Holden Caulfield is Beastly Dead?

'This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise' is a short story by J. D. Salinger published in October 1945, and republished in the 1958 anthology The Armchair Esquire, edited by Arnold Gingrich and L. Rust Hills.

The story describes Vincent Caulfield's visit back home after the war. He's upset because his brother Holden (as described in "The Last Day of the Last Furlough") is missing in action, and is unable to accept the possibility Holden may be dead. The story ends:

Drenched to the bone, the bone of loneliness, the bone of
silence, we plod back to the truck.

Where are you Holden? Never mind the Missing stuff. Stop playingaround. Show up. Show up somewhere. Hear me? It's simply because Iremember everything. I can't forget anything that's good, that's why.So listen. Just go up to somebody, some officer or some G.I., and tell them you're Here--not Missing, not dead, not anything but Here. Stop kidding around. Stop letting people think you're Missing. Stop wearing my robe to the beach. Stop taking the shots on my side of the court. Stop whistling. Sit up to the table!

Train Dreams - Denis Johnson

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was not awarded this year although three books were nominated in the far from clear or foolproof conditions in which the prize is generally made. 

It was the Pulitzer Board that decided not to present the fiction award, and not the jury, which selected the three nominated works for consideration by the board. In fact, all three jurors have expressed dissatisfaction over the outcome as well as the Pulitzer selection process itself.

No fiction published in 2011 was felt worthy by the Pulitzer Board although one of the nominees was Karen Russell's Swamplandia  and another was David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.  

It may be that Russell's novel might not have lived up to the promise of her short story collection debut, and Wallace's novel is unfinished, and I don't recall anyone saying it is his greatest work - perhaps, it might have been on its way there: a steep mountain to climb, that one. 

Annual prize-givings are a crude way to adjudicate the state of fiction - they help market literary novels and give a guide to readers/buyers as to what is thought to be current, and that is about as far as they can ever really go. 

It may be that 2011 was a dud year in fiction - there must be some dud years, after all - but it is based on the assumption that we read novels in the same way we read newspapers - to find out what is happening now. We don't. Of the eight books I have read this month, only one was published this year - the rest span from 2011 to 1852 - thank you, Mr. Dickens. Readers have a longer run at fiction than these shindigs and shenanigans attest.

The third nominee is proof of this. This was  Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, which was published as a long short story in the  Paris Review in 2002, and last year was  packaged in the US as a novella, and, it seems, elsewhere before this in 2006. Not yet published in the UK, it is, however, available as an audiobook read by Will Patton alongside the stories from Jesus' Son. I read it in 2005.

Whether the novella is greatly different from the story, I can't say - it may be its once 50 odd pages of short story can be spread across 100+ pages of creamy white wide-margined paper and sold as such without much more being added.  I would want nothing to be taken away from it, and any additional sentences from Denis Johnson are to be savoured.
What I can say is that  'Train Dreams' or Train Dreams, at whatever length, is a remarkable product in any year or decade: a tale of wolves and trains and revenants that calls to mind  Hemingway and Faulkner and Alice Munro and Henry James and Cormac McCarthy while also being very distinctly its own wayward and brilliantly conceived self.
I read it again and it improves - although (and I think this may be a common effect of reading it) it has grown in the mind but in that miraculous way that  still matches the memory of reading it. There is the epic grasp - it is about America - and, while it seems always to be wavering, the seeming contrary of its intense focus on one character, a character not wholly yielding to such a gaze; and there is the wife, a ghost returning and granting him a vision of how she might have died,  a midnight garden full of wolves, a wolf-girl, her broken leg, her escape, pulling at the splint he has made for her, and the comedy of two marriage proposals, one gracelessly made, another gracefully refused. And how so much about this life would have gone unnoticed but for its author: it obeys Robert Bresson's injunction to 'Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.'

Hart Crane - The Broken Tower - James Franco Trailer

Marching Through a Novel: John Updike

            MARCHING THROUGH A NOVEL

                Each morning my characters
                   greet me with misty faces
                willing, though chilled, to muster
                   for another day's progress
                through the dazzling quicksand,
                   the marsh of blank paper.
                With instant obedience
                   they change clothes and mannerisms,
                drop a speech impediment,
                   develop a motive backwards
                to suit the deed that's done.  
                   They extend skeletal arms
                for the handcuffs of contrivance,
                    slog through docilely
                maneuvers of coincidence,
                    look toward me hopefully,
                 their general and quartermaster,
                    for a clearer face, a bigger heart.
                I do what I can for them,
                    but it is not enough.
                FORWARD is my order,
                    though their bandages unravel
                and some have no backbones
                    and some turn traitor
                like heads with two faces
                    and some fall forgotten
                in the trenchwork of loose threads,
                    poor puffs of cartoon flak.
                FORWARD. Believe me, I love them
                    though I march them to finish them off.

David Foster Wallace: Reading as a Writer

Foster Wallace's marginalia is fascinating and characterful - almost as if he turns the book he is reading into one that he might write.
As reported in The New Yorker, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas announced their acquisition of the David Foster Wallace archive. Along with many manuscripts, notebooks and juvenilia

There are also some two hundred books from Wallace’s own library. “Virtually all of the books are annotated, many are heavily annotated,” Schwartzburg said, and noted that Wallace was especially fond of taking notes and compiling vocabulary lists on the inner cover. The collection, heavy on contemporary fiction, contains nearly all of Wallace’s friend Don DeLillo’s novels, including some pre-publication typescripts. Other titles include Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” and “The Tipping Point,” and Jonathan Franzen’s “Strong Motion.” “Unfortunately,” Schwartzburg said, “there does not appear to be a copy of ‘The Corrections.’ ”

There is, however, a paperback copy of Mary Higgins Clark’s pulpy suspense novel “Where are the Children?” “I have no context for it, but it looked like he was doing a rhetorical analysis of how gender relationships were playing out over the course of the novel,” Schwartzburg told me. “He appeared to really engage with her and looked carefully at how she structured her narrative. Clearly, he read very widely.” There’s even a marked-up edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which Wallace circled words like “witenagemot.”

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”

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Flaubert's 'A Simple Heart' and Chekhov's 'The Darling'

Tolstoy recognised Chekhov’s particular genius with a modesty and insight that does not always characterise his literary judgements: for example, Shakespeare he considered ‘ordinary’ and Maupassant, at his worst, was no more ‘moral filth’ but:

…as an artist Chekhov cannot even be compared with the old Russian writers— Turgenev, Dostoevsky, or myself. Chekhov has his own manner, like the Impressionists. You see a man daubing on whatever paint happens to be near at hand, apparently without selection, and it seems as though these paints bear no relation to one another. But if you step back a certain distance and look again, you will get a complete, over-all impression. Before you there is a vivid, unchallengeable picture of nature.[1]

Tolstoy characterises Chekhov as a writer who saw differently from his peers, his work only appearing to be a series of glances, but, in truth, the product of a sustained and original gaze.

Chekhov's ‘The Darling’ was a particular favourite among Chekhov’s stories and Maxim Gorky recalls Tolstoy speaking of it with rapture to a group of listeners, one of whom was Chekhov:

‘It is like lace,’ he said, ‘made by a chaste young girl. There were such lace makers in olden times who used to depict all their lives, all their dreams of happiness in the pattern. They dreamed in designs of all that was dear to them, wove all their pure, uncertain love into their lace.’[2]

It is a tender evocation of a story that is not, in itself, wholly tender. Tolstoy even wrote an essay[3] on ‘The Darling’ in which he claimed that Chekhov may have written the story with the intention of satirising Olenka and all such women who unthinkingly devote their lives to men, but, Tolstoy asserted, Chekhov achieved, instead, a story that was a riposte to all who proposed women should be the equal or independent of men:

(Chekhov) intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless. And he did bless, and unconsciously clothed this sweet creature in such an exquisite radiance that she will always remain a type of what a woman can be in order to be happy herself, and to make the happiness of those with whom destiny throws her.

This, he claimed, was the effect of the story and, proving that ‘what makes the story so excellent is that the effect is unintentional’ Tolstoy recalled how.

I learnt to ride a bicycle in a hall large enough to drill a division of soldiers. At the other end of the hall a lady was learning. I thought I must be careful to avoid getting into her way, and began looking at her. And as I looked at her I began unconsciously getting nearer and nearer to her, and in spite of the fact that, noticing the danger, she hastened to retreat, I rode down upon her and knocked her down -- that is, I did the very opposite of what I wanted to do, simply because I concentrated my attention upon her. The same thing has happened to Chekhov, but in an inverse sense: he wanted to knock the Darling down, and, concentrating upon her the close attention of the poet, he raised her up.[4]

Tolstoy is misguided in believing that, despite himself, Chekhov wrote a hymn to the submissive woman, but right in considering that creating her was an act of attention by Chekhov, a sustained and rigorous gaze, but it strives neither to be judgmental nor definitive. Tolstoy, most especially in his latter days, felt art should have a moral thrust. Its business was to answer the question of how one should live, and the art he admired was an art that shared and expressed his own moral certainty.[5] For Chekhov, famously, there were no answers: one’s efforts went into framing the question, and not supplying the answer. In Tolstoy’s later work the moralist intrudes, but never in Chekhov’s. Chekhov, in this regard, is like Flaubert, who declared:

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Maupassant, for Chekhov, was an inspiration – the first modern writer, one who seemed to Maupassant without a moral agenda, a writer intent on looking and not judging. Maupassant, too, equated good writing with skilled observation.

There is an unexpected side to everything; the smallest thing has something unknown in it; we must find it.[6]

Maupassant took lessons in looking, and he took them from Flaubert. Maupassant was well placed enough in his associations as a younger writer to come under the tutelage of Louis Bouilhet and Gustave Flaubert. Bouilhet was a poet and head librarian in Rouen and Flaubert had been a close friend of Maupassant’s late uncle. The two men put the youthful Maupassant through what was something of a Creative Writing course.

For seven years, the young Maupassant did not attempt to publish his work but sent everything he wrote to Flaubert, and, the following Sunday over lunch, Flaubert

…little by little, hammered into me two or three precepts that summed up his long and patient teachings. One of these precepts was to be original: 'If you have any originality, you must first dig it out. If you don’t have any, you must get some.[7]

Originality, for Flaubert, was a question of attention. He regularly set Maupassant the task of describing something ordinary and familiar – ‘a blazing fire or a tree in a plain' – but, to describe it successfully, Maupassant had to search for the ‘unexplored’ element in it because, Flaubert believed,

we are accustomed to seeing things only through the memory of what others have said about them.

Next, Maupassant recalled:

…he forced me to describe, in a few phrases, a creature or an object so that it was clearly distinguishable from all other creatures or objects of the same race or species.

The creature or object might be a grocer on his doorstep, a concierge smoking his pipe, or a cab-horse in a row of cabs. The challenge was, ‘with a single word,’ to show how that particular grocer, concierge, or cab-horse resembled no other.[8] This was the search for le mot juste: the exact word, the precise word – verb, noun, adjective – that would recreate the creature or object for the reader:

One should never be content with approximation; one should never try to avoid the difficulty by resorting to subterfuge - even if it fools the reader—or to linguistic trickery.[9]

This is how Maupassant described his writing course in ‘The Novel’, one of the few texts in which he discussed his own techniques, but it has been suggested that some of the other lessons he was given can be deduced from Flaubert’s introduction to Bouilhet’s Dernières Chansons (1872). Here, Flaubert declared, art should neither:

…teach, correct, nor moralise…dénouements are not conclusions; no general inferences can be drawn from a particular case…Prose, like verse, must be written so that it can be read out loud. Poorly written sentences never pass the test: they tighten the chest and impede the beating of the heart…style goes straight to the point and leaves no impression of the author himself: the word disappears in the clarity of the thought, or rather, by sticking so closely to the thought, leaves it entirely unhampered.[10]

In Flaubert’s work, in Maupassant’s and in Chekhov’s, we witness the result of such principles in the clarity and specificity of the prose, the seamless and fluent style, and the complicated symbolism of the Felicité’s parrot – is Flaubert mocking piety or celebrating it as a human need? If Olenka is a fool, where do we find Chekhov saying this outright – if at all?

The tutoring came to an end when Maupassant wrote his first great short story, ‘Boule de Suif.’[11] Flaubert edited the story, considered the completed tale ‘a masterpiece’ and died three weeks later. Maupassant helped prepare his body for burial,

…bathing it in eau de Cologne, dressing it in silk underwear and a suit, complete with waistcoat, cravat and skin gloves, and brushing the famous moustache.[12]

In this description of preparing the body, it is the number of details - the careful accounting of them – the attention to detail - the 'silk' underwear, the 'skin gloves' and, especially, the brushing of the ‘famous moustache’ that evoke Flaubert's lingering presence, Maupassant's tenderness and the debt to be honoured. These are the details that make a funereal moment blush into life.

Maupassant learned his lessons well.[13]

Three years before this – and while those lessons were in progress – Flaubert wrote Three Tales, of which ‘A Simple Heart’ is the first. ‘A Simple Heart’ exemplifies the writerly craft he so effectively instilled in Maupassant.

There is much to say about Three Tales and the sense in which the small book is the culmination of all his pre-occupations as a writer, but the focus here is ‘A Simple Heart’ and its relation to Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’.

Both are accounts of women. Both deny themselves complicated plots. Both, in short forms, take the long view of a life, and both concern themselves with love, love both with and without an object.

‘A Simple Heart’ opens with a cameo of Felicité and the context in which she exists. From the start there is a wonderful and noticeable specificity:

For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, washed, ironed, mended, harnessed the horse, fattened the poultry, made the butter and remained faithful to her mistress--although the latter was by no means an agreeable person…Summer and winter she wore a dimity kerchief fastened in the back with a pin, a cap which concealed her hair, a red skirt, grey stockings, and an apron with a bib like those worn by hospital nurses. Her face was thin and her voice shrill. When she was twenty-five, she looked forty. After she had passed fifty, nobody could tell her age; erect and silent always, she resembled a wooden figure working automatically.[14]

It is a detailed summary of the character, but it seems to end with a dismissal: is this our heroine? What will animate this wooden figure?

Abused and unregarded since birth, Felicité is presented as a victim, one with a tendency, that later becomes a habit, for reverence: this, in itself, might be the definition of a martyr, but Felicité is no simple victim. After being abandoned by Theodore, her first love, she is in great distress but quickly recovers her equanimity

The poor girl's sorrow was frightful. She threw herself on the ground, she cried and called on the Lord, and wandered around desolately until sunrise. Then she went back to the farm, declared her intention of leaving, and at the end of the month, after she had received her wages, she packed all her belongings in a handkerchief and started for Pont-l'Eveque.

This is the first of several instances when she shows a vigour and resourcefulness that surprises others, but of which she seems unaware such as the episode when she fends off the bull, or the incredible long walk overnight taken to see her nephew leave port, or the way she chases and catches up with the carriage taking Mme Aubain to the dying Virginie.

In both the protagonists of ‘The Darling’ and ‘A Simple Heart’, there is a lack of awareness, a lack of self-image. In ‘The Darling’, when Olenka is left bereft by two dead husbands and an unreliable lover, she vanishes even to herself. Olenka is made human, is made purposeful, by her love. She is nothing unless he loves. In love, she parrots her lover’s words. Felicité, too, is nothing to herself. She, too, is a parrot:

And Felicité worshipped devoutly, while enjoying the coolness and the stillness of the church. As for the dogma, she could not understand it and did not even try. The priest discoursed, the children recited, and she went to sleep, only to awaken with a start when they were leaving the church and their wooden shoes clattered on the stone pavement. In this way, she learned her catechism, her religious education having been neglected in her youth; and thenceforth she imitated all Virginia's religious practices, fasted when she did, and went to confession with her. At the Corpus-Christi Day they both decorated an
altar…

When Virginia's turn came, Felicité leaned forward to watch her, and through that imagination which springs from true affection, she at once became the child, whose face and dress became hers, whose heart beat in her bosom, and when Virginia opened her mouth and closed her lids, she did likewise and came very near fainting.

The following day, she presented herself early at the church so as to receive communion from the cure. She took it with the proper feeling, but did not experience the same delight as on the previous day.

There is always the temptation to go inward when investigating character, to ignore the externals of a life and dig up the secret within. In both texts, the inner lives of the characters are narrow. There is, seemingly, little booty to be had. Not every character is a Hamlet or a Mrs Dalloway. They seem to offer less, but it is a matter of looking and not of judging.

Flaubert’s story covers the long arc of Felicité’s outwardly undramatic and unremarkable life and one of the signs of Flaubert’s immense skill as a fiction writer is the way in which he conveys the passing of time. He does not plod in his account of the passing years or appear to skip from incident to incident.

His ability to create a scene is evident – Virginie’s first communion, the horses in the sky, the procession that coincides with Felicité’s death are just a few examples of when the writer lingers and carefully showcases a significant moment, event or exchange, but the technique most vital to Flaubert’s handling of time is the rendering of a habitual action as if it, too, were a dramatic scene.

Take the ‘Horses in the Sky’ passage in ‘A Simple Heart’

When she reached the Calvary, instead of turning to the right, she turned to the left and lost herself in coal-yards; she had to retrace her steps; some people she spoke to advised her to hasten. She walked helplessly around the harbour filled with vessels, and knocked against hawsers. Presently the ground sloped abruptly, lights flittered to and fro, and she thought all at once that she had gone mad when she saw some horses in the sky.

Others, on the edge of the dock, neighed at the sight of the ocean. A derrick pulled them up in the air and dumped them into a boat, where passengers were bustling about among barrels of cider, baskets of cheese and bags of meal; chickens cackled, the captain swore and a cabin boy rested on the railing, apparently indifferent to his surroundings. Felicité, who did not recognise him, kept shouting: "Victor!" He suddenly raised his eyes, but while she was preparing to rush up to him, they withdrew the gangplank.

The packet, towed by singing women, glided out of the harbour. Her hull squeaked and the heavy waves beat up against her sides. The sail had turned and nobody was visible; —and on the ocean, silvered by the light of the moon, the vessel formed a black spot that grew dimmer and dimmer, and finally disappeared.

This is a scene. It is rendered with the simplicity and visual clarity one might expect of a film script: one could, with only slightest changes, turn it into one, and, remember, a film can only be made of scenes, not summary:

1.EXT. OUTSKIRTS OF HONFLEUR. NIGHT.

Long shot: FELICITÉ reaches the Calvary outside the town, looks right and left, turns right.

2. EXT. STREET IN HONFLEUR. NIGHT.

Mid shot: FELICITÉ stands in the empty street, looks left and right, turns left.

3.EXT. STREET. NIGHT.

Mid shot: FELICITÉ stands in another empty street, looks left and right, and then walks on.

4. EXT. COALYARDS. NIGHT.

Long shot: FELICITÉ surrounded by the black slack heaps of the coal yard, dwarfed by them.

5. EXT. THE HARBOUR. NIGHT.

Long shot: moonlit, a harbour filled with vessels.

6. EXT. HARBOUR. NIGHT.

Close up: a boat knock against hawsers.

Pull back to midshot and Felicité’s feet as she walks past and we follow her as the path slopes abruptly and then, from behind her, we pan round to see the harbour, its lights flittering to and fro. Close up of FELICITÉ, searching the skyline. Offscreen, the sudden scream and braying of several horses. FELICITÉ, terrified, looks up. Silhouetted against the moon, several horses suspended against the sky, manes flaring, legs galloping on air, the screams increased etc…

This is a scene that Flaubert presents in detail. We are ‘in the moment’, so to speak. A scene is where the writer attends to the actual moment, dramatises it.

Summary is an account of more than one moment – or when the moment described is given only cursory attention. Summary is where in your stories patient tutors scrawl in angry capital letters: Show, don’t tell.

Summary (or telling) accelerates a narrative – events are being compressed. Summary, by its very nature, condenses time. One can summarise a novel in a sentence or even a title – War and Peace? But with this speed comes distance and detachment. It is much harder to make summary as vivid or immediate to a reader.

Making a scene or dramatising an event (showing) decelerates a narrative. The narrative slows down for dialogue, for the description of a room or a gesture. Detail gives weight, and suggests to the reader that this moment or this exchange is significant.

Too much scene-making, however, and the pace can be meandering or static. The story eventually stalls. This is why most fiction shifts between these two modes.

In Flaubert and Chekhov, however, telling is a showing; they render summary as if it were a scene, as here, from ‘The Darling.’

Now she was completely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his armchair lay in the attic covered with dust and minus one leg. She got thin and homely, and the people who met her on the street no longer looked at her as they had used to, nor smiled at her. Evidently her best years were over, past and gone, and a new, dubious life was to begin which it were better not to think about.

In the evening Olenka sat on the steps and heard the music playing and the rockets bursting in the Tivoli; but it no longer aroused any response in her. She looked listlessly into the yard, thought of nothing, wanted nothing, and when night came on, she went to bed and dreamed of nothing but the empty yard. She ate and drank as though by compulsion.

…Gradually the town grew up all around. The Gypsy Road had become a street, and where the Tivoli and the lumber-yard had been, there were now houses and a row of side streets. How quickly time flies! Olenka's house turned gloomy, the roof rusty, the shed slanting. Dock and thistles overgrew the yard. Olenka herself had aged and grown homely. In the summer she sat on the steps, and her soul was empty and dreary and bitter. When she caught the breath of spring, or when the wind wafted the chime of the cathedral bells, a sudden flood of memories would pour over her, her heart would expand with a tender warmth, and the tears would stream down her cheeks. But that lasted only a moment. Then would come emptiness again, and the feeling, What is the use of living? The black kitten Bryska rubbed up against her and purred softly, but the little creature's caresses left Olenka untouched. That was not what she needed. What she needed was a love that would absorb her whole being, her reason, her whole soul, that would give her ideas, an object in life, that would warm her aging blood. And she shook the black kitten off her skirt angrily, saying:

‘Go away! What are you doing here?’

And so day after day, year after year not a single joy, not a single opinion.[15]

Notice how seamlessly that summary of actions and events – the passage of time - melted into the scene with the cat: a moment in that passage of time. Flaubert covers the months and years in the same way – with the specificity of detail a writer often only gives a scene:

Each morning, out of habit, Felicité entered Virginia's room and gazed at the walls. She missed combing her hair, lacing her shoes, tucking her in her bed, and the bright face and little hand when they used to go out for a walk. In order to occupy herself she tried to make lace. But her clumsy fingers broke the threads; she had no heart for anything, lost her sleep and ‘wasted away,’ as she put it.

In order to have some distraction, she asked leave to receive the visits of her nephew Victor.

He would come on Sunday, after church, with ruddy cheeks and bared chest, bringing with him the scent of the country. She would set the table and they would sit down opposite each other, and eat their dinner; she ate as little as possible, herself, to avoid any extra expense, but would stuff him so with food that he would finally go to sleep. At the first stroke of vespers, she would wake him up, brush his trousers, tie his cravat and walk to church with him, leaning on his arm with maternal pride.

His parents always told him to get something out of her, either a package of brown sugar, or soap, or brandy, and sometimes even money. He brought her his clothes to mend, and she accepted the task gladly, because it meant another visit from him.

We have a habit of thinking the short story is about a moment, intensely observed, a moment of change, of the chance for change or revelation. Here are two stories that take account of years with characters that decay with time but do not, in essence, change although one is granted what seems, to her at least a revelation.

But whether a story covers an hour or a century, a short story writer always handling time and Chekhov and Flaubert more vividly exemplify this.

The passage of time is there in the way Flaubert and Chekhov depicts its effects. In her youth, the sight of Olenka’s plumply naked shoulder reduces her first husband to a sigh. By the story’s end, she is old and stout, embarrassingly chasing the callow youth she has elected to love, a youth who even in his dreams shouts at her and fends her off. And there is a falling off in the quality of objects of her love: the theatre owner and then the timber merchant who marry her, the Vet who does not, the vet’s son who repulses her as he grows older, curses her in his dreams.

Time in both stories is a record of decline.

The sturdy Felicité who can outpace a horse and carriage in her prime and outface an angry bull grows deaf, lame and blind. Her mistress loses her daughter, her money, and her status. Even the minor characters that thread the story are marked by time, such as Bourais

Monsieur Bourais, a retired lawyer. His bald head and white cravat, the ruffling of his shirt, his flowing brown coat, the special way he bent his elbows when taking snuff, his whole person, in fact, produced in her the kind of awe one feels in the presence of a great man

A counsellor to Mme Aubain, a respected authority, there comes a point in the story when he seems suddenly to slip from his prestigious position when Loulou enters the story

Bourais' face must have appeared very funny to Loulou. As soon as he saw him he would begin to roar. His voice re-echoed in the yard, and the neighbours would come to the windows and begin to laugh, too; and in order that the parrot might not see him, Monsieur Bourais edged along the wall, pushed his hat over his eyes to hide his profile, and entered by the garden door, and the looks he gave the bird lacked affection.

The slip in respectability is not sudden. It has simply been unnoticed, unattended, by the characters, except the parrot.[16] The parrot sees before anyone else – because the parrot truly sees him, having no investment in Bourais, no agenda: in this Loulou is an artist – that Bourais is sham. Towards the story’s close, they and we learn:

…of Monsieur Bourais' death in an inn. There were rumours of suicide, which were confirmed; doubts concerning his integrity arose. Madame Aubain looked over her accounts and soon discovered his numerous embezzlements; sales of wood which had been concealed from her, false receipts, etc. Furthermore, he had an illegitimate child, and entertained a friendship for ‘a person in Dozule.’

In Flaubert, the body withers, reputations crumble, and so do objects

Virginie's frocks were hung under a shelf where there were three dolls, some hoops, a doll-house, and a basin which she had made. Felicité and Madame Aubain also took out the skirts, the handkerchiefs, and the stockings and spread them on the beds, before putting them away again. The sun fell on the piteous things, disclosing their spots and the creases formed by the motions of the body. The atmosphere was warm and blue, and a blackbird trilled in the garden; everything seemed to live in happiness. They found a little hat of soft brown plush, but it was entirely moth-eaten. Felicité asked for it. Their eyes met and filled with tears; at last the mistress opened her arms and the servant threw herself against her breast and they hugged each other and giving vent to their grief in a kiss that equalised them for a moment.

Think, too, of Mme Aubain’s house, so lovingly itemised in the story’s first page and monitor how it changes throughout the story, how the furniture is moved from room to room, then sold off, how the house empties and falls asunder, the roof rots, the shutters no longer open.

And, of course, there is Loulou, the parrot. At first sight:

His body was green, his head blue, the tips of his wings were pink and his breast was golden.

After death, he is stuffed

…screwed into a mahogany pedestal, with his foot in the air, his head on one side, and in his beak a nut, which the naturalist, from love of the sumptuous, had gilded.

And then

Although he was not a corpse, he was eaten up by worms; one of his wings was broken and the wadding was coming out of his body…Sometimes the sun fell through the window on his glass eye, and lighted a spark in it which sent Felicité into ecstasy.

The parrot an object of veneration not just to Felicité but also it becomes one in the service that ends the story when it stands upon an altar - although only its skull is visible on the altar:

…hidden beneath roses, showed nothing but his blue head, which looked like a piece of lapis lazuli.

In the introduction to the Penguin edition of Three Tales, Geoffrey wall comments on the tales:

…each portray a certain religious experience, but they do so in (a) contemporary idiom…the sacred survives, oddly disguised, even in the century of wide-awake bourgeois techno-miracles.[17]

Wall goes on to quote from one of Flaubert’s letters in which he writes:

I do not know (nobody knows) the meaning of body and soul, where one begins and the other begins. We feel the play of energy and that is all.

It is this play of energy that complicates the details that Flaubert deploys in ‘A Simple Heart.’ Loulou is a parrot, a dead parrot, a stuffed parrot, but not to Felicité: it is the object of her love; it is the Holy Spirit. Trace the references in the story to birds, to the sky, to those horses hoisted into the air, to the Loulou, living and resurrected only to rot again.

One of the markers of time in ‘A Simple Heart’ is the Feats of Corpus Christi, a Catholic celebration of the Eucharist in which a wafer of bread becomes the body of Christ while remaining a wafer of bread. In such a way, Loulou is both parrot and Holy Spirit because that is how Felicité attends to it.

As Felicité ages, as her eyesight fails, as her hearing diminishes, her world narrows. Everything passes her by. The parrot is all she sees and even seems to hear. Like a saint intent on decreation, her attention on the world concentrates upon the parrot and she sees through it, through its reality, to some supernatural dimension,

Pay enough attention to a thing – to anything- and even the tooth of a dog will glow, and a parrot will not only partakes of God’s grace, but also become it – and still be a parrot.

---

[1] http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap8.htm. Tolstoy’s opinions seem dismissive when given in such a summary, but, at length, they reveal a great deal about his own purposes as an artist. One of the best reflections on Tolstoy’s literary judgements is George Orwell’s ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf This site also carries Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’ http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/ and the highly influential ‘Politics and the English Language’ http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/ . For those of you whose experience of Orwell includes ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ the breadth, incisiveness and accessibility of Orwell’s essays will be a particular pleasure.

[2] ibid

[3] http://www.submissivewife.org/publicresources/tolstoy_darling.html

[4]http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap8.htm

[5] That said, in the work of his prime, what distinguishes Tolstoy is his almost complete understanding of what it is to be human and contradictory. The anecdote about the bicycle might more especially apply to his own original intentions in writing of adultery in Anna Karenina, a novel that may have began as a critique of an adulterous woman but that resulted in a work with a rich, generous and varied presentation of what family and marriage involve as well as a comprehensive understanding of the question of ‘how one should live’; in that novel and in War and Peace, he arrives at ‘a complete, overall impression.’ As a critic and thinker, he was a dogmatic: as an artist, he was incapable of being so, which is why, perhaps, he came to disown the novel as a means of pursuing his philosophy.

[6] See ‘The Novel’, G. de Maupassant, Pierre and Jean, Penguin, 2006.

[7] As well as de Maupassant’s essay, the relationship is also covered in Graham Robb’s review of Maupassant’s Afloat: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/cruising-with-genius

[8] Quite simply, to see this in practice, note how each of the characters in ‘A Simple Heart’ and ‘The Darling’ is introduced, not just the main characters, but also especially those who pass by, appear for just a sentence. Each could set off to become the protagonist in a story of his or her own.

[9] Ibid

[10] ibid

[11] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm#2H_4_0003

[12] Ibid

[13] Tolstoy, who was repelled by Maupassant’s tales of lesbians and prostitutes, came to admire the ‘moral relation’ of the author to his subject, and (no doubt remembering Maupassant’s account of Flaubert’s lesson in the introduction to Pierre et Jean) ‘that peculiar, strained attention, directed upon an object, in consequence of which the author sees entirely new features in the life which he is describing.’ Robb: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/cruising-with-genius/?page=2

[14] Quotations from ‘A Simple Heart’ are taken from http://www.fullbooks.com/A-Simple-Soul.html. Roger Waterhouse’s translation, Three Tales, Penguin, 2005, offers a more eloquent version as well as introduction by Flaubert biographer, Geoffrey Wall.

[15] Quotations from ‘The Darling’ are from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Darling. The translation is by Constance Garnett, among the very first to translate Chekhov and other great Russian writers into English, and, while others are said to be more accurate, it is in Garnett’s translations that Chekhov is most widely known by English readers.

[16] If one were to look for a crucial difference between Chekhov and Flaubert – possibly Chekhov and any writer before him – it might lie in VS Pritchett’s remark that in Chekhov the ‘sights and sounds are heard’ as if by the characters.

[17] p. Xiii, Flaubert, G. Three Tales, translated by Roger Whitehouse and, with an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wall, Penguin, 2005

Billy Collins: The Quaintness of the Past

The Quaintness of the Past
Billy Collins
Posted Tuesday, June 8, 2010, at 6:51 AM ET

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Billy Collins read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

.

I turn the page of a magazine
and find a black-and-white photograph
of a roadhouse taken in the 1950s,
an old clapboard affair
with a car of that vintage,
maybe a Plymouth, parked in front.

It is almost enough to inspire me
to take a snapshot of something around here
first thing in the morning,
maybe the little bakery down the street
where I often go for coffee and a muffin
and the big city paper
and the French girls behind the counter.

Ideally there would be a few modern cars
parked in front,
then all I would have to do
is walk back home and wait 50 or 100 years
for the photograph to become a thing of interest and value.

Of course, I will be long gone by then
and time will have marched on,
though I never think of time as marching
down a football field blowing a trumpet
or into a city square
with a rifle on its shoulder.

I picture time advancing more slowly
up a mountain, leaving
all the moments of history behind
like climbers who have to leave behind
one of their companions on a cold glacial slope.

And sometimes, decades later,
the body is discovered,
the ice is chipped away, and we get to see
a photograph of the remains—
the bones of the hands arthritically
fisted up, the jaw locked tight,
a skull wearing a woolen cap,
the man quaintly smiling out at us from the past
before we wet a finger and turn the page.

David Means: The Spot

David Means' fourth collection, The Spot, is new out. There are writers you wait to hear from, and writers you track through periodicals and websites: David Means is one such - and it's not the easiest name to track through Google.



The first story is 'The Knocking', originally printed in The New Yorker, in which a man is plagued by a noisy neighbour and (in brackets) the demise of his own marriage, is a monologue, even a rant - a beautifully cadenced rant that runs from a pathological obsession to near hysteria only to return again and again to resignation and to reverie.

Could more be made of it than a writerly exercise? Yes, it has that feel, but what redeems it, and redeems all Means's work, even the most brutal, is its tenderness, and even as an exercise it shows how match fit the prose is, fascinatingly auditory not only in what it chooses to describe but in its diction and syntax.

Imaginative capacities gather around the knock. A hammer against a nail, sharp and determined, goes on a beat too long, pounding and pounding throughout an entire evening, with metronomic precision. The rounded edge of a sap—lead in leather—is slapped against the floorboards overhead, making a blunt rubbery thud with a leathery overtone. A sharp metallic tap, not too loud and not too soft, comes out from under the casual noise of a summer afternoon—the roar of traffic on Fifth combined with high-heeled taps, taxi horns, and the murmur of voices—with a hauntingly pristine quality, like the tin tip of a walking stick. A sweeping sound stretches from one side of the head to the other, arriving one afternoon . . . Again, many of these knockings come late in the day, when he knows, because he does know, that I’m in my deepest state of reverie, trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions, throwing out, silently, wordlessly, my theorems: Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, begins to form something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the penultimate days in the house by the Hudson), and then is, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss; Mary gone, kids gone).

The prose savours sound even as the narrator savours the pained memories of his failed marriage - just as we all secretly savour the complaints we make against those who disappoint or do us wrong, and how we permit incomprehension and a sense of victimhood to goad us almost into ecstasy.

The story is one long complaint and complaint - which means to express a grievance but also a mourning, an outcry of grief , a yearning for lost love- here becomes a prayer, even a hymn.

To complain means also to groan and creak as a mast - and the narrator is islanded in his Manhatten flat -which makes me think how Melville also haunts this prose. I never want David Means to write a novel - and not one the size of Moby Dick - his commitment to the short story form is admirable and, to this reader, necessary - but something akin to a Billy Budd is within his register and his reach.

But then not enough is said about the future books or stories we imagine might come from a favourite writer. David Thomson is well practiced in expressing how we dream other movies, other combinations of stars in favourite films, how, in reading a novel, we cast and direct a future adaptation. We do it, too, with books we have yet to read and ones we can have no reasonable expectation of reading. You find me, having already read this first story and three others in magazines, staving off reading anymore today, imagining what the other nine might be so I can compare my dream of them with printed reality.