The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Read online

  THE

  PENGUIN BOOK

  of the

  BRITISH

  SHORT

  STORY

  VOLUME 2

  From P. G. WODEHOUSE

  to ZADIE SMITH

  _______

  Selected with a General Introduction by

  PHILIP HENSHER

  Contents

  General Introduction

  THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE BRITISH SHORT STORY

  2

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court

  ‘MALACHI’ WHITAKER

  Courage

  JACK COMMON

  Nineteen

  ELIZABETH BOWEN

  The Dancing-Mistress

  EVELYN WAUGH

  Cruise

  JAMES HANLEY

  The German Prisoner

  T. H. WHITE

  The Point of Thirty Miles

  LESLIE HALWARD

  Old Sweat

  JULIAN MACLAREN-ROSS

  Death of a Comrade

  ALUN LEWIS

  Private Jones

  ‘HENRY GREEN’

  The Lull

  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER

  The Trumpet Shall Sound

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  Winter Cruise

  ROALD DAHL

  Someone Like You

  L. A. G. STRONG

  The Rook

  T. F. POWYS

  The Key of the Field

  GRAHAM GREENE

  The Hint of an Explanation

  G. F. GREEN

  A Wedding

  ANGUS WILSON

  The Wrong Set

  RHYS DAVIES

  A Human Condition

  FRANCIS KING

  The Mouse

  WILLIAM SANSOM

  A Contest of Ladies

  SAMUEL SELVON

  Knock on Wood

  MURIEL SPARK

  Bang-Bang You’re Dead

  ROBERT AICKMAN

  Bind Your Hair

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  The Perfect Tenants

  J. G. BALLARD

  The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D

  CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE

  Red Rubber Gloves

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  In and Out the Houses

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  Mason’s Life

  ALAN SILLITOE

  Mimic

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  The Camberwell Beauty

  JEAN RHYS

  Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers

  IAN MCEWAN

  Pornography

  ANGELA CARTER

  The Courtship of Mr Lyon

  DORIS LESSING

  Notes for a Case History

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  The Means of Escape

  ALASDAIR GRAY

  Five Letters from an Eastern Empire

  BERNARD MACLAVERTY

  Phonefun Limited

  SHENA MACKAY

  Cardboard City

  BERYL BAINBRIDGE

  The Longstop

  DOUGLAS DUNN

  Bobby’s Room

  GEORGINA HAMMICK

  Grist

  ADAM MARS-JONES

  Baby Clutch

  GEORGE MACKAY BROWN

  Three Old Men

  A. S. BYATT

  Racine and the Tablecloth

  MARTIN AMIS

  Career Move

  CANDIA MCWILLIAM

  The Only Only

  JANICE GALLOWAY

  last thing

  ALI SMITH

  miracle survivors

  TESSA HADLEY

  Buckets of Blood

  ADAM MAREK

  The 40-Litre Monkey

  JON MCGREGOR

  The Remains

  ZADIE SMITH

  The Embassy of Cambodia

  Author Biographies

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  To A. S. Byatt

  General Introduction

  1

  The British short story is probably the richest, most varied and most historically extensive national tradition anywhere in the world. But before introducing a Penguin Book of the British Short Story, it’s as well to admit that every single substantive word in the title, apart from ‘Penguin’, is under fierce debate. Certainly I felt unclear about what ‘British’ might mean, and was completely unable to lay down rules for who might qualify as British. It might make sense to include everyone who wrote as an inhabitant of the British Isles and as a subject of the government in London. That would include all Irish writers until 1922, but it is most unlikely that anyone would expect to find a story from James Joyce’s Dubliners in this anthology. Foreign-born writers resident in the UK I ruled out where there was a strong movement to regard them, as in the case of Katherine Mansfield, as conferring merit on their place of birth rather than their residence. On the other hand, I have chosen to include Elizabeth Bowen, whose subject seems indubitably British. There are undoubtedly writers here who, to some readers, will seem to contribute to the British short story, rather than belong to it; there might, indeed, be a strong argument for including Henry James in an anthology of this sort. But Britishness is slippery and debatable, as indeed the British short story often is.

  ‘Short story’ is still more problematic. What is a short story? Eager pundits queue up to explain that a short story must consist of a single situation, a short space of time, a small number of characters, be less than a certain number of words, and so on. These restrictive demands have been around for a long time, often ultimately deriving from Poe’s grandiose suggestion, applying Aristotle to a new literary form, that ‘unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance’.1 Although this insistence comes from the same writer, who insists that ‘the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’2, the point about unity has been taken very seriously ever since. Certainly, in this country, reviewers for an 1880s London journal, The Athenaeum, which took an interest in the American short story, were already regularly insisting on ‘economy and unity of effect’.

  The market for such restrictive explanations seems to have expanded with the rise of creative writing as an academic discipline, but they remain uncertain and unconvincing. All of these pundits would quickly find themselves having to explain away the existence of great short stories that seem hardly to have the slightest notion of any of the single situation, a limitation of time, a consistent tone, or anything else. D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ covers thirty years in its marriage of the sublime and the minute, and takes a detailed comparison of four marriages as its grand subject. Restrictions of length, too, seem unsustainable, and there are short stories by Conrad that press on to 30,000 words and beyond. Why ‘Typhoon’, at 30,000 words, is universally regarded as a short story and Nightmare Abbey, at 26,000 words and possessing a more uniform setting, is described as a novel is a question only answerable by the accidents of publication history. Practical concerns prevented this anthology from acknowledging the occasional expansion of the short story, which in general flourishes at between 4,000 and 15,000 words, into much longer forms.

  If it is difficult to reach a conclusion about what the formal literary limits of the short story are, the debate about the historical phenomenon of the short story also shows no sign of resolution. There are two general views about the short story, one inclusive in tendency, the other more rigid. In the inclusive account, a story told in brief is as old as mankind, and there are short stories to be found in ancient Greek literature, and in the Bible, before turning up in the English language
(one friend firmly told me) in a short story in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A generous and open account might include a Canterbury Tale before moving on to Mandeville’s fantasy travel writing, and starting in earnest with Elizabethan prose romances.

  On the other hand, the exclusive and rigid account of the short story sees it as a very particular historical phenomenon. The term ‘short story’ only occurs towards the end of the nineteenth century, although it is difficult to be quite sure when: the OED’s first citations, which are from 1877 and (Trollope’s autobiography) 1882, seem to use the phrase as an established usage. To a surprising degree, authors of the time do seem to regard it as a much newer form than the novel. In 1894, the short-story writer Lanoe Falconer talked about ‘the literary capabilities of the short story, still in its infancy’.3 In Britain, writers were relatively slow to perceive the possibilities of short fiction, both artistically and commercially. American writers were obliged to develop a practice in short fiction as early as the 1790s, and certainly by the 1820s, because the American public generally preferred cheap, copyright-evading editions of English novels. One authority explains: ‘The American short story … emerged in the 1830s when the flood of British imports drowned the American novel and left magazines and gift-books as the only paying outlets for native fiction.’4 Those English novelists, by contrast, found their principal markets in the long form. The restrictive history of the short story maintains that, despite foreign practitioners such as Pushkin, Kleist and Washington Irving, the British short story only seriously begins with the establishment of major, well-paying short-story magazines such as The Strand in 1891.

  Both historical accounts have something to be said for them, and both are, in the end, wrong. There doesn’t seem to be anything to be gained from regarding any piece of made-up narrative as a short story, even if it is in verse. Even such pieces of imaginative prose as the Elizabethan prose romances seem to me so different from the short story when it emerged under that name, and to contribute so little to its development, that nothing was to be gained by starting so very early. (I admit, too, to finding almost all of them agonizingly dull.) On the other hand, indisputable short stories were being written and published in Britain long before The Strand and even the mid-Victorian journals such as All the Year Round started taking an interest in short fiction. In this anthology, the Scottish writers Hogg and Galt will be seen to be writing perfectly shaped and conceived short stories by the 1820s.

  It made sense, however, not to start at that point, but to go back somewhat, and examine the different and often intriguing ways in which prose pieces of short imaginative fiction were trying to make sense of themselves in relation to the novel. The first pieces in this anthology are not, in the modern sense, short stories. But they bear in a vital, animating way on the short story’s historical development. They are trying to distinguish themselves from the long form, and are drawing on a number of literary counter-examples. The Fielding is a compacted, sequential romance; the Defoe a mock-documentary account of confected reality; a morality tale starts to get out of hand in Hannah More. In other stories, possibilities are set out which will bear fruit long afterwards in the history of the form: Mary Lamb’s entrancingly static idyll is a story about a life with no story. I include Swift’s extraordinary ‘Directions to the Footman’ in part because it shows how narrative was always lurking, ready to rip up the most morally directive of stories, and partly because it foreshadows in an unmistakable way a tendency of recent years, to cast short stories in the form of non-fictional lists, instruction booklets and other secretly story-telling sequences of prose (Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)’ from Self-Help is a good recent example). All these are working towards a definition of the short story in distinction to the emerging form of the novel. By the time Galt (and Scott) start to publish their short stories, the definition is clear, and confident; and it did not emerge from nothing.

  2

  Nowadays, when we read short stories, we read them in an unusual way, and one that may not resemble the way they were originally intended to be read. We read short stories in anthologies like this one, but mostly in substantial collected or selected editions, intermediate or summary accounts of a short-story writer’s career. We are used to reading the short fiction of a single author one piece after another. Of course, the single-author collection can be a marvellous thing, introducing the reader to an author’s world with intensity and power. Some of the most powerful encounters I had in the course of compiling this book, indeed, were with beautifully conceived and executed collections from which it was hard to choose a single example, such as Douglas Dunn’s superb Secret Villages or E. M. Delafield’s The Entertainment. But it’s important to recognize that short stories were not first written to be read in this way, for the most part, but to be read singly and in very varied company. Short-story collections, and especially volumes entitled Collected Stories, I found, may be misleading, heavily revising short stories written much earlier, organizing an author’s short stories in ways designed to obscure their publishing history, or even omitting most of an author’s work under a title implying completeness. Some of the worst offenders in this regard are ‘collected’ editions compiled by the authors themselves. Sometimes, collected editions are calculated to make a particular effect by including works never regarded as within the author’s body of short fiction. Readers were very surprised to see the huge bulk of Alasdair Gray’s collected short fiction, Every Short Story, when it was published by Canongate. On investigation, Mr Gray had chosen to include an entire novel, previously published as Something Leather, under a new title. To gain an accurate sense of a writer’s short fiction, it is often necessary to return to their first publication – usually in journals.

  For the greater part of the short story’s history in Britain, the main publishers of short fiction were the editors of magazines and journals. Even very distinguished and famous writers did not write their short stories to be first read in a collection between hard covers; their stories were submitted to the editors of magazines like – in roughly chronological order - Blackwood’s, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Household Words, All the Year Round, Cassell’s, The Fortnightly Review, The Strand, Black and White, The Yellow Book, Adelphi, Life and Letters, Lilliput, Encounter, Horizon, the London Magazine, Granta and very many others. There were journals to publish stories in very many different genres and styles, and each had its particular flavour. Some journals dabbled in short fiction and serial novels – Country Life published a short story from time to time, occasionally hitting gold or digging deep into its coffers to bring out something by a star author (it published John Masefield’s ‘Davy Jones’s Gift’, for example). Others were overtaken by fashion and broadened their scope to include fiction: The Gentleman’s Magazine, published from 1731, gave in and brought out fiction between 1868 and 1890 before withdrawing from the fiction market in its remaining seventeen years. Fiction was a core part of the endeavour of many popular journals, even of daily newspapers – at first, usually novels or serial works, but as time went on, increasingly relying on the short story. The quantity of short fiction published by the Daily Mail in its early history beggars belief, none of it collected, all of it now effectively lost. Much of it must have given a lot of pleasure in its day.

  The breadth of publications taking and paying for short fiction in this country, and the equally wide spread of possibilities in America and elsewhere, made it perfectly possible for a successful writer of short fiction to earn a good living, and even (like Conan Doyle) to become rich. In the 1890s, after the appearance of The Strand and Black and White as magazines that would publish only short fiction rather than serialized novels, at least twenty-three magazines were founded that published short fiction significantly or exclusively. In the decade and a half before the First World War, there were ‘at least thirty-four high circulation magazines publishing substantial quantities of short stories’.5 The primary market, and the primary source of inco
me for these writers, was publication in the journals.

  Some instances might reveal how, even without the consistently higher payments available from American magazines, British authors could attain real professional competence through selling short stories to magazines, and it was clearly worth investing a good deal in time, money and skilful craft. Some payments: Hardy’s payments for a single short story went from £20 in 1878 to £100 in 1894. Twenty pounds was a fairly standard payment for decades. It is what Stevenson was paid for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, and by the 1930s E. M. Delafield’s customary price for a story had only risen to £30. There were still less well-paying journals – the Yellow Book paid Arnold Bennett £3 for a short story – but often hard-nosed and flush journals took a view about what an author could do for them, and paid accordingly. An interesting study by Reginald Pound has revealed the range of payments made by The Strand to authors in 1914 for single short stories, and it shows what they thought they could gain by star names. Britten Austin was paid £31/10s, P. G. Wodehouse £40, A. E. W. Mason £166/13/4, rising to £350 for W. W. Jacobs. It is complicated to translate these sums into modern-day equivalents, but it is worth noting that studies of the middle classes at the time cite a family doctor’s average annual salary before the First World War as around £400. These, of course, are just the payments for first serial rights in Britain. Many, perhaps most, authors of short stories could also sell the story in the United States, and subsequently second serial rights in both Britain and the US, so that a story for which a British magazine paid £50 could easily end up earning three times as much merely from serial publication. These individual magazine payments, impressive as they are, fall short of Conan Doyle’s extraordinary income. He was paid £50 each by The Strand for the four first four Sherlock Holmes stories, and then engineered a colossal increase. After 1895, the magazine never paid less than £100 per thousand words for anything he wrote. After Sherlock Holmes had been killed off and – through public demand – resurrected, Doyle was offered £3,000 for twelve stories by an English publisher and £6,000 by an American. Later still, Doyle received an offer of 75,000 dollars, or approximately £12,500 at the conversion rate of the time, for twelve short stories.6 There was no question that magazine publishing of short stories could be among the most financially lucrative form of writing long into the twentieth century. This investment encouraged the most able and ingenious writers of the day to place it at the centre of their practice.