13 May 2024 – Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett, PhD Conservation Biology (Lincoln 2016), MA Modern & Medieval Languages – German and Swedish (KC 1987, Cantab 2020), Diploma in Translation – German into English (City University/Institute of Linguists 1998)
Candia McWilliam (1955 – ) is a gifted Scottish short story writer with a number of publications under her belt, including a collection I once ‘magpied’ from a bookshop shelf in London, Wait Till I Tell You, published in 1997. She has been widely admired and won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1994, along with numerous other accolades and plaudits.
‘Her words sparkle and fizz. […] Her work is like poetry in its scrupulousness and writerly care, yet at the same time it’s devastatingly everyday …’ Michèle Roberts, Independent on Sunday
‘McWilliam’s minute observation, structural finesse and wry humanity give full voice to the many dimensions of her subject matter’ Lucy Atkins, Guardian
‘The flaunt of the writing asks for admiration … this is Candia McWilliam at her remarkable best’ Helen Dunmore, The Times
‘The language is beautiful – packed, characteristically, with felicities so generous that it is perhaps better not to read these stories one after the other, but savour them one at a time, slowly’ Eliza Charlton, Sunday Telegraph
‘These pictures are sharp glances and eccentric explorations that make us wait – pleasurably – for their slow, subtle graces to dawn on us’ Sylvia Brownrigg, Independent
‘McWilliam is a magically original writer, arranging words like sweets, making phrases sumptuously fortuitous’ Julie Myerson, Mail on Sunday
https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/candia-mcwilliam
I re-opened Wait Till I Tell You and started to read, smiling at the phrases she used to describe certain situations and people and things. At random, I chose one of the short stories to read; again as I thought, even if the spine of the book was remarkably unlined. Maybe I had been a very careful reader in the 1990s, with certain books at any rate. Others were full of pencil markings and underlinings… An intriguing title indeed. What were those ‘American’ thoughts and, indeed, what is ‘American’ thinking (not that I was under any illusion that this would be some sort of philosophical analysis). Elise – who works in a library – goes out for a meal with and her other half, who has been ‘working abroad’…
I chose this passage quite randomly as an illustration of her talent for capturing moments in human behaviour. The observer is a woman observing other women. She evidently does not approach nights out in the same way as they do, is not part of a gaggle of friends (others may think less charitably) who go out ‘scouting’ for boys, but is already in a seemingly stable relationship with her other half; except the other half has come home (from America she is led to believe) to break off their engagement. Elise has previously reported ‘feeling that they were both old and young’ – a red flag if ever there was one since she describes the relationship almost along the lines of a pair of comfortable shoes. And so it goes…
Those American Thoughts
“Elise forked the mince out of her pitta, mashed it around in a swarfy tangle of raw carrot and swallowed it with a go of the Lilt. There were women arriving for the riggers now, great-looking girls on heels, carrying backwards off a few casual fingers short jackets with fur on at the neck. Drinks arrived, ice, and small bottles of tonic. Coral nails flashed as the women palmed their nylons smooth over their insteps and up over ankle bracelets. Only a woman couldn’t groom herself like these ones would put the ankle bracelet on over the stockings, Elise had noticed. These women wore the bracelets like wedding rings, seriously, to say something about themselves.
Although it seemed that the women who had just arrived hardly spoke, the noise from the group of riggers grew. The men seemed to fill out, their voices too, in the presence of the women. The women looked in small mirrors at parts of themselves, eye-teeth, frownlines, upper lips, glimpses of throat. Whey they had put their mirrors away with snappings and zippings and wary lumbar movements of roosting, they started to try to get a view of parts of themselves harder to see, shoulder blades and elbows, knee-backs and the inner surfaces of nail ends; some looked at the tips of their high heels as though checking that nothing had been impaled there since the last look. One or two of the women spoke to one another to enlist help in checking some part of the construction that was hard to see even by the utmost craning, the hang of a dress over a buttock, the alignment of a belt with a hem at the back. It all looked private, but public, as though the women knew what gestures pleased the men, suggesting to them things about which they had been thinking for weeks out in the North Sea but could not name here and now.
Lillie Langtry watched with unsighted approval. Elise looked on and wondered where you learned those things. Was it from men or from other women, or was it born in you like knowing how to walk in heels and never telling people you’d heard their story before, and being unpopular with dogs.”
Walking in heels is just a question of balance and placement – see Priscilla Queen of the Desert. As for never telling people you’d heard their story before, well, this depends on the nature of the relationship and whether you are at a stage where a mere eye-rolling will do, or you accomplish a nifty change of subject, or a look at your wristwatch, or a quick glance over that person’s shoulder as you spot someone, anyone, else. I imagined it would be quite difficult to be unpopular with dogs – it’s usually the other way round – but I think I have read that Candia is more of a cat person, without being canine-exclusionary.
Candia has what you’d call ‘the eye’; great observational skills. Her own life experiences I would guess also enabled her to write so well about human relationships. The outsider perspective is what I will say she has, in common with many other writers on the human condition, which in turn seems to have been a consequence of an unusual and ‘disrupted’ upbringing, compounded with an innate gift.
I chose this book all those years ago (over 25 now), not because I knew she was an author lauded by critics who themselves could probably have vied with her for the vivacity and skill of their prose, although that does much to recommend her, but because I fell a little in love with the art work on the front cover. A pastel, sketchily drawn in muted but also vivid colours, depicting a pale blue, almost-lavender bird (uncaged) – more than likely a Budgerigar – perched on the stem of a poppy-like flower seemingly looking towards a couple of yellow objects. A toy or some food – millet – or perhaps, if you used up more of your mental energy, even a window, surrounded by a sky-like blue, partially obscured by a blind, through which the parakeet might escape outside, to freedom. If only it did not look so passively observant. An illustration by Craigie Aitchison (1926-2009).
Short stories, such as these, suited my ‘lifestyle’ too, at that time. And perhaps they even suit my way of reading and thinking throughout my life. Novels often seemed ‘too long’ if they exceeded more than a couple of hundred pages: I made an exception for Possession. Plays were not really meant to be read – but seen – although they could be ‘tolerated’ as reading matter, mainly for academic purposes or to check a quotation was correct. Poems were favourite of all.
At the time I ‘found’ Candia McWilliam she was still a youthful and promising author who had won a number of prizes between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s. A Scot, she had studied at Cambridge – Girton – and gained a First in English. (In fact, the one thing that is missing for me from the short stories is a glossary for terms such as ‘slatch’, ‘guddling’ and ‘blash’. Scotland and England, eh; two nations divided by ‘one’ language: who would have thought it?). I know now from having read biographical material and interviews in the press that she always felt Scottish, and an outsider in England, and I wondered how it had come to be that she had studied at Cambridge – so far South, although not as far South as Oxford, of course. I can only think that, although she had options North of the Border, she was pleasing someone’s expectations or recommendations and that Girton, being an all-women College at the time, on the northernmost edge of Cambridge, was the most comfortable place for her.
Even if this is the only writing by Candia McWilliam I have ever bought and read, I can truly say, that I thought it every bit as splendid as some of the critics had promised. I saw her picture – a lovely portrait by Jerry Bauer – on the back cover and thought she looked handsome, slightly mysterious, and intellectual, with an air of foreignness, elegance and Garbo, with sad-distant-thoughtful eyes.
Into-English-Translations 