"II Plce:r Dō Mō koe:r" a short story by Hortense Calisher (first published September 1, 1956, in The New Yorker)

A Story about a New York City College woman's semester in Paris, in 1956

Host Webpage for Paris in July 2016

"Certainly, Hortense Calisher’s stories take their place in that central line of narrative that runs from Henry James and William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton through Scott Fitzgerald and Hortense Calisher’s contemporary, the late John Cheever."  - John Hollander, from his Introduction to The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher.

Hortense Calisher (1911 to 2009, born and died in New York City) published twenty books in her life, mostly novels but some memoirs also.  My knowledge of her work is limited to a few of her short stories I have so far read and posted upon.  The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, a world class literary treasure, will appeal to those who like the New York Stories of Edith Wharton and Henry James.  My quick research found no visits to Paris in her life history but in the educated affluent circles she lived in and wrote about many had been there.  Young women often spent a college term there to polish their learned in Americs French.   "

"II Plce:r Dō Mō koe:r" is about a young Female New York high school student  who is enrolled in a class in French being taught by a phonetics expert.  They are not initially taught grammar, word meaning, just how to make the sounds.  The instructor uses a phonetic alaphabet to represent the sounds, it is used in the story title.  Here is the class description:

"I was taught to speak French with tears. It was not I who wept, or the other girls in my high-school class, but the poet Verlaine—the one who wrote “II plœ:r dã mõ kœ:r.” Inside forty slack American mouths, he wept phonetically for almost a semester. During this time, we were not taught a word of French grammar or meaning—only the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sounds the symbols stood for, and Verlaine translated into them.

The story title is meant to be the International Phonetic Alphabet transcription of a line from Verlaine.b

In a few years, midterm in college, she goes to Paris to enroll in a language class.  Paris was still recovering from the war and such classes, which included room and some board, were common.  At first she is concerned the French, who she sees a snobbish, will laugh at her accent but the teacher tells her she speaks beautifully.  She does a tourist walk of the city but she cannot really understand the citizens.  

This is not a story with a big plot or dramatic turns.  Just an elegant account of one young woman's experience in Paris in the 1950s.

French Literature and History on The Reading Life  

Host Webpage for Paris in July 2016

So far for July in Paris I have read

1.  The Dogs and the Wolves by Iréne Nemirovsky 

2.  Mavis Gallant -  Two Set in Paris works, a short story and a note book entry

3.  Five Nights in Paris by John Baxter.

4.  The Little Paris Book Store by Nina George

5.  "The Problem of Summer Time" by Marcel Ayme

6.  "Love Under the Roof" by Emile Zola

7.  "The Purse" by Honore de Balzac 

8.  Favored Stranger:  Gertrude Stein and Family by Leslie Warren

9.  "Czarist Emigres" by Joseph Roth

Mel u 

 

"In Greenwich There Are Many Gravel Walks" by Hortense Calisher (August 12, 1950 in The Yorker)

My Posts on Hortense Calisher

I recently discovered another new to me writer I wish I would have known about fifty years ago.  The sad thing is I know there are many such writers out there and the wonderful thing is I know there are many such writers out there.  

Hortense Calisher's (1911 to 2009- born and died in Manhattan) full collection of published works is over a meter long. (There is a little background information in my prior post on her.)  "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravel Walks" is the lead story in the Open Road Publishing Edition of The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, introduced eloquently by John Hollander.   I will be reading all of the thirty six stories in the collection and will at least journalise my reading of them.

This story is set in the Greenwich area of New York City in 1950.  The area is comfortably affluent, there are lots of artists, what were once called "Bohemians", gays and various flotsam.  The story starts with the story of a twenty something returning veteran, W W II ended just a few years ago, living with and taking care of his badly alcoholic mother.   They live from income left by her husband.  We see the interaction and mutual dependency of the pair.  Then the son goes to the brownstone of Robert.  Robert is or fancies himself to be a supporter of promising young artists and a perhaps pretentiously a bit reader of mostly French literature.  I think there is a code meaning when Robert says "one no longer needs to read Gide" but I am not quite sure what Gide meant in Greenwich in 1950.  I am assuming it is a reference to an emerging gay culture but I am wondering if it has a concrete meaning.  Robert has many books and he seems to lead at least a partially reading life.  Robert is at least twenty five years older than those who visit him.  Telling a bit of the plot action, for a reason we never know, one of Robert's guests kills himself by leaping out a window. Then a third distinct element of the story begins.

We learn a lot about several people in just a few pages (the estimated reading time is 19 minutes).  We are kind of thrust in the middle of several lives and situations and that is how we leave.  

I greatly enjoyed this story, a work of refinement and cultural depth.

Much of the work,of Calisher is published by Open Road Media.  Their fairly priced very interesting and diversified collection can be viewed at the link in this very accurate quote from Independent Publisher.

“Groundbreaking,” “cutting-edge,” “light years ahead of their time” – call them what you will, Open Road Integrated Media is a true leader in digital book technology. Started in the summer of 2009 by Jane Friedman (former President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide) and Jeffrey Sharp (an Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning filmmaker), Open Road has flourished in the e-book and digital market.

Mel u

Hortense Calisher - Two Short Stories - "The Pool of Narcissus" and "Letitia, Emeritus"

"In Hugo is maybe where I learned the freedom to be discursive, to trust that there will be readers who can accept long sentences, and long meanings. In the nineteenth century quite ordinary readers could do that. And also accept that a big novel can ramble structurally, and maybe should. It’s the run-of-the-mill jobs where you always know where you’re going. A big novel has a deeper directional sense." Hortense Calisher in her Paris Review interview

Yesterday I discovered yet another new to me writer I now want to read in some depth, Hortense Calisher (1911 to 2009-born and died in Manhattan.  Her collected works in book form would fill over a meter on your book shelves and I think it is a meter you would be proud and happy to read.  Calisher in her very interesting Paris Review interview said she thought of herself first as Jewish then as American.  Both of the stories I read yesterday focused on young women from affluent families but my  range extends way beyond that.   Of the two stories I read, one was very good and the other simply amazing. 

"The Pool of Narcissus" is a day in the life, circa 1950 or so, of a family of very affluent New Yorkers.  The family, leaving of the servants, consists of a twelve year old girl and her sixteen year old sister and their widowed mother.  The girls never knew their father but he left them in a lovely brownstone set for life.   The interaction between the two girls is perfect (I have three daughters 16, 18, and 21 so I really appreciated this being well done).  The mother has a suitor of sorts, he owns a pharmacy.  We go along as the girls and the pharmacists go to his shop to get ice cream.  (If you can recall when pharmacies had lunch counters you were alive in the period in which this story is set.)  The brief conversation between the mother and the pharmacist are very poignant and a way sad.

"Letitia, Emeritus" is a great story focusing on the subtle hard to see at first the cruelty and indifference in which a mentally challenged girl born into a very wealthy old money family is treated. I think the story takes place in the American south but I am guessing based on small clues.  Letitia is twenty four but mentally is about six.  At first she appears a normal structurally sound young woman but in a bit one can see her mind does not quite focus.  Her siblings were sent to Oxford and Harvard and did brilliantly.  Six years ago Letitia's family placed her in an elite in terms of cost girls college whose primary function was to turn out wives for the sons of wealthy families.  She has her own maid to dress her and all and has only the most expensive clothes.  In six years she has never gone home, not even when the school is closed for the summer or Christmas. She always hopes she will go home.  Her parents come maybe once a year for a few minutes. Today is graduation day and in a ceremony sure to offend all now, the engaged girls are all introduced.  When a student gets engaged she completes a special engraved card and turns it in.  To be included in the list of engaged girls is a very big thing.  I hate to tell to much of the really sad near heartbreaking close but an elderly male professor, an emeritus from a real university where he taught classics, has the job of inspecting the girls toga outfits for a traditional graduation party and the girls laugh about how "hands on" he is in his inspections. The professor, we are not privy to quite what happened but he has some kind of passionate encounter, stopping short of sex, with the physically adult Letitia.  I just can't spoil the heartbreaking ending that shows the depth of the cruelty and indifference with which Letitia is treated but the close was almost overpoweringly intense in its sadness.  

There are a total of thirty six stories in The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher. I look forward to reading them all as well as some of her longer works.

Paris Review interview (has good background information)

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2576/the-art-of-fiction-no-100-hortense-calisher

Much of the work,of Calisher is published by Open Road Media.  Their fairly priced very interesting and diversified collection can be viewed at the link in this very accurate quote from Independent Publisher.

“Groundbreaking,” “cutting-edge,” “light years ahead of their time” – call them what you will, Open Road Integrated Media is a true leader in digital book technology. Started in the summer of 2009 by Jane Friedman (former President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide) and Jeffrey Sharp (an Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning filmmaker), Open Road has flourished in the e-book and digital market.

Mel u