Could she save the short story?
It is unsurprising that the recipient of such remarkable largesse is an American. The USA is the undisputed capital of the short story at the moment, easily eclipsing the UK and Ireland. Several American writers considered among the best of the past 50 years — John Cheever, Raymond Carver and Grace Paley among them — wrote almost exclusively in the medium, while widely regarded younger authors such as Lahiri and Lorrie Moore are known primarily for their short stories. Indeed, the success of Lahiri, the daughter of Bengali immigrants, would make most novelists green with envy. Her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won a Pulitzer prize and sold more than 600,000 copies. Unaccustomed Earth, her second, went straight in at No 1 on the New York Times fiction chart.
During the same period, the British short story has undergone a sharp decline. With the exception of William Trevor, no author from the UK or Ireland currently occupies top-rung status on the global literary scene by virtue of his or her short fiction. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith may have written short stories, but none could be called a world-class practitioner of the genre. The British short story has become the pipsqueak sibling of the novel — smaller, weaker and less liable to earn respect.
All is not lost, however. Efforts are under way to return the short story to its former status on this side of the Atlantic. In addition to the O’Connor award — the world’s biggest for a single collection — the National Short Story Prize was launched in 2005 “to re-establish the importance of the British story after many years of neglect”. Funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and supported by the BBC and Prospect magazine, the £15,000 prize is the world’s largest for a single short story.
Both these awards recognise that there was a time when the British Isles were a centre for short-story excellence. The first modern one is widely credited to be Sir Walter Scott’s The Two Drovers (1827), while the most famous character in Victorian literature — Sherlock Holmes — owes his existence almost entirely to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short fiction. James Joyce’s Dubliners, published in 1914, is one of the most influential collections ever compiled, while writers such as W Somerset Maugham and Roald Dahl were able to command staggering fees for their work — in the 1920s, Maugham was so popular, he received $3,000 from American magazines for stories of usually no more than 1,000 words. Kipling, Saki, DH Lawrence, Frank O’Connor, VS Pritchett — until recently, writers from the British Isles have been among the genre’s best exponents.
So, what happened? What accounts for the current transatlantic divide? For one thing, the short story has an even richer history in America than it does here. The genre truly came of age there with the publication, in 1837, of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, or, more precisely, Edgar Allan Poe’s celebrated review, in which Poe proclaimed the short story superior to the novel because it can be read in one sitting: “During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences resulting from weariness or interruption.”
Poe’s clarion call could not have come at a more opportune moment, ringing through a changing literary marketplace that was to prove fertile ground for the short story. The mid-19th century saw the proliferation of mass-market magazines catering to an ever-growing (and ever more literate) urban audience. And these needed content. They needed stories. Although serialised novels filled this need in Britain, readers of American magazines such as Harper’s, Collier’s and The Atlantic Monthly preferred short stories, which, as Poe suggested, could be consumed in one sitting by an increasingly mobile, increasingly distracted population. As with film half a century later, the short story was a genre whose time had come.
The popularity of the American short story increased with the creation of The New Yorker, Esquire and Playboy magazines in the 20th century. The opportunity to be widely read (and highly paid) meant the greatest writers took the genre very seriously. Although everybody knows how Fitzgerald and Faulkner toiled in Hollywood to make ends meet, less well known is the key role short-story publication played in paying the bills. In the 1920s, for instance, Fitzgerald could command $4,000 from The Saturday Evening Post for a story. In today’s terms, that is about as much as a screenwriter would get for a rewrite (or a professor of creative writing would make in a year from a top American university). In the 1950s, Cheever was able to live comfortably in upstate New York simply by virtue of publishing his remarkable stories in The New Yorker. With such incentive,masters such as Hemingway, Maugham and Carver turned the short story into something very large indeed.
The bonanza, however, seems to be coming to an end. Even in America, the readership for short stories is undergoing a significant contraction. Fewer large-circulation magazines are publishing fiction, and those that do fail to pay enough to keep writers in the black. (The New Yorker pays a dollar a word for first-timers, which means you can’t even buy a car if you are lucky enough to place a short story there.) Lahiri notwithstanding, New York publishers are increasingly less likely to take a chance on a short-story collection. As no less an authority than the Pulitzer-winning novelist Richard Ford put it recently: “Not that I sense story writing or fiction in general to have suffered a decline in excellence, only a fall-off in its public-relations campaign.”
Yet, despite an ever-shrinking market, remarkable stories continue to be published in America, and a new generation of excellent short-story writers are making their names there. Although a lot of this writing is a product of simple momentum — younger writers emulating their masters — there is another reason for this resilience: the robust system of subsidisation in place in America, funded primarily by the nation’s vast archipelago of university Master of Fine Arts (MFA) writing programmes. As the short story loses its economic viability, writers who were formerly supported by magazine publication and lucrative relationships with New York publishers are now kept afloat by teaching gigs. Even authors as acclaimed as George Saunders and Tobias Wolff hold university positions. Similarly, as the big New York houses shy away from short stories, a growing number of small, subsidised presses are taking up the reins, bringing out books that would have been championed by the majors only a generation ago.
If the UK is to enjoy a revitalisation of the short story, it will almost certainly have to look to the American model — not the old one of big-spending mass-circulation magazines, but rather a system of state and university sponsorship that allows talented writers to work and publish in a shrinking market. In many ways, this is already happening, not merely through the well-funded prizes mentioned above, but through a burgeoning network of writing programmes, with places such as Goldsmiths, Bath Spa, Warwick and Manchester (which recently hired Martin Amis) joining the long-established University of East Anglia.
There is, of course, a downside to this new system, as shown by what has happened to poetry in America, where cushily subsidised poets have lost nearly all contact with a wider reading public. American writing students often move directly into teaching positions without having to test the turbulent waters of the marketplace, creating work that can be effete and self-referential. (Cormac McCarthy famously called the MFA system a “hustle”.) It would be a shame if short stories went the way of poetry, becoming little more than academic exercises for the few, instead of work commuters could read on the 5:48 home.
Twenty years ago, Anthony Burgess worried about the coming of a new kind of story, “appropriate to a university magazine, appropriate to a little review subsidised by a university or subsidised by the state: the story in which there is a kind of revelation, the hope of a revelation, but not much more”. This hasn’t happened yet — one need only read the work of Wolff or Mary Gaitskill to understand how robust the genre remains in America — but, as the short story travels further from its populist roots into academia, it runs the very real danger of becoming truly small.
Giants of the small form
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904, pictured below) The undisputed master — the good Russian doctor’s subtle, sad, infinitely human tales set the standard.
Read: The Lady with the Little Dog.
Guy de Maupassant (1850-93) Perhaps the genre’s greatest formalist. His elegant stories are filled with clever twists and cunning denouements.
Read: The Necklace.
Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961) His lean, muscular style is perfectly suited to the genre’s brevity and understatement.
Read: Hills Like White Elephants.
John Cheever (1912-82) His stories of affluent, melancholy suburbanites captured the malaise of Eisenhower’s America.
Read: The Swimmer.
Grace Paley (1922-2007) The New Yorker’s stories are characterised by a remarkable ear for dialogue and a sense of how tragedy and comedy are life’s twin pillars.
Read: In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All.
Raymond Carver (1938-88, pictured bottom) Dirty realism’s prime exponent. The desperation stays in the mind long after reading.
Read: A Small, Good Thing.
James Joyce (1882-1941) Before stretching the novel to breaking point, he provided the gold standard for the collection with Dubliners, his indelible portrait of a city and its people.
Read: The Dead.
Flannery O’Connor (1925-64) Famously, at five, she trained a chicken to walk backwards; later, the shy, eccentric Southerner had the short story doing comic tricks nobody has since rivalled.
Read: Good Country People.
V S Pritchett (1900-97) The greatest British exponent in the 20th century: nobody else could so quickly and accurately render the stubborn, unfathomable vagaries of a character.
Read: The Diver.
William Trevor (1928-present) Arguably the greatest short-story writer currently working.
The Irishman’s bittersweet stories of blasted lives prove him to be a true inheritor of Chekhov.
Read: A Bit on the Side.
TEN TO FOLLOW
George Saunders and Haruki Murakami are absurdists with soul; Lorrie Moore and Mary Gaitskill know what sex in the city is about; Kevin Canty and Annie Proulx take us into the West’s dark heart; Joy Williams and Tobias Wolff map the human heart’s wilder precincts; Jhumpa Lahiri and Aleksandar Hemon show how it feels to discover a new world.
