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is that the novel is somehow a superior form of literature, to be taken more seriously than any other, rather than an outdated and exhausted form that, like a liturgical mass or glorified military portrait, belongs to a period of culture dependent on and reflecting a redundant social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.

Two prose poems

The online journal Scud describes itself as ‘lo-fi purveyor of free art’ (and that’s all the info on offer, apart from the content, but what it does, it does well IMHO). They’ve just published two of my prose poems: I carry this noose’, and ‘I went to the sage’.

Can editors be trusted?

I’ve been reading some of Aidan Higgins’s tales and autobiographical pieces, Helsingør Station & Other Departures (1989) — a writer who I first read about forty years ago (Balcony of Europe) (what happened to my copy, I wonder? Lent or disintegrated). He was recommended to the publisher John Calder, as I recall, by none other than Samuel Beckett (‘He has talent, I think’); and famously received a letter from Beckett advising ‘Despair young, and don’t look back’ (reproduced in Alannah Hopkin’s memoir, A very strange man (2021).

So here, in a London-based memoir called ‘The bird I fancied’, the author and companion go to London Zoo, and he describes: ‘In the apiary the caged ones stretched out their long arms and took flying leaps at the trapeze’. These are some bees, I’m thinking. The error is compounded several times (p181-182). So surprised I was that I went back to a historical dictionary to see if the word might previously have referred to apes not bees. Elsewhere in the same account, Higgins readily and casually reveals ignorance about cricket and the Lords cricket ground. Why would he write in such a sloppy manner? His publisher was Secker & Warburg, a London firm: did no-one there bother to read what he’d written and quietly suggest amendments?

To me it seems common sense, not eccentricity, if I’m not sure of a word, to check it in at least one dictionary. And even when I am confident of a word, I’ll often check it in an etymological dictionary in order to understand or explore possible resonances.

What the above examples suggest — and this one, and those mentioned here, and here — is that it would be foolish to expect an editor to spot errors, glaring or subtle. What do they do, I wonder?