Rudyard Kipling and Craft of Fable: Part II: "Without Benefit of Clergy," "Mary Postgate," "The Gardener":

        

        When I posted Part I of my discussion of Kipling's short stories last week, I really wasn't sure anyone would be interested in him in this day and age.  But the post, which included a discussion of "The Man Who Would Be King," received a fairly large number of views. Thank you.  What follows is the conclusion of a draft of the chapter on Kipling in the book I am working on entitled A Critical History of the British Short Story.  I would appreciate comments and suggestions.

          The tenuous world of fable is also the subject of Kipling's other well-known India tale, "Without Benefit of Clergy." This story has already been analyzed thoroughly by Eliot L. Gilbert who offers an existential reading of the tale, suggesting that in its depiction of an absurd universe it is very much like the conclusion of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Gilbert says that the threat of disaster broods over the story and that the "sense of the irrationality of life is always lurking in the background."  The basic theme of the story, says Gilbert, is the futility of ritual and conventions as a hedge against disaster. However, he suggests a moral interpretation of  the characters' need for order; for the need implies a distaste for the world as it is and a great longing "to substitute for the disorganized reality of today, the perfectly structured artifice of tomorrow."  Eliot suggests that Kipling is saying here that the untidy reality of today is the only reality there is and that life has a law of compensation which decrees that provision for the future must be made at the expense of the present.

            Such a reading, although perhaps justifiable in terms of the content of the story, ignores the fabular structure of the tale and insists that the story exists in a cosmic reality of external "justice" or "retribution." However, what the story actually depicts is the typical "double life" of fiction itself in that John Holden lives in two worlds--the world of everyday reality of his government job and the self-created fantasy world of his life with Ameera. The first is a world governed by the rules and laws of society, whereas the second violates all rules and laws of the first by attempting to set up purely aesthetic laws of its own. In the social world, Holden must conceal all traces of both happiness and sorrow in his fantasy world where Ameera is all the world in his eyes and exists only for him: "When the big wooden gate was bolted behind him he was king in his own territory, with Ameera for queen." The child that is expected when the story begins is a symbol of the bond that exists between them, an embodiment of their complete devotion to one another.  

      Throughout the story, Ameera is aware of the external world that threatens to impinge upon them as she worries about the white mem-log who might take Holden from her. When the child is born, the baby becomes "a small gold-coloured little god" and is named Tota, for the parrot who is regarded as a sort of guardian-spirit of native households. And indeed he is a symbol of the little house that serves as Holden's fantasy world. It is only when the child begins to develop individuality, when he tells Holden that he is not a spark but a man, that abruptly he becomes ill and dies. Holden must then turn his mind to his work; and indeed the focus of the story shifts to the everyday world when Holden discovers that the "old programme" of "famine, fever, and cholera," which soon takes Ameera, has reestablished itself. Holden's cry, "Oh, you brute! You utter brute!" is a cry against brute reality itself. The story ends with Holden's return to the house three days later to find it looking as though it had been untenanted for thirty years. The owner of the house says he will have it pulled down "so that no man may say where this house stood."  The end of the story marks the end of the fantasy itself, for with the reassertion of reality the story itself inevitably must end.

        Just as in "The Man Who Would be King," although certainly here with a different tone, the fabular nature of "Without Benefit of Clergy" is characterized by Biblical language and poetic talk, talk which Ameera characterizes as "very good talk."  Indeed, it is talk that perpetuates the fantasy situation, for dialogue is the central means by which the story is told. The story opens with dialogue about the impending birth of the child and continues throughout with Holden and Ameera speaking in "thees" and "thous" and trying to live within a world of "good talk," even though Ameera finds that with the birth of the child, she must have "straight talk" and "very hard talk" in a way that she did not have to think of before.

            It is not that the child must die in order to prove that ritual is not a hedge against cosmic reality, but rather the child must die because he is a concrete symbol of the intangible fantasy world that holds Holden and Ameera together. However, the problem is that the child is not only symbol but also external reality; that is, he is heir to the rules that govern the external world, rather than a creature solely of the "good talk" that governs the fantasy world. In the terms of the fable, when Holden asserts his individuality he escapes the realm of symbol, and thus his death destroys the fantasy world itself. The death of Ameera is only the ultimate objectification of the death of the fantasy world which is finally objectified in the destruction of the house so that the fantasy world becomes as if it had never existed at all. Just as in "The Man Who Would be King," the fantasy world can exist only so long as external reality is not allowed to intrude, only so long as the participants of the fable can maintain their separation in a world of their own making.

        "Mary Postgate" has been singled out by Boris Ford in his discussion of Kipling as representative of many of Kipling's shortcomings as an artist. The story is "internally quite bogus," says Ford, "manipulated from the outside and for preconceived purposes." Ford accuses Kipling of creating the story purely for the purpose of indulging his own feelings of revenge and hysteria, thus making the central character a vehicle for his own vicarious enjoyment. ( "A Case for Kipling," p. 7l). This is a harsh criticism typical of critics who refuse to look at Kipling's short fictions as stories which exist in their own right, preferring instead to make moral judgments on Kipling himself. The conclusion of the story, when Mary Postgate allows the fallen enemy pilot to die, is indeed a shocking one, but should be understood in terms of the character that Kipling creates. The most interesting aspect of the story is that it focuses on a character who is only known from the outside and who only exists in relation to other characters. As her mistress says to her at one point, "Mary, aren't you anything except a companion?  Would you ever have been anything except a companion?"  Mary's response is, "I don't imagine I ever should. But I've no imagination, I'm afraid."

         However, it is precisely Mary's imagination, an imagination that is never revealed to us until the shocking conclusion, that is the subject of the story. To Miss Fowler, Mary is but a companion; to young Wyndham Fowler, she is an "unlovely" orphaned nephew--"Gatepost," "Postey," or "Packthread," his "butt and his slave." When she cannot master the charts he brings home from the war, he says, "You look more or less like a human being.... You must have had a brain at some time in your past.... You haven't the mental capacity of a white mouse." Whatever Mary thinks of Wyndham is not directly revealed, for we never know what she thinks. "What do you ever think of, Mary?" Miss Fowler demands at one point. The reader can only guess.

         And the only guess the reader can make is based on her reaction to news of Wyndham's death. "The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite steady in the midst of it." Passivity is indeed Mary's primary characteristic, passivity and what Miss Fowler recognizes as her "deadly methodical" nature. Mary's true imaginative relationship to Wyndham is indicated by her preparations to burn all of his things. The extremely long list of items that fill almost a page of text indicates, without sentimentalizing, Mary's devotion to Wyndham. But it is the death of the child in town by a bomb that more fully objectifies Mary's relationship to the dead young man. After she sees the ripped and shredded body of the child, she uses Wyndham's words about the enemy: "'Bloody pagans!'  They are bloody pagans.  But,' she continued, falling back on the teaching that had made her what she was, 'one mustn't let one's mind dwell on these things.'" By the time she reaches home, the affair seems remote by its very monstrousness.

         However, as she prepares the sacrificial oil to burn the remaining possessions of Wyndham, the images of Wyndham and the child return in the person of the downed enemy pilot. As the pilot asks for help, she cries, "Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn." And the dead child she has seen is of course not only the child in the village, but also the image of Wyndham, the only child, in her passivity, she has ever had. As the pilot cries for help, she screams, "Stop that, you bloody pagan" in Wyndham's own words. Consequently, the pilot becomes not a human being, but a thing responsible for the death of Wyndham and the child in the village. As she hums and tends the fire, she thinks, "if it did not die before [tea-time] she would be soaked and have to change."

            Mary's primary characteristics of passivity and method serve her well here as she thinks with a secret thrill that she can be useful in the war effort. As she waits for the man to die, "an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel.  Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life."  When the sound of death does come, she says, "That's all right," just as she has said when she found out that Wyndham had fallen from four thousand feet. After she goes to the house and takes a luxurious hot bath before tea, Miss Fowler finds her relaxed on the sofa, looking "quite handsome!"

        Mary Postgate, solid and unknowable as her name implies, is the kind of character that Katherine Mansfield often singles out later on in British short fiction. "Mary Postgate" is a tacit story of Mary's hidden life in which she lives only in her imaginative relationship with others.  What the story provides is the ironic single opportunity for Mary to act, by refusing to act, thus creating a bitter epiphany for the reader. Her secret thrill and final transfiguration result from her sense of being allowed to act in the world that she previously has only read about in the newspapers. The dropping of the pilot from the sky is like the magical breaking in of the external world into her previously hermetically-sealed world of passivity. It allows her to perform what she understands to be useful work in the world. The fantasy world becomes momentarily real and thus Mary finds a release for her previously unexpressed desires.

            Like "Mary Postgate," Kipling's most famous story, "The Gardener," also depends on  concealment of an inner life for its effect. And Like "Without Benefit of Clergy," it depends on the notion of a double life, a split between external reality and a tenuous inner reality. Both Edmund Wilson and Frank O'Connor call "The Gardner" Kipling's best story, even a masterpiece, but, as so often the case with Kipling criticism, they do so with reservations.  Edmund Wilson believes that the story is not of the highest quality because of the fairy tale properties of the ending. O'Connor also has serious reservations about the conclusion of the story when Helen goes to the cemetery to visit the grave of her illegitimate son and meets a man she supposes to be the gardener, thus echoing the mistake of Mary Magdalene when she goes to the tomb and meets the resurrected Jesus.

         The impact of the conclusion of the tale depends, of course, on the fact that Kipling has concealed the truth about the boy being Helen's son throughout the story. O'Connor accepts the argument that such a concealment might be justified by the fact that Helen herself has concealed this knowledge from the village, but still he does not believe that this rescues the story. O'Connor says that had he written the story he would have revealed the illegitimacy at the beginning. The result would be to remove the story from the world of celestial gardeners and place it in the real world, thus indicating throughout that "The Gardner" is a story of Helen's heroism in bringing the child home in the first place (l0l-l03).

          Eliot Gilbert has tackled these objections to the story directly and has suggested that Kipling is not guilty of trickery here, but instead has concealed the facts of Helen's case as an essential echo of the theme of concealment which prepares the reader to experience the same shock that Helen does at the end. He argues that the supernatural ending "represents the final intensification of the author's vision, too compressed and cryptic to find expression within the realistic framework of the rest of the tale." However, as excellent as Gilbert's discussion is in rescuing the story, it still would not dismiss O'Connor's misgivings, nor does it clearly explain why Kipling's vision requires the so-called supernatural conclusion.

         The basic technique of the story depends on a gap between details that are "public property," that is, details which the village is aware of and which in turn the reader knows, and unwritten details which are private property, known only to Helen herself. What is public is a lie and what is private is the truth. Furthermore, what is ugly in the public eye is revealed as beautiful in the eye of the reader at the conclusion.  The basic question is: what makes the truth beautiful at the end? Even at the conclusion, Helen does not accept the young man as her son, still referring to him as her nephew, thus continuing the protective lie she has perpetuated throughout the story. The irony, however, lies in the fact that Helen's heroism depends precisely on this concealment, for it is obviously done not for her own sake, but for her child's.

            Earlier in the story, when the boy wants to call Helen "Mummy," and she allows him to do so as their secret only at bedtime, she reveals the secret to her friends, telling the boy that it's always best to tell the truth. His reply--"when the troof's ugly I don't think it's nice"--constitutes a revealing irony in the story about the nature of truth and its relationship to beauty. What the boy calls "ugly" is the truth Helen tells that the boy calls her "Mummy," even though she is not his mother. The truth that she is his mother is however the beautiful truth that cannot be revealed within the profane realm of everyday society, for that truth would indeed be ugly from that profane point of view.

            The death of the boy and his mysterious spontaneous burial under the shelled foundation of a barn marks the psychic death of Helen also, for in her double life, she truly has lived, like Mary Postgate, only for her son. The resurrection of his body marks a parallel resurrection for her as she makes her trip to visit the grave. Mrs. Scarsworth is, as other critics have well noted, an embodiment of Helen's split self and thus echoes her previous position. Mrs. Scarsworth tells Helen that she is tired of lying. "When I don't tell lies I've got to act 'em and I've got to think 'em always. You don't know what that means." Helen of course knows precisely what that means, but even though she is the one most able to directly sympathize with Mrs. Scarsworth, still she cannot tell the truth, for that truth is ugly within the profane world.

            However, what is ugly to the profane world is finally revealed as beautiful within the realm of the sacred. Helen, who is both Mary Magdalene, the fallen, and Mary the mother of Christ, goes to find the grave of her son and savior and is directed to it by the ultimate embodiment of the sacred. It seems inevitable, in a story which deals with a double life-- the life of public property and the life of private emotion--that the ultimate incarnation of spirit within body in Western culture should be the means by which the secret of spirit is revealed to the reader. The secret revealed at the end of the story is the same as the one revealed when Mary comes to look for the body of Christ--that is, that he is not here, but has arisen--that is, that he is not body but spirit. The true reality of the story is the reality of the sacred and always hidden world, which is sacred precisely because of its hidden nature.

           

            As is usually the case in short fiction, it is the world of spirit, the world of the sacred that constitutes the truth, and that truth, regardless of what it appears to be within the profane framework, is always beautiful. It is not so much that Kipling plays a supernatural trick at the end of the story, but rather that he needs an ultimate embodiment of spirit within body to communicate the ironic reversal of the apparent lie being the most profound truth. The not-told of the short story is more important than what is told, for what cannot be told directly always constitutes the ideal nature of story itself.

                                                                     Works Cited

Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. Oxford: Clarendon,  l98l.

Dobree, Bonamy. Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist. Oxford UP,  l967.

Fussell, Paul. "Irony, Freemasonry, and Humane Ethics in Kipling's 'The Man Who Would Be

            King." English Literary History 25 (1958): 2l6-33.

Gilbert, Eliot L. The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story. Athens: Ohio UP, l970). 21-49.

James, Henry. "The Young Kipling." Kipling and the Critics. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. NY UP, l965.

Lewis, C. S. "Kipling's World." Kipling and the Critics. Ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. NY UP, l965.

O'Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. Cleveland, Ohio: World, l963.

Robson, W.W. "Kipling's Later Stories." Kipling's Mind and Art, Ed. Andrew Rutherford.  Stanford UP,             1964.

Wilson, Edmund. "The Kipling that Nobody Read." Kipling's Mind and Art. Ed. Andrew

            Rutherford. Stanford UP, l964.

Lionel Trilling's essay from The Liberal Imagination is reprinted in Kipling and the Critics, pp.

            89-98;

Edmund Wilson's essay from The Wound and the Bow is reprinted in Kipling's Mind and Art, pp.

            17-69.

The New Yorker's 2014 Summer Fiction Issue of Love Stories

I love a good love story.  I don't mean those "date movie" bits of fluff and/or coarse carnality that parade as love stories nowadays.  If you have ever checked the background info on my blog, you probably know this, since my favorite book is The Great Gatsby and my favorite movie is The French Lieutenant's Woman—both love stories about the mad complexity of being seized by love.  I just finished rereading the ultimate love story Wuthering Heights because in doing the research for my recent presentation in Ottawa on Alice Munro, I was reminded that it was her favorite book as a young woman—that she read it numerous times—not a healthy thing to do, she once admitted to an interviewer.

So, when I got my recent issue of The New Yorker and saw that they were devoting their Summer Fiction issue to "Love Stories," I was excited.  Well, maybe not excited, but itchingly intrigued.  The double issue includes five short "memoir" pieces on the subject of "My Old Flame" by the likes of Rachel Kushner, Joshua Ferris, Colm Toibin, Miranda July, and Tobias Wolff.  These pieces seem to have been written at the request of The New Yorker editors, and like many such "why don't you write us a few hundred words about…." they don't seem particularly inspired—just ordinary jobs of work by competent writers.

The four short stories in this issue on the subject of "Love" are by David Gilbert, Ramona Ausubel, Haruki Murakami, and Karen Russell.  I read them all four straight through today in a morning of what in California we call "June Gloom"—early morning low clouds that conceal the sun until about 3:00 in the afternoon.  You wouldn't think that June would be such a depressing month in California, but there you are, or rather, here I am, feeling gloomy, not only by the weather, but by these silly, cynical, bland, and boring stories ostensibly about love.

Good stories, as you perhaps know, I read more than once.  However, after reading these four fictions in the Summer 2014 New Yorker, I just can't bring myself to read them again.  Here are my first-reading impressions:

Ramona Ausubel's "You Can Find Love Now" is an oh so clever bit of silliness about the Cyclops (you know, the one-eyed giant from Odysseus) looking for love in all the modern places by seeking advice for online dating from an online service.  Two page fillers of advice, such as "Know who your target is," followed by sophomoric responses such as "I like fat girls, old girls, tall girls, tired girls.  Girls who lack adequate clothing, girls whose best idea for getting my attention is to send a photo of themselves holding suggestive Popsicles, their fists covered in red melt."  (snicker, snicker).

Karen Russell's "The Bad Graft" is about a young couple who take a honeymoon type road trip to Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, where she gets "pricked" (get it) by a thorn on a Joshua Tree and is invaded by the spirit of the tree.  It's a bit more ambitious than Ausubel's trope, but not by much.  In her "This Week in Fiction" interview, Russell tries to give the story mythic significance by talking about transformation, metamorphosis, etc., etc., but the fact of the matter seems to be that she just got a case of tourist fascination with the twisted trees while on a trip to Joshua Tree and wanted to demonstrate her Internet-based erudition, as she has done in her stories in the past.  I appreciate she is having a good time here—she says part of the "weird fun" of the story was trying to imagine what a plant might articulate to itself if it were suddenly folded into human consciousness—but the fact is that the story tells us more about plants than about human love.  It plants are your passion, you might have fun with it too.

David Gilbert's "Here's the Story" starts off with two people on an airplane holding hands.  Anyone who has ever read an airplane love story in their lives will know by the end of the first paragraph that the damned story is going to end with the plane crashing.  And sure enough—spoiler, spoiler, with no alert)—it does.

In his "This Week in Fiction" Interview, Gilbert said that this is his first attempt at doing "historical fiction," noting he was always too lazy to do the research.  However, now because the Internet makes it so easy for someone who knows nothing about a certain historical milieu to appear as if he knows everything, we must wade through a lot of historical detail about an Easter Love-in at Elysian Park and the final game of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1967 before we can get to the fatal plane crash.  It does not make the story any more interesting to have our suspicions confirmed by Gilbert, who admits that the  "idea" for the story came from a response to the question of "What really happened to the original lost parents of the Brady Bunch children—you know the first wife of a "man named Brady and "the lovely lady's" first husband.  Well, if you read through this tedious context-ridden story, you will know.

The least gimmicky story in the bunch is Haruki Murakami's "Yesterday," although it too depends more on the trick title allusion (Beatles) than any real understanding of love. (I sought the song out on my i-pod and played it this morning; it did not make the June gloom go away.) The story is a triangle piece about two guys and a girl—one who wants the girl but not really, and another who realizes he wants the girl too late. No reaching for cleverness here, as in the other three stories—but it is just bland and flat—lots of dialogue that does nothing but fill up pages (The New Yorker pays by the word, you know), nothing much about the mysterious complexity of love, just a quickly forgettable story about the one that got away, or what might have been, or something like that.

O.K. call me a romantic and be damned.  But a love story should be about love—like those crazy adolescents of Shakespeare, those explosive forces of nature of Emily Bronte, like that clumsy coming together of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in front of the fireplace, like Fitzgerald's crazy Gatsby who does it all for that silly irresistible Daisy.  Good Lord, New Yorker, don't give me uninspired blandness and sophomoric cleverness.  Give me love!

Rudyard Kipling and the Craft of Fable: Part I--"The Man Who Would Be King"

            As I mentioned some time ago, I am working on a critical history of the British short story, focusing on the generic characteristics of the form as reflected in major short stories since the eighteenth century. In this post and one next week, I discuss what I consider to be the crucial generic issues in four stories by Rudyard Kipling. Works Cited will appear at the end of Part II.

            Hardly anyone talks about Rudyard Kipling's fiction any more, especially his short fiction. However there was a time when Kipling received quite a bit of attention, much of it negative.  I suggest it might be worth noting that the caustic criticism Kipling's short stories once received is precisely the same kind of criticism that has often been lodged against the short story form in general--for example, that the genre focuses only on episodes, that it is too concerned with technique, that it is too dependent on tricks, and that it often lacks a moral force.

         Henry James noted that the young Kipling realized very early the uniqueness of the short story, seeing what chances the form offered for "touching life in a thousand different places, taking it up in innumerable pieces, each a specimen and an illustration." In a word, James argued, Kipling appreciates the episode" (l8). However, it is just this appreciation for the episode, according to influential critic Edmund Wilson, that prevented Kipling from becoming a great novelist: "You can make an effective short story, as Kipling so often does, about somebody's scoring off somebody else; but this is not enough for a great novelist, who must show us large social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic impulses of the human spirit, struggling with one another" (32).

         Moreover, it is not simply because Kipling could not "graduate," as it were, to the novel that critics have found fault with him. Irish short story great Frank O'Connor confesses his embarrassment in discussing Kipling's stories in comparison with master storytellers like Chekhov and Maupassant, for he feels that Kipling has too much consciousness of the individual reader as an audience who must be affected. C. S. Lewis also recoiled from Kipling for similar reasons. Complaining about what he calls the excess of Kipling's art, he cites how he constantly shortened and honed his stories by blotting out passages with Indian ink. Ultimately, says Lewis, the story is often shortened too much and as a result "the style tends to be too continuously and obtrusively brilliant" with no "leisureliness." 

        Lewis's criticism is similar to Edmund Wilson's, for it suggests displeasure with Kipling's stories because they are not based on the same assumptions as the novel. Lionel Trilling notes that the words "craft" and "craftily" are Kipling's favorites, and Wilson says that it is the paradox of his career that he "should have extended the conquests of his craftsmanship in proportion to the shrinking of the range of his dramatic imagination. As his responses to human beings became duller, his sensitivity to his medium increased."

         Such remarks indicate a failure to make generic distinctions between the nature of the novel and the nature of the short story; they either ignore or fail to take seriously Stevenson's realization that the tale form does not focus on character, but rather on fable and on the meaning of an episode in an ideal form. Bonamy Dobree has noted this fabular aspect of Kipling's stories, suggesting that as Kipling's mastery of the short story form increased, he became more and more inclined to introduce an element of fable. "Great realist as he was, it is impossible to see what he was really saying unless the fabular element is at least glimpsed" (l67).

         However, the fabular element, so common to the short story form, is often criticized as being limiting in Kipling, as indeed over the years it has been a central cause of criticism of short fiction generally. For example, W. W. Robson has suggested that Kipling's desire to have complete possible control of his form and medium, while it can lead to impressive achievements in fantasy and fable, "can also lead to a simplification and distortion of human character" (260).

        Such a judgment assumes that human character in fiction is constituted solely of conduct, that character is created and revealed by the actions of man in time and space, in the real world.  And indeed, such an assumption is typical of the expectations we have about character in the novel form. However, such need not be an assumption of character in the short story. As Isak Dinesen has suggested in her story "The First Cardinal's Tale," the tale or short story form is one that focuses on an idealization-- not man and woman seen as they are in the everyday world, but rather transformed by the role they play in the story itself. In the short story, it is the fable that is the focus; the characters exist for the sake of the story rather than the story existing for the sake of the characters.

            In this post and one more, I will briefly discuss four of Kipling's best-known stories--"The Man Who Would be King," "Without Benefit of Clergy," "Mary Postgate," and "The Gardener" in an attempt to identify the essential short-story characteristics of Kipling's work. I do not claim that these stories are not highly crafted, that they do not involve unrealistic character, that they do not depend on artifice. For in many ways, they must stand guilty of such charges. 

     What I do wish to suggest is that such charges are not necessarily damaging, for they indicate that Kipling was perhaps the first English writer to embrace the characteristics of the short story form whole-heartedly, and that thus his stories are perfect representations of the transition point between the old-fashioned tale of the nineteenth century and the modern twentieth-century short story--a transition, however, which Joseph Conrad, because of the profundity of his vision, perhaps was better able to make than Kipling.

         One of Kipling's most Conrad-like stories is one of his earliest pieces, "The Man Who Would Be King," which Henry James called an "extraordinary tale" and which many critics have suggested is a typical Kipling social parable about British imperialism in India. Walter Allen calls it a "great and heroic story," but says that Kipling evades the metaphysical issues implicit in the story and refuses to venture on the great generalizations forced upon Conrad in "Heart of Darkness" (67-68). In perhaps the best discussion of the story, Paul Fussell, Jr. calls "The Man Who Would Be King" "a zany exemplum" in which fantastic burlesque events cloak a sober theme. However, Fussell does not carry this notion of burlesque very far, contenting himself with a discussion of the Biblical and Masonic allusions in the piece. 

            Fussell suggests that much of the plot of "The Man Who Would Be King" constitutes a "virtual parody of Biblical history," but he does not understand that such a burlesque and parody tone and structure might be the basic motivation of the story. Instead he concludes by suggesting that although the story embodies a Christian-Masonic commonplace moral that a man who would be a king must learn to rule himself, Kipling ennobles the theme and rescues it from being obvious by giving it an ironic treatment. The story, says Fussell, has a tone of serious playfulness stemming from Freemasonry which must have struck Kipling as both profound and silly at once.  "It is precisely this knowing Masonic tone which provides 'The Man Who Would be King' with the paradoxical comic-pathetic quality which is the major secret of both the brilliance of its narrative technique and the rich humanity of its ethical import."

         While I agree with Fussell that the secret to the story is its tone, I feel that Fussell's concern for theme prevents him from seeing that indeed tone and style are everything in the tale.  The story primarily focuses on the crucial difference between a tale told by a narrator who merely reports a story and a narrator who lives a story. The frame narrator is a journalist whose job it is to report the doings of "real kings," whereas Peachey, the inner narrator has as his task the reporting of the events of a "pretend king."  This situation reflects a basic fictional problem:  The primary narrator tells us the story of Peachey and Davrot, which although it is fiction, is presented as if it were reality. The secondary narrator tells us a story of Peachey and Davrot in which the two characters project themselves out of the "as-if" real world of the story into the purely projected and fictional world of their adventure. 

            The tone of the tale reflects the journalist narrator's bemused attitude toward the pair of unlikely heroes and his incredulity about their "idiotic adventure." "The beginning of everything," he describes, was his meeting with Peachey in a railway train when he learns that the two are posing as correspondents for the newspaper for which the narrator is indeed a real correspondent. Role-playing is an important motif in the story, for indeed Peachey and Davrot are always playing roles, for they are essentially vagabonds and loafers with no real identity of their own.  

     After the narrator returns to his office and becomes "respectable," Peachey and Davrot interrupt this respectability (characterized by the narrator's concern for the everyday reality that constitutes the subject of his work) to tell him of their fantastic plan and to try to obtain from him a factual framework for the country where they hope to become kings. "We have come to you to know about this country, to read a book about it, and to be shown maps," says Carnehan. "We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books." The mythic proportions of the two men, or rather their story-book proportions, for mythic sounds like too serious a word here for the grotesque adventurers, are indicated by the narrator's amused awareness that Davrot's red beard seems to fill half the room and Carnehan's huge shoulders fill the other half.

         The actual adventure begins with more role-playing as Davrot pretends to be a mad priest (an ironic image that he indeed is to fulfill later) marching forward with whirligigs (playful crosses?) to sell as charms to the savages. The narrator again becomes "respectable" and turns his attention to the obituaries of real kings in Europe until three years later, Peachey returns, a "whining cripple" to confront the narrator with his story that he and Davrot have been crowned kings in Kafiristan, and "you've been sitting here ever since--oh, Lord!"  Peachey's inserted story is thus posed over against the pedestrian story of the narrator's situation and is contrasted to it by its fantastic, story-like nature in which indeed Peachey and Davrot have set themselves up as fictional kings in a real country.

            The story-like nature of the adventure is indicated first of all by Peachey's frequent confusing of himself with Davrot and by his frequent reference to himself in the third person.  "There was a party called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was with Davrot. Shall I tell you about him? He died out there in the cold. Slap from the bridge fell old Peachey, turning and twisting in the air like a penny whirligig, or I am much mistaken and woeful sore...."  As Peachey tells his tale, he insists that the narrator continue to look him in the eye, thus becoming an image of the Ancient Mariner who holds the wedding guest by his glittering eye and thus links the listener and teller in a story-made bond.

            As Paul Fussell has suggested, the events that Peachey tells suggests a parody of Biblical history, and indeed Peachey and Davrot often speak to the people Davrot calls the "lost tribe" in Biblical language. The purpose of these Biblical allusions is to give Peachey's tale an externally-imposed story framework, indeed the most basic and dignified story framework in Western culture. The progress of Davrot's becoming king moves from fighting to craft via masonic ritual, a ritual that reaffirms Davrot's superior position and controls his followers.  

     However, since Davrot has projected himself into the role of god as king, and thus assumes a position in the kingdom as the fulfillment of prophecy and legend, he is bound to this particular role. It is only when he wishes to escape the pre-established role and marry a native girl that his world falls apart. When he is bitten by his frightened intended bride, the cry, "Neither God nor Devil, but a man," breaks the spell and propels Davrot and Peachey out of the fictional world and back into reality again.

            The fact that Peachy and Davrot are really only over-determined doubles of each other is indicated not only by Peachey's reference to himself as suffering Davrot's fate, but also by the fact that if Davrot is the ambiguous god-man, Peachey is the one who must be crucified. Kipling finds it necessary of course to make this split, for he must not only have his god-man die, but he must have him resurrected as well. Peachey is the resurrected figure who brings the head of Davrot, still with its crown, back to tell the tale to the narrator. Peachey's final madness and death and the mysterious disappearance of the crowned head are the ironic fulfillment of a final escape from external reality.

         It seems clear from the serio-comic tone and the parody use of Biblical story and language that what Kipling is attempting in "The Man Who Would be King" is a burlesque version of a basic dichotomy in the nature of story itself. The narrator, who deals with real events in the world, tells a story of one who in turn tells a story of fantastic events in which the real world is transformed into the fabular nature of story itself. Davrot/Peachey project themselves into a purely story world, but once accepted there, they cannot break the code of the roles they have assumed.

            When they do make such an effort, the story they have created, and thus the roles they have played, become foregrounded as roles only and crumble like a house of cards. The man who would be a king can only be a king in the pretend world of story itself, and then only as long as story-world or story-reality is maintained. A story character cannot be human, for when he attempts to become real, i.e., when he begins to take his story status as true reality, the story ends. 

     It is little wonder that "The Man Who Would be King" has such a comic tone, for truly what Kipling is playing with here is not the nature of empires, but the nature of story. If one wishes to read the story as a parable of the tenuous and fictionally-imposed nature of British imperialism, then such a reading is possible, but only because the story primarily is about the essentially tenuous nature of the fable world itself.

The 2014 Canadian Literature Symposium on Alice Munro

You may be wondering why after rapid-fire postings at the beginning of May (Short-Story Month, according to some bloggers), I once again disappeared for a few weeks.

The reason being:

After returning from the Canadian Literature Symposium on Alice Munro at the University of Ottawa campus, my wife and I rushed down to Tucson, Arizona for my younger daughter's being hooded for a Ph.D. degree in English, and two-weeks of helping her pack up her house for a move back to Southern California, where her husband has landed a full-time job at Saddleback College teaching math.  No job yet for my daughter, for literature is not in such demand as math.  Go figure!

A few words about the Ottawa conference, where I had the honor of delivering one of the keynote addresses on Alice Munro: 

The conference was held over two and a half days at the University of Ottawa campus, where the two organizers of the  Symposium, Gerald Lynch and Janice Fiamengo, make their academic home.  It was attended by sixty or so academic scholars, critics, writers, and editors familiar with Munro's work over the years,

Among the highlights was the other keynote speaker, Robert Thacker of St. Lawrence University in New York state, author of the authoritative biography Alice Munro:  Writing Her Lives.  Bob Thacker knows more about Munro and her work than anyone.  His presentation, focusing on the arc of her work from the story "Walker Brothers Cowboy" to her final collection Dear Life, regaled the audience with information and insights that only Bob Thacker would know.  He was consulted many times during the weekend as a dynamic resource for all things Munro.

Bob was invited because he is the expert on Alice Munro.  I was invited because I know a bit about the short story, and, as I suggested to the audience, when you talk about Alice Munro, inevitably you talk about the short story—which I did.

Among the many interesting and provocative papers presented during the weekend, another high point for me was a panel on the career of Munro, featuring Virginia Barber, Munro's long time agent and friend; Ann Close, a senior editor at Alfred Knopf Publishing; Douglas Gibson, another long-time Munro friend and her Canadian editor; and Daniel Menaker, one of the editors at The New Yorker for many years when Munro was publishing there. 

Although these four provided some interesting factual information about Munro's career, including contracts and sales, the most engaging part of the panel was hearing from the four people who were the most important in helping Munro establish her career.  Barber said she and Close were working on preparing a second Selected Stories of Munro's work.  Barber said that Munro's final collection  Dear Life got a big boost after the Nobel Prize award, selling 400,000 copies and being licensed in forty different countries.  Ann Close added that the new uniform  paperback series put out by Vintage after the Nobel win has sold over 400,000 copies, and Dear Life has sold an additional 200,000 copies in paperback. I was grateful that four such important people, people who affectionately call Munro "Alice," were willing to attend and share personal anecdotes about their relationship with her.

Some other observations and reactions to the presentations: The  opening panel of "Writers' Appreciations" featured Steven Heighton of Kingston, Ontario; Robert McGill of U. of Toronto, Lisa Moore of St. John's NL, and Aritha Van Herk of U. of Calgary.  I particularly liked Heighton's description of Munro's stories as being "holographic," that is, not linear and not flatly two-dimensional, but rather viewable from multiple in-depth angles simultaneously—metonymic in the sense that the whole was embedded in each part.

Other presenters discussed the stories Munro wrote when she was a student at U. of Western Ontario; her use of multiple points of view; The View from Castle Rock as a story cycle; the theme of invasion; teaching Munro's stories in Slovenia; the use of letters in her stories,; and the use of memorized poems.  The latter was particularly interesting to the audience, for it evoked issues of recitation as a means of linking generations, as well as the significance of embedding rhythms in the mind.  One of the final presentations was a provocative piece by well-known Munro expert Magdalene Redekop of U. of Toronto, about Munro's stories "Lichen," in which Munro is seen as the prototypical storyteller—Scherazade.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the presentations of two professors from the U. of Toronto who are well-known for their light-hearted approach to the serious business of studying and teaching great literature—Dennis Duffy and Tim Struthers.  Dennis did a lively presentation on Munro's story "Too Much Happiness," and Tim did what he called a tribute to "the only voice" of Alice Munro, ending with a memorable quote from the Kentucky writer Wendell Berry.

It was a pleasurable conference, with no rancor, no posturing, no academic egos—just genuine love for the work of a Canadian—indeed an international—treasure, who if there is any justice in the world, should singlehandedly rescue the short story from its second-class status.

Short Story Month 2014: Alice Munro

I go to Ottawa tomorrow to join my Canadian colleagues in a celebration of the work of Alice Munro. Professor Robert Thacker, author of the excellent biography of Ms. Munro, Writing Her Lives, and I share the honor of giving keynote addresses.  Professor Thacker will speak on Friday afternoon, and I will speak on Saturday morning. Many fine writers, critics, and scholars will discuss various aspects of Munro's work over the three-day weekend. I will give you a summary of the celebration when I return.

Since I will be taking a break from my blog for a few days while in Ottawa, I though it only appropriate that I post a brief discussion of her work before I left.  I have written many blogs on Alice Munro over the past several years, but for some reason have neglected her most personal collection, The View from Castle Rock.  Munro says that as she put together the material in this book over the years, not surprisingly, since she is, with little or no argument, the best short-story writer currently practicing that underrated art, the material began to shape itself into “something like stories.” The combination of the words of her ancestors and her own, she says, resulted in a re-creation of lives about as truthful as the past can be.

 In addition, Munro says, during this same period she was also writing a special set of stories that she had not included in her last four books of fiction because she felt they did not belong.  Although they were not memoirs, they were closer to her own life than other stories she had written.  She says in her previous stories, she drew on personal material, but then did whatever she wanted to with it, for the chief thing she was doing was “making a story.”  However, in these new pieces, she knew she was doing something closer to what a memoir does—exploring her own life, although not in a rigorously factual way.

The View from Castle Rock is made up of these two separate sets—five family chronicles that Munro says are “something like stories” and six pieces drawn from her own life that she emphatically declares are “stories.” Munro describes them as two separate streams that flow into one channel.

The first story, “No Advantages,” is the most historical, least fictionalized, of the five pieces of “family history.”  The narrator is Munro, in her sixties, traveling alone in Scotland.  When she finds the gravestone of her great-great-great-great-great grandfather, born at the end of the seventeenth century, she enjoys that familiar human experience of imagining her ancestors existing in time and space.  Discovering he is the last man in Scotland to have seen the fairies, she envisions him as a sort of Rip Van Winkle who encounters little people, about as high as a two-year-old child, calling his name.  She draws conclusions and forms hypotheses about him and those who follow him.  She identifies a trait of her Scottish ancestors that forms her own attitudes generations later--the reluctance to call attention to one’s self, the opposite of which is not modesty, but rather a refusal to turn your life into a story, either for other people or for yourself--a curious trait for a storyteller who has all her adult life transformed her life into story.

The title story of the collection moves closer to fictionalized narrative.  Its imaginative spark derives from a received story of one of her ancestors, a young boy, being taken up to Edinburgh Castle by his father, who points out a grayish-blue piece of land showing through the mist beyond the waves and pronounces gravely “America.”  The boy knows he is not looking at America, but rather an island off the coast of Scotland, but this does not lessen the force of the illusion of a land that does have “advantages,” so far away, yet so close—a combination of fiction and reality.  The story focuses on the actual journey the family makes to Nova Scotia. Although Munro says she depends largely on a journal kept by one of the family members, whereas he merely records events, Munro speculates and humanizes, inventing actions for which she has no historical basis and creating motivations based on her imaginative identification with her ancestors.

“Illinois” deals with an event that must have been irresistible to Munro, who has written previous stories of tricks and cross-purposes.  A young male ancestor steals his baby sister and hides her; two silly young girls who like to play jokes steal the infant a second time to tease another boy.  It is a comedy of errors that ends well when the father finds the baby. “The Wilds of Morris Township” has less drama and little comedy, focusing on the quiet intentions of an ancestor who builds himself a house and lives out his life in a brotherly-sisterly relationship with a second cousin.  Munro’s recollection that her father said he had seen the odd couple at church when he was a child brings the chronicle of the family closer to her own life.

“Working for a Living” recounts how Munro’s father begins his adult life as a fur-trapper and seller of skins for the commercial market and how he meets her mother.  After her father stops raising animals for fur, he gets a job at a foundry as a night watchman; when Munro, as a young girl, goes to visit him there, she sees him as someone other than just her father.  In this story, we are introduced to Munro as a future writer. While her father provides her with particular explanations of the foundry, she is more interested in the general effects--the gloom, the fine dust, and the atmosphere of the place. Munro leaves this first half of The View from Castle Rock with her father listening to his grandfather and other men speaking in the dialect of their own childhood---an appropriate transition to the second half, which begins with a fictional account of Munro’s early understanding of the complex relationships that daughters have with their fathers.

 

“Fathers,” the opening piece of the second part of the book, brings us closer to the kind of story that has made Munro famous.  Describing the relationship that two different girls have with their fathers, it is structured around theme rather than event.  First, there is Dahlia, who hates her father for his brutality and would kill him if she could.  Secondly, there is Frances, whose parents try to encourage their daughter’s friendship with Munro. However, when Munro sees Frances’ father squeeze the mother’s behind, she feels some sort of “creepy menace” about them.  Not used to this open display of attention, she feels cornered and humiliated.  She recalls once when her father beat her for some back talk to her mother, the probable source of “Royal Beatings” one of Munro’s most famous stories.  However, she does not compare her situation to Dahlia’s, but she knows that her father hates the arrogance in her.  “Fathers’ is a story about two kinds of father/daughter relationships, neither with which Munro completely identifies, but both of which she intuitively understands.

All the stories in this second section point to Munro’s future as a writer.  In “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” she is thirteen and has a secret poetic idea about looking up through apple blossoms, which has an irresistible formality for her, like kneeling in church.  She has her first erotic feelings for an older boy, but when they are interrupted in what Munro expects will be her first sexual experience, she realizes that the boy is having a relationship with the woman who owns the farm where he works.  Once again, the story ends with a presage of Munro’s future life as an author, for she says for the next few years it is men in books who become her lovers, sardonic and with a ferocious streak in them; her preference running to Heathcliff rather than Edgar Linton, Rhett Butler rather than Ashley Wilkes. 

In “Hired Girl,” Munro, 17, takes a summer job with a family.  When they have a party and friends come to stay the weekend, Munro thinks they are glamorous, like the people she has read about in magazines--people who drink a lot, have affairs, and go to psychiatrists.  When the visiting husband suggests she go swimming without her bathing suit, the next time she is in the water she pulls her top down and thinks of him touching her, feeling both a sense of pleasure and repulsion. When the summer is over, the husband for whom she works gives Munro a copy of Isak Dinensen’s Seven Gothic Tales.  The fictional takes precedence over the merely real, for as soon as she begins to read, she loses herself in the book, believing that this gift of literature has always belonged to her. 

In “The Ticket,” Munro is 20 and preparing for her wedding with her first boyfriend.  The family is glad someone wants her, for she has always scared men off with her intelligence and her arrogance.  More and more, Munro sees the world in terms of language.  As if they were stories, she studies three marriages as a way to prepare for her own—that of her parents, which is the most mysterious because like many children she cannot imagine them in any connection except the one through her; that of her grandparents, which she knows from reports from her mother; and that of her Uncle Cyril and Aunt Charlie, who warn her about marriage.  Munro makes a rare confession in this story by saying that her first husband deserved better than what she gave him; he deserved a “whole heart.” 

The last three stories in the collection bring events closer to the present.  In “Home,” Munro is in love with a man other than her husband, her mother has died, and she comes to visit her ill father and her stepmother, a woman good at sniffing out high-mindedness and superiority.  In “What Do You Want to Know For?” she is married to her second husband and has been told she has a lump in her left breast and must have a biopsy.  Over sixty now, she does not think her death would be a disaster.  It is at this time in her life that she begins to think more about her family and to become interested in imagining them in the past.

In the Epilogue, entitled “Messenger,” Munro ponders the impulse to investigate one’s family history, sifting untrustworthy evidence, linking names, dates and anecdotes--determined to be joined to death and thus to life.  Alice Munro’s most personal book ends appropriately with a metaphor, a huge seashell, which she holds to her ear to listen to the pounding of her own blood and the roar of the ocean.  This metaphor of listening to the self and the sea brings the book full circle, echoing the young ancestor so many years ago, gazing from Castle Rock across that misty ocean which held the future and now holds the past.

Short Story Month 2014: William Trevor

As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available.  Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. 

This mystery of motivation is as true of Trevor's first collection The Day we Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories, 1967 as of his last collection forty years later, Cheating at Canasta, 2007.  In honor of one of the two best short-story writers in the world today, I offer a few comments on the stories in that last collection.  I only hope there will be another.

In  “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Cahill, a nineteen-year-old Irish man takes a couple of young Spanish tourists, seeking a blessing on their marriage, to a statue that was once thought to shed miraculous tears.  However, the miracle of the statue has since been discredited, and the Dublin man who told them about it was only lying to get them to buy him drinks. Cahill knows all this, but wants the fifty euro he charges to drive the couple out to the statue.  On the way back, a young female child, who has a habit of doing such things, runs out in the road and into his car. Cahill does not stop.

When the child’s body is found in a quarry half a mile from her home, the mother, a dressmaker, who has borne the child out of wedlock, begins to stalk Cahill, hinting that she saw him hit the girl.  Cahill imagines that he walked back to the site of the accident and carried the body of the child to the quarry, but he knows that it was the mother who has done this.  The mother urges Cahill to leave his girlfriend and invites him to come home with her. Cahill, afraid, without knowing what he fears, cannot dismiss the connection between him and the dressmaker.  When he tries to understand this, he is bewildered, but he knows that one day he will go to her.  The story suggests that it is possible that death and guilt, as well as birth and love can unite two people.

Guilt, secrets, and obsession also dominate “Folie À Deux.” Wilby, a divorced man in his forties, is in Paris, indulging in his interest in rare stamps.  At a café, he sees an employee who looks like a man named Anthony who Wilby knew as a boy, a man who disappeared years before and who everyone assumed was dead.  Wilby recalls a significant event that has bound them together in guilt.  Once the two boys, out of curiosity, put Anthony’s old dog Jerico in a small boat and pushed him out to sea, just to find out what he would do. They hear the dog howling and later see its body when it is washed up on shore.

Although this does not seem to affect Wilby so much, it profoundly changes Anthony, who becomes quieter and more withdrawn.  Later when Wilby runs into Anthony again at school, he discovers that Anthony is even more remote and strange; Wilby does not befriend him again, even though he feels guilty about this.  Like Cahill in “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Wilby’s guilt is muddled by bewilderment.  When he goes back to the café and realizes that it is Anthony, Wilby knows that he will return to his own safe, tidy world, but this morning he likes himself less than he likes his childhood friend. 

The mystery of motivation and secrets of the past also energize “The Room.”  A forty-seven-year-old woman named Katherine is engaged in an affair, perhaps in revenge, for her husband’s involvement with a prostitute, who was murdered and for whom he was a suspect, nine years before.   Katherine lied for her husband then, in partial repayment for her inability to have children, providing him with an alibi, although it seems quite clear that he did not kill the woman.  

When the man with whom she is having an affair asks Katherine why she loves her husband, she says that no one can answer that question and, in a statement central to Trevor’s success with the short story, asserts that most often, people don’t know why they do things. For the nine years since the murder, she has not asked her husband about the girl, but knows that her alibi for him has given her release from any restraint.  The story ends with her knowledge that the best that love can do is not enough, for what holds people together is often guilt, debt, secrets.

What makes people do what they do and the mysteries of what holds them together or tears them apart is also central to “Bravado.”  Five young people are on the way home late at night—the leader Manning, his cohorts Donovan and Kilroy, Aisling, his girlfriend, and a second girl named Francie. When Dalgety, a boy they scorn as a geek, urinates in someone’s yard, Manning, who always likes to play the big fellow, knocks him down and kicks him. The next morning the boy is discovered dead.  Donovan and Kilroy are sent to jail for eleven years, getting off easy, for they did not know that Dalgety had a weak heart. 

Manning disappears, but writes to Aisling several years later, telling her he has changed.  Aisling finishes school and gets a job but never marries.  At Dalgety’s grave, she begs for forgiveness, for she knows that the beating was done to impress her, to deserve her love, and watching it she had felt a momentary pleasure.  She sometimes thinks she will run away from the shadow of bravado that hangs over her, but she is also now a different person and feels that she belongs to where the act took place.

Guilt and the mysteries of the past have a wider compass in “Men of Ireland.”  A fifty-two-year old man, Donal Prunty, returns to the small village in Ireland where he was born after having spent several years in England “on the street.”  Prunty goes to the parish priest, Father Meade, for whom he served Mass when he was a child and tells him about hearing the old stories of priest abuse with other men--the “hidden Ireland.”  When he accuses Father Meade of abusing him, the priest knows he is lying and wonders if he is confusing him with another priest, his brain addled because of methylated spirits.  Although he insists that no finger has ever been pointed at a priest in this village, still he goes to a drawer and takes paper notes and gives to him.

After Prunty leaves, the priest does not blame him because you cannot blame a hopeless case, and he feels guilty for not being able to reach him as a boy as his mother has asked of him.  He knows that no honorable guilt and no generous intent have made him give Prunty the money, but rather that he has paid for silence.  He accepts that the petty offense of Prunty is minor beside the betrayal by the Church and the shamming of Ireland’s priesthood. 

The inexplicable nature of love and human need dominate such stories as  “An Afternoon,” in which a young girl meets a man in a chat room and then arranges to meet him in person.  She obviously needs the attention of the man and seems to trust him, although the reader is suspicious of his thoughts, discovering gradually that he has met young women like this before.  He is solicitous of the girl, winning a necklace for her in a carnival type game and giving her drinks.

 However, his plans, whatever they are, are foiled, when his aunt, with whom he lives, drives up, telling him to remember that he is on probation.  The girl goes home, and hears her mother and the man she lives with having a fight.  In face of this, the girl, even though she now knows the man planned to take advantage of her, still thinks of him tenderly.  She kisses the necklace he gave her and promises she will always keep it with her.

“The Children” begins with the perspective of Connie, a child of eleven, whose mother has just died.  It then shifts to a woman named Teresa, forty-one, whose husband left her several years before.  Two years later Robert, Connie’s father, asks Teresa to marry him.  Connie takes her mother’s books up on the roof to read them, although it is really pretense, for she is too young to understand them.  She worries that all her mother’s books will be sold, so she wants to know what every single one of them is about.  Five days away from the wedding, Teresa comes to see Robert and they decide to cancel the wedding.  Realizing that nothing is as tidy as they had thought, and that no rights cancel other rights, they both know they have been hasty and careless.  Robert accepts that time will gather up the ends, and that his daughter’s honoring of a memory was love that mattered also. 

"Cheating at Canasta"  opens with a man named Mallory, an Englishman in his middle years, at Harry’s Bar in Venice, famous as a hangout of Ernest Hemingway.  It has been four years since he was last here with his wife Julia, who is now afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.  As a last request, she has made him promise to go back to Harry’s, but he is not sure if this trip is really meaningful.  However, when he hears an American man ask his younger wife why she is crying, he becomes interested in their quarrel.  When they leave, he tells them the reason for his trip, feeling ashamed that he has come close to deploring this tiresome, futile journey.  He recalls letting his wife win at canasta, even though she was not sure why she was happy when she won.  As the couple leave, the man smiles, hearing his wife’s voice say that shame isn’t bad, nor is humility, which is shame’s gift.

These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored.   They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

Short Story Month 2014: Grace Paley

The first thing one notices about the short stories of Grace Paley is the voice that narrates them.  It seems unmistakably  the voice of a woman talking to other women.  Paley once said in an interview that it was "the dark lives of women" that made her begin to write in the first place, adding that at the time she thought no one would be interested, "but I had to illuminate it anyway."  In a preface written especially for The Collected Stories, she says that in 1954 or 1955, when she first felt the storyteller's need, she was not sure that she could write the important serious stuff that men were writing.  Consequently, she says she had no choice but to write about what had been handed to her:  "Everyday life, kitchen life, children life."

Usually, the women in Paley's stories are either unwed, widowed, or divorced; although they often have lovers and children, they are not defined either by marriage or the desire for marriage.  This focus on the female without men has resulted, say some critics, in stories that are feminist in point of view, language, and theme.  And in her new preface, Paley says she agrees, at least to the extent that every woman writing during the decades of the 50's, 60's, and 70's had to "swim in the feminist wave."  Paley's stories are often unified by her focus on the voices of women engaged in conversation, gossip, jokes, intimacies, and above all, storytelling. 

It is the power of this talk and storytelling, Paley insists, that bonds women together into a unified, collaborative force to make their voices heard.  In an interview, Paley once said, "Our voices are, if not getting a lot louder, getting so numerous.  We're talking to each other more and more."  Paley believes that women banding together and talking to one another, especially mothers, constitute a powerful political force for social change.  When you have kids, you get involved in community affairs, Paley says, for your concern is for protection of the children.  Indeed, in many Paley stories, the community of mothers on the playground constitute a central source of social consciousness.

Although Paley's stories show a concern for community and social responsibility, they are far from solemn social tracts or feminist polemics.  Instead, they are characterized by an earthy awareness of urban folk culture combined with an often bawdy sense of humor.  For example, the women in Paley's stories rebel against the traditional role of woman as passive partners in sexuality, and at the same time they reject the egoistic image of men as the answer to all woman's needs.  As Mrs. Luddy tells the character Faith Darwin in the story "The Long Distance Runner," men thought they were bringing women a "rare gift," but it was just sex, "which is common like bread, though essential."  As Faith and Mrs. Luddy talk, like many other women in Paley's stories, we begin to realize that such collaborative talk among women fosters community and freedom.

Faith Darwin, Paley's alter ego, was first introduced in a pair of early stories in The Little Disturbances of Man categorized as "Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life."  The first one, entitled "The Used-Boy Raisers," begins with the typical Paley ironic voice--"There were two husbands disappointed by eggs"--and then continues with Faith's voice characterizing her husband and former husband, who are dissatisfied in the way she has fixed their eggs, as Pallid and Livid as they quarrel about the future of the Jewish race.  At this point in Faith's life, she rarely expresses her opinion on any serious matter and says she considers it her destiny to be, "until her expiration date, laughingly the servant of man."  But as the two husbands go off to face the "grand affairs of the day ahead of them," Faith's voice has managed to gently ridicule the pretensions of these "clean and neat, rather attractive, shiny men in their thirties."

In many ways, the various situations of Faith Darwin reflect the central thematic concerns of Paley's fiction.  As Faith moves from egoistic self pity to a broader identification and sympathy with women in general and women as an oppressed group in particular, she embodies Paley's own growing conviction that fiction can serve a powerful purpose in affirming community, hope, and love.  Faith reappears in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in the story "Faith in the Afternoon," where, recently abandoned by her husband, she visits her parents in a retirement home.  Although she is very much aware of her family history, she holds herself aloof from family in this story, rejecting union and connection. 

Another story, "Faith in a Tree," finds Faith still holding herself aloof, this time symbolically sitting on the limb of a sycamore tree above an urban playground.  However, by the end of the story, she is brought out of her lofty perch by her eight-year-old son's sympathetic identification with the purposes of a peaceful antiwar march and decides to change her distanced perspective to one of social and artistic involvement.  In the final Faith Darwin story in Enormous Changes, "The Long-Distance Runner," Faith jogs to her childhood neighborhood on Cony Island.  Finding the area now populated by African Americans, she retreats to her old home place and stays for three weeks, uniting both with her past and with the black woman Mrs. Luddy who now lives there.

In "Friends," in Paley's third collection, Later the Same Day, Faith goes with her friends Ann and Susan to visit another friend Selena who is dying.  The story is a Paley experiment in creating a collective narrator; she has said in an interview that it is based on her own female friends with whom she had a kind of collective existence.  "Ruthy and Edie," also in Later the Same Day, begins with the relationship between two young girls who talk about the "real world of boys" and fight their fear of a strange neighborhood dog, then shifts to a period many years later at Ruthy's fiftieth birthday when she invites three friends, including Faith and Edie, to her apartment for a celebration.  The story ends with Ruth's anxiety about her success as a mother as she struggles with the hopelessness of protecting her granddaughter from the hard world of "man-made time." 

Faith appears again in "The Expensive Moment," in which the network of women, a frequent theme in Paley's stories, broadens to include a Chinese woman who Faith and Ruthy have met at a meeting of a women's governmental organization sponsored by the UN.  Over tea in Faith's kitchen, the three women wonder whether they were right to raise their children as they did.

A number of Paley's stories are so short that they seem carefully crafted situations symbolic of the circumstances of women.  For example, "Love" is an inconclusive episode in which a man tells his wife about his past loves, one of whom is a fictional character in her own book.  "Lavinia:  An Old Story" is a brief monologue in which a black woman tries to talk her daughter's suitor out of marrying her.  "At That Time, or The History of a Joke" is, in itself, little more than a joke in which the virgin birth becomes the source of several satiric jabs at the Christian religion.  The story "Anxiety" consists primarily of a woman's warnings to a young father taking his daughter home from school; "In This Country" is a two-page prose-poem in which a female child tries to understand whether her maiden aunt has a life of her own; and "Mother" is a two-page memoir brought on by a woman's hearing the song "Oh, I Long To See My Mother in the Doorway."  The two short pieces, "A Man Told Me the Story of His Life" and "This is a Story about My Friend George, the Toy Inventor," are more like brief parables than fully-developed narratives.  In one, we hear of a man who, unable to fulfill his dream to be a doctor, saves his wife's life because of his diagnostic ability; in the other, a man invents a pinball machine that is a poem of the machine, its essence made concrete.

"Wants"--a three-page piece in which a woman meets her ex-husband at the library when she returns books she has had checked out for eight years--effectively expresses a woman's basic desire to be the kind of person who returns books in two weeks, stays married to the same person forever, and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of urban centers.  In "Living," a woman friend calls Faith to tell her she is dying, but Faith says she is dying too, for her menstrual bleeding will not stop; the story is a poignant but restrained exemplum of female sympathy and identification.  "Northeast Playground," another three-page story, deals with a typical Paley social concern as she describes going to a playground where she meets eleven unwed mothers on relief who band together in a kind of playground.

When asked about these very short stories, which seem to challenge the limits of narrative structure, Paley said that a story is more often apt to be too long than too short, arguing that stories should deal with more than the simple dialectic of conflict.  "I think it's two events or two characters...bumping against each other, and what you hear, that's the story."  And that, she says, can happen in two pages.

Grace Paley is very much concerned with the nature of storytelling in her stories, for her narrator is often self-consciously aware of the fact that the characters in the stories are fictional creations.  One of her most frequently anthologized stories, "A Conversation With My Father," is Paley's most explicit treatment of her view of story and its relationship to hope for the future of women.  The protagonist of the story, a writer, is visited by her eighty-year old dying father who wants her to write a Chekhov-type story for him, one with a plot, a concept she despises because, she says, it takes away all hope.  In order to please her father, she tells two versions of a story of a woman who becomes a junkie so she can remain close to her son, who has become a junkie.  Although the father sees the situation of the woman in the story-within-the-story as tragic, the narrator sees it as comic.  As a result, the story is, as many of Paley's stories, both tragic and comic at once.

What Paley rebels against in "A Conversation With My Father" is the inevitability of plot, which, because it moves toward a predestined end, is a straight line between two points.  A basic difference between fiction and "real life," Paley suggests is that whereas real life is open and full of possibility, fiction moves relentlessly toward its predetermined end.  A basic difference between the father's reaction to the woman in the story-within-the-story and the author's reaction is that whereas the father takes her situation seriously, as if she had a separate existence in the world, the author knows that the woman is her own creation; thus, although she feels sorry for her, she never loses sight of the fact that as the author she has the power to alter her destiny.

            The key words in the titles of several of the stories in Later the Same Day are "telling," "listening," "hearing," and "story," for the nature of narrative talk is central to all of them.  As a storyteller, Paley's central concern is the basic characteristics of story, specifically, the characteristics of oral narrative specifically associated with women.  In "Listening," at breakfast, Faith tells her husband Jack the two stories "Anxiety" and "Zagrosky Tells," stories which she neglected to tell him in the story "The Story Hearer."  Jack complains these are stories about men and urges her to tell him the stories told by women about women.  Although Faith says they are too private, many of Paley's stories are indeed about the very private talk between women.

            Paley's concern with the nature of story moves many of her narratives into the realm of self-reflexive fiction or metafiction, for they are about reality as a language construct.  Although her stories lack the kind of tight intentional patterning of the well-made short story since Poe, they are not "realistic" in the usual "slice-of-life" sense. Paley is too self-conscious a writer to be content with straightforward mimetic treatments of real people in the real world.  As a result of her refusal to build her stories around a clear conflict and thus move them toward am emphatic sense of resolution and closure, a number of critics have often been puzzled about how to discuss her stories about women.

            Paley's very brief stories have also been the source of many critical reservations, for they are so short and seemingly inconsequential that they seem to challenge the lower limits of storyness.  Paley has sometimes been classified among those contemporary short story writers known as "minimalists," although her minimalism has been more accepted than that of Ann Beattie, Mona Simpson, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison because of her subject matter focus on the urban Jewish community and the community of women.  In spite of the politically correct nature of her characters, she has been criticized for self-indulgently engaging in meaningless memoirs and desultory dialogues that, although they contain socially significant ideas, are not really stories at all.

            However, this is the same kind of criticism that once was lodged against Anton Chekhov, the originator of the tradition of short-story "realism" to which Paley belongs.  Although her stories seem like mere slices of life without intentional pattern, they are actually quite carefully crafted narratives in which simple objective description takes on symbolic meaning by a careful structure of repetition and interconnection of motifs.  Paley believes that stories should be "like life," at least the  way life should be--that is, open-ended, full of hope, promise, and possibility.  Stories should not be governed by the inevitability of plot, particularly plot determined by the goal-directed nature of male culture.  If life is like a story, then Paley insists that we should all be story tellers, each writing his or her own stories and forming communities of stories with others.

Writing for Grace Paley is a collaborative, social act, not merely in the obvious sense of centering stories on social issues, but in the more complex and profound sense of writing as the creation of a community of speakers and listeners sharing the same values.  Not content to remain the prisoner of a language system based on the dominant male culture, Grace Paley has devoted her art to the creation of a language-based community made up of talk by women to women.