Progress of Stories

by Laura (Riding) Jackson

  And I do hope that those of you who should not have gone away long ago will get just a little pleasure out of these stories, as I got just a little pleasure out of writing them. I do not expect you to get a great deal of pleasure, because that can be got only from the truth itself, and even then we have to be careful that we are not fooling ourselves, that we haven't made full measure (full pleasure) mean altogether too large a party. Starting at the beginning, you will probably not get much pleasure out of the first stories: do not be ashamed to admit it, I did not mean you to. But as you go on you will perhaps get just a little more, and just a little more pleasure, till we come to the last story, a last lesson in geography, where we will leave the whole matter hanging for just a little while until we know more exactly where we are (who we are). And then, while we are waiting (for just a little while) to know more exactly where we are (who we are), we shall talk about Hans Andersen (for just a little while). We shall try to make him feel at home at the party where all the conversation is gradually becoming the same conversation; for you know how self-conscious modesty makes people—we must all become rather proud, behave rather as if we were each in his or her own way rather important. Some of us may indeed be a little more important, but none of us has been so patient as he, made such a little while of such a long while. And it will be pleasant for him, for he will have a golden crown, a crown of real gold; and it will be pleasant for us, for the crown will be a token that in a little while it will really be all the same conversation. Until when we shall, perhaps, tell one another just a few more stories—to show that we are not worried.

  L.R.

  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1982)

  1

  WHAT can I write prefatorily for this new edition of Progress of Stories—the first edition was published forty-six years ago—that will relieve its appearance in a new time of an effect as of an honorific unveiling of antiquities, while clarifying the impulses that moved me to make it the book that it was? I believe that it is blessed with the gift of scrupulous unhurriedness—every moment of it a full moment's worth of telling- time—that is the essential spirit of story-progress: the gift not of my authorial giving, but what it is given a telling of stories to be when nothing but the telling of them, no least ulterior purpose of a telling, is allowed to lead the way, surreptitiously or otherwise. That what was told in the book's stories was ready to be told, had a verisimilitude in itself as that which came to mind to me for telling, should be palpable in present reading-contact with it. Does not everything hold together of itself, each story-length possessed of an inner reasonableness of step-by-step narrative consecution, what it becomes as whole welling out of what was incipiently accumulated for progress to a finish? I am counting on the original material to exhibit its intrinsic naturalness as story-content—on its needing no special justification in its reappearance as entitled to perennial interest as material of art. The initiating impulses from which the stories issued were not impulses of art, not impulses to construct stories but to tell stories.

  Stories that are products of art can only provide literary experience—experiences of managed imagination. Stories that are products of nature—of human nature as against human art —fill the mind's vacancies in its conception of the possibilities of personal life, as physical nature has experimented in variations in living forms to the kind and number that vacancies in biological possibility have invited. Products of art are things in excess of that which has natural and necessary presence among us. But what are stories that are not products of art? What kind of critical water can the classification 'products of nature', 'nature' understood as human nature, hold? Let us allow that it is a water free of the impurities of classificatory terminology: stories that are products of nature, that come naturally to the mind for telling, reflecting the infinite progression of circumstances in which the reality of live being consolidates itself reiteratively, mirroring to the mind its own live reality. I view the stories presented here—including the early stories I have added, to form a new part—as written upon a natural premise of the mind (the mind one has by nature as a being of mind) that life is all happening: it makes itself into a story, stories, it begins and ends as a story, or is a continuous story, or a world of stories. The story-way of speaking, of the mind's telling what comes to it as within the possibilities of the reasonably thinkable, what 'makes sense', has a step-by- step connectedness with itself in all that happens in it with an effect of life-likeness (of the experienceable, if not of the experienced), is the natural model for all telling of the true— what the mind knows to be happening or to have happened, knows to be so, as it tells it.

  It can be perceived from how I am writing here in this new, later preface that my view of the nature of story-telling and of the nature of truth-telling as being closely related has not altered in the time intervening between the two prefaces. But I have, in that time, applied myself with increasing attentiveness to the possibilities of truth as ultimately resolvable by the measure of the linguistic possibilities of truth, the mind's truth-telling will being unquestionable. I shall dwell a little here on this matter of truth to bring readers of the new edition into intimate range of my long-sustained devotion to story and truth as linguistically, and in all the poignantly human aspects of intellectuality and emotionality, poignantly kindred.

  Truth can be the story the mind tells of itself: of the course of happening within its personal thought-compass. Or it can be the story of the mind's experience not just of consciousness of the course of its thought but of the course of the knowable beyond the bounds of the mind's understanding acquaintance with itself as the being—the being of mind—it personally constitutes. Thus the story-telling model of human speaking, or, as speaking recorded for silent apprehending is literarily named, 'writing', persists, in its natural casting of speaking or writing as reduplicating the live processes of happening, into the open areas of knowledge and understanding that all minds share as the world of intelligent being—partaking, in their unitary reality as minds, of the identity of mind. This mind of unparticular identity is the motive force of consciousness of itself that turns being into an ever-expanding, ever-contracting universe of infinitesimally infinite probing of the truth of itself. Our minds, which we call 'human', give mind—mind unparticular—earth-place for the universal story of being it has to tell. We become, as minds, propitious points of departure for and return from experience of the universal content of being, the exploring of what—of everything having being in some particular guise within this compass—manifests a connectedness of consciousness-like mutuality, in its happening as itself, responsively inter-occurrent between it and being of other particular guises. We know ourselves as truth-concerned beings. And the telling of truth becomes our minds' foresense of our minds' full possible and, truth told, the meaning that our lives will have as the lives of beings realizing the possibilities of being to their universal full.

  The secret of Progress of Stories was, and remains (for, though I am about to tell it, the confidence will be treated as a whimsical confiding of what cannot be publicly confided—as indeed it was treated in its first edition, where I told it in the preface, as I am about to do here) the delight that can be felt in the good fortune that, if for this or that reason there can be no telling of truth at that or this time, there can be telling of a story or stories that, though told as not being and known not to be truth, flush the expanded word-scenery of the mind with a truth-like radiance. In the telling or in the attending to the telling of a story or stories, all the faculties of the mind suited to employment in the telling of truth can exercise themselves in a joyful freedom of trial of their powers of timing of thinkable happening and the wording of it in promptitudes of matching moments in progress. The progress is only story- progress, but the feel of the progress is precious to the mind, helps the mind to feel its beat: I am tempted to say 'heartbeat', with thought of how the Latin cor, meaning 'heart', had considerable use, lexicographically described as 'figurative', as m
eaning also 'soul, mind'. A mind surely has a beat, a beat of what I should prefer to call, to calling it thought-progress, meaning-progress. And that delight which I have described as, for me, the essence of the love of stories, takes its course along the story-path, mounting as the story-meaning mounts in progress-beat.

  The account I have been giving of my understanding of the nature of the story has brought to naming-point a quality of the story that inheres in it, I think, as its crucial justification. The characterization seems to me the touchstone of the necessary naturalness that a story's makeup should have as a course of happenings told with an immediate presence to them of narrating words. The words should precipitate in the mind consciousness of the nature of truth, though the actuality of the told is not true, rather, an accidental course of thought that has timed itself to the narrative proprieties of truth. The effect—the name of the quality—is heart-breaking. Truth, experienced as a quality of what is told, is not heart-breaking but mind-purifying, disburdening thought of the weight of the unknown or the ill-understood. Truth lightens the mind of its controlled uneasiness in consciousness of ignorance and understanding-failure (no sane, naturally functioning mind can disburden itself at will of such consciousness). Truth does not delight: it heals the mind of ills borne in it, kept to the possible least in interference with its natural course of thought- happening—it lifts it up from bends in it of unfulfilled mind- capability, dragging, weighty emptiness of incomprehension. The satisfaction a story yields, that stories yield, is that of the passingly sweet flavor of knowledge of what might be. It is heart-breakingly real to the mind as experience of what might be—the mind loves the experience not as it loves truth, but as it loves itself, the beat in it of the sense of truth as the ultimate in knowledge and understanding, of the beat of its life as mind.

  The stories that make up the original Progress of Stories represent, in that combination, an important personal factor in my life's work, which I should like to be regarded at the least as work concerning the telling, in the terms of human consciousness, of all that is to tell of the being of things and beings. But only an important personal factor. Although I wrote other stories up to the time of the first publication of this book, and much indeed of story sort in later time, the other story-writing does not as a whole have the degree of purity in the quality of soul- (or mind- or heart-) sweetening medicinality that these stories have—for who, as I conceive human sensibility, love truth, and all that gives itself the shape of truth, for passing kindness to the mind, to minds. These I regard, that is, as especially having a simply imbibable virtue of private comfort-giving to minds that are not primarily preoccupied with their private condition, but primarily or entirely preoccupied with their condition as places in the total mind- compass of being in which and from which truth gathers into speakability. They were solace to me in the period, of less than a decade, of their writing, in which what was the cosmically important (or the humanly general important, which is the same thing!) in my preoccupations of mind was mounting to my progressive best of definition as naturally all-preoccupying matter of all minds. They were, they are, of no importance for me, or for others, except as little, mortal, interims of solace in the undying trial of mind for the telling of being—the telling of the true story of being, that succeeds as a telling of the very 'thing', being, the 'thing' brought into presence, in the telling, in its living, its very, reality.

  The stories that I am adding as supplements to the original collection, of the same writing-period, have all more in them of the truth-concern insistencies of the verbally active mind, but much less of this than is to be found in my later story writing. In the later, the force of anticipation of truth, as the necessary identity-character of all writing (indeed of all speaking) not destined for burial in the mortuary archives of the make-believe important, points the mind, minds, towards a truth-ultimate while stressing the actualities of our falling short of it in our working life of mind, or minds. The happy medium of satisfaction (which I have called 'delight') in the mere incidental, inconsequential exercise of the faculties of the mind directed towards a truth-ultimate is considerably overshadowed in the later story-writing by intellectual solemnities of appreciation of the verging of the story-telling upon the borders of truth. I am thinking in particular of A Trojan Ending, a novel of 1937, and Lives of Wives, a book of stories of 1939, both of historical subject-matter.

  I am including in the supplementary additions to the original early storybook a single story of later, much later, writing (of the sixties). I was moved to write it as a little end- of-year Christmas gift for a few friends, and I have since made a few presentations of it. In none of the responses that I received was there any manifestation of the story's having for the recipient the quality I have described as, in my experience as a writer and reader of stories, a reader and writer of stories, the constitutional and spiritual essence of story-nature. I had written the story with the weight upon my consciousness of the compulsive appeal to rejoicings exerted upon people by the Christmastime and end-of-year gathering of time into a knot of challenge to their day-on-day judgement of their lives as worth the living of them. There was no movement in the story towards an arrival at the truth of the matter. I was possessed only, in the telling, of the sense of a pattern of movement, of a rhythmic beat of consciousness of how 'things' happen, corresponding to the immediately environing flow of human behavior evidently directed by a common impulsion (which reverberated in my own mind, as in the minds of all the others in whose company I was by time's ever-abrupt, continuously only momentary, all-inclusiveness). The kind of truth the story had, has, is altogether substanceless. To me it is of the heartbreaking (in the sense of this I have expounded) quality that must inhere in a story for it to be a story truly. Nothing in it is true!—but what is told takes the mind nevertheless into the heart of the ultimate necessity: that all must 'in the end' be told. Every story's ending—be it truly a story—strikes the note of the finality-beat of this necessity.

  In including the little story 'Christmastime' in this book as an appropriate addition, though it is of over twenty-five years later vintage than any of the original or any of the added stories, I am acting under the persuasion of its having an outstanding purity of story-motivation. Perhaps its possessing this character (my persuasion being justified) and that of its failing to be heart-touching to the minds of the persons to whom I presented it are knit together in a single explanation. Can the case not be that, although the book in its original edition made only a little stir in the hearts of reading minds of the time, its heart-mind stirring potency subsiding in the later periods to the value of a 'neglected book' for citing as such by persons solicited as having an eye for revivable literary curiosities, the motivation-innocence that informed the stories endured in private survival in myself, no stranger amidst the truth-telling motivations that took over, for the most part, the site of preoccupation in my mind? While, in the decades between the thirties (the decade of general dissolution of faith in the future) and the current decades, which, for those who think of themselves as replacing lost hope with intelligently limited expectations, inaugurate an era of enlightened cynicism, innocence has come to seem an intellectually unwholesome state of mind, even for engagement in a private pleasure of telling, or spelling out to oneself the telling of, a might-be or might-have-been in a truth-like pattern of inevitable sequentiality?

  The late story, the original ones, the added ones, have all the same kind of worth of perdurable unimportantness. They are dispensable, there is no important need of them; but, given survival by circumstance's impartiality of choice between the important and the unimportant, they confer the kind of blessing our patience with ourselves can honorably confer on the lesser engagements of our minds for which greater ones are put off (for the sake of allowing our minds to acquit themselves of their necessities of accomplishment in the freedom of an order determined by natural impulse). Stories have important unimportant uses for our mind, in relation to the us
es that more important forms of consciousness-engagement have for them.

  I ought not omit from the account of my story-writing a number of stories of the early thirties left in manuscript form with much else of my papers and work-properties, when I was forced to flee from Mallorca at the start of the Spanish Civil War—all this coming into other hands, lost to me except for a very small portion come back to me much later by a gracious stroke of chance. One of the recovered stories, 'Description of Life', was recently published in a limited edition. It is a lonely slice-of-life figment expressive of my sense of the time of how much of what could be told of human life was lost in being regarded as having only a random interest as self-limited oddments of private life. I have done no story-writing since I wrote 'Christmastime' except for a lengthy trial in very recent years of the possibility of a legend in which universal principles are given personal identities, and the course of their interaction in immediate modern time is told as a story of all-human happening-reference and meaning-orientation. It has lain uncompleted for many months, presenting difficulties that may be too real for resolution within a story—by the story-wit that puts unresolvable difficulties to story-time eternal rest.