Beginnings of and for the True Short Story in England

269 BEGINNINGS OF AND FOR THE TRUE SHORT STORY IN ENGLAND Wendell V. Harris (Northern Illinois University) When Kipling brought forty of his Indian stories together as Plain Tales from the Hills, he made available to the Anglo-Indian and, shortly, the English reader more stories which were both truly short and truly different in effect from other forms of fiction than had been published in England during the preceding eighty-eight years of the nineteenth century. Thirty-two of those stories are under 30OO words. After Kipling the deluge: six years later one finds the true short story in its brief, less-than-5000-word form dominating the first volumes of the Yellow Book, pushing its way into periodical after periodical, filling volume after volume. During these same years, as the prefaces to the New York edition make abundantly evident, Henry James was finding the growing fondness of magazine editors for the short story extremely annoying. James wrote 112 of what he preferred to call "tales," 47 of which are over 15i000 words, 25 over 21,000, 10 over 30,000. The longest stories in the Yellow Book itself are, I believe, James's three contributions. Only six of James's "tales" are under 6OOO words, five of these having appeared during the 1890's, the decade which Wells and others have described as the golden age of the short story. In general, the briefer stories caused James special agonies. Describing the writing of "The Middle Years," he tells us of the "boilings and reboilings of the contents of my small cauldron" and remembers "the whole process and act. . . one of the most expensive of its sort in which I had ever engaged." The process of boiling down the initial draft sounds, superficially, very much like the repeated application of "well-ground Indian Ink" and "a camel-hair brush" which Kipling counseled after the limits set by the Civil and Military Gazette had taught him to make an art of a necessity.-!- However, James never really got the hang of it. It is perhaps significant that "The Middle Years" remains 2000 words longer than the 5500 to which he said he had trimmed it; and more significant that for all the care devoted to it, "The Middle Years" is not really successful. Indeed, there are only a few exceptions to the general rule that vintage James comes only in magnums. That a writer as remarkably skillful and whole-heartedly devoted to analyzing the art of fiction as James seems to have been unable to come to terms with the demands of the short story at a time when many lesser English writers, learning from Kipling, from Stevenson, and from French and American models, were inspired to do good work in that genre is interesting, though not in itself striking. However, the juxtaposition of James's shorter fiction with Kipling's and, for instance, the stories H. G. Wells was writing by the mid-nineties, suggests that we ought to look once again at the peculiar demands of the short story as a form. James was quite aware both of the need for unity of effect in the short story and the corollary requirements concerning choice of subject and economy of treatment. James and many other writers failed to see that while the novel and nouvelle offer the reader a world to enter, the short story can, and is expected to, offer a vignette to contemplate, the angle of vision from which the reader is 270 allowed to view that vignette is crucial, and that angle must be fixed early in the story. Our expectations when we take up the novel, at least the traditional novel, are rather like those with which we take up a volume of biography or history - in addition to an amalgamation of style and imagination which results in characters, scenes, and events interesting in themselves, we anticipate the emergence of a pattern. The experienced reader of a novel thus approaches it with a patience born of having found that there is an intrinsic interest in immersing oneself in a comprehensive fictional world from which significances gradually emerge. One not only immerses oneself in the world...