Brevities

By Stefan Kanfer

SHORT SHORTS

Edited by Irving Howe and Iiana Wiener Howe

Godine; 262 pages; $12.95

"Short story" is the most elastic category in modern literature. "Story" may mean a series of events, a monologue, even a simple description with no characters at all. As for "short," it may signify a narrative of 10,000 words or a terse moral fable. In Short Shorts, Editor Irving Howe (World of Our Fathers) and his wife liana have decided to explore the far end of the genre. None of their selections requires more than eleven pages (D.H. Lawrence's A Sick Collier); some need four (Grace Paley's Wants). But the works are small only in measure. All contain social and psychological resonances that sound long after this remarkable book is closed. A few are comic, like James Thurber's If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox, a portrait of the crocked general handing over his sword to an astonished Lee. In two cases, stories provide a mirror effect. Isaac Babel's The Death of Dolgushov concerns the inability of men fully to apprehend the griefs and atrocities of battle; Doris Lessing's Homage for Isaac Babel is about the inability of children to comprehend the depths and subtleties of Babel's deceptively plain fictions. But most of the tales are discrete, ironic parables, works, as Irving Howe describes them, "brought to a stark conclusion--abrupt, bleeding, exhausting."

There is not a false note in Short Shorts. The contents--38 fictions--range back to Leo Tolstoy's The Three Hermits, whose pious innocents forget a prayer and run on top of the ocean to find their condescending teacher. The most recent are powerful condensations of modern life by Heinrich Boll, who describes a professional laugher producing merriment on cue for everyone but himself, and Paula Fox, whose News from the World describes a woman and her contaminated seaside village withering for lack of love. Between these terminals, Chekhov, Kafka, Mishima, Hemingway, Borges and a score of other master miniaturists show that brevity can be not merely the soul of wit, but the whole of it, and that almost all writing can benefit with pruning, from the short story to the rave review.

--By Stefan Kanfer

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