by William Boyd
Mind you, if one was to be honest, one would have to confess that as a genre travel writing—at book length—with a few notable exceptions, makes tedious reading. Shakespeare is all too well aware of Waugh’s shortcomings but makes the valid point that the seven travel books in this collection form a kind of covert autobiography. We receive opinions, discover attitudes and prejudices that are unadulterated by fiction: we are permitted a direct glimpse of the man. And it’s a good point to make, but Waugh, it seems to me, always adopted a mask when he wrote a travel book and the comments and reflections often appear on closer examination to be disingenuous or assumed. I’m not so sure we uncover the truth or learn much more about this difficult and hugely complex man.
I had read all these books before but thought it might be a useful exercise to reread the first and last of his travel writings—Labels (published 1930) and A Tourist in Africa (1960)—to see what differences there were between the young man, recently published and recently married, and the prematurely old, eminent writer, full of cafard and taedium vi-tae, looking at the world with a carefully cultivated jaundiced eye. Labels has always been the most interesting of Waugh’s travel books because it witnessed and was written as his first marriage collapsed. When you know the facts behind the book it appears almost as a fiction: Waugh, the narrator, looks on at himself and his wife Evelyn, thinly disguised as travelling companions, posing as a detached and disinterested observer. Little of the acute misery he was suffering as he wrote it is obviously present, except for the final paragraph, and it has, like all his travel books, an air of hoops being doggedly jumped through. The pages on Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona would challenge the most soporific guidebook.
In A Tourist in Africa Waugh, in his mid fifties, is now playing the part of the choleric, aged author. He can barely bestir himself to make any effort to engage our interest, spending pages, for example, summarizing books he has read on the voyage out to Mombasa. Occasionally you sense his spirits rise such as when, in Dar es Salaam, he comes across a man calling himself Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an American madman who was travelling the world crowning himself king of every country he found himself in. For a couple of pages the book turns into pure Waugh: the wholly relished black humour, the refusal to judge or comment, the clinical description of total absurdity. But such occasions are rare.
Even the fabled style slips. Labels is far more garrulous than mature Waugh, almost chatty, which is not surprising given the author’s age. A Tourist in Africa is interesting insofar as it shows the Augustan verities of his writing turning decadent: the matchless prose becoming slack and pompous: “For me a voyage is the time to read about the places for which I am bound and to study the bestsellers of the past year. I got through two books a day and never found myself without something readable.” Clichés (“breakneck speed”) and the use of the same adjective in the same line are sure signs of his lack of energy and interest, not even picked up at proof stage: “Over great areas the tsetse fly keeps man away. The great European settlement,” etc.
Waugh had little respect for his travel writing but Nicholas Shakespeare is right to claim that there are flashes of insight. Talking about Cecil Rhodes, Waugh contrasts the lives of the politician and the artist: the politician “fading into a mist of disappointment and controversy,” the artist “leaving a few objects of permanent value that were not there before him and would not have been there but for him.” This is very close to a personal credo, in fact: this was how Waugh saw himself and is both an exalted and humble definition of what a genuine artist hopes to achieve. Spontaneously addressing a school in Rhodesia he says he has been studying the wonders of the English language for over fifty years and every day still has recourse to a dictionary. There are nuggets of gold in these overworked seams but they are hard to find.
However there is one link between the first and last of these travel books that does resonate. When Waugh wrote Labels he had been cuckolded and was contemplating the impending and very public shame of his divorce. That personal hurt comes to the surface at the end of the book as his boat moves slowly up the Thames to its berth: “I woke up several times in the night to hear the horn again … It was a very dismal sound, premonitory, perhaps of coming trouble, for Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be happy for very long.” Bleak words from a twenty-six-year-old who has just seen his world collapse. But the end of A Tourist in Africa sees a similar bitter envoi as he leaves the continent: “Cruelty and injustice are endemic everywhere.” It was while Waugh was away from home writing Labels that his wife betrayed him. And I have always thought, myself, that the collapse of Waugh’s first marriage was the determining event in his life, that this cataclysm shaped him in one way or another for the rest of his days. The saddened, humiliated young man of Labels is maybe not so far removed from the posturing clubman roving round Africa. Perhaps that helps explain why there is always something joyless in Waugh’s travels.
2003
The Short Story
“Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market women.” This observation comes from a notebook that Anton Chekhov kept during the last six years of his life between 1898 and 1904. In it he jotted down snatches of conversation he had overheard, anecdotes, aphorisms, interesting names and embryonic ideas for short stories. This entry about aristocrats and market women belongs to the last category. The more one has read of Chekhov the more one can envisage the short story that might have grown from this bleak comparison. The point is well made and as true today as it was in nineteenth-century Russia—death is the great leveller—but more interestingly these twenty words can lead us towards an initial way of understanding the short story as opposed to its larger sibling, the novel. I would argue that you could write a short story inspired by Chekhov’s words but they wouldn’t be sufficient for a novel.
What draws a writer to the short story? Some writers rarely tackle it, or else, in a full career, only write half a dozen stories. Others seem perfectly at home with the form and then let it drop. And then there are those for whom the novel appears the threat. Yet William Faulkner regarded the short story as harder to write than a novel. Many of the greatest short story writers have steered clear of the long form, by and large: Chekhov, J. L. Borges, Katherine Mansfield, V. S. Pritchett, Frank O’Connor. My own case is perhaps typical: I have written eight novels but I cannot stop writing short stories—something about the short form draws me back again and again. The aesthetic pleasures on offer are fresh and beguiling.
It’s important to remember that the short story as we know it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The arrival of mass-market magazine publication and a new generation of literate middle-class readers in the mid to late nineteenth century saw a boom in the short story that lasted maybe a hundred years or so (things are different today). Many writers were initially drawn to the form simply as a way of making money. Particularly in America: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe all subsidized their less well-remunerated novel-writing careers by writing stories. In the 1920s Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 for a story by the Saturday Evening Post (a vast sum today—multiply by ten to get some idea of a comparison). Even John Updike, in the 1950s, reckoned he could support his wife and young family by the sale of five or six stories a year to the New Yorker. Times have changed.
The popularity of the short story—indeed its very availability—has, unlike the novel, always been driven by and has always been somewhat at the mercy of commercial considerations. When I published my first collection of stories, On the Yankee Station, in 1981, many British publishers routinely brought out short story collections. Not any more. Moreover, there was a small but stable marketplace where a story could be sold. A short story writer could place his or her work in all manner of outlets. The stories in my first collection, for example, had been published in Punch, Company, Lon
don Magazine, the Literary Review, Mayfair and broadcast on the BBC. As a young writer I started writing short stories because at the time it seemed logical: this was my best chance of getting published.
All this talk of money and strategy masks the tenacious appeal of the form. In the end writers write short stories because a different set of mental gears are engaged. Melville wrote short stories as he laboured with Moby-Dick saying, “My only desire for their ‘success’ (as it is called) springs from my pocket and not my heart.” And yet, in the process, he wrote works of short fiction (“Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno” amongst others) that are timeless classics. The point being that something else occurs in the writing—and reading—of a short story that is on another level from the writing and reading of a novel.
The basic issue here, it seems to me, is one of expansion versus compression. To go back to the remark I made apropos Chekhov’s little memento mori about aristocrats and market women: we see that the ideas, the inspiration, that will drive a novel, however succinctly expressed, have to be capable of endless augmentation and elaboration. The essence of almost every short story, by contrast, is one of distillation, of reduction. It’s not a simple question of length, either: there are twenty-page short stories that are far more charged and gravid with meaning than 400-page novels. We are talking about a different category of prose fiction altogether.
A common analogy is to see the novel as an orchestra and the short story as a string quartet. Beautiful and rich music will be produced by them both but the imbalance of scale will always favour the novel when it comes to variety, nuance, texture, power and so forth. But the analogy strikes me as false because once again it is all about size, and this leads us in the wrong direction. The music produced by two violins, a viola and a cello cannot ever sound anything like the music produced by dozens of instruments, but a paragraph or a page from a short story is indistinguishable from a paragraph or a page from a novel. The short story draws on exactly the same resources as does the novel—language, plot, character and style. Nothing—none of the literary tools that novelists require to write their novels—is denied the short story writer, which is not true for a composer of chamber music as opposed to orchestral. A more pertinent comparison—to try and pin down the essence of the two forms—is poetry: to compare the epic with the lyric. Let us say that the short story is prose fiction’s lyric poem, contrasted with the novel as its epic.
There are many definitions of the short story. V. S. Pritchett defined it as, “something glimpsed from the corner of an eye, in passing.” John Updike has said, “More closely than my novels… these efforts of a few thousand words each hold my life’s incidents, predicaments, crises, joys.” Angus Wilson observed that, “Short stories and plays go together in my mind. You take a point in time and develop it from there; there is no room for development backwards.” All things to all writers, then: the quotidian epiphanic moment, the submerged autobiography, a question of structure and direction. I could cite other definitions—some contradictory, some far-fetched—but all, in their own way, possessing some cogency. If the house of fiction has many windows so too, it seems, does the house of short fiction.
Therefore it might be worth trying to categorize the short story in a bit more detail, to try and classify its multifarious forms. I have published three collections of short stories over two decades, a total of thirty-eight stories, in all. Perhaps there are another four or five uncollected ones out there—juvenilia in university magazines, the odd one-off commission for an anniversary (I seem to remember I wrote something about 1984 and Orwell) or a themed number of a magazine or anthology. In any event what repeatedly draws me to the short story is its variety—the enticing possibility of adopting different voices, structures, styles and effects. Looking at other collections by other writers, I gradually came to the conclusion that there are in fact basically seven types of short story and that within these seven categories almost every kind of short story can be accounted for. Some of them will overlap, one category will borrow from a seemingly unrelated type, but these denominations seem, by and large, to subsume all the species of the genus. In this diversity we may begin to see what short stories have in common.
The Event-Plot Story
This term was coined by the English writer William Gerhardie in 1923 in a short, fascinating book he wrote on Chekhov. Gerhardie uses this appellation to distinguish Chekhov’s stories from everything that had preceded him. Up until Chekhov, all short stories, virtually without exception, were event-plot ones. In these stories the skeleton of plot is all important, the narrative is shaped, classically, to have a beginning, middle and end. The revolution that Chekhov set in train—and which reverberates still today—was not to abandon plot, but to make the plot of his stories like the plot of our lives: random, mysterious, run-of-the-mill, abrupt, chaotic, fiercely cruel, meaningless. The stereotype of the event-plot story is the “twist-in-the-tail” famously developed by O. Henry but also used widely in genre stories—ghost stories (W. W. Jacobs, for example) and the detective story (Conan Doyle). I would say that today its contrivances make it look very dated, though Roald Dahl made something of a mark with a macabre variation on the theme and it is also a staple of self-appointed yarn-spinners (Jeffrey Archer, for example).
The Chekhovian Story
Chekhov is the father of the modern short story and his influence is still massive and everywhere. James Joyce pointedly claimed not to have read Chekhov when he published Dubliners in 1914 (most of Chekhov’s work had been translated into English since 1903) but the pointedness of the disclaimer is highly disingenuous. Dubliners, one of the greatest short story collections ever, owes a great deal to Chekhov: or to put it another way, Chekhov liberated Joyce’s imagination in the same way Joyce’s example later liberated others.
What is the essence of the Chekhovian short story? Chekhov wrote to a friend that, “It was time writers, especially those who are artists, recognised that there is no making out anything in this world.” I would say that the Chekhovian point of view is to look at life in all its banality and all its tragicomedy and refuse to make a judgement. To refuse to condemn and refuse to celebrate. To record the actions of human beings as they are and to leave them to speak for themselves (insofar as they can) without manipulation, censure or praise. Hence his famous retort when he was asked to define life. “You ask me what is life? That is like asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and that’s all there is to it.” But the effect of this world view as expressed in his stories has had an astonishing influence. Katherine Mansfield and Joyce were among the first to write in the Chekhovian spirit but his cool, dispassionate, unflinching attitude to the human condition resounds in writers as diverse as William Trevor and Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bowen, John Cheever and Muriel Spark.
The “Modernist” Story
I choose this title to introduce the other giant presence in the modern short story—Ernest Hemingway. I use the term to convey the idea of obscurity and deliberate difficulty. Hemingway’s most obvious revolutionary contribution to the short story was his style: pared down, laconic, unafraid to repeat the most common adjectives rather than reach for a synonym. But his other great donation was a purposeful opacity. When you read Hemingway’s early stories (far and away his best work, as it happens) you understand the situation at once. A young man is going fishing, he camps out for the night. Some waiters gather in a cafe. In “Hills Like White Elephants” a couple at a railway station wait for a train. The mood is tense between them. Has she had an abortion? And that’s about it. Yet somehow Hemingway invests this story and the others with all the covert complexities of an obscure modernist poem. You know there are hidden meanings here and it is the inaccessibility of the subtext that makes the story so memorable. Wilful obscurity in the short story works: over the length of a novel it can be very tiresome. This idea of modernist obscurity overlaps with the next category.
The Cryptic/Ludic Story
Here the story presents i
ts baffling surface more overtly as a kind of challenge to the reader—Borges and Vladimir Nabokov spring immediately to mind. In these stories there is a meaning to be discovered and deciphered whereas in Hemingway it’s the tantalizing out-of-reachness that entrances. A Nabokov story such as “Spring at Fialta” is meant to be unravelled by the attentive reader—and it may take several goes—but the spirit behind its teasing is fundamentally generous: dig deep and you will discover more, is the implied message. Try harder and you’ll be rewarded: the reader is on his mettle. One of the great cryptic short story writers is Rudyard Kipling, something of an unacknowledged genius of “suppressed narration” as it is sometimes known: stories like “Mary Postgate” or “Mrs Bathurst” are wonderfully complex and multilayered. Critics still argue passionately about the correct readings.
The Mini-Novel Story
It establishes its remit in its title. Like the event-plot story this is one of the first forms the short story took. In a way it is something of a hybrid: half novel, half short story—trying to achieve in a few dozen pages what the novel achieves in a few hundred: a large cast of characters, lots of realistic detail. Chekhov’s great story “My Life,” for example, belongs to this category. It has a span of many years, characters fall in love, marry, separate, children are born, people die. All the matter of a Victorian three-decker is somehow compressed into its fifty or so pages. These stories tend to be very long, almost becoming novellas, but their ambition is clear. They eschew ellipsis and allusion for an aggregation of solid fact, as if the story wants to say, “See: you don’t need 400 pages to paint a portrait of society.”