A Work in Progress

Short Story 'Monday': Little Disturbances

A mere twenty pages stand between me and the end of Mary Costello's The China Factory.  I have quite enjoyed her writing and these Irish stories with their thread of melancholia that seems so pervasive in them.  They are intense and sometimes very dark.  I've not felt much joy or bliss in them to be honest.  The characters struggle in their situations and their relationships.  Particularly in their relationships.  These are average people leading mostly ordinary average sorts of lives and while that can be heavy going (and I am glad I didn't try and gulp these down quickly), I can see bits and pieces of these emotions and struggles in my own life.   I can't decide whether this makes me feel better or worse.  Better to think that I am not alone in my own 'struggle', yet worse to think are there no really happy relationships?  No one is happy all of the time, but I hope there are couples out there who are happy a good lot of the time, that the struggles and difficult moments are worth it in the end.

Once again I read two stories this weekend, "Little Disturbances" and "Room in Her Head", but I was drawn more to the first story than the latter one, so let me tell you about that one.

It's hard to face the end of your life when you feel moments of regret over the choices you have made.  Not the people you have ended up with but the way you chose to live your life.  How do you face not knowing whether you might have been happier had you taken some other risks.  Would you have been happier, might your spouse been happier, your marriage stronger if you had left Ireland and maybe gone to America?  That could be true of any of us, and I often think of those 'sliding door' moments myself.  What if I had made some other choice, said no instead of yes, gone elsewhere.  Would I be very different?  Would I be happier?  Would those around me have been happier?  You could drive yourself crazy wondering these things.

In my eyes, this is one of the things that struck me so much when I read this story. 

"He hears music when he wakes these mornings.  The notes float up from below, pouring softly into the room, and for a moment he thinks it is Miriam, Miriam perched on the piano stool with her legs swinging and the purple-flowered wallpaper swirling around her and the notes spilling from her fingers."

One of the things I like about Costello's storytelling is how she lures you into her stories by, in this case, this seemingly insignificant memory.  Miriam is the narrator's daughter.  One of his children who has gone off to Canada to live and now fears flying and so doesn't return home often.  We later learn that she had a disagreement with her parents.  The narrator, the father, is much older and there is the strong hint he is not well, that perhaps he is facing some terrible illness.  He tends to drift off into his memories and his wife is short with him.  They don't seem especially happy together, but maybe they are settled and comfortable, and when you have built a life together how do you give it all up?

"Marie has gone from him little by little, year by year, and the going is almost complete.  He has never been enough; she had wanted a fuller life, and a small bit of glamour.  The years wore her down, the worry, the work."

And then he thinks:

"Something spills out of us, and it cannot be put back again."

And so the regrets and wondering.  "He thinks of all the blindness he ever had".  I guess in life there are more moments like this than the sort that soar.  Those moments of release of feeling that cloud lifting, those rare moments of beauty and the sublime.  But facing illness is a wake up call, if you will listen anyway, a chance to laugh and maybe forget just for a moment. 

And so that is the beauty in Costello's storytelling.  How she can take these moments of everyday life, important moments sometimes, and hold them up to the light, and sometimes you feel as though they are your own.  And I suppose it is the mark of a good writer if she makes the reader just a little uncomfortable.  She stirs things up inside a reader and leaves her just a little bit unsettled. 

I do admit, however, after the next two stories, "Insomniac" and "The Sewing Room", I think I will leave Ireland behind for a while.  I might pick up a collection of stories designed around a theme but consisting of the works of various writers.  Or I might give a recent collection by Ali Smith a try.  Actually, go read the blurb on Ali Smith's stories, it sounds quite promising and maybe a little lighter, too.  Lightness is just as important in life and storytelling as heaviness and darkness.

Short Story 'Monday': The Astral Plane

I have really liked all the stories I've been reading this past month or so, but you know how thematically it has been lots of melancholy in the stories from The China Factory.  Melancholy is fine, and sometimes really it is just what I want in a story, and heaven knows that life is full of melancholy moments.  But sometimes you just want something else.  A little brighter perhaps.  Maybe melancholic but not in an entirely sad sort of way.  Is that possible even?  Well, it's been more of the same again, though one story resonated a bit more than the other.

I read two stories this weekend, but I'll tell you first (or mostly) about the second one, "The Astral Plane", which has to do with love affairs from a distance and bookishness and correspondence.  This can all be pretty tricky business to be honest when it happens that the people involved are married . . . to other people.  I know it happens and I frown upon that sort of disloyalty in real life, but somehow I don't  mind so much when it comes to taking place in a story.  Is that cheating somehow?  (Figuratively, I mean.)

Do you think a person can be guilty of cheating when they don't actually physically do anything wrong?  I do.  I mean there is disloyalty in the heart, a disloyalty of intention.  I know it happens and maybe it really isn't something that one might set out to do intentionally, but if it affects a real, ongoing relationship, then maybe it is a problem after all.  And I suspect it happens all the time--little crushes that are never acted upon.  Does it happen only because there is already a problem in the relationship or come about purely by chance?

"She should be happy.  How then could she explain why she didn't feel enough?  Is there a measure for enough?  And when the enough plateaus out, as it does in a long marriage, is there a different kind of measure?  Is there an index for love?  She looked over at him, at his dark eyes and greying temples.  And is there, she wondered, any explanation why on this warm night in this beautiful corner of the earth, with the vast  ocean beyond the window and the moonlight overhead--is there any explanation why my head is filled with thoughts of another man?"

One night A. receives an email from a man in New York who has found a copy of a book she left at a literary lecture he attended while on a trip to Dublin.  He politely asks if she happens to the the owner as an email address was written in the back of the book.  He read the book and loved it and asked if he could return it to her.  And A. on the other side of the Atlantic while E. is in New York replies and so starts a conversation about books and writers.  It's obvious they have things in common.  She sends him a message joking about his erudition and knowledge of literature and tells him she will soon need shades on "this side of the Astral Plane', which then becomes their tagline.

Is it just a virtual correspondence like that of Charing Cross Road (wasn't Frank Doel married while Helene was not? yet their correspondence was entirely charming).  For A. and her husband Adam, and he shows her genuine affection always, it becomes something of a secret wedge.  And he can feel it, too, but he never quite suspects anything is going on.  It's strange to think that some unmet person can fill a need or a void in another person.  That a correspondence can become so intense that the two become passionate, but a passion that results in argument and a kind of forgiveness.  Mary Costello explores the "confluence of hearts" and she turns the tables just a bit when E. returns to Dublin opening a new set of problems and opportunities that  may result in something predictable, or not--in the hands of someone like Mary Costello.  An interesting "affair of the mind".

"And Who Will Pay Charon?" is worth a mention, and could easily elicit a whole post.  The story is a bit disturbing, however, in the unraveling of a bit of a mystery.  This is another story of relationships, but in this case of missed opportunities.  Maybe not missed but choices of opportunities not taken and not exactly regretted.  It's a story that calls into question Fate.  A man and woman come together, and while the woman would like to pursue the relationship, the man decides to forego it.  She moves away but many years later returns to this small Irish town and becomes something of a recluse.  The explanation of why, what happened to her in London in the disturbing part.  In a way this is a story of "what ifs".  What if they had gotten together?  But the man, the narrator thinks that while she may have had a different life, would she and he together "be tried" in some way, would they still need to pay Charon?  An interesting question, which I am not sure I agree with, but then we'll never know about these "what ifs", will we?

Next week: "Little Disturbances" and "Room in Her Head".

Short Story Monday: A Hodgepodge

I had a bit of a short story reading extravaganza this weekend.  Some I liked more than other, which is not too surprising really.  I am still greatly enjoying Mary Costello's collection, The China Factory, and am officially at the halfway mark.  I love her writing but I must say all the stories I have read have a strong thread of melancholy running through them.  They seem to be primarily about relationships, some happier than others but mostly about disappointments and missed opportunities. 

In "The Falling Sickness" the death of a first husband brings back painful memories of the accidental death of their young son.  It seems that so often the death of a child will either bring the parents closer together or force them irretrievably apart.  It was just a momentary lapse.  Just one short second of letting go of a hand and a car unable to stop and lives are changed forever.  Many years and a divorce later the husband falls while mountain climbing and there is just the tiniest hint  or question about whether it truly was a simple accident.  A healthy man who is well trained and experienced falls to his death, but the ex-wife knows the guilt he carried with him over the years.  Perhaps the affair that put a dramatic end to the relationship weighs heavily on the mind, too.  And then the wife, now remarried and moved on to a new life, looks out over the congregation and wonders if the woman who so boldly called during their time of grief is there at the funeral, too. 

"Sleeping with a Stranger" is another story, though more directly this time, about infidelity.  Two chance encounters.  Was the first a setup for the second.  Was that moment of two souls passing destined to be inevitably the fulfillment of one man's earlier desires.  And for the woman, is it life's disappointments that grind her down and allow it to eventually happen?  Simple acceptance?  The man is a school official on his way to make a teaching inspection.  As it turns out a woman he sees on the side of the road looking at t dead fox is the teacher he is coming to review.  His marriage is not an unhappy one.  He knows he has given his wife everything--every day, all the quotidian moments and even after death their bones will mingle together in the grave.  Yet that one lapse.  That one moment of unfaithfulness is his own that he will not share with her.  Does it count for everything or nothing at all he wonders. 

It can be hard not being judgemental when it comes to cheating spouses.  In cases of infidelity it always seems to easy to assign blame, but it is the mastery of Costello's storytelling that makes those black and white thoughts turn markedly grey.  It is hard to see those unfaithful spouses as anything but human.  Flawed and with failures, yet not bad people.  Just glitches on an otherwise calm radar. 

I did manage to read Belle Marshall Locke's story "The Hiartville Shakespeare" club, which is one of the weekly freebie Library of America stories.  It was light and amusing and just the right sort of story to offer a little comic relief after a couple of heavier stories.  It pokes gentle fun (in a guffaw-inducing manner) at those turn-of-the-century Shakespeare literary clubs that had become so popular at the time.  It is quite a satirical story about a group of young ladies preparing to have a performance of Shakespeare monologues and dramatic scenes to be performed for the benefit of the "crippled foot-ball players" (who I am very sure would appreciate an afternoon of Shakespeare, right?).  The ladies decide that they must have a proper rehearsal which results in banged heads and scratched limbs, a sprained ankle and other sundry cuts and bruises.  But the show must go on, and the rehearsal proceeds until each girl is nursing some hurt or other.  The club president remarks that "football may be dangerous, but it's a baby's game compared to Shakespeare!

And I even managed to read this week's (May 9 issue) New Yorker short story by John L'Heureux, "Three Short Moments in a Long Life" which is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at the "mysteries" of a long life (so long that the mysteries are perhaps not so mysterious at the end).  The moments shared are during youth, middle age and near the end of a long life, a life maybe that has ended up being too long.  You can read the author's Q&A here.  It feels good to get back to my New Yorker stories.  Maybe I can get back on track once again.  I only ran out of time to read one of the Vintage Shorts that I downloaded and mentioned to you.  Something to look forward to reading this week!

More Stories from the China Factory

I hope to get back on my Short Story Sunday schedule eventually (and hope even more to get back into my New Yorker short story reading routine), but until then I am still reading and enjoying even if I am not posting on normal short story day.  So, two more stories by Mary Costello from The China Factory.  She is a lovely writer, but the stories, certainly the first of the two I will share tend towards the melancholy.  I actually don't mind melancholy since it so often resembles life--just the ordinary with moments both sad and beautiful.

I think "Things I See" might be my favorite story so far (early days yet since I am a mere four stories in).  The narrator is a young mother who works while her husband plays the stay at home dad.  The pair are joined by her younger sister who is staying with them for a week.  The story is all about the things and people she observes every day, though not just simple observations but internal reflections on her life and world and relationships. 

"Outside my room the wind whistles.  It blows down behind our row of houses, past all the bedroom windows and when I try to imagine the other bedrooms and the other husbands and wives inside, I hear my own husband moving about downstairs.  He will have finished reading the paper by now and broken up the chunks of coal in the grate.  Then he will carry the tray into the kitchen, carefully, with the newspaper folded under his arm.  He will wash the mugs and leave them to drain; he will flip the blind so that the kitchen will be bright in the morning."

Her husband, she thinks to herself, is predictable and safe.  Sometimes she longs to be alone however, able to putter around the house.  Yet there is a contentment in the idea of her husband and tiny daughter in her memory--she will linger in their afterglow of nearness until some sound shatters the moment and brings her back to reality.  Of late she has had a worry, a concern, for their future.  It's not the idea of their getting old together but of "growing different" and what woman in any relationship has not worried about that.  What happens to any relationship over time where the pair doesn't grow in the same direction and twines together but branches off in some other direction?

She has a new image to call on.  Returning home from work earlier in the day, she comes upon husband and child and her younger sister returning home from a walk and sees three happy people, flushed by the wind and chill in the air laughing at some shared joke.  Who made it?  What brought on the laughter.  And the narrator wonders and thinks to herself that this child is so apart from her that she almost cannot claim her, so much is she with her father.  This shared moment has excluded her.  This moment, this thing she sees.  These things she sees are not only just everyday average things, but these shared moments outside herself that raise doubts of her place and others' intentions and actions. 

"The Patio Man" is a somewhat perplexing story and I had to skim over it again a second time to see what I had missed, as when I came to that last nuanced moment of the story I knew I had read it too fast and hadn't been paying as careful attention as I should have.  Never underestimate the power of a short story. 

The patio man is the narrator of the story with yet more observations, but these are entirely different really.  Yet another ordinary life filled with ordinary things--visiting friends and family, thinking of journeys he'll be taking with friends, but mostly he thinks of gardens since he is a gardener by trade.  And yes, along with tending to gardens and planting and designing he also sets slabs of stones to make patios which he is in the process of doing for a woman who rarely leaves her house.  There's a reason for this as she is expecting a baby.  But still, she tells him, she's never been one much for the outside. 

On his second day of work she comes out and tells him she must leave unexpectedly, her face is pale and she looks ill and in the end he offers to take her to the hospital as she is in some distress.   A moment and a situation he has never had to deal with and one that enlightens him to the reality of women's lives. 

"Something had been forming, cell by cell, limb by limb, in the dark of her.  Vertebrae, tendon, knucklebone.  The iris in an eye.  Now, it had fallen away, a subtraction of her being.  Fingerprints cut short in the making.  He thinks of things he has not thought of before, about women's lives.  It is not the same for men at all.  His hands turn on the steering wheel,  His strength, his maleness, is of no avail."

This is the sort of understated yet still vivid moment that Mary Costello writes about in her stories.

The next two stories: "This Falling Sickness" and "Sleeping with a Stranger."

Short Story 'Monday': Mary Costello

So, after much deliberation and consideration, I've decided to give the stories of Mary Costello a try.  I have heard good things about her from trusted sources and after reading the first two stories this weekend think this will be a perfect fit.  Maybe this is my year to read lots of Irish Literature as Costello grew up in County Galway and now lives in Dublin.  I plan on reading her first novel, Academy Street, at some point.  It won the Irish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award.  The story collection I am now reading, The China Factory, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.  So, as you see the accolades for her writing abound.

As this collection, with just a dozen stories, is just over 150 pages, so I am hoping to make quick progress.  Most stories are only around ten pages, but in the hands of someone as talented as Costello seems to be, ten pages is a pretty wide canvas on which to paint quite a good story.

The collection opens with the titular story, "The China Factory".  This is in its own way a coming-of-age story.  Certainly by the story's end there is a feeling that the character has made a number of self-revelatory observations about her youthful behavior.

"The summer I turned seventeen I worked as a sponger in a china factory.  I walked to the end of our road every morning to catch my lift to the city with Gus Meehan, and every evening I came home with a film of fine dust lodged in the pores of my skin.  From the back seat I had a view of Gus's broad shoulders and the china clay caked in the creases of his neck and in his grey hair.  The air inside the car smelled of cigarette ash and stale masculine sweat."

Gus is shy and deferential with a bit of a stammer and by almost anyone's standards is something of a misfit.  But he is a gentle soul and I think the unnamed narrator recognizes this but is just too young an inexperienced to appreciate such accomplishments.  She's not cruel but she's not got the self-confidence yet either to stand behind her beliefs rather than fall in line with the poor regard of her young coworkers.

I think Gus holds a certain fascination and attraction for her.  She watches and notices from a distance, but being young she is still trying to find her way in the world.  She manages to get a prize position applying gold leaf to the china plates, a position coveted by her coworkers, which of course does nothing to endear herself to them.  Maybe for this reason that the girls now resent her, and the fact that all along she had planned to leave at the end of the summer for university that she so blithely 'throws Gus under the wheels' so to speak when the other girls make fun of him.  She tells her story looking back from her new life, wishing she might have been able to take them all with her into her new world. 

"You Fill Up My Senses" is the story of a mother's life as observed through the eyes of her young daughter.  Once again Costello's young narrator is a keen observer who only over time sees the real world of a woman she thinks of as someone "who understands everything about her".  Her mother may understand this child, but it will take the narrator time to fully understand the life of her mother.  Her mother's mother died when she was young, so she grew up motherless.  And sometimes the narrator fears the same will happen to her.  It's always interesting seeing the adult world through the eyes of a child.  They make interesting and often accurate observations but often misunderstand the nuances of what they see. 

As the wife of a farmer and the mother of several children there is never any rest, no matter how weary she may be.  Even when the farmer's/her father's day comes to an end, her mother is still has the family's chores.  What will it take to have her mother forget the five children and the arguments and the never ending work.

"She gazes at their faces in the honeymoon photograph.  They do not know what is ahead of them.  If they knew what was ahead of them they might have left the lakes of Killarney."

The book blurb says that Costello "examines the passions and perils of everyday life with startling insight, casting a light into the darkest corners of the human heart."

Next weekend definitely "Things I See" and hopefully, too, "The Patio Man".

Joy of Stories: Choosing a New Collection

So, so far two short story collections this year and I loved them both--the first by Tove Jansson and then the most recent stories by the inimitable Elizabeth Taylor.  How to follow up after two such remarkable women writers?  I could (happily) read more stories by either woman.  But I have so many other collections to choose from.  Here are the books I grabbed that were closest at hand and seem a reasonable length:

By the Light of the Silvery Moon edited by Ruth Petrie.  This collection was compiled in honor of the 10th birthday of of the Silver Moon Women's Bookshop (sadly now defunct).  This collection contains stories by a nice variety of women writers-from Elizabeth Jolley, to Lisa Alther, Liza Cody, to Shena Mackay to Hanan al-Shaykh.

A Few Days in the Country and Other Stories by Elizabeth Harrower.  Harrower is an Australian writer and this collection has stories published in journals in the 1960s and 1970s.  I read her story "Alice" in the New Yorker last year and was hoping to try more of her work and voila, here is the collection!

What's It Like Out? and Nobody's Business by Penelope Gilliatt.  I want to try something by Gilliatt this year and what better introduction to a writer's work than by reading a few short stories?  Also, I am hoping to read more Viragos (and Persephones, too), because I love the books both presses publish.  I so enjoyed Elizabeth Taylor and I want something like her work, but some other view of the world.  Anthony Burgess called her "highly intelligent, economical, poignant, highly contemporary."

The China Factory by Mary Costello.  I have heard many good things about her and this collection.  "Her prose is subtle, strong, and lyrical, while her knowledge of human nature yields memorable characters. Common themes in these stories are the shock of loneliness, the inability of people to communicate with honesty, the effects of shame, the fear of self-disclosure, and the strain of infidelity and cruelties on relationships. Through variations in style, using both male and female points of view, she depicts modern Irish lifestyles." (Booklist).

Dimanche and Other Stories by Irene Nemirovsky.  I have read a few of her shorter works and one or two stories, but I seem to be collecting her books without making much of a dent in that particular pile.  "  Written between 1934 and 1942, these ten gem-like stories mine the same terrain of Némirovsky's Suite Francaise: a keen eye for the details of social class; the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives; the manners and mannerisms of the French bourgeoisie; questions of religion and personal identity. Moving from the drawing rooms of pre-war Paris to the lives of men and women in wartime France, here we find the beautiful work of a writer at the height of her tragically short career."  I have the lovely Persephone Books edition.

Strangers by Antonia White.  I have already read two of White's novels this year and would be happy to further read some of her short stories, which I suspect will be thematically similar to the Clara Batchelor quartet.  "With uncompromising clarity, in her careful, delicate prose, antonia White looks at the pains and joys of growing up, of falling in and out of love, the borderlands between love and loneliness, sanity and madness, belief and the loss of faith."

The Rendezvous and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier.  I have read quite a few of her short stories and I think I must own nearly all her books.  She is an excellent short story writer and I recognize a few in this collection I have read before, but I am always happy to revisit her work.  It has been far too long since I have read her, too.

How to choose!  Of course part of the pleasure of picking a new book is comparing and contrasting and dipping into the books and seeing which clicks at the moment.  And with stories you truly don't know what treats you are in store for.  I only hope whichever I decide on will be as stunningly good as both Elizabeth Taylor and Tove Jansson's writing.  Check back Sunday (or Monday . . .depending on how well organized I am this coming weekend) to see which will end up in my reading pile.

Short Story 'Monday': Good-Bye, Good-Bye

Two stories by Elizabeth Taylor this weekend and two left for this coming week and that will be it for her wonderful story collection, The Blush.  I do have a number of new and interesting (and calling-out-to-me) collections that I am trying to decide between for my next choice, but I also feel very tempted to just grab another collection by Taylor (I think I have about three plus a hefty complete stories collection) and keep going with her work.

In "Good-Bye, Good-Bye" Taylor juxtaposes two 'love affairs'-one a new and burgeoning love and the other a melancholic look at an impossible love, an affair long past and assumed put to bed.

"On his last evening in England he broke two promises--one, that he would dine with his brother, and another, older promise he made to a woman whom he loved."

The more significant promise that Peter breaks is to call on Catherine, this woman he still loves and once had an affair with.  They parted and Catherine made him promise that it was over and he would not contact her again.  She is a married woman and with nearly grown children and is spending the summer holidays at the place where she and Peter had once saw their passion come alive.  Peter sees her husband, busily working in the City, as someone only worried about making money and babies. 

The seaside summer holiday is not just a holiday for her eldest daughter who had invited her first beau and now nurses a broken heart as his expected arrival has come and gone and the train brought only Peter.  For Catherine Peter is not a welcome guest however much she might still have feelings for him.  When Sarah's guest turns up after all Catherine reflects that his tardy arrival will only be worse for her daughter now--as it is worse for her, too.  ". . . all that carefully-tended hatred has vanished in a few seconds."

As is only expected with Elizabeth Taylor she creates a story that is pitch perfect.  Those emotions once so carefully contained and bottled up now well to the surface once again.  Catherine just barely keeps her anguish from the children and holds Peter, figuratively anyway, at arm's length.  It's so easy to imagine the love affair, perhaps the result of the war, the passion and then the parting.  But no matter how much she might still feel love she can think only now of the well-being of her children and then watches her daughter already falling into that trap of loving a man and perhaps being at the mercy of his whims.

I can't find where I must have written about it, but I am sure I read Taylor's brilliant nod to Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" some time in the past.  "Poor Girl" is a wonderful ghost story.  Is it a ghost?  Perhaps.  There is certainly something or a trace of someone in the schoolroom.  Or maybe it is the precocious little boy Hilary that awakens something.  Is he some strange conduit or past experiences coming to life once again in the here and now?  Florence Chasty is a respectable and modest young woman.  Miss Chasty, please, to Hilary who is only too quick to take the familiar with her.

The story begins innocuously enough at the start.  It's an earlier time, but not so very long ago.  She has come to act as governess to a little boy who seems the elder of the two. 

"Miss Chasty's first pupil was a flirtatious little boy.  At seven years, he was alarmingly precocious, and sometimes she thought he despised his childhood, regarding it as a waiting time which he used only as a rehearsal for adult life.  He was already more sophisticated than his young governess and disturbed her with his air of dalliance, the mockery with which he set about his lessons, the preposterous conversations he led her into, guiding him skillfully away from work . . ."

Hilary might push the boundaries of propriety, but Miss Chasty is reasonably good at getting him to settle into his work even if he flirts and messes about--calling her Florence, or Poor Girl, asking her to wait to marry him.  He is a seven year old dandy who when he is old enough to grow a moustache will surely look the spitting image of his papa.

Oh dear.  His papa.  Even Hilary's mother, while indulging her husband in his "little joke to make him feel youthful" by comparing son to father, inwardly thinks--please God let it be only in looks and not in action be like his father.  There's a warning there.  Because dear papa has a fondness for young maids and governesses.  And then another warning that not all is right in the household . . . the red lipstick smudges on poor Miss Chasty's teacup or the sweet scents that seem to hover in the schoolroom.  Surely Mrs. Wilson's first impressions of Florence were not wrong. But what is that rustling of skirts about Miss Chasty's person?  Surely not silken undergarments?! 

There is something not quite right in the schoolroom.  It's hinted at and there is an aura about the place.  What happened here so long ago?  What is happening now?  What is coming over poor dear Miss Chasty?  If you have a chance, do give this collection a go.  I've not yet read a story in it that I didn't like.

Next up "Hare Park" and "You'll Know It When You Get There".

Short Story: Perhaps a Family Failing

Like father, like son?  The acorn never falls far from the tree?  Describe it any way you like, in Elizabeth Taylor's short story "Perhaps a Family Failing", from the collection Blush, the men in the Midwinter family leave much to be desired!  I think Mrs. Midwinter already knows that.  However young Beryl Cotterell is finding out the hard way.

Another very good short story by Taylor.  This one is told from different perspectives, or rather moves from character to character and family to family to show a young, just-getting-married couple.  The wedding has just come and gone and the fact that Mrs. Cotterell, the mother of the bride, in the opening paragraph of the story says right off the bat that Mr. Midwinter, the groom's father, is a man she "detested" pretty well sets the tone.  However, it is the further implication of what that means for Beryl.  It's what comes at the end of the story that makes you shake your head and imagine what her life will be like. 

I suppose it is just the tiniest bit comic, and there is a knowingness about the story.  Taylor turns her razer-sharp eyes towards domesticity and the idea that happily ever after so very often isn't really happy after all.  There is no need to read on or wish for more story to see what happens after the wedding, since it is easy to imagine what's going to come next.  What's impressive about Taylor's writing is the fact that she doesn't just assign blame in a clichéd manner.  There is always more at play in her work.

Maybe Geoff and Beryl are actually made for each other, though when Beryl says she is sure she can "break him of the habit" of his obsession with public houses you just know it is not going to be as easy as she thinks it will be.  As a matter of fact, she will likely learn the hard way that you can't break someone else's bad habits.  The wedding goes off without a hitch.  Mrs. Cotterrell is happy that the reception is her affair and she can keep a close eye on the details (the Cotterell's being teetotalers so there will be no drunken nonsense).  Mr. Midwinter in all his obnoxiousness has tied a sardine can to the back end of the married couple's car (to be removed at the first opportune moment). 

The only thing to come even close to mar the day is the sudden shift of weather.  A seaside honeymoon is marked by a bleak stretch of promenade from the bedroom window as a strong gale blows in.  The clash of family preoccupations is evident, though with Beryl she is perhaps a bit more worried about appearances and the desire that everything should be "just so" including her dress, hair and makeup.  The Cotterell's seem a reasonably nice, upstanding, moral sort of family whereas the Midwinters are headed by a somewhat belligerent, overbearing father with several sons who probably ride roughshod over all and sundry and a poor mother who is shoved to the background hampered by her meekness.  Beryl castigates Geoff for his teasing and wish for a little hanky-panky before dinner ("Oh don't be so silly.  It's broad daylight.").  And Geoff's father tellingly notes that he's like his dad ("Not given to asking anybody's by-your-leave when he feels like a pint."). 

So, I've told you everything except the best part, which is what happens (or doesn't) in the bridal suite on the honeymoon of this very "happy" occasion.  You're just going to have to read the story for yourself.

Four stories left in this collection, which I plan on finishing in April (several contenders for May short story reading already).  Next up is "Good-Bye, Good-Bye").

Short Story (Monday): Summer Schools

Okay, so I won't gush this week about Elizabeth Taylor's short story collection, Blush, but it really is very good and I've read yet another amazing story.  I fully expect to love each weekly installment now.

This week's story, "Summer Schools" first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958.  It's quite revealing what a character does or does not say, isn't it?  Or, I'll pose the question, what does it say about a person that they embellish and embroider and share an encounter they've had while another person simply omits all mention of a quite momentous event in their life?  In the hands of Elizabeth Taylor, who in her usual understated way, it says a lot.

Melanie and Ursula are spinster sisters, both school teachers of a 'certain age'.  The two live in an unnamed seaside town and by all appearances lead quiet and very uneventful lives.  Somehow, middle age has crept up on the pair and the banality weighs more heavily on one more than the other.

"Ursula, two years younger, was plumper, brighter, more alert.  Neither was beautiful."

***

"Melanie's swearing was something new since their father had died--an act of desperation, such as a child might make."

An old school friend of both sisters invites Ursula to come stay, claiming lack of space for the single invite rather than asking both sisters.  In reality Pamela can't stand Melanie who is somewhat on the curmudgeonly side.

" . . .the two sisters always spent their holidays together; in fact, had never been separated.  To Melanie, the invitation seemed staggering insolent, and Ursula's decision to accept it could hardly be believed."

It's only the forboding of middle age that gives Ursula the courage (or the effrontery as Taylor notes) to accept the invitation.  She asks Melanie to look after her cat which only annoys her even more and provokes her into making up her own vacation plans.  She tells Ursula she had planned to go on a summer lecture course--the Victorian Novel.  Trollope, George Eliot.  Oh, Lord, thinks Ursula.

So the bulk of the story is made up of each sister's chosen holiday.  Ursula finds their friend Pamela much changed, quite the domestic goddess, yet the vacation visit is marked by the "motif of drinking". Think 1950s "Mad Men" I suspect.  As girls Ursula remembers only the stifling household Pamela was raised in and her new lifestyle seems quite the escape from her rigid upbringing.  Perhaps a little short of a swinging singles weekend, nonetheless Ursula has a romantic adventure with another guest--a younger man.  A not unwelcome encounter.  

Meanwhile Melanie's literature course is marked by lectures on Middlemarch attended by obnoxious posers, but the professor giving the talks is a writer of swoonworthy appearance.  Pity his wife is in attendance, sitting in the corner of the room forever knitting and so accustomed to her husband's lectures she could easily answer the questions herself.  And she's well aware of the effect he has on the female attendees but is comfortable in the knowledge that nothing inappropriate will occur.

Interesting what each encounter will do to each sister's self-esteem.  The younger man calls Ursula 'darling', and despite it being a meaningless endearment, how nice to be the focus of a young man's attention.  And Melanie can't seem to put from her mind the two frumpish maiden-ladies who live just up the lane.  They may be no more than just into their fifties but are eccentric and at war with each other.  And the warning signs are there that Melanie and Ursula will follow suit.

Holidays over, Melanie is determined to be the last one home, the sister with the most satisfying holiday stories, but even catching the later train and taking her time, Ursula only wanders in well after Melanie.  And not an ounce of artifice.  So, who do you think embellished and who omitted?  With Elizabeth Taylor it's always what she doesn't expressly say that makes the story.  Those devastating moments always come in such an understated way. 

Next weekend "Perhaps a Family Failing".  Only five stories left, so I will surely finish before the end of the month, and maybe even sooner.  I've already got several new contenders for my next short story read!

Short Story (Monday): The Rose, the Mauve, the White

Yesterday was a little too nice outside (and I guess I was a little too lazy) to sit in front of a computer and compose a post.  But I did read a short story and a few other books as well, so my posting schedule will be a little off this week, but I'll catch up eventually.  Many thanks for the 'coming of age, beachy-setting' reading suggestions that have been offered.  I have two books on hand already and I know I can find the others at the library so I will be exploring them this week (and will let you know what I come up with in time for next weekend) and seeing which other books I can come up with--perhaps a list to follow.  How fitting since I want a coming-of-age story that the Elizabeth Taylor short story I read was about three young women going to their first proper dance. 

Elizabeth Taylor is so talented at capturing those domestic scenes that ring entirely true.  She moves from character to character to tell her story, inside the minds of the Pollard family--Myra the mother who likes to be around the young people as "they keep one young oneself".  Charles is the eldest sibling who finds it impossible to find a quiet place to practice his calling for three cheers that he must undertake later at the dance, as his youngest twin sisters take great pleasure in following him about and teasing him mercilessly. 

It's sixteen-year-old Katie, however, the middle child whose best friends from school are soon arriving, whose moment as a blossoming young woman is the focus of the story.  The three share a bedroom where they go to school and Katie dreads how her family will appear to them.  Obnoxious younger sisters who are such nuisances and a bore of an elder brother.  (Though maybe not such a bore since one of the girls asks after him the moment they descend from the train.  Seeing ones family through the eyes of others is always most illuminating.

"It was now that she began to see her home through their eyes--the purple brick house looked heavy and ugly now that the sun had gone behind a cloud; the south wall was covered by a magnolia tree; there were one or two big, cream flowers among the dark leaves: doves were walking about on the slate roof; some of the windows reflected the blue sky and moving clouds.  To Katie, it was like being shown a photograph which she did not immediately recognize--unevocative, as were the photographs of their mothers in the dormitory at school--they seldom glanced at them from the beginning of term to the end."

There is nothing especially shocking about this story.  No earth shattering twist, just the essence of life, a slice of a slightly more than average day in a middle class family.  Each member contributing a little more color to the story, moving it along just a little bit, shedding a little light on some other family member, friend upon friend. 

It's this one somewhat more special moment than all the rest that Taylor paint so vividly yet so simply.

"But they were coming downstairs.  They had left the room with its beds covered with clothes, its floor strewn with tissue-paper.  They descended; the rose, the mauve, the white.  Like a bunch of sweet-peas they looked, George [the father] thought."

She gets all the details down just right, to the girl who ends up being a wallflower (you can tell by looking at her that she'll be left on the shelf), the one who is experiencing having her first beau and the one who catches her friend's brother's eye.  Down to that last blissful moment of knowing, being a little more aware of life and the world as she lays awake in bed after all is said and done.

Even the seemingly mundane is exciting in Elizabeth Taylor's hands.

Next week "Summer Schools".