The Books: “Little Black Book of Stories” – ‘Raw Material’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The next book on the shelf is the last short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called Little Black Book of Stories. This is an excerpt from “Raw Material”. A creative writing teacher in a small town – a failed writer but a good teacher – discovers something in one of his students essays – something that makes him want to write again. It’s an unexpected student too – an 80 year old spinster (his words), who never speaks in class, who writes these long pieces about how they used to do the wash, how they used to black the stoves – and, because this is AS Byatt we’re talking about – we get to read the student’s essays. A story within a story. The title takes on a couple layers of meaning – because, as we read the student’s essays – we are reading, unedited, the “raw material”. The teacher, Jack, is a great little character study – in a couple of broad brush strokes AS Byatt creates an entire world, a life, a history. She’s so good at that. And another thing – she never has contempt for her characters. Even if they are ridiculous or self-aggrandizing or whatever. Think of Leonora, the blowsy lesbian feminist literary critic in Possession – who is, to some degree, a stereotype of the clumsy well-meaning boorish TMI American. She’s supposed to be a caricature – but Byatt doesnt’ write about her with contempt. Jack could be someone we just laugh or sneer at … but thank God, we don’t. He is a failure. But he sees something in this woman’s writing, something raw – somethiing good – and the story is about that ephemeral fleeting feeling of wanting to make art, needing to make art. Oh, and her observations about what the other students in the class write – even though we don’t get to read those – are hysterical, and maddening. You know, writing as therapy, or writing as hiding – wanting to be congratulated, or admired, whatever. The 80 year old student doesn’t write for any of those reasons. She writes to show. Here is the opening of the story. See how she create Jack??

And believe it or not – the story has a terrifying horrible ending ( hard to believe, I know). But I had to go back and reread the whole story, looking for clues, things I might have missed.

Excerpt from Little Black Book of Stories. – “Raw Material”.

He always told them the same thing, to begin with “Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.” Every year, he glared amiably at them. Every year they wrote melodrama. They clearly needed to write melodrama. He had given up tellilng them that Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was, precisely, that.

The class had been going for fifteen years. It had moved from a schoolroom to a disused Victorian church, made over as an Arts and Leisure Centre. The village was called Sufferacre, which was thought to be a corruption of sulfuris aquae. It was a failed Derbyshire spa. It was his home town. In the 1960s he had written a successfully angry, iconoclastic and shocking novel called Bad Boy. He had left for London and fame, and returned quietly, ten years later. He lived in a caravan in somebody’s paddock. He traveled widely, on a motor bike, teaching Creative Writing in pubs, schoolrooms and arts centres. His name was Jack Smollett. He was a big, shuffling, smiling, red-faced man, with longish blond hair, who wore cable-kknit sweaters in oily colours, and bright scarlet neckerchiefs. Women liked him, as they liked enthusiastic Labrador dogs. They felt, almost all – and his classes were predominantly female – more desire to cook apple pies and Cornish pasties for him, than to make violent love to him. They believed he didn’t eat sensibly. (They were right.) Now and then, someone in one of his classes would point out, as he exhorted them to stick to what they knew, that they themselves were what he “really knew”. Will you write about us, Jack? No, he always said, that would be a betrayal of confidence. You should always respect other people’s privacy. Creative writing teachers had something in common with doctors, even if – yet again – creative writing wasn’t therapy.

In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully to sell two different stories based on the confessions (or inventions) of his class. They offered themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates. They told him horrorand bathos, day-dreams, vituperation and vengeance. They couldn’t write, their inventions were crude, and he couldn’t find a way to perform the necessary operations to spin the muddy straw into silk, or turn the raw bleeding chunks into a savoury dish. So he kept faith with them, not entirelly voluntarily. He did care about writing. He cared about writing more than anything, sex, food, beer, fresh air, even warmth. He wrote and rewrote perpetually, in his caravan. He was rewriting his fifth novel. Bad Boy, his first, had been written in a rush just out of the sixth form, and snapped up by the first publisher he’d sent it to. It was what he had expected. (Well, it was oone of two scenarios that played in his young brain, immediate recognition, painful, dedicated struggle. When success appeared it appeared blindingly clear that it had always been the only possible outcome.) So he didn’t go to university, or learn a trade. He was, as he knew he was, a Writer. His second novel, Smile and Smile, had sole 600 copies, and was remaindered. His third and his fourth – frequently rewritten – lay in brown paper, stamped and restamped, in a tin chest in the caravan. He didn’t have an agent.

Classes ran from September to March. In the summer he worked in literary festivals, or holiday camps on sunny islands. He was pleased to see the classes again in September. He still thought of himself as wild and unattached, but he was a creature of habit. He liked things to happen at precise, recurring times, in precise, recurring ways. More than half of most of his classes were old faithfuls who came back year after year. Each class had a nucleus of about ten. At the beginning of the year this was often doubled by enthusiastic newcomers. By Christmas many of these would have dropped away, seduced by other courses, or intimidated by the regulars, or overcome by domestic drama or personal lassitude. St. Antony’s Leisure Centre was gloomy because of its high roof, and draughty because of its ancient doors and windows. The class themselves had brought oil heaters, and a circle of standard lamps with imitation stained-glass covers. The old churchy chairs were pushed into a circle under these pleasant lights.