Tess Uriza Holthe Makes a Short Story Connection

I’ve been noticing a slight increase in the number of linked short story collections lately, so when Tess Uriza Holthe‘s The Five Forty-Five to Cannes showed up among the new releases, I invited her to tell me about its origins. Her debut novel, When the Elephants Dance, was widely acclaimed and a #1 bestseller in her native San Francisco; it will also be the selection for nearby Mountain View’s second annual city-wide book club this November.

The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes wasn’t planned. I was working on my sophomore book and my mother in-law invited me on a three-week trip to Cannes and the Italian Riviera. The whole point was to take a break from the second book and though I was happy to do that, I couldn’t concede not to write at all. So I brought one notebook to log down our travels, the sights, the sounds, and the people, with the idea that perhaps in the future if I decided to set a story in France or Italy I would have a sense of the place.

For the plane ride over, I brought along three short story collections: Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever, Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Storie, and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (the Finca Vigia edition). By the time we landed in Milano I was in a short story frame of mind.

I loved how a character in Ship Fever—I think it was the Carl Linnaeus character from “The Behavior of Hawkweeds”—showed up even for just a second in another short story, or maybe his name was simply mentioned, but to have him exist outside of his short story was a fascinating concept for me. I wanted to play with that concept, the idea of the character continuing on after their short story ends.

With few exceptions—Joyce’s Dubliners, Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”—I never felt that the characters lived outside of their story. They ended once their short story ended, whereas with a novel I always feel as if the characters continue to exist somewhere.

I’d like to think Gregor Samsa, Holden Caulfield, and Scout all shop at the same fictional beach front market somewhere; The doomed Alejandra and John Grady Cole have dinner every night with Robert Jordan and Maria. In my imaginings, Jane Eyre and Lily Bart have their own circle of friends that may or may not include Grace Marks; while Raskolnikov and Chichikov play chess as Nabokov’s Hermann whispers in Raskolnikov’s ear and Madame Flaubert and Bathsheba Everdene wait their turns.

The possibilities in a novel are eternal. But when coming upon a short story I always guarded my feelings, the way I would during a temporary stay at an eccentric aunt’s house, not wanting to get too attached because then I would have to say goodbye for good.

Of course we know the fate of the protagonist at the end of “To Build a Fire,” but he made such a strong impression I thought surely there was someone waiting at home and what would their lives be like now? So when I read Andrea Barrett’s book and saw how she linked a character to another story, even for just a moment, I thought, “Oh, of course.” She opened up a window for me.

Over the course of my stay in the Riviera, Hemingway’s sense of adventure and McCuller’s melancholy seeped into my skin. Coupled with the beauty of Cannes, the palm trees, the ocean, the heat, the sale signs waving in every boutique and the holiday from my second novel—I soaked in the Mediterranean like a first crush. That dreamy mooning-over feeling where the person, or in this case the place, could do no wrong.

The second day we were at this outdoor café in Cannes, just a few blocks down from the seaside International Hotel, formerly the Ritz Carlton. (It’s on the 5:45 cover; it’s the large building with the turquoise bishop-shaped corner caps. Erin Schell, the book cover designer, did such a wonderful job with the colors; in selecting that poster, it’s like she read my mind.) So there we were, sipping a beautiful inexpensive Bordeaux and families were trickling in, coming from the beach to have lunch, and I remember thinking, “How nice it must be, that some of these people must come here every year as an annual get together. The memories they must have.” My next thought was sort of a daydream: What if one year, as a family is growing apart as families do, separating and coming together, a young man, the black sheep of his family, is literally trying to make his way back to them to this paradisiacal meeting place and he is somehow kept from meeting the rest of his group?

I wrote the thought down and forgot about it. The following day I logged down three women I saw walking arm in arm; they would be the inspiration for the Three Widows. In the same way, I jotted down a dog running through the market in Aix, having grappa at the Hotel Rapallo, and watching the Italian variety shows. A young man of about fifteen or sixteen on the train ride to Cinque Terre saw us struggling with our luggage, trying to get it on the overhead bin without dropping it directly on someone’s head, and he helped us without even being asked. He would later become the inspiration for Gian Carlo the pickpocket.

That evening I had jet lag and could not fall asleep. I decided not to fight it and reflected upon the many people and images from our day. My mother in-law and I were sharing a big room at the International so I tried to be as quiet as I could as I wrote a note down, tossed in bed a few more times, wrote an addition to the note, then another, and another. Finally, I decided to get up, went to the bathroom, turned on the light and sat on a wooden vanity chair, and sketched out the outline of three or four stories over the next hour. Three hours later, I had sketched the whole book out, with the idea of having them interconnect through the train rides. One person bumping elbows with another character. Maybe someone joining in with some mundane conversation and following that person through their day. It became like a game to me to see if I could have my characters do walk-ons, cameos into the other character’s life even after their individual story had ended.

Over the next three weeks my mother in-law and I were on a train EVERY day, visiting nearby towns. I wrote furiously, filling up my notebook so that I had to stop and buy different notebooks. I wrote a few stories in a Harry Potter notebook, another in a Hello Kitty one, because that’s all I could find. And so I wrote the whole collection by pen, a lot of it from the window seat of a moving train, looking out into the captivating landscape outside. A very Jane Austen experience.

The book came out whole except for the last story, which I was inspired to write a few months later for no reason at all except that the character’s voice came through one day. I don’t remember the catalyst except somehow I believe that sentence came to m:, “On the train ride over she dreamt she had dropped the urn.” “The Homecoming” turned out to be the perfect end cap, bringing everything full circle. It was a fascinating feverish experience. I had to purge the stories from me or they wouldn’t let me rest.

2 July 2007 | guest authors |