Leaves on the Life-Tree

The Seduction of Solitude, Kim Dallesandro (Incunabula Media 2022)

I bought this book because I liked the title, the cover and the author’s name. But would I like the stories inside? I’m glad to say that I did. I liked them a lot. They were like leaves on the life-tree, fluttering and flickering, elegantly shaped and intricately veined. D.M. Mitchell says this on the back cover:

One of the things that I find astonishing about Kim Dallesandro’s writing is its razor-sharp economy. Her short stories have the biblical weight of the classic blues songs put out by Sun Records back in the 50s; little pocket psychodramas that capture not only whole lives but a whole era in microcosm. Comparisons are odious but inevitable, so if I throw a few names onto the table here – Cormac McCarthy, Robert Carver, Shirley Jackson – Kim Dallesandro doesn’t suffer by the comparison.

That’s good apart from the comparison to Cormac McCarthy. I don’t agree with it. McCarthy is a clumsy, pretentious and humorless writer. Dallesandro is precise and elegant and humor flashes through her work like flakes of mica in polished stone. No, she’s more like Charles Bukowski. Except that his prose is boring and flavorless. Dallesandro’s prose has the elegance and subtle flavors of poetry. And sometimes the concision of poetry, the concentration of emotion and experience into small spaces on the page that open big spaces in the reader’s head or heart. Like this line: “Life is a lonely game we try to play with others.”

All of the stories are about people trying to play the lonely game of life. Dallesandro can evoke childhood or old age, write with the voice of teenagers or tots:

I was eleven nine years ago, tall for my age and “quiet in a loud way” as mama put it. Daddy had left about three months before my birthday, so I didn’t get much of anything that year except a long sad story every single night before I was allowed to go to sleep. And we sat here where we find ourselves tonight, in mama’s room playing with makeup and hairspray. She’d rat and tease up my hair into shapes I’d never seen on a head before then spray it with a stream of hairspray that lingered in the room for what seemed like hours. – “Snowballs”

She liked to trace the varicose veins on her legs while she stared out the window in the late afternoon. They were like mazes, or intricate spider webs; she tried to find a beginning point and an end making it a game but never succeeding in finding a clear path to the end and it always surprised her that one more had appeared overnight while she slept – same as those deep lines near her mouth that they call “laugh lines” though she didn’t do much of that anymore. – “The Chair”

Most of the stories are written through the eyes and emotions of women and girls, but she can capture the lives of men and boys too:

Charlie rode the train all night, the wind blowing through the open window, a childhood habit he never let go off, opening the window and letting that wind caress his face as he slept dreaming of fast cars and places far away from here. – “When the Rains Come”

She can also capture the lives of stupid or uneducated people, male and female, young and old. Some of the stories are about those who have long been dismissed as “rednecks” or “white trash”. They drink, they take drugs, they fuck and fight and sometimes commit suicide. But there’s no prurience or superiority in Dallesandro’s descriptions: she has sympathy and sadness for all her characters. They all acquire “the usual scars”, the ones you carry after “life has sliced away at you”, as she puts it in the story “2am”. That story wanders and whispers and builds towards something I always find it very hard to reach in my own stories: a perfect last line. So it’s one of the stories that reminded me of lifting the lid of a music-box and watching and listening as a glittering ballerina pirouettes and a little tune tinkles and twists and ends.

Except that music-boxes can seem twee and that’s something Dallesandro never is. She didn’t remind me of Cormac McCarthy, but she did remind me of Robert Aickman. Their style and themes are completely different, but their stories have depth and mystery. And intelligence. I could feel a powerful mind beneath the words as I began reading The Seduction of Solitude. The stories don’t try to show off, but the elegance and economy of the prose are like the brushstrokes of an expert painter: outward signs of great inner power.

Fernand Khnopff, I lock my door upon myself (1891)

And it’s a painter that the stories also reminded me of, via a happy typo on the front cover. The title there reads The Seduction of Soitude. Which is a happy typo – or maybe not a typo at all – because it brings to mind the French soi, “self”. Soitude could be translated “selfhood”. And the Francophone Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) had a motto: On n’a que soi – “One has only oneself.” His paintings are like Kim Dallesandro’s stories: they’re elegant and precise and convey endless depth and mystery on two-dimensional canvas. Dallesandro’s prose does the same on the two-dimensional page. Or really the one-dimensional page, because language is a line of symbols in the eye or ear.

Or under the fingertips, if you think of Braille. I once learned a little of that, wanting to know how it felt to read with my fingers, not my eyes. It felt strange and intimate, which is why it would feel both right and wrong to read The Seduction of Solitude in Braille. It’s a strange and intimate book, which is why it would feel right to read it in Braille. But it’s about loneliness and our unending desire, and unending failure, to truly connect with others. And reading by eye echoes that: we see the surface and never get beneath. The only depths are in our own minds, as we play the lonely game of life and learn again and again that On n’a que soi – “One has only oneself.”

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Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• The Seduction of Solitude at Lulu

• Incunabula Fiction — more of Kim Dallesandro’s books

• Fernand Khnopff at Wikipedia

• Psyches and Psychoses — the short stories of Guy de Maupassant

• King Cormac — incendarily interrogating the cruddiness of Cormac McCarthy

• The Cruddiness of Cormac (continued)

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Conteur Compatissant

Short Stories, Guy de Maupassant, translated by Marjorie Laurie (Everyman’s Library 1934)

Sympathy is an interesting word. It literally means “with-feeling”, that is, sharing someone else’s feelings, while the Latin compassio means “with-suffering”. But both of these words have weaker and wetter meanings in modern English. When I say that Maupassant was a compassionate writer who had sympathy for his characters, you need to read it in the older, stronger senses. He could feel with other human beings, victims and villains, the ordinary and the eccentric, and bring them to life on paper.

But he could do more than that: he had sympathy for, sympathy with, animals too and some of his most moving stories are about dogs, horses and donkeys. One, “Love”, is about a pair of wild birds and the hunters who shoot them. It’s included in this collection, which begins with “Boule de Suif” and ends with “The Horla”. “Boule de Suif”, or “Ball of Lard”, was Maupassant’s early great success. It combines three of his obsessions: prostitution, cruelty, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. The title is actually the nickname of a plump, amiable prostitute who befriends but is then betrayed by the respectable folk who share a coach with her on a journey through occupied France. A Prussian officer wants to sleep with her, but she refuses. He won’t let the coach go on until she gives in. Her fellow travellers force her to do so, then salve their own consciences by treating her like “a thing useless and unclean” when their journey resumes.

It’s one of the longest stories here and also one of the most powerful, finely observed, closely and compassionately written. And it’s echoed by another story, “Mademoiselle Fifi”, which is also about prostitutes and the German occupation. But this time the title is the nickname of a Prussian officer, a sadistic dandy who treats the French with contempt but gets more than he bargains for when he mistreats a young prostitute called Rachel. That name is Hebrew for “Ewe” and Rachel is in fact Jewish, so the revenge in the story has even more resonance now. She stabs Mademoiselle Fifi to death and then successfully escapes. But the story is less successful than “Boule de Suif”. It’s too obviously a wish-fulfilment fantasy and the victim turns the table too neatly on the villain. And if Rachel’s name is intended to be ironic, it’s a literary touch that undermines Maupassant’s realism.

I think I’d read the story before in French, but it didn’t stay with me strongly. Other stories I’d read in French did stay with me strongly, like “Miss Harriet”, about a repressed English virgin who commits suicide far from home, and “The Devil”, about a peasant woman who’s given a fixed price to oversee the final hours of a dying woman. “Miss Harriet” is tragic, “The Devil” tragi-comic, and both are good examples of Maupassant’s sympathy for women and his ability to write about them convincingly. But “The Devil” is also a good example of his sympathy for peasants. As the Roman writer Terence said: Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. – “I am human and I regard nothing human as alien to me.”

But many people can say that: Maupassant was one of the rare few who could translate his sympathy into powerful art, whether he was writing about an Italian widow avenging her only son in “Vendetta” or a French diplomat learning about the cruel fate of “the only woman I ever loved” in “Shali”. That story is actually expurgated: the French original, in 1884, went further than the English translation did in 1934. And Maupassant should be read in the original. As Gerald Gould says in the introduction: “It has been said by one rather acid French critic that one reason English people think so highly of Maupassant as a writer is because his French is so easy.”

That’s right: he writes with the utmost clarity and simplicity, but when I read him in French I have to concentrate, so the meaning blossoms more slowly and powerfully in my mind. That’s why I find myself unable to re-read some of his stories. They’re not extravagantly violent or cruel, but I find them too powerful and too unpleasant. “The Horla” isn’t one of those stories and although it is one of Maupassant’s best, some of its power comes from what you know about its background. Maupassant was beginning to go mad from syphilis when he wrote it. In “The Horla”, the human being he’s sympathizing with is himself. Not long afterwards, he was confined to an asylum. Then he was dead at the age of forty-two. No other writer has written so much so well in such a short life. Some of his best stories are here, but anyone who can should read him in French. He was a genius who combined simplicity with sympathy in a way that no other writer I’ve ever read has matched.

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