Review – Short stories

William Trevor, The hill bachelors (#Review)

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Well, Kim (Reading Matters) and Cathy’s (746 Books) “A year with William Trevor” project is all but over, and I’ve only done one post – on the titular story in the little The dressmaker’s child collection. The second story, “The hill bachelors” (as in bachelors living in the hills), was first published in his collection titled The hill bachelors.

William Trevor (1928-2016), as most of you will know, is an Irish writer of novels and novellas, short stories and plays. He is particularly good at writing about marginalised people, or those who are loners or outsiders, and writes authentically about them, regardless of their age or gender. “The hill bachelors” is another of these, though perhaps more a variation on the theme. Is the protagonist Paulie marginalised? In a sense perhaps? Is he a loner or outsider? Again, it depends on how you see him, and the choices he makes.

Trevor is one of those writers who lets the reader work out who’s who, what’s what, as we go. The first two paragraphs of this story describe a 68-year-old woman, wearing mourning clothes, waiting for “them” who will decide her future. Very little is overtly explained, but by the end of the second paragraph, we know that she has worked hard and got on with whatever life has thrown at her – and, it seems, she will continue to do so with a calm resignation.

Then, we are introduced to a man we come to realise is her 29-year-old son, Paulie. He is coming for his father’s funeral/wake. He is the youngest of five children, and had not had a good relationship with his “hard” father. It soon becomes apparent that the mother expects the children to work out what will happen to her now – and what will happen to her now, as soon becomes apparent, is that Paulie will return to the family farm. After all, “he was the bachelor of the family”, and his job as a lorry driver “wasn’t much”. However, to do this he will have to give up the woman he loved as she is not interested in a farm life.

While he is working out his notice back in town, his mother is helped by neighbours, the bachelor Hartigan and his sister. It is this sister who introduces the idea of the hill bachelors. She suggests that Paulie would not want to come back because

“It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,” Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony hand in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.
“Paulie’s not married either, though.”
“That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?”

Seeing bewilderment in Paulie’s mother’s face, she goes on to explain that “the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited”.

And so Paulie comes back. He “harboured no resentment … it was not the end of the world”. What was “the end of the world”, however, was hearing the woman he loved say that life on a farm did not attract her. He works hard, and he starts dating local women, but Miss Hartigan seems to have known whereof she spoke.

The story is told third person, through the alternating perspectives of the mother and Paulie. We hear what the the rest of the family thinks, or has done, mostly through Paulie’s and his mother’s thoughts and assumptions, through their deep knowledge of how their family works and of the rural traditions within which they live. There is a little dialogue, but not much. Paulie and his mother are both “types” and yet quietly individualised too.

There’s no big drama in this story, just ordinary people making the decisions that seem right at the time. Paulie’s mother is not unkind or demanding. Indeed, she offers to move in with a married daughter, and, in a little revelatory moment, Trevor lets on that she’d shed some private tears in her early days on the farm. She would do her best to make it easy for a new wife, unlike her own experience. However, marriage to a man from the hills has taught her passivity, to do what she’s told, so she resigns herself – as we are led, from the opening paragraphs, to expect she’d do – to see out her lot. Paulie, too, seems resigned, like his mother, to play out the role set for him, even if it means joining the titular hill bachelors.

All this makes it a far more complex story than it might seem on the surface. It means that, as much as we’d like to, it’s hard to see Paulie as a victim, because he does have a choice, difficult though it may be. But the pull of tradition and responsibility is strong, and while Paulie is aware of what is happening to him, he is resigned to it. Ultimately, as he himself realises, “guilt” and “goodness” have nothing to do with it, it just is what it is, “enduring, unchanging” – and he is not going to buck it.

Trevor thus leaves it for us to think about – to think what the different choices might mean for his mother, for Paulie, and, more widely, for the rural way of life that, regardless of their decisions or their own thoughts about it, does seem to be on its way out. It is up to us readers to ponder the bigger picture, to wonder where that will get him, them or the farm. After all, if he doesn’t marry, what will happen? In continuing their rural traditions, will anything be ultimately achieved, or will this be another sad little life?

Cathy (746 Books) has reviewed the collection.

William Trevor
“The hill bachelors”
in William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child
London: Penguin Books, 2005
pp. 21-39
ISBN: 9780141022536
(First published in The hill bachelors, 2000)

Claire Keegan, So late in the day (#BookReview)

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In her final Novellas in November post, Cathy (746 Books) wrote about Claire Keegan’s short story “So late in the day”, and included an online link to the story. Having not read any of Keegan’s writing, to that point, and feeling the lack, I pounced – and was not disappointed.

“So late in the day” is a beautifully observed story told through the eyes of a man named Cathal. In it, he reflects on his relationship with a woman, Sabine, whom we come to realise is no longer around. Why? The story starts by encouraging us to empathise with him. His work colleagues seem worried about him, and his boss encourages him to go home early. The opening paragraph contains hints of things being a little awry or disturbed. It’s gloriously subtle. Every word carries weight, which makes the reading pure pleasure as you ponder just what the straightforward-sounding words and sentences are really signifying.

Life is clearly discombobulated for Cathal. For example, as he makes his way home, we are told:

For no particular reason, a part of him doubted whether the bus would come that day, but it soon came up Westland Row and pulled in, as usual.

The “for no particular reason” is telling, because there is a reason he feels uncertain, albeit we don’t know it yet, and his unawareness of why he feels this way is part of the issue.

So, the bus comes, and he finds himself sitting next to a woman who seems to want to talk. Hmm… he’s not happy. Soon, however, she turns to her book, The woman who walked into doors. Now, it’s a rare writer who inserts books into their stories randomly, but I didn’t know this book, so off I went to the internet and very quickly found that it is by Roddy Doyle. The Guardian quotes him on why he wrote this book which features a pre-existing character of his: “I had to give Paula a chance to explain why: why she married this man in the first place, and why she stayed with him.”

Gradually, then, the penny drops, but oh so slowly, because Keegan’s story is told from a man’s point of view, and this man is so woebegone, so clueless.

This is the sort of writing I like, writing that challenges the reader to work a bit, to read between the lines and not jump to simplistic responses. Cathal is an unreliable narrator. He does not see the whole truth, but Keegan draws out, from his own mouth, exactly what has happened, so that it all becomes clear to us, the reader, while he remains locked in his cluelessness.

There’s another challenge for the reader, though, besides sussing out what has happened, and it’s to do with how we feel. We start by feeling sympathy for him. He’s sad and lonely. But, as he talks about Sabine, a picture builds up. He is the more passive one in the relationship, but more than that, he is the taker. She organises the outings. She cooks, though he does grudgingly clean up, resenting the mess she makes. She’s generous, doesn’t “mind the cost” of nice food, spending “freely” at the markets, while he either tots up costs or, when he’s paying, makes mean choices. When he proposes to her, it’s devoid of romance. Is he emotionally repressed, and should we continue to feel for him, or is something else going on?

Quite late in the story, in a telling flashback, he remembers an occasion from his childhood. His brother had played a nasty trick at the dinner table on their nearly sixty-year-old mother, and instead of remonstrating with him the father joins the laughter. In this anecdote, and his reaction to it, we see the depth of his disconnect in how to relate to a woman, which adds to our growing awareness of an ungenerous, self-centredness in him. He doesn’t know how to give. There are occasional glimmers of awareness, but by the end, when we know exactly why he is so sad, why this day is so hard for him, we are left wondering what to think about him. Can he change? Or, more to the point, does he realise he needs to change? Does he fully comprehend the depth of his failure?

The French-translated title for this story is Misogynie, which makes no bones about its over-riding theme, but I like the subtlety, the multi-layered meanings behind “So late in the day”. To tease that out here, however, really would spoil the story for any of you wanting to read it.

Meanwhile, I’ll share this from early in the story. As Cathal is leaving work, we are told

He would ordinarily have taken out his mobile then, to check his messages, but found that he wasn’t ready—then wondered if anyone ever was ready for what was difficult.

Good question, but it doesn’t augur well for our narrator’s development does it?

An absolute gem of a story.

Claire (Word By Word) also liked it.

Claire Keegan
“So late in the day”
in The New Yorker, 28/2/2022

Available online at The New Yorker.

Margaret Atwood, The Labrador fiasco (#Review)

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Although I am an Atwood fan from way back, I haven’t, to date, taken part in Marcie’s (Buried in Print) MARM (Margaret Atwood Reading Month) event. But I promised her I would this month, albeit with just one little short story probably, this one. I have had The Labrador fiasco on my “little book” TBR shelf since it was produced as a Bloomsbury Quid back in the 1996. I have no idea why I have not read all my little books, but, there you go!

Most of you will know Margaret Atwood (b. 1939). I read several of her books before blogging – including her dystopian novel, The handmaid’s tale; her historical fiction novels, Alias Grace and The blind assassin; and her more contemporary novels Cat’s eye and The robber bride – and I have more on my TBR. But, I have only reviewed her twice here, her novella, The Penelopiad (my review), and her recent poetry collection, Dearly (my review). Now, I bring you a short story. This woman is versatile.

As far as I can tell, “The Labrador fiasco” was first published in this edition. Many of my “little books” comprise previously published short prose works, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here. I have three other Bloomsbury Quids, two of which were previously published, with the other, Nadine Gordimer’s Harald, Claudia and the son Duncan (my review), also seeming to have been first published as a Quid. Interesting, but not relevant to my discussion of Atwood’s story, so let’s move on. The Quids, though, are gorgeous little books.

“The Labrador fiasco” is a “story-within-a-story” story. (Ha!) The framing story concerns the narrator and her aging father and mother. (The narrator’s sex is not provided, but let’s go with female as Atwood is female.) The father, in particular, is declining, having experienced a stroke six years before the story’s opening. It is told first person by the daughter, who regularly visits her parents.

The story within comes from Dillon Wallace’s The lure of the Labrador wild, published in 1905. Wallace was, says Wikipedia, “an American lawyer, outdoorsman, author of non-fiction, fiction and magazine articles” and this, his first book, was a bestseller. It tells of an exploratory trip through Labrador undertaken by Wallace and a man called Leonidas Hubbard, with their Cree Indian guide, George. The Cree bit is important as the Cree are not from the region they were travelling in. Anyhow, the aim was to explore a part of Labrador that hadn’t been explored by Europeans, with Hubbard wanting to “make his name”. However, as Wikipedia (and Atwood’s story) explains, they took the wrong river from the start, with tragic consequences.

Atwood’s story opens with:

It’s October; but which October? One of those Octobers, with quick intensities of light, their diminuendos, their red and orange leaves. My father is sitting in his armchair by the fire. He has on his black and white checked dressing gown, over his other clothes, and his old leather slippers, with his feet, propped up on a hassock. Therefore it must be evening.

There’s so much going on here, besides the gorgeously structure sentences. We are immediately put on the back foot with “which October”, and “it must be evening”, but at least the father is very much present. The uncertainty suggests that the story is being told from a later time. Whichever October it is, however, it is autumn – or fall – and that means the season of decline. Within a couple of paragraphs, we learn of the father’s stroke, and know he is declining. But, the question, “which October”, also hints at the October in the Wallace-Hubbard story when things have really started to sour – because not only is it cold of course, but our explorers have taken the wrong route and are running out of supplies.

This is the set up. As the story progresses, the narrator’s father, who was an experienced outdoorsman himself in his day, provides a running commentary on the explorers, with the narrator adding her own layer. “They took the wrong supplies”, the father says, pleased because he would have known what to take. However, our narrator wonders “what supplies could they have taken other than the wrong ones” … “No freeze-drying then” or “nylon vests”, for example.

“harsh and unmarked and jumbled”

What Margaret Atwood does in this story, then, is parallel the deterioration in the condition of the explorers as their expedition goes awry, with the narrator’s father’s decline as he ages. The explorers leave things behind, their feet suffer because they don’t have effective footwear. The father leaves hobbies behind, and says his feet are too sore to walk. The father thinks he would have done the expedition better, but he faces his own “forest” and in fact, like the explorers, he and his supporters are not fully equipped to deal with it.

And so it goes. In under 40 (very small) pages, Atwood combines commentary on a failed (colonial) expedition, conveying the poor planning and hubris of those involved, with a tender family story of an adult child and mother coping with a failing father. To do this she calls on her obvious love and knowledge of Canada’s history and “wilderness” (a contested term now, I know), and her keen interest in humans and how our lives play out.

We are all explorers, I think Atwood is saying, and the way, at least some of the time, can be “harsh and unmarked and jumbled”. It takes all our energy to traverse it. Good planning and the help of others can ease the way, but in the end, we each have to do it on our own. A clear-eyed, clever and tight story with an ending that encompasses genuine warmth with an acceptance of life’s realities. Beautiful.

Read for MARM 2023

Margaret Atwood
“The Labrador fiasco”
London: Bloomsbury, 1996 (A Bloomsbury Quid)
64pp.
ISBN: 9780747528890
Available online at Independent, 1996

Hal Porter, Francis Silver (#Review, #1962 Club)

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Introducing my first review for the 1962 Year Club – Shirley Hazzard’s “The picnic” – I said I had read two short stories and might post on the second one. I am doing so now but, stupidly, I left the book back in Canberra and here I am in Melbourne, so my post will be limited, and without the usual quotes to convey Porter’s writing style. But, it was this, or not at all, because by the time we return home, I will be onto other things. I am cross though, because Kerryn Goldsworthy did write a useful introduction, which, if I remember correctly, placed Porter as part of a change in short story writing from the more realist school that had held on strongly since Lawson.

Like Hazzard’s story, “Francis Silver” appears in the Carmel Bird edited anthology, The Penguin century of Australian stories.

Who was Hal Porter?

Porter (1911-1984) was an Australian novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer. His first autobiography, The watcher on the cast-iron balcony (1963), is regarded as a classic.

The Wikipedia article, linked on his name, is relatively brief, but there is a more thorough biographical entry for him in the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB). Written by literary critic and academic, Peter Pierce, it tells us that he had many occupations, including teaching (on-and-off at many schools), librarian, and shorter term jobs like window-dresser and sheep-station cook. But, cutting to the chase, it also reveals Porter as a problematic figure, because of his pederast behaviour. Peter Pierce writes, for example, that, around 1940, he had “an affair” with a male student at the school where he taught, “an indiscretion that went unpunished”. Those were the days, I suppose. This “affair” – should we grace it with that description? – is apparently fictionalised in his short story “The dream”.

Pierce also writes that, in her 1993 book, Hal Porter: Man of many parts, Porter’s biographer, Mary Lord was, “even-handed in judging an old friend and sensational in revealing Porter’s paedophilia, in particular his sexual relations with one of her sons.” Hard to understand. Moreover, Pierce says that Porter’s third autobiography, The extra (1975),

ventilated many of Porter’s prejudices — against Jews, ‘foreigners’ and Aborigines. The counterpart of Porter’s grace, charm and cultivation was an intense snobbery that, for instance, saw him elevate his father’s occupation from engine-driver to engineer. His facility at winning friends was matched by ceaseless demands on their patience.

So, a difficult man, and one I thought twice about sharing here. However, I read the story, liked it, and as it doesn’t smell of these difficult issues, I am covering it in the uncomfortable spirit of separating the work from its creator. Peter Pierce described him in his 2012 ADB entry as “one of the finest of all Australia’s authors of short stories and a pioneer of the first flowering of autobiographical writing in this country”. (This piece by the late academic Noel Rowe explores the Porter issue in depth.)

“Francis Silver”

“Francis Silver” is a first-person story in which an older man tells of fulfilling a deathbed request from his mother who had died at the age of 41 when he was 18. All through his childhood, he had heard about a man called Francis Silver, who, his mother had implied, had been not only a beau, but an alternative potential husband to the country-living man she did marry, the narrator’s seemingly long-suffering father.

Through our narrator’s childhood, his mother had shared with him an album of postcards sent to her by Francis Silver. Along with sharing this album, she had told stories about this man which suggested he was a worldly, debonair man, who loved the theatre. Her wish was for him to give the postcard album to Silver – but, on no account, was he to also give the lock of her hair that she had kept in an envelope with Francis Silver’s name on it. He was to burn that.

Francis Silver, his mother told him, had worked in a picture-framing shop, and that is where our narrator finds him – but what he finds doesn’t gel at all with the stories his mother had told. The story, then, is about memory, illusion and reality, and the boy’s recognition of the difference. In his own romantic fantasy, he had decided to ignore his mother’s second request and give Francis Silver (whose name works as a mantra in the story, hence my using it in full for each reference here) the lock of hair too. But, as he confronts reality, he changes his mind. The closing sentence vividly conveys his decision in an act that encompasses layers of meaning and feeling.

The father is a less developed figure, because the son was in his lively mother’s thrall, but the sense we get is of a man who loves his wife, and who tolerates her flights of fancy, feeling comfortable, it seems, that she chose – and remains with – him. He seems to recognise (or trust) that Francis Silver is one of those escape fantasies people have to help them cope with the tedium of life, the fantasy that, should it get too hard, there were, or perhaps even are, other options. The narrator, as a boy, doesn’t understand these nuances.

There was a strong autobiographical element, I understand, to Porter’s writing. From the little I read for this post, I am aware that there are such elements in this story. For example, Porter’s beloved mother died when he was 18 years old, as does the narrator’s mother in this story. How much else might be autobiographical though, I don’t know.

Anyhow, just to finish … in the end, the narrator resolves the differences he confronts and is generous to his father for whom Francis Silver had seemed an imagined (if not, as it turns out, real) rival. Our narrator has also learned something about the imagined, illusory past, and its relationship to present realities. A tight, neat, engrossing story.

* Read for the 1962 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

Hal Porter
“Francis Silver” (orig. pub. in Hal Porter, A bachelor’s children, 1962)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 186-197

Shirley Hazzard, The picnic (#Review, #1962 Club)

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As I have done for most “year” reading weeks*, I decided for 1962 to read a short story by an Australian author. I read two, in fact, and may post on the second one later.

Today’s story, though, is Shirley Hazzard’s “The picnic” which I found in an anthology edited by Carmel Bird, The Penguin century of Australian stories. It was my mother’s book, which Daughter (or Granddaughter to her) Gums gave her for Christmas 2006. I’m glad she kept it when she downsized. Shirley Hazzard is a writer I’ve loved. I have read three of her books, including the novels, Transit of Venus and The great fire, but all of this was long before blogging. I have mentioned her on the blog many times for different reasons, but an early one was in my Monday Musings on expat novelists back in 2010.

Who was Shirley Hazzard?

Hazzard (1931-2016) is difficult to pin down, and can hardly be called Australian given she left Australia in 1947 when she 16, returned here briefly, but left here for good when she was 20. Wikipedia calls her an Australian-born American novelist. As I wrote in my expat post, Hazzard didn’t like to be thought of in terms of nationality. However, she did set some of her writing in Australia, and did win the Miles Franklin Award in 2004 with her novel The great fire, against some stiff competition.

According to Wikipedia, she wrote her first short story, “Woollahra Road”, in 1960, while she was living in Italy, and it was published by The New Yorker magazine the following year. This means, of course, that “The picnic”, first published in 1962, comes from early in her writing career. Her first book, Cliffs of fall, was published in 1963. It was a collection of previously published stories, including this one. Her first novel, The evening of the holiday, was published in 1966, and her second, The bay of noon, was published in 1970, but it was her third novel, The transit of Venus, published in 1980, that established her.

She is known for the quality, particularly the clarity, of her prose, which, it has been suggested, was partly due to her love of poetry

“The picnic”

It didn’t take long for me to discover that “The picnic” is the second story of a linked pair, which were both published in The New Yorker in 1962. Together they tell of an affair between the married Clem and a younger woman, Nettie, his wife May’s cousin. The first story, “A place in the country”, concerns the end of the affair, while in “The picnic” the ex-lovers meet again, eight years later. They are left alone by May, probably deliberately thinks Clem, while she plays with their youngest son down the hillside.

This is a character-driven slice-of-life story in which not a lot happens in terms of action but which offers much insight into human nature – and into that grandest passion of all, love.

In 2020, The Guardian ran a review of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected stories, edited by Hazzard biographer Brigitta Olubas. Reviewer Stephanie Merritt writes that “Hazzard’s recurring themes here – enlarged upon in her novels – are love, self-knowledge and disappointment”. From my memory of Transit of Venus in particular, this rings true. And, it is certainly played out in “The picnic”.

So, love, albeit a failed love, is presumably played out in the first story, but in this story it is still present in its complicated messiness. The two ex-lovers look at each other uncomfortably. Self-knowledge is part of it, but it’s not easily achieved for Clem for whom self-deception has also powerful sway. There’s resignation about love – “an indignity, a reducing thing” which he sees can be a “form of insanity” – and about marriage, which involves “a sort of perseverance, and persistent understanding”. There’s also a male arrogance. He didn’t, he realises, “know much about her [Nettie’s] life these past few years – which alone showed there couldn’t be much to learn”. By the end of his reverie, he comes to some self-understanding, despite earlier denials, about his true feelings and about the decision he’d made. Whether the reader agrees or not, he feels he has “grown”.

Nettie’s reveries tread a roughly similar path. There’s not a lot of regret to start with. She sees he is nearly fifty, and with “a fretful, touchy air”. She sees his self-deceptions, and his caution, and yet her feelings, like his, are conflicted. For her, too, love is a complicated thing:

… one couldn’t cope with love. (In her experience, at any rate, it always got out of hand).

What I haven’t conveyed here, because you have to read it all to see and enjoy it, is the delicious way Hazzard conveys their internal to-ing and fro-ing, through irony and other contradictions. They say nothing to each other, but in their thoughts and observations, while they rationalise what happened and why it was right, they reveal their true feelings. Love and disappointment or disillusion live side by side, never quite resolved.

The story is told third person but from shifting perspectives. First Clem, followed by Nettie, reflect on their situation at some length. Then, in a surprise switch, the short last paragraph moves to May, whose feelings neither of them had seriously considered in all their internal ponderings. But Hazzard makes sure we see them. This technique reminded me of Kevin Brophy’s very different short story “Hillside” which does a similarly powerful switch of perspective in the last paragraph. In both cases, concluding with the perspective of someone who is both outsider but very much affected by the situation just nails it.

Not only did I enjoy this story, but I’m very glad to finally have Hazzard reviewed on my blog.

* Read for the 1962 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book). This week’s Monday Musings was devoted to the year.

Shirley Hazzard
“The picnic” (orig. pub. The New Yorker, 16 June 1962)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian short stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 178-185

Kevin Brophy, The lion in love (#BookReview)

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This year has been, for me, the year of the short story, partly because short stories have fitted in with the sort of year I’ve had, but also because short stories – individually, in anthologies, and in collections – have been coming my way in great number. This is fine, because I love a good short story. Fortunately, this latest collection, The lion in love by Kevin Brophy, contains good short stories.

The lion in love is Brophy’s second collection, but I’ve not read him before. He worked in many jobs, but his last job was teaching creative writing at the University of Melbourne, where he is now an Emeritus Professor. According to the university’s page for him, he has twenty books of poetry, fiction and essays to his name. Finlay Lloyd’s page lists some of his awards and other accolades, and adds that “as a writer he has chronicled urban Melbourne, especially the street life of his heartland, Brunswick”. This focus is evident in The lion in love, but not exclusively so, as several stories are set in other places. The opening story, “The lesson”, for example, is set in England, while “Apartment with balcony” is mostly set in Amsterdam, and the tight little “Experience” is set in Spain, to name some. I loved those set in Melbourne and Victoria – because these are places I’m getting to know – but the inclusion of these more exotic settings gave the book a richness I wasn’t expecting.

What also gives this book its richness is the variety in voice, tone and form present in the collection. Some stories are first person, and some third; some are realistic, while others, like “The googly” and the titular “The lion in love”, are more fable-like; some are dark, some a little melancholy, and some contain humour while others offer little slices of a time in a life. They range in length from the single-page “A child’s tale” to the 16-page “Apartment with balcony”. Despite the variety, however, every story feels carefully observed.

What, then, are they observing? Good question! The answer, to put it simply, is human beings – old ones, young ones, male ones, female ones, the seekers and questioners, the sad, the curious, the certain, the uncertain, and so on. Take for example, “Apartment with balcony”, in which the unnamed third person narrator tells the story of his youthful friendship – from school days to young adulthood – with rich boy, Herman. It starts in Melbourne, but mostly takes place in Amsterdam where they have been given the opportunity to apartment-sit. The apparently “ugly” Herman is sure of himself, while our narrator is far less so, with his thoughts frequently turning to death – but he is willing to watch and learn. The boys are interested in girls, and Herman talks about them a lot:

He was a dreamer, I guess. I admired that, because it meant he might one day dream about more serious things, more ambitious things, once we got the talking-about-girls thing out of the way. And he would be okay, we both knew that, because he was from a wealthy-enough family of well-educated parents, uncles, aunts and cousins. When he was ready for it, the right girl would hook up with him, we both knew that without having to say it.  Whether I would find a girl eventually was a more difficult question.

There’s a familiar sensible-poor-boy-accompanies-more-reckless-rich-boy trope here, and the ending won’t greatly surprise, but there’s much to enjoy and think about in the telling.

Now, though, let’s go back to the beginning, to “The lesson”, an English-set realist story about a young boy living with his recently separated mother. Like “Apartment with balcony”, this is a coming-of-age story. Our third person narrator is on the cusp. He’s interested in girls, and experiences his first kiss, but more significantly, he’s trying to work out who he is and how life works. Insecure, uncertain, but imaginative, he peppers his mother with “what if” questions, but she’s too mired in her own grief to engage.

This story perfectly exemplifies the subtle way Brophy conveys meaning. It starts with our protagonist in a tumble-down church cemetery where “tombstones lean at all sorts of angles”, but it is spring with jonquils and bluebells growing “any-which-way”. Already a contrast is established between dark chaos and a more lively one. The opening paragraph ends at the church gate, where the sombre meets the mundane, with one sign “listing the names of local men who died in the First World War” and another “asking people to take away their rubbish when they leave”. Such is the stuff of life where big things jostle against the everyday. Without spoiling anything, the story ends with the boy holding “an ice cream in one hand and a grey sea stone in the other hand, a stone, not much smaller than his boy’s heart”.

Closing the collection is the more surreal titular story, “The lion in love”, whose first person narrator is an older, experienced woman. It’s set in a Melbourne street – in Brunswick, presumably, given the referenced proximity to the zoo – during the pandemic. As people’s hair grows longer and wilder during Melbourne’s long lockdown, our protagonist’s neighbour across the road looks increasingly like a lion, and starts to behave like one, at least in the eyes of our narrator whose imagination runs amok. In a very different way, this story, which traverses that fine line between the wild and the civilised, also jostles the everyday with bigger questions about “love and pain”.

In between these two are fifteen other stories. In many, the characters aren’t named, creating a detached tone that encourages us to observe and think, rather than be emotionally led through identifying with characters. It works well, particularly in the stories that are more fairy-tale or fable-like, such as “The googly” which is about the middle of three brothers. It riffs, surely, on the traditional “three bears” story, but in this case the “middle” one is not necessarily “just right”, though neither is he the opposite. He is just another being working his way through life’s ups and downs:

He knew now that the difference between fiction and living is that in living there are no shapely endings, there can only be endurance.

“Hillside” is one of the shorter stories, and tells of an ageing couple who visit their son’s grave. The third person perspective subtly shifts between the husband, wife, and an omniscient narrator, as the couple contemplate life, death, grief and ageing:

They bend over their son, close together, their heads so close they might be looking down over a bassinet. She says something. He nods because whatever it is she is saying he knows he would agree with her. He notices some clay has splashed across the lettering on the plaque in one corner, so he takes out his handkerchief and bends down to wipe it. This cleaning is something he can do even if he cannot weep or pray or say words his heart should be composing.

Look at that spare precision. Soon after, the husband and wife topple over, and must wait for a cemetery worker to help them up. The next day the wife tells their daughter what had happened. Upon that, in the last sentence, the perspective suddenly shifts to the daughter’s, and we see a whole other element to this story.

The lion in love is full of characters who engage us with their quiet sincerity. Whether they know it or not, they offer us wisdoms that are worth heeding, because they are like us. I’m going to leave you with a couple of my favourite takeaways. The first comes from “The lesson” and refers to the arrival of the Vikings on the English coast. Our young narrator considers their impact:

Those mad pagan Vikings taught the men of Beeston how to make the boats that would make them famous, so you can’t know, can you, whether what you see coming out of the water in front of you is a dog of doom or an angel of salvation?

No, you can’t – but you can always be open to possibility. The other is from one of the few stories with named characters, “But if she did”. This is another observer story, and is a little reminiscent of “Apartment with balcony” except it traverses a longer period of time and thus of life. Our observer, watching his rich friend struggle with grief, notes that

There are no true endings, only pauses for one thing to stop and another thing to start.

I, however, need to end this post. I’m not sure I’ve done this collection justice, but I hope I’ve conveyed enough of its subtle beauty and quiet truths to encourage you to give it a try.

Lisa reviewed this in a far more timely fashion than I, but I offer this, now, to Brona for her 2023 AusReading Month.

Kevin Brophy
The lion in love
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2022
173pp.
ISBN: 9780994516572

(Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd)

Susan Glaspell, A jury of her peers (#Review)

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One of my retirement activities is to co-ordinate a little band of volunteer indexers at the National Film and Sound Archive. Not only do we do useful work for the Archive, but we get to socialise a little with our peers, meaning we talk about what we are watching, listening to, and reading. Recently, one of the team sent me a short story to read. He “raved” about it, he wrote in the accompanying email. Well, I have now read it and I’m mighty impressed too. It’s by an American writer and appeared in one of the those annual best short stories volumes, this one for 1917.

Susan Glaspell

The author of the story, as you will have worked out from the post title, is Susan Glaspell (1876-1948). I had never heard of her, but fortunately she has a decent-sized Wikipedia page which you can read, but I’ll give a brief summary here. She was a playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. Indeed, she and her husband founded America’s first modern theatre company, the Provincetown Players. Wikipedia then says, and I’ll quote because why try to paraphrase it:

First known for her short stories (fifty were published), Glaspell also wrote nine novels, fifteen plays, and a biography. Often set in her native Midwest, these semi-autobiographical tales typically explore contemporary social issues, such as gender, ethics, and dissent, while featuring deep, sympathetic characters who make principled stands. Her 1930 play Alison’s House earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Wikipedia has much more to say but essentially, like many women writers, her star faded, partly Wikipedia says, because her “strong and independent female protagonists were less popular in the post-war era, which stressed female domesticity”. However, from the 1970s on – we all know about this revival don’t we – she started to regain traction. Now, she is recognised as a “pioneering feminist writer and America’s first important modern female playwright”.

All this might clue you in to why I so enjoyed her story.

“A jury of her peers”

Kindle ed.

“A jury of her peers” is quite a long short story, but it engrosses from the beginning because of how Glaspell slowly unfolds the story, incisively developing, as she goes, a number of ideas that still speak to us today. We readers work out fairly quickly what has likely gone on, but our fascination lies in how the two women protagonists come to their understanding of the matter, how they try to resist what they have intuitively guessed, and what they decide to do about it. Overlaying this are the assumptions made about them (and about women in general) by the men involved, which adds a social dimension to the moral one. It’s a wonderfully complex story. It’s no accident that the main action takes place in that women’s domain, the humble kitchen.

The story, according to Wikipedia again, was loosely based on the 1900 murder of a man called John Hossack which Glaspell covered while working as a journalist. She originally wrote it in 1916 as a one-act play, Trifles, for the Provincetown Players, before turning it into a short story. Later, it was adapted for an episode of that 1950s TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and into a 30-minute film by Sally Heckel in 1980.

The plot is simple. A farmer, John Wright, has been murdered, and his wife, the diminutively named Minnie, taken into custody, the day before the story’s action takes place. The story opens with Sheriff Peters and the county attorney Mr Henderson picking up the Wrights’ neighbour, farmer Mr Hale, who had called in the death the day before. Their aim is to visit the scene to look for evidence that might explain what had happened, that might provide a motive. In the buggy is the sheriff’s wife Mrs Peters who is coming along to collect some clothes for Minnie. At the last minute, Mrs Hale is asked to join them, at the request of Mrs Peters who appears to need some support in her sad task.

So, this band of five arrive at the Wrights’ “lonesome-looking place” and, while the men go in search of their evidence, the women remain in the kitchen-living area to get those items Minnie had asked for. As they do, they start to notice things around them – providing insight into Minnie’s life and state of mind – and slowly they piece together an understanding of what had happened. These two women don’t know each other well, so they are cautious with each other, sometimes moving “closer together” in solidarity, particularly when the men appear at intervals and invariably belittle women’s skills and knowledge, but other times drawing apart, uncertainly feeling each other out as they simultaneously feel out their own thoughts and feelings.

The practical farmer’s wife Mrs Hale increasingly senses what sort of life Minnie had led, and feels guilty, criminal even, about never having visited her, but she is uncertain about how the timid-seeming, law-abiding Sheriff’s wife is reacting. However, every now and then she catches in Mrs Peters “a look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else”. Eventually, they connect, “in a steady burning look in which there was no evasion, no flinching”.

It is so beautifully done, with barely a wasted word or description, with every interaction carrying weight, with perfect use of metaphor (involving birds, cages, and knots) and irony. It reminded me, just a little, of Pat Barker’s The women of Troy (my review), another story in which men underestimate women, to their detriment (though they may not always know it). And so, in this story, a number of issues are explored, including morality and natural justice versus the law; gender and men’s superior, condescending dismissal of women’s skills and knowledge; neighbourliness and guilt; and female solidarity.

“A jury of her peers” is a subversive crime story, one that wowed me, for its subject matter, particularly given the time it was written, and for its sure, unflinching writing. I’m impressed that it was chosen for an annual best anthology by a man – but perhaps that’s me being condescending now. Whatever! I would love to read more Glaspell.

Susan Glaspell
“A jury of her peers” (orig. pub. in Every Week, 5 March 1917)
in Edward J. O’Brien (ed.), The best short stories of 1917 and The yearbook of the American short story
Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 2014
pp. 256-282
Available online at Hathitrust

Carmel Bird, Love letter to Lola (#BookReview)

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In her prose piece, “Ocean of story” (my post), Christina Stead wrote that

It is only when the short story is written to a rigid plan, or done as an imitation, that it dies. It dies when it is pinned down, but not elsewhere. It is the million drops of water that are the looking-glasses of all our lives.

The stories in Carmel Bird’s latest collection, Love letter to Lola, could never be accused of being written to a rigid plan – and if you know Carmel Bird, you would never expect them to. What I so enjoy about Bird is the subversive way she plays with form and tone, while never losing sight of the things she wants to say – but more on that later. Love letter to Lola contains eighteen short stories, the majority of which have been published elsewhere, but mostly in niche or themed journals and collections. However, “The tale of the last unicorn” appeared in The dead aviatrix (my review), as did the titular “Love letter to Lola”, except that here Spixi’s letter earns response.

This new collection is divided into two main sections – Animals, comprising twelve stories, and Human and Angels, the other six. These are followed by a Reflection in which Bird discusses the inspirations for the stories, and much more besides, including, if you read it carefully, her thoughts on stories, writing and fiction. Ignore it at your peril! She tells us, in this last piece, that while the collection has “no primary overall topic … there is a fairly consistent kind of slant on life in general, and a distinct recurrence of themes, motifs, and propositions”. That there is, and in big picture terms, it involves “peering at life and death from different angles, in varying moods”, with a particular interest in “the wild and weird things humans do to undermine the safety of the planet”.

“inklings and threads” (“Two thirds of the truth”)

So, let’s start with the first section, Animals. The twelve stores are told in the voices of different animals, reminding me a little of Chris Flynn‘s Here be leviathans (my review). The animals, their locations and habitats, and their eras vary, but the subject matter all relates in some way to death, and, in several cases to a very particular type of death – extinction. Consequently, we have stories from, or about, a Spix’s macaw (“Love letter to Lola”), a passenger pigeon (“Resurrecting Martha”); a dodo (“The comeback or a pond of dreams”); and a thylacine (“Fertile and faithful”). In these stories, Bird plays with, among other things, plans by the “scientificators” to clone and return animals to existence, but in each one there is a different spin, drawn from the facts. Overall, there is a valid incredulity about the whole business, but the way Bird writes it through her various creatures is gloriously entertaining. Just read Dodo’s story to see what I mean.

“Fertile and faithful” is a good example of Bird’s playing with form and voice. It a distinct biblical look and tone to it, but the bite and wordplay are ever-present. She writes of plans by “delirious and magical scientists” to “grow a shiny new version of the great stripy animal within the being of a tiny little browny grey Sminthopsis, known as a dunnart”:

CHAPTER 3

8. And in the almost fullness of time the scientists became gods.

At the other end of the spectrum – hmm, is it the other end? – are the pathogenic creatures capable of playing havoc with the human race, like mosquitoes (“It’s a mosquito thing”), flies (“Surveillance”) and rats (“Completing the 1080 project”), not to mention that most reviled of creepy-crawlies, the cockroach (“The affair at the Ritz”). Then, there is the sad story of a spider, “Margaret Orb-Weaver, The Interview, 19 September 1922”, inspired by the small green spider seen crawling across a white card on Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin. This story takes the form of an interview with Margaret just before she descends into the vault on the coffin. In her brief moment of fame, Margaret manages to pass on a few truths. In this and other stories, like “The cockatoo’s question”, Bird, whose imagination runs rife while simultaneously being grounded in reality, reminds us of our contemporary ills, like the spectre of fake news, or our faith in money.

The second section, Humans and Angels, picks up more of Bird’s fascinations, fascinations that won’t be new if you’ve read other work by her, and particularly if you’ve read her bibliomemoir Telltale (my review). Through her love of fantasy and magic, and of weaving fact through her imagination, she further explores and shares her thoughts about the weird and disturbing things that humans do – and with the same sophisticated wit that we experience in Animals.

I loved “Yes my darling daughter” with its cheeky, pointed playing with the idea of wolves and sharks, and the dangers confronting young women. The chatty tone, as in so many of the stories, belies the message, but if you miss it, the “helpful quotations” at the end should see you straight.

Our last speaker is Beau, the Recording Angel (“Recording Angel”) who leads us on a merry dance (or, danse macabre, perhaps) through the island of Nevermind, referencing, presumably, humans’ general apathy. As he does so, he tells various stories including those of two young historical figures, “Walter’n’Matilda”, who suffer tragic deaths but find true love in Nevermind. If, as our angel instructs, you put their two names together quickly, you might catch a hint of a popular Australian song – and thereby catch some of the workings of Carmel Bird’s mind.

The delight of reading Carmel Bird is also the challenge. The delight comes from the playful way she digresses, the way she can allude to, or reference, anything from a children’s picture book to a Greek philosopher to the latest work of scientists, or even to her own characters and works. The challenge is how many of these we pick up because Bird‘s mind is not our mind and her reading is not our reading. But it doesn’t really matter because we are sure to pick up enough of the inklings and threads woven throughout to recognise the things Bird would like us to think about – seriously but with hope in our hearts too.

But again, if you are struggling, there are the four epigraphs which provide the perfect guide to how to approach her stories and what we should expect as we read them. Pure gold.

If you haven’t realised by now, I love reading Carmel Bird. Her “endless search for meaning”, as she describes it, is wrapped in the sort of darkly entertaining writing that I can’t resist. It is the sort of writing I can happily read again and again – with the same expectation that I read Jane Austen. That is, both writers can make me laugh and squirm at the same time, which for me is just right.

(Review copy courtesy the author, but copies are available from Spineless Wonders. Yes, Carmel Bird herself sent me this book, but that is not why I loved it. It made me do that all by itself.)

Carmel Bird
Love letter to Lola
Strawberry Hills: Spineless Wonders, 2023
223pp.
ISBN: 9781925052961

Mary TallMountain, Snatched away (#Review)

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Mary TallMountain’s “Snatched away” is the ninth story of fourteen in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, that I’ve been working through this year. It, like the previous three, was published in the 1980s, in 1988 in this case.

Mary TallMountain

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides minimal information about her. He gives her heritage as Athabascan, Koyukan and Russian on her mother’s side, and tells us she was born Mary Demoski in Alaska in 1918, and died in 1994. Wikipedia’s article on her describes her as “a poet and storyteller of mixed Scotch-Irish and Koyukon ancestry” (Koyukon being Alaska Native Athabascan). Later in the article Wikipedia also mentions her Russian heritage.

Wikipedia provides more background, though not as much as on some of the other writers I’ve read in this anthology. She didn’t start writing until she was in her 50s, which means the 1970s , and she was part of the Native American Renaissance. However, the works listed seem to be primarily poetry, and there’s no discussion of her prose writing. It describes her main themes as being Native and Christian spirituality, including a connection to nature. It also tells us that she was given up for adoption when she was 6, by her tubercular mother, who knew “she would inevitably die” from the disease. It was not a happy experience for TallMountain. Her step-father was abusive, and she was forcefully dislocated from her culture.

TallMountain’s whole life was a challenge – from the unsurprising alcoholism, given her difficult childhood, to serious health problems, including cancer and a stroke.

“Snatched away”

“Snatched away” is told through the eyes of a white man, Clem, who has an Athabascan partner, Mary-Joe, and two children, though this is only slowly revealed. The framing story takes place over a day, in the 1920s, as Clem manoeuvres his way down the Yukon river, meeting rivermen and reflecting on his life. Through him, TallMountain tells of the culture of Athabascan river people whose survival depends on their river, fishing and hunting skills:

Quick dark silhouettes against the greens of alder and cottonwood, the Indians were part of sky, river, earth itself: they wove their dories through tumbling water, poled schools of darting salmon, strode like lumberjacks. Born rivermen, Clem thought with respect. Still, the river was a tough customer. In the seven years he’d been here, ten men and boys had downed between Nulato and Kaltag.

The river might be tough, but it is nature, and its spirit and theirs are entwined. The more problematical thing is the impact on their lives and culture of the arrival of white people, particularly with their diseases like small-pox and tuberculosis.

TallMountain doesn’t gloss over or romanticise life, before or after the arrival of the whites. Rather, she tells it as it is. Early in the story is a scene, told in flashback, in which Clem spends an afternoon on the riverbank with locals, young Andy, who had later drowned, and Little Jim. They see a bundle rolling fast down the river and, on his asking what it is, Clem is told it’s a “Baby. Throwed away”. A common practice in the “old time” for imperfect babies, with a “bum leg” maybe, or “head mashed”, it happened less now, but women will still do it, he’s told, if the baby is “too bad”.

Death pervades the story, actual or intimated – from the babies and the drownings to the aforementioned diseases – but its handling is unsentimental.

From the opening paragraph describing the Yukon as being in a “fierce, frowning mood” to the end when Clem’s “words are snatched away by the wind”, it is the river that controls the story. Its power and potential to both sustain with fish and birds and to kill, and its associated spirituality, are evoked through the people Clem interacts with on his journey – like the consumptive Floyd out hunting mallard and Willy the fisherman who “looked as if he had always been there” and who tells Clem “you got to watch that river” – and through Clem’s physical struggle to keep his boat upright and on course. The river is a living thing, and should never be underrated. Nor perhaps, should be the Woodsman, an Athabascan bad spirit about which Clem asks Willy. It’s a joking reference, but with a tinge of something else all the same, given soon after this Clem senses “something besides fish alive, out there in the river”.

There is clearly an autobiographical element to the story, with Clem’s partner, like TallMountain’s mother, contracting tuberculosis and the local doctor offering to adopt the children, just as Tallmountain had been. Clem is bothered, but philosophically believes “it will all work out in the wash”. Will it? Much is left open in this story.

Like many of the stories in the anthology, “Snatched away” is at least partly about the intersection of cultures. TallMountain, like many of the authors, is of mixed heritage, and in the little I’ve found about her on the Internet, she was comfortable with that. In fact I found an Interview with her in which she describes herself as an “inbetween”*, by which she means having “a connection between two different cultures” to which must be done justice. As Clem fights his way down the river, he thinks about his own heritage and background, as well as of the Athabascan people. As he tires, he sees the faces of his wife and children “wavering” in the mist. But, his specific pronouncement about “Indianness” just after this – “what difference now, how much the blood is mixed” – felt sudden and a bit out of the blue.

It may be that TallMountain was more poet than storywriter, but I did still enjoy the story, even if more for its gorgeous writing about the river and its people than for its narrative coherence. And it has been anthologised more than once, which says something.

* Joseph W. Bruchac III, “We are the inbetweens: An interview with Mary Tallmountain”, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1989), pp. 13-21

Mary TallMountain
“Snatched away” (orig. pub. 1988)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 65-74
ISBN: 9780486490953

Rayna Green, High cotton (#Review)

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With Rayna Green’s short story, “High cotton”, we pass the halfway mark in that anthology I’ve been posting on over the last few months, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. We are also getting closer to the anthology’s publication date of 2014, so these chronologically listed stories are starting to bunch up in their dates. The previous two were both published in 1983, with “High cotton” being published just a year later in 1984.

Rayna Green

Again, I’m mostly using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and Wikipedia to introduce the author. Blaisdell’s intro is brief, as usual, but it is he who formally clarifies Green’s identity as a Native American, explaining that her “Native background, through her father, is Cherokee”. Identity, as we’ve come across already in this collection, can be problematical so I was a bit unsure when Green’s Wikipedia article didn’t explicitly provide her tribal affiliation, as I’ve found for our preceding authors. As this anthology specifically contains stories by Native American writers, I do want to identify how each writer fits into this.

Wikipedia’s article on Green (b. 1942) isn’t completely silent. It does imply her heritage, describing her as the “first American Indian to receive a Ph.D.” in Folklore and American Studies, and stating, near the end, that she was “a founding member of both the Cherokee Honor Society and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society”.

Continuing with Wikipedia, I was also surprised that, unlike for our previous writers, Green is not introduced as a writer, but as a curator and folklorist – at the Smithsonian Institution, among other organisations – and as having worked in academia. Duke University is more useful regarding her writing career. In 2008, it said that she had written or edited four books and published “many essays on American Indian representations, American Indian women, American identity, American Indian material culture, and American Indian food and foodways”. The page also says, and this was of particular interest to me, that

Several of her short stories and essays on Native women and American identity have been widely reprinted and have served as standard reading for twenty years in courses in women’s studies, American Indian studies, and American studies (e.g., “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of American Indian Women in American Culture,” “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in Europe and America,” “Magnolias Grow in Dirt: Southern Women’s Bawdy Humor,” and “High Cotton”).

This seems like a good point to move to today’s short story …

“High cotton”

“High cotton” is a tricksy story. For a start, it is framed as a story within a story, which suggests that storytelling is one of its concerns. There is also the challenge of the Oklahoman Tahlequah vernacular that is used in the telling. Finally, there are complicated relationships, and, dare I admit it – identities – to unravel. I’m not sure I completely got them all, but that I think it part of the point about identities: To what extent are they what you are born as and to what extent what you choose?

The story-within-the-story concerns Rose who, in effect, gets the better of those who have made her life hell – the Baptist Church and her abusive alcoholic white husband Will – by emulating Jesus to encourage said husband to convert to Christianity and preach the word. The story turns to almost pure farce at this point as Rose prances around the bedroom in a cloudy, white nightgown exhorting her out-of-it husband to repent his ways. She can’t believe that he doesn’t recognise her, but she does such a good job of it that he does indeed repent and go on to preach the word while, in a pointedly ironic twist, she goes on to support herself by selling the very liquor that had made her life a misery. And, she stays away from the church.

Framing this is Grandma (Rose’s sister, I think) telling the story to Ramona (a great-niece, I think). Green opens her story with:

Is everything a story? Ramona asked her.

To which Grandma replies, somewhat cryptically:

It is if a story is what you’re looking for – otherwise it’s just people telling lies and there’s no end to it.

While Grandma waits for Ramona’s response, Ramona is watching some “purple cockscombs” through the kitchen door. This ends the opening paragraph so, hmmm, what do these “purple cockscombs” signify, as they seemed too deliberately placed there to mean nothing. They are flowers, but my first thought was of the cockscomb strutting about in foolish pride. My web search retrieved several, often paradoxical meanings. Symbolsage.com provides a good description, summarising them as symbolising “love, affection, silliness, partnership, individuality, strength”. Green could be calling on some of these, and/or on that “cockscomb” image of showy emptiness.

Perhaps more relevant to focus on is the black snake that runs across another character’s foot out in the cotton fields. The snake doesn’t bite her – a Cherokee named Gahno – but the event results in pandemonium and change that involves, over time, the women working on the cotton fields leaving. This infuriates the German plantation-owner Poppa, particularly when his daughter (Ramona’s mother) marries Gahno’s son: “Betrayal was bad enough, but race mixing was worse”.

It is only after we are told all this, and after Ramona has doctored Grandma’s iced tea with some “boogered Indian” whiskey, that we hear the story of Rose and Will. Grandma is quite the storyteller:

Rose got all the church women to pray and pray over him, week after week, and they kept poor Jesus awake yelling about Will’s sinful state. The more they prayed and hollered over him, the more he cussed and drank. And that made them pray more. You know how them prissy Baptist women is, honey—wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful—and they like to drove everyone to the ginmills and shake dance the parlors before long. But everyone was more disgusted with Will.

By the end of the story Will has been dead some years, and Rose “had turned Indian just as sure as she’d turned away from Christians”.

To conclude, we return to the aforementioned snakes. Grandma tells Ramona that Rose “always figured, just like Gahno, that snakes were meant to warn you, and she took the warning”. As for stories? Well, they may be lies or they may be what Grandma calls them, “snakebite medicine”. “High cotton” is an intriguing story. Green evokes a lively scene, and explores with dark humour the complexities of multiracial communities where personalities and cultures clash, but I did have to read it several times to work out who was who. If anyone else has read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Rayna Green
“High cotton” (orig. pub. 1984 in That’s what she said: Contemporary poetry and fiction Native American women, ed. Rayna Green)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 59-64
ISBN: 9780486490953