James Francken

Sonny Liston didn’t really have any friends. Not, at least, among the reporters covering his heavyweight title fight with Floyd Patterson in 1962. Intimidated by Listen’s criminal record and connections with organised crime, the press took his sullenness for the recalcitrance of an underworld brawler. The former heavyweight champion is no less threatening in Thom Jones’s two previous collections of short stories; though kept in the wings, he is mentioned frequently by the centre-stage characters: a doctor who is ‘about to smirk’ when walking in on a couple having sex in the hospital ward is arrested by the patient’s baleful stare – ‘Sonny Liston could give such a look’; a recently enlisted marine regrets his decision to join up when he meets boot-camp disciplinarians ‘most of whom looked like close relatives of Charles “Sonny” Liston’. Jones – a former boxer and Vietnam veteran – appears to give Liston a better part in the off-beat title story of his new, third collection. A young amateur boxer hoping to go forward to the Chicago Golden Gloves competition finds himself frustrated by the truculence of his stepfather and the indifference of his mother to almost everything but the application of the green paste of her nightly face mask: ‘Can’t you just say, “Good, I’m glad you won. You’ve made me a happy lima bean”?’ His optimism is revived by a trip to watch Liston training for the Patterson fight, where we finally come face to face with the fearsome boxer and the boy receives a signed photo: ‘To the Kid, from your friend, Sonny Liston.’ But a cornerman’s heavy-handed intervention (‘a man in a gray sweatshirt demanded two dollars each for the photographs’) and the boy’s subsequent failure in the ring stress the lessons of adult life that remain to be learned; the photo and the friendship are shuffled into the past.’‘

‘Passerby, go tell other peoples that this village died to save Verdun so that Verdun could save the world.’ President Poincaré’s declaration, inscribed on a simple marker, set in stone those memories of French resistance to German aggression in World War One that he hoped would be indelible. By 1920, defences along the Verdun salient were mouldering away, the battlefields being pillaged for copper and steel. The sacrifice made by the 3rd Company of the 137th Infantry Regiment, buried alive by German bombardment while holding their line of trenches, was a fading legend. The soldiers’ bayonets, which protruded from the earth above their upright bodies, had been hacked at, pieces taken away as souvenirs; some had been stolen. An American banker donated 500,000 francs towards the preservation of what has become known as the Trench of the Bayonets. Deciding that ‘nothing could typify the tragedy and heroism of the bayonet trench better than the trench itself,’ the architect of the Verdun monument designed a concrete covering for the site which would stave off decay. He guaranteed that it would ‘last for at least five hundred years’. The authenticity of what was preserved is uncertain: exploding howitzer shells could not completely fill a section of trench with earth; the trench is more likely to have been covered over by other soldiers out of respect; the bayonets may have been planted to mark a mass grave. But the significance of the site was assured, given Pétain’s status as the ‘Victor of Verdun’ and France’s saviour, according to the young Captain Charles de Gaulle – wounded and taken prisoner under Pétain’s command – ‘when a choice had to be made between ruin and reason’.’‘

A nervous young lawyer leaves a rabbi’s house with a sinking feeling. The arguments that he had prepared now seem hopeless: he couldn’t persuade the immigrants that their old-fashioned clothes were out of place in a New York suburb. The other Jewish inhabitants of Woodenton had warned him: ‘there’s a good healthy relationship in this town because it’s modern Jews and Protestants.’ They had known that the newcomers would be implacable: ‘Making a big thing out of suffering, so you’re going oy-oy-oy all your life, that’s common sense? … They live in the medieval ages, Eli – it’s some superstition, some rule.’ But Eli wants to accommodate the rabbi; he changes out of his new tweed suit and wanders into town in an Orthodox get-up – black hat and gabardine. In ‘Eli, the Fanatic’, the transformation helps Philip Roth connect up some of the leading themes of his short stories: anxiety, desire, separation, the odd, unsettling consequences of changes that are incomplete.’‘

China was a surprise to Auden and Isherwood – it reminded them of Surrey. Faber had commissioned them to write a travel book about the Far East early in the summer of 1937. The Japanese invaded northern China in July, capturing Peking; by August the troops had reached Shanghai and the itinerary of the book was decided. With many foreign correspondents already in Spain, Auden was confident that in China ‘we’ll have a war all of our very own.’ But Journey to a War describes how the fighting eluded them – they went to places they had been told were on the front line, but nothing was ever happening when they got there – and how they ended up in Shanghai. The freedoms of the treaty port were disappointing: they were bored by the endless receptions, garden parties and cold buffets. Isherwood came to realise that the ‘appalling atmosphere of suburban Surrey’ masked dissipation:’‘

William Strunk was a standard-bearer for the use of bold, brief English. In The Elements of Style, first published in 1918, the Cornell professor set out his rules of usage and principles of composition in the form of direct commands – ‘Sergeant Strunk snapping orders to his platoon’. ‘Omit needless words.’ ‘Do not affect a breezy manner.’ But ‘times change, and so do written communications’; a new style handbook has been published that intends to retire Strunk from service. The Elements of E-mail Style insists that in a world of electronic messages, methods of writing and editing that take ‘hours or days’ are outdated. An e-mail should have an impromptu feel and the handbook suggests how to create this effect: sentences can be truncated, for example, and capital letters ignored. A reply to an e-mail can arrive within minutes, so the tone of a message should be conversational: in an informal e-mail, a stiff greeting or stilted closing is out of place. The Elements of E-mail Style gives the reader advice on good ‘netiquette’ – the conventions for messages sent via the Internet – and explains how to have better high-tech chit-chat.’‘