A Master of French Tales

Guy de Maupassant is often referred to as the Father of the Short Story. In his career, he  became a celebrated short story writer, novelist and literary journalist. Devoted to Normandie, his home, de Maupassant wrote prolifically of French life during the  latter part of the 19th century. After civil service during the years of 1870-1871, he worked as a clerk in government but remained disciplined to his writing craft, as he integrated his experiences into realistic stories. He is known for his clear and direct narrative style.

Some of De Maupassant’s well-known stories and novels include: The Necklace, Boule de Suif, Two Friends, Bel Ami, Mademoiselle Fifi, Une Vie, Pierre et Jean and Notre Coeur. A now famous anecdote was told of De Maupassant wherein he proclaimed to a gathering at a dinner party that he could write a story about anything at all. A dinner guest then plucked up a piece of string and asked, “Well then, can you write a story about a piece of string?” Hence, De Maupassant’s short story, The Piece of String.

De Maupassant knew Gustave Flaubert from a young age and became influenced by him as a friend and as an author. Flaubert introduced the younger writer to literary circles and together, in 1880, they formed the groupe naturaliste, at which time, de Maupassant expanded his oeuvre to include travel writing, short plays and poems. In all, he wrote 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse, some of which were published posthumously.

The Heart of Elizabeth Bowen

 

Elizabeth Bowen’s sixth novel, The Death of the Heart, (1938), begins with exquisite prose describing the lake in Regents Park at the height of winter. She fills us with the beauty of London in mist, of the lake’s ‘indignant’ swans, with its gray, white coldness and sublimity, as though cold were light. From here follows dialogue that is so engaging and humorous as to fit the categories of both setting and description. Of course, the quick, witty parlance of these two Londoners, Anna and her friend, St. Quentin, propel the story along – adding more fascination. Of Bowen’s large oeuvre, including novels and short fiction, most of her settings take place in London, between the wars or during wartime.

Anna and Thomas Quayne live across from Regents Park in a posh home called Windsor Terrace.  He is an advertising executive and she has an inheritance of her own. They are  wealthy yet incomplete. They have these droll conversations with each other when they’re alone;

            Anna:  “Darling, don’t be neurotic. I have had such a day.”

          Thomas:  “We are minor in everything but our passions.”

         Anna:  “Wherever did you read that?”

        Thomas:  “Nowhere: I woke up and heard myself saying it, one night.”

        Anna:  “How pompous you were in the night. I’m so glad I was asleep”.  

But, these amusing exchanges become more acerbic after Thomas’ younger sister, Portia, moves in. She has been recently made an orphan, but the grief of a sixteen-year-old girl remains hardly recognized by the Quayne couple.

Still, Portia and Thomas have a natural sibling-bond, though they hardly know each other, and Thomas is older than Portia by nearly twenty years. That distance is enhanced by the fact that Portia’s mother was their father’s mistress. In a less guarded way, Thomas and Portia speak with familiar ease when in Thomas’ study, away from Anna. He asks Portia how her classes are coming along. She thinks history is “sad.”

“A lot of bunk and graft,” answers Thomas. He truly cares about Portia, in his way, and they both feel a specialness about each other, which is felt rather than expressed. They have their father in common.

However, Thomas’ attention trails off. He can only put in so much effort with Portia. He retreats to his own individual sorrow. As for his wife, Anna:  She forgets to pay attention. When they fall short of engaging with Portia, as if she were only an unavoidable fixture in the room, Portia’s eyes wander into the middle distance, across the room or out the window. Often, she would become absorbed with memories of her mother and their life in Europe, spent mostly in hotels where they constantly met new people while traveling. Portia may retreat to her memories; yet she is more than circumspect. She is a keen observer whether she wants to be or not. She notices every nuance and every look (or lack there-of). Hence, her quiet intuition has everyone on their guard – an unexpected annoyance that was unforeseen by Anna, having never met Portia, except when she was a baby, and so not knowing how the girl had grown into an acutely observant teenager.

Soon, Portia’s minimalist but no less potent diary plays a bona fide part in the story, secretly locked away and yet read by too many people, especially Anna. For Anna sees something of herself in Portia. Even then, it seems to never really occur to either Anna, or Thomas, amidst their elite lifestyle, that Portia is not only extremely sensitive even for a teenage girl but is also in grief

Of the handful of people that Portia meets through her brother and sister-in-law, Major Brutt is the warmest. He genuinely likes Portia. He appreciates her young curiosity and is cheered by her quite charming sociability. A generous person, who delights in delighting others, Major Brutt sends Portia large, boxed puzzles, while sending Anna flowers (that she can’t stand.) As Portia works at Major Brutt’s puzzles, the metaphor becomes poignantly clear. She asked herself humbly for what reason people said what they did not mean, and did not say what they meant. She felt most certain to find the clue when she felt the frenzy behind the clever remark.

It is when Portia falls in love that she is brought nearly to the breaking point. Eddie is a young Londoner, a rogue, a wit, handsome and irresistible. He is as much an outsider as Portia and Major Brutt, yet Eddie manages to somehow belong, in his own unique way. As an effusive character, Eddie brings out all of the dodgy secrets, namely Anna’s. One by one, we witness the surfacing of these secrets and Portia’s struggle with them. In any brilliant story, there is always at least one character who transforms; we hardly want Eddie to change, as he is the perfect villain, or half-villain, with his bizarre witticisms and his constant use of the word, “darling,” and his dark instability. He himself admits to being “wicked” – indeed, his provisionally winning personality depends upon being hopeless and self-deprecating. Yet, he nestles into Portia’s unaffected friendship and her artless love. Portia and Eddie have tea together at Madame Tussaud’s, much like Alice in Wonderland and The Mad Hatter.

In this story, Portia transforms the most dramatically. Unlike the other characters, Portia grows up. Elizabeth Bowen often made children the most interesting component of her stories, shaping their characters and lovingly weaving them into the fabric of her writing. She knew children, as she knew all human character.

At first, I was troubled by the title, The Death of the Heart, it sounded so morbid. As I read, I kept wondering whose heart would die. I feared it would be Portia’s. Actually, Portia is the only character who really has a heart, and though she experiences every variety of tragedy and heartache, she manages to make the attempt at saving everyone else from the death of all human compassion in their dull hearts.

Elizabeth Bowen might have been called the Mother of modern story-writing. Not only did she have a natural, flowing feel for dialog, she had an apparent instinct for placement and when to write a clever remark after a bit of secret history; when to fit the facial gesture of her least favorite character into some beautifully sublime scenery. In The Death of the Heart, Bowen makes writing look easy; which of course, it isn’t.

As one of her more mysterious characters, Anna’s friend, St. Quentin, says, “Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little.”

 

 

 

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“The Rich Boy,” a Short Story by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Out of his collections of short stories, The Rich Boy (1926) is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best pieces. Today the tale might be called a short novella; it has also been deemed a psychological study of the advantaged. It is the story of a young man born into wealth and how he responds to love, relationships and issues of money and status within his upper-class, Fifth Avenue inner-circle.

Fitzgerald begins by depicting rich people almost as if they are a separate race – “they are different,” the narrator explains:

“They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are… Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.”

Fitzgerald made the art of characterization seem easy. He molds his characters quickly as if with a painter’s brush, so that I feel I know them perfectly. Their gestures, body-language and thought-processes flow smoothly from the palette, yet his people are not boring stereotypes. Indeed, Fitzgerald himself had this to say about characterization:

“Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.

 

Fitzgerald was among the writers and artists of the “Jazz Age,” a term he invented himself.

 

Fitzgerald was devoted to Zelda, though they had a distressing relationship.

 

The main character in The Rich Boy, Anson Hunter, grows up having an English governess so that he and his siblings learn a certain way of speaking that resembles an English accent and is preeminent to middle and even upper-class American children. Thus, the people around him know he is superior – they know he is rich by just looking at him.

The tension of the story begins right away – with his fitful love for Paula, and an iffy engagement, tinged with the kind of alcoholism that deviously thwarts everything in sight. Anson is a man who lives in separate worlds during the glittering, glamorous, roaring 20’s, when everything seems impossibly affordable – big houses, flashy cars, Ritzy nights on the town. Yet, his stories take a turn, just as the Stock Market did at the dawn of the 1930s. Fitzgerald’s settings are bewitching. Today some of the vernacular might sound old fashioned, yet, the efficient punch of its delivery stands as a first-rate testament to the writer’s craft!

Everything about Anson creates tension. Even his wealth and his absolute capability cause apprehension. Then there is the awful hold that alcohol has on him and the maddening indecision it creates between Anson and a real commitment to Paula – or any woman. Finally, the way Anson goes about counseling all of the couples in his “circle” yet cannot maintain a lasting relationship of his own. This compulsive-will to verify himself as a moral, respectable, mature man of New York society by patching up difficulties in other marriages proves to be an irreparable flaw in Anson’s character. The conflict builds up to a sad denouement when Anson begins dutifully setting about putting an end to the illicit affair of his uncle’s wife, Edna. And when his machinations turn out badly, Anson takes no responsibility for the tragedy.

 

Ernest Hemingway wrote about his friendship with “Scott” in, A Moveable Feast, set in Paris.

 

I want to like Anson even as I realize that underneath all of his glamour and devotion to high society and tradition of family posterity, he is really suffering inside with alcoholism. This handicap, or tragic flaw, gains my sympathy. However, Anson’s ultimate indecision in regards to commitment and real love, his hyper-vigilant need to interfere in the affairs of others, begins to strike me as infuriating – and of course, this very lapse in character adds to the tension of the story.

Fitzgerald’s propensity for describing a bar-scene at the Yale Club or the Plaza Hotel became thematic to his tales and, upon further reading, takes on a recurring vignette from one tale to the next. Yet, I find myself lapping up these settings that involve stylish bars and hotels, because they are so well articulated, from the clever dialogue at the bar with a bartender or drinking-companion, to the colorful yet moody renderings, to the inevitable infatuation with glamorous women and the way these motifs affect Fitzgerald’s heroes.

I think of Hemingway’s, A Moveable Feast, throughout Fitzgerald’s short story; because, in Hemingway’s novel he describes Fitzgerald’s terrible weakness for alcohol. I also think of, The Razor’s Edge, by Somerset Maugham, perhaps because of its detached yet familial narrative style.

Fitzgerald, in a style all his own, offers shocks of unexpected sensitivity and wisdom, which seem somehow surprising. I almost worship the writer’s vocabulary and his way of forming a phrase, such as – “rapt holy intensity” when describing the lovers. Or Anson and Paula’s “emasculated humor:” I found this such an apt way of describing the initial repartee that occurs between two people who are falling in love inside their own profound, yet rather childish, bubble.

“Nevertheless, they fell in love – and on her terms. He no longer joined the twilight gathering at the De Soto bar, and whenever they were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue, which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on both sides of immature and even meaningless statements…”

 

The writer pictured in Hollywood not long before his death at the age of forty-four.

Fitzgerald was contracted to write screenplays for Hollywood at two separate stages of his career, though he contemptuously viewed it as “whoring.” The author inserts himself briefly, however lightly-concealed, into Anson’s life:

 

“…one (friend) was in Hollywood writing continuities for pictures that Anson went faithfully to see.”

Thus the interweaving of fiction and autobiography! The glamour and infamous history of the writer himself affects the impact of his tales; yet, whether a reader knows about the writer’s life or not, Fitzgerald’s works are treasures!

 

 

Christmas Stories

Everyman’s Pocket Classics

Christmas tales are meant to cheer us and to help usher in the Christmas spirit; yet, every favorite tale embodies a degree of struggle, an element of danger or some darkness that must be gotten through. There may be magic and wonder leading up to the final, satisfying denouement of Christmas morning – upon waking to find everything wished for sitting under the starry lights of the Christmas tree, but the waiting is always prolonged.
Most of the stories in the Everyman’s Pocket anthology follow this pattern distinctively, in 20 different ways. From Charles Dickens to Richard Ford the inveterate Christmas struggle is traced.

Dickens and Early Russian Writers

The anthology begins with a Dickens tale called The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton (from The Pickwick Papers). Charles Dickens was only 25 when he wrote this playful tale, and the ironic humor that we have come to love in just about every Dickens story is delightfully fresh in this selection from his first novel. It is a Christmas Eve ghost story amidst a nighttime landscape of snow and stars and a bad-tempered old grave digger named Gabriel Grubb. A bit like A Christmas Carol, Grubb is visited, in this case, by a fantastical goblin king and his goblin courtiers. They sing terrifying ghostly songs to Gabriel Grubb and, rather violently, teach him a lesson about life and his disagreeable attitude toward other people. Dickens, the eternal humanitarian, makes a case for women as being the most compassionate of the human race.

He saw that women, the tenderest and most fragile of all God’s creatures, were the oftenest superior to sorrow, adversity, and distress; and he saw that it was because they bore in their own hearts an inexhaustible well-spring of affection and devotedness.

Of the Russian writers in the anthology, Nikolai Gogol is most similar to Dickens, yet Gogol’s devils and witches of Christmas Eve are finally conquered by the, mostly benevolent, characters of a snowy village near St. Petersburg in The Night Before Christmas. This is a famous Russian fairy tale about a gifted painter and blacksmith who paints frescoes of the saints on the church walls and who is therefore most sought after by the devil. This devil, whose lover is a witch, steels the moon on Christmas Eve and tempts the best, god-loving people of the village. Another delightful, fantastical tale!
Leo Tolstoy’s Where Love Is, God Is and Anton Chekhov’s Vanka are both heart-warming stories that evoke questions of morality, spirituality and the love of God and people.

Vladimir Nabokov’s more modern narrative reflects an elegant mastery of story-telling with a unique, stream-of-consciousness style in the beautiful yet tragic story titled, Christmas.

The night was smoke-blue and moonlit; thin clouds were scattered about the sky but did not touch the delicate, icy moon. The trees, masses of gray frost, cast dark shadows on the drifts, which scintillated here and there with metallic sparks.

The three Russian writers are similar to Dickens in their sympathy toward humankind; they are quite clear about the virtues of compassion. In the modern tales, however, the narrative of compassion and human mercy is more implicit.

British Writers Apart from Dickens

When it comes to expert story-writing, leave it to the British. And when it comes to writing a great detective yarn, leave it to Arthur Conan Doyle to tell an amusing Sherlock Holmes story. The investigation in The Blue Carbuncle takes place in the bustling streets of London, in Covent Garden Market, two days after Christmas. Holmes is just as we like him: clever, articulate, circumspect, and yes – merciful.

Anthony Trollope’s whimsical Christmas at Thompson Hall mixes suspense with a smattering of cheeky humor. His name, Trollope, like his writing style, gallops or trots along and is as ever: impeccably English. And Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant Bella Fleace Gave A Party takes place in Ireland, outside Dublin in the Market town of Ballingar where a wealthy, eccentric lady decides to divert death and instead throw a party. The story is expertly written, detailed and surprisingly ironic. Elizabeth Bowen, who always wrote a flawless tale, is somewhat dated in Green Holly, yet the witty cadence makes this bizarre ghost story worth the read. And Muriel Spark whisks the reader along in Christmas Fugue. It is a romantic tale, a travel piece, in which the main character, Cynthia at twenty-four is suspended in a kind of limbo or liminal zone up high in the air on a passenger jet. Questions of belief… in Christmas, in the start of a new life, in a love affair and in reality itself are raised in an unforeseen way.

American Writers

Willa Cather, a favorite American poet and novelist, had a beautiful way of drawing in the reader and maneuvering the plot. The Burglar’s Christmas takes place on Christmas Eve in Chicago. Reminiscent of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, juxtapositions of excitement vs. safety, and poverty vs. success, drive this touching story along, together with the prevailing theme of motherhood and mother-son relationship.

John Cheever’s excellent Christmas is a Sad Time For the Poor examines the benevolence of people in a New York City high-rise apartment-building one day out of the year when these sophisticates have the chance to give. And Truman Capote’s now famous A Christmas Memory is the striking memoir about a seven-year-old boy and his elderly cousin. Capote’s style is compelling from the first sentence:

Imagine a morning in late November.

This poignant tale is a must-read at Christmastime.

John Updike’s evocative The Carol Sing takes us through a melancholy surveillance of the cycles of life, death and seasonal holidays in highly intelligent, sharply witty prose.

Strange people look ugly only for a while, until you begin to fill in those tufty monkey features with a little history and stop seeing their faces and start seeing their lives.

Grace Paley’s The Loudest Voice is about a Jewish schoolgirl, Shirley, who has the most resonant voice in a Christmas play. Her family and the Jewish families in her neighborhood struggle to accept their children being in a Christian play. Shirley, representing the only first-generation American in her family, is open-minded, curious, helpful and resoundingly confident.

Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award winner, Richard Ford depicts a divided American family mired deeply in issues. In Creche, the main character, Faith, a successful L.A. attorney, narrates the story amidst growing resentments, threats and dangers. Yet, by Christmas Eve, the snow still glistens over everything and the children are tucked away safely in their beds. Ford holds our interest and sustains a measure of hope with his buoyant prose, as when Faith goes for a solo, nighttime ski-run:

Here the snow virtually hums to her sliding strokes. A full moon rides behind filigree clouds as she strides forward in the near-darkness of crusted woods.

Canada

Nobel Prize winning, Canadian author, Alice Monro’s gamey tale is a bold and effective portrait of human nature. The Turkey Season describes the acute observations of a fourteen-year-old girl who is surrounded by small town people who tend to be decidedly small-minded and cruel. Still, Christmas appears to win in the end.

These stories represent a fine collection of esteemed writers. I have not mentioned all of the stories here, some of them are simply short and sweet, but for a good measure of the Christmas spirit and a reminder of what it is to have a sympathetic heart, all of them are worth reading.

An Engagement Waylaid

And Now For Something Completely Different: A Story Vignette of My Own.

Oliver and I descended the stairs at Market and Montgomery Streets down to the BART station underground. We wandered unfamiliar searching for the ticket machines so we could buy our tickets to Oakland for Stacie and Mark’s engagement party. As we stood at the machines with our dollar bills drooping at the ready, we were suddenly helped, (accosted rather), by two nefarious characters. The first, a young, scraggly 20-something guy who snatched our bills and explained incoherently what to buy and how to buy it as he wildly hit buttons and tapped the screen until our tickets popped out, rather miraculously. Then he pointed out that we should give him two dollars.

We were then left with one ticket of the proper amount for going to and from Oakland and one ticket that had five dollars more than we needed. Inexplicably, the second character popped up: a scraggly, 40-something, rather taciturn yet officious fellow who attempted to help us retrieve some of that extra cash on our ticket but in actuality only succeeded in giving himself two dollars. We do not say no to these people. Thus equipped, we toddled off to our train stop. Once aboard, the rather vacant train whisked us down underwater. A harrowing experience, if you are not used to it, which I never will be, as the old train screeches and scrapes its way through the decades old tunnel at the speed of light, 30-feet below the surface of the bay. At the deepest point, a nerve-crushing sound much like, perhaps, the Death Star scraping through a tight tunnel sent pulsating waves rattling to the core of my soul. I am reminded why I never take BART.

The train emerged above ground in a burst of stark, East Bay sunlight. The worst of the noise ended, and we rattled along on what now seemed rather tottery tracks, high above and over sun-blanched suburbs and empty, industrial buildings. We looked at each other with relief and promptly exchanged overly exuberant jokes in a compulsive fit of jollity. The bright sun moved across the gentrified interior, through the wide, bubbled, scratched windows and across our squinting brows, as the car wavered and turned on its tracks.

Two women sat across from us after the first stop. They could have sat anywhere in the empty compartment, as it  was Saturday and quite uncrowded, but sat across from us and ignored us, putting on their makeup as they chattered-on, their lips and eyes becoming wider and more expressive with each swathe of a pencil-like brush. When the train stopped again, the compartment doors parted with a deep swoosh. We could see through the open doors a brick wall bearing the MacArthur Street sign. “Ours is the next stop,” we agreed. And the doors remained open. We snickered to ourselves at a man who had fallen asleep with his mouth open. And the doors remained open and would not close. We laughed at this, too, in our spectacular ignorance, for this was our stop, in actuality.

However, we unwittingly got off at the wrong stop, the next one, which dropped us in East Oakland where we walked the long and winding way to Stacie and Mark’s place, through dusty neighborhoods that reeked of rancid soy-sauce and stale hamburgers, where the scant population shuffled in ratty clothes and thin-soled shoes, and where a hot wind blew a lone, crusty, fallen leaf down the sidewalk like a shrunken tumbleweed. Once, while peering at the screen of my phone, texting Stacie in the relentless sunshine, a poor soul walked up into my personal space and mumbled something I could not make out. He was too far-gone to incite fear, still, all I could think to say was “sorry,” and he wandered on his way.

Falling in Love With The Short Stories of Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is probably best know for his poems of sublime beauty set amidst the simple, beloved people who live in the seaside village of Swansea in Wales. The poems ring clear and majestic, with a rhythmic zeal. Not surprisingly, the short stories of Dylan Thomas read much like his poetry. They are exquisite tales told with the same passion and Welsh cadences that evoke a mixture of exhilaration and simplicity, delight and tragedy, not unlike the stories of James Joyce, whom Thomas loved and revered.

After the Fair draws a parallel to Joyce’s oft-emulated story from the Dubliners, Araby. Indeed, Thomas’ story seems to begin where Joyce’s Araby leaves off: at the village fair after it has closed up for the night. Instead of a boy who stands in the open isles under the night sky, the main character is a little girl who appears to have no home. Somewhat dark and mysterious, the tale carries a sublime, fantastic air, as do many of Thomas’ stories. A girl who is brave but also scared, she makes her way through the shadows cast by the wooden horses.

“Once she stepped on the boards; the bells round a horse’s throat jingled and were still; she did not dare breathe again until all was quiet and the darkness had forgotten the noise of the bells.”

The Fat Man from his humble, lighted doorstep says into the night, “Who?” “Who?,” after the girl has knocked on his window and then hides. When she hears his thin voice, she laughs. The story is quick and playful with suspense and a merciful kindness.

The sparse dialog somehow creates the impression of a great deal of communication between the girl and the Fat Man. They innocently become fast friends as they toast bread inside his tiny, mirthful hut. At the end of the story, there is the ever-present epiphany, which Joyce invented and Thomas developed in his own style.

In all of the Collected Stories, there is the feeling of lines being blurred between fantasy and reality, of dream-recollection or heightened imagination. With Brember, from Thomas’ Early Stories, the theme from Joyce’s Araby emerges in the shadows of the rooms in an old house. As if the boy in Araby had returned as a grown man to the house of that earlier story.

Shadows flickering above the man’s taper candle and the pale moonlight coming in through the windows, a sad pathos imbues the room and the man’s memories:

There were tears in his eyes, a great longing for something he had known and had forgotten, loved but had lost.

It is a ghostly story, animating inanimate things, which is part of Thomas’ poetic brilliance. Many of his stories are autobiographical: about a boy and the quirky, loveable and often complex people living in Swansea. The stories are highly crafted, blending the ghostly and the suspenseful; the humorous and the tragic; and pathos with enchantment. The tales involving a boy are comparable to Joyce’s Dubliners, they cling to the drama and innocence of childhood, the enlargement of life that Thomas sang of in so much of his poetry.

As, In the Garden, the boy loves the garden but is afraid of it at night. He imagines the dark trees talking to one another. And he hates the nighttime summer bugs that fly into the kitchen, especially, the great grey moths that blundered round the room, for he knew they were in league with the things in the garden outside.

Here, in the garden, the trees and the groping shadows take on an animated life in the boy’s imagination. His racing mind invents a fantastical world of looming darkness, mystery and treasures. The boy really feels the effects of his imaginings:

… he was more afraid than he thought he could ever be. The garden writhed about him, and the walls and the trees shot upward so that he could not see the sky. The pointed roof of the summerhouse shot up the dark like a steeple hat.

These earlier tales are often ghost stories with a sublime ending, while the stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, which are clearly dedicated to James Joyce, are most often comedies. As with The Peaches – A bitter-sweet tale of class and strife, addressing friendship, religion and sexuality told with Thomas’ distinctive Welsh humor.

At the end of the Collection are what I would call The Beautiful Tales and his most beloved tales, as Quite Early One Morning and A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which Thomas broadcast via the BBC as well as to audiences in America. Like Dickens, Thomas read his own work to an adoring fan-base. Listening to recordings of Dylan Thomas reading his poetry is to better understand his meaning. It is a very moving experience. He read with eloquent passion and a glory to life and living that is welcome today more than ever.

After hearing some of the poems by Thomas in his own melodious and burly Welsh tongue, you can hear his voice in reading his stories. The lilting accent, the magical, textured language soaring down through the years as if from a cathedral. It is the simple, common scenes animated to life with rhythmic word play and clever personification that endear us most, as in The Followers:

The thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. The pavements shone long and yellow. In squeaking galoshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home against the thistly wind –

In another paragraph, the word hollow or hallowed is used four times. Instead of sounding too repetitive, this lends a unique drama. As with his poetry, such poetic devices as repetition and elegiac sound-patterns enhance the writer’s artistry. If the poems evoke the pathos Thomas intended, then his stories will inspire a deep love for his mastery of invention and story-telling craft.

Painting of a Welsh coastal village much like Swansea by Dorian Spencer.

The Irresistible Short Stories of Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin, (sho-pan), was a master short story writer. She was a natural who, like most women of her time, had no formal training in the craft of writing. Equipped with just a French, Catholic school education in St. Louis and many interesting experiences in French Louisiana, Chopin taught herself to write with only her natural talent and the influences of Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola and Walt Whitman, her favorite contemporary writers.

But Chopin developed an alluring style all her own. Indeed, the shortest of her numerous stories seem to end too quickly; many of these shorter works are about three pages long in hardcover – ending often with the milieu of a very personal, spiritual revelation. Thus, the reader wants more of the story and more of the characters; they linger, like music, creating a delicious surround-sound of Chopin’s writing-voice.

Her characters are vivid with life and personality, namely that of the Cajun and Creole people of French populated Louisiana; although, this locale is not always obvious. An Egyptian Cigarette, told in the first person, is a tale, which could take place almost anywhere, about a woman who smokes an exotic cigarette given to her by an architect friend who travels. Chopin renders sweet, sumptuous details – as in the very box containing the cigarettes: covered with glazed, yellow paper – you want to touch the paper and feel its crinkly texture – and to hold between your fingers the tobacco of the same golden color.

The woman gets high from the cigarette and has a disturbing “dream” told in intricate, burning detail. Her induced vision seems to reveal the promise of more hidden encounters, yet she snatches up the remaining cigarettes.

I walked to the window and spread my palms wide. The light breeze caught up the golden threads and bore them writhing and dancing far out among the maple leaves.

Chopin is not bogged down by scene-changes; she shifts from one event, or timeframe, to the next as easily as gliding out of a room. Plots and characters vary, so that one story will be verdant with Southern vernacular while the next will ring with Ivy-League pomp and English suspense.

When you meet Pauline this morning she will be charming; she will be quite the most attractive woman in the room and the only one worthy of your attention…

So begins, A Mental Suggestion, a short, suspenseful love-story – about nine pages long in hardcover. The main character is a young professor of psychology, Don Graham, whose primary, scientific interest is in mental suggestion. Chopin’s setting is rife with lush maple trees, green lawns and sprawling tennis clubs. Graham decides to test his mental suggestion theories on two of his friends who have no interest in each other, and the professor’s experiment works brilliantly, causing the couple to fall in love and thereby giving Graham a huge ego boost. But, when his friends decide to get married, the professor worries and obsesses over how long his ‘spell’ will last. So he resolves to break the spell in order to test their love.

This is where Chopin’s skills of suspense come in. Like an all-powerful god or Cupid, Graham works his counter-mental suggestions in the cozy living room of his friend, Faverham, the newly wed husband – as rain dashes the window outside.

…the two forces, love, and the imperative suggestion had waged a short, fierce conflict within the man’s subconsciousness, and love had triumphed.

Hence, for once, Chopin allows love to overcome the dark intimation of doubt.

Desiree’s Baby might be the most well known of Chopin’s short stories, having been in the literary canon of most high school and college English curriculums. It is a brief, exquisitely told tale concerning the country’s racial past, particularly in the South. Beauty pervades Chopin’s story in these lush, Southern surroundings and in the lovely, innocent Desiree. However, the ugliness of racism becomes the driving theme, and the final loathsome truth of slavery and deep seeded racism arrives at the very end of the story.

The Storm is one of Chopin’s more erotic short stories. Like her novel, The Awakening, which was criticized and rejected by society at the time, The Storm is filled with the secret desires of married women and men who are in a turmoil of feelings that can’t be expressed verbally. These stories are delightfully rich with a colorful mixture of people and languages: the Patios, a fusion of either Spanish or French plus the dialect of the region; Creole people who were born in Louisiana but were of French or French-Canadian ancestry; the blacks and Indians of Louisiana and always the presence of children.

Castaways

Shakespeare’s The Tempest may be the definitive castaways-tale. There is the duke, Prospero, who becomes usurped from the throne by his own brother and put to sea, along with a baby girl, in a meagerly provisioned, shoddy boat. Ovid, Shakespeare’s unofficial muse, used this suspenseful theme in the mythical tale of Perseus. Similarly, there is an island on which the two exiled royals find refuge and where they ultimately long for a return home. In both Shakespeare and Ovid, the castaways survive with the unusual advantage of magic.

The Tempest’s Prospero has spent his life studying books of the supernatural within the sequestered comforts of his beloved Milan. Now, many leagues from his homeland, surviving for approximately twelve years on a faraway island in the Mediterranean, Prospero has been plotting with his art to conjure a storm, a tempest, which will bring his enemies to the island. It takes a tremendous amount of control to accomplish such a feat, and Prospero certainly is something of a control freak at best and a cruel brute at his worst.

Though he adores his daughter, Miranda, Prospero is manipulative with her in the way he controls her thoughts and her memory and even what she sees:

The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,
And say what thou seest yond. 1.2.411,412

With cunning conversation, he allows for certain memories to filter in. But when Miranda begins to recall too much, Prospero utilizes his absolute power to knock her out with sleep. So, Miranda is continually awakening from naps with a quizzical look on her face. Still, she has very early memories that appear to be surreptitiously pressed on her by Prospero:

’Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me? 1.2.46-49

Mirada, (whose very name is phonetically similar to the words memory and remember), speaks with eloquence about what she does or does not recall of her early childhood in Milan. She is the angelic, innately wise ingenue that Shakespeare often employed for his female characters.

Since landing on the isle, Miranda has been under Prospero’s tutelage and influence. Yet, her temperament hardly resembles her father’s. For instance, while Prospero has enough angry aggression to create a violent tempest that would bring a ship crashing in flames to the shore, Miranda has not inherited any of his meanness; in fact, she sympathizes with the crew:

O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer! 1.2.5,6

As they made the island their home, Prospero had quickly acquired slaves: Caliban, (an anagram of cannibal,) a native of the island who is referred to as a grotesque creature – and Ariel, a male or kind of asexual sprite, who had been imprisoned in a tree trunk by Caliban’s mother, a witch. The witch has since died, so Prospero frees Ariel from the tree, but imprisons the airy spirit all the same with threats of returning him to the tree if he does not obey:

Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot
the foul witch Sycorax… 1.2.259,260

In keeping with this colonialist trope, Shakespeare has Prospero commanding these two slaves for the magician’s own purposes in raising the storm and using his minion, Ariel, to perform spritely tricks on the royals, who wash ashore. Indeed, Ariel is eternally on-call to carry out fantastic, magical activities all across the island. Hence, Prospero, who was exiled, has exiled his captors to the imprisonment of slavery and bondage.

The dialogue is highly poetic even between the oppressed Caliban and his master, for Prospero and Miranda taught Caliban to speak, thus he speaks their elevated language, yet he resists their complete control by saying:

You taught me language; and my prophit on’t
is, I know how to curse… 1.2.365-366

On the other hand, Ariel addresses Prospero as he would want to be addressed:

All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail!… 1.2.189

However, Ariel’s salutations to Prospero are so slavishly sycophantic, one might mistake it for mockery. But Ariel has been promised the carrot of eventual freedom; and so, the invisible sprite dashes from one side of the island to the other and then out into the middle of the sea before you can blink, in order to fulfill Prospero’s deeds.

With Ariel, there are many references to the Greek gods and goddesses, unicorns, mysterious incantations and mythical masques and pageants. In Act IV, a magnificent engagement-ceremony is performed for Miranda and Ferdinand, who fall in love at first sight. With a fantastic tableau and supernatural arias, Ariel conjures the spirits of Queen Juno and the goddess Ceres. Invoking the Proserpine myth, Ceres must first be assured that Venus was not a part of this union, for Ceres has forsworn the Goddess of Love because of the way Venus sealed the fate of Ceres’ daughter, Proserpine, who was abducted by the King of Hell to become the Queen of the Underworld. After Ceres has the assurance that Venus had no part in this coupling, the engagement-ceremony for Miranda and Ferdinand is then blessed by Juno, Ceres and the singing and dancing of ethereal spirit-nymphs.

Unlike Ovid himself, who was exiled by Augustus Ceasar to the island of Tomis in the Black Sea, Prospero attains his desired outcome: the royals and their lords land – setting the stage for the magician’s machinations. In perfect, Shakesperean writerly-timing, the newly arrived men notice the enchantments in the sultry island:

These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger. 5.1.227,228

Still, the royals and their men soon speak of plans to establish an ideal government in a sort of utopian society. Politically, however, their ideals only lead them to contradiction, debate and trechery. And as with most Shakespearean plots, the jesters stumble on stage to mock everything that is taking place in the play.

Meanwhile, Prospero and Miranda are prized with the most philosophical and poetic lines, as when Prospero addresses his new, prospective son-in-law, Ferdinand; Prospero councils:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep… 4.1.156,- 158

Another poetic tool, personification, is generously used throughout the play, as when Prospero personifies time:

Now does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not; my spirits obey, and time
Goes upright with his carraiage… 5.1.1

Finally, Prospero’s solemn speech in Act V has been attributed to Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater. Spectacular as it is, the soliloquy is too long to quote here, (5.1.34-57), as is Prospero’s epilogue, a prayer, really, of farewell and forgiveness. (Epilogue)

Yet, Miranda utters the most famous and widely used lines in The Tempest when she says:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t! 5.1.182-185

These are the words she speaks as all of the survivors of the tempest gather around Prospero. They are highly optimistic words that can be broadly interpreted coming from innocent Miranda, who could not recall seeing another man, other than her father, Prospero, and a slave, Caliban, her entire life.

{photo taken with my BlackBerry}