R. B. Cunninghame Graham as a Writer of Short Fiction

61 R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM AS A WRITER OF SHORT FICTION By James Steel Smith (San Fernando Valley State College) In the three decades since his death in 1936 Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham has, for the most part, been forgotten. His stories are no longer reprinted in anthologies and are seldom referred to by literary historians; all we have left from that strange, busy life are a few colorful memories of an eccentric Scot and the definitive account of the horse in the Americas. As with many another romantic, his life was so unusual that it captured his readers' attention, pulling it away from the writer 's works.1 His life possessed a theatrical quality. He came from a famous Scottish family, was educated partly in Spain, as a young man lived on the South American pampas and saw something of the bloody civil wars and Indian fighting, escaped execution by killing his Indian guard, saw frontier Texas life, travelled in forbidden Moroccan territory and was captured there, returned to England to a stormy career in Socialist politics (involving street fighting and a brief term in parliament). His appearance and bearing, his championing of unpopular causes (including Scottish Nationalism), his association with many of the famous writers of his time (William Morris, Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and others) - these contributed to the making of a colorful public character that made it difficult for readers to concentrate on his writing and to distinguish between it and his life, particularly since Graham himself made little effort to help them make the distinction. He set much of his fiction in remote places that possessed romantic associations for most English and American readers - South America, Mexico, the Southwestern United States, Spain, and the Arab lands of north Africa. It is easy to pigeonhole him as a travel writer; the way In which he often gave over the task of narration to world wanderers, who seemed to resemble the author closely, further deepens the impression that one Is getting a slightly fictlonized travelogue. Graham, moreover, wrote many outright travel books, including one of the greatest of this genre - Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey In Morocco - which have kept the travel-writer image forward and his role as a writer of fiction in the background. Graham should at last be given serious consideration as a writer of fiction. We shall find him not as remarkable a maker of short fiction as his contemporaries Joyce, D. H. Lawrence or Katherine Mansfield, but still a craftsman whose short romantic inventions have their own special qualities and which quite possibly could have more meaning for new readers today than they did for readers earlier in the century. Without themselves seeming accidental or Incomplete, Graham's tales leave one with an aftersense of fragmentation, a feeling 62 that the scene or episode or persons described were fragments of something not given and to be guessed at. They are bright, vivid pieces, but their very vividness somehow suggests chipping, a breaking-off in such a way that the ragged edges, clear and hard, promise, without defining, a larger reality - which, too, might be Just a large, Jagged fragment. This sense of accidentality, incompleteness, fragmentation in Graham's work has two primary causes: 1) his making the core of a story explosive, unexplained, seemingly pointless violence or unrationalized, uncompensated loss, or both together, and 2) his choice of narrative modes that underline the elements of casual irrelevance and unreason in the events he describes. The great majority of Cunninghame Graham stories are accounts of violent incidents or moments of irrevocable loss. Often much of the story presents the circumstances of the violence and loss, but seldom does it explain the violence or the loss. The whole impact of the story lies in the shattering, unexplained, and seemingly causeless. Indeed, the author's refusal to interpret his facts as conditioning circumstances perhaps achieves his point. Certainly, it accounts for the special impact of the violence and loss in his stories; it is as if he put up in a literary shooting gallery a rare vase and blasted it into fragments, without comment. This sense of fragmentation in Graham's stories...