Books: The Occasional Victory

TALE FOR THE MIRROR (307 pp.)—Hortense Calisher—Little, Brown ($5.50).

The short story is surely the most intractable of prose forms. Few authors can write one well; yet anything less than brilliance is worthless. A mediocre novel can at least be a tolerable companion; a mediocre short story is merely a bore. But a writer who masters the form hears only the faintest of applause; his publisher wants to know when he is going to turn out a novel. Collections of short stories once helped launch such writers as Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter, but these days short stories are worth little in royalties and less in prestige. Irwin Shaw, for instance, is known less as one of the country’s best short-story writers than as one of its least distinguished novelists.

Despite all this, master short storyists continue to appear, just as stubborn young acrobats continue to teach themselves to ride the unicycle. Hortense Calisher, a 50-year-old Manhattan mother of two, is one of the masters. Precision and imagination have one of their rare conjunctions in her work. The precision is of language. The face of a British lady journalist “had never seen mascara perhaps but, in a quietly topographical way it had seen almost everything else”: a pale, 40-year-old lawyer is a member of a generation “that had been schooled so tonelessly free of prejudices that it had nothing left with which to anneal its convictions.” Only rarely is there a flawed word, erring on the side of fancied precision; Miss Calisher is the sort who might say, for instance, “percipient” instead of “perceptive.”

The author’s fine imagination is for people. Her characters, the reader feels with approval, are thought up, not noted down. Her menagerie is too various to be a mere assemblage from the parts-bin of relatives’ tics and friends’ twitches. The best of her originals are members of the remarkable Minot family (Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra), a Hudson River clan that has subsisted for 200 years on no income at all. The Minots live by dining out, and walk safely the precarious line between guesthood and sycophancy by balancing good fellowship with mordant truth telling. For an author who does not resort to burlesque, this is not an easy notion to bring off, but Author Calisher does it delightfully. She ticks off the guestly ability of each Minot forebear, and then gets down to the problem of the current Minot, a moneyless widow who, in an age when the great houses are closing, mortally fears that she will be reduced to taking a position as secretary to a grim old birdfancier.

What is startling about this story (and several others) is that it is about a victory. Most short stories are about defeats. This may be because men’s defeats outnumber their victories, or because writers are afraid of wives and waiters, or merely because defeats are lonely and short stories must be limited to a few characters. Some of the author’s realizations are sad, but some are not, and the uncertainty is welcome.