Have Another Biscuit With Your Tea

By Wyatt Mason

Last night was the annual American devotional exercise to the excesses of second-class storytelling. I didn’t watch, so won’t bag on the particulars, much less the idea of such a celebration. It’s very likely that if I had watched I would have wept a joyous plenty: when it isn’t purely ridiculous (”you’re the next contestant on… the Price is Right!”) it is uncomplicatedly moving to watch people get good news (a version of Stendhal’s Syndrome, I’m guessing). Even so, most movies, especially movies that are well received, are terrible, for reasons that the Oscars make routinely obvious, both by what films they omit and of course select. Benjamin Button was, to my mind, high flown garbage of a very pure grade, an excellent example of the triumph of technique over storytelling truth.

What can be accomplished without $160 million dollars isn’t surprising at all, and it’s always nice to see something short and authentically moving that doesn’t require any effects more special than syntax and something to say. Granta, for example, has a new issue devoted to “Fathers”. Many good short pieces by a range of writers including Jonathan Lethem, Joseph O’Neill, Siri Hustvedt and Francesca Segal. My favorite in the issue is by Ali Smith. I haven’t read her novels but now will. Her brief “Portrait of my Father,” contains this paragraph:

My father, one afternoon, sat at the dinette table, unscrewed my talking bear whose cord had broken, and screwed it back together. It worked. ‘When people are dead, graves aren’t where to find them. They’re in the wind, the grass.’ That’s the kind of thing he said. When I asked him what you do if you see something in the dark that frightens you, he said, ‘What you do is, you go up to it, and touch it.’ When things went wrong in the neighbourhood, people would come to my father for help. When we went to visit an old neighbour last autumn, in her eighties too, she called him Mr Smith. ‘Call me Donald, now, Chrissie,’ he said. She shook her head. ‘You’ll have another biscuit with your tea, Mr Smith,’ she said.

And not much more. A deceptively simple recollection, that ends like a Russian gymnast nailing a dismount. Deceptive ease, real power, and nothing extra. The whole thing takes three minutes, and will brighten your Monday. Read it here.