The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Read online

  The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

  Hortense Calisher

  For Richard Howard

  Contents

  Introduction by John Hollander

  I

  In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks

  Heartburn

  The Night Club in the Woods

  Two Colonials

  The Hollow Boy

  The Rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake

  The Woman Who Was Everybody

  A Christmas Carillon

  II Plœ:r Dã Mõ Kœ:r

  If You Don’t Want to Live I Can’t Help You

  A Wreath for Miss Totten

  II

  Time, Gentlemen!

  May-ry

  The Coreopsis Kid

  A Box of Ginger

  The Pool of Narcissus

  The Watchers

  The Gulf Between

  The Sound of Waiting

  Old Stock

  The Rabbi’s Daughter

  The Middle Drawer

  III

  The Summer Rebellion

  IV

  What a Thing, to Keep a Wolf in a Cage!

  Songs My Mother Taught Me

  So Many Rings to the Show

  One of the Chosen

  Point of Departure

  Letitia, Emeritus

  The Seacoast of Bohemia

  Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra

  Saturday Night

  Little Did I Know

  Night Riders of Northville

  In the Absence of Angels

  The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  by John Hollander

  WRITING AN APPRECIATION OF—and expressing appreciation for—a volume of more than twice-read tales is an allusive business. I remember now reading this wonderful collection for the first time nine years ago, and at that time remembering the occasions on which I first encountered some of them individually (reading “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks” in the New Yorker) or in collections (having “Letitia, Emeritus,” still a favorite of mine, read aloud to me in enthusiastic wonder by a now-dead friend). The literal echoes of the New York City I had known in my own childhood, through a maternal grandfather not entirely unlike Hester Elkin’s father in the stories grouped in Part II of this volume, have been overlaid by the more figurative ones of reencounters with originally recounted tales, which had since rebounded from intervening texts. Hortense Calisher has herself suggested a relation between the story “Heartburn” and her remarkable novel Journal from Ellipsia of over a decade later, but there may be a more general matter involved. “Heartburn,” a kind of story that descends in American literature from Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a parable of skepticism, of doubt itself put in doubt by an age whose only faith rests on the authenticity of doubting. Its fable is based on our popular idiom of “swallowing something” as believing, just as the less starkly allegorical treatment of rural populations in New England, in the almost novella-length “The Summer Rebellion,” beginning to be reassumed by the land itself is an expansion of the idiomatic “going to grass.” Rereading both of these through the screen of acquaintance with Hortense Calisher’s powerful recent novel Mysteries of Motion points up once again something true not only of this writer’s own oeuvre, but of American fiction in general.

  I suppose this might be called the matter of the novel as opposed to the matter of romance; of stories, as one might phrase the distinction, rather than tales. I use the latter word in Hawthorne’s, rather than in Henry James’s sense—although the latter’s relation to the parabolic mode of the former is itself a matter of some interest—to distinguish the fabulous from the realistically fictional, to indicate the ground rules within which a tale like “In the Absence of Angels” unfolds its action as contrasted with the principles that provide the epistemological armature for a story like “The Middle Drawer” or the heartbreaking “The Coreopsis Kid.” Certainly, Hortense Calisher’s stories take their place in that central line of narrative that runs from Henry James and William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton through Scott Fitzgerald and Hortense Calisher’s contemporary, the late John Cheever. (In the matter of genre alone, “Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra” or “Night Riders of Northville” seem firmly entrenched in familiar territory, however unique their mode of handling.) But there is another strain—one James himself was unable totally to repress—which comes from Hawthorne and Melville and which has been most flagrantly exemplified since by Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon, the tradition of prose romance. And here is to be found the province of those tales, and near tales like the very Jamesian “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street.”

  Hortense Calisher’s constant measurement of the claims of each of these traditions from the viewpoint of the other has given her whole body of fiction its great strength, its outstanding evidence of skill and meditative power aside. There are so many rings to the show, now, of the circus of fiction, even as there are to that of our lives, that it is almost a reader’s relation to these texts themselves that seems to be evoked as a strange undersong by the remarkable lines at the end of “So Many Rings to the Show” where the husband and wife, newly married, have already been redeemed from illusion by an older reality: “So, in the darkness, he clung to her for a moment not as a lover but as he might cling to some foolish crony who had once been there together with him in the Arcady of the past.” Thoughtful readers—and Hortense Calisher does not really write for readers who cannot think very well—will always feel that these stories have been there together with them in the past.

  The group of stories about Hester and Kinny Elkin and their family possesses a curious quality of interconnection, which is itself not novelistic. Each of them is totally self-contained, and ancillary characters and situations are generated by each story individually. And yet they are full of echoing and reflecting moments and scenes. The continuity that does exist is provided more by an authorial sensibility and critical consciousness than by the family and the German-Jewish middle-class Manhattan of their milieu. “The Pool of Narcissus” and “The Sound of Waiting” embody two aspects—indeed, two phases—of the history of the incursions of parental sexuality upon the disputed territory of adolescence. They are both classic American stories of what the author herself calls “youth revolving before the prospect of the world.” And yet there is a deeper, almost mythographic element, the stuff of tale rather than story, about them. Hester, in “The Pool of Narcissus,” receives her intimation of sexuality as in a darkened mirror of the sort in which we catch glimpses of ourselves unawares, and thereby almost unrecognized. Kinny, in “The Sound of Waiting,” responds to an injunction provided by an echo of the past—he is going and doing likewise, having been vouchsafed an overhead sense of the familiarity (in all its senses) of erotic adventure. And yet innocence and experience, echo and mirror, nymph and youth, all combine and exchange roles in these two stories, and the precise questions that a literalist would raise about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, are subsumed under the larger ones that wisdom would always want to ask about youth and age, memory and hope, fragility and force. They are surely stories, but their relation to one another is almost that of fable.

  Every reader will want to perceive his or her own connections between these pieces, even as the author in her introduction sees her own, and I shall not pursue any further the matter of the overall figure (in Robert Frost’s word) these stories make. But I cannot refrain from commending the reissuing of this volume as an important literary event. Hortense Calisher’s collected stories constitute a primary body of work by a major American writer of
fiction; moreover, they represent the unrelinquished claims of serious fiction to that moral power that Martin Price has so effectively characterized in his recent critical study, Forms of Life. They are being republished at a moment when a minimal sensibility has become high fashion, when the writer’s craft seems to have been consumed in authorial self-hatred, and a reductive grimness or ridiculousness, the humming and drumming of imaginative failure celebrated in naively imitative form, has become an authenticating imprimatur. These stories are the work of a master, and as such, they have a remarkable novelty. Nobody who has never done scholarly research can perhaps understand how fresh the dusty air of the stacks of a major library can seem as compared with the tired raging, on the outside, of fashions on their way to the grave. But even the slightest ironic comprehension of the gyrations of history can lead one to understand how the attribution of staleness and death to the breath of the past is itself a dead wind. In their continuity with a major American fictional tradition, as in their very means of realizing themselves beyond it, Hortense Calisher’s stories celebrate the powers of moral imagination as deployed in narratives that half conceal, and half disclose, their own exemplary or fabulous nature. Her stories and tales are evergreen reminders of the nobility of responsible, attentive, vulnerable and somehow triumphant consciousness.

  A STORY IS AN APOCALYPSE, served in a very small cup. Still, it wants to be considered in its own company only. The presence of neighbors changes it. Worlds meant to be compacted only to themselves, bump. Their very sequence can do them violence. Even when all the stories are by the same hand.

  Here are thirty-six, covering almost two decades, and combining three prior collections. In the Absence of Angels, here entire, was my first book as well; it is full of beginnings. Yet it too was a selection. By the time it went to press there were more stories available, and I continued to write them. Three years on, however, I began a novel which was to take another seven years to complete. After its publication came Tale for the Mirror, A Novella and Other Stories—a selection from among the shorter works written during that eleven-year interim. A second novel was followed by Extreme Magic—again a novella with stories. The two title novellas are here omitted. All the stories are here, plus one which is new to book form. Since all three collections are only weakly chronological and follow no other natural order, I have felt free to desert their tables of contents for another arrangement entirely.

  What I have done is to try for what a conductor asks of a program, or a composer would hope for if he had the concertizing of his own work—to sustain and pleasure the natural rhythms of an audience. These rhythms—the rise and fall of interest, the need to go from frivol to gloom, from dark to light, from female to male to the general, and from an untrustworthy reality to a joyously recognizable fantasy—I take to be much the same as my own.

  One group of stories, those centered around the Hester-Kinny Elkin family, are related. They are indeed, my relations. Yet, in all quasi-autobiography, as one exorcises the family world the mere facts begin to disappear, in favor of the mere truth. Hester was certainly me. But Kinny, the boy in “A Box of Ginger,” was also. When I found that out (in answer to a canny question from William Maxwell), I was the one surprised. I was to find this knowledge useful and comforting whenever I wrote of men and boys. There is no reason why they should not be our Bovarys.

  Even so, Kinny in “The Gulf Between” is my real brother, as a sibling seen. And by the time the young man in “The Sound of Waiting” and the young wife in “The Rabbi’s Daughter” come along, it no longer matters that they are aspects of me; they are youth revolving before the prospect of the world and not yet aware who they are; he doesn’t yet know that as a valet to memory only, he will sink back, as those parts of oneself do; she, whose feminism scarcely has a name, doesn’t know that she will revolt. As for the Father and Mother, as I have just this moment seen, they do not change; they remain like the ushabti, the statuettes placed in the tomb so that its owner, dead or dreaming, may be served by them. In such stories, only the children mutate. And grow up to write them.

  I had intended to do more about the Elkins. They were to be a grand first novel, of many story-chapters centering out like the spokes of a wheel. Gradually I saw that this wheel might be turning all my life. And that though I might at any time return with another spoke, I must now leave at once. When I did return, the tone (“Time, Gentlemen!” and “Songs My Mother Taught Me”) had altogether changed. Few of this group were written chronologically, none toward that end, and none of course came really from behind the eye of a child. So there was no obligation to begin the book with them. I put them in its center, where they may radiate.

  I begin rather with the story in which I deserted the literal world forever, for the imaginary one. “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks” was also the story after whose appearance the press began poking the idea of novels at me, as if on my own I might never have thought of them. My answer at the time—made with that hauteur which is the other side of fright—was: If a tale can be told in seven thousand words, why use seventy? I still believe that. And I still feel that same respectful scare—at the thought of all the tales, long some of them, which wait to be told.

  Meanwhile, scanning this table of contents, of course I see many connections with the novels that were to come. (And with some yet to come.) Sometimes a novel-in-progress may erupt a story sideways, as with “May-ry,” written while I was on the section of False Entry that takes place in the Southern United States (I had to give myself a guilty permission to delay the longer concentration: I’ve lost many stories by not doing so.) Conversely, I can see, if I’m not careful, that whoever wrote “The Watchers” might well write a novel narrated by “the heart doomed to watch itself feel,” that Spanner in “One of the Chosen” faintly anticipates the Judge in The New Yorkers, as the young Peter Birge in “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks” is very close, in the writer’s sympathies, to the hero of Eagle Eye. (As the “rabbi’s daughter” and her baby are kin to the young mother-and-child in Textures of Life.) I can see now why the young beauties who are just pulling off their blouses in “Songs My Mother Taught Me” will end up in Queenie in the buff. (Alongside Queenie’s political ancestress, “Ginevra Leake.”) And why, if one doesn’t strain at swallowing newts à la “Heartburn,” one may someday open one’s jaws wide enough to accommodate an eight-foot ellipse, swum in from the Elsewhere that only the uninitiate still call science-fiction, and as human a noncharacter as you ever wrote—of whom your English publisher will ask “Tell me. I have to know. Was he a Lesbian?”

  To which you must close ears, eyes, and quickest—mouth. In case you were about to quip “No. She was Gulliver.” Analogies are everywhere—afterward. And though you would rather not, you can see them sharper than anybody.

  I do see, more gladly, a certain temperament in the story form. Its very duration, too brief to make a new mode in, verges it always toward that classical corner where sits the human figure. And perhaps the genre flourishes best during those periods of life—both for authors and eras—when the human drama is easier accepted as the main one going. Whenever we lose this sense of ourselves as a train of people and gear, plodding eternally down the ages or purposefully up, we tend to dissipate into style—in every genre. The novel, that deceptively ragged cave, can take more echoing. For a time. And maybe more gear. But a loss of the humanist spirit will show up earliest in the shorter form, not because it is any more conservative, but because there is no space where that loss may hide. A story can have only one heart at a time, and it must palpitate visibly.

  So doing, it can animate any idea, in any shape. A story may float like an orb, spread like a fan or strike its parallels ceaselessly on the page—as long as all its clues cohere. Language itself may be the idea. Many stories now being written are about the imperfect clueing between language and life. Or about the ugliness of shape. Often, after an upsurge in any art—such as we have had here in the past fif
ty years of the short story—artists tire of symmetry, of conclusiveness, and even of the very authority that such a renaissance brings. This is natural. The old avant-garde is coming back. Hail! In literature one need never say farewell.

  I’ve grown to think that any art form is avant-garde to begin with, by having hurtled itself over and through our animal and psychic barriers to become—itself. How extraordinary of a statue not to be a stone—and for thousands upon thousands of quiet gazers to know this—at once. How odd of a story to be never only conversation, yet neither a poem nor a song.

  I go to the short-story world most perhaps for the multiplicity of its voices, which crowd in, endearingly intimate, approachable, from across terra firma whose scale one can almost see. For the writer, that world is as fell—in the sense of a knockdown blow—as any other. It’s the world where once I learned, and learn again laboriously, that a writer’s own voice may clap in many tongues, all the while the single meaning keeps chanting its Gregorian. Staring at these stories, I know that they have already arranged themselves. The stories of an individual writer are already a collective; that is their nature. Between the written ones—these rows of tumuli that I visit so rarely—and those other motes still searing toward me from the wide lens of the unwritten, a membership has been forming from the beginning. At any moment another may join them. Looking forward is looking back.

  —H.C.

  I

  In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks

  ON AN AFTERNOON IN early August, Peter Birge, just returned from driving his mother to the Greenwich sanitarium she had to frequent at intervals, sat down heavily on a furbelowed sofa in the small apartment he and she had shared ever since his return from the Army a year ago. He was thinking that his usually competent solitude had become more than he could bear. He was a tall, well-built young man of about twenty-three, with a pleasant face whose even, standardized look was the effect of proper food, a good dentist, the best schools, and a brush haircut. The heat, which bored steadily into the room through a Venetian blind lowered over a half-open window, made his white T shirt cling to his chest and arms, which were still brown from a week’s sailing in July at a cousin’s place on the Sound. The family of cousins, one cut according to the pattern of a two-car-and-country-club suburbia, had always looked with distaste on his precocious childhood with his mother in the Village and, the few times he had been farmed out to them during those early years, had received his healthy normality with ill-concealed surprise, as if they had clearly expected to have to fatten up what they undoubtedly referred to in private as “poor Anne’s boy.” He had only gone there at all, this time, when it became certain that the money saved up for a summer abroad, where his Army stint had not sent him, would have to be spent on one of his mother’s trips to Greenwich, leaving barely enough, as it was, for his next, and final, year at the School of Journalism. Half out of disheartenment over his collapsed summer, half to provide himself with a credible “out” for the too jovially pressing cousins at Rye, he had registered for some courses at the Columbia summer session. Now these were almost over, too, leaving a gap before the fall semester began. He had cut this morning’s classes in order to drive his mother up to the place in Connecticut.