In Rough Country (4 page)

Narrated in the cool, detached tone of a fairy tale, “A Country Love Story” evokes the experience of living with a brilliant man who has become mentally ill. Daniel isn't a celebrated confessional poet but rather a professor given to “private musings” and obsessive work on a research project “of which he never spoke except to say that it would bore [his wife, May.]” To insulate herself from Daniel's unpredictable mood swings, and from the loneliness of their lives in a beautiful but isolated old farmhouse in Maine, May fantasizes a lover who appears in an antique sleigh in the front yard of the house. The lover exudes a ghostly seductiveness: “there was a delicate pallor on his high, intelligent forehead and there was an invalid's languor in his whole attitude. He wore a white blazer and gray flannels and there was a yellow rosebud in his lapel. Young as he was, he did not, even so, seem to belong to her generation,
rather, he seemed to be the reincarnation of someone's uncle as he had been fifty years before.” Through the long winter in their close quarters, as Daniel becomes increasingly deranged, suspecting May of infidelity, so May becomes increasingly enthralled by her phantom lover: “She took in the fact that she not only believed in this lover but loved him and depended wholly on his companionship.” When Daniel demands of her, “Why do you stay here?” May has no answer, as if a spiritual paralysis has overcome her. At the story's end, Daniel has survived the winter and seems to be recovering his sanity while May, exhausted and broken by her ordeal, is “confounded utterly.” In a daze she goes outside to sit in the antique sleigh from which her phantom lover has now departed, “rapidly wondering over and over again how she would live the rest of her life.”

“A Country Love Story” is reminiscent of Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw” (1899) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), similar tales of seclusion, sexual repression, and psychological disintegration. Stafford would certainly have known James's famous ghost story but isn't likely to have known “The Yellow Wallpaper,” long forgotten in Stafford's time but subsequently rediscovered by feminist scholars and now frequently reprinted. Stafford's story strikes the contemporary reader as a missive from a bygone pre-feminist era when marital loyalty, not running for one's life, was the married woman's ideal. Stafford's vision of woman's fate at the hands of men is a dark one, passivity to the point of masochism.

Set in Adams, Colorado, and narrated in the forthright
tone of a middle-aged western woman very different from the fatally sensitive May, “In the Zoo” is another of Stafford's tales of what might be called domestic Gothicism. Again, a tyrannical, mentally unbalanced individual dominates a household; Mrs. Placer, or, as she wishes to be called by her charges, “Gran,” becomes a foster mother to two orphaned sisters after their parents' deaths. Mocked and bullied by Gran, treated, like servants, the girls grow up “like worms” in an unrelenting atmosphere of “woe and bereavement and humiliation.” The story erupts into physical violence rare in Stafford's fiction, when a vicious watchdog trained by Gran kills a pet monkey owned by an elderly friend of the sisters. It's a traumatic memory both women bear through their lives, as the sinister influence of Gran seems to have permanently altered their personalities.

Stafford's last published story, the corrosively memoirist “An Influx of Poets,” (1978), is a cold eye cast upon that post-war era in our cultural history when (male) poets exuded a Heathcliffian glamour as remote to us now as the smugly self-congratulatory Norman Rockwell covers of the
Saturday Evening Post
:

No more glamorous poet-figure than Theron Maybank, who attracts women with his “brilliant talk and dark good looks somehow reminiscent of the young Nathaniel Hawthorne” a casual anti-Semite (“I would never have a Jew as a close friend”) who nonetheless betrays his desperately vulnerable wife with a
zaftig
Jewish beauty, encourages her incipient alcoholism and hurtles her “off the brink on which [she] had hovered for so long into a chasm.” This late story of Stafford's reads like recklessly disguised memoir, giving off sparks of raw, pained vitality in counterpoint to the more detached rhythms of “A Country Love Story,” its obvious predecessor, concluding with the most poignant of ritual deaths:

Stafford is at her brilliant and tragic best in the unnerving mode of domestic Gothicism, but, elsewhere, she's enormously funny, capable of withering satiric portraits as pitiless
as those by Mary McCarthy, with whom she shares a zestful disdain for hypocrisy, pretension, and feminine “niceness.” The Manhattan-based stories “Children Are Bored on Sundays,” “Beatrice Trueblood's Story,” and “The End of a Career” portray social types who verge upon caricature, while the obese, gluttonous egotist Ramona Dunn of “The Echo and the Nemesis” is a clownish type who shocks us with her sudden humanity. (Is Ramona an incest victim? Stafford seems to hint so, with admirable subtlety.) Lottie Jump, the aptly named shoplifter-friend of eleven-year-old Emily Vanderpool of “Bad Characters,” is a bold, brash daughter of Oklahoma migrant workers whose humanity registers upon us belatedly; so too, Angelica Early of “The End of a Career,” who is blinded by the world's admiring yet condescending attention, fails to develop a personality and is devastated by even the first, mild ravages of aging: “her heart, past mending, had stopped.” (A virtual word-for-word replication of the ending of James's
The Turn of the Screw
.) Several of Stafford's memorable stories elude definition, striking a chord somewhere between comedy and horror: in “Cops and Robbers,” the drunken, bullying father of five-year-old Hannah takes her to a barber to have her beautiful long hair shorn, as a way of punishing her mother with whom he has a quarrel; in “The Captain's Gift,” the elderly, genteel widow of an army general receives from her grandson, an army captain stationed in Germany in the early 1940s, an unexplained, alarming gift: “a braid of golden hair…cut off cleanly at the nape of the neck, and so long it must have hung below her waist.”

The impersonal pronoun
her
, unobtrusively inserted here, is a typically chilling Stafford touch.

In her wittily ironic view of humanity, Jean Stafford is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift for whom humankind was divided about evenly into “fools” and “knaves”—naive victims, evil aggressors. Stafford's indignation is hardly less savage than Swift's, though the terms of her moral satire are likely to be realistic. Her most mordant story, “A Modest Proposal,” takes its title from Swift's famous satire, providing, in a milieu of rich Caucasian tourists in the Caribbean, the most extreme image in Stafford's fiction: the “perfectly cooked boy”—a native, black baby victim of a house fire—offered to the racist Captain Sundstrom by a jovial friend:

Is the story authentic? Is it a grotesque tall tale, meant to tease Captain Sundstrom's genteel guests? In the shocked aftermath of the narration, one of the guests throws a glass onto the stone floor of the terrace where it “exploded like a shot”—an enigmatic response that, ironically, summons the native kitchen boy
to the scene. Stafford's contempt for the gathering, as for the privileged white class to which they belong, is perfectly evoked: “[The kitchen boy] ran, cringing, sidewise like a land crab, and the Captain, seeing him, hollered, “Now, damn you, what do
you
want? Have you been eavesdropping?”

Collected Stories
by Roald Dahl,
with an introduction by
Jeremy Treglown

B
orn in Llandaff, Wales, of well-to-do Norwegian parents, educated in England and a pilot with the Royal Air Force for part of the Second World War, Roald Dahl (1916–1990) is the author of numerous books for children
¹
and a relatively small but distinct body of prose fiction for adults,
Over to You
(1946),
Someone Like You
(1953),
Kiss Kiss
(1960),
Selected Stories
(1970),
Switch Bitch
(1974), and
Eight Short Stories
(1987). The
Collected Stories
, with an excellent introduction by Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown, is a gathering of forty-eight stories of considerable diversity, ambition, and quality, with settings ranging from Kenya to rural England, London, and New York City and narrative styles ranging from realistic to the fabulist and surreal. Though a number of Dahl's most engaging stories, particularly in his early career, are cast in a realist mode, Dahl's reputation is that of a writer of macabre, blackly jocose tales that read, at their strongst, like artful variants of the Grimms' fairy tales; Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H. H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel
Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. As a female character says in the ironically titled “My Lady Love, My Dove”: “I'm a
nasty
person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That's why we get along together.” Given Dahl's predilection for severely punishing his fictional characters, you might expect this nasty lady to be punished, but Roald Dahl is not a writer to satisfy expectations.

Though in his fiction for adults as in his books for children Dahl exhibits the flair of a natural storyteller, for whom no bizarre leap of the imagination is unlikely, he seems to have begun writing, at the urging of C. S. Forester, as a consequence of his wartime experiences in the RAF, which included crash-landing in the African desert and participating in highly dangerous air battles during the German invasion of Greece. Such early stories as “An African Story,” “Only This,” “Someone Like You,” and “Death of an Old Old Man” draw memorably upon these experiences and suggest that, if Dahl had not concentrated on the short-story form, and more or less abandoned realism for the showy detonations of plot made popular in Dahl's youth by Saki and O. Henry, who both published first collections of stories in the early 1900s, he might have developed into a very different sort of writer altogether. The first story in this volume, “An African Story,” is a tale of primitive revenge recounted in the most laconic of voices, as chilling as any of Paul Bowles's parable-like tales of North Africa: an adventurous young RAF pilot develops engine trouble while flying solo above the Kenyan Highlands, makes a forced landing and finds himself on a desert plain where he is given aid by an elderly farmer who tells
the pilot an unnerving story, or confession, “so strange that the young pilot wrote it down on paper as soon as he got back to Nairobi…not in the old man's words but in his own words,” to be discovered by others in his squadron after his death. The anonymous narrator of “An African Story,” speaking of his dead colleague, might be speaking as aptly of the young Roald Dahl himself:

In “Only This,” a woman lies sleepless with anxiety after having heard a squadron of RAF bombers fly overhead en route to an air battle with the Germans; one of the pilots is her son, whose death by fire, vividly imagined, dissolves the barrier between reality and dreams and between a mother and her son, in this story of Lawrentian subtlety and intimacy that must have been, to Dahl's readers in the early 1940s, deeply moving, like its companion piece “Death of an Old Old Man,” a mesmerizing account of the final, excruciatingly protracted minutes of a fighter pilot whose plane has been struck by a German Focke Wulf, forcing him to parachute out, and down, to his death in a muddy pond: “I won't struggle, he thought. There is no point in struggling, for when there is a black cloud in the sky, it is bound to rain.” In “Someone Like You,” a spare, minimalist story in a heavily ironic Hemingway vein, two former
RAF bomber pilots are getting companionably drunk together not long after the end of the war, reminiscing about “jinking” on their bombing missions:

In “The Soldier,” a story of 1948, a former soldier's growing paranoia/psychosis is signaled by a pathological growing numbness in his body: by degrees he is losing his capacity to feel sensation, even pain. Suffering from a kind of delayed shell shock—with which his wife is inexplicably unsympathetic—he becomes susceptible to hallucinations and sudden outbursts of rage:

Like numerous other calculating females in Dahl's stories, canny Edna saves her life by dissociating herself from her troubled husband, who seems headed for incarceration in a mental asylum at the story's end, like the similarly over-sensitive male protagonist of “The Sound Machine,” an amateur scientist named Klausner who has invented an ingenious machine that will be his undoing:

Since Klausner is “a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted,” we are not surprised when the sound machine picks up the “frightful, throatless shrieks” of roses being cut in the garden next door, and the terrible shriek of a tree into which an ax has been driven: “enormous and frightful and…it had made him feel sick with horror.” Klausner too is led away: the inevitable fate for an individual who hasn't inured himself to the horrors of even ordinary life, like “normal” people.

One of Dahl's most gripping stories is the very brief “The Wish,” in which a highly sensitive, imaginative, and lonely
child fantasizes lurid dangers in the design of a carpet in his home—“The red parts are red-hot coals…the black parts are poisonous snakes”—which he has no choice but to walk on, with nightmare results as an initially playful notion blossoms into what appears to be a full-blown psychosis, or worse. (Are the poisonous snakes really alive?) Subtly rendered, poignantly convincing, “The Wish” is reminiscent of Conrad Aiken's classic tale of encroaching childhood madness, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” A kindred tale of growing adult paranoia originating in childhood trauma is “Galloping Foxley,” in which a London commuter in his early sixties begins to imagine that a fellow passenger on his train is an old public school prefect—“A ‘boazer' we called it”—now in his sixties; as a boy, this Foxley had been a brutal sadist allowed by Repton school tradition to beat any of the “fags” in his residence:

Rare among Dahl's stories, “Galloping Foxley” ends upon an unexpectedly muted, unmelodramatic note.
²

In the aptly titled “Poison,” one of Dahl's most brilliantly
realized stories, an Englishman living in Bengal, India, is held thrall in his bed by what he believes to be a krait (a highly poisonous snake common to the region) coiled and sleeping on his stomach, beneath a sheet. The terrified man, unable to move for fear of waking the snake, is aided by a fellow Englishman, the narrator of the story, and by a local Indian doctor who behaves heroically only to be viciously insulted when the ordeal is over by the racist Englishman he'd helped: “You dirty little Hindu sewer rat!” This story, for most of its length an excruciating tale of suspense, exudes the air of a fable even as it must have made for painful reading at the time of its first publication, in the popular American magazine
Collier's
.

 

After these admirable early stories, in which Roald Dahl would seem to have invested much of his own, intimate experience, Dahl moves decisively away from prose fiction of an intensely inward, sympathetic kind: intimacy is rejected for distance, sympathy for an Olympian detachment, as if the writer were determined not to succumb to the dangers of over-sensitivity like his victim-characters, but to identify with their punitive and sadistic tormenters, like the prefect bully Foxley who goes unpunished for his cruelty. In
Someone Like You
, and in successive collections of stories, Dahl casts a very cold eye upon the objects of his satire who are divided about equally, to paraphrase that most savage of English satirists, Jonathan Swift, between “fools and knaves.” Jeremy Treglown speaks of Dahl's admiration for Ian Fleming (“One of his heroes”) and of Dahl's increasing focus upon situation, to the exclusion of character:

As Roald Dahl's books for children are often fueled by fantasies of tricks, pranks, revenge in various guises, so what “really matters” in Dahl's mature work is punishment: “Vengeance Is Mine, Inc.,” a slapdash anecdotal tale ostensibly set in New York City, might well be the title for Dahl's collected stories. Like his younger contemporaries Muriel Spark and Patricia Highsmith, Dahl has a zest for blackly comic/sadistic situations in which characters, often hapless, are punished out of all proportion to their wrongdoings. In one of the more subtly crafted stories, the ironically titled “The Way Up to Heaven,” first published in
The New Yorker
in 1954, an exasperatingly slow, doddering, self-absorbed old coot, seemingly so wealthy as to live in a “large six-storey house in New York City, on East Sixty-second Street, [with] four servants” and his own private elevator, is allowed, by his long-suffering wife, to remain trapped in the elevator as she leaves for six weeks in Europe to visit with her daughter:

In a mordantly funny coda that must have stirred visceral dread in male, upper-middle-class
New Yorker
readers of that pre-feminist era, the elderly liberated woman, returning from a highly enjoyable visit with her daughter, is pleased to discover when she re-enters the six-storey town house, a “faint and curious odor in the air that she had never smelled before.”

In the frequently anthologized blackly humorous anecdotal tales “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “William and Mary,” kindred long-suffering wives of annoying husbands exact lethal if improbable revenge: in “Lamb to the Slaughter,” a revenge-tale of comic-book simplicity, a woman named Mary is told by her “senior policeman” husband that he intends to leave her; with a single swing of a frozen leg of lamb, she kills him; when his policeman-colleagues come to investigate, Mary roasts the lamb and serves it to the idiots who, eating, speculate on where the murder weapon might be:

In the belabored revenge fantasy “William and Mary,” another exasperated wife named Mary exacts a yet more ingenious revenge upon her husband, or upon his brain, which has been removed from his body following his “death” and kept alive by artificial means in a basin, at enormous expense. In a plot purloined from the popular science-fiction novel
Donovan's Brain
(1943) by Curt Siodmak, the egotistical William Pearl, reduced to what resembles a “great gray pulpy walnut,” will be free to luxuriate in a purely intellectual world, “able to reflect upon the ways of the world with a detachment and a serenity that no man had ever attained before” linked to the outside world by a single, ghastly eye, the brain will even be able to peruse the London newspapers. But we know that William, or his brain, will not be treated with the wifely devotion William might have wished for, since Mary is perceived in broadly villainous strokes by a scientist-friend of her husband: