Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Ben Okri (1959– ) is a Nigerian-born, UK-resident novelist and poet. He won the 1991 Booker Prize for his third novel, The Famished Road, the first volume of an African trilogy continued in Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). His other novels include Starbook (2007) and The Age of Magic (2014). He has also published poetry, essays and short-story collections, including Tales of Freedom (2009), in which ‘The Message’ appears.

  Sharon Olds (1942– ) is an American poet whose twelve collections include Satan Says (1980), The Dead and the Living (1984), The Wellspring (1996) and Stag’s Leap (2012), which won both the Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot Prizes. Olds was New York State Poet Laureate 1998–2000 and is currently a professor at New York University.

  Michael Ondaatje (1943– ) is a Sri-Lankan-born, Canadian novelist and poet. His six novels include The English Patient, which won the 1992 Booker Prize, Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Cat’s Table (2011). He has also published numerous poetry collections and edited various anthologies. His memoir, Running in the Family, in which ‘Harbour’ appears, was published in 1982.

  Joseph O’Neill (1964– ) is an Irish-born, New York-resident novelist. Netherland, from which the excerpt in this anthology is taken, was published in 2008. His other novels include The Dog (2014). He has also written a work of non-fiction, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2001), and teaches at Bard College in New York.

  Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She moved to Cambridge after winning a Fulbright Fellowship at Newnham College, where she met and married fellow poet, Ted Hughes, in 1956. Plath wrote poetry from a young age and published her first volume, A Winter Ship, anonymously in 1960. She put her name to her second collection, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), but her only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Plath committed suicide less than a month after the book’s publication. Her posthumous publications include Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1972) and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977).

  Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) was born in Beaconsfield and was an only child, a status he celebrated in many of his stories, once observing, ‘in fiction, only-children are the interesting ones’. His first novel was for children, The Carpet People in 1971. The Colour of Magic (1983) was the first book in his landmark Discworld Series. The series would comprise 41 novels by 2015, the year of his death. Other novels include Good Omens (1990), a collaboration with Neil Gaiman, and Nation (2008). He was appointed KBE in 2009.

  Philip Pullman (1946– ) is the British author of the fantasist His Dark Materials trilogy and winner of the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Prize and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Northern Lights (1995, titled The Golden Compass in the US) was voted winner of the ‘Carnegie of Carnegies’, to commemorate the medal’s 70th anniversary. He is also the author of the Sally Lockhart series of children’s books (1985–1994), and The Firework-Maker’s Daughter (1995), The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010) and Grimm Tales for Young and Old (2012).

  Jean Rhys (1890–1979) was born and raised in Dominica but was resident in England from the age of sixteen; yet it was in Paris, under the encouragement of Ford Madox Ford, that she published her first writings, the collection of stories called The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927). Her subsequent novels include Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). None was successful and, after the Second World War, Rhys dropped out of sight and was widely thought to have died. Yet, in 1966, she published Wide Sargasso Sea, which won several awards. Her final collection of stories, Sleep It Off, Lady, which includes ‘On Not Shooting Sitting Birds’, was published in 1976.

  Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was born in Baltimore. Her father, a renowned pathologist, encouraged her to write poetry at a young age and she learned a love of literature from the shelves of his library, which included volumes of Blake, Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson. Her 25 award-winning poetry collections include Diving into the Wreck (1972), for which she won the National Book Award. A prominent feminist, Rich’s various non-fiction works include 1976’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Her poem, ‘Dreamwood’, first appeared in Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988, and will be appearing in the forthcoming Collected Poems 1950–2012.

  Tim Robinson (1935– ) was born in Yorkshire, studied mathematics at Cambridge and taught it in Istanbul, then pursued a career as an avant-garde artist in Vienna and London. In 1972, he removed to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. He has published books on the largest of the islands, and also subsequent works on Connemara and a translation (in collaboration with Liam Mac Con Iomaire) of the Irish-language modernist novel Cré na Cille, published as Graveyard Clay. His maps of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara are published by Folding Landscapes, Roundstone, Co. Galway, a small press founded by Robinson and his partner, M.

  Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) was an American poet and translator, born in Michigan. His first collection of poems, Open House (1941), was rooted in childhood memories of the greenhouses of his father, a florist. Subsequent publications include The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), Praise to the End! (1951) and The Waking (1953), which won the Pulitzer Prize and brought his poetry wider renown. A book of light verse and nonsense poetry followed: I Am! Says The Lamb (1961).

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was an English poet, painter and translator who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. His verse translations include The Early Italian Poets (1861). Several of his poems appeared in the 1850 collection The Germ, including the work ‘My Sister’s Sleep’, and later works include Ballads and Sonnets (1881). ‘Nuptial Sleep’ appeared in his sonnet cycle The House of Life (1870), its eroticism causing controversy among critics. His artwork can be viewed in galleries and museums such as Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses his famous painting, ‘The Day Dream’.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) was born in Lyon. He learnt to fly in 1921 and soon thereafter joined the French Air Force. In 1931, he published Night Flight (Vol de Nuit), which established his literary reputation. In 1935, while trying to break the speed record from Paris to Saigon, he crashed in the African desert and almost died of thirst. This was recounted in Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes, 1939). Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated The Little Prince while living in New York during 1942. Since translated into more than 250 languages, it has become one of the best-selling books ever published. Saint-Exupéry frequently read and wrote while flying, sometimes delaying landing to finish a book. He flew reconnaissance during the Second World War and it was on one such mission during July 1944 that he disappeared, presumed dead.

  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) employed imagery of sleep perhaps most prevalently, of all his works, in Macbeth (as my dad observed in his 1999 biography). The unmanning of Macbeth during the course of the play, to the point where he receives the news of his wife’s death with fatalistic resignation, is measured in terms of increasingly guilty fear – itself in turn charted by his lack of that ‘season of all natures’, sleep:

  Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!

  Macbeth does murder sleep’ – the innocent sleep,

  Sleep that knits up the travell’d sleeve of care,

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

  Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

  Chief nourisher in life’s feast . . .

  Charles Simic (1938– ) is a Serbian-American poet, translator, essayist and philosopher who has served both as poetry editor of the Paris Review and as United States Poet Laureate (appointed 2007). He won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End (1989). He has published many poetry collections, from 1967’s What the Grass Says to 2015’s The Lunatic.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was brought up in Radzymin, Poland, the son and grandson of rabbis, and much of his no
vels and short stories are set among the Jewish communities of Poland, Germany and the USA, to where he emigrated in 1935. His novels include The Family Moskat (1950), The Magician of Lublin (1960) and Enemies: a Love Story (1972). He also wrote a play, Schlemiel the First (1974), and many stories for children. ‘The Re-Encounter’ first appeared in the Atlantic. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.

  Muriel Spark (1918–2006), novelist and poet, was born and educated in Edinburgh, where she attended James Gillespie’s High School for Girls, immortalized in her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Her other novels include The Comforters (1957), Memento Mori (1959), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Loitering with Intent (1981) and Aiding and Abetting (2000). She published a memoir, Curriculum Vitae, in 1992 and was appointed DBE the following year.

  A. E. Stallings (1968– ) is an American-born, Athens-resident poet and translator. She has published three books of poetry: Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006) and Olives (2012).

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1895) was a Scottish writer who studied engineering (his father and grandfather both being lighthouse engineers), qualified as a lawyer, yet found fame as a writer – with the adventure story Treasure Island (1883). Kidnapped (1886) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), among other novels, followed; the latter having been inspired by a dream (‘it practically came to me as a gift’). He published his verse recollections of childhood, A Child’s Garden of Verse, in 1885, from which ‘Escape at Bedtime’ is taken. Stevenson spent the last five years of his life in Samoa, where he co-wrote his final works with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, such as The Ebb-Tide (1894).

  Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali writer and artist. He began writing poetry at the age of eight, and such was the power of his first collection of poems, at aged 16, published under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃaha (‘Sun Lion’), that the poems were seized upon by academics as long-lost literary classics. Although known mainly for his poetry, Tagore also wrote eight novels, four novellas, eighty-four short stories, essays, travelogues, drama and 2,230 songs. His nationalist political views were expressed in Manast and led to a bungled assassination attempt in 1916.

  Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was a librarian as well as the author of twelve novels, including A Game of Hide and Seek (1951) and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), five volumes of short stories and one children’s book, Mossy Trotter. Her story, ‘The Idea of Age’, first appeared in The New Yorker in 1952. Her husband, John Taylor, was the director of a sweet factory.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign. He first published poetry at the age of 17, with his brothers, in a local magazine. His volumes of verse include Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which included ‘Mariana’, the two-volume Poems, which included works such as ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Ulysses’, and The Princess: A Medley (1847), as featured in this collection. Subsequent works include In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) and Maud: A Monodrama (1855/56), which included the poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.

  Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was an English poet and nature writer who was killed in the First World War at Arras in 1917. A prolific writer of reviews, critical studies and biographies, he only wrote poetry from 1914, after encouragement from Robert Frost. He wrote most of his poems while on active service and lived only to see the publication of Six Poems (1916), not the later collection Poems (1917), published posthumously. He also wrote a novel, The Happy-Go Lucky Morgans (1913) and several influential books about the English countryside.

  James Thurber (1894–1961), born in Columbus, Ohio, joined the editorial staff of The New Yorker magazine in 1927, at the suggestion of his friend, E. B. White, a contributor. Thurber went on to feature some of his pieces published in The New Yorker within the collection, Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940), and a later volume, Further Fables for our Time (1956). Failing eyesight – the result of a boyhood accident – forced him to curtail his drawing during his forties, however, and, by 1952, he had given it up altogether. Thurber continued to write until his death and his work, which includes several book-length fairy tales, has been collected in over thirty volumes. The Thurber Prize has been awarded since 1997 for outstanding American humour, to recipients such as Jon Stewart and Ian Frazier. It is administered by Thurber House, a non-profit literary centre and Thurber museum, housed in one of his boyhood homes.

  John Updike (1932–2009) was an American novelist, poet and critic. His twenty-one novels include The Centaur (1963), the Rabbit Series (1960–2001), Couples (1968), The Coup (1978) and The Witches of Eastwick (1984). His Collected Poems 1953–1993 was published in 1993 and, in 2003, he was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities.

  Jess Walter (1965– ) is an American author of six novels, including The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009) and Beautiful Ruins (2012). He has also written a collection of short stories, We Live in Water (2013), in which ‘Can a Corn’ appears, and a non-fiction book. He is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, among other prizes.

  E. B. White (1899–1985) was an American essayist, novelist, children’s writer and parodist, who wrote for The New Yorker for eleven years, joining the magazine in 1925. As well as Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952), his work included a bestselling revision of William Stunk Jr’s Elements of Style (popularly known as Stunk and White, 1959). ‘The Second Tree from the Corner’ first appeared in The New Yorker.

  Walt Whitman (1819–1892), born on Long Island, produced the first, self-published edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Eight further editions were published during the poet’s lifetime, Whitman constantly revising and expanding the work until his death, 95 pages growing to nearly 440. Whitman served as a volunteer hospital visitor during the Civil War, experiences that infused the sequence published in Leaves of Grass as ‘Drum-Taps’ (1865). ‘On The Beach at Night’ appears in ‘Sea Drift’, a cycle within the third edition of Leaves of Grass.

  Richard Wilbur (1921– ) was born in New York and has published several collections of poetry, from The Beautiful Changes, and Other Poems (1947) and Ceremony, and Other Poems (1950) through to New and Collected Poems, which won Wilbur his second Pulitzer Prize, in 1989. He has also translated plays by Molière and Racine, and contributed songs to Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide. Wilbur served as United States poet laureate 1987–1988.

  Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was born in Dublin. His father, Sir William, as well as being Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon, wrote books in his spare time about Irish folklore and archaeology. Lady Jane Wilde, under the pseudonym ‘Speranza’, wrote poetry for the revolutionary nationalists, a group known as the ‘Young Irelanders’. She would read this poetry to Oscar when still a young child. After studying at Oxford and moving to London, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888, having already written various fairy stories for magazines. The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) followed, then his plays Salomé (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband in 1895, before his imprisonment for gross indecency (1895–1897). Over a hundred years later, the first public monument to Wilde was unveiled in central London. The steering committee behind the statue included the poet Seamus Heaney, and it is inscribed with a line from Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892): ‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’.

  Hugo Williams (1942– ) is a British poet and travel writer. His first volume of poetry, Symptoms of Loss, was published in 1965. Subsequent collections include Sugar Daddy (1970), Dock Leaves (1994), Billy’s Rain (1999, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize), Dear Room (2006) and I Knew the Bride (2014). He was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1994.

  P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) was born in Guildford, Surrey, but became a US citizen in 1955. He made the US his home after being branded a traitor in Britain during the Second World War: captured at Le Touquet, he had agreed to make broadcasts for the Germans.
His name was subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing but the scandal led to his emigrating. Piccadilly Jim (1917) established Wodehouse as a writer and he went on to write over 100 books. He is best known as the creator of Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves.

  Tobias Wolff (1945– ) is an American author whose works include the memoirs This Boy’s Life (1989) and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994); the novel Old School (2003); and four collections of short stories, including The Night in Question (1997), in which this anthology’s story ‘Powder’ first appeared. Wolff has also edited several anthologies, among them The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (1994). He is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University.

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was born in London, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the first editor of The National Dictionary of Biography. She is the author of Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927) and A Room of One’s Own (1929). ‘A Haunted House’ appeared in Monday or Tuesday (1921), the only collection of short stories published during her lifetime, which was cut short when she committed suicide in 1941, Woolf having suffered from a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life.

  James Wright (1927–1980), born in Ohio, wrote ten collections of poetry during his lifetime, including The Branch Will Not Break (1963), Shall We Gather at the River (1967) and This Journey (1982). Seven collections of poems and letters have been published posthumously and in tribute to Wright, including Above the River: the Complete Poems (1992), in which ‘Old Bud’ first appeared. His son, Franz Wright, was also an acclaimed poet: they are the only father and son to have won separate Pulitzer Prizes in the same category.

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) was born in Yonkers, New York. His novels include Revolutionary Road (1961), The Easter Parade (1976), Good School (1978) and Cold Spring Harbor (1986). He was not commercially successful as a writer (in comparison with the influence that it is now acknowledged his work has exerted on notable American writers, from Raymond Carver to Richard Ford) and in the years immediately after his death of emphysema all of his novels were out of print. During his lifetime, just one of his short stories appeared in The New Yorker, after repeated rejections. ‘Bells in the Morning’, which is reproduced in this anthology, first appeared in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, published posthumously in 2001.