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fiction goes, has been to break down the short story as such into some
form of memoir, reminiscence, or anecdote, especially about childhood
or about one's dear, foolish, pathetic, and comical elders, a genre
which was probably initiated by
Life With Father,
the interminable
Broadway success which first appeared (as prose revery, nostalgia, and
reminiscence) in
The New Yorker.
And in fact, Mary McCarthy makes
the most of this transformation or confusion of genres in her story,
anecdote, or whatever it is, "Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?" declaring
joyously: "Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction,
and therefore do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasant
character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience
which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so
desirable in portraiture." Miss McCarthy is not as lucky as she thinks
she is, for she takes her assumed freedom from fiction's requirements
as an excuse for seeking no authenticity whatever; and her irony is
misplaced, for she assumes that in memoirs, in literary portraits, and
in biographical writing there is no need for reasons, explanations
(clinical or some other kind), and an effort to connect effect and
cause. Miss McCarthy is also an excellent illustration of the fact that
when good writers write for
The New Yorker,
they adopt attitudes and
mannerisms which are absent from their serious writing elsewhere. And
this is also true of such different and gifted writers as Robert Gorham
Davis, Peter Taylor, Niccolo Tucci, Christine Weston, Kay Boyle, Jean
Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov, Carson McCullers, Mark Schorer, and
probably true of others with whose work elsewhere I am unfamiliar.
Most of these writers are striving in one guise or another---or none at all
-to write their memoirs, although they are authors who in their writ–
ing elsewhere manage to distinguish very well between fiction and
personal history, as if they knew by heart and believed Aristotle's dis–
tinction between poetry and history, and never forgot Gertrude Stein's
remark that anecdotes are not literature.
These writers must be distinguished from other kinds of authors
whom
The N ew Yorker
also brings forward as masters of the short
story. One kind is the genuine
New Yorker
author such as James
Thurber and Ludwig Bemelmans, who are comic geniuses: but who
are humorists, and not storytellers. The distinction is a real one, but
The New Yorker
ignores or blurs it. Probably
The New Yorker
made
possible or helped to foster their kind of humor, and if all the writing
in its pages were like theirs, there could be no reasonable objection to it.
But then there is another kind of writer who also engages in false im–
personation, the engaging reporter or journalist who never disguises
