Art of the Short Story

D.H. Lawrence was a prolific writer of short stories, more than 60 in a lifetime. The art of that vehicle is to tell a compelling story in a nutshell that can be cracked at bedtime and savored in whole before one closes one’s eyes at the end of the day. Or in just a few days.

The reader gets to start out on a reading journey certain that the full story will be told within a short memory span. A different expectation than that for a novel, or a serious work of non-fiction, where early plot goings-on and characters can escape the memory box. For many of his readers, short story is D. H. Lawrence at his best.

Short story has been my mindset whim recently, and so I took off the dusty bookshelf a tattered, paperback copy of “The Complete Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence,” vol. II, the full original set being a 1922 copyright.

“England, My England” could be the flagship short story, but it is hard to pick just a single flagship. The intense romantic life of newly wed and still childless Egbert and Winifred opens the story but transforms sharply as children come. Love and intense desire are still there, but the children bend the relationship forever. She becomes the authoritarian for them by her own nature, and he the affectionate, and so adored, laid-back father, just as he is laid-back in other ways.

The children are three little daughters, none more than six years of age.

“He stole them from her, in emotion and spirit, and left her only to command their behaviour. A thankless lot for a mother. And her children adored him, adored him, little knowing the empty bitterness they were preparing for themselves when they too grew up to have husbands: husbands such as Egbert, adorable and null.”

In so few words, D.H. Lawrence gives life to a marital situation that might be quite common and recognizable to some readers. With so few brush strokes he puts the central point of the story on canvass to see in vivid colors. A novel might take a chapter or more to develop this family dynamic, but it is managed here with such economy because it simply must be.

Other authors of the classics who are known for their capacity to package a compelling tale into the short story include Edgar Allen Poe and Ivan Turgenev, but of course there are many more.

Ivan Turgenev is a favorite. He gained first recognition with his collection of short stories in “The Hunting Sketches” (1852). Poe, of course, we all know for “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” These became American favorites of film media in the arts unknown to Poe in his own time. Poe died in 1849. They are part of a relatively modern Octopus Books collection comprising “Forty Two Tales,” first published in 1979, just one source now among others.

So when you get worn to the bones across weeks of bedtime reading of tomes of 500 pages or more, as I did recently, you can turn to Lawrence, Poe, and Turgenev among others and not lose even a step in the excitement of reading. In modern times, there is truly something out there for every pace and every mood change.