PREFACE“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book—of short stories.”
“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book—of short stories.”
As you know, it is considered rather provocative to launch a book of short stories. It is asking for trouble. The least I can do is to offer a brief apology; and I cannot do this without writing a preface, which requires an apology in itself. Unless you are a Bernard Shaw you find a preface a most embarrassing business. Having written the stories I would rather talk about anything else—old furniture, for instance. Perhaps my best policy will be to start by attacking you, O Reader, friend or enemy, as the case may be. You are a most exacting fellow. Far more exacting than a reader of novels, or works of reference, or even histories; for the reason that your criticism follows a more circumscribed tradition. You are a kind of gourmet whose palate is acutely sensitive to accustomed flavors and satieties. It is always easier to be an epicure of a small repast than of a banquet. A novel is less easily digested. You may enjoy it in parts, or derive satisfaction from the matter, or from the manner of telling, but with a short story you require abonne bouche. You have a most arbitrary standard. When you raiseyour eyes from the last line you pass through a most peculiar mental process. It all takes place in a few seconds. In a flash you see the shape and form and color, the application of the title, thepointof the whole thing. You demand this, and you also demand to have your senses tickled by some cunning solution, and to be soothed by something unexpected at the close. You observe it as a whole, in the same way that you would observe a water-color sketch, or a Sheraton chair. You may afterwards further examine the sketch, and even sit on the chair, but their appeal to you depends on that first glance. Otherwise you turn away, a dissatisfied and disgruntled gourmet. To-morrow you will dine elsewhere. The truth is your sense of tradition had been outraged.
Fortunately for you, and for me, tradition is a fine thing. Nothing comes out of the blue, except perhaps thunderbolts and they are not really very useful things, certainly no good to any one trying to create. Chippendale, Sheraton, or Heppelwhite were all men of strong individuality. You could never mistake a Sheraton chair for a Chippendale, or a Chippendale for a Heppelwhite; and yet they were all craftsmen who worked on strictly traditional lines. The same may be said of Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Joseph Conrad and Tchekoff. Please do not think that I am mentioning my own short stories in the same breath with the stories of these giants. I only want to point out to you that those of us who desire to write them have a noble tradition to follow. You may argue that theanalogy between the making of a chair and the creation of a short story is rather far-fetched for the reason that the plan of a chair has long since been fixed and determined by the nature of the seated attitude; that until we find a new way of sitting down the plan of the chair must remain the same; whereas the short story may wander at random over the wide fields of human nature. To this I will reply—Has human nature altered perceptibly more than the nature of the seated attitude? You are bound to agree with me that it hasn’t. The Arabs—who have always been the best story tellers—have stated that there are only seven stories in the world. The complications of what is called Social Progress have not increased the number. They have rather restricted it. The emotions can do no more with dollars and girders than they used to be able to do with magic carpets and languishing houris. People love, hate, struggle and fructify, and to set down their story is a nice respectable craft with a fine old tradition—very like chairmaking.
The two crafts have another point in common. It is the business of them both to make you comfortable. When I start reading a story by Tchekoff I feel comfortable at once. On quite a different plane I feel the same with that remarkable story-teller, O. Henry. They may shock me, or thrill me, or delight me, but I know it’s going to be all right. My sense of tradition will not be outraged. Tchekoff may give me that accustomed sense of satiety by a mere turn of a phrase; O. Henry by some amazing double surprise. But Iknow all the time that there will be nothing to worry about.
In these stories, then, I have merely tried to be a good apprentice to skilled craftsmen. I claim for them no originality at all. Though their setting is entirely modern, and they deal with such things as fried-fish shops, and public-houses, and the like, they are just the same old seven stories told in the bazaars of Ispahan three thousand years ago.
If through them all you feel something which links them together, which moreover makes you and me more intimate with each other, then I shall feel as happy as Sheraton’s apprentice must have felt when some noble patron of the master’s stopped in the workshops to give him a word of encouragement.
Stacy Aumonier.