A Seasonal, Collaborative Personal Anthology 2021
In the four years since its inception I have ended the year with a collaborative seasonal Personal Anthology, in which people pick their favourite Christmassy, New Years-y or plain wintry short story. This year, however, suggestions were in short supply. I guess we’re all tired. So for this final email of the year I have gathered together a dozen entries from previous years’ Christmas Specials. I hope you enjoy them!
I am scheduling A Personal Anthology for the new year right now, so if you would like to contribute – if you have a dozen favourite short stories you would like to introduce and write about for our weekly email – then please do get in touch!
Other than that, I do hope you have a Merry Christmas, and that we all have a happier New Year in 2022.
‘The Christmas Shopping’ by James Kelman (First published in The Burn, Secker & Warburg, 1991)
Like much of Kelman’s fiction ‘The Christmas Shopping’ (written in the demotic Glaswegian dialect of the author’s hometown) begins in medias res, plunging the reader if not so much into the heart of the action, then at least somewhere towards the fag-end of a rambling, apparently inconsequential anecdote:
That obelisk thing I was talking about, it was lying stranded down the back of Argyle Street.
As observed by the story’s unnamed narrator, the obelisk thing (its description is later refined to “more like a Celtic Cross”) causes minor waves of interest in the steady stream of Christmas shoppers. A couple of men from one of the local bars give it a cursory glance before moving on (“one of them was fucking pished anyway”); a group of teenagers laugh at the object, possibly contemplating mischief (“Teenagers, you’re never quite sure,”); a businessman (“a posh cunt with bowler and brolly”) seems less annoyed at an obstacle in his path, more at the unexpected disturbance in the natural order of things; while an elderly lady is so intrigued that she decides to take a closer look, free from any hint of embarrassment (“You notice that a lot about old folk; seen it and done it”).
Finally, a young woman in a red hat approaches the obelisk. Up until now the narrator has been a largely unknown quantity (though the reader will have been able to glean a pretty decent thumbnail sketch of his character from his attitude towards the various passers-by). But the arrival of the woman in the red hat moves the narrator to action, bringing the story to a close which, at first glance, is as innocuous as its beginning:
I felt like asking her if she fancied going for a coffee or a cup of tea or something but then I noticed something in her face when she sees me so I says to myself, Fuck that for a game, and I just crosses ower into Ingram Street and I carried along the way I was going. Some women are funny, I wisni taking any chances.
At just over two pages in length, ‘The Christmas Shopping’ a beautifully succinct example of Kelman’s talent for capturing transient scraps of the quotidian; holding them up to the light for us to marvel at for a fleeing moment; before the world moves on and they’re gone forever. And while it may be tempting to read allegorical meaning into it (the fallen cross, the lone bystander, the yearning for companionship/shelter during the festive season, etc) to me it is simply, and more affectingly, a snapshot of a lonely man in a crowd; the bland irony of the title only adding to the story’s poignancy and its underlying sense of frustration and pathos.
Chosen by W.B. Gooderham. Gooderham is a freelance writer. He blogs at http://livesinlit.com and http://bookdedications.co.uk/. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.
*
‘The Loudest Voice’ by Grace Paley (First published in The Little Disturbances of Man, Doubleday, 1959 and can now be found in The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, Virago Modern Classics. You can hear Grace Paley read it for Vermont Public Radio here)
‘The Loudest Voice’ is the only story I know of about being Jewish at Christmas time. Shirley Abramowitz, growing up in a secular Jewish family in the 1930s, is called upon to narrate her school’s nativity play because her “voice is the loudest”. It’s hard to describe what a revelation the story was for me when I first read it. Like Shirley, I grew up in a secular Jewish immigrant family in New York. My parents were ambivalent about Christmas, religious identity, the mythology of America… almost everything; they sometimes approved of celebrating Christmas and sometimes didn’t.
Every time I thought I found a book or TV show about people who didn’t celebrate Christmas (The House Without a Christmas Tree, a Hallmark Special), it turned out to be about people who stopped celebrating because of a trauma instead of because of cultural reasons, and the trauma was always addressed and the Christmas tree erected and decorated before the show was over.
But Christmas in ‘The Loudest Voice’ isn’t magical or redemptive – it appears simply as one kind of cultural practice in a multicultural society. “The teachers became happier and happier. Their heads were ringing like the bells of childhood,” Shirley observes, as the children decorate the school for a holiday many of them don’t celebrate. I recently found a recording of the story that Paley made for Vermont Public Radio in 1998. Hearing it so many years after I first read it, I was struck by how deftly and perfectly Paley conjures up a working class New York neighbourhood where it is a good thing to have the loudest voice: “There is a certain place where dumbwaiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home. My voice is the loudest.”
Chosen by Linda Mannheim. Linda is the author of three books of fiction including This Way to Departures, She divides her time between London and Berlin. You can read Linda’s full Personal Anthology and other seasonal contributions here.
*
‘The Mistletoe Bough’ by Anthony Trollope (First published in the Illustrated London News, Christmas Supplement, December 21, 1861. Reprinted in Tales of All Countries, second series, 1863. See also Early Short Stories, ed. John Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 1994)
Must a short story take the world by storm? Trollope doesn’t seem to think so: ‘The Mistletoe Bough’ is a rather gentle tale of a courtship taking an interesting turn around this festive time of year. It begins with a “very delicate” quandary, as the Garrow family wonder whether the branch of mistletoe should be “hung up on Christmas Eve in the dining-room”; they are expecting visitors, and Miss Garrow is desperately keen to avoid an embarrassment involving one of those visitors in particular. Namely, Godfrey Holmes, the young assistant manager of a bank in Liverpool, to whom she has been engaged, but is engaged no longer.
Elizabeth’s younger brothers, unaware of the awkwardness, mock her as “my lady Fineairs” and “a Puritan” for her rejection of the mistletoe bough; the narrator concedes that she may have half a point, at least. “Kissing, I fear, is less innocent now than it used to be when our grandmothers were alive, and we have become more fastidious in our amusements.”
Complications ensue that have little to do with Christmas. But there are some comical seasonal touches, and the whole concoction has a thoroughly, predictably Victorian charm, and (this is the personal part) offers some light respite to the reader who has been bitterly gorging on the short stories of Fleur Jaeggy, T. F. Powys and other reputable malcontents. Also: Trollope earns bonus points for deploying the term “the bump of philomartyrdom” in the incidental process of mocking the period’s phrenology craze.
Chosen by Michael Caines. Michael works at the Times Literary Supplement and is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century. You can read his full Personal Anthology and other seasonal contributions here.
*
‘Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor’ by John Cheever (First published in The New Yorker, 24 December 1949, and available in Vintage Cheever: Collected Stories, 2010)
An excellent test of a Christmas story is to read it out of season. It was a rare close and scorching British summer when I first read Cheever’s Collected Short Stories. In ‘Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor’ Cheever opts to bludgeon his readers from the outset: “Christmas is a sad season”, “Christmas is a sad season for the poor”, “Christmas is a very sad day of the year”. As Christmas Day dawns upon a lavish New York apartment building, we are introduced to elevator operator, Charlie; a man on the margins of society trapped within the working confines of a gilded cage, within the confines of an elevator – “He held the narrowness of his travels against his passengers…as if they had clipped his wings”. Humour with a moral twist is best served gin-dry in Cheever stories; although there is a “loneliness” to our protagonist, there is also a balancing air of “petulance”. No one is above or below mockery and censure.
Charlie fabricates a lie: one that can – and should – be judged on a variety of levels by the reader. It is this lie that morphs from a comedy of manners into a strangely elevated (pun intended) chain reaction spreading far beyond the confines of the elevator shaft and class boundaries of the apartment block and onto the streets of New York. The affluent in the story are – on the surface – defined by their trappings, yet it is middle-man Charlie’s hubris – in the form of greed and an abundance of alcoholic Christmas cheer – that pinpoints the vital moment in the narrative arc as romp gives way to reality. Often it takes a dose of Christmas spirits to remember Christmas Spirit in Cheever Land; and it appears the longest journeys can be undergone in the ups and downs of a simple elevator. What is poverty? What are riches? Who is content? Who is alone? If these questions are only posed at Christmas, then it is indeed “a very sad day of the year”.
One sentence that sums up the underlying bittersweet mood of the story – and almost resonates louder than the title itself: “…and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over.” With this Christmas short story, Cheever confirmed himself – to me, at the height of summer – as a writer for all seasons.
Chosen by Jane Roberts
*
‘Bath Time’ by Jenny Diski (First published in Sacred Space, edited by Marsha Lowe, Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Collected in The Vanishing Princess, Ecco reissued 2017)
Written in Diski’s imitable style, ‘Bath Time’ offsets realism and desire. The story is a lesson in reduction, distilling human existence into a single dream, a woman’s longing for the perfect bath. ‘Bath Time’ scratches at the edge of absurdity whilst staying close to gritty, visceral details: Imperial Leather, greyish vinyl tiles, a “slow stream of immersion heated water.” A life is told through time in encapsulated hot water: embryonic baths, Dettol disinfectant childhood baths, a kaleidoscope bath tripping on LSD… Finally, the story leads us to a much-awaited Christmas Eve and the prospect of a present on the 25th, the ultimate, empyrean bath, the fulfillment the woman’s “greatest ambition.”
When I first read ‘Bath Time’, as a twenty-year old Drama student, I loved the story so much it inspired my final degree show. My play about women, bathrooms, and metamorphosing bodies was a reflection of Diski’s world. When the lights went up, three women occupied a real pink bathroom suite: a pale rose toilet, curved sink, and a bath filled to the brim with tiny, bright white polystyrene balls. As the main character lay in the ‘water’, describing scrubbing raw her teenage skin, the tiny balls poured over the edge of the bath in mounds, which became waves, spilling across the stage floor. The little white bubbles, perfect spheres, dropped off the brink of the stage in a curtain like a waterfall, falling into the orchestra pit.
Chosen by Susanna Crossman. Susanna is an Anglo-French writer. She is the author of L’île sombre, Les Editions Delcourt, La Croisée, 2021, and co-author of L’Hôpital, Le dessous des Cartes (LEH, 2015). Her fiction has been short-listed for the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. More at: https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com @crossmansusanna. You can read her individual Personal Anthology here.
*
‘Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story’ by Paul Auster (First published in The New York Times on Christmas Day, 1990, and then as a standalone title from Faber & Faber. You can listen to it read by the author here.)
Once, several Decembers back, it turned out I’d be spending Christmas alone. The idea didn’t bother me too much; I saw myself hunkering in with a couple of thick blankets, a box of mince pies and some new books while steadily drinking my way through a bottle of Jura Superstition. As it happened, following a drunken expedition to steal a tree late on Christmas Eve, I didn’t end up spending the day alone. But that is another story.
I feel about Paul Auster much as I do about Christmas itself: the idea of it often better than actually having to live through it. But this story, filled with chance and accident, all about tales and their telling, reminds me of that Christmas I never quite got to spending alone.
Chosen by CD Rose, who is the author of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else, The Blind Accordionist, all published by Meville House. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.
*
‘The Tailor of Gloucester’, by Beatrix Potter (First published by Frederick Warne & Co, 1903)
But it is in the old story that all the beasts can talk, in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the morning ….
I have to confess that I am not a huge fan of Beatrix Potter’s tales – Mrs Tiggywinkle scares me (especially as Theresa May seems increasingly to be morphing into her), Peter Rabbit had much to be fearful of in Mr McGregor’s garden, and let’s not dwell on the fate of Tom Kitten for too long… but her beautiful Christmas story, the 18th century-set ‘The Tailor of Gloucester’, which appeared in my Christmas stocking (ok, then pillowcase: I was a greedy child) in the year 197-, has always brought a lump to my cynical throat.
The Tailor (a patron saint for freelancers everywhere), tired, poor and under pressure to complete an important commission for Christmas Day – a sumptuous cherry-red waistcoat to be worn by the Mayor of Gloucester on his wedding morning – is laid low by illness and the mendaciousness of his bad cat, Simpkin, who hides the last piece, or twist, of silk thread required to complete the tailor’s task. “No More Twist,” which the Tailor mutters repeatedly in his delirious sleep, is a phrase I find myself coming out with when I feel at a low ebb, or when I think about the consequences of a No Deal Brexit.
The Tailor is saved by a flurry of mice, who strive – secretly, magnificently – to complete the task, and the relenting of Simpkin, who turns out not to be so bad after all. It’s snowy, magical and IT WILL WARM THE COCKLES OF YOUR HEART, as my beloved mum used to say.
Chosen by Catherine Taylor. Catherine is a critic, editor and writer. Her memoir The Stirrings is forthcoming from Weidenfeld and Nicholson. You can read her individual Personal Anthology and other seasonal contributions here.
*
‘The Winter Journey’ by Georges Perec (First published in 1979. Republished in Winter Journeys, Atlas Press, 2013 in a beautiful limited edition with translations by Harry Mathews, John Sturrock and (mainly) Ian Monk. ‘A Winter’s Journey’ was also published separately as a chapbook by Penguin Classics in 1996)
In ‘The Winter Journey’ the narrator (a young teacher of literature) is browsing in the well-appointed library of a French country house when he comes across a volume called The Winter Journey (Le Voyage d’hiver) edited by one Hugo Venier.
To his astonishment he realises that the book is not, as he at first assumes, an anthology of great French poetry, but rather an unknown and hitherto unidentified source. Published in 1864, it confirms beyond any doubt that the poetic giants of the Belle Époque – Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Verlaine, Rimbaud and many others — all plagiarised their most celebrated lines from Vernier’s compendium.
Everything he thinks he knows about French literature is challenged, and overturned. He decides to find out more about the mysterious Hugo Venier.
But it is September 1939, and the Occupation is about to interrupt his researches. Only after the Liberation is he able to revisit the library and continue his investigations, but . . . but that would be to let the chat out of the sac.
This exhilarating jeu d’espirit is part Derridian, part Borgesian, and entirely Perecian (and if that combination doesn’t snag your immediate attention what are you doing here?) Perec has surprisingly never before featured in A Personal Anthology and I hope that his belated appearance will prompt more readers to enjoy his most frequently re-published work.
‘Le Voyage d’hiver’ was written for inclusion in a publisher’s catalogue and published in 1979. The author died three years later.
In 1992, there appeared the first in a series of twenty more Journeys, prompted by Perec’s original, in which other members of the Oulipo group expanded on the original. A highlight is Jacques Jouet’s ‘Hinterreise’, about a researcher who discovers an early 18th century composer named ‘Ugo Wernier’ who appears to have produced work subsequently plagiarised by Mozart, Bach and Schubert, a story which itself could be said to plagiarise Perec’s.
Chosen by David Collard. David’s book Multiple Joyce: 100 short essays about James Joyce’s cultural legacyis published next June by Sagging Meniscus Press of New York. He edits a weekly cultural newsletter called The Glue Factory.You can read his full Personal Anthology and other seasonal contributions here.
*
‘Quare Name for a Boy’ by Claire Keegan (First broadcast on RTE. First published in Antarctica, Faber 1999)
Christmas is an excellent way of testing a character. The in-built structure of Christmas, with its romantic and familial expectations, its association with heavy drinking and the anti-climax and nostalgia many readers will remember from childhood, means it is a festival that serves the short story well. Claire Keegan’s first collection Antarctica makes strong use of Christmas and New Year in the stories ‘Quare Name for a Boy’, ‘Men and Women’ and ‘Love in the Tall Grass’. Her writing is very precise and takes the reader right inside a way of life, right to the heart of a character and their particular seasonal agony.
‘Quare Name for a Boy’ is a post-Christmas story, a memory of an unconventional Christmas during which a couple had a six-day fling “to break the boredom of the holidays”. The story takes place when the woman, who lives in England, returns to Ireland to meet the man in a pub and tell him that she is pregnant. Her memories of their time together at his mother’s house are wonderfully atmospheric:
I wore nothing but your mandarin-collared shirts that came down to my knees, your thick brown-heeled football socks.
She sits up in the night and listens to cars passing through the slush. The story carries an entire country’s history of sexual relations inside it: “Irish girls should stay home, stuff the chicken and snip the parsley,” but the narrator is unwilling to snare the man like a fox and live with him “that way”. She doesn’t want to look into his eyes “years from now and discover a man whose worst regret is six furtive nights spent in his mother’s bed with a woman from a Christmas do.”
The tension builds as the “green wood hisses in the grate” and the man carries their drinks “like a man carrying the first two bucketfuls of water to put out a blaze in his own stable”. This is a story about Ireland’s future, too – the narrator doesn’t want to be the woman “who shelters her man same as he’s a boy. That part of my people ends with me.” Equally, (spoiler alert) there will be “no boat trip, no roll of twenty-pound notes, no bleachy white waiting room with women’s dog-eared magazines.” Published in 1999, it is especially moving to read this story in 2018 – a year in which Irish people voted to repeal the eighth.
Chosen by Hannah Vincent. Hannah is a novelist and playwright. Her first novel, Alarm Girl, was published by Myriad in 2014 and her second, The Weaning, was published by Salt in 2018. She teaches Creative Writing on the Open University’s MA and life writing on the Autobiography and Life Writing programme at New Writing South. You can read her individual Personal Anthology here.
*
‘New Year’s Eve’ by Mavis Gallant (First published in The New Yorker, 10 Jan 1970. Available in various Gallant collections, including The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury)
Whatever happens on New Year’s Eve “happens every day for a year”. That is a scary thought. Especially for the unhappy bereaved Plummers and unhappy almost-orphan Amabel, who spend a squirmingly uncomfortable last night of the year in Moscow enduring the wrong opera in the wrong language with the wrong people.
It’s not a long story and there’s not much plot, just Amabel’s delusions and the Plummers’ dark innards scalpeled open. But every sentence of Gallant’s exact and flowing prose brings a little ping of surprise – oh, she’s going to do that now! Hey, I wasn’t expecting that! Gallant’s characters are frequently outspoken but rarely understand each other. (And when they do, they pretend not to.) Here, Cyrillic script and minds disorderly with time and loss add further division. Nothing, it seems, will rescue the Plummers from their lonely cells, but, at the end, there is a hint that Amabel’s incapacity for deep thought may save her – and that is also typical of Gallant, where intelligence is so often a bar to any conventional form of happiness.
‘New Year’s Eve’ is both heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, and if the evening’s events will indeed repeat themselves throughout 2019, we could all do worse than indulge in some Gallant before the fireworks start.
Chosen by Jo Lloyd. Jo is from South Wales, where she enjoys naming the elements. Her short fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Best British Short Stories, and the 2018 O Henry Prize Stories.
*
‘The New Year’s Tree’ by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Ross Ufberg (Collected in A Very Russian Christmas: The Greatest Russian Holiday Stories of All Time, New Vessel Press, 2016)
Mikhail Zoshchenko’s story was a childhood favourite, and, rereading it more than thirty years after I’d originally read it, I find myself surprised anew by the turns it takes. It opens with the description of a tree, decorated for the holiday with “beads, bunting, lanterns, walnuts, pastilles, and Crimean apples […] and underneath the tree were presents.” As a child, I was mesmerized by the idea of a tree decorated with edible items: that tradition had all but disappeared in the 1980s.
Brother Minka and sister Lyolya begin eating the sweets off the tree, though knowing that they’re doing something against the house rules. Soon, their desire for sweets escalates. “If you took another bite from the apple, then I won’t stand on ceremony anymore and I’m going to eat a third pastille and in addition I’m going to take this bonbon cracker as a souvenir,” Lyolya says to her brother. The main turn of this story comes after the guests arrive and the children’s mother discovers that the gifts she had meant for the visiting children have been destroyed. The conflict escalates further, from being between children to being between parents, and the moment when the mother takes offence at her son being called “a bandit” (or “a brigand” in this translation) and lashes out at the other parent was deeply satisfying to me as a young reader.
The mother chooses to drop the rules of polite behaviour, and sides with her children against the visiting families. Today we talk about attachment theories and unconditional love between parents and children: these ideas were far from mainstream in the Soviet Union. To me, as a small child and even as a teen, this story was the ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy. Not only do the kids get to gorge on sweets, but also their mother supports them with unconditional love – all done with humour and merriment. Happy New Year!
Chosen by Olga Zilberbourg. Olga English-language debut, Like Water and Other Stories was published in September 2019 (WTAW Press). She is the author of three Russian-language collections of stories.
*
‘The Iceberg’ by Tove Jansson (First published in Bildhuggarens dotter (Sculptor’s Daughter), 1968. Republished in The Winter Book, Sort of Books, 2006)
Tove Jansson’s much-loved Moomins hibernate all winter but the characters in A Winter Book, a collection of the Finnish polymath’s selected stories, are very much awake. None more so than the narrator of ‘The Iceberg’, a little girl whose family has just moved to the country, who creeps out of their house in the dark of the night to spy on her iceberg, with its oval-shaped, girl-sized grotto on one side. The iceberg had floated into the bay, all green and white and sparkling, and very early for the time of year. In just four pages, Jansson weaves a magical, miniature tale of adventure and hope and the harsh realities of life. Somehow, especially now, I feel we are all that little girl, standing on the edge of the shore, berating herself for not being brave enough to jump aboard and sail away on a floating island.
Chosen by Susie Mesure. Susie is a freelance journalist and interviews authors and writes features and columns for newspapers including the i paper, the FT, and most of the others. You can read her individual Personal Anthology here.
***
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 1,800 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. His story 'A Prolonged Kiss' was shortlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.