Also by diane williams
This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul,
the World, Time, and Fate
Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories
in Which God Might Choose to Appear
The Stupefaction
Excitability: Selected Stories 1986–1996
Romancer Erector
It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature
Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine
Copyright © 2018 by Diane Williams
Introduction copyright © 2018 by Ben Marcus
The stories in this collection were originally published, sometimes in different form, in the following volumes: This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate © 1990 by Diane Williams and published by Grove Weidenfeld.
Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear
© 1992 by Diane Williams and published by Grove Weidenfeld.
The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella © 1996 by Diane Williams and published by Alfred A. Knopf. Excitability: Selected Stories © 1998 by Diane Williams and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Romancer Erector: Novella and Stories © 2001 by Diane Williams and published by Dalkey Archive Press. It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature: A Novella and Stories © 2007 by Diane Williams and published by FC2, an imprint of The University of Alabama Press. Reprinted with permission of The University of Alabama Press. Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty © 2012 by Diane Williams and published by McSweeney’s. Reprinted with permission of McSweeney’s. Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine © 2016 by Diane Williams and published by McSweeney’s. Reprinted with permission of McSweeney’s.
New stories in this collection first appeared, sometimes in different form, in the
following journals and anthologies: “The Beauty and the Bat,” “Witchcraft Today,”
“The Fucking Lake,” and “Day of Awe” in Granta; “The Forgotten Story” in Five
Points; “Don’t Talk to Him for Such a Long Time,” “Happy Presence, Timeless
Inspiration,” “The Perverted Message,” and “The Hours of Coincidence” in Harper’s;
“Oh, Darling I’m in the Garden” in The London Review of Books, reprinted in The
Best Small Fictions 2018, Braddock Avenue Books; “The Sure Cure” in McSweeney’s;
“Grace God” in The Lifted Brow; and “The Important Transport” in Egress.
All rights reserved.
Jacket painting reproduced with permission from
The Croatian Museum of Naïve Art and Damir Rabuzin:
Ivan Rabuzin On the Hills – Primeval Forest, 1960, oil on canvas, 692 x 1167 mm,
Collection: The Croatian Museum of Naïve Art, Zagreb, Croatia.
Published by Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Diane.
Title: The collected stories of Diane Williams / Diane Williams ;
introduction by Ben Marcus.
I. Title.
PS3573.I44846 A6 2018 813’.54—dc23 2018027943
ISBN 978-1-61695-982-1
eISBN 978-1-61695-983-8
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ON DIANE WILLIAMS BY BEN MARCUS
Diane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, most of them no more than a page long. She’s a hero of the form: the sudden fiction, the flash fiction, whatever it’s being called these days. The stories are short. They defy logic. They thumb their nose at conventional sense, or even unconventional sense. But if sense is in short supply in these texts, that leaves more room for splendor and sorrow. These stories upend expectations and prize enigma and the uncanny above all else. The Williams epiphany should be patented, or bottled—on the other hand, it should also be regulated and maybe rationed, because it’s severe. It’s a rare feeling her stories trigger, but it’s a keen and deep and welcome one, the sort of feeling that wakes us up to complication and beauty and dissonance and fragility. It’s a sensation we can only get by reading (that’s the only place I’ve ever found it), and once you’ve had it you want to keep having it again and again. This feeling avows the complexity of life, it does not flinch from our harder suspicions about how vulnerable and brutal our enterprise is. Such work feels—I don’t know how else to say it—brave. It is difficult to encounter the world as it is experienced by Diane Williams, but this difficulty seems necessary.
So how does she do it? What is this literary approach? What is her trick?
Williams’ unusual literary method reveals the thin rigging of most narrative, and then deploys that rigging to make spectacular shapes—abstract, maybe, or realistic, who can say? Every shape is abstract in the end, and every shape is familiar and intimate in the right context. Yes, she’s using the tools of narrative, and her language often is plain in that it sounds spoken rather than labored-over and page bound. There’s a Dick and Jane quality to the prose, if Dick and Jane had been forcibly drowned and then brought back to life, maybe starved for a while, induced with madness but warned, at pain of death, to conceal it.
The conventional narrative tools Williams uses to bring her fiction to life are disfigured here. It would seem that she’s melted them down and made them into new weapons. Sharper, weirder, more brutal. They get the job done and they make a kind of bloodsport out of the domestic scenes she so often creates. We recognize this sort of fictional material—families in crisis, romantic partners at each other’s throats—but there is so much that is creepily detuned, so much that is just alien and odd. These mad, unsettling texts wear the costume of short fiction but that costume has been torn up and sewn back together. A stitch-work disguise, a masquerade. Is it poetry, what she does? Is it prose, is it magic, is it biological weaponry? Is it real, is it a sham? Well, yes to all of these questions. Yes, I think so.
These are some of the most defiantly resistant texts (resistant to easy understanding, I mean) that I have read, even while they seduce and beckon. They are intimate and dark and intense, often, but they remain cryptic and removed, as if they are being told in a language we don’t quite speak, or as if they are driven by a deeper code that we can’t crack, a code that governs the composition of these stories and determines what they will be and how they will operate.
I’ve been a pusher of Diane Williams’ work since her first book came out in 1990. You’d think I would have developed a slicker pitch about it by now, a quicker sell. You’d think. But woe to anyone who tries to summarize the uncanny attacks on reason that constitute this body of work. And yet it is still tempting to try to make sense of it all, not just because most of us are doomed to hunt for sense, to douse ourselves with certainties and clear points and meaning. It’s that the stories themselves flirt so wickedly with sense but rarely quite build it, rarely quite commit to an entirely coherent scene or moment in narrative time. This is part of the shock to reading Diane Williams for the first time. Her stories end so soon after they’ve begun, and we readers are thrust back into ourselves to wonder and worry. What was that we just read? What did it mean? What happened? What was it about? Each sentence becomes a piece of evidence, designed to mislead as much as it is designed to clarify. On the one hand these stories would seem to give so little, at least in the quantitative sense. Yet how is it that they reson
ate so profoundly? How is it that they endure?
Well, I don’t know. I just don’t, and this ignorance does not really trouble me, because it does not keep me from a profound enjoyment of this work. These stories matter because they derail us from our expected feelings and belief, and in so doing put us face-to-face with our world, undisguised. These stories work the way art does: with great mystery, and, you know, why do we need to mess around with that?
It could help to say what these damn things are about. They are about people. Foolish, foolish people. In other words, all of us. The stories chart the kind of behaviors we show the world when our desires get the better of us. Desperation is on terrible display, and who is not a culprit when it comes to rash acts? These stories are comedies of manners, or tragedies of the absence of manners. They document desire gone wrong, which is to say that they document desire. In a Diane Williams story there is frequently a narrator who surprises herself, who comes to revelations as if by accident, and who encounters the world at large with awe and wonder. Wisdom is rarely handed down by a narrator. It is stumbled across, discovered accidentally, or missed entirely. Wisdom is in the next room. Innocence and confusion reign supreme, but these states are always one thought away from some kind of difficult revelation, and it is this territory that Williams stakes out as her own. The threshold before understanding.
What’s often slippery and mysterious in a Diane Williams story are not the individual sentences—although these can be stunning, and indeed they traffic in sharp and unexpected syntax—but the eerie and sometimes inscrutable transitions between the sentences. This is where wild leaps take place, where logic falters and gives way to something more impressionistic and disruptive. We can’t help but look for one thing to lead to another, and here one thing does lead to another, but it’s such a funny another, such an unexpected one, that the result is often bracing and can be wholly, deliciously disorienting. In a Diane Williams story, we think we know something, but we certainly don’t know the next sentence, and it’s an uncertainty that Williams exploits to great effect.
Stories are a strange term for what Diane Williams writes. We might not read them for plot or sequence or narrative, exactly, even though those things rear up sometimes. In the earlier stories especially there is a kind of narrative continuity, an adherence to plot. But not so far into her career she tinkered with the machine, and the texts took a turn toward the cryptic. I used to think she was making prepared texts from unexpected source material: turn of the century gardening books or etiquette manuals, that sort of thing. Found texts. Now I’m not so sure. And the truth here might not matter. Even if there is found language afoot, Williams had to unearth it, and she had to put it in the order we now hold in our hands. It’s been masked and cut up and proofed far beyond recognition, resulting in something that is her very own. She saw something in the language that no other writer could see.
In many of these stories, a character speaks, something happens, objects in a room are described. But Williams is so restrained and selective that we see just slivers of her world, and soon enough she brings down a kind of hammer and the story has ended. The abruptness and anticlimactic quality of some of her endings can be challenging, but it asks us to reflect in different ways, to feel resonance where we may not have initially been alert to it. It is tricky for a writer to end such short texts. One expects that there would be a temptation for revelation, a lowering of the boom, and this happens now and again in a Diane Williams story. But sometimes too these endings misbehave and chart an unsettled space that is rarely explored in fiction.
In the end maybe these stories enact the dark impossibility of true understanding. They show us how little we can know, how doomed we are when we seek absolute comprehension. Yes, they are funny and manic and unexpectedly entertaining, but beneath their antics rests a grim view of human congress, a kind of inevitable despair around life among people. However much we puzzle over these stories, Diane Williams knows perfectly well what she’s doing, and that’s perhaps all we can ask of a wholly original literary artist.
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF
DIANE WILLIAMS
THIS IS ABOUT
THE BODY, THE MIND,
THE SOUL, THE WORLD,
TIME, AND FATE
(1990)
Lady
She said please. Her face looked something more than bitter, with hair which it turned out was a hat, which came down over her ears, which was made of fake fur, which she never removed from her head. She had glasses on. Everything she wore helped me decide to let her in.
She wore flat black patent-leather shoes with pointed toes, with black stockings, wrinkled at the ankles, with silver triangles set in on top of the toes of the shoes to decorate them, and she had on a long black coat, and she was shorter than I am.
Her skin was a bleak sort of skin, and there was no beauty left in her—maybe in her body.
I felt that this lady is fast, because she was at the place where I keep my red rotary-dial phone before I was, after I said, “The phone is in here.”
She said, “I know the number.”
Sitting on the arm of my sofa, she dialed while her knees were knocking into and tipping back onto two legs my too-small table, which my phone sits on, and my oversized brass lamp, which sits on the table too, with the huge shade, might have crashed. The lamp was clanging, ready to go. She got it back.
She said, “Merla!” into the phone receiver.
I knew it—she must have known it—Merla knew it too, that Merla was only a matter of one hundred to two hundred yards from my house, because this woman I had let in, she had told me right off the house number she was looking for. She was telling Merla that it was impossible to get to her, that there was no way on earth, that she had kept on running into this east-west street.
“A nice picture,” she said to me. She had gotten herself up. She was looking at all of those men dressed for one of the dark-age centuries, marching through foliage, trekking around a hunched-up woman at a well, with their weird insignias on their chests, that nobody I know can figure out, with their faces—version after version of the same face.
She said, “I have a”—something something—“reproduction—” I cannot remember the dates or the royal reign to which she referred, when she was toying with this miniature chair that I have, grabbing it by its arm, and swiveling it on the clubbed foot of one leg, as she was leaving, after everything had been agreed upon with Merla. She would not be getting out of her car for Merla. Merla would meet her at the corner. Merla would.
She, the lady, must have been curious or put off by the jumble of dirty things at my front door that I suppose she first noticed when she was leaving, or by the splendor of my living room just off from the jumble. She missed going inside of it to see what was going on in each of the pictures in there.
What this woman had done to me was incalculable, and she had done it all in a period of time which had lasted no more than five minutes, which so many others have done, coming in here only for the telephone, because I had waved at her while she was shouting at Merla, I had said, “Would it help you to know the number of this house?”
Then I had told this little person my wrong address, not because I wanted to, nor because of any need on my part to make up a lie.
I said 2-7-0 which is way off the track, except for two digits, but I had rearranged them, the 7 and the 0, but I did not know I had done that. All that I knew was that I had done something unforgivably uncivil.
It was a lapse to reckon with. I took her into my arms, so that she could never leave me, and then jammed her up into the corner with the jumble by the front door and held her in there, exhausting myself to keep her in there. I didn’t care. It hurt her more than it hurt me, to be a lady.
Violence is never the problem. Love at first sight is.
The Nature of the Miracle
The green glass bo
ttle rolled into, rolled out of my arms, out of my hands, and then exploded, just as it should, when it hits our bluestone floor, and spreads itself, and sparkling water, on the territory it was able to cover from our refrigerator to the back door.
The bottle used to fit tightly in my hand, easily, by the neck, and the way one thing leads to another in my mind, this means I should run away from my marriage.
I should run to the man who has told me he does not want me. He does not even like me. Except for once he took me, and my head was up almost under his arm, my neck was, and my hand went up his back and down his back, and he copied what I did to him on my back with his hand, so that I would know what it would be like, I would have an idea, and then I could run home to my marriage afterward, which is what I did before, after we were done with each other; and the way one thing leads to another in my mind, this means I should run to the man for more of it, but the way one thing leads to another, first I will tell my husband, “I would not choose you for a friend,” then I will run to the other man, so that I can hear him say the same thing to me.
This is unrequited love, which is always going around so you can catch it, and get sick with it, and stay home with it, or go out and go about your business getting anyone you have anything to do with sick, even if all that person has done is push the same shopping cart you pushed, so that she can go home, too, and have an accident, such as leaning over to put dishwasher powder into the dishwasher, so that she gets her eye stabbed by the tip of the bread knife, which is drip-drying in the dish rack. It is a tragedy to lose my eye, but this heroism of mine lasted only a matter of moments.
Orgasms
I swear I did not have anything of hers except for my dark idea of her which I have been keeping to myself until now.
The Collected Stories of Diane Williams Page 1
