‘Kew Gardens’ by Virginia Woolf

Throughout ‘Kew Gardens’, which has been described as a modernist short story, the narrator returns to the very English flowerbed, focusing on a snail as it moves through the flowers offering a ground-level perspective of the world on a hot, July day. The story relays the unfolding of a moment or a series of moments, rather than a grand, unified narrative or plot. Flowers and shrubs and the garden are essential features in this story, but they are not named, and despite the precise descriptions they are not easily identifiable:

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red, blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour.

The narrative shifts from the flower bed to the couples walking past in turn, four couples – a husband and wife, an old and a younger man, two women, a courting couple, none of whom have much communication between them. Are the unnamed flowers supposed to signify something or are they just there as ‘real’ flowers in the environment of the story? Woolf remains elusive about this.

First published privately in 1919, and collected in Monday or Tuesday, Hogarth Press, 1921. Later collected in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, 1944. Now available in an illustrated edition from Kew Publishing, 2016, The Mark on the Wall and Other Stories, Oxford, and Selected Stories, Penguin Classics

‘Forest Life’ by Federico Falco, translated by Jenifer Croft

‘Forest Life’, an Argentinian short story, is an ode to the pine forest and flora and fauna where Wutrich and his daughter, Mabel live. When their home is threatened, Mabel is under pressure to marry a Japanese man, Saikoti, who grows flowers in greenhouses on the plains, a day’s drive from the mountains where she and her father live. Wutrich moves into a nearby eldercare facility, where he longingly reminisces about the life and environment he has lost: “Four hundred and fifty thousand pines, he said. We transported them on horseback. And then, all these years… All those pines up there, he said, growing so slowly you wouldn’t even notice it.” Mabel herself finds, in her new home amongst other Japanese immigrants, her eyes becoming “lost in that ground with a single tree”. Over the course of the story, a subdued relationship develops between Mabel and Sakoiti. They come to recognise that their union was only possible because they were both displaced, through deforestation and immigration, to live in a new environment. Falco uses precise descriptions of the landscape to reflect his characters internal experiences. Flowers and trees – nature’s profound beauty, cyclical deterioration and rejuvenation, and rootedness – mirror the character’s interior lives, their memories, and aspirations. He examines the stillness of human existence, its stoicism and how minute details and private inner worlds connected to nature, reveal a sophisticated philosophical way of living and being.

First published in English in A Perfect Cemetery, Charco Press, 2021

‘The Garland’ by Saadat Hasan Manto

‘The Garland’ is set in the frenzied days of Partition in Pakistan. A Muslim mob in Lahore attacks the statue of Sir Ganga Ram, a famous Hindu architect and philanthropist, pelting ‘him’ with sticks, bricks and stones. One man smears the statue with coal tar and another is shot by police as he places a garland of shoes around the monument’s neck. The satire closes with the injured man being rushed off, “to be bandaged at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital”, founded by the very same Ganga Ram whose image he had been wrecking. Manto allows the reader a quick apprehension of an ironic truth, but the characters remain unconscious.

First published in 1948 and collected in Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, Penguin Global, 2009

‘Lawley Road’ by RK Narayan

A comparable Indian story also about the early days of Partition is RK Narayan’s dark comedy Lawley Road (1943), the central premise of which is whom a monument should commemorate. In the fictional town of Malgudi, a series of bureaucratic absurdities around colonial symbols illustrate the legacy of colonialism and the confusion and crisis of identity after Independence. The Chairman of the Municipal Council decides to remove the sculpture of Sir Frederick Lawley, “with breeches, wig and white waistcoat and that hard determined look”, from the Lawley Extension, after it has been renamed Gandhi Nagar, even though “people had got so used to it that they never bothered to ask whose it was or even to look up. It was generally used by the birds as a perch.” The twenty-foot statue, “with the firmness of a mountain”, is blasted off its molten lead pedestal “with a few sticks of dynamite.” However, it is soon discovered there had been a mistake: Sir Lawley, whose statue had been uninstalled, had always been a friend to Malgudi, not to be confused with another Sir Lawley, a ruthless tyrant. The government orders the Chairman to reinstate the monument. The effect is tragicomic: the reader is always aware that the squabbles, typical of human nature, are of no consequence against the backdrop of violence and dislocation of Partition, which was occurring at the same time.

First published in 1943 and collected in Lawley Road, Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1969. Now available in Malgudi Days, Penguin Classics

‘The Artificial Nigger’ by Flannery O’Connor

‘The Artificial Nigger’ is also located in a shifting political landscape, but in the US. The two main characters move through an unsettling experience culminating in the sighting of a statue leading them to an awareness of sorts. In a rural town of Georgia, Mr Head and his grandson, Nelson prepare for a trip to Atlanta. They argue about whether or not Nelson will recognise “a nigger”. After a stressful day in the city, Mr Head and Nelson see a plaster figurine of a black, lawn jockey on a lawn. This is their moment of reckoning. Mr Head says, “An artificial nigger!” which the boy repeats, in the “exact same tone.” Mr Head explains the statue is there because “they ain’t got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one.” The statue elicits an emotional response from the old man and his grandson and they reach an understanding of their familial bond and “all the mystery of existence”, but, as the reader appreciates, they remain unaware of their racist attitude and their wider connection to humanity.

First published in A Good Man is Hard to Find, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955

‘Propaganda by Monuments’ by Ivan Vladislavic

In ‘Propaganda by Monuments’, Vladislavic bring into focus a similar dilemma, but in the context of apartheid. Told from two points of view, the story contemplates the fate of discarded statues: what would happen if they were exported to another country, and how it would affect the identity of the sender and recipient. In contrast to the parochial setting of the other stories, Vladislavic’s is an international drama between South Africa and Russia. In Pretoria, one of the protagonists, Khumalo, has a brainwave when he reads a newspaper advertisement: Moscow City Council is giving away ‘surplus’ statues of Lenin. Khumalo reflects that apartheid has ended and his café now needs “a change of clothes”. He writes to Moscow asking if he could be gifted, or purchase, a “spare statue” for his renamed “V.I. Lenin Bar and Grill”. In Moscow, Grekov, a bored translator in the Administration of Everyday Services, receives the letter and sets out looking for the unwanted statues, in the “scrap heap… of history”. He tries but fails to imagine what will take the place of Lenin’s statues in the squares, and reflects “how soon people become bored with the making and unmaking of history”. This casual observation made flippantly by Grekov is in fact a profound realisation: the reader recognises that ordinary citizens are disinterested in history because it makes them feel nervous, insecure and irrelevant. When Khumalo receives Grekov’s response, he drives through a white neighbourhood, and stops to examine the monument of J.G. Strijdom, an Afrikaaner, and proponent of apartheid. Khumalo sees the sun shining through the statue’s “finely veined bronze ears”, and understands “how, but not necessarily why, the impossible came to pass”. Khumalo has comprehended less than he realises, and a broader and deeper understanding of historical consequences is the reader’s alone.

Published in Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories, David Phillip, 1996

‘Hinterland’ by Carol Shields

The effect of another type of missed realisation is examined in Carol Shields’ short story ‘Hinterland’. Here the fleeting nature of an existential experience of beauty is explored; the present is poised as a moment with potential, but it passes without acknowledgement and the result is distance and dissatisfaction between the characters. A couple takes an excursion to the Cluny Museum in Paris where Meg notices the painting of a sculpture, “a particular gilded Virgin”. She says that the portrait will be the single object she will remember from their trip. However, her husband, Roy says he missed it, and he returns on his own to the Museum to view it. Standing in front of the painting, he reflects on its “crude approximations, but is nonetheless moved at the way a human life drains towards one revealing scene”. A fire alarm prompts him to leave the Museum in a panic. Later this incident is the only thing he recollects, while Meg reminisces on the expensive long distance telephone call she made to her daughter. Neither of them will think of the painting, and their “remembrance of specific events” will become “worn smooth and treacherous as the stone steps of ancient buildings.” The recognition is only for the reader, while the characters stay trapped in their limited understanding.

Published in The Orange Fish and Other Stories, 1989, and the Collected Stories, Fourth Estate, 2004

Introduction

Publishers will tell you that most short story collections are doomed from the start. There’s a long-standing bias among readers that novels are a better value, or perhaps more serious, than short stories. As a consequence, short story collections often fall out of print and quickly become neglected – which is why, a few years ago, I decided to devote a year to reading and writing about nothing else on my Neglected Books website.

When I proposed a personal anthology that would just feature some of my favourite stories by neglected writers, I thought it would be easy. When I went through the 50-some posts about short story collections on my site, however, I soon had a list of at least as many stories.

So, I decided instead to focus on stories that are not only by neglected or little-known writers but also that push an envelope, often playing with boundaries between the act of reading and the act of writing or taking its subject to the extreme. They demonstrate what I consider one of the strengths of the short story form, which is that it is always open to experimentation and testing limits. They could be considered metafictions, even though most of them were written long before William Gass invented that term.

Coincidentally, this selection also adds a dozen new names to the list of authors collected the Total Personal Anthology.

‘On the Floor’ by Joan Jukes

This story is a marvel and a mystery. Joan Jukes was either a pseudonym or she never published anything other than this one story, which first appeared in Edward J. O’Brien’s short-lived magazine New Stories. It’s also, as far as I know, the first example of a short story narrated by a disabled character. In it, a young woman who’s unable to walk unaided, due to some unspecified degenerative disease, falls on the floor in her family’s dining room and is stuck there waiting for someone to come along and help her up.

“On an occasion like this,” she tells the reader, “I have sometimes tried to sing out for help in an unmistakably jaunty tone of voice to let everyone know at once that I am happy and carefree, I haven’t lost an eye or broken a leg, but this attempt has never been successful, because through closed doors my gay halloo seems to pierce like a shriek of agony.” Despite her situation, the narrator’s voice is struck through with a mix of ironic acceptance and jaundiced scepticism of the capacity of the able people in her world to see past her limitations. You wish that Joan Jukes had had the chance to build a whole novel around this wonderful voice. It’s really a landmark work that ought to be in high school readers around the world.

First published in New Stories volume 1, number 6 (December-January 1934-5, included in The Best Short Stories 1935, edited by Edward J. O’Brien, which is available online on the Internet Archive here

‘The Nature of the Task’ by Howard Nemerov

Although Nemerov published four novels and two story collections, he’s best known as a poet, having twice served as Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress and won most of the major literary prizes for his poetry. Not many people seem to know his short stories, however, which is a shame because they have a wonderful way of playing with the reader’s mind. Nemerov definitely recognized the opportunity to experiment that the short story form offered him.

‘The Nature of the Task’ is a perfect example. A man is assigned the task of killing all the flies in a room. The room is simple and bare, just a cube with a linoleum floor and a window high on one wall. The fact that he sees no flies, he reassures himself, doesn’t mean they’re not there: perhaps they’re hidden in the pattern of the linoleum.

But he’s also been given no fly swatter, so perhaps it’s not literal flies he’s meant to kill. Perhaps it’s “the nasty black thoughts that feed on the filth of the self, and whose buzzing has but this one use, that it serves to keep the soul from sleeping in its foulness.” Or perhaps the purpose of assigning him the task of killing flies in a room where no flies existed was to have him do nothing at all. He begins to lose track of the difference between looking – for flies, for patterns in the linoleum, for barely perceptible differences in the walls—and thinking.

It’s probably a good thing that ‘The Nature of the Task’ is just ten pages long: were Nemerov to have gone much further, he and the reader both might have gone insane. But as it is, the story’s a giddy dance along the edge of madness.

First published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 42, No. 2, Spring 1966, included in Stories, Fables and Other Diversions, David R. Godine, 1971

‘Delta Q’ by Alvin Greenberg

I first read this story when I was researching my senior thesis on the experimental short story back in the late 1990s. It’s a great example of using the short story to take just one simple thing and stretch to test the limits of the subject (or the writer).

“After a while I could no longer tolerate the taste of just-cooked food,” the story begins. “Only leftovers were bearable.” Soon, the narrator is shopping at ghetto shops, where he finds food far past its ‘Sell By’ date still sold: “a world of dented canned goods, stale sweet rolls, ground beef turning brown, shriveled ears of corn…” He prepares gourmet meals only to let them sit for days in his refrigerator, losing their taste, scent, look, trying to fix the moment at which the beef roast or chocolate mousse lose their identity entirely. “All I want is a moment now and then when I can say, This is I, this is reality, we are face to face and it is known what we are.”

Greenberg takes his title from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in which Δq refers to the uncertainty or inexactness in the measurement of the position of a particle. The Uncertainty Principle postulates that there is a limit to the accuracy with which one can observe and describe the universe, and ‘Delta Q’ is an illustration of the futility of capturing reality with absolute precision, particularly through such a crude instrument as language. I love how Greenberg blends strong physical elements and elevated conceptual elements in this one piece.

First published in The Antioch Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 Winter, 1977, included in Delta Q, University of Missouri Press, 1983

‘Can’t You Get Me Out of Here?’ by Julia Strachey

I tracked this story down after reading the remarkable Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey, which her lifelong friend Frances Partridge compiled from Strachey’s papers and her own recollections and diary after Strachey’s death in 1979. As a writer, Strachey was more often frustrated than accomplished, and her few short stories have never been collected.

There’s so much going on in this story it’s really a tour-de-force. It starts with a description of how Strachey (clearly the unnamed narrator) reads to her near-blind father from The Times. “Pass on!” he shouts whenever she hits a headline he’s not interested in. Then she recalls how a tree frog accidentally leapt into a large bowl of pasta while she was lunching once at an Italian hotel. “I am a tree frog myself,” she writes:

And I can confirm that it is indeed a brash curiosity about queer-looking-things-far-glimpsed that starts a tree frog’s nervous speckled legs to twitch. I know it all—the lunatic leap out from the scaffolding into space, the brief whiz through colored airs, then the landing down in the dark, among yielding, treacherous, slithering things. I know the seasick and obsessional floundering around tangled up in those writhing strings, the panic, and the desperation in the cries ‘Where am I?—Can’t you get me out of here?’

It ends with an account of how she and her husband once dropped off a friend’s dog at a kennels. Her description of the animal’s fear of the unknown is almost visceral and leads to a meditation on the responsibility of humans to care for other creatures that is more powerful as any animal rights tract.

First published in The New Yorker, included in Stories from the New Yorker, 1950-1960, Simon & Schuster, 1960

‘Worm’s-Eye View’ by John Sommerfield

This might not really qualify as a short story, though it’s the first in what’s called a collection of stories. It might better be called a reflection of Sommerfield’s experiences as an RAF enlisted mechanic in World War Two.

It opens with the recollection of how he and his crewmates at a bomber base in the North would walk through a wood between their quarters and the airfield.

Sometimes when we came under the shade of those trees and sniffed that elusive vegetable smell we were reminded of a different world, one having nothing to do with the way we lived now, nor belonging to the fantasies of civilian existence with which we tantalized ourselves.

As Sommerfield takes us from the cold and wet of England to the heat and monotony of an airfield in Egypt, he describes how essential these fantasies are to a soldier’s emotional survival—and yet, at the same time, understood to be fragile and unreliable:

Bemused by our own fantasies, warped by disillusionings, fooled and moralized at and lied to by authority, what chance had we of seeing and understanding what we were and what was happening to us?

He draws from the journal he kept throughout the war, noting how absurd were his attempts to assert any fact or opinion with confidence. “History, that scattered us about the world, hid its face from us.” In a quiet and unassuming way, ‘Worm’s-Eye View’ is a reflection on how fiction is both necessary and problematic for our existence.

Included in The Survivors, John Lehmann, 1947

‘The Perfectionist’ by Joseph Slotkin

Joseph Slotkin published numerous short stories in the 1950s and early 1960s, mostly in SF magazines, but his work has never been collected. ‘The Perfectionist’ takes America’s love of the car to the point of obsession and beyond. Car salesman always say that new cars lose value the minute they’re driven off the dealer’s lot, and in this story, Slotkin portrays a man fighting a fierce but doomed battle to deny that reality:

There ought to be something in the world that could be kept safe and inviolate….

… And maybe if he and this machine kept moving, nothing could harm them–they could move like planets in their orbits, like meteors—

… Even dust could not settle on them, if they moved fast enough, away, and if anyone or even anything got in the way, they would go faster….

It’s a wonderful illustration of William Carlos Williams’ line about the pure products of America going crazy, but also a chilling reminder of the futility of trying to stop time.

From Discovery #6, 1955