Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
I am sorry if that’s a plot spoiler for this vignette’s ending. Early Seventies in Belfast, and the narrator — driving at a roundabout with his wife beside him, and kids in the back — rescues a man from the violence of the UDA, not a Fenian man but a Presbyterian? Why do my eyes glaze over? I should know more than I do. I was an agnostic adult in the early Seventies watching the news from where I lived in England, but a story is a story and needs to be told, even if nobody now understands it. History is like being on a roundabout?
“In one dream I’m in school and nobody in the class knows what ‘onomatopoeia’ is except me. But I can’t put my hand up. I’m paralysed. Another dream is of me snoring. And jerking awake to stop me snoring.”
This is a classic story. Is it already a classic story I happen not to have encountered before, i.e. a work that has already been deemed by others to be a classic? I shall check after I have written this review of it. A story about a skinny, precociously smart 11 year old boy and his experiences within sofas as a so-called righteous means of Catholics burgling Protestants. His pissing and sleeping arrangements within the sofa are larger than life, but wildly believable, as are his father and uncle who are part of the gang selling furniture then burgling the house where it is delivered, the boy in the middle of the night cutting himself out of the sofa and letting them in! There is so much more to take in about these laterally thought-out manoeuvres, particularly the manoeuvre here in question in what can only be deemed an unforgettable Swiftian masterpiece.
“It’s that soap with the wee label that never goes away. Imperial Leather. The last thing to go is the wee label. How do they make it do that?”
“When they had a boiled egg at home their mother spooned it from the shell into a cup and mashed the bits up with some butter so that the yellow and the white mixed evenly.”
Not forgetting the elastic band in the white? And what we infer might have happened to the boys’ parents….This is the story of two brothers, around 10 and 12, who seem to be staying with their parents’ posh social friends, the lady a gaily, smartly dressed one who refers to the time as quarter to lemon, and her husband a Catholic doctor, I infer, who likes Agatha Crispy stories as well as medical books in his library, one of the latter containing a “person with a blackened hairy tongue thrust out. A bare woman with droopy chests covered in spots. Then babies stuck together…” – and one brother is hated by the other for his bodily noises, and they share a game of archery with the hosts in the garden, and when the latter leave the garden, one boy points his bow and arrow at the other… But the crucial scene is where one boy in his pyjamas dances with the lady on the bespoke sprung dance floor…the “gorgeous clothes” and rhapsodic religion of dance to the sound of showtime standards. Dancing outside the ‘iron lung.’ And we gradually realise why the boys are staying here. I felt as if I had been immersed in some aura of perfumed cigarettes and banana flaws of innuedo. Moments that I shall cherish…
“The doctor’s wife took a seat on a stool and leaned her elbows on the table staring at her guests. She looked long and hard at them then smiled. ‘I would just love two boys like you,’ she said. There was a sound of crunching toast and chewing.“ The boy’s slow motion football… ‘Like you’re in syrup when you head the balloon – it’s slow motion – like in the pictures.’ “…the radiogram was up and a record was revolving slowly – clicking in the overrun.” Not forgetting the childish talking in code that the husband and wife had learnt from the boy’s parents. “‘We speak it even though we don’t have any children,’ said the doctor’s wife.” The once sprung archery bows and bent arms now forgotten…
“The doctor said grace and they all bowed their heads after the doctor’s wife bowed hers.”
“If there was one thing worse than worrying, it was wasted worrying.”
This incredibly observant story means a helluva lot to me. Empathy apotheosised. My visit to hospital clinics in recent years, observing the other patients, and interacting with those nurses and doctors who attend me as an oldish man during tests and results, and my reading literature in between as a waiting-room dewaiter! Here in this story it was Chekhov, recently mine has been MacLaverty, a godsend…. I must “degrump”!
Please excuse me quoting this whole crucial passage…
“He was struck yet again by the power of the word. Here he was – about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head. Not only that, but he can share sensations and emotions with this student character, created by a real man he never met and translated by a real woman he never met. It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present.”
“It was a Sunday and felt like a Sunday. ‘Family Favourites’ was on the wireless.”
I know that particular memory. But this kaleidoscope of memories of Fifties Belfast is over my head, like the lofted football of its plot. Extended family stretching across the terraced street, with characters galore, a priestly Father, a famous footballer as guest, memories of a certain sectarian football game and its printed programme, now a valued item much later as we look back. And the father who was his nibs, then sketcher of those playing, and there is one great line in this story that sums me up as I try to force my way through the roof of this story’s house…
‘You’re no good if you can’t make something out of a blot.’
Lead water pipes did me in, too!
“Granda was now leaning forward with his elbows on the table. ‘There wouldn’t be a foul from start to finish.’ ‘Where’d be the fun in that?’ said Father Barney.”
“‘You’ll not lay a finger on me,’ said Ellie, laughing. She bunched her fists and held her elbows tightly in to her waist.”
This is a poignant story, poignant literally, sniggerable, too, perhaps, as two sisters dress and clean the dead body of their 20 year old niece Ellie, died from UTI, I infer, unless I misremember something. The older sister, with hung gold cross vertical on a chain to stop abrading the chin, stricter than the other sister, and such strictures extended to not only the spitting upon an iron to see how hot it is but also inserting a hot poker into a goffering iron for smoother lace to be put on the body, and, later, a pointed intimacy with the corpse to absolve the message given by a gold ring they found around Ellie’s neck. “Why would anyone want to wear the likes of that? Instead of on your finger.” There’d been no such poker for Ellie, thank God, judging by the auntopsy! (My word, not the story’s). Ellie died before she fulfilled her love with a man who that aunt considered to be unworthy, one of three lodgers in their house — as we see in extended flashback — a love affair as a single kiss after he eased a skelf from Ellie’s finger with a needle! Any ‘brothel sprouts’, notwithstanding!
“And if it isn’t foulness and filth they’re after, it’s a round-about way to lead up to foulness and filth.”
She is being assessed for dementia, a Joycean monologue, her son now come from England to say to her that she shares in the decision, as she tells us, of where she goes now, a northerner being in Dublin because of her husband who died forty plus years ago. Possibly the greatest self-expression in literature of encroaching dementia — I should know! — within a narrator’s account of it, if all her memories and tragedies like losing another son and much else are to be believed. And her accidentally burning a shrine at home with candles, her home to which she yearns to return instead of being put away in a different home…
“All four of them. They each had something different to say. The stones took on a life of their own – like Plath’s mushrooms. Strong, elbowing forward, butting for attention. Our story must be told.”
Arguably, this author’s most powerful story. I find it hard to imagine that those stories by him I have not yet read can be more powerful than this. A novelette, in fact, a tale of painting and an island and pesky invasive ticks and rape and old fashioned photographic Polaroids. A gallery’s art installation of notes for this story and expressive images by the artist, the victim woman, now an artist with a gallery exhibition, who was raped when she was younger on a Scottish island while she was painting — a callow painter, now one who has exorcised that rape in more ways than one, artistically and actually by taking advantage of the fact that boys and men on that island were never taught to swim because if their fishing boat goes down, it was somehow better that way. And the doctor and his wife on the island whom she sought thereafter… Too much to cram into this review. I simply re-visualise its suspenseful nature, its cinematic qualities, and the ability for art like literature and painting to put ourselves into the head of the rapist who cussed ‘fuck and cunt’ — till we also re-visualise this woman, his victim, with whom we are meant to empathise. But who knows the truth of all the repercussions we are shown? The presumed victim’s real-time, contemporaneous notes (e.g.”How to incorporate the ghosts without actually showing them?”) as part of the Art itself, as I always hope my gestalt real-time reviewing can also achieve by mutual synergy of collusion. Making the ultimate truth, or the ultimate lie. This is a work with literally several significant elbow moments. Check them out. I won’t quote them here. And the flashing in the eye of a reflected sun by knife or square mirror, always a circular light to blind us.
“He spun through the pages with his thumb. It was blank except for the beginning pages.”
An aunt called Nora helping her niece by taking out two small grand nephews, and we are also told about her unrequited love with someone who said ‘Adieu’ when going as a soldier to the Great War, now, as a spinster, she is checking routes in a gallery to ensure the boys do not see any unruly art.
“Porridge stuck to you – it set you up for the day.”
“It had been years since she had travelled upstairs on a bus.”
‘There’s no use hurrying if you don’t know the times of the trains.’ That’s what she was once told by her eternal sweetheart who went off to war.
She once treasured ‘The Encyclopaedia of Primary Teaching.’ ‘The air was full of small mechanical sounds, tickings and scrapings.’
We, too, are imbued with her ‘dwam’, as she shows them, in the museum, a Mummy with blatant blackened substances and a split nosebone, a life as death.
“The soul leaves the body and tiptoes to the doorway. Then turns and goes back to kiss the body that has sheltered it all these years.”
There is no way to convey this story. And its ending. With mere snippets. There were so many other snippets that chose not to be quoted by me. They said you have to read all of this story, or none of it. Too late, I countered!
“How futile all this was. How was anyone to deduce his life from such fragments?”
Indeed, but the story deduced itself, this time, without my help. A Scottish poet as professor in a Iowa university who gets lost in the typical winter storm of the mid West — lost in the quadrangle! “No, I’m not being raped – I’m just lost. Yes, somewhere in the middle of the fucking campus.” Lost despite the single flagpole. Trying to find a bus to get home. His desired loved one Lorna now estranged in Scotland. Evocative conveyance of life’s Blind’s Man’s Buff, if not bus! He and Lorna back home once watched The Dolls House together, another Nora to go with the one in the previous story above? Until another flagpole as coordination — a tall Indian cleaning lady from the University building — carries a telephone message to him from Lorna… to get his bearings, somehow making me remember again what his mother once said…
28 thoughts on “Women’s Weird: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937”
Twin-Identity by Edith Stewart Drewry (1891)
I could not make head nor tail of this story’s plot. A story no doubt remarkable in eliciting such a response from the likes of me!
Strangely in the light of the wording I happened to use yesterday above, the next story below, just now read, contains these words …. “They could not make head or tail of the context for some time, and then Mr Maxwell discovered that a leaf had been cut out.”
The Blue Room by Lettice Galbraith (1897)
“Something occurred then of which, since it has nothing to do with this story, I need only say that it wiped out for ever any idea of marriage on my part,…”
Yet this young lady as narrator becomes by the end of the story an old woman called Mrs Marris, or am I confused? As much as she is confused by the word ‘incubate’ and ‘incubus’ in the different connections with poultry farming and witchcraft! That makes this otherwise effective but standard tale of haunted-room-for-guest-overflow bedroom-with-a-backstory in a large house intriguing and even more creepy! Not forgetting the lethal crease left by a body in bedcovers….”testing the ghost-theory” of Sprenger?
The poultry farming trope is echoed in the next story below… A Green Bowl for the Blue Room?
FYI Johnny Mains’ anthologies of stories akin to Women’s Weird as reviewed by me in the past, as follows….
“The voice of poultry usually means not only a hen-coop but a barn and a house,…”, but here means a gradual, delightfully inconclusive narrative incubation of thr open-ended mystery of…
The Green Bowl by Sarah Orne Jewett (1901)
“We were on our way home, as safe as dolls in a nursery when we had our little adventure and got the green bowl.”
The ‘adventures’ of a lady and her young ‘companion’ lady with horse and carriage, this one she tells within the frame story to other ladies, an adventure, lost under ‘drowning rain’ and hearing that voice of poultry, but at last seeing a church steeple, that later she unaccountably calls a spire! And manifold horse sheds outside a church wherein which church they find basic shelter till found in the morning by a local woman who gives them the heavenly apotheosis of an idyllic breakfast and the story of her two green bowls, one she gives to our narrator as ‘companion’ reciprocalist of their fore-telling powers. A strong suspenseful tale that needs iconising. A narrator who at one point says, “The only trouble was that there was so little of me.” And you will never forget the description of the green bowl as looked at by the listening ladies within the frame story. But such a claim of never forgetting depends on my own fore-telling skills, or will only time tell? —
“…and when we had been in the house an hour one felt as if it had been a week…”
“The old pony plodded up yet another hill; we went clattering down its deep descent; and there, in the green bowl of a meadow sloping down from its woody fringes above, lay scattered the bellying booths, the gaudy wagons and cages of the circus. All but hidden in the trees above them, a crooked, tarnished weathercock glinted in the sunset afterglow.“ (my italics) — from MEMOIRS OF A MIDGET by Walter de La Mare (my review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/memoirs-of-a-midget-by-walter-de-la-mare/)
The weathercock and the circus, and compare the ladies’ horse in ‘The Green Bowl’ “The horse was whinnying after us like a whole circus,…” And the storyteller’s own ‘midget’ statement: “The only trouble was that there was so little of me.”
I have now since read the little bit on-line about the above story and I see it has been interpreted as a ‘Lesbian’ story. I can empathise with that interpretation and factored it in. WDLM’s Midget lady also had such Sapphic yearnings as a major part of his novel.
Another of those stories where someone struggles homeward after many years and finds their loved one, here a mother, either dead or dreaming — a near-sighted woman in the dark just off the train, her advanced letter of arrival seemingly ignored, and finding herself in the erstwhile homelands that a thunderstorm has now turned into a foreign territory of swollen river with its wild accoutrements acting as both godly help and fell hindrance to her passage homeward… Yes, another story with such a pattern of a plot, but perhaps the most effective of them all, as we gradually gain a picture of the backstory, of mother-daughter bonds, and, with overflowing tank undiverted, who is dreaming whom? Or is it Death dreaming up us all?
The Hall Bedroom by Mary E Wilkins Freeman (1905)
“, the gentle slope of the hills and the church spire in the background – but still it is well done. It gives me the impression of an artist…”
Whatever that description of a painting in a so-called hall bedroom really is, this story itself is a “vestibule” to nowhere or heaven, a narrowing channel to the ‘fifth dimension’, or whatever takes the reader’s fancy, full of fragrances and tastes, where effects precede causes… “It seemed as if the odour reached my mentality first.” The brain says rose, then the nose smells it. A sort of archetypal haunted painting story, here in a boarding house on 240 Pleasant Street, and its hall bedroom with a haunting backstory. “I seemed to be wading breast-high through flower-beds of Paradise,…” Eventually touching those denizens that a mere struck match makes vanish… Whether dream or a new religion, I note there were once 240 pence in a pound, the mock pleasure of money, and that piece of paper with figures just accounts… …’advance and retreat’ of bliss like life’s river? To heaven or nowhere.
“It was never cloying, though of such sharp sweetness that it fairly stung. It was the merging of a material sense into a spiritual one. I said to myself, ‘I have lived my life and always have I gone hungry until now.’”
PS I presume this American author was privy to the pervasive numerical nature of the British currency! From above story: “The income was not enough to support me in any kind of comfort, and I saw that I must in some way earn money. […] …although that actually took my last penny, that is, the last penny of my ready money, and I was forced to draw on my principal to purchase my first supplies, a thing which I had resolved never on any account to do.“ (my italics)
“The struggle for money always injures the fine grain of a woman;…”
“‘….the novelty never ceases. I feel each day is our first day together.’ ‘Oh, it is the sense of “home” which is so precious to me – it is the wonderful sense of peace – of the rooms sanctified – of the quiet permanence – it is that which is so precious after –’”
This is quite a revelation for me. I genuinely believed that I had reviewed all this author’s collected stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/the-collected-stories-katherine-mansfield/, but this marvellous ghost story seems not to be among them! In apotheotic synergy with Walter de la Mare (my reviews of all his stories here), this Mansfield story with Bloomsbury references tells of a girl or young lady in a rainstorm with soggy package of madeira cake who shelters in the porch of house that is to be let or sold. And somehow she is transported within as a future idyllic life in the house as herself with a husband or are they children role-playing their adult selves with teddies and their own pretend children? A house we now live in ourselves for a nonce. A life or lives left unlived! It is pure magic, general fiction as well as ghost story fiction at its very best, and thanks to this book for bringing it to my attention. The ‘quiet permanence’ that is ourselves…
“Standing aloof between the approaches was the house – large, red-tiled, and built back in the shape of the letter ‘T’…”
This is a stylish haunting story set in British Imperial India as helped along by the book’s generous amount of footnotes, a general feature of these Women’s Weird anthologies. Here, of a child-brooding British lady whose cousin brings his wife and delightful children to this part of India, and the lady already there is reluctant to see them move into the eponymous bungalow, but not only because she had grown fond of the children, because the place had been airbrushed till now discovered from some hinterland, but why? Yet it seemed too good to be true for the new family’s needs till whatever backstory curse embodied by the bungalow saw them go ‘home’, which meant to go back to Britain, I see. Whatever the message that was meant to give? The derelict stable area had ‘stray goats’. The actual stray ghost description seen by the children inside the bungalow, however, has left a mark on me and is a moment in such tales of terror to cherish, or to airbrush, too, till one is drawn back to read it again, as I think I might do so to see what else I find in its ‘bran pie’.
“– while I burrowed into the bran, and there interred the bodies of dolls and cats and horses, and all manner of pleasant surprises.”
Bran pie = Brain pie?
From ‘bran pie’ to the next story’s “brain fever”…
Outside the House by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor (1920)
“He softly kicked the ball of wool on its way, with a sly wink at me, adding – ‘That’s how they get there, unless the Twins walk off with them in another direction, among the trees;…’”
On one level a ludicrously and disarmingly unbelievable plot, on another an effective echo of the First World War trenches and the precarious coal mine working conditions back home. “…the horror lay in the suffocating fog, and in the apparent wish to haul me into some abyss” and the no man’s land between trenches…A mix of real-time account by a defiant but shell-shocked, hell-shocked man with war-injured leg, allowed to visit the large house with what you will ever surely store away in your mind as the Low Lawn, a new archetype to conjure with, and someone else, a fellow soldier as friend, viewing this account in hindsight, as I do, at a shadowy third remove, with my own real-time review of the story he concocts, as truth or dream. Why was the lame man allowed by his sweetheart to go to meet her family in this large house as her affianced but without her? The house where you had to go indoors at 5 pm into a sort of brief visit to Bonnyville scenario, imprisoned inside from the horrific visions outside, whatever ironmongery files upon a soft hasp can do. Visions that are seriously worthy of the greatest writers of the weird like Machen’s Angel of the Mons and William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland. A very strong story in this way that, for me, has the best description of what I have long found to be gluey or treacly or foggy Zenoism as major themes in much weird literature such as Aickman and many others (see countless reviews on my websites)…”’Something’ retarded my every step! I found myself trying to put into words my inability to get along,…” And a ‘fairyland of flowers’ inside the house in all the rooms including a domed garden with clock golf! To compensate for keeping the things outside outside! A mutant apotheosis of Elizabeth Bowen! A brain fever that even makes Cartesian philosophy complicit!
“‘Dear child, I’m a man with a thinking machine. I can’t promise not to think,’ I said.”
The next story below is also the outside of a house invading within it.
Florence Flannery by Marjorie Bowen (1924)
“‘You seem to spend a power of time by the pond,’ she replied. ‘What are you here for?’ ‘I’m waiting for something,’ he said. ‘I’m putting in time, Mrs Shute.’”
This is a highly strange and, for me, meaningful, story of a carp pond and a coincidence of names by an author with her own near namesake Elizabeth Bowen, whose work I cherish. I now cherish, with a shudder, her near namesake’s words by reading this work today. A carp that is a man that is a tench, I guess, regarding all my past reviews of John Cowper Powys. The name of FF is scratched on a window in a seaside house to which another woman — a feisty London chorus girl with sluttish ways, also bearing FF as a name, now Mrs Shute — is brought in marriage by a Mr Shute, and she is disappointed by the downtrodden house and its grounds. And she is even more disappointed, to say the least, by the connection with another woman called FF with a backstory that straddles oceans, and a man called Daley or Paley who, having settled in the house’s grounds, more or less embodies that tench, here called carp. It was as if I, too, was destined one day to arrive at reading this story, and so it has been. Another coincidence or material synchronicity? But not before Mrs Shute (the FF who straddles 300 years) sells her sole riches in the form of a diamond to buy “a carpet wreathed with roses, a gaudy dressing-table and phials of perfume, opopanax, frangipane, musk, potent, searing, to dissipate, she said, the odours of must and mildew.” Toward a carpthartic ending…
(Possible spoiler.) Now something even more special, if that were possible! An ‘imaginary friend’ story perhaps even outdoing the more boy-like Slopbasin Soilipsism stories of Walter de la Mare! Viola starts, of course, here, as a child with her ‘imaginary friend’ she calls Binns, in all the magic of those times and of large houses and sewing rooms, and pareidoliac cosy fires, flames as flowers, and much else like that, and her sense of her head as a bare attic to fill, and getting her own back on her frustrating nurse by spitefully setting Binns to make the scissors start walking on their round-headed handles towards the nurse! A magical kinetic power? Or something even more rarefied? The passages describing these scissors are second to none. Or is Binns real in some peculiar sense? As she grows older we feel her associative emotions when in France with its strange songs — and even when aged 17 and a man only she seems to know as James woos her, or does she woo him? And she has these daydreams or real sightings by magic of what he is doing when he is not with her. She somehow resents his absences and she calls him back and perhaps it is only myself who thinks his full name may be James Binns even though he is unaware of his own magical existence. I somehow doubt it, but a part of me does wonder… Her laughter at the end — does she now relate his presence in her room to the shadow that she herself casts of Binns upon its wall? Whatever the case, I cannot do justice to this substantive work, and I am spoilt for choice in quoting from it, so I shall quote nothing.
The House Party at Smoky Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1935)
This is a story that any review of it will inevitably SPOIL, I guess. But here I precariously go… without even a single mention of the white parrot….The fact that I was there, too, among the listed company invited to a social gathering on Smoky Island, at the house thereon, and the nature of the narrator’s knowledge of the various guests about most of whom you receive penned thumbnails. In particular a certain couple as ‘item’ who hold the ominous limelight of the ‘frame’ story, yes, a massive frame story when compared to the ghost story-telling night’s stories that they tell each other, stories about which we receive, again, penned thumbnails. A gamut of a period. The portrait of an era. And thus I particularly felt an affinity with the ‘Bright Young Things’, who, amidst the ghost story-telling, “sat cross-legged on the floor with arms around one another quite indiscriminately as far as sex was concerned … except one languid, sophisticated creature in orange velvet and long amber ear-rings, who sat on a low stool with a lapful of silken housekeeper’s cat, giving everyone an excellent view of the bones in her spine.” That is where I shall leave it, its guestalt complete.
The Black Stone Statue by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1937)
“But I was thinking as a sculptor. What do I care for roads or buildings? Sculpture is my whole life!”
This is a singular weird tale of the old school, in many ways ever-prophetic, and needed to be read today in our own times, and duly so, I have been brought to read it by forces unknown to me. A boarding-house ‘frame story’ whereby its now told backstory crystallises and is told to the sculptor as narrator by a third party. This being its inner story of witnessing a part of the Brazilian jungle after a plane crash, the part of the jungle that has turned into an impossibly hard black petrified stone or rock. And a humming blob creature who created such petrification now somehow smuggled back to civilisation and the lust for art-and-its-fame versus the more practical applications of such substance for mankind, and here deploying the lust for what can be the prelude to harnessing a new AI Frankenstein monster of art? Yet, the doubt remains at the end that out of such a monster will become a genuine genius of expression?
“The black stone statue which, ironically, I chose to call Fear of the Unknown, is not a product of my skill.”
The gestalt of literature that is yearned for and with its own autonomous life?
Roaring Tower by Stella Gibbons (1937)
“My heart was like stone.”
From the petrifying and humming monster in the previous story above, to a new humming, often a roaring, from bees around rosebushes at a ruined tower in the bay, or some other entity that scared the Cornish community whereto our heroine — with heart of stone against her parents for trying to exorcise her love for a sweetheart — had been exiled for curative purposes. To her Aunt, and a little niece who had been made aware by the village idiot of the source of the humming or roaring… and our heroine defies sense and enters the realm of the Tower, not believing, perhaps, that Time may otherwise have healed her ‘deathless wound’? A Beauty-and-the-Beast type story that is at times sublimely visionary. A Blakean cartharsis to expunge the ‘carptharsis’ in a different story above. And there are three telling ‘elbow’ moments in this story, too, as if one day it knew I would read it! Even flowers in the sea…
“…and saw with unseeing, unhappy eyes the conservatories and hothouses of the sea, green fronds and purple and red, swaying below me in innocent beauty.”
Flowers of the Sea, depicting the story by Reggie Oliver that I first helped first publish in 2011 with that title, a writer whose aunt was Stella Gibbons.
The Black Stone Statue
ON THE ROUNDABOUT
“To tell the story.”
I am sorry if that’s a plot spoiler for this vignette’s ending. Early Seventies in Belfast, and the narrator — driving at a roundabout with his wife beside him, and kids in the back — rescues a man from the violence of the UDA, not a Fenian man but a Presbyterian? Why do my eyes glaze over? I should know more than I do. I was an agnostic adult in the early Seventies watching the news from where I lived in England, but a story is a story and needs to be told, even if nobody now understands it. History is like being on a roundabout?
THE TROJAN SOFA
“In one dream I’m in school and nobody in the class knows what ‘onomatopoeia’ is except me. But I can’t put my hand up. I’m paralysed. Another dream is of me snoring. And jerking awake to stop me snoring.”
This is a classic story. Is it already a classic story I happen not to have encountered before, i.e. a work that has already been deemed by others to be a classic? I shall check after I have written this review of it. A story about a skinny, precociously smart 11 year old boy and his experiences within sofas as a so-called righteous means of Catholics burgling Protestants. His pissing and sleeping arrangements within the sofa are larger than life, but wildly believable, as are his father and uncle who are part of the gang selling furniture then burgling the house where it is delivered, the boy in the middle of the night cutting himself out of the sofa and letting them in! There is so much more to take in about these laterally thought-out manoeuvres, particularly the manoeuvre here in question in what can only be deemed an unforgettable Swiftian masterpiece.
“It’s that soap with the wee label that never goes away. Imperial Leather. The last thing to go is the wee label. How do they make it do that?”
LEARNING TO DANCE
“When they had a boiled egg at home their mother spooned it from the shell into a cup and mashed the bits up with some butter so that the yellow and the white mixed evenly.”
Not forgetting the elastic band in the white? And what we infer might have happened to the boys’ parents….This is the story of two brothers, around 10 and 12, who seem to be staying with their parents’ posh social friends, the lady a gaily, smartly dressed one who refers to the time as quarter to lemon, and her husband a Catholic doctor, I infer, who likes Agatha Crispy stories as well as medical books in his library, one of the latter containing a “person with a blackened hairy tongue thrust out. A bare woman with droopy chests covered in spots. Then babies stuck together…” – and one brother is hated by the other for his bodily noises, and they share a game of archery with the hosts in the garden, and when the latter leave the garden, one boy points his bow and arrow at the other…
But the crucial scene is where one boy in his pyjamas dances with the lady on the bespoke sprung dance floor…the “gorgeous clothes” and rhapsodic religion of dance to the sound of showtime standards. Dancing outside the ‘iron lung.’
And we gradually realise why the boys are staying here.
I felt as if I had been immersed in some aura of perfumed cigarettes and banana flaws of innuedo. Moments that I shall cherish…
“The doctor’s wife took a seat on a stool and leaned her elbows on the table staring at her guests. She looked long and hard at them then smiled. ‘I would just love two boys like you,’ she said. There was a sound of crunching toast and chewing.“
The boy’s slow motion football…
‘Like you’re in syrup when you head the balloon – it’s slow motion – like in the pictures.’
“…the radiogram was up and a record was revolving slowly – clicking in the overrun.”
Not forgetting the childish talking in code that the husband and wife had learnt from the boy’s parents. “‘We speak it even though we don’t have any children,’ said the doctor’s wife.” The once sprung archery bows and bent arms now forgotten…
“The doctor said grace and they all bowed their heads after the doctor’s wife bowed hers.”
THE CLINIC
“If there was one thing worse than worrying, it was wasted worrying.”
This incredibly observant story means a helluva lot to me. Empathy apotheosised. My visit to hospital clinics in recent years, observing the other patients, and interacting with those nurses and doctors who attend me as an oldish man during tests and results, and my reading literature in between as a waiting-room dewaiter! Here in this story it was Chekhov, recently mine has been MacLaverty, a godsend…. I must “degrump”!
Please excuse me quoting this whole crucial passage…
“He was struck yet again by the power of the word. Here he was – about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head. Not only that, but he can share sensations and emotions with this student character, created by a real man he never met and translated by a real woman he never met. It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present.”
A BELFAST MEMORY
“It was a Sunday and felt like a Sunday. ‘Family Favourites’ was on the wireless.”
I know that particular memory. But this kaleidoscope of memories of Fifties Belfast is over my head, like the lofted football of its plot. Extended family stretching across the terraced street, with characters galore, a priestly Father, a famous footballer as guest, memories of a certain sectarian football game and its printed programme, now a valued item much later as we look back. And the father who was his nibs, then sketcher of those playing, and there is one great line in this story that sums me up as I try to force my way through the roof of this story’s house…
‘You’re no good if you can’t make something out of a blot.’
Lead water pipes did me in, too!
“Granda was now leaning forward with his elbows on the table. ‘There wouldn’t be a foul from start to finish.’
‘Where’d be the fun in that?’ said Father Barney.”
THE WEDDING RING: Ellen Tierney 1884–1904
“‘You’ll not lay a finger on me,’ said Ellie, laughing. She bunched her fists and held her elbows tightly in to her waist.”
This is a poignant story, poignant literally, sniggerable, too, perhaps, as two sisters dress and clean the dead body of their 20 year old niece Ellie, died from UTI, I infer, unless I misremember something. The older sister, with hung gold cross vertical on a chain to stop abrading the chin, stricter than the other sister, and such strictures extended to not only the spitting upon an iron to see how hot it is but also inserting a hot poker into a goffering iron for smoother lace to be put on the body, and, later, a pointed intimacy with the corpse to absolve the message given by a gold ring they found around Ellie’s neck. “Why would anyone want to wear the likes of that? Instead of on your finger.” There’d been no such poker for Ellie, thank God, judging by the auntopsy! (My word, not the story’s). Ellie died before she fulfilled her love with a man who that aunt considered to be unworthy, one of three lodgers in their house — as we see in extended flashback — a love affair as a single kiss after he eased a skelf from Ellie’s finger with a needle! Any ‘brothel sprouts’, notwithstanding!
“And if it isn’t foulness and filth they’re after, it’s a round-about way to lead up to foulness and filth.”
THE ASSESSMENT
“Old age is something you never get better of.”
She is being assessed for dementia, a Joycean monologue, her son now come from England to say to her that she shares in the decision, as she tells us, of where she goes now, a northerner being in Dublin because of her husband who died forty plus years ago. Possibly the greatest self-expression in literature of encroaching dementia — I should know! — within a narrator’s account of it, if all her memories and tragedies like losing another son and much else are to be believed. And her accidentally burning a shrine at home with candles, her home to which she yearns to return instead of being put away in a different home…
“He takes me, not by the elbow, but by the hand.”
UP THE COAST
“All four of them. They each had something different to say. The stones took on a life of their own – like Plath’s mushrooms. Strong, elbowing forward, butting for attention. Our story must be told.”
Arguably, this author’s most powerful story. I find it hard to imagine that those stories by him I have not yet read can be more powerful than this. A novelette, in fact, a tale of painting and an island and pesky invasive ticks and rape and old fashioned photographic Polaroids. A gallery’s art installation of notes for this story and expressive images by the artist, the victim woman, now an artist with a gallery exhibition, who was raped when she was younger on a Scottish island while she was painting — a callow painter, now one who has exorcised that rape in more ways than one, artistically and actually by taking advantage of the fact that boys and men on that island were never taught to swim because if their fishing boat goes down, it was somehow better that way. And the doctor and his wife on the island whom she sought thereafter… Too much to cram into this review. I simply re-visualise its suspenseful nature, its cinematic qualities, and the ability for art like literature and painting to put ourselves into the head of the rapist who cussed ‘fuck and cunt’ — till we also re-visualise this woman, his victim, with whom we are meant to empathise. But who knows the truth of all the repercussions we are shown? The presumed victim’s real-time, contemporaneous notes (e.g.”How to incorporate the ghosts without actually showing them?”) as part of the Art itself, as I always hope my gestalt real-time reviewing can also achieve by mutual synergy of collusion. Making the ultimate truth, or the ultimate lie. This is a work with literally several significant elbow moments. Check them out. I won’t quote them here. And the flashing in the eye of a reflected sun by knife or square mirror, always a circular light to blind us.
“He spun through the pages with his thumb. It was blank except for the beginning pages.”
VISITING TAKABUTI
An aunt called Nora helping her niece by taking out two small grand nephews, and we are also told about her unrequited love with someone who said ‘Adieu’ when going as a soldier to the Great War, now, as a spinster, she is checking routes in a gallery to ensure the boys do not see any unruly art.
“Porridge stuck to you – it set you up for the day.”
“It had been years since she had travelled upstairs on a bus.”
‘There’s no use hurrying if you don’t know the times of the trains.’
That’s what she was once told by her eternal sweetheart who went off to war.
She once treasured ‘The Encyclopaedia of Primary Teaching.’
‘The air was full of small mechanical sounds, tickings and scrapings.’
We, too, are imbued with her ‘dwam’, as she shows them, in the museum, a Mummy with blatant blackened substances and a split nosebone, a life as death.
“The soul leaves the body and tiptoes to the doorway. Then turns and goes back to kiss the body that has sheltered it all these years.”
There is no way to convey this story. And its ending. With mere snippets. There were so many other snippets that chose not to be quoted by me. They said you have to read all of this story, or none of it. Too late, I countered!
WINTER STORM
“How futile all this was. How was anyone to deduce his life from such fragments?”
Indeed, but the story deduced itself, this time, without my help. A Scottish poet as professor in a Iowa university who gets lost in the typical winter storm of the mid West — lost in the quadrangle! “No, I’m not being raped – I’m just lost. Yes, somewhere in the middle of the fucking campus.” Lost despite the single flagpole. Trying to find a bus to get home. His desired loved one Lorna now estranged in Scotland. Evocative conveyance of life’s Blind’s Man’s Buff, if not bus! He and Lorna back home once watched The Dolls House together, another Nora to go with the one in the previous story above? Until another flagpole as coordination — a tall Indian cleaning lady from the University building — carries a telephone message to him from Lorna… to get his bearings, somehow making me remember again what his mother once said…
“The back of my hand to you.”
I shall now, in due course, read and review any stories from BLANK PAGES that I have not already read, here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/12/blank-pages-by-bernard-maclaverty/
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