‘Wingstroke’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov

‘Wingstroke’ is a fabulously strange and over-looked piece of weird fiction. It concerns a man named Kern who, reeling from the suicide of his wife, finds himself at a European ski resort where everything appears to be loaded with meaning and coincidence. There is also a touch of the fantastical about his surroundings, as well as with his fellow skiers. Marooned in the hotel, he notices himself being watched by “some pale girl with pink eyebrows”, and at dinner he encounters a “man with goat eyes”; whilst his creepy acquaintance, Monfiori, is described as having “pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with reddish fluff on their tips.” Kern appears to have entered a new reality, one where when it snows the hotel seems to “float upwards”. The perfect setting then for a supernatural encounter.

Also at the hotel is Isabel – known about the resort as ‘Airborne Isabel’ – an attractive and popular young woman whom Kern befriends and quickly becomes obsessed with. She inhabits the room next door to Kern’s. Much to Kern’s disbelief, Isabel likes to stay out on the slopes after dark, leaping, as she says, “right up to the stars” and encountering who-knows-what in the snowy darkness.

One night, unable to sleep, Kern hears guitar music, laughter and strange barks coming from Isabel’s room. The next night – drunk, half-crazed, and suicidal himself – Kern notices that Isabel’s key has been left in the door. What Kern does next, bursting into the room and telling Isabel that he needs her love, sets off the chain of bizarre and unexplained events which reach their sad conclusion the next day when Isabel takes part in a skiing competition.

The sudden intrusion of the supernatural into this story is what, for me, makes it such a great read. There’s a chance, obviously, that what Kern encounters in Isabel’s room could be a figment of his increasingly unhinged mind. Told in vivid and descriptive prose and packed with unsettling imagery, ‘Wingstroke’ is one of the finest weird fiction tales I’ve read. We’re left feeling as if the ending hasn’t been adequately explained, whilst at the same time secretly understanding everything. What hasn’t happened is that what we understand about the ending hasn’t been confirmed, which is of course what makes it so memorable.

First published in Russian, as ‘Udar krïla’ in Russkoye Ekh, 1924, and then in English in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf, 1995

‘The Pipe’ by Jack Pendarvis

Some years ago I went through a McSweeney’s phase – collecting the McSweeney’s editions, and the short story collections of authors whose work I discovered in those pages. Jack Pendarvis was one such author. In his story, ‘The Pipe’, a radio DJ has been buried underground for 46 days “to break some kind of record”. The frightening thing about this story is that guarding the DJ’s air pipe on the midnight to 6am shift are a security guard and a paramedic, two people – it quickly becomes apparent – you wouldn’t trust to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.

On the first night they smoke dope and discuss what things they could drop down the pipe, such as fire ants or cotton balls. Some nights the paramedic doesn’t turn up (he’s writing a rock opera), leaving the security guard to whisper to the DJ and force sandwiches down the pipe when he worries the DJ might be hungry. One of my favourite moments is when the paramedic plays a self-penned song for the security guard called, “Half-Hearted’, and we realise why no one has ever written a song with that title. “Half-hearted when you told me that you love me,” the song goes. “Half-hearted when you told me that you care.” (Try singing it and you’ll understand.)

I remember not being able to stop reading as the days counted down, increasingly concerned as to what would be found when they eventually dug the DJ up, given that he’d been under the not-so-watchful eye of these two imbeciles. Had Pendarvis actually provided an answer to that question, I probably wouldn’t still be thinking about this story all these years later.

First published in The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure, MacAdam/Cage, 2005

‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard

A very Aickman-esque tale. I’ve heard it suggested that Aickman actually wrote this story when he and Howard were in a relationship together, which seems like a misogynistic viewpoint. It could be that this is Howard trying to out-Aickman Robert Aickman. Whatever, this is an extraordinary story with just the right amount of weirdness and ambiguity to leave the reader haunted and having to come up with their own conclusions.

‘Three Miles Up’ concerns two friends, John and Clifford, as they embark on a barging holiday. Following a furious row they pick up a mysterious but friendly young woman called Sharon. We realise something is not right about Sharon because when John and Clifford speak to a small boy who’s watching them from a tow path, she emerges from the cabin and the boy gives “a sudden little shriek of fear…and turned to run down the bank the way they had come.” Whatever spell Sharon has cast over John and Clifford to veil her true self, the boy obviously sees her for what she is. After they encounter a turning on the canal not shown on their map, which Sharon gently encourages them to take, they soon discover that they’ve made a terrible mistake.

First published in We are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (a collaboration with Robert Aickman), Jonathan Cape, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, Jonathan Cape, 1975 – more latterly Picador, 2015 – and in Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories, Tartarus Press, 2003

‘The Familiars’ by Micaela Morrisette

With only a handful of short stories to her name (only four that I’m aware of) Micaela Morrissette was, for a time, one of my favourite writers.

‘The Familiars’ is a beautifully written tale of a mother vying for her son against the imaginary friends who keep appearing from under his bed. The great thing about this story is that there is so much detail and such ambiguity that it can be read and enjoyed anew again and again with the reader noticing different things each time. I’ve read ‘The Familiars’ about five times now and I still haven’t quite grasped what’s actually going on in this story. Are the boy’s friends real or only imaginary? There does seem to be some sort of magic going on. In one scene the mother visits her dead husband’s grave, then goes to a stream and casts away some of his belongings. Yet we are never told why. This made me wonder if the friends are actually the father returning in a different form, and this was the mother’s way of trying to be rid of him/them. Or perhaps the story is about the mother’s attempts to rein in her son’s imagination before he starts school and enters the real world. Or perhaps it’s merely about loss and mourning, and the ways that people deal with it. That’s the beauty of this story, it seems designed to make you ponder and speculate; an approach that in the wrong hands could simply frustrate the reader, but here it keeps you coming back again and again to re-read.

First published in Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realities, 2009

Introduction

Print advertising is expensive. When I started CB editions in 2007 I took a cheap option, placing a classified ad in the LRB: ‘Imagine yourself, dear reader, sitting in your favourite chair with your book and “your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array”, and every so often you look up and say, even if there is no one else in the room but the dog, Hey, switch off the TV and listen to this – and you start reading aloud.’ I offered a free CBe book to the first six readers who could name the story from which the nine drinks were quoted, and I was going to start there, with ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’ by Donald Barthelme, but I’ve reread it and decided that Barthelme is one of those writers who for me was liberating when first encountered – Oh, you can do it that way! – but I’m now in a different place. Writers are ruthless.

‘At Hiruharama’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

Reading aloud remains important. Publishing has been a way of doing this. I used to read aloud to a friend who for more than forty years ran a tiny bookshop in Notting Hill, more shed than shop, when she was in a care home and we knew from the first few paragraphs whether or not we wanted to carry on. Penelope Fitzgerald flew past that test. A number of the review quotes on her short novels express both deep admiration and bafflement – and that’s another test the writing I like best has to pass: however much I study it, I cannot work out how it’s done. I’ll offer ‘At Hiruharama’ from Fitzgerald’s posthumous collection of stories, The Means of Escape: genealogy, a remote homestead in New Zealand (“Don’t picture a shack, though. There were two rooms, one with a stove and one with a bedstead, and a third one at the back for a vegetable store”), a home birth for which the doctor arrives late but not too late to rescue a twin daughter the father had put in the waste with the afterbirth – “whereas the first daughter never got to be anything in particular, this second little girl grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well” – and Brinkman, visiting, who is hungry:

Two more women born into the world! It must have seemed to him that if this sort of thing went on there should be a good chance, in the end, for him to acquire one for himself. Meanwhile, they would have to serve dinner sometime.

The receptionist on Sunday afternoons at the care home where I read this story aloud was a Polish woman called Mrs Boyle. I said to her: ‘Maybe we were married, once.’ She gave me long look: ‘I don’t think so.’

First published in New Writing, Minerva/Arts Council, 1992; collected in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000

‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ by Mavis Gallant

Two self-imposed rules: no writer I have published with CBe; and no Chekhov, no Isaac Babel, no Alice Munro, no certain others who I’d like to believe can be taken as read (and re- and re-read). I sincerely believe that Mavis Gallant belongs in the latter gang, and she is here only because she seems to have a cult rather than a wide following. ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ is one of her best-known stories; but really, there are no duds.

No, begin at the beginning: Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost.

But that’s the end, the final sentences. This is the beginning:

Now that they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, ‘Everybody did well in the international thing except us.’

‘You have to be crooked,’ he tells her.

‘Or smart. Pity we weren’t.’

But no, the real beginning is at the top of the page, the words of the title, the ice wagon going down the street. “When I was a kid I would get up in the summer before the others, and I’d see the ice wagon going down the street.” That’s Agnes speaking. The street was in Saskatchewan. Agnes’s family was not rich. Agnes is Peter’s boss in the office in Geneva, a girl, twenty-three at most. “The people he worked with had told him a Scandinavian girl was arriving, and he had expected a stunner. Agnes was a mole: She was small and brown, and round-shouldered as if she had always carried parcels or younger children in her arms.” Peter is afraid: “He saw the ambition, the terror, the dry pride. She was the true heir of the men from Scotland; she was at the start. She had been sent to tell him, ‘You can begin, but not begin again.’”

Agnes, who never drinks, gets drunk at a party and tells Peter about the ice wagon while, under orders from the hostess of the party, he is escorting her home. And while Peter’s wife, Sheilah, back at the party, is starting an affair with a man who will get the Fraziers out of Geneva and onto “the Oriental tour that should have made their fortune”. They reach Agnes’s apartment: “The room was neat and belonged to no one.” She showers and puts on a dressing gown and rubs her cheek on his shoulder. “He thought, This is how disasters happen.” Nothing happens. He goes home.

But something has happened, something that will have Peter still wondering, years later, “what they were doing over there in Geneva – not Sheilah and Peter, Agnes and Peter. It is almost as if they had once run away together, silly as children, irresponsible as lovers.” Something to do with the ice wagon – which he imagines seeing in the place of Agnes, and “the weak prairie trees and the shadows on the sidewalk”. He could take that morning that belongs to Agnes for himself, if he wanted, “but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day? Sheilah is here, it is a true Sunday morning, with its dimness and headache …” Peter has always been lost.

First published in The New Yorker, 1963, and available online to subscribers; variously collected, including in Paris Stories, NYRB, 2002, and Collected Stories, Everyman, 2016

‘The Carpenter Kushakov’ by Daniil Kharms, translated by Matvei Yankelevich

Kharms is here because he is a wonder but also to refute those evil Amazon and marketing-department algorithms that assume I have a single-track mind and that if I like one kind of writer I cannot possibly like a completely different species of writer.

The carpenter Kushakov goes out to buy some glue and slips on the pavement and busts his head. Goes to a drugstore and buys a bandage and tapes up his head. Goes out again and slips and busts his nose. Buys a bandage and tapes up his nose. Goes out again and slips and busts his cheek. Buys a bandage and tapes up his cheek. Goes out again and slips and busts his chin. Buys a bandage and … Back home no one recognises him and they lock the door. “The carpenter Kushakov stood awhile on the landing, spat and went outside.”

Around the time I first read this story my near-neighbour slipped on an icy pavement and put out his hand to break his fall and broke his wrist. And the next day he slipped again and put out the arm that was not in plaster and broke his other wrist. Kushakov reminds me of the old lady who swallowed a fly – and then spider to catch fly, and then bird to catch spider, and then cat to catch bird … Eventually, horse to catch cow. “She’s dead, of course.” Kharms’s blend of absurd logic and structural repetition and violence surely appeals to children. I’m going to read Daniil Kharms to my grandchildren.

Published in Today I Wrote Nothing, The Overlook Press, 2009; online version here

‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño

B, “who is inclined to melancholy (or so he likes to think)”, and his father drive from Mexico City to Acapulco for a holiday. B is aged 22 and is reading an anthology of French surrealist poets translated into Spanish. They stay in an almost empty hotel; they sleep, eat, order beers, stroll on the beach, drive around, watch TV, even have a little adventure (their hired boat capsizes) – time passing “in a placid sort of daze that B’s father associates with ‘The Idea of the Holiday’ (B can’t tell whether his father is serious or pulling his leg)”. Eventually, of course, the mood turns “and an icy phase begins, a phase which appears to be normal but is ruled by deities of ice (who do not, however, offer any relief from the heat that reigns in Acapulco)”. The story ends a split second before violence hits the page. Much of the story depends on the banal but watching Bolaño trying to write dull and failing dismally is one of life’s pleasures.

First published in The New Yorker, 2005, and available online to subscribers; in Last Evenings on Earth, translated by Chris Andrews, Harvill Secker, 2007; Vintage paperback, 2008

‘Rose’ by Guy de Maupassant, translated by H. N. P. Sloman

I have read very little Maupassant. I understand this story to be a seriously odd record of male perception of female desire.

Margot and Simone ride in a landau along the Rue d’Antibes in Cannes on the evening of a festival in which men and women hurl bouquets of flowers, then instruct their coachman to drive out to a nearby bay – tranquillity, bliss, “but there’s just one thing lacking”. “A little love, you mean?” “Yes.”

For Margot, not to be loved, “even if only by a dog”, would be intolerable. Simone is more picky: she’d rather not be loved at all than by – for example – the coach driver. Margot insists that to be loved by a servant is amusing, and recounts the story of the maid she hired four years previously, Rose: a tall, thin, shy girl, skilled dressmaker, genius as a hairdresser. Rose dressed and undressed Margot, and “after my bath she rubbed and massaged me, while I dozed on my sofa”. But then a police inspector arrived and “they took my maid away” in handcuffs: Rose was a man, an escaped rapist and murderer. Margot claims that she felt no anger at having been deceived, and no shame at having been “handled and touched by this man”, but rather “a deep sense of humiliation as a woman” – because, as I understand it, Rose, a rapist, had rejected her as a sexual being.

A final oddity. I’m pretty sure Maupassant has got the women out of sync at the end, and that in the final paragraph it’s Simone and not Margot who is staring at the brass buttons on the coachman’s livery. Am I wrong? If I’m right, why has no one else noticed?

First published in 1884; variously collected, included in Boule de Suif and Other Stories, Penguin, 1946

Gauging a barrel by Piero della Francesca

Going off piste. I like stories that infiltrate or mimic other forms: letters, recipes, inventories, instruction manuals. Here is a found story, both exact and mysterious in its dependence on another way of interpreting the world, in the form of instructions for calculating how much wine your barrel can hold. I like the deadpan tension between the absurd precision of the fractions and the deceptively random nature of the sequential instructions. I like the fact that the author is also the painter of The Nativity and The Baptism of Christ in London’s National Gallery: sublime brushwork and mathematical competence were not entirely separate skills, and Piero could assume the same mathematical knowledge from his lay-educated literate audience. And because I conceive of maths as a (very beautiful) language unto itself, reading this passage is like reading a story in translation. A braccio is an obsolete Italian unit of measurement based on the length of the human arm.

Published in Trattato d’abaco, c.1460; quoted in English translation in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford University Press, 1972

‘Summer Day’ by Ivan Bunin, translated by Graham Hettlinger

Going short: a dozen lines. “And all day a bootmaker sitting barefoot on a rotting bench near a tumbledown shack, his belt unbuckled and his long shirt hanging loose, the sun beating down on his shaggy head. He sits there killing time with a red dog.” “Shake!” But the dog doesn’t know that command. Eventually the dog “lifts one paw uncertainly, drops it back to the ground”, and gets hit in the face for its pains.

Published in Sunstroke: Selected Stories of Ivan Bunin, Ivan R. Dee Inc., 2002

‘Summer Night’ by Elizabeth Bowen

Going longer. I found this story when, during the time I wrote under the pen name Jack Robinson, I went looking for my family in fiction. There are male Robinsons in fiction by Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Kafka, Céline, Muriel Spark, Gerald Brenan, Sherwood Anderson, Chris Petit; in films by Patrick Keiller; in poems by Weldon Kees and Simon Armitage; and yes, they share distinctive family traits. ‘Obdurate’ comes to mind. ‘Imperturbable’ is one of the first adjectives applied to Bowen’s Robinson, a factory manager in a small town in Ireland, separated from his wife and children. “When Robinson showed up, late, at the tennis club, his manner with women was easy and teasing, but abstract and perfectly automatic. From this had probably come the legend that he liked women ‘only in one way’.”

A woman drives fast through hilly countryside at sunset to spend the night with Robinson, her lover. Robinson has guests, a deaf woman and her loopy brother, who stay beyond their welcome and are leaving just as the woman arrives. In fact the whole story seems intent on crowding out the lovers – pages are occupied by the woman’s husband, and her two children, and Aunt Fran – and when, finally, the lovers are alone everything is awkward, neither of them knows how to behave. There’s a war on: “You cannot look at the sky without seeing the shadow, the men destroying each other.” The only people who come out of this well are the deaf woman and Vivie, one of the woman’s children: “One arbitrary line only divided this child from the animal: all her senses stood up, wanting to run the night.”

I did think about choosing the scene – around 20 pages – in Bowen’s The House in Parisset in the garden of an emptied-out house in Twickenham on an idle, warm afternoon at the end of April: Karen, Max and Naomi lying under a cherry tree in blossom, silences and drifting talk (“What I say would often be right if I meant something else”), hands touching on the grass. In my mind it’s a scene that swims free of its context, of what comes before and what after, to become a complete short story in itself; many novels contain such episodes.

Published in Look at All the Roses, Jonathan Cape, 1941; collected in The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1999

‘Dancing’ by James Buchan

I need a story in here from one of the late 20th-century white males who peddled white male lust and privilege in gorgeous bespoke sentences and who for a time had me in thrall: James Kennaway, James Salter, Alfred Hayes … I’m choosing ‘Dancing’ by James Buchan, about whom Michael Hofmann once declared: “I don’t believe this country has a better writer to offer.” ‘Dancing’ is the third in a series of stories that make up Slide, a book that (says the blurb) “calmly records the moral demolition of an Englishman”. The opening: “My first foreign posting was in Kuwait, where I went in 1979 as Press and Information Secretary at the Embassy”: booze, sex, death, cover-ups, tribal loyalty. The closing:

‘Dance,’ Gay shouted. ‘Dance, cunts.’

She was falling. Her hair swept a Persian rug. Her eyes were wide open, looking past me or at nothing at all. I felt my balance go. I hit the chess table, and felt it sway and teeter over. The bronze horse danced. Picture lights. Mouths agape. Blue stripes. A burst of sparks. Black shoes. Kurt Axel.

Published in Slide, Heinemann, 1991; Minerva paperback, 1992