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Episode image is a detail from the cover of Distant View Of A Minaret by Alifa Rifaat, published in 1985 by Heinemann; cover illustration by Sabiha Khemie.
Shorter than usual, for good reason, this week’s Page One is a skim through the first pages of some short stories. Always remember that the first page of a short story is extremely good value because what you are getting is a greater proportion of the whole.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is discussed in Page One 101.
The collection of Nabokov short stories, mentioned here, was in fact given to Charles Adrian by Michael Caines when they recorded Page One 25.
Martin Bengtsson talks about Daniil Kharms in Page One 58.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is also discussed in Page One 135 and in Page One 141. Other books by Angela Carter discussed on the podcast are Wise Children (Page One 54), The Passion Of New Eve (Page One 76) and The Sadean Women (Page One 123 and, briefly, Page One 190)
Other writing by Margaret Atwood is discussed in Page One 47 (Alias Grace), Page One 95 (Hair Jewellery), Page One 108 (The Edible Woman), and Page One 146 (The Penelopiad).
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 1st July, 2014.
Book listing:
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
A Bad Day To Be Winning by George McWhirter
On Reaching Forty by Maya Angelou
Forty Years Ago And Forty Years Ahead by Margaret Atwood
How To Describe A Jazz-Age Birthday Party by Sarah Churchwell
The False Prophet by Sembene Ousmane (trans. Len Ortzen)
Distant View Of A Minaret by Alifa Rifaat (trans. Denys Johnson-Davies)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 86th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian. I've run out of guests again so you're stuck with me for the next half hour and I'm going to be talking about short stories.
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
I used to be a great consumer of short stories. I still love the short form in general – pop songs made me very happy and I'm always delighted if a theatre piece I'm going to see is set that lasts less than an hour – but I love long-form work too. And I think more and more as I get older. I'll happily get lost in a well-written doorstep of a novel. A Suitable Boy, for example, which is a monster on the shelf, was a total delight and I'll always be happy that I made time for that. If you get the chance, do start it. It's worth it. But long art is a different pleasure. Long books are very different pleasure. They last several sittings. They accompany me through, you know, a relatively significant portion of my life. When I start a short story there's no need for any commitment anxiety. I think that's why I used to like them so much. I know that I will very likely finish the story before I have to stand up again. And,along with all of the other things that can be good about short stories, I should probably declare that I just enjoy the speed at which you can get through them. It's very satisfying to feel as though you haven't had to invest very much time and yet you've managed to finish something. Tick!
Collections of short stories also respond very well to being put down and left for a while and then picked up again much later on in a way that novels often don't. You don't need to worry about losing momentum and it doesn't matter if you've forgotten what happened in previous chapters. They're perfect for reading in a waiting room or before going to bed. Recently, my before-bed books have included Daniil Kharms' Incidences. A Complete Maupassant, which I started well over a year ago and am nowhere near finishing. I'm somewhere about a third of the way through the first volume, I think, and I've abandoned that for a while. There was a collection called English Short Stories that I worked my way through evening by evening for... yeah, a few weeks. And then a big book of Nabokov short fiction that's currently sitting next to my couch. I don't remember when I started that. I was given it a couple of years ago, I think. And, you know, I've read stories and then other things have slid in between and it doesn't matter at all. I can go back to it at any time.
And then, short stories have this advantage too: you know that you're going to find out very quickly what is going to happen. And this is interesting for my purposes today because, although compared to novels, perhaps, there isn't the same need to hook readers on the first page, the first page of a short story is likely to take us a long way into the story. In some cases, the story might only be a page long. Daniil Kharms's stories – some of them were read by Martin Bengtsson in the 58th Page One if you're interested – they're often less than a page long. Still, that said, most of what I'm reading today is longer than a page so, you know, prepare yourselves for the customary frustration and disappointment. Just know that you're getting a larger proportion of the whole today than you would, perhaps, normally.
Okay, I'm going to start with something good. Are you ready for that?
Music
[Intro by The Neptunes]
Charles Adrian
I REMEMBER HOW, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.
And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I'd left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the concert programmes I'd abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughter's wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.
Are you sure, she'd said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress he'd bought me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallised fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, finer than anything she'd worn since that adventurous girlhood in Indo-China, daughter of a rich tea planter. My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire...
That was the first page of The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, which is from an edition of a collection called The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories published by Vintage in 2006. It has a beautiful cover – as all Vintage books do – showing a woman with pink legs and high heels incorporated into... there are no shoes, just her legs finish in this pink high heel. There's only one leg and that's appearing from beneath this Little Red Riding Hood-style cloak. And before I read, you might have recognised Intro from the Neptunes album The Neptunes Present… Clones. My music concept for today, predictably enough, is short pieces of music. Or just short tracks from albums. Here's one of those from Sufjan Steven's album Come On Feel the Illinoise [sic].
Music
[One Last Whoo Hoo for the Pullman by Sufjan Stevens]
Charles Adrian
At nine seconds long that one's called One Last Whoo Hoo for the Pullman. And here's something called One Before Munsters Theme by the Mardi Gras Big Band. That's right, I think. It's from their album Alligator Soup.
Music
[One Before Munsters Theme by the Mardi Gras BB]
Charles Adrian
There isn't much more that needs to be said about that, I think.
Now my next collection is called The Second Blackstaff Book of Short Stories – which was published in 1991 with the assistance of the Arts Council, Northern Ireland – and the first story, by George McWhirter, is called A Bad Day to be Winning. And just look how much work the title is doing in this story.
A Bad Day to be Winning
George McWhirter
Often I ate champ at their house where they lived in Cooper Street near the meadow. Mostly they ate sausages and champ or plain champ and had the greyhounds been fed the same mashed potatoes, chopped scallions and butter as the family, they would have fattened into canine pashas in their pens. Their kennels were built on the grand scale, up to a ceiling as high as that of a regency house and open into the backyard; concrete foundations with runnels and raised bowls were fitted into the lower walls.
The dogs never looked to be impressed. Strapped into their horsehair blankets for the wintertime, their backs were as skinny and bent as safety pins. They were muzzled to stop them nipping at anything that passed by, or to keep the bitches' maws off their whelps, or the stud from snapping at the bitches. Like miserable mendicants, the lot of them wandered in constant solicitation of somebody or something to put the bite on.
Andy had put in a huge window between the kitchen and the enclosure. Eating at the table with the family, we could watch the dogs and the three pack of greyhounds could watch us.
‘It tortures the animals,’ Lena moaned.
‘It makes them run,’ said Andy. ‘They see what they get when they win.’
‘And what's that?’
‘Fed.’
‘They'll bloody well forget, then, for they never bloody win!’
At a distance, walking up Cooper Street to a card [?] at Dunmore...
That's just one page out of sixteen and we already know so much about where the story might be going. You don't know where the story's going – I promise you that – but you know the world in which it takes place. It's all there in the first page.
Now, do we have time for a burst of Elgar? One of the Enigma variations just quickly?
Music
[Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, “Enigma”, No. 5 by Elgar/The Royal Philharmonic/Daniel Barenboim]
Charles Adrian
Okay, that was Variation No. 5 played by the London Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
My next book is an oddity. It's called Virago is 40; A Celebration and, although it was filed under Short Stories in Oxfam Books, it's really a collection of short writings of all sorts, including short essays and poems – like this one, the first piece in the book, which is by the now late Dr Maya Angelou.
On Reaching Forty
Other acquainted years sidle
with modest
decorum
across the scrim of toughened
tears and to a stage
planked with laughter boards
and waxed with rueful loss.
But forty
with the authorized
brazenness of a uniformed
cop stomps
no-knocking
into the script
bumps a funky grind on the
shabby curtain of youth
and delays the action.
Unless you have the inborn
wisdom
and grace
and are clever enough
to die at
thirty-nine.
I cheated. I read the second page because I wanted that last little bit. I'm also going to read you a couple more of the first pages from this book. Here's the first page of Margaret Atwood's contribution, called Forty Years Ago and Forty Years Ahead.
So I racked my brains on the subject of Forty. The results were not promising. In forty days and forty nights of rain the earth was covered in water, says Genesis. Forty thieves tried to do in Ali Baba but came to a bad end. Forty were the days of purification that beautiful virgins went through before being inducted into the king's hareem, says the Book of Esther. Why Forty? Search me. It was a guy thing. Didn't want stinky virgins.
Lewis Carroll's Queen Alice is welcomed numerically:
Put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea—
And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-times-three!
But surely there is a missing verse:
Put apples on covers and websites and more—
And welcome Virago with forty-times-four!
Here's why I sing thusly: Virago became my UK paperback publisher in the seventies – not quite forty years ago, more like thirty-four – because, quite frankly, no one else wanted to.
Okay and I haven't finished yet because I'm going to read the whole of Sarah Churchwell's How to Describe a Jazz Age Birthday Party, which is two pages long. It goes like this:
When The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, Gertrude Stein wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald explaining what had impressed her most about this new novel. ‘You are creating the contemporary world,’ she told him. It has become a truism that Gatsby is the Jazz-Age novel par excellence but what most of us don't realise is how much of our contemporary moment was born in the lost world that Scott Fitzgerald was helping to create or at least to intuit.
Between the end of the First World War in 1918 and Fitzgerald's departure from New York for Europe – where he would write Gatsby – in early 1924, more than a hundred words were first recorded in English that many of us would think define our age but actually jazzed their way into existence during the roaring twenties. Here are forty of them that may surprise you:
Cool, motherfucker, teenage, columnist, publicised, mass-media, brand name, performative, robot, rebrand, transvestite, to proposition, post-Freudian, cold turkey, quantum mechanics, feedback, sadomasochistic, homosexually, post-feminist, biracial, to ace, French kiss, fucked off, fundamentalism, bagel, atom bomb, ultrasonic, comfort zone, junkie, market research, off the rack, food chain, nutritionist, posh, upgrade, nouveau poor, inflationary/deflationary, merchant bank, arbitrage...
[playing with the sound of the word] ... arbitrage... arbitrage... arbitrage... arbitrage... arbitrage...
... subprime.
In his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise Scott Fitzgerald was the first to record the words ‘t-shirt’, ‘daiquiri’, ‘hipped’ – ‘I'm hipped on Freud and all that’ – and the use of ‘wicked’ as a term of approval. Both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald liked the compliment ‘slick’ in 1922, the year in which he would set Gatsby. ‘Thank you for the slick party,’ Zelda wrote to one editor that year and at the end of the year e. e. cummings was the first to record ‘party’ as a verb, writing in a letter that he had ‘partied with the New York literary crowd in Paris’.
And so it turns out that some wicked cool partying to celebrate turning forty is not beneath our dignity after all.
I like words, so I like that last piece. And it redeems, I think, what is otherwise a very patchy collection of bits and pieces – as these ‘books by request’ often turn out to be. Who buys them originally, though? Who was the first owner of this copy? I should report that it was published last year – 2013 – and is already being sold second hand. It also looks suspiciously crisp and unread.
Here's a classic:
Music
[Her Majesty by The Beatles]
Charles Adrian
Her Majesty by the Beatles.
Now, I don't know if you remember the eagle-featured mother from my first story, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber... Oh, and I didn't say at the time but there's a resonant title, right? The Bloody Chamber. Where's that story going? A woman getting married, going off by train towards... the bloody chamber... Anyway, here's another bird-faced character in a story by Sembene Ousmane [/sembeɪne uːzmɑːne/] – I assume that's how it's pronounced. I haven't done any research. The collection is called – rather baldly I think – African Short Stories and it's subtitled Twenty Short Stories from Across the Continent. The first section is West Africa and this story is called The False Prophet. It's by Sembene Ousmane, as I said, and is translated by Len Ortzen.
Mahmoud Fall, with his bronze countenance, aquiline nose and his rapid walk – though not so rapid as the hawk-like glance of his eyes – came of a line of Senegalese Muslims. Faithfully abiding by his ancestors' motto, ‘What is mine belongs to me, but there is nothing to stop us sharing what is yours’, he did no work. Or to be exact, he did not like killing himself with work. When children slyly asked him, ‘Mahmoud, why aren't there any cats where you come from?’ he would answer, ‘I don't really know.’
It was his way of avoiding saying that cats, like him, liked to be fed without doing anything – which is why there are none to be seen in Upper Senegal. The land there is arid, and the inhabitants erect their tents at nightfall and strike them at dawn. An animal cannot live at man's expense when man is a nomad. Like clings to like, it is said. But these two shun each other. And any cat seen perchance in that country is a pitiful sight.
Mahmoud Fall, tired of doing nothing, with his pockets empty, had decided to journey towards the sunset and the country of the Bilals. In his view these ebony-skinned men were his inferiors, only good for guarding the hareem, after having been castrated which eliminates disputes over the paternity of the children.
When he reached Senegal, Mahmoud Fall changed his name. He called himself Aidra, a name which opened all doors to him. He was received everywhere with the respect due to his rank. Having studied the Koran in Mauritania – something the Senegalese always regard with respect – he profited from his knowledge of the Holy Book, presiding over prayers and sinking into interminable genuflexions. The local...
I like Mahmoud. Something bad is going to happen to him. It's a good story. I tell you that for free.
Here is Chopin's Prélude Opus 28 number 10 in C sharp minor, played by Alain Planès.
Music
[Prélude Op.28 No.10 in C sharp minor by Chopin/Alain Planès]
Charles Adrian
My last book for today on this whistlestop tour is a collection of stories by the Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. The collection is called Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories and this, the first one, is the title story. Mine is a Heinemann edition from the African Writers Series published in 1985 and it has a wonderful cover illustration of a woman in a hijab, looking slightly askance. We're looking at her full in the face but her attention is taken up by something altogether else that we can't see. It's somewhere to the side of us or behind us. I like that very much. Here's Distant View of a Minaret, the first page of:
Through half-closed eyes she looked at her husband. Lying on his right side, his body was intertwined with hers and his head bent over her right shoulder. As usual at such times she felt that he inhabited a world utterly different from hers, a world from which she had been excluded. Only half-aware of the movements of his body, she turned her head to one side and stared up at the ceiling, where she noticed a spider's web. She told herself she'd have to get out the long broom and brush it down.
When they were first married she had tried to will her husband into sensing the desire that burned within her and so continuing the act longer; she had been too shy and conscious of the conventions to express such wishes openly. Later on, feeling herself sometimes to be on the brink of the experience some of her married women friends talked of in hushed terms, she had found the courage to be explicit about what she wanted. At such moments it had seemed to her that all she needed was just one more movement and her body and soul would be quenched, that once achieved they would between them know how to repeat the experience. But on each occasion, when breathlessly imploring him to continue, he would – as though purposely to deprive her – quicken his movement and bring the act to an abrupt end. Sometimes she had tried in vain to maintain the rhythmic movements a little longer, but always he would stop her. The last time she'd made such an attempt, so desperate was she at this...
And that's it.
A little shorter than usual, it's also been a jerky episode today, moving swiftly – too swiftly, perhaps – from one thing to the next without much time for reflection, without much of a thread to bind everything together, without really much of an attempt to create any sense of a whole. But don't think that that was accidental! That, right there, that's that's how it can be to read a collection of short stories. I suggested at the beginning of the episode that they are forgiving of a kind of faithlessness – you can very easily put a particular collection down and read something else and then pick it up again and then put it down again – but I think they also lend themselves to that. Too many short stories one after the other can be overwhelming. As Forest Gump might have said, given a little encouragement in the right direction, a short story collection is like a box of chocolates: you need to pace yourself or you'll make yourself sick.
Here's Epilog by Einstürzende Neubauten from their album Hans [sic] der Lüge. See you next week.
Music
[Epilog by Einstürzende Neubauten]
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]