My Gun Is Quick, by Mickey Spillane – May, 1953 (1950) [James S. Avati]

James S. Avati’s cover art for Signet Books’ 1953 edition of Mickey Spillane’s My Gun Is Quick combines elements of mystery, eroticism, danger, and anonymity (note that Mike Hammer’s face is turned away from the viewer, while the background is little more than shades of red) that are nicely representative of paperback art of this genre and period. 

I don’t know if this scene represents an event described in the novel, but, well, it’s effective.

Admittedly, unlike many of the books featured at this blog, I’ve not – just yet!- actually read this particular work.  However, even having only lightly skimmed the novel’s pages in search of an excerpt representing Spillane’s literary style (see below), the qualities of his writing emerge almost immediately:  Crispness of language; violence – both perpetrated and experienced by protagonist Mike Hammer; a sense of foreboding and mystery; a rapid-fire sense of action; steady continuity and focus, with no extraneous action or dialogue. 

The man was a hell of a writer.   

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You can view the full 1957 United Artists film version of “My Gun Is Quick” (directed by Victor Saville, with Robert Bray as Mike Hammer, and Whitney Blake as Nancy Williams), at the Internet Archive.

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(An excerpt from page 157 of this Signet paperback…  Though the text is actually a single paragraph with only two sentence breaks, for the purpose of this post, I’ve arranged it such that most lines are single phrases, as separated by commas.)

From the river the low cry of dark shapes and winking lights that were ships
echoed and re-echoed through the canyons of the avenues. 
Lola turned the radio on low, bringing in a selection of classical piano pieces,
and I sat there with my eyes closed, listening, thinking, picturing my redhead as a blackmailer. 
In a near sleep I thought it was Red at the piano fingering the keys
while I watched approvingly, my mind filled with thoughts. 
She read my mind and her face grew sad,
sadder than anything I had ever seen and she turned her eyes on me
and I could see clear through them into the goodness of her soul
and I knew she wasn’t a blackmailer and my first impression had been right;
she was a girl who had come face to face with fate and had lost,
but in losing hadn’t lost all,
for there was light of holiness in her face that time when I was her friend,
when I thought that a look like that belonged only in church
when you were praying or getting married or something,
a light that was there now for me to see
while she played a song that was there for me now to see
that told me I was her friend and she was mine,
a friendship that was more than that,
it was a trust and I believed it … knew it and wanted it,
for here was a devotion more than I expected or deserved and I wanted to be worthy of it,
but before I could tell her so Feeney Last’s face swirled up from the mist beside the keyboard,
smirking,
silently mouthing smutty remarks and leering threats
that took the holiness away from the scene and smashed it underfoot,
assailing her with words that replaced the hardness and terror
that had been forgiven before we met and I couldn’t do a thing about it
because my feet were powerless to move
and my hands were glued to my sides by some invisible force that Feeney controlled
and wouldn’t release until he had killed her
and was gone with his laugh ringing in the air and the smirk still on his face,
daring me to follow where I couldn’t answer him;
all I could do was stand there and look at my redhead’s lifeless body
until I focused on her hands
to see where he had scratched her when he took the ring off.

References

James S. Avati…

…at askArt

…at Wikipedia

…at invaluable – The World’s Premier Auctions and Galleries

Mickey Spillane…

…at Wikipedia

…talks Mike Hammer, his writing process, and wealth (1962), at CBC

…February 11, 2004, at Carolina People (Part I)

…February 11, 2004, at Carolina People (Part II)

RIP Mickey Spillane (Mickey Spillane on the Dick Cavett show), at consumerguide

My Gun Is Quick…

…at Wikipedia

…at IMDB

Franz Kafka – The Complete Stories – 1983 [Anthony Russo] and 1971 (1946) [Klaus Gemming]

There are many ways to “illustrate” a story, without literally illustrating the story. 

For example, you can depict characters, events, and settings, either literally or symbolically.  You can portray physical objects or places; moods and expressions, or, reactions and emotions.  

Another way to present an image of a story is by displaying the very text of the story.  A nice example of this appeared as the cover of Shocken Books’ 1971 edition of Franz Kafka – The Complete Stories, which was originally published in 1946.  The 1971 edition of the book shows a page of the handwritten text of one of Kafka’s stories, though (!) I don’t know the particular story – or perhaps novel – to which the text pertains, and neither the cover flaps nor title page reveal this information.  But, for a book cover of a collection of a writer’s writings, Klaus Gemmings’ cover “works”.

As stated on the cover flap, “FOR THE FIRST TIME, all the stories of Franz Kafka – one of the great writers of the twentieth century – are collected here in one comprehensive volume.  With the exception of the three novels, the whole of his narrative work is included.  The remarkable depth and breadth of his shorter fiction, the full scope of his brilliant and probing imagination become even more evident when the stories are seen as a whole. 

The collection offers an astonishing range of insights into the writer’s world: his war of observing and describing reality, the dreamlike events, his symbolism and irony, and his concern with the human condition.  The simplicity, precision, and clarity of Kafka’s style are deceptive, and the attentive reader will be aware of the existential abyss opening beneath the seemingly spare surface of a tale.

An irresistible inner force drove Kafka to write: “The tremendous world  have in my head.  But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces.  And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it!”  For him, writing was both an agonizing and a liberating process: “God does not want me to write, but I – I must write!”  Kafka’s work was born from this tragic tension.”

The book’s 1983 softcover edition (with a foreword by John Updike) takes a different approach:  Like other compilations of Kafka’s works published by Shocken in the 1980s, the cover displays a small, square-format, untitled, symbolic illustration by Anthony Russo.  Perhaps the interpretation of the image is meant to be enigmatic; perhaps left to the reader.  If so (I think so), I think the composition of an anonymous man staring through a window – or door? – yes, a door – with two open doors behind him, represents “Before The Law”, the full text of which is given below…

Before The Law

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper.
To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. 
But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment.
The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. 
“It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at the moment.” 

Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side,
the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. 
Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says:
“If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite of my veto. 
But take note: I am powerful.
And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. 
From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. 
The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.” 

These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected;
the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone,
but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in the far corner,
with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard,
he decides that it is better to wait until he gains permission to enter. 

The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. 
There he sits for days and years. 
He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. 
He doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him,
asking him questions about his home and many other things,
but the questions are put indifferently,
as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. 

The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey,
sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper.
The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark:
“I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything.”
During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper.
He forgets the other doorkeepers,
and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law.
He curses his bad luck;
in his early years boldly and loudly;
later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself.
He becomes childish,
and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper
he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar,
he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change to doorkeeper’s mind.

At length his eyesight begins to fail,
and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him.
Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance
that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law.
Now he has not very long to live.
Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point,
a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper.

He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. 
The doorkeeper has to bend low toward him,
for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man’s disadvantage. 
“What do you want to know now?” asks the doorkeeper; “you are insatiable.” 
“Everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man,
“so how does it happen that for all these many years no one buy myself has ever begged for admittance?” 

The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end,
and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear:
“No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. 
I am now going to shut it.”

(Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

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Here are four other stories by Kafka, the page number of each denoting the softcover edition.  In terms of depth (upon depth, upon depth, upon…) each tale is stunning in its own way.

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The Next Village (404)

My grandfather used to say, “Life is astoundingly short. 
To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I can scarcely understand,
for instance,
how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that –
not to mention accidents –
even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.”

(Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

Prometheus (432)

There are four legends concerning Prometheus.
According to the first
he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men,
and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
According to the second
Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks,
pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
According to the third
his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years,
forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
According to the fourth
everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. 
The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. 
The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. 
As it came out of the substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.

(Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

A Little Fable (445)

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. 
At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running,
and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left,
but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already,
and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” 
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat,
and ate it up.

(Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

The Departure (449)

I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables.
The servant did not understand my orders. 
So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. 
In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. 
He knew nothing and had heard nothing. 
At the gate he stopped me and asked, “Where is the master going?” 
“I don’t know,” I said, “just out of here, just out of here. 
Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.” 
“So you know your goal?” he asked. 
“Yes,” I replied, “I’ve just told you. 
Out of here – that’s my goal.”

(Translated by Tania and James Stern)

Paco’s Story, by Larry Heinemann – 1986 [Paul Bacon] [Updated post…]

(First posted in November of 2017, “this” revision includes an excerpt from Larry Heinemann’s novel…)

God’s Marvellous Plan.
Our man Paco, not dead but sure as shit should be,
lies flat on his back and wide to the sky,
with slashing lacerations,
big watery burn blisters,
and broken, splintered, ruined legs.
He wallows in this greasy, silken muck that covers him
and everything else for a stone’s throw and dries to a stinking sandy crust.
He lies there that night and all the next day,
the next night and half the second day,
with his heels hooked on a gnarled, charred,
nearly fire-hardened vine root; immobile.
And he comes to consciousness in the dark of that first long night
with a heavy dew already soaked through the rags of his clothes,
and he doesn’t know what hit him.

Am I ever fucked up, he thinks to himself,
but he doesn’t so much say this or even think it as he imagines looking down at his own body,
seeing – vividly – every gaping shrapnel nick,
every pucker burn scar,
every splintery compound fracture.

And at first he encounters his whole considerable attention on listening –
for the cries, the hoarse, gulped breathing,
the whispering supplication of the other wounded,
for water,
for Jigs the medic,
for God’s simple mercy.
(Swear to God, James, you have not heard anything in this life
until you have heard small clear voices in the dark of night calling distinctly, “Help me, please” –
though they say the crying of wounded horses is worse.
Paco waits with closed eyes and stilled breath,
to shiver and be appalled at the dry raspy voices;
waits patiently to whisper back in answer.
But he hears, of course, nothing.
(pp. 18-19)

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Paul Bacon’s cover art

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Larry Heinemann

Starlight, by Scott Ely – 1987 [John Dispenza] [Updated post…]

(“This” post was created in November of 2017.  It’s now been updated, to include an excerpt from Scott Ely’s novel…)

Jackson walked across the compound toward the bunker line,
looking for a bunker that looked like the one he had just seen in the scope. 
Suddenly mortar rounds started dropping. 
Jackson dived into the nearest shelter, a recoilless rifle emplacement. 
The firebase’s mortars and 105s replied.

“Hey, it’s fucking Alabama,” a soldier said.

“Hale kick you out of the TOC?” another soldier asked.

“I –“ Jackson began.

Rounds began to drop close to the emplacement and men scrambled for cover. 
Jackson heard the shrapnel whistle overhead.

“Get the fuck out of here, Alabama!”, a soldier yelled. 
“You’re drawing fire just like fucking Light.”

The firing had stopped and someone shoved Jackson out of the emplacement.

“Go get somebody else fucked,” a voice yelled after him.

Jackson ran for the radar bunker.

Alfred could still be all right. 
Maybe it was the next incoming that was going to get him, Jackson thought.

But when Jackson reached the radar bunker,
he found the bunker had taken a direct hit which had collapsed the roof. 
A group of soldiers were already trying to dig out Alfred’s body.

I don’t want to know this fucking shit before it happens, Jackson thought,
gasping for breath.

Jackson returned to the TOC and sat up on the roof for a long time in the light rain. 
Although he kept turning the starlight on, it remained dark.

After Alfred’s death Jackson wanted to put the starlight away and never look at it again. 
He understood why Light wanted to get rid of it
and how Light had known nothing was going to happen to him
all those times Jackson had gone out in the bush to meet him. 
But other soldiers had died during the attack,
and who was to say one of them, not Alfred,
was the doomed soldier he had watched in the scope. 
The soldier might have died somewhere else, at Firebase Mary Lou or even in Laos.

Yet every night, Jackson looked at the scope because he wanted to know what the future held for him. 
But he never saw himself in the scope, although he saw other soldiers die,
always shadowy forms whose identities were uncertain. 
Jackson was sure he would recognize himself if he appeared in the scope. 
Jackson was never more afraid, choking and gasping for breath,
than when he watched a doomed man’s image take form in the scope.

But Jackson gave no more warnings. 
He had learned how useless that was by his experience with Alfred. 
He never knew for sure who was going to die. 
No one would believe him, and soon his reputation would be similar to Light’s. 
Hale might banish him to the jungle.

Every night Jackson called Light on the radio but received no reply.  
He thought about going out to find Light but Light had warned him to stay at the firebase. 
Perhaps Light had seen something in the scope.

So Jackson kept watching men die in the scope,
the starlight glowing the green light,
the men’s bodies torn by shrapnel or bullets,
and as the glow faded and the screen turned dark,
Jackson was left breathless and afraid.  (pp. 130-131)

Mockingbird, by Walter S. Tevis – April, 1981 (1980) [Unknown Artist]

“When the drugs and the television were perfected by the computers that made and distributed them, the cars were no longer necessary. 
And since no one had devised a way of making cars safe in the hands of a human driver,
it was decided to discontinue them.”

“Who made that decision?” I said.

“I did.  Solange and I. 
It was the last time I saw him. 
He threw himself off of a building.”

“Jesus,” I said. 
“And then, “When I was a little girl there were no cars. 
But Simon could remember them. 
So that was when thought buses were invented?”

“No.  Thought-buses had been around since the twenty-second century. 
In fact there had been buses, driven by human drivers in the twentieth. 
And trolley cars and trains. 
Most big cities in North America had what were called streetcars at the start of the twentieth century.”

“What happened to them?”

“The automobile companies got rid of them. 
Bribes were paid to city managers to tear up the streetcar tracks,
and advertisements were bought in newspapers to convince the public that it should be done. 
So more cars could be sold, and more oil would be made into gasoline, to be burned in the cars. 
So that corporations could grow,
and so a few people could become incredibly rich,
and have servants, and live in mansions. 
It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. 
It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies –
sexual and economic and narcotic –
upon the automobile. 
And the automobile prepared the wat for the more profound –
more inward –
dependencies upon television and then robots and, finally,
the ultimate and predictable conclusion of all of it:
the perfection of the chemistry of the mind. 
The drugs your fellow humans use are named after twentieth-century ones;
but they are far more potent,
far better at what they do,
and they are all made and distributed –
distributed everywhere there are human beings – by automatic equipment.” 
He looked over at me from his armchair. 
“It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires –
to warm the cave and keep the predators out. 
And it ended with time-release Valium.”
I looked at him for a minute. 
“I don’t take Valium,” I said.  (176-177)

The Blue Valleys – A Collection of Stories, by Robert Morgan – 1989 (Lisa Lytton-Smith)

This post, illustrating the cover of Robert Morgan’s The Blue Valleys, was originally created in April of 2017.  It’s now – in November of 2019 – been updated to include Joanne Kennedy’s 1989 book review from The New York Times, and, the book’s table of contents… 

THE BLUE VALLEYS, By Robert Morgan.

(Peachtree, $15.95.) 

The New York Times Book Review
Review of Joanne Kennedy
December 10, 1989

The strong, pungent stories in “The Blue Valleys,” a first collection by the poet Robert Morgan, are set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, whose hills and valleys are a sturdy home for his characters, mostly working people at the mercy of circumstance.  As these intricate tales progress chronologically from Civil War times to the present, the dignity of simple farm life is complicated by the advent of computers, working wives and disrespectful children, and the land becomes less a source of livelihood than a vital touchstone.  In perhaps the best story in the book, “Tailgunner,” a former prisoner of war named Jones realizes that he has spent his life doing things he never wanted to do, married a women he never intended to marry.  Wondering why he alone was spared in the World War II crash of a B-24, he encounters his real self only in the pine woods.  “It was as though he had forgotten something about himself for almost forty years,” James muses.  “He could not explain why the peacefulness of the trees reminded him of instants of great danger and sickness, why he felt close to some bedrock definition, some value.”  Similarly, in the story called “A Brightness New and Welcoming,” a soldier dying in the sordidness of a Yankee prison camp during the Civil War thinks about the pristine water of a spring that he had cleared on his home place, and the way the spring, “seemed the dial of some instrument.”  The resilience of childhood, the misery of life in a trailer and the humor of December romance are also among the diverse subjects of the stories in this beautifully crafted collection, a procession of tales rich with native detail and character, told in language as plain and deep as the hills, the whole weighed with an awareness of death that looms over the struggle for a meaningful life. 

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Contents

A Brightness New and Welcoming (originally as “Camp Douglas”), from Jacaranda Review

Pisgah

1916 Flood, from South Dakota Review

Crossties

War Story, form St. Andrews Review

Let No Man, from Maryland Review

Family Land, from Appalachian Heritage

The Lost State of Franklin

Tailgunner

The Half Nelson, from Memphis State Review

Night Thoughts, from Epoch

The Pickup

Blinding Daylight, from Celery

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Lorna had never understood the sharpness of her tongue.

It was a habit she had developed as a teenager,
and it had grown on her over the years.

She did not realize how she sounded.

He thought of recording her on tape and then playing it back to her.

She would be astonished at the harshness in her voice,
at the belittling tone of her comments.

She knew how to be polite in public, and with her friends from church.

It was only with him, and with her sisters, that side of her came out.

But she was mostly a good woman,
though he had not meant to spend his life with her.

That was why he seemed so tolerant, why he almost never quarreled.

If he let himself go who knows what he would end up saying.

He might let it out that he had never wanted to marry her,
never wanted to be with her.

It would tear away whatever grace their life had had,
pull down the scaffold and show how badly fitted and supported they really were.

It would ruin her opinion and pride in herself.

His very lack of feeling for her had been the essence of his devotion and patience,
which so many friends had praised,
especially at the times when other friends had divorced.

– “Tailgunner“, by Robert Morgan

Barking Man and Other Stories, by Madison Smartt Bell – 1990 [Dan Reed]

Contents

Holding Together, from Boulevard

Black and Tan (formerly “Going to the Dogs”), from The Atlantic Monthly

Customs of the Country (revised), from Harper’s Magazine

Finding Natasha, from Antaeus and Louder Than Words

Dragon’s Seed, from Boulevard

Barking Man, from The Northern Review

Petit Cachou

Witness, from Harper’s Magazine

Move On Up

Mr. Potatoehead In Love, broadcast on National Public Radio

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“Mr. Thracewell, my brother Alfred,” Big Brother said. 
“Alf, fetch Mr. Thracewell a gin and French.” 
He passed Alf an empty glass and leaned to whisper in his ear,
“Jesus Christ, your tie’s not straight.”

As Alf receded into the hallway,
he thought he heard the murmured invocation London School of Economics,
and he swallowed against that plauguey roughness in his gullet. 
The kitchen was empty and he snatched up the gin bottle,
carried it into the pantry and shut the door after him. 
With the bottle upended over his jaws,
he squinted up at its butt until he saw four bubbles rise,
then lowered it and gasped. 
Gin and French? 
He sniffed the glass the Beeb had given him, but the scent was unenlightening. 
He fixed a gin and tonic with a lot of ice and headed back toward the front of the flat. 
En route he toppled a tower of bowler hats from the hall stand,
made an abortive move to gather them, then decided to let them lie. 
Deep in conversation with Big Brother,
Thracewell took the drink unconsciously and tasted it without looking. 
Alf watched his mouth shrivel to the surface of the glass,
and at that very instant the vast bubbles of gin he’d swallowed burst inside him with a soft explosion.

“iirrrfffooorrrffffaaarrrROOOOORF OOOO OOOO!!!” he howled. 

All around the room he could hear vertebrae popping with the speed of the turning heads.

“Your younger brother is this, you say?” Mr. Thracewell murmured. 
“My word, a most original chap.”

(Madison Smartt Bell, “Barking Man”, p. 105)

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Madison Smartt Bell (photograph by Craig Daniels)

The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy – June, 1952 (November, 1939 (1878)) [Bayre Phillips]

“He had been a lad of whom something was expected.”

He had been a lad of whom something was expected. 
Beyond this all had been chaos. 
That he would be successful in an original way,
or that he would go to the dogs in an original way,
seemed equally probable. 
The only absolute certainty about him
was that he would not stand still in the circumstances amid which he was born.

Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighboring yeomen,
the listener said, “Ah, Clym Yeobright: what is he doing now?”
When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing?
It is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular.
There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity, good or bad.
The devout hope is that he is doing well.
The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it.
Half a dozen comfortable market men,
who were habitual callers at the Quiet Woman as they passed by in their carts,
were partial to the topic.
In fact, though they were not Egdon men,
they could hardly avoid it while they sucked their long clay tubes
and regarded the heath through the window.
Clynn had been so inwoven with the in his boyhood
that hardly anybody could look upon it without thinking of him.
So the subject recurred:
if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better for him;
if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for the narrative.  (190)

Yorktown, by Burke Davis – October, 1952 (January, 1954) [Tom Dunn]

No boyhood, for before he was twelve he had been alone,
an oversized hostler in the old Quiet Woman Tavern in Philadelphia,
brawling with the Negro grooms,
gambling with them for the casual coins flung to them by travelling gentlemen. 
At first a runway from his bondage,
and then a men on his own: furrier, hostler, stableboy, groom, barman, cuckholder,
in an endless succession of inns and posthouses on the rutted roads of Pennsylvania –
The Crooked Billet,
The Penny Pot House,
Wench & Serpent,
the King of Prussia,
the Jolly Post Boy,
the Good Ox,
even the old Indian Queen,
where they now said Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration.

And beyond that, no more than piecemeal recollections of his time as a child inChester County.
A rare glimpse of the fat grainlands,
returning with prankish clarity,
or of the work- and sun-ravished face of old Pigot, his first master.
He had forgotten, if indeed his child’s brain had ever recorded, the village tale
that he was the foundling son of the daughter of a secretary to the governor of Pennsylvania,
and of an itinerant barber and dancing master up from the Indies,
probably French, or at least had run away like a Frenchman.  (17)

Things Not Seen and Other Stories, by Lynna Williams – 1992 [Raul Colon]

This post, which first appeared in early 2018, has been updated to include Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times July 17, 1992 book review of Things Not Seen.  While the “initial” version of the post included the review as a scan, this revision includes the review as full text, followed by a close-up of Raoul Colon’s cover art.

I’ve also (October, 2019) updated the post to include a brief excerpt from the story “Last Shift at The Mine”.

Scroll down just a little…

Contents

Afghanistan

The Sisters of Desire

Personal Testimony

Sole Custody

A Morning in the Late Cretaceous Period

Last Shift at the Mine

Rescue the Perishing

Legacy

Things Not Seen

________________________________________

Books of The Times

A Thousand Tiny Heartbreaks

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Things Not Seen

And Other Stories
By Lynna Williams
213 pages. Little, Brown & Company.
$18.95.

The New York Times
July 17, 1992

The characters in these fine new stories by Lynna Williams are outsiders, people excluded from the safe, warm circle of familial affection.

In “The Sisters of Desire,” a young woman named Chris is recovering from a nervous breakdown.  Chris takes a job baby-sitting for an 11-year-old girl named Rachel, who proposes that they form a fan club for her stepfather, Tom.  It’s not long before Chris realizes that she has actually fallen in love with Tom, that she wants to replace his wife and take her place beside him as Rachel’s mother.  As the impossibility of this fantasy sinks in, Chris sees again “how separate she was, and would always be, from them, through history and circumstance, through all the things she felt but could not say.”

It’s a feeling shared by Ellen Whitmore, a preacher’s daughter who narrates two stories in this volume (“Personal Testimony” and “Rescue the Perishing”).  At the age of 9, Ellen learned that she was adopted, and this knowledge warps her subsequent relationship with her father.  On one hand, she wants to hurt and embarrass him by ghostwriting phony testimonies for the other children at Bible camp; on the other, she tries to earn back his love by trying to introduce an ill-tempered neighbor, who had supposedly been a Nazi, to Christ.

Looking at her father, she thinks, “I was sure that what I wanted most in the world was for him to love me back, not in the ‘Ellen is my daughter and I have to prove it’ way that was familiar to us both by then, but in the old way, when he looked for me in any room he went into.”

Ms. Williams’s other characters also ostensibly belong to families, but they, too, suffer from feelings of exclusion and alienation.  In the title story, a woman named Jenny begins to recover memories of being abused as a child, and these memories, accelerated by therapy, begin to contaminate her marriage.  She grows nervous, paranoid and defensive.  Her husband, David, soon catches her sense of peril; he begins to distance himself from her and question his own impulses toward their daughter.  He tells Jenny he wants “this to be over”; he wants “things to be the way they were.”  “What if I’m O.K.,” she responds, “and things still aren’t the same?  What if they never are?”  In relating such stories, Ms. Williams demonstrates an uncanny ability to write scenes that effectively dramatize her characters’ emotional dilemmas without ever seeming stagey or didactic.  Emily, the heroine of “A Morning in the Late Cretaceous Period,” realizes, while wandering through a dinosaur exhibit at the local museum, that memories of her former husband have come between her and her new husband, Tom.  “She stops speaking to him halfway through the Triassic period,” Ms. Williams writes, “feigning desperate interest in the museum dioramas of earth 225 million years before.”  Moments later, “they enter the Cretaceous period,” she writes.  “All around them, the known world is splitting into separate continents, and Emily pushes ahead, until she’s standing alone somewhere on the edge of North America.”  She feels stranded and alone, and when she gives Tom a quick, desperate shove she feels “she has moved her marriage toward extinction with an act she can’t explain and can’t take back.”

Anna, the heroine of “Sole Custody,” who lost her child, Katie, to cancer several years ago, experiences a similar epiphanic moment, when she peers in a window of the house belonging to her ex-husband, Jay.  Everything she sees inside – pictures of Katie, along with furniture, knickknacks and toys that attest to Jay’s new life with his new wife and new baby – makes her realize how much she has lost, how much she remains in thrall to the past.

Cancer, unemployment and divorce – these sad, ordinary facts of life, rather than the melodramatic sort mentioned on the evening news (“drunk drivers, or snipers at the mall, or boulders pushed at cars from freeway overpasses”) – are the ones that haunt Ms. Williams’s characters.  In many cases, the mere fear or premonition of such “things not seen” is enough to drive these people to the brink of emotional despair.  By dwelling on bad memories or intimations of some unnamed future disaster, they court misunderstanding and bad luck.

In “Afghanistan,” a man named Hopkins tries to decipher a note left by his wife: “Have gone to Afghanistan.  Tess at Scotts’ overnight.  Food in fridge.”  The second half of the note is clear and accurate: his daughter, Tess, is indeed at a neighbor’s house for the evening, and there is a casserole with stuffed pasta shells in the refrigerator.  The first sentence is more perplexing: since his wife is a linguist, Hopkins tells himself, Afghanistan must be a kind of code for something else.  After reading a newspaper story with a headline that says, “Afghan Left Feels Betrayed by Russians,” he decides that “Afghanistan” must symbolize “betrayal” to his wife, although he’s unsure whether she means her betrayal of him, or his betrayal of her.

In each of these stories, Ms. Williams writes with quiet assurance, delineating her characters’ psyches with the same authority she brings to her descriptions of their day-to-day routines.  The writing is limpid, almost translucent, allowing the reader almost complete access to these people’s inner lives.  One is left with both an appreciation of the resilience of love and an understanding of its frightening limitations: its failure in the face of illness, grief and existential fear.

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– Lynna Williams –

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We’ve known for months we couldn’t stay unless Mark could find permanent work. 
We’d talk about it sometimes late at night,
but then it would be another day and we’d be doing anything we could to stay. 
I could write a book about that – about all the things we never thought could happen to us. 
Like going on welfare this winter, when Mark couldn’t find any work at all for six weeks. 
On my going to work at the Traveler’s Motel three days a week, cleaning rooms. 
Two and a half years ago, when Mark got laid off again,
we would have fought about my working at any job, much less as a maid. 
But not anymore. 
I know he’d do it instead if he could. 
When I come home on those days, he and Molly make me sit at the table
while they bring me dinner like it’s a hotel. 
“Madame, perhaps desires the macaroni?” Mark will say,
and Molly, who’s started to swallow the beginnings of words,
will punch me on the arm with her little fist and say, “Caroni, Dame?” 
I am never sorry about anything when they’re carrying on like that. 
And as long as Mark is talking, I know we’re all right. 
So we’ve been doing whatever we’ve had to – until two weeks ago. 
That was when Mr. Peterson told me there’s not enough business at the motel
and they don’t need me anymore. 
We’ve been using that money, and whatever we can earn doing odd jobs, to eat,
and drawing out what little savings we have left to pay the utilities. 
My parents made the June house payment. 
We let them because it looked like there might be a buyer if we could just hang on. 
There are some older people up here looking for retirement homes. 
But nothing’s happened, and we can’t wait anymore.  (“Last Shift at The Mine”, pp. 145-146)