Interview: David Constatine, author of Tea At The Midland and Other Stories

The short story is a form of writing that sets you free, says David Constantine. He gives a masterclass to Susan Mansfield

A MAN and a woman are sitting at afternoon tea in the Midland Hotel, overlooking Morecambe Bay. We never find out their names, though we do learn, in time, that the man has a wife elsewhere. They argue, briefly, about beauty and art. On the skyline, some kite-surfers look “like grace itself, the heart and soul of which is freedom”.

This is David Constantine’s short story “Tea at the Midland”, the title story of his new collection, and a past winner of the prestigious BBC National Short Story Competition. It feels like a kind of sacrilege to paraphrase it; really you should just read it. It’s only five pages long, restrained, delicate, a small, perfectly shaped moment in which nothing monumental seems to happen – only it does, really. Stylistically, it is elegant, nothing is superfluous. As AS Byatt has said of Constantine: “Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be. Reading them is a series of short shocks of (agreeably envious) pleasure.”

“The best story stories feel as though they’ve been scooped out of the flux of life,” says Constantine, speaking not of himself but of “greats” such as Lawrence and Chekhov. The author of eight volumes of poetry as well as four distinguished collections of stories, he is self-effacing about his talent, prefering to say that he “tries to” write, and that he was “lucky”: that his career as a lecturer in German literature took him to the North-east when Neil Astley was starting Bloodaxe, then to Oxford, where Comma Press is based. All this denies his skill: he is a master. Talking to him about writing for an hour in the living room of his Oxford terraced house is like attending a writing masterclass.

Perhaps because he has written only poetry and short stories, he has not been recognised – as surely he should have – by public acclaim, major publishing houses and big literary prizes. Comma Press hopes this may be about change, when In Another Country, a film based on an earlier short story, goes into production next year with director Andrew Haigh, produced by Film Four. Constantine is philosophical: it might, but it might not. “To my mind, the short story is rather like poetry in terms of the economics of it, in that nobody expects to make any money out of it,” he says. “It frees you up, it is not a mercenary interest, it couldn’t possibly be.”

He writes, he says, “the kind of short stories that someone would write who is mainly writing poems”. “I think that if you try to write poems it makes you very attentive to language. It also makes you quite impatient of language which is merely instrumental, which is just saying this happened, then that happened, to get you from this point to the next.”

In a short story, you can go straight to the moment of crisis, “when things are being made apparent, for good or ill. There’s a forcing of the issue, something which is submerged. And then you wonder whether they’re going to be able to carry on, whether this is a good breakthrough or a complete catastrophe. If [‘Tea at the Midland’] was a 19th-century novel, we might have reached that point in the couple’s life after after two volumes of previous family history.”

A Constantine short story is usually anchored in a specific place. “Tea at the Midland” cannot be anywhere other than the art deco hotel in Morecambe, recently restored, with its mural by Eric Gill. Yet the place serves the story, never vice versa: the melancholy of the Scilly Isles out of season becomes the backdrop for the story of a drifter who finds a brief sense of community and friendship; a traffic jam on the M6 briefly brings together a widower, a young woman, and a jilted husband, each in their own separate moments of crisis, observing an elderly couple tending their garden underneath a motorway flyover.

“I couldn’t start unless I had that kind of local knowledge, so they’re all rooted in places that I know, or can imagine sufficiently by amalgamating various other places,” he says. The derelict Victorian school in Durham in the story called “Goat” is a place he knew from voluntary work with the homeless, always flooded with water, until the extraordinary winter where everything froze and the stairs became an iced-up waterfall. This history becomes a frame for fiction: a homeless man, a young woman volunteer and a disgraced canon experiencing a brief moment of joyous abandon.

Water is important in Constantine stories: the freezing water in the old school; the beautiful, treacherous waters of Morecambe Bay; a spring found in a remembered garden; the submerged causeways and dangerous tides of the Scilly Isles. A previous collection of stories is titled Under the Dam. “Yes, it’s terribly important,” he nods. “That must have to do with the fact that it’s boundless, and can’t be bound, that it’s always in movement, that it’s the source of life.”

In a story called “The House by the Weir and the Way”, the sound and intensity of the weir becomes instrumental in the tale of two elderly women clinging on to life in a crumbling mansion in France just off the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. Again, the house is a remembered one, where Constantine and his wife Helen stayed when walking stretches of the route. The rest is imagined.

“There’s something about a weir, the way that weirs work, which is more that slightly unsettling. This story came from a combination of the water going past and this extraordinary Compostela route, which is full of bizarre people. It’s just like Chaucer, really. You get Parisians, walking along more or less with parasols and high heels, doing a mile at most and then being picked up by taxi. And you get these deadly serious people who have walked all the way from Germany, some for very serious religious, and some who don’t believe in God at all.”

We don’t find out the end of the story for the two women in the crumbling old house, or the drifter who winters on the Scilly Isles, wrestling past demons and writing letters to a person (a lover?) who never writes back. These moments scooped from the flux of life merge seamlessly back into the flow. Constantine maintains that he’s “no good at plot” (not entirely true), however, it isn’t his aim. “The best short stories by the people I really admire are open at the end rather than closing, and the form allows that. I detest the idea of closure, in life and in writing, I don’t think it’s true to life, so I try to write against that idea. The way a writer writes is the way he or she feels about the world.

“Also, muddle isn’t the same as truthful complexity. It’s just bad art if you muddle people. You can ask people to entertain a lot, [including] contradictory things, but you should only do that in all good conscience, when you’re trying to get something across which is really this contradictory and complex.”

Often, his protagonists are people on the margins, homeless or in old age, or inhabiting some form of institution. “Alfie” is the remarkable story of an old man who “escapes” from a care home, and finds himself travelling through France by bicycle, despite having only a few months to live. “The basic question in all of them is: are you living well, and if not, why not? Is this a life you’d be prepared to put your name to? Are you proud of it? Do you feel it’s what you should be doing?” Constantine says. “This is why I don’t think of them as hopeless stories. I think they’re quite upsetting, at least some of them upset me, but I don’t think they’re hopeless, I think there’s a drive to live more connectedly, live more intensely, just live more really.”

Many of the stories offer glimpses of utopian worlds which, though fragile (like the old couple’s garden under the motorway) and often temporary, glow with beauty. “Leaving Frideswide” describes an idyllic institution for the disabled in a future vision of Oxford, facing closure as ecological catastrophe advances.

Though it’s beautifully sad, as many of these stories are, it isn’t hopeless: the caring resourcefulness of Fridewide’s female guardian suggests that a future is possible. There is a persistence of love, which adds a further poignancy. “I do instinctively write against resignation. In that sense [the stories] are not realistic, they are utopian. There’s an awful lot of what I think of as utopian refusal to be settled down into circumstances which stunt you.”

Constantine grew up in working-class Salford, and began writing poems and stories as a teenager, part of the post-war generation who reaped the benefits of grammar school education. It bought him a passage of Oxford, “a university I knew nothing about”, and a route into an academic career. He work all his life as a lecturer in German literature, first at Durham University, then back in Oxford at Queen’s College, until he retired in 2000. And he kept writing. “When you’re at a university, you meet lots of people who write, and for most people it just falls away. It’s something you do at a certain age, it passes, and it’s no very great loss. And in a few cases – it says nothing about whether you’ve got any talent or not – you just carry on doing it, because you can’t imagine living and not doing it. When I meet people who are on creative writing courses, I say, ‘If you can stop doing it, stop, and that will be at least one marker of how serious it is to you’.”

Although it is as hard as ever to persuade major publishers to take on collections of short stories by all but the most famous writers, there is a healthy burgeoning of smaller specialist presses, prepared to exploit opportunities offered by new technology, including apps and podcasts. Comma Press is one such, And Other Stories is another, which was one several independent publishers which featured on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist.

Would Constantine ever be tempted into longer fiction? Experience suggests perhaps not. “With short stories, you must never feel that the subject has simply been abbreviated in order to get it into 3,000 words, or 5,000 words. If it feels like an abbreviated thing then it hasn’t worked.” The form is flexible: the longest story in the new collection, “An Island”, is some 16,000 words, and it feels – like the others – just right. “So if I felt that there was a very pressing project, and I began it and saw that in order not to abbreviate it I would have to write 50,000 or 60,000 words, I would do that.”

Which is his careful way of saying: never say never, but don’t hold your breath. Best to enjoy his marvellous stories, and be content with that for the time being.

• Tea at the Midland and Other Stories by David Constantine is published by Comma Press £9.99