We asked author Philip O'Ceallaigh what his favourite or most inspiring short stories were.
This is what he said:
Hard to choose a favourite Hemingway story, but it would have to be from his first collection, In Our Time, and most days I’d go for Big Two-hearted River. It’s a strange story, because nothing much happens. In it, a man walks into the wilderness to find a good place to fish. It describes the places he walks through, the heat of the day, the light through the pines, the weight of the pack on his back, how he made his camp, and the fishing itself. Once in one of my own stories I described a man reading a story, immersed, while in a busy street of a crowded city. I didn’t name the story, but I was imagining him Big Two-Hearted River, and registering my own reaction to what Hemingway had achieved:
“What was beautiful about the story was… a sensual pleasure, in each of the things he saw and did. …It was a feeling for beauty that the writer of the story possessed. In the words he chose, in his intention to observe and report the world, there was something very pure and solitary. And when you followed the words and saw the things as the man walked and camped and fished, you too felt that the world was once again something new to be seen and noticed and felt.”
Hemingway describes the natural world so that you feel it, but it is his ability to describe conflict that critics remark more often. Like Isaac Babel, he describes terrible things without seeming to register any writerly distress. Frank O’Connor in The Lonely Voice, his classic study the short story form, claimed that what the two men had in common was the ‘romaniticism of violence,’ presumably because they did not explicitly condemn the events they described.
My favourite Babel stories are those describing his boyhood in the ghetto of Odessa in Tsarist times. The Story of My Dovecot describes the young Babel’s attempts to be an exemplery student, to gain admission to education in the face of an ant-Jewish quota system. He gets his exams on the same day a Cossack pogrom tears through the ghetto. A lesson on the power of the pen, perhaps. (Babel was executed during the Stalinist purges. He had given up writing, but at that point even a writer’s silence was a crime.) Other Babel stories I love are In the Basement (“I was a deceitful boy. That was the result of reading…”) and Guy de Maupassant, where he goes from a romantic appreciation of the writer’s spirit to a knowledge of the facts of his terrible life of illness and madness (“I was brushed by a foreboding of truth.”)
O’Connor got it wrong. Babel did not romanticise violence. He just knew it was there.
Chekhov is another kind of artist. His prose never calls attention to itself. It is measured and understated. One of my favourites is simply entitled My Life, the leisurely tale of a young provincial of good family who innocently decides to earn his living by manual labour. Interestingly, My Life is on the long side, and you sense that arbitrary definitions of form do not trouble the author. The story takes as long as it takes. These days his publisher would tell him to pump some air in it so they could put it out as a novel.
Hard to choose from among such Bukowski classics as Six Inches, All the Pussy We Want and The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California. In the latter, two winos steal a corpse. It turns out to be the best date they’ve had in quite some time. They have epiphanies such as “she can’t say NO!” and “Everything is so sad – that we live all our lives as idiots and then finally die.” In the drunk exhausted dawn they push her out to sea, and among the seaweed and the waves, with her hair moving in the current, she becomes a mermaid.
I like Bukowski because he turns the junk of life into art. And that his style is so delightfully un-literary, anti-literary. He does stuff you shouldn’t do, says what doesn’t get said, seems less to be courting a readership than spitting in its collective eye. And yet he’s a marvelously efficient, concise writer. His best poetry works in the same way as his stories, as compact punchy narratives, and so many episodes from his novels could stand alone as stories too.
What defines a short story? Sometimes they’re not even all that short. Other times they’re poems. About all you can say about them is they are self contained, that they work. Sometimes they’re even bits of something else that doesn’t really work: I’m thinking of a novel I’ve just read by Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch. Ridiculous novel. But I’d throw chapters 23 or 28 in there among my favourite short stories.
Philip O'Ceallaigh
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This reminds me that I really do have to read some Babel. Is it a coincidence that both he and Frank O'Connor have namechecked Maupassant in titles of their stories? (O'Connor wrote one called 'A Story by Maupassant'.) Perhaps this is a rite of passage all great short story writers must pass through.
The guest blogger here, Philip Ó Ceallaigh, is no slouch himself. I recently read and enjoyed his collection The Pleasant Light of Day.
Posted by: John Self | July 02, 2009 at 03:17 PM
The Spirit Level,
Find the book so up lifting and so true. Seems nowadays to us to be such common sense. However, we seem abou to be hit with the change from Keynesian Economics to Friedman Economics and injustice seems to be the name of the game! How can we avaod this? Have you read 'The Shock Doctrine' by Naomi Klein?
Posted by: Liz Donnelly | November 09, 2009 at 08:19 PM