Issue 60 Takes Wing
Mr. Crow is (not) overcome.
Sixty issues. Mr. Crow is not a sentimental sort; the Nietzsche of the bird species isn’t sentimental. Put away your hanky, madam. Sir, ditto for the snuff box. Still, c’mon, sixty issues. All right. Es reicht! Enough said. Onwards. The April Issue of The Bombay Literary Magazine is ready for your perusal.
We will accept submissions for Issue 61 from May 01-May 31st. We will put up a submit form on May 01. Guidelines can be found on our submission page. Sometimes people send us their work via email. Please don’t. Email is a terrible way to manage submissions. Instead, we use a form and a couple of clever little elves. If you are the type who likes reminders, consider subscribing to our Insta feed. About the only thing we post on it are reminders and the occasional half-hearted humblebrag.
In other news, we’re also starting a new initiative from Issue 61. We are looking for essays on “subjects pertaining to literature, especially the writing of literature”, about 2,000-words to 5,000-words in length. Perhaps a more suitable term for the category would be “creative non-fiction”. But we should mention that we aren’t looking for reviews of specific books. Viewed through our monocles, the book review is a different beast from the essay. We do have plans for book reviews, but later, later.
Q: What sort of essay on “subjects pertaining to literature, especially the writing of literature”?
Ans: God knows, yaar. Just send it to us. If we knew what we wanted, wouldn’t we just go ahead and write it ourselves? This is the kind of magazine that has a crow as its mascot and is into Chinese poetry and cloud chambers.
Speaking of which: a cloud chamber is a fascinating device, isn’t it? There’s something both very far-future as well as steampunk-ish about cloud chambers. Imagine a camera capable of recording the mind-numbing flux of particles in real time, whatever “time” means on that scale. That beautiful cover image is of a kaon particle going two rounds with some other particle, possibly itself. A koan about a kaon, so to speak. It’s impossible to comprehend that this ceaseless flux underpins everything: tariffs and taboos, bird cries and brand new babies, the death of stars and the syllables of a haiku. Everything. Perhaps this is the closest we, the living, will ever come to any testable, fundamental truth about reality.
Today’s colophon, by Paul Kimm, talks about honesty. As he notes, truth and honesty aren’t quite the same thing. We’d published Paul’s wonderful story, The Entirety of Our Illumination, in Issue 59 (December 2024), and it had —in one reading of the story— a couple who become distant because each is convinced they loved the other more. It’s one of those stories where everything can be changed if need be, but not the title. Over to you, Paul.
Colophon: The Illusion of Honesty
PAUL KIMM
The wonderful team at The Bombay Literary Review got in touch and asked me if I’d like to contribute an essay, and my immediate reaction was, yes, I’d love to do that. Then, after sending the email saying just that, I remembered, not really having forgotten, that I’d just come back to China to start teaching a new semester, had fairly raging jet lag, had just bought a house Spain I won’t be able to visit for another few months, and am trying to finish a novel by getting up at 5am daily and working on it for a couple of hours each day over much needed chain drinking of black coffees. So, having reminded myself of all that, I questioned my comment that ‘I’d love to do that’ and understood that I would love little of the doing it, but almost all of having done it, and that two things had occurred in my reply to Anil; one being I had been dishonest about my enthusiasm, but secondly, I didn’t know I had been deceptive in this declaration until after I’d clicked send.
This illusion of honesty is not only something that occurs in quickly sent emails, but something I have wrestled with in my own writing, and whilst it’s something I wouldn’t go as far to say I have an obsession with, it is a principle of my approach that, at least for the time being, I’m sticking to. So, where does this commitment to a version of honesty come from, what does it look like, and why is important to me?
A. WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?
The first part of this answer is simple; it’s the writers who inspire me, and these range from Alexander Dumas to Hemingway through to more recent authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård. All of these for slightly different reasons.
With Dumas I admit that I didn’t read him until just last year when, now in my mid-50s, I picked up The Count of Monte Cristo, and decided it was time. And, in the spirit of honesty, with the brick of 1300 pages in my hand, knowing the tome was close to 200 years old, I concede that I dreaded it, the task of reading it felt like the literary equivalent of doing the dishes, cleaning the car, and mowing the lawn all in one and for several months on end. Yet, within a couple of dozen pages I was hooked, and this wasn’t the characters, the plot, the style, but the appearance of Dumas in the story, his frequent popping out of the page to say, ‘hey, I’m here, the writer, how are you dear reader?’ This style, no longer de rigueur, I found incredibly refreshing, and frankly honest, with the writer not even attempting to hide, with him as my very present tour guide through the life of Edmund Dantes.
Skipping forward around a hundred years, the perhaps most predictable choice as a bastion of honest writing is the stripped back and bare prose of Ernest Hemingway. I have a particular affection for his short stories, Cat in the Rain being a favourite. Nary an adverb in sight, metaphor-less, simile free, sparse on adjectives, just the visual, filmic short sentences of verbs and nouns, an almost police report account of actions, facts, no authorly omniscience, all these linguistics adornments removed I can’t help but see the honesty that remains. Hemingway’s writing is the birthday suit of literature in my opinion. Cat in the Rain is also a prime example of his ‘iceberg’ theory of writing, with the apocryphal six-word short story perhaps its peak: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
Karl Ove Knausgård brings us to our current century, and his brand of honesty is most prominently experienced in his six-volume collection, My Struggle, where he writes with the aim of being as authentic to his own self and the reality of how life is as much as possible. With Knausgård’s work he is very much on the page, announcing himself Dumas-like, describing actions a-la-Hemingway, but also providing levels of detail to the mundane and quotidian in a way that reflects the reality of our own days, weeks, and years, that are, yes filled with families, friends, our dramas, loves and other otherwise, our tribulations, but unlike many other stories, he gives us the minutiae of life. The opening of a cupboard, the making of an omelette, the taking out of rubbish, the starting of a car, teeth brushing, dishwashing, clothes ironing, ticket buying, and yes, I could really go on and on, are all slowed down on his pages in a way, at least for me, that brings a calm and severe honesty to what our lives are really like, because, to quote Knausgård, “The duty of literature is to fight fiction. It's to find a way into the world as it is.”
B. WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
I could cop out of this question and simply say ‘refer to the above’, but that would, whilst being honest, be unfair to anyone who’s got this far into this essay (there’s my nod to Dumas!). So, first of all, for me it means the writer is present, they are there, on the page, be it as a guide, a suggester of greater depth to a story by giving me just the bare bones (a metaphor Hemingway would be ashamed of) or a chronicler of every step we make, from that first pad of our feet on the bedroom rug in the morning, through to the making of the first coffee of the day, to sip at over the TV news, the slow getting ready for work, and the walk down to the bus stop at half past seven in the morning (such is the prosaic, Knausgårdian nature of my weekday mornings). For me it’s all three, but equally a commitment to not hiding from the page, avoiding an overly fecund decoration of words, staying out of the jungle of figurative and flowery language, not allowing any control over the description of others’ emotions, except our first person own, and presenting life as it can be seen only, the ‘world as it is’.
C. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Well, it doesn’t have to be. We choose our own hills to die on, and this is mine, for the time being at least. I want in my writing to be there on the page, but honestly there. If there are words on a page, someone wrote them, and I don’t want to be disabused or coerced out of that knowledge when I read something, nor do the same to others when they might choose to read something I’ve written. And, once those words and sentences are on those pages, written by those authors, I don’t want to be hoodwinked with language that does anything other than present the movements of those on the page in front of me. I want my stories to be as honest to being human as possible.
D. STORIES ARE FICTION, RIGHT? WHO CARES?
Good question! Yes, they are fiction, so how can they be true? And, if they can’t be true, how can they be honest? This somewhat banal flowchart of questions postulates that honesty and truth are the same thing, but I’m not sure they are. In fact, I’m more convinced they are not. This is because honesty is what we pull from our heads, and is based on what we believe we’ve seen, and remember, and as Knausgård himself has said, “We don't know what's in a memory, what’s true and what's been told to us.” As fiction writers perhaps this doesn’t matter, and Knausgård’s My Struggle series is auto-fiction, and therefore sits slightly to the side of fiction. However, the more a story appears like honesty and truth the more entranced I am, and so ultimately it is, of course, a matter of taste and personal principle, but in deference to the quotation on memory above I rechecked my email to Anil, and my opening paragraph of this piece, and saw that I never wrote ‘I’d love to’ and had typed ‘I'm very keen to contribute’ in the response, and in the space of a few weeks can see how memory has impinged on honesty, and so honesty does become fiction given long enough in the mind.
E. WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES?
In all honesty, the consequences of writing like this depend on the story you’ve told and who’s reading it. In Knausgård’s case his honesty, his depiction of his life and memory bordered on catastrophic as his marriage failed shortly after publication and he continues to be estranged from a number of close family members, but in fairness that is the risk of memoir, and I do want to come back to fiction. Fiction is not truth, but fiction can be honest, and for me, that’s done with a commitment to style, process, and principle. The consequences of this are based on the truth we are, thank heavens, not all the same. Many of us want to be dashed into the jungle, flown to Mars and beyond, be in the head of a person we could never be, and see places and meet people beyond our ken, at the same time as being bashed on the head with language as rich as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and there is much great literature that does that, and much of it I adore too. So, ultimately, it does come down to that most prosaic and simple of metaphors, of what is simply our own cups of tea, my cup of tea perhaps not being like yours, dear reader.
——
PAUL KIMM is from a North East coastal town in England. He writes short stories about his working-class upbringing and early adulthood, and other things. He has had publications in Literally Stories, Northern Gravy, Fictive Dream, Mono, Bristol Noir, and several others.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Banner image: © Levon Biss, Photograph of Seraya Duan Kasar (Shorea fallax). Date Taken: 02/2020. Photo Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Camera: NIKON D850. Original collection: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. See also: The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits: The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss.
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue of Crow & Colophon. Subscribe for free to receive updates about The Bombay Literary Magazine and notes of a literary persuasion.