PART SIX OF MY REVIEW OF THE PENGUIN BOOKS OF THE BRITISH SHORT STORY
CONTINUED FROM PART FIVE HERE: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1207-2/
Edited by Philip Hensher
My previous reviews of older or classic fictions: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
My review of the Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/26/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story/
When I read the stories in the above two books, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below:
KINGSLEY AMIS: Mason’s Life
This meeting between a man called Pettigrew and another called Mason is an amazing vignette that I have never read before, and I wish I had. I hope it lasts long enough, at least in my mind, so as to maintain it as a fuller understanding of what it provides me with. You see, I have been seriously obsessed with what I originated as my terminology of ‘co-vivid dreaming’, for the last couple of years or so, a serial phenomenon interconnected within the literary gestalt being sought — and the evidence of this fact is actually within my gestalt real-time reviewing over this period. Please do check by googling “co-vivid” or “covivid” together with “nullimmortalis”. Of course, it may already be too late, and this vignette itself has become swept up by fleeting co-vividness. A dream already lost about a non-existent Kingsley Amis work.
Front page version of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/29/kingsley-amis-masons-life/
I feel this vignette is so significant that I have taken the unusual step of providing a reading copy: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/masons-life-by-kingsley-amis/
ALAN SILLITOE: Mimic
“If life is one long quest to avoid deciding what you are, I suddenly knew that I was a moth when one whole wing was touched off by the candle.”
I was wondering whether or not this intense work is a portrait of autism in a boy and then man with his own narration by various of his Proustian selves. SPOILER midway through: “This isn’t a story.”
Yet, it is more than just tranches of life in the ‘cheap lodgings’ of the body. It is the mimicking of moth and mother and father and wife and oneself and others, a stabbing of the wind within the weight of a big-head, using concepts of parallel reincarnation and, ultimately, madness to camouflage madness with the Zeno’s Paradox in this story-soliloquy: “To question why one is alive means that one is only half a person, but to be a whole person is to be half dead.” Till reaching the long-distant cliff-face of the present moment: The Magic Mountain of the self as “an apotheosis of glorious mimicry.”
“I had to sit with time, feed it my bones in daylight and darkness.”
A Mann’s Man?
My eccentric method of pre-setting a reading voyage through these two anthologies is alone made worthwhile by the synchronous segue as secret sharing between MIMIC by Alan Sillitoe and this Conrad classic (and possibly MASON’S LIFE, too!)…such a mutual synergy making the Conrad seem even more powerful, if that were possible!
JOSEPH CONRAD: The Secret Sharer
“…it’s to no commander’s advantage to be suspected of ludicrous eccentricities.”
The irony of that is not lost to me. And this substantive work tells not only of a new Captain (the narrator) but also of him as a Captain new to an old ship whose crew are already inured to it, a ship subject to anchor-watch in the Gulf of Siam. You will already know of the late-coming of an effective stowaway, accused of murder, swimming from another ship and luckily finding a side-ladder where our Captain himself is holding anchor-watch, a second self, a secret sharer, a double, a man whose later gift of a shared sun-hat leads our Captain from danger… a telling mythos of man and his ‘nemo’ (see that quote from John Fowles earlier, re the Saki, in this review). A man who meets his Koh-ring, for me, a second self to Bowen’s KÔR as well as Conrad’s Gate of Erebus. And the ‘endless gale’ with ‘a sea gone mad’. And the sticking out of a tongue from the Captain Archbold of the second self’s ship Sephora: “He had had terrible weather on the passage out – terrible – terrible – wife aboard, too.” And the playing by the two Proustian selves of hide and seek, as it were, with our Captain’s steward. And the ‘terrifying whiskers’ of our Captain’s First Mate and the ‘whispering’ elsewhere by contrast (“And in the same whisper, as if we two whenever we talked had to say things to each other which were not fit for the world to hear, he added, ‘It’s very wonderful.’”), a whispering by our Captain with his second self, as if whispered sexily to each other, as well as the earlier scorpion in an inkwell left unsolved (Leggatt in the L shaped cabin?)…
And much else.
Below are my choice quotations as meaningful landmarks in the body of this work to steer by, including any elbow-triggers! …
“But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself. […] but I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man acts up for himself secretly.”
“…my mind picturing to myself the coming passage through the Malay Archipelago, down the Indian Ocean, and up the Atlantic.”
“…got a sleeping-suit out of my room and, coming back on deck, saw the naked man from the sea sitting on the main-hatch, glimmering white in the darkness, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.”
“It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror.”
“And I knew well enough also that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more. I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping-suit.”
“…the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own grey ghost.”
“….his elbow in the ratlines of the mizzen-rigging…”
“He had turned about meantime; and we, the two strangers on the ship, faced each other in identical attitudes.”
“And then you speaking to me so quietly – as if you had expected me – made me hold on a little longer.”
“There was a sort of curiosity in his eye that I did not like. I don’t know whether the steward had told them that I was ‘queer’ only, or downright drunk, but I know the man meant to have a good look at me.”
“…and all the time the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality, sleeping in that bed, behind that door which faced me as I sat at the head of the table. It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.”
“I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret sharer of my cabin….”
“That mental feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically as if the mood of secrecy had penetrated my very soul.”
“Sometimes he reclined on the floor, his legs bent, his head sustained on one elbow.”
“Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes than mine? It was like being haunted.”
“‘Are you going on, sir?’ inquired an unsteady voice at my elbow.”
“‘My God! Where are we?’ It was the mate moaning at my elbow.”
Front page version of this review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/joseph-conrad-the-secret-sharer/
V. S. PRITCHETT: The Camberwell Beauty
“There was Pliny with his nose which looked servile rather than distinguished, wearing a long biscuit-coloured tweed jacket with leather pads at the elbows…”
This is the finest Pritchettware.
I often lust for it, but rarely expect to reach its core. Its ultimate drumroll of triumph, after winding through the alleyways of wardrobe paragraphs under a single bare bulb for the optimum character in the stain of ink upon an object’s surface, here the, themselves single-minded and lustful, characters of antique dealing, pre-FLOG-IT rogues and rivalries of yore, and their womenfolk, one girl/woman here, not single-minded, but simple-minded as I S A B, or in a mirror, B A S I, the Zeno’sParadox of Isabel writing out (like Mr Ramsay’s alphabet) her own name, starting at age 14 in this story, later a young woman just as simple-minded as before in the aspic of who she thinks loves her most and of whose men are chasing after her.
“Under the lip of the jug was the small face of an old man with a long nose looking sly and wicked.”
The narrator himself gets stuck in Isabel’s aspic. Returning to her a Dresden she undersold him. And there are other characters milling about in this story, in this maze of Meissen, August’s men and a bugle she blows when she is alarmed. One paragraph has a squeaking door. It’s that I still lust for. “We live on myths.” The trade that fiction plies as suspended selves upon shelves of disbelief.
“At the heart of the trade is lust but a lust that is a dream paralysed by itself.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/essential-stories-v-s-pritchett/
Another would-be Isabel, this time sending her unfinished letters to the dead?
JEAN RHYS: Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers
“He laughed and hoisted her on to his knee. With her head against his chest she listened while he rumbled gently: ‘Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.”
But this is a much younger girl, pre teenage, at outset who, we hope, outgrows herself, as she, already a white settler in the West Indies of 1899, falls in love with a white man just come from England, who then marries a ‘coloured girl’, and he was once seen naked with a cutlass (for shearing?), amid hints of cannibals and zombies.
“‘His death was really a blessing in disguise,’ said one lady.”
I reviewed the next story originally when reading it in one of Robert Aickman’s Fontana Ghost Story anthologies, as follows, in its then context —-
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A. V. LAIDER by Sir Max Beerbohm
“Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.”
An engaging and truly ingenious story of two men (one of them AVL and the other the narrator) — reminding me of the combined dichotomy / synergy in the two men in the Guildea story above — men who spend their time, often staying in the same hotel as a convalescence after influenza. Involving a letter on the hotel’s letter board where the letters are gartered till their recipient finds them there, letters that imagination makes converse with each other about how long they have been gartered there, some letters new, some old, and this particular letter — reminding me of the preternaturally fated letter in the Bowen story above — is from the narrator to AVL, and the repercussions are that they overcome their aloofness again and tap each other’s IMAGINATION as Conan Doyle’s real THINGS when ‘Playing With Fire’ above, thus deploying their DUPLICITY, the contradictions of FATE and FREE WILL, and whether murder is murder or a weakness …. a train journey, a discussion on PALMISTRY and on various hands’ lifelines and the hole in one particular hand’s lifeline, and other such paradoxes of truth, making me wonder which one of these two men had died of influenza, even though I had no evidence to believe that either of them was still alive! Or now dead!
“I suppose you would say it was written in my hand that I should be a believer in free will.”
The review’s full context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/25/the-2nd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories/
IAN MCEWAN: Pornography
“…O’Byrne used to call him Little Runt. At Harold’s elbow a miniature radio rasped…”
Two brothers, one, O’B, ten years younger but taller than the other, H.
H runs an ‘adult’ magazine shop business and employs O’B there.
O’B is playing fast and loose with two nurses, but neither knows of the other. One nurse in particular is off the wall in what she makes O’B do for her sexual needs. Whatever the engrained state of his tackle.
I could go on…but don’t go there!
This is a remarkable stylish portrait of such a scenario and its righteous but disturbing outcome! A highly transgressive version of the scenario in the above Pritchett. But here hawking into a paper hankie.
Panties and gas mask, notwithstanding. Leather jacket versus leather jacket. Feel the quality, not the width. Go to Ipswich Bus Station. Go to a disused church in the Brixton end of Norbury. Go to the foot of the Post Office Tower. I’ve been to all three of these general venues and now I’m made fully to go there, as sent by this story, a ‘there’ that I hoped never to go to! — “cocked his head towards the invisible ceiling,…” And, from my own worm-eyed view, a different concupiscent tower was prematurely toppled at the point of its optimal sensitisation. A memorable story I hope never to remember.
“O’Byrne decided to give her one last chance and with naked grunts hauled himself on to his elbow…”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/ian-mcewan/
Front page version of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/31/a-memorable-story-i-hope-never-to-remember/
ANGELA CARTER: The Courtship of Mr Lyon
“It gave him further, comforting proof of his unseen host’s wealth and eccentricity to see the dog wore, in place of a collar, a diamond necklace.”
But how did Beauty’s father think he knew as a fact, from a distance, that this Spaniel — the familiar of Beast — wore a necklace that had real diamonds? A rhetorical question on my part, one that will remain unanswered because there is no answer, transcended by this Angela Carter story with its own Beauty that one can only compare to Angela Carter as an indication for you of its intrinsic style and meaning. A tripartite blend of Lewis Carroll and Brothers Grimm and, yes, Angela Carter….
“…and there, to her well-disguised dismay, she found her host, seated beside the fire with a tray of coffee at his elbow from which she must pour.”
Suddenly, one realises from such a trigger partway through that there is ever a first negative tipping-point to every story that then gradually meanders, with equal Beauty, towards what one knows to be a sad ending, but here one is somehow tipped up, indeed tripped up by even that fearful certainty. Kissing hands, flinching at his touch, the Beauty and the Beast syndrome and her father’s initial crime of stealing, for her, a white rose from the leonine Beast’s garden, all of these events having, in hindsight, caused the story’s turning “a mite petulant when things went not quite as she wanted them to go.” And you know this is a feint of tantalising the reader before the inevitable happy ending, But were you right the first time in fearing the worst, and is any review inevitably nothing but a mischievous counter-feint? The carats of diamonds deemed counterfeit as well as the characters themselves? The ending, as part of the whole story’s inner syndrome, changing each time you read it?
My previous reviews of this author: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/907-2/#comment-2213 and https://nemonymous123456.wordpress.com/59-2/
From page version of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/31/angela-carter-the-courtship-of-mr-lyon/
My previous review of the next story was as follows, in its then context of a different anthology…
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“Yet he sprang out and dressed himself, for he was determined to settle once for all which was real: the omnibus or the streets.”
A boy from Agathox Lodge — on his own and later with Mr Bons (cf the letter chopped from BONES prefiguring Evenson cleavings in my recent review canon here) — travels the eponymous vehicle over the rainbow, with all the literary references and relevance to a literary or hyper-imaginative gestalt, a story telling of “a homonymous world” as well as how to ease a “queasy soul” with such “leit motifs”, in fact one of my favourite stories ever, and probably yours, too. Well, it is E.M. Forster after all.
“It is odd how, in quite illiterate minds, you will find glimmers of Artistic Truth.”
“Because — because all these words that only rhymed before, now that I’ve come back they’re me.”
“I have honoured you. I have quoted you. I have bound you in vellum.”
“For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.”
A genuine gestalt review motto, the last quote above, for me. And re-reading this work today, I am also alerted to the significance of one of my reviews in 2013 of a work entitled Ø ALTITUDO that is connected with the flights-of-imagination of the realist Sir Thomas Browne, who drives Forster’s bus on our hero’s first journey in it: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/o-altitudo/ (the later comments attached to that review are as important, I feel, as the review itself.)
DORIS LESSING: Notes for a Case History
“…as a tiger-striped movement of fire.”
The story of Maureen marooned in life during a 1942 air raid? Something amorphous from the Blitz that smoulders away Bowen-like as she manipulates and mis-manipulates, during the changing times, from rations onwards, manipulates herself, and others, boys, then men, her plainer friend Shirley, her parents, all being a game of Chance and deliberate Art, financial Capital, too. and sulking disguises and attending art galleries and foreign films. But ever tied to her legacy of having the family grocery shop originally named after her when a young girl. And her feisty self-destructive moments that become part of the manipulative map. One man Tony vying with another, Stanley, in this pattern of becoming disguised as her own mother from wartime, an often pointless battle to better herself and to exploit her inbuilt prettiness. Not sure where I, as a reader, was going with all this, either! And why. Just is.
“During this period she several times burst into tears when alone, without apparent reason; afterwards she felt that life had no flavour. Her future was narrowing down to Stanley; and at these times she viewed it through Tony Head’s eyes.”
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/the-good-terrorist-doris-lessing/
Beware spoilers…
PENELOPE FITZGERALD: The Means of Escape
The Hobart seraphine player, accordion cum organ, in a church with storm doors galore for young Alice, alone, to unlock and shut again, in times when penitentiaries kept men prisoners in sacking-masks for silence’s sake, yet they still knew somehow when the ships did run in the vicinity. This is a classic story that will stay with me, as I witness the things, out of inky darkness in the church becoming shapes, one of them now an escaped prisoner called Savage, with whom naive Alice, as perhaps with Isabel in the Pritchett, is captivated by this male shape, and promises him women’s clothes as disguise to stowaway, like the earlier ‘secret sharer’, on the Constancy.
Full of sins and truly felt simple-minded sacred Biblical moments, and a disappointment with St. Paul, one wonders why we really got to know a certain Mrs Watson earlier in the story, a woman late of the Punch and Judy loss of three children and her time at the Female Factory, and I first thought her even more naive than Alice, or even more stupid than the ‘incredulous stupor’ of a Mrs Luke, till it is this Mrs Watson (amid the ‘human warren’ of Alice’s home) who becomes the one whom Savage prefers to deck him out in female clothes. And, either by the previous story’s Maureen’s ‘chance’ beyond Joseph Conrad’s CHANCE or something else, Mrs Watson preempts Alice by accompanying Savage on his voyage of escape to England! Despite the sign of two thumbs and forefingers he had once given our Alice. So I felt sad for Alice. But inspired, too, by being allowed to read about it. Even Bowen had her sign of a thumb and two fingers, I thought to myself. Any ‘spent tea-leaves’, notwithstanding.
From that in previous story above to …
“At its crest hang her two hands, with the orthodox decussation, an elaborate ten-fingered symbol.”
in
WYNDHAM LEWIS: Brotcotnaz
“The distillations of the breton orchard have almost subdued the obstinate yellow of jaundice, and Julie’s face is a dull claret.”
From the King in Yellow to another painting altogether, Gauguin I say, not Franz Hals! Julie married to and beaten to near death by Nicholas Brotocotnaz suffers from erysipelas (one of my ancestors had that with the skin separating from his massive skull, as massive as mine) but the two visits of the narrator Kairor, when he hears about the jay bird, not a prisoner like Savage, he realises that Nicholas depends wholly on cause and effect for his very being, and when a horse backs into his wife and parts of her need amputating it does save her from so much beating from him! While he thought it was a secret sharer and alter ego or nemo or double who had done it …”Had fate acted without him?” The less body she had, the less body he could beat, I guess. Untouchable, as it were …even if the bone remained underneath the shed skin, I wonder? Kairor as harbinger of synchronicity, not cause and effect!
“There was, in short, the effect, but not the cause. Whatever his ultimate intention as regards Julie, he is a ‘jaloux.’ All his wild jealousy surges up. A cause, a rival cause, is incarnated in his excited brain, and goes in an overbearing manner to claim its effect. In a second a man is born.”
“But after this moment of intense void the furniture did not quite resume its old positions, some of the pieces never returned, there remained a blankness and desolate novelty in the destiny of Brotcotnaz.”
I reviewed the next work in a number of separate sittings in 2014, as part of reviewing all this author’s stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/every-short-story-1951-2012-by-alasdair-gray/ —
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Five Letters From An Eastern Empire by Alasdair Gray
First Letter
“Since I was now the tallest man aboard I had to disembark first.”
So far, I sense this is a sequel-prequel of the previous Axletree story, working through the practicalities of that story’s quantitative easing of the soul. This first chapter of the next story or novella is the first letter home from Bohu to his parents, Bohu being the serious side of a bi-polarity of two Poet Laureates to the Emperor, both of them on a barge journey to the central palace along with the Emperor’s headmasters and accountants… No, I cannot sufficiently convey in real-time the abased pilgrimage within the great walled hub or the ‘etiquette’ of this scenario; the etiquette is for anyone reading this review to join in this envisaged pilgrimage and read the first letter before I read and review and perhaps ‘spoil’ the second letter home, as I infer the next chapter to be. All I can really say so far, is that I am entranced…and will want to let this substantial work linger longer in my reading-life till I can’t resist its impelling me to continue reading it sooner rather than later before some postman in the guise of the head-lease author has time to start altering Bohu’s next letter!
***
Second Letter
“Each of you loved and hated a different bit of me.
With this second letter to his parents, Bohu’s poignant ‘backstory’ is slowly revealed, if we are to believe this letter (it says later that this is his last letter something that the umbrella title contradicts) – but I feel that Bohu, who was earlier described by me, but not by his first letter, as a Poet Laureate, is being groomed, by the emperor’s order, via headmasters and escorted by janitors, and is both protected and exposed through his situation, encouraged to write this letter to his estranged, now lower-down-the-pecking-order parents, ostensibly to act as some personal catharsis but also, I am wondering, so that he can divulge things that the headmasters need to know.
Tohu, the other part of the bi-polarity (my expression, not the letter’s), is more of a vestigial growth upon Bohu (I infer) rather that a balanced equal half, while the emperor himself, it is implied, is also shrunken (and blind). What do I believe? I believe this novella, if that is what it is, continues to seep ineluctably into my own mind and I will let it ferment there gently till at least tomorrow when I shall attempt to interpret the third letter. (Meanwhile, whoever is overseeing Bohu’s prose is certainly a great teacher, judging by these first two letters.)
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Third Letter
“It is true that the world is so packed with the present moment that the past, a far greater quantity, can only gain entrance through the narrow gate of a mind. […] Remember that the world is one vast graveyard of defunct cities, all destroyed by the shifting markets they could not control, and all compressed by literature into a handful of poems.”
…so speaks one of the headmasters (head masters?) through Bohu in his third letter to his parents, a letter which in many ways paradoxically bears out that his second letter was indeed his last letter to his parents. To give you more about this or of the nature of Bohu’s description of meeting the emperor (possibly one of the most striking scenes in all literature compressed or otherwise) would spoil something in your real-time reading of it. I’d only say that I am now unaccountably reminded of ‘The Holy Sinner’ by Thomas Mann where the future Pope Gregory was shrunk to the size of a hedgehog. You may be reminded of something else, like some works of another Thomas, Ligotti? I am following some etiquette here of not unravelling too many of this work’s staggering images and thoughts – but by simply saying such a thing I am trusting that you will not be able to resist seeking out this book to read it for yourself. Or it may be because I have not yet unravelled some of these things myself!
***
Fourth Letter
“Perhaps when I was small I had gazed as greedily for the mere useless fun of it, but for years I had only used my eyes professionally, to collect poetical knowledge, or shielded them, as required by the etiquette.”
A lesson for us all. Legacy seekers as a form of etiquette to distract from a wish for death – but this letter has a wistful sense of heady dalliance with love and life, by also creating that one poem that will outlast us – denying the fashion these days for dwelling in Ligottian anti-Natalism or for espousing a singular puppetry that controls us like its own puppets. Not ‘a conspiracy against the human race’ so much as an idyll to something that transcends us, despite the despair of those around us. Just thoughts that went through my mind, but Bohu still wrestles with his letters: written not to a stark, ventriloquisable puppetry or poetry but to an idealised parentage, and there is one more letter yet to read. Or his head-master (Alas Dare?) wrestles with them in his stead.
***
Last Letter
…turns out to be a surprisingly short letter – a coda to the symphony, this truly great work…hinting that the best results can stem from what you didn’t intend but you have to intend something at least to find out what you didn’t intend. Only dare to open oneself to this conundrum or die in the process. Toynbee’s challenge and response. The Laureate’s apparental bi-polarity is indeed capable of decoding. There is more to this than I expected, too, before I turned the page to this last letter, to the last letter of both poets’ names – u. You.
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/35138-2/