Year: 2023

‘A Necklace of Raindrops’ by Joan Aiken

If you do read to children regularly, you soon discover how much unedited rubbish is packaged up for them under cover of a celebrity name and gargoylish cartoons. The mental red-penning is exhausting. So Joan Aiken’s fairy tales are a gift: a real, skillful writer who brings as much craft and care to bedtime stories as grown-up novels. The title story of her first collaboration with the equally bewitching illustrator, Jan Pienkowski, manages to be completely fresh while sounding as polished with telling as something from the Hans Christian Anderson canon (the repetitive formulas of fairy tales are, I would argue, a form of oral poetry we all know). The North Wind blesses a young girl with a necklace of raindrops that has magical powers, and says he will bring a new drop each birthday; then “he flew away up into the sky, pushing the clouds before him so that the moon and stars could shine out”. Who wouldn’t want to hear what happens next?

First published in A Necklace of Raindrops and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1968; frequently reprinted

‘The Fan Museum’ by Anthony Vahni Capildeo

I possibly admire the prose of the poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo more than that of any living writer. Its poised, inquisitive sentences inhabit a capacious space between essay, poem, drama and tale, where no stray perception is too small to pin precisely (“a table of dieted elegance”) and no connection too great to make in one leap. In late 2020, I ran an outdoor poetry reading group for our MA Creative Writing students as a supplement to the limited in-person teaching allowed by Covid rules. The prose fiction students were just as wowed as the poets by “The Fan Museum”, for the way that it shades imperceptibly between documentary and dream, describing a place that “dissolves”, as does the speaker, whose asides about stillness, travel and the Caribbean counterpoint this meticulous description of a “house in Scandinavia”. Falling asleep, the narrator literally collapses, like one of the fans they have been admiring: “First my feet folded one on to the other, soles partly touching; the seams of my legs twisted and relaxed, clasped into position like an enchanted dress gone back into a nutshell”. But the extraordinary then ends simply and innocently, as if signing a postcard: “I was glad to visit the Museum of Fans”.

First published in Measures of Expatriation, Carcanet, 2016

[“The Fuel-Gatherer’] by V.S. Naipaul

Although from different generations, Capildeo and Naipaul were cousins, and — having made my choices here without making this connection — I now see some shared qualities in their feeling for the post-colonial double exposure of place, as well as the deep history of English eloquence. The first part of The Enigma of Arrival, titled “Jack’s Garden”, appears to be a ruminative memoir of Naipaul’s experience of moving to the English countryside — specifically, Wiltshire — and gradually acclimatising to its ways. But then you realise he has somehow hypnotised you with his reflective narration in order to tell, obliquely, the nested stories of his neighbours, including Jack, his wife, and Jack’s father-in-law. 

There is something beautifully looping about the construction of Naipaul’s prose, throwing out lines of thought as leisurely as country walks, only to pull them tight like a trapper’s snare. This happens in the study of the father-in-law, who is introduced as “a Wordsworthian figure, bent, exaggeratedly bent, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude”. A recurring theme is the narrator’s attempt to reconcile the pre-industrial English pastoral that he absorbed from books in 1940s Trinidad and 1950s Oxford with the 1980s factory farming on his doorstep. Here, his allusion to Wordsworth — who was, of course, writing about the effects of industrialisation too — signals a novelist’s homage. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth argued that the language of poetry should not differ ‘from that of good prose’. Instead, he ensured poetic elevation through the passionate repetition of phrasing — and this is also one of the secrets of Naipaul’s miraculously steady and clear-eyed prose style. When the father-in-law is met “actually with a load of wood on his back: Wordsworthian, the subject of a poem Wordsworth might have called ‘The Fuel-Gatherer’”, the narrator sketches a man whom he only ever hears speak one word (“Dogs?”). Intensely observing his daily habits, Naipaul describes — with deepening sympathy — how the old man constructs a habitual “run” across the landscape, ignoring new boundaries by covering barbed wire with plastic sacking if necessary. 

At the end of the vignette, which covers a few pages, this last, unravelling sentence delivers a blow of pathos as profound as one of my favourite Lyrical Ballads, “The Last of the Flock”: “And so strong were the reminders of the old man’s presence, so much of his spirit appeared to hover over his run, over his stiles and steps and those oddly-place rolled-up plastic sack, even those he had rolled up and tied long ago and which were shredding now, plastic without its shine, blue turning to white, so much did all this speak of the old man moving slowly back and forth on his own errands, that it was some time before it occurred to me that I had not seen him for a while.”

First published in The Enigma of Arrival: a novel in five sections, Penguin, 1987; new edition with author’s preface, Picador, 2011

‘Angel Boley’ by Stevie Smith

This dark tale in verse, from Smith’s final, posthumous collection, addresses the existence of evil. It was her response to the Moors Murders, although it takes place “in the middle of the last century”. Angel Boley realises that her mother, Malady, and her husband, Hark, are luring children into the kitchen to kill them. So she takes it upon herself to be an avenging “Angel of Death”. Gathering poisonous mushrooms, she puts them “into a soup, and this soup she gave / To Hark, and her mother, Malady, for supper, so that they died”. She is arrested and confined to an asylum, “and soon she died / Of an outbreak of typhoid fever”. It is a vision of a world without ultimate justice, but with a morality, nevertheless, of human judgement (someone keeps writing “She did evil that good might come” on Angel’s gravestone, until the vicar declares it God’s will). Smith’s lack of a happy ending feels like the logical outcome of her unusually flat and rhymeless verse, driven by the necessity of plot from one shocking event to the next, as if deliberately passing over the chance to prettify. 

I will always be grateful to the poet Moniza Alvi for introducing me to this poem when I was supervising her PhD thesis, which argued that Stevie Smith has not been given her due by literary criticism. I sometimes wonder if there is a strange self-portrait in the figure of Angel, who like Smith is perfectly serious about telling the unvarnished truth, but judged by others to be unstable. 

First published in Scorpion and Other Poems, Longman, 1972; reprinted in The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith, Faber and Faber, 2015, ed. Will May

‘What’s He Building?’ by Tom Waits

I don’t know if anyone has ever proposed an analogue for the prose poem in the occasional spoken-word tracks you get on rock albums, but Tom Waits is a master of this resting-the-vocal-cords mode. He has said of this track, from Mule Variations(1999), that it was a tribute to the “word jazz” of Ken Nordine: “I wasn’t able to get it to fly as a song, so I just took the words and started saying them”. The result is an intimately creepy narration that wavers in and out of rhyming couplets, like the speaker of a Browning monologue gone to seed, revealing as much about his own paranoia as about the neighbour he is spying on: “What’s he building in there? I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children”. I first heard it around 2001, when I briefly lived in the States, and its growling menace — delivered over a clanging soundscape of midnight DIY — seems prophetic of the domestic paranoia that would grip the country after 9/11. The way Waits stretches out the phrase “he used to have a consulting business in Indonesia” oozes bar-stool xenophobia. 

First released on the album Mule Variations, Anti-, 1999 and available here

‘Plight’ by Frances Leviston

Frances Leviston wrote one of my favourite books of British poetry of the last decade: Disinformation (2015). She hasn’t yet published another, but there has been a collection of stories — all about characters called Claire — written with the same descriptive acuity about the physical world, cunningly revealing the feelings that lie beneath placid surfaces. “Plight” depicts a young woman at the pinch point of a dangerously passive family dynamic, in which the male siblings — the eldest over-rational, the youngest over-impulsive — might be the Freudian superego and id, leaving Claire as the poor ego struggling for self-realisation in the middle. What lifts it all to another level is the way Leviston’s narration is interrupted by sensuous paragraphs on the history of felt as a textile, which seem to have come from Claire’s rejected “creative critical” Art History dissertation, and in which what is felt is also what is not said: “As you work it, the felt shrinks. Its edges turn wavy, ragged; it ripples and the dips fill up with foam. You think it’s ruined, and sometimes it is; but sometimes its only approaching its new form. You pour on more water to rinse the fulling suds away, and then, when it’s relatively clean, you stretch it out to dry on a great frame called a tenter, from which we get the phrase ‘to be on tenterhooks’, meaning ‘to be suspended’.”

First published in The Voice in My Ear, Jonathan Cape, 2020.

‘Art Doesn’t Own It’ by Will Harris

Prose poetry often gets rather meta towards the end, so I thought I’d end this Personal Anthology by nominating a text that is, literally, personal, in the sense that I am — sort of — one of its personae. Will Harris was our Poetry Fellow at UEA last year, and as part of his time here he gave a masterclass for the Poetry MA students, on a serene May evening, where he read from a prose work in progress and invited comment from the room. My contribution was to mention Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” — specifically, the bit where Benjamin compares a story from Herodotus to a seed that survives, dormant, for centuries, in an airtight pyramid. What preserves both story and seed, says Benjamin, is their dryness. My anonymous double in the retelling remembers it much more articulately than I did, though also doesn’t mention something I added — which is that Benjamin’s inspired simile of a seed surviving “for centuries” has been debunked. Does it matter, though? It’s a wonderful story about stories, as is this poetic essay, which is an elegant and reflective refashioning of an hour or so during which we kept a many-angled thought collectively alive (“this is the story we’re telling now, together”). These hours are why we have universities.

First published online in Too Little / Too Hard, issue 1, and available to read online here 

‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville

This is an oft-anthologised story I know, but I still find the boldness and bravery of this mysterious scrivener as thrilling as when I first watched them play out—through the shocked eyes of our narrator, his disbelieving employer, who is of course fully tangled in the web of obligations and indignities that Bartleby so provocatively rejects. How fragile these systems really are, we might think. The motivations behind Bartleby’s refusals can be interpreted many ways, a mystery that’s part of the story’s pull, but we could do worse than keep him in mind through an era that continues to inspire dissent. All together now… we would prefer not to.

First published in Putnam’s Magazine, November-December 1853, and collected in The Piazza Tales, Dix & Edwards, 1856. Now widely available, including in Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, Penguin Classics. Available online at Project Gutenberg

‘The Trojan War Museum’ by Ayse Papatya Bucak

An extraordinary story. The cover copy of Bucak’s collection (of which this is the title story) has this summary: “the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialise, and make sense of, generations of war.” A fragmented structure seems a good way of working with mythic material, and this story keeps those ancient gods suitably mighty and strange, while offering a unique empathetic perspective and crucial thread of humanity through a world of ongoing violence. A difficult read at the time of writing.

First published in Guernica, July 2019, and available to read here; collected in The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, W. W. Norton, 2019

‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Angela Carter

What’s going on at the edges of the words in a Shakespeare play—or any great canonical text, for that matter? This story is like a guided tour of the strange truth behind the painted backdrop, the real characters underneath the pretend-poetry version, the waterlogged English wood sitting soggily beneath the theatrical pretence, the heart of darknesses (of patriarchy; of imperialism) at the play’s core. And yet it’s also a story of visions, that are poetic, and magic, and hilarious, and unknowable, in their own right.

First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985, and collected in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995; Vintage, 2006

‘Words’ by A.L. Kennedy

I could have included any number of Kennedy’s short stories on this list but instead I am choosing to bend the remit a bit and mention Words: A One-Person Show, her solo comedy performance about language and love that I was lucky enough to see as a student. Kennedy is great onstage—as warm and witty and wise as the show itself—and it was an experience that helped me stay determined to keep working across the dual worlds of (fiction) writing and live performance. Give words the respect they are due and They. Will. Make. You. Shine.

First performed in 2009 and touring to various places across the UK and elsewhere with its final performance in Humboldt University, Berlin. The full text is reprinted in On Writing, Jonathan Cape, 2013

‘All At One Point’ by Italo Calvino

Most of this story takes place in the impossibly tiny cramped point that is pre-Big Bang existence, then suddenly bursts the desire to make pasta for everyone; and so, everything else must follow: the physics for the act of making must come into being; the chemicals and atoms of pasta have to pop into existence; there must be sunlight to ripen the wheat, so stars duly explode; even the concept of everyone has to become comprehensible, so matter must rush outwards to fill time and space. This life-affirming world-shaping desire to host and cook and gather is more gendered than I would prefer nowadays (it could easily be “friends, let’s have pasta!” rather than “boys, I’ll make you some pasta!”) but the humane philosophy at the core of this mind-expanding story is wonderful anyway and to read it is to be made happy.

First published in Italian in 1965 in Le cosmicomiche and in English in 1968 in Cosmicomics; reprinted in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin 2009