I remember reading this story years ago and feeling then the usual disappointment I tend to get when reading a story about a writer. Those years back I tried to read as many short stories as I could. I often couldn’t. Still, I tried to follow any leads, discover new writers and get some of their collections as soon as I heard about them. O’Connor was one such I discovered after getting some collection in Scab City library which contained a story about a woman with a wooden leg being somehow left stranded by an errant bible seller in a hay loft. It was something like that, and appealed to me at the time, I think, because it seemed , like some stories by Maupassant, unstintingly realistic in its portrayal of human cruelty, something I had come to see a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first story in the collection, since I started reading it again at the end of the summer, which to me is entirely unsatisfying.<--More-->

It is a short piece and the main character is indeed a dragon. Now, I have no objection to stories about animals, nor even fictional animals. There is one story by Kafka which I began to read some months ago about a mole-like creature living in a constant state of anxiety. That was a longer story, and I stalled in reading it. I was reading several things at the same time back then, but the story also failed to sustain my interest. At least, however, I could see what was being expressed. Just as Temple Grandin, who writes about autism and studies animal behaviour, has written about animals and considers that the state of anxiety that aspergic and autistic people tend to experience is redolent of the state she considers most animals experience themselves, Kafka was making a point about humans which raises this story to a level where it demands attention as a part of his oevre. I do object, however, to a reliance on the fantastical to shore up a story. For me, every writer who supplied a positive quotation for that insipid tome The Life of Pi where even the protagonist cannot be named without some phobia of ordinary life getting in the way, is tainted. Here too, just with talking tigers who are said somehow to provide proof of God, the problem was mainly that dragons do not exist and so fail to excite me. But another issue here is that there is little substance to the humans who populate the story in its few pages. Nabokov resorts to some simplistic satire in collapsing the town targeted by the dragon, who finally ventures out of his cave, into a struggle between two tobacco firms. The first puts posters all over the dragon, who sleeps off his indigestion after eating a few people, and then the second, mistaking the dragon for a rubber mock-up provided as a PR stunt sends out a man on a horse dressed up as a knight. This sends the dragon back to his cave in remembrance of the death of his mother. Soon after, he dies.

The problem here is that we have no reason to care about anybody or anything in this story and so the only thing which could conceivably amuse would be the satire, which is pretty broad brush stuff, or the fantasy, which is itself pretty pedestrian, especially with this dragon expiring so easily after no confrontation at all.

Given the satire there is no reason for us to favour one tobacco firm over the other, to salute the inventiveness of one manager over the other, especially given that the death and retreat of the dragon is serendipitous.

I have not yet decided what to make of this author as a short story writer. Of course, I have not yet tackled his great works.

I bought a copy of Nabokov’s Collected Stories five or six years ago on the strength of some kind of recommendation. It was a time I was looking into all kinds of short story writers. Looking back it is hard to believe how this interest of mine went cold. Though I packed and unpacked William Trevor’s weighty Collected Stories numerous times from my suitcase as I packed for my first trip to Prague on the 30th of December, 2003, weighing and reweighing the damn thing, I barely read two or three stories in the twenty months I was there, each time remarking to myself how cathartic it was to do just that, and how important it was to do just that much more often. I read V. S. Pritchett, Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Carver, of course, Brendan Behan, Grace Paley, Katherine Mansfield, and many other greats. But I would read only a handful of stories by each author rather than a whole book. Indeed, I remember being depressed when M_____ read Where I’m Calling From, Carver’s Selected Stories, in English, in no time at all, when I was not convinced I had even made it through the whole collection myself.[–More–]

The Nabokov collection stalled after a few stories because there was far too much of the supernatural for my liking. I find it very difficult to read stories and novels which deal in either the supernatural or indulge in any kind of magical realism, allegory or fantasy - my attempt to read Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, the subject under discussion this month for the Guardian book club, in order to gauge my ability to closely read a book in a month, is struggling for this reason.

Nabokov’s prose style is incredibly rich. In my last post I had intended to write a little about two stories of his I had read. The first of these, Beneficence, was a short piece that saw a man, a sculptor, waiting for a lover with whom he had recently quarrelled. He was waiting at the Brandenburg Gate. (This is part of the experience, for me, of reading Nabokov, this sense of envy, of inferiority, of this man with his experience of evocative places in what seems to me to have been, experientially, such a richer period of history than our own. He knows languages and places so well, and indeed, his son, in the preface can sign off, “Dmitri Nabokov, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Montreux, Switzerland, June 1995″.) This story is little more than it’s setting, albeit a setting seen through the eyes of this man, who is to be disappointed. But it is the descriptive skill Nabokov has that makes the story. In his youth he had planned to be a painter (and here again, one reads of his experiences and wilts in envy and sadness), and with a story like this one can see he had the eye for it.

La Veneziana is the story Dmitri writes of as demonstrating this love of painting most clearly. In addition, it displays his love of playing and writing about tennis. Set in a castle, the story concerns an art dealer, McGore, and his beautiful wife, the old colonel and his tempestuous son, Frank, who is carrying on with his aforementioned Maureen, and this latter’s bashful friend, Simpson.

The story carries many authorial interjections of the kind I find far less off-putting than even the suspicion of otherworldly goings-on. “Narrowing his eyes, Frank looked after them… and then, turning to Maureen, said a few words that will doubtless surprise the unprerceptive reader…” This I find inobtrusively playful. In contrast, I resent, in postmodern literature the idea that the manner in which a narrative has come to be on paper must be explained away as if, firstly, a story, expertly told, remains the most unnatural thing in the world, and secondly, and absurdly, it can only be normalised by means of a further story.* I suppose I struggle when such interjections become more involved, and perhaps have difficulty when, say, Milan Kundera, steps into his novel to describe how a character first came to him, but it is refreshing, I suppose, to see that I so embrace these old-fashioned values of story telling.

It is the detail and the setting again which bring me in to the story. The relations between the characters are very real. It was, paradoxically, this which I believe first disturbed me about Nabokov’s stories those years ago. I think that I may have found, say, A E Coppard’s stories of wood sprites and supernatural beings, a little less alienating, partly because these seemed to be so much a part of rural life. Nabokov’s were rich and detailed, set the scene and then, it seemed, brought in the supernatural for twists and turns, and for endings. This seemed like gimmickry. It seemed like he was almost sabotaging his own story, the world he had constructed.

In La Venezia, this is much the same, but this time I was able to read on, and, more or less, to continue to enjoy and admire the story. There is a twist to the story, and by the end of the tale I found myself perhaps trying to anticipate the twist as much as I was involved in the lives of the characters, and this is, for me, an inferior way of reading a story. All the same I will persist with Nabokov. He is certainly worth it.

In reading such stories I am inevitably reminded of my own struggles with word-finding. Maybe it is with being away from England for a period, and because of my own suspicion of the language while I was away (I considered it somehow a language in decline, a debased and [again I search for the word!] decadent tongue which refuses to come alive with the people I am intent on writing about, people I for so long resisted in terms of my fiction, considering them somehow unworthwhile subjects of literature). But there again, I always had problems with word blindness, and though my vocabulary was once much superior to what it is today, it was the simpler words which often evaded me, leaving my prose reading like an imitation of Will Self at his worst.

Oh, yes, one section of the story which was interesting to me in terms of POV, was a short section (which reminded me somewhat of Keats’ Beadman) in which the watchman introduces some activity in the gallery in which Simpson is to be humiliated. He is granted two paragraphs and then moves on:

Thus the pleasant, innnocuous old fellow, like some guardian anggel, momentarily traverses this narrrative and rapidly vanishes into the misty domains whence he was evoked by a whim of the pen.

* * *

On reading this, a couple of exercises occurred to me. One could, on reading a story, strike out all those passages that, for one reason or another, one would not write oneself, and either try to do something with them, or to write analogues of them, or resculpt the story without them in one’s own style to give some indication of how one stands.

* This is part of the animus for carrying on with the Lord of the Flies structure that built up around FF while I was inn Florence with one story being placed within another which itself stands within another. I would see this as excrescence were it not for the fact that, A> I have a real fondness for old stories of mine which have expired due to lack of time and temperamental constraints. This one, Lord of the Flies, died when the Apple iBook computer I am writing on at the moment died on me in Prague, forcing me to fly home heartbroken. And B> Quite aside from encoding a political commentary on the world in which we live, the structure which grew up around Lord of the Flies, can serve as a comment on the development of literature.

ps. Should the formatting of this post be all to cock, this is due to the fact that Firefox keeps on crashing on this old G3 iBook, locking up the damn thing for minutes at a time. I have loaded up the old version of Internet Explorer it shipped with to try and get something done, but find that it is either incapable of running Java or for one reason or another is not up o the task of encoding the text into HTML. It may take me some timme, of course, to get round to updating it.

I have been thinking seriously recently about setting up a reading club for writers in the area. One that would take in short story collections, novels and plays, poetry and biography, but perhaps also films. I have come to realise that I really must make a concerted effort to study more fiction and learn from the form of the stories and novels I most appreciate, to really think through structure and point of view. This has been an obsession over the last week or so and I have been thinking of the best way to go about finding a good group for this end, and of a way to organise and structure the group, but at the same time I have tried hard to narrow my focus to a single book, and to try to study it. To this end I think I should try to make a few notes on notable books and stories I read in an attempt to learn from them. Read the rest of this entry »