‘The Bull Calf’ by Janet Frame

From a tale of corrupted adult natures to another of childhood innocence. Like many, I first came across Janet Frame after watching Jane Campion’s film, An Angel at My Table. Then read her autobiography published under the same name. If you haven’t read it, why not? My God! And when you discover that she received electroshock therapy in 1940s New Zealand after a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and was then scheduled to have a lobotomy – only to be reprieved at the last minute because her first story collection had won a literary award – well, then you think, at least in this one case fiction actually achieved something. At least this time it really mattered. My favourite novel of hers is The Edge of the Alphabet, which conjures a drab post-war London now long gone. My favourite short story is this one, ‘The Bull Calf’.

Frame not only had to contend with mental illness, but struggle with rural poverty too. It seeps across every page – the fraying clothes, the toe and heel plates fixed to her shoes, the home-made sanitary towels made from torn-up old sheets. Every morning she has to milk the cow before school, and the cow’s usually wandered off, miles away. Resentment seethes inside Olive Blakely, Frame’s stand-in for this story, but it’s never overdone. (That’s one of the best aspects of Janet Frame’s writing – there’s never a feeling that she has to strive for an effect. Nothing’s overcooked, it’s all so natural). One day, in the darkness, she comes across two men attacking the bull calf that lives in a nearby field. At least that’s what they seem to be doing. In fact they’re neutering it but she’s too young to understand. Her father and mother won’t tell her what’s going on and seem embarrassed when she starts crying and telling them that the bull calf’s bleeding to death. Now for the strange and memorable twist: a Chinese family is visiting (and where have they come from? How many Chinese people could there have been in 1930s South Island, NZ?) and the young man of the family hands her a bowl of water containing a narcissus: “You have it. It is for you.” Taking it upstairs, she “touched the petals gently, stroking them, marvelling again at the transparency of the whole flower and the clear water where every fibre of the bulb seemed visible and in motion as if brushed by secret currents and tides.”

Curiously, I was in New Zealand when Janet Frame died. Suddenly portrait shots of this reclusive writer were on the covers of big-circulation magazines, smiling and radiant, as if her story had had its happy ending after all. Yet the feeling I got was that still no-one really knew what to make of her; some part of her awkward personality continued to embarrass them to the end. (By ‘them’, I mean the general public, whoever they might be). Her work was badly stocked in the bookshops and nowhere to be found in the second-hand stores. Despite her success, the books themselves had hardly flooded the market. Well, who wants to read about poverty, about being strapped down for enforced electroshock therapy, and who, above all, wishes to be reminded that we New Zealanders came within a whisker of slicing off a part of a young woman’s brain, a young woman who happened to be our most gifted writer in a hundred years? Easier to just forget it – and her! So said the general public. But long live Janet Frame – says I.

From The Reservoir, The Pegasus Press, 1966. Collected in You Are Now Entering The Human Heart, The Women’s Press, 1984

‘Scenes from the Life of a Faun’ by Arno Schmidt, translated by JE Woods

If you’re after raw, overlooked talent, how about Arno Schmidt? A very nice Irishman introduced me to him and I’m forever grateful. Your eyes pop out when you first look at a page of Schmidt. All those exclamations marks !! And <strange punctuation> and every new paragraph beginning in italics. Surely this isn’t going to work, you think to yourself. Too distracting, trying too hard. In answer to the unspoken accusation Schmidt himself declared, “We are not dealing with a mania for originality or love of the grand gesture, but with… the necessary refinement of the writer’s tool… Let us retain the lovely=essential freedom to reproduce a hesitation precisely : ‘well – hm –: Idunno – – : can we do that….’ (Instead of the rigidly prescribed: ‘Well, I don’t know…’)”

You get the idea. But does it work? <Yes> !! Before two or three pages have passed the semi-pictogram style drops away and, suddenly, you’re in direct communion with Arno Schmidt’s mind. Which is a very good place to be. Such energy. The writing’s discursive, touching on many subjects of interest to him and – another virtue – he never bothers with transitions. Or rarely. Those workmanlike chunks of prose that other writers feel obliged to create in order to produce a satisfying transition from one scene to the next hold no interest for Schmidt. The result is a giddy headlong style, yet he never loses sight of his story. ‘Scenes from the Life of a Faun’ starts in 1939 and tells the tale of Herr Düring, a middle-aged government administrator working under the Nazi regime. Having fought in WW1, he’s too old to be called up again so, head down, he goes quietly on while despising those around him. (Not coincidentally, the narrator of each of the three stories found in this volume, one of which is set in the future, is by far the most intelligent person encountered). Given an archiving job by his boss, Düring comes across the historical figure of Thierry, a deserter from the Napoleonic Wars (‘the faun’) who once hid out in a wooden shack in a nearby forest. Düring takes the cue and, by 1944, it saves his life.

A superlative quality of Arno Schmidt’s writing is his power of description. How about this: “Bushes in scaly sea-green capes appeared along all paths and waved me ever deeper down the road; stood as spectators at meadow’s edge; did trim gymnastics; whispered wantonly with chlorophyll tongues.” Or this description of a woman’s face: “She glided in nearer… soundlessly unbolted that hangar of a mouth: dental slabs the size of dictionaries occupied her jaw bow, beneath nasal pilasters; her eyelashes bristled like carpenter’s nails.”

‘Scenes from the Life of a Faun’ concludes with a five page description of a firebombing raid which is just one of the best things I’ve ever read. “Every maid wore red stockings; each with cinnabar in her pail… Hundreds of hands spurted up from the sod and distributed stony handbills, ‘Death’ inscribed on each.”

Hunt, hunt, hunt down Arno Schmidt, like Herr Düring hunted down his Napoleonic deserter.

First published in German in Aus dem Leben eines Fauns, 1953. Translated as Scenes From the Life of a Faun, Marion Boyars, 1983. Collected in Nobodaddy’s Children, Dalkey Archive, 1995

‘Wireless’ by Rudyard Kipling

Probably, the first thing you should do these days when talking about Kipling is confront his politics. He wasn’t a racist, so far as I can make out. He was an imperialist and a jingo. He supported the Boer War which, when you get down to it, was the British Empire’s violent campaign to get its hands on the South African gold reefs. He hated Suffragettes, opposed Irish Home Rule and lost few opportunities to brand socialists as ‘soap-dodgers’. Etcetera. Yet here also was the boy who’d gone psychosomatically blind as a result of the abuse suffered at the hands of the Holloway family in Southsea; the boy who spoke Hindi as a first language; and the man who wrote some of the most ‘magical stories in the English language’. (Which must be right, since the blurb on the paperback in front of me says so. But I agree). You have to know, or learn, how to separate the man or the woman from the work. (Shakespeare, anyone, who hoarded grain during a food shortage? Caravaggio, who castrated and killed a man?)

But back to Kipling – and his influence. The young James Joyce said, “If I knew Ireland as well as R.K. seems to know India, I fancy I could write something good.’” Isaac Babel studied him. Jan Montefiore, in the Introduction to her edition of his selected stories, detects a descriptive similarity between sections of The Waste Land and this story ‘Wireless’. (TS Eliot anthologised Kipling’s verse). She also suggests Hemingway pinched a line or two of it for his own story ‘In Another Country’. Everybody read him, even if they disagreed with his politics. In ‘Wireless’ Kipling sets up his main plot – the young Mr Cashell experimenting with early wireless technology – and through it stitches the red thread of chemist Mr Shaynor’s romantic attachment. ‘Red’ is appropriate because the story’s drenched in the colour, not least the spots of blood that show in Mr Shaynor’s handkerchief after his coughing fits. To pointlessly cut short a beautiful thing, there are more than Hertzian waves in the air. The spirit of John Keats is somehow, but plausibly somehow, channelled through the dozing Mr Shaynor, who then commences to scribble: ‘Remember,’ (says the narrator) ‘that in all the millions permitted there are no more than five – five little lines of which one can say: ‘These are the pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry.’ And Mr Shaynor was playing hot and cold with two of them!’ – John Keats also being an apothecary and also, of course, dying from TB.

Incredible story. Incredible. Ever so slightly, my hands shook when I re-read it for A Personal Anthology.

First published in Scribner’s Magazine, August, 1902. Collected in Traffics and Discoveries, 1904 and most recently in The Man Who Would Be King, Penguin Classics, 2011

‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ by Alan Sillitoe

The constellations were aligned on the day Rudyard Kipling was born. Not so on the birthday of Alan Sillitoe. “I suppose it could be said that I had risen from the ranks. I had become a writer of sorts, having for some indescribable reason, after the evacuation and during the later bombs, taken to reading books,” he explains. Sillitoe came out of the Nottinghamshire slums and factories, made his name with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and followed it up with The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959). By that time he’d long escaped Nottingham and was living on an army pension in Deia, Majorca, where he came to know Robert Graves. It’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar writers – the erudite, patrician Graves, steeped in the classics, with an aristocratic heritage, and the upstart Alan Sillitoe with his stories of working class rebellion and alienation. Yet the two were friends. At the start of The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller, a writer named Alan tells us: ‘Yesterday we visited the house of a friend who lives farther along the valley… sitting on the terrace with my eyes half closed and my head leaning back in a deckchair… I heard the sound of a cuckoo coming from the pine woods on the mountain slopes.’ Was the house Robert Graves’s? In my imagination, it is.

The cuckoo accomplished what a surgeon’s knife could not. I was plunged back deep through the years into my natural state, without books and the knowledge that I am supposed to have gained from them… I was set down once more within the kingdom of Frankie Buller.Whereupon follows a story that begins with kids playing war games and ends, in adulthood, with the sort of forced electroshock therapy that Janet Frame must have undergone. Unlike Frame, Frankie Buller hasn’t survived the treatment well. The light in his eyes has died; silently the narrator rages against ‘the conscientious-scientific-methodical probers’ who did the never-to-be-reversed damage.

I, meanwhile, wonder what happened to Alan Sillitoe. To his writing, I mean – to his talent. It’s easy to forget what a big name he was back then, in the 1960s. (Before my time, but I know). “Over 275,000 copies sold in Pan Books alone” announces my copy of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, printed in 1972 and now as brown as a used teabag. That’s a lot. But Sillitoe had gone off the boil by then – I haven’t read anything of his that’s much good after the first run of success. My understanding is that is he moved to London and, for a time at least, lived the life of a successful author. Coming from where he came from, who can blame him? And no doubt I’m ignorant of his later life. Yet I can’t help speculating about what later works of excellence he might have been produced if he’d stayed quietly on Deia.

From The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, W.H. Allen & Co., 1959

‘The World is Alive’ by J.M.G. Le Clézio, translated by Daphne Woodward

Once I had to attend a family hospital appointment. Waiting on green vinyl chairs in the hospital’s basement, I looked around at the nameplates on the doors of the consulting doctors. One had a long French first name, I don’t remember what. But the surname jumped out at me – Le Clézio! I wanted to rush into that room and shake the doctor’s hand: ‘You must be the son / daughter / nephew / other of the great JMG,’ I saw myself saying. ‘Tell him he’s got a reader on the south coast of England! Because I can’t imagine there are many of us!’ Of course I didn’t go running in like that. (The room was empty anyway). Instead I took down his volume of short stories, Fever, as soon as I got home. Another scan through. Jean-Marie Gustave has plenty of readers, in Europe, having brilliantly sustained his career since his 1963 debut, The Interrogation. Not to mention the small matter of winning that big Swedish gong in 2008.

Two aspects of Le Clézio’s writing that I find myself drawn to: first his rejection, at least in his fiction, of theorising. He isn’t a philosopher and doesn’t want to be one. Doesn’t feel the need to justify himself. That makes for a refreshing change from an intellectual class who often feel the need to speak in tautologies (the sense of a sentence is in the sentence of sense, etcetera). I can’t claim to be well read in modern French fiction, but this tedious little virus does seem to infect more lines than perhaps it ought to. And then, second, Le Clézio’s a camera, an X-ray machine. Microscopic-macroscopic. Straight out of left-field.

I’m not certain that ‘The World is Alive’ even is a story. There’s no protagonist. There’s no plot, and not one single story event. But oh boy, is there setting. Here he describes the method: “One has to go out into the country, like a Sunday painter… choose a deserted spot and look about for a long time. And then, when one has had a good look, one must take a sheet of paper and draw, in words, what one has seen.” (“All you have to do is look and describe,” said the great Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis once). And so we embark upon a description of a valley, a range of mountains, the fauna and flora within its folds, unlike anything you’ve ever read before. It’s as if a madman’s decided to catalogue every square millimetre he can see. Except the madman happens also to be an ant, or sometimes a bird, and happens also to be blessed with high-octane literary talents that he knows how to use. Now, who could say no to that?

(Claude Lévi-Strauss tried the same thing once, an exhaustive description of a sunset. I wonder if it’s a French thing?)

First published in French in Fièvre, Gallimard, 1965. First published in English in Fever, 1966; now available as a Penguin Modern Classic, 2008

‘The Muggletonian Archive’ By E.P. Thompson

After a lifetime of scholarship, a diligent academic tracks down the archive of an obscure religious sect – the Muggletonians, a heretical splinter group that came into existence during the ferment of the English Revolution. The archive has been kept intact throughout the centuries, held secure in the back rooms of Bishopgate pubs, surviving industrialisation, the Victorians, the firebombing of the Luftwaffe. Even better, the academic discovers that the archive, now relocated to Kent, is in the possession of the last living Muggletonian, one Philip Noakes.

Immediately we know where we are, and we sigh a contented sigh. It’s Jose Luis Borges, or a disciple. It’s a comfort read, an intellectual hall of mirrors that’ll tease us and be over in a few pages. And E.P. Thompson is a skilled emulator:It was a strange situation. Mr Noakes himself was the last repository of a 300-year-old tradition. He conversed with me freely about Muggletonian practices and doctrine. He frequently said: ‘We believe’ – and yet one could not point to another believer.

‘Almost salivating, the professor is taken to a store room wherein lie 82 apple boxes. Here at last is the archive. “Eighteenth century bindings appeared, and manuscripts, as well as holograph songbooks. I confess that the light was so bad that, when we came to the last box, with trembling fingers I lit a match.” After some persuasion, and hastened by the onset of old age and ill health, Mr Noakes agrees to let the collection be lodged in the British Library. It’s the triumph of the professor’s career. The story even ends pleasantly: ‘All is sweetened by the recollection of the kindness shown to me by Mr Noakes. It was indeed a privilege to have been taken into the confidence of ‘the Last Muggletonian’.

There’s only one, small, detail. E.P. Thompson was a distinguished historian and never, to my knowledge, wrote a short story in his life. The Muggletonians were every bit as real as the Ranters and the Quakers. William Blake’s mother was one of them. So out the window goes Borges – because every word of The Muggletonian Archive is true.

From Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, The New Press, 1993

Introduction

In putting this together, I picked twelve of my favourites, then had a look to see if there was a theme hiding in there that might create some kind of order. Unsurprisingly, there was (in stories, as in life and love, we often have a type). Broadly speaking, my favourites deal in daily life, in people putting one foot in front of the other. These stories give no quarter to the extraordinary, full as they are of the ordinary, of people doing their best in difficult circumstances or having already done their worst. My type is characters who are ordinary and layered, whose complexity makes me work a little to understand them and whose honesty means I am happy to do the work.

Family – which features heavily here – has always struck me as a fascinating, slightly doomed experiment. The sheer weight of expectation we expect it to carry with grace: that we will be loved no matter what, that we will be forgiven, the permanent benefit of the doubt we expect for ourselves (and often withhold from others). In some cases that faith is justified and in others it is not, and both are here, because eavesdropping while families unfold their loyalties and limitations is about as absorbingly human as it gets.

Twelve wasn’t quite the Mary Poppins bag I imagined it would be and I’ve had to leave many others out. That said, here are the ten stories and two essays I carry with me. The ones that often cross my mind, that raise questions that interest me and, sometimes, answers that comfort me.

(Any misinterpretations of these writers’ intentions are entirely well-meaning and duly mortifying.)

‘Codas’ by Carys Bray

Music teacher Louise is “at the age of unwelcome surprises” and, throughout the story, must navigate a new world in which her father struggles to recover from a stroke. A football coach, he has always directed things, yet cannot now find his way to the end of a sentence, “She waited for him to expound on the problem, unsure whether she should ignore the loose end of the sentence or attempt to tie it for him.” Resilience and helplessness are tangled together, like the map of blood vessels Louise looks at to picture her father’s surgery.

“Parenthood was a series of codas,” Louise thinks. While parents are familiar with the pinpricks that accompany a child’s shift into a new stage, Bray uses the idea of a coda [the concluding passage of a piece of music, connected to but often quite different to what has gone before] to draw delicate sketches of the reversal that sees ageing children make wishes for their parents. There is a dizzying circularity in the endless shifting of need: who will care for our parents, for us, for our children? The best Louise can do – the best any of us can do – is to hope that here will be someone kind to do it when the time comes.

‘Codas’ is the bittersweet standout in a powerful little collection on seven different kinds of love.

First published in How Much the Heart Can Hold, Sceptre, 2016

‘Sky’ by Donal Ryan

William has lived in the same house all his life, which he sees as normal and others see as suspicious: “Did you never want to have a look at the world? No, faith, I did not,” he says. “This road is as good as any, or as bad.”

(I think I might have picked this story for that punctuating “faith” alone, for the rural life it conjures.)

William tries to reach out, phoning a helpline, taking computer lessons, but his efforts fail at the last – while he can look with wonder at the vastness of the world, he cannot engage in cutting it down to fit himself. For William, the world is real and tangible – the road, the crows, the sky. Everything else is, he says, “a world of knowledge and nonsense”. The beauty of the story is that William might be absolutely right or he might just be bound by fear. His invisibility is at its most heartbreaking when his sister moves away, taking his beloved nephew Billy with her. “I’m only a ghost to him now, and he to me,” William says.

Ryan is at his best among the broken and the wistful, and here he writes with just enough sentimentality to tighten the cord between your brain and your heart, but without leaving you feeling cheap afterwards.

First published in A Slanting of the Sun, Doubleday Ireland, 2015. Also published in Irish American and available to read online here

‘The Moons of Jupiter’ by Alice Munro

Another hospital bedside, another father and daughter. (Like I said, a type.) Older this time, and thus with their beliefs and biases about one another more firmly entrenched. Janet says, “I used to tell people that he never spoke regretfully about his life, but that was not true. It was just that I didn’t listen to it.” This story has all the truth and regret that bind families together, the nursing of slanted memories and misremembered grievances. It is a relief to read these things written down, to recognise our ordinary monstrous self-centredness and to acknowledge, as Janet does, the relief that others will make their choices without us and we need simply live alongside them.

Munro’s single-sentence encapsulation of a character is a thing of wonder and this story has one of my favourites: a character seen only in passing in a planetarium is described as “a man with a red face and puffy eyes, who looked as if he might be here to keep himself from going to a bar.”

First published in published in The New Yorker in May, 1978, and available online for subscribers to read here. Collected in The Moons of Jupiter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982, and then in Selected Stories, Vintage, 1996 and Vintage Munro, Vintage, 2005

‘The Translator’s Funeral’ by Rónán Hession

The writer and her wife, the translator, are found dead in their garden by the postman, one having died of natural causes and the other of a broken heart. The story catalogues a series of misunderstandings that can arise from interpreting others’ words and intentions, yet, crucially, how kindness can ensure that those mistakes are never devastating.

Hession’s respect for the art of translation shines through in the carefulness of his sentences. When the two funerals are accidentally double-booked, the people of the town worry about which to attend: some say the writer’s work will bring people to the town, and “the guide dog trainer said yes, but it was the translator’s words they had all read.” The difficulty – and indeed the wisdom or necessity − of separating things into their component parts, whether people and the jobs they do or the entwined lives they lead, is beautifully described here. Full of Hession’s trademark gentle yet incisive observations on the world and how we can live well in it.

First published online in the Irish Times on 13 August 2020

‘The Starlight on Idaho’ by Denis Johnson

Johnson writes shambolic characters with a sort of grubby, gleeful honesty. Here, Mark ‘Cass’ Cassandra is a recovering addict, in the early days of yet another rehab stint and writing imaginary letters to everybody to whom he is bound by blood or hurt: “I’ve got about a dozen hooks in my heart, I’m following the lines back to where they go.”

Every time I read this story, I think that the concerns of men and women writers are often very different, with men writing men externalising their pain and distributing it among the various people (often women) in their lives, while women write women swallowing their words and internalising it all. If writing about shambles is male territory, nobody goes for it like Johnson, with Cass describing his life in recent years as a serious of disasters – broke, lost, homeless, detox, shot. Yet underneath the bravado, Cass seeks to make amends for his mistakes, not wanting to end up where his grandmother has darkly prophesied, “buried in a strange town with your name spelled wrong on your grave.”

Of others’ pain, he says, “That’s what we gotta do is get down to just one story, the true person we are, and live it all the way out.” The hope in that one line will follow you.

First published in Playboy, 2007. Collected in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Jonathan Cape, 2018

‘Until the Girl Died’ by Anne Enright

Anne Enright is unmatched when it comes to writing anger and forgiveness and getting on with things and the triumph of the everyday. In this story, a woman’s husband has been having an affair, as he has done several times before, each time returning home contrite and armed with suggestions for a weekend away. This time, however, the girl in question died in a car accident. The man is stunned, chiefly by his own ageing, while his wife is left to reassure the girl’s grave that she mattered to him.

The story shows how complicated ordinary life is. How savage, how careless we are with one another when we think we are invincible. How much we can hurt others in the pursuit of what we think we deserve. With typical Enright acerbity, the woman says, “It’s the great mystery, isn’t it? What men ‘want’. And the damage they might do to get it.”

It is possible to live and to love someone from within that crack between generosity and vengeance, the story tells us. Time may not heal, exactly, but it passes and we run out of steam, which can amount to the same thing. “How did we get through the next week?” the woman asks. “Normally, at a guess. We got through the week in a completely normal way.”

First published in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008. Also available in Yesterday’s Weather, Vintage, 2009

‘Under the Awning’ by Melatu Uche Okorie

Family reunification brought Didi from Africa to Ireland to join her mother and siblings. She feels alienated from her environment, from her family, from her own expectations. Everything tells her she does not fit. Her aunt describes how, in her daughter’s school, “all the children’s pictures were put up on the wall with their countries of origin written above it and how the children with non-national parents had their parents’ countries of origin.”

Didi buys a diary, begins to write, joins a writing class, where, when it is her turn to read, her words do not fit either. Her classmates critique her writing from their perspectives of discomfort: she is told that writing in the second person makes the character “hard to care about”, that the story is “bleak and negative” and told by someone “full of hatred and self-loathing.”

Irish people are used to being hailed for their welcomes, and Okorie’s story superbly skewers that accepted wisdom. It is a necessary reminder that it is high time we stopped clinging to our smug old ideas of ourselves and recognised that, too often, those outstretched hands are designed to keep people at a remove – you are welcome, yes, but only ever as an outsider.

First published in This Hostel Life, Skein Press, 2018. Anthologised in The Art of the Glimpse, Head of Zeus, 2020)