CONTINUED FROM PART THREE HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26609-2/
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 the above two books, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below:
E. W. HORNUNG: Gentlemen and Players
“…it’s my profound conviction that Jack the Ripper was a really eminent public man, whose speeches were very likely reported alongside his atrocities.”
This is an entertaining story of two rough diamonds with principles of amorality — Raffles the ‘gentleman’ and the narrator Bunny the ‘player’ as sidekick, the former being an arch burglar hidden-in-plain-sight, as is the most wickedly effective of bowling techniques in cricket using similar concealments, I sense. Such bowling in cricket — as well as sidekicks or dribbling in football — being based on the notion of Dahl’s jinking in the previous story reviewed above, I propose.
“What I admired, and what I remember, was the combination of resource and cunning, of patience and precision, of head-work and handiwork, which made every over an artistic whole. It was all so characteristic of that other Raffles whom I alone knew!”
Raffles, a worthy cricketer himself, persuades Bunny, not a cricketer at all, to join in a weekend at a country house to play cricket as a means to steal valuable jewellery. I won’t bother you with all the machinations and competing burglars and policemen all hidden in plain sight. Just trust me, even if “…my trust in Raffles was much too solid to be shaken by a want of trust in me,…”
…but how can such trust in the Jungian lottery of a self’s consciousness be too solid to be shaken by a want of trust in that self being my own self?
L. A. G. STRONG: The Rook
“So far, that is of course, as was con—
Ah. There was young Kerrigan, walking casually across the grass. At sight of him the rooks in the tree rose in a body …”
Rose in a body. That bit tells the whole story in an eggshell, the shocking shooting by an old man of the rook among many rooks in the old man’s garden, when the little rooks would have made a better pie for the old man and his wife to eat, an old man like me who shot the bird, as an almost gratuitous murder mistaken for a rook-collective instead of a parliament. And the priest, who witnessed the mercy stabbing of the dying rook by another priest, started marking exams instead of invigilating them as he did before witnessing, in body, such a mercy. But were they really rooks? Well, Corvus, at least. I actually seemed to feel the poignantly numb and gradual dying of the bird by means of this remarkably heart-wrenching, more-than-merely-vicarious experience of a story that I would never finish experiencing before my consciousness became the crook that numbly, if not nimbly, stole away before it knew it flew.
Front page version of this Rook review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/15/the-crook-that-numbly-stole-away/
SOMERVILLE AND ROSS: Trinket’s Colt
This boggy craquelure of a story reads like something you never want to finish, in case it ends with a dud ending. Arguably, it did! Or I misunderstood it. But, whatever, it made it somehow seem even more perfect, if you can have comparatives or superlatives of ‘perfect’. We run breezily like T.H. White’s chasing hounds through its realms of meaning and plot, through the wonderfully described various wet consistencies of Irish bogs, where a perpetrated horse-stealing crime out-Raffles Raffles himself, a theft of a stolen pedigree colt from the best characterisation I have ever read of a feisty octogenarian woman whose grandson Flurry Knox is one of the those stealing it, and implicated, too, is the Resident Magistrate of the area, in involuntary cahoots with the grandson. The latter should have known better, being the narrator! Don’t go there! But are you following me so far? Whatever the outcome, this review of it has ‘an economy of truth’ (an expression actually used in this story; perhaps its very first use in any literature?). But why was the colt eventually buried in a sandpit!? Perhaps the octogenarian’s own employed Robinson Crusoe lookalike of a horseman might know?
“‘am I in Bedlam, or are you?’ […] …my elbow administered a fresh shock to my tottering nerves.”
Interesting comparison between Grandmother Trott here and Grandma Knox above, between the Chief Magistrate Steward here and the Resident Magistrate above, but any such considerations are soon transcended by the incantatory feeling of importuning and yearning in the next work below, a story by another Powys (my favourite Powys TILL NOW having been the John Cowper version) but which the madder Powys, I still do not know.
T. F. POWYS: The Key of the Field
“The leaves spun around him in the wind, for the October frosts had turned them yellow, and the November blasts had shaken them from the trees.”
The ghostly-like incantatory yearning and importuning being Uncle Tiddy’s for the Squire’s Field (a sort of Heaven as I found out when finally given the key myself by discovery of this superlative story, no comparison, otherwise) near Madder Hill, the key to which is yearned for by both Trott (who lives with her lusty grandsons) and Tiddy (who gives a home to his comely adolescent niece Lily.) Tiddy sees the key — once he had lost it by fell Trott means — everywhere as a form of pareidolia in every object he sees. Out of reach but ever there. His loss of the key through gossipy innuendo about his fulfilled yearning for his niece (he did love her, but how he loved her we shall never know), but some of the other Trott machinations also lead to rape, childbirth and death. But who knows what was sown where. And whether I myself have indeed been given the wrong key, to stop, at all costs, this story “to become a prey to the spoiler”, nobody can know. The Squire himself, you see, was deemed ‘merry’ in his ways, and the guests he had are left indeterminate, and the final innuendo prevails as to what key Tiddy was finally given by the Squire and to unlock into what sort of Heaven — or Hell? The spinning dead leaves had their own pareidolia shape of a key, as was said at outset.
Front page version of this Powys review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/16/to-become-a-prey-to-the-spoiler/
From the above Powys to the next work below — another subsumption into the madder, this one by a writer called Mew …
“Well, I can’t to anyone open every door; whoever owns the poor little house, there must be rooms of which, to the end, I keep the key.”
CHARLOTTE MEW: Mark Stafford’s Wife
If only Kate did not give the key to the eponymous “lurking horror”, who looked over her shoulder: the celebrity ‘vivisectionist’ or ‘pathologist’ writer called Stafford, but a writer of what? Of books of fiction? … Looking over her shoulder like Death or like God? A Hamlet to her Ophelia, whether with her hair done up or let down, as depicted in a photographed tableau towards the smashed negative-plate that could only happen to early old day frozen stances ….
This would have been deemed a great classic ghost-horror novelette like May Sinclair’s ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’. It also outdoes even Daphne du Maurier’s darknesses of short fiction, but the Mew novelette would only have been deemed to possess such greatness if without its own ohm-resistor of style as if borrowed from a tentacular blend of the late works of Henry James and the most rarefied yet-to-be-written Elizabeth Bowen works. A unique style by Mew that I relished, but perhaps many wouldn’t.
This Mew work even prefigured Elizabeth Bowen’s conceit of a ‘shadowy third’ with its own ‘shadowy fourth’! Certainly Mew was one up on Bowen! But Mew as a word also defined as a noun meaning hiding-place.
But who is the shadowy fourth?
The unreliable narrator, a mature woman as Kate’s mentor?
Charlie Darch, a stolid man of ‘the glare’, whom she was engaged to marry before she married Stafford?
The eponymous hindsight monster Stafford himself? — but was he a monster at all, or did he write it all as fiction, as St. Quentin did in Bowen’s ‘Death of the Heart’?
But the shadowy fourth can not surely be Kate herself who sees herself as the one “over-shadowed”, or do I misremember that? — a woman who is at first a fay sprite, but later striding in ‘the glare’ of society, when often neglected by her husband Stafford.
As the narrator herself says — ‘a bewildering tangle.’ Full of stumblers. Indeed, was Mew herself hidden in plain sight ‘overshadowing’ them all? “…this uplifting darkness, that we are in the grip of – blind – blind stumblers –!”
Soak in some of this masterpiece….
“It was her pose, though no one ever posed less consciously, to despise the stuff of dreams; yet I believe she walked sometimes clad wholly in that gossamer;…”
“They had foreseen, these two young people, they protested with confident effrontery, that I was capable of producing some sober, gifted and impossibly eligible person, and in view of such a blunder, to spare me and the shadowy fourth our disillusionment, had settled it themselves.”
“I wasn’t so distinguished. I had submissively run through Mark Stafford’s books and didn’t care for them. They gave me too much the idea of a vivisectionist at work, the man with the knife, with, in his case, no great end to serve, though I had the assurance of Kate and worthier critics than this incisive touch – this pitiless impartiality was, properly understood, superb.”
“He suppressed himself to give you room, kept in the shadow not to disturb your flickering lights; his own, one suspected, burned extremly clear, defined things perfectly though he had the air of moving about like the rest of us with a delightful vagueness, involved in the general mist.”
“He doesn’t for a moment want to. Charlie is too straight a path, he hasn’t any windings – not the shadow of a turning, and when Mark Stafford’s walking in a garden, he makes instinctively for the maze.”
“‘And this is the person who used to talk of her “simple self”!’
‘The simplest selves have, haven’t they, private corners, quiet nooks?’
‘The simplest people don’t deliberately pose to their favourite painters, for the purposes of mystification.’”
“‘It’s not to be Calvé,’ she announced immediately. ‘It’s to be Réjane.’”
“She seemed to have no shadows, no pensive side, so suddenly had she ceased to be the Kate I knew or guessed at. I had said of her once that she seemed to hang between two worlds, giving her then, in thought perhaps, a vague companionship with spirits of a lighter air, but at last she had come down and planted herself on a patch of earth. She hadn’t etherealized, she had materialized. Stopping determinately from the path of dreams, shaking away the mists, she stood out an intensely actual figure shining with a hard, new brightness.”
“Didn’t she,’ I asked, ‘ever confront you with the warning that, in a given case, she meant to shine?’
‘Not a whisper, not a breath!’”
“Poor Kate! What were we looking for? It may have been a conscience-stricken fancy that, for all its stealth, she felt our scrutiny and faced it – beat it off with her unclouded gaze, her remote serenity. There was one moment in the dusk, when there seemed to be something like a lurking horror in it.”
“Kate was to posture as Ophelia to the Hamlet of the little Frenchman, who had been languid as an invalid and difficult as a spoiled child until the idea, his own, of impersonating the morbid Dane served partially to restore his lost deportment and vitality.”
“If one was sure – but nothing’s sure – that there was at the close – deliverance from this awful light, this uplifting darkness, that we are in the grip of – blind – blind stumblers –!”
“…some shapeless horror, looking over her shoulder straight, as she hideously persists, into her soul.”
“They are beyond that – the dead. They are divinely indifferent.”
Pingback: “in the grip of – blind – blind stumblers –!” | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
…and now to “That’s a master key that opens all locks and that – that’s what I bleed people with.”
in…
GRAHAM GREENE: The Hint of an Explanation
Who swallows fiction as truth?
Essentially a religious story, and — if its ending in particular becomes a climax excised or bled away like a train boiler’s mistifying steam — this work has at its heart the dark absurdity and disarming strangenesses and haunting hints of an Aickman story for its own sake, this Greene being an insidious classic that should be showcased in horror fiction anthologies as well as in literary ones, whereby there is an abiding hint of an evil ‘Thing’ that is often anthropomorphised, as it says, into Satan, a work that tells of a discussion of hints about ‘the corruption of children’, a discussion between an Agnostic and a stranger he meets on the train who is a Catholic, on a precariously light and dark train as it enters and leaves tunnels with its own echoing haunting whistle, I assume — yes, a work that also yields hints of hints, hints of other leasehold hints of which the freehold author is possibly unaware. The intentional fallacy of the Eucharist.
And who should ever be able to forget Blacker the Baker, a ‘freethinker’ who once importuned the Catholic when the latter stranger was a small altar boy? Except the Agnostic (listening to him tell this and then telling us) was not a stranger to himself, with his being Greene’s leasehold narrator. And the model tableau of an electric train with which the Thing tempted that erstwhile boy to unswallow God. To unswallow His ‘extraordinary coincidences’ and ‘traps’, too.
The Thing of this story is Greene as freehold author. With a key that not only bled Christ but also wounded him up. The train not being electric powered at all? All fiction contains lies mixed with hints of hybrid truth, such as electricity that needs a clockwork key as well as a radiator bleeder, hints instilled into the minds of its readers…. All of us clocked in and clocked out from afar by the Thing that starts the live circuit that is a mock-up of life and death. The blood and the life of fiction and its often involuntary electricity in the regenerative thews as part of the suspended disbelief that is translated into the sprung faith of such fiction as later such faith is transubstantiated into bread to be swallowed and then offloaded. My reviewer’s unconsecrated freehold-thinking ‘hint of an explanation’ at least!
My front page version of my review above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/18/to-unswallow-god/
My review in 2017 of Greene’s UNDER THE GARDEN: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/under-the-garden-graham-greene/
And so from the Greene we make the perfect segue to the unreliable narrator who later dared not ‘divulge’ something, plus half hints of an explanation …
“I labour under a grave disadvantage as narrator of this story…”
“‘…back – to keep – something – No; I can’t speak of it yet. Do you mind calling Brown?’
‘Well, Somerton,’ said Mr Gregory, as he crossed the room to the door; ‘I won’t ask for any explanations till you see fit…’”
here…
M. R. JAMES: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
“There was no bond of connection between them, either historic, symbolic, or doctrinal,…”
Well, everyone must already know this classic terrifying story — i.e. terrifying when its accruing of gestalt is complete following the connection of cryptic clues from Germany to England of three prophets depicted in stained glass and the counting of 38 stones etc and and the common man servant called Brown who wrote an epistle containing, inter alia, these words: “it will be a Pleasure to see a Honnest Brish Face among all These Forig ones.”
A story of subtle fumbling hints outside bedroom doors, towards the reported — after being withheld — narration of more substantial horror of clambering down a well, after decoding many garbled letters of the alphabet, and antiquarian or ecclesiastical men terrified at monstrous forces let loose, i.e. forces I dare not describe here for fear they will become the prey of T.F. Powys’ spoiler.
But I can clearly allow myself the indulgence of pointing out, perhaps for the first time, that it was one of those ‘elbow’ triggers — often discovered while gestalt real-time reviewing — that let Things loose… “…my left elbow knocked over and extinguished the candle. …”
Front page version of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/19/the-treasure-of-abbot-thomas/
G. F. GREEN: A Wedding
“…her face done white to round spider eyes,…”
This beguilingly disconcerting vignette also has a dislocating style, with June sunlight tactile and in motion alongside Bowenesque ‘psychological furniture’, staccato, abridged, with impatient syntactical hints of a more fulsome explanation that the 12 year old boy — at the wedding ceremony at the church and reception of his father’s remarriage to a woman called Phyllis — is drunk via this dislocated perception, i.e. firstly drunk with poetic near-meaninglessness via such a description of him as possibly induced by mourning his mother whose photograph we see, and then literally he is made drunk with champagne at the reception by another of this book’s importuner of an altar-boy, even if this boy’s altar was a different altar…but the boy stays safe by dint of his own stoical netting of nature and its ways around him? Even though still drunk while rowing his rocking boat left tethered by the lake? Unless I am beyond being able to steady the meaning of my own reading’s boat…
“Prayer, like a net closed on them at the altar,…”
Front page version of above review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/05/19/prayer-like-a-net-closed-on-them-at-the-altar/
G. K. CHESTERTON: The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit
“…the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities.”
Well, when I read that at the start, I thought we had an even more unreliable narrator than that of the The Treasure of Abbot Thomas story, which turned out to have a monkeypox monster with tentacles, and here, in the Chesterton, chimpanzees. But now I am prey to the SPOILER! So, beware! Do not read further into this review!
A mad story of old ladies at a Dorcas meeting… “…out of their poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is anything so heart-breaking in hell.”
Don’t let me detain you though at that earlier point above of a mock plot-spoiler warning, because this story is about detaining itself. Detaining as a job, and depending on the assumed identity of your detaining rôle, the fee is different. Here a man, tussling with a collar stud, is detained from going to a dinner party, by a visit from a flappy, floppy, Vicar belonging to my county of Essex, a Vicar whose urgent plea for a speed of urgency has an even more be-longing Zeno’s Paradox of fictional detainment by his deliberation of dialogue style, and his covering of all necessary detective-story machinations. But who is ‘Major Brown’ in this story? Well, it’s not that man-servant called Brown from the Abbot’s treasure story, but Father Brown in disguise! (Unreliable narrators need equally unreliable reviewers, I guess.)
“He lived perpetually near the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose their reason. And I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart disease.”
***
My reviews of all the many stories by G.K.C. about Father Brown: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/the-complete-father-brown-stories-g-k-chesterton/
ANGUS WILSON: The Wrong Set
“With this government you have to be grateful for the air you breathe.”
A melting-pot of the shockingly hatefully racist homophobic as spoken aberrations, during the time of Atlee’s government, a flash story surrounding Vi who works as a singer in a club, amid vying class struggles, work rivalries, sucking up & hypocritical ploys, and her nephew whom she feels responsible for, what with his getting mixed up with the Reds et al. A heart of gold, after all, has Vi, perhaps? Telephoning a Telegram. As we experience this brief tranche of life that creeps or cripps to a full glare of interaction and various characters coming alive off the page into a mix of what we already have today, too. It all must feel at home.
“I’ve had a windful of Tory talk before now and it hasn’t killed me.”
I studied ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES in 1964 for O level or in 1966 for A Level.
I forget which!
“…love as a passion–it is our European specialty–must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the gai saber to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.”
— Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)
MAY SINCLAIR: Wilkinson’s Wife
“Wilkinson’s wife was not at all nice to look at. […] A heavy cloud of dulness seemed to come into the room, with Mrs Wilkinson, at nine o’clock. It hung about her chair, and spread slowly, till everybody was wrapped in it.”
One of May’s works of which I was previously unaware. A man with a wife whose description may ever haunt one with a ‘But for the Grace of God…’ , whatever the defiant comparison with the previous story above of vile political incorrectness stemming from old fictions written in a strange country called the past.
She is the blight of all dinner parties, to his own social detriment. But one widow, Cornelia Norman, plies her own sister’s playing of music to help deaden for him the wife’s effect and thus hope net him for herself….till deaden meant deaden for real. And the truth came out of where Mr Wilkinson’s ironic but selfless devotion truly resided. A devotion to the future’s riddance of misogyny (as inspired in him by Nietzsche’s possibly unlikely regard for the Troubadours) and to a love romantically plighted, even if later blighted. Is this the then future’s suffrage from our history today or suffrage in its original sense as ‘the intercessory petitions pronounced by a priest in the Litany’?
“May we? May we?”
***
My previous reviews of May Sinclair: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/192/ (many of her stories including ‘The Intercessor’) and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/15/where-their-fire-is-not-quenched/ (her ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’ (one of my favourite ever ghost stories and already mentioned above in this review in respect of the Charlotte Mew work.)
This review continues here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1207-2/