Writers Tame and Timid:
STEINMAN, MAXINE
Writers Tame and Timid Prize Stories 1960. Edited by Mary Stegner. Doubleday. 284 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Marine Steinman Short story writer, Contributor, "Midstream" WHETHER THE 16 stories in...
...Reviewed by Marine Steinman Short story writer, Contributor, "Midstream" WHETHER THE 16 stories in this volume—the O. Henry prize winners for 1960—really constitute the best that was published by American writers in the period between winter 1958 and summer 1959 is an open question...
...unfortunately, they also display signs of anemia, or what the television commercials call tired blood...
...his man dying of cancer was effective, and the only criticism I can make is that essentially the story had no conflict...
...Elizabeth Enright, Janet Fowler and Robin White (who came off with third prize...
...Purdy had a convincing mother and son caught in a web of despair, but at the risk of being presumptuous, I will have to accuse him of taking an easy way out...
...or, to put it differently, the endings were too clearly intended as Endings and did not do justice to the complexities implied...
...at the moment, it would take Faulkner himself to reconcile me to the subject of magnolias and all that...
...I suppose, depending on technique and theme...
...What is lacking most of all is robustness...
...and what is evident—if only from the almost total absence of satire—is that writers today have become lazy and tamed...
...To say that what ruins a great deal of modern fiction is the near-faceless and ultimately boring characters in it, is to repeat something that has been said many times before...
...Perhaps, as Wallace Stegner says in his commendable introduction, "the truly superb short story is a miracle...
...As for the second prize winner, "Defender of the Faith" by Philip Roth, it impressed me more in the context of this volume than when I first read it in Goodbye, Columbus...
...Predictability, I believe, also marred Gina Berriault's tale of a girl on the brink of womanhood and Sylvia Berkman's "Ellen Craig...
...Put simply, the main problem of the short story is to combine bigness with brevity—how...
...Swarthout's portrait of conforming college students was a trifle simple-minded, and Kentfield only-brushed the surface of his subject and let poetic symbol outweigh human life...
...they seemed promising, but none of them got anywhere or even tried to, and I suspect that the authors counted on technique and a "bit of life" to carry the day...
...and perhaps, as he also points out, the general level of American short-story writing is lower than one might think...
...I have the impression that the writers here simply did not aim high enough to begin with and, whatever their personal limitations, succumbed without a struggle to the supposed limitations of the short-story form...
...In fact, the main trouble seems to be that the writers were too little involved in their people and their themes, and in the interests of writing "stories" let the stuff of stories go by the boards...
...Only rarely are they moving, original or unexpected, and the temptation at the end is to shrug...
...And whether short-story writers employ the bright-colloquial method, the poetic, the subtly knowing (a technique preferred by the women), or what I would call the straight-man's narrative, the results tend to be airless and timid...
...As for tone, much of it is superior to the matter conveyed...
...Too many of the selections were predictable echoes, replicas of well-known patents, and the cranking of the machinery was much too loud...
...Too little that is written involves real passion, disappointment, idealism—or, for that matter, even interest in life...
...No doubt the stories which won first and second prize lived up to their potentials better than the others, but I am afraid I have to disagree with Mr...
...I can only say that his tale of a doomed fisherman was for me neither "Conradian" nor "Greek '—but possibly I dislike "lofty" stories and am therefore not qualified to judge...
...Unable to criticize its parts, and even acknowledging that it had a perfection of a kind...
...The motive for printing what by now must be 9,000 New Yorker stories beginning with the words, "My great-grandfather was an ape," (or rather, this being far too inflammatory, ". . . wore alligator spats in winter") has never been revealed to me, but then, the mainsprings of vice usually are hidden...
...Eugene Ziller also tried to say more than nothing...
...Stegner about the first prize winner, "The Ledge," by Lawrence Sargent Hall: it didn't strike me as superb in the least...
...Roth's characters at least have personalities, and although I was unmoved by his besieged hero, the conflict of allegiance he portrayed was relevant and true...
...They show talent, a degree of virtuosity, sensitivity and sophistication...
...I am afraid, a jaundiced view of the taboos many periodicals live by in accordance with a secret religion only they can explain...
...This, in one way or another, I found to be the case in the pieces by Robert Henderson, Maurice Ogden, Robert Granat...
...he went on and on—endlessly—without much art...
...However, leaving publication matters aside, the prize stories selected by Mary Stegner from a variety of "big" and "little" magazines are less than interesting...
...Herbert Gold was more ambitious: on the contrary, what ruined his painful account of a divorce was an excess of thoroughness...
...Disappointing also were the stories by James Purdy, Glendon Swarthout and Calvin Kentfield...
...That nothing equal or better was submitted for magazine publication in the first place I tend to doubt, having...
...Elizabeth Spencer's story of Southern ghosts I would also place in this category out of pique...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 19
