Here’s a story that’s been told before in this blog but bears repeating. See the short story? It ain’t dead. Oh, publishing types keep saying it is. But writers keep writing them and publishers feel obliged to keep putting them out. In recent weeks new short story collections from Ali Smith, Shena Mackay and Stephen King have all appeared in bookshops and today (December 1) Harper Voyager publish two massive volumes of short stories from Ray Bradbury (the best part of 1800 pages between them).
But of course it’s the smaller publishers who remain keenest on the form. For the last week I’ve been enjoying collections from Welsh publisher Parthian and from Comma Press, based in the north-west of England (though the stories in poet Sean O’Brien’s enjoyable book The Silence Room are mostly set in the north-east). Both publishers may be money-short but they’re imagination-rich. They put me in mind of the best kind of indie record labels in being both proudly provincial while wilfully internationalist in outlook. Strange Language, Parthian’s anthology of Basque short stories is as vivid an example of that as you can get, though I could equally point to Comma’s upcoming Reberth, a collection of stories based in "cities on the edge" - ie, Liverpool, Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul, Marseilles and Naples. It’s not too great a stretch to see Comma, say, as the literary equivalent of Factory Records.
Best of all, there’s no special pleading required for any of the books I’ve been dipping into. O’Brien’s collection is funny and ghoulish (and I say that even though it features a real Neanderthal Geordie called Teddy in one story, Not in Gateshead Any More, a terrible slur on a good name I’d say). Comma’s other recent title The New Uncanny is a very satisfying anthology which takes an idea and spins it out gratifyingly (Gerard Woodhouse’s The Underhouse in particular is a story that has its heart an uncanny image and idea; a room that is a mirror image of the one above it). Parthian’s Strange Language is a window on a culture that has remained stubbornly alien, as editor Mari Jose Olizaregi points out: "In total, only 60 titles have been translated from Basque to other languages, doubtless too few for a nation of such dedicated travellers". And while I’ve only read one story in Lewis Davies’s collection Love and Other Possibilities, and a couple in Deborah Kay Davies’s Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, I want to read more. The first two stories in Grace ... are evocative, rich in language and at times genuinely shocking - read the last few lines of The Point and you will get a shiver, I promise you. What’s the best thing short stories can do? Get a reaction. And both these books and these publishers deserve that.
Friday, November 21
Close to You, Sean O'Brien (The Silence Room, Comma Press, 2008)
Saturday, November 22
Not in Gateshead Any More, Sean O'Brien (The Silence Room, Comma Press, 2008)
Sunday, November 23
Seeing Double, Sara Maitland (The New Uncanny, edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page, Comma Press, 2008)
Monday, November 24
The Dummy, Nicholas Royle (The New Uncanny, edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page, Comma Press, 2008)
The Underhouse, Gerard Woodward (The New Uncanny, edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page, Comma Press, 2008)
Tuesday, November 25
Tamagotchi, Adam Marek (The New Uncanny, edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page, Comma Press, 2008)
Wednesday, November 26
Bibliography Iban Zaldua (Strange Language: An Anthology of Basque Short Stories, edited by Mari Jose Olaziregi, Parthian, 2008)
Invisible Friend, Iban Zaldua (Strange Language: An Anthology of Basque Short Stories, edited by Mari Jose Olaziregi, Parthian, 2008)
Thursday, November 27
The Mattress, Harkaitz Cano (Strange Language: An Anthology of Basque Short Stories, edited by Mari Jose Olaziregi, Parthian, 2008)
Friday, November 28 Maria and Jose, Arantza Iturbe (Strange Language: An Anthology of Basque Short Stories, edited by Mari Jose Olaziregi, Parthian, 2008)
The Red Shawl, Arantza Iturbe (Strange Language: An Anthology of Basque Short Stories, edited by Mari Jose Olaziregi, Parthian, 2008)
Saturday, November 29
Teresa, poverina mia, Bernardo Atxaga (Strange Language: An Anthology of Basque Short Stories, edited by Mari Jose Olaziregi, Parthian, 2008)
Sunday, November 30
Mr Roopratna's Chocolate, Lewis Davies (Love and Other Possibilities, Parthian, 2008)
Monday, December 1
Stirrups, Deborah Kay Davies (Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, Parthian, 2008)
The Point, Deborah Kay Davies (Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, Parthian, 2008)
Sex is a problem, don’t you find. In literature almost as much as in life. How, other than retreating into flowery, prissy-mannered metaphor, do you talk about something so intimate when the vocabulary you can use has been either medicalised or, worse, colonised by pornographers?
Reading Anais Nin’s erotic short stories - commissioned by an anonymous client in the 1940s - you can see the difficulty. They trip up time and again on the words she has to (ahem) hand to describe the (parts of) the body in motion.
Her sex scenes are, you could make an argument, the least sensuous element of her writing. I have a vague recall of an old Bookmark programme on BBC2 some time back in the 1990s which examined Nin’s work and extracts from her journals revealed her as very capable of an easy, everyday sensuality. She could write very evocatively about everyday things - food and clothes and rooms - painting a picture of the world with tactile immediacy. You can see that in her erotic stories too, although more sexually directed, as in this example from the story Linda:"In France they know the erotic value of heavy black satin, giving the shimmering quality of a wet naked body. They know how to delineate the contours of the breast, how to make the folds of the dress follow the movements of the body. They know the mystery of veils, of lace over the skin, of provocative underwear, of a dress daringly slit."
I suppose, on reflection, that wouldn’t look too out of place in an Anne Summers catalogue, but it does have a charge to it that talking about the "sex mouth" of a character (oh I think you can guess what that is) doesn’t.
Of course, ultimately Nin’s stories are pornographic. That’s their purpose. They conform to the tropes of the genre. In Linda the title character finds herself in an orgy in the woods and serving as a high-class prostitute in a high-class brothel. In The Maja, Maria, "Spanish, then Catholic, then thorougly bourgeois", marries a painter but won’t let him see her naked. It’s only when she returns to find him lying naked on top of a nude painting of her that she abandons her own buttoned-upness (it’s possible that only in an erotic story would sensual abandonment be the outcome of that particular situation).
We could use Nin’s stories to raise the question as to whether our very imaginations have been colonised by pornography. Or is it, perhaps that our imaginations are intrinsically pornographic in the first place. But while fantasies may have their place, and written fantasies at least don’t exploit some poor actress (if we had time we could talk about the whole notion of objectification here but let’s save that for another day), you do feel there must be a way to talk about something so elemental, so intrinsic to life as sex in a more realistic register.
Two stories I’ve read in the last couple of days attempt to do just that. The more lascivious is the American writer Harold Brodkey’s short story Innocence, which, frankly, is anything but. It is a very detailed account of a sexual encounter that is startling in its candour, its insistence and persistence. It kind of bulls its way through and past the language problem. In some ways the climactic conclusion is much as you would expect, but, the literary critic Frank Kermode has argued: "The point of the tale is not to be erotic but to show that, like his narrator, this writer can go on and on and on, his prose glistening with the effort of bringing you to climax."
It’s an audacious piece of writing but in the end I prefer the fleeting glimpses of intimacy you can see in Jackie Kay’s What is Left Behind. "We have this room and we have it for this night and we have our naked bodies. We got everything so pared down. Before our rooms, my body was like a gone thing. Sure, I used it. I got up and I moved around the house and got in the car; but I didn’t really know it. It was real slow. Until we got the rooms, and then my body was suddenly there in the room."
It’s a glancing take on sex and maybe works in the same way a horror story might work, in that it doesn’t let the reader see what’s really happening. It lets them use their imagination. How pornographic that imagination might be, well, that’s for you to decide.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
Saturday, November 15 The Maja, Anais Nin (Eros Unbound, Penguin Great Loves, 2007) Saffron, Anais Nin (Eros Unbound, Penguin Great Loves, 2007)
Sunday, November 16 The Woman on the Dunes, Anais Nin (Eros Unbound, Penguin Great Loves, 2007)
Monday, November 17 Hilda and Rango, Anais Nin (Eros Unbound, Penguin Great Loves, 2007)
Tuesday, November 18 Her Body, Ewan Morrison (The Last Book You Read, 2005)
Wednesday, November 19 What is Left Behind, Jackie Kay (Wish I Was Here, Picador, 2007)
Linda, Anais Nin (Eros Unbound, Penguin Great Loves, 2007)
Thursday, November 20 Innocence, Harold Brodkey (My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, Harper Press, 2008)
Last weekend I finally got around to visiting the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. As always it’s the desire to vent and purge in her art that appals, enthrals and sometimes breaks your heart. I like her quilts best but there’s a pencil drawing of her hometown’s amusement park Dreamland that bears the legend "Mad Tracey from Margate ... Everybody’s Been There". There’s probably a large measure of self-pity in that, but there’s also pain and defiance. And maybe, in the scratchy delicacy of her drawing, a tenderness too.
A couple of days later I picked up a copy of Bad Behaviour, Mary Gaitskill’s late-eighties book of short stories which traverses similar emotional terrain, though in a much cooler register. Here are stories about addiction, prostitution, the messed up corners sex gets us into. "In the past it was almost baffling to me why people focused so much on the sexuality and on how dark it was," Gaitskill told me when I interviewed her last year. "I literally didn’t understand it. When I wrote Bad Behaviour and Because They Wanted To (her second collection of stories), I was living in one case in New York and in the other case in San Francisco, and the kinds of thing I was writing about I was seeing all around me so it didn’t seem really unusual."
If you read Something Nice in which a client fantasises sentimentally about a young prostitute he keeps visiting that statement itself might seem unusual. But Gaitskill’s skill is to bring a shop-soiled humanity to a world of "damp Handi-wipes, a radio, an ashtray, a Kleenex box and a slimy bottle of oil" and "muddy black makeup".
It’s interesting to compare her stories with Sam Lipsyte and Steve Almond, both American writers a generation younger than Gaitskill but tapping into the same areas of experience - that point where bohemianism slides off into desperation. Both, though, thread their stories with a boyish glee in disgust (most obviously in Lipsyte’s Cremains, in which the narrator mixes up his dead mother’s morphine with his dead mother’s remains and then injects the result). I’ve read both writers in the past and enjoyed them (that show-offy ghoulishness can be fun if you’re in the right mood and it’s not the only thing they offer), but read in close conjunction to Gaitskill (who can be just as dark) they feel a little, well, adolescent.
Heaven, the last story in the Gaitskill collection is 30 pages long but as the puff from the New York Times Book Review points out is "denser with life than many novels". It is a family story, about one mother watching her children grow up and watching life change. There are addictions, there are bad marriages, there is domestic violence, there is pain and desperation and death. That makes it sound like a soap opera. But it’s much richer and stranger than that. And it’s heavy with tenderness. This morning I think it might be the best short story I’ve read all year.
"They had egg sandwiches and fruit for lunch. Virginia had cleaned the kitchen and put a vase of pink and white carnations on the table. The fruit was cut up in a large cream-coloured bowl. They helped themselves at a leisurely pace, sometimes eating the wet, lightly bruised fruit straight from the bowl with their fingers. The afternoon sun came in, lighting up a sparkling flurry of dust flecks."
Next week, it’s probably time to talk about sex, don’t you think?
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
Monday, November 10 Old Soul, Sam Lipsyte (Venus Drive, Flamingo, 2002) The Wrong Arm, Sam Lipsyte (Venus Drive, Flamingo, 2002)
Tuesday, November 11 An Affair Edited, Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behaviour, Vintage, 1989)
Wednesday, November 12 Cremains, Sam Lipsyte (Venus Drive, Flamingo, 2002)
Thursday, November 13 Something Nice, Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behaviour, Vintage, 1989)
Heaven, Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behaviour, Vintage, 1989)
Friday, November 14
The Law of Sugar, Steve Almond (My Life in Heavy Metal, William Heinemann, 2001)
Pornography, Steve Almond (My Life in Heavy Metal, William Heinemann, 2001)
Just noticed that the Vietnamese born, New York based short story writer Nam Le, whose appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival I mentioned in August won the Dylan Thomas Award worth £60,000 last night (Monday). Well deserved.
The danger with this blog is that it turns into a kind of never-ending confessional. A constant litany of "and here’s another writer I hadn’t read before". Frankly, there are far too many of them to own up to. And if I’m honest I don’t see the blank spots in my reading as particularly problematic. The act of reading, after all, should be a pleasure, not a chore. Why force yourself to read something because you feel you should?
Of course if I followed that line religiously I wouldn’t be writing this blog, would I? Which brings me to Doris Lessing , who, it should be clear by now, I’ve never read before, but am glad I have now.
You could delineate Lessing’s work in terms of isms - feminism and Marxism most obviously. In her introduction Margaret Drabble says of Lessing’s work: "‘Feminist’ is a label with which she has often quarrelled, but there is no doubt that she has changed the nature of discourse about and by women as well as the relationship between the sexes. Her work marks a paradigm shift in the history of sexual politics."
Does that sound serious? Well, you know what? There’s nothing wrong with seriousness. Especially when, as in Lessing’s writing, it is so limpidly displayed. She’s also very funny. In The Day Stalin Died, one British comrade sobs that Uncle Joe has been murdered by capitalist agents.
"‘People don’t die just like that? she said.
"They do at seventy-three," I said."
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
Wednesday, November 5
Growing Up, Joyce Cary (Modern Short Stories, edited by Jim Hunter, Faber, 1964)
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