Searches & Seizures

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“I began this collection of short novels with no idea that this was what I was doing. Having just finished a full-size novel, The Dick Gibson Show, I thought it would be good to write a short story, something I had not attempted since 1964. I am a slow writer, and a nervous one, and the story I started I worked at diligently but without conviction for three months. Then a friend told me an anecdote about a friend of his who maintains a sort of zoo for his own amusement, whereupon I abandoned the story and undertook to write The Making of Ashenden. It got longer than I had expected, and when I finished it I saw that I had written a novella.

“But I was hooked; I had enjoyed writing the novella, enjoyed (I’m talking now about the writer’s always minimal pleasure) writing at that length more than at any other. Hence, when an interviewer asked me about my next book, on the spur of the moment I told him I was working on a collection of novellas. I wasn’t, but as soon as I said it I knew it was something I really wanted to do.

“The second to be written was The Condominium and, sadly, it was inspired by my attendance at the funeral of an aunt I loved very much. The events in the story have nothing to do with my aunt, but as I sat shivah in the bungalow in New Jersey where I had spent my summers when I was a boy, I found myself brooding about the relationship between the houses people live in and their bodies.

“The third story was The Bailbondsman. It was written in London, and it came to me virtually all at once when I saw the word “bailbondsman” in a sentence in a book; for some reason the word — I mean the word—frightened me, as it still does.

“Since this is a collection of novellas, I tried, once I knew what I was doing, to link the stories thematically — or, to be more precise, to link them through some sort of thematic progression, which explains my decision to arrange them as I have here. Thus, all three stories have certain characteristics in common. In each case the protagonist is a bachelor (at one time I had thought of calling the collection Eligible Men), and each is concerned in one way or another — though very differently — with death. Images recur from story to story, though these images are intended to shift their meanings with their contexts.

Go, little book…”

— STANLEY ELKIN