‘An Abduction’ by Tessa Hadley

Another opening story, with another superlative first line: “Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed.” One of the truisms of short stories is that every word has to earn its keep, but Hadley – who is surely one of the finest short story writers living – takes this to new levels, forcing even her conjunctions to do a job of work. Look at her choice of “and” in this sentence, rather than the expected “but”: the “and” makes the lack of noticing just as great a crime as the abduction itself. It also implies a great deal about Jane’s circumstances, which Hadley brings vividly to life in just a few resonant sentences: it’s the 1960s, Jane is home (Surrey!) for the summer from boarding school, and the sun is relentlessly shining. “It wasn’t acceptable in Jane’s kind of family,” we’re told (note the passive tense, the use of “acceptable” and “kind of”, all of which are redolent with class associations) “to complain about good weather, yet the strain of it told on them, parents and children: they were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly they longed for rain.”

Bored, hot, listless and frustrated, when a car of university students pulls up beside her she agrees, almost unaccountably, to their offer of a lift. and passes a revelatory 24 hours with them, before slotting apparently seamlessly back into her own life. As she grows older, though, the seams begin to fray; the event that was accommodated at the time turns out to be too vast and jagged to be subsumed, and comes, in later years, to take on an almost totemic significance: to represent for her the possible other; the life unlived. It’s a painful scenario, plangently played out, but the real wallop comes in the final paragraphs, which reveal with lancing matter-of-factness that the boy to whom she lost her virginity that night “has no memory [of her] at all”. “He’s had too much happiness in his life since, too much experience,” the story concludes. “He’s lost that fine-tuning that could hold on to… the girl’s cold skin and her naivety, her extraordinary offer of herself without reserve, the curtains sweeping the floor in the morning light. It’s all just gone.” It’s a masterpiece, this one, almost too painful to tangle with. Loss and longing again, and not a word wasted.

First published in Bad Dreams and Other Stories, Vintage, 2018

‘Thirteen Ways of Looking’ by Colum McCann

Again, technically – technically – you might be tempted to call this a novella. But it’s in a short fiction collection, and by god I loved it, so it’s going in. As with all the best short stories – indeed, all the best art – this collection, and this tale, is about time. The curtain lifts on the bedroom of a murder victim, but the murder is yet to take place. While the reader, sitting outside the story’s fictional time, sees the future, the victim himself is unaware that his clock is ticking.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking” is a detective story turned inside out. Everything about the crime is known: time, date, place and method. The killer’s identity emerges smoothly and without fanfare: there are no dead ends or red herrings; no tension; little drama. Peter J Mendelssohn, 82, widowed, subject to the various afflictions and indignities of old age, exits his apartment in a January snowstorm, shuffles the few blocks to his favourite restaurant, eats an abortive lunch with his graceless son, leaves, dies. In conventional crime fiction we peer over the investigators’ shoulders, watching as they assemble clues and draw conclusions, but the detectives themselves are vague presences here. It’s not their thoughts we’re privy to but the victim’s: the son of a Jewish family who fled Europe for the United States, married his childhood sweetheart, fathered two children, served as a judge. In the “deep stone well” of his mind, memory flourishes, and the past dances and spins. His death is just a moment, but inside his head every moment is present. Knowing this, we feel the vastness of what’s lost.

The story carries an odd real-life coda. Like Mendelssohn, McCann was himself knocked unconscious in the street while trying to intervene in an assault – but the incident didn’t take place until after this story was written. This might be a coincidence, but it’s one that proves his point: time is subjective, and the present constantly obliges us to reassess the past. “Sometimes it seems to me,” McCann says, in a note at the end, “that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only ever look back.” In this superlative story, he manages to express both possibilities at once.

First published in Thirteen Ways of Looking, Bloomsbury, 2015

‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall

This story, which went on to win the National Short Story Prize, is, like Daisy Johnson’s, a tale of metamorphosis. The short story form seems particularly suited to these – drawing tight boundaries around the boundary-less; building walls around that which can’t be walled in. Hall’s story, when first read, delivers a genuine, galvanising shock: it’s the tale of a married couple, living in comfortable suburbia, for whom all is easy, and comfortable, and well, until the moment when the wife turns into a fox. The story focuses on sex, in the first half, pre-transmutation: the husband and wife love one another and enjoy one another. But the fox whom the wife becomes isn’t a metaphor for sex: she’s purely, practically, entirely animal, leaving scat on the floor, musk on doorways, preferring her meat served up live.

The story is told through the husband’s eyes: it becomes clear, after the transformation occurs, that we’ve never known the woman; she’s as inscrutable in her human form as she is in her animal one. And what’s fascinating about the tale, the true strangeness at the heart of it, is not so much the transformation as the man’s reaction to it: his shock, of course, but then his acceptance, and finally his longing, his sense of loss. The fox has cubs, and the man knows them to be his, and he loves them, and their mother. He vows to himself that he’ll protect them, and realises that he cannot; that he has no place in their story. This is a story that obliges us to stay on its surface: try to dig deeper, to find sense or significance, and you find quickly that there’s no give; we simply have to accept what we’re shown. “He has given up looking for meaning,” Hall says of the husband, towards the end. “Why, is a useless question, an unknowable object. It is what it is, in other words. But what it is, is rich, strange, provoking and beautiful.

Originally published in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017

‘Fugee’ by Hawa Jande Golakai

Also not technically a short story, I guess, but a piece of narrative non-fiction. Still, it’s short, it’s telling a story, and it’s stone-cold brilliant, so I’m claiming it. Does a story have to be fiction? I think not, on balance – but possibly that’s a conversation for later. I read this piece this year, following on from a trip to the wonderful Arvon Centre at Totleigh Barton, where I sat in on what can only be described as a masterclass on editing by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. I missed the reading in advance, but was so intrigued by this piece, which the class discussed at length, I tracked it down afterwards, and was blown away.

In a series of diary entries, Liberian author Hawa Jande Golakai describes her engagement with the 2014 Ebola crisis, which took root in Guinea, across the border, before spreading further afield. She considers the epidemic as an epidemic (she trained and worked as a medical immunologist), as a reminder of the laziness of western assumptions about Africa and Africanness (in this way it reminded me of Aida Edemariam’s brilliant book The Wife’s Tale, which talked about the West’s framing of and response to the 1984 Ethiopian famine – how little things have changed), and as a lens through which to view her own relationship with her country, her new and still fragile identity as a writer, her life. Ebola feels distant, and other, and then circles closer and closer, forcing her to look at it, and at the decisions she’s made.

I love reading writers considering their own lives as texts – Lorna Sage did it brilliantly in Bad Blood; Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands is a fantastic recent example – and this is exactly what Golakai is doing so deftly and thought-provokingly here. She shifts registers with ease, and maximum impact: describing text-flirting with a possible lover one minute; border closures and aid agencies the next. It’s a catalogue of the mundanity of catastrophe, the dailiness of fear, the cigarette-paper gap between fury and guilt – and it is brightly, beautifully, brilliantly written.

Commissioned for the anthology Safe House,ed. Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Cassava Republic Press, 2016. Subsequently published in Granta 134: No Man’s Land, April 2016 and available online here

‘A Birthday Treat’ by Richmal Crompton

I’m ending with this one in order to break my own rules: because in this story, as in every Just William story, all of our questions are answered, all lines of enquiry resolved, every end tucked in neat and tight as the sheets on an apple-pie bed. They’re like early 20^th century versions of Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes, in other words. Note to Larry David: Richmal Crompton got there first.

They’re also by far – I mean, by miles – the funniest stories I have ever read. With the possible exception of the cheese-on-the-train scene in Three Men in a Boat, I suspect that their humour is unsurpassed in literature. Crompton’s brilliance, I think, rests on four pillars: a recognition of and a commitment to the mock-epic; an understanding of the insularity and misapprehensions of children, and an ability to render that in dialogue; a glorious feel for adverbs; and a judicious deployment of repetition that borders on genius. If ever I’m feeling in the need of cheering up I pick up a Just William collection – and, today being Friday 13th 2019, I’d humbly suggest that you could do worse than doing the same.

This story begins with 11-year-old William and his gang of boon companions, the self-styled Outlaws, being dazzled by the pretty young aunt of one of their members, and determining to give her a birthday treat. The most appropriate tribute, they agree, would be the staging of a “waxwork” show, in which the Outlaws will conspire to portray such diverse subjects as Charles I, Dick Turpin holding up a coach, Columbus discovering America (“William was Columbus, and Henry, Douglas and Ginger, lying on the ground side by side, were America”) and General Moult, an elderly and irascible inhabitant of the village, walking (“As a matter of fact, William could do the half strut, half run that was General Moult’s normal mode of procedure to the life.”). They arrange to present this fiesta in a barn at the edge of the village but, thanks to a fatally crossed wire, find themselves stepping out on to the stage of the Parish Room, before a horrified crowd who were expecting to attend the New Era Society’s lecture on Egyptology. William, unperturbed, “looked around his paralysed audience. ‘Ladies and gen’l’men,’ he began, ‘this is a waxwork show, ‘cause of her birthday, an’ I’m doin’ the talkin’. The first waxwork is me. I’m not dressed for it, but you can imagine me in a long coat an’ I’ve got these things on for Columbus an’ I’ve not got time to go changin’ every time. Ladies an’ gen’l’men, this is the only waxwork show of its kind in the world. We’re just goin’ to begin an’ if you’ll kin’ly watch careful this is General Moult walkin’ along the road – lifelike an’ nat’ral. This is waxwork number one, ladies an’ gen’l’men. This is General Moult walkin’. Kin’ly all watch General Moult walkin’.’”

I’m not going to tell you what happens at the end (which I’ve chosen because it exemplifies all the elements mentioned above – though others will have their own favourites, and on a different day I can be talked around) – you’ll have to read it for yourself. But do, do read it. I reread it twice yesterday, once to myself and once aloud to my husband. On both occasions I was laughing so hard I had to stop – and I want that for all of you. Joy is a wonderful thing – and it’s joyful to understand that as well as everything else, short stories can be the perfect vehicles for delivering that, too.

Originally published in William the Conqueror, George Newnes, 1926

Introduction

The rules of this game require me to select a dozen stories, no more, no fewer – which is both a blessing and a curse. Twelve is enough to get anyone thinking, far too few to represent the range of writers and stories we should celebrate. But formal constraint can be a spur to invention, so I have invented another arbitrary rule to give myself a principle of selection. Which brings me to story number one:

‘True Short Story’ by Ali Smith

This most playful of stories about truth and fiction kicks off with a boorish conversation in which two men in a café discuss the difference between the novel (“A flabby old whore!”) and the short story (“a slim nymph”). It careens through a litany of more-or-less awful jokes, a disquisition on friendship and time, a passage of literary criticism/creative writing tips (we’ll come back to that) and a heartfelt plea for wider access to the cancer drug Herceptin. So, is this even a story, let alone a true one?

Well, it contains facts: Smith’s friend, with whom she says she wrote the story in discussion, had cancer and would have to pay for the drug. The initial prompt for the story came, Smith has said, from overhearing a conversation pretty much exactly like the one described. But there’s the rub. The written story starts not with the conversation, but with Smith sitting in the café observing the two men and – in the way that we all do – speculating about who they might be, before the second paragraph begins: “I stopped making them up.” She starts listening instead. In this manoeuvre Smith simultaneously highlights the artifice of the story, claims to reject that artifice in favour of truth and employs a classic framing device beloved of so many ‘realist’ storytellers. Whether you like this sort of metatextual game is a matter of taste – I do, up to a point – but there’s no denying Smith’s skill and sheer chutzpah.

It’s also the perfect palate-tickler for an anthology. Smith chucks in reflections on the short story from a dozen or so writers and literary theorists. One of them, Elizabeth Bowen, says that the short story “creates narrative every time absolutely on its own terms”, which is certainly true of this story. Wondering how the other prescriptions might stand up gave me my self-imposed rule.

First published and still available in Prospect, Dec 17 2005; collected in The First Person and Other Stories, Penguin 2009

‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville

Franz Kafka (Smith says) says that a short story is a cage in search of a bird.

Melville’s story – like Smith’s – employs a leisurely, nineteenth-century frame in which the narrator introduces himself and his other employees before getting on to Bartleby, and ends with an epilogue in which he explains what little he can and generalizes desperately: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” It is desperate because all this paraphernalia is being deployed in a doomed attempt to capture the soul of the competent but wilful copyist whose power over our imagination comes precisely from the fact that he would “prefer not” – to work, to leave the office, to recognize the incongruity of his position. A man who would literally prefer to starve to death in prison than explain himself. Is Bartleby as free as a bird? Hardly, but the story’s inability to capture him is the reason it’s impossible to forget.

First published in Putnam’s Magazine, Nov/Dec 1853, included in Piazza Tales, 1856, and now published everywhere, including by Melville House Publishing, 2004 and online here

‘Things You Should Know’ by A.M. Homes

Tvetan Todorov says that the thing about a short story is that it’s so short it doesn’t allow us time to forget that it’s only literature and not actually life.

I’ve enjoyed AM Homes’ tough-minded, acerbic, emotionally off-kilter stories for years – from the one about dating a Barbie doll to the recent tour-de-force about love and atrocity, ‘Days of Awe’ (Granta 143; collected in Days of Awe, Granta Books, 2018). But I’ve chosen ‘Things You Should Know’ for purely personal reasons. When I studied Chemistry at school I always felt I was missing something basic: I muddled along, I passed the exam, but I never quite knew how or why. There must have been some explanation at the start of term that I had somehow missed. Over the years, this sensation recurred – remind me again why structuralism mattered? What is it you expect from me in this job, exactly? – until one day in 2003 I read: “There are things I do not know. I was absent the day they passed out the information sheets.” And I have never forgotten it. The sheets the narrator believes were handed out by her fourth grade teacher include, she guesses, “Not things to know, not things you will learn, but things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don’t.” It was perhaps the most banal epiphany ever because the fact that it’s a story – and the collection’s title story at that – means mine is obviously not a purely personal response at all.

Collected in Things You Should Know, Granta Books, 2003

‘A Walk in the Park’ by James Kelman

Nadine Gordimer says short stories are about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.

I recently wrote a story in which a man in his sixties easily locates a book he hasn’t read since university, because his shelves are so well organized. Pure fantasy, of course: the set of books I’ve read is much larger than the set of those I can currently lay my hands on. I’ve chosen ‘A Walk in the Park’ from The Burn partly for its brutally ambiguous title, and partly, if I’m honest, because I simply could not find my copies of his earlier collections Greyhound for Breakfast and Not, not while the giro. If you’re only familiar with the novels – or not familiar with Kelman at all – these are a treat. Pure slivers of working class Glaswegian life, with all the poverty and alcohol and love and rage that the late 80s had to offer, but all rendered with minute attention to the detail of language and dialect. It’s prose you have to read at talking speed – which suits me fine: I’m a slow reader – tuning in to the demotic speech and thought-patterns of his frequently broken, but always human, characters. Some people found Kelman difficult to read – just as, more recently, some inexplicably declared Anna Burns’ Milkman difficult to read – but if you can’t hear Kelman’s people talking in your head, it’s because you’re not listening. Slow down.

‘A Walk in the Park’ maintains a perfect balance between banality and tragedy in the story of a man and woman, both weighed down by failed relationships; they meet and wonder what to do of an afternoon:

They stood staring at each other for several moments. Then she said: The library?
Nah.
A walk in the park?
Uch naw.

But a walk in the park it is. They even hold hands. She tries, she teases, and he tries, too, but all the while he’s keeping the lid on a boiling rage born of frustration, of an awareness of his own inability to cope.

A brief flash, indeed, if fireflies lived for thirty years.

First published in The Burn, Secker and Warburg, 1991; Minerva paperback 1992; currently available from Polygon, 2009

‘Stirrings Still’ by Samuel Beckett

Eudora Welty says that short stories often problematize their own best interests and that this is what makes them interesting.

Which brings us to Beckett. I don’t go in much for heroes: Joe Strummer, maybe, Samuel Beckett. Beckett spent six decades writing stories that, in Smith/Welty’s words, increasingly problematized their own best interests – if you think it’s in the interest of a story to be a story, or even to be read. But when you can’t go on, and can’t not go on, either, what else can you do?

So where to start? I’ve plumped, perversely perhaps, for the end. Not The End, written forty years earlier, but Stirrings Still, the last completed prose he wrote. In it a man, unnamed but recognizable to Beckett readers from long before The Unnameable (1953), sits alone in a bare room and contemplates his own death. A barrel of laughs? Not exactly. Beckett is at heart a comic writer and fabulously funny (the two don’t always go together) but his humour, always bleak, was struck from harder and harder rock as time went on. However, there is a moment of clarity here, perhaps even of grace, that had eluded him in much of the later prose. He recalls an old friend (who had died and left him, naturally) and a favourite poem; there are hints of Beckett’s own literary hero, Dante, and in the end, a glimmer of a hint of an idea that he might, after all, have managed to fail better:Such and more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end. And you can’t say fairer than that.

First published in a signed limited edition, and in The Guardian, 3 March 1989; later republished in the posthumous edition As the Story Was Told (1990). Available in Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, Faber & Faber, 2009: and in The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, 1995

‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’ by P.G. Wodehouse

Henry James says that the short story, being so condensed, can give a particularized perspective on both complexity and continuity.

I’ve paired James and Wodehouse partly because I can’t help thinking ‘The Master’ would be outraged, while Wodehouse would be tickled pink, and partly because “complexity and continuity” captures perfectly the essence of a Wodehouse story. Blandings will never change: the inadequacies of foolish young men and officious private secretaries will always be overcome by a combination of smart, attractive young women and the apparently accidental interventions of the ninth Earl; there will never be a tenth; the Empress will sicken and fatten, but never be slaughtered for pork chops. That we know all this is part of the joy, allowing us to wallow in the glory of the comic engineering like … well, like pigs in mud.

There are those, of course, who prefer the world of Jeeves and Wooster, and a handful with a soft spot for Psmith, against whom I say nothing; but for me, in the short form at least, nothing Wodehouse wrote could better ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’.

First appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, October 1936, and the Strand, January 1937. It was included in the collection Lord Emsworth and Others, 1937, which is currently available from Everyman, 2002. The story is included in a number of collections and available alone as a ‘Penguin Modern Mini Classic’, Penguin, 2011

‘The Coat’ by Carys Davies and ’The Overcoat’ by Nikolai Gogol

Jorge Luis Borges says that short stories can be the perfect form for novelists too lazy to write anything longer than fifteen pages.

It is rare for a Davies story to last that long: ‘The Coat” clocks in at eight and-a-half. Her recent novel, West,musters only 149. Mistress of the art of concision, her stories are also, like Wodehouse’s, precisely engineered, their final lines slotting into place in ways that both surprise and satisfy.

Evangelina Hine keeps her handsome blacksmith husband Joseph’s coat hanging by the door he walked out of a year ago because she can’t – or won’t – see him as “a man who was doing his best to disappear”. The narrator, Margaret, sent to comfort her, and perhaps make her see sense, finds herself feeling more than pity. When Joseph unexpectedly returns, it is not as a ghost, but as a woman; a story about pity for an abandoned wife suddenly becomes one about the self-pity of the still-married Margaret.

A lazy writer could get away with giving us far less plot: it takes real effort to craft so much in so small a space. But not everything is about concision. Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ runs to twice Borges’ outer limit. It plunges us straight into a rambling, chatty voice:

And so, in a certain department there served a certain clerk; a not very remarkable clerk, one might say – short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as haemorrhoidal … No help for it! the Petersburg climate is to blame.”

In short, it looks like we’re in a tale (notably, the Granta edition is The Collected Tales– not stories), an anecdote that will follow the rambling byways of the teller’s mind; in reality, this first paragraph is as self-aware as Ali Smith’s, its descriptions as pitch-perfect as Wodehouse’s.

Half a dozen pages in, our not very remarkable clerk, Akaky Akakievich, visits the tailor Petrovich to get his old coat repaired. (“Of this tailor, of course, not much should be said, but since there exists a rule that the character of every person in a story be well delineated, let us have Petrovich here as well.”) Repair is impossible: Akaky Akakievich must buy a new coat he cannot afford; after months of scrimping – and dreaming of his new coat – he finally manages to buy it, only to be robbed at once. By now we’re twenty pages in, and we know the only question is just how much worse things will get for poor Akaky Akakievich.

And on we go, through a rollicking, devastating, genuinely affecting satire that makes one wonder whether Borges might not have got things back-to-front. Perhaps the novel is the perfect form for writers too lazy for short stories.

‘The Coat’, in The Redemption of Galen Pike, Salt, 2014. ‘The Overcoat’, in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. By Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Granta Books, 2003, and available online, including here

‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’ by William Trevor

William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like a flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people’s lives.

If Gogol’s artful rambling was part of the point, William Trevor was the master of the kind of writing in which every word earns its place, pays its taxes and volunteers for good causes on the side. Over 20-odd novels and a dozen story collections, there’s no shortage of broken lives to choose from. In the middle of the first page of ‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’ we find the following paragraph:

Now in her early fifties, slender, softly spoken, with a quiet beauty continuing to distinguish her features, Miss Elizabeth Nightingale considered that she was fortunate in her life. She had inherited a house on the death of her father, and managed without skimping on what she earned as a piano teacher. She had known the passion of love.

How’s that for giving us the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of someone’s life? For telling us what she believes about the fullness of her life and what she lacks, and how both can be true at once. In less than sixty words.

Published in Last Stories, Penguin, 2019