A Quiet Resonance

...And it seems to me that the immensely discouraged tone of our fiction has to do with the fact that American writers are so very intellectual, in the sense of intellectuality as a business, a "good living...

...Crisp, aromatic and as undeniably touched by human hands as a French bread, his book is based on the bygone premises that readers are able to contend with their lives and give them shape, and that they can still relish an objective account of experience that does not measure out their days in mammoth triumphs and defeats...

...Instead, Mr...

...It was like Montmartre, but it could never for one moment be mistaken for a European city view...

...As it turns out, the "stopping train," that wonderful British conveyance with its comfortable old upholstery and private compartments one can board from the platform, was merely the scene of the courtship that led to William Sanderson's marriage...

...By the time Sanderson reaches Bil-lingshurst, he can no longer contain himself...

...That green in pieces, in flecks as fine as motes, had haunted her mind's eye the whole time she had been away, as the dreadful but slightly melodious crash of porcelain had sounded in her ears...

...I find him curiously benign in his attitude toward distress, because his sympathy is of a sort that suits the complaint...

...Men of words in an era of periodicals, they suffer, as literate Americans at every level appear to, from an insalubrious lack of immunity to other writers' notions...

...he does not believe that his feelings are larger than words...

...The effect is one of extraordinary fidelity of tone, as in a string quartet...

...From as far back as the '40s, when so many highbrow writers seemed to find themselves adequately represented by the word "alienation," to the participatory present when sociologists define our "lifestyle" and Watergate Committee senators call for moral "perceptions," we have been catching words, ideas, even self-images as easily as we catch colds...

...Now you take care of yourself," Lucy tells her, "and don't get up to no mischief...

...Everything about this story is mild and muted—the landscape, with its silvery water meadows and haphazard nasturtiums, the hero, indeed the erotic gesture itself—and that is part of its charm...

...The wind blew strongly, swirling up bits of soot and dust which stung her face...

...odd-ness and endurance of all sorts are what he particularly feels for...

...Still, this off-beat and unpretentious writer encourages us to shore up such eccentricities as we may value in ourselves, and settle for being exceptional...

...This sounds like Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton, and we think we are in for another saga about the prizing of furniture as the revelation of character and taste, a personal history written in gilded chairs and snuff boxes...

...The kinds of points Rushmore makes—here that sex, though direct in its resolution, is often elusive in its origins...

...Lucy the maid, level-headed and tactful even in convalescence, is the nearest the author gets to a heroine, and she is still more prepossessing in the eyes of her beholder, the Countess, who has magnified her, in the way helpless old people do with their servants, to a figure of tremendous authority, even of mystery...

...Rushmore, who sees no need to confront us with our formidable potential for evil, simply observes that we are not all touched or driven to extremity by the same outward circumstances, and further, that we do not all act according to Hoyle, or even Freud...

...To her right there fell away one of the most extraordinary views she had ever seen, the river, the new expressways, bridges, factories . . . and with this sight the racket of the city...

...How clever of Lucy to pick these extraordinary heights on which to live, thought the Countess, much the most desirable situation in the whole city...

...In the long title story, "A Life in the Closet," Rushmore continues to reserve judgment and to eschew thinking in terms of heroes and villains, not in order to produce a modern anti-hero, but to put his characters and us in our natural place, unsteadily in-between...

...She visits her ailing maid, Lucy, in Harlem...

...and she rents her apartment for a second time, to a pregnant girl whose black lover has gone back to Ghana—a range of experience unprecedented in her sheltered life...

...She must know...

...Later a benevolent psychoanalyst guides him through associations, searching in vain for an undigested trauma, a jaundicing frustration...

...Even those few forceful innovative novels whose names we might be able to summon up have done less to enlarge or fortify us than to confirm our worst suspicions and get on our nerves...

...The most immediately appealing story is "The Stopping Train," about a modest sexual crime: On the train that makes all the local stops between London and Amber-ley (in Sussex), an intelligent-looking American, father of three teenage girls, suddenly reaches out for the breasts of a young lady passenger...

...the large breakables, the piercing green Sevres cachepots...

...Gershe (a brute in his cyclist outfit but a mama's boy underneath) on to independence and self-assertion...

...Rushmore deals in a very affectionate and observant way with both the crotchets and resilience of old people, and in a sense they are the special subjects of his fiotion...

...Whatever did she mean by that...

...She must know," the Countess thinks guiltily, imagining that so competent and adaptable a person must surely see beyond the mere surface delinquencies...

...It gives him perspective, so that, for example, his countess remembers in the midst of Harlem the much worse condition of the English gardeners and grooms of her childhood, in their unheated cottages with outside privies, and marvels at the American penchant for instant self-reproach...

...for example, she had been forced to leave out lest the room look too bare...

...In these somewhat quaint episodes, there is not a literary or social stereotype to be found...

...in "A Life in the Closet," that involvement with others may lead us to dole out injury as often as beneficence—are not wisdoms that will make us hope to set the world right...

...Downright aristocratic in his indifference to the Zeitgeist, Rush-more has the old-fashioned virtue of not professing that he is inarticulate...

...She gripped her pocketbook and parcel more firmly and glared around her and tried to think of other things...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp WE HAVE ONLY to remember certain novels that we gave ourselves over to wholeheartedly—like Dickens' Our Mutual Friend or Martin du Gard's The Thibaults or Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook— to admit how lifeless and disappointing American fiction has been during the last three decades...

...Whether as academicians or magazine contributors, they spend their efforts on transitory controversial issues (as opposed, for instance, to a writer like Thomas Mann, who bent his intellect painstakingly to aspects of life that genuinely preoccupied him...

...she accompanies a dying woman on her last trip to Europe...

...But there they were lighting up the room...

...What is more, the approach is as far as one can get from the dominant 20th-century short story convention of hurling us into the slough of despond in the last paragraph with still another creepy instance of the soul's debilitation...

...Tucked inside the story about the acquisition of this silly bird is a serious and understanding account of disturbance in marriage...

...Gershe's cyclist outfit of black leather and silver chains somehow puts the Countess in mind of her first sexual response to an attractive butcher's boy with hard eyes in a small village in Kent...

...The story ends as the edified psychoanalyst, identifying with his patient's nostalgia for things past, looks into his mirror and wonders if he ought to inquire about a new treatment for restoring hair...

...The implausible rival in the triangle is a gorgeous macaw bird who sashays like an exhibitionist on his perch, and, rank sensualist that he is, emerges from his cage every evening at eight to settle on his owner's lap and await the meting out of affection...

...If you have ever shared a minor sorrow, only to watch it grow to alarming proportions on the face of your confidante, you appreciate the element of discrimination in a writer's concern...

...A feeling of relief and great happiness washed over her...

...A sporting gesture of resistance to this epidemic mentality comes in the form of a small book, A Life in the Closet, by Robert Rushmore, containing a novella and five short stories...

...Her vital spirits thus jogged, after so many years, the elderly lady flings herself with a vengeance into all manner of human attachments...

...she eggs Mr...

...Open Water," another subtle treatment of marriage, and in this case bisexuality, is again effective by its very quietude, its lack of analysis and its reserve...

...In "An Only Child," jealousy, perhaps the most vivid of emotions, is handled with humor, a fine proportion, and not too much woe...

...Gliding past plebeian backyards full of roses, toward Christ's Hospital, Pulbor-ough, Horsham—the names themselves are pure romance to an American—it is more potent than Proust's famous madeleine for recapturing, in middle age, a younger and more passionate state of being...

...It makes us follow with surprising interest the predicament of a most unlikely protagonist, a self-concerned widowed English countess, accustomed to wealth yet short on spending money, as she fusses over subletting her Park Avenue apartment to a man who has left a motorcyclist's outfit in her bedroom closet: "Slowly her gaze swept the room...

...When the Countess visits Lucy, who is recuperating at home from an operation, Harlem rises up before her not as we read about it but as it would actually be for an elderly lady from Park Avenue, a comic mixture of preconceived fears and relief at the sedate reality: "Might they not stand casually by as the robber's knife was plunged into her heart, as she fell to the pavement and her fine old English blood—a satisfying blend of Norman and Saxon with a dash of her great-grandmother's Welsh to add piquancy—began to trickle down the hill along Edgecombe Avenue...