Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ by Herman Melville

conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness… Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity.

This is a bad choice for this anthology. It’s not exactly an unheard-of hidden gem. It’s not even a short story. It’s right on the edge of what you could read aloud to A-Level students, most of whom would fall asleep halfway through. And yet it is irresistible.

A lawyer hires a third member of staff for his small office. While Bartleby impresses at first, it quickly becomes apparent that he has a unique approach to work and a healthy disregard for authority. The narrator grows increasingly unable to manage or understand his new scrivener, whose catchphrase is sure to come in handy for any teacher in a modern school.

First published 1853. Available online here

‘A Sound of Thunder’ by Ray Bradbury

‘It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior.’

 Read it. Do the voices.
1952; available online here

‘Charles’ by Shirley Jackson

“Look up,” he said to his father. “What?” his father said, looking up.“Look down,” Laurie said. “Look at my thumb. Gee, you’re dumb.” He began to laugh insanely.’

This is a story about a boy called Laurie who starts school. Most of his stories revolve around ‘Charles’, another, much naughtier boy in his class. His parents are keen to find out more about ‘Charles’, to meet his parents, and to offer the teacher some moral support. It is only when Laurie’s mother attends a parent-teacher evening that we realise the truth about ‘Charles’.

I tend to teach this story alongside Jekyll & Hyde, for fairly obvious reasons. Why does Laurie invent Charles? Do you think Laurie will continue to talk about Charles now he has been found out? Has Laurie changed as a result of starting school, or was he always like this really?

First published in Mademoiselle in 1948. Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, FSG, 1949

‘Kew Gardens’ by Virginia Woolf

…one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed…

This is a very simple, very short story set in Kew Gardens. As a snail makes his steady way around a flowerbed, a number of groups pass by and we are given a brief snapshot of their conversations. This is not an easy sell, but it works beautifully as an introduction to modernism and provides a valuable opportunity for younger readers to think about the impact (and practicalities of) narrative structures and devices.

Quite a lot of hand-holding is required, admittedly, but once it clicks it really clicks.

Why does the author keep coming back to the snail and the colourful shadows made by the flowers? Would this story make sense if the descriptions of the snail were removed? Can you see any links between Kew Gardens and any other texts you have read? What do you notice about the dialogue? In what ways is it similar to dialogue you are used to reading? In what ways is it different?

First published 1919, collected in Monday or Tuesday, Hogarth Press, 1921

‘The Landlady’ by Roald Dahl

“But I’m always ready. Everything is always ready day and night in this house just on the offchance that an acceptable young gentleman will come along.”

Seventeen-year-old Billy Weaver travels to Bath with work. Having been told to find his own lodgings, he chances across an odd but competitively priced Bed & Breakfast. He receives a warm welcome, has a chat about the names in the visitors book, and joins the landlady for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

I tend to read it for fun at first, then force them to think about the way the story is structured afterwards.

How does the writer prevent us from realising the woman is a murderer until the end of the story? Are there any hints that the Bed & Breakfast and the woman aren’t normal? Look again at the last sentence – is this a good way to end the story? Is it better to know a story is a scary story from the beginning, or is it better to find this out as a surprise?

First published in The New Yorker in November 1959; then anthologised in Kiss Kiss, Michael Joseph, 1960

Introduction

What I like best about the tiny letter format is the ‘letter’ bit: the way they arrive in your inbox so personally, as if really from a friend. I usually read it in bed, too, the way I’d read a letter. So I’ve tried to write a tiny letter which can be read like that, intimately, and to keep it to stories I love in that same way: not intellectually but personally, the ones I have internalised and sometimes even reused. I’ve tried to keep it short: I think ‘tiny’ is a good word, too.

‘The Serial Garden’ by Joan Aiken

Like most writers I was an unsuccessful child: ‘I played in the school yard all alone,’ as Frank O’Hara put it. Also like most writers I spent hours obsessively reading almost anything. The floor of my childhood bedroom was where I formed my unhygienic reading habits: to this day, I read books back-to-front and sides-to-middle – not so much interested inwhathappens but how, and in images and phrases I could store in my head. Joan Aiken’s short stories were particularly good for this: they’re beautifully written and beautifully formed too, packed with surreal images and well-turned sentences). I must have read ‘The Serial Garden’a hundred times.  Mark Armitage – the Armitage family are a recurring trope – stumbles on a very disagreeable breakfast cereal which tastes of alfafa grass but has a beautiful printed cut out garden on the back of the packet, and a delicate, magical and sad sequence of events results. Certain phrases from this story – Mark finding the putting of the garden together “a long, fiddling, pleasurable job” or missing his sister, ill with measles and “a handy and uncritical eater”, haunt me unreasonably to this day. I suppose it’s also a story about me and my brother in the ‘70s when there really were terrible little corner shops and we built an Asterix village from the back of the Weetabix packets.

First published in Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home (Doubleday, 1968), collected in The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories (Virago, 2015)

‘Idyll’ by Guy de Maupassant

I played a lot of clock patience when I was about fourteen: I liked to watch the pattern repeating and deviating. In the same way, I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse. They were soothing even if they didn’t quite deliver that hit of total absorption I was looking for. Guy de Maupassant’s ‘La Parure’, which I read in French, seemed a bit like one of those patterns at first, so I moved over to his stories in translation, and found myself in receipt of the strong stuff, his marvellous mixture of shape, character, and sensuality. ‘Idyll’, for instance, is outrageous: a man meets a wet nurse on the train. He is hungry and she is busting and the result is stupendous. It helped to cure me of the notion that sex didn’t exist in the past. Also, I’d been on the train in the opening description and I was amazed that writing showed it better than telly. “The train had just left Genoa en route for Marseille and was following the long curves of the rocky coast. It slithered like an iron snake between the mountains and the sea, past beaches of yellow sand lapped by little silver waves, before being swallowed up into the mouth of a tunnel like an animal bolting into its lair.”

First published in 1884. Widely translated and collected, including in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories (Penguin Classics, 2004)

 

‘The Young Girl’ by Katherine Mansfield

From Maupassant I hopped via Penguin Classics to Chekhov then Katherine Mansfield. Oh, I could fill this tiny letter with Katherine Mansfield, but I’ve picked ‘The Young Girl’ because I nearly know it by heart. The narrator, who seems to be an older man, has the care of a teenage girl thrust at him by her mother, desperate to go back to the gambling halls in what seems to be Monaco. Nothing bad happens: just a dreamlike narrative with carriages and wonderful ice creams. The girl is very angry, but the story ends on a transformative image:

“Please,” she stammered, in a warm, eager voice. “I like it. I love waiting! Really really I do! I’m always waiting – in all kinds of places.”

Her dark coat fell open, and her white throat – all her soft young body in the blue dress – was like a flower that is just emerging from its dark bud.’

First published in The Athaneum, 1920. Collected in The Garden Party (1922) Available online here

‘You Should Have Seen the Mess’ by Muriel Spark

I grew up in Edinburgh and so with Muriel Spark. I still like her short stories best: she seems to be to get bored with plots even in novellas. ‘You Should Have Seen the Mess’ was a favourite of mine at sixteen:  it’s about class, the artistic life, and untidiness – things which concern me still. A girl, her Edinburgh voice clear on every page – “we did not go to the full extent”, she says of sex – and trained like Spark, as a secretary, is taken out by an artist who we recognise as rich and talented, but she rejects him because he is not tidy enough for her. I always worried why the artist liked the tidy stupid girl though: I felt it didn’t bode well for me. (I was right.)

First published 1958. Collected in The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories and the Collected Short Stories (Canongate, 2011)

‘Livvie’ by Eudora Welty

Critical consciousness is a terrible thing for book love, and so are weekly essays. I didn’t adore many books at university but I did discover the Southern Gothics: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, my favourite of all because of that sensual, dream-like quality I am always looking for. I ate up all her stories, and realise that I actually internalised and re-wrote ‘Livvie’, which is the story of a young girl married to an older man who leaves him on his death-bed for her lover, in my novel Meeting the English. Welty manages to make not only Livvie but her husband and lover entirely sympathetic: like Idyll,it’s a story about the life force almost more than sex.

First published 1942. Collected in Thirteen Stories (Harcourt Brace, 1977)

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

Becoming a teacher did much to refresh my love of reading: it lets you go over and over small bits of text and share them too. I came across Jamaica Kincaid as a writer of teenagers, but actually she has a wide range and a startling biography.‘Girl’ is a very short story entirely in the imperative about the duties of a young girl in the Caribbean – another story about women, and cleaning. The voice, shape and details are all spot on: I love to teach this; it’s the definition of a rich text.

First published in The New Yorker, June 1978 and collected in At the Bottom of the River (FSG, 1983)

‘Love of Fat Men’ by Helen Dunmore

It took me a long time to start to think I could write myself, and even longer after I started to write poems to dare to break into prose. Helen Dunmore showed me you could do both. ‘The Love of Fat Men’ is one of her ‘Ulli’ stories:  about a cool, but emotionally honest Finnish girl. I’ve spent a lot of time in Finland too and recognise the cold grey landscape and Ulli’s trenchant, open character. Helen Dunmore gave me my first good review and was unfailingly generous to me and many others throughout her career. She died recently and I miss her

From Love of Fat Men (Penguin, 1997)