Anomalies of the Short Story | Page 4

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, and not in