The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, Page 2

  This, in a sense, is the ‘enigma’ of John Fowles’s short story here, as a social fiction contends with an artistic one. And the extraordinary flourish with which the form has developed over the 1970s and 1980s has surely something to do with the relationship between social and historical awareness and a revived fictionalist curiosity. The recent renewal of interest in the short story displays a very wide variety of preoccupations: the grotesque and fantastic modes of the stories of Ian McEwan and Angela Carter, the use of the oral story-telling tradition in Salman Rushdie, the exploitation of Jewish or Japanese inheritance in Clive Sinclair or Kazuo Ishiguro. In the short story as in the novel, it grows harder to suppose that there is a single or clear-cut tradition, just as it does to deny that the short story is serving us as a supremely artful form and a field of fictional experiment. One of the virtues of the story is that it shows us that in every serious work of fiction the writer is saying something crucial about the form he or she is using, as well as treating a subject or distilling an experience. Recent writers have emphasized this greatly and given the short story a remarkable contemporary promise. And so it is appropriate that this volume should not only display, as I think it does, that our major post-war writers have consistently explored the forms of short fiction but that it should give a large part of its space to the achievements of an outstanding young literary generation who are coming to dominate fiction and its future.

  The aim of making this collection was to show that in Britain now the short story is an adventurous, inventive, very various and, above all, a discovering form. In creating it I have had great help from my wife Elizabeth, who did much of the collecting and organizing, from Martin Soames of Penguin Books, and from many of the writers included. I should also express my larger debts to others who have helped concentrate my notions of what the form can mean: my former colleagues Angus Wilson and David Lodge; other friends who are often former students, including Rose Tremain, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Clive Sinclair, all of whom did much to expand my view of the story; and many present students who are working in the genre and doing exactly the same.

  Malcolm Bradbury

  Norwich, 1987.

  * * *

  MALCOLM LOWRY

  * * *

  STRANGE COMFORT AFFORDED BY THE PROFESSION

  Sigbjørn Wilderness, an American writer in Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship, paused on the steps above the flower stall and wrote, glancing from time to time at the house before him, in a black notebook:

  Il poeta inglese Giovanni Keats mente maravigliosa quanto precoce mori in questa casa il 24 Febbraio 1821 nel ventisessimo anno dell’età sua.

  Here, in a sudden access of nervousness, glancing now not only at the house, but behind him at the church of Trinità dei Monti, at the woman in the flower stall, the Romans drifting up and down the steps, or passing in the Piazza di Spagna below (for though it was several years after the war he was afraid of being taken for a spy), he drew, as well as he was able, the lyre, similar to the one on the poet’s tomb, that appeared on the house between the Italian and its translation:

  Then he added swiftly the words below the lyre:

  The young English poet, John Keats, died in this house on the 24th of February 1821, aged 26.

  This accomplished, he put the notebook and pencil back in his pocket, glanced around him again with a heavier, more penetrating look – that in fact was informed by such a malaise he saw nothing at all but which was intended to say ‘I have a perfect right to do this’, or ‘If you saw me do that, very well then, I am some sort of detective, perhaps even some kind of a painter’ – descended the remaining steps, looked around wildly once more, and entered, with a sigh of relief like a man going to bed, the comforting darkness of Keats’s house.

  Here, having climbed the narrow staircase, he was almost instantly confronted by a legend in a glass case which said:

  Remnants of aromatic gums used by Trelawny when cremating the body of Shelley.

  And these words, for his notebook with which he was already rearmed felt ratified in this place, he also copied down, though he failed to comment on the gums themselves, which largely escaped his notice, as indeed did the house itself – there had been those stairs, there was a balcony, it was dark, there were many pictures, and these glass cases, it was a bit like a library – in which he saw no books of his – these made about the sum of Sigbjørn’s unrecorded perceptions. From the aromatic gums he moved to the enshrined marriage licence of the same poet, and Sigbjørn transcribed this document too, writing rapidly as his eyes became more used to the dim light:

  Percy Bysshe Shelley of the Parish of Saint Mildred, Bread Street, London, Widower, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin of the City of Bath, Spinster, a minor, were married in this Church by Licence with Consent of William Godwin her father this Thirtieth Day of December in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixteen. By me Mr Heydon, Curate. This marriage was solemnized between us.

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN

  In the presence of:

  WILLIAM GODWIN

  M. J. GODWIN

  Beneath this Sigbjørn added mysteriously:

  Nemesis. Marriage of drowned Phoenician sailor. A bit odd here at all. Sad – feel swine to look at such things.

  Then he passed on quickly – not so quickly he hadn’t time to wonder with a remote twinge why, if there was no reason for any of his own books to be there on the shelves above him, the presence was justified of In Memoriam, All Quiet on the Western Front, Green Light, and the Field Book of Western Birds – to another glass case in which appeared a framed and unfinished letter, evidently from Severn, Keats’s friend, which Sigbjørn copied down as before:

  My dear Sir:

  Keats has changed somewhat for the worse – at least his mind has much – very much – yet the blood has ceased to come, his digestion is better and but for a cough he must be improving, that is as respects his body – but the fatal prospect of consumption hangs before his mind yet – and turns everything to despair and wretchedness – he will not hear a word about living – nay, I seem to lose his confidence by trying to give him this hope [the following lines had been crossed out by Severn but Sigbjørn ruthlessly wrote them down just the same: for his knowledge of internal anatomy enables him to judge of any change accurately and largely adds to his torture], he will not think his future prospect favourable – he says the continued stretch of his imagination has already killed him and were he to recover he would not write another line – he will not hear of his good friends in England except for what they have done – and this is another load – but of their high hopes of him – his certain success – his experience – he will not hear a word – then the want of some kind of hope to feed his vivacious imagination –

  The letter having broken off here, Sigbjørn, notebook in hand, tiptoed lingeringly to another glass case where, another letter from Severn appearing, he wrote:

  My dear Brown – He is gone – he died with the most perfect ease – he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd at half past four the approaches of death came on. ‘Severn – lift me up for I am dying – I shall die easy – don’t be frightened, I thank God it has come.’ I lifted him upon my arms and the phlegm seemed boiling in his throat. This increased until 11 at night when he gradually sank into death so quiet I still thought he slept – But I cannot say more now. I am broken down beyond my strength. I cannot be left alone. I have not slept for nine days – the days since. On Saturday a gentleman came to cast his hand and foot. On Thursday the body was opened. The lungs were completely gone. The doctors would not –

  Much moved, Sigbjørn reread this as it now appeared in his notebook, then added beneath it:

  On Saturday a gentleman came to cast his hand and foot – that is the most sinister line to me. Who is this gentleman?

  Once outside Keats’s house Wilderness did not pause nor look to left or right, not even at the American Express, until he had reached a bar whi
ch he entered, however, without stopping to copy down its name. He felt he had progressed in one movement, in one stride, from Keats’s house to this bar, partly just because he had wished to avoid signing his own name in the visitors’ book. Sigbjørn Wilderness! The very sound of his name was like a bell-buoy – or more euphoniously a light-ship – broken adrift, and washing in from the Atlantic on a reef. Yet how he hated to write it down (loved to see it in print?) – though like so much else with him it had little reality unless he did. Without hesitating to ask himself why, if he was so disturbed by it, he did not choose another name under which to write, such as his second name which was Henry, or his mother’s, which was Sanderson-Smith, he selected the most isolated booth he could find in the bar, that was itself an underground grotto, and drank two grappas in quick succession. Over his third he began to experience some of the emotions one might have expected him to undergo in Keats’s house. He felt fully the surprise which had barely affected him that some of Shelley’s relics were to be found there, if a fact no more astonishing than that Shelley – whose skull moreover had narrowly escaped appropriation by Byron as a drinking goblet, and whose heart, snatched out of the flames by Trelawny, he seemed to recollect from Proust, was interred in England – should have been buried in Rome at all (where the bit of Ariel’s song inscribed on his gravestone might have anyway prepared one for the rich and strange), and he was touched by the chivalry of those Italians who, during the war, it was said, had preserved, at considerable risk to themselves, the contents of that house from the Germans. Moreover he now thought he began to see the house itself more clearly, though no doubt not as it was, and he produced his notebook again with the object of adding to the notes already taken these impressions that came to him in retrospect.

  ‘Mamertine Prison,’ he read … He’d opened it at the wrong place, at some observations made yesterday upon a visit to the historic dungeon, but being gloomily entertained by what he saw, he read on as he did so feeling the clammy confined horror of that underground cell, or other underground cell, not, he suspected, really sensed at the time, rise heavily about him.

  MAMERTINE PRISON [ran the heading]

  The lower is the true prison

  of Mamertine, the state prison of ancient Rome.

  The lower cell called Tullianus is probably the most ancient building in Rome. The prison was used to imprison malefactors and enemies of the State. In the lower cell is seen the well where according to tradition St Peter miraculously made a spring to baptise the gaolers Processus and Martinianus. Victims: politicians. Pontius, King of the Sanniti. Died 290 B.C. Giurgurath (Jugurtha), Aristobulus, Vercingetorix – The Holy Martyrs, Peter and Paul. Apostles imprisoned in the reign of Nero. – Processus, Abondius, and many others unknown were:

  decapitato

  suppliziato (suffocated)

  strangolato

  morto per fame.

  Vercingetorix, the King of the Gauls, was certainly strangolato 49 B.C.. and Jugurtha, King of Numidia, dead by starvation 104 B.C.

  The lower is the true prison – why had he underlined that? Sigbjørn wondered. He ordered another grappa and, while awaiting it, turned back to his notebook where, beneath his remarks on the Mamertine prison, and added as he now recalled in the dungeon itself, this memorandum met his eyes:

  Find Gogol’s house – where wrote part of Dead Souls – 1838. Where died Vielgorsky? ‘They do not heed me, nor see me, nor listen to me,’ wrote Gogol. ‘What have I done to them? Why do they torture me? What do they want of poor me? What can I give them? I have nothing. My strength is gone. I cannot endure all this.’ Suppliziato. Strangolato. In wonderful-horrible book of Nabokov’s when Gogol was dying – he says – ‘you could feel his spine through his stomach.’ Leeches dangling from nose: ‘Lift them up, keep them away…’ Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Mann, ditto brother: Buddenbrooks and Pippo Spano. A – where lived? became sunburned? Perhaps happy here. Prosper Mérimée and Schiller. Suppliziato. Fitzgerald in Forum. Eliot in Colosseum?

  And underneath this was written enigmatically:

  And many others.

  And beneath this:

  Perhaps Maxim Gorky too. This is funny. Encounter between Volga Boatman and saintly Fisherman.

  What was funny? While Sigbjørn, turning over his pages toward Keats’s house again, was wondering what he had meant, beyond the fact that Gorky, like most of those other distinguished individuals, had at one time lived in Rome, if not in the Mamertine prison – though with another part of his mind he knew perfectly well – he realized that the peculiar stichometry of his observations, jotted down as if he imagined he were writing a species of poem, had caused him prematurely to finish the notebook:

  On Saturday a gentleman came to cast his hand and foot – that is the most sinister line to me – who is this gentleman?

  With these words his notebook concluded.

  That didn’t mean there was no more space, for his notebooks, he reflected avuncularly, just like his candles, tended to consume themselves at both ends; yes, as he thought, there was some writing at the beginning. Reversing this, for it was upside down, he smiled and forgot about looking for space, since he immediately recognized these notes as having been taken in America two years ago upon a visit to Richmond, Virginia, a pleasant time for him. So, amused, he composed himself to read, delighted also, in an Italian bar, to be thus transported back to the South. He had made nothing of these notes, hadn’t even known they were there, and it was not always easy accurately to visualize the scenes they conjured up:

  The wonderful slanting square in Richmond and the tragic silhouette of interlaced leafless trees.

  On a wall: dirty stinking Degenerate Bobs was here from Boston, North End, Mass. Warp son of a bitch.

  Sigbjørn chuckled. Now he clearly remembered the biting winter day in Richmond, the dramatic courthouse in the precipitous park, the long climb up to it, and the caustic attestation to solidarity with the North in the (white) men’s wash room. Smiling he read on:

  In Poe’s shrine, strange preserved news clipping: CAPACITY CROWD HEARS TRIBUTE TO POE’S WORKS. University student, who ended life, buried at Wytherville.

  Yes, yes, and this he remembered too, in Poe’s house, or one of Poe’s houses, the one with the great dark wing of shadow on it at sunset, where the dear old lady who kept it, who’d showed him the news clipping, had said to him in a whisper: ‘So you see, we think these stories of his drinking can’t all be true.’ He continued:

  Opposite Craig house, where Poe’s Helen lived, these words, upon façade, windows, stoop of the place from which E.A.P. – if I am right – must have watched the lady with the agate lamp: Headache – A.B.C. – Neuralgia: LIC-OFF-PREM – enjoy Pepsi – Drink Royal Crown Cola – Dr Swell’s Root Beer – ‘Furnish room for rent’: did Poe really live here? Must have, could only have spotted Psyche from the regions which are Lic-Off-Prem. – Better than no Lic at all though. Bet Poe does not still live in Lic-Off-Prem. Else might account for ‘Furnish room for rent’?

  Mem: Consult Talking Horse Friday.

  – Give me Liberty or give me death [Sigbjørn now read]. In churchyard, with Patrick Henry’s grave; a notice. No smoking within ten feet of the church; then:

  Outside Robert E. Lee’s house:

  Please pull the bell

  To make it ring.

  – Inside Valentine Museum, with Poe’s relics –

  Sigbjørn paused. Now he remembered that winter day still more clearly. Robert E. Lee’s house was of course far below the courthouse, remote from Patrick Henry and the Craig house and the other Poe shrine, and it would have been a good step hence to the Valentine Museum, even had not Richmond, a city whose Hellenic character was not confined to its architecture, but would have been recognized in its gradients by a Greek mountain goat, been grouped about streets so steep it was painful to think of Poe toiling up them. Sigbjørn’s notes were in the wrong order, and it must have been morning then, and not sunset as it was in the other house with t
he old lady, when he went to the Valentine Museum. He saw Lee’s house again, and a faint feeling of the beauty of the whole frostbound city outside came to his mind, then a picture of a Confederate white house, near a gigantic red-brick factory chimney, with far below a glimpse of an old cobbled street, and a lone figure crossing a waste, as between three centuries, from the house toward the railway tracks and this chimney, which belonged to the Bone Dry Fertilizer Company. But in the sequence of his notes ‘Please pull the bell, to make it ring,’ on Lee’s house, had seemed to provide a certain musical effect of solemnity, yet ushering him instead into the Poe museum which Sigbjørn now in memory re-entered.

  Inside Valentine Museum, with Poe’s relics [he read once more]

  Please

  Do not smoke

  Do not run

  Do not touch walls or exhibits

  Observation of these rules will insure your own and others’ enjoyment of the museum.

  – Blue silk coat and waistcoat, gift of the Misses Boykin, that belonged to one of George Washington’s dentists.

  Sigbjørn closed his eyes, in his mind Shelley’s crematory gums and the gift of the Misses Boykin struggling for a moment helplessly, then he returned to the words that followed. They were Poe’s own, and formed part of some letters once presumably written in anguished and private desperation, but which were now to be perused at leisure by anyone whose enjoyment of them would be ‘insured’ so long as they neither smoked nor ran nor touched the glass case in which, like the gums (on the other side of the world), they were preserved. He read: