Short Stories for Study [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674497573, 9780674497566

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Short Stories for

Study

Short Stories for

Study

CHOSEN AND A P P R A I S E D B Y

Kenneth Payson Kempton

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS · CAMBRIDGE · 1953

Copyright, 1953, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Distributed in Great Britain by Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press London

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 53-5948 Printed in the United States of America

NATHANIEL BENCHLEY R. V. CASSILL ROBIE MACAULEY SLOAN WILSON

FOREWORD M Y PURPOSE IN THIS BOOK IS TO HELP WRITERS SOLVE

problems that are bound to arise in their work and that, they are likely to think, were especially rigged to trap and throw them. The chapter headings follow roughly the plan of an earlier book, The Short Story; except the first and last, each chapter is divided into three sections: theory bearing on a principle of technique or management of content, a relevant short story, and comment suggesting to what extent practice met theory and how it fell short. Thus, the book is not so much a collection of short stories as a record and explanation of aims, hits, and misses. It is also an attempt to bring closer, in creation and in critical understanding, two divergent but not irreconcilable concepts of the short story: the underpaid, too-little read, often original but undisciplined literary piece; and the highly paid, well-wrought, widely read, but often shallow and formularized commercial job. Most of the stories chosen seem to have the merits of both, with a minimum of their defects. K.P.K. Boothbay Harbor Maine 15 December 1952

Contents PART ONE

I. II.

TO A W R I T E R - F O R - R E A D E R S C O N T I N U I T Y AND I M M E D I A T E SCENE "LOVE, DEATH, AND THE LADIES' DRILL TEAM," by Jessamyn West, from the New Yorker

III.

"I" AS

"I" AS

60

WITNESS

"DEATH OF RED PERIL," by Walter D. Edmonds, from Mostly Canallers VI.

41

PROTAGONIST

"A LETTER OF ADMONITION," by Sloan Wilson, from the New Yorker V.

20

S T R E A M OF E X P E R I E N C E "THE SARDILLION," by Elizabeth Enright, from the Yale Review

IV.

1

92

O B J E C T I V I T Y A S A P P R O A C H AND A S METHOD "DECK THE HALLS," by Nathaniel Benchley, from the New Yorker

115

INTERLUDE

VII.

A HORRIBLE

EXAMPLE

"JIM BENT, DESERTER"

153

X

CONTENTS PART TWO

VIII.

CONTENT OF THE WRITER "THE GLASS HOUSE," by Dorothy Livesay, from Northern Review

IX.

PLAUSIBILITY "THE INVADERS," by Robie Macauley, from Tomorrow

X.

XVI.

278

FOR PLOT READ IDEA "THE PRISON," by Bernard Malamud, from Commentary

XV.

250

PLACE "LARCHMOOR IS N O T T H E WORLD," by R. V. Cassill, from Furioso

XIV.

2 32

PERSONS "NUNS AT LUNCHEON," by Aldous Huxley, from Mortal Coils •

XIII.

212

SURPRISE "THE ABSENT-MINDED HEART," by William Maxwell, from the New Yorker

XII.

188

SUSPENSE "A TRIP TO CZARDIS," by Edwin Granberry, from Forum

XI.

165

304

INDIRECTION AND RESTRAINT "THE SHADOW OF AN ARM," by Thomas Hal Phillips, from the Virginia Quarterly Review

3 22

TO A READER-OF-WRITERS

344

IT WILL BE SAID, PERHAPS, THAT A M A N WHOSE WORK

has risen to no higher pitch than mine has attained, has no right to speak of the strains and impulses to which real genius is exposed. I am ready to admit the great variations in brain power which are exhibited by the products of different men, and am not disposed to rank my own very high; but my own experience tells me that a man can always do the work for which his brain is fitted if he will give himself the habit of regarding his work as a normal condition of his life. I therefore venture to advise young men who look forward to authorship as the business of their lives, even when they propose that the authorship shall be of the highest class known, to avoid enthusiastic rushes with their pens, and to seat themselves at their desks day by day, as though they were lawyers' clerks; and so let them sit until the allotted task shall be accomplished. The Autobiography of Anthony

Trollope

PART ONE Technique is the application stories being read.

of methods

designed — Bernard

to

insure

DeVoto

I. TO A WRITER-FOR.READERS FASTIDIOUS READERS M U S T HAVE FEARED THAT BEFORE

the first quarter of this century ended, commercialism would debase the literary value of the short story to that of advertising copy. Yet in those years some very fine short stories got published and were widely read. Innocent bystanders have since begun to worry lest an opposite trend, intellectualism, spreading through the century's second quarter and by its fifth decade fairly prominent in belletristic short fiction, may not prove still worse an influence. This guess, too, may be wrong. For many years now, some short stories have exposed deeply hidden Freudian motivations; others have merely recorded overt projections of subhuman or animalistic impulses. Some have espoused racial issues, emphasizing injustice, deprivation, and discrimination against minorities, while others have focused on the dissolution of the family or the church. Many protagonists are doomed only as the story opens, whereas the fate of others is traced back for several generations to show the implacable forces of decadent heritage and corrupt environment at work long before resistance became possible. There are writers who find their most felicitous expression in stylistic experimentation, and there are those whose mood is most freely released by exploration of the various shock values of abnormal psychology. Some short stories have been known to recount almost no physical events; in others there is a plot, but it thickens mainly in the author's head, finding utterance along several levels of symbolic meanings besides the literal, if any. These materials and methods came, of course, not all at once but by a gradual process of discovery and accretion. For a time, writers were content with one, or at most two new departures; then three or four were found necessary as those first introduced became conventional; then five or six. Nowadays, our really high-powered

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SHORT STORIES FOR STUDY

intellectualist tries for the package lot plus its natural adjunct, a critical analyst to supply a gloss, or allegorical interpretation, of the microcosm. If his explication proves to be all wrong, good; if yet other critics can be induced to disagree and furnish fresh, conflicting analyses, all the better; for then the intellectualist's original intention may remain debatable, which may have been his original intention. Meanwhile, however, a relatively weak though stubborn opposition — the innocent bystanders referred to, doubters and worriers at mid-century — have voiced or stand ready to voice more or less cogent complaints. They contend, for instance, that any literary form requires for survival a spontaneously interested public; that the intellectualized short story grows less and less a story, more and more a dreary exercise, steadily losing — despite promotional effort — its normal discerning readers; while the popular short story, though deteriorating esthetically, is gaining more and more readers of all kinds. They say the intellectualized short story is too hard on any kind of reader for its own good. They charge the authors of such stories with worshiping the arcana fetish, playing secrets with themselves; they maintain that a contemporary belletristic short story is often more difficult to unravel than a capable popular mystery — and less rewarding, being hard labor from start to finish. They profess to find characters in the round — that is, balanced by naturally opposing traits such as are generally found in living persons — extremely rare in such fiction. Humor, they assert, is all but obsolete; and to prove this statement they cite a recent anthology editorially applauding itself for having at last discovered a "genuinely humorous," an "awfully funny" short story that turned out to be about a servant girl who felt obliged to carry, through an evening of mild carouse with a sailor, a dead fish. They say if this is comedy they are Jerome K. Jerome, who it seems wrote something of the same sort about somebody with cheeses, only his was funny, long ago. As against the rare exception of the dead-fish type of hilarity, they argue, as a rule the intellectualized short story is too gloomy, lopsided, monstrous to justify a claim of tragedy; like the reader, its characters never get a break. There can be no conflict if the

TO A WRITER-FOR-READERS

3

hero is doomed at the start or before, and where there is no conflict there can be no suspense. In such a case, they feel, the only interest a reader can be expected to summon lies in the question whether or not he is going to be able to get through the story still in his right mind. Finally, the worriers sum up their complaint by saying that the popular short story at its commercialized worst could scarcely be any sillier, any further from reality, than are some present specimens of intellectualism; that, although a negative merit maybe, at least the popular short story seldom pretended to be anything but what it was — pleasant, easy reading; whereas the belletristic pretends to be several other things and a short story besides; and that any kind of story should mean, at first or second reading and: without the aid of an interpreter, something to some kind of reader. To which unmannerly blast an exponent of intellectualism might reply: What reader? No reader is any concern of his, or ever was. Then is this rarefied product not, the worriers may earnestly rejoin, the sort of anti-wisdom or anti-learning known as obscurantism, here posing as belles-lettres? What about the young, aspiring writer? How good or how bad is this intellectualism for him? He is likely to go to college nowadays. Won't the young man or young woman interested in creative writing there find intellectualism in an advanced and hard-shelled form? Won't it confuse the student in lecture courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature? Worse yet, won't the virus infect courses in creative writing, where under the guise of "directed free discussion" it can assail the student with the authority of dogma, at the same time subtly appealing to the lazy side of his creative temperament by its predilection for little or no self-discipline, little or no perspective or objectivity, and carte blanche to write as he pleases? Will there not be born in him a yearning to write something that nobody will ever understand? After all, the worriers contend, it isn't as if there were no market for intellectualized experimentation. Little magazines, subsidized quarterlies, reviews now and then pay fairly well; with the prize and anthology trade included, avant-garde publication can lay claim to a sizable slice of business. Evidently there are a considerable number of persons willing to pay for such pub-

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SHORT STORIES FOR STUDY

lications, who take some esoteric sort of pleasure in being befuddled, or merely in leaving such printed matter about and thus becoming known as of the faith. But have we not, say the worriers, reached a point where no man has faith but in himself? Isn't it true that the critics are fouled in their own dialectics, that few of them use the same terminology, that the few who do differ flatly therein on semantics? Isn't each critic assumed, and certainly selfassumed, to be like an oracle dead right on all points—if you can follow him and until the next is heard. What, finally those innocent bystanders beg — what lies ahead of intellectualism? Blank pages? Chocktaw? T o this plea the redoubtable intellectualist has perhaps no reply. He may smile with pride at the disturbance he has created, he may flush with anger, he may simply turn away bored. Perhaps he and his detractor do not speak the same language any more. One hears both sides, usually overstated. The truth is — I feel sure — that if any such concerted movement or persuasion as has been called intellectualism exists, it has had and will have no more damaging influence on the short story than had commercialism in the 1920's and later. The short story is not going to pieces. As a deliberative literary form it is by now old enough, broad enough, and flexible enough to contain within its rational limits many queer specimens and yet as a whole remain unimpaired, at least a piece of sound craftsmanship, at its very best a work of art. What in some ways may seem a decadent trend may actually be only logical development carried a little too far. Since the century opened, many colleges and universities apparently came to the conclusion that to force teachers really interested only in research to teach writing as a sideline (this used to be the practice, simply because more students than teachers wanted to write) was bad for them, for their students, and for writing. For at least a generation now, such work has been done in large part by young writers who also want or, since literary recognition may come slowly, have to teach writing. They supply the interest extended to actual practice that scholars lacked. These young men and women naturally look forward for new approaches to old problems

TO A WRITER-FOR-READERS

5

in creative writing, and they stimulate students to follow their example. It should be so, or new learning of the arts will cease. True, young writers and some older ones recently practicing the literary short story have seemed to stare pretty hard at the seamy side of life. (Commercial writers are equally prone to view an unearthly happy side, and declare it whole cloth.) Now a part of this gloomy staring may be due to the perennial delusion of the amateur-at-heart that the serious or tragic is intrinsically higher art than the light or comic. Most of it, however, must have a more sensible explanation. Life itself has been showing, has been forcing sensitive minds and imaginations to stare at, its seamy side for over thirty years. A first principle of creative writing is that a man must use the material he knows best. Perspective on that material, objectivity about it, maybe a degree of universality stemming from it may not come except with greater years. It may be best, a young man may gain objectivity sooner, if allowed to ease off his chest early the prejudice that is almost inevitably present in what he knows best. This change in the colleges has been reflected, quite naturally, in the periodicals that college people, now a very large total, read. Some of the stories published in little-known magazines are good by any standard — I mean they are good reading as well as good examples of the short story near its peak performance. Some, I grant, are oddities that may some day possess a slight historic interest. And some are very bad by any standard. But parallel findings must be true of many periodicals in the country and, I suspect, always have been true of any art form anywhere. I do believe, nevertheless, that it is time for a reappraisal of the short story in terms of its main objectives; for a renascence of faith in it as representation of characteristic, rather than marginal, life; as objectified interpretation of human experience for, chiefly, the enlightenment and entertainment of nonprofessional readers, and in so far as possible without arbitrary or exhibitionistic monkeyshines. This book is addressed to the potential author who concurs in that belief: who wants to write merely to be read, thoroughly understood on not more than, say, two readings, and enjoyed by his

6

SHORT STORIES FOR STUDY

readers. T o such a writer I hope to bring practical aid, spiritual comfort, and no highfalutin nonsense. He can be fairly sure that no pretty but nebulous ideals will be here set forth, no categorical dictum or dogma will be laid down, no punches will be pulled. Each premise and conclusion I hope to be ad hoc — a reasoned theory, a story, an appraisal — derived from and shaped by a single motive: to stimulate and nourish a creative writer's growth in the understanding of human nature, in patience in expressing his understanding, and in knowledge of his craft. Everything here, whether by the authors of the stories reprinted or by me in theory or in comment weighing the stories, is part of an effort to help such a writer to create nothing more, and certainly nothing less, than the best fiction-for-readers of which he is capable. The effort goes a little further. I have tried to see his situation, internal and external, as I saw it somewhat obscurely through my own eyes when I began to write short stories, and since then have seen it more clearly through the eyes of many eager but puzzled students. I have tried to choose, for illustration of the principles of short-story writing that underlie technique (methods of telling) and management of content (ideas and material for their demonstration), such examples as would have helped me and as have helped my students. And I have written about them what I wish I could long ago have read, written by someone else. These stories, moreover, are not offered as models of perfection, not as jigsaw puzzles that need assembling, but merely as, for the most part, good stuff that their authors probably toiled and sweated over, doubted, despaired of, cursed and almost tore up, but somehow brought to completion and found readers for — work that has defects as well as merits. I believe that studying the one may be as valuable as studying the other. Most of these stories have been read to classes, and a good deal of my comment on them has developed from the subsequent discussion. Assuming the writer-for-readers to be an honest craftsman, as I shall do, I doubt if his internal situation — what he wants to do with his work and hopes to get from it — changes much with his years or has changed much with the hundred and fifty years that the short story has lived as a distinct literary form. He wants to know that

TO A W R I T E R - F O R - R E A D E R S

η

each piece as it leaves his desk is the best he can write at that time, not excluding the prospect that he will do better next time. He hopes, with an editor's permission, to find readers; and without in any sense coddling or catering to them he means to keep readers in the back of his mind as he thinks and writes, instead of thinking and writing only for himself. Ernest Hemingway once expressed this relationship to readers as it is born and matures in the writer's mind. He said something like this: You write for a while getting all the fun, the reader getting none. Then for a while as you go on writing, you get less out of it but the reader begins to get something. Finally you get no fun but the reader gets it all. (He might have added that in that final stage you get great satisfaction out of doing hard work that a reader enjoys.) Foreseen as feasible, this final stage might even come first and be permanent. A writer-for-readers may legitimately want, I believe, as many readers as he can find. If he succeeds in getting many without lowering his standards, fulfillment of the desire and high payment for his work may to some extent compensate for its generally low critical rating. With equal justification he may seek few but highly intelligent readers; for he will then have the satisfaction of knowing that he is communicating on a high plane, is being read by thoughtful minds. Again, this assurance plus more likely critical approval (and now and then a grant or prize ) will perhaps make up for a much lower payment. He may, however, want — as Kay Boyle, William Faulkner, and a few others have wanted, and caught, though not without occasional taunts from the opposite critical camp—both the best and many readers. He will probably have to settle for one or the other. But if he continues to yearn for both he should try to achieve both, even though to the last he finds himself publishing only for those readers he feels less happy to have won. If, finally, he can't make up his mind which he wants, let him cease debating with himself and get to work. A story will find its proper level. Whoever his readers — we must remember here his professional honesty — all he really needs money for is to be able to go on working. If he gets enough for that, he is as happy as can be, and goes on. I do not advocate starving in a garret; butter is good on bread,

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SHORT STORIES FOR STUDY

and marmalade even better. Something should be said, though, for creative, noneconomic happiness, known by those working in all the arts who succeed in making something out of what was — a thought, a lump of clay, a never-heard sound, pigment — nothing at all. So much for the inside of a young writer-for-readers. Outside, even in the last quarter-century, the forces pulling an unpublished storyteller this way and that, hampering, bewildering, misleading him have multiplied and strengthened to a total of pressure that may turn him permanently from what he wants to do, or into a different person. A writing man used to be left alone to write; if he happened to meet an editor, it was tete-ä-tete and usually all to the writer's benefit. Now, unless he antisocially insists, with his first success he finds himself an essential piece of stage property to his own promotion at parties, on speaking dates, in newspaper interviews and over the air. This activity can be fun, but also it can become physically wearing and mentally distracting. Again, a new, inexperienced writer used to be held in relative anonymity and used to receive relatively fixed payment. Hard in certain respects, this treatment kept him striving. Now, his very youth and newness are exploited; and the dubious inference, by him as by others, may be that he is good because he is new. A struggling newcomer, on the other hand, may see advertising to the effect that editors are bidding for the work of unknowns; he, unknown, is getting rejection slips from the periodicals named. If he becomes successful, his rate of payment rises — in some quarters it can rise to a fantastic height — and he may find editors less and less ready to accept his work at the price they themselves set. He is likely to guess that at the moment they are looking for unknowns again, and he wishes he were back where he started. Along with his ups and downs, the struggling writer can hardly get through a week without being importuned to buy something that, it is promised, will work wonders for him: some authors' service, clipping bureau, club or association, periodical, or conference. On every hand he sees prizes offered, fellowships granted, honors conferred for work that seems to him so-so or worse. He believes his own is better, yet often he can't seem to persuade others to

TO A WRITER-FOR-READERS

9

share his belief. He can scarcely pass a bookstall or enter a library without stumbling on a new anthology. He has a normal interest in such books, whether trade (varicolored jackets) or text (usually monochrome). They contain the work of his forerunners and contemporaries; naturally he wants to know what has been done and is being done well in his craft. He opens one and is abruptly disillusioned. Outstanding merits, no faults whatever, have been found in short stories that seem to him mediocre or poor. At this point he must realize that his judgment is prejudiced by his as yet unfulfilled, perhaps unrecognized, desire to be represented in such a book. He may also get some encouragement from the likelihood that if ever he is represented it will be by what he considers the worst story he ever wrote, and that by the time the book comes out he will dislike and distrust every word of his piece; naturally, for by then he will be doing much better work. Even so, the uneven quality of fiction in our trade and text anthologies needs some explaining. In the first group belong The Prize Stories of 19—-: The O. Henry Awards, edited in recent years by Herschel Brickell; The Best American Short Stories, 19—, edited by Martha Foley; and an occasional, short-lived competitor such as Cross-Section 194-, edited by Edwin Seaver. As for the second group, text collections have become too numerous to be listed here; they seem to appear now at the rate of about four a year. Nobody can say that good and very good short stories are not to be found in these books. What can be wondered at, in the trade annuals, is the erratic spread from very good to very bad, both year-to-year and in a single year's gleaning. Probably we expect too much. It seems possible that, some year, no very good short stories happened to be published. But awards must be made every year; a full volume of short stories must be given the palm; or the project will be forgotten by the buying public, or, worse, some upstart will muscle in and get a piece of the market. For similar reasons, perhaps, even in lean years those stories selected must be editorially lauded and given vigorous promotion. Again, it is only reasonable to conjecture that critical exhaustion from too much and too constant reading sets in here, producing blind spots or general myopia. Expediency might be a factor. Short stories can be

ΙΟ

SHORT STORIES FOR

STUDY

readily, if superficially, classified by theme and material; it seems only human for editors or judges in a hurry (and hurry goes without saying, in view of the torrent of entries) to let such classification outweigh critical standards, in order to put together a book with as strong an appeal to as many buyers as possible. T h e trade anthologies do seem to exercise some control of this sort, although it may be quite inadvertent. There will be found an example of many of the most familiar types of material — a jazz or blues story, a divorce, a misunderstood or overperceptive child, a war, a lost-cause, a dog, a faculty, a What Does It Mean? story, and so on; but only one of each per volume, oddly enough. Or the classification may seem to have been geographical, by author or by setting, as if to make the book representative of, and attractive to buyers in, all sections of the country. Or there may seem to be a preference for well-known writers, as if on the ground that they can do no wrong, but with a judicious sprinkling of young unknowns who can to advantage be puffed as deserving wide attention. These are guesses, and they may all be wrong. But if we expect too much there may be the reason that we have been promised too much. T h e mere selection of stories for either kind of collection has come to imply great merit; selection coupled with unstinted and unqualified praise, whether hurried or tired or short-sighted or arbitrary, certainly adds avowal to implication and completes what may be to some readers (especially the writer-for-readers I have in mind) a vicious circle. These are great because they are here because they are great. Some curious statements and devices do get into both trade and text anthologies. I have puzzled over a pageful of diagrams that suggest a few plays in football, for a team of only four or five, all moving but all held within a mystic circle. A n amusing story by Ray Bradbury about spooks and hobgoblins was once editorially lit up like a neon sign as invoking "the shades of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, all of whom would have understood at once what [the author] was up to." But would Irving have understood the light amorality of "Homecoming"?* Wouldn't Hawthorne have considered it vicious and vulgar, Poe found it rather obvious? N o t that * Prize Stories of 194η: The O. Henry Awards, Doubleday & Co.

TO A WRITER-FOR-READERS

we today necessarily agree with them, but what is a reader who has read or been told something about those writers to think? A judge of a national contest stated in the preface of the volume containing the prize-winning entries that a story showed "almost flawless technique" without a hint as to how it missed perfection in this respect, or much of any evidence that the critic knew the meaning of "technique." The word "form" is kicked around earnestly, sometimes senselessly. A reader knows art form, good and bad form. Form alone means shape, structure. But we find in one collection that form is what Sherwood Anderson preferred to plot, and is therefore good. The story cited is "Death in the Woods," * to some readers rather formless; that is, told any old way at too great length. The writer of a short story well built and deeply moving, invited by the editors of an anthology to add an explanation of how it got written, admits he borrowed a bit from Shakespeare, with whom he must be on the best of terms, for he calls him simply "Bill of Avon." (This is a kind of form?) Biographical material about authors, now traditional in collections, although useful for reference and often interesting to students of literature, may have an opposite effect on those who want to write. One recent collection reproduces authors' autographs. In another are listed the annual prize winners from the start of the enterprise more than thirty years ago. A student of the short story can be expected to recognize here about eight names. He is bound to wonder what happened to all the rest of those short-story writers once found to be geniuses. Something needs saying about the careless use of such words as "best" and "classic" and "masterpiece" before we are swamped by a tidal wave of promoted greatness. Arnold Bennett, no artist, once maintained that a classic would not be one if it had not been steadily pushed by a prejudiced minority of publishers, editors, and scholar-critics. This was a gross oversimplification; exceptions such as the popular demand for Shakespeare's plays come to mind. And there is the occasional great work, such as Moby Dick, that without the efforts of a small group of discerning readers we might have lost. Still, there may have been a kernel of truth in Bennett's rationalization. If he had qualified the statement and gone on to * Death in the Woods and Other Stories, Liveright.

SHORT STORIES FOR STUDY

specify a few artificially imposed masterworks, he might have proved his case. Without knowing the ratio of popular demand to critical support at the time of publication, I feel pretty sure that the nonexistence today of Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, George Eliot's Silas Marner, most of Meredith's novels, and among short stories Frank Stockton's "The Lady or the Tiger?" would have meant small loss to me. These works received heavy promotion in my schooling; they were prescribed reading. In any event, it can hardly be denied that a good deal of evanescent and meaningless classic- and masterpiece-making-by-promotion is going on today for the short story. We love superlatives, especially biggest and best. Best for whom? This we may not have time to consider. We are prone to assume virtue in a piece written long ago, or just yesterday, or under some other promotionally feasible circumstance — or simply because we have selected it for publication. The assumption sells a book. It may make an academic reputation. It gives students something to talk about. It fills time. But it may do harm to those relatively few but very valuable young people who hold, usually without knowing it, the future of short fiction in their heads. I am doubtful whether analyses of masterpieces, prescribed reading, use of models, imitation are of help to someone with a good short story in him and the desire to write it well and see it published; and I suspect that their effect on one who has the desire without, yet, the added urge of specific material may be imaginative paralysis and creative frustration, with or without diversion of energy into scholarship or criticism. T o a hopeful would-be author, with ideas and material filling his head, enforced confrontation of a masterpiece, real or soi-disant, can be comparable to a slap in the face by a loved parent. You can praisefully explain it, line by line; but your analysis, no matter how glowing, will contribute little to his development as a writer. The chain of cause and effect it forges is alien to his experience. The work as a whole is to him at once a fact and a glittering improbability. It is there, but when you are done it has been chopped up into little pieces of laudatory analysis. What he needs is not praise and analysis; what he needs is appraisal and synthesis. He might have filled the need himself, given time, or he might have been

TO A WRITER-FOR-READERS

I 3

led to it. N o w he may never even see it. He is not and can't be the same sort of person you say the author was; he is living at a different time under other conditions; no matter how strongly you urge him to write as the author wrote, he cannot (except to copy his style) do so. He can admire, he is with you there; he can read and reread the story, finding new brilliant touches each time. But write? W h y , the more powerfully you have interpreted and appreciated that piece of prose, the firmer may his conviction become that he can't write at all. Of so short a form there must be — if we are candid — only a very few unexceptionably excellent specimens. Besides its brevity (as compared with what it must accomplish), two other limitations seem to prevent the short story from rising, except on very rare occasion, to the highest level of art. One is its youth, bringing the genre as yet too close to our eyes and forcing us into some sort of compromise between content — once naturally strong to start it, now undeniably weakened—and technique — once all but unknown, now wonderfully sharp and convincing. Has any short story both technique and content of the highest order? Which element is more essential to greatness? W h o can say? For a trial run over this target, let us compare two short stories showing the same general attitude toward what life can do to people, one by a pioneer and past master, the other by a brilliant contemporary: Maupassant's "The Necklace" and J. D. Salinger's "Pretty Mouth and Green M y Eyes," from the New Yorker, July 14, 1951. In "The Necklace," which occurs in late nineteenth-century Paris, Mathilde Loisel, a gay and pretty girl of the lower-middle class, has married a government clerk when she might have done better, and is unhappy. She longs for a large wardrobe, jewels, high society, and is disgusted with her husband's contentment with their lot. One night he brings her an invitation to a ball to be given by the head of his bureau at the palace of the Ministry. She lacks a suitable gown, but he manages to squeeze out 400 francs for one. Having no adornment for the dress, Mathilde goes to her only friend of the upper class, Mme Forestier, a former convent schoolmate, who is happy to lend what Mathilde believes is a diamond

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necklace. She enjoys herself at the ball, but somehow between there and home loses the necklace. Panic-stricken, the two search everywhere, seek help from the police, the newspapers, the cab companies, all in vain. Loisel realizes that the necklace must be replaced. He and Mathilde go from jeweler to jeweler until they find a string of diamonds apparently just like the one lost. Its price is 36,000 francs. The sum is paid, half with inherited and half with borrowed money, and the diamond necklace is returned to Mme Forestier, who now is cool to her friend, doesn't even open the box, and chides Mathilde for her tardiness. Repaying the loans ruins Loisel, ages Mathilde, and takes ten years; but it is at last done. One day in the Champs Elysees, Mathilde again meets her friend, still young and beautiful, and now all pity and affection. Taking courage from the fact that Mme Forestier never noticed the substitution, Mathilde recounts the whole miserable experience. Then her friend tells Mathilde that the necklace she borrowed was paste, worth about 500 francs. T o anyone who ever worked hard for something that proved less than worth the effort — that is, almost everybody — the story strikes home. A reflective reader interested in writing, notes that its time span is more than ten years, creating a huge discrepancy with reading time that may impair an illusion of reality. This observation leads to another: the author is quite visibly guiding the story (although with care and skill) now fast as a synopsis, now slow to let in detail and dialogue; but always making sure that we follow the surface aspects that he wants us to know, being careful to conceal (at a crucial point he writes through Mathilde's sense impression: "she discovered a superb necklace of diamonds" apparently in order to avoid as storyteller a deliberate falsehood) or simply to ignore what he for his own reasons does not want us to know until the end of the story. Thus, in spite of all his care to guide and hide, loopholes and loose ends are left, because he was so busy guiding and hiding that he left himself no chance to relate behavior to personality, to motivate action except for the struggle to repay borrowed money. Examined closely, the story seems to represent a chain of unhappy coincidences that might occur once in a thousand years. Why, when Mathilde replaced the necklace, was her dear friend's manner distant, cool, and accusing? On the other

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hand, w h y at the end is Mme Forestier abruptly friendly, gracious, and full of pity? Incidentally, if she is so, w h y does she tell Mathilde the truth? H o w did it happen that Mme Forestier's paste necklace was kept in the box from a fashionable jeweler who knew nothing about it? (There is an untold story.) H o w was it that Loisel, who could barely afford 400 francs for a party gown, had an inheritance from his father of 18,000 just when it was needed? What was Mme Forestier doing with a necklace of paste? W h y didn't she open the box when the genuine necklace of diamonds was returned? Such questions can multiply until the whole fabric of the story is honeycombed with doubt. T o all of them there is only one answer: the author wanted it that way and told it that way to conceal the fortuitous structure of his story. The effect is of incomplete telling, which pushes the characters this way and that at the author's will. Something went wrong with this author-managed, author-told story. Nowadays, being brought up on more convincing technique, a thoughtful reader must accept the story in spite of its specious method of stacking the cards and tipping the scales. He admires it for what it says about an age-old problem of honesty. In "Pretty Mouth and Green M y Eyes," which occurs in midtwentieth-century Manhattan, Lee, a lusty bachelor, is about to consummate a casual affair with the wife of his younger colleague in a law firm when the husband, Arthur, calls on the telephone to ask if Lee happens to remember with whom his wife, Joanie, left a party that evening at which all three were present. T h e telephone is so near the couch or bed on which the lovers are lying that Lee can talk almost without changing his position, one arm around Joanie. Lee says no, he didn't notice. Arthur, more than half drunk, says she hasn't come in, and in the course of the conversation becomes hysterical and sobs out the sordid details of his wife's nymphomania (or his own insane jealousy), their quarrels, and some rather pathetic incidents of their earlier life together. During the long talk, at least half of which Joanie hears, the change in her manner from that of one sought to that of one seeking a lover is subtly implied, as is also Lee's gradual turning from her. Lee, really in his own defense, does such an expert job of half baiting, half bucking up Arthur that he, evidently, at some point

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guesses the truth. After hanging up, Arthur calls again to say that Joanie has just come in and everything between them is all right. This time Lee cuts him short, pleading a headache. T h e story ends as Lee breaks into senseless irritation at Joanie's touch. This sort of thing must have happened to many human triangles in present-day cities. T h e story seems not to have been intended to move the reader, but to draw from him an ironic chuckle, maybe a sneer. W e feel no attraction to, no pity for, any one of its characters. W e note that the time span is little longer than the episode would take to occur; that the author is revealed only by his by-line, the entire story having been set down as if by an impersonal mechanism that merely sees and hears; that full comprehension, even aided by the author's skillful selection of implicative behavioristic details, depends on closest cooperation and agile inference by a constantly alert reader; and that Mr. Salinger's interest appears to be confined to behavior, about which he of course reaches no conclusion. His characters are tangled in negative motives: Lee hoist by his own petard, Joanie losing both men (not that she cares), and Arthur having only the hollow revenge (he can't know of the rift between the lovers that we see and hear) of letting Lee know that he knows, perhaps suspected all along, what his wife and Lee are up to. These people are close to personified abstractions: lechery, jealousy, and so on. T h e y have mouths to talk and kiss with, hands to feel and smoke and drink with, ears to hear with; but these are incidental appurtenances, their most prominent organs being sexual, their compulsive motives libido, jealousy, fear, revenge. But in the telling of the story there is no catch, no slip, no loophole or loose end; it is an example of the subtlest short-story technique, real as the experience itself, and in that respect impregnable. Still, the very care necessary to this technique conveys the impression that the author believes his characters are characteristic and thus worth attention, if not interest. A reader uninfected by the love-nest-crash obsession cannot agree. These characters are plainly marginal, they are psychopaths of one sort or another; a story dealing wholly with warped minds cannot (he hopes) be characteristic of human nature. Then there remains the rather frightening implication that perhaps some day, perhaps even now, such persons as Salinger has depicted will be or are normal; that

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they may read stories about the queers who stay married, raise families, take a drink or two before dinner, and in general get on all right; that they will find amusement in such marginal, humdrum lives. With this thought the balance swings back as the reader becomes aware that this fear may have been part of the author's intention, and that if it was he was leaning too heavily on perhaps the last possible shock value in realism turned naturalism turned ghost story. In sum, both pieces are very good, one moving, the other disturbing; and beyond that they are very good in quite different departments of writing. I do not see how anyone can weigh the satisfactory content plus inadequate technique of one against the lack of content plus superb technique of the other. But I lean toward Maupassant because there is something worth recording in the grim drudgery and futile privation of the Loisels, no matter how badly put; and nothing in the other, well as it is written, that seems worthy of record outside a case history. "The Necklace" has certainly earned the right to be called a classic. T o me, it is on a lower plane of artistry and emotionally shallower than two other stories by Maupassant, "The Piece of String" and "Tallow Ball"; than Daudet's "The Last Class," and than Chekhov's "The Darling." Yet in spite of its faults "The Necklace" clearly transcends the limitations of brevity and youth in the short story, and moves into universality. Whether Salinger's story does or does not we cannot say at present. We can see that it illustrates a third propensity of the short story — timeliness, the rising from and applying to one particular age and sort of place — that may subvert the accomplishment of durable art. Specific, concrete details must carry the story. The more specific and the more nearly concrete — in an imagination bounded by, and a mind fixed only on, the present indicative — usually the more temporal and local, and the sooner forgotten. But someone will know about "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" in, say, A.D. 2025. I have been trying to suggest the risk to young creative writers incurred by the incautious use of "classic" and "masterpiece," and by the prescriptive reading of anything unreservedly admired. A horrible example might have a better influence. In a freely com-

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petitive society, since baffling and disruptive pressures exist, perhaps the prospective writer must learn by trial and error. Still, a plan for defense will do him no harm. If he (or she, of course) is in college: Find out discreetly in which courses discussion is actually free, choice of reading is optional, and most time is spent on basic principles. Once committed, the student is naturally under obligation to follow directives. If he finds he was misinformed, he can do the prescribed reading and then do more on his own, and in class discussion use both. If he must imitate, he can learn to put imitation on and take it off like a glove, remaining himself. H e can test everything read or heard by determining its intention, the means used, and the relative worth of the result. If he is beyond college or did not go: Inquiries, practices, tests now have a wider range of application, including editors, publishers, associates, friends and acquaintances, agents, sellers of services. Let him not put too much credence in any single opinion, judgment, or offer. Trade anthologies are for the general reading public. Reading stories in them, as well as those in text collections, can be useful if he interprets editorial comment attached as promotion, in the first instance, and in the second questions everything according to the three-ply test above. Reading of anything in quantity may have a depressing effect, and extensive reading of stories in current magazines is almost sure to. For material let him look about him or into his past, never seek it in print. Let him ignore prizes. If and as socio-literary promotion begins, a priority among sponsors becomes advisable; say, editor or publisher, agent, organization — but the order may change. Reading or speaking to clubs or other gatherings, for pay or not, is an indulgence useful only if wholly enjoyed. Even so, once a month seems enough. Doing his best and improving his best are going to be easier if he remains personally unknown (except of course to friends and neighbors) and lets his name and his work speak for him. As against an invitation to attend a writers' school or conference, or subscribe to any professional service, let him weigh the possible alternative of going alone somewhere he has never been, talking with and getting to know people he has never known. Whatever comes through the mail unsought is ipso facto suspect. Let him assign a fixed period

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for work every day, and even if it is only an hour and for several days he seems to get nowhere, let him cling to privacy, quiet, and the seat of his chair. After he has sold one story, let him find a good agent and send him a story at suggested or self-determined, regular intervals. Following such a plan for from one to five years, he may not be out of the woods but is pretty sure to be seeing daylight ahead. My hope is that the work of writing short stories may be helped by the study of theory and practice, unhindered by aura of academic sanctity or miasma of promotion. Part of the work cannot be reached by any outsider, must be left to talent, experience, will power, and God. What can be reached should be clear: undogmatic but expressing a definite standard, looking from a reasoned point of view. Besides the principle-illustrating factor in choosing stories, I had in mind two preferences. All should have appeared within the last thirty years or so; thus their authors could take advantage, if they liked, of the development of technique through the 1920's. And I searched especially for work of genuine freshness and unclassifiable flavor — rare in popular, literary, and experimental magazines alike — work that seems to flow from writers who write chiefly, and merely, to be read, to be well understood, to be wholly enjoyed. Such stories balance a concession to the reader's interest, which if excessive might result in commercialism, with a counterweight less heavy than the demands of intellectualism: faith in the reader's intelligent cooperation. Their writers told the truth as they saw it, yet made the truth readable.

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but a single blow. This fact was recognized by writers as far apart in time and conceptual approach as Poe, Ο. Henry, and Joyce; and each, according to his lights and the technical implements discovered and practiced by his time, worked out his own solution to its demands. They knew, as did Hawthorne and Maupassant, and as William Faulkner has recently demonstrated,* that a short story must move — physically or metaphysically and preferably both — from start to finish in one direction, in order to say one thing. Its course may be covert while it is being read, but it is there and remains single for all that. The idea it expresses, the blow it strikes, may be the more telling for being left wzsaid yet neatly implied. In any case, its force at impact is the result of movement along that planned line, movement that the reader perceives though he cannot know the outcome — movement that makes him feel everything is coming. As, if all goes right, it is. Thus, a blow — here, at least — is something more than a blow. A reader must know its cause, like hearing the provocation and seeing muscles contract; and just after the impact he should be able to infer its effect, not only on whom or what has been hit but on the hitter, and grasp its meaning as characteristic instance in the long record of mankind's giving — and taking — blows. In other words, although a short story is, relatively speaking, only a moment in time, to be convincing it must transcend its temporal as well as its spatial brevity, must be rooted in its characters' past and leave the reader not uncertain of their future. * Compare the short-story version of "Spotted Horses" in These Thirteen (Random House, 1931), with its longer form in The Hamlet (Random House, 1940).

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This feat presents only moderate difficulties. Individuals do not act or react without traceable stimuli, and their behavior under stress, if closely observed and clearly expressed, will usually foretell as well as tell itself. A thoroughgoing knowledge of the persons he is creating, with the knack of suggesting but not stressing traits unessential to the story — often innate talents — are the writer's mainstay here. But a subtler requirement, having to do with the relationship between actual and narrative time, and offering for the most part only artificial aids to accomplishment, entails a good many obstacles. Somehow, both time and artifice must be rubbed out, so they are there (or were there) but don't show. None but the most naive reader believes that a short story actually occurred; yet the writer must persuade all readers that it might have. Of very few stories can the author truthfully say that they happened exactly as set down; yet every writer must believe that his every story did so (in his mind, its truest possible origin), or no reader will believe it could have happened anywhere. Borrowing from the manner of historical record, as if in a plea for belief in fiction as fact, traditionally the short story uses the past tense. But this use hinders more than it helps create an illusion of reality. If the crucial moment in time during which the blow was struck has passed, it seems dead and done with. Who cares, now? This discrepancy is the short storyteller's most persistent headache. By some means or other, but inconspicuously, without breaking so far with tradition as to distract the attention from his material,* he must make the past tense seem present, the time at which the story is, not was, happening. For time before this moment he must use, with some latitude, once it is fixed, the past perfect; for time after the story ends, foreseen, he will use several devices to be discussed later. By whatever means and at whatever time, the writer's main intent is to create an effect of intimacy and immediacy; to make the impact of the moment so real that, at least while the reader is reading, the story not only might have happened but must * Eudora Welty's "Old Mr. Marblehall," in A Curtain of Green (Doubleday & Co., 1942), uses the present tense as its constant. T h e purpose seems to have been ironic, the protagonist's life having all but passed. Being very short, perhaps the experiment was successful. But some readers will find it technically self-conscious, too fancy.

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be happening, here and now and to him; and, the type fading, the act of reading forgotten, all living sharpens and narrows to the life of the mind. This necessity, the most stringent in short fiction, where much must be done in little space and the feasible protection of a margin of reader credulity, his willingness at least to suspend disbelief, is variable, puts a high premium on two interrelated factors: time span and continuity. T h e inexperienced writer bravely knocks off an opening scene of three or four pages, without having given much thought to how much time the whole piece will cover. H e knows well the persons he has to deal with, the one thing he wants them to demonstrate, where the demonstration occurs; and he is confident that all these matters are sound stuff. Yet he owns to an uneasy feeling. His opening, though readable, has a weird air of finality about it. He is still far from what he chiefly wants to say, yet he seems to have finished. Nothing moves on. Maybe nothing has moved. After that first scene, there is a blank in his mind. It is almost as if the one or two or three people he has brought to life took a breath or two, said a few words, did something or other, then suddenly and for no cause died. H o w to go on? H e reads over the pages, still likes the scene and feels it is too good to be thrown out. It isn't the idea he had in mind, and it doesn't seem to be even leading up to that idea. But it may be something better. T h e question is what to do with it? This is a common occurrence, even to experienced writers. Three or four pages done smoothly have an insidious appeal, a false authenticity. T h e difference is that after several repetitions of the performance the experienced writer sees through that appeal. H e knows that any part of a proposed short story that detaches itself from the rest, as a separate unit or scene, is no good. H e knows that he has gone wrong in one or both of two ways: he has written that opening scene in order to acclimate himself to the story or persuade himself that he has surely a story worth writing; or he has written it merely to introduce the characters to the reader. The reason for its air of finality is simply that the story has not begun to move. T h e scene is a sketch of two or three persons going through story motions but minus story: it is static, descriptive, expository.

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If anything at all has happened, the time of its occurrence either has no reference to the time the story ends or, with reference to that moment, is too far from it. In short, he began what might have been his story too early, leaving himself with the dreary and futile task of filling with something or other too much time before the end. He knows that he must learn, and learn again, to be able to do several things at once, without appearing to do any of them; and that above all it is incumbent on him to get the story into motion on the first page, better yet in the first paragraph, best in the opening sentence.* He knows this can always be done, though it takes doing to be unobtrusive, by forecasting the theme of the story through reference, as yet unestablished, to its symbol; or, more directly and simply, by showing motive in the protagonist (something he wants or wants to escape) and opposition or obstacle to its attainment. And so he knows exactly what to do with those three or four opening pages. Slide them off the table, making sure that they come to rest safely in the wastebasket. N o t perceiving the heart of the trouble, the inexperienced writer may assume that the blank confronting him at the end of his opening scene is merely a normal difficulty of creative writing, a test of his courage and stamina, to be wrestled with and with luck overcome. T w o methods of dealing with the situation will occur to him, and he may spend time and energy choosing between the two, blind to the fact that neither will help. He will slog ahead with some sort of continuous but irrelevant and probably dull action following the first scene, eventually finding a half-baked novelette or even novel on his hands; or he will make a four-line space at the end of the scene, center a " 2 " or " I I " in the next line, and write his short story in what he hopefully calls chapters but what, to the reader (if he ever has a reader) will more resemble hiccups. A typographical convention seems to support this second subterfuge, making it the harder to discard. For a long time short stories have appeared in magazines, and been reprinted in books, in sections, numbered or not. Without recourse to original manuscripts it is difficult to say whether they were so written or * Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy," in The Courting of Dinah and Other Stories (Doubleday & Co.), begins: "But if it be a girl?"

Shadd,

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whether, as is the custom today, they were so divided by a make-up editor to break the next and improve the appearance of a page. But this much is certain: no short-story writer can afford the risk of a break in continuity, representing change of place or lapse of time, unless something more impelling than time or place has been set in motion to force the reader to jump the gap without noticing it, and read on. The ideal short-story time span would seem to be a period not much longer than the time it takes to read the story. The ideal is seldom attainable, but it is there to shoot for, and shooting for it will sharpen the young writer's aim. In practice, time span is widely flexible. But we must remember that variable margin of reader credulity on which the story operates. Restriction on time span varies inversely with a writer's ability to superimpose on continuum a pattern of emotional consequence that for the reader abolishes the pattern of time. The young writer needs the discipline of restriction and will feel the more secure for accepting it. It usually necessitates beginning the story later, often much later, than he thinks he can do comfortably. But writer's comfort will never write a good short story. Restriction, moreover, forces him to weigh detail against time and, usually, strip detail to its salient minimum. It puts him to the test of rooting his story in the past and foreshadowing its future, of moving in one direction to say one thing, of gathering energy from its mass to strike that single blow. But — here is hope if not comfort for him — adoption of a minimal time span is the surest way of catching and holding a reader's attention. This must be true because, so written, in its manner and pattern fiction comes closest to reality by paralleling the continuum of existence while transcending it. W e do not live separate sections: day flows into night, night into day. Most of us do experience more dull and meaningless moments than exciting and significant ones. It is the aim of the short story to flow like life itself, giving meaning to what would lack it if only lived. Flow can be represented, meaning conveyed, by an adjusted time span and a relative continuity. Perhaps the most sensible view of these two factors in technique

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plots a middle course between the extremes of rigid fidelity to reading time and hit-or-miss laxity. Time should not be lost sight of, but neither should it be the only or the most important framework of the story. By confining the action to a relatively short period we shall be able to take advantage of the fact that time seems to quicken when emotion runs high; as tension in the story increases, acceleration of pace toward the end will seem only natural. Especially useful is the trick of habituating the mind to feasible limits of time while conceiving the demonstration of a storyable idea, of adjusting the action to fit a naturally limited time frame — a day, a night, one morning, an afternoon. Within the frame, as time and action allow, a flashback — or, better, several very short flashbacks — can root the story firmly in the past; and, if needed, a foreflash can imply its future. Even so, absolute continuity will not be possible. But that may be just as well. The last thing we want visible is stop watch or timetable. Let there be one in our minds; but let it appear in the story, except when time looms as motive force, only in undertone. Motives, thoughts, emotions make far better transitions than such cliches as " T w o hours later . . ." or "It was now two o'clock." A solution to all problems of time span and continuity is to be found in steady reliance on what has been called "immediate scene" as the story constant. Immediate scene does the here-and-now part of making the past seem present to the reader. It is a sometimes light and thin but ceaseless stream of specific and concrete details of action and speech, perceived by someone in the story or just outside of it. It is borne by the simple past tense: "he ran," "snow fell," "she was eating." T o remain immediate it must avoid the synoptic, which swallows large units of time in short gulps ( " H e spent a year on the West Coast"), and the customary, which classifies actions in groups ( " H e used to come by every morning," " H e would sit on the steps and talk to her," " H e was in the habit of skipping breakfast") — unless the record of such grouped actions is integrated and made organic by being thought or said by someone other than the author while the constant, the main stream of more specific, immediate details is flowing. Even so integrated, these less immediate forms of recording action are best kept to a

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minimum. Time has a way (this is customary action) of catching up with a story and even running ahead of it; and when this happens, the reader is more likely to be with time than with story.

LOVE, DEATH, AND THE LADIES' DRILL TEAM* by Jessamyn West E M I L Y COOPER, the newest member of the Pocahontas Drill Team, was the first to arrive at the Burnham Building, where the morning practice, called by their drill-master and team captain, Mrs. Amy Rotunda, was to be held. She stood for a while enjoying the wind — California's warm, dry September wind — before starting up the stairs to Burnham Hall. Burnham Hall was less pretentious than its name, being no more than the drab, unfurnished second floor of the building that housed, on its first floor, Burnham's Hardware, but the only other hall available in the small town of Los Robles was, though its rent was lower, unfortunately located above Sloane & Pierce's Undertaking Parlors. Emily was halfway up the stairs when she was hailed from the sidewalk below by Mr. Burnham himself, holding a key aloft. "You one of the Pocahontas girls?" he called. Emily turned about on the stairs and gazed down at the wideshouldered old man. The wind was lifting his coattails and tossing his white hair about in tufts, like those of the bunch grass she had known as a girl in the Dakotas. She hesitated for a moment before answering. She was a Pocahontas, all right, but "girl" was a different story. She was thirty-six years old, had been married exactly

* Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright, 19J1, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

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half her life, and had only an hour ago started her youngest off to his first day of school. Then, left without a child in the house for the first time in fifteen years, she had told her passing image in a mirror, "This is the beginning of middle age for you, Emily Cooper." Now "girl." Mr. Burnham, as if understanding the reason for her hesitation, smiled as she came back down for the key. "My youngest is fifty," he said. Then, perhaps fearing that she might consider such confidences too personal, coming from a stranger, he spoke reassuringly of the weather. "Nice blow we're having — nice touch of wind." He faced about for a second after saying this, to get the full force of the warm, lively agitation, which had everything movable in Los Robles moving. Actually, this talk of the wind was far more personal to Emily than Mr. Burnham's remark about his children. When he put the key in her hand, she said, "It's wonderful weather. I love the wind." Then she, too, was overtaken by a conviction that there was something unseemly in so much openness with a stranger, and she said a quick thank you and started back up the stairs. As she was unlocking the door, Mr. Burnham called, "Throw open the windows, will you? Modern Woodmen used the hall last night and they're a smoky lot." Mr. Burnham was right about the Woodmen. Emily felt as if she were stepping into the bowl of a pipe still warm and filled with fumes. There were windows across the entire front of the hall, which faced on Los Robles' Main Street, and she opened them all. Then she pulled a chair up to the middle window and sat down to await the arrival of her teammates. There was not much to be seen on the street below her. Ten o'clock on a Monday morning is not an hour for shoppers, and the children who yesterday would have been out in the wind, shirttails lofted for sails, diving and swooping like birds, but much noisier, were behind closed doors, with shirttails tucked in, and speaking only when nodded to by Teacher. She thought of her own Johnny and hoped he was finding school the wonder he had imagined it. He had left her without a tear, without even a backward look, declaring, with the pleasure of a man who has arrived at a goal long deferred, "Now I am a scholar." Emily leaned out the window to watch a tumbleweed, blown

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into town from one of the surrounding barley fields, cross Main at Brown, travelling west swiftly and silently. In the vacant lot across the street, the tall, switch-stemmed dust flowers were bent down almost as low as grass. Beneath the window, the Burnham Hardware sign was swinging, and the awning was bellying and snapping with the sound, she supposed, of a ship under full sail. A few merchants were beginning to go up the street to the Gem for their midmorning cups of coffee. Merchants, the wind revealed, had bodies. Inside their usually unyielding tubes of serge and herringbone, their legs were astonishingly thin. As if in restitution for this exposure, the wind parted their coattails to display their firm and stately bottoms. A black cat passed below, its blackness not even skin-deep, for its hair, wind-blown, exposed a skin as white as that of any butcher-shop rabbit. Emily thrust her hands out across the window sill, feeling through her outspread fingers the full force and warmth of the blowing — as if I were the one true gauge, she thought, the one responsive and harmonious harp. She was leaning thus, and by now almost half out of the room, when Mrs. Rotunda, the drill captain and coach, and Miss Ruby Graves, the team's star performer, arrived. Emily was new not only to the drill team but to the town of Los Robles, and was still able, she thought, to see people as they really were, unlabelled by a knowledge of their professions or reputations. But "Miss" and "Mrs." are in themselves labels, and Mrs. Rotunda's gray hair, elaborately waved and curled, with a fancy off-center part at the back and sculptured bangs arranged with all the finality of marble, said widow, said woman without a husband, filling in an empty and lonesome life with what, in the old, rich days, she would never have wasted time on. While, somewhat contradictorily, Miss Graves' black hair, long and innocent of the slightest ripple, said spinster, said woman without a husband and reconciled to the idea that her hair, curled or uncurled, was never going to be a matter of moment to any man. But without that "Miss" and "Mrs.," without her knowledge that Amy Rotunda was Fred Rotunda's widow, and Ruby Graves was Milton Graves' unmarried daughter and housekeeper, would she have had all this insight about hair? Emily couldn't say. It was the same with Opal Tetford and Lacey Philips, who ar-

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rived next. Mrs. Tetford's husband was an official in the local Bank of America, while Mrs. Philips' husband owned and operated a big grain ranch out on the edge of town. Knowing this, Emily thought Mrs. Tetford's soft opulence was suited to the protection of vaults and burglar alarms, while Mrs. Philips' rawboned frame was right in its austerity for a background of endless barley fields and rolling, cactus-covered hills. Mrs. Rotunda said, "I am going to demand that the Woodmen do something about this tobacco smoke. Do they think they're the only ones who use this hall?" Miss Graves, who prided herself on being unprejudiced about men, though with every reason to justify prejudice, said, "I expect they are chain smokers, Amy. One cigarette after another all evening long." Mrs. Rotunda, who had no need to conjecture, said, "Well, they could at least use a little Air-Wick afterwards." She went to a window and leaned out for a breath of uncontaminated air. The other ladies drew up chairs at the windows. Beneath them, Mr. Sloane, of Sloane & Pierce, passed by on his way to the Gem for his midmorning cup of coffee. Mr. Sloane, like many undertakers, was the picture of rosy durability, an evidence to mourners that though one life had ended, life itself endured. Mrs. Rotunda withdrew her head from the window and began to pace up and down behind her seated teammates. "No," she declared. "I could never bring myself to do it. Not for a mere twofifty, anyway." Emily looked inquiringly at Lacey Philips, who was seated next to her. "The Sloane & Pierce hall rents for two-fifty less than this one," Mrs. Philips explained. "Save two-fifty at the price of drilling back and forth, quite possibly, over the body of your own dead mother? Not I," said Mrs. Rotunda firmly. "It would take a lot more than two-fifty to reconcile me to that." Ruby Graves, who, in the manner of maiden ladies, combined extreme idealism on some subjects with extreme matter-of-factness on others, said, "If your mother passed away, Amy, wouldn't they hold the services for her down in Anaheim?" Mrs. Rotunda replied with patience. "Ruby, I was speaking

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hypothetically. Mother has owned a plot at Rosemead for I don't know how long, and will, of course, be laid to rest there — not be brought up here to the Sloane & Pierce funeral home to be marched across by Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias and others for whom such things don't matter. But I only mentioned her as an example. I would have exactly the same scruples about marching over your mother." Ruby turned away from the window. "Mother passed away a year ago Labor Day, Amy," she said in a voice that forgave the forgetfulness. Mrs. Rotunda put her hands to her head. "Ruby, I could bite my tongue out!" she cried. "My point was — anyone. I'd have too much fellow feeling to meet above the remains." Emily said, "I think Sloane & Pierce is a good place for Jehovah's Witnesses to meet, though." "Do they meet there?" Mrs. Tetford asked. Mrs. Tetford had a reputation for asking questions — trained, they said, by Mr. Tetford, who was a man who liked to supply answers. Emily nodded. "Why?" Mrs. Tetford asked. "I don't know," Emily said. "I mean why do you think it's a good place for them to meet?" "Oh. Well, that's one of the things a church is for, isn't it?" Emily asked, and, thinking of her own children, seeing them already grown and scattered, and herself and John .left alone with their memories, she added, "To remind us that all earthly things pass away?" Mrs. Rotunda, at the words "pass away," stopped her pacing, and the hall had the silence of a room in which a clock suddenly ceases ticking. The women turned toward her and she extended her arms as if about to ask some extraordinary favor. "Oh, girls!" she cried. "My dear girls! Let's not be morbid. Let's not dwell on the inevitable or we'll have no heart for our practice." Her life is drilling, Emily thought, smiling. The lodge is her husband and we are her children. She admired Mrs. Rotunda and hoped that, should she ever be left alone, she could be as sensible. Mrs. Rotunda came to the window at which Emily and Lacey sat, and perched between them on the window sill. Gazing down into

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the street, she shook her head. "Poor girl. Poor, poor girl," she said. "Imola Ramos?" Emily asked, though there was not, at the moment, anyone else in sight who could possibly be called a girl. Imola was a black-haired, brown-skinned woman of about her own age. Her red-flowered dress, which looked as if it might have started life as a window curtain or a tablecloth, was cut like a Mother Hubbard and belted in closely with what appeared, from the second story of the Burnham Building, to be a piece of gray, frayed clothesline. It was plain to be seen that she wore no brassiere — and not much else, for the wind plastered the big red flowers as close to her thighs as if they were tattooed there. "Ramos!" Mrs. Rotunda said. "Why, Emily, Imola's name's no more Ramos than yours is. Her name's what it's always been — since she was married, anyway. Fetters. She married LeRoy Fetters so young it's hard to remember that she was born a Butterfield. But it's Fetters now. That Mexican never married her. Couldn't, to do him justice, since LeRoy would never divorce her. And anyway, why should he have married her? She was willing to live with him." "Live with him as man and wife," Ruby explained. "I never knew they weren't married," Emily said. "I've always heard her called Mrs. Ramos." Mrs. Rotunda excused this. "You haven't been in Los Robles very long. It takes a little time to catch on to these things." Imola, who was carrying two shopping bags heavy enough to curve her square shoulders, stepped off the sidewalk and into the vacant lot opposite the Burnham Building. There she set the bags down amidst the blue dust flowers, and while the disturbed cicadas one by one ceased shrilling, she hunted in her purse for her cigarettes. By the time she had her cigarette lighted, the cicadas were once again filling Main Street with their country cries, and Imola, her head on one side, appeared to be listening with pleasure to the sound. " W h y did she leave her husband?" Emily asked. "That is the mystery," Mrs. Rotunda admitted. "There never was a better man on earth, to my mind, than LeRoy Fetters." "LeRoy used to wash Imola's hair for her, regular as clockwork, every ten days," Mrs. Philips said.

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"Why, I always wondered," Mrs. Tetford asked. "Pride," Ruby said. "Pure pride in that great mane of black hair." They were all watching Imola, standing at her ease in the vacant lot, the wind outlining her sturdy body — a woman obviously well and happy. Disagreeing with Ruby, Mrs. Tetford answered her own question. "In my opinion, LeRoy did it to save the price of a beauty parlor." Contradicted about motives, Ruby took a new tack. "They say, Mrs. Cooper, that this Mexican manhandles her." Mrs. Rotunda sniffed. "They say," she said. "I saw. Just a week ago today, I saw them having breakfast at the Gem, and Imola had black-and-blue spots the size of quarters on her arms." Ruby said, "Poor Imola." "What were you doing down at the Gem at breakfast time, Amy?" Mrs. Tetford asked. "Who said anything about its being breakfast time? As a matter of fact, it was three in the afternoon, and I was having a root-beer float. But those two were having fried eggs and hot cakes, bold as brass, not making the least effort to deceive anyone." "Why?" Ruby asked. "Why were they having breakfast at that hour?" "You may well ask, Ruby," said Mrs. Rotunda shortly. "I feel so sorry for Imola," Mrs. Tetford said. "They live out near our ranch, you know," Mrs. Philips told them. "They're on the edge of the irrigation ditch, in one of those three-room shacks that the water company furnishes its Mexican workers. T w o rooms and a lean-to, really, is what they are. Mattress on the floor, in place of a bed. Old, broken-down, rusty oil stove. Chesterfield with its springs half through the upholstery." "I wonder how Imola's mother bears it," Mrs. Rotunda said. "Do you ever see them?" Mrs. Tetford asked Mrs. Philips. "Many's the time. Manuel doesn't seem to have any regular working hours, and in the summertime they do a lot of sporting around together, in and out of the water. And the shoe's on the other foot this time so far's washing is concerned. Imola's the one who does the washing now."

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"His hair?" asked Ruby. "Well, just generally," Mrs. Philips answered. " A Butter field washing a Mexican! Sunk that low! It doesn't bear thinking about," Mrs. Tetford said. "I expect he's pretty dark-skinned?" asked Ruby, who evidently could bear thinking about it. . " T h e y both are," Mrs. Philips explained. "After they finish swimming or washing, whichever it is, they lay around in the sun, sun-tanning. And, like as not, Manuel will play some music for Imola on that instrument of his. That banjo or guitar — I never can tell the two of them apart." "Fred used to play the clarinet," Mrs. Rotunda said. " H e had a natural ear for music and could play anything he'd heard once." "Is it flat-backed or curved, Lacey?" Mrs. Tetford asked. "This musical instrument?" "I never did notice," "Big or little, comparatively speaking?" "Big," Lacey Philips said. "It's a guitar, then. I thought it would be. That's the Spanish national instrument." " H e is dressed, I suppose, by the time this music-making starts?" Ruby Graves said. "Dressed!" Mrs. Philips exclaimed. "Why, Ruby, he sits there strumming out melodies and flinching off flies as innocent of clothes as a newborn babe!" "And Imola?" "Naked as a jay bird. Lying in the grass kicking up her heels. Sometimes silent, sometimes singing." Mrs. Tetford shook her head. "The poor girl." "Play to her, hit her. I guess Imola runs the full gamut with that man," Ruby speculated. "Speak of the devil," said Mrs. Philips, motioning with her chin up the street. Emily, who had been watching Imola as she listened to the talk about her, saw her throw away the stub of her cigarette and wave at the man coming up the street toward her. Ramos was a short, stocky man with a strong, toed-in walk and, when he reached

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Imola, a quick, white smile. Imola stooped down when he turned in at the vacant lot and brought up out of one of her shopping bags an enormous bunch of purple grapes. "Isabellas," said Mrs. Philips. "First it's a feast, then it's a fast with them, I guess." "He's a big, burly fellow," Mrs. Rotunda admitted. "Naked and singing by the irrigation ditch," Ruby marvelled ps Imola popped grapes alternately into her own mouth and into that of the Mexican. " L e R o y Fetters was a registered pharmacist," Mrs. Rotunda told Emily. " A very responsible man. He always took a real interest in whether his prescriptions helped." "Breakfast at three o'clock," Ruby murmured as the feeding below continued, interspersed with considerable affectionate horseplay. "I wonder what it tastes like at that hour." " N o t a thing in the world to keep you from finding out, is there, Ruby?" Mrs. Rotunda asked. "I doubt it would be the same alone," Ruby said. Across the street, the grapes finished, Imola, there in the broad daylight of midmorning and in the middle of Los Robles, first kissed the Mexican full on the mouth, then put a cigarette between his lips and, while he shielded it with his hands, lighted it for him. T h e ladies were silent for quite a while after this. Finally, Mrs. Tetford said, "Poor Imola! Where is her pride?" Imola now lighted a cigarette for herself. Emily, watching the two of them at their ease amid the weeds and dust flowers, the wind carrying their cigarette smoke streaming away from them in transparent plumes, said, to her own surprise, "Pride? W h y , Mrs. Tetford, pride doesn't enter in. She loves him." There was another long silence in the hall. A number of additional members of the drill team had arrived, and Emily felt that her unconsidered word was settling amongst them like a stone in a pond of still water. But just at the moment when she supposed the last ripple had disappeared, Mrs. Rotunda repeated the word, in a voice that lingered and explored. "Love?" she asked. "Love?" Is she asking me, Emily thought. But evidently she was not, for before Emily could answer, Mrs. Rotunda had turned her back on the window and was calling the team together. "Girls, girls!" she

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cried. "Let's not moon! W e won't wait for the others. Now, hands on shoulders, and remember, an arm's length apart." Mrs. Rotunda turned them away from the windows and got them linked together. They reversed by eights, went forward by twos, and formed hollow squares. Emily, still thoughtful, still lingering by the window, saw Imola and the Mexican pick up the shopping bags and proceed, together and equally burdened, down the street. She saw Mr. Sloane return, refreshed, from the Gem to his work. She saw Mr. Burnham out on the edge of the sidewalk, face uplifted as if searching the wind for scents of some lost place or time. She saw how the wind, swooping down off the dry, brown hills, wrapped the soft prints of her drill mates' dresses about their vari-shaped bodies, so that they moved through the elaborate figures of Mrs. Rotunda's planning like women in some picture of past days. And Mrs. Rotunda's brisk commands — "To the rear by twos!" or "The diamond formation!" — were like a little, inconsequential piping, the way the wind, veering, shrills for a second or two through a crack before resuming its own voice, deep and solemn and prophetic.

A question that sometimes lurks in a writer's mind, and that can pester him unless he identifies it as normal and does something about it, is whether to risk melodrama by attempting violence or to play down his material, a no less difficult course, working for everyday clarity through emotions limned by understatement, thus risking dullness or dislocation by his attempt at symbolic implication or irony. T o some extent, naturally, his choice depends on his material. But until he comes to know for good what he can and cannot do, he should try both, and now and again have another try at whichever, so far, he has not yet been able to do successfully, perhaps this time doing it. Miss West's story illustrates the second conceptual approach. The waters through which she guides us are fairly still, but they run deep and clear.

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Probably this story would not win a prize in any year. As well as violence it lacks timeliness, although if you listen you will hear in it the slow, strong heartbeat of time. Ruby Graves' eager, incorrect surmises about Imola's love life, the contrast between the American husband LeRoy Fetters toiling as his wife's hairdresser and the Mexican's woman happily washing her man's body—these bridge space as well as time. Indeed, Miss West has turned her back on timeliness by making the behavior of different kinds of women toward passing time the matter of her story. The piece is so natural throughout, so gentle and good-humored, she seems to have attempted little. Actually, the scope of the story is so wide it needed playing down. What was attempted is accomplished in minimal space, unpretentiously, in a tone muted to the almost casual. This was not easy. The middle-aged women of Pocahontas Lodge, of whom and of women elsewhere we have a representative group in the widow, the spinster, and the wives, respectively, of a banker and a successful rancher, call themselves and are called by others "girls"; they meet together, in the more expensive hall of two available, in order to avoid the one above the undertaker's, for mutual protection against loneliness and a sense of frustration, for gossip, and for something to do; and what they do has a doubly ironic force: they all go through the same motions, and these motions are distinctively masculine and were once military. In short, convention-bound, unloved and unloving, they lead lives of evasion, subterfuge, and pretense. Imola, by contrast a renegade from convention, has in her life with the Mexican tramp all the vitality, the genuine emotions, the femininity that they lack or have forsworn. N o w Emily, herself nearing middle age and fearing it, a newcomer in town and a recruit to the drill team, observes this contrast and applies it to her own life. And she gains by the experience. W e reach the single blow toward which the story has been moving when, near the end, Emily sweeps aside Mrs. Tetford's false "Where is her pride?" with "Pride? Why, Mrs. Tetford, pride doesn't enter in. She loves him." The revelation, her recognition that Imola is happy, and at her own age, because Imola is still in love, staves off her dread. For Emily, too, is still in love. A notable feat is Miss West's handling of Emily's past, her pres-

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ent home life, and her future. All three are mentioned very briefly, two of them only indirectly. As for her past, all we know is that she was a "girl in the Dakotas" married at eighteen; but these slight details are later seen to have been shrewdly chosen, relating her life to that of Imola, who also married very young and is now far from her childhood environment. The portrayal of Emily's present situation at home is a triumph of succinct implication. A less careful writer might have begun the story too early, with a scene before she leaves home, and been left with a tangential, detachable unit and the necessity of filling in her walk to the hall or making that four-line space. Not so here. Emily has just seen Johnny, her youngest (she has other children, then), off to school for the first time, and he has left without a backward look, putting her in a lonely mood. The fact that the child is named for her husband, and the single reference, later, to the husband by name ("thinking of her children, seeing them already grown and scattered, and herself and John left alone with their memories") are all we have. It is sensible to say about fiction, as about drama, that a character not directly seen lacks motive force. John is never seen, even through Emily's reminiscent and conjectural mind's eye. But this is not Emily's and John's story, it is Emily's alone. For her to think about how much she loves him would be as irrelevant as an opening scene at the breakfast table. The very way she does think about him, in scattered, short interpolations that take their love for granted as something known only to themselves; and her recognition of Imola's behavior toward Manuel, despite all the talk misconstruing it, as love — as something she, Emily, knows all about — these give proof enough of how things are with her and John. The future is even more economically dealt with. It lies in the last word of the story, "prophetic," referring to the wind; and for full comprehension invites consideration of that element. The wind as symbol for the passing of time seems a singularly happy invention. Like time, the wind is always on the move; and it is something you can turn your back to, shelter from, forget — and find creeping up on you to overwhelm you; or something you can be fond of as a spectacle of motion, as a revealer of reality, as a cleanser of the spirit. Miss West uses the wind in all these analogies. Emily's liking for it, in the second sentence, sets the key. The

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wind as symbol is prepared for in the third paragraph, established in the fifth, and given its most important meaning as revealer ("A black cat passed below, its blackness not even skin-deep, for its hair, wind-blown, exposed a skin as white as that of any butcher-shop rabbit") in the seventh, which also marks the completion of the forecast end of the story — the dread of middle age dispersed —• here in the beginning. But it is only toward the very end that this careful and natural build-up comes home to the reader with full force: "the wind carrying [Imola's and Manuel's] cigarette smoke streaming away from them in transparent plumes," a significant suggestion about their future just preceding Emily's recognition of love as the conqueror of age; then Emily, the truth revealed, seeing old "Mr. Burnham . . . face uplifted as if searching the wind for scents of some lost place or time," and "the wind . . . [wrap] the soft prints of her drill mates' dresses about their vari-shaped bodies, so that they moved . . . like women in some picture of past days"; and finally hearing "Mrs. Rotunda's brisk commands . . . like a little, inconsequential piping," in contrast to that conclusive, prophetic voice. One or two minor reservations about the story should be mentioned. The last sentence of the seventh paragraph, especially its last clause, following the dash, seems superfluous and a dangerous break into direct mental discourse in a piece bent on playing down its emotional values. This assumption by Emily of unique perception gilds the lily — to the reader her perception was all right until she thought so highly of it — and is slightly damaging to a character with whom the reader was already in entire sympathy. If I had written the story (I wish I had), I should want those words out. It is hard enough, while writing a story, to get a clear, objective view of it, a reader's view, for really, while writing, the writer is the story; and it is doubly hard, of course, when full realization of the story by the reader depends upon his grasp of symbols. Yet there is the task, and there is the risk inevitably present: understress the symbol and nobody gets it; overstress it and a character is distorted. Again, the names Rotunda and Graves, so closely juxtaposed, seem altogether too obviously symbolic to sound real. Once thought of, Rotunda may well have been irresistible because of its double implication; of the two it seems the less desirable all the

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sapie. Concrete objects do make many surnames and, so personified, as it were, are preferable to personified abstractions — though not by much. W e can takes a Graves, remembering the title, in passing, with a warm sense of the natural being also apt; another so close, even though it may be a surname, is too much; Rotunda stops us on a distracting doubt. But that slight pause is the only one in "Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team." Its technical brilliance as exemplar of continuity in immediate scene outshines other merits. The time span of an hour or so — giving Emily fifteen minutes to reach the hall after seeing Johnny off to nine o'clock school, we watch until midmorning, when Imola kisses the Mexican and Mr. Sloane returns to work after taking coffee at the Gem — is much longer than reading time; yet continuity, the ceaseless, evenly paced stream of concrete details recorded through Emily's sense impressions and thoughts, is so close that the reader is aware of no discrepancy. The story starts in the first sentence, with Emily's arrival at the drab second floor of a pretentiously named building. Little space is given to Emily's personality (merely, she enjoys the wind); and none to her appearance. The first she will demonstrate; the second would distort the first if conveyed through her sense impressions, and is unimportant anyway. The flashbacks, brief and few, do not halt the flow. A motive (Emily's loneliness, hence her too-eager early toleration of the drill-team nonsense) and opposition (her doubts — and ours — as the women arrive) are apparent almost at once, and they are expressed as the wind is established as symbol and as the story moves. There' is no recording of synoptic or customary action, except (as in the talk about Imola's and Manuel's life) that integrated in the immediate scene. The dialogue, begun as soon as a second character appears, in the second paragraph, is almost continuous to the end of the story; perhaps more than any other one factor is talk, when natural and revealing as this is, an aid to continuity. In the rhythm of question and answer, remark and refutal, agreement or disagreement, the passage of time is lost to the reader, and the writer finds opportunity to let things happen faster or slower than would be strictly compatible with action or reading time, according to his needs. In this story, the fact that the reader loses track of time while the characters are over-

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concerned about it is pertinent and to the author's ironic purpose. Here, then, is a short story that moves — physically and metaphysically, in one direction to say one thing — by means of immediate scene that without breaking continuity includes for convincingness sufficient reference to the past and a neatly implicative foreshadowing of the future.

III. STREAM OF EXPERIENCE IF W E AGREE THAT THE SHORT STORY SHOULD MOVE

in one direction to say one thing, it goes almost without saying that if organically impelled the movement will seem more natural and be more effective than if visibly propelled by the writer. This is to say that a short story should move by its own emotional momentum. Given story able material (that is, a motive and opposition to its attainment) fit to represent an idea, we shall hardly lack the emotional force needed to start and keep it going, or even to quicken the pace toward the end. The difficulty lies in writing ourselves out of the affair, remaining unseen. Modern short-story writers have sensibly rejected disillusioning personal references of all sorts: to the story as story ("Our story opens on a cold November day in 18—"); to the reader ("You, my friend, will understand . . ."); and to themselves as writers, either directly ("I do not profess to know what happened") or indirectly by chatting about the story before it begins, interpolating brief essays on this or that during its course, and pointing out its moral, or general application, at the end. They are learning but have not yet quite wholly mastered the discipline of invisibility extended even to the oblique glance of inference.* There must have been a good deal of Henry James in his concept of a "Central Intelligence," although he usually created protagonists enough like himself for the rationalization to be unnoticeable. Some upper-level, avant-garde writers today simply cling stubbornly to their technical freedom, meaning freedom from selfdiscipline in this respect. In popular stories, granted their substance is less rewarding, discipline is generally firmer. A slow gain in # Prize Stories of 1948: The O. Henry Awards contained twenty-three stories, four of which show the writer pushing his story; the 1951 volume contains twenty-four stories, with a slightly smaller proportion of inorganic telling methods.

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nearly all types is discernible, however, in a new awareness of risk weighed against possible greater gain. Leonard Casper's "Sense of Direction," from Southwest Review* deliberately presented two points of view in consecutive, alternating sections over the same time span, in order to demonstrate an idea infeasible through either alone or through any other single medium. A short delay in establishing the telling method, like the first sentence of "Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team," actually a brief statement by the author; or a short break from the method early in the story means at worst only a small impairment of illusion and may, by saving space, amount to a positive gain over strict consistency. The charge of visible propulsion by the author cannot be brought today without close study of the story. Author omniscience is virtually outmoded; inconsistency that at first glance appears damaging must be carefully studied in relation to other factors. With the writer expunged, just how is a story to run on its own emotional momentum? W e shall investigate four basic methods, all of them brought to a peak of technical excellence within the last thirty years, each of them having many variations. The first to be considered, which has been called "stream of experience," is perhaps the one used most often today; it is highly flexible and relatively easy. It was spasmodically used in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury novels; its consistent use in the short storyt seems to have been chiefly inspired by Joycean stream of consciousness, from which it is an offshoot better adapted to short fiction than its long-winded and often cryptic forerunner. Stream of experience parallels the continuum of existence usually by over-all indirect mental discourse — that is, in the third person singular and the past tense, instead of the first person and present tense of stream of consciousness — of the protagonist. He experiences the story while it is happening, and the channel of his perception may be narrowed to his sense impressions or it may widen to his thoughts conveyed in any way possible, so long as they are still his thoughts. This is what appears. Actually, the * Reprinted in Prize Stories of 19s1 and in The Best American Short Stories, 1951 (Houghton Mifflin Co.). 1" Susan Glaspell's " A J u r y of Her Peers," Every Week, 1917, is an early example, almost wholly consistent.

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writer has allowed part of his creative imagination to enter his conception of the protagonist and record the experience as felt by him or her, retaining the rest of his creative imagination to control the story. Readers have become so accustomed to this channeling of a story, and like it so well, that about its only prerequisite nowadays is the protagonist's constant presence on scene. This seems justifiable. After all, if the main character walks off and the story moves on without him,* there is now felt a jolt into some sort of magic on the author's part that nobody felt fifty, or even thirty, years ago. Much of the method has become abbreviated, to be understood elliptically. Mention of a character's name in the opening paragraph, or merely a pronoun, a single recorded action by that character (of which of course he is aware), a sense impression by that character or his perception of a state of mind or emotion — any one of these details may be enough to establish the method, as much as to say, "This is his story. W e are inside him from here on." T h e normal effect of this method is like a bid for some degree of reader sympathy for the character, and this may amount to an invitation to the reader to identify himself with the character and live the story as he lives it. Wide variations in the factor of sympathy are conditioned, and by the writer indicated, by the amount of writer-and-reader sympathy the protagonist deserves. Thus, an intimate telling position within a character deserving strong sympathy will omit verbs of thinking, will not call the character by name until he has been addressed by another character, will move freely from indirect to direct mental discourse, and will use language throughout full of the protagonist's characteristic idiom; while at the other extreme a rather remote telling position, though still on the perimeter of a not wholly sympathetic protagonist's consciousness, will be more formal and aloof, meticulously attaching verbs of thinking to what is thought, naming, surnaming, and even entitling the character Mr., Miss, or Mrs., never using direct mental discourse, and retaining a flat, neutral language. It is perhaps safe to say that the method should not be used to portray a protagonist drawing no sympathy at all; certainly such use, risking incongruity between the writer's and the reader's estimates of the * As in Katherine Mansfield's "Marriage a la Mode," in The Garden and Other Stories (Alfred A. Knopf).

Party

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personality represented, with its misplaced bid for sympathy and reader self-identification, can in inexperienced hands confuse and finally exasperate the reader. This is not to say that all protagonists should draw sympathy. A balance of qualities for reality is the first essential, always; and three other methods of telling are yet to be considered. In the use of any method, however, the writer should feel responsible for establishing rapport with his reader. Only so can he progress from concepts of personality known and shared to those hitherto unknown, or at least hitherto unrecognized as what the story proves them to be. Further latitude, regardless of any pull on the reader's pity, admiration, or solicitude, is afforded within the scope of this method merely for defining personality. Having recourse to sense perception and to thought processes at three stages of literalness, and thus immediacy (paraphrase, indirect, and direct mental discourse), the writer can adjust the shape of the channel to reveal, for instance, the sensitive but inarticulate, the garrulous but insensitive, the thoughtful as well as the unthinking person, and so on. H e can write the story without letting the protagonist think, provided he feels, or without letting him say a word, provided he hears the speech of others. These are extreme variations, to be used rarely. Even so, the flexibility of stream of experience is such that the only human being through whom his story cannot be told is one who awakens no spark of interest in the reader, who is blind, deaf, dumb, bereft of nerve ends and taste buds, and whose brain is incapable of coherent images utterable in words. He would not experience anything. At its best, the method is the most natural and deeply moving vehicle of the short story, for it has the richest resources.

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THE SARDILLION* by Elizabeth Enright "ROO-PERT! Roo-pert!" Gerda's faraway voice calling the name over and over began to have a strained sound, frightened and deserted; soon she would be crying; but Rupert sat where he was, cross-legged on the terrace wall, listening without answering. She was lost again, that was all, she was always getting lost. By now, after a week, she should have known her way around, but Aunt Menden's place was big, and fitted out with trees and fake forests and pathways like a fairy puzzle. Let her learn it then, let her be afraid; he had often been afraid. He sat there, silent, looking out from under his too long black bangs with dark, stern, interested eyes. "Roo-pert! Roo-pert!" And now, yes, there was the whimper, the quaver of tears, and at the last moment, the instant before all was lost, Gerda came around a camellia tree, emerged from the wilderness she had been carrying with her, and saw the house, the wall, and Rupert sitting there. The unexpected presentation of safety caused her to weep afresh, almost to howl. "I called you, I was lost. I called!" "You did? I didn't hear you." "I don't see why not. I yelled." "That's funny. It's a still day, too. . . . I wonder — Yes, I bet that's it. Ho-ly cat!" "What are you talking about? You didn't answer because you didn't want to answer, I bet. I bet that's it." "No, it's not, I wish it were," said Rupert in a low voice. "If * Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright, 1950, Yale University Press.

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you'll come up here and shut up, I'll tell you." Gerda cried a little longer but curiosity got the upper hand. She dried her nose and eyes on the sleeve of her sweater and came up the steps slowly, still heaving mechanically with the aftermath of sobs. In one hand she carried a camellia, peppermint-striped, and in the other a spray of tea olive to smell. Her face was stained and frayed, pathetic. "All right now, come here, close, so I can tell you." Rupert leaned forward and she hoisted herself up on the stone beside him, her short legs swinging. She looked at him with large gray eyes still glittering at the edges, and the last tear crawled slowly down her cheek, like a fly on fruit, diminishing as it crept, and leaving a salty trail to dry behind it. She sighed a final, purged sigh, lifted the tea olive to her nose and inhaled with a deep, liquid sniffle. "Well, go on. Tell me what you were going to." "Gee, I wonder if I ought to. Maybe I better not." "Oh, Ru! That's no fair!" He leaned away, appraising her. "You're kind of young. I don't know if you could take it. . . ." "Take what? Tell me, tell me!" He leaned close again, lowering his voice. "Don't say I didn't warn you. Come nearer, we mustn't be overheard. The reason I couldn't hear you was because the Sardillion was between us. It was close to you." "Sardillion? What do you mean, the Sardillion?" "Shut up, I tell you!" Rupert's eyes flashed from left to right, informing of danger. "The Sardillion is a — a Thing. It's a Big, Still Thing! It's invisible and nobody knows how big it is; it could be as big as a mountain or as little as a tent — " "Oh, it could not!" Gerda said. "I don't believe you." Here on this wall she could »be skeptical. It was just another of Rupert's Things, like the Keldigger, or the Rangenapps. Some of them were funny, some terrible. The Keldigger particularly had been terrible. It had brought her out of sleep with screams two years ago. But she had been little then, only five. Now she was wiser. "Listen, I'm telling you. You better listen. This Thing is invisible, and it has a smell, too, nice at first and then awfuller and awfuller, so strong it could choke you — "

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" W h a t does it smell of?" Gerda put down the spray of tea olive the better to grasp the imaginary smell about to be offered her. Rupert cast about in his mind. He remembered the church. "Lilies. At first it smells sweetish like a lot of lilies and white flowers, and then it gets stronger and stronger, until your nose is all full of it and then your lungs, and your mouth tastes of it and finally you can't breathe any more — " Gerda thought of the Keldigger. "Don't scare me too much," she said prudently. But Rupert was scaring himself; he could feel a tingle at the nape of his neck, his voice trembled with awe, water came into his eyes. He whispered: "Nobody knows whether you just walk into it, or if it comes after you. T h e y think it kind of drifts around like a low cloud, or fog off the lake. And when it comes close to you, quiet, quiet, you can't hear a thing. There's no noise in it, and no noise can get through it, no matter how you yell — " "Stop it! Stop it!" Gerda jumped down from the wall with her hands over her ears, one still clenching the camellia, one the spray of little leaves. "It's not so much because I'm frightened, Ru, it's because I'm hungry." And she ran indoors, calling: "Hallie! Where are you? I want a cookie." Rupert stayed where he was, smiling with pleasure, proud of the Sardillion. In this place you could believe anything, for it was a dead-alive country where the frail perpetual sunshine was more silver than gold, and the huge silent trees were hung with gray mosses, like frayed banners, or the wigs of old witches, or plumage torn from some archaic bird. Hanging like that, sifting the wind and listlessly moving, these mosses appeared always as relics of passage, the forlorn mementoes left behind when the action has departed elsewhere. It was a dead-alive place: yet, though it was winter and many trees leafless, the towering camellias still carried their jetty leaves and round flowers. Remembering Getda's last word, Rupert got down from the wall feeling hungry and went into the big warm house: only half a house, Aunt Menden said, the other half having been burned down during the W a r between the States, a recent war of which she often spoke, but which had nothing to do with the one just over and

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which he knew all about. The house was very big and certainly seemed whole enough to him; perhaps Aunt Menden had been joking, though that was not likely. He had not heard her laugh yet, though she often smiled in a faint, serious way. She was a gentle, sighing woman, hard to imagine as the core of a household, the heart of a home, yet that is what she was to be, now. When they had all come down here a few weeks after the Accident, Aunt Menden had put her arms around Rupert and he had breathed her unfamiliar sweetish smell. . . . "This is your own home, now, honey; I'm sure we are going to love each other. . . ." Yet she had not looked at all sure, she had looked apprehensive and uncertain: don't be too noisy, don't be too dirty, don't startle me too often, her look had said. . . . Still, somebody has to take care of people when they're children. Rupert understood that, and Gerda sometimes understood it. Mendy was away at boarding school, she was old, and Sanchia was only a baby, witlessly viewing the world from a high place always: from her crib, her high chair, her nurse's arms. They did not need to understand as he and Gerda must. He tiptoed through the dining room with all the dark watchful furniture and the silver tea set. He did not feel that he would ever be at home in the dining room or in his own bedroom where the bed had a roof on it and was big as a pavilion. But the pantry reassured him; like the kitchen, it retained the robust memories of food. He liked its shelves of glass and china, the sprig of mint in a tumbler at the window, the two tall faucets with elegant swan necks drooping above the sink. The kitchen was the best place, though; light, warm, and used-looking. The stove had a huge black hood, there were many red canisters, and three different kinds of cookies, always, in three different jars. The cook, Aletta, and Willie May, the maid, had not yet come in to start the evening meal. Gerda sat on the long deal table with crumbs on her lip watching Hallie feed Sanchia in her high chair. The baby stared impassively at the window, absently beating on her tray with a spoon and opening her mouth from time to time to take a proffered mouthful without glancing at its source. Rupert chose the peanut cookies. He sat on the table beside Gerda, watching Hallie coax Sanchia and talk idiot talk to her.

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"Now s'e takes anuzzer. Open wi-ide! 'At's my tiny lamb." Every time she held the spoon out to the baby, Hallie opened her own mouth; what was worse was that Gerda opened hers, too, and the whole slatternly performance brought vague enchanted smiles to both their faces. "She's slobbered milk all down her chin; her bib's soaked. Ugh!" said Rupert, pretending to retch, but he continued to sit there. The warmth soothed him, and the sweetness of the cookies; even the cooing nonsense of the nurse. But when Aletta came crackling in, with a look of annoyance, he got down from the table. "Come on, Gerda, I'll take you with me and show you the layout of this place so you can't get lost any more." They went out by the other door this time; down the steps and across the wide lawn at the foot of which lay an artificial lake with an island in it and a boathouse on the shore which contained no boats. They chose one of the wide alleys between the camellia trees; the leaves made tall dark walls and here and there amongst them there were statues: nymphs and goddesses whose naked marble whiteness was sharpened by the somber screen behind them. High in the late-day sky some crows were flapping and crying. The children forgot that Rupert had intended to show Gerda her way about; they were contented walking the quiet paths. The evening cold crept in among the shadows, and all was still, mysterious and new. "Will we like it here?" Gerda asked. "I don't know. Maybe." "I will if you will." "Aunt Menden's all right." "Yes . . . I like Aletta best." Beyond the long avenues of camellias they came to the semiforest where the old live oaks stood among the lesser trees like seasoned giants among pygmies. The path was narrow here, dark green with moss. "Where are we going, Ru?" "I want to show you something." "What is it?" "Wait, can't you? You'll see." A little farther on there was a clearing to the left of the path and

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in the center of this was an unexpected, rather foreign sight: a tall dense stand of bamboo. Its leaves were lacy, intricate, crowded together, a cloud of emerald green standing on many heron legs. One knew the way the whole small jungle would bend and shimmer on its supple stems when the wind blew. "It's like what they have in the Pacific. One of those islands. We'll play war here, soon; you can be a Jap." "I will not be a Jap. I always get killed." "Okay, maybe I'll be the Jap next time." "Can we go home now?" " N o t yet, there's something else. Come on." Beside the path the live oaks were gray as columns of smoke; the crows were gone out of the sky. "But I want to go home." "We're almost there." And presently he led her out upon a little arched bridge above a clear dark pool. They leaned against the log railing, looking down. "This is pretty. Is this it?" "Yes, isn't it neat? I'm going to go fishing here." They stood in silence. Out of the black shallow water, cypress trees soared from swollen bases, and the cypress knees rose up in curious pointed cones like goblins and goblins' churches. It was very quiet. There was no ripple in the fringe of fern that edged the pool, half of it submerged, and from the branches overhead the long gray wigs of moss hung motionless. The water deepened, and the sky, and a star was abruptly brought to view among the boughs. Nothing had moved here for a hundred years. Gerda's face had a pearly solemn hue as she turned it towards her brother, and her whisper was apprehensive: "Rupert, can you hear me now?" Unexpected anger and achievement blazed in his breast. He did not answer, did not alter his position, leaning his elbows on the railing and staring at the pool below. "Rupert, Ru! Can you hear me? You can, I know you can!" Still he did not answer. He yawned instead, and scratched his neck. "The Sardillion! It's the Sardillion!" she cried; but when she began to scream and clutch at him, he, too, became alarmed.

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"Shut up, drippy, I hear you, I heard you the whole time. It's all right, I said, it's okay!" "Oh, run, oh, run." "But it's all right, it always was all right. I was just kidding." Still, he was running, so was she. The forest fell behind them in no time, and the dark camellia walls flowed away on either side, dreadfully peopled with smiling, snowy women, half undressed. "It's all right!" Rupert kept shouting, no longer shouting it to Gerda, and he was glad when they were out of the dark garden: the broad lawn was safer and the long windows of Aunt Menden's house had a bright commonplace benevolence. The children fell into the house, hungry again, refreshed by terror and escape. Gerda went to bed before he did, being younger. He was allowed a half hour's grace and not one minute of it would he yield, though his eyeballs felt dry from keeping his lids up, and yawns pressed against the roof of his mouth like great storms rushing through a cavern. He stared doggedly at his open book, but all the words and sentences were garbled by his sleepiness. In the fireplace the fire sucked and nibbled till the logs caved in. Aunt Menden yawned openly, with a little musical moan; her needles ticked against each other, paused. "It's a quarter to nine, Rupert, honey." "Already? Oh, okay. Good night, Aunt Menden." "Sweet dreams, dear." His lips touched her powdery, old-smelling cheek. "Good night." "Good night." He went up the curved carpeted stairway feeling heavy, letting his yawns out till his jaws ached. A little draft from somewhere crept through the upstairs hall which was furnished like a real room with polished chairs, a settee, mirrors, pictures on the wall — (First Love, Last Love, Horse Fair at Charlotte) — though no one ever paused there, ever sat on anything, or used the hall for any purpose but that of passage. Rupert listened at Sanchia's door; no sound there but the steady to-and-fro of Hallie's snoring. He listened at Gerda's, but she also was asleep, her slumber punctuated, always, with gentle comments in a jargon to which he had never found the clue.

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His big room was chilly. One lamp was lighted. In the little grate the fire had been out for hours; there was now and then a whisper, a tiny crackle from the ashes, but no warmth. He shivered as he undressed, gooseflesh stood on his thin stripped arms and thighs; he debated with himself about brushing his teeth — the bathroom also was cold — but as usual his conscience drove him. When he was in bed the sleepiness was gone, chilled out of him. It was the same every night. It was a long time before his cold body could warm the cold sheets, and by the time that had happened his eyes had grown used to the night and he saw that there was moonlight beyond the windows. In the soft hint of light within the room he could see the great soaring bedposts, black, monolithic, and overhead the canopy, far away, seeming to tremble. This bed could be a thing that moved, having a keel or wheels or runners to carry it over the snowy steppe. It could be drawn by horses, oxen, an elephant, or it could be rising and falling, cutting the waves in two . . . With the thought of motion the thought of the Accident stood suddenly before him: the vision his unwilling mind had fabricated and on which it now insisted. Again he watched the two tiny people in the tiny car — for all was viewed from above with a hawk's perspective — speeding down the long hill road, like a drop on a pane, and then turning the curve at the bottom and starting across the tall bridge, and the bridge breaking, breaking, breaking in slow motion with every particle distinct . . . He would not stand for this. He sat up in bed with his eyes open and stared at the moonlit window. What quiet country enfolded this house; but perhaps it was quiet only in winter, only in the flowering, half-living winter that took place down here. But the house was quiet, too, no voices, no footsteps, not the faintest clank or tinkle from the distant kitchen, and even the rustle of ash was stilled in the grate. He longed for his aunt's footsteps on the stairs, for Sanchia to call out, for a bird to cry in the wilderness. But there would be no call, no bird, he knew at last; his terror allowed no hope. The refracted light in the room seemed to intensify, become bluer and bluer, azure in color, and it seemed to be alive in some way: moving and sparkling before his staring eyes. He could feel the hair prickle on his scalp, but he did not call out;

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who would hear him? Bolt upright, he sat in bed waiting, teeth chattering, and soon, as he had expected, he caught the first faint rumor of fragrance, the sweet clinging perfume of the funeral flowers.

Emotional momentum is what we are to watch here, in order to see whether the story is automotive or in any way propelled by the author. A boy teases and bullies and frightens his younger sister with visions of monsters. He is acting, playing a part rather deftly; but almost at once we suspect some cause beneath the one apparent. "Let her be afraid," Rupert says to himself; "he had often been afraid." In the middle of the first paragraph, this slips by almost unnoticed. The two children are in strange country, have been there only a week, are being taken care of by their aunt. "Somebody has to take care of people when they're children." Rupert remembers a church, the strong scent of lilies, and the Accident; but these details break through his acting into his conscious mind one at a time and spaced out. He plays the part so convincingly, he frightens himself, twice. The first time, in broad daylight, Gerda is only half frightened — she has been his victim before; and he escapes by getting back into his role of bully and horror-storyteller. The second time, his fright is partly caused by his success in frightening Gerda; she has remembered and believed a detail ("when it comes close to you, quiet, quiet, you can't hear a thing") he told her before but has forgotten — perhaps because she misconstrued it — a detail that therefore hits him with the force of truth. He tries to bluff but fails. He drops his role, admits he was kidding, but now it is too late; dusk has fallen, Gerda leaves him, and soon he is alone in his bedroom facing the fear that has been nibbling at him all afternoon. This is emotional momentum, in this case the difference between appearance (Rupert the frightener) and reality

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(Rupert the frightened) narrowing slowly, the reader's knowledge of the truth being paced by Rupert's recognition of it, until at the end everything but the truth is stripped away. The story is a perceptive and sympathetic study of a child's struggle with fear. At the end he is still struggling; we see that it is conscience and courage that have motivated his behavior; and the high level of his courage is revealed by his suspicion throughout that defeat was inevitable. As against this courage, his weakness, his fascination with fear — his own as well as Gerda's — is his undoing. Yet, in a sense he doesn't realize, he gains by the experience. He learns here that he cannot escape, by play-acting or any other means, for the fear is a part of himself. His desire to play with fear seems wholly natural, springing from curiosity to know about something (death and the ritual following it) unknown to him. One or two sense impressions he has, the rest he must teasingly picture for himself. He wants, wants terribly, to know. So the picture, fantastic, but real to him, the only thing he has to go by ("the bridge breaking . . . with every falling particle distinct") pushes through at last into his mind and stays there in spite of all his efforts to keep it out. The connecting link between the Accident image and the Sardillion image, between his unconscious and his conscious, lies much farther back in the story than "the thought of motion" in the final paragraph. It is the smell, "nice at first, then awfuller and awfuller, so strong it could choke you — " of lilies at the service that crept into Rupert's creation of the Sardillion through his unconscious when, as it were, he wasn't looking. His sensitiveness to odors ("he had breathed [Aunt Menden's] unfamiliar sweetish smell," and "His lips touched her powdery, old-smelling cheek"), very different from little Gerda's comforting sniff of tea olive, confirms the strength of the link. These details, born of extensive knowledge of child psychology sharpened by complete realization of this particular child, and beautifully ordered, are in sum a preparation, in the beginning and through the course of the story, for the end. As striking are two other technical achievements: the compression used early in the story, and the swiftly mounting transformation of fear from abstraction to the concrete in the last four paragraphs. A short-story writer may justly feel elated when he has made the

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words of a given passage serve two ends. The two paragraphs beginning "Remembering Gerda's last word" and " H e tiptoed through the dining room," which get Rupert down off the wall and into the kitchen, serve three purposes besides their fundamental duty of recording continuous action: they lay the scene inside the house, they furnish through flashbacks sufficient information to indicate the present situation and root this experience in the past, and they reveal Rupert's temperament as highly imaginative, sensitive, and subject now to some sort of neurotic trauma. The passage is worth close study for the amount and relevance of information it condenses with ease and naturalness — for there's the rub: one can be informative and one can be natural; to fuse the two qualities takes high skill — as the story moves on. W e note Aunt Menden's use of the phrase "War between the States," the word "pavilion," and Hallie talking "idiot talk" to the baby Sanchia. Miss Enright is very deep inside the boy here; there is not an image that doesn't spring straight from Rupert's troubled mind. The build-up to fear made specific and concrete is even closerpacked. By this time in the story, tension has drawn tight as the reader suspects what is coming; yet the final four paragraphs must overcome greater inertia than the passage just mentioned, for its pace must be fast — faster than any heretofore. Rupert has played with the thought of fear. Twice, in a bid for her company to his own terror (see her "I will not be a Jap. I always get killed"; and his concession: "Okay, maybe I'll be the Jap next time"), he has frightened Gerda; and the second time become so frightened by his very success that he stops acting and tries ("I was just kidding . . . It's all right!") to calm himself as well as her. N o w Gerda goes off to bed. With his "half hour's grace and not one minute of it would he yield," we know not only the imminence of some concrete form of his fear but the whole experience as an expression of his yearning — surrounded as he is by women, girls, a baby — to grow in knowledge and be a man. By the fire he fights off sleep. When he is told by Aunt Menden that the time has come, his kiss and goodnight are properly casual. Then begins the most powerful part of this story. The "little draft from somewhere" in the upstairs hall is the first detail, which is strengthened by the chill in his room — shivers from physical cold preceding shivers of fear. He wants

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to skip brushing his teeth, "but as usual his conscience drove him." How far are we now, and yet how logically have we come, from that first, apparently true but really false impression of Rupert! In bed, he finds sleepiness has gone and the sense of motion — suggested by the bedposts and canopy that have been for him a boat or a cart or the trappings of an elephant — begins. And "with the thought of motion" (the immediate cause; we noted the first cause far back in the story) the Accident looms again. It "stood suddenly before him: the vision his unwilling mind had fabricated and which it now insisted." This is the point at which his unconscious merges with the conscious and becomes merciless in imagined but precisely remembered detail. But he "would not stand for this. He sat up in bed," trying bravely to get hold of himself through the reality of what he can see about him, what he can hear. His reliance on his senses is pathetic; we recall that it was his exaggeration of one sense impression that formed a link between what was and what is, that made a first cause early in the story. Well, he can hear nothing, and all he can see is vague ghostly light, "azure in color" (the vision infiltrating reality) and "alive in some way: moving and sparkling." He will not call for help. We know this has happened before. He waits, and what he cannot hear, what he cannot see, comes to him by the sense most significant to him and hence to us, all through the story, "the sweet clinging perfume of the funeral flowers." ("Nice at first," he had told Gerda — some deeply hidden love for his parents, some hint of his mother there.) This is not imagined as the vision was: Rupert doesn't remember, but there are camellia trees in blossom outside his window. It is this mounting and accelerating accumulation of specific and concrete details that proves the story to be far more than the tale of a little boy punished for scaring his sister. Examined as an illustration of stream of experience, "The Sardillion" offers other writers help by its technical merits and encouragement by its one serious flaw. The opening of the story sets the telling method clearly yet inconspicuously, establishing a relatively intimate telling position within Rupert's thoughts and sense impressions. "Roo-pert!" Someone is calling, but more important, someone is hearing and translating the call. In the last clause of the first sentence, there he is.

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The next three sentences are as plainly indirect mental discourse as if introduced by "he thought." T h e fact that no verb of thinking appears indicates the close telling position, while the naming of Rupert rather qualifies the implication. In the fifth sentence we have the exact position: the picture of Rupert on the wall comes through his sense impression of himself; he is playing a part, he knows how he looks, he is looking like that purposely. The very language is his: "She was lost again, that was all, she was always getting lost" — by repetition showing the irksomeness of taking care of a younger sister, and by the tumbling clauses; and later by "fake" and "fairy puzzle." W e are all set, then. Here is a protagonist deserving the reader's interest and sympathy, with a perhaps temporary qualification. Note that the first verb of thinking is Rupert's remembering the church, considerably beyond this point, long after any verb would be needed to help fix the telling position. Note also the indefinite pronoun in "In this place you could believe anything," a little later — a colloquial mainstay of indirect mental discourse in stream of experience. Indeed, reading that word as the first word of a story, without quotes, nowadays a reader would sense what the writer was up to. W e come to the flaw, unfortunately the last topic in this discussion. Important matters should come last. Though damaging, it is not the most important area for study. The point of view seemed to shift briefly, the security of the telling position to waver, when Gerda didn't at first believe in and wasn't frightened by the Sardillion. "Here on this wall she could be skeptical. It was just another of Rupert's Things, like the Keldigger, or the Rangenapps — " and so on. Following Gerda's expostulation in the same paragraph, these sentences seem to be coming through Gerda. In fact, a little farther along, "Gerda thought of the Keldigger." Doubt enters, for also these sentences might be stated by a momentarily heedless, omniscient author. But the doubt is relieved by the discovery that they are simply Rupert still thinking as Gerda might think, without a verb of thinking, interpreting Gerda's attitude toward himself and his fantastic creatures. "It had brought her out of sleep with screams two years ago" could be neither Gerda nor author. "But she had been little then, only five" is obviously Rupert. Still, the doubt lasted long enough to require a pause

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and consideration of this against that. And then the word "skeptical," early in the paragraph, leaps at the eye like a skyrocket whooshing round a nursery. What on earth has happened here? W e look, closely perhaps for the first time since the story began, at the language with which Miss Enright worked her magic. I f this whole story reaches us through Rupert, where did he get this large, highly poetic, stodgily prosaic vocabulary? Granted he is imaginative, could he achieve the image of Gerda emerging "from the wilderness she had been carrying with her"? What about his offhand use of "jetty" as an adjective? What about such an elaborate phrase as "unexpected presentation of safety" or "bright commonplace benevolence," the rare "unabruptly," and "archaic," and "forlorn mementoes"? "Her face was stained and frayed, pathetic." "Her slumber, punctuated always with gentle comments in a jargon to which he had never found the clue." What does Rupert know of punctuation or jargon? These bits are impressive prose, but they are pure rhetoric; they are Miss Enright's rhetoric, not Rupert's plain phrases. They have the disastrous effect, when thus recognized, of looking down on if not actually patronizing the characters. Even in one of our best views of the boy who wants to be a man, when he enters the kitchen and watches the baby being fed, the author spoils the perfect choice "idiot talk" with "the whole slatternly performance brought vague enchanted smiles to both their faces." She began precisely, as has been noted, in Rupert's idiom, but she slipped, it seems inadvertently, into her own. Young writers are sometimes bothered by a sense of their inadequacy when it comes to polished prose. T h e y feel they have failed unless common happenings have been expressed in fresh and striking terms. T o o much has been made of this need, too little of a greater need — in the short story, anyway — for appropriateness. Let those who think their prose lacks polish take heart from study of a short story that went wrong in this respect, perhaps for this very reason. It is not polish that is needed; it is sharp ears for uttered language, it is fidelity to speech as well as to personality. Would the story have been better, even more moving, if Rupert's idiom had been held throughout? T o my mind, yes. Miss Enright loves words. W e all do. But her love of words ran away with her

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here, impairing the illusion of reality. This was not a matter of weighing loss of consistency against some greater gain. The gain, if it can be called that, is not germane to the story. T o write the story consistently and appropriately would have been much more difficult. But it would have been worth the effort. At some loss in pungency and vividness, at least we should not have had the weakening effect of a choice of medium, a discovery that it was inadequate, and the substitution of another medium far outside the story. We should not have had the distraction of the writer showing through her story — not of course explicitly, not visibly propelling it — but by implication in the telling.

IV. "I" AS PROTAGONIST TEACHERS

USED

TO

WARN

THEIR

STUDENTS

AGAINST

writing in the first person, and some editors and literary agents still frown on the practice when the "I" of the story is its leading character. In the first instance, the argument was that such prose sounds conceited; in the second, notwithstanding many good stories so written, "Readers don't like it," or "It reads like a true confession." Behind the second argument, perhaps, lurks the fear that lowerlevel readers, the large majority who cannot fully enjoy a story unless they identify themselves with the protagonist and throw themselves into his experience, will find this form of daydreaming difficult if the character's ego is so starkly expressed. These contentions do not reach the heart of the matter. A prejudice may have existed, but the growing incidence, recently, of two kinds of the method (the wholly fictitious "I" and the all but actual "I"), in various types of reputable magazines, indicates that at least prejudice has been overcome. Indeed, the evidence may be more positive. Today there is a closer relation than many of us realize between the technical devices of the short story and those of films and radio. These simpler and much more easily assimilated, if. usually shallower, mediums are also more flexible; they leap and run where the short-story writer must, with stout heart hopeful of a higher reward, still plod or crawl; they borrow devices from fiction and often overplay them to a degree unthinkable there, but in so doing widen the fiction reader's tolerance. For instance, perhaps the necessity, real or assumed, for first-person telling (sometimes called "narration") in motion-picture and radio scripts, as a means of tying together the multilateral or multitemporal parts of a story, seems to have done more than merely overcome prejudice. We have come to expect it and take such telling for granted. Perhaps our acceptance of the first person in short stories has become

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affirmative, related to our acceptance of good reporting (Rebecca West's, for instance), in the first person, of actual events in which the reporter, merely by his presence and his sensitive and authentic interpretation, may be said to play a leading part. Perhaps the "I" fades out in our growing satisfaction that this is true and we are there. In any case, the self-effacing teacher's distrust of the pronoun was futile. The egocentric writer can delete all his "I"s and still find ways of breathing in the reader's face. A more relevant warning would be that if you write a short story in the first person of the protagonist you may be dulling the edge of suspense by thus revealing prematurely that, whatever physical and spiritual dangers confronted him, "I" survived. This may be highly important or no matter at all, but it is worth considering. There are four other applicable considerations. Before taking them up, let us see how the method works. T h e telling position is the center of the story; its constant, in the first person and past tense, is the channel of perception of the character without whom the story could not have happened, whose involvement in it and whose success or failure (to oversimplify motive and opposition) are its chief interest and the reader's main concern. Until about the beginning of this century, with a few exceptions first-person stories were overtly set in the frame or circumstances of their telling, at start and finish showing the teller, his audience, and the scene of the telling. T h e frame often overweighed the story, besides entangling the writer in multiple quotation marks. T h e amount of artifice used to conceal the writer, instead revealed him — and not in the straightforward manner of the all but actual person to whom something worth telling has happened, but in the embarrassing light of someone who has tried to hide himself and failed. Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," far back in 1846, had pointed the way to a briefer and more convincing means of gaining illusion: cut away the frame, omit the over-all quotes, and make the opening imply the immediate scene of the telling or writing. T h e story has become an archetype. Just as readers grew able to infer the presence of verbs of thinking elliptically omitted from mental discourse in stream of experience, so now they are thoroughly accustomed to this more economical — if slightly more de-

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manding, on them as well as on the writer — manner of first-person telling. T w o kinds of "I"-as-protagonist telling have been mentioned. Often they impinge, sometimes merge, but it is usually possible to make a rough distinction. Both are more difficult, requiring stronger self-discipline, than is stream of experience; and the second to be considered here is far more difficult than the first. When readers of Godey's Lady's Book found a story beginning, "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge," they knew at once — since it was most unlikely that anyone living in the 1840's could have friend or foe named Fortunato, and the lofty rhetoric and diction bespoke, even then, a simulated Old World — that the protagonist was fictitious. Poe had concocted a dramatic tale about revenge and had put it into the mouth or let it run from the pen of an wrafortunate and long-suffering, but proud and resourceful, person named Montresor — a man somewhat like himself in some respects but under such radical differences of time and place and circumstances that he was able to objectify the imagined experience. He had simply placed himself, or a part of himself, inside the fictitious Montresor's personality and told the story as, assuming translation, Montresor might have told or written it, long after the episode occurred. This is the first kind of "I" as protagonist, the fictitious "I." But when readers today pick up a story beginning, " M y wife and I live in Westport," or " N o t long ago, I spent some time in Oxford," the implication is quite opposite. T h e directness and informality of approach (the author often referring to himself or being addressed by name), the simple, free-and-easy language, the particularity of detail in time and place — all mean that the protagonist is the writer himself. This is not to say that every detail of the story that follows must be strictly autobiographical. Few writers are lucky enough to dream or live short stories that can be set down word for word exactly as they occurred. It is to say that the story is based on true occurrences and that the protagonist is the writer modified by the story's demands. Modification, as we shall see, requires greater effort to objectify lived experience than is required by a fictitious "I." Bias, whims, prejudices that the writer-

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teller takes for granted in himself will be strange and may be incommunicable to the reader if they are allowed to appear in the story; and even if understood they may distort the character of the teller into a person through whom the story, at least as the writer conceives it, would not normally, thus cannot come. Young writers sometimes fall prey to this invisible monster, the unsuspected ego, and wonder what has happened when a reader finds the story unreadable. Inadvertent distortion resulting from the presence of unseen prejudice makes the experience all too true, too true to be believable; makes it melodramatic or sentimental, perhaps both, wearing the importunate, buttonhole-plucking manner of a person who thinks his premiums or peccadilloes important enough to tell the world — if he has won out, making him a braggart, if he has lost, a cry-baby. From a telling position so close to the writer, objectifying the experience thus becomes a task as vital as it is difficult. This is the sine qua non of the all but true "I" as protagonist. Strong means, besides clear vision, are needed to make the experience sharable here. If the experience can be told some years after its occurrence, that will help. If the writer can in some way deprecate himself as he was then, that too. But humor, itself a kind of objectification, is the saving grace of this perilous telling position. If we can find something, no matter how inconsequential, a little funny in our performance of only yesterday, the reader will chuckle and understand. Probably he, too, once made a fool of himself. ' Of, then, the four applicable considerations, a first suggestion: Behind both kinds of "I"-as-protagonist telling, it seems to me, there should be a reason for telling to lift the method above the arbitrary or merely garrulous; and if the facts to be told are intimate (as at the heart of the story they are pretty likely to be) there should be a reason that seems to the protagonist compulsive and that the reader can comprehend as such. This need brings us, as before, to the personality of the protagonist. A man explains to a friend, years afterward, how he came to give up playing chess. The episode appears trivial. It seems that at nineteen he had found himself facing the champion in the rubber game of the finals of an international tournament, and in mid-game he had conceived a sequence of eighteen moves that would insure

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victory. He scrupulously followed the planned sequence, his opponent answering each move as expected. When, however, our man reached his seventeenth move in the sequence, the strain of remembering or his suppressed excitement proved too great and he played his eighteenth instead — and lost. "The curious thing was," he says, "that getting beaten seemed to me unimportant. What filled my mind was the need of explaining how close I had come to winning. I explained this to my opponent, and he shrugged politely, not getting the point at all. Unsatisfied, I spent the night telling my friends, who kept saying, 'Yes, yes.' At odd moments I improved the explanation, making it clearer and more pointed. I got into the habit of telling new members of the chess club about it, of course entirely for their benefit, because some day they might profit from my mistake. They always said, 'Yes, yes,' too. When I began to tell waiters and taxi drivers, I was committed to a mental institution. When I got out, chess meant nothing to me." We feel the validity of inner pressure here. We remember how sure Hauchecorne was, in "The Piece of String," that if once he could convince some body it was not the wallet he picked up that day, everything would be all right. A chord is struck, kinship established. Is there any one of us who, under no matter how remotely related circumstances, after some extreme effort that narrowly failed has not felt the compulsion to explain how paltry was the cause of failure compared to the huge effort expended and the proximity of success? The episode proves far from trivial, because its 'motives are sharable; we understand the compulsive reason for the telling. After several drinks, a man opens his heart to confide in a friend how he happened to leave his wife, whom he loved and still loves, he says, better than anything on earth. This ought to be profound and significant. He was never jealous or even suspicious, he insists, and this may have been his undoing. Perhaps he took her too much as a matter of course. He had always been sort of dazed at his good luck in getting her. Of course he is supporting her still, the divorce is up to her any time she wants it, he wouldn't think of contesting. But he's through, that's for sure. No, it wasn't any special one thing. Maybe she drank too much, but there wasn't any trouble about that. He wouldn't think of having her followed; that business runs into money, and he knows there was nothing of that

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sort going on, even though he had to be away most of the week. Anyway, he expected her to have a good time, keep from being lonely; he did, himself, you have to do something just to stay alive in these upstate towns after working hard all day. No, there was just one thing, she couldn't keep her hands off the boys. First her eyes she couldn't, then her hands. Anybody, no special one. For all he knew she didn't mean a thing by it. But he'd come home, loving her and wanting her, and he'd find they had a date. Either people would be coming in or they would be going out somewhere. And then it would begin. Sure he'd get boiled, who wouldn't? She'd make up to somebody, and he'd get boiled to make it not matter. "You can see how it was, can't you, honey?" he says to the friend after several drinks. Whereupon the whole structure collapses. This man's motives are not sharable; we see too soon through his professed motives to the real cause of his behavior, which perhaps neither he nor the writer saw clearly enough. The man didn't tell it all, not because he would naturally abstain from letting the reader know he was talking to a woman, but because the writer made him abstain. Something damaging to the man's story was building up as he told it, and at the end we identify this flaw too late, and feel cheated: the man had no reason we can understand during the story for telling it at all, and he had some fairly sound reasons, even by his own standards, for keeping his mouth shut. The first episode is true, as improbable as are most synopses, yet waiting for some writer who has had a similar experience to see it in the hard white light of objectivity and make of it a story comparable to that told by Montresor, who kept his secret for fifty years and then had to tell. The second is a bad short story that probably never actually happened but that has been written many times, in many forms, by students. Invariably each writer believes that his version is the first and a world-beater. Although still below the experience level he writes about with such assurance, each student also believes the story to be watertight, a smash, a boffo, whether or not the reader foresees the end. For if he does, the student avows himself to be a member of the John O'Hara branch of the naturalistic school here allowing the reader to watch a heel operate. And if he does not,

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there is the surprise ending. But the membership claimed is as specious as the surprise. As the protagonist had no sharable reason for telling, the students had none for writing the story — by this method certainly, perhaps by any method. As a second suggestion: The constant presence of the protagonist on scene, a factor that required watchful management in stream of experience, is of no moment here, since the protagonist who tells his own story cannot get off scene if he tries. He may hear, after the fact, of matters important to himself that have occurred in his absence, perhaps with some loss in tension; but the reader is still with him, feeling the effect on him; not with the occurrence already past. He may, as we shall see later, misinterpret what has happened, the reader believing his interpretation or seeing through it to fulfill the writer's ironic intent; in either case with a consequent increase in tension. But it is not the fact of the protagonist's presence that must concern us; it is its impact because of his personality plus circumstances beyond his control — its impact on the reader. The third suggestion has to do with the medium of expression — the protagonist's thought processes and his language — by which the story finds utterance. Here once again we must meet the exigencies of character, that of the writer and that of the protagonist. If the latter is fictitious, and provided he has been conceived wisely as someone similar to the writer in some respects but radically different in others (the differences may be those inherent in his separation from the writer by time or space or both, as well as those of temperament), the only further injunction needed is that the protagonist should be thoughtful enough and articulate enough to have found a story here in his experience worth telling, and to be able to express it to the precise degree of completeness that fulfills the writer's intention. In the all but actual protagonist, the nearfusion of writer with story character presents greater difficulties. W e are all of us windbags, must be or we shouldn't have anything to write. It is a prejudice that we hotly deny yet must to ourselves admit and do something about before this kind of "I"-as-protagonist method can be attempted. The apparent ease of controlling the story in person, instead of at second-hand through the angular channel of an imagined personality, is more than offset by this ne-

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cessity of editing ourselves to character proportions. Words as words are no good, no matter what fun it is to brandish them. A singing typewriter may be a siren's song pulling us off course. Beating dictionary and thesaurus may be so much wasted effort. (Following this crooked, bookish trail, I once wrote, "I observed that the men had begun to manifest symptoms of incipient somnolence," and never observed till the print hit me in the face what I had done to myself, an unlettered and rather literal-minded dock clerk telling my story in person.) Figures of speech are as suspect as cliches. Striking new expressions are relics of a shady past. The only criterion of thought and language is the stiffest conceivable: Are image and utterance strictly commensurate with personality, with motive force in story; is either holding up the reader or nudging him on; are both so appropriate that they have in fact become inaudible and invisible? A fourth and final suggestion, the need in the narrator for enough dramatic sense to make the story effective, applies only to the fictitious "I." If the writer as narrator lacks this touch — the ability to hold the reader's attention by choice of incident and detail that implies more than it states, and by never at any point telling quite all — of course he would better not be writing fiction. But the fictitious "I" shows the need acutely. Either he must have something of the showman about him, or, rarely, his apparent lack of showmanship — a subtler sort of show — must be the means by which the story reaches the reader, over his head. I do not mean that he must be an exhibitionist, although perhaps a trace of exhibitionism is inevitably present in any creature, living or fictitious, who honestly finds his experience important enough to be shared. The chief appeal might be for solace, it might be merely for communication, sprung from a desire to be associated with others and perhaps understood by others. And it might, justly enough, spring from a need to confess and redress a wrong, or to solve a problem, or simply to pass on to others something learned. In both its forms, the method has the advantage of intensity. Like that of a lyric, the heart of a story must be sincere; and this method is telling from the heart. The dangers attendant on its use have been considered here not in order to warn writers away but to encourage wider practice of this difficult but forcefully genuine

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vehicle. Well done, it brings the reader into closest accord with the writer. For the course of the story, indeed, reader and writer become one being called "I." Strangely enough, too, the method seems to confirm a belief long held by readers but until recently shunned by writers as slippery and somehow illicit: There must be a story here. It actually happened.

A LETTER OF ADMONITION* by Sloan Wilson B A C K in the early spring of 1943, I received an official letter of admonition from the Navy. I suppose there are many ways one can take such a thing — one can joke about it, or feel ashamed, or just accept it as a painful but not especially meaningful experience and forget it. I was twenty-three years old, and I was overwhelmed. I had just completed a long stretch of what I considered very arduous sea duty, the last few months of it in command of a small vessel on the Greenland Patrol, and to have nothing but a letter of admonition to show for it seemed unfair. My resentment was increased by the fact that at about the same time a friend of mine who had spent a year on Navy Public Relations duty in Washington got a commendation. For a long time after I got the letter, I would wake up at night thinking about it. As matters turned out, the letter didn't keep me from being promoted, and soon after I got it I was put in command of a bigger ship, but still I would lie awake brooding. A mixture of outrage and humiliation would overtake me, and sometimes I would have to get out of my bunk and take a hot shower before I could get back to sleep. •Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright, 1951, The N e w Yorker Magazine, Inc.

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Often, at night, I saw myself explaining to a board of admirals just how the incident for which they had admonished me had happened, and then I imagined them getting together informally and saying, "You know, perhaps we made a mistake — let's take it back." I pictured their letter of apology, and the commendation, like my friend's, that I had them send along with it. But a letter of admonition is a final thing — as final as the act that gives rise to it — and mine was securely lodged in my service record in Washington, where I suppose it still rests. Eventually, I stopped lying awake nights thinking about it, but only lately have I been able to remember it with neither remorse nor resentment, and to look back not so much to the letter as to the long chain of events that led up to it. I don't know just where such a chain of events can really be said to begin. Perhaps this one began with my desire to command a ship. It is hard for me to understand now, but when I was twenty-two, that was my whole and final ambition. I was too young for such a job, too inexperienced, and fitted for it neither by education nor by temperament, but I wanted it badly. Partly, this was because I saw the commanding officer of a ship as an independent person, free to exercise his individuality without the restraint of superiors. Also, I think the romantic picture I had of being a swashbuckling ship's captain appealed to me more than I knew. Such ceremonies as the raising and lowering of the little black-and-white pennant, the "third repeater," that is flown when the commanding officer is not aboard impressed me. Furthermore, the ship's captains I had encountered were an attractive lot. The size or type of ship they commanded made little difference. I had seen them gathered in officers' clubs, drinking more and singing louder than anyone else without fear of reproach, for the commanding officers of ships, including the ensigns who commanded tiny subchasers, were respected even by admirals. I knew that there must be poor captains, of course, but I also knew that, by and large, the skippers were the most capable officers the brass hats could find. Promotions in rank came to all officers automatically, as did ribbons denoting the geographic areas in which they served, and medals were sometimes awarded capriciously, but a man was not given the full responsibility for a ship and a ship's company unless his record had been gone over

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critically. I felt that an order to, command a ship would be at the same time a stamp of approval and admittance into the society of the best fictional, historical, and contemporary heroes. T o me, it meant life on the grand scale, and was irresistible. I had many obstacles to overcome in trying to get command of a ship. I was only an ensign, and I looked even younger than I was. I tended to become seasick rather readily, and my commanding officers rarely seemed astonished by my abilities. On the other hand, I had assets — determination, and a willingness to do any dirty job in any part of the world so long as it was a possible step toward command of a ship. There were lots of ships that no one in his right mind would have wanted to command. With cool calculation, I set my sights for one of those. I was a junior watch officer on a fairly large ship at the time I undertook my campaign. I had seen some top-heavy little supply ships that had been pressed into service for patrolling the coast of Greenland and servicing weather stations there. The notion of duty aboard these cramped, dangerous little ships was generally regarded with horror by qualified officers, so after thinking the situation over I wrote a formal request for duty aboard one of them and presented it to my commanding officer. He looked at me as though I were crazy, and asked me why I wanted the transfer. I said piously that I thought I could be of greatest service there. With a sigh, he said he would forward the request to Washington. For several months, nothing happened. I became a lieutenant junior grade at precisely the same moment that all the other ensigns who had been commissioned at the same time as I were promoted. Then, one day, my orders arrived, and my commanding officer handed them to me. I was assigned, "as executive officer and prospective commanding officer," to one of the smallest ships in the fleet, bound for Greenland. She had once been a privately owned coastal freighter, and she retained her peacetime name, Quicksilver — a name that I later discovered was extremely unsuited to her. "Do you have any idea what you're in for?" the skipper asked. "I think so, sir," I said. "I requested this duty." I took my orders, and went to my stateroom to pack. The news that I was being transferred spread quickly around the ship, and

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the other officers came in to commiserate with me. It hadn't occurred to any of them that I had asked for the assignment. "Do you realize what those damn little ships are like?" a tall, thin lieutenant asked. "I think I do," I said. "Anyway, orders are orders." T h e ship was in Newfoundland at the time, preparing to sail for Greenland. A plane took me to her. All during the flight, I was so full of dreams of myself as a ship's captain that I was totally unprepared to meet the man who actually was captain of that ship, and who would remain so until he found me competent to succeed him. He was a short, heavy man about forty-five years old, a little Churchillian in appearance, except that he had let his reddish hair grow long since leaving the States several months before. When I showed him my orders, he looked very dubiously at me and set me to work helping the ship's other officers — an ensign and a warrant officer — go through a huge locker of official mail that had been accumulating for weeks. My dreams were somewhat dashed by this menial assignment, but I made up my mind that I had only to wait. I was so preoccupied with dreams of grandeur that the ship looked wonderful to me. I liked the light-blue-and-white camouflage, and I hardly noticed the smallness of the vessel, the inadequacy of the equipment, and the almost impossibly cramped quarters, or thought of the dangers promised us by our orders, which I saw soon after I arrived. They called for us to take a voyage to a point farther north on the coast of Greenland than other ships of the Patrol had gone. W e were to build a weather station there, set up its radios and generators, and install, with their supplies, the two men who were to operate it. The ensign and the warrant officer, knowing I was their prospective captain, were distant toward me. They were both older than I; the warrant officer was old enough to be my father. H e was from Maine and had had a great deal of experience at sea, but his lack of formal education prevented him from being commissioned. H e treated me with dignity, and I shall always be grateful to him. The ensign, a huge, slow moving man who towered above me, was unhappy on that ship, and shortly after I met him, he took me aside and told me that a sister ship of ours had become coated with

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ice while returning from Greenland a few months before and had capsized and been lost with all hands. I had heard about this incident, but literally had never given it much thought. I told the ensign that freakish weather had been responsible and that we would be all right. While I was comforting him, I felt that I was already commanding officer. A few days after I went aboard the ship, we sailed. From the beginning, things went badly for me, and my hopes of getting command of the ship quickly — or at all — faded. I was desperately seasick. The tiny vessel pitched and rolled in the steep seas between Newfoundland and Greenland until I thought the very fastenings would come out of her planking. The commanding officer very quickly ascertained that my knowledge of navigation, seamanship, and the handling of a ship was narrow. The thirty-three enlisted men, knowing I was their prospective commanding officer and seeing me seasick and inept, treated me with something less than reverence. It became fairly obvious that I was not that paragon so revered by the Navy, "a natural leader of men." Furthermore, I had been so immersed in my dreams that I had done a sloppy job of sorting the official mail. When we were in the middle of Davis Strait, the captain called me into his cabin and gave me hell for it, and for a week I was obliged to spend whatever time and energy I had left over from my regular duties clinging to a filing cabinet and refiling the papers I had put in the wrong place. When we got to Greenland, things went from bad to worse. After we had moored in the fiord that was to be our base, the captain often went ashore with the commanding officers of other ships anchored there, but he never took me along. I had hoped he would, and would introduce me as "the prospective commanding officer," but apparently he had forgotten those words on my orders. I was just a watch officer again (the executive officer on so small a ship was almost indistinguishable from a watch officer), and instead of having a stateroom to myself, I shared a grubby little cubbyhole with the warrant officer and the ensign. While we were at our base, there wasn't much I could do to try to make up for my performance on the way to Greenland, and the skipper seemed progressively less friendly. I was glad when we finally started north. That trip from the south of Greenland to a point many hundreds

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of miles north of the Arctic Circle was a strange one. The men on the other ships at the base had felt sorry for us, but after we were under way, I realized that our skipper was genuinely delighted with the assignment. He was, to a certain extent, like me, in that he felt it was a proud thing to have command of a ship. Even on such a desolate voyage as that one, he kept himself spotlessly clean, and never experimented with a beard or a mustache, as many of the rest of us did. He shaved every day, and his long hair was always combed and trimmed. He enjoyed the role he was playing. He was an expert seaman who had grown bored with routine trips up and down the coast of southern Greenland. The voyage north was taking him into unknown territory, and he had been looking forward to it for a long while. I began almost at once to wonder whether he might not give me command of the ship when we got back to our base. It seemed to me that possibly he had been afraid of being transferred to another ship before he could take the trip north, and that this had been his reason for holding me down. Or perhaps, I sometimes thought, he was waiting to see if I had the ability to take command under really difficult circumstances. In gloomier moments, I guessed it was far more likely that he had already decided I could never do it, and was just waiting until the trip was over to get rid of me. I didn't know what was in his mind, but I tried to read his thoughts in his every gesture. We worked our way north between the ice that was packed a few miles offshore and the towering red rocks of the Greenland coast. Now and then, when we hit open water, the ship bucked as she had in Davis Strait, but I was getting over my seasickness and I made it a point to eat huge meat sandwiches whenever I was on the bridge, so that the captain would see me and know I had conquered my weakness. I practiced navigation constantly, and dug through Knight's "Modern Seamanship" until the pages literally came out of the book. Still the captain treated me as an unworthy subordinate rather than a potential equal. Occasionally, we stopped at little Eskimo settlements, and the lonely Danish administrators, who had been marooned there for years, would give parties for us. The captain sometimes got drunk at these and made bitterly sarcastic remarks to me. It was summer, and we were so far north that

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there was no night at all, so the parties had an odd quality of timelessness. Instead of dawn coming to end them, there was only a kind of continuing high noon. Weeks went by, blended into one long, relentless day, and gradually the strain of the voyage and of my position aboard the ship began to tell on me, and on the captain. One day, a few weeks after we had left our base, I was seated in the forecastle, which was our only eating place, drinking coffee. The ship was jammed into the pack ice near a small island, awaiting the return of our motor launch, which had gone to take supplies to a weather station on the island. A seaman came down and said the captain wanted to see me on the bridge right away. I jumped up and went to the bridge. The captain was sitting on a stool by the wheel, and the first thing I saw was that his hands were trembling, which was unusual, for he was not a nervous man. His voice shook with fury, and he spoke in short, abrupt sentences. Bluntly, without preamble, and in the strongest possible terms, he told me that I was the worst officer he had ever met, and a despicable man as well. He said that it was absurd to think of me as a prospective commanding officer, that I wasn't even a good watch officer, that everybody aboard the ship, including himself, loathed me, that as soon as we got back to the base, he was going to transfer me with a bad fitness report, and that meanwhile I was relieved of all duties aboard the ship and confined to my quarters. The indictment was so sweeping that I could think of no defense whatever. In my heart, I believed he was right about my not being able to command a ship, but the rest of his tirade came as a complete shock. There had been no one incident to touch it off; it was simply an accumulation of feeling that had grown in him during that endless arctic day until it was too great for him to keep bottled up any more. He was a good commanding officer, and the idea of turning his ship over to someone else made him feel almost as a man might if he were asked to pick a new husband for his wife and father for his children. The sight of me, with my impertinent ambitions, had evidently infuriated him from the beginning, and he had controlled himself as long as he could. Looking back, I am grateful that he was so emotionally upset when he delivered himself of his burden. All the while he spoke, I felt the life ebbing out of me, and it was only the tremble in his

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hands and in his voice that gave me a momentary, saving sense of superiority. When he was through, I said, in a detached voice, "I can't be as bad as that," and went to my quarters. I lay down on my bunk, and, one by one, the accusations he had made came back to me in sickening succession. I lay counting them off, like beads on a string. In a few hours, I heard the launch come back and the winch grind as it was hoisted aboard. Then I heard the engine, and I started automatically to go on deck before I remembered that I was confined to my quarters for the rest of the voyage. Actually, I was kept in my quarters about three weeks. I found my position extremely embarrassing, because I had to rub elbows with the ensign and the warrant officer, who shared the tiny space, and who had to stand longer watches because I was off duty. The ensign, who had been resentful of my position as prospective commanding officer, was rather smug and never spoke to me, but the warrant officer acted with his usual quiet dignity. H e conversed with me, but never about my debacle or about the working of the ship. He talked about his children at home in Maine, and the price of lobsters there. Every once in a while, an enlisted man came down to get gloves or a warmer coat for one of the officers, or, oftener, to go through our quarters on his way to the engine room. The crew had always treated me with that terrible reserve all enlisted men are capable of turning on officers they don't like, but, sur-' prisingly enough, they were now friendly toward me. It was through them that I kept informed of the position of the ship and the state of the weather. Sometimes, as I lay in my bunk reading, the ship would be brought up with a terrible jar, and usually a seaman would come down on some pretext a few moments later and would tell me the extent of the ice pack we had struck. As the ship worked north, the ice, got worse and worse, until finally it was grinding at our sides all day long and there was real danger that we would get stuck and be frozen in for the winter. The captain continually had to back the ship up, then drive her full speed ahead to butt her way through it. Several times I was knocked out of my bunk. After I had been in my quarters three weeks, the captain came down and ordered me back to duty. It was the first time I had seen him since he had berated me, and I was shocked at how tired he looked.

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"Don't think this changes anything," he said. " W e just need another hand. I can't let you lie down here any longer, but don't forget that you're going to be transferred with a bad fitness report as soon as we get back to the base." "I won't forget," I said. For the next few months, I stayed almost constantly on the bridge. I found I was more relaxed now that my fate had been decided. I developed a good deal of skill in working the ship through the tightly packed ice that lay all around us in chunks like enormous boulders, some of them far bigger than the ship. It gave me real pleasure to ease the ship's bow between two gigantic pieces of ice, gradually increase the power until they parted and let us through, and then cut the speed of the engine before we picked up headway and crashed into the next ones. My happy relationship with the enlisted men continued. They all knew that my disgrace had only been postponed, and somehow this enlarged me in their eyes. They carried out my orders with a cheerfulness and promptness I had never seen before, and on watches we joked together. Finally, I realized that wherever I went aboard the ship, except near the captain or the ensign, I was among friends. After a long while, we reached our destination, established the weather station, and headed south just as the sea began to freeze into a solid sheet of ice. By the time we got as far south as the Arctic Circle, there was darkness for a few hours in each twentyfour, and it was a relief to have the old cycle of night and day back again, and to have at least the illusion of a fresh start every twenty-four hours. As we neared the base, I wondered what I would tell my wife and my friends, for I had done a fair amount of boasting in letters about my prospective command, but the initial shock of being in disgrace had worn off. I am surprised now to think how calm I was. W e reached our base in the fiord one cold, snowy afternoon and moored alongside a Dutch freighter. My clothes were already packed, and I lay down for one last night's sleep aboard the ship I had hoped to command. I don't know how long I had been asleep when I was awakened by a blundering hand on my face. I struggled up, and in the dim light saw the captain looking down at me.

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The heavy breathing of the warrant officer and ensign, asleep in nearby bunks, filled the compartment. I smelled whiskey, and realized that the captain had been drinking heavily. I thought he had come to give me a final, agonizing lecture on my weaknesses, or perhaps even to bait me about the sorry outcome of my ambitions, and I said, "Get out of here and leave me alone." He stood there weaving, and then, as though he had not heard me, he whispered hoarsely, "Get up! Get up! I want you to get up!" " G o to hell," I whispered back. "I don't have to carry out your orders when you're drunk." "I want you to come to a party," he said. "I don't feel like a party," I replied. I lay down and pretended to be going back to sleep, but he kept poking me and whispering, "Get up! Get up! I want you to get up!" Finally,, I decided to go with him, partly because I thought it might do me good to get drunk and partly because I thought it might do me even more good if my last sight of the captain should be the sight of him drunk. I got into my uniform and followed him onto the deck, across it, up a swinging Jacob's ladder to the snowcovered deck of the Dutch freighter, and down a long iron ladder to the freighter's main saloon. It was a big compartment, lit by lanterns because the freighter's generators had broken down. The ship's officers — lonely men who could not go home, since the Germans were occupying their country — were standing in a corner with some commanding officers of other ships, drinking whiskey and singing "Bless 'em All." My captain took a tumbler from a rack on the bulkhead. One of the officers handed him a bottle and he half filled the tumbler with whiskey. He held it out to me, spilling a little of the liquor, and said, "We're all ahead of you. Drink this and catch up." I took it, and got about half of it down before I gagged. My head swam, and I hardly understood it when the skipper said to the singing officers, "I want you to meet the next commanding officer of my ship." The announcement made no particular impression on them.

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They stopped singing and stared at us thoughtfully — or perhaps it was only the whiskey I had drunk that made them appear thoughtful to me — and then they started to sing "Bless 'em All" again. "Do you mean it?" I asked the skipper. "You've come a long way," he said. "Sing!" I sang. T o this day, that ridiculous song has more emotional overtones for me than Beethoven's Fifth. Even while I was singing, I wondered whether the skipper had changed his mind about me before or after he was drunk, but at the time it didn't seem important; actually, I never found out. The next day we were surprisingly awkward toward each other. W e ran through the ceremony of transferring command very brusquely, and that afternoon, when the time came for him to catch a plane that would take him to the States, and his new command, he went ashore without saying goodbye to anyone. The first few weeks I was in command, we lay at our base and I had all the prerogatives and none of the responsibilities of my new position. The skippers of the other ships accepted me as an equal, and I drank as much and sang as loudly as any of them at the officers' club. When I went ashore, the quartermaster grinned at me and hoisted the little black-and-white pennant, and as I walked away from the ship I could not resist peeking over my shoulder to see it fluttering there high above the deck. The big ensign became very attentive to my wishes, and the old warrant officer continued to treat me with his wonderful mixture of kindliness and dignity. Then the ship got orders. They were simple enough — we were to take some engine parts a few hundred miles down the coast of Greenland to a fiord where there was a big freighter that had broken down. A new ensign came aboard, and our old ensign became executive officer. When the cargo had been loaded, I went up on the bridge and had the lines cast off. The engine throbbed quietly, and the ship moved away from her mooring and down the fiord toward the open sea. I turned the bridge over to the warrant officer and went down on deck. It was fun to look forward along the curve of the hull plunging through the water, and to think she was my ship. When I went below for a cup of coffee, the cook produced a coffee roll he had made just for me. It was getting dark when we bucked through the pack ice that

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stretched like a belt along the coast. W e took the ship out to sea about twenty miles, then changed course to parallel the coast. T h e wind was rising slowly, but the barometer was fairly steady and I didn't expect much weather. The new ensign relieved the warrant officer. I left orders for him to call me if the weather got worse, and went to the captain's cabin, which was adjacent to the bridge, and turned in. T w o hours later, I was awakened by water dripping on my face. The new ensign was leaning over me, and water was coming off his cap and coat. "Captain!" he said. "Captain! You better get up. The weather's getting terrible." I sprang from my berth. The ship was rolling heavily. I groped my way to the wing of the bridge. In the darkness I could see a steady sheet of white spray arching over the ship, and the moan of the wind was louder than the sound of our engine. I turned toward the door of my cabin, and in that moment half expected to see the figure of the old skipper emerge and hear him say, "You go below — I'll take over." Instead, the captain's cabin was empty, and the door swung violently back and forth with the roll of the ship. I closed the door, and just then the warrant officer came onto the bridge. "Looks pretty bad, doesn't it, Captain?" he said. "We're just decoding a storm warning. It seems to have come a little late." "We'll be all right," I said, but it was so ridiculous for me to be reassuring that experienced man that I added, "What do vou think?" "We'll be all right," he said. " W e got plenty of sea room, and the wind's offshore." The ship was laboring more and more. W e slowed her down, first to half speed, then to slow speed, and finally we stopped the engine and drifted before the storm. In spite of her clumsy appearance, the ship rode like a duck. Toward morning, snow began falling, and all that day we could see only a few feet in any direction. The executive officer reminded me of our sister ship that had iced up and rolled over with all hands, and I said to him, "It was a fluke of the weather. We'll be all right," but I asked the warrant officer to check our ice mallets and axes, and to be ready to chop ice if it formed too fast.

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As things turned out, it didn't. Toward the end of the third day, the wind abated, although the snow continued. W e picked up a radio beam, and homed on it toward the fiord where we were to take the engine parts. For two days, we wallowed through the snow, and then the fathometer showed we were approaching the coast. Suddenly, the entrance of the fiord, with snow-covered mountains on three sides of it, appeared just ahead, and we saw the ship we were looking for anchored in it. "We'd better radio the base that we got here," the old warrant officer said. "Maybe they've been worried." "Tell them we arrived safely, and make it sound routine," I said. For the next few months, we carried out routine assignments along the coast of Greenland. Once, we took food to a settlement that was in short supply, and the Greenlanders (they did not like to be called Eskimos) lined up on a high bluff overlooking the harbor to greet us. They jumped up and down, in their fur breeches and sealskin boots, and cheered. W e blew our whistle, sounded our siren, and flashed our searchlight, and their cheers redoubled. Another time, we went through Prince Christians Sound, which cuts across the southern tip of Greenland, making an island of Cape Farewell. The white mountains reared so high and so close on each side of us that the ship was like a small boy in a valley. At night, I stood on the flying bridge with the warrant officer. The northern lights pulsed in the sky above us, and as we threaded our way through the narrow vein of black water, the moonlight glittered on the great ice cliffs. Then, just as I was growing confident of my ability to pilot the ship along the Greenland coast, we got orders to take her back to the States for an overhaul. Everyone else aboard was jubilant, but I wasn't. It was early December by then, and the trip to the States was a long one. Until we got pretty far south, it would be dark most of the time. It had been on a similar voyage, just a year before, that our sister ship had iced up and rolled over. The thought of the long voyage scared me, and it amazed me that the men were not also scared. They talked only of the things they would do after they got home. Their main worry seemed to be whether we would get there in time for Christmas. W e started out in convoy. A big empty tanker was on our star-

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board beam and a Liberty ship on our port. Ahead of us was a troopship, and our orders said that if she were torpedoed, we were to pick up as many of her men as possible. The weather was rough from the beginning. The tanker had so little ballast that she had difficulty steering, and she veered back and forth. In the night, she would loom above us like a mountain, and we would have to change course hastily to avoid being run over. After this had happened several times, I signalled the convoy commodore and requested permission to follow the convoy at some distance. I felt that a submarine wouldn't bother with a ship as small as ours, and that we would be safer there. The commodore gave permission. For about a week we trailed along in the wake of the bigger ships, but the weather got rougher and we had trouble keeping up. One morning, when dawn came, the other ships were gone from sight. We had no radar to tell us where they were, so we plowed on alone. The skies were heavily overcast. It was impossible to get sun or star sights, and we were too far from land to use our radio direction finder. W e set a course in the approximate direction of Boston, where we were supposed to go, and let her drive. The days grew longer, but snow came more and more frequently, and finally settled down into a continuing blizzard. Steel and manila lines a half inch in diameter accumulated snow and ice until they looked like thick white tree trunks. Ice formed on the superstructure, and on deck. It wasn't long before the scuppers froze, so most of the water that came aboard also froze before it could drain off. The ship staggered on under the load of the ice and hesitated longer and longer before righting herself after each roll. "Looks like we might be getting a fluke of the weather," the executive officer said. I was surprised to see that he wasn't scared at all. He and the warrant officer took a crew of men with axes and mallets and started chipping the ice, but it formed faster than they could remove it. Eventually, we turned and jogged along with the wind, away from Boston and toward Iceland. That way, the ice formed more slowly, but it still coated the stern, and it kept creeping forward. I reduced the watch to myself, a helmsman, a man in the radio shack, and one in the engine room — everybody else chopped ice — and I spent a lot of time thinking about our sister ship.

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Luckily, the wind and snow lessened after two days, and we were all right. The skies were still overcast, however, and we could take no sights. W e turned and again wallowed in the general direction of Boston. Once, the moon came out from behind a cloud just at dusk and I got a line of position, but it gave me only a rough idea of where we were. When our dead reckoning showed we were near land, we turned on the radio direction finder, only to discover that the dampness had shorted it out. W e pushed ahead, and finally land showed on the horizon. I had very little idea what land it was, and we crowded closer to identify it. Toward dusk, we saw a light flashing, timed it, and found it was on Cape Ann, near Gloucester. Boston was only about thirty miles away. It was the twenty-second of December. W e had been at sea approximately three weeks. I had spent almost the entire time on the bridge, and I was dead tired, but excitement kept me awake. Night came, and with it more snow, but we were so near home that it dampened no one's spirits. The men sang, "I'm dreaming of a brown Christmas, Greenland's really made me sick of white." In a little while, we could see the Boston lightship. I climbed from the bridge to the flying bridge above it, where the warrant officer and the quartermaster were. The warrant officer had the deck. As we passed the lightship, I saw a maze of harbor lights ahead, appearing and disappearing in the snow flurries. I went down and consulted the harbor chart. The channel looked long and crooked. I had never taken a ship into Boston Harbor, or into any harbor but the Greenland fiords, at night. "I think we'd better lay off here until morning," I said to the warrant officer. "The boys will be awfully disappointed," he said. "Down in the forecastle, they're pressing their shore clothes." I looked and, with astonishment, saw that he himself already had on a neatly pressed blue uniform. "I don't know how to take her in there on a night like this," I confessed, pointing toward the blur of blinking lights in the snow ahead. "I've been in there a thousand times," he replied. "Let me take her in."

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I said all right, and stood on the flying bridge while he piloted her in. He did a beautiful job threading his way through the channels in the dark and snow. Suddenly, there were blinking lights all around us. Advertising signs, railroad lights, automobile headlights, and navigational lights were all mixed together and reflected in the still waters of the harbor. None of us had seen lights like that for more than a year. When we passed the submarine-net tender, she signalled us that she had orders for us to proceed to a harbor shipyard the name of which was unfamiliar to all of us. "Ask them to repeat the name," I said to our quartermaster. He flashed our light rapidly at the tender, and the name was repeated. "Where the hell's that?" I asked the warrant officer. "Never heard of it," he said. "It's probably some little yard started since the war." We tried to ask the tender where the yard was, but by that time we were well past her, and apparently she didn't see our signals. I looked at the chart, but the names of the shipyards were not given. We circled around and around the inner harbor in the snow, wondering whom to ask for directions. We blinked our signal light at what looked like a signal tower, but our light must have been lost among all the others, for there was no answer. We continued to circle. "I'll take over," I said to the warrant officer. "Go down and see if any of the men who come from Boston know where that shipyard is." The warrant officer left the bridge. I waited what seemed a long while. About a thousand yards away, I saw a wharf where welding was going on. Blue arc lights and sparks stood out against the blaze of all the other lights. I decided I could moor at the wharf and ask directions if none of our men knew where the yard was. The warrant officer did not come back, and I grew more and more impatient. I was imagining going ashore and telephoning my wife, who was living near Boston. It would be a proud moment, arriving from Greenland with my own ship three days before Christmas. Still the warrant officer did not come back. I headed the ship toward the wharf. We steamed along for a few minutes, going closer to the bright lights of the welders. Suddenly,

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I had a sickening sensation as the bow lifted, the ship shuddered, and we went aground. "Back full!" I said to the quartermaster. The engine churned, but we didn't move. The warrant officer appeared, astonishment on his face, and a chart on which he had marked the location of the shipyard in his hand. "What are you doing here?" he said. "It's shoal!" "I know," I said. He went forward and took soundings. "There's only six feet of water up here," he called. "We're hard aground in soft mud." The tide, we soon found, was dropping. We cut the engine to keep its cooling system from being clogged with mud, and in the silence that followed we could hear people ashore singing Christmas carols. "The bastards!" the quartermaster said indignantly. "Singing Christmas carols!" He turned and looked at me with accusing eyes, and I noticed for the first time that he, too, had on his dress blues. "How long will we be here?" he asked. "Till the tide comes up again," I said. Dawn found us careened over on a mud flat in the middle of Boston Harbor. We must have looked odd there. Our Iight-blueand-white camouflage was designed to make us invisible in the Arctic ice, but it did not render us invisible on the mud flat. Apparently we made quite an impression on the brass hats in the Navy's Boston office. A couple of admirals and two or three captains came out in a launch and circled us incredulously. Reporters in a motorboat took pictures. I had wanted glory, and I got publicity. My wife read about my homecoming before she heard from me. When the tide was at full crest, a tug took us off; no damage was done to the ship. The same could not be said for me. In the weeks that followed, a board of investigation held hearings. I was embarrassed to be able to give no adequate explanation of why I had sailed my ship onto a mud flat in Boston Harbor. Why, the admirals wanted to know, hadn't I taken bearings to ascertain my position on the chart before proceeding toward the wharf? I had been confused by the lights, I said lamely, and I had been tired after many nights on the bridge. I couldn't add that I

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had been dreaming of telephoning my wife, and that the voyage had somehow seemed to me to be over. During the hearings, the warrant officer tried to take all the blame, in spite of the fact that, on my orders, he had been below when I decided to head toward the wharf, but he succeeded only in implicating himself along with me. The admirals all too apparently felt that we were a pair of buffoons for whom no punishment could be too harsh. After the hearings, I was sent to a school where I took a course in antisubmarine warfare. It was there that the letter of admonition came. In precise official language it admonished me for grounding my ship, and for the poor judgment and faulty piloting that had caused me to do so. There was nothing to say in reply. Then my friend, who sat in the seat next to mine at school, got his commendation for Public Relations work. I hoped he'd die. Even when, a month later, I was given command of a larger ship and ordered to take her to the South Pacific, the official, ineradicable rebuke stung. The story of my having been stranded in Boston Harbor soon became fairly famous among my fellow-officers, and there were frequent references to it around the officers' clubs. For months, I grew incoherent at the very mention of the incident. There was something, I felt, that I had to explain. I had to say something to make it clear that I hadn't actually been a fool at all, or at least that I had become less of a fool than I once was, and that all those months in Greenland were an experience of great significance to me, which a silly, last-minute grounding couldn't alter, but the more I tried to explain this, the more ridiculous I sounded. It took me a long time to realize that there was really nothing to be explained at all.

Of the two varieties of "I" as protagonist this is the tougher. The author writes: "It is autobiographical, and was changed into legal fiction with some difficulty. What I've got to learn to do is write

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about something other than myself." In all but possibly one or two essentials, this protagonist is the author and this story is true. T h e redundant but natural, colloquial first word, "back," the particularity of time and place in the opening paragraph, the direct approach to the experience are sure signs. A man recalls how, in his youth, he rose to command a small naval vessel, brought her safely to port by mighty effort and able seamanship, only to run aground in harbor and receive for his pains an official and permanent reproof. W e have every reason to believe these facts, and no reason whatever to doubt them. W h y , then, is this a short story and not a chapter in the writer's autobiography? It might be one of those extremely rare instances of an experience that literally shaped itself into a short story, that actually happened to this particular individual in just this way. But there is evidence to the contrary — evidence of art that conceals itself and makes truth to fact also truth to human nature. The desire to command a ship seems a normal motive in youth. But this desire in so strong a form that almost any ship will do — desire so consuming that plans are laid and executed to get a generally unwanted command, in spite of inexperience and physical unfitness — this as motive is almost too good for story purposes to be factually true. For by its slight exaggeration of the normal it unifies, it clarifies, it justifies the entire tale. T o Sloan Wilson the protagonist, commanding a ship "meant life on the grand scale." Sloan Wilson the writer conceived the experience as an instance of the difference between the dream and the reality. The protagonist-dreamer must be taken down a peg, and he was. A n officer bent merely on fulfilling his assigned duty, whatever it was, would not have suited the writer's purpose. Perhaps the worst possible motive in the protagonist, for story purposes, is the one that seems likely to have been the true, the actual one: a young officer isolated from his commander, his equals, and his subordinates by differences of background and education trying to prove himself by their terms in their language. Maybe here was prejudice (as if to say: "Here I am, educated, sensitive, and all that, and where does it get me with these bohunks?") that had to be seen and rooted out, for which a motive more sharable had to be substituted. I may be quite wrong,

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but I should like to see the pages and pages that were written and thrown away before this final, objectified draft came into being. I believe the motive — this is far from disparagement — was fictitious. Thus, although the events are autobiographical, if my guess is right the author did here find something other than himself to write about. There is supporting evidence of the short-story writer unobtrusively yet hard at work adapting fact into fiction. He sees himself in perspective, after ten years. He deprecates the seasick dreamer he was then. Early he suggests humor to come ("one can joke about it") but then adds, "I was overwhelmed." By these small means he edits himself to character size, looks back objectively at himself, sees his behavior about the receipt of his orders as a naive pose, records his disappointment at his first "menial assignment" as executive officer and at his successive rebuffs by the skipper. Thus he understands the skipper's condemnation of him (he has a low opinion of himself) but is surprised at the new friendliness of the crew when he is confined to his quarters. And thus he is brief and casual about the growth of his seagoing competence, letting us see his ability grow and prepare him for command. The strongest evidence of all lies in the writer's use of first-person pronouns, singular and plural. From the beginning through the opening of the mail, there seems to have been no restraint on the use of "I." It is I, me, and mine in such profusion that without the perspective established by the writer the protagonist's preoccupation with himself might well have been unbearable. But as he goes through the mail, his mind still absorbed by "dreams of grandeur," there is a sudden change to the plural: . . . or thought of the dangers promised us by our orders. . . . They called for us to take a voyage to a point farther north on the coast of Greenland than other ships of the Patrol had gone. W e were to build a weather station there . . .

This shift to plural pronouns means to me the protagonist's premature and false assumption of identification with the ship and its company as one unit, a relationship that he later recognizes in the skipper as the probable cause of the man's hostility to him, "the prospective captain." For the narrative lapses into singular pronouns

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and with few exceptions (which refer to the ship rather than to any person or persons) so continues until the protagonist takes command. With the arrival of that test, however, the plural pronoun appears again and is given added force, as if to show its validity, by its use in dialogue: "Looks pretty bad, doesn't it, Captain?" he said. "We'll be all right," I said.

And later: "Tell them we arrived safely, and make it sound routine," I said.

This time, the now valid identification of the protagonist with ship and company, since he has earned it, mainly carries the narrative by means of plural pronouns until the ridiculous but understandable mishap in Boston Harbor ("I'll take over," I said to the warrant officer) when the warrant officer comes on deck, the marked chart in hand. "What are you doing here?" he said. "It's shoal!" "I know," I said.

It is as if, with these laughably understated words, an acknowledgment had been made that the unit of new skipper, ship, and ship's company has been broken, identification of the protagonist with the rest of the unit is no longer possible; it is he who is individually responsible. Then the story ends. Perhaps we should stop at this point and ask ourselves what the piece is all about, what as short story it means. A short story may mean different things to different readers, and still be good; it may have meant one thing to its writer and be interpreted by a reader as something related but different, and still be good. Here, it seems, there can be little variance of findings, so direct is the approach to meaningful material and so varied yet unilateral are the indices of a single and simple implication. The theme of this story, the general truth it demonstrates by a particular instance, is that actions speak louder than words. W e note the dreams of grandeur as shadowy symbols of verbiage, perhaps words read in books. W e note the protagonist's laconic speech as his true feeling toward words — his "I won't forget" when, ignominiously, he is recalled to duty merely because another hand is needed, his " G o to hell" and "I

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don't feel like a party" when the skipper, drunk, comes to get him, and another crucial understatement, not in quotes, toward the end, "the voyage had seemed to me over." W e note that the protagonist's reply to any speech is shorter, or voiced in shorter sentences, than was the remark addressed to him. W e note the protagonist's brief statement about the improvement of his seamanship, the stripped and matter-of-fact record of the separation of the ship from the convoy and her struggle to reach port. W e note that the fear of a repetition of the fate suffered by her sister ship in similar conditions is kept to himself, or that previous disaster is mentioned curtly as due to "a fluke of the weather." We note especially that the letter of admonition, not of course quoted at this late stage, although the temptation to quote it or parts of it must have been excruciating, was composed of words attributing vast importance to a relatively trivial matter. And above all, we note the closing words of the story: "there was really nothing to be explained at all." If this meaning will do, and there seems little doubt, here is the affirmative element in a story that may seem on quick reading to be mostly negative and frustrative, expressing the futility of struggle to lead, to survive, and to grow in knowledge and ability. And the affirmation, though implicit, is strong and pervasive. Sloan Wilson's concept goes beyond Maupassant's in "The Piece of String"; for here his protagonist finds, in action, despite the brass hats and their silly syllables of censure, release from the fetters of obsessive explanation. T o balance the books we should consider, finally, whether this attempt to tell a story, to demonstrate an idea, by this very difficult method was wholly successful. It seems to me longer than was necessary: surely the first two paragraphs could be lopped off without much, if any, loss, beginning with the present third paragraph at "I don't know just where the chain of events leading up to my letter of admonition began," which would be equally direct and informal, get at the story sooner, and avoid the weakening effect of repetition now felt in the final paragraph. Again, it is doubtful whether the suspense inherent in the long, rough voyage home is not dulled by the method used. True, before the end we know that physical disaster is subordinate to the main theme, but at the time we are not sure of this. Yet again, the language of the story

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is rather formidable — an unfortunate quality since it points directly at what might have been the writer's autobiographically true motive, not to the boyish and sharable fictitious motive ascribed. It is a little as if the writer had too many things to manage at once, and in his effort to see himself in perspective as protagonist became in the telling too serious and literary. Ten years' growth is to be expected, but hardly to this extent. W e are assailed by such words as "resentment," "commiserate," "humiliation," "furthermore," "responsibility," "irresistible," "preamble," "indictment," "superiority," "conversed," "debacle," "prerogatives," which conceivably could be characteristic of a certain sort of mature man but are not the natural utterance of the youth who carries the story, or the most natural expression of reminiscence of that utterance. It is refreshing to find these overdignified words thinning out as the story progresses, and being replaced by shorter, Saxon words, idioms, and colloquialisms such as "I had to rub elbows with the ensign and the warrant officer," "It was fun to look forward . . . and to think she was my ship," and "As things turned out, it didn't." One finds especially an increase in contractions and a free-andeasy use of forms of the verb "to get." Just possibly, the change was intentional, implying change in the personality of the protagonist — a minor but essential part of the movement of the story toward the expression of its idea. Still, the first thousand words or so make heavy reading. N o matter how sound the intention, there are two things a writer can seldom, if ever, afford to do: puzzle the reader or bore him. As against these few defects, the general success of the story seems certain. Perspective is firmly established. The reason for telling is strong and sharable. A long time span is covered smoothly by the implied immediate scene of the telling. W e are drawn consistently in a single direction, by the presence of an understandable motive beset by almost insuperable difficulties, to be shown a single and convincing idea. Technique aside, the best of the story is its restrained humor. I could not do without the singing of "Bless 'em AH" aboard the Dutch freighter, the skipper's long-awaited announcement of his successor making "no particular impression" on anybody in the confusion, and the delicious final view of the admirals "incredu-

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lously" circling the grounded little ship so near her dock in Boston Harbor. Such images are rare in American literature, which usually takes itself too seriously. They are not frequent anywhere. It is worth remarking, although no serious blemish of so fine a writer, that Joseph Conrad tried once, in Nostromo, to make a joke — and failed.

V.

"I"

AS

WITNESS

OUTSIDE THE PROTAGONIST, FIRST-PERSON TELLING OFFERS

a rich variety of positions through any one of which, theoretically, a story can be channeled to the reader. Indeed, the possibilities of variation are so great that choice of the most accessible and effective medium can intrude upon the area of conceptual approach and become a prime nuisance. Several ways may have to be tried, one after another, through several characters, not all of whom are essential to the story, until the writer hits on the one that seems most natural and least contrived, the one that comes closest to fit representation — implied or stated — of his idea. Impatience or a shrinking from the drudgery of self-discipline may suggest a quicker route to completion: telling the story by the first method, calling this the most natural, that enters one's head. Almost always, however, what seems to the writer the most natural (i.e., the easiest) has an opposite effect on the reader. The hard way, here, is more apt to be the best way. A close look at the chief varieties, at least, followed by a reasoned choice, although this procedure may create no masterpiece, will, within the capacity of the writer, come as near to excellence as the sound use of technique can reach. Choice of one of the outer telling methods may depend, first, upon the emotional depth and strength of the material. We can see that the intensity inevitably present in a story told by its protagonist will lessen and fade, obscured or glossed over by a telling position in a character more or less removed from the heart of conflict, who cannot feel its stress so keenly. But if the central material is violent, this more distant approach to it may, by suggestion or the teller's very insensitivity, make violence the more convincing. If, on the other hand, the material is relatively gentle and no great depth of emotion is stirred, and particularly If the action is reported after its occurrence, a remote telling position may write it right off the page into inconsequence and oblivion. Management

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of story structure in order to insure the teller's presence on scene, secondly, will now-become a more prominent factor; but means can be found for making his presence plausible and then taking it, and expecting the reader to take it, pretty much for granted. Thirdly, the teller's dramatic instinct, his ability to shape the telling in such a w a y that suspense is held and surprise — to whatever degree is desired — effected, becomes highly important again. Fourthly, inadvertent distortion of the teller's personality by the presence of prejudice unseen by the writer, tending toward melodrama or sentimentality in the protagonist-told story, will no longer threaten to create disparity between writer's and reader's evaluations of the teller; the remoter is the telling position from the heart of the story, the easier is the writer's task of seeing the teller in perspective and objectifying his personality. But a new threat, having to do with the amount of space used to describe and identify the teller, will be felt; if the space devoted to him (as distinguished from that devoted strictly to what he tells) is greater or less than the interest he inspires in himself as a person, or the amount of morive force he lends the story, trouble looms. In the first instance, a distraction may be set up that lets him steal the show but weaken or obscure the story; in the second, the story will seem, to careful readers, to run on without its teller — that is, by dubious sleight of hand, with the author telling it in his first person. Finally, choice will be conditioned by the need of expression — suitable thought and its natural utterance — in the teller: can he tell it all, or can you plausibly let him tell only part of it or tell it blind, in such a way that the reader catches the rest, the truth of the matter, over his head? These considerations will be clarified by a rough listing of possibilities in telling position, with reference to a few recent short stories easily obtainable in books — stories that have used first-person tellings, for good reasons, at various stages of remoteness from the center of the action. Classification of any group of stories is almost as difficult as is choice of the best method for one proposed story; some overlap, and one variant may logically in mid-story become another; and many minutely different varieties must be omitted, or at best only suggested, here. Certainly a strong reason, easily overlooked, for using an outer but still first-person teller lies

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in the absence of a single, feasible protagonist; that is, if the idea of the story involves two persons equally, or if a group of persons, such as a family, is the main agent of and demonstrates the idea, or if the protagonist is inarticulate or diffident or lacks some quality vital to the telling. Another sound reason, and one that is present behind all first-person tellings, is the capacity of this method to cover a long time span securely, within the immediate scene, stipulated or understood, of the telling. A first telling position, closest to the protagonist and yet outside him, exists within a participant in the action. Easily discernible are three kinds of participants: the interpreter, whose part in the story, though it may also be physical, consists chiefly of making clear to the reader what would not be clear without his telling; the implicated but helpless interpreter, who clarifies the story for the reader and wishes to take an active part in it but is prevented from doing so; and the unseeing, unwilling, or mistaken interpreter, over whose puzzled or myopic view the story reaches the reader in spite of his deliberate or unwitting efforts to misinterpret it. A second telling position, fairly close to the protagonist by reason of curiosity, blood relationship, motivated sympathy or interest, yet inactive, exists in a mere witness. Here again will be found the seeing and the unseeing teller. A third position, more remote, is that of a mere witness who in the course of the story becomes an active participant. And this change may take place just as or just after the story ends. Finally, a fourth position, most remote, its teller least discernible as an individual, is the mere recorder, who may fade in identity from a name or a personal pronoun, singular or plural, to the status of unidentified neighbor, relative, or passer-by. Reading such stories as those listed as examples in the preceding table and keeping an attentive ear and a sharp eye on the organic channel by which they reach the reader, one can usually recognize the reason underlying the writer's choice of vehicle. One can gauge, too, a careful balance between the space used for identification of the teller and the motive force, in physical action, revealing interpretation, or ironic misinterpretation, that the chosen medium supplies the story. The trick in writing is, of course, to get just enough to fulfill the intention without creating a distrac-

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tion that might blur the story or let an appealing narrator disappear from the page. At the closest position outside the protagonist, the participant-teller is named, clearly seen as an individual and felt as a major force in the story. A t the remotest, he is a mere bystander, nameless, sexless, nondescript, and recognized as teller only by the occasional appearance of such phrases as "It got about"; "we all knew"; "they call him crazy but the fact is"; "it was learned on good authority." Told from any position well chosen and maintained, or for sound reason changed, we are still there.

DEATH OF RED PERIL* A Tragic

Melodrama

by Walter D. Edmonds ^ h a t do them old coots down to the store do? Why, one of 'em will think up a horse that's been dead forty year and then they'll set around remembering this and that about that horse until they've made a resurrection of him. You'd think he was a regular Grattan Bars, the way they talk, telling one thing and another, when a man knows if that horse hadn't've had a breeching to keep his tail end off the ground he could hardly have walked from here to Boonville. A horse race is a handsome thing to watch if a man has his money on a sure proposition. M y pa was always a great hand at a horse race. But when he took to a boat and my mother he didn't have no more time for it. So he got interested in another sport. * Copyright 1934, by Walter D. Edmonds. From Mostly Canallers, by Walter D. Edmonds. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Co. and the Atlantic Monthly Press.

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Did you ever hear of racing caterpillars? No? Well, it used to be a great thing on the canawl. My pa used to have a lot of them insects on hand every fall, and the way he could get them to run would make a man have his eyes examined. The way we raced caterpillars was to set them in a napkin ring on a table, one facing one way and one the other. Outside the napkin ring was drawed a circle in chalk three feet acrost. Then a man lifted the ring and the handlers was allowed one jab with a darning needle to get their caterpillars started. The one that got outside the chalk circle the first was the one that won the race. I remember my pa tried out a lot of breeds, and he got hold of some pretty fast steppers. But there wasn't one of them could equal Red Peril. T o see him you wouldn't believe he could run. He was all red and kind of stubby, and he had a sort of a wart behind that you'd think would get in his way. There wasn't anything fancy in his looks. He'd just set still studying the ground and make you think he was dreaming about last year's oats; but when you set him in the starting ring he'd hitch himself up behind like a man lifting on his galluses, and then he'd light out for glory. Pa come acrost Red Peril down in Westernville. Ma's relatives resided there, and it being Sunday we'd all gone in to church. W e was riding back in a hired rig with a dandy trotter, and Pa was pushing her right along and Ma was talking sermon and clothes, and me and my sister was setting on the back seat playing poke your nose, when all of a sudden Pa hollers, " W h o a ! " and set the horse right down on the breeching. Ma let out a holler and come to rest on the dashboard with her head under the horse. " M y gracious land!" she says. "What's happened?" Pa was out on the other side of the road right down in the mud in his Sunday pants, a-wropping up something in his yeller handkerchief. Ma begun to get riled. "What you doing, Pa?" she says. "What you got there?" Pa was putting his handkerchief back into his inside pocket. Then he come back over the wheel and got him a chew. "Leeza," he says, "I got the fastest caterpillar in seven counties. It's an act of Providence I seen him, the way he jumped the ruts." "It's an act of God I ain't laying dead under the back end of that horse," says Ma. "I've gone and spoilt my Sunday hat." "Never mind," says Pa;

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"Red Peril will earn you a new one." Just like that he named him. He was the fastest caterpillar in seven counties. When we got back onto the boat, while Ma was turning up the supper, Pa set him down to the table under the lamp and pulled out the handkerchief. "You two devils stand there and there," he says to me and my sister, "and if you let him get by I'll leather the soap out of you." So we stood there and he undid the handkerchief, and out walked one of them red, long-haired caterpillars. He walked right to the middle of the table, and then he took a short turn and put his nose in his tail and went to sleep. "Who'd think that insect could make such a break for freedom as I seen him make?" says Pa, and he got out a empty Brandreth box and filled it up with some towel and put the caterpillar inside. "He needs a rest," says Pa. "He needs to get used to his stall. When he limbers up I'll commence training him. N o w then," he says, putting the box on the shelf back of the stove, "don't none of you say a word about him." He got out a pipe and set there smoking and figuring, and we could see he was studying out just how he'd make a world-beater out of that bug. "What you going to feed him?" asks Ma. "If I wasn't afraid of constipating him," Pa says, "I'd try him out with milkweed." Next day we hauled up the Lansing Kill Gorge. Ned Kilbourne, Pa's driver, come aboard in the morning, and he took a look at that caterpillar. He took him out of the box and felt his legs and laid him down on the table and went clean over him. "Well," he says, "he don't look like a great lot, but I've knowed some of that red variety could chug along pretty smart." Then he touched him with a pin. It was a sudden sight. It looked like the rear end of that caterpillar was racing the front end, but it couldn't never quite get by. Afore either Ned or Pa could get a move Red Peril had made a turn around the sugar bowl and run solid aground in the butter dish. Pa let out a loud swear. "Look out he don't pull a tendon," he says. "Butter's a bad thing. A man has to be careful. Jeepers," he says, picking him up and taking him over to the stove to dry, "I'll

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handle him myself. I don't want no rum-soaked bezabors dishing my beans." "I didn't mean harm, Will," says Ned. "I was just curious." There was something extraordinary about that caterpillar. He was intelligent. It seemed he just couldn't abide the feel of sharp iron. It got so that if Pa reached for the lapel of his coat Red Peril would light out. It must have been he was tender. I said he had a sort of a wart behind, and I guess he liked to find it a place of safety. W e was all terrible proud of that bird. Pa took to timing him on the track. He beat all known time holler. He got to know that as soon as he crossed the chalk he would get back safe in his quarters. Only when we tried sprinting him across the supper table, if he saw a piece of butter he'd pull up short and bolt back where he come from. He had a mortal fear of butter. Well, Pa trained him three nights. It was a sight to see him there at the table, a big man with a needle in his hand, moving the lamp around and studying out the identical spot that caterpillar wanted most to get out of the needle's way. Pretty soon he found it, and then he says to Ned, "I'll race him agin all comers at all odds." "Well, Will," says Ned, "I guess it's a safe proposition." W e hauled up the feeder to Forestport and got us a load of potatoes. W e raced him there against Charley Mack, the bankwalker's, Leopard Pillar, one of them tufted breeds with a row of black buttons down the back. The Leopard was well liked and had won several races that season, and there was quite a few boaters around that fancied him. Pa argued for favorable odds, saying he was racing a maiden caterpillar; and there was a lot of money laid out, and Pa and Ned managed to cover the most of it. As for the race, there wasn't anything to it. While we was putting him in the ring — one of them birchbark and sweet grass ones Indians make — Red Peril didn't act very good. I guess the smell and the crowd kind of upset him. He was nervous and kept fidgeting with his front feet; but they hadn't more'n lifted the ring than he lit out under the edge as tight as he could make it, and Pa touched him with the needle just as he lepped the line. Me and my sister were supposed to be in bed, but Ma had gone visiting in Forestport and we'd snuck in and was under the table, which had a red cloth onto it, and

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I can tell you there was some shouting. There was some couldn't believe that insect had been inside the ring at all; and there was some said he must be a cross with a dragon fly or a side-hill gouger; but old Charley Mack, that'd worked in the camps, said he guessed Red Peril must be descended from the caterpillars Paul Bunyan used to race. He said you could tell by the bump on his tail, which Paul used to put on all his caterpillars, seeing as how the smallest pointed object he could hold in his hand was a peavy. Well, Pa raced him a couple of more times and he won just as easy, and Pa cleared up close to a hundred dollars in three races. That caterpillar was a mammoth wonder, and word of him got going and people commenced talking him up everywhere, so it was hard to race him around these parts. But about that time the lock keeper of Number One on the feeder come across a pretty swift article that the people round Rome thought high of. And as our boat was headed down the gorge, word got ahead about Red Peril, and people began to look out for the race. W e come into Number One about four o'clock, and Pa tied up right there and went on shore with his box in his pocket and Red Peril inside the box. There must have been ten men crowded into the shanty, and as many more again outside looking in the windows and door. The lock tender was a skinny bezabor from Stittville, who thought he knew a lot about racing caterpillars; and, come to think of it, maybe he did. His name was Henry Buscerck, and he had a bad tooth in front he used to suck at a lot. Well, him and Pa set their caterpillars on the table for the crowd to see, and I must say Buscerck's caterpillar was as handsome a brute as you could wish to look at, bright bay with black points and a short fine coat. He had a way of looking right and left, too, that made him handsome. But Pa didn't bother to look at him. Red Peril was a natural marvel, and he knew it. Buscerck was a sly, twirpish man, and he must've heard about Red Peril — right from the beginning, as it turned out; for he laid out the course in yeller chalk. They used Pa's ring, a big silver one he'd bought secondhand just for Red Peril. They laid out a lot of money, and Dennison Smith lifted the ring. The way Red Peril histed himself out from under would raise a man's blood pressure

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twenty notches. I swear you could see the hair lay down on his back. W h y , that black-pointed bay was left nowhere! It didn't seem like he moved. But Red Peril was just gathering himself for a fast finish over the line when he seen it was yeller. He reared right up; he must've thought it was butter, by Jeepers, the way he whirled on his hind legs and went the way he'd come. Pa begun to get scared, and he shook his needle behind Red Peril, but that caterpillar was more scared of butter than he ever was of cold steel. He passed the other insect afore he'd got halfway to the line. By Cripus, you'd ought to've heard the cheering from the Forestport crews. The Rome men was green. But when he got to the line, danged if that caterpillar didn't shy agin and run around the circle twicet, and then it seemed like his heart had gone in on him, and he crept right back to the middle of the circle and lay there hiding his head. It was the pitifullest sight a man ever looked at. You could almost hear him moaning, and he shook all over. I've never seen a man so riled as Pa was. The water was running right out of his eyes. He picked up Red Peril and he says, "This here's no race." He picked up his money and he says, "The course was illegal, with that yeller chalk." Then he squashed the other caterpillar, which was just getting ready to cross the line, and he looks at Buscerck and says, "What're you going to do about that?" Buscerck says, "I'm going to collect my money. M y caterpillar would have beat." "If you want to call that a finish you can," says Pa, pointing to the squashed bay one, "but a baby could see he's still got to reach the line. Red Peril got to wire and come back and got to it again afore your hayseed worm got half his feet on the ground. If it was any other man owned him," Pa says, "I'd feel sorry I squashed him." He stepped out of the house, but Buscerck laid a-hold of his pants and says, "You got to pay, Hemstreet. A man can't get away with no such excuses in the city of Rome." Pa didn't say nothing. He just hauled off and sunk his fist, and Buscerck come to inside the lock, which was at low level right then. He waded out the lower end and he says, "I'll have you arrested for this." Pa says, "All right; but if I ever catch you around this lock again I'll let you have a feel with your other eye." Nobody else wanted to collect money from Pa, on account of his

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build, mostly, so we went back to the boat. Pa put Red Peril to bed for two days. It took him all of that to get over his fright at the yeller circle. Pa even made us go without butter for a spell, thinking Red Peril might know the smell of it. He was such an intelligent, thinking animal, a man couldn't tell nothing about him. But next morning the sheriff comes aboard and arrests Pa with a warrant and takes him afore a justice of the peace. That was old Oscar Snipe. He'd heard all about the race, and I think he was feeling pleasant with Pa, because right off they commenced talking breeds. It would have gone off good only Pa'd been having a round with the sheriff. They come in arm in arm, singing a Hallelujah meeting song; but Pa was polite, and when Oscar says, "What's this?" he only says, "Well, well." "I hear you've got a good caterpillar," says the judge. "Well, well," says Pa. It was all he could think of to say. "What breed is he?" says Oscar, taking a chew. "Well," says Pa, "well, well." Ned Kilbourne says he was a red one. "That's a good breed," says Oscar, folding his hands on his stummick and spitting over his thumbs and between his knees and into the sandbox all in one spit. "I kind of fancy the yeller ones myself. You're a connesewer," he says to Pa, "and so'm I, and between connesewers I'd like to show you one. He's as neat a stepper as there is in this county." "Well, well," says Pa, kind of cold around the eyes and looking at the lithograph of Mrs. Snipe done in a hair frame over the sink. Oscar slews around and fetches a box out of his back pocket and shows us a sweet little yeller one. "There she is," he says, and waits for praise. "She was a good woman," Pa said after a while, looking at the picture, "if any woman that's four times a widow can be called such." "Not her," says Oscar. "It's this yeller caterpillar." Pa slung his eyes on the insect which Oscar was holding, and it seemed like he'd just got an idea. "Fast?" he says, deep down. "That thing run! Why, a snail with the stringhalt could spit in his eye." Old Oscar come to a boil quick.

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"Evidence. Bring me the evidence." He spit, and he was that mad he let his whole chew get away from him without noticing. Buscerck says, "Here," and takes his hand off'n his right eye. Pa never took no notice of nothing after that but the eye. It was the shiniest black onion I ever see on a man. Oscar says, "Forty dollars!" and Pa pays and says, "It's worth it." But it don't never pay to make an enemy in horse racing or caterpillars, as you will see, after I've got around to telling you. Well, we raced Red Peril nine times after that, all along the Big Ditch, and you can hear to this day — yes, sir — that there never was a caterpillar alive could run like Red Peril. Pa got rich onto him. He allowed to buy a new team in the spring. If he could only've started a breed from that bug, his fortune would've been made and Henry Ford would've looked like a bent nickel alongside of me today. But caterpillars aren't built like Ford cars. We beat all the great caterpillars of the year, and it being a time for a late winter, there was some fast running. We raced the Buffalo Big Blue and Fenwick's Night Mail and Wilson's Joe of Barneveld. There wasn't one could touch Red Peril. It was close into October when a crowd got together and brought up the Black Arrer of Ava to race us, but Red Peril beat him by an inch. And after that there wasn't a caterpillar in the state would race Pa's. He was mighty chesty them days and had come to be quite a Agger down the canawl. People come aboard to talk with him and admire Red Peril; and Pa got the idea of charging five cents a sight, and that made for more money even if there wasn't no more running for the animile. He commenced to get fat. And then come the time that comes to all caterpillars. And it goes to show that a man ought to be as careful of his enemies as he is lending money to friends. We was hauling down the Lansing Kill again and we'd just crossed the aqueduct over Stringer Brook when the lock keeper, that minded it and the lock just below, come out and says there was quite a lot of money being put up on a caterpillar they'd collected down in Rome. Well, Pa went in and he got out Red Peril and tried him out. He was fat and his stifles acted kind of stiff, but you could see with

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half an eye he was still fast. His start was a mite slower, but he made great speed once he got going. "He's not in the best shape in the world," Pa says, "and if it was any other bug I wouldn't want to run him. But I'll trust the old brute," and he commenced brushing him up with a toothbrush he'd bought a-purpose. "Yeanh," says Ned. "It may not be right, but we've got to consider the public." B y what happened after, we might have known that we'd meet up with that caterpillar at Number One Lock; but there wasn't no sign of Buscerck, and Pa was so excited at racing Red Peril again that I doubted if he noticed where he was at all. He was all rigged out for the occasion. He had on a black hat and a new red boating waistcoat, and when he busted loose with his horn for the lock you'd have thought he wanted to wake up all the deef-anddumbers in seven counties. W e tied up by the upper gates and left the team to graze; and there was quite a crowd on hand. About nine morning boats was tied along the towpath, and all the afternoon boats waited. People was hanging around, and when they heard Pa whanging his horn they let out a great cheer. He took off his hat to some of the ladies, and then he took Red Peril out of his pocket and everybody cheered some more. "Who owns this here caterpillar I've been hearing about?" Pa asks. "Where is he? Why don't he bring out his pore contraption?" A feller says he's in the shanty. "What's his name?" says Pa. "Martin Henry's running him. He's called the Horned Demon of Rome." "Dinged if I ever thought to see him at my time of life," says Pa. And he goes in. Inside there was a lot of men talking and smoking and drinking and laying money faster than leghorns can lay eggs, and when Pa comes in they let out a great howdy, and when Pa put down the Brandreth box on the table they crowded round; and you'd ought to've heard the mammoth shout they give when Red Peril climbed out of his box. And well they might. Yes, sir! You can tell that caterpillar's a thoroughbred. He's shining right down to the root of each hair. He's round, but he ain't too fat. He don't look as supple as he used to, but the folks can't tell that. He's

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got the winner's look, and he prances into the centre of the ring with a kind of delicate canter that was as near single footing as I ever see a caterpillar get to. By Jeepers Cripus! I felt proud to be in the same family as him, and I wasn't only a little lad. Pa waits for the admiration to die down, and he lays out his money, and he says to Martin Henry, "Let's see your ring-boned swivel-hocked imitation of a bug." Martin answers, "Well, he ain't much to look at, maybe, but you'll be surprised to see how he can push along." And he lays down the dangedest lump of worm you ever set your eyes on. It's the kind of insect a man might expect to see in France or one of them furrin lands. It's about two and a half inches long and stands only half a thumbnail at the shoulder. It's green and as hairless as a newborn egg, and it crouches down squinting around at Red Peril like a man with sweat in his eye. It ain't natural nor refined to look at such a bug, let alone race it. When Pa seen it, he let out a shout and laughed. He couldn't talk from laughing. But the crowd didn't say a lot, having more money on the race than ever was before or since on a similar occasion. It was so much that even Pa commenced to be serious. Well, they put 'em in the ring together and Red Peril kept over on his side with a sort of intelligent dislike. He was the brainiest article in the caterpillar line I ever knowed. The other one just hunkered down with a mean look in his eye. Millard Thompson held the ring. He counted, "One — two — three — and off." Some folks said it was the highest he knew how to count, but he always got that far anyhow, even if it took quite a while for him to remember what figger to commence with. The ring come off and Pa and Martin Henry sunk their needles — at least they almost sunk them, for just then them standing close to the course seen that Horned Demon sink his horns into the back end of Red Peril. He was always a sensitive animal, Red Peril was, and if a needle made him start you can think for yourself what them two horns did for him. He cleared twelve inches in one jump — but then he sot right down on his belly, trembling. "Foul!" bellers Pa. " M y 'pillar's fouled." "It ain't in the rule book," Millard says.

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"It's a foul!" yells Pa; and all the Forestport men yell, "Foul! Foul!" But it wasn't allowed. The Horned Demon commenced walking to the circle — he couldn't move much faster than a barrel can roll uphill, but he was getting there. W e all seen two things, then. Red Peril was dying, and we was losing the race. Pa stood there kind of foamy in his beard, and the water running right out of both eyes. It's an awful thing to see a big man cry in public. But Ned saved us. He seen Red Peril was dying, the way he wiggled, and he figgered, with the money he had on him, he'd make him win if he could. He leans over and puts his nose into Red Peril's ear, and he shouts, " M y Cripus, you've gone and dropped the butter!" Something got into that caterpillar's brain, dying as he was, and he let out the smallest squeak of a hollering fright I ever listened to a caterpillar make. There was a convulsion got into him. H e looked like a three-dollar mule with the wind colic, and then he gave a bound. My holy! H o w that caterpillar did rise up. When he come down again, he was stone dead, but he lay with his chin across the line. He'd won the race. The Horned Demon was blowing bad and only halfway to the line. . . . Well, we won. But I think Pa's heart was busted by the squeal he heard Red Peril make when he died. H e couldn't abide Ned's face after that, though he knowed Ned had saved the day for him. But he put Red Peril's carcase in his pocket with the money and walks out. And there he seen Buscerck standing at the sluices. Pa stood looking at him. The sheriff was alongside Buscerck and Oscar Snipe on the other side, and Buscerck guessed he had the law behind him. "Who owns that Horned Demon?" says Pa. "Me," says Buscerck with a sneer. " H e may have lost, but he done a good job doing it." Pa walks right up to him. "I've got another forty dollars in my pocket," he says, and he connected sizably. Buscerck's boots showed a minute. Pretty soon they let down the water and pulled him out. They had to roll a couple of gallons out

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of him afore they got a grunt. It served him right. He'd played foul. But the sheriff was worried, and he says to Oscar, "Had I ought to arrest Will?" (Meaning Pa.) Oscar was a sporting man. He couldn't abide low dealing. He looks at Buscerck there, shaping his belly over the barrel, and he say, "Water never hurt a man. It keeps his hide from cracking." So they let Pa alone. I guess they didn't think it was safe to have a man in jail that would cry about a caterpillar. But then they hadn't lived alongside of Red Peril like us.

This seemingly ingenuous story has received well-meant but shortsighted and misleading praise. No great harm can be done the general reader by associating it with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," although the similarities are only superficial (first-person telling by an interested witness, in dialect, of man-instigated racing of lower-order creatures) and Mark Twain's early effort is bound to suffer by any closer comparison. The use of grotesque exaggeration, moreover, pretty obviously links "Death of Red Peril" to Paul Bunyan tradition; but to point this out and say nothing more is to overlook the more important fact that Walter Edmonds' piece is rooted in reality. Granted, too, there are several famous animal heroes in American fiction. Some day, perhaps, Red Peril may join them. The point is, however, that such conjectural palaver is no more relevant to the use of technique to create humor in this short story than is the remark that failure and death of a contestant are here made funny. Such observations may fill time in the classroom or space in a book, may even be of some interest to students of literature. But by skimming the surface of a deftly comic satire — a tale that would be just as good if "The Jumping Frog," Paul Bunyan, Man o' War, and for that matter Rin-Tin-Tin had never been heard of — they can only frustrate and discourage students capable of writing short stories that mean much more than they say and wanting to know just how this can be done. The truth is, we have here a searching but gentle and remarkably

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good-humored spoof of horse-racing, written of and from upper N e w York State, a region where the sport once assumed the solemnity, the ritualistic patterns, and the myth-potency of religion. The first nudge to this effect is felt in the subtitle, the second in the opening paragraph, when the teller describes the "old coots" sitting around the country store gossiping of a horse forty years dead, building him up until "they've made a resurrection of him." That, in short, is just what the author, via the old canaller, is going to do with Red Peril, though actuated by a cause quite the opposite of senile nostalgia. T h e author's motive is both artful and sound. This is no mere tall tale. T h e nub of the matter lies in the fact that the teller is recalling a boyhood experience of which he at the time believed every word. The teller as adult knows, of course, that in all probability those concerned were more or less under the influence of alcohol, and for the benefit of realistic readers the author now and then lets him sketch in this probability. But under the controlling, firm hand of the author he begins to tell the story precisely as he saw and heard it; that is, as fact — take it or leave it. Herein, not in exaggeration, lives the solid truth behind the fantasy; herein the prospective writer can perceive that the author has managed his material so craftily that a reader can see himself as the credulous and enthusiastic boy, but at the same time as the reminiscing man brought up in the tradition of race tracks and betting yet inclined to regard the sport as a lot of fuss over nothing; and thus can also see the satiric idea implied by the contrast (incongruity resulting from big and gravely serious matters juxtaposed with and symbolized by small and trivial ones; large, fast animals with and by small, slow ones; and men going as daffy over the latter as over the former) that the author allows to seep through the telling. It is funny, but that is not the point for writers; behind the joke lies another, with a barb: when you come right down to it, Walter Edmonds is saying, men can be as gullible, can make as big fools of themselves, as boys. This intention is carried out through the story with sly thoroughness. W e notice, first, a vocabulary full of horsy and horseracing terms now applied to caterpillar-racing: "fast-steppers," "last year's oats," "rig," "stall," "pull a tendon," "timing him on the

I ΙΟ

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track," "breeds," "brute," "bright bay," "got to wire," "swivelhocked," and "canter." Second, we notice this language used to express horse-racing ideas and to portray horse-race betting strategy and tactics: "Now, then . . . Don't none of you say a word about him." "Pa argued for favorable odds." "Pa and Ned managed to cover the most of it." "Word of him got going . . . so it was hard to race him around these parts." (Easy enough to race him, hard to win anything on him.) Third, held up to ridicule are the traditional, perhaps imaginary, beliefs of horsemen and horse-racers and animal-lovers generally: An unshakable conviction in the animal's superior intelligence (the family goes without butter on account of Red Peril's aversion to it, oblivious of the fact that the caterpillar has already mistaken yellow chalk for butter). And the belief that the animal can hear, understand, and react to spoken words: "You've gone and dropped the butter!" T o all this the finishing touch is supplied by Pa's running eyes, his elaborate and impassioned devotion to his favorite, his twice knocking Buscerck into the canal, and the beautifully restrained last two sentences: I guess they didn't think it was safe to have a man in jail that would cry about a caterpillar. But then they hadn't lived alongside of Red Peril like us.

Every detail, it seems, serves the intention and functions as an organic part of the whole concept. It has been made to do so by the author's shrewd choice of this telling method and of this particular teller. By no other method, through no other sort of utterance, could the full meaning of the story have reached the reader. A few defects somewhat dull the brilliance here. After a second or third reading of "Death of Red Peril," one may wonder whether, in fact, the hand of the author does not now and then become too artful, and in consequence show through the telling. When Long John Silver roars, "Shiver my timbers!" something as real as the parrot drops out of Treasure Island. The long up-hill struggle by writers to use actually spoken language, despite editorial qualms and proofreaders' prissy conventions, would make a book in itself. Stephen Crane found every colloquial contraction spelled out with gruesome pedantry in the serialized first publication of The Red Badge of Courage. Hamlin Garland was per-

" i " AS WITNESS

I II

suaded to enclose simple, universally acceptable vernacular phrases in quotation marks. Hemingway substituted the word "obscenity" for anything his publishers felt his readers couldn't stomach. All these were makeshifts, undermining truth to human nature. A character is either a swearing man or he is not. If the teller of "Death of Red Peril" was a swearing man, he would not have said "Jeepers!" — an expletive no doubt current though juvenile in the i93o's, when the story was written, but sounding strangely modern for the 1890's, when the story occurred — and instead of "Cripus!" or " M y Holy!" he would have come out with the blasphemous words those words were meant to suggest. If he was not a swearing man, either he would not have used expletives at all, or some repressive influence — a domineering, pious wife or stern parson — would have led him to use these dilute forms. No such influence is indicated; and if the proportion of coarse masculine over gentling feminine influence in his father's house was reflected in the teller's own, the idea is unthinkable. W e must come to the conclusion that these ghosts of profanity were editorially suggested or originally offered by the author as safe, as words that would get by. T o anyone who has spent time around racing stables they are a sorry comedown, almost a breach of faith. (One cannot help feeling, nevertheless, that to have been a nonswearing man would have been more consistent with the restraint used by the teller otherwhere in the story.) Luckily, editors' and readers' tolerance of spoken and unspoken language used in stories has broadened since the thirties. Editors of popular magazines are still squeamish, but literary magazines, quarterlies, and book-publishing houses have swung round to a more sensible view. The best rule for the writer to follow, I believe, is that of strict fidelity to personality. Let him never put in cuss words merely to liven up the story. They won't do that. If profane and obscene terms are an indispensable part of a character's personality, let him set them down just as he or she would say them. Then let him hold the line against all opposition. "Death of Red Peril" is much more than good enough for its expletives to be brought up — or set back — to date. Examination of two more matters concerning use of " I " as wit-

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ness — how the author sets up and maintains this telling position, and how he lets his narrator accelerate and end the story — is relevant here. "My pa" and "I remember" are the introductory signals; the opening is natural and unhurried, explaining the technique of caterpillar-racing and briefly lauding the speed of Red Peril before getting into the story. Then the sixth paragraph slips into immediate scene (within the immediate scene of the telling) and indicates clearly the age of the teller at the time remembered: We was riding . . . in a hired rig with a dandy trotter, and Pa was pushing her right along and Ma was talking sermon and clothes, and me and my sister was setting on the back seat playing poke your nose . . . There he is, the small boy familiar with horses, observant, enthusiastic, and curious about everything under the sun; above all loyal to his pa. When the family gets home, with Red Peril safe in Pa's handkerchief, we still see as well as hear the boy: . . . while Ma was turning up the supper, Pa set him down to the table under the lamp and pulled out the handkerchief. "You two devils stand there and there," he says to me and my sister, "and if you let him get by I'll leather the soap out of you." Thus the boy's presence is felt and accepted as normal through the training of Red Peril for the first race. That night, with a crowd of men on the boat and Ma "gone visiting in Forestport," the teller (at the author's instigation) quite understandably feeling the need of making plausible the presence there of two young children, takes time to say, "Me and my sister was supposed to be in bed, but . . . we'd snuck in and was under the table, which had a red cloth onto it, and I can tell you there was some shouting." Nothing could be neater. In all the hooraw and hurly burly of the race, we can picture a close-cropped or pigtailed head poking up momentarily over the table edge, then ducking down again to give a breathless report. W e can see small ears bent, down there in the shadows, to catch the odds given, the bragging, the theorizing of old Charley Mack. The teller is still there. But just beyond this point, as the action lapses into synoptic,

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I I 3

there is a change. "Pa cleared up close to a hundred dollars in three races." Now this is within the plausible area of knowledge of the adult reminiscing, but something is lost; it seems unlikely that the boy knew the figure at the time. Pa told him later, no doubt. To say so would have taken little space, and would have kept the keen edge of the boy's story. Again, in the race that took place in Buscerck's shanty above Number One, "ten men crowded [inside] and as many more again looking in the windows and door." No mention of the boy. The grown teller gives a detailed account, a close-up of Henry Buscerck and his handsome, bright bay brute with black points and a short fine coat, a step-by-step description of the race, and a word-for-word transcript of Pa's quarrel with Buscerck before and after the blow that dropped the lock-tender into the canal. Was the young teller there? If not, how can he recall the talk and minute details so precisely? We don't know. Once again, through the comic scene before the justice of the peace the story moves further and further from any indicated presence of the teller. The cross-purpose dialogue between Oscar and Pa is not even something that the most observant young boy would catch; or if he did catch it, he would explain it instead of letting it so delightfully tell itself. And from there on, through the race with the Horned Demon in Number One shanty and Buscerck's second dunking in the lock, the boy is lost. He is still talking, through the words of the grown man, through the carefully chosen words of the author; but he himself is no longer an organic part of the story. It has moved on without him. Did the author let the teller forget? Did the author himself forget? Was the omission of an occasional reference to the boy's presence deliberate, in the hope the reader had forgotten him? But the reader never could do that. The boy's burning ardor, his unshakable faith in his pa and in Red Peril were an essential part of the story. The reader may still conjure up a sight of that boy, crowding in among men's heavy legs, peering in a window, rushing out to the lock edge to cheer his pa's furious blow. But the reader must do this alone, without benefit of author. Another writer planning to use this telling method will be wise not to trust too much to a reader's imaginative powers. Several races are recounted here, shifts of scene are rapid and numerous, and the humor is steadily main-

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tained; all despite this blurring, this fade-out of the original teller. Under less experienced management, readers are all too ready to pull up short and ask themselves, "What goes on here? Who's telling this story? How does the man remember everything so clearly if he as a boy wasn't there?" The quickened climax and end of the story seem even more plainly beyond the telling powers even of the man recalling a then-thrilling experience of his boyhood. From long and leisurely, the sentences beginning the next-to-last paragraph become abruptly short, each conveying a single implicative image calling on the reader to fill out the picture. This is highly sophisticated narrative. It is swift, funny, strongly yet delicately done. But the contrast with the rest of the telling up to the point noted, which was so boyishly naive, shows the author, impatient with or distrustful of his method, taking over the job in person, with a consequent loss of illusion. "Death of Red Peril," nevertheless, seems a very fine example not only of a subtle intention almost perfectly executed through the telling of an interested witness, but of the most effective use of dialect in any sort of story. Mark Twain and Bret Harte, too eager to bring the true sounds of human voices to readers' mental ears, rather overplayed their opportunity by laboriously phonetic reproduction that was neither accurate nor readable. Walter Edmonds knows just how to do it. Close listening is the first essential; then the use of local idioms, such as "turning up the supper," and of overproper words put in for show ("resided," "refined"); and, finally, the sounds of local speech suggested merely, with minimal infraction of grammar and syntax, and phonetically imitated only when (as in "histed," "yeller," "agin," "figger," "canawl," "acrost," "animile," "twicet," "carcase") pronunciation runs clear out of the dictionary and phonetic spelling makes quick sense. The story would be worth close study if this were its only merit. But of course it is not. "Death of Red Peril" is creative reporting lighted by satire at its best, at once amusing and instructing mankind.

VI. OBJECTIVITY AS APPROACH AND AS METHOD TO

PRACTICE

OBJECTIVITY

AS

A

STORY

MEDIUM,

A

writer must train down hard and lean. This is the stifFest test, not so much of his ability to eliminate himself from his material as of his willingness to submerge all his creative activity — memory, observation, curiosity and sympathy, knowledge, selection literal and symbolic, structure, pace, and proportion — below the flowing surface of human experience to be recorded, so that the craft carrying his people is actually propelled by their oars though guided by his hand reaching up through the depths and grasping its rudder. Other writers can see him there, toiling in what to him may often seem a cold and treacherous gloom. What the reader reads, however, is something as calmly detached as the narrative that might come from the remotest, the dimmest stage of an unidentified "I" as witness, with not only every last vestige of personal telling, substantive and verb, cut out; but cut out, too, all the organic teller's cherished powers of analysis, comparison, reminiscence, conjecture, interpretation, and even his thought. This objective medium seems to the informed reader the very simplest way to tell a story: it is, of course, by all odds the most difficult. T o use it the writer has deliberately discarded and renounced all channels of storytelling but one: that of two, possibly three, senses — not of any person in the story —- of an impersonal nonentity outside it. The senses to be chiefly used are those of sight and hearing; that of smell may occasionally be safe, but taste and touch or feeling are too personal. So the writer has become a sort of bisensory movable organ, like a lens that can also receive and translate sound waves. If this lens-diaphragm is strictly used, it will record its own sense impressions but not attribute these — directly, at least — to any character; that is, the point of view and

SHORT STORIES FOR STUDY

hearing will be for the most part quite outside the sense impressions as well as the thoughts of all persons in the story. The writer's hand must direct the instrument, his brain select such small but unmistakable, sense-perceived manifestations of motivated action and reaction that the reader knows, without being explicitly told, as much as the writer wants him to know of what goes on in every head and heart — what is happening, but above all why. Hawthorne, like other short-story writers in English at the middle of the nineteenth century, would have found this way of writing difficult if not downright impossible. Yet for thousands of years before Hawthorne's time, unknown tongues had been telling stories with a rudimentary sort of objective anonymity, and less than a decade after his death Maupassant was to give purpose and direction to what is now accepted tradition. In some of his best short stories it was for Hemingway the only way he could write. He it was who chiefly gave the method its motivating undertone. When, in "The Killers," the two gunmen in the lunchroom pass arbitrarily from not knowing what they want to eat to baiting George about his big dinner and his town, a flag is lowered and taps sound over the remains of all windy, psychological, analytical, interpretative tellings; the reader knows without having been told that the gunmen are jittery. It was a trick that playwrights for eight centuries, having the direct visual medium, cut their teeth on; objective writing under Hemingway's hand made the action and speech palpable and meaningful in fiction. "Clean," Hemingway called this way of writing, meaning (to a man fearing sentimentality above all other weaknesses) unsentimental. "Deadpan," followers of his lead have called it; and still others, "No nonsense," "No comment," and "No fuss or feathers." Whatever the description, all who have achieved success here may admit to a justifiable pride. It takes doing, they are apt to say. And they are right, sometimes righter than they know. For sometimes they think they have done it when they haven't. I said "informed readers" find the method natural and assume it easy. It is not, as a rule, for readers in the mass. As it is the hardest possible road for writers, today it demands of readers the most agile and supple inferential attention. They must catch a paragraph of motivation in a word or two of speech or behavior. The point of

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I I7

the story may lie in that simple phrase.* If they miss it, with its undertone, for them the story makes no sense. This high-level readership is no argument against objective telling and none for it; but by each would-be writer it should be taken into account. T o use objective writing effectively he must go to the greatest trouble for a very limited, if highly cultivated, select, responsive, and critically authoritative audience. Aiming so high, he stands a far greater chance of missing his mark. And a bullseye, remember, is but one shot. Still, this arduous method is to be recommended as exercise, to keep him in training, even if no story so written finds print. Failure will keep him humble, keep him trying; and humility upon extended effort is what some successful practitioners have, so far, lacked. Swollen with assurance, it is easy to think you have a clear undertone when all you really have is nonsense. Something happened, perhaps not to the method but to your approach to it. That, too, must be objective. Indeed, as will perhaps be seen, lapses from the narrowest objectivity in the telling are relatively harmless as compared with failure to objectify the conceptual approach. For there, dealing with symbols that may be true and assimilable or arbitrary and thus disestablished, you may find yourself in N o Man's Land. The field of objectivity is not crowded; there is plenty of room for masterpieces here. Those interested — not so much in masterpieces as in gaining the ability to use the full power of the method, which is great — will want to know more specifically how this apparent miracle of oblique, multi-functional telling, this approach to and practice of objectivity, can most hopefully be accomplished. T h e suggestions that follow are tentative. T h e method is still in a formative stage. But I believe that if they are taken the results will be better than if they are not. First, an advantage is to be gained by confining one's material to the most familiar and thoroughly comprehended area of one's experience. N o passing acquaintance with events, place, persons, no second-hand knowledge, no reading, no hearsay will do. T o write * See John Collier's " T h e Chaser," from the New Yorker, reprinted in jo Great Short Stories, edited b y Milton Crane (Bantam Books, 1952), which ends with the sentence '"Au revoir,' said the old man" — carrying the whole idea in au revoir.

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of this matter in this manner a man must have lived it, and either by detailed written notes or by something close to total recall must be able to reproduce the experience so minutely that the flutter of an eyelash, a flexed hand, a word, the turned head — every individual gesture connoting human motive, desire, response — will carry with it an inner meaning as unassailably unique as was its origin. Second, he will do well to regard the experience in so removed yet clear perspective that no opinion or interpretation of his own about the persons concerned, no slant or bias or comment by so much as a careless adverb, is allowed to leak into the images of its telling. He can do this by pretending that the experience he knows so well, which was originally colored by his personal feelings for or against its agents, occurred without him and is recurring in the presence of a selfless, helpless, nameless, invisible — but highly impressionable— recorder. He can do it if accurate reproduction of the experience becomes so vitally important to him that in focusing on that aim he finds nothing else important, or even worth mention. Third, he will have conceived or will now conceive this experience (which was his but is his no longer) as existing not for its face value as a mere sequence of events but as a specific illustration of, revealing by implication, a general truth — a concrete example of what most readers accept only in the abstract; and this particular instance of demonstrated truth he must see as applicable to human nature in the round or — with a prayer — as universal. But he must not say, or let his story say, a word of this. It must be revealed by implication. It must lie there like a sleeping dog, in the superficially recorded behavior of his people, unsaid but left for the reader to awaken. Fourth, even if the experience itself ran over years of time and was lived in a number of different places, objectivity will be the more feasible if he is able to limit his time span to a period not much longer than reading time, his locale to a single setting or its immediate, accessible neighborhood. Objective telling runs by the clock, not the calendar, and on a dolly of moderate reach. Continuity will here be as nearly absolute as is literately possible; and as every discernible thought process or sense impression attributable to his characters or to himself personally is undesired, so no speech will

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justifiably be paraphrased: for the time it runs, in the place it occurs, the story is to give a total impression of recording every spoken word that has significance. The bisensory instrument moves here and there in a crowd, but each new detail it picks out is calculated to be of such validity that the reader forgets or is willing to ignore the change of position. To him it will be, rather, as if the details as recorded themselves moved, in a strong, steady stream past his eye and ear. The method works well, as Hemingway has proved, to reveal a sensitive but inarticulate protagonist. It works equally effectively when the protagonist is no individual but a group. The larger the group, naturally, the more difficulty is encountered with the physical limitations imposed by time and place. It will not, I believe, serve as vehicle for propaganda, political or sociological; and its ability to portray psychotic persons varies inversely with their deviation from a reader-felt norm. Its dangers of obscurity, ambiguity, dislocation, and plain dullness are obvious. A weakness of the method in its strictest form, often not evident until it is attempted, is its inability to orient a story situation by temporal and geographical circumstances without explanation. You can let two characters tell each other who they are, where they are, and why they are there; but unless they are total strangers to each other, very voluble, very curious, and up to this point in their lives utterly oblivious of their surroundings (in sum, pretty unlikely), the result will be as unnatural as a radio commercial in dialogue, with both talkers taking the form of inquiring about the product while actually extolling it to the audience. It seems that recently we have recognized this weakness and got around it by a slight relaxation that allows brief introductory or interpolated statements, if sufficiently impersonal and detached, and especially if space-saving, to satisfy the reader's need for a quick notion of time, place, and circumstances. The greatest danger, as I mentioned earlier, lies in the successful writer's inevitable overconfidence, his growing conviction that his typewriter cannot go wrong. Objective telling can be used, and with astounding effectiveness, but for some reason — perhaps springing from the rather narrow singularity of one man's area of experience — only now and then. It is not a durable talisman, a

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lamp that can be rubbed every day, or even every year. One w h o bravely attempts to write consecutively a series of strictly objective stories will almost surely come to grief. John Steinbeck's fifth novel, Of Mice and Men (1937), drew a good deal of whatever power y o u are willing to grant it from objective writing. In the following year he published a volume of short stories, The Long Valley, many of them objective in technique and some, at least, written under contract for first-serial publication in a magazine. Let us examine, b y precis and brief excerpts, one called " T h e Chrysanthemums." * The time is December, the place a ranch and the road to and from it, in the Salinas Valley, California. The rancher's wife, thirty-five, is cutting down last summer's chrysanthemum stalks and searching for pests in the new growth. Her husband, who has been talking business with two men from town, comes across the yard to praise her gardening, tell her of a sale he has made, and suggest that they dine out and go to a movie as celebration. She agrees. He mentions some boxing bouts they might go to, but she demurs at that. While he finishes his day's work, she sets a few chrysanthemum slips in her rooting bed. An itinerant tinker drives up in an old rig and, by pretending interest in the chrysanthemums, persuades her to let him mend a couple of pans. He talks about his work and his life on the road, and she responds to its romantic appeal. She tells him about her love of gardening, especially the sensation of unity she gets when nipping off new buds to make a plant more prolific. The tinker starts to parallel this sensation with one he feels at night, but she cuts him off, takes the words out of his mouth, says she has felt that too. It's a feeling of rising up and up, and "every pointed star gets driven into your body . . . Hot and sharp and — lovely." He returns to more practical matters, and after agreeing to take some of her slips to a woman who, he says, would like them, goes on his way. She whispers a strange, unheard-by-him farewell: "That's a bright direction. There's a glowing there." She goes into the house to dress, and while bathing scrubs "herself with a little block of pumice, legs and thighs, loins and chest and arms, until her skin [is] scratched and red." She dresses slowly, lays out her husband's clothes, and waits for him on the porch. Her husband comments on how nice she looks, how "different, strong, and happy." She admits to feeling strong. They start for town in the car. Far ahead she sees "a dark speck" on the road, and recognizes her damp sand and carefully planted slips, dumped there by the tinker, who has kept her pot. Then she sees the tinker's wagon in the distance; they pass it, but she doesn't look back. Her husband complains that now she's changed again. She asks if they may have wine at dinner. He con* The Portable Steinbeck, Viking, 1943.

OBJECTIVITY AS APPROACH

I2I

curs. She asks about the fights. "Do the men hurt each other?" . . . "Do any women ever go to the fights?" He says a few go; he doesn't think she'd like it but he'll take her if she really wants to go. No, she doesn't want to go. She turns away from him. She pulls up her coat collar so he will not see that she is crying, "weakly — like an old woman." N o reader of "The Killers" will easily forget its opening sentence and paragraph: "The door of Henry's lunchroom opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter." Behind this starkly matter-of-fact fluidity, one feels something impending; the objective writer gains a cumulative tension by omitting many details while confining his record to a stripped brief of action and speech. From first word to last, somebody is saying or doing something. In contrast, the first three paragraphs of "The Chrysanthemums" are static, are crowded with impressionistic detail — a description of the valley, the weather, the season, and the ranch: a vacant stage. They comprise a short essay on a scene not yet relevant to any story. The use of the word "tender" ("The air was cold and tender") misses the mark, for no one but the author could have admitted this personal sense impression. N o w Maupassant, feeling his way through the beginning of "The Piece of String," used about three hundred words to describe a market day at Goderville; but it was a crowd of people and carts and animals his lens-diaphragm recorded, and briefly we glimpsed Hauchecorne in the mass, only to lose him again. The objective writer clings to persons, to humanity, in the mass or individually — to flesh and blood and spirit; he begins there, goes on there, ends there, the talk and behavior illuminating motives; he knows that to spend space on weather and scenery and season — unless these affect or are affected by persons — is to tax the reader's patience and give him time to question the impersonality of the method. Once we see Elisa Allen, the rancher's wife (she has been waiting in the wings while her creator wrote the essay), the story overcomes its self-imposed inertia and begins to move. And it seems at first to move in a single direction. Here, at least, is a person, a woman in the prime of life, happy and busy in her flowerbeds. Interest picks up as we welcome her appearance and hope for a motive to follow; a strong motive in this strong, brisk woman, and some almost equally strong (or perhaps still stronger) yet under-

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standable opposition. There may be, we feel, a story here after all. W e remember, though, that by the terms of objectivity the author will not have recourse to his own interpretation or to a character's thoughts for presenting and shifting or sustaining motives; he will do this only indirectly, by recording speech and behavioristic details that will create the motivating undertone and make drives and pressures, as well as the surface record, clear. So we must watch Elisa closely, stay alert, wait for small signs and portents, and be sure to catch each as it comes along. Instead of catching, we are caught and misled. Elisa casts a frequent glance toward her husband and the two businessmen across the yard. Is this merely curiosity, is she fearful lest the two men somehow cheat Henry, or is she perhaps interested in one of those strangers? "Elisa started at the sound of her husband's voice," as he neared her, the men gone. (She feels guilt, then. The last inference was right.) At her husband's praise, "Elisa straightened her back and pulled on the gardening gloves again. . . . On her face there was a little smugness." (A sly one, she knows she can fool him.) But we learn later that this, if not a blind alley, is a crooked one. There is nothing between Elisa and either of those two men from town. The most we can say, after reading the entire story, is that perhaps Elisa, sexually frustrated, is interested in any man who comes along. But objective writing should not permit several possibilities held in abeyance; behavioristic detail should imply motive at the moment of reading. Hide-and-seek is easy for the author, hard on the reader. Inferential alertness having failed us, it holds a weaker piomise and we slack off somewhat. The author does too, using more and more behavioristic details that carry no certain undertone or those whose undertone he must all but state. In the first class: "Elisa looked up," "Elisa laughed," "her breast swelled passionately," "Elisa's voice grew husky," "Her upper lip raised a little, showing her teeth." (In context, this facial contortion may have been intended to indicate doubt, scorn, or disbelief.) "She sat unmoving for a long time," while Henry was changing his clothes. "Her eyes blinked rarely." (This I believe gets across; she is scheming something.) In the second class: " T h e irritation and resistance melted from Elisa's face," "Elisa's eyes grew alert and eager," "She

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stopped and seemed perplexed," "Elisa stiffened and her face grew tight"; then at Henry's repeated praise, "For a second she lost her rigidity," "She grow complete again." And finally, "She relaxed limply in the seat." No prize fights for Elisa. She weeps. The story ends. Dimly through these behavioristic and almost expository tags one can perceive a broad motive (frustration) but only one that shifts before clear establishment and splits into five or six, none of which seems either comprehensible or dominant. Except for the tinker's treachery and her disillusionment in him, one can discover no opposition except of course what is provided by Elisa's mysteriously erratic nature. She is constantly defeating herself in one way or another, but why and over what issue only God and Mr. Steinbeck know. Everything is done for her, almost everything outside her goes right and gives her a chance to be happy; but, insisting on her neurosis when, as it were, rejected by the tinker, she refuses happiness. W e know, at least, that she longs for something. But whether it is the freedom suggested by the nomadic life of the tinker, or children symbolized by her care of the young plants, or manliness as indicated by her delight in her strength and her masochistic scrubbing of her body in the bath, or a normal sex life hinted at by her tenseness when with her possibly impotent husband, or merely her lost youth as implied at the end — who can say? Ignorant of the desire that opposes her and creates frustration, we can't know what the story means. A conceivably premeditated idea — that Elisa wants something that she, therefore the author, therefore the reader can't identify — we must reject in deference to Mr. Steinbeck's known ability as a storyteller: such a meaning would make Elisa scarcely worth the reader's attention. The author has been commended as a symbolist. But surely, here, we are confronted with a mass of conflicting, disestablished symbols, and casually invited to take our choice. If we glance back at the title, often a key to comprehension in tough cases, "The Chrysanthemums" is of little help. Elisa's behavior with and relation to her plants follows the pattern of all the other symbols of her unmotivated personality — mention without clarifying stress; and her varying emotions about the plants are all finally negated by her behavior toward the tinker, which is itself negated by what follows his de-

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parture. She is hurt by his act of throwing away her slips, yet at once seems to understand and forgive his keeping the pot. Again, w e must discard as too far-fetched and fantastic the possibility that the source of Elisa's frustration lies in her compulsive behavior toward plants (nipping, cutting, rooting only to nip and cut again) carrying over into her behavior toward persons: with plants she is notably adjusted, uninhibited, not frustrated at all. Thus, by any possible route we can take, w e reach the same group of vague conjectures; and must reluctantly conclude that this is arbitrary, self-impelled, and fuzzy work, a disservice to the method under consideration, its effect annoyingly arty, muddy, and unreal. Fortunately for beginning writers, a younger generation has done better with objectivity.

DECK THE HALLS * by Nathaniel Benchley and his wife do not give many parties, but when, for some seasonal or sentimental reason, they do give one, it is likely to be something pretty special. A case in point was their annual Christmas-tree trimming party last year. Allen believed that, in itself, trimming a Christmas tree was a tiresome job and that the festive spirit was lost before even the larger ornaments had been hung. One man, working alone, he maintained, could get to hate the whole idea of Christmas and would eventually start snarling at and striking his children when they tramped among the ornaments trying to help. Under these JAMES ALLEN

* Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright, 1948, T h e N e w Yorker Magazine, Inc. Reprinted in Side Street (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1950).

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conditions, Christmas Eve was apt to turn into a brightly lighted Walpurgisnacht. So, to get around this danger, he conceived the idea of having a party, usually on the Saturday before Christmas, to which thirty or forty people were invited and of which the underlying idea was to trim the Christmas tree. Anything else that happened was so much gravy. The Aliens' house was ideally arranged for such a party. It was small, as N e w York houses go, but the living room ran the entire length of the second floor and was spacious enough for any kind of recreation up to, but not including, lacrosse. The dining room and kitchen were on the ground floor, and the top two floors were divided up into bedrooms. There was a garden in back, which the Aliens shared with their friends Mr. and Mrs. Charles Beiden, who occupied the twin house adjoining theirs. The preparations for the tree-trimming party were extensive, and were divided between the male and female members of the two households. Allen and Beiden did most of the physical work, such as getting and setting up the tree, carrying ladders, and running miscellaneous errands. T h e y also sat down a lot, analyzed their various projects from a pseudo-scientific standpoint, and thought up new and unusual ideas for entertaining the guests. T h e y had their first idea for this year's party the day before the party. T h e y had just set down a nine-foot Norway spruce in the Aliens' living room when Allen said, "I suppose we ought to get some balloons, just for the hell of it." "I guess so," Beiden said, panting. "The kids can use them afterward." Allen, too, was still panting from the effort of carrying the tree upstairs. "I just hate the idea of blowing them up," he said. "There must be an easier way." "Those guys in the Park have a gas tank. Maybe we could borrow one of them." "They're not out now. Maybe we could get some helium somewhere, though." " W h y not call Gus Lewis? He's a chemist." "Aha." Allen went to the telephone and dialled a number. "If you want beer, there's some in the icebox," he said. "Bring me one, too."

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Beiden went downstairs, opened two cans of beer, and came back to the living room as Allen was hanging up. "Any luck?" he asked, handing Allen his beer. "Yes. He's going to send it over." Allen looked around the room. "It's in a two-hundred-pound tank," he said. On the afternoon of the party, the Aliens' kitchen was something of a shambles, with food and glasses covering nearly every square inch of flat surface. On a shelf near the sink was a large earthenware crock in which two boxes of frozen peaches were soaking in a gallon of brandy. At one end of the kitchen table, Allen and Beiden were grinding toast for the turkey dressing, and at the other end Kay Allen was chopping onions, celery, and mushrooms in a large wooden bowl. Allen turned the handle on the meat grinder while Beiden fed the toast into it, being careful not to get his fingers caught. Virginia Beiden came in with a tray of glasses and went out with a ham, which she had agreed to roast in her oven. Finally, Allen stopped grinding, shook his arm a couple of times, and went over and peered into the earthenware crock. "I think she's done," he said. "Let's strain it off." They got a large pot and spread a kitchen towel over it, and while Allen held the edges of the towel, Beiden poured the brandy and peaches into it. Beiden watched the thin trickle of brandy in silence for a while. Then he looked up. "You know," he said, "I just had an idea." "An idea for what?" "For the Star of Bethlehem. You take a piece of cardboard and cut a hole in it the shape of a star. Then you bend it so it fits over one of the tree lights, and you wire it to the top of the tree. It'll throw a light on the ceiling the shape of a star." "It sounds good." Allen drew the edges of the towel together and squeezed the last of the brandy into the pot. "Let's get this done first, though." He threw the peach mash into the sink and picked up the pot of brandy, and he and Beiden started for the cellar. T h e doorbell rang. "I'll get it," Kay said. "You two run along." She opened the door and was greeted by a man who was supporting with his arms a

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five-foot-long, shining aluminum cylinder, the top of which was painted yellow. "Here's your helium, Ma'am," he said. " M y what?" "Your helium, Ma'am. T h e helium you ordered." On his way to the cellar, Allen heard the conversation. "Just bring it in," he called to the man. "That's fine." He handed the pot to Beiden and went back into the kitchen. "It's for the balloons," he explained to Kay as he signed the slip. Both K a y and the man stared at him, and then the man looked slowly around the room. He took the slip from Allen in silence and left. Outside, he turned and looked at the house for a moment, then climbed into his truck and drove off. Down in the cellar, Allen and Beiden carefully divided the peachflavored brandy between two aluminum kitchen pots, each one containing two gallons of white wine, and then gingerly set the brimming pots into the deep freeze. T h e y stirred the mixture thoughtfully for a while; then Allen sniffed one of the pots. " W e might as well see how she tastes now, without the champagne," he said. " W e can't add that until the last minute anyway." "Yes," said Beiden. "If the base isn't right, this is the best time to find out." Allen went into his workroom and got two beer mugs, which he dipped into the brew. He handed one dripping mug to Beiden. "Well, cheers," he said. "Cheers." Beiden lifted his mug. T h e punch was cold, but when it hit his stomach, he felt a warm glow that went all the way through to his backbone. He took another sip. "Marvellous," he said. Allen looked critically at his mug. "It seems all right," he remarked. He pulled up an empty packing case and sat down. "Have a seat," he said. "We've earned a rest." Beiden perched on the edge of a trash barrel. "You know," Allen said, staring at the ceiling, "what this party ought to have is some sort of entertainment." "Won't that more or less take care of itself?" Beiden asked, trying to light a cigarette with one hand.

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"Yes, but we ought to have something a little extra." Beiden thought a minute. "Sam Cavanagh plays the piano. He's coming." "That's not enough. I mean something different." Beiden put down his mug and lighted his cigarette. "George Curtis can be pretty funny if he's given something to do," he said. "That's more like it. But what should we have him do?" "He's best at giving lectures. Have him lecture on something." The door to the cellar opened. "James, are you there?" Kay called. "You guessed it." "Well, how about you two wizards stringing the lights on the tree? I still have a lot to do. And on your way you might take that gas tank up into the living room. It can't stay in the kitchen." Allen stood up, dipped his mug into the punch, and held out his hand for Belden's. "Man can't string lights on one wing," he said. With considerable trouble, they hauled the tank of helium up to the living room and propped it in a corner. Next, they untangled the lights, spread them out on the floor, and, string by string, plugged them into a base plug and checked the bulbs. They worked in silence for a while, semi-hypnotized by the lines of red, yellow, green, and blue lights. Finally, Allen spoke. "I have it," he said. "Good," said Beiden, through a spare bulb he was holding in his mouth. "What?" "I have the subject for George Curtis to lecture on." "Dis done," said Beiden, who was beginning to feel the international spirit of Christmas. "Have him do a medical lecture. We can get one of those anatomical charts, give him a pointer, and leave the rest up to him. It would be right up his alley." "It's not very Christmassy," Beiden said. "Or does that matter?" "He could make it Christmassy. You know — 'Tiny Tim Travels Through the Thorax,' or something like that." "That's not very good." "Well, I just thought of it," Allen said. "He could probably do better." "I'm sure he could."

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"I'll call D o c Waters. He's coming anyway, and I'll ask him to bring a chart from his office." Allen went to the telephone and Beiden started stringing the lights, humming "Stille Nacht, Heilige N a c h t " to himself as he worked. In a couple of minutes, Allen joined him, a string of lights around his neck. "He's going to try," he said. " G o o d . " Beiden got on his hands and knees and crawled behind the tree, dragging the lights after him. T h e tree rocked and Allen steadied it. " H o w would 'Boxing Day in the Duodenum' be for a title?" Allen asked. "You're getting warmer," said Beiden, invisible behind the tree. "Myself, I like 'Deck the Halls with Bleph'arosphincterectomies.'" "I don't." "That's because you never had one." Virginia Beiden came into the room. "Look, sport," she said to the tree, "how about coming home? W e have people for dinner." " W h o ? " said Beiden, not moving. "Some people named Potter, some people named Watrous, and some people named Allen." "I'll be there," Allen said, "but K a y may not be able to make it. She says she still has a lot to do. People are invited here for ninethirty." Beiden crawled out from behind the tree. "It's getting so a man doesn't have a minute he can call his own," he said. "I was all set for a nice nap back there." A t nine-twenty-five, K a y Allen, who hadn't been able to make it to the Beldens' for dinner, came downstairs. Her blond hair was pulled straight back and held behind with a large silver comb. She wore a black dinner dress with a sloping neckline and a full skirt that made a crisp swishing noise as she walked. She turned on the lights on the tree, then walked around the room, emptying the last few ashes out of the ashtrays and giving final pats to the chair and sofa cushions. It was superfluous motion, because the room had a clean, newly pressed look; even the pictures on the walls seemed brighter than usual. A t the garden end, four chairs were arranged in an arc near the phonograph; in the middle of the room, against one wall, was a large green davenport, in front of which was a

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marble-topped coffee table holding an empty punch bowl and several dozen glasses; and at the street end were more chairs, the piano, and the tree. Beneath the tree were five cartons full of decorations, and against the wall stood a ladder, which Allen had brought up to use in putting the topmost ornaments on the tree. Kay stood in the middle of the room, looked around, then lit a cigarette. She shook the match out and threw it in the fireplace, and was about to sit down when the doorbell rang. She heard Gregg, the houseboy, open the door, and an unfamiliar voice said, " G o o d evening." There were footsteps on the stairs, and a tall, thin man whom Kay had never seen before came into the room. H e had pale-blue eyes, and his blond hair was thinning on top. "Mrs. Allen?" he said. "I'm Alec Marks." " H o w do you do?" she said. They shook hands. "Sit down." Marks sat down and looked around the room. "I trust I'm not too early," he said. "Your husband told me any time after ninethirty." " N o t at all. Jim is next door, having a bite to eat. He'll be over in a minute. Would you like a drink?" "I'd love one," said Marks. Kay got up and started for the punch bowl, then remembered that it had not been filled. She called downstairs to Gregg and went back to her chair and sat down. She smiled briefly. "It'll be right here," she said. "Well," said Marks hesitantly, "this certainly is a nice place you have here." " W e like it." There was a short silence; then, suddenly, Kay reached for the telephone. "Maybe I'd better call Jim," she said. "He should be here by now." She dialled the Beldens' number. Beiden answered. "Charlie, will you tell Jim he's got guests?" she said. "Sure thing. We'll be right over." She hung up and smiled at Marks. "He'll be right here." "You didn't have to do that for me," Marks said. "Well, he should be back anyway. People are due at nine-thirty." "Yes, that's what he told me." Marks hesitated. "Is this — is this a special occasion? I mean should I have . . ."

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"Oh, no. This is just a tree-trimming party." "Oh, a tree-trimming party." Marks looked over his shoulder at the tree. "Say, that's a pretty nice tree you have there." He got up and walked over to it. "A regular beauty." "Yes, isn't it? I just hope nobody knocks it over. Last year, the day after the party, the cleaning woman came in and upset the tree. All over the room." Marks laughed. "Well, I guess that's the way it goes." He sat down. "Yes, I guess it is," Kay said, forcing a laugh. The doorbell rang. With a sense of relief, Kay got up. "Excuse me," she said. "I'd better get that. Gregg is busy with the punch." "By all means." Kay went downstairs and opened the front door. A short, heavyset man with dark eyebrows that joined over his nose stood before her. "Is this the Allen residence?" he asked. "Yes," said Kay. "I'm Frank Toland." He broke into a large toothy grin and stepped inside. "I'm Kay Allen. Just leave your hat and coat here." Toland took off his hat and coat and, rubbing his hands together, followed Kay upstairs. "Well," he said, looking at Marks, "just as I suspected — a party!" He laughed. "Mr. Toland, this is Mr. — Mr. — " "Marks. Alec Marks." "Glad to know you," Toland said. They shook hands. "Sit down, won't you?" Kay said. They sat down. "Well," said Toland, looking around, "where's the old man? Out already?" "He'll be right here," Kay said. "In fact — " Gregg came into the room carrying one of the aluminum pots full of peach-flavored brandy. "I couldn't find anything else to bring it in, Ma'am," he whispered apologetically as he poured the punch into the bowl. "That's all right," said Kay. "Did you mix in the champagne?" Gregg stopped pouring. "No'm," he said. "I couldn't find it." "Just a minute. I'll get Mr. Allen." Kay went to the telephone.

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She dialled the number and Beiden answered. "Charlie," she said, "may I speak to Jim?" "You bet. Just a minute." Allen came to the phone. "I'm on my way," he said. "I was out the door when you called." "Well, make it snappy." She hung up. "Really, I'd just as leave have it without champagne," said Toland, standing over the bowl. "Well, I guess it wouldn't hurt," Kay said, and poured him a glass. She poured one for Marks, then one for herself. "Well, Merry Christmas," she said, lifting her glass. The two men said, "Merry Christmas," and they all drank. "Zingo!" exclaimed Toland. He had drained his glass. "Just what the doctor ordered," he said, smacking his lips. Kay looked at him apprehensively. The doorbell rang, and she heard Gregg answer it. She held her breath while footsteps approached up the stairs, then let it out in a sigh of relief as she recognized the bald head and pointed nose of Dr. Sam Waters. He was carrying something that looked like a rolled-up home-movie screen. "Sam!" she cried, running to him and embracing him. "It's good to see you!" "Hello, girl," he said. "Merry Christmas. I got your God-damned chart." "My what?" "Your chart. The anatomy chart Jim called about. I couldn't find one at the house, so I stopped by Joe Marlin's and borrowed his." "I don't know anything about it," Kay said. "Let's put it in the corner." She leaned it against the helium tank. "Come on, have a drink. Dr. Waters, this is Mr. Toland, and Mr. Marks." The three men shook hands. "We were just talking about doctors," Toland said. "I said this punch was—" He was interrupted by Allen, who came running up the stairs. "I'm sorry to be late," he said, and then, seeing Marks and Toland, he added, "Hello, Alec. Hello, Frank. Have you two met everybody?" "Yes, we've met," Kay said quietly. "And before you sit down,

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suppose you break out the champagne for the punch. Gregg couldn't find it." "It's right there in the laundry. I'll get it." He disappeared downstairs, and Kay heard him say, "Go right on up." The Beldens came into the room, followed by Mr. and Mrs. Potter and Mr. and Mrs. Watrous. They were in the middle of a conversation they had started at the Beldens', and they stopped only long enough for introductions, then sat down and continued talking. Charlie Beiden left them, came over to where Kay was standing, and looked at the tree. "Oh, my God!" he said. "I forgot all about the Star of Bethlehem. Have you any cardboard?" "Look up in Jim's dresser," she said. "I think you'll find some shirt cardboards." Beiden went upstairs just as Allen came into the room with two bottles of champagne. He poured them into the punch bowl, stirred the punch, and ladled himself a glass. He took a swallow, then walked over to Marks, who was standing, alone and silent, near the bookcase. "How are you making out, Alec?" he asked. "Fine, thanks," Marks said. "This is a wonderful party." "Well, we think it's a nice way to start Christmas — " He was interrupted by Kay, who was introducing four newcomers. "I'll be right back," he said, and drifted away. Sitting near the tree, Beiden worked slowly and painfully, cutting a star out of a shirt cardboard. He then folded the cardboard so that the star-shaped hole was at the top, trimmed the edges, and gingerly climbed the ladder to the top of the tree. He worked one of the lights around so that it pointed upward, and slipped the cardboard over it. A formless, blurred spot of light showed on the ceiling. Beiden moved the cardboard back and forth experimentally, then descended the ladder. Cut it too big, he said to himself. He went to the punch bowl and refilled his glass, then went back to the tree, sat down, and started cutting a new star. Gradually, the room filled. As people came in, they gravitated either toward the punch bowl or toward the garden end of the room. Very few went near the tree. They were divided into the standers and the sitters; the standers moved from group to group, fairly slowly, and the sitters moved from chair to couch to chair,

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even more slowly. Some people sat on the floor, and they moved only about once every forty-five minutes. The room filled with noise, but for a moment John Watrous's voice soared above it like a rocket: "Well, I read somewhere that octopus beaks found in the stomachs of sperm whales indicate that there are some octopi that are ninety feet long." Then his voice faded. Allen was discussing mountain climbing with a husky, bearded man. "I did it only once," Allen said, "and that was by mistake. I asked the hotel clerk if he knew of a good place to take a walk, and before I knew it we were climbing the Wetterhorn. Oh, hello, Mary." A short, stoutish woman in her early forties, wearing a hat trimmed with red cherries, came up to him, and he kissed her on the forehead. "Mrs. Gleason," he said, "this is Mr. Dempster," indicating the bearded man. "How do you do?" said Mrs. Gleason. She looked at the tree. "My, you haven't got very far with it," she said. "I'd better get to work." She moved off and picked up a handful of ornaments from one of the cartons, then carefully and precisely started to hang them. Beiden was on the ladder, testing his second star. "I'll be out of your way in a minute," he said. He leaned over, almost lost his balance, then steadied himself and adjusted the cardboard over the light. There was the same blurry glow on the ceiling as there had been before. He took the cardboard off, looked at it, and slowly descended the ladder. "Maybe I've gone stale," he said to Mrs. Gleason. "I'll try again later." She looked at him curiously as he walked away. Allen was at the punch bowl, refilling two glasses, when Beiden came up to him. "Did the Doc bring the chart?" Beiden asked. "I don't know. Let's find him." Allen gave one glass to a tall, willowy brunette who was sitting on the couch, and he and Beiden went to look for Dr. Waters. They found him talking with George Potter, who was saying, "And that cleared up the adhesion. It was a brilliant piece of surgery. I've watched several operations, but this was the most delicate I've ever seen." The Doctor nodded politely, then turned and greeted Allen. "Did you bring the chart, Sam?" Allen said. "Yes," said the Doctor, pointing to the corner. "There it is."

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Allen went over and unrolled the chart, looked at it for a moment, and snapped it shut. "Perfect," he said. "Perfect. Thanks a million." "Well, I hope you'll be careful with it," the Doctor said. "I borrowed it. Incidentally, what's the helium for?" He pointed at the tank. "Oh, that's for blowing up balloons," Allen said. "I suppose we might try a couple now." He opened a closet door and took out a paper bag full of balloons. He fitted the neck of one over the nozzle of the tank and gingerly turned the valve. There was a squeaking hiss, and the balloon swelled fast. Allen shut off the valve. "Aha," he said. He pinched the neck of the balloon and took it off the nozzle. "Did you ever inhale helium?" the Doctor asked. "No," said Allen. "What does it do?" "It knocks your voice up about three octaves." "No kidding?" "No kidding. Try it. Just inhale what's in the balloon." Allen put the neck of the balloon to his mouth, released his fingers, and inhaled deeply as the cool gas forced itself into his lungs. He held his breath for a moment, then let it out, saying, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." His voice sounded like that of an effeminate Donald Duck, and his eyes grew wide with astonishment at the weird sounds. Several people turned and looked at him. He took a breath of air, and his voice became normal. "I'll be God-damned," he said. Potter was mystified. "How did you know about that?" he asked the Doctor. "I'm a doctor," said Dr. Waters. "Oh, my God," said Potter. "Why didn't you say so?" "The next time I vote," Virginia Beiden said earnestly to Alec Marks, "I'm going to vote for someone I know. I don't mean personally, but I'm going to find out all about the candidate before I — " She stopped as she heard the voice of her husband, who had sat down next to the willowy brunette on the couch. "I wonder what it would be like," he was saying, "to play a musical instrument after inhaling some of that helium."

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"I can't imagine," said the willowy brunette, who looked superficially like Joan Bennett. "Why? Do you play?" "Not any more. I used to play the sax. Long ago." " H o w wonderful. Were you good?" "Not very. I played in the school band." "I'd love to hear you play sometime." "I can get it right now, if you'd like." "Oh, I wouldn't think of troubling you now." " N o trouble. It's just next door." Beiden stood up. "I'll be right back," he said. Virginia watched him thread his way through the crowd, and a sinking sensation hit the pit of her stomach. She turned back to Marks and asked, "Where were we?" After letting three or four people talk through the helium, Allen inflated a few balloons, knotted their necks, and let them rise to the ceiling. For the first time, he noticed George Curtis, who was standing near the bookcase and talking with a thin, rangy woman who somehow looked as though she had just come down from Boston. Allen moved over to them and heard Curtis saying, "I don't agree with you. Ophelia shouldn't be vague — she should be sharp. She requires probably the sharpest characterization in all Shakespeare." "Excuse me," Allen said. "Can I see you a minute, George?" "Sure." Curtis excused himself, and Allen led him to the corner where the chart stood. Several people were standing around, so Allen picked up the chart and started downstairs. "Come on," he said. "I want to show you something." They went into the dining room, where Allen unrolled the chart and hung it from the top of a window. It was a longitudinal section of the human body, showing most of the important organs and nerve centers in brilliant color. "How would you like to do a lecture — a Christmas lecture — on this?" Allen said. Curtis's eyes lighted up and he smiled. "Wonderful," he said. He thought for a while, and his face grew more radiant as successive ideas occurred to him. "Can you give me a little time?" he said finally. "I'd like to work out a routine." "AH the time you want. Just tell me when you're ready."

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T h e garden door opened and Beiden came in. " Y o u haven't seen the mouthpiece for my sax lying around anywhere, have you?" he asked. " N o , " said Allen. "I haven't seen your sax since last Christmas." Beiden went upstairs and picked his way through the people who were sitting on the floor until he found his wife. She and Marks were comparing the amount of exercise involved in tennis with that in horseback riding. "Excuse me," Beiden said to Virginia, "but have you seen the mouthpiece of my sax anywhere?" "No, I haven't, lover," she said, relieved. "I can't remember when I last saw it." Beiden looked at the couch. The willowy brunette was gone. "Oh, well," he said. B y midnight, the room was practically full. Gradually, the word got around that food was being served, and people began slowly to drift downstairs to the dining room, which was lighted only by candles. Some people ate standing up, others sat on the window ledge or in the few chairs, and some carried their food upstairs, being careful not to bump into those who were coming down. In one corner of the dining room, George Curtis stared at the chart, smiling to himself and eating a slab of ham in his fingers. T h e general conversation was slowed down only slightly by the food; as most of the guests returned to the living room, the only noticeable difference was that the noise was somewhat lower in pitch and the individual conversations could be heard more clearly. From the tree, Mrs. Gleason heard Nancy Watrous, who was sitting on the couch, saying, "It doesn't make any difference how well a man can paint. If he can't draw well, he's not a good artist." " H o w about Picasso?" asked Marks, who was sitting at her feet. "Pooey on Picasso," said Nancy. " H o w about Botticelli?" Across from her, on a love seat, her husband was telling the willowy brunette that it was impossible to determine the weight of the human head without severing it from the body, and the willowy brunette was believing every word of it. Nearby, Beiden was sitting on the floor, in a discussion of naval tactics with Potter. " N o w , say here's your sub." He put his fork on the rug. "And here's your ship." He put his knife down a short distance away.

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From the other end of the room, a girl's voice rose above the conversation. "Nobody knows the real me," she said defensively. "They just know the me I pretend to be." In the corner by the helium tank, two writers stood in a selfimmolating mood, each agreeing that if he didn't write a good book by next year, he was through, and in a chair by the bookcase Toland was fast asleep, his mouth open and his head cocked slightly to one side. Downstairs, there were only three people left in the dining room: Curtis, who stood smiling in front of the chart, and an unidentifiable man and woman, who sat in a dark corner in quiet and, for the woman, tearful conversation. The woman got up, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and left the room. The man lit a cigarette, then followed her upstairs. The food brought renewed energy to the party, and a kind of intensity crept into the action and the conversation. Allen and Beiden decided to inflate some more balloons, and this led almost immediately to a contest to see who could make the biggest one. Several balloons were broken this way, and since they were big balloons to begin with, they made considerable noise when they exploded. The others floated and bumped around the ceiling, and anyone who wanted one had to jump to get it. Dorothy Potter watched her husband, who was somewhat on the short side, trying to reach one, and broke into uncontrollable laughter. A woman who kept her hat on, because she was letting her hair grow out, got up to explain the Mexican hat dance to Marks, and Marks surprised everybody by getting up and showing her the rudiments of the morris dance. The telephone rang and Toland sprang from his sleep, said, "That's for me," and answered it. It was for him. Belden, who had been explaining the psychology of fear to the willowy brunette, suddenly switched the subject to wrestling and said, "I'll show you a hold that never fails. Watch this." He got up and went over to Allen, who was making disparaging remarks about Julius Caesar as a historian, took his arm, and said, "Hold still a minute." There was a brief flurry, and Beiden landed on his back with a crash. He went back and sat down. "Well, you see how it should have worked," he said. Next to him, he heard Watrous saying to the woman who looked as though she had come

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from Boston, "I think I know you well enough to tell you this," and there followed something he couldn't hear, after which the woman shrieked as though she had been stabbed and covered her face with her hands. Three people whom nobody knew broke into sudden laughter in a corner. "I'm not a good mother — I know I'm not," Kay said to Virginia Beiden. "I don't think my kids have any fun." "Neither do mine," said Virginia. "I think you're a better mother than I am." "Maybe no kids have any fun. Maybe childhood is horrible all over." Dr. Waters came up to Kay. "I'm sorry, girl, but I've got to go," he said. "I've had a wonderful time." "Oh, Sam, don't go. Please." "I've got to. Do you know where the chart is?" "Downstairs, I think. I wish you wouldn't go." "Must." He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, said •good night to Allen, and went downstairs. In the dining room, Curtis was still standing in front of the chart, chuckling to himself. "Sorry, my boy," the Doctor said, "but I have to take this. Are you all through with it?" Curtis looked at the Doctor, then at the chart, and said, "Yes, I guess so." The Doctor snapped the chart shut, took it down, and put it under his arm. "Good night," he said. "Nice to have, met you." When Curtis got upstairs, several people were leaving, but those who remained were carrying on with increased vigor. Marks was doing a Highland fling with the woman who had kept her hat on; he had taken off his coat and thrown it in a corner, and she had taken the scarf from her neck and was carrying it in one hand. In the center of the room, Allen and Beiden wrestled quietly, having removed their coats, ties, and shoes, and at the phonograph Kay and Virginia were sorting through stacks of records, assisted by Toland. Potter was teaching the "Whiffenpoof Song" to the willowy brunette, and Watrous was showing the woman who looked as though she came from Boston how to inhale helium. Nancy Watrous and Dorothy Potter were playing a duet of "I Can't Get Started with You" on the piano while three people whom nobody

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knew sang the words. T h e other people were divided among the groups, and offered comments and encouragement as they seemed needed. Slowly, imperceptibly, the party thinned out, and just as slowly the noise subsided. Without any obvious transition, the separate conversations merged into one, until, at last, everyone was gathered near the phonograph. Kay sat at Marks's feet while Toland and Virginia examined the records. Toland, it turned out, had a fine knowledge of choral music, and the records he selected had a soothing, restful quality. Allen lay back in a chair with his eyes closed, and Beiden was stretched out on the floor on his stomach, his chin resting on his hands. " M y God, that's beautiful," Marks said after one of the records had been played. " W h a t does it come from?" "It's one of Petrarch's sonnets to Laura," Allen said, opening his eyes. Suddenly Virginia looked at the clock. "Do you realize what time it is?" she said to Beiden. "Nope," he said. "It's five-thirty." She stood up. "And I've got the children tomorrow. Today. Are you coming, Charlie?" "I think I'll stay a while." "You were dears," Virginia said to the Aliens, "and I can't thank you enough. I'll be seeing you all too soon." She said good night to Marks and».Toland, and left. Marks stood up. "I've got to go, too," he said. "I had no idea it was so late." He looked at Allen. "You saved my life tonight, Jim. I've never had a better time." T o Kay, he said, "As for you, I love you." "Wait a second. I'm with you." Toland stood up. "I hardly need point out that I had a good time," he said, and then to Kay he added, "All I ask is that your forgive my earlier condition." "Think nothing of it," she said. "Everybody gets a bad clam now and then. Come back again and we'll have a real musical evening." Marks and Toland left, and Kay stood up. "I don't know about you lugs," she said, "but I'm going to bed." 7

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"Don't leave me, Charlie," said Allen. " W e still have some punch left." "Anything for a friend," said Beiden, rising and taking Allen's glass. Kay went upstairs, and Allen and Beiden sat quiet, staring at the room. T h e ashtrays were piled high with cigarette butts, and the tops of the tables were speckled with ashes. Everywhere they looked there were punch glasses — singly, in pairs, and in groups, on the tables, on the floor, on the piano, on the arms of the chairs, and on the mantelpiece. In one corner was a small pile of clothing, some of it Belden's, some of it Allen's, and some of it unidentifiable. Under one chair were three dishes, and under another chair was a woman's hat. A dozen or so balloons hung motionless on the ceiling, and one, which had lost its buoyancy, rested gently on the couch. Fifty or sixty records were spread on the floor around the phonograph. T h e candles had burned down in the wall sconces, and long gobs of wax hung beneath them. A t the far end of the room, the tree glittered. T h e red, white, green, blue, and silver ornaments reflected the colors of the lights, and the tinsel hung neatly and profusely from the branches, which had spread out with the weight of the ornaments until the tree seemed to take up the whole end of the room. It rose straight, tall, and brilliant, and on the ceiling directly over it was a perfect star-shaped glow of light.

T h e author has given us a record of this story, from the time he first thought of writing it until, a good many weeks and rejections later, it was sold. His account is illuminating in two ways: it illustrates the genesis in very familiar fact of a short story using the objective approach and telling method; and it clears up an ancient myth created by lecturers and textbooks to the effect that writers "practice" and/or "publish" the short story without turning a hair or batting an eyelash. T h e piece got its start as follows: Obviously, it was more a job of reporting than anything else. . . . My wife and I are the Beldens and our landlord-neighbors are the Aliens

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. . . T h e real Aliens have these tree-trimming parties every year, and last summer . . . I decided to do a deadpan description of such a party, more or less as a historian would detail the Battle of Gettysburg. With the help of our group, I compiled a list of about fifty typical remarks heard at parties . . . and then made a chart, assigning these remarks to the main characters and tracing their progress through the evening. . . . Naturally, when I came to the actual writing of the thing I had to deviate somewhat from the outline, but the chart helped to keep all the characters lined up for me.

W e shall pass over for the time being that first statement about reporting, except to say, who knows what a piece is, after he has written it? Here was the story conceived, a deadpan, no-comment record of an unusual but to the writer familiar party occurring in a place and including persons well known to him. Here was the decision to write what had actually been said, the list of collected remarks, and the chart that assigned these to various speakers and gave the writer a sort of timetable of the evening. And here is his admission of being forced to deviate from the chart — a wise measure, in my view, for no plan is any better than a writer's ability, on occasion, to change it — when he really got into the story. Consider, now, the large number of persons the writer's concept forced him to observe and keep track of. Consider the possibility that, as the story reaches the reader, the protagonist here is not only a group of people but a group composed of three groups, which might be represented by three concentric circles. The inmost circle includes the four leads, the Aliens and the Beldens, and of course their children, mentioned but unseen. The middle circle comprises their intimate, first-name friends: Dr. Waters, Mrs. Gleason, the Potters and Watrouses. The outmost is a crowd of people not known at the beginning of the party, or known only slightly and to certain members of the two inner groups: social creditors the hostess saw a chance to pay off, business acquaintances, quite possibly even people Allen and Beiden have seen briefly in bars. It is my guess that all these, nevertheless, constitute the protagonist of the story and reveal its meaning. N o individual of any group is more important than one of any other. And movement is plainly discernible toward the inmost circle. At the be-

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ginning, the two smaller groups are distinctly and almost hostilely separate from the larger; you can tell what group a character belongs in by behavior and speech when he or she enters; members of the outmost circle give and get awkward courtesy, silence, and cliches, whereas those of the two inner circles distribute kisses and wisecracks impartially in the rough-and-tumble of known and liked friends. N o w look near the end of the story. It is all one crowd, in which the reader can scarcely distinguish between members of the original inmost, middle, and outmost circles. The point is, whether or not the author is aware that he had a conscious hand in all this, the idea that strikes the reader is that of the psychological and social fusion of heterogeneous groups of persons into, perhaps a temporary, but nonetheless for the time being a homogeneous unit. Call the motivation alcohol and good food, the holiday mood, hospitality and gratitude therefor, getting the tree trimmed painlessly, or what you wish. The result is the same. T h e difficulties facing the man who "decided" to do this job were complex and tremendous. T o see them clearly before noting how he dealt with them, let us contrast the materials and structure of this story with those used by John Steinbeck in " T h e Chrysanthemums.'' Both stories are in immediate scene throughout, with no flashbacks to speak of and no foreflashes except Virginia Belden's "I've got the children tomorrow." Yet for some reason that I cannot quite explain or substantiate, we feel that the Benchley story has roots in the past and in a sense foreshadows its future, whereas no such feeling comforts the reader of Mr. Steinbeck's piece. Perhaps an explanation is to be found in the fact that the people in the Christmas story are very like those we know, whereas Elisa and Henry and the itinerant tinker, though recognizable as human beings, seem isolated by the moment in time they are visible, typical yet strangely unreal. Perhaps the difference lies in the simplicity of the first as against the pretentiousness of the second, or perhaps in the clarity of the first as against the fogginess of the second. In any event, we know that Benchley's people will go on leading about the same sort of lives they have led, up to and through this evening; no such certainty is felt about the rancher and his wife.

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There is no appeal in anyone in "The Chrysanthemums," whereas in "Deck the Halls" every person mentioned, no matter how slightly, exerts a pull on the reader's interest. Both writers remain deadpan; but Mr. Steinbeck's intention can safely be termed grave, while Benchley is "telling the truth with a smile," as Ε. K. Rand once paraphrased Horace. (I don't mean that Benchley himself did much smiling, or any. But he lets the reader smile, and that's what Horace meant.) "Deck the Halls" runs from the day before the party until about six A.M. of the day after, when the party ended; but it runs with no sense of time lapse or action omitted. Sustained continuity by objective telling was a huge job in itself. "The Chrysanthemums" spans a much shorter period, from late afternoon to early evening of one day, making continuity no problem at all. Mr. Steinbeck's story opened with untenanted description; Benchley's begins with an approximately equal wordage of direct and impersonal explanation of the situation and the persons chiefly involved, in the relaxed objective manner now current. Mr. Steinbeck can be seen laboriously painting his winter scene; nowhere, at the start or elsewhere, is the writer of "Deck the Halls" visible. The sharpest point of contrast lies in the number of people introduced in the two stories. "The Chrysanthemums" has but five characters, and two of these, unnamed, are seen only briefly, early in the story. In the second paragraph of "Deck the Halls," the author coolly announces "thirty or forty people" as on the way, and then without apparent difficulty proceeds to make good his promise. Besides the four leads and their children, there are .fifteen named characters here, and twenty unnamed but identified as present, including the man who brings the helium tank: a total of thirty-nine persons in 5,000 words of story. Such an undertaking can be characterized only as massive. T o execute the plan, the objective lens-diaphragm might not stop long anywhere, thus enforcing on the writer the creation of something significant at every stopping point or he would be writing a synopsis; and it must possess two stages of audio-visual exposure, both critical: a briefly static snapshot of an individual or small group, and a panoramic or time-exposed sweep of the whole crowd (particularly needed in

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the middle and toward the end of the story) to show the dissolving differences and the fused unit. In short, in most conceptual and structural respects, John Steinbeck's project was elementary whereas Benchley's proved immensely involved, refractory, and exasperating. I can only marvel at the courage required to tackle and complete this short story; I can explain it only by the hopeful assumption that some of its difficulties were not seen until the author was too deep in the telling to stop. Right there was where spunk and gumption had to take hold. But "Deck the Halls" wasn't yet sold. When I got it done [the author's account continues], it was a fat 12,000 words, and I sent it to Good Housekeeping, with whom I had discussed the original idea. They shipped it back, saying that it had too much drinking in it for them, and from there it started the rounds of the women's magazines, most of whom rejected it on the grounds of its length. They like them either 6,000 or 36,000. Finally, in desperation, my agent called . . . The New Yorker and told them we had a piece from which they might be able to extract a workable story, and they agreed to read it and see what could be done. The verdict was that they would take it if I could trim it to 5,000 words; so, by cutting pages, paragraphs, sentences, and finally words, I got it to the required length. I have often told students that one pretty sure sign of the professional craftsman, as distinguished from the amateur, is to be found in willingness to delete what has been written and felt to be needed. An editor once told me that the writer of a first story recently published came rushing into his office with the accusation, "You have chopped two hundred words out of my story!" "Madam," he was able to reply, "in fact we took out twelve hundred." Once, suffering grievously, at an editor's request I cut a thousand words from a six-thousand-word story I had written; but a friend who read both versions couldn't see any change. I remember thinking at the time that after referring to his letter to me the editor merely counted the pages of the shorter version and initialed the piece for acceptance. Time having passed, I now believe he may have run through the manuscript. W e all have had similar experiences, in which the knife must be applied, probably for a good reason. An editor, besides keeping an eye on the

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space he has available, has a fresher and clearer eye on what we have labored over until we are blind. Still, I have never heard of deletion so drastic as was required of Benchley here. I haven't seen the twelve-thousand-word draft of "Deck the Halls." But I haven't much doubt that the one you have read is better. We have no reason to believe doctors infallible, yet the simplest logic lends credence to the notion that if they don't know their business, certainly nobody e l s e does. That is my belief about editors. And another factor enters here. If prolonged, just as when written too often or too consecutively, the objective story loses its bite. It should be added that although Mr. Steinbeck's approach to his story was not really objective, his use of the method (except for that word "tender," his semi-expository behavioristic details, and his fuzzy symbolism) is strict: Elisa watches and she hears; these verbs might denote attribution to her of sense impressions, but they are more likely to be the impressions recorded by the objective bisensory recorder, which sees her watch and hears the sounds she hears. When she scrubs herself with pumice, there is no mention of her sensation; her skin is scratched and red — external impressions. When she sits still on the porch, waiting for Henry to dress, there is no mention of her thinking or any thought recorded, although thinking is obviously what she is doing. On the other hand, Nathaniel Benchley's objectivity is very strict in his approach to his material, whereas his method of writing now and then spreads momentarily out of the strictly objective into other channels. "Deck the Halls" is, indeed, so relaxed in method that within the opening explanation of five paragraphs — itself an easing-off of the rigidly objective — lie paraphrased thought ("Allen believed," "he conceived,") and paraphrased indirect discourse ("he maintained") channeled through ,both Allen alone and through Allen and Beiden ("They . . . analyzed . . . and thought up"). And when Kay Allen comes downstairs, just before the party begins, the recorder is so close to her that everything she does might be perceived by her, everything seen might be seen by her; and, her sense impression "She heard Gregg, the houseboy, open the door" being openly stated, in short, the method here is or could be stream of experience.

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H o w did this happen? Through carelessness? I think not. Remember that the Benchleys in real life are the Beldens of the story. If you were determined to write a deadpan piece that included yourself and your wife as two of four important characters, would not such a stressing of the other couple as we see here probably occur to you as a good way of being sure that the experience came out objectified? I believe that it so occurred to this author, and his easement of method was actually the result of his strict discipline of approach. You will have noticed other, slight divergences from the narrow path. Beiden "felt a warm glow" when the punch hit his stomach. He says something to himself (it might have been an audible mutter) when the star makes only a vague blur on the ceiling at his first try. Sense impressions are occasionally attributed to other characters. All such minor vagaries could have been forced into line, every single detail expressed objectively, but my feeling is that effort so spent would not necessarily have improved the story and might have detracted somewhat from its expansive and serene tone. For objectivity works here with ease and amazing accuracy where it counts most heavily. Behavioristic detail carries the undertone of motivation in at least four important places: when the man arrives with the helium tank, about which Kay knows nothing, and leaving, stares back at the house; when Marks and then Toland arrive and to Kay's apprehension and embarrassment make gawky remarks (compare with this bit the circumstances of their departure) ; when Virginia Beiden grows anxious over her husband's desire to find and play his saxophone for the willowy brunette; and, best of all, the whole sequence of George Curtis and the anatomical chart. George's smiling acceptance of the fact that he must be parted from the chart and never give his Christmas lecture on it is possibly the neatest single stroke in the story; he has had, after all, all the fun of lecturing without a twinge of pain. Many brief parts of this story lie warmly welcome in a reader's memory, giving rise to chuckles long after reading. T h e final paragraph, and of it the final sentence, are, as they should be, by all odds the most moving. Benchley reserved his description for the end of his piece, where every detail in it would be significant to the

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reader; and our last sight of the cluttered living room includes the two characters (no pun is intended) who most enjoyed the party. The objective bisensory recorder moves slowly past them and around the room, coming to rest on the tree, now completely trimmed, and on the star-shaped glow on the ceiling directly over the top of the tree. So the story ends. What does it mean? All things to all men, perhaps. The author called it "obviously a job of reporting" and thought it meant chiefly that "the effects of the punch made [the characters] more and more pseudo-profound." It is certainly much more than reporting. The meaning I catch from it is not quite his; to me, in fact, all his people become more candid, simpler, and more childlike as the evening progresses. T o me the meaning is implicit in the theme of the star-shaped glow above the tree. This idea was introduced early ("You take a piece of cardboard," Beiden says . . .) and it was lightly stressed by Belden's unsuccessful first effort. Then you lose it; you think it is just one of the incidents noted on the author's chart, now done with. In the flood and ebb of the party, you forget it. But in that concluding picture, suddenly perfect and potent, there it is. We see here that, on occasion, what the objective lens-diaphragm chooses not to mention for a while can when again mentioned become so important it wraps up the story. T o me the meaning of "Deck the Halls" is that times and customs change but grown people of different kinds are still kids at heart, at least around Christmas. Nathaniel Benchley is expert and unassuming in his choice and use of symbols. He deals with those that are simplest and most natural, understandable to almost everyone. Once he has set up his symbolic pattern — the three groups of people slowly becoming one group, the light that is to shine over all — he sticks to it. H e would hotly deny that the piece he slaved over and reduced in length by more than half holds any hint of genius or makes any bid for critical recognition. That is the way a writer should be and should feel about his stuff. But he wrote better than he knows. "Deck the Halls" is convincing proof that objective writing can limn others than the lush, the lug, the heel, the bawd, and the psychotic. It is that great rarity, an amusing and a moving short story

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about people of the sort we like to have around us, in whose doings we see part of ourselves reflected. And it creates, finally, a small but perfectly formed light over a befuddled and cluttered living room of a world.

INTERLUDE

A Horrible Example

VII. A HORRIBLE EXAMPLE A GOOD M A N Y YEARS AGO, I W A S ONE OF THREE OR FOUR

graduate students assisting the director of an intermediate course in English composition at Harvard College. Present-day creative writing courses, at Harvard as elsewhere, are limited in enrollment to let the instructor read the work of every student; informal roundtable discussion of pieces read aloud is sensibly preferred to lectures; and each student has easy access to and frequent contact with the teacher, often amounting to collaboration with a person engaged during his spare time in writing for publication. The jamboree called English 6 numbered over three hundred undergraduates. Attendance at lectures, twice weekly at two o'clock, was not obligatory for assistants or students, and some sleepy afternoons the hall must have held no better than a sprinkling. W e gave no examinations; no reading was required or recommended. There were no section meetings. English 6 met in a body or, if the head of the course was ill or out of town, an assistant scrawled a notice on the blackboard, and amid cheers English 6 dispersed. This easygoing routine was rudely broken every two weeks by the necessity of writing and handing in a 2,000-word paper, in any form and on any subject the student chose. For the assistants, as well as the class, this was the chief work of the course. We read, corrected, commented upon, and graded these papers. And each of us conferred once a month with each student whose prose or verse he had read. My crowd comprised seventy to eighty young men. T w o thousand handwritten words covered, roughly, eight to ten pages of lined theme paper. It was a weary load. Oddly enough, though, my labor in that course was not without reward. This is an understatement. One manuscript that came by chance into my hands has been of more help to me in teaching — if not its author in English 6, hundreds of other students who later took other courses in writing, over which I presided — than any

SHORT STORIES FOR STUDY '54 text or any scheme or syllabus that I might have devised could possibly have been. I well remember the afternoon in late autumn when this prize came my way. W e assistants had met after class, as usual, and had sorted into our several piles the huge drift of paper covering the lecturer's desk. I had slipped a stout rubber band around my bunch and, more or less in the state of mind of a convicted man anxious to start serving time and get it over, as I walked across the Yard I first peeked at the paper on top and then drew it out and began to read it. It was a short story, written in a heavy, sweeping, masterful hand, in bright purple ink. After a page, I stopped walking, I remember, and either sat on the steps of Emerson Hall or perhaps leaned against a brick post of the Quincy Street fence. This cessation of motion was necessary; I found I couldn't read the piece and keep moving. It was wonderfully funny, but I wasn't laughing; I wasn't even chuckling. It was the funniest thing I had ever read, but it had been written in grim earnest. I read "Jim Bent, Deserter" through to its last words and fell into euphoric reverie. Here in my hands was a short story that at a glance appeared, first, to have made all, or nearly all, the humanly feasible mistakes in short-story writing; and, second, to have made them with such indomitable gusto, such utterly disarming zest, that not a one could be missed, either as joke or as blunder. Here was a very paragon of gaucherie, a triumph of mismanagement, a masterpiece of unreality occurring with all the swift, momentous gravity of a very horrid dream. When I got back to Warren House, I asked a secretary to typewrite a copy of the story. In doing so she neglected to take down the name of the writer, which, as had been directed, lay with the name of the course and the date due on the reverse side of the last sheet. I overlooked this omission at the time, the original manuscript was returned to its author, and I have long since forgotten the man's name. It is to be understood that I am not in the habit of holding students' work up to ridicule. Whoever he was, I owe him a debt that never could be paid. My conference with him was something of an anticlimax. Yes, he was fond of Kipling's army stories. Yes, he liked to go to the

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moving pictures. (If you are familiar with the subtitles of silent films current in the early 1920's, you will note a marked similarity between them and the dialogue in "Jim Bent.") I suggested that perhaps the short story wasn't the right thing for him and he might do well to try other forms. Something expository, for instance. He thought this over solemnly, fingering the pages of his beloved fable, of which he had plainly held high hopes, with a crushed air, and finally promised to try. The upshot probably was that I taught him next to nothing. I had an odd suspicion, however, that the young man really needed no teaching. Whatever vocation he entered, I am sure he achieved success. N o halfway measures for him! When he did something, he did it.

J I M BENT, DESERTER Captain in the United States Army, found himself in a precarious position. In short it was this. His close friend and comrade at West Point, had fallen violently in love with the Major's wife, and not only was it a very disgraceful proceeding, but his constant night visits, sometimes lasting most of the night, indicated that the matter must soon come to a head. Lieutenant Kane didn't mean to break up the Major's home, but he was passionately in love with the lady in question, and merely did not have the courage and the will power to control his passions. Captain Bent thought the matter over, and after seeing that arguing with Kane did absolutely no good, he decided to go over and see Mrs. Lane, the Major's wife. "This outrageous proceeding must stop," he said to Mrs. Lane as he entered the door, "And who are you to dictate to me?" "You know it is ruining Kane and, God knows, it is awful for your husband. If he should find out, he'd kill you! And by ginger he ought to know. It is the most shameless thing I've ever heard of for a woman of your age to make love to a boy, behind your husJ I M BENT,

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band's back. Why some day he will do something that can't be patched up! And who will be to blame? I tell you it must stop!" "Will you kindly leave my house and mind your own business?" stormed Mrs. Lane, stamping her foot down on the floor. "Not until you have promised that you won't see him again. He promised not to come over here tonight and he won't. But later he will if you allow him to, and you must not do that. Come now Mrs. Lane, can't you see how awful it is? It must be stopped!" "As I've said before it is none of your business and what's more he is coming over tonight!" "Then I will tell the Major!" Bent turned to walk out. His blow had struck home. "Oh please Mr. Bent. Don't do that. He would kill me. Please," placing her arms around his neck, "please promise you won't — oh — oh — " "So you damnable cur! You made me promise to stay home, so that you could have her yourself! By God I'll kill you for that!" Kane stood in the doorway, his eyes flashing and his lips quivering. "Just wait a minute and let me explain old man, I was just — " "Explain Hell! Come on, fight for your dirty life, or die like the coward you are!" Kane drew his gun. Bent jumped at him and seized his wrist. There was a great straining and pulling as the gun wavered, pointing first here — then there. Finally a loud report. Kane staggered back with a bullet in his shoulder. "Get out of here. Get out," he yelled at Bent, who, seeing his friend only wounded, was glad to have a chance to see the sentinel and explain the shot as an accident. "Darling," said Kane, after his assailant had left, "I thought you cared for no one else, but I suppose it was his fault, and he was forcing his attentions. There, there. My shoulder's all right. Just give me a kiss and it will be fine." Thus it went on. Kane, completely overcome by Mrs. Lane's beauty, kept making love to her and showering her with kisses for many hours. In the meanwhile, Bent, completely overcome by the accident, paced the floor of his own bungalow waiting for Kane's return. Longer and longer he waited until finally the door swung open

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and in came Mrs. Lane, confused, excited, and completely overcome by terror. "Oh Mr. Bent, something terrible has happened! It is awful. He's dead. You killed him." "What? Impossible! I only shot him in the shoulder. How could I — Oh God! Is he really dead?" "He's dead! What shall I do? Oh, the disgrace to the poor boy! I can stand it, but to him, and his poor mother. Death oh yes, but then disgrace; it is awful!" "You should have thought of that before you — , " "But now. It is now we are thinking about. He's dead. You killed him. You must go away — " "What, desert? N E V E R ! " "But think of him. You killed him. N o w the least you can do for him is to save his good name, and his mother! You can slip out and hide and no one will ever know why he was killed. But, can't you see Mr. Bent? It's the only honorable thing for you to do." "I'll go. You don't deserve it. He does, poor boy, and so does his mother. But you — " " H o w will I know when you are gone?" "When you see these lights go out, I will have gone, and then you can report me. I only hope to heaven I'm shot by the sentinel." She left him immediately and it was not long before he gathered a few necessary things together and slipped out into the night. It was some time later in the slums of N e w York that Bent found himself at a table in a cheap saloon. He was there for no reason at all, except that he had nowhere else to go. He gazed around thoroughly disgusted with the place and everybody in it. Suddenly his eyes fell on a girl who looked rather more refined than anyone he had seen for a long while, and far more sad than even he felt. A brusk bar man came up and asked her for an order. " A glass of water please," she said. "What in Η — do you think you're doing in here lady? Taking my good time with water! G e t — H e y ! " Bent had seized him by the neck. "You pusillanimous beast, get that water or — " he left the rest to the flushed bartender's imagination.

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"I'm gittin' it. I'm gittin' it." "Oh thank you so much sir, I really don't know what I would have done without your help. H e was so horrid. Do sit down won't you? I don't care if you do drink, but I never did want to." "I don't drink myself, but do tell me, why are you in here and what do you do? I'm really very curious, but it is such a relief to see someone who isn't so confoundedly cheap." "I might ask you the same question," she laughed, "who are you?" "Jim — er — Simmons," he replied, "and I'm really not doing anything. Just 'hoboing' you know." "My, you seem like more than that. What a fine soldier you'd make!" " W h y do you say that?" he asked quickly. "Oh you are so strong and brave, and you — er — don't seem too — er — busy." "Well I'm not really too busy, but I don't know anything about the army and you see I really am not as brave as I look." "Oh I know you are, but won't you take me home? I hate this awful place." " W h y certainly. I'm overjoyed to have the chance." Bent rose from the table and walked out with his new acquaintance, far happier than he had been since his desertion, and for the first time was his mind light for at least a moment. It was some time later that Bent realized how much he cared for the girl, and how much he regretted the barrier that kept him from asking her to become his wife. He was in her apartments calling on her when his feelings came to the surface. "Darling," he said, "I am not what you think I am, but a deserter from the United States Army." "What? W h y Jim! I knew you had been something that was worth while. You are far too intelligent to be a mere 'hobo,' but I never knew you were a deserter. Why don't you go back and suffer the punishment? Then we'll be free to be —-er — , " she stopped in great confusion. "You know, I am crazy to marry you darling, but I can't go back. I simply can't." "Jim, you must. Pay the penalty and then I'll marry you. I have

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a secret to tell you too. I'm in the Secret Service. I was told to find you and deliver you to the authorities, but it would be so much better if you would give yourself up!" "Then all you have told me of your love was a lie? You were just trying to catch me? You don't care at all? You want me to give myself up?" "Oh but I do care. Give yourself up, pay the penalty, and then we will be free to marry." " A Hell of a lot of freedom I'll get after a murder charge." "Murder! Oh God. And they're here after you. Run! Take the fire escape. They're at the door! Run! Q u i c k ! " "I'll give myself up! Come in!" " N o ! No! Your man isn't here. Don't come in." "Come in, Jim Bent, deserter, is here." It was the next morning. Jim Bent stood facing the Colonel. "What have you to say, Sir?" "Noth—." The door burst open. Major Lane staggered in. "I've done it. I've killed her." "Who?" "The animal that called herself my wife. It is she who has made me a criminal. I shot Kane. She made me keep quiet. She lied. I found her out. I killed her with these hands." "Bent," said the Colonel a few moments later, "I've locked our little detective in my office. Are you going to leave her there?"

As soon as I had a class of my own, I began to read "Jim Bent" aloud. I had no thought, at first, of using it for instruction, I only wanted to cheer them up. It seemed a good thing for the last hour of a term, sending students off on a note of serene imbecility. I would read it very slowly — it has to be so read or the laughs kill the lines — and with a straight face, without comment. Soon I began to feel that more use could be made of the story than I had so far put it to. About this time I was offering an elective

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course in creative writing of various kinds, and was thus able to widen the scope of the anonymous masterpiece. Without hesitation I made it the inverted text for everything I had to say about the short story. First I would read it, then say in effect, "All you have to do is avoid everything this man did and do something better," then go back and take it sentence by sentence, asking what was wrong with this, and then this — and why. When first I tried this scheme, it took from four to six weeks to complete discussion of the story. After a year or so, "Jim Bent" sprawled over an entire term and I had a course in the short story. To write a 5,ooo-word explication, also line by line, came as a matter of course; "How Not to Write a Story" appeared in The Writer, May-August, 1934, in several installments. Publication brought in a sizable mail, mostly favorable, though one very popular short-story writer and novelist (celebrated among his lesser brethren for the fact that he first induced Lorimer, of The Saturday Evening Post, to pay fifty cents a word) wrote in to say that the general effect of my articles was too negative. It is relevant to mention here that several former students have accused me of writing "Jim Bent" with tongue in cheek as a specimen of multilateral fictional boner, and of palming it off on classes as undergraduate work. There is plenty of internal evidence to the contrary: Mrs. Lane "stamping her foot down on the floor," "in her apartments," the haphazard punctuation, the ambiguous pronouns, and so on. I have tried to explain that I am not half clever enough to have faked these errors, and I hope that the foregoing account will settle any remaining doubts. Eventually, of course, I became as bored by the piece as I might have been if I had written it. So bored, in fact, that I ceased to read or refer to it, and tucked it away and forgot it. But at about the same time some results of its long promotion began to come in. A lawyer wrote me that he always got firmly fixed in his mind the image of Jim Bent before and during the writing of a brief; helped keep him logical, he said. A captain in the Medical Corps of the Army of the United States (not, of course, quite on a par with the elite officers of the United States Army in the story) reported that so far he had successfully avoided majors' wives and shoulder

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wounds. Perhaps the most gratifying response came from a former student who has become a writer of short stories: It might interest you to know [he says] that "Jim Bent, Deserter" has been a constant guide for me in writing fiction. Bent is always sitting on my shoulder, and whenever I hear him say, "I couldn't have said it better myself," I cross out what I have just written and rework it until the Bentisms are gone. Or nearly gone.

PART TWO Content includes conception and management of material for effectively representing ideas, to the end that short stories be fully understood and enjoyed.

VIII. CONTENT OF THE WRITER A FRIEND OF M I N E WHO WRITES AND TEACHES WRITING

sometimes says to a student or comments on his script, "Your idea is less than absorbing," or "The theme is scarcely worth writing about." In short, throw it out. I have often applied this criticism to a character in a story. Referred to content, it seems to me a contradiction in terms. If an idea is discernible, it is to me almost always potentially interesting and therefore worth representing; and no matter how weak or lame the presentation, the chance good for further work looking toward fulfillment of its promise — provided only that the writer is willing to explore his concept more thoroughly, perhaps enlarge or modify it, and in revision manage its expression better, more effectively, by keeping an eye on his reader's sympathies, mnemonic faculties, and expectations. Indeed, I have now and then gone to work with a student whose piece had received this condemnation by my friend (we turn them over this way to make sure they get brown on all sides), and the revision, unrecognized by him as a revision, has been found good. This is not to brag. The same sort of job has been done by my friend for me — or, that is, for the student-writer — in helping to revise and recreate characters I could not tolerate and wanted thrown out. The difference amounts only to a slight divergence in conception of what makes a short story. On one point, moreover, my friend and I always and unreservedly concur: we can't abide a script conveying no idea whatever. Thus, in college writing courses, both of us and perhaps all of us strive to achieve the impossible; for even if the student is unwilling to rewrite or the rewritten story also falls flat, we fondly believe the next one will be better by his having followed through to the best of his ability this time, or at least he will have taken one step up merely by understanding how and where he went wrong. But after college he is on his own; then he must do, or try to do, what

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we tried to do with and for him. The hard-shelled, harried editor is then his only reader, and although the editor is, as we were, paid to read, he is reading for thousands of others who, far from being paid, expect to pay or have paid for their reading — and who will growl and yell and cancel subscriptions if it is not to their liking. So, out there in the open market, our juvenile and often arbitrary grades shrink to three: A for acceptance, C for possible revision scantily suggested in vague terms (or for "Uh-uh, but try us again"), and Ε for a printed rejection slip. Out there is where the blue may really begin or, as likely, the fog-obscured pavements of repeated failure, and nobody will give a hoot which. W e strive to achieve the impossible. W e prepare for a professional life completely unpreparable and unpredictable. W e try to simulate a situation — teacher as editor, class as reader-critics — that hasn't any rough parallel, except in other arts and professions, outside of college. And we are, probably, at the nadir of accomplishment when we begin to talk about story content. Content must be, first of all, experience. The young writer, in college or just out, or at an age commensurate with graduation, has had already more experience than he will have through all the rest of his life. If at this time he should fall ill or be injured, and thus live bedridden to the age of seventy or eighty, he would still have encountered, in the first quarter-century of his life on earth, more than enough experience to keep him busily writing every day until he died. But this is not to say that he would have the content of several novels in his mind, or of many short stories, or of even one. One trouble is that many young people do not recognize the values of experience while or just after receiving it, and sometimes until they are too old to see any value in it at all or remember its details. They flee from the use of experience, when young because being theirs it's dull, later because it seems no longer even theirs but, rather, to have happened to someone else. Others overvalue experience to the exclusion of its priceless concomitant, imagination, and ride their joys and sorrows to sudden death; extravagantly they pour out the emotional reactions of perhaps ten hypersensitive, subjective years in as many pages — and then wonder either why it sounds so disgusting or what on earth there is left to write about now.

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Maybe that is why we try and try to do the impossible: to persuade them to see their experience as it really was, not as they overemotionally thought it was at the time, and as highly valuable; and to see it as it goes on, in constantly sharpening perspective; and above all to see it so minutely that they can be thrifty with it and make later experience last, as they go on living, for a lifetime. Because that is what they must do if they are durably to turn experience into short-story content. We try to make them see all this and start doing all this now, while there is yet time, before their bread and butter depends on the seeing and the doing. For after they leave us, nobody can be expected to be of much help. Out there where the winds of commerce blow hot and cold, and the rain of checks and rejection slips falls casually on the good, the mediocre, and the bad — out there the writer is alone with his experience, his imagination, and himself. And with the last named there is a crucial relationship that he must maintain. He must keep faith not so much with himself as with the ideal self he wants and intends, but may not be able, to be. So while writing every story he is living painfully a more important one, of which he is the protagonist, he has the motive, and is his own obstacle; but the end of which is ever in doubt. Selling the less important story, the written one, may not lead toward a happy ending of the more important; and he must keep himself constantly braced for the shock of not selling the less important, to prevent this from making an end to the more important story. Yet not a word, not a hint, of this more important story must reach the reader in the less important. If it should do so, he will be writing not fiction but autobiography. Enough of that. If men and women lacked courage, no stories would ever get written. From investigating technique we already know something of content: that a short story should move in one direction to say one thing, and move on its own emotional momentum; and that a short story is personality plus motive plus obstacle — a problem or struggle against opposition, the end or solution demonstrating in specific terms some general truth about human nature. Now, having in mind the relationship between the writer and his ideal self, and the figurative story this relationship forces him to live while writing all his literal ones, we can go further. Not a

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soul, probably, has so much as let it be known that he or she aims at authorship without meeting head-on some friend, neighbor, or relation with a prize-winner and world-beater at tip of tongue, if only the aspirant will hold still and listen. A man out there beyond the reach of college certainly knows enough to listen, thank the teller, and quickly forget as useless what was told him; no matter how good the story, he didn't live it. But what if the would-be helper happens to be an editor willing to buy the story if our man will only write it? Can a man sit down to his typewriter and tell himself now he is to write a piece about this or that, because this or that has never appeared in a story before, or because it is the coming thing, everyone is talking about it, it is the rage? Can he, on the other hand, sit down and just begin on anything, confident that as his fingers find the keys everything good and nothing bad will come? Q r can he record with photographic similitude a group of persons he knows very well, feeling sure that some one will see meaning there and a short story will result? Can he, perhaps, sketch out an allegorical scheme, abstractions represented by human figures (Sexual love = Hester, Spiritual love = Dora, Man in doubt = Jonathan), the whole to be orderly and accurately categorized; and then, by building human beings out of these materials, eventually have a short story? I doubt it. In every case cited, I believe, the relationship between himself and his ideal self that I was talking about is bound to suffer and perhaps break down. In one group of hypotheses, he will commercialize his product; in the other, he will estheticize it and quite possibly anesthetize the reader. Content, I believe, cannot successfully be contrived or prescribed, by the writer for himself or by any outside agent. It cannot, usually, even be externally suggested. Unless a writer is to turn himself into a fool or a fiction factory, each short story must rise from his lived experience and be shaped to an objective meaning by his imagination; and he must have but this one story to write at any one time, and this story must be, for him, while he is remembering and shaping and managing, and while he is actually writing it, the most real and vital thing in all his known world. And once done, he must try not to care,

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although he will despite all he can do, whether the thing gets printed or not. It's done the best he can. Let someone else take over from there. I know there is more than a whiff of dogmatism about all this. It is a personal view or a chain of personal reactions, sprung from one man's writing experience and the experiences of a few closfe friends. It needs some documentation, and even when so supported it cannot be proved and must be taken or left, subject to the qualifying experiences of others. Call it at best a rough guide, an uncorrected compass. Granted at the start that the economic urge to sell what one has written is at least as sound as the purely esthetic urge. In the latter area, as Anthony West avers, "free choice is paramount" and there is no real contact between living and writing. In the former, while getting knocked about, the man who wants to sell will constantly live stories that, from the esthete's comfortable lookout in his ivory tower, he could only dimly dream of or observe shrunk to pigmy size in his researcher's telescope. Then too, the economic urge bars two others patently undesirable, the merely exhibitionistic and the escapist unaware. Yet, really, the desire to sell is as dangerous as any other motive behind craft or art. You need a sheet anchor to windward, holding her head to wind and seas through the night. And may there be stars, and a wakeful skipper conning them. It is tough but it is necessary to be both a salesman and an idealist. That almost impossible balance must be maintained. Here are a few instances where, probably, it was not — with confusion, doubt, loss of time and impetus, and delayed progress resulting: An editor showed me a painting he was going to reproduce as a cover. It showed a square-rigger's maintop steeply canted against long green combers and a dour sky, and a young man frantically clawing up the ratlines, with something — maybe terror, maybe rage — ablaze in his eyes. "I'd like to have a lead story to go with it," the editor said. I rationalized that if artists illustrated text why couldn't I write a story to illustrate a picture? I did my best . . . There is a mixed feeling in the bones when a finished piece is good, something like the feeling caused by the death of an intimate friend who has happened to leave you some money; there is

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the permanent emptiness, the never-again sensation, and with this but apart from it the mysterious and actually unreasonable premonition of reward. After writing that story for the cover, I had only the suspicion that it wasn't any good. When it appeared, I was sure of this. Often, and naturally, a writer dislikes his story by the time he sees it in print. My certainty went beyond that distaste, made me doubt if / was any good, and made my next story harder to write. Once, just after I had sold a story for a comfortable amount, I told myself, "Now this next I will write to please nobody. This will be writing as it ought to be, done slowly, carefully, enjoyably. No suffering. It might even be good." I remember how it shaped itself in my mind: a man who had committed a crime or felt guilt commensurate with such a deed ran away from pursuers, real or imagined, into the woods, and finding an empty cabin lighted a lamp and prepared to spend the night there; he ate supper, took heart in the belief that he was now over the worst, and settled down with his pipe — then heard behind him accusing fingers gently tapping outside the windowpane. These of course were moths beating their wings and soft bodies against the glass. What happened to the man I don't remember. The point is, everything concrete here was a symbol of some abstraction: good, evil, fear, escape, retribution — each detail worked out with the greatest care. Worked in, rather, something like the under side of a hooked rug. It was all very complex, very subtle; nothing showed on the surface, yet I knew everything was there. I never had so much fun writing. Then I read over the rough draft and tore it up. Written to please nobody, it pleased nobody. Here an unknown author achieved a limited, if unknown, success. A friend of mine was in a low spot lasting weeks when suddenly he received from his agent a story idea conceived by an editor who had seen and liked his work and wanted more. The idea was simple and sound, and it had a neat, paradoxical twist: a young man, born in the country and bred by parents who had deep roots there, fed up with out-at-heel rusticity, subsistence farming and fishing, and village gossip, is about to break away for the city when he meets a girl from a city orphanage spending two weeks at a charity camp near his home. T o her this spot is heaven on earth, and she

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jumps at primitive living with the spirit of a pioneer. "He can take it from there," the editor had said. My friend did. He chose a place he knew well and loved. He made characters, a bit here and a bit there, from persons he knew. Having done some settlement work, having served on the staff of a summer camp, he felt at home everywhere in the story. He did a good job, the editor bought it, and that was that. Almost. Some time later, in the doldrums again, he received another letter from his agent, this one with a threepage, single-spaced enclosure. It seems that the editor felt collaboration had worked so well, why not continue? Whereupon he had dictated to the agent's secretary the ideas of seven stories, each one worked out in close detail. My friend went at the first idea like a starved tiger. A week later he had discarded that but was well started on the second. A month later he was blasting away at the fourth or fifth. You can see what had happened. All seven ideas looked pretty good. None actually demanded that it be written. In another month he was on his second round of the seven, and sneering at some of his own phrases as they came up again. He couldn't find a reason in the world for not writing those stories, one after another. Yet he could not write any one of them. When finally he had given up the lot and had sent apologies to the editor, when he had sunk again into his own private hell of creation and was coming up again with something I guessed would be good because he wouldn't talk about it, I asked if I might borrow the editor's story ideas. He passed over the three dog-eared, torn pages, almost illegible now because of the notes he had scrawled and rubbed out and scrawled again in the margins. "They're a gift," he said. "Just get them out of my sight." He looked, for him, happy. All he had wanted, all any writer ever wants, was one drink; with the best intentions that editor had drowned him. I read over the seven ideas, and it seemed to me that at least one of them, the first, in fact, had distinct possibilities . . . Then I remembered. I filed them away, not because I or anybody else would ever make them into stories; merely as evidence of an editor's misguided generosity. Hence my belief that content cannot successfully be prescribed or self-prescribed, or even externally suggested. The matter of stories must rise from experience, often via the unconscious mind

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that stores up things we actually know nothing about until they reach the surface of consciousness. The experience must be objectified, must be shaped by deletion and addition to represent a sharable idea. A writer will do well to have only one story to write at one time, and if that story becomes as vital to him as it would if it were the last he would ever write, he will do very well. But he must write it to be read.

THE GLASS HOUSE* by Dorothy Livesay Morning THE house lay open. Upstairs and down, red tile floors glowed in the light, autumn sun poked a bold hand into cobwoven corners, but touched more gently the fading portraits on the walls. Anna, the servant girl, singing at one of the windows, shook out her cloth as if it was sun dust she was scattering. Then she paused briefly to look down into the garden. On the petals of pink roses below, tiny pin-pricks of dew rested. And all down the slopes of the garden, and lower still, among the orchards, dew gleamed and sparkled like myriads of tiny mirrors. Every leaf held a reflection. It was very still, save for the crystal sound of water dripping from a spring. Then out of nowhere a little wind sprang up, blustering through a hemlock, finally knocking over a handful of yellow leaves from a poplar tree. It was over, so. But a rose petal had fallen. A t the long window a curtain had quivered, as at some unfriendly passing. Someone was down in the garden, busy on hands and knees. It * First published in Northern Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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was Charlotte, planting out young strawberries. Her round yellow hat, her black smock, completely disguised her identity. She liked being so: nothing but a squat animal, grubbing in the earth; becoming more and more the colour of the earth as she worked. Her fingers, pressing each root tenderly into the ground, lingered there a moment before passing on to the next. Here was such a tiny, delicate leaf, rusting a little at the edge. She stopped to caress it. How the sun seemed to make it alive! She looked upward, to feel the warmth in her face. Opposite her, a few feet away, a rabbit sat, taut. He nibbled at something, then crouched down ready for flight. His wide slant eyes watched hers attentively; his ears, like two blades of grass, poked up into the air. They stared. Charlotte, breathless with delight, sat on her heels motionless until every muscle ached. She began to envy the rabbit, so effortlessly still: till suddenly, with a last nibble, a joyous kick of the heels, he was off loping through the grasses. Charlotte leaned forward to watch: but he had vanished. "The darling, the darling," she whispered. Then she picked up a strawberry plant tenderly, as though it were a small, shy rabbit. Along the narrow path beside the vegetable garden, yellow and red branches were stretching out to the sun. Their leaves drifted to Lawrence's feet as he walked there slowly, pipe in mouth. As it was falling he caught a maple leaf, captured it. In his hand it lay quivering, warm as a flame. "Colour," he said aloud. "Colour." "That is what I want to describe," he was thinking. "The fire in things. Even an inanimate thing, a dead thing, has its passion." He gazed at the leaf meditatively, puffing at his pipe. A gust of wind blew up, and he let it fall to the ground. Sauntering on, he stopped again in a small arbour, leaned over the garden wall. Something alive, an awkward mass of black, crowned by a straw hat, caught his eye. The being crawled slowly along the ground, bent down over the earth. "She's at it again," thought Lawrence. "Oblivious. But passively happy, I suppose." Then, as the figure sat up suddenly and stared off into space: "The priestess!" he muttered.

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He amused himself by standing there, unknown to Charlotte and analysing her. "One ought to feel poetic about Charlotte . . . She's so symbolic. I might be able to, if only she moved like a Diana. But that — that hat. Such a sexless hat," he thought. "An inanimate object, certainly without passion." He was turning away, when he saw Charlotte bend to the earth again, planting something. A desire to tease her seized him. "Hello there, goddess of the earth!" Charlotte turned her head. She looked annoyed already. "Why don't you do something?" she enquired. "I am doing something." "Oh." "I am preserving my health." "I suppose that is one way of saying that you are writing poetry." "Not at all. But in ten years, after all that grubbing, you'll be an old woman, Charlotte. At the age when you ought to be fascinating. Whereas I — " "Oh you'll be famous and fascinating, my dear cousin. I've no doubt." It amused him to watch her digging a hole viciously with a little brown trowel. "Thanks for your encouragement. I shall remember it gratefully, ten years from now." Lawrence smiled mockingly. He hoped she felt his look. But her stolid black smock, her battered hat, betrayed nothing. He kicked up a few clods of earth, newly upturned to the sun. Charlotte said nothing. He stopped, staring intently at her quick firm fingers pressing down the earth. "I say — " h e began. Then he thought better of it. Charlotte was so mute. Across the sun a tiny cloud passed: for a moment, it was cold. Silently, Lawrence continued his walk, threaded his way carefully out of the vegetable garden. Then he found that his pipe had gone out. Celia was cutting flowers, higher up on the terrace. Every morning she went out determined not to cut a flower. The gardener, old Jake, told her every time he came, once a week, that to take the blossoms from "the place where they growed up" was a sin. She

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believed him. She listened meekly, her grey head bent, her grey eyes soft as clouds. But this was a morning when Jake would not be about. And sitting in her room sewing she could not help thinking how beautiful those pale mauve asters, single-petalled, would look on her sunlit table. With a sprig or two of goldenrod, perhaps, if there were any left. Beside her lay the scissors. She glanced out of the window: no one about. Only the encouraging sun waving to her, and a few birds fluttering south. After all, two or three asters . . . Celia laid down her sewing, seized the scissors. In a moment she was out on the terrace with battalions of pale mauve asters falling into her arms. In a little wooded valley to the left of the vegetable garden, John was hiding. He ought to have been at school. But first a squirrel, then a woodpecker, had lured him into the wood. If only it were Saturday, and he had his new gun! H e found some hazel nuts that made his hands tingle when he tore off the prickly jackets. He found a quantity of small red mushrooms, the kind that mother liked. He gathered them all; but in pursuing a pale blue butterfly he let the mushrooms fall to the ground, unheeded. Then it grew hot, as the sun penetrated through the branches. In a small open glade John sat down, took off his sweater. He saw three crickets attempting to reach a certain twig. John separated them. One emigrated to America, the other disappeared into darkest Africa. The third was buried under a volcano. "Because I am Fate," John explained to the cricket. (He had heard Cousin Lawrence talking to his mother about Fate. " W h y am I here now — why are you here?" Lawrence had demanded. "Because he has nothing else to do," Charlotte had giggled to John.) It was very hot now in the glade, especially when one thought about Africa. John took off his shirt. Then, as the sun joy of the sun caressed his body, he took off everything, leaped from stump to stump in sheer nakedness. H e turned somersaults in the grassy places, climbed trees to frighten a scolding squirrel. Then, in sudden abandon, he started to run: through the woods, through the patches of sunlight and shadow, his feet lightly scattering the

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crisp dead leaves. Breathless, at the edge of the wood, he leaned against a stout oak. There he made water, to watch it run in little channels along the roots. The sound of a cart rattling made him remember, suddenly, how near he was to the road . . . He slunk back, crouching behind the oak. A horse and cart hove into sight along the dusty road. He saw that Anna was driving, going to the village for provisions. John watched her fascinated, suddenly aware of his nakedness, the harsh feel of the bark against his skin. Anna was whistling. She sat, dark and upright at the top of the wagon, the sun shining in her face, holding the reins with careless, uncovered arms. John was surprised that she did not guess he was there, nor search for him among the trees. He stared after her. A moment later, sober-faced, he turned into the wood to find his clothes. Suddenly, at noon, it was cold. The sun went out, clouds raced, crows cawed. An uneasy wind hovered in the hemlocks. Charlotte came up from the garden slowly. Her nails were stinging, uncomfortable, with the feel of earth in them. Her hat blew off, spun across the lawn just in time for Lawrence to pick it up, present it to her with exaggerated politeness. Her mother stood at the door saying they were late, wondering where John was. "How cold it is, Aunt Celia," said Lawrence, shivering a little. "Yes isn't it?" Celia smiled. "Suddenly, autumn." But she seemed warm, he thought, as an apple on a bough. "I'm hot," Charlotte said pointedly. Then John appeared, swinging his school books ostentatiously. As she brought in the dishes at lunch, Anna heard them all exclaiming over the asters. Pale mauve and deeper violet, they leaned out of a blue bowl in the centre of the table, hiding the bread, the butter, the salt. "I could not resist cutting them," Celia admitted. Lawrence smiled at her. "Like the bright red leaves I could not resist picking up, and dropping," he said. "I saw a rabbit," Charlotte began.

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"That's nothing. I nearly caught a squirrel, without a gun — " cried John. "Where dear?" Celia was serving the soup. " O h — On the road to school." John relapsed into silence. He stared with a curious, penetrating look at Anna as she handed him his milk. "Were you at the village today, Anna?" She was startled. Her dark face flushed. W h y should the kid ask that? "Sure I was." She went out of the dining-room, jauntily. If the kid had followed her — seen her stop at Jim's place — but no, he was at school! In the kitchen, staring out of the window, she began to sing again, softly. Evening N o one knew it, but the wind possessed the sitting-room at dinner time. Someone had left the window carelessly latched; and while they were all closed off in the dining-room, safe and warm, here the curtains were dancing, the pictures were creaking. In the fireplace, flames struggled feebly with wind, sometimes soaring out of reach, sometimes dwindling out of sight. A fresh draught, smelling of rain and wet leaves, met Charlotte as she opened the door. She stood perfectly still a moment — as a person will who, drugged with warmth, finds suddenly clarity in the wind's breath. But Lawrence, who was behind her, began shivering immediately. "B-r-r." He fumbled for the light, then hurried to close the window. Charlotte walked over to the fire, knelt down, and began piling on wood. " W h y is it so cold?" Celia had followed them. "I'm sorry, Mother. I left the window open." "Always, always!" "I know . . . But we'll be warm in a minute." Lawrence was hovering behind her, his delicate fingers stretched out toward the flame. Her own, beside his, looked rough and masculine. Noticing it, she withdrew them, hid them in her pockets. But he too had noticed. He always noticed. " W h y do you always have pockets in your dresses, Charlotte?" Celia answered for her, laughing in a way she had that took all

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the sting out of words. "She always needs pockets. So none of her clothes look respectable because of the things that bulge out." "I don't care how my clothes look," said Charlotte. "You ought to care," Lawrence told her. "Nobody need look at me." "But they can't help it. That's the trouble. Truly, Charlotte, if you could have seen yourself this morning, huddled up in the vegetable garden . . ." The rabbit. T h e darling rabbit! Charlotte remembered. That was the happy thing to remember about this day. That, and the early sun shining on the fields, glittering on the leaves of the orchard . . . But Lawrence was still talking. "Something ought to be done about Charlotte; don't you agree, Aunt Celia?" There was no answer. "Hello," he cried, turning around, seeing that her chair was empty. "I expect she's gone to make Johnnie go to bed," Charlotte explained. "Poor kid. When I was young I was sent to bed regularly at half past seven, and just as regularly I slipped out the window, climbed down a tree, and made for the fields. Nobody ever found out." Charlotte stirred the fire, drowsily. "Ah, but you probably didn't have anyone to kiss you goodnight and see if you had said your prayers." "No. And I didn't have any prayers to say." "I'm sorry." "What?" " I say I'm sorry." He stared. "Thanks awfully," he was beginning, with his mocking smile; but she saved him the trouble. "It would have done you good to have a few prayers to say." "Lent a certain air of grace to my Don Juan appearance, eh?" She felt the anger flushing her face. H e was so sure of himself, of what he was. She wanted to shake him, to startle him out of himself. Aloud, she said, almost wearily: "You're no Don Juan, Lawrence." He laughed. "Well you're no Diana either, sweet cuz." Her mouth tightened, to hide the lump in her throat. This could not go on! She stood up, took one warming look at the fire.

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"You'll excuse me. I have to work," she said. "Ah, yes. The botanical collection!" He was sneering even at that. Yet when he added goodnight, she answered him steadily. It was only on the other side of the door that her composure went . . . John was lying awake in bed, staring into the dark. When Celia came in softly to kiss him, he pretended to be asleep. But it was no use: never, with Mother. Either he breathed too fast, or held his breath too long. Or else his eyelids quivered. "Still awake?" Celia sat down on the edge of the bed. "Nearly. Goo'night, Mum." He murmured it drowsily, but she was not deceived. "Goodnight, son. Have you said your prayers?" "U-h-h," said John. "What, dear?" "Aw gee, I forgot, Mum. I'm too sleepy now." "You'll be a great deal sleepier once the prayers are off your mind." "I don't wanna say my prayers." " W h y not, John?" "I just don't." After stroking his hair thoughtfully, as if sorry, she rose to go. "Mother!" "Well, dear?" "Don't go." He snatched her hand. "What is it then?" "You won't tell anybody?" "If it is between you and me." "Yes." He pulled her head close to his own, whispered it hesitantly. "I didn't go to school this morning." There followed a long talk between Celia and himself concerning honesty, prayers, and squirrels on Saturday mornings only. John resolved to remember all three, always. But when she had forgiven him, kissed him, and slipped out of the room, he remembered what he had not told her: how he had left his clothes and run bare through the wood . . . He fell asleep, smiling.

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There was a light still in the kitchen. Celia opened the door, peered within. "Oh, it's you, Anna." The girl was putting the dishes away. "Sure it's me." Celia looked at the girl sharply. She was never quite sure, nowadays, whether Anna was being insolent. "You're late this evening" was all Celia said. "Dinner was late." "I know. Another time we won't wait for Mr. Lawrence." (She must speak to him about his carelessness.) "He's kind of irregular, ain't he?" And Anna grinned. Mockery or not, Celia thought, she was a gay slip of a thing, always singing when she worked. "Yes, Anna. There's nothing more for tonight when you've finished." "O.K." Celia, closing the door, frowned. The girl certainly was getting slack, familiar. Tomorrow — tomorrow she would mention it. Lawrence had sat down gloomily before the fire, feet stretched out, head flung back. How the flame warmed him, drew him! The leaf in the morning, the bright fire in the evening. This warmth was what one needed. Yet his theory that there was passion in everything did not apply to Charlotte. She would live forever unaware of life, he thought. The taste of it . . . the waste. He stared drowsily at the burning wood. On one side a sorcerer frowned intently. On the other a young girl danced, head gaily tilted in the air. Queer, how he was always seeing pictures. Perhaps he was really more of a painter than a poet — an imaginative painter. He would have to ask Celia. Celia. He grew irritated, waiting for Celia. He must be a little bit in love with her. Yes, for she was a woman! If poor Charlotte was only like her mother, with that quick gift for understanding. But no, Charlotte was all tied up inside, unresponsive outside. Celia . . . Celia . . . He left the fire, roamed vaguely about the room. Now he touched an ornament, a book, stood before a painting. Everything in the room spoke distinctly of Celia. Outside, a shutter banged against the wall, creaked in the wind.

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Lawrence opened the French window to secure it. Wind lurked everywhere, tossed the trees, sallied out into the open — then suddenly swooped past him into the room. At the same moment, on the walk outside, a girl slipped past him, running. It was Anna. Lawrence gazed after her, suddenly alert, restless. A vague disquiet seized him. But then the wind struck him in the face. He closed the window. Anna was running. The wind, running too, excited her. She opened her coat, flung wide her arms, flew along the road. The darkness on either side, the queer sound of the wind, for once meant nothing to her. She ran, faster and faster, laughing with the speed of it. So it was she fell panting upon the other figure who had blundered across her path. Her arms were seized sharply. "Oh! Oh it's you, Jim, is it?" She leaned away from him breathless, laughing. "Did I scare you, Anna?" "No! No!" " W h y were you running?" "To find you, silly." Swiftly in the dark he reached down to meet her panting mouth. They swayed together, as if the wind were blowing them. When Celia finally came into the room, Lawrence was still facing the window. It would be rather dramatic, he felt, to turn, to say to her quickly: "You know, Celia, I am beginning to think I am a painter as well as a poet." The speech was ready on his tongue, but as it happened, Celia spoke first. "Lawrence, I don't like to have to chastise a nephew but you must not be late for dinner as you were tonight. It is hard on Anna." "Anna?" He was lost for a moment. Then he remembered: the girl running. Late for her lover. He had kept her late for her lover! If Celia . . . He swung away from her, shrugging his shoulders. "Oh, Anna! Well, sorry," he said. So this was the mood Celia was in. Well — he need not talk. He could sit alone dreaming by the fire, excluding Celia.

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But Celia had reached the fire before him. "You've nearly let it go out," she cried. "Oh, Lawrence!" "Sorry, Celia." This time he was sorry. He leaned above her, against the mantel, while she took the bellows and nursed the flame into life again. Watching her, he was content. And when she was relaxed and sitting down opposite him, with that odd little smile playing about her lips, he began to talk. Celia listened, stirring the flame gently. Outside, as in a dream, wind sent the first drops of rain rapping sharply, warningly, against the window.

Arriving at a fair appraisal of "The Glass House" is not easy. The story irritates a reader in a dozen ways unsuspected by the author. Her mannerisms (the word "tiny" appears three times in the first four paragraphs), her habit of stating a small, trivial fact as if it were of the utmost importance ("Then he found that his pipe had gone out"), her choice and delineation of personality are an almost constant invitation to stop reading. She leaves the reader uncertain whether she sees how juvenile her characters, especially Lawrence, are. There is some deliberate development of character (Charlotte learns to take Lawrence's teasing), but there is also some quite inadvertent change of character amounting to inconsistency (Celia is a rather boring child about the asters; later, saying goodnight to John, she is a wise and tender mother). There are times when a quality that can only be called cuteness becomes all but unbearable. Yet to the patient reader the story has merits. It is characteristic of serious work that often finds its way into serious, belletristic monthly and quarterly magazines. And if it goes waywardly wrong on certain essentials of storytelling, we can gain by making out an honest balance sheet of its merits and its defects, in order to find if we can the source, or sources, of its failure to catch and hold the reader's interest. Remembering technique, one may here consider in passing whether the author's omniscient telling and her numerous abrupt

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shifts, sometimes in consecutive sentences, from the sense impressions and thoughts of one character to those of another; whether her division of the piece into Morning and Evening, with several subdivisions in each, create a gain greater than their inevitable loss in reality, sympathy, and understanding. Could these persons have been fully presented by any single telling method? If not, would somewhat different persons, with traits that might be lost by technical change replaced by traits expressible by consistency, make a clearer, more real and moving presentation of the idea? More pertinent now, is an idea present? If so, is a demonstration of it in specific terms feasible with this material conveyed as it is here? The author is a poet, and she has been rated a good one. Her prose uses several poetic instruments and characteristics: acute sensitivity to sense stimuli; preoccupation with images compactly phrased; short sentences paralleling poetic compression of line; alliteration ("On the petals of pink roses . . . pin-pricks . . ." "She stopped to caress it. How the sun seemed . . ."); figures of speech; verse rhythm (omit the definite article italicized in the following clause, and you have solid iambs: "but touched more gently the fading portraits on the walls" — without the omission the line would be not incompatible with free modern metrics); personification of Nature or natural elements; and the attribution of sensation, even emotion and will, to inanimate things (the curtain, the wind, the rain) that John Ruskin long ago termed "pathetic fallacy," and that, today, for reasons of their own, some poets shun. It is to be considered how much all this poetizing adds to the story, as story, or whether, by making the approach to material rather breathless, particularly at the beginning, and by stressing emotion that is not really that of any character, it detracts from the story. Surely a touch of poetry seldom did a storyteller any harm. But is this more than a touch? The question is worth thought, and thinking is bound to include consideration of the appropriate and, indeed, essential iM&jectivity — the personal sincerity — of a lyric poem. In my judgment, these outward signs of the lyric poet's attitude toward his material, though not the root of the trouble here, are closely related to it. The whole matter is baffling. The piece has a strong auditory

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appeal, the means used for producing this appeal seem simple and innocent enough, and yet almost everything comes out wrong. Much the same riddle confronts us if we investigate structural matters. The author tells, plainly, of a place that she knows very well and of persons with whom she is completely familiar. W h y shouldn't a writer take a single day in the lives of her characters as her time span if she wants to? (Something of the sort was recommended in Chapter II of this book.) If we disregard the frequent breaks (or hiccups), or think of them filled in with brief transitional passages, continuity would be established. As it is, immediacy is set up and held throughout; and morning and evening of one day are not incompatible with reading time. The group of five characters (not counting the gardener and Jim) is workable in this space. One cannot help noting with satisfaction the neatness with which time elements and personal encounters necessary to hold the thread of narrative have been fitted together, so that the gaps are easily jumped by almost immediate comprehension of what is going on in the new section. And best of all, in the author's very insistence on striking detail briefly recorded, as well as in her ability to let the reader know more than her characters know, there is an authentic and cumulative suspense. Then what on earth is wrong? W h y are we almost continually invited to stop reading? W h y does this suspense build up to next to nothing, and at the end leave us unsatisfied if not actively annoyed? Content is, I think, the answer in a word. When we come to a close study of its content, "The Glass House" proves all too revealing. Our dissatisfaction with the selection and management of its material has, however, several causes. This narrative must have been self-prescribed. That is, it must have been conceived (as in the case of its arbitrary technique) without much of any consideration for the reader's desires, hopes, and expectations. The Celia here is, quite possibly, the author herself, unobjectified. Indeed, a part of the author as Celia, also seen too close, lies in most of the other characters. In Charlotte's love of growing things and living things, like the rabbit; in John's love of independence, his later turn toward truth, and his final glee over having a secret even from his mother; in Lawrence's erratic and excessively Romantic temperament, his incurable amateurishness, his

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pretentiousness, his priggish and blind self-sufficiency, above all in his search for emotional gratification under the guise of philosophical inquiry. This subjective taint is to be found even in old Jake, the gardener, who is forced into the absurdity, by horticultural as well as by moral standards, of stating that it is a sin to cut flowers. Miss Livesay's refusal or inability to objectify experience, in fact, makes the disparity between her estimates and the reader's estimates of her characters so wide and pronounced that at what she may have felt were high points in the story — Charlotte a clod of earth, Lawrence deciding he is perhaps painter as well as poet, naked John urinating in the woods — the reader's feeling may be only annoyance, disgust, or sheer boredom. There is none of the Celia-author in Anna or Jim, of course. And what is the result, how do they shape as living persons? Anna is overwritten, Jim is a few words, two lips, two arms. T h e y are merely any pair of rustic lovers — simple, direct, uninhibited, to contrast with the more complex people living in the house. W e can call them symbols; they are little more than that. Yet the author found another agent, if not a living person, to write about here — Nature. Into the manifestations of Nature she has poured her most ardent, and again her most subjective, efforts. It is for this reason that I held her metrical and poetic instruments to be indicatively related to the basic trouble with the story. T h e lyric poem and the short story, though both are short and the story may well carry a touch of poetry, are in one respect sharply different, sharply clashing forms. It might be said that the lyric is nothing unless it is honestly subjective, but that the story is nothing unless even the author's conception of it — not to mention selection and management of content — is objective. T h e point is evident just here, in Miss Livesay's treatment of Nature. T h e arbitrary, because inorganic and unintegrated, importance of autumn, the wind, the cold, and finally the rain is forced upon us exactly as those words about the sin of cutting flowers were forced out of Jake's mouth. W e don't believe it. Going a little deeper, what is the impact on one another of these people? W e can see reaction between Lawrence and Charlotte, Celia and John, Anna and Jim. But which of these, or what other impact and reaction, does the author want us to feel is the domi-

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nating matter of the story? The group, the household, perhaps? I have tried to make that the answer, but I can arrive only at the conclusion that here the group-as-protagonist is not enough. All I can find the author saying is "I see these people more clearly than they see themselves," and to that there is a distressing but necessary response: " W e readers see them as clearly as you do, but much sooner than you do, and we therefore tire of them sooner." Perhaps the heart of the matter lies in the first, most fundamental question of all: does this narrative move in one direction to say one thing? If it does, I for one cannot follow the line of movement or hear what has been said. I see no reason why emotional conflict should occur on this particular day; obviously these people have been living together for some time, yet today is no culmination of long, minor abrasive forces; today seems to have no roots in the past. There is minor character development during the day, but no one major development. The story ends in doubt, too, with no conjecturable future. The possibly incestuous hint carried by the closing situation, by the behavior of Lawrence and Celia, but especially by that unhappy word "warningly," applied to the sound of rain (warning whom we can't know, so scrambled has been the telling method) — all this is a good deal less than satisfactory as conveyor of theme. About the most it can do is suggest a story to which what we have read so far is only a beginning, a story not yet written. In short, " T h e Glass House" has characters, a place, and action. It has a sequential but no consequential pattern; it has facts but no fiction. There is in it no discernible central, over-all idea or theme. W e must regretfully conclude that what this glass house chiefly reveals is the content of the author's mind as she picks over the material, trying this and that, in search of a story that finally she does not write. Content of the writer is the first imperative of good fiction. What he remembers, what he observes as his experience continues, the cast and temper of his mind and his imagination — these, though important, are not quite enough. It is his ability to coordinate experience with, and subordinate experience to, an idea — a general truth, here to be couched in dramatic terms — in short, his ability to create a story, that he simply cannot do without. And, although

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content cannot successfully be even self-prescribed, it certainly can be shaped and managed, with an eye on the reader and an understanding of the opportunities and limitations of six factors of management now to be discussed and illustrated.

IX. PLAUSIBILITY THE WORD "PLAUSIBLE," WHICH BY DERIVATION

FROM

the same Latin primitive as that of "plaudit" once meant simply praiseworthy, now usually denotes only an apparent quality or degree of reasonableness, hence probably suspect, specious, or deceptive. The negative form "implausible," on the contrary, still conveys the opposite of the original meaning of "plausible": untrustworthy or, most commonly, improbable. Semanticists might helpfully determine whether ironic usage, as in the case of "likely" (A likely story!), has not influenced this change. It hits us very nearly. In short fiction, to garble Hamlet's words, plausibility is more dishonored in the breach than honored in the observance. We must hark back to something like the early meaning here, since no other word will quite do. This may be no harm. Though praiseworthy, plausibility is only the mechanical part of convincingness, acquiring the reader's more or less willing suspension of disbelief while he reads the story — a small part indeed of the whole area of management of content. It contributes little to his complete emotional engagement. Present, it often is ignored or unrecognized by the reader, and at best is taken for granted; only when incomplete or absent does its loss raise a murmur of protest that may become a howl. This factor is as essential as the letters of the alphabet, but like them is of slight autonomous potency. A short story ever so plausible, if lacking the support and impetus of more positive, more inclusive, higher-voltage factors, will not only be unconvincing but will go, after a page or two, unread. Still, plausibility must be there. It is the blocking back, the unsung hero of a team. It is the rivets in the hull below the water line of a ship. It is the foundation of the house of story content, and it had better not be built of sand. In commenting on "The Glass House" I held that it had facts but no fiction. The statement can now be clarified. As I see it, first, every story is based on facts, uses facts, in the perhaps philosophi-

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cally loose but most commonly agreed meaning of that word — observed phenomena, presumably true in the sense of existent, about life on earth (to use examples from the story just cited, asters blooming in the fall, cobwebs in room corners, wind slamming doors, untended fire dying) — facts with which the reader, whether or not he has actually shared the experience that brought them to light, probably cannot but agree; but, second, as I see it, so based as a matter of course, a good story moves on to synthesize and unify and symbolically energize its facts into fiction: the dramatic (i.e., indirect, nonexpository) demonstration, by one specific and concrete instance, of a larger, more general, and often abstract fact or truth (i.e., the story idea) about human nature, even the knowledge of the existence of which being not necessarily shared by the reader, with the validity of which, therefore, unless measures have been taken to forestall all reasonable doubts and objections on any grounds whatever, the reader is more than likely flatly to disagree. If the way I see this complex synthesis is sound, other factors than plausibility (to be discussed and illustrated in action later) bear on and energize the creation of what above is called the fiction. Plausibility is mainly concerned with the facts. Consider a quasi-algebraic equation: the clear + the credible = X. A n y quest for clarity leads to the tangled roots of prose. Ours is by nature a language far from lucid. For the most part uninflected, its unwieldy vocabulary rapidly gaining by accretion from many tongues as well as by its own inventiveness, and losing by casual discard almost as fast, its spelling phonetically a mess, its grammar subject to change without notice, its syntactical and rhetorical principles loose and vagrant, English is flexible to a fault and as hard to pin down as a balloon jib in a squall. In fiction, even postJoyce and post-Stein, a few solid grips are still to be had, if they are caught and held with discretion. T h e following list is tentative: Sentences no longer than needful or fit but varied in length and in pattern to avoid distraction by mannerism from the matter to be expressed. Short words preferred to long, familiar to unfamiliar, plain to ornate, native to foreign — except that all preferences may be altered by the needs of characterization. Paragraph structure

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catch-as-catch-can, with two basic holds useful: first, paragraphs being the milestones of continuity, lay out the course that allows for acceleration toward the end but indicates an approximate equidistance between milestones in passage of time — no stopovers and no leaps; and, second, as a new speech in dialogue usually requires a new paragraph, let what the speaker does, thinks, how he looks, or how he speaks appear just before, during, or just after his speech in the same paragraph as his spoken words, not in the paragraph preceding or following, jumbled up with the speech, appearance, behavior of others. Agreement of subject with verb. B y each pronoun (except in idioms, such as it rains, it dawned on me, it seems) unmistakable reference to a single, agreeing-in-number antecedent substantive in the immediately preceding context (not to be taken as advice to avoid pronouns, substituting pseudosynonymous nouns: result journalese). Close contiguity of a modifier of any sort to whatever is modified. Conciseness by tight meaning and by excision of superfluous, often adjectival or adverbial, excessive in degree, Fancy Dan, or vague words. Constant utterance by specific and concrete detail, in so far as possible unique in application and without embellishment of expression, rather than by generality or abstraction. But all of these, as was said above, qualified and conditioned and shaded by the particular job at hand, by the individual personalities to be represented, by the telling method chosen, by the characteristic spoken language of the participants and their thought processes, and by the nature and tone — light or grave, naive or sophisticated, simple or abstruse — of the idea to be demonstrated. For all adjuncts and aims of clarity, the listening ear and the seeing eye best the latest dictionary. Words are greased pigs running on ice. You have not only to catch them but to hold and pass them on to someone who perhaps never cared much for pork, and to see that again they are grasped, still alive. A writing man comes to fear words almost as much as he loves them. T h e y are at once his joy and his despair. Of them as carriers of unaltered meaning he can never be quite sure; and the more he writes, and the more words he knows, and the wider and deeper grows his experience to be verbally passed on — the harder his task becomes. This is fundamental but elementary; we must get beyond a First

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Reader. In fiction, clarity is literal only at its lowest level. A story reader, though he has a taste for daydreaming, is not trying and will not try very hard to learn anything; his intention is by and large intellectually weaker than that of the learner, if, potentially, emotionally much stronger. All unaware of the greased pig writhing in his slack arms, he must be informed of (that is, taught) certain facts in themselves possibly as dull as animal husbandry, yet essential to his mere comprehension of — to say nothing of his agreement with — the forthcoming fiction; and this while he is to be synchronously and cumulatively perked up, excited, by some means or other charmed and beguiled. T o pass quickly and surely beyond that perilous informing stage and reach firmer ground, everything to be set down — and the less, in comparison with all that might be set down, the better — should be, first, integrated within the terms of the story (one character telling another, a character observing or hearing or feeling, a character thinking) and thus made to appear natural rather than openly and primarily informative; and, second, everything written should be instantly understandable, or at least instantly conjecturable — I mean at the very moment of reading, not a half-page or even a half-sentence later. What Mr. DeVoto has called "post-operative suspense," citing as example Faulkner's oblique, implicit semi-clarification, a hundred pages later, of who raped whom and how, in Sanctuary, is strictly for Mr. DeV., Mr. Faulkner, and the birds. In the short story, anyway, mystification is not clarity. T h e rule applies throughout, but application of it is the most exhausting at beginning and at end. Starting, there is so terribly much to tell. T h e situation alone, not to mention the chain reaction it sets off, rides us and weighs us down. The place alone — geographical, architectural, decorative, sociological, religious, political data swarm and buzz in the head. T h e protagonist alone . . . His motive . . . T h e obstacle . . . W e can't find the handle of the ball. Fifteen pages could be written (and have been) with no story so much as tickled into being. W e pine for the compact, neat clarity of "Hurrah for another happy day!" cried the Rover Boys, springing from their beds. Well, we haven't got it and don't want it, for other and sensible reasons. But this puerile yelp might lead somewhere. Come to think of it,

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most of the data above documenting place and person would be irrelevant to story; and such of it as is imperatively cogent must be of only secondary importance and can therefore be postponed. The Rover Boys move immediately. W e have first, to get the story moving, only to answer the questions Who? and Why? very briefly — that is, set down in narrative form according to a method tentatively chosen a person and a motive; that is, simply name him or her and show the presence of it — letting the answers to Where? and When? and How? be tucked in bit by bit as the chance offers. Even this sounds like a good deal. It is not, really, but if it seems so, pare it down further. Let there be very little told at first, but make that little of prime importance and unmistakably clear. The ending brings us to a worse pass. Here meaning must be clarified without usually being explicitly stated at all. If implication is either obscure or obvious, the whole laboriously built structure collapses. The canny writer begins with the end in mind and lets the story return to it; or, failing in that, along the way searches for the way to say it without saying it, and with luck stumbles on it, or waits and still searches, and sometimes gives up and turns to some other notion — whereupon, without warning, up come the very words, which maybe lay in his unconscious all the time, needing only a shift of his intention or a slackening off of his too-anxious concentration to rise and demand they be written. This may explain why a writer, alone and presumably at work though motionless for hours, may suddenly yell like a catamount and start clicking. Curious neighbors may tap their heads, his wife may sigh, but only the natural has happened. He can't explain it. He has lit on a way to be clear without being too clear. What is credible and what is not? Here is a cloudy region, not well explored. T o one reader the unassailably credible may be to another ignorance or deliberate falsehood. In a genuinely funny story, much that would be incredible otherwhere may pass as within belief. A fantasy is not meant to be literally believed; yet, so long as its allegorical validity hovers over it and so long as it keeps faith with its own terms and limitations, it is believed. With these exceptions and qualifications taken into account, even, the most we can say is this: a fact hitherto unknown, an act by a character,

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or an event occurring beyond a character's volition or control is generally accepted by readers as credible, or suspected by them, weakening the illusion of reality, or flatly rejected as incredible, smashing illusion, according to conditions subject at best to approximation, never to any fixed rule. Yet, in view of the penalty, credibility is to be aimed at and striven for by every means available and suitable to story telling. In the area of behavior and action, w e know that readers' hopes and sympathies, dextrously inspired, play an important part in their acceptance of what would otherwise be hard to swallow; that readers knowing little or nothing of psychology will take without a doubt what is psychologically sound and carefully motivated by antecedent, perhaps oblique, reference; and that an external event, no matter how fortuitous or coincidental, if recorded early and without the assumption of any great motive force in story line or structure — I mean, if nothing much hangs on it — will be equally acceptable as within the limits of credibility. W e know these things because we have read and believed dozens of short stories that operate under these or similar conditions: Faulkner's " A Rose for Emily," * John Collier's "De Mortuis . . ." t and even Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis," t a fantasy, are outstanding exemplars. Beyond such generalities (and of course every story we write takes us far beyond) we must grope in all but darkness, feeling for holds, peering ahead to try to avoid disaster, and counting ourselves lucky if something or other that we in our gullible creative haze took for gospel is not by some captious amateur-encyclopedist given the lie. About all we can do is take precautions. For other reasons, but for this one especially, we naturally use as material only such personal characteristics and features, such places, such motives and consequent actions as we know well by experience or can get to know well. W e check and recheck used facts as elementary as phases of the moon, the grip of a Stillson wrench, or how a bowline is tied. W e shun the exceptional, the marvelous, fortuitous, or coincidental — no matter if it is factually true, especially if it •From These 13 (Random House). tFrom 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker (Simon and Schuster). tFrom A Quarto of Modern Literature (Scribners).

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is factually true — unless such matter is so unimportant that the story could occur without it, in which case it may well be deleted as extraneous anyway. For the truth we are after, partly to be reached by credible accuracy to physical and metaphysical law, though based on multitudinous small facts, must rise above fact and be ultimately as plain and unremarkable as the nose on our face. "This," we say cautiously, and the reader agrees; "plus this," we say, the reader if our luck holds still agreeing; "causes this" we say — and lie low, hoping f o r the best. Agreement with this final and over-all truth will be determined by the reader's understanding, often arbitrary or incomplete, and his application of a loose, never coded, and never to be coded law of averages. If, pinned down to answer (a ridiculous hypothesis!), he concedes that under all the circumstances involved and set forth, in a majority of cases (as if there could be more than one, to our way of thinking!) the story might just so have happened, with that generous concession we must be content. Thus, as I began by remarking, we have to consider plausibility as a somewhat paltry and negative — though necessary — factor. But if that derogatory taint, that suspicion of deception in its meaning, be ignored, we shall find the equation will prove: the clear and the credible create plausibility. N o honest writer can deny a justifiable pride in not being charged with dishonesty.

T H E INVADERS* by Robie Macauley L I K E bright figures on a poster they suddenly appeared at the top of the stairway, outlined against the sky. He was dark and she

* Reprinted from Tomorrow by permission of the author.

(copyright, 1950, by Garrett Publications, Inc.),

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was blond as the summer morning around her, a tall, easy-standing girl, deerlike, trim, and nordic-faced as any printed model on a fashion page. She wore a fire-colored playsuit belted with white, blue sandals, and she carried a basket on her arm. She could not resist raising the other arm just as they reached the dune edge, as if she were demanding to be photographed by some ready camera, ever prepared for her newest step or gesture. "Oh, how glorious!" she said. He laid down the things he had been carrying, and together they stood and looked. That early June had been racked with storms and filled with an overplenty of rain. The doors and windows of the cottages to the right and left of them on the dune and farther back in the woods were still blind with nailed-up boards or shutters and, driving along the road to the shore, they had met no one, because it was nearly the first day of real summer weather we had that year. The dune was tall and it was as if they looked from a high theater balcony down onto a tremendous vacant stage. Over the slightly curved shoreline the very small waves folded themselves gently while the whole expanse of water out to the far horizon glistened like a sheet of stretched blue silk. "We have it all to ourselves," he said. "That's fine." She made a half-circle sweep with her arm. "Is that all it means to you? Look, Gib, doesn't it suggest something? I mean, doesn't it suggest something more than just that to you?" He had decided to pick up their things again and had managed to get most of them into his arms. "Yes, it's a nice view," he said, "but I've seen it lots of times before." "Not that. Don't you see what I mean? I mean it's like our life together after we got married — no one has been there before; it's all ours to do with what we please." "I suppose so," he said, starting down the stairs. "But I hope it won't be as empty as all that." "Now you're being nasty, Gib." "No, I wasn't. Now look out for these stairs. They're rotten and one good shake would knock them down." "I wish you wouldn't snub me like that. Sometimes I think you don't appreciate things the way I do."

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"I'm just busy with all this gear," he said. She followed him down the steep stairs, and when they got to the level of the beach they went directly down to within five yards of the water. As he laid their blanket out on the sand and put their surfboard, picnic basket, and towels to one side, she stripped off the red garment; underneath it she had a bathing suit that shone green like the water in a quiet shoal. They lay down flat in the sun for a while and watched two clouds that swam like lonely white fish in the sky. He watched them for a long time as they glided through the airy blue pool and out of sight. He closed his eyes, but after a few minutes he awoke with the feeling of lying in a bath of warm honey. The sun had risen higher and it seemed to be nearly noon. She lay on her back and he could see that she was now asleep. T o his eyes she was like the elegant landscape of some familiar province as he lay there barely breathing. Sitting, he looked down on her as an aviator might look down on his own country and recognize the gentle heights, the rolling plains, and the symmetrically built town of her face. He closed his eyes and lay back again. A familiar country? Yes, something like that. When he had asked her to marry him he was not quite so aware of the borders and confines, he thought drowsily. Past the country club on one side, the suburban home on another, the good schools, the parties, the familiar names, was an unexplored wilderness, a wild Ireland beyond the pale. There was a certain dark frontier farther than which one could not go. As he fell asleep again he dreamed about riding a bicycle around an enclosed track with no exit. In time she awoke, and she awakened him by tickling his ribs and kissing him on the forehead. "Shall we go swimming now?" While they were dozing a brisker wind had come up, stirring the surface of the water into rough little whitecaps that broke on the shallows about a hundred feet out. He picked up the surfboard and she followed him to the edge of the beach. Janet was somewhat afraid of the water. She had explained it by saying that someone had pushed her into a deep place once when she was a child and she had nearly drowned. She always asked a hundred ques-

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tions to reassure herself before she finally put her foot in. Is it cold? It looks terribly cold, doesn't it? Do you think there's any undertow today? N o w let's not go too far out, shall we? It is freezing, isn't it? She followed by inches; he was already pushing the white board through the waves toward the spot where the breakers curled over. If you took the right moment and jumped on the board just ahead of a breaking wave it would carry you on the crest nearly to shore. He showed her how. A wave rolled toward them, bigger than any of the others. " N o w ! " he said, and boosted her onto the board. She slithered her body until she got firmly settled and grasped the handholds at the side. He swung the front end around a little so the wave would catch her evenly. It was almost on them. "Hold tight!" he yelled, and dived beneath the water. As long as his breath held out he swam beneath the surface. The ridged sand of the bottom slid under his hands and a colder current knifed along his backbone. It was quiet here; the water scarcely seemed to move. He opened his eyes and thought that fish swimming in this green silence would never realize the dash and fury of the surface. But he preferred the waves. He put his hands flat on the sand and gave himself a push that plunged him up and into the air again. He looked for her. But he had got turned around in swimming under water and he was facing down the beach. H e was suddenly aware that the beach was no longer empty. He tossed his head to throw the water out of his eyes and began a slow sidestroke. There were two figures on the beach, two men walking along the edge of the sand about a quarter of a mile away. They were not wearing swimming suits, they were fully dressed, and, though close to the shore line, they were not wading. They walked along slowly side by side as if going down a city street. H e caught the glint of the sun on skin and then he realized that one was black. He had only a minute to wonder about them because in the next he heard Janet calling to him, "Hi! It got away from me, Gib." She was floundering in the shallows where the wave had carried her and trying to stand up in the riptide. She got up and waved

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to him. In the tossing water he could see the white back of the surfboard being carried down shore. It was about halfway between himself and the two men walking along the beach. Then she saw them. She slowly lowered her arm, and even at this distance he could feel her astonishment. Not that there was anything odd about other people on the beach — it was usually crowded this time of year — or that there was anything particularly strange about these two, but they had become so accustomed in the last few hours of thinking of themselves as the only two people in the world, had so accepted and enjoyed their isolation, that anybody's coming would be a shock. He planned to remark something about Crusoe and Friday when he came up with her. But now he had to swim for the board and it was getting farther and farther away. He went as fast as he could, but before he had gone very far he hoped that the two men had sighted it. He hadn't noticed before how strong the downshore current was. It seemed to push him along, but the board was traveling faster. They stopped, and one of them stooped and rolled up his trousers legs. He was coming out into the water now and Gib could see him lifting the board up. Then they came on down the beach at the same pace toward the spot on shore where Janet was standing. Both of them had their arms hooked over the board. He reached the shallow water and stood up; when he got to the shore they were just handing the surfboard to Janet. "Thanks," she said with a smile. "It knocked me over and ran away." They didn't smile in return. "O.K., lady," the white one said. "It's O.K." They were not men, but boys. They both seemed to be about sixteen or seventeen, though they were short, shorter than Janet. He took Janet's arm and they went up and sat on the blanket and lighted cigarettes. The boys stood and stared at the surfboard which lay near the water where she had dropped it. They turned it over and looked at the other side. Evidently it was sandy because they scooped up water in their hands and tried to wash it off. "That's O.K.," Gib said. "It'll be all right." The boys came up and sat down carefully, about four yards away from them. The white one had skin the color of skim milk. He was either

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completely and prematurely bald or else his head had been closely shaven recently. He had a small bunched face with sharp features that reminded Gib of some kind of tool, a monkey wrench, perhaps. The other one had closecut hair, too, and a flat face like an imprint in some thick, warm tar. They sat close together, arms folded over their knees, and occasionally seemed to give each other a slight push or nudge, like a signal. They were wearing high bootlike shoes, which they had put aside on the sand, but that was the only way they had prepared for the beach. Their shirts and trousers were made of similar gray stuff and the pants legs of the one who had gone after the surfboard were black from being wet. Except for the slight movement of shoulders or elbows, they sat very quietly, gazing at Janet and Gib. Gib felt that he had to say something. "Where you fellows from?" he asked. "Flint," said the colored boy. The other one said something to Gib. It was a strange accent, Polish, he thought, and the words were run together. "We come up to the beach, we hitched up for the day," was what it sounded like. It might be a speech impediment, Gib wasn't sure. "Aren't you going in swimming?" "No, we ain't going in swimming." This was the colored boy and, though the words sounded unfriendly, the tone was soft and meaningless. "We ain't got no suits," he finally said. They asked about the surfboard. It was a neat board, they said. They had never heard of anything like that. Carried the lady right into shore. After that no one said anything for a while. Janet had been rubbing suntan lotion on her shoulders, but when he started to light a cigarette, she took him quickly by the arm. "Let's go back in the water," she said, and ran into the waves, still pulling her rubber cap over her ears. She was ahead of him all the way out to the sandbar where the waves broke. They dived through one together and when they came up she said, "Listen, I wanted to talk to you. What do those two want?"

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In the trough of the wave before the next one came they stood and looked back to the shore. The two figures had moved; they were a few feet out in the water pushing the surfboard around between them. They were being careful not to let it get away. The next wave slapped the swimmers before they knew it; it seemed to break just behind their ears, rush over them, and pull them violently toward shore. When they emerged, she took his arm with both hands. "They're up to something, I know it. Did you notice their clothes? They look as if they'd run away from a reformatory." Her fingers gripped harder against his skin and her voice was drawn and uneasy. He was a little dismayed by her show of nerves. "Well," he said, "I think it's obvious that they think we're in their way. They came up here to go swimming. They haven't any suits and they can't swim naked until we go away." "Maybe you're right," she said doubtfully, "but they give me the shivers anyway. They don't seem like boys, do they? There's something awfully grim about them." "Forget it," he said, pretending to duck her. "We'll move our things up the beach and eat lunch. They probably won't stick around long if we ignore them." He dived over the next wave and they started for shore. A little compunction, a little guilt troubled him over his compromise with her fears. The boys had seemed only somewhat lost and lonely to him. If they lived in a crowded tenement, as he supposed, this stretch of empty sand and empty water must bewilder them more than he could understand. But he forgot about that as he raced her to the beach. They did as he had said. The boys, now sitting close together in the same spot, watched their movements of gathering their things and going off without any question. They were still sitting there when Janet and Gib got out of sight around a place where the beach narrowed and the dune came close to the water. " W e might have offered them a sandwich," he said as they were eating. She shook her head. "It was better not to. We'd have them around like flies all afternoon."

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After they had finished eating they lay still on the blanket again, letting the sun cook them. He drifted again into the dozing state, dangling between real sleep and real wakefulness. Suddenly he was disturbed. It was nothing more than a momentary change in the light or the air, as if a shadow had passed across the sun. He felt that he must open his eyes, wake up. Slowly he did. They were sitting there less than ten feet away, staring silently at his face. "What do you want?" he asked, and sat up. They sat together just as before, one head dazzlingly black in the sun, close to the naked blue-white one. He felt that she was stirring on the blanket, and in a minute she would see them too. It seemed impossible to explain their strange insistence, this speechless patience, in his own terms. She would be frightened when she saw them here again and a little of her panic would take hold of him, he knew — not entirely, but just a little more, and he was afraid of it. He spoke slowly. "You fellows must be hungry?" He waited for an answer, but all he saw was a minute movement as if they had both at the same time shifted a little nearer the blanket. "Would you like a couple of sandwiches? W e have some left over." They were silent. He went to the picnic basket on hands and knees, taking care not to disturb her. He reached in and took out the leftover sandwiches, still wrapped in wax paper. The white boy extended his hand and took them. Gib was aware that she was awake now and listening. " W h y don't you go away somewhere and eat them?" For a minute he was not sure that they would pay any attention. Finally they rose slowly and went about twenty yards away; then they sat down again. They began to unwrap the sandwiches. "Get rid of them," she whispered. "They're planning something, Gib, I know it. They're after us." Her whisper was hysterical; he could see a white bloodless band running across her cheeks beneath the tanned surface. "I can tell." "Nonsense," he whispered back, but the very violence of her exaggeration shook him. "They have criminal faces," she said. " N o w don't be silly, Janet. They haven't done a thing. They're pests, sure, but that doesn't mean they're up to anything." But the

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confidence had gone out of his words and he was aware of an angry pulsing under his ribs. "By God, if I thought so . . ." he said. "Look!" she whispered sharply. They had stood up, dropping their sandwiches in the sand, and were looking at some spot down the beach, near the edge of the water. "What is it?" she asked. They could not tell. Gib got up on his knees to see. The two boys were going forward in an awkward stalk. They both stopped to gather something and then broke into a trot. Gib saw what it was. There were five or six sandpipers hopping in their delicate spinsterish fashion along the edge of the shore. The boys were running at them now and the birds took alarm. The boys stopped and began to throw the stones they had picked up as the frightened birds scattered on the beach or began to fly out over the water. One of the attackers gave a quick cut-off laugh and then they were running down to the edge of the water. "They're coming back!" she said. They stood looking down at Gib and Janet. The colored one laid the sandpiper on the ground as if it were an offering or a prophecy. Neither of them said anything yet; the colored boy smoothed the dead feathers with his hand and he smiled as he did so. When he smiled, Janet screamed. "Get out of here!" The words shot out of her mouth. "Get out of here and leave us alone. You've bothered us enough today. We don't want you, understand? We don't want you; you can go wherever you're going and take your bird with you. Go away!" Gib realized that he had taken hold of her hand and that his other hand was clenched in a fist. His breath was pumping; he knew he was hers. They were undecided and they both kept glancing down at the bird as if they expected it to tell them something. The colored boy made some kind of gesture with his open hand in front of him, the palm showing pink in the center. At last he said, "We . . . I don't know. We ain't bothering you." "Get out of here," Gib said. Now he was sure of himself. "We don't want you." The white boy sat down. Janet's face was white now; it didn't seem pretty any longer. She was gathering up their things and with no more words Gib helped

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her. They put everything together and started down the beach, walking close to the water so that they could move faster on the hard sand. "Are they?" she asked after a while. He had kept glancing back. "Yes," he said. The stairway was nearer; they had only about fifty yards to go. He looked back again. "They're about a hundred feet behind us," he said. They got to the bottom of the stairs and she started to climb, panting from the exertion. He went a little more slowly, shifting the things in his arms so that he might drop them easily. He looked back and saw that the two were close behind them. They were standing at the foot of the stairs now. Their faces were raised toward him, and it seemed to him for a moment that they looked only puzzled and curious. The colored boy stood a few paces in front of the other with his hands dropped by his sides. Suddenly he made that odd empty gesture with the palm of his hand and Gib paused near the top of the stairway. But it was the white boy who spoke in his queer accent. His voice was windy and panting. "Mister," he said, "give us a lift out to the highway?" "No!" she said from behind him. "Hurry, Gib, hurry and for God's sake watch out." Her voice had risen to the pitch of a bird's shrill, dying scream. "Watch out!" Gib ran up the last few steps. He could see the boys stand there for a moment and then they came forward and began to climb the stairs. He saw the black hand and the white hand clenched on the railing. "Gib!" He threw the blanket and the surfboard on the ground and faced around. He watched them climb until they were less than ten feet below him. "Gib!" she whispered. They were close. He knew what he had to do from the tone of her biting whisper. He wrenched at one of the 2 x 4 railings and the rotted thing came away with the pull. He saw the two faces, one black, one white, tottering in front of him. He swung the club with all his force, and he saw the whole rickety structure give way. At the moment the blood splashed on his hand, the stairway fell. It

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seemed to burst into chunks and fragments of wood and avalanche down the steep dune. In the tangle of wood and sand and bodies he could see a raised black hand, open in the air with a pink spot showing in the center of the palm.

The opening of "The Invaders" seems technically uncertain, all the hard work that went into it showing through for lack of clear vision. But the reader is made aware very early that a story is imminent — by the title, by the likelihood of a cause-and-effect interplay of personality implicit in the sharp contrast of character, even before the boys appear; and if he continues reading he will not be disappointed. Small harm is done by opening objectively a story all the rest of which is to be channeled through the sense impressions, thoughts, and emotions (that is, by the stream of experience) of one of its characters; but this opening, though an external shot of both persons and scene, is not really objective. It is colored and confused by what must be the author's rhetoric: by "like bright figures on a poster" leading to Janet's theatrical gesture of the up-raised arm "demanding to be photographed by some ready camera," not in keeping with her personality as later revealed; by the water "glistened like a sheet of stretched blue silk" and "two clouds that swam like lonely white fish in the sky" — these flourishes seeming scarcely worth the effort; and as we get on, especially by the inadvertently ludicrous simile "he looked down on her as an aviator might look down on his own country," etc., which (now at last in Gib's stream of experience) we understand was intended to lead up to the familiar middle-class background of these two people, the "unexplored wilderness" in Janet's character beyond, and Gib's dream "about riding a bicycle around an enclosed track with no exit," but which is undermined by the doubt, first, whether Gib the literal, slow-thinking good guy would regard his girl's body as "the elegant landscape of some familiar province," and, second, whether any man would. Style bloats these paragraphs.

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The opening is muddled further by obscurity and an unnoticed pothole. "The top of the stairway, outlined against the sky" is of course perfectly all right later, when "dune edge," "cottages to the right and left of them," and "road to the shore" have sunk in, but is far from clear at the moment of reading, partly because the author tried to cram too much into his first sentence. W e see and commend his natural desire to make this first picture of the couple mock-heroic, in order to serve, by its false air of discovery and conquest, as preparation for, by contrast with, their disastrous flight at the end; but the fact is, too much unclarity and irrelevance stand in the way of his achieving his purpose. It seems like sublety sought for its own sake, which often comes to grief. Particularly, the "we" at the end of the fourth paragraph baffles and distracts the reader. It is none other than the first person plural of an unidentified witness, and this being its only occurrence, it throws all the rest of the telling out of focus. Are we to understand that some person who knows Gib and Janet is peeking at them through the dune grass, guessing at Gib's thoughts, looking under water at him, and so dreadfully on to the end? If not, just how does this story reach us? Again the author has made himself visible by implication. That pronoun is the more unfortunate for the fact that the central theme and its strong, clear indication of the future (Gib chained to Janet for life) are established and depend upon the very circumstance, so logically presented, that nobody but those two young people would ever know that Gib or anyone else swung the piece of railing at the intruders. Seldom indeed has the semblance of accidental death or serious injury been so convincingly offered as here by the evidence that remained after Gib drove his car away. The "we," if it happens to be remembered, blurs this certainty and leaves the future in doubt, marring an otherwise handsome achievement. The trouble is a familiar one, and it can be avoided or remedied. Here, plainly, the author was searching for the right telling method even as he worked over the opening paragraphs. He found it. But then, instead of going back and rewriting the opening to fit it, cleaning out not only his own visibly propulsive efforts but everything not seen, heard, felt, or thought by Gib, and putting what he did set down in Gib's characteristic language — instead,

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perhaps fearing he would lose the story if he waited, he went on. B y the time he had reached the end, the beginning had jelled in his mind; he was worn out, as the writer of any good story has every right to be, and could no longer see his opening in perspective, through a reader's eyes. In spite of these difficulties, the beginning of the story accomplishes two valuable intentions. First, by talk and action it allows the two chief characters to demonstrate themselves and their contrasting temperaments to the reader, naturally and without seeming to inform; and, second, with Gib's line, " N o w look out for these stairs. They're rotten and one good shake would knock them down" — it provides solid yet unobtrusive preparation for the crash at the end. Both, each in its own way, work for the creation of the necessary but unsung, often unnoticed, factor of plausibility. The story is to be made plausible by physical laws and by psychological phenomena. Note the facts supporting this preparation and sort them into the two categories: Gib knows the place ("I've seen it lots of times before") and the stairs, and he is precisely the sort of person — practical-minded, literal, a bit tacit u r n — who knows what he is talking about and who talks only about what he knows. Note the subtler support of inconspicuous preparation afforded by management of the material in such a way that the reader takes the decrepitude of the stairway in other reference (Janet's safety) than that finally employed. It is by such gentle, adroit nudging in both areas, physical and psychological, that the author forestalls objection to the crash as fortuitous. Just before the crash, more exciting material having intervened, the reader has quite forgotten Gib's remark about those rotten timbers; when it occurs, in a flash he remembers and is content. ( W e shall have another look at this factor of management under the heading of surprise.) Testing the author's physical facts for clarity and credibility, we can hardly help remarking three more, minor weak spots in the course of the story, all of them having to do with his setting. "Riptide," "Flint," and the sandpiper episode: each stopped me short, momentarily, and I am still puzzled by them. T o anybody brought up on the Atlantic seaboard and familiar with tidal movements on East and West coasts, a rip or riptide is the

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choppy turbulence caused by the opposition of two currents, or by waves wind-driven against the tide. It is a common sight off the mouth of any river or in some narrow channel between an island and the mainland. Webster so defines the words. In this meaning, it would seem improbable that the balance of someone getting to her feet after swimming could be threatened, as Gib thinks Janet's is, by the equally improbable occurrence of a riptide very close inshore. Perhaps the ebb of the wave that carried Janet to the beach, the undertow, is meant; but that would be the result of sizable surf, not of the "rough little whitecaps" mentioned previously. Then too, this mysterious riptide — a true rip holds floating objects within its area — sweeps the surfboard stright "down shore." Taking "riptide" to mean simply current, as we must, we are confronted by a pair of inconsistencies, each also inconsistent with itself: "little whitecaps" suddenly becoming breakers mounting and crashing with enough force to make a girl's standing up in the shallows difficult; and a current running close along, parallel to, the shore, of enough strength to overcome the force of the surf tending to throw the surfboard aground. But this downshore current, conquering surf all the way, not only keeps the surfboard afloat but sends it along faster than Gib, a good swimmer, can swim with the current to help him. I couldn't believe it. Part of my trouble was that I thought all along this was seashore. Now Flint appears. There may be many Flints, but the one best known is in southeastern Michigan. Without any great knowledge of the Great Lakes, many readers must have heard or read of abrupt strong winds, even of swift currents and a perceptible tide in that region. If a doubt persists, perhaps many of them will give the author the benefit of it and hurry on. Yet I can't help suggesting— the avoidance of any doubt is so simple — that some small word or phrase got in early would have set the scene precisely for Easterner or Far Westerner, opened the mind to agreement with the behavior of elements hitherto unfamiliar, and saved the possibility of stopped reading and reader befuddlement. It is through such broadening, by minute care, of readers' acceptance of the facts of, and thus continued engagement in, the story that a setting limited by local ground rules (or wind and water rules) becomes nationally and even internationally well known, and the

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accurately specific is made an instrument in creating the universal. As for the sandpipers, these little birds are briefly described, and graphically too ("spinsterish" is perfect), with one detail excepted: for all I know, Great Lakes sandpipers may hop, although this manner of getting along the beach would seriously slow down the speed of possibly the most agile and elusive small waterfowl native to North America; certainly, all other varieties run, and run with a twinkling scurry of legs so swift that they blur even at close range. (Sparrows hop, robins sometimes hop and sometimes run.) Sandpipers are also exceedingly fast in flight, a flock of them skimming water or sand with dizzy dips and rises and swoops here and there, a good deal like swifts, but always holding their group formation. The point is that if two city-bred boys armed with beach pebbles, were they ever so good marksmen, hit and killed one of these darting, swerving bits of bone and feathers with what must have been their first shot, the episode was an extraordinary piece of luck and something to marvel at rather than believe. Thus the incident loses plausibility, the dead bird validity as symbol or as motivation; Janet and Gib were as likely to be disgusted by the exhibition as to find it menacing. Pondering over this story, I have wondered whether all of its apparently slack regard for facts might have been, on the contrary, a deliberate mingling of actually widely opposed and remote topographical, marine meteorological, and ornithological details, in the mistaken belief that such procedure would make its application more general. One hardly need go far in such belief without discovering its fallacy, and I cannot think the author was misled by it. More probably the explanation is similar to that of his jumbled opening. He knew he had a good story in him, the knowledge deeply excited him, and he wanted above all things to get on with it, overlooking a few minor matters on which it was to be based, failing to check his facts. On the higher level of psychological phenomena and personal interaction, " T h e Invaders" is a prime example of the factor of plausibility. Nothing could be more carefully planned or more reasonable than the relationship between Janet and Gib, which is the central theme of the story. The author's understanding of human behavior, his ability to set up and hold a causal structure

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that moves naturally but inevitably along a single line toward demonstration of its idea, and his mastery of the demonstration itself make " T h e Invaders" wholly, if horribly, convincing. Even the first encounter with the two boys is a small work of art, their infiltration for a possibly hostile purpose being disguised by their willingness to help with the surfboard, by Janet's naive joke missing fire, and by the easygoing Gib actually trying to welcome the strangers by starting to talk. W e have come to like this Gib, but to some extent we see through him. W e know he is trapped, but not yet how completely and wretchedly he will be. Janet's timidity has been deftly prepared for when, before this, she went into the water. When this trait in her, reacting to the appearance, manner, and speech of the boys, becomes fear, as evidenced by her question to Gib, "What do those two want?" it seems inescapable that her fear should begin to work on and in him. And a page later he proves this by asking her question of the boys themselves, "What do you want?" Janet has to do little more prompting, although, being Janet, she keeps at him to the end of the story. (There is purpose here, too.) When she screams at sight of the dead bird in the boy's hand, Gib is already ripe to share her hysteria. Their flight begins as eerily yet as inexorably as the flight of moonlit dry leaves swept by an unfelt breeze. Every least detail meshes; the action strides to its climax and denouement with the effortless strength and emotional conviction of something that must be true. In sum we have here, almost unimpeded, a searching and disturbing study of fear — fear not as incubus to a single victim, but fear as disease, as spiritual and physical infection. Of great help to our understanding of the author's intention is the scrupulous equivocality of the boys' behavior. W e know at every moment of the story exactly how Gib stands with Janet, she with him. Of the boys we are never quite sure. Their motives may be almost wholly innocent throughout, or wholly vicious, or they may lie at some mixed stage between these two extremes. It is beautifully done, and with sound purpose, for of course Janet is just the sort to snatch at the worst possibility. Her fear creates Gib's. These grow and blossom into a certainty, now perhaps shared by the reader, of the presence of evil. (Evil is present, but not where you might think

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while reading.) The certainty, blown up and dinned into him by Janet, forces Gib into action that his own fear persuades him is defensive but which, just as possibly, might be a cowardly and brutal assault on the boys, whatever their motive. The shock of realization falls on us even as the stairway collapses and the boys are impaled and crushed. Nobody will ever know, we think in that instant. But here is the neatest, the most telling part of the whole structure — the projection of the story into its untold future. Macauley has done his work so well that we have to go on thinking. Gib, we unfailingly see — friendly, quiet, unselfish, reflective Gib will come to know. Soon he will get a clear light on this miserable experience; and it will lie heavy on him and plague and torture him indefinitely. (He had compunctions, we remember, about compromising with Janet's fears; he had a sense of guilt far back when she was first afraid.) We can't suppose for a moment that the engagement will be broken. The author has taken care of that, too. "He knew he was hers," even before their flight and his act of violence. Afterward, what Janet knows will bind Gib to her, again through fear. And even if he forgets, Janet will remind him. Janet will keep after him about this just as she kept after him to hurry, hurry, on their trip back to the car. She will put him in the role of hero at first, which for him will be bad because already he will have seen what sort of role he really played; and then later, as doubt of her own suspicion and of her part in the panic and flight begins to dawn on her, without implicating herself she will put Gib in another, less noble but truer role, which will be far worse. Growing bold under his physical protection, she will accuse him of being the one who was first afraid. In one way or another through the long years, Janet will bring it up, refer to it by a word or a look — their hideous secret — many times. Thus, from the moment he swung the railing, Gib is sentenced for life. It seems hard, he is so likable — carrying all the gear down and back, from beginning to end thinking only of this prize of his, this beautiful girl who loved him. Yet the sentence is just. We recognize a touch of the universal in Gib. Perhaps, like a good many other likable and unselfish young men, Gib actually doomed himself by an excess of passive virtue; perhaps, blinded by good looks and pretty clothes, he couldn't draw the line between service and servitude.

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A critic, of course, wants the moon. If only the author had done this or that, written it thus and so, he reflects, unsatisfied with anything less than what he considers perfection — and the greater the merits, the greater his discontent. In this instance, a critic had better think twice. Here is a story that magnificently survives its defects. If it were flawless, other writers could never learn.

X. S U S P E N S E IF THREE-VOICED PROSE COULD BE SCORED L I K E

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and simultaneously heard or read and understood, it would be easier to explain the interdependence and reciprocating force of plausibility, suspense, and surprise as factors in the management of shortstory content. The analogy alone suggests, if not tripartite equivalence, an approximate balance between two factors, with the third more in evidence as if carrying the air. Such a relationship is often found in the short story. " T h e Invaders," for instance, is somewhat lacking in clarity and credibility of fact; although the final collapse of the stairway was soundly prepared for, as a whole the story seems rather weak in basic, physical plausibility. Whether providential or intentional, the fact is, similarly, that with those stairs taken care of there was no great need for surprise, the end of the story being set ablaze inferentially by the reader's long, dismal look into Gib's future. But " T h e Invaders" creates and sustains a moderately strong, simple kind of suspense. This is the tone of the story; it would be the tune of the music. T o class a kind of suspense as simple is no disparagement. Although to create very strong and subtle suspense a writer must first conceive a person about whose fate the reader cares greatly, such a person and that sort of suspense were not wanted in "The Invaders" and would, in fact, have marred it. Gib seems exactly right: likable, but when you think him over there has been just enough tolerance, servility, or plain stupidity in his behavior to prevent the reader from going all out for him, to let the reader see that Gib got what he asked for. T o make him stronger in character, more intelligent, more appealing in any way, in order to lure the reader into unbearable anxiety over his predicament and horror at his fall (of which the falling stairway may be a symbol) from independence and self-respect, would have been, first, to set up a contradic-

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tion in terms (for how could anyone but Gib as he is have been taken in by Janet in the first place?); second, to make sentimentality or melodrama out of a story that here avoids both by clinging strictly to the cause-and-effect interaction of personality; and, third, to give poetic justice a punch in the eye. Yet since suspense and surprise have a special relationship, they should perhaps be studied in stories requiring these factors in greater amount and of more crucial importance than are to be found in "The Invaders." Suspense and surprise rest on plausibility, of course, like two children on the ends of a teeter; if the fulcrum isn't strong enough, they both fall. The special relationship that I mean exists between the weights of the two children, the relative strength of the two factors. Just as a marked difference in weight of the two children destroys balance and makes riding difficult, suspense too long drawn out enfeebles surprise, having given the reader a chance to foresee it; while surprise too sudden or carelessly motivated becomes shock that the reader won't believe and may laugh at. But equally weighted — just enough yet not too much of either — the two factors form about the neatest and prettiest coordinated arc the short story can describe. Within balance, both can be somewhat variable, and the aim is to adjust the strength of each to what seems natural to the material and theme, the relative depths and shallows of emotion, the violence or calm, logically conceived. Too much management, as bad as too little, becomes obvious manipulation, with inevitable impairment and possible fracture of the illusion of reality. Well adjusted, more felt than seen, suspense and surprise are uniquely potent in the short story, as exclusively its property as is immediate scene. They constitute its main design; there can be no letdown if the sequence increases tension to a single burst. It is not quite enough to say that suspense is the reader's emotional reaction (the curiosity-solicitude-hope-anxiety-terror synergy) to information withheld from him. It goes without saying that such withholding, if it is to produce any reaction better than curiosity-confusion-irritation-apathy-derision, must be integrated and reasonable. Arbitrary befuddlement of the reader by a mass of half-told implications, any one of which might be the key to the author's secret, is not suspense; at all times the reader should

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have a conjecturably sensible hypothesis, even if finally it proves to be wrong. And within the channel of the telling method, nothing should be withheld that the medium, personal or objective, would in the circumstances find accessible, be likely to think or speak of, or see, hear, and record. With these dangers avoided, much depends on the personality of the protagonist and the conditions of his problem or predicament. A character who can by his own perspicuity see, or whom the nature of the opposition has allowed to see, his fate or probable disaster overtaking him will exert a stronger pull on the reader's sympathy if he puts up a struggle than he would if he did not. Gib, blinded by love and inertia, thought he saw but saw not. All he knew was that he was Janet's; the knowledge deluded him into struggling against the wrong opposition, taking his real enemy with him, and swinging the railing to defend her. Here there was a slight pull on our sympathy quite early, as soon as we saw how likable and willing and tolerant Gib was. But the strong pull comes only after the story has ended, through our pity. ( W e have seen others blinded as Gib was, seen them suffer as he did and was going to.) A character, on the other hand, who exerts a strong pull at the very beginning and who sees his problem, his fate overtaking him, clearly, might reasonably struggle merely by taking to flight, leaving our sympathy undiminished — indeed, perhaps increasing it — through our fear for his safety. But what of a protagonist who, through no blindness or other deficiency in his personality, through circumstances quite outside his range of vision and beyond his ability to prevent, cannot see the disaster that the reader sees looming over him? Here is a situation very different from Gib's. The kind of suspense produced by it, since both pity and fear in the reader are wrung, may properly be termed complex; and if the protagonist's pull on the reader's sympathy is strong from start to finish, suspense so subtle can be almost overpowering. It is this sort that we shall see illustrated. Integrated and reasonable withholding of knowledge seems to create the desired synergy most naturally when the reader's slow acquisition of information he wants is exactly paced by a character's acquisition thereof; and when that character is a person

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cherished by the reader almost to the extent of an alter ego, a person about whose physical survival, or mental or physical well being, the reader has been made to care so deeply and intensely that for the time being the character is himself. A personal bond of such strength is indeed difficult to forge within the space of a short story, and we find it only rarely. Yet it makes a mark worth shooting at. Nothing much is lost by missing. A hit, even a chance hit, and the world is won. Then, in a short and disciplined form of writing Aristotle could hardly have dreamed of, two and a half millenniums after its conception, catharsis through pity and fear moves as strongly, as deeply, as ever; and regardless of story endings superficially called "happy" or "sad" really grips and shakes the reader. True, there are minor sources of suspense (perhaps they should have been discussed earlier) that seem to gainsay the supremacy, and in any event may add to the power, of this personal bond between reader and protagonist. Stark objectivity (we remember that the stream of experience of, say, an unemotional, somewhat inarticulate character can be almost objective in method), by its rigid selection and reluctant admission of a story detail-by-detail, may lend an independent force to suspense. And there is something about certain localities, conditions of weather and season — whether fog, bone-biting cold, the shattering heat of high noon; whether an emptied city, a shadow-peopled jungle, a ship becalmed or on her beam ends, a village street with only the window hangings slyly astir if you pass — there is something about place aptly dreamed and recalled (Stevenson called it, after Shakespeare, "miching mallecho") that, quite beyond the character or characters involved, makes the reader feel as did Kipling's child in bed awake at midnight that "everything is coming." But the main source is personal, as the main device is delay in telling. Suspense is as ancient as narrative in any form. Storytelling of all kinds — myth, folklore, epic, drama, long fiction (Anna Karenina is strongly yet delicately wrought of suspense in its subtlest form; Tess of the UUrbevilles and For Whom the Bell Tolls are overwrought and soggy with simpler varieties) and short fiction, from the ablest short stories to the pap found in pulp maga-

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zines and soap opera — can scarcely hope to exist for long without this factor of management. To many readers, many of them discriminating, it is the whole story. There seem, then, to be two chief types of suspense, each being subject to subdivision into two minor types whose only differentia is that between physical and psychological (i.e., mental-moral-spiritual) danger to the protagonist — often a faint distinction, since what menaces the body generally threatens the mind as well, and vice versa. Still, one should keep the distinction, no matter how faint, in view, if for no other reason than that of the constant necessity for thorough exploration of all the implications of one's material. It is by such study of the interexistence of mind and body that a story, for instance, of mere physical action may bloom into one in which such action, though present and effective, is revealed as the surface effect of a much deeper and more powerful conflict in the hidden stresses and pressures of individual — instead of type — characters. Compare almost any story by Marryat with almost any one by Melville or Conrad. The difference between the two chief types of suspense has been seen to be sharper, being essentially a difference in the relative positions, as to knowledge wanted but withheld, of author or teller, reader, and protagonist. The position of author or teller, of course, remains constant; he knows all, all the time. In the kind of suspense that has been called simple, the protagonist is permitted to share with the reader the knowledge of his danger; thus merely the outcome, whether disastrous or salving, is withheld as long as is naturally possible from both. To this shared ignorance about the outcome, in the kind of suspense that has been called complex (it has been related to the situation known as dramatic irony), is added the protagonist's ignorance of the very danger that threatens him, a knowledge of which is shared by the reader and the author or teller. A good short story often presents both kinds, moving from simple to complex for perhaps the stronger climax, or from complex to simple for swifter pace. One cannot help noting and regretting the disinclination, almost the abhorrence, shown lately for this factor of management by short-story writers of, presumably, the highest literary ideals. Is this distaste a symptom analogous to the modern composer's

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plunge beyond tonality, the poet's scorn for metrics, the painter's concern with nonobjectivism? Of course, there have always been rebels tö convention and there always should be (such people keep the pedants and die-hards on their toes), provided that the true cause of revolt is not merely a distaste for discipline and provided its result is demonstrably as good as — I don't insist that it improve on — the conventional. In short-story writers, often the true cause seems to be either laziness or fear of encroachment by readers or editors on their soi-disant inviolate egos. Strong suspense is very hard to create and sustain. A first step is submergence of the author's ego in his material.

A TRIP TO CZARDIS* by Edwin Cranberry I T WAS still dark in the pine woods when the two brothers awoke. But it was plain that day had come, and in a little while there would be no more stars. Day itself would be in the sky and they would be going along the road. Jim waked first, coming quickly out of sleep and sitting up in the bed to take fresh hold of the things in his head, starting them up again out of the corners of his mind where sleep had tucked them. Then he waked Daniel and they sat up together in the bed. Jim put his arm around his young brother, for the night had been dewy and cool with the swamp wind. Daniel shivered a little and whimpered, it being dark in the room and his baby concerns still on him somewhat, making sleep heavy on his mind and slow to give understanding its way. "Hit's the day, Dan'l. This day that's right here now, we are goen. You'll recollect it all in a minute." # First published in Forum, copyright 1932. Reprinted by permission of the publishers of Current History.

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"I recollect. W e are goen in the wagon to see papa " "Then hush and don't whine." "I were dreamen, Jim." "What dreamen did you have?" "I can't tell. But it were fearful what I dreamt." "All the way we are goen this time. W e won't stop at any places, but we will go all the way to Czardis to see papa. I never see such a place as Czardis." "I recollect the water tower " "Not in your own right, Dan'l. Hit's by my teilen it you see it in your mind." "And lemonade with ice in it I saw " "That too I seen and told to you." "Then I never seen it at all?" "Hit's me were there, Dan'l. I let you play like, but hit's me who went to Czardis. Yet I never till this day told half how much I see. There's sights I never told." They stopped talking, listening for their mother's stir in the kitchen. But the night stillness was unlifted. Daniel began to shiver again. "Hit's dark," he said. "Hit's your eyes stuck," Jim said. "Would you want me to drip a little water on your eyes?" "Oh!" cried the young one, pressing his face into his brother's side, "don't douse me, Jim, no more. The cold aches me." The other soothed him, holding him around the body. "You won't have e're chill or malarie ache to-day, Dan'l. Hit's a fair day " "I won't be cold?" "Hit's a bright day. I hear mournen doves starten a'ready. The sun will bake you warm. . . . Uncle Holly might buy us somethen new to eat in Czardis." "What would it be?" "Hit ain't decided yet. . . . He hasn't spoke. Hit might be somethen sweet. Maybe a candy ball fixed on to a rubber string." "A candy ball!" Daniel showed a stir of happiness. "Oh, Jim!" But it was a deceit of the imagination, making his eyes shine wist-

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fully; the grain of his flesh was against it. He settled into a stillness by himself. " M y stomach would retch it up, Jim. . . . I guess I couldn't eat it." "You might could keep a little down." " N o . . . I would bring it home and keep it. . . ." Their mother when they went to bed had laid a clean pair of pants and a waist for each on the chair. Jim crept out of bed and put on his clothes, then aided his brother on with his. They could not hear any noise in the kitchen, but hickory firewood burning in the kitchen stove worked a smell through the house, and in the forest guinea fowls were sailing down from the trees and poking their way along the half-dark ground toward the kitchen steps, making it known the door was open and that within someone was stirring about at the getting of food. Jim led his brother by the hand down the dark way of yellowpine stairs that went narrowly and without banisters to the rooms below. The young brother went huddling in his clothes, aguelike, knowing warmth was near, hungering for his place by the stove, to sit in peace on the bricks in the floor by the stove's side and watch the eating, it being his nature to have a sickness against food. They came in silence to the kitchen, Jim leading and holding his brother by the hand. The floor was lately strewn with fresh bright sand that would sparkle when the daybreak got above the forest, though now it lay dull as hoarfrost and cold to the unshod feet of the brothers. The door to the firebox of the stove was open and in front of it their mother sat in a chair speaking low as they entered, uttering under her breath. The two boys went near and stood still, thinking she was blessing the food, there being mush dipped up and steaming in two bowls. And they stood cast down until she lifted her eyes to them and spoke. "Your clothes on already," she said. "You look right neat." She did not rise, but kept her chair, looking cold and stiff, with the cloth of her black dress sagging between her knees. T h e sons stood in front of her and she laid her hand on first one head and then the other and spoke a little about the day, charging them to be sober and of few words, as she had raised them.

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Jim sat on the bench by the table and began to eat, mixing dark molasses sugar through his bowl of mush. But a nausea began in Daniel's stomach at sight of the sweet and he lagged by the stove, gazing at the food as it passed into his brother's mouth. Suddenly a shadow filled the back doorway and Holly, their uncle, stood there looking in. He was lean and big and dark from wind and weather, working in the timber as their father had done. He had no wife and children and would roam far off with the timber gangs in the Everglades. This latter year he did not go far, but stayed near them. Their mother stopped and looked at the man and he looked at her in silence. Then he looked at Jim and Daniel. "You're goen to take them, after all?" She waited a minute, seeming to get the words straight in her mind before bringing them out, making them say what was set there. "He asked to see them. Nobody but God-Almighty ought to tell a soul hit can or can't have." Having delivered her mind, she went out into the yard with the man and they spoke more words in an undertone, pausing in their speech. In the silence of the kitchen, Daniel began to speak out and name what thing among his possessions he would take to Czardis to give his father. But the older boy belittled this and that and everything that was called up, saying one thing was of too little consequence for a man, and that another was of no account because it was food. But when the older boy had abolished the idea and silence had regained, he worked back to the thought, coming to it roundabout and making it new and as his own, letting it be decided that each of them would take their father a pomegranate from the tree in the yard. They went to the kitchen door. The swamp fog had risen suddenly. They saw their mother standing in the lot while their uncle hitched the horse to the wagon. Leaving the steps, Jim climbed to the first crotch of the pomegranate tree. The reddest fruits were on the top branches. He worked his way up higher. The fog was now curling up out of the swamp, making gray mountains and rivers in the air and strange ghost shapes. Landmarks disappeared

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in the billows, or half-seen, they bewildered the sight, and an eye could so little mark the known or strange that a befuddlement took hold of the mind, like the visitations sailors beheld in the fogs of Okeechobee. Jim could not find the ground. He seemed to have climbed into the mountains. The light was unnatural and dark and the pines were blue and dark over the mountains. A voice cried out of the fog: "Are worms gnawen you that you skin up a pomegranate tree at this hour? Don't I feed you enough?" The boy worked his way down. At the foot of the tree he met his mother. She squatted and put her arm around him, her voice tight and quivering, and he felt tears on her face. "We ain't come to the shame yet of you and Dan'l hunten your food off trees and grass. People seein' you gnawen on the road will say Jim Cameron's sons are starved, foragen like cattle of the field." "I were getten the pomegranates for papa," said the boy, resigned to his mother's concern. She stood up when he said this, holding him in front of her skirts. In a while she said: "I guess we won't take any, Jim. . . . But I'm proud it come to you to take your papa somethen." And after a silence, the boy said: "Hit were Dan'l it come to, Mamma." Then she took his hand, not looking down, and in her throat, as if in her bosom, she repeated: "Hit were a fine thought and I'm right proud . . . though today we won't take anything. . . ." "I guess there's better pomegranates in Czardis where we are goen " "There's no better pomegranates in Czardis than right here over your head," she said grimly. "If pomegranates were needed, we would take him his own. . . . You are older'n Dan'l, Jim. When we get to the place we are goen, you won't know your papa after so long. He will be pale and he won't be as bright as you recollect. So don't labor him with questions . . . but speak when it behooves you and let him see you are upright." When the horse was harnessed and all was ready for the departure, the sons were seated on a shallow bed of hay in the back of

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the wagon and the mother took the driver's seat alone. The uncle had argued for having the top up over the seat, but she refused the shelter, remarking that she had always driven under the sky and would do it still to-day. He gave in silently and got upon the seat of his own wagon, which took the road first, their wagon following. This was strange and the sons asked: " W h y don't we all ride in Uncle Holly's wagon?" But their mother made no reply. For several miles they traveled in silence through their own part of the woods, meeting no one. The boys whispered a little to themselves, but their mother and their uncle sat without speaking, nor did they turn their heads to look back. At last the narrow road they were following left the woods and came out to the highway and it was seen that other wagons besides their own were going to Czardis. And as they got farther along, they began to meet many other people going to the town, and the boys asked their mother what day it was. It was Wednesday. And then they asked her why so many wagons were going along the road if it wasn't Saturday and a market day. When she told them to be quiet, they settled down to watching the people go by. Some of them were faces that were strange and some were neighbors who lived in other parts of the woods. Some who passed them stared in silence and some went by looking straight to the front. But there were none of them who spoke, for their mother turned her eyes neither right nor left, but drove the horse on like a woman in her sleep. All was silent as the wagons passed, except the squeaking of the wheels and the thud of the horses' hoofs on the dry, packed sand. At the edge of the town, the crowds increased and their wagon got lost in the press of people. All were moving in one direction. Finally they were going along by a high brick wall on top of which ran a barbed-wire fence. Farther along the way in the middle of the wall was a tall, stone building with many people in front. There were trees along the outside of the wall and in the branches of one of the trees Daniel saw a man. He was looking over the brick wall down into the courtyard. All the wagons were stopping here and hitching through the grove in front of the building. But their Uncle Holly's wagon and their own drove on, making way slowly as through a crowd at a fair, for under the

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trees knots of men were gathered, talking in undertone. Daniel pulled at his mother's skirts and whispered: "What made that man climb up that tree?" Again she told him to be quiet. "We're not to talk to-day," said Jim. "Papa is sick and we're not to make him worse." But his high, thin voice made his mother turn cold. She looked back and saw he had grown pale and still, staring at the iron-barred windows of the building. When he caught her gaze, his chin began to quiver and she turned back front to dodge the knowledge of his eyes. For the two wagons had stopped now and the uncle gotten down and left them sitting alone while he went to the door of the building and talked with a man standing there. The crowd fell silent, staring at their mother. "See, Jim, all the men up the trees!" Daniel whispered once more, leaning close in to his brother's side. "Hush, Dan'l. Be still." The young boy obeyed this time, falling into a bewildered stare at all the things about him he did not understand, for in all the trees along the brick wall men began to appear perched high in the branches, and on the roof of a building across the way stood other men, all gaping at something in the yard back of the wall. Their uncle returned and hitched his horse to a ring in one of the trees. Then he hitched their mother's horse and all of them got out and stood on the ground in a huddle. The walls of the building rose before them. Strange faces at the barred windows laughed aloud and called down curses at the men below. N o w they were moving, with a wall of faces on either side of them, their uncle going first, followed by their mother who held to each of them by a hand. They went up the steps of the building. The door opened and their uncle stepped inside. He came back in a moment and all of them went in and followed a man down a corridor and into a bare room with two chairs and a wooden bench. A man in a black robe sat on one of the chairs, and in front of him on the bench, leaning forward looking down between his arms, sat their father. His face was lean and gray, which made him look very tall. But his hair was black, and his eyes were blue and mild and strange as he stood up and held the two sons

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against his body while he stooped his head to kiss their mother. The man in black left the room and walked up and down outside in the corridor. A second stranger stood in the doorway with his back to the room. The father picked up one of the sons and then the other in his arms and looked at them and leaned their faces on his own. Then he sat down on the bench and held them against him. Their mother sat down by them and they were all together. A few low words were spoken and then a silence fell over them all. And in a while the parents spoke a little more and touched one another. But the bare stone floor and the stone walls and the unaccustomed arms of their father hushed the sons with the new and strange. And when the time had passed, the father took his watch from his pocket: "I'm goen to give you my watch, Jim. You are the oldest. I want you to keep it till you are a grown man. . . . And I want you to always do what mamma tells you. . . . I'm goen to give you the chain, Dan'l. . . ." The young brother took the chain, slipped out of his father's arms, and went to his mother with it. He spread it out on her knee and began to talk to her in a whisper. She bent over him, and again all of them in the room grew silent. A sudden sound of marching was heard in the corridor. The man rose up and took his sons in his arms, holding them abruptly. But their uncle, who had been standing with the man in the doorway, came suddenly and took them and went out and down through the big doorway by which they had entered the building. As the doors opened to let them pass, the crowd gathered around the steps pressed forward to look inside. The older boy cringed in his uncle's arms. His uncle turned and stood with his back to the crowd. Their mother came through the doors. The crowd fell back. Again through a passageway of gazing eyes, they reached the wagons. This time they sat on the seat beside their mother. Leaving their uncle and his wagon behind, they started off on the road that led out of town. "Is papa coming home with Uncle Holly?" Jim asked in a still voice. His mother nodded her head.

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Reaching the woods once more and the silence he knew, Daniel whispered to his brother: "We got a watch and chain instead, Jim." But Jim neither answered nor turned his eyes.

To write honestly and effectively of children takes unusual courage. Exploitation of the young, for what has proved melodrama or sentimentality or, more recently, mere shock, has been so widespread that the very thought may be nauseating and the first attempt blow up in the writer's face. Effies, Evas, Pearls, Little Joes, and Tiny Tims winged their way through the nineteenth century; in reaction, their opposite numbers have wallowed and walloped through the first half of the twentieth. Rare indeed is the child in fiction who can be called real. Beetle, in Kipling's Stalky & Co.* and of course Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, seem to have been drawn from life without adulteration for ulterior motive, but they are adolescent or older. The child seems to be dynamite. Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," + often reprinted and highly praised, is no better than a brilliant failure: its telling method binds us too close to the schizophrenic protagonist, demanding sympathy we are not sure we can grant, for we must take the entire story on his say-so; yet in the opening sentence he (or the author behind him) denies knowledge of any cause of the episode, and later obviously omits important material; thus in the end our sympathy goes to the apparently blameless mother. Avoiding this confusion, though somewhat incoherent in structure, "Your Mother's Gone to Heaven," t by Lettie Rogers, gives a remarkably true and moving picture of a child under great emotional stress; although the story received deserved promotion, it went unnoticed by contest judges and anthologists. * Doubleday & Co.

f Among the Lost People, Charles Scribner's Sons. t ΜcCall's, January 1950. Offprinted b y the magazine,

with another story, under this title. T h e pamphlet can still be had, on application.

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Besides courage, this sort of work requires unusual skill and wisdom. If we regard childhood either as an isolated phase of life from which we adults luckily have graduated, or as a heaven of innocence and altruistic intuition to which unluckily we never can return, all is lost before the battle begins. T o my way of thinking, in "The Sardillion" Elizabeth Enright shows she had the courage and the wisdom needed: she there saw childhood and allowed us to see it as a period of growth (for Rupert) or of waiting to grow (for his younger sister, Gerda); the growth of the boy pointed up by the static condition of the girl. Perhaps it is the child at the moment in his relation to outer forces when he can, if he will, develop that, with technical skill added, makes childhood stand clear in three dimensions and be of more than contorted reality, of more than melodramatized, sentimentalized, or temporarily shocked interest to mankind. I mean the child who faces two ways but must choose one of the two and go on or back; who yearns for both the known and comforting past and the unknown but magnetic future, yet must make his decision and take the consequences. And as for skill, this again seems to be first (even before technique takes hold) a matter of insight into clash of motives, decision, and resultant motion: the concept of childhood as self-conflict because of sensed incompleteness; of a child as someone still partly blind but wanting very much and trying very hard to see clearly, still a little deaf but forever pricking up his ears, still hardly better than dumb yet struggling to speak and make sense, be understood; and as technical means to suggest this inner battle, the powerful appropriateness of undertone, ambivalence, and particularly understatement. At least this view of, and this approach to, the psychic dynamics of childhood suit best the need of movement in the short story; and they chiefly inform and illuminate "A Trip to Czardis." The telling method here, so restrained and closely tuned to personality its expression, can be called objective. A great deal of the story seems to have been set down by the anonymous lens-diaphragm recorder, linguistically tipped a little for sympathy. But on close examination a good deal, too, might be through Jim's stream of experience — although a stream, characteristic of Jim, that for the most part carries only physical movements and other sense impressions, not thoughts. A little here and there might be through Daniel.

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Much of the opening might be coming to us through either or both of the boys. And at a crucial point in the story — But his high, thin voice made his mother turn cold. She looked back and saw he had grown pale and still, staring at the iron-barred windows of the building. When he caught her gaze, his chin began to quiver and she turned back front to dodge the knowledge in his eyes.

— suddenly we hear, see, interpret sense impressions, and suffer through and with the mother. Is this arbitrary magic, omniscience? I don't think so. All of them covered by the muted tone and excellently chosen language, these divergences slip past without for a moment disturbing the illusion of reality. The language is the binding force, the secret behind this telling method just off objectivity. It is so simple and hushed and homogeneous, it would serve as expression for any one of the three persons involved; not an image, hardly a word but any one of the three, or Uncle Holly if he had happened to be there all the time, or some close friend who knew them well — or, indeed, the objective lens-diaphragm recorder that, tipped a little, now and then slips a little closer into the senses or the mind of one or another — hardly a word but any one of all these might reasonably have created and used. It seems, moreover, to be a vehicle deliberately chosen, as I believe for two reasons, a negative reason and a positive one. It clearly implies both an emotional and an intellective unity in the mother and the two sons, and it precludes even the appearance of self-pity in any one of them, or the faintest tinge of sentimentality in the piece as a whole. It seems to me a marvel of skill and wisdom combined, as intimate as stream of experience could be, yet as detached as strict objectivity. Here technique, as always in a good story, merges and interlocks with content. What of the past of these people in " A Trip to Czardis"? It may strike a reader with surprise that he never learns what crime, if any, the father had committed and whether he was justly or unjustly executed. Yet the story has a strong taproot in the past. If the matter omitted is considered with reference to the persons concerned and the medium of telling used, it is recognized as of little or no importance. It is the imminence of the father's death that overshadows everything. What we do know of the past is of supreme importance. It has been hinted at early, by the mother's warning to her sons, especially Jim, and by Uncle Holly's presence

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and help; but we discover this taproot in the past rather late, for it has been logically masked by the woman's grief and shame and her nervousness. It is revealed with tragic force in the prison scene near the end. This family is four persons; it has a head, who will soon be lost. T h e discovery is no tear-jerker; it relates directly to Jim's assumption of authority, his growth, as soon as he knew the truth and from then on. T h e discovery works, moreover, as a powerful lever for prolonged suspense, since we the reader aren't yet positive that the worst will happen. And it was to this purpose, this final discovery, that the author constantly refused to dramatize any emotions or tell any more than the barest facts of behavior. Time and again he told less. This, then, is reluctant admission of a story as a technical ally of management of content. Granberry's use of Suspense is our main concern. " A Trip to Czardis" is a good example, because it shows all kinds. The personal bond between reader and protagonist that I mentioned is forged at the very beginning, where Jim wakes first, puts an arm around his small brother, and comforts him. Place helps, too, at the point where Jim climbs the pomegranate tree for a gift for his father. B y the time his mother has rebuked him, the bond is unbreakable; but it is to grow in strength, as Jim grows, to the end of the story. Through this early part, the suspense is simple. The reader is as much in the dark as are the two boys, as queasily excited as they at the prospect of going to see their father; but their mother's strange reticence, and her secret conference with Uncle Holly after his question "You're goen to take them, after all?" increase his tension. T h e reader can check back, he can pause on something like "after all" and consider its implication. Already, though still in the dark, he suspects; the boys, excited by the thought of the trip to see their father so long absent, suspect nothing. Complex suspense begins here, on as yet no specific knowledge, merely in the reader's premonition. Detail follows detail — Uncle Holly wanting the top up and the mother saying no, the mother saying nothing when asked w h y they don't all go in Uncle Holly's wagon, the crowds on the road all headed for town — that withholds information from the boys and the reader but increases his fearful suspicion, while them it only puzzles. Then, a sympathy-anxiety-fear synergy established in him, the reader's premonition is confirmed

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by acquisition of knowledge that runs ahead of the boys'. Daniel's knowledge lags throughout; that is, with respect to the younger boy, suspense remains complex, tightening the reader's fear for him. But mercifully — and with a single exception to be noted later, naturally — the ailing and timorous Daniel is not permitted to know what this is all about. Knowledge would be sheer brutality; he couldn't understand. His childlike delight in the gifts provides irony as contrast to and background for what, meanwhile, has happened to his older brother. Jim's knowledge catches up with the reader's somewhere in the paragraph beginning "Finally they were going along a high brick wall on top of which ran a barbed-wire fence." Although the paragraph does not mention Jim, and it is Daniel who sees the man looking over the wall, Daniel who pulls at his mother's skirts and asks, "What made that man climb up that tree?" we can almost see Jim's mind working, adding up the details and reaching the awful truth. Jim knows, now, and what for a while was complex suspense with respect to both boys becomes simple suspense again with respect to Jim, but a simple suspense that is excruciating because of the weight of what we have learned that we didn't know before, and because in learning now Jim has become a part of us. How will he take it? What will he do? What can he do? Jim shows that he knows by helping his mother quiet Daniel, by beginning to take his father's place, by beginning to grow; and this sharing of responsibility, though we see its Tightness and respect him for it, hurts almost as much as his remaining in ignorance — far more than his simply being crushed by the knowledge — would have hurt. Does Jim struggle, once he knows? Physically, of course, he cannot; the forces arrayed against him are far beyond his ability to resist. Besides, resistance would be childish, and he is leaving childhood behind him, as shown at the end of the story by his ability to phrase a question that, answered, will tell him what he wants to know without disturbing Daniel; and by his silence, like his mother's silence now, at the very end when Daniel speaks. The struggle, in fact, took place within him, just before he found a way ("Papa is sick," etc.) to explain the strangeness of events to his brother, and thus quiet him. It was a tough struggle, and he won it. Simply, he

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takes the truth tight-lipped. The story shows this, in its characteristic oblique way, by all but ignoring him from the moment when Jim says, "Hush, Dan'l. Be still," and Daniel obeys, until the final sentence. Between those points we have only Jim's failure to speak when his father gives him the watch, a powerful implication that he is unable to speak; "The older boy cringed in his uncle's arms," as the crowd presses forward to stare — a concession to childhood weakness that is momentary; and Jim's carefully phrased question, already mentioned, asked to confirm what he knows only too well, but to clear up the mystery of the two wagons and Uncle Holly's presence: "Is papa coming home with Uncle Holly?" This is very little, considering all that happens in that space; but the story is so packed with implication that in that final sentence Jim's relationship with and emotional response to his brother, his father, and his mother stand out starkly clear: "But Jim neither answered nor turned his eyes." W e come to the single exception in Daniel's behavior, a single word. The child's last line is "We got a watch and chain instead, Jim." At this most important point in the story, where nothing should retard the swift end, "instead" may distract the reader by sending him off into a series of anxious surmises. Could the author possibly have meant that Daniel was willing to substitute the gifts for his father permanently? Or could the author have meant that little Daniel, bewildered and ignorant throughout, has now suddenly come to partial awareness of the truth? Perhaps the likeliest supposition is that Daniel used the word to mean — since his papa is coming home with Uncle Holly — merely that the gifts will serve as replacement for the trip home. But the irony seems too subtle, and we came too long a way to catch it. Daniel's line would be better if "instead" had been dropped out. There is strong, simple irony enough as it is. Instead of giving as they had planned, the boys received. In figurative or symbolic terms, each received as much knowledge as — and a gift that — he could understand, enjoy, make use of: Daniel a bright toy to take his mind off his ailments and grown-up matters he would never understand; Jim a watch telling him it was time to grow up, and with it a terrific jolt that started him growing. The story is notably modest and unpretentious, in manner and

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matter. Dealing with quite unimportant, uninformed, underprivileged people, it convincingly creates in them a dignity and a sense of unflinching personal integrity seldom found in fiction. It speaks in a low, hesitant, but clear and eloquent voice that, translated, would be understood and found meaningful almost anywhere on earth, at almost any time in history. The tragedy here does not torture the reader with the presence of implacable and unjust power used to smash the weak; it uplifts and inspires the reader by showing him the weak and lonely holding fast to their ideals in the very face of crushing adversity. He is cleansed in heart by the experience shared with Jim. "A Trip to Czardis" seems to deserve permanence as part — a small but indispensable part — of the world's literature.

XI. SURPRISE LIKE

ITS

PARTNER

SUSPENSE,

SURPRISE — THIRD

OF

those factors in management of short-story content that function more or less cooperatively — has suffered recent neglect by intellectuals. It is easy to guess why but hard to say with certainty. Perhaps several reasons underlie the low esteem in which surprise is held. Since we have come to know Chekhov, even in translation — although he began as a writer of comic sketches and shows a vein of irony, a wry sort of humor, up to the last period of his work — we have become very solemn about the short story as a work of art. Surprise may have seemed inappropriate to the serious-minded, even undignified. Granted, it is much harder to manage successfully even than suspense. To the stern realist it may have looked like manipulation; to the follower of the naturalistic philosophy in fiction, the you-can't-win school, the dangerous proximity of laughter must have made any sort of surprise but sudden death seem utter falsehood. There may be a reason behind all these, a reason no more sensible but older. Surprise was the most important element — it was "the point," as we still say — in the earliest nonliterary ancestor of the short story, the oral anecdote, usually funny and sometimes bawdy. Surprise antedates mothers-in-law. It may well have brought about the first laugh on earth. Being still current today, in written as well as spoken form, it is perhaps that component of any kind of story having the longest continuous incidence. On this account alone, it must always have had detractors. But in modern times particularly, the appearance of surprise (with or without the laugh) in prose fiction must have supported the suspicions of pious and puritanical persons that story-writing and story-reading were an immoral pastime, giddy daydreaming on the reader's part, meretricious hobby on the writer's. Charges to this effect persisted in England and America into the middle of the nineteenth century. To meet

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them and vindicate itself, fiction put on a long face and gave itself airs — as weighty information, as history or biography, as soulsaver, as propaganda. Greatly oversimplifying what was actually a long and complex change, it may be said that fiction regained, for esthetic reasons, the moral or didactic purpose its earliest literary ancestor, the beast fable, had possessed. No wonder, then, if some novelists and short-story writers of high ideals today are overserious, shun humor, and look with distaste at a chief source of humor: the suddenly revealed incongruity (or congruity, for that matter) of surprise. Of course, there was no need then and there is none now of any guilt complex inducing pretense or disguise. Help was coming, from France, from Russia, in the positive affirmation of the dissemination of imaginative truth as irreproachable aim, and of fiction itself as conveyor of all aspects of humanity, not as the reader might wish they were but as the writer honestly sees them to be. And we are more tolerant today. What our doubters of the validity of surprise, our solemn Johns, lose sight of is part of the very affirmation that frees them, the resolve to see and record all aspects of life as it really is. There is room enough in the short story for the serious and the light of heart. Surprise, on the light side or on the dark, is as truly symbolic of living as anything else. The reversal, abrupt or prolonged, apposite or grotesque, for a laugh sorry or mellow or gay, all along had staunch supporters. Exaggeration has been a large ingredient in one kind of surprise. When Washington Irving, in A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty * * * by Diedrich Knickerbocker, told deadpan of salmon leaping up Niagara Falls, he was but carrying on the tradition of ironic exaggeration, a sound kind of incongruity used by John Lyly and Swift and Henry Fielding. A nine-pin ball that Rip Van Winkle, while asleep for twenty years, saw start rolling from the hand of a bearded little melancholy personage has bowled through a forest of tall tales, and not stopped yet. Stephen Leacock's mutineers, we remember, stocked their raft (made of chopped-up lengths of mast while the rest of the crew slept) with — a bicycle pump. Robert Benchley's floundering treasurer with his preposterous report was not far out of line. Mark Twain had given us surprising humor of both kinds,

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exaggerative and characteristic. Ambrose Bierce used surprise as a savage weapon. Saki (Η. H. Munro) aimed mostly at the prodigious or fantastic, but often with a snicker of irony accompanying the grimmest final turn. John Collier, Pritchett, and Roald Dahl have followed him. O. Henry's snap endings, often weakly coincidental or inadequately wrought for enactment by hastily drawn types of persons, as in "A Municipal Report," could elicit a roar of mirth, as in "The Cop and the Anthem"; draw a crooked smile of pity, as in "The Skylight Room"; a tender chuckle, as in "The Gift of the Magi"; or, in a few stories, two of the best, in spite of haste and florid language, being "A Blackjack Bargainer" and "The Last Leaf," could really hurt. Dorothy Parker and Ring Lardner used the full force of incongruity for satire, now mild, now bitter. Katharine Brush is remembered for only two short stories, both of which depend for effectiveness on surprise: "Night Club," * gently comic; and "Good Wednesday," f scathing under its calm. William Faulkner based "A Rose for Emily" on telling method and motivation so superbly fit and restrained that its surprise, verging on the incredible, sounds wholly and ghastly true. We have had plenty of amusing and awesome tall tales, burlesques, satires, ironic exaggeration in several forms. It is the carefully planned and prepared-for bouleversement that the contemporary short story seems to lack and have need of to blow it out of its esthetic doldrums. Surprise well handled requires ingenuity, but this is a trait native to our intelligence. The kind of surprise that I mean is less than shock; it does not laugh at or cheat the reader; it carries no sting in its tail. It is, perhaps, when you come to think it over, really no surprise at all but the only thing that could have happened. As things went, it was unthought of, that's all. It is a reader's delight, believable magic. Call it flippant or frivolous and turn to intricate and sober symbolism if you will. Surprise of this happy, unassuming kind will still make the world go round. To an everyday writer, the only surprising thing about surprise is his ability to figure it out and bring it off more than once. Each feat seems unique, his last try, impossible while he is working on it, unrepeatable when done. He sees surprise in the abstract clearly * O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 192η, Doubleday & Co. tO. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of ι$$ι.

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enough as relief from the tension of suspense, come-uppance for overconfidence, or salve for hurt or sorrow. He sees it, also theoretically, merely as a sound and effective way to end a story. H o w to create a surprise — there, like that — in black type on white paper is quite another matter. That he can't see at all. Perhaps he recalls dimly how the last one dropped into his lap, and he develops a watching tactic. H e puts himself on the alert for some small action, trait, or fact — something inanimate, physical, or psychological — which a reader can be induced (with certain preparatory stimuli that he won't notice as such) to accept as true; but which also, not recently having recognized or perhaps even thought about, a reader will find in a sense unfamiliar and to some extent therefore surprising. From his reading and from his experience he has seen good stories grow from this seed alone — roots firmly reaching and holding, twigs stretching into boughs, main stem straight and tall, and leaves crowning the whole and concealing the structure. He waits, keeping an eye out, perhaps working on something else. Eventually, out of experience or memory or observation comes something that he recognizes as possible. It may be mechanical as a vise, but if so he sees (or instantly puts) a person at it or struggling against it. More probably it is something human, a trait or characteristic or an attitude in human nature that, if built into the right individual under the right conditions, might result in a story. H e knows little or nothing of physics, but this thing he has may seem to him like a nuclear proton, a minute central particle on which everything else depends. But everything else is confused. He has gleams and glimpses of the complete atom, as if in X ray or cross section, with other protons and electrons and alpha particles shooting here and there without any apparent purpose or connection. Staring at nothing, he is trying to get the thing in focus and its parts in order, trying to change what seems spatial chaos to what might be expressed sequentially in time, with cause and effect to its main spin. Inspiration has nothing whatever to do with the result, never had anything, never will have. Very little, almost nothing, fell into his head or his lap. What he does with it is the hardest part, the cloudiest and sweatiest beginning of the thinking part, of writing this kind of short story. The whole business, which was next to nothing

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to start with, may come to nothing. But, sometimes, things fall into place. The chain reaction is set off. What was spatial and formless becomes linear and has shape in temporal terms. The ever-fresh allure and challenge of the factor is surprise as revealer of the difference between appearance and reality. So ambiguous is the behavior of man, so close in semblance may lie quite opposite motives and emotions and desires (grin of pain-bearing to grin of triumph, abstracted stare to the löng look of pity or anger or merely assumed vacuity; the inhibited to the deliberately secretive, the hysterical to the merely relaxed and playful, the innocent to the disingenuous), and so ready is man, as character and as reader, to interpret or misinterpret attitude, word, and deed at best equivocal and at worst completely deceptive, that here in surprise as stripperoff of masks and involuntary guises, conscious pretense, self-conscious poses may be found the richest single source of shortstory content. Analysis of hundreds of stories can proceed without uncovering one not directly risen from this differentia or on which it has no bearing. A meant only thus and so, but Β took it for this or that; B's manner naturally led A to suspect that Β felt whatsis about whosis; so here's the fat in the fire until suddenly . . . It isn't so easy as that. It is so much harder that grave dangers — glibness, superficiality, type-casting, formularizing — lie in wait for him who accepts such a lead. The generality can be made only by one who at the time has no one particular story worth writing in mind, but is glancing back at many written, mostly by others. It can be said safely only for the purpose of showing coefficients of structure, read to advantage only if promptly forgotten. Every good story must first be lived, as unique and fresh experience, before being written; and then it must, still unwritten but living in the mind, be relived under more or less revision, cool and as detached as if it were someone else's story, for the engagement of and hopedfor acceptance by other minds. Even this is not the ultimate goal. W e shall try to sightsee that later. But this reach toward other minds is the only honest way to the last keep, others' hearts. The mental revision referred to works thus: once the differentia, the ambivalence of fact or behavior, is hit upon — or, more likely, dredged up out of the unconscious by association with something similar or very different just felt or observed — once, that is, It is

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recognized, the revelation of It must be planned and prepared. Some writers, luckily confident, like to sneak up on a surprise, reducing preparation to a minimum and concealing its few roots deeper than a careful first reading can perceive; in this way perhaps they get a small shiver of surprise, themselves, as they write. Nobody can begrudge them that. But the method must rely heavily on the reader's willingness to reflect after reading or read a second or a third time. Other, perhaps overconscientious, writers will prepare very thoroughly, planting so many roots that enough for acceptance cannot escape the reader; and he too may go back and read again for the pleasure of bringing them all to light. Such writers want the revelation to be clear and utterly convincing in a flash. Or, in a third case, the difference in management may hang not on the writer's temperament but on the temper and tone of the story, whether serious or light, emotionally deep or shallow, fast-paced or slow. But in any event and by all, the revelation is to be regarded, planned, and executed as of something that was true, or potentially true, from the very first word of the story. This, then, is the tandem that the writer must push and ride throughout: knowing the truth all along, he must submerge the truth in an appearance or semblance actually false, but which for the time being he must also devoutly believe to be true if he hopes for the reader's belief. He must operate with equal validity on two levels of plausibility, using appearance as if it were reality, but at the same time being careful to insert preparatory (though by the reader at the moment of reading unapplied, being taken in other reference) leads and hints to the actual reality forthcoming. An average number of leads, though this is highly variable, might be set at three. The earliest — often present in the opening paragraph, and urgently needed before the end of the first page — can safely be quite pointed; the reader, not yet fully oriented to the implications of character plus motive, is here not only fairly gullible but of short memory, having to absorb so much at once. Succeeding leads must be progressively subtler, well spaced out after the first one or two, and their alternate references should grow stronger and stronger. It is a man of daring, not to say bravado, who will insert a lead of any kind just before the revelation, when his two levels of plausibility (despite gravity and paradox, they have been converging

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all this time) suddenly meet and become magically yet logically one; usually, if the task of preparing the reader's subconsciousness hasn't been done by that time, it won't be done at all. (And if, on the other hand, the task has been overdone, preparation has flowed from the subconscious into the conscious and the reader has stopped reading, with a snort.) Naturally, too, any sort of patching-up explanation after the surprise is almost sure to be futile and may be as disastrous as any sort of lead just before it. All things considered, you see, this is a perilous journey. I have come nowhere near marking out the way. But it is a way, as I have tried to suggest, that each writer must blaze for himself and blaze afresh each time he undertakes it. Surprise may seem like trickery. It is not, and a small grin on a single reader's face as he finishes a story will prove that it is not and repay you, besides, for all your trouble.

T H E ABSENT-MINDED HEART* by William Maxwell T H E valentines covered two long trestle tables in the basement of Brentano's, and there were not, of course, any of those engineering marvels, circa 1910-20, that opened with a creak and revealed, with all the charm of stereoscopic perspective, a sailboat, a swan, a garden gate. I suppose, Morison Tyler, who was in his early forties and had a simple, emotional preference for the way things used to be, said to himself, if you have never known valentine boats and swans and garden gates, you don't really miss them. It might even be an advantage, he reflected, in that the less you knew about the past, the easier it was to be satisfied to live in the present, where, * Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright, 1952, The N e w Yorker Magazine, Inc. Originally published under the pseudonym W. D. Mitchell.

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like it or not, you had to live. On the other hand, it did not seem probable that thirty years from now anybody would be searching nostalgically for examples of the insipid, greeting-card kind of thing he saw before him. People weren't even searching for them now, as a matter of fact. He was the only customer in that part of the store. He remembered suddenly a stationery shop on Lexington Avenue, in the Sixties somewhere, that had old-fashioned valentines, or at least used to have them, but they were too old-fashioned; they were Late Victorian, and expensive. Also, it was raining, and he didn't have time during his lunch hour to go all the way up there. So, instead, he chose one of the greeting cards, which had a picture of a green pea pod on it, with two peas cozying up together, and the legend "Be my POD-ner, Valentine!" The clerk brought him his purchase, in an envelope wrapper, and his change, and he wandered over to the racks of paper-bound reprints. Row after row, rack after rack, he combed through the titles for ten or fifteen minutes, ending up with five mysteries and two straight novels. On a nearby table was a selection of marked-down art books, which he looked over rapidly and which yielded a prize — a large illustrated volume on Jean Fouquet and other French painters of the later Middle Ages. As he left the store, he put the two packages of books, with the greeting card between them, under his overcoat, so that the rain wouldn't soak through the wrappings. He was in a hurry — he still had to eat and stop in at the bank and be back at his office by two-thirty — but when he saw, across Fifth Avenue, the red front of a candy store, he hesitated, and then crossed over and stood examining the window display. There was a considerable price range in the heart-shaped boxes of candy. For twelve-fifty, you could get a red plush heart pierced with an ornamental brass arrow; for six-fifty, a red taffeta heart; and for five dollars a white moire (so a sign informed him) heart with red artificial roses on it. The gold-paper hearts were fourseventy-five. The red paper hearts with white roses on them were four dollars and a quarter. And the unadorned red paper hearts — the kind that were always in the windows of candy stores at this time of year — were two dollars and a quarter. As nearly as Tyler could make out, the chocolates in all of them were identical. He glanced at his watch and then went in the store and asked

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for a plain paper heart. The girl behind the counter produced one, in a cardboard box, and Tyler reached for it, too soon. The girl behind the counter wrapped the box up tediously in pleated white paper. Tyler looked again at his watch, and when the girl picked up a red ribbon, he said, "Don't bother, I'll just take it the way it is." Though time is money to some people, it was not to the girl behind the counter, and she had, besides, the honor of the candy store to think of. She tied a perfect bow and then wrapped the box again, in ordinary wrapping paper. As Tyler left the store, he reminded himself that he had one more purchase to make, but that would have to wait until evening. Tyler and his wife had lived in the country for the past six years, and he had fallen out of the habit of these annual celebrations. In the wintertime, the long train ride in a hot coach was hard on flowers, and there were flowers in the garden all summer long, so there was no point in bringing cut flowers out from town. He could have (and should have, he now realized) brought Lois candy once in a while, but he was usually in a hurry to make the five-twenty-four, and didn't pass a candy store on the direct route between his office and Grand Central. This winter, they had closed the house in the country and sublet an apartment in town for three months, by way of a change, and so he had a chance to shoot the works. And that, he told himself, was what he was doing. At quarter after five, when Tyler left his office with the candy, books, and greeting card once more under his coat, it was still raining, and large flakes of snow fell with the rain. He zigzagged south and east, and arrived at a little basement flower shop on Third Avenue in the upper Thirties. It didn't have very good flowers, but Lois felt sorry for the old Italian woman who kept it, and would prefer flowers from there, even though they weren't absolutely fresh, to flowers from anywhere else. The old woman was not in the shop this evening, and the middle-aged man who had taken her place was not the type to arouse the sympathy of the susceptible, or to care whether he aroused them. He would have been perfectly at home in a gangster movie. Tyler's first glance around the place was discouraging. They ought to be able to do better than this, he said to himself, on Valentine's Day. The anemones were faded and ready to drop their petals. The roses in the refrigerator were

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too far open. There were nice gladioli, but Lois detested them, and jonquils, which didn't suggest the occasion. In the end, Tyler picked out a dozen dark-red carnations and asked for a stalk of mimosa. "I don't know that it looks very much like Saint Valentine's Day," he remarked when he saw the flowers spread out on a sheet of green wrapping paper. The florist grunted and threw in some ferns. Tyler paid him, turned up his coat collar, and, loaded to the gunwales with valentine offerings for the dearest wife a man ever had, went out into the peculiar night. As he walked into the entry of his apartment building, a woman was just fitting her key into the lock of the inner door, and held it open for him. He held the door of the self-operating elevator open for her, and as it closed, she looked at him inquiringly. "Three," he said. "I'm going to three, too," she said. He pressed the button, and as they rose, she remarked, with a glance at the paper cone in his left hand, "How nice — flowers on a night like this!" "It's Valentine's Day," Tyler explained. Her failure to reply, and something in her expression, led Tyler to believe that she — a widow, perhaps — had no reason to expect any flowers this evening. A t the third floor, he held the door open for her and she went off down the hall, and Tyler, standing in front of 3-C, shifted the parcels in order to put his key in the lock. As the door swung open, Lois called out to him from the kitchen. He tipped his head forward and let the rain run off the brim of his hat onto the sublet carpet. "It's a lousy night." "Awful," she agreed. "Hang your coat in the bathroom. I just got in about twenty minutes ago myself, so I know." She was smiling at him as he passed the kitchen door on his way into the living room; she must have seen the flowers and parcels, but all she said, strangely, was "I was going to have a drink ready for you, and then I decided to make crepes Suzette." He put the flowers on the dining table and began unwrapping the books. "I called you from the office," he said. "I went out about two-thirty," she said from the kitchen. "I was looking for a hat, but I couldn't find anything." "I thought we'd eat out tonight."

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"I stopped at the Grand Union on the way home," she said. "What's a half of one and three-fourths?" Multiplying and dividing, he arranged the books on the table and took the greeting card out of its wrapper and put it inside the paper cone, with the flowers. "Seven-eighths," he announced as he walked into the kitchen. She struck the egg beater lightly on the rim of a stainless-steel mixing bowl, held it under the faucet in the sink, and then looked into the enamel two-cup measuring vessel that was the bane of her existence. "It doesn't even have the thirds marked," she said. "I'm dividing the recipe in half, which makes a third of a cup of flour and seven-eighths of a cup of milk. What'll I do?" H e took a pencil from his coat pocket and marked an approximate third and then seven-eighths of a cup on the inside of the vessel. "Take a chance," he said as he handed it to her. He made an Old-Fashioned for her and a highball for himself, and carried them into the living room. In a moment, she joined him and said, "Oh — you brought me some flowers!" "And books," he said. "You were complaining last night that there was nothing in the apartment to read." H e turned away, so as not to seem too interested, or too pleased with himself. When he looked again, she was standing with the flowers unwrapped and the envelope in her hand. "Carnations!" she exclaimed. "And mimosa. Where did you get it?" "In that shop you go to. I don't know whether they're fresh or not." "They're beautiful." She drew the greeting card out of its envelope. There was a silence. "Saint Valentine's Day — I forgot about it! I haven't anything for you." "That isn't the point," he said happily. "I wanted to surprise you. I hoped you wouldn't remember." But it was he who was surprised. Her eyes grew very bright, and then the tears spilled over. "I don't know how I could have forgotten it," she said sadly. H e put his arms around her and kissed her, and as she wiped the tears away with her hand, she said, "At least I've got crepes Suzette for you — if they turn out." H e brought her a Kleenex from the linen closet, and she blew her nose and then went into the kitchen, put a casserole in the oven, set

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the time clock on the stove, and returned to the living room with a tall glass vase that belonged to the sublessors and that she had refrained, until now, from using. When she had arranged and admired the flowers, they looked at the books. "It's been one of those days," she said. "I got a late start with the housework. My pleated skirt came back from the cleaners with the pleats pressed in the wrong way. Our checkbook won't balance — you'll have to do something about it. Then I started to fix my new red dress, so I could wear it tomorrow night. I cut the seam apart at the waist, and when I got it all fitted and basted, it wasn't right, and I remembered that the only way it can be done is without cutting. So now I have to sew it up again and start all over. Just as I was going out, I went to get something from the icebox and discovered that there were pools of milk on the bottom shelf — it had leaked out of the container and was all over everything. It had somehow got inside the plastic bag, on the parsley and lettuce. It was even under the aluminum foil on the cheese, and had turned sour. There was no mail. Every hat I tried on was just a hat. There weren't any that made me feel different from when I didn't have a hat on, and that's the only point of a hat, so I gave up and took a bus uptown to that place Mrs. Piel told me about, where they have 'seconds' of Finnish china — between Ninety-first and Ninety-second, she said, on Lexington — and couldn't find it and went clear up to Ninety-seventh Street before I turned back, and of course it was between Ninety-first and Ninetieth, and everything I liked was out of stock, and I walked all the way home." "All the way from Ninety-first Street?" "Yes," she said. "It was a perfectly dreadful day." Now that she had finished telling him about it, she was quite cheerful. They had another round of drinks before the clock on the stove reminded them of food. As Tyler lit the candles on the table, he noticed that she had put the pea-pod greeting card on the bookcase, and he called out to her, "Did you like your valentine? It's sort of awful, but it was the best I could do." "It's darling!" she called back from the kitchen. "It's just wonderful." The crepes Suzette turned out very well, in spite of the two-cup measuring vessel. When Lois had brought in the coffee, she lifted

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the cover from the box of chocolates and said, "I've never had candy in a heart-shaped box before." "It's the one thing that hasn't changed," Tyler said. "Candy in heart-shaped boxes for Valentine's Day I can remember clear back to my childhood. It always used to be that way." The telephone rang while he was speculating on which piece he would have, and Lois left the table to answer it. "Yes, Bea," she said. "How are you? . . . Oh, we're fine. . . . Well, just a minute. Let me ask Moris." With her hand on the mouthpiece, she said, "It's Bea Curtis. She wants us to come for a cocktail on Thursday." He nodded, and she said into the telephone, "We'd love to. . . . What? . . . Oh, no! Moris brought me flowers and candy and books. . . . Yes, today. Isn't that just like him!" The conversation concluded, she placed the phone in its cradle and returned to the table. Smiling, she lit a cigarette and then, unable to keep the joke to herself any longer, she leaned toward him, took his hand in hers, and said, "Valentine's Day is next Thursday." In a flash, all the evidence that Tyler had been denying all day long arranged itself before his mind: letters he had signed at the office, dated February 7th; his desk calendar, on which he had written a luncheon engagement for February n t h ; the absence of a crowd around the valentines in Brentano's, or in the candy store; the florist's grunt; the strange expression of the woman in the elevator. "But tonight is the night I needed it," Lois said.· "This whole room smells of carnations."

In the study of surprise, to detail theory, reprint a short story as illustration, then analyze the story with reference to the theory seems hardly fair to the author. His piece took a great deal of hard work, and was meant and deserves to be read for its total effect, without prognosis or post-mortem. Without these it has a chance to live. Yet here it lies on the dissection table. The extenuating circumstance is that we are not general read-

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ers. As William Maxwell conceived, shaped, and wrote " T h e Absent-Minded Heart" for the general reader's pleasure rather than for his own, we pick it apart not for our pleasure but to gain understanding of the management of content. At the same time, however, we must try to imagine ourselves general readers, to reassume the state of mind of someone coming fresh to the story, without any technical knowledge but willing, if interested, to be amused or enlightened or both by a daydream with a point to it. Only by combining special knowledge with the broad motive of the general reader can we hope, as analyzers, to become creators and synthesizers of other — our own — material. T h e story illuminates the dynamics of surprise. It is thoroughly motivated, sound as a nut, and shows lucidly the factor of plausibility (on which the surprise rests) on two levels synchronized: appearance in the guise of reality and reality itself, submerged because taken in other reference; the two gradually converging until, at the moment of revelation, they become one. So carefully has all this been done that there may arise the question whether the story, suitably for its material a very short one, was not oversupplied with preparatory leads and after-the-fact explanation. On both counts, to some extent the question will have to be answered for himself by each individual reader. Some readers, even when being read aloud to and without time to check and weigh, are more acute than others in foreseeing surprise (they are also the ones whose uncanny foresight takes them off tangentially on false leads) and more sensitive about having a point already, in their opinion, made hammered home. In a class of twenty, knowledgeable about creative writing but uninformed about the nature of surprise, there are usually four or five college students who foresee — or say they foresaw — the end of a story competently built up to a sudden incongruity. Whatever the answers in this instance, no one can reasonably deny the presence in " T h e Absent-Minded Heart" of, if need be, more than compensating merits. Not counting the title — a good one, and the boldest lead of all, secure in the fact that nobody thinks of a title once read — there are five leads to the revelation at the submerged level of reality, and five alternate implications at the level of appearance. Three of

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each are bunched in the first half of the story, the other two of each kind being spaced out, the final occurrence of both being in the same paragraph, that just preceding the surprise. The leads on the level of reality submerged decrease in pointedness and grow steadily subtler; the implications on the level of appearance progress just the other way, from the very indirect to the all but obvious. This pattern seems right here, and it must have been carefully devised; but other material might suggest other patterns. There can hardly be any fixed form. The first lead at the submerged level of reality appears in the two final sentences of the opening paragraph: People weren't even searching for them now, as a matter of fact. He was the only customer in that part of the story. The alternate reference, invited by the preceding context, is of course that modern valentines are no better than standardized greeting cards. The author had a right to permit himself a chuckle over the phrase "as a matter of fact." If the reader were in possession of all the situation at this early point — Brentano's valentine tables deserted on what the protagonist (thus the reader) believes is Valentine's Day — this very strong lead would be incredible and stop the story. But he isn't. The strong lead put in early slips by unnoticed. The next three are other-reference implications at the level of appearance masked as reality: Also, it was raining, and he didn't have time during his lunch hour to go all the way up there. He was in a hurry — he still had to eat and stop in at the bank and be back at his office by two-thirty — followed in the next paragraph by the two hasty glances at his watch. The subtle implication — subtle because for all we know his lunch hour may often be hurried — is that this day is different; he may be on a last-day, last-moment search for what he wants to buy, the things he buys indicating why and for whom. Then, after an interval, come two more leads at the level of reality, in the flower shop and in the elevator:

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They ought to be able to do better than this, he said to himself, on Valentine's Day. The alternate reference here is that the shop is no good anyway. In the elevator: Her failure to reply, and something in her expression, led Tyler to believe that she — a widow, perhaps — had no reason to expect any flowers this evening. Both, even in retrospect, are delicious, very ingenious, wholly natural, now that we know Tyler pretty well; both would work either way. After another interval, there follows a pair, one of each kind, closely juxtaposed. Lois opens the valentine: There was a silence. "Saint Valentine's Day — I forgot about it! I haven't anything for you." This seems to me nothing short of a writer's triumph. She knows Moris much better than we do. In that moment of silence, actually she has guessed the truth, while at the same time her affection and her recognition of his happiness in giving have made her resolve to conceal it. Quick as scat she says something that fits exactly into the structure of appearance already built. Then, after he gloats a bit: Her eyes grew very bright, and then the tears spilled over. This lead to the revelation is far less pointed than are earlier leads, but alternate references — chagrin at forgetting, nostalgia at thought of youth lost — are strong. The fact is, she likes the old bumbler just about the way he is, early or late — likes him so much it hurts. So we arrive at the final pair, again one of each kind, the one at the level of appearance plain as day, that at the level of submerged reality a complex double-entendre, and both so close to the revelation immediately to follow that the typewriter keys may have burned the author's fingers: "Oh, no!" [says Lois on the phone to Bea] "Moris brought me flowers and candy and books . . ."

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As soon as you supply Bea's unheard preceding question, "Are you two going out tonight?" this hits hard again at the apparent fact, Valentine's Day. Lois' answer has implied, "Why should we go out? We've got all we want right here." And then just afterward, still Lois to Bea on the phone: "Yes, today. Isn't that just like him!" The emphasis on "today" with its dangerous closeness to reality, is smoothed over by the sentence following, which may mean Isn't it just like him to be so romantic, or so generous; or, as we are soon to know it does mean, Isn't it like him to be so absent-minded. The two levels have converged, and at the author's last nudge of adjustment, "Smiling . . . unable to keep the joke to herself any longer," Lois tells him, and the two levels become one. The next paragraph, in which Moris thinks back over the evidence he ignored at the time, most of which the reader knows and has already recalled, appears to be superfluous explanation at best and at worst a rather patronizing writing-down to the reader. But if we imagine the paragraph deleted — so that Lois' "Valentine's Day is next Thursday" is followed at once by her "But tonight is the night I needed it," and her pleasure in the scent of carnations ends the story — the real value of the paragraph can be seen. It is a heartless reader who has not become fond of Moris Tyler by this time. Is all his striving to re-create an old-fashioned Valentine's Day on that rainy, hurried afternoon to go for nothing? It seems so, as his bemused mind turns over the signs and portents that he so stupidly, but so eagerly, too, disregarded. The paragraph is a pause, allowing time for reflection and anxiety about Moris. Even as the reader begins to worry about him, after the revelation, something has built up that the reader has ignored — Lois' horrible day. And her final admission that Moris did just right, that he can conjure up a celebration both valid and romantic a week ahead of the calendar, caps with a new, small surprise, fitting and relieving, the big surprise just disclosed. A graduate student, unmarried, very earnest, called this story "slight." It explores, to be sure, no very profound emotions, and it ends, as we say, "happily." Perhaps it cannot be fully appreciated by unmarried readers under forty. Nevertheless, to my mind we could

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do with many more slight stories of this variety, many less of the slapdash, shallow, machine-gun-dialogue sort and of the deeper and heavier sort. Certainly, writing "The Absent-Minded Heart" was no slight task. Virtually every word had to be fitted into its place; and the wit, ingenuity, poise, and sheer courage of the author — his Tightness of order and emphasis — are everywhere manifest. The first thousand words, with Moris alone on scene — probably the hardest possible opening — must have been uphill plodding. The dialogue between husband and wife before they have settled down with their drinks is without question a brilliant achievement: the smile, the casual words, the truncated talk perfectly understood, his naive delight that he had remembered while she had forgotten, and her instant cheerfulness after unburdening herself about her awful day — all these touches strike home with a glowing reality, warm and trustworthy and comfortable. Like Nathaniel Benchley's "Deck the Halls," this story exemplifies seasonal work at its. best — not banged out anyhow to meet an editorial need, but based on experience objectified, the matter of long thought and skillful planning, finally appearing with a singular spontaneity and zest (as if it cost no effort), suitable enough for the occasion but offering a point to its daydream more important and interesting than any date on the calendar could be. A noted and learned critic, Mr. Edmund Wilson, who has also written short stories, scoffs somberly at surprise as "the wow in the final paragraph." I wish he and others of his persuasion might see their way clear to a broader view. On their part, the slick fictionfactory workers would do well to raise the management of this factor to a higher standard, if for no other reason than to make such a slur impossible. In brief, surprise foreseen is collapse; surprise scanted is shock and disbelief. Here you walk the high wire, trembling inwardly, but to all appearance with as calm and light and sure a tread as if your tightrope were stretched only an inch or so above ground.

XII. PERSONS AN OLD M A N I USED TO KNOW W E L L HAD AN ENGAGING

(to me, at least) trick of snuffling dryly in pairs, like a couple of hyphens, at the top of his larynx when nervous or a little upset. I can still see him clearly — rather short, upright, inclined to be stocky, with thinning gray hair parted in the middle over gently twinkling eyes and a bristly mustache. I can see the bone structure standing out from temple to cheek, and the flick of a muscle above his jaw as he sat reading and thinking. He was a mild sort of man, but determined, a hard worker. Very clear in my memory are his hands — the wide palm, the short spatulate fingers — as they held a book, or as one gripped a pen or a fly rod, or both on the handle bars of his bicycle or resting cupped over his knees when he played chess. Clearest of all is the impression of his stance, his feet spread a little, not widely, his head tipped as he looked up at someone and laughed without making a sound. In fact, he was my father. Although I have not seen him for many years, I can remember every smallest thing about him. I have often thought what a wonderful character he would make in a story — for someone else to write. For me he would be impossible; I know him too well, I still love him too well. Something of this knowledge and affection would creep in under my guard and distort the story; an ulterior motive would show as sentimentality. So I tell myself, and then wonder if I haven't already put him into several stories without knowing I did so. I think I have — parts of him, here and there. Our next-door neighbors' child is a fascinating small witch. In ten years or so she will be a beauty. She is beautiful now, with light blond hair and bright blue eyes, though thin as a rail. She wears herself out playing — running games, acting games in which she wears her mother's old clothes, riding her bike with her hair streaming out behind red cheeks — and drags home in the dusk too tired

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to eat. She smiles like an angel, she giggles with both hands over her mouth, she talks very f a s t — with a slight lisp just now through a missing front tooth. I watch her from a window or she, chattering a steady stream most of which I can't catch, watches me working in the garden; and I wish and wish I could get her down on paper in a story. I don't know her well enough, I say. Here I am, an old dodderer to her; and there she is, a streak of lightning with a dimple and bewitching smile. H o w can I know how her mind works or how childish emotions overcome her? Actually, as is every person on earth, she is unique. But I lack the key that would open the door to her singular personality. O n paper she would appear a wraith or a type. Actually, there is no telling how living persons become characters in stories. One can have glimpses and hints, one can form generalities — there must be something picturable (but isn't there that, if you can find it, in everybody?), something story able (but isn't that only a matter of fitting motive to person?), perhaps it is better not to be too close or too far away from a person, to see the character potential clearly; but usually the process of character creation destroys its origin in the memory. T w o certainties — perhaps the only two — are, first, that living persons lie at the very heart of storytelling, and, second, that very seldom if ever does a living person literally transcribed, or someone wholly fancied, come out alive on paper. There must be control, adjustment, management. A good short story results from the integration of many small elements and forces, especially in persons. As regards the basic nature of personality, in my earliest years at teaching, before I had written anything, I can remember trying to deal with the short story under the then traditional heads of plot, setting, and characterization. Already I suspected that the textbooks currently in use — Hill's Rhetoric and Barrett Wendell's English Composition — were off the track. Not only were they discussing with grave authority forms of writing (Description, Exposition, Argumentation) that nobody could find in print, they were subdividing these mythic forms, especially what they called "Narration," by what seemed to me quite arbitrary and academic proportionment and emphasis into categories that looked equivalent enough when all laid out, but were not. In my notes and in class

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discussions, I found myself transferring more and more material from the sections on plot and setting to that on characters. Of what validity could be a plot (what is plot, anyway?) not sprung from the interaction of personalities? W h a t use could setting be if it was merely written in by the author, a short descriptive essay before the story began or interpolated while the story paused; what use, that is, unless someone in the story saw, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched it? And as to that, didn't whatever details or impressions of scene the senses absorbed and transmitted by thought, speech, or action depend a great deal on the mental or emotional state the character was in at the time? Didn't this state depend on the kind of individual he was and what effect other individuals or events in the story had on him? I watched people, I read stories, looking for answers. First the textbooks were laid away. Then all three headings disappeared from the classroom, the terms were scarcely ever used, and we merely talked about getting persons into words that fitted well with nothing left over, words that would let them seem real and be natural, moving through a story by spontaneous behavior instead of being pushed and hauled through it by the writer. Catching personality — it might be through a detail of appearance or behavior or action implying a trait, it might be through the trait openly disclosed — we decided, for better or worse, was the be-all and end-all of catching a story. T h e discovery of personality-catching as the heart of story-catching was easy as compared with any attempt to show just how the thing was to be done. I came to the conclusion, which I still hold, that characterization cannot be taught; possession of the knack, or lack of it, goes back too far into the roots of the would-be writer, has to do too closely and permanently with his formation as a person. It is a gift, but the only gift needed. Without its impetus, one might as well go to work at once on something else. W i t h it, lacking everything else, no matter how many false starts, tumbles, crack-ups lie ahead, beyond them lies success in creative writing. Yet a very small amount of this gift, being present, can be nourished and grow. And the gift-in-full can be directed, by suggestion, to prevent waste and preserve its long life. T o want to know how one stands is only natural. Let us return briefly to the content

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of the writer: to what his forebears and environment have made him, and to what he has made of himself, thus in all respects is, at the time he takes up writing. He has, I believe, a more than usual supply of patience in dealing with details, and of tenacity to work details into a large design, and of vision to see the design clearly and constantly as his main and true objective although he is muddling along, knee-deep in trivia. It is natural for him to see at least two sides of almost any question, and all sides of any person. He has an insatiable but impersonal curiosity about all living people — what they look like and wear, how they behave and talk, especially how their behavior reveals or conceals what they think or feel under various conditions — to the extent that he tries to imagine how they behave when he is not watching them. He is always trying to detect the relative representational degree of behavior; that is, to what extent it illustrates what other people would do and how other people would react to given conditions, and to what extent it is singular. He has, too, the ability to observe himself as well as others, and now and then to laugh at himself. His curiosity about people extends to all living creatures, to aspects of Nature, to growing things, and to the pursuits and habits and customs of mankind in general. The world is his encyclopedia, and he refers to it and turns up something significant almost every day. On no area of exact knowledge or formal learning is he much of an authority. Probably he cannot remember dates; he may have trouble balancing his checkbook; many wildflowers are by him termed roadsidia Americana. But he well remembers precisely how the final movement of Brahms' Fourth Symphony sounded on a particular day twenty years ago. The smell of dry leaves burning in the fall, and their smoke lying flat in layers on the still air — this will start him thinking about something and somebody. The wrenched look on a face, a wave higher than a lighthouse, the taste of bacon fried in the woods — these and ten thousand other sense impressions he can never forget. He likes to think about what and whom he saw, or what happened to him, yesterday, and last year, and several years ago. He likes to mingle with people of all kinds and under all circumstances.

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He probably has never been described as "the life" of any party or gathering. But he was there, he knows what went on and remembers it. In a recurrent dream he sees words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs — all exactly right — going down on paper under his hands. Waking, he can't recall a syllable of all this. He reads a good deal. He spends a good deal of time doing nothing, busy only with his thoughts. In all, or almost all, other respects, he is very like everybody else living on his street or in his town. And this sketch of him is at best an approximation. He can be different in small ways and still be a personality-catcher. But if we can only approximate the sort of person likely to possess the faculty of personality-catching, it is possible to go further with and be more specific about what he seeks — his material, under the general heading of experience his stock in trade. This is, of course, knowledge of human nature; knowledge of the appearance and behavior of human beings in all circumstances and under all sorts of conditions of life. Knowledge can be gained continuously from his own behavior and response to sense and emotion and thought stimuli of living, provided he can objectify them. Knowledge can be had from books on psychology, physiology, psychophysics, and psychopathology. Such a work as John Watson's Behaviorism can be useful if read with qualifications. Freud, Jung, and their followers, though heavily overworked of late, are classifiable here. Cognate, more general studies by modern philosophers — William James, Whitehead, Benedetto Croce, Bertrand Russell, Santayana, John Dewey, for instance — who have tried to bring the phenomena of man's relationship to man and to God out of abstract generality and into the area of the specific and concrete, by channeling their observations and logic along the lines of social customs, endeavors, and aspirations — these too can be of service. A natural objection to reliance on books of any relevant sort stems from their generally sensible but for our purposes cramping, because inductive, methods. To take an extreme example, the case history seems most attractive, reads almost like a story; but actually the case history, by im-

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plication if not openly, classifies people into only two huge categories, the normal and the abnormal; or else, by exploring only the second it denies the existence of any norm. This is something less than satisfying for the would-be writer of short stories. For the short story cannot convincingly present monsters; it will not be read if it portrays robots; but it must somehow manage to draw a little from both (G. K . Chesterton remarks somewhere on the availability as material of the ordinary man who does something extraordinary), creating individuals who seem real but are factually untrue and utterly unclassifiable. T o o much or too credulous reading stimulates the creation of types or, worse, monstrosities. There is at present a fad for delving into the abnormal but factually true and, substituting readers' shock or wonderment for their understanding and sympathy, passing off the exceptional as at least expectable. If we have faith in literature as evidenced by the long view, we can hope this is the last gasp of a borrowed naturalism gone bookish and horror-struck for novelty's sake, like the Jacobean theater; and that it will prove of as short duration. The main source of knowledge of human nature under internal or external stress must be the result of direct observation, born neither from love nor hatred (and certainly not from derision) but from an intense, detached curiosity about the human race — an acquisitiveness that has two leading attributes: scrutiny in perspective, that is, a sense of relativity between mortal desires and mortal achievements, to rid the writer of prejudice; and a touch of compassion, which can create comedy or tragedy or mingle both. This is how I believe (but cannot guarantee) the process works. First, the individual gifted, in the sense above, keeps his eyes and his ears open, not by any special effort and often not even knowingly, but because he is so constituted that he can't do otherwise. Eyes and ears are shorthand for all his senses. He does not usually take notes. H e may sometimes, and he may make use of them later or he may throw them away. H e is more likely, fearing the deadly crystallizing effect on fiction of fact in written form, to keep, off and on when he feels like it, a bare journal (meant only for himself) of places, events, and persons. He is most likely to take down no record of experience. In low moments, he may worry about losing all this; it flashes or grinds past him in ten thousand different as-

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pects, a rush of color, line, sound, sensation, emotion, thought too huge and confused to be recorded — or so he feels; and habit being habit, he makes no change but takes in what he can. With courage and a sort of inner assurance — often taken for conceit but not that, more a tempered abstraction — now and then noted in the behavior of creative persons in any medium, he knows that although he may seem to be losing all or most of this he actually has it still, naturally cannot put his finger on all of it at the moment, but can and will when the time comes and it is needed. Once wholly experienced, it lies submerged but accessible. When the time comes, in fact, not only will no special effort be needed on his part; no effort he could make would prevent its imperative entry into his mind. Second, once at work on the demonstration of a general idea by means of specific detail, he will apportion his creative thinking roughly as follows: One person, storyable and thoroughly realized, to equal one third — in importance, not necessarily in space — of the whole affair. (By "storyable" is meant- having characteristics comprehensible to the reader as typical, sharable, similar to his; but at the same time having one of these characteristics — the one, usually, that gives rise to the motive of the story — in somewhat enlarged, intensified, perhaps dominant form, this one therefore not familiar to the reader but strange, not sharable until the fiction has engaged him and worked its spell on him — the characteristic of a singular, a unique individual.) The one person's motive — not alone its logical presence in him but its continued impact and action on him and on others — to equal roughly another third of the total effort. And an obstacle or series of obstacles, in him or outside him, to the attainment of his motive to equal the final third of the thinking involved. If these three gears balance and mesh, the effect will be one thrust. Like the transmission and differential of a car, they will not be visible. What will be seen is forward motion. Motion is the constant need. Truest and sturdiest of propellants is the torque of personality. Third, the owner of the gift will know or soon learn that, as I remarked early in this chapter, the most lifelike persons on paper are as a rule neither wholly fanciful creations of the mind nor exact transcripts of living persons, but a composite of several prototypes fused with a fancied but psychologically sound trait or at-

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tribute to fill thematic needs. Again, it is in the proper balance between the observed group of minor but supporting characteristics and the single, often imagined, dominant one that reality lies. Here, with this fusion of the imagined with the actual to supply motive, exaggeration beyond findings of normal experience is needed. I submit that exaggeration must either be moderate or vary with the amount of appeal — sympathetic, comic, or whatever — generated by the character, if it is to avoid the charge of caricature. Moderate iteration of the dominant trait alone (not by tag or cliche, by varied signs of speech and behavior) can produce the needed degree of emphasis, without risking an increase that would obviously exceed reality and assault the reader's intelligence by trying to pass off on him as real a character who is really grotesque. Fourth and finally — this the gifted personality-catcher will have to learn — successful portrayal of character reverts to rudiments. A list or inventory of visual details (such as began this chapter) or inherent traits will not be read. T h e single, significant detail or trait will be buried in the mass. The writer must screen the lot, get ten down to three and three down to one or two — selection depending on implicative weight, relative conciseness in expression, and significance in the story — and let all the others go. Most discerning readers don't so much care nowadays what a character looks like, as a whole person, as they do about what juts out of or lies under his appearance. As for traits, emotions stated on the authority of the author are not fiction but exposition; even analyses of temperament must be integrated by being channeled through a speaker or a telling method. By far the best way to present a person in a story is that which adopts the role merely of recorder of his speech, his behavior, and within the bounds of telling method, his sense impressions and thoughts; thus actually letting him present himself. But even this, of course, not all at once; little by little as the story moves, and he moves — personality under fire, annealed or disintegrating — with it.

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NUNS AT LUNCHEON* by Aldous Huxley " ^ ^ h a t have I been doing since you saw me last?" Miss Penny repeated my question in her loud, emphatic voice. "Well, when did you see me last?" "It must have been June," I computed. "Was that after I'd been proposed to by the Russian General?" "Yes; I remember hearing about the Russian General." Miss Penny threw back her head and laughed. Her long ear-rings swung and rattled — corpses hanging in chains; an agreeably literary simile. And her laughter was like brass, but that had been said before. "That was an uproarious incident. It's sad you should have heard of it. I love my Russian General story. iVos yeux me rendent fou" She laughed again. Vos yeux—she had eyes like a hare's, flush with her head and very bright with a superficial and expressionless brightness. What a formidable woman. I felt sorry for the Russian General. "'Sans cceur et sans entrailles" she went on, quoting the poor devil's words. "Such a delightful motto, don't you think? Like 'Sans peur et sans reproche.' But let me think; what have I been doing since then?" Thoughtfully she bit into the crust of her bread with long, sharp, white teeth. " T w o mixed grills," I said parenthetically to the waiter. "But of course," exclaimed Miss Penny suddenly. "I haven't seen you since my German trip. All sorts of adventures. My appendicitis; my nun." • F r o m Mortal Coils, by Aldous Huxley, copyright, 1922, 1950, by Aldous Huxley. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers.

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"Your nun?" "My marvelous nun. I must tell you all about her." "Do." Miss Penny's anecdotes were always curious. I looked forward to an entertaining luncheon. "You knew I'd been in Germany this autumn?" "Well, I didn't, as a matter of fact. But still — " "I was just wandering round." Miss Penny described a circle in the air with her gaudily jeweled hand. She always twinkled with massive and improbable jewelry. "Wandering round, living on three pounds a week, partly amusing myself, partly collecting material for a few little articles. 'What it Feels Like to be a Conquered Nation' — sob-stuff for the Liberal press, you know — and 'How the Hun is Trying to Wriggle out of the Indemnity,' for the other fellows. One has to make the best of all possible worlds, don't you find? But we mustn't talk shop. Well, I was wandering round, and very pleasant I found it. Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig. Then down to Munich and all over the place. One fine day I got to Grauburg. You know Grauburg? It's one of those picture-book German towns with a castle on a hill, hanging beer-gardens, a Gothic church, an old university, a river, a pretty bridge, and forests all round. Charming. But I hadn't much opportunity to appreciate the beauties of the place. The day after I arrived there — bang! — I went down with appendicitis — screaming, I may add." "But how appalling!" "They whisked me off to hospital, and cut me open before you could say knife. Excellent surgeon, highly efficient Sisters of Charity to nurse me — I couldn't have been in better hands. But it was a bore being tied there by the leg for four weeks — a great bore. Still the thing had its compensations. There was my nun, for example. Ah, here's the food, thank Heaven!" The mixed grill proved to be excellent. Miss Penny's description of the nun came to me in scraps and snatches. A round, pink, pretty face in a winged coif; blue eyes and regular features; teeth altogether too perfect — false, in fact; but the general effect extremely pleasing. A youthful Teutonic twenty-eight. "She wasn't my nurse," Miss Penny explained. "But I used to see her quite often when she came in to have a look at the tolle Engländerin. Her name was Sister Agatha. During the war, they told

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me, she had converted any number of wounded soldiers to the true faith — which wasn't surprising, considering how pretty she was." "Did she try and convert you?" I asked. "She wasn't such a fool." Miss Penny laughed, and rattled the miniature gallows of her ears. I amused myself for a moment with the thought of Miss Penny's conversion — Miss Penny confronting a vast assembly of Fathers of the Church, rattling her ear-rings at their discourses on the Trinity, laughing her appalling laugh at the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, meeting the stern look of the Grand Inquisitor with a flash of her bright, emotionless hare's eyes. What was the secret of the woman's formidableness? But I was missing the story. What had happened? Ah yes, the gist of it was that Sister Agatha had appeared one morning, after two or three days' absence, dressed, not as a nun, but in the overalls of a hospital charwoman, with a handkerchief instead of a winged coif on her shaven head. "Dead," said Miss Penny; "she looked as though she were dead. A walking corpse, that's what she was. It was a shocking sight. I shouldn't have thought it possible for anyone to change so much in so short a time. She walked painfully, as though she had been ill for months, and she had great burnt rings round her eyes and deep lines in her face. And the general expression of unhappiness — that was something quite appalling." She leaned out into the gangway between the two rows of tables, and caught the passing waiter by the end of one of his coat-tails. The little Italian looked round with an expression of surprise that deepened into terror on his face. "Half a pint of Guinness," ordered Miss Penny. "And, after this, bring me some jam roll." "No jam roll today, madam." "Damn!" said Miss Penny. "Bring me what you like, then." She let go of the waiter's tail and resumed her narrative. "Where was I? Yes, I remember. She came into my room, I was telling you, with a bucket of water and a brush, dressed like a charwoman. Naturally I was rather surprised. 'What on earth are you doing, Sister Agatha?' I asked. N o answer. She just shook her head and began to scrub the floor. When she'd finished, she left the room

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without so much as looking at me again. 'What's happened to Sister Agatha?' I asked my nurse when she next came in. 'Can't say.' — 'Won't say,' I said. No answer. It took nearly a week to find out what really had happened. Nobody dared tell me: it was strengst verboten, as they used to say in the good old days. But I wormed it out in the long run. My nurse, the doctor, the charwomen — I got something out of all of them. I always get what I want in the end." Miss Penny laughed like a horse. "I'm sure you do," I said politely. "Much obliged," acknowledged Miss Penny. "But to proceed. My information came to me in fragmentary whispers. 'Sister Agatha ran away with a man.'— Dear me! — One of the patients.' — You don't say so. — Ά criminal out of the jail.' — The plot thickens. — 'He ran away from her.' — It seems to grow thinner again. — 'They brought her back here; she's been disgraced. There's been a funeral service for her in the chapel — coffin and all. She had to be present at it — her own funeral. She isn't a nun any more. She has to do charwoman's work now, the roughest in the hospital. She's not allowed to speak to anybody, and nobody's allowed to speak to her. She's regarded as dead.' " Miss Penny paused to signal to the harassed little Italian. "My small 'Guinness,' " she called out. "Coming, coming," and the foreign voice cried "Guinness" down the lift, and from below another voice echoed, "Guinness." "I filled in the details bit by bit. There was our hero, to begin with; I had to bring him into the picture, which was rather difficult, as I had never seen him. But I got a photograph of him. The police circulated one when he got away; I don't suppose they ever caught him." Miss Penny opened her bag. "Here it is," she said. "I always carry it about with me; it's become a superstition. For years, I remember, I used to carry a little bit of heather tied up with string. Beautiful, isn't it? There's a sort of Renaissance look about it, don't you think? He was half-Italian, you know." Italian. Ah, that explained it. I had been wondering how Bavaria could have produced this thin-faced creature with the big dark eyes, the finely modeled nose and chin, and the fleshy lips so royally and sensually curved. "He's certainly very superb," I said, handing back the picture.

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Miss Penny put it carefully away in her bag. "Isn't he?" she said. "Quite marvelous. But his character and his mind were even better. I see him as one of those innocent, childlike monsters of iniquity who are simply unaware of the existence of right and wrong. And he had genius — the real Italian genius for engineering, for dominating and exploiting nature. A true son of the Roman aqueduct builders he was, and a brother of the electrical engineers. Only Kuno — that was his name — didn't work in water: he worked in women. He knew how to harness the natural energy of passion; he made devotion drive his mills. The commercial exploitation of lovepower, that was his specialty. I sometimes wonder," Miss Penny added in a different tone, "whether I shall ever be exploited, when I get a little more middle-aged and celibate, by one of these young engineers of the passions. It would be humiliating, particularly as I've done so little exploiting from my side." She frowned and was silent for a moment. No, decidedly, Miss Penny was not beautiful; you could not even honestly say that she had charm or was attractive. That high Scotch coloring, those hare's eyes, the voice, the terrifying laugh, and the size of her, the general formidableness of the woman. No, no, no. "You said he had been in prison," I said. The silence, with all its implications, was becoming embarrassing. Miss Penny sighed, looked up, and nodded. " H e was fool enough," she said, "to leave the straight and certain road of female exploitation for the dangerous courses of burglary. We all have our occasional accesses of folly. They gave him a heavy sentence, but he succeeded in getting pneumonia, I think it was, a week after entering jail. He was transferred to the hospital. Sister Agatha, with her known talent for saving souls, was given him as his particular attendant. But it was he, I'm afraid, who did the converting." Miss Penny finished off the last mouthful of the ginger pudding which the waiter had brought in lieu of jam roll. "I suppose you don't smoke cheroots," I said, as I opened my cigar-case. "Well, as a matter of fact, I do," Miss Penny replied. She looked sharply round the restaurant. "I must just see if there are any of those horrible little gossip paragraphers here today. One doesn't want to figure in the social and personal column tomorrow morn-

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ing: Ά fact which is not so generally known as it ought to be is that Miss Penny, the well-known woman journalist, always ends her luncheon with a six-inch Burma cheroot. I saw her yesterday in a restaurant — not a hundred miles from Carmelite Street — smoking like a house on fire.' You know the touch. But the coast seems to be clear, thank goodness." She took a cheroot from the case, lit it at my proffered match, and went on talking. "Yes, it was young Kuno who did the converting. Sister Agatha was converted back into the worldly Melpomene Fugger she had been before she became the bride of holiness." "Melpomene Fugger?" "That was her name. I had her history from my old doctor. He had seen all Grauburg, living and dying and propagating, for generations. Melpomene Fugger — why, he had brought little Melpel into the world, little Melpchen. Her father was Professor Fugger, the great Professor Fugger, the berühmter Geolog. Oh, yes, of course, I know the name. So well . . . He was the man who wrote the standard work on Lemuria — you know, the hypothetical continent where the lemurs come from. I showed due respect. Liberalminded he was, a disciple of Herder, a world-burgher, as they beautifully call it over there. Anglophile, too, and always ate porridge for breakfast — up till August, 1914. Then, on the radiant morning of the fifth, he renounced it for ever, solemnly and with tears in his eyes. The national food of a people who had betrayed culture and civilization — how could he go on eating it? It would stick in his throat. In future he would have a lightly boiled egg. He sounded, I thought, altogether charming. And his daughter, Melpomene— she sounded charming, too; and such thick, yellow pigtails when she was young! Her mother was dead, and a sister of the great Professor's ruled the house with an iron rod. Aunt Bertha was her name. Well, Melpomene grew up, very plump and appetizing. When she was seventeen, something very odious and disagreeable happened to her. Even the doctor didn't know exactly what it was; but he wouldn't have been surprised if it had had something to do with the then Professor of Latin, an old friend of the family's, who combined, it seems, great erudition with a horrid fondness for very young ladies."

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Miss Penny knocked half an inch of cigar ash into her empty glass. "If I wrote short stories," she went on reflectively, "(but it's too much bother), I should make this anecdote into a sort of potted life history, beginning with a scene immediately after this disagreeable event in Melpomene's life. I see the scene so clearly. Poor little Melpel is leaning over the bastions of Grauburg Castle, weeping into the June night and the mulberry trees in the garden thirty feet below. She is besieged by the memory of what happened this dreadful afternoon. Professor Engelmann, her father's old friend, with the magnificent red Assyrian beard . . . Too awful — too awful! But then, as I was saying, short stories are really too much bother; or perhaps I'm too stupid to write them. I bequeath it to you. You know how to tick these things off." "You're generous." "Not at all," said Miss Penny. "My terms are ten per cent commission on the American sale. Incidentally there won't be an American sale. Poor Melpchen's history is not for the chaste public of Those States. But let me hear what you propose to do with Melpomene now you've got her on the castle bastions." "That's simple," I said. "I know all about German university towns and castles on hills. I shall make her look into the June night, as you suggest; into the violet night with its points of golden flame. There will be the black silhouette of the castle, with its sharp roofs and hooded turrets, behind her. From the hanging beer-gardens in the town below the voices of the students, singing in perfect fourpart harmony, will float up through the dark-blue spaces. 'Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rof and ''Das Ringlein sprang in zwei' — the heartrenderingly sweet old songs will make her cry all the more. Her tears will patter like rain among the leaves of the mulberry trees in the garden below. Does that seem to you adequate?" "Very nice," said Miss Penny. "But how are you going to bring the sex problem and all its horrors into your landscape?" "Well, let me think." I called to memory those distant foreign summers when I was completing my education. "I know. I shall suddenly bring a swarm of moving candles and Chinese lanterns under the mulberry trees. You imagine the rich lights and shadows, the jewel-bright leafage, the faces and moving limbs of men and

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women, seen for an instant and gone again. They are students and girls of the town come out to dance, this windless, blue June night, under the mulberry trees. And now they begin, thumping round and round in a ring, to the music of their own singing: "Wir können spielen Vio-vio-vio-lin, Wir können spielen Vi-o-lin.

Now the rhythm changes, quickens: "Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara, Bumstarara, Bumstarara, Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara, Bumstarara-rara.

The dance becomes a rush, an elephantine prancing on the dry lawn under the mulberry trees. And from the bastion Melpomene looks down and perceives, suddenly and apocalyptically, that everything in the world is sex, sex, sex. Men and women, male and female — always the same, and all, in the light of the horror of the afternoon, disgusting. That's how I should do it, Miss Penny." "And very nice, too. But I wish you could find a place to bring in my conversation with the doctor. I shall never forget the way he cleared his throat, and coughed before embarking on the delicate subject. 'You may know, ahem, gracious Miss,' he began — 'you may know that religious phenomena are often, ahem, closely connected with sexual causes.' I replied that I had heard rumors which might justify me in believing this to be true among Roman Catholics, but that in the Church of England — and I for one was a practitioner of Anglicanismus — it was very different. That might be, said the doctor; he had had no opportunity in the course of his long medical career of personally studying Anglicanismus. But he could vouch for the fact that among his patients, here in Grauburg, mysticismus was very often mixed up with the Geschlechtsleben. Melpomene was a case in point. After that hateful afternoon she had become extremely religious; the Professor of Latin had diverted her emotions out of their normal channels. She rebelled against the placid Agnosticismus of her father, and at night, in secret, when Aunt Bertha's dragon eyes were closed, she would read such forbidden books as The Life of St. Theresa, The Little Flowers of St.

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Francis, The Imitation of Christ, and the horribly enthralling Book of Martyrs. Aunt Bertha confiscated these works whenever she came upon them; she considered them more pernicious than the novels of Marcel Prevost. The character of a good potential housewife might be completely undermined by reading of this kind. It was rather a relief for Melpomene when Aunt Bertha shuffled off, in the summer of 1911, this mortal coil. She was one of those indispensables of whom one makes the discovery, when they are gone, that one can get on quite as well without them. Poor Aunt Bertha!" "One can imagine Melpomene trying to believe she was sorry, and horribly ashamed to find that she was really, in secret, almost glad." The suggestion seemed to me ingenious, but Miss Penny accepted it as obvious. "Precisely," she said; "and the emotion would only further confirm and give new force to the tendencies which her aunt's death left her free to indulge as much as she liked. Remorse, contrition — they would lead to the idea of doing penance. And for one who was now wallowing in the martyrology, penance was the mortification of the flesh. She used to kneel for hours, at night, in the cold; she ate too little, and when her teeth ached, which they often did, — for she had a set, the doctor told me, which had given trouble from the very first — she would not go and see the dentist, but lay awake at night, savoring to the full her excruciations, and feeling triumphantly that they must, in some strange way, be pleasing to the Mysterious Powers. She went on like that for two or three years, till she was poisoned through and through. In the end she went down with gastric ulcer. It was three months before she came out of hospital, well for the first time in a long space of years, and with a brand new set of imperishable teeth, all gold and ivory. And in mind, too, she was changed — for the better, I suppose. The nuns who nursed her had made her see that in mortifying herself she had acted supererogatively and through spiritual pride; instead of doing right, she had sinned. The only road to salvation, they told her, lay in discipline, in the orderliness of established religion, in obedience to authority. Secretly, so as not to distress her poor father, whose Agnosticismus was extremely dogmatic, for all its unobtrusiveness, Melpomene became a Roman Catholic. She was twenty-two. Only a few months later came the war and Professor Fugger's eternal

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renunciation of porridge. He did not long survive the making of that patriotic gesture. In the autumn of 1914 he caught a fatal influenza. Melpomene was alone in the world. In the spring of 1915 there was a new and very conscientious Sister of Charity at work among the wounded in the hospital of Grauburg. Here," explained Miss Penny, jabbing the air with her forefinger, "you put a line of asterisks or dots to signify a six years' gulf in the narrative. And you begin again right in the middle of a dialogue between Sister Agatha and the newly convalescent Kuno." "What's their dialogue to be about?" I asked. "Oh, that's easy enough," said Miss Penny. "Almost anything would do. What about this, for example? You explain that the fever has just abated; for the first time for days the young man is fully conscious. He feels himself to be well, reborn, as it were, in a new world — a world so bright and novel and jolly that he can't help laughing at the sight of it. He looks about him; the flies on the ceiling strike him as being extremely comic. How do they manage to walk upside down? They have suckers on their feet, says Sister Agatha, and wonders if her natural history is quite sound. Suckers on their feet —• ha, ha! What an uproarious notion! Suckers on their feet — that's good, that's damned good! You can say charming, pathetic, positively tender things about the irrelevant mirth of convalescents — the more so in this particular case, where the mirth is expressed by a young man who is to be taken back to jail as soon as he can stand firmly on his legs. Ha, ha! Laugh on, unhappy boy! It is the quacking of the Fates, the Parcae, the Norns!" Miss Penny gave an exaggerated imitation of her own brassy laughter. At the sound of it the few lunchers who still lingered at the other tables looked up, startled. "You can write pages about Destiny and its ironic quacking. It's tremendously impressive, and there's money in every line." "You may be sure I shall." "Good! Then I can get on with my story. The days pass and the first hilarity of convalescence fades away. The young man remembers and grows sullen; his strength comes back to him, and with it a sense of despair. His mind broods incessantly on the hateful future. As for the consolations of religion, he won't listen to them.

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Sister Agatha perseveres — oh, with what anxious solicitude! — in the attempt to make him understand and believe and be comforted. It is all so tremendously important, and in this case, somehow, more important than in any other. And now you see the Geschlechtsleben working yeastily and obscurely, and once again the quacking of the Norns is audible. By the way," said Miss Penny, changing her tone and leaning confidentially across the table, "I wish you'd tell me something. Tell me, do you really — honestly, I mean — do you seriously believe in literature?" "Believe in literature?" "I was thinking," Miss Penny explained, "of Ironic Fate and the quacking of the Norns and all that." " 'M yes." "And then there's this psychology and introspection business; and construction and good narrative and word pictures and le mot juste and verbal magic and striking metaphors." I remembered that I had compared Miss Penny's tinkling earrings to skeletons hanging in chains. "And then, finally, and to begin with — Alpha and Omega — there's ourselves: two professionals gloating, with an absolute lack of sympathy, over a seduced nun, and speculating on the best method of turning her misfortunes into cash. It's all very curious, isn't it? — when one begins to think about it dispassionately." "Very curious," I agreed. "But, then, so is everything else if you look at it like that." "No, no," said Miss Penny. "Nothing's so curious as our business. But I shall never get to the end of my story if I get started on first principles." Miss Penny continued her narrative. I was still thinking of literature. Do you believe in it? Seriously? Ah! Luckily the question was quite meaningless. The story came to me rather vaguely, but it seemed that the young man was getting better; in a few more days, the doctor had said, he would be well — well enough to go back to jail. No, no. The question was meaningless. I would think about it no more. I concentrated my attention again. "Sister Agatha," I heard Miss Penny saying, "prayed, exhorted, indoctrinated. Whenever she had half a minute to spare from her other duties she would come running into the young man's room.

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Ί wonder if you fully realize the importance of prayer?' she would ask, and, before he had time to answer, she would give him a breathless account of the uses and virtues of regular and patient supplication. Or else, it was: 'May I tell you about St. Theresa?' or 'St. Stephen, the first martyr — you know about him, don't you?' Kuno simply wouldn't listen at first. It seemed so fantastically irrelevant, such an absurd interruption to his thoughts, his serious, despairing thoughts about the future. Prison was real, imminent, and this woman buzzed about him with her ridiculous fairy tales. Then, suddenly, one day he began to listen, he showed signs of contrition and conversion. Sister Agatha announced her triumph to the other nuns, and there was rejoicing over the one lost sheep. Melpomene had never felt so happy in her life, and Kuno, looking at her radiant face, must have wondered how he could have been such a fool as not to see from the first what was now so obvious. The woman had lost her head about him. And he had only four days n o w — f o u r days in which to tap the tumultuous love power, to canalize it, to set it working for his escape. W h y hadn't he started a week ago? He could have made certain of it then. But now? There was no knowing. Four days was a horribly short time." "How did he do it?" I asked, for Miss Penny had paused. "That's for you to say," she replied, and shook her ear-rings at me. "I don't know. Nobody knows, I imagine, except the two parties concerned and perhaps Sister Agatha's confessor. But one can reconstruct the crime, as they say. How would you have done it? You're a man, you ought to be familiar with the processes of amorous engineering." "You flatter me," I answered. "Do you seriously suppose — " I extended my arms. Miss Penny laughed like a horse. "No. But, seriously, it's a problem. The case is a very special one. The person, a nun; the place, a hospital; the opportunities, few. There could be no favorable circumstances — no moonlight, no distant music; and any form of direct attack would be sure to fail. That audacious confidence which is your amorist's best weapon would be useless here." "Obviously," said Miss Penny. "But there are surely other methods. There is the approach through pity and the maternal instincts. And there's the approach through Higher Things, through the

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soul. Kuno must have worked on those lines, don't you think? One can imagine him letting himself be converted, praying with her, and at the same time appealing for her sympathy and even threatening — with a great air of seriousness — to kill himself rather than go back to jail. You can write that up easily and convincingly enough. But it's the sort of thing that bores me so frightfully to do. That's why I can never bring myself to write fiction. What is the point of it all? And the way you literary men think yourselves so important — particularly if you write tragedies. It's all very queer, very queer indeed." I made no comment. Miss Penny changed her tone and went on with the narrative. "Well," she said, "whatever the means employed, the engineering process was perfectly successful. Love was made to find out a way. On the afternoon before Kuno was to go back to prison, two Sisters of Charity walked out of the hospital gates, crossed the square in front of it, glided down the narrow streets towards the river, boarded a tram at the bridge, and did not descend till the car had reached its terminus in the farther suburbs. T h e y began to walk briskly along the high road out into the country. 'Look!' said one of them, when they were clear of the houses; and with the gesture of a conjurer produced from nowhere a red leather purse. 'Where did it come from?' asked the other, opening her eyes. Memories of Elisha and the ravens, of the widow's curse, of the loaves and fishes, must have floated through the radiant fog in poor Melpomene's mind. 'The old lady I was sitting next to in the tram left her bag open. Nothing could have been simpler.' 'Kuno! You don't mean to say you stole it?' Kuno swore horribly. He had opened the purse. 'Only sixty marks. Who'd have thought that an old camel, all dressed up in silk and furs, would only have sixty marks in her purse. And I must have a thousand at least to get away.' It's easy to reconstruct the rest of the conversation down to the inevitable 'For God's sake, shut up,' with which Kuno put an end to Melpomene's dismayed moralizing. T h e y trudge on in silence. Kuno thinks desperately. Only sixty marks; he can do nothing with that. If only he had something to sell, a piece of jewelry, some gold or silver — anything, anything. He knows such a good place for selling things. Is he to be caught again for lack of a few

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marks? Melpomene is also thinking. Evil must often be done that good may follow. After all, had not she herself stolen Sister Mary of the Purification's clothes when she was asleep after night duty? Had not she run away from the convent, broken her vows? And yet how convinced she was that she was doing rightly! The Mysterious Powers emphatically approved; she felt sure of it. And now there was the red purse. But what was a red purse in comparison with a saved soul — and, after all, what was she doing but saving Kuno's soul?" Miss Penny, who had adopted the voice and gestures of a debater asking rhetorical questions, brought her hand with a slap onto the table. "Lord, what a bore this sort of stuff is!" she exclaimed. "Let's get to the end of this dingy anecdote as quickly as possible. By this time, you must imagine, the shades of night were falling fast — the chill November twilight, and so on; but I leave the natural descriptions to you. Kuno gets into the ditch at the roadside and takes off his robes. One imagines that he would feel himself safer in trousers, more capable of acting with decision in a crisis. They tramp on for miles. Late in the evening they leave the high road and strike up through the fields towards the forest. At the fringe of the wood they find one of those wheeled huts where the shepherds sleep in the lambing season." "The real 'Maison du Berger.' " "Precisely," said Miss Penny, and she began to recite: "Si ton coeur gemissant du poids de notre vie Se traine et se debat comme un aigle blesse. . . .

How does it go on? I used to adore it all so much when I was a girl: "Le seuil est parfume, Γ alcove est large et sombre, Et lä parmi les flews, nous trouverons dans Γ ombre, Four nos cheveux unis un lit silencieux.

I could go on like this indefinitely." "Do," I said. "No, no. No, no. I'm determined to finish this wretched story. Kuno broke the padlock of the door. They entered. What happened in that little hut?" Miss Penny leaned forward at me. Her large hare's eyes glittered, the long ear-rings swung and faintly tinkled. "Imagine the emotions of a virgin of thirty, and a nun at that, in the terrifying presence of desire. Imagine the easy, familiar

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brutalities of the young man. Oh, there's pages to be made out of this — the absolutely impenetrable darkness, the smell of straw, the voices, the strangled crying, the movements! And one likes to fancy that the emotions pulsing about in that confined space made palpable vibrations like a deep sound that shakes the air. W h y , it's ready-made literature, this scene. In the morning," Miss Penny went on, after a pause, "two woodcutters on their way to work noticed that the door of the hut was ajar. They approached the hut cautiously, their axes raised and ready for a blow if there should be need of it. Peeping in, they saw a woman in a black dress lying face downward in the straw. Dead? No; she moved, she moaned. 'What's the matter?' A blubbered face, smeared with streaks of tear-clotted gray dust, is lifted towards them. 'What's the matter?' — 'He's gone!' What a queer, indistinct utterance. The woodcutters regard one another. What does she say? She's a foreigner, perhaps. 'What's the matter?' they repeat once more. The woman bursts out violently crying. 'Gone, gone! He's gone,' she sobs out in her vague, inarticulate way. 'Oh, gone. That's what she says. Who's gone?' —'He's left m e . ' — ' W h a t ? ' — ' L e f t me . . .' — 'What the devil . . . ? Speak a little more distinctly.' — Ί can't,' she wails; 'he's taken my teeth.' — 'Your what?' — 'My teeth!' — and the shrill voice breaks into a scream, and she falls back sobbing into the straw. The woodcutters look significantly at one another. They nod. One of them applies a thick yellow-nailed forefinger to his forehead." Miss Penny looked at her watch. "Good heavens!" she said, "it's nearly half-past three. I must fly. Don't forget about the funeral service," she added, as she put on her coat. "The tapers, the black coffin in the middle of the aisle, the nuns in their white-winged coifs, the gloomy chanting, and the poor cowering creature without any teeth, her face all caved in like an old woman's, wondering whether she wasn't really and in fact dead — wondering whether she wasn't already in hell. Good-by."

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The story sparkles. Several technical instruments and factors in the management of content contribute to the display. T h e immediate scene in the restaurant gathers together and unifies for a single effect a number of told immediate scenes and a multitude of details widely separate in space and time. There are two narrators. T h e more important because more prominent is, of course, Miss Penny; but the function of "I" should not be underrated or misunderstood. "I" describes Miss Penny, contributes suggestions and a long descriptive scene, spurs on the chief teller or reins her in, and is, actually, the motive force behind the story. It was plainly Mr. Huxley's intention for "I" to represent himself: "I" is a writer of fiction; his laconic and noncommittal speech, well calculated to lead on Miss Penny, was shrewdly managed to draw interest and sympathy while acting as contrast to her voluble telling and overbearing manner; his early statement, "but that had been said before," and, rather late in the story, his reply to Miss Penny's urging that he write a story on the material she is giving him, " Y o u may be sure I shall," seal the certainty. W e must take Mr. Huxley's word for it; we cannot, in considering this short story, differentiate between the author as a living person and the author as a character. He is there in the story by his own admission and wish, and is to be appraised as a character. Both narrators, we note, are trained writers, observing life as a matter of course and holding decided opinions about living and dying. Both are acutely imaginative. A further advantage is gained, through instinct or design, by the fact that both tellers are ostensibly only playing with story material, pretending, imagining the writing of a story while the story is being told; so that they may stop, start again, stop again when and where they wish, interpolate their feelings and opinions or, as effectively, be silent without losing the thread of narrative or becoming incoherent. Thus the vehicle of expression works as smoothly and as effortlessly as a precision machine. Small wonder, then, if the extremely ingenious and intricate structure of the story — its back-and-forth movement in time holding suspense when needed, preparing every detail for the accelerated pace and swift ending — remains unseen. The strongest element is unclassifiable under technique or content. Only the most captious reader will find "Nuns at Luncheon"

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less than highly readable. Once under way, the story induces a snicker or chortle in almost every line. There is release in the laughter produced, possibly a hysterical or near-hysterical sense of pleasure in seeing institutions and customs long held sacred not only torn to shreds but tramped upon. The incongruity is cumulative, the pressure builds up to a long-pent roar of mirth when Sister Agatha, discovered by woodcutters and unable to explain her predicament because her seducer has stolen her false teeth, is quite naturally taken for a fool. The total effect of the story is both authentic and astounding; burst follows burst of incredible fireworks; yet here it all lies quiet, in cold black type. Obviously, too, the intent of the author was satire. But when one tries to discover the cause and nature of the attack, and particularly its object or objects, no solution appears. Since Juvenal, this form of writing has seemed best justified, promising permanence as art, when one or more of the following attributes is present: a corrective motive indicated by suggested betterment of conditions satirized; impersonality covering the identity of satirist and the satirized by symbolism or allegory; and detachment from local or temporal circumstances that, being soon forgotten, would render the attack meaningless. None of these conditions obtains here. Miss Penny is exhibited, especially at her triumphant exit from the story, as a growing menace to society about whom nobody, least of all the author, need have the slightest misgivings; the satirist not only appears in person but bids for the reader's interest and sympathy, while the individual satirized is drawn with such vigorous acerbity and exactitude of grotesque detail that, though her identity now after thirty years may be forgotten, she must have had a living prototype (she is as certainly factual and as basically unadulterated fact as was Maugham's portrait of Hugh Walpole in Cakes and Ale)·, and the circumstances of time and place are so particularized that already they are hazed over and in another thirty years may require a gloss. And Miss Penny, although the chief object of attack, is by no means the only one. Any attempt to enumerate other butts will fail unless a list is made of persons and beliefs not attacked. We cannot call this story satire. We must call it satirical, bitterly and generally satirical, for some reason not yet determined. We are far from all that laughter.

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So doubt enters. W e must get at the meaning of the story, and the only method possible is through a study of its enactors, one of whom is Mr. Huxley himself. (Or so he has asked us to believe.) Two interpretations of the story are tenable, depending on our interpretation of "I" and Miss Penny. Neither redounds greatly to the author's credit as catcher and creator of personality, and the consequent ambiguity between the two readings (although it may have afforded him a private joke-of-all-jokes at the reader's expense) seems to constitute a further detraction from what at first appeared a brilliant achievement in this factor of management. The only fully grasped person here is Miss Penny. Her the author seems to have known so well that he could embroider factual details into the purely fanciful — such as the earrings, the woman journalist's outward scorn of but inward yearning to write fiction, the savage curiosity of an old maid about sex — without making the caricature too outlandish, in a swiftly moving story, to be credible. By this first interpretation, the author uses Miss Penny not so much as a storyteller, rather as a mouthpiece through which he can jeer at a good many activities and customs and institutions that he personally finds ridiculous: spinsters, journalists, American magazines, Roman and Protestant Churches, universities, sexual inhibitions and sexual drives, but especially and above all ideal love — in short, at almost everything and everybody conveniently in sight at the moment, with one exception. Himself. But this very wanton and extensive jeering, plus his ostentation of utterance and choice of material (note his proffered familiarity with French, German, Latin used mock-heroically or mock-romantically) actually reveal himself as something of a joke that he missed, while at the same time undermining the illusion of reality within which a story must operate. In this instance, the story told by Miss Penny, of the authenticity of whose facts we have no assurance and some cause for doubt, becomes more and more a sort of fairy tale within a warped but perhaps basically factual anecdote, creating neither convincing fiction nor credible fact. By this interpretation the piece begins as fiction but ends as polemic. It seems hardly necesaary to add that the distortion of some unknown person into a caricature called Miss Penny is suggestive of the failure to create individual personalities in Kuno and Sister

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Agatha. The former is at best, just as visually represented, a worn photograph; he never speaks a word in the reader's hearing; he comes to us via the Doctor, Miss Penny, and Mr. Huxley, and probably was guessed at. Sister Agatha's false teeth give her away at once (as did Miss Penny's "corpses hanging in chains" earrings). She again is only a broad type with luridly grotesque touches, a character who can be pushed at the author's humorous whim from seduction into near-sainthood into farce. By a second interpretation this story is an intensive, rather than extensive, attack. There is no general polemic, the author is not accountable for what Miss Penny rails at, and the story proper occurs only in the restaurant, its only characters being Miss Penny and Mr. Huxley. The story told by Miss Penny within the story is to be taken as nonsense, made up by her out of whole cloth, and is used merely as a lever by which Mr. Huxley, through his modest aloofness and reluctant participation, pries open and reveals the tremendous sexual yearning and the equally strong sexual repression within Miss Penny's unconsciousness. This leverage begins where Miss Penny wonders if she will ever be "exploited." The negative, embarrassing silence that follows compels her to justify herself as person, as professional, and as contented because courted (if not yet won) spinster. The stages of the told story follow the pattern of this attempted justification, as Miss Penny repeatedly tries to lure Mr. Huxley into collaboration, only to snatch the telling from him. At the same time the author allows her, before the reader's eyes, to deny and refute by implication (note the early description of her eyes and ears; note that she, ä reporter of facts, is here spinning the wildest species of yarn while at the same time professing disgust at it and extreme boredom; note the ironic application to her of the funeral of Sister Agatha) all three phases of her intended vindication of herself, and in the very words that she believes creates and confirms them. Yet, if this interpretation is correct, our conclusion must be that Mr. Huxley has drawn a superficially comic but essentially an incredibly stupid person, a monster in chains, far too exaggerated for anyone not momentarily blinded by laughter to believe. Katharine Brush's "Good Wednesday" shows a similar (much simpler) pattern of self-condemnation disguised äs justification, the äuthor

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using stages in the revelation of the protagonist as substitute for movement by motive-obstacle-success or -failure. But there there is no ambiguity, the method is straight and clear, the material no less keenly satirical but carefully objectified and held in control; and the result is a story that provides no laughter but knocks the reader all but off his chair by producing a shattering surprise based on thoroughly realized and thoroughly credible characteristics of human nature that might turn up at any time, anywhere. Here, what meaning, what general truth is present and demonstrated, by either interpretation? All female reporters are like Miss Penny? All aging spinsters have an ungovernable appetite that will out if properly baited? All social, intellectual, or religious institutions are preposterous? Certainly not. Yet something is achieved here that must be taken reluctantly as the meaning of the story. "Nuns at Luncheon" emits a derisive blast at both the possession and the loss of virginity; this, by whatever interpretation of material and details, is proved by the title. It is a curious achievement, a childish revolt from faith once celebrated with hymns and prayers and the building of cathedrals in honor of a virgin. It is an act of defiance of and disbelief in the classical-Christian idea and ideal of humanism; and to it the reader may finally react with a loud laugh or a corresponding disbelief of his own in the author's ability to be, in this instance, anything more durable than a showoff or an incompetent cartoonist. The story seems to sparkle. The question is whether with the spark of life or the duller, iridescent glow of decomposition. Characterization must show balance, and within balance characters must usually move — like spinning tops, like persons. Something more or something less than a desire to ridicule humanity is needed behind the writing of a short story. "Nuns at Luncheon," readable as it is, provides an illustration in reverse, an anythingelse-but, for personality-catchers.

XIII. PLACE UNLESS W E ARE EXPECTED TO PUT NO CREDENCE IN THE

similitude that representation of life in fiction bears to life itself (a still rather remote possibility, though pined for by nonobjective symbolists), the place or places in which a short story occurs exerts a strong, if relatively subordinate, influence on the convincingness of the whole effort. Place is a living otherwhereness, first of all, having, like the well-drawn, three-dimensional character, familiar and typical aspects but also strange and individual ones. Its demands on the writer for intensive experience are like those of characterization, especially in the interaction between the impact of sense stimuli and the emotional and mental response of personality. The relationship between place and person is closer than that. Besides the more commonly recognized features of landscape, seascape, architecture, furniture, and custom, place includes weather, season, climate, day-into-night-into-day sense of time, and a quality impalpable and abstract (though humanly deriyed and expressible by concrete symbols) that we can suggest only by the misused word "atmosphere" — as of calm-storm, haste-leisure, clutter-orderliness, routine-discovery, artifice-candor-naivete, and all sorts of ramifications indicative of influence of place on person or of person on place — hovering over and diffused through some small section of man's world, his work and play. With such a welter of possibilities conceded as relevant, for the short story a high premium is set at once on selection of two kinds: details to be chosen and words to express them. As in personalitycatching, the short-story writer must be willing to throw out attractive details by the barrel, to discard nine-tenths of what he knows and would like to include but strive to save the precious remainder. And for this form of fiction that on losing mobility ceases to be he must also forego, to a large extent, the two kinds of words that immobilize and freeze life, even momentarily, as if for a photo-

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graph — namely, adjectives and adverbs. It takes only a moment or two of contiguous still snapshots to make a time exposure. What we want is the effect of a single flash: the shutter opening, the limned and meaningful scene instantly clear to the tiniest twig and freckle, then again darkness. The hardest test of linkage between person and place lies in the title. Any list of well-known titles of fiction long and short will show a preponderance of substantives that name or imply a person. The best of these (I mean as titles) do not stop there but manage to suggest the presence of an individual on location — as if the authors were mindful of the close relationship, the impact of sense stimuli of all kinds on personality, giving place the right to function while at the same time fulfilling the person. Not to be dogmatic, such a title may be given broad and flexible preference, though it is sometimes impossible of attainment. There is obvious need for brevity. Apt selection of a title favors the specific and germane over the generic, the definite over the indefinite, the concrete over the abstract, in a short combination that not only carries an independent invitation to read but is clear by itself without post-reading reference. Within limits, I believe a statement has more force than a term. Next in importance and related to the preceding qualities is discovery of a title that is not merely a tag or handle attached by the author, but a phrase that occurs (I don't mean one injected for the purpose) naturally and organically in the story to follow. If this quality of peculiarly belonging to one story and to no other is achieved, place functions first, if ever so lightly, as an inseparable adjunct of personality. And the title may have to wait, before being chosen, until the whole story is written. True, much time and effort spent on so small a part may seem to go for nothing. Some magazines employ an assistant editor who does little more than change titles to conform with policies no mere writer can understand. I once spent two days in a jungle of pretty good titles for a story, at last hit on one ("Change Me Never") that seemed very good; but in due course found the piece headed "A Summer Affair." Although he had thrown out the specific in favor of a trite, generic title, the caption-master had included season and atmosphere without sacrificing the suggestion of personality. Still, an editor who abstains from puttering deserves a grand

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prize. And a lengthy search for a title, or any other small part of a story, is never fruitless. Eventually, the thing that seems exactly right will be found, and no anxious afterthought can mar its luster. Katherine Mansfield called one of her short stories " A t the Bay." Here is an author-attached tag, concrete only in its context, definite without being specific or even entirely clear, owing to the various denotations and connotations of "Bay," and symbolically significant — from the sheltered bay (of life?) one or more characters appear to scan bewilderedly the unprotected, dim, turbulent vastness of open sea (life's meaning?) — only after the story has been read and, problematically, solved, with all the labor but less satisfaction than that accruing to the solution of an acrostic. The prepositional phrase writes the title off the page. This story can be useful in a consideration of the major aspects and functions of place, as well. " A t the Bay" * begins, in part, as follows: V e r y early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. T h e grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves . . . Round the corner of Crescent Bay, between the piled-up masses of broken rock, a flock of sheep came pattering. They were huddled together, a small, tossing, woolly mass, and their thin, sticklike legs trotted along quickly as if the cold and the quiet had frightened them. Behind them an old sheep-dog, his soaking paws covered with sand, ran along with his nose to the ground, but carelessly, as if thinking of something else. And then in the rocky gateway the shepherd himself appeared. He was a lean, upright old man, in a frieze coat that was covered with a web of tiny drops, velvet trousers tied under the knee, and a wide-awake * From The Garden Party and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1922, 1937, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

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with a folded blue handkerchief round the brim. One hand was crammed into his belt, the other grasped a beautifully smooth yellow stick. And as he walked, taking his time, he kept up a very soft light whistling, an airy, far-away fluting that sounded mournful and tender. The old dog cut an ancient caper or two and then drew up sharp, ashamed of his levity, and walked a few dignified paces by his master's side . . . The sun was rising. It was marvellous how quickly the mist thinned, sped away, dissolved from the shallow plain, rolled up from the bush and was gone as if in a hurry to escape; big twists and curls jostled and shouldered each other as the silvery beams broadened. The far-away sky — a bright, pure blue — was reflected in the puddles, and the drops, swimming along the telegraph poles, flashed into points of light. Now the leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one's eyes ache to look at it. The shepherd drew a pipe, the bowl as small as an acorn, out of his breast pocket, fumbled for a chunk of speckled tobacco, pared off a few shavings and stuffed the bowl. He was a grave, fine-looking old man. As he lit up and the blue smoke wreathed his head, the dog, watching, looked proud of him. This is alert, hypersensitive, crystal clear, fluent if leisurely prose: a refreshing delight to the eye and ear of the mind. It appears to be also the conventional nineteenth-century opening of a story — the careful setting of the stage, the time of day, the season, and at the writer's pleasure the introduction of life, first vegetable, then animal, finally human. But this it is not. It might also be the opening of a contemporary short story transmitted to the reader objectively. Nor is it this. Of the three, it is actually only the first, very good prose. Except that the story occurs in this general locality, its whole first section, three times the length of the part quoted, bears no discernible relation to it. Nobody but the author sees this opening scene; nobody and almost nothing in it appears again. The shepherd so lovingly drawn, who might be God, or a painted figure on a back-drop — or merely a man to tend the sheep — drops out and stays out; and the only physical connection that a reader can find between this seemingly modest but actually pretentious opening and the story is the fact that the sheep are later reported to a minor character as having been seen. A t sunrise, all the characters are asleep in their beds. A bulky, dislocated, floating opening will put off all but the most earnest or bedazzled reader, who is content with mere spatial and sequential values. The opening here is much more than any reader

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needs to understand the rather soggy symbolism that may have been Katherine Mansfield's chief purpose; and much more than most readers want. Most readers want — and w h y not? — to see the persons involved at once and move into the story with them. W h e n at last a reader of " A t the Bay" finds the chief persons, he finds them quite impervious to their surroundings and concerned only with one another. In fact, so far as the characters go, with suitable shifts of flies and back-drops the story could have been called and occur " A t T o w n , " "In the Country," or "From the Mountain." Neither bay nor sea has any impact on anybody; thus there can be no response. Place here sinks below the level of stage properties to that of author's whim. This is not to say that Katherine Mansfield was incapable of integrating place. "The Garden Party," a very moving story, actually does for two places, two atmospheres, two ways of life what " A t the Bay" fails to do for one, by letting personal awareness of both in conflict supply the motive power. Joseph Conrad's "The Lagoon" * has a long descriptive opening, but all of it is needed. N o r do I mean that place should become an active agent in the story, as it is said that Egdon Heath becomes in The Return of the Native or the tidal bore in Stevenson's The Merry Men. T h e only active agents in a story are human beings, but place can inspire their activity by its presence, or by its absence at least help to reveal them — as in a story about people insensitive to their surroundings. I mean only that if place is made prominent and promising, so that the reader feels its intended power, the main channel by which such feeling can reach him is a person or persons in the story. Does this conception of place limit the writer or tend to formularize the short story? Well, a person sensitive or insensitive comes suddenly on a particular place for the first time in his life . . . a person searches for a place and finds it exceeding-meeting-disappointing his expectation, or never finds it . . . a person lives in a place so long he can't see it . . . two people have disparate notions of the same place, and both are right or wrong . . . a person tells another of a place worth seeing, and the other goes past it unaware . . . a person lives in a place so long he can't see himself * Tales of Unrest, Doubleday & Co., 1920.

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. . . a person — but the possibilities are limited only by the differences among people and among places. The only problems are selection and characteristic interaction.

LARCHMOOR IS NOT THE WORLD* by R. V. Cassill I N THE winter the glassed arcade between Thornton and Gillespie Halls was filled with potted flowers so it smelled and looked like a greenhouse. Last night's storm, blowing in across the athletic fields of the Northwest campus, had left a shape of frozen snow like a white boomerang in the corner of each pane behind the rows of geraniums and ferns. The first time Dr. Cameron walked through the arcade on this particular day, he stopped to point with his pipestem at the ranked greenery so slightly and perilously separated from the outside cold. "There," he rumbled to Mr. Wilks of History, "is your symbol for this young women's seminary. There is your Larchmoor girl cut off by a pane of glass from the blast of your elements. A visible defiance of the nature of things, made possible by a corrupt technology." Mr. Wilks grimaced and chuckled, weighed this illustration of their common attitude toward the college in which they taught, finally amended, "The glass is wrong. Glass they could see through. See the world in which they don't live even though. . . ." His thought trailed off in a giggle. At Larchmoor Mr. Wilks seemed to spend most of his energy looking behind him to see if he had been overheard. • Originally published in the Winter, 1950, issue of Furioso. Reprinted by permission of the editor and the author.

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"True," Dr. Cameron said. As they loitered through the arcade, the music and the rumble of the student lounge rose to them from the floor below. It rose mixed inextricably with the smell of baked goods from the dining hall and the moist smell of steam from laboring radiators. Now and then a cry, barbaric, probably happy but otherwise meaningless, punctuated the noise. "The analogy breaks down, true. Listen to them down there. One gets to be like an animal trainer. Sensitive to their noises. If I had no calendar I could tell by their tone that Christmas vacation started this afternoon." "Then there's an identifying noise that distinguishes Christmas Vacation from the beginning of — say — Spring Vacation?" "Hmm. Yes, that's right. In seven years my ear has become acutely attuned to it. You'll pick it up eventually. Unhappily in learning their mass sound you'll become unable to distinguish one of them from the others. Compensation at work. They will seem to you one single enormous female juvenile named Shirley or whatever the name would happen to be of the child movie star ascendant in the year of their birth." Dr. Cameron's baby-pink face grew almost radiant. "Tomorrow," he said, "the sonsofbitches will all be gone home and we'll have three weeks of peace. Shantih." The second time he went through the arcade that day he met Sandra White, dressed for her journey with high heels now and a fur coat, looking like the ads in the fashion magazines with the good sharp empty Nordic shape of her head an appurtenance to the excellent clothes — looking five years older than she had looked that morning in his American Literature class. Her manner, too, had been changed with her clothes so that she spoke to him as a young matron patronizing an old and crotchety, really lovable, duck who had "made his lah-eef out of literature." "Dr. Cameron. Thank you for the list of books," she said. "I don't think I'll give any presents this Christmas except books and I. . . ." Yet because this was so obviously a statement coined to please him, both became momentarily embarrassed. It was the girl who first recovered and went on, "I think I'll get Daddy the Dos Passos USA." "Hmmm." He chewed his pipestem and stared at the glass roof of the arcade, then smiled. "Well," she said in defense, "Daddy is really searching . . . for

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. . . that kind of Americanism. He's not just a businessman. He's really. . . "Yes," he said. "I understood you to say you wanted this list of books for yourself, not just for presents." "Oh. I'm going to ask for the Yeats for myself," she said. Her tone, demanding that this would please him, produced from the efficient catalog of his memory the image of her eyes becoming feminine-dramatic in that class hour a week before when he had quoted "An aged man is a paltry thing . . . unless soul clasp its hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress." Well, the quotation had been an indulgence for him and not intended for the class at all. It had been a parade before their innocent minds of a conscious expression of his own dilemma. He had spoken the lines to his class with the motives that lead a man to confess to his dog the sentiments for which he has no human confidant. But this little female, Sandra, whatever those words may have meant to her, had caught something of their importance to him and trapped him now into paying for the indulgence with a compliment to her taste. "Fine," he said, "that's fine." With a still doubtful look she said "Merry Christmas" and let him go on to his office. Here was the sanctuary which he had been seven years in building. A desk barred off one corner of the room. W h e n students came in he sat behind it like a magistrate at the bar. Three walls, excepting door and window spaces, were lined to the ceiling with books. "I bought them," he once told Wilks, "but only for insulation and display. It's fatuous to assume that anybody can own books. I think that President Herman is pleased to find them there when he brings down parents and the prospective customers to exhibit me as a mechanism of the English department." His swivel chair took most of the space behind the desk. It made of the corner an efficient nest, for he could swing to any of the cabinets and drawers in which he filed themes. Also within reach were the two material items he needed for his intellectual life. One was a bolt tied on a length of wrapping cord that he sometimes swung as a pendulum. The other was a motto that he had lettered painstakingly on colored paper. Originally it had come from an

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examination paper handed in to him during his first year at Larchmoor. "Shelley's main purpose was to write a lot of poems," it said. "This it came easy for him to do." Sometimes when he was alone he could place the inscription before him on his desk and sit laughing crazily at it until all the stains of teaching at Larchmoor were washed away. Then purified, without moving except to throw his shoulders back, he would watch that fraction of the campus where the pendulum of seasons appeared before his window. This afternoon the sunlight was a strange and clamorous orange that moved on the black tree trunks and the snow. Here nature dramatized the quality of a Beckman painting, black cedars over water, it might have been, or such a landscape as the horns in Sibelius presented with not so much art as longing, such a landscape as might contain a golden mute princess called out by Death — that central myth that all the Romantics had exploited. T h e embroidered, death-bidden, golden will-o'the-wisp (and Sandra White now drifted on his mind's screen in a role that would have surprised her. N o t as an intellect that shared his understanding of poetry but, wrapped in a rich cocoon of fur, wool, and silk that protected her delicacies from the blowing cold, as the image itself which the poets had conceived and desired — the figure on the Grecian urn, the witchlady on the mead, or that which Malraux's Dutchman saw on the Shanghai sidewalks, proud and strutting beyond the reach of the proletariat desire) which like Shelley's Beatrice must be the fairest, youngest, purest of flesh to satisfy the snowy mouth of the Death the Romantics had imagined. T h e peacefulness of snow is pure commercial folklore, he speculated, and in art the cold North always somehow emerged as the symbol of hungry frenzy — like the glacid and perfect tyranny which Plato described as the worst disaster of all that society can manage. T h e disorder of cold which had wrought the counter disorder of Northern art — the wind-whipped fires in the snowfield — with its load of desire protesting too much. If Dr. Cameron had moved closer to his window, he would necessarily have seen more than this private landscape of a f e w trees, snow, and sun in which his mind pursued the lost girl. H e would have seen more than twenty Larchmoor girls standing in the slush

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in front of the Kampus Kabin while they waited for taxis. They bounced, giggled, sang ("a woman, a woman, a woman without a man, teedlededum, bumph"), chewed gum, shifted packages or suitcases from hand to hand, stamped their fur-topped boots in the muck of the road. He knew they were there, not five degrees outside the arc of vision which the window gave him. "But I have the right not to look." With the arrival of each Christmas Vacation since he had come to Larchmoor he had discovered himself confronted with a particular crisis of fatigue and depression. The beginning of yet another school year and the first exacting months hollowed him emotionally, and the pleasures of intellect had lost their recreational power. While the girls went off to whatever indulgences the society provided for its most expensive and pampered stock, he went to his bachelor rooms to read and smoke incessantly, and considered how he might get a job elsewhere until always, with the passing of the actual and figurative solstice, the change of renewal occurred. What was compounded of hatred and contempt for Larchmoor led him first to review the other places he had taught — the two big universities where the younger assistants whinnied like mares around the head of the department and the religious college where he had been forbidden to smoke on campus and required to attend chapel daily — then led through a couple of drinking bouts with some one of his friends, like Mr. Wilks. There had always been younger men like Mr. Wilks coming and going as Larchmoor instructors. Just out of graduate school they regarded Larchmoor as a stepping stone to bigger schools, but while they stayed — one or two each year succeeding those who had gone — they formed a fit audience though few for such occasions as the Christmas drunks. Those times gave him the chance to elaborate with perverse brilliance on the attractions Larchmoor had for him. They would be sitting in the easy chairs of his rooms with a litter of crackers and cheese on a card table between them, the black windows frosting over, and in the late hours the monologue would pause only when one or another went unsteadily to the bathroom. "Do you remember reading about that Jap general on Iwo Jima . . . said Ί will die here' . . . the component of all the forces of his life . . . so that even the melodrama was right for the bandy-

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legged little bastard. Fitting. The answer is a kind of balance — not balance — but that second in the pendulum's swing when all the forces are composed so there must be an instant of harmony that the eye isn't quick enough to catch when one reasons that there must be no motion. Still. . . . The effort of the mind to perpetuate that second by selection out of all the comic and vicious flux in us and around us is the same as the slave's impulse to throw off his ropes. . . . Larchmoor locks up kids that should be out and doing things. Their bad luck is good for me. There are different ages, and for me freedom doesn't exist in the world. It's an asylum growth. . . . I've got my office for asylum like a rat's nest in the corner of a busy house. I don't huddle there because I'm interested in the house. Nobody but a damn fool would be concerned with Larchmoor as Larchmoor. . . . It gives me a stable place to sit and watch the 'pismires'" here he smiled " 'and the stars.' And don't you know, Wilks, that a man has to actually utter his ideas? Your gloomy newspapers tell you that. It's such an undeniable premise of the search for freedom. Here I can say whatever I please to my classes. Elsewhere, in these days, I might be quickly apprehended as a Communist or an atheist, but when I say something to my girls they put it in their notebooks and there's an end to it. Oh, I have my disguises here. On another level I can talk to the vermin Herman" — Larchmoor's president — "the same way. As far as that goes. When he asked me what I thought of the new dormitory with the air-conditioned bedsprings I made some trivial remark about painting 'our outward walls so costly gay.' And he thought it was my stamp of approval, yes he did. . . . And then we mustn't fool ourselves. Where else could I go? I'm not a scholar in the sense that I've ever felt a mission to get my name in PMLA or write a book on Chaucer's cook's marmal. I'm a reader, that's all I amount to. 'Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.' Larchmoor not only lets but forces me to be honest with myself. The games it plays with me are not much bother. To them I'm just an old gaffer that talks like Bartlett's quotations. I have a place here. They pay me as a fixture. . . . The girls are pretty. Like old David's my bones need the warmth provided by a moderate proximity of young female flesh. My disguises . . . I look too

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old to notice them. I am too old to letch for any of them, but by God they're pleasant furniture. . . . At Larchmoor I come close to balancing. If it were any better I'd get involved with it. No doubt I've searched subconsciously for Larchmoor all my life. I'm preoccupied with how I die. Like the Jap general. That isn't morbid at my age. More natural. I want to die in this moral Iwo Jima . . . and be buried under the hockey field." He had put on his overcoat to go home when he passed through the glassed arcade for the third time that day. This time a clatter of heels on the tile floor rang behind him. There was a hand on his arm and Shirley Bridges' face suddenly thrust so close to his own that he jumped back. At first the circles of white around her eyes and the chalky strip on either side of her mouth struck him as an antic fashion culled from the pages of Vogue and destined to become a part of the fluctuating uniform of Larchmoor. But even as he began to smile her hand clawed down his sleeve until she had hold of his bare wrist, and he understood that her face was marked with some girlish emotion. Her hand on his wrist was wet and cold. He felt pain in the back of his skull and then a release of anger. "What's the trouble, Miss Bridges?" He lifted her fingers one at a time from their hysterical grasp. "Are you ill?" To his exasperation she said, "No. My grade. You. . . ." "I understand," he said. He cleared his throat the better to snarl. "In spite of your studious industry, I, I, I have so seriously misprized you that I reported you to the Dean, who maliciously put you on academic probation. Now you're going to be forbidden the delights of the jukebox and the downtown dance hall for the rest of the semester." The tonic of anger had blurred away any distinctions he might have tried to make between her and The Larchmoor Girl in a more temperate season. "Every coercion will be applied to force you to the unreasonable humiliation of reading your books. I am committed to the belief that you will live through it. Now, if you will excuse me, may I bid you a Merry Christmas?" "Please," she said. In the blue expanse of her eyes the pupil diminished nastily, like an insect pulling its wings to its body. He felt the burning of his face. She'd better not put her hands on me again, he thought. "Don't take all this so intensely. There really isn't any reason you can't make up your work. Weren't you

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the one last fall who was, well — so sublimely confident of her ability? You sometimes make interesting comments in class. I think you just need to decide to do some work." "No," she said. "Talk to me." Her mouth hung loose like a bright ribbon, and her tongue arched against her lower teeth. "You're not well." She nodded. "Talk to me in your office. Please." One hall on their way led past the president's office and reception rooms. She would not go this way. Without quite knowing why, he let her guide him down a roundabout stairway. While he lit his pipe and rocked squeaking in his swivel chair, he looked at the girl's hands. The lacquered nails were broader than they were long and the fingers were tapered like a child's from the palm. How do they manage to look like women? he asked himself. What corruption and tampering with morality in the flesh is it that lets them or makes them look generally the same from fifteen to thirty-five, brushed and painted and girdled to a formula that here across his desk was breaking down into its sodden components. He noted that two beads of spittle had stuck in the corners of Shirley's mouth. What would be the effect, he wondered, if he should announce at once that he had reconsidered her case and had already decided to give her an A for the semester? "You restore my faith," he said. "In seven years of teaching here I have never seen a Larchmoor girl who spent the day before a vacation even thinking about the college, let alone the grades she might get in one class in Biblical literature." "They're going to kick me out," she said. "Oh nonsense. No final grades go in for six weeks yet." "They are," she insisted. "They sent for Daddy. He's in President Herman's office now. I know they sent for him to take me out of school." "Because of your grades? Not because of your grades, surely." "Oh. I thought if I could get my grades straightened out that would help." "You mean you've got in some kind of trouble. If your grades were good you might get by with it?" The note of sarcasm was heavy enough to warn her of a trap. She

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said, "No, I don't think there would be any trouble if my grades were all right. I could work everything else out, I know." "If you're in difficulty you ought to have gone to your housemother, not to me." "Honest it's the grades and my classes and things." Dr. Cameron shook his head. His white mustache dipped at the ends as he made a face. "I'm guilty of many things, but I have never given any grades I didn't think were deserved; so there isn't much use to talk, about that. Nevertheless I might tell you something that will reassure you. Among other things Larchmoor is a commercial institution. I have even heard President Herman speak of it as a business. You pay a considerable tuition here which would have to be refunded if you were dropped before the end of the semester. I have no doubt that the administration will find some way to avoid that unpleasant necessity." This will end the interview, he thought. She can understand that better than anything. Coin is the sea that bore them hither and will bear them hence. It is the direct communication, the basis of knowledge on which whatever they might get from the library or classroom would only be fluff. "Does that explain exactly why they aren't going to kick you out?" "It isn't that way, is it?" He grinned like a devil. "Undoubtedly." Less because she demanded it than because of the habit of explanation he went on, "There's much more to it than that. I have simply given you a short cut to understanding why you won't be expelled. From your side of the fence everything seems to be an absolute. Every rule, every pronouncement, perhaps. I'm old enough to know there are no absolutes. Everyone here who has anything to do with your case lives in a tangle of confusions and opinions not so different from your own. Out of these will come some compromise that won't be too hard on you. That's the truth. That's the way the world goes. Compromise, compromise. President Herman's decrees and judgments may seem absolute and final to a freshman. They're not really. He's not God Almighty." "They're all God Almighty," the girl said. "My father is God Almighty too." He was not sure whether she meant this as a joke or as an attempt at philosophy, but whichever it was it seemed to amuse her. "That's why it's so goofy. They say I destroyed their

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faith. Didn't you hear about that, Dr. Cameron? It happened in your Biblical Lit class so I guess you knew about it. It's so funny because I think there is God Almighty. Lots of them. You're another one because remember at the first of the year you told us to use our minds and question things and then I was the only one that argued and you're going to give me an F." "You haven't handed in any work," he said irrelevantly. He turned the swivel chair sharply sideways so the old bearings screamed. So the other little ones had sat in class all semester being careful to hear nothing, read nothing before their open eyes except what confirmed those memories of Sunday School they liked to call "their faith." All right. He had known that and had remarked on it caustically. But here was the other twist — that they were leagued, each little monster with her shining braids, to smell out differences within the herd which had not been apparent to him. He labored his memory for images of the class from which this one girl would appear standing like a martyr among the Philistian mob. She said that she had "argued." He could remember nothing of the sort. Each day she had seemed as impersonal as a ninepin in a row of her classmates. Her eyes had been as blue as theirs, her hair more blonde than some; the courtesy of her bored attention had been the same though she had not taken notes so assiduously as a few. Somehow, on a level of intuition that he could only guess at they had found the intolerable difference in her. He remembered the wetness of her hand on his wrist and wondered if it had been fear they smelled. "I thought you got along all right with the girls," he said. "I will try. I will get along if they'll let me stay. I think I was just beginning to make some friends." She drew in her upper arms against her breasts and shivered. "That sort of thing has to happen. I don't suppose it's possible to make friends." The idea, with her own interpretation, had not helped. "I know I could," she said. "Don't you have any — well, people, girls you run around with here?" "Oh yes. My roommate. And there's lots of others. I know how to make them like me if I could stay."

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If there had been someone impartial with them — Mr. Wilks perhaps — to whom he could have rationalized the abyss he glimpsed, letting orderly words mount like a steel bridge over it, he might still have kept himself from involvement. "One must not seek the contagion of the herd," he would have said. " G o d knows what conformities they may exact from her once she has kissed the rod. Whatever it may cost to maintain even the fear, if it's only the fear that distinguishes one. . . ." If he could have found the words on which he depended. " 'Larchmoor, calm and serene on thy hill,' " he muttered. " N o w Miss Bridges, Shirley, maybe we ought to look at this another way. Suppose they . . . suppose you leave Larchmoor now. There are bigger schools you might go to where you'd have a better chance to be yourself." "Bigger?" she said. "Oh no." "You mustn't forget that there is time for anything you want to do." " N o t if I go home," she said. "But you're wrong. There will be fifty years ahead of you" — realizing that she could not believe this — "Larchmoor is not the world. Every possibility is open at your age." "Would you go to the president and tell him I'm a good student? Could you give me any kind of a good grade if I'd work all through vacation?" She rose and came round the desk and stood just in front of him, just beyond arm's length from him. She stood very straight facing him and neither swaying nor looking at him. "Please," he said. "Sit down. .I'm afraid I don't understand at all. I can't understand why it's so important for you to stay here. You have so many years ahead of you. There is plenty of time. G o home for a while." She sighed like a child, heavily. "I guess I ought to tell you why they sent for Daddy. It was because when the railroad agents came out to sell tickets home I was the only girl in school who wasn't going. I would have stayed here if they would have let me. Then I got scared and rented a hotel room downtown." H e was afraid to ask any further questions. Once again his necessary refuge was not in forty years of the poor scholar's study but only in the pipe which he could chew and smoke and scrape osten-

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tatiously as he did now. His eyebrows arched as though to admonish her to say no more. "I can't go home. I'm afraid of Daddy. That was the reason." "Now, now. You could surely explain to him. . . . Grades aren't that important." "He fought me last summer with his fists. I'm not quite as strong as he is. He knocked me down and was choking me when mother came and made him stop." The words were rushing from her throat like a foul torrent heaved up by the convulsions of her body as she writhed from side to side. "Don't know what he'll do to me now. Now. Now." The revelation of pain, however confused, was not to be doubted. (So Shelley's Beatrice would have said, "Reach me that handkerchief — My brain is hurt.") Then as though she was rid of it, she quieted. "I hit him first and cut his face with my ring." She held up her right hand, showing the ring and for the first time that afternoon laughed shortly. Resentment mixed with his bewilderment and horror. All around about them, he thought, on the walls and towers of Larchmoor, on the stubblefields and highways for unimaginable miles lay the snow. It's as if she's trying to drag me with her into elements that neither of us, teacher or student, should ever have to face. She's trying to elect me not just her father, but as she said, God Almighty. "Why?" he asked. His voice seemed to boom. "I don't know why he did it," she said with crazy slyness, her face weird. (Oh, icehearted counsellor . . . If I could find a word that might make known The crime of my destroyer. . . .) "Are you sure you're well? Have you told anybody else about this?" She shook her head. "They sent me downtown to see the psychiatrist when they found out I wasn't going home. I told him. He said he'd help me. I think he's the one that told them to send for Daddy to come and get me. I'm in trouble so they're afraid I'll dirty up

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their college. But I would be good and everybody would get to like me if I could stay." The president's secretary knocked on his door and put her head in. "Oh, good," she said seeing them both and then bobbing her head as though to confirm a suspicion that they were both quite real. "Can I speak to you privately, Dr. Cameron?" She pulled the door tight behind him and whispered, "Wheeeew, what a relief. The whole campus has been upside down looking for Shirley Bridges. Her father wants her upstairs. W e couldn't find her in her room and they thought she might have done away with herself." "Who thought that?" he demanded angrily. "I don't know. W e were all worried." "But why should anyone think such a thing?" "We've been having a lot of trouble with her. Her father says she gets in trouble wherever she goes. He just can't seem to do anything with her. He's going to take her home. I guess it's a good thing he came when he did. W e had to send her to the psychiatrist last week." "Oh that's nonsense. Anyone can go to a psychiatrist." "Well," she said. "Well, don't pick on me. Will you send her right up to the president's office?" Instead he went himself. The noise in the halls was faint and infrequent now. Buses and taxis had carried most of the students to the depot. H e passed one of the maids locking her mops into a closet and slowed his angry, absorbed march to say Merry Christmas to her. A little man whose mouth protruded as though he were deciding whether or not to whistle sat in the president's reception room. H e looked as sleek and innocent as a little dachshund perched on the edge of an overstuffed lounge. Dr. Cameron nodded stiffly to him. So this is the fist-fighter, he thought. T h e champ. " G o right in," the secretary said. The hand in which President Herman held his glasses dangled over a chairback. He gestured with the glasses to indicate that Dr. Cameron should sit down. "I'm glad you've come, Arthur," he said. "I understand from Miss Lee that Shirley Bridges has been in your office all afternoon. We've been very much concerned with Shirley today."

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"As well we might be." "Yes. Oh yes." "She's in a very tight spot. You might call it a kind of snare that tightens the more she struggles." "She's not well. Upset mentally. There are always the few who can't adjust to Larchmoor. Her father is very much concerned with her, poor fellow." He sighed. His eyes rolled up under their thick lids. " T h e girl has a rather different interpretation of him." "You mean about her father's beating her? That's an unsavory story for her to tell, isn't it?" He looked challengingly across his desk like a lawyer requiring a Yes or No answer. He's no fool, Cameron thought. This is going to be difficult. The president continued, "Shirley is quite an actress. Her talent should find its outlet on the stage. She's told that story to several people around here. Did she just tell you today? She seems to have fled to you as a last resort. If I'm not mistaken, she told the same story to the housemother before she'd been here two weeks. With different embellishments, I suppose. She'd broken this or that rule and seemed to think the story would be a kind of excuse. Don't you think a less unpleasant story might have served her better?" "And what if it is true?" "Do you believe it?" "Suppose I did not. W h y did Miss Lee say to me 'they thought she might have done away with herself'? Whether you believe the story or not, you seem to recognize a terrible situation there." "I'm sure that I have no idea what Miss Lee may have meant." There was a clock on President Herman's desk with ornate bronze scrolls representing the tails of mermaids. With a lead pencil's point he traced out first one then the other of these scrolls. "I have, just as an assumption, gone so far as to assume that Shirley's story with all its — its morbid implications — might have some foundation. I have a psychiatrist's report in which such possibilities are examined. Inconclusively anyway. I don't put much stock in psychiatry. It's best not to. But if they had any basis, I would say they were the best of reasons why Shirley — and her father — ought to scamper away from Larchmoor, wouldn't you, Arthur?"

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"I would not. She needs something to hang on to. Let her stay, Dr. Herman." "Mr. Bridges has decided, I think, that he'll take her home. That was all settled before you came up, Arthur." "Are you going to let him? Whatever else is true, that girl's afraid of him." "Is she? Maybe she's been up to something that ought to make her afraid of him." He sighed deeply for Larchmoor's sake. "That kind of thing has happened here before. Another good reason she shouldn't be here. Arthur, do you imagine that I am going to tell a parent — a parent — that Larchmoor forbids him to take his daughter home?" He chuckled at the impossibility. ("Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate, And the strange horror of the accuser's tale Baffling belief and overpowering speech.") "Larchmoor isn't a hospital, Arthur. If Shirley is having mental troubles and her father isn't, ah, just the one to see that she's taken care of properly, some of the family will surely handle it." " T h e y will? H o w do we know? Ό that the vain remorse which must chastise crimes done had but as loud a voice to warn. . . . ' " President Herman tapped his pencil impatiently on the desk top. "That's all very well," he said. "It means, in the language of the Rotary Club, 'Don't expect George to do it.' " "You think I might understand the language of the Rotary Club?" "In the situation that's what it means. It's from a play. The Cenci. By Shelley. He was an English poet." He had seen the warning glitter in President Herman's eyes but he could not now stop his sarcasm. Yet President Herman maintained the reserve which had helped him greatly in administering a school so old and prosperous as Larchmoor for so many years. "Arthur, do you realize the scandal we narrowly missed? Seems she had rented a hotel room downtown and told her roommate she was going to stay there and 'get soused.' Can you imagine?"

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"So her roommate told you that? My God, my God. Doesn't Larchmoor ever produce anything but little stoolies? I don't understand that girl, but I believe she needs help. And as soon as there is some suspicion that she might every student and old maid housemother and the administration itself set on her. Did you ever see a flock of chickens go after one with a broken leg?" N o w President Herman's face had grown faintly red. "I must say, Arthur, that I'm considerably interested in hearing your opinion of Larchmoor. You've always seemed rather reticent and noncommittal. All these years. I'm glad to know what you think of us." The two old men glared at each other. "I apologize," Dr. Cameron said. "That was an unfortunate outburst. Let me begin again and appeal to you in the name of the Christian principles which guide Larchmoor." "I resent your sneering when you say 'Christian principles.' " Both of them stood up. "If I sneered," said Dr. Cameron, "the intonation was superfluous. I told that girl. . . ." Compromise, compromise were the words he had in mind. He could see no reason now for saying them. Blinded by his feeling — the whole compounded hate for Larchmoor, which must gloss over everything — he stumbled against a little mahogany coffee table as he turned to leave. This little and inconsequential piece of reality that had tripped him up was, finally, his undoing. President Herman might have forgiven him or forgotten the hot things he had said. But when he felt the table strike his shins, he stood for just one second watching it: then he kicked it with all his might. It flew against the wall, its glass top tinkling, and lay on its side. H e threw his hands above his head in a terrible gesture. "You dull, criminal, unperceiving bastards," he shouted and rushed from the room. If Mr. Bridges had been still outside in the waiting room, he would have struck the man, seen how good he was with his fists at anything besides beating up his daughter. The little dachshund man had gone. N o one was there by Miss Lee, the secretary. She was watching him with terror, and it did him good to see her cringe. Without beginning to think what he would say to Shirley, only

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aware that it was now he who must and would protect her, he went to his office with all the speed his old legs could manage. She was not there. He hunted, ridiculously, in the offices next his own and in the nearby classrooms, almost dark now. He had a tremendous fear for the girl. His head began to ache as he trotted from room to room. There is a long hall in the buildings at Larchmoor, beneath the glassed arcade and extending through the principal structures as an evidence that Larchmoor girls not only don't have to go out in the weather as they pass from bedroom to dining room to classroom, but that they need not even veer from a luxuriously straight path. After the classrooms, Dr. Cameron went to the end of this hall. There, far off, down a long perspective of windows and doors, he saw Shirley and her father. T h e y were talking, and as he watched, the dachshund man took her coat from the rack outside the student lounge and held it for her while she put her arms into it and flipped her hair up over the collar. T h e y went out the front door together. He got his coat and overshoes. He took from his desk the gloves which he had been almost ready to put on two hours ago. He walked down the hall toward the door from which Shirley and her father had left, but slowly, reluctantly. Was it all a lie that she had told him? If he were going to come back at the end of vacation, would he have heard that one of the busybodies on the Larchmoor payroll had unearthed the plot — "she just tried to fix it so she could stay in the hotel with her boyfriend. Got caught at it." No, no, it couldn't be just that. Whatever it was, though, however muddled and sordid, the walls of Larchmoor — that were bigger, much bigger than Larchmoor; as big as money and complacency — were going to enclose it gently in indestructible steam heat. He was the only one who had been projected, tossed, into the cold, where an old scholar had to worry about rent. T h e lights along Larchmoor's main walk had a festive air. Each one had been wreathed in red and green for holiday. A t the bases of the lampposts and in the trees overhead, driven back only a little, lurked the blue shadows of the absolute snow. It was not Shirley who had lured him out of his warm corner into this, not any real Shirley that he had been protecting or that had determined he would die in the real cold, he thought, defending himself against

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self-ridicule, self-obloquy. The realer Beatrice, the gold-embroidered princess, the beautiful lady without mercy and without hope had brought him out of the door.

Place includes here landscape, architecture, furniture, season, weather, custom, and profession; all these elements are, in small or large degree, indispensable to the clear portrayal and movement of personality. Place functions most vigorously, moreover, in the integrated union of these elements manifest in what we must vaguely call "atmosphere," part place, part personality, a factor greater than the sum of its parts. A discussion of place must, therefore, almost constantly refer to the person who in part created its atmosphere and who in a sense was created by it. Dr. Cameron reacts so violently, at this crucial moment in his life, to the abrupt impact of sense stimuli of place that the story could not occur without the interaction that has been building up for years between him and life at Larchmoor. The dynamics of this interaction, though suppressed by inversion and disguised by Cameron's inertia and his false sense of power, are felt cumulatively by the reader throughout the story. The character seems to have been based on a prototype, with a good deal of the living individual cut away and certain characteristics — such as Cameron's strong Romantic confusion indicated by his "indulgence" in Yeats, his Bible course, his passion for Shelley, and his mixing of sense impressions in "such a landscape as the horns in Sibelius presented" — otherwhere collected and cunningly substituted to conform with and support the theme. The author's problem was to create a person just bored, conceited, learned, and dense enough to be taken in by the very material he taught, in the authoritarian place where he taught it. Dr. Cameron seems a brilliant solution. His slightly exaggerated personality would almost fit many an actual professor in small institutions of higher learning — men who through laziness, conceit, scholastic preoccupation, or distaste for the personal contacts of teaching have for long hidden doubt and perhaps disgust

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under a smooth, hard, bright patina of one sort or another, and therewith fooled students, colleagues, administrators, and for a time, as Cameron does here, themselves. Certainly the character was drawn on the strength of intimate knowledge objectified, and — even more important — with compassion keen enough not only to carry over the pitiless scrutiny to which Cameron is subjected but in the end to humanize, almost indeed dignify, a figure who might easily have been as funny as Cameron is but no more lifelike than a scarecrow. The only passage I take exception to (and the only blemish I can find in the story) is the lengthy description, in customary action merging into immediate scene of the past, breaking continuity, of Cameron's drinking bouts during the holidays. This I could do without or would prefer drastically reduced, not because it isn't true to type or this individual — perhaps it is — but because, first, the break is bad; second, the passage slows down the story after an exceptionally significant and readable opening that, however, has not yet reached concrete statement of Cameron's motive ("So dream all night," Keats phrased it) or its obstacle (Shirley Bridges) and has therefore as yet created no suspense; and, third, because although the passage must have been fun to write, it adds nothing except that Cameron gets drunk on liquor as well as poetry. The story opens with a master symbol derived from place and misinterpreted by personality — a symbol easily missed by the reader because it is so natural and was so ingeniously related to two phases of Cameron's temperament: the glassed-in arcade connecting two college buildings and lined with potted plants. This structure is returned to at the end of the story, when Cameron looks down the long hall under it and under the building adjoining to see Shirley and her father leaving the college in open and undeniable amity. But this arcade with its plants is only the shell of the symbol. The part seen and interpreted by Dr. Cameron and Mr. Wilks — the sheltered, warm walk between buildings giving students a sight of the outside world "in which they don't live," and possibly the lush but in a sense unnatural growth of plants (girls) from which stronger growth-producing, actinic rays, as well as inclement weather, have been screened — this is the more obvious but less revealing part of the master symbol. Its kernel, unnoticed by both

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instructors although within their range of vision, and inconspicuously set in mid-sentence by the author as he leads us into Dr. Cameron's stream of experience, is the "shape of frozen snow like a white boomerang in the corner of each pane behind the rows of geraniums and ferns." That white shape in that particular spot, visible to but unremarked by Cameron, contains by implication the meaning of the story. Cameron's pale vision of the Romantic's ideal heroine, represented with a hazy sensuality by Sandra White, then Shirley Bridges, is preferred by him to any reality. The statement of the story title, which he applies so glibly to the students, without his knowledge refers more closely to himself. A life of willful paradox used as weapon of offense here boomerangs on the man who lived it. Thus we see him blinded and bloated by his pretentions and the furniture of his profession to the extent that, although he loathes his work, he praises it; a cynic, he is snared by a simpleton; although professing wide and detailed knowledge he has no understanding of his colleagues or his students or himself; claiming to be only a reader, he believes himself a true scholar; he lives for dreams that cannot possibly be realized; he knows too well what lies inside books but, both ostensibly ("I bought them . . . but only for insulation and display") and actually, fails to connect their meaning with the stuff of life; and is ultimately beguiled into low-grade martyrdom and ejection for a false cause of which he has no knowledge and in which he would have had, if he could see clearly, no faith. The idea is tied up securely by the final sentence: "The realer Beatrice, the gold-embroidered princess, the beautiful lady without mercy and without hope had brought him out of the door." Romantic poetry had made his dreams veracious; losing faith in the vision, his sense of belonging to and owning it, he lost both vision and reality. Dr. Cameron's fate is clearly enough suggested, and he deserved it. Nevertheless — and this is Cassill's greatest accomplishment — no reader can lack sympathy for him or fail to send up a few private huzzas when Cameron kicks the coffee table and denounces President Herman. In desperation, here is Cameron forthright at last. W e see now his trouble in full. He has the essential idealism of the teacher grown rank and wild.

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You cannot wholeheartedly hate, despise, or love a person and make of him a convincing character in a story. But the understanding necessary to link a person with place may tone down the emotion, balance the character, and so gain the end after all. When it comes to place, affection and distaste may be mixed, depending on your proximity to it or temporary separation from it. You can hate a place and still be fond of it, and bring it alive and kicking to the page. Perhaps the secret is to let yourself feel, but to canalize through another person who will modify them, both emotions.

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ter. This must be the talisman, the holy of holies, the secret that if once learned leaves nothing impossible of attainment. This chapter should have come first. Reading it would have made reading the book needless. He who thinks this deludes himself. There is no single heart of the matter, no talisman, no secret revealing the act (art or craft) of writing a good short story. Almost everything in this chapter has been touched upon before. It should come last, or almost last. Its postulates seem to me of the greatest importance; set down first, they might be meaningless; and in any position they are the hardest to formulate clearly and persuasively. The highly paid, commercial storyteller goes after plot like a hound on a hot scent. He deals in easily understood people having categorized emotions and stock reactions to familiar and simple stimuli: wealth, ambition, power, love, envy, jealousy, fear. He is alert for timeliness, for what many readers at a given moment will be eager to daydream about. He deals, too, though bound by these limitations that he considers imposed on him and essential, in swift and significant openings, carefully controlled pace and total wordage, consistent telling method, realistic dialogue, solid if mechanical plausibility, minutely contrived suspense (usually simple), and if possible a whale of a surprise. Concocting a plot having these characteristics is no easy matter, but he does it again and again and again, quite possibly not realizing that he has concocted a formula, and, whether or not, finding that habit eases difficulties and practice makes perfect. Not content, however, with mere plot, which is after all only synopsis, he fleshes out and fattens the pattern, he polishes his prose to make it sound alluring, hard-boiled, sophisticated, or tender; he develops an appealing style by injecting new expressions, odd ways of saying simple things, and always the very

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latest patois. In the end he has a strictly fashionable creation, as "different" (than what?), as tempting and palatable, and as overpriced as the newest pre-season "original" gown. With all his labor and for all this rich return, he hasn't the faintest trace of a notion what his story is about, what it means or whether it means anything. If you ask him (don't ask just after a story has been published, he is sure to say he writes stories, never reads them), he will begin with something like "Well, you see, there's this boy . . ." and give you a detailed synopsis and that's all. Or he will say, as one writer said to me, "Means? It means fifteen hundred bucks." Yet I submit that to condemn this popular and likable manufacturer of assembly-line stories is foolish. Along with his crassness, his ephemeral and superficial and spurious daydreams about life as his readers wish it might be, he has something that we lack and need. If we could learn that trick of his of catching the reader's eye and holding it for three or four or five thousand words, and put it to better use, the gain would be incalculable. If via the reader's eye we might learn to catch his mind, his heart . . . T h e simon-pure esthete finds "plot" a horrid word. He sees no plot to speak of in Chekhov or Joyce; instead, a distillate of life to him more significant (for what life, whose life is measured off by the plot-yard?), and he is likely to cap the sensible discovery with the error of thinking that his life, raw and undistilled, will do. H e associates plotting with commercialism, catering to mass tastes at their lowest level, surrender of the artist's creative imagination, and repression or negation of his dearest possession — mood. He will not give an inch of plot to any reader. W h e n he is in the mood, he writes — perhaps a story but more likely a vignette so inert, so swathed in layers of symbolism, so full of unrealized whim and prejudice, so tricked out with made words and secret puns that the work is not sharable as representation; and although some character in it may do a deal of thinking, hardly a muscle moves. The esthete knows no more than does the commercial writer what his story is really about, what it means. He knows it is advanced and daring, and perhaps that's all he cares. Some day, when the mood is on him, he will write another even more so. N o w all this foolishness may not be wholly his fault. His sort of

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work, imitative and subjective, is sometimes encouraged in college classrooms. Perhaps he has been misled by critical generalities, or thrown out of kilter by extremist views. Of course, too, he has seen and heard the word "plot" worn to a frazzle by readers, jaded critics, most of whom, never having written a story, consider plot as he does a separate entity, an end in itself. I would be glad to see "plot" in this sense struck from the dictionary and plotting abolished, if in return the esthete and the toplofty intellectuals who egg him on would agree to condemn mood. Mood ignores the reader's Bill of Rights if not, indeed, the rightful existence of any reader. "My mood was . . ." "It's a mood piece." "If only I could preserve the mood." Once a writer becomes engrossed in something he claims to be his mood, he is setting out across the Styx without Joyce or Chekhov as Charon. Establishment of mood entails collapse of perspective and abandonment of objectivity. Instead of inviting'or challenging the engagement of readers, the story fouled in mood demands their resignation. Anyone who has to be in the mood to write is no writer. But the esthete, too, has something we need. He lives in a hard shell of intolerance to mediocre, too easily assimilable, silver-lined daydreams; if any readers who still find short fiction anything more than pastime or coma happen to be around, he wants them stung, disturbed, shocked into realization of the complete muddle life can be. Not content with physical action alone, or any logical relationship between physical and psychic, he dips into psyche — granted, his own — and brings up what honestly he thinks he finds. Plot? Falsehood. Manipulation. A skin-game. This is integrity of a kind, a blind but passionate integrity. If we could retain its unflinching fervor but relax its too-fastidious eclecticism, if we could turn its stony inward stare outward, we should own and learn to use artistic integrity. Much of the conflict seems to hinge on different conceptions of plot, especially on its quantitative validity. Here I am on the side of the esthete. Plot, I believe, equals zero. I mean that if you go in search of a story thinking the thing to look for and the handle to pick it up by is plot, you will not get far. Few stories more substantial or evocative than a game of leapfrog or a half-hour of calisthenics can be found plot-first. Reduced to the gimmick, sought as

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an end in itself, plot has a sneaky way of absenting itself and if finally located is likely to wear threadbare hand-me-downs scarcely covering its rickety bones. On the other hand, if plot is ignored and a better way to catch a story is taken, what plotters and critics and readers call plot appears as if by magic, in sufficient quantity and of a quality to satisfy — if not all hands — at least some readers. It is this better course, which though median will necessitate no ignominious surrender of high principles, that we must lay out and steer by. A chief difference between the short story and most other short forms of published prose — editorial, criticism, essay, for instance — is its chronological structure, its basic framework as a sequence of happenings. These may be physical or metaphysical and are usually both, but whichever they are, they take time — time to happen represented by time to write — and make a linear, not a spatial, pattern; and one happening follows another by a relationship that ultimately links all together. This was what was meant by the postulate, here offered early and often, that a short story must move. When the postulate was qualified by the condition that movement must be in one direction to say one thing, the condition implied that the parts must move also, in order to supply an integrated force coming from several directions but bearing on a single objective. Time, therefore, is only the frame. A list of errands, an inventory of goods, a timetable, any polling list or roster has a similar frame without being even superficially like a story. The frame is sequential. The frame of a story is sequential and also consequential. The relationship of happenings in a short story that integrates forces to move in one direction and say one thing is causal. And the better course than plotting for the writer to lay out and steer by is toward an idea or a theme via the conflicts and interplay of personalities. An idea without person or persons to embody and enact it is an abstraction. A person unemployed in the demonstration of an idea is a character sketch or profile. The two together, one constant, though step-by-step elucidation may give it the appearance of movement; the other constantly moving under stress of motive plus opposition (plus what?) —the two together are a short story in the making. Plus ineluctable outcome, and the story is made.

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Luckily for all of us, ideas are not to be listed. Attempts have been made; but the more earnest and thorough the effort, the less useful and more laughable seems the result. An idea pinned down for classification floats away to appear under another category. Your idea is not mine. If you hand it to me, I can do nothing with it but hand it back. If this were not true, if an idea were not inextricably bound up with and a part of him who conceives it, an idea would not be an idea; it would be a formula. But an idea can be recognized, and the lack of one can be felt. And identifying and evaluating ideas in others' stories, although it will not create ideas for us, makes conception less of a jolt, more natural. The one idea to be expressed by a short story may be very simple (pursuit, escape, clarification of doubt, Joyce's epiphany) or fairly complex; it may be almost obvious or almost recondite; it may be emotionally superficial or profound; its demonstration may demand physical activity amounting to violence or physical control sublimating action, or the tone of the demonstration may be as untroubled by thought and action as a pond into which a single pebble is dropped; and its pace may be fast or slow, so long as there is a relative acceleration toward the end. These matters depend on the heart of the idea, fit personality. I don't know why we should question a writer's main motive or means, if the total effect is appropriate and lies within their terms and specified limitations. In short, I am for tenable ideas of all kinds, thoroughly realized, soundly and readably bodied forth. Even stories of physical action, adventure, and mystery, whose ideas totter on the perimeter of literature — stories which may have to be plotted — are certain to be weak in reality unless the primary or conjunctive aim, concern about personalities suitable and capable, guides the plotting. Everywhere else, I believe, plot as plot is an accessory after the fact and amounts to nothing. So long as concern for character dominates, plot will be created. Probably it need not be said again: individual plus motive plus opposition plus outcome represent idea and equal story. Looking ahead, a writer possessed of an idea with a person to illustrate it will see that a few adjustments are needed before the

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piece begins to run. Naturally, the reader's interest will quicken if some person in the story (not necessarily the protagonist) enlists his sympathy, his hope, his fear. Simple suspense, and sometimes complex, will be strengthened if in whatever struggle is coming the odds seem fairly even. Surprise firmly seated in plausibility may be wrought of the simplest materials if both sides, vulnerable in certain respects, strong in others, promise the possibility of victory or defeat. N o harm can be done by permitting the reader to identify himself, if he likes, with some person in the story. Few readers so invited will be greatly stirred by the sight of a superfortress flattening a kitten. But adjustment must know where to stop; if it continues beyond the point, it becomes plotting. T o my way of thinking, a preconceived happy or sad ending (in the belief that either sort has intrinsic value) is as clearly a mark of the amateur or fictioneer as is scurrying round for a plot to make a story of. Of course, the only really good ending follows inescapably what preceded, which, however, was conceived with some regard for the reader's allegiance and his expectation, and thus is both inevitable and satisfying. Far from mechanical plotting, taking this course may mean that sometimes you don't know how a story is coming out until, or just before, you reach the coming-out point. This procedure seems risky. It may involve rewriting and rewriting. And there is always the ugly possibility of discovering, after long labor and many scrumpled pages, that there isn't any outcome to this thing; it is deadlocked, and you, who thought you might have, haven't a story. But who can steer any course without risk? W h o can afford to be afraid of rewriting? By any method, who can be sure that he has the best story he can write until the last period? The risky and troubled course I advocate has at least one advantage. A part of you can live again in the story as it lives (this is not deciding what to write while writing, we are far beyond that stage), can live in one of its people, feeling every word not as a word but what it stands for. While another part (if you can hang onto your hat) sits back and watches and merely records — content to see justice done or, if need be, to balance a longer reckoning, injustice.

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THE PRISON* by Bernard Malamud T H O U G H he tried never to think of it, at twenty-nine T o m m y Castelli's life was a screaming bore. It was not just Rosa or the store they tended for profits counted in pennies, or the unendurably slow hours and endless drivel that went with dispensing candy, cigarettes, and soda water; it was this sick-in-the-stomach feeling of being trapped in old mistakes, even those he had made before Rosa changed T o n y into Tommy. He had been, as T o n y , a kid of many ideas and schemes, especially for getting out of this thickly tenemented, kid-squawking neighborhood, with its lousy poverty, but everything had fouled up against him before he could. W h e n he was sixteen he quit the vocational school where they were making him into a shoemaker and began to hang out with the grayhatted, thick-soled-shoe boys who had the spare time and the mazuma and displayed it in fat wonderful rolls down in the cellar clubs to all who would look, and everyone did, popeyed. T h e y were the ones who had bought the silver caffe espresso urn and later the television, and they arranged the pizza parties and had the girls down; but it was getting in with them and their cars, leading to the holdup of a liquor store, that had started all the present trouble. L u c k y for him the coal-and-ice man who was their landlord knew the leader in the district and they arranged something so nobody bothered him after that. Then before he knew what was going on — he had been frightened sick by the whole business — there was his father cooking up a deal with Rosa's old man that T o n y would marry her and the father-in-law would, out of his

* First published in Commentary, A p r i l 1951. Reprinted b y permission of the author.

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savings, open a candy store for him to make an honest living. He wouldn't spit on a candy store, and Rosa was too plain and lank a chick for his personal taste, so he beat it off to Texas and bummed around for three months in too much space, and when he came back everyone said it was for Rosa and the candy store, and it was all arranged again and he, without saying no, was in it. That was how he had landed on Prince Street in the Village, working from eight in the morning to almost midnight every day, except for an hour each afternoon when he went upstairs to sleep, and on Tuesdays, when the store was closed and he slept some more and went at night, alone, to the movies. H e was too tired, always, for schemes now, but once he tried to make a little cash on the side by secretly taking in punchboards a syndicate had distributed in the neighborhood, on which he collected a nice cut and saved fiftyfive bucks that Rosa didn't know about; but then the syndicate was exposed by a newspaper, and the punchboards melted away. Another time, when Rosa was at her mother's house, he took a chance and let them put in a slot machine that could guarantee a nice piece of change if he kept it long enough. He knew of course he couldn't hide it from her, so when she came home and screamed when she saw it, he was ready and patient, for once not yelling back when she yelled, and he explained it was not the same as gambling because anyone who played it got a roll of mints every time he put in a nickel. Also the machine would supply them a few extra dollars cash they could use to buy television so he could see the fights without going to a bar; but Rosa wouldn't let up screaming, and later her father came in shouting he was a criminal and chopped the machine apart with a hammer. The next day the cops raided for slot machines and gave out summonses wherever they found them, and though Tommy's place was the only candy store in the neighborhood that didn't have one, he felt bad about the machine for a long time. Mornings had been his best time of day because Rosa stayed upstairs cleaning, and since few people came into the store till noon, he could sit around alone, a toothpick between his teeth, looking over the News and Mirror on the fountain counter, or maybe chin with one of the old cellar-club guys who had happened to come by for a pack of cigarettes, about a horse that was running that day

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or how the numbers were paying lately; or just sit there drinking coffee and thinking how far away he could get on the fifty-five he had stashed away in the cellar. Generally the mornings were this way, but after the slot machine usually the whole day was rotten and he along with it. Time moldered in his heart and all he could think of the whole morning was going to sleep in the afternoon, and he would wake up with the sour remembrance of the long night in the store ahead of him while everybody else was doing as he damn pleased. He cursed the place and Rosa, and cursed, from its beginning, his unhappy life. It was on one of these bad mornings that a ten-year-old girl from around the block came in and asked for two rolls of colored tissue paper, one red and one yellow. He wanted to say go to hell and stop bothering but instead went with bad grace to the rear, where Rosa, whose bright idea it was to handle the stuff, kept it. He went from force of habit, for the girl had been coming in every Monday since the summer for the same thing, because her rock-faced mother, who looked as if she had arranged her own widowhood, took care of some small kids after school and gave them the paper to cut out dolls and such things. The girl, whose name he didn't know, resembled her mother, except her features were not quite so sharp and she had very light skin with dark eyes; but she was a plain kid and would be more so at twenty. He had noticed, when he went to get the paper, that she always hung back as if afraid to go where it was dark, though he kept the comics there and most of the other kids had to be slapped away from them; and that when he brought her the tissue her skin seemed to grow whiter and her eyes shone. She always handed him two hot dimes and went out without glancing back. It happened that Rosa, who trusted nobody, had just hung a mirror on the back wall, and as Tommy opened the drawer to get the girl her paper this Monday that he felt so bad, he looked up and saw in the glass something that made it seem as if he were dreaming. The girl had disappeared, but he saw a white hand reach into the candy case for a chocolate bar and for another, then she glided forth from behind the counter and stood there, innocently waiting for him. At first he felt like grabbing her by the neck and smacking her till she puked, but he had begun to think, as he often did, how

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his Uncle Dom, years ago before he went away, used to take him with him when he went crabbing to Sheepshead Bay, T o n y alone of all the kids. Once they went at night and threw the baited traps into the water and after a while pulled them up and they had this green lobster in one, and just then this fat-faced cop came along and said they had to throw it back unless it was nine inches. Dom said it was nine inches all right, but the cop said not to be a wise guy so Dom measured it and it was ten inches, and they laughed about the lobster all night. Then he remembered how he had felt after Dom was gone, and tears filled his eyes and he found himself thinking about the way his life had turned out and then about this girl, moved that she was a thief. He felt he should do something for her, warn her to cut it out before she got into a jam and fouled up her whole life. T h e urge to do so was strong, but when he went forward she glanced up frightened because he had taken so long. The way the fear showed in her eyes bothered him and he did not attempt to say anything. Then she thrust out the dimes, grabbed at the tissue rolls and ran out of the store. He had to sit down. He kept trying to make the urge to speak to her go away but it came back stronger than ever. He asked himself what difference does it make if she swipes candy — so she swipes it; and the role of reformer was strange and distasteful to him, yet he could not convince himself that what he felt he must do was unimportant. But he worried he would not know what to say to her. Always he had trouble speaking, stumbled over words, especially in new situations. He was afraid he would make a sap of himself, and she would not take him seriously. He had to tell her in a sure way so that even if it scared her some, she would understand he had done it to set her straight. He mentioned her to no one but often thought about her, always looking around whenever he went outside to raise the awning or wash the window, to see if any of the girls playing in the street was her but they never were. T h e following Monday in an hour after opening the store he had smoked a full pack of butts. He thought he had what he wanted to say but was afraid for some reason she wouldn't come in, or if she did, this time she wouldn't take the candy. He was not sure he wanted that until he had said what he had to say. But at about eleven, while he was reading the News, she appeared, asking as usual for tissue paper,

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her eyes shining so she had to look away. He knew then she meant to steal. Going to the rear he slowly opened the drawer, keeping his head lowered as he sneaked a look into the glass and saw her slide behind the counter. His heart beat hard and his feet felt nailed to the floor. He ransacked his mind to recall what he had intended to do but it was like an empty room so he let her, in the end, slip away and stood tongue-tied, with the dimes burning his palm. Afterwards he explained it to himself that he hadn't spoken to her because it was while she had the candy on her and she would have been more scared than he wanted. When he went upstairs, instead of sleeping, he sat at the kitchen window, looking out into the back yard. He blamed himself for being too soft, too much chicken, but then he thought no there was a better way to do it. He would do it indirectly, slip her a hint he knew, and he was pretty sure that would stop her, and then sometime after, he would explain to her why it was a good thing she had stopped. So next time he cleaned out the particular candy platter she helped herself from, thinking she would get wise he was on to her, but she seemed not to, only hesitated with her hand before she took two candy bars from the next plate and dropped them into the black patent leather purse she always had with her. The time after that he cleaned out the whole top shelf, and still she was not suspicious, and reached down to the next and took something different. One Monday he put some loose change, nickels and dimes, on the candy plate but she left them there, only taking the candy, which bothered him a little. Rosa asked him what was he mooning about and why he had all of a sudden taken to eating chocolate bars. He didn't answer, and she began to look suspiciously at the women who came in, not excluding the little girls; and he would gladly have rapped her in the teeth but it didn't matter as long as she didn't know what was what. At the same time he figured he would have to do something decisive soon or it would get harder for the girl to stop stealing. He felt he had to be strong about it. Then he thought of a plan that satisfied him. He would leave just two chocolate bars in the plate and insert under the wrapper of one a note she could read when she was alone. He experimented on paper, printing many messages to her, and the one that seemed best he cleanly copied on a strip of cardboard and slipped it under the wrapper of one chocolate bar.

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It said, "Don't do this any more or you will suffer your whole life." He puzzled over whether to sign it A Friend or Your Friend and finally chose Your. This was on Friday, and he could not contain his impatience for Monday. But on Monday she did not appear. He waited for a long time, until Rosa came down, then he had to go up and the girl still hadn't come and he was intensely disappointed because she had never failed to come. He lay on the bed with his shoes on and stared at the ceiling. He felt hurt, disillusioned, the sucker she had played him for and was now finished with because she probably had another. The more he thought about it the worse he felt. He worked up a splitting headache that kept him from sleeping, then he suddenly slept and woke without it. But he had awaked depressed, saddened. He thought about Dom getting out of jail and going away God knows where. He wondered whether he would ever meet him somewhere if he took the fifty-five dollars and left. Then he remembered Dom was a pretty old guy now and he might not know him even if they did meet. He thought about life. You never really got what you wanted. No matter how you tried you made mistakes and could never get past them. You could never see the sky and the ocean because you were locked in a prison, except that nobody called it a prison, and if you did, nobody knew what you were talking about, or they said they didn't. A pall settled over him. He lay motionless, without thought or sympathy for himself or anyone. But when he finally went downstairs, ironically amused that Rosa had permitted him so long a period of grace, there were people in the store and he could hear her screeching at the top of her lungs. Shoving his way through the crowd he saw in one sickening look that she had trapped the girl with the candy bars and was shaking her in such fury that the kid's head bounced back and forth like a balloon on a stick. With a curse he tore her away from the girl, whose sickly face showed her terrible fright. "Whatsamatter," he shouted at Rosa, "you want blood?" "She's a thief," Rosa screamed. "Shut your filthy mouth." "A dirty rotten thief." T o stop her yowling he rapped her with his knuckles across the mouth but it was a harder blow than he had intended. Rosa fell back

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with a gasp. She did not cry but looked dazedly around at the people and tried to smile, and everyone could see her teeth were flecked with blood. "Go home," Tommy ordered the girl, but then there was a commotion near the door and her mother came into the store. "What happened?" she said. "She stole the candy," Rosa cried out. "I let her take it," Tommy said. Rosa stared at him as if she had been hit again, then with mouth distorted began to sob. "One was for you, mother," said the girl. Her mother socked her hard across the face. "You little thief, this time you'll get your hands burned good." She pawed at the girl, grabbed her arm and yanked her out. The girl, like a grotesque ballerina, half ran, half fell forward, but at the door she managed to turn her white face and thrust out at him her red tongue.

The first flick of an idea for a story might have brushed the author's mind upon seeing a young man something like Tommy — sullen, bored, living on memories of an active and enterprising past that had to be covered up for some reason — tending a small store, practically doing nothing; that is, merely the contrast between past and present. I don't say it did. But if it did, Malamud was wise enough to see it wasn't enough: a contrast, half of it dead anyway, is apt to prove static, pictorial, dense. Or a first whisper might have been heard as the author happened to see something he wasn't meant to see: an act of pilfering that is a common practice, a primary exercise of wits and hands in the slums of a large city. If so, this was mobile enough but merely an isolated episode. Both might have been discarded for good reasons. But both may have continued to live in Malamud's memory and bother him. There is something implacably real and taunting about the seen person, the witnessed act. There it is, and there. What about it? Perhaps he turned both

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meager, useless bits of life over and over in his mind. And then suddenly the thing came in a rush. If he somehow put the two together . . . promptly they fell together, and he had it: the ironic justice of a so-to-speak reformed, a relatively big-time larcenist having to watch — no, better, choosing to watch, with the possible motive of reforming lest the watched one suffer his fate — the pettiest sort of larceny (contrast made to move), by a beginner, a boy — no, a girl would be better . . . If that could be done, what would happen? Perhaps again Malamud was wise enough to see that what would happen — and something must, that was his lookout — would depend wholly on the two personalities involved. Perhaps he saw sentimentality loom up ahead if the attempt to reform was to be successful. Offhand, reform seems unlikely without a very different foundation, and even with the difference a story could easily lapse into something sickening, like "Editha's Burglar" reversed, or the sleight-of-hand management of events despite personality by O. Henry at his hastiest and emptiest. Reform in this case could demonstrate a daydream that we might wish would come true, but be likely to demonstrate nothing and mean nothing, in terms of what does usually happen. After all, Tommy's record was there behind him, and the girl was a petty thief. So here may have entered the author's first suspicion — it may have come later, and in any case I hope he waited to let suspicion harden into certainty — of the necessity for the attempt at reform to fail. Failure would demonstrate something very real, recognizable, and long-lived. It had been said, negatively, in two neat lines— Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage — by Richard Lovelace three hundred years ago, and as have been most true ideas, exemplified by stories over and over again. But this story would be entirely fresh and new; this would start calm, build up and tighten slowly, then suddenly explode. If this was to be made feasible, the author must have seen the necessity — equally important as failure of the attempt to reform — of making success seem, until the last possible moment, not only natural and reasonable, but promising.

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There was the idea: a man can make his own prison. And here was material, in the form of two persons as yet not fully realized, but glimpsed, who by their feelings and actions could represent the idea. So Malamud went to work on Tommy, filling in details. By now Tommy was the only possible protagonist of the story, and he had additional advantages as medium with failure suspected by the author; since execution of the idea became, more and more clearly, the recounting not only of a struggle between dishonesty and a sort of pragmatic honesty, but of a losing struggle between a young man and, outwardly (details filled in having shown that the small girl alone wouldn't be enough), several members of the opposite sex. Inwardly, of course, the struggle throughout would be between Tommy and himself. Tommy would see everything but a true picture of himself, and that could be shown through what he remembered, as it were over his head. Tommy's hopes would fly highest (if the reader could be induced to tag along), and their fall would be the most shattering. It was, after all, Tommy's story. The problem was to catch him exactly right. Probably Malamud hadn't written a word yet; certainly he had written very few words that remain in the story now. He may not have gone through all this incoherent groping and reasoning consciously; if he was lucky, all or much of it came in a flash or a series of flashes. I am sure that everything followed from this point of conception, once these matters were settled. Getting at the right characters, chiefly Tommy, but the girl and the two women also, was all there was left to do. This was a good deal, though, and it must have taken patience and the most scrupulous care. Incorporating Tommy's stream of experience as the telling method, though a right choice, was no easy task, as shown by three lapses from it: "Time moldered in his heart," "so long a period of grace," and "like a grotesque ballerina" are vivid expressions but author's rhetoric beyond Tommy's experience and powers of expression. Objective telling would have made of the long time span a thin synopsis, and telling by a witness would have been prejudicial and too remote from the center to make the story a moving experience. Sentimentality was the only danger attendant on stream of experience, and if my guess is right

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the author avoided that by his management of content and, for the most part, by his choice of language. Tommy's thoughts not only carry the flashback but go on with the extended present, as suspense builds up, so naturally that Monday after Monday slips past unnoticed by the reader, and the pace quickens imperceptibly to the final scene. The spare economy of statement during those last, appalling seconds is the most effective part of the story. But the hardest labor and the finest artistry here make no great show. Sought out and almost without exception caught and reproduced are the details of temperament, locality, and incident that build (what plotters would call plot) on a thorough realization of personality the structure of motive-obstacle-outcome. These details, creeping singly into the reader's perception, keep him unaware of the hard and tightening fabric. Tommy, certainly no great shakes as a person, could hardly be more or less and carry out the author's meaning. He spins on his own axis while the story moves around him. From the start he is more acted upon than acting, drawing his existence from his dependence on others and when life doesn't suit him calling it a bore. He remembers himself as Tony, "a kid of many ideas and schemes" but schemes "especially for getting out of this . . . neighborhood"; no leader, he joined a gang and got into trouble as a member; luckily, "their landlord knew the leader in the district" and "arranged something so nobody bothered him after that." Tony knew no details, he knew only the result. Then his father arranged the marriage with Rosa, arranged the candy store as a means of keeping Tony out of trouble. The boy's flight to Texas (finding "too much space" could not be said better so briefly) was his one bold stroke, and it went for nothing when he, true to his dependent nature, returned. (But that one show of initiative, even in flight, was necessary to the story.) Now Tommy instead of Tony — the author shows unusual care in a detail as small as the connotation of given names—really begins to build his prison around him. As he was dumb and submissive and used by others or helped by others, up to the entrance of the tenyear-old girl, so is he used, without his knowledge, when she begins to steal candy. Thus the only sympathy created for TonyTommy is negative, felt by contrast with the other characters, all of whom are actively repugnant. For Tony as Tommy we feel a

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limited pity that is strengthened by the fact that the story is coming to us through his thought and senses wherein, though bored, he exhibits no pity for himself. He spins, in perfect balance. We are in his shoes. His weakness, his sense "of being trapped in old mistakes," his resignation to boredom are sharable. Who has not felt, at one time or another, a part of his dreary load? And spinning, he moves. When Tommy begins to scheme out some way, not of escaping, himself, but of warning the girl so that she may escape, of dissuading her from stealing without letting anyone know — without even letting the girl know from whom the warning comes — at once our sympathy becomes positive, our hope builds that he too may thus escape his half-built prison, and tension mounts as try after try is unsuccessful but is replaced by another. There is something irresistible, almost a touch of the heroic, in an attempt to do for another what one has been unable to do for oneself. And each try — the opposing forces in the outward struggle have been soundly equalized here — seems to us, as to Tommy, more promising. Success seems just off his finger tips. It will be success in the inward struggle, too; nobody will ever know of it; it will be something he can remember, one time when he actually thought out a plan and alone carried it through — did it. Accordingly, even on that final Monday, when the girl does not come and Tommy at last goes upstairs and lies there dozing and hopelessly brooding, our hope is stronger than his. We still take this dislocation of his plans and consequent discouragement to be the dark before the dawn; we still believe things are coming out all right. So firm and sure has been the author's motivation on both levels of plausibility — note especially at the level of reality submerged the girl's persistent failure to take more than two candy bars, and the natural planting of suspicion in Rosa — that things still could come out all right. Did Malamud wait until that moment to let his suspicion of failure harden into certainty? Probably not, probably before then the story was grooved. But he might have waited; his balance is so secure, he might have brought the story to an end either way without objection. Yet we concede his ending is the better. The explosion in the final paragraphs is as swiftly logical as blue lightning hard on the snap of thunder. Rosa's suspicion falsely affirmed, the girl's mother

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appearing, confession wrung from the girl, blow after blow falling — and for Tommy the final ignominy of the small thrust-out tongue of the child he had tried to save from his sort of prison — these strike the reader with the inevitability of a world gone wrong that couldn't have gone right. After all, Tommy had it coming to him. Has Malamud played God without authority here? Has he tampered with reality in order to bring about a preconceived end? I do not think so. I believe the story has a soft spot or two; those mentioned and the memory of crabbing with Uncle Dom, the fortuitous lobster that was a legal ten inches, which as lead to Tommy feeling moved that the girl was a thief lacks connection. With these unimportant exceptions, the story seems strongly wrought and true. Surely it has enough (if we must use the word once more) plot to satisfy any readers but those in a coma. Its chief value for writers lies in the evidence that its pattern of action was not ferreted out as a separate entity, an end in itself, and the characters pushed into enacting it. " T h e Prison" appears to have followed naturally upon the author's discovery of two persons capable of illustrating a tenable idea, upon his exploration therefor of the weights and balances of human nature to be involved, and upon his patient and successful search for details that would embody this concept, would make it stick.

XV. INDIRECTION AND RESTRAINT A READER LIKES TO BE GUIDED, FIRMLY AT THE START,

more lightly through the midsection of a short story, then toward the end freed and allowed to step out for himself. If a story is to transmit an over-all meaning dramatically — that is, without a direct statement of it, but with some indirect guidance — it is the writer's duty to recognize but not overplay the reader's desire; his effort will be, at first, not to seem to talk down to the reader, then not to talk up to him, and finally not to talk at all. The terms "guidance" and "talk" are not, of course, used in literal reference to any overt activity by the writer or to his voice falling eerily upon the story from somewhere outside or beyond it; I mean the words in a sense wholly figurative, the writer's activity exclusively indirect but rising from his need to impart what the reader needs to know (such matters as what sort of person we have here, what he wants, why he can't seem to get it, how this affair comes out) if he, the reader, is to be expected to feel and to agree that the over-all meaning is worth going all this way to get; and I mean as a principal method of indirection the channeling of all information through a telling that preserves the illusion of reality and makes the whole seem to happen spontaneously, letting the reader infer what he will. On skates, you snap the whip and the last man coasts for half a mile. This diminution of guidance is not only feasible and natural, as the story progresses and the reader becomes cognizant of its personalities, the conflicting forces they exert while each spins in balance, the main trend of the piece and its idioms and symbols; it is also helpfully suggestive to the reader by the fact of its parallel pattern with the normal pattern of quickened pace. In "The Prison," for instance, early guidance via Tommy's thoughts is firm and the pace is relatively slow; after the appearance of the child, once

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Tommy's motive is established, guidance diminishes to a running thread of his reasoning, and a record of physical action — his attempts, her circumventions — takes its place; pace quickens accordingly to a tempo that allows several weeks to pass in several paragraphs without impairment of illusion. At the end, guidance disappears, every move carries its fell implication, and in scarcely more reading time than would be taken by the cries and action the story is over. If the reader has not caught the idea by that time, no amount of guidance will do him any good. Aesop, if we can imagine this material within his range, would have added to the fable itself something like "If a man builds his prison, no attempt to escape will succeed." Malamud didn't have to do that, partly because a popular, nonliterary ancestor of the short story, the oral anecdote, sprang up long before Aesop, worked its way into literature, and sturdily survived to the present; partly because, with its help, first hearers, then readers through the centuries became mentally more agile; and partly because the permissible motive behind storytelling has greatly broadened. Malamud's meaning is the more pointed for not having been stated. The story need no longer, in fact it had better not, preach. Or, too openly, even teach. Best if it merely points, makes its illusion of life real, and leaves the idea up to the reader to catch and make use of or ignore. The chances of absorption and use via inference are far greater (it must be good, the reader's wits caught it) than they would be via direct statement. In itself this ability to guide without seeming to, this willingness to point and leave off, this habit of exemplification-preferred is no child's play. Life is so swift and so complicated, it is all one can do to keep his hands off. Indirection? Who ever won anything that way? A writing man looks up at myriads of stars in the night sky, some bright, some dim, all of them innumerable light-years away from him and swimming in some vast nothingness that may be only a small part of an unimaginably vaster whole. (He reads of flying saucers . . .) Walking in the woods or alongshore, he finds in some tiny plant or seashell a concentration of symmetrical and sustaining life for which its ledge or clearing might serve as planet, the rest of this world as universe, and so outward into infinity. (He reads of

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new advances in chemistry and biology . . .) He tries to configure the billions of men who inhabit this planet, some enslaved, some more or less free, some well, some ill, some reflective and articulate, some almost blank of mind and wordless — but each perforce clinging to a nub of hope, desire, anticipation, memory of some kind to live for and struggle for and with luck attain or regain, and thus fend off for a time the inner darkness of loneliness or despair. (He reads about the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, by means of which millions of these sentient beings may destroy other millions, for some reason most of the destroyers as well as the destroyed may have by then forgotten . . .) He hears men say will equal vociferousness what they don't mean and what they do but with questionable motive. He sees pity and compassion become mechanized and standardized in overlapping drives for this and that good cause. He sniffs the air more and more heavily poisoned, sees cars going faster and road construction lagging, hears supersonic snarls and bangs. The headlines are as tall, the announcer's voice is as urgent, whether there is any news or not, whether the advertised product is any good or not. (He reads of steady advancement in living and dying, and for the photographer every face wears a fixed smile . . .) Well, the areas of knowledge are too broad, there is too much of everything; it all seems a mess to him. Perhaps originally a beautiful mess, and still possessing great slabs and chunks, curves and colors and phases of beauty, but too vast and mixed for any one man to understand, let alone think of setting to rights. Yet always there is one small corner or aspect of this huge, inexplicable chaos that he knows, up and down, all around, and through and through: a man — two men — a man and a woman — a place — something somebody wants and somebody who wants to keep him from getting it; and some simple, not yet quite forgotten, truth (or conjectured truth, nothing now remaining absolute but nothing) about the nature of mankind — something that presentation in a story of his known, peopled corner of all knowledge might make clear, or even amusing, to others who haven't happened to experience just what he has experienced. Here is his nub: his hope, his reward, his consolation, his justification for writing — if only he can make this minuscule part of the

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entire mighty mess clear and plain — that's all he aspires to, so that others can see it in their minds' eyes as something like what he saw. (Something like: that would be by their powers of association; that would be indirection if he could start it working.) This small bit he is sure of, this infinitesimal scrap of the whole whirling jumble he might even settle once and for all. If only he can pull it off that way, clear and plain and something like, a miniature weed or seashell of amusing enlightenment, that will be compensation for a universe of muddled data. Child's play? It is hard labor, the hardest. But with things as they are, not to undertake it would be unbearable. Quite possibly, though, a writing man's hope extends beyond indirect presentation for mere amusing enlightenment. Suppose his peopled corner of knowledge by experience includes a wrong done, or a prejudice aborting justice, an intrigue successful but unrevealed, an inherited bias taken for granted, any one of which invites expression not so much of the general by the particular as of some temporary or local phase of the particular, on which men disagree. Suppose there are two sides at least to this matter, his experience has planted him solidly on one side, and he wants to use his knowledge not only to the end that readers accept his demonstration as true to life and human nature in general but as proof that his side is right in this particular disagreement — thus making his knowledge a lever by which readers can be moved beyond enlightened agreement to physical action (more or less violent) by the ballot, by legislation, by striking, by donations to causes, by escape from political or social ties, even by taking up arms in civil or world warfare. In short, his hope and purpose are self-imposed — we needn't, yet anyway, consider extra-imposed — propaganda. N o w at once the difficulties of indirection enormously increase. In particular, obstacles arise before those aids to indirection in short fiction that have been called "guidance" and "talk," which are the hand and voice of the writer working through his people. In the first instance, where the writer's aim was only verisimilitude and a point about human nature, he had on his hands only a private affair between his ability and his artistic conscience. But now the affair has become public; he is no longer an individual, a free agent — that is, relatively free; nobody who creates for others is entirely

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free. He has chosen to act for a group: of neglected children, of Negroes, of Jews, of oppressed peasants, of miners, of white-collar workers, of small businessmen. He still has verisimilitude to struggle for, but it is more difficult to achieve because the point, which was before only some innocent aspect of human nature in the large, has now narrowed to a dagger's point. He has more to say and less to say it with. Small wonder if his.artistic conscience gives a little under pressure of his assumed public conscience, if characters come out on paper unbalanced, and what they do or what is done to them seems incomplete or distorted. The natural pattern of diminishing guidance and accelerating tempo, moreover, becomes reversed. At the start, where firm guidance is needed, and care about this need until the reader is oriented may make pace relatively slow, the man with a message must run light and fast, according to the best principles not of short story but of dialectic, lest he lose a possible convert. Later, when guidance naturally lightens and pace begins to quicken, he is more apt to bear down and slow down, thinking it safe now to get in some good licks. All this time, the temptation to abolish indirection and speak out in person must have been increasing. Near the end, where guidance would normally disappear and life flash past in a matter of seconds that speak for themselves, the temptation to hammer home his message is almost more than he can bear and the story lags in proportion to his resistance. If crusade conquers artistic conscience, illusion cracks and the story not only stops before his writing stops but the stoppage is retroactive as the reader sees that no story ever really began. It was an axe being ground. It may be reasonably doubted whether the absorbing compassion for all humanity that seems to have been, over the centuries, a lasting impetus and a deep wellspring of fiction is compatible with propaganda. In short stories, I have searched for the quality and found only its ghost or skeleton, the writer burning with self-pity or indignation at the sight of the few oppressed or underprivileged, burning with fury at the often not much more numerous privileged or oppressors; hence defying indirection and achieving the level of tract or broadside, caricature, sentimentality, melodrama, or plain obscurity. The more local and temporal the attack, the sooner its prototypes and issues are forgotten. If a piece of fiction is to live as

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art, it must have a more secure foothold. Even in novels, the rule maintains. W e are told that Uncle Tom's Cabin exerted a powerful force toward the crisis of the Civil War. But this is relevant now only as sociological datum; no matter how powerful the book was as document, it is a poor story. There is, if you dig it out, a good deal of the Dreyfus case in Penguin Island, but the book as a whole looms over and blots out that minor application, a great work of art. It is often pointed out that War and Peace is a masterpiece, both as social document and as art, because its thesis is laid out along almost the broadest possible lines; but I wonder if Anna Karenina, intensive in focus and structure but broader yet in emotional power because it has no thesis beyond the enlightenment of mankind, no impetus except compassion, is not greater yet. Examples in this argument must be novels. I cannot cite a really good short story having a specific religious, political, or sociological message inciting to action. But it seems fairly certain that if such a one is to be written, the writer needs something even stronger, more subtle, more gentling to his indignation than the aids to indirection. These he must of course use. He must build and guard verisimilitude with his life, preserve clarity and naturalness above everything else, and at the risk of being found lacking in spiritedness or eloquence be willing to let his story — it is first and last, he must remember, a story he is writing — follow the principles of diminishing guidance and accelerating pace. But he needs more. A still, small voice will be heard farther and longer than a yell of rage. He must write in an undertone, he must play down if he is to get his readers worked up. He must let action speak louder than any words. He needs a constant, strong, self-imposed restraint.

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THE SHADOW OF AN ARM* by Thomas Hal Phillips P E A N E sat on a stool beside the compress and watched the cotton, like a stream of snow, slide down into the baler. In his right hand he held a short hickory rod, now worn sleek, with which he stirred the cotton so that the chute would not choke. He could not see Mr. Sid and Mr. Clark, standing on the weighing platform behind him, but he could hear them; and Mr. Clark was saying: "But Papa, that's old-timey business. If I'm going to keep books I want to pay everybody with a check every Saturday night. And if they say I never paid, then I'll have a record." "All right," Mr. Sid said. "All right. But nobody yet ever told me I didn't pay them. Let's go on up to the house and you can write the checks." Above the sound of the gin Peane heard Mr. Sid walking toward him. He knew Mr. Sid's walk. Then he felt the hand touch his shoulder and Mr. Sid said: "We're going to dinner. We'll be back in a little while." "Yessuh," Peane said. He heard them go down the ladder. Then he looked around to see that Mr. Clark was the last to disappear below. He hoped Mr. Sid wouldn't let Mr. Clark start writing checks on payday. Having a check was not the same as having the bills, even the wrinkled bills; and that was another thing Mr. Clark didn't understand. But Mr. Sid did. Peane reached out his right hand and jerked the cotton down. * Copyright, 1950, by the Virginia Quarterly Review, the University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the Virginia Quarterly Review and of the author.

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Sometimes he did not use the stick at all. He liked to feel the cotton just before it went into the bale. It was warm and soft then. He smiled a little. His hands and arms always looked blacker against the white blanket sliding downward. He half-closed his eyes and pictured every wheel that quivered now in a long, steady drone. He knew everything about the gin: he and Mr. Sid had built it. He knew more about it than Mr. R o y Drew, who was only the ginner. He thought of Mr. R o y because he heard laughter. It came from the suction platform at the front of the gin, and he knew it was Mr. Roy talking to Mr. Albert. They were ginning Mr. Albert's bale now, and in a few minutes Mr. Albert would come back to the compress and joke about how much his bale was going to weigh. After a while he heard the steps he expected but he did not look up at that moment, for the chute was filling. His left hand reached out for the lever; slowly the presser went down. Then he released the lever, and with a hiss of steam the presser jolted upward again. "Peane?" "Yessuh." He turned. It was Mr. Albert. He was tall and heavy and red-faced now. Peane could remember when he was tall and slender and the bottoms of his trousers always struck above his ankles. "Where's Sid?" " A t the house. For dinner." His left hand worked hard at the lever again. "When you gonna quit monkeying with this old gin and come over to my place to grow cotton?" "I don't know, suh." Peane laughed. Mr. Albert was a lot like Mr. Sid. "Well, hell. I feed my hands. It's nearly one o'clock." "Yessuh. Mr. Sid'll be back now, any time. Then I go eat." "Has Clark come home from school to run his daddy's farm next year?" "I don't know. Mr. Sid didn't say yet. But Mr. Clark's here." Peane let the press down and up again. A light cloud of steam covered his hand. "What's it gonna weigh?" Peane laughed. "About 490." Mr. Albert looked over into the baler. " N o w when the hell have

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you weighed a bale for me that didn't push the pe beyond five hundred?" Peane reached out with the stick, for the chute was filling again. He let the presser down and the compress creaked. Mr. Albert grunted. "I'll be damned, Peane. If I brought you and Sid a sixhundred-pound bale, your old compress would bust wide open. You ought to get a new all-electric outfit, like the one in Raymond. Just touch a button there and a button here . . ." They turned to the sound of steps behind them. Mr. Sid was climbing the gin's back ladder. His big arms and shoulders were just above the gin's floor. A healthy red always showed across his face. "Sid," Mr. Albert said. "Did you hear what I said?" Mr. Sid was standing straight now. He was big, not fat. "No. What?" "If you don't jack up this damned gin and put a new electric outfit under it, I'm gonna start hauling my cotton to Raymond." Mr. Sid grinned and came on to where Peane sat. He put his hand on Peane's shoulder. "He can't tell a good gin when he sees one, can he?" Peane laughed. Mr. Sid turned toward Mr. Albert. "You want those fancy suction motors to shoot your cotton through and cut it all to pieces? Hell no." "I know," Mr. Albert said. "I know they shoot it through so fast it looks like it's sprinkled with pepper. And cut it up too." "Now you're talking," Mr. Sid said. He took the hickory stick from Peane's hand. "Reckon this bale will touch five hundred, Peane? Or is this another one of those shirttail bales of Albert Bynum's?" "A dollar on it," Mr. Albert said. "A dollar that it tips five hundred." Mr. Sid laughed. "You better go on and get something to eat, Peane." Peane walked toward the house with the November chill close about him. He wondered what it would be like if Mr. Clark took over the gin, though he did not believe Mr. Sid would let him change anything. He remembered Mr. Clark saying: "But you ought to switch over to electricity, Papa. You could save on cord-

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wood, and belts, a dozen things, and cut out half the work. . . ." And Mr. Sid had said: "I'm sixty-two years old. I'm not going to tear up something I built just to do away with a little work. That's the trouble with the world. People trying to get out of work when it's the best thing I know of to keep a man happy — plenty of work and a good wife." "But it's foolish not to switch." "Someday, Clark," Mr. Sid had said, "it'll belong to you and Elizabeth and Karen. Then you can put in electric motors and push buttons — mirrors, if you want to." Mr. Clark did not understand. But Peane understood. It was something you felt, and not something to talk about. He looked back for a moment to the gin which he and Mr. Sid had built thirty years ago: the high tin top, the tall smokestack, and the silver suction pipes. He turned and hurried on toward the house. He passed his own small house and then Etta's house at the edge of the garden. He did not see anyone nor any smoke from Etta's chimney. It seemed like a day when everything had stopped. Something was waiting. On the back steps, at the big house, he stopped. He did not remember the first time he had gone into that house. He remembered being seven and Mr. Sid six, and together they had sometimes slept on the same pallet. Then Mr. Sid was suddenly grown — all too soon. His face was big and red, and the ridges leaped on his arms when he lifted any weight. The farm was all his. But he did not make Peane work in the fields. Together they had built the gin — though a few of the field hands helped now and then. That was why Mr. Sid didn't want the gin changed. Mr. Clark could never understand. Peane went into the kitchen. When he did not see Etta, he called to her. He heard only a voice in the living room, and he knew it was Mr. Clark. "Mother, what time did Elizabeth and Karen go to Vicksburg?" "While you were at the gin. They didn't know you wanted to go. And besides, they're going to be at the high school all afternoon." That was Miss Annie. Then she said: "Peane? Is that you?" "Yes, ma'am."

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"Etta's in the garden. She put you a plate in the warming closet." "Yes, ma'am." The moment his hand touched the warming closet of the stove he heard the gin's whistle, and in his mind he could see clearly the long blasts of steam rising above the boiler. His heart leaped but he did not move. His hand seemed glued to a platter. Mr. Clark's voice was quick in the living room. "Mother, something is wrong at the gin. That damned old dilapidated boiler, I guess." Peane wanted to turn, to say the whistle wouldn't blow if there was anything wrong with the boiler. But his hand still clutched the platter. "Peane?" Suddenly his hand jerked to his side and he was hurrying toward Mr. Clark. "Let's see what's the matter. I've been telling Papa that something was going to happen . . ." They ran out of the house toward the gate and the car. Peane sat in the back seat as they raced down the driveway and turned into the road toward the gin. Mr. Clark's lips kept moving: "Damned old thing ready to fall in on his head and Papa won't change it. No telling what's happened now." The car lurched from the gravel road on to the sawdust-covered gin yard. Peane's hands reached out and pressed against the seat when the car came to a stop near the scales. He ran behind Mr. Clark toward the ladder of the gin. At the head of the ladder Mr. Albert towered above them. He reached down and caught Mr. Clark's arm, helping him up the last few rungs. "Over here, Clark. . . ." Peane pulled himself up quickly to the gin's floor. His short breath was like a quick heartbeat. Mr. Sid was lying beside the compress, his bloodstained arm folded across his chest. His sleeve was hardly torn, like little rips from barbed wire. A small streak of blood crossed his lips. "You can't stop the blood," Mr. Albert said. "Too much in the shoulder. You'll have to take him to Raymond. You can't get to Vicksburg in time." "But there's nothing at Raymond — a two-by-four clinic." "We can't get to Vicksburg."

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Mr. Clark was kneeling. His own face was turning white. Mr. Albert reached down and pulled him up. "Go on. Go on down, Clark. Get the car started. Peane's stout. He can lift him and I'll hold his arm and shoulder." "Where's R o y ? " Mr. Clark said. His breath was fast. "Gone after you. Go on now. . . ." He shoved Mr. Clark toward the ladder. Peane stooped and lifted Mr. Sid, who opened his eyes and closed them again. "Peane?" Peane could not answer. Mr. Sid was too heavy. Mr. Albert had the injured arm and shoulder and he was saying: "Easy, Peane. You'll have to carry him down the ladder by yourself — not toom for us both." Peane's foot touched the top rung. He inched downward. His shoulders touched either side of the ladder opening. He wanted to look up, as if suddenly everything was reversed and he couldn't ask God for anything unless he looked up. He was almost saying: "God, you know I can't think of nothing with all this weight. . . ." Then he was in the car and they were moving. Mr. Clark's right hand was cotton-white upon the steering wheel, and Mr. Albert was holding the shoulder and whispering: "You made it, Peane, and that damned ladder sagging with all your weight. . . ." And still Peane wanted to look up but he could not, he thought, for the weight in his arms. It was all a little like the times they used to wrestle — and he could throw Mr. Sid. He wanted to touch Mr. Sid's face, to wipe the streak of sweat and blood away. Mr. Sid did not open his eyes. He said: "The press caught my shoulder. It stuck. The lever. You know how it does . . . sometimes . . . Peane. . . ." Peane did not move though the weight was getting heavier and heavier. He wished Mr. Sid was six or seven. He could hold him then. It would be all right. For a moment Peane seemed to close his own eyes. Then the car was stopping. His body came to life again, beneath the weight. He put Mr. Sid on the white table in the clinic. Then, without saying anything, he turned and went back to the car. He wanted to look up and say something, now that the weight was gone, but he

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was sick — low inside him. He got into the back seat. Then he saw the blood and got into the front seat, put his head down into his hands, and tried not to think of the dripping from the cotton which Mr. Albert had held beneath the torn sleeve. He sat a long time. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. "They want you in there," Mr. Albert said. "And hurry. I have to leave — to go to Vicksburg after Elizabeth and Karen." In the hall of the clinic Peane saw the doctor and Mr. Clark and the nurse. They were in a little group. Peane knew the doctor: he was Mr. Edgeworth's boy and not much older than Mr. Clark. "Can't we do something else?" Mr. Clark was saying. "Can't we wait until Karen and Elizabeth get here?" "Yts," the doctor said. "We can wait. But the sooner he gets the blood the better. And they're not likely to have AB, since you didn't. He can't wait long for a transfusion." Mr. Clark kept looking at the doctor, not at his face, but at the mask hanging around his neck. Then slowly he turned to Peane. His face was very white. "Would you give Papa a transfusion — if you're the right type?" Peane could not answer; he had not expected Mr. Clark to ask him anything. He nodded, and again he was beginning to be sick, low in his stomach. Mr. Clark caught his arm lightly and said: "Go with the nurse." It was the first time Peane ever remembered Mr. Clark's touching him. He nodded again, and then he followed the nurse. He was trying to think about his hat, trying to remember where it was. The room was white and the smell was sharp. The nurse took the forefinger of his right hand and washed it with alcohol. "Hold still," she said. "Is he going to be all right?" Peane said. "We don't know." "Sometimes it gits stuck," he said. "The lever at the compress." "Clench your fist, then open it." He was afraid. "It stuck with Mr. Sid. Then the press comes down . . ." "Open it. Your hand." "But it always comes down slow and you can git out of the way. Only this time it must . . ."

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She pricked his finger. "Now lean back and rest awhile." She went away and he closed his eyes. In a few minutes he was lying on a white table with the needle in his arm. It was the thought of the needle that hurt. He kept his eyes closed and tried to think that it was only somebody pinching him — like Mr. Sid poking fun. "It was the right kind," the nurse whispered, but she did not seem to be talking to him. And he was afraid to ask anything; even his asking might make things go wrong. After a few minutes he heard: "I'm all through now. You just lie there and rest awhile." He lay there, trying not to remember, and the nurse went out. But the smell and the quietness did not make him afraid any more. He felt as if he had touched something he had always wanted to touch, had held something he had always wanted to hold. It was a long time before the nurse came back into the room. He was glad when she came. "They're moving Mr. Walters now. He's awake. The doctor wants you to lift him onto the bed. They're all sick. Everybody but the doctor. Some people can't look at blood." Peane nodded slowly. He got up. "You know where room two is? Down the hall?" "No, ma'am." "Come on. I'll show you." She went down the hall ahead of him and turned into a room. He reached the doorway of the room and stopped. His hand clutched the facing. Then he knew that Mr. Sid's arm was gone. "Here," the doctor said. "Can you lift him by yourself?" Peane pulled his hand away from the facing. Slowly he walked toward the bed. "Stand between the roller and the bed," the nurse said. "And turn his head that way." Slowly Peane nodded. He was numb with the feeling that he might drop Mr. Sid. His whole body seemed unable to stand. Then his hands moved under Mr. Sid's shoulders and under his thighs. His arms against the white sheet were darker now — like their being against the stream of cotton in the compress. He closed his eyes, lifted, and turned. Something hurt in his stomach. Mr. Sid's shoul-

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ders touched the bed. H e opened his eyes and for a moment stared. Then his lips moved slowly. "Peane . . . did you give me the blood?" "Yessuh." "You shouldn't be lifting me." "You're all right now," the nurse said quickly. "You're going to be all right." Her hands moved along the sheet beside his good right arm. Mr. Sid kept looking at Peane. "You know how that damned lever sometimes sticks. . . ." "Yessuh," Peane said. "You rest now," the nurse said. She motioned Peane quietly toward the door. Peane walked home. H e knew that he did not have to walk: it was something he wanted to do. H e had walked for a long time when he realized that it was beginning to rain. The wind seemed to whip the low clouds down into his face. He had been thinking that Mr. Sid would be all right. When he came within sight of the gin, he thought of Mr. Clark there, so he turned and cut across the pasture and went past the barn toward the house, which was dark now. When he passed the big house he wished that somebody had been there: he wanted to tell somebody something. It was a strange feeling, as if nothing had happened to Mr. Sid, but the day itself had died. In the damp darkness inside his room he lay on his bed and waited. He did not sleep, but sometimes he would feel his arms, as if to make certain that nothing had happened to them. A little while later he heard the sound of a car, and he got up. Then he saw the light from the big house. He crossed the yard to the back door and went into the kitchen. He was not hungry. He only wanted to tell somebody something — that everything was gone and he could never go back to the gin again. H e could hear voices in the living room. Then suddenly Mr. Clark was saying: "Peane? Is that you?" "Yessuh." He was trying hard to think how to tell Mr. Clark — he would take over the gin now. "Did you want something, Peane?" Peane could not answer. He could not say anything.

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"Oh, you want your pay." Mr. Clark turned back into the living room. The house was silent, more lifeless than Peane ever remembered. Then Mr. Clark was returning across the dining room toward the kitchen. He held out a check before him. Still Peane could not move nor say anything. Mr. Clark reached out and pushed the check into his coat pocket, and then he quickly drew two twenty-dollar bills from his wallet. "Here's something for you, Peane. And if you don't mind, I wish you wouldn't tell anybody about giving the blood." They did not say anything else to each other. After a minute Mr. Clark went back into the living room. Peane stood and watched until the light went off in the dining room. Slowly he turned and went out into the night. He looked across the yard toward the gin, and beyond the gin toward Mr. Albert Bynum's place. But for a while he did not move. He took the check and the bills and tore them piece by piece and let the rain wash the pieces out of his hand and onto the ground. Then he began to walk, for he knew that Mr. Sid would understand. And he was thinking that he would not take all of himself: he would leave something behind.

T h e author's intention was straightforward and uncomplicated. Appropriately he created a simple, very sensitive, but almost inarticulate person to carry out the intention and present his idea. Since readers' prejudice was bound to run strong, however, Phillips must have recognized the necessity — the demand on his ability — for the subtlest forms of indirection and restraint. T h e story has a message, in that its theme is open to argument or is accepted in theory but not in fact, or simply has been lost sight of; but the message is not specifically religious, political, or sociological. True, Peane has religious faith the white men appear to lack; but his faith is merely characteristic, very close to superstition, and being of importance only to himself not a subject of contention here. Again, although at the end of the story Peane suffers from misunderstanding by young Mr. Clark and from slights

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and indignities commonly associated with the status of slavery, and his extreme physical effort in Mr. Sid's behalf goes wholly (except by Mr. Sid) unnoticed and unrewarded — in spite of these vestiges Phillips is not trying to say that Peane in spirit is still a slave. Far from it. Nor is he maintaining that Peane is ignorant when under better conditions he could have been wise. Peane is, in fact, more knowledgeable about the old gin he helped build, has a better understanding of human nature, is readier and more decisive in an emergency, holds himself in better control than young Mr. Clark; and the question whether a new, electrically powered gin that works faster, saves labor, but cuts up the cotton and leaves it dirty is better than the old was by the author deliberately left open. It doesn't matter. Nothing that could come under the head of progress— mechanical or human — matters. The message undercuts all such in order to explore and utter something about basic relationships. By this causal sequence Phillips is pointing, first, at the fact that all men, regardless of faith, economic obligations, political ties, and formal education, are blood brothers; and, second, that a Negro, like any other man, is potentially a free agent who at his own risk can go anywhere, do anything his conscience suggests, give loyalty unasked and expect it given unsought, and even in physical failure and separation find an inward satisfaction in his freedom of will and action concretely exercised. The message is broad of base; in other circumstances it could be uttered anywhere, at any time. It is positive: instead of attacking racial discriminators, it builds up to human, perhaps heroic, stature the misunderstood, the underrated, the discriminated against. It was not meant to incite to action, for none is suggested. But it goes as far in that direction as is possible without becoming a tract. It invites readers to think, to compare, to judge for themselves — on the whole, the strongest inducement to rational action — and stops. The author never allowed himself to forget that he was writing a short story. The piece opens with another (not this time ironic) master symbol: the "short hickory rod" (symbolic of submission) "now worn sleek" with Peane's use of it to pull the cotton down the chute, but now and then discarded (symbolic of his potential free will and ac-

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tion) when he prefers to use his hand. As much as any man would, Peane liked to feel the soft cotton. He chooses to lay down the rod (even of submission born of affection and loyalty, once these become insupportable), sure that Mr. Sid would understand. The end of the story is made reasonable by this early foreshadowing. Indirection gained by channeling the story through Peane's stream of experience is evident throughout, from " H e knew Mr. Sid's walk" to the last significance-charged action. Guidance now and then suffers a little, so conscientious is the author about maintaining thought and expression at Peane's level of understatement of emotion and bare record of sense impression. Four characters appear or are heard very early in the story, quite a crowd for this medium, especially since Peane knows them all well, has special feelings about each that are needed by the reader, yet naturally would not all at once list and distinguish them. The father-son relationship in the first paragraph, for instance, is by Peane ignored; it could have been indicated without breach of temperament or idiom if Peane had referred to the son as "young Mr. Clark" at once, before Clark speaks. This bit of guidance was worth getting right, since it is basic to the story. Another important distinction, which should have been made early, is that the man referred to by Peane simply as "Mr. Albert" is in fact the Mr. Albert Bynum whose offer of work Peane presumably goes to accept at the end of the story; if the man's full name had been mentioned at first — it is natural enough and is done later — the distinction would be made. Again, at the end of the story, where no guidance should be needed, for simple lack of clarity we are somewhat at a loss. He [Peane] looked across the yard toward the gin, and beyond the gin toward Mr. Albert Bynum's place. But for a while he did not move. . . . Then he began to walk, for he knew that Mr. Sid would understand. The look, the negative statement in failure to move, and finally the possibly aimless walking don't quite do the job. Indirection becomes vagueness. So hard is the author trying to play it down and avoid heroics that he won't let Peane even think where he is going and thus give the reader the satisfaction of surely knowing he is bound for Mr. Albert, who "was a lot like Mr. Sid." When it comes to restraint, there is an observation to be made

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about this factor of management. It is multilateral, a chameleon for protective coloring, and nimbler than a snake. On the important matter of his message, Phillips' restraint is unexceptionable. Over a detail of management almost trifling in comparison, which he most certainly would have seen and avoided if he had not had the main need of restraint so much in mind, he goes off the deep end with reckless abandon. There are far too many arms and movements of arms in this story. These overwhelm the wanted effect of the shadow of a single arm. At first reading they may not be obtrusive, but this is a piece that deserves several readings, and on the second or third the arms stick out and wave at you everywhere, at best distracting and at worst disastrously comic. His hands and arms always looked blacker against the white blanket sliding downward. [Mr. Sid's] big arms and shoulders were just above the gin floor. . . . the ridges leaped on [Mr. Sid's] arms when he lifted any weight. [Mr. Albert] reached down and caught Mr. Clark's arm . . . Mr. Sid was lying beside the compress, his blood-stained arm folded across his chest. Mr. Albert had the injured arm and shoulder . . . And still Peane wanted to look up but he could not, he thought, for the weight in his arms. Mr. Clark caught [Peane's] arm lightly . . . In a few minutes he was lying on a white table with the needle in his arm.

All these occur before the amputation. Then: . . . H e knew that Mr. Sid's arm was gone. His arms against the white sheet were darker . . . Her hands moved along the white sheet beside [Mr. Sid's] good right arm. H e did not sleep, but sometimes he would feel his arms . . .

This is overstressing and weakening by repetition a symbol that if used with restraint would have been potent. If noticed, its effect is

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disparaging to the reader's intelligence. It may have been deliberate, but I believe it was not. As I say, restraint is a now-you-see-it-nowyou-don't problem. This lack of the factor seems an understandable oversight by a writer so deep in the essentials of his story that he failed to see that the events he had to record were going to entail a good many arm movements anyway — that the literal meaning ran close to the symbolic — and, hence, needed minimizing if the symbol was to come out sharp and moving. Having, as he believes, finished a story, a man's critical faculties have been dulled by his creative faculties (page after page, often, he knows by heart), and he is as blind as a bat. Perhaps stowing away the manuscript and trying not to think of it for a while (I know this is difficult), then a fresh rereading will give a clearer view. T h e story as a whole is so good that these strictures seem unfair. It comes down, as do most brilliant short stories, to thorough understanding of an individual; but here, particularly, understanding was needed and is used as an instrument in the factors of indirection and restraint. The best thing about the story is the inconspicuous gathering of its forces to the focal point of Peane's decision, his acknowledgment of himself as a free agent and his act of walking away. The engagement of the reader is so firm, his interest in Peane as a person so engrossing, that It seemed like a day when everything had stopped. Something was waiting.

or . . . he wanted to tell somebody something. It was a strange feeling, as if nothing had happened to Mr. Sid, but the day itself had died.

— plainly, if considered in the cool light of reason, bits of fancy or superstition that happen to be convenient in mounting tension — are both, on the other hand, sharable statements; that is, convincing, within the terms of the telling method, as truth. Restraint suitable both to Peane and the story is almost everywhere discernible. When the whistle lets go, "His heart leaped but he did not move . . . Peane wanted to turn, to say the whistle wouldn't blow if there was anything wrong with the boiler. But his hand still clutched the platter." Many details are carefully understated: "His sleeve was hardly torn, like little rips from barbed wire. A

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small streak of blood crossed his lips." (Very precise. The fact is, he sweated and his arm brushed his face. Think of the gore available.) The absence of phonetic dialect, except in "Yessuh," is an indirect means of expressing the message. Peane's laconic speech — except in the dislocated dialogue with the nurse, he scarcely says anything but yes or no — plays down the emotional material, at the same time making good contrast with Peane's feelings seen and felt ever more clearly. When Peane, going down the ladder with Mr. Sid, looks up instead of down to pray, and succeeds in praying by denying that he can pray, again we accept, share, agree; as we do again when, after the transfusion, " H e felt as if he had touched something he had always wanted to touch . . ." for, although in the old days he and Mr. Sid had slept on the same pallet, had wrestled together, in this story Peane has touched nobody except when asked to carry Mr. Sid. Others have touched him, a different matter. Peane's sense of touch, we remember, was made acute very early in the story. At the end, when Peane tears up the check and the bills, perhaps our faith in him wavers; this act seems like heroics in spite of all the author could do. If weighed, however, perhaps it is not. The act itself has been worn thin by use, and no doubt the choice and number of words could be improved. Note, though, that nobody sees this act but Peane and the reader joined in his stream of experience, and that so far as the check goes it is a calculated and practical act, not an emotional display. Peane simply didn't want Mr. Clark to have any hold on him; if he signed and cashed the check, he would naturally think that Mr. Clark would have authority over him and might call him back. Only to the extent that it supported Mr. Sid's opinion about paying by check was the act emotional. As for the bills, Mr. Clark isn't going' to know that they are destroyed, and Peane is shrewd enough to see that the gift won't give Mr. Clark any hold on him; Mr. Clark won't say anything about that business, because he told Peane not to. Peane won't take the money, and tearing up the bills with the check is a reasoned act of independence. In short, this gentle, observant, intensely loyal, finally decisive Peane seems exactly right for the indirect conveyance of the idea. If the author began, in his mind, with this plan of the demonstra-

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tion of free will in a man long held by inherited submission to authority, as well as by his own love for its present exponent, he must have considered under what conditions the exercise of free will — that is, Peane's finding that staying on at the gin would be impossible— by separation from Mr. Sid would be convincing. The pressure must be strong, he saw; not only the threat of Mr. Clark taking over; not only Mr. Sid losing his arm; but these plus Mr. Clark paying wages by check, plus his paying cash for the transfusion given without thought of payment, plus the final indignity, Mr. Clark's telling Peane, who would never tell, not to. The cumulative pressure was carefully planned. But the reward, the author also saw, must be in Peane's terms great and lasting. So he made it. "He would not take all of himself: he would leave something behind." This, then, for the time being was Phillips' small corner of a confused and confusing world. He knew it and believed it, and believed he could let others see it as he did. Though simple enough in essence, the idea had implications; it might prove a good deal for some people to swallow. The telling demanded subtle indirection and a fierce restraint, coming out calm and flat, as if it told of nothing much. But "The Shadow of an Arm" goes back to first principles. It tells much, most of this between the lines.

XVI. TO A READER-OF-WRITERS FOR A LONG T I M E ,

I DISTRUSTED MOST TEXTBOOKS ON

the short story. It seems natural for anyone who writes to feel that nobody can know his problems; that any attempt to classify and set down in expository prose the principles underlying creative effort, no matter how plausible, how reasonable, must be a waste of time because illumination of the process is inevitably accompanied by disappearance of the presumed aim — the desire to write short stories. The clearer the exposition, the simpler the classification and elucidation, the less venturesome appeal remains in the reader for the doing. Terminology alone is a high hurdle; attention directed to labels diverts energy from what one is really after, what lies behind or within. Instead of stimulating creative writing, it seemed to me, many such attempts destroyed its primary impulse. There was an unhappy air of how-to-make-or-do about such books, putting the reader at once on the defensive and holding him there. Were there any fixed principles behind the writing of a good short story? Ah, yes. Weren't one man's principles as good as another's? Oh, no. Hadn't sheer genius time and again created excellent work without evidence of the slightest regard having been paid to any principles? Yes, but — Some envious insect asked the centipede how on earth he managed all those legs. "Why, it's easy! Here, I'll show you," he replied, and striking out with confidence — "See?" — fell in a heap. A good many people (I was among them) don't like to be told how to make or do; they prefer at whatever cost to find out for themselves. Collections of short stories with critical commentary seemed to me particularly suspect. When at last, in a desperate attempt to bring some order out of the chaos of conflicting aims and hit-or-miss terms, the solemn gibberish that passed for gospel on the short story, I wrote a textbook,* or Reader, rather, included some* The Short Story,

Harvard University Press, 1947.

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where were the words "I am not in favor of studying models by . . . a running commentary nudging the reader into comprehension . . ." By this method, particularly, the compiler and critic seemed to take proprietary rights in a mere skein of opinion calculated to tangle the strongest feet and divert the most urgent creative purpose into appreciation of literature, no more. One learns slowly. Two considerations can alter the outlook on this kind of work, and did alter mine. First, to be useful such a book should be compiled and written from a point of view so far from dogma that, except on a few universal precepts, disagreement is expected and welcomed as a stimulus to creation. Second, the book must be toned in some way to induce a manner of reading, and thus leave a total impression neither negative nor neutral as regards creative work to follow, but positive. It is easy — we all must have had the experience — while reading a collection of short stories, with or without commentary, to slip into the acceptant but passive frame of mind of a reader-forpleasure or a reader-for-information. In this state we are for the time being either a general reader, who expects an emotional return for his effort, or an acquirer of knowledge expecting an intellectual return without, necessarily, the intention of doing anything with or about the information acquired except perhaps remember it. A story moves past our mind's eye. W e live it vicariously, as the author intended we should, feel a tingle of suspense as the knot of person-motive-obstacle tightens, get the proper fillip of surprise the author planned and executed, and turn the page. If theory preceding and commentary following explore matters we hadn't thought of or didn't note while reading the story, docilely we make an attempt to store these away for future reference. That is not the way I hope this book has been read or the impression I tried to leave on the reader. Neither the reader-forpleasure nor the reader-for-information frame of mind will do my reader any good after this book has been read. For my purpose, afterward is the important time, the only time that really counts. I hope for disagreement, violent protest, cries of "Value judgment!" For these would start or keep the reader writing, if only to disprove me. That would be a positive reaction. A friend of mine began a course on argumentation at a girls'

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college with the remark that teaching the subject was difficult because the feminine mind seemed prone to take any argument personally. "Why, / don't!" the class shot back at him. I want this book to be taken personally. While writing it I have tried to prevent those passive states of mind from getting a hold on you. Very early, I expressed the hope that reading would be only a preface to writing. Now at the end — your beginning, I hope — a few matters that I was unable or forgot to include, and that may provide some further stimulus, occur to me. I put them in the form of question and answer: If imitation is unwise, why study short stories? By the word "imitation" I mean trying to be like, to write like, someone well known. The craving and attempt are identified with fame, not writing but the hoped-for result of writing. Things imitated are aspects and manners sometimes superficial but individually stakedout and in a sense privately owned: manner of expression (P. G. Wodehouse); atmosphere more or less exclusively associated with the work of an established writer (Hergesheimer's climate of wealth, Hemingway's lost generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald's extravagance and devil-take-the-hindmost); or a particular detail or incident bearing the author's unique interpretation of life (Joyce's epiphany, as in "Araby," "Counterparts," "The Dead").* Imitation of this sort, even if successful, will tend to make the imitator but a pale shadow of the writer he admires. It will not, as is sometimes contended, increase facility in writing; it may lead to unconscious plagiarism, and its general effect is a creeping paralysis on the imitator's creative powers. But technique and factors of management of material are common property; they are a means, a vehicle, through which, once mastered, creative ingenuity can flow. It is for the purpose of becoming familiar with these and using them, by first noting their use — sometimes misuse or abuse — in others' work, that the study of short stories is recommended. What about style? I believe there should be no such thing as style in the old-fashioned sense, meaning a put-on and habitual manner of writing. True, styles of contemporary writers of short stories are often identifiable and widely divergent (Hemingway's and Katherine Anne Porter's, Faulkner's and Saroyan's, for in* Dubliners, The Viking Press.

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stance); but these evolved from each individual author's temperament, his attitude toward his material, what he chiefly wanted to say — not (I hope) because he was after style as style. A young writer should not seek style as a good in itself, as having intrinsic merit or validity. T o strive for style will only make the objectifying of experience and the choice of telling method, as well as the management of material, more difficult; the writer as writer more likely visible as story propellant and to the reader illusion-splitter and distracting. Complete absorption of the writer in his material will leave no eye for style available. The manner in which a story is written — the choice, order, and number of words; the idioms and contractions; the colloquial or formal tone; the arrangement of clauses in sentences, the length and shape of sentences themselves — all should be wholly conditioned and determined by the material— the persons, the place, the events, and the idea that these, fused, demonstrate — and by the telling method; and this functionally integrated manner of expression may vary with each story. Something that critics and readers may call "style" will perhaps eventuate simply from a writer's natural choice of material and method. Let it. Are there no other principles than those discussed and illustrated in this book? Probably. Or if not now, there soon will be. These happen by experience to have formed a classification in my mind. With reference to what has been said about them, I believe they are as complete as a classification of principles need be. Additions might turn up, or a different classification may do as well or might do better. Are not short stories written and published today in apparent ignorance or defiance of the principles here mentioned? Certainly, although the number seems to be lessening. Sometimes such stories gain, sometimes lose by being written blind. Some writers write without knowing or wanting to know how. I have been telling how — by one classification — to those who may lack assurance and want to know, giving them consistent standards by which to judge the relative gain or loss in others' work, thus in their own. I believe that acceptance and use of these principles will improve the young writer's chances for publication. How much reading of published short stories should a prospec-

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five writer do? This is a hard question, a right answer depending on the individual and the way he or she reads. In general, not much. Certainly not many masterpieces, real or so-labeled. Taste and inclination should be factors, but factors qualified by common sense. Much reading of a special, favored kind of story should be avoided, other kinds explored. Reading of short stories published before, say, 1900 should engender study chiefly of factors of management. The reading of many stories in current magazines, especially if done enviously, or indignantly, or for the purpose of slanting a proposed story of one's own according to apparent specifications, is deplorable and actively harmful. It will do no harm, though, to remember that James Fenimore Cooper, who was in the habit of reading contemporary novels aloud to his wife, one evening finished one and hurled the book across the room saying, "By God, even I could do better than that!" He began writing the next day, and did, probably, a little better. Neither will it do any harm to bear in mind that living life and thinking about it is a great deal likelier to stimulate the writing of good stories than is the reading about life, getting it at second hand, in stories. This poses a problem for those who live partly or wholly unhappy lives and naturally don't care to dwell on the fact any more than they have to. But the problem can be faced and answered, avoiding the wrong kind of escape into reading and writing. By "wrong" I mean unreal: escape into life as we wish it might be but is not. There are better escapes from the too bitter, too personal present. Some people, tough-grained, can sublimate misery by expressing it. One can forget most troubles in a close and compassionate contemplation of others' troubles, others' lives. There is always the past, usually happier than the present, and if well remembered a vast source of material — the past to be made memorably present — as Proust has proved. Yesterday is already the past. And there is also the future based on present knowledge and understanding, rare indeed without its promise; therein lies an opportunity for the strongest power of the imagination, the power to synthesize what is with what might logically — not unreally — be, to make whole, to make one. Thrifty, thoughtfully chosen, long-meditated reading should generate this power. Since the beginning of writing we have all led just about the same sort of lives, of mixed pleasure and

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pain, joy and sorrow; it is our reactions to these that are different, as each of us in some particular is quite unlike all the rest; and it is our reactions to life that matter, allowing us to read an old story with fresh interest, and write stories expressing ideas that have been expressed over and over before us, yet in our telling becoming in every sense new. The less we have published, the more we want to read the work of others in order to peek through the fence, so to speak; and the more resolutely the desire to read should be curbed or turned in another direction to broaden and sharpen our outlook on life. The more we have published, the less we want to read, for the less we can read with a reader's pleasure; but then the more we should read, not so much for pleasure as for professional growth, to keep in touch with a still changing form of writing. How should a short story be read by a would-be short-story writer? With three eyes. One for the general reader: He knows much less about writing than do you or the man or woman who wrote the story, but as a rule he knows what he wants. He is willing to have his intellect stimulated, his wits challenged; but what he chiefly wants is to have his sympathy or antipathy aroused, he wants to feel the story, logically and emotionally, as it moves, he wants to live for a while in a place other than the place he actually inhabits, with people like but different from the people he knows. His interest will go at once to Imola, in "Life, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team"; he will see at once that there is in her what some part of him has wished for a long time to be; and he will worry about Emily Cooper's coming under the influence of Mrs. Rotunda and her mannish drill, worry about Emily not being able to see this desirable possession of Imola's, as he sees it, in time — that is, before the end of the story. He will understand young Rupert, in "The Sardillion," struggling with his terror, trying to exorcise it by being tough with little Gerda, but to no avail because being tough with Gerda induces in him the recognition of the shape and weight and silence and smell of what was only a dream. The reader is loaded, cocked, and primed — with curiosity, hope, anxiety, hate, desire, anticipation, tenderness, loyalty, gratification, satisfaction, or disgust; he will get the point but he is, mostly, directive feeling, and he will laugh, cry, wait, or do all three at once if the direction is right . . . And one eye for the

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editor: Although he will never admit it, he knows more about writing than does the general reader, more than the man or woman who wrote the story, and — except in one respect, though it is the most important — more than do you. If the general reader is mostly heart, the editor is brain. He has read stories, thought about them, pulled them to pieces to see what made them tick or stop ticking, and found himself wrong enough times to keep him searching for — the only way he can describe it—-"a good story." He can see the invisible wheels of a story turning silently and smoothly, or by fits and starts. He can discern the idea of a story faintly foreshadowed in its early words. He can smell its tone as the story opens like a bud. He has unstated convictions about pace and proportionment — why, for instance, the short and funny conclusion of Sloan Wilson's " A Letter of Admonition" caps the long, mostly serious narrative preceding. Being objective himself, the editor can know when the subjective experience has been objectified and made sharable and when this has not been completely done and whim and prejudice show through. He recognizes suspense, both kinds; he wishes he had more soundly planted surprise. He is alert for new forms, methods, ideas and means for demonstrating them; yet he clings to a hard core of basic principles evidenced by the development of the short story before his time, which tends to make him skeptical of pieces having no definite shape, no consistent method, no discernible idea or a half-baked one. Things-musthappen-because is the nearest he can come to saying what he wants, and that is close enough . . . And one eye for yourself, the writer-to-be: You know far more about writing than does the general reader or the author of the story you are reading; you can be both of them and yourself besides. And in that one most important respect you know much more than does the editor. All he can say is yes or no, the most he can do is take a story apart. Learning something from him and something from the reader, and not a little from the man or woman who wrote the story you have read, you can put a story together so that it runs on its own volition, by its own emotional momentum, in one direction in order to say one thing. As writer's eye you can combine the faculties and emotions of reader and editor, at the same time letting those peculiar to your gift as creator function. In your reading,

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your writer's eye will note small, uniquely significant signs of life in others' experience or invention, not in order to repeat or imitate these, but to winnow from your experience or ingeniously devise the uniquely significant trifle that will speak for itself in your story. Some remote cousin of an anatomical chart on which a Christmas lecture was happily composed and as happily never delivered . . . of a splash of blood on a shattering stairway railing . . . of a pomegranate intended as a gift to a father who wouldn't need it . . . of a shape of frozen snow like a white boomerang . . . of the tongue of a beaten child stuck out in hatred of one who tried to help her . . . or of a short hickory rod worn sleek with handling. Your images will appear when needed, they will have the fresh, hard impact of these, and the ability of these to touch some unsuspected spring and let a wholeness of living pour out still alive. Having read with three eyes, you will know them when you see them, and know what to do with them. This has become rather personal, but perhaps so it should. Writing is a very personal, sometimes a very lonely affair. Only by speaking directly to someone in the throes and joys of creation can faith be voiced at all. Here is mine in you. Committed only to telling the truth as you see it and to making the truth readable so that others can see, you will go far in this affair, giving light and now and then laughter to a world that has never had enough of either.