It is very quiet here, this morning. My brother-in-law, Kevin, is still asleep. Kathleen left about an hour ago, while Megan, Ryan, and Will made their way back to the city early last night. Kevin and I will have the place to ourselves until Friday, when our Labor Day crowd will begin to show up.

I don’t feel much like working. The air is still, and so am I. Yesterday, while his parents went for a swim on their own, Will fell asleep in my arms. That hadn’t happened in two years, and, two years ago, he was a considerably smaller child. I savored the ordeal as long as I could, and then laid him on the bed with a fresh bottle of milk. He did not protest. That bit of quiet time aside, he spent the day in whirling dervish mode. I expect that he is very happy to be back with his friends in day care, although we’re all a bit apprehensive about his realizing that his best friend has graduated to pre-school.

***

Over the weekend, I finished The Blush, Elizabeth Taylor’s second short-story collection (1958). As with her novels, I couldn’t stop; I was like Will, asking for “More.” The omnibus is never going to be out of reach; I look forward — again, as with her novels — to re-reading Taylor’s stories.

Almost everything in The Blush is beguiling, but one story stands out for a complexity that is more than simply narrative. “In a Different Light” builds up a dramatic heft as it covers its considerable length (eighteen pages in the Virago edition), but seems to take a furious pleasure in smashing the unities of time, place, and action. The central character is not immediately identifiable as such, and her translation from a Greek island to suburban London seems almost improper, as though Taylor were making a mistake by keeping the story going. She’s not, of course, for it is only in London that the Greek currents of tragedy and comedy can begin to flow. That’s where the characters come from; that is where they must experience their crises, however small-scaled.

Jane and Barbara are middle-aged sisters. For some time, Jane has been living on a Greek island with her husband, who has just died. That is why Barbara has come out to see her — to try to persuade her to come home to England. Jane, however, has gone native, and almost everything she says is colored with austere fatality. When they encounter an unattached Englishman at the post office, he is tipped into Jane’s critical maw.

Jane and Barbara, at lunch, discussed him — Jane, with an almost Greek sharpness of curiosity and detachment, her sister thought. It was very mcuh like the way she was eating her artichoke — the deft stripping away of leaves, the certainty of the hidden heart being there for the reaching. Licking oil from her fingers, Jane said, “So his wife writes to tell him about the rain. Complainingly, I dare say. He thinks he is glad to get her letters, but he is gladder to put them out of his mind.”

“This you know,” said Barbara.

“This I know. And he also thinks he is glad to be in Greece. He has to be. I expect he has waited twenty years or more to come here and how can he afford, now that he’s here, to dwell on his sunburn and his blistered feet and mosquito bites? I bet he gets frightful diarrhoea, too, poor old thing.”

Jane does know. It is the tragicomedy of everyday life, Taylor’s impalpably insistent theme. Roland, the Englishman, turns out to be an architect; his wife, Iris, prefers to spend her holidays in Buxton —Iris, Buxton: dramatic foreshadowing. Who can think of irises in Buxton while roasting in the Mediterranean sun? (“Iris,” remember, is the Greek for “dawn.”) The sisters spend a lot of time with Roland during the following days, and then one day Barbara and Roland climb the mountain to the convent, where they both take naps in the sun. There is nothing romantic about this episode. In the singular and poignant passage that takes us into Roland’s confidence, it is acknowledged that he “was not greatly drawn to either” sister. He leaves a day later, and “as they turned away,” Jane strikes another oracular note.

“You may be invited once to Hampstead, then you’ll have to ask them back, and you’ll wish you hadn’t to — and Leonard will, even more. ‘My friend I met in Greece’,” she said mockingly. “After that, you’ll send Christmas cards for a year or two — especially if you can find any with a Greek flavour, which I should think would be unlikely.”

What’s most interesting about this story is not the degree to which Jane’s prediction proves to be correct, but rather the weight in Barbara’s mind, after she has met Iris (who turns out to be as dreadful as anyone who prefers Buxton to Greece must be), of the mystery of our relations with each other. As I say, there is nothing overtly romantic about her time with Roland, but we are not told that she wasn’t drawn to him. Roland’s choice of helpmeet makes Barbara happier in her happy marriage, but there is no getting round the unsettling queerness of things. This is what Taylor underscores with her prettily ironic ending. Barbara and Leonard are laughing (about Iris), and their children, Robert and Serena, are made very happy by the sound.

Hearing it, they thought they would be good forever, so that it would never stop. The world then became a settled, a serence place to be in.

One can well imagine Jane’s riposte.

I’d like to go back to that singular paragraph about Roland, which is a bit too long to quote in full; and, in any case, I want to hold up a detail that I might have missed if I hadn’t just read F R Lucas’s book on style, in which the best part of a long chapter, “The Harmony of Prose,” is devoted to scannings of striking literary passages, ancient and modern. I don’t want to attempt a summary of Lucas’s highly cautionary remarks about the judicious introjection of meter into prose, but I can say that they have made me a somewhat more appreciative reader. When I came upon the following reflection of Roland’s, it stopped me dead and insisted upon being copied into my notebook.

Dreams had come true, but merely to give birth to others.

If you insert a break at the comma, you have two lines of verse, and sweet lines they are. The thought is certainly wise enough to merit the polish: giving birth to new dreams is what dreams’ coming true is all about, as we discover on those rare occasions of dreams’ actually coming true.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2012 at 8:54 am.