by William Boyd
The Poetic/Mythic Story
In strong contrast, the poetic/mythic story seems to wish to get as far away from the realistic novel as possible. This category is wide and includes writers as varied as Hemingway (his terse and brutal one-page vignettes that interleave his In Our Time story collection), the stories of Dylan Thomas and D. H. Lawrence, J. G. Ballard’s moody riffs on inner space to the long prose poems of writers like Ted Hughes and Frank O’Hara. This is the short story-quasi-poem and it can range from stream-of-consciousness to the impenetrably gnomic.
The Biographical Story
This is the one category that seems harder to define. One way of putting it would be to describe it as the short story deliberately borrowing and replicating the properties of non-fiction: of history, of reportage, of the memoir. Borges’s stories play with this technique regularly. The overweening love of footnotes and bibliographical annotation in younger contemporary American writers is a similar example of the genre (or to be more precise they represent a hybrid of the Modernist Story and the biographical—if my taxonomy is correct). Another variation is to introduce the fictive into the lives of real people. I’ve written short stories about Brahms, Wittgenstein, Braque and Cyril Connolly, for example—imagined fictive episodes in their real lives, yet have drawn on all the research that would be required as if the piece were an essay. A very valid definition of biography is that it is “a fiction conceived within the bounds of the observable facts.” The biographical story plays with this paradox and in so doing attempts to have its cake and eat it, to capture the strengths of fiction and the non-fictional account simultaneously.
Today, in the UK especially, it has never been harder to get a short story published. The outlets available to a young writer that I benefited from in the 1980s have virtually dried up. Yet, despite the state of publishing, the short story seems to me to be undergoing something of a revival, both here and in the USA. The socio-cultural explanation for this would perhaps be the massive increase in creative writing degree courses. The short story is the perfect pedagogical tool for this kind of education and conceivably the tens of thousands of stories being written (and read) in these institutions are cultivating a taste for the form in the way that the mass-circulation magazines did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, I feel that there may be a different reason why readers of the short story have never really gone away. And once again, this has nothing to do with length. The well-written short story is not suited to the sound-bite culture: it’s too dense, its effects are too complex for easy digestion. If the zeitgeist is influencing this taste then it may be a sign that we are coming to prefer our art in highly concentrated form. Like a multi-vitamin pill, a good short story can provide a compressed blast of discerning, intellectual pleasure, one no less intense despite the shorter duration of its consumption. To read a short story like Joyce’s “The Dead,” Chekhov’s “In the Ravine” or Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is to be confronted by a fully achieved, complex work of art, either profound or disturbing or darkly comic or moving. The fact that it takes fifteen minutes to read it is neither here nor there: the potency is manifest and emphatic.
Perhaps that’s what we are looking for, as readers, more and more these days—some sort of aesthetic daisy-cutter bomb of a reading experience that does its work with ruthless brevity and concentrated dispatch. But, as writers, we turn to the short story for other reasons. I think, finally, it comes down to this ability that the short story offers to vary form, tone, narrative and style so quickly and so dramatically. Angus Wilson said he began writing short stories because he could start and finish one in a weekend before he had to return to his job at the British Museum. There is a real investment of effort, to be sure, but it’s not the long haul of the novel with its years of generation and execution. You can write a plot-event story one week and a ludic/biographical one the next. Chekhov, the quintessential short story writer, referred to this same pleasure in the notebook I quoted from above. He had copied down something Alphonse Daudet had written and it obviously resonated strongly with him too. All short story writers will know what he means. Daudet’s words were these:
“Why are thy songs so short?” a bird was once asked. “Is it because thou art so short of breath?”
The bird replied: “I have very many songs and I should like to sing them all.”
2004
Anton Chekhov (1)
An A–Z
A. Anton
Anton Chekhov died a hundred years ago, on 15 July 1904. He was forty-four years old. His lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis. In Russia Chekhov is revered as a short story writer of genius; his plays are considered as extremely interesting but somehow ancillary and complementary to his main achievement. And this Russian conception of his work has some validity: Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short story writer ever. Like certain great pieces of music, his stories repay constant revisitings. The two dozen or so mature stories he wrote in the last decade of the nineteenth century have not dated: what resonated in them for his contemporaries resonates now, a hundred or more years on. Chekhov, it can be argued, was the first truly modern writer of fiction: secular, refusing to pass judgement, cognizant of the absurdities of our muddled, bizarre lives and the complex tragicomedy that is the human condition.
B. Biarritz
Chekhov visited Biarritz in south-west France in 1897. His health was failing and he had to seek a warmer climate in the winter months. For an effectively monoglot Russian writer (scant French and a little German) and a semi-invalid he had travelled fairly far and wide in his life. In Europe he knew Germany, France and Italy (how one wishes he had visited England). In 1890 he made an epic eighty-day trans-Russian journey to Sakhalin, a prison island in furthest Siberia. The book he wrote about the conditions of the prisoners there is earnest but dull; it does not live up to the near-intolerable struggle it took to reach the place. He came home by steamer via the orient: Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon and then through the Suez Canal to Odessa.
C. Critics
“Critics,” Chekhov said once to Maxim Gorky, “are like horse-flies which prevent the horse from ploughing. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double bass and a fly settles on its flanks and tickles and buzzes… he has to twitch his skin and swish his tail. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: ‘Look I am living on the earth. See, I can buzz too, buzz about anything’.” Chekhov went on: “For twenty-five years I have read criticisms of my stories and I don’t remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once [a critic] said something which made an impression on me—he said I would die in a ditch, drunk.”
D. Drink
Untypically for a Russian of his era, Chekhov was not a heavy drinker. His elder brothers Kolia and Aleksandr were chronic alcoholics and perhaps the memory of the squalor of Kolia’s wasted life (he was a hugely talented painter who died aged thirty-one) put Chekhov off. Yet Chekhov’s last act in life was to drink a glass of champagne. Fatally ill, he had travelled to the German spa town of Badenweiler in the vain hope that German doctors might save him. German medical etiquette demanded that, when the patient was near death and there was nothing more that a doctor could do, a glass of champagne would be offered. Chekhov knew what this meant. He accepted the glass, muttered “Ich sterbe” (“I’m dying”) and drank it down. His last words were: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.” Then he died.
E. Event-Plot
This is William Gerhardie’s phrase—one he uses to describe the kind of fiction written before Chekhov. Gerhardie, who is tremendously acute about Chekhov (he published a passionately enthusiastic short book about him in 1923), spoke with real authority. An Englishman, born in Moscow in 1895, wholly bilingual, Gerhardie idolized Chekhov (whom he read in Russian long before he was translated). Gerhardie himself was described in hi
s 1920s heyday as “the English Chekhov” and they do share a similar philosophy of life—though Gerhardie’s talent had a briefer flowering. Gerhardie’s analysis of Chekhov’s genius maintains that for the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life were made the form of the fiction. Previous to Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions: the narrative was manipulated, tailored, calculatedly designed, rounded-off. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens and Turgenev could not resist the event-plot powering and shaping their novels. Chekhov abandoned this type of self-conscious “story” for something more casual and realistic. As Gerhardie says, Chekhov’s stories are “blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life.” This is why Chekhov’s stories still speak to us a hundred years on. His stories are anti-novelistic, in the traditional sense. They are like life as we all live it.
F. Faith
Chekhov’s personal world was a Godless one: despite his orthodox religious upbringing, he asserted, in 1892, that “I have no religion now.” He wrote about religious folk, indeed one of his greatest stories is entitled “The Bishop.” But intelligent people who believed in God seemed baffling to him. “I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer.”
G. Grigorovitch
In 1886 Dmitri Grigorovitch, a distinguished Russian writer, wrote Chekhov a letter which changed his artistic life. Up until that date Chekhov had earned his living as a composer of humorous short stories, almost like variety sketches (he was a qualified doctor but it was his writing that sustained him financially). He published these jeux d’esprit under a pseudonym, “Antosha Chekhonte.” The vast majority of them have not aged well: arch, knowing, manifestly trying to be funny, these stories were hack work. Then in 1886 he published a story, “Requiem,” under his own name. Grigorovitch was hugely impressed, and wrote to Chekhov acclaiming his talent and urging him to abandon his comic squibs. “Stop doing hack work… better go hungry… save up your impressions for work that has been pondered, polished, written at several sittings.” Chekhov was overwhelmed by this letter and his reply is valuable if only because it is perhaps the only time that Chekhov drops his guard and gushes. “Your letter struck me like lightning. I almost burst into tears, I was profoundly moved and I now feel it has left a deep trace in my soul.” Grigorovitch’s passionate urging worked. For Chekhov it was a Damascene moment. The eighteen years remaining to him bear witness to his new zeal as a serious artist.
H. Home
Chekhov was born in 1860 in the Crimea, in a town called Taganrog, far to the south of Moscow on the Sea of Azov. More Levantine than European (Turkey was 300 miles away), Taganrog was a hot, fly-infested port with a varied population—Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Italians. Chekhov’s father was an indigent grocer whose debts eventually caused the family to flee to Moscow. Chekhov had four brothers and one sister—Aleksandr, Kolia, Vania, Misha and Masha. Very early in his life Chekhov became the family breadwinner. He supported them all—doggedly and in the main ungrudgingly—until his death.
I. Intimacy
In his short life Chekhov had many lovers but he had, as we would now term it, a real problem with commitment. Most of the women he had affairs with would have been happy to marry him but Chekhov was always careful to keep them at a distance, to break the relationship off if it seemed likely to become too heated.
J. The Japanese Girl
On his voyage back through the orient from his travels to Siberia Chekhov went to a brothel in Hong Kong. He wrote to a friend, “The Japanese girl… doesn’t put on airs, or go coy, like a Russian woman. And all the time she is laughing and making lots of tsu noises… When you come, the Japanese girl pulls with her teeth a sheet of cotton wool from her sleeve, catches you by the ‘boy,’ gives you a massage and the cotton wool tickles your belly. All this is done with coquetry, laughing, singing and saying tsu.”
K. Koumiss
A fermented mare’s milk that was believed, in the 1890s, to be a defence against tuberculosis, as a source of “good” bacilli. In 1901 Chekhov undertook a koumiss cure, drinking four bottles of the milk daily. He gained twelve pounds in weight in a fortnight. A month later he was still coughing blood.
L. Lika Mizinova
The one true love of Chekhov’s life? Chekhov married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901 when he had three years left to live. It was a union that dumbfounded and outraged most of his family—it seemed incomprehensible. It has subsequently been presented as one of the great romances of the twentieth century. My own theory is that his long affair with Lika Mizinova was the real love story. He met Lika in 1889, she was a teacher, an aspiring opera singer, blonde and buxom and nineteen years old. Chekhov was ten years older. For almost a decade they conducted a bantering, passionate on-off love affair. No other woman in Chekhov’s life held his affections so long but he always refrained from proposing marriage. Frustrated, Lika had an affair with Chekhov’s close friend and business manager Ignati Potapenko (a married man). They had a child together. Betrayal enough to break up any relationship, one would have thought—but Chekhov kept seeing Lika. Her career failed, she grew plump but something kept drawing him back to her. They last met in 1897 but Lika remained very friendly with Chekhov’s brothers and sister. She is often considered to be the model for Nina in The Seagull.
M. “My Life”
This is the longest story Chekhov wrote, it’s almost a novella and is, in my opinion, his greatest. In it you will find all the key Chekhovian tropes: the black humour, the candid depiction of the absurdity of life, its fleeting happiness, its “weirdness and vulgarity” (as Stanislavsky put it), its brutal randomness. This dark Chekhovian comic ruthlessness found its way into English literature via William Gerhardie. Katherine Mansfield plagiarized Chekhov but she responded to his more elegiac tone. Gerhardie sensed Chekhov’s tough realism, his acknowledgement of life’s bland cruelty. Gerhardie in turn was a huge influence on Evelyn Waugh (Waugh’s early comedies are extremely Gerhardian, a fact that Waugh himself acknowledged later in life). This tone of voice has subsequently come to seem very English, but it was there in Chekhov first. My other favourite Chekhov stories in no particular order are: “The Lady with the Dog,” “In the Ravine,” “A Visit to Friends,” “Ionych,” “The Bishop,” “The House with the Mezzanine,” “Three Years.”
N. Nice
Chekhov went to Nice in 1898 to protect his damaged lungs from the ravages of the Russian winter. It’s a city I know well, I spent most of a year there in 1971. Like Biarritz, Nice is a place where, here and there, the ghost of Chekhov haunts its streets. At the turn of the century it was popular with Russians and Chekhov stayed in a Russian pension in the rue Gounod. The room I rented was on the rue Dante, a few blocks away. Chekhov liked Nice (the weather was good) and tolerated the routine and circumscribed life he lived there. Nice was a good place to read, he said, but not to write.
O. Olga Knipper
A leading actress at the Moscow Art Theatre. She acted in the earliest productions of Chekhov’s four finished plays—The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov married her in 1901, three years before he died. Olga survived him by fifty-five years, dying in 1959 (she also survived Hitler and Stalin). She was an ardent keeper of the flame but, despite her efforts to portray it otherwise, there is no disguising that the marriage was a strange one. They spent much more time apart than together (hence their copious and affecting correspondence): she acting in Moscow, Chekhov convalescing in Yalta on the Black Sea. Sometimes she even kept her Moscow address from her husband. She and Chekhov tried to conceive a child but failed. There is strong evidence, however, that she was unfaithful to him and miscarried another lover’s child in 1902.
P. Pavel Egerovitch Chekhov
Chekhov’s father. The son of a serf, he was both absurdly devout and a ruthless disciplinarian. He beat his sons remorselessly. Chekhov saw it as the watershed in his life the day he woke knowing that he would not be beaten b
y his father. Yet this sentimental, sadistic boor was financially supported loyally and tirelessly by his third son throughout his life, living with him in his various establishments and particularly at Melikhovo, the small estate Chekhov bought to the south of Moscow and which, of all the places he lived in (from 1892 to 1899), he most loved. Pavel Chekhov effectively ran the estate with shrewd serf-like application. He died in 1898, aged seventy-three, on an operating table when the surgeon was attempting to rectify a gangrenous hernia. Pavel had forgotten to put on his truss and developed the fatal hernia by picking up a 20-pound bag of sugar. Chekhov declared it the end of an era, that “the main cog had jumped out of the Melikhovo machine.” He never loved his father but he had never let him down. He abandoned Melikhovo shortly after his father died.
Q. Quinine
At Melikhovo Chekhov had two dachshunds which he called Quinine and Bromine. Quinine was his favourite. The most natural and unposed photographs of Chekhov show him sitting on the steps of his veranda with Quinine tucked under his arm.
R. Real Lives
Chekhov said: “Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.” By this I take him to mean that other people are fundamentally opaque, mysterious—even people you know very well, your wife or husband, your family. Janet Malcolm, who has written a profound and insightful book on Chekhov (called Reading Chekhov), says that “We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other.” This, it seems to me, is the great and lasting allure of all fiction: if we want to know what other people are like we turn to the novel or the short story. In no other art form can we take up residence in other people’s minds so effortlessly. Chekhov tells us a great deal about his characters but, however, resists full exposure: there always remains something “blurry,” something secret about them. This is part of his genius: this is what makes his stories seem so real.