A Personal Anthology, by Charles Boyle

Editor’s note: The Personal Anthology schedule is looking unusually empty for the next couple of months so if you have wondered about getting in touch to enquire about contributing, now would be a good time! Now, back to Charles…

Print advertising is expensive. When I started CB editions in 2007 I took a cheap option, placing a classified ad in the LRB: ‘Imagine yourself, dear reader, sitting in your favourite chair with your book and “your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array”, and every so often you look up and say, even if there is no one else in the room but the dog, Hey, switch off the TV and listen to this – and you start reading aloud.’ I offered a free CBe book to the first six readers who could name the story from which the nine drinks were quoted, and I was going to start there, with ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’ by Donald Barthelme, but I’ve reread it and decided that Barthelme is one of those writers who for me was liberating when first encountered – Oh, you can do it that way! – but I’m now in a different place. Writers are ruthless.

‘At Hiruharama’ by Penelope Fitzgerald (First published in New Writing, Minerva/Arts Council, 1992; collected in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000)

Reading aloud remains important. Publishing has been a way of doing this. I used to read aloud to a friend who for more than forty years ran a tiny bookshop in Notting Hill, more shed than shop, when she was in a care home and we knew from the first few paragraphs whether or not we wanted to carry on. Penelope Fitzgerald flew past that test. A number of the review quotes on her short novels express both deep admiration and bafflement – and that’s another test the writing I like best has to pass: however much I study it, I cannot work out how it’s done. I’ll offer ‘At Hiruharama’ from Fitzgerald’s posthumous collection of stories, The Means of Escape: genealogy, a remote homestead in New Zealand (“Don’t picture a shack, though. There were two rooms, one with a stove and one with a bedstead, and a third one at the back for a vegetable store”), a home birth for which the doctor arrives late but not too late to rescue a twin daughter the father had put in the waste with the afterbirth – “whereas the first daughter never got to be anything in particular, this second little girl grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well” – and Brinkman, visiting, who is hungry:

Two more women born into the world! It must have seemed to him that if this sort of thing went on there should be a good chance, in the end, for him to acquire one for himself. Meanwhile, they would have to serve dinner sometime.

The receptionist on Sunday afternoons at the care home where I read this story aloud was a Polish woman called Mrs Boyle. I said to her: ‘Maybe we were married, once.’ She gave me long look: ‘I don’t think so.’

‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ by Mavis Gallant (First published in The New Yorker, 1963, and available online to subscribers; variously collected, including in Paris Stories, NYRB, 2002, and Collected Stories, Everyman, 2016)

Two self-imposed rules: no writer I have published with CBe; and no Chekhov, no Isaac Babel, no Alice Munro, no certain others who I’d like to believe can be taken as read (and re- and re-read). I sincerely believe that Mavis Gallant belongs in the latter gang, and she is here only because she seems to have a cult rather than a wide following. ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ is one of her best-known stories; but really, there are no duds. 

No, begin at the beginning: Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost.

But that’s the end, the final sentences. This is the beginning:

Now that they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, ‘Everybody did well in the international thing except us.’

     ‘You have to be crooked,’ he tells her.

     ‘Or smart. Pity we weren’t.’

But no, the real beginning is at the top of the page, the words of the title, the ice wagon going down the street. “When I was a kid I would get up in the summer before the others, and I’d see the ice wagon going down the street.” That’s Agnes speaking. The street was in Saskatchewan. Agnes’s family was not rich. Agnes is Peter’s boss in the office in Geneva, a girl, twenty-three at most. “The people he worked with had told him a Scandinavian girl was arriving, and he had expected a stunner. Agnes was a mole: She was small and brown, and round-shouldered as if she had always carried parcels or younger children in her arms.” Peter is afraid: “He saw the ambition, the terror, the dry pride. She was the true heir of the men from Scotland; she was at the start. She had been sent to tell him, ‘You can begin, but not begin again.’”

Agnes, who never drinks, gets drunk at a party and tells Peter about the ice wagon while, under orders from the hostess of the party, he is escorting her home. And while Peter’s wife, Sheilah, back at the party, is starting an affair with a man who will get the Fraziers out of Geneva and onto “the Oriental tour that should have made their fortune”. They reach Agnes’s apartment: “The room was neat and belonged to no one.” She showers and puts on a dressing gown and rubs her cheek on his shoulder. “He thought, This is how disasters happen.” Nothing happens. He goes home.

But something has happened, something that will have Peter still wondering, years later, “what they were doing over there in Geneva – not Sheilah and Peter, Agnes and Peter. It is almost as if they had once run away together, silly as children, irresponsible as lovers.” Something to do with the ice wagon – which he imagines seeing in the place of Agnes, and “the weak prairie trees and the shadows on the sidewalk”. He could take that morning that belongs to Agnes for himself, if he wanted, “but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day? Sheilah is here, it is a true Sunday morning, with its dimness and headache …” Peter has always been lost.

‘The Carpenter Kushakov’ by Daniil Kharms (in Today I Wrote Nothing, translated by Matvei Yankelevich, The Overlook Press, 2009; online version here)

Kharms is here because he is a wonder but also to refute those evil Amazon and marketing-department algorithms that assume I have a single-track mind and that if I like one kind of writer I cannot possibly like a completely different species of writer.

The carpenter Kushakov goes out to buy some glue and slips on the pavement and busts his head. Goes to a drugstore and buys a bandage and tapes up his head. Goes out again and slips and busts his nose. Buys a bandage and tapes up his nose. Goes out again and slips and busts his cheek. Buys a bandage and tapes up his cheek. Goes out again and slips and busts his chin. Buys a bandage and … Back home no one recognises him and they lock the door. “The carpenter Kushakov stood awhile on the landing, spat and went outside.”

Around the time I first read this story my near-neighbour slipped on an icy pavement and put out his hand to break his fall and broke his wrist. And the next day he slipped again and put out the arm that was not in plaster and broke his other wrist. Kushakov reminds me of the old lady who swallowed a fly – and then spider to catch fly, and then bird to catch spider, and then cat to catch bird … Eventually, horse to catch cow. “She’s dead, of course.” Kharms’s blend of absurd logic and structural repetition and violence surely appeals to children. I’m going to read Daniil Kharms to my grandchildren. 

‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño (First published in The New Yorker, 2005, and available online to subscribers; in Last Evenings on Earth, translated by Chris Andrews, Harvill Secker, 2007; Vintage paperback, 2008)

B, “who is inclined to melancholy (or so he likes to think)”, and his father drive from Mexico City to Acapulco for a holiday. B is aged 22 and is reading an anthology of French surrealist poets translated into Spanish. They stay in an almost empty hotel; they sleep, eat, order beers, stroll on the beach, drive around, watch TV, even have a little adventure (their hired boat capsizes) – time passing “in a placid sort of daze that B’s father associates with ‘The Idea of the Holiday’ (B can’t tell whether his father is serious or pulling his leg)”. Eventually, of course, the mood turns “and an icy phase begins, a phase which appears to be normal but is ruled by deities of ice (who do not, however, offer any relief from the heat that reigns in Acapulco)”. The story ends a split second before violence hits the page. Much of the story depends on the banal but watching Bolaño trying to write dull and failing dismally is one of life’s pleasures.

‘Rose’ by Guy de Maupassant (First published in 1884; variously collected, included in Boule de Suif and Other Stories, translated by H. N. P. Sloman, Penguin, 1946)

I have read very little Maupassant. I understand this story to be a seriously odd record of male perception of female desire.

Margot and Simone ride in a landau along the Rue d’Antibes in Cannes on the evening of a festival in which men and women hurl bouquets of flowers, then instruct their coachman to drive out to a nearby bay – tranquillity, bliss, “but there’s just one thing lacking”. “A little love, you mean?” “Yes.”

For Margot, not to be loved, “even if only by a dog”, would be intolerable. Simone is more picky: she’d rather not be loved at all than by – for example – the coach driver. Margot insists that to be loved by a servant is amusing, and recounts the story of the maid she hired four years previously, Rose: a tall, thin, shy girl, skilled dressmaker, genius as a hairdresser. Rose dressed and undressed Margot, and “after my bath she rubbed and massaged me, while I dozed on my sofa”. But then a police inspector arrived and “they took my maid away” in handcuffs: Rose was a man, an escaped rapist and murderer. Margot claims that she felt no anger at having been deceived, and no shame at having been “handled and touched by this man”, but rather “a deep sense of humiliation as a woman” – because, as I understand it, Rose, a rapist, had rejected her as a sexual being.

A final oddity. I’m pretty sure Maupassant has got the women out of sync at the end, and that in the final paragraph it’s Simone and not Margot who is staring at the brass buttons on the coachman’s livery. Am I wrong? If I’m right, why has no one else noticed?

Gauging a barrel by Piero della Francesca (in Trattato d'abaco, c.1460; quoted in English translation in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford University Press, 1972)

Going off piste. I like stories that infiltrate or mimic other forms: letters, recipes, inventories, instruction manuals. Here is a found story, both exact and mysterious in its dependence on another way of interpreting the world, in the form of instructions for calculating how much wine your barrel can hold. I like the deadpan tension between the absurd precision of the fractions and the deceptively random nature of the sequential instructions. I like the fact that the author is also the painter of The Nativity and The Baptism of Christ in London’s National Gallery: sublime brushwork and mathematical competence were not entirely separate skills, and Piero could assume the same mathematical knowledge from his lay-educated literate audience. And because I conceive of maths as a (very beautiful) language unto itself, reading this passage is like reading a story in translation. A braccio is an obsolete Italian unit of measurement based on the length of the human arm.

‘Summer Day’ by Ivan Bunin (in Sunstroke: Selected Stories of Ivan Bunin, trans. Graham Hettlinger, Ivan R. Dee Inc., 2002)

Going short: a dozen lines. “And all day a bootmaker sitting barefoot on a rotting bench near a tumbledown shack, his belt unbuckled and his long shirt hanging loose, the sun beating down on his shaggy head. He sits there killing time with a red dog.” “Shake!” But the dog doesn’t know that command. Eventually the dog “lifts one paw uncertainly, drops it back to the ground”, and gets hit in the face for its pains.

‘Summer Night’ by Elizabeth Bowen (in Look at All the Roses, Jonathan Cape, 1941; collected in The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1999)

Going longer. I found this story when, during the time I wrote under the pen name Jack Robinson, I went looking for my family in fiction. There are male Robinsons in fiction by Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Kafka, Céline, Muriel Spark, Gerald Brenan, Sherwood Anderson, Chris Petit; in films by Patrick Keiller; in poems by Weldon Kees and Simon Armitage; and yes, they share distinctive family traits. ‘Obdurate’ comes to mind. ‘Imperturbable’ is one of the first adjectives applied to Bowen’s Robinson, a factory manager in a small town in Ireland, separated from his wife and children. “When Robinson showed up, late, at the tennis club, his manner with women was easy and teasing, but abstract and perfectly automatic. From this had probably come the legend that he liked women ‘only in one way’.”

A woman drives fast through hilly countryside at sunset to spend the night with Robinson, her lover. Robinson has guests, a deaf woman and her loopy brother, who stay beyond their welcome and are leaving just as the woman arrives. In fact the whole story seems intent on crowding out the lovers – pages are occupied by the woman’s husband, and her two children, and Aunt Fran – and when, finally, the lovers are alone everything is awkward, neither of them knows how to behave. There’s a war on: “You cannot look at the sky without seeing the shadow, the men destroying each other.” The only people who come out of this well are the deaf woman and Vivie, one of the woman’s children: “One arbitrary line only divided this child from the animal: all her senses stood up, wanting to run the night.”

I did think about choosing the scene – around 20 pages – in Bowen’s The House in Paris set in the garden of an emptied-out house in Twickenham on an idle, warm afternoon at the end of April: Karen, Max and Naomi lying under a cherry tree in blossom, silences and drifting talk (“What I say would often be right if I meant something else”), hands touching on the grass. In my mind it’s a scene that swims free of its context, of what comes before and what after, to become a complete short story in itself; many novels contain such episodes.

‘Dancing’ by James Buchan (in Slide, Heinemann, 1991; Minerva paperback, 1992)

I need a story in here from one of the late 20th-century white males who peddled white male lust and privilege in gorgeous bespoke sentences and who for a time had me in thrall: James Kennaway, James Salter, Alfred Hayes … I’m choosing ‘Dancing’ by James Buchan, about whom Michael Hofmann once declared: “I don’t believe this country has a better writer to offer.” ‘Dancing’ is the third in a series of stories that make up Slide, a book that (says the blurb) “calmly records the moral demolition of an Englishman”. The opening: “My first foreign posting was in Kuwait, where I went in 1979 as Press and Information Secretary at the Embassy”: booze, sex, death, cover-ups, tribal loyalty. The closing:

    ‘Dance,’ Gay shouted. ‘Dance, cunts.’

    She was falling. Her hair swept a Persian rug. Her eyes were wide open, looking past me or at nothing at all. I felt my balance go. I hit the chess table, and felt it sway and teeter over. The bronze horse danced. Picture lights. Mouths agape. Blue stripes. A burst of sparks. Black shoes. Kurt Axel.   

‘The Taking of Elżbieta’ by Ryszard Kapuściński (in Nobody Leaves, translated by William R. Brand, Penguin Classics, 2017)

Grace Paley, Isak Dinesen, Alejandro Zambra and Etgar Keret are knocking at the front door … But I left the back door open and this one, which I happened to be reading at the time of making this list, snuck in. Nobody Leaves is a collection of Kapuściński’s early domestic reportage in post-Stalinist but still Communist Poland, bulletins from a place that, as the translator notes in the introduction, “was, from our perspective today, as ‘exotic’ as any of the Third World countries he covered”. Fact, but it reads as fiction. Elżbieta was born in late 1939; her father was imprisoned by the Germans, her mother dug beets (“the soil that beets grow in is heavy soil”); after the war her father suffered two heart attacks and couldn’t work, her mother sold the medicines she was given for her tuberculosis “so that I could give Elżbieta what she needed”. The girl becomes a schoolteacher but instead of going to university she enters a convent: “At Elżbieta’s home it was cold, the pot was empty, and her mother lay there spitting clots. At the nuns’ it was warm and they fed her well.” The mother travels to the convent and is rebuffed; writes to her daughter and the letter is not delivered; writes to the Primate of Poland and is told “we advise you to keep quiet”. The narrator: “It strikes me that this is not bad advice … I also think that centuries of experience have gone into this reply.” The narrator visits Elżbieta – “we were kneeling in the snow, under a low sky, with an iron grille between us” – and is asked what he has brought for her. “I really don’t know. Perhaps only your mother’s scream.”

For more Polish reportage-as-story, see Hanna Krall, The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories(translated by Madeline G. Levine, Other Press, 2005).

‘Love, Death & Trousers’ by Laura Francis and Alexander Masters (Published in The Paris Review, Summer 2017; available online to subscribers)

Curated transcription. The curator here is Alexander Masters, author of A Discarded Life, based on 148 diaries found in a skip in Cambridge in 2001. The diary-writer was Laura Francis, live-in companion and servant for an elderly professor. Masters on Francis: “Laura could be an excellent diarist but frequently wasn’t … Her writing is repetitive, self-obsessed, confused, and two millimeters high.” But: “Even when the diaries are agonizingly tedious, you want to go on reading them because they are true. There’s none of the story-teller’s fraudulent scene-setting, character development, points of conflict, concluding resolution. You are peering in on a real woman who thinks she is alone – a woman in the final stages of tedium. She is writing about being human: the arbitrariness, the impotence, the fog.”

For The Paris Review, Masters arranged selected diary entries on specific subjects into ‘found stories’. The trousers one is hilarious. Some entries from another selection:

Various dates, 1959:

E said I’m very small, not interested in the world.

E said she didn’t believe in any of my gifts, not even writing.

E said I am stupid.

E said my song-capacity nothing, just a manifestation of the sexual impulse, like the singing of the birds.

July 23rd: Sat with the flickering lights in the leaves of trees playing in the hall, and thought thoughts that weren’t thoughts.

Aug: A desperate need for E; if E would have nothing more to do with me, I’d have nothing more to live for – would go ‘off my rocker’, or commit suicide. Almost feel I HATE E.

‘Itinerary’ by Lucia Berlin (in Evening in Paradise, Picador, 2018)

“I was leaving Chile for college in New Mexico. It was the going alone that was so glamorous. Dark glasses and high heels.” And it’s her first plane trip. There are stop-offs, at each of which her father has arranged for someone to meet her. Lima: Ingeborg, long tan legs, a large colour photograph of her father wearing “a rose-colored shirt that I had never seen before”. Panama: Mrs Kirby, canasta in “the pale silence of the American sector”. Miami: aunt Martha, grotesquely fat, “I clung to her, sank into her and her smell of Jergens lotion, Johnson’s baby powder”. Albuquerque: “The air was clean and cold in New Mexico. No one met me.” Pride, excitement, vulnerability, “so much I did not see or understand, and now it is too late”.

Where has Lucia Berlin been all my life? She was published by small presses in the 1980s and by Black Sparrow Press from 1990 and she died in 2004 and it took until 2015 for a big publisher, and then critics and reviewers, to wake up and take notice. She is sharp, quick (but alert to everything going on in the room), funny, unafraid, generous. (All things which contemporary mainstream publishing is not: I have no doubt there are other Lucia Berlins out there still waiting for the readers they deserve.) Of course she wrote short stories: there were too many other things going on in her life to sit down at a desk for the time it takes to write a novel.

Charles Boyle is founder-editor of the small press CB editions. He has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction (sometimes under pen names). Forthcoming in November: Invisible Dogs.

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,800 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 is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors.

* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read and subscribe here.