The Best British short stories
Excerpt from the book introduction:
Last year I suggested that the British short story was simply marking time and that the most fruitful advance at the moment was to be seen in America. The new American generation had begun to realize, as a character in one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories put it, that America Tost everything it wanted in the boom.’ The American short-story writers also were in grave danger of losing everything they wanted in the boom. The American magazines were corrupting them. These magazines were standardized and wanted standardized stories. Originality and sincerity were at a discount.They were practically unmarketable. Stories had to be written to patterns based on wish fulfillment, and for such stories, editors were paying fantastic prices. They bought no others. To a lesser degree, the situation is now the same in England. The number of periodicals printing short stories of any significance has shrunk alarmingly in the past two years. I find the field of my necessary reading for this series of books sharply contracted.
There are fewer distinctive stories published, and I find it hard to believe that fewer are being written. In fact, manuscripts that come to me unsolicited suggest rather the opposite state of affairs. I am forced to believe that it is simply the channels of publication that are lacking. May I suggest a bold experiment that has already proved a success in America? In the spring of 1931, two American journal¬ ists in Vienna who were distinguished short-story writers launched a stenciled periodical called Story in which they had gathered together a group of short stories which had proved unwelcome to most American magazines.
Greatly daring, they issued eighty copies of this typewritten pamphlet. It was the most distinguished literary magazine of our time. Copies of this first issue now fetch several guineas in the auction room. The edition was exhausted in two or three days. I found it necessary to reprint four stories from this issue in my American collection of stories for that year.
The second issue was printed by a job printer in Vienna. Then the two journalists lost their means of livelihood overnight and with their small savings went to Mallorca to live cheaply.
They took Story with them. It was a unique ‘little magazine’ because it appeared regularly every two months on time. It printed more fine short stories in two years than the entire American periodical press had succeeded in publishing in five, and this notwithstanding the fact that it could not afford to pay for contributions or to arrange for advertising its existence. It was not even distributed in an ordinary way.
Contents
- The Pipe-Smoker — Martin Armstrong · 3
From The Fortnightly Review
- Time — H. E. Bates · 11
From The New Statesman and Nation and Story
- A Glass of Stout — T. O. Beachcroft · 16
From The London Mercury
- The Facts About Benjamin Crede — Neil Bell · 28
From The London Mercury
- Love’s Labour’s Lost — Anthony Bertram · 48
From John London’s Weekly
- The Red Hen — Peter Blundell · 58
From The Windsor Magazine
- The Tommy Crans — Elizabeth Bowen · 69
From The Listener
- Prince of Obolo — Roger Dataller · 76
From The London Mercury
- The Inn — Louis Golding · 90
From Time and Tide
- A Gamble in Clocks — Richard Plunket Greene · 94
From Life and Letters
- Three, or Four, for Dinner? — L. P. Hartley · 101
From Life and Letters
- Confessional — Myrtle Johnston · 117
From The Cornhill Magazine
- Twenty Years After — Janko Lavrin · 129
From The New English Weekly
- The Way Home — Orgill Mackenzie · 135
From The Adelphi
- God Came Running — H. A. Manhood · 146
From The New Statesman and Nation
- Whispering — Allan N. Monkhouse · 151
From The Manchester Guardian
- Bones of Contention — Frank O’Connor · 155
From The Yale Review
- Our Father — James Stern · 169
From The London Mercury
- Flowers for a Lady — Eisdell Tucker · 175
From The Adelphi
- Their Fellow-Prisoner — Urith Voyle · 184
From Blackwood’s Magazine
- Home to Wagonhouses — Malachi Whitaker · 197
From John London’s Weekly
- The Stream — E. H. Young · 204
From Good Housekeeping, London
editor: Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien,
Imprint varies: 1922-25, Boston, Small, Maynard & Company; 1926-32, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company; 1933- Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company; 1940- Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company