← Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Writers & Readers
00:58:14
Host Meg Wolitzer presents two stories and two poems the celebrate the power and mystery of reading and writing. Billy Collins contributes magical verse from two perspectives in “Books” read by Kirsten Vangsness, and “Dear Reader,” performed by Dion Graham. N.K. Jemisin entices us with a tricky narrative that contemplates the cost of literary celebrity. It’s read by Yetide Badaki. And at least one character in Ian McEwan’s “My Purple Scented Novel” wants celebrity at all costs. It's read by Tony Hale.
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- [00:08]
Meg Wolitzer
Betrayal, obsession, scandal. These days, this kind of outrageous fun is associated with your latest binge watch. But on this episode of Selected Shorts, we dig into all the intrigue a great short story can deliver. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Join me. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Short fiction can tackle any subject from birth to death, from soup to nuts. But we admit we have a soft spot for fiction that is about the act of reading and writing. It gives us an opportunity to explore the act of literary creation from several perspectives. First, what impels a writer to write? And what kinds of challenges does that commitment offer? Second, why do people read? What is the effect of a powerful text? Why do we cherish books? And third, does writing have a life beyond that of its creators? Is text ultimately the human subtext? This program is bookended by the distinguished poet Billy Collins in two poems about reading and writing. In between stories that consider the idea of what constitutes success and whether this attaches itself more to the author or to the work itself. The first is a provocative fantasy by N.K. jemisin about the price of literary celebrity, and in the Second, by Ian McKeown, a daring plot reverses the fortunes of two writers. If we ever need reminding about the deft economy of poetry, Billy Collins is there. The former poet laureate of the United States is often praised for his ability to add something transcendental to ordinary subjects in such volumes as Questions About Angels and Sailing Alone around the Room. New and Selected Poems. You've enjoyed reader Kirsten Vangsness as computer whiz Penelope Garcia on the television series Criminal Minds. But she's also an accomplished performance artist, touring with her shows Mess and Theo, Cleo and Woo, and sharing Kirsten's agenda on her podcast. Here she is with books by Billie Collins.
- [02:41]
Billy Collins
Books from the heart of this dark, evacuated campus, I can hear the library humming in the night, an immense choir of authors muttering inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves. Giovanni Pontano next to Pope Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic cord of language. I picture a figure in the act of reading, shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book, a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie as the suicide of lovers saturates a page or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem, he moves from paragraph to paragraph as if touring a house of endless paneled rooms. I hear the voice of my mother reading to me from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs, and inside her voice lie other distant sounds, the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night, a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech. I watch myself building bookshelves in college, walls within walls as rain soaks New England, or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat. I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light, until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow. When evening is shadowing the forest, small brown birds flutter down to consume them, and we have to listen hard to hear the voices of the boy and his sister receding into the perilous woods.
- [04:52]
Meg Wolitzer
Kirsten vangsness Read books by Billy Collins. I'm Meg Wolitzer. I love the way this small poem can travel so far, both physically and in imagination. Collins poems, however short, always make you feel that you have all the time in the world. This beautiful piece immediately brought me back to my own college library, a place I came to love, especially at ungodly hours in the week before exams. Even then, I think I understood that there would probably never be another time in my life when much of what I would be asked to do was read books and then respond to what I was reading. I've been in love with books since I was a kid, lost in the stacks at my suburban public library, and I'm still in love with them. And libraries, especially the ones that feel steeped in the past, populated by the ghosts of writers and readers, have had a lot to do with it. Our next story, Henosis, is by N.K. jemisin. Henosis is a classical Greek word that means unity, but it's also been used to name everything from a mushroom to a video game. What writer could resist a word with so many potential meanings? Jemison's works include the novels the City We Became and the World we make and the short story collection How Long till Black Future Month. Our reader, Yetide Badaki, is a Nigerian born actress known for television work on shows such as American Gods and this Is Us. She's also worked with Chicago's acclaimed Steppenwolf Theater Company. Now she reads. Henosis by N.K. jemisin.
- [06:36]
Yetide Badaki
By N.K. jemisIn chapter four but they're going to kill you, the woman said. Harkham sighed at her silhouette. Of course they are, he replied. Chapter 2 the car lurched again. Harkin looked up from his agent's face on the backseat screen, wondering what on earth was wrong with his Driver Luke Din. Have you been at the scotch again, man? There was no answer, but of course he hadn't pressed the intercom button. He kept forgetting that he had to. Harky, what is it? Janet's voice, tinny through the screen speaker, echoed in the limousine compartment. He knew he should have brought the headphones. Nothing, he said out of habit. Through the one way privacy screen he could see the silhouette of the driver. Just a head and a hat and a hint of shoulder. But was that head shorter than it should have been? And was that a lock of hair falling from the hat to curl over one shoulder? Luketon hadn't had hair since Harkim's first son, now a father himself, had grown his. Harkim pressed the button this time. Is Luked in ill? He asked. He seemed fine this afternoon. There was a silence for a moment, then the door lock suddenly went down. A moment later, Janet's face vanished in a haze of static. The city wire connection had been shut off. A woman's voice returned over the speaker. Please don't be alarmed, Mr. Harkham. Pressing the button hard enough to make his thumb twinge, Harkham said, who the hell are you? And the silhouette turned its head enough that Harkham could glimpse a night lit pro profile, one eye barely visible. You don't know me, said the woman. I'm just a fan. Chapter one, your greatest fan. Gushed the girl in front of Harkin, inhaling deeply and bouncing a little on her toes. And though Harkin was too old to fall for such blandishments, or at least he thought he was, he gave the girl an extra wide smile. To my greatest fan, he said, writing with an exaggerated flourish, and then politely raised his eyebrows. Wanda, she said. Wanda, he finished from a grateful old man. She beamed and leaned forward to pick up the book. The pendant between her breasts, something indistinct, preserved in amber, swung forward as she did, which gave Harkim a lovely excuse to feast his eyes. Thank you so much, Mr. Harkim. If you don't mind, can I ask just one quick question? Given the chiastic structure of the narrative in Dayton's Gate, did you intend for Inez to symbolize the impetuousness of youth? I can't get over how she died. Some of Harkim's pleasure faded, though he resisted the urge to sigh. My dear, he said as gently as he could, I haven't a clue what a chiastic structure is. And you're spoiling the book for those who haven't read it. He smiled and nodded toward the line behind the girl. Several of its members were glaring at her. She went from simpering to sulky at once. Sorry, she said. I thought you might like a little intelligent conversation for a change. Never mind. She turned and stalked away. The next woman came up to the desk, holding out an old and tattered first edition of the Mighty Bob, his first published novel. Looking at it, Harkin could not help breaking into a grin. Well, well, he said, taking the book reverently. Its cover was loose and so dog eared that he marveled it was still legible. Someone's loved this book. Where shall I sign? Anywhere, said the woman. And there's no need to address it to me. But please sign it from the Opus Award. Shoo in. Harkim laughed at that, as did several of the people in line who were near enough to hear. You want me to jinx myself, do you? But he grinned and signed the book with that phrase anyway, just because it was such a pleasure to meet a true. As he handed the book back, she brushed his fingers with hers before taking it. I love you, she said. Thank you, he said, and gave her a kind smile before beckoning the next person forward. Chapter 5 the words did not make sense. Janet spoke to him again, and he blinked, recovering enough to focus on her. I'm sorry, sorry, she repeated. She touched his hand. Across the banquet hall, tears sheening her face amid sweat, Rasa Abregado hurried toward the stage. Through a gauntlet of cheers and standing ovation and stamping feet, she climbed the steps shakily, though they had both done it easily during the awards rehearsal. Harcombe remembered joking with her that if either of them won, they would raise the award and say in their speech that the other had been robbed. Rasa babbled her way through the speech, then hefted the award, a full sized, blunted replica of Yukio Mishima's famous Tantu, complete with sheath. She thanked the jury and her readers and then walked off the stage. Chapter 3 what is this? Trembling, Harkim fumbled for the door latch, even though he knew it was locked. There were such tales in his mind. Famous people hunted, stabbed, tortured to death by the fans who claimed to love them. A kidnapping, said the woman, and Harkim's heart fluttered and clenched within his chest. For your own good, he tried the door locked. The car was moving at full speed anyhow. What could he do? Fling himself out and break every bone in his body? Be run over by the cars behind them? That is an impossibility, madam, he said. It was a small sob to his pride that his voice did not shake. By definition, a kidnapping takes its victim somewhere he does not wish to be against his will. How could that be to anyone's good? I've read your books for years, the woman said. And all at once Harkin placed her voice his jinx, the mighty Bob. I've read all of the Opus candidates this year. It's not right that you're on the short list. Was she upset over that? Madam, please. I understand that you may want a different author to win, but I assure you it isn't right. The car lurched a little, as though she jerked the wheel. Harkham caught his breath, hopefully not loudly. It just isn't right. He closed his eyes, trying to think past panic. There are five shortlisted candidates this year, he said. Reasonable, yes? He wanted to sound reasonable. Calm. Reassuring. An 80% chance that someone else will win, yes. So there's no need for this. A 20% chance you'll win somehow. Despite the thin reverberation of the limo's intercom, he heard the sob in the woman's voice. How can you stand it? Well, this isn't the first award I've been nominated for. Or lost. He added the last quickly, lest she think him arrogant after all. Do you know what a piece of Vonnegut's face is worth? The woman asked. Harkin flinched. Nothing, he said. His grave is state property. Protected now. Amazing, really, how much derision the intercom could convey. Not before the relic hunters got to it. His fingers alone went for millions on the black market, and he died naturally. No, it was probably a bad idea to argue with some who was demented enough to kidnap him. But Harkim had never been able to ignore a blatant falsehood. Janet had always warned him not to spend much time with people from Hollywood because of that. It wasn't natural. Natural is going to sleep and never waking up. He fell, hit his head, lingered for weeks before he finally kicked. Was a miserable, slow, ignominious death for such a great man. Compounded. The woman snapped. His heirs fought over his estate. His publisher and agent and film rights holders fought over every scrap of his oeuvre. Pieces everywhere once they found his grave. Her voice thickened with tears. That was the least of what they did to him. Great men leave legacies, harcom said. He spoke more harshly than he should have. But he was not afraid anymore. Just a child, he realized. She was just a foolish, idealistic child. That is the nature of greatness. To change all those who fight. It is an artist's fate, an artist's duty to share all that they are and have been with the world. And when you win? The woman was breathing hard, barely coherent. When they give you that award, your legacy ends. It means they think you've done all you're going to do, the best you'll ever do. It means they stop listening. She was right, Hockham realized with some surprise, not wholly a thoughtless child that made some of his anger fade and replaced by sympathy. They always stop listing eventually, he said, sitting back on the limousine's leather seat. Sooner or later. Now, please. He closed his eyes, feeling old and tired. Take me to the ceremony. Chapter 6 Afterward, Harkim walked out of the hotel alone. To his very great surprise, the same limousine was there waiting for him. The driver, who stood beside the car, was hidden behind dark glasses and beneath a chauffeur's hat, but the body within the uniform was unmistakably female. Harkim stopped in front of her. You've gotten your wish, he said. I'll live to see another day. Congratulations. Yes, she said. The glasses did not wholly screen her. In the intensity of the hotel lights, he could see her eyes searching his face. He looked away, tired of her worship. Rather than face it, he looked up at the sky, where a few stars or perhaps satellites managed to penetrate the city's light haze. They'll have taken Rasa away by now. So she can be killed. The woman's voice shook again. To be dismembered, yes. Harkim slid his hands into his pockets. They'll send the pieces to all the usual places. Museums, libraries. An ear or two to the University of Iowa's writing workshop, the obligatory tooth. To Columbia, those hacks. Wherever she can inspire the next generation of creators. He shrugged. More dignified than what happened to Vonnegut. Not as messy as what Mishima did to himself. Killed. She didn't raise her voice, but he felt her vehemence. Her earnestness radiated against him like heat. He closed his eyes, basking in it, since it was all he had. Her novel was brilliant, he said at last. She deserves to be remembered like this. Honored at the height of herself. Not to die alone and poor and forgotten, as so many of us do. A long and fragile silence fell. Do you want me to take you home? The woman asked. He shook his head. Going home would reinforce his failure. He'd notified his landlord that the apartment might become available. He'd have to rescind that notice, but he had nowhere else to go. If he went somewhere with other people, he would have to endure their pity in gloating. I don't know. What do you want to do then? He laughed a little, running a hand through his sparse hair. Nothing. I don't care. I'm open to suggestions. After a moment, the woman said, I have a gun. She spoke very softly, surprised. Harcom looked at her. This time she looked away. He considered her offer. If it happened this way the night he lost the opus at the hands of a crazed fan, he shook his head. Impossible to say how people would react, what they would remember. Some would value him even more, given the strangeness of his death. Some would lose interest, thinking he'd hired the woman to do him in for the glory. He could only control the when and why of his legacy, not whether or for how long. He was glad for the woman's kindness, even if she would not think of it as such. Drive on then, my good woman, harcom said when she opened the door. He got in.
- [21:53]
Meg Wolitzer
Yetide badaki read N.K. jemisin's Henosis. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Jemisin is alive to the irony of literary celebrity, the conflation, almost religious, of being in one and the same moment, a God and a sacrifice. And what an elegant mashup of styles. There's a hint of Shirley Jackson, a hint of the Matrix, a hint of noir crime novelist Dashiell Hammett, and an oblique tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, master of matter of fact dystopias. Nonlinear storytelling pops up a lot in art, often in films and plays. It can be found in Pulp Fiction, Memento, and Harold Pinter's Betrayal. Whether going from the end to the beginning or just jumping around, such a shift not only affects story but also feeling. There's an observation I've always loved, and both filmmaker Jean Luc Godard and Flannery O'Connor have been credited with it. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, though not necessarily in that order. When we return, the ultimate literary crime. You're listening to Selected Shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back. This is Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. The theme of the show is reading and writing, so of course we want to take this opportunity to remind you that we have much more to offer. Think of our website@pledshorts.org as your own personal library, where you can check out past shows and enjoy bonus interviews with our distinguished roster of authors. You can also find us and them on your favorite podcast platforms. Our third work is a compelling narrative of deceit and betrayal by Ian McEwan, the celebrated author of such bleak masterpieces as atonement and Amsterdam. McEwan writes with a lighter touch in My Purple Scented Novel, a satirical tale about two authors and one masterpiece. Not to give away the plot, but there's humor, suspense and a reveal reading. The story is Tony Hale, a frequent shorts performer. He's known for his work on Arrested Development and Veep, and recently appeared in Netflix's limited series the Decameron.
- [24:40]
Tony Hale
My Purple Scented Novel. You will have heard of my friend, the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbett, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade. Time can be ruthless with reputation. The association in your mind is probably with a half forgotten scandal and disgrace. You've never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few our names remained rigidly attached like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause my decline then his descent was my earthly triumph. I don't deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life and I don't intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages a confession. To make it fully, I must go back 40 years, to a time when our lives happily and entirely overlapped and seemed poised to run in parallel toward a shared future. We studied at the same university, read the same subject, English literature, published our first stories in student magazines with names like Knife in your eye. But with names like that, we were ambitious. We wanted to be writers, famous writers, even great writers. We took holidays together and read each other's stories, gave generous, savagely honest comments, made love to each other's girlfriends, and on a few occasions tried to interest ourselves in a homoerotic affair. I'm fat and bald now, but then I had a head of curls and I was slender. I like to think I resembled Shelley. Jocelyn was tall, blond, muscular, with a firm jawline, the very image of the Ubermensch Nazi, but he had no taste for politics at all. Our affair was simply bohemian posturing. We thought it made us fascinating. We did very little to or with each other, but we were happy to have people think we did a lot. None of this got in the way of our literary friendship. I don't think we were properly competitive at the time, but looking back, I'd say that initially I was the one who was ahead. I was the first to publish in a real grown up literary magazine, the North London Review at the end of our university career, I got a good first. Jocelyn got a second class degree. We decided that such things were irrelevant. And so they turned out to be. We moved to London and took single rooms just a few streets away from each other. In Brixton I published my second story, so it was relief when he published his first. We continued to meet regularly, get drunk, read each other's stuff. And we began to move in the same pleasantly downtrodden literary circles. We even began at roughly the same time to write reviews for the respectable national press. Those two years after university were the height of of our fraternal youth. We were growing up so fast. We were both working on the first novels. And they had much in common. Sex, mayhem, a touch of apocalypse, some violence, some fashionable despair, and very good jokes about all the things that could go wrong between a young man and a young woman. We were happy. Nothing stood in our way. Then two things did. Jocelyn, without telling me, wrote a TV play. That sort of thing, I thought at the time, was well beneath us. We worshipped at the temple of literature. TV was mere entertainment, dross for the masses. The screenplay was immediately produced, starred two famous actors, was passionate about a good cause, homelessness or unemployment. That I had never heard. Jocelyn men. It was a success. He was talked about, noted. His first novel was anticipated. None of that would have mattered if I had not at the same time met Arabella, an English rose, ample, generous, calm. A funny girl who remains my wife even today. I'd had a dozen lovers before then, but I got no farther than Arabella. She laid on everything I needed by way of sex and friendship and adventure and variation. Such a passion was not enough in itself to stand between Jocelyn and me. Or me and my ambitions. Far from it. Arabella's nature was copious, unjealous, all embracing. And she liked Jocelyn from the start. What changed was that we had a child, a boy named Matt, on whose first birthday Arabella and I were married. My Brixton room could not accommodate us for long, so we moved farther south, deep, deeper into the postal districts of southwest London. First to Southwest 12, later to Southwest 17. From there one reached Charing Cross by a 20 minute train ride, which itself began only after a 25 minute walk through the suburbs. My freelance writing could not support us. I found a part time teaching job at a local college. Arabella became pregnant again. She loved being pregnant. My college job turned full time just as my first novel was published. There was praise, there was mild damnation. Six weeks later, Jocelyn's first novel was out, an instant success, though it didn't sell much more than mine. In those days, sales hardly mattered. His name already had a ring to it. Mm. There was a hunger for a new voice and Jocelyn Tarbet sing, saying more sweetly than I ever could, his looks and his height. Nazi is unfair. Let's say Bruce Chatwin with Mick Jagger scowl, His high turnover of interesting girlfriends, the beaten up MGA sports car he drove fed his reputation. Was I envious? I don't think so. I was in love with three people. Our children seemed to me divine beings. Everything they said or did fascinated me. And Arabella continued to fascinate me too. She was soon pregnant again and we moved north to Nottingham with teaching and family responsibilities. It took me five years to write my second novel. There was praise a little more than last time. There was damnation a little less than last time. No one but me remembered the last time. By then, Jocelyn was publishing his third. The first had already been made into a movie starring Julie Christie. He'd had a divorce, a news house in Notting Hill, many interviews on tv, many photographs in lifestyle magazines. Oh, he said hilarious, scathing things about the Prime Minister. He was becoming our generation's spokesman. But here's the astonishing thing. Our friendship did not falter. Certainly it became more intermittent. We were busy in our separate realms. We had to get the desk diaries out well in advance in order to see each other. Occasionally he traveled up to see me and the family. By the time of our fourth child, we had moved even farther north to Durham. But usually I was the one who traveled south to see him and his second wife, Joliet. They lived in a large Victorian house in Hampstead, right near the heath. Mostly we drank and talked and walked on the heath. If you'd been listening in, you would have heard nothing between us to suggest that he was the star and that my literary prospects were fading. He assumed that my opinions were as important as his. He never condescended. He even remembered my children's birthdays. I was always installed in the best guest room. Joliet was welcoming. Jocelyn invited friends around who all seemed lively and pleasant. Oh, he cooked big meals. He and I were, as we often said, family. But of course, there were differences that neither of us could ignore. My place in Durham was friendly enough, but child trampled, crowded, cold in the winter. The chairs and carpets had been wrecked by a dog and two cats. The kitchen was always full of laundry because that was where the washing machine was. The house was afflicted with many ginger colored pine fittings that we never had time to paint or replace. There was rarely more than one bottle of wine in the house. The kids were fun, but they were chaotic and noisy. We lived on my modest salary and Arabella's part time nursing. We had no savings, few luxuries. It was hard in my house to find a place to read a book or to find a book. So it was a holiday of the senses to pitch up at Jocelyn and Joliet's for a weekend. The vast library, the coffee tables supporting that month's hardbacks, the expanses of dark polished oak floor, paintings, rugs, a grand piano, violin music on a stand, the banked towels in my bedroom. Oh it's awesome shower. The grown up hush that lay around the house, the sense of order and shine that only a daily clean lady can bestow. There was a garden with an ancient willow, a mossy Yorkstone terrace, a wide lawn and high walls. And more than all this, the place was pervaded by a spirit of open mindedness, curiosity, tolerance and a taste for comedy. How could I stay away? I suppose I should confess to one solitary strain of dark sentiment, a theme of vague, unequal I never gave expression to. Honestly, it didn't trouble me that much. I'd written four novels in 15 years, a heroic achievement given my teaching load and hands on fathering and lack of space. All four were out of print. I no longer had a publisher. I always sent a finished copy of my latest to my old friend with a warm dedication. He would thank me for it, but he never passed comment. I'm quite sure that after our Brixton days he never read a word of mine. He sent me early copies of his novels, 29 to my 4. I wrote him long appreciative letters about the first two or three. Then I decided for the sake of our friendship's equilibrium, to respond in kind. We no longer talked or wrote about each other's books, and that seemed fine. So you find us past midlife. Around the age of 50, Jocelyn was a national treasure and I. Well, it was wrong to think in terms of failure. All my children had processed or were processing through university. I still played a decent game of tennis. My marriage, after a few creaks and groans and two explosive crises, was holding together, and the rumor was that I'd be a full professor within a year. I was also writing my fifth novel, but that was not going awfully well. And now I come to the core of this story, the seesaw's crucial tilt. It was early July and I headed from Durham to Hampstead, as I often did straight after marking final papers. As usual, I was in a state of pleasant exhaustion. But this was not the usual visit. The following day Jocelyn and Joliet were going to Orvieto for the week and I was going to house sit, feed their cat, water their plants and make use of the space, the silence to work on the meandering 58 pages of my novel. When I arrived, Jocelyn was out running errands and Joliet made me welcome. She was a specialist in X ray crystallography at Imperial College. A beautiful sleek woman with a warm low voice and a very intimate manner. We sat drinking tea in the garden, swapping news. And then, with a pause and an introductory frown, as if she had planned the moment, she told me about Jocelyn. How things were not going so well with his work. He'd finished a final draft of a novel and was depressed it had failed to measure up to his ambitions, for this was supposed to be an important book. He was miserable. He didn't think he could improve it, nor could he bring himself to destroy was she who suggested they take a short holiday and walk the door dusty white tracks round Orvieto. He needed rest and distance from his pages. While we sat in the shade of the enormous willow, she told me how downcast Jocelyn had been. She had offered to read the novel, but he had refused, reasonably enough, for she's not really a literary sort of person. When she'd finished, I said airily, well, I'm sure he can rescue it if he can just get away for a while. They set off. The following morning I fed the cat, made myself a second coffee, then spread my pages on a desk in the guest room. The huge dustless house was silent, but my thoughts kept returning to Joliet's story. It seemed so odd that my ever successful friend should have a crisis of confidence. The fact interested me. It even cheered me a little. After an hour, without taking any sort of decision, I wandered toward Jocelyn study. Locked in the same open minded spirit, I wandered into the master bedroom I remembered from our Brixton days where he used to keep his marijuana. It didn't take me long to find the key at the back of his sock drawer. You won't believe this, but I had no plan. I just wanted to see. On his desk I A huge old electric typewriter hummed. He had forgotten to turn it off. He was among the many word processing holdouts in the literary world. The typescript was right there in a neatly squared off pile, 600 pages long but not vast. The title was the tumult. And underneath I saw in pencil fifth draft, followed by the previous week's date. I sat down in my old friend's study chair and began to read. Two hours later, in a kind of dream, I took a break, went into the garden for 10 minutes, then decided that I should get on with my own wretched attempt. Instead, I found myself drawn back to Jocelyn's desk. I hesitated by it, then I sat down. I read all day, paused for supper, read until late, woke early and finished at lunchtime. It was magnificent, by far his best, better than any contemporary novel I remembered reading. If I say it was Tolstoyan in its ambition, it was also modernist, Proustian, Joycean in execution. It had moments of joy and terrible grief. His prose sang more beautifully than ever. It was worldly. It gave us London. It gave us the 20th century. The depictions of the father, five central characters, overwhelmed me with their truth, their brightness. I felt I'd always known such people. Sometimes they seemed too close, too real. The end, a matter of 50 pages, was symphonic in its slow unfolding grandeur, sorrowful, understated, honest. And I was in tears, not only for the plight of the characters, but for the whole superb conception, its understanding of love and regret and fate and its warm sympathy for the frailty of human nature. I stood up from the desk. Distractingly, I watched a battered looking thrush hopping backward and forward across the lawn in search of a worm. I do not say this in my defense, but again I was empty of schemes. I experienced only the glow of an extraordinary reading experience, a form of profound gratitude familiar to all who who love literature. I say I had no plan, but I knew what I would do next. I simply enacted what others might only have thought. I moved like a zombie, distancing myself from my own actions. I also told myself that I was just taking precautions, that most likely nothing would come of what I was doing. This formulation was a cushion of vital protection. Looking back now, I wonder if I was prompted by rumours of the Lee Israel Forges or by Borguet's Pierre Menard or Calvino's if on a Winter's Night a traveler or an episode in a novel I'd read the year before. The Information by Martin Amis. I'm reliably informed that Amos himself derived that episode from the evening of drinking with another novelist. The one memory fails me with the Scottish name and the English attitude. I heard that the two friends entertained themselves by dreaming up all the ways one writes might ruin the life of another. But this was different. It may sound improbable, given what followed, but on that morning, I had no thoughts of causing Jocelyn any harm. I was thinking only of myself. I had ambitions. I carried the pages into the kitchen and tipped them into a plastic bag. I took a taxi across London to an obscure street where I knew there was a photocopying shop. I came back, returned the original to Jocelyn's desk, locked the study, wiped my prints off the key, returned it to his sock drawer. Back in the guest room, I took from my briefcase one of my empty notebooks. I'm always giving them for Christmas. And got to work, serious work. I started making extended notes for the novel I had just read. The first entry I dated two years in the past. I deliberately strayed from the subject several times, pursued a relevant idea, but kept coming back to the central line of the story. I wrote at speed for three days, filling two notebooks, sketching out scenes. I found new names for the characters, altered aspects of their past, their surroundings, details of their faces. I managed to work in some minor themes from my previous novels. I even quoted myself I thought New York would serve for London. Then I realized that I could never bring in any city to life the way Jocelyn had. So I returned to London. I worked hard, and I began to feel that I was being truly creative. This was, after all, going to be my novel as well as his. In the remainder of my stay, I typed out my first three chapters. A few hours before they were due to return, I left Jocelyn and Joliet a note explaining that I had to return north for an example. Examiner's meeting. You might think that I was being a coward, that I couldn't face the man I was stealing from. But it wasn't like that. I wanted to get away and keep working. I already had 20,000 words, and I was desperate to press on. At home, I told Arabella truthfully that my week had been a complete success. I was on to something important. I wanted to spend the summer holidays developing it. I worked through the rest of July. In mid August, I printed out my first draft and made a bonfire in the garden of my photocopy. I made a mass of corrections on the pages, typed in my marks, and in early September, the new draft was ready. Let's face it, the novel was still Jocelyn's. There were brilliant passages of his that I left almost intact. But there was enough of my own writing there to allow me a sense of proud possession. I had sprinkled the pages with the dust of my identity. I'd even included a reference to my first novel, which one of the characters is seen reading on a beach. My publisher, in one of those savage clear outs of the so called mid list, had with profound regret, let me go. I was contractually free. Rather than self publish on the Internet, I chose to go with an old fashioned vanity press called Gorgeous Books. It was a dismayingly rapid process. Within a week I had in my hands an early copy of the Dance she refused. The COVID was purple with gold embossed letters and flowery copper plate, and the pages were faintly perfumed. I inscribed one and sent it registered post to my dear friend. I knew he would never read it. All this was achieved before I resumed teaching in late September. During the autumn, in my free time, I sent the book around to friends, to bookshops, newspapers, always making sure to enclose a hopeful little note. I gave copies to charity shops in the hope of gaining a humble circulation. I slipped copies onto the shelves of secondhand bookshops. I heard by email from Jocelyn that he had put the tumult aside and was working on something new. I knew now that I had nothing to do but wait and hope. Two years passed. I made my usual visits to Hampstead and we avoided, as we often did, talk of our own work. In that period, I did not hear from a single person, apart from my wife on the subject of the Dance she refused. Arabella was swept away by it, indignant, then furious that it was ignored. She told me that my famous friend should be doing so, something to help. I told her calmly that it was a matter of pride not to ask him. On trips to London, I distributed more copies of the Dance and in secondhand bookstores. By Christmas almost 400 copies were out in the world. Three years separated the appearance of the Dance she refused and the tumult. As I had expected, friends had told Jocelyn that he'd written his best and he must publish when he did. The press was also, as I'd expected, a sweet chorus of songbirds in fluting ecstasy. I hung back in case the process had set in. Train found its own momentum. But since no one had read my perfumed version, nothing could happen. I was obliged to give the matter a shove. I sent my creation in a plain envelope to a bitter, gossipy critic on the London Evening Standard. My unsigned note said in Courier 16 point, does this remind you of a highly successful novel published last month? Much of the rest you will know. It was the perfect story. A wild storm surged through my house in Josslyn's all the correct ingredients. A wretched villain, a Quiet hero, a national treasure knocked flying from his pedestrians or dishonest fingers deep in the till. An old friend down on his luck, betrayed whole passages lifted, whole conceptions stolen characters too. No plausible explanation from the guilty man whose friends now understood his reluctance to publish tens of thousands of copies of the tumult removed from the shops and pulped, and the old friend nobly refused to condemn, unavailable for interviews. And of course a genius revealed. Best book in years, a modern classic. A mild man loved by his students and colleagues, dumped by his publisher. Books out of print. Then a scramble to procure the rights, all the rights to the backlist as well as dance agents and auctions involved, film rights and movie people involved. Then the prizes. Booker, Whitbread, Medici, critic circle in one long noisy banquet, copies of the gorgeous edition selling for £5,000 on Abe Books. Then, as the dust settled and with my books still flying off the shelves, thoughtful articles on the nature of literary kleptomania, the strange compulsion to be caught, and acts of artistic self destruction in late, late middle age. In emails and phone calls with Jocelyn, I was cool. I sounded offended without saying so, keen to break off, at least for now. When he told me how baffled he was, I cleared my throat, paused, then reminded him of the copy I'd sent. How else could it have happened? Finally, I gave one interview to a California magazine. I became the authoritative version, picked up by the rest of the press. I allowed the journalists access to my notebooks, rejection slips and letters, copies of the hopeful notes I had attached to my purple copies. He saw my crowded circumstances. He met my cheerful, charming wife and friendly children. He wrote of my dedication to the high cause of my art. My quiet reluctance to criticize an old friend of the indignities of vanity publishing, suffered without complaining. The rediscovery of a brilliant backlist comparable to the John Williams phenomenon. Courtesy of the American Weekly. I became a saint in my private life. All predictable enough. Eventually we bought a big old house on the edge of a village three miles out of Durham. A stately river runs through the grounds. At my 60th birthday, two grandchildren were in attendance. The year before, I'd accepted a knighthood. I remain a saint, an exceedingly rich saint, and I'm close to becoming a national treasure. My sixth novel didn't do so well with critics, though the sales were rolling. Esque, I think I might stop writing. I don't think anyone would mind. And Jocelyn? Also predictable. No one in publishing would touch him, nor would the readers. He sold his house, moved to Brixton our old stomping ground, where he says he feels more comfortable. Anyway, he teaches creative writing, night classes in Lewisham. It pleases me that Joliet stuck by him, and there are no issues between us. We remain close. I've forgiven him completely. He often comes to stay and always has the best guest room, facing the river where he likes to fit, fish for trout and row for miles. Sometimes Joliet comes up with him. They like our old university friends, who are kind and tolerant. Often he cooks for us all. I think he's grateful that I've dropped any hint of accusation that he ever looked inside that purple scented edition. Sometimes, late at night, when he and I are sitting by the fire, it's a vast fireplace, drinking and raking over this curious episode, this disaster, he tells me again his own theory, which he's been refining over the years. Our lives, he says, were always entwined. We talked over everything a thousand times, read the same books, lived through and shared so much. And in some curious way our thoughts, our imaginations fused to such an extent that we ended up writing the same novel, more or less. I cross the room with a bottle of decent Pomerol to refill his glass. It's just a theory, I tell him, but it's a good hearted theory, a loving idea that celebrates the very essence of our long, unbreakable friendship. We're family. We raise our glasses. Cheerful.
- [52:09]
Meg Wolitzer
Tony hale performed Ian McEwan's My Purple Scented Novel at the Getty center in Los Angeles. I'm Meg Wolitzer. What's wonderful about this breathtaking tale is that McEwan uses the tropes of classic murder mysteries in the construction of a kind of literary murder. This is McEwan's particular gift, to take conventional expectations, a happy marriage, a deep friendship, and twist them morally. I'm not sure why everyone is fascinated by plagiarism, but we are. The idea that a writer might possibly skip the hard part and just take something that doesn't belong to them can be so exciting, especially the moment when they get apprehended or sometimes escape apprehension. But less nefarious writers who've been at it for a long time actually run the risk of self plagiarism. You write a good line and you think, huh, that looks familiar. And then you realize you wrote it years ago in an earlier book, and so you can't use it now, damn it. But Ian McKeown has a great time here with plain old plagiarism, and we delight in the vicious and illicit fun. Finally we end where we began, with the poet Billy Collins, asking us to consider the relationship between ourselves and the authors we read. His poem, Dear Reader, is performed by Dionne Graham, an award winning audiobook narrator whose impressive portfolio includes works by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.
- [53:49]
Dionne Graham
Dear reader, Baudelaire sees you as his brother and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs to make sure you have not closed the book. And now I am summoning you up again, attentive ghost, dark, silent figure standing in the doorway of these words, Dryden makes you feel enclosed in the candle glow of a paneled library, leather bound Ovid and Horace on their shelves. With Tennyson you are in a moated garden, and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree on a day haunted by clouds. But now you are here with me with no particular place to rendezvous beyond the open pasture of this page. No zeitgeist marching in the background, no ethos thrown over our shoulders like a cape. This is the way we like it, I think, our contact momentary, accidental as a book by a window blown open by the wind, unnoticed by the monocled eye of history, we are together in a scene so ordinary you could be the person I held the door for at the bank this morning, or the man who wrapped my speckled fish. You could be someone I pass on the street, or an indistinct face behind the wheel of an approaching car, sunlight flashing off the windshield. I am the one driving in the other direction, looking up into the small posted mirror where I watch you diminish my echo my twin, and vanish around a curve in this whip of a road we will always be traveling together.
- [56:02]
Meg Wolitzer
Dionne Graham performed Dear Reader by Billy Collins. The poem reminds us of the way works of literature draw us into the worlds and orbits of the authors, whether they are acknowledged masters or writers new to us. So two Stories and Two Poems consider both the simple pleasure of reading and the morally complex aspects of creation, success and adulation in Dear Reader. Billy Collins suggests that the writer and reader are always traveling life's road together. I'm Meg Wolitzer and I'm happy to have shared this leg of the journey with you. Thanks for joining me for Selected Shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimkin, Vivienne Woodward, and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in Los Angeles, are recorded by Phil Richards. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the deal. Performed by the Dierdorf Petersen Group, Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space.