KMWR: Is there a painting out there that you love enough to steal? For me, The Kiss by Klimt.  

RS: That would be Golding Constable’s Flower Garden by John Constable. I don’t really need to steal it because it is in Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich and I can walk over there and see it whenever I like. And Golding Constable’s Vegetable Garden is right next to it. Constable never sold or exhibited these pictures. It seems like they were personal records of what could be seen from his family home, which was pulled down shortly after he died. The pictures were painted from the upper floors of the house. The garden railings and a bit of the stable are still there.

KMWR: A key moment in the story for me were these lines: “Generally he felt that there was a barrier between himself and other people and now there was a breach in it. He was unsure whether he should allow the outside to flow through that breach to him or to make a sortie, to escape from himself.” My reading of the story was that Paul sorties into himself, as we see him step into the mirror of his damaged self (and through that mirror, he pushes away his younger self and embraces himself as the curator). Can you speak to this idea—am I reading too much into it?

RS: I never think people are reading too much into things. Everything is overdetermined, as the psychoanalysts would say. I am interested by your idea. I think it the sort of thing that the story is about. I think every proper engagement with a work of art, even as a reader or spectator, is a taking account of one’s self and an inevitable snapping of a few threads that attach us to the past. Paul has definitely become lost in the turmoil and changed by that experience. I suppose it isn’t clear what he has become. That would only be temporary anyway. As the curator says, you need to keep drawing. I think I must be more interested in processes than in endings and answers. I like stories that resemble dreams and I am happy with William Gass’ assertion that stories should end unsatisfactorily.

KMWR: Can you describe how your writing life has evolved over your career?

RS: It's kind of you to describe what I do as a career. I wrote my first story when I was about nineteen or twenty. I then wrote steadily for about ten years. I then stopped writing entirely a couple of years after my children were born and wrote nothing for the next twenty years. I’m not sure why, I had plenty of time to write. I suppose I had other things on my mind. More importantly, in terms of evolution, I would like to think that I have always been looking to write something new, to learn something, although I do have consistent interests. I have no real reasons to write that are not born of self-motivation. I have no one to please but myself and so I have no incentive to repeat anything. I am much more interested in old people now than I was when I was twenty. It’s been interesting re-reading Modesty. I have found its prose more florid, perhaps I should say more lyrical, and in some ways more interesting than the kind of thing I have been writing lately.

KMWR: “Modesty” has a dark, elegant texture. You write, “What a difference there was between walking these streets and spectating from the window. The difference between a man and his shadow. Here was frost and darkness.” Can you say more about your writing process for this story? How did the first draft come about?

RS: I think the kernel for this story would have been my visits to Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, Suffolk where Gainsborough was born, although he did not live there long. It is full of his paintings now and is a most impressive museum and gallery. A number of things that I say about Buhovac are actually true of Gainsborough. I find that I need two things to make my story inventions work. The first for Modesty could have been this real location and the second would have been wondering what circumstances would make it practical and ambiguously justifiable to take one of the paintings home. Once I had thought of keeping a painting safe from revolutionary revellers that was all of the plot that I thought I needed. As for process, I write notes, at least over a period of weeks, sometimes years, then I arrange the notes into scenes, then I write the scenes in longhand, then I type it up, then I read it out loud to myself twenty times, never more than once a day, keeping a tally with little five-barred gates. Then it’s finished.

KMWR: What have you been reading recently and what would you recommend?

RS: I have all but finished Angus Wilson’s As if by Magic and before that Sybille Bedford’s biography of Aldous Huxley. I’m not sure I would recommend either of these very strongly, although Sybille Bedford always writes well. Angus Wilson’s The Old Men at the Zoo is much better than As if by Magic and he wrote an excellent story called Raspberry Jam. When I was an undergraduate I did a course on which Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire were set texts. Reading these literally changed my life and made me want to write. More recently I have come across the French Surrealist Jean Ferry and his stories are in all ways fantastic.

KMWR: Finally, are you working on anything new?

RS: I am. Whenever I finish a story I simply start the next one. I suppose I must write between eight and ten a year and have been doing so for the past twelve years or so. The last story I finished, a couple of days ago, is called Jazz and concerns a bisexual love triangle with added vampires. Now I am writing IOU and that is about how you have to pay for everything one way or another.

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Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton, UK. He works in a press cuttings agency in London. Before that he was a teacher and then foreman of a London Underground station. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. He has had stories published in Stand, Panurge, 3:AM, The Write Launch, Eclectica, Confingo, Here Comes Everyone, Book of Matches, Punt Volat, The Decadent Review, The Cabinet of Heed, Heirlock, The Main Street Rag, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Pearl River Quarterly, Angel Rust, Lunate, Blue Stem and Wraparound South. He has had three stories published in Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar chapbook series. Micro stories have been published by Sledgehammer, Third Wednesday, Palm-Sized Press, 5x5, Star 82, The Ocotillo Review, deathcap, The Westchester Review and Clover & White. A story appeared in Salt’s Best British Stories 2020 volume.

He tweets mostly about stories here; @RobertJStone2

Website: https://robertjstone.weebly.com/

Read “Modesty” here.