Elliot's Reading Week of 8-8-21: Short stories by Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, Joyce

 Elliot’s Reading - Week of 8-8-21

R.V. Cassill chose only one Ernest Hemingway story for his Norton Anthology of Short Stores - not sure why, as EH had, with the possible exception of Joyce, the greatest influence on American short fiction in the 20th century. That said, his selection, the much-anthologized Hills Like White Elephants, aptly shows EH’s enigmatic, terse prose style at its best. The story, in 3 or 4 pp., shows us about an hour in life of an American couple waiting for a train at a remote depot in Spain - an express bound for Madrid. The first half of the story, which EH tells mostly in dialog, seems mundane and uneventful, except that these two consume an enormous about of alcohol before boarding the train; the wife makes a observation that the hills in the distance look like white elephants, the husband notes that he’s never seen white elephants, no why should you?, his wife says. This becomes a mantra for them: We sense that their relationship is built on her awry observations and his dismissal of them - this will not end well. And then we get a hint as to where they’re headed and why: One of them, the woman I think, is to undergo some kind of medical procedure - it seems  like she’s facing an elective procedure that will render her sterile. This is obviously a huge, risky, life-altering decision and they seem to be doing all they can talk talk in enigmas and to deaden their sense w/ drink. An outsider waiting for this train would notice nothing awry, but EH brings us right into this marriage and in just a few lines we see everything that’s gone wrong for these two - yet leaving us, mysteriously - as he does in so many stories - with no clear answers or resolution: Who are they? What are they facing and why? What brings them to this place, this land? What will become of them? 

As everybody, at least of my age, has already read Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery (in the Cassill Norton anthology), it’s impossible for the story today to have the same shock it would have had on its initial publication (1948), it’s still an amazing story of creepiness and fright - reaching back in style to of course Hawthone (the ostracism, the occultism, the community gone mad - see early post on Young Goodman Brown, ditto Scarlet Letter) and forward such dystopian/religio fanatic works at Handmaid’s Tale - but still it stands on its own, a terrific piece of writer economy. And what’s the point? I think there’s more to it than the frightening evocation of this deathly Lottery and its results; especially in light of the recent Jackson bio and more recent publication of her collected (selected?) letters, we see her as a writer who in many ways felt like a social and intellectual outcast, living as “faculty wife” in a small community in Vermont, far from her home (which maybe was a plus). She was great at creepiness and horror - Haunting of Hill House, the book not the limpid miniseries -was frightening to read and at just the boundary of the credible - but in light of what we know of her and her struggles for success and acceptance plus her rejection/exploitation by her husband - we can see this story as a psychological masterpiece, a look into the torment of an outcast soul. 

Cassill wisely included 3 stories by James Joyce in his Norton 

anthology of Short Fiction. Along w/ Hemingway, Joyce had the greatest influence on the course, style, subject matter of 20th century short fiction, and his work would be revered today (maybe even more so) had he stopped at the end of Dubliners, restless soul that he was. Two of the selections in the anthology are good representations of JJ’s style and mode: Araby, about a young man who wants to get to the local fair to buy a trinket for an (older?) woman on whom he has a secret crushing; nothing works out well. Didn’t Updike pick this theme up on one of his early stories? The second, A Little Cloud, is about a she and timid young man who goes out for drinks with his boisterous, self-important friend - a man who’s seemingly made it big in London journalism, who is bullish and condescending, and whom we can see through in an instant. The story ends with the timid man heading home to wife and children, feeling remorse and regret, but whose life is the better? The third story is unassailable, as The Dead is widely revered as perhaps the greatest short story (it’s not really that short) ever written. On the surface, its a richly detailed period piece, an meticulous account of an xmas eve gathering at the home of three elderly, unmarried, highly musical sisters - though the narrative focuses closely on Gabriel, the nephew, a big presence, an honored guest, a fatuous man who believes he’s much more dynamic, intelligent, and perceptive than his peers. For most of the story, it seems to be a cinematic re-creation of this one night of music, dancing, dining, and many little social cuts and insults - most notably the woman who taunts Gabriel for writing book reviews in an English-based newspaper and for failure to recognize or even take interest in his Irish heritage. She pierces his balloon so to speak, but she a bit nasty and self-important herself. The story emerges as truly great literature in the final section, when Gabriel thinks about the course of his life and his marriage, remembers shards of passion and ecstasy, obviously yearning to have sex with his wife, Gretta, as the head off for a hotel room; she is quiet and withdrawn, and she eventually confesses that she has been thinking about a man she’d known in youth and who willingly died of love when she left him. A musical passage made her think of this young man - and it’s interesting how all of the great modernist writers - think of Proust and Mann e.g. - recognize the important relationship between music and memory. In any event, Gabriel has completely misread her, feels despair and disappointment, and at the end reflects in unforgettable language, of his life, heading toward death, as are we all. 

Elliot's Reading Week of 8-1-21: Eliot (George) and Hawthorne

 Elliot’s Reading - Week of 8-1-21: (George) Eliot and Hawthorne 

Have reached the half-way point in my slow (re)reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and what’s left to be said? The section I just finished, Three Love Problems, moves the plot along on its several divergent - later to converge - tacks, with the typical GE insights that any reader will highlight while reading along. There are some passages too complex for me to discern and several on 1820s English politics are best skimmed, but most are insightful and original; no writer thought as much about her or his work as did GE. In essence, in the section we see the various relationships heading toward calamity: the young, ambitious Dr. Lydgate, clearly a central character in all plot lines, has married the beautiful Rose Darcy and we can see that he’s spending way too much money in setting up household and that his marriage may be a disappointment to him - he’s far more professionally and intellectually driven for her and he shows little attention to her: She’s his ornament, perhaps. Meanwhile, her spendthrift brother was bound for Oxford and, if I remember, an ill-suited career in the church and too unsettled to marry his beloved Mary Garth when her family fortunes change somewhat as her father unexpectedly gets hired to manager a couple of estates - so perhaps they can get together and marry (I am confused on some of these plot points, sorry). We readers also know that Mary may be due for a huge inheritance as the final portion of a will has yet to be read. Most important, Dorothea Brooke recognizes that her marriage to Casaubon was a terrible mistake, that he’s unable to love her in any way (including sexual - though this is hinted at only) and he likewise realizes that he will not live to complete his great scholarly enterprise - at the end of the chapter/section they both seem to recognize how their life together has been a failure and an illusion, and they sadly totter off together, he old and frail and lost and she providing him with at least some support. The question is: Will she be drawn into the world of politics (her uncle’s) and social change (her husband’s cousin Will)? 

The short stories of Nathanael Hawthorne aren’t read much today outside of intro American Lit courses (if those still exist), so, yes, his stories from the early 19th century feel at times a few centuries older than that - thanks (or no thanks) to his heavy use of allegory and Christian morality and fatalism. Two of the NH’s stories in the Casill Norton anthology are examples of his quaintness and of his still-enduring power as a fiction writer and innovator. The two - Young Goodman Brown and The Birthmark - are weird and mysterious and for that alone they might find some contemporary readers drawn to their otherworldliness: He’s not that far from Lovecraft Country, after all. YGB tells of a man who embarks on some unexplained overnight mission which entails his leaving behind his young bride, Faith (get it?), to traverse the forest en route to a neighboring town; across the span of his night journey he encounters the luminaries of his town engaged in some secret, Cabalistic, totally unChristian ceremony - and he returns a damaged and withdrawn man, and lives that way his entire life. It’s no coincidence that this story, like many of NH’s, is set in his town of Salem, with its dark, not-so-secret history. The Birthmark tells of a beautiful woman whose beauty is marred only by a birthmark shaped like a tiny hand on her cheek; her scientist husband has concocted a potion that, once imbibed, will erase the birthmark, making her beauty perfect. But there is not such thing as “perfect” in our earthly, made-of-mud existence; the potion works but takes not only the birthmark but also (spoiler, kinda) her life: Perfection is neither replicable nor human. 

Elliot's Reading Week of 7-25-21: Three short stories, Flaubert, Forster, Gallant

 Elliot's Reading - Week of 7-25-21

Gustave Flaubert’s short story, The Legend of St. Julian, is a surprise, at least to me, in that it’s such a break from the style of GF’s most famous (and best) works, naturalism - which to me is something like realism (art as the mirror held up to world) seen through the reaction of personal emotions and experiences of the author: see Madame Bovary or, especially, Sentimental Education. This story, however, is the recollection of a legend, the spoiled childhood of the young St. Julien who under his father’s tutelage becomes and expert hunter and killer, who over the course of his life accidentally kills his father, from which follows his long repentance and life in abject poverty and free of violence, and at last his ascension to heaven, and, in the final passage, Fl notes that St. J is the patron saint of his village and his story is memorialized in the stained-glass windows of his local church. So the writing itself, an improbable, impossible legend, is at the opposite pole from naturalism - but we do see in this story some of Flaubert’s great writing, not so much, in fact not at all, in the extended passages that show St. J slaughtering innocent animals for no purpose other than blood lust, but in the final sequence, as he runs a small ferry at a river crossing and helps, in particular, a dying leprous beggar - quite a stunning passage that encompasses tenderness and sympathy as well as great loathing and repulsion - which of us would similarly comfort the dying? 

 The E.M. Forster story The Road from Colonus is much-anthologized though it’s not a good example of EMF’s work at his best; the forced conclusion feels out of date even for its time, when the form of the short story had already moved from the surprise ending/ironic twist of the 19th century into the more open and emotive style of Joyce, Hemingway, and others. The Forster story tells of a group of well-to-do British folk on a muleback jaunt through Greece; they come to a small village and the elder stateman of the group dismounts, spends some time marveling at a mysterious, ancient tree and declares that he wants the group to spend the night at a rundown cabin in this village - which would disrupt their well-planned itinerary (involving catching a ferry boat and a timely return to England). His daughter and other traveling companions pretty much force him back onto his mule and they quickly depart, pursued by some nasty village folk who hurl rocks at the departing crew. That in itself makes for a slightly  weird and cynical short story - but EMF foolishly adds a coda, in which the cantankerous old man and his care-taking daughter learn that the tree he’d so admired had fallen in the night - the exact night of their visit! - and crushed to death the stone-hurlers. To me, that’s a ridiculous ending to story that adds nothing to our sense of who these people are or what the story might be hinting at regarding class relationships and cultural distances. A better approach to EMF’s work would be via his novels, Passage to India of course, one of the great naturalistic novels of the century, but also Howards End - both of which have much to say about class relationships and cross-cultural encounters. 

The Mavis Gallant story in the Cassill Short Stories (Norton) anthology, The Acceptance of Her Ways, is, for better or for worse, representative of MG’s writings. Gallant published regularly in the New Yorker through the 80s and even 90s I think, and, even then, she seemed a writer born too late - one who worked in the style and the milieu of an earlier generation. She was closer to Henry James than to her much more renowned fellow-Canadian short-story mater, Alice Munro. MG wrote primarily, exclusively?, about France, Europe, expatriate Americans - as in this barbed but finally inconsequential story: A young woman, having cleaned out her ex in a divorce and adopted a new name, lives as a boarder in the cheap pension on the Italian (not the fancier French) Riviera, in a strained relationship with the owner of the small rental property - she’s treated as a servant and largely dismissed whereas in fact she has plans to clean the landlady out of a bit of her money and to live it up, at least for a while, on the French side of the divide. There’s plenty of acrimony and bitterness throughout the story, but in the end, at least today, it feels distant, remote. Who are these people? Who lives this way any more? Why should we care about them today? MG’s work, insofar as this story typifies her work, feels passee - though I know there are gems among her stories as well (isn’t there a terrific story that begins with tossing the packet of wedding invitations into the Seine). Typical or no, maybe this story was a bad choice for an anthology.