Book Reviews : The Pleasures of British Short Stories

The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories edited by Malcolm Bradbury (Viking: $18.95; 448 pages) “The lyric poem of modern fictional prose” is a definition of the short story given by Malcolm Bradbury in his introduction to this anthology of British writers. And just as the lyric gradually became the dominant form in poetry, so he sees the short story gathering power to itself in our time, growing distinguished “for its linguistic and stylistic concentration, its imagistic methods, its symbolic potential.”

Plenty of evidence exists for this development across the global literary scene. Nevertheless, “Modern British Short Stories” offers its own distinct pleasures. The nationally based short-story collection is an excellent idea in itself. Like a culture capsule, it contains short takes on mores, visions and preoccupations, capable of explaining (as fiction has always done) different social worlds to one another, and reassuring us too of the happy persistence of cultural variety.

Since Malcolm Bradbury is himself a novelist specializing in social observation (“The History Man,” “Rates of Exchange”), he is drawn to this aspect of things. For example, a large group of the stories chosen focuses on marriage or the heterosexual affair; and from it, we see patterns emerging that differ just enough from American norms to be illuminating. Middle-class couples maintain a passionate commitment to civility amid a deepening embitterment about marriage, while in the desolate stories of Sillitoe and Bainbridge working-class men and women are unable to value either themselves or each other and become locked in attitudes of contemptuous indifference. In Bainbridge’s “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie,” a husband suffers a heart attack while his wife, sitting next to him clapping to bring the stage fairy, Tinker Bell, back to life, hushes his groans.

Relations between the sexes seem to be no better, if not quite the same in Britain as here. But when we turn from social realities to questions of art, specifically fictional technique, the differences are striking.

In British stories, authorial voices still confidently strike in and say their piece for the reader: “What remains of our original story?” asks Adam Mars-Jones rhetorically (“Structural Anthropology”). Or, “This is a story, I suppose, about a failure of intelligence: The Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence” (Lessing, “To Room Nineteen”). Readers attuned to contemporary American fiction may be tempted to protest: “But you can’t have it that way anymore!” The author as authority in his or her work must no longer be overt, with us. And yet the strength of the Lessing story builds until it is irresistible: Through her painstaking rehearsal of a housewife’s quest for total solitude, we grasp what perhaps we couldn’t get otherwise--women’s unspeakable horror of the sacrifice (potentially total) of self in motherhood.

Finest Stories

Some of the finest stories, such as those by Elizabeth Bowe, Muriel Spark and Kingsley Amis, draw on experiences of World War II for access to the deep themes of failure and mortality. These disparate writers share a gift for mordant accuracy in the foreground details, which here resonate splendidly with an underlying elegiac note that has long been a strength in English literary tradition.

Bradbury’s choices from recent work are naturally vulnerable, for this is an anthologist’s hardest challenge. Mary Lavin is absent: surely his worst sin of omission. He rightly includes Angela Carter--but not one of her marvelously retold folk tales; and Graham Swift is represented--but not by one of his better stories, such as “Learning to Swim.” The gifted Ian McEwan does better, with “Psychopolis,” if we can overlook the routine British complaints about aggressive American women.

The editor’s own story, “Composition,” also about the visiting Englishman in the United States, unhappily confirms his weakness for an adolescent style of sexual satire. It is a credit to Bradbury that the volume in general rises well above the level of his own fictional talent.