The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley
Leslie Poles Hartley
The Complete Short Stories
For the first time, the complete short fiction of L.P. Hartley is included in one volume. A novelist whose work has been acclaimed for its consistent quality, he also produced a number of masterly executed short stories. Those stories, written under the collection titles of The Travelling Grave, The White Wand, Two for the River, and Mrs. Carteret Receives are in this edition, as is the flawless novella Simonetta Perkins.
Leslie Poles Hartley was born in 1895 and died in 1972. Of his eighteen novels, the best known are The Shrimp and the Anemone, Eustace and Hilda, The Go-Between, The Boat, The Hireling, The Brickfield, Poor Clare, The Love Adept, and My Sisters’ Keeper. The Go-Between, when filmed, was an international success, and the film version of The Hireling won the principal award at the 1973 Cannes festival.
INTRODUCTION
(to The Collected Short Stories of L. P. Hartley, 1968)
The author of The Go-Between is one of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original. For the world of his creation is composed of such diverse elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the processes of human thought and feeling, especially of its queerer and more whimsical processes: he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of a Gothic imagination that reveals itself now in a fanciful reverie, now in the mingled dark and gleam of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness. Further, both observation and imagination are given significance by the fact that they are made the vehicle of an intense moral vision. It is not a comfortable vision. Man, as seen by Mr. Hartley, is born with a soul that instinctively desires virtue and happiness. But some original sin in himself and in the nature of things is at work to thwart his strivings towards them and brings them, more often than not, to disaster—a disaster he accepts as largely deserved.
Such is the vision of life presented in Mr. Hartley’s novels. We find it also in this volume of his collected short stories. With a difference however. In the novels the diverse elements are fused into a single whole; in the stories, one or other tends to dominate. In some the ‘Gothic’ strain in its author’s talent gets it head, as it never does in the novels. Like his eighteenth-century forebears, Mr. Hartley goes in for tales of terror. Sometimes the terror is earthly: The Island, The Killing Bottle, The Travelling Grave are stories of crime. More often the terror is unearthly, an affair of the supernatural. But both earthly and unearthly are steeped in the same atmosphere of eerie and sinister evil. Perhaps this atmosphere suits the unearthly stories best; now and again Mr. Hartley’s criminals are too like evil spirits to be wholly convincing as human beings. There is no difficulty, however, in believing in his ghosts. They and their stories assault the imagination with the compelling horror of nightmare. Yet like that of nightmare, their horror is founded on waking experience. For though Mr. Hartley’s sense of reality plays a subordinate part in these stories, it is effectively there. The nightmare events are more terrifying because they are interspersed with details drawn from their author’s exact and humorous observations of the real world. Rumbold, in A Visitor from Down-Under, listens to a programme for children on the wireless, ignorant that it will soon be the medium by which he is brought into communication with the ghost of the man he has murdered.
‘. . . A Children’s Party,’ the voice announced in an even, neutral tone, nicely balanced between approval and distaste, between enthusiasm and boredom; ‘six little girls and six little’ (a faint lift in the voice, expressive of tolerant surprise) ‘boys. The Broadcasting Company has invited them to tea, and they are anxious that you should share some of their fun.’ (At the last word the voice became completely colourless.)
After this it is the ghost’s turn to take over: and his intervention is all the more macabre by contrast with what has gone before.
Mr. Hartley’s moral preoccupations also have their place in his tales of terror. His ghosts are never inexplicable elementals, but spirits of vengeance or manifestations of spiritual evil. This moral element in his tales give them a disturbing seriousness not to be found in the ordinary ghost story. Like those of Henry James and Walter De La Mare, they are parables of their authors’ profounder beliefs.
Mr. Hartley’s Gothic imagination predominates then in one section of his stories; others display his interest in the by-ways of human psychology. He is much concerned with neurotic compulsion and neurotic frustration. Oswald Clayton in Witheling End suffers from strong compulsive fits of constraint which have the effect of blighting all his friendships: Mr. Amber in A Tonic is possessed by a frustrating fear of death that stops him telling his symptoms to the specialist he has gone to consult, lest they should reveal that his disease is fatal. Akin to these tales, but standing apart from them, is the brief novel called Simonetta Perkins, in which is described the gradual steps by which the fastidious and sophisticated Miss Johnson of Boston finds her carefully preserved philosophy of living compulsively undermined by a violent physical passion.
Mr. Hartley’s pictures of these different psychological troubles is wonderfully convincing and his insight into the working of neurosis alarmingly acute. But it is always the insight of an artist. His interest is imaginative, not clinical; these stories are not mere efficient studies in morbid psychology. For we see them through the transfiguring medium of Mr. Hartley’s subtle ironic temperament. Here is the hypochondriac Mr. Amber waiting to see the specialist.
Mr. Amber strayed into the waiting-room and sat down in the middle of an almost interminable sofa. On either hand it stretched away, a sombre crimson expanse figured with rather large fleurs-de-lys and flanked by two tight bolsters that matched the sofa, and each other. The room had heavy Oriental hangings, indian-red, and gilt French chairs, upholstered in pink. ‘A mixture of incompatibles, thought Mr. Amber, ‘is contrary to the traditional usages of pharmacy, but in practice it may sometimes be not inadmissible.’ His mind was sensitive to its environment.
Finally Mr. Hartley’s sympathetic imagination enables him to endow his psychological ‘cases’ with a more universal interest, Clayton and Amber and the rest of his frustrated heroes are revealed as representatives of the human condition. Their particular quirks may be odd and even ridiculous, but they are only comical examples of the kind of weakness that afflicts all of us. As I have said, Mr. Hartley does not take a hopeful view of the human lot. Most of his dramas end in frustration if not in anything worse; and if Oswald Clayton and one or two others do contrive to extract themselves from their troubles, it is through a chance stroke of luck. The one story in the collection that ends well, in the full sense of the word, is the delicate little anecdote called The Price of the Absolute. Its last paragraph sees Timothy Carswell going off with the Celadon vase which he has so recklessly purchased, in a state of confident rapture; for he feels himself to be the possessor of Absolute Beauty incarnate. Can this mean, we wonder, that Mr. Hartley thinks that art is to be trusted even if life is not? that the experience given by a work of art can be perfect, in a way that an experience given by life never is? Such an implication seems implicit in the tone with which he describes the vase.
Suddenly he stopped, for on a shelf above his head was a vase that arrested his attention as sharply as if it had spoken to him. Who can describe perfection? I shall not attempt to, nor even indicate the colour; for, like a pearl, the vase had its own colour, which floated on its surface more lightly than morning mist hangs on a river. . . .
‘Turn on the light!’ commanded the proprietor. So illuminated, the vase shone as if brightness had b
een poured over it. It might have been floating in its own essence, so insubstantial did it look. Through layer on layer of soft transparency you seemed to see right into the heart of the vase.
This passage is memorable not only for the light it throws on Mr. Hartley’s beliefs, but also as an example of his art at its beautiful best; the precise and exquisite expression of an exquisitely refined sensibility.
D.C.
SIMONETTA PERKINS
Simonetta Perkins was first published in Great Britain in 1925
1
‘Love is the greatest of the passions,’ Miss Johnstone read, ‘the first and the last.’
She lifted her eyes from the book, and they rested on the grey dome of Santa Maria della Salute, rising like a blister out of the inflamed and suppurating stonework below. The waters of the canal were turbid, bringing the church uncomfortably close. ‘How I hate Baroque,’ thought Miss Johnstone. ‘And this, I am told, is the best example of it. It comes of being born in Boston, I suppose. And yet a Johnstone of Boston should be able to appreciate anything. Anything good, that is.’
She read on.
‘Other passions tend to exaggerate and to intensify, but love transforms. The victim of the amorous passion has a holiday from himself. No longer does he discern in the objects he sees before him the pale reflection of his own mediocrity; those objects become the symbols of an inner quickening. An effulgence of the Absolute irradiates his being.’
How often have I read this sort of thing before,’ thought Miss Johnstone, trying to ignore the Salute, and fixing her gaze on the chaster outlines of St. Gregory, across the way. ‘Consider the servants here,’ she soliloquised, glancing right and left along the sunny terrace whose steps were lapped by the waves; ‘has any one of them, for any one moment, been irradiated by an effulgence of the Absolute? I think not.’ She met the smirk of a passing concierge with a reproving stare. ‘But they are all married, I suppose, or whatever in Venice takes the place of marriage.’
The print rose up at her, and she started once more to read.
‘Love is an inheritance that falls to the lot of all mankind. Anger, envy, jealousy, cruelty; pity, charity, humility, courage: these emotions are partial and unequal in their incidence. They visit some, and others they pass by. But man that is born of woman cannot escape love. Of whatsoever age thou art, reader, never believe thyself secure from his fiery dart.’
‘Now here,’ exclaimed Miss Johnstone, slamming the book face-downwards on the wicker-work table at her side, ‘here, among much vapid rhetoric and dreary rubbish is one huge, dangerous, vital, misleading falsehood.’
This outburst having caused more than one lorgnette to be directed upon her, Miss Johnstone ceased to testify openly and continued her reflections to herself. But never had her whole consciousness, her whole being, shown itself, to her, so vociferously articulate. From her toes to her hair she was an incarnation of denial. ‘It is a lie,’ she thought, ‘a cruel, useless lie. If I—since the writer, after many meaningless generalizations, now impudently addresses himself to me—if I had been capable of this passion, would not Stephen Seleucis and Michael B. Sprott and Theodore Drakenburg and Walt Watt have awakened it? They awakened it in everyone else, even in Mamma.’ She looked round: but her mother had not yet appeared.
‘The pinnacle of eligibility on which I sat, and to which in a month I must return, was, and no doubt again will be, festooned with offers of marriage. They affected me no more than an invitation to dinner, except that I was harassed by having to take some of them seriously. I am absolutely immune from love. If I marry, it will be from considerations of convenience.
‘Alas that one cannot reply to an author except by making notes in the margin, notes he will never see! And this love-adept has wisely left his margins slender. Let me see what he says now. Aha! a threat!’
‘In the case of solipsistical and egocentric natures, the tide of love, long awaited in secret’ (Miss Johnstone frowned) ‘may find a tortuous and uneasy passage. There is much to be absorbed, much to be overcome. The habit of self-communion must be subdued; all those private delights, the sense, so delicious to some, of retiring into oneself and drawing down the blinds, must be repudiated and foresworn. The unfortunate egoist must learn to take his pleasure from without; he is no longer his own warehouse and market place, he must go out to buy. No longer may he think, “I will sit in such and such a position, it gives me ease”; or, “I will take a drive to-day and refresh my spirits”, or, “to-morrow I will choose a suit of clothes”; for he will no longer find pleasure in the satisfaction of daily needs. Rather he will say, “If I rest my cheek thus upon my linger, now will Chloe regard it?” and, “I will wait upon Melissa with my barouche, though I abhor the motion”, and, “since Julia is away I must go ragged and barefoot, for without her sanction I dare not choose either silk or shoe-leather”. To such as have been accustomed to give others the first place in their thoughts, the oncoming of love will prove a bloodless revolution; but to the egoists, the epicures of their own sensations, the change will be violent, damaging and bitter.’
‘Should I call myself an egoist?’ Miss Johnstone mused. ‘Others have called me so. They merely meant that I did not care for them. Now if they had said fastidious or discriminating! On the whole it is a pity that Stephen Seleucis is coming next week; but he did once say, “Lavinia, it isn’t only your charm that attracts me, it’s your refusal to see charm in anyone else. Even in me”, he added. How could I contradict him? Certainly I am not selfish. Punctual myself, I am tolerant of unpunctuality in others. It is the mark of a saint, Walt Watt once told me. Why do I recall these foolish compliments? They ought never to have found their way into my diary; and it is no answer to the author of this odious manual (who has somehow contrived to pique me) to urge that idle young men have talked as though they were in love with me. Can it be that I am vain? Why else should I have treasured those insinuating commendations? When Mamma speaks her mind to me, it goes like water off a duck’s back.’
At that moment two visitors, both men, walked past her. One tilted his head back, as though his collar chafed him; but Miss Johnstone knew instinctively that he was indicating her, as, with an interrogatory lift of his voice he said,
‘Beautiful?’
‘Well, no,’ his friend replied, ‘not really beautiful’ They passed out of ear-shot. Miss Johnstone blinked, and involuntarily caught up the treatise upon Love, in her agitation forgetting to sneer at the opening words.
‘Like all great subjects, love has its false prophets. You will hear men say, “I do not know whether I am in love or not”; but your heart, reader, will never give you this ambiguous answer. Doubtful symptoms there may be, excitement, irritability, sleeplessness, without cause shown; but uncertainty, when the eye of desire at last has the beloved object in its view, never.’
Miss Johnstone had recovered from her embarrassment. ‘What execrable taste!’ she exclaimed. ‘The eye of desire, pooh!’ She raised her own eyes, as though to record a protest to the heavens, but her outraged glance never climbed to the zenith. An intermediate object arrested it. Posted in front of her, though how it got there unobserved she could not imagine, a gondola lay rocking. At either end it was lashed to those blue posts whose function, apart from picturesqueness, Miss Johnstone for the first time dimly understood; and the gondolier was sitting on the poop and staring at the hotel. No, not at the hotel, decided Miss Johnstone, at me.
She tried to return the stare; it troubled her. It was vivid, abstracted, and unrecognizing. It seemed to be projected up at her out of those fierce blue eyes.
She turned to look behind her, half expecting to see some dumb show, a servant making a face, that would explain the gondolier’s interest and explain it away. She saw only a blind window and a blank wall. Unwillingly her eyes travelled back, searching vainly in their circuit for some less hazardous haven. Once more they rested on the gondolier. Hunched up, he sat, but without any appearance of awkwardness or of constrict
ion; one brown hand drooped over his knee: the gold of his rings glittered against the brown. He was like some black bird that, in settling, had not troubled quite to fold its wings.
‘But he can’t really fly,’ thought Miss Johnstone, meeting his eyes at last, ‘and there’s the water between us.’ Emboldened by the reflection, she scanned his face. Did the twist of his brown moustache make him too predaceous, too piratical? She decided it did not. How did he come by the tawny hair that waved under the gallant curve of the black sombrero? Of course, many Venetians had brown hair. Again she dropped her eyes before the urgency of that stare, and at the same moment was conscious of a change in the demeanour of the loitering servants, and heard a familiar voice.
‘Lavinia! Lavinia!’ Right and left her mother’s summons enfiladed the terrace. ‘Am I to wait here all night?’
‘Coming!’ cried Miss Johnstone in a thin pipe, making her way through the occasional tables to where, nodding and tossing her bold, blonde head, her mother stood while the servants scurried round her.
‘Where is my gondola?’ that lady demanded, her eye sweeping the Grand Canal with such authority that her daughter thought the craft must rise, like Venus, from the waves. ‘I ordered it for eleven. I come down at half-past eleven, and there is no sign of it.’
‘Emilio, Emilio,’ called a concierge, shrinking so much that his scarlet waistcoat hung quite loosely on him. ‘He is here, Madam.’
‘Why doesn’t he come then, if he’s here?’ Mrs. Johnstone asked, adding in a gentler tone, ‘I see, he’s untying himself. What unhandy things these gondolas are. No wonder they are to be abolished.’
Propelled from post to post by Emilio’s outstretched hand the deprecated vessel drew up to the steps. With a gesture that just escaped being a flourish, the gondolier took off his hat and held it across his body; his hair blew backwards, caught by the wind. As though in a dream Miss Johnstone saw her mother, poised on the unsteady embarkation board, give him the benefit of that glare before which all Boston quailed; and then, a weakness surely without precedent, she saw her mother’s eyelids flicker.