Kith and Kin

The very idea of collecting the best English short stories into their own separate book invites a skeptical wince. What do England’s Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence have that can’t be found in New England’s persistent moralist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or New York’s prosaic exile, Henry James? What difference whether we quench a taste for other-realism with a work by England’s J. G. Ballard or Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez? If Penelope Fitzgerald can etch characters so incisively from London, can’t Alice Munro do every bit as well from Ontario?

Open, with anticipation and perhaps a bit of attitude, a collection of English short prose selected by A.S. Byatt, who attempts to explain what makes English stories unique. Her own fiction has made her a bestselling, prize-winning author (“Possession” won the Booker Prize in 1990), which only adds intrigue to her choices.

Too modern to tolerate provincialism, Byatt precedes the anthology with her own essay and mentions the international masters of the form--Russia’s Anton Chekhov, France’s Guy de Maupassant, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, America’s Raymond Carver--even as she praises the “eccentricities and excellences” of the English. It seems worth recalling that the British began to appreciate their own literary talents only in the 1820s, when women teachers first infiltrated the public schools. Earlier, a respectable education required studying the Greek classics, ignoring home-grown talents.

Friends whom Byatt consulted along the way suggested that she include Irish, Scottish and Welsh authors among the English, but she allowed only for pure national credentials. Irish-born William Trevor has lived in Devon for years, but he is not included in Byatt’s anthology. D.H. Lawrence abandoned England for America, yet he does make the cut. Limiting her choices in this way helps Byatt answer perhaps the most slippery question there is to ask about any nation’s literature: What, exactly, is English about English fiction?

“Imperialist, insular, nostalgic for merrie England, class ridden, complacent,” she answers, acknowledging the Anglophobian arguments by vaulting over them in a single phrase. Her own criterion, she explains, is that the writing and the story be an especially satisfying example of one form or another that fits her list of the categories British authors have mastered, from mysteries and morality tales to Gothic fantasies and slices of class-conscious social realism.

Beyond that, Byatt argues for the long-debated theory that there is such a thing as a national style and that it can be defined by the stories in this anthology. To put that style into one sentence, she calls on Fitzgerald, one of England’s leading contemporary novelists. Observing a school boy as he teaches himself to play rugby, Fitzgerald ends up describing the essence of a British literary trait.

“The patient, self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed to him most characteristically English,” she writes. Byatt would say the same about English prose.

Byatt establishes the framework for this anthology in her smart essay then squeezes 37 stories into the frame. Her timeline extends from the Victorian era, when Charles Dickens and William Gilbert helped develop a dominant British form, to such contemporary writers as Ian McEwan and Angela Carter, who show the influences of the past even as they break away.

Byatt’s own taste for dark romance gives continuity to an otherwise widely disparate assortment of writing. In the 19th century, Thomas Hardy’s “A Mere Interlude” does more than remind us of his skill at evoking pastoral England, already a fading reality in his day, allowing readers the satisfaction of a happy ending. (What seems like a romantic mismatch turns out to be a very good marriage.)

His skill at describing such everyday experiences as a ferryboat ride or such familiar British characters as a suppressed leading lady seems to have influenced later writers as diverse as Sylvia Townsend and H.E. Bates.

From the mid-20th century, Elizabeth Taylor’s “The Blush” displays some of the most powerful writing in the collection and makes us cringe at every drop of social snobbism buried in our bones. A bored upper-class housewife longs for a close-knit family, while her housekeeper worries that she can’t afford another baby, although she is pregnant.

Themes emerge in this collection that can seem coincidental but are pervasive and start to feel like English traits. In many stories, nature is a character, even a protagonist. Evelyn Waugh’s “An Englishman’s House” and V.S. Pritchett’s “On the Edge of the Cliff” are extreme examples.

“That’s what we need--rain,” Waugh’s leading man, Beverley Metcalfe, says in the first pages of a story about the battle to save an unspoiled Cotswold village. Real estate developers have other plans. Metcalfe is a transplant from the city, and his gardener sets him straight about the rain, reminding us of place as well as weather. “Ur can always see Pilbury Steeple when rain’s a-coming,” he explains. In this story, appreciating nature takes on the heated intensity of a political discussion.

Pritchett’s acrid vision of romance between a world-weary 70-year-old and a spitfire of 30 builds around a remote cove. Harry shows Rowena “the hole” where he once swam nude, hoping she will glimpse his rakish past. “It reminded her of his mouth when she had once seen it (with a horror she tried to wipe from her mind) before he had put his dentures in.” Nature is in romantic sympathy with the grotesquely human.

Ballard paints an exotic island whose vibrant colors and mutant vegetation turn macabre. In “Dream Cargoes,” the fertilizer is made of toxic waste. Lawrence uses an island to reveal the inner world of a man in search of utopia for one. In “The Man Who Loved Islands,” Mr. Cathcart is a loner who moves a lot. The first island he lives on is fertile and flowery, the last one is a mound of rocks. Cathcart never seems to understand what drives him. Lawrence spells it out: “But anyone who wants the world to be perfect must be careful not to have any real likes or dislikes. A general good will is all you can afford.”

Cultural habits--dare we say British habits?--serve as literary devices in stories from eras as distant as M.R. James’ late 19th century mystery, “Two Doctors,” to the contemporary science fantasy “Solid Geometry” by Ian McEwan. Personal diaries are central to both stories. In “Geometry,” a dreamer preserves his grandfather’s leather-bound science journals and uses an obscure formula he finds inside to end a sour romance. He makes his lover disappear from this plane of existence. In “Doctors,” a mystery is revealed through the memoirs of a bemused lawyer.

Such tricks abound. “The church” is a presence in these stories, to the point at which it starts to feel like an example of the nostalgia for merrie old England that Byatt pokes fun at in her essay. In modern times, religious diversity has changed the face of England.

Anthony Trollope’s “Relics of a General Chasse: A Tale of Antwerp” introduces us to the Rev. Augustus Horne, “a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England,” a vain fashion plate and the butt of a joke. The parish ladies cut up his best trousers for pin cushions and purses.

In Ronald Firbank’s “A Tragedy in Green,” Lady Georgia Blueharnis often fancies herself as one of the Bible’s most evil women: Herodias, who ordered her daughter, Salome, to ask for the head of John the Baptist. While the church clock strikes eight, her ladyship plots murder.

Byatt defends her case for the British style with an assortment of stories that should entertain even her toughest opponents. If she had included brief biographies of the authors and dated their works, her anthology would have been just about perfect.