The World of Tessa Hadley’s Short Stories

I’ve been reading a few contemporary British authors recently. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth had been sitting on my shelf snowed under by a sleeve of dust waiting its turn as I turned from Goethe to Tolstoy to Dickens, my pretentious self refusing to read anything produced in the last 50 years.

Finally, deciding that I was in need of a “fun and relaxing read”, I decided to take Smith’s debut novel on holiday to Belgium over Christmas. Note: a 500-page novel depicting London in all its multicultural and postcolonial glory should not be anyone’s idea of a “fun and relaxing read”.

Note: it was an AMAZING read. Having just surfaced from Dickens’ revolutionary London/Paris of A Tale of Two Cities, I can testify that Zadie Smith comes close to Dickens in the way she portrays London of the 70s, creating a multitude of characters whose background roots stretch way further than Dickens’, and linking them all together in a cohesive comedy (culminating in a great final chapter) that would have earned a murmur of approval from Shakespeare.

But: I’m not here to talk about Zadie Smith.

After reading White Teeth and feeling that I needed some time to appreciate its impact before diving into the world of yet another novel, I decided to pick up Tessa Hadley’s short story collection Bad Dreams from the library.

I don’t normally read short stories, but after reading Hadley’s amazing miniatures, I wonder why I don’t. Perhaps one of the burdens an English Literature graduate carries with him is the respect he believes ought to be given to the “greats” of literature. Reading the stories of a contemporary British writer, I felt liberated from the pressure of having to admire. Instead, I could read these stories as what they are; stories, meant to pique your interest, leave you hanging and make you marvel.

Reading these two British writers (Hadley is about a generation before Smith) back to back made for an interesting comparison. How different Hadley’s writing is to Smith’s! I was seeing the world through two completely different lenses. No wonder Zadie Smith says “there is no such thing as a neutral language. The question is who do you want to be manipulated by.”

Having read mostly novels, I was struck by the way short stories could evoke in my imagination a world no less significant than the world of a novel, especially when grouped together in a collection like Hadley’s, where each short story is self-contained yet the reader detects that a thread links all the stories together.

All the protagonists in Hadley’s stories are female. The point I’m trying to make is not that this is some superficial strategy to overturn the patriarchy and represent female power. Hadley’s idea of female subjectivity is much more subtle, and colours all the stories in the collection. In most of the stories, rather than have the protagonist go out and do something, most things simply happen to them, and the stories seem to indicate certain turning points in which the characters grow out of their innocence; seemingly trivial events that become pivotal moments in the characters’ lives. For example, young Jane in the first story, “An Abduction”, was simply convinced to join a group of Oxford boys on their wild day of adventure. She lost her virginity to a boy she found dashing, only to see him sleep with someone else later that same day. But Hadley’s characters aren’t characters who react to such situations; the narrator tells us that Jane “never told anyone what had happened to her” and when she grew up even “took on board all the usual Tory disapproval towards drugs and juvenile delinquency and underage sex, and never saw any implications for her own case”, while the boy she lost her virginity to “has no memory at all of Jane” because “he’s had too much happiness in his life since, too much experience”. In a way, nothing is restored, the short story does not have an “all’s well that ends well” conclusion, and that is when Hadley’s world opens up to us. The quiet injustice of that event in childhood fades into the background, and becomes the poetry of Hadley’s storyworld.

Nor are the protagonists’ thoughts and emotions clearly articulated. All we have is the image of “the curtains sweeping the floor in the morning light”, the image of the scene imprinted onto Jane’s subconscious when she saw the boy sleeping with another girl. There is something so moving about an image rather than emotion articulated; it says so much more because it is beyond words. When we recall an intense emotional event we oftentimes don’t recall the feeling but what we see at that certain moment. This makes Hadley’s stories so much more poignant. It is poignant because it is never, ever larger than life; in fact, it shows that life is larger than what we make it out to be. Hadley’s vision of childhood and the trauma that comes with it is very moving, and I very much resonate with it. The fact that she is able to penetrate to the heart of it all so piercingly, using images and painting a picture rather than directly articulating, suggests to be that there is something autobiographical about the stories; in any case, they must be very personal to her. It’s not a bad thing to want to read into the author’s life through her stories; after all, it is only because the stories are so close to the hearts of us readers that we want to know more about the creator of them.

Another aspect about Hadley’s stories which interest me greatly, and which I believe allows her to evoke a world bigger than the scale of the story itself, is her use of symmetry. In “One Saturday Morning”, a story in which the young protagonist Carrie must repress all the emotional burdens brought upon her young heart by the events of one day (news of the death of a family friend’s wife, which is the first time she encounters the notion of death; witnessing said family friend trying to kiss her mother; afterwards having her mother scold her for not being in bed), we encounter a horse chestnut tree outside the window of the house, whose shadow makes the front room always dark. At the end of the story, after all the inward emotional turmoil, we return to the same tree, which is stirred by a breeze, as well as a “street lamp glowing through the foliage” like “a glassy lozenge” (what beautiful imagery!). Seeing this (Hadley doesn’t tell us explicitly that Carrie sees this, but that’s only because all description is the subjective world of the protagonist, which as we have surmised is also partly Hadley’s own), Carrie “hardly knew if she’d actually seen Dom dancing on the balcony with her mother, or if that had only happened in her imagination, a vision of what consolation might be–something headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children”. Firstly, the tree is not just there to be seen; it is there to trigger a realization in Carrie, the realization that she might have imagined it all in her head. Setting in Hadley is always functional because it is a part of the characters’ thought processes and it plays a part in their internal psyche; it is not something external. Secondly, the reduces the internal psychological adventure of the child into something insignificant; in the grand scheme of things, the world does not change because of the loss of innocence in Carrie. In the end, it is Carrie who adapts to the world and restores her inner equilibrium, by keeping it all to herself to the point where she believes she could have just made it all up. Symmetry has a way of putting things into perspective in Hadley’s storyworld.

Symmetry in that way contributes to something subtle that pokes at the reader without them being conscious of it. Oh, I vaguely remember a mention of this same horse chestnut tree, therefore I think of the journey our young protagonist has gone through within the confines of this house and within the space of a day! But there are more obvious symmetries in some of Hadley’s stories too. Or perhaps parallel is a better word. In the last story, “Silk Brocade”, Ann Gallagher was given a silk brocade by her friend Nola–whom she looks down upon–as part of a request to make a wedding dress. Nola is engaged to a rich man who owns the beautiful Thwaite Park, and Ann and her friends were invited to have a picnic there with the promise of looking at all the materials they had stored in the house. However, on the day, they have a merry, drunken picnic at Thwaite Park and forgets all about checking out the materials. Days later Nola dies of diphtheria, the wedding dress naturally never materializes and the silk brocade forgotten until almost two decades later a married Ann finds it in a cupboard, dies it purple and makes it into a jacket for her daughter Sally. Sally visits Thwaite Park one day to help her boyfriend out on a job, but instead gets “preoccupied” with another boy and leaves her jacket there. This coincidence of place and similarity of event despite difference in time not only creates a sense of “what goes around comes around”, but also gives us a sense of perspective in Hadley’s worldview. “A jacket hardly mattered, in the scheme of things”, is how the story ends, but of course this is from Sally’s point of view. Thinking more deeply, we realize that the jacket, made of the silk brocade, carries a faint remembrance of Nola with it, returned to Thwaite Park by an accident made by Sally, who doesn’t understand its significance. Nola is in a way returned to the place her heart belonged, decades later, without any wilful action on her part. On the other hand, Ann was divorced from the man whom she picnicked with on that day at Thwaite Park 20 years ago and then later married, and it is precisely Sally’s infidelity that causes her to forget the jacket. These parallels as well as counterpoints in Tessa Hadley’s brief story are what gave the story such a grip on me. The imagery and symbols in her story, through their careful treatment by the author, imprinted themselves on my subconscious deeply without my realizing how. It is only in writing this that I am able to unpack some of the techniques Hadley used in order to achieve this.

Short stories, in their brevity, allow readers to see their structures much more clearly, but this also means it’s much harder to “surprise” the reader or escape the curse of being clichéd. Yet Tessa Hadley pays such attention to detail and form, creating worlds not only through her language but also the structural integrity of her stories, that the imagination evoked by her words most definitely outgrow the stories themselves.