The Devil Gets His Due, page 30
The lack of a definition of the form has left the way open for publishers to name certain pieces and collections of pieces in accordance with a non-aesthetic hierarchy of their own. Since a novel sells better per se than a collection of short stories, groups of short fictions, lacking all novelistic line or coherence, like Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps or Faulkner’s Knight’s Gambit, are called “novels.” From the other side, in a day when the term “familiar essay” evokes only images of aging English Professors, anglophile and of attenuated sexuality, standard familiar essays like Mary McCarthy’s “The Friend of the Family,” W. C. Williams’s “The Colored Girls of Passenack” or Aiken’s “Gehenna,” are jumbled together with fragmentary memoirs and lyric poems in prose, as well as more strictly specified prose “imitations.” It is not a question of demanding an impossible purity of genres, but of resenting the judging by unwary critics of quite different intentions by a single body of standards.
Certainly the first step toward clarity is the frank recognition that the short story has fallen heir to various alien obligations since its institution. On one side, it has had thrust upon it certain functions of the lyric poem, most importantly the symbolic realization of an immediate emotional response, and on the other hand, it has had to come to terms with various obligations of the essay, learning to take in its stride discursive and witty commentary. The essay has other avatars, book reviews or letters to the editor, but for most of us the short story is all the poetry we now have. From the beginning, certain writers like Poe were able to achieve in the short story effects that eluded them in their verse. It is fitting, therefore, that Faulkner, the best writer of the group before us, be a poète manqué; and that Conrad Aiken attain in a few of his stories (“Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” for instance) an economy and precision of lyric form that ordinarily is fumbled in his verse. Williams provides another sort of case. One of the functions of his prose is apparently to provide a touchstone beside which his poetry will seem unequivocally verse. Poetizing as he does on the last possible margin of prose, he is driven to postulate an absurdly prosaic prose, which attains, when it does not fall into dry fragments, an incredible austerity. But generally speaking, it is precisely the Romantic traditions of High Rhetoric, the stance of self-conscious virtuosity, so contemned in contemporary poetry, which succeeds in the current short story, whether openly as in Aiken and Faulkner, or somewhat abashedly (with a resultant added tension) in Hemingway and his followers—represented here only in the other lumpen efforts of Raymond Chandler and the writers of Science Fiction.
The strain inherited from the essay has not countered but rather strengthened the impulse toward a high artificial diction, whether the result be the DeQuincyish elaboration of an Aiken, or an Oscar Wildish play of ornamental wit as in Mary McCarthy.
Certainly, the two influences have joined to undermine the prestige of “plot” in the short story, crushing it between the upper and nether millstones of theme and symbol. Even in the detective story, where the fable with its archaic reversal and recognition seems essential, writers like Chandler (claiming a direct laying on of hand from Dashiell Hammett) have been hacking away at the importance of the puzzle-solution structure, the last stand of the rational plot in Christendom, deliberately losing the dénouement in a sloppy unraveling covered by a heavy baroque style. In recent issues of the New York Times book review supplement, Chandler and John Dickson Carr have been fighting out, for the last time, one hopes, the importance of “plot.” One remembers Marx’s quip about history repeating itself on the level of comedy.
The amazing downfall of plot is made evident I think by the irony, increased from year to year, of calling a respectable collection of short stories by the name of O. Henry. Despite an annual pious reference by the editor of the collection to the “patron saint” of the form, I suppose it is embarrassingly clear to everyone that O. Henry, who could only plot in the ultimate mechanical sense, never wrote a short story at all.
We find now such talents as Miss McCarthy’s and Mr. Williams’s, lacking completely any “invention,” turning without qualms to the short story. “Invention” has, as a matter of fact, become in many quarters as suspect as draughtmanship in painting; it seems beside the point. Of course, the ability to contrive fables is honored still in the slick magazines, where it is so cynically pledged to the embellishment of formulae, that complete dishonor may seem preferable. In more serious magazines, “invention” is permitted to function only under the aegis of Kafka, that is in devising ingenious literal levels for allegories of the unconscious; but in such areas where a dénouement is irrelevant, and a story is ideally left unfinished, invention is turned from the making of “plots,” whose mounting tensions and resolutions imply rationality, to embodying apprehension of an unresolvable irrationality.
It is presumably because the general essay is without status that such discursive minds as Mary McCarthy’s turn to the short story. Certainly, the pleasures provided by her intended fictions seldom seem different from those afforded by what she used to call drama reviews in the Partisan Review. Occasionally, when life has been kind enough to provide a fabulous frame for her self-laceration and wit (“The Cicerone” is the most nearly successful effort in the present collection, though it does not nearly reach the baleful fascination of “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt”), she gives us the proper formal pleasures of fiction, in addition to that rare sense she can provide of shameful enjoyment, so that participating in her writing becomes the equivalent of retailing an especially vicious bit of gossip, or peering, in abysmal shame and fascination, through a keyhole. It is, I suppose, because she is so utterly at the mercy of experience for fictional occasions that her present collection is eked out with essays and memoirs.
In the place of invention, the writer of short stories has become, above all, an exponent of “focus”—and one has the sense of much performance in this field as the lucky or carefully plotted “shot,” and of the writer as the candid camera man, hanging by his feet from the window sill, or crawling on his belly in the midst of life’s traffic, in pursuit of the “angle” that alone gives meaning to the event thrust up by the aimless shuffle of circumstances. William Sansom’s “My Little Robins,” the first story of his collection of “aspects and images,” gives us a piece which is at once a description of such a method and its result—but in his work the pure “shot”-effect is marred by an intrusive style, which hints continually that the meaning of the event may have been as much in the writer’s sensibility as in the painfully achieved “angle.” W. C. Williams provides us with the most unmitigated instances of the technique, his “epiphanies” (the term is from Joyce, of course, to which Williams is often compared, though The Dubliners, with its highly patterned rhythms and rich, almost fin de siècle romantic metaphor, is quite another matter) given through an almost transparent medium. In “Make Light of It,” the focus is all; the artist has reproduced, but ostensibly has not retouched, a given middle, only adding to it by the simple process of “cutting” a significant beginning and end. Williams’s stories do not, of course, always proceed by the mere cold process of excision to which he pretends; their intent is marred occasionally by a warm, often embarrassing sentimentality, a veneration of the Passenack Polack as noble savage, sometimes rationalized as “communism”; but on the whole, he is reasonably faithful to his method.
The general inadequacy of the actual short story is the failure of style, and that in turn depends both on our inability to achieve a critical justification of style, and on a more deeply underlying inability to make enough of essential contemporary experience amenable to the control of language. And yet, logically, it is style which should be doing the work of faith in rational form rested upon a loss of faith in the rationality of common or shared experience of this world; but in its place, we have come to entertain a deep belief in the organizing power of individual feeling, the coherence of sensibility. But style, that is to say, diction, metaphor and rhythm, does for sensibility what action once did for the reason. No writer realized this more clearly, and acted more successfully on his realization, than Henry James.
It is no surprise, therefore, to find him much honored by contemporary writers; but it is discouraging to find him emulated only on the most superficial level in the contemporary short story. I actually find his influence working, not merely bowed to, in the only one story before me, my own “Fear of Innocence,” and there I may be influenced by the knowledge of my intentions. Certainly The Injustice Collectors of Louis Auchincloss, which evoked James in a blurb, and displays on the jacket the external signs of the world in which he moved, provides only a blasphemous parody of the master, bringing to a kind of sub-life in the midst of the Jamesian décor a series of poorly imagined, feebly managed O. Henry contrivances.
In Aiken and Faulkner one finds the sort of strategic hesitancy, the palpable brooding on point of view, the willingness to commit a more than reasonable burden to language, that reminds one strongly of James—but in these older writers his typical exaggerations and excesses have been made very much their own, regionalized to Aiken’s post-Freudian Boston, and Faulkner’s “South,” so indistinguishable from our own inner darkness. The lesson they have learned essentially is that blessed lesson of excess. Without hubris the short story is no damned good, and certainly the most interesting writers in my lot (whether finally good or bad, the only ones with a chance to be good in a way that will concern and move me) are the excessive ones: Aiken, Faulkner, Miss McCarthy, Sansom, who is not as good here as when performing inside the Kafkaesque world of “fireman Flower,” Raymond Chandler and Paul Bowles. These share at least the quality of the outrageous which separates them from the glutinous gray mass of the two collections, Shaw, Sykes, etc. One is tempted to apply to the latter dull throng the Dantean advice on the spiritual mugwumps: Non ragioniam di loro, ma guarda e passa; but Heaven is not my immediate goal, and I must pause to discuss their plight.
The impression one gains from the anthologies in particular is that most current writers are so busy knocking wood and staying out of the rain that they cannot write a sentence capable of compelling a reader past the first paragraph. It is not merely, I think, a matter of too many disparate writers torn from their familiar surroundings and compelled to huddle together, without benefit of Thurber cartoons or holes in the magazine covers; it is their likeness that their new contiguity reveals, their carefulness, their anti-style.
Such a story as the Stegner prize piece in the O. Henry (“The Blue Winged Teal”), or practically any of the stories of Irwin Shaw, are so well-behaved, from their pat, unshifty symbols, carefully indicated in the title, to their carefully muted endings, that they are really (I mean unless one is a subscriber to the New Yorker or Harper’s and has painfully learned to read them) unreadable. It is hard to realize at first that the carefully unrhythmical sentences, the rejection of metaphor and rhetoric, is a deliberately espoused and practiced technique. Writers who will allow themselves the disorganized opening of Stegner’s story, or the shameless and unconvincing letter-device that makes Shaw’s well-known “Act of Faith” go, would be ashamed to yield themselves up to the gayety or terror of language. There is nothing more offensive than offhand amateur psychoanalysis, but one can hardly doubt that the fear of language masks an essential fear of experience. The child’s world is the world into which such writers plunge by preference—a manageable world toward which they can condescend a little with the gentlest of sentimentalities.
Christopher Sykes, who comes to us inexplicably touted by Evelyn Waugh, appears to be a British version of the anti-stylist at home. He seems always on the verge of implying some larger ethical framework against which his off-hand stories would take on a further range of meaning, but he is so intent on reassuring us that he is really a good fellow after all, who gets the point and likes his bit of fun, that he never breaks through the polite chatter of his style. The resolvedly old-fashioned structuring of his stories (“Saint George” is a sufficiently dismal example) helps not at all.
When writers like Mr. Sykes on his side or Mr. Shaw on his are tempted to deal with such matters as the War, they reduce its terror to occasions for the sort of laughter or tears which barely rises above the level of boredom. And I suppose, after all, that one of the functions of the anti-style is precisely this: to give us a false sense of power over our environment, much as the set happy ending does, by bringing it down to the level of our easy contempt or acceptance, as the case may be. These writers are the Fannie Hursts of our period, and there will be just the same astonishment twenty years from now when we discover them inside the covers of our “best” collections, as there is now at finding Fanny in the earlier lists. (It would be ungrateful not to name the few writers in the collections who escape completely the sort of enmity to language I have been describing: Paul Bowles, Saul Bellow, George P. Elliot.)
Irwin Shaw deserves special comment, perhaps, for he has fallen only gradually into the production of the highly finished, eminently salable, but still somehow respectable article—the sort of cake that one eats and has. I remember feeling how aptly his The Young Lions was used in the recent movie Sunset Boulevard as the off-time “serious” reading of a young hack writer and gigolo. His work is precisely what the weary, liberal writer of bad movie scripts dreams he might turn out if he were only “free”—the sort of work in which social awareness and fundamental decency are entrusted with the work proper to the imagination. I have a great deal of respect for Shaw as a “case”; when I was in college, his play Bury the Dead found the precise clichés to express the political opinions of the leftish young, and I have sympathized with his more recent desire to withdraw it in light of what we have learned on either side of the last war. In a story called “Main Currents of American Thought,” he has drawn a picture of the hack who attempts to keep alive his self-respect by buying Parrington’s Main Currents . . . But it is precisely at this point of aspiration that his irony lapses into sentimentality, and he makes of the whole world of terror, bounded by memories of Clifford Odets and the time when every young writer was a Commie, something unrecognizably bereft of terror and ambiguity. He is the slickster par excellence of that good liberal mind which has lost touch with imagination and rhetoric and serious wit, and is defenseless against patness and self-pity.
Faulkner, windbag and Dixiecrat (at moments disconcertingly the Senator Claghorn of literature), and Miss McCarthy, the sort of spiritual Trotskyite that any right-minded liberal instinctively hates, are able more easily to honor the imagination—as well as that failure of love and triumph of terror, so essential to our world, but so unseizable by any journalistic or political substitute for the imagination. It is in the free activity of metaphor that the true stylist most spectacularly reveals himself; he has an almost anarchist attitude toward the autonomy of figurative detail within his fiction, whereas the anti-stylist is an aesthetic totalitarian whatever tickets he votes. The outrageous writer gives to the Devil of the irrational his due, and as always more than his due, in his handling of the trope.
Miss McCarthy’s metaphors are the wittiest—at first glance, the most nearly autonomous of our lot; they not only compel from us a little shudder of recognition, but they betray us momentarily out of her given fictive world. But in the end they cohere into an organized system, a double series, perpetually suggesting the two other worlds that frame and define the intellectual society to which the action of the series is confined. One level of similitude threatens to reduce the world with which she deals to the realm that defines it from below, the world of things, especially machines or machine-made products: “he looked like an English cigarette,” his eyes were “like strange green headlights on an old fashioned car”; Europeans become “fortune-telling machines.” At the same time, another level of similitude is insisting on comparisons with an upper world of spirit, in terms of a religion in which none of her protagonists confess they believe. A woman mutters, “Ite, missa est,” as the black market transaction is completed; through the polite gestures of the cicerone one senses “the swing of the censer” and “the swish of the altar-boy’s skirts”; the self-deceit of an unsympathetic husband is a “cardinal article of faith,” and his closed view of his relationship with his wife is “his authorized version.” It is this larger, half-ironic acceptance of a triple world, material, human, spiritual, preserved at the metaphoric level where the limitations of conscious allegiance are forever defeated, that opens Miss McCarthy’s stories out beyond her declared intent.
The metaphorical world of Mr. Aiken is less intellectualized, its irony more latent. His is the conventional world of Romantic tropes, what makes against his post-Freudian understanding of symbol a strange tension, not unlike that in Dylan Thomas’s poems. When his 1920-ish Freudianism is bluntly stated, Mr. Aiken is likely to appear hopelessly old-fashioned, but against the even more old-fashioned counterpoint of “hawk-bright and frost-blue,” against the inevitable comparison of swiftness to swallows and arrows (but we know all about swallows and arrows!) the effect is redeemed to freshness. The very title of one of his better stories, “A Pair of Vikings,” is such an accepted soft image—but within its Romantic insights, Mr. Aiken is able to achieve a fine and rewarding irony.
