"The man in the bed has an excruciating sense of humour. It is a very simple bed. Pine. People visited him and left flowers. A Chinese chrysanthemum means cheerfulness under adversity. A red chrysanthemum means I love. A white chrysanthemum is truth. Pine represents pity, but the bed is not pine after all. It is steel, steel that has been painted white, a hospital bed. The man was in a hospital bed. He was sick. This is a story. It represents chrysanthemums."
(from Quincunx, Thomas M Disch, The New SF, Arrow, 1970)
On the fourth of July Thomas Disch killed himself. This morning I read his short story, Quincunx, a ludic word puzzle written the best part of four decades ago now. Quincunx means an arrangement of five things at the corners and centre of a square. The story - or stories, it’s an arrangement of five of course - is not really science fiction. Disch didn’t really write science fiction as the term is understood. Speculative fiction - that 1960s notion promulgated by Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine - is a better description. I don’t really understand the story (stories). But that’s okay. I keep reading.
The last section, entitled The Assumption, is set in a "room 334". The number prompts a memory. A memory of the teenage me trying (and mostly failing) to read Disch’s novel of that number, 334. That book is set in a terminally overcrowded New York. The sense of claustrophobia is what I remember, the squeezed-tight world Disch’s words conjure up.
It’s all I remember of the book. Not the plot or the prose but that perfume. It’s actually a lot to remember after the best part of 30 years. It’s the best tribute I can think of.
Way, way back in March I started talking in this parish about journeying through the 20th century via the short story. One story for each decade. Over the next couple of months I kept looking for the perfect place to start and I had it in my head I’d do the journey chronologically and continuously. I kept thinking that and before I knew it nearly three months had gone by and I’d still not started.
So I’ve changed tack. And I’ve started with one story, from 1919 I believe. And I’ll dip in and out of the journey as and when I choose.
To the second decade then. DH Lawrence is so out of fashion today that I almost hesitate to say anything in his favour. But Tickets, Please is such a haunting, disturbing story it deserves attention. The first time I read it I wasn’t aware it was written so close to the end of the First World War. The wartime setting is obvious, of course. The fact that the tram line at the centre of the story, winding its way through "stark, grimy, cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops" is almost entirely manned by women - "fearless young hussies" Lawrence calls them- says as much. But I wonder now how much the violence at the heart of the story was some echo of the much, much greater violence of the previous four years?
The story reads more like a Dionysian rite than anything. There’s a tram inspector called John Thomas, a man with an eye for all the ladies that work on the route. He dates and then discards one of those fearless young hussies, Annie. She doesn’t take it lightly, gathers half a dozen of his old flames and then arranges to meet John Thomas at the depot where the other women are already waiting for him. They ask him to choose one of them to walk home with. He refuses. It goes badly for him. "He turned his head away. And suddenly with a movement like a swift cat, Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying and himself staggering."
That is just the start of their assault on the inspector. "He was their sport now. They were going to have their own back, out of him. Strange, wild creatures, they hung on him and rushed at him to bear him down. His tunic was torn right up the back, Nora had hold at the back of his collar, and was actually strangling him. Luckily the button burst. He struggled in a wild frenzy of fury and terror, almost mad terror. His tunic was simply torn off his back, his shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked. The girls rushed at him, clenched their hands on him and pulled at him: or they rushed at him and pushed him, butted him with all their might: or they struck him wild blows. He ducked and cringed and struck sideways. They became more intense."
The women then get him onto the floor and despite his struggles he can’t break free. "You ought to be killed," Annie tells him, slapping his face and telling him to choose. He does. He chooses Annie. And there the story more or less ends, with a strange eerie sense of non-resolution. I come away humming with the wildness of it.
"I actually remember the movie that was made about the band and the movie had gotten it pretty much right except the filmmakers forgot to add the endless paternity suits, the time I broke Kenny's arm, dear liquid in a syringe, Matt crying for hours, the eyes of fans and "vitamins", the look on Nina's face when she demanded a new Porsche, Sam's reaction when I told him Roger wanted me to do a solo record - information the filmmakers seemed to not want to deal with. The filmmakers seemed to have edited out the time I came home and found Nina sitting in the bedroom in the house on the beach, a pair of scissors in her hand, and they cut out the shot of a punctured, leaking water bed. The editor seemed to have misplaced the scene where Nina tried to drown herself one night at a party in Malibu and they cut the sequence that followed where her stomach was pumped and also the next shot, where she leaned into the frame next to my face and said, 'I hate you,' and she turned her face, pale and swollen, her hair still wet and plastered to her cheeks, away from me." (from Discovering Japan, by Bret Easton Ellis)
I've been looking for some of those. Ellis doesn't make it sound much like fun being in a band. I was reading Toby Litt's novel I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay not so long ago and he didn't make being in a band sound much like fun either. Wouldn't be jealousy, would it? Just a thought.
2) The face of monsters
Actually, reel back to that shot of Nina's face "pale and swollen" a moment. Prompted by the prospect of ghost stories being told at the East Neuk Festival this weekend (www.eastneukfestival.com) I looked out a book of ghost stories and read MR James's The Rose Garden. It's a pretty slight tale, not one of his best, its creepiness never quite outdoes its middle-English surroundings (in his best stories its the middle-English surroundings that intensify the creepiness). But its vision of a ghost in the box-bushes carries a momentary chill and sounds a little like Nina: "It was not a mask. It was a face - large, smooth and pink. She remembers the minute drops of perspiration which were starting from its forehead ... how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the upper lip."
Meanwhile, anyone in the vicinity of Cameron Kirk near St Andrews on Friday at 4pm can hear a performance of The Ash Tree http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/jamesX05.htm] Now that's a proper scary MR James story. You want proof? Read this ...
"There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a strange movement there; it sees as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish, which move back and forward, even as low as his chest. It is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out of the window in a flash; another — four — and after that there is quiet again."
Monday, June 23
Gideon, ZZ Packer (The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 2007)
Tuesday, June 24
The Liar, Aleksandar Hemon (The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 2007)
Wednesday, June 25
The Monster, Toby Litt (The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 2007)
Thursday, June 26
Water from the Sun, Bret Easton Ellis (Water from the Sun and Discovering Japan, Picador Shots, 2006)
Friday, June 27
Jacklighting, Ann Beattie (The Penguin Book of International Short Stories 1945-1985, edited by Daniel Halpern, 1989) XXII, Nathalie Sarraute (The Penguin Book of International Short Stories 1945-1985, edited by Daniel Halpern, 1989)
Saturday, June 28
The Child Screams and Looks Back at You, Russell Banks (The Penguin Book of International Short Stories 1945-1985, edited by Daniel Halpern, 1989) He Met Her, Richard Ford (Waterstone's Princes Street Front Window, 2008)
Sunday, June 29
Discovering Japan, Bret Easton Ellis (Water from the Sun and Discovering Japan, Picador Shots, 2006)
There's a documentary about the American science fiction writer Harlan Ellison at the Edinburgh Film Festival tomorrow (Wednesday, June 25 ). The blurb in the festival brochure describes him as "possibly the angriest writer alive". I don't think they really need to qualify that statement. There's no possibly about it. The teenage me loved that bubbling, apocalyptic anger, the sheer rage he vented at the world in every interview.
Rereading some of his short stories does, though, give a more nuanced view of the man. Sure there's a rather adolescent strain of provocation in him (again, one that suited the adolescent me). In How's the Night Life on Cissalda he posits sex-obsessed aliens materialising on earth and conjoining with every single human being - the Queen, the Pope, Truman Capote - and, err, there's no polite way to put this, basically fornicating them to death.
But the more interesting stories include one in which a man calls home only to find himself talking to another him, a "him" that then proceeds to take over his life - an idea that would appeal to JG Ballard or David Lynch, though here their cool reptilian visions are refracted through Ellison's blood hot prose.
Better yet is Jeffty is Five, a beautifully poised fantasy story about a friendship in which only one of the two boys in the story grows up. Ellison uses the idea as an elegy for the loss of innocence and a warm nostalgic hymn to post-war America - the candy he used to eat, the radio shows he used to listen to. A story that might suggest all that anger is really misdirected regret for what he - and we - might have lost.
WHAT I READ LAST WEEK
Monday, June 16
Night Surf, Stephen King (American Supernatural Tales, Penguin, 2007)
Tuesday, June 17
How's the Night Life on Cissalda, Harlan Ellison (Shatterday, Granada, 1983)
Wednesday, June 18
In the Fourth Year of the War, Harlan Ellison (Shatterday, Granada, 1983)
Thursday, June 19
Endless Night, Karl Edward Wagner (American Supernatural Tales, Penguin, 2007)
Friday, June 20
Four Blue Chairs, Hanif Kureishi (Midnight All Day, Faber, 1999)
Saturday, June 21
Morning in the Bowl of Night, Hanif Kureishi (Midnight All Day, Faber, 1999)
Sunday, June 22
The Umbrella, Hanif Kureishi (Midnight All Day, Faber, 1999)
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