To celebrate the release of Stephen Orr’s The Boy in Time, we’re pleased to be publishing a sneak peek into the pages of the collection. The extract comes from Stephen’s introduction to the collection, where he writes about his first forays into short fiction, and highlights some of his inspirations for his work.
A plane in the distance, artillery, his father waiting, and the boy wonders what to do. In Stephen Orr’s new short story collection, a child born into a world he can’t comprehend waits for answers, overcome with possibilities. The collection’s impressionistic take on the short story captures a child’s bewilderment of what it’s like to be alive.
Read the introduction below.
Like many, I started writing short fiction (doesn’t this sound more respectable than stories?) well before I wrote a novella, then a novel, dripping with details and characters and plot, in the way the ‘greats’ (Dickens, for example, I started reading him when I was fourteen) taught us to write.
These early fictions were so laboured, predictable, welded onto familiar frameworks, that a few years later, looking back over them, I decided I’d said nothing original, so, as is the ritual, took them into the backyard (a dozen or so, perhaps) and burned them. This would ensure (Kafka and Max Brod-like) there were no traces of what was most certainly rubbish (although maybe genius – how far did my capacity for self-delusion reach?). The smoke would rise as an offering to the gods of the second-rate, and they’d be appeased, leave me alone, and I could get on with something worth reading.
From a young age we learn that words are tools. If I say ‘sunrise’, that’s enough (though some writers insist on making it painfully clear). Sex, more than enough. The term ‘drunkard’ is useful, but just as limiting. This is the art, the balance, between what’s kept in and excised.
We needn’t hear why her uncle wore taffeta, but it’s interesting, and took three days of research, so why not? We know there are millions of fictions written every year, thousands published; there are MFAs and creative writing degrees and people get up at four am to describe their version of the universe, or ignore their starving children to turn out another neglected poem. We insist upon the perfect metaphor, feel we’ve conquered the world when we cut another adjective, the twist, ah! you didn’t see it coming, did you, this is why she was murdered, here are the reasons for the divorce, all of this, as words, again, fail to counteract our own little man-made Coriolis effect. Somehow, we believe, we’ll get what others have missed. The nifty shift in tense, the unique stream-of-consciousness, the Sebaldian photos of desiccated fish.
I’m most interested in writers who can teach me something. Maybe this started at Sunday school, where some young teacher (determined to save our suburban souls) asked, ‘Who’s heard of the parable of the mustard seed?’ Of course, we’d only heard the parable of Steve Austin, Six Million Dollar Man, or the demigod H.R. Pufnstuf, so this was an intriguing question.
As she read: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed a man plants in his field.’ Going on to explain how this seed grows into ‘the largest of garden plants, and becomes a tree’. Me, my sister, the others thinking (perhaps): Why are we hearing about … oh, hold on, it’s not actually about the mustard seed! The clues were there: the teacher’s authentic smile, the simile-peppered text, the reluctance of the Author to give anything away, the insistence that the reader or listener makes his or her own meaning.
From there, the journey continued. With The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist came Dickens’s short fiction; with Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men, ‘The Chrysanthemums’. Patrick White revealed himself in new ways with his more theatrical, mystical and arcane stories (the ones he didn’t think would make it to novelhood?) with The Cockatoos and The Burnt Ones.
There was, it seemed, a connection between the small and big; the simple ideas and fleshed out epics.
Either way, one seemed necessary for the other, although with Jorge Luis Borges I learnt that short fiction wasn’t the poor cousin of novels, but the germinal seed, Whitman’s procreant urge, the things closest to what our ancestors grunted over Neolithic campfires. Clay statuettes made in the images of gods; base metals heated over ancient fires to make mythical alloys that would, as the centuries passed, become tools for the assembly of Great Literature. Sung by nineteenth century mastersingers in Nuremberg; Portnoy rhapsodising behind locked doors; Leopold Bloom contemplating the snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea.
Borges made it clear. Picking up in 1928 from where God had left off. Baltasar Espinosa staying at the Los Alamos ranch ‘south of the small town of Junin’ with his cousin Daniel. When Daniel is called away to Buenos Aires, Espinosa allows the Gutre family (‘they had come from Inverness and had arrived in the New World – undoubtedly as peasant labourers – in the early nineteenth century’) to move into a room beside his. He finds an English language Bible and starts reading them the Gospel of Mark (and the story finds its title, and framework). The family members take it too literally and, when Espinosa sleeps with their young daughter, use Mark’s lessons for their own ends: ‘… they cursed him, spat on him, and drove him back to the house … Espinosa realised what awaited him on the other side of the door … they had torn down the roof beams to build a cross.’ Nothing to see here. A simple moral, but no moral. Still, the largest of garden plants had become a tree. Nothing didactic or moralistic, no lessons to be taught or learnt by seven-year-olds with their socks pulled up to their knees.
Upon discovering Borges, and other masters of short fiction, the way forward was clear – say less, say it with less certainty, remove everything you can, make the idea so compelling it can never be unread, forgotten, discounted. Vonnegut created rules, and writers love rules, don’t they? Be a sadist. Start as close to the end as possible. Give the reader as much information as possible as soon as possible. But for me it was always the idea. Everything else was, and is, confetti.
Short stories can be anything we want them to be. The gem of the novel you know you’ll never write (I’ve saved myself years of work through condensing ideas into fictions for The Saturday Paper); a description of the way the man at the creamery scoops the ice cream, stops, wipes his brow, gazes out the window, continues; pleas for change; moments of horror (Flannery O’Connor’s adventures into gothic Catholicism); apprentice pieces; testing the water for something larger (Malcolm Lowry’s short version of Under the Volcano). The best examples of short fiction can’t be canned, labelled, opened and consumed at will. No writing course can teach them, no formula derived, no deeper understanding of some perfect model that leads to others (although this is how we mistakenly keep teaching fiction). Maybe that’s why there was only one Bible, and even that was a heavily edited and curated collection of fictions.
Stories like Juan Rulfo’s ‘Do You Hear the Dogs Barking?’ Here, we encounter a father carrying his injured son, Ignacio, across his shoulders as they cross mountains in search of the town of Tonaya. Why? What’s there? What answers? What redemptions? What’s happened to Ignacio? The boy tells his father, ‘Put me down here – leave me here – you go on alone.’ But the old man is determined, and disgruntled. ‘I’m not doing all this for you. I’m doing it for your dead mother. Because you were her son … she’s the one who gives me courage, not you. From the first you’ve caused me nothing but trouble, humiliation and shame.’ As we long for some explanation, but realise it’s not, it never will be, forthcoming.
In 2017, after publishing short fiction for a dozen years, I selected the best published and unpublished works and released them in a collection titled Datsunland.
What I left out, I see in retrospect, were my attempts at being funny, making a point, trying to convince readers of this or that – the lessons writers have to keep learning over and over. There were one or two that I wouldn’t, shouldn’t, have included. Luckily, collections allow a few moments of grace for the lesser to be subsumed by the greater. Mercy! But the truly great collections make no concessions. J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ strikes a perfect balance between the ordinary and tragic, as Seymour Glass unwinds before us, as the god Salinger (with a little help from William Maxwell) plays with his characters, describes their moles, their reading (‘Sex is Fun – or Hell’) and what happens when fish get banana fever (‘it’s a terrible disease’).
Or perhaps Chekov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’, Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, O’Connor’s ‘You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead’), the first remarkable reading of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, or the way one keeps returning to Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, feeling, somehow, there’s something you missed last time.
Here, then, is my second collection. I’ve tried to include a selection, a cross section of styles from experimental (‘The boy in time’) to problematic (‘Incident near Hoxtolgay Town’), tragic (‘Mrs Meiners has gone to get chalk’) to the stories that just appeared, ready-made (‘Violettowne’).
I found some ideas in newspapers, magazines, books. For example, ‘The leaf winds’, the last days of World War II, the actions of a family faced with uncomfortable truths. Something overheard (‘Violettowne’); a metaphor taken to its logical conclusion (‘The death of Tomas Kirja’); and sometimes, a realignment of the real world with my own. There are ghosts, sex, death and murder; the way in which (according to Borges) heaven and hell seem out of proportion; and children, cast into the horrors of the world we, and our old people, have made for them. The boy in time running for his life, wandering the desert, trying to make himself understood, survive. These stories have washed up on the beach over many years; only some were found and collected, others given to charity or, again, offered up to the flame. Maybe that’s the fate of every story we tell? They were published in The Saturday Paper, Burning House Press, Island, Westerly, Meanjin, The Saltbush Review and the anthology Thrill Me. As I’ve tired of the predictable, I’ve experimented. Will continue to do so, until I’m either unfathomable, surplus to need, or worst of all, boring. Then I’ll settle into my memories, and the visions that elude words.