This event was in the Guardian Spiegeltent at the Festival, at 10.15; I thought it was at 10.30 and was about a minute late, much to my embarrassment. They had to play some music for a couple of minutes whilst I and a couple of other latecomers scurried in and blushed all over the place. But, once in, I enjoyed this event very much. Both writers have short story collections out: Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference (which I've read) and Tessa Hadley's Married Love (which I haven't). The talk was therefore about the particular nature of short stories, what they are like to write and to read. I've never actually read anything by Tessa Hadley, but as her particular interests include Austen, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Colm Tóibín (more of whom another time), I'm already quite a fan of her. Here is her 'author statement' on the British Council website, which I think is rather nice:
I love the irresponsibility of short stories. Writing short, you create with a free hand. Each new development you imagine can be drawn in to the story without consequences, with all the lightning-bolt effect of a first thought, no requirement to elaborate a hinterland. A quickly scribbled indication of background can stand in for a whole city, a whole past. And yet I can’t stop wanting to write novels too. Novels see things through. The reader is in for the long term; the writer is in for a sizeable stretch of her life. In a novel there’s not only the dazzle of the moment, but also the slow blooming of the moment’s aftermath in time, its transformation over and over into new forms. I love to write about the present, and the past that’s recent enough for me to remember. The fiction writer’s ambition is modest and overweening: to take the imprint of the passing moment, capture it in the right words, keep it for the future to read.
Both writers read extracts from their work, and the subsequent discussion focused substantially, like the passage above, on the difference between novels and short stories. It was chaired by Sue MacGregor, who was just what a chair ought to be: directing the writers in places where you would expect them to be modest (insisting on reading out parts she thought were particularly brilliant), but not conspicuous or interrupting the flow of discussion.
There was a lot of talk of the impact of a short story, the fact that it is like a punch or an explosion, it has to be engineered very strictly and must have a sense of being "tightly-strung". Sarah Hall mused that it was a bit like throwing a pot: you have to get it right on the first "throw", and can't save it by reworking if the first go isn't right. I'm not sure how much I agree with this -- I think a patient craftsmanship can improve things a lot more than writers (including myself) would like to admit -- but I do agree that short stories tend to come from a particular 'feeling' rather than the kind of scope you need for a novel. Hall also talked about the judgment you have to make about a short story, deciding whether it could "go the distance" into a novel, or should stay in the short form. This is something I've often wondered about things I've written -- whether they should and could be teased out and extended, or whether this would lead to 'padding' and dampen the whole effect -- so it was good to hear. Not to mention the apparently 'banality' of this idea, the admission that writing is often as much to do with logistics and practicalities as inspiration and vision.Tessa Hadley was the one who really impressed me, though I'm not sure why. She was lively and quick and extremely eloquent, and self-effacing. I almost wondered whether she had erased the sense that younger writers have of writing being bound up with your own attractiveness. I don't think this is a stupid or judgmental thing to say. I have this feeling myself more frequently than I'd like to admit, and been conscious of it in things I've given people to read. I have also on occasion sensed it in things friends have given me to read (and not always that young, either!).
Sarah Hall, in my impression (which is of course pure speculation), hasn't quite got rid of this sense yet, and it shows in the collection: many of the protagonists of the stories are women obsessing in one way or another about a relationship with a man; the book cover itself shows a naked woman with her back to us, on several different cover designs. I wondered how much these women were fictional versions of herself -- more than in the usual way for a writer! Perhaps this is an unfair way to belittle her writing -- after all, female sexuality is a perfectly valid and important subject -- but it was a feeling I had as I read the stories on the way up to Edinburgh, and seeing her in person gave me the same feeling again, so I'm standing by it. I should, however, say that I liked some of her stories very much, in particular 'She Murdered Mortal He' (the title, according to Google, taken from a Bob Dylan lyric). She can create a sense of oppressiveness and draw out a tense moment in a way that makes for good reading.But going back to Tessa Hadley: she read Elizabeth Bowen's story 'The Jungle' for the series of short stories podcasts released by the Guardian in 2010, and I was very struck by the way she captured tension and tone and mood with a very calm, restrained rendering (see previous post on authors reading their own work!). Though I have never read any of her fiction, she has mysteriously installed herself in my list of favourite literary figures. And, later the same day, she chaired the event with Colm Tóibín. More of which in a later post!
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