Dear Illusion: Selected Stories

AFTERWORD

This piece by Kingsley Amis originally appeared as the Introduction to the 1987 edition of Collected Short Stories.

These are nearly all the short stories I have ever published; I omit ‘The Sacred Rhino of Uganda’ (1932) as uncharacteristic. I wish there were more of them, and not only because I should be that much richer if there were. For one to an extent committed to the novel of standard length (which I take to be in the region of 75,000 words) and to producing fairly regularly too, setting out on something of a different order of size, something that hardly need do more than get as far as a second page in order to have being, is a busman’s holiday certainly, but still a holiday. From having to keep twenty Indian clubs in the air at once you suddenly find yourself given licence to get by with two. And if you drop one of those, what does it really matter? A couple of botched pages can be filed sine die or even scrapped; a couple of hundred — well, I hope it never happens to me.

If shorts are so angst-free, why not write more of them, perhaps switch to them? Partly because (for that very reason, I suspect) short-story ideas or starting-points come to me rarely, as can be seen. Novel ideas turn up with no greater frequency but, in their different case, quite fast enough (touch wood). Each sort of idea declares itself as such instantly, simultaneously with its dawning. For instance, the moment I thought of the word that Courtenay says to Barnes near the end of ‘The House on the Headland’ I knew I had a short story and also that it would be, or seem to be, a secret-service story. Whereas, when once in Tottenham Court Road a taxi hailed by an Asian ignored him and stopped for me instead, I knew I had a novel coming and also that it would be about a rich fellow of progressive views.

All the same, a glance will show that my kind of short story has a strong affinity with the novel; its scale is different but its internal proportions, the relative parts played by dialogue, narrative, description, are alike and make the two read alike. And the stories are telescoped novels in that it would be feasible, however savagely boring the result (and the process), to draw them out to near standard length. Potter’s earlier life in the timber yard and something of his marriage could be stuck on to the front of ‘Dear Illusion’, but Sue Macnamara could not be brought into any of that and so the structure would be deformed. The one story here that has to begin and end where it does is ‘Mason’s Life’ — almost true too of the four SF-drink pieces. Anyway, the things that only the short story can do, the impression, the untrimmed slice of life, the landscape with figures but without characters, make little appeal to me. This collection is really one of chips from a novelist’s work-bench. I say so without complacency. A novel may, indeed in certain respects does, call for not only more sustained but also more intensive effort than a story; even so, a volume of Kipling’s stories, say Life’s Handicap, offers stiff competition on merit to Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Almayer’s Folly or any other novel of the period. Well, few writers move with equal facility in both forms. Graham Greene seems to, though.

Mention of Kipling leads me to wonder whether, if he were today to produce ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ or another masterpiece from the book referred to, he would find its magazine publication as easy as he actually did in 1890. Then and for long afterwards, weeklies and monthlies entirely or largely devoted to new fiction, for the most part short stories, flourished in both Great Britain and the United States. Now, notoriously, a tale of any length has to fight for a place alongside political articles, interviews with film directors, cookery columns and soft porn. Just as notoriously a hardback or paperback collection usually does worse commercially than a novel by the same author. This last fact was once explained to me by a publisher (not one of mine) as reflecting readers’ dislike of having to acquaint themselves with a new set of characters a dozen times over in the course of the book, instead of getting shot of the trying task for good at the beginning. Can that be right? Have readers got worse? — after all, there are more of them. Or have short-story writers got worse? — after all, writers of everything else have. But then novels go on getting read, or at least bought. But then again, not in hardback very much. Perhaps the vestigial puritanism that breeds reluctance to fork out £11.95 on a mere (book-length) story breeds outright refusal when the merchandise is a lot of little stories. Perhaps.

My other possible partial explanation takes account of another fact, that of course the short story of the 1980s is to be seen not only among tits and bums, etc., but also in those pale and sickly present-day equivalents of the Victorian fiction magazines, the periodicals subsidized by the Arts Council or one of its offspring. A writer, or any other kind of artist, who partly or largely need not depend on pleasing the public, who in effect has his fee guaranteed whatever the quality of his product, is tempted to self-indulgence and laziness. You may maunder on at your own sweet will in prose or verse (or something called verse) and get your money regardless. But when it comes to a book and the public, a larger public, is invited to pay the full price, even that of a paperback, it jibs. It turns to a novel, which as yet is unlikely to contain any material subsidized by the Arts Council.

The above has at any rate the merit of heeding a third fact: when people decline to buy something, they usually do so because they see insufficient merit in what is on offer. And word gets round; I should guess that the term ‘short story’ has become a fully fledged consumer-deterrent in its own right, like ‘sensitive study’ in a different context. Short-story writers need another Kipling to restore their image. But Rudyard resurrected would have a plenitude of more urgent business on his hands.

In reprinting these pieces I have followed the policy of altering nothing material, merely supplying omissions and rectifying stylistic and factual erros. In particular, ‘Who or What Was It?’ retains its original form of radio script. Let me say here that the broadcast had an interesting and mildly appalling sequel. My intention had been to fool listeners into thinking it was a factual account until three-quarters of the way through and then, with luck, induce them to suspend their altogether necessary disbelief for the last few minutes. The detail about the cross was put in partly to make incredulity inescapable and final. For some, it missed its mark most grievously. An old friend, himself a novelist, the late Bruce Montgomery (‘Edmund Crispin’) telephoned to ask if the story was true; when I demanded to know how he could have thought that it could conceivably be true, he disarmingly shifted his ground by saying he wondered if I had had a go of DTs. A television producer telephoned to suggest using it for one of a new series of programmes on the supernatural. I asked how it was proposed to set about this. ‘Well,’ came the reply, ‘I thought we might start by taking the cameras along to the pub.’ I said, ‘Pub! What pub?’ and there was a great silence.

The funniest and most frightening of these cases was a letter from something calling itself the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College, Oxford, director Sir Alister Hardy, FRS. The writer, who was not Sir Alister, said that he and his colleagues were collecting examples of outlandish coincidences and the like, asked for further details of my ‘experience’, and added that so far nobody known to him had come across ‘such a striking and remarkable nexus of events as you describe’. I hope not. There was another good bit about my having been (on one view of the matter) in two places at once; that was comparatively straightforward, the man said, an obvious case of ‘bi-location’. You could not wish for a finer example of the popular habit of thinking that giving something a Latin name goes a fair part of the way towards explaining it. ‘Mummy, there’s a monk floating in the air — how does he do it?’ ‘It’s called levitation, dear.’ ‘Oh, I see.’

I was tempted to string this fellow along, but compassion or laziness intervened. Eventually, I believe, the Religious Experience Research Unit or its scribes published a compendium of striking and remarkable nexuses of events. If I have the right book in mind, it received a great deal of respectful attention. In one way, this is not at all surprising. All sorts of people are uncomfortable in a universe where there seems to be nothing supernatural, nothing beyond this life, no undiscovered forces, no God. I sympathize; I find it none too cosy myself; but I do wish there were a little less eager, cruising credulity about. I wish too, quite vainly, that such people, other people too, would face a little more squarely what is entailed by believing, or believing in, something.

Science-fiction fans among many will remember how, one night in 1938, Orson Welles put out an adaptation of his near-namesake’s War of the Worlds over a New York radio station. It was cleverly done as a succession of supposed news broadcasts and, near the end, supposedly genuine commentators described the invaders from Mars horrifically battering their way into the city. According to the story, thousands of listeners panicked, fled along the streets, besieged bus terminals, drove off into the countryside. This showed credulity all right, stupidity too — ‘news’ of that sort would not be going out on just one channel, etc. But it also showed a certain consistency. If, for whatever inadequate reason, you really believe the Martians are coming, then you are behaving logically and appropriately by trying to run away, you are following out the consequences of your belief.

Nobody, as far as I know, panicked or drove to Cornwall as a result of my broadcast. But those who said they thought the story was true, or might be true, responded illogically and inappropriately. Consider: if you saw a man restoring to life another clinically certified as dead beyond the possibility of error (and that would be less extraordinary than what I described over the air), the appropriate response would surely not be, ‘How very interesting. I might telephone that chap in a day or two and see if I can find out a bit more about it.’ No; if you telephoned anyone it would be the Archbishop of Canterbury, you would fly to the Vatican, approach the worker of the miracle and say, ‘Master, I will sell all that I have and follow you.’ Those reactions to my broadcast constitute one more small piece of evidence that, when it comes to any debatable question of this sort, from the existence of ghosts to the value of palmistry, the line between belief and disbelief is becoming blurred. Is astrology true or false? Many would say that there was something in it, many more than take the slightest practical notice of its advice. Do you believe the flat-Earth theory? Yes and no. That way madness lies.

I have seen it said that the first three stories here are parts of an unfinished or discarded novel, and that ‘Moral Fibre’ comes from a draft of my novel That Uncertain Feeling. Neither is true.

Kingsley Amis