Read The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Online
Authors: Hortense Calisher
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The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher
Hortense Calisher
For Richard Howard
Introduction by John Hollander
In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks
The Rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake
If You Don’t Want to Live I Can’t Help You
What a Thing, to Keep a Wolf in a Cage!
The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street
by
John Hollander
W
RITING 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.