GETTING IT OUT THERE

 

John Carey, top dog in Eng Lit crit and Oxford prof sounds the alarm in a review of Philip Hensher’s two volumed anthology of short stories: 

What the British short story needs, Hensher insists, is not prizes but outlets. It came to life in the rich magazine culture of the 1890s, which was itself a response to the new mass-reading public created by the 1870s education acts. Its readership was not the old leisured class but clerks and office workers, needing their fiction in quick doses. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, published in the Strand Magazine were written with them in mind, and Hensher counts 23 other mag­azines from the same decade that regu­larly featured short fiction. Writers could earn a living - or, in Doyle's case, a for­tune - just from short stories. Now almost no British periodicals publish short fiction, and shamingly, as Hensher observes, The New Yorker has been more hospitable to British short-story writers in recent years than any British outlet. It also pays better: the BBC's fee for a short story broadcast on radio would not, he estimates, cover his weekly laundry bill. 

Yes it is regrettable that the fine art of the short story has been displaced in the universe of popular entertainment by The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing just as the string quartet has been superseded by Elvis and Adele. But whaddyagonnado? It’s the market innit. Oiks still read books but they like bonkbusters or fantasies by Jackie Collins and JK Rowling. And who’s going to deny them these simple pleasures?  

Lack of outlets is a crux, as JC avers. So where do the literate cognoscenti (Crazy Oik readers and writers) turn in this age of dearth? Print-on-demand little mags maybe. We don’t have to stick our begging bowl under the patron’s nose – like Eliot pan-handling Lady Rothermere to get Criterion afloat - we can do the whole show right here in the barn. Crazy Oik fees (currently £0) won’t pay your laundry bill (who has those anymore? Or even ever?). I guess Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle would have had one but for now you’ll just have to wash your socks in the sink and hang them on the radiator. And as for posterity – well, it’s not all bad, thanks to technology. The Oik website will be archived in some corner of Google’s vast digital empire to be discovered by anthologists a hundred years from now. For those future readers the laundry bill will be as obscure as the hansom cab. Everyone will be flush on the Citizen’s wage and writing for the sheer pleasure of it – that’ll be progress indeed.

KEITH HOWDEN 

Come and Suffer 

In Blackpool, Catterall  and Swarbrick sold their beers under  the  title C & S.
This was commonly translated as Come and Suffer. 

Those were the days, maybe, coming after
the Sex Express to Blackpool North and galaxies
of C & S. We called it Come and Suffer.
Innocence doped the ozone. There were fairies
at the bottom of the garden. Beatle-bonneted,
Daft Jack and Jock pranced Saturday matador. 

It was Cock-Lorel land. Daft Jack and Jock
groped pleasure beaches, boozed and inhaled
the time’s illuminations. C & S spoke
new Eden’s horticulture. We knew the world
our mussel. Waltzers waltzed, the Tower
towered, ballrooms boiled Blackpool Rock. 

This was the swinging sixties. Hope hiccupped sure
as hangovers hard-won from C & S.
Slot-machines always paid. The Fun-House’s  offer
seemed unironic. Done with National Service,
Daft Jack and Jock forgot short back and sides
to march in mad Cockaigne. The Tower 

pointed the way our world was going,  the tide
was always high and every fag-machine
promised Valhalla. Expectation frothed
in every pint of C & S. Wogs still began
at Calais. Spain was tomorrow. New Utopia
castled the sands and towered the Promenade. 

It was cloud-cuckoo land. In the end, always,
the Ghost Train and the Winter Gardens waited.
Daft Jack and Jock  rode the return express
to darkened stations. The Tower shrivelled.
We Came and Suffered, learning the sobering
seventies, the excremental eighties.

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Parachute Training Tatton Park 1944 - Albert Richards