Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He knew the difference, of course. In 1939, in his discussion of his revision of what is probably his finest story, “The Country of the Blind,” he wrote that he had lost his tolerance for the idea story, the gimmick, the trick ending—the potboiler he had written so many examples of. “You laid hands on almost anything that came handy, a droning dynamo, a fluttering bat, a bacteriologist’s tube . . . ran a slight human reaction round it, put it in the oven, and there you were.” He could have gone on doing it forever, he says, but for the feeling that “not only might the short story be a lovely, satisfying, significant thing, but that it ought to be so, that a short story that wasn’t whole and complete like a living thing, but just something bought and cut off like half a yard of chintz on a footstool, was either an imposture or a lost opportunity.” But “the vogue for appreciating the exceptional in short stories was passing,” he says, and when he tried to write stories that didn’t suit the market, editors rejected his submissions, and so he “drifted out of the industry.”

  He had quit selling cloth by the yard at seventeen when he broke his apprenticeship. Selling words by the yard got him going as a writer, but maybe it led him to impatience with the form itself. For it is certainly untrue that the short story flowered in the 1890s and then declined into triviality; the form went on developing and flourishing right through the twentieth century. I wonder if what stopped him was not so much the editors’ lack of appreciation for the exceptional as the critics’ increasing restriction of literary fiction to social and pyschological realism, all else being brushed aside as subliterary entertainment. No matter how good his stories, if they were fantastic in theme or drew on science or history or any intellectual discipline for their subject, they could be dismissed categorically as “genre fiction.” It is a risk every imaginative writer runs, even now; writers who crave literary respectability still hasten to deny that their science fiction is science fiction. At least Wells stood by his imaginary guns.

  But he stopped firing them.

  Meanwhile, The Time Machine has never been out of print for a hundred and some years now. And though only a few of Wells’s short stories have come near that genuine literary permanence, the best of them remain vividly alive, amazingly pertinent, sometimes unnervingly prescient, as haunting as nightmares or as bright unrecallable dreams.

  I chose twenty-six stories from the eighty-four collected in John Hammond’s massive and invaluable Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells. I selected for excellence, of course, not as defined by the standards of realism, which have little use or application here, but generic excellence. Was the story outstanding in itself for intellectual urgency or moral passion, for some particular virtue or strangeness or beauty? Was the story outstanding of its kind, and was the kind an interesting one? Was it fruitful, vital, did it lead forward to other works of other writers? I am not one of the readers who prize only “greatness” and to whom “great” art is defined by being inimitable, unique, a dead end. I see art as a community enterprise both in place and time, and believe that art that leads to more art is more valuable than sterile excellence.

  Certain stories I left out with regret; one is “A Story of the Days to Come,” full of interesting stuff, but so long it would have taken up half the book. I would have liked to include some of the satirical, joking tales that Wells was good at, such as “Aepyornis Island” and “The Pearl of Love,” but being light, they got pushed out of the boat.

  Because almost all Wells stories are genre stories and because I value them as such, I arranged them, not chronologically, but in sections by genre or subgenre. Each section has a brief introduction, talking about what kind of stories they are, where this kind of story came from, and what it may have led to.

  As for trying to sum up the stories as a whole, as a set, it’s difficult. Wells is an elusive writer. Certainly one sees his distinctive style throughout the book. Many of the stories are told in a journalistic tone, easy and breezy, extremely self-confident but unpretentious, clear, moving forward at a good clip—it all seems quite simple, quite artless, which is exactly what the author wanted. He distrusted the high aesthetic manner (a charming note to his friendship with Henry James is that each man confessed he often longed to rewrite the other’s stories). But he was a careful writer and tireless rewriter, keenly aware of what he was doing, sensitive and skilled in his craft. A modulation of his tone can be as effective as a key change in music.

  We are often told that in stories written less to reveal individual experience or character than to entertain or inform or stimulate the imagination, plot is needed to provide structure, and action is all-important. Wells plotted cleverly, and his action scenes are vivid and suspenseful; but his true mastery, I think, was in that very difficult, underestimated, even maligned element of storytelling, visual description. Wells can make you see what he wants you to see. When this is something that does not in fact exist, a fantastic scene, a dream or prophecy, his power seems uncanny. He was—literally—a visionary. Perhaps the finest things he wrote are the wonderful lunar morning in The First Men in the Moon and the glimpses of the dying world at the end of The Time Machine, and in the short stories one comes again and again on a similarly vivid scene, a glimpse into another world, fearful or radiant or simply very strange. These visions have the authority, in memory, of something seen with one’s own eyes. A squadron of airplanes over Naples (two years before Kitty Hawk!) . . . two men laughing and making faces at people who stand unseeing, frozen in time . . . a dreaming garden behind a door in a wall . . . the faces of the townsfolk in the Country of the Blind . . .

  Book Reviews

  Many of these pieces differ in some details from their original publication, having been edited slightly when I was preparing them for this book. The only one I changed substantially (mostly to update it) is the review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Dorset Stories.

  I dithered between chronological and alphabetical order for these reviews, and settled for the alphabet so that readers could easily find an author they might be looking for. The original published versions of most of the reviews can be found on my website, and the publications in which they first appeared are listed in the acknowledgments.

  I like book reviewing, and in order to keep doing it have taken a good many chances on books I didn’t know anything about till I read them. It’s sad when the advance reading copy that arrives in a dense cloud of blurbs all declaring it a supreme masterpiece of gut-wrenching lyricism turns out to be a dud. But mostly I’ve been lucky in being asked to review a book by an author I’m already interested in, or a book that won me over even though I didn’t much expect to like it.

  Most of the reviews were published in the Manchester Guardian, to whose editors I am grateful for many opportunities to review good books, for wonderfully flexible, intelligent editing, and for being eight thousand miles away. The New York/East Coast literary scene is so inward-looking and provincial that I’ve always been glad not to be part of it; but when I lived in London I was positively terrified by the intensity of British literary cliques, the viciousness of competition, the degree of savagery permitted. That bloodymindedness may have lessened somewhat, but still, whenever I review a British book for the Guardian, I’m glad I live in Oregon.

  But then, I always am, except when I’m homesick for California.

  Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder

  2006

  Most collections of short stories by a single author are grab bags, but some approach or achieve real unity; it is a different unity from that of the novel, and deserves some attention. The gaps between stories, the lack of obvious continuity, preclude the supporting structures of conventional plot. If the stories tell a story, it must be read in glimpses and through the gaps—a risky gambit, but one which offers singular freedom of movement and ironic opportunity.

  In such episodic narratives character, place, and/or theme replace plot as unifying elements. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed
Firs are both about a single town and a few strong characters. Each book seems to have begun as a “local color” story or two written for periodicals, the success of which led the author to further explorations of Cranford or Dunnets Landing, and to the realisation that she was in fact writing a work of considerable length and scope. Freed from the tyrannies of Victorian plotting, both these lovely books develop locality and character with a lightness and subtlety that was rare then, and is still rare now.

  Though it seems to me a genuine form, this kind of book has no accepted name, perhaps because it’s an exception rather than a rule. Many collections that pretend to unity merely fake it. That does have a name: a fix-up—a collection of short stories stuck together with some kind of expository word-glue invented after the fact, or merely arranged in hope that recurrences or similarites of place, person, or theme will hold the pieces together. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is an example: inter-story glosses patch over contradictions and anachronisms, but the stories don’t really tell a coherent history, and parts remain far more memorable than the whole. Yet fix-up seems an unnecessarily disdainful name for that lovable book, and it absolutely won’t do for Cranford. We need a name for a book that is truly a story told in stories. Could we call it a story suite?

  Moral Disorder consists of eleven short stories. Is it a collection, a fix-up, or a suite? A suite, I think. Place, perhaps the commonest cement of the story suite, is not very important, but the stories have a single protagonist, a central character—or I think they do. She is variable, elusive, even a bit slippery. This is, after all, a book by Margaret Atwood.

  Seven of the stories are told by an “I” who remains nameless, four from the third-person point of view of “Nell.” It’s easy to project Nell into all the stories, because they run in chronological order from childhood to age, the central figure is always female, and there are definite clues that Nell is the protagonist even when not named. Such clues are needed, for there isn’t very much in the first-person stories of childhood and adolescence to connect the girl to the woman Nell—no strong sense of character or destiny, no overriding reason to think this is, or isn’t, the same person. The last two stories concern a woman’s experience with her father entering dementia, her mother in extreme old age. The daughter may well be Nell, the parents may be the parents of the child in the earlier stories, but I had no feeling of recognition, of rejoining the same people at a later stage of life. The book did not quite form a whole for me, an architecture, a life story however episodic. The glimpses are brilliant, but the gaps are wide.

  Things happen to Nell; she accepts what happens; this is not a portrait of a powerful character, perhaps rather an intimation of experience shared by many women. So character is not a strong bond, locality ties only a few of the stories together, and if the stories are connected by theme, I haven’t found what it is yet. What they have in common is a clear eye, a fine wit, and a command of language so complete it’s invisible except when it’s dazzling.

  One story is dramatically and effectively out of place. Starting with the second story, we follow Nell through the years from her childhood with sister and parents, through the vicissitudes of semi-marriage—does Tig in fact ever divorce that ghastly wife and marry her?—the trials of amateur farming and late parenthood, and at last to her middle age, the daughter of parents at the edge of death. But the first story in the book is chronologically the last, a portrait of Nell and Tig in their own old age, when they are the parents on the edge of death. Why this reversal works so well I don’t know; perhaps because “The Bad News” is a stunning opener, electric with wit, energy, Atwood’s achingly keen sense of fear and pain. She has never been sharper, dryer, funnier, sadder. And there was wisdom in not putting this story last, because the last two are about dying, the end, and this one isn’t, quite—not yet.

  Not yet is aspirated, like the h in honour. It’s the silent not yet. We don’t say it out loud.

  These are the tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we’ve only recently come to think of as still, and really it’s no smaller than anyone else’s window.

  The uncomplaining, absolute accuracy of this is most admirable. “The Bad News” really has some news for its readers.

  None of the other stories entirely escape conventionality, not a word I’d expect to use about Atwood. The subjects are familiar tropes of the current short story: miseries and confusions of childhood, city people learning life on a subsistence farm, dysfunctional family members, Alzheimer’s. They are not quite predictable, but near it, though there is a patience, a kindness in the tone which is not common. Atwood doesn’t pull any of the surprises, the narrative flights and dodges she’s so good at, except in that first story. There the old Canadian couple morph quietly into an old Roman couple in a small Gallic town called Glanum, which Nell and Tig once visited as tourists. Breakfast is good whether in Toronto or Glanum, but the world is not in good shape. Terrorism, barbarians threatening the empire. The news is all bad—the news is always the same and always bad, and what are two old people supposed to do about it? This gentle, plausible slide into a fantasy that deepens reality is Atwood at her slyest and sweetest. There really is nobody like her.

  Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood

  2009

  To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near future that’s half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books called science fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is “fiction in which things happen that are not possible today.” This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers, and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

  Who can blame her? I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favorable stance.

  So, then, the novel begins in Year 25, the Year of the Flood, without explanation of what era it is the twenty-fifth year of, and for a while without explanation of the word Flood. We will gather that it was a Dry Flood, and that the term refers to the extinction of—apparently—all but a very few members of the human species by a nameless epidemic. The nature and symptoms of the disease, aside from coughing, are undescribed. One needs no description of such events when they are part of history or the reader’s experience; a reference to the Black Plague or the swine flu is enough. But here, failure to describe the nature of the illness and the days of its worst virulence leaves the epidemic an abstraction, novelistically weightless. Perhaps on the principle that since everything in her novel is possible and may have already happened the reader is familiar with it, the author doles out useful information sparingly. I sometimes felt that I was undergoing, and failing, a test of my cleverness at guessing from hints, reading between lines, and recognising allusions to an earlier novel.

  The Year of the Flood is a continuation, not exactly a sequel, of Oryx and Crake. Several characters from the earlier book appear, along with such institutions as God’s Gardeners and the Corporations. The Gardeners, an eco-religious sect, farm rooftops, which can be defended from the gangs and marauders who infest the streets. Presented with irony and affection as seeking harmony with nature in the breakdown o
f civilisation, the Gardeners are a memorable invention. As for the Corporations, these aren’t the dear familiar corporations that now control our governments in a more or less surreptitious fashion, because in the novel there appear to be no fuctioning national governments. The setting may be the upper Midwest or Canada, but there is no geography, no history. The Corporations, and particularly their security arm, CorpSeCorps, are in total control. As in the earlier book, all science and technology is Corporation-owned, in the service of furthering capitalist growth and keeping the populace unrevolutionary while destroying the resources and ecological balances of the planet at an ever-increasing rate. Genetic manipulation has been busy producing useless or noxious monsters such as green rabbits, rakunks, and partly rational pigs.

  You can see that the world of the Year 25 is not an improvement on the world of another great realistic novel, 1984. It is if possible even more depressing, most of humanity being dead and the few survivors scrabbling out an evidently hopeless existence. Not even Beckett could make a scene so bleak endurable for several hundred pages, so much of the novel takes place in flashbacks to as early as the Year Five, when things were bad, but not that bad, yet. And the story finds its vitality in the characters through whose eyes we see these scenes. Probably what I will remember from the book in a year’s time will not be its grim events, but the two women Toby and Ren.

  One of the features supposed to distinguish “popular” from “literary” fiction is the nature of the characters who enact the fiction. In a realistic novel we expect to find individual personalities of some complexity; in a Western, mystery, romance, or spy thriller, we accept or welcome conventional types, even stock figures, the Cowboy, the Feisty Heroine, the Dark Brooding Landowner. We may, of course, in any one example, get the reverse of what we expect. The supposed distinction is so often violated in both directions as to be nearly meaningless. But there is one kind of fiction where complex, unpredictable individuality is really very rare. That is satire, and satire is one of Atwood’s strongest veins.