The State of Ireland: The Pushcart Prize, V:
King, Robert L
Differing styles ironically jostling TIE STATE OF IRELAND Benedict Kiely David R. Godine, $14.95, 389 pp. THE PUSHCART PRIZE, V BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES Edited by Bill Henderson The Pushcart...
...William Harmon's "Eiron Eyes" is an enthusiastic, witty appraisal of Louis Zukofsky...
...If style and self are one, then Binchey's is a loss of the spirit, like Ireland's, a state where Kiely sees the once distinctive idiom shrinking to the boundaries of a common explelive...
...He goes above character to give us its embodiment, the singular voice...
...Jan Carew's essay on the Caribbean writer takes its fire from his personal involvement...
...The State of Ireland, though, is a book to reread and cherish...
...THE PUSHCART PRIZE, V BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES Edited by Bill Henderson The Pushcart Press, $17.95, 608 pp...
...That bed, the reader knows, had held her lover's corpse a few hours earlier, and Thompson's Hound was after bigger game...
...Fair enough perhaps in a society that remembers its hostages in Iran by tying plastic ribbons on telephone poles, but hardly the stuff of expansive literature...
...Do you know, now, that was not badly put...
...In some stories, the narrator appears as "I" for a moment or two...
...In contrast, Robert Penn Warren writes about seeing, saying, knowing, time and being, all in twenty-eight measured, subtle, unaffected lines...
...Unwilling or unable, however, to assume the liberating burden of a rich cultural heritage, too many Pushcart authors fall back on a detached understated style or on easy juxtapositions of opposites...
...Elizabeth Spencer's "The Girl Who Loved Horses" is well paced and complex beneath an obvious surface, and Asa Baber's "Tranquillity Base" earns its final horror...
...Proxopera, he says, and likes the sound of the word...
...Lewis Hyde is fascinating on gift exchange...
...After dramatizing this exchange, the narrator informs it with a nicely ironic allusion: With deliberate speed, majestic instancy, he walked from the dining-room to her bedroom, tossed the book onto her bed where she would see it on her return and know he had read it, and that her nastiness was uncovered...
...None of the seventeen stories in Pushcart Prize, V can measure up to Kiely, and a few of them are quite good...
...He doesn't see the life that's going on under his nose...
...Whether he is Kiely himself or a Celtic Everyman, the "I" remains beautifully undefined, no doubt because he has nothing to prove to or about himself...
...She has a certain felicity of phrase...
...His sure self-awareness allows him to look outward, to see the world whole-bishops, reporters, whores, professors-and to honor its layers of wit and folly and joy and loss...
...long history of sin, he'd be afraid of his breeches to enter any of them...
...Cynthia Ozick in "Levitation" goes far beyond her mannered opening with a concluding section that recalls the end of "Flowering Judas...
...In general,Pushcart criticism may succeed where its fictions fall short because non-fiction can report its subject and assume its values without making the sympathetic leap that creative art requires...
...This collection is alive with differing, yet compatible styles that ironically jostle against one another...
...values derive from references to Budweiser, Chrysler, Kenny Rogers, CB, and TV...
...David Plante's achievement in "Jean Rhys: A Remembrance" relies for its understated force on the reality of her slightly senile, slightly deranged, highly intelligent point of view...
...Cultural signs like the ones satirized in Lolita are often enshrined in Pushcart fiction...
...In "Maiden's Leap," for one example out of eighteen, a pompous writer learns that he is less creative than his cousin/housekeeper when the death of her lover brings her diary to light...
...Bo Ball's imagery and understatement play off against normal human expectations...
...arrogant and patronizing, his criticism of her writing uses formal diction that complements his sterile life: He read...
...These strategies may pass for honesty or objectivity once in a while, but over the long haul (as in much of "On the Big Wind," "Showdown," "One Spring," and others), they are numbing...
...fine story on that theme...
...But if Dublin had the best brothels in the long history of sin...
...it should mark Kiely's well-deserved entry to the college readers that include selections from Dubliners...
...Other lessons of permanent worth come from David Bosworth's essay, "The Literature of Awe," proof that a categorical approach to literature can illuminate and challenge, especially the reputations of Beckett and Vonnegut as practitioners of the literature of despair...
...We learn from him still...
...Despite its shortcomings (which are, after all, our own) The Pushcart Prize is well worth having as more than just a record of what our small presses are doing...
...He says there are no brothels in Dublin...
...the density of a scene matters more than the movement of nar- rative...
...The unwilling Granda Binchey, whose memories of his dead wife are interwoven with lines from Catullus, would use language for stability-to . exert a measure of control over a world that could quite literally blow up around him no matter what he chooses to do...
...He should give us a fine story on that theme...
...Robert L. King THE TITLE of the novella which concludes Benedict Kiely's collection of short stories comes out of the musings of its central character, a retired teacher forced by IRA Provisionals to be an agent of their terror: "Not even the Mafia thought of the proxy bomb, operation proxy, proxopera for gallant Irish patriots fighting imaginary empires by murdering the neighbours...
...One of the solid critical essays in this Pushcart volume ("Wrapped Minds'' by David Perkins) comments on much of the other fiction and on the poetry too: "Since it is relation-less, it cannot be found inadequate...
...So long as he can coin a word, he is more than a delivery man for death, but soon 1 his ordeal will reduce him to quoting a ' soldier's obscenity as later he will parrot j the words of his housekeeper...
...Because Kiely's art springs- from a culture and not a geography, he builds stories poetically...
...But then she has some Macmahon blood in her, and the educational advantages that over the years this house has afforded her...
...his "Wish Book" is The Grapes of Wrath in small...
...Kiely's stories almost casually allude to centuries of literature and song...
...sometimes he speaks to us directly, but he never moralizes...
...Unless it is a conscious pose, ironic understatement too easily becomes a refuge for the moral bankrupt...
...stepping back leads to walking away...
...some of his characters prize Tarzan and reject Yeats, but they all breathe the same thick air...
...Since it holds out no promise, most of the thirty-three poems here qualify as verse...
Vol. 108 • March 1981 • No. 6
