The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MODERN BRITISH SHORT STORIES

  Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist, Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia and cofounder there, with Angus Wilson, of the creative writing MA course. His novels include Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted as a famous television series; Rates of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987), also televised; and Doctor Criminale (1992). His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984; revised edition, 1992), No, Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991), The Modern British Novel (1993) and Dangerous Pilgrimages (1995). He edited Modernism (with James McFarlane, 1976), The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (1988) and The Atlas of Literature (1997). He was also the author of a collection of stories and parodies, Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), and several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Unsent Letters (1988; revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1987). He wrote many television plays, in particular the television ‘novels’ The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East, and he adapted several books for television and film, including Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue, Kingsley Amiss The Green Man and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.

  Malcolm Bradbury was awarded the CBE in 1991 for his services to Literature and was knighted in the 2000 New Year’s Honours List. He died in November 2000.

  THE PENGUIN BOOK OF

  * * *

  MODERN BRITISH SHORT STORIES

  * * *

  Edited with an Introduction by

  Malcolm Bradbury

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Viking 1987

  Published in Penguin Books 1988

  This selection and Introduction copyright © Malcolm Bradbury, 1987

  All rights reserved

  Pages 8–10 constitute an extension of this copyright page

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196515-4

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Malcolm LowryStrange Comfort Afforded by the Profession

  (from Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place)

  Samuel BeckettPing

  (from Collected Shorter Prose 1945–80)

  Elizabeth BowenMysterious Kor

  (from The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen)

  V. S. PritchettA Family Man

  (from V. S. Pritchett: Collected Stories)

  Dylan ThomasThe Burning Baby

  (from Adventures in the Skin Trade)

  Graham GreeneThe Invisible Japanese Gentlemen

  (from May We Borrow Your Husband)

  Angus WilsonMore Friend Than Lodger

  (from A Bit Off the Map)

  Jean RhysThe Lotus

  (from Tigers Are Better Looking)

  William GoldingMiss Pulkinhorn

  (from Encounter, August 1960)

  Kingsley AmisMy Enemy’s Enemy

  (from Kingsley Amis: Collected Short Stories)

  Ted HughesThe Rain Horse

  (from Wodwo)

  Alan SillitoeThe Fishing-boat Picture

  (from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner)

  Doris LessingTo Room Nineteen

  (from A Man and Two Women)

  Muriel SparkThe House of the Famous Poet

  (from Bang Bang You’re Dead)

  John FowlesThe Enigma

  (from The Ebony Tower)

  J. G. BallardMemories of the Space Age

  (from Firebird 3)

  William TrevorA Meeting in Middle Age

  (from The Stories of William Trevor)

  Edna O’BrienIn the Hours of Darkness

  (from Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories)

  B. S. JohnsonA Few Selected Sentences

  (from Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?)

  Malcolm BradburyComposition

  (from Who Do You Think You Are?)

  Fay WeldonWeekend

  (from Watching Me Watching You)

  David LodgeHotel des Boobs

  (from Cosmopolitan, 1986)

  Beryl BainbridgeClap Hands, Here Comes Charlie

  (from Mum and Mrs Armitage)

  Ian McEwanPsychopolis

  (from In Between the Sheets)

  Angela CarterFlesh and the Mirror

  (from Fireworks)

  Martin AmisLet me Count the Times

  (from Granta 4)

  Rose TremainMy Wife is a White Russian

  (from Granta 7)

  Salman RushdieThe Prophet’s Hair

  (from London Review of Books, 16 August 1981)

  Julian BarnesOne of a Kind

  (from New Stories 7)

  Emma TennantPhilomela

  (from Bananas Anthology)

  Clive SinclairBedbugs

  (from Bedbugs)

  Graham SwiftSeraglio

  (from Learning to Swim)

  Kazuo IshiguroA Family Supper

  (from Firebird 2)

  Adam Mars-JonesStructural Anthropology

  (from Firebird 1)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks are due to the copyright holders of the following stories for permission to reprint them in this volume:

  Kingsley Amis: for ‘My Enemy’s Enemy’ from Collected Short Stories (Hutchinson & Co. Ltd), (reprinted by permission of Century Hutchinson Ltd). Martin Amis: for ‘Let Me Count The Times’ from Granta 4, © Martin Amis, 1981 (reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd). Beryl Bainbridge: for ‘Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie’ from Mum and Mr Armitage, © Beryl Bainbridge, 1985 (reprinted by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd and Anthony Sheil Associates Ltd). J. G. Ballard: for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ from Firebird 3, © 1982 J. G. Ballard (reprinted by permission of the author c/o Margaret Hanbury, 27 Walcot Square, London SE11). Julian Barnes: for ‘One of a Kind’ from New Stories 7, 1982, © Julian Barnes, 1982 (reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd). Samuel Beckett: for ‘Ping’ from Collected Shorter Prose 1945–80 (John Calder, 1984), (reprinted by permission of the author and John Calder (Publishers) Ltd and of The Grove Press Inc.). © Samuel Beckett, 1974; all rights reserved. Elizabeth Bowen: for ‘Mysterious Kor’ from The Collected Stories of Elizab
eth Bowen, © 1946 and renewed 1974 (reprinted by permission of Jonathan Cape Ltd., Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen). Malcolm Bradbury: for ‘Composition’ from Encounter and Who Do You Think You Are?: Stories and Parodies (Seeker & Warburg Ltd, 1976). Angela Carter: for ‘Flesh and the Mirror’ from Fireworks, © 1974 Angela Carter (reprinted by permission of the author and Deborah Rogers Ltd). John Fowles: for ‘The Enigma’ from The Ebony Tower, © 1974 J. R. Fowles Ltd. William Golding: for ‘Miss Pulkinhorn’ from uncollected material (reprinted by permission of William Golding and Faber & Faber Ltd). Graham Greene: for ‘The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen’ from Collected Stories (reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger Ltd). Ted Hughes: for ‘The Rain Horse’ from Wodwo (reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd). Kazuo Ishiguro: for ‘A Family Supper’ from Firebird 2, © 1982 Kazuo Ishiguro (reprinted by permission of Deborah Rogers Ltd). B. S. Johnson: for ‘A Few Selected Sentences’ from Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (first published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1973), © the Estate of B. S. Johnson. Doris Lessing: for ‘To Room Nineteen’ from A Man and Two Women, © 1963 Doris Lessing (reprinted by permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd on behalf of Doris Lessing). David Lodge: for ‘Hotel Des Boobs’ from Cosmopolitan 1986, © David Lodge, 1986 (reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd). Malcolm Lowry: for ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession’ from Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place © Margerie Bonner Lowry (reprinted by permission of the Executors of the Malcolm Lowry Estate, Jonathan Cape Ltd and Literistic Ltd). Adam Mars-Jones: for ‘Structural Anthropology’ from Quarto magazine (reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd). Ian McEwan: for ‘Psychopolis’ from In Between the Sheets, © 1978 Ian McEwan (reprinted by permission of Deborah Rogers Ltd). Edna O’Brien: for ‘Mrs Reinhardt’ from Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (reprinted by permission of Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd). V. S. Pritchett: for ‘A Family Man’ from On the Edge of the Cliff (reprinted by permission of the author and Chatto & Windus Ltd). Jean Rhys: for ‘The Lotus’ from Tigers Are Better Looking (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1978: first published in Art and Literature, no. 11, 1967), © Jean Rhys, 1967. Salman Rushdie: for ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ (first published in the London Review of Books, Vol 3, No. 7 1981), © 1981 London Review of Books (reprinted by permission of Deborah Rogers Ltd). Alan Sillitoe: for ‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, © 1959 Alan Sillitoe (reprinted by permission of Tessa Sayle Agency and Alfred A. Knopf Inc.). Clive Sinclair: for ‘Bedbugs’ from the collection Bedbugs, © 1982 Clive Sinclair (reprinted by permission of Deborah Rogers Ltd). Graham Swift: for ‘Seraglio’ from the London Magazine, 1977 © Graham Swift, 1977 (reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd). Muriel Spark: for ‘The House of the Famous Poet’ first published in the New Yorker, 2 April 1966, © 1966 Copyright Administration Ltd (reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated). Emma Tennant: for ‘Philomela’ from Bananas, © Emma Tennant, 1975 (reprinted by permission of the author). Dylan Thomas: for ‘The Burning Baby’ from Adventures in the Skin Trade (reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd). Rose Tremain: for ‘My Wife is a White Russian’ from The Colonel’s Daughter (Hamish Hamilton Ltd and Arena; first published by Granta), © Rose Tremain, 1983 (reprinted by permission of Richard Scott Simon Ltd). William Trevor: for ‘A Meeting in Middle Age’ from The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (The Bodley Head Ltd, 1967; first published in Transatlantic Review, 1966), © 1967 William Trevor. Fay Weldon: for ‘Weekend’ from Cosmopolitan, 1978, © Fay Weldon. Angus Wilson: for ‘More Friend than Lodger’ from A Bit Off the Map, © Angus Wilson, 1957 (reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd).

  INTRODUCTION

  In setting out to collect the thirty-four short stories that make up this anthology of new British writing in probably the most difficult of all the prose forms of fiction, I had two main aims in mind. One was to display as well as I could the achievement of some of the best work produced by the strongest of our recent British writers, no easy task in a limited space, and one that tempts simplification and prejudice. The other and rather more difficult aim was to be broadly representative, so that the book might give not only a reasonable idea of the variety, but also the general trends and directions that have been taken by British fiction in the years since 1945.

  It so happens that these two somewhat divergent intentions seemed to grow more reconcilable as I read through the many short stories from which this anthology has been collected. The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression – in some ways the most modern of them all. For what we usually mean by the genre is that concentrated form of writing that, breaking away from the classic short tale, became, as it were, the lyric poem of modern fictional prose. The great precursors were Chekhov, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and Sherwood Anderson. It took on a strong modernist evolution in the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Babel and Kafka which, in the period after 1940, was followed by a new wave of experiment led by Beckett and Borges, and provided the short story with a repertory of late twentieth-century forms. The modern short story has therefore been distinguished by its break away from anecdote, tale-telling and simple narrative, and for its linguistic and stylistic concentration, its imagistic methods, its symbolic potential. In it some of our greatest modern writers, from Hemingway to Mann to Beckett, have found their finest exactitude and most finished stylistic practice. In fact, for many prose-writers it has come closest to representing the most ‘poetic’ aspect of their craft.

  But if the short story is a major modern form, and if the above is the kind of thing it is, then it is sometimes argued that the British have not been especially good at it. We have owed as much to the tradition of direct narrative as of poetic narrative, to D. H. Lawrence as to James Joyce. The British short story has often seemed to resist those laws or conventions – about the story as an art of figures rather than adventures, or about the need for it to be committed to the single occasion or the single concentrated image – that have marked a good deal of its development elsewhere. The British have never been noted for respecting aesthetic skills in their authors, and the broad reputation of British writers in the form has been, with some striking exceptions, rather like that of British chefs in the field of haute cuisine; we may be able to imitate the practice but not generate great change or artistic originality. This may be one reason why only a few British writers have made the short story their first or only form, and why a good many of our finest short story writers also happen to be our finest novelists.

  That fact has a convenience for this anthology, for it does, indeed, mean that many of the authors in this collection are our major writers of prose-fiction in general; hence the volume does display many of the striking directions and tendencies generally visible in British fiction since the War. But it also shows, I believe, that the short story has an importance and originality in the British line far greater than is often supposed. It is true that we have been somewhat short of those great magazines – consider the American tradition from, say, the Kenyon Review to the New Yorker – which encouraged the flourishing and development of the genre. But there have been moments, specifically during the 1940s when the pressure of wartime experience and the shortage of paper brought us Penguin New Writing and Horizon and the talents to fill them, when general interest in the short story has enlarged. We seem to be living in another such moment now, with a new wave of interest in short fictional forms. Though only a few recent writers have been short-story writers first, some of them have been of enormous importance. Writers of the thirties and forties like V. S. Pritchett and Elizabeth Bowen had major inheritors, such as William Trevor and Edna O’Brien, and the tradition seems particularly strong among new writers. Ian McEwan and Clive Sinclair, Adam Mars-Jones and Rose Tremain have made special use of the short story, and in a number of cases established their reputations with them, much as Angus Wilson did in the 1940s.

  Perhaps it
is that link between the novel and the short story that has made its development in Britain seem close to the same spirit of argument that has fed the British novel. To say it crudely, that argument has been one between a notion of prose-fiction as falling into a long-standing tradition of realistic or reportorial narrative, and the notion of it as an art of language, of experimental form and symbol, a notion that has often led in the direction of the strange, the fantastic, the grotesque, the surreal and the mythic. In much post-war fiction these traditions have seemed to collide, producing new kinds of self-questioning and a fresh enquiry into the nature and the proper conditions of a fiction. That range is very obvious in this collection, reaching, as it does, from writers, like Samuel Beckett and Malcolm Lowry, who have been strongly marked by the modernist tradition, but who have taken it further, to writers who have largely practised the story as a social and anecdotal form, like Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe and William Trevor. Equally it ranges from those writers who have stressed the self-questioning awareness of fiction (B. S. Johnson, John Fowles and David Lodge, for example) to those who, like Emma Tennant and Angela Carter, have explored the form’s links with fantasy, fairy-tale and legend.

  It seemed right to start this anthology at the close of the War, a time when there was indeed a revival of the short story and a marked sense of change in the spirit of writing, which we can sense in the fine, fragile manner of Elizabeth Bowen’s story and which somehow seemed peculiarly appropriate to the experience of life during the War. V. S. Pritchett once called the short story ‘the glancing form of fiction that seems to me right for the nervousness and restlessness of contemporary life’, and his own work managed a reconciliation of form and experience which has been a mark of a good deal of post-war British fiction. It was Angus Wilson’s appearance as a short-story writer at the end of the 1940s that suggested the post-war story had a new social experience to attend to, and that succession goes on still. Around the same time Samuel Beckett was developing a new form of experimental short story – exemplified by the difficult, exasperating and remarkable story ‘Ping’ in this collection; and in the work that followed we can sense not just the division of the modern British story into two traditions, one pre-eminently social and one predominantly experimental, but a sequence of constant attempts at reconciliation.