The Guardian's Blog, page 159

Poem of the week: The Line of Beauty by Arthur O'Shaughnessy

A remarkably gentle vision of the end of days, and what little might survive

The title of this week's poem, "The Line of Beauty" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, will be familiar to many readers as the title of the fine novel by Alan Hollinghurst, which won the Booker prize in 2004.

Both poem and novel's title share a common ancestor. The quotation comes from William Hogarth's 1753 treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, where, in chapter seven, Hogarth unveils his aesthetic Philosopher's Stone. Beauty, essentially, is S-shaped: its recognition depends on a distinguishing line "composed of contrasting curves on a plane". It's slightly fanciful but amusing to think that O'Shaughnessy's poem, first published in 1881, is situated more or less in the middle of an imaginary S curving between Hogarth's treatise and Hollinghust's novel.

Perhaps O'Shaughnessy chose the Petrarchan sonnet as his form because he found there an equivalent "line of beauty", blending variety and symmetry. Traditionally, the sonnet contrasts the mutability of the beautiful with the permanence of the principle of beauty, something that, in a different way, his own poem sets out to do.

The poem moves lightly on its metrical feet, and the millenarian vision is almost languorous. While lines two and four, by only seeming to come to a rest, challenge expectations, the tone remains gentle, and the enjambment is hardly disruptive, as "summer fails/ To come again" and "earth with lagging footsteps seems well-nigh/ Spent in her annual circuit through the sky …" There's a forlorn, echoey sound in the "b" rhyme (fails/pales/avails/wails) with its flicker of a second syllable, which suggests the world ends with a dying fall, if not a whimper, as "decrepit man", with a despairing gesture, it seems, "lies down lost in the great grave to die". The placing of this line after the idea of love as "a quenched flame" is erotically suggestive.

The sestet picks up a brisker pace and stronger rhetoric. There's a lively variety in the syntax: two big questions form line nine and are answered with the splendid dramatic flourish of 10, reaching all the way back to the title: "A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line." This seems a stronger claim than Hogarth himself makes. Once again, the poem's line is extended, with a further rich brushstroke of description: "Curving consummate."

Hollinghurst's title contains a pun: the "line" of beauty and the lines of cocaine enjoyed, sometimes self-destructively, by the book's young "movers and shakers". This is probably a nuance too far for O'Shaughnessy's poem. But perhaps it shares with Hollinghurst's novel the reference to a lover's bodily beauty. Even Hogarth links the idea of his line to the actions of human bodies; the dancer, the artist as he draws, can exemplify it in their movements. O'Shaughnessy's sonnet doesn't at first appear to be a love poem. But Dinah Roe (who paints O'Shaughnessy as something of a "mover and shaker" himself) provides an interesting note to the poem's last line in her Penguin anthology, The Pre-Raphaelites from Rossetti to Ruskin. This takes us to a passage in Swinburne's "Laus Veneris": "And lo my love, mine own soul's heart, more dear/ Than mine own soul, more beautiful than God."

If O'Shaughnessy's sonnet is saying that love makes man and God interchangeable, the poet has found an interesting new way of refreshing an old platitude. But perhaps something more interesting is going on. Perhaps the British-born Irish poet is bringing his scientific knowledge to a view of the universe as interconnected beyond conventional linear hierarchies and natural/supernatural boundaries.

The Line of Beauty

When mountains crumble and rivers all run dry,
When every flower has fallen and summer fails
To come again, when the sun's splendour pales,
And earth with lagging footsteps seems well-nigh
Spent in her annual circuit through the sky;
When love is a quenched flame, and nought avails
To save decrepit man, who feebly wails
And lies down lost in the great grave to die;
What is eternal? What escapes decay?
A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line
Curving consummate. Death, Eternity,
Add nought to it, from it take naught away;
'Twas all God's gift and all man's mastery,
God become human, and man grown divine.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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2. The Two Things game

Each day in the run-up to Christmas, we present an extract from Barnaby Rogerson's fascinating Book of Numbers. Today, our festive countdown reveals that any discipline can be boiled down to two basic principles

[1] People love to play the Two Things game, but rarely agree about what the two things are. [2] That goes double for anyone who works with computers.

A few years ago, Glen Whitman was chatting with a stranger in a Californian bar. When he confessed to this stranger that he taught economics, the drinker replied without so much as a pause for breath, "So what are the two things about economics? You know, for every subject there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important."

"Okay," said the professor. "One: Incentives matter. Two: There's no such thing as a free lunch."

Inspired, Glen started playing the Two Things game and recording some of the results on a web page (Google "Whitman" and "Two Things" and you'll get there). But it's more fun to try it for yourself – and especially good if you find yourself at a dinner next to a self-important professional. Here are some of the best of Whitman's:

Finance: [1] Buy low. [2] Sell high.
Medicine: [1] Do no harm. [2] To do any good, you must risk doing harm.
Journalism: [1] There is no such thing as objectivity. [2] The end of the story is created by your deadline.
Theatre: [1] Remember your lines. [2] Don't run into the furniture or fall off the stage.
Physics: [1] Energy is conserved. [2] Photons (and everything else) behave like both waves and particles.
Religion: [1] Aspire to love an unknowable god. [2] Do this by trying to love your neighbour as much as yourself.

Tomorrow: tricolons.

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson (Profile).

Reference and languagesEconomicsBarnaby Rogerson
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1. The year one

As the Christmas countdown begins, we will be running daily extracts from Barnaby Rogerson's fascinating Book of Numbers. Our advent calendar, appropriately enough, starts at the season's very beginning

Our western dating system – BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini – Year of Our Lord) – was conceived in the sixth century by a Romanian monk called Dionysius Exiguus, and came into widespread scholarly use after its adoption by the Anglo-Saxon historian the Venerable Bede.

Prior to that, European historians dated years according to the Roman consul who held office in a given year. Working in Rome, Dionysus declared that the current year was AD 525, based on the birth of Christ taking place in the year 1 (there being no Western concept at the time of zero). Gospel historians later decided that Jesus was actually born a few years earlier, between 6 and 4BC. Dionysius, it seems, may have wanted to disprove the idea that the end of the world would take place 500 years after the birth of Jesus. That would have made it 6,000 years after the Creation, which was believed to have taken place 5,500 years before Christ. Dionsyius himself estimated, based on cosmological readings, that the end of the world would take place in 2000.

The CE/BCE (Common Era) designations, increasingly used to secularise history, are widely regarded as modern, politically correct innovations but were in fact introduced by Jewish historians in the mid-19th century. But, for those who might want an alternative, there are plenty of other dating systems. The Jews start their calendar in 3761BC; the Mayans, in 3114BC; the Chinese, with the start of the Yellow Emperor's reign in 2696BC; the Japanese, in 680BC; the Muslims, with the emigration of the prophet Muhammad from Medina from Mecca in AD 622; the Copts, with the Year of the Martyrs in AD 284, while the Ethiopian church starts the clock back in 5493BC.

Tomorrow: the Two Things game.

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson (Profile).

ReligionChristianityJudaismIslamReference and languagesHistoryChristmasBarnaby Rogerson
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Breaking up with books is hard to do

Getting rid of old favourites is easier said than done. What books would you find hard to part with?

Too many books: they have to be culled. It's a cry that echoes through my house every few months, usually when a stalagmite of them topples on somebody's toe. The last cull involved packing my daughter's childhood into eight boxes – a melancholy task, cheered only by the willingness of her old primary school to take them, sight unseen, for the Christmas fair. This time, more drastic action was needed. Instead of riffling through the piles on the floor, I decided to work from the top.

Up on the most inaccessible shelf, where the cobwebs join ceiling to wall, was nearly three foot of reclaimable space, aka the collected works of Charles Dickens.

Now I love Dickens, and wouldn't be without copies of Bleak House, Great Expectations and David Copperfield. But the ones I actually read – have ever read – are in handy paperback editions. When my husband decided to make Barnaby Rudge a holiday project, he downloaded the Project Gutenberg text to his iPad.

So what is the value of the 16-volume edition that somehow found its musty way to me from my grandparents' flat many years ago? These are books that aspire to be furniture: published in the early 1930s by Hazell, Watson and Viney, they're the colour of polished mahogany with gilded curlicues that might grace the chambers of the lawyers pursuing Jarndyce v Jarndyce. It's nice to see the original illustrations, but the text itself is too cramped and faded to be easily readable. These volumes have the lurky-murky smell of books that have lurked too long in the murkier depths of secondhand bookshops.

This isn't the first time I've considered getting rid of them, but two obstacles have always stood in my way. The first is the inscription in my grandfather's handwriting from 1933. I hate the idea of books as furniture, a fetish unforgettably skewered by F Scott Fitzgerald in the third chapter of The Great Gatsby. But there's a biographical poignancy to the idea of my grandparents filling the shelves of their new home with brown Dickens, red Macmillan pocket editions of Kipling and red and green Loeb Classical Library volumes, which I find hard to resist. Unlike Gatsby they did, at least, cut the pages.

The second reason I am reluctant is more pragmatic: how do you dispose of a yard of old, but not antique, books? Libraries aren't interested in secondhand books, and the several collections already on offer on eBay – most at less than £50, buyer collects – don't seem to be making a dash for the door.

Bibliophile Gillian Thomas captures my ambivalence in her blog, The Afterlife of Books: "That books outlive their authors is a consoling thought. That they outlive their readers evokes the opposite reaction." Their desolate fate reminds her of Tony Harrison's poem Clearing,

The ambulance, the hearse, the auctioneer
Clear all the life of that loved house away.
The hard-earned treasures of some 50 years
Sized up as junk and shifted in a day.

Perhaps I'll put these ones back on the shelf. Just for now.

Charles DickensFictionClaire Armitstead
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Bernardine Bishop's miraculous achievement | Margaret Drabble

Novelist's posthumous Costa prize shortlisting provides this amazing writer with some of the afterlife she deserves

Bernardine Bishop's remarkable novel, Unexpected Lessons in Love, has just been shortlisted for the Costa awards, a fact which has brought much joy to friends, family and a growing number of admirers. It was published in January 2013, and Bernardine died of cancer in July, aged 73, the week in which the paperback appeared.

She is not here to enjoy the continuing afterlife of her work (which will include, we hope, more of the fiction that she wrote in her last, astonishingly creative, year) but, as one of her friends has said, how pleased she would be that we are all so pleased. She had the most generous of spirits, and an intense curiosity about other people: her piercingly attentive blue eyes (and her training as a psychotherapist) elicited confidences and confessions from all she knew. She was a great listener, as well as a great storyteller. Her characters were utterly real to her, and she enjoyed their company; her illness was irradiated by the pure felicity of invention.

And she was brilliant at plot. Plots flowed effortlessly from her, as she rediscovered the talent she had laid aside in her 20s. The story of her own life has been such an adventure. She loved to talk about her work, and, in her company, we all received unexpected and fortifying lessons in dying. This shortlisted novel, written in illness, is full of vitality and happiness – a sort of miracle.

Costa book awardsAwards and prizesMargaret Drabble
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Thanksgiving for fiction's awful celebrations

Novelists sweeten the great family occasion by reminding readers just how sour it can be

November's final Thursday is rarely a reason for rejoicing in American fiction, although authors may have been quietly grateful to their Puritan ancestors for the opportunities Thanksgiving presents for depicting unravelling families, public rows and cooking crises. Not to mention sour comedy, as in Scott Fitzgerald's leftover turkey recipes in The Crack-Up.

In Anne Tyler's A Patchwork Planet, the problem is a missing turkey (and one too many pumpkin pies). In Jay McInerney's Model Behaviour, it's parents who turn up for a restaurant meal with the protagonist in Manhattan, where his drunken dad behaves monstrously. Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, set over a Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, sees two families imploding as the kids' and parents' sins and lies are exposed during the eponymous storm. But shunning your kinsfolk is just as bleak in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which shows loathsome lecturer Chip shopping for one on the November holiday after being dumped by his student girlfriend.

Two recent novels derive their structure from the build-up to the supper. In Suzanne Berne's The Ghost at the Table, sisters squabble over their childhood years, while in Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land his hero Frank Bascombe prepares for the various challenges presented by his two ex-wives and children, and meanwhile experiences setbacks, ranging from George W Bush's election victory to being shot at.

In modern Thanksgiving fiction (as in Thanksgiving movies), in short, what the reader is invited to give thanks for is not belonging to families like these: if you're looking for Dickensian warmth and wholesomeness, you'll need to go back to Louisa May Alcott's story, "An Old-Fashioned Thanks-giving". And even that has a title suggesting that, in 1881, the celebratory meal was already prone to go pear-shaped.

FictionShort storiesF Scott FitzgeraldJonathan FranzenAnne TylerJay McInerneyJohn Dugdale
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On translating Camus

Sandra Smith, author of Penguin's latest version of The Outsider, answers questions about how she took L'Etranger into English

Sandra Smith, the translator of the latest Penguin Classics edition of The Outsider and a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, answers questions about Camus and translation. Most of these questions emerged from readers' discussions of this month's book

I know that you were keen to translate The Outsider for a long time before you were asked to do the Penguin translation. Why is this particular book so important to you?
I had taught the book for many years, sometimes in the original French and sometimes using the English translation(s), depending on the level of French of my students. The new translation was actually my idea as I had found the previous translations lacking in certain key respects. So I put a proposal in to Penguin and it was approved, to my enormous delight.

Why do you think Camus endures so well?
Camus endures for several reasons. Firstly, he writes beautifully, mixing literary skill and philosophical ideas seamlessly. People can relate to his work on so many levels. He is very human and his politics are the politics of peace. There is a little-known work by him called "Lettres à un ami allemand" (Letters to a German Friend) written during the Occupation which are a brilliant mixture of history, sociology, politics and literature. Camus demonstrates his love for life in all his works, despite the Absurd and all the negative aspects of this world. He has faith in the basic goodness of people. He is an optimist – whereas Sartre was such a pessimist!

When did you first read The Outsider, and how did it strike you then? Following on from that, what happened to your opinions of the book as you worked on the translation? Did they alter at all?
I read L'Etranger many years ago as a student and immediately wanted to know more about Camus, so read more. He was my idol! I just loved the way he wrote. As I translated the book, I appreciated even more the enormous skill that went into it. The language is simple in the extreme but the symbolism and underlying philosophical ideas quite complex.

And afterwards?
My opinion did not change as to the importance of the book and its relevance. It is, and deserves to be, a classic. However, "La Peste" (The Plague) and "La Chute" (The Fall) are also brilliant.

You listened to a recording of Camus reading The Outsider as well as working with the text while you worked on the translation. What difference did this make?
I was very excited when I discovered that the Librairie sonore in Paris had released a recording of Camus reading the entire book on French radio so immediately ordered the CDs. I listened to his reading and tried to translate with his intonation, pauses, breath, emphases, et cetera in mind. It was very helpful.

In relation to this idea, a contributor called Daveportivo also asked:
"In literature or any writing, I feel maintaining and manipulating a pace is crucial to an author's tone and also the way readers will react to a whole range of revelations or actions. I love the way well-constructed pieces can have you singing to the author's tune or dancing to his rhythm, and it leads me to wonder how you maintain or reflect this in a translation. Meaning can vary dramatically enough when translating, but with syntactical differences and (I imagine) considerable variation in syllable count I imagine it must be very difficult to echo Camus' flow. To use my school French as an example, Bonsoir and Good Evening have very different feels both on the tongue and within a sentence. Anyway, The Outsider (this version) had a very particular sense of flow and I'm always curious whether the content/meaning of the sentences simply serves to define Camus' style and the rhythm of the narrator's voice, or whether switching the nuts and bolts of one language for another turns this on its head."

Sandra Smith answered:
You have put your finger on the main issue of translation! There is no one answer, unfortunately, but I can say that I feel that translation is basically a subjective process. When I read something, my personal response to it influences how I translate. In this work, I listened to Camus' reading and also tried to imitate the terse style of Meursault that contrasted to the lyrical style used when describing nature. Also, the style of Part II is very different from Part I, with much more analysis and longer sentences, so it was important to transpose that into English.

Can you explain your Maman/Mother strategy to our readers? There's been a lot of debate about how to translate the famous first sentence and Mersault's subsequent references to Maman in the reading group this month.
When I first got the contract and told people, the first thing everyone asked was "How will you translate the first sentence?" It was a real challenge because most translators used "Mother", which I found did not get across the close relationship that "maman" implies in French. One translator left the word in French, which didn't really tell the reader anything about the connotation. I chose "My mother" because I thought about how someone would tell another person that his mother had died. Meursault is speaking to the reader directly. "My mother died today" seemed to me the way it would work, and also implied the closeness of "maman" you get in the French. Afterwards, I used "mama", partly because it sounds like "maman" and partly because I was aware that a British audience would probably prefer "Mum" and an American reader "Mom" so I needed something that worked on both sides of the Atlantic.

Related to this question, Derekenfrance also wrote:
"I've a question for Ms. Smith about how she has translated the opening sentence of L'Étranger. In the French, one reads "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte." She has chosen to translate this as "My mother died today." While much of the commentary about this sentence has focused on Ms Smith's decision to include the possessive pronoun "My", I'd like to focus on the placement of the word "today". She has followed the majority of the translators (if not all?) by putting "today" at the end of the sentence, even though in the French it is found as the first word of the book. I'm sure she made this decision consciously, and I'd like to ask why."

Sandra Smith answered:
In French, the emphasis often comes at the end of the sentence while in English it is at the beginning. I felt that "Today my mother died" sounded awkward and did not give the proper stress.

A follow up question also came from CamusScoiety, who asked "why the narrator chose to start off with an announcement that his mother died today (or today his mother died) only to immediately cast doubt on this fact."

Sandra Smith answered:
The doubt indicates he is not in constant contact with his mother and also that the old people's home chose to send him an impersonal telegram to announce her death. I feel Meursault is quite shocked when he reads this.

How guilty is Mersault and what of?
He is guilty of killing the Arab, and he never denies this. He is prepared to go to jail for it. He is not guilty of premeditation, which the jury does not believe. According to society, as symbolised by the legal system and religion, he is guilty of being different: unrepentant, an atheist, someone who threatens society's values. The examining magistrate who brandishes the cross in front of him actually says that if Meursault does not believe in God then his (the magistrate's) life has no meaning.

What do you make of Camus' famous suggestion that Mersault is "the only Christ that we deserve"?
When Camus said that Meursault is the only Christ we deserve, he continued to explain that he meant no disrespect to anyone religious. What he meant was that, like Jesus, Meursault refused to lie and was prepared to take the consequences of not pretending to feel or be something he wasn't.

Do you think that attitudes towards colonialism have clouded Camus' reputation. (And if you do, do you think that's fair? Or is he misunderstood?)
I think Camus had very mixed feelings about the Algerian situation and had he lived longer, it would have been interesting to see what he wrote about it as events evolved. I don't think it has clouded his reputation. Camus was a pacifist and once said "Je ne déteste que les bourreaux" – "I only hate butchers." (Letters to a German Friend.)

Finally, can you tell us what you make of the famous final paragraph? Why does Mersault hope that there would be many spectators on his day of execution and that they should greet him "with cries of hatred."
In my Introduction, I explain the Biblical reference in the French, which I tried to get across in the translation. I think the last sentence goes back to what Camus said about Meursault being the only Christ we deserve. Like Christ, Meursault is willing to suffer and take on the "sins" of others through his death. Society is guilty of condemning him for being different, for who he is rather than what he has done. Also, at the end, Meursault affirms the value of life, so to my mind, he accepts that killing the Arab was wrong and he deserves

to be condemned for that.

Albert CamusFictionSam Jordison
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Judging the Guardian first book award and seeking an objective verdict

It's been a fascinating process, but the search for a perfectly just conclusion was always going to be tricky

Over an eight-week period from September to early November, I met every week with a small group of intelligent and thoughtful people to discuss 11 intelligent and thought-provoking books by 11 new authors. The venue was Waterstones Covent Garden and thepurpose was to contribute to drawing up a shortlist for the Guardian first book award. The experience was hugely enjoyable and I feel very lucky to have been a part of it. But it raised more questions than it answered about just what makes a good book, how to evaluate one book against another and whether it is at all possible to come to some sort of fair and objective decision.

As the weeks went by my thoughts centred on four issues. From the beginning we wondered how far we should allow ourselves to be swayed by our own likes and dislikes, or whether to assess each book on more objective criteria such as quality of writing, structure and substance, and to try to consider how far it succeeded on its own terms – even if, as one member of the group put it, the subject matter was "not [our] bag". We did strive for a degree of such objectivity in our discussions, but all of us were swayed by visceral reactions to each book. When it came to the final vote, those whose bent tended to the political opted for books like Felix Martin's Money: The Unauthorised Biography, which furnished ammunition for their interests. Those more concerned with the psychological had psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life high on their list. The quest for objectivity seemed ultimately to have been a quixotic one.

Sometimes we needed to be reminded that this was a first book award and that one of the criteria was the potential shown for future development by each author. Arguably the risk here is that younger first-time writers, who might be presumed to have more room – and time – for improvement are privileged over the older ones. In practice I think the group simplified this question into the more concrete (if more subjective) one of: "Would I ever want to read anything else by this author?" And this proved to be quite an effective tool of selection.

One of the main fascinations of the Guardian first book award is the challenge posed by comparing fiction with non-fiction and poetry. Over the weeks I began to wonder whether our judging schedule, which entailed reading each book in a week or less, inevitably disadvantaged the non-fiction works. Novels are designed to be read sequentially and continuously, within a relatively short time frame. This does not necessarily apply to works of non-fiction, which might well benefit from being dipped into rather than swallowed whole. Is this one reason why a longlist with equal numbers of fiction and non-fiction became a shortlist of four novels and one non-fiction title?

About halfway through our deliberations it emerged that one of the most important criteria for judging this year's Man Booker prize had been how far the novels on its shortlist offered up new insights on re-reading. I determined to use this as one of my own criteria, since it seemed to me that it could apply equally to fiction, non-fiction and poetry. On reflection, however, it does have some drawbacks. In particular it can prejudice the chances of "genre" fiction. One of the novels on the longlist, Gill Hornby's The Hive, was a rather frothy mixture of romantic comedy, satire and farce. It was an enjoyable one-off read, but I would never want to read it again. So is there, perhaps, a difference between a good book and a good read? And is being a good read a sufficient qualification for winning a literary prize?

Two weeks ago the shortlist was announced and this has forced me to interrogate some of my earlier scepticism about the holy grail of objectivity. Three books on the list – Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, Sex and the Citadel by Shereen El Feki (Chatto & Windus)
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Picador)
Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach (Picador)
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan (Doubleday)

Guardian first book award 2013Guardian first book awardAwards and prizesFictionHealth, mind and bodyPolitics
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A brief survey of the short story part 53: Katherine Anne Porter

Full of both concrete and hallucinatory detail, Porter's slender output includes some of the very best American stories

Katherine Anne Porter lived a long life but published sparingly. Her bibliography is patchy despite its slightness – 27 stories and one novel – and yet a handful of her stories rank among the best in American literature, fired by a voice and quality of insightfulness that no other writer shares. Her style, a particularly lucid strain of modernism, was formed from channels cut by Henry James, Willa Cather and James Joyce, and made its own pronounced impression on her fellow southerners Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers. But there is something set deep within her writing that bears no marks of influence, and is not found elsewhere. This unique quality is surely the reason why she can make a serious claim for greatness from a relatively modest platform.

Porter grew up poor, scion of a once grand Louisianan family shunted by circumstance to rural south Texas. Like John Cheever, she devoted considerable energies to convincing people of her august lineage. This makes her sequence of "autobiographical" stories (which feature Porter's fictional alter-ego, Miranda) even more remarkable an achievement, because they are not drawn from life as they appear to be. When she was 30, after a brief, radicalising spell in New York, Porter travelled to Mexico to witness and to an extent participate in the cultural revolution under Álvaro Obregón. Her first stories, written in the early 1920s, take Mexico as their setting.

"Flowering Judas" (1930) took longer to emerge, and is the most extraordinary of Porter's Mexican stories. It blends religious faith, political belief and eroticism in a narrative that feels at once concrete and hallucinatory. Laura, a young, idealistic American, is committed to socialism, but still "slips now and again into some crumbling little church" to pray. The labour leader Braggioni, whose body "swells with ominous ripeness", tries each night to seduce her. Disillusioned, Laura sees Braggioni as a betrayal of the revolutionary ideal, and at the same time realises that her idealism is romantic nonsense. Yet she still runs Braggioni's errands, smuggling pills into prison for a fellow revolutionist who uses them to kill himself. In the story's final sequence Laura dreams that the suicide returns to punish her act of betrayal, each strand of the story combining in a charged and horrific vision.

Betrayal, which as Charles Baxter has observed "gives off a very particular hum" in Porter's work, defines another of her masterpieces, "Noon Wine" (1937). The story describes a failing Texas dairy farm and the hiring of a stranger, the taciturn Swede Mr Helton, whose industry turns around the fortunes of the Thompson family. A decade later another stranger arrives at the farm gate, the bounty hunter Homer T Hatch, who is intent on running Mr Helton to ground for a crime he committed in North Dakota 10 years before. Mr Thompson, however, doesn't want to let him go. The confrontation between Thompson and Hatch is one of the great scenes of American literature: menace throbs beneath a veneer of civility, and the mood shifts queasily between humour, pettiness and grave threat. When Thompson kills Hatch he is cleared by a jury, but cannot shake his sense of guilt. Like the unfortunate peasant in Guy de Maupassant's "A Piece of String", he spends days travelling the countryside explaining what happened to his neighbours but failing to convince them, or himself, of his innocence. His great act of betrayal is to involve his wife in this process, a decision that demeans her and leads to his suicide. An explanation for the extraordinary power of "Noon Wine", which has often and understandably been described as a modernist Greek tragedy, is given by Porter in a 1956 essay: it is "a story of the most painful moral and emotional confusions", she writes, "in which everyone concerned, yes, in his own crooked way, even Mr Hatch, is trying to do right".

Thompson's suicide is described with a haunting simplicity: "Taking off his right shoe and sock, he set the butt of the shotgun along the ground with the twin barrels pointed towards his head. It was very awkward. He thought about this a little, leaning his head against the gun mouth". The passage exemplifies the command Porter shows when writing about death. She nearly died after contracting Spanish flu in Denver in 1918, and in her fictionalised account, the 1939 story "Pale Horse, Pale Rider", death appears to Miranda in a fever dream as a stranger who "leaned far towards her and regarded her without meaning". In the surging stream of consciousness narrative "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" Porter goes further still, to the threshold of death and beyond:

Her heart sank down and down, there was no bottom to death, she couldn't come to the end of it. The blue light from [the] lampshade drew into a tiny point in the centre of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up.

The passage prompts – and earns – comparison to Tolstoy, who, more than any other writer, keeps returning to the moment of death in his fiction (think of that "black sack into which an invisible, invincible force" is thrusting Ivan in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich").

As Granny Weatherall lies dying her mind roves the past, which in Porter's work is an involute and inescapable territory. All of her characters find themselves tightly enmeshed in personal and collective memory, an active force that limits and often determines their actions. To escape this hold, it seems, requires escaping life itself; in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" it is only when Miranda is on the brink of succumbing to her illness that she discovers "There were no longer any multiple planes of living, no tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright between them". Porter's most complete exploration of this theme is "Old Mortality" (1937), a long, tripartite story exploring the myths families construct around themselves, and the tension younger family members experience as they try to break free of them. At the story's end Miranda rejects the oppression of tradition, but the final line – arriving like a blow – describes "her hopefulness, her ignorance", and implies that her supposed escape is only the next wave of myth making in process. As this suggests, Porter is a fatalist, which explains why her endings so often feel absolutely necessary. "The reader expects," the novelist Penelope Gilliatt once noted, "some counter-twist on the last pages, but no such trick. The end is a true end, and the truth of its acceleration comes when you read any of her finest stories a second time."

Which is not to say Porter's stories are programmatic. They are too intensely realised for that. They possess, in Robert Penn Warren's memorable description, "rich surface detail scattered with apparently casual profuseness", but beneath it rests "the close structure which makes such detail meaningful". Porter denied the deliberate presence of symbolism in her work – "I never consciously took or adopted a symbol in my life", she told an interviewer in 1963 – but intention, whether or not she was speaking truthfully, is beside the point here. Great stories generate their own meanings, and take on new life in the mind of each reader. Porter's stories are of the past, but they remain active and alive.

Next: Dambudzo Marechera

Short storiesFictionChris Power
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Doris Lessing's visions of the future

After exhausting the possibilities of realism, her science fiction went on to chart the implications of a world in flux

It was maybe 20 years ago, with two close friends who knew her well, that I visited Doris Lessing at her home in north London. She sat at the table where she ate and fed her guests, her face strangely luminous under the odd defective lighting middle-class English homes then seemed usually to boast. In this furtive illumination she radiated a poised stillness that reminded one of a portrait painting by some master. She seemed denser than life, a bit like Gertrude Stein in the great portrait by Picasso. Her face had the carved hardness of that portrait, but fuller than that, for it was a face that beautifully lacked self-regard, a face that looked out at the world and understood.

Several years earlier she had finished her vast Canopus in Argos: Archive sequence of SF novels; a few years later she embarked on her final surveys of the searing future. I was visiting her as a critic of SF, as a reader of her work, as a pilgrim. By the mid-1960s, it seems in retrospect, she had said everything about the world it was possible for her to say in the form of the "normal" non-fantastic novel. Even The Golden Notebook (1963), which was understood as a scathingly real-life description of the condition of women, edged formally toward the outer limits of realism, being shaped as four intersecting thought experiments in telling the life of a person. (It was a bit like a cubist portrait by Picasso.) And just a few years later, she closed her five-volume Children of Violence sequence with a final tale, The Four-Gated City (1969), which thrust into the near future in order to gain a clear view of things.

By 1970 or so, in other words, there may have been nowhere to go, for a writer of her dedicated intensity of vision, but into the fantastic, where the fate of the world could be visualised – if only, at times, in cartoon form. Several tales of this category preceded her magnum opus: Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). But it is of course the vast five-volume metaphysical space opera known as Canopus that marked her full mastering of SF. At its heart, Canopus is an epic of uplift: throughout the inhabited galaxy, advanced species collaborate (and vie) with each other to guide less civilised worlds, like Earth, through Times of Trouble, in particular the 20th century here. The first volume, Shikasta (1979), consists of reports back home by an emissary to Earth attempting to recover from the terrible years that climaxed in World War Three. Further volumes – the effect is sometimes a bit like Guernica – revisit Earth from different angles to gaze upon the anguish. Other volumes travel elsewhere.

In the mid-1990s, when we visited her, she was not so much an SF writer, for she had never been intimate with that engaging but fractious cohort, as a world author who wrote SF. She was one of the first in the English language (there are more now) to shift from realism into the kind of fantastika that illuminates the real. She grasped very early the inability of realism to describe the changes that were besetting the world at a rate that has not begun to slacken yet, in the year of her death. At her table, in the warmth of her sudden smile, which was not at all basilisk-like, I felt all the same that I was in the presence of a seer.

Her last novels moved from the terrors of our times, though the Mara and Dann books – Mara and Dann (1999) and The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) – made it clear that, as Lessing saw it, for aeons the future would have to be defined in terms of aftermath. The years of her active life were so terrible that she could not conceive of an unscarred planet. It may be that she won the Nobel prize in 2007 for not flinching.

Doris LessingScience fictionFictionJohn Clute
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