Chance Would Be a Fine Thing

A new story, 2260 words of it written today.

Why, I wrote one of 3400 only a couple of years ago.

At this rate I'll have a small book of them ready before I'm 90.

 

I very much doubt if it's any good but I very much enjoyed doing it. 

It might be more than semi-autobiographical and it would be a very different story from the points of view of any of the more than semi-fictional people mentioned in it. Of course, that readily makes the narrative so fashionably unreliable but it might not explain itself to readers as it does as reportage from the front line in the way that it does to me.

 

A lot of fiction is disguised autobigraphy and can't help being that but, in writing that today, I became increasingly concerned about how 'confessional' it was, just unloading old traumas into something I wanted to call 'art'.

Robert Lowell, Sylvia and Anne Sexton are called 'confessional' for revealing themselves more thoroughly in their poems than we might regard as necessary. One of the most persuasive aspects of Thom Gunn's work was his attempt at 'impersonality' which was very laudible and almost got past me. But, no, in a lot of ways, he was confessing, too.

 

Art is in the making of the thing. Outpourings of one's anxieties don't automatically qualify as that.

I don't know who, if anybody, I can show Chance Would Be a Fine Thing to or even why I'd want to. It can be something I very much enjoyed writing, a day well spent, if it's left where it is. I could even decide to read it back and edit it a bit.

But probably not. The point of writing- there could be a clue in the word- might be the writing.

It might even be something as New Age as 'therapy' but, whatever it is, I'm glad I did it.

Whether anybody ever reads it or not is entirely another matter and doesn't matter much, for that matter.