Nobody would argue that vintage Waugh lurks in any of his short stories or that we meet there anything like the magisterial wit of A Handful of Dust, Ninety-Two Days, or The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Short forms tempt Waugh toward his melodramatic, schoolboy-rag side—he needs more room to develop nuance and the appearance of sympathy with his characters. Still, [Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories] is a worthwhile collection of short pieces if not a startling one, eleven of the twelve stories having first appeared in book form as far back as 1936….
Twelve stories for $12.95, plus tax. It works out to about $1.13 per story, certainly moderate as reading matter goes today…. But even Waugh's most frantic admirers would have to admit that some of these stories are worth less than $1.13. "Cruise" ("Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure"), with its repeated tag-line "Goodness how sad," I'd rate at about 35 cents. On the other hand, some of these stories are worth more than $1.13. "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing, despite the crudity of the irony, is a valuable ($2.75?) enactment of the theme that the violent and irrational are often housed quite comfortably within the benign and the reasonable. "Excursion in Reality," a satire on the philistine stupidities of filmmaking, probably seemed funnier in 1932 than now, but it's still worth about $2.00. "Bella Fleace Gave a Party" is right up there too, almost unbearably wrenching with its intermingling of wit and pathos. "Winner Takes All," about a meddling mother's arranging things so that her elder son triumphs in all ways over her younger, thus paying homage to the sacred tradition of British primogeniture snobbery, is another valuable bit of irony….
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