The Penguin Books of the British Short Story
PART EIGHT OF MY REVIEW OF THE THREE PENGUIN BOOKS OF THE BRITISH SHORT STORY
CONTINUED FROM PART SEVEN HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/35138-2/
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 these three books, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below:
TESSA HADLEY: Buckets of Blood
“On Sheila’s instructions she took several carrier bags of bloody sheets and towels to the launderette, where she sat reading Virginia Woolf while the washing boiled.”
I genuinely believe this is one of the most powerful short stories I have ever read. It held me stock still throughout its length. Its genius loci and characterisation and prose style, all terribly immaculate. Maybe because I went to University in the late Sixties, an innocent abroad. And the dire student squats and cigarette rolling etc were apparent by then, as the university was being built from scratch around us. Sheila is visited by her younger sister Hilary as our viewpoint on the situation, and the mœurs of their vicarage world and their perception of a dreadful mother of mothballs and germolene, and what destruction of a way of life Hilary is faced with when travelling by coach — as we all did in those days — to her sister’s predicament at university across the foreign land that was then Britain’s localities to others of its localities, and the shocking awakening and transgressive ruptures — eased towards the end by a genuine elbow trigger (“She was propped up calmly on one elbow on the pillow, and seemed returned into her usual careful self-possession”) where the nightmare began to end and the mushroom basements became a stoical realisation and a harmony with an ugly truth in sunshine and Hilary’s return ironically to the equally spiritually dreadful vicarage life.
This work is supremely something special.
“—The gods are disgusted at you, she said gleefully.—Apollo to the Furies. Apoptustoi theosis. Never let your filth touch anything in my sacred shrine.”
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/26/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story/#comment-24351
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ADAM MAREK: The 40-Litre Monkey
“Being in the room felt like being suffocated in an armpit.”
This is an absurdist version of Flannery O’Connor’s suited gorilla story, I guess. Here a baboon called Cooper in a pet shop kept by man who is obsessed with his pets’ exact targeted displacement (equivalent to creative dislocation in fiction such as this), displacement of bathwater measuring each pet’s volume to the extent of maintaining perfect size with the help (‘So you grease him up to make him waterproof?’) of Vaseline (if not the previous story’s Germolene!) and/or steroids and/or controlled dieting, towards perfect competitive statuses in the Big Animal Group to which he belongs. We see all this through the narrative eyes of a customer seeking a pet for his girl friend, I recall, and what this customer actually ends up with is …. Well, telling you would spoil it. A wonderful non sequitur or just a lullaby to make more measured the obsessive excitement of the whole menagerie.
“‘That’s perfect’, I said.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/adam-marek/
D. H. LAWRENCE: The Prussian Officer
Well, this lengthy story ends with the ultimate elbow trigger, it really does! — and I am just as much miraculously fazed as the young ‘orderly’ soldier himself in this famous story was fazed by the flash and flame and flare of anger in his body as well as mind, a fury with his Prussian Officer’s bruising treatment of him mind and body alike, that Officer Captain, who is tantamount to the same Captain, it seems, as the Captain in the Carson McCullers novel that I happened to review in detail very recently HERE as if I had been meant to do so! And I sense that the same more obviously inferred repressed homosexual desire there caused the over-proud Captain here to act in the way he acted against his orderly.
A story full of Lawrencian landscape as well as visionary or body-spiritual descriptions, mountains of snow sighted within extreme heat, mountains to which the orderly yearned to become part of himself after the crucial over-brimming of his own anger causing every single mentioned part of the Captain’s body, except ironically the elbow, to be crushed. And we are left with simple memories of a shepherd seen but not seeing us, and a raft on a river, a woodpecker with “erratic mice” designs on its wing, and a squirrel.
And inexplicably “A woman, full-skirted, a black cloth on her head for head dress, was passing like a block of shadow through the glistering green corn, into the full glare.” And the double mention of a pencil, once in the Captain’s hands spearing the orderly’s thumb, and the pencil behind the orderly’s ear that triggered the start of this battle between a man and his more worthy servant. Or not.
Simply soak yourself in my choice extracts below, leading to that finale of an elbow trigger…
“The captain was a tall man of about forty, grey at the temples. He had a handsome, finely-knit figure, and was one of the best horsemen in the West. His orderly, having to rub him down, admired the amazing riding-muscles of his loins.”
“…the look of a man who fights with life. His fair eyebrows stood bushy over light blue eyes that were always flashing with cold fire. He was a Prussian aristocrat, haughty and overbearing.”
“…a certain zest, such as wild animals have in free movement. And this irritated the officer more and more.”
“One day, as the orderly was smoothing out the table-cloth, the officer pinned down his thumb with a pencil, asking: ‘How did you come by that?’”
“He must go and take the coffee to the captain. He was too stunned to understand it. He only knew it was inevitable – inevitable, however long he lay inert.”
“It was as if he were disembowelled, made empty, like an empty shell. He felt himself as nothing, a shadow creeping under the sunshine.”
“The captain passed into the zone of the company’s atmosphere: a hot smell of men, of sweat, of leather. He knew it very well. After a word with the lieutenant, he went a few paces higher, and sat there, a dominant figure, his sweat-marked horse swishing its tail, while he looked down on his men, on his orderly, a nonentity among the crowd.”
“There was a pain in his head, as he walked, that made him twist his features unknowingly. But hard there in the centre of his chest was himself, himself, firm, and not to be plucked to pieces.”
“Yet, deep inside him, he knew that it was so, the captain should be dead. But the physical delirium got hold of him. Someone was knocking. He lay perfectly still, as if dead, with fear. And he went unconscious.”
“He had never been ill in his life. He did not know where he was or what he was. Probably he had got sunstroke. Or what else? – he had silenced the captain for ever – some time ago – oh, a long time ago.”
Then, finally, GESTALT followed by ELBOW…
“Then the pain he felt was another single self. Then there was the clog of his body, another separate thing. He was divided among all kinds of separate beings. There was some strange, agonized connection between them, but they were drawing further apart. […] Then again his consciousness reasserted itself. He roused onto his elbow and stared at the gleaming mountains.”
*
My earlier review of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/the-rocking-horse-winner/
Front page version of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/d-h-lawrence-the-prussian-officer/
JON MCGREGOR: The Remains Friskney
On the surface, an avant garde prose poem. Meaning will be found….eventually.
A meaning yet to be mined. No research possible, because of Intentional Fallacy beliefs.
ZADIE SMITH: The Embassy of Cambodia
“Pock, smash. Pock, smash.”
High walls, Badminton shuttlecock as an eternity of the air’s laminar flows or a hippo swimming in the floating guise of Andrew Okwonko who had found Christ and deemed numerology demonology, and Fatou once chambermaid in Accra now in Willesden as nanny and housecleaner to an eventually devilish mother despite Fatou dislodging a lethal marble from a gullet to save of one of the kids. It was her disguised Sainsbury bags, though, that got me most, and, yes, her guest passes for the swimming pool she stole from her employers, a pool in suburban London at the health centre next to the strange eponymous embassy, whereby we also learn that the Big Man syndrome is not only in Andrew or in tinpot dictators worldwide but also today in the British Prime Minister, I say! Hiroshima crossed with the Mass Baptism in the Accra swimming pool (shirts billowing in the water like an earlier cricketer’s shirt in the windless air) — just leitmotifs alongside of those bodies buried in the previous Friskney story …yet to be found! And, remarkably, there are three separate ‘elbow’ triggers, too, in the text of this work, triggers following the watery and airy laminar thermals of jab, frisk and float. A tidal story of Fatou’s poignantly telling life-story so far, and the shuttlecock that is her one single hope.
Not forgetting the abrupt Devil’s whiplash flow of this book’s earlier hawser?
“nine children washed up dead on the beach”
My review of Zadie Smith’s Epitome of Elbow in MOONLIT LANDSCAPE WITH BRIDGE – https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story-part-two/#comment-1570
Daniel Defoe: A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs Veal
“Mrs Veal sat her down in an elbow-chair…”
The two separate uses of the ‘elbow-chair’ — in this ‘story’ by a visiting narrator, Defoe, I assume, who thinks he is telling us non-fiction about the phenomenon of an inarguable ghost — are crucial physical logistics in what was said to happen in physical space. A constricting choreography of Mrs. Bargrave at home and the arrival of Mrs Veal, a friend who arrives to make peace after a gap in their friendship. The hindsight of Mrs V having died before this visit is explored and any motives in Mrs B thus claiming what happened are questioned, and whether Mrs B was influenced by her bad husband, I infer, and the homilies about angels and wise saws in Drelincourt’s Book of the Dead seem to hold the whole thing together. As well as all the extenuating circumstances of what Mrs B knew which she couldn’t have possibly have known without Mrs V’s visitation.
Truth or fiction, I wonder whether there is enough elbow room in most places where our bodies are buried? And heads with enough space for the brain power needed to envisage what is even logically possible for us to accomplish after our death? Like this visitation of Defoe to us just accomplished in this book of the dead!
“…the elbow-chair, she thought, would keep her from falling on either side.”
Front page version of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/11/daniel-defoe-a-true-relation-of-the-apparition-of-mrs-veal/
A TRUE relation within a FICTION?
Jonathan Swift: Directions to the Footman
“Never clean your shoes on the scraper, but in the entry, or at the foot of the stairs, by which you will have the credit of being at home, almost a minute sooner, and the scraper will last the longer.”
Advice from the author who perhaps mischievously lies that he was once a footman himself. Tips, sometimes outrageous, to footmen and various heads-ups and ready excuses and counterintuitive suggestions, e.g. as to the artful scatology of bodily fluids in served sauces, and even a modest proposal for when you are finally and inevitably hanged as a footman with all these tips of advice eventually failing!
“If you are ordered to break the claw of a crab or a lobster, clap it between the sides of the dining room door between the hinges:”
Snuffing candles, and musical chairs without chairs, and much else in stylish detail, give us a good clue as to the mœurs of the time in general and the footman’s lot in life. After all, death or being prematurely tipped up must eventually come to us all.
“…and if he strikes it down with his elbow by forgetfulness, that was his fault and not yours.”
Henry Fielding: The Female Husband
“…squeezing as many soft things into her hands,…”
This is an ancient ironic waking prophecy of the Trans or Sapphic, here with pronouns sometimes confused rather by a sense of humour at sex and fascination with body parts than a self-consciously false bashfulness of exegesis in what is actually told us, a falsity that is denied at the end with any wokeness being formally unwoked. Prudity, in hindsight, unpruded, if not unpruned.
“It has been observed that women know more of one another than the wisest men (if ever such have been employed in the study) have with all their art been capable of discovering.”
The story of a woman from the Isle of Man who first marries a Mrs Johnson and the latter, like a certain much later Mr Johnson, tries one thing and then another before deciding on one of them, e.g. woman to woman sex and then denying it by saying she now loves normal married sex! Just like Fielding seems to do with what moral he is moralising here!
All with a mix of involvement by Methodism and, latterly, our her(oine) dressing as a Doctor, our hero(ine) as a male Moll Flanders, perhaps, who has a slightly confused version of sex acts with other Mollies, with the latter believing the ‘soft things’ they were offered to fondle were natural sex and preferable to elbows, I guess! Arriving at due trial and error, then a real trial and subsequent whippings.
“…there was more eloquence in the false spellings […] than in all Aristotle.”
One thing has occurred to me to ask. Why isn’t WILLIAM TREVOR included in these Penguin Anthologies, whilst Elizabeth Bowen, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce are?
My reviews of all William Trevor stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/
Hannah More:
Betty Brown, the St Giles’s Orange Girl: with Some Account of Mrs Sponge, the Money Lender
“Those gentry had one night, in a drunken frolic, broke down the door, which happily had never been replaced; for, since that time, the lodgers had died much seldomer of infectious distempers.”
A moral tale as poor Betty is sponged upon with the detrimental interest and capital and commission calculation, a usury of shillings, in her oranges-barrow trade but then released by a kinder lady to the fateful determination, if not free will, as granted by God, whereby Betty arguably fared better in a sausage-shop.
But the earlier doorlessness symbol gives me quite another moral, one that perhaps the author did not intend!
From sausage-shop to farm…
Mary Lamb: The Farm House
“….very frequently the hens left their eggs among the nettles. If we could find eggs and violets too, what happy children we were!”
Louisa, 4, had never left London, never even hardly seen a single grass blade, when she was taken by her parents to stay with her Grandma and her sister (who had equally never been to London), to stay on a farm with them, and she learns the pleasure and seemingly destructive if natural changes and recompense of the countryside cycles of flowers, hay making and sheep-shearing, and being held over to look at bee-stings by a man with a black beard. The plainly naive but stylishly told story, deployed for its own sake, simply ends with her seeing some men coming in from the field to sit at the long white table in the welcoming heat of the kitchen.
“Just before the men came out of the field, a large faggot was flung on the fire;”
James Hogg: John Gray o’ Middleholm
“The coincidence was however too striking to be passed over without scrutiny. Even the wisest of men would have been struck with it, and have tried to find out some solution; and curious would I be to know what a wise man, in such a case, would have thought of the matter.”
…being the same within the oubliettes of postured literature itself, finding a ‘pose’ or ‘purse’ of value in the conjunction of leitmotifs to reveal the yearned-for and glistening gestalt. The often hilarious absurdity of John Gray’s quest, too, where the ‘column of air’ that the science of physics lays upon this needy man and makes treasure-hunting even more tempting, i.e. those caches that Abbots et al buried under stones, stones that John’s scrying of dreams could reveal. So, those columns of air then becoming pits that he dug with his bonnet of bonnets upon his head. His wife Tibby Stott and a half a dozen half-naked daughters, one of whom he is caught deshabille with.
And Tibby he spikes with a loom needle as part of a scrying dream or, later, he thinks she is a hare. Some stones he needs to turn up are spouted over in blood. One stone is shown to be three-cornered but it turns out to be a cobbler’s hat, so he digs the column of a pit beneath the cobbler’s feet! Till he realises that the cobbler was part of a dream that sent him there and that the cobbler’s dream sent him back home to 13 apple trees that he plumbs, and finds “**** ****”, the story’s own hidden spoiler. But of the ‘twa black craws’ — that is my own **** ****. “Queer dreams” and a sum of £213.12.6 — I scry the detailed and the broad sweep alike, the daft and the potentially sensible.
John’s gossiped-of madness is as wise as you take it to be. I feel I am wiser myself having read this relatively ancient work, despite its sporadic tranches of unscryable Scottish dialect that Borders on something not far from madness.
“…all clouted about the elbows and armpits,… […] He always wore a bonnet, and always the same bonnet, for ought that any one could distinguish. It was neither a broad nor a round bonnet, a Highland bonnet nor a Lowland bonnet, a large bonnet nor a small bonnet; nevertheless, it was a bonnet, and a very singular one too, for it was a long bonnet,…”
Front page version of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/16/james-hogg-john-gray-o-middleholm/
Cross-referenced with Zelenyj’s A Valley For Dorothy: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/alexander-zelenyj/#comment-1649
John Galt: The Howdie
Over the years I have leapfrogged works where I could not live with the dialect in which it is couched. This is the next in such a tradition, although I might have needed to work at its labour and given birth to a story for cherishing even if in such mutation of expression…
Yet when the dialect unclouds in the second half of this Midwife’s Tale …”… it behoves me to make an observe, that neither omen nor symptom occurs at a birth, by which any reasonable person or gossip present can foretell what the native, as the unchristened baby is then called, may be ordained to come through in the course of the future.”
This review continues here: https://nemonymous123456.wordpress.com/the-penguin-books-of-the-british-short-story/