Short Stories

This is the largest and most eclectic of Wilding’s four collections of short stories so far. Its 284 pages include stories ranging from ninety pages and two. Mostly written in the first person, they range in space between England and Australia, go back to the childhood of the narrator(s) (sometimes identified as Mike or Michael, making the autobiographical inferences irresistible) and in mode range from social realism through to the surrealistic modes of ‘What it was like, sometime

T.A.G. Hungerford’s new book Stories from Suburban Road is sub-titled ‘an autobiographical collection’ and comes complete with an appendix of photographs in the style of a family album with captions such as ‘Mick and me, 1922’, ‘Me, aged 16, and Phyllis Kingsbury, Scarborough, 1931’, and ‘Mum and Mrs Francis Victoria Wood, Como Beach, 1930’. Also, throughout the collection each story, sixteen in all, is accompanied by a photograph of the period of the author’s childhood and adolescence between the wars. The impression this provides is that the reader is invited to participate in Hungerford’s nostalgia for his past which consequently may be an inaccessibly private world – more reminiscence than substance. This impression proves to be quite incorrect. The photographs are moments frozen in time, enclosed in a period before this reader was born and the stories offer insight into them. They mutually contribute to the impression created, generally, of a world of innocence and delight. The happy and robust youth in the photographs looks contentedly into the camera from an ordered, acceptable world. They also perhaps complement the selectivity of the author’s imagination.

In an authorial note Fay Zwicky describes her collection of stories as thematic rather than chronological.

They are all concerned more or less ironically, with the growth of a writer’s consciousness which may help to account for the varying degrees of stylistic density and the shifts in personae.

The first seven stories, the Helen Freeman sequence, offer a retrospective view of Helen’s struggle to establish a female identity in a world dominated by men and by masculine edicts and rituals. Taking a hint from the introductory note, these stories reflect, in essence, the stages in the author’s personal development from her youthful recollections of her family during and after the Second World War to her marriage and separation. It is arguable whether these stories should be treated as the discontinuous narrative of one life, though they can be read that way. They are not, however, an autobiography. 

It is comparatively rare for a new writer to bring out his first two collections in the one year, and even more rare that one should be a collection of verse and the other of short stories. Yet this is exactly what Peter Goldsworthy has done. His name will be unfamiliar to many, but those who regularly read literary magazines will have come across his stories and poems before and he will undoubtedly be heard of again.

This collection of stories put me off from the first page. In the opening paragraph there is ‘an exuberant kelpie bounding’. The second paragraph outdoes that, presenting seagulls as ‘wheeling and screaming’, in search of ‘a reeking fish head’. We already know that ‘the life was lonely, but it was peaceful’. Clichés enlivened by irony or just some simple surprise of context proves useful tools in the hands of a good writer. But Julie Lewis, on the evidence of Double Exposure, is not a good writer and cliches are offered up to us without any apology. Much of the problem seems to be that she overdoes adjectives and adverbs:

She felt for a pulse. Feeble. She gingerly touched the stubbly cheek It was bruised and there was a gash on the forehead. His clothes, seaman’s wear, were soaked. She studied the unconscious form. He was fairly young, about thirty, she thought. Looked a battler. She smiled ruefully and gently lifted the lock of hair that had fallen across his brow. It was matted with blood. (‘Flotsam’, p 2)

The only woman in The First UQP Story Book is the naked one on the front cover. She is sitting in a kind of beanbag chair with her legs crossed and a floppy straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She is reading a book called The Possession of Amber which is by Nicholas Jose. Nicholas Jose is a man and so he was allowed to be actually in The First UQP Story Book.

Science-fiction short stories traditionally made their first appearance in American and British pulp magazines. The best stories then appeared in anthologies. In recent years more stories have been published for the first time in all-new anthologies, skipping the preliminary magazine stage. This in turn has led to the growth of science fiction publication in those countries, such as Australia, which do not have sufficient population to support specialist science fiction magazines of their own. Other Worlds and Rooms of Paradise are each all-new anthologies of science fiction. Rooms of Paradise is the more polished collection. Six of its twelve stories are by established overseas writers – including stars like Brian Aldiss and R.A. Lafferty – and the other six are by Australians. The local product is not overshadowed in this company; I think that in general the Australian stories are as well written and more original.

I found this a book of uncertain trajectory. On the one hand its target seems to be a broad readership, for these forty-three short stories were first written for the periodical, Tabloid Story, whose method of distribution has been the effective one of being hosted by student and national journals of wide circulation. On the other hand, the collection includes a long self-conscious explanation of itself whose apparent interest in a secure perch on a tertiary syllabus would exclude the popular audience. In it the editor outlines why these stories represent a revolution in Australian short fiction, anatomises the causes and course of this upheaval, locates its European and Latin American antecedents, names its genres – in short tells why his authors should attract serious study rather than serious enjoyment. The ruse, of course, is to hallow an episode in Australian literature, a manoeuvre that I found as transparent as it is indicative of shaky confidence. A revolution with genuine roots will hallow itself.