I have always preferred writing short stories to writing novels. Not that there is much similarity and not that a writer can usually get away with writing only one or the other (Katherine Mansfield almost did). Stories of all lengths and depths come from mysterious parts of the cave. The difference in writing them is that, for a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder. For me it was James Joyce’s Dubliners, written in 1921, seven years before I was born, that showed me how (or at any rate that) short stories can have the power to burn up the chaff, harden the steel without comment or embellishment or explanation. I like Irish, French, Russian and American short stories best. They are the strongest.
Human beings, it seems to me, are dependent on story—stories—painted on cave walls, sung on jangling instruments, chanted or spoken in lullaby from their beginnings. Children deprived of stories grow up bewildered by their own boredom.
My own first awareness of stories was when I was four years old, listening to my mother as we sat at my bedroom window and I writhed and wriggled on her knee as children do when they listen without looking. I had just lately realised that the marks in the middle of the small, shiny pages of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit were words. They had sounds invisibly attached. Attaching the sounds to the marks was called ‘Reading’. Pictures were great, but they were extras. It was a moment of joy.
At the same time, it was a moment of disquiet for above my head, at the window behind the curtain, there was something terrible. I couldn’t see it but I knew that it was there (‘Will you please SIT STILL!’) ‘But there’s something there behind the curtain.’ ‘Don’t be silly.’
I jumped up and tweaked the curtain, and behind it sat a disgusting freckled blackish parrot with loose-skinned leathery claws. I knew that the parrot was death.
I wriggled on. Out of the window the huge sky, the weedy railway line, the space between two empty shabby mansions, the distant Cleveland Hills. Eight years later (1940) I was sitting doing my homework and still I didn’t care to look up at that curtain when a little aeroplane flew past, very low. It had a swastika on its side and I could see the dark round bullet of the pilot’s helmet. I shrieked out: ‘There’s an enemy plane.’ Up from the kitchen came the command not to be silly when from somewhere near the steelworks to the north of us came the most almighty explosion. The dangerous presence was still there.
Five years ago, at eighty, I went to look at my old home again and it looked exactly the same as in the ’30s—beautifully kept, polished door-knocker and letter-box, rows of perfect antirrhinums straight as pink soldiers—except that I found I could still only manage a quick glance at my bedroom window, now covered in net. I found myself shaking. ‘Jane has always had her ecstatic side,’ my mother used to say, ‘and ecstasy is all very well, but—’
It wasn’t ecstasy that got me away from the burden of home. It was English literature and an award to London University that set my ecstatic side aflame. Then it went out. The work was dreary, heavy with Anglo Saxon, and there was no money for theatres or extra food. Though I didn’t admit it, I was bored except for when I was in the wonderful but ice-cold Bedford College Library (no coal or heating in the ’40s). At school the domestic science mistress who was vague about geography had asked me when I reached London to go and visit her niece—newly arrived from ‘the Colonies’ and very shy. Her school was near Reading (which she pronounced as in reading) and that sounded promisingly like a suburb of London. I nearly turned back when I found the train fare was ten shillings. I used my last faded bank note.
And then I was greatly humbled by the school-girl niece herself who looked all of twenty-one, wore wonderful clothes, was bronzed by African sun and was clearly not home-sick at all. She didn’t know what to do with me. Desperately, she said there was a lecture that afternoon by L. A. G. Strong, a well-known critic then, on ‘The Short Story’. Would I like to come to it?
I had read his book, The Short Story at school and what he thought, I thought too. In it he says, ‘Think of the reader not yourself. Make everything interesting. Write about everything—even linoleum.’
On the way back to the London train I followed L. A. G. Strong. I climbed into the same carriage. I sat down beside him. He looked dejected and tired with deep lines between his nose and his sweet mouth. I fell in love. I began to talk. This may sound like nothing, but for me, almost pathologically self-conscious, it was like removing all my clothes and belly-dancing. In time he said, ‘I believe you write’ and I said yes. ‘Send me something.’ Looking weary, he courteously passed me a card.
I went back to college (ecstasy in the ascendant) and sent him a short story (called The Woman Who Lost a Thought—and I have it yet) and waited.
Silence. Silence for two weeks. Then a letter typed in royal blue ink, ‘Jane—you are a writer beyond all possible doubt.’
And for a while I stayed with short stories. The first volume of them was about children on a white beach, and I called it A Few Fair Days. I posted it in a letter box on the corner of Murray Road in Wimbledon. After three weeks I telephoned the publisher and asked if she was going to accept them as there were other publishers who might like them. Astounded silence. The publisher, at Hamish Hamilton, said afterwards that she had told her secretary there was a mad woman on the phone and would she find her manuscript and send it back. The secretary found it in the three-foot high pile of unsolicited manuscripts and said ‘D’you know—I think these might just do.’
I have written and published eight or nine collections of short stories and ten novels since then. One won the Katherine Mansfield award, two won the Whitbread and another was a collection about Jamaica, where I had only spent sixteen days, and it won nothing. I was getting rather above myself. These early stories are somewhat wild. Then a new publisher asked for a collection with ‘more stories, if you think you can’ and I airily said, ‘of course’. I don’t think this was true. I turned for some years to novels and harder work and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Writing fiction has been my life for the past forty years. I finished what I thought should be my last book a year ago, the final novel of a trilogy called Old Filth. Last Friends is a novel, but I like to think it has short stories embedded. When I finished, ‘Farewell,’ I said. ‘Amen.’ I must learn when to stop. That is what short stories teach you.
Yet perhaps the most gratifying thing since writing this book and its two companion volumes before, which have taken eight years, was the phone call this year from my most faithful and enduring publisher, Richard Beswick of Little, Brown. He asked for ‘a big, chunky anthology of all your favourite short stories.’ I said that I understood that nobody wanted to read short stories now but he said, ‘You are wrong. Look around. Choose your favourites. Times are changing once again.’
The deathly parrot recedes. Maybe he was never there. How much more and how much better I might have written had I not been so timid.
Reading Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man the other day I came upon the ballad of The Outlandish Knight where the heroine escapes death and returns home to safety. There is nobody there but a parrot in the window (I swear I had not read this poem at four years old).
The parrot being up in the window so high
And hearing the lady did say
‘I’m afraid some ruffian has led you astray
That you’ve tarried so long away.’
Well, the parrot is vanquished and the ecstasy is now fitful. The luck in the writer’s life always is to have been able to use the sweets of fiction to get near the truth.
JANE GARDAM
May 2014