by Susan Hill
The same must be true of Chekhov, and, as I know no Russian, he has only ever come to me in translation. But ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is on my list of essential short stories all the same. Better to read Chekhov in English than not read Chekhov at all. Is that true of any foreign writer?
Many novelists have also written short stories but very few bring off both forms with equal success. Novelist’s stories sometimes wear a slight air of pointlessness, as if they were made out of leftovers – either that or the novelist has never quite found the short-story voice. And it is different. A short story is not just a short novel.
Here are two collections of short stories by P.G. Wodehouse, that comic genius. But they don’t work, or not for me, because Wodehouse thrived on the leisurely approach, ambling up to a novel, taking the scenic route, and the short-story form does not work like that. Nor, I think, does it work for crime. The Strand Magazine used to publish short detective stories, and most nineteenth-century crime novelists turned their hand to the crime in short form, too. But crime also needs space in which to spread itself, to build, to engage with minutiae. So my perfect Collection contains no short crime, even by the best writers, even by Conan Doyle and Ian Rankin.
Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Grace Paley, Helen Simpson – my collections by these writers were huddled together. So far as I know, none of them has written a novel. They are all short-story writers first and last, though Paley also wrote poetry.
The trouble with Munro and Gallant is a sameness about all their stories. They blur together. I cannot distinguish between any of their characters because they are so alike, live the same ordinary lives in the same ordinary places. With Munro, the problem is Canada. I have a problem with Canadian as I do with Australian writers. (I know, I know.) But that is emphatically not true of America and strangely, though she too writes of ordinary people living ordinary lives, quite untrue of the stories of Grace Paley.
I interviewed Grace Paley at the Cheltenham Festival a few years ago. I greatly admired her work, and admired her record in campaigning for civil rights in her native America as much, so it was obviously an honour. It was also great fun. Grace was a wonderful talker and easy to interview because you just wound her up and set her going, and the audience was extremely appreciative. All went swimmingly, until the end, when I ushered Grace ahead of me down the short flight of steps from the stage, followed her, tripped and crashed headlong. The rest is something of a blur, but in the confusion of pain and attendants with walkie-talkies calling an ambulance and bringing blankets, I was aware of Grace bending over me with a look of tender concern and anxiety that I will never forget. Nor will I forget hearing what she said when, at that same moment, someone came up and asked her a question about her stories. She sounded quite shocked as she said, ‘How can I talk about literatoor when my friend is so hurt?’
She called the hospital to enquire after me later that night and rang me when I got home, sent me flowers and a signed book with a card when she returned to America. I loved her. How could I not love her stories, or fail to include one in this imaginary perfect Collection?
Which seems to be coming along nicely, and may be useful to all those who want only the best on their shelves, a sort of crystallised or distilled library. My Collection will be all the short stories you will ever need – or I will ever need, for that matter. The toppling piles on the dining-room table can go.
Helen Simpson was one of those rare writers who mastered the short story completely from day one and the publication of her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed. A friend said, ‘We read Margaret Drabble to feel the Zeitgeist, our daughters read Helen Simpson.’
She has an immaculate touch and seems to have been born with the ability to point up a story, pin down a situation, a place, a group of people, in the frighteningly small space that is the short story. I re-read a story of hers here, another there, and they come up in sharp, fresh focus every time. I have spent a while in choosing which one to put in my Collection and plumped for ‘Burns’s Night’, from her last volume, because it captures the whole awfulness of a dinner full of braying, kilted, drunken, randy, rich, young bankers and business men, which in its turn captures a whole era that has evaporated into the mist.
Who else to select? William Trevor. John McGahern. Both Irish. Both very fine novelists. Both equally fine, and prolific, short-story writers, with that ultimate accolade, a book called The Collected Short Stories of … They both go in, as they both go into any list I am required to supply, from time to time, of ‘Writers Who Have Influenced Me’ or ‘My Ten Best’.
I am not going to let any of their work go, I need all of their stories, all their novels. I may have difficulty selecting one of each for my anthology.
No difficulty with Katherine Mansfield, surprisingly enough. I have found four separate selections from her short stories on my shelves, and three of them can go. The one to keep is essential as much for its long ‘Introduction’ by Elizabeth Bowen as for the stories themselves. Many an Introduction is a waste of space but Bowen never wasted a word and this is as good an essay on Mansfield as can be found: perceptive, thoughtful, densely argued, packed with insights – and utterly ‘Bowen’.
I am picking two of Mansfield’s stories. Not ‘Bliss’. Not At the Bay’, though many would argue for those. But I cannot be without one of the best stories ever written about childhood, A Doll’s House’, and her masterpiece, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’. How often do I pick up a book by an author and move sideways to their biography? Always, with Katherine Mansfield, and the study of her by Claire Tomalin, best of biographers. The problem is that I cannot find it. I have a list here. ‘Books I know I own but cannot lay my hands on’. It goes down on that.
V.S. Pritchett. D.H. Lawrence. Frank Sargeson. Frank O’Connor. Sylvia Townsend Warner. Raymond Carver. Henry James. All collected volumes of short stories but I have a gut feeling I won’t read any of them again.
Ah, here is Muriel Spark, sharp as a pencil, cool, stylish, one of the rare writers whose stories are on a par with her novels for brilliance, another to put on the bedside table, another for the collection. ‘The Black Madonna’ should go in there I think, because it is quintessence of Spark.
In a small and separate pile are the ghost stories. It is the only literary genre I can think of which is overwhelmingly represented by the short story rather than the novel. M.R. James. Henry James. Dickens. L.P Hartley. Edith Wharton, and many, many anthologies, for many a writer, past and recent, has written just one or two ghost stories. I wonder why. Did they have one ‘true’ story to tell? Were they specially commissioned for a handsome fee? Or did they just want to see if they could do it? My anthology will contain just two ghost stories – M.R. James’s ‘O Whistle and I’ll come to you’, and Edith Wharton’s ‘Mr Jones’. The other two I am going to re-read by the fire soon are novellas, so do not qualify – A Christmas Carol and The Turn of the Screw, and who will disagree that these are the two best ghost stories ever written?
I have found nine short-story anthologies of a mixed and general nature in the house and that is probably nine too many. Every compiler has their idiosyncrasies, every collection contains several stories whose inclusion I regard as totally unjustified, everybody chooses the wrong story by X or fails to put in one by Y. They just make me cross. I will do much better by myself.
Will I ever write another short story myself? I wish I knew.
The Man with the Charming Smile
IT WAS PROBABLY 1962. Definitely London. Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.
I have no idea in whose house the smart drinks party was held or out of whose kindness I was invited as a tyro novelist cum undergraduate. All of that has gone beyond recall, as have the faces of the other guests – though I remember waitresses in white aprons circulating with trays of cocktails.
The beam of ligh
t falls on a man standing leaning against a fireplace. His cocktail is on the shelf beside him. In his hand there is a cigarette holder. He has a high colour to his high cheekbones, a high forehead, too. High style. I am old enough to know that it is rude to stare but who would not stare at the craggy remains of such mesmerising good looks?
‘Do you know Ian Fleming?’ someone asks me.
I suppose that he said something to me, and there was a charming smile and crooked teeth and a waft of blue smoke from the long holder. It was over in a few moments because he was deep in conversation and laughter and I backed away, hoping to have become invisible.
So many people whose opinions I thought were important in those days sneered behind their hands at Ian Fleming and James Bond, though I daresay that, like Liberace, Fleming cried all the way to the bank. Why? Because the books were popular? Because they started being made into movies? ‘Sex, violence and brand names,’ one of my University tutors said about Bond with a dismissive wave of the hand. I often wonder if he had ever actually read any of them.
Here they all are, the Jonathan Cape hardbacks and the paperback versions, too, in their old stylish Penguin covers, not the hideous recent ones. Sometimes only a James Bond will do.
But, as people have come to understand, there is much more to Fleming than ‘sex, violence and brand names’, more than exotic travel, more than escapism – he writes so well, plots so well, does dialogue and structure and suspense and surprise so well. Some of the best stylists have been the greatest entertainers – Raymond Chandler. P.G. Wodehouse. And Fleming.
I could not get through my year without re-reading at least the best of the Bonds. Dr No. From Russia with Love. Goldfinger. Casino Royale. You Only Live Twice. How many thrillers can you re-read? They are disposable, open and shut, throwaway, leave-on-a-train books. To stand up to years of repeated readings there has to be more than blood and thunder, especially as, once you know what happens next, you lose the element of surprise.
But the villains, the settings and the set pieces, the friends back at the office – M, Miss Moneypenny – none of these fade over time, meeting them again is always a pleasure, just as escaping from sharks or roaring across a lake in a powerboat at full throttle or, perhaps best of all, sitting down at the casino table with James Bond, never loses its thrill.
Towards the end of Ian Fleming’s life, when he was ill and out of sorts and temper, the only person whose company always delighted him was that of his close friend and editor at Jonathan Cape, the man he called ‘gentle reader’ – William Plomer. No one who knew William could be surprised at that. There was something enigmatic about both of them, a sense of hidden lives, other selves, an impression that behind the wholly civilised and gentlemanly facades something else was always going on.
The spy story holds a fascination all of its own. Fleming’s, escapist, highly coloured, are a world away from those of the greatest spy writer of all, John le Carré, for he is deadly serious while Fleming is only semi-straight-faced – for much of the time he is joking. In a le Carré novel, the colour is drained away and, if Fleming writes well, le Carré is in a different league as a novelist. Every aspiring writer should be made to study his books to see how it should be done, how it is done best, but they would learn a thing or three from Ian Fleming as well.
Every so often, the dark stretches of memory give way to a moment or two when the light falls full on the handsome man with the high colour and the broken nose, leaning against the fireplace, glass to hand, smoke coiling from the cigarette holder. And the smile.
‘Do you know Ian Fleming?’
Children 3 Adults 0
IT IS HARD to remember that there was, and not so very long ago either, a world of children’s books which did not contain Harry Potter, and the My Favourite Author lists were sometimes headed by Enid Blyton, sometimes by C.S. Lewis but most often by Roald Dahl. In the constant changing of the book-tide in this house, many volumes come and go but more children’s books have earned a permanent place than any other genre, and Dahl is in no danger of losing his. His popularity was at its peak when my daughters were growing up. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Witches, Matilda, The BFG, The Twits, Esio Trot… on and on they seemed to go.
One reason why some children’s authors attain popularity among their young readers is, of course, because adults disapprove of them. It was one of the reasons we were all so devoted to Enid Blyton. Some parents are vociferously anti Jacqueline Wilson, who writes about dysfunctional families, step-children and teenage sex, and it has done J.K. Rowling no harm to have her books banned by fundamentalist Christian groups in America. Roald Dahl was disapproved of by adults because he believed that life was a permanent war between them and children, and he was always and everywhere on the side of the latter. Child anarchy is a dominant theme in his stories but children did not realise this consciously. They adored Dahl because he talked about snot and bums and made adults smell, but along the way, children recognised him as one of their own, and knew that he told riotously good, highly original, madly inventive stories in which magic invaded the ordinary world and extraordinary things happened casually, as they do in all the best fairy stories. That is what Dahl wrote, and he is in the greatest tradition. He is not afraid of frightening children, he knows they can take it, he is happy to point the finger at the duplicity and selfishness, and sometimes downright wickedness, of adults, going behind the masked smiles and cooing voices to reveal the real nastiness. Grown-ups can be cruel and stupid, snobbish and hurtful, and children know it. But meanwhile, there are the other worlds which Dahl so amazingly invented and which children flocked to enter. Some adults find his books disturbing because they know that each one conceals more than a grain of truth. Dahl liked to disturb and provoke. His short stories for adults pack a punch of absolute surprise, a single revelatory moment of horror. That is what the short story can do best. Tales of the Unexpected – the title is absolutely right.
I will re-read his children’s books. I have not done so for twenty years. It will be interesting to see how they appear to me now that I do not have small children to defend against their terrors, even though they always alarmed me far more than they alarmed them.
Dahl’s autobiographical books are here too, Boy and Solo, but an autobiography only reveals what its author intends, and they do not quite explain why Dahl was like he was – which, in my experience of him, was like a character out of one of his own books: slightly eccentric, contrary, enjoying being curmudgeonly, bad-tempered, autocratic – and burying any warmth, friendliness, affection, amiability, as deep as possible. But those qualities were there all right.
We met first in the 1970s when we were judging a Daily Telegraph short-story competition for which there had been, as there always are, many hundreds of entries. When we four judges met – the others were the literary editor of the paper, David Holloway, and the publisher Diana Athill, then senior editor with André Deutsch – we had undertaken to bring along a shortlist of just a dozen stories, having gone through the reading and weeding process for weeks beforehand. There was some overlap – three of us had several choices in common. Only Roald’s list of stories was entirely different. Moreover, he ridiculed and derided ours, and would brook no arguments. He was having his way or he was walking out. Impasse. I have been on judging panels since where this has happened (though only one other where a walkout was on the cards). Only the tactful, patient persuasion of David Holloway kept Dahl in his seat and fended off more ructions. I do not remember the outcome but I know that we had to go away and re-read and change our minds and then return to be bullied some more before we reached a compromise – meaning, we decided to go along with what Roald wanted. He bullied us and I came away with a hearty dislike of the man. But I had not then read any of his children’s books – and several of the best were still unwritten. Above all, I had not yet had children of my own. I did not get the point of Roald
Dahl at all.
Fast-forward some fifteen years and I’m on another panel of judges with him, this time for the (now defunct) Sunday Express prize for fiction. The others were Clare Francis, Auberon Waugh and the literary editor of the paper, Graham Lord, and, once again, there were clashes. But Dahl seemed far mellower this time, and there were no threats of a walkout, or even much complaint, when his candidate did not win the £20,000 prize.
‘He had a successful operation on his bad back and he’s got a new wife,’ Waugh whispered to me over the lunch.
On the off chance of his being in good temper, I had slipped my daughter’s copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into my bag and, as he seemed to be in an approachable mood, asked him if he would sign it. He did so cheerfully, then reached out for one of the notepads on the table and wrote ‘Love to Jessica from Roald Dahl’ on perhaps a dozen of the pages, tore them off and said, ‘Give her these … she can sell them in the playground.’
After lunch we piled into taxis and went straight to the Café Royal and the prize-giving ceremony, but because of the traffic the cabs dropped us off on the opposite side of the road. Regent Street was, as ever, thick with cars and buses and the rest of us started to walk up to the nearest pedestrian crossing. Roald was having none of that. He was a tall imposing man and he simply raised his walking stick to hold up the traffic which was streaming towards us and stepped out into the road. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. We scurried over, all of us following him and his still-raised stick like embarrassed sheep, to the Cafe Royal, where a posse of professional autograph hunters lay in wait. Roald waved his stick at them. ‘Go away. I only give autographs to children.’
