Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Stories by Yerlin Cassill, James Hall And Herbert Gold in New Collection IN His introduction to Fifteen by Three (New Directions, paperbound, $1.35), James...
...Feeling for others is far from a moral quality, and very complicated...
...Take, for example, "The Burglars and the Boy," which is written in the first person as if it were something that happened to the author, as perhaps it did...
...Near the Margin of the Bay," on the other hand, does with great precision what it is supposed to do...
...Laughlin deserves our gratitude...
...Cassill's comment on it is helpful...
...This naturalness also permits him a freedom of comment that violates all the rules but does not offend the reader because the comment is an organic part of the story...
...Laughlin told him about "writers like Herb Gold and Jim Hall, like Verlin Cassill and four or five others who are really trying to do something about the short -story to keep it from going stale and keep it growing as a -form...
...The Biggest Band" tells a simple story and tells it well, with considerable humor, but the device the author uses to give it a larger meaning is uncomfortably obvious...
...In the most experimental and most elaborate of the stories, "The Life of the Sleeping Beauty," method becomes an end in itself...
...Ko Win is not the only student of the contemporary American short story who will find the book valuable...
...The first story in the volume, R. V. Cassill's "Larchmoor Is Not the World," which has appeared in several anthologies, shows how a skillful writer can build meaning upon meaning...
...Cassill is as good...
...You are hoodwinked into believing that he is just an ordinary fellow telling an ordinary yarn because his style seems so natural and familiar...
...The extraordinary thing about Herbert Gold's stories is that they seem to be free not merely from artifice but even from method...
...Gold makes the point nicely, but he wants to make a further point, and so he says, speaking as the boy grown older, "I had forgotten Jasper the Jeweler...
...Probably the commonest kind of failure in the short story is flatness:"What is supposed to happen to the reader doesn't...
...He always appears to be telling a story with the artlessness of your Aunt Elizabeth, and yet each of the stories communicates as large a meaning as anyone can ask for...
...The art of the short story is to make a little do a lot— to isolate some relatively small, relatively manageable segment of experience and to present it in such a way that 'it has a maximum of significance...
...As they attempt in an embarrassed and bungling fashion to dispose of the problem he has created for them, he becomes more and more sympathetic, and he is proud of himself because of the insight achieved in this "glimpse of how others felt about things...
...He was a tired, trusting, owl-eyed man who had neglected to keep up his burglary insurance...
...The Goldfish" begins wonderfully, but in the end Cassill's love of symbolism runs away with him...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Stories by Yerlin Cassill, James Hall And Herbert Gold in New Collection IN His introduction to Fifteen by Three (New Directions, paperbound, $1.35), James Laughlin tells of a .conversation he had in Rangoon with a Burmese writer named Ko Win...
...The book is better than its rather bumptious introduction...
...He had a sick wife, too...
...Ko Win wanted to know where he could find stories by these admirable writers, and Mr...
...it remains a story about a boy and some chickens and a weasel...
...A Spot in History" and "In the Time of Demonstrations" are both skilled and boldly original...
...Action in Time of Twilight" seems to me, like Cassill's "Sleeping Beauty," too much concerned with how rather than what...
...In other stories, notably "Susanna at the Beach" and "Aristotle and the Hired Thugs," Gold uses the same method—i.e., the same apparent absence of method—to accomplish even more...
...None of the other stories by Mr...
...The boy, delivering papers early one morning, happens upon two burglars in a jewelry store...
...Feeling that Ko Win had too high an opinion of the short stories published in the New Yorker, Mr...
...Fless," which is in somewhat the same vein, is more successful...
...James B. Hall's "The Lion and the Chalice," I am afraid, is that kind of failure...
...These two fine stories should be enough in themselves to convince Ko Win or anyone else of the vitality of the short story in contemporary America...
...There are fifteen stories, all of them interesting and some very fine, and each of the contributors has written a note commenting on his work in general and in particular on the stories included in this volume...
...How he does this is his secret, but I can see that he owes part of his success to his mastery of the vernacular...
...It is a fine story, and Mr...
...Laughlin, after explaining that their work mostly appeared in the little magazines, resolved then and there to publish a collection of their stories...
...But all the stories in the volume are instructive, even those that are not wholly successful, and Mr...
...The Romanticizing of Dr...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 46
