‘Errand’, by Raymond Carver

As a Chekhov devotee it might seem odd I should choose a story about, not by, Chekhov. But in truth, I prefer his plays, and this, about Chekhov’s final moments and death by champagne is classic Carver – or classic Gordon Lish (Carver’s editor), as we might now be led to believe. Regardless of that, it has all the precision, sobriety and exquisite timing of Carver’s best work with an added Russian flourish, and is the last story in Elephant, the collection published in the final year of Carver’s life. (Carver died aged 50 in 1988). My best friend, Sonia Misak, with whom I’ve been sharing stories both real and imagined for most of our lives, gave me my copy of Elephant at New Year 1990. Carver was quite possibly already terminally ill when he wrote ‘Errand’, but in it he is exploring Chekhov the writer rather than Chekhov the dying man; and reading it calls to mind that great line of Virginia Woolf’s: ‘I meant to write about death, but life kept breaking in as usual.’

(Originally published in Elephant. Also in from Where I’m Calling From, Harvill, 1993)

‘A Little Night Music’, by Jeanette Turner Hospital

The Australian author Jeanette Turner Hospital’s collection Isobars is uneven in places but its themes of unreliable memory, fugue states and global connections are persistent and powerful. (An isobar, in meteorology, is a line on a map where linked points have the same atmospheric pressure occurring at a given time). All anxieties about flying are fully indulged in this brief ghost story, written about an eleventh-hour passenger who boards a plane at the last minute. The narrator of the story, a woman, is highly apprehensive, with good reason: the previous night a flight on the same route had been blown up by a suicide bomber: there were no survivors. Her seat companion for this flight is a young man who speaks little English and appears distracted and tormented. The woman seeks to comfort him. After they both fall asleep she is ravaged by terrible dreams; when she wakes to daylight, the man has gone. Not to be read on long-haul, unless you’re a complete masochist.

(From Isobars, Virago Press, 1990)

‘Most Beloved’, by Tatyana Tolstaya

A descendant of Leo Tolstoy, Tatyana Tolstaya’s ravishingly bittersweet stories started appearing in 1983. (I would also point readers to her extraordinary dystopian novel The Slynx, published by NYRB Classics). In ‘Most Beloved’, from her second collection Sleepwalker in a Fog, originally published as part of Penguin’s International Writers series, the life and death of an seemingly unremarkable woman, Zhenechka, a fixture in the household which she serves as devoted housekeeper and governess is sketched in the form of impressions, dreams and wistful – but not whimsical – remembrances of her by those she loved, scolded and taught. It is a supremely Russian story of the Soviet era – yet all the perceived greyness and sterility of that period is transformed, under Tolstaya, into luscious Pushkin-like prose.

(From Sleepwalker in A Fog (Penguin, 1991), translated from Russian by Jamey Gambrell)

‘Secretary’, by Mary Gaitskill

Everyone familiar with the film of the same name should read the original story by Mary Gaitskill, whose tense accounts of New York in the 1980s are some of the best I’ve read, the written equivalent of photographer Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency series. Instead of the Hollywood version of ‘Secretary’ with shy but sexy Maggie Gyllenhaal and remote but irresistible James Spader hooking up in a BDSM happy-ever-after, this is entirely more grubby, unfulfilling and realistic. Introverted Debby is persuaded by her despairing family to take a dull job as typist for an unassuming, not particularly successful lawyer, who remains unnamed. When Debby makes a typing mistake, the spanking begins, to her terror and delight. It’s a study in social awkwardness and mutual loneliness with faultless sentences such as this: ‘It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let go’.

(From Bad Behavior, Sceptre, 1988)

‘A Night at the Opera’, by Janet Frame

The New Zealand author Janet Frame is best known for the autobiographical trilogy published as An Angel at my Table, and the subsequent film by Jane Campion. It was Frame’s stories and novels, though, which would prove a lifeline and her way out of rural poverty, family tragedy and mental instability. Frame was frequently admitted to psychiatric hospitals in her 20s and underwent electroconvulsive therapy following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She was scheduled for a lobotomy, which was cancelled when, in 1951, her dreamlike first collection of fiction,The Lagoon, won one of NZ’s most prestigious literary awards, an almost unbelievably fated intervention. In this story, found among Frame’s papers after her death, a screening of the Marx Brothers’ classic film parallels the humdrum yet surreal routine of the residents of Park Lane Hospital, where ‘the weeks had no name, nor the months, nor the years’.

(Published posthumously in the New Yorker, 2008. Available online)

‘A Tranquil Star’, by Primo Levi, translated by Ann Goldstein

When I think of Primo Levi, I think of the title of Myriam Anissimov ‘s Levi biography: Tragedy of an Optimist. Levi was a young Jewish chemist from Turin when he was deported to Auschwitz; his incredible survival and long return journey home to Italy are documented in works such as If The is A Man and The Drowned and the Saved. His death in 1987 as a result of a fall from the staircase in the apartment building where he was born and continued to live has long been debated as suicide or accident. But Levi was not only a witness and documenter of the Holocaust; his writing was also intellectually and playfully curious, quixotic and strangely comforting, as his stories prove. As with his masterpiece The Periodic Table, Levi combines complex scientific fact with lyrical language to lovely effect, as in the mysterious, allegorical yet highly rigorous ‘A Tranquil Star’.

(From A Tranquil Star and Other Stories. Penguin Classics, 2007)

‘A Bit On the Side’, by William Trevor

It was my mother, who was of Irish extraction, who first introduced me to William Trevor’s writing, and to Trevor himself: they both died at the end of last year.‘A Bit On the Side’ is typical downbeat WT, suffused with unshowy regret about chances not taken and lives not lived – the whole watched over with his all-seeing, all-compassionate eye. Two unprepossessing lovers in middle age resolve to part, but agonisingly find they cannot; she has recently divorced, he remains married. ‘She had never asked, she did not know, why he would not leave his marriage. His reason, she supposed, were all the reasons there usually were’. Unfailingly polite to and considerate of each other, there are no Grand Guignol turns here: instead, ‘they would grow old together while never being together’.

(From A Bit On the Side and Other Stories. Penguin, 2005)

‘The Blue Lenses’, by Daphne du Maurier

A decade ago I compiled an anthology of Daphne du Maurier’s menacing short stories for the Folio Society, with an introduction by Patrick McGrath (this has since been republished by NYRB Classics). ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘The Birds’ are probably the best known, but to me ‘The Blue Lenses’ is the most sinister. A woman, Marda West (even her name is weirdly off-key), undergoes a serious eye operation. Weeks later, and once the bandages have been removed, with replacement lenses implanted, she perceives that the heads of her fellow humans have been gruesomely replaced with those of animals, the worst saved for those closest to her: her surgeon, her personal nurse and her husband. In 2015, like Marda in the story, I began a series of sight-saving operations. I’d completely forgotten about ‘The Blue Lenses’ till the morning of the first procedure, when it inconveniently came back to me in all its full horror. Du Maurier’s cleverness at building suspense into the everyday, using, as Patrick McGrath describes, a ‘reverse anthropomorphism’ to emphasise the old adage of seeing people as they truly are, is told with quiet matter-of-factness which only increases the helplessness and fear of both Marda and the reader. I’ve omitted the brilliant final twist.

(From The Breaking Point and Other Stories, 1959. Available in Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, NYRB Classics, 2008, and The Breaking Point, Virago Modern Cassics, 2009)

‘Gold Boy, Emerald Girl’, by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li left her training as an immunologist to become a writer. Medicine’s loss is literature’s gain: her first novel, the grim, Dostoevsky-like The Vagrants, is one of the best books published in the last 10 years. Li excels at short fiction, too: in this collection she explores, through the latent melancholy and resigned pragmatism of her characters, the fractured nature of modern China, where she grew up (she moved to the US in her 20s): its cultural and historical upheavals, its individual deaths and departures arbitrarily violent or casually mundane by turns. In the strikingly hesitant title story, the Gold Boy and the Emerald Girl, both raised as only children, are set up for a pairing off in middle age by his anxious mother, who is unaware that they are mismatched because their romantic impulses lie in different, possibly forbidden, directions. Nonetheless, the two reach an understanding and a resolution that ‘they would not make on another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness’.

(From Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Hamish Hamilton, 2010)

Introduction

Certain kinds of personalities have great trouble with lists, and I have one of them: I can actually conceive of the entries left out as slighted objects with tangible emotions. So it’s a great temptation to begin this selection with a rush of obviouslykatherinemansfieldchekhovtessahadleymavisgallanttoo, tucked within which is a clear pleasedontjudgeme. But this is madness, and I have found myself freed by something that the great broadcaster Danny Baker said of his appearance on Desert Island Discs: it’s not an affidavit, you can change them all if you like. So these are stories that have made a great impression on me at some point in my life, but if I look too carefully at why it will all stop making sense. If I had to isolate one common element, it would be that, in completely different ways, they are all thrilling; they provoked in me a feeling of utter absorption and delight.

‘The Three Fat Women of Antibes’ by W Somerset Maugham

This is one of the first short stories I remember reading: in the days before YA, you simply raided your parents’ shelves, although I seem to remember my mother actually putting it into my hands. Three well-to-do ladies of a certain age take a long holiday in Antibes, which serves the dual purpose of incessant bridge-playing and a serious attempt to shed the pounds. Perhaps their greatest challenge beyond reduction is to find a reliable fourth for cards; and on this occasion they believe they’ve found the holy grail in the (irritatingly slim) shape of Lena. Vivid, witty and spiteful, it is perhaps at odds with contemporary conceptions of sisterhood, but the tales of trumps taken and “antifat” rusks eaten still makes me laugh with agonised recognition of weak will and its consequent mayhem. Read it, but perhaps even better, listen to Maugham reading it on Youtube, made all the funnier by his pronunciation of the “fet” the ladies are determined to banish.

(first published in Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan in 1933, collected in Vintage’s Collected Short Stories Volume 1, available online here)

‘Comrade Bingo’ by PG Wodehouse

In the sad days before Bertie Wooster’s chum Bingo Little found wedded bliss in the arms of the romantic novelist Rosie M Banks, he sought high and low for love, including an infatuation with would-be revolutionary Charlotte Corday Rowbotham. Before long, Bingo finds himself an entryist to the Heralds of the Red Dawn, a group committed to the overthrow of the aristocracy and to ushering tumbrils along the streets of Mayfair. The story contains an important life lesson: if emotional fulfilment requires you to disguise yourself with a false beard and heckle your family and friends at Speakers’ Corner, the relationship is unlikely to progress to a happy conclusion. Jeeves, Wooster, Aunt Dahlia, Gussie Fink-Nottle and Bingo himself were my constant companions through teenage years (along with Stalky & Co and Nancy Mitford’s aristocrats, make of all that what you will), and their misadventures still make me laugh.

(First published in The Stand in 1992 and collected in The Inimitable Jeeves, currently available from Arrow, which itself is in the Hutchinson Jeeves Omnibus 1 along with two other books.)

‘The Chinese Lobster’ by AS Byatt

One of three stories inspired by the work of Henri Matisse, ‘The Chinese Lobster’ – first published with its companions in 1996 – seems thoroughly in step with today’s debates about power relations between men and women and the locus of authority. The Dean of Women’s Studies at a London university arrives in the supposedly neutral space of a Chinese restaurant to present an art historian with charges of sexual abuse that a female student has made against him. He is outraged, and cites the student’s lack of ability as a clumsy defence; but we are also encouraged to consider the pain he feels at her desecration of his beloved Matisse. Beyond its subject matter, it is remarkable for the creation of a palpable atmosphere of unease and ambiguous luxury, emblematised by the live lobster trapped in its tank.

(First published in The New Yorker in 1992, and collected in The Matisse Stories, Vintage)

‘Tebic’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner

‘Humphrey, what is Tebic? What does it do?’
‘Its duty – as Woolworth’s expects of it. Now go on to something else, you’re only halfway down.’

Tebic is a small gift – wrapped in silver paper, encased in blue plastic and embossed with a head of Athene – that Humphrey Warburton gives his wife Lydia in her Christmas stocking. The problem: he can’t remember what it is, and she throws it aside – until one day, it is seized on by a lunch guest who declares herself a “Tebic addict”. What I love about this story is that I still don’t know what to make of it, having it read it over and over again, or refined my ideas of what the mysterious Tebic might be – the best I can do is to say it sits in my mind with a black-and-white framed photograph of the back of a woman’s head that I’ve had for years.

(First published in The New Yorker in 1958, and collected in The Music at Long Verney)