‘Thunderstruck’ by Elizabeth McCracken

I have just reread this because it’s been nearly 10 years and once again it completely knocked me off my feet. Elizabeth McCracken is the first writer I’ve discovered on social media not through personal recommendation, but through just liking her so much. Her Twitter account has for years been a font of delight, affection and humour.

So it was a shock – albeit a pleasant one – to discover that McCracken’s short stories are mini-masterpieces of pain and love. Or rather, the pain that comes from love, but is assuaged by it.

The story ‘Thunderstruck’, which closes this volume, is a perfect example of this. It’s about an American family – wife, husband, two daughters – who travel to Paris and suffer a tragedy which reframes their entire existence. If you’re a parent, it describes your darkest fears, but also your most intense joys. Love and pain, in fact.

First published in Story Quarterly, collected in ‘Thunderstruck and Other Stories’, Random House 2014

‘Wodwo’ by Mark Haddon

I could have picked almost any of the stories from Haddon’s collection The Pier Falls. It’s a masterful set of tales, and I find Haddon to be extraordinarily interesting – a poet, a novelist, a short story writer, and an artist, he seems to ooze a frenzied creativity which is paradoxically under iron control. ‘Wodwo’ tells the story of a middle-class family settling down for Christmas Eve, with their complex power structures and and rancid complacence beautifully rendered with telling detail after telling detail, when they are interrupted by a terrifyingly earthy figure at the French windows, carrying a gun and offering a game.

Rereading it just now I realised that I did not know what ‘wodwo’ even means. An Internet search reveals a Ted Hughes dramatic monologue which I have not read, and the information that a ‘woodwose’ or ‘wodewose’ is Middle English for a ‘wild man’, a staple of Medieval literature who can often be found carved into cathedrals alongside the Green Man.

That should give you a flavour of what is going on here – a social satire surging on waves of deep myth. It’s a fabulous story.

Collected in The Pier Falls, Jonathan Cape, 2016

‘Omphalos’ by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is an unclassifiable phenomenon. His second collection, Exhalation, is recommended by both Barack Obama and Alan Moore. How do you file someone who appeals to minds as different as those? His short stories are magnificent thought experiments, packed with precise erudition, as if Borges had written a series of Black Mirror.

The story I’ve chosen, ‘Omphalos’, asks what the pursuit of science would look like in a world where God was definitively, provably real; that the Creation could be dated, and evidence of it was everywhere. What would it mean to be a scientist in a world like that? Chiang makes this feel astonishingly vivid, and when doubt intrudes into the cosy scientific world he sets up it lands with frightening intensity. But the collection is full of moments like this. It is just beautifully done.

Collected in Exhalation, Picador, 2019

‘Love Letter’ by George Saunders

I can vividly recall reading this when it was first published, when Trump was still president, when we all thought Biden could never take the fight to him, when four more years seemed a probability, not just a possibility. And then what? What would he have done with four more years?

‘Love Letter’ gives one possible answer to that. A loving, beautiful letter from a grandfather to his grandson in a future America, where the Trump family has stolen the presidency, where letters are opened and read and keyboards are tracked. My new book, After London, describes a Britain under a surveillance government, and this does the same for America, but in only three pages, and with Saunders’s exquisite eye for human love and pain.

I’ve just reread it and it is still chilling. How close American came to disaster. And how close it may come again.

Published in The New Yorker, April 6 2020, and available to subscribers to read here

Introduction

If you ever edit an anthology of prose poems, people will ask you: “What’s the difference between a prose poem and flash fiction / micro-essay / other sub-genre?” For The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) I had two rules: it had to be written without line breaks, and it had to have been published as poetry. The second was necessary because it stopped me, for example, weighing chunks of Virginia Woolf on the poetry scales.

In general, though, my attitude is: you tell me! To think of genre as the answer, rather than the question, takes the fun out of reading in-between things. So for this personal anthology, I thought I would choose ‘short stories’ that sit somewhere between prose and poetry…

‘Scarbo’ by Aloysius Bertrand

As far as I can tell, there has only ever been one English translation of Aloysius Betrand’s mysterious work Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), which appeared from an academic press and is long out of print. The absence of a version for the general reader is strange, because Gaspard is widely regarded as a founding text of prose poetry as a genre — Baudelaire cites it admiringly in the preface to Paris Spleen — and also a highly original work in its own right, ranging from evocations of Dutch painting to lightning-flash Gothic horror. So when translations of individual Bertrand pieces appear, I treasure them. In my anthology, I used “The Madman”, by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, the text of which appeared in a little magazine, once available online, but now [candle blows out] vanished. It featured Bertrand’s demonic gnome Scarbo, as does this piece, which Maurice Ravel set to fiendishly jittery piano music, and which Patrick McGuinness translated for his Penguin Book of French Short Stories (2022). McGuinness, a prose writer and poet, brings a beautiful mix of magic and precision to Bertrand’s hallucinatory sentences, which glitter like Ravel’s glissandos: “How often have I seen him land on the floor, pirouette on one foot and roll through my bedroom like the spray from a sorceress’s wand!”

First published in French in Gaspard de la Nuit, 1842; translated into English for The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: From Marguerite de Navarre to Marcel Proust, 2022, Volume 1

‘Horn Came Always’ by Samuel Beckett

The achievement of Beckett’s plays and novels means that his short prose — which stands at an angle to the French prose poem tradition — tends to get overlooked. But here you can find his wicked sense of humour in very pure doses. This is one of his “Fizzles”, written in French and self-translated into English, and it reads like a miniaturised version of the already-brief monodrama, Krapp’s Last Tape. The opening sentence — “Horn came always at night” — establishes the deadpan double entendre of this monologue by a bed-bound speaker who, for some reason, is visited in the middle of night by a man (Horn) who tells him about a remembered woman from a notebook illuminated by a torch. That’s about all you need to know: the rest is the exquisitely tragi-comic unfolding of physical misery (“What ruined me at bottom was athletics”). The last sentence has stuck in my head ever since I first read it. It is a melancholy flourish, made funny and sad by the absurd return of phallic symbolism and the sudden vivid timbre of Irish colloquialism: “My fortieth year had come and gone and I still throwing the javelin”.

First published in English in For To End Yet Again, John Calder, 1976, subsequently collected in The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, Grove Press, 1995

‘Calling Jesus’ by Jean Toomer

“What happens if W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is considered the first hybrid poetry collection?” asks the poet Terrance Hayes in his recent critical book, Watch Your Language. The slave spirituals of the South echo through Du Bois’ study, making it an important influence on Jean Toomer’s hybrid work Cane (1923), which mingles verse, prose and drama to imagine the same lives. Originally published as a magazine piece called “Nora”, “Calling Jesus” comes in the second part of the book, which is concerned with the African American migration from the agricultural South to the cities of the North. It describes a woman whose soul is like a cowed, “thrust-tailed dog”, left outside the large house in which she lodges, longing at night for the “dream-fluted cane” she has left behind. There is something almost clairvoyant about the way that in Cane — his only work of fiction — Toomer seems to catch perceptions that had never been written down before (“sensitive things like nostrils, quiver”). The verbal music of this three-paragraph portrait — which follows Toomer’s extraordinary lyric of the electric age, “Her Lips are Copper Wire” — trembles with tenderness for its subject and her soul left out in the cold (“filled with chills till morning”).

First published as “Nora” in The Double Dealer, September 1922, and reprinted as “Calling Jesus” in Cane, Boni and Liveright, 1923. Available to read here

‘Calypso’ by James Joyce

“I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a ‘novel’; and if you call it an epic it will not matter”, said T.S. Eliot of Ulysses. There’s also an argument for calling it a collection of spectacularly detailed short stories. Joyce said that it began as an idea for one of the tales in his debut, Dubliners (1914): a man wanders the city streets in a way that echoes The Odyssey. This eventually gave Ulysses its episodic structure, which plots the day of Leopold Bloom on 16 June 1904 onto the adventures of Odysseus. Epic as the later episodes are, they all technically take place inside an hour, and at their heart have the same mundane encounters that inspired Dubliners. What Ulysses adds is an amazing sort of colorization technique, whereby the black-and-white cinema of Joyce’s early realism suddenly engages all the senses simultaneously. In the virtually perfect “Calypso” — Joyce used the Homeric titles for magazine publication, but removed them from the final book — Bloom goes out to the butcher’s to buy breakfast, cooks and serves it to his wife in bed, then heads to the loo at the bottom of the garden. Its mouthwatering sentences make rich poetry of domesticity: “Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray”. I would happily re-read them every morning forever.

First published in The Little Review, June 1918, and revised and expanded for Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Available to read here

‘A Favorite Colour’ by Gertrude Stein

I don’t know if Gertrude Stein was ever left in charge of children, but I imagine she would have been a somewhat Mary-Poppins-ish combination of severity and mischief. Most of her work is not for children, but the engine of its genius is a relentless questioning of why things are as they are, and even at its most austere it rarely strays far from a storytelling cadence. So I was delighted to discover that Stein had written a book for children, which became a favourite of my daughter when she was about four. This tiny chapter has the sound of poetry and concerns the big subjects of the small child: their names, their favourite things, and what they know about the world. “Her name is Rose and blue is her favorite color. But of course a lion is not blue. Rose knew that of course a lion is not blue but blue was her favorite color.” It used to work a charm at bedtime — something about its patient cadences completely settled her mind.

First published with illustrations by Clement Hurd in The World is Round, William R. Scott, 1939; new illustrated editions published by Shambhala in 1993 and Harper in 2013

‘A Necklace of Raindrops’ by Joan Aiken

If you do read to children regularly, you soon discover how much unedited rubbish is packaged up for them under cover of a celebrity name and gargoylish cartoons. The mental red-penning is exhausting. So Joan Aiken’s fairy tales are a gift: a real, skillful writer who brings as much craft and care to bedtime stories as grown-up novels. The title story of her first collaboration with the equally bewitching illustrator, Jan Pienkowski, manages to be completely fresh while sounding as polished with telling as something from the Hans Christian Anderson canon (the repetitive formulas of fairy tales are, I would argue, a form of oral poetry we all know). The North Wind blesses a young girl with a necklace of raindrops that has magical powers, and says he will bring a new drop each birthday; then “he flew away up into the sky, pushing the clouds before him so that the moon and stars could shine out”. Who wouldn’t want to hear what happens next?

First published in A Necklace of Raindrops and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1968; frequently reprinted

‘The Fan Museum’ by Anthony Vahni Capildeo

I possibly admire the prose of the poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo more than that of any living writer. Its poised, inquisitive sentences inhabit a capacious space between essay, poem, drama and tale, where no stray perception is too small to pin precisely (“a table of dieted elegance”) and no connection too great to make in one leap. In late 2020, I ran an outdoor poetry reading group for our MA Creative Writing students as a supplement to the limited in-person teaching allowed by Covid rules. The prose fiction students were just as wowed as the poets by “The Fan Museum”, for the way that it shades imperceptibly between documentary and dream, describing a place that “dissolves”, as does the speaker, whose asides about stillness, travel and the Caribbean counterpoint this meticulous description of a “house in Scandinavia”. Falling asleep, the narrator literally collapses, like one of the fans they have been admiring: “First my feet folded one on to the other, soles partly touching; the seams of my legs twisted and relaxed, clasped into position like an enchanted dress gone back into a nutshell”. But the extraordinary then ends simply and innocently, as if signing a postcard: “I was glad to visit the Museum of Fans”.

First published in Measures of Expatriation, Carcanet, 2016

[“The Fuel-Gatherer’] by V.S. Naipaul

Although from different generations, Capildeo and Naipaul were cousins, and — having made my choices here without making this connection — I now see some shared qualities in their feeling for the post-colonial double exposure of place, as well as the deep history of English eloquence. The first part of The Enigma of Arrival, titled “Jack’s Garden”, appears to be a ruminative memoir of Naipaul’s experience of moving to the English countryside — specifically, Wiltshire — and gradually acclimatising to its ways. But then you realise he has somehow hypnotised you with his reflective narration in order to tell, obliquely, the nested stories of his neighbours, including Jack, his wife, and Jack’s father-in-law.

There is something beautifully looping about the construction of Naipaul’s prose, throwing out lines of thought as leisurely as country walks, only to pull them tight like a trapper’s snare. This happens in the study of the father-in-law, who is introduced as “a Wordsworthian figure, bent, exaggeratedly bent, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude”. A recurring theme is the narrator’s attempt to reconcile the pre-industrial English pastoral that he absorbed from books in 1940s Trinidad and 1950s Oxford with the 1980s factory farming on his doorstep. Here, his allusion to Wordsworth — who was, of course, writing about the effects of industrialisation too — signals a novelist’s homage. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth argued that the language of poetry should not differ ‘from that of good prose’. Instead, he ensured poetic elevation through the passionate repetition of phrasing — and this is also one of the secrets of Naipaul’s miraculously steady and clear-eyed prose style. When the father-in-law is met “actually with a load of wood on his back: Wordsworthian, the subject of a poem Wordsworth might have called ‘The Fuel-Gatherer’”, the narrator sketches a man whom he only ever hears speak one word (“Dogs?”). Intensely observing his daily habits, Naipaul describes — with deepening sympathy — how the old man constructs a habitual “run” across the landscape, ignoring new boundaries by covering barbed wire with plastic sacking if necessary.

At the end of the vignette, which covers a few pages, this last, unravelling sentence delivers a blow of pathos as profound as one of my favourite Lyrical Ballads, “The Last of the Flock”: “And so strong were the reminders of the old man’s presence, so much of his spirit appeared to hover over his run, over his stiles and steps and those oddly-place rolled-up plastic sack, even those he had rolled up and tied long ago and which were shredding now, plastic without its shine, blue turning to white, so much did all this speak of the old man moving slowly back and forth on his own errands, that it was some time before it occurred to me that I had not seen him for a while.”

First published in The Enigma of Arrival: a novel in five sections, Penguin, 1987; new edition with author’s preface, Picador, 2011

‘Angel Boley’ by Stevie Smith

This dark tale in verse, from Smith’s final, posthumous collection, addresses the existence of evil. It was her response to the Moors Murders, although it takes place “in the middle of the last century”. Angel Boley realises that her mother, Malady, and her husband, Hark, are luring children into the kitchen to kill them. So she takes it upon herself to be an avenging “Angel of Death”. Gathering poisonous mushrooms, she puts them “into a soup, and this soup she gave / To Hark, and her mother, Malady, for supper, so that they died”. She is arrested and confined to an asylum, “and soon she died / Of an outbreak of typhoid fever”. It is a vision of a world without ultimate justice, but with a morality, nevertheless, of human judgement (someone keeps writing “She did evil that good might come” on Angel’s gravestone, until the vicar declares it God’s will). Smith’s lack of a happy ending feels like the logical outcome of her unusually flat and rhymeless verse, driven by the necessity of plot from one shocking event to the next, as if deliberately passing over the chance to prettify.

I will always be grateful to the poet Moniza Alvi for introducing me to this poem when I was supervising her PhD thesis, which argued that Stevie Smith has not been given her due by literary criticism. I sometimes wonder if there is a strange self-portrait in the figure of Angel, who like Smith is perfectly serious about telling the unvarnished truth, but judged by others to be unstable.

First published in Scorpion and Other Poems, Longman, 1972; reprinted in The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith, Faber and Faber, 2015, ed. Will May