THE LISTENER and Other Stories
HELEN HUDSON
E.P. Dutton
Out of print; various prices
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Time magazine called Helen Hudson's first novel,
Tell the Time to None, "a clean-cut gem of a novel."
The New York Times Book Review said, "Miss Hudson is a gifted writer; and she is to be welcomed."
Now in these thirteen stories Miss Hudson demonstrates again her remarkable ability to be at once satirically incisive and compassionate, to delineate the human being while exposing the irony of the human scene.
Many of her stories deal with solemn themes, but even the most somber of them is enlivened by her unexpected wit, the swift, wicked similes of her observations. Hers is prose for everyone who delights in the language.
Above all, these are character studies in which the individuality of her creations is vivid. The stories are frequently both poignant and astringent, for Helen Hudson presents such contrasting pictures of her characters that she is able to evoke sympathy even for those she reveals most completely.
THIS BOOK WAS INHERITED FROM MY MOTHER. THANKS, MAMA.
My Review: I love discovering new-to-me writers. When my mother died in 1999, she had in her downsized library a large selection of midcentury writers whose oeuvres are largely forgotten today...Sloan Wilson, John P. Marquand, Harry Golden...many of which I've managed to retain over my own peregrinations.
Three of Miss Helen Hudson's books, this one,
Tell the Time to None, and
Meyer Meyer, were there as well. There they sat ignored by me for literal decades. I paid them no mind but liked the Sixties aesthetic of their jackets. Then I was at a lovely, long-gone bookstore in Austin, Texas, browsing the bizarre and eclectic collection of modern, current, and antiquitous books its truly weird owner had accreted. There was a short-story anthology called
New Voices, '64...and since a forty-year-old selection of "new voices" is bound to be fascinating, it came home with me.
Helen Hudson's story,
A Bottle of Sherry to Dr. Polk, was in that anthology. I read it with complete pleasure, a real sense of knowing this main character and the support staff making her life possible, and the acerbic nature of the lady's humor (I speak of both author and character):
“...And where's Margaret Pier? I know she's not dead, even if she's almost as old as I am and twice as stubborn."
"She said she'd never set foot inside this house again. Not after what you said the last time."
"Did I say something dreadful?"
"You said blind Republicanism like hers was an inherited social disease, like syphilis. You said it. I heard you myself.”
My very own soul-mother, is Mrs. Pritchard. I love that and I love her and I realized that thank
goodness I had the whole collection to read! I was chuffed. I was also mid-upheaval in my life, and the project of reading and reviewing the collection fell by the wayside. I added the book to my online catalogs in 2011 and found again the quote above, and another below, from
Dr. Polk; what a delight! More personal-life upheavals followed in fairly short order; the read-n-review project got shelved (heh) again.
I follow a blog called
Neglected Books and have since goodness-knows. I've found many a forgotten tome to enjoy, notably the now-well-known classic Missouri novel
The Moonflower Vine that the blog helped rehabilitate. I have a list of amazing authors I'd thought of mentioning to Blogger Brad Bigelow over time, but never did for a huge variety of reasons. Well, I did it this year, and the author was Helen Hudson.
She was the big sis of
Encyclopedia Brown's creator, Donald Sobol. They were products of the Depression-era left-wing Jewish world of the Bronx. It shows in Author Hudson's frequent forays into the world of social-justice fiction, most notably in her last two novels (1971's
Farnsbee South and the delightful
Criminal Trespass from 1985); she's also the editor of a 2002 charity anthology called
Dinner at Six: Voices from the Soup Kitchen, which I possess but haven't read. Her desire to strike a blow against mindless conformity and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo is the thread that tied together all of her work that I've read, and I suspect all that I haven't yet.
For all who, like me, remember when
Kirkus Reviews hated everything except the very, very best work, I reproduce here their assessment of
The Listener and Other Stories:
Marking, but not necessarily wasting, time while waiting for an appropriate successor to Miss Hudson's fine novel Meyer (sic) (1966), these stories read like probing a dying nerve–a series of nasty jabs compulsively sought. In spite of the energetic manipulations to mystify and terrify—somehow you keep on reading. The title story details the psychiatric career of a bloodless doctor whose imperviousness drives his patients to death and ruin, until he is finally pierced at once by the cries of his patients and quits his profession. There is a jovial undertaker whose love for his work is unappreciated by a grieving couple: a suburban matron who is shockingly lured to death by a shuffling old woman whose affiliation is suspect; a suicide who had touched the lives of his neighbors; a large unloving lady haunted by the masculine spirit of rising walls; an elderly man who leads a phantom congregation as a Jewish temple is destroyed. Three of the stories deal with less eccentric matters, among them the bitter career of an exploited Negro housekeeper. Perhaps Miss Hudson needs the novel form for a deeper and more liberal probe of people as well as circumstance. However these are diverting exercises if the Glance Macabre is for you.
The Glance Macabre (love that phrase!) being very much for me, off I go! Of course, I'll make my customary comments à la
the Bryce Method.
The Listener couldn't be more 1967 (the year
The Virginia Quarterly first published it) with its free association and celebration of analysis. Dr. Toye's enormous ears and absence of personality make him the caricature analyst, silent and open to the shrieks and moans of the needy. Then in comes a man with a seriously unexamined life; a man with hidden desires and a wife who bores him out of his mind; and Dr. Toye listens him into an early grave. The long dark night of Dr. Toye's soul has begun.
He spent his life in his house, downstairs during the day and upstairs at night, and never went out to lunch. For the truth was that he was happy only in his office, sitting upright behind his desk with a body stretched out on his couch and a voice talking just to him.
Born too soon, our Dr. Toye. He should be among us now.
4.5 stars
Sunday Mourning reveals the deep fissures in lives struck by tragedy. An undertaker, an unhappy profession to be sure, grows accustomed to death; but the living left in its wake are a fresh, painful disappointment every day. This isn't a story so much as a beautiful observation of three people in extremis.
Mr. Hawley, the undertaker, was a big man with a tweed jacket and seat in the New Hampshire legislature.
–and–
She was a small scrawny woman with a round little mouth shaped to hold a straw, as though she took life in tiny sips.
No one is less prepared for death than a parent is for their child's. Author Hudson had no illusions about how pain destroys identity. She was able to reassure us that there is still restoration and rebuilding after its ravages. 3.5 stars
The Strange Testament of Michael Cassidy examines the weird, frictionless life of a casually anti-Semitic, racist Catholic whose Jewish neighbors he has never failed to serve in his grocery store. He detests and despises Maureen, his crass and hateful wife though he shares her prejudices in his quiet way. This being the 1960s, though, Cassidy is caught in an ugly war between tradition and modernity that we called "urban renewal" or "slum clearance" then; today its successor is the less obviously offensive "gentrification." Ghastly Maureen will go to her ghastly sister in Kansas; Cassidy will not. He remains in the old homeplace. Where will he live?
...he discovered the temple, though he did not realize, at first, what it was, merely a huge old building empty and silent, surrounded by gaps, and left to rot in the rain. He found a side door unlocked as if for him, a sanctuary of silence for a man whose head was a drum for the world to beat.
His quiet-man act at last rewarded with silence! Until, one day, the past comes calling with its one unshirkable responsibility.
4 stars
The Hungry Eye belongs, in a roundabout way, to Michèle, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Paris. Her life is blighted by the unfashionable size of her, at a time and in a place where "petite" was de rigueur and "mignon" was not just a modifier for expensive filet. She has lived the most useless imaginable life; she does nothing, causes nothing, cares for nothing but herself. This is the most
New Yorkery story I've read by Author Hudson, and still it manages to be truly bitterly angry about the waste and uselessness of "the ladies who lunch." In the end, what I found silly and what displeased me was the silent chorus, the personified self-image that takes up the story's space the way Michèle takes up her bijou little apartment. A disappointed 3.5 stars, all for the off-kilter eroticism of sexless voyeuristic intentions.
Send a Patrol Car to Spartanburg isn't even a little bit subtle in its accusation of cruelty by neglect in a racist society. Mattie Burns isn't in control of anything about her life, she works for the Lovings (get it?) and when I say "works" I mean it literally. Scrub, polish, well let Author Hudson tell you:
{Mattie} had worked for the Lovings for years, ever since their first child and their first move. They had lived on the third floor of a narrow, surly little frame house that pinched and squeezed at every turn, its windows fixed intently on the slums creeping up slowly two and a half blocks away. Mattie had carried the garbage can up and down three flights of stairs and piled most of the furniture out the back door when guests came. The Lovings paid her the standard minimum wage, even though "domestics" were not included in the law, and she scrubbed and swept and waxed and polished and hung out the wash, sitting on the toilet seat and leaning out the third-floor window, which, her friends warmed her, was dangerous for a woman with her "pressure."
But Mattie can't just quit, there's brother Clifford's pills to buy and administer, there's her own home to clean, there's the whole world waiting on an old black woman to bend her back and get after it. Zora Neale Hurston said, in
Their Eyes Were Watching God, "De nigger woman is de mule uh de world." Mattie would agree, I will just bet.
4 stars because it appeared in
Mademoiselle magazine in 1966 and how Author Hudson managed to storm that bastion of privilege with this angry story beggars my paltry imagination.
Hermes' Beard chronicles the Greek adventures of Arleene and Gerald, American (of course) tourists (of course) whose entire lives are summed up in the one moment when Arleene (!) says to herself, "Gerald was right about everything." And how horrible it was that he dared to be right about everything since the trip was her idea. And how much she detests his big, American size and his German-speaking communication with the locals (remembering this is a mere 20 years after the Nazi occupation of Greece) and, well, him. All of him. She even resents the fact that he dared to be right about the Hermes of Praxiteles being less impressive than the archaic statue, Hermes Kriophoros, whose beard we have all seen in our art history course texts.
In short, the sheer unadulterated bliss of marriage. Whiny meets overbearing, neither side "wins" because it's a draw as to who's the more awful wretch.
4 stars
A Bottle of Sherry to Dr. Polk details the last moments of independence that a starchy matriarch, Mrs. George Pritchard (Emma), as she prepares...is prepared...to move into a nursing home since her advancing dementia will no longer allow her not to be constantly supervised. She hasn't lost her self yet, though one can sense its inevitability:
“Frankie," she said softly, "do you know what my idea of heaven is? A place where the windows are always clean, and the people I want can always come to dinner.”
Her long-time day nurse receives the confidence with stoic, understated unhappiness; an older man with rather too much experience dealing with dementia-suffering souls, I was deeply and sadly affected by the story, by the sense that it gave me of Author Hudson's intimate knowledge of her material. I give it
5 stars
After Cortés goes there with the anti-Catholic rhetoric:
...the humiliation of his spirit was the worst of all. He felt no Father to this slovenly, loose-lipped flock. It pained him to force his mind to meet theirs, to reduce the intricacy and beauty and mystery of Catholic dogma to the simple act and the blunt command, like limiting Hamlet to its plot. He read late at night, and since there was no one with whom to share his thoughts, he took them to Mexico each summer. There the mating of mind and eye helped to carry him through the next winter.
Mexico's long-famous tradition of anticlericalism, and its openly syncretic species of Catholicism, make Father Charles Cheney feel anonymous enough to wear a flowered shirt and khakis in place of the collar and rigmarole he trudges through his East Bronx life in. While approaching Chichén Itzá he meets Carla, a tourist from LA and one of the California types that's so effin' irritating you want to slap them goodbye before they plummet over a handy cliff: the "free spirit" who makes no plan, reserves no room, brings only what money they have and then sponges and mooches and wheedles their way around wherever it is they land. To be fair, these people are from everywhere, but the American entitlement of the Carlas of California is extra grating. Father Cheney does his damnedest (!) to unscrape his unwanted acquaintance, wishing all manner of uncharitable things on the Mormon missionaries and the rich Texans who stay in his hotel. He even devises a subterfuge to avoid them all: He will get up at five-thirty to see the ruins and be on his way back to Mexico City before they drag themselves out of bed! But Gawd, in her merciless pitiless cruelty, will not have any such pleasure doled out to her priest. Oh no indeed.
4 stars for the glorious
gall-and-wormwood ending.
The Tenant expresses the tragedy of one who is simply not meant for this world.
After it happened, the neighbors all said they'd always known there was something queer about Mr. Markham...{b}ut at the time, Mr. Markham was merely a pale, thin man in a gray suit and a narrow tie who lived in the attic with his wife; he was a good-looking man, though his face seemed, somehow, more like a slightly smudged copy than the real thing. ... They never learned where he was from. They only knew that he did not seem to belong here. He had the terrible courtesy of the permanent guest.
People like Mr. Markham, who married the lazy but competent Mrs. Markham despite the fact that she was not pretty or witty or anything except devoted and grateful that he noticed her, aren't really of the Earth still less any specific location on it. That was Mrs. Markham's job. Her life changed when their money ran out. He wasn't fit for anything practical so she went to get food for the table. He drifted. He took jobs and left or lost them in no time at all. He wore holes in his shoes trying to make the world give him a space, and still he couldn't.
It's a very sad tale, but one I'll bet you any money there's a face attached to in your mind's eye already. Most of us know a Markham, a man or woman who simply...can't. This one, Author Hudson conjured a caring and devoted mate for and that makes the inevitable end so much more poignant.
4 stars
The Road to Kingswood stars an old-country woman, elderly, with "feet like hooves" in her sensible black oxfords meant for walking, walking, walking, trying to sell greeting cards to people who did not want or need to greet anyone with a cheap preprinted card. Mrs. Harrington, soignée widow of Hank, dreads this apparition appearing on her doorstep. As soon as she opens the door to get rid of her, the worst of her nightmares comes true. The slightly sweaty old thing squats at her kitchen table, demanding a glass of water then a ride to the bus stop...and at every turn, Mrs. Harrington (née Butt, of Myrtle Avenue, Flatbush) fails every test of common decency and courtesy. She wants the untidy creature out of her nine-room home with its two-hundred-year-old furniture! Why should she drive the always-walking woman to the bus stop when she got here by herself?
The gods disapprove of selfishness. The road to the burial ground awaits us all, but when and how are the unknowns.
4 stars
Strange Fare goes in a hack for the last, long ride with a stranger. A cabbie becomes Charon; a man whose Earthly days are done hails him and begs to be taken home.
How funny it is when someone you don't know needs more than you can imagine giving. 3.5 stars
An Appointment with Armstrong joins a used-up, useless old academic, a relic of a day gone forever, as he is once again about to be ritually humiliated in his quest for the final accolade once bestowed upon Professors: tenure. He is summoned to his department head's office for an eleven-thirty meeting, and of course readies himself to go promptly. He moves through his solitary home, once shared with a woman he never saw fade out of her prime in deepening despair and disappointment.
It seemed ages now since Louise had died, leaving him all alone with the empty years flapping about him. But it was only last fall when Death had crept round and round the house like a starved cat. Nursing Louise, he had known it was there, though he kept the doors closed and the shades drawn against it. Louise had known too, and accepted it, even welcomed it after the long years of illness. She stopped noting the days or the hours; forgot to remind him to leave the laundry out on Thursdays or pay the cleaning woman on Fridays or get her medicine. She merely lay quietly with her eyes closed in the darkened room under the mound of blankets, as though she could no longer wait and had made her own grave and settled herself in it.
Author Hudson knew that woman, I'm sure, and knew the husband whose failure to launch was more caustic to her than to him. Her life ended in a heap of leftover shreds; his potters along as it always has, as he always was and so is today. The ice between them wasn't visible to him and was lethal to her. The meeting with Armstrong, we know from the moment the subject is broached, will never happen and nothing will change until the day this dry, pointless man's largely unused heart stops.
4 stars for the savagery of Author Hudson's hatred sheathed in such an elegant way.
Thy Servant is another one of Author Hudson's angry screeds against the religious among us for their terrible, two-faced judgmental ways. Suzie is coming to be housekeeper for Mr. and Mrs.Gillespie and their SEVEN daughters (but they aren't Catholic!), just until her husband's hitch in the Army is over. Suzie is a perfect fit for the family, omnicompetent, overdriven to achieve, and as the oldest of thirteen (Catholic) children accustomed to enforcing discipline.
Except...what do you know...her perfection is, while not an act, just the opening act of an emotional Grand Guignol that is
Single White Female meets
Hazel. The story is utterly chilling. It's devastating in its judgements of the Gillespies as layabouts and Suzie as Torquemada in Mother Teresa's weeds. This is the most even-handed hatchet job that's been done outside of a murder scene. And the best part is there is no one except a seven-year-old child who witnesses the entire unwinding of these grave-cloths. We're not treated to overheated emotional scenes, we're given the simple and unadorned facts the way a kid sees the world and then, mirabile dictu, the kid survives the crash without so much as a scrape!
4 stars
Fine farewell to Author Hudson's world. È finita la commedia per ora.
