Little misunderstandings of no importance : stories

NOTE

Baroque writers loved ambiguity. Calderon, and others with him, made ambiguity into a metaphor for the world. I suppose that they were moved by faith that, on the day when we awaken from the dream of living, our earthly ambiguity will finally be explained.

I, too, speak of ambiguities, but it’s not so much that I like them; I am driven, rather, to seek them out. Misunderstandings, uncertainties, belated understandings, useless remorse, treacherous memories, stupid and irredeemable mistakes, all these irresistibly fascinate me, as if they constituted a vocation, a sort of lowly stigmata. The fact that the attraction is mutual is not exactly a consolation. I might be consoled by the conviction that life is by nature ambiguous and distributes ambiguities among all of us. But this would be, perhaps, a presumptuous axiom, not unlike the baroque metaphor.

Concerning the stories collected here, I should like to supply only a few notes on their beginnings. I stole A Riddle in Paris one evening in 1975, and it stayed within me long enough to come out in a version that unfortunately betrays the original. I shouldn’t mind if Spells and Any Where in the World were considered, in the broadest sense of the term, ghost stories, which doesn’t mean that they can’t have another interpretation. The first owes something to a theory of the French child psychologist Dr. Franchise Dolto, while, in the case of the second, it may be superfluous to specify that it was inspired by Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris, particularly the prose poem from which I took the title. Bitterness and Clouds is a realistic story. Cinema owes much to a rainy evening, a small railway station on the Riviera, and to the face of an actress now dead.

About the rest of the stories I have little to add. I can only say that I wish Waiting for Winter had been written by Henry James and The Trains that Go to Madras by Rudyard Kipling. They would doubtless have come off better that way. Rather than regret for what I have written, I feel regret for what I shall never be able to read.