20 AUGUST 1983, Page 21

Fantasy lives

Francis King

rr hese two collections of short stories, 1 the first by an American woman and the second by an Englishman, are totally dissimilar. Though Bobbie Ann Mason now lives in Pennsylvania, all her stories circle round the same area of small-town Ken- tucky. Mr Fleetwood, on the cl.her hand, is a cosmopolitan, whose stories jet in, like his characters, from Italy to England or from the United States to Italy.

Each story by Miss Mason is a recreation of life, in all its quaint, baffling, funny, pathetic inconsequentiality, in one small, obscure corner of the world. Few of her English readers will ever have visited the towns that she describes, few are likely to do so. But it is probable that they will retain the impression that they have made a visit, in some other existence or in a dream, so in- tense is her evocation. • In contrast, Mr Fleetwood's stories are not so much realistic simulacra of life as fantastic metaphors for it.

One of Miss Mason's constant themes is the manner in which, with no decisive snap of the thread, human relationships become unravelled. In some instances, they remain that way; in others, the fabric knits up again, with no apparent effort by either of the parties. In the title story, 'Shiloh', for example, a truck2driver, out of work after an accident, observes, through a haze of marijuana smoke, how his tough, indepen- dent wife is slowly receding from him, in a new-found interest first in body-building and then in English composition. When he takes her to the Civil War battlefield of Shiloh, she, in effect, vanishes out of sight, leaving him with the desolating sense that, just as he has never understood the inner workings of history that erupted in so much carnage, so he has never understood the in- ner workings of the marriage that is now causing his own living death.

Again, in 'Still Life with Watermelon', a wife, whose husband has inexplicably taken off for Texas with a buddy — is the buddy perhaps, as her closest woman friend sug- gests, a homosexual? — obsessively paints one amateurish picture of watermelons after another, in the hope that a rich, eccen- tric collector of pictures of watermelons will buy one off her. Eventually, wife and hus- band are reunited. The journey to Texas has been a crazy adventure for him; and she, working away at her watermelons, has been on a journey no less crazy. Now they are together once more in all their usual or-

dinariness; but some faint recollection of their fugues into craziness will obstinately remain with them.

Another constant theme is the persistence with which the past works like a yeast in the present. In 'Nancy Culpepper' for example, a young woman becomes obsessed with the ancestress whose name she bears. Her nonagenarian grandmother has a hoard of family photographs, which, now that she is about to go into an old people's home, the young woman hopes to claim for herself. Eventually, there, in her hands, is the faded photograph of another young woman, in an embroidered white dress, 'her eyes fixed on

something so far away' the future con- taining her namesake. Photographs, as the symbols, at once shadowy and powerful, of an ever-living past are used to eerie effect in stories other than this one.

As an incessant, intrusive counterpoint to the lives of these ill-educated characters, their television screens, in living-rooms, kit- chens or bedrooms, project images of a world which they are doomed never to ex- perience except at second-hand. Often, they pay more attention to the images of drama than to the actual dramas (love, bereave- ment, betrayal) in which they are engulfed.

Unlike Miss Mason's extraordinarily or- dinary people — even the suspected homosexual turns out not to be one — Mr Fleetwood's gay actor afflicted with the sense that he has fallen off the world, his other gay actor kept in solitary confinement and tortured by the Chileans, his famous inventor so shy that he employs an actor to impersonate him on his public appearances, his black male prostitute with ambitions to be a painter, his dance-instructress who of- fers up her art to God, and his storyteller with the power actually to create people, are not the sort of characters whom one would be likely to meet.

Whereas Miss Mason's style has the unadorned strength of her Kentuckians, Mr Fleetwood's is that of a literary Burlington Bertie, whose serpentine sentences, one periphrasis cradled in another, are often neo-Jamesian in their complex elaboration.

Between them, these two collections, each highly enjoyable in its own fashion, demonstrate the extraordinary diversity, akin to that of the liede, of the art of the short story.