I have always preferred writing short stories to writing novels. I have had to learn over 30 years how to attack and survive a novel. A novel is a trek home from the desert, sometimes a journey you wish you had never started. Exhausting and humbling, just occasionally wonderful.



But a short story can come from a deeper part of the cave. In a novel you make preparations. You lay in for a siege, carrying a flickering lantern. For a short story you need to carry a blow-lamp for a building site. James Joyce’s Dubliners were the first short stories I read that showed me a completeness that a novel never can have. Then I found the Russians, Katherine Mansfield, William Trevor and the confident, fearless Americans. After the war I read an unpretentious, honest short book called The Short Story by LAG Strong. He wrote, “If you are going to be a writer, write. Write about everything. Write about linoleum.”

In my first term reading English at London University I had a letter from my old school teacher, Miss Onions, who taught cookery (for years we had hardly seen an onion), asking me to look up her niece who had just arrived from “the Colonies” and was very lonely in a school in Reading. I had no idea that Reading (which she pronounced as in “reading”) was not a suburb of London and I was shocked to find that I had to give up my last faded ten-shilling note for the train fare. The schoolgirl niece looked all of 21, was poised, beautifully dressed, bronzed with African sun. She hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with me.

There was to be a lecture that afternoon. Someone talking about writing short stories. Would I like to come? She didn’t seem enthusiastic.

Who should be giving it but LAG Strong. He talked about linoleum. We were going back to London on the same train. I followed him into his carriage. He had deep sad lines between nose and mouth. In those days I was almost pathologically shy. When I began to talk to him I felt I was stark naked and doing a belly-dance. He was longing for sleep but I blundered on. “Do you write yourself? Send me something,” he said, gave me his card and disappeared. I sent him a (very) short story called “The Woman Who Lost a Thought”. I have it still. He wrote back a fortnight later, in bright blue ink, the words “Jane, you are a writer beyond all possible doubt.”

For 40 years thereafter I have been publishing novels and seven or eight collections of short stories. LAG Strong, alas, is gone.

The best thing to happen to me for years was when my publisher rang to say he wanted to do a book of my short stories – old ones and new – a “fat, chunky, satisfying book”. It would never sell, said I. “Nobody reads short stories now.”

But he said, “You are wrong. They do. It will be a big success.” And so it seems to be. And Miss Onions, good woman, refunded the ten shilling note.

Extract

from “Miss Mistletoe”

Daisy Flagg was a parasite. Nothing wrong with that. Hers is a useful and ancient profession. In Classical times every decent citizen had a parasite. There were triclinia full of them. They flourished throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, though later demoted in England to the status of mere court jesters - demoted because your pure parasite does not have to sing for his supper. Not a bar. Not a note. His function is to sit there smiling below the salt cellar; not ostentatiously below it, but as ami de maison.

Now and then the parasite was noticed by those upstream above the salt, among the silver platters. Sometimes he was taunted and had to pretend to enjoy it. There was a Roman parasite who was teased by his host that he had only been invited because the host was having his way with the parasite’s wife, and Ha! ha! ha! the parasite had to reply.

More about The Stories

“Gardam may be well into her ninth decade now (and none of these stories was written before middle age), but her imagination crackles with menace. Each one of these narratives – none of them afraid of looking into the great terrifying secrets of love and grief, death, ageing and faith in a mere handful of pages – makes the heart race.”

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