Essential Stories – V.S. Pritchett
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The Modern Library, New York 2005
Selected by Jeremy Treglown
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
A seeming,y demented common woman with her eponymous sack, imagining a monocled General and orange gardens in Valencia, as she dreamcatches her lights in Piccadilly – sometimes lights are bodily innards like lungs, though? cOVID-19? Coronavirus? A plague upon lights. And golden circles like orange spheres? A “ballet into nothing”, or VOID…
“…people’s faces bobbed up and down like Chinese lanterns.”
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
– Ovid, Heroides
“She, fey and war-like, was waving her twig.”
This story is a real discovery! Rarely published? The two members of a long-married childless couple, he a rent collector, sleep in separate rooms, and talk to each other through the wall or via the open doors before going to sleep. Open doors, but did he lock the gate outside to where the windfall apples clustered? He said, yes he locked the gate. So poetically astonishing the observations of conversation and of their anxieties and of their falling asleep images, later disturbed by truly eerie events, like strange men walking through their rooms or at best dreams, intent on the apples that had thumped and thumped from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Apple Tree, or horses as holy hokum equine spirits or children of his ambitions beyond rent collecting? The gate was left open, after all, by him, or God had later opened it surreptitiously? Who rents what from Heaven? The last is a serious question.
“He didn’t wear a hat. He gave me a look and I gave him a look. I didn’t like the look of him. And he didn’t like the look of me.”
And if you don’t wear a hat you can’t raise it for a passing hearse. Even for a hearse carrying a coffin with yourself in it! This is a highly poignant story of the narrator – a travelling salesman whose father is an undertaker – a narrator staying at a hotel, getting off with the girl receptionist who wants to get out of such downtrod hotel life, then they are both stalked by her boy friend on his motor bike, followed by a lot of twists and turns (one of them deadly traffic) that take me back to how I started this review. A mutual cross-reference of the dead and the living, the loved and the loved, even if both were unloved when compared with life’s aspiration of moving on for the better. Staccato, deadpan and naive. An essential story. With a sense of wry humour.
“Hearses are funny things to drive.”
“‘Nobody have any soup. I want soup. Nobody soup,’ he said sadly to the proprietor.”
Great short stories, it seems to me, always have a brush with NEAR-Absurdism. A brush with a brush with the deadpan truth and the disarmingly idiosyncratic as it were. Here seven men have a reunion in and we are told of their various quirks and style of personality. And the dinner party tale of one of them drowning in his pyjamas. Or did I get that wrong?
“We agreed with what he said. We all stood up and, by our private parts, swore that he was right. It was one of the evils of Spain.”
“At Carragh-cross road the signpost stood emptily gesticulating like some frightened speaker with the wind driving back the words into his mouth, and the two roads dangling from its foot.”
And, in Ireland amid the troubles, extroverted Micky visiting, until his money runs out, for a year or so, visiting his introverted brother Charlie (Micky, as a Canadian, being a fighter with the British during the World War) had shot down the Holy Ghost thinking it was a bird. Charlie arguably a coward by staying in Ireland, by being sick.
And whose enemy was whose? A tale of two brothers and the dog Micky gives Charlie, snatched away, a tale that is darker than the darkest tale you might read in any fiction genres, even in the darkest genres that there are. Or is the word somber, not dark? The brothers’ respective introversion and extroversion are far deeper and more wayward than these two clinical words – that I have probably misused – portend.
It takes a drinking schoolmaster to transcend the knots – until you realise that ‘schoolmaster’ is an old nickname not an occupation.
“All his life he had waited, to stand in all his stature and fullness, attending the Passion.”
The Passchendaele, too? This is the powerful story of Calvert the clerk, his head bent like cobblers, carpenters and mechanics, taken to the trenches, where a bullet makes his head upright permanently. So he stays metaphorically with head bent as he is incapable of doing worthwhile jobs. The reader is one of the Angels in their story, as Calvert did have an initial brush with Heaven at least by being in this work, and the reader judges this irony of a story for what it truly is. A lowly yet open culvert, one for the flow of truth and honour.
I’ve cheated for once, as about the next story I quote directly from someone (Yiyun Li) who seems to know a lot more than me about what the power of short stories is all about…
This review is written by the greatest hair barber I’ve ever met, where shaving is tantamount to gestalt real-time reviewing………
[[The story is short—six pages, written in first person. It opens when the narrator, waiting in a small town for a train that was not to come, spots a barbershop and decides to have a haircut. Other than this one impromptu decision, we learn nothing more about the narrator himself for the rest of the story. But what propels a man to enter a barber’s shop when his should be waiting for the train to leave the town? Already it is described as “a dead place,” and “ten miles from this town the skeletons of men killed in a battle eight centuries ago had been dug up on the Downs.”
Once in the barbershop, the narrator serves entirely as ears and eyes for the readers. In the barber’s chair is a sickly-looking young man, grim as the town seems to be. But wait, there’s also the barber himself, who, despite not speaking to his customer, is efficient and dutiful and contented with his job. “A peculiar look of amused affection was on his face as he looked down at the soaped head.” And when the customer was gone, “the barber was smiling to himself like a man remembering a tune.”
A happy man! As one can easily make a happy man talk, the narrator, with a few questions, is able to make the barber tell a triangle love story. But is it the narrator’s accomplishment? The more the barber talks, the more the readers realize that no, the narrator could be any stranger from out of town—the barber has been waiting for the moment to recount his tale of triumph all along. The narrator only surrenders himself when loneliness drives him into the barbershop.
And the story of triumph in love—how the barber beat his best friend to marry a girl they both courted—is an old story, and the barber, a good storyteller as Pritchett himself was, does not dwell on his success but more on his friend’s deterioration in his lost battle. First he tried to poison the barber, and when that failed, the friend sent the couple “the best man’s present” by slitting his throat, but that effort failed, too.
“Funny present,” the barber said. The couple lived happily ever after, with the friend coming to visit all the time, playing with their children. “The only thing is he doesn’t like shaving himself now,” the barber said of his friend. “I have to go over every morning and do it for him. I never charge him.”
The story is over. It’s time for the narrator to exit the barber shop. A short story is always like that, showing you the way out before you are ready, closing the door behind you, but only when you hurry down the platform to catch the train do you realize that the story has taken part of you hostage: the barber in with his bemused smile; the slowly-dying friend who feels the touches of the barber’s hands every day. “Where’s the hope?” bemoaned my young student, and not knowing how to make him feel better, I gave him a very American answer. “The hope,” I said, “is with the title of the story—You Make Your Own Life.”]]
YIYUN Li
http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2010/09/17/yiyun-li-a-razor-sharp-vs-pritchett-story/
My own review, in 2009, of Yiyun Li’s own PAVILION about a flu epidemic – a subject that seems very apt today!
Pavilion by Yiyun Li
“He was a singer, and he sang for them every morning…”
I feel this is a fascinating fable concerning the coming ‘flu pandemic. An interesting contrast between the different permanences – with the possibility of young people dying before old. And, like the first story, the reader needs to impute death as a refined palimpsest of the spirit. But not really palimpsest this time, but karaoke.
And I wonder if ‘pavilion’ is rooted in ‘papillon’? The women to whom the man sang were kind enough archetypically to safeguard the chrysalis until he flew away and left its ‘tent’ behind…? (16 July 09 – 3 hours later)
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/anonthology/
“‘Do you like spotted dick?’ So it was.”
An amazing rolling story as if the town and countryside has worse disorientation than the sea whence the sailor has been invalided out. The sailor comes to the narrator’s bungalow, neighbouring a bungalow where the so-called Colonel’s Daughter lives, with her bathtub of empties. A but nympho in her way, I guess, but was it left unsaid that our narrator, in her sights, did like more than just dick for his pudding? Being a book reviewer has its own Temptation just as the lost or led astray sailor has his own temptations, but I am tempted to say that these three characters make a right rollicking story that, in turn, also makes light of anything – even of a just spotted plague, I guess. None of us reach Whitechapel, perhaps.
A story of a seventy years old husband and wife, facing the hopelessness of past habits, not helped by the recurrent air raids, now with a visit from their 40 year old son. The mother wants all three of them to be together again as in the idyllic, more hopeful past. I was an only child, too, now 72, and her feelings affect me deeply. She feels her personal entropy of hopelessness equally deeply. Meanwhile, the father still has his faith, his faith in his belongings and no doubt in his God, that the air raids won’t harm them – and the mother surreptitiously shows the son all the father’s treasures, some quite gratuitous, including his sole favourite painting of Daniel in the eponymous den. I know what that means, without knowing exactly what it does mean to the father here. I do not have the same faith as this father, but I have my own treasures, these books I read and publicly build into a Gestalt, and my photos of frozen time, of time still happening around me, at least for the moment. A life changing as well as a life affirming story, despite its moving perceptions of sadness and angst.
“Mr. Timberlake went upstairs to wash his hands.”
Later he steams in the hot sun having been dunked in the river when his show-off punting went wrong! Meanwhile, Timberlake is a religious lecturer, and in many ways, reminds me of Michingthorpe in William Trevor’s ‘A Friend in the Trade’ (a story I happened to review this very morning here) – Timberlake being a flaccid, wide-eyed and dull innocent, an inculcator who has had the instinct of any Error (Evil) removed from his consciousness. He visits the youthful narrator who has the maturity to experience doubt about the Purity of Timberlake’s religion, a religion that had already been inculcated into the narrator’s soul by his family, despite an ‘ape’ of doubt that often made visitations to tarnish such certainty in the narrator. Timberlake’s accident on the river is not conducive to infallibility; however this feeling is tempered by the vision of a gold leaf saint from religious painting, when crushed buttercups start attaching themselves to Timberlake’s sodden suit when he laid down in a meadow to dry out! This is an adeptly devastating satire upon unthinking religions – yet I admired the poignant Error or Timberlake’s Ways, as a sort of rough justice that was done to Christ? Perhaps, this story’s subtitle should have been ‘The Angel Ape’s Annunciation’.
“‘The mine of the past,’ he said. ‘The dark mine of the past.’”
Miss Freshwater’s niece returns after 25 years to a place where she, the niece, once lived — to clear out her aunt’s house, and is picked up at the railway station by a forward taxi-driver called Robert, as if she is instinctively ‘captured’ (as can only work within the truth of instinctively inspired fictions such as this one) and he relishes burning things and using the house’s proudly special wheelbarrow towards bonfires, good fires, to help her clear the house, wherein she is steeped in regretful vanities and sadnesses of memory, turning over papers and photos, and she listens to Robert’s own backstory, his wild youth and the disaster in the mine now making him a lay tub-thumping preacher in a local Mission, the marquee of which can be seen from the house. That is just a skeleton of the story, and there is much more to hang on to it – of resignations and clumsy overtures and oblique sincerities between the two of them. The wheelbarrow is a recurring leitmotif for some emotion or possibility I continue to keep on not quite putting my finger upon. Or not quite putting the whole of me upon. Until it tips me out at the end. They must have used wheelbarrows, I guess, to clear the way to get Robert out of mine.
“‘…You don’t know anything about life when you’re young and when you are old it’s too late…’”