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THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH Part 4
PART FOUR, as continued from here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1303-2/
100 OF THE FINEST SHORT STORIES EVER WRITTEN chosen by David Miller
My previous reviews of older or classic fictions: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I review this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Fate as the meeting of elbows, I reviewed the next story last November, as follows:
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SUNDAY AFTERNOON by Elizabeth Bowen
“Now, the sensations of wartime, that locked his inside being, began as surely to be dispelled – in the influence of this eternalized Sunday afternoon.”
Eternalised by Maria’s wrist watch or the number on her wrist when she visits Henry in wartorn London from here in relatively peaceful Dublin. Henry has come back to Dublin to experience his Proustian chocolate cake and to see a petal fall on a sandwich, amid the older people he once knew in a Dublin, but only as a holiday assuming the bus back is not already ten minutes early when they send him off. He survived the bomb on his London flat but losing his valuables within it. So much meaning in this relatively short war story, amid these older Dublin people but also the young petulant Maria who had been too young when he first left for London, I guess. But too young for what? Old enough for what, now? What Fate awaits them? Those times were sensed as significantly Fateful. A sense of importance in matters around them that have now slipped away into history, and replaced by our triviality today, I guess. Even Fate has gone crazy today, I find.
“With folded arms, and her fingers on her thin pointed elbows, she immediately fixed her eyes on Henry Russel.”
Maria thus has elbows as well as wrists. But later she touches his elbow!
“She looked secretively at her wrist-watch. Henry wondered what the importance of time could be. He learned what the importance of time was when, on his way down the avenue to the bus, he found Maria between two chestnut trees. She slanted up to him and put her hand on the inside of his elbow.”
Fate as the meeting of elbows.
“…she seemed to be crouched up inside herself.”
“Maria has no experience, none whatever; she hopes to meet heroes – she meets none. So now she hopes to find heroes across the sea. Why, Henry, she might make a hero of you.”
“The tug her rubbing gave to the cloth shook a petal from a Chinese peony in the centre bowl on to a plate of cucumber sandwiches. This little bit of destruction was watched by the older people with fascination, with a kind of appeasement, as though it were a guarantee against something worse.”
So much detail within details as well as petals, you need to absorb every particle of this story. And someone said this Sunday afternoon that the war around them would have no literature! Think again!
“So much so, that Henry felt the ruthlessness of her disregard for the past, even the past of a few minutes ago.”
“…the grace of the thing done over again. He thought, with nothing left but our brute courage, we shall be nothing but brutes.”
But then Maria suddenly becomes Miranda, as, by projection, she enters the stage of a world’s tempest if not temple of time… where she will become as nothing to those she leaves behind in Dublin. And nothing to us when we finish this story, whatever the memories invoked by a cake. The stuff dreams are made on. With thin elbows, growing even pointier, even thinner, till attenuating to nothing?
“‘Miranda. This is the end of you. Perhaps it is just as well.’
‘I’ll be seeing you –’
‘You’ll come round my door in London – with your little new number chained to your wrist.’”
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My detailed reviews of all Elizabeth Bowen’s stories and novels:
HOW TO WRITE A SHORT STORY: Sean O’Faolain
“But the in between? What went on in the poor devil in between?”
The story of Morgan, short story writer, “He was going to out-Maupassant Maupassant.” Now visited en passant by a story with too many sequels, defying the artistic Unities, an older man called Frank remembering when he was called Rosy, the most beautiful boy in the school, grubbily seduced at 12 years old by the 18 year old School Captain called Bruiser, amid a series of billets-doux and a final farewell letter (‘sent with the blancmange and the cherry’) that later got destroyed (“tore it into bits unread and flushed it down the W.C.” ) as Bruiser was destroyed by the war, and Frank eventually finds a woman at least for a nonce, one who helped breast-feed his hunger, and Morgan is trying to massage all this into a gestalt, the story of stories. But he ends up with a poem about a seashell! And when factored into L.P Hartley’s W.S. (HERE) an hour or so ago this reveals a vital coincidence that literature as an idyll has ever embodied in-between its parts, being another story that also mentioned W. S. Maugham and more, and we learn one lesson ….
“For me there is only one fountain of truth, one beauty, one perfection. Art, Frank! Art! and bugger la vie!”
My previous reviews of Sean O’Faolain, two stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/09/penguin-modern-stories/
A FAMILY MAN by V.S. Pritchett
“Among families she felt herself to be strange and necessary – a necessary secret. When William had said his wife was beautiful, she felt so beautiful herself that her bones seemed to turn to water.”
I am glad that i missed seeing the rather childish sexual hints in, inter alia, flute and blow, as this otherwise sad serious story would have been spoilt, a story about a woman called Berenice being visited out of the blue by William’s wife who is rather ungainly to say the least, making William’s mistress Berenice feel less beautiful. And there is a bitter humour when both women find out, by talking, that William had been philandering elsewhere and Berenice had been mending his flute only for to him to play it to another woman, a shadowy third…
Time for Berenice to swallow hard and regroup, I guess.
My previous reviews of VSP: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/essential-stories-v-s-pritchett/ and https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/v-s-pritchett-the-camberwell-beauty/ and https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1377-2/#comment-2571
GIMPEL THE FOOL: Isaac Bashevis Singer
“Gimpel, the czar is coming to Frampol; Gimpel, the moon fell down in Turbeen; Gimpel, little Hodel Furpiece found a treasure behind the bathhouse.” And I like a golem believed everyone. In the first place, everything is possible, as it is written in The Wisdom of the Fathers,…”
‘They’re set on making me their butt.’, and ‘The schoolboys threw burrs,…’, and Gimpel is indeed duped and made to look small in front of the whole place, until he is married to a woman who lay with other men and Gimpel’s cherished children are all bastards, not his at all, and he never has his own way with her. Even the Rabbi’s strictures are variable, and Gimpel sort of forgives her by saying “women are often long on hair and short on sense,…”, but he is ever haunted by the shadowy-third he often sees beside her in bed, and after leaving her, he dashes back to her as his wife and to ‘his’ beloved children: “I hurried onward, and before me darted a long shadow.” Even with a ghost story frisson about summoning evil spirits: “Then I felt like whistling, but I remembered that you don’t whistle at night because it brings the demons out.”
He has a vision of his wife, after her death, blackened and warning him —but later that vision of her changes for the better, it seems.
And he is indeed visited by the so-called ‘spirit of evil’ that I took to be something quite different to what Gimpel and maybe the author thought it was, a spirit who says to him – “The whole world deceives you […] and you ought to deceive the world in your turn.” It teaches us indeed, as a symbol for our own times, that existence is naturally ever a ‘thick mire’, and, then, ironically Gimpel’s own wisdom teaches us a lot about how to face this existence on earth and about its lies giving birth to further lies, a thick mire of them as to how it always is when you’re here baking or blackening your bread and later how to face the new better always of death…
“I heard a great deal, many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn’t happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference can it make? Often I heard tales of which I said, ‘Now this is a thing that cannot happen.’ But before a year had elapsed I heard that it actually had come to pass somewhere.”
“When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception.”
If only we could all be as simple as Gimpel!
My previous review of IBS: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/the-penguin-book-of-the-modern-american-short-story/#comment-24874
GUESTS OF THE NATION: Frank O’Connor
I instinctively knew what was happening here to the English soldiers being held prisoner by the IRA, playing cards with their gradually characterised captors, and having comradely arguments with them about religion, about life, the universe, everything, taking place in the collusively landscaped bogs and these English were later shot in execution by these Irish ‘comrades’ because the English elsewhere had by now shot dead some Irish prisoners. Death as a poignant stoicism, collapsing in dead words from between the beauty of words.
THE RED SHOES: Hans Christian Andersen
This famous story of a girl called Karen (meaning ‘pure’) and the red dancing shoes she can’t take off short of chopping off the feet in them …
The story’s officious guardian angel with wings from shoulders down to feet and the happy ending in Heaven are based on the author’s middle name. A purity of no-body, as the eventual end result. Any ‘church portraits’ as memorabilia, notwithstanding, I guess.
“She danced over an unfenced graveyard, but the dead did not join her dance. They had better things to do.”
LOVE: William Maxwell
“If she kept us after school it was not to scold us but to help us past the hard part.”
A brief apotheosis of this book’s earlier “Fall of the Idol”, it being also about a schooldays crush on a teacher, but here the beautiful kind-hearted young female teacher’s fall is by a disease, perhaps one from sniffing sweet peas given to her by the children? I guess not as my research shows no linkage, but I wonder about a past summer’s now old circus poster on a barn and, later, her gravestone as seen through the eyes of this work’s own Just William. And the lady who tended her in the last days of the illness and now tends this grave lovingly as witnessed by the boy… I perhaps need to be held back in class to get me past the hard parts.
Just William in ‘Fall of the Idol’ by Richmal Crompton as well William Maxwell?
Front page version of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/03/love-william-maxwell/
PETRIFIED MAN: Eudora Welty
“Ever’body in New Orleans believes ever’thing spooky.”
A hairdressing salon, and interactions of womanly chat, and a little boy under the sink eating stale peanuts, and the connections between, who lives with whom, and what they are destined to become or give birth to…
“Mrs. Pike!” Mrs. Fletcher could only sputter and let curling fluid roll into her ear. “How could Mrs. Pike possibly know I was pregnant or otherwise, when she doesn’t even know me? The nerve of some people!”
The unique message I got from this miracle-working of words, is that none of us are safe. Best to immerse yourself in this skein of connections. Know thy enemy…
From stone to flesh, to freak show fortune tellers, and the eponymous Mr Petrie gradually turning to stone who may be a previous rapist on the run, a panoply as growths of gossip, perfumed cigarettes and getting a set and perm on the point of maternal delivery! Words set in stone, as a stay to death’s loosening hair?
“Well, honey, they got these two twins in a bottle, see? Born joined plumb together – “
THE SWIMMER: John Cheever
“He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.”
This is the justifiably famous story where a man does not yet know he is on his life’s last legs as, whether drunk or not, he attempts to swim the county upon a ‘river’ named after his wife, from garden swimming-pool to garden swimming-pool of his erstwhile neighbours, them often holding pool parties, a rite of passage that is like the absurd struggles of life itself towards the emptiness of death? Never to realise that life itself had been even emptier than death, I guess. Even fame, if one attains it by, say, writing great stories, is eventually empty. Eventually empty, whatever the achievements of privileged pedigree with its own struggles and hurdles, too, I guess, after yesterday.
I reviewed the next story a month or two ago here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/elizabeth-taylor-stories-2/#comment-1722 as part of my reviewing all Elizabeth Taylor’s stories…. as follows….
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THE BLUSH by Elizabeth Taylor
“…glancing at the clocks in one room after another, listening for her husband’s car – the sound she knew so well because she had awaited it for such a large part of her married life…”
Zeno Paradox time again? Ironic in hindsight that waiting, bearing in mind whom I inferred to be in that car with him! Don’t ask! – especially if you don’t want a plot spoiler!
The story of Mrs Allen’s relationship with her homehelp Mrs Lacey, who’d lost her figure compared to Mrs Allen, that makes it seem even more ironic! Mrs A who’d regretted having never expected nor had a child, and Mrs L with several children, and even at her age today, expecting again!
“I’ve got my own set,’ Mrs Lacey said airily. ‘After all, he’s nearly twenty years older than me.”
Mrs A, thinking of Mr A…
“Her relationship with Mrs Lacey and the intimacy of their conversations in the kitchen he would not have approved, and the sight of those calloused feet with their chipped nail-varnish and yellowing heels would have sickened him.”
…bow-legs and inflamed eyelids and pickled walnuts…
Mrs A drenched, then Mr Lacey arrives to talk to her out of the blue, about Mrs L’s indisposition and his hinted plot spoiler …
“Twenty years older than his wife – or so his wife had said – he really, to Mrs Allen, looked quite ageless, a crooked, bow-legged little man who might have been a jockey once.”
…jockey! Makes the Horse and Jockey pub even more ironic, where Mrs L had her set and left her kids to look at her from outside!
‘It’s too much to expect.’
Ends poignantly with Mrs A’s suddenly mirrored blush meaning more than what it means!
IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES: Delmore Schwartz
“An occasional carriage passes, the horse’s hooves falling like stones in the quiet afternoon, and once in a while an automobile, looking like an enormous upholstered sofa, puffs and passes.”
A man waking up on his 21st birthday has been dreaming of being in a picture house, with accompanying organ, watching a film in 1909, and seeing his parents’ courtship with evocative scenes of the time and place, including merry go round and waltz and perhaps an alternate world scene of a fortune teller, which is true, which is not, but he tries to influence the film by shouting at it, as he knows the marriage ended badly.
Two important impossibilities — one that shouting at the screen (sufficient to get him thrown out by the usher) would never work at all in affecting the plot’s continuity on the screen already filmed, one scene already shown being the photo of them being taken with a squeeze of a bulb, but of course the second impossibility makes the first one paradoxically possible because, I infer, he would never have been born at all if his shouting had worked! Never been born in order to be at the picture house at all. Unless he was already conceived, pre-marriage, some one shouts at me! But it was all a dream, in any event, so why waste my time shouting back at this story, urging it to get real?
RASPBERRY JAM: Angus Wilson
“His imagination was taken by anything odd – strange faces, strange names, strange animals, strange voices and catchphrases – all these appeared in his games.”
This is a masterpiece of the grotesque, but also a sad corruption of small boy’s imagination. Or does imagination corrupt itself?
A horror story, an absurdism that also seems true. I, too, as a small boy in the 1950s, had lonely imaginative games, and created different worlds with my toys, and Johnnie, here, metamorphises, say, his farm animal toys into people within stories and dramas…
In the posh society where his family featured, he had two characterful ‘old maids’ as special friends, one, despite her age and faded looks, was still after the men, both ladies being so-called do-gooders in society, but stubborn in their ways, and I think these two were not Johnnie’s imaginary friends like the farm animals, but real ladies, as we are told that his often absent father disapproved of them, what with their dressing-up games with Johnnie, and the danger, as his father saw it, of Johnnie becoming a ‘cissie’.
In hindsight, perhaps his father was right. Or was he imaginary? Well, he is created by this fiction, after all. Hmmm.
The two ladies are unbelievably believable, the witty prose language wondrous about them, and their eccentricities rife, but descending into the most grotesquely mad behaviour after imbibing, and I dare not divulge the climax of Johnnie’s relationship with them, because you would fail to be as shocked as I was, if I did divulge it. A gratuitous fable with no moral. A conte cruel.
THE LAST MOHICAN: Bernard Malamud
A story that is full. Too full to handle. A Jewish student come to Rome to write the unique work on Giotto, if not to see a painting by him never seen before, dependant on his sister for money, and he has an epiphany or this book’s GLIMPSE OF TRUTH when he sees himself outside himself, and another Jew looking similar to himself, all about the Jewish plight in Europe just after the war, and this Jew stalks him, pesters him, first for his warm suit, for his loose change money, bereft, this second Jew, wanting investment to sell ladies’ stockings, but, after he eventually vanishes, the Jewish student maniacally seeks him for the missing Giotto chapter that I have not yet told you about; the second Jew ends up being found selling holy beads or rosaries outside St. Peter’s. You see, the second Jew had stolen the first one’s valuable first chapter on Giotto, and in those days there was no icloud! Obsessed with this chapter, do they become one in the end, do we all become one whatever the religion or no-religion, O Giotto, we become you! The perfect circle? The Last Jew? Except his alter-ego half had burnt the pages of the chapter. And so we still seek, even today, Giotto’s perfect circle, that yet unclaimed key to human heaven’s clouds.
PARSON’S PLEASURE: Roald Dahl
“Mr Boggis was driving the car slowly, leaning back comfortably in the seat with one elbow resting on the sill of the open window.”
That is the opening sentence, the first elbow trigger as such I’ve found, and, what is more, there follows a wonderful story of O. Henry con-trickery, and a story the end of which set me laughing literally aloud, and that rarely happens! The story of Boggis masquerading as a parson who, on paper, triangulates cross-sections of countrified landscape to include the target farmhouses and other country houses where he can ply a cheating trade in antique furniture, buying cheaply from the farming community and selling dear to the London trade. Farmers are easy bait it seems, and amazingly read by chance a story of such rural sports by O. Henry a couple of days ago (reviewed here), and that made me think if the internet was in place at the time, Boggis would never have been able to play such tricks. And his shenanigans here with a trio of hard-bitten farmers regarding a Chippendale Commode I dare not detail here for fear of severe spoilers worse than those farmers themselves!
THE RED-HAIRED GIRL: Penelope Fitzgerald
“…concentrating always on not spilling anything, without knocking the back of the chair and the door itself, first with her elbows, then with her rump.”
Impossible to summarise the fascinatingly meaningful tantalisation of minutiae in this story of a group of art students with English or French names, including the only French speaker called Hackett, who choose, in the nineteenth century, to have their en plein air painting project at a downbeaten fishing town. With a sense of tedium, this town, and a sense, too, of human bodies dredged from the sea like the fish. Black porridge, and Hackett, employing the eponymous serving girl as model for outside painting, has the only hotel room, and then their master tutor comes from Paris to check up on their work. This story lives by what is missing in it, as does Hackett’s painting of the girl. This review of it has much missing, too — severely so! But I managed to borrow from thin, if not plein, air a scarlet shawl, if only to drape, within my reading mind, where it should have gone in the story.
Cross referenced with Leopard-Spotted Scarf here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/dark-arts-by-eric-stener-carlson/#comment-25531
THE LOTTERY: Shirley Jackson
This is the famous gratuitously cruel Tontine of a story involving a village of 300 souls, children and adults, with collected stones and bits of folded paper in a worn out black box that some say was partly built out of its predecessor box. The unfairness of choice and the eventual ‘prize’ plainly and gratuitously told with skilfully decorative evocations of place and people. The process of literature as one’s ongoing life itself and the duly allotted death of each reader while reading a book partly made from a predecessor book. That glimpse of truth. Words as stones or stories.
Cross-referenced with CORRIDOR here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/dark-arts-by-eric-stener-carlson/#comment-25541
This review continues here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26965-2/