A Personal Anthology, by Michael Caines
What a dauntingly brilliant series this is. All that I can contribute to it, I think, is the following clutch of recommendations – which is, alas, merely a list of stories that have troubled, or continue to trouble, me. That have troubled me for two days or two months or two years or two decades. That will trouble me, I suspect, for a good while yet. Admittedly, the trouble is sometimes an entirely pleasurable one. And this is part of what short stories are about, perhaps. You could say. Even so. I am – you know – troubled.
And that’s just by short stories.
Enjoy!
‘Mock’s Curse’ by T. F. Powys (from Mock’s Curse: Nineteen stories, edited by Elaine and Barrie Mencher, Brynmill Press, 1995)
"The Old Testament Scriptures end with a terrible word. This word no polite language of modern times can ever soften . . . ." T. F. Powys’s power over me is something remarkable. He often writes about pariahs of one sort of another; I feel that if wasn’t one already, I become one, and a complaisant one at that, when I read him. He wrote many fine stories and lived in a world of his own. One anecdote has it that, when he was eventually persuaded to take a ride in a motor vehicle, for all the wonder and speed of the experience, he merely commented, with the fluttering visions revealed by the vehicle’s headlamps, that travel by such means must have been hell for lepidopterists. (Also recommended: the novels Mr Weston’s Wine and Unclay, as well as Powys’s various story collections.) ‘Mock’s Curse’ is the story of two brothers, John and James, and how they fall out.
‘The Widow’s Widow’ by Rose Rappoport Moss (First published 1998. Collected in In Court, Penguin, 2007).
"I was thinking how lucky they were to live at this moment when the whole country and the world would see a change momentous enough for myth." The story (the story? one of the stories?) is that South Africa gave up on the nefarious idea of apartheid in the early 1990s. And that that process of surrender took a few years. Rose Rappoport suggests that history is less willing to play along with human whim than we might hope. It is narrated from the point of view of someone returning to South Africa after some time, a considerable time, abroad. Black and white remains fixedly black and white. There is a long way to go. It reminds me of both a period of grand political change in my own lifetime; and also, somewhat more trivially, of my local library, since that is where I came across Rappoport’s work in the first place. Nobody had ever recommended her, written about her at me, or anything like that. Gor’ bless the British library system.
‘La Penseuse’ by Dorothy Edwards (from Rhapsody, Parthian, 1927)
"It was the first time since Mary’s girlhood that she had been in a library which was the possession of and the expression of the tastes of a single person." Public libraries are all very well, but, alas, I reserve especial interest and (often) admiration for other people’s personal libraries. Dorothy Edwards has the female protagonist of this story enter such a library, and it is as quietly astonishing a scene as one could wish for. I like this Dorothy Edwards. ‘La Penseuse’ is a story of three intelligent, interesting people who grow close because they live in the same Welsh village; then, who would have thought it, things change. It is both sad and happy. I am not sure I will ever get over it, nor Edwards’s way with telling the story in the first place.
‘The Creature’ by Edna O’Brien (from A Scandalous Woman (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990)
"She was always referred to as The Creature by the townspeople, the dressmaker for whom she did buttonholing, the sacristan, who used to search for her in the pews on the dark winter evenings before locking up, and even the little girl Sally, for whom she wrote out the words of a famine song." Look, I’m sorry about this. But I hope that the quality of the stories I’m talking about here, should you actually wish to read them for yourself, will justify my selection, and really, well, really that’s the only criterion, isn’t it? (Isn’t it . . . ?) This story by Edna O’Brien concerns the narrator herself (I think it’s herself) and her putting things right. Thank the Lord for people trying to put things right.
‘The Skylight’ by Penelope Mortimer (from Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Arrow, 1966)
"The heat, as the taxi spiralled the narrow hill bends, became more evident." Apart from anything else, I like my copy of this story collection by Penelope Mortimer, from 1966 (the collection first being published six years earlier). It features, on the front cover, a fine monochrome portrait of the author laconically burning her way through a cigarette, leaning back and observing all human folly in her wicker chair, The story itself, by the way, tells of a mother arriving at a holiday destination with her five-year-old son, and the anxieties that accrue, accumulate, accrete grotesquely, around the idea. The tension it generates is, to my mind, extraordinary. But don’t think about that now. Just relax. Pour a drink. Read on.
‘At Sea, at Night’ by Ivan Bunin, translated by Sophie Lund (First published 1923. Collected in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, Penguin, 1992)
Now I suppose, approaching the halfway point of this highly personal anthology, it is a not unreasonable time to confess that I am myself, oh yes, a dabbler in the fine art of fiction. Oh yes! I have myself written more than one short story. Although I should always be getting on with something else (commissioning a review, reading some long-deferred classic etc), and therefore seldom begin, let alone threaten to complete, something on a grander scale than a short story. I love a short story. My boss expressed not so long ago, in podcast form, his mystification at the idea of short fiction being fulfilling but, alas, we feel differently on this point. Long books daunt me but also, obscurely, move me to annoyance. What is the point of them? Why use many words when few will do? Alas – here we are. And, sure enough, here is Ivan Bunin. A master of the form. This particular instance, about a dialogue between two men meeting on the deck of ship ‘on its way from Odessa to the Crimea’, is economic yet quite open to vistas of . . . life. They are a ‘pair of celebrities’; yet here they are alone, struggling to come to terms with one another. Personally, I find it quietly, desperately riveting.
‘The Crisis’ by M. John Harrison (from You Should Come with Me Now, Comma Press, 2017. Available to read here)
"You sit over a one-bar fire in a rented room." Humblebrag time! I’ve met that M. John Harrison. I heard him quietly read this story during a wondrous evening of art, organized by somebody artistic in East London. It struck me as uncanny at the time, with its straightforward, serious-minded depiction of the homeless being deployed in a countermeasure against the incursion of alien invaders in the City of London. But like those invaders, Harrison’s story itself exists on more than one plane; and once you’ve glimpsed that, life is never the same again. I feel that this is a story that really has altered me. I was so proud, ludicrously proud, to have even a shred of involvement in seeing it published in the TLS last November.
‘The House Made of Sugar’ by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Daniel Balderston (from Thus Were Their Faces, New York Review Books)
"Suspicion kept Cristina from living." Involvement is a word with a somewhat different meaning in relation to this bleak beauty, in which a man (I think) recalls the story of his true love’s curious attitude to life, the house they buy together, the little lie he tells in order to avoid upsetting her, the consequences of that lie . . . . Luck plays a part in this story. As it does in:
‘Faithful Lovers’ (formerly ‘The Reunion’) by Margaret Drabble (first published in Winter's Tales 14, ed. Kevin Crossley-Holland, from Macmillan, 1968. Collected in A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, Penguin, 2011). Available to read here)
"There must have been a moment at which she decided to go down the street and around the corner and into the café." This is the story of a chance encounter, between a man and a woman. For some reason, I think it happened around the corner from a place where, years later, I encountered someone I had loved, and still loved, momentarily. More to the point, it is a London story, and such things do happen. I have met my brother twice by chance, under different circumstances, wandering through different parts of town. Margaret Drabble magnificently sets off old disagreements against enduring memory, passion and the rest. Oh for a scintilla, whatever that is, of her skill.
‘Blow’ by Susan Minot (from Lust and other stories, William Heinemann).
"He called in the middle of the day to ask if he could come over." The end, alas, is drawing near. Do I have many more tales of regret and loss and melancholy, and all the rest, to hand? Ah, well, for a slight (insultingly slight; forgive me) change of pace, here’s a (AHEM) sexy little number by Susan Minot (and from a hardback that, oh I admit, calamitous though it is, that I bought for the title and the sexy author photo! Well, what can I say? I was young(er) and foolish(er) then; and as for now . . .). In ‘Blow’, Bill drops by. The narrator notes what a mess he is: "He was like a hunted man". He jitters around. It’s a fairly short short story. The gift, the sting, the killer blow is in the last line. Susan Minot: not just a pretty face, you dubious, desperate, positively stupid, semi-literate boy. I’m troubled by the place this story has in the world.
‘Scropton, Sudbury, Marchington, Uttoxeter’ by Jessie Greengrass (from An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, JM Originals, 2015)
"My parents were grocers." Ten down, two to go. So many wonderful writers, so many wonderful stories, I now realize, that are not going to make the cut. Such as it is. But consider this, and while we’re on the subject of regret: Jessie Greengrass’s last story in her first collection, about a woman (I think) recalling her parents, and paying their old haunt (singular) a visit. Am I going to cling to Jessie’s coattails, too, as well as M. John’s? Yes, I think I am. Ms Greengrass was once a member of a small outfit called the Brautigan Book Club, as was I. It was fun, you might say, hearing people enthuse about Richard Brautigan. But here we are, and Jesse is a superb short writer and I’m . . . OK. Never mind.
‘The Dead’ by James Joyce (from Dubliners. Available to read here)
Let this personal anthology be taken as proof that there are far too many heart-horrifyingly good short story writers out there. In a dozen stories, you can, of course, only scrape the surface; dip a foot, as it were, amid a dozen specimens of the species. Lord knows, and now you know, too, that some extraordinary things have slipped by me. I would name all the wonders if I could: William Maxwell, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Anne Enright, Helen Simpson’s ‘Up at a Villa’ and . . . all that rest. For now, though, the end must be the incontrovertible end to Dublinersby James Joyce. Not only because of the story, but because, a couple of years ago, I heard the actor Aidan Gillen read the story in the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, attached to Shakespeare’s Globe, and it was then that the wonder of thing struck me anew. Some stories are glimpses. ‘The Dead’ is not, of course. Mr Gillen made it mesmerising. The story and the performance combined perfectly. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.
Michael Caines works at the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the editor of a TLS bicentennial celebration of Jane Austen. He is writing a short book about literary prizes, and a slightly longer book about Brigid Brophy; and he recently received a Literature Matters award from the Royal Society of Literature to establish a free quarterly books newspaper, to be called the ‘Brixton Review of Books’. Potential readers and contributors alike are encouraged to get in touch!
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