‘Love, and a Question’ by Robert Frost

Fifthly: Some of Robert Frost’s poems, especially those from North of Boston (1914), are in effect short stories. ‘The death of the hired man’ is a prime example, though the lines “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/ They have to take you in” are assuredly better in poetry than they could ever be in prose. ‘The ax-helve’, from a different volume, New Hampshire (1923) is another good candidate. It does not build to any dramatic conclusion, just quietly finishes, with the French immigrant craftsman completing the task of making a new axe helve for the poet; yet it is perfectly rounded as an event, filling an evening. But counter-intuitively, I would choose an earlier poem, ‘Love, and a question’ from A Boy’s Will (1913) as my Frost short story. It is only four stanzas long, each of eight lines. It is a very short story ending on a question that reverberates well beyond the poem’s end. 

A bridegroom is asked for hospitality by a stranger on his wedding night. The cottage in which the groom and his bride are awaiting nightfall is isolated; winter is coming on. The groom would normally be generous, but – 

whether or not a man was asked
          to mar the love of two
by harboring woe in the bridal house,
          the bridegroom wished he knew.

First published in A Boy’s Will, David Nutt, 1913. Available to read online here

From ‘Piano’ by Jean Echenoz, translated by Mark Polizotto

The reason I think my sixth choice should have been a short story is that though it forms part of a novel, the rest of the novel is completely unmemorable, whereas this extract is striking, complete in itself, a dramatic whole. It is Jean Echenoz’s Au Piano. Two men are walking in the Parc Monceau in Paris. One is very smartly dressed. “He is going to die a violent death in twenty-two days’ time”, we are told, and though we are also told that that is not what he is afraid of, the impression builds that he is under the threat of immediate death or disaster. He is under the thumb of his smaller, scruffier companion, who is under the command, it seems, of a third man who is not present. The protagonist, Max, is refused permission to have a drink by his minder, who relies for compliance on the mere threat of a phone call to the absent third.
 
The minder steers his ‘victim’ (protégé?) past the statues in the park, studiously avoiding those representing composers. Max vomits twice with fear, and is again refused permission for a drink at a bar as they leave the park. Suddenly, they are ‘here’ – at building number 252. They make their way through hallways, passages, doorways and into a dark space. Is Max about to be assaulted? There is the noise of a swell or a crowd. And suddenly, the minder shoves Max through a curtain, the swell surges into a tempest, and “there it was – the piano”. The terrible Steinway is what Max has been viscerally dreading all this while. He is a concert pianist plagued by the most extreme stage-fright. He takes his seat in front of the fifty-two monstrous teeth, the conductor waves his baton, and they are off into the Second Concerto in F-minor, Op. 21, by Frédéric Chopin.

First published in Le Piano, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003. English translation, Piano, published byVintage Press, 2005

The episode of Paolo and Francesca by Dante Alighieri

The seventh choice is too early, too poetic, too perfect ever to count as a short story. But I should love to someone to write it again in a kind of continuing mise en abyme. It is Dante’s episode of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno (V. 70-138). Francesca was married off to Gianciotto, but fell in love with her husband’s brother Paolo. (The story was so well known that Dante skimps on all the details that might have extenuated the lovers.) When the character Dante asks the lovers what sin has put them there in hell, buffeted by the winds that hardly ever lull, Francesca tells him how irresistible love brought them together. They were reading together one day the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, adulterous lovers lured and betrayed by Gallehault – Galeotto. Their eyes met once or twice over the book; their colour came and went. But when they reached the line about the smile that called forth the fatal kiss, Paolo kissed Francesca on the mouth. “Galeotto fu ’l libro, e chi lo scrisse.” “The book was a Gallehault, as was its writer.” 
 
Already two stages of betrayal have taken place – the writer (the author of the Arthurian tale) and the book are both seducers. In a further stage, Paolo seduces Francesca by means of the reading, though she is complicit too: “That day we read no further in it”. I should like to read a story about a professor of Italian reading this passage of Dante to a susceptible female student, and their falling into one another’s arms.

First published in 1472.

‘Providence’ by François-Guy Abauzit

A failed seduction along these lines is the subject of my eighth choice, ‘Providence’, by François-Guy Abauzit. It has not been translated yet. An aging professor of French literature, great admirer of Stendhal, in a tired marriage, is attracted to their student lodger, Marina. He does not push his luck; but one evening, she comes into the dark garden where he is smoking, asks him for a cigarette, and collapses in tears on his shoulder. Her boyfriend is leaving for Italy: she asserts that there is no one like him in the whole world. In genuinely avuncular mode, the protagonist puts his arm round her shoulders, and crassly explains that the only reason she attributes every virtue to the boy is because she is in love: it is what Stendhal calls ‘cristallisation’. She curses ‘his’ Stendhal – “encore un vieux con”, the “encore” implying ‘like you’, and storms inside. The prof’s appeal to a literary predecessor has done nothing but alienate the young woman. But paradoxically, he feels more tender towards his wife – although he sits down to write, in French, the story (the récit) of what has just happened, specifically because his wife does not read French. He betrays her without having betrayed her.

Published in the collection Puits de lune, Éditions de la Fenestrelle, 2015

‘Clay’ by James Joyce

My next two stories are undoubtedly short stories in the classic tradition. They are short, in prose, about a single main character or event. They ‘cristallize’, in another sense: they are heart-rending vignettes, in a small space. One is from James Joyce’s Dubliners, ‘Clay’ (First published 1914; read here in Penguin Popular Classics 1996, pp. 110-18). The other is from Vladimir Nabokov’s A Russian Beauty. They are intimately connected in that, in each case, the protagonist does not understand that a personal disaster hangs over her, while the people around her do. But the way this is conveyed in the two stories is utterly different. 
 
In Joyce’s ‘Clay’, the protagonist Maria, a tiny person with a lowly job in a laundry, is going to visit her brother Joe and his family for the evening of Hallow-e’en. Maria buys treats for Joe’s children on the way to his house: she is a generous soul whom everyone loves – and pities, though this she is unaware of. They all play a Hallow-e’en game which involves being blind-folded, and choosing a saucer, by touch alone. When Maria’s turn comes, she picks a saucer with something soft and wet on it. There is an embarrassed silence, and the bigger girls are ticked off severely, and told to throw it out. The only clue as to what this might have been, and its traditional significance, is in the title of the story. Then the company urge Maria to sing: she sings “I dreamt that I dwelled in marble halls”, repeating one verse by mistake, though no-one points this out. Her brother Joe, to whom she had been a little mother when they were young, is so moved that his eyes fill up with tears, and “he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was”. The pathos of an impending death is completely down-played.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, now widely republished, including in Penguin Classics. 

‘Breaking the News’ by Vladimir Nabokov

In the Nabokov story ‘Breaking the News’, Eugenia Isakovna is an elderly widow, rather deaf, living alone in exile in Berlin. She has an only son, working in Paris. At least, she thinks she has: in fact the second and third sentences of the story are: “Her only son had died on the previous day. She had not yet been told.” He had fallen down a lift shaft. The story relates how her friends the Chernobyskis hear of this first. They distractedly debate how to break the news, whether to tell her somehow “by degrees”, suggesting first that he is very ill. A group of emigré friends assemble for tea at the widow’s house, getting more and more agitated as they fail to break the news. Finally, in anguish, as she pushes her hearing aid toward her visitors fearfully, “sobbing Chernobyski roared from a distant corner: ‘What’s there to explain – dead, dead, dead!’ but she was already afraid to look in his direction”. The metaphorical aspect of her literal deafness is terrifying; though Nabokov almost over-does the effect with the letter from the son recently received by the widow, which speaks of his being “plunged up to the neck in work and when evening comes I literally fall off my feet, and I never go anywhere.” The twisting of “literally” to mean “metaphorically”, but as it turns out, horribly literally, is shocking.

First published in Russian in 1935. Published in translation by Nabokov and his son Dmitri Nabokov, in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, 1973. Collected in The Collected Stories, Penguin, 2016.

‘A Retrieved Reformation’ by O. Henry

Eleventh is this story that my father used to read us. (My childhood friends’ enduring memory of my father is of his reading stories to us all in the evenings.) It is hopelessly romantic – a tear-jerker – but I loved it. The protagonist, crack safe-breaker Jimmy Valentine (suitably named, as will be seen) receives news of his pardon for a four-year sentence while working in the shoe-shop of the prison work-place. A recidivist, after being freed he cracks three more impossible-seeming safes, and is pursued by the detective who originally arrested him, Ben Price. He makes for an obscure little town, Elmore; and the first thing that happens is that he sees the girl of his dreams, Annabel Adams, entering the bank. It turns out her father owns the bank. Smitten, Jimmy books into a hotel as Ralph D. Spencer, and soon sets up in the shoe business, and becomes engaged to Annabel. 
 
His life has turned around, and he plans to bequeath his safe-breaking tools to a pal. He carries them with him in a suitcase on an expedition to buy wedding clothes with his bride-to-be and some of her family, which includes two nieces of Annabel’s, little May and Agatha, aged nine and five. But her father wants first to show off his new state-of-the-art safe in the bank. While the adults are chatting, the older girl locks the younger in the safe, which has not yet been primed with its codes for opening. Hysterical cries rend the air (as O. Henry does not quite write) and Annabel turns in all innocence to Jimmy to do something. Jimmy looks at her “with a queer, soft smile on his lips”, and asks for the rose she is wearing, which he stuffs into his vest pocket. “With that act Ralph D. Spencer passed away and Jimmy Valentine took his place.”
 
Meanwhile, the detective Ben Price has discovered Jimmy’s whereabouts, and is looking in through the windows of the bank preparing to nab him when he comes out. He watches as Jimmy unpacks his tools, works away at the safe, and in full view of all present, has it open within ten minutes. The little girl is saved!
 
Jimmy walks out, ignoring a despairing “‘Ralph!’” from Anabel. At the door he finds a big man somewhat in his way – the detective. Jimmy offers himself for arrest, saying nothing now matters to him. But Ben Price behaves rather strangely. “‘Guess you’re mistaken, Mr. Spencer. Don’t believe I recognize you. Your buggie’s waiting for you, ain’t it?’ And Ben Price turned and strolled down the street.”
 
The wonderful thing is that my father, the most upright citizen you can imagine, was in the shoe business himself.

First published, as ‘A Retrieved Reform‘, in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, April 1903. Collected in Roads of Destiny, 1909

‘Alien Adventure’ by Lawrence Eagar

As for the twelfth slot, I should like to keep it open, to be filled one day by one of my children or grand-children. One good candidate is ‘Alien Adventure’, by Lawrence Eagar, aged 9. It is full of gems such as “They disposed of the alien space-craft merrily”, and “‘What th . . . th . . . ?’ he pondered, surprised.” But no doubt there will be many more to choose from.

Unpublished

Introduction

When I was toying with ideas for a PhD thesis a few years back, one of them was to write about how short stories tackle the Big Subjects. I was interested in what a short story is, what it is for, and what a writer of the seeks to get out of them, and how they can often be the most incisive way of getting to the heart of something. I have a lot of sympathy for the Borges line about saying in one paragraph what novelists take 500 pages to say. I also like the Irwin Shaw line (I forget the exact quote) about the novel having to be about an entire man in all his aspects for all his life, whereas a short story can be about one man for a moment. But I also like that a short story lives beyond its pages. It is created with the express purpose of lingering in the reader’s mind, to go on and unfurl in the days, weeks and months and years after the first reading and keep revealing its meanings. I think my anthology picks stories that do this, but also, they are stories that use the short form to take on those Big Issues, from national identity to the Holocaust, from sexual politics to social politics, feminism, grief, loneliness, German philosophy, and just plain old growing up. It’s a bit eclectic, but therein lies the joy.

‘The Conquered’ by Dorothy Edwards

I’ve been commissioned to write a play about the life and work of Dorothy Edwards, the Bloomsbury lot’s ‘Welsh Cinderella’ (as her patron-of-sorts David Garnett used to introduce her). The play has been a real passion project (and if all goes to plan it’ll be touring Wales and further afield in 2023) and an important part of the process has been to frequently remind myself why I am doing it in the first place. Edwards’ fiction (she published a short story collection and a novel before her suicide in 1934 at the age of thirty-one) is strangely enigmatic, the very epitome of the work being done in the spaces between what is written. Her work is uniformly sublime. She wrote in her journal about her fiction being the place where she could arrange her thoughts “pure and unclouded” and that gives a sense of what her prose does. “The Conquered” is perhaps her most famous work, although I’d argue she is largely forgotten, especially when you compare her to other women writers who moved in similar circles, like Katherine Mansfield. Some Welsh writers, such as the novelist and poet Christopher Meredith, and academics like Claire Flay, did good work on bringing her back into the fold over the last twenty years, and I wouldn’t have ever read her had it not been for their revivalism (and then my wife reading her on her MA in Cardiff). ‘The Conquered’ is frequently anthologised and sometimes I feel it is to the detriment of her other stories, and her novel A Winter Sonata. But this is her only story that really touches on Wales – it is set in the marches but also “the conquered” of the story can be interpreted as the colonised people of Wales embodied by the self-loathing collaborative spirit of the Welsh upper-class characters the narrative introduces us to.

First published in Rhapsody, Wishart, 1927; subsequently anthologised and republished by Virago in 1986, and Parthian as part of the Library of Wales series in 2007. Available to read on the Library of Wales website here

‘A Father in Sion’ by Caradoc Evans

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that Welsh literature (in the English language) owes its greatest unpaid debt to Caradoc Evans. He was much reviled – famously, his portrait was slashed with a knife as it hung in the National Portrait Gallery in the 1920s and the Western Mail called him Wales’s “best hated man” – he was, even if only legendarily, Wales’s Public Enemy Number One. My feeling on this is one of intense jealousy for his notoriety. I think Wales has always put too much stock in the toeing of the line when it comes to established narratives of what it means to be Welsh. Evans wrote unflinchingly and grotesquely about the village communities her grew up in and his stories are unflattering, to put it mildly – that was bad enough – but what was worse was that he did it from London, where he had been a journalist for a few decades before My People, his first and most controversial collection, was published in 1915. I am now convinced Evans’ detractors have and had a moronic view of both Wales and literature in general – what literature is for and what it can do. I’ve come to view Evans as a hero, even if that’s been a recent appraisal. I am writing a book for the University of Wales Press, a sort of history of Welsh literature, but from a creative rather than academic approach, and as I go on this journey, I keep coming back to an inescapable feeling that My People remains the most important event in Welsh writing. It knocked the stuffing out of everyone and a hundred and seven years later his stories still burn ferociously. I include here ‘A Father in Sion’ because it’s the first and what better place to start, but I could have had anything of his.

First published in My People: Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales, Andrew Melrose, 1915. Available to read on WikiSource here

‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield

At the risk of giving away too much information, a small 1950s edition of A Dove’s Nest my wife picked up in Hay-on-Wye an age ago is on the windowsill of the downstairs loo along with some other essentials like a Claire Keegan book and The Penguin Book of Exorcisms. Mansfield has lingered with me for a few years, but only recently, partly because her story reflects something of Dorothy Edwards (and of course, Woolf, with whom Mansfield had a complex respectful rivalry). I am consistently astounded at how modern Mansfield’s voice remains – she was the consummate modernist, I guess. She is forthright, fearless, and exceedingly good company. I love that Virginia Woolf just couldn’t keep away from her. I don’t think Woolf particularly liked her, but she was compelled to be in her presence, to discuss writing with her, to explore that mind of hers. Mansfield was a New Zealander, and I think it’s important to remember something I heard Eleanor Catton once say about the psychology of the New Zealand writer, that people just don’t realise how isolated a place it is, and how far away from their closest neighbours they are. That has an effect in many ways, but particularly on how a writer views the world. Mansfield was, as the experts would have it, an adventuress, and her life story is even more brilliant in its colours of passion and intensity than the fiction she dedicated herself to. As her death encroached (she probably caught her tuberculosis from DH Lawrence) she wrote incessantly, and ‘The Doll’s House’ comes from this period. It is a great example of that voice I am so enraptured by. It is lively, funny, it cuts you dead with its swagger. I just love being around it.

First published in The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, Middleton Murry, 1923, and widely collected. Available to read on the Katherine Mansfield Society website, here

‘Work’ by Jo Lloyd

I was teaching an undergraduate creative writing class up at the University of South Wales last year and one of the students was building a collection of short stories all based around her experiences waiting tables in a bougee bistro pub somewhere in the south Wales valleys. I was reminded immediately of one of my favourite stories from one of my favourite writers. ‘Work’ sits rather awkwardly in Lloyd’s 2021 collection The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies – awkwardly in an entirely convincing and satisfying way – in that it isn’t quite as elegiac and grittily magical as the stories around it. ‘Work’ is about one of those aimless figures at a point in their life when it looks like this is it, this is what life is going to look like, and the journey has turned into a destination. I am in awe of stories that take the truth at the core of every life – that it is both wonderous and boring – and makes the most of both of those things. Dorothy Edwards did the same for her peculiar parade of well-to-dos in their country houses and retreats, kicking stones and wondering about how nothing ever happens. The last line of ‘Work’ is a gut-punch (I won’t give it away) and a return to that which is found in Edwards, although this is about the modern working-class experience – or rather that new modern class of university-educated worker bees hobbled by debt and a narrowing middle. ‘Work’ is a quiet masterpiece about that ignored (apart from by Ken Loach, maybe) strata of society, home to the people who fall between the cracks.

Published in The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies, Swift Press, 2021

‘The Bellarosa Connection’ by Saul Bellow

Maybe a bit of a cheat as this was published as a novella, but it does also appear (and where I first came across it) in Bellow’s Collected Stories (2001), but it is such a great piece of work by… what is that cringey expression that’s currently going around?… the GOAT???… and it also falls in perfectly with this idea of how a short story can find a way into tackling the biggest issues around. ‘The Bellarosa Connection’ is generally regarded as Bellow’s only concerted effort to write about the Holocaust in his fiction. Setting aside the argument that everything Bellow wrote was in the shadow of the Jewish experience, it is telling that even a writer as unflinching and confident as Bellow waited so long before finding a way to take it head on. Even then, it isn’t head on. ‘The Bellarosa Connection’ is as much a story about storytelling as it is about the Holocaust, which is of course a central tenet to the legacy of that event – how do we tell that story? How do we pass it down? How do we make it more than history, slipping further from our technicolour understanding of things with every passing day. It opens with a typically Bellovian sentence – by which I mean almost every Bellow sentence is magnificent, only some are more magnificent than others. “As founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia, forty years in the trade, I trained many executives, politicians and members of the defense establishment, and now that I am retired, and the institute is in the capable hands of my son, I would like to forget about remembering.”

First published as a novella by Penguin, 1989, and then in Saul Bellow: The Collected Stories, in 2001