Endangered Species
BOLGER, EUGENIE
Endangered Species The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Astor House. 502 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Arietta Minot Fay belongs to an endangered species. A world concerned ...
...They are to New York what Joyce's Dubliners is to Dublin, the subtlest social observation wrapped in rue...
...These autobiographical pieces about the Elkin family have much to say about families everywhere...
...More important, she knows when to end a performance, when to sit back and let others savor what has been said...
...In them, the city's old West Side comes to life once again, the rambling apartments with their twisting halls, high-ceilinged rooms, carved cupboards, and dark, overstuffed furniture...
...So Mrs...
...Fay is dining out, taking her charm, her style, and her store of anecdotes to local dinner tables in hopes of finding a sinecure herself...
...details deftly shift and join to form conflicting patterns...
...But by the time we encounter Mrs...
...Of the latter she says, "Its very duration, too brief to make a new mode in, verges it always toward that classical corner where sits the human figure...
...To be sure, not all of Miss Calisher's stories are equally successful...
...Her prose is leisurely, cadenced, sparked with images from a poet's flint...
...Still, Arietta Fay can work wonders with the slightest tale...
...And reading, or rereading, the 36 pieces in The Collected Stories—all have appeared in earlier volumes or in magazines?one comes to fear that Miss Calisher, too, belongs to an endangered species...
...In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks," the opener of the collection, is perhaps too carefully machined—its gears well-meshed, but exposed...
...For generations such espirit had been sufficient to earn men of the Minot clan comfortable positions with the wealthy and the well-stationed...
...The Elkin stories are among Miss Calisher's richest achievements...
...Her skill is not easily defined...
...She possesses all the resources of that inestimable lady...
...She believes in firm structures and plots...
...Worse, she is the sole support of a nine-year-old son and a crumbling mansion...
...Her stories, symmetrical, conclusive, polished to the glint, are classics of their kind...
...All one can say for sure is that in her company the dull seem witty, the everyday is extraordinary, the present rich and pleasurable...
...It is obvious that for Miss Calisher the human drama is the main one going...
...In many ways, Hortense Calisher can be likened to this marvelous creature of her imagination...
...The Scream on 57th Street," however, is a multi-layered tale of psychic terror that Henry James would have envied...
...the smells of the kitchens...
...the servants, meek, tyrannical or harassed...
...the propriety and fuss of clothes, meals, routines, manners...
...Miss Calisher discusses her writing and the short story form itself...
...And perhaps the genre flourishes best during those periods of life—both for authors and eras —when the human drama is easier accepted as the main one going...
...These stories also sound a theme that resonates through all Miss Calisher's work: the isolation we cannot avoid and cannot face...
...Her stories are filled with the detail that establishes mood and place...
...Fay, on page 410 of The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, sinecures have been scarce for some time, her husband and her father have been dead one year, and her bank balance has dwindled to $126.35...
...The Sound of Waiting" and "The Middle Drawer" describe not only the specific gulf between one father and one son, one mother and one daughter, but the elemental family conflict from which all other conflict derives...
...In her brief introduction...
...She has a sense of timing, an ability to dramatize and an instinct for involving her audience...
...Some, like the one about the zebra in the garden, have problems with their denouements...
...Fay Dines on Zebra," dealt with more disturbingly in "What a Thing, to Keep a Wolf in a Cage," and raised to an anguished peal in "The Scream on 57th Street...
...A world concerned with organizational charts and the Gross National Product has little need of her...
...For the volume reminds us that Miss Calisher, the author of several novels and a recently published memoir, deals in commodities we rarely find any longer...
...They tell of the wounds inevitably inflicted in the most loving households, wounds that ache and shape events for generations...
...It is a theme hinted at even in so light-hearted a story as "Mrs...
...Fay's stories are equally remarkable...
...Not all of Mrs...
Vol. 59 • January 1976 • No. 2
