Four Stories and Me

Four Stories and Me
(This essay retraces some of the ground covered in this post. It was written for the competition held by Thresholds and as they didn't appreciate it I thought I'd inflict it on you. Thresholds have lots of interesting essays on the short story if you feel like reading more.)

Sometimes it seems that a short story can embed itself deep inside the memory, into crannies that novels can’t fit into. Some stories are forever curling and uncurling deep inside my own head. Why have these particular stories burned so deeply into my mind? It seems to me that many of those that have managed to establish themselves in my mind depict an absurd world where actions are dictated by chance and prejudice and the frailty and insignificance of human life are foregrounded.

The stories that push themselves upon me are The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County by Joseph Mitchell; Hunters in the Snow by Tobias Wolff ; To Build a Fire by Jack London; and The White Bitch by Liam O’Flaherty. All focus on the absurdity and frailty of life, and there is little evidence of hero’s or their journeys in any of them. Indeed O’Flaherty’s story toys with the idea of the short story as something throwaway itself.
Somehow these stories encapsulate my relationship to the short story and much of my own attitude to life. They have stood up to many readings and will stand up to many more.
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Whenever I try to remember a dream I stumble into a paradox. The dream seems to consist of a complex series of events and associations that would take a long period of time to narrate, the sort of complex web that a novel might weave. However, when I try to recall the structure of the dream, the series of events, it seems the dream was almost instantaneous, like a match briefly ignited on a windy shore, guttering, and then suddenly extinguished.

Some stories seem like this to me, and the sense of a bright flame in a dark universe seems part of what makes them so memorable.
These stories all have something of the dream about them, and a true sense of the world’s absurdity. And surely absurdity is the realm of the short story, for the absurd is of its nature less suited to the deconstructive intricacies of the novel. The absurd is somewhat like a dream, the drunkard Klansman planning to teach the bootleggers a lesson; the peasant putting life and limb at risk for the bitch he had just a few minutes earlier, tried to drown; the fire melting the water that will quench it; the punch line turned back on the joker.
The stories are set in isolated worlds. Indeed one is written in a world that consists of two people, a dog, a cliff, a boat and the sea and another simply one man, a dog and the cold. However this is no barrier to their ability to comment on the human condition.

Something about the stories

Written in 1938, The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County is an early piece of anti-fascist writing, deploying the arsenal of the satirist against the posturing of Mussolini, Göring and the whole fascist crew. However, they are only mentioned in the opening line: ‘Every time I see Mussolini shooting off his mouth in a newsreel or Göring goose-stepping in a rotogravure, I am reminded of Mr Catfish Giddy and my first encounter with Fascism.’

After that we are back in the world of the narrator’s youth, the year 1923, in Stonewall, North Carolina, the time and place where ‘Mr Giddy and Mr Spuddy Ransom organized a branch of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or the Invisible Empire, which spread terror through Black Ankle County for several months.’
Mitchell revels in the absurdity of the Klansmen, their two leaders are a drunk and a religious fanatic; one a tobacco salesman, one campaigning for potatoes to be grown instead of tobacco. The children spy on, and laugh at their activities, and know full well who the ‘bedsheets’ are. When the head Klansmen get white sheets for their mules the sight of these be-sheeted asses frightens the other mules unseating many Klansmen and causing them to stick to automobiles from that point onwards.
We know from the first sentence that their history will be short but the event that brings it to an end is not heroic but even more absurd than what has preceded it. Three Irish bootlegger brothers are set to be targeted so they get hold of some dynamite to protect themselves. When the Klan fail to arrive the three brothers, high on their own supply, detonate the three charges of dynamite, blowing huge holes in the ground and almost destroying their own house and holdings. The damage, and the holes, are sufficient to convince the Klansmen not to ride any more and they disband.

The whole story reads to me as a refusal to see Fascism as legitimate. The down home humour is perfectly pitched. Giddy and Spuddy may be as laughable as their names but they are shown as capable of perpetuating horrific cruelty upon the powerless. It also suggests that cowardice is a fundamental element of prejudice as people try to hide from their own failings by attacking traits of other people, even when those traits are also their own.

Hunters in the Snow, seems to me to sit easily beside Mitchell’s story. Three men; Kenny, Frank and Tub head out hunting for the day. Similarly to Mitchell’s Klansmen they are, one thinks, using it as an excuse to get out of the house.
The trio is like a comedy act with Tub as the fall guy. The story opens with him waiting in the cold and then the others arrive an hour late and drive the van up onto the pavement to force him to scramble out of the way. After they return from hunting Kenny shoots a couple of objects and then the landowner’s dog and then points the gun at Tub pretending to have gone off the rails. Tub, spooked, shoots Kenny. It turns out that Kenny had, in fact, been asked to shoot the old dog by the landowner.
Much of the story consists of the drive to the hospital in freezing weather as Kenny bleeds to death. His behavior before the shooting leaves us with little sympathy. His death allows the others to connect in a way they never could when Kenny was around. Frank admits to having fallen for his babysitter and Tub that his weight is not a result of ‘glands’ but of secret binge eating.

Although both of these stories are absurd, they also seem to take place in a somewhat comforting universe. The Klan are disbanded and Kenny reaps what he sows. The next two stories, however, are less comforting and it is perhaps no coincidence that I see both as being at least partly about the act of writing, or perhaps that should read the act of failing to write.

To Build a Fire by Jack London reduces the cast to a mere one, as a man who has got wet in dangerously cold weather tries, unsuccessfully, to light a fire to dry his clothes, and save his life.
Early on we are told that he lacks imagination, the cold ‘did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.’
The trail he follows is a dark curling hair line in the white expanse of snow. Perhaps imagination might lead us to imagine this as a metaphor for a story, winding its way across the white expanse of paper. And the protagonist’s attempts to light a fire could also be seen as the attempt to write a story. It is often unsuccessful.

The White Bitch tells in around three pages the story of a couple who decide to get rid of their dog because they can’t afford a license. To this effect they lead the dog to the edge of a cliff, and after some arguments, throw him off. However the dog does not die and the couple change their minds and rescue him from the sea. The woman says that she will sell some material she has set aside for a dress to pay for the license. It is at once throwaway and mythical.

In O’Flaherty’s story the dog is white with a couple of black spots, easily seen as a metaphor for the blank page itself. And the sea, well it could be the wastepaper basket. There goes another page. No wait, there might be something in it. Or maybe there isn’t, but what does that matter. The story seems almost a cosmic joke on the whole idea of stories.
The absurdity of the situation reminds me of Beckett and the relationship, blasted by drink and mutual disappointment, seems to find an echo in the work of Raymond Carver. O’Flaherty creates a series of linked yet meaningless events where the characters expend a lot of effort and emotion simply to get back to the same place that they started out from.
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There is something that the short form allows to happen in these stories. It focuses our minds on the act and doesn’t detract from it by elaboration, or extraneous backstory or plot. It then seems to amplify that act and the echo reverberates for longer than it would were the incident just part of a longer work, or spread through a longer work.
It also seems to be the perfect vehicle for an absurdist viewpoint. If life is absurd, surely a novel is hard to justify but a short story can pretend it is just a moment’s work, a fiction belied by the tautness and balance displayed in all these stories. When I kick words around trying to form them into stories it is these that are my polar stars. I just wish it wasn’t so cold at this desk, and that that fire would catch.

I used to write stories for my brother when I was younger. He would be given a title and told to write an essay of so many words for the next day and would pay me 50p to write them. I have never enjoyed writing so much since. The anonymity freed me completely from everything other than frustrating and confusing expectations. I played it for laughs and, I believe, the stories got them. Perhaps I need to embrace the absurd again. After all it is what attracts me as a reader. And dogs, it appears.