



Produced by David Widger





LITERATURE AND LIFE--Some Anomalies of the Short Story

by William Dean Howells



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY


The interesting experiment of one of our great publishing houses in
putting out serially several volumes of short stories, with the hope that
a courageous persistence may overcome the popular indifference to such
collections when severally administered, suggests some questions as to
this eldest form of fiction which I should like to ask the reader's
patience with. I do not know that I shall be able to answer them, or
that I shall try to do so; the vitality of a question that is answered
seems to exhale in the event; it palpitates no longer; curiosity flutters
away from the faded flower, which is fit then only to be folded away in
the 'hortus siccus' of accomplished facts. In view of this I may wish
merely to state the problems and leave them for the reader's solution,
or, more amusingly, for his mystification.




I.

One of the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a
form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short
story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said
to be. Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as
that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate
householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances
when gathered into a boarding-house.

Yet the case is not the same quite, for we see that the short story where
it is ranged with others of its species within the covers of a magazine
is so welcome that the editor thinks his number the more brilliant the
more short story writers he can call about his board, or under the roof
of his pension. Here the boardinghouse analogy breaks, breaks so
signally that I was lately moved to ask a distinguished editor why a book
of short stories usually failed and a magazine usually succeeded because
of them. He answered, gayly, that the short stories in most books of
them were bad; that where they were good, they went; and he alleged
several well-known instances in which books of prime short stories had a
great vogue. He was so handsomely interested in my inquiry that I could
not well say I thought some of the short stories which he had boasted in
his last number were indifferent good, and yet, as he allowed, had mainly
helped sell it. I had in mind many books of short stories of the first
excellence which had failed as decidedly as those others had succeeded,
for no reason that I could see; possibly there is really no reason in any
literary success or failure that can be predicted, or applied in another
Base.

I could name these books, if it would serve any purpose, but, in my
doubt, I will leave the reader to think of them, for I believe that his
indolence or intellectual reluctance is largely to blame for the failure
of good books of short stories. He is commonly so averse to any
imaginative exertion that he finds it a hardship to respond to that
peculiar demand which a book of good short stories makes upon him. He
can read one good short story in a magazine with refreshment, and a
pleasant sense of excitement, in the sort of spur it gives to his own
constructive faculty. But, if this is repeated in ten or twenty stories,
he becomes fluttered and exhausted by the draft upon his energies;
whereas a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as an agreeable
sedative. A condition that the short story tacitly makes with the
reader, through its limitations, is that he shall subjectively fill in
the details and carry out the scheme which in its small dimensions the
story can only suggest; and the greater number of readers find this too
much for their feeble powers, while they cannot resist the incitement to
attempt it.

My theory does not wholly account for the fact (no theory wholly accounts
for any fact), and I own that the same objections would lie from the
reader against a number of short stories in a magazine. But it may be
that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in
the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all
the short stories in a magazine'seriatim'. On the other hand, the
identity of authorship gives a continuity of attraction to the short
stories in a book which forms that exhausting strain upon the imagination
of the involuntary co-partner.




II.

Then, what is the solution as to the form of publication for short
stories, since people do not object to them singly but collectively,