The Penguin Books of the British Short Story
PART NINE OF MY REVIEW OF THE THREE PENGUIN BOOKS OF THE BRITISH SHORT STORY
CONTINUED FROM PART EIGHT HERE: https://weirdtongue.wordpress.com/the-penguin-books-of-the-british-short-story/
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 these three books, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below:
Frederick Marryat: South West and by West three-quarters West
This review cannot have quotations to ‘box its compass’ because, as with its central character Jack Littlebrain, I did not surreptitiously write them down to assist my poor memory’s winning of a roast goose dinner. Suffice to say, by other means, this is the tale of Jack and his career at sea under the auspices of his uncle the Admiral. The latter tries to help him cheat his own disability of stupidity so as to further him in the ranks rather than sending him to Bedlam or simply allowing him to remain in the tale’s audit trail towards the avoidable destiny of being cured, for good and all, by a tomahawk in the head.
The eponymous wind has indeed brought to me, if garbled later by my mind, these memories of such a wind as herself in this tale — this point-of-the-compass-wind as a gentle fairy that shared Jack’s cabin bed and loved him till the last, despite his forgetting himself when told by her never to mention any other wind directions even during his official duties amid the cruelty of winter. She also induces me to think that this tale of herself is a revelation, a perfectly couched fantasy tale that should have been anthologised and iconised more than all those other tales that were over-promoted beyond their ability.
Cross-referenced with ‘The Homes We Deserve’ here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/alexander-zelenyj/#comment-1654
Cross-referenced with THE HORLA: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/28/that-glimpse-of-truth/#comment-24862
William Thackeray: A Little Dinner at Timmins’s
“Mr and Mrs Fitzroy Timmins live in Lilliput Street, that neat little street which runs at right angles with the Park and Brobdingnag Gardens. It is a very genteel neighbourhood, and I need not say they are of a good family.”
….and thus starts this authorial narration in cahoots with a colluded-with reader, obviously a socially satirical fable by hilarious dint of some of its human names as well as the above place names. Yet, it is far more than that; it’s a wondrous tale of a dinner party followed by an evening party in a house in Lilliput street too small to hold such functions. Even the man of the house has a study like a pantry. Yet they are social climbers, this couple with a baby, with the pervading inimical force of his mother-in-law who interferes in such functions (who “…never tired of beating, and pushing, and patting, and wapping the curtain and sofa draperies into shape in the little drawing-room.”)
And one long passage in particular, when the man of the house shops for the party at Fubsby’s cake shop, is an unmissable high point in all literature, a scene which induces him to return to this shop again and again to be served by its beautiful young ladies with whom he is infatuated, as spied on by his mother-in-law. Just soak in below just a tiny few of its other high points,…including a soup stock to die for, and not forgetting the concept of Elbows in Hell as mentioned by the butler called Truncheon! …
— “…and your table is as narrow as a bench – we can’t hold more than heighteen, and then each person’s helbows will be into his neighbour’s cheer.”
“(for going abroad is out of the question in these dreadful times).”
“Funnyman, the great wit, was asked, because of his jokes; and Mrs Butt, on whom he practises;”
“…how many spits, bangmarry pans, and stoo pans they had.”
“The baby was found sucking his boot-hooks the next day in the nursery;”
“all these accumulated miseries fall upon the unfortunate wretch because he was good-natured, and his wife would have a Little Dinner.”
Elizabeth Gaskell: Six Weeks at Heppenheim
“I had strolled about the dirty town of Worms all morning, and dined in a filthy hotel;”
In many ways a straightforward novelette — described stylishly, traditionally and accessibly, with deceptively hypnotic monotony in places — of a young man, as narrator, who, before starting his potentially monotonous legal career in England, makes some sort of grand tour in Europe on a relatively low budget, and ends up in the eponymous locale near Worms, whereby he stays at an inn near some vineyards, but he soon falls feverishly sick (as abruptly as a baby boy called Max at the inn does later in the story). A widower (with children such as Max) and the widower’s sister, who run the inn together, and one of their housemaids called Thekla, are inferred to take care of the narrator while he is in a coma and later we gradually see through his eyes a growing relationship with these people. And each of their backstories, particularly Thekla’s backstory, starting with a letter she receives from a man whom she has known from their childhood. And the cut and thrust of motives between these various people pan out towards an apparent happy ending, amid the strange laws of the Vineyards in this part of Germany, leading to a Festival of the Vintage with “harvest-hymn”, all of which is wonderfully described, as also are many of the emotions of health and sickness and love and sadness and happiness… but, for me, there are undercurrents, too… a bold inchworm within the grape, or outside it? — a sort of ‘terroir’ (sic)?—
“The uncurtained window on my left looked into the purple, solemn night.”
….which presages the grapes’ purple stains on the face of baby Max before he becomes ill. The teething of a boy Bacchus?
Thekla — “been run off her legs,…”
“Most likely every one has noticed how inconsistently out of proportion some ideas become when one is shut up in any place without change of scene or thought.”
A serious turning point in the story as elbow-trigger…
“I raised myself on my elbow, and called her back.”
“I could see dots of scarlet, and crimson, and orange through the fading leaves;”
“He was smeared all over with grape-juice, his sturdy fingers grasped a half-eaten bunch even in his sleep.”
“Already one or two of those well-known German carts (in the shape of a V) were standing near the vineyard gates, the patient oxen meekly waiting while basketful after basketful of grapes were being emptied…”
“All night long I dreamt my feverish dream – of the vineyard – the carts, which held little coffins instead of baskets of grapes –“
“Mrs Inchbald’s pretty description of Dorriforth’s anxiety in feeding Miss Milner; she compares it, if I remember rightly, to that of a tender-hearted boy, caring for his darling bird,…”
And resonating with earlier references to Worms…
“– not that he is conscious of pain, poor little worm;”
“Fritz and Thekla lead little Lina up to the Acre of God, the Field of Rest, to hang the wreath of immortelles on her mother’s grave. Peace be with the dead and the living.”
Front page version of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/25/elizabeth-gaskell-six-weeks-at-heppenheim/
My previous review of Mrs Gaskell as chosen by Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-1st-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/#comment-21903
A seemingly timely reading of a Victorian story that refers to ”the rights of women in America,…”
Anthony Trollope: An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids
“When we have seen a thing, it is never so magnificent to us as when it was half unknown.”
This was published in 1860, and the Suez Canal was completed in 1869, and the characters talk about, inter alia, the impossibility of it being built. Characters who are going on an excursion from Grand Cairo, and you gradually grow to know the English Mr Damer, Mrs Damer, their daughter Fanny, their two teenage boys less so, and an American man called Ingram who seems to love Fanny, and a French man who is proud of France as all nations here are, even the pestering Arabs if Trollope can be transcended, and, yes, of course, the eponymous Sabrina Dawkins, a lady unprotected by sticks for her peas and thus proud of her fortitude without men. And any reference to the artificial incubation of chicken eggs in this readably compelling story, with wondrous genius-loci, should be taken with a pinch of salt, if not sugar!
“Their road from the village of the chicken-hatching ovens lay up along the left bank of the Nile, through an immense grove of lofty palm trees, looking out from among which our visitors could ever and anon see the heads of the two great Pyramids;”
Sabrina (“cheek carries everything now-a-days”) is vying for a place in a future excursion down the Nile to her ‘sacred spot in history’, along with the Damers, with her contending, amidst scarcity of places in their party, with Ingram — and the implications of this and his budding relationship with Fanny make this an amusing and entertaining story. Thoughtful, too, in time’s backshifting way. Any backsheish, notwithstanding.
“‘I might, perhaps, have said also that we create more beautiful things,’ said Mr Ingram. ‘But we cannot create older things.’”
The climb up the Pyramids with donkeys and Arabs is perfectly pitched, if now politically incorrect. The characters have their own political discussions. And there seems to be something mound-scatological as well as -eschatological about this in the perhaps unintentional context as lent by a preternatural passing of time till today…
“They were still two miles distant, and the sphynx as yet was but an obscure mound between the two vast Pyramids.”
After the prospect of foul smells of actually entering the Pyrmaids to find Cheops or Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps, somehow [SPOILER] the outcome of feminist Sabrina’s carefully plotted ploys are dashed. But Trollope be transcended, she should have counted herself lucky to escape the Damers, I say!
Mrs Damer, in particular! (Has anyone spotted this connection before?) —
At one early point in the story…
“The Arabs for a moment retired to a little distance, like flies driven from a sugar bowl; but it was easy to see that, like the flies, they would return at the first vacant moment.”
And much later in the story…
“…and they found Mrs Damer at the bottom, like a piece of sugar covered with flies. She was heard to declare afterwards that she would not go to the Pyramids again, not if they were to be given to her for herself, as ornaments for her garden.”
Sugar snap peas and sticks!
Wilkie Collins: Mrs Badgery
“‘I wish you could contrive not to cry over the top of my head, ma’am,’ said I.”
This story tells of such an extreme apotheosis of burrowing badgery that one wonders why it did not give birth to that term for future usage as examples of extreme nuisance, here from a “widowed incubus”. This is the story whereby a bald gentleman is desperate that there is no law available for ridding the house he has just bought from such a badgery by a woman, the Matilda Martyr, who is so besotted with grief at her husband’s death that she feels she has the right to impest every room where they spent their married life, in this house she no longer owns. It is both hilarious and frightening in a hellish way, I think. No wonder he insisted on “Hullo!” not Hello. And he is terrorised that his fontanelle cannot escape her burrowing teardrops. And the touching of his arm in church with the dead man’s “abstract theology”. Popping in to see if his collar has been starched, no doubt. Not even snores could penetrate the crape. Mock feints or faints, even ‘man-traps’, and there is no law to halt this duel, “my house” against “hershrine.” Ha!
Charles Dickens: Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings
“(you might have struck me into the centre of the earth with a feather when she said it)”
From Wandering Christians to Parlours writing stories, this is mainly Mrs L’s account via such Parlours of her Lodgings on Norfolk Street, a telling novelette, that encompasses, inter alia, blacked-up faces or black welling from within on boot sponges, as she tells us of the girls working for her, and her customers, con-tricksters or impostors or just ordinary folk and their habits, and her rival ‘Miss Wozenham lower down on the other side of the way’, once called a “female heaver”, and the arrival of a Major as lodger and mentor eventually Godfather in cahoots with her as Gran, and the young married couple whose lodging terms were but arithmetical terms that did not work properly because it was before the Calculating Boy arrived as their foundling via that lodging couple almost a God given virgin birth, I infer, after rescuing the wife from suicide at the wharf. “Flying to her death”, her arms like wings. A poignant clever manipulation of emotion and working-people parlance in Dickensian style. Caps doffed or lost and then found. A paragraph here of “Sleeping Ugly”, organ men and fire-irons, a corner window upon a corner window and an elbow-trigger just before the foundling boy goes off to Boarding School ready for his own story contribution to this work, as a happy ending, kindly tricking his Gran and Godfather, if not his God Father. Yes, the trigger is a hinge upon another hinge: “…when the poor Major put one of his neat bright-varnished boots upon the fender and his elbow on his knee…” And thus the Mite eventually stopped the Major Moping, by more than just “Umtraction” from whole lists of kitchen implements. I loved this work, remarkably new to me. ‘Follow the Monkey’, and much of it miraculously ‘dropped into my noddle’, if you would excuse the expression.
“Nobody ever died.”
I reviewed, as follows below, the next story a year or two ago, a work having what I now note are two remarkable elbow-triggers….
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THE THREE STRANGERS by Thomas Hardy
“THERE IS NO FUN UNTILL i CUM”
A dark rainy atmospheric Higher Crowstairs house where a shepherd lives, high and low lands thereabouts having different microclimates, and tonight there’s a Christening party with 19 guests, a dancing party vying with a ‘sit-still party’. The respective interactivity of three male strangers (one dressed in cinder-gray) who arrive separately out of the dark rainy blue, as it were, is a hoot and a half, involving a hanging for sheep stealing or writing prose that trips you up at every turn. In a good way. But what is a “hedge-carpenter”? And there are also today’s “‘wuzzes and flames’ (hoarses and phlegms)” and ‘grogblossoms’ up the nose.
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My still on-going review of all Thomas Hardy’s short stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/collected-short-stories-thomas-hardy/
The next story I reviewed in the context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/07/the-5th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/, as follows…
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As well as being an equivalent to Oliver O’s Oleronous beckoning enchantment, this Oliphant is a novelette with a figurative ‘elephant-in-the-room’ transpiring to be a diamond ring that bites and stings — and do please compare this with the ring that I coincidentally (!?) read about this very day in ‘Him We Adore’ HERE!
THE LIBRARY WINDOW by Mrs. Oliphant
“Or was he thinking, still thinking, of what he had been writing and going on with it still?”
“It is a longing all your life after — it is a looking — for what never comes.”
…being that gluey never-ending or nullimmortalis that attracts Aickman so much in the stories he chooses for this book series. Here, the so-called window opposite, in the library, that — in this work’s wonderfully evoked conditions of changing light — often looks less like a window at all, and the well-characterised naive girl narrator, amid older ladies as companions, including her aunt, gradually begins to see a man writing endlessly, and beckoning, and waving to her from deep within it, amid the narration’s stray thoughts of enchantments and fairy folk and the conjured covivid bubble of dream and reality. Intensely and incrementally haunting not only for the girl but also for us, as we piece together the intriguing backstories behind it. Her agonising pangs become ours.
Remarkable elbow-trigger in the Oliphant as noted today: “And then, just when there was a little movement of his elbow, as if he were about to do this, to be called away by Aunt Mary to see Lady Carnbee to the door!”
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Body Snatcher
“…if you begin, you must keep on beginning; that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.”
“We must do something for you, Fettes; I fear you are out at elbows; but we must see to that –“
The meeting of a doctor called Wolfe and another man called Fettes, both in older or decrepit age, particularly the diselbowed Fettes, meeting by chance in a pub when the doctor is called to an emergency there. And one of the co-tipplers or topers there later put together his own gestalt of ghoulery that he ‘wormed’ piecemeal from Fettes about the mutual past of the two men who had just faced each other again, for a nonce, in the small space between the pub’s landing and exit…
“…the wide oak staircase landed almost in the street; there was room for a Turkey rug and nothing more between the threshold and the last round of the descent; […] …and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour sot, bald, dirty, pimpled, and robed in his old camlet cloak, confront him at the bottom of the stairs. […] The scene was over like a dream; but the dream had left proofs and traces of its passage.”
And the wormed-out tale is of the Resurrection Man or the Body Snatcher…
“From such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber,…”
The graphically gruesome accounts are never to be forgotten, in that small grey area between the exhumations for the students’ dissecting rooms and the sheer glory of gory, the two men’s greed, their growing amorality and acceptance of such deeds in that niche of space where evil lurks, and coffin lids rattle. Fettes is at first fazed by the arrival of a young woman’s body who was fit enough for him to be talking to only the day before, but thereafter he is ineluctably inured in his own inner creature’s future foxearth, I deem. Then more than just fazed by a man called Gray who ends this story with that space between black and white, a space smaller than ever, with, arguably, a Swiftian ironic reference to the famous book that Gray had recently published! And someone called Richardson had Gray’s head to dissect. But who is Mr K——?
The rifling of bodies couched in language as rape would be — in contrast to the implied love between snatcher and snatched — the latter’s head touchingly laid upon the former’s shoulders…
What are you, lion or lamb? Only the wicked cannot rest. The rest is nothing.
SILVER BLAZE: Arthur Conan Doyle
“A child would know Silver Blaze with his white forehead and his mottled off-foreleg.”
…this famous Sherlock Holness story, too, similarly known by us all, even the odd child here and there. Watson is a sort of child to be tutored, but there is no sure lock against such a child, even though he is not omniscient in this narrative memoir because Sherlock’s ‘whisper’ — carrying the plot with it — was not heard by Watson, and thus unheard by ourselves, yet Watson is no modernistic ‘unreliable narrator’ either! He is astute enough to lay clues for my ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ process, now primed by tackling these Sherlocked works, having practised unlocking such literature when earlier applying this reviewing process to all the Father Brown stories (HERE). And that thought now gives me a clue, in the flow of my pondering, as to the nature of Silas Brown, perhaps, and, consequently, of his boss Lord Backwater, despite their names and the Watson-context implying otherwise! Whatever the value of a half-crown bribe.
I will not further re-rehearse all the clues laid by Watson’s memoir, for fear of spoilers, but I shall merely list them here, like listing the contents of someone’s pocket, as this ‘story’ does, my own list comprising the speed of the train taking our heroes to Dartmoor, the nature of the Somomy stock, a carried mutton dish, a ‘penang-lawyer’ stick weighted by lead, the town of Tavistock being in the middle of a huge circle, the arguable red herring of gypsies in the area, the ‘cataract knife’, a wax Vesta under the matting, a lady’s ostrich-feather trimmed dress, lame sheep with a ‘singular epidemic’, a bill for £37 15s, the nicking of something subcutaneously, arrival at Clapham Junction, and much else.
I shall further list (as the quotes below) what I myself found important as clues, clues particularly to my own involvement in sharing my thoughts with at least one other person (a person perhaps not unlike Watson) who is reading this unofficial review of mine, but with any horse in it being called Desborough notwithstanding.
“Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson – which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs.”
“….for nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person,…”
“Though most of the facts were familiar to me, I had not sufficiently appreciated their relative importance, nor their connection to each other.”
“See the value of imagination…”
“That is the advantage of being unofficial. I don’t know whether you observed it,…”
“faker like him has many a dodge”
Not forgetting, though, Watson’s ‘touching the arm’ of a ‘day-dreaming’ Sherlock in this ‘story’, sure to unlock or trigger something important.
But, each time they are resurrected by the modern consciousness as reliable reality from fiction, which of them wins the race to truth in the end?
My recent review of A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/a-scandal-in-bohemia-sir-arthur-conan-doyle/
BEHIND THE SHADE: Arthur Morrison
“….he closed his finger and thumb upon the brim of his hat, and let his hand fall forthwith. Preparing now to accomplish this salute,…”
Neither the reviewing officer’s replaced nod of an aborted salute as described above or the ‘deacon in a dudgeon’, the real eponymous shade in this brief work about a smaller, if bijou, house than the rest of the neighbourhood is “a cone of waxen grapes and apples under a glass cover” in the window, curtains tied behind it, of Mrs and Miss Perkins, mother and daughter. Earlier, a fell man from Stidder’s Rents in this often choking and sticky brown fog of the East End bashed about Mrs P thinking it was his own mother! And Miss P took over being Mrs P, leaving her mother’s digestive organs to shrink inside the bijou house, I infer, as she, the younger one, tried giving paid piano lessons to make ends meet in the way the above closing of finger and thumb met, I guess. Causing a lot of envy in the neighbourhood. And their landlord Crouch came so often pestering for rent, that, after the strange morbid discovery he found inside the bespoke small house, after bellowing through its keyhole, on a bed and a wooden box respectively, the shade of fruit could hardly give him financial or even spiritual recompense, I guess. Forgive the spoilers and possible misreadings and for leaving the parcels till last. Just as the tropes and leitmotifs of this story that I put together as gestalt seem to make it somehow much bigger than its overt textual briefness of size. A recurring shade bigger than the endemic shadow it throws throughout.
“All this while nobody watched closely enough to note that the parcels brought in were fewer than the parcels taken out.”
Cf my review today of The Lady With The Dog by Chekhov: “…a figure on horseback, with its hat in its hand and its head broken off.”
SUGGESTION: ‘Mrs Ernest Leverson’
“Also, I had hinted of his secret affection for her, and lent her Verlaine.”
This is a suggestive story of supreme subtlety. Of flirting and a mixed-age relationship leading to a ‘monstrous marriage’ where like Prince Charles, the husband married to a young girl goes off regularly to visit his ‘old friend’ whom I assume to be female. And of the younger male narrator, that man’s son, who has not come out of the closet even to himself, but his lending a book by Paul Verlaine to a a young pretty lady speaks volumes to me. Especially during his quandary with a another young man. Also involving a powerful older woman called Lady something or other who tries to control affairs as they do in Elizabeth Bowen. And a ‘brown person’ who talks in literary clichés, I recall.
The New Humour and the Modern Pagan. Beautifully stylish, with so much more of exquisite detail crammed into this relatively short gem.
This review continues here: https://cernzoo.wordpress.com/the-penguin-books-of-the-british-short-story/