THE NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 298, 9 March 1945, Page 5

THE NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORY

Sir,-I wonder what is reader-opinion of the modern New Zealand short-story writer? I mean the type of literary masquerader sometimes fostered by The Listener and enjoying such a carnival of success elsewhere.

Everybody knows the dearth of good short-story tellers in our time, The art of telling a story well, even if it survives in speech, is somehow being lost for writing. And in this famine of talent a clique of literary opportunists have muscled in with a low-grade substitute. Patently incapable of carrying on the tradition, the pretenders are superlatively able at turning out something that might be taken for a literary sketch if it did not have the capital defect of being almost totally obscure. The obscurity is probably unintentional; forgive it as the collapse of an attempt at subtlety. But deliberately to turn one’s back on such elements of a story as construction and climax is to forsake the very heart and soul of it, besides hinting rather suspiciously of the narrator’s lack of ability to attempt them, Fortunately there is an academic air about these stories. It warns the reader. He is quick to sense that he is reading something by a person with a rage for writing and no talent for telling a story. It really doesn’t matter what the innovators turn out: a fine story will

always be a yarn; and in spinning a yarn de Maupassant was never above telling it simply, or O, Henry never too experienced to overlook the value of a plot. The short story in our country is in the hands of a coterie of snobs who believe that the sham artistry of a conscious literary style is the sole stock-in-trade of a storvteller.

T. V.

HINDMARSH

(Wellington)