The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Read online

  Was there a regional aspect? Perhaps. The Scottish short story has aspects of folklore and a consistent interest in experiments with voice that is their own – I was sorry not to find space for Eric Linklater, and to have included some more early compilers of folklore would have taken the anthology in a direction too rich to be merely sampled. The Welsh short story produces profound mastery, and its fascination with the unexpected direction and the superficially relaxed, conversational purpose emerges in Rhys Davies and the breathtaking Alun Lewis story – a hearty, skirling, raucous quality, too.

  It may be that the British short story offers the longest and richest national tradition in the world, and with its own particular qualities of genre, extroversion, confidence and improvisation escapes any kind of predictability. This anthology could very easily have been twice as long as it is. I was determined that I would not include famous writers on the basis of achievement that, in reality, lay elsewhere – neither Firbank nor Virginia Woolf would command our interest on the basis of their stories if they had never written novels. E. M. Forster was a difficult case. The stories I most admired were published posthumously, ruling them out of consideration, and the ones he published in his lifetime suffered from the whimsy that his novels, at greater length, command and subdue. Nor was it right to include stories that were merely historically interesting; Scott’s short stories are important, but I couldn’t admire any of them as much as the best of Galt. I also thought that Walter de la Mare was in the unusual position of requiring lengthy submersion in his peculiar tone. It was impossible to imagine any of his stories making sense in an anthology of this sort, and I could not make up my mind whether he was a writer of genius or a writer of essentially entranced badness.

  I thought it was my duty to shut my ears against the noise of fashionable approbation. Particularly in the case of contemporary writers, it would have been easy to have gone along with some lazily acclaimed writers. Of course, there are some writers at work now whom I omitted at the last with immense regret, such as Jane Gardam, David Rose, Gerard Woodward or Helen Dunmore. There were other highly acclaimed practitioners, however, who never came near a final selection. Reading through an author’s successive collections of stories was a salutary lesson in discovering that a large reputation really had no idea how to put a story together, or had only one idea, much repeated over the course of decades. Other restrictions made themselves felt. It was agony to confine myself to a single story by a very varied and fecund writer. Worst of all, it sometimes had to be accepted that an author who had done something rather brilliant with a short story couldn’t quite justify his or her space at the expense of a greater master. While not feeling much guilt about the omission of a fashionable name or a Woolf – they will survive my neglect – I do feel guilty about these unfamiliar names who had made something strong and beautiful and striking, and yet, at the last, I found that a J. E. Buckrose, a Margery Sharp, an Elizabeth Goudge, an H. A. Manhood or an R. Murray Gilchrist (much admired by Arnold Bennett) had to drop back into oblivion. With all that, the task of systematically reading thousands of short stories by hundreds of writers in journals, collections and magazines must count as the most rewarding and surprising of my professional life.

  6

  Many conversations, much correspondence and casual discussion over the years contributed to this anthology. I would like to thank John Mullan, John Sutherland, Tessa Hadley, Alan Hollinghurst, Nicola Barr, Harriet Harvie-Wood, Georgia Garrett, Georgie Hammick, Peter Parker, D. J. Taylor, Jane Feaver, Ginny Baily, Maggie Fergusson and Candia McWilliam for very helpful suggestions. The idea of the anthology was Simon Winder’s at Penguin. Simon both confidently went along with the notion of an anthology on a very generous scale, and, just as importantly, kept the project within bounds. I should also say that he coped manfully with the loss of a splendid Ian Fleming story at the very last stage. The detailed investigation of both journals and collections of stories was only possible thanks to the London Library and the British Library. I would also like to thank Bath Spa University, which gave me time off from teaching at a crucial stage to allow me to get through a very large quantity of reading. Above all, the work of selection owes most to A. S. Byatt, who carved a pioneering path with her 1997 Oxford Book of the English Short Story and whose selfless interest and engagement in conversation and correspondence gave me a lot to think about. I am very happy to dedicate this anthology to Antonia, and to correct at least one glaring omission from her anthology; she modestly left herself out, and it is a pleasure to be able to include a superb story by my predecessor.

  Notes

  1. Review of N. Hawthorne, ‘Twice-Told Tales’, in Poe, Edgar Allen, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York, 1989), p. 571 .

  2. ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, ibid, p. 19.

  3. The Collected Stories of Lanoe Falconer (Palo Alto, 2010), p. 13.

  4. Baldwin, Dean, Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950 (London, 2013), p. 8.

  5. Baldwin, p. 43.

  6. Lycett, Andrew, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (London, 2007), pp. 298, 299.

  7. Baldwin, p. 101.

  8. Chambers’s Journal, 3 June 1871.

  9. ‘A Few Notes upon Mr James’, Yellow Book, vol. 7, p. 71.

  10. Reported on Twitter by an audience member called Koa Beck, 1 February 2014, after a talk at Beth Elohim, Park Slope, Brooklyn.

  11. Khushwant Singh Selects: Best Indian Short Stories, vol. 2 (Harper Collins, India), p. 9.

  12. Quoted by W. Forbes Gray, ‘A Hundred Years Old: Chambers’s Journal, 1832–1932’, Chambers’s Journal (1932), p. 83.

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court

  The poet who was spending the summer at the Anglers’ Rest had just begun to read us his new sonnet-sequence when the door of the bar-parlour opened and there entered a young man in gaiters. He came quickly in and ordered beer. In one hand he was carrying a double-barrelled gun, in the other a posy of dead rabbits. These he dropped squashily to the floor: and the poet, stopping in mid-sentence, took one long, earnest look at the remains. Then, wincing painfully, he turned a light green and closed his eyes. It was not until the banging of the door announced the visitor’s departure that he came to life again.

  Mr Mulliner regarded him sympathetically over his hot Scotch and lemon.

  ‘You appear upset,’ he said.

  ‘A little,’ admitted the poet. ‘A momentary malaise. It may be a purely personal prejudice, but I confess to preferring rabbits with rather more of their contents inside them.’

  ‘Many sensitive souls in your line of business hold similar views,’ Mr Mulliner assured him. ‘My niece Charlotte did.’

  ‘It is my temperament,’ said the poet. ‘I dislike all dead things – particularly when, as in the case of the above rabbits, they have so obviously, so – shall I say? – blatantly made the Great Change. Give me,’ he went on, the greenish tinge fading from his face, ‘life and joy and beauty.’

  ‘Just what my niece Charlotte used to say.’

  ‘Oddly enough, that thought forms the theme of the second sonnet in my sequence – which, now that the young gentleman with the portable morgue has left us, I will …’

  ‘My niece Charlotte,’ said Mr Mulliner, with quiet firmness, ‘was one of those gentle, dreamy, wistful girls who take what I have sometimes felt to be a mean advantage of having an ample private income to write Vignettes in Verse for the artistic weeklies. Charlotte’s Vignettes in Verse had a wide vogue among the editors of London’s higher-browed but less prosperous periodicals. Directly these frugal men realized that she was willing to supply unstinted Vignettes gratis, for the mere pleasure of seeing herself in print, they were all over her. The consequence was that before long she had begun to move freely in the most refined literary circles: and one day, at a little luncheon at the Crushed Pansy (The Restaurant With A Soul), she found herself seated next to a godlike young man at the sigh
t of whom something seemed to go off inside her like a spring.’

  ‘Talking of Spring …’ said the poet.

  ‘Cupid,’ proceeded Mr Mulliner, ‘has always found the family to which I belong a ready mark for his bow. Our hearts are warm, our passions quick. It is not too much to say that my niece Charlotte was in love with this young man before she had finished spearing the first anchovy out of the hors-d’œuvres dish. He was intensely spiritual-looking, with a broad, white forehead and eyes that seemed to Charlotte not so much eyes as a couple of holes punched in the surface of a beautiful soul. He wrote, she learned, Pastels in Prose: and his name, if she had caught it correctly at the moment of their introduction, was Aubrey Trefusis.

  Friendship ripens quickly at the Crushed Pansy. The poulet rôti au cresson had scarcely been distributed before the young man was telling Charlotte his hopes, his fears, and the story of his boyhood. And she was amazed to find that he sprang – not from a long line of artists but from an ordinary, conventional county family of the type that cares for nothing except hunting and shooting.

  ‘You can readily imagine,’ he said, helping her to Brussels sprouts, ‘how intensely such an environment jarred upon my unfolding spirit. My family are greatly respected in the neighbourhood, but I personally have always looked upon them as a gang of blood-imbrued plug-uglies. My views on kindness to animals are rigid. My impulse, on encountering a rabbit, is to offer it lettuce. To my family, on the other hand, a rabbit seems incomplete without a deposit of small shot in it. My father, I believe, has cut off more assorted birds in their prime than any other man in the Midlands. A whole morning was spoiled for me last week by the sight of a photograph of him in the Tatler, looking rather severely at a dying duck. My elder brother Reginald spreads destruction in every branch of the animal kingdom. And my younger brother Wilfred is, I understand, working his way up to the larger fauna by killing sparrows with an air-gun. Spiritually, one might just as well live in Chicago as at Bludleigh Court.’

  ‘Bludleigh Court?’ cried Charlotte.

  ‘The moment I was twenty-one and came into a modest but sufficient inheritance, I left the place and went to London to lead the life literary. The family, of course, were appalled. My Uncle Francis, I remember, tried to reason with me for hours. Uncle Francis, you see, used to be a famous big-game hunter. They tell me he has shot more gnus than any other man who ever went to Africa. In fact, until recently he virtually never stopped shooting gnus. Now, I hear, he has developed lumbago and is down at Bludleigh treating it with Riggs’s Superfine Emulsion and sun-baths.’

  ‘But is Bludleigh Court your home?’

  ‘That’s right. Bludleigh Court, Lesser Bludleigh, near Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire.’

  ‘But Bludleigh Court belongs to Sir Alexander Bassinger.’

  ‘My name is really Bassinger. I adopted the pen-name of Trefusis to spare the family’s feelings. But how do you come to know of the place?’

  ‘I’m going down there next week for a visit. My mother was an old friend of Lady Bassinger.’

  Aubrey was astonished. And, being, like all writers of Pastels in Prose, a neat phrase-maker, he said what a small world it was, after all.

  ‘Well, well, well!’ he said.

  ‘From what you tell me,’ said Charlotte, ‘I’m afraid I shall not enjoy my visit. If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s anything connected with sport.’

  ‘Two minds with but a single thought,’ said Aubrey. ‘Look here, I’ll tell you what. I haven’t been near Bludleigh for years, but if you’re going there, why, dash it, I’ll come too – aye, even though it means meeting my Uncle Francis.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘I certainly will. I don’t consider it safe that a girl of your exquisite refinement and sensibility should be dumped down at an abattoir like Bludleigh Court without a kindred spirit to lend her moral stability.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you.’ His voice was grave. ‘That house exercises a spell.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A spell. A ghastly spell that saps the strongest humanitarian principles. Who knows what effect it might have upon you, should you go there without someone like me to stand by you and guide you in your hour of need?’

  ‘What nonsense!’

  ‘Well, all I can tell you is that once, when I was a boy, a high official of Our Dumb Brothers’ League of Mercy arrived there latish on a Friday night, and at two-fifteen on the Saturday afternoon he was the life and soul of an informal party got up for the purpose of drawing one of the local badgers out of an upturned barrel.’

  Charlotte laughed merrily.

  ‘The spell will not affect me,’ she said.

  ‘Nor me, of course,’ said Aubrey. ‘But all the same, I would prefer to be by your side, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Mind, Mr Bassinger!’ breathed Charlotte softly, and was thrilled to note that at the words and the look with which she accompanied them this man to whom – for, as I say, we Mulliners are quick workers – she had already given her heart, quivered violently. It seemed to her that in those soulful eyes of his she had seen the love-light.

  Bludleigh Court, when Charlotte reached it some days later, proved to be a noble old pile of Tudor architecture, situated in rolling parkland and flanked by pleasant gardens leading to a lake with a tree-fringed boat-house. Inside, it was comfortably furnished and decorated throughout with groves of glass cases containing the goggle-eyed remnants of birds and beasts assassinated at one time or another by Sir Alexander Bassinger and his son, Reginald. From every wall there peered down with an air of mild reproach selected portions of the gnus, moose, elks, zebus, antelopes, giraffes, mountain goats and wapiti which had had the misfortune to meet Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake before lumbago spoiled him for the chase. The cemetery also included a few stuffed sparrows, which showed that little Wilfred was doing his bit.

  The first two days of her visit Charlotte passed mostly in the society of Colonel Pashley-Drake, the Uncle Francis to whom Aubrey had alluded. He seemed to have taken a paternal fancy to her: and, lithely though she dodged down back-stairs and passages, she generally found him breathing heavily at her side. He was a red-faced, almost circular man, with eyes like a prawn’s, and he spoke to her freely of lumbago, gnus and Aubrey.

  ‘So you’re a friend of my young nephew?’ he said, snorting twice in a rather unpleasant manner. It was plain that he disapproved of the pastel-artist. ‘Shouldn’t see too much of him, if I were you. Not the sort of fellow I’d like any daughter of mine to get friendly with.’

  ‘You are quite wrong,’ said Charlotte warmly. ‘You have only to gaze into Mr Bassinger’s eyes to see that his morals are above reproach.’

  ‘I never gaze into his eyes,’ replied Colonel Pashley-Drake. ‘Don’t like his eyes. Wouldn’t gaze into them if you paid me. I maintain his whole outlook on life is morbid and unwholesome. I like a man to be a clean, strong, upstanding Englishman who can look his gnu in the face and put an ounce of lead in it.’

  ‘Life,’ said Charlotte coldly, ‘is not all gnus.’

  ‘You imply that there are also wapiti, moose, zebus and mountain-goats?’ said Sir Francis. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. All the same, I’d give the fellow a wide berth, if I were you.’

  ‘So far from doing so,’ replied Charlotte proudly, ‘I am about to go for a stroll with him by the lake at this very moment.’

  And, turning away with a petulant toss of her head, she moved off to meet Aubrey, who was hurrying towards her across the terrace.

  ‘I am so glad you came, Mr Bassinger,’ she said to him as they walked together in the direction of the lake. ‘I was beginning to find your uncle Francis a little excessive.’

  Aubrey nodded sympathetically. He had observed her in conversation with his relative and his heart had gone out to her.

  ‘Two minutes of my uncle Francis,’ he said, ‘is considered by the best judges a good medium dose for an adult. So you find him
trying, eh? I was wondering what impression my family had made on you.’

  Charlotte was silent for a moment.

  ‘How relative everything is in this world,’ she said pensively. ‘When I first met your father, I thought I had never seen anybody more completely loathsome. Then I was introduced to your brother Reginald, and I realized that, after all, your father might have been considerably worse. And, just as I was thinking that Reginald was the furthest point possible, along came your Uncle Francis, and Reginald’s quiet charm seemed to leap out at me like a beacon on a dark night. Tell me,’ she said, ‘has no one ever thought of doing anything about your Uncle Francis?’