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V.S.Pritchett describes the short story as springing from a ‘poetic impulse’, which might, of course, be no more than the vaguest of hints that prompts a writer to make a start. Elsewhere he suggested that fiction ‘reveals’ what life only hints at.
C.S.Lewis in his writing on story says something similar. He compares the story to a net in which the writer tries to catch a bird, but in which he can only hope that the reader will see only a ‘flash of wings.’
Hemingway writes of a story needing only a single statement of truth to validate itself – and implying perhaps that without one, it can’t!
The three snippets, as far as I know, were written in isolation, yet for me they resonate. However interesting the events we recall or imagine when writing a story, what will needed, to give that story traction and value for the reader, will be something within that resonates with their sense of what reality is like. They will be alerted to, or reminded of, something that is hinted at, true, or flying in the perceptual skies of their own lives.
The writer might not know exactly which is Hemingway’s ‘one true sentence’, or Pritchett’s revelation, or Lewis’s flash of wings, and neither might the reader, but the contention must be that if it is not there the story will be fatally lacking – though it might fool a generation of readers (and writers), and if it is there, it will be sensed, even if not identified.
Hemingway also wrote about ‘holes’ in stories. He was referring what the writer knew, or didn’t know about the story he was telling. What the writer knows, but does not share with the reader, Hemingway seems to be saying, adds to the story, but what the writer doesn’t know, he is most definitely saying, will leave a hole in the story that the reader will feel, even if unconsciously.
What is revealed is not necessarily perceived, nor is that flash of wings necessarily glimpsed, and Hemingway’s one truth might not be appreciated – but those three writers, and, I suspect many others that I have not encountered, are telling us that the revelation, and the flash, and the truth, are fundamentally what make our stories worth reading, and worth writing.
I was talking to my friends, BHDandMe recently, and they were in two minds about something. The writer, Frank O’Connor came into view, metaphorically speaking, and something he wrote while having a several page carp about Kipling took our attention.
Now O’Connor’s carp was about the short story The Gardener, one of more than two rather exceptional stories in the collection Debits and Credits of 1926 – latish in Kipling’s canon. In that piece O’Connor makes what seems to me to be an astonishing statement, which is this: ‘I have found myself rewriting the story as it might have been written by Chekhov or Maupassant…’
While BHDandMe admired the hutzpah of such an assertion (t)he(y) was also shocked by the temerity of making it. Perhaps if t(he)y had written a story as powerful as, say Guests of the Nation, it might have been different. But BHD, I know for a fact, has re-written several stories by authors from the past (though none, to my knowledge, by authors from the future!).
His motives in doing this were perhaps similar to those of O’Connor’s – to find out a little bit more about the original story (‘to see what would happen’ O’Connor says). But BHD was also interested in finding out if the ‘feel’ of the story, its emotional impact on him as a reader, could be recreated or at least echoed by a story written from his own perspective in time and place. Me, it should be pointed out, would never dream of pulling such a stunt with a poem (or an essay, come to that). O’Connor’s analysis of his version of the story, by the way, seems to have, as Me was told once when writing about a poem of his, ‘missed the fucking point.’ –(Glad you pointed that out, BHDandMe).
BHD’s attempts, with stories by, among others, Alphonse Daudet, (Les Etoiles & La Chevre de Monsieur Seguin), L’Abbe Bourdelot (Monsieur Oufle) and Paul Arene (Uncle Sambuq’s Fortune), have been transpositions rather than replicas, and have met with mixed success, as stories and as explorations. Henri & Monsieur Oufle, a riff on the good Abbe’s farce involving a ‘bear suit’, translated to a modern-day Pizza restaurant, worked well enough to be picked out for performance at Liars League’s Hong Kong Branch, and can be found online. Les Etoiles became Shooting Stars, moving from a Luberon shepherd’s bothy in the nineteenth century, to a 1970s film-set in the English Lake District.
In none of these though, did BHD ever imagine he was writing ‘as it might have been’ by a Chekhov, Maupassant, or even a Daudet, Arene, or Bordelot. He was just doing his best as a BHD!
The practice is instructive though, as well as being fun. When there’s something you ‘get’ out of a story that you can, or can’t get out of a rewrite it clarifies something – not necessarily the same thing – about the original writer and your response to him or her, and about yourself, and your own writing.
While on my trip to New Zealand I took the chance to read at one of Auckland’s Open Mic sessions. Inside-Out at Cafe One2One on Ponsonby Road is a well established monthly reading slot for local writers, and musicians. On the 14th of November 2018, as usual, I suspect, the room was packed and buzzing.
It’s quite alarming, I found, to contemplate reading to an audience as far round the world as you can get without starting on the journey home. What do they care about? What will they understand? What will amuse them? Rile them? Wind them up? Move them? And will it do it for the right reasons? How the hell does one choose just what to fill that five minute slot with? It was unnerving too, to find how similar the event was to the Carlisle (Cumbria, UK) Speakeasy and Litcaff events I’ve been familiar with over the last dozen or so years. And amid those similarities, of course, the startling differences, of expectation, attitude, and perception, like the explosions of palm leaves that force their way through the canopies of ‘ordinary’ looking trees in what might be an English countryside. Walking on a turf headland forty minutes drive from the city, was like being on the coast near Whithorn. Crossing the fence line on the usual sort of stile, we stepped into what seemed a sub-tropical forest. Difference, and similarity in life, as in Art.
So, I’d taken a fistful of books to read from, made a dozen plans that I tore up, ended up reading one story, and one poem. The story, A Last Visit, taken from Talking To Owls (published by the excellent, but now retired Pewter Rose Press in 2012 – I have a couple of dozen copies left: Paypal me £6 GBpounds, and your address and I’ll send you one), but previously unpublished, and rarely read in public. The poem, All Things Are Connected, from Acumen‘s 60th anniversary anthology, and before that in #56 from 2006. In both cases, they seemed to understand what I was getting at. I should put that poem in a collection, if I do another.
Reading old work gets more enjoyable as I age with it, and reading new work less so! I had a new ‘work’ to read on the 14th, though, for a game they play here is to give you a fistful of words on a printed form, and ask for a piece of micro-fiction or poetry to go into the draw. Hell, I thought, why not? All Things itself came out of a not wholly different exercise. Five of these raw pieces would be picked out of a hat, and guess what, mine was one of them! We each got a prize too…in my case Ivy Alvarez’s poetry collection Disturbance (Seren Books,2013),about which more perhaps after I’ve re-read it.
There isn’t, in my possession, an image from the reading, but if one turns up, I’ll post it! As an alternative, here’s a Kiwi forest, familiar, and unfamiliar.