SHORT STORIES
| Sir,-Leo Waters asks why I imagine he writes. Surely, from his letter to make money. Vergil reports that the track to ‘tliades is greasy, and consequently, in making a priority of the profit motive, there is danger of a permanent lowering of the aim from the masterpiece to the pot-boiler, and this puts the writer outside the orbit of my appeal for more and better short stories, As regards competition from women’s
magazines, there is no such thing as a new plot anyhow. The best you can do is a new angl® on an old one, and it is up to you whether you achieve "sentimental slush" or something else. . Criticising an admittedly clever story a leading magazine editor wrote thus: "This story has several failings; it is written in a rather dreary style and deals with unpleasant people and it has a tragic ending; and as I have pointed out with great respect, it is almost impossible to get people "to pay a shilling for this kind of thing, as they have enough misery in their own lives without buying more." This puts in a nutshell the whole law and the "profits" for the magazine short story. I am told that my call on the domain of the diaper for a spot of make-believe was a futile gesture, as nowadays, all up to the minute babes scoff at. the story of Santa. O. Henry is the ideal exponent of this art. He does not need Zola’s dead dogs and decaying vegetables, the sadistic humour of the Grimm Bros., or the cruelty of the Russians. He gets closer to the heart of things than any of these. With supreme ‘wizardry he provokes us to laughter or tears, sometimes to ‘both at the same time.. His humour is deeper and more lasting than the comic wit that gets a loud guffaw, and his sense of the tears in things, like minor music, invades the spirit with a gentle sadness and he makes us like it. Professor Leacock thinks that the Latin America of O. Henry is most likely as gloriously unreal as fhe London of Charles Dickens, the Salem of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or any other beautiful picture of the higher truth of life than can be shattered into splinters in the distorting of cold fact.
E. A. W.
SMITH
(Christchurch).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 463, 7 May 1948, Page 5
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391SHORT STORIES New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 463, 7 May 1948, Page 5
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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