I have this secret little fantasy (as only an overly enthusiastic reader can have) of reading the stories in Infinite Riches each week and then accompanying the short story with another work by each author. Eighteen authors so eighteen additional books. Well, a person can dream anyway. Last week it was Sylvia Townsend Warner and I happily pulled out my copy of Lolly Willowes (and may still read it yet--well sooner than later that is).
This week I have been introduced to Penelope Gilliatt. Along with short stories she was also a film critic for The Observer as well as The New Yorker. There's something about New Yorker authors that I really like. More often than not I get on really well with their work (think William Maxwell, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever . . .), so when I see that they are or were contributors to the magazine I think I will be in for a treat. I was not disappointed by Penelope Gilliatt. As a matter of fact when I read the brief biographical description and saw that she wrote the screenplay for the 1971 John Schlesinger film, Sunday Bloody Sunday (a film I watched for the first time last fall and loved and have watched it a couple more times since then, including during my recent break), I knew that I had to order a copy of the screenplay.
In case you are curious, the film is about an unusual love triangle. I think it was credited for being the first film to show a happy and fulfilling (or reasonably so) homosexual relationship. It's a brilliant movie and now I think I will indeed read the book since it is pure dialogue. The film stars Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head, and it is interesting to think of how she portrays relationships both on film and in a short story. She conveys so much in shorter works. The editor noted how Gilliatt was able to craft her story with such economy and both "creates and dismantles [a] relationship within single sentences of wounding clarity". It's on this same terrain she tells her story in "Living on the Box".
The story is a portrait of a marriage between a famous and successful (if idiosyncratic) nature poet and his supportive wife (whom he married for "her gaiety"). He's what you might call high-maintenance. An artist who must be handled with kidd gloves. The sort of man who can talk so eruditely on and on without actually saying anything, if you know the type. At least that's what I thought when I read the story.
"During the twelve years of their life together, he had tutored her carefully in monkishness. As part of the training he spoke to her rarely. To rail at her meant opening a conversation, and this involved preposterous changes in his day."
Do you see what I mean? He's a man with a carefully regimented schedule. He would go on walks and often leave her notes, perhaps the better not to be disturbed and intruded upon. "In his mordant presence she always felt vulgar and self-indulgent." This is a story filled with biting observations. Do you think we always hurt the ones we love the most? He knows how to wound her. "He's such an abrasive spirit". And to get back at her, at something she says or does . . . just to be contrary (and because she assumed he would turn them down), he agrees to do a filmed interview with the BBC. Quite a coup for them, and they'll want to film the wife as well.
The Wife spends so much time getting ready and preparing mentally for the interview, it made her late for lunch, which of course they would expect as a matter of course.
"She knew that she had never been an intellectual, but she thought she had probably once been capable of insight."
And when the young men doing the interview returned from their walk with the Poet and began to film her in the kitchen, "she forgot every word she had learned." But maybe just as well as when she answered the questions it was with a realization of opinions she hadn't even quite realized she had had.
This is such an illuminating story and told, as the editor remarks, with such economy. This is what I love in a short story.
Next weekend: Jane Bowles.
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I'm going to catch myself now. I said that I love New Yorker authors, but maybe sometimes I just appreciate them more than anything. I mean, it's hard to love everything you read, though I do go into every story with that anticipation and hope. Last year I read two of Robert Coover's stories and I think maybe I am just not his best audience. But I will say that "The Crabapple Tree" which appears in the Jan. 12 issue is my favorite thus far. It's quite macabre however. He tends to do retellings of fairy tales, or his stories have a very fairy tale-ish quality to them. This is a story about a fragile little boy (who has some magical quality), his vampish stepmother, a death (maybe, probably, accidental) and a crabapple tree under which no one in the town will go. A tree from which the birds feast and if anything get louder and bigger and if anything are more of than ever. I know there is more to it than I am seeing, or maybe I am trying to see something that isn't there.
If you're curious, this is one you can read online.
Have you read a short story this week?