Stylist
Francis King
y t is possible that, in the choice of the title 1Quotalions from Other Lives for her short collection of short-stories, Penelope Gilliatt was being deliberately self- depreciatory. There are short-stories even shorter — by Chekhov, Mansfield, Kipling, Pritchett — which nonetheless manage to encompass the lives of their chief characters; but the effect here is, for the most part, the tantalising one of people glimpsed momentarily from the window of a passing train or overheard momentarily in a silence in a crowded room. These people rarely have pasts and even more rarely futures and what is revealed about either past or future seems to have little connec- tion with the present in which author and reader come on them.
The first story, 'Break', for example, is essentially an account of how, in New York, two improbable partners, a doctor from Czechoslovakia and a woman from England, meet and get married. Playing tennis with her daughter, the woman rup- tures her right plantaris muscle and, in agony, telephones a friend for the name of a doctor. The friend suggests a Dr Ellie Brown (female) and the injured woman, having consulted the telephone directory, then makes an appointment with a Dr Eli Brown (male). But before this there are three pages describing how Dr Eli Brown's Scots ancestors first 'leapt over the Roman Wall to the North of England' and then, in the 15th century, 'flew to what is now Czechoslovakia'; of how he was brought up in the castle of his grandfather, a Prague judge; of how he travelled to the States to be educated and to England to become a lawyer, before once again travelling to the States to train as a doctor. All this is re- counted with the artistry of the born stylist which Miss Gilliatt undoubtedly is; but, curiously, it does little to illuminate either his character or his relationship with his pa- tient.
Love between people seemingly incom- patible because of differences of nationality (as in this story), age, class or education is a frequent theme. In 'When Are You Going Back?', the characters are once again a woman and a doctor of different na- tionalities; but, in this case, the setting is London, not New York, the woman is a 23-year-old American student at the Lon- don School of Economics, and the doctor, improbably for a man in his fifties, is work- ing as a waiter to finance his research.
In 'Teeth', the incompatibility is one both of occupation and class. The girl is a sculptor, the man a dentist. The girl's fami- ly decide that 'a dentist is not up to scratch for you' — a doctor or even a vet would be another matter. The dentist himself gloomi- ly suspects that 'a drill's too like a welding machine' for a marriage to hold any pro- mise of success.
In 'Twice Lucky', there are two seeming- ly incompatible couples on board an Atlan- tic liner: an English-born girl, resident for most of her life in Ohio, and an artist who wants to paint her; and the girl's 79-year- old American grandfather and the 49-year- old London-born nursing sister who works for him. Their geographical situation, half way between England and the States, seems to symbolise the literary situation of the col- lection as a whole.
When relationships are not surprising because of the seeming incompatibility of the partners, then they are surprising because they have lasted for so long. Thus, 'We're Here' is an account of an aged ex- judge treating his no less aged mistress to dinner in an expensive restaurant; and in 'Seven O'Clock of a Strange Millenium and All's Well' (Miss Gilliatt's titles tend to be whimsical), a farmer of 71, with literary leanings, attempts to poison the husband of a woman of the same age, because he has for so long been in love with her.
The diverting oddity of such situations extends to the style. Miss Gilliatt is par- ticularly adroit in evoking an appearance in a single phrase: 'Douglas had the sort of face which seems to have eaten into itself'; 'a French woman professor with a plait round her head and a face like a muffin'; the lower part of the face was cold, and it chattered with talk, but the eyes were warm, and the forehead was wrinkled through being lifted with incessant interest.'
The best Story, since it has the unerring sense of direction which many of the others, for all their readability, disconcer- tingly lack, is 'When Are You Going Back?' The worst is 'Stephanie, Stephen, Steph, Steve', about a family in which the heroine, Stephanie, has a mother called Stephanie, a father called Stephen, a tutor called Steve and a stepbrother and stepsister called Stephen and Stevie.
Of the 12 stories, eight have appeared in the New Yorker. Such a fact tempts the re- viewer to the glib judgment of 'typical New Yorker stories'. But a more accurate one would be to say that in their vivid juxta- position of incongruities, their witty con- ceits and, above all, in their chicness, they belong to the interior-decorating school of fiction. They set off their characters' lives to brilliant effect; but they usually leave the essential architecture of those lives un- touched.
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