Is there anything less nautically charming than the Fire Island ferries? They are boxes on barges, built for passengers who won’t be paying much attention to the boat.

I don’t go in for photographic actualités much, but as it happens Kathleen is on the boat in the picture, or was — she is at home and in bed as I write. For the first time, I found myself altogether alone on Fire Island. I walked back to the house, and quickly changed into my beach togs. The tide was high, and my walk was often interrupted by knee-high sweeps of water. Showered and dressed afterward, I sat down with the rest of A Dedicated Man. Dinner consisted of reheated asparagus soup — Kathleen had bought a bunch of the sorries looking spears (“and those were the best”) that were good for nothing else — and the half of a BLT that Kathleen didn’t even attempt to eat just before she left the island — and a few loads of laundry went through the necessary stages. I spoke to Kathleen three times, I think, the last to say good-night. By then, I had read all the Elizabeth Taylor stories and had shifted to Timothy Mo’s historical novel, An Insular Possession.

It got very cold in the night. I ought to have grabbed one of the fleece comforters on the sofa much sooner than I did. For the first time, the ceiling fan was motionless overhead.

***

A Dedicated Man is a short collection; there are only nine stories, half as many (give or take) as in the two previous collections. They are varied and assured, all top quality. The second story, “The Little Girl,” has a wicked ending that is funny precisely because it confirms a mother’s fears that her daughter is going to grow up to be like an obstinate aunt (who married a millionaire). There are hints throughout the stories of William Maxwell’s lapidary little book, The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales — perhaps the first piece of not-entirely-realistic contemporary fiction that I could appreciate — and I’m more than ever of the opinion that Maxwell, Taylor’s editor at The New Yorker, was inspired by her submissions — but in “Mice and Birds and Boy” the hints gather a certain heft, as characters are cloaked in the familiar costumes of fairy tale. The little boy’s mother, for example, takes on the cast of the stock wicked stepmother. Notwithstanding her Italian lessons and her Japanese cooking, she is thoughtlessly selfish, and it’s telling that she doesn’t have a name. Mrs May, the sometime grand lady who has been reduced to living in a gardener’s lodge that she doesn’t keep very clean, turns out not to be the witch whom little William expects to find in so strange (and, for a while, enchanting) a little house. But these foundations, unexpected but familiar, support the timelessness not of old fables but that of the best adult fiction. There is the melancholy (seen from any standpoint but his own) of William’s transitory interest in Mrs May; as children grow up, they leave things behind, even people. There is the mystery of Mrs May’s evidently mismanaged fortune, which glistens with bits of evidence that, if she is a sweet old lady, it is only William who sees her as such, and not because children see more clearly than adults do but very much because they don’t. The entire story is haunted by the second paragraph.

“I was thought to be beautiful,” she said, and she wondered: “How long ago was that?” Who had been the last person to comment upon her beauty, and how many years ago? She thought that it might have been her husband, from loyalty or from still seeing what was no longer there. He had been dead for over twenty years and her beauty had not, by any means, been the burden of his dying words.

What a twist of the knife! What was the burden of his dying words? Something unpleasant? Perhaps it was the death duties that Mrs May mentions when she tries to explain to William why she is living in a hut. “These death duties William thought of as moral obligations upon dying — some charitable undertakings, plainly not approved of by Mrs May.” William may not be so far wrong as his ignorance of taxation suggests. William’s family inhabits the stables once attached to Mrs May’s property, and when Mrs May discovers this, she is dumbfounded, because, reduced to penury as she is, she nonetheless lives in a building constructed for human habitation, not for that of horses. This makes her a bore, because she cannot stop asking William about details of his home life that don’t interest him at all. Presently, William decides to obey his mother’s ban on visits to Mrs May. And what of William’s kind father? Again, he wears the mask of thr browbeaten good man. He is not, as for an instant it seems that he might be, the hero to rescue Mrs May. We are left thinking that something about Mrs May makes her ineligible for heroic rescue. “Mice and Birds and Boy” is a puzzle for adults, and, as such, meant not to be solved.

“A Nice Little Actress” is impossible to think of without smiling, even if the young man does shoot himself at the end. Somehow, that is part of the dark comedy. I am almost certain that Taylor did not mean this story to be a burlesque of Puccini’s Il Tabarro, but that’s what came to mind. Iris is a bored housewife, stuck in a cluster of wartime bungalows and agonized by the sound of cinema organs emanating from all the other little houses. Instead of listening to a soap opera, Iris lives one. “She was always playing little tricks and this was the first which had ever come off.” You can see how pathetic she is right there. She redoes her hair for the man on whom she has played the trick (a poor young musician lured into her living room by a photograph recording of the Archduke Trio) and her husband notices. “All right for a change,” he says, but he thinks that it looks “absurd, snaky and greasy.” The high point in the comedy is not an event but a sentence that reminds us that what is really going on when you read a story is that you are reading a story: which means that you are a character yourself, and your laugh, when you read the following, is the climax: “He had arrived at the stage now, the neighbors notes, when he entered the back door without knocking.” Iris is heedless and reckless, but because she is not, after all, living on a barge in the Seine amidst Latin lovers but rather immured in an exurb surrounded by noticing neighbors, her bad behavior has no consequences for her. There is not a single genuinely funny detail  in “A Nice Little Actress,” but, thanks to Taylor’s writing, I cannot for the life of me wipe the smirk off my face. If only Trollope had written The Eustace Diamonds like this!

I have to read “The Voices” to Kathleen, because something like it happened to me once, and is one of my great stories. Because of its Moroccan setting and dodgy English folk, “In the Sun” may remind you of The Man Who Knew Too Much, but so much the better if it does, because you won’t see the ending coming. (You probably wouldn’t anyway.) “Vron and Willie,” the last story, brought Edward Gorey to mind; it was very like one of his gaily limned chapbooks about jovial psychopaths. “As If I Should Care” and “Mr Wharton” are both about the other end of the middle class, the one that Taylor escaped by virtue of brains and charm, but never forgot that she might have dropped into. “As If I Should Care” actually dips into the upper reaches of the working class. When Taylor turns her sights in this direction, her sense of humor is replaced by a furious empathy. It is only in a novel, Angel, her extraordinary portrait of an ambitious writer of trash, that she finds room for both.

***

The treat that I’ve been saving for these few days of solitude is Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. It looks yummy.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012 at 9:08 am.