Perfect prose
Kate Chisholm
Chekhov, Louisa M. Alcott, Kafka and co. wrote them for money; thinking of them as a lucrative money-spinner to keep their families in bread and potatoes. Now they usually yield so little money from magazines and book publishers that very few writers devote themselves to perfecting the art of the short story (at least in the UK, though it’s not nearly so true in America or Canada). Of the great British magazines that used to churn out stories by Dickens and Gaskell, Hardy and Kipling, only the People’s Friend is left, published since 1869 by D.C. Thomson of Dundee (also publishers of those great products of the literary imagination Beano and the Sunday Post). Young, aspiring writers are instead encouraged by their agents and publishers to go off and produce the next monster novel.
The short story, that perfect snapshot of a life in just a few pages, the jewel-like precision of description, has been in danger of becoming an extinct literary species. All the big-money prizes (and associated kudos) have been devoted to novels, or poetry — until a couple of years ago when the combined forces of Prospect magazine and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts decided to launch a prize, worth a useful £15,000, for the best short story. No age limit; no sex, religion, colour or race discrimination. Just a colourful piece of writing, with a distinct atmosphere and convincing characters, conjured up in fewer than 8,000 words. It might seem an easy way to make a buck until you sit down and attempt it. Great patience and concentration are needed to create the architectural symmetry and distilled essence required of a short work, as opposed to a great, baggy novel.
The literary significance of last year’s prize was overtaken by political controversy as Hanif Kureishi’s shortlisted story, about beheadings in Iraq, was withdrawn at the last minute from its broadcast slot on Radio Four because of sensitivities over its subjectmatter. This year the BBC has become the main sponsor of the prize, and quite right too. As the largest short-story commissioner in the UK it should be encouraging the development of the form, not just by ensuring they are broadcast but by making it worthwhile for writers to spend the years it will take to practise and refine their technique, just as musicians have to learn their craft in often tedious daily exercises.
‘We hope,’ says Martha Kearney, chair of this year’s judging panel, ‘that readers and listeners will be encouraged to embrace the short story once more,’ and not just on radio. The shortlist of five stories has already been published in paperback as The BBC National Short Story Award 2008, in time for the announcement of the winner, Clare Wigfall, on Monday’s Today programme.
Wigfall, at 32 the youngest writer on the shortlist, has produced an extraordinary story for someone born in Greenwich, south-east London, and brought up in California in the 1980s, who has never lived in Scotland. ‘The Numbers’ is set some time in the far-distant past on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. One of the judges remarked that it’s ‘an astonishing feat of historical ventriloquism’, Wigfall creating a heroine, Peigi Nicfionnlaigh, a lonely young woman, so far removed from her in experience and knowledge. Peigi, who has been obsessed with counting numbers — ‘they lend a logic to the world ... they can be a comfort’ — since her childhood days at the village school, stumbles across the dark secrets of her island home.
Short stories are probably a bit like chamber music in that you appreciate them more the older you get, when you’ve learnt, hopefully, a bit more patience and willingness to work at what you read. I do enjoy reading them, but they also work brilliantly on radio, taking us back to the aural roots of our literary culture. A short story can be heard and held in the mind as a thing entire and of itself; a pleasing sufficiency of thought. The five stories on the shortlist were first broadcast on Radio Four last week, read by a superb group of actors including Samantha Bond, Geoffrey Palmer and Ron Cook. If you’re quick you can catch them on Listen Again. I listened to all five at once, and was intrigued by the huge range of style and flavour, from an atmospheric tale by Erin Soros about children in Canada climbing up a death-defying surge tank to Jane Gardam’s sharply observed tale from her collection The People of Privilege Hill. She gave us so many characters in just half an hour, from an entirely believable trio of cantankerous retired judges to their eccentric hostess Dulcie and her precocious eightyear-old grandson Herman, whose antics made me laugh out loud.
There were over 600 entries to this year’s prize, whittled down to five by a voting system among the judges that was derived, says Kearney, from the method used by the Prix Goncourt. What we now need, of course, is to revive the custom of a Spectator magazine short-story slot. ‘I have paid my dues’ were the words spoken by Tom Castro (see Travel pages) at his last exhibition a few months ago in Berlin. It is not by accident that three people fainted. Why? Was it recognition? A sense of déjà vu? It’s because you, the eye viewer, knows instinctively that you are there. Maybe the fainting trio saw themselves? Was it to them in some large way a rebirth? Castro is one of the most prestigious artists today to have discovered himself. The artist is not afraid: he embraces the recession. Indeed, he has paid his dues. But have we?
Orelia Distingo
Previous page
