THE PYLON by L. P. Hartley

“dreams go by contraries”

A very disturbing story, whatever one’s mien. But not healthily disturbing like normal scary horror stories were before this one was written. Black static not white, I sensed. An artificial story in a positive way as well as negative, ironically structured by Mother Nature, as well as electrically by giant live Meccano, a story about a boy called Laurie, and his complexes arguably about his puberty (Freud and Oedipus are specifically mentioned) and his dreams regarding the pylon situated close outside the house where his family lives. Taken down and now being rebuilt even bigger. At first a symbol of his purpose in life, later his greatest fear with nightmares about climbing the Oedipyl. Indeed, despite ‘pylon’ also being a massive opening or gateway to a temple, Laurie sometimes sleeps with his Dad (a man perhaps purposely named Roger?), ostensibly to make Laurie feel more secure when he wakes up from such nightmares…. one day he wakes up and sees…

“Standing in front of the low casement window, Roger’s tall figure blotted out the daylight. The outline of his arms down to his elbows, his shield-shaped back and straddled legs showed through the thin stuff of his pyjamas;…”

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More reviews of L.P. Hartley: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/03/other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/

THE LOTTERY: Shirley Jackson

This is the famous gratuitously cruel Tontine of a story involving a village of 300 souls, children and adults, with collected stones and bits of folded paper in a worn out black box that some say was partly built out of its predecessor box. The unfairness of choice and the eventual ‘prize’ plainly and gratuitously told with skilfully decorative evocations of place and people. The process of literature as one’s ongoing life itself and the duly allotted death of each reader while reading a book partly made from a predecessor book. That glimpse of truth. Words as stones or stories.

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Context of this review: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/986-2/

THE VATS by Walter de la Mare

 

A brief story in words that somehow mean more and more the less and less they are read. The ultimate perhaps is never to read this work at all and depend on osmosis as solely generated by this review.

A story with characters deployed by one of them as narrator. Two “clock-vexed men” discussing the nature of time itself, and walking upon an unearthly terrain that started off as idyllic England — not that they are in a SF vision, but inside one of Zeno’s Paradoxes, the reader needing to be no more nor less than “half-woken” enough to continue sensing a half-meaning that ever promises more.
A number of vast vats placed monumentally upon some morphed Salisbury Plain, with Time tantamount to the water in the vats, and we can dive in and out, with cross-references to the Bible and to whatever else the reading mind conjures up as its occult source.

It is full of “hugger-mugger, feverish, precipitate” words that ever threaten over-spilling. A time-elongating story’s momentous, prophetic synergy with my reading of it. The second character, the narrator’s friend.

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Context of this review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/walter-de-la-mare/

THE NAP by Walter de la Mare

Full previous context of this review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/06/the-elbow-stories-of-walter-de-la-mare/#comment-25449

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“Like all Saturday dinners in his household, this had been a hugger-mugger dinner – one of vehement relays.”

This next story I chose is the perfect onward progression of the ‘solipsism / slopdish’ theme-and-variations that I proposed earlier above, together with a man’s whole family, en masse, being tantamount to this book’s erstwhile ‘Visitor from Porlock’! —

Ostensibly, and as an early Corrie fan, I deem this an early working-class soap-opera (“…slid the soap out of the basin where Charlie had abandoned it, and hung up the draggled towels again in the tiny bathroom.”) It has gender rôle issues of the day, that we should forgive for what they are. “…half-sexed nagger” and, like most women, his wife “always went off at a tangent.”
The scene is that of Mr Thripp (“He was breathing heavily, for he inclined nowadays, as he would sometimes confess, to the ongbongpong.”) He cherishes his solitude especially when his beautiful man-hunting young daughter Millie goes out and his two sons, smoking James and footballing, Charlie, go out, too, the latter with the noise of “fifteen Charlies”. And particularly when his wife Mrs T is about to go to what we all called ‘the pictures’ in those days, she going with a flighty, flirty, highly made-up Mrs Brown (“Mr Thripp indeed was no lover of the ultrafeminine.”), Mrs Brown who says of picturehouses: “But I enjoy the dark, Mr Thripp … It rests the eyes.’”
Mr T has two clocks, one with a Zeno-like “pendulum – imperturbably chopping up eternity into fragments of time.” He is jug just as much as a jug is a jug, and insists ironically on doing the housework so that he can be sooner alone with his precious pot of tea for one and the ‘nirvana of a nap’ as I’m not sure what? — not exactly a dream, but a nap as a solipsism wherein his family anxieties play out and are hopefully transcended as the real truth of this fiction. For example, he witnesses Millie with a new boy friend whose “elbows were on the marble-top table, and he was looking at Millie very much as a young but experienced pig looks at his wash-trough.” Soap-basin, wash-trough, and, now, yes, I infer, slopdish! Aptly, then, it is Millie who is transcended this time, by dint of the nap as she returns home somehow to share Mr T’s tiny pot of T! But… “…it might be multitudinous shades of the unborn that were thronging about the glass of his window. Mr Thripp rose from his chair, his face transfigured with rage and desire for revenge.” — and thus the previously read story’s Anti-Natalism above is also played out by Mr Tea within our own solipsistic eyes, I guess.

“Within, the two clocks on the chimney-piece quarrelled furiously over the fleeting moments, attaining unanimity only in one of many ticks.”