The 'New Yorker' Short Story

...Having pasted on my labels, let me hasten to add that they are not meant to be merely patronizing and that these are four craftsmen whose talents and attainments I deeply admire...

...Cheever of the doomed hero of his "The Bus to St...

...author, "Out Went the Candle" The expression "New Yorker story" is common enough, but it would seem to mean different things to different people...

...Second, it would probably be wise to make a distinction between the stories featured in the front of the magazine (which have included some of the finest short fiction of our time) and those which seem to plug the holes in the middle and back of the book, between the long, rich columns of advertising...

...For those who have already read a good number of them in that omnipresent journal, there will be few surprises in this handsome volume: Miss Stafford is traversing the familiar terrain of tough childhood in Colorado and neurotic adulthood in Newport and Europe, Mr...

...Well, if I were to modify that today, I suppose I would have to make two qualifications...

...For example, when Miss Stafford is in her relaxed or reminiscent mood, the comic gyrations of her children (as in "Bad Characters") veer uncomfortably close to the picturesque...

...She was old...

...Fuchs the neon desert of Hollywood and the concrete desert of Jackson Heights, and Mr...

...Mr...

...One commences to speculate whether almost unbearable—and well-nigh total—recall has not been rearranged and edited so as to render not only bearable but "entertaining" that which was originally nasty and brutish...

...Instead, they put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies...

...To her, but not to her children or their contemporaries...

...Maxwell at his heartrending best...

...They had lived their whole lives," observes Miss Stafford of three of her characters, "on the laurels of their grandparents...

...For others, it has come to mean a mannered, pointless vignette, usually with commuters, often with cocktails, but with no discernible beginning or end...

...Why is this...

...Reviewed by Harvey Swados English Department, University of Iowa...

...What I am wondering, not just about Miss Stafford but about those who appear with her in this excellent book as well, is that life does not seem a challenge to these writers, unless it be a challenge to our stoic virtues—-and even when it is treated with gaiety, we tend to suspect the gaiety itself as a carefully created cover for unhappier responses to the terrible problems of life in our age...

...She knew again that nothing was out of the ordinary, that hopes were betrayed, that you always started out with illusion, and yet everything was a wonder to her...

...Reviewing 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker just seven years ago, I tried to pin down just what this quality was...

...I hope I will be forgiven if f quote myself: "The overall impression is one of diminution rather than of magnification...

...Cheever the surreal landscape of that exurbia where bowlered commuters ride nude to work and where things are never quite as they seem, Mr...

...Most of the stories are in focus —but the focusing has been done from the wrong end of the telescope, so that in story after story we are given something smaller than life...

...When we turn to the stories of Miss Stafford and her companions, we may begin—but hardly end—by noting that 13 of the 15 stories included in this collection appeared originally in the Neiv Yorker...

...As he watched his daughter doing obediently what was expected of her," says Mr...

...If they can be said to have a common purpose beyond the desire "to make sense out of life," as the authors put it in their foreword, it may be that of defining present existence as no longer capable of being mastered, as uncontrolled, as running down—• as I have already hinted, a definition not unknown to readers of New Yorker stories...

...It is hardly likely that New Yorker editorial policy has succeeded in impressing a common viewpoint upon so many different writers of such diverse talents...

...their goal had already been reached long before their birth...

...A good dozen of these stories are not merely cunningly wrought but do achieve precisely what they set out to achieve...

...Fuchs (who writes with the authority of the social critic and the poet, strangely, almost weirdly like the late Scott Fitzgerald) closes a chronicle of wretched souls ironically entitled "The Golden West" with the reflections of the mother of one of the lost Hollywood souls...

...First, 1 am a little less sanguine today about the New Yorker's editors keeping their hands off the fiction they buy...

...Maxwell the tormented world of early adolescence that he charts with tender fidelity, and the equally tormented (if not as interesting) world of Fairfield County...

...James's," "it struck him that he and the company that crowded around him were all cut out of the same cloth...

...One would have to except "What Every Boy Should Know," which presents Mr...

...And yet, while there is much artistry in them there is little that is simply satisfying...

...It would seem more probable that these writers are actually reflecting, both in the manner and in the material of their cautious little stories, the powerlessness of the individual in an age of naked, com-centrated power...

...They were bewildered and confused in principle, too selfish or too unlucky to abide by the forms that guarantee the permanence of a society, as their fathers and mothers had done...

...For some it is a kind of seal of approval, like Good Housekeeping's, certifying to the quality of the product...

...For publishers, we are told, it is the only short fiction that has a reasonable chance of selling in hard covers in today's bookshop market...