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from Colonus is much-anthologized though it’s not a good example of EMF’s work at his best; the forced conclusion feels out of date even for its time, when the form of the short story had already moved from the surprise ending/ironic twist of the 19th century into the more open and emotive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.