"What do you see, Madam" by Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood (1917)

"Her world held rows and rows of dusty caned chairs, and over these, like migrating robins, the pink anatomy of the chorus -- hips thrown out against the painted drop, listless eyes that saw only supper, a new step, and once in a while, some other things. Mamie Saloam could go where she willed. She could stoop or look up because Mamie breathed true ambition and heroic drudgery.

When she passed the boundaries of decency, it was a full run for your money; when she went up in smoke, those original little pasty pans of Egypt became chimney pots. If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class." From "What Do You See, Madam?"

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is a classic of modernism.  She has a cult like following, perhaps more talked about than anymore read.  I have not yet read Nighfwood but would like to one day.  I am today to be able to share with my readers a very interesting, no doubt a little shocking for 1920, one of her stories that can be read online.  Barnes was fascinated by the demi-monde world of New York City, in an era where the Bowery was a theater district, of sorts and the line between actress and prostitute was a bit blurry.  

Mamie is a young actress, playing the part of Salome in the story of John the Baptist.  This drama was popular as it gave theater managers an excuse for having women do sultry dances in brief outfits.  Theaters were policed by public decency groups.  Mamie is just beginning to feel the power of her sexuality.  It is when she glances at herself, from the back, in a mirror that she realizes she won't have to "eat cod from a paper bag" any more.  When the ladies of The Decency League comes in the manager of the theater asks them "What do you see, Madam?"

"What Do You See, Madam" is a very well done story.  It lets us see how Mamie feels.  I would have liked to have been front row center on Mamie's opening night and I could have told my wife I was at a theatrical performance of a biblical story.  

Link to the story on The Lodestar Quarterly  

(1917 is my guess of first publication date, if you have details, please leave a comment.

Please share your experience with Djuna Barnes with us.

Djuna Barnes was born on the 12th of June 1892 in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. She began her career as a reporter and illustrator for magazines, under pseudonyms such as Lydia Steptoe, and Gunga Duhl, the Pen Performer. In the 1920s she lived in Paris with her lover, the sculptor and silverpoint artist, Thelma Wood. She was a member of the influential coterie of mostly lesbian women that included Natalie Barney and Janet Flanner. Although she wrote many plays, short stories, and poems, she is best known for her novel Nightwood, written in 1936. She died in 1982.  from Lodestar Quarterly Mel u

"The White Mother" and "The White Dog", two short stories by Fyodor Sologub translated by John Cournos, 1908?)

Two Short Stories by Balzac's First Russian Translator. -  Late Czarist Period 

Fyodor (sometimes translated as "Theodor", born and died in St Petersburg, Russia) Sologub is a second level Russian writer that I encountered for the first time yesterday.  He was a profuse literary writer and was the first, according to my research, to translate Balzac into Russian.  That alone makes him an important figure.  He wrote a number of short stories and I enjoyed the two I read. (At the end of this pits I will include a link from which you can download  a collection of his short stories translated by John Crounus , from 1915.  Crounus (1881 to 1966) was born in Russia into a Yiddish family.  His family immigrated to the USA, living in Philadelphia, when he was ten. He had a diverse career as a writer and it is for his translations that he is still known.  

"The White Mother". Published somewhere between 1900 and 1913

"The White Mother" feels like a story Balzac might have written, or Turgenev on a sentimental day.  The story focuses on a thirty five year old bachelor.  When we first meet him he is at a party and the hostess is trying to suggest matrimonial prospects to him.  He listens to her but his heart is in verthe grave, given many years ago to his beloved and passed Layla.  Much of his time is spent thinking of her, she fills his dreams and he has no interest in displacing her with a wife.  One day he is out for a walk and he comes on a young boy crying and lost in the streets.  The man asks where his father lives and learns he is dead.  The boy tells him he has two mothers, one white and one black.  At first he thinks the black mother must be a nun and the boy an orphan.  He finds out the white mother is the boy's deceased mother, the black mother is his black haired black eyed step mother.  She wants to get rid of the boy, left as a burden on her as a stepmother after his father died.  After some pondering and conversations with friends, the boy somehow makes him think of a son he and Layla might have had, he adopts the boy, the final touch is when the stepmother says she will agree to it only on the condition the man pay her for the clothes the boy is wearing.  This is a story aimed at the heart and it works.  I enjoyed reading it a lot.

"The White Dog"

"The White Dog" is a very interesting story set in the Russian countryside.  It has an amazing close that I am surprised got past censors circa 1907.  One of the central characters is an unmarried woman, having reached spinsterhood at thirty or so.  I don't want to spoil the plot for potential readers but at the close of the story she strips naked and runs outside, she evidently transforms into a huge white dog.  Two men hear the unearthly howls of the dog and take it for a werewolf and shot her.  As they approach the dog they see it is a woman, covered in blood.  No doubt this story echoes Russian folklore and certainly it can be seen as the final venting of frustration by the woman and perhaps as societies disregard for such women as no longer of value.

You can read online or download a collection of stories here

Mel u

"Pink Flannel" by Ford Madox Ford (May 8, 1919 in Land and Water)

A Short Story set in WW I by the Author of The Good Soldier and Parade's End 

Yesterday I was very please to find included in an anthology of short stories I was kindly given by Dover Publishing a story by Ford Madox Ford (1873 to 1939).  "Pink Flannel" was originally published in Land and Water a literary and political journal focusing on World War One, May 8, 1919.  Land and Water was published weekly in England from 1914 to 1920.  It is a stream of consciousness story centering on an English soldier in the trenches in France thinking about his up coming 36 hour furlough.  (Ford volunteered for frontline duty in the war even though he was above the age of required service.)

The man is in a panic as he cannot find a letter he received from a married woman arranging their meeting during his short leave. He needs to find out if she wants to continue the affair.  He is afraid some malicious individual will show the woman's husband the letter.  As German gun fire and artillery rain over him he racks his brain to try to recall where he might have hidden the letter.  He can identify the weapon by the sound and knows which are most dangerous.  There are not a lot of hiding places in his base in the trenches.  He seemingly shrugs off the threat of death but is in a panic over the lost letter.  Ford does a marvelous job of displaying the stream of thoughts of the soldier.  

I read this in a forthcoming in 2015 anthology 100 Great Short Stories selected and introduced by James Daly, published by Dover Thrift Editions.  The selection of stories is first rate, with a combination of must includes and more creative selections.  The formatting, of course this may be fixed upon publication, is a total mess, with no clickable index.  Translator information is not given and date of first publication information, very important, is left out.  I had to Google Ford's story to find out when it was first published.  

In my brief research I could not find the story online.  

Mel u

Note added Feb 19-  I got in touch with Max Saunders, leading authority on FMF, he advised me that Ford wrote just over twenty short stories but more are still being discovered in little known his journals from the period. 

First Love by Ivan Turgenev (1860, translated by Constance Garnett)

First Love is Ivan Turgenev's most read novella.  A group of people are looking for ways to pass the time (now they would all be on devices) and agree to tell each other stories about their first loves. A man of advanced years agrees to go first and tells us of his love, at age 16, for the daughter of a neighbor. First Love is just an amazing work, the remembered experiences are marvelously rendered.  I would put it and his Faust and King Lear of the Steepes with the best of the works I have ever read, especially First Love.  Seemingly simple, it is a story of great emotional depth and complexity.  There is a scene in the story, readers will know it, that is overwhelming powerful.

Please share your experinces with Turgenev with us.  

Mel u

"The Great Breteche" by Honore de Balzac (1830). Clifton Fadiman on Balzac

My Posts on Balzac

I first heard, I am almost certain, of Honore de Balzac in The Life Time Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman (1960).   I might have been twelve or so, I had no one to guide me into the reading life, no conceptions of classics and Fadiman became my guru.  He says in his introduction his book is not for scholars (which he says are often well  read only in their narrow field) or the very well read but for me it was a wonder.  The great books of the world listed with concise introductions that made me want to read them.  In his introduction Fadiman gave a lot of good advice, one was if a classic work does not resound with you, put it down and come back to it in a few years.  He says the very well read would quibble with his selections and that writers have their ups and downs in fashion.   I would include some Japanese and Indian works, and not just to be politically correct.  

In his chapter on Balzac he lists two novels, both in The Human Comedy, as elements of the life time reading plan. The books are Pére Gioriot and Eugénie Grandet.  I think I have now read  the major Balzac novels and Fadiman's recommendations seem spot on.  He says "no other novelist before him understood the world of money as did Balzac".   He then repeats what seems a common place error, that The Human Comedy consists of some 100  books.  Fadiman can be excused  his error more than modern writers as he could not easily for $2.95 download the full Comedie Humaine and see what really constitutes the work.  Fadiman says, in 1960 as of 2014 I have no clue, that Balzac is not much read in America.  This is possibly because potential readers felt overwhelmed by what they were told about the size of the collection.  Here are the facts.

25 short Stories

25 novellas

41 Novels. (At most ten novels are more than 500 pages)

(The line between novella and novel is not rigid but this is close enough).  

Many book bloggers could read through the full Comedy in under three months.  

"The Grand Breteche" (a short story component of The Human Comedy, translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell) is set at the same party as is "Another Study of a Woman".  Balzac, as did many writers of his era, often used as his narrative method one person telling a story to another.  "The Grand Breteche" is a great Gothic style horror story that could have inspired the great Irish master of the form, French Hugenot descended Sheridan Le Fanu. ( I admit I did not know what a "Breteche" was so in case I am not the only one so ill educated here is a picture- it is important to the story to be able to visualize this.)

In fact the story is structured as one person telling a group of people a story a Notary (an important individual at the time who preformed numerous level services involving wills and bequests) had told him.  The story of the notary is in part the retelling of a story of one of his contacts.  The first teller was, just for curiosity, wandering around an old castle abandoned for decades.  He runs into the narrator who very politely tells him he is on private property which the owner has denied all access.  He wants to know why so the notary tells him a story.  It centers on a married couple, infidelity, and a terrible revenge with servants paid for silence.  I really don't want to spoil the ending.  This is a really fun story you can read just for enjoyment.  

It can be easily found online.

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Mel u

"A Sheltered Woman" by Yiyun Li (March 10, 2014)

A Short Story by the 2005 Frank O'Connor Prize Winner

Anytime I am presented with the opportunity to read a short story by Yiyun Li, winner of the Frank O'Connor Prize in 2005, I am pleased.  Prior to this I have read both of her novels and several of her always excellent short stories.

"A Sheltered Woman", long listed for The London Times short story of the year prize for 2015, the richest single story award, set in Shanghai, centers on a woman who makes her living taking care of mothers and babies for the first month after birth.  She lives with the families.  She has had numerous offers to work permanently but she does not want to become emotionally involved with the family or caught up in any drama.  

My main purpose here is to journalise my reading of this story and to let my readers know they can read this story online.  I really enjoyed it and will keep on reading stories by Yiyun Li when I can

The story can be read here

Biography from the Author's webpage

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist of Story Prize and shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Kinder Than Solitude, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Yiyun Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, and 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

Mel u

A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac (1838) - a novel. A component ofThe Human Comedy)

"The Countess had longed for emotions, and now she had them, terrible, cruel and yet most precious.  She lived a deeper life in pain than pleasure". 

Translated by Katherine Prescott Wormeley

My Posts on Balzac

Everyone who writers about Balzac, including me, says his work deals with the impact of money and commerce on his characters and through them France and especially Paris.  I began to wonder as I near the midpoint in The Human Comedy, is "money makes the world go round" the deepest theme in Balzac?  In the lines I quoted from A Daughter of Eve I am starting to see there is much more to Balzac.  

Balzac wrote fast, he needed to earn a lot from his writings.  He knew works about the foibles and the sexual peccadillos of the upper class were popular so he wrote many of them.  Who is not so saintly to never have felt a degree of schadenfreude upon hearing someone born into great wealth has gotten themselves in a fix?  A Daughter of Eve is formula Balzac.  It is one of the better done minor novels of the comedy.

It begins with two sisters talking to each other about their marriages.  One seeks the advice of the other and thus begins a  story of one of the sister's infidelity, brought on by boredom, much like Emma Bovary. The sister is married to a count, a very good man and decent husband.  She just wanted to feel stronger emotions than bland happiness and material comfort.  

There are some very good, near as good as Proust, descriptions of grand parties.  At one the omniscient narrator tells us what type  of bosoms have gone in and out of style in Paris.  We learn what types of breasts different kings fancied.  There are great descriptions of people and places.

A Daughter of Eve is a minor work but very much worth reading.

This story was translated by Katherine Prescott Wormeley (1830 to 1908)  I was astounded when I researched her.  She immigrated from England at 18 with her wealthy family.  Her father was a Rear-Admiral in the British Navy.  They settled in Rhode Island.  She became very involved in a project helping train poor women to work in hospitals.  When the American Civil war began she channeled thousands of women into jobs as army nurses and helped organize and manage nursing staff and field hospitals during the long war.  She also worked thousands of hours as a battle hospital nurse under horrifying conditions.  She latter founded the U. S. Sanitary Commision which set standards for hospitals and nursing.  Through her countless 1000s of men, on both sided, survived.  She wrote many very moving letters describing the war.   She asked for nothing for her services.

Form 1893 to 1807 she translated for an American publisher a forty volume edition of The Comedie Humaine and this brought Balzac to American readers.  She also translated Dumas and other writers.

There are several good webpages devoted to her role in the American Civil War.  One of them is 

http://civilwarrx.blogspot.com/2011/08/katherine-prescott-wormeley.html

I read one of her civil war letters to her mother in which she talks of her work.  It is beautifully written and shows great intelligence.  

Katherine Prescott Wormely was a great person and a hero of the reading life.  I bet Balzac would have been greatly honored to have her translate his works.

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Mel u