I’ve been stringing it out as much as I can, but I’ve almost finished reading Fragments of a Life Story. It’s an anthology of all the short stories Denton wrote, finished or not. Compiled by Michael de la Noy (Denton’s first biographer), Fragments Of A Life Story presents Denton’s short stories in autobiographical order, irrespective of the chronology of publication.
I know now that it’s not how I wanted to read them. Denton (presumably) chose the order in which he wanted his stories to appear in their anthologies, and I’d rather have experienced them the way he wanted me to experience them. Luxuriating in a completed story such as The Trout Stream, then being presented with a couple of pages of a story fragment is discombobulating. I can understand why MDN wanted to structure the anthology in this way – we can follow Denton’s life and the people around him – but I’d have preferred the unfinished stories to be presented in a separate section. They were never intended to form an arc.
Having said that, though, it should also be said that some of the unfinished stories feel finished, and many of the completed stories feel unfinished. Whilst he more than makes up for it with his subject matter and peerless description, the one thing that Denton doesn’t always do well (in my eyes) is endings. I’m often still deeply immersed in the story when it abruptly ends. When I Was Thirteen, for example, finishes whilst Denton’s brother is busily hitting him. Brave and Cruel finishes with Denton unable to prevent giggles escaping in an awkward situation. It’s a bit unsatisfactory and leaves me a smidge grumpy, whereas I finish others – The Trout Stream, for example – on a sigh of satisfaction.
Other things I’ve noticed so far: I First Began To Write is the only story that properly breaks the fourth wall, with Denton explaining how he approaches his writing. It put me in mind of Stephen King’s On Writing, and I loved the brief peep into his thought process. Denton’s realisation that he wants to write about how he feels rather than tell stories sheds light on his writing style, and how it evolved into vivid, detailed minutiae about not just his feelings, but his senses and how he experiences the world. In The Coffin on the Hill, for example, we experience with him the excitement of a boat trip through his child eyes. I could taste the brass porthole when Denton licked it so that he could fully sense the boat. I was on that boat with Denton, a fellow eight year-old, delighting in the minuteness of everything, curling up and feeling like a mole, whilst precociously adult in his tastes and observations. It’s astonishing that he can recall sensations and emotions so vividly twenty years after they occurred.
I’ve also noticed that Denton describes places and objects in great detail, but rarely people. For example, he mentions in A Fragment of a Life Story that Touchett (i.e. Francis Streeten) has terrible teeth, but doesn’t describe them in the same detail as he describes, say, Lymph Est, his doll in The Coffin on the Hill. His description of his grandmother’s library in The Vast House is so vivid that we could probably pick it out from a lineup of photographs, but we’d struggle to do the same with most of his characters.
And now, dear reader, I have a bit of a problem. Having complained that Denton isn’t always great at ending his stories, it feels incumbent on me to sign off with a sizzler of an ending to this post. But I can’t think of one. So, um… bye for now.