wonders that it hasn’t been declared an Olympic sport. While I was preparing this book, the American short-story writer Lorrie Moore was reported as telling a presumably not incredulous Brooklyn audience that ‘American short story writing is the best in the world really … partly because it has been nourished by universities.’10 I was interested to read the unqualified opinion of the veteran Indian writer Khushwant Singh in an anthology of Indian short stories that ‘Western short stories tend to be prolix, leaving the reader to guess what they are all about. That is why many critics believe that the West has lost the art of writing short stories. In India, on the other hand, the short story is as vibrant as ever.’11

  No doubt very similar statements of national pride could be gathered from many nations, but it is simply impossible to imagine any British writer now asserting anything of the kind. That is not because of any serious doubt about the quality and the energy of the tradition, but because we just don’t say that sort of thing. I don’t want to enter into nationalist competitions: there is no point in trying to elevate one nation’s writers in the form over another. Chekhov, Alice Munro, Kleist, John Cheever and Kipling are, in the best sense, freaks, and their genius is at once local and irrelevant to a local tradition. The consequences of this national modesty, or at any rate the refusal to bang the national drum, are that the British short story has been consistently underestimated and even dismissed. It is much easier, for instance, to find reviews of American collections in British newspapers than British collections. Reading some ill-informed accounts of British short fiction, I was reminded of the foreword to the first edition of the London Magazine in 1954, where the editor expressed a recurrent attitude through allegory.

  Two small boys came across a walnut tree one day at the bottom of a large, neglected garden. One of them said ‘I can’t see any walnuts on that tree.’ The other replied: ‘I bet you there are some, all the same.’ And he swung up into the tree with his stick. The first boy was staring into the leaves where his companion had disappeared, when suddenly a walnut hit him on the nose and then a shower of them crashed into the grass all round him. A voice from the top of the tree shouted out in triumph: ‘Who said there weren’t any walnuts?’ To which a voice from the ground replied: ‘How do you know they aren’t rotten? Rotten ones don’t count.’ But when the boy who had climbed the tree slithered down, he found that the other boy had walked away without bothering to look.

  I found, preparing this book, that there were people who, like that boy, were prepared to dismiss the local tradition immediately; on investigation, sometimes this attitude came shortly before the revelation that they had never read, and sometimes never heard of, V. S. Pritchett, A. E. Coppard or Kipling’s short stories.

  But what is that local tradition? What do Britain’s short-story writers do most characteristically? In some ways, I came to think of Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterpiece, ‘Silver Blaze’ as the exemplary British short story. It is extraordinarily playful with the conventions of its own genre, beginning with an indication of the murderer that could hardly be more explicit or blatant. It is concerned with a huge range of sign
ificant and interesting physical objects, including the elaborate dress that is never seen and its owner never identified. It is about the actions of the overlooked and misunderstood. It is about social class, of course. Like many great short stories from Britain, it revolves around a general social gathering with its own rituals – William Sansom’s wonderful ‘A Contest of Ladies’ is a good comparison. It appears to be telling a thrilling story while in fact being entirely contemplative and thoughtful about events in the past – the action of the story is mostly confined to two train journeys and a long walk. It is macabre, and draws some ingenious amusement from its grotesque elements – the cleverest and most enchanting surely the detail of the lame sheep that Sherlock so brilliantly intuits. (He tells us how brilliant he is, too.) It gives the appearance of being richly exact, while in fact being an utter fantastic fabrication – as Doyle himself noted, if the events had happened in real life, half the characters would have been in jail and the others banned from racing for life. And it shows no terror of literary genre, while doing with the conventions of that genre whatever it feels like.

  Playfulness is never far from the British short story. This playfulness encourages the form in unexpected directions at different times; the brilliant outbreak of experimental short fiction in the 1960s, including Christine Brooke-Rose and J. G. Ballard – I should also like to have included Anna Kavan – started to influence quite unexpected people including Kingsley Amis. But long before that, the quality of playfulness never prevents the British short story from attaining real seriousness and emotional depth. Arnold Bennett’s simply magnificent ‘The Matador of the Five Towns’ finds space for engaged amusement in its fabulous social panorama, closing down on meanness and tragedy in a little room. Kipling’s ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’, surely the howling artificial pinnacle of Kipling’s genius, was written and published a couple of months before the outbreak of the Great War; as a consideration of hysteria and wildness in the public mind, it has never been matched. Unexpectedly, it is both painfully cruel and fascinated by comedy in the most detailed way. More recently, the brilliant flippancy of tone of Georgina Hammick’s masterly ‘Grist’ shading by degrees into real, wailing grief sustains a long-established tone in British writing. That interest in the overlooked, the apparently insignificant, finds a parallel not just in Dickens’s great ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings’ but in a flurry of superb and often richly orchestrated writing on proletarian subjects from the 1890s onwards – the Yellow Book stories and, here, Jack Common’s beautiful story, are followed by the magical G. F. Green and Alan Sillitoe, one of the greatest of the writers here. In recent years, I very much admired David Rose, and would have liked to include a story by him about road-menders. Above all, the great British short story is outward-facing, analysing the world. Chambers’s Journal promised, on its foundation in 1832, ‘lots of nice little stories about travellers in Asia and Africa’.12 As it moved into its heyday, the fascination with the outwardly exotic was supplemented by a much richer vein, finding considerable exotic interest in territories closer to hand.

  There are sumptuous riches in the British short story, and the raucously exuberant piece of playfulness is only part of it. There is, too, an exquisitely withdrawn and precise vein, often claimed by women writers: these were among my most precious discoveries while reading, and I came to see the tradition that runs through Malachi Whitaker, Dorothy Edwards, Viola Meynell and Elizabeth Taylor to Shena Mackay, Jackie Kay and Jane Gardam should also be mentioned here – as a sublime, vulnerable one. Withdrawn exactitudes are an important part of the tradition, but only part. It often needs to be stressed that the British short story can be most itself when rumbustious, violent, extravagant, fantastical; above all, when it yields to a national taste for the theatrical.

  So often, the great British short story seems to be fascinated by performance. A recurrent form is the narrator after dinner, who shares the best story he ever heard: as time goes on, and leisurely dinners become less universal in the real world, the story starts to turn towards the tale told in a railway carriage, like Graham Greene’s thrillingly preposterous ‘The Hint of an Explanation’, or – surprisingly common – the tale told by a barber to his client, of which the greatest must surely be V. S. Pritchett’s ‘You Make Your Own Life’ with its final brutal slash of the razorblade. Pritchett was the greatest of British short-story writers, and embedded in the art of performance, whether in the sardonic explanation of a stage trick in ‘The Fall’ that opens up a man’s relationship with his absent brother, or the performance that has no idea that it’s going on until its last line, as in ‘When My Girl Comes Home’, or the stage monologue which ‘The Camberwell Beauty’ initially seems to be. The monologue, as of a stage character, is a very common form in the British short story; I regretted not being able to include more after Dickens’s ‘Mrs Lirriper’ set an unmatchable standard that only Pritchett began to reach. Too many others were ultimately rather limp interwar matinée offerings, but the indirect relationship with the stage, and with performance generally, animated many of the best short stories here.

  The quality of performance drives two recurrent qualities of the British short story: its dependence on comedy in any and all circumstances, and its love of Grand Guignol. Wild and impossible violence often emerges from physical specificity, as in the Aickman or the great T. H. White story. The physically specific can be the source of comedy, too, and often these two very British modes combine. Adam Marek’s eye-popping story ‘The 40-Litre Monkey’ has plenty of precedents. Even a writer as unfailingly sympathetic as Tessa Hadley can give a story of considerable suffering the detached and borderline flippant title ‘Buckets of Blood’. Readers may be surprised at the things they are asked to laugh at by Somerset Maugham, Wilkie Collins or Max Beerbohm. The violence in the splendid Wodehouse story is always, it seems, waiting to break out. Sometimes the territory that seems to interest the writer is the exact moment when the laughter freezes on the lips, not just in the sublime and terrifying Kipling story but, in a minor key, in the A. E. Coppard and Rhys Davies. Both Coppard and Davies were masters of what A. S. Byatt very accurately calls ‘mixed tones’, and in their very best stories, as represented here, the reader is often moved to laughter before wondering whether laughter is quite the thing. The uncertainty, exactly pinpointed, is at the heart of their achievement.

  It’s common, in compilations of this sort, for the anthologizer to make a case for his general subject by playing down the comic element. Comedy is so much at the centre of the British short story that, by contrast, I’ve sometimes included a short story by a writer not primarily known for his or her humour. Elizabeth Taylor’s virtuoso late ‘In and Out the Houses’ has all her social precision of detail (the ravioli!) but is cast as a broad farce where only one character ever goes anywhere – the technical command is stunning, like a Mozart rondo. I wanted, too, to highlight Elizabeth Bowen’s gift for comedy with a savage edge with a relatively unfamiliar early piece rather than the acknowledged greatness of ‘Mysterious Kôr’. That gift for comedy in surprising places continues: it beautifully lightens Zadie Smith’s wonderful ‘The Embassy of Cambodia’ with some unexpectedly broad, Dickensian characters. I don’t think it will ever go away, however superficially serious the subject of the short story.

  From that valuing of comedy comes, I think, a characteristic of the British short story to entwine, reverse, overturn itself and take directions that nobody could foresee; this emerges most consistently in tone and flavour. The great British short story is often a ferocious ride with hidden traps and unpredictable bogs, explosions and patches of tranquillity or exhaustion. Surprise is a quality often prized; even the surprise offered by a story that never changes its tone, like Dorothy Edwards’s or Mary Lamb’s stories. In an extraordinary story by Penelope Gilliatt I came close to including, a well-planted fictional robot called FRANK does exactly nothing, but deserves the story’s title. The surprise may be in the point of view, as in the w
ild shifts of direction in the Jean Rhys short story, or realizing that the person who places himself at the centre of the story has no significance whatsoever, as in Pritchett’s ‘The Camberwell Beauty’. Comedy, the tripping up of expectations, the overturning of an established world: these things have a tendency to shape the form even when laughter is not contemplated.

  Some of these distinctive qualities are more or less permanently present in the British short story. Some, however, ebb and flow with fashion, and I have tried to suggest in my selection how the short story has a predominant flavour and urgent themes at different moments in its history. The feeling of growing hysteria with a diabolic edge before the Great War is striking – the feeling, perhaps, as Richard Strauss’s Salomé puts it, that ‘es sind noch nicht genug Tote’, there aren’t enough dead yet. There is speculation about what women are to do with their lives in the 1920s that emerges in a spate of brilliant feminine two-handers. New subjects emerge; new themes interest the best talent at work.

  A confident relationship with genre has never limited the British short story, though some genres have proved more fruitful to the form than others. The love story and the detective story were evidently very popular forms in magazine fiction: they did not seem to me to be natural candidates for short fiction, often requiring as they do a slow expansion on the significance of details and a warm growth of feeling over time. Perhaps for the same reason, there was no shortage of historical short stories, but, apart from Jean Rhys and the unique genius of Penelope Fitzgerald, very few I could much admire. Other forms, however, that could rest on suggestion and airy implication were natural. I sometimes felt, reading through the collected stories of classic authors, that an anthology of this sort could be made up of nothing other than the occasional ghost story that almost every British writer produced; there is at least one first-rate example from the works of many writers, including Saki, Elizabeth Bowen and Penelope Fitzgerald, as well as specialists like E. F. Benson and M. R. James. Ghost stories are British in the most conventional way; the great practitioners, like M. R. James and Robert Aickman, rely on a background of propriety and high respectability. When those moments of propriety are broken, sometimes with screaming terror, sometimes merely with the narrator being physically touched for the first time in the story, or by gatecrashing a party, a different, less orderly side of the British is revealed. Science fiction, too, which can rest on the suggestion of vast unknowable changes, was as natural to short fiction from the start as horror. Fine as G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Honour of Israel Gow’ is, it would be perfect if it ended before the solution started being put together, at the point of maximum bafflement, with all the horror and grotesquery in full untethered flight. Another point of genre possibility comes with the curious, dreamlike fantasy that sometimes overtakes the short story: the burst of allegorical mysticism in late-1940s short stories, including T. F. Powys and Sylvia Townsend Warner, is a very striking one – one should perhaps add Tolkien’s long and beautiful ‘Leaf by Niggle’, a story it proved impractical to include.