A Personal Anthology, by Melissa McCarthy
I met someone. They told me a story, and now I can’t take it out of my head.
‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley (First published in The Examiner, January 1818. Collected in Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; With Other Poems, C. and J. Ollier, 1819, and Selected Poems and Prose, Penguin Classics, 2017. Available online here)
“I met a traveller from an antique land,” starts the narrator. What is being offered to the reader in the course of this short (just fourteen lines) story? Person, setting, incident, mood; a precise choice of whittled-down language and detail; a particular way of considering, isolating, describing something, so that a moment in text resonates out through time and space and over “the lone and level sands.” These seem to me to be pertinent aspects of a short story; that’s what Shelley’s doing, entirely successfully, here. I think this one through in my mind when I wake up in the night, and it calms my heartbeat, sends me off to sleep.
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Included in Lyrical Ballads, J. and A. Arch, 1798 and The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, 1997. Available online here)
A man trying to go to a wedding meets another man. It’s the ancient Mariner, who collars the Guest and proceeds to tell him an absolutely cracking story. Then what happened – Death and a thousand thousand crawly things came out playing ghostly dice? Hold off unhand me greybeard loon, too right. The events are memorable, and the language lovely: “The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: / At one stride comes the dark;” (though I notice with interest that this verse is an improvement, added in to later editions).
I like the way it foreshadows Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick, too, with a sailor who has encountered a white creature seeing his ship go down with all companions into a whirlpool, while he alone bobs up to tell the tale. And the Mariner’s story demonstrates the power of storytelling: the Guest misses the ceremony; he’s been educated, informed and entertained; he ends up “A sadder and a wiser man.” If the Mariner’s adventure can wreak that on the Wedding-Guest, what might it do to us readers, too? A good story broadcasts or expands, on and on; it has an afterlife, as though radioactive.
‘Introduction’ by Alan Garner (First published in the NYRB reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift, 2011)
This is an intro written nearly forty years later for a reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift. It’s also a story, in a personal vein, in which Garner investigates the process of creativity, describing how ideas, memories, and events pile up then tug at your sleeve. He’s explaining how he came to write the book, and it involves a meeting with a neighbour: “A descendant of an old Mow Cop family told me a story she’d heard from her grandmother, who could neither read nor write.” But she had retained the oral tradition that some Spanish slaves, being marched north to build a wall, escaped and established a dark-haired community in Cheshire. Garner is “startled” to realise that this old, local folk tale is a version of the story of the Legion of the 9th, lost to Roman history in 120 AD.
He describes this meeting as an illustration of how he works, gathering scraps of stories, repeating and reworking them. And though he lights on the final line very early on in the process, he then has to “leave it and let the rest of the story write me.” Garner is a very distinctive writer. I wouldn’t say I even like his stories, not most of them, (though his retelling of the Russian ‘Bash Tchelik’ is fabulous) but they are completely haunting; they don’t let you go.
‘In Uncertain Time’ by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (First published in Spanish as ‘En el tiempo indeciso’ in the collection Cuentos de futbol, Alfaguara, 1995. First published in English in When I Was Mortal, Harvill, 1999)
In a Madrid nightclub the narrator encounters a famous footballer, then, later, his girlfriend. It turns out badly. I like the whole of Marías’s line that weaves in and out between reportage, film reviews, memoir, pondering, making up stories about the past. This one’s about writing about football, which I like. And about the relationship between time and language, football and sex.
Many of his short pieces are factual, about the “real” Marías, it seems. But, as with anything, once it’s written down and given to someone else to read, that becomes its status: a story on the page. Any other attributes: truth, fictionality, genre, person; they’re all only notional now. It’s all stories.
‘The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’ by Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne & Co., 1905)
This one is imaginary, sort of. The main tale is a story about a girl called Lucie who meets the eponymous washerwoman and discusses the increasingly precarious status of the rural working classes. Or, it’s a fairy tale about a hedgehog. All of Potter’s short stories have great illustrations, obviously, but the language – all the phrases, names, cadences – and the characters (Old Mr. Benjamin Bunny smoking his home-grown!), and sense of place, are wonderful even without the pictures.
And as with the Mariner, it’s a story with a framing device, which comes not at the start but as a footnote at the end: although some people think Lucie must have been dreaming, the narrator demurs: “I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells–and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-winkle!”
The narrator’s engagement with the beyond-the-human has altered her doors of perception, contributed to her intertextual world-building. If you like that sort of thing, Potter is way ahead of the curve. If you just like badly-behaved kittens, she’s also great.
‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad (First serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899. Collected in Youth, A narrative; and Two Other Stories, William Blackwood and Sons, 1902; Heart of Darkness, Penguin, 1989. Available online at Project Gutenberg here).
Now I’m tacking to the traditional, with a longish short story, told by an effacing narrator who sits in the boat at Greenwich and listens to Marlow telling a story about “how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap.”
I’ve just put this in because Conrad is brilliant, he’s a water/death writer, and he produces many short stories and long novels about which we can at length debate which is the best. Pass the port.
‘The Old Doll’s House’ by Damon Runyon (First published probably in Collier’s Weekly during the 1930s. Collected in More Than Somewhat, Constable and Company, 1937 and On Broadway, Penguin, 1990)
Another classic here with Damon Runyon. They’re all about the narrator strolling down Broadway and bumping into one of the guys. Who tells him a story. There are so many good ones – ‘Dancing Dan’s Christmas,’ ‘Dark Dolores’ (I like this one so much that we named our daughter after it) – but I’ll pick this one because it’s slightly Scheherazade-like, about how a good story can ward off the death that’s waiting just outside the door. The plot is that Lance McGowan has perhaps foolishly edged in on Angie the Ox’s splendid trade in merchandise, and is now being pursued by three very crude characters with sawed-offs. He takes refuge in the living-room of “the richest old doll in the world,” and charms this Miss Abigail Ardsley so convincingly that, during Lance’s subsequent trial for the murder of Angie the Ox, she’s happy to appear in Lance’s defence, stating that “It is just twelve o’clock by my clock” when Lance is with her, so it cannot have been him throwing four slugs into Angie at exactly this time, five blocks away.
There’s a twist, as in every Runyon. And as in every story, his language is just so funny. Or, the language of the nameless narrator, who explains that “the reason I know this story is because Lance McGowan tells most of it to me, as Lance knows that I know his real name is Lancelot, and he feels under great obligation to me because I never mention the matter publicly.”
More and more it strikes me, on re-reading Runyon, that there’s a commodity even more important than money or booze (that’s, potatoes or wet goods) to the guys and the dolls, and that’s information. That’s what they’re all hustling for, trying to control the flow of, conceal, withhold, embellish, all the time.
‘At the Gallery of National Art’ by C. D. Rose (In The Blind Accordionist, Melville House, 2021)
I pick this because C. D. is my current literary hero, with his expanding galaxy of books about books about photos of writers who write about reading books about typewriters… I like the way that he uses the form of the short story (and the lecture, the compilation, the bibliography,) to build up one large, hilarious oeuvre which basically expands upon the idea of “we love to read.” With Tintin jokes.
In this story, a blankly desolate man meets a visitor: “sometimes I am startled into feeling: this morning, for example, a young girl came to me and asked me a question at which I marvelled.” So says the narrator, who is, as he repeatedly states, a Warder at the Gallery of National Art. We don’t know the question, let alone the answer, as he’s unable to reply to her, then or years later. Time bundles and tangles in the gallery and in the Warder’s mind, as it does right through this collection, and through Rose’s other books.
The ‘A Brief Note on the Translation’ that precedes this collection of stories includes the useful observation that “I once knew someone (who was an idiot) who claimed they would never read a work in translation, as it was not authentic. But there is no authentic text, no original.”
‘Averroës's Search’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley (Originally published in Spanish as ‘La busca de Averroes’ in Sur, 1947. First collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First published in English trs by Norman Thomas de Giovanni in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. This edition, Penguin, 2000)
Averroës spends the day struggling to translate Aristotle into Arabic, before going to a dinner with tiresome, poetry-spouting intellectuals. One guest, a traveller from an antic land, confuses the others with his reportage: there are foreigners who, instead of telling a story in a civilized manner, do a bewildering activity of many people pretending (like little kids) to be the different characters who feature in that story. They’re actors, in China, but the whole concept of what they’re doing is inconceivable to the scholars in Córdoba.
That’s what this main story is about: the incommunicability of ideas, over time, through languages, and into different cultures. But, suggests the narrator, “History will record few things lovelier and more moving than this Arab physician’s devotion to the thoughts of a man separated from him by a gulf of fourteen centuries.”
This understanding of another is what the narrator, too, is attempting, as he explains when he pops up, Beatrix Potter-like, at the end. But as in all of Borges, there are mirrors and stage-sets, perspective changes and reverse shots everywhere: he feels that “my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story.”
‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’ by Arthur Conan Doyle (First published in The Strand Magazine, February 1927. Collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, John Murray, 1927, and World’s Classics, 1999. Also online at Project Gutenberg here)
This is a late Holmes story (thirty-six years after the first magazine appearances), so it’s a bit self-aware. It starts with Watson warning off any miscreants who fancy they can interfere with the great detective’s records: “The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes's authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.”
But it has the classic ingredients: a noble and trusting heroine, a lion, a fake lion, love affairs, cads, boardinghouse landladies, London, etc. What I also like about all the Holmeses is their model of story-creation as a way of solving a crime. A person comes into the study and tells them a story. Then through reading – reading the clues on the person, or in Holmes’ comprehensive archive, or in the evening papers, or by reading letters and telegrams that network across the country all through the day – through reading they create the resolution. By the end of each of Watson’s case notes, the crime is solved, society is re-levelled, and the case, like a disease or pathology, is cured.
‘The Curtain’ by Raymond Chandler (First published in Black Mask, 1936. Collected in Killer in the Rain, Houghton Mifflin / Riverside Press, 1964, and in Collected Stories, Everyman’s Library, 2002)
“The first time I ever saw Larry Batzel he was drunk outside Sardi’s in a secondhand Rolls-Royce.”
No no! you say, that isn’t right: Raymond Chandler’s 1953 The Long Goodbye starts, “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”
But this isn’t the novel, it’s one of his earlier short stories that he reworked, spliced together, reconfigured into the better-known books. This one is mainly the germ of The Big Sleep, though its opening incident – the P.I. meets a damaged man who spins him a yarn – recurs in The Long Goodbye. This novel – about friendship, devotion (it’s way better than The Great Gatsby), coffee and booze – is brilliant, so it’s illuminating to see this way-stage in its creation.
Reading this Collected Stories, in a volume heavy enough that it could kill a man, is slightly disorientating, like walking through the back rooms of a cinema where films of all the Chandlers are showing on different screens at staggered times and the reels have got mixed up: the same noir images flicker, repeat, start again then veer off differently.
I like this fuzzy repetition, whether it was prompted by financial need, lack of new ideas, or, (I’d hope) a compulsion to keep telling parts of the same story again and again. Because it won’t leave you alone.
‘I knew these people…’ by Sam Shepard (First screened as part of Paris, Texas [dir. W. Wenders], 1984. First published in Paris, Texas: Screenplay Ecco Press, 1991. There’s a pdf of the working script here, pp. 175-180)
“I knew these people, these two people,” starts Travis, the main speaker in this short story told in the form of a dialogue. “The girl was very young, about seventeen or eighteen, I guess. And the guy was quite a bit older. He was kind of raggedy and wild. And she was very beautiful, you know?”
The other speaker doesn’t say very much, just an interjection or two, mainly at the start. It sounds like the man is telling her about two characters from the past. But by the end of the story, we can see what she, too, gradually understands – “I thought I recognized your voice for a minute” – that this story is about a woman and a man, and it’s now being told by that same man, to the very woman who features in it. He’s talking about them, their shared (disastrous) history, how he understands it now.
It’s a crushing piece of story-telling (admittedly in the film it is consummately delivered by actors Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, with Ry Cooder on guitar), touching on the gap between how we first understand ourselves, and how we look back; about failure of love, about dreams and the limits of language; about loss. The narrative starts with the factual and historical, but turns sad, then horrific, then dream-like – she dreamed of escaping, Travis recounts, while he wanted to be far away, “Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets.”
It ends, in a way, inconclusively. But what story doesn’t? You can’t include everything in one text. And then it crumbles and decays (as Shelley’s desert traveller suggests); everything will have disappeared, except a fragment or a figment.
I close with this speech because it does so beautifully the thing I’m interested in throughout this selection: it’s by telling a story about somebody else that they both come to understand that it has actually been about them all along. The short story isn’t about someone else, or, it is, but it plays tricks, moves person, time, and place, so that by the time we’ve got back to the end, it’s also about someone different: you. And you’re not quite the same as you were at the start.
I met someone, they told me a story, and now I can’t get it out of my head. It was already in there.
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Melissa McCarthy’s latest short text, ‘Delta, Darkness, Ditto,’ is published in the artists book Exceptional Subjects, a collaboration between her and the photographer Norman McBeath. Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro (Sagging Meniscus) came out in 2023, in the wake of Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion (Sternberg) of 2019. She’s a contributing editor at Exacting Clam magazine. See her website sharksillustrated.org for more.
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