The Penguin Books of the British Short Story
PART TEN OF MY REVIEW OF THE THREE PENGUIN BOOKS OF THE BRITISH SHORT STORY
CONTINUED FROM PART NINE HERE: https://nemonymous123456.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:
Evelyn Sharp: In Dull Brown
“‘That comes of the simple russet gown,’ she thought; ‘of course he thinks I am a little shop-girl.’”
A story (too subtle to explicate beyond instincts or feelings) in the more gentle era of governesses and conscious sense of cyclic weather seasons and men labelling or prejudging the nature of different women, involving a chance meeting, here, on an omnibus during an unseasonably warm November day after much rain the day before — presaging some later props for this will-powered woman in girls-in-fiction’s russet brown garb and a man who has strict expectations about women, yes, props in the fare-staging of umbrellas — expanded into Spring after other ‘chances’ of meeting as deliberated upon by some mischievous seemingly chance force of a freehold creator of leasehold triangulation of ‘shadowy thirds’ as characters: two sisters and this man.
T. Baron Russell: A Guardian of the Poor
“As he shuffled off, Mr Borlase eyed his round shoulders and shining elbows with disapprobation.”
The shining elbows of John Hunt. For someone so shabby, with an equally ‘faded’ but kind (“Half an ounce of shag screwed up in paper!”) wife, a wife now near to dying after her giving birth to his lovely son whose baby fingernails he kissed, John Hunt has shining elbows. At least they were shining! And he loved his dog, whether he could afford its licence or not. “‘What, Joey! What the little bow-wow – didn’t they let you in?’”
Mr Borlase though, sharp-practising and unkind employer (draper) — “‘Lady wishes for a dark ’eliotrope ribbon, shot with cerise.’ (Such atrocities were common at Borlase’s.)” — an employer of this era masquerading as a so-called Guardian of the Poor; you must surely ride the sad attrition he caused, as conveyed by this work’s adept and feeling prose…
“, almost sinfully novel. The raw material of feminine adornment was what Borlase and Company dealt in, uncostly chiffons and faced ribbons,”
“Lest any should go empty away, Borlase and Company in person – pompous, full-fed, and evaporating venality at every pore – mingled with his patrons near the exit; and woe to the shop girl who had failed to cajole her customer! This duty of shop-walking Mr Borlase divided at busy times with a lean man, grey-headed and stooping at the shoulders, who rubbed lank hands together…”
That was John Hunt stooping. Old coat and new… there is some mix in Borlase that harboured kindness when he donates a newer frock-coat to John, so I eat my words – but not eaten for long. Ever pure evil has a shining elbow somewhere to make it perfect by being imperfect, I guess, but which is really a threadbare sop?
“‘…look at the braid, look at the elbows.’ […] and he pushed Hunt by the elbow to the staircase which led to the upper storeys.”
“Presently he [Hunt] turned to the deal table – spotless, and scrubbed until the harder fibres of the wood stood out in ridges where the softer parts had worn away.”
“A leaking gutter-spout outside dripped – dop – dop – dop – on the stones; the recurrent sound impressed itself dully on his brain.”
AMY FOSTER by Joseph Conrad
“She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones; and the old chap, taking off his immense black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs to look where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his long arms above his head,…”
This powerful emigrancy novelette (with vile migrant agencies sending people over the seas) seems to be in the same patterned synergy with MARY POSTGATE by Rudyard Kipling that I happened to read and review yesterday HERE. Instead of falling out of the sky, this strange long-armed man called Yanko Goorall on his way to America from Central Europe is shipwrecked (who the little girl in the red frock was, I am still unsure) on the coast of England into a community, a blight of a bay, of leaden locals walking with souls downturned, prejudiced against any strangers such as Yanko…
The local doctor introduces me to many of its local characters and traits, while Yanko’s strangeness somehow evolves into his lithe leaping over stiles, and the making of holy crosses as signs, and he seems to attract the unimaginative woman called Amy who had been the only one kind to him, but even she has to enter the attrition of waiting for him to die, but what of the son they produced together?
A fiction work rife with Yanko’s initial awe and confusion at the sights he sees from ship to shore, and his later dancing upon pub tables! And they never really understood him. A shipwrecked blessing or a curse? This story will certainly lurk somewhere in any old man’s soul who reads towards the last story that he will ever attritionally wait to read. But which story will it be? He won’t know till he has read it. Or begun the next.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/joseph-conrad-the-secret-sharer/ and https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/the-lagoon-by-joseph-conrad/
H. G. Wells: The Magic Shop
“‘We get them’ – he picked one out of his elbow as he spoke – ‘free.’”
This is a story I seem to have remembered from my childhood, not yet read again until now. I think it must have influenced my early ‘Jack-in-the-Box’ story (now made available HERE.)
“Gip made no answer, but his grip tightened on my finger, and so we came into the shop.”
Later…
“You know, perhaps, that sinister something that comes like a hand out of the unseen and grips your heart about.”
You, too, must know this story of the eponymous shop suddenly found somewhere or other in the West End by Gip or Gibbles and his father as narrator, and all the tricks shown, and the sense of impending horror as well as magic and childhood’s nostalgia for the sort of toys I played with in the early 1950s, and the fears embedded in the childhood mind then, so different from today’s childhood fears, I suspect. Gip as alternate version of gyp, cheating or ‘To be disgusted to the extent that results in a small unintentional vomit.’ And I have lost count of the number of meanings for ‘gibbles’ I have found today!
How can you have ever forgotten this ‘Genuine Magic shop’ that Gip (“the Right Sort of Boy”) enters with his Dad, and the actually ‘prestidigital’ shopkeeper (“leaning over the counter – he really had an extraordinarily long body”) and his wriggling red demon et al, and his scorning a spoilt child ‘Nyar!’ outside who can’t get into the shop….
“I resumed my hat, and the rabbit lolloped a lollop or so out of my way.”
So pleased Gip ended up not ‘unhinged’, but can’t help wondering whether the ‘whited sepulchres’ had anything to do with the living ‘white kitten’ he didend up with…
“We none of us know what the fair semblance of a human being may conceal, sir. Are we all then no better than brushed exteriors, whited sepulchres —“
M. R. James: The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
A story that is deliberately told by by the unknown narrator that some assume to to be MRJ himself via all manner of bits and pieces like an obituary, and other articles, and a diary and letters and a piece of paper that falls from the eventually crucial carving itself that somehow triggers this story pervasively in hindsight. Therefore, the only way to read it is by real-time reviewing it into an eventual gestalt about Archdeacon John Haynes, and whether the story’s ultimate truth about his guilt, belying all the good things otherwise said about him before then, derives, at least in part, from the fact that the name John is used for apparently three different characters — as the Archdeacon’s own name, the name of his servant whose timing of a knocking on a door is questionable, and that of Austin the carver himself of the three carvings prior to the stalls being “odiously furnished”. Significant that even the narrator says he wants to make “a story out of” these bits and pieces. Story initially intended as fiction, not gestalt as guilt-by-truth in the deadly hindsight of the so-called ‘story’ by its end?
Below are some other clues as to how the cat creature that was once blamed on a stair rod has become a very frightening nightmare to anyone who reads this story attentively.
So best not to read it? Perhaps.
But I MUST BE FIRM! (Impossible to break a pen when typing on a keyboard, though).
“….the refinement of the scholar united with the graces of the Christian.”
Haynes writes on Episcopacy, and is connected, by dint of this story, to “the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus” and “a volume of Discourses upon the Several Events in the Life of Joshua,…” and “Cyrus, an epic poem in several cantos, the product of a country clergyman’s leisure,…” and “σ κατέχων,’ […] in rather cruel allusion to the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians”.
Even “the writings of Mr Shelley, Lord Byron, and M. Voltaire may have been instrumental in bringing about the disaster,…”
“The peaceful and retired seclusion amid which the honoured evening of Dr Haynes’ life was mellowing to its close was destined to be disturbed, nay, shattered,…”
But does the Narrator at that point know of his own suspicions about Haynes by the end? Haynes may have been disturbed and shattered, but not surprised, assuming his guilt was true. The horror was pervasive in hindsight.
Why did the first keeper of Haynes’ ‘box’ never open it? Sounds far fetched to me.
“…the wood seemed to become chilly and soft as if made of wet linen….”
And I could go on listing… the Hanging Oak, the puppets, ‘baldacchino of wood’, the letter from the maidservant, John’s sister Letitia, but I must stay firm, and not make false assumptions to fit my confirmation-bias, not even the whistle I heard when I read this aloud:
“…the innumerable errors and complications with which I am confronted, and I shall gladly and sincerely join with the aged Israelite in the canticle which too many, I fear, pronounce but with their lips.”
My other reviews of M.R. James: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/09/oh-whistle-and-ill-come-to-you-my-lad-m-r-james/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/19/the-treasure-of-abbot-thomas/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/count-magnus-by-m-r-james/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/the-4th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/#comment-21688 and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/weird-a-compendium-of-dark-and-strange-stories/
Later cross-referenced with SIMONE by Elizabeth Taylor: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/07/12/simone-by-elizabeth-taylor/
‘Saki’: The Unrest-Cure
Massacre manqué…
“…every rustle of wind through the shrubbery, was fraught with horrible meaning.”
It is not often one reads an anthology of short stories where there are consecutive stories, the previous one above and this one, wherein ‘episcopacy’ and ‘episcopal’ are respectively mentioned. Nor one — this Saki one — where there is talk of the possible need to “give lectures in Berlin to prove that most of Wagner’s music was written by Gambetta;” and where someone, namely Clovis, states “We are going to massacre every Jew in the neighbourhood.” The infamous story, rarely printed, let alone read, often taken seriously enough to provide its own unrest cure to those staid literati who prefer their cold duck uncurried as a metaphor for literature worth quietly reading. The story where Clovis meets a stranger on a train who complains of being made deeply anxious by a thrush nesting in a different place this year from the place it usually nested, and Clovis, as curative disrupter of rest, sets about providing… providing what? Blotting paper to soak up any blood and tears or a steam yacht to escape to the next story below wherein a would-be episcopal Clovis is disguised as Father Brown?… (I don’t know what happened to the murderous Boy Scouts, though.)
My previous reviews of Saki: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/youre-talking-rather-through-your-hat-when-you-speak-of-feeding-on-hares/
I previously reviewed the next story in 2015 as part of reviewing all the Father Brown stories (here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/the-complete-father-brown-stories-g-k-chesterton/), as follows —
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THE HONOUR OF ISRAEL GOW by G.K. Chesterton
““That is curious, too,” he said. “Twenty-five candles, and not a trace of a candlestick.””
“I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle Castle. But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe.”
“It’s like the dream of an atheist. Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more pine-trees…”
A story that – with many inexplicable objects or leitmotifs – is its own real-time review!
FB shows Fb how to gather the synchronised shards of random fiction and truth from the gestalt of things without their own things. All the contained without their containers. Payment potentially with its change given with greater ultimate value than the payment itself. Sleep as a demonstration of faith. And the honesty of a manservant as meticulous and slavish as a belief in nonsense as the way towards sense. Dental artefacts, notwithstanding.
There is something about the humour in these stories, a comfortable absurdity edged with sublime horror, an edge which the reader finds hard to keep this side of, knowing, though, that if he did topple over it, all its humour as well as its sense of necessary horror would be paid out, and no change given.
“As there is no intrinsic virtue in denigration, the critic who resorts to it, should be required to pass a test of qualification and sensitivity, at least twice as stringent as that imposed upon a critic who loves. Normally, love is not blind but clairvoyant. […] Moreover, there is some degree of absolute nobility in praise; and a high degree of ignominy in belittlement, even in justified belittlement. The capacity for praise that is at once warm and discerning implies a degree of fineness in the critic that is, alas, rare in anyone. These truths are so simple and obvious as to call for unfailing repetition.”
— Robert Aickman
ENOCH SOAMES by Max Beerbohm
“Put those knives straight!”
Please excuse me if I fall into solipsism when reviewing this famous so-called satire in the guise of fiction, a fiction that utters truths that only fictions can utter. You see, I, too, have ever claimed to possess a preternatural instinct that I only choose fiction works to review that are worthy of my time, worthy of themselves as works, not that I choose to praise all the fiction works that I happen to read. And ‘DKF’ in the “DKF 78,910” mystery from this fiction, after all, is, alphabetically, only just one letter out from DFL, if slightly out of order, too. Indeed, this work has the expression “Elbows squared” as perfect elbow-trigger just before Enoch Soames is taken into the future by his Miltonic Temptor, via a so-called ‘Catholic Diabolism’, to check on his “posterity”, and he earlier tried to get people to read his impossible book NEGATIONS (just as I, with the same ‘vanity’, do so today with my equally impossible NEMONYMOUS NIGHT(2011))! Just as someone like me has also “hated to talk of anything about which he couldn’t be enthusiastic.”
And Max Beerbohm himself, as narrator, becomes himself an IMMAJNARI phonetic truth by having created Soames for real in the first place! But it is a witty, fictional satire meanwhile, as a disguise for its intrinsic truths otherwise, a satire upon THE YELLOW BOOK and the absinthe crowd, and poets like Baudelaire Mallarmé, and de Quincey, and there is another Soames books called FUNGOIDS, and I wrote things with similar titles when I went to a university, not far from Preston, thirty years before Soames turned up in our world by means of a sort of diabolical HG Wells’ Time Machine, if not Dr Who’s. And I still try to make my way into posterity by writing such things and, in my own version of REAL-TIME, issuing gestalt reviews just like this one — “meteoritically”, as Beerbohm puts it. You see, “…an artist who gave truly new and great things to the world had always to wait long for recognition.” We just need, like Soames, to straighten out our ‘rouged with rust’ knives, I guess…
“‘You aren’t an artist,’ he rasped. ‘And you’re so hopelessly not an artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem true, you’re going to make even a true thing seem as if you’d made it up. You’re a miserable bungler….”
My earlier review of Max Beerbohm: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/29/a-v-laider/
Arnold Bennett: The Matador of the Five Towns
“Strange, every step that I take in the Five Towns seems to have the genuine quality of an adventure!”
“As for the quality of majesty – yes, if silver trumpets had announced the advent, instead of a stout, aproned woman, the moment could not have been more majestic in its sadness.”
Where do I start? How can I do justice to this emotionally massive panorama of a story as told by Loring’s singular mind as narrator, a mind lent to him as guest by an authorial host, a story that has crowds-and-power or auto-da-fe mingled with sadness and majesty amid the trams, eventually forming, for me, a life-changing gestalt that emerges from Loring’s sometimes cataclysmic naivety when assessing, say, newspaper printing (“A kind of cavernous retreat in which monstrous iron growths rose out of the floor and were met half-way by electric flowers that had their roots in the ceiling”), pigeon messaging and viewing, from a grandstand, a needle football match in the five towns where the footballers look like dolls. And the star player (this story’s matador) breaks his leg but is later seen riding a bike, unless I was mistaken. And his wife that night perishes giving birth to a pigeon pair of twins, upon which birth laddish bets had been placed. The only way for me to deal with this slice of great literature of not only genius but also genius-loci and gestalt is to real-time some aspects of it….
Loring is staying with the the Brindleys and they suddenly realise a commitment that is magnified, like this story, from simple life – a grandma’s unforgivably forgotten birthday — and they abandon their guest to the entertaining company of the local doctor (“transferred forcibly from host to host”) as they leave to celebrate the birthday. Great or small, everything is part of a larger cosmic painting by one of the William-Blakeans? The story is about a larger “Host”, though. And those ‘sheets of wavy green’… and Zeno’s Paradox time in someone having “wound up his watch; a large, thick, golden one. This watch-winding established a basis of intercourse between us.”
“Both Mr and Mrs Brindley had evidently a humorous appreciation of crises, contretemps, and those collisions of circumstances which are usually called ‘junctures’ for short. I could have imagined either of them saying to the other: ‘Here’s a funny thing! The house is on fire!’ And then yielding to laughter as they ran for buckets.”
Talk of a place called Axe and the Brindley’s boys “having first revolved on their axes”, and later mention of Aix regarding “maddened children, whose destination was apparently Aix or Ghent, and whose wings were their tatters.”
Three telling elbow-triggers:
“Nobody took any notice of us as we insinuated our way up a rickety flight of wooden stairs, but when by misadventure we grazed a human being the elbow of that being shoved itself automatically and fiercely outwards, to repel.” — “He seemed to be all feet, knees, hands and elbows. His head was very small – the sole remainder of the doll in him.” — “Tall lads in aprons elbowed me away and carried off the green papers in bundles, but not more quickly than the machine shed them.”
Ironically, today, some footballers do earn millions! —
“…his great knees going up and down like treadles amid the plaudits and howls of vast populations. And all that now remained of that glory was these debased and vicious shapes, magnificently useless, grossly ugly, with their inscriptions lost in a mess of flourishes. […] The conception of him tracing symbols in a ledger, counting shillings and sixpences, descending to arithmetic, and suffering those humiliations which are the invariable preliminaries to legitimate fatherhood, was shocking to a nice taste for harmonious fitness … […] …with a thin red necktie down your breast (instead of a line of mud up your back), and embroidered breeches on those miraculous legs, and an income of a quarter of a million pesetas, and the languishing acquiescence of innumerable mantillas.”
And we learn much from past literature to teach us how to transcend the present, indeed a Jungian gestalt —
“I wanted, as a philosopher of all the cultures, to feel that the present was indeed a majestic crisis, to be so esteemed by a superior man. […] Mean, harsh, ugly, squalid, crude, barbaric – yes, but what an intoxicating sense in it of the organized vitality of a vast community unconscious of itself.”
My earlier review of Arnold Bennett: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/24/i-have-become-a-different-person-after-reading-this-strange-aberration-of-literature/
D. H. Lawrence: Daughters of the Vicar
“So that now the little church stands buried in its greenery, stranded and sleeping among the fields, while the brick houses elbow nearer and nearer, threatening to crush it down.”
Aldecross, with this opening elbow-trigger somehow ironically symbolising the later “butterflies and cherries” on a Mansfield clock. God and Time and how things work out by nature and what things ‘fritter’ and flitter away within the human version of nature that we call indeed human nature, and Mrs Durant “rocking slightly” on the ground in illness having pulled the cabbages from the earth, as men pulled coal from deeper in the same earth.
Two baby baths, one for the baby of Mary who’s married to an ‘abortion’ called ironically Mr Massy (“the little clergyman” to distinguish him from the bigger one called Mr Lindley), the other equivalent baby bath later being her sister Louisa innocently washing Alfred’s coal-black back…
Mr Lindley with his mercenary wife, now vicar of Aldecross, previously sermonising to farm labourers and now to coal colliers, finds it hard to subsist on this living, as he is tolerated not embraced by the community. They have children including two daughters who we see grow up, Mary and Louisa, Mary eventually a Mrs Massy, Louisa who sort of fancies the local man Alfred Durant, who ran away to the Navy.
A novella of the tension of status, the conflict between reason and passion, and dealing with a complex human nature that has too many dichotomies than just two sisters’s characters. Somehow such complexity sort of all simply pans out like coal dust or snowflakes, but never gold. Not ideal but never completely damnable.
Mr Durant (“Already he was going dead; being a tailor, his large form had become an encumbrance to him.”) is Alfred’s father, part of Aldecross, with Louisa thus being a social cut above Alfred…. and the eventual barriers to their marriage, as family faces family.
Mr Massy is an amazing shrimp of a character: “And it was as if he had accepted the Christian tenets as axioms. His religion consisted in what his scrupulous, abstract mind approved of.” Eventually his obsession: “The world was all baby for him.” — and as her brother-in-law, “Miss Louisa was afraid of him. And she was bound, during the course of the prayer, to have a little reverence for him. It was like a foretaste of inexorable, cold death, a taste of pure justice.”
Mary, as the dichotomy between two sisters:
“She would not feel, and she would not feel.”
While Louisa… “They are wrong – they are all wrong. They have ground out their souls for what isn’t worth anything, and there isn’t a grain of love in them anywhere. And I will have love.”
“The old woman was sitting rocking slightly among the ragged snowy cabbages.”
That gamble of a horse that beset DHL. Of a boy whose two sisters had outgrown their dollshouse.
“‘They will soothe the wrench,’ she said.” But not the death that the wrench uncovered.
Alfred…
“He did not approach her. She was there like a wonderful distance. But it was a treat, having her in the house. […]The whole tide of his soul, gathering in its unknown towards this expansion into death, carried him with it helplessly, all the fritter of his thought and consciousness caught up as nothing, the heave passing on towards its breaking, taking him further than he had ever been.” — to Canada?
Two baby baths leading to an ending, human nature’s bathos.
***
“In the valley that was black with trees, the colliery breathed in stertorous pants, sending out high conical columns of steam that remained upright, whiter than the snow on the hills, yet shadowy, in the dead air.”
My previous reviews of D.H. Lawrence: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/d-h-lawrence-the-prussian-officer/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/the-rocking-horse-winner/
Rudyard Kipling: The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat
A revelation and prophecy of how our Parliament would sink into chaos theory and mumbo jumbo in our own day, instigated by literally sick journals and newspapers, where Earth’s flatness and Brexit are two sides of the same Guppy Dance. They gave us the wrong FONT!
“Our halfpenny evening paper, which we will call The Bun to distinguish her from her prosperous morning sister, The Cake, was not only diseased but corrupt.”
Starting as a revenge story, where some good-time chaps (accompanied by their MP friend) are tried and convicted, in Huckley village, for speeding and horn sounding fit to scare a horse, tried by the man on the horse as himself a stitch-up magistrate (he was an MP, too), this revenge generating a viral self-feeding journalistic campaign, presaging Twitter, aided and abetted by the irrepressible impresario Bat Masquerier who was also tried for something else in Huckley, Huckley becoming a household word for a dance, a hoopoe, and a Society of Flat-Earthers who actually later did turn up for real! Resulting, by a crazy panoply of wonderful words about various eccentric characters and expressed in ever-spreading prose farcicals, yes, resulting in a song and dance routine and a rave theatre show that went viral alongside a global earworm, such things even or especially infecting Parliament with an unbridgeable polarity of song & dance venom, and Deep State conspiracies, and possible whiffs of racism.
“It was weeks ere we could see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate did not hang on any passing owner’s passing mood, they did miracles.”
Stacy Aumonier: The Great Unimpressionable
Beware stoical spoiler!
“Ned smoked his pipe all the time, and Toffee was an unembarrassed cicerone. He was a little jealous of this unnecessary female, but he behaved with a resigned acquiescence. His master could do no wrong. His master was a god, a being apart from all others.”
Ned the young postman with a dear dog called Toffee sees Ettie in sort of unofficial betrothal and they each hold similar conversations with each other recurrently, amid these common country folk with humdrum concerns, until Ned recruits himself and goes abroad with the army having exciting adventures, and stoical illness, and stoical danger, and his own stoical bravery, amid Germans, Arabs, “black devils”, et al…all the time writing humdrum letters homes and hearing news that his sweetheart has got another fellah. This is poignant stuff when he finally returns home after several years on the day after Toffee becomes what I see as dead sticky under a car, and this event at last unsticks Ned’s stoicism with tears!
Viola Meynell: The Letter
“; she gave no helping hand at the anxious time of harvest, and at last she stopped milking, with inconceivable inconvenience.”
A young woman, who we gradually assume has been made pregnant, becomes more and more sluggish and cannot help around the farm, and her father exhorts her to write to the man and tell him exactly what wrongs he has done her and the farm. And they eventually produce the note-paper like ‘blotting paper’ for her to write upon, and she agonises what to write, in an accretively clogging Zeno’s Paradox (“And what’s the good of me going out to earn sixpence if she stops at home and spends a shilling!”) of not even half measures, along with her gait…
“The country had been all flat beneath her swift, untiring feet. Now it rose and fell in so marked a way… […] She was more like an old man she met creeping up the lane than like those who used to be her playmates. […] She was out as long as possible that day, until clinging round each of her ankles was such a mass of the threads of cobweb that they seemed woven into soft grey fabric.”
Blotting up her energy. Described in a studied poetic language that somehow needs to stick to the eye before entering the soul. And we are made to stand still ourselves. Until we are all happily freed from our sad soul by what she discovers in a meadow and the letter she finally writes.
Cross-referenced with EVELINE by James Joyce: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/08/05/eveline-james-joyce/
A. E. Coppard: Olive and Camilla
“Camilla Hobbs, slight and prim, had a tiny tinkling mind that tinkled all day long; she was all things to little nothings. The other, Olive Sharples, the portly one, had a mind like a cuckoo-clock; something came out and cried ‘Cuckoo’ now and again, quite sharply, and was done with it.”
Sometimes you encounter a short story, where you ask: where has it been all my life? A touching, often amusing, story of two beautifully characterised spinsters who have been friends all their life, with a dabble or two with men friends, at first living together, and travelling abroad together, then settling (“they were both now of a sad age, an age when the path of years slopes downwards to a yawning inexplicable gulf”) into separately designed houses to different tastes near a village where we learn of some of the village’s inhabitants, but then with much business about past memories of menfolk (FOUR TIMES! with one of them), involving latent rivalries between them, and one of them sinking into bad drinking habits, they seem to be ready to live together again by the end, with some exquisite visions of their country matters as an Eden…
….with some earlier anecdotes along the way, one about a soda-water siphon bought by one of them exploding in a train carriage causing one of them to change her corsets in situ, corsets that later go missing. Luke Feedy the gardener telling stories of people ever gifting him a single sovereign. The compulsive pouring of brandy from a silver teapot, and a servant cooking by chance a cockatoo, and the decidedly off-putting eating habits of fatty things at breakfast… “There are two simple tests of any friendly relationship: can you happily share your bed with your friend, and can you, without unease, watch him or her partake of food?”
“…on the pathway to Olive’s door she nearly stepped on a large hairy caterpillar solemnly confronting a sleek nude slug.”
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/07/the-7th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/#comment-22131
E. M. Delafield: Holiday Group
“Constance, as a matter of fact, would have been his favourite child, if he had considered it right to have a favourite child – which he didn’t – but with boys, one had to think about education.”
“…Herbert, who had all his life suffered from train-fever.”
This is an engagingly simple and sadly telling tale of the Reverend Herbert and his wife Julia, and their three children, one a baby, the others toddlers, I think. He had at last received an expected legacy and sends his wife off to book lodgings at the seaside, so that they can have a second honeymoon with the kids!
When they eventually go there by train, Julia grows tireder and tireder in her care for the others, like her own mother before her, and they walk up and down the steep ascent to the extortionate (e.g. sixpence for the cruet!) lodgings, and there are many details about spades, a choice of plain or fancy cakes, swimming matters, etc.
A slice of life if not cake, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the destiny of Ethel, their servant, who’d gone off to her own home with the family’s cat, while they were on holiday.
“…he in his turn got into the double bed. He tried to make his voice sound only kind, and not resentful, but the effort was wasted upon Julia, who was sleeping like the dead.”
Dorothy Edwards: A Country House
“Night does not round things off. Night is a distorter.”
This story is a major short story discovery for me, especially after reading, by chance, a similar discovery: THE ISLAND by L.P. Hartley HERE a day or so ago, about a supposed electrician and emotional matters between two men and a woman, involving Hugo Wolf music! There the Hartley story’s own metaphorical equivalent to the flagstaff of meaning also flew, as it were, “senselessly”, at the end… (Aickman echoes, too.)
Here it is a man as narrator dwelling on his wife…
“It takes many years to close up all the doors to your soul. And then a woman comes along, and at the first sight of her you push them all open, and you become a child again.”
And he wants to care for her, and put electricity into the country house, where no drought, as here today in my own real-time, would prevent a stream in the grounds fulfilling the power for an electric substation…
“‘There is enough water,’ he said, ‘and I suppose it is fuller than this sometimes?’
‘Yes, when it rains,’ said my wife.”
The electrician is a musical man and matches the musical tastes of the wife, and the narrator feels the electrician is spiritually outside the plain utility work that he oversees, the work with the substation…”forming a sort of triangle with the hypotenuse underground.” – “Nothing but a yellow brick hut with steps to go down, and an opening like the mouth of a letter-box in the wall nearest the stream.”
Doubling such work with a holiday when staying at the country house; it is not on an island but is a place with deceptive lake in the distance that the electrician thinks is the sea…
“What can anyone do with a strange man in the drawing-room but play the piano to him? She played a Chopin nocturne.” That night distorter.
“…he later sung Brahms” and discussed Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. And one particular Hugo Wolf song emblemises the conflicting emotions involved… and he stood to attention like a flagstaff with elbow as flag?
“She played for him, and he stood up at attention, except that, with his right arm bent stiffly at the elbow… […] People do not change their lives suddenly. That is, they don’t except in literature. And now I feel at peace about it.”
John Buchan: The King of Ypres
“That night he had evil dreams.”
A feisty and eventually touching story of a British Private (Scottish), never with dry boots, sleeping with potatoes, eager to bayonet the Boche, finds in the ‘Wipers’ town he is alone, abandoned by his fellow troops, needed to quell the vacuum and deal with the locals’ looting and drunkenness, vulnerable to accusations of desertion, tantamount to becoming mayor of the place, wearing a girl’s skirt provided to him as his manly kilt, and a local woman who he is fond of…. the ending is not entirely happy but potentially full of hope in seemingly impossible circumstances against the Boche, a hope we all know is somehow transcended, I guess. A Brit in charge of the unruly French? ha! A story that is British and British stories are best!
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