‘The Book of the Great Dhoul and Hanrahan the Red’ by W.B. Yeats

Off-putting title aside, The Celtic Twilight is a richly entertaining collection of short-shorts; pretend it’s not Ireland and you’ll have a great time. The Golden-Dawn-through-a-glass-darkly fantasies ‘Rosa Alchemica’ and ‘The Tables of the Law’ are worth reading if only as prep for M. John Harrison’s capper, The Course of the Heart. Even in their starched calling-on-Lady-Gregory duds, the first two Stories of Red Hanrahan are memorably grim and funny.

So much for responsible proselytizing.

I was a classic scholarship boy reworked for the late 1970s – Never Mind the Bollocks was unleashed a month or two after I started college — and quickly fell into the role of spoilt oblate, snatching whatever I could reach before the authorities caught on and tossed me out on my scrawny ass. One afternoon while trawling the Bryn Mawr library I noticed an unfamiliar ornately bound book on the Yeats shelves. It included titles I recognized but also some bizarrely skewed prose — “the Brew of the Little Pot”, seriously? — and when I checked the volume out (they let me borrow it!) and compared it to my second-hand Mythologies paperback I found a completely new-to-me installment of Red Hanrahan’s adventures, dropped when Yeats revised and recollected them.

Literarily, Yeats was right to consider the story irredeemable. Even in its 1890s context it’s embarrassing: brew from a little pot of exoticizing condescension, transparently false worldliness, and abjectly timid horniness. I can’t recommend it lowly enough.

Autobiographically, I learned to seek out original sources whenever possible, not so much for scholarly as for amusement value. As for the treasure itself, well, I was plenty embarrassing in my own right, and something about its plotline — crave the book, posture with the book, barely and fitfully comprehend the book, drift from the book, get drunk, fall down — seemed strangely authentic.

Published in The Secret Rose, 1897. Currently shelved as a nasty-to-the-touch forty-four-year-old grey-on-grey Xerox copy clipped to a similar copy of Giacomo Joyce. Available online here

‘Red Wind’ by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler began writing late in life and peaked early in his career, never surpassing his last couple of pulp stories and first novel, The Big Sleep. From self-mocking title through muted farewell, 1939’s ‘Trouble Is My Business’ delivers quintessence of Chandler in a compact package. At the moment, though, I’m even more drawn to 1938’s ‘Red Wind’, partly because it holds the Chandler line I recite most often (“Just another four-flusher”), and partly because I can excerpt its opening and closing paragraphs without spoilers:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

and:

They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.

Originally published in Dime Detective, 1938, and frequently reprinted

‘Tulip’ by Dashiell Hammett

Unlike his older disciple, Dashiell Hammett hit his stride just as he began writing novels; four of the five are masterpieces. Definitive works are risky business, though: The Glass Key and The Thin Man left dead ends on both sides of the street. He never finished another story, but five years after his death Lillian Hellman printed a sizable chunk of manuscript she titled ‘Tulip’. It’s mostly dialogue, mostly between Hammett and an old war ‘buddy’, I guess would be the word, shooting the shit and yanking each others’ chains not long after Hammett finished a penitentiary stretch for contempt of a commie-hunting court.

Not much good gets said about ‘Tulip’, but then most of it was said by readers who wanted Sam Spade. Me, I like the fragment at least as much as more recent exercises in nothing-happening. I like its cautious rhythms, its attempt at honest reportage of everyday avoidances and games of play-risk and real-risk. Because I’m a sentimental sap I even like that it has two endings. Here’s the first of them:

If you are tired you ought to rest, I think, and not try to fool yourself and your customers with colored bubbles.

A short goodbye but a hell of a lot more dignified than Chandler’s Playback.

Probably drafted around 1952. Published in The Big Knockover, edited by Lilian Hellman, 1966

‘Vintage Season’ by C.L. Moore

Travel stories are generally told by the traveler but Catherine Moore, like Joanna Russ (below), Karen Joy Fowler (in ‘Standing Room Only’), and Chuck Berry (in ‘Havana Moon’), takes the touristed’s point of view, the year-rounders rather than the summer people. And what do they all talk about? The tourists, of course; the tourists are news.

Bonus pandemic angle, too.

First published, credited to ‘Lawrence O’Donnell’, in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946. Reprinted many times since

‘The City of Penetrating Light’ by Thomas M. Disch

In a supposed age of irony Thomas M. Disch was the most skillful ironist I know. Very much an American ironist, too; to misquote Auden, “Mid-America hurt you into poetry.” Bible-thumping flag-waving hypocrisy remained a favorite target, and he never freed himself from the paranoia, villainizing, and feuding endemic to our homeland; their garbage-incinerator stench pervades his last writings.

The ironist’s razor-edge dance can’t be sustained indefinitely, and although Disch was equally effective on either the sardonic or sentimental side of the blade, both modes are difficult for readers to enjoy unalloyed except in bursts. His novels were always crafty, and some are treasurable concepts, but I think of him first as a writer of short stories. If I wanted to sell you on Disch, I might suggest (depending on your own proclivities) ‘The Squirrel Cage’, ‘Descending’, ‘The Asian Shore’, ‘Et in Arcardia Ego’, one of the 334 stories, or ‘Getting into Death’. If I thought you shared my own proclivities I might risk ‘Slaves’, with the sentence that seems to me his apotheosis:

There were red balloons and blue balloons and yellow balloons and pink balloons and green balloons and orange balloons.

If I wanted to select a personal Disch, though, that would be his short and never-reprinted monologue ‘The City of Penetrating Light’, which latched onto me in a basement in small-town Missouri and hasn’t yet loosened its grip: visceral nostalgia for what’s never been experienced and never will be.

Published in Fun With Your New Head, 1968. Available online here by kind permission of the estate of Thomas M. Disch

‘The Second Inquisition’ by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ was a tall woman with strong opinions and a voice trained to dominate an auditorium. Novels provided room enough for sharp elbows, close-quarters combat, and dialectic layering. Most of her shorter stories taste comparatively watered-down.

‘The Second Inquisition’ is an exception, a uranium-dense fruitcake of 1920s Americana, 1950s science fiction, and 1970s disgust, a coming-of-age and a protest against the age come into, with an exchange I’ve always found inspiring:

“We despise you,” she said. “That’s what we do. We think you’re slobs. The scum of the earth! The world’s fertilizer, Joe, that’s what you are.”
“Baby, you’re blue,” he said, “you’re blue tonight.”

The story ends — is this a spoiler? — “No more stories”, which works best in its place at the end of The Adventures of Alyx omnibus. Russ’s later novels The Female Man and The Two of Them both, in very different ways, restart and retell the tale and they could easily join Alyx in a Library of America volume.

First published in Orbit 6, edited by Damon Knight, 1970. Reprinted as the conclusion of Russ’s Alyx series in 1976 and several times since

‘What Girls Are Made of’ by Pat Califia

The first and last stories of Pat Califia’s second collection share a milieu and a theme: the taming of the butch.

‘Big Girls’ is a harrowing character study, or test of character, like a Pinter two-hander except for negotiating a satisfactory-all-round conclusion. I think its Olympic-level sadist, Reid, would have made a far more interesting lead and far more wholesome role model than the serial killers who infatuated the era’s media executives, but nobody axed me.

‘What Girls Are Made of’, on the other hand, is a sociable comedy cut to a classic pattern: charmingly awkward young person progresses through a series of slapstick humiliations to achieve a more settled position.

Regrettably, my libido slithers quick as a garter snake away from bondage, discipline, pain given or received, or even basic role-play. But I love comedy, I trust comedy, and I couldn’t find a Robert Benchley piece suitable for this last slot, so here we are.

Published in Melting Point, 1993

Introduction

After perhaps five and a half decades of reading stories and three or more of publishing them, I’m still no closer to knowing how to choose my favourites, let alone the best. There’s part of me – not a part I much like if I’m being honest – which would have loved to be able to select a dozen perfect stories, each one building on the previous to show, cumulatively, what the form can do, while simultaneously offering a short history of its evolution. Well, not me; not today. After all, the people who want that can just go out and buy A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, a magical book which raises the art of close-reading to near-mystical levels of insight and pleasure. I decided the only way I could do this was to be honest. What follows are almost certainly not the best stories I’ve read. I wince at the omissions (no Saunders, Cheever, Moore, Munro). No, this is a list divided roughly into stories that have lived inside me for a long time and those which I’ve read more recently and can’t shake off. 
 
Maybe people who know me well will see some kind of unifying taste emerge from my selection. I don’t. In fact, as I get older, I find I care less about the meaning of stories. Once I saw them as hieroglyphs encoding important human truths.  Now, the less they ‘mean’ the better. I might be wrong about this, or maybe I’m just getting lazy, but what I increasingly like about stories – and I’m reading more of them now than I ever have – is that they exist at all: small, opaque distorting reflections of life. As Edmund Burke once said of poetry, they lend existence to nothing. Or, to adapt Wallace Stevens, the meaning of a story is another story. You have been warned.

‘The Holly Tree’ by Charles Dickens

This is perfect example of a not-so-great story laying siege to a young man’s mind. I first read it as a teenager in New Zealand, during a balmy Christmas holiday. I longed for the frigid joys of home and the prodigious, obliterating quality of snow.  The narrator is leaving London in a huff, thinking his fiancée loves another (this also struck a chord) heading North to Liverpool and a life of exile in America. The account of leaving London in a stagecoach at five in the morning in the pitch dark and bitter cold and gradually disappearing into a blizzard is Dickens at his descriptive best. The hot glass of purl (no idea, sorry), being ‘built up with straw to the waist’ to keep warm, and the rhythmic thrum of the wheels of the coach and the horses hooves seeming to play the chorus to ‘Auld Lang Syne’, still haunt me, especially if I’m driving North. Then there is the arrival at the eponymous Holly Tree Inn and the slow realisation that they are likely to be snowed in for days with insufficient reading material. Dicken’s brilliant solution to this is to have the narrator entertain himself by reminiscing over inns he has visited (“That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness”) and the wild stories he’s heard therein (“Upon which one of the dark men wrung the parrot’s neck, and said he was fond of roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one for breakfast in the morning”). Being snowed in. Pub stories by the fire. Quaffing “julep, sling or cocktail”. My sense memory fires up every time I read it. There’s even a neat and happy ending. 

First published in Household Words, Christmas Edition, 1855 and republished in Christmas Stories, Chapman & Hall, 1894 and available to read here

‘The Tower’ by Marghanita Laski

I’m not generally a lover of the show-off’s ending, but I love a good ghost story. ‘The Tower’ is better than good. For me, only Elizabeth Jane Howard’s eerie canal-based tale, ‘Three Miles Up’ comes close to matching its claustrophobic power. Laski was a fine novelist, a popular broadcaster and a scholar who specialised in ecstatic religious experience. All three feed into this story of a married woman, alone in her car for the first time, pulling off the road in Tuscany in order to climb an abandoned tower that has caught her attention in the guide book her husband “was always urging on her”. I first read the story as a child in an exemplary Puffin anthology called Authors’ Choice (published in 1973) where it was introduced by Alan Garner. His final comment tells you all you need to know: “As soon as Caroline reaches the tower, the author turns relentless, and the result is, simply, the most terrifying story I know.”

First published in Cynthia Asquith’s Third Ghost Book, 1955, reprinted in Authors’ Choice, Hamish Hamilton, 1970, and available to read here

‘The Sylvan Life’ by Jonathan Meades

The accumulation of telling detail that I so loved in ‘The Holly Tree’ is put to rather different use here. This is from Jonathan Meades first collection, Filthy English (1984), published when he was Features Editor at Tatler and before he’d established his television persona combining deadpan delivery of astonishing articulacy, backed up by the minatory combination of sunglasses and a dark suit. His air of menace, the curiosity bordering on voyeurism and the startling precision of language are all present in this phantasmagoric story of the rural working class in the New Forest in the 1950s. The open scene of a chicken being killed by the feral child Wendy sets the scene. Her grotesque brothers set up a livestock rustling business. Her father “his flat cap dark with hair cream” collects pigswill or “scrape”. The family terrorise a delusional lower middle-class couple who take over the local shop. Somehow this squalid brew of incest, violence and hallucinogenic mushrooms is transformed by Meades’ language something approaching the sublime. I first read it as a student, and knew I’d found the writer who understood my England: the terrifying, dirty, intoxicating one beyond the reach of Ordnance Survey tourist maps and brown heritage signs. I’ve published Jonathan for over twenty years now. It all started here, with a dead chicken and room full of meat flies.

First published in Harpers & Queen, November 1982 and in the collection Filthy English, Jonathan Cape, 1984 and Fourth Estate, 2003

‘Communist’ by Richard Ford

This is about as perfect as the classic American short story gets. Les, now in his forties, is looking back on an incident which happened when he was sixteen in Montana in 1961. His mother’s boyfriend, a self-declared Communist called Glen, returns after an unexplained absence and offers to take them to shoot snow geese. They go and the geese make an unforgettable display. They kill six. The gamble seems to have paid off, until a moment of misunderstanding between Glen and Aileen, Les’s mother, undoes it all and Glen departs. “A light can go out in the heart”. Later, Les and his mother have an honest conversation on the porch, something they never manage again. An adolescent rite of passage, limited ideas of masculinity, sublime natural beauty, the sudden ugliness of violence, the inescapabilty of insecurity and fear, the tentativeness of maternal love. All are present and correct. But the astringent clarity of Ford’s language and his ability to drop in the unexpected line to reverse the emotional polarity save the story from descending into a checklist of ‘Dirty Realist’ clichés. There’s none of the garrulous intimacy that make Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels his finest achievement (I was at Harvill when we published the Pulitzer-winning Independence Day), but the sound of Les’s first goose hitting the ground with “an awful sound, the sound a human would make, a thick, soft, hump noise” still haunts me. 

First published in Antaeus, 1984 and in the collection Rock Springs, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. Collected in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone, Touchstone, 2007. You can read an extract online here

‘Banished Misfortune’ by Dermot Healy

In the early seventies, at the height of the Troubles, an Irish musician and his family set off on holiday from their farmhouse home in Fermanagh in the North to the city of Galway in on the West Coast. On arrival, McFarland the fiddler goes out alone, plays some reels, gets drunk and comes home to relate a story he’s been told to his sleeping wife. Somehow, Healy manages to pack into this deceptively slight tale levels of richness and intensity that have reverberated in my mind since I first read it in the early 1990s. The sense of family anticipation as they pack the car “talking in a holiday voice”, the feral beauty of the landscape (“the thump of chestnuts on the soft floor of the night”), the menacing helicopters and checkpoints, McFarland obsessively reading Scott’s account of his final trip to Pole, his wife wanting to take a young man’s mop of hair and “squeeze his face between my thighs so he might scarcely breathe”. The language is layered and nuanced and needs to be read and re-read slowly for the magic to take hold. Few writers can move from modernist interior monologue to comic vernacular dialogue like Healy. You sense that he is already building out towards something bigger, and it’s possible to read ‘Banished Misfortune’ as a dry run for A Goat’s Song, his masterpiece which wasn’t published until almost two decades later in 1994. The best line is given to McFarland’s father, not a musician but a self-taught master builder, who had raised the farmhouse his son’s family now live in from the rocks and trees of the land itself: “In a foot of land there’s a square mile of learning.”

First published in Best Irish Short Stories, edited by David Marcus, Elek Books, 1976 and collected in Banished Misfortune and Other Stories, Allison & Busby, 1982

‘Over by the River’ by William Maxwell

This long story breaks all the rules. It is an episodic portrait of the Carringtons, a well-off family living in a smart apartment near the river on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Nothing much happens – breakfasts, school runs, dog walks, troubled dreams. The two young girls catch cold. A domestic maid leaves suddenly. The cook of a friend commits suicide by jumping into the river. That’s about it. There’s no plot and the narrative focus switches from character to character – each member of the family, their friends, a bag lady, the suicidal cook, their dog – even to a piano at one point (creative writing classes usually advise against this courting of narrative confusion). It is thirty-five pages long and it’s riveting. Of course, Maxwell knew what he was doing – he was fiction editor of the New Yorker for over thirty years: it was to his porch in Connecticut that the young Salinger drove to read aloud the first draft of what became The Catcher in the Rye. Few writers have a better feel for what Maxwell in his preface to his Collected Stories calls “the natural history of home”. He’s like a shape-shifting anthropologist, continually swapping hosts so he can show rather than tell the reader what’s happening. And this dipping inside other minds sometimes induces vertigo. When George Carrington stares at himself in the mirror one morning he realises his fatal flaw. “Nobody was ever as real to him as he was to himself. If people knew how little he cared whether they lived or died, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him.” And then we’re off chasing the dog again. This story works because of its restlessness and the absolute control Maxwell has over his material. As the young William Faulkner once observed of Sherwood Anderson’s stories: “No sustained plot to bother you, nothing tedious; only the sharp episodic phases of people.”

First published in The New Yorker, Jul 1 1974, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in All the Days and Nights, Knopf, 1994, currently a Vintage Classic