It has been a hot minute since we met for coffee and poetry, but I'm glad we've found each other again.
Poems:
Today's poems are by Rosabetty Muñoz, tr. by Claudia Nuñez de Ibieta (from Poetry, Oct. 2024/225:1)
Poems:
Should you wonder why Unexpected Weather Events is no
longer listed on Amazon (or suggests an unknown wait-time), or should you
wonder why your bookstore doesn't sell it and may not offer ordering it for
you, here is the short version. The distributor suddenly closed its doors,
which upended hundreds of small presses, affecting all of their titles, and the
writers who publish with them.
Should you want a longer version, complete with a glossary tailored for this
tale, please continue.
Terms:
Publisher - The person/people/group/business that accepts a writer's
book and guides it from its manuscript form to its final book form that can be
borrowed or bought from libraries and bookstores.
Distributor - The entity that helps move copies of the book from
the publisher to bookstores. The go-between. Something like a travel agent.
Bookstores - Places where we can buy books. Places that prefer
to purchase books through distributors because they can return copies that they
don't sell. Also, it streamlines purchasing, as they can order titles from
multiple presses through a distributor, instead of having to write contracts
with each publisher, besides reordering, returning, payment, etc.
As the writer, I do not dip my toe into the relationships among publishers,
distributors, and bookstores. So know that the following account is my trying
to best to sort a likely more complex situation.
🌹
Once
upon a time in the Kingdom of Books, there were distributors who functioned
like couriers, moving the books from the publishers in the forest to the
bookstores in the cities. For many, many years the Kingdom of Books functioned
this way. A writer hunched over a table, scribbling or typing long or short
stories, and when the writer was done, they wrapped the manuscript in brown
paper and sent it by a herd of doves to a publisher. Should the first publisher
accept the manuscript, the doves would return to the writer and live happily
the rest of their days. Should the first publisher reject the manuscript, the
doves would be re-harnessed with the heavy block of pages and fly it to the
next publisher. This would go on until either the doves found a publisher, the
doves returned to the writer half-starved and missing many feathers, or the
writer cursed the Gods of Publishing and never sent the doves out again.
Meanwhile, the Publishers in the Forest daily received herd and herds of
doves from around the kingdom. Every day more doves came. Donkeys, too.
Giraffes, dogs, passels of ladybugs--all carrying manuscripts from hunched
writers around the kingdom.
Over the course of the year, the Publishers in the Forest, sent many animals
back to their writers with good news or bad news. Good news being that the
manuscript was accepted and the publisher would transform it into a beautiful
book that hundreds of scribes would copy into thousands of copies that would
finally be distributed around the kingdom for citizens to read.
For many years, the Kingdom of Books functioned happily like this. In the
Kingdom of Books there existed, in a nearly parallel reality, another forest,
the Small Forest of Publishers. The Small Forest of Publishers was a lovely
place, full of exotic birds and waterfalls that fell without gravity, sometimes
up instead of down. The flowers drank tea and the clouds wove rain, and many
writers stumbled out of Publishers of the Forest into this forest and
immediately knew this is where they should send their manuscripts. Once
established, The Small Forest of Publishers let it be known that they enjoyed
reading manuscripts by unknown writers or writers with manuscripts that might
puzzle, surprise, or speak in special ways that not all citizens in the kingdom
would like to read, think to read, or even find in order to read--much less
purchase.
After the scribes made all the copies of the books, they sent them to The
Couriers Operating on the Big River. Now, it should be known that The Couriers
Operating on the Big River had several important jobs. For one, to take the
books from Publishers of the Forest and send those books to the kingdom's bookstores.
Because The Kingdom of Books loved readers, and more deeply, readers who bought
books, if the bookstore did not sell all the copies of a book, it could send it
BACK to The Couriers on the Big River. Sometimes those books would then be
destroyed, left to rot in a warehouse, or perhaps returned to the Publishers of
the Forest, although the Publishers were not in the habit of saving books or
housing them—that was simply not part of their job, in the same way that a university
does not let alumni come back to live in the dorms in the event that they do
not find a job.
In the parallel reality of the Small Forest of Publishers, many of the publishers tried to be everything—like the housewife of yore who birthed, raised, clothed, disciplined, and educated her children all by herself. The Small Forest of Publishers figured out how to read manuscripts, and then of the few they could afford to accept, they then prepared, scribed, and couried all by themselves; they also housed the books and sold some from their back porch.
Often, because a person who ran a press/publishing house in the Small Forest of Publishers had to do all of the jobs, they could only produce one to three books every 365 days. In producing so few titles, the publishers in the Small Forest rarely saw profit and would raise a glass to toast on years they broke. Many arts groups and literary clubs would help support these publishers when they could, since every day could be the day the publisher closed down—from fatigue, sorrow, or bankruptcy of soul or bank account.
According to those who know, one day there came to the Small Forest of Publishers a stranger. That stranger had lived, likely, in the Forest of Publishers and knew how it worked. But the stranger, finding the Small Forest of Publishers and seeing how fatigued they were, knew there was a better way. The stranger sat in the tavern and told the publishers about couriers. The publishers rolled their eyes. Of course they knew about couriers. They also knew about the cost of working with couriers, for there existed only The Couriers on the Big River. Guess how much of a cut they want from sending the books to the bookstores? The stranger was shocked and said let me go talk to them. And so the stranger journeyed many days to the Couriers on the Big River. The stranger sat in a tavern by the Big River and told the couriers about the Small Forest of Publishers. The couriers laughed and said that they knew about the Small Forest and said it was hardly worth their time to transport only a few boxes of titles each year, and those boxes were often returned from bookstores full or so nearly that it might as well be full. Which is why, the couriers pointed out, they had to charge by the amount of inventory they moved.
The stranger saw the problem.
The stranger then went to the city and sat in the tavern where the booksellers came. The stranger told the booksellers about the Small Forest of Publishers. About the exotic birds and upside-down waterfalls there. The booksellers nodded and smiled half-heartedly. We would sell those books, but our customers are not used to those kind. We could not order as many in order to avoid sending back so many. We only have so many bookshelves, you see. And we only have so many customers, you see.
The stranger saw.
The stranger met other strangers and explained the dilemma of the Small Forest of Publishers and the strangers decided to rent a few sheds in the city and set up an office. This became called Small Press Distribution. They bought an old boat and rented a dock on the Big River. The Small Forest of Publishers signed on the dotted line and began sending their books to Small Press Distribution (SPD). In turn, SPD sent the books to bookstores in small batches, and became the go-between of many, many presses that produced a few books each year.
And it was good for many years. Not fantastic. But it worked. The publishers in the small forest no longer had to do the job of courier, which allowed them to spend their time more in the production side of the manuscripts, which they enjoyed more since they were more like avid readers than businesspeople. The bookstores were happy because their bookshelves became more diverse and they didn’t have to send a thousand doves back and forth to the Small Forest of Publishers about contracts or books that didn’t sell or needing more books, and so on.
Then, one day, the Small Forest of Publishers stopped receiving messages from Small Press Distribution. Or when they did receive a message, the reply came months later. In the kingdom, bookstores would order books from Small Press Distribution and receive half the number they’d requested. Or none. The writers in the kingdom started hearing from readers that they could not find their books anywhere—or had ordered a copy but the order had never been filled.
The tavern in the Small Forest of Publishers became a small place of confused publishers. They exchanged stories and found that they were all experiencing the same frustrations with Small Press Distribution.
Unbeknownst to anyone, a cold ghost had settled in the sheds and dock and boat of Small Press Distribution. A ghost that ate books and strangers. The strangers working there tried to fight the ghost, telling no one about the ghost or the fighting. And then one day, when the strangers came to work, the ghost had eaten everything. There was not even a front door. And so they posted a message, hung by used fishing line from a tall tree, announcing that they were closed. That a ghost had eaten the books and that maybe the ghost had regurgitated them into different sheds around the kingdom. They could not be sure. But it was over. The publishers would have to search the kingdom far and wide for the books. The bookstores would have to search for the publishers of the titles.
And so, that is why Amazon no longer carries the books from the Small Forest of Publishers.
That is why well-known bookstores never carried, or now do not carry, books from the Small Forest of Publishers.
The Small Forest of Publishers are
trying to find their books while simultaneously picking up their jobs as
couriers again. They continue selling books from their back porches, but it is
as much up to the readers in the kingdom to journey to those back porches.
Without directions, a guide, donkey, or dove.
Poems:
Poems:
Last night, I participated in a reading of Eliot's iconic poem, The Wasteland. In preparation, I've spent the past month listening to recitations of the poem on Audible, various podcast episodes, and YouTube videos. There is, of course, the required listening to T.S. Eliot himself read it--even if his auditory imagination is a stack above his auditory performance. There are fan readings by strangers among us that are enjoyable in their own right, especially since these are often recited in the first, neutral and plodding tones we ourselves may have silently read onto the poem upon finding it.
In college, when I was assigned to read The Wasteland (with a gentle suggestion that we should read it first without the footnotes), I came to class ready to discuss it and found that my professor Trena Evans had wheeled in a TV and a black and white recording of people reading it. And what a smart move! Listening to the actors suddenly settled the poem into its hills, valleys, tavern conversation, birdsong, and distant gramophone music--and I was dazzled. Dazzled. That I was living in downtown Chicago, away from rural life for the first time in my life, must have made The Wasteland a poem peculiarly right for helping me understand this place and life where I now found myself.
And now, over twenty years since I first carried The Wasteland around in my head and on the far edge of the country, I've spent many running miles this month listening to it again, and other solo moments reading it. And how wonderful! How necessary! To have Eliot's words actively moving in my brain, changing the colored lens I see life through. As I ran the Bitterroot Runoff up 3,000 ft of increasing elevation, Eliot said to me "In the mountains there you feel free", and I thought, I do not feel free; I feel tired. So Eliot and I had a bit of a joke there. When my preschoolers and I were walking through the park and had to turn around, I saw our shadows and Eliot said, You see how it rises to meet you. And I thought, Yes, there it is! Then I said, Look at our shadows! to the child whose hand held mine.
All of this is to say that living inside a poem, a great poem, is a wonderful, meaningful experience that I have missed. Rolling it around as it rolls me around as a marble in wind. Of course I recommend it. And if you begin searching for the voices of those who call the poem into what it can become, then I absolutely recommend this dynamic, stellar, and deeply considered performance of The Wasteland by Fiona Shaw:
Poems:
So glad to be back! And with these poems. Enjoy!
Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (April 14, 2024)
Poems:
It has been a hot minute since we last met up for good words by other people, but I'm glad that you've checked back to see if a new edition might be up. It is! It's a rainy day in my part of the world, and we are slogging toward April, but it's officially Spring, so that's a new word to think about being inside.
Poems:
This April, I'll be returning home to visit family and to share stories from my newest story collection, Unexpected Weather Events.
Below, you'll find the calendar that will lead us to each other, book-wise. Please bring yourself (and your friends, your neighbors, and your family). <3
On Wednesday, April 3th, I'll be in Bloomington, Indiana's oldest bookstore, Caveat Emptor. I'll be signing copies of Unexpected Weather Events from 6:00-7:00 PM, followed by a reading from 7:00-8:00 PM.
The stories revolve around rural villages and the surreal relationship among grief, love, and loss. In one story, a child explains a war that now surrounds the cornfields and playground; in another story, a family sells their house after the husband and father dies by suicide. Snow turns to blood, a mass genocide occurs in the stone quarry at the end of a country road. And yet birds still sing, a mother hides oranges in a winter yard, and a widow decorates for Christmas.
The event is free and open to the public, and I hope you'll be there.
Caveat Emptor
112 N. Walnut
Bloomington, Indiana 47404
(https://www.
Facebook event link: https://www.facebook.com/events/24915628808082367
A few weeks ago, I was honored to share Unexpected Weather Events as the guest at Northwest Passages Book Club, a recurring salon-like event hosted by the Spokesman-Review and featuring regional titles and authors. Thanks to everyone who worked the sound, lights, and all the technicalities, and to Lindsey Treffrey for making the experience welcoming and comfortable. The seats were all full, and the audience and I had a very good conversation after the more formal discussion. It's a lovely event, and if you live in or near Spokane, you should definitely attend the next one if you haven't before.
If you missed the event, you can watch it virtually on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkleaG33sU. Or you can watch it right here:
The book event will be hosted by Indy Reads, a non-profit organization with a mission to support literacy, create community, and provide opportunities to strengthen oneself and others. They run a bookstore and provide workshops, tutoring, conversation circles, author events, and many more positive opportunities. I'm so honored to take a part in their mission, if only for a few hours, and I'm looking forward to learning more--so I hope that you can attend and learn more with me. You're absolutely invited. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is encouraged: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/author-reading-erin-pringle-tickets-861025780287?aff=oddtdtcreator
Unexpected Weather Events at Indy Reads
Sunday, April 7th, 2024
Noon-2:00 (ET)
1066 Virginia Avenue, Indianapolis, IN
Indy Reads website: https://indyreads.org/
Indy Reads on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndyReads/
This Thursday, February 22nd, please attend the Northwest Passages event. I'll be in conversation with Spokesman-Review writer Lindsey Treffry about my newest book, the story collection Unexpected Weather Events. I hope you can attend; if not, send someone in your stead.
What to know
.png)
This coming Thursday (February 22, 2024), my newest book Unexpected Weather Events will be the focus of the Northwest Passages audience at the Spokesman-Review building. The event will include a conversation led by Spokesman writer Lindsey Treffry, questions from the audience, and a reading from the book by yours truly. Today, Treffry's article about Unexpected Weather Events ran in the paper. She discusses the book itself and spun in a few words I'd spoken during a recent phone conversation we had.
“Grief is this – trying to carry tragedy at the same time you’re trying to buy Oreos,” Pringle said. “I think losing, in itself, is this trying to balance the mundane livingness of life with what feels like life-changing tragedy and not letting either one of them take over to the point that you’re neglecting the other.”
Northwest Passages is a book-focused, author-centered discussion with regional writers or books on regional subjects. Copies of Unexpected Weather Events will be available to purchase at the event, thanks to Auntie's Bookstore.
Read the full article here: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/feb/18/erin-pringles-unexpected-weather-events-may-bring-/
Thanks for checking in to see whether a new installment of poems is ready. It is! Hope you've found good poems by other people during the past few Sundays that we missed.
Please enjoy this reading of my story "Valentine's Day," recorded on Valentine's Day. The story first appeared in Willow Springs, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and now lives in my new collection of stories Unexpected Weather Events.
🕮💘
🕮
Interview: https://www.whisperingstories.com/interview-with-author-erin-pringle/
After reading Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I looked for more of her work at my favorite bookstore Giant Nerd Books in Spokane. They didn't have any, so when I returned the next week, I was delighted to find four books of her books waiting. What a wonderful bookstore! So, I figured I ought to start fulfilling my part of the request and purchase Dark Tales—which I quickly devoured. In fact, at times, I would be reading and think how I ought to slow down. Or that it would be so nice to be finished with the book so that I could reread it with the second eye that brings so much more out. Suddenly, my first reading became a preliminary run.
In my book, that's a sign of an excellent book.
Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson is a selection of stories from her previous collections and several unpublished works. The book is fantastic, every story a careful and ingenious work of art. If I’d realized upon purchase that the book wasn’t one of her original collections, I likely would have paused to read her collection The Lottery, which is already in my queue. Regardless, I will enjoy encountering these stories again, whether by rereading this collection or stumbling upon them in the collections she gathered during her lifetime. I will not keep you in suspense: this is definitely a book to read, no matter your preferred genre or style.
Every. Single. Story. Is. Fantastic.
The stories range from first-person to third-person, but the majority of them are told in third. The ordering of the stories is well done—each story complementing the one before it, whether in tone, subject matter, speed, or length.
All of the stories turn in the end, usually in an unexpected but earned way—much like the episodes in Twilight Zone. She very much could have written for the program, and one can easily imagine Shirley Jackson and Rod Sterling sitting by a fireplace trading cigarettes and stories.
In these “dark” tales, dark stands in for strange, unexpected, slanted. None are gory or gross, none are horror or require nail-biting in suspense. No, these are almost like illusions—where one expects ground, it turns out to be the reflection of ground—where one reaches into a hat for a rabbit and pulls out a smile.
Because the stories absolutely function on the way they twist, I’ll simply note a few favorites and leave the rest to come alive to haunt you.
My absolute favorite is “Louisa, Please Come Home,” the story told by a young woman about how she ran away, how very well she planned it, and how all worked out swimmingly—from taking the bus instead of walking, to purchasing a plain raincoat that looked like anyone’s raincoat, to wandering the bus station late at night with other college-aged girls. Her trick, she believes, is to imagine herself as others like her and then to think like them. She finds a room in a house to rent and follows the news of her disappearance, which varies from kidnapping to murder. In one poignant moment, she and her landlady are having breakfast and the girl’s picture is in the newspaper. The girl remarks that she looks a lot like the picture, and her landlady waves her off and says not to be so self-absorbed. Ha! But it is not simply the telling of a well-executed plan but an exploration into the anonymity we all experience without trying:
“It’s funny how no one pays any attention to you at all. There were hundreds of people who saw me that day, and even a sailor who tried to pick me up in the movie, and yet no one really saw me.”
This not-seeing—this fact of our being like so many others—becomes a terrifying reality toward the story’s end.
In another story, “The Story We Used to Tell,” two friends find themselves transported from a house into an old picture of the house. When the first friend disappears, she is searched for but the case of her whereabouts soon abandoned. Her friend insists that a few more days be given before giving up and that night she sleeps in her friend’s bedroom:
“The full moon had turned into a lopsided creature, but there was still moonlight enough to fill the room with a haunted light when I lay down in Y’s bed, looking into the empty windows in the picture of a house. I fell asleep thinking miserably of Y’s cheerful conviction that the old man was loose in the picture, plotting improvements.”
When the friend also becomes consumed by the picture, she and her friend encounter a strange dancing couple who harass them and dance with them. This story is one of the darker visions in the book and is threaded with vivid, nightmarish imagery with a turn at the end that invites, if not requires, the reader to begin again.
Many times, I felt myself hearkening back to Patricia Highsmith's Collected Stories because of the variety in this collection and its particular focus on the house as an intimate space, such as the story of Highsmith's in which a young woman is tidying her house for her sister's visit, or in another in which a person continually buys parakeets and gives them to all the people who post "lost parakeet" signs in the city. All seems fine but nothing is actually fine.
In Dark Tales, Jackson walks Jack the Ripper into a bar, playing the role of a man worried about a girl slumped drunk in an alley; in another story, a wife imprisoned in her bedroom by a jealous husband has accepted her fate; in a short but memorable story about a college girl stealing small objects from her roommates, the ironic importance secrets play in creating community becomes laid bare.
All told, these are stories to be told again. They are all quite readable, the style consistently beautiful but clear, the insights sudden and thought-stopping, and the variety of tales makes for a well-rounded trip through the halls of Jackson’s stories. I recommend Dark Tales this in every way and would hope the book or any one of its tales be included in literature classes. None of Jackson’s work appeared in any undergraduate or graduate literature course I took, though clearly should have—this is simply, and unquestionably, writing of the highest caliber.
🕮
Three poems for today's reading. Enjoy!
Poems:
I picked up a vintage paperback of We Have Always Lived in the Castle somewhere in life and finally read it over holiday break. It is one of the most beautiful and perfectly told stories I have ever read. It was so strange and right that I'd feel excited by the reading experience itself. Joyous. As one feels when falling in love, just being near the person. From the narrator’s way of thinking to the descriptions of the small town to the minds of the characters--Jackson's telling is rich and finely crafted in its minimalist approach.
The narrator is the younger of two daughters in the Blackwood family, a once wealthy and powerful family in the town but after five family members were all poisoned to death at the same dinner, the family has become alienated, feared, and ridiculed by the town. The house remains like a haunted house on the outskirts of town, and Merricat is the only one of the three to leave the house for town, for weekly grocery shopping, which she does not enjoy.
“The rows of stores along Main Street was unchangingly grey. The people who owned the stores lived above them, in a row of second-story apartments, and the curtains in the regular line of second-story windows were pale and without life; whatever planned to be colorful lost its heart quickly in the village. The blight on the village never came from the Blackwoods; the villagers belonged here and the village was the only proper place for them.
I always thought about rot when I came toward the row of stores; I thought about burning black painful rot that ate away from inside, hurting dreadfully. I wished it on the village.”
Merricat and her older sister Constance live in the house with their wheelchair-bound uncle whose mind wanders in time, and he sometimes begins narrating parts of the night of the poisoning either as though he’s there again or as a more present-self who has been rethinking that night from every angle in order to figure out how it happened.
The older sister Constance had stood trial for the deaths and the trauma of that, not to mention and the loss itself has kept her homebound. It is a quaint but isolated life—one that the narrator loves. She loves her sister Constance, and her love reminds me of how I once felt about my older sister when I was very young--a kind of idolization as much as adoration. Merricat spends much of her time alone, busy in her mind creating games that help her determine varying routes through town or arbitrary rules that guide her daily play in the surrounding woods. Some of these rules call back to her life when her parents were still alive--there is the sort of faint outline of that life still showing through in this one.
She has learned about botany and cooking and much from Constance. Constance cares for both the uncle and Merricat, allowing them both to live as much in their imaginations as in reality. Which perhaps allows her to do so too; one of the magical aspects of the novel is only understanding Constance through her interactions with other characters. What sort of life had she imagined for herself before that night? Before that trial? How does she imagine herself now that she has become caretaker for a disabled uncle and wandering sister?
However imagined, the way of life that Merricat, Constance, and Uncle Julian have measured out their days becomes threatened when a far-flung cousin comes to visit and ingratiates himself into the family. He begins courting Constance, which involves his frequent and vocal disagreement with the way she allows Merricat to behave or allowing Uncle Julian to live there instead of in an institution of some sort. The cousin comes to seem like the physical incarnation of the town and patriarchy—constricting, narrow, self-serving and with a lust for money. His presence makes the house feel under threat, and the narrator tries multiple clever ways to make him go away. Each attempt beautiful in its enactment.
But the way everything turns out, which I’ll leave to you to discover, leads to a kind of ideal life for the sisters--or at least for Merricat who has Constance all to herself. But their lives, fully autonomous now, exist only by sacrificing all interaction with the outside world in order to live it, safely. Where the town had tried to demolish them in rage and jealousy, now the town keeps them alive out of guilt and pity.
Surely there is a clear wisdom here that Shirley Jackson is pointing at, regarding the total sacrifice that women must make in order to live autonomous, creative lives—or perhaps it shows the extent that love, or nurturing, when used to protect another, can lead to self-destruction and the suffocation of one’s own possibilities. Multiple times while reading it I thought the novel must be a queer classic and taught in many a queer literature class due to its way of rendering identity, relationships, love, and the conflict between the individual and the community that leads, inevitably, either to the total annihilation of self or town. They cannot both live and retain their points of view because of the chasm in perspectives.
In conclusion, Jackson writing is superb. The style, the perspective, the way that the story and mystery of the family’s murders unravels via town folk chants, the wandering mind of the uncle, the overheard dialogue of an archaic afternoon tea. It’s gothic and observant and creative. Shirley Jackson has definitely become one of my favorite writers, shoulder to shoulder with Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. She sees inside things and writes in the strange angles that reveal the world in useful light. And this book's light seems to glow like ghosts thrown on the wall by a modernist’s stained glass lamp.
Perfect.
"It's to be rather drastic," she said, "The idea is to cut myself off entirely. I'll not be seeing even any of you. No radio, no telephone, no newspaper, no visitors. I'm not even going to talk to Sarah and Annie [her household help]. It's to be--well, exactly as though on took a thumb out of a bowl of soup"
Which is to mean that her removal will seem to change nothing in the lives of everyone else. Her children rally and cheerfully escort her up the stairs to her room. It's then in these two weeks that she has the time to reflect on her life, talk to the portrait of her deceased husband, and rest from the constant beat of war. She rereads the love letters her husband wrote her when they were first married and he was in the Spanish War. On the second week, she begins feeling more restless and goes down during a night blackout and talks to one of the volunteer watchmen. It seems like the first real conversation she has had, where she isn't holding back one part of her in order to steady the other. At the end of her isolation, she feels much better, sees that her children have survived without her, and is able again to contribute to the war effort. It ends with her volunteering to stand by the air-raid phones.
She felt happier than she had felt for a long time [... Sitting by the phones] wasn't much, she thought. But after all wasn't that what this war was about? That weary people, men and women and children, could sleep in peace; could live and work and sleep.
Above her the sky was filled with stars. Some day Andy would be up there. But perhaps Herbert [her husband] was up there too, and maybe God and all his angels. She waited serenely, while she put her family and the beaten weary world into her hands.
What I appreciate about the stories is not only the strong female characters who often appear (although there are frivolous ones, too) but also her candid portrayal of the war--whether its effect seems small, as in the fact of rationing, or whether it changes the course of the characters' lives, such as in my favorite story "Test Blackout" when a man volunteers to be Post Warden on night shift once a week. His wife finds his decision laughable and makes fun of him to her bridge-playing friends as he goes out, wearing the helmet and gear he wore in the first world war. It does not fit well, which he is aware of. But in volunteering, he has gained relationships with the men in the neighborhood and regained a clear purpose for his life; his life as a businessman was flailing. He now feels needed and necessary.
On the night of the story, there's to be a test blackout, and while the readers are allowed to see the seriousness of the event, he is on edge for it all to go well and has clearly practiced all the steps of the evening. His wife, however, leaves their apartment lights on, and he has to leave his place to call her up and remind her. Her response is to shrug him off. She forgot, she says, even though he'd reminded her. It's in this interaction that we see to the nth degree how little she listens to him and what it means for some people to disregard the war or live as though it weren't there--thus endangering the lives of everyone else. She lives her life as though everyone were playing at war, which allows her to continue playing at life--hosting bridge parties and making jokes.
During the blackout, his fellow warden and friend is wounded and rushed to the hospital. Earlier we learned that this friend was a single father and had instructed his child on what to do should something like this happen, and so our man goes to pick up the boy from the apartment and envisions a new life for himself. He imagines raising the boy so that his friend can enlist in the war, the boy visiting for summers the rest of his life. And he imagines how he will tell his wife and at first she will not go along with it but eventually she will. It's a story of purpose, and almost like a glimpse into the life of Tom in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit before he is sent off to the war, which explains why his life after the war seemed so purposeless and hollow.
Overall, Alibi for Isabel is an interesting collection full of fresh and clever stories, both deeply rendered or necessarily flat characters, and now provides a useful glimpse into the lives of people during the decades between the world wars. It certainly highlights how passive and distant our own civilian lives have become, despite the many wars ongoing around the globe. It seems that a great many of us are playing bridge from warm apartments.
When out book-looking, I will definitely keep my eye out for more vintage paperbacks by Mary Roberts Rinehart. This will certainly not be my last by her. She clearly has a lot to teach me about writing and life.
🕮
Welcome back to this week's installment of Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee--our perfect excuse to gather and drink coffee while I read good poems by other people.
Eventually, he does get the job—at about the same time that his grandmother dies and leaves him a small inheritance and a house. The pressures at work (caused as much by his fear of failure as by learning this new job) added to the pressures created by the unsettled and disputed estate lead to Tom seeing himself as a phony—or at least he starts really meditating on the chasm between his experiences in the war and the workaday world he is now expected to live in.
This is when we finally learn of Tom’s time in the war. From the rhythm of jumping out of airplanes, becoming lost on one of the jumps and killing a man for his coat, to the brief leave he has in Italy before being sent to a third location. He and his best friend believe that they will surely die this third time, and the droning nearness of death creates the atmosphere in which Tom ends up having a love affair with a woman for the 49 days of leave.
Like Odysseus living with Circe on her island, Tom lives with Maria in a kind of fever dream. She too understands the darkness of war, having watched her parents die from white phosphorous. He has seen men take the heads, teeth, and fingernails of enemies for souvenirs. But in that brief time together, they live in a sort of highly attuned present. On the day he learns he’s to report for duty, she tells him she’s pregnant. The rest of this is followed by a harrowing memory of dropping from an airplane onto an island already under attack by water and his accidental killing of his best friend whose corpse he then carries for hours searching for a medic.
Now, back in his New York life he mainly tries not to think or talk of the war. The children have chicken pox, his wife wishes for a better house, he commutes to work on a train with other men in gray flannel suits. He finds his wife lacking in depth since she has had a comparatively easy life and judges her attempt to see the bright side of any situation a symptom of this—and so their marriage seems like a dull theatrical production they both play parts in—if only because they married before he left for the war and must resume their parts after.
In a particularly poignant passage, Tom sees the pre-war vision of himself still lives inside his wife--and with it their pre-war dreams. On the night of his return from the war, his wife takes him to a hotel and
“began to talk brightly about the future. As he listened to her, he had gradually realized that here in this pretty girl sitting across from him in a pair of silk pajamas was himself as of 1939. Here was a kind of antique version of himself, unchanged. Here was the casual certainty that he would get a job which would soon lead to the vice-presidency of J.H. Nottersby, Incorporated, or some firm with a name which would have to sound like that. Here was all the half-remembered optimism, the implicit belief that […] they would of course be happy, real happy for the rest of their lives. The trouble hadn’t been only that he didn’t believe in the dream anymore; it was that he didn’t even find it interesting or sad in its improbability. Like an old man, he had become preoccupied with the past, not the future. He had changed, she had not.”
As Tom sees success in his new job, he runs into a former paratrooper from his company who knew of Tom’s relationship with the Italian woman and the resulting child. Tom fears the man will use the knowledge of the child to blackmail him or worse. Much of the novel is Tom fearing the worst, whatever the situation. What will happen if he loses his job. What his boss will say if he doesn’t feign positivity and play the “yes man” to whatever the boss asks of him. What will happen if his grandmother’s will is successfully contested. Everything always feels teetering on a precipice in his mind.
The later part of the novel dips briefly into two other men on the periphery of Tom's life. First, the local judge who will have to settle the matter of the estate and his background--the way conflict makes his stomach ache, which is constant in his job, and the way in which his Jewishness has isolated he and his wife from the town, despite how highly he is respected for his fairness as a judge. And second, Tom’s boss, a man small in stature who has pulled himself out of childhood poverty by working twelve-hour work days, despite his now significant income and enviable lifestyle. His public and personal life is work, which has led to a hollow marriage, despondent wife, and strangers for children. Finding himself the head of United Broadcasting, various foundations and non-profits, and a life tangentially connected to his family's, he starts to see the negative results of such a life—but is so entrenched in it that he only considers his way out by grooming Tom into the same financial trajectory. He is our cautionary character who never served in either of the wars, having enlisted but not deploying before the first war's end. His existence in the novel suggests a kind of cultural rift between the generation that experienced the first war and the generation that experienced the second, and with it, dissimilar perspectives about life and death.
By the novel’s end, Tom has stopped being a “yes man” and has started telling his boss the truth as he sees it. This eventually leads to positive results. The estate is settled on his side thanks to the judge's investigation into the matter. Tom learns that his Italian love and child are living in poverty and rather than ignoring this, he decides to send money to support them, after telling his wife the truth of the war —of having killed 17 men, the godawful experience it had been, the affair, and she in turn is able to be honest with him. This all happens toward the end of the book, so while she does become angry with him, it takes her only a matter of hours to forgive him and stand by his side—agreeing to help support his child in Italy however they can. Had Wilson given more time to the revelation, Tom's wife may have become a more dimensional character, but likely not since all of the female characters are self-sacrificing supporters of their men--the depth of their support equal to their value in the eyes of the men (and novel).
There is enough grimness, cynicism, and tension throughout the novel both to propel it forward and to allow its rather tidy, fairy-tale like ending.
At the heart of the novel is the friction between the American Dream and the disillusionment of it after war as well as the question of how people survive their own lives—through busying themselves, ignoring their pasts, working tirelessly, pretending to agree with those with more power in order to gain in power, to live in a nostalgic past, acting opposite to their parents in an attempt to avoid their mistakes, or trying to profit from a changing present—all while coming from or waiting for the next war.
Overall, yes, you should find a copy of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. There are so many well written passages—both in analyzing the society or of striking images, such as burning the legs of a grand piano during a picnic—that the book is worth your while. I’m glad I picked it up.
🕮