Short Story Wednesday: "Shrapnel" James Lloyd Davis (reviewed by Matt Paust)

 

SHRAPNEL – James Lloyd Davis

Shrapnel is what warriors call the little pieces of flesh-tearing metal launched by a bomb, an exploding artillery or mortar shell, or a grenade like the one on the cover of James Lloyd Davis's new collection of fifty literary tales. A warrior himself, having served in Vietnam, Davis knew well the metaphor's power when he chose SHRAPNEL as the book's title. He doesn't explain why he chose it, but to me the grenade represents Davis's creative mind. Open the book, and its cleverly crafted pieces fly at you—the many sizes and shapes—none lethal, although some will discomfit readers whose own minds cringe from notions outside familiar terrain.

    "Be good for what ails them," as my mother would say in her generous variation of the “tough s**t” lesser souls are apt to employ.

But words are “only games, after all,” Davis reassures us in the first of Shrapnel’s stories, Knitting the Unraveled Sleeves, a tender, yet suspenseful yarn from the viewpoints of an Irish couple, he a retired fisherman who can’t resist going “to sea” with his small boat every morning from their home on the Nova Scotia coast. This morning, protected from cold north winds in the heavy wool sweater his wife knitted for him, he catches “a heavy, proper cod” As he prepares to gut the fish, noting that with its size it could feed him and his wife for at least a couple of days, lightning from an approaching storm strikes the water nearby and heavy gusts arrive pushing waves and battering the little boat. He drops the fish and tries to start the outboard motor. In his haste he floods the engine, but, knowing the oars won’t get him home in time, continues to struggle with the motor hoping to beat the storm that’s racing toward him...

Resonances of another old-man-at-sea story reach through these words as no surprise recalling the other author’s physical sense in this one’s visage. Indeed, Davis does Hemingway more than once in this collection, albeit keeping to subtle inflections and with original characters and stories. The tone is hard to miss from the start in Storefront Poet: “Opening the shop in the early morning, turning the key in the lock, I look over in time to see Mrs. Rodriguez wave from her taqueria across the street. Her bright eyes and beautiful teeth always make my day, but this morning they help me transcend the sounds of a low rider homeboy, passing by between us on Telephone Road, basso profundo speakers trembling my big glass window with alpha-waves I never really understood, but recognize...”

Hemingway’s seeming simplicity can tempt any halfway skilled wordsmith to give him a try, especially a male who resembles the Nobel laureate in his person. And Hemingway parodies abound. Key West holds an annual “Bad Hemingway” contest for writers, and it seems the winners frequently look like “Papa” as well as try to send up his easily recognizable style. I don’t know if James Lloyd Davis has ever entered this contest, but it would surprise me, as, based on these stories alone, I find him unquestionably too serious a writer to consciously make fun of another.

Not that his sensibility doesn’t drift onto other stylists’ turf, such as the “Southern grotesque” plots and characters of the inimitable Flannery O’Connor, whose milieu and tempo come through with dark familiarity in Davis’s flash story Way Cross, Georgia, 1937. Imagine two traveling snake-oil salesmen who attract deadly trouble hawking “holy” mineral oil off the back of their pickup in a banjo-belt crossroads town. Laughs and gasps from this masterful glimpse of con and consequence.

No one is safe from Davis’s unerring eye and ear—bumpkins, slicksters, tough guys, damsels, predators, victims...none so vulnerable as other artists, such as Where have you gone, Norma Jeane, Norma Jeane? And those in the “being” vignettes: Bogart, James Dean, Che, and Picasso. “Being Picasso” has one of those laugh-out-loud endings you write down so you get it just right in your mental archive: (Being Picasso has left me entirely drained, so I must now lie down. It is also dangerous, Please…don't try this at home.)

For those attracted to Shrapnel thinking the stories might be about the military, considering the grenade on the cover and seeing that Davis is a Vietnam vet, if such is the only sort of story you feel like reading at this time, there are two, which alone are worth the price of this book. Both are short, no longer than the average newspaper column, but they are unforgettable—even for readers who have never worn the uniform. They are Memorial Day and Pulitzer Grade.

In wrapping up this review I want to leave you with something special, a zinger perhaps, something to “close the deal” as people in sales would put it. But I’m not selling anything. I’m merely sharing my enthusiasm for a book I truly enjoyed, hoping to infect you with some of that spirit because I know no one who reads Shrapnel will come away disappointed. These stories, as I mentioned my mother would say of them, “Are good for what ails you.” I would add, “They’re just plain damned good.” As for zingers, Davis has sprinkled so many sparkling, resonant lines of prose throughout these stories I am hard-pressed to pick only one to leave you with. I had planned early on, in the very first story—Knitting the Unraveled Sleeves—to use this line to conclude the review: “What is it that anyone can wish for, finally, but comfort, a hedge against solitude, and, once in a while, a poke or two at rapture?” And that line has held up against all of the others that come to mind right now. It’s a keeper. It shall stay with me for the rest of my life. But it’s too fine a sentiment for zinger duty.

What we need now is what stand-up comics call a rimshot. If you don’t know what I mean, you’ll find out when you read Standup Gigs in Zendos Make You Cry. It features the comic “Zenny Youngman, [who] walks onstage and blinks, squints into the silence, the spotlight so bright he cannot see the room. The sharp light it casts illuminates the pockmarks on his cheeks, accentuates his wide nose, casts shadows that resemble a dark mustache on his upper lip. His intro ends and he bows at the waist.” The silence continues, joke after joke… Oh, the jokes aren’t that good, but we feel his pain. We love Zenny. We want someone to laugh. And when the rimshot comes, we do.

Happy Birthday, Josh. To all I could ask for in a son. 

Monday, Monday

 Reading WHAT I ATE IN A YEAR, Stanley Tucci. (Lots of pasta). He goes to the gym every day though. 

Kevin is leaning toward University of Wisconsin. They have a lot of sports management programs, Firs t I heard of this as a major. 

Went to a clarinet concert for Josh's birthday. Like THE STUDIO (Apple), sort of. Just started TH E PITT (MAX). 

What are you up to?

FFB: TRIAL AND ERROR, Anthonyn Berkley (by Casual Debris from 2012)

Anthony Berkeley: Trial and Error (1937)

Berkeley, Anthony, Trial and Error, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1937
______, Trial and Error, New York: Dell Books (Great Mystery Library), September 1967. 316 pp (my edition, below right)
______, Trial and Error, London: House of Stratus, 2001. 396 pp (bottom left)

Rating: 8/10

Its excellent premise is what attracted me to Anthony Berkeley's original, innovative and highly entertaining Trial and Error. Mild-mannered Lawrence Butterfield Todhunter learns that due to an aggressive aneurism he doesn't have much time left on this earth. Wanting to commit a great, humanitarian act before he goes, he throws a dinner party and tosses out a hypothetical, which leads nearly everyone to declare that great can be achieved through murder, so long as the victim is deserving of death. Hence Todhunter decides that before his impending doom he must seek out an appropriate victim and commit this terrible act.

Anthony Berkeley's novel has been out of print for some time, since the late 1960s it appears, with the exception of a small print run in 2001 by House of Stratus. This is a terrible shame because Trial and Error is an excellent read, a unique mystery that reads almost like an epic novel as it spans various significant episodes, each one a small book on its own, from Todhunter's seeking the perfect victim to the murder itself and its eventual trial. The book is split into five parts, each part dealing with a substantial leg in Todhunter's journey. There are a number of twists and I won't reveal anything more about the central plot.

The novel also boasts great characters, dialogue and attention to detail that is simply riveting. The world Berkeley manages to create is very real, and the geography of the various UK locations are clear; we always know where we are and where the settings lie in relation to one another. Moreover, the novel is filled with a good deal of humour despite its premise and its incessant focus on death. Yet what elevates Trial and Error from a good British mystery to a great novel is its notions of absurdity. Throughout the novel is a pervasive sense that despite the high dramatic aspects of life, both selfish and altruistic actions are governed by nothing more than chance; no matter how we strive for control the idea that we can influence destiny, our own or someone else's, is ridiculous. It is clear that the universe has its plans and the minutest element can thrust and thwart our plans in any seemingly random direction. And in the final scene even these ideas are challenged, as Berkeley twists the entire story into something altogether different.

Trial and Error is additionally a success due to its innocuous protagonist. Lawrence Todhunter is barely a character, a simple man with simple ideas, impressionable and easily influenced, harmless in every dimension of his being. While it initially appears that such a character would undoubtedly fail in maintaining interest in any kind of novel, Todhunter succeeds in growing on the reader, not necessarily through his altruism, but through his determination and particularly because he does indeed transform. Not static at all, this Todhunter. Berkeley also risks creating an over-sentimental character, particularly as he is nearing death, and yet does a wonderful job in being direct with his story and avoiding overblown sentimentality.

The novel's only weak point is at the early stage of the trial, when Berkeley feels the need to restate details which the reader is already familiar with. This portion of the work suffers a little in its pacing, but once the cross-examination begins, the writing, particularly the dialogue, is so riveting that we nearly forget the slow progress of the previous thirty or so pages.

Anthony Berkeley's Trial and Error is a rare find that is absolutely worth seeking out.

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Short Story Wednesday, THE WIND IN THE ROSEBUSH, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

 Jerry House used to live in Southern Maryland. Now he lives in Florida.

This is from 2008.

The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural
by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (whose married name was sometimes preceded by a dash) was a popular 19th and early 20th century author. She has been credited with an astonishing 238 novels as well as several short story collections. Her duties as secretary to Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr., brought her into contact with many of the literary lights of the day. Amazingly versatile, she produced a number of works of very high standard. In 1902 she began a series of supernatural stories which were published in Everybody's Magazine. One of her publishers, Doubleday Page, had an editorial relationship with Everybody's and brought out The Wind in the Rose-bush the following year. About the same time, however, Everybody's was sold to another company which had no use for "outlandish" or "morbid" stories.

With Everbody's market closed to her, Freeman went on to different kinds of fiction. Our loss. While her other work (both deservedly and otherwise) has faded into obscurity, the six stories in The Wind in the Rose-bush remain among the best of its kind. It was the fashion in turn-of-the-century popular fiction to portray family life in a mawkishly sentimental manner, but in Freeman's stories, the domestic trumped the sentimental. Her characters are real people with real flaws, while the supernatural hides quietly in everyday events, slowly coming into light. Several of these stories are standard fare in anthologies collecting "great" supernatural stories.

Here are the contents:

The Wind in the Rose-bush
The Shadows on the Wall
Luella Miller
The Southwest Chamber
The Vacant Lot
The Lost Ghost

Notice that I keep using the word "supernatural" rather than "ghost". Some of the six are true ghost stories; others are ghost stories only by courtesy. Mrs. Freeman does not bother to explain the supernatural in these stories: she allows the reader and the characters to experience it -- which is more than enough. The most accomplished of the stories may be "Luella Miller", who is a woman who may or may not be a psychic vampire and whose influence may or may not have been transferred to her home. In "The Lost Ghost", two gossiping ladies are diverged from telling the expected ghost story by an altogether different ghost story. "The Southwest Corner" gives us a haunted room that grows more menacing as the story progresses. The first of "The Shadows on the Wall" is that of a murdered brother; the next...?

These six stories were later combined with five lesser stories to form the Arkham House publication of The Collected Ghost Stories of Mary Wilkins-Freeman (1974). Despite that title, there evidently several of her supernatual stories that remain uncollected.

George Kelley 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK 

Jerry House

Todd Mason