In writing last week about Eudora Welty's latest volume of short stories I said that somewhere between Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield the short story had got off its trolley, and I suggested that it was Miss Mansfield who was in large part responsible for the exaggerated subjectivity which has so variously corrupted modern short fiction. The line of descent from Miss Mansfield to Miss Welty may not always be easy to trace: the family resemblance is more a matter of the carriage of the head than of feature for feature. But in a writer like Sylvia Townsend Warner the connection can be seen more readily. Miss Warner is less talented perhaps, and less ambitious, than Miss Welty, but she is an accomplished practitioner of her craft and more typical of her literary generation. Twenty-eight of her stories, many of them familiar from having appeared in the New Yorker, have been gathered in A Garland of Straw. They are an interesting sampling of the thin brew of sensibility which has been so largely our nourishment in English and American short fiction since Miss Mansfield separated the flesh from the bone of Chekhov.

I use the word sensibility in its frankly pejorative connotation; obviously, sensibility under control is as necessary to a writer as an ear to a musician. But just as, in the case of Miss Welty, a too great subjectivity manifests itself in too great a preoccupation with fine prose, in Miss Warner a too great subjectivity manifests itself in an overdependence upon her private and special awarenesses. This is what I mean by sensibility, the delusion that an author's fugitive insights and sensitivities and symbolical observations will carry, in a piece of fiction, the full weight with which they are charged in the writer's own experience. They never do. Actually, they reduce the stature of a story to the size of the smallest elements that compose it—and this despite the fact that there is always implicit, in oversubjective writing, an author's emotion of superiority to his environment and his fellowman.

Sylvia Townsend Warner lives in a more politically conscious world than Miss Mansfield. Many of her stories are concerned with politics, war, and "issues"; one has the impression, however, that the bigger the issue the smaller and more personal the symbol by which Miss Warner communicates her indignation, and that the cause itself is actually secondary to the triumphant play of Miss Warner's creativity about it. For instance, a story called "Apprentice," in intent one of the serious stories in A Garland of Straw, deals with the way Nazism can corrupt people. "Apprentice" is set in occupied Poland and is the story of a little girl who lives under the protection of a German Gauleiter. In the midst of starvation Lili has plenty to eat, and she elaborates a wonderful game in which, standing above the public road, she dangles bits of food on a string for the starving passersby to jump for. But one young Polish boy resists her temptations, and Lili becomes maddened with the need to break his independent spirit. On a particularly cold day she dangles a cinnamon bun before the boy; he is so hungry that he jumps for it, and Lili jerks the string out of his reach just as the boy falls dead of cold and hunger. Thinking, "It must be really terrible to die like that," Lili pulls up the bun and eats it.

Well, a story like this, it seems to me, defeats its purpose. Primarily concerned to assert the Tightness of her own feelings, Miss Warner luxuriates in her scorn of the child Lili; in consequence, Lili becomes an incredible little monster instead of a credible little human being. And in consequence of Lili's monstrosity, Miss Warner's whole indictment of Nazism exposes itself as a contrivance.

Of course, not all Miss Warner's stories show such a flagrant discrepancy between purpose and method. Some are merely sketches or anecdotes ("The Trumpet Shall Sound," "To Cool the Air"); some are frankly fragmentary ("Rainbow Villa," "Setteragic On"). But the least of them mingles with the most ambitious without the reader being aware of a disturbing difference in kind because, having a common point of departure in sensibility, they all sacrifice permanent meaningfulness to the fleeting triumphs and self-justifications of the creative moment. Although Miss Warner is willing to be far more humanly fallible than Katherine Mansfield would ever have wished to be, and although her prevailing temper is neither ecstatic nor pitying but acidulous, her stories are unmistakably fledglings from "The Dove's Nest."

I have used Miss Warner as an instance of one of the major faults of a whole literary school; in fairness I should also point out that she has a liveliness and flavor which put her in a class quite apart from most of the writers represented in such a collection as Martha Foley's The Best American Short Stories, 1943.