William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Today, in the UK especially, it has never been harder to get a short story published. The outlets available to a young writer that I benefited from in the 1980s have virtually dried up. Yet, despite the state of publishing, the short story seems to me to be undergoing something of a revival, both here and in the USA. The socio-cultural explanation for this would perhaps be the massive increase in creative writing degree courses. The short story is the perfect pedagogical tool for this kind of education and conceivably the tens of thousands of stories being written (and read) in these institutions are cultivating a taste for the form in the way that the mass-circulation magazines did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, I feel that there may be a different reason why readers of the short story have never really gone away. And once again, this has nothing to do with length. The well-written short story is not suited to the sound-bite culture: it’s too dense, its effects are too complex for easy digestion. If the zeitgeist is influencing this taste then it may be a sign that we are coming to prefer our art in highly concentrated form. Like a multi-vitamin pill, a good short story can provide a compressed blast of discerning, intellectual pleasure, one no less intense despite the shorter duration of its consumption. To read a short story like Joyce’s “The Dead,” Chekhov’s “In the Ravine” or Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is to be confronted by a fully achieved, complex work of art, either profound or disturbing or darkly comic or moving. The fact that it takes fifteen minutes to read it is neither here nor there: the potency is manifest and emphatic.

Perhaps that’s what we are looking for, as readers, more and more these days — some sort of aesthetic daisy-cutter bomb of a reading experience that does its work with ruthless brevity and concentrated dispatch. But, as writers, we turn to the short story for other reasons. I think, finally, it comes down to this ability that the short story offers to vary form, tone, narrative and style so quickly and so dramatically. Angus Wilson said he began writing short stories because he could start and finish one in a weekend before he had to return to his job at the British Museum. There is a real investment of effort, to be sure, but it’s not the long haul of the novel with its years of generation and execution. You can write a plot-event story one week and a ludic/biographical one the next. Chekhov, the quintessential short story writer, referred to this same pleasure in the notebook I quoted from above. He had copied down something Alphonse Daudet had written and it obviously resonated strongly with him too. All short story writers will know what he means. Daudet’s words were these:

“Why are thy songs so short?” a bird was once asked. “Is it because thou art so short of breath?”

The bird replied: “I have very many songs and I should like to sing them all.”

2004

Anton Chekhov (1)

An A — Z

A. Anton

Anton Chekhov died a hundred years ago, on 15 July 1904. He was forty-four years old. His lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis. In Russia Chekhov is revered as a short story writer of genius; his plays are considered as extremely interesting but somehow ancillary and complementary to his main achievement. And this Russian conception of his work has some validity: Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short story writer ever. Like certain great pieces of music, his stories repay constant revisitings. The two dozen or so mature stories he wrote in the last decade of the nineteenth century have not dated: what resonated in them for his contemporaries resonates now, a hundred or more years on. Chekhov, it can be argued, was the first truly modern writer of fiction: secular, refusing to pass judgement, cognizant of the absurdities of our muddled, bizarre lives and the complex tragicomedy that is the human condition.

B. Biarritz

Chekhov visited Biarritz in south-west France in 1897. His health was failing and he had to seek a warmer climate in the winter months. For an effectively monoglot Russian writer (scant French and a little German) and a semi-invalid he had travelled fairly far and wide in his life. In Europe he knew Germany, France and Italy (how one wishes he had visited England). In 1890 he made an epic eighty-day trans-Russian journey to Sakhalin, a prison island in furthest Siberia. The book he wrote about the conditions of the prisoners there is earnest but dull; it does not live up to the near-intolerable struggle it took to reach the place. He came home by steamer via the orient: Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon and then through the Suez Canal to Odessa.

C. Critics

“Critics,” Chekhov said once to Maxim Gorky, “are like horse-flies which prevent the horse from ploughing. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double bass and a fly settles on its flanks and tickles and buzzes… he has to twitch his skin and swish his tail. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: ‘Look I am living on the earth. See, I can buzz too, buzz about anything’.” Chekhov went on: “For twenty-five years I have read criticisms of my stories and I don’t remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once [a critic] said something which made an impression on me — he said I would die in a ditch, drunk.”

D. Drink

Untypically for a Russian of his era, Chekhov was not a heavy drinker. His elder brothers Kolia and Aleksandr were chronic alcoholics and perhaps the memory of the squalor of Kolia’s wasted life (he was a hugely talented painter who died aged thirty-one) put Chekhov off. Yet Chekhov’s last act in life was to drink a glass of champagne. Fatally ill, he had travelled to the German spa town of Badenweiler in the vain hope that German doctors might save him. German medical etiquette demanded that, when the patient was near death and there was nothing more that a doctor could do, a glass of champagne would be offered. Chekhov knew what this meant. He accepted the glass, muttered “Ich sterbe” (“I’m dying”) and drank it down. His last words were: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.” Then he died.

E. Event-Plot

This is William Gerhardie’s phrase — one he uses to describe the kind of fiction written before Chekhov. Gerhardie, who is tremendously acute about Chekhov (he published a passionately enthusiastic short book about him in 1923), spoke with real authority. An Englishman, born in Moscow in 1895, wholly bilingual, Gerhardie idolized Chekhov (whom he read in Russian long before he was translated). Gerhardie himself was described in his 1920s heyday as “the English Chekhov” and they do share a similar philosophy of life — though Gerhardie’s talent had a briefer flowering. Gerhardie’s analysis of Chekhov’s genius maintains that for the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life were made the form of the fiction. Previous to Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions: the narrative was manipulated, tailored, calculatedly designed, rounded-off. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens and Turgenev could not resist the event-plot powering and shaping their novels. Chekhov abandoned this type of self-conscious “story” for something more casual and realistic. As Gerhardie says, Chekhov’s stories are “blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life.” This is why Chekhov’s stories still speak to us a hundred years on. His stories are anti-novelistic, in the traditional sense. They are like life as we all live it.

F. Faith

Chekhov’s personal world was a Godless one: despite his orthodox religious upbringing, he asserted, in 1892, that “I have no religion now.” He wrote about religious folk, indeed one of his greatest stories is entitled “The Bishop.” But intelligent people who believed in God seemed baffling to him. “I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer.”