Leonora Brito: unfulfilled talent

In my many years working in community development, mostly in England and Wales, I remember widespread appreciation for the fact that the city of Cardiff had achieved, over years, very considerable racial integration (the Tiger Bay phenomenon) without a history of confrontation or violence. I designed and ran a British Council residential event round about 2004 which included an off-site visit to explore this very phenomenon.

But I don’t believe I ever came across the name of Leonora Brito until recently, when I got hold of a collection of her short stories, Dat’s love (1995). Brito expresses the experience of growing up mixed-race in urban south Wales, through lively invention, keen observation, an ear for the rhythm of vernacular conversation, and sensitivity to the difference between casual and less casual racism.

I was attracted partly because I’m interested in writers who did not decide (or, worse, might have been persuaded) at an early age that they were ‘Going To Be A Writer’ — Brito left school at sixteen, eventually took an art course, followed by a degree in Law and History, before Dat’s love was published when she was 41. And secondly I was attracted to this book because I’m interested in authors known by a single work. Sadly, although apparently she was working on a second collection — reassuringly not seduced by any pressure to write a novel — she died in 2007 and there’s no sign, as far as I’m aware, of any other pieces.

Don’t be put off by Penguin Books' wild exaggeration and their puffers’ illiterate habit of splitting infinitives, this is lively writing which feels like the emergence of a talent sadly undeveloped. Not all the stories are successful, in my view, but there is both raw talent and subtle insight into the black feminist experience here.

An instance of unfulfilled talent like this is a reminder to all of us — something like ‘get on with it, you don’t know how much time you have’.

John Clare’s house move

John Clare cottage 

As a writer in the 21^st century, if you have to move house, even for a short period, you just make sure all your output — draft texts, notes, resources, submitted and published pieces — is backed up safely in the cloud, and you can then focus on things.

It was different in early 19^th century in rural Northamptonshire, even for a man of self-proclaimed peasant background and upbringing “with six children aged between one and eleven, at least one cat, a large oak bookcase and some three hundred books — not to mention all Clare’s manuscripts, which he had gathered from various nooks and crannies around the old cottage”. Clare later wrote:

‘On flitting from my native place… I hunted over my bundles of paper intending to save the trouble of carriage by destroying those I set least store by… but I read them and paused, thinking of old days and old feelings and, excuse my vanity gentle reader — if I did not think them worthy of your praise, I felt I could not burn them’.

(Jonathan Bate, J. John Clare: a biography, 2003, p363-364).

Micro-fiction and the dreaded novel

Last week The Observer published an interview with Mark Haddon, together with several of what it calls his ‘micro-stories’. Some are prose poems rather than stories, and one is spoiled by two clichés: but a couple are glorious, especially the piece called ‘Pineapples’.

The interview manages to overlook the fact that there already exists a very active field of writing in flash and micro fiction, as if Haddon had discovered the form himself (I am sure he wouldn’t make such a claim, of course).

But the most revealing point is that having generated a collection of more than 150 such pieces,

‘his agent and publisher both demurred on the stories, finding them “too many, too short, too diverse and lacking a connecting theme”’.

Agent and publisher deserve all the ridicule that comes their way. I suspect these are people who incurably want the world and human experience to be containable — like a novel. It’s a classic negative response from the literary publishing industry, it’s a wonder they don’t choke on their own irony. While they encourage the churning of lengthy well-padded over-elaborate novels, does it not occur to them to ask if they’re not ‘too long and too samey’?

One problem that this attitude causes is that if an author of flash or micro-fiction were to put together a collection that had stylistic consistency and a connecting theme (it’s hard to imagine how that could not be dull, or that the notion would avoid padding and not stifle innovation) they would be encouraged by agent and publisher to — you guessed — ‘write a novel’!

I recall seeing a blog headline somewhere that read something like this: ‘You’ve had a few stories published — so can you write a novel?’ As if anything short were a kind of apprenticeship for the latter. The familiar implication is that the novel is somehow a superior form of literature, to be taken more seriously than any other, rather than an outdated and exhausted form that, like a liturgical mass or glorified military portrait, belongs to a period of culture dependent on and reflecting a redundant social structure. (The novel I would most like to read is one that provides an account of just that. Can we move on now please?)

Fortunately, there are independent publishers who cannot be accused of the corrosive faults that dominate publishing. I look forward to reading Mark Haddon’s forthcoming collection, Fog and pineapples, however it gets published, and hope it has some kind of impact on the industry’s dinosaurs.