Books: Bedside Reading

GREAT ENGLISH SHORT NOVELS (879 pp.)—Edited by Cyril Connolly—Dial ($6).

This book belongs to the cozy tradition of bedside belles-lettres. The selections, picked well off the main highroad of English literature, range from stormy thrillers to sunny farce, from the thunder of Samuel Johnson’s prose to the lightning of Aldous Huxley’s. They include little-known works by little-read writers as well as little read works by well-known writers: Maria Edgeworth, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, George Meredith, Thomas Love Peacock, William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf. Few readers will like all of these stories, but almost everybody will be entertained by some of them.

In Dr. Johnson’s biographical Life of Richard Savage, a gifted but improvident London hack writer gets embroiled in bastardy, murder, poverty, affluence, licentiousness and general skulduggery, but as he squanders his talents and dies in a debtors’ prison, the rigorous moralist writing his story extends his compassion and pleads for that of the reader. In Le Fanu’s The Room in the Dragon Volant, a rich and credulous Englishman is tricked on a trip to France by a pretty girl and a couple of Gallic sharpsters, but emerges somewhat wiser from the coffin in which they have nailed him. In Meredith’s The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, a complex English lady joins battle with a simple British general, reduces his defenses, and finally takes him into her camp as a lifetime ally. In Huxley’s The Farcical History of Richard Greenow, a brilliant young man is possessed of a sister personality. When he isn’t functioning as himself, Richard Greenow, a fighting pacifist, he is operating as Pearl Bellairs, a violently patriotic war propagandist—all of which permits Author Huxley to aim his wit at two political extremes and much that is in between.

Editor Cyril Connolly, who uncovers no English Candide or Death in Venice, makes an appropriate literary point in his introduction that “the great short novel is not an English form,” and his selections help to prove it. None of the Great English Short Novels are great, and some of them are not even novels. But a number of them have other readable qualities that make this a pretty good book to have within reach on a night table.