S'OOKS
715
written with enormous effort. Perhaps it is that great effort which
makes the pages and the life they try so hard to describe . seem
distant and ancient so that, when they come, the observations of
things now around us, things we ourselves maybe hadn't even quite
noticed yet, they come often as a shock. All this happened only
yesterday. But, not many people try this hard anymore.
The O. Henry Prize Stories have started up again, edited now
by Richard Poirier, author of
The Comic Sense of Henry James.
I
wonder, who reads short stories? When you pick up a magazine,
do you turn to the short story? What is it doing there, anyway?
It looks as boring as a poem, and probably it is. Maybe if you
yourself write short stories, yes, you take a quick slice at it, to see
who's doing it now,
is
he one up on you or not, what's he copying.
. . . Who are these people, what do they want.... No, of course,
some short stories are better than other short stories, and it is
true that now and then there is even genuine pleasure in them;
in, I think, the ones that are old-fashioned tales, like Malcolm
Lowry's boat story, like Ivan Gold's in this collection, a familiar
kind of Army expose, but teasing the reader along, lots of plot
and plenty of character; or like Peter Taylor's "Heads of Houses"
in this book, a comic, subtle juggling of the humors of family life,
ending, like all of Taylor's best stories, up in the air on a comically–
strung eat's cradle over a dreadful abyss. But these others. So many
of them are about a child's reluctant discovery of death or sex.
You do not want to hear, any more than I want to say, why this
should be. And as for style, there seem to be two attempts, one
pure golden Mid-West, "The day was clear, with an icicle-blue
clearness, and the frigid sun huddled not far above the horizon,
surrounded in its rainbow of sun-dogs." The other sounds like the
jittery teen-:age burlesque of the comic book,
Mad,
but I miss the
point, perhaps because I don't know what it is that is being
burlesqued, " 'You're so goddam potted I should be able to grow
by standing on you, shnook! Knock off the Ivy line,' I said angrily,
signalling Nick to pour me another beer, 'what's the cut of those
Sears Roebuck duds you're wearing but Ivy?'" Reading these
stories, I meditate unfairly that the University of Iowa Workshop
is to writers what the WPA once was to painters, and
The Atictntic
Monthly
and '
P~airie
Schooner
their Post" Office walls. Yet out
