I love reading short stories but sometimes I worry that when I am reading, especially with someone like Elizabeth Taylor, that I am not reading them carefully or slowly enough. When reading something so short--less than twenty pages in most cases--it is almost like making sense of a bite size work of art. It's easy to take stories for granted and sometimes they are fairly simple, but sometimes they are layered and there is more at play than what meets the eye. Of course sometimes in the simple act of just writing about a story, telling someone what happened helps make it clearer. I've actually got two stories to share today as last week's story fell by the wayside here. So first the story I read this weekend and then a little catch up for last week's story.
In today's story, "The True Primitive", it's hard to say really just who is the real primitive. Is it Lily, the young woman who never "considered culture" until she fell in love. Or her the father of her young man, Mr. Ransome who seems to throw at her all the books he had read one after another--not literally, of course. I think Taylor took a serious pleasure at skewing her subjects, particularly those who seem most self-absorbed. Harry, Lily's boyfriend, and Harry's brother are willing participants in his high-brow cultural proclamations, but there is something honest and earnest about Lily that I like. Painters names where often mentioned, too, but they seemed gentler somehow to Lily.
"She felt a curiosity about someone called Leonardo when first she heard him mentioned about had wondered if he were Harry's cousin. When she asked Harry he laughed and referred her to his father, which meant three-quarters of an hour wasted, sitting in the kitchen listening, and then it was too late for them to go for their walk. Trembling with frustrated desire, she had learnt her lesson; she asked no more questions and sat sullenly quiet whenever the enemy names began again."
Curiously I am more keen on Lily than on Mr. Ransome despite his piles of books. He's a self-taught painter as well as a great reader and his sons respect his opinions. He just seems so stuffy.
"Mr. Ransome wondered how Harry and Lily could prefer the sodden lanes to a nice fire and a book to read beside it. He read so much about great passions, of men and women crossing continents because of love, and enduring hardship and peril, not just the discomforts of a dark, wet night--but he could not see Harry and Lily go out without feeling utter exasperation at their fecklessness."
I admit I would like a book in hand sitting in front of a nice fire, but Mr. Ransome is such a "type". I'll happily read Balzac, too, but I like a good mystery or comfort read and I imagine Mr. Ransome scoffing at my reading choices. Maybe, though, I like Lily as she gets the best lines in the story. When Harry tells her sadly that his father has been so good to them since their mother died. He no longer has anyone to read to in the evenings and he misses that.
"'She did the best thing, dying,' Lily thought."
Sorry, a little inward chuckle especially when later he is thinking of those evenings when he would read aloud and his wife would sit and sew and her look of "humble gratitude" when their eyes met across the room.
". . . something, he thought, must have seeped into her, something of the lofty music of prose, as she listened, evening after evening of her married life."
Hmm. I wonder. Little hints at what might with time come if she dares to stick it out with Harry, but the best moment (inward cringe for the reader) is what comes at the end and what makes her literally turn around and run in the other direction!
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Last weekend's story is a longish one and one of my favorites so far, "A Troubled State of Mind". In this wonderful story, two friends, contemporaries must reassess and rework their friendship after one marries the widowed father of the other. It took a number of paragraphs to work out what was happening between the two and what their relationship was.
Sophy has returned from school in Switzerland to meet her new step-mother Lalage. Only the two are long standing friends, Lalla being an orphan, has spent so much time with Sophy on school breaks rather than travel to distant relatives. An orphan and a widow might have much in common thanks to their loneliness only age does sometimes make a significant difference in the end. The girls decide to try and live as more formal daughter and step-mother rather than try and simply continuing being schoolgirl friends.
There is a comfort and security being with an older and established man who can take care of a young woman all on her own. But it is brought home to her just what she is missing when Sophy returns from school for a vacation. An invitation that Sophy might have brought her friend to all of a sudden becomes a minefield and a place not to bring her much older husband. And how awkward, as an invitation is not forthcoming since to bring the older man would put everyone else in a difficult situation.
These new circumstances make everyone just slightly self-conscious and Sophy finds it exhausting to play this new role that everyone has been pushed into. If only her mother had not died, she and her father would be downstairs together and Lalla would join her in her room as young friends ought to be.
It's almost like a divorce and who will maintain friendships now that a pair has been split into two. Only now one has left the group and moved into a new sphere where her own contemporaries can't easily join her. It all comes into sharp focus when Sophy's father realizes that life will be so much easier when his daughter returns to Europe, the chasm is so great between those her age and his own life. The saddest of all, however, is Lalla's realization that she no longer fits into either world comfortably. And to see her old friend in a new romance, ah the envy poisons her blood and spills over into despair.
Elizabeth Taylor's stories can be so very quietly devastating. Next week I will be officially halfway through the book and will be reading "The Rose, the Mauve, the White". The thrill of a new story and what it might be about . . .