Short Story Sunday: Forbidden Love

It’s Sunday, so it’s short story time again, and this week I’ve abandoned Persephone for Virago and I’m dipping into Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Selected Short Stories, which are every bit as wonderful as I hoped they would be. These tales, written between 1932 and 1977, are as sharply subversive as her other work led me to expect, her prose is faultless, and the humour is as dark as ever. She’s the antithesis of Angela Thirkell, and the perfect restorative for those times when you feel you’ve had a tad too much light-hearted sweetness and a surfeit of happy endings – and even I reach that point sometimes. Actually, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Angela Thirkell are so very different that I find it hard to understand how I can like both of them so very much. I guess it just proves that variety is the spice of life.

In the first story, A Love Match, we meet brother and sister Justin and Celia Tizard, both damaged by the horrors of the First World War, who find comfort and healing in an incestuous relationship. They fall into it almost by accident. Left alone when her fiancé is killed, Celia welcomes her brother home on leave, but she cannot bear to listen to his night terrors as revisits the hellish scenes of the conflict. So she goes to him, to quiet him, and comfort him, and things go on from there.

After the war they live abroad for a time, but they return to England, and are accepted by the residents of Hallowby as a ‘disabled major’ and his ‘devoted maiden sister’ who seem middle-aged long before they are. They know their relationship is wrong, but they love each other, and I think they quite enjoy having a secret life, and the thrill of constantly watching what they do and say to ensure they are not discovered.

Returning from their sober junketings, Justin and Celia, safe within their brick wall, cast off their weeds of middle age, laughed, chattered and kissed with an intensified delight in their scandalous immunity from blame. They were a model couple.

Years pass, and life continues: they make friends and involve themselves in the community. Then Celia receives a series of poison pen letters from someone who obviously knows about the couple’s illicit relationship.  The perpetrator turns out to be a young girl, who has made advances to Justin and been rejected (or so he says). He promises to ‘settle’ her, and we never know what happens, but the letters stop, and the girl is left unharmed (but bad tempered).

If anyone else has any suspicions they never mention the matter. It is death which finally exposes the brother and sister. They fall victim to a bomb which hits their house, and are discovered dead, in bed together, amid the wreckage of their home. Even then, their kindly neighbours either cannot, or do not want to, consider the truth of the situation, so they decide Justin must have gone to comfort Celia during the raid.

It’s a sad little tale and, like so many short stories, I feel there is a degree of ambivalence. Was Justin carrying on with pretty little Mary Semple? And do people realise just how close the major and his maiden sister really are, but choose to ignore it? And their death seems almost like some kind of retribution because they have broken a taboo, like something out of an ancient Greek play.

A Little Less Conversation Please!

Edward Hopper's Room in New York... And there is a link to
this week's Short Story Sunday, I promise... Just read on...

It’s Sunday again (it does seem to come round very quickly), and that means it’s time for another short story, so out of my wonderful Persephone anthology comes Here We Are, by Dorothy Parker,  which I didn’t really like.  I’d never read any of her fiction before, and I’d expected something sharper, wittier, more satiric.

Written in 1931, set in America, it features a young couple travelling by train to their honeymoon hotel. They’ve been married exactly two hours and twenty-six minutes, though to her it already seems longer, and here they are, alone together, not knowing what to say to each other.  They are obviously nervous, and slightly embarrassed, but their conversation is so strained I really do wonder if they have anything in common at all. It would seem not, for at one point Parker writes:

“I don’t know,” she said. “We used to squabble a lot when we going to together and then engaged and everything but I thought everything would be so different when you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.”

Despite their protestations that they ‘won’t fight or be nasty or anything’ they are very quarrelsome couple– especially her. They bicker about her new hat, her old admirer, bridesmaid Louise and how they should spend their wedding night... she has letters she ‘simply must’ write, while he suggests going to see a show. And even if he apologises and tries to placate her, she turns things around so he’s still in the wrong, and she seems to take everything he says the wrong way, and to twist it, reading more into it, and making it mean something he never intended.

Somehow I feel their future as husband and wife is going to be terribly bleak and empty, and that she will become even more petty-minded, spiteful and downright vindictive, punishing him because nothing will ever turn out as she hoped. And he, easy-going, will be just as dissatisfied but will do anything to please her, for the sake of a quiet life, and will never understand what it is that he has done wrong.

I would have to say I loved the opening of this tale as the nervous young man in his new blue suit spends too long arranging their ‘glistening luggage’ in the Pullman carriage – obviously putting off the moment when he and his bride must communicate in some way. In fact, not only do they never seem to connect mentally or emotionally, but there is no contact between them, for they sit opposite each other and the girl, who looks ‘as new as a peeled egg’ finds it hard to meet his eyes, and prefers to gaze out of the window. These two never touch. They are strangers, and it’s like one of those Edward Hopper paintings, where people always seem so lonely, even if they are together. I think Room in New York, painted in New York in 1932  kind of captures the feeling of separateness of this couple, who are headed for a hotel in the city.

Parker manages to create the image and atmosphere in very few words, and to place these two in their social class through the description of their cheap shiny luggage, and their cheap shiny clothes. And they’ve got a new life to match their new possessions but, sadly, it will be no better than the old. I thought this first page was so well written, and I had high hopes of what was to come, but as far as I was concerned it was all downhill after that, because it was all dialogues. Eleven-and-a-half pages of dialogue. 

You can tell I’m not keen on lots of dialogue, except in plays, of course. Personally, I blame Walter Scott, because I’ve had an aversion to conversation-dominated fiction since studying Guy Mannering at school, with all that incomprehensible, archaic Scottish dialect. It put me off Scott for life as well. Am I the only one who feels that too much dialogue in a novel or short story is a bad thing? And has anyone else been that influenced by something they read and hated when they were young? 

Dorothy Parker

Short Story Sunday

Time for Short Story Sunday again, and I will start by saying I absolutely hated this week’s offering, and had it been the first tale in The Persephone Book of Short Stories I doubt I would have read any further. Fortunately it’s story number two, and ahead of me lie Dorothy Whipple, EM Delafield, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mollie Panter-Downes and a host of other wonderful authors, so it’s onwards and upwards as Eric Robson might say, and I’m certainly not giving up. By the way, for anyone who never listens to Radio 4, Eric Robson is the presenter of Gardeners’ Question Time (one of the best things about Sunday afternoons) and that’s his catchphrase, which I always find rather comforting – almost on par with Julian of Norwich who said: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Anyway, as usual I am digressing. I hear you ask what it is that I do not like, and the answer

Katherine Mansfield

is Katherine Mansfield’s The Black Cap. She’s an author I always feel I ought to read partly, I suspect, because she was a cousin of Elizabeth von Arnim, whose books I love. Over the years I’ve picked up work by Mansfield on several occasions, and browsed through a page or two, but it’s never appealed enough to make me buy or borrow, and this story hasn’t made me change my mind. Dated 1917, it’s written as if it were a script for a series of short scenes in a play or film, and despite the fact it’s so short it’s obviously a complete work, with a very clearly defined beginning, middle and end, which is fine, because I was always taught that every good story should have these qualities, in the correct order. Of course, literary rules like this are frequently broken very successfully, but the format works OK here – it’s that scripted style I don’t like, which is odd, because I enjoy reading plays, so that can’t be the only reason I don’t like this.

And it can’t be the fact that we never get to know the characters’ names, because there are plenty of books with anonymous central characters which I read over and over again - Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ is one of my all-time favourites. Nor can the subject matter be to blame: after all, there are lots of great stories which hinge on a woman meeting her lover.

Here the twist is that the woman then abandons him – because he has lost his hat and is wearing an appalling black cap which looks absurd. From this moment it’s obvious the assignation won’t go according to plan, because the black cap is more than a fashion or lifestyle faux pas: it seems to reference the black cap worn by judges announcing the death sentence, but in this case it heralds the end of the affair. The woman decides it highlights their differences in outlook, and feels it is impossible to love a man like that because he is not her style. So she heads back home to her husband (who we last saw over breakfast), looking forward to a meal of cold fowl and orange jelly.  It shows how small, unimportant things can change perceptions and alter lives, but I disliked the lady intensely, and couldn’t feel any kind of sympathy for her. I would go so far as to say I thought she was a shallow, small-minded, self-satisfied, selfish bitch, and her lover was well out of the relationship, and I felt really sorry for her husband. But I didn’t like the two of them either. And I found the dialogue stilted.

Reading this through, none of my comments sound like a coherent critique of ‘The Black Cap’, and I suspect my attempt at an appraisal is very much an emotional response. It’s just one of those stories that didn’t gel with me, largely because I didn’t like that script format or Mansfield’s writing style. But, mad though it sounds, I might have enjoyed the same plotline written by a different author. Currently I’m trying to think who would do it justice!