Review – Short stories

Chris Flynn, Here be Leviathans (#BookReview)

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I am not one of those readers who shun weird narrators. Indeed, you’ll find several in this blog, including a skeleton, a dead baby, a foetus and a mammoth fossil. The critical thing for me is not who the narrator is, but whether that narrator is convincing and offers a perspective that engages my mind and heart. Of all the writers I’ve read over the last decade, one that stands out in his ability to surprise and excite me with different voices is Chris Flynn. His short story collection, Here be Leviathans, is astonishing from its first page to its last in its array of narrators.

There are nine stories in this collection, and it is a testament to Flynn that by the second or third one I was fully invested in who would be the narrator this time. I was never disappointed, albeit they ranged from the animate (like the grizzly bear which opens the collection, in “Inheritance”) to the inanimate (such as the airplane seat which narrates the second story, “22F”).

But, before I continue with Flynn’s book, I want to share something he says in his also entertaining “Afterword/Acknowledgements/Blame apportioned” statement. Describing one of his stories as having been inspired by Thea Astley, he refers to his role as one of the judges in Meanjin’s Tournament of Books and shares the exact words of his that I quoted back in my 2013 post on that tournament:

Astley was the progenitor, the chain-smoking, wise-cracking, jazz-loving four times Miles Franklin-winning champion of linguistic manipulation whose style got on Helen Garner’s nerves and who pushed the envelope of Australian literature when no-one else had the cojones to do so.

Flynn’s work is different to Astley’s – time and experimentation having moved on – but he too pushes the envelope of Australian literature, which is why he was one of the writers mentioned the article that inspired my recent Monday Musings on weird Australian fiction. And like Astley, his interests are personal and political. He’s interested in the ways we live in the world, in the injustices we enact, which translates to a concern with issues like colonialism, the environment, and the fallout from an unbridled interest in progress. His touch might feel lighter than Astley’s – he can be laugh-out-loud funny at times – but fundamentally both writers question who we are as human beings. What does what we do say about who we are?

“What a piece of work is man” (Shakespeare via Albert VI)

So, let’s explore Flynn’s brand of weirdness, and why I enjoyed it so much – despite the fact that the opening sentences of the first story, “Inheritance”, were truly shocking:

I ate a kid called Ash Tremblay yesterday. Parts of him, at least. The good bits. The crunchy skull, the brain, a juicy haunch.

What is a reader to think? Fortunately, you don’t have to think very long because very soon our narrator outs himself (it is a “he”) as a bear. He shares a few home truths about humans and our assumptions and behaviours. If you ignore the gruesomeness – after all, a bear has got to eat – the story is pretty funny. Its ostensible subject matter is inherited memory – in this case the bear has inherited Ash’s memory – but it is also a work of ecofiction, which includes exploration of issues like sustainability and colonialism. It is refreshingly bold, asking us to envisage different ways of acting in nature, and, at 30 pages, it is also long. But who cares?

The second, much shorter story, “22F”, is also a work of ecofiction. Its first line seemed ordinary enough, “The first day in a new workplace is always nerve-wracking”. It is, isn’t it? As the story progresses, however, you start to wonder just who this new employee is until the penny drops, it’s seat 22F on a plane. After this story, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of working out who was telling each story as I started it. But, back to 22F. In his Afterword, Flynn explains that the story was inspired by the Werner Herzog documentary Wings of Hope about the sole survivor of a 1971 airplane crash. Herzog and that survivor, Juliane Koepcke, return to the site of the crash, and find parts of the plane in the jungle. Flynn writes:

Memory and place. A reminder that we are only passing through and that everything is part of something larger.

Along the way, though, he discusses other issues, like workplace behaviour:

Toilets are inveterate boasters and disgusting perverts. You can’t believe half of what they say.

Eventually 22F’s plane crashes, and while the bodies disintegrate reasonably quickly, 22F is “fashioned from material that does not break down so readily … I will be here for a very long time”.

And so the stories continue, some with multiple voices. “The Strait of Magellan”, for example, is told by the appropriately named super yacht Nemesis, with interspersed commentary by a pandemic virus, HHSV1-ABAD. “Shot down in flames”, on the other hand, is told in sequential voices – by a creek which has been here for sixty-thousand years (that is, that’s how long it’s had its name!), a red fox, a rifle, and finally a bushfire, which wins the day:

I ate the defiant people who stayed.

Such arrogance. Who do they think they are, that they might resist me? I am elemental. I define this paltry world. I decide who stays in their current state and who transforms. I will find you and I will devour you, for I am Alpha and Omega. I was there at the beginning and I will be there at the end. There is no escape.

Many of the stories’ narrators, in fact, identify human stupidity – and arrogance.

In his Afterword, Flynn describes the last story “Kiss tomorrow goodbye” as the “hardest” story to read, but that does it an injustice. It’s the only one narrated by humans, and is inspired by the people who live in the tunnels under Las Vegas. It looks hard because there’s not a punctuation mark in its 30 pages, and its spelling is idiosyncratic to say the least, but in fact the voice and its rhythms are such that it’s not hard to read. It’s a story about survival and makes for a good end to the collection – one that leaves us in no doubt about all the troubling issues that Flynn has explored throughout but that also offers a glimmer of hope in the ingenuity and defiance of its protagonists.

The question of course is do these weird perspectives work or are they just a writerly exercise in “pushing the envelope”? For me they worked. It was fun trying to nut out whose voice it was this time. But there was a point to all this, because these are voices we can’t really argue with. They are not us, but they know us intimately. They speak their truths, like Albert VI, the space monkey (macaque) in “Alas, poor Yorick” who is so hopeful of surviving his space mission but who, like all the Alberts preceding him, is ultimately another pawn in the space race.

Colonial aggression and environmental destruction are recurring themes in the collection, but both are subsumed into an overriding idea which concerns something more paradoxical – mortality and survival. Death or its threat pervades the stories, but there are openings too. Some are small, but they are there.

In his Afterword, Flynn says that “they don’t make them like Astley anymore. She wrote what she wanted and didn’t give a shit”. I disagree. I think they do, and Flynn is one of them. It is great that there are publishers around like UQP who are willing to work with such writers.

Chris Flynn
Here be Leviathans
St Lucia: UQP, 2022
233pp.
ISBN: 9780702262777

Review copy courtesy UQP, via publicist Brendan Fredericks

Jack D. Forbes, Only approved Indians can play made in USA (#Review)

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The title of the next story in Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers is almost as long as the story itself. Well, not quite, but, occupying just two pages in the anthology, it is a short short story. It was first published the same year, 1983, as the previous story, “Turtle meat” by Jospeh Bruchac III, but is very different in tone.

(I apologise to those of you who were expecting my next post to be on Chris Flynn’s Here be Leviathans. It is coming, soon, but I had to put it aside for my end-of-July reading group book, and I do want to do it justice.)

Jack D. Forbes

Again, I’m using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and, mostly, Wikipedia to introduce the author. Forbes (1934-2011), says Wikipedia, was an historian, writer, scholar and activist who “identified as being of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent”. He is best known for his role in establishing one of the first Native American studies programs at the University of California Davis. He also cofounded D-Q University, “a prominently Native American college in Davis, California”. His activist career started in the early 1960s, when he became involved in the Native American movement, which, Wikipedia explains, “asserted the rights to sovereignty and resisting assimilation into the majority culture”.

Blaisdell introduces his story with this: ‘”Only approved Indians can play made in USA” is almost too sad to be funny, but funny it is’. Or, is it?

“Only approved Indians can play made in USA”

I enjoyed this story because of the way it addresses that issue that can dog First Nations peoples in colonial settings, that of proving indigeneity, which feeds into ideas about identity. It’s an issue I’ve discussed here before, including in First Nations writer Anita Heiss’ Am I black enough for you (my review), and in the essay “Channelling Mannalargenna” (my review) by the non-Indigenous journalist Kathy Marks.

In her book, which is a few years old now, Heiss shares the working definition of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person used by Australia’s Federal Government:

An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he “or she” lives.

I share this purely for background purposes to this story. I am not going to get into the Australian situation because it’s not an issue I have followed recently. It was particularly problematical in Tasmania in recent decades, but I believe that much of that has now been resolved, to the extent that self-identifcation and community recognition are the accepted criteria.

Meanwhile, though, Heiss’s comment is relevant to Forbes’ story which concerns an All-Indian Basketball Tournament, and the two teams that are about to play, one from Tucson and one from the Great Lakes. Many people had come to watch, “mostly Indians” we are told, with many being relatives or friends of the players. There was betting, and “tension was pretty great”. The issue is that the Tucson players are, in general, much darker. Many also have long hair, and some have goatees or moustaches. A rumour starts from the Great Lakes camp that they are Chicanos, not Indians. (If you know your American geography, you will know that Tucson is in southern Arizona, so not far from Mexico, while the Great Lakes are up there near Canada.)

Anyhow, this is a serious point because, as the story goes, the Indian Sports League’s rule is that “all players had to be one-quarter or more Indian blood and that they had to have their BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] roll numbers available if challenged”. The Great Lakes players, coming from a big Midwestern city, are all over this:

they all had their BIA identification cards, encased in plastic. This proved that they were all real Indians – even a blonde haired guy. He was really only about one-sixteenth but the BIA rolls had been changed for his tribe so legally he was one-fourth.

You can feel the tongue firmly planted in the cheek – the satirical tone – here can’t you! They challenge the Tucson players, many of whom, as it turns out, can speak their language. None of the urbanised Great Lakes players could, but they claim this proved nothing. Only the BIA card did! The story is short and you can read it at the link below.

“Only approved Indians can play made in USA” is a clever, and oh-so succinct story that draws on recognisable conventions of competitive sport to produce a satire that explores the role of regulation and law in people’s lives, the way power can be wielded, and its potential for destabilising cultural heritage and disrupting solidarity. The ending is particularly biting because after the Great Lakes team has had its way, the last word is given to a white BIA official. That tells you all you need to know about this story.

Jack D. Forbes
“Only approved Indians can play made in USA” (orig. pub. 1983; also published in Forbes’ collection, Only approved Indians: Stories, 1995)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 57-58
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online at genius.com

Joseph Bruchac III, Turtle meat (#Review)

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I’m continuing to work through the stories in Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. With this post, we jump from 1968 to 1983, which mens we are getting close to contemporary territory. The story is “Turtle meat” by Jospeh Bruchac III.

Joseph Bruchac III

As before, I’m using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and Wikipedia to introduce the author, though in this case Blaisdell is extremely brief. Bruchac was born in 1942 and, says Wikipedia, “identifies as being of Abenaki, English, and Slovak ancestry” with his Abenaki heritage coming from his grandfather. He writes poetry, novels and short stories, with “a particular focus on northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore”, and is the director of a press which publishes new Native American writers. He is also a performing storyteller and musician.

This post’s short story, “Turtle meat”, was first published, according to Blaisdell, in 1983, in an anthology titled Earth power coming: Short fiction in Native American literature, which was published by the Navajo Community College Press. It was published again in Bruchac’s own collection, Turtle meat and other stories, nearly a decade later in 1992.

“Turtle meat”

Wikipedia’s description of his focusing on “northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore” certainly rings true for this story. Blaisdell introduces the story this way, “In this strange great story about an elderly Native American who has been living for years with a debilitated woman, Bruchac writes one of the most extraordinary fishing scenes in literature”. That sure sets up some expectations. It is also a bit misleading because “the debilitated woman” is simply old. She hadn’t always been so.

The story concerns Homer LaWare who, when the story opens, had been Amalia (Mollie) Wind’s hired hand for decades after she had kicked out her husband and come for him. There’s a little sense of “Driving Miss Daisy” here except we are on a farm and life is more earthy than Miss Daisy’s refined life with her Black American chauffeur. To start with, Homer and Mollie have been lovers from the beginning, even though Homer always slept in his cot in the shed – his decision it seems, because “it’s the Indian in me”.

The point at which the story starts, both are showing their age. The story opens with Mollie calling out to him because she needs help getting off the toilet. He comes in from the once-farmed but now overgrown field, and “gently” lifts her, reassuring her that she’s not old, that it “must of was just a cramp. Nothing more than that”. This opening scene tells us a few things – that they are old, of course; that they are comfortable with each other; and that he is sensitively attentive to her physical and emotional needs. We also learn that she has retained ownership of the farm that had originally been her father’s, and that Homer is happy with that: “It’s the Indian in me that don’t want to own no land”. Her grasping husband, Jack Wind, had been sent packing, and her “no-good daughter” had not been seen for years.

The central part of the story describes Homer’s fishing expedition – his catching (and cleaning) several yellow perch, and then an old snapping turtle. It’s a battle – it was easier when he was young “and his chest wasn’t caved in like a broken box” – but he does it. Finally, having been out longer than he’d expected, he returns home, muddy and bloody, to find Amalia missing. Where is Amalia, and why is her daughter – who has “Jack Wind written all over her face” – sitting in Amalia’s rocker?

In one sense, “Turtle meat” is a traditional story of ageing parents and grasping children, but it is imbued with a different sensibility. Homer’s battle with the turtle recalls other literary battles between fishermen and their prey, but in this case it is not only about Homer confronting his age, but is also symbolic of the battle Amalia simultaneously faces. I suspect, too, that the choice of a turtle has specific cultural references for Bruchac, given turtles seem to feature often in his writing.

It’s a great story, as Blaisdell says, but what makes it particularly so is the writing. The characters are more than just types. There’s a natural dignity to them, with an individuality that is conveyed mostly through dialogue – and in Homer’s case, also through his thoughts expressed via italics. The descriptive writing is tight and fresh. And it has a quiet humour. Take, for example, Homer out on his boat:

He looked in the water. He saw his face, the skin lined and brown as an old map. Wattles of flesh hung below his chin like the comb of a rooster.

“Shit, you’re a good-looking man, Homer LaWare,” he said to his reflection. “Easy to see what a woman sees in you.”

How can you not warm to such a character and such writing?

Unfortunately, I don’t think this story is available online so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s another one worth reading from this anthology.

Joseph Bruchac III
“Turtle meat” (orig. pub. 1983)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 50-56
ISBN: 9780486490953

Tuesday Atzinger, The River (#Review)

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Back in January I reviewed two stories from Ellen van Neerven and Rafeif Ismail’s anthology Unlimited futures: Speculative, visionary Blak+Black fiction for Bill’s (The Australian Legend) Australian Women Writers Gen 5 Week. The stories I reviewed were the second and third in the anthology because they were the first two by Australians in it. The anthology’s first story, however, is African in origin. Titled “The River”, it is by Tuesday Atzinger, who is described in the book’s Biographical Notes as “a poet and emerging writer … [who] … explores and celebrates Afro-blackness, queerness, disability and feminism. They peddle in discomfort and their primary goal is to fling words together to make you squirm”. Atzinger currently lives in Melbourne “on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nations”.

“The River” is worth discussing for several reasons, but specifically because it’s the first piece in the anthology, so was, presumably, chosen for a reason. Some of that reason is explained in the anthology’s introduction, which, by the by, takes the form of a conversation between the two editors. One of the topics they discuss is the cover, which was designed by Larrakia woman, Jenna Lee. Ismail describes it as looking at “the interaction of separate cultures in the most respectful and wonderful way”, and also sees it as suggesting “infinity”. It does, doesn’t it. Van Neerven adds that it also reflects “the movements of water” in the anthology. She says:

We were going to begin the anthology with water to allow those kinds of threads of connection and continuation to flow into each other. For me the cover really kind of feels like rivers connecting and the light that is created through water, but it’s also water that we protect and have a relationship and a responsibility to.

Water! Such a complex element in our lives. Most of my friends adore the sea, but for me it’s the rivers that draw me most. They can be young, direct, and fast, or slow, meandering, and somehow wise, or anything inbetween. They can be critical to creation stories, and this role is part of Atzinger’s opening story, making it particularly appropriate as the opening piece.

The first thing to say about “The River” is its form – it is a short story in verse. The River is not named, but we know it’s in Africa, partly because an African word, Ubuntu, is repeated throughout the story: “Ubuntu/Together”. According to the New World Encyclopedia ‘Ubuntu pronounced [ùbúntú], is a traditional African concept. The word ubuntu comes from the Zulu and Xhola languages, and can be roughly translated as “humanity towards others”.’ It has been adopted more widely around the world for its humanistic concepts – and is also, would you believe, “used by the Linux computer operating system” to convey the sense of bringing “the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world”. Valid appropriation? I didn’t find much concern about this use on the ‘net.

Anyhow, to the story itself. We are immediately introduced to the River, and a village that lies near it. The word “prosperous” is used, but we are warned that things aren’t so simple:

Shallow water so clear that the stones beneath it glistened brightly
Depths dark and mysterious, hiding all that lay below
The River, ever a source of sustenance
                                                                      And of danger

The story starts with creation: “Eons ago/The River had rippled in welcome as the people first arrived”. It provided refuge and sustenance; it saw “passion, grief, joy and courage”; it saw, in other words, the life of the community, of “the people who slept under the sun”. It had also seen “a lineage of Chiefs/Some wise, some brave, some imperious” until the present one “Mehluli – the Warrior Chief”. He is described in words like “proud”, “arrogant”, “dominating” and “greedy”. He desires a woman, Thandeka, but she already has a “perfect love” with Amandla, a hunter. Amandla fears the River, fears the aformentioned danger, and while she’s away hunting her fears are justified when the Warrior Chief makes his move on Thandeka.

The problem is that you “cannot refuse the chief”. Violence ensues. The River acts in an unusual way, and a dramatic story follows as Thandeka fights back, as does the River, to right the balance that has been disturbed. It is, ultimately, a story with a moral, a story to teach proper behaviour, right values.

The story is told in a beautiful, poetic style. The changing rhythms and strong use of repetition convey elemental and opposing tones – prosperity and togetherness versus power and greed. “The River” is a thoroughly enjoyable read. It is founded in the sorts of lesson-giving stories that are part of most belief systems, but its queer-love narrative brings the story and its traditional message into modern thinking and times. A worthy first story for the anthology, I think.

Tuesday Atzinger
“The river”
in Ellen van Neerven and Rafeif Ismail (ed.), Unlimited futures: Speculative, visionary Blak+Black fiction
North Fremantle: Fremantle Press in association with Djed Press, 2022
pp. 23-41
ISBN: 9781760991463 (eBook)

Leslie Marmon Silko, The man to send rain clouds (#Review)

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After a two-month hiatus, I return to my reading from Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers with a three-decade jump from D’Arcy McNickle’s 1936-published “Train time” to Leslie Marmon Silko’s “The man to send rain clouds”, which was published in 1968 .

Leslie Marmon Silko

Again, I’m using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s brief intro and Wikipedia’s article to introduce the author. According to Wikipedia, Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948) is one of the key figures in “the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance“. I don’t know much about the trajectory of Native American writing, within the larger American culture, so this gives me a bit of a guide to how it has gone.

Silko was born in Albuquerque, of Laguna Pueblo ancestry, and grew up on the Laguna Pueblo reservation – which I visited with my family on a memorable road trip through New Mexico in December 1991. (For those of you who haven’t been to New Mexico, I recommend it as a special place to visit – physically, historically and culturally.) Silko, says Wikipedia, was schooled at local Indian schools, before attending the University of New Mexico from which she graduated with a BA in English Literature, in 1969. She then briefly attended law school, before deciding to pursue a literary career full-time, which has included teaching at several universities.

This post’s short story, “The man to send rain clouds”, was published while she was an undergraduate. It earned her a National Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant, and continues to be a popular anthology choice, apparently. She has, since then, written several novels, a “poetic memoir”, and many essays. In one of those essays, Wikipedia says, she criticised Louise Erdrich for abandoning “writing about the Native American struggle for sovereignty in exchange for writing “self-referential”, postmodern fiction”. Interesting. I’ve only read two books by Erdrich, and one so long ago I can’t recollect the details, but The bingo palace (1995) does confront the challenge of marrying tradition with contemporary life.

Blaisdell’s introduction includes a statement by Silko on why she writes, which is

to find out what I mean. I know some of the things I mean. I couldn’t tell you the best things I know. And I can’t know the best things I know until I write.

I understand what she means here. I don’t find talking easy. I find it easier through writing to work out what I know and mean.

“The man to send rain clouds”

Wikipedia summarises Silko’s themes as being grounded in a wish “to preserve cultural traditions and understand the impact of the past on contemporary life”. Her career, it says, “has been characterised by making people aware of ingrained racism and white cultural imperialism”. Many of her characters “attempt what some perceive a simple yet uneasy return to balance Native American traditions survivalism with the violence of modern America”. This is all part of a continuing theme in the Southwest regarding “the clash of civilisations” and “the difficult search for balance that the region’s inhabitants encounter”. Much of this is already evident in this early short story of hers.

“The man to send rain clouds” concerns the interaction between Pueblo Indians and Christianity. It reminded me in a small way of Marie Munkara’s Every little thing (my review) except that Munkara’s is a full-length and often laugh-out-loud work versus Silko’s more wry short story. However, both show the power-play between the original people of a land and the churches that came in to save them, and also how the oppressed First Nations people can sometimes, at least, work it to their advantage.

Silko’s story concerns the death of an old man, Teofilo. It opens with his body being found under a “big cottonwood tree” by brothers-in-law Ken and Leon. It describes their going through some traditional death rites, including preparing the old man’s body with face-paint, before bringing him back to the pueblo. It’s here that the title is explained: they say to the old man, after scattering cornmeal, “Send us rain clouds, Grandfather”, which specifically introduces the importance of rain to them and suggests its role in their rites. On their way back into the pueblo, they meet the priest who asks whether they had found Teofilo, but they give a noncommittal reply, telling him that “everything is OK now”. When the priest replies that they “shouldn’t allow him to stay at the sheep camp alone”, they continue with their obfuscation:

“No, he won’t do that any more now”.

I loved Silko’s subtle use of humour in the story. In this brief conversation, Silko sets up exactly how the locals deal with the priest, politely but also determined as much as possible to keep him out of their business. The rest of the story concerns their funeral business, including another delightful encounter with the priest when one of the pueblo’s members feels that some “holy water” wouldn’t go astray.

It’s a quiet story, but a strong one. The tone is measured, the pace unhurried, mirroring the values and attitudes of the pueblo people who are doing their best to preserve their customs while maintaining peace with those who have the power. The same tone is used for the priest’s non-confrontational response, and his own decisionmaking, reflecting, presumably, his need to work with rather than against the people. It’s a story ripe for discussion.

The imagery is beautiful, evoking the snow-capped mountains, the arroyos, mesas, and sandy flats that characterise that part of New Mexico. There is a strong use of colour, which is mostly muted, supporting the tone, with a touch of red to herald something bigger. And of course there’s the rain motif that runs through the story, reflecting its importance to the pueblo’s survival.

A moving story, that I commend to you. It’s a quick read.

Leslie Marmon Silko
“The man to send rain clouds” (orig. pub. 1968 under the name Leslie Chapman)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 45-49
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online via the University of New Mexico.

William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child (#Review)

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I knew, when Kim (Reading Matters) and Cathy (746 Books) announced their “A year with William Trevor” project, that I had a little book containing some William Trevor short stories but, could I find it? Nope. It was a little book after all. And then, voilà, just the other day while I was doing my book decluttering and packing, I came across it. It’s Pocket Penguin 22 from Penguin’s 70 Years celebration, and is called The dressmaker’s child, but it contains three short stories, so these will be my (very willing) contribution to the project. Two of the stories were chosen by the author from previous collections, but for the titular story this is its first appearance in book form.

Most of you will know of Trevor (1928-2016) but, in a nutshell, he’s an Irish writer of novels and novellas, short stories and plays. He won many literary awards in his life, and was particularly well regarded as a short story writer – making him right up my alley. In fact I have read one of his short stories before, early in this blog.

In her most recent Trevor review (of a novel titled The children of Dynmouth) kimbofo writes that it didn’t take her long to feel that she was in “familiar William Trevor turf in which he takes a seemingly ordinary character with eccentric traits and lets them loose in a confined setting”. This could apply to the short story, “The dressmaker’s child”, as it is about a young nineteen-year-old motor mechanic, Cahal, working for his father in a small town. He’s the only son in a family of girls – all of whom have left – and he is “scrawny” with a “long face usually unsmiling”. The story opens on him applying WD-40 “to the only bolt his spanner wouldn’t shift”, which sets a tone that perhaps other things are, or might be, locked up for our protagonist.

As he continues to work on the car, a young Spanish couple appears, wanting to be driven out to see the Sacred Virgin (Our Lady of Tears) who they believed – that is, they had been told so by a barman – would bless their marriage. Now Cahal knows the statue’s special spiritual status had been disproved and thus rejected by the church, but with a 50-euros job in the offing, he doesn’t actively dissuade them from their mission.

Trevor describes the trip, complete with hints of self-delusions, until on the way home Cahal’s car hits a child – the dressmaker’s child – who is known to run at cars and who, up till then at least, had never been hurt. With the Spanish couple kissing in the back of the car, and choosing avoidance over action, Cahal continues driving despite being aware of “something white lying” on the road behind him. Back in town, nothing is said about the dressmaker’s daughter for a few days, but Cahal remains uncertain. It affects his relationship with his young woman, and when the dressmaker herself starts to appear in town at his side, hinting that she knows what had happened, but is not reporting him, his fears and uncertainty increase.

This is not a thriller, but there is a plot and an ending (of course) so I will leave the story here. It’s nightmarish stuff, but very real too.

Trevor’s writing, his unfolding of story and character, is a pleasure to read. Take Cahal’s character, for example. From the stuck bolt (albeit does start to loosen, hinting at possibilities), he is depicted as rather gormless, bowling along, taking opportunities as they come without a lot of consideration – and somewhat different to his father who, during a conversation about the Swedish couple, shakes his head “as if he doubted his son, which he often did and usually with reason.”

This brings me to the point of the story which, as we are slowly brought to see, is the impact on Cahal of what he did or didn’t do – and the almost catatonic fear it engenders:

Continuing his familiar daily routine of repairs and servicing and answering the petrol bell, Cahal found himself unable to dismiss the connection between them that the dressmaker had made him aware of when she’d walked behind him in the night, and knew that the roots it came from spread and gathered strength and were nurtured, in himself, by fear. Cahal was afraid without knowing what he was afraid of, and when he tried to work this out he was bewildered. 

It changes his life – not in the way we might expect but in a way that shows with absolute clarity how avoidance and inaction can be as potent as anything else. Trevor, like my favourite short story writers, is less about drama and more about the complex realities of human interaction in which accommodations rather than simple resolutions are more often the go. I look forward to the next story.

William Trevor
“The dressmaker’s child”
in William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child
London: Penguin Books, 2005
pp. 1-20
ISBN: 9780141022536
(First published in The New Yorker magazine, October 4, 2004: available online)

D’Arcy McNickle, Train time (#Review)

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Continuing my reading from Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, we now jump a decade from John M. Oskison’s 1925-published “The singing bird” to D’Arcy McNickle’s “Train time” which was published in 1936 .

D’Arcy McNickle

As before, I’m using both anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s brief intro and Wikipedia’s article to introduce this author. D’Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) was, like the previous authors, of mixed parentage. He was born on the Flathead Reservation in Montana to an Irish father and a Cree-Métis mother, and was an enrolled member of the Salish Kootenai nation. He attended schools on and off the reservation, then went to the University of Montana, before studying at Oxford University and the University of Grenoble.

He wrote a few novels, but is probably best known for his first, The surrounded, which was published in 1936, the same year as the piece I’m reviewing here. From the summary I’ve read, it sounds like it draws from his own life, like so many first novels. However, that same year, 1936, McNickle started working at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a US federal agency. He worked under John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who encouraged self-government for Native Americans. McNickle became knowledgable about Native American policies, and in 1944, helped found the National Congress of American Indians in 1944. By 1950, he was publishing non-fiction works on Native American history, cultures, and governmental policies. Later, he worked in academia as an anthropologist.

Of his short stories, Blaisdell writes that “his quiet and intense stories seem to have been informed by a deep experience of Chekhov’s and Hemingway’s short fiction”. “Train time” is certainly quiet and, depending on your perspective, intense – with an ending that leaves many questions hanging.

“Train time”

“Train time” takes place on a train station, where twenty-five Native American (“Indian”) children from the local Reservation are waiting for a train to take them to an off-reservation boarding school. This has been organised by the local white Indian agent, Major Miles, who believes he is doing a good thing. He is, we are told, “a man of conscience. Whatever he did, he did earnestly”.

The trouble with earnest people – as I know a bit too well – is that they can lack imagination. He is thinking about these children who are about to leave the Reservation “and get a new start. Life would change. They ought to realise it, somehow-” It’s hot and stifling, the children are restless, and he is stiff and soldier-like. Not a recipe for the sort of inspirational words the situation needs. Then, he spies a young boy, “little Eneas”.

The Major remembers the moment, six months earlier in the depths of winter, when he had visited Eneas’ home to find out why his grandfather had not started the wood-cutting job he’d been employed to do. Turns out the grandfather and grandmother were no longer capable of such work. Not only that, they seemed ill, and the Major felt trapped. He feared catching pneumonia; he felt unable to help personally out of his salary, as where would it stop; and government resources were limited. Then, he had spied “little Eneas” who was doing his best to help the old people. Eneas’ “uncomplaining wordlessness”, his “loyalty to the old people”, had got the Major thinking. Here was “a boy of quality”. Surely he’d be “shirking his duty” if he failed to help him. So, he had come up with a plan to have the old people cared for and send Eneas off to boarding school. The trouble was that Eneas didn’t like the plan.

But, our Major was not to be dissuaded (so much so that “against his own principles” he had even bought “a week’s worth of groceries” for the old people):

Whether the boy understood what was good for him or not, he meant to see to it that the right thing was done…

You can imagine what that right thing was. The story concludes with our returning to the Major and the children on the railway station, and the Major trying to find those words to inspire the children. The Major knew that “none had wanted to go”, so he wanted to make them see “what this moment of going away meant”. What it meant of course, in the well-meaning Major’s mind, was a bright future.

There is no epiphany for the Major but the powerful imagery in the closing paragraphs, in which “a white plume flew upward” while the “flying locomotive loomed blacker and larger” conveys what the author thinks.

McNickle does a great job of evoking the Major. We see his good intentions, but we also see his stiffness and his obliviousness to the humanity of those he wants to help. This sort of well-meaning paternalism was pretty rife amongst those who wanted to do “the right thing” wasn’t it? I’d love to know how the story was received at the time. Did stories like this get the message across?

D’Arcy McNickle
“Train time” (orig. pub. Indians at work 3, from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, March 15, 1936)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 40-45
ISBN: 9780486490953

Myra Morris, The inspiration (#Review, #1940 Club)

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As I have done for some previous “year” reading weeks*, I decided for 1940 to read a short story by an Australian author. After a bit of searching I settled on Myra Morris, and her story “Inspiration”, because … let me explain.

My last two Australian contributions for these reading weeks were works by men – Bernard Cronin and Frederic Manning – so this time I wanted to choose one of our women writers. I found a few in Trove, but the one that caught my eye was by Myra Morris, because she was already known to me: in my Monday Musings for the 1929 year, and back in 2012 in another Monday Musings where she was listed by Colin Roderick in his Twenty Australian novelists. She also has an entry in the ADB. Clearly she had some sort of career at least, even if she is not well remembered now.

Who was Myra Morris?

ADB‘s article, written by D.J. Jordan in 1986, gives her dates as 1893 to 1966. She was born in the Mallee town of Boort, in western Victoria, to an English father and Australian mother. Her literary abilities were encouraged by her mother and an English teacher at Rochester Brigidine Convent, and she had verse published in the Bulletin. From 1930 she was part of Melbourne’s literary, journalistic and artistic circles, and “was active in founding and organising the Melbourne branch of P.E.N. International”. Her circle of friends, it appears, included Katharine Susannah Prichard.

While she wrote book reviews, novels and essays, her favourite form was, apparently, short stories. She was published in newspapers, and her short stories have been anthologised, but there is only one published collection of her stories, The township (1947). Translations of her work were published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Jordan writes that she:

has been acclaimed as one of Australia’s best short-story writers. Her clear pictures of life in country and town contain a wide range of characters and reveal her tolerance and understanding of humanity in its struggles. Like her novels, her stories combine earthy realism, poetic imagery and a broad humour. Sometimes her plots are marred by the demands of the popular market, but her often beaten-down and defeated people always contrast with her lyrical evocation of landscapes. 

“The inspiration”

I picked “The inspiration” primarily because it was by Myra Morris, but I was also attracted to it because it’s set in Melbourne and its protagonist is a musician. Both of these interest me. The plot centres on violinist, Toni Pellagrini, who, as you can tell by his name, is of Italian background. Every afternoon, he plays in a 5-piece ensemble in the cafe at “Howie’s emporium”. It’s when he is happiest, we are told. When he is playing, he is “a different creature entirely from the little dark, harassed person who at other times sorted out vegetables in his father’s fruit shop”. You sense the immigrant life. Indeed, at one point Toni realises that without his music he could be seen as “a fat, oily little Dago”.

Toni is ambitious. He wants to play somewhere better than the cafe, in Kirchner’s Orchestra for example. At the cafe, however, the customers are “indifferent”, and offer only “inconsequential applause”. They are more interested in their chatter, in being seen, than in the music. You know the scene. Toni’s distress starts to affect his playing, so much that the other players notice, until one day a young girl appears. She provides him with the needed inspiration (hence the title). She listens with an “absorbed gaze” and breaks into “furious clapping” when the music ends. Toni has his mojo back. Then, they hear that the famous Kirchner is looking for players and is at the cafe. But, as they begin to play, the girl is not there, and Toni is unable play well anymore without her, his inspiration …

What happens next is largely predictable – except that Morris adds a delightful little twist that doesn’t spoil the expected ending but adds an unexpected layer.

Like Jordan, the Oxford companion to Australian literature particularly praises Morris’ short stories, saying that “her talent for domestic realism and naturalistic description, especially of rural environments, is best suited to the short story”. “The inspiration” is not one of these stories – it is urban set, and is not domestic – but its immigrant milieu (both in Toni’s family and the gypsy-inspired ensemble in which he plays) and its resolution suggest a writer interested in capturing the breadth of Australian life as she saw it.

* Read for the 1940 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.

Myra Morris
“Inspiration”
Published in Weekly Times (2 March 1940)
Available online via Trove

John M. Oskison, The singing bird (#Review)

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From Zitkala-Ša’s 1901-published “The soft-hearted Sioux”, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers jumps a quarter of a century to 1925, and John M. Oskison’s “The singing bird”.

John M. Oskison

Again, anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides a brief intro to the author, but it’s Wikipedia that is able to provide more detail. John M(ilton) Oskison (1874-1937) was, like our two previous authors, of mixed parentage. He was born in Cherokee Nation to an English father and part-Cherokee mother. He went to Stanford University (where my friend who gave me the anthology went, in fact!) and was president of the Stanford Literary Society. Wikipedia says he was Stanford’s first Native American graduate. He apparently went to Harvard for graduate school but he left to become a professional writer after he won a short story competition.

By his death he had published novels, short stories and many pieces of journalism. A novel titled The singing bird was found in his papers in 2007 and subsequently published. Timothy Powell, writing about this novel, suggests it is “quite possibly the first historical novel written by a Cherokee”, and argues that it offers “an interpretation of indigenous history that stresses survival and empowerment over removal and despair”. It is set in the 1840s-50s, after the Cherokees had been removed to Indian Territory, and in it, Powell says, Oskison ‘skilfully blends fiction and reality, thoughtfully demonstrating how literature can rewrite the master narrative of “history” and bring to life moments in the past that remain outside the scope of the written records maintained by the dominant white society’. This sounds like the sort of historical fiction that is starting to appear in Australia, like Julie Janson’s Benevolence (my review) and Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (my review), novels that correct the colonial historical perspective that has been prevailed for too long. Oskison was, like our previous two authors, an activist.

Blaisdell focuses more on the story. He describes it as an “exciting, densely plotted story” but suggests the reader needs to “hold tight” because it is “dotted with odd, struggling phrasings that make it seem as if Oskison were translating it”. The title, he explains, refers to “cuckolding”, with “singing bird” being a term used by “full-bloods” for a “deceiving wife”. He suggests that ‘the issue of “full-bloods” versus half-breeds” is a messier theme’.

“The singing bird”

Powell says that it is not known when Oskison started writing his novel The singing bird. However, he does mention that this story was published in 1925 and wonders whether Oskison began to formulate the novel around this time. From Powell’s description of the novel, the characters names are different, it has a multilayered narrative structure unlike the story, and the narrative is very different, so let’s leave the novel there.

Wikipedia says of Oskison that “his fiction focused on the culture clash that mixed-bloods like himself faced”. “The singing bird” is interesting in this regard because, as Blaisdell suggests, a significant issue in the story concerns “full-bloods and half-breeds”. The story opens with Big Jim (Jim Blind-Wolfe) sending his wife Jennie away because it is time for the men to talk. They make up “the inner, unofficial council of the Kee-too-wah* organisation” and they are “self-charged with the duty of carrying out the ancient command to maintain amongst the Cherokees the full-blood inheritance of race purity and race ideals”.

This “council” is concerned about the “alarming late growth of outlawry in the tribe, an increase in crime due to idleness, drink and certain disturbing white men who had established themselves in the hills”. As they discuss this serious business, Oskison writes that “paradoxically … They would pass a jug of honest moonshine – but they would drink from it discreetly, lightly, as full blood gentleman should!” Nice touch!

Meanwhile, the ousted wife Jennie, takes herself to the “out cabin” with its “inviting pine-log room”. Here she awaits, we are told, Lovely Daniel who has already been introduced to us by the men, as their “wild half-breed neighbour”. Jennie, though, is expecting to “know shivery terror, the illicit thrill of the singing bird”. And so in the first two pages, the story is set up: Big Jim has sent his wife to the out cabin so that his little council can talk men’s business about half-breeds and white men, and that wife is waiting for one of those half-breeds to visit her in the cabin. Simple story of a dominating husband and unfaithful wife? Sounds it, but all is not as it seems. Oskison unfolds the plot well. We flash back to how Jennie and Lovely Daniel had come to know each other (including the development of his “wonderful plan, a credit to his half-breed shrewdness, if not to his name”), and to how enmity had developed between Big Jim and Lovely Daniel, before returning to the main narrative. There is a revenge theme to the story, one involving Lovely Daniel wishing to avenge having nearly been killed by Big Jim after a political altercation that had turned violent.

So if it’s not a simple unfaithful wife story, what is it? Well, it’s political. There is tension between the full-blood Kee-too-wahs and the half-breeds over whites, and the issue of leasing land to them. The full-bloods (through Big Jim) see leasing land as the thin end of the wedge, while the half-breeds (through Lovely Daniel) see the white man coming as inevitable anyhow. Big Jim, then, represents the Cherokees’ fight for their land, their fight “against “race deterioration and the decay of morale in the long years of contact with the White in Georgia and Tennessee”, while Daniel is the bad, wild man. As Blaisdell says, the theme of “full-bloods” versus half-breeds” is messy, particularly given Oskison was himself of mixed-descent. Perhaps we are intended to see this story – this conflict – more in terms of symbolism than realism, as a story about the primacy of protecting land and culture. (This suggests it’s an anti-assimilation story, though I believe there’s much discussion about Oskison’s attitude to assimilation.)

I found the writing a bit heavy-handed at times, but it also has an interesting tone. There is a sense in Oskison’s language, for example, that the full-blood Kee-too-wah men are not the whole answer either (as they sit “like remote, secret gods, in judgment on the conduct of a community”). And, although Jennie takes significant agency in the story, she is still expected, when it’s all over, to make breakfast for the men!

“The singing bird” is an intriguing story. It’s one that seems to raise as many questions as it answers, particularly when seen within the context of Oskison himself, of his oeuvre, and of course of his times – times I know little about.

* See Wikipedia.

John M. Oskison
“The singing bird” (orig. pub. Sunset Magazine, March 1925)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 25-39
ISBN: 9780486490953

Zitkala-Sa, The soft-hearted Sioux (#Review)

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Zitkala-Ša’s “The soft-hearted Sioux” is the second story in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, sent to me by my American friend. I posted on the first one, Pauline Johnson’s “A red girl’s reasoning”, a couple of weeks ago.

Zitkala-Ša

As he does for all the stories, anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides a brief intro to Zitkala-Ša and her story. Also known by her married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938) was born at the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. She was educated at a Quaker missionary school and then, because she wanted to be more than the presumed-for-girls job of housekeeper, she went to the Quaker-run liberal arts school, Earlham College. She went on the teach at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. As with Johnson, Wikipedia fleshes out the details. It tells us that she hated being stripped of her culture at the Quaker missionary school, that she learnt piano and violin there, and that when she graduated from it in June 1895, “she gave a speech on the inequality of women’s rights”.

Wikipedia chronicles her life well, so do read it if you are interested. I’ll just add here that, it introduces her work with: “She wrote several works chronicling her struggles with cultural identity, and the pull between the majority culture in which she was educated, and the Dakota culture into which she was born and raised. Her later books were among the first works to bring traditional Native American stories to a widespread white English-speaking readership”. And it concludes that her “legacy lives on as one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century”.

Regarding “The soft-hearted Sioux”, Blaisdell explains that “it is narrated by a young Christianised man who returns to his Sioux reservation as a missionary” at which time his father says to him that “your soft heart has unfitted you for everything”. In this story, in other words, Zitkala-Ša exposes some of the iniquities of colonialism.

“The soft-hearted Sioux”

According to Wikipedia, Zitkala-Ša had a fruitful writing career, with two major periods, the first being 1900 to 1904, during which our story was published. In this period, she published legends from Native American culture – which she apparently started collecting while she was at Earlham – and autobiographical narratives. “The soft-hearted Sioux” has an autobiographical element, I guess. The protagonist is male, and I don’t believe she returned from college a missionary, but she did go to a Christian school. Other stories published in this time were clearly more autobiographical: “An Indian teacher among Indians”, “Impressions of an Indian childhood”, and “School days of an Indian girl” (all in 1900).

The story is told first person. At the opening, our narrator is in his “sixteenth year” and is sitting in the family’s teepee with his parents on either side of him, and his maternal grandmother in front. The grandmother is smoking a “red stone pipe” and it is passed around as they provide him with advice. It is time for him to find a woman, to learn to hunt and bring home meat, to become a warrior. We then jump nine years. He had not, he tells us, grown up to be “the warrior huntsman, and husband” expected of him. Instead, the mission school had taught him that killing was wrong. For “nine winters” he had “hunted for the soft heart of Christ, and prayed for the huntsman who chased the buffalo on the plains.” In the tenth year, he is sent back to his tribe

to preach Christianity to them with the white man’s Bible in my hand and a white man’s tender heart in my breast.

He no longer wears the buckskin clothes and blanket on his shoulders as he does at the opening. Now, “wearing a foreigner’s dress”, he walks “a stranger” into his father’s village.

The story then is about the impact and implications of assimilation, the dislocation it causes for both individuals and society. Our young man, thoroughly inculcated with Christian thought, arrives home to find his father ill, and being tended by the “medicine-man … the sorcerer of the plains”. He is disturbed about his father’s “unsaved soul” and tries to banish the “sorcerer”. So begins his life as a missionary. He knows it will be hard, but is confident he will succeed. I’ll leave the story there, as you can read it online (link below) but, knowing who is writing this story and why, you won’t be surprised to discover that he doesn’t succeed. The story is sentimentally told, in the style of the time, but its subject-matter is strong and emotive. Zitkala-Ša uses the motifs of the opposing Native American and Christian cultures well – the dress and customs, the knife of the brave versus the soft heart of the Christian, with softness here, equating less with gentleness than with weakness – to make her points.

Zitkala-Ša, herself, of course, was Christian-educated like her protagonist, but she went on to use the tools of that education to fight for the rights of First Nations people. She did that in various ways, including through politically activism. She was involved with the Society of American Indians (SAI) which, says Wikipedia,”was dedicated to preserving the Native American way of life while lobbying for the right to full American citizenship” and went on to found, with her husband, the National Council of American Indians. She also actively promoted women’s rights, through a grassroots organisation for women, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

But, an important part of her activism was through her writing. By publishing stories like “The soft-hearted Sioux” in majority-culture journals, like Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly, she hoped, I believe, to educate that culture in its impact on her people. The story is still worth reading today. Its style is dated, lacking some of the subtlety and nuance we are used to, but it nonetheless conveys truths that still stand and it provides us with a window on how long this fight has been going on. I’m loving being introduced to new-to-me writers and activists, like Pauline Johnson and Zitkala-Ša, through this book. They are women well worth knowing about.

Zitkala-Ša
“The soft-hearted Sioux” (orig. pub. Harper’s Monthly, March 1901)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 17-24
ISBN: 9780486490953
Available online at upenn