My reviews of THE TRAVELLING GRAVE AND OTHER STORIES: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/the-travelling-grave-and-other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/
And THE TWO VAYNES and a few other stories: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2022/08/15/the-two-vaynes-by-l-p-hartley/
Any further reviews will be in comment stream below…
THE CROSSWAYS
“Michael still carried a scar from a gash that a bear had given him; it ran all the way from his elbow to his shoulder, making a bluish groove in his skin which you could feel with your finger. When he wanted to impress on them the danger of going too far into the forest he would show them the scar. Olga used to try not to look at it but Peter said he would like to have one like it.”
Michael, stern and sometimes bad-tempered, lived with his wife Lucindra or ‘Cindra’, foreign and sometimes she uses a language her two children Peter and Olga do not understand. They live in or near a forest but he says they should not go deeper into the forest to where they could not see the light at its edge. Until a pedlar arrives when Michael is not there with shiny and sharp objects to buy and his telling of the crossways in the middle of the forest signposted to the land of heart’s desire. The outcome takes us past a bear who stands up when it sees us but believes our story and goes off, back on all fours
Our circular route home, unless our foot is injured like Cindra’s and there is nobody there to carry us? Michael’s cross ways transcended?
THE SHADOW ON THE WALL by L.P. Hartley
“It might have been someone she knew, but who can recognise a shadow?”
A decidedly strange story, so strange, it outdoes Aickman, and is far more frightening than it seems at outset, indeed genuinely frightening in spite – or because – of the intrinsic absurdisms, as we follow Mildred Fanshawe, “a bachelor woman” and interior decorator to a stay-over-night house party, a house she had done some work in for a widow called Joanna. A house like a hollow E, whatever that means! Mildred, being famous for her neuroses, she is for some reason put into a room next to a single gentleman who makes the party into an 8. Mildred thus under his protection as it were in a separate wing of the E from the other guests, a wing with two rooms each with doors to the corridor and a shared lockable partition door. There is so much here of an oblique fish-gaping nature, and the more mundane muddy boots outside in the corridor, and snake-like blood coils, and that shadow on the wall while Mildred sits in the bath, and involving reconnaissances between rooms with or without a torch, and was there one man in the bed next door, or two? — and other disarming or disconcerting strangenesses galore, and I cannot really do justice to the tantalisingly inexplicable scare-power of this story as a whole.
Sorry, muddy suede shoes, not boots! And so much more I should have picked out from this story’s hollow excrescences.
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TWO FOR THE RIVER
“Now time for some real work. Or so I promised myself, and rested my elbows on the iron table,…”
This marking the trigger for two visitors to the writer-narrator’s riverside house (with chokingly evoked water plants and a threatening swan when he goes out in his boat), and weirdly I read an Elizabeth Taylor story with its river even more spread out and, in the Taylor, along with the swan and, later, two strangers, the river enters literally INTO a house, a story read and reviewed only a few hours ago HERE. This I find to be one of those astounding coincidences of mutual synergy that often seem to happen when in the gestalt real-time reviewing mode!
The writer seems destined to sell his house to this white-clad couple who unexpectedly arrive in their boat, as if by some pervasive destiny, and, the writer, being old, like me, is relishing processes of thought as being more valuable than objects of possession. Hence his sudden wish to sell his house along with his possessions. Much business with swans and the couple becoming at first desirous of buying the house and later not so, when attacked by the swan in their boat, whiteness becoming a grey transparency, an insidious quality after the house holds a conversation with the writer. These words, though, are still his possessions, I guess, and they will ever include the house that they described. But who knows how it was really meant to end. An ending triggered by his ‘elbows’ explicitly now ‘let slid along the table’—
“—the darkness pressed down on my eyes and took me into it.”
THE FACE by L.P. Hartley
“…the problem of Doris and Edward, digging straight lines from me to them, making an angle which, when I came into it, assumed the dignity and completeness of a triangle.”
…and that’s the best thing in this throwaway story, about a self-conscious ‘shadowy-third’ narrator. Otherwise, a story that is ‘krazie’, featuring a cafe with that name! A man called Edward who ever doodles a complex and OCDly precise face of a woman whom he wants to marry, and those friends who wish to help him, including the narrator who finally triangulates Edward with a mishmash of whores and twin sisters…. Don’t go there!
Cross-referenced with Hartley’s FACIAL JUSTICE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/10915/
THE CORNER CUPBOARD
“Death could breathe out without ever breathing in.”
This is a very very very very strange story. You feel as if you, too, become mentally woven into its red carpet. About a gentleman called Philip who has many medicines, moves to one of the many large houses in this country called ‘Old Rectory’ and this happens during the Second World War, and the house is too large for him, and he employs a household servant called Mrs Weaver, and just this very second while writing this, I noted her connection by name to the carpet, while I didn’t do so when reading the story itself! She is haunted, it seems, by her late husband who died during the First World War, and I inferred that she nursed him through a form of insanity caused by shell shock, and he played with his toy soldiers to the very end. And Mrs W’s own phobia of tortoiseshell notwithstanding, with, say, a tortoiseshell clock thus placed in the eponymous cupboard (just noticed just this second the apt pairing there of tortoise and clock!) — Philip sees his medicine bottles seem to be meticulously and oddly regimented within the same cupboard, with cottonwool body-shapes as if ripe for voodoo, but we also sense this is a modern art installation (“odd, surrealist effects”) that matches his own methodical mystique with objects, small things as well as big as the aforementioned carpet. Who is madder here, I wondered — Mrs W or her master with whom she falls in love? And which of them a go-between? And she nags him to allow her to rub his body all over with lineament from the cupboard when he has ague. Don’t go there! (Oh, I must not forget to mention the gassing and, yes, the meat skewer, for fear of this story’s own voodoo curse upon anyone who deliberately forgets meticulously to mention such things when reviewing it!)
“Dost thou hear the blood drip, Dashka?”
THE PYLON
“dreams go by contraries”
A very disturbing story, whatever one’s mien. But not healthily disturbing like normal scary horror stories were before this one was written. Black static not white, I sensed. An artificial story in a positive way as well as negative, ironically structured by Mother Nature, as well as electrically by giant live Meccano, a story about a boy called Laurie, and his complexes arguably about his puberty (Freud and Oedipus are specifically mentioned) and his dreams regarding the pylon situated close outside the house where his family lives. Taken down and now being rebuilt even bigger. At first a symbol of his purpose in life, later his greatest fear with nightmares about climbing the Oedipyl. Indeed, despite ‘pylon’ also being a massive opening or gateway to a temple, Laurie sometimes sleeps with his Dad (a man perhaps purposely named Roger?), ostensibly to make Laurie feel more secure when he wakes up from such nightmares…. one day he wakes up and sees…
“Standing in front of the low casement window, Roger’s tall figure blotted out the daylight. The outline of his arms down to his elbows, his shield-shaped back and straddled legs showed through the thin stuff of his pyjamas;…”
Pingback: Two rare L.P. Hartley stories… | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
NOUGHTS AND CROSSES
“More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows.”
A silly story of cross-purposes and coincidences, as Fred Cross has lost his dinner date diary and the names of whom he had invited, thinking they wanted to publish his long unpublished work on Jacobean Dramatists. Leading into a world of dangerous gangsters. Don’t go there!
“Their conversation, like an iceberg, trailed unmeasured depths beneath it.”
THE PAMPAS CLUMP
“Who can tell where it ends and you begin?”
A tale of an obsessive phobia, the nature of the eponymous clump, its feel of all ages in its striated colours, and its transparency at a distance and impenetrability when nearer, or is it vice versa in this story? Its overt softness made of razor-sharp leaves. And Thomas (who owns the house and its clump) and Fergus, his friend, entertain Julia and Hilary, the former a widow who has shed her now dead husband and thus regained her own character if still permeated with his! — and her new (Sapphic?) friend Hilary whom Thomas perhaps fancies, subject to the obsession that someone hides behind the clump, and they hold a sort of professional experiment or game that I cannot cover fully here … a bit of the Two Vaynes and the Travelling Grave, and who is it immolates himself on the clump? And because of what unrequited love? It was Fergus, though, I believe who loved himself! — and of all the many clocks in Thomas’s house, the one Fergus loves is the one that lags!
The story reveals everything and nothing, meantime. Impenetrable and transparent in one fell swoop, indeed.
PER FAR L’AMORE
“He felt as though his skin didn’t quite fit him, it was loose in some places and tight in others; and much as, in one way, he welcomed every breath that blew, another part of his sensorium shrank from it.”
An eventually most haunting story of Venice, making us sense its heatwave and plagues of mosquitoes that affected the English man staying there with his wife and daughter, and the social gathering he wanted to avoid because of the above quoted condition, but his wife is persuaded by the hostess to come and his 20 twenty year old daughter, too, whom he saw plagued with — although for her it was ‘played with’ — men like mosquitoes all called Nino or Luigi or something! The hostess of the party promised them she had a secret ploy against mosquitoes, and it turned out to be an ‘encampment’ of tented mosquito nets within one large gallery, tents with variable transparency or thickness, dependent on their purpose, whether a game of bridge or the making of love, or just conversation, even a couple for single misanthropes! Eventually dark and indistinguishable shapes within…
A story of waiting gondoliers and other unclear machinations, leading to tragic and Aickman-premonitory results, things which would be a spoiler to divulge. And there’s a final unforgettable view of the mosquito ‘encampment’ wherein I seemed to misread ‘muslin’ as ‘muslim’…
“Unwillingly he re-entered its precincts. How alien it was. Like something conjured up by an enchanter — purposeless, yet with a potent personality of its own, and not a pleasant one: a personality that recalled the lawless deeds of desert warfare. He was careful not to brush against the muslin fabrics. Each tent had its flap ajar — all birds had flown. But, no, one tent was shut.”