Table Of Content

THE OXFORD BOOK OF SHORT STORIES CHOSEN BY V. S. PRITCHETT NEW YORK OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1 9 81 This edition published 1981 by Book Club Associates by arrangement with Oxford University Press Introduction and selection © V. S. Pritchett 1981 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Oxford book of short stories. I. Short stories, English I. Pritchett, Sir Victor Sawdon 8zj'.oi'o8 PR1309.S5 ISBN 0—19—214116—3 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS INTRODUCTION xi SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832., Scottish) The Two Drovers 1 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804—1864, American) The Birthmark 27 EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809—1849, American) The Fall of the House of Usher 43 MARK TWAIN (1835-1910, American) The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County 61 BRET HARTE (1836—1902, American) The Iliad of Sandy Bar 67 AMBROSE BIERCE (1842—Pi9i4, American) The Coup de Grace 78 HENRY JAMES (1843-1916, American) Paste 84 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894, Scottish) Thrawn Janet 99 vi Contents JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924, Polish, naturalized British) The Secret Sharer 109 RUDYARD KIPLING (1865—1936, English) The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot 147 O. HENRY (1867—1910, American) Telemachus, Friend 167 HECTOR HUGH MUNRO ('SAKl') (1870-1916, English) Sredni Vashtar 174 STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900, American) The Open Boat 179 WALTER DE LA MARE (1873-1956, English) An Ideal Craftsman 202 W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM (1874-1965, English) An Official Position 219 SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941, American) I Want to Know Why 238 A.E. COPPARD (1878-1957, English) The Field of Mustard 247 JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941, Irish) Grace 255 Contents vii D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930, English) The Rocking-Horse Winner 2.75 RING LARDNER (1885-1933, American) Who Dealt? 2.90 KATHERINE MANSFIELD (1888-192.3, New Zealand) The Woman at the Store 300 KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (1890—1980, American) Flowering Judas 310 LIAM O'FLAHERTY (1896- , Irish) The Tent 3Z2. WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897—1962, American) Dry September 330 ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1898-1961, American) Hills Like White Elephants 341 ELIZABETH BOWEN (1899-1973, Irish) The Demon Lover 346 V.S. PRITCHETT (1900- , English) Many Are Disappointed 353 SEAN O'FAOLAIN (1900— , Irish) Sinners 362. viii Contents FRANK O CONNOR (1903—1966, Irish) Guests of the Nation 371 MORLEY CALLAGHAN (1903- , Canadian) The Runaway 382 H. E. BATES (1905-1974, English) Never 391 R. K. NARAYAN (1906- , Indian) A Horse and Two Goats 395 EUDORA WELTY (1909- , American) A Visit of Charity 411 WILLIAM SANSOM (1912-1976, English) Various Temptations 417 MARY LAVIN (1912- , Irish) My Vocation 432 PATRICK WHITE (1912- , Australian) Five-Twenty 443 JOHN CHEEVER (1912- , American) Goodbye, My Brother 466 DORIS LESSING (1919- , British) Mrs Fortescue 487 Contents ix FLANNERY O'CONNOR (1925-1964, American) Parker's Back 5 01 WILLIAM TREVOR (1928- , Irish) Going Home 5 20 JOHN UPDIKE (1932— , American) Lifeguard 539 REFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 545 INDEX OF AUTHORS 549 INTRODUCTION This anthology is a selection of short stories written in the much- travelled English language by authors whose roots are in five con- tinents and are nourished by a variety of cultures. The period covered is from the early nineteenth century to the present day. There is no suggestion that they are 'the best'. All anthologies are a matter of personal taste: the only claim I can make for this one is that it has been formed by seventy years of passionate addiction to the short story and fifty years as a fellow writer in an art or craft that is distinctive and, for the writer, exquisitely difficult. The bond between all of us is our fascination not only with the 'story' but with its relatively new and still changing form wherever it appears; and I fancy that, as a body, we are more conscious of what other story writers have done in other languages, in France, Italy, North- ern Europe, Russia, and Latin America and even in what is called the Third World, than our novelists commonly are. In private life, story-telling is a universal habit, and we think we have something that suits especially well with the temper of contemporary life. For my purposes two stories in English literature by Sir Walter Scott - The Two Drovers and The Highland Widow - seem to es- tablish the short story as a foundational form independent of the diffuse attractions of the novel: the novel tends to tell us everything whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely. More important - in American literature, Washington Irving and, above all, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne - defined where the significance of the short story would lie. It is, as some have said, a 'glimpse through' resembling a painting or even a song which we can take in at once, yet bring the recesses and contours of larger experience to the mind. If we move forward to the stories written, say, since 1910 I would say the picture is still there - but has less often the old elaborately gilded frame; or, if you like, the frame is now inside the picture. But, to go back to the nineteenth century after Scott, it is noticeable that American writers and those in young societies took to the new art with more alacrity than the British who were overwhelmed by the vitality of the great English novelists of that prolific age. The short stories of Dickens, Thack- xii Introduction eray, Mrs Gaskell, Hardy, and many excellent minor writers, do read like crowded episodes of a continuing novel, or like novels that have been started and then given up. Hardy's stories could as well be novels; his genuine short stories are in his laconic poetry. Yet, the compulsively novelizing Trollope is an exception; he did discover the short story when he became a traveller. One remembers the Lotte Schmidt stories and the remarkable Cornish Tale, Malachi's Cove. If the British held a distinctive place it was chiefly in the stories of exotic travel. We had to get away from our closed doors and closely curtained windows. Not until Robert Louis Ste- venson and Rudyard Kipling did we join the American fabulists. And, on reflection, we notice these two writers are on the move, restive when at home. In saying the present volume is the expression of a personal taste I must add that constant difficulties of space and copyright are the anthologist's nightmares. One would need two or three volumes to do justice to the abundance of past talent and the new feeling for experiment in the youngest generation who are more given to the clinical document than to fable. One is forced to be arbitrary, to reject some masters because they have been over-anthologized. If Jack London, P. G. Wodehouse, Max Beerbohm, Saul Bellow, Ber- nard Malamud, and many others are omitted this implies no lack of admiration for their gifts and contribution. There is also the special difficulty of the length of short stories. The short-story writer has always depended on periodicals. In the nineteenth century, newspapers in all countries published quite long stories every week and fat magazines published immensely long ones: stories that one has to call novellas, a delightful form that may run to thirty or forty thousand words. A master like Henry James gets longer and longer as the years go by. Not only are such writers lengthy; their prose is leisurely, often sententious and delights in cultivated circumlocution and in the ironies of eu- phemism. The break in prose style between ourselves and our eld- ers that occurred in, say, 1900 is also a symptom of the conflict between long and short. It is painful to have to reject George Moore's Albert Nobbs (from Celibate Lives), a neglected work of genius, simply because it goes on and on. (It is still in print.) I have had to be sparing of other longer stories and have tended, where possible, to turn to the unusual or little-known examples of a tal- Introduction xiii ent. So, Henry James is not represented by The Real Thing — the well-known key to his art - nor by The Pupil or the admirable Bench of Desolation-, but I do think the far briefer Paste, though it has a too obvious debt to Maupassant, is one of James's character- istic gems. There is a similar difficulty with Joyce: The Dead must surely be his most impressive and seminal story, but, again, it is very long and it has often appeared in anthologies: I have preferred therefore a shorter story from Dubliners where his genius was first signalled. The variety of Kipling in scene and manner makes nonsense of the attempt to find the typical; I have chosen the Kipling of Lon- don's East End rather than the magical Indian scene, for this Cock- ney aspect of Kipling's work is often overlooked. In general, I have sought the surprising and perhaps uncharacteristic tale such as Katherine Mansfield's The Woman at the Store and in African, Ca- nadian, Australian, and New Zealand writers I have looked less to the native scene than to what these writers have given to the art. They indeed require a volume to themselves. I go some way in sup- porting Frank O'Connor's view that the short story has flourished in what he calls 'anarchic' societies, in which social bonds are loose and where the traditional satisfactions of a culture are slack. How- ever, the great French tradition is a clear exception to O'Connor's argument. In the present century, now eighty years old, style, attitudes, and natural subject matter have changed. Strangely, we are now closer to the classic poetic conception of the short story as Hawthorne and Poe saw it, closer - in our mass societies - to fable and to the older vernacular writers. We are less bound by contrived plot, more intent on the theme buried in the heart. Readers used to speak of 'losing' themselves in a novel or a story: the contemporary addict turns to the short story to find himself. In a restless century which has lost its old assurances and in which our lives are fragmented, the nervous side-glance has replaced the steady confronting gaze. (Short-story writers - like painters - are now in something like the situation of Goya in his art.) In a mass society we have the sense of being anonymous: therefore we look for the silent moment in which our singularity breaks through, when emotions change, without warning, and reveal themselves. One remembers the ter- rible moment of passion in Kipling's Mary Postgate, the dumb re-