Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth, translated by David le Vay

I didn’t know this story by Joseph Roth until I wrote his biography, which was published by Granta last year titled Endless Flight (oh, and I guess I should mention that it’s out in paperback this October…). This novella is one of his later works, published in 1937 when he was in an advanced state of alcoholism. As his mental health declined Roth increasingly retreated from his agonising present into a fictional world based on his childhood in a little town in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, now in Ukraine. His friend Stefan Zweig remarked with this book’s publication that it was a marvel his talent was so intact, and it ‘almost looks as if he could be saved’. He couldn’t; Roth would die two years later in Paris. This is one of his minor works, but still brilliant. As I say in my book:

“Weights and Measures hasn’t the depth and heft of The Radetzky March nor the emotional clout of Job, but it is precise, lucid, immersive in its evocation of the little town and devastating in its depiction of a virtuous man’s collapse into drink-sodden obsession.”

Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian Army at his wife’s behest (by this stage in the increasingly misogynistic Roth’s life, his male characters’ lives are usually derailed by women), to become the inspector of weights and measures in the border town of Szwaby. The vacancy arose with the death of a well-loved inspector, held in such esteem by the traders because he was too drunk to do the job properly. Eibenschütz intends to bring law and order to this town of dubious traders, who defraud their customers by using false weights on their scales, and immediately meets with suspicion. He makes an enemy in tavern landlord Leibusch Jadlowker, and so the story proceeds to its gripping conclusion. This is Roth’s childhood world distilled into 100 pages with a superb lightness of touch.

First published in German as Der Falsche Gewicht, 1937. First published in English translation in 1982 by Peter Owen; currently available as a Penguin Modern Classic, 2017

‘Who Cares for the Caretaker?’ by Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair is often amusingly self-deprecating about his “mad quests” to trace the occult energies that he detects charging through the landscape of London. This pursuit of the legend of David Litvinoff is a fine example, and it’s one of my favourite pieces of his writing. Sinclair’s psychogeographical prose has illuminated London for me in so many ways, but this piece has especial meaning as it inspired my book Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld. In summer 2010 I happened to take two books on holiday with me, Rodinsky’s Room and Journey Through a Small Planet, a memoir of growing up in Whitechapel in the 1930s by Emanuel Litvinoff, whom I mentioned earlier. I didn’t know there was any connection between the two, so when I read them both I was struck by the coincidence.

Sinclair’s beguiling chapter on David Litvinoff in Rodinsky’s Room piqued my interest in the life of the ‘Chelsea chancer’ who connected the worlds of rock music, fine art and criminality in 1950s and ’60s London. From a few clues – acquaintances’ faded memories, rumours of revelatory diaries, tapes of Litvinoff in telephone conversation with a Welsh vagrant who may have been the model for Mac Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker – Sinclair spins up the legend of this man whom he saw as a conduit to a hidden London, but whose life was untraceable.

He makes the story sound tantalisingly impossible to tell, full of unprovable rumours and dead-ends: it was hard to find anyone who remembered Litvinoff, he claims, as “the price of membership of that exclusive club seemed to be burn-out, premature senility or suicide”. That turned out not to be strictly true – through some good old-fashioned journalistic legwork I found plenty of sane and healthy people who shared their memories with me – but the way Sinclair captures the madness and melancholy of Litvinoff’s life was fundamental to starting me off on my own mad quest. This isn’t a short story in conventional terms, of course, but it’s an abbreviated story of Litvinoff’s life that captures his brilliance and weird allure, and it’s the beginning of the story of how I became fascinated by him.

First published in Rodinsky’s Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Granta, 1999

‘Eveline’ by James Joyce

A good deal of my writing has been influenced by an interest in the Jewish history I’m connected to through my mum’s side of the family. But I find my dad’s family history interesting too: his ancestors were Irish Quakers, and in the 19th and early 20th Century part of the family lived in Dublin and ran a well-known shop in Great George’s Street South known as ‘Pim’s’ or ‘the Stores’. There are a couple of references to it in Dubliners: in ‘Two Gallants’ the caddish Corley mentions, apropos of the girl he’s pursuing, that “I told her I was in Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know.” In ‘Eveline’, which I prefer to ‘Two Gallants’, the titular character works there. As the 19-year-old weighs up whether to leave her painful homelife in Dublin and elope to Argentina with her lover, she wonders:

“What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. … She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.”

This is such a poignant story, written with such restraint and delicacy. You can hear the silences, feel the weight of Eveline’s own destiny on her shoulders. It’s an exquisite piece of writing.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, and widely republished since, including by Penguin Classics, 2000)

Le Bal by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith

This is a brutal, brilliant little story of a mother’s social ambition undone by her poisonous relationship with her daughter, written in 1930 and published in English translation after the discovery and huge success of Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise in 2004. The Kampf family have ascended through 1920s Parisian society since Alfred Kampf made money on the stock market, but they remain acutely aware of their humble origins. Rosine Kampf, obsessed with her status and desperate for acceptance among the upper classes, decides to throw a ball that will confirm their arrival in high society: “Doesn’t it make you proud to think your parents are giving a ball?” she asks the daughter whom she has spent the day insulting and bullying. Fourteen-year-old Antoinette would love to attend, but Madame Kampf will not hear of it: “This kid, this snotty-nosed kid, coming to the ball! Can you just picture it?” Instead, Antoinette is instructed to address the 200 envelopes inviting all manner of glamorous and high-profile guests; but fatally for Madame Kampf, she also relies on her furious daughter to undertake another critical element of the arrangements… the denouement is delicious and handled with consummate skill.

First published in French in 1930, Éditions Bernard Grasset; first published in English translation in 2007, Vintage

‘Paul Bereyter’ by W G Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

There’s an old story that I suspect W G Sebald knew, about two Jews in eastern Europe in the early 20th century wanting to flee persecution and wondering where to go. One says: “Maybe Australia.” The other says: “But it’s so far away!” And the first says: “Far away from where?”

Paul Bereyter was one of Sebald’s narrator’s schoolteachers. The story opens with the narrator recalling the moment in January 1984 when he learned of Bereyter’s suicide, and then read an obituary that left him feeling haunted. “Almost by way of an aside, the obituary added, with no further explanation, that during the Third Reich Paul Bereyter had been prevented from practicing his chosen profession. It was this curiously unconnected, inconsequential statement, as much as the violent manner of his death, which led me in the years that followed to think more and more about Paul Bereyter, until, in the end, I had to get beyond my own very fond memories of him and discover the story I did not know.”

The story is, as you would expect with Sebald, not so much a direct narrative as a compelling rumination that explores the condition of people in Bereyter’s situation. In my teaching I like to get students thinking about the relationship between our interior and exterior in the contexts of place-writing, examining how place can shape our identity, our mood, who we think we are and how we behave. We feel our connection to place both psychologically and physically, and this relationship works both ways: we project our psychological needs on to our surroundings as much as we are shaped by them. The stories in The Emigrants examine the darkness implicit in this scenario: that if our attachment to place is undone, this displacement can dislocate us both physically and psychologically.

This is something I’ve thought about a good deal while writing my Joseph Roth biography, but also in general over the years with regard to my maternal grandparents’ experiences as refugees from Nazi-occupied Vienna. When the place you thought was home – the place you grew up in, formed your sense of self in, and considered yourself a part of and safe within – reveals itself suddenly and violently not to be home, you lose your original, foundational reference point and are physically and existentially cut adrift. You are disabused of the ideas you had about who you were, and that you were a valued participant in that society. You become severed from the place that helped to form you, and the aspects of yourself that were propped up by the social role you performed there are suddenly unsupported and fall away. You are rudely ejected from a shared history that gave you identity, so you are not only disengaged from place but from time – you lose sense of a greater narrative that your life’s chronology plays out within. Your life makes less sense. And this is not even to mention the trauma that you feel on losing friends and family to genocide, and the guilt you feel for surviving.

Then there’s the matter of assimilation in the new country – the psychologically exhausting business of attempting to pass, of suggesting to your new fellow countrymen that you share their identity, an identity you are hastily learning as an autodidact… So, the violent destruction of one identity, the exhausting performance of another during which you second-guess yourself at every instant because you feel, as Joan Didion put it in The White Album, that everyone else has a script and you are improvising – and you feel that soon you’re bound to get caught out. Role-playing, acting, while attempting to recover from the ground having opened up beneath your feet, and that you will never again quite trust attachment to place as a secure source of identity.

At the same time, you lose any illusions of future physical safety: you are anxious that the new place that has accepted you as a refugee may one day turn on you too. Metaphorically, psychologically, you keep your suitcases packed. You never know when you might need to move on. You don’t put down roots that couldn’t be dug up again at haste if necessary. No place seems to guarantee psychological or physical security. There is no longer a ‘there’ by which to orient yourself – it’s gone.

So ‘Far away from where?’, you say wistfully – because you still look back in the direction of home but you know it no longer exists, or not for you… you no longer have a viable ‘there’ as a reference point, and while you may still orient yourself by reference to a lost home, you know you can’t go back there. You feel peripheral, both to your new country and the old country. You exist in a hinterland. So you’re not only doubly marginalised, you’re alienated, and the idea of home suddenly seems illusory and sad. You become like Sebald’s narrator’s Uncle Kasimir looking at the ocean in another of the stories in The Emigrants: “‘I often come out here,’ said Uncle Kasimir, ‘it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where.’”

Or as Sebald writes with regard to Paul Bereyter, “one was, as the crow flies, about 2000km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.”

The Emigrants is an extraordinary book, one that I read shortly after Sebald’s death in 2001 but appreciated and understood better when I reread it last year. These stories are a profound act of empathy that display Sebald’s lifelong project to understand his native country’s descent into barbarism, and in particular the condition of the people Germany failed to murder and forced into exile.

First published in Die Ausgewanderten, Eichborn Verlag, 1992; first published in English in The Emigrants, Harvill Press, 1996

‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever

Thinking about this story now having just written about The Emigrants, I’m seeing odd resonances between the two: in wildly different scenarios, both examine the disintegration of the self. I found this story particularly powerful because of the circumstances in which I read it. Few people will need to be reminded how strange summer 2020 was. With the sudden disappearance during the spring lockdown of so many of the usual reference points – professional identity, social interaction with friends and strangers – by which we define ourselves, many of us were left disorientated and dislocated, questioning what remained of us without the usual structure to our lives. The exact chronology escapes me now but there was a period when it was deemed permissible to sit in isolation for a while in an open space and, during that time, on a bench in Waterloo Park a few minutes’ walk from my home in Norwich, I belatedly discovered the brilliance of John Cheever. I haven’t yet read all of the works in the 900pp Collected Stories but of those I’ve read, this tale is my favourite at a push, along with ‘Goodbye, My Brother’. I’m choosing ‘The Swimmer’ because of its strangeness, the luminosity of Cheever’s sentences, how it evokes the empty luxury of American suburbia where every home has a swimming pool and an assortment of residents who are sad and numb and drink too much, and its gradual revelation of Neddy Merill’s psychological collapse – disturbing enough at the best of times, but which shook me with unnerving power during the pandemic.

First published in The New Yorker, 1964, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Harper & Row, 1964, and The Stories of John Cheever, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978; now Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 2010

When Marnie was There by Joan G. Robinson

For my final choice I’m going back to my childhood again. I’m cheating a bit with this in that it’s a novel, but it’s a fairly short children’s novel and I’m so keen to recommend it to people that I’m just going to go ahead. One day when I was at middle school, I guess in 1987 or ’88, I delved around in the classroom’s box of reading books, pulled this out and thought it looked worth a try. It turned out to be the most beautiful, haunting story I read when I was a boy. When Marnie was There is the tale of a lonely girl named Anna, who takes a train from London to a Norfolk coastal village (modelled on Burnham Overy Staithe) to convalesce from illness in the care of an elderly couple, the Peggs. When she arrives, she walks down to the staithe and across the water she sees the Marsh House, which captures her imagination. One night she finds a boat and rows to the house, where she encounters a mysterious girl, Marnie, who becomes the friend that Anna dearly needs. It is a story powerfully evocative of the austere beauty of the north Norfolk coast, acute in its understanding of childhood loneliness, often poignant, sometimes perilous, and with a skilfully crafted resolution so moving that my eyes have moistened just thinking about it.

First published in 1967 by Collins

Introduction

These stories each use ideas of place differently, whether to signal class or status, insecurity or transience, human connection or violence, satire or sincerity. Some feature what were once called ‘non-places’ – airport lounges, barns, motorways, tube stations, malls. Even the settings with the most potency – cathedrals, cottages, abbeys, housing estates – are rendered to suggest something unexpected in their familiar forms. I’ve ordered this list according to solidity – why not? – beginning with the most grounded and ending with the most allusive. By the end the whole concept of place will have dissolved utterly, taking with it the very foundations of this list. I can’t apologise enough.

‘Kilbride’ by Frank Ronan

All of the stories in Ronan’s 1996 collection are uncomfortable. ‘Kilbride’ concerns Helen, who still holds a candle for her ex-lover Michael, a man just fallen for a country and western singer named Michelle Kelly. Helen, now married with kids, resents her role in getting Michael together with Michelle, at what she had intended to be a joke of an evening in a flat-roofed pub in Kilbride. The story crackles with unreasonable desires, ugly snobbishness and uncomfortably recognisable behaviour, all amplified by the setting. Ronan usually dispenses with description of place swiftly in his stories, but in this one setting and character are intimately entwined. Michael is up ladders fixing windows in Michelle’s mother’s rackety house; Helen is weeping with derisive laughter at the purple and gold scallop-shaped sink in the new lover’s bathroom; the Starlite Lounge, where the lovers meet, is only redeemed in Helen’s eyes by having an older country pub attached to this vast modern extension. Class, lust and responsibilities are all illuminated here by descriptions of buildings and what they represent in our most heated and unreasonable moments.

First published in Scripsi, Australia. Collected in Handsome Men are Slightly Sunburnt, Hodder and Stoughton, 1996

‘Alight at the Next’ by Eley Williams

Williams’s writing communicates the same sort of joy in inventing and sharing sentences that makes reading, say, Ali Smith or Hilary Mantel such a delight. Unpredictable thoughts spill out: “my spirit animal is probably a buttered roll” or “For example, we’re missing a snail insisting that he’s in the haulage business.” It captures a moment, as the doors on a District Line train open, accompanied by the semi-drunken rush of thought of our narrator, travelling with someone they hope to invite home. To their own astonishment, as they hesitate to ask, the narrator also reaches out and places a hand on the forehead of man on the platform to prevent him from boarding. In the staggered layout of the text, the thoughts within thoughts, Williams gives us the euphoric, confused, overwhelming feeling of falling for someone, and of doing something completely out of character, trying to control everything in one perfect second, in a place that feels crushingly familiar. I think I’m the third person on here to cite this story, after CD Rose and Naomi Frisby. [In fact the fourth: Joanna Walsh also picked it – Ed.]

First published in 3:am Magazine, 2014, and available to read here. Collected in Attrib., Influx Press, 2017

‘The Wall in the Head’ by Lynsey Hanley

“The wall is about not knowing what is out there, or believing that what is out there is either entirely irrelevant to your life, or so complicated that it would go right over your head if you made an attempt to understand it.”

I’ve been so inspired by this stand-out autobiographical essay in Hanley’s first book. It’s a vivid, moving, personal story of class and the barriers facing a council-estate child when meeting the world beyond. She writes so brilliantly about Chelmsley Wood, the Midlands housing estate of her youth, and the opportunities and limitations such a place afforded her. After reading it, the idea of the wall in the head haunted me for years, so similar were our backgrounds, but here was someone with a much sharper and more politically focussed mind explaining the effects of those circumstances back to me in ways I had not fully understood. But beyond that that, those personal moments she shares – in relationships or education – have a vertiginous quality, making the reader feel like they’re falling back into a half-remembered youthful world of malleability and uncertainty.

First published in Estates: An Intimate History, Granta, 2007

The 199 Steps by Michel Faber

I read this while I was in Whitby, and it was one of those rare moments where I allowed myself to experience the place and the writing as one. A kind of ghost story, a cunning mystery and a romance, it follows Sian, who joins an archaeological dig in the ruined Abbey, and who uncovers secrets that lead her into all sorts of unexpected danger. The town is entirely integral to the whole story, and the writing has a kind of energy and momentum that suggests Michel Faber was swept up in the place, much as Bram Stoker had been over a century before. His descriptions of running up those precarious stone steps has a kind of exhausting visceral quality that makes you crave your fish and chips even more.

First published by Canongate Books, 2001

‘New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too’ by Douglas Coupland

Among all of the zeitgeisty commentary, slacker chic and cultural insights in Generation X come snappy descriptions of the landscape of post-Reaganite America, which Britain was swift to copy. Is it a novel? Is it linked stories? Yes. One of the tales, ‘New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too’, features some terrific descriptions of the Mojave Desert, where we hear that nuclear scientists once came to get drunk, crash their cars and get eaten by desert rats. Dag, one of the central trio in the book, tells a story of Otis, a man who goes to explore the atomic bomb craters of New Mexico. On his way back Otis spots a landscape of malls. “He was idly thinking about the vast, arrogant block forms of shopping mall architecture and how they make as little visual sense in the landscape as nuclear cooling towers.” He then drives by a new yuppie housing development, equally shocking in coral pink. Otis thinks “‘Hey! These aren’t houses at all – these are malls in disguise.’” It’s a tale told in the flat blankness of slacker style, withheld and arch, and its descriptions of landscapes are informed by Coupland’s other career as a graphic designer, all surfaces and image. And it is no less powerful and moving for that.

First published in Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, St Martin’s Press 1991

‘Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains’ by AL Kennedy

There is a kind of mania in this story. The narrator’s voice appears on one level calm and reasonable, but as the story unfolds it seems a control mechanism for appearance’s sake, and a smokescreen for her loss of agency. The narrator lightly details her husband’s infidelities in a way that becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the reader, but for our masochistic central character life appears to be a series of preordained patterns, and everything seems as important as everything else. Never more so than in her strange obsession about how the trains terminate at Garscadden, the stop before hers, despite how few people ever get off there. She comes to blame the trains for the failure of her marriage, and for almost killing her husband, a kind of chaos theory of relationships.

“I went down, as usual, to stand on the westbound platform, this time in a hard, grey wind, the black twigs and branches over the line, oily and dismal with the damp.”

And she finally drags that oily and dismal world back to her cheating spouse.

First published in Beloit Fiction Journal Vol 5, No. 1, and collected in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Polygon, 1990