Trevor’s Little People

I’ve just begun to plow through William Trevor’s massive The Collected Stories, a treasure house of some eighty five short stories, all 1,250 pages of them.  One can appreciate why he has been called one of the greatest UK short story writers. They are masterful stories and although my preference for American literature had – until now -- overridden my desire to read Trevor, I knew Updike had a high regard for his work (and Trevor reciprocated his admiration for Updike’s).  It took the mention of a Trevor short story in an Ian McEwen novel, Sweet Tooth, to remind me that there is a world of literature out there I haven’t yet uncovered and as I’m trying to write some of my own short stories, I picked up this gem from one of Amazon’s partners for less than a buck plus shipping.  An incredible bargain, if you have the strength to hold book, especially when reading in bed, a habit I’ve developed in the quiet of the night.  But this 2 plus lb book requires support on a pillow on my stomach as I read in bed!  Sometimes, as much as I enjoy reading at that particular time, I find myself falling asleep with my glasses on, still holding the book on the pillow, my wife finally turning off the light, removing the book from my sleeping hands, marking the page, and removing my glasses. 

It’ll be some time before I’m “finished” with these stories (other than for reasons of occasionally falling asleep!).  First, they are to be savored and thought about.  It’s not a fast read, particularly for someone who is trying to better understand the short story craft and is taking notes here and there.  Some stories are best appreciated when reread as well. Furthermore, I have other things to read so I’ll put this down from time to time to get to those other works, novels generally.  And of course, there is life to attend to.  Reading is what is left over to do after a busy day.  Therefore, these early comments on what I’ve read thus far.

How do I possibly categorize these stories?  As Updike had his characters -- such as The Maples --- mostly modeled after friends and family, highly educated, upper middle class folk with an excessive libido, Trevor has his “little people,” people eking out a life in the UK after WW II, some of whom have allowed their fantasy lives to take over, living with illusions frequently to the very end of the story, ones of which they may not even be aware.  It leaves the reader with a sense of wonder, about human nature, about the miracle of day to day existence in general.  How do we all get by, burdened by the past or by expectations?  Trevor once defined the short story as ''an art of the glimpse,'' whose ''strength lies in what it leaves out.”  It’s the reader’s job to fill in the latter.

Many of the characters begin at one level of a story, exemplary folk in the reader’s mind, only to have life take them down a peg or two, then three, to the end of the story.   One such story, “The General’s Day,” concerns a retired General, well known in his town, who leaves his housekeeper during the day to explore the town, usually with fantasies of meeting a younger woman, or seeing friends (who assiduously avoid him), meanwhile suspecting his housekeeper of stealing from him or secretly imbibing his liquor.  And yet he goes off, and not everything goes as he’s imagined.  But there is the past to cling to, as do many of Trevor’s characters, along with their hopes.  Here’s just a piece of Trevor’s prose which makes this point:

The General walked on, his thoughts rambling.  He thought of the past; of specific days, of moments of shame or pride in his life.  The past was his hunting ground; from it came his pleasure and a good deal of everything else.  Yet he was not proof against the moment he lived in. The present could snarl at him; could drown his memories so completely that when they surfaced again they were like the burnt tips of matches floating on a puddle, finished and done with.  He walked through the summery day, puzzled that all this should be so.

Not wanting to give away spoilers, it’s hard to go on with this story gem.  Suffice it to say, the General’s day ends not as he hoped, but apparently as it always has, and the reader observes human nature stripped threadbare.  In fact, if anything characterizes Trevor’s stories, it is his unrelenting dissection of lives, bit by bit, getting to core truths, ones not evident at the beginning. 

Thus far my favorite story is “In at the Birth” but to try to analyze it or say anything about it is just to spoil another reader's enjoyment of the story.  But I will say it is constructed with such care that the outcome, surreal in many respects, is still in keeping with Trevor’s love of his “little people.”   Meanwhile, I still have scores of his stories to read and perhaps I’ll revisit Trevor in these “pages” sometime again in the future.  Must confess, the sheer bulk of the collection starts to make sense reading on a Kindle, something I have resisted, not because I am a Luddite, but I’ve been a book person all my life (personally and professionally).  

I remember commuting to my first publishing job in 1964 from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the BMT.  As any veteran “strap-holder” will know, it took a certain skill to hold on with one hand, and read a paperback book with the other, turning the pages with that one hand.  It’s a skill that is not applicable to this book!  Nonetheless, The Collected Stories of William Trevor is highly recommended if you like the genre.  

PS  Trevor is "revisited" in this entry

Perfectly Frank

Richard Ford is one of the few authors that’ll I’ll buy any book he writes as soon as it is published in hardcover. I’m particularly fond of the Frank Bascombe novels, Ford’s protagonist from The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land, written in the first person by a “familiar old friend” from New Jersey.  I feel I know this person as I knew Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  Frank is four years younger than I and Rabbit was ten years older.  But the times recounted by these characters are of my era.  No wonder I’m so familiar with the landscapes of their lives. And it is interesting that both Updike and Ford had declared the end of their Angstrom and Bascombe novels with the completion their trilogies, only to come out with one more, as if the character told the writer he had something else to say.  I certainly thought the Bascombe works had come to an end when he wrote Canada, a fine novel.

But primarily it is Frank’s voice, the way he thinks, that connects with me -- plaintive, sardonic, ironic, perplexed, now somewhat resigned, and with a wry wit. 

The hardcover edition of Let Me Be Frank With You is also a treasure to hold, a three piece binding, nicely designed  including the jacket, printed on an off white stock, with headbands and foot bands, but as with most hardcover editions nowadays, no longer smyth sewn – instead it’s a “perfect bound book” in a hard case.  In my book production days, this would be library-unacceptable, but I suppose we should be grateful that the hardcover book still hangs on, pre-digital-historical relic though it may be.

I confess I ordered this as soon as I heard about it without knowing the details.  It’s by Richard Ford and it’s another Frank Bascombe book.  That’s all I needed to know.  It turned out not be a novel but instead four lengthy short stories, loosely held together by Hurricane Sandy and the theme of aging. 

The leitmotiv of the Hurricane is actually central to the first story, “I’m Here.” At the request of an old real estate client, Arne Urguhart (Frank became a real estate agent after he was a sportswriter and an aspiring novelist), he goes to the Jersey shore to see what’s left of the house he sold Arne, actually the house that Frank lived in with his ex-wife Ann. 

In the second story, “Everything Could Be Worse,” he is visited in his present home in Haddam, the town where Frank began his journey in the The Sportswriter, by a Mrs. Pines, who has become displaced by the Hurricane, and injured as well, a cast on her arm, and has an unexpected urge to see the home in which she grew up and in which a terrible crime was committed.  Frank invites her to tour the house and her story unfolds.

From there we segue to “The New Normal” where Frank goes to visit his ex-wife who is now a resident of a high-end retirement community, with progressively deteriorating Parkinson’s disease, one she even blames on the Hurricane as a “super-real change agent.  It was in the air. 

The concluding story says much about the underlying theme of the entire collection, “Death of Others.”  Here he goes to visit a friend who is literally at death’s door, living in a home he’s occupied for scores of years, being attended to by hospice.  Frank was once his neighbor.  The dying man, Eddie Medley, makes a startling confession to Frank. The Hurricane in this story hangs in the background on Eddie’s silent TV, a program surveying the damage.

I was prepared to be disappointed by this book as it is not another FB novel.  Independence Day, the second FB novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is probably his best.  Just the opening sentence of that one expresses his love of the geographic territory: In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.  In his new short story collection, such a sentence would seem to be impossible.  Why?  Because FB has aged.  He sees life and Haddam differently now.

So, while being disappointed that this was not another novel, if one concentrates on “the voice” and the themes, perhaps it actually works better as a number of loosely connected short stories.  I think that genre feels so natural for what Ford has to say.  What Frank says about “love” could be said about his life — Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.  And so these stories represent single acts, making up Frank as he enters old age.

When you grow old, as I am, you pretty much live in the accumulations of life anyway.  Not that much is happening, except on the medical front.  Better to strip things down.  And where better to start stripping than the words we choose to express our increasingly rare, increasingly vagrant thoughts.

It's not true that as you get older things slide away like molasses off a table top. What is true is I don't remember some things that well, owing to the fact that I don't care all that much. I now wear a cheap Swatch watch, but I do sometimes lose the handle on the day of the month, especially near the end and the beginning, when I get off-track about "thirty days hath September ... " This, I believe, is normal and doesn't worry me. It's not as if I put my trousers on backwards every morning, tie my shoelaces together, and can't find my way to the mailbox.

And I was also amused by Frank’s description of the dangers of falling as a senior citizen.  I’ve been warned as well because one of my so-called “necessary” medications has the side effect of thinning bones. They even wanted to give me other medication to combat those side effects, but that one has its own likely side effects (I refused). Pick your poison I’m told, although as one doctor empathetically told me, “it’s not your bones that’s gonna get you, it’s something else.”  I could not have said it any better than Frank, though, and reading this book should be required as one enters the final stage of one’s life.  As Bette Davis said, “growing old is not for sissies.”

Here’s Frank’s take on it: I'm also concerned about stepping on a nail, myself And because of something Sally said, I feel a need to more consciously pick my feet up when I walk-"the gramps shuffle" being the unmaskable, final-journey approach signal. It'll also keep me from falling down and busting my ass. What is it about falling? "He died of a fall." "The poor thing never recovered after his fall." "He broke his hip in a fall and was never the same." "Death came relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard." How fucking far do these people fall? Off of buildings? Over spuming cataracts? Down manholes? Is it farther to the ground than it used to be? In years gone by I'd fall on the ice, hop back up, and never think a thought. Now it's a death sentence. What Sally said to me was "Be careful when you go down those front steps, sweetheart. The surface isn't regular, so pick your feet up." Why am I now a walking accident waiting to happen? Why am I more worried about that than whether there's an afterlife?

He somewhat reluctantly, but obligingly, goes once a month to visit his ex-wife (his present wife, Sally, is fine with this) Ann who now lives in cutting edge senior care center, one in which there is progressive health care, right to the grave. At Ann’s new home, Carnage Hill (love the name of the place), being sick to death is like a passage on a cruise ship where you’re up on the captain’s deck, eating with him and possibly Engelbert Humperdinck, and no one’s getting Legionnaires’ or being cross about anything.  And you never set sail or arrive anywhere, so there’re no bad surprises or disappointments about the ports of call being shabby and alienating.  There aren’t any ports of call. This is it.

Ann get’s under Frank’s skin. And she has a knack of getting me under her magnifying glass for the sun to bake me a while before I can exit back home to second-marriage deniability.

He handles his visits by displaying his “default self.” The Default Self, my answer to all her true-thing issues, is an expedient that comes along with nothing more than being sixty-eight - the Default Period of life. Being an essentialist, Ann believes we all have selves, characters we can't do anything about (but lie). Old Emerson believed the same. " ... A man should give us a sense of mass ... ," etc. My mass has simply been deemed deficient. But I believe nothing of the sort. Character, to me, is one more lie of history and the dramatic arts. In my view, we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that. But nothing else - nothing hard or kernel-like. I've never seen evidence of anything resembling it. In fact I've seen the opposite: life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end.

His move back to Haddam -- where he originally began as a sportswriter aka aspiring novelist – gives him both a sense of place and an opportunity to express his sense of change.   Wallace Stevens commented “we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”  Not Frank Bascombe. 

Our move to Haddam, a return to streets, housing stocks and turbid memories I thought I'd forever parted with, was like many decisions people my age make: conservative, reflexive, unadventurous, and comfort-hungry - all posing as their opposite: novel, spirited, enlightened, a stride into the mystery of life, a bold move only a reckless few would ever chance. As if I'd decided to move to Nairobi and open a Gino's. Sadly, we only know well what we've already done.

Indeed, neighborhoods change and new neighbors are remote….  

In the eight years since Sally and I arrived back from Sea Clift, we haven't much become acquainted with our neighbors. Very little gabbing over the fence to share a humorous "W" story. Few if any spontaneous invitations in for a Heineken. No Super Bowl parties, potlucks, or housewarmings. Next door might be a Manhattan Project pioneer, Tolstoy's grand-daughter, or John Wayne Gacy. But you'd hardly know it, and no one seems interested. Neighbors are another vestige of a bygone time. All of which I'm fine with”

Code variances have led to such unpredictable changes, especially for Frank’s neighborhood which has been recodified as a “mixed use” neighborhood, the end of life as we know it.  Though my bet is I’ll be in my resting place before that bad day dawns.  If there’s a spirit of one-ness in my b. ’45 generation, it’s that we all plan to be dead before the big shit train finds the station…..How these occurrences foretell changes that’ll eventuate in a Vietnamese massage becoming my new neighbor is far from clear.  But it happens – like tectonic plates, whose movement you don’t feel ‘til it’s the big one and your QOL goes away in an afternoon.  From my own experience, Amen to that.

The last story seems to tie everything together.  It carries the ironic title of “Death of Others” as if it can’t happen to us, something we all secretly believe, even knowing intellectually it will.  If we didn’t hold on to that fantasy, perhaps we’d go crazy.  In this regard, I envy religious people who actually look forward to the “afterlife.”

In the mornings as he has his breakfast Frank listens to the local call in radio station, a program called Yeah?  What’s It To You?  Most of the discussion lately has been about the “killer storm.” He enjoys listening to his fellow Haddam citizens, their views and personal life evaluations…as nutty as they sometimes are.  For a man in retirement, those brief immersions offer a fairly satisfying substitute to what was once plausible, fully lived life.

He also reads the local obits to honor the deceased, but also quietly to take cognizance of how much any life can actually contain (a lot!), while acknowledging that for any of us a point comes when most of life’s been lived and there’s much less of it than there used to be, and yet what’s there is not to be missed or pissed away in a blur.”

On that radio program he hears the labored voice of Eddie Medley, ex neighbor, and a Michigan Wolverine alumnus as Frank.  An old friend.  A dying friend.  Eddie also leaves a message on Frank’s answering machine.  Something in his voice…frail, but revealing of an inward-tendingness that spoke of pathos and solitude, irreverence and unexpected wonder. More the tryer than I'd first thought, but caked over by illness and time. Even in a depleted state, he seemed to radiate what most modern friendships never do, in spite of all the time we waste on them: the chance that something interesting could be imparted, before-the-curtain-sways-shut-and-all-becomes-darkness. Something about living with just your same ole self all these years, and how enough was really enough. I didn't know anyone else who thought that. Only me. And what's more interesting in the world than being agreed with?

Frank really doesn’t want to see him, a dying man.  He tells him on the phone he’s too busy.  Eddie replies: I’m busy too.  Busy getting dead.  If you want to catch me live, you better get over here.  Maybe you don’t want to.  Maybe you’re that kind of chickenshit.  Pancreatic cancer’s gone to my lungs and belly…It is goddamn efficient.  I’ll say that.  They knew how to make cancer when they made this shit.

At his advancing age Frank has also been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don’t do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness  Only (in my view) it’s a less-ness that’s as good as anything that happened before – plus it’s a lot easier. 

Although Frank does volunteer work, reading for the blind and welcoming veterans back home, he leaves 60 percent of available hours for the unexpected – a galvanizing call to beneficent action, in this case.  But what I mostly want to do is nothing I don’t want to do.  Nonetheless, as he has the time for the “unexpected” and he goes to see his old friend.

He finally gets to Eddie’s house and is admitted by the hospice worker to the bedroom. Eddie looks like a skeleton, has trouble even talking, breathing, but he is trying to tell him something. Frank bends down to listen ’That’s what I’m here for.’ Not literally true.  Eddie may mistake me for the angel of death, and this moment his last try at coherence.  Death makes of everything in life a dream.  Eddie reveals an old, dark secret, one impacting Frank.  No spoilers here.

The take away of this splendid collection of FB stories is if you are planning to grow old, or if you have already joined our group, this is a primer of what is in store.  But it’s more than the content, it’s the unique voice of Frank Bascombe, and hopefully there will be other such works from Ford in the future.  And remember, there’s something to be said for the good no-nonsense hurricane, to bully life back into perspective.

A Stay at Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac

That’s the way I felt reading this deliciously elegant novel by Anita Brookner:  I too in the late fall, out of season, was ensconced in the Hotel Du Lac, observing the eccentricities of the characters staying there and, in particular, those of our protagonist, Edith Hope.  She is a writer of romance novels and she has come to the hotel from her home in England more as banishment than a vacation.  But for what reprehensible indiscretion?  We have to wait until about midway through the novel to find that out and while it’s a surprise, it is totally understandable in context.  Meanwhile, Edith who is determined to finish her next novel while staying at the hotel becomes more tangled with the few other people staying there at the end of the season, each with reasons for their own for self-exile.  In fact if anything stands out in the novel, particularly for Edith, it is a sense of estrangement.  But as her own life becomes involved with the lives of the others there on the increasingly frigid misty shores of Lake Geneva, Edith is changed, seeing herself in a different light.

If one had asked Edith before, she would have prided herself on her independence, but, now, she is no longer sure how independent a woman should or can be.  After all, one returning visitor there, Mrs. Pusey, and her middle aged daughter, Jennifer, come every time of this year with the singular purpose to shop.  “And she was enabled to do this by virtue of the fact that her late husband had prudently deposited certain sums of money in an account in her name in a Swiss bank.”

Edith is a writer, so Mrs. Pusey “presented her with the opportunity to examine and to enjoy, contact with an alien species.  For in this charming woman, so entirely estimable in her happy to desire to capture hearts, so completely preoccupied with the femininity which had always provided her with life’s chief delights, Edith perceived avidity, grossness, ardour.”

As these brief quotes attest, there is a 19^th century quality to the writing, even 18^th century.  Consider what Edith remarks in a letter to her lover, David (married, unlike Edith), back home when imagining the kind of man Mrs. Pusey’s daughter, Jennifer, would ever marry: 

I wonder if Jennifer is ever to marry. On which outsider will descend the supreme accolade of becoming an insider? How will he be recognized? He will have to present impeccable credentials: wealth equal to theirs, or, if possible, superior, a suitably elevated style of living, an ideally situated residence, and what Mrs. Pusey refers to as "position". All these attributes will come before his physical appearance, for Jennifer might be led astray by that into making a hasty judgment. My feeling is that the chosen one will be agreeably but perhaps not emphatically masculine; he will be courtly and not too young and very patient and totally indulgent. He will have to be all of these things because if he is to be a match for Mrs. Pusey's vigilance he will have to spend a great deal of time with her. With them both. In fact I see Jennifer's married life as being an extension of her present one; simply, there will be three of them instead of two. The only rite of passage will be the wedding, and as this will be seen primarily as the pretext for buying more clothes its ultimate significance will be occluded. This man, Jennifer's husband, will occupy a position equidistant between the two of them, on call in both directions. He will perforce be the man of the family, but he will not be a Pusey. And in any event, were they not perfectly happy before he came along? Were not their standards of excellence confined to themselves? How could he possibly justify any suggestion of change?

Isn’t this something almost out of Jane Austen?  But of course, this is a 20^th century novel, and men do figure differently in the equation, particularly for Edith, who has a long term dalliance home in England (is David the reason she has been banished to the Hotel we wonder?) and at the hotel she meets her match (intellectually), Mr. Neville, with whom she spars as the novel progresses.  He figures in a double surprise ending, one we sort of suspect and the other we do not.  Can’t say much more about the characters here or spoilers would be self evident.  But I will say one thing, the solitary women there at the hotel, Monica, Mme de Bonneuil, as well as Mrs. Pusey, are there, one way or another, because of men.  And so is Edith.

Brookner displays tightly woven prose, almost like a short story, each word carefully chosen and measured.  It is elegant and it glitters throughout her work.  I especially enjoy when writers write about writing.   And Edith Hope is ironically a writer of popular romance novels, one she herself recognizes is not about the real world.  She’s working on a new novel, Beneath the Visiting Moon, one she imagines she’ll make great progress on while at the hotel, trying to keep to a daily schedule of writing, “[bending] her head obediently to her daily task of fantasy and obfuscation.”

But she is mired now in the lives of the people at the hotel, and as determined as she is to keep up the daily grind, she has difficulty.  She imagines she’ll have to read fiction to restart her creative juices:

Embroiled in her fictional plot, the main purpose of which was to distance those all too real circumstances over which she could exert no control, she felt a weariness that seemed to preclude any enthusiasm, any initiative, any relaxation. Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties, since when she was writing she could only read something she had read before, and in her exhausted state, a febrile agitation, invisible to the naked eye, tended to distance even the very familiar. Words became distorted: 'pear', for instance, would become 'fear’.  She dreaded making nonsense of something precious to her, and, regretfully, disqualified Henry James. Nothing too big would do, nothing too small would suffice. In any event, her attention was fragmented.

No small coincidence that Edith mentions Henry James as Brookner writes with a similar style and interest in the complexities of human psychology.  Hotel Du Lac deservedly won the Booker Prize in 1984.  I’m glad I visited the hotel!  I can also recommend Strangers, another Brookner novel I read a few years ago.  Among other topics, I wrote it up briefly here.