by William Boyd
For Susan
Contents
Introduction
Killing Lizards
Not Yet, Jayette
Bizarre Situations
Hardly Ever
The Care and Attention of Swimming Pools
Next Boat from Douala
Gifts
My Girl in Skin-Tight Jeans
Histoire Vache
On the Yankee Station
Bat-Girl!
Love Hurts
Extracts from the Journal of Flying Officer J.
The Coup
Long Story Short
The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’
Transfigured Night
Hôtel des Voyageurs
Never Saw Brazil
The Dream Lover
Alpes Maritimes
N is for N
The Persistence of Vision
Cork
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Introduction
The first genuine, proper piece of fiction I wrote was a short story. It was in 1971, I was nineteen years old, and it was called ‘Reveries of an Early Morning Riser’. The story was transparently autobiographical in nature – a somewhat elegiac account of a relationship I had had with a German girl in the previous spring and summer while I was studying at the University of Nice1. I wrote it specifically for a competition run by the English Literature department of Glasgow University where I had just begun my MA degree. Most unusually for the time, the university had appointed a resident creative writer, an elderly poet called George Bruce2, and the short-story competition was his idea, a competition open to all the undergraduates reading first-year Eng. Lit. (a large number, several hundred strong). I wrote my story, submitted it and to my delight and astonishment won first prize – a £10 book token. I still have the typescript of ‘Reveries of an Early Morning Riser’ and the manuscript of another short story I wrote a little later but it seems that after this initial spurt my taste for writing short stories lapsed, rather. However, I wrote a great deal at Glasgow University (1971–75): much journalism – I was the film and theatre critic for the university newspaper – a play about my schooldays (submitted unsuccessfully for a playwriting competition), quite a lot of pseudonymous poetry and a novel called Is That All There Is? The title came from a great Peggy Lee song and the story was once again set in the south of France on the Côte d’Azur and, yet again, was unabashedly all about me (though I called my fictional alter-ego ‘Henry Rush’). My formative year in Nice was proving a fertile mulch for my embryonic fiction-writing imagination.
Looking back now I can see that I was writing in the way many young writers begin: using my own life experiences as raw material – changing the odd name here and there, introducing the odd wish-fulfilling narrative swerve (the boy gets the girl) – but basically relying on the simple authenticity of the experience (which I could certainly vouch for) as the motor for the narrative and its characters. It’s a phase most young writers go through – only a very few brilliant exceptions produce work of any value, let alone of lasting value – and I can see that the fiction I wrote while at Glasgow University represents a working-through of the autobiographical mode. Very soon afterwards I stopped writing about myself and my life and have never really started again.
In 1975 I left Glasgow and went to Oxford University to do a post-graduate degree – I was working on a D.Phil thesis earnestly entitled ‘Philosophical Influences on the Poetry and Prose of P.B. Shelley’ (another substantial piece of unpublished writing) – and it was at Oxford that the short story came back into favour. Once again the catalyst was competitions. The university magazine, Isis, diligently and civilly exploited the fact that many distinguished writers lived in and around the city and, every term or so, invited one or other of them to judge a short-story competition. In 1976 I wrote a short story called ‘The Laubnitsch Upright’ and entered it for an Isis competition judged by Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. ‘The Laubnitsch Upright’ was inspired by a poem, ‘Sunday Morning’ by Wallace Stevens, and was set in a provincial American city, telling the story of two removal men who, one Sunday morning, try effortfully to manoeuvre a huge rare piano (the ‘upright’ of the title) into the house of a rather attractive older woman. For me this story is significant in that it was about people, a world and an idiom I had never encountered (I hadn’t been to the USA at that stage of my life). I was going against the received wisdom handed down to young writers – ‘write about what you know’ – and was deliberately writing about something I knew nothing about. I was obliged, in other words, to use my imagination. I don’t know if Iris Murdoch and John Bayley picked up the complex skein of allusions to Stevens’ poem running through the story but they liked it sufficiently to award it second prize in the competition (and another book token duly came my way). Over the next year or so I entered other Isis short-story competitions. One was judged by Roald Dahl and he bestowed third prize on me for a story I wrote called ‘Patience at Spinoza’s’; another was a science-fiction story for a competition judged by Brian Aldiss3 in which I wasn’t placed at all. The downward curve was plain to see – it seemed it was time to stop entering short-story competitions.
And so I went to the wider world and started sending out my short stories to magazines – literary magazines, humorous magazines, women’s magazines – anywhere that published short stories, in fact. I reworked ‘Patience at Spinoza’s’ and sent it off to London Magazine, a legendary small literary journal edited by Alan Ross with a reputation for discovering new writers and poets. Alan Ross4 wrote back remarkably quickly: yes, he would take the story and would pay me £15 but I had to change the title – ‘Patience at Spinoza’s’ simply wouldn’t do. I concurred – it was a terrible title – and immediately changed it to ‘Next Boat to Douala’. It was published in the August 1978 issue of the magazine.
More significances accrue here: ‘Next Boat from Douala’ was not only the first story of mine to be professionally published – and it’s included in this collection – but it also launched my career as a novelist. The story relates an unhappy sexual misadventure in the life of a young, overweight, often drunk British diplomat living in West Africa named Morgan Leafy. Inspired by my success with Alan Ross and London Magazine I wrote another story about Morgan Leafy, ‘The Coup’ (also published in this collection), that was taken by Mayfair magazine. This time the cheque was in three figures and there was a commissioned illustration – I seemed to be on a roll. And in a sense I was: my scatter-gun submission programme drew its fair share of rejections but I began to place more and more stories – Punch, Company, the Literary Review, the BBC’s Morning Story among others – over the next few months and soon, it seemed to me, I had the makings of a small collection.
However, during this time (1976–9 approximately) I was also, amongst other things, writing novels. I wrote a novel called Against the Day about the Nigerian civil war, the Biafran war, that I had witnessed at close-ish hand while I had been living in Nigeria during the late 1960s. This was somewhat self-consciously experimental – a kind of collage-novel made up of scraps: newspaper articles, letters, diary extracts and so on. Alan Ross said he liked it but I think I knew in my heart it was not fully achieved. Moving from the post-modern to the commercial I wrote another novel, a thriller about a poet (if that’s not too grotesque an oxymoron) called Truelove at 295, but I never offered it to a publisher as by then I had formulated another plan.
By the summer of 1979 my short-story success rate was looking fairly impressive. In two years or so I had managed to place eight stories in different magazines and on BBC radio. I calculated that I would have a better chance submitting a collection of these stories to pu
blishing houses rather than one or other of the two novels I had written (Is That All There Is? had been permanently bottom-drawered). So I chose two publishers who had a reputation for publishing short-story collections – Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape – and simultaneously sent my stories off to them, addressed to the managing director of each firm. I added as a postscript to my covering letter – and I’m not sure why I did so – that I had also written a novel featuring the character ‘Morgan Leafy’ who appeared in two of the stories. This was pure fantasy: I had a pretty clear idea of a novel featuring Morgan Leafy in my head but not a word of it had been written down.
With unheard-of speed – again in a couple of weeks – I received a letter from Hamish Hamilton (I never had a reply from Cape). It was signed by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, the managing director, and it said that he was interested in the stories but would like to see my synopsis of the ‘Morgan Leafy’ novel before he came to any decision. The novel in my head swiftly became a five-page outline, swiftly despatched. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson wrote back (and I remember this vividly, the ultimate red-letter day): yes, he would like to publish my short-story collection but with one proviso – the ‘Morgan Leafy’ novel, which I had by now entitled A Good Man in Africa, would have to be published first.
Slight problem: massive euphoria clouded by the need for a potent white lie. So I lied – I needed to do some work on the manuscript, I said, some re-writing, re-typing, re-organizing, a matter of a few weeks only. Luckily my wife, Susan, was by now working for Oxford University Press, so there was one salary coming into the household. With the aid of the Hamish Hamilton offer now official – on paper–I managed to secure an Arts Council grant (£900 I think). By then I was a jobbing college lecturer at Oxford (also teaching English to foreign students) – and all this work would have to be temporarily dropped as I hastily wrote my ‘already-completed’ novel – bills would still have to be paid. Money secured, I sat down at the kitchen table in Oxford and wrote A Good Man in Africa in a white-heat of passion, febrile excitement and total conviction. Three months later the novel was delivered: Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson6 had no idea what demonic energies he had provoked.
So my short stories led to my first novel and the purpose behind all this reminiscing is to illustrate just how intertwined the two forms have been in my own beginnings as a writer and in my ongoing development. I’ve always written short stories alongside my novels and the essential reason is, I believe, that the short story offers a different aesthetic experience, both in the writing and in the reading. For the novelist it is more akin to changing art form – as when one leaves the novel to write a play or a film or a poem. Different mental gears are engaged, different pleasures are experienced – and, crucially, more risks can be taken.
A few years ago I wrote a long piece for the Guardian7 newspaper in which I came up with an unofficial taxonomy of the short-story form. There were, I claimed, basically seven types of short story – and I duly defined them. Looking at the stories collected here I think I have written stories in five of the seven categories that I cited and I think this variety tells me, and tells readers, perhaps, a great deal about why I write short stories. It is a question, finally, of freedom: freedom to change habits, to experiment, to take risks, to try out different voices, to fracture narrative – freedom to do things in your writing life that the novel doesn’t allow for the simple reason that it takes so long to write a novel. Fiction, for me, is all about liberating my imagination: and that liberation seems to function particularly appealingly in the short-story form.
This new omnibus volume of stories, The Dream Lover, gathers together the stories in my first two collections: On the Yankee Station (1981) and The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ (1995) representing approximately a decade and a half of my short fiction. All the stories are published in the same order I originally devised for the collections – and they are loosely chronological. My third collection, Fascination (Penguin, 2004), is still in print and my fourth is taking shape with three new stories, post-Fascination, having already seen the light of day in other publications and formats. The practice is well established: I write novels but I will also always continue to write short stories, I’m sure, for the reasons listed above. However, there seems something faintly valedictory about this new collection – an oddly baleful sense of ‘setting one’s house in order’. But this kind of re-arranging and re-assessing is also squarely within the tradition of the short story: a story’s first appearance in a newspaper or a magazine or broadcast on the radio has an impact but, inevitably, it is an ephemeral one. So the writer collects the disparate stories he has written between hard covers in a slimmish volume and christens them with a general title as a way of making their ephemeral life a little more permanent. However, with a very few exceptions, the shelf life of a short-story collection is not the same as that of a novel – though this is nothing new: Chekhov was acutely aware of this phenomenon in the 1890s and assiduously republished his early volumes. Thus, for writers, the urge remains a powerful one – to gather their stories together and lead them into the embracing fold of the oeuvre and keep them there, safely. The stories in The Dream Lover are as much a part of my writing life – and help explain who I am as a writer of fiction – as my novels.
William Boyd
London, 2007
Footnotes to Introduction
1 That year (1971) at the University of Nice provided the backdrop for other, later short stories: in this volume they are ‘Gifts’, ‘Alpes Maritimes’ and ‘The Dream Lover’.
2 I remember George Bruce but I remember his successor in the post, William Price Turner, better. Both were amiable and supportive: these were the first writers I ever met.
3 In 1979, Brian Aldiss became a near neighbour in Oxford – and a firm and lasting friendship ensued (no mention was ever made of his oversight in the competition).
4 Alan Ross became, therefore, the first person to publish me, picking my work out from the dozens of unsolicited stories routinely submitted to his magazine, and was an influential figure in my literary life and someone for whom I continued to write up until his death. My memories of Alan and London Magazine can be found in my book of collected non-fiction, Bamboo (Penguin, 2006), page 547.
5 I did, however, pinch the name – ‘Neil Truelove’ – of my eponymous poet/hero for the lead character in my second film, Dutch Girls, where he was played by the very young Colin Firth. Also, a lot of thinking about war and human conflict in Against the Day went into my second novel An Ice-Cream War. Writers recycle avidly: nothing is wasted.
6 Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson therefore joins Alan Ross as my other key literary mentor. Christopher remained my editor until he left publishing to become a literary agent. The two collections of stories that make up this volume were published under his aegis, as were my first six novels. He has known the true story for many years now.
7 I seem to have written a fair bit of theory about the short story recently. The Guardian essay on the seven types of short story is in Bamboo (page 237). There is another essay called ‘A Short History of the Short Story’ that I wrote for Prospect magazine and which can be read on my website (in the ‘Journalism’ section on the Media page) at www.williamboyd.co.uk.
Killing Lizards
Gavin squatted beside Israel, the cook’s teenage son, on the narrow verandah of the servants’ quarters. Israel was making Gavin a new catapult. He bound the thick rubber thongs to the wooden Y with string, tying the final knot tight and nipping off the loose ends with his teeth. Gavin took the proffered catapult and tried a practice shot. He fired at a small grove of banana trees by the kitchen garden. The pebble thunked into a fibrous bole with reassuring force.
‘Great!’ Gavin said admiringly, then ‘hey!’ as Israel snatched the catapult back. He dangled the weapon alluringly out of Gavin’s reach and grinned as the small twelve-year-old boy leapt angrily for it.
‘Cig’rette. Give me cig’rette,’ Israel demanded
, laughing in his high wheezy way.
‘Oh all right,’ Gavin grudgingly replied, handing over the packet he had stolen from his mother’s handbag the day before. Israel promptly lit one up and confidently puffed smoke up into the washed-out blue of the African sky.
Gavin walked back up the garden to the house. He was a thin dark boy with a slightly pinched face and unusually thick eyebrows that made his face seem older than it was. He went through the kitchen and into the cool spacious living room with its rugs and tiled floor, where two roof fans energetically beat the hot afternoon air into motion.
The room was empty and Gavin walked along the verandah past his bedroom and that of his older sister. His sister, Amanda, was at boarding school in England; Gavin was going to join her there next year. He used to like his sister but since her fifteenth birthday she had changed. When she had come out on holiday last Christmas she had hardly played with him at all. She was bored with him; she preferred going shopping with her mother. A conspiracy of sorts seemed to have sprung up between the women of the family from which Gavin and his father were excluded.
When he thought of his sister now, he felt that he hated her. Sometimes he wished the plane that was bringing her out to Africa would crash and she would be killed. Then there would only be Gavin, he would be the only child. As he passed her bedroom he was reminded of his fantasy and despite himself he paused, thinking about it again, trying to imagine what life would be like – how it would be different. As he did so the other dream began to edge itself into his mind, like an insistent hand signalling at the back of a classroom drawing attention to itself. He had this dream quite a lot these days and it made him feel peculiar: he knew it was bad, a wrong thing to do, and sometimes he forced himself not to think about it. But it never worked, for it always came faltering back with its strange imaginative allure, and he would find himself lost in it, savouring its pleasures, indulging in its sweet illicit sensations.