The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

In January I read an extremely positive review of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction in a 1930s New Yorker magazine. Unable to find any of her short stories at the time, I instead read "The Heat of the Day," which I found tedious in its obsessive examination of people's thought processes. In short, I was impressed by her approach and her zeal but I found the book extremely annoying.

Now, after a long slog, I'm finishing off "The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen," which apparently contains all of the short fiction she ever wrote...and let me tell you, she wrote a lot. Many of these stories were ones that the New Yorker reviewer raved about. How has it been?

Complete collections of a prolific writer's short fiction should come with a big warning, which unfortunately I know I'd disregard anyway: "Do not read all these stories in a row. They were not meant to be read this way. They previously appeared in diverse periodicals and smaller collections. You have been warned."

So I'm warning you: just as the complete short fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges can drive you insane, so can the complete short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Not because it's BAD -- it's brilliant, in fact -- but just because there's too much of it.

And like the complete works of ANY writer I found myself noticing the trends in her work, most particularly:

• The trauma of moving to different houses, particularly among the upper classes. Her characters suffer the sale of the ancestral homes and the purchasing of newer, awkward, unpleasant homes which turn out of have sweaty plaster.
• The trauma of living off another person's charity, especially when the other person isn't charitable and -- in reality -- just keeps people around to traumatize them.
• The strange boredom of off-season luxury resorts.
• The thought processes of alienated, troublesome children.
• Aunts. Everybody's got an aunt who is the most significant secondary character.

These are things that you wouldn't notice if you read her stories occasionally, and they're entirely superficial to the plots themselves, but when you're reading them all in a row it's like "Oh yes, a new house, a strange aunt, now let's get to the heart of it please."

And the hearts of these stories are devastating, especially the ones written during the '20s and '30s. Most of them are about the slow, mundane grind of everyday relationships and the hidden compulsions that modernists so loved to write about. Bowen has a particular ability for troubled children who are so lifelike that you almost want to turn away. The precocious Maria (in the story of the same name) the crying little boy with his ducks (in "Tears, Idle Tears") and the absolutely doomed Hermione (in "The Easter Egg Party") are permanently stuck with me.

Bowen's style isn't one that relies on an all-encompassing statement to make its point; instead, the drama builds and builds through successive examples, leaving you squirming with the terrible, truthful awkwardness of it all. Here's a description of Hermione, viewed through the eyes of a pair of aunts who are trying a last-ditch attempt to integrate her with other children.

She shook hands with a rigid arm, on which all the bracelets jumped. She looked straight at everyone, but from a moody height: what was evident was not just fear or shyness but a desperate, cut-off haughtiness. In her eyes existed a world of alien experience. The jolly, tallish girls with their chubbed hair, the straddling little boys with their bare knees, apt to frown at the grass between their sandshoes, rebounded from that imperious stare. Either she cared too much or she did not care a fig for them -- and in either case they did not know how to meet her.

And that's before things get bad. You see, it's both normal and abnormal, expected and unexpected: it's the odd part of people and everyday life that you try not to look closely at.

Elizabeth Bowen writes almost all of her stories about these situations.

Then there's the other, somewhat less satisfying trend, the one that the New Yorker reviewer had particularly liked: the ghost stories. These appear from out of nowhere in the collection and they disappear just as quickly and bafflingly. Why did Bowen write about ghosts as often as she did?

Well, most of the ghosts are catalysts for the emotional outpourings of her characters, and likewise the reader is uncertain as to whether they're REAL ghosts or not...except in two stories, one of which (Green Holly) is surprisingly gruesome.

Unfortunately Bowen had an occasional tendency to doddle, in which case her longer stories end up in the same vein as "The Heat of the Day," seeming directionless, obsessive, and far too inward-looking. Her writing was at its best at ten pages or less. I found every story that was longer than 15 pages to be virtually unreadable (and believe me, I have a high threshold for this sort of thing).

Rather than tell you to go out and read the whole book (which I don't recommend) or tell you NOT to read her work (which would be a disservice), I suggest you pick up her Collected Stories and only read the ones from the '20s and '30s, and only the shorter ones. If you have a personal interest in the London Blitz then you should read the War-Time stories as well (and at least give "Mysterious Kôr" a try, which harkens back to her best creepy character studies).

If any Elizabeth Bowen fans read this, please let me know which novels YOU would suggest. I have another one lying around someplace but I don't think I can handle it right at the moment.

"An Awfully Big Adventure" by Beryl Bainbridge

First "Harriet Said," then "According to Queeny," and now "An Awfully Big Adventure." Beryl Bainbridge has a real facility for troubled, unreliable, inscrutable, dangerous, and somewhat sociopathic pubescent girls.

Since I discovered her writing last year I have been slowly collecting her work...a used book here, a reprint there. Something has kept me from devouring them all in one sitting, as though each one must be read at exactly the right time and long after the previous one. Each of the three novels I've read have left me totally satisfied and a little stuffed; they're delicious dinners, the kind you don't want to eat every night.

"An Awfully Big Adventure" is amazing. Bainbridge has a touch of Vladimir Nabokov to her, an art of setting up a logical sequence of characters and props, and then allowing them to operate quietly behind the main action of the book. The perceptive reader catches glimpses of these background objects and tries to guess their trajectories, and it seems that when everything comes together in a Bainbridge novel it must be a tragedy, but a PERFECT tragedy; something that the victims, two hundred pages ago, should have seen coming.

Let me try to describe this better: these books are beautiful, witty, vicious, and true. They're about the unreliable memories of others and ourselves. They're about the disconnect between what people say and what they actually feel, and the effect this disconnect has on other characters (and the reader).

But on top of all that the stories are GOOD stories, they're well-formed and satisfying. Like, "An Awfully Big Adventure" may be unconventional under the surface, containing layer upon layer of translucent meaning, but on top of it all it's about second-rate actors in a scruffy British reperatory theater, coping with postwar shellshock and unrequited love and...well, I won't say anything more. You should just read it.

I notice that the local video store just got the movie adaptation in, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. I have a feeling I'll hate it, but I'll watch it anyway.

Liveblogging My Grandfather's Tapes II

Continuing the liveblogging, because I know you're curious how that wiener thing ended up.

This "wiener deal" caused a tightening of tour restrictions...wouldn't let tourists near chicken or wiener processing, then wouldn't let them in the beef kill or the pork kill. Tours kept getting cut down, both in volume and number.

He stopped taking tours two years ago. He was "senior man" and felt that other and younger fellows might be better at it. He did the tours for thirteen years. He started at Schneider's in 1934 and was still doing tours in 1989, well over fifty years with the company. They have a retiree's travel club. A woman who started at Schneider's when he did suggested the travel club after retirement, have been doing it for twenty years...have several trips on the go.

Trips to Alexandria, New York. A ten-day trip to the Ozarks, one to Toronto, one through the Welland Canal, one to the Shaw Festival. So he's still involved with Schneider's. They used to rent their own busses but the costs were too high, now go through a travel agent.

INTERVIEWER: I know that you went to PEI during World War Two. Tell me more.

He went to London to enlist, but he and his brother were told to wait for their call. He got his call in August 1942, got into the service in November or December. He went into the Air Force, his brother was in the Army. He went to a camp near Montreal. Went to the Toronto Hunt Club for initial training, was then sent to Jarvis for further training, also LINK trainer, where he "washed out." He didn't have the physical qualities necessary.

The LINK trainer was a machine similar to flying. Just an imitation. Just barely the cockpit. There was scenery around you and you had the horizon, what it was was a simulated aircraft flight. He couldn't judge between the aircraft and the ground so they washed him out. He was finished.

So he remustered to aeroengines (ground crew), he typed wills at the Toronto manning pool for troops who were enlisting, this was at the sheep pen in the Exhibition grounds. Then he went to Galt for the aeroengine training school, in some of the old factory buildings down there. Then was shipped to St. Thomas, just a holding depot for postings, waiting for his assignment, continued marching and was held in barracks.

Then was posted to Moose Jaw for four days -- on ground crew, out on the airstrip. Would warm up planes in the morning, test everything. It was a bombing and gunnery school. An aircraft would carry two fellows, would drag a flag on a cable from behind. The fellows in another aircraft would shoot at the flag and record the results. They also dropped imitation explosives, fly over targets. A fellow in a pigeonhole would record how the bombing run went.

Then he was posted to Prince Edward Island. Two stations were there: Summerside (surveillance for submarines) and Mount Pleasant (also bombing and gunnery school). Was there from June 1944 to June 1945 with Rita (his wife). Had two rooms, four families living in one house, had a daughter (Sharon) just a year and a half old.

The armistice was signed and he was sent back to Ottawa until his discharge. Got it in Toronto in October 1945 on the Exhibition grounds. He was never sent overseas, possibly because he was married and had a child, and was also thirty. They had kids, 19, 20, "sharp as tacks, and, you might say, champing at the bit." He was on an overseas draft but they took him off. So he ended up in PEI, not in a war zone.

INTERVIEWER: Were there accidents during training?

Planes did go down, he was on guard duty on occasions when two went down. A seaplane crashed on an Ottawa roof near Hull, he was sent out to guard the plane and make sure it wasn't tampered with. At Mount Pleasant a plane went down and he guarded it for a week. To keep everybody away, civilians, air force people, until investigators could determine what happened.

Came back home in 1945. He was glad to get home. Then he went back to Schneider's. His job was held, and the plant treated the soldiers well. They made up a monthly food box that was sent to every worker in the service. The boxes contained toffee, cigarettes, canned butter, cookies, biscuits, summer sausage, canned meat. Also mailed overseas. Clarence Heller was in charge of the department that oversaw that operation.

It was a good place to work. There weren't too many people suffered, and if they did it was their own fault. J.M. (the founder) knew the old originals in the plant and he'd go out and visit them. Fred was quiet, more the businessman. Norm was everybody's friend, would ask people's opinion of things.

INTERVIEWER: Who were the old-timers you started there with?

When he started, a lot of the original employees were there. William Rohleder was the fellow that J. M. brought over as the sausage maker. "He was big, fat, German fellow." Jolly and robust. He was retired by that time. When J.M. started he only knew how to make pork sausage, so he brought in Rohleder. Wanted to branch out. Rohleder was practially a partner, probably had some money in the business when he retired.

The Radke brothers. Oscar worked in the cook room, Dutch loaf was roasted at that time. Oscar ended up in catering, making roast loaves and roast tails, had a special recipe for potato salad. Harry Radke was a "pig-sticker." "In other words, he stuck he hogs."

Gus Hagerman was head of the cook room, he might have invented the Dutch loaf. The Dutch loaf is a baked liver loaf, has a liver flavour to it. It's still made. J. M. was around. Freddy Maier worked in the office, did bookkeeping. Fred Schneider was head bookkeeper, in charge of finance. Norm Schneider was a mechanic, factory superintendent, also very quality-minded.

Edgar Gimble was cashier, one of the old originals.

INTERVIEWER: Thanks to both of you!

GRANDMA: I've heard things too, that I've never heard!

Vaudeville

I'm not much of an Abbott & Costello fan but they probably didn't write this joke anyway:

Costello: I've been experimenting with shortwaves!

Abbott: When did you start experimenting with shortwaves?

Costello: Ever since I got slapped by a tall WAC!

It's a joke so clean you could tell your grandparents! And for those people who AREN'T grandparents, here's some context: a WAVE, a WAC, and for additional bonus points, a WREN.

PS: Overheard on the March 7, 1946 edition of the "Abbott and Costello Show."

Yossarian Lives!

People have always told me that I should read Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." They always compare it to "Gravity's Rainbow" in its intricacy, huge cast, WWII setting, and combination of low-brow humour and high-falutin' intellectual condundrums.

So I've finally read it, and I'm not sure what I think. I know that I disliked the first half, with its constant string of repetative jokes (and when I say "constant," I really mean it: page after page, paragraph after paragraph, joke upon joke upon joke).

Gradually, however, I became aware of "the trend," and therefore I started to "get it." Every one of the huge number of characters is a critical piece of the novel's fine-tuned equipment, like the 34 miniscule parts of Orr's tiny valves. They're like parts of one of those Rube Goldberg machines: each character is ridiculous, but they fit together and spin around and perform their stereotypical actions until -- at the end -- Yossarian is popped out with a new, honest, and strangely noble purpose at the end.

I also noticed that, about halfway through, the novel was getting darker. From the first uneasy hints about Snowden's death in the plane, to Milo's bombing of his own base in order to make a profit, to Kid Sampson's comical but gruesome death ("Kid Sampson had rained all over. Those who spied drops of him on their limbs or torsos drew back with terror and revulsion..."), to Yossarian's gut-wrenching, helpless walk through "The Eternal City," and ending with a real, final, blow-by-blow description of Snowden's slow death from a piece of shrapnel that literally burst his entrails into the casing of his flak jacket...

Wow. My skin crawled. By sickening me with silliness and then, gently, leading me into some of the most grotesque and hopeless fiction I've ever read, "Catch-22" did something that most books can't do: it UPSET me. It didn't necessarily ENTERTAIN me or EDUCATE me, but it got under my skin and made me hurt, mentally. As for its comparisons to Gravity's Rainbow...I can certainly see that, but whereas Gravity's Rainbow is paranoid yet hopeful, Catch-22 is more cynical and relentlessly pessimistic: the characters know EXACTLY who is out to get them, and they know EXACTLY how it will be done, and there's no way of stopping it.

I think the book is often messy and confused, and too wrapped up in its cleverness for its own good. But at other times Joseph Heller's games made me laugh in outright delight; other than Nately's Whore's outrageous homicidal antics, which had me stifling my laughter in my little cubicle at work, my favourite moment was understated, and one that you needed to read closely to understand:

'Hungry Joe was killed.'

'God, no! On a mission?'

'He died in his sleep while having a dream. They found a cat on his face.'