Thursday, March 17, 2016

Three short stories I wish I wrote. I’d recommend to anyone who writes or who loves literature.



The Snows of Kilimanjaro Ernest Hemingway: A couple on safari wait for a plane to rescue the male lead character whose leg has developed gangrene. It appears the plane will not arrive on time as the guy reevaluates his life. He drinks and berates his girlfriend. The story unfolds through their dialogue. The male has flashbacks of his life and they largely run parallel to Hemingway’s own travels. The flashbacks are interspersed with the main story. Throughout the story, vultures wait for him to give up.

The flashbacks are very Hemingway-like. He talks about Paris, Greece and Turkey. Through these glimpses you get a sense of a wider world exists in this fiction. He talks about skiing with former enemies. His observations combine to show his great eye for detail and his talent for understatement. One of my favorite observations is: “But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas day with the mountains showing across the plain that Barker had flown across the lines to bomb the Austrian officers' leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran. He remembered Barker afterwards coming into the mess and starting to tell about it. And how quiet it got and then somebody saying, ''You bloody murderous bastard.''

Those were the same Austrians they killed then that he skied with later. No not the same…”


Ice Palace F. Scott Fitzgerald: Ice Palace published in 1920 is an early story in which Fitzgerald first makes his Zelda-like character into his muse. It's obvious that the genesis of this story came from his days when he was stationed in the south and first courted her. Zelda is on the verge of hooking up with him and coming north. There is a heartbreaking scene when her old local boyfriends realize that they are no longer good enough for her.

Clark stared straight in front of him at a bolt on the clattering windowshield.
“Sally Carrol,” he said with a curious intensity, “don’t you like us?”
“What?”
“Us down here?”
“Why, Clark, you know I do. I adore all you boys.”
“Then why you gettin’ engaged to a Yankee?”
“Clark, I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ll do, but—well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here, and Ben Arrot, and you-all, but you’ll—you’ll—
“We’ll be failures?”
“Yes. I don’t mean only money failures, but just sort of—of ineffectual and sad, and—oh, how can I tell you?”
“You mean because we stay here in Tarleton?”
“Yes, Clark; and because you like it and never want to change things or think or go ahead.”

The Zelda-like character then moves to Minnesota. You really get a clash of civilizations from the juxtaposition of the slow languid pace of the south to the north where she needs warm beverages and blankets while travelling on the train. Up north, they have this big winter festival. In the town they build a giant ice palace. The female lead goes into the palace, somehow gets separated from the others and gets lost in a labyrinth of ice.

“Harry!”
Still no answer. The sound she made bounced mockingly down to the end of the passage.
Then on an instant the lights went out, and she was in complete darkness. She gave a small, frightened cry, and sank down into a cold little heap on the ice.

She gets lost inside and can’t find her way out. She is eventually rescued by friends of her boyfriend who say,

“Child, child! We’ve been looking for you for two hours! Harry’s half-crazy!”

Great use of elements as a way of showing the lifestyles that is really separating these two cultures and also as a way of showing what is separating the two protagonists. Fitzgerald also shows a fantastic ability to see things from someone else’s perspective, in this case Zelda’s.

Gigolo and Gigalette Somerset Maugham: This is a fantastic story of a depression era couple who are living at their wits end as to how they will survive tough economic times. The woman has always been the bread winner and she makes her living by jumping from height into a small tub of water. He wrote:

"How's Stella?" asked Sandy.
"Oh, she's all right. Likes to have a lay-down before the show, you know. Steadies the old nerves, she says."
"I wouldn't do that stunt of hers for a thousand pounds."
"I don't suppose you would. No one can do it but her, not from that height, I mean, and only five foot of water."
"It's the most sick-making thing I've ever seen."
Cotman gave a little laugh. He took this as a compliment. Stella was his wife. Of course she did the trick and took the risk, but it was he who had thought of the flames, and it was the flames that had taken the public fancy and made the turn the huge success it was. Stella dived into a tank from the top of a ladder sixty feet high, and as he said, there were only five feet of water in the tank. Just before she dived they poured enough petrol on to cover the surface and he set it alight; the flames soared up and she dived straight into them.

The female lead is very good at the acrobatic trick they are using to make a living but she is beginning to lose her nerve. The crowds continue to gather at each swanky hotel and you sense that what they are really coming for is that one time that the female lead doesn't make it. It's a little like people going to a NASCAR race for the accidents.

"What's the matter, darling?"
"Syd, I can't do it again tonight," she sobbed.
"Why on earth not?"
"I'm afraid."
He took her hand.
"I know you better than that," he said. "You're the bravest little woman in the world. Have a brandy, that'll pull you together."
"No, that'd only make it worse."
"You can't disappoint your public like that."
"That filthy public. Swine who eat too much and drink too much. A pack of chattering fools with more money than they know what to do with. I can't stick them. What do they care if I risk my life?"
"Of course, it's the thrill they come for, there's no denying that," he replied uneasily. "But you know and I know, there's no risk, not if you keep your nerve."
"But I've lost my nerve, Syd. I shall kill myself."

The couple is trapped in their own con as they really have no other means of surviving tough economic times. It is either go through with it or back to the scrap pile that they came from.

"Tonight, and every night till I kill myself. What else is there? I know you're right, Syd. I can't go back to all that other, stinking rooms in fifth-rate hotels and not enough to eat. Oh, that Marathon. Why did you bring that up? Being tired and dirty for days at a time and then having to give up because flesh and blood just couldn't stand it. Perhaps I can go on another month and then there'll be enough to give you a chance of looking round."
"No, darling. I can't stand for that. Chuck it. We'll manage somehow. We starved before; we can starve again."
She slipped out of her clothes, and for a moment stood naked but for her stockings, looking at herself in the glass. She gave her reflection a hard smile.
"I mustn't disappoint my public," she sniggered.

Any of these three I would take, and it makes my world feel a little more rounded to know that someone experienced these experiences and had the good senses to write it down.

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