Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

The Short Story

“Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market women.” This observation comes from a notebook that Anton Chekhov kept during the last six years of his life between 1898 and 1904. In it he jotted down snatches of conversation he had overheard, anecdotes, aphorisms, interesting names and embryonic ideas for short stories. This entry about aristocrats and market women belongs to the last category. The more one has read of Chekhov the more one can envisage the short story that might have grown from this bleak comparison. The point is well made and as true today as it was in nineteenth-century Russia — death is the great leveller — but more interestingly these twenty words can lead us towards an initial way of understanding the short story as opposed to its larger sibling, the novel. I would argue that you could write a short story inspired by Chekhov’s words but they wouldn’t be sufficient for a novel.

What draws a writer to the short story? Some writers rarely tackle it, or else, in a full career, only write half a dozen stories. Others seem perfectly at home with the form and then let it drop. And then there are those for whom the novel appears the threat. Yet William Faulkner regarded the short story as harder to write than a novel. Many of the greatest short story writers have steered clear of the long form, by and large: Chekhov, J. L. Borges, Katherine Mansfield, V. S. Pritchett, Frank O’Connor. My own case is perhaps typical: I have written eight novels but I cannot stop writing short stories — something about the short form draws me back again and again. The aesthetic pleasures on offer are fresh and beguiling.

It’s important to remember that the short story as we know it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The arrival of mass-market magazine publication and a new generation of literate middle-class readers in the mid to late nineteenth century saw a boom in the short story that lasted maybe a hundred years or so (things are different today). Many writers were initially drawn to the form simply as a way of making money. Particularly in America: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe all subsidized their less well-remunerated novel-writing careers by writing stories. In the 1920s Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 for a story by the Saturday Evening Post (a vast sum today — multiply by ten to get some idea of a comparison). Even John Updike, in the 1950s, reckoned he could support his wife and young family by the sale of five or six stories a year to the New Yorker. Times have changed.

The popularity of the short story — indeed its very availability — has, unlike the novel, always been driven by and has always been somewhat at the mercy of commercial considerations. When I published my first collection of stories, On the Yankee Station, in 1981, many British publishers routinely brought out short story collections. Not any more. Moreover, there was a small but stable marketplace where a story could be sold. A short story writer could place his or her work in all manner of outlets. The stories in my first collection, for example, had been published in Punch, Company, London Magazine, the Literary Review, Mayfair and broadcast on the BBC. As a young writer I started writing short stories because at the time it seemed logical: this was my best chance of getting published.

All this talk of money and strategy masks the tenacious appeal of the form. In the end writers write short stories because a different set of mental gears are engaged. Melville wrote short stories as he laboured with Moby-Dick saying, “My only desire for their ‘success’ (as it is called) springs from my pocket and not my heart.” And yet, in the process, he wrote works of short fiction (“Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno” amongst others) that are timeless classics. The point being that something else occurs in the writing — and reading — of a short story that is on another level from the writing and reading of a novel.

The basic issue here, it seems to me, is one of expansion versus compression. To go back to the remark I made apropos Chekhov’s little memento mori about aristocrats and market women: we see that the ideas, the inspiration, that will drive a novel, however succinctly expressed, have to be capable of endless augmentation and elaboration. The essence of almost every short story, by contrast, is one of distillation, of reduction. It’s not a simple question of length, either: there are twenty-page short stories that are far more charged and gravid with meaning than 400-page novels. We are talking about a different category of prose fiction altogether.

A common analogy is to see the novel as an orchestra and the short story as a string quartet. Beautiful and rich music will be produced by them both but the imbalance of scale will always favour the novel when it comes to variety, nuance, texture, power and so forth. But the analogy strikes me as false because once again it is all about size, and this leads us in the wrong direction. The music produced by two violins, a viola and a cello cannot ever sound anything like the music produced by dozens of instruments, but a paragraph or a page from a short story is indistinguishable from a paragraph or a page from a novel. The short story draws on exactly the same resources as does the novel — language, plot, character and style. Nothing — none of the literary tools that novelists require to write their novels — is denied the short story writer, which is not true for a composer of chamber music as opposed to orchestral. A more pertinent comparison — to try and pin down the essence of the two forms — is poetry: to compare the epic with the lyric. Let us say that the short story is prose fiction’s lyric poem, contrasted with the novel as its epic.

There are many definitions of the short story. V. S. Pritchett defined it as, “something glimpsed from the corner of an eye, in passing.” John Updike has said, “More closely than my novels… these efforts of a few thousand words each hold my life’s incidents, predicaments, crises, joys.” Angus Wilson observed that, “Short stories and plays go together in my mind. You take a point in time and develop it from there; there is no room for development backwards.” All things to all writers, then: the quotidian epiphanic moment, the submerged autobiography, a question of structure and direction. I could cite other definitions — some contradictory, some far-fetched — but all, in their own way, possessing some cogency. If the house of fiction has many windows so too, it seems, does the house of short fiction.

Therefore it might be worth trying to categorize the short story in a bit more detail, to try and classify its multifarious forms. I have published three collections of short stories over two decades, a total of thirty-eight stories, in all. Perhaps there are another four or five uncollected ones out there — juvenilia in university magazines, the odd one-off commission for an anniversary (I seem to remember I wrote something about 1984 and Orwell) or a themed number of a magazine or anthology. In any event what repeatedly draws me to the short story is its variety — the enticing possibility of adopting different voices, structures, styles and effects. Looking at other collections by other writers, I gradually came to the conclusion that there are in fact basically seven types of short story and that within these seven categories almost every kind of short story can be accounted for. Some of them will overlap, one category will borrow from a seemingly unrelated type, but these denominations seem, by and large, to subsume all the species of the genus. In this diversity we may begin to see what short stories have in common.