I recently picked up The Penguin Book of American Short Stories, edited by James Cochrane, which traces the evolution of the short story form in American literature and is it forcing me out of my twentieth century literature comfort zone, but I’m really enjoying it. Authors I’d probably shy away from with false presumptions – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Francis Bret Harte are just a few I’ve encountered so far -  are proving to be completely enthralling. Ambrose Bierce, on the other hand, I had read before – The Devil’s Dictionary when I was much more sneeringly cynical – and assumed he wrote solely as a humorist. Turns out Bierce lead quite the fascinating and diverse life. “One of the Missing” – available to read online – published in 1888, is a powerful piece set in the American Civil War.

Jerome Searing is an orderly serving in Georgia in Sherman’s army. An exceptional marksman, he is given the task “to get as near the enemy’s lines as possible and learn all that he [can.]” As he enters the depths of the forest, his comrades predicting they’ll never see Searing again, contemplating that their enemy could potentially get hold of his rifle when he comes to his certain end. Methodically Searing makes his way through the growth, the danger of the task exciting him emotionally, but not physically. Finding the enemy gone, he discovers a plantation house, deserted, desolate, and in a state of great decay.

But it was decreed from the beginning of time that Private Searing was not to murder anybody that bright summer morning, nor was the Confederate retreat to be announced by him. For countless ages events had been so matching themselves together in that wondrous mosaic to some parts of which, dimly discernible, we give the name of history, that the acts which he had in will would have marred the harmony of this pattern.

While aiming his rifle at some distant Confederate soldiers, the plantation house collapses around Searing. Meanwhile, Searing’s brother Lieutenant  Adrian Searing is directed to advance in the same direction as his brother. Jerome regains consciousness, briefly hallucinating that he has been buried and his wife is kneeling on his chest. Caught trapped beneath a number of fallen beams, with only his right arm able to move, he slowly struggles to free himself. Unable to move the debris, he notices his rifle pointing at his forehead, remembering that he had cocked the gun and set the trigger and that the slightest touch could set it off. Continuing to free himself, he realizes that the rubble too could discharge the rifle, leaving him effectively helpless.

Gradually he became sensible of a pain in his forehead – a dull ache, hardly perceptible at first, but growing more and more uncomfortable. He opened his eyes and it was gone – closed them and it returned. ‘The devil!’ he said irrelevantly, and stared again at the sky. He heard the singing of birds, the strangely metallic note of the meadow lark, suggesting the clash of vibrant blades.

A severe pain in his head, he floats in and out of consciousness, sinking into a number of reveries. Fear and pain take hold of him, and he attempts to discharge the rifle to end it; only when he successfully uses a board to touch the trigger, the gun doesn’t fire but Jerome Searing dies regardless. He is, twenty two minutes after Lieutenant Adrian Searing has started in the same direction, discovered by the soldier, who pronounces the man dead, at least having been dead a week.

What struck me about “One of the Missing” is how intensely such a short passage of time is described and drawn out. Time is distorted – not only in Adrian’s estimation of the time of Jerome’s death – but in the narrative itself. What occurs within the twenty minutes reads like Jerome is in agony for days. War changes a man so irrevocably that his own brother is unable to recognize him. The suggestion that the stray bullet from the rifle has already penetrated Jerome’s brain is disturbing in his own inability to consider it a possibility, even as he feels a searing pain in his head. Even without having comprehensive knowledge of the historical context, “One of the Missing” is a war story that doesn’t romanticize the damaging effects of war and the split second decisions made under immense pressure.

[image credit: Ambrose Bierce, portrait by J.H.E. Partington.]

The Short Story Soiree is back after a short break last week due to my time getting gobbled up by other commitments. Incidentally, this also marks the 100th post on Start Narrative Here, and it’s kind of nice to have a milestone post take place within a week dedicated to my favourite author. In The Mortgaged Heart, Margarita Smith argues that these shorter pieces of McCullers’ writing are examples of early writing exercises rather than fully formed stories. “Sucker” was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1963, but it is believed that Carson wrote it when she was about seventeen. Included in the documentation of The Mortgaged Heart is a rejection letter dated 1939 listing the twenty six publications that rejected two of McCullers short stories, “Sucker” included.

The Sucker of this short story is the younger orphaned cousin of the narrator, Pete, who share a room together. Pete at sixteen is just beginning to become interested in girls, specifically the coiffed and manicured Maybelle, while Sucker at twelve is a quiet and timid boy who idolizes Pete. Sucker tries to bond with Pete, but Pete is too preoccupied with the perpetually aloof Maybelle. Mimicking Maybelle’s own rejection of Pete, Pete belittles and ignores Sucker and his feelings. Written from Pete’s perspective after the major change in their relationship, he is remorseful over his treatment of Sucker, but aware that he is unable to take any of it back.

Now that Sucker has changed so much it is a little hard to remember him as he used to be. I never imagined anything would suddenly happen that would make us both very different. I never knew that in order to get what has happened straight in my mind I would want to think back on him as he used to be and compare and try to get things settled. If I could have seen him ahead maybe I would have acted different.

As Maybelle starts to pay more attention to Pete, so too does Pete to Sucker. One evening, awakened from the bliss of a dream of kissing Maybelle, Sucker asks Pete if he likes him as much as a brother. Pete responds positively, even calling Sucker “a swell kid.” In this moment Pete realizes that he actually does really like Sucker, probably even more than he likes Maybelle, and they begin to grow closer. As the fluctuating desires of Maybelle turn against Pete, Pete too rages against Sucker, taking out his frustrations on the only person he can. As Pete repeatedly and brutally hurls out insults and insinuates that Sucker is unwanted, something changes in Sucker, a change is visible to Pete even as it is happening. Sucker is never quite the same afterward, a hardness comes into his face, and he retreats. Pete too is changed by this event, but has no way of altering his past behaviour.

More than anything I want to be easy in my mind again. And I miss the way Sucker and I were for a while in a funny, sad way that before this I never would have believed. But everything is so different that there seems to be nothing I can do to get it right. I’ve sometimes thought if we could have it out in a big fight that would help. But I can’t fight him because he’s four years younger. And another thing – sometimes this look in his eyes makes me almost believe that if Sucker could he would kill me.

It’s pretty wrenching stuff, the loss of innocence and faith in other people at such a young age. Disappointments from those who you hold highest always sting the most. Pete’s callous lashing out at Sucker causes irreparable damage to their relationship; and Pete recognizes that his harsh treatment of Sucker is unforgivable. It’s not my favourite McCullers short story (that easily goes to “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” which I could probably quite easily spend an entire week talking about), but “Sucker” hits a nerve because of the sensitive treatment of youthful disappointments.

[Also, when I was younger and learning to talk I couldn't pronounce my name - Jessica - properly and so called myself "Sucker." As in Jes-sucker, get it? It's for the best the nickname hasn't stuck beyond the occasional use from immediate family members.]

My, these Saturday Soiree‘s come along ever so quickly. This past week I’ve been reading Salinger‘s For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Other Stories as my public transport book, so another Salinger story is the feature of this week’s Soiree, and I’ve chosen the quietly affecting “For Esmé with Love and Squalor.” In “For Esmé” an enlisted soldier and aspiring writer reminisces about a young girl he met in London during the war.

Following a training session and awaiting reassignment, the soldier takes a walk around the rainy town and happens upon a small church where a children’s choir is practicing. Sitting in on the practice, the soldier takes notice of a young female singer who appears to be bored but has a very sweet singing voice. Out in the rain again, the soldier avoids the recreation center where his fellow soldiers are spending time, and retires to an empty civilian tearoom. The young girl, her younger brother and their governess come into the tearoom out of the rain; the verbose and precocious young girl strikes up a conversation with the soldier.

‘I thought Americans despised tea,’ she said.
It wasn’t the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she’d care to join me.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps for just a fraction of a moment.’

Esmé and the soldier discuss his reasons for being in town, her encounters with Americans, his personal life and her relationship with her deceased father whose watch she wears despite being too big for her tiny wrist. Esmé’s younger brother Charles eventually joins them, becoming Esmé’s topic of conversation and occasionally interjecting. Upon learning that the soldier is an aspiring writer Esmé asks him to write her a story, something about squalor which she loves reading about. The story then moves into what the soldier calls “the squalid, or moving, part of the story”, thinly disguised as Staff-Sergeant X, the soldier is quartered in a house in Bavaria after the Allies victory in the war, whose mind and psyche have been damaged by his war experiences.

He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.

After a brief discussion with his companion, Clay, about Clay’s girlfriend who is studying psychology and has offered her diagnosis on X’s mental breakdown. Left alone again X discovers a parcel which has been readdressed to him three times. Esmé has sent him her fathers watch, and a short note telling him how much she enjoyed their time together that afternoon beforehand. Charles adds his own note as well, which made me laugh out loud:

Charles, whom I am teaching to read and write and whom I am finding an extremely intelligent novice, wishes to add a few words. Please write as soon as you have the time and inclination.
HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHALES

Thematically, it is very similar to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish“; a shellshocked soldier is touched, inspired, affected by the innocence of a child; the contrast between what he has seen in action and the unaffected innocence of the child almost becomes too much to bear. Unlike “Bananafish”, “For Esme” ends on a more positive note, with the soldier inspired by Esmé positivity and he finally senses the possibility of recovery. Though the watch has been damaged in transit, for the soldier it is a symbol of hope, of faith, and of the goodness that humans are, against all odds, capable.

I was planning to continue with Jay McInerney with another Alison Poole short story, but with the death of J.D. Salinger this week – a round up of the various tributes was published by the Guardian – I felt that it was a good time to look back at some of his shorter fiction. This week I’ll be reading the first of the Glass Family stories “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from the short story collection Nine Stories, usually published outside the U.S. as For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Other Stories.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” follows two separate dialogues, presumably occurring at roughly the same time. The first is a telephone conversation between Muriel and her mother. The dialogue is mostly banal, Muriel is on holiday in Florida with her husband Seymour, who her mother has some misgivings about. There is constant mention of some “funny business with the trees” that concerns Muriel’s mother, especially when she discovers that Seymour drove down to Florida. Muriel asks her mother about a book that Seymour sent her from Germany:

‘No. Only he asked me about it, when we were driving down. He wanted to know if I’d read it.’
‘It was in German!’
‘Yes, dear. That doesn’t make any difference,’ said the girl, crossing her legs. ‘ He said that the poems happen to be written by the only great poet of the century. He said I should’ve bought a translation or something. Or learned the language, if you please.’
‘Awful. Awful. It’s sad, actually, is what it is. Your father said last night—’

Muriel’s mother further reveals that Seymour has been seeing a psychiatrist and has recently been discharged from an Army hospital. The psychiatrist has told Muriel’s father that “Seymour may completely lose control of himself.” The emphasis in italics in their dialogue really allows their voices to sound out, you can perfectly hear the stress they place on particular syllables. After briefly discussing a dinner with the local psychiatrist, Muriel and her mother move on to more important matters, such as the state of Muriel’s blue coat and the season’s clothing styles. Meanwhile, young Sybil Carpenter is talking with her mother as she slops sun-tan oil on her skin. Sybil keeps asking “Did you see more glass?”, driving her mother crazy. Sybil runs down to the beach and reaches Seymour Glass in an out of the way part of the beach. They strike up a conversation, suggesting familiarity.

‘The lady?’ The young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. ‘That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children in her room.’ Lying prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. ‘Ask me something else, Sybil,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine bathing suit you have on. if there’s one thing I like, it’s a blue bathing suit.’
Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. ‘This is a yellow,’ she said. ‘This is a yellow.’

Seymour’s ease of communicating with Sybil reminds me of Holden’s relationship with his younger sister Phoebe in The Catcher in the Rye. Children are easy to talk to for these characters because they don’t hide behind any illusions, that barrier that we’re forced to set up to protect us against the world hasn’t been put up yet. Innocence. Seymour engages Sybil in a hunt for the elusive bananafish, and tells her the story of the tragic life they lead swimming into holes filled with bananas. They stuff themselves so full with ripe banana flesh that they can’t swim out of the hole again, and so they die of banana fever in the hole. Again, doesn’t this suggest innocence and innocence lost? Once we gorge ourselves on all that adulthood has to offer, we can’t get out of it and reach that purer state of childhood naivety again. Here the story takes on a severe shift. After an altercation in the elevator with a woman he thinks is looking at his feet, Seymour returns to his hotel room.

Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. he cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

It’s a powerful story, deceptively simple and with a macabre humour simmering below the surface. Vale Jerome David Salinger, goddamn could you write a story.

J.D. Salinger, January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010

I’m continuing on from last week’s foray into Jay McInerney’s short stories, I’m still working through How It Ended: New and Collected Stories and in a burst of insomniac desperation reading, came across “Story of My Life.” Written in 1987, it is the stream of conscious thoughts of Alison Poole, an aspiring drama student whose father hasn’t paid her monthly tuition fee. Eagle-eyed readers among you (or those with instant access to wikipedia and the like) may recognize Alison as quite a figure of late 80s and early 90s American Literature. Inspired by McInerney’s ex-girlfriend and more recently at the centre of an extramarital affair turned political scandal with former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, Rielle Hunter, Alison Poole not only features in this short story, but was expanded upon in McInerney’s novel Story of My Life. She also appeared as an almost victim of Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and again in Ellis’ Glamorama. (You can read more about Hunter’s presence in literature as Alison Poole here.)

This is nineteen eighty whatever.

It’s almost difficult to see what makes Alison Poole such an enduring character for these writers, but in “Story of My Life” McInerney creates her as, yes, a vapid spoilt little rich girl coke fiend but she’s not entirely detestable. Written entirely in the much maligned valley girl vernacular, peppered with lots of likes and self-aware rhetorical questions, Poole appears to be a wickedly clever, if a little lost, young woman. She’s manipulative, spiteful and cruel but … who enjoys only reading about well behaved women? Exactly.

Skip Pendleton is this jerk I was in lust with for about three minutes. He hasn’t called me in like three weeks, which is fine, okay, I can deal with that, but suddenly I’m like a baseball card he trades with his friends? Give me a break. So I go to this guy, what makes you think I’d want to go out with you, I don’t even know you, and he goes Skip told me about you. Right. So I’m like, what did he tell you, and he goes Skip said you were hot. I say great, I’m totally honored that the great Skip Pendleton thinks I’m hot. I’m just a jalapeño pepper waiting for some strange burrito, honey. I mean really.

Alison is stressing out because her father, refusing to pay a full yearly tuition because of her tendency to not stick with things, has missed the monthly tuition payment for her drama school classes. After receiving phone calls from eager young men being directed her way from an ex-lover, Skip Pendleton, and inspired by her friend Didi’s possible pregnancy troubles, Alison tells Skip that she is pregnant with his child and requires money for the abortion. Her father eventually gets in contact with her, having parted ways with another young lover, and promises to send her the tuition  money. Alison realizes that she is actually pregnant and will have to use her excess money to terminate it. To celebrate, Alison and friends enjoy a drug-fuelled binge which sees her hospitalized and reminiscing about her prized horse which was poisoned to death when she was younger. She remembers her father coming into her room (there is a heavy suggestion of abuse here, but it isn’t expanded upon in the short story) and admitting that he had the horse poisoned in order to claim the insurance money. When confronted, her father denies any knowledge of it and Alison Poole wonders how much of her life is just a dream.

So, okay, maybe I dreamed it. I was in bed, after all, and he woke me up. Not for the first time. But right now, with these tranqs they’ve got me on, I feel like I’m sleepwalking anyway and can almost believe it never really happened. Maybe I dreamed a lot of stuff. Stuff I thought happened in my life. Stuff I thought I did. Stuff that was done to me. Wouldn’t that be great? I’d love to think that ninety percent of it was just dreaming.

It’s not exactly life affirming literature. Alison’s concerns are mainly shallow and petty, but as a character she has such a strong and distinctive voice that is difficult to ignore. The slang may grate on the nerves of some, but McInerney uses it so well and so accurately that it makes Alison stand out as a character. Though her plight may be seen as sad, or sick, or the epitome of superficial youth, reading her story in her own voice allows the reader more sympathy toward her. I’m strongly inclined to order the novel, and having just reread McInerney’s introduction to this collection I’ve discovered that another story “Penelope on the Pond” features an older Alison.

(It appears this may be an appropriate time to read the Alison Poole stories, as John Edwards just last week admitted that he is the father of Hunter’s illegitimate daughter, after having denied it for almost two years. This story is as almost as interesting as the exploits of the fictional Alison Poole.)

I’m not as far into Jay McInerney’s short story collection How It Ended: New and Collected Stories as I would usually be by this time of the week. However, I think that taking it slow with McInerney is ideal because, at least eight stories into it, many of the stories cover very similar territory. The stories are short, sharp observations of the rich, usually involving copious amounts of substance abuse. From what I know of Bright Lights, Big City, this plutography seems to be his stock in trade. Fittingly enough, Jay McInerney made a cameo appearance in the second series of Gossip Girl. This week’s Soiree is going to be spending a little time with “Third Party”, a story set in one night in Paris.

Paris, the city of lights, the city of romance and love. For Alex, Paris is where he retreats to lament his most recent failed relationship with a woman named Lydia, and to take up smoking, more for the image he wishes to project rather than any inherent desire for tobacco:

Alex started smoking again whenever he lost a woman. When he fell in love again, he would quit. And when love died, he’d light up again. Partly it was a physical reaction to stress; partly metaphorical–the substitution of one addiction for another. And no small part of this reflex was mythological–indulging a romantic image of himself as a lone figure standing on a bridge in a foreign city, cigarette cupped in his hand, his leather jacket open to the elements.

As he sits down for dinner at a hotel, a young attractive couple intrude on his table and join him as if that is what they were there for. Alex thinks they have mistaken him for someone else, but goes along with them anyway. Frédéric and Tasha discuss New York and their hatred of Paris, drinking and getting to know each other through the false pretence. Alex becomes increasingly intrigued by the attractive, provocative Tasha who casually reveals that she and Frédéric are ex-lovers. The threesome decide to hit the Parisian nightclubs together afterwards, Tasha and Alex becoming more and more physically intimate.

Alex hadn’t been clubbing in several years. After he and Lydia moved in together, the clubs lost their appeal. Now he felt the return of the old thrill, the anticipation of the hunt–the sense that the night held secrets bound to be unveiled before it was over.

After Frédéric has an argument with a bartender, he and Tasha decide to leave, leaving Alex alone. He walks out onto the street, only to meet up with the pair again. They drive around and Alex further considers the loss of Lydia and gets sexually entangled with Tasha on the backseat. The previous suggestion of violence – Tasha biting Alex’s tongue until it bleeds, Alex ripping the wound open – builds up to the climax: Frédéric crashes the car and in the resulting wreckage Alex confronts them about who they think he is, only be verbally eviscerated by Frédéric. Alex gets carried away with this vision of himself through others eyes, from the cigarettes to going along with the mysterious Tasha and Frédéric. He is all illusion and pretence and doesn’t really have much of substance. The tension builds and is released in a cataclysm of violence and decimates Alex’s relentless image of self-importance.

In a fury, Alex kicked him in the ribs, “Who the hell do you think I am?”
Frédéric smiled and looked up at him. “You’re just a guy,” he said. “You’re nobody.”

It may not be mindblowingly amazing writing, but it features the common tropes of McInerney’s stories so far: sex, drugs, rich people with no real concept of anything beyond themselves. And, I kind of like it, because most of these characters are so shallow, their stories are so neatly wrapped up within a few pages. I’m looking forward to reading the rest.

The Smiths, purveyors of jangly pop perfection, are the ideal candidate for a fiction anthology: witty, literate, sardonic and the musical saviours of innumerable adolescents for decades. In Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction Inspired by The Smiths, Peter Wild has compiled a series of short stories each using a different Smiths song title as their starting off point. As I was reading through this, I was a bit underwhelmed. Most of the stories seemed a bit lackluster, not terrible, just painfully average. Perhaps writing openly inspired by such an iconic and influential band can only invite comparison to the golden wit evident in the songs they reference. Instead of reading on I’d put the book down and listen to the Smiths. About halfway through the collection a quartet of great stories rose above the rest, and after having thought I wouldn’t be able to find a single story in Paint a Vulgar Picture to write about, I had a shortlist of four great stories to choose from. After reading and rereading the stories I liked, I’ve decided upon James Hopkin’s “Jeane” for this weeks Soiree.

But nostalgia is a form of tenderness, isn’t it? It comes sewn with soft regrets. And it’s strange: even when we were together, Jeane, I was always looking for you.

“Jeane” captured the same sort of desire to belong, if only with one other person or to one particular place, that the Smiths always aroused in me. It is the nostalgic remembrance of a young woman named, you guessed it, Jeane, from the perspective of a unnamed narrator. Written in an ambling, melodious prose addressed to Jeane, the narrator recounts his days spent with Jeane in her underground flat, in their local pub and following her to the backstreets of Berlin, eventually losing track of her and daydreaming about the possibilities of her current whereabouts. The lack of closure and the absence of finality ensuring they are forever entwined, at least in the narrators strongly evocative memories of Jeane.

Jeane herself is something of a spitfire, a tough brazen Northern girl who spouts off in rages against anything she sees unfit for her ideal world, the university secretary, righteous journalists, ignorant students. Even bouncing off Morrissey’s lyrics – “but it will never be clean” – Jeane goes on cleaning rampages while our narrator watches, wondering whether she is attempting to erase herself in the process. If Jeane is trying to remove herself from her surroundings, the narrator is unable to remove her from his consciousness, while at the same time recognizing the distance that existed between them when they were together.

So, tell me, Jeane, when was it that you began to disappear? Or did I simply start looking for you more? ‘I don’t do love,’ you told me, the first time you kicked me out. You went spiky, your hair, your shoulders, all of you shaping like a flint-edged projectile about to be flung. ‘And I don’t do people. And you are a people.’

I really liked “Jeane”, the imagery of the story has stuck with me for days, and it has urged me to seek out more fiction by James Hopkin. His debut novel, Winter Under Water, sounds like it runs along very similar lines, at least in terms of narrative: “When Joseph meets Marta, who has come to the UK to research the forgotten histories of remarkable women from across Europe, he is captivated, and Marta feels the same; when she returns to her previous life, their relationship continues through letters and phone calls. Then Joseph decides to visit Marta in her native Poland.” His writing style may not be for everyone – the focus is on style and moments of everyday beauty rather than story or plot – but it sunk its hooks into me and I’m looking forward to reading more of Hopkin’s work.

* * *

Here’s the original version of “Jeane”, a b-side to “This Charming Man”; an acoustic version with Sandie Shaw, 1967 Eurovision Song Contest winner and renowned pop idol of both Morrissey and Johnny Marr, on vocals; and finally a cover by Pete Doherty, of the Libertines and Babyshambles, covering “Jeane” in his own shambolic, rambling way.

This is the first installment of what I hope to be a regular feature for 2010, The Short Story Soiree. I tend to read short stories in their collected volumes and generally on short public transport trips, so my experience with short story anthologies is more interrupted than with a novel, and I find it hard to discuss a collection of stories as a whole. The Soiree is an opportunity to focus on a particular story I’ve enjoyed.

Kicking off 2010 with an extremely short story, Richard Yates’ “Bells in the Morning” from The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, which comes in at just under three pages long. Its brevity, however, does nothing to diminish the power of Yates’ stark prose. “Bells” is the story of two men, Cramer and Murphy, in Germany on the battlefront. On a cold, rainy morning the artillery stops and they hear the feint ringing of church bells in the distance. Aware that it is unusual for the church bells to be ringing in the time of war, Murphy suggests that perhaps the war is over. Cramer runs through this in his head, realizing it adds up, war could be over, he tells himself to remember the details of the moment but then he recalls that it is Easter Sunday and the civilians are likely attending church services.

“In a little while they were comfortable, swallowing coffee and smoking, shivering when fingers of the first yellow sunlight caressed their shoulders and necks. The grayness had gone now; things had color. Trees were pencil sketches on the lavender mist. Murphy said he hoped they wouldn’t have to move out right away, and Cramer agreed. That was when they heard the bells; church bells, thin and feminine in tone, quavering as the wind changed. A mile, maybe two miles to the rear.”

Most of the story is dialogue or Cramer’s thoughts which works without becoming banal but then there are lines like “Trees were pencil sketches on the lavender mist” which are beautifully evocative, even more so in contrast to the context.

“Listening, they sat smiling shyly at each other. Church bells on misty mornings were things you forgot sometimes, like fragile china cups and women’s hands. When you remembered them you smiled shyly, mostly because you didn’t know what else to do.”

One of my general notes of the other stories in the Yates collection is that they all seem to hone in on the split second, often retrospective, realization of personal failure. This comes into play in “Bells” as well, the hope that war is over builds slowly until further information is recalled and shatters their illusion. War also plays a strong role in masculine experience in Yates’ short stories, if not the defining experience of his male characters. Yates himself served in World War 2 in France and Germany. The bells, the false signal of hope and peace are described as being “feminine in tone” which is something to consider. The camaraderie between Murphy and Cramer is not warm or friendly, but there is a strong sense of familiarity between them suggesting they’ve been on the frontline together for a while: “It was better that he didn’t, for Murphy would have answered something about only trying to help you, kid.” “Bells” isn’t representative of Yates’ stories which tend to take place in the familial/domestic or work/business realms, but it is indicative of the great emotional power that Yates instills in his narratives.

“Son of a bitch. Easter Sunday.”