Short Story September – Highsmith & Turgenev

Little tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith

My reading for Short Story September got off to a good start with the Highsmith, which also fits in with the RIP xxi challenge. It was first published in German in 1974 and in English in 1977. The edition I read was part of the pocket-sized Penguin 60s series published to celebrate their 60th anniversary – and unlike many of the volumes of short stories in that set which are excerpted from longer collections, it contains the full 17 short stories of the original, some of which are very short indeed.

These are all little chillers, full of suspense and revenge, and with evocative titles which explain the path the tale will take. You’re left in no doubt about ‘The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife’, ‘The Mobile Bed-Object’, ‘The Coquette’, ‘The Breeder’, but also ‘The Perfectionist’, ‘The Prude’ and ‘The Female Novelist’ and so on. The title that got me though was the second in the collection – ‘Oona, the Jolly Cave Woman’!

We begin though with ‘The Hand’, which is a) one of the very short ones, and b) possibly the most macabre of the lot. A young man asks his girl’s father for her hand – and he gets it – just the hand! Which leads us to Oona, who will meet her end by the hand of a jealous wife, but before that is described thus:

She was a bit hairy, one front tooth missing, but her sex appeal was apparent at a distance of two hundred yards or more, like an odour, which perhaps it was. She was round, round-bellied, round-shouldered, round-hipped, and always smiling, always jolly That was why men liked her. She always had something cooking in a pot on the fire. She was simple-minded and never lost her temper. She had been clubbed over the head so many times, her brain was addled. It was not necessary to club Oona to have her, but that was the custom, and Oona barely troubled to dodge to protect herself.

‘The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife’ was a classic – a wife takes every opportunity once married with a child to go with whomever she chooses, be it the window cleaner or family lawyer. She resolves to kill her husband – with food – inducing a heart attack when she suggests he plays tennis after months of rich artery-clogging fare.

None of the protagonists of these tales have any redeeming qualities whatsoever, they all think they are better than everyone else. Highsmith’s matter of fact prose lays it out for the reader, emphasising nasty actions. I felt it was best of a dipper-into type read, as if you read in one go – although easily doable, they are a little repetitive in some aspects – with the similar (but different) relationship dynamics in the tales.

Three Sketches from A Hunter’s Album by Ivan Turgenev

Translated by Richard Freeborn

The full collection of 25 stories was published in book form in 1852, early in Turgenev’s career. This pocket-sized edition picks three of them: ‘The Loner’, ‘Meeting’, and ‘Living Relic’. Although I devoured Tolstoy’s War & Peace and Anna Karenina in my teens, I never explored the classic Russian authors further – no Dostoyevsky and no Turgenev for instance, so this was a good opportunity to get to know the latter a little. I was delighted to find I loved these three tales finding Freeborn’s translation (from 1967 originally) very readable indeed.

In the first, a well-off hunter with his ‘racing drohsky’ carriage takes refuge with a forester when a storm threatens. Said forester is nicknamed Loner, and he lives in a cottage with his young daughter and baby, his wife having run off. He is feared by the other peasants for fiercely protecting his master’s forest, and our narrator intercedes on another peasant’s behalf when they come across one illicitly chopping wood, while Loner is leading the narrator back to the main path after the storm has passed.

In the second tale, the narrator is enjoying being with nature, having a kip under the trees, hidden from view. When he wakes he witnesses a meeting between a young peasant woman and a man, in which she is pleading for him not to abandon her. It’s sad, but at the start of this tale there is some lovely nature writing:

I was sitting in a birch wood one autumn, about the middle of September. […] The sky was either covered with crumbling white clouds or suddenly clear for an instant in a few places, and then, from behind the parted clouds, blue sky would appear, lucid and smiling, like a beautiful eye. I sat and looked around me and listened. The leaves scarcely rustled above my head; by their very noise one could know what time of year it was. It was not the happy laughing tremolo of spring, nor the soft murmuration and long-winded talkativeness of summer, not the shy and chill babblings of late autumn, but a hardly audible dreamy chattering.

In the final selection, ‘Living Relic’, the narrator and his friend have been hunting, and visit an old farm belonging to the narrator’s mother in the countryside. The narrator is wandering in the gardens when he hears a voice from one of the outbuildings. Inside he finds an old lady, actually not that old, but bed-ridden and wizened. Lukeria had worked for their family, and he remembers her from his youth. She had been injured and ill for seven years now, releasing her fiancee to marry another. Pyotr, the narrator stays with her a while, finding that she is being looked after, and is thankful them for doing it, glad to be alive, but not demanding of anything. Before leaving he checks that she will continue to be cared for.

As I said, I enjoyed these enormously, and have added the book of the complete Sketches from a Hunter’s Album to my wishlist. They may be tales of haves and have-nots, but twas ever thus, and do they have a distinct Russian flavour.

What a super start to Short Story September.