Sadness unresolved
H E Bates short stories
Bloomsbury Reader
H E BATES was a wildly popular and prolific author whose sixty-odd books – including Love for Lydia (1952) and The Darling Buds of May (1958) – had initial print runs of up to 100,000; he was hailed by Graham Greene as Britain’s greatest living short-story writer and the equal of Anton Chekhov.
Forty years after his death, Bates has fallen off the literary map. He has been ignored by academics and, increasingly, by readers too – to the extent that much of his work is now out of print. To mark the 110th anniversary of his birth, Bloomsbury is reissuing his entire collection of short stories (they total more than 300) in a series of ebooks, which will be released in monthly instalments throughout the coming year. Print editions will follow, if demand is sufficiently high.
One of the mysteries of this immensely engaging collection is why demand ever fell away. But Bates was always something of a conundrum. In his obituary in 1974 (when he was still in favour, if not in fashion), the Times described him as a ‘prose poet’; but in his autobiography Bates posed as an anti-intellectual, railing against the ‘snob-pit’ of literary critics and claiming to be content with the simple gift of being able to ‘put the English countryside down on paper’.
On one level, the power of his stories lies in his ability to do just that. He grew up in Northamptonshire, the son of a shoemaker, and it is in the rural landscape of his chapel-going childhood that his most memorable stories are set. There are no pantomime twists or surprise endings – Bates writes about small, everyday human dramas, evoking the days when the sun shone on ‘ditches of rising meadowsweet’ and when, in true Midlands fashion, ‘all pudding was eaten first’.
As a young man he found inspiration in midnight walks, and from his earliest collection, Day’s End (1928), written when he was 23 and working as a warehouse clerk, one feels that the presence of nature in his life amounts to a kind of mysticism. As he grew older, his style remained unchanged: his prose is evoca- tive, but never over-descriptive, enabling him to bottle his golden cornfields into stories only a few pages long.
But Bates is much more than a nature writer. One of the most intriguing aspects of his work lies in the tension between the lyrical voice and the sadness that the stories convey. In ‘Fear’, a thunderstorm evokes a grandfather’s sense of mortality; ‘Gone Away’ describes a child bemused by a family death; in ‘Alexander’ a boy picks a forbidden apricot as a gift for a girl, but never has the chance to deliver it.
The Irish writer Frank O’connor observed that the short story tends to focus less on society than on the outcast – which seems particularly true of Bates. His subject is the child on the sidelines, the lonely waiter, the woman excluded from the village tea. And while his stories hang within a moral framework, they offer no neat resolutions: sadness remains unresolved, and virtue does not always triumph.
It is not impossible to see why Bates went out of fashion. Too provincial, too nostalgic, more interested in buttercups than in big ideas. And while the modernists were experimenting with ever more inventive narrative styles, Bates ignored the winds of literary change and carried on writing with the supreme, almost casual confidence of a natural storyteller blessed with the ability to name every bird in the wood.
And yet there is an unease in Bates’s work, as if he knew that his landscape was under threat. Today, that sense of loss makes his writing seem oddly prescient – and to many readers his nostalgia will strike a strong chord. One day, when there is no countryside left, Bates’s stories will serve as a faithful document to a vanished world; meanwhile, these forgotten treasures make a first-class read.