A Penguin volume of four short stories (a different volume is shown in Books 2009; it has many more stories, but lacks The Last of the Valerii) has been instructive; the four of them – The Last of the Valerii, The Real Thing, The Lesson of the Master, and Daisy Miller - vary considerably in length, and the latter two, at least are more novellas than short stories. I am a great lover of the short story, and although it seems to me that there are few principles defining what is and is not such a story, one of them (apart from mere length) should be a single narrative stream, however complex the actual story may be. When I find the latter two stories are around 70 pages, a doubt is raised!
The Last of the Valerii is on a common theme – I can think of stories by Kipling, Buchan, and Huxley which use it, and doubtless there are others – but still a compelling one. A newly wed couple retreat to the husband’s ancestral house outside Rome, and Martha, the new American wife, careless of tradition and desperately in need of something to do, starts archaeological investigations in the grounds. A Roman goddess is discovered, and quickly usurps the husbands affections, and even his interest and vitality. A marble statue, two thousand years old, and missing one hand, rots his soul and draws him away from his wife and threatens even his sanity and his life. Apart from Martha, no-one is surprised or even troubled; this how things are, these are the old forces that you cannot use and discard as you will, this is a price some men must pay. The writing is quiet, measured, unexciting, but the story is troubling: even when the goddess is buried again, the peace and harmony of the status quo ante is not quite restored.
The next two stories were less satisfying. The Real Thing is a slighter piece, the story of an artist who finds that for illustrating books, a couple of poor, socially insignificant shop workers make better models for his middle and upper class characters – and are more personally engaging, too – than a couple who are undoubted the “real thing”, although they have fallen on hard times. The artist’s evolving relationship with this couple is sensitively and finely drawn, as he eventually realises that he cannot use them, however much he wants to help. The Lesson of the Master is a rather precious piece about a young novelist who, on the advice of a revered older writer, gives up his love affair in order to concentrate on writing his masterpiece; after much turgid prose and tedious psychologising, he returns from a long stay abroad to find that “the Master” has married the lady he loved. Really, a mannered piece of social trivia worth a tenth of the space.
But the final story in the book, Daisy Miller, is much more pleasing. Daisy Miller is an American, young, attractive and innocent, whose travels in Europe are marked by social naivety and light, flirtatious approach to everyone she meets who might be fun. She goes alone where she ought not, she befriends an Italian her fellow Americans fear is a fortune hunter, and she alienates her own community in Rome. She is watched at a distance by Winterbourne, another American who is a little older and wiser than her, and who has lost half his heart to her – but not all his sense. All ends tragically – she succumbs to and dies of a fever, and he tells his aunt, who had refused to meet her, that she had been right all along in warning him that he was too innocent and would regret taking up her acquaintance: "I was booked to make a mistake". It is an amusing and affecting story, with a lightness of touch and a percipience which is missing from some of the other pieces in this volume.
Comments