The Bazaar and Other Stories (3 page)
at the
Cockerel Press:
I’ve for some time been thinking over a project of getting 7 (fairly
able) writers to write one story a piece to the heading of each one
of “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Some people in France did this –
I don’t know if you came across the book? – de Lacretelle,
Cocteau, Morand (in his good days) and four others. The result
was interesting. I discussed this with Mr. Coppard some time ago
& he said he’d do one, and I expect Mr. Strong would too. Would
the idea be of any interest to you? It’s only just an idea, as I say,
and may not be worth pursuing. I think the selection of writers
would be very important, as the stories should be neither
mawkish or sensational, nor over-heavy. (HRC 10.4)
Gibbings volleyed back two further ideas for jointly written books.
In a letter to Bowen on 19 October 1932, he suggested “Excuses,” in
which “four or five women writers create compromising situations
for the husbands of their heroines,” or “Volume,” in which “half a
dozen authors” narrate the fulfilment of a “fortune told by some
professional” (HRC 11.5). Even though none of these collaborative
projects came to fruition, they attest to the high spirits and
camaraderie of the 1930s. Bowen views joint efforts as occasions for
drollery. By the same token, the short stories that she writes for
collaborative books impose constraints of length, content, and tone.
The stories written for such joint ventures reveal how Bowen rises to
the challenge, or not.
Some of Bowen’s best stories – “Summer Night,” “Ivy Gripped
the Steps,” “Mysterious Kôr” – were written in direct or indirect
response to the Second World War. During the 1950s she wrote few
stories and none at all in the 1960s, yet during this period her
critical analysis of the genre sharpened. Between February and May
1960, she taught a course on the short story at Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, New York. In two extant spiral-bound notebooks that
contain her syllabus and lecture notes, she lays down some precepts
for the short story. The lecture notes project information tele
graphically, for they are intended to be pedagogical aids rather than
extensively worked out arguments. None the less, Bowen extracted
the essentials of this teaching experience for an article called
“Advice,” published in the July 1960 issue of
. In
“Advice,” Bowen, still pronouncing in a professorial voice, claims
that “Language can not only register but heighten, by its speed, its
emphasis and its rhythm, the emotional pressure we put behind
it” (
Afterthought
214). She cautions against repetition in subject or
expression that rigidifies into convention. On the other hand, the
pursuit of novelty in language – ornamentation for its own sake –
distracts the reader. “There is a dramatic element in language, which
is latent even while held in check,” she concludes (
Afterthought
213).
Despite being the place where “emotional pressure” and a “dramatic
element” combine, language clamps down on those pressures like a
lid on a pot.
The Vassar notebooks disclose Bowen’s thinking over the
genealogy of the short story in relation to her own accomplishments
in the genre. In a class devoted to the short story as “unique
expression,” by which she means the tell-tale personality of an
author stamped into the fabric of a story, Bowen considered talking
about her own fiction. In the end, she refrained, or so the lecture
notes suggest. Instead she discussed stories that she particularly
cherished: Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” Mansfield’s “Prelude” and “In a
German Pension,” Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” Joyce’s “The Dead,”
Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner,” Maugham’s “The Colonel’s
Lady,” Welty’s “The Shower of Gold,” James’s “The Beast in the
Jungle,” Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and a smattering of stories by
Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stegner, Dorothy Parker, J. D. Salinger,
Seán O’Faoláin, O. Henry, and others. The syllabus lists canonical
tales and an exuberant dose of contemporary American works
tailored to the Vassar students.
Bowen elaborates on the common ground between drama and
short stories in the Vassar notebooks. Dramatic tension, she claims,
coils within the short story. Drama and short fiction share “
concentration of Forces [Tautness]
a presentation of things in terms of
effect (Play must not
sag
: S.S. must not do so either” (HRC 7.3;
Bowen’s punctuation and emphasis). Both drama and the short story
present scenes without narrative “rambling”; action unfolds with “a
sense of pressure – of immediacy – of something happening within
the grip of
our
senses – under our eyes” (HRC 7.3). For maximum
effect, character, simplified and unified, emerges through confron
tation with other characters. Dialogue in both the short story and
drama can occur without being spoken. As Bowen emphasises, “The
Short Story is – thus – the right – indeed, the inevitable – form for
the treatment
of an
incident, crisis, or, situation which the writer
feels to be of greater importance than its
apparent
triviality might
show” (HRC 7.3; Bowen’s punctuation). The statement implies that
the modern short story heightens the significance of a seemingly
trivial event. The story does not take inspiration from heroic or
grandiose action; its shape and length derive from its implication in
ordinariness. As Bowen comments in her preface to
The Faber Book of
Modern Short Stories
, the short story, as a product of the twentieth
century for the most part, is not “sponsored by a tradition” (
Collected
Impressions
38). The story does not aim at synthesis, but demonstrates
susceptibilities and irrationalities.
The Vassar notebooks detail Bowen’s understanding of the short
story as a vehicle for supernatural or uncanny events. She advises
that the “‘atmosphere’ necessary for MAGIC
throughout a novel
[.] Hence, suitability – for Magic – of the S.S.”
(HRC 7.3). The macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe confirm such a
claim, as do the ghost stories of Henry James. In Bowen’s view, the
story has a mandate to explore mysterious or uncanny events. The
quick pace of short narratives limits rational conjecture, which
allows the author to perpetrate irrational actions and activate
primitive emotions such as fear. In her Vassar notes, Bowen insists
that irrationality inheres in the short story form:
The UNCANNY means – I think? – the unknowable – something
beyond the bounds of
knowledge –
fear
With
Fear
, we return to
Primitive Feeling
depict
or
evoke fear
us
in the
primitive sense of fear
is
the measure of the “Success” of the Ghost STORY. (HRC 7.3;
Bowen’s lineation and emphasis)
Having previously discussed the primitive aesthetic of modernist
writers such as Lawrence in her lectures, Bowen equates the success
of a ghost story with the ability to stir fear in readers or characters
within the narrative. In “Just Imagine . . .” Noel and Nancy indulge
their craving for fear by telling and listening to ghastly stories;
as much as Noel wants to terrorise Nancy, Nancy longs to be
terrorised. Pointing out the allegiance between the uncanny and the
short story, “Just Imagine . . .” administers placebo doses of fear to
Nancy, if not to the reader. Because the short story condenses
action, connections between events or people remain unspoken. The
uncanny lodges in the recesses of such unspoken connections, or
what Bowen calls the “unknowable”; where information is incom
plete, irrational explanation or primitive feeling springs up.
Bowen’s identification of the story with uncanniness explains the
preponderance of stories in this volume that have a supernatural
bent or a fairy-tale quality. Unannounced, fairy godmothers fly in
from nowhere to attend christenings. Wicked older women start
covens and prey upon vulnerable youths. Ordinary houses turn out
to be haunted by ghosts claiming to be rightful heirs. Although
these traits and characters belong to the fairy tale, Bowen domesti
cates them into Christmas narratives or adapts them to fables. She
treats the fairy tale as a flexible form that need not adhere to the
enchanted conclusions of Goldilocks or Cinderella. Praising the
Brothers Grimm for rescuing oral tales from oblivion, Bowen
comments that the Grimm stories “are tales for all. For children, they
have the particular virtue of making sense. Everything that a child
feels should happen
happen” (“Enchanted Centenary” 113). The
fairy tale appeals to her for two particular reasons: first, it embodies
wish-fulfilling potentiality; second, by keeping alive oral narration,
it stresses the bond between narrator and audience. As Bowen claims
in “The Comeback of Goldilocks et al.,” “the fairy tale, in its extreme
simplicity, is a supreme test of the narrator’s art” (74). In terms of its
dimensions, the fairy tale roughly corresponds to the short story.
Although the fairy tale depends on some recognisable formulae, it is
subject to the dual pressures of representing conflict and finding a
conclusion to conflict within limited temporal dimensions, as does
the short story.
However unacknowledged, the fairy tale has a vibrant presence
within modernism, especially but not exclusively among Irish
writers. Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales promote charity and urbanity as
aspects of modern temperament. William Butler Yeats admires the
simplicity that Wilde achieved in his fairy tales: “Only when he
spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of his speech, or in some
simple fairy tale, had he words exact enough to hold a subtle ear”
(
90). Yeats may be no judge of fit language in fairy
tales, for he miscalculates their effect on the young: “Wilde asked
me to tell his little boy a fairy story, and I had but got as far as ‘Once
upon a time there was a giant’ when the little boy screamed and ran
out of the room” (
Autobiography
91). The fairy tale has calmer effects
in other modern texts. James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man
(1916) evokes a mythic realm of childhood by reciting the
formulaic opening of the fairy tale, albeit with a twist: “Once upon
a time and a very good time it was . . .” (7). In the same spirit, Henry
Green’s novel
Loving
(1945) begins, “Once upon a day,” and ends,
“happily ever after” (1, 225).
Joyce, Green, and Bowen take up the fairy tale ironically. In
, the goings-on in an Irish country house during the Second
World War defy belief. As Marina MacKay points out about Green’s
novel, “the neutral Republic of Ireland was something of a fantastical
never-never land during what its politicians euphemised as ‘The
Emergency’” (103). Like Joyce and Green, Bowen responds to the
myths foisted on children or countries with the evocation of tales
that disconcert expectations. “The Good Earl,” with its blend of a
collective Irish “we” narrator and late Victorian setting, converts the
folk tale into a political allegory. The earl builds a hotel and buys a
steamboat at the expense of commonsense and the common good.
Forests have been denuded and the castle has become dilapidated
because of the earl’s overweening ambition. The mythic quality
of “The Good Earl” – its shifting from past to present tense, its
abridging of decades – makes the story a fable of aristocratic folly.
A fairy tale for adults, the story stretches the boundaries of the form.
The fairy tale is not morally static or constricted by formulae in
Bowen’s view. In an introduction to
, she
points out that Ruskin’s fairy tale has three brothers but no princess,
and a “decidedly comic” person, the bedraggled South-West Wind,
who practises magic (iii). Ruskin’s tale thus contradicts the conven
tions of the genre. No matter how earnestly she praises traditional
tales, Bowen uses the fairy tale, with its provenance in housewives’
stories, to revise conventions of gender and morality. She resists
stereotypes of helpless girls and helpful godmothers. Cast as an
orally transmitted seamstress’s tale, “I Died of Love” takes place
between the last years of Victoria’s reign and some unspecified later
time. Magical elements, such as Miss Mettishaw’s sewing skill and
her coming and going at the busiest times for the shop, mingle with
a cautionary story of love and folly. Neither Bowen nor Miss
Mettishaw promises a happy ending. Indeed, the destruction of Miss
Mettishaw’s millinery establishment reconfigures the “happily ever
after” of the fairy tale. In a less anxious register, “The Unromantic
Princess” does not deny the virtues of commonsense and punctuality,
but those virtues succeed better when combined with tolerance
and a human capacity to love. The princess dispenses with fairy
godmothers because wizardry has no place in the proper governance
of a country, which henceforth will operate along “modern lines.”
Many of the children in Bowen’s stories show practical intelligence.
In “Brigands,” precocious children outstrip adults in their under
standing of thieves. Whereas the adults prove incapable of thinking
of anyone but themselves, Oliver and Maria act more or less out
of curiosity and selflessness. They do not believe in supernatural
explanations. As “The Claimant” and “Christmas Games” demon
strate, sorcery and magic are best left to adults.
The majority of stories in this volume are indeed written for and
about adults. In a realist rather than a fairy-tale mode, they depict a
tangle of unhappy love affairs and marriages. More often than not,
Bowen trains her sights on the crisis of sundered love brought
about by an accumulation of misunderstandings, disappointments,
and betrayals. Lovers in these stories are rarely romanticised, let
alone romantic; modern love forbids the celebration of grandiose
passions in and of themselves. Lady Cuckoo comically ignores
Uncle Theodore’s marriage proposals in “Emergency in the Gothic
Wing,” which does not dissuade him from asking again. Lovers, such
as the irascible pair in “Moses” or the tetchy couple in “Flavia,” are
subjected to ironic diagnoses, either by each other or by the
narrator. Many of these stories tabulate the costs of love. An extramarital affair painfully ends a marriage in “Story Scene.” In “So Much
Depends,” the carelessness of a young woman in love contrasts with
the anguish of a mature woman unsure of how to be in love: Ellen
spreads discontent wherever she goes because she feels wronged,
whereas Miss Kerry manages her more passionate feelings without
ostentation.