Category: Keiron Pim

Keiron Pim is the author of two biographies, Endless Flight: the Life of Joseph Roth (Granta, 2022) and Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld (Jonathan Cape, 2016). He teaches non-fiction writing at the University of East Anglia and the National Centre for Writing, and has written for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Spectator. He also works as a proofreader and mentors aspiring non-fiction authors. He lives in Norwich with his wife and three daughters.

‘Hodel’ by Sholom Aleichem, translated by Julius and Frances Butwin

Sholom Aleichem, the pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, is probably the best-known writer of Yiddish short stories. Many of them concern Tevye the dairyman, a pious, simple man whom life sets an inordinate number of trials, often concerning his daughters. This story is a bittersweet account of a father’s reluctant acceptance that he must let his daughter Hodel become her own person, even if that means making mistakes, and even if it means her unwisely falling in love with a firebrand young revolutionary with whom she plans to change the world. I discovered it when I picked up a second-hand copy of The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories, attracted partly by my interest in Jewish literature, but also because it was edited by Emanuel Litvinoff, whom I had met a few years previously. Litvinoff was an eminent Anglo-Jewish writer of the mid- to late-20th Century. I wrote a biography of his nefarious half-brother David Litvinoff, and interviewed Emanuel about David in 2010, when he was 95 years old. It was an honour to meet him, and I only wish I’d known about this book already so we could also have discussed his selections. I imagine that he chose ‘Hodel’ for its delicately wistful tone, its portrayal of father-daughter relationships and the power of its famous closing lines, uttered by Tevye to the narrator after he has forlornly bid Hodel farewell. “And now let’s talk about more cheerful things. Tell me, what news is there about the cholera in Odessa?”

First published as ‘Hodl’ in Yiddish in 1894; first published in translation in Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, Crown, 1949, and collected in The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories, Penguin, 1979

‘If She Bends, She Breaks’ by John Gordon

For my second choice I’m going back to a story that was one of my stand-out reading experiences as a young boy. Aidan Chambers’ ghost story anthology for children, Ghost After Ghost, contains various tales that gave me an enjoyable shudder. But this one got right under my skin. Perhaps the East Anglian setting made it feel close to home – it is set in the Fens and I lived in north Norfolk at the time – but mostly it’s to do with John Gordon’s ability to convey the unforgiving bleakness of a fenland winter, the way we begin to sense the fear beneath the joshing schoolkids’ bravado as they dare each other to step out on to the frozen drainage dyke, and the skill with which he reveals a chilling realisation about the narrator. Maybe that twist would be more quickly apparent to an adult reader, but to the eight-year-old me it prompted a shiver down my spine as cold as the black water beneath the ice on a fenland canal.

First published in Ghost After Ghost, ed. Aidan Chambers, Kestrel, 1982, and collected in Catch Your Death and Other Stories, by John Gordon, Patrick Hardy, 1983; regularly anthologised thereafter

‘Stickeen’ by John Muir

Now for one that means a lot to my children, and by association it means a lot to me too. In 2018 we had a holiday in California, including a couple of nights in San Francisco. The City Lights Bookstore stayed open until midnight at that time (its website suggests the opening hours have changed since then) so one night, once my wife and our three daughters were in bed, I walked for 45 minutes across the city to visit the literary landmark founded in 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (That journey is a whole different story, one that revealed to me the severity of San Francisco’s homelessness problem, and that I told here if anyone’s interested) I picked up a copy of Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World, and a couple of books for my daughters: The Wonderful Oby James Thurber, and this little story by John Muir.

Muir was a Scottish-American naturalist, adventurer and author who was responsible for preserving great swathes of American wilderness that became national parks. In 1880 he undertook an expedition to Alaska. As he and his Native American crew prepared to depart, they were joined by a missionary reverend and then by his “little black dog that immediately made himself at home by curling up in a hollow among the baggage”. Muir was a dog-lover but thought this one “so small and worthless that I objected to his going”, given that they were likely to spend weeks out in the cold rain and snow. “But his master assured me that he would be no trouble at all; that he was a perfect wonder of a dog, could endure cold and hunger like a bear, swim like a seal, and was wondrous wise and cunning, etc., making out a list of virtues to show he might be the most interesting member of the party.”

I read the story to my girls when we got back home to Norwich, and we were all swept up into the perilous adventure. I won’t say more than that when faced with arduous weather and terrifying crevasses, little Stickeen – named after the Native American tribe – proved braver and bolder than most humans and became an inspiration: to those on the Alaskan adventure, and to those of us who read about him in the comfort of our homes today.

First published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, September 1897; expanded into book form in 1909, with many subsequent editions

‘The Fox and the Goose’, traditional song

This is a song that dates from at least 1500, but the version I grew up knowing was popularised during the mid-20th Century. There’s a lovely recording of it from 1946 by Burl Ives, and it became something of a standard during the 1960s folk revival. I first heard this on a record by the folk singer Julie Felix that my mum used to play when I was very young. It’s a song I strongly associate with my early childhood, and the nostalgia is heightened by the fact my mum died last year; but I also associate with being a dad as my daughters love it too. I’ve often played it for them on guitar and we sing it together.

It’s interesting to think about it as a short story, one that has been whittled down to its essentials over the centuries, because there’s a lot packed into its seven verses. There’s an atmospheric sense of place – it’s a cold, moonlit night and the fox has a long journey from his den to the farm. When he gets there, he declares that a couple of the birds in the farmer’s pen are going to “grease my chin” – an enjoyably archaic phrase meaning to gorge yourself on a meal so that it’s smeared around your mouth. (Think of the foxes eating in Wes Anderson’s film adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox – I’m sure he must know this song!)

There’s the savagery of the fox catching the duck and the goose, captured in a few brutal images: “He grabbed the grey goose by the neck, threw the duck across his back; he didn’t mind their quack, quack, quack, and their legs all a-dangling down-o.” There’s the comedy of ‘Old Mother Flipper-Flapper’, the farmer’s wife, who “jumped out of bed, and out of the window she poked her head” before alerting her husband. Then there’s a chase – the farmer sets off in hot pursuit but the fox (the ‘fals fox’ in the original Middle English, ‘fals’ meaning cunning or deceitful) manages to elude him and flee. There’s filial ingratitude – when he brings this fine meal back to his wife and cubs, “the little ones … say: ‘Daddy, daddy, go back again, for it must be a mighty fine town-o!’” And after that there’s a moral too. Rather than go running back again to satisfy his children, the fox and his wife tuck into the meal – “they’d never had such a supper in their life!” – while the little ones get to chew on the bones, presumably while reflecting on the consequences of their greed.

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, entry for July 4th, 1982, by Sue Townsend

I read the Adrian Mole books in the mid-Eighties when I was nine or ten years old and found them hilarious, although on rereading them as an adult I’ve realised how many subtleties and references went over my head at the time. This entry, though, I found as affecting then as I do now; it’s only now that I’m a bit better able to articulate why. The diary format gives Adrian’s notes a self-containment that sometimes lends them the quality of a short story. Here Sue Townsend is at her brilliant best in creating a sketch of domestic life that subtly conveys the tensions of a relationship and the fears that can come with old age: of death, of losing one’s dignity, of loneliness.

Bert Baxter, the elderly man whom Adrian has volunteered to assist through his school’s Good Samaritan scheme, urgently summons him one evening while he’s at home eating his spaghetti Bolognese. Adrian arrives at Bert’s council house to find that the television has been turned off, ‘so I knew something serious had happened’. It turns out that Bert’s wife, Queenie, has had ‘a bad turn’. She’s in bed without her make-up on. This is how Adrian relates the subsequent exchange:

“I asked her what was wrong. ‘I’ve been having pains like red-hot needles in my chest.’ Bert interrupted. ‘You said the pains were like red-hot knives five minutes ago!’

‘Needles, knives, who cares?’ she said.”

It’s a brilliant exchange of dialogue that says so much in so few words about the participants’ characters and their testy but affectionate relationship. Adrian asks Bert if he’s called the doctor, and Bert says he hasn’t because Queenie is frightened of doctors. Adrian phones home instead, and soon both his parents come round and take control. They call an ambulance.

“It was a good job they did because while it was coming Queenie went a bit strange and started talking about ration books and stuff,” reports the perennially naive Adrian: later, his mother will call from the hospital to confirm that Queenie has had a stroke. Bert’s brusque concern for his wife becomes clear as he holds her hand and calls her a “daft old bat”. Just as the ambulance men are shutting the doors and preparing the drive away, Queenie calls to Adrian to fetch her rouge. “I’m not going until I’ve got me rouge.” Adrian has to rifle through Queenie’s possessions in her bedroom to find it. The dire circumstances mean that the usual social protocols fall away and he is suddenly foraging through the accumulated private clutter of these elderly people’s lives, glimpsing something of their interiors: their emotional attachments, their fears. “The top was covered in pots and hairnets and hairpins and china dishes and lace mats and photos of babies and weddings.” He finds the rouge in a drawer. Once she’s gone, a forlorn Bert says: “What am I going to do without my girl to help me?”

The Mole family invite to come home with them but he won’t leave the house, as he’s scared the council will take it away from him. The story has such a mixture of the particular and the universal: a few paragraphs set in an elderly couple’s council house in Leicester in 1982 and you’re deep inside Thatcher’s Britain, but of course the issues that come with old age always resonate. Townsend handles this little story with such tenderness, such economy and poignancy. She’s a writer I miss very much.

First published by Puffin/Methuen, 1984

Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth, translated by David le Vay

I didn’t know this story by Joseph Roth until I wrote his biography, which was published by Granta last year titled Endless Flight (oh, and I guess I should mention that it’s out in paperback this October…). This novella is one of his later works, published in 1937 when he was in an advanced state of alcoholism. As his mental health declined Roth increasingly retreated from his agonising present into a fictional world based on his childhood in a little town in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, now in Ukraine. His friend Stefan Zweig remarked with this book’s publication that it was a marvel his talent was so intact, and it ‘almost looks as if he could be saved’. He couldn’t; Roth would die two years later in Paris. This is one of his minor works, but still brilliant. As I say in my book:

“Weights and Measures hasn’t the depth and heft of The Radetzky March nor the emotional clout of Job, but it is precise, lucid, immersive in its evocation of the little town and devastating in its depiction of a virtuous man’s collapse into drink-sodden obsession.”

Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian Army at his wife’s behest (by this stage in the increasingly misogynistic Roth’s life, his male characters’ lives are usually derailed by women), to become the inspector of weights and measures in the border town of Szwaby. The vacancy arose with the death of a well-loved inspector, held in such esteem by the traders because he was too drunk to do the job properly. Eibenschütz intends to bring law and order to this town of dubious traders, who defraud their customers by using false weights on their scales, and immediately meets with suspicion. He makes an enemy in tavern landlord Leibusch Jadlowker, and so the story proceeds to its gripping conclusion. This is Roth’s childhood world distilled into 100 pages with a superb lightness of touch.

First published in German as Der Falsche Gewicht, 1937. First published in English translation in 1982 by Peter Owen; currently available as a Penguin Modern Classic, 2017

‘Who Cares for the Caretaker?’ by Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair is often amusingly self-deprecating about his “mad quests” to trace the occult energies that he detects charging through the landscape of London. This pursuit of the legend of David Litvinoff is a fine example, and it’s one of my favourite pieces of his writing. Sinclair’s psychogeographical prose has illuminated London for me in so many ways, but this piece has especial meaning as it inspired my book Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld. In summer 2010 I happened to take two books on holiday with me, Rodinsky’s Room and Journey Through a Small Planet, a memoir of growing up in Whitechapel in the 1930s by Emanuel Litvinoff, whom I mentioned earlier. I didn’t know there was any connection between the two, so when I read them both I was struck by the coincidence.

Sinclair’s beguiling chapter on David Litvinoff in Rodinsky’s Room piqued my interest in the life of the ‘Chelsea chancer’ who connected the worlds of rock music, fine art and criminality in 1950s and ’60s London. From a few clues – acquaintances’ faded memories, rumours of revelatory diaries, tapes of Litvinoff in telephone conversation with a Welsh vagrant who may have been the model for Mac Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker – Sinclair spins up the legend of this man whom he saw as a conduit to a hidden London, but whose life was untraceable.

He makes the story sound tantalisingly impossible to tell, full of unprovable rumours and dead-ends: it was hard to find anyone who remembered Litvinoff, he claims, as “the price of membership of that exclusive club seemed to be burn-out, premature senility or suicide”. That turned out not to be strictly true – through some good old-fashioned journalistic legwork I found plenty of sane and healthy people who shared their memories with me – but the way Sinclair captures the madness and melancholy of Litvinoff’s life was fundamental to starting me off on my own mad quest. This isn’t a short story in conventional terms, of course, but it’s an abbreviated story of Litvinoff’s life that captures his brilliance and weird allure, and it’s the beginning of the story of how I became fascinated by him.

First published in Rodinsky’s Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Granta, 1999

‘Eveline’ by James Joyce

A good deal of my writing has been influenced by an interest in the Jewish history I’m connected to through my mum’s side of the family. But I find my dad’s family history interesting too: his ancestors were Irish Quakers, and in the 19th and early 20th Century part of the family lived in Dublin and ran a well-known shop in Great George’s Street South known as ‘Pim’s’ or ‘the Stores’. There are a couple of references to it in Dubliners: in ‘Two Gallants’ the caddish Corley mentions, apropos of the girl he’s pursuing, that “I told her I was in Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know.” In ‘Eveline’, which I prefer to ‘Two Gallants’, the titular character works there. As the 19-year-old weighs up whether to leave her painful homelife in Dublin and elope to Argentina with her lover, she wonders:

“What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. … She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.”

This is such a poignant story, written with such restraint and delicacy. You can hear the silences, feel the weight of Eveline’s own destiny on her shoulders. It’s an exquisite piece of writing.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, and widely republished since, including by Penguin Classics, 2000)

Le Bal by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith

This is a brutal, brilliant little story of a mother’s social ambition undone by her poisonous relationship with her daughter, written in 1930 and published in English translation after the discovery and huge success of Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise in 2004. The Kampf family have ascended through 1920s Parisian society since Alfred Kampf made money on the stock market, but they remain acutely aware of their humble origins. Rosine Kampf, obsessed with her status and desperate for acceptance among the upper classes, decides to throw a ball that will confirm their arrival in high society: “Doesn’t it make you proud to think your parents are giving a ball?” she asks the daughter whom she has spent the day insulting and bullying. Fourteen-year-old Antoinette would love to attend, but Madame Kampf will not hear of it: “This kid, this snotty-nosed kid, coming to the ball! Can you just picture it?” Instead, Antoinette is instructed to address the 200 envelopes inviting all manner of glamorous and high-profile guests; but fatally for Madame Kampf, she also relies on her furious daughter to undertake another critical element of the arrangements… the denouement is delicious and handled with consummate skill.

First published in French in 1930, Éditions Bernard Grasset; first published in English translation in 2007, Vintage

‘Paul Bereyter’ by W G Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

There’s an old story that I suspect W G Sebald knew, about two Jews in eastern Europe in the early 20th century wanting to flee persecution and wondering where to go. One says: “Maybe Australia.” The other says: “But it’s so far away!” And the first says: “Far away from where?”

Paul Bereyter was one of Sebald’s narrator’s schoolteachers. The story opens with the narrator recalling the moment in January 1984 when he learned of Bereyter’s suicide, and then read an obituary that left him feeling haunted. “Almost by way of an aside, the obituary added, with no further explanation, that during the Third Reich Paul Bereyter had been prevented from practicing his chosen profession. It was this curiously unconnected, inconsequential statement, as much as the violent manner of his death, which led me in the years that followed to think more and more about Paul Bereyter, until, in the end, I had to get beyond my own very fond memories of him and discover the story I did not know.”

The story is, as you would expect with Sebald, not so much a direct narrative as a compelling rumination that explores the condition of people in Bereyter’s situation. In my teaching I like to get students thinking about the relationship between our interior and exterior in the contexts of place-writing, examining how place can shape our identity, our mood, who we think we are and how we behave. We feel our connection to place both psychologically and physically, and this relationship works both ways: we project our psychological needs on to our surroundings as much as we are shaped by them. The stories in The Emigrants examine the darkness implicit in this scenario: that if our attachment to place is undone, this displacement can dislocate us both physically and psychologically.

This is something I’ve thought about a good deal while writing my Joseph Roth biography, but also in general over the years with regard to my maternal grandparents’ experiences as refugees from Nazi-occupied Vienna. When the place you thought was home – the place you grew up in, formed your sense of self in, and considered yourself a part of and safe within – reveals itself suddenly and violently not to be home, you lose your original, foundational reference point and are physically and existentially cut adrift. You are disabused of the ideas you had about who you were, and that you were a valued participant in that society. You become severed from the place that helped to form you, and the aspects of yourself that were propped up by the social role you performed there are suddenly unsupported and fall away. You are rudely ejected from a shared history that gave you identity, so you are not only disengaged from place but from time – you lose sense of a greater narrative that your life’s chronology plays out within. Your life makes less sense. And this is not even to mention the trauma that you feel on losing friends and family to genocide, and the guilt you feel for surviving.

Then there’s the matter of assimilation in the new country – the psychologically exhausting business of attempting to pass, of suggesting to your new fellow countrymen that you share their identity, an identity you are hastily learning as an autodidact… So, the violent destruction of one identity, the exhausting performance of another during which you second-guess yourself at every instant because you feel, as Joan Didion put it in The White Album, that everyone else has a script and you are improvising – and you feel that soon you’re bound to get caught out. Role-playing, acting, while attempting to recover from the ground having opened up beneath your feet, and that you will never again quite trust attachment to place as a secure source of identity.

At the same time, you lose any illusions of future physical safety: you are anxious that the new place that has accepted you as a refugee may one day turn on you too. Metaphorically, psychologically, you keep your suitcases packed. You never know when you might need to move on. You don’t put down roots that couldn’t be dug up again at haste if necessary. No place seems to guarantee psychological or physical security. There is no longer a ‘there’ by which to orient yourself – it’s gone.

So ‘Far away from where?’, you say wistfully – because you still look back in the direction of home but you know it no longer exists, or not for you… you no longer have a viable ‘there’ as a reference point, and while you may still orient yourself by reference to a lost home, you know you can’t go back there. You feel peripheral, both to your new country and the old country. You exist in a hinterland. So you’re not only doubly marginalised, you’re alienated, and the idea of home suddenly seems illusory and sad. You become like Sebald’s narrator’s Uncle Kasimir looking at the ocean in another of the stories in The Emigrants: “‘I often come out here,’ said Uncle Kasimir, ‘it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where.’”

Or as Sebald writes with regard to Paul Bereyter, “one was, as the crow flies, about 2000km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.”

The Emigrants is an extraordinary book, one that I read shortly after Sebald’s death in 2001 but appreciated and understood better when I reread it last year. These stories are a profound act of empathy that display Sebald’s lifelong project to understand his native country’s descent into barbarism, and in particular the condition of the people Germany failed to murder and forced into exile.

First published in Die Ausgewanderten, Eichborn Verlag, 1992; first published in English in The Emigrants, Harvill Press, 1996

‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever

Thinking about this story now having just written about The Emigrants, I’m seeing odd resonances between the two: in wildly different scenarios, both examine the disintegration of the self. I found this story particularly powerful because of the circumstances in which I read it. Few people will need to be reminded how strange summer 2020 was. With the sudden disappearance during the spring lockdown of so many of the usual reference points – professional identity, social interaction with friends and strangers – by which we define ourselves, many of us were left disorientated and dislocated, questioning what remained of us without the usual structure to our lives. The exact chronology escapes me now but there was a period when it was deemed permissible to sit in isolation for a while in an open space and, during that time, on a bench in Waterloo Park a few minutes’ walk from my home in Norwich, I belatedly discovered the brilliance of John Cheever. I haven’t yet read all of the works in the 900pp Collected Stories but of those I’ve read, this tale is my favourite at a push, along with ‘Goodbye, My Brother’. I’m choosing ‘The Swimmer’ because of its strangeness, the luminosity of Cheever’s sentences, how it evokes the empty luxury of American suburbia where every home has a swimming pool and an assortment of residents who are sad and numb and drink too much, and its gradual revelation of Neddy Merill’s psychological collapse – disturbing enough at the best of times, but which shook me with unnerving power during the pandemic.

First published in The New Yorker, 1964, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Harper & Row, 1964, and The Stories of John Cheever, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978; now Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 2010

When Marnie was There by Joan G. Robinson

For my final choice I’m going back to my childhood again. I’m cheating a bit with this in that it’s a novel, but it’s a fairly short children’s novel and I’m so keen to recommend it to people that I’m just going to go ahead. One day when I was at middle school, I guess in 1987 or ’88, I delved around in the classroom’s box of reading books, pulled this out and thought it looked worth a try. It turned out to be the most beautiful, haunting story I read when I was a boy. When Marnie was There is the tale of a lonely girl named Anna, who takes a train from London to a Norfolk coastal village (modelled on Burnham Overy Staithe) to convalesce from illness in the care of an elderly couple, the Peggs. When she arrives, she walks down to the staithe and across the water she sees the Marsh House, which captures her imagination. One night she finds a boat and rows to the house, where she encounters a mysterious girl, Marnie, who becomes the friend that Anna dearly needs. It is a story powerfully evocative of the austere beauty of the north Norfolk coast, acute in its understanding of childhood loneliness, often poignant, sometimes perilous, and with a skilfully crafted resolution so moving that my eyes have moistened just thinking about it.

First published in 1967 by Collins