There’s a book which over the years has started to have a mildly hypnotic power over me. It’s the Norton anthology of American short stories. I’ve lost the dust cover, which if I do remember used to show a 1930’s painting of a student couple, on the steps of a red brick building, probably the entry to a university building, on a sunlit afternoon. I first picked up the book around 20 years ago, and I had tentatively read one or two of the stories, feeling intimated by the difficult English and the numerous cultural allusions, many of which I could not understand. I tried to read the last stories first, thinking that they would have a “modern” and interesting feel, but the author had cautiously stopped somewhere in the late 60’s, to avoid getting in the quagmire of having to choose among contemporary authors, except for safely accepted greats like Updike. Those 60’s short stories were rather hysterical in tone, fiercely political and surrealistic outpourings which only intimidated me even more, especially as I could scarcely understand all the politics.

Then I fell one night on John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer” and was pretty enchanted by its dreamy atmosphere. The theme of slipping through time by swimming was gripping, with a strong initiatic feel to it. In the story, the man starts swimming in the “perfect morning” of happiness, and by the time he reaches his home in the evening, it is autumn and he realizes that in fact he is bankrupt and his home is empty, yet he had forgotten that in the morning. The story is not logically coherent, but we are not really asking it to be so, because it is clear that it is taking place in a symbolical/ poetic realm. I remember going to sleep thinking of a man emerging from a swimming pool, under a cold late afternoon sky, which was reflected in a background maze of canals which ran through a suburb of elongated, red roofed houses. For me, it was as if those swimming pools which he had swam through had somehow been connected by a magic underground river.

Another story which strongly impressed me, though I could only half understand it when I first read it, was “Becky” by Jean Toomer. According to the notes on the writers at the back of the anthology, Jean Toomer was a highly talented black writer of the 20’s, a solitary figure who later wandered in Gurdjeff’s mysticism. “Becky” reads like an incantation, I guess it’s an imitation of the tone of a preacher in a trance. It’s a short short story, in an urgent, delirious style as if we are seeing the character during a feverish dream:

“Becky had one negro son. Who gave it to her ? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks’ mouths. She wouldn’t tell. Common, God-forsaken, insane white shameless wench, said the white folks’ mouths. Her eyes were sunken, her neck stringy, her breasts fallen, till then. Taking their words, they filled her, like a bubble rising – then she broke. Mouth setting in a twist that held her eyes, harsh, vacant, staring…Who gave it to her ? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks mouths. She wouldn’t tell. Poor Catholic poor-white crazy-woman, said the black folks’ mouths. White folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who’d put His cross upon her and cast her out.

When the first was born, the white folks said they’ve have no more to do with her. And black folks, they too joined hands to cast her out….The pines whispered to Jesus…The railroad boss said not to say he said it, but she could live, if she wanted to, on the narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road. John Stone, who owned the lumber and the bricks, would have shot the man who told he gave the stuff to Lonnie Deacon, who stole out there at night and built the cabin. A single room held down to earth….O fly away to Jesus…. by a leaning chimney…..”

The sentences “The pines whisper to Jesus” and “O fly away to Jesus” keep appearing throughout the story, as asides in the middle of a sentence, and become more exclamatory (“O pines, whisper to Jesus, tell Him to come and press sweet Jesus lips against their lips and eyes”) as the story becomes more frenetic. The end is a bit of a letdown, but that sentence “The pines whisper to Jesus”, with its three “s” which imitate the sound of the wind through the pine needles, had really burnt itself into my mind. A few years ago when I had just started writing my second novel, I was stuck at the first page. The hero, Sanjay, was around 9 years old, and he was out at sea on a pirogue one night with his cousin Mahen the fisherman. What next ? I wondered. Then I wrote “The soft wind carried a whisper: “Sanjay” it said”. The sentence had a familiar ring to it, and I knew that it came from something remembered. It was only afterwards that I saw the connection.

I guess it’s pretty clear I have a strong interest for the supernatural. Right now, in the same anthology, I’m reading “Kneel to the rising sun” by Erskine Caldwell. He’s much better known that Jean Toomer, and writes in a gritty realistic tone which I feel a bit hard to digest. In the morning, I read “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irvin ( the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil) and, predictably, I enjoyed it.

Over the years, I’ve read maybe half of the stories in this anthology. Very often I re read the ones I’ve enjoyed, rather than venture to read new ones. I’m not at all in a hurry to finish it. I think I like the idea, when I hold that book that “this is America. I’m holding America in the palm of my hand”. Maybe I’m more in love with that idea of “having” this book, which I imagine as a book of wonders ( like the travel books by ancient writers, which promise you tales of gold and monsters. I imagine bison-filled plains and gleaming skyscrapers within the pages of this book) than I’m interested in listening to the writers, whose style can be sometimes grey and harsh.

Or maybe it’s nostalgia. This book was one of three or four books which I used to keep at my bedside, around ten years ago. I was then very religious, in a strongly temple going manner, and maybe because I did meditation, colourful images and impressions tended to linger in my mind. The two other books I was reading then before going to sleep were a very good translation of Dante’s Hell and a collection of the metaphysical poets ( Donne, Marvell). That’s why I remember so well Cheever’s swimmer, and the thick, manly and poignant poetry of Dante and Donne. There was something darkly beautiful, about reading these sinuous, difficult yet sensual writers, before going to sleep.