Humanity as Raw Meat

...In the traditional drama there would be ritual actions to be followed by the women-folk, the washing and laying out of the body, the drawing of blinds and burning of wild herbs, the ceremonial wailings and the choice of mourning clothes...

...He could not kneel...

...Pain must be manifestly inescapable...

...Perhaps, as Tuohy muses at one point, "the idea of God is the only escape from the categories and the classifications...

...Tuohy is not altogether innocent of a certain vivisectionist relish...

...Women are seen as a sexual threat, an embarrassing nuisance, a dykish joke, or at best an alien form of life to be dealt with at a respectful distance...

...The doors slid shut...

...there remains only his affection for Sergeant Withers, an engaging old rogue in the next bed who "got the most tremendous kick out of life...

...The good sergeant is now dead, of course, adding poignancy to this particular instance of male bonding across class lines...

...Interestingly, in several of these stories the only relief from the prevailing gloom is a nostalgia for male-bonding activities--notably soldiering--contrasted with the present misery of dependence on family or female relatives...

...Nanny, a comic Establishment archetype, is instructed by a former charge in the true significance of Winnie-the-Pooh: "Rabbit's friends-and-relations represent the oppressed proletariat...

...The historian may postulate, concludes Tuohy, that "by the time Nanny returned to Kensington Palace Gardens she had . . . withdrawn her support from Pooh and Piglet and taken a stand in favor of Rabbit's friends-and-relations...

...His sickness is incurable, he can never go back...

...The title story is set in the "home counties," that bastion of the English petite bourgeoisie...

...Evidently there was some glandular secretion which adjusted his women for the encounter with death: in grief they flowered a little, as though they were pregnant...

...Take a story like "The Trap...

...Tuohy achieves true pathos here...

...If Tuohy confined himself to the evocation of milieu and the pinpointing of social types, he would perhaps be no more than a very clever genre artist, specializing in, say, English Uptight...

...the word is thought to be derived from the Irish insurrection of 1798...

...In "A Reprieve," a 58-year-old man...

...Tuohy tends to write about helpless, retiring men and self-sufficient, even aggressive women...

...Sometimes the cards are too visibly stacked against the characters for their suffering to be edifying...

...He goes to sec his father's body: "There was no gesture he had been given to make, no approach...

...The English, of course, are particularly expert at the deadly art of social classification, and Tuohy--in this book as elsewhere--shows himself a taxonomist second to none...

...The public-school boy locked in the incommunicable anguish of puberty, the real-estate man with his crushed fingers, the retired soldier facing social and sexual obsolescence, all are mocked by the "gleaming landscape" that holds them in bourgeois parenthesis...

...Royal sport, to be sure...

...In "A Life Membership," set in the seedy limbo of immediate postwar London, two middle-class loafers waiting to be rescued by the old-school-tie network casually prey on a workman suddenly rich with the insurance money from an industrial accident...

...Yet I feel a little ashamed of enjoying them as much as I did...

...Ructions," it should be said, are the "uproar, quarrel, rough-and-tumble or noisy outbreak" (Webster) that erupt in even the best-regulated English nurseries when institutionalized power relationships dissolve into naked force...

...Such people as Tuohy creates do exist, after all, but one should not be too fascinated by their misfortunes...

...One cannot mistake the distaste in passages like this, from "A Floral Tribute": ". . . once it had become clear that his father was to die, he had watched them assume their roles: Ma was going to be wonderful, and Priscilla was going to be perfectly sweet to her...

...These stories are the work of a master craftsman...

...the eponymous fingers belong to an upwardly mobile real-estate man who has the social ineptitude to get them mangled in a train door...

...He said to the waxen caricature 'Good-bye' and to himself 'I don't understand.' But already he felt there was nothing to understand...

...Tuohy writes of a mourner who feels merely numbed, "it nagged him to know whether his mother had yet wept...

...Another hospital story depicts an art dealer successfully recovered from an operation who is dismayed to find that the "special relationship" he thought he had with his favorite nurse was imaginary...

...There was a minute before the train started and he watched her standing there...

...Thus Frank Tuohy, in a characteristically bleak short story from his new collection, Fingers in the Door (Scribner's, 157 pp., $5.95...

...She did not look at him any more, but was making small half-blind movements, like an animal searching incredulously round the walls of its trap...

...Although he is in dreadful pain, his ex-typist wife, hagridden with snobbery, is concerned only that he should not make a scene in front of the other first-class passengers, while their vapid teen-age daughter accuses him of ruining her day...

...The pain in many of his stories pertains more to embarrassment, which passes, than to true psychic injury, which does not...

...Tuohy, who has seen for himself --and in his past work extensively documented--the awful cheerlessness of life in the people's democracies, here makes savage fun of Marxist analysis by applying it to the children's classics of the English upper middle class...

...Now even grief is an unknown quantity...

...Nobody has to see the world in terms of such unrelieved gloom...

...But the middle-class English who inhabit these pages have no idea of God to speak of, nor do they have rituals that might deliver them from the solitary confinement of private experience and restore to them a sense of human community...

...the story is a gem...

...But in the Southern part of Great Britain today, these were all obsolete or only to be performed by professionals...

...retired after 30 years' service with the Police of an Island Colony," lies in a hospital dreaming of a return to the village where Stavros, his chauffeur and faithful friend of many years, awaits him under the olive trees...

...But Tuohy knows that class, like race or creed, is only one of the grosser and more visible ways we "classify in order to deal with one another," he recognizes that classification is a never-ending process pursued at every level of consciousness down to the very minutiae of existence...

...Perhaps this has something to do with what one might call the pornography of social uncase...

...The intellectuals, Owl and Eeyore, have abdicated their responsibilities . . . C. Robin, who seems to represent the feudal alliance of King and People (a 'Prince Hal' figure, his Falstaff is Pooh, and his Ancient Pistol, the fantasizing Piglet), retreats into an alliance with the hereditary aristocracy ('Arise Sir Pooh de Bear...

...In the best of these stories Tuohy uses the magnifying glass of art to show the process operating at the wincing interface between life and life, where solitude seeks redress...

...Yet one has doubts...

...In a manner strongly reminiscent of Angus Wilson, the human impoverishment of Tuohy's characters is underscored by the manicured graciousness of the English countryside...

...One is reminded of the paintings of Francis Bacon: flayed torsos on butcher's hooks, humanity as raw meat...

...After a disastrous evening he finally manages to put her on the tube train...

...And here, in the mute agony of his characters, he reveals the reductio ad absurdum of the class system: the dreadful discovery that one is all alone, the solitary member of a class of one...

...in the end it is hard not to feel that Tuohy has an ax to grind...

...The finest story in this collection, "A Floral Tribute," documents the reaction to death of people culturally unequipped to deal with it...

...Perhaps by way of comic relief Tuohy offers us "Ructions," a satirical fantasy in which an English nanny is suborned into using her position in the households of the mighty for the purpose of spying...

...Like the shock of icy water, Tuohy's work takes one's breath away...

...A charmless Polish girl, betrayed by "the competing puritanisms of Church and State," pursues her English teacher to London, there to receive the inevitable rebuff...

...but to his last breath he will resist the nurses' demand that he go and die at his sister's, with whom he has absolutely nothing in common...

...In the end I was glad to close the book...

...I couldn't put the book down...

...It is an excruciating tale, but the effect is to shock rather than to move, and there is a gratuitous brutality in the manner as well as the matter that I find repellent...

...But the very comicality of the Nanny figure brings another objection into focus: Is there not a powerful undercurrent of misogyny in these stories...

...And so on...

...if it is circumstantial, if it derives only from a situation the author has patently contrived, it loses its authenticity...