The O'Henry Awards
WEALES, GERALD
The O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, 1959. Edited by Paul Engle. Doubleday. 308 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Gerald Weales Department of English, University of Pennsylvania; contributor, "Reporter,"...
...Here is ample evidence that one strain in current American fiction chooses to mix the imaginative, the unrealistic, the fantastic with the more familiar social and psychological observation...
...And, yet, a few generalizations are possible...
...It may well be that he consults them, 'but if he does he should know that the Reporter, Hudson Review and Partisan Review have not been published at the addresses given for years, that Everywoman's and Family Circle are now a single magazine with a single address and that the Pacific Spectator, alas, has been dead for years...
...Occasionally, as in Ellen Currie's "Tib's Eve," it is a laugh-aloud comedy...
...Still the bulk of the stories—and not only those by the writers mentioned—are good ones...
...A small point, but an annoying one...
...This element can be as simple as the suitcase full of peanut butter that Cheever's hero in "The Trouble with Marcie Flint" carries with him on his escape from Shady Hill to Torino...
...That, too, I have come to expect...
...The endings are up-beat...
...Often, as in the same story, the laughter edges into something close to pathos...
...Perhaps the simplest thing is to read them and discover your own likenesses and—at their best—your own likeness...
...Often, too, there is the triumph, which brings us to the third element common to many of these stories...
...In between these extremes lie the magic that Elliott's anthropologist discovers among the Dangs...
...It can be as complete as the fantasy, with all its suggestions of the Western tall story, in William Eastlake's "Flight of the Circle Heart," a pleasant surprise for me since I have somehow missed Eastlake's work...
...I am aware that I have just made a composite portrait of a collection of short stories that are probably more valuable for their differences than for their similarities...
...the cheerful, chatty vision of God that comes to Alma Stone's "The Bible Salesman...
...Elliott's "Among the Dangs," to which Paul Engle has awarded second prize, is probably the most exciting story in the volume...
...Perhaps the Zeitgeist is to blame...
...and the peculiar sence of the more than tangible in O'Connor's "A View of the Woods...
...This years, as usual, there are a few selections that seem to have got in by mistake, but the volume as a whole testifies to the fact that there is a deal of good fiction writing in this country today, a testimony that a few critics, with their eyes longingly on the '20s, resolutely refuse to hear...
...Jean Stafford—are in this year's O. Henry selection, but they are enough to give a comforting sense of continuity...
...I do wish that Engle would get his publisher to doctor the list of "Magazines Consulted" that appears at the end of his volume...
...The comedy can be grotesquely grim, as in O'Connor, but more often—Cheever, Stafford, Elliott, Peter Taylor, MacDonald Harris—there is an amused observation, slightly satiric, which becomes, finally, an acceptance, even an embracing of fumbling human attempts at triumph...
...Although it is variety that is likely to give life to a collection of short stories, a reviewer's instinct is to go for similarities...
...More likely, my words are the pale recognition that I have just read a group of stories that, some well, some clumsily, have something familiar to say about human existence...
...If there were a strong line running through the stories in this volume, Engle would have found it and used it in his Introduction, in which, as at a carnival show, he gives a hint, an advertisement of what the reader is likely to find once he gets inside...
...I do not mean by that exactly what the agency boys have in mind when they insist on television plays about "happy people with happy problems," to use the phrase that Herbert Gold brought back once from an abortive story conference...
...I mean that the characters pass through the experience of despair, of frustration, of loss and come out the other side alive...
...Only four regulars—John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, George P. Elliott...
...Not that the volumes do not have personalities of their own—distant suggestions of the special tastes of their editors—but the same writers appear with such regularity, with the first-timers and the one-timers peeping out among the headliners, that the volumes published since World War II seem finally like one large group portrait...
...the other three writers, from whom I have come to expect quality as a natural right, are perhaps not operating at the top of their talent...
...contributor, "Reporter," "Commentary" AFTER A WHILE the prize story collections run together in my mind so that I can no longer remember in which year, in which volume (the O. Henry Awards or Martha Foley's Bests) a particular story appeared...
...Akin to this odd angle of vision is a humor that runs through many of the stories...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 13
