Eric The Blue

American stories: Ring Lardner's "The Golden Honeymoon"

By way of preface, a few lines concerning the "critical consensus" regarding Ring Lardner (1885-1933). According to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lardner wasted his talent writing about baseball, "[a] boy's game, with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, a game bounded by walls which kept out novelty or danger, change or adventure." John Berryman thought this was mostly wrong: Lardner was not primarily a "baseball writer" and, even if he had been, there's nothing inherently unserious about that. Berryman:

Yogi Berra is a boy? Lardner wrote about big leaguers largely: not boys, men, in danger every second of demotion to the minors, or focuses of national attention. They were nowhere, and they will be nowhere. Here they are, in continuous crisis, dramatized in the key plays Lardner describes so well. Now take a man who had always a dim view of life: this precariousness makes a good subject . . .

Berryman, however, expands on Fitzgerald's suggestion concerning a lack of seriousness by arguing that almost all Lardner's best-known works exhibit carelessness and a lack of anything like artistic purpose. Of "The Love Nest," for example, he says the story could only have been written in order to get a big check from The Saturday Evening Post and that whatever appeal it has is connected to the cheap thrill of a journalistic exposure. You think Hollywood big shots have happy marriages? Think again! (Berryman doesn't mention that almost no one who's able to read thinks that Hollywood big shots are known for their happy marriages.) Elizabeth Hardwick amplifies when she puzzles over "the element of self-destroying indifference" in the prefaces Lardner wrote to his story collections—collections, she says, that include a few great stories, which she enumerates: "My Roomy," "Champion," "Some Like Them Cold," "The Golden Honeymoon," "Haircut," and "Zone of Quiet." It would have been amusing, and a blow to the notion that there's a critical consensus on Lardner, if she'd included "The Love Nest."

"The Golden Honeymoon" is about the fiftieth anniversary wedding trip of a New Jersey couple to the Tampa-St. Pete area. The story is told in the voice, including the grammar and spelling and malapropisms, of the husband. This is a device Lardner, in one form or another, used over and over again. Some of his fictions are the diaries of the leading character; others, the principal's personal letters; here, the husband, back home in New Jersey, is setting down his semi-literate account of his Florida trip. In Huck Finn, the boy's natural, unliterary voice registers the truth about every situation he encounters. In Lardner, it's one more way in which the author registers disapproval. By their language you will know them to be rubes. I think I've noticed that the word "cringy" is these days enjoying an elevated currency, and is often used, for example, to describe social media posts in which the unselfconscious user accidentally reveals their own unflattering traits. That, I think, is how these stories of Lardner's may be said to "work." The reader has to see through the self-presentation to the truth, but it isn't hard. 

The husband is of a type described by Miller in Death of a Salesman and by Lewis in Babbitt, a sort of Chamber of Commerce dunce. Here he is on the story's first page, when we're just getting to know him:

Yes, sir, we was married just fifty years ago the seventeenth day of last December and my daughter and son-in-law was over from Trenton to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding. My son-in-law is John H. Kramer, the real estate man. He made $12,000 one year and is pretty well thought of around Trenton: a good, steady, hard worker. The Rotarians was after him a long time to join, but he kept telling them his home was his club. But Edie finally made him join. That's my daughter.

These few sentences aren't a bad introduction to Lardner's subjects and methods, in "The Golden Honeymoon" and most everywhere else. Have you not heard of John H. Kramer—note the use of the middle initial, conferring dignity—"the real estate man?" (In that case, you must not read the business section like a serious man.) Lardner's characters are obsessed with attaining a level of social prestige—by how much money they make, by whom they marry and associate with, whatever is required to be esteemed by others. You can imagine that the son-in-law must be quite the specimen of humanity, given his income and that he can afford to put the Rotarians on the back burner. The Rotarians are like a running gag in "The Golden Honeymoon." When the celebrating couple finally gets to Tampa, the husband makes sure to mention if any of the other retirees he meets are Rotarians, and he never misses a social club meeting if a Rotarian is going to speak on a topic such as the current business climate. A couple less obvious things to mull over. Is it social climbing that moves Edie to make John H. Kramer join the Rotarians, or does she maybe just want the tedious drudge out of the house? I am surmising that if our narrator praises his son-in-law for being "a steady, hard worker," it means the guy's a tedious drudge, but Edie would know for sure. Also, who gets married a week before Christmas?—unless there are extenuating circumstances the Rotarian worshiper chooses not to divulge. 

The question about what Edie makes of her husband prefigures one concerning what "Mother" (the narrator's designation for his wife) makes of her husband. For he is a manifest drudge, and she's been married to him for fifty years. That's a long time to listen to his patter. It doesn't seem possible, but in Florida there occurs a plot twist that places him in a more ridiculous light. By chance, they meet some fellow vacationing septuagenarians—a Michigan veterinarian and his wife. It happens that more than fifty years ago the vet had been the narrator's rival for Mother's hand. Naturally, the narrator attributes his former rival's long-ago relocation in Michigan to humiliation over having not been chosen by Mother. Naturally, the narrator makes invidious comparisons between his former rival's white beard and his own more youthful looks. Naturally, the narrator thinks that the Michigander did not make as good a match as he did. The problem with the vet's wife, the narrator informs us, is that she talks too much and brags about her kids, which is likely true but of course it's definitely true about him. This is where college freshmen write "Irony" in the margin of their anthology. 

Absurdly, these two men reenact their courtship rivalry from a half century ago. It seems that the vet and his wife are at more ease financially—their lodging situation, the restaurants they favor—and you can imagine the pain this causes our narrator. He makes it unintentionally plain while ostensibly criticizing the other fellow's lack of thrift. When the couples play five hundred, opposite spouses are partners, and the Michigander and Mother always win. They then joke about being "a winning team," a detail the narrator cannot prevent himself from noting. He begins lobbying for competitions at which he excels, the main one being checkers, a game whose name is virtually synonymous with simplicity. His victory of fifty years ago is nothing for him now and, notwithstanding an ability to maintain a tone of chatty ease, his irritation radiates. In the presence of the women, he says something rude to the Michigan man, whose name is Hartsell (the narrator has hurt his thumb while losing a game of horseshoes):

Well, my thumb was giving me considerable pain and I felt kind of out of sorts and I guess maybe I forgot myself, but anyway, when we was about through playing Hartsell made the remark that he wouldn't never lose a game of cards if he could always have Mother for a partner. 

So I said:

"Well, you had a chance fifty years ago to always have her for a partner, but you wasn't man enough to keep her."

The Hartsells are offended and thereafter avoid the narrator and his wife, whose vacation days, like the story, are anyway coming to an end. But not only the Hartsells are offended: the narrator's wife stops talking to him. His annoyance extends to her, so in order that there might be a happy ending she has to make a conciliatory move—which she does, by comparing Hartsell unfavorably to the man she married.

Usually in Lardner, everything is obvious and there is no one to cheer for. In a fairly typical situation, there is "romantic interest" between a cad and an attractive woman alert to the possibilities for getting ahead. They mutually exploit one another and the reader is obliged to hate them both, along with whatever supporting cast might be occasionally hustled on and then off the stage to enhance the presentation of trivial villainy. What I like about "The Golden Honeymoon" is the suggestion, however faint, that Mother has been "managing" this dummy for fifty years. It's her penance for having married him. At one point in the story, the narrator is running down Hartsell's wife, cataloging her faults, when he sees fit to register Mother’s response:

"You are getting too cranky. Maybe she does talk a little too much but she is good hearted. And Frank is always good company."

This is a rare instance in the fiction of Ring Lardner: a human being plausibly defended by another human being, who credits the accused with having "a good heart." The story also succeeds, I think, as a quietly desolating account of the wan fun to be enjoyed among retirees beneath the Florida sun. 

American stories: Hemingway's "In Another Country"

 

The title is taken from a play, The Jew of Malta, by the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who is best known for savagery and nihilism (and for having been murdered when he was 30). A Jew, Barabbas, is being tried before a panel of Christian clerics when he anticipates a question:

FRIAR BARNARDINE
Thou hast committed—

BARABBAS
Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

The story will end with a somewhat less cynical expression about a deceased woman, but we might start by observing that the phrase "in another country" is (trivially) apt in the sense that the narrator, an American, is in Milan, Italy, recuperating from a war wound, and (nontrivially) apt in a sense relating to a more figurative geography. To attend their therapeutic sessions, the narrator and the other convalescing soldiers must cross a bridge spanning a canal, on the other side of which the hospital rises. The older part of the hospital is architecturally "very beautiful" but the soldiers get their therapy in "new brick pavilions" that, we know without being told, have been thrown up to meet the need arising from the carnage of war. The narration lays a peculiar stress on the bridge crossing to get to the hospital. It's in a different district, across a boundary, "in another country" to which the casualties travel. 

The therapy is a new technology that receives its first mention in the sentence about the hospital campus:

Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

Polite and interested while understanding that the official good cheer and optimism is wishful thinking, or a lie: that's the implication. In case the reader misses the resigned bitterness, the narrator provides the following account of his experience with the machine that was to "make so much difference":

My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: "That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion."

No, it won't pass. The narrator isn't fortunate. Playing football was for the world that existed before the brick pavilions and these useless therapies. That's what the narrator understands but, maintaining a certain sense of decorum, does not state outright. The "geography" of the story refers to a region of the mind or spirit. The narrator's experience of life, especially of war, has exiled him from the land of respectable, uplifting views.

This theme is variously developed, considering that the story is very brief—less than 4 pages in this online  pdf. The machines are one lie. Another is the medals that the soldiers have been awarded. The narrator has medals since he'd been wounded, the wound being in his view a mere accident: he might have escaped injury, or he could have been killed, but it happened that he was wounded, so he has medals and commendations stating, "with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American." That is his experience; here is someone else's:

Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. 

Another accident, a disfiguring wound, a bitter joke, the way in which the flatness of the details that are divulged tend to undercut notions of honor, valor, glory: "He went to South America and worked in a bank."

The story ends with an episode relating to another of the patients, an Italian major with a withered hand. Being older and from Milan, he is apart from the other soldiers, but the narrator speaks with him when he comes regularly for his treatments. Though an Italian, the major resides in the same figurative country as the other soldiers—the first mention of him, before he steps forward at the end, is his half humorous, half mocking contribution to the narrator's conversation with the optimistic doctor: "And will I too play football, captain-doctor?" He knows the machines won't change anything, but, like the others, goes along with the prescribed regimen, and he and the narrator speak Italian together, the major giving lessons in grammar after the narrator says that Italian seems the easiest of languages. The story till now has been all decorum on the surface, cynicism and despair just below. Then one day the decorous major blows up. He pronounces the machines "idiotic." He calls the narrator an "impossible disgrace" for his grammatical mistakes. He somewhat oddly asks the narrator whether he plans to marry, insisting, "Speak grammatically!" When the narrator says he hopes to marry, the major explodes with anger. He jerks his hand out of a machine, tells the attendant to "turn this damned thing off." He is ushered away briefly and, returning, apologizes to the narrator for his outburst, explaining that his wife has just died. Then:

He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very difficult," he said. "I cannot resign myself." 

He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. "I am utterly unable to resign myself," he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door. 

"I cannot resign myself. . . . I am utterly unable to resign myself." I have mentioned before this "trick" Hemingway has of achieving an elevated effect by pretending to translate speech in one language into English that he can then make sound like the King James Bible (since it's a translation, possibly wooden or literal, rather than the actual words spoken). Maybe he was too fond of the trick but I think it worked this time. Part of the success must be that all the soldiers seem "resigned," and the major, facing a catastrophe unrelated to war—the scope in this very short story is widening—suggests that he regards "resignation" as an ideal that he has in this instance failed to attain. But he recovers himself to make a "soldierly" exit. 

There is one more paragraph describing how the major stayed away for three days before returning for more useless treatments. In those three days the doctor has filled the walls with framed photographs of functioning limbs supposedly healed by the new machines. The story ends:

In front of the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always understood we were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window. 

Some of Hemingway's stories are unscreamed screams. In this one, the scream comes out and is then stuffed. 

American stories: Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge"

Flannery O'Connor, whose stories have long filled me with morbid fascination, has fallen victim to "cancel culture." In her case, a dormitory named for her on the campus of Loyola University Maryland was, at the direction of its president, Jesuit Fr. Brian Linnane, rechristened after he received complaints about the "racist perspective" of some of her writings. O'Connor has many defenders, especially among Catholic intellectuals, and not all of them are as frank as Jennifer Frey, a philosopher at the University of South Carolina whose brief for the defense acknowledges the casual racial slurs that adorn O'Connor's personal correspondence. Frey refers also to O'Connor's "disappointing" and "cringeworthy" dismissal of black intellectuals, most notably James Baldwin. I'm pretty sure she must have in mind the following passage from a letter O'Connor wrote on May 21, 1964, about three months before she died, to her friend Maryat Lee:

About the Negroes, the kind I don't like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. [Martin Luther] King I don't think is the age's great saint but he's at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don't know anything about Ossie Davis except you like him but you probably like them all.

The backdrop for these benighted opinions, and of the evident sneer directed at her liberal friend, is of course the civil rights movement in Dixie. O'Connor was born at Savannah in 1925. Her father died of lupus while she was a teenager. After being afflicted with lupus herself as a young woman, she spent the rest of her days—she died at 39—living with her mother on the family farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, a town of about 11,000 a hundred miles southeast of Atlanta. There, from 1953 to 1964, she wrote most of the stories collected in A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955) and all the stories collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge, which was published posthumously in 1965. Change wrought by the civil rights movement was the principal social fact of her time and place. It seems to have had no part in her early fiction, but in the later stories, such as the title story for Everything That Rises, race is close to the thematic center and her treatment of it cannot fairly be characterized as "racist," though I think "unsentimental" and the overused "ironic" might be apt. Without too much imagination one might even regard the story as a prophetic counterpunch to the jaw of some of her current critics.

It's about a ride on a recently integrated city bus—the half hour before, the ride itself, and a few minutes after it ends. The main character is the mother of an adult son, Julian. She isn't herself named, except the family name very fleetingly, which may suggest that she's intended not as an individual but as a representative specimen of humanity. Once a week she attends a "reducing class" at the Y. But since the buses have been integrated she refuses to ride them alone and has therefore recruited Julian to accompany her to the Y. He resents the imposition, which is the occasion for some comedy as they prepare to depart from her house for the walk to the bus stop.

It's the conversation that's funny—"cringeworthy," you might say. The subject of race is on the mind of the 50-something white lady and she's pleased with her own opinions. She tells Julian—it's a boast—that his great grandfather owned slaves. Irritable and eager to contradict, he points out that there are no longer slaves. She counters that "they were better off when they were" and, as if she thought this might be harsh, elaborates: 

"It's ridiculous. It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence."

The referent of the recurring "it's" is of course racial integration. The idea that the descendants of slaves should rise on their own side of the fence, regarded by Julian's mom as proof of her “realistic” views, is explicitly denied by the story's vivid title, "Everything That Rises Must Converge." We'll see what comes of that. Meanwhile, as they prepare to depart for the bus stop, there is quite a lot made about a new hat that Julian's mother has bought. Did she pay too much? Should she return it? Wear it to the Y? The hat is clearly unusual and hideous. She decides to wear it, naturally. 

Talk, talk, talk, more ridiculous talk—all, one feels sure, perfectly rendered. It doesn't stop when they get on the bus. They take their seats at the front, the side bench that faces the aisle. Julian's mother makes meteorological observations to no one in particular, just to see who she can chat up. She finds a taker, a "thin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair." Surveying the other passengers, Julian's mother observes: "I see we have the bus to ourselves." (Meaning, of course: no blacks.) She and the woman with protruding teeth agree that things used to be better as now there is so much crime. The code hasn't changed, or acquired a better disguise. The two women boast of their children. We learn that Julian is a recent college graduate trying to get on his feet. He wants to be a writer but is currently selling typewriters. The lady with the protruding teeth remarks that these occupations are related and that he'll move from the one right into the other. Forced to listen, Julian is beside himself.

This is funny enough so that one might not notice that the story is turning. The neighborhood is shabby. The mother is unmarried, doesn't drive, relies on public transportation. Yet Julian has been to college. Sacrifices have been made. It seems all that is true, too. A black man boards and takes a seat on the opposite bench beside a white woman, who immediately rises and moves to a seat farther back. Julian then rises to take the seat she vacated beside the black man. When his mother looks straight ahead, she now sees her son sitting next to a black man on the integrated bus. She hates it, which is why Julian loves it. He knows it will be worse if he strikes up a conversation with the black man, so he asks for a light. But in his eagerness he has failed to think things through. When the man produces a light, Julian remembers he has no cigarettes—he had recently quit smoking because he can't afford it. The man repockets his matches with an annoyed look. We are told that he's nicely dressed and carries a briefcase but not whether he is aware of being a prop in the white man's drama. 

Something like this happens again and again in O'Connor's stories. You laugh and laugh and think you know who the joke is on—and then the joke widens. Frustrated by his failure to commune with a black person, Julian falls into a reverie. They are almost to the Y. What if, when his mother rose to disembark, he remained seated, and when she told him they were at their stop he stared blankly at her as if they were strangers? Morally, they are strangers, since his superiority is to himself so evident. What if he knew a black professor or lawyer and brought him back to the house for dinner? Better yet, a beautiful black woman? "There's nothing you can do about it," he'd say to his mother. He's jolted back to reality when the bus stops and an actual black woman boards. 

The new rider has a young kid with her and is enormous. To Julian's annoyance, she wedges in beside him. Her clothes are ridiculous, perhaps because she's limited by what she can fit into. The narration of events is interrupted to describe her fully. Is there an element of racial caricature? No, I think the point to make is that the gigantic black woman is the second person in the story meriting a physical description. The first had been the white woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair. The two are united in their grotesquery. Something about the black woman seems familiar to Julian. She is an imposing, threatening, scowling presence, a real eyeful, and it takes a minute for him to realize that she's wearing the same hideous hat as his mother. 

Her little boy sits across the aisle, next to Julian's mother. You won't be surprised to hear that she thinks children are all cute, especially black children. But before she can force her generosity on the boy the bus arrives at the stop for the Y. She's pleased when the enormous black woman is going to get off with her kid at the same stop and determines to give the youngster a coin. Julian sees her digging in her purse as the boy and his mom walk away on the sidewalk and the bus pulls away. Maybe he comprehends the racial condescension inherent in the act, maybe he doesn't want to hear from his mother for the next weeks and months about her kindliness toward a black child. Anyway, he tries to stop her, but too late. The black woman is insulted. She shouts that her son doesn't take anyone's pennies and, swinging her big arm, strikes Julian's mother in the face with her pocketbook. She falls to the ground, injured and dazed, her customary self-satisfaction erased. Everything that rises must converge! Thwack! That's the end of the story but for a modulated denouement in which, in the last sentence, Julian, stunned by his mother's disorientation, becomes disoriented himself and is jerked from complacency:

The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.

What to make of this? I mentioned that from a sufficient altitude O'Connor told this story again and again. A critic might say she's a bit of a one-trick pony. In another story, maybe her most famous one, the idle chatter of self-satisfied talkers yammering about the golden days of yesteryear includes the parties' agreement that, nowadays, "A good man is hard to find." The old lady who says this soon comes face to face with appalling evil and I think the reader is meant to perceive that her platitude is actually an expression of the Christian doctrine of original sin. To say that the characters in "Everything That Rises," black and white, are "united in grotesquery" tends in the same direction. Reading the story over again, one notices small flourishes, sort of like angels hovering in the corner of an otherwise realistic painting, such as when in the opening Julian impatiently waiting for his mother is compared to Saint Sebastian waiting for the arrows to begin piercing his flesh: a signal, however humorous, that more than ordinary verisimilitude might be at stake.

For O'Connor, the only significance is religious significance. Social issues are just emblems of theological ones. "Everything That Rises" will probably seem to most readers more congenial, less disturbing, than most of her others. For example, it can be enjoyed by anyone who might appreciate quite a devastating cartoon of a "woke" young person, too hip to be decent to his mother. Estelle Parsons reads the story, here.

American stories: Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in a log cabin in Ohio. The family's poverty forced him into menial labor while still a younger teenager. He extracted himself from that situation when, still a teenager at the outset of the Civil War, he enlisted in an Indiana infantry unit. He served for all four years of the war, fought in several battles, was twice wounded in action, and rose through the ranks to become a staff officer. After the war, he worked for many years as a journalist in San Francisco, but he also published short stories. In his time he was known as "bitter Bierce," his generally bleak outlook having been formed by his war experience at the beginning of adulthood. In this respect he resembles, for example, Hemingway, who is said to have admired his short fiction. Bierce had a kind of sidelight of composing word definitions exhibiting his subversive intelligence and impatience with conventional pieties. These were eventually collected and published, first as The Cynic's Word Book and then, expanded, as The Devil's Dictionary, which is probably his best known work. A sampling:

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are. . . .

LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage. . . .

MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

NEGRO, n. The piece de resistance in the American political problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build their equation thus: "Let n = the white man." This, however, appears to give an unsatisfactory solution.

POSITVE, a. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

His definition for "longevity" ("[u]ncommon extension of the fear of death") seems an apt port of entry to his most famous story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." The setting is a railroad bridge over a stream in northern Alabama during the Civil War. The "occurrence" is a hanging. The condemned is a southern planter who has been tricked by a federal spy into trying to burn down the bridge, which is the crime for which he's being hung. As the story opens, a good deal of attention is devoted to the method and machinery of the execution. Farquhar, the condemned planter, stands on a plank in the center of the bridge. His hands are tied behind him. There is a sentinel at either end and a company of Union soldiers for an audience. The rope around his neck is secured above him to a bridge cross-timber. There is enough slack in the rope so that it curls at his knee before looping up to where it's tied around his neck. We are told that he is unhooded and that no bandages cover his eyes. The plank he stands on is balanced across some railroad ties. A Union officer stands on the other end of the plank. When signaled by his superior, he'll step aside and the hanging will occur by a teeter-totter action: Farquhar's end of the plank will tilt down and he'll fall backwards between two ties, but the rope is short enough to keep him from getting wet. The narration proceeds imperceptibly into the consciousness of Farquhar, who reflects: "The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective." And: "He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts on his wife and children." Before entering Farquhar's consciousness, his appearance had been described: mid-30s, pleasant features, pointed beard, grey eyes, kindly expression, a well-fitting coat.

This is a horror story. Just intolerable, and it gets worse:

Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the smoke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or nearby—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

It seems then that heightened physical sensations are an aspect of the stress-induced phantasmagoria, which include punishments that ought to be mutually exclusive: the awful sound is both near and far, a stereophonic hell. Since the source is his ticking watch, it only seems that the intervals are longer. The intention of all this cannot be anything other than to arouse in the reader a mixture of sympathy and hopelessness—and a wish for escape.

And the wish is granted! Farquhar falls, the rope jerks, injuring him, but it also breaks and he's in the water coming to his senses. He frees his hands. The soldiers shoot and miss, the splatters of water made by the bullets striking his face. The horror story is now a kind of exciting get-away drama; as has been said, nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. He dives and swims, dives and swims, the stream carries him into a wood and safety. He strikes out on foot, has minor adventures, is lost, finds his way. The story of how he came to the Owl Creek bridge is told in a flashback. Finally he finds a "straight road" that takes him back to his home, the "wide white walk" to a verandah where his wife is waiting. She steps down to greet him, he means to embrace her, and then the story ends:

As he is about to clasp her, he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him, with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence!

Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge. 

So the escape interlude was an extension of the hallucinatory quality of the ticks of his watch. It all fit in the time required, after the Union officer stepped off one end of the plank, for the slack part of the rope to get taut and snap his neck. Bierce describes an unbearably cruel situation, grants the reader's wish for an out, only to reveal that the escape was a hallucination—the situation was as hopeless as realistically described at the opening. I can understand someone complaining about having been manipulated, tricked. That one can make out the effect the author is going for—darken the darkness by allowing some artificial light before flicking it off—tends to diminish that effect. But not altogether. Why did Bierce make the condemned man for whom we sympathize a Confederate rebel, a member of the planter class? It wasn't on account of his Gone-With-the-Wind sensibility. Probably if the Confederates had been hanging a Union sympathizer it would have seemed too much like a partisan statement relating to the late war. The Confederates are so wicked! The Union men so noble! That wouldn't do, because Bierce wanted to paint everyone and everything in the same bleak color.

The story, which was originally published in the San Francisco Examiner on July 13, 1890, can be read online here.

American stories: Faulkner's "Barn Burning"

Since literature is made mainly by adults, you might think that adult characters and themes would predominate, and as far as I know that's mostly true. But the exceptions are often memorable. The greatest of the English novelists is probably Dickens, who, on account of his own blighted childhood, was obsessed with the lives of children, and the result is that we have Oliver Twist, Pip, Amy Dorrit, David Copperfield, etc., etc. What is the best American book? Maybe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, concerning the picaresque adventures of a 13-year-old. It's the sequel to Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the events of which occurred a year earlier, when the boys were 12. When Dickens was 12, he went to work in a shoe-blacking factory after his father was incarcerated for debt at The Marshalsea prison. Mark Twain's father died when he was 11, and the next year he left the fifth grade to go to work as a printer's apprentice. 

William Faulkner might be an exception to the general rule that a writer, if interested in childhood, is consumed by it. His biography contains no early upheavals leaving permanent scars or demons to be exorcised. He is, though, the ambitious chronicler of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, in north central Mississippi, where some of the residents are kids. The story "That Evening Sun," about the dysfunctional Compson family, is just one installment in the Compson family saga, which is developed most notably in the novel The Sound and the Fury. In "That Evening Sun" the Compson kids are initiated into the South's racial caste system against the background sound of their murmuring, querulous, narcissistic, ineffectual parents. In "Barn Burning," another of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, he turns his attention to another Yoknapatawpha family, the Snopeses. 

First, the name: have you ever noticed that almost all English words starting sn- have negative, ugly connotations? One example would be snag, and, along this line, the Snopes family character on whom Faulkner lavishes the most attention is Flem Snopes. For background, here is Encyclopedia Britannica describing the family pedigree:

Through treachery and corruption, Flem Snopes gathers power in Frenchman's Bend, Miss. His cousins are emblems of depravity, including murderous Mink, pedophile Wesley, bigamist I.O., mentally disabled Ike, who lusts after a cow, and Launcelot ("Lump"), who sells tickets to view Ike's perverted scenes. The next generation includes a pornographer, a venal politician, a thief, and the uniquely honest Wallstreet Panic Snopes.

The main character in "Barn Burning" is Flem's younger brother Sarty, who is 10 years old. As the story opens, he's with his father, Abner Snopes, and an unnamed brother, which would be Flem, in a store where a justice of the peace has convened a trial. The complainant, a man named Harris, has charged that Abner burned down his barn. The story Harris tells is that Abner's hog wandered into his corn field. He returned the hog and told Abner that he should fix his pen. Next time he found Snopes's pig in his corn, he put it in his own pen. When Abner came to get it, he gave him some wire to mend his pen. Third time the pig got into his corn, he went to the Snopeses and saw the spool of wire he'd given Abner still rolled up in the yard. He now insisted Snopes pay him a small sum of money. That evening, Abner got a Negro to deliver the money to Harris, along with a message: "Wood and hay kin burn." Later that night, Harris's barn burned to the ground. 

The Justice of the Peace is not wholly persuaded by this strong circumstantial case. Harris admits that the Negro who delivered the money and the message has disappeared, but suggests that the needed direct evidence could be supplied by Sarty, who has been listening while at the same time being distracted by the sights and smells inside the store. He's 10 and his dim perception of the proceedings is rendered by Faulkner, in part:

He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father's enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He's my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet.

As the Justice begins to question him, Sarty realizes that his father expects him to lie, and he means to lie even though he is in despair over it, but then Harris, too decent to feel good about pressing his case to this extent, withdraws his request that the boy testify against his father. Abner is acquitted of the barn burning, though the Justice also gives him some free advice: go somewhere else to live. Abner's reply, the first time he speaks, is "something unprintable and vile" and to the effect that he'd be glad to leave the area.

That's the first three pages. It establishes the low character of Abner Snopes. No reader can doubt who burned the barn down. Also, however, every detail helps fill in the picture. He sent a Negro with his money and his message about what can burn. He could have done it himself, but that would have deprived him of the degree of separation that ended up being the hole in Harris's case. Was he that sagacious? Then maybe that's part of his character, too. He's not an incompetent criminal. Also, he probably enjoyed sending a Negro on an errand for him. Harris is a better man than Snopes, but Snopes is good enough to send a Negro on his behalf. Not going to speak to you man-to-man. Got Negroes I can send to talk to you for me. That's how big a man I am. 

The story is about Sarty Snopes, however. He's 10 and was going to lie for his father to the Justice of the Peace, whom he perceives to be an enemy of his family. The story is a dramatization of something that must happen to almost everyone without often making it into literature. You're born into a family. For awhile, it's all you know and your loyalty is absolute. In time, you get to know other people and families. They aren't like yours. Comparisons are inevitable. What if you're a Snopes? The family ways and values are inferior to the ones you are now for the first time discovering outside the only world you've known. The essential, or comparative, decency of Harris and the Justice of the Peace is not lost on the reader. The former declines to press his case. The latter acquits Abner out of devotion to some unnamed principle. Sarty Snopes might not have words for his apprehension but he apprehends, too. In the climactic scene of the story, another barn is about to be burned, and Sarty disowns the Snopeses. In Faulkner's ceaselessly expanding chronicle, he's never seen or named again. There is a trilogy of novels concerning the Snopeses, sometimes called The Snopes Trilogy, and in the first of them, The Hamlet, a character is describing the Snopes clan and mentions that once there was another brother, a little one he vaguely remembers seeing somewhere once. In Faulkner's fiction that is the only other allusion to the existence of Sarty, who declared his independence from the Snopeses at age 10.

According to one view, Sarty is a 10-year-old hero who chooses honor and decency over Snopes family values, but I'm not sure the part of the story I've skipped lightly over justifies that. Abner does move his family, and the wagon conveying their possessions receives the following description:

It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember—the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother's dowry.

They're poor tenant farmers, what is called white trash. When they arrive at the house of their new landlord, it seems natural to compare the life suggested by the contents of their wagon with the house of the new landlord, set back in a "grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs," beyond "a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses." When Sarty finally sees the house, he's rapturous, and the narration includes his italicized thoughts:

. . . he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father. . . . Hit's big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch. . . .

And then his father's flat and deflating assessment of the house, spoken like a Snopes:

"Pretty and white, ain't it?" he said. "That's sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain't white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it."

Crude, but is Abner altogether wrong, and Sarty wholly correct? The dispute that brings on the prospect of another barn burning arises when Abner tracks manure into the glorious house, staining an expensive rug delivered from France, and then, charged with cleaning it, takes the rug home and ruins it by washing it in lye. A deliberate and despicable act, but I anyway do not feel a lot of sympathy for the landlord either, the owner of that great house whose anger is kindled by the staining of a rug. It's possible to detect the author's two-mindedness, his grudging respect for Abner Snopes, somewhat in the manner that you might admire an ugly weed for being able to live and grow out of a crack in the cement. Flem, endowed with his father's calculating rapaciousness, survives and prospers. Sarty drops from sight. 

In 1980, the story was made into a 38-minute movie starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Abner Snopes; you can watch it at you.tube. The text of "Barn Burning" is here.

American stories: Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

 

There is a local angle for Minnesotans as the author, Tim O'Brien, was born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1946—lots of Americans born in 1946—before the family moved, when he was 10, to Worthington, in the southwest corner of the state, where he graduated from high school in 1964. He then attended Macalester College in St. Paul: honor student, an editor of the college newspaper, president of his class. He graduated from Macalester in the spring of 1968 and planned on continuing his education at Harvard, but the Vietnam War was escalating—it was the year of the Tet Offensive—and that summer his draft notice appeared in the mailbox in Worthington. Though he was opposed to the war, as evidenced by signed editorials in the Macalester student newspaper, he reported as directed in the notice and served two years as a US Army grunt in Vietnam. This was plainly the defining experience of his life. His war memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home), was published in 1973 and was followed, in 1978, by the Vietnam War novel Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award. His third book, The Things They Carried, published in 1990, is a collection of linked stories, some of which seem more like memoir: all are narrated by a Vietnam veteran who is now a writer. The story called "The Things They Carried" opens the book and gives the collection its title. 

There is a technique of literature called the catalogue, in which names or objects are compiled in a long list. To my knowledge, the great original is from the Iliad, the section in Book II where Homer gives the names of all the ships, together with the names of the leaders and their soldiers and the districts from whence they came, that sailed against Troy. "The Things They Carried," a war story some three millenia hence, employs the same technique, but the catalogue is made of—"the things they carried," that is, the items that the grunts "humped" across Vietnam on their expeditionary missions. It begins:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

And we learn, as the paragraph proceeds, that Martha is an English major, that she loved the poetic works of Geoffrey Chaucer, that her letters were "chatty" but "elusive on the subject of love," and that they weighed ten ounces. One expects events in a war story but this one is made mostly of this elaborate catalogue of the things the men carried. The narrator moves on from Lieutenant Cross to other members of the platoon and we are filled in, one by one, on the things that this man and that one carried. Of course, many items were carried by all, or most, of the soldiers:

P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. 

And on and on it goes. What can be said about it? The lieutenant's name, Jimmy Cross, calls attention to itself: Christ figure? suffering servant? One may take him to be the leader of a band of pilgrims on a journey, like in The Canterbury Tales, whose author is name-called in the first paragraph. Cross's girlfriend Martha, the English major, might point out that in the General Prologue Chaucer methodically moves through the various pilgrims, describing each one briefly, thereby achieving a kind of miniature portrait that is then deepened in the tales that are told along the way to Canterbury. "The Things They Carried," the first story in The Things They Carried, may function in a similar way.

Considered apart from the other stories, however, the accumulation of items carried has an incantatory force. One receives an overwhelming sense of burdens. The men are burdened, materially but also immaterially. The flat naming of items permits the narrator to bury his strong emotion about his experience beneath the mass of all the carefully observed and collated stuff. He pretends to be completely objective. He's just giving a list. But it's possible to detect a certain attitude toward the stuff and, by association, toward the war. Never a mention of anything a dignitary might say on Memorial Day. Not a laminated copy of the Gettysburg Address. Instead, can openers, cigarettes, Kool-Aid &c. Once, the narrator allows something like an editorial opinion to intrude on the catalogue:

If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs [areas of operation], where the land was dense with Toe Toppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine detector. With its headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety.

By describing this technique of the catalogue, I think I've accounted for most of the words in the story. But there is one incident, one event. All this business with the catalogue is like the backdrop for the thing that happens. One of the soldiers in the platoon, Ted Lavender, is killed. We've seen that the story doesn't begin with him—it begins with Lieutenant Cross. Lavender isn't the last soldier mentioned, either. He's just in the mix, as it were. He receives his first mention in the sentence following the one about Jensen's R&R in Sydney, Australia:

Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. 

This is hardly what literature teachers call "foreshadowing," right? Just told, flat out, that he got shot in the head. Wasn't for nothing that he was scared. The next sentence concerns how they all carried 5-pound steel helmets. So moving on. Next mention of Lavender:

Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity.

One more item in the catalogue: premium dope. Lavender next comes up in connection with yet another item:

Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that carried him away.

This is just a couple of pages into the story, which continues in the same manner, but with details of Lavender's death occasionally distilled in the catalogue. The killing occurs when the platoon is on a mission to blow up enemy tunnels, an operation that affords the narrator the opportunity to describe the explosives and detonators—more things that have to be carried. For some reason, the tunnels can't just be blown: someone has to descend into them and investigate. Lots are drawn for this task. A soldier named Strunk loses. He disappears into the tunnel and is gone for what seems too long. Lavender moves away from the group to pee. Strunk emerges, and the relieved joking is interrupted by the sound of the sniper shot that kills Lavender as he heads back to the group. His wound is described with the same clinical detachment that the narrator devotes to the specs of the carried things. Waiting for the helicopter that will take Lavender's body away, the soldiers smoke the dead man's dope. One jokes that the moral of the event relates to the dangers of drug use (as they smoke up Lavender's unused stock). Kiowa, the devout Baptist who carried an illustrated New Testament, is obsessed with the way Lavender crumbled unceremoniously, no somersaults or picturesque effects like in the movies. Something about the everyday haphazardness of it strikes him as "unchristian." Lieutenant Cross blames himself for allowing reveries about Martha to interfere with the strict imposition of safety protocols and so burns her pictures and letters. The platoon burns to the ground the nearest Vietnamese village and an animal is cruelly tortured. I'm relating all this together but in the story it's conveyed in separate snapshots, the killing of Lavender and its effect on the rest of the platoon acting as a leitmotiv that at intervals interrupts the unfurling of the list of things that had to be carried. The list is unending, the weight of obscene experience infinite:

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds.

American stories: Faulkner's "That Evening Sun"

A wee bit of background with anecdotes: Faulkner's novels and stories are a chronicle of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County and the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha's county seat. These correspond with Lafayette County (pronounced with emphasis on FAY) and Oxford, Faulkner's home town, in the north central part of the state, about 85 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. Oxford is home to the University of Mississippi, where the young Faulkner was enrolled long enough to make a D in the only English class he ever took. For his novel Absalom, Absalom! he drew a map of Yoknapatawpha County on which he marked where various events described in his fiction occurred. Main characters in some of the books appear in others as minor characters, as the author turned his attention first here and then somewhere else. Faulkner enthusiasts have constructed biographies of his characters from all the information that may be gleaned from the different fictions in which they appear. The Compson family is at the center of two of his best novels, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and "That Evening Sun" is narrated by one of the Compson children, Quentin, who says he was 9 years old when the events of the story occurred, 15 years ago. In Absalom, Absalom!, however, Quentin commits suicide at the end of his freshman year at Harvard. When Faulkner was asked about the problematic timeline, he replied that "these are my people" and "I can move them around if I want." 

Another curiosity related to timeline comes into view once we get into the text of the story. We are told right away that the events we're going to hear about occurred 15 years ago, and we learn later that Quentin was then 9 years old (and his sister Caddy 7, and brother Jason 5). This means it would be possible for Quentin to comment upon the events from his adult perspective, but he does not. The narration seems limited to the point of view of someone 9 years old. Probably the best example of this relates to the most shocking incident of the story, when the Compson's black maid, Nancy, is arrested and then viciously assaulted by a white man:

. . . they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say:

"When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It's been three times now since—" until Mr Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, "It's been three times now since you paid me a cent."

That was how she lost her teeth. . . .

The adult reader comprehends, as the 24-year-old narrator must, that the Compson family maid had a prostitution sidelight and one of her customers, a banker and deacon in the Baptist church, did not feel obliged to pay. Moreover, he felt free to assault her in the presence of the marshal. Only she went to jail. Mr Stovall obviously knew it was impossible for him to commit a crime against a black woman. This as I say is shocking, but the narration is flat, because it is limited to the perspective of a 9-year-old (even though the actual narrator is 24), who doesn't understand what it all means. 

Let's ask two questions about this. (I.) Why, from the viewpoint of the narrator, Quentin Compson, who is either 9 or 24, depending on how you measure, is this incident in the story? (II.) Why, from the viewpoint of the actual storyteller, William Faulkner, is this incident in the story? The answer to the first question is that a 9-year-old white boy has noticed that the family's black maid is missing teeth and this incident explains why. It reveals something about Nancy. The answer to the second question is that the answer to the first question reveals something about Quentin Compson. Nine is old enough to be horrified, to say nothing of 24. But it seems he wasn't. And isn't.

Perhaps a good deal about the story may be comprehended if we keep always in mind this gap between "the story Quentin tells" and "Faulkner's story." Quentin directs our attention to Nancy. It develops that she's pregnant, and that her common law husband, Jesus [sic], is angry since the child is not of "his vine"—it's possible it's of the vine of a banker and Baptist church deacon. Jesus has left Nancy, but she's terrified that he's going to return and kill her. The Compson family is inconvenienced by her paralyzing fear: for example, she's afraid to leave their house to walk home at night, sleeps in their kitchen and, on one occasion, moves her pallet to the floor of the children's upstairs bedroom after being frightened by sounds in the kitchen below. Some of this is beyond the ken of 9-year-old Quentin, but the journalistic character of his account—what he saw, what he heard people say—permits the reader to understand more than he did.

And one thing a reader, but not Quentin, might perceive is that different members of the Compson family have different reactions to Nancy's troubles. The father (Jason Sr.) is somewhat sympathetic but mainly irritated. He tries to persuade Nancy that her fears are unwarranted. Twice he urges her to seek the counsel and assistance of "Aunt Rachel," her neighbor in the black part of town who sometimes said she was Jesus's mother and at other times denied it. You can almost make out Mr Compson's internal monologue: my life would be easier but for these ignorant Negroes and their inscrutable lives! Some of his irritability arises from the necessity of appeasing his wife, who in all the fictions about the Compsons is an almost disembodied voice, always complaining from another room. In "That Evening Sun" it's: I cannot have a Negro sleeping in my house. We pay taxes, why is it our job to protect this Negro? I can't believe you're proposing to leave me alone in this house in order to walk home a Negro.

Mrs Compson is a miserable specimen of humanity. Quentin doesn't say so, but Faulkner does, indirectly through Quentin.

The children's reaction is at first ambiguous and then at the end heartbreaking. In the last scene Nancy, who can't abide the thought of being alone, persuades them to accompany her home without permission of their parents, who have forbidden the kids to cross the ditch—symbolism!—that separates the homes of the whites from those of the blacks. But, once there, she is too distracted to be able to deliver on the fun she'd promised them. They feel uneasy. Eventually Mr Compson comes for them. As they prepare to leave, so that Nancy will be alone, her fear gives way to something more like resignation, and Quentin in his familiar flat manner reports the following detail:

"When yawl go home, I gone," Nancy said. She talked quieter now, and her face looked quiet, like her hands. "Anyway, I got my coffin money saved up with Mr Lovelady." Mr Lovelady was a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents. He and his wife lived at the hotel. One morning his wife committed suicide. They had a child, a little girl. He and the child went away. After a week or two he came back alone. We would see him going along the lanes and the back streets on Saturday mornings.

The Compsons leave. Mr Compson, from outside, tells Nancy to come and bolt the door, but she just sits in her chair by the fire. As they walk away, she's visible through the open door till they get to the ditch. Caddy and Jason start arguing. The 5-year-old says he's "not a nigger." The 7-year-old says, no, but he's "scairder than a nigger." Mr Compson admonishes, "Candace!"

Quentin had just reported himself asking the crushing question toward which the whole story was moving. "Who will do our washing now, Father?" he says. 

The story's achievement is to evoke, in just a few pages, an entire culture, that of the American south around a half century after the Civil War, exhausted, decrepit, shot through with rot. The detail about the man collecting “insurance” money from people like Nancy! Characters like that in Dickens are bearable on account of a certain cartoonish aspect they tend to possess. There's something almost entertaining about their depravity. This one, though he has the Dickensian name of Mr Lovelady, is "short, dirty." Quentin Compson is just reporting, but the author's disgust is palpable. 

American stories: Hemingway's "The Killers"

Hemingway's "The Killers" is another of the Nick Adams stories. I wrote about "Indian Camp" here and noted that in Hemingway's first book of stories, In Our Time, the boy keeps getting older in the successive fictions in which he figures as the main character. In "Indian Camp," the first Nick Adams story, he appears to be around 10. In "Big Two-Hearted River," which concludes the book, Nick is a young man and Great War veteran. After In Our Time, Hemingway only occasionally returned to Nick, and does not preserve the chronological element: "The Killers" appeared in Hemingway's next collection of stories, Men Without Women, and one surmises that Nick is in late adolescence, younger than he was at the end of In Our Time. 

The story is set mainly in Henry's lunch-room, a diner in a town called Summit, which I suspect is not an invented place but a reference to what is now known as Summit Township, in Mason County, Michigan. I took up the question of the geography of the Nick Adams stories in "Up in Michigan with Philip Roth," here. The short version is that Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, but the family had a summer home on Walloon Lake, near where the eastern shore of Lake Michigan meets the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula. If "Summit" in the story is connected to Summit Township, it would be on or near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan around 165 miles south of Walloon Lake. That is, it's a place Hemingway would have known on account of passing through, possibly sometimes stopping to eat, on boyhood trips from Chicago to the lake home.

As the story opens, two menacing customers enter the lunch-room. Nick, the only customer, had been talking with George, who is taking orders, when the men enter, and so he watches and listens as rudeness deepens into something else. First, there is trouble ordering food as the customers, strangers in the small town, try to order from the dinner menu:

"I'll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes," the first man said.

"It isn't ready yet."

"What the hell do you put it on the card for?"

"That's the dinner," George explained. "You can get that at six o'clock." 

George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter. 

"It's five o'clock."

"The clock says twenty minutes past five," the second man said.

"It's twenty minutes fast." 

"Oh, to hell with the clock," the first man said. "What have you got to eat?"

"I can give you any kind of sandwiches," George said. "You can have ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver and bacon, or a steak."

"Give me chicken croquettes with green peas and cream sauce and mashed potatoes."

"That's the dinner."

"Everything we want's the dinner, eh? That's the way you work it."

"I can give you ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver—"

"I'll take ham and eggs," the man called Al said.

Film noir dialog owes a lot to Hemingway. The detail about the clock becomes important. For now, let's just observe that it seems odd that it would be twenty minutes fast. If George knew that, why wouldn't he fix it? Is he trying to put off the time that dinner could be ordered? A clock set to the wrong time suggests something—disorder?—that is reinforced perhaps by Henry's lunch-room being run by George. Toward the end of the story, Nick goes to Mrs Hirsch's boarding house, and, assuming that the woman running that place is Mrs Hirsch, calls her by name:

"Well, good-night, Mrs Hirsch," Nick said. 

"I'm not Mrs Hirsch," the woman said. "She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I'm Mrs Bell."

"Well, good-night, Mrs Bell," Nick said.

There isn't any reason for this odd detail but to connect it to Henry's lunch-room run by George, where the clock is set to the wrong time (maybe). You might say that nothing is as it ought to be, or as you'd expect, or would like to be able to count upon. 

The two men soon order Nick back into the kitchen with the black cook.  Max stays in the customer area with George and Al is in the kitchen with Nick and the cook, who are gagged with towels. Max and Al call to each other from different rooms, and Max talks to George. It develops that the two diners are gangsters in Summit to kill an ex-prizefighter named Ole Andreson. They have sawed-off shotguns beneath their coats. The one called Max asks George if it's true that Ole Andreson takes his dinners in Henry's lunch-room every evening at six o'clock. George allows that he "sometimes" does, and when he does, it's around six. 

And so the waiting begins. The question is whether Ole Andreson, who one guesses in his boxing career must have crossed the head of a gambling ring, is going to show up to eat at the diner. Remember, the clock had said 5:20 when the hitmen were ordering food, though it may only have been 5. Max tells George to tell anyone who enters to eat that the cook has had to step out and that they should come back later; if they persist, or it's a take-away order, he is to make it himself. Al props open with a ketchup bottle the slit through which dishes are passed from the kitchen to the eating area and directs Max and George where to sit as they all wait—presumably so they won't obstruct his line of sight to the door, and his shooting angle. A few people do come to eat, and the mundane conversations as they complain to George or order food tend to heighten the tension: the intrusion of the ordinary upon the horrific highlights the horror. We are told at intervals what time the clock says. Eventually the gangsters decide Andreson isn't coming and they leave.

Of course this leaves George, the cook, and Nick alone in the diner with knowledge of Andreson's peril. George asks Nick if he will warn Andreson. Against the cook's advice, young Nick Adams says he will. Up to this point, you might almost have forgotten about Nick's presence. He has spoken three times. The first, he answers one of the gangster's question about his name by saying simply, "Adams." When ordered to go back into the kitchen, he says, "What's the idea?" And after the gangsters leave, upon having the towel removed from his mouth:

Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before. 

"Say," he said. "What the hell?" He was trying to swagger it off.

This adolescent bravado is what in my mind establishes Nick's age as on the boundary of young manhood. In "Indian Camp," the point had been the effect on him of the "inner story" about the birth and suicide at the camp. He does not now appear to have been similarly overwhelmed by the unpleasantness at the diner, or at least in front of the two other men he is eager to act that way. But then he goes to the boarding house to warn Andreson.

When Mrs Bell—he thinks it's Mrs Hirsch—shows him to the room of the former prizefighter, Nick on being told to enter opens the door and sees Andreson lying on his bed in his clothes. Nick begins telling his story. Andreson does not seemed alarmed. The narration of events at the diner, as described by Nick, is repeatedly interrupted to state that Andreson "did not say anything" and, instead of looking at Nick, stared into the wall at the side of his bed: "Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything." Nick ends his story by saying, "'George thought I better come and tell you about it.'" Andreson then speaks for the first time: "'There isn't anything I can do about it.'" The conversation continues:

"I'll tell you what they were like."

"I don't want to know what they were like," Ole Andreson said. He looked at the wall. "Thanks for coming to tell me about it." 

"That's all right."

Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed. 

"Don't you want me to go and see the police?"

"No," Ole Andreson said. "That wouldn't do any good."

"Isn't there something I could do?"

"No. There isn't anything to do."

"Maybe it was just a bluff."

"No. It ain't just a bluff." 

Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall. 

"The only thing is," he said, talking toward the wall, "I just can't make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day."

"Couldn't you get out of town?"

"No," Ole Andreson said. "I'm through with all that running around."

He looked at the wall.

"There ain't anything to do now." 

"Couldn't you fix it up some way?"

"No. I got in wrong." He talked in the same flat voice. "There ain't anything to do. After a while I'll make up my mind to go out."

"I better go back and see George," Nick said.

"So long," said Ole Andreson. He did not look toward Nick. "Thanks for coming around." 

On the way out, the aforementioned mix-up with Mrs Bell occurs. Back at the diner, Nick tells George about his encounter with Andreson—the cook, having heard the start of it, retires into the kitchen, saying he doesn't even want to listen. All Nick's swagger is gone. It seems Andreson has been on the run and would now rather just face his end. Only he hasn't yet fortified himself sufficiently. He hadn't shown up at the diner because all day he'd been afraid to go out. Eventually he would. Maybe "the killers" will find him in his bed in his room before he goes out. Nothing I think is more affecting than the repeated, "There's nothing to do." Nick can't shrug it off as he had the ordeal in the diner over the dinner hour. Here's how "The Killers" ends:

"What's he going to do?"

"Nothing."

"They'll kill him."

"I guess they will."

"He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago." 

"I guess so," said Nick.

"It's a hell of a thing."

"It's an awful thing," Nick said.

They did not say anything. George reached down for a towel and wiped the counter.

"I wonder what he did?" Nick said. 

"Double-crossed somebody. That's what they kill them for." 

"I'm going to get out of this town," Nick said.

"Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do." 

"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."

"Well," said George, "you better not think about it." 

"You better not think about it" recalls the ending of "Indian Camp," wherein the young Nick Adams "felt quite sure," in the last sentence of that story, "that he would never die." Of course he will, as will Andreson, even though it may be too awful to think about. 

I sometimes think that "The Killers" has not aged as well as some of Hemingway's stories. If that's true, it could be that the originality now may seem hackneyed on account of a thousand noir movies that have copied its manner. The picture at the top is Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks." I remember that in college I had to buy for a course an American literature anthology that had this picture on its cover. One of the included works was "The Killers," and I've always suspected that the cover is meant to refer to that story in particular. The correspondence isn't perfect. For one thing, there's a woman in the Hopper picture, which moreover appears to be set in a city instead of a small town. But there is the same aura of menace, and the story, considering it's mainly dialog, has a distinctly pictorial effect: Hemingway is intensely interested in the way things look, and the play of light. We aren't told much, mostly we just overhear (as it were) what's said, but we are told that the lunch-room is a converted saloon, and that this explains why there is a long mirror on one wall in which Max gazes at George—maybe so that he can see him while looking directly at the door? (Hopper's nighthawks' diner has no visible door.) I didn't mention the story's abrupt opening:

The door of Henry's lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.

Yes, they sat down at the counter and began talking. The next paragraph without quotation marks begins:

Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window.

The Wikipedia article on "Nighthawks" mentions that Hopper may have been influenced in this work either by "The Killers," which he is known to have admired, or by another Hemingway story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

American stories: Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

At some point in my life I acquired, for $1.50 according to a penciled note on the flyleaf, a stained and yellowing Modern Library hardcover edition of The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I know what you're thinking, especially if you had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school: should have left it on the shelf of the used book store and bought a cup of coffee instead. I hear you. But this weekend, for whatever reason, I pulled it off the shelf by its loose spine and read a few of the "selected tales." Dark, very dark, and somewhat bewildering. If you can get past the language, the brocaded style sodden with words one encounters nowadays mainly in legal writing and church liturgies ("herein," "verily," "hitherto"), these stories may seem modern, "Kafkaesque."

My Modern Library volume closes with "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," pages 1209 to 1223. This happenstance seduced me into thinking it's from late in Hawthorne's  career, though I see now that it was composed in 1832, the year he turned 28. The Scarlet Letter was eighteen years in the future. I wonder whether Hawthorne did not himself think very much of the story. In 1837, he published a book, Twice-Told Tales, so-called because it collected fictions that he had previously managed to place in various magazines: "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" qualified but was not included. My sense, however, is that, except for maybe "Young Goodman Brown," it is now Hawthorne's most frequently anthologized story.

That might be because it seems a representative work. When I say "dark," I mean, for one thing, it's night, like in all the scenes you remember from Macbeth. As in "Young Goodman Brown," a young man sets out after the sun has set and ends up peering intently into gloom, trying to make out things and succeeding mainly at becoming disoriented and perplexed. The effect of "straining to see" is duplicated in the reader. Why has Major Molineux's young kinsman traveled to Boston to seek him out? What is the back story? What's going on? This information is withheld. Instead of ordinary verisimilitude, which tends to have the effect of firming up the ground beneath your feet, there is darkness, encounters with churlish Bostonians, surreal faces, at last one kindly resident whose kindliness, it develops, is the come-on of a prostitute. At the beginning, when the adolescent enters Boston, his crossing into the city on the ferry in the dark is described with some elaboration, and I think the general situation of a young man crossing is meant to suggest that what follows is, for him, a new realm of experience: an initiation story, then. 

Robin—that's the youth's name—moves through the city, inquiring of people whether they can direct him to the home of "my kinsman, Major Molineux." No one helps. Robin always has some benign explanation for being rebuffed, and the requisite ingenuity is repeatedly attributed to his "shrewdness." But his confidence slides toward anxiety as in his nocturnal wandering he meets only with vaguely hostile personages who supply only vaguely disquieting news of his kinsman. The reader is borne along by mysteries. Why is Robin seeking Major Molineux? Why do the people he meets not have the same high regard as he for his kinsman? What will happen when, or if, the title character appears onstage? 

The resolution, when it comes, is swift but does not altogether dissolve the ambiguity. Robin is told by a grotesque stranger, with a face half red, half black, that if he keeps watch at the intersection where his long walk has delivered him he will within an hour see Major Molineux. While waiting, he falls into a reverie, or dream, and sees the family that he's left outside his boyhood home—his father, a minister, an older brother, his mother and younger sisters. When they turn to enter the house, Robin would enter behind them, but "the latch tinkled into its place, and he was excluded from his home."

The unhappy vision concluded, he comes to and is greeted by a generous-seeming man, although by this point at least the reader is suspicious of everyone. The back story is revealed as Robin pours it out to the man. His father and Major Molineux, a man of the world and of inherited wealth, are cousins. His older brother is to succeed to the farm that his father works when not performing his church duties. On a visit, the childless Major had once hinted that he'd help establish one of the boys, and the point of Robin's journey, since there's nothing for him at home, is to realize the promise of his kinsman's good intentions. No sooner is this revealed than a mob, in which Robin can see every demonical townsperson he has that night encountered, parades into sight. Hauled along in a cart, the object of the mob's abuse and derision, is the tarred and feathered Major Molineux. Then:

He [the Major] was an elderly man, of large and majestic person, and strong, square features, betokening a steady soul; but steady as it was, his enemies had found means to shake it. His face was pale as death, and far more ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the foam hung white upon his quivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by a quick and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation. But perhaps the bitterest pang of all was when his eyes met those of Robin; for he evidently knew him on the instant, as the youth stood witnessing the foul disgrace of a head grown gray in honor. They stared at each other in silence, and Robin's knees shook, and his hair bristled, with a mixture of pity and terror.

I don't know whether we are to have forgotten that it's nighttime, or maybe are supposed to imagine a scene like in a light-and-dark painting, the hideous subject illuminated by an invisible source. Making connections, one recalls that the story's first paragraph, which casually established the historical context, had noted that a hundred years ago colonial governors appointed by the British crown were regarded with contempt by the American colonists. We are now clearly meant to conclude that Major Molineux was one of these hated governors. But that, and the fact that the hope of Robin's journey lies dashed, is about all that's clear. It would however be hard to miss Hawthorne's sympathetic description of a man whom patriotic lore encourages us to condemn. Are we to take the side of the gross mob? That is what Robin does at the very end of the story, by joining in the laughter directed at his humiliated kinsman from whose beneficence he had hoped to advance. The mob parades past and out of sight, Hawthorne writing:

On they went, in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man's heart.

That is the last sentence, but for a brief coda in which Robin asks his new companion, the older man to whom he'd told his story, to show him the way back to the ferry, and receives for a reply:

"Some few days hence, if you wish it, I will speed you on your journey. Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux."

This final occurrence of "shrewd," now weighted with something like the mockery heaped on the Major, is the last vaguely sinister note struck in a story that could be described as a phantasmagorical vision of evil.

American stories: Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," subtitled "A Story of Wall Street," was first published in two installments in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, the issues for November and December of 1853. It follows then by two years Moby Dick, and by a few more Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), concerning life on the islands of the South Seas, including among cannibals, popular travelogues now known mainly to solvers of crossword puzzles, where their utility as answers is boosted by a high vowel-to-consonant ratio.

"A story of Wall Street": definitely not an exotic adventure on a whaler or Polynesian isle. The narrator is a real estate lawyer, and the titular character a copyist hired, in these days before typewriters, to churn out handwritten legal instruments, the kinds of things that even back then were signed at real estate closings. The narrator introduces himself:

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never address a jury, or in any way draw down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an eminently safe man.

There soon follows a description of his "snug retreat," with an emphasis on the view from his office windows, which at one end afford a prospect of nothing but the blackened brick wall of the adjoining building. The gap between the buildings is so narrow that the picturesque effect is made visible at all only by a thin shaft of sunlight filtering into the crevice from the unseen sky above. The office is partitioned by swinging doors, the narrator occupying one side and his copyists the other, but, when Bartleby is hired, the new copyist is placed on the narrator's side, behind a screen, so that he can be quickly summoned—he's able to hear, though not see, his employer, the narrator, from his cell within a cell. Before the events of the story begin to unwind, with the narration of Bartleby's strange ways, the narrator describes the peculiarly offset eccentricities of his three more longstanding employees. If one were to speak of the "total effect" made by the story's opening, it might be of a dungeon inhabited by madmen, though the genial narrator seems quite unaware of the picture he's painted. 

Enter Bartleby, who in his job interview strikes the narrator as "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn." What everyone who's read the story will remember is, I would prefer not to. This is Bartleby's response to every request that he perform the miscellaneous duties of his position. Part of my affinity for the story arises, I'm afraid, from familiarity with the work Bartleby declines to perform. It's very detail-oriented and frequently involves comparing—that is, one person reading aloud one document while another follows along in the freshly minted one to make sure that "23 rods" hasn't become "32 rods" or "thence northeast" changed to "thence northwest," errors that would introduce a defect into the chain of title. Bartleby's accruing refusals do not seem to me as outlandish as they're meant to be. Once, where I worked for more than 25 years, a new employee being trained on her first day was told to take a break at around 10 o'clock. She asked whether what she'd been shown so far was a fair representation of the work she'd do, and, upon being told it was, she left for coffee and never came back. She'd prefer not to. 

If you think Bartleby's behavior is outlandish, the problem is to account for it, and the theories are about as numerous as the commentators. In one, the story is an allegory of Melville's career: scriveners are writers, of a kind, and the idea is that Melville would prefer not to supply the public with the kind of popular tales with which he'd achieved an initial success. This is at least in line with the biographical record. In the decade beginning with the publication of Moby Dick, Melville earned from his books an average of $228 per year. According to the PBS "American Experience" documentary about him, Melville's life after Moby Dick was "a battle against obscurity and financial ruin." He eventually retired from professional authorship to take a job as a customs inspector on the New York City docks. When he died, age 72, in 1891, the manuscript of Billy Budd, his second greatest work, was discovered among his papers, but remained unpublished for 33 more years. 

A related interpretation is unapologetically Marxist, or maybe Marxian, since I would prefer not to is muted compared to Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. In this view, it's pointed out that every request Bartleby declines relates to the advancement of the business enterprise. Suppose, asks Lionel Trilling in the last paragraph of his essay on the story, the narrator had one day told Bartleby that he felt faint and would like a glass of water after being helped to the couch. Would Bartleby have then replied I would prefer not to? We don't know. He's never asked to do anything like that.

It seems to me, however, that in the world according to Marx there would be no story at all. There would be no accruing episodes of inexplicable refusal and mounting exasperation on the part of the narrator/boss, because Bartleby would simply be cashiered after his first, or possibly his second or third, passive breach of duty. So there is, in addition to the mystery surrounding Bartleby, another concerning the narrator's tolerance and increasing accommodation of his blandly insubordinate employee. The narrator can't explain Bartleby but he takes a crack at explaining himself:

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity, then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps be driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval.

There is in this a moral imagination and psychological subtlety that one would have thought was beyond the very safe real estate lawyer. What weighs more, Bartleby's survival or his own "delicious self-approval"? This passage occurs relatively early in the development of Bartleby's intransigence. As events unwind, Bartleby's behavior is a constant, but the narrator ratchets up his accommodations to such a point that, near the end, instead of firing Bartleby, he rents new office space, leaving Bartleby behind, and in this way finally being relieved of him. He executes this plan, though he is plainly vexed by the thought that he is abandoning Bartleby, a pang he treats by the gift of money. The upshot is that the new tenant of his old office space sends a complaint about a vagrant. A real estate lawyer would realize it wasn't his problem, but the narrator returns to his old haunts, verifies that Bartleby is indeed the source of the complaint, offers him more money, even invites him into his own house, but . . . I would prefer not to. Bartleby in the end is incarcerated at the Tombs, where the narrator visits him and, at last, is the first to discover that he's died. The story ends with a cri de coeur from the lips of the real estate lawyer: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah! humanity!"

I do not know what to make of it, but, to return again to the concept of "total effect," one reaches for words like desolating and bleak. It seems clear that "a tale of Wall Street" is meant ironically. The setting is Wall Street but the condition is general. The blackened brick wall less than ten feet from the narrator's office windows might seem like the opposite of the vistas of Moby Dick, but remember that in that novel, when Ishmael first goes aboard the Pequod for a job interview, he's asked why he wants to go whaling. He replies that he’d like to see the world. Captain Peleg answers that, in that case, he should "take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there." Ishmael's narration continues:

For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand.

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing toward the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see. 

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?"

"Not much," I replied—"nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."

"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?"

I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must. . . .

 

American stories: Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"

Somewhere the American writer Joan Didion expresses her admiration for Hemingway, and she calls attention especially to the opening of his second novel, A Farewell to Arms:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.  In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.  Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.  The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Her point related to the effects that can be achieved by the simplest English words strung together in perfect sequence, and how Hemingway's style, famous for its "simplicity," only pretends to be simple.  The above passage, heavy with Anglo Saxon words of a single syllable, is nevertheless poetic and highly wrought--notice, for example, how the mountains of the first sentence give way to boulders and pebbles in the second and then, in the third, dust, which in the last sentence is repeated in a choric way, so that the sound this paragraph of English prose makes is: mountains, boulders, pebbles, dust, dust, dust.

The (very) short story called "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" begins:

It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.  In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.  The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.  

If the buried texts were discovered in an archaeological dig, someone would surmise that the same person wrote these two distinctive paragraphs.  They share the recurring forms of "dust" as well as "leaves of trees," and instead of beginning "In the late," like the novel, the story commences "It was late."  It's late, most obviously, in a day.  It's also late in the life of the old man who drinks.  And the lateness of the day may suggest that it is late too in an era, the one in which the promises and consolations of Christianity sustain hope and organize life.  The story comes to a kind of climax when one of the waiters recites a blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer, the blasphemy arising from his substitution of nada, the Spanish word for "nothing," in the place of almost every noun: Our nada, who art in nada, nada by thy name, &c.  

Four characters appear on stage, so to speak, in the story--the old drinker, two waiters, and a barman.  We do not learn anyone's name.  Hardly anything happens: the old man drinks, the waiters talk, the old man gets shooed away so that the café can be closed, one waiter heads home and the other walks to a bar that's still open, [the end].  The place usually reserved for character and action is filled with what might be called "atmosphere," which arises mainly from the associations of "lateness" and the nothing, nothing, nothing.  The first paragraph of exposition is followed by a stretch of dialogue between the waiters:

"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.

"Why?"

"He was in despair."

"What about?"

"Nothing."

"How do you know it was nothing?"

"He has plenty of money."

First the lateness, then the nothing--and the topics of despair and suicide, augmented with a bitter joke.  I said that the atmosphere takes the place of character but that isn't wholly true.  In this first exchange, the waiters aren't differentiated: if it were a play, the speakers could be designated "one waiter" (as the first speaker in fact is) and "another waiter."  But as they talk it's revealed how different they are.  The younger one is married and annoyed by the old drinker whose tarrying keeps him from going home to his wife and bed.  The older one is unmarried (possibly widowed), sympathetic and solicitous toward the old drinker, makes bitter jokes, and is unhurried because he has nowhere in particular to go after the cafe closes and suffers anyway from insomnia.  Of course he is the one who will recite his own version of the Lord's Prayer as he walks to the bar after his colleague has chased out the old man and the cafe is shuttered for the night.  In retrospect, it's clear that, in the opening bit of dialogue, he's the one who speaks first, knows of the old man's attempted suicide, gives "nothing" as the reason for it, and makes the joke about money to which the younger man makes no reply (maybe because he can't imagine why someone with plenty of money would be in despair--in other words, he takes it as a straight answer, not a bitter joke).  

It's clear that the old drinker and the older of the two waiters are the objects of the author's keen interest and regard.  For example, the older waiter reprimands the younger one, who has just shooed the old drinker:

"I am of those who like to stay late at the café," the older waiter said.  "With all those who do not want to go to bed.  With all those who need a light for the night."

This is highly rhetorical--it sounds more like the King James Version of the Bible than a waiter closing up at night--and may be explained as Hemingway's attempt to achieve an elevated effect by pretending to translate the waiter's Spanish into English.  But the translation aspect is just a ruse to maintain plausible verisimilitude.  The author's purpose is really just the elevation, which functions as a kind of italics.  The speech is a Declaration of Sympathy, a credo that is soon amplified when, walking to the bar after the café is closed, the old waiter thinks to himself:

What did he fear?  It was not fear or dread.  It was a nothing that he knew too well.  It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.  It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.  Some lived in it and never felt it . . . .

Like the younger waiter.  The older men, robbed of youth's delusions, feel the weight of the lateness and the nothing.  The story's effect derives from the way the subdued, placid surface covers desperation: it's an unscreamed scream.   

But it would be wrong to regard the story as an expression of nihilism.  Implicit in some of the details is the idea that while the game can't be won it should still be played the right way.  There is something to put up against the nada--pleasant night cafés, brandy, light, order, fellow-feeling among sufferers, correct behavior.  When the old drinker and would-be suicide is chased from the well-lit café by the younger waiter, he does not fail, though drunk, to count up the empty saucers stacked before him so that he can then count out of his coin purse the money necessary to pay his bill, including a tip.  We are then told:

The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity.  

"The waiter" who watches and registers "unsteadily but with dignity" has to be the older one.

[North] American stories: Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls"

 

The geographic home of Alice Munro's fiction is southwestern Ontario, Canada, the plug of land nearly surrounded by three of the Great Lakes--by Lake Huron on the north and west, by Lake Erie on the south, and, on the east, by the western end of Lake Ontario.  The metropolis of Toronto sits like a sentinel near the northwest corner of Lake Ontario, and a line drawn southwesterly from Toronto to Windsor, next to Detroit, Michigan, passes through or near several pretty substantial towns--Cambridge, Kitchener, London.  But north of that line--Munro territory--is thinly populated farm country.  She was born in 1931 at Wingham, sometimes, as in "Boys and Girls," called in her fiction Jubilee; it's about 55 miles northwest of Kitchener.  Her father was a fox farmer.  The first sentence of "Boys and Girls" is, "My father was a fox farmer."  Those collecting autobiographical tidbits might also notice that the name of the girl narrator's younger brother, Laird, seems a version of the author's birth name, Alice Laidlaw.  

"Boys and Girls" was one of the stories in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968.  If you know one thing about Munro, it's probably that she recently won the Nobel Prize--in 2013, when she was getting too old and frail to spend the cash award.  Though I'm not a reliable guide on these things, my sense is that her Nobel-worthy reputation rests more on stories from the middle and latter part of her career.  There is a view that she just kept getting better and better.  Her stories tended to get longer, and began exhibiting what reviewers and scholars have called "complex architecture," including preeminently big jumps in time as a story of maybe 40 or more pages shows a character at different stages in life but not in the order of young-older-old.  The themes and settings changed, too.  Later stories are less apt to be set in and around Jubilee, and more apt to concern older women alone in the world.  The successful author may have become a bit more cosmopolitan.  The earlier stories are almost always set in rural and small-town southwestern Ontario.  They are not anything like "technically innovative."  A recurring theme, or maybe I should say "situation," is--feeling the inadequacy of labels but here goes--female coming-of-age tale.  "Boys and Girls" is one of these.

The title: sounds like something a kindergarten teacher would say several times a day, with a faint accent of myth--"male and female He created them."  The second sentence is an amplification of the first, the declaration that the narrator's father is a fox farmer:

That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their furs were prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders.

Munro's prose can go on and on without ever really calling attention to itself, but it seems hard to ignore here the emphatic fall of monosyllabic verbs.  You want to know about fox farming?  Killed--skinned--sold.  The narrator doesn't let on that she is aware of any irony, but she proceeds to describe the calendars depicting "treacherous northern rivers" and "plumed adventurers" that these fur companies gave her father.  The calendars were hung by the kitchen door.  Meanwhile in the whitewashed cellar, on a work table illuminated by a bare hundred-watt bulb, her father skinned the foxes, removing the pelt so that it was inside-out, then tediously scraped away "little clotted webs of blood vessels, the bubbles of fat."  The slippery and rat-like fox carcasses were put in a sack and buried at the dump.  Once, Henry Bailey, the playful hired man, had taken a swing at the narrator with a full sack.  Her mother had not liked that.  She tells us that her mother disliked the pelting operation, not without reason, for the whole house smelled of fox--which smell, however, the narrator found "reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles."

The story at first may not seem to be about anything more than the details of the fox farm operation.  The narrator describes them with a kind of subdued Dickensian relish--where the foxes lived, how their cages were arranged, how they were fed, what they were fed, the chores she performed, her superiority as a farmhand to her younger brother Laird.  All the details convey her keen interest and love, but it wouldn't be right to say we learn of this only through indirection or inference.  Her desire to please her father, a somewhat mysterious man, is intense:

Whatever thoughts and stories my father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions.  Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride.  One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, "Like to have you meet my new hired man."  I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure.

"Could of fooled me," said the salesman.  "I thought it was only a girl."

And a page later this blunt, soaring assessment:

It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically important.

Ritualistically.  In my father's service.  These phrases, evocative of religious sublimity and sacred rites, seem oddly elevated for the topic of fox farming.  I think maybe they're supposed to seem odd, like the lying calendar pictures that contrast with killed-skinned-sold, the table lit by the bare bulb, and the bag filled with slippery carcasses that gets buried at the dump.  The drama in the largely incident-free story relates to the resolution of these opposing things.

One of the things the foxes eat is horsemeat.  When neighbors have a horse no longer useful for farm work, they sell it cheaply to the narrator's father, who kills it, butchers it, feeds it to the foxes.  When a horse is available, it makes sense to buy it now, even if the need isn't immediate, since it doesn't cost much to keep the horse alive for a week or a month or half a season.  And so it happens that for awhile the narrator's family is keeping two horses.  Notwithstanding their short life expectancies, they name them: the male is called Mack and the mare they call Flora.  Mack is old and easy to handle whereas Flora is spirited--it seems she was available not on account of her age but because a farmer had gotten a tractor.  I said the story is largely incident-free, but toward the end these two horses get killed.  It's practically the only two things that happen in the story.  All the rest is description and incidental detail--atmospherics, you might say.  The narrator sees the first horse get killed and plays a part two weeks later when the second is killed.  

Mack is the first to go.  One day the narrator guesses what's going to happen and she hustles herself and Laird into the barn, so that they can watch.  Laird looks out through a crack between boards and the narrator finds a knothole "that gave me the view I wanted--a corner of the barnyard, the gate, part of the field," and then:

My father came in sight carrying the gun.  Henry was leading Mack by the halter.  He dropped it and took out his cigarette papers and tobacco; he rolled cigarettes for my father and himself.  While this was going on Mack nosed around in the old, dead grass along the fence.  Then my father opened the gate and they took Mack through.  Henry led Mack away from the path to a patch of ground and they talked together, not loud enough for us to hear.  Mack again began searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not to be found.  My father walked away in a straight line, and stopped at a short distance which seemed to suit him.  Henry was walking away from Mack too, but sideways, still negligently holding on to the halter.  My father raised the gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot him.

I set this down because I know for sure I can't adequately describe it.  The first sentence establishes the narrator's telescopic view through the knothole and suggests a peculiar intensity of vision.  What she'll see is lifted out of ordinary experience.  Things begin to happen--things that have a strong ritualistic aspect, like the men preparing to smoke.  Their movements and actions function to accomplish the task safely, but, through the knothole, they register in her consciousness like a liturgy.  Though she had before ascribed the phrase ritualistically important to her father's work, the ritual she now observes repels her.  You can tell from the way it naturally occurs to her to describe what she sees.  Laird would not apply "negligently" to Henry's grip on the halter. She thinks her father stops short "at a distance which seemed to suit him" because, to her, it seems like more negligence.  And the horse nosing around for a tuft of grass in the seconds before being shot.

Two weeks later it's Flora's turn.  This time the narrator has no intention of watching.  Once is enough.  In the days since Mack was shot, she has reflected, while combing her hair in a mirror and wondering whether she'd be pretty, on what she'd seen, "the easy, practiced way my father raised the gun."  She and her brother are playing up by the house when they hear wild whinnying down by the barn.  They run to see what's happening.  The spirited Flora has broken away from Henry, gotten out of the barn, and is running free in their large, L-shaped field.  The gate at the far end is open. Her father yells for her to race to the end of the field and shut the gate.  She runs very fast, ahead of Laird, and gets to the gate before Flora, and also before her father gets to the bend in the L to see.  Instead of shutting the gate, she opens it wide and the horse escapes.  She can't explain to herself why she does this.  It's a useless gesture, worse than useless since Flora won't really get away and it's a waste of her busy father's time to have to go after her in the truck.  Sure enough, that afternoon the truck rolls back into the yard with a big tarpaulin spread over the back.  At dinner, in the house, over bowls of steaming and overcooked vegetables, Laird tells what she'd done and she cries.  Her father makes "a curt sound of disgust" but excuses her with the same dismissive phrase that the feed salesman had used--"She's only a girl."  The last line of the story is: 

I didn't protest that, even in my heart.  Maybe it was true.

Probably "Boys and Girls" is not among Munro's very best stories, but it's been attractive to me ever since I first had to read it in a college class on the short story.  I wish now I could remember the form in which the teacher got the text for us.  I don't recall ever seeing "Boys and Girls" in an anthology.  Maybe he just made copies for us out of his own edition of Dance of the Happy Shades.  It seems that even way back in the late 70s there would have been other Munro stories to assign, and that he must therefore have really wanted us to read "Boys and Girls."  One possible reason, because I think it applies to me now and so it could have applied to him then, is that loving her stories makes you curious about her, and one senses that in "Boys and Girls" the fictive draperies might not be too heavily embroidered.  In a detail that seems extraneous, the narrator goes with a friend to a show in Jubilee in the interval between the two horse shootings.  She reports having a good time, and the name of the friend, Judy Canova, is dropped into the story, the only mention of this girl, and I kind of wonder if young Alice Laidlaw didn't have a friend with a similar name with whom she went to shows in Wingham, the closest town to the fox farm on which she grew up in southwestern Ontario.  

American stories: Richard Ford's "Rock Springs"

 

The title refers to the town in southwest Wyoming.  The narrator, his girlfriend, his young daughter (who is not the girlfriend's daughter), and a pet dog are on their way to Florida from Kalispell, Montana, when their stolen car breaks down just outside of Rock Springs.  The main incidents of the story occur at a trailer park on the edge of town and then later at the Ramada Inn of Rock Springs.  The trailer park adjoins a gold mine and was built by the mining company for the temporary workers who have come to Rock Springs for the high wages.   Besides the trailer park, the mine and its wandering workers are responsible for a bustling prostitution trade in town--on the cab ride from the trailer park to the Ramada Inn the cab driver complains about it and mentions that he almost had ignored the narrator's phone call, so sure was he that it was more prostitution-related business.  The story, only 26 pages of pretty big print long, is "about" a lot of things, one being the American West circa 1985.  

Here is the first paragraph:

Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn't turn me in to the police.  I had managed to scrape with the law in Kalispell over several bad checks--which is a prison crime in Montana.  And I knew Edna was already looking at her cards and thinking about a move, since it wasn't the first time I'd been in law scrapes in my life.  She herself had already had her own troubles, losing her kids and keeping her ex-husband, Danny, from breaking in her house and stealing her things while she was at work, which was really why I had moved in in the first place, that and needing to give my little daughter, Cheryl, a better shake in things.

The very smooth first-person narration is one of Ford's calling cards and is employed to great effect also in his most famous works, the series of novels about Frank Bascombe--The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank with You.  Here, notice how much information is passed, effortlessly, about certain kinds of people living a certain kind of life in a certain place. Later, on their way to Florida by way of Rock Springs, Edna will prepare cocktails in paper cups on the ledge made by the open door of the glovebox, eliciting from the narrator the casual observation that, while writing bad checks will land you in jail in Montana, consuming liquor on the front seat of your moving automobile is perfectly legal.  The West!

But does the narrator's easy flow of words reveal more than he intends?  (More than the narrator intends, not more than Richard Ford intends!)  For example, the "which" in the last sentence refers to the reason he moved in with Edna, but, regarding the specifics: is the idea that his presence is protection against the marauding ex while she's away at work? or is the attraction that she is away at work--that is, has a job--something he currently lacks (therefore, perhaps, the bad checks)? or might it be both, one explaining the advantage on her side and the other, his?  There's a lot going on, I think.  The ex, Danny, is no prize, that's clear, but it appears that a court might have determined that he is a more fit parent than Edna--a lot fitter, since she has "lost" the children.  Yet the narrator advances, as a reason for moving in with her, giving his daughter "a better shake in things."  It doesn't seem wise.  The narrator has at least a vague sense of this, for the story's second paragraph commences:

I don't know what was between Edna and me, just beached by the same tides when you got down to it.

The themes of the American West, constricted lives, life decisions that seem poor but almost necessary, indifferent or neglectful parenting, children made vulnerable by their stumbling parents--all adumbrated in the deceptively casual opening.  I think you could also say that the story is about what is often called The American Dream.  Does the phrase ever refer to anything beyond baubles, luxury possessions, financial ease?  In "Rock Springs," it seems a fraud.  The car the narrator steals, off an ophthalmologist's parking lot in Whitefish, Montana, is a cranberry-colored Mercedes, but his considerable troubles deepen when the luxury vehicle breaks down next to a literal gold mine that has spawned a huge trailer park and thriving local prostitution industry.  

It's dusk.  The narrator pushes the stolen Mercedes into the trees as Edna steers.  When he can't push the car farther, he leaves it to sink on its tires in the soft sand and heads into the trailer park to call for a cab to bring them into Rock Springs.  The interview he has with the trailer park resident amounts to an interlude, ambiguous and affecting.

He climbs the portable wooden steps leading up to the door of the first lighted trailer home.  His knock is answered by an attractive, 60ish African American woman--the narrator calls her a Negro.  Though her husband is at work at the mine, she invites him in to make his call.  She is very polite, and, not wanting to arouse suspicion, he lies politely about the details of his predicament.  Though he of course has no intention of calling a tow truck, he looks up towing companies in the phone book--it's the 1980s!--she gives him so that he can remember a name and tell the cab driver a plausible lie that might also allay suspicion.  It's more pleasant than he expected in the trailer home.  It looks comfortable, lived in, there is the smell of a nice dinner cooking on the stove, kid toys on the floor--the narrator compares it favorably in his mind to other trailer homes he's known, another detail: he has known trailer homes.  When he expresses admiration, she observes that the home is owned by the company.  Not everything is well here, either.  The toys are for a young boy who lurks behind the woman, not speaking, because, it develops, he can't: "special needs," we say.  His father, the lady's son, is deceased, and his mother abandoned him, so grandma and grandpa have stepped into the breach, at least temporarily.  They are from Rockford, Illinois, and are going to be in Rock Springs for three months, making good money at the mine before moving back to Illinois.  You piece this all together from the conversation they have, and the effect is like a variation on a theme in a musical work.  It's all there: struggle, trouble, vulnerable children, instability, rootlessness, everyone from somewhere else, a meeting in Rock Springs between the small-time crook from Kalispell and the dignified woman from Rockford, she looking forward to a return home and him on his way to Florida, trying to stay a step ahead of the law and the prospect of doing so dimming.  The stolen cranberry Mercedes sunk in sandy soil among trees off the roadway will be discovered in the morning.

When the narrator gets back to the road, the cab is already there and Edna and his daughter and their little dog are waiting.  The cab driver's complaint about local social conditions includes that motel rooms in the boom town are exorbitant and he offers to take them some place reasonable.  The narrator, however, opts for the Ramada Inn, on the theory that the police always check the dives first and, anyway, it's been a hard day and he wants to be comfortable.  Once in their room, the story moves quickly to its conclusion.  The exhausted little girl falls asleep even though she hasn't eaten all day.  Tired of motels and stolen broken cars,  Edna announces her intention to buy a Greyhound ticket back to Kalispell in the morning.  The narrator gently remonstrates with her--it seems he's crushed, or would be, if he weren't so accustomed to disappointment.  But he has to go on.  He'll need a car tomorrow, so a new crime has to be committed.  When it's very late, and Edna has fallen asleep on the last night of their life together, he leaves the room to scout out the cars parked in the lot, and the story ends with another--hard to describe, but evocative, modulated expression of yearning, similar to what happened at the trailer home, the details mirroring his own but suggesting circumstances less unhappy:

I walked over to a car, a Pontiac with Ohio tags, one of the ones with bundles and suitcases strapped to the top and a lot more in the trunk, by the way it was riding.  I looked inside the driver's window.  There were maps and paperback books and sunglasses and the little plastic holders for cans that hang on the window wells.  And in the back there were kids' toys and some pillows and a cat box with a cat sitting in it staring up at me like I was the face of the moon.  It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car.  Nothing seemed surprising, nothing different.  Though I had a funny sensation at that moment and turned and looked up at the windows along the back of the motel.  All were dark except two.  Mine and another one.  And I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn?  Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared?  Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him?  Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him?  Would you think he had a daughter?  Would you think he was anybody like you?

American stories: Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" (and some predecessors)

 

With most writers, you begin to feel, once you've read enough of their output, that you know and recognize their world.  You even hear people say things like "the world according to Milton" or "the world according to Hemingway," and you have an idea what they're talking about.  In the latter, for example, there is a war going on, either in the foreground (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls) or in the background, which may be explicit ("Soldier's Home," "In Another Country") or unmentioned, "left out" but present ("Big Two-Hearted River," The Sun Also Rises).  I've been rooting around in my paperback edition of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and notice that, in a publisher's blurb, fellow writer Stanley Elkin illustrates the principle by enthusing, "I'm nuts about Raymond Carver's new stories.  They're real as discount stores, time clocks, the franchises in small towns, bad marriages."

The point can be amplified, with respect to Carver, by noting how certain kinds of situations recur.  Here's one.  It's the middle of the night.  Husband and wife are in bed. Wife has a lot of unspecified stuff rattling around her head and can't sleep.  Husband has no trouble sleeping and so is oblivious to wife's almost desperate state of mind, the symptoms of which, though not the underlying cause, are described in a succession of simple, declarative sentences. 

She looked in on the children.  She pulled the covers up over her son's shoulders.  She went back to the living room and sat down in the big chair.  She paged through a magazine and tried to read.  She gazed at the photographs and then she tried to read again.  Now and then a car went by on the street outside and she looked up.  As each car passed she waited, listening.  And then she looked down at the magazine again.  There was a stack of magazines in the rack by the big chair.  She paged through them all.

That's from "The Student's Wife."  At the end, she goes back into the bedroom, where her husband "looked desperate in his heavy sleep":

As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes.

In "I Could See the Smallest Things," the sleepless wife hears her open gate outside.  She nudges her husband, who only groans.  Then:

I stayed still awhile longer until I decided it was no use.  I got up and got my slippers.  I went to the kitchen and made tea and sat with it at the kitchen table.  I smoked one of Cliff's unfiltereds.

It was late. I didn't want to look at the time.  I drank the tea and smoked another cigarette.  After awhile I decided I'd go out and fasten up the gate.

Outside, she sees her next door neighbor, in his pajamas, flashlight in one hand and bug poison in the other, crouching in the yard plantings, killing slugs.  They have a brief conversation that is evocative of happier past times on both sides.  He shows her a slug.  When she goes back inside to bed, she gives her husband "a little shake" and

He cleared his throat. He swallowed.  Something caught and dribbled in his chest. 

The story closes with her connecting husband to slugs in the yard next door. 

If Carver's career is divided into two phases--an early, "minimalist" one, in which the editor Gordon Lish figured prominently, and a late one that was cut short by his death, age 50, in 1988--then "The Student's Wife" and "I Could See the Smallest Things" both belong to the early phase.  So does "The Bath," in which a young mother goes to a bakery and orders, from a not very sympathetic-seeming baker, a cake for her son's eighth birthday.  Then, on the morning of the party, before the cake can be picked up, the boy is struck by a car while walking to school.  The parents keep a vigil at the hospital.  The boy slumbers in something like a coma, nothing happens, the reader along with the parents is subjected to the grim hospital world where tanned and well-dressed doctors speak evasively to frightened consumers of health care, and, finally, the mother goes home to take a bath.  Soon as she's fed the dog, the phone rings:

"Yes!" she said.  "Hello!" she said.

"Mrs Weiss," a man's voice said.

"Yes," she said.  "This is Mrs Weiss.  Is it about Scotty?" she said.

"Scotty," the voice said.  "It is about Scotty," the voice said.  "It has to do with Scotty, yes."

And that's the end of the story.  This dead-fall of an ending, the telephone call of the baker, has an awful and desolating force that may put one in mind of the gate-knocking scene in Macbeth.  (At dawn on the morning after the night of the murders, there is a knocking at the castle gate, which, considering what has just happened, should be the hand of God--but it turns out just to be some drunken revelers getting in late.  The king's corpse, and those of his slumbering body guards, haven't even been discovered yet.)  You don't perhaps realize the nightmare you've been sunk in till it collides with the mundane. 

Now that I've compared him to Shakespeare, it remains to be said that Carver wasn't altogether happy with the "minimalist" stories collected in Will You Please Be Quiet Please and What We Talk About.  In this interview--full of interest--he answered the question, "How has your work changed?"

I knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I'd be at a dead end—writing stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn't want to read myself, and that's the truth. In a review of the last book, somebody called me a “minimalist” writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn't like it. There's something about “minimalist” that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don't like. But all of the stories in the new book, the one called Cathedral, were written within an eighteen-month period; and in every one of them I feel this difference.

One of the stories in Cathedral is "A Small, Good Thing," which is a reworking of "The Bath."  The new story is around three times longer, mostly because it continues forward in time.  The redone first part is very similar, though you notice, if you put the two texts side-by-side, that most of the changes have a softening effect. For example, the doctors, while still tanned and well dressed, have not been dealt a natural void in the human sympathy suit.  The boy, however, dies in the hospital.  The numbed parents go home and realize it's the baker who keeps calling on the phone.  He wants the money for his stale cake.  Enraged, they drive to the mall where the bakery is located.  It's in the wee hours of the night, everything is dark, and they are contemplating violence.  The baker lets them into his well-lighted work place and the angry exchange we're expecting begins.  But it comes out that the birthday boy has died and the baker's sullen demeanor falls away.

He looked at them, and then he shook his head slowly.  He pulled a chair out from under the card table that held papers and receipts, an adding machine, and a telephone directory.  "Please sit down," he said.  "Let me get you a chair," he said to Howard.  "Sit down now, please."  The baker went into the front of the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs.  "Please sit down, you people."

And the story ends:

"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf.  "It's a heavy bread, but rich."  They smelled it, then he had them taste it.  It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains.  They listened to him.  They ate what they could.  They swallowed the dark bread.  It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light.  They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

Probably this comes on too strong.  The way in which the accoutrements of the baker's financial interests--the receipts and the adding machine and the telephone directory he used to look up the numbers of delinquent customers--are swept to the side as he exercises himself to make the grieving parents comfortable: it's too obtrusive.  Similarly with the blunt evocation of the Eucharist that ends the story.  Yes, Raymond Carver, they are communing.

This ending, however, is another of the recurring situations, and in maybe Carver's finest story the effect is unspeakably powerful.  This is "Cathedral," the title story, which can be read online here.  It's about a visit--by a blind man to the home of the narrator and his wife.  The blind man and the wife are great friends.  They met when she worked briefly as his assistant, and on her last day, when they were parting, the blind man had asked whether he could touch her face with his hands.  She had let him, and he had run his hands all over her face and neck.  They hadn't "seen" each other since that day but had kept in touch through tapes sent back and forth in the mail.  She had been through a divorce and a suicide attempt before marrying the narrator and the blind man had heard about it all on tapes.  The narrator tells us he knows these things and he tells us how he knows them: she told him.  Now the blind man's mother has died, so he's traveling, and he's going to come to their house.  The narrator's wife is eagerly anticipating the visit, but he's not.

His wife drives to the train station to pick up the blind man.  When she returns, the narrator describes how he watches his wife get out of the car, walk around to help the blind man, gently guides him, smiling and laughing, to the front door.  You get the idea that the smiling and laughing is unusual, not something that happens a lot in this house.  There are bare suggestions of constrained lives, lots of drinking, dead-end jobs, no kids.  The wife, however, has prepared a nice meal.  The narrator watches as the blind man eats with gusto.  He does not turn down the offer of a drink, or of a refill.  The trio repair to the living room with dessert.  The narrator turns on the tv--not the usual entertainment of a blind man.  But the tv is going.  They smoke dope.  The narrator notices that this too does not appear to be the blind man's usual pastime, but he's trying to be a good guest.  The pot takes down the wife, who falls asleep on the couch.  Now it's just the two men and the tv.  The narrator feels uncomfortable.  The tv show is about European cathedrals--sounds like PBS.  He flips through the channels, but nothing seems better, and he lands back on the cathedral show.  It occurs to him that the blind man might have no concept of cathedrals.  He tries describing them in words but feels he fails.  The blind man asks him whether it's okay to ask if he's religious.  The narrator says he isn't religious.  The blind man allows that he in fact doesn't have any conception of cathedrals but has an idea.  What if the narrator helped him to draw one?  The narrator finds materials, and the story winds down, the two men touching as the sighted one guides the hand of the blind man over the construction paper, their joined hands leaping up again and again for the spires, the narrator closing his eyes--"I thought it was something I should do"--and saying: "It was like nothing else in my life up to now."

[Originally posted as "Carver's World" on April 8, 2017.]

American stories: Sherwood Anderson's "I Want to Know Why"

In college, I was assigned to read for one class Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of linked stories about the residents of a small Ohio town--Anderson was born at Camden, Ohio, in 1876--and, for another class, two of his short stories, "The Egg" and "I Want to Know Why."  Possibly Anderson was enjoying a renaissance among the professors in the English Department at one small, Midwestern college, because my sense is that his reputation has been in eclipse now for a long while.  If he's mentioned in literary histories, his own work might receive about the same attention as the friendship and encouragement he bestowed on some of the leading figures of the next generation--he was a mentor of kinds to Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, others.

I remember that "I Want to Know Why" made an especially strong impression on me, though reading it again now I find its merits offset to a degree by something like melodrama, or sentimentality.  It's a story about a teen-aged boy from Kentucky and horse racing.  The boy, in whose voice the story is told, loves the horses, and skips town with friends to see the races at Saratoga.  Though the story isn't long, and the description of the journey not emphasized, the details that are sketched in appear to be a version of Huck Finn, the trip being accomplished by jumping box cars and nights spent sleeping in hay lofts.  There is also the boy narrator's vernacular, which is reminiscent of Huck's and includes some intentionally offhanded-seeming racial commentary of satiric import:  for example, the good, responsible whites will always turn in runaway boys, and are thus to be avoided, whereas "niggers" will give them food and show them where to sleep.  When you're young and white and breaking the rules, you find yourself suddenly among Negroes, and it's a relief.

The contradictory aspects of "the sport of kings" must be what attracted Anderson to it as a subject for this story about a boy's disillusionment.  On the one hand, there are the horses themselves, unusual but majestic animals, and the exciting spectacle of the races as well as the bucolic life around the track and stables.  And, on the other hand, the stain of gambling and corruption.  Through the first part of the story Anderson, in the voice of the boy, develops the former idea almost into a mystical religion of horse racing.  The track rituals take on the aura of religious sacraments.  The boy's devotion permits him to surpass the status of a mere novitiate, and the ache he feels when contemplating the very best horses would permit him to make a lot of money if he cared to place bets.  But of course he isn't interested in that.  The conclusion of this theme occurs in the moments before the big race at the Saratoga track.  There are two favorite horses, both from farms near the boy's home, which was partly the motivation for the trip.  Before the race, the horses get saddled on a wide, open lawn, and the boy goes to have a look.  One of the favorites did not appear to be "such a much standing in a paddock."  But the other favorite, Sunstreak, inspires in him the achy feeling that comes over him when in the presence of a superior creature.  The boy describes his own rapture, tears come to his eyes, and, significantly, he locks eyes with the horse's trainer, who also has a shine in his eye.  Of course Sunstreak wins the race.  The other boys are all excited but the narrator, knowing what will happen, watches calmly.  After the race, he "cuts out" from his companions in order to be alone.   He wants to seek out that trainer, be near him somehow, because of the attachment he feels.  Both understand the same deep thing.

He sees the trainer get in a car with some other men and drive down a road that skirts the shrine of the Saratoga race track.  He walks down the road a piece just because it's the road the car had gone on.  He comes to a side road, by a "rummy-looking farmhouse," and sits down.  Sure enough, the car comes back and turns into the side road.  The men, who are drunk, get out of the car and enter the farmhouse.  The boy approaches the exterior and, standing on some bushes, looks in an open window.  Of course it's a brothel.  He sees the object of his veneration sitting on the lap of the prettiest woman there, who nevertheless looks a little like the horse that wasn't at the paddock "such a much," "but not clean like him," and "with a hard ugly mouth."  The man brags about having trained the horse that won the big race that day, and gives the woman the same shiny-eyed look the boy had observed at the paddock just before the race, when it was directed at Sunstreak.  The boy never mentions this incident to his friends or, once home, his family.  He resumes his normal life, which includes hanging around horses, and the story concludes:

But things are different.  At the tracks the air don't taste as good or smell as good.  It's because a man like Jerry Tillford, who knows what he does, could see a horse like Sunstreak run, and kiss a woman like that the same day.  I can't make him out.  Darn him, what did he want to do like that for?  I keep thinking about it and it spoils looking at horses and smelling things and hearing niggers laugh and everything.  Sometimes I'm so mad about it I want to fight someone.  It gives me the fantods.  What did he do it for.  I want to know why.

If the story isn't over the top, it comes close enough so that I feel like I notice the effect it's going for rather than feel that effect myself.  Although forty or so years ago it had on me the intended effect.  I mentioned that Anderson was a kind of mentor to Hemingway, whose story "My Old Man" appears modeled on "I Want to Know Why."  I think the Hemingway story is under appreciated--perhaps because he wrote so many others that are equally good and more "representative" in the respect that the author speaks in his own inimitable voice rather than that of a boy narrator.  Anyway, it's interesting that the younger man, while following Anderson so closely in theme and subject matter that one may almost feel "My Old Man" is in tribute to "I Want to Know Why," nevertheless scrubs from his story, to desolating effect, anything and everything that has about it any whiff of being over cooked.  Both stories can be read online.  "I Want to Know Why."  "My Old Man."

American stories: Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"

Because the author, Ernest Hemingway, was born on this date, July 21, in 1899, at Oak Park, Illinois. He shares a birthday with the poet Hart Crane.

"Hills Like White Elephants" was one of the stories in the collection called Men Without Women, published in 1927.  There are two characters (not counting the woman who serves them drinks), identified only as "[t]he American and the girl with him," although the man later calls the woman "Jig."  So, a man with a woman, but all is not well.

Most of the words in the story are the dialog between these two people as they have a couple of drinks at a train station in Spain, somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid.  But there are two paragraphs devoted to describing the landscape.  The first opens the story:

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white.  On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.  Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep the flies out.  The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building.  It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes.  It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

This speaks of desolation, dirt, barren heat, a certain cheapness with flies.  It's "on this side," the other side being left for the moment undescribed.  The two talk for about three pages--the whole story is about five pages--and then the girl, Jig, unhappy with the conversation, gets up from the table and takes a short walk to where she can see across to the other side:

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station.  Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro.  Far away, beyond the river, were mountains.  The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

The opposite: life, fecundity, beauty. She feels the difference but "the American" is oblivious.  What have they been talking about?  She's pregnant, and he wants her to have an abortion.  Her feelings are complex, which distinguishes them from his.  Here is a portion of the talk at the station along the Ebro:

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said.  "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.  

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig.  It's really not anything.  It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything.

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time.  They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."

"Then what will we do afterward?"

"We'll be fine afterward.  Just like we were before."

"What makes you think so?"

"That's the only thing that bothers us.  It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."

It's the only thing that's made him unhappy.  Her dissatisfaction, we are made to feel, is in contrast thoroughgoing.  An abortion isn't a solution for her unhappiness.  "That's what we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks," she had asked a moment before, describing their rootless and hedonistic life in the moment of her revulsion from it.  And he replies, "I guess so."  

The story concludes: 

He picked up two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks.  He looked up the tracks but could not see the train.  Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking.  He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people.  They were all waiting reasonably for the train.  He went out through the bead curtain.  She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.  

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"I feel fine," she said.  "There's nothing wrong with me.  I feel fine."

I have emphasized the verbs "drank" and "looked" because I suspect Hemingway means us to connect them to--regard them as corroboration of--Jig's bitter summary of her life with "the American," traveling around looking at things and trying new drinks.  The word that stands out, however, is the adverb reasonably.  Hemingway spurns modifiers, and when his characters lean on them in dialog it's generally a sign of the author's moral disapproval.  If you strike the adverbs--sop up the oily come-on-- from the American's pitch to Jig, what's left is his reasonable self-seeking.  Everyone can understand him.  It's harder to say what ails Jig.  In one of her letters, the uncompromisingly devout Flannery O'Connor told a friend that Hemingway's best fictions are charged with an aching longing for what she called "Catholic fullness of life."  I think that's her way of describing why it's ridiculous for the American to have supposed that, while he drank an Anis at the bar, Jig got better and now "feels fine."  The dead fall of her false cheer is the last bit of desolation in this withering and despairing story.

 

American stories: J.F. Powers's "The Valiant Woman"

Within the pages of Dr Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare lives a phrase that has stuck in my head since I first dutifully read it, during college days.  From familiarity with the dramas of Shakespeare, says Johnson, "a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world."  It's the highest praise, this idea that Shakespeare had mastered the whole human scene and that his treatment of every inch of bandwidth leaves the indelible impression that there is nothing more to be said on this topic, and that one, and this one, until in the end what's captured is all the world's transactions.  

One is tempted to say that the fiction of J.F. Powers raises the question of whether you can work it in reverse, for the subjects of his two novels (Morte D'Urban and Wheat that Springeth Green), and all his best short stories, are Roman Catholic clergymen--priests, a variety of hermit.  The hermits are to read Shakespeare to learn about the transactions of the world, but what if it's the hermits who interest you?  They have their own transactions, presumably.  As a kid growing up with lots of Catholic friends, I was pretty interested in their exotic customs, how they had their own schools and told what must have been tall tales about the nuns, and then this horrible necessity of "going to confession."  I'd listen, rapt, as they casually explained how in that booth they'd fess up to having fought with their siblings, or cursed, or entertained "impure thoughts."  I began to be interested, too, in the bachelors who listened to this stuff.  What a crazy life!  And you can't read about it in the works of Shakespeare.

We do however have Powers, who for years lived in central Minnesota, teaching English at St. John's University and producing five books, one per decade starting with the story collection Prince of Darkness in the '40s and concluding with Wheat that Springeth Green in the '80s.  He died, age 81, at Collegeville, Minnesota, in 1999.  One of the stories in Prince of Darkness is called "The Valiant Woman," winner of the O. Henry Award for 1947.  When I first read it, I remember noticing the fleeting allusion to the Minnesota setting.  Two priests are talking.  One says to the other, by way of accounting for how a priest of their mutual acquaintance had managed to retain an efficient Filipino housekeeper, "Fish is pretty close to Minneapolis."  Rereading it now, I am reminded that the story takes place on the evening of the 59th birthday of Father John Firman, the priest who'd like to acquire a good housekeeper himself.  But probably it's not possible in the backwater parish he serves, which, one surmises, might be up or past Collegeville way.  I remembered that it was his birthday but, being 59 myself, was on this reading struck by Fr. Firman's age.

So: a priest, 59, in need of a housekeeper.  The first part of the story shows pretty clearly why he needs one.  The one he has, Mrs. Stoner, is a terrible shrew who is domineering and repulsive in a ratty sort of way.  Her stupidity, which is on display at the birthday dinner which opens the story, has not prevented her from manipulating Fr. Firman to her own advantage.  By alluding to rats, I mean to suggest that the reader may feel a certain grudging admiration for the guile with which a low specimen of humanity has successfully pursued her self-interest; if so, we're at the end of positive things that might be said about her (and rats).  The whole situation is comic, a henpecked priest.  One might have guessed that at least the celibacy requirement would spare a man from this fate.

The humor of the exposition relies heavily on Mrs. Stoner, a kind of stock character, unless she transcends that category and attains the status of a cartoon.  Here's a flavor of her conversation.  She's passionate on the subject of famous converts to Catholicism.  Fr. Nulty is Fr. Firman's birthday dinner guest.

Mrs. Stoner served up another: "Did you read about this communist convert, Father?"

"He's been in the Church before," Father Nulty said, "and so it's not a conversion, Mrs. Stoner."

"No?  Well, I already got him down on my list of Monsignor's converts."

"It's better than a conversion, Mrs Stoner, for there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of . . . uh, he that was lost, Mrs. Stoner, is found."

"And that congresswoman, Father?"

"Yes, a convert--she."

"And Henry Ford's grandson, Father.  I got him down."

"Yes, to be sure."

Father Firman yawned, this time audibly, and held his jaw.

"But he's only one by marriage, Father," Mrs. Stoner said.  "I always say you got to watch those kind."

"Indeed you do, but a convert nonetheless, Mrs. Stoner.  Remember, Cardinal Newman himself was one."

Mrs. Stoner was unimpressed.  "I see where Henry Ford's making steering wheels out of soybeans, Father."

"I didn't see that."

"I read it in the Reader's Digest or some place."

A lot of ground covered, from Henry Ford to Cardinal Newman to the Reader's Digest, but perhaps Mrs. Stoner is sufficiently absurd to make one overlook Fr. Nulty's failed attempt to quote Scripture.  Powers's priests often suffer from either a surplus of worldliness or a surplus of mediocrity, and Nulty and Firman fall less ambiguously into the second category.  The satire aimed their way, more gentle than what Mrs. Stoner gets clubbed with, is suffused with something like pathos.  Fr. Firman, 59 years old, presumably toward the end of his career as an active priest, and he can't solve his housekeeper problem?  The adjective for that is ineffectual.  I think perhaps the reader is supposed to speculate that a lack of ability may account for him being stuck in a backwater parish at the back end of his career.  Fr. Fish, who's "pretty close to Minneapolis," solved his problem.

The effect of the story owes something, I believe, to a certain undercutting action.  When I was curious about the lives of priests, I didn't imagine them being consumed by housekeeper troubles.  It's worth noting what isn't on Fr. Firman's mind, so far as we can tell--or Fr. Nulty's, either: their preaching, their teaching, the troubles of their parishioners, a recent pastoral call, any theological question or dispute.  I'm not one whose measurements can be trusted on this subject, but I think that, notwithstanding many scandals, laypeople may still cling to an exalted, heroic conception of priests.   Instead, at the conclusion of "The Valiant Woman" Fr. Firman is stumbling around his room, lunging ineffectually at a mosquito, knocking over statuary, inviting some more inane commentary from Mrs. Stoner.  The rectory's transactions. 

American stories: John Updike's "Separating"

 

Of the serial creations of John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom is easily the best known, and the Nobel laureate Henry Bech must hold the second position.  I, however, am partial to Richard and Joan Maple, characters to whom Updike returned again and again in short stories written over the course of around twenty years, starting in the mid-50s.  Eventually these fictions, sometimes called "the Maples stories," were collected in a volume called Too Far to Go, which was published in 1979.  The title refers to the far shore of marriage--the death of a spouse, when the wedded partners necessarily part.  The Maples didn't make it.  They, and their marriage and world, are the subject of eighteen stories. "Separating," the fourteenth, was first published in the June 23, 1975 issue of The New Yorker.

The story may have been finished before that and held back till solstice time, for it commences:

The day was fair.  Brilliant.  All that June the weather had mocked the Maples' internal misery with solid sunlight--golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only strain in Nature.

The narrator is of the third person variety and has it seems special access to Richard's consciousness.  A paragraph later:

In his sealed heart he hoped the day would never come.  

Now it was here.  A Friday.

The "it" is the day to tell the kids, of whom there are four.  The story's most impressive achievement may be the evocation of Richard's dread, which almost cannot allow that the children will get the news on a bright June Friday, the oppressive burden of the task being better fitted to some parallel time when there aren't seasons or named days.  The story indicates that the Maples have been waiting for "the perfect time."  The main obstacle is the oldest, Judith, who has to get home from a school term in England.  And you can't just drop this news on her soon as she's back.  She has to get acclimated.  Without directly saying so, the story makes you understand that Richard is thankful, or temporarily relieved, that this seems wise, since it puts off the day he dreads.  But now Judith is acclimated.

The plan was to inform each kid individually.  Richard had assumed there would be a general announcement, but Joan thought each kid deserved their own conversation.  In a kind of paradox, the partner who seeks the divorce, Richard, is also the one who takes it hardest.  Joan is comparatively prim, efficient, and reasonable.  Her cool ease registers almost unconsciously on Richard and adds to the reader's consciousness of his misery.  It wasn't her idea to break up the family!  I had the thought that Joan may have advocated for separate conversations in order to inflict four times the pain on Richard, who, in the afternoon of the evening when the bad news is to be unveiled, distracts himself by working assiduously, and a little clumsily, on a household repair.  It is something like Updike's calling card that the details of this repair are more thoroughly described than they would be by almost any other practitioner, but there is also here a dual purpose: Richard's immersion in the task is part of how his acute discomfort at the prospect before him is communicated.  It's very hard for him.  He has to distract himself.

In the event, it's too hard for him: he fouls the plan, which had been to tell Judith first after separating her from a brother and sister at the conclusion of a family dinner of lobster and champagne meant to celebrate her return home.  But Richard breaks down and cries before the dinner can end.  The big revelation scene Updike renders:

Between them, Margaret, no longer called Bean, thirteen and large for her age, gazed from the other side of his pane of tears as if into a shopwindow at something she coveted--at her father, a crystalline heap of splinters and memories. It was not she, however, but John who, in the kitchen, as they cleared the plates and carapaces away, asked Joan the question: Why is daddy crying?

Richard heard the question but not the murmured answer.  Then he heard Bean cry, 'Oh, no--oh!'--the faintly dramatized exclamation of one who had long expected it.  

John returned to the table carrying a bowl of salad.  He nodded tersely at his father and his lips shaped the conspiratorial words 'She told.'

So, not according to plan, and all a little off key.  Joan covers for Richard by reciting--"levelly," "sensibly"--the prepared remarks:  Mom and dad agree ... a trial separation for the summer ... need space and time to think ... don't make each other happy enough.  The desired effect, I believe, is of words that sounded right in the study falling flat on actual delivery--anyway, that's how it works on me.  Judith, trying too hard to copy her mother's tone, says she thinks it's silly, they "should either live together or get divorced."  John is put off by his younger sister Bean having suspected what was coming and loudly insists that they should have been told that mom and dad weren't getting along.  Instead of risking the wrong authentic response, the children fall into a sophistication contest.  John, his parents realize, is a little drunk on the champagne, and he and Richard go for a walk on their property and have a conversation to which the narrator at one point attaches the adverb "stiltedly."  When the memorized  inadequate words are used, the unmemorized inadequate words are left.  At least it's done, the dreaded task for better or worse accomplished.

But it's not.  The Maples' fourth child, the eldest boy, "closest to [Richard's] conscience," is at a rock concert, and the plan was always for his father to pick him up in the wee hours at the train station and tell him on the drive home.  So Richard's ordeal continues.  The narration is infused with by now familiar undercurrents.  The train is due at 1:14, so Richard sets the alarm for 1:00.  While Joan sleeps soundly beside him, his mind churns.  At one, he gets up, dresses, goes downstairs, turns off lights that, on account of the evening's consternation, had been left on.  The car engine starts.  We're told he hoped it would not.  On the short drive, he sees happy revellers pouring out of a bar.  He arrives at the train station a little early and hopes that the train will be late, but it rolls in right on time.  He sees his son disembark.  On the bright side, two of his friends get in the car with him.  Dropping them off at their houses will supply a brief reprieve.  He really doesn't want to drink of this cup.

Updike's handling of the close is restrained and the effect, heartbreaking.  Stunned by the news, the boy, Dickie, repeats questions.  He woodenly declines his father's bland offers of kindness, such as calling in sick for him the next day.  At the house, he walks directly to his room.  Richard thinks maybe the door will slam, but he hears it quietly click shut.  Later, he enters the room to comfort the boy, and the story ends:

Richard bent to kiss an averted face but his son, sinewy, turned and with wet cheeks embraced him and gave him a kiss, on the lips, passionate as a woman's.  In his father's ear he moaned one word, the crucial, intelligent word: Why?

Why.  It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness.  The waiting white face was gone, the darkness was featureless.  Richard had forgotten why. 

Though some sophisticates seem to regard it as irrelevant and a breach of etiquette even to mention it, Updike and his first wife had four children, like the Maples two boys and two girls, lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the topography of which seems consistent with what we learn of the Maples' property, and, also like the Maples, were divorced in the 1970s.  In "At War With My Skin," an autobiographical essay, Updike, afflicted since youth with psoriasis, describes how he suffered a flare up at the time of his divorce--"my face broke out, my shoulders and neck became so encrusted I couldn't turn my head without pain."

 

 

American stories: Thom Jones's "The Pugilist at Rest"

A famous author--Hemingway?--prescribed, as a remedy for writer's block, the exercise of writing one simple sentence,  declarative and true.  I have no idea how "The Pugilist at Rest" came to be written, but, from the first time I read it, I've liked to imagine Thom Jones at an impasse and, taking Hemingway's advice (if it was Hemingway), composing the sentence

Judging a prizefight is a very subjective thing.  

This sentence occurs in the story at the end of a description of a boxing bout between a couple of marines at a marine corps boxing "smoker."  The contestants are the narrator, a skilled boxer and former middleweight champion of the 1st Marine Division, now a smoker and "borderline alcoholic," and another marine with a reputation such that no one will agree to fight him.  The narrator is a decorated Vietnam combat veteran suffering a long slide and the story indicates he wants to prove to himself and his buddies that he isn't finished yet.  At the start of the fight, he is tagged by innumerable heavy blows, but, after getting knocked down once, he gets back on his feet and begins a rearguard campaign of counterpunching.  His opponent continues to crowd him, occasionally landing another ferocious punch, but now he's a little arm weary, and in the middle rounds the fight tilts toward the narrator, who keeps landing solid left jabs--more than 400 of them, he suspects.  Nevertheless, he occasionally gets trapped on the ropes, where the stronger, fitter man pummels him.  This continues until by the end of the fight both men are too exhausted and brutalized to hurt one another any further.  The referee declares the narrator the winner, but he doesn't think it means much.  Judging a prizefight is a very subjective thing.

The narrator is not the stereotypical jarhead boxer.  He alludes to Homer, the ancient Greek philosophers, St. Paul, Dostoevski, and the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.  The description of his match against the other marine is preceded by an extended meditation on a work of art from antiquity, "The Boxer at Rest" (shown above).  The narrator speculates that the unknown sculptor had in mind Theogenes, a renowned Greek athlete, and explains that what was then known as boxing was not governed by "the kindergarten Queensbury Rules" of today.  Instead, the fighters were strapped to large stones, to immobilize them, and placed practically nose to nose.  At a signal, the fight would start, and it ended when the loser was dead.  It is said that Theogenes won more than 1400 such bouts.  The narrator observes, in what he would put forward as another simple and true sentence: Then, as now, violence, suffering, and the cheapness of life were the rule.

Since the meditation on the statue precedes the boxing match, it might be said that it functions as a thesis: here is a proposition (that violence, suffering, and the cheapness of life are the rule, as suggested by the statue), and here is the proof (the vicious boxing match that is then described).  But it could as well be said that the significance of the statue is explanatory, inasmuch as it tends to illuminate the narrator's earlier career in the marines.  He had been a semper fi marine.  Gung-ho.  Believed in all the patriotic and soldierly ideals inculcated in basic training.  He could have had a desk job, but he turned it down, insisting instead that he be assigned to an infantry unit, and then, under the influence of a charismatic and admired peer, he trained to be a "recon marine," which meant learning to parachute out of airplanes so that you could drop down behind enemy lines to execute dangerous reconnaissance missions.  The part of the story preceding the meditation on the statue is highlighted by the narrator's account of his first recon mission, which, in its lavish and harrowing detail, is the counterpart of the similarly arresting narration of the boxing bout. 

The narrator's unit is dropped into a northern province of South Vietnam, near the demilitarized zone.  The mission is "no big deal," the main purpose being acclimation.  But on the morning after the drop, the narrator's team gets ambushed in an open field.  When the firefight begins, the narrator is investigating a possible NVA tunnel on the edge of the field, so he is separated from the other marines.  Incoming mortar shells kick up loose earth which clogs his rifle, rendering it inoperable.  These circumstances contribute to his survival as he is during the fight either not noticed or forgotten by the North Vietnamese soldiers.  He can only watch, and what he sees might be called unspeakable, though he describes it with almost clinical precision.  The narrator is in particular affected by the death of his charismatic friend and that of another marine who, on the day he's killed in this firefight, was less than two weeks shy of completing his tour of duty.  The narrator's ideals are routed by rage and grief.  It seems clear that what I called above his "long slide" began on the day of that firefight, his third in country.  

It's tempting to say that "The Pugilist at Rest" seeks to persuade the reader of the lesson of the statue--that "then, as now, violence, suffering, and the cheapness of life were the rule."  Yet his description of the statue suggests an ideal that one might place against this harsh fact.  The figure of the seated boxer stirs the narrator because he detects in it the artist's conception of what a person might aspire to in even a hellish life: dignified resignation, endurance, excellence in the performance of necessary tasks.  The real pathos of the story derives from the chasm between this ideal and what actually happens to the narrator.  He got hit in the head too many times and the long slide accelerates.  He's afflicted with headaches, seizures, depression, and the effects of countless and powerful prescription drugs.  Out of desperation, he considers submitting to brain surgery.  He rarely leaves his house.  A VA nurse delivers a couple of terriers who are trained to watch people like him as they sleep, and to rescue them in the event that they have a seizure in bed, which would put them at risk of being smothered in the bedding. And then this pyrotechnic story ends with a desolating dead fall:

If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow--maybe stay at my sister's place.  If they send me to the nuthouse I lose the dogs for sure.  

"The Pugilist at Rest" may be read online at lithub, here.  The author's NYT obituary, published on October 18, 2016, makes plain that the story is to a considerable degree autobiographical. 

American stories: John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio"

"The Enormous Radio" was first published in the May 17, 1947 issue of The New Yorker.  It begins:

Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins.  They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester.

Sutton Place, for those who have not watched "Million Dollar Listing" on the Bravo Network, and so are uninformed about the New York City real estate market, is a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side (East 50s), where nowadays a one-bedroom condo offered at a low seven-figure price would cause the cognoscenti to wonder what was wrong with it: definitely no view across the East River.  But note that Cheever says that the Westcotts lived near Sutton Place.  Westchester County, to which they aspire, lies in the Hudson River valley just north of the city and is home to some of the most affluent suburbs in the country.  Something about the way this opening is handled, the snide or nearly snide statistical precision, or over precision, indicates the author's reservations.  That the Westcotts hoped someday to live in Westchester suggests they had no loftier goal than moving up the real estate chain and that John Cheever perhaps would recommend another way of life.

So is the story going to be a satiric take-down of the Westcotts?  The sentence following upon the statistical abstract of their lives is a physical description of Irene, "a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written."  Regarding her husband, Jim:

He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve.

Yes, it's going to be, already is, a satiric take-down.  The next detail, however, concerns the Westcotts' love  of "serious music": they attend a lot of concerts, and at home spend time listening to music on the radio.  When their radio breaks, Jim buys Irene a new one, enormous, contained within an ugly gumwood cabinet, and the documentary realism of the opening is jettisoned.  For this enormous radio, when turned on, picks up, in interludes between Mozart quintets and the "Ode to Joy" and Chopin preludes, conversations and goings-on in the other units of their apartment house, which include:

"For Christ's sake, Kathy," he said, "do you always have to play the piano when I get home?"  The music stopped abruptly.  "It's the only chance I have," a woman said.  "I'm at the office all day."  "So am I," the man said.  He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door.  

Instructions to a maid before the cocktail guests arrive: "Don't give the best scotch to anyone who hasn't white hair," the hostess said.  "See if you can get rid of that liver paste before you pass those hot things, and could you lend me five dollars?  I want to tip the elevator man."

"I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning," a woman said.  "It must have fallen out of that bracelet Mrs Dunston was wearing last night."  "We'll sell it," a man said.  "Take it down to the jeweler on Madison Avenue and sell it.  Mrs Dunston won't know the difference, and we could use a couple of hundred bucks."

Now and again the radio picks up the cooing, English-accented voice of a neighbor's nanny calming a baby with nonsense verse, the candle flame of goodness in a naughty world--and supplying also an ironic commentary on some of the other overheard bits, such as the plan to sell Mrs Dunston's diamond to the jeweler: "'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,'" the Sweeney's nurse sang.  "'Halfpence and farthings, say the bells of St Martin's.  When will you pay me? say the bells at old Bailey . . .'"

Sex and money, the Sweeney's nurse, money and sex and debauchery, the Sweeney's nurse: a fugue, with the defining contrapuntal themes, played on the enormous radio.  At first, the Westcotts are amused and go to bed laughing, but the new knowledge begins to weigh on Irene.  Something is finally being written on her wide, fine forehead.  Home during the days with this radio, she hears more and more, and begins to feel discouraged and obsessed.  One night, in the wee hours, her son calls for a glass of water:

All the lights in the neighborhood were extinguished, and from the boy's window she could see the empty street.  She went into the living room and tried the radio.  There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke.  "Are you all right, darling?" he asked.  "Yes," a woman said wearily.  "Yes, I'm all right, I guess," and then she added with great feeling, "But, you know, Charlie, I don't feel like myself any more.  Sometimes there are about fifteen or twenty minutes in the week when I feel like myself.  I don't like to go to another doctor, because the doctor bills are so awful already, but I just don't feel like myself, Charlie.  I just never feel like myself."  They were not young, Irene thought.  She guessed from the timbre of their voices that they were middle-aged.  The restrained melancholy of the dialogue and the draft from the bedroom window made her shiver, and she went back to bed.

In the concluding scene, the Westcotts are themselves unmasked, more profoundly than we probably expected.  Jim comes home from work more tired than usual and, already feeling irritable, is shoved across a line by Irene's new sensitivity.  He complains about her spending--"fur coats and radios and slipcovers." He confesses, probably for the first time, his disappointment with his career and his worries about money, the kinds of things he thinks about.  She pleads with him to stop, the neighbors will hear, but he hurdles on over this objection and demands to know why she has suddenly become "so Christly," a real "convent girl," and he proceeds to throw into Irene's face some incidents from her past that only an intimate would know--chicanery and theft connected with the probating of her mother's will, indifference to a friend in need, an abortion.  Then the coda:

Irene stood for a minute before the hideous cabinet, disgraced and sickened, but she held her hand on the switch before she extinguished the music and the voices, hoping  that the instrument might speak to her kindly, that she might hear the Sweeney's nurse. Jim continued to shout at her from the door.  The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal.  "An early morning railroad disaster in Tokyo," the loudspeaker said, "killed twenty-nine people.  A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns.  The temperature is forty-seven.  The humidity is eighty-nine."

We might have been expecting to be pleased to witness the humiliation of some Upper East Side deplorables and instead we get world-sorrow washing over the whole earth and a muffled call, in the action of some nuns and the songs of the Sweeney's nurse, for forbearance and love.   Merry Christmas from John Cheever!

American stories: Flannery O'Connor's "Parker's Back"

I wrote here about Flannery O'Connor and the notebook of prayers she kept while a student in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa.  She was a Catholic from the deep South, a close observer of the fundamentalist Protestants who surrounded her, and the kick-ass effect of some of her stories comes, I think, from the way in which, either gradually or suddenly, you comprehend that the joke isn't on who you thought the joke was going to be on.  John Updike, having quoted a few passages from the work of another author (Anne Tyler), remarked, "This is O'Connor cartooning without the cruelty, without the pinpoint tunnel to Jesus at the end of all perspectives."  Cruelty, cartoons, fanaticism--Updike captured, in one sentence meant to describe Anne Tyler, an awful lot of Flannery O'Connor.  

In a letter to a friend dated January 21, 1961, she expressed dissatisfaction with a story she was working on called "Parker's Back": 

It is too funny to be as serious as it ought.  I have a lot of trouble with getting the right tone.

She seems to have discarded it and then taken it back up in 1964--the year of her death, in August, at age 39, from lupus, with which she had been stricken in her mid-20s.  She was a semi-invalid for most of her adult life, and was dying when she returned to "Parker's Back," but the humor that she was seeking to blend with her serious purpose remains in the finished story.  It begins with an absurd courtship of a homely fundamentalist by the title character, O.E. Parker, a type of southern drifter and ne'er-do-well.  Without understanding his own motives for courting her, he seeks to arouse her jealousy by describing his employer:

He had told her that the woman was a hefty young blonde; in fact she was nearly seventy years old and too dried up to have an interest in anything except getting as much work out of him as she could.  Not that an old woman didn't sometimes get an interest in a young man, particularly if he was as attractive as Parker felt he was, but this old woman looked at him the same way she looked at her old tractor--as if she had to put up with it because it was all she had.

Another of his methods is to show her his body, all festooned with tattoos.  He suggests slyly that the best ones are where she can't see but she isn't impressed.  Actually, he isn't either.  In a virtuoso sequence, the back story of his life is related by way of the history of his attraction to tattoos.  He quit school at sixteen, went to a trade school, quit that in favor of a job at a garage that allowed him to pay for more tattoos, and then joined the navy after his mother failed to get him interested in religion.  Of course he got a lot more tattoos in the navy:

He had stopped having lifeless ones like anchors and crossed rifles.  He had a tiger and a panther on each shoulder, a cobra coiled about a torch on his chest, hawks on his thighs, Elizabeth II and Philip over where his stomach and liver were respectively.  He did not care much what the subject was so long as it was colorful; on his abdomen he had a few obscenities but only because that seemed the proper place for them.  Parker would be satisfied with each tattoo about a month, then something about it that had attracted him would wear off.  Whenever a decent-sized mirror was available, he would get in front of it and study his overall look.  The effect was not of one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched.  A huge dissatisfaction would come over him . . . .

It's around about in here that the quite funny "cartooning" merges into something else suggested by "haphazard," "botched," and "huge dissatisfaction."  It seems the hardscrabble loser O.E. Parker has in him something of the spiritual quester and that this accounts in some mysterious way for the attraction to tattoos and the plain fundamentalist woman whom he first courted and then married without knowing why.  By this time in his life, the only blank canvas on his body is his back. He hadn't wanted any tattoos where he couldn't himself very easily see them, but now he becomes obsessed with filling up his last open body space with a work of tattoo art that Sarah Ruth--that's her name--won't be able to resist.  It turns out that the title is a bit of a double entendre, since the obvious meaning refers to the back of Parker, the last empty space, whereas the more significant reading of "Parker is back" suggests that this story may be meant as a kind of religious parable of returning.  Toward the end, Parker enters his favorite tattoo parlor and demands to see the book "with all the pictures of God in it."  Then:

"Father, Son, or Spirit?"

"Just God," Parker said impatiently.  "Christ.  I don't care.  Just so it's God."

The artist returned with a book.  He moved some papers off another table and put the book down on it and told Parker to sit down and see what he liked.  "The up-t-date ones are in the back," he said.

On this recommendation, Parker begins at the end, where he finds reassuring pictures of a friendly Jesus--the good shepherd, "forbid them not," the physician's friend, and so on.  He thumbs backward toward the front of the book, back in time, to the less "up-t-date" specimens.  As he progresses, the artistic renderings of Jesus become more and more austere, less reassuring.  He passes one toward the front, hears a voice telling him to GO BACK--a bit more playfulness with the title, perhaps--and finds himself contemplating "the haloed head of a flat, stern, Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."  This is the one he chooses.  If there is the under tone of a sneer in that reference to the up-t-date ones being at the back, it's the author's contempt for what has become of Christianity.

Notwithstanding his dim comprehension, the tattoo artist, over the course of two days, diligently reproduces the Byzantine Christ on Parker's back, and he must have done a good job judging by the effect it has on its first viewers:  on his way back to Sarah Ruth, Parker stops by a pool hall, and when his friends, after some glad-handing, lift his shirt to have a look, "Parker felt all the hands drop away instantly and his shirt fell again like a veil over the face."  When the pool-hall gang recovers, they try to make a joke of it, and a fight breaks out.  They throw Parker out into the alley and 

Then a calm descended on the pool hall as nerve shattering as if the long barnlike room were the ship from which Jonah had been cast into the sea.

This fleeting allusion to the book of Jonah, the closest thing in the Bible to a short story, may reveal quite a lot about what to make of "Parker's Back," which ends with Parker leaning against the pecan tree in his yard and crying after Sarah Ruth kicks him out of the house for having defiled himself with a graven image of God.  This seems a deliberate echoing of the conclusion to the Book of Jonah, and in retrospect the silence of the pool-hall gang when they see what's beneath Parker's shirt is the analog for the heathen sailors who, when the sea ceases raging once they throw Jonah overboard, "feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows."  Thus Jonah, against his will and without even knowing it, was a successful missionary for the God from whom he was trying to flee.  Is there a suggestion that the pool-hall gang may also have been turned in a new direction? 

The biblical book and O'Connor's story share the method of joining hilarity to religious purpose, as well as the theme of God hunting down stubborn sinners and using them to achieve his ends.  Though Jonah's unending recalcitrance, which keeps his unintentional successes on the ship and at Nineveh from being over tidy, reminds us that in "Parker's Back" the Christian fundamentalist fails to recognize her own God in the flat stern gaze of the Byzantine Christ.  Her sinning husband knew the face of God when he saw it near the front of the artist's book. 

American stories: Hemingway's "Indian Camp"

Back in 2013-14, I did a series of posts on the stories in James Joyce's Dubliners, one of my favorite books.  Here is a link to the one on "Araby," about a young boy who has an unpleasant epiphany when he goes to buy a gift for a girl he likes at a bazaar.  I enjoyed that exercise and think I will start a series like it, except that the subjects will be a continuous miscellany of stories I like by American authors.  First is going to be Hemingway's "Indian Camp."  It can be read online here, if you are interested.  It's only about 1500 words long.

"Indian Camp" was the first story in Hemingway's first collection, In Our Time, published in 1925, the year he turned 26.  Possibly it is misleading to say "collection," for the stories in the book are preceded by brief vignettes and the successive headings "Chapter I," "Chapter II," "Chapter III," etc.  So Hemingway did not think of the book as a collection of unrelated stories.  In this respect, In Our Time resembles Dubliners, which had been published in 1914--Hemingway admired it and seems to have studied it carefully.  The stories in Joyce's book are about ordinary Dubliners who keep getting a little older as the book progresses.  "Araby," for example, is the third story, and the main character is on the brink of adolescence.  In the last story, "The Dead," the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is middle-aged.  In In Our Time, we have not a succession of characters but a single character, Nick Adams, who is a little older in each story in which he appears.  (He doesn't appear in all of them.)  "Indian Camp," then, is the story for Chapter I in the first edition of In Our Time.  It's the first Nick Adams story, both with respect to the boy's age (one guesses around 10) and date of composition (1923 or 1924--the above picture is contemporaneous, as it's Hemingway's passport photo for 1923).

Here's what happens in the story: 

Nick is on a fishing trip with his father, who is a physician, and his father's brother, George.  They camp on the shore of the lake they fish.  On the other side of the lake is an Indian camp.  As the story opens, two Indians have come in row boats in the night to summon Dr Adams.  A woman at the camp has been in labor for two days, unable to deliver her baby, which is in the breech position.  Nick, his father, and uncle cross the lake in row boats with the Indians.  Here is the paragraph in which Hemingway describes their entry to the camp:

Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman.  She had been trying to have her baby for two days.  All the old women in the camp had been helping her.  The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made.  She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty.  She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt.  Her head was turned to one side.  In the upper bunk was her husband.  He had cut his foot very badly with an axe three days before.  He was smoking a pipe.  The room smelled very bad.

Unless I've miscounted, eleven sentences, 121 words, 142 syllables, and one comma.  Every word is one or two syllables but for "Indian," which occurs twice.  George and Nick are pressed into service as assistants and Dr Adams addresses successfully the medical crisis.  In the immediate aftermath, he is giddy and tells his brother that to have performed a C-section with a jack-knife and then sewed up the incision with fishing line is "one for the medical journals."  The improvised operation has been accomplished without the aid of an anaesthetic.  Before leaving, Dr Adams checks on the husband in the upper bunk.  The man lies on the edge of the bed away from the open part of the room, face to the wall.  When the doctor lifts his lamp, Nick happens to be standing right where he can see that the sagging part of the bed is full of pooling blood and that the man has with a razor slit his throat from ear to ear, nearly decapitating himself.  He evidently could not endure his wife's suffering.

Hemingway's spare narration somehow amplifies the horror of the scene.  In the muted conclusion, Nick and his father are in the row boat again, headed back across the lake.  Nick asks questions, like whether suicide is very common and whether some women do it, too, and his father answers.  The sun is just coming up, and there is a chill in the air that contrasts with the warmth of the water when Nick trails his hand in it.  In another detail, a fish jumps, forming a circle in the water.  It is as if the nightmare is receding as father and son row away from the fallen world back into Eden.  This sense seems consistent, perhaps, with the description of the original night crossing to the Indian camp, when Nick had leaned back in the boat, his father's arm around him, as the Indian rowed them through the mist on the lake.  We might say that the structure of the story is a framed narrative--the frames being the two trips across the lake by boat--and that its "point" is the effect of the inner story on the approximately 10-year-old Nick Adams.  The last sentence is:

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, [Nick] felt quite sure that he would never die.

The Indian camp experience is too awful to be assimilated and accepted.