‘Hygiene’ by Julian Barnes

When I think of the story ‘Hygiene’, by Julian Barnes, I think of the image of the aged, feeble major, stuck up a ladder during his yearly gutter-cleaning task. Suddenly, unpredictably, he is terrified that he will fall. The major is frozen on his rung, unable to go up or down, he is “Scared fartless. Of the whole damn thing.” ‘Hygiene’ is a story, carried by the Major’s perfectly honed voice, about aging and sexuality, detailing his long-term relationship with a London prostitute called Bab. Yet, ‘Hygiene’ is not so much about sex, as it is about change, the loss of landmarks and moments in life when you realize you are no longer the person you used to be.

First published in the New Yorker, September 1999. Collected in The Lemon Table, Picador, 2004. Also available as a Storycuts digital single

‘The Terrible Rages of Lillian Strauss’ by Deborah Levy

Swallowing Geography dazzles, bites and snarls. A disorientating wandering between physical bodies and lands, Levy’s book can be read as fragments, short stories, or from beginning to end. In the collection, we meet cowboys, a tourist “a wanderer, bum, émigré, refugee, deportee” and the furious, gin-drinking Lillian Strauss. In the book “beginnings and ends curls into each other.” Language startles and unsettles. The story ‘The Terrible Rages of Lillian Strauss’ is a vivid, piercing depiction of daughterly love, an aging mother’s anger, and Lillian’s excellent habit of planting red-hot pokers in her garden, ready for them to bloom. If Swallowing Geography were a firework, it would be a Screaming Spider, fast-burning, noisy and hard-bursting, shooting out straight stars into the night sky like dozens of little spider’s legs. 

From Swallowing Geography, Jonathan Cape, 1993. Swallowing Geography was republished together with Beautiful Mutants in Early Levy, Penguin, 2014 and on its own as a Penguin Essentials, 2019

‘The Séance’ by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Roger H. Klein

Isaac Bashevis Singer writes intricate short stories, densely populated by languages (Yiddish, Polish, German and English), New York intellectuals, Holocaust survivors, demons, and ghosts. In ‘The Séance’, the aging Dr Kalisher, who has researched the system “according to which all things from the smallest grain of sand to the Godhead himself are Union” finds himself reduced to weekly spiritual séances, automatic paintings and vegetarian suppers with the “painted bulldog” Mrs. Kopitzky, who channels the spirit of Bhaghavar Krishna. Dr. Kalishner, who is suffering from a prostate complaint, and lives in a bug-ridden room, knows the séances are a joke. But ‘The Séance’ is a story about faith, what we need to believe in, and a particularly human, and hairy type of hope. Universal Rebirth. 

From The Séance and Other Stories. First published in Yiddish in 1964. First English publication 1968, FSG/Penguin

‘As They Rode Along The Edge’ by Leonora Carrington

‘As They Rode Along The Edge’ is from Carrington’s collection The Seventh Horse and Other Tales. Haunting, humorous and viscerally violent, these surrealist texts are unearthed from fairy tales and nightmares. Carrington wrote “I’ve always had access to other worlds. We all do because we dream.” ‘As They Rode Along the Edge’ is the story of Virginia Fur who “has a mane of hair yards long and enormous hands with dirty hair” and travels the countryside on a wheel, surrounded by fifty cats. It is a gruesome myth of revenge against hunting, wild boars, one hundred nuns and a terrible feast, attended by a million birds of the night.

From The Seventh Horses and other Tales, EP Dutton, 1988. Also Penguin, 1988 and Virago, 1989

‘The Ice Bear’ by Helen Dunmore

‘Love of Fat Men’, one of my favorite short story collections, is a bleak landscape of a book, inhabited by shifting characters. Facing transition, not quite fitting in, men and women fall in and out of focus, sharply defined and then blurred, questioning who they are… Dunmore leaves a lot of space in her stories, a territory, which as Blanchot writes, “ can’t be printed anywhere.” In ‘The Ice Bear’, Ulli is on a Baltic ferry crossing, at the end of her summer travels.  With only enough money left to buy two buns, she sits across a café table from a newlywed missionary, coming from “holy people with sweet cake and their shiny pails….” Her attention veers from the straight-laced man, to a group of drunken Finns on the slippery deck. Where does she belong, gulping schnapps or sharing breakfast with an ice bear “wooly and white but they’ll claw you up for the use of their mate and their young”?

From Love of Fat Men, Viking, 1997

‘The Artist at Work’ by Albert Camus

In ‘The Artist at Work’, Jonas, a painter, achieves fame, and then physical and mentally retreats from society. He moves his studio behind a curtain, into the bedroom, the bathroom, and finally onto a tiny platform in his hallway where he hides for weeks. Here, he claims to be working on a painting, a blank canvas with a word that can be made out” but without any certainty it should be read as solitary or solidary.” 
 
‘The Artist at Work’ is an existential story about reconciling two unbridgeable contradictions: our need for communion and belonging, with our sense of personal freedom. Just before Camus’s untimely death he drafted a note for his final novel, intertwining this duo of seemingly opposing parts of each human existence, “I’m resolved on autonomy, I demand independence in interdependence.”

First published as ‘Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail’, 1957. Collected in Exile and the Kingdom, 1957. Available in a new translation by Carol Cosman, Penguin, 2006

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by J.G Ballard

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ is a beautifully paced dystopian text written by Ballard in 1977, the very dark tale of a physical family reunion. Against all government recommendations, and having spent a lifetime only communicating via screens – in courtship, marriage, pregnancy and child-rearing – two parents and their children finally get together, for the first time, in real life. 
 
The result, well, I think I should let you imagine how J.G. Ballard would write such a scene of unbounded love…
 
In terms of pyrotechnics, there is an article dealing with this subject entitled: How to Light Fireworks at Home – Without Getting Dead.

In Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982. Also in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014 and  English Short Stories from 1900 to the present, Everyman Classic, 1988

‘Why is Pepe Canary Yellow?’ by Irenosen Okojie

Okojie’s brilliant and bold writing (which I have just discovered) is a cocktail of dark and comic surrealism stirred with prosaic human tragedy, and a pinch of London. Think of: foot fetishes, a boy who grows a tail, a story about Asda and electric brains.  Okojie’s words light the sky with resistance, resilience and ambiguity. These are tales that explode at the end of our firework show, igniting a questioning sky. To finish this anthology on a cheerful note, or at least with a light display celebrating humanity, read the story, ‘Why is Pepe Canary Yellow?’  about the infamous bank-robber dressed as a chicken, who listens to customers, and leaves behind recipes for coconut cakes, because “If the intentions are good, certain things are forgivable.”

From Speak Gigantular, Jacaranda, 2016

Introduction

In an interview for Five Dials, Lydia Davis said that certain words and sentences “defy assimilation”, meaning that on each reading they continue to strike her as “surprising, fresh and new”. Looking at my list below, I note that this is one thing many of the pieces have in common. Something else that’s clear when looking at this list, is that the content, for me, is subordinate to the form: the words and the spaces between. Anything can carry if the writing is good enough. I decided to make an anthology of writing that has marked me in some way as a writer, and has helped me on the way to becoming a writer (always becoming a writer). In no particular order I’ve tried to illustrate, in the case of each, what I learned.

‘Axolotl’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn

Where is your narrator? A simple enough question, the narrator has to be somewhere.  But it’s something that, as a beginning writer, is easy to forget until you’re halfway through a story, or a chapter, and you’re left wondering why your story is proving so unwieldy. In this short piece Cortázar achieves a seamless shift in perspective, while the narrator remains constant, one mind to another mind. Some technical dexterity is required to get this right, and he gets it so right, all the way penetrating into this existential question, the “diaphanous interior mystery” of consciousness. 

First published in Spanish in Litereria, 1952 and collected in Final del Juego. First published in English in End of the Game, Pantheon, 1967 and collected in Blow Up And Other Stories, Pantheon, 1985

‘Work’ by Denis Johnson

Tense, and time. Johnson’s collection of stories is narrated by the same protagonist throughout. Studying sentences like “But now the river was flat and slow”, I learned (continue to learn) to manage tense in a story. Speaking in the past tense, within that speaking about something that happened further in the past, or is happening in the ‘present’ of your story, in the past tense, confused yet? Perspective rears its head again, where is your narrator telling the story from, what point in time? This will set the tone. If the character is talking to us about an event that took place a year previous, the rougher edges of what looks like a harrowing experience may have smoothed out somewhat, they know what happened next, compared to something that happened to the protagonist the day before. Just knowing this while you’re writing gives a better flow, the language will naturally follow from the awareness of perspective. And on to the language, there is definitely something that defies assimilation: “the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me.” A hailstorm, such a description allowed me to see it as if for the first time. 

First published in The New Yorker, November 14, 1988 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Jesus’ Son, FSG, 1992, Granta, 2012. Also available to read here