A Personal Anthology, by Simon Ings
I told myself: “Let them choose themselves. If you remember them, if they’ve been clinging to your back for years, jabbering in your ear, peel them off, throw them into the pot and stir. Ignore the superego. Jettison everything that smacks of variety, balance, reason, and taste.”
I’d misremembered some of these stories. Memory is a two-way street. The stories disfigure you, and then you turn around and disfigure them. There are no hard feelings. Can you spot the three-legged ones?
Nonetheless, and for reasons that mostly elude my understanding, these are some hills I would cheerfully die on.
‘Small Heirlooms’ by M. John Harrison (First published in Other Edens, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, Unwin Paperbacks, 1987, and collected in Travel Arrangements: short stories, Gollancz, London, 2000)
Kit returns to her dead brother’s house to tidy up his literary estate. He got around a bit in his day: extracts from his diaries pastiche Patrick Leigh Fermor’s pre-war adventures in eastern Europe wonderfully well. But it’s not her brother’s memoirs that haunt Kit so much as his attitude. There’s something solvent about it. Something corrosive. Kit’s brother seems capable of plucking despair out of thin air, though given his air was gritted with the smoke from Theresianstadt, he may not have had much of a choice. “We shouldn’t have to live our lives unless we can live in them, thoughtlessly, like the animals,” Kit wrote to him once, and by the story’s latter stages we are inclined to agree.
Right up until the last line, ‘Small Heirlooms’ reads as a complex meditation on the relationship between writing and memory.
“In bed she decided over and over again, ‘He poisoned his own memories, too.’”
This being an M. John Harrison story, you know some fiendishness is brewing. The story holds its insights floating in plain sight, all to be unlocked by that killer last line.
I read this story, which is really two stories held in some sort of stereoscopic suspension, again and again, and I said to myself, “I’m going to learn how to do that.”
Well. Nope. But still I travel hopefully.
‘Tamagotchi’ by Adam Marek (First published in The New Uncanny, edited by Sarah Eyre & Ra Page, Comma, Manchester, 2008, and collected in The Stone Thrower, ECW Press, Toronto, 2013; available to read online at The Short Story Project)
Luke’s dad is at his wits’ end, trying to reset a dying Tamagotchi. Sticking a sharpened pencil into the hole in Meemoo’s plastic back won’t do it; neither will a pin. Luke, meanwhile -- an intense kid who’s struggling with all manner of developmental problems -- is ostracised at school because Meemoo’s infected his classmates’ own Tamagotchis with something that looks very much like AIDS:
“It had now lost three of its limbs, having just one arm left, which was stretched out under his head. One of its eyes had closed up to a small unseeing dot. Its pixellated circumference was broken in places, wide open pores through which invisible things must surely be escaping and entering.”
Over the course of a few pages, ‘Tamagotchi’ transforms from goofy family anecdote, through Uncanny Valley holiday brochure, into something possessing the intensity of Peter Nichols’s play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. It’s a depiction of care all the more poignant for it’s being focused virtually nothing: a toy that’s no more than thirty pixels dancing on an LCD screen. You keep expecting Marek to tip us into something that’s easier to handle -- a robot story, a father-and-son story, a medical allegory -- but he absolutely refuses to let us off the hook.
‘Busto is a Ghost, Too Mean to Give Us a Fright!’ by Gerald Kersh (First published in Courier, Spring 1938, under the pseudonym P. J. Gahagan, and collected in The Best of Gerald Kersh, selected by Simon Raven, Heinemann, 1960, and most recently, Faber and Faber, London, 2013)
For much of his career, Kersh wrote lively, ingenious popular shockers -- stories like ‘Clock Without Hands’ and ‘The Crewel Needle’ -- that shone a gay, garish light about the place without knocking anything over.
Now and again, though, something bubbled up in him –- some fragment of his past, spent in some “abominable little furnished room” -- a gnarled lump of irreconcilable residue that he never quite worked out how to scratch.
Meet Pio Busto, landlord, extortionist, dog-lover, drunk on Red Lisbon, “a handful of spoiled human material, crumpled and thrown aside”. (Can you hear it coming yet? It’s a style as distinct as a theme tune, and it’s always recognisably the same material, run through the sprockets again and again, in variation after variation: comedy that’s subversive, savage, uneasy, off-colour, violent.)
Pio Buston’s dog Ouif has just got itself run over. It’s smashed, finished, but Busto can’t bring himself to shoot it -- which is where our narrator comes in: “Old yer gun loew-er... Nah, sqeeeeeeze yer trigger--”
Kersh wants his characters to earn our compassion. He’ll nail his monster down until he writhes. We hate him, we hate him, we hate him -- and then a moment arrives.
‘Thrown Away’ by Rudyard Kipling (First published in Plain Tales from the Hills, Thacker, Spink and Company, Calcutta, 1888, and available in Collected Stories, Everyman, 1994)
RK was surely having a bit of private fun with that title, for there is something about ‘Thrown Away’ that feels positively tossed off. It’s executed with an immense care to appear merely anecdotal. At the end of it you’re left thinking, dizzily, How could anything that light pack such a punch? Half a notebook later, you’re still unpacking its symmetries. This has to be, surely, one of the most highly organised stories in the language.
A sheltered young colonial officer arrives in India, and takes everything about the place far too seriously. Having got himself into various romantic and financial scrapes, none of them career-ending, he kills himself -- as sheltered, over-serious men tend to do -- and then it’s up to his Major and the narrator to manufacture him a more fitting death (cholera will do), so as to comfort and protect his parents.
Kipling’s early diagnosis of The Boy’s condition (his early upbringing has “killed him dead” before he even arrives) is so striking, and is played out with such ghastly aplomb, it’s easy to forget that it’s only half of the story’s machinery. The rest involves the Major and the narrator, burning the bed, burying the body, scaring off the neighbours, in tears one minute, pissing themselves with laughter the next, because honestly, The Boy’s death is farce, not tragedy, and if there were any mercy in the world it should be possible to wake him up and tell him so.
But there isn’t.
So there you are.
All you have is your decency, which, to maintain, you sometimes have to do the silliest things.
‘Robot’ by Helena Bell (First published in Clarkesworld no.72, September 2012, and available to read online here; anthologised in We Robots: Artificial Intelligence in 100 Stories, edited by Simon Ings, Head of Zeus, London, 2021)
Sometimes, all a story needs is a voice. The voice, (on those rare occasions) is the story. In the very act of articulating itself, it tells you everything.
Helena Bell’s ‘Robot’ is essentially a list of dos and don’ts for the help -- the help in this case being a medical ingestion device manufactured by (presumably friendly) aliens.
“You may wash your aluminum chassis on Monday and leave it on the back porch opposite the recyclables; you may wash your titanium chassis on Friday if you promise to polish it in time for church; don’t terrorize the cat...”
The lonely, sick old woman composing these instructions suspects that the robot is out to steal her dresses, the love of her rather neglectful children, her estate, and maybe, just maybe, the planet.
This last possibility is not especially interesting; it’s only here, I suspect, to keep the genre literalists happy. What matters to me -- what I can’t get out of my head -- is that voice: persnickerty, passive-aggressive, peremptory, and dying by degrees.
“Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?”
As we map the hole she’s leaving in her account of herself, the narrator’s true shape emerges. Oh, but it’s painful: never let your voice become stronger than you are.
‘Gigolo and Gigolette’ by W. Somerset Maugham (First published in Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan, May 1932, and collected in Collected Short Stories Vol 1, Penguin, 1963, now in Vintage Classics, 2000)
What I remember:
Gigolette is a professional diver, whose circus routine has her plummeting into ever smaller containers. Audiences across Europe are astounded and agog, and every show’s a sell-out: sooner or later she’s going to fall to her death, and people want to be there when it happens.
There’s a downturn in the business, that sets Gigolette and her partner Gigolo at odds. I do remember that Gigolette is left no more or less at risk than she was when the story started, except that she has come to dissociate from herself. She views her death dispassionately now: the eventual, inevitable malfunction of a human mechanism. She has died already, and we somehow missed the crucial moment.
What I forgot:
Gigolo is Cotman and Gigolette is Stella. Their fortunes are actually going in the other direction -- they’re improving. Getting Stella to dive into a bucket has brought the couple success after years on the bread-line, scratching a living in dance halls and hotels and, by the way, failing to break into the movies. Cotman, we are told, is sincerely in love with Stella, and though he probably believes this, we certainly don’t. After the life they’ve had, love is an uncertain proposition. Hunger and exploitation hollowed the pair of them out, years ago.
Here’s the last line:
“‘I mustn’t disappoint my public,’ she sniggered.”
That “sniggered” is a master-stroke.
‘Fondly Fahrenheit’ by Alfred Bester (First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1954, and collected in Starburst, The New American Library, New York, 1958)
James Paleologue Vandaleur -- spoiled, weak, and feckless -- has one source of income, renting out the services of his multiple-aptitude android. The trouble being, his pride-and-joy loses its mind whenever the ambient temperature goes above 92.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Vandaleur’s been spending a lot of time with his intermittently murderous companion, and like any odd couple, they’ve begun to project their personalities onto each other. This isn’t telepathy. This isn’t what the science fiction academics call a “novum”. This is what happens in every marriage, and (incidentally) why James Fox’s Tony comes such a cropper in Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant.
So much for the material. What are you going to do with it?
THE RULES OF PULP FICTION
(an incomplete list)
RULE 1: state the rules of your stylistic game straight away, and with as much insolence and brevity as you can muster. Bester’s first line?
“He doesn’t know which of us I am these days, but they know one truth.”
RULE 2: you’re building a helter-skelter, not a viewing platform. *Keep it moving*.
“‘Then it got to arson. Then serious destruction. Then assault . . . that engineer on Rigel. Each time worse. Each time we had to get out faster. Now it’s murder. Christ! What’s the matter with you? What’s happened?’”
Make motion your god, and your aesthetics will veer off in odd directions. Lines like “She was short, stocky, amoral and a nymphomaniac” will sound to outsiders like you’re reaching for effect. You will know how painfully necessary this register is for you.
RULE 3: distil everything. There’s no time for realism. Reach for the compression bag of simile, so that a search party, say, becomes
“one mile of angry determination stretching from east to west across a compass of heat.”
RULE 4: round here you don’t show: you *tell*:
“‘If I could only get rid of you. If I didn’t have to live off you. God! If only I’d inherited some guts instead of you.’”
RULE 5: remember that you are a professional poisoner. Everything you do, however hedged, reduces to desire and death. So why hedge? Know what you are.
“‘It kidnapped a child. Took her out into the rice fields and murdered her.’
‘Raped her?’
‘I don’t know.’”
RULE 6: Overdrive rules 1-5 and after a lifetime’s obscurity, you will become Alain Robbe-Grillet. You will become David Lynch. You will become Barry Gifford. Which is to say: you will become one of the most accomplished experimentalists ever to make print.
At which point, you can climb on top of that dung-heap of yours and exclaim:
“Oh, it’s no feat to beat the heat.
All reet! All reet!
So jeet your seat
Be fleet be fleet
Cool and discreet
Honey . . .”
and no-one -- no-one -- will dare to say where you went wrong.
‘Jamesie’ by J. F. Powers (First published in The New Yorker magazine on June 19, 1943, and collected in Prince of Darkness and Other Stories, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y, 1947)
In this dreamt-up anthology of mine, ‘Jamesie’ is shouldering a lot of weight. It’s the story of a small-town kid, obsessed with baseball, who hero-worships Leftie (“the Local Pitcher Most Likely to Succeed”) only to watch as he throws a crucial game.
I want to tell you why this is a great story, but that\s like listening to a solo on the piccolo while the orchestra’’ butting in, heavy on the brass, screaming AMERICANA!
So I’ll come clean.
First, Powers’s ‘Jamesie’ is standing in for every Ray Bradbury protagonist I couldn’t otherwise squeeze into this letter (and throw in the youthful creations of Kotzwinkle and Toole while you’re at it).
Second (and here I have no excuse, because I’m no longer even talking about short stories) the baseball sequences in ‘Jamesie’ are emblematic of the sports commentary sequences that rise in a delirium-inducing tide over the narrative of Americana, my all-time favourite (Don DeLillo) novel.
(I am, incidentally, completely ignorant about American sports. I’m almost afraid of learning about them, for fear that suddenly Don DeLillo, Powers and the rest will, at the height of their Shamanic display, suddenly start to make practical sense. Wouldn’t that be a bust? Picture me as Maria Schneider, terminally disenchanted by Marlon Brando’s account of his ordinary midwestern life at the end of Last Tango in Paris...)
Okay, one last try: Only American writers write well about children in a condition of freedom, and Powers is the best of them at describing ordinary human disappointment.
“‘Why don't you get out of my room and go and be with them! you're on their side! and uncle Pat drinks near beer!’”
One other thing to like about Powers, before I end. Like Kipling, he operates in a lucid (Christian) moral universe. If any writer here thinks that would be a limitation on their art, may I humbly suggest that they grow up?
‘A Guatemalan Idyll’ by Jane Bowles (First appeared in Mademoiselle, April 1949, and collected in Plain Pleasures, Peter Owen, London, 1946)
I’ve read a lot of John. I’m new to Jane. And I don’t know how else to put this: Jane Bowles and her writer-composer husband John Bowles shared a brain. There’s no point asking who fed from whom. Two subtly distinct sensibilities, at a formative period in their lives, shared a space that I suspect bore a more than passing resemblance to Gerald Kersh’s “abominable little furnished room” -- only in their case it was situated abroad, in a world that the traveller in Jane’s story “had always imagined as a little boy to be inhabited by assassins and orphans, and children whose mothers went to work.”
A North American traveller arrives in a one-horse town in central America and makes exactly the mistake Kipling’s “Boy” makes in the story ‘Thrown Away’. He takes everyone there far too seriously, falls in love, gets into pointless arguments about money -- the full nine yards.
Here, though, we see his behaviour through the eyes of the people who live here, and for whom “not taking things seriously” turns out to be a code of behaviour more strange, arcane and violent than any our Traveller, bless him, could ever imagine.
John and Jane’s work is gendered in a way that is at once welcome and enriching. Where John reaches for the knife, the hammer and the nail in the ear, Jane contents herself with a slap -- only it’s a slap turned up to a sort of Bad News Tour 11, “a terrible blow in the face, using the hand which held the pills, and thus leaving them sticking to the child's moist skin and in her hair”. (If slaps are your thing, incidentally, go straight to ‘Camp Cataract’.) John’s alter egos caper and rattle off-stage toward their Shakespearean catharsis. Jane’s Traveller stays pinned, squirming, to the surface of things, beaten into submission by “a formless but militant sounding piece” of dance music (he’s dancing! with a woman! he’s having an idyll!) “which came to many climaxes without ending,” rather like this story, which is not so much a trap for its character (though it is that) so much as it is a test of strength for the reader, because I ask you, just how much anxiety can a body take?
‘The Station’ by H. E. Bates (first published in Argosy, January 1935, and collected in Cut and Come Again, Jonathan Cape, London, 1935)
M. John Harrison (who wrote the story ‘Small Heirlooms’, included here) once lent me Seven by Five, a chronologically organised selection of Bates’s short stories. “Your mission,” he told me: “show me the point beyond which everything he touches goes rotten.”
You see, at some point (and long after ‘The Station’ was first written) Bates worked out what it was he was good at, and it killed him stone dead. He stopped exploring his preoccupations and he started fetishizing them. How else could it have happened, that the author of Love for Lydia ended his career wearing the clown nose and big shoes of the “Pop Larkin” series?
In ‘The Station’, a lorry driver and his mate park up at a service station that the new road has forgotten. (You’re right to do a double-take: James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice puts almost exactly the same material through the engine of pulp fiction.)
The waitress is alone. She’s young, beautiful, snapped up at nineteen; her husband is away. (See what I mean about The Postman...?)
There’s a plum orchard out the back and the waitress goes and picks some plums so the drivers can have something sweet to eat. Then the lorry drivers pick some for themselves. They may as well, the plums are ripe, they won’t last long.
The drivers eat the plums. They drink their coffee. They pay and leave, and glancing back, they can see nothing of the station
“but the red sign flashing everlastingly out and on, scarlet to darkness, The Station to nothing at all.”
It’s the single most erotically charged story I have ever encountered. And I’m not talking about a moment in the story, or two, or three, or a special glance, or a particular word -- I’m talking about the eroticism infusing the entire story.
What a feat this is probably doesn’t need going over. The erotic is slippy -- we slide off it, again and again, into something else: power, politics, pornography, farce--
Farce is interesting: the English found a way of nailing the erotic in place with farce, and called it bawdy. If you want to know what the anima looks like, go look up a beach-shot of Barbara Windsor circa 1969.
But I digress. (You see? Slippy...)
‘The Station’ is what Bates could achieve when his talents had reached their full ripeness. And just like that, the season turned, the plums rotted, and the waitress grew disappointed, or frustrated, or bitter...
Or maybe none of those things! How about she was happy, and contented, and fulfilled, and -- God help her -- what if she just lived a long time?
That’d do it. That would be enough. Scarlet to darkness. Bates-as-Eros to Bates-as-silage. Genius to nothing at all.
‘Goodbye, My Brother’ by John Cheever (First pulished in The New Yorker, August 25, 1951, and collected in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, Berkley Publishing Corp., New York, 1952, and now in The Stories of John Cheever, Vintage, 1990)
Yes, this is the first short story in my Vintage paperback edition of Cheever’s Collected Stories.
Yes, I did only read it last week.
Yes, it was the first of Cheever I’ve ever read. (I’m paid to write books, not read ’em, as somebody else said -- another somebody I clearly haven’t read.)
But, since we’re coming to the end: In our inveterate pursuit of small heirlooms -- stories that distort us, so we may distort them -- it seems to me that the trick, is to read well, but not too seriously. To come at letters like life, not exactly “thoughtlessly, like the animals”, but rather with some necessary and healthful modesty, because the world does not stay still: it’s a helter-skelter, not a viewing platform.
Anyway: ‘Goodbye, My Brother’.
One of the most written-about stories in American letters. Here it is, in unorthodox company, pressing all kinds of buttons (especially the ones marked “Kipling”, “Powers” and “Bowles”), as the Pommeroy family emotionally reject their most conspicuously virtuous member, not because he’s virtuous (and he really is) but because -- well, put it this way: were an old man to slip on a banana peel and fall down an open manhole, and then were the manhole to teeter and then fall down on top of him, it would never once occur to Lawrence to split his sides laughing.
“Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do?”
If Neddy Merrill in ‘The Swimmer’ is too big for the world that contains him (yes, I’ve been picking the plums), brother Lawrence is too small. There are people on this good green earth that you must disregard. Are they good people? Doesn’t matter. Virtue counts. But so does scale.
‘Fingers and Toes’ by Leonard Michaels (First published in Going Places, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1969; also in The Collected Stories, FSG, 2007)
Whenever Channel 4 beamed a pair of naked buttocks into our living room (and that was way more often than you may remember), my mother would jump from her chair as at a point of order and declare (in a voice that might easily have been a model for late-period Margaret Thatcher at the dispatch box) “THAT’S UNNECESSARY!”
Every time I read a Leonard Michaels story, I find myself leaping out of my chair, and biting down on my lower lip so as not to let Harold Bloom catch me summoning the strong dead.
This is the story of one of those New York loft parties that you never get invited to (and by “you” of course I mean “me”) -- a “love?!” triangle, working itself out with mind-numbing absurdity and viciousness in a dance of jammed doors and tangled underwear, literary quotations and dead-eyed confessions.
“‘My feet are like seashells, Henry.”
‘No.’
‘Seashells. Curled, hard. I walk bonky, bonky”
Michaels was one of those wilful, leering, permanent adolescents who garnered plaudits and patrons now and again, much as Baal garnered virgins in the Brecht musical, and for the same reason: people's well-intentioned cloth-earedness. (How often must we be confusing “protean” with “unwashed”?)
His writing is like an accident in a firework factory -- all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. A spew of me-me-me and hee-hee-hee.
Ah, but who am I kidding? It’s all so compelling, catching and fixing everyday human hate in an eruption of verbiage the way Weegee caught fucks in his news-camera flashlight on the shores of Coney Island.
And as it was with Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig, so it will be with Michaels: in fifty years time he’ll be hailed a genius.
“I reread the note, chucked up laughs like the clap of big buttocks.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake man, was that really NECESSARY?
Simon Ings is a novelist and science historian based in London. His journalism appears in the Telegraph, the Spectator, New Scientist and Nature. http://simonings.com
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.
* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.
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