British author Leslie Croxford will be well known to many readers of the Al-Ahram Weekly for his novels, sometimes reviewed in the paper when they first appeared, as well as for his many other activities as an academic, most recently as Vice-President of the British University in Egypt.
He has now published a new collection of short stories, From Madrid to Heaven, that will be eagerly sought after by his fans. They exhibit many of the themes of his longer works of fiction, now distilled into the smaller compass of the short story, a demanding form for which Croxford shows himself to have a hitherto unsuspected talent.
There are 14 stories in the collection, published late last year by Diwan Books in Cairo, with the last story, one of the shortest, providing the title for the whole. Most of the stories have Spanish settings, whether in Madrid or elsewhere in the Peninsula, and all at least refer to other places, most often in North America or the Arab World.
Such places re-enter the consciousness of Croxford’s characters as they reveal information about themselves during unexpected meetings, guiding them onto sometimes neglected paths. This wide-ranging geographical experience is something that is shared by the author, as Croxford himself, a native of Alexandria and educated in England, has made his home at various times in Egypt, the US, and Spain.
As a result, he is perhaps peculiarly well placed to enter the lives of his characters, imagining the journeys, sometimes involuntary and in response to political or other events, that have brought them from homelands the length and breadth of the Mediterranean to Madrid, Tangiers, or other places where memories of past entanglements re-emerge.
Almost always they do so in conversations, often randomly provoked by chance encounters, but once started relentlessly pursued as memories of usually better times, or at least less complicated ones, are shared. Perhaps there is a therapeutic element at work here, since even though the conversations do not take place in consulting rooms, with cafes, restaurants, or private apartments being the usual venues, they can clarify events and fill in gaps in an individual’s past.
The first story in the collection, “Transit in Tarifa,” also one of the longest, strikes notes that are continued in the dozen or so others that follow. Two men, strangers, meet by chance in a hotel in Tarifa, a traditional crossing point from Morocco to Spain. Croxford sketches in some descriptive details, but as often in his stories these are few, with only the basics being provided almost as asides.
One of the men, Martin, in his sixties and at the end of a regular career, is heading south across the Straits to Morocco as a kind of professeur sans frontières. “Education is the great laissez passer, isn’t it,” he demands of his new friend. “I’ve had my moments, early successes with a sense of achievement. But soon enough I saw how different I was from everyone else… Simply put, I could never be myself through competing with others. So, not competing, who might I be?”
The other man, Mostafa Salama, more conventional in outlook, has found himself in Tarifa against his will. “I never imagined I’d find myself here again – not like this alone,” he confides to Martin over breakfast in a café. “‘We would come here all together,’ he added, clearly finding it painful to remember, after the ruinous turn of events in his country, like others, with the Arab Spring.”
Mostafa is waiting for things to blow over back home while hoping to gather his family around him abroad. The encounter of the two men in Tarifa, their paths crossing by chance, draws attention to lives that ordinarily would never have touched had it not been for the force of external events. Having touched, however, there is the possibility that they will discover a perhaps surprising empathy that the regular business of life would more usually have ruled out.
“Mostafa had started recalling a life which, with his relatives and friends continuously around him, he had never before needed to think about. It had been enough to live it. This was the first time he was setting it all out in words, with his poorly knotted tie and rumpled sleeves unexpectedly summoning forth in his neighbour something Martin could not remember feeling previously, at least not recently,” the narrator says.
“In this case [it was] to straighten the appearance of what was suddenly less of a caricature, a stock Middle Eastern figure, than some vulnerable being awaiting not merely his coffee, now being served to him, but whatever might be demanded of him here at the Straits.”
Perhaps Mostafa thinks similarly, “straightening out” the appearance of the man sitting opposite him, with his story of finding himself in retirement – by travelling to Africa of all things – as if engaged in a modern caricature of a 19th-century adventure story, patterning his life after stories told by mediocre writers of the liberating effects of travel for European tourists of older age.
Milieu: Most of the stories in From Madrid to Heaven are set in public or semi-public places, with the characters usually meeting when travelling or on their way to other engagements. Hotel lobbies, airport lounges, cafes, and museums or picture galleries all work well.
While it would probably be wrong to say that the people in the stories are less guarded than usual in such places, they have at least ventured, or been forced, outside the bounds of settled routine. Introductions take place, but not usually by third parties, and as a result conversation can flow.
Most of the characters are middle-aged, sometimes retired or semi-retired, very often not engaged in a regular career or full-time job, and perhaps as a result not as eager as they otherwise might be to hurry away. There is usually no office waiting, children have grown up and gone away, and many of the characters are experimenting with second or even third careers. They might be working in the arts or tourism, be something in academia, or at work on writing a novel. Little is being tried for the first time, and expectations are generally kept quite low.
The second story in the collection, Le Vrai Paradis, introduces David Louis, late middle-aged, who “directs the Study Abroad Centre for American students such as those from the East Coast college where he taught before moving to Madrid.” Having finished or abandoned his teaching career, he makes ends meet by journalism, but finds a lack of freshness in it, particularly when compared to the motivations of those travelling to Europe for the first time or less disillusioned about its benefits than he is.
The journalism market is narrowly focused, and it “restricted David to writing on Madrid restaurants for an in-flight airline magazine” and reviewing “vanity press biographies of the country’s kings and queens in expatriate magazines.” Suddenly, an unexpected meeting with a former student and her family hauls him back to wider horizons and the rejuvenating qualities of a largely forgotten past. It was “the long dormant life his infant self knew well but had had wrested from him. It was the paradise into which he felt the girl hailing him back,” the narrator says, it turning out that he, like she, had been born and brought up in Alexandria.
As is the case with many writers drawn to try their hands at writing short stories, Croxford shows himself to be very much aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the form. His stories recount fragments taken from much longer lives, and there is not the space to develop character, to introduce new incidents, or even to stray far from an initial scene. Events take place over at most a couple of days, and things come to a head quite quickly.
Getting round such limitations, or making them into virtues, has often entailed a heightened awareness of the short story as a form in the hands of many writers, and Croxford is in good company when he makes many of his characters work as writers themselves. Their struggle to produce the right number of words, and then sell their efforts to publishers, draws attention to his own experiments with fictional form.
Some of his stories are told by first-person narrators, some in traditional third-person mode, and some almost entirely in dialogue. Sometimes the narrator asks questions about the most appropriate way of putting what he wants to say.
Such questions find their way into Le Vrai Paradis when David tries his hand at writing a novel based on his and his family’s experiences, what he feels he should be doing rather than writing restaurant reviews or visiting museums with students. “It was to be based on his family’s expulsion [from Egypt] in the 1960s. His parents constantly referred to it, evasive as they were even with well-meaning outsiders… His mother, when asked in London where she was from with that accent, would answer ‘I’m French.’”
“Should he write in the first person, or would the detachment of an omniscient narrator be better? How resentful could the tone afford to be without alienating the reader? David’s indecision was paralysing. Once more the novel stalled.” The encounter with the student and her family clears away some of his writer’s block at least.
Another story, “Homecoming,” introduces Mark Seddon, no longer young, who has been summoned “home to Madrid to look after his aged parents.” Convinced in his early years that a budding writer must acquire the maximum amount of material, he “lounged on Thai beaches with newfound girlfriends or smoked joints on Mexican ziggurats.” He was modelling himself on older figures such as writers who one way or another were also international travellers, people like the English-language authors Joseph Conrad or Somerset Maugham.
However, his “fictional ideas never actually came to a point. They remained a series of unfinished manuscripts accompanying him from pillar to post.” Ironically, Croxford insinuates, it was only when summoned back to do his duty that Seddon found his true subject in his relationship with his father at the latter’s home.
Perhaps the story that most addresses the setbacks of the writer, as well as his or her occasional successes, is “Open Ticket” in which the narrator, failing to meet his sales targets in the company he works for, is sitting in “the Adolfo Suarez Airport, waiting for my flight out of Madrid.” His less than stellar business career is taking him to a posting in Niamey in Niger, a backwater for the company, but possibly for that very reason a source of relief.
However, there is also the question of his relationship with Theresa, “an aspiring critical theorist in the Computense University literature department.” He runs into Silvia, who once served as the model for one of his characters. “Silvia in the first draft, but unnamed in your book,’ she said. “The one refused by all the publishers. Didn’t you pay, finally, to bring it out yourself?”
In the final story in the collection, “From Madrid to Heaven,” a writer, an expatriate resident of Madrid, addresses a letter to his brother in London, having been prompted to do so by a bookmark falling out of a book. It is an opportunity for another conversation, entirely one-sided this time, that gathers up some of Croxford’s major themes: the past, the therapeutic effects of writing and conversation, and questions raised by lives lived and not lived.
Leslie Croxford, From Madrid to Heaven, Cairo: Diwan, 2024, pp303.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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