British writer David Constantine has won
the 2013 Frank O’Connor Short Story award, which will be presented this week at
the International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland. It comes with a prize of 25,000 Euros. The
title story of the collection, “Tea at the Midland” won the 2010 BBC National
Short Story Award, which came with a prize of 15,000 British pounds. According
to my calculations, that’s 57,246 U.S. dollars. Not a bad haul for short
stories.
Constantine has been around for a while,
but because he writes poems, stories, essays, and translations—alas, no
novels--he is not well known, especially not in America. He laments, as many
short story writers have before him, that the novel is too often seen as a superior
form, “as if you’re working toward graduating to a novel,” but he is hopeful
that such attitudes are starting to shift. I am happy to say that, thanks to
the work of several very fine short-story writers and a number of very bright
and very dedicated critics and scholars, that is true in Great Britain—not so
much in America.
Like many great short-story writers, Constantine
says he is not partial to creating plots, adding: “The best short stories by
the people I really admire are open at the end rather than closing, and the
form allows that. I detest the idea of closure, in life and in writing.” With
short stories, Constantine says, “you must never feel that the subject has
simply been abbreviated in order to get it into 3,000 words, or 5,000 words.”
Of course, what Constantine does not like about closure is that it smacks of
plot—usually in the short story, a kind of “rigged” plot.
David Constantine said in a recent
interview that he writes “the kind of stories that someone would write who is
mainly writing poems.” He added: “I think that if you try to write poems it
makes you very attentive to language. It
also makes you quite impatient of language which is merely instrumental, which
is just saying this happened, then that happened, to get you from this point to
the next.” Of course, what Constantine
is expressing his impatience at is language that just advances mere plot.
So what is the kind of story written by
someone who mainly writes poems? I will
try to pose an answer that question by making a few comments about the title
story of Tea at the Midland.
First the context for the story. The Midland is
a hotel in Morecambe, once a popular bayside resort in Lancashire, on the west coast
of northern England. The Midland is an art deco hotel that fell into disrepair
in 1998, but was restored and reopened in 2008, complete with art works by the
artist Eric Gill, including one of his best-known works, a bas-relief behind
the Reception desk of the main lobby, depicting a nude Odysseus being greeted
by Nausicaa and three of her handmaidens with food, drink, and clothing. The
inscription on the bas-relief reads: “There is good hope that thou mayest see
thy friends.” A biography of Gill in 1989 by Fiona MacCarthy revealed that the
artist had sexual relations with his sisters and his daughters, not to mention
his dog.
The two most basic questions we often ask about
a story are: What happens in this story? And what is this story about? The answer to the first question is, on the
surface, quite simple. A man and a woman are having tea and scones and an
argument in a hotel tearoom. They are having, or have been having, an affair;
he is married; she is not. We don’t know how long the affair has been going on.
An unknown narrator describes the event,
largely from the perspective of the woman, although at certain points he seems
to know what the man is thinking also.
When the story opens, the woman is watching
kite surfers on the bay, admiring them for their grace and beauty.
The couple has been having an argument about
the famous bas relief in the hotel entitled “Odysseus welcomed home from the
sea,” by the artist Eric Gill. The man dislikes the frieze because he knows
that the artist was a paedophile who had sex with his own daughters. The woman
is more interested in the subject of the frieze than the artist. She has read
The Odyssey and knows the background of the
artwork; the man does not. She tells him the story of how Odysseus was welcomed
on the island by Nausikaa and her family and about how, after he was fed and
clothed, fifty-two young men rowed him back to his home in Ithaca; on the way
back they were turned by stone by Poseidon because they helped Odysseus, whom
the god of the sea hated.
Telling the story, the woman cries, and the man
accuses her of never crying about him, after which he leaves. After the woman watches
the surfers paddle ashore with their boards and sails, she pays the bill. On
the way out, she sees a man kneeling and explaining the frieze to a little girl—telling
her it is about how the people welcomed Odysseus, a stranger, because every
stranger was sacred to them, concluding that the lady in the frieze would have
liked to marry the stranger, but because he already had a wife they rowed him
home.
That’s what happens in the story—not much in
the way of plot. But then, ever since Edgar Allan Poe redefined “plot,” the
short story is not about what happens, but rather what kind of artistic pattern
the language, characters, action, and ideas create and what significance it
has.
Constantine once said that his stories often
start with a single image and then from there, it is a “process of realisation,
for me and hopefully for the reader.” In
what follows, I hope to articulate my own “process of realisation" in
reading this story.
The story opens with a sentence that establishes
the situation: “The wind blew steadily hard with frequent surges of greater
ferocity that shook the vast plate glass behind which a woman and a man were
having tea.” The sentence sets up a contrast between the sporadic ferocious surges
of the wind behind which the man and woman are “protected” in their stasis. The
voice of the story begins with a description of the outside world rather than
the inside one. The sea is seen as “breaking white” in shallow water far out,
then leveling out with nothing “impeding” the waves until they are “expended”
on the shore. The sky “was torn and holed by the wind and a troubled golden
light flung down at all angles, abiding nowhere, flashing out and vanishing.”
This rhythm of ferocity contrasted with stasis, suggested by “torn,” “holed,” “flung,”
“flashing,” and then, the waves coming on shore, “vanishing,” establishes the
emotional rhythm of the story.
The perspective shifts to the surfers towed by
kites: “And under the ceaselessly riven sky, riding the furrows and ridges of
the sea, were a score or more of surfers towed on boards by kites.” The phrase “ceaselessly
riven,” suggesting being torn apart, further sets up the emotional situation of
the story. The sound of the language—“a score or more of surfers towed on
boards by kites” insists that the language must be attended to.
At this point, a motif of motivation of gesture
is introduced by the voice: “You might have said they were showing off but in truth
it was a self-delighting among others doing likewise. The woman behind plate
glass could not have been in their thoughts, they were not performing to
impress and entertain her.” The description suggests a self-contained set of
gestures, a performance only because it is being observed by a spectator
separated by the heavy glass window.
What is emphasized about the surfers is their
control of the ferocity of the sky and waves: “In the din of waves and wind
under that ripped-open sky they were enjoying themselves, they felt the life in
them to be entirely theirs, to deploy how they liked best.” Although this
observation is expressed by the nameless narrator, the next sentence suggests
that the perspective of the woman has shifted to the woman, confirmed by the
following admiring, even envious, observation:
To the woman watching they looked like grace itself, the heart and soul
of which is freedom. It pleased her particularly that they were attached by
invisible strings to colourful curves of rapidly moving air. How clean and
clever that was! You throw up something
like a handkerchief, you tether it and by its headlong wish to fly away, you
are towed along. And not in the straight
line of its choosing, no: you tack
and swerve as you please and swing out wide around at least a hemisphere of
centrifugence. Beautiful, she thought. Such versatile autonomy among the strict
determinants and all that co-ordination of mind and body, fitness, practice,
confidence, skill and execution, all for fun!
I felt I had to quote this long passage, for it is important in setting up
the contrast between the woman’s emotional situation and the man’s. The man is
introduced in the next sentence, and it does not take much to know him, for he has
not noticed the surfer riders and is only aware of the “crazed light” and the “shocks
of wind” as “irritations.”
All he sees
is the woman, and all he sees in her is that he had “no presence in her
thoughts.”
The first character voice we hear in the story is the man’s voice, who repeats
something he has said earlier, but which the woman is not thinking about: “A
paedophile is a paedophile. That’s all there
is to it.” This startles the woman from her attention on the surfers, and the
man is annoyed even more by her being startled, for it makes him aware how “intact
and absent” she had been. “Her eyes seemed to have to adjust to his different
world.” She is annoyed that he is still
harping on the pedophile subject and wants him just to let it be. But he cannot let it go; he is angry that he
has not been able to “force an adjustment in her thinking.”
Now we get some background context.
The woman has made the arrangements for their tea at the Midland hotel;
she has brought him here because she hoped he would find it a romantic rendezvous
and that they would come here some night and get a room with a big curved window
and look out at the bay. However, he sees this not as an invitation but as a
recrimination. They have obviously been arguing about the fact that Eric Gill
did the frieze in the lobby; she has already lost interest in the specifics of
the argument and has seen it as an indication of “his more general capacity for
disappointing her.” Even though he sticks with the Eric Gill argument, she
knows he just wants something to feed the “antagonisms that swarmed in him.”
She, “malevolently” gives him what he wants,
asking him if he would have liked the bas-relief if he had not known it was by
Gill or if he had not known Gill had sex with his sisters and his daughters,
and, she adds, “Don’t forget the dog.”
She pushes the argument further, ostensibly making it an issue of art for
art’s sake, vs. art for social purposes, asking him to hypothesize that what if
Gill had made peace in the Middle East, to which he replies, making peace is “useful,”
to which she retorts, “And making beauty isn’t.” She turns to look at the waves, the light, and the surfers, but cannot do
so with her previous attention. This makes her angrier, and her turning away
makes him fills him with rage. “Whenever she turned away and sat in silence he
desired very violently to force her to attend and continue further and further
in the thing that was harming them.” This cryptic comment is a technique that
Chekhov innovated and that Hemingway and Carver and William Trevor, and James
Lasdun, and David Means, and Alice Munro, and…..I could go on and on with other
great short story writers who use language to suggest but not explain complex
human interactions and emotions.
In the next paragraph, the woman pushes the
Gill argument into wider generalities about the difference between the way she
sees the world and their relationship and the way he does. She says if she took
his view, she would not be able to enjoy watching the surfers unless she knew
that none was a rapist or a member of the British National Party (an extreme
right wing organization). Or she would have to hate the sea itself because in
2004 at Morecambe Bay twenty-one Chinese workers collecting cockles were
drowned when an incoming tide cut them off from the shore.
He denies this, but she says the way he thinks
and the way he wants her to think is to join everything together so that she
cannot concentrate on one thing without bringing in everything else. She says
that when they make love and she cries out for joy and pleasure, according to
his view she must keep in mind that some woman somewhere is screaming in pain.
She says he should write on his forehead the
lie he told his wife to make this tea possible so that whenever he looked at
her kindly, she would have to remember that lie and thus spoil the moment. When
he tells her how much he risks for her, she says she risks something too, that
she also has something to lose.
When he sarcastically tells her to stay and look
at the clouds, for he is leaving, she talks about the background to the frieze—saying
Odysseus was a horrible man,
that he did
not deserve the courtesy he received from Nausikaa and her parents, for she
knows the horrible things Odysseus has done and the horrible things he will do
when he gets home and kills the suitors to his wife Penelope. But she says in
spite of that context, at the moment Gill chose to capture him in the frieze,
he is naked and helpless, asking the man, “Aren’t we allowed to contemplate
such moments.”
When the man says he has not read the Odyssey, she says she must have been a
fool to think that she would have read passages of the book to him if they got
one of “those rooms with a view of the sea and of the mountains across the bay
that would have snow on them.” At seeing the tears in her eyes, the man looks
more closely at her. “He felt she might be near to appealing to him, helping
him out of it, so that they could get back to somewhere earlier and go a
different way.” But this time, at least for the moment, it has gone too far.
She then tells him about the fifty-two young
men who row Odysseus back to Ithaca and then on the way back, Poseidon, who hated
Odysseus, turned the men and their ship into stone and sent them to the bottom
of the sea. The man says he has no idea why she has told him this story and
upbraids her for crying about imaginary people in a book and never crying about
him, to which she asserts that he never will see her cry for him and their
relationship.
The penultimate paragraph needs quoting in
full, for it captures a moment of metaphoric resolution that needs no explanation:
The sun was near to setting and golden light came through in floods from under
the ragged cover of weltering cloud. The wind shook furiously at the glass. And
the surfers skied like angels enjoying the feel of the waters of the earth,
they skimmed, at times they lifted off and flew, they landed with a dash of
spray. She watched till the light began to fail and one by one the strange
black figures paddled ashore with their boards and sails packed small and
weighing next to nothing.
But there is one final paragraph, a kind of coda that sums up the woman’s
sense of loss. A tall man is kneeling in
the lobby by the frieze explaining to a little girl, probably his daughter,
what the sculpture depicts. He tells her it is about welcome, for every
stranger was sacred to the people of the island, concluding, the lady admitted
she would have liked to marry him but he already had a wife at home. So they
rowed him home.”
What is the story about?
I think it
is about a couple who have reached a point of divergence. There is no specific
cause that has brought them to this point; it is certainly not that they
disagree about what to think of Eric Gill and his bas relief. And now that they
have reached this point, there is nothing that can be said or done to bring
back what they perhaps once had.
The basic difference between the woman and the man is that the woman is
still trying to hold on to the romantic sense of the moment set apart from the
everyday world, a moment of beauty, of freedom, or art for art’s sake, love for
love’s sake; there is nothing “useful” about being in love; it just is. She
watches the surfers and longs for their detachment, their control of their own
transcendent moment. She admires Gill’s bas-relief because Gill has caught Odysseus
at just the moment when he is vulnerable and helpless and the young woman reaches
out to him and he is saved. And that moment has nothing to do with what
Odysseus has done in the past or will do in the future.
Similarly, Eric Gill’s private life has nothing to do with his capturing
of that transcendent moment. And you cannot hold the sea accountable for the
death of the cockle pickers; it is nonetheless beautiful for all that. The
story is about the loss of love, about the difference between the romantic and
the realistic. At the end, the woman watches the father explain the frieze to
the little girl, knowing that, like Odysseus, the man she was with has gone
home to his wife, and she is left alone, with no husband, with no child--with
only the image of the strange black figures like angels weighing next to
nothing paddling ashore. It is a Keatsean moment of beauty and the only truth
that one can have—the truth of the much desired, but always evasive,
transcendent moment elevated out of space and time—all you know and all you
need to know.
A story very similar to this is Hemingway’s “Hills
Like White Elephants,” which I have discussed in a July 4, 2011 blog entitled “Haunted
by Hemingway.” Another story similar in its poetic economy is James Lasdun’s “It’s
Beginning to Hurt,” on which I posted a blog September 28, 2010. I invite you
to read those two stories and compare their technique to David Constantine’s
subtle and complex “Tea at the Midlands.”
I congratulate David Constantine for his two
prizes. Good short stories should be rewarded. I only hope I have proved to be
the kind of reader that this story deserves.
