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This story eventually found its way into Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory.  I haven’t read that yet.  ”Colette” is also sometimes titled “First Love.”  It is the memory Nabokov has of a summer trip taken in 1909, when he was 10.  The first two pages (of a four page story) take place on the train journey from St. Petersburg to Biarritz in southern France.  I kept waiting for Colette to show her face, but she doesn’t.  It turns out that is far from a bad thing.  In Nabokov’s hands, this train journey memory is magical.  For example:

It was marvelously exciting to move to the foot of one’s bed, with part of the bedclothes following, in order to undo cautiously the catch of the window shade, which could be made to slide only halfway up, impeded as it was by the edge of the upper berth.

Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp.  A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench.  Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices, somebody’s comfortable cough.  There was nothing particularly interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of its own accord.

There’s such lovely peace there in that night, “somebody’s comfortable cough.”  A decade later Nabokov’s life — all of Russia — would be in turmoil, but in 1909 they were still able to travel to France for a two-month vacation.  The details feel like memory; the reader feels the nostalgia and the comfort.

Colette, who is nine (and whose real name was Claude Deprès), finally arrives at the narrator’s side: “On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette.”  As often happens with young children, they jump right into friendship, having no reason to distrust one another.  Our narrator develops an innocent passion for the young girl:

Two years before, on the same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely, sun-tanned little daughter of a Serbian physician, but when I met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing.  Colette seemed to me so much stranger than all my other chance playmates at Biarritz!  I somehow acquired the feeling that she was less happy than I, less loved.

I like how the love is innocent; it certainly feels true and pure.  He loves playing beside her, he worries about her, he empathizes with her.  She must trust his love, for one day while looking at a starfish, he kissed him on the cheek:

So great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was “You little monkey!”

I kept wondering just what would happen to this young couple.  Naturally, this summer fling could not last forever.  They were too young to have any power to make it last beyond, yet it does last in Nabokov’s memory:

The leaves mingle in my memory with the leather of her shoes and gloves, and there was, I remember, some detail in her attire (perhaps a ribbon on her Scottish cap, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me then of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble.  I still seem to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it in, while she runs with her hoop ever faster around me and finally dissolves among the slender shadows cast on the gravelled path by the interlaced arches of its border.

This is a wonderful short story about an innocent love and its effect through the years.  An A+?  Well, I think “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” is the better of the two (I like Lolita quite a lot more than Catcher in the Rye, so that is not just a statement in support of the man who inspired this bi-weekly feature and its title), but it was such a pleasant read with some hearty sadness, perfect for a warm summer day when one doesn’t want to contemplate suicide.

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Because it takes place in the interior of this blog, I’m not sure everyone who would be interested is aware of the New Yorker fiction forum.  On the left-hand sidebar you can see the link to the forum’s main page, as well as the individual pages for the most recent five issues.  I do my best to stay on top of the weekly fiction, offering my thoughts and hopefully taking part in a larger discussion about what’s good and bad there.  The forum has been active since the first issue of 2010.  There are many great comments.  Not so many commenters recently, unfortunately.  Is it summer?  Have the lackluster stories put off readers?  Are people not getting what they want from the forum?  Perhaps any or a combination of those is the cause.

The good news is that any of you can help make it better (unless the problem really is the run of ho-hum stories — in that case, I’m afraid we’re in the hands of the editors).  Most of the fiction is available for free on The New Yorker website, and I’ve linked to them in the individual pages here.  If you’re ever interested in some generally good short stories and some always intriguing discussions about them, check out the forum and share your comments.

Furthermore, if you have suggestions for how to make the forum better, please leave your comments below or contact me via email if you don’t want to look critical in public.

Okay, on to the fiction.

There have been 31 pieces published so far this year.  The next half of 2010 will have less, I presume; three of the five double issues will be published, and we probably won’t see another issue featuring eight pieces of fiction as we did in the recent June 14 & 21 issue.  I’m hoping, however, that the latter half of 2010 has more top-tier stories.  I’m afraid the first half has only a dozen stories I thought were worth reading, perhaps a dozen that were mediocre — the rest I thought were quite awful.

Though my general impression of the first half of 2010 is that there was more mediocrity than anything, when I look at the individual titles, I must step back and remember just how superb a few of them were.  All in all, reading each issue was more than worth it.  Yes, I read Joshua Ferris’s “The Pilot” (which I still think was just thrown in because the magazine wanted something from him), but I also got to read Philip Meyer’s “What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone.”  Also, just as finding a superb short story by an unknown author might lead to a very rewarding relationship over the years, the bad ones eliminate any desires I might have had to explore that authors work.  Perhaps unfairly, but, hey, only so much time, etc.

So if I look at the first half of 2010 with those eyes, it has been a great six months.  Here are my favorites of the first half of 2010.  I’ve even tried to rank them.

1. Philip Meyer: “What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone” — I didn’t write much about this short story when I typed up my thoughts on it, but that isn’t because I didn’t like it.  As you can see, I think it’s the best of the years so far, and I’ve acquired his novel American Rust and can’t wait to see if it’s as great.  Sadly, this is the one story in this list that is not available for free online.
2. Allegra Goodman: “La Vita Nuova” — Strangely, I also didn’t write much about this story.  But I did put at the end, “This is what we read this magazine for.”  Hopefully that was enough to tempt some to read this great story.  I haven’t rushed out to read her other works though.
3. Nicole Krauss: “The Young Painters” — This is the last offering of this half of 2010, and I loved it.  I thought the writing exquisite.  I’ve heard from others that Krauss’s novels are superb in parts and other parts not quite.  I’m curious about how I’d feel.  From this story, I certainly am excited for her new book.
4. Claire Keegan: “Foster” — “Foster” has been a favorite of commenters.  In fact, the page devoted to “Foster” has had more hits than almost any other post on this blog — if you don’t count my Home Page, it is number five in all-time hits.  It’s an incredibly well written piece, very subtle and touching.
5. Jonathan Franzen: “Agreeable” — Despite the fact that I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read by Franzen, I can’t bring myself to read his novels.  Something tells me I’m going to be disappointed, though I like him a lot in these small doses.  However, this piece has convinced me to give up my baseless prejudice and read The Corrections — I’m just not sure when I’ll do that.
6. Jennifer Egan: “Ask Me If I Care” — After not enjoying, particularly, “Safari,” Egan’s first offering in 2010, I was surprised to find myself really enjoying “Ask Me If I Care,” which forms a part of her newly released novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.  I haven’t read that novel yet — haven’t got it yet — but I am intrigued.
7. Jeffrey Eugenides: “Extreme Solitude” — I look forward to anything I can get my hands on by Jeffrey Eugenides.  The Virgin Suicides made me a fan for life, so not even my disappointment in Middlesex could take that away.  This is a great short story that is derived from his future book.
8. Janet Frame: “Gavin Highly” — Some commenters didn’t like this story at all, but I couldn’t shake it.  I thought it was written so well and that it’s implicit reflection on story telling was superb.  The story telling, from the perspective of a six-year-old, completely covers up the horrors going on — well, almost covers up.

So if I stop griping about “The Pilot” and focus on these eight (and a few others) then I realize how much I’ve enjoyed this year’s fiction up to this point.  In the next 11 weeks we’ll see the stories submitted by the remaining 20 Under 40 authors.  Hopefully they’ll all be great.  Some I’m particularly looking forward to are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Adrian, Daniel Alarcón, Yiyun Li, and Karen Russell (though, really, I’m looking forward to them all).

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When the story opens, I thought it might be quirky and somewhat surreal, despite the fact that we learn up front that the main characer is just dreaming:

He dreamed his brother’s death at Fredericksburg.  General Burnside appeared as an angel at the foot of his bed to announce the tragedy: “The Amry regrets to inform you that your brother George Washington Whitman was shot in the head by a lewd fellow from Charleston.”  The General alit on the bedpost and drew his dark wings close about him, as if to console himself.

When the forty-ish Walt Whitman woke up (already the author of Leaves of Grass), he was so upset that he set off for Washington to search for his brother in the hospitals.  As it turns out, his brother is well:

A piece of shell pierced his wispy beard and scraped a tooth.  He spit blood and hot metal into his hand, put the shrapnel in his pocket, and later showed it to his worried brother, who burst into tears and clutched him in a bear hug when they were reunited in Captain Francis’s tent, where George sat with his feet propped on a trunk and a cigar stuck in his bandaged face.

But rather than return home, Whitman stayed in Washington and began helping out at the hospitals.  All of this is based on truth.  Upon seeing the name “G.W. Whitmore” listed as dead or wounded in the New York Tribune, Whitman feared it was actually his brother and went searching for him.  Whitman really did end up sticking around to help out.

As did “A Tiny Feast,” “Every Night for a Thousand Years” deals with a child facing death while the adults are powerless to put a stop to it and must simply show love.  Here we and Walt Whitman meet Henry “Hank” Smith, a wounded boy travelling as part of a transport Whitman is taking back to Washington.

With every jolt and shake of the train a chorus of horrible groans wafted through the cars.  He thought it would drive him insane.  What saved him was the singing of a boy with a leg wound.  The whole trip he sang in a rough voice indicative of tone-deafness.  His name was Henry Smith.  He’d come all the way from divided Missouri, and said he had a gaggle of cousins fighting under General Beauregard.  He sang “Oh! Susana” over and over again, and no one told him to be quiet.

Hank still has his leg only because he pointed his daddy’s pistol at the doctor about to cut it off.  His leg has been getting better at the hospital, but his fever keeps coming back.

This is a beautiful story, full of peaceful but lonely moments, like when Whitman wanders around Washington at night, going up and down the Mall, finding that he’s again at the foot of the Capitol, passing the President’s house where “[o]nce he saw a figure in a long, trailing black crêpe veil move, lamp in hand, past a series of windows, and he imagined it must be Mrs. Lincoln, searching forlornly for her little boy, who had died two winters ago.”  Whitman has dreams of California and comforts Hank with myths of that state.

Again, this is a beautiful story.  I have read only two pieces by Chris Adrian, and they have both been so strong, so well crafted in the way that you just can’t tell there’s a craft, so devestating and yet it’s that kind of devestation that makes you stop and look around in reverence.  Which brings to mind the apparent source of the title, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous quote:

If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!  But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smiles.

That glimpse at beauty that we take for granted, that beauty which if it came just once every thousand years would instill in us such a reverence for it — that is just what I’d say Adrian has captured here.

It’s obviously time for me to read more.

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This story did two things for me: (1) it made me want to get to know Stafford more — it’s an intriguing character portrait; (2) it made me think that neglecting Stafford might be like neglecting Edith Wharton — their style (at least, according to my limited perspective) is very similar and their dissection of New York society very acute.

The main character, Emma, is visiting the Metropolitan Museum on Sunday.  While there she almost panics when she sees an old acquaintance.  Here are the opening lines:

Through the wide doorway between two of the painting galleries, Emma saw Alfred Eisenburg standing before “The Three Miracles of Zenobius,” his lean, equine face ashen and sorrowing, his gaunt frame looking undernourished, and dressed in a way that showed he was poorer this year than he had been last.

There’s no sign of the panic there yet.  It doesn’t come for a while, actually.  We first get some interesting insights into Emma’s relationship with Alfred and, even more importantly, into Emma’s troubled heart:

Emma liked Alfred, and once, at a party some other year, she had flirted with him slightly for seven or eight minutes.  It had been spring, and even into that modern apartment, wherever it had been, while the cunning guests, on their guard and highly civilized, learnedly disputed on aesthetic and political subjects, the feeling of spring had boldly invaded, adding its nameless, sentimental sensations to all the others of the buffeted heart; one did not know and never had, even in devouring raptures of adolescence, whether this was a feeling of tension or of solution — whether one flew or drowned.

Still no sign of panic.  But soon we get this interesting sentence wherein we learn that something has happened to Emma relatively recently:

In another year, she would have been pleased to run into Alfred here in the Metropolitan on a cold Sunday, when the galleries were thronged with out-of-towners and with people who dutifully did something self-educating on the day of rest.

That line “in another year” is almost a repeat from above.  There is something that has made this year unlike any other year.  The encounter with Eisenburg has thrown off Emma’s plan.  This little outing to the Met was part of a bigger plan that resembles some sort of rehabilitation, but that plan has not only been thwarted but its goal is shown to be more distant than Emma hoped.

She paused because she could not decide what to look at now that she had been denied the Botticelli.  She wondered, rather crossly, why Alfred Eisenburg was looking at it and why, indeed, he was here at all.  She feared that her afternoon, begun in such a burst of courage, would not be what it might have been; for this second’s glimpse of him — who had no bearing on her life — might very well divert her from the pictures, not only becuase she was reminded of her ignorance of painting by the presence of someone who was (she assumed) versed in it but because her eyesight was not bound to be impaired by memory and conjecture, by the irrelevant mind-portraits of innumerable people who belonged to Eisenburg’s milieu.

Emma has withdrawn from society — not that it was her society to begin with.  She grew up where they could play hide-and-seek behind lilac bushes and not behind ash cans; these had a head start “because they had grown up in apartments, where there was nothing else to do but educate themselves.” 

This is only a glimpse at this story.  There are a few pages left where Emma looks at the others in the museum, in particular at some of the youths wandering around.  There are some powerful social dynamics going on, but this is played out in the Met and in the context of art and science and religion.  As I said above, the style and the precision reminded me of Edith Wharton.  The tone of the story isn’t lightened by Wharton’s wit and charm, but this particular one didn’t need that.  Certainly it is time to develop a relationship with Stafford.

Meaning to start at the beginning by reading “Two Old Tales About Women (Found in a Rattan Tea Caddy c. 1913),” published March 15, 1958, I instead accidentally picked up “Two Old Tales About Men and Women,” the second appearance of this strange series, published June 21, 1958.

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As the title suggests, there are two stories.  If you’ve read So Long, See You Tomorrow, a beautiful narrative by a man looking back on his youth, you might be surprised, as I was, by the way the first tale begins:

Once upon a time, there was a country so large that messengers journeying from the capital to the frontier were often never heard from again.

I wasn’t expecting the tale to be a kind of fable.  I had been expecting something lonely, something a bit more reflective.  But here the main character is the King who rules a land with no regard for time.  Everything that happens happens drawn out over hours or even years.

It took the King a long time to realize that something was wrong and another five years to consider carefully what he ought to do about it.  The council of state had not met since his father’s time, and when it finally convened, at his order, the King’s opening remarks took three weeks, after which the council adjourned and met again in the following autumn.

The solution to the problem (the coffers are empty and spending is going up) is to build a big marble watch.  Before the watch can be completed, though, the kingdom is overthrown by some enemy.  The King goes into hiding for a while, until finally news comes:

The enemy — never, it seemed, very large in number — had grown weary of subjugating so inactive a country, had provoked a war with another small neighboring state, and had not been heard of for nearly six months.

This is a strange little story, more strange because it just wasn’t what I expected from Maxwell or The New Yorker.  I don’t want to suggest it is slight, though, just because it takes the form of a fable.  Furthermore, the writing is top-notch, very fluid and very clever.

The second story is a bit more what I expected from Maxwell.  Here’s how it begins:

Once upon a time, there was a half-crazy woman who lived off the leavings of other people, who shook their heads when they saw her coming, and tried not to get in the conversation with her.  They wanted to be kind, but there is a limit to kindness, and the half-crazy woman was so distracted that anyone listening to her began to feel half-crazy, too.

It still has a friendly-narrator tone to the telling, but it is a bit darker, a bit lonelier and a bit more intimate than the first tale.  Here we watch the woman talk to her pig, the fire, and finally death, yet this is a strangely intimate tale.  It kind of felt warm, like a good holiday story.

I don’t want to talk much about the stories themselves.  They are very short and to summarize them is to simplify them and take the pleasure out of Maxwell’s voice.  What I’d like to find out is what Maxwell’s motive was?  Why did he publish two series of these tales which read like fables, one in 1958 and one in 1965?  I’m anxious to read the others, and I hope to get a better idea about the work as a whole.  If anyone has any insights, they are very welcome.

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Despite the quantity of stories, it is possible to get through them all relatively quickly.  Most are incredibly short, perhaps less than a page.  Barthelme is known for these short short fictions.  For me, the length of these pieces is important because Barthelme is also known as a postmodernist writer.  I can stand much postmodern writing, if I’m in the mood – but I can actually enjoy it when it comes in small doses.  Somehow it doesn’t feel as gimmicky at that point.

Well, let me introduce the story in the same way I was introduced to it.

How do you want to cook this fish?  How do you want to cook this fish?  Harris asked.

What?

Claire heard: How do you want to cook this fish?

Breaded, she said.

What?

Fine!

Obviously this isn’t going to be a positive look at affection.  Claire and Harris are married, at least, they are married in this first section — some might say fragment.  While this discussion on fish is going on, Claire is thinking, “We have not slept together for three hundred nights.”  Claire calls her mother who says, “They go through phases.  As they get older.  They have less tolerance for monotony.”  Claire thinks, “I’m monotony?”

The next section (fragment) is short.  I’ll just be liberal in my quoting here:

Sarah decided that she and Harris should not sleep together any longer.

Harris said, What about hugging?

What?

Hugging.

Sarah said that she would have a ruling on hugging in a few days and that he should stand by for further information.  She pulled the black lace mantilla down to veil her face as they left the empty church.

I have done the right thing the right thing.  I am right.

It is not possible (I don’t think) to follow this story from beginning to end.  At first it seems obvious: Harris is having an affair with Sarah.  Claire is being neglected, and their marriage appears to have already failed.  In the next two fragments, Claire visits an old pianist and Harris visits a clairvoyant.  Then, suddenly, there’s this:

Sarah calls Harris from a clinic in Detroit and floors him with the news of her “miscarriage.”  Saddened by the loss of the baby, he’s nevertheless elated to be free of his “obligations.”  But when Harris rushes to declare his love for Claire, he’s crushed to learn that she is married to Phillip.  Hoping against hope that Harris will stay with her, Sarah returns.  Harris is hung over from drinking too much the night before when Sarah demands to know if he wants her.  Unable to decide at first, he yields to Sarah’s feigned helplessness and tells her to stay.

And this is just the beginning of a long list of non sequiturs.  Strangely, somehow, I have no idea how, the feelings come together in the end and when we look back we can see the whole of the landscape we’ve just traversed.  Its elements don’t fit together when one placed next to another.  It is not explicit, but there is so much manipulation and spite going on these few pages with these three miserable characters (four if you count the clairvoyant; the pianist actually seems quite content — or perhaps he just doesn’t expect much now that he’s an old pianist).  It’s a mess of feeling and a complete mess of narrative — but it works.

It all comes together (that’s not to say the non sequiturs make sense) in a final ambiguous scene.  Well, the scene is not actually that ambiguous.  It has happiness on its surface, but underneath is a lot of pain.

This story packed a punch.  Though it was not my favorite by any means, it amply returned my investment.  Since his pieces are so short, I’ll definitely be revisiting him again soon!  Thanks KFC for recommending Barthelme to me.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

The only other Spark novel I’d read was The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie.  However, though there are some slight thematic similarities, The Driver’s Seat is not at all what I’d have expected from the writer of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  This one is hellishly dark.

There are several stylistic similarities, though.  In both, Spark eschews foreshadowing and, early on, discloses information about the characters’ fates.  For example, in The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie we learn almost at the beginning that,

Mary Mcgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famour for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire . . .

Similarly, in The Driver’s Seat Spark gives us an unflattering portrait of a character — the central character here — and lets us know that we won’t be with her for too long:

Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull.  Her lips are a straight line.  She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking.  Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, party by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.

And, just in case the reader didn’t catch the meaning of that “identikit” (which, incidentally, is the name of the film based on The Driver’s Seat, starring Elizabeth Taylor as Lise), Spark doesn’t keep us in the dark for long:

She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.

Knowing that Lise will be dead the next morning doesn’t offer much light on the story, though.  We don’t know who will commit the murder.  Throughout the day Lise will meet several brutal men, and we will keep wondering, “Is it him?”  But even if we did know who the murderer was early on, we would still have no idea why.  And that is the crux of this story: why does this woman end up dead the next morning?

So we know the story won’t end happily.  But, the story doesn’t begin happily either.  Lise is going on a holiday, and she’s trying to find the perfect dress.  Just when she thinks she’s found one, the sales clerk tells her it is made of that new stain-resistant material.  Lise freaks out, giving us our first clue early on that Lisa is just not a stable person.  This is not a comical scene, either; it’s uncomfortable to read.  Spark has us in her control immediately, and her confidence is apparent without getting in the way.

Finally, Lise does find an awful dress she likes and goes to the airport.  She keeps telling people that she’s going on holiday and that her boyfriend is waiting for her at the other end.  However, we get the sense that she doesn’t know who this man is yet, only that she will know him when she sees him.  And, just as in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we get Jean’s common refrain “I am in my prime” whenever she defends herself, in The Driver’s Seat we get “he’s not my type” with almost everyone Lise meets.

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The chapter on the airplane is strange.  Honestly, throughout the novel I felt I was reading something by Roberto Bolaño.  People just kept doing strange things for no apparent reason.  It’s unsettling.  It’s also at this point when we meet, Bill, one of the most unsettling characters in the novel:

Lise’s left-hand neighbor smiles.  The loudspeaker tells the passengers to fasten their seat-belts and refrain from smoking.  Her admirer’s brown eyes are warm, his smile, as wide as his forehead, seems to take up most of his lean face.  Lise says, audibly above the other voices on the plan, ‘You look like Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother.  Do you want to eat me up?’

If you’ve seen the Elizabeth Taylor film, then you cannot get this image out of your mind.  Bill is just creepy as he stares, almost salivating, at Lise.  He’s on a macrobiotic diet, always eschewing Yin for Yang.  On his diet he is required to have one orgasm per day.  He will pester Lise through much of the book.  If he doesn’t, he has to make up for it the next.  And it gets stranger:

The engines rev up.  Her ardent neighbour’s widened lips give out a deep, satisfied laughter, while he slaps her knee in applause.  Suddenly her other neighbour looks at Lise in alarm.  He stares, as if recognizing her, with his brief-case on his lap, an dhis hand in the position of pulling out a batch of papers.  Something about Lise, about her exchange with the man on her left, has casued a kind of paralysis in his act of fetching out some papers from his brief-case.  He opesn his mouth, gasping and startled, staring at her as if she is someone he has known and forgotten and now sees again.  She smiles at him; it is a smile of relief and delight.  His hand moves again, hurriedly putting back the papers that he had half-drawn out of his brief-case.  He trembles as he unfastens his seat-belt and makes as if to leave his seat, grabbing his brief-case.

Throughout the book, Spark has her characters flashforward a day, and we see them answering questions about Lise for police reports.  Here’s what the man who abandoned his seat says:

On the evening of the following day he will tell the police quite truthfully, ‘The first time I saw her was at the airport.  Then on the plane.  She sat beside me.’

‘You never saw her before at any time?  You didn’t know her?’

‘No, never.’

‘What was your conversation on the plane?’

‘Nothing.  I moved my seat.  I was afraid.’

‘Afraid?’

‘Yes, frightened. I moved to another seat, away from her.’

‘What frightened you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why did you move your seat at that time?’

‘I don’t know.  I must have sensed somehting.’

‘What did she say to you?’

‘Nothing much.  She got her seat-belt mixed with mine.  Then she was carrying on a bit with the man at the end seat.’

Unlike a Bolaño novel, however, this one does begin to resolve itself, and we begin to connect the dots in the narrative.  Ultimately, it is a sad novel displaying emptiness.  And, in one final effort to compare this one to The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie: I think The Driver’s Seat is better.

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The story begins:

She bought the teacup in 1939, of all years.

Hah!  Another reason I went for the 1970s was an attempt to see a piece of fiction a bit more distant from World War II.  It’s not that I don’ t like that fiction — I love it — it was more to get some variety in the dates of these features and to see the themes arising at different parts of the century.  Of course, the War has been at least a shadow is so much fiction since 1939.  Of course, in 1976 in particular, as the mother in the story says, “It wasn’t that long ago.”  “Look at a Teacup,” however, is still a product of the 1970s, a time when social mores were changing rapidly and yet where this narrator — a daughter, trying to connect in some way to her mother — feels a strong pull to the past.

We soon learn that the narrator’s mother was married in 1939 (“Even on sale, it was an extravagance as far as her new in-laws were concerned; it set her apart.”).  The narrator is unmarried (“Some people just don’t want to get married — I know that,” she says broadmindedly.  But she knows I’m saying marriage isn’t there anymore; the flowered flannel nightgown isn’t being hung on a peg in a closet next to a pair of striped pajamas anymore.”).  From that date — 1939 — the daughter contemplates the passing years — for a teacup.  We get what must be one of the most beautiful, evocative descriptions of a teacup ever.  But the teacup isn’t really the point.  It is “a detail, a small uncharred finger from the mid-century bonfire.”  There are no embedded photographs (other than the comics), but the subtle emotion-laden description of an object while keeping in mind the passage of time reminded me of W.G. Sebald:

In the cup, amid the bundle of pastel falling flowers at the bottom of the bowl there is another firm, thin gold circlet.  It shines up just below the most deeply submerged flower, like a shoreline submerged by a momentary tide of morning tea.  The engulfed flowers become oranges and violets — those colors.  Above the tea-line there are green leaves and several jots of blue flowers, not deep and bright like cornflowers but a powdery, toneless blue, a monochrome without shadow or cloud.  Also, there is the shape of the flowers.  Some are plump, all curve and weight.  There is a pale lavender rose on the saucer, with a rounded, balled-up cabbage head of petals; and on the opposite side a spiky, orange dahlia-like flowers.  None of the flowers looks real.  They are suggestions, pale, almost unfinished, with occasional sparks of brightness, like a replica of memory itself.  There is a slur of recollection about them, something imprecise, seductive, and foggy but held together with a bright bolt of accuracy — perhaps a piercing glance from a long-dead uncle, whose face, all the features, has otherwise faded and gone.

There is an interesting contrast between the mother and the daughter.  The daughter is constantly looking back — “everything drives me into the past that she insists is safely gone.”  The mother insists that “you can’t keep going over things . . . It’s the flow of life that counts.”  And the mother isn’t being coy.  She really doesn’t seem to think she has much to offer:

I try to get her to talk about her life, but she won’t do that.  It’s not that she thinks I’m prying.  “Well, honey, what do you want to know?” she says.  “I mean, what’s there to say?”

And there’s this wonderful line, coming after the wonderful details of the teacup: “Her details don’t add up to a life story.”  There is a lot going on in this very short story — passage of time, mother/daughter relationship, generational gaps, war, marriage, family – and it is all beautifully written.  Highly recommended.  So far, my efforts to find “classic” New Yorker fiction for the Clock at the Biltmore have been paying off.

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If you’ve read this story, you will understand my confusion upon reading the first line of this story about Catholic priests.  If you haven’t read the story, here it is:

I had spent most of the afternoon mousing — a matter of sport with me and certainly not of diet — in the sunburnt fields that begin at our back door and continue hundreds of miles into the Dakotas.

I was thrilled.  Not only is the writing great, but realizing that this story was going to be told by a cat . . .

That cat is Fritz.  For years he has been the favorite of Father Malt, a leading priest in the parish.  “Favorite” is not limited to “favorite cat.”  It is apparent to all that Fritz is Father Malt’s favorite companion, and Fritz enjoys certain benefits for this.

At least I was late late coming to dinner, and so my introduction to the two missionaries took place at table.  They were surprised, as most visitors are, to see me take the chair at Father Malt’s right.

This story was delightful.  Fritz is an exceptional narrator (this story alone suggests to me that Powers really is criminally neglected).  While showing us the petty struggles of these priests, Fritz gives us great descriptions of the parish and of its inhabitants.

As Father Malt was the heart, they were the substance of a parish that remained rural while becoming increasingly suburban.  They dressed up occasionally and dropped into St. Paul and Minneapolis, “the Cities,” as visiting firemen into Hell, though it would be difficult to imagine any other place as graceless and far-gone as our own hard little highway town — called Sherwood but about as Sylvan as a tennis court.

Of course, given the title, not all is going well for Fritz.  At that table where Fritz sits proudly next to his master, eating from the table, also sits Father Burner, a jealous priest.

My observations of humanity incline me to believe that one of us — Burner or I — must ultimately prevail over the other.  For myself, I should not fear if this were a battle to be won on the solid ground of Father Malt’s affections.  But the old man grows older, the grave beckons to him ahead, and with Burner pushing him from behind, how long can he last?  Which is to say: How long can I last?

Unfortunately for Fritz, Father Malt will be absent for three days, a Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, returning again on Tuesday morning (religious imagery or references are used throughout, though this is not your typical religious story).  In this time, Fritz discovers another enemy in the form of Father Philbert.  The two priests conspire to rid themselves of this cat.  Their plan is startlingly brutal: they will beat Fritz while holding a crucifix up to him.  When Father Malt returns, they will tell him the cat is possessed, proving their point when Fritz flees at the sight of the crucifx.

I had no appetite for the sparrows hopping from tree to tree above me, but there seemed no way to convince them of that.  Each one, so great is his vanity, thinks himself eminently edible.  Peace, peace, they cry, and there is no peace.

Definitely a classic story from a nearly forgotten author.  Fortunately, there is a limited but fruitful body of work awaiting.

Irwin Shaw’s ”Preach on the Dusty Roads” was published on August 22, 1942, less than a year after the United States entered World War II.  I didn’t know it when I started reading the story, but its primary concern is World War II.  In fact, more than “I Am Waiting,” which was kind of a satire, “Preach on the Dusty Roads” threatens to be a sentimental call to action.  Another interesting part of going through old issues of The New Yorker?  Looking at the cover art through the century.  You pretty much always know what part of the century you’re in:

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Irwin Shaw published nearly three dozen stories in The New Yorker between 1937 and 1955.  I selected one from roughly the middle, though I was tempted by “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.”  It’s easy to see why he was so often published.  “Preach on the Dusty Roads” begins beautifully.  I have marked almost the entire section as material I should find a way to quote here.  Of course, I won’t do that, but it is hard to pick out what to pull.  Well, here’s the first paragraph:

Nelson Weaver sat at his desk and wrote, “Labor . . . Bridgeport plant . . . 1,435,639.77.”  Then he put his sharply pointed, hard pencil down among the nine other sharply pointed, hard pencils arrayed in severe line on the right side of the shining desk, below the silver-framed photograph of his dead wife.

We already have a good idea about Nelson Weaver’s personality, and Shaw helps us feel the tedium and melancholy with a few well chosen details placed side by side in a long sentence.  Nelson is an accountant in some Manhattan firm.  He takes some time out of his work to look out his window.  Below him are a few buildings that sit between him and the Hudson River.  When I read the story, I was sitting in my own Manhattan office, which overlooks the Hudson.  I was, in fact, taking a break from reading accounting reports (thankfully, I don’t prepare them).  I wonder who could describe my life and demeanor in such a succinct sentence.  And, after reading this next passage, I wondered how a masterful sentence about my own work would sound; the rhythm here is superb, the tedious job changed into an art:

The tax sheets for Marshall & Co., Valves and Turbines, were nearly done.  He had sat at this desk for thirty-five days, working slowly and carefully, from time to time deliberately putting down a number on a page, like Cézanne with his six strokes a day on a water color, until the huge, elaborate structure of Marshall & Co.’s finances, which reached from bank to bank and country to country, from Wilmington, Delaware, where it was incorporated, to Chungking, China, where it sold electrical equipment to Chiang Kai-shek — until all this sprawling, complex history of money paid and money gained and credit offered and rejected and profit and loss, palpable and impalpable, was laid bare and comprehensible on five short pages of his clean accountant’s figures.

The already energetic prose — surprisingly energetic considering we are reading about a hyper-organized accountant just finishing up a tax report — builds with intensity as Nelson keeps looking at the clock.  It turns out he is waiting for Robert to come along.  We get a report at 10:35.  A few paragraphs later we get to 10:40; then 10:43.  And if we didn’t already feel sorry for Nelson, Shaw starts to let us see just how this job has affected him:

10:47.  No Robert yet.  Nelson put down the paper because the figures were beginning to jump before his eyes.  More and more frequently, he found that happening to him.  Well, along with the waistline that grew an inch a year and the tendency to wake at five in the morning and his lack of shock at overhearing people calling him a middle-aged gentleman, that had to be expected of a man who had led a quiet, rather unhealthy life at a desk and was now over fifty . . .

Robert, it turns out, is Nelson’s son.  He comes into Nelson’s office wearing his new lieutenant’s uniform.  Most of the remainder of the story describes their travel to Grand Central Station where, sometime after noon, Robert is going to get on a train that will begin his journey into the war where he will command five medium tanks.  The son has performance anxiety:

“Thirty tons apiece, with a crew of four men.  They represent an investment of God knows how many hundred thousand bucks.  And I’ve got to tell them to start, stop, go here, kindly demolish that hot-dog stand to the left, would you be so good as to put six shells into that corset-and-lingerie shop five blocks down the street.  It was easy enough in maneuvers.  But in the real thing . . .”  he grinned widely.  “The faith the U.S. government has in me!  I’m going to develop a beautiful case of stagefright.”

While waiting for the train, father and son sit down to eat.  Again we get a glimpse of honorable and yet how pathetic Nelson is, even in the eyes of his son.

“When I was your age,” Nelson said, “I ate just like that.”

And suddenly Robert had looked at him very soberly, as though seeing his father twenty years old — and loving him — and seeing the long years that came after with pride and pity . . . .

It isn’t that Nelson has done anything wrong in his life.  He’s a hard worker.  He’s successfully raised a family.  He’s dedicated.  His son looks up to him and sees some great strength.  What creates the pity, what underlies the whole story, is the great sense of loss when we consider Nelson’s life in that office overlooking the Hudson.  It’s a remarkably well-written peace.  Even if the general topic is simple (and it has been done more creatively in Cheever’s brilliant “The Swimmer”), the way Shaw puts it together is nuanced and nice to read — I only thought of “The Swimmer” afterwards.  But then comes the final section where a roar of fury erupts from Nelson, and we move away from the general theme to how the immediacy of the war interacts with the hours in the office.  Here’s a snippet:

I worked, and it wasn’t easy, and I was poor for a long time, and only the poor know how hard it is to stop being poor . . . . I worked . . . . Nonsense!  I’m guilty . . . .  I should’ve been out stopping this . . . . I am nearly the same age as Hitler.  He could do something to kill my son . . . .I should’ve been doing something to save him.

It’s still great writing on a sentence level, but the problem now is that it’s hard to know whether it’s Nelson or Shaw whose doing the speaking.  At the end of a subtle story we get this rant which fits with the character only slightly.  Nelson’s son’s departure is brought up in the rant, as you see, but only as a means to bring about this worry, this fit of indignation, and it doesn’t feel quite genuine.  This is more a bit of preaching — or, actually, condemning — from Shaw himself.  I’m definitely a reader who doesn’t like a message to be conveyed that pretends to be universal, and its even worse when the writer abandons the story to purvey it.  I like to take my characters and their stories as individual cases, individual explorations of humanity.  I believe fiction should seek to enrich, not to prove.  If I feel reproved, good — but let it be because of how the story itself affected me and not because the writer was preachy.  Here Shaw seems to have diverted from his character to prove a point.  Unfortunately this renders the character false because it appears that the character was derived from the predetermined ending of the story and not the other way around.

Perhaps I was feeling overly sensitive since I could easily relate to Nelson’s worklife.  The truth is, I see value in that viewpoint — believe me, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that there are important things to do out there that I and many others are not a part of because work demands we engage with things as seemingly silly as recording depreciation and amortization.  I could have come to that conclusion on my own from the subtleties and conversations introduced in the first 4/5ths of the story.