The Australian Long Story by Mandy Sayer
Australia has a rich and lengthy storytelling tradition, dating back thousands of years to the myths of the Aboriginal Dreamtime. After European settlement, this oral storytelling ritual found expression around campfires and in pubs, with outback workers and itinerate labourers telling tall tales and yarns that staved off loneliness and provided entertainment in a harsh bush environment. Henry Lawson, considered 'the father' of the Australian short story, was one of our first writers to make a successful transition from oral to written storytelling, honing the yarn into a literary form in the 1890s and early twentieth century. Since then, the Australian short story has flourished, embracing the voices of women, migrants, children and refugees.
The idea for this collection of long stories was inspired by three sources. The first was my own foray into the form; the second was Richard Ford's 1998 anthology, The Granta Book of the American Long Story; and the third was my reaction to the most recently published collections of Tim Winton (The Turning, 2004) and David Malouf (Every Move You Make, 2006), both of which contained unusually long and extremely accomplished stories (between 10 and 20000 words). It made me wonder if there was such a thing as an Australian long story.
But first I had to contemplate the definition: what distinguishes a short story from a long one, and at what point does a long story become a novella? Ford states in the introduction to his anthology that neither he nor his writer colleagues could come up with a concrete definition of the novella as a form, and therefore he regards all of the works selected for his collection as 'long stories' – even those that are over 50 000 words and were initially published as individual books.
Although Ford makes a compelling case for abandoning the title 'novella', for me, it didn't feel right. At the beginning of this inquiry I didn't know why – it was just a hunch. My research for this collection ranged widely, roaming through literary history around the world. It soon became obvious that many of the great international short story writers had also written stories of considerable length, many of which have become a part of the literary canon: Heinrich Von Kleist's 'The Marquise of O', Anton Chekhov's 'Ward No. 6', James Joyce's 'The Dead', Ernest Hemingway's 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber', Eudora Welty's 'June Recital', William Faulkner's 'The Bear', Peter Taylor's 'The Old Forest', and just about everything Alice Munro has ever written. Having said that, there are also numerous masters of the short story form who never wrote a lengthy story; Raymond Carver comes to mind, as does Henry Lawson.
It was Edgar Allan Poe who first came up with a working definition of the modern short story: 'a story short enough to be read in one sitting', which seems reasonable to me. Other theorists have claimed, in one way or another, that short stories should be brief, have a single, compressed storyline, and contain an epiphany or turning point, however slight. This, too, seems more than reasonable. I don't believe that a character sketch, a slice of life, or a chapter of a novel can be published as or even called a short story. For me, narrative equals change, usually in the fusion of character and plot, and this idea is most purely realised in the structure of the modern short story. In a novel, a narrative can meander, falter, misstep or hiccup and still be forgiven – even celebrated – by its readers if it is interesting and entertaining enough. The short story, however, is an unforgiving form: any flaws or transgressions are immediately apparent.
After reading scores of longer narratives – some labelled stories, others novellas – interesting patterns began to emerge. Those published as novellas contained some formal features that seemed to allow them to stand on their own, while those published as part of a larger collection usually did not. And these formal features had nothing to do with length.
For me, the difference lies in complexity. One of Ford's inclusions in The American Long Story, 'Goodbye, Columbus' by Philip Roth, was initially published as a full-length, independent work. At around 50 000 words, this humorous gem about manipulation and class has a main storyline and two little offshoot narratives – or subplots – woven within it. This is indeed a novella.
On the other hand, Jane Smiley's 'The Age of Grief' (another of Ford's inclusions) was first published as part of a collection of stories, all based on the complementary themes of love and marriage. 'The Age of Grief ' is billed as a novella on the cover of the original book, but while it is a beautifully crafted piece of work, it actually contains all the formal structures of the short story: it has various turning points that escalate into crisis, epiphany and resolution, but all through a single storyline, without any subplots.
Once I had unravelled some differences between a long story and a novella, I began to wonder what features, if any, distinguish a long story from a short one. The obvious answer is length. But are there technical differences between the two? What can the long story achieve easily that the short story finds more difficult? Going back to Poe, I found that like the short story, the long story 'could be read in one sitting' – but didn't necessarily need to be. Again, this is more to do with complexity than length. The lengthy story is complicated enough to sustain more than one sitting because, if successful, it gives readers enough to chew on mentally during the intervals.
After reading so many long stories – both Australian and international – two other features began to emerge that set the form apart from the traditional short story. The first and probably most significant difference is the way it can negotiate the passing of time. Generally, the short story is accomplished at covering a modest amount of time through a compressed storyline. It can be a single, dramatic scene (Ernest Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants'); span a few hours (Katherine Mansfield's 'Her First Ball'); or be narrated over period of days or weeks (Eudora Welty's 'Why I Live at the P.O.'). While not impossible, it is difficult for a short story to span a year or more, though it demands the technical dexterity of a writer like Anton Chekhov ('Lady with a Toy Dog') or Richard Yates ('Liars in Love').
The long story, however, is able to incorporate vast passages of time. It can narrate passing years, even decades, without seeming forced or rushed. Naturally, because of its length, the long story has the luxury of broader context and exposition, but it also has the leg room to forge through narrative time and space. (I should stress that while the long story can do this if the events in narrative demand it, it of course doesn't have to.)
The second feature distinguishing the long story from the short is point of view. The short story is generally confined to a single perspective. Again, it is possible to narrate a short story from multiple points of view but to be quite honest I can't find any superlative examples. Even in my own practice of short story writing, any attempts to do so have fallen, well, short. A broadening of the perspective tends to either lessen the potency of the story or increase its length until it falls into the long story category. The long story is able to embrace more than one point of view without becoming a novella: that is, without diverging into subplots. An early example of this is Kleist's 1803 story, 'The Marquise of O'. It is narrated from an omniscient point of view (we are inside the minds of many of the characters, rather than one), but each character's point of view fuses into one storyline, one climax, one resolution. Another example is Eudora Welty's 'June Recital', which effectively alternates in point of view between a young brother and sister. This story is also a fine example of the long story's ability to transcend time: not only does it use flashbacks (difficult to achieve with the short story's need for compression), it also employs flashbacks within flashbacks. Again, even though there is a mosaic of time frames and points of view, every piece of the story contributes to the one narrative.
When I began my reading for this collection, however, most of these ideas and theories were set to one side. My only selection criteria were excellent quality, an Australian author and an Australian setting. Furthermore, the story had to justify the length. Some long stories were not included because they seemed overwritten: what was narrated in eighty pages, for example, could have been narrated in forty-five.
Initially, I imagined that the stories in the collection might span from the nineteenth century to the present day, providing a historical and literary overview. The further my reading delved into the past, however, the shorter the stories became. Sure, there were one or two longer stories from the nineteenth century, like Marcus Clarke's 'The Mystery of Major Molineux' (1881), but they were genre rather than literary works, and not of a high enough standard. The early to mid-twentieth century didn't provide many more examples, well written or otherwise. The great practitioners of the Australian storytelling tradition – Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Dal Stivens, Hal Porter, to name a few – all concentrated on shorter versions of the form.
I suspect this phenomenon had more to do with practicalities than aesthetics. A long story was not complex enough to be published independently as a book, and not short enough to be published in a journal or magazine (a regular source of income for twentieth-century authors). On the other hand, it could be said that this preference for brevity mirrors what we've come to think of as a trait of our national character: a restrained, laconic voice that refuses to call too much attention to itself. The seeming simplicity of the short story also sits well with our Australian preference for the appearance of equality. As Christina Stead noted in the introduction to her uncollected short fiction, Ocean of Story (1985), 'What is unique about the short story is that we can all tell one, live one, write one down.' The Irish author and critic Frank O'Connor believes that the short form attracts stories from any given country's underdogs – what he calls a 'submerged population group'. He cites James Joyce's working-class Dubliners, Ivan Turgenev's serfs, and Guy de Maupassant's prostitutes, to name a few. The same could be said for Lawson's bush heroes and swaggies, Baynton's isolated and abused heroines and, later, Peter Cowan's farm labourers and Judah Waten's immigrants.
I did discover a few examples of the longer story written before the 1970s, but again, not many. In 1968, Christina Stead published The Puzzleheaded Girl: Four Novellas, but they were all set overseas. In the 1960s, Patrick White produced several long stories, for example 'Down at the Dump', 'Dead Roses' and 'The Burnt Ones', but I found his supposed satirising of the working class distinctly unfunny. He also, in my view, commits the cardinal literary sin of patronising his characters. Shirley Hazzard initially published the long story 'A Place in the Country' in two instalments in The New Yorker (illustrating my earlier point about the difficulty of placing long stories in magazines) but the unnamed 1950s setting (most likely the US) had no references to Australia and, to me, read as slightly clichéd.
The one long story from the earlier part of the twentieth century that I seriously considered was Frank Hardy's 'The Cockie in Bungaree', published in the 1964 anthology Australians Have a Word for It, edited by Gertrude Gelbin. Originally adapted from an Australian folk song that Hardy first heard in a Gippsland pub, it is a riotous account of masculine rivalry and class distinctions set in the harsh Victorian countryside of the 1930s. The problem with including it in this collection, however, was that it was too different in terms of tone, style and setting (the 1930s) to keep company with what would become the final selection.
The 1970s brought enormous changes to the Australian cultural and political landscape: feminism, arts funding, social welfare, free tertiary education, and the recognition of Aboriginal land rights, to name a few. Australia was emerging from its isolated, colonial identity and becoming part of the wider international community, demonstrated by the strengthening of the Australian film industry and how well our cinematic stories began travelling overseas. At the same time, short story writers like Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding, influenced by international writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Donald Barthelme, were shaking off the Australian story's tradition of realism in favour of more experimental, even surreal, narratives. These formal innovations led to a significant expansion in Australian short story writing, with an increase of publishing in both in magazines and full-length collections.
The proliferation of full-length collections, unrestrained by expectations of realism, gave short story writers more elbow room. No longer bound by the national story tradition of laconic brevity, long stories began to appear in the late 1970s in unprecedented numbers. (Two such stories are republished in this anthology: Peter Carey's 'The Chance' and Elizabeth Jolley's 'Grasshoppers'.) Furthermore, these and other writers, such as David Foster, Antigone Kefala, Thea Astley and Helen Garner, no longer felt obliged to articulate what it means to be 'Australian' – previously a significant expectation placed on Australian writers. By the 1980s the Australian short story had grown up and, for some, grown long. It seemed natural, therefore, to restrict this collection to the past four decades – a rich and compelling era for the form.
Making the final selection involved some tough decisions. My only regret is that I could not find a long story written by, or from the point of view of, an Indigenous Australian. Perhaps this is because the storytelling tradition of Indigenous Australians is oral, and therefore necessarily short, or because their written literary history is comparatively brief when measured against the British and European traditions. Yet another could be that they are attracted to other mediums of storytelling, particularly filmmaking, dance, music and painting. Whatever the reason, I hope in possible subsequent editions of this collection the omission may be rectified.
As an organising principle, I decided to begin the collection with the elder master of the group, David Malouf, whose story is set in the lush forests of Queensland during the earlier part of the twentieth century, and complete it with the up-and-coming young gun of Australian literature, Nam Le, whose story about a boy dealing with both his first love and his dying mother is set in contemporary times. Curiously, both are coming-of-age stories, as is Tim Winton's breathtaking 'Boner McPharlin's Moll', which details, over many years, a teenage girl's relationship with the bad boy of a small coastal town and her eventual and unwitting betrayal of him. Not one, but four girls come of age in Gillian Mears' 'The Childhood Gland', an elegant, funny and heartbreaking tale about the lifelong bond between sisters. Narrated non-chronologically and with radiant lyricism, 'The Childhood Gland' is yet another example of how the long story can play with time.
Louis Nowra's 'Ten Anecdotes About Lord Howe Island' is a delightful, rare example of the comedic long story. (And yes, I would have chosen it even if I weren't married to the author, though we did argue over his fee.) In my reading for this collection I found that the long story tends to be highly dramatic and, for some mysterious reason, rarely humorous. But this particular story is wonderfully whimsical and funny, and adds variety to the tone of the collection. Helen Garner is at her peak exploring the nuances of domesticity and jealousy in 'Honour', where relationships shift as subtly as tectonic plates, while Elizabeth Jolley is at her brutal best in 'Grasshoppers', exploring selfishness and casual cruelty – with devastating results. Peter Carey's 'The Chance', though non-realistic and set in a surreal environment, can be read as a very Australian yarn about our 'tall poppy syndrome', while Peter Goldsworthy's 'Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam' is an excoriating tale about the limits (or non-limits) of parental love and mortality, a story stunning for both its bravery and restraint.
Several of the stories in this collection may be already familiar to some readers; indeed, some of them are already deemed classics. My hope is that, say, fans of Helen Garner's 'Honour' might be introduced to the lesser-known stories of the late Elizabeth Jolley, or that Tim Winton enthusiasts may delight in the work of the comparatively younger Nam Le.
Every one of these stories has something utterly unique to offer, both in writing style and subject matter. It has been an honour and a pleasure to collect them into one volume. I trust you'll enjoy reading them as much as I did.
– Mandy Sayer, March 2009
http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9781926428000&Page=Extract
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