Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Drowning’ by Joanna Walsh and ‘My Death’ by Lynda Schor

‘Drowning’ is redolent with those earlier depictions of motherhood in the seventies where women took to testifying to their experience, and in so doing to making the personal political. So, when I first read ‘Drowning’, I was already there, in motherhood as abysmal, as oblivion, motherhood as death of self, say… In Lynda Schor’s 1979 ‘My Death’ it’s not the sea but the bathtub in which the mother drowns herself, and then in her case she was dead already:
‘Listen Ruth, I’m dead. Could you pick up the kids for me and keep them a while till Dave picks them up?’
‘I’m dead too. I was going to call you and ask whether you could pick up Rosalee?’
Somewhere between ironic and deadly serious, Schor charts an afternoon as a mother, dead, but obliged to carry on with her chores. “The baby sucked greedily, unaware of my condition.” Her husband suggests she think of something more positive, chiding her, “You always complain.” The story casts an acerbic gaze on parenthood, one typical of the era, but not without resonance today.
‘Drowning’ was first published in Vertigo, And Other Stories, 2016. ‘My Death’ is anthologised in Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, ed. Moyra Davey, 2001)

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

And even before that mother-as-subject, mother-as-madwoman in the attic had been portrayed in The Yellow Wallpaper. The first sentence – “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer” – prefaces a tale in which this ordinariness becomes increasingly and disturbingly deranged. I read it when I was a teenager, and I read it then as a narrative of hysteria. Written at the end of the Nineteenth Century, it’s certainly of that era, the epidemic of hysteria, of Charcot and the Salpêtrière, and the narrator’s own “hysterical tendency” is mentioned on the second page. It’s only now, on rereading as a mother, that I recognise it as an explicit tale of the post-partum condition. While the absent baby is only mentioned three times in the whole story, it’s the wallpaper that absorbs the new mother’s gaze:
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down and tramples upon you. It’s like a bad dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions – why, that is something like it.
It is not the baby but the wallpaper that is the object of her attention, that keeps her up at night, and with which her own self increasingly blurs: the story ends when she has switched places with the woman creeping in the wall paper: “It is so pleasant … to creep around as I please.”
First published in 1892, my copy is Virago, 1997

‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall

‘Mrs Fox’ isn’t a first-person telling of motherhood, but for its staggering sentences, for its depiction of motherhood as becoming-animal, for its writing of the mother into folktale, it belongs here. There is a frank curtness to this as with all Sarah Hall’s stories; it is both tautly written and oozily bodily. ‘Mrs Fox’ won the BBC International Short Story Award in 2013. The scene of encounter between husband and wife-become-fox, which I am quoting only in part here, still stalls me.
Beneath one trunk there is an opening, a gash between stones and earth. Her den. … She cocks her head, as if giving him licence to speak. But no, he must not think this way. Nothing of the past is left, except the shadow on his mind. … There are four, they stumble towards their mother. … As she feeds them her eyes blink closed, sensually, then she stares at him.
Privy to this no man could be ready.
First published in 2014 by Faber as a Kindle single, and collected in Madame Zero

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius, translated by Jamie Bulloch

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is billed as a single sentence, but that’s not where the charm lies (nor in the Joycean inflections) – though ‘charm’ there certainly is in this hesitant, expectant monologue of a pregnant German woman in Rome. It’s 1943, her husband’s at war and she is on her way to listen to a Bach concert. The monologue is structured by the woman’s walk through the city, it becomes a detailed, personal, psychological map of a city read through the body of a pregnant woman, and I turn to it again and again for the attention it gives to the architecture, to the textures of brick and stone, the steps and bridges, rivers and views. Unable to read Italian, ignorant to the realities of war, the woman’s monologue has a touching naïvety to it that only starts to fall away in the very last pages.

First published as ‘Bildnis Der Mutter Als Junge Frau’, 2006. This first English translation, Peirene, 2010

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

As if maternity gives itself to monologue, and then, Tillie Olsen’s 23-page monologue is coloured by the very impossibility of finding the time to gather thoughts:
And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.
And yet it’s the domestic scene, and this story itself, that provides the occasion for that gathering together and totalling. Elaborated over the ironing board, this is an exquisite piece of writing balancing regret, retrospect, guilt and defensiveness as the mother deliberates how she brought up her first child, her monologue rhythmed to the methodical back and forth of the iron… It’s tender and jarring and unresolved:
Only help her to know – help make it so there is cause for her to know that she is more than this dress on the ironing-board, helpless before the iron.
First published in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell, 1961/Virago 1980

‘On Interruptions’ by Sarah Ruhl

The monologue, the reverie, and in equal measure the fragmented, the interrupted… as in Sarah Ruhl’s ‘On Interruptions’ in which the text is interrupted, left hanging, as – full-blast, mid-sentence, in rushes the child.
Sorry. In the act of writing that sentence, my son, William, who is now two, came running into my office to ask for a fake knife to cut his fake fruit.
The artifice of the story is cut through by the antipathy of writing and mothering. This happens a second time, and on the third the thrust of the child’s hand onto the keyboard makes his presence visible in the text:
Perhaps that is equally 7. My son just typed 7 on my computer.
So motherhood acts beyond the page, and interruption makes for jagged texts, for shards and sharp edges.
In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, FSG, 2015, and available here

‘Light’ by Kathleen Jamie

Likewise, for Kathleen Jamie, the writing, the thinking becomes a happening-in-between, a happening-alongside:
Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in traffic, oyster catchers. In the school playground, sparrows.
Being mother is the invisible scaffold to many of the texts in Sightlines and Findings, and in the moments that scaffolding show through it revises, or reshapes the sense of the text itself, revealing just how her ecological writings are pinioned by a maternal subject seeing perceiving the world. This trope is most insistent in ‘Light’ where a passage on the change of seasons, and the changing light is shot through with the cry of a child outside – “She makes a call poised just between play and fear” – turning it into a suggestive shard of reflection on the liminal instant being child, becoming teenager: “Filaments and metallic ribbons of wind-blown light, just for an hour, but enough.”
In Sightlines, Sort of Books, 2012

‘Milk’ by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A taxonomy of the everyday of motherhood (“feed the boys, wave my husband to work, fill the dishwasher, pick up toys, clean spills, glance at the clock…”) makes its focus the milk, the story is ensconced in the hours spent in breastfeeding and expressing milk. Testifying both to the day-to-day tasks and to the absorption with these tasks, it is mimetic, but mimesis doesn’t mean not sublime, and not winding. It has all the tropes of the short story: narrative arc, foreshadowing, characterisation, rise and fall of tension and it is also the most searingly moving and acute rendering of motherhood, and the very precariousness of being a mother, that I have read.
If I am washing dishes, everything must be fine. If I am scrubbing scrambled egg from a pot, everything must be fine. … If I stay home and hang the clothes on the line, that means everything is normal, doesn’t it?
In The Dublin Review, number 70, Spring 2018

‘Accumulations (Appendix F)’ by Kate Zambreno

In January The White Review published ‘Accumulations (Appendix F)’ by Kate Zambreno online.  The text was printed as a thin column, so the reader could scroll and read one-handed, while breastfeeding. As such it both established the nursing dyad and, with the insertion of a screen into the mother-child configuration, it gave permission to break it. Permissive and equally provocative, this publishing act mirrors the stance taken by the text itself, which begins, “I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of this past year.” It’s taxonomic, ekphrastic, playful and irreverent, at one instant positioning the nursing mother and child in front of the El Greco ‘Holy Family’, at another in front of a Harry Dodge video. “I figured if there were so many penises in that room it was okay to have my breast peek out through my leather jacket, like a floppy blue-veined sac of a sculpture, scratched and sad.” So there’s this discomfiting layering of reading subject, writing subject and written object… it unravels, subverts, queers… anything I’ve ever read about motherhood, and I’m dwelling on it still…

In The White Review online

Introduction

Obviously attempting to select merely twelve short stories that affected me is an absurd and pointless exercise, but as a fan of list-making for no reason, here we go. I am a great believer in the power of the short story and what it can achieve as a form, and I constantly rail against the (mostly British) idea that the short story is something a writer cuts their teeth on before progressing to the proper literature of the novel. It’s much better to see the short story as being able to do things the novel cannot, and vice versa, rather than pit them in false opposition.

I believe the short form lends itself best to strange, weird or eerie fiction where mood and atmosphere are as important as character and plot. And as reality has become stranger or more unsettling than any fiction we can create, here are some of the weird stories I consider the best (and one that’s not really weird at all).

‘Black Country’ by Joel Lane

Joel Lane (1963-2013) is the single most underrated writer of fiction I can think of. I was at Fantasycon 2016, in Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast, where I picked up a collection of his and was immediately sold by the following bit of blurb: “Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape.”

I devoured the book in big greedy gulps, amazed that such writing even existed – precisely the kind of writing I was hunting for and trying to write myself. Using the well-worn trope of the melancholy police officer as the access-point to all the strata of the society in which he lives, Where Furnaces Burn is a bleak and heady mix of the kind of brutal British crime writing of David Peace, Derek Raymond and Ben Myers’ crime novels, mixed with existential pessimism and prose stylings of horror writers like Thomas Ligotti. I always thrilled to Joel Lane’s use of a specific landscape – and one curiously underrepresented in fiction. Here we have expert evocations of a blighted Black Country, the derelict warehouses of Digbeth, mysterious trains rattling through a dark and rain-soaked Birmingham. Joel Lane creates a terrifying world of post-industrial machine worship, bizarre pagan ritual and ghosts comprised of plaster and rotten wallpaper that make the place nightmarish, frightening and weirdly compelling.

I could choose any of the stories in this collection, but I will choose ‘Black Country’ as it captures everything I love about Joel Lane’s writing.

Lane is well known amongst genre circles, and had had a couple of more mainstream novels published by Serpent’s Tail in the early 2000s (including the brilliant From Blue to Black), but seems largely unknown otherwise. This is a crying shame, and should change.

First published 2010 as a Nightjar Press chapbook. Collected in Where Furnaces Burn, PS Publishing, 2012

‘The Stains’ by Robert Aickman

There are many Robert Aickman (1914-1981) stories that I could have chosen – famous contenders like ‘The Hospice’ and ‘The Swords’ are rightly celebrated and could easily be on this list. But it is the long short-story ‘The Stains’ that has stayed with my thoughts more than any other.

‘The Stains’ focuses on that most Aickman of characters, a sad and unremarkable middle-aged English civil servant, Stephen, whose wife Elizabeth has recently died. Bereft and unsure of what to do with himself, he takes a leave of absence from work to stay with his brother in “the north” who has published “two important books on lichens”. Stephen, perturbed by his brother’s wife, begins taking long walks on the moors; and one day he meets a young woman named Nell who is collecting mosses and lichens. She fascinates him, and he is intensely attracted to her. She becomes a kind of path toward liberation for him, representing a mysterious and ancient world that he craves in the face of creeping modernity. It is strongly implied she is an aspect from nature, a nymph of some sort. She, if she exists at all, is a relic from a deep past that Stephen romanticises, much like the lichens his brother studies. He fetishises her “aboriginal” nature.

Then he notices a strange lichen-like stain on her body. They move into together, the walls of the house they attempt to domesticize becoming covered in strange fungal and lichen growths. The stains spread to Stephen’s body, before nature comes to claim him utterly.

‘The Stains’ is the most intriguing, nuanced, and saddest of Aickman’s stories and its meaning can be endlessly deciphered and interpreted but never fully pinned down; as with all of his work, that is its great and enduring strength.

First published in New Terrors, ed. Ramsey Campbell, Pan Books, 1980; collected in The Unsettled Dust, Faber & Faber, 2014

‘The White Cat’ by Joyce Carol Oates

There was a gentleman of independent means who, at about the age of fifty-six, conceived of a passionate hatred for his much-younger wife’s white Persian cat.

 A highlight among highlights from Joyce Carol Oates’ brilliant Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque collection, ‘The White Cat’ is the story of Julius, a wealthy man in his late fifties who does not need to work, and his much younger wife; she spends a lot of her time with her circle of theatre friends in the city, leaving him alone to collect his rare antiques and ponder why he still feels unsatisfied, despite having accrued everything he considers necessary for a successful life. Adding to his woes is Miranda, the white Persian cat he bought for his wife, who seems to like everyone except Julius and will not let him stroke her or come anywhere near here. Julius is annoyed – didn’t he buy the cat, and bestow it to his wife as a gift? So why does the cat not show him any affection? He owns the cat, right?

So, Julius decides to kill Miranda, attempting to make it look like an accident. The cat doesn’t die, returning from the grave again and again, much to Julius’s distress…

‘The White Cat’ is one of those great stories that is absurdly funny, genuinely creepy, and one that can be interpreted in several different ways – is Julius simply transferring his feelings towards his wife onto the cat, or is there something genuinely wrong with the animal? Often lauded as a highlight of feminist horror short-fiction, this was the story that made me understand why Oates is considered such an important writer.

First published in A Matter of Crime, Harcourt Brace, 1987; collected in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, Penguin/Plume, 1995