‘The White Cattle of Uppington’ by Gerald Murnane

If you have never read any of Gerald Murnane’s writing before, the opening lines of ‘The White Cattle of Uppington’ will give you an idea of what it is like:

The following is a list of descriptions of some of the details of some of the images in some of the sequences of images that the chief character of this piece of fiction foresaw as appearing in his mind whenever during a certain year in the late 1970s he foresaw himself as preparing to write a certain piece of fiction. Each description is followed by a passage explaining some of the details of some of the images.

And so the story proceeds, with Murnane describing and analysing a young man reading Ulysses on a commuter train into Melbourne in the late-1950s; the same young man masturbating in a bedroom; the same person, slightly older, trying to inveigle himself with a rural artistic community, and later taking creative writing classes. The prose, like all of Murnane’s prose, is methodical, plain in the sense of vocabulary although sometimes baroque in terms of sentence structure, and completely unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Beckett is the closest comparison to be made, because of that shared ability to transform straightforward explanation into something bewilderingly complex, like the description of the sucking stones that runs to nearly 1500 words in Molloy.

I have only begun reading Murnane in the last couple of years; in fact I only read this story after I had almost finished compiling this anthology. But as far as I can tell from my limited knowledge, Murnane’s project is all of a piece: his novels, short fiction, memoir (I don’t think he writes poems) are all part of a larger investigation into the makeup of memory: why do we remember what we remember, and in the way we remember it? Elsewhere in the collected short fiction, in a story called ‘In Far Fields’, he describes telling a creative writing student that “I had studied my mind for many years and had found in it nothing but images and feelings…a diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns”. On and on his methodical description goes, as he attempts to understand why his mind should work like this, and what it means that it does.

I find Murnane’s approach completely addictive. I can understand why some find it chilly at best, if not utterly infuriating, but when I pick up his books I find them very difficult to put down again, whether he is spending four pages recounting everything he can remember from several decades spent reading the TLS, or returning once again to a recurring and haunting vision of grasslands spreading all around him to the horizon. These grasslands are both his Victorian home turf and, to return to ground we covered with Ballard, an inner landscape that says something about the nature of his mind. And on top of this we as readers bring our own associations: “I see what it makes me see”, as Pepita says, although Murnane’s style is largely about getting us as readers to see exactly what he sees. He is also someone who buys into interconnectivity. “If you write about something for long enough”, he said in a 2013 interview, “you’ll find that it is connected to something else”. As a statement that is banal. As a lifelong artistic method, it seems profound.

Murnane almost certainly won’t find any answers to the questions he’s asking, but as Donald Barthelme noted, “the task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions”. I think Murnane really does want an answer, but like Ned, the protagonist of the last story in this anthology, he’s going to have to do without.

From Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018

‘If I Vanished’ by Stuart Dybek

Ned’s wife has left him. He remembers a question she asked him once a couple of years before: “What if I were to vanish?” She says she heard the line in a film, some Kevin Costner western she can’t remember the name of. Thinking the film might contains some clue to why she’s gone, Ned tracks it down: Open Range. A review he reads online mentions something about its “‘defence of the values of a vanishing lifestyle’”, and it’s here that the story within Dybek’s story reveals itself: Ned has embarked on a journey for meaning, but all the leads he follows will turn out to be false.

It’s an exaggeration to say that in the best short stories not a single word is out of place, but it’s true that the words in a short story do tend to be more constantly freighted with meaning. That’s just the way they have to work if you have anything you really want to explore within their constrained length. There is a Vladimir Nabokov story called ‘Signs and Symbols’ (‘Symbols and Signs’ in its original 1948 appearance in the New Yorker; you can and should read it here) that plays a game with how attuned the skilled short story reader is to hidden meaning. An elderly husband and wife return home from an unsuccessful visit to a mental institution, where their son has made another suicide attempt. He suffers from “referential mania”, a condition that means he “imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence…Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him…Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept”. The story ends with three phone calls. The first two are a woman dialling the wrong number, but as the phone rings for a third time both parents and reader are certain it’s the hospital calling to tell them their son is dead. That is the meaning that our experience of stories, our own referential mania, has taught us to anticipate. Point made, Nabokov ends the story with the phone unanswered.

Ned is similarly attuned to his surroundings on the night described in ‘If I Vanished’: a performance of Pictures at an Exhibition playing on the car radio as he ventures into the snowy night to track down a rental copy of Open Range; an encounter at a donut shop where the woman serving him mistakes him for someone else; the film itself, plucked off the shelf and taken home to be analysed. Alongside Ned we are eager for some answer to be found, although all of us – reader, author, character – know that sometimes things just don’t work out that way, not even in stories.

From Paper Lantern, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014. Read the story in the 9 July 2007 issue of the New Yorker:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/09/if-i-vanished

Introduction

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

“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.

From Mock’s Curse: Nineteen stories, edited by Elaine and Barrie Mencher, Brynmill Press, 1995)

‘The Widow’s Widow’ by Rose Rappoport Moss

“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.

First published 1998. Collected in In Court, Penguin, 2007

‘La Penseuse’ by Dorothy Edwards

“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.

from Rhapsody, Parthian, 1927

‘The Creature’ by Edna O’Brien

“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.

from A Scandalous Woman, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990

‘The Skylight’ by Penelope Mortimer

“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.

From Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Arrow, 1966

‘At Sea, at Night’ by Ivan Bunin, translated by Sophie Lund

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.

First published 1923. Collected in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, Penguin, 1992

‘The Crisis’ by M John Harrison

“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.

from You Should Come with Me Now, Comma Press, 2017. Available to read here

‘The House Made of Sugar’ by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Daniel Balderston

“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:

From Thus Were Their Faces, New York Review Books

‘Faithful Lovers’ (formerly ‘The Reunion’) by Margaret Drabble

“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.

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

‘Blow’ by Susan Minot

“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.

from Lust and other stories, William Heinemann

‘Scropton, Sudbury, Marchington, Uttoxeter’ by Jessie Greengrass

“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.

From An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, JM Originals, 2015