Loose Contacts

Two stories, both by Miriam Burke, focus on gay men in the manner of tourists from one developing country visiting another developing country. Grandmothers and the ravages of ageing are the subject of two stories while the Church is featured in the backdrop of four stories. Eight are in the first person. Mental crises lurk, like unseen muggers, just around the corners of most of the stories. There is an earnestness which should be appealing, but isn't. We are being invited to read a guide-map to the galaxy on the back of a potato peel, but what we actually see are the tailings from last night's dinner lying shrivelled on the drain-board.

The one area in which these stories score points is in a quality of diligence. Effort has certainly been spent in trimming away flourishes and in polishing phrases which hold the attention, as from Mama B's Kitchen: "This woman, whose body laughed at age was the object of my son's green sex peeking at her, wondering, lusting, why else would he watch her?" Or, from Piglady, the product of a bowel-movement described as a "knobbly brown corn-cob lying at Muriel's feet". Scarlet Dancing is spicy with dialect: "What she want to hold on to a damfool name like Danzzing for is totally beyond my escalations." The tone is spare and austere in all the stories except for a few touches of poetic description in Pale Cecilia and the Policewoman.

In her editor's Note, Melanie Silgardo explains that these pieces were culled from the flood of submissions resulting from appeals made through literary magazines and writers' workshops. She found she had to avoid approaching the selection from the angle of equal representation for all the many different minorities into which the confederation of women is increasingly splintered. Two of the authors have novels in progress and several find themselves suddenly included in other anthologies. She expresses the hope that publishers will continue to permit new writing to flourish through ventures such as this book and Virago's New Poets of two years ago.

However, going by the example of Short Circuits, it seems to me that publishing is too often regarded as a form of occupational therapy for the increasing hordes of would-be writers who have had unfortunate or marketably tiresome life-experiences. It should be the job of editors to weed out the authentic writers from amongst the manuscript foundries, yet that task is being passed on to readers instead. Walking into a bookshop is like entering a jungle of thoughts and ideas all screaming to be plucked, yet the majority are weeds and thorns, bitter fruit of empty lives. If any proof is needed that we inhabit an era of disillusionment and despair, no source is better than the average anthology of short stories and poetry issuing from the West. Such an assortment of grim and grimy lives has probably never before been assembled in human history. But then there has never before been such an army of literate beings or such rampant access to the means of publication as now.

How would we find the works of Wilfred Owens and Siegfried Sassoon if all their fellow soldiers had turned their hands from guns to poetry? Would a thousand poets have bloomed? Or would the scattering of genuinely eloquent and precious voices have been lost in the cacophony of the many hoarse and ambitious ones? Since the turn of the century, women have been locked in battle against the existing definitions of self, biology and culture. Many of us see ourselves as foot-soldiers who must use our words as weapons to storm citadels forbidden to us. Some of these weapons are beautifully crafted but a much greater number are either butter-knives or blunt instruments better suited for dialectics than for fiction. This is a shame. For when we use words exclusively as weapons we lose sight of their non-aggressive purposes, such as in recording the art and pleasure of being human.