J. Burnley, ed. Penguin Modern Stories 1 (1969)

     J. Burnley, ed. Penguin Modern Stories 1 (1969) Modern is the operative word here: these stories are modern in that curiously restricted sense that never meant contemporary. Current stories aren’t ‘modern,’ they are just stories being written now. There is a deliberate bleakness of vision, an attempt at depicting “real life”, that feels false in these stories. Or maybe it’s the earnestness with which the writers present their ideas, as if no one had ever understood that people are fearful, petty, hypocritical, and very, very confused about life.
     No doubt a generation or two from now people will find some value in these stories; now, I find them of “historical interest” only. That is, they are reminders of a time when writers and other artists very self-consciously set themselves up in opposition to bourgeois tastes (itself a misnomer, since it’s really just common taste, and is shared by all classes at all times). They were heirs of Shaw and Ibsen, but by the time they wrote, the iconoclastic rebellion of Late Victorian and Edwardian times had become the received wisdom. Or rather, it had become merely fashionable. But then fashion relies on the appearance of revolt and change, it must constantly generate the illusion of being in the forefront, while following a safe couple of steps behind.
     The writers (William Sansom, Jean Rhys, David Plante and Bernard Malamud) already seem dated, and their talents seem to me to have been wasted. In other words, it was the fashion to appear to be out of fashion, and that never works. But it takes a while to realise that, and a writer’s life may be done by the time he discovers that he must write what matters to him, not what appears to matter to the taste-mongers. By the time these ‘modern’ stories were collected, Updike and Munro (for example) were already writing, and they made no attempt to be ‘modern.’
     I didn’t read all the stories, skimming most of them. I don’t know if there was ever a #2 in this series; probably not, for by the late 60s a different style of epater les bourgeois had displaced the ‘modern’ one. Not a keeper. * (2004)