Not only is the monthly Six Degrees of Bookish Separation one of my favourite literary memes, as hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best, but this month it starts with a famous short story by one of my very favourite writers! Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ starts out jauntily enough as the description of a traditional event in small-town America but gets more and more disturbing and sinister in every paragraph. When it was published in The New Yorker on June 26th, 1948, it received the highest volume of readers’ letters that the magazine has ever experienced.
Some were baffled, some were outraged, a few thoroughly enjoyed it… and my first link the chain features a controversial story that also appeared in The New Yorker and went viral. Except that this story was published in 2017 and therefore the uproar was mostly on social media rather than via readers’ letters. I am talking, of course, about ‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian. The other thing it has in common with Jackson’s notorious short story is that it starts off as the description of a mediocre/bad date such as we have all known, but becomes more and more disconcerting as you read it (and perhaps even more uncomfortable in retrospect).
How can I resist a cat as my second link? Which takes me to a masterpiece of observation of unreliable humans and a rapidly changing society through feline eyes, in Natsume Soseki’s I Am A Cat. Yes, it’s a chunky book – and you may be surprised to hear that Soseki intended it to be a short story at first, but was convinced to add more and more stories to it, as it appeared serialised in literary journal Hototogisu in 1905/06.
Rather a leap in my next link: Soseki studied for two years in England, at UCL, and was utterly miserable most of the time. So I thought I would turn to someone else’s more joyful (and satirical) journey around England, namely Karel Capek’s Letters from England, which convey a bemused, not entirely uncritical but on the whole admirative glance at England in the 1920s.
An unimaginative link next: Capek’s book was published in 1925 and so I looked for other books published that year. I ignored two firm favourites, The Great Gatsby and The Trial, and instead turned to Anita Loos and her best-known comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Nowadays the book is better known for its film adaptation starring Marilyn Monroe as the blonde and Jane Russell as the brunette. At the time of publication, however, Anita Loos was hugely popular as a scriptwriter, playwright, novelist and actress.
She provides the link to the next book, because she wrote the stage adaptation for Colette’s novella Gigi in 1951. It made a star of Audrey Hepburn, although in the screen version she was replaced by Leslie Caron.
For my final link, I use Audrey Hepburn again. In the film version of the musical My Fair Lady, she in turn replaced Julie Andrews, who starred in the stage version. The musical is of course based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which is far more of an indictment on the English class system (and accents) than is apparent in the (admittedly, rather lovely) musical.
My little chain has perhaps been less well travelled this time, but it has included a short story, a novella, non-fiction and a play, so I tried to travel through genres this time. Where will your six links take you this month?
findingtimetowrite 