Two in the Modern Tradition

...At his best, though, as in the two stones mentioned and m one about a musical comedy star gone over the hill before he knows it, Warn is casual m the finest sense His natural narrative voice has tricks down its throat that are as surprising as men and women are He also satisfies our urge for tension, our urge for unforeseen predictability and our urge for reverberant resolution...

...Another way of categorizing fictional modernity-a way that explains why our definition of endings has expanded-is to say that goodness and badness of character became less than primarily interesting A psychoinoral rule of fictional law went into effect, and what became interesting was the troubled state of psyches and the influences of such trouble on actions...

...Modern stories characteristically end by disclosing a vexed future rather than closing down a vexed past The emblem of mechanical stories, O Henry's "Gift of the Magi," leaves its devoted couple in a problematical position, but their problem will be resolved by the passing of a little time In the classical modern story, resolution often means m part that the reader has located what the problem is-there lies some of his satisfaction, as it must, because the problem has only just begun to be unwrapped...

...A more complicated story is "Journey to the Source " As readers of her novel, The Soul of Kindness, will remember, Elizabeth Taylor has a large appetite for ironical nastiness, and this story feeds it "Journey to the Source" investigates a variety of dependent relationships among a set of tourists at a tiny French inn, run by a mother and son who also figure importantly The interactions ultimately boil down to the revelation of a stunning selfishness on the part of Gwenda, who has been traveling as companion to the wealthy but otherwise deprived Polly...

...Reviewed by Richard P. Brickner Teacher, The New School, author, "Bringing Down the House' I have an aunt with a fierce ear for music As a child, she would come trotting from the farthest corner of the house when a prankster at the piano left a chord unresolved -come trotting, in anguish, to resolve the chord herself Our urge for resolution remains similarly intense m the last third of a century that has tortured the very existence of resolution, and this urge continues to be largely satisfied (though not by contemporary music...

...Most of the other stories in this collection also leave us on a ledge of poignant contemplation after we have overheard secrets behind walls or within skulls Like Wain, Miss Taylor can be small and slight (as what short-story writer occasionally isn't, and shouldn't be), but she is in only one case slick In "The Flypaper,' although we are left briefly aghast, as at a Hitchcock trick, we are also left frustrated, questionless, possessed of a scary piece of information yet without the knowledge that leads us back out of the work...

...Elizabeth Taylor is an exemplar of the writer with an eye for troubled psyches One welcomes rather than resents the sights, fiction sanctions nosiness Her title story this time out, in her 15th book, deals intimately with a middle-aged couple providing a summer holiday for two poor Jamaican boys from London, and the difficulties this visit causes the marriage "The Devastating Boys" do not, finally, devastate the couple but restore it Yes, a story with a "happy" ending, yet an ending that, in the kind of peace it represents, reminds us of time that cannot be retrieved Peace and pain are one...

...The stories of a Donald Barthelme are exceptions We do not understand them in the traditional modern way, and when we do understand them, it is likely to be as much during as at the end The pleasure they give and the point they make seem to he in their presentation of the bizarre as typical There are other exceptions-Borges' literary mysticism, W S Merwin's dream-fables Nevertheless, for the most part it is still, in Peter De Vries' phrase, "a beginning, a muddle, and an end" that we crave and that we get Contemporary music has largely expelled the sonata form, yet the fictional holy trinity endures...

...In Wain's "While the Sun Shines," shallower than "The Life-Guard" but a pleasure for the immediacy of its tension, a tractor driver hays a treacherous hill where a predecessor has been maimed I'm not giving everything away by telling that the driver passes the physical test The physical climax is not the ending, which involves a tainted moral victory with repercussions that extend the story outside itself in time...

...It is not the selfishness itself that astonishes, however, it is its depth under the revealed circumstances Another form of revelation is the very range of the dependencies exposed (this is partly a revelation of technique), and the irony these dependencies give off when they become interdependencies Under the story's surface, as under a sheet, the drama of interlocked people hops and wriggles The quiet inn is a stage for psychological carnage, and a literal death At the end, we are asked to ask ourselves, who is dead, and who will stay dead...

...John Warn and Elizabeth Taylor are gifted contemporary-conventional British short-story writers (novelists too) Then climaxes, when successful, are usually of the implicit, reverberant sort, but there Both writers are interested in "ordinary" life, interior and exterior, and not m the fantastic or surreal, interior or exterior While Wain depends a good deal on physical crises for generating excitement, Taylor relies more purely on crises of personal interaction Wain's stories tend to take place outside of domestic circumstances, Taylor's within...

...Written art is the hardest to transmute, it would be, and too often is, frivolous to put words into the equivalent of a tone-row or a collage In addition, modern fiction is traditional Two to three generations have by now occupied what remain the most significant recent expansions of fictional territory into psychological webs and snares, into corners of important mundanity, into implicit kinds of resolution that leave us m a wave of intimate knowledge and, frequently, amid a rumble of conjecture When we read a new story by a thoughtful modernist, we are able reasonably to hope for the satisfaction of passage through a crisis -overt, often physical-to a last-minute revelation, which will generally concern the state of a character's consciousness...

...The wonderful title story of Wain's collection gives us a lifeguard at a down-and going British resort, eager to show how safe for swimming the ocean is under his eye But a demonstration-emergency he sets up soon gets out of hand and turns into a real one Wain is very good at rendering panic By the time the story is over, its title has undergone a convulsion, a complicated battle, physical and psychological, fought between its very words "life" loses because "guard" wins It is a complete story, exciting, subtle, and resolved-resolved in resounding dilemma We've gotten used to this sort of resolution Dilemmas are often answers, often there is nothing beyond but them...

...Warn has the knack of keeping the reader reading When he disappoints, we are likely to be more disappointed than we would be if his motive were not quite so much to keep us reading Some of the stones m this new collection are slickly slighter than they need be Warn will settle for casual glances where scrutiny is called for In his last novel, A Winter in the Hills, the same difficulty emerged-a tendency to lift the pressure In these stories, lifting the pressure takes the form of choosing easy satirical marks or m other ways sticking to the surface of a matter...