Achilles and Diana. Story (1963). 48 pp./ca. 5070 wds. London: Dennis Dobson, 1963; New York: Franklin Watts, 1964. Illustrations by Carol Barker. The second of three children's picture books illustrated by Carol Barker (preceded by Achilles the Donkey and followed by Achilles and the Twins). Eads quotes the dustjacket as stating that unlike the first story, the writer/artist collaboration was more typical for this volume with the artist illustrating Bates's text. Taking up where the first volume ended, Achille's falls in love with a she-donkey and a wedding is planned. But first, Diana takes ill on eating ice-cream, and is saved only by a remedy supplied by Popo the pelican, who appears miraculously when Achilles most needs help. The story closes with a wedding replete with a canopy of flamingos and a lavish feast and, several months later, the arrival of twin donkeys. Very sweet illustrations match the romance and celebration.
Achilles and the Twins. Story (1964). 48 pp./ca. 5800 wds. London: Dennis Dobson, 1964; New York: Franklin Watts, 1965. Illustrations by Carol Barker. The third of three children's picture books illustrated by Carol Barker (preceded by Achilles the Donkey and Achilles and Diana ). Achilles, discontented and missing his mother, lashes out at his boisterous twins, Miki and Moko. Taking his injunction to "go away" seriously, they stray far from home in search of their grandmother and grow very thirsty; just in time they discover the fantastic estate of the wealthy and fat Madame Zena Putitoff, rescuer of birds and animals. At the suggestion of the twins, she sets her "detective-messenger department" to work on finding Popo the penguin and eventually receives news that Popo has been poisoned by a fruitseller (from whom Achilles had escaped, in the initial Achilles book). Rescuing Popo in her gold-plated Rolls Royce, Madame Putitoff rebukes the fruitseller, and has him arrested and jailed). Popo recovers under her care, leads her to Achilles's mother, and the story ends with a grand reunion of twins, parents, Popo, Madame Putitoff, and the grandmother, celebrated with champagne. Again featuring wonderful illustrations of rich coloring and humor, the story includes the puzzling regret by the twins that "if we hadn't run away it [Popo's poisoning] would never have happened," which would make more sense had there been some explicit connection made between the publicity to find Popo and the fruitseller's attack. This and the first volume both promote the concept of justified rebellion against inhumane treatment, with the animals at Madame Putitoff's estate calling "Up the rebels! Freedom for ever!" However, the first and third books skirt the fruitseller's claim to Achilles, whom he fairly purchased.
Achilles the Donkey. Story (1962). 48 pp./ca. 3000 wds. London: Dennis Dobson, 1962; New York: Franklin Watts, 1963. Illustrations by Carol Barker. The first of three children's picture books illustrated by Carol Barker (followed by Achilles and Diana and Achilles and the Twins). The dustcover states that "Carol Barker painted the pictures in this book after a visit to Greece. they were shown to H.E. Bates who liked them so much that he agreed immediately to contribute a text." A simple story of a young donkey in Greece, named for his running abilities, who is separated from his mother and bought by a cruel fruit-vendor. He escapes his ill-treatment with the help of a pelican named Popo. Both text and artwork are colorful, warm, and endearing. Baldwin (208) notes that "the series provides adventure without violence and instills a sense of respect for animals as well as an appreciation for local color." Bates's only earlier stories for children were the very early "Seekers" (1926), "The Peach Tree" (1929), and "The King Who Lived on Air" (1929), marred, as expressed by Baldwin (208) by "cloying sentiment and easy morality," and a non-fiction children's book, "The Seasons & The Gardener (1940).
"Across the Bay." Story (1952). 31 pp./ca. 8740 wds. An examination of post-war sexual attitudes, strong in both atmosphere and characterization, and similar in theme to the 1951 novella The Grass God. A vacationing veteran becomes involved with a young French woman, only to learn that the "father" who joins her each weekend is in fact maintaining her as his lover. The tense and touching involvement of the two young lovers is effectively counterbalanced by the soldier's comically mundane table partners. In Argosy (November 1952), The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963).[post war, sex] (4/05)
"Afternoon at the Chateau." Story (1964). 15 pp./ca. 4800 wds. A particularly unsuccessful late tale in which two World War II air-force pilots return to a scene from their past, a French chateau where each had enjoyed the food, wine, and company of a lovely Countess. With fond memories of drinking exploits, glorious gardens, and the flamboyant Countess herself, they anticipate a wonderful reunion, but instead are received by her sullen daughter, in jeans and sandals, who responds hostilely to their efforts at conversation. Bates suggests that her anger may derive from the knowledge that her father was not the Count but one of many Air Force officers known by her mother, indeed perhaps one of her two visitors. Driving away after an unbearably awkward visit, the men make small talk and attempt to understand the bitter young Bohemian girl. In The Fabulous Mrs V (1964). [soldiers, France, bohemians] 7/07
"Alexander." Novella (1929). 67 pp./ca. 14, 950 wds. A boy, age eleven or twelve, and his uncle travel by horsecart to the garden of an eccentric old lady, where each year they pick fruit. Along the way, they offer a ride to a woman, Auntie Fell, and, while visiting at her home, the boy becomes enamored of her daughter; he also encounters the old "dried-up" grandmother. Bates's depiction of the rapport between Alexander and Uncle Bishop, the mesmerizing pace of the journey, the eerie vision of the old woman, and the boy's idealization of the girl set the dreamy atmosphere of the story. Arriving at the gardens, Alexander encounters the wealthy "old tit," and, with instructions not to touch certain trees against the back wall, picks plums until his uncle breaks for an idyllic and abundant picnic lunch. While the uncle naps, Alexander wanders and meets the darkly cunning and cynical poacher Smack, teller of tall tales, and picks a forbidden apricot as a gift for the girl. On the return, his hopes to again see her are dashed by his uncle's need to get home, and he is thrust into first reflections on pleasure, pain, and life itself. Based very closely on trips Bates took with his grandfather George Lucas to nearby Stanwick (depicted in Vanished World 85-97, and in the essay "Victorian Garden" in In the Heart of the Country), the dreamlike day seen through Alexander's eyes, the cast of mythical and symbolic figures, and the boy's exposure to love, evil, and disappointment are joined in what many consider Bates's first masterpiece of writing, and his coming of age as an author. Bates would return to the characters of Alexander and Uncle Bishop, as well as similar themes of boyhood, in the 1939 tale "The White Pony." Discussed at length by Vannatta (24-27). In Seven Tales and Alexander (1929), Thirty Tales (1934), Twenty Tales (1951). MS: SL. [t:boyhood, autobiography, rural, George Lucas, coming of age] (1/05)
"All the Milkiness of May-Time." Essay (1972). 5 pp./ca. 1200 wds. A celebration of the English countryside in Spring, as Bates takes a "favourite journey" across Kent and Sussex to Brighton. Evoking both W.H. Hudson and Edward Thomas, Bates finds no evidence that the landscape is "in danger of demise or decay," and instead experiences it with "fresh admiration" and an "abiding magic" each year. In The Countryman (Summer 1972, lxxvii, 2, pp. 41-45).[nature]5/10
Fletcher Allen. In World in Ripeness (28-32), Bates relates his working relationship with his commanding officers in the Air Ministry, one of whom, Fletcher Allen, became a strong advocate and the motivation for Bates hiring his first literary agent, Laurence Pollinger, in 1944.
"And No Birds Sing." Story (1964). 12 pp./ca. 3800 wds. A twelve-year-old girl, whose overworked and materialistic parents have little time for her, runs away from home and takes refuge briefly with a homeless vagabond in the woods. Exposed to the simplicity and slow pace of Mr. Thompson's life, the girl thinks of her parents and her home, replete with "the telly, the fridge, the radio, the cooker and the washing machine all crammed in together, the table with uncleared breakfast remains still on it when she got back from school, the grey eye of the television set holding her a mute captive there in the dead half-darkness while she waited for someone to come home." After several days and nights of innocently allowing her company, the vagrant hears search dogs and hurriedly sends her home, recognizing his compromising legal position. The girl, baffled by this sudden change of mood, runs "back where she belonged, to where the house was dead." While capturing well the girl's receptiveness to the smells, sounds, and spirit of nature, the tale is a simplistic depiction of the loss of family ties and traditions in modern society. Baldwin (212) notes the potential for "an exploration of values, but the drifter is idealized and the girl's family too conventionally materialistic for the clash to generate any sparks." In The Fabulous Mrs V (1964), H.E. Bates (1975), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).[social commentary, homeless, technology, coming of age] 7/07
"Animals -- All the Year Round." Essay (1942). 12 pp./ca. 1900 wds. Wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker and commentary by Bates are in a style similar to that of their collaborations in Through the Woods (1936) and Down the River (1937). Twelve half-page illustrations are accompanied by familiar reflections on animals of the forest, as well as less familiar ones on domestic and farm animals. The commentary roughly follows the seasons, and the final illustration is a calendar for 1943. In The 1943 Saturday Book (London, October 1942, pp. 241-52).[nature]9/09
"Artichokes and Asparagus." Essay (1941). 18 pp./ca. 5900 wds. A slightly altered version of the essay called "Tchehov and Maupassant" in The Modern Short Story (published some six months earlier). In Life and Letters Today (London, October 1941, xxxi, 50, pp. 4-21). 9/09
"An Aspidistra in Babylon." Novella (1959). 52 pp./ ca. 15,000 wds. A reminiscence of a girl's loss of innocence, drawing it's title from her description of herself at eighteen as "dull as one of the aspidistras that cluttered up...our little boarding house" and her mother's characterization of the life of soldiers in their garrison town as "Babylon." Bates masterfully captures the girl's seduction by an officer, her several months of blissful first-love, and a near-disastrous experiment with theft that left her considerably wiser. The story is enlivened by the colorful Batesian stalwart, a pleasure-loving chambermaid experienced in the ways of the world. Vannatta (117) finds the piece flawed by the "smug superiority" of the narrator looking back on her foolish youth, thereby providing an interpretation of the events rather than allowing the reader to form his or her own assessment. Baldwin (203) conversely finds it the most successful in the collection of the same name: "There is neither sentimentality nor cynicism in the presentation: everything is ordinary and unspectacular. Yet a life has been wasted by trusting and loving too much, and the resulting tragedy is genuine." However, it is not obvious that the respectably-married narrator was in any way ruined by the experience, but simply made aware of the existence of corruption in the world. In Woman's Own (11 July 1959), An Aspidistra in Babylon/The Grapes of Paradise (1960), The Grapes of Paradise (1974).[coming of age, seduction, love] 5/07
An Aspidistra in Babylon: four novellas (1960). London: Michael Joseph, 1960; Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Co. (An Atlantic Press Book), 1960, with title The Grapes of Paradise. An uneven quartet of novellas that continues the theme of unhappy love explored in The Nature of Love (1953) and Death of a Huntsman (1957). Baldwin (203) summarizes reviewers and finding the tales "readable but flat, the characters lacking conviction and pungency." Contains: An Aspidistra in Babylon, A Month by the Lake, A Prospect of Orchards, The Grapes of Paradise. 6/07
"Aunt Tibby." Story (1956). 9 pp./ca. 2200 wds. A tale of Uncle Silas told by the narrator's aunt (from the opposite side of the family as Silas), one of the only people able to "get the better" of him. The owner of a renowned and spotless public-house, Aunt Tibby is in danger of losing her best assistant to the womanizing Silas until she serves him up a pie "made and baked by Thirza" (the girl): "I just forget...whether it had four toads and eight frogs in it or four frogs and eight toads. Or whether it was three live eels and two slow worms or..." In Evening Standard (18 August 1956), Sugar for the Horse (1957).[silas] 6/05
"Autobiographical Note." Essay (1939). 2 pp./ca. 450 wds. A compilation by Michael Harrison consisting of fourteen stories by authors under the age of thirty, each story being introduced by an "autobiographical note." Bates writes of himself with humor: "Left the newspaper--graduated to a warehouse dealing in nails, linen-thread, eyelets, stiffeners, calico-linings, leather, hessian, buckram, rivets, sprigs, heels, tapes, besides Heaven knows how many other things that are used in the making of a boot...[writing] did not prevent his being captain of the local football team, a member of the local cricket team, or hundred yards champion, in his socks, of the local sports. Would almost rather, in fact, have been an athlete than a writer. In Under Thirty: An Anthology (London: Rich & Cowan, 1939, pp. 27-28).[autobiography] 9/09
Autobiography (1969-1972). Three volumes consisting of The Vanished World (1969), The Blossioming World (1971), and The World in Ripeness (1972).autobiography notes: edward garnett, 3-vol ab, natural history works, gardening works
"Awakening." Essay (1969). The title given to extracts from the first volume of Bates's autobiography, The Vanished World, which were printed in The Times (London, "Saturday Review" section, 23 August 1969, pp. i, iv).
"Back Home." Essay (1954). 1 pp./ca. 1100 wds. Bates's appreciation for England, especially its flowers and trees, after several months in the South Seas, is followed by concern that "the character of the Englishvillage is rapidly altering -- disastrously." Bates relates visits with his wifeto families and schools in Fiji and Samoa and contemplates that perhaps it is only those "who come home from remote places, out of great distances, who quite realise what England can really mean." In the Sunday Express (London, 16 May 1954). [England, travel] 11/09
"Bahamian Flower Show." Essay (1953). 1 pp./ca. 500 wds. Bates visits a tropical flower show wondering what it will have to offer, and finds beauty that is "luxuriant" and "exotic" in contrast to the "endearing cottage simplicities" typical of English flower shows. Complete with detailed mention of outstanding specimens. In the Sunday Times (London, 31 May 1953).[gardening]7/10
"The Baker’s Wife." Story (1927). 17 pp./ca. 3760 wds. Twenty-seven year old Janet and her husband of three years, the avaricious and unfeeling baker Jack, travel to Burton Fair to sell bread and pastries. Janet meets her former lover, the sensitive, cultured Sinclair and, kissing and embracing him, she grieves their quarrel and her ensuing desperate and unhappy marriage. At fair’s end, Sinclair and Janet find the drunken Jack and load him into the wagon for the ride home. Angry at the “meanness and pettiness of her existence,” Janet drives the horses wildly, but the baker’s remonstrances bring her back to resignation and tears. Highly dramatic emotions and an unrealistically disgusting character in the baker distinguish this story from the more subtly atmospheric tales of youthful innocence typical of Bates's first collection. In The Humanist (April 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[marriage, working class, rural](1/05)
"The Banjo." Story (1940). 17 pp./ca. 4160 wds. Two travellers, sharpening knives and scissors and playing banjo tunes for change, stop for a night in a wood. Charlie covets the banjo owned by the man named Uncle, imagining himself making more money on his own and then buying desperately needed shoes. He attempts to steal it, and in the ensuing struggle, is accidentally killed by his own knife, much to the bewilderment of his friend. Joining past vignettes relating to travellers and their hardships, the tale fails to engage us in its characters. In The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947). [t:travellers, music, theft](1/05)
"The Barber." Story (1929). 7 pp./ca. 1500 wds. In Vanished World (36-38), Bates describes the barber shops of his youth that "inflicted on me so considerable an amount of torture that even now, nearly half a century later, I still intensely dislike having my hair cut." Forced to visit them on Saturdays, he and other lads were made to wait until the barber had served each of the "army of men" there: "black-necked, poaching, shoemaking, prizefighting, often stinking men." In this story, based closely on his own experiences, Jonah is an outrageously imperious and capricious barber who ridicules and mocks the boys, never in fact cutting their hair but providing an allure that makes them return, rather than visit "some more discreet, black-coated model of a barber." A touching vignette of innocent boys in the often terrifying and distasteful world of men. In the New statesman and Nation (20 July 1929), Seven Tales and Alexander (1929), Thirty Tales (1934), and Twenty Tales (1951).[t:boyhood, barbers, autobiography] (1/05)
"The Barge." Story (1928). 7 pp./ca. 1970 wds. A boy, leaving his village to work on a barge, and filled with fear and dejection, is teased by an old-timer that "you'll get over it." He hopes that the barge will stop and allow him to change his mind, but the it glides on, and his feelings of blackness and despair return. Like many of the tales in Bates's first collection, a sensitive if sentimental glimpse at youth at a critical point in time. In Day’s End and Other Stories (1928).[boyhood, ship, fear](1/05)
Albert Bates, father of H.E. Bates, was born in 1878 to Charles Lawrence and Emma Bates. He lived with his mother and maternal grandmother until the death of Emma when he was two, then with her mother until her death, and from then on with his father and his new wife Elizabeth. He retained the name Bates, and thereby "twentieth-century English literature was spared the embarrassment of having yet another Herbert Lawrence on the scene" (Vanished World 8). Bates refers to him as "the other great formative influence on my childhood [along with George William Lucas] ... a deeply religious man, not merely devoted to the Methodist faith but positively locked in its uncompromising strait-jacket" (Vanished World 27), with strong views on cards, gambling, horse-racing, drinking, and dancing. At ten, he worked half-time in his father's firm (Knight and Lawrence) while attending school half-time (a life captured in the character of Adam in Charlotte's Row). At 13, he was asked to stay on at school as a teacher, but he declined. He eventually became head of the packing and export department and a commercial traveller, showing leather samples in northern England and Scotland. Bates notes his lovely copperplate hand, his excellence in math, spelling, and general knowledge, and his love of reading and acquisition of a "tolerably good little library"(Vanished World 28). From his mother he inherited a passion for the countryside, and he took pleasure in gardening (although he had only a tiny space to do so); he also greatly loved music, "teaching himself to read music, then ...buying a piano. He himself was possessed of a very fine, strong bass voice, the rich warm depth of which I can still hear emerging from the tiers of the chapel choir, of which he was subsequently conductor, like a splendid diapason" (Vanished World 29). Bates portrays him as providing well for the family, never a farthing in debt. Baldwin (29) contrasts the middle-class respectability and aspirations provided by Albert Bates to the working-class values of Bates's maternal ancestors, giving Bates a boyhood straddled between the two classes. [walking VW30 , money/lottery 127, vw67 takes over menton.Great love of countryside]. link to wife
Joseph Bates, an uncle of H.E. Bates and a great nature-lover, whose taxidermy shop forms the setting of the story "The Ship." (Baldwin, 20)
Lucy Bates (nee Lucy Elizabeth Lucas), Bates's mother, born in 1878 to George William and Elizabeth Lucas and died in 1972. Bates wrote that his "mother went to work as a half-timer, in the shoe-making industry at the tender age of ten, tying knots, for the princely sum of two shillings a week" (Vanished World 7). According to Baldwin (20), she was a strict Methodist (like his father), hardworking but undemonstrative, possibly even manipulative or hard. She appears as Richardson's mother in Love for Lydia but otherwise had no influence on Bates's work except, as Baldwin points out, possibly influencing Bates in his predilection for "warm-hearted, full-blooded women" by way of contrast.
"The Bath." Story (1934). 14 pp./ca. 2880 wds. An episode from Bates's trip to Germany, in the company of Charles Lahr and others, a trip also captured in "A German Idyll." A party of six, all desperately wanting baths, hike in the August heat up a mountain to Charles's (Karl in the story) village, "a lost and beautiful place." As in "A German Idyll," their arrival causes great excitement and celebration, but after a few days they become discontented, and the villagers grow cool. A schism in the party is averted only by an invitation to a rich farmer's bath-tub; that visit, related with humor and color, ends as "we linked arms with the peasants...and we all sang at the tops of our voices, not knowing quite what we were singing, in the common language of joy." Bates casts the village and its inhabitants in luxurious language that conveys a timeless place of fantasy. Baldwin (73) notes that the episode is recounted almost identically by Rhys Davies. In Lovat Dickson's Magazine (March 1934), Modern Short Stories (London: Lovat Dickson and Thompson, 1935), Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940).[t:germany, lahr, autobiography, travel] (1/05)
"The Battle of Britain, 1940." Essay (1944). 3 pp./ca. 1300 wds. A poignant reflection on the 1940 air battle, and three memorable qualities of it: unlike other important battles, it was fought above British land; it was fought against great odds; and its purpose was "as clear as the high light of summer in which so much of it was fought." In the Royal Air Force Journal (London, September 1944, ii, 9, pp. 298-300), Slipstream: A Royal Air Force Anthology (1946). [world war] 11/09
"The Battle of the Doddle-Bug." Alternate title of "The Battle of the Flying Bomb."
"The Battle of the Flying Bomb." Essay (1945). Unpublished, 1945. ca. 30,000 wds. One of two unpublished essays commissioned and owned by the Royal Air Force. A statement accompanying a photocopy of the essays in typescript form (the other being "The Night Interception Battle 1940-1941") reads: "The original material in this book is the property of the Royal Air Force on whose behalf it was prepared by H.E. Bates whilst commissioned as a Flying Officer (Later Squadron Leader). The original material forms exhibition material, itself part of a wider exhibition entitled "H.E., Give Them Their Life." Concerning this, the second of the essays, the cover page states: "Story Two, The Battle of the Doodle Bug. A similar fate [see the earlier piece for the statement on it] awaited H.E. Bates when he was commissioned to write the story of Hitler's revenge weapons, the V1 and V2 in 1945. The flying bomb or doodlebug created much excitement in Squadron Leader Bates, particularly as his own house was under the flight path of these hideously noisy robots. The material he gathered both in Southern Britain and later in France was to form a traumatic tale which the R.A.F. wanted to publish, but which the War Department felt contained too many sensitive facts. It was stamped 'Closed Til 1972' and remains unpublished." Eads calls the essay"The Battle of the Flying Bomb" and refers to it as a "pamphlet, on duplicated sheets" as having approximately 30,000 words; the photocopy examined for this entry is in eight chapters with approximately 31,500 words, and may therefore be identical to the original, although the other essay appears to have two different typescripts. The Doodlebugs: The Story of the Flying-Bombs, (London: Hutchinson, 1981) by war historian Norman Longmate quotes extensively from the essay, which he refers to as "The Battle of the Flying Bomb" with location "File Air 20/4140 in Public Record Office." Like its companion essay, the work is a thorough history as well as an engaging account for the general public, in which Bates discusses both the V1 and V2 bombs from a technical standpoint, as well as the techniques of interception and defense; the effects on English society, including fires and evacuations of London, and the responses of government and military officials to German tactics and propaganda. Other non-fiction treatments of the War include The Battle of Britain, "Escape," and There's Freedom in the Air.[t:war, pilots,non-fiction] (6/10)
"The Beauty of the Dead." Story (1939). 16 pp./ca. 3800 wds. A woman lays dying, attended by her devoted husband of forty years and surrounded by fine furniture, china, and glassware that over time had become their mutual obsession. Defying the doctor's instructions to bring in nursing help or even to build a fire, the husband labors in his workshop over the construction of her coffin. Finding her dead, he works all night to complete the work, and lays her in the coffin. "With tears in his eyes he stood ...for a long time, taking in the beauty of the snow-light that was growing stronger every moment, and the beauty of the dead." A bleak tale, on the one hand capturing the fierce strength of an unusual marriage, but at the same time depicting an isolation that has become eccentric and unhealthy. In the Fortnightly Review (December 1939), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), The Beauty of the Dead and One Other Short Story (1941), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), The Poison Ladies and Other Short Stories (1976).[t:marriage, age, death] (1/05)
The Beauty of the Dead and One Other Short Story. Stories. 1941 (May). Limited edition of 23 copies printed by the Corvinius Press of two stories previously published in The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories. 66 pp. Contains: The Beauty of the Dead, The Bridge.
The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories. Stories (1940). London: Jonathan Cape, 1940 (6 December). 256 pp. Including seven previously unpublished tales (and eight published previously in periodicals), this collection, like the preceding Flying Goat, is generally considered part of a low point in Bates's career. Bates continues his longstanding sympathetic treatment of the dispossessed -- the aged, simpletons, children, or people burdened by bad choices -- but with added complexity and less idealization. Almost all of the stories focus on a bleak character or situation, and characterize marital and family relations in a miserable light. While most of the stories suffer from some flaw of construction or conception, several finely display Bates's characteristic compassion and observation of subtlety, among them the title story, Love is Not Love, Quartette, and The Earth. Baldwin (143-144) finds "few genuinely new or vigorous tales in the volume," although "the style is as exquisite as ever, and the stories show the practiced hand of an experienced craftsman." He notes "excessive explanation and easy moralizing." Vannatta (54-57) agrees, saying that Bates "lapses again and again into a regrettable discursiveness that is diametrically opposed to the artistic virtues that he defends in theory and previously executed so admirably in the past...At this point in Bates's career the freshness and vigor seem to be largely absent from his writing." Contains: The Beauty of the Dead, The Bridge, Fuchsia, The Ferry, The Loved One, Old, The Banjo, A Scandalous Woman, Love is not Love, Quartette, Mr. Penfold, The Goat and the Stars, The Earth, Time to Kill, The Little Jeweller.
"Beauty's Daughters." Story (1935). 26 pp./ca. 5330 wds. The narrator, a young travelling man (not unlike that in The House With the Apricot), stays a night with a mother and two daughters, all high-living and spoiled, and a father, deaf and meekly indignant at their carousing. Pervaded by descriptions of the drought-ridden farmland and the bleak household, this unconvincing story exposes the father's flawed devotion to his daughters, and his despondency in the face of his miserable marriage. In Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951). baldwin 104 based on walking tour Cotswalds [t:traveller, family, marriage, daughters, rural] (1/05)
"The Bedfordshire Clanger." Story (1949). 7 pp./ca. 1960 wds. Returning to the very successful Uncle Silas character after ten years, Bates has Silas regaling his young nephew with a typical tall tale, this one involving a buxom landlady and poor grub, a pudding that is "hard as a hog's back" called the Bedfordshire Clanger, and a conclusion in which Silas keeps the landlady warm, "half-starve naked...in her nightshirt" and from then on is "never in want fur the nicest bit o' pudden in the world." In Argosy (September 1949), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951), Sugar for the Horse (1957), The Best of H.E. Bates (1980).[silas, sex] (1/05)
"The Beginning of Things." Story (1942). 7 pp./ca. 1720 wds. A tale of a twenty-year-old pilot who is shot down and loses his arm, but who flies solo again. Featuring more action and excitement than most of the "Flying Officer X" stories, Bates sympathetically portrays a soldier with "one of the faces of those who fight wars they do not make and for whom flying and life are one: the faces of those who should be watched, the faces of the young -- and not of the young who die, but of the young who are shot down and live, of those who are at the beginning of things." In the News Chronicle (22 April 1942), Argosy (July 1942), There's Something In The Air (1943), How Sleep The Brave and Other Stories (1943), Something In The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952).[t:war, flying officer x, pilots] (1/05)
"The Bell." Story (1943). 6 pp./ca. 1610 wds. In this slight but touching tale in the "Flying Officer X" series, the narrator and a comrade visit a pub accessible by ferry, a bell serving to request ferry service. The proprietor and his wife inquire about the narrator's old squadron and in particular about their favorite, a fun-loving prankster named Mr. Lockley. They are moved by the story of Lockley's difficulties in his personal life and his military service, and of his eventual success as a pilot, ending with his imprisonment; his death is suggested but left ambiguous. Returned by ferry, the narrator hears the ferry bell, reminding him of one of Lockley's typical tricks. Lockley's story resembles in some respects that of the pilot in "The Greatest People in the World," such as poor luck, accidents, a fear of flying, and the loss of family in the war. In the Jerusalem Radio Forum (Airgraph Digest, 4 June 1943), Slipstream: A Royal air Force anthology (1946), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952).[t:war, pilots, flying officer x] (1/05)
The Best of H.E. Bates. Title of the American edition of the 1963 story collection Seven by Five.
The Best of H.E. Bates: A Selection of Novels and Short Stories. Collection (1980). A posthumous collection, not to be confused with the selection of short stories made by Bates in 1963, the English title of which is Seven by Five but the American title of which is The Best of H.E. Bates. Contains: Fair Stood the Wind for France, The Purple Plain, The Darling Buds of May, The Triple Echo, The Four Beauties, The Simple Life, The Bedfordshire Clanger, The Major of Hussars, The Wild Cherry Tree, The Little Farm, Great Uncle Crow.
Joseph Betts. In the preface to My Uncle Silas, Bates says that many of the Silas stories were based on the real experiences of Bates's great-Uncle Joseph Betts, "late husband of my maternal grandmother's sister Mary Ann." Betts is described at greater length in Bates's Vanished World (60-61) as a "reprobate, rapscallion, crafty as a monkey, liar, gardener of much cunning, drinker of infinite capacity, afflicted with one blood-shot eye that gave him a look of devilish fascination." He is similarly described in Through the Woods (24-27), where Bates mentions that he underwent a serious operation at seventy-five and "went gaily on to live another fifteen years of aggravated wickedness and cunning." In each of these accounts and in the Silas stories, Bates recalls fondly his visits to Betts in his Bedfordshire cottage in the town of Sharnbrook (Baldwin 49).
"Birds and Seeds." Essay (1939). 1 pp./ca. 1100 wds. An entertaining celebration of the autumnal activities of blackbirds, tits, finches, starlings, and other birds in the garden. In The Spectator (27 October 1939, clxiii, p. 280). [Gardening] 9/09
"The Birthday." Story (1926). 9 pp./ca. 1890 wds. Nicoll, home from university, attends the birthday party of 16-year-old Irene. His is uncomfortable, especially when a candle falls from the cake and burns a hole in the tablecloth, signifying bad luck. Alone with each other in the kitchen, they kiss, but he leaves dispirited, thinking of her as he goes to bed; Irene has a restless night, interrupted by memories of him, his kisses, and the fallen candle. A surreal snapshot of the emotions of two young people. In The Nation (30 Oct 1926), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[youth, love] (1/05)
"The Black Boxer." Story (1931). 42 pp./ca. 7130 wds. A portrait, near novella length, of an aging boxer. In a beautiful passage, Bates introduces Zeke Pinto doing a "curious dance" that includes wild movements, cartwheels, wild calls, and afterwards instruction in the steps, for the gathered stagehands. His boss, Sullivan, upbraids him for being out of shape and neglecting his training, noting that he is losing fights and thus money. In vivid prose, we see him struggle against the local Dan Harrison, twenty years his junior, but finally winning the fight with a foul cut below the belt (not however observed by the referee, Sullivan). In the end, he is left "tired and stupefied and ashamed." Like a number of the stories in Bates's third collection, the emphasis is on characterization, and on people lost in purpose and connection. Pinto is black, old, and no longer needed in the carnival life, yet he retains some nobility of stature and spirit in his interactions with the angry boss and in his acceptance of his life. In his preface to a 1938 collection of his stories, Country Tales, Bates would single out this tale, along with "Charlotte Esmond," as accomplishing his difficult transition from a focus on mood to a focus on character and thereby projecting him "into a new world." In Everyman (3,10,17 December 1931), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949).[carnivals, boxing, blacks] (1/05)
The Black Boxer Tales. Stories (1932). London: Pharos Editions, 1932 (15 February). 272 pp. Dedication: "To my wife." New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1932. Bates's third collection displays growing maturity in plot, writing, and especially characterization, while building on his previous skill at creating plotless atmospheric pieces. Several stories explore new settings or character types -- a boxer, a shopkeeper, a German prisoner, performing artists. At the same time, others portray the familiar characters and country settings of his previous Midlands tales: the disenfranchised, innocent children, the dashing poacher or mower, and a girl entering womanhood. Baldwin (102) notes that Bates's style here has "matured into a flexible instrument of lyric beauty or realistic power, as the occasion demanded. But there remains in most of these tales a disturbing lightness, a want of solidity at the core that many readers would trace to a lack of ideas." Vannatta (33-35) observes the increased interest in characterization and in new subject matter, both of which when added to his previous strengths give Bates a "short-fiction aesthetic which will serve him well in the prolific years of the 1930s." In 1949, five years after Bates's transfer of allegiance to publisher Michael Joseph in 1944, Cape would reissue these eleven stories with a new title story as The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales. Contains The Black Boxer, On the Road, A Love Story, Charlotte Esmond, A Flower Piece, The Mower, The Hessian Prisoner, Death in Spring, Sheep, The Russian Dancer, and A Threshing Day for Esther.(1/05)
"The Black Magnolia." Story (1968). 37 pp./ca. 8300 wds. A delightful farce, involved two voluptuous and liberated women and a repressed, teetotaling bachelor. Their fruitless efforts to attack the "fortress" of his puritanical attitudes are hilarious and reminiscent of Bates's best comical work in the Larkin Family and Uncle Silas works. The work shares with several other late stories a celebration of the sensual life ( "A Party for the Girls" and "A Couple of Fools"). In The Wild Cherry Tree (1968).[sex, repression, love of life, comedy] 10/07
"The Blind." Story (1938). 9 pp./ca. 1690 wds. An unconvincing tale of a charlatan itinerant optician, one J.I. Vairpatana, and the farming couple who spend increasing amounts on worthless ointments for their daughter's sight. Bates depicts the girl's inclination to deny her worsening condition, and the self-deception as the father pays "for something else besides a cure. He bought prestige, importance, some essence of slight mystery, a thing to boast about." In The Spectator (7 January 1938), The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).[t:doctors, indians, health, naivete] (1/05)
"Blossoms." Story (1927). 8 pp./ca. A young widow, Francie, daily bicycles her son two miles to school and back, and takes great pleasure in the speed, wind, sounds, and plant-life on the journey. One morning the boy asks about the red dust of the emerging elm-blossoms, layering the grass and road. Riding back, her love for her child makes her see his face, "in reality stupid, unenlightened and mute" as "simply and eloquently beautiful" and she envisions him first as a strong and clever youth, then as a mature man. She dreams of him following her path of singing,, and perhaps performing in London. The next morning when the boy asks the same questions as before, she is blind to his dullness and forgetfulness. Soon the elms and other trees fully blossom, and continue to convey to Francie hopes and dreams, never to be realized, on the blossoming of her boy. A very sweet, though sad, evocation of the devotion of a mother to her son, and of the power of nature to influence the emotions. In The Nation (31 December 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[motherhood, love, dreams, nature/emotions] (1/05)
The Blossoming World. An Autobiography, Volume Two. London: Michael Joseph, 1971 (October); Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Illustrated by John Ward. 184 pp./ca. 58,000 wds. Bates's second volume of autobiographical memoir covers his career from 1926 to 1941, providing insight into his mentor, Edward Garnett, and others who furthered his work. Baldwin (225-226) notes the work's strengths and weaknesses: a highly enjoyable book but one with few personal revelations, and especially little evidence of the family life that was core to Bates's happiness. [autobiography] 6/08
"The Blue Feather." Story (1957). 14 pp./ca. 3950 wds. A long Uncle Silas tale, in which Silas recalls being caught poaching at the Castle Hanwick, and his subsequent adventures with the crazed woman of the house; refusing to get his cap from under her bedsheets, he is faced by the woman "starve naked, with a double-barrel gun in her hands." "Not long arter that they took her away, poor gal...She'd been away afore, but I never knowed." In Sugar for the Horse (1957). [silas, poaching] 6/05
A Breath of French Air. Novel (1959). 160 pp./ca. 41,000 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1959; Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company (An Atlantic Monthly Press Book), 1959. The second of five Larkin family novels has the entire family of eleven travel to the north of France: much comparison is made to England, difficulties are experienced and resolved by the newly-weds Charlie and Mariette, Pop Larkin engages in a variety of dalliances, and the entire cast, including Angela Snow and her nun-like sister, convene on a splendid dinner in the conclusion. The well-realized character of hotel owner Madame Dupont returns in the fourth book, Oh! To Be In England. [larkin, france] 8/05
"Breeze Anstey." Story (1937). 46 pp./ca 11300 wds. Two woman, twenty-eight-year-old "Lorn" Harvey and twenty-three-year-old "Breeze" Anstey, pursue an idyllic herb-farming life in the country, making naive business plans, laboring hard, and forming a bond that at least for the younger woman becomes romantically and sexually imbued. The arrival of Lorn's lover, a supercilious Doctor in his fifties, commands all of her attention and awakens Breeze to her feelings, her disappointment, and to a recognition of what her future must entail. Vannatta (41) states that the piece "might be considered one of Bates's very best stories except that it so obviously draws from Lawrence's "The Fox." Baldwin (126), while noting the similarity, considers it a "Bates classic...For Breeze the painful transition from innocence to experience is both liberating and tragic. If her views of life and love were naive illusions, at least she possessed a heroic desire for love and perfection." The story captures the awakening of "forbidden" feelings in Breeze, and concludes tenderly and optimistically as she leaves the farm "where things had seemed, a moment before, to be all over, but where they seemed, now, to be just beginning. And she knew that the rest, whatever it was, lay with herself." Lawrence's "novelette" (as he himself called it) was published in 1922, and it can be assumed that Bates had read it; the two stories differ in important ways, and it could be said that Bates simply explores the same territory, and in the process reveals different aspects of it. In Lawrence's tale, the tense manipulation of people and events by the man, rather than the emotional state and development of the "spurned" woman, is the main interest. For Bates, Lorn and her lover are mainly tools to help reveal Breeze's realization and development. In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Twenty Tales (1951), Selected Stories (1957), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963).[sex, romance, coming of age, homosexuality, rural] (1/05)
The Bride Comes to Evensford. Novella (1942). 54 pp./ca. 19,700 wds. London: Jonathan Cape, 1943 (1 February). Dedication: "To Dilys Powell and Leonard Russell" (contributor to and editor of, respectively, The Saturday Book). A tale written and published in the midst of Bates's work for the Air Ministry, but hearkening back in style and subject matter to his pre-war stories. It follows Miss Cassell from her arrival in a small town to work for a draper, to her marriage to him, her increasing command over the business and the household, and finally to a absurd infatuation with a young man as a widow in her fifties. Throughout the bleak story, the lead character is presented as lacking in feeling, ruthless and ambitious, and incapable of relationship with other people, thus resembling many a previous Bates character in being trapped within her own emotional prison. Baldwin (158) notes that the story is the first publication since Spella Ho (1938) to "derive from Northamptonshire material. The theme once again is the stultifying effects of devotion to work and wealth, this time with a female central figure who rivals Bruno Shadbolt [in the novel Spella Ho] in a singleminded devotion to material success." Because of Bates's success with his war stories, the book "quickly sold ten thousand copies -- more than any previous novel by a wide margin." This story, along with the remaining "Flying Officer X" stories, would be Bates's last offerings to his long-time publisher, Jonathan Cape, which published it singly and as the lead story in a 1949 compilation. In The 1943 Saturday Book (London: Hutchinson, October 1942, Part 5), The Bride Comes to Evensford And Other Tales (1949).[t:northhamptonshire, ambition, lonely women] (1/05)
The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales. Stories (1949). London: Jonathan Cape, 1949 (14 November). 224 pp. Dedicated "To Dilys Powell and Leonard Russell" (contributor to and editor of, respectively, The Saturday Book, where the title tale was first published). A reissue of the 1932 collection of stories, The Black Boxer Tales, with the addition of the 1942 novella The Bride Comes to Evensford as the new title story. Bates left publisher Cape in 1944 for Michael Joseph; in this and in the 1947 compilation Thirty-One Selected Tales, Cape was attempting to reap some benefit from its Bates catalog in the light of Bates's tremendous wartime and post-war popularity. Contains: The Bride Comes to Evensford, The Black Boxer, On the Road, A Love Story, Charlotte Esmond, A Flower Piece, The Mower, The Hessian Prisoner, Death in Spring, Sheep, The Russian Dancer, A Threshing Day for Esther. (1/05)
"The Bridge." Story (1940). 31 pp./ca. 6300 wds. A long narration in five numbered parts by a twenty-two-year-old woman, in which she and her older sister both vie for their boarder, the chief engineer of a modern by-pass and concrete bridge to replace the town's "old hump-backed bridge." Bates establishes the roots of the conflict in their childhood relations with their father, relates the awkwardness of the older sister in expressing her romantic feelings, and depicts the cruel behavior both of the narrator and of the man, who eventually reveals himself married and unavailable. The story ends symbolically with a cherished lime-tree nearly downed, the antagonism intact, and a new boarder inspiring the attentions of both sisters. Baldwin accurately cites the story as an example of the "excessive explanation and easy moralizing" that characterizes the collection The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories. Bates's first novel, The Two Sisters, also involves two sisters, a suitor, and much natural symbolism, and ends with the sisters together again. In Horizon (January 1940), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), The Beauty of the Dead and One Other Story (1941), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957).[t:sisters, rivalry, romance, affairs] (1/05)
"The Brothers." Story (1934). 18 pp./ca. 3780 wds. A dark portrayal of a tense and disturbed relationship between two gypsy brothers, one meek and the other bullying, as they gather and cut timber. Goaded by his sister-in-law, the timid one is finally "filled with the diabolical strength of pure cowardice" and moves to attack his brother. Losing courage, he is destined to a life of abuse and domination. In The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940).[t:brothers, rivalry, despondency] (1/05)
"Buds of March." Two paragraphs, included in a 1941 anthology The House of Tranquillity, and selected from a chapter called "The Darling Buds of March" in Through the Woods.
Bumpus's Book Store, Oxford Street, London. In the summer of 1926, responding to Bates's restlessness and loneliness in his hometown of Rushden, Edward Garnett arranged a position for him (and subsidized his salary) in the Children's Department of a bookshop run by John Wilson (Baldwin 67-68). In the 1950 memoir Edward Garnett, Bates wrote that Wilson "must often have been dismayed at the sight of another of Garnett's proteges strolling in and out of the shop just when he thought he would." In his autobiography Bates would write that he was "dreamy, unpunctual, impractical, indolent and more or less useless" at the store and offered the children's book The Seekers (published by Wilson) partly to assuage his conscience (Blossoming World 39-40). (1/05)
"The Butterfly." Story (1959). 9 pp./ca. 2250 wds. A boy, tended in England by a governess and visited by his parents (who live in Asia) only in the summers, talks with his father over breakfast; the reader deduces that the mother has left her husband for another man and that a certain butterfly, long wanted by the boy for his birthday, only reminds the husband of his pain. The story subtly captures the boy's confusion, his love for his mother, and his father's awkwardness and insensitivity. In The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [boyhood, family relations] 2/06
Henry James Byrom. An important friend to Bates during his adolescence, Byrom arrived at Kettering Grammar School two years after Bates and was one year older. Bates describes him as "the very person I needed: "intelligent, warm, witty, athletic, and a lover of music, theater, and the countryside" (Vanished World 106-108). Byrom, who went on to study history at King's College, London, inspired Bates academically and remained a lifelong friend (Baldwin 37), among other things serving as best man at his wedding and going on a walking tour of the Cotswolds with him in August 1932. (1/05)
"A Candle for Spring." Essay (1958). 1 pp./ca. 800 wds. A vivid and affectionate account of a late winter, and its effect on flowers, birds, and humans, ending in ruminations during a power cut: "And heaven it was, I must say, to live for an hour or two ... with nothing to do but gaze at a cold spring evening fading with an occasional yellow flicker from tossing daffodils under a dim light of three candle-power and wait in silent patience for spring to win the old, immemorial battle." In The Spectator (28 March 1958, cc: 200, p. 287). [nature]4/10
"Candle Power." 1 pp./ca. 250 wds. Essay (1972?). A four paragraph reminiscence of "one Christmas--I think the first of the war--totally unlike any other before or since." Bates recalls five guests at the family table, a Czech couple with their baby son and a German woman and her daughter. "I searched my mind for a way of quickly alleviating the sadness. Music, it seemed to me, was the answer and Dvorak was surely the name...No scene of Christmas has ever struck me so forcibly. I have known gayer ones, happier ones, noisier ones, more bucolic ones, but never one so poignant." Included in a photocopy of p. 224 of an unidentified book, with the citation "H.E. Bates in Woman." Bates notes that the dinner took place more than 30 years before; if the dinner took place in 1939, then this piece can be placed from 1970 on, probably appearing in a December issue of Woman magazine (which also printed, on 16 September 1972, "The Moment that Changed My Life"). [autobiography, Christmas]5/10. PHOTOGRAPH OF TEXT
"The Captain." Story (1937). 17 pp./ca. 4000 wds. A soldier and his girlfriend spend weekends at their cottage, leaving a greyhound in the care of a sixteen-year-old boy during the week. While the woman establishes a light and warm rapport with the boy, the Captain dislikes him intensely and reacts violently when he brings first a snake and then an otter to show her. When the Captain throws the otter to the greyhound, which tears it "to pieces, throwing it about, ripping it in lust, until it was like a blood-soaked swab," the boy exacts revenge by starving the dog. But the couple return before the dog has died and, at story's end, the boy is about to be confronted by the Captain. In its treatment of repression, anger, and violence (with overtones of sexuality), the story represents a new direction for Bates far from either comic sketches or atmospheric rural ones. Vannatta (41) finds the story "an almost painful reading experience: the story of abusive power, hatred, torture, and innocence defiled, all set in the lush gardens of a country summer home." Similarly, Baldwin (126) calls it a "deliberately cruel and bitter story" in which "Bates challenges readers to confront cruelty as a fact of human life. If we are shocked by the boy's torture of a dog, by how much more should we be revolted by the pain of inflicting it on others? It is one of Bates's most successful stories with a direct moral intent." In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Country Tales (1940), Twenty Tales (1951), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [t:violence, repression, sex, boyhood, dog] (1/05)
"Captain Poop-Deck's Paradise." Story (1963). 16 pp./ca. 3900 wds. Treating a theme best covered in earlier work, a barely entertaining portrait of a professional con-man in his sixties, who surrounds himself with beautiful young women and finagles capital through enticing newspaper advertisements. In Argosy (March 1963), Pick of To-Day's Short Stories (1963), The Wedding Party (1965). [con man, boats] 7/07
Carrie and Cleopatra: a Play in Four Acts. Play (1939). Unpublished. Typescript ca. 104 pp. . Although performed at the small Torch Theatre in London in April 1939, with Louise Hampton in a lead role and with assistance from Bates's long-time supporter Violet Dean, it closed after a brief unsuccessful run and was never revived or published. Jonathan Cape's choice not to issue it would later figure in the dispute with Bates about contracts and book options that eventually severed their relationship. Bates refers to the play in The World in Ripeness (119) (1/05)
"The Case of Miss Lomas." Story (1937). 18 pp./ca. 4300 wds. A widower in his fifties, on a coastal holiday, half-heartedly involved in a flirtatious relationship with the hotel proprietor's very young daughter, is confronted about the relationship by another guest, the reserved and troubled Miss Lomax. He attempts to befriend her, but she, on finding him continuing the romance and overhearing herself disparaged by him, refuses to speak with him; however he observes her "looking at him with the oddest conflict of emotions: hatred and doubt and despair and what he felt was also a kind of religious devotion." At the end of his stay, fearing that the girl might have become too attached and do something rash, he learns instead, from her letter a week later, that Miss Lomas has killed herself. An unsettling tale of sexual repression and of an unlikely, questionable liaison. Vannatta considers it one of the best stories in Something Short and Sweet, noting that the widower resembles Miss Lomax in his fear of passion and is revealed throughout the story to be incapable of understanding human emotion and motivation, including his own. In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Twenty Tales (1951). [travellers, repression, sexuality] (1/05)
"The Cat who Sang." Story (1963). 12 pp./ca. 3900 wds. A late, absurd, and forgettable comic tale, in which a overworked teacher hallucinates that his black cat Susie is able to sing Schubert's "Trout" theme (which unfortunately is rendered inaccurately, both in notes and rhythm, in the musical notation appearing in the story). Neither his vet nor his fiancee hear the singing as anything more than "unbottled echoes of distant caterwaulings on cold moonlight nights" but another young woman catches a husband by a more favorable response and by dying her hair jet black. In Argosy (June 1963), The Fabulous Mrs V (1964). [cats, music, men/women] 7/07
Catherine Foster. Novel (1929). London: Jonathan Cape, 1929 (April). 256 pp./ca. 55,800 wds.; New York: Viking Press, 1929. Bates's second novel, written in 1928 following his abandonment of the flawed Voyagers, features clear and exquisite writing, delicate and precise imagery, and a predictable storyline. Part 1 introduces Catherine Foster, a lovely and creative young woman married to the dull and respectable merchant Charles, and living in a town not unlike Bates's own Rushden. A life in nature, with music and the company of her close-knit family, has given way to a suffocating existence with a man who married her not so much to prolong his single experience of passion but to "see the end, for once, of a new experience" and thus return to his bourgeois life of commerce and reason. His insensitivity to Catherine, nature, and music lead her to hate him "over and over again for his meanness and soullessness" and to experience "a certain fearlessness, a power to accomplish any kind of defence in the cause of those things she loved, trees, blossoms, clouds -- the bereaved thrushes, and if necessary for the cause of another, woman or man, who shared her love of sensuous things." Part 2 introduces Charles's younger brother Andrew, a handsome, charming, but slightly disreputable character. A series of scenes, in the Foster home and garden, boating, at a concert, and in the woods, portray Catherine and Andrew discovering each other, and sharing their love of music and nature. In Part 3, they engage upon an affair, conducted at his flat in nearby Harkloe, but Andrew's debts (partly a result of his expensive gifts for Catherine), an encounter between the brothers, and Catherine's desperate and persistent attachment to Andrew (which he finds increasingly distasteful and boring) all lead him to drop her and disappear, debts unpaid and money stolen from his employer. At the novel's end, Catherine knows she will never escape the dreariness of her life, that it would go on, "indefinite, unrevolutionized, unalleviated except by the remembrance of things." The reader is led to sympathy for Catherine throughout the novel, forgiving her poor choices in men, and acknowledging the social and family influences that affected those choices. In his discussion of the novel, Vannatta (27-30) notes that, like Bates's first novel, The Two Sisters, Catherine Foster concerns a woman who attempts to escape a confined and unhappy life through passion, but fails; he notes the importance of atmosphere to both novels but the more realistic tone of the second novel. He also notes that in Charles's attitudes towards Catherine and in her attitude towards premarital sex, Bates addresses social questions of a very contemporary nature. Baldwin (79-80) notes that the plot "is essentially that of Madam Bovary," and while noting Bate's increasing maturity as a writer (under the influence of the editing of Edward Garnett), he also observes that in focussing on emotional states rather than character interaction, and by failing to flesh out either of the male characters, Bates has created a novel of beauty but not one of depth or intensity. Baldwin also notes that Bates was forced to alter a passage in the novel that Wren Howard (partner with Jonathan Cape) found indecent. Manuscript: SL. [add death of assistant, deathbed scene] [affairs, marriage, social constraints] (1/05)
"Chaff in the Wind." Story (1953). 9 pp./ca. 3090 wds. A melancholy portrait of a woman grown cynical and disillusioned as she converses with a suitor to her younger sister. As in most of Bates's rural fiction, the natural elements -- burning chaff, the wind, and an autumn rain -- are poetically interwoven with her constricted thoughts and feelings. In Evening News (20 April 1953), The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963). [rural, women] 5/05
"Charlotte Esmond." Story (1930). 38 pp./ca 6380 wds. A joyless and passive widow, owner of a cooked-meat shop that serves theatergoers, briefly finds hope in a courting salesman and then in her granddaughter. In the end, after the tragic death of the baby while under her care, she returns to her former life, resigned to boredom and loneliness. With traces of earlier stories ("The Flame," "Nina"), Bates presents the desperation of Charlotte's daily existence and reveals her underlying psychology: the suspicion of all that is not plain to see, the repression of all emotion in a philosophy of resignation, and an indifference to everything. Sharing some of the more realistic themes of Charlotte’s Row, the story displays Bates’s growing interest in characterization as well as in the social and economic context of his characters. In his preface to a 1938 collection of his stories, Country Tales, Bates would single out this tale, along with "The Black Boxer," as accomplishing his difficult transition from a focus on mood to a focus on character and thereby projecting him "into a new world." In The Criterion ( October 1930), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), Thirty Tales (1934), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949) and published in a separate edition as Mrs. Esmond's life (1931).[widow, resignation] (1/05)
Charlotte's Row. Novel (1931). London: Jonathan Cape, 1931 (30 March). 271 pp./ca. 59,400 wds. Dedication: To Henry James Byrom." New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Written in 1929 with the provisional title "Early Years," Bates's third novel portrays a colorful cast of characters in a shoemaking street very similar to that experienced by Bates in Rushden: Adam, a young boy modelled after Bates's father, Albert Bates, (who started out in the shoe business at the age of ten) and through whom much of the novel is experienced; the idle, arrogant, ostentatious, and drunken shoemaker Quintus Harper, superficially influenced in his philosophy by his friend Masher, a gentle, book and nature-loving, socialist shopkeeper; Quintus's daughter Pauline, passionate, idealistic, and in love with Masher; a hypocritical Baptist baker (see Bates's bake-house memories in Vanished World 69-70) who brutally beats Adam for theft; and the wives, respectively abused and shrewish, of Quintus and Masher. A series of episodes, some quite powerfully written, depict poverty, hunger, violence, death, and hopelessness; both in dialogue and in action, religion and the economic system are criticized, in contrast with the idyllic countryside enjoyed by Masher, Pauline, and Adam. Even the despicable Quintus eventually appears as a victim, as he revenges Adam's beating and longs to take his dogs to the woods. More realistic and harsh both in subject matter and in style than Bates's previous works, the novel had a mixed reception. Baldwin (97-99) notes that Bates for the first time uses multiple points of view, and commends him on avoiding both sentimentalizing the working-class characters and preaching to the reader; he notes that all of the principle characters are "imposed upon countrymen whose quiet village has been transformed into a clamorous factory town" and whose lives have been therefore ruined. However, he criticizes the novel as lacking a vision or organizing principle. Vannatta (30-31) calls it a "thematic and structural mishmash...an anachronism: a piece of nineteenth-century naturalism without the redeeming political vision -- simplistic and puerile as it often was -- of the proletarian novels that were appearing around the world" in the 1930s. Bates himself felt that his writing of the novel was less influenced by others ("Gorky hadn't a hand in it, nor anyone else," quoted in Baldwin 93) and was based more on his own experience. Vannata (31) concludes his discussion by saying that "flawed as the novel may be, it marks the end of his apprenticeship and looks forward to his flowering as a writer." (1/05)
"Chateau Bougainvillaea." Story (1938). 19 pp./ca. 3950 wds. Midway through a ten-day holiday in the north of France, a young schoolteacher is irritated by the mercenary small-mindedness of her fiancee, a draper's assistant. In an abandoned chateau (which she nicknames after a vine that represents the exotic, despite her never having seen it) she feels great happiness and security; these give her the strength to perceive a "deeper discontent" and to admit that, with this man "the future was already a thing of the past." A sobering glimpse at youthful romance and developing maturity. In John O'London's Weekly (22 April 1938), Atlantic Monthly (January 1939), The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), The Good Corn and other stories (1974), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).[t:engagement, romance, France, suffocation, feminine strength] (1/05)
"Chelsea." Essay (1935). 2 pp./ca. 950 wds. A second review of the Chelsea Flower Show (see "Crime by Blossoms," published in May 1933), in which Bates again adopts a humorous tone in detailing the wonders of what he calls a "manifestation of floral religion." A year later Bates would once again review the show ("The Other Chelsea"). In the New Statesman and Nation (25 May 1935, ix 222, p. 749-750). [flowers] 2/09
"Cherry Ripe." Story later titled "Daughters of the Village."
"The Child." Story (1928). 8 pp./ca. 1600 wds. A simplistic tale seen through the eyes of a very young girl, mesmerized by the sight of sea and swimmers through a window containing panes of many colors (showing her a "world more evanescent and startling in colour than ever the sea could be"). Tiring of being only an onlooker, she throws off her clothes and runs to meet the swimmers, making "little jubilant noises" and waving her hands. Her innocent pleasure is met by "fat women" and 'thin men" who, ashamed of her nakedness, shout for her to return. "But towards the sea that with its rolling yellow breast had appeared the very emblem of some bright, entrancing day, the child in its loveliness ran on." In The Criterion (December 1928), Now and Then (Summer 1929), Seven Tales and Alexander (1929), Thirty Tales (1934).(1/05)
"The Chords of Youth." Novella (1968). 43 pp./ca. 11,900 wds. Bates revives the character of Aunt Leonora (introduced in the 1965 story "The Picnic") in this comic novela in which Leonora entertains a visiting German, mistaking him for an old flame. Bates delights in depicting linguistic confusion, a wild flurry of food and wine (in the manner of Pop Larkin), and the irritation of a stiff and pompous English bureaucrat (the German's host). Vannatta (122) finds the plot and themes (of lost youth and nationalism) to "merely provide an excuse for introducing a group of eccentric, comic characters. We have great fun with these walking caricatures for a time, but the lack of focus eventually results in tedium." In The Four Beauties (1968), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [germany, comedy, slapstick] 10/07
"A Christmas Song." Story (1950). 12 pp./ca. 3320 wds. Clara is a sensitive young music teacher both touched by the request of a young man for the music to a song (which in time is identified as Schubert's famous "Standchen") and repulsed by the social world offered by her town of Evensford (Bates's first use of this name for a leather-factory town based on his native Rushden). She reluctantly allows herself to be dragged to the annual Christmas party, at the factory owner's mansion, but is unable to join in the rowdy fun or "let the blinds up" with a crass party-goer who attempts to seduce her. "Socially and culturally trapped, betrayed by her taste for refined culture into alienation from the vulgar and but vital life around her...Clara will never participate fully either in the life of the spirit or that of the flesh" (Baldwin 183); she thus resembles many an appealing Bates character whose future nevertheless seems bleak and limited. In Woman's Own Magazine (28 December 1950, with the title "A Song to Remember"), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963). [Evensford, love, music, society, unhappiness] (1/05)
"Cloudburst." Story (1936). 14 pp./ca. 3400 wds. A husband and wife vainly race to harvest their barley before a storm arrives; the crop ruined, the man lashes out at the woman over a trifle: "His anger was impotent, useless. It was anger in reality not against her, but against the storm, the ruin." In the style of much of Bates's earliest work, the story captures the atmosphere, beauty, and struggle of rural life. In John O'London's Weekly (15 August 1936), Something Short and Sweet (1937), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Twenty Tales (1951).[rural, marriage, anger, land] (1/05)
"Coconut Radio." Story (1955). 7 pp./ca. 1650 wds. The sixth of six brief newspaper "Tales of Tahiti." At a dinner party in Tahiti, various guests talk about their lives abroad while consuming exotic food and drink. One is accompanied by his vahini (native mistress), a blank-eyed and unsmiling older woman drinking gin; another arrives with his new vahini, a beautiful, smiling girl of fourteen or fifteen. A quick snapshot of British residents of Tahiti. In the Evening Standard (22 October 1955), The Wedding Party (1965), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [tahiti, expatriots] 6/05
"Colonel Julian." Story (1945). 14 pp./ca. 3980 wds. The title character, an 83-year-old veteran of service in India and owner of a mansion now hosting pilots, is both bewildered by and fond of young Pallister, with his RAF lingo, his dedication to flying -- which Julian characterizes as a disease in contrast to the more business-like detachment of earlier soldiering, his lack of perspective on his role in a larger military strategy, an absence of ethics that Julian decries in the "careless and calculated attitude" towards "killing Huns," and his contrasting tenderness when describing orchards in Normandy. There is a fragility to both characters: the older man, whose wars seem very small in comparison with the "frightening and enormous power" in the hands of the younger, and Pallister, sunbathing naked during his conversation with Julian, and thereby revealing the evidence of his injuries, medical treatments, and tortured return to flying. When, at tale's end, Julian learns that Pallister "bought it" the previous night, the poignant tragedy in both men's lives remains. As Vannatta (78) expresses it, Julian is "suddenly confronted with the realization that war has changed from a heroic, romantic endeavor to some cold, unblinking thing that kills young boys indifferently and leaves the living little more than physical and emotional scar tissue." A very strong, finely-constructed and understated portrait of two generations estranged by the whirlwind changes of wartime. In the Atlantic Monthly (February, 1945, with title "Colonel Motley"), Life and Letters Today (August, 1945), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974).[war, generations] (1/05)
Colonel Julian and Other Stories. Stories (1951). London: Michael Joseph, 1951 (June); Boston: Little, Brown and Company (An Atlantic Monthly press Book), 1951. Dedication: "To M.J. [Michael Joseph] with affection and gratitude." Bates first new collection of stories since the war displays a mature seriousness, with the exception of two typically ribald and humorous Uncle Silas tales. Following the war novels, three of which were set in the far East, Bates sets four stories in Asia and treats the war and its effects in two others. Three tales, in addition to the Uncle Silas sketches, are set in the English countryside and one ("A Christmas Song") introduces the town of Evensford, the Rushden-like setting of Bates's 1952 novel Love for Lydia. Two stories ("The Park" and "The Little Farm") were written in 1941 and another ("Joe Johnson") was written in 1944; the remainder stem from 1945 on, with fully nine of the fiteen selections written between 1949 and 1951. Vannatta (77-80) discusses four stories in depth and notes that, employing 'the same methods and themes that served him for twenty-five years," the war represents "only the most extreme manifestation of a theme that we witnessed [in Bates's works] with increasing frequency in the 1930s: the ravages of time and a changing culture." Baldwin (182-183) notes that the book "includes a number of studies of the oddities of humankind, characters who have been rubbed by life until flat on one side --literally oddballs." He finds the book "notable not only for the excellence of its stories but also for the quality of its style. Once again Bates achieves his effects by carefully selected details, restrained metaphor, and economical writing. The lushness and occasional laxness apparent in the last two war novels have disappeared, with the result that these stories penetrate human suffering and psychology in ways that are at once familiar and strange...This was Bates's quiet, unspectacular reaction to the postwar world; it drew little attention to itself in matter or manner but illuminated the condition of ordinary men and women." Bates thought highly enough of the collection to include six of the fifteen tales in his 1963 collection of thirty-five "best" stories. Contains: The Little Farm, Colonel Julian, Time Expired, The Lighthouse, Joe Johnson, The Park, Sugar for the Horse, The Flag, No More the Nightingales, The Bedfordshire Clanger, A Girl Called Peter, The Major of Hussars, Mrs. Vincent, A Christmas Song, The Frontier.(1/05)
"Colonel Motley." Alternate title of "Colonel Julian."
"A Comic Actor." Story (1929). 13 pp./ca. 2800 wds. An unsuccessful farmer, William Twelvetree, fulfils his life's ambition by auditioning for a village play and receiving the part of a monk. An infatuation with the young lead lady reaches a peak on opening night and he makes a fool of himself on stage, forgetting his lines and infuriating her. Returning to his devoted wife and daughters, he is unable to tell them the truth and "not knowing how else to cover his confusion, he began to bow, gravely and with a trace of weariness...smiling in a strained way as if indeed he had been some real jeune premier, very bored and very successful, at the height of his triumph." A fine early story, realistic and touching. In the New statesman and nation (29 June 1929), Seven Tales and Alexander (1929), Thirty Tales (1934).[theatre, embarrassment, rural](1/05)
"The Common Denominator." Story (1954). 20 pp./ca. 5530 wds. A tale of two maiden sisters, whose household routines, somewhat comically described, become completely disrupted when their manservant becomes ill and he requires a live-in nurse. Upon his death, one lashes out in anger at the cold and businesslike nurse: "I think it's perfectly scandalous the way you have behaved in this house...You treated everybody as if they were dirt." Her sister, however, having unexpectedly found a kind of intimacy with the servant in comforting him during the night, "had no hatred...she could think of nothing but the night-light, the plum branch and the way she had lain in the warmth of the bed." None of the characters, in this upper-class household uncharacteristic of Bates, is particularly compelling or appealing, but Baldwin (193) finds that "beyond the simple human compassion lies an important social message for the builders of the welfare state--that personal relationships are often more important than professional competence, and human warmth a more effective medicine than doctor or hospital can dispense." The story first appeared in serial form as "A Man in the House." In John Bull (20 March 1954), The Daffodil Sky (1955). [servants, domestic life] (6/05)
"Concerning Authors' Cottages." An edited reprinting of "My Cottage That Was a Barn."
"Conservatory Revived." Essay (1968). 2 pp./ca. 2200 wds. One of four by Bates in a series called "Gardens of Ideas" (preceded by "Undersoil Heating for Sub-Tropical Treasures" and "Growing 4,400 Alpines in Birmingham," and followed by "Jungle Rarities in Norfolk." Bates reports on his visit to the Wiltshire garden of Cecil Beaton, fashion photographer and stage and film designer, and a winter conservatory that reflects a "man of great taste, much sensitivity." In the Daily Telegraph Magazine (London, 29 March 1968, pp. 36-38).[gardening]6/10
"Corinthian-Casuals v. Bishop Auckland, 1956." Essay (1956). 4 pp./ca. 1250 wds. A play-by-play account of a football match on August 3, 1956, displaying Bates's love of the game, his knowledge of its individual players, and his ability to capture the drama of a close match in print. In the Sunday Times (London, 8 April 1956), The Footballer's Companion (London, 1962, pp. 204-207). [football/sports]11/09
"A Cotswold Day." Essay (1932). 1 pp./ca. 1000 wds. with two photographs. Bates's first published essay on the English countryside finely balances local color, social commentary, and evocative descriptions of towns and countryside largely protected from "the disease of ugliness [that] spreads with the machine [the automobile]." Taking the tone of a travel essay, Bates continues his Cotswold wanderings in "England Living and England Dead." In The New Clarion (August 27, 1932, i, 12, 271).[nature]1/09
"The Country Doctor." Story (1931). 13 pp./ca. 3220 wds. At the auction of the effects of Doctor Quintus Starling the assembled "dealers, old clothes women, farmers and private persons" fondly remember him as an avid sportsman who, having no interest in human company or women, had let his love fall instead upon ''animals, upon his mare, his dogs, and upon birds." To the dismay of the sportsmen and gamekeepers, two fine guns are sold at a high price to a "little woman, mouse-like, insignificant, nondescript." Miss Julie Atherley, aged 65, bicycles home through the countryside with the guns in tow and reflects on her meeting the doctor twenty years earlier when he had required her help with a hunting accident. Since then, once a week, he had visited her, often bearing game and exchanging pleasantries. "She had grown very fond of him. His personality had unfolded itself before her like a tapestry, rough, gloomy, picturesque, the threads of his stoicism, his atheism, his love, his moodiness woven to a fabric which was for her indestructible in its nobility and strength." Having purchased the guns in his memory ("two objects which, in use or out of use, repelled and terrified her"), she breaks into tears, catches herself and "when the servant brought in her tea she was sitting upright, sunk into tranquillity, and nothing remained to indicate that she had just come through the ordeal of hiding away the very soul of that godless stoic, that bluff sportsman, that most lovable man, her friend the doctor." First published in the Fortnightly review (January 1931) with the title "The Country Sale" and later in the limited edition The Story Without an End and The Country Doctor (December 1932). Manuscript: Single sheets of the manuscript were inserted in twenty-five signed copies of the printing of the book.[friendship, rural, romance](1/05)
The Country Heart. Essays (1949). London: Michael Joseph, 1949. Drawings by John Minton. 239 pp./ca. 84,000 wds. The copyright page states that the work is "a revised and amended edition of O! More than Happy Countryman and The Heart of the Country" (as Eads notes, the exclamation point and the omission of "In" as the first word of the second title are both errors); an estimated word count for the two earlier works, the revised edition, and two new chapters indicate that possibly Bates reduced the texts by at most 1500 words (but more careful examination would be required to confirm even this) but that otherwise any revisions were likely to have been small substitutions and alterations. The woodcuts of C.F. Tunnicliffe were replaced by drawings by John Minton. After the newly-written "Introduction: Yesterday" appear "Part One," containing the fourteen essays that made up In the Heart of the Country, "Part Two" containing the ten essays that made up O More than Happy Countryman, and lastly the "Epilogue: Tomorrow." In the introduction, written at Christmas (1948), Bates contrasts the countryside of his childhood with that after two wars; he finds "the things that make up so much of this book" to be largely destroyed and asks whether they are "merely the tender trivialities of one man's recollection or are they eternal things?...They are very dear to me and I am frightened of the answer." The epilogue, despite being subtitled "Tomorrow," begins with fond reminiscences of Bate's maternal grandfather and paternal great-grandmother and reflections on how they represented the best of the English countryside -- "English rural aristocrats of the finest type: gentle, decent, honest, fine to look at, upright and proud" (although Bates uses the term "aristocrats" despite their poverty, hard work, and lack of education). Bates reflects on the continuity of country life for centuries, with industrialization and mechanization bringing slow but unspectacular change, until after the first world war, when the full effect of the internal combustion engine was felt by both town and country. He considers the fusion of town and country to be "one of the few hopeful things in a fairly hopeless world," feeling that in a world increasingly focused on destruction, there must occur a "rediscovery of country life and the countryside" because of the creative power of agriculture. While appreciating what urban life can offer to rural dwellers, he also speculates that the worst examples of pre-fab urban developments have produced "the means of destroying themselves" through the atom bomb. "Are we really witnessing, not symbolically but actually, the destruction of an era, and being drawn back, with corresponding force, to a life that is closer to earth, the element which sustains us?" Contains: Introduction: Yesterday; Part One: Sudden Spring; Fisherman's Luck; Overture to Summer; Fruit Blossom Time; "Clouded August Thorn; Strange Battlefields; The Great Snow; A Summer Spring; "...Bring Forth May Flowers;" Victorian Garden; Wealden Beauty; The Strangeness of Fish; The Parish Pump; Flowers and Downland; Part Two: Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori; The Great House; Sea Days, Sea Flowers; Mr. Pimpkins; The Future Garden; The Garden on Leave' The New Country; The Old Tradition; The Green Hedges; O More Than Happy Countryman; Epilogue: Tomorrow. [nature, progress, war, non-fiction] (1/05)
Country Life. Essays (1943). Harmondsworth Middlesex England; New York: Penguin Books, 1943. 144 pp./ca. 58,000 wds. Unlike Bates's other nature books, this volume is a selection from his brief "Country Life" columns in The Spectator. Eads lists contributions in fifteen issues of the journal from 26 April 1935 to 24 October 1941, from which the selections for the published volume were made. In The Blossoming World (81), Bates credits Jonathan Cape's editorial assistant Rupert Hart-Davis with Bates's work for the Spectator, the column giving "me the very first regular income, a magnificent 6 guineas a week, that I had had since first beginning to write." The columns are grouped under the section headings The Birds; Country Problems, Country Government; The Seasons and the Weather; The Countryside at War; Flowers and Trees; Eat and Drink; Country Ways, Country Folk; Animals; Landscape; On the Land; In the Garden; and Prunings and Clippings. Baldwin (120) notes that Bates wrote the column as a substitute for its regular writer, Sir William Beach Thomas, until he was permanently assigned in 1940: "In this column (reminiscent in format of 'The Sign of the Rainbow' in the Kettering Reminder) he could comment on everything from new varieties of seed to rural housing, sanitation, and medical care. This was the political arena in which he felt comfortable, and it was one to which he contributed a great deal of careful thought, common sense, and experience." In his foreword, Bates maintains that science has brought about a "revolution" in interest in country life: improved communication, transportation, public health, domestic comforts (such as electric light and improved heating systems), and research about birds, flowers, and animals have "made possible for us, of the twentieth century, the easiest, safest, most comfortable, most accessible, most equitable and most varied kind of country life that has ever been known in England." He goes on to say that because "I believe that a happy country life is based as much on decent wages, decent sanitation and decent education as on the charm of Springtime and the call of the blackbird," the essays treat such issues a much as they do natural phenomena. Indeed, Bates states that "the countryside of England is, perhaps more than any other countryside in the world, man-made...To believe that the countryside will grow and blossom and remain beautiful without the intelligent and active interest of men and women is therefore a great mistake. It is to the opposite of such a belief, and to the kind of countryside and country life that have grown and will grow out of it, that this book is dedicated."[rural] (1/05)
The Country of White Clover. Essays (1952). 190 pp./ca. 46,000 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1952 (26 May). Drawings by Broom Lynne. With a title describing Bates's adopted county of Kent, Bates explores some of his favorite topics of earlier essay collections: flowers, gardening, and country life. Like his columns collected in Country Life, he also touches on the English and Kentish character, the effects of the war and technological change, and expresses opinions about the work ethic in a welfare economy. Entertaining anecdotes about the trimming of trees on his property, the hiring of gardeners (including a reappearance of the character of Mr. Pimpkins from the 1943 O More Than Happy Countryman), and a village flower show flesh out a volume that Baldwin (184) finds "wise and homey." In contrast to his other non-fiction volumes of essays on nature and rural life, the volume includes much about flowers and the changing of the seasons in France and Spain; these chapters, sometimes only tenuously related to the core topic of Kentish life, render the book more a compilation of unconnected essays than any of Bates's previous non-fictional works. None of the essays was published separately either before or after appearing in this 1952 collection. Contains: Journey to Spring, The Country of White Clover, A Piece of England, Trees and men, Union Rustic, The Face of Summer, Railway Flowers, The Show, All Summer in a Day, The New Hodge, Sea and September, The Turn of the Year. [nonfiction, nature, travel, kent, gardening, flowers] 4/05
"Country Parliament." Essay (1941). 7 pp./ca. 1900 wds. Bates writes of four satisfying years as chairman of his Parish Council, and at the same time reflects on the poor state of rural government: "a combination of carelessness and somnolent indifference to what can be and ought to be done, or a combination of grandiose ideas and a serious misconception of everything fundamental to rural life. Yet they are run like this in England to-day; and they are run too on the equally questionable combinations of bigotry and jealousy, pecksniffing and back-biting, bureaucratic jiggery-pokery, and plain, dumb slackness of heart." What might be a parochial article with little relevance to today is rightly ended with a reflection that "in this stagnant rural apathy...may be seen the workings of the same dry rot that contributed to the fall of France and may still, even after victory [in the World War], bring the roof of English democracy tottering about our ears." Bates wrote regularly about rural concerns, including government, in his Country Life essays. In Life and Letters Today (London, January 1941, xxviii, 41, pp. 198-204).
"Country Pub." Essay (1934). 2 pp./ca. 1760 wds. A memoir of a Bedfordshire inn maintained by one of Bates's aunts, Matilda, sister to his maternal grandmother Priscilla Bird Lucas. Bates fondly recalls the atmosphere, fragrance, customs, and clientale of the "modest and dignified little pub" that "reflected the character of my aunt. It was not prim, and I am pretty sure it was not always proper, but it had about it a kind of austere homeliness." Bates would later mention his aunt and pub in the first volume of his autobiography, The Vanished World (54). In the New Statesman and Nation (25 August 1934, viii, 183, pp. 237-238). [autobiography, lucas] 2/09
"The Country Sale." Original title of the story later titled "The Country Doctor."
"Country Society." Story (1955). 19 pp./ca. 5200 wds. At a party hosted by his comically nervous wife, a bored and cynical husband becomes enchanted by a young lady. Amidst all the other guests, whose affairs and sordid personal histories Bates reveals in exaggerated mockery, the girl is fascinated, delighted by everything. Her older host is touched by her spirit, and at the close of the evening, his wife disappointed in her efforts at social advancement, he is filled with a new appreciation of life. One of Bates's better attempts at light modern comedy, Baldwin (198) sees it as a hint of the spirit of the Larkin family novels (and further notes that "surely there is a bit of H.E." in the character of the husband). In The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [5/05][rural, party, comedy]
Country Tales: Collected Short Stories. Stories (1938). 412 pp. London: Readers' Union, Ltd, 1938 (September). An edition for Readers' Union members, identical to the 1940 edition published by Jonathan Cape except for the later substitution of "The Captain" for "The Palace" (due to the lawsuit described under "The Palace"). The volume of thirty stories is arranged chronologically and, with the exception of The Black Boxer, among the stories from each collection the order is identical to that of the original collection, with two stories from Bates's first collection (Day's End and Other Stories), none from his second, two from The Black Boxer Tales, then eight (all but five) from The Woman Who Had Imagination, twelve (all but two) from Cut and Come Again, and six (out of sixteen) from Something Short and Sweet. In the prefatory "The Writer Explains," Bates states that except for minor proof reading, he has not revised any of the stories "because I feel that once a story is written, printed and published it should have reached, in a sense, a state of finality" and "the author should then resist impulses to tamper with it, to superimpose on it the touches of a maturer experience and technique." He offers frank criticism of his earliest stories ("I was groping my way towards becoming a conscious writer" and "showed a dangerous appetite for sucking the significance out of trivialities"),and discusses his increasing emphasis on character over mood as well as his complete disinterest in plot. Lastly he bemoans the state of short-story publication in England, maintaining that it is "in every way a finer means of expression of our age of unrest, disbelief and distrust than either the novel or poetry." Contents: The Easter Blessing; Never; The Black Boxer; Death in Spring; The Story Without an End; The Gleaner; The Woman Who Had Imagination; Time; The Waterfall; Innocence; Sally Go Round the Moon; The Brothers; Beauty's Daughters; Cut and Come Again; The Mill; Waiting Room; Little Fish; The Station; The House with the Apricot; The Plough; Jonah and Bruno; The Bath; Harvest Moon; The Pink Cart; Cloudburst; Italian Haircut; The Palace; The Kimono; The Landlady; Breeze Anstey. (1/05)
Country Tales: Collected Short Stories. Stories (1940). 412 pp. London: Jonathan Cape, 1940 (5 July). Identical in contents to Country Tales (Readers' Union edition, 1938) except for the substitution of "The Captain" for "The Palace" due to the lawsuit regarding the appearance of the latter title in 1938. (1/05)
"A Countryman Remembers -- Trees and Foxes." Essay (1974). The title given to an excerpt from Through the Woods that was printed in Living (London, June 1974, viii, 6, p. 88).
"A Couple of Fools." Story (1964). 21 pp./ca. 6600 wds. A charming sketch, comic in a fashion different from Bates's more typically exaggerated humorous work. Two fashionable young women, ripe for a luxurious Sunday afternoon outing, find that their flamboyant hats win them attention and favors at every step. They are seated at a crowded restaurant with two young men who are initially cold but increasingly interested, as the girls order rounds of martinis for all. The story grows ever-more sensual and surreal; faced with a huge bill and two companions far too drunk for anything but a taxi home, the girls laugh the afternoon away, saying "Lovely to be a fool...Marvellous. Just to be all swing-high and a fool. The others miss so much...See what a good hat can do." Baldwin (213) notes a similarity in the story's setting to that of "The Angel" in A House of Women, and praises the tale as "a delightful romp celebrating good food and wine, spring weather, and youth -- a carpe diem lyric delightful in its telling." Another story in the collection, The Fabulous Mrs V, similarly celebrates liquor, food, and sex ("A Party for the Girls"). In The Fabulous Mrs V (1964), H.E. Bates (1975).[youth, food, wine, hats]7/07
"The Courtship." Story (1960). 13 pp./ca. 4000 wds. A touching story with a Christmas theme (first published on a Christmas Day) regarding patience, devotion, and a simple man's satisfaction in giving to others. With many a deft and charming detail, the narrator tells of helping a man deliver a "sizeable hand-truck loaded with flowers" and recounts his story: two middle-aged admirers, neither of them good-looking, conduct a courtship of some fifteen years anticipating the day when the woman's mother would die and leave her free to marry. Turning over part of his pay to his sweetheart each week for "a treat" was a "simple act of generosity [that] not only became a habit as satisfying in itself as an evening prayer might have been to another person; it became a means of fortifying him in courtship, in what were to be the long years of waiting for Edna." After Edna herself dies unexpectedly, the man responds by using some of the never-spent money on an abundance of flowers for her mother, pressing the last one on the narrator: "I carried the flower in front of me, carefully, holding it in both hands. It was exactly like a steadfast fragrant candle, pure and white as snow, lighting the outer darkness." Vannatta (90) calls the tale the "most fundamental affirmation of the power of love in Bates's canon...Instead of grieving miserably over his loss, he realizes that his life has been enriched and ennobled by love." In the Sunday Express (25 December 1960), Pick of Today's Stories (1961), The Wedding Party (1965). [love, christmas, flowers] 7/07
"The Cowslip Field." Story (1959). 10 pp./ca. 2500 wds. The opening selection in The Watercress Girl, Bates's highly successful collection of stories hearkening back to his boyhood in Rushden and the surrounding countryside, and one of Bates's three favorites from the set. A young boy and neighbor woman take a summer's walk to a nearby field, he plying her with constant questions and she chiding him for "chattering so much" - - in the telling, Bates reveals the magic and mystery of birdsong, buttercups, and anthills until they reach an immense "cowslip forest...All the fragrance of the field blew down on him along a warm wind that floated past him to shake from larches and oaks and hedges of may-bloom a continuous belling fountain of cuckoo calls." Having filled their baskets and hats, they make chains and he persists in urging his companion -- a plump, dwarfish spinster -- to let down her hair: "a strange transformed woman he did not know, with groping blue eyes, a crown on her head and a necklace locking the dark mass of her hair, stared back at him...'You look very nice, Pacey," he said. 'You look lovely. I like you." As they leave the field, she seizes they boy, "swinging him joyfully round her body and finally holding him upside down." A sterling example of Bates's ability to capture nature, emotions, and relationships, all in a short vignette. Vannatta (84-85) discusses the story at length as an example of the expert mingling of pathos and "haunting beauty" typical of the collection: "the fact that the boy's naivete allows him to see past the ugly surface to the beauty of the essential woman only underscores the tragedy and unfairness of her position in life." Baldwin (199-200) similarly considers it "the most effective and memorable" of the collection's stories: "a masterpiece of visual word painting" that "resonates with mythical power" through the use of the symbolism of the woman's uncoiled hair ("an ancient sign of sexuality [that] suggests meanings the boy cannot grasp)...Eden, the woman, beauty, sexuality, and the serpent come together in a single innocent image." In The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), Seven by Five/The Best of H.D.Bates (1963), The Poison Ladies and Other Stories (1976), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [boyhood, rural]2/06
"Crafts of Old England." Essay. 8 pp./ca. 6500 wds. A wonderful account of visits with craftsmen and women in the autumn of 1936: "hand-weavers as far apart as Devon and Northumberland, with a wood-turner in Northamptonshire, a potter in Kent, a bell-maker in Oxford, a smith in Rutland, with lace-makers from Bedfordshire, a quilter from Westmorland, with thachers and wheel-wrights and smiths and lace-makers and saddlers." Marvelously illustrated with sixteen photographs, Bates records interviews with both thriving and struggling craftsmen, explores the successes of the Rural Industries Bureau ("that...almost unbelievable thing, a government department working for love"), and anticipates the day when some of the crafts will disappear: "we shall lose something precious of our national inheritance. Because these arts are something more than mere occupations of the human hand. They are part of the very accent of the history of the island." In John O'London's Weekly (Special illustrated supplement, i-viii, bound between pp. 426-7, 4 December 1936). [rural, crafts] 9/09
"Crime by Blossoms." Essay (1933). 2 pp./ca. 800 wds. A tongue-in-cheek review of the annual Chelsea Flower Show, constituting Bates's first of several works showing his love of gardening and, in particular, flowers. Also of note are two references to "masculine-looking ladies [who] buttonholed them [nurserymen]and bombarded them with the fiercest horticultural catechisms." Bates's fiction features a number of lesbian characters who are consistently portrayed as masculine in appearance and manner. Bates would again review the show in 1935 ("Chelsea") and 1936 ("The Other Chelsea"). In the New Statesman and Nation (27 May 1933, viii, 183, pp. 684-685). [gardening, lesbians] 1/09
"Croix de Guerre." Story (1942). 5 pp./ca. 1540 wds. An entertaining Air Ministry tale about a modest French pilot who was captured by the Nazis and then escaped from them to safety with the allied forces. To his displeasure, the "Vichy authorities" assign him to north Africa and offer him the Croix de Guerre medal; as the medals are presented, he is among the squadrons flying over the ceremony, on his way to England and the R.A.F. In the News Chronicle (11 May 1942), Argosy (August 1942), How Sleep The Brave and Other Stories (1943), Something In The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952).[war, pilots, flying officer x] (1/05)
A Crown of Wild Myrtle. Novel (1962). London: Michael Joseph, 1962; New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963. 192 pp./ca. 38,000 wds. Characterized by both Baldwin (208) and Vannatta (103-104) as a "summer read" -- an entertaining but forgettable entertainment, slight in characterization and formulaic in structure -- this short novel (or long novella) depicts the escape of young Ruth Forbes from a middle-aged and possessive lesbian companion, to the arms of the strong and understanding Jack Marsden. Set in the Greek islands, and containing effective elements of romance, suspense and violence, Vannatta characterizes it as "but an exotic variation of Bates's well-worn pattern of the inhibited young woman being introduced to passion and love by a more experienced man" and Baldwin finds the ending psychologically flawed and smacking "too much of pulp fiction." Midway through the work, Ruth refers to the story "Out of Nowhere into Nothing," saying "That was how I felt. That was me." The reference is to a 1921 story by Sherwood Anderson.[Greece, lesbian, love triangle] 4/08
The Cruise of the Breadwinner. Novella (1946). 63 pp./ca. 19000 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1946 (July); Boston: Little, Brown and Company in association with The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1947 (March). A coming-of-age story, in which Snowy, a young crew member on a coastal patrol boat, "goes out, all starry-eyed in his notions of war's glamour and glory, to find himself involved in naked and bloody battle...finally [sailing] home...strangely grown in stature and refined by fire" (Bates's introduction to the anthology Six Stories). Two downed pilots, one English and one German, are rescued by the boat, but an air attack kills one of the three crew members and wounds the pilots, both of whom in the end die, with Snowy in attendance. Vannatta (62-65) notes both that at a time when England was tired of the war, Bates’s story found a receptive audience, and that although Bates calls upon his RAF experience to some extent in this work, for the most part it draws upon imagination. He discusses at length a running motif related to sight and vision. Snowy has a highly-developed ability to identify planes by sound but is limited by the lack of binoculars, long promised to him by his Captain, and eventually acquired from the German pilot. “The binoculars underscore his need not only for sight, but insight into the true nature of war, suffering, death…almost all suggestions of maturity or immaturity, ignorance or experience, [in the novella] are couched in terms of vision or blindness” (64). Snowy progresses from the view that “war was wonderful” to an acknowledgment of little difference between the two dying soldiers, back to a one-sided hatred of Germans, and finally to a broad vision of war and “all the dead pilots, all over the world.” Vannatta notes further that, contrary to Bates’s usual emphasis on atmosphere, in this work plot and characterization take precedence. Baldwin (166) notes the resemblance in structure to Bates's earlier coming-of-age tale, "Alexander;" he refers to "the hard objective style and spare narrative...The characters are painted in bold, clear strokes, and the contrast between their simple humanity and the cold fury of war makes this an intensely moving story." He notes that critics were unanimous in their praise of the work; Bates, in The World in Ripeness (111-113), proudly cites the critic James Agate's comparison of the work to Conrad's Typhoon. He acknowledges inspiration for the story in Crane's Red Badge of Courage, characterizes it as his second novella [after The Bride Comes to Evensford] and writes at some length of his fascination for that genre. Years later, Bates would include the tale in the anthology Six Stories (Oxford, 1965) "at the suggestion of the publishers," the other authors selected by Bates being de Maupassant, Chekhov, Beerbohm, Joyce, and Hemingway. In The Saturday Evening Post (23 March 1946), The Cornhill Magazine (April 1946), Twelve Modern Short Novels (London: Odhams Press, 1946), The Cruise of the Breadwinner & Dear Life (1951). [war, coming of age](1/05)
The Cruise of the Breadwinner & Dear Life. Stories (1951). London: Michael Joseph, 1951. [Evensford Edition -- Eads] Contains two previously published novellas, The Cruise of the Breadwinner (published as a book first in 1946) and Dear Life (published as a book first in 1949). (1/05)
"Cut and Come Again." Story (1934). 10 pp./ca. 2090 wds. A woman delivers dinner to her new husband, who is cutting a hedge. They resume last night's quarrel, displaying their insecurities, fears, and immaturity. On her departure, the man watches her, "unsure about it all, lost in a conflict of doubt and tenderness and some curious inexpressible pain." Baldwin (115) says of this story: "By a series of tiny incidents and gestures, Bates tells us all we need to know of a young married couple's first quarrel. The hedge the husband is cutting is the perfect objectification of the issue that divides them and all people, married or not, who quarrel." Published as "The Hedge" in The Listener (12 December 1934), and subsequently as "Cut and Come Again." In Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Selected Stories (1957), The Poison Ladies and Other Stories (1976).[marriage, rural, youth] (1/05)
Cut and Come Again: Fourteen Stories (1935). London: Jonathan Cape, 1935 (28 October). 285 pp. Dedicated "To Edward J. O'Brien." The book that inspired the oft-quoted review by Graham Greene, in which he compares Bates favorably with Checkhov (see Blossoming World 123), continues the generally rural themes of previous collections, with the emphasis on mood and atmosphere. Several stories, including a fine Uncle Silas tale (The Revelation) are humorous sketches reminiscent of Mark Twain, and nine stories are either narrated by a young boy or otherwise concerned with boyhood. One reviewer wrote that "his new collection of stories shows him growing more powerful, more realistic. His style is harder, more austere, but with this gain in force, Mr. Bates has lost none of his lyrical beauty, his singleness of theme" (Richard Church, John O'London's Weekly). Vannatta (37) writes that "The Station" and "The Mill" "elevate an otherwise indifferent collection to the status of one of Bates's four or five best." Baldwin however (116), calls it "one of the most wholly satisfying collections of his career, not duplicated for overall excellence until The Watercress Girl many years later." Contains: Beauty's Daughters, Cut and Come Again, The Mill, The Revelation, Waiting Room, Little Fish, The Station, The House with the Apricot, The Irishman, The Plough, Jonah and Bruno, The Bath, Harvest Moon, The Pink Cart.(1/05)
"The Daffodil Sky." Story (1955). 23 pp./ca. 6400 wds. A dark and finely constructed tale, in which a man recently released from prison relives the events that put him there; he goes to visit the woman he loved, with whom he planned to build a life but whose ambiguous relationship with another man led him to commit murder. At her home he is greeted by her daughter, perhaps his daughter as well, and they walk together to the bus and then to a pub. Vannatta accurately refers to "undercurrents of incest and violence" in this excellent portrayal of the man's damaged life and spirit. In The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963).[relationships, jail, incest] 6/05
The Daffodil Sky. Stories (1955). London: Michael Joseph, 1955 (October); Boston: Little, Brown and Company in association with The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1956. 256 pp. Dedication: "To Sir Louis Sterling." A fine collection of fifteen short stories, written between 1952 and 1955 and ranging from portraits of the English in foreign lands to poetic treatments of rural life in Bates's Northamptonshire, that amply display Bates's mature command of structure, atmosphere, and characterization and his compassionate view of the human condition. Vannata (80-82), calling the volume "Bates's crowning achievement in the later years," contrasts the "rich variety of tones" in the collection with previous works "where Bates tended to deal primarily in the subtle shadings of pathos." While acknowledging that some of the more significant tales resemble other late works in their "assiduous analysis of dangerous passion, ineffectuality, and loneliness," he rightly notes that a majority of the tales hearken back to Bates's earliest work in focussing on atmosphere and characterization, by examining "situations rather than sequences of events." Bates included nine of the stories in his 1963 collection Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates, evidence of his own high opinion of the collection. Contains: The Good Corn; The Daffodil Sky; Country Society; Across the Bay; Elaine; The Maker of Coffins; The Treasure Game; Chaff in the Wind; The Small Portion; The Common Denominator; A Place in The Heart; The Evolution of Saxby; Roman Figures; Go, Lovely Rose; Third View on the Reichenbach. (6/05)
"The Dam." Novella (1972). 38 pp./ca. 11,000 wds. A love triangle, ending in a mother's murder of her daughter. An Englishman on holiday at an alpine hotel pursues a German woman, breaking through her "stiff, cold Teutonic, regimented air." The arrival of her daughter reveals a long-standing and mutual hatred and, as the man's attentions transfer to her, the mother grows increasingly hostile to both lovers, in the final page pushing her daughter over a cliff. The piece is weaker than other Bates efforts on similar themes, partly because the man's interest in both women is less than convincing. In The Song of the Wren (1972). [love triangle, murder] 10/07
The Darling Buds of May. Novel (1958). 160 pp./ca. 44,000 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1958; Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company (An Atlantic Monthly Press Book), 1958. The first of five Larkin family novels follows the transformation of Mr. Charlton from a malnourished and timid tax clerk to a fully-converted member of the Larkin way of life: an easygoing celebration of nature, food, drink, and family. In the process, the reader is introduced to the Brigadier, Miss Pilchester, and Angela Snow -- each of whom Bates utilizes in the subsequent novels, and towards the end, Bates sets up one of the subplots of those sequels, the purchase of the Bluff-Gore house. Setting the style for the series, the book ends with a grand celebration, and the announcement of the wedding of Charlie and Mariette. The novel was filmed with the title "The Mating Game," an adaptation criticized by Bates in an article called "When the Cinemagoer Complains That - 'It Isn't Like The Book' - Who's To Blame?" It was adapted for stage and produced at the Saville Theatre, London, starring Elspeth March and Peter Jones, and at Northampton Repertory Theatre [date?]. From 1991 to 1993, Yorkshire Television produced a highly-successful television series called The Darling Buds of May, which faithfully recreated the first novel as well as some of its successors. [larkin] 8/05 [theater dates, need movie/tv entries]
The Darling Buds of May: The Pop Larkin Chronicles. Novels. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993. 331 pp. A posthumous collection of the first three of the five Larkin Family novels. Contains: The Darling Buds of May, A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh.
"Daughters of the Village." Story (1953). 8 pp./ca. 3300 wds. A group of women working the beet fields stops for lunch; their saucy conversation is dominated by the large and comic Pol, who talks of asking the farmhand Harry to a dance. "A gnome on an orange tractor, a little man with a flat black head and piercing, doleful blue eyes that searched the skirts of the women and roamed along the line of bodies bowed against crosswinds as they hoed the fields." All the women laugh about Harry except Phoebe, "a tall, high-cheeked girl with long fine legs and pale brown arms" who, upon hearing Harry's tractor, "makes up her lips for Harry. Her neat young lips were already wet with cherry-stain and now she began to turn them a redder, richer orange with smears of bitten fruit." She pretends to get her "beauty sleep" during the delightful repartee between Harry and Pol, during which the topic of the dance is left undecided, Harry in fact throwing out an invitation to Phoebe, but with no response. With the arrival of a young mother and child, Pol turns her attention to the infant, saying "You're my man, aren't you?...You're the man for me." The bravado and sadness of the spinster Pol, the sensuous energy of both Phoebe and Harry, and the playfully suggestive dialect and dialogue render this a fine rural tale more typical of Bates's work in the 1930s, one surprisingly never included in Bates published story collections. In Argosy (August, 1953, with title "Cherry Ripe"), Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (1961). [rural, women] 5/05
Rhys Davies. Welsh writer, chiefly of short stories, who frequented Charles Lahr's Progressive Bookshop in London, where he met Bates around 1926. He was a member of the group travelling to Germany in 1927 and an occasional correspondent with Bates later in life. His book Print of a Hare's Foot (London: Heinemann, 1969) confirms much of what Bates recounts in A German Idyll and The Bath.(1/05)
The Day of Glory: A Play in Three Acts. Play (1945). 79 pp./ca. 20,900 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1945. Set in the lounge of a family home in southern England and taking place in a twenty-four hour period in the summer of 1942, the play concerns "the impact of war on the individual...a single day of action as it affects the family of a young and successful fighter pilot. Through the eyes of his uncle, a colonel mentally wrecked by one war; of his young sister, adoring and in her adoration utterly oblivious of the future...of his pre-war fiancee [need accent] and her pre-war standards and ideals which she sees being destroyed before her eyes; of his lover, with her clarity and tenderness born out of the knowledge that the lives of pilots are shorter and more tense and more rarified than our own; and lastly of his mother, who with the brilliant and painful vision of motherhood sees the destruction of three generations exemplified by a single tragedy" (from the "Publisher's Note" as quoted in Eads, 60). Overlapping in many ways with Bates's "Flying Officer X" stories in sympathetically portraying pilots and their motivations, the fears and desires of their loved ones, and the struggle to find meaning during wartime, the play was produced at Salisbury on October 31, 1945 and broadcast by the BBC on November 5, but not produced in London until after the war [get date]. In The World in Ripeness, Bates writes at some length of his aspirations as a playwright, and of his lack of success with some fifteen one-act or three-act works over the course of many years. Bates says that upon his assignment to the R.A.F. station at Oakington, he was inspired first to write a play, but focused instead on stories, especially as another author had written a play in a similar vein. By the time he returned to the work and had it produced in London, "all fervour for the war had been dissipated...one could only sense, on the first night, an atmosphere cold and disillusioned." Bates says that the play did better outside of London and "is, however, still [in 1972] performed and has even achieved, in Holland, a state of some permanency as an annual event." [war, pilots] (2/05)
The Day of the Tortoise. Novella (1961). 94 pp./ca. 19,800 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1961 (November) . Illustrated by Peter Farmer. A gentle tale of a brief interlude of pleasure in the drab existence of a man nearing his sixties. Fred Tomlinson shops, cleans, cooks, and otherwise indulges the eccentric demands of his three spinster sisters until a familiar Bates character, the fun-loving Kitty, disrupts the long-established routines of the household. Penniless, heavy-drinking, and pregnant by a married man, she introduces him to dance, drink, kisses, and song while he provides her temporary lodging in the stable, unbeknownst to his sisters. After the girl's departure, Fred retains some of his newly-discovered capacity for joy, and in this respect the story differs from many a Bates tale where the main character tries but fails to break out of a suffocating existence. Baldwin (207) notes the Cinderella quality of the tale, and praises Bates's talent for "comic invention in depicting Fred's sisters, but more important is the empathy he shows for Fred and Kitty -- people we might despise if we met them, but who earn our sympathy and understanding." The title refers to one of Fred's pets, a tortoise who is led by a leash on walks in the garden. Baldwin (202) cites correspondence dating the writing of the work as January 1960, with first publication in Argosy in September, 1960, with illustrations by Mary Dinsdale. [love, music] 5/07
Day’s End and Other Stories. Stories (1928). London: Jonathan Cape, 1928 (June), 288 pp. New York: Viking Press, 1928. Dedicated “to George William Lucas, also a story-teller.” Bates's first collection of stories, including almost every story he had written by the age of 23, is remarkable for its range of subjects and skilful prose. As noted by Baldwin (75-76), most of the tales concern "underdogs" -- children (4 stories) , adolescents (9), old people (7), and an idiot, and two very effectively contrast age and youth ("Fear" and the "Fuel-Gatherers"). Bates shows great sensitivity to the emotions of these characters in simple but poignant situations, creating atmosphere from elements of nature, and, in the best stories, displaying Checkhovian skill at revealing much through dialogue and sparse prose. While most of the stories reflect his Northamptonshire roots (including much subtlety in portraying the natural world), others have more urban settings or are domestic stories in which natural setting is irrelevant. Vannatta (13-22) notes that even in this first collection, Bates expertly utilizes the methods of his entire career: reduction of characterization and plot to only essential elements, and pictorial and inferential style methods that incorporate nature in creating meaning. Bates, in the preface to Country Tales, a 1938 collection of his stories (including none from this first collection), would write that "stories like 'Fear," 'Fishing,' 'Blossoms,' 'the Idiot' and 'Harvest'... were written easily, quickly and light-heartedly, often between breakfast and lunch...I was groping my way towards becoming a conscious writer....I showed a dangerous appetite for sucking the significance out of trivialities [which] threatened...to make me a writer of very limited scope." He also refers to "The Birthday" and "Two Candles" as examples of "the dreamy world of the subjective...in which mood was more important than character." Among the more popular and successful stories are "Harvest," "The Idiot," "The Easter Blessing," and "The Flame" (the only story in the collection selected by Bates for inclusion in The Best of H.E. Bates). Contains: Day’s End, The Baker’s Wife, The Birthday, The Shepherd, The Easter Blessing, The Spring Song, The Mother, Fear, The Dove, The Flame, The Holiday, Two Candles, The Fuel-Gatherers, The Father, Gone Away, Harvest, The Barge, The Lesson, The Schoolmistress, Fishing, Never, Nina, The Voyage, The Idiot, Blossoms.(1/05)
"Day’s End." Story (1928). 55 pp./ca. 12,390 wds. Seventy-year-old Israel Rentshaw and his daughter Henrietta, barely surviving on his poorly-maintained farm, receive notice that the property will be sold. Bates depicts Rentshaw’s dissolute and jinxed forty years on the farm, his inertia in taking action towards buying it, and his failing health. Urged by his daughter to give up the farm and rest, Rentshaw pushes himself to fell a young fir to repair a hen-house, suffers a heart-attack, and the land is sold. Rentshaw suffers regret over financial matters while convalescing, but dies with a comforting vision of the fir-tree. While excessively long, and sometimes melodramatic and simplistic in its message, this early tale nevertheless contains excellent passages that depict man in nature and man against society, themes of Bate’s entire output. The title-tale and lead selection in Bates's first volume of stories, it is one of four stories in that volume dealing with the aged; it also bears some similarity in its theme with "In View of the Fact That." In Day’s End and Other Stories (1928). [age, rural, landowners] (1/05)
Dear Life. Novel (1949). Boston: Little, Brown and Company, An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1949 (November); London: Michael Joseph, 1950 (February). 152 pp./ca. 37,000 wds. Written in the midst of Bates's immensely popular war novels (The Jacaranda Tree, The Scarlet Sword) is this short novel that represents one of the few experimental efforts that Bates made in his long career. The graphic and powerful story of teenage Laura -- as her life devolves from an abusive and miserable home situation to a series of senseless robberies and killings with an ex-soldier -- is Bates's vehicle to present the "nightmarish physical and spiritual wasteland of post-World War II London...easy sex, easier violence, bomb craters and blasted buildings...where inhabitants stumble as if in shock, remnants of a ruined civilization" (Vannatta 72-73). In the process, the reader is exposed to a variety of characters, all of them despicable: an unfeeling mother and abusive stepfather, a crazy uncle, and a self-absorbed employer and choir director; Bates also sets the background of disappointed aspirations in love and school, and the loss of her father in the war, that precede Laura's downward slide. The compassionate portrayal of a young person, neglected and absolutely devoid of willpower or self-esteem, has precedent in a number of Bates's novels and short stories, but the progression to nihilistic destruction sets the work apart. Vannatta (72-75) writes extensively about this little-known and (at the time of publication) much-maligned work. He notes that explicit violence is evident in previous works of Bates, in particular the war novels, but that "neither the fact nor the quantity of violence in Dear Life shocks us so much as its nature, mindless and unrepentant, and the method which Bates employs to present a bleak fable of a world in ruin." He praises Bates's "skill in creating a world so grotesquely soulless and violent as to transcend the real to the surreal" and considers the novel, which "ends without a hint of resolution, condemnation, or hope," to be a precursor of such works as Golding's Lord of the Flies and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange; "as an indictment of soulless postwar English society it is infinitely more powerful and honest than the 'angry young man' fiction that followed in the 1950s." Baldwin (170-171) notes that the novel represents a first and shocking return to naturalism after a swing towards romanticism in the war novels, "a progressive loss of objectivity that drifted eventually into sentimentality;" he suggests that this shift was influenced by Bates's research for Edward Garnett, his tribute to his first editor, and the reminder of Garnett's teachings on "the need for severity and objectivity that had in the past produced much of his best work." Ms: King's School, Canterbury (Hugh Walpole Collection). Later published in The Cruise of the Breadwinner & Dear Life (1951).[post-war, family, adolescence, violence, crime, music](1/05)
"Death and the Cherry Tree." Story (1959). 10 pp./ca. 2600 wds. A glimpse at three children at play: a boy interested in war games and being in charge, a young girl who has tired of his domination and wants to fix him a pretend meal, and a newcomer, an older girl willing to cater to the boy but also mature enough to use her feminine attractions to gain her own control. The story ends with the young girl deserted by the boy and sadly returning home. Reminiscent of an earlier story about childhood relations, The Peach-Tree: A Fantasy. In The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [childhood] 2/06
"Death in Spring." Story (1931). 19 pp./ca. 3080 wds. The narrator and his friend Irene visit the woods in April to observe fox-cubs. There they meet an old man who invites them into a shooting-hut. He has come to have a last shot before his death, although it is too early for hunting season. "His body was like an aged tree, and his eyes were like two miraculous young leaves...they were like the eyes of a child or of a young girl, full of unquenchable life and curiosity and wonder." He tells them of his illness, of his sportsman's life, and of a lover some sixty years ago who played Cleopatra on stage. He hopes to "hang on a bit longer -- a bit longer. It's nice to think of summer coming on...But I haven't heard the cuckoo yet, have you? It seems late this year." As they depart, he offers this advice: "If you wish to do anything, do it. Do what you feel you must do. Don't listen to other people. You're young, Let them go to the devil. It's your life, not theirs." Returning through the woods, they hear a shot and later a cuckoo; "I wondered if the old man had heard it too and how often he would hear it again." A fine example of an early mood piece with a growing skill at characterization. In John O'London's Weekly (29 August 1931), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), Thirty Tales (1934), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951). [age, death, rural] (1/05)
"Death of A Huntsman." Novella (1957). 73 pp./ca. 16,700 wds. A tragic love triangle, involving an older man (Harry), his former lover who is now "a boozy, bitchy, frowsy woman--much like Harry's wife" (Vannatta 113), and her beguiling daughter, an avid horserider, which whom he falls in love. The romance is convincingly portrayed, but the title and the natural imagery deployed by Bates both anticipate that it will be short-lived; the girl's mother, threatening Harry that she will tell her daughter of their past affair, causes him to recklessly crash his car. Like the other novellas of this period, Bates explores unhappy relationships, although in this case presenting "just a hint of sunshine in Bates's bleak thematic sky" (Vannatta 114). In Argosy (April 1957), Death of a Huntsman/Summer in Salander (1957), The Grapes of Paradise (1974), A Party for the Girls (1988). [marriage, romance, horseriding][ 7/05
Death of a Huntsman. Novellas (1957). 224 pp. London: Michael Joseph, 1957; Boston: Little, Brown and Company in association with The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1957. Appearing in Britain with the title Death of a Huntsman and in the United States with the title Summer in Salander, this was Bates's second collection of novellas (following The Nature of Love in 1953) and, as discussed at length by Vannatta (112-116), it is in many ways a "thematic extension of its predecessor. All the novellas deal with love relationships, and all end unhappily." However, while the first collection contained no examples of genuine affection or love, this collection includes "relationships that--had conditions been happier--might have developed into something resembling a healthy love." In addition, he notes that while the first collection envelops "the reader in a suffocating fog of gloom," in the second collection "we are refreshed with an occasional ray of humor." Regardless of theme however, Bates's mastery of characterization, atmosphere, and style are in full evidence; Vannatta notes that two of the works effectively use the length of the novella to allow a "movement/countermovement structure" and reversals in characters and plotting. Contains: Death of a Huntsman; Night Run to the West; Summer in Salander; The Queen of Spain Fritillary.
"Death of Uncle Silas." Story (1934). 12 pp./ca. 2350 wds. The third of three initial Uncle Silas tales (see "The Lily" and "The Wedding") depicts Silas rebellious and feisty to the end, filling his medicine bottles with elderberry and cowslip wine, shooting a blue jay in his garden, and tricking his housekeeper by slipping out at night. Disbelieving that Silas could really be dying, his great-nephew bids a poignant and fond farewell to a man who "was so old that it had always been hard for me to realize that he had ever been born." In The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), My Uncle Silas (1939, with an initial "The" in the story title).[silas, rural, age] (1/05)
"The Delicate Nature." Novella (1952). 57 pp./ca. 15,500 wds. Like its companion novellas in the collection The Nature of Love, this taut depiction of a sordid love triangle explores desire and lust, but not love. Bates builds tension prior to the arrival of "the great Malan," a plantation owner, and his wife Vera, very effectively setting the stage for an affair between Malan's assistant, Simpson, and Vera, as well as Malan's inevitable murder. Simpson's innocent love for Vera is dashed when she makes plain that the affair was merely her attempt to win back her husband. In an ending that Vannata (112) correctly finds anticlimactic, "merely adding another level of bitterness and disillusionment to an already bleak vision," Vera tells Simpson that "You know now how it feels" (unreciprocated love). Vannatta (111-112) notes “the influence of W. Somerset Maugham -- to whom The Nature of Love is dedicated – [in] the polished style, careful construction, and tropical setting, but Conrad’s influence is even more apparent. Simpson – young and naïve, travelling into the dark heart of Malaysia’s jungle to a rubber plantation – is Bates’s Marlow. Malan – powerful, mysterious, something not altogether right about him – is Bates’s Kurtz.” In Argosy (July, 1952), The Nature of Love (1953).[love, sex, Asia] (4/05)
"The Diamond Hair-Pin." Story (1961). 13 pp./ca.4200 wds. In a tale where Bates might be expected to portray the inability of human connection, he instead portrays two people who choose to face their fears and reach out to each other. A young draughtsman, "cautious, withdrawn and self-centred," places a newspaper ad for a piece of jewellry he has found, in the process becoming obsessed with romantic fantasies about its owner. The woman who answers has a "plain dull face, its hopeless stare and the straight short hair where no hair-pin could ever possibly have sat." The two catch each other in various lies, but rather than causing them to retreat, this humbles each of them, and the man, making "an abrupt and incredible conquest of shyness," asks to see her again. Acknowledging that " everything takes time," the two face a future together. In Modern Woman (March 1961), The Fabulous Mrs V (1964).[love, lies] 7/07
"The Disinherited." Story (1942). 6 pp./ca. 1580 wds. In this "Flying Officer X" story, Bates introduces a station with men from every continent, and singles out an older and distinguished Czech: "in order to be one of us, to fly with us and fight with us, Capek had come half across the world." The tale relates his imprisonment and travels, with a comrade named Machakak and through many countries, to become an R.A.F. pilot. But with the death of his comrade, "now alone...the hardest part of it all, perhaps, is that Capek cannot talk to us. He does not know words that will express what he feels...He does not know words like endurance and determination, imperishable and undefeated, sacrifice, and honour...He does not know the words for grief and friendship, home-sickness and loss...Above all he does not know the words for himself and what he has done...Looking at his white hair, his dark eyes and his long hands, I am silent now." In contrast to many of the other war stories, Bates takes a melancholy and sombre tone, while at the same time presenting the quiet strength and bravery of R.A.F. pilots. In the News Chronicle (18 May 1942), Argosy (September 1942), There's Something In The Air (1943), How Sleep The Brave and Other Stories (1943), Something In The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).[flying officer x, pilots] (1/05)
The Distant Horns of Summer. Novel. London: Michael Joseph, 1967. 280 pp./ca. 86,000 wds. Bates's final novel represented a departure for him, both thematically and stylistically. With a very small cast in an unidentified part of England, Bates explores the all-consuming imaginary lives of two characters -- six-year-old James, neglected by his globe-trotting parents, and his seventeen-year-old governess, Gilly -- and their struggles with deceit and disappointment. Gilly finds herself increasingly drawn into James's fantasy world (populated by the elderly Mr. Pimm and Mr. Monday) to the point of joining James in setting places for them at table, until the arrival of Alex Ainsworth, a dishonest womanizer, with whom Gilly conducts a demeaning affair. The novel ends with the temporary disappearance of the boy (but his eventual return, alone again with a new governess), the enlistment of a drunken neighbor in the effort to find him (with the resulting failure of the "real" world of neighbors and policemen to grasp that Mr. Pimm and Mr. Monday are indeed imaginary, rather than dirty old men), and what appears to be Gilly's suicide (although handled ambiguously by Bates). Vannatta (106-107) notes that the affair (a familiar Bates theme) is only of interest in how it affects James and Gilly and "only as it precipitates their twin descent into psychosis. He praises the work, where "Bates creates a believable world of dreams and illusion" in which the reader cares about the characters and their fates. Baldwin (215-216) finds the work a "very fine novel" that includes "rounded and believable characters in a fully realized setting and combines them in a carefully constructed plot." He finds Bates's exploration of reality to be "not philosophical but practical, an inquiry into the nature of appearance and reality through ordinary experiences and levels of consciousness" and notes that the adult world is "equally confused" (the drunken neighbor and the policemen), leading to a Shakespearean play-within-a-play situation where "reality and imagination become difficult to separate."[childhood, imagination, affair] 5/08
"The Dog and Mr. Morency." Story (1938). 10 pp./ca. 1925 wds. An unimpressive tale of a miserable man in an unsatisfying marriage, burdened with the care of his wife's pomeranian. Having himself urged the acquisition of a dog, but a large and large protective one, Mr. Morency "felt the gradual growth and hardening of a peculiar hatred" and vows to shoot either dog or wife. But leading the animal to the end of the esplanade, service revolver in pocket, he meditates on the thousands of dogs being walked around the world, and on his own "miserable, despicable...absolute caricature of a dog...He saw in the reflecting eyes of the small dog a small reflection of himself. He saw the dim light of something abject, downtrodden, a little forlorn, deeply unhappy...And in that moment he could have shot himself." In John O'London's Weekly (28 October 1938), The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).[t:pets, marriage, humor, dogs, miserable man](1/05)
"The Double Thumb." Story (1956). 8 pp./ca. 2130 wds. An Uncle Silas tale involving a pretty woman, a jealous husband, and a narrow escape, with Silas in the end telling his nephew that "You're a-gittin' too fly by half, boy. You're a-startin' to ask a sight too many questions." In Evening Standard (13 August 1956), Sugar for the Horse (1957). [silas] 6/05
"The Dove." Story (1927). 5 pp./ca. 890 wds. A young brother and sister are frustrated and saddened by their caged dove's refusal to eat, sing, or move, despite all efforts to please him. In the morning, finding him nearly dead, they are distraught and they abandon him. Later in the day, learning that other doves are singing in the woods, the children’s faces “seemed to reflect from somewhere an indefinable a look of wistful unbelief, of sad conviction, as if knowing this could never be.” A simplistic sketch of youthful innocence and lessons. In the Manchester Guardian (6 October 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928).[youth, rural, animal](1/05)
"Down the Garden Path." Essay (1932). 2 pp./ca. 600 wds. Bates praises Down the Garden Path, a book about gardening by Beverley Nichols, as "full of joy. It quivers and bubbles and brims over with the love and delight of flowering things." And he writes that "One day I also may have the courage to write a book on myself as a gardener," (a prediction that was realized in several of Bates's books, including Flowers and Faces, A Fountain of Flowers, and A Love of Flowers."In Now and Then (Summer 1932, pp. 17-18). [literature, gardening] 6/10
Down the River. Essays (1937). 151 pp./ca. 36,700 wds. London: Victor Gollancz, 1937 (December); New York: Henry Holt, 1937. "With 83 Engravings on Wood by Agnes Miller Parker." In this sequel to Through the Woods, Bates writes lovingly of the rivers of his childhood, the Ouse and the Nene, and of the many aspects of river life, both natural and human, that he appreciates, such as flowers, birds, otters, mills, boats, fish and fishing, ice-skating, and seasonal changes. While writing as if following a river from Northamptonshire to the sea, Bates allows himself many delightful digressions in memories of his grandfather and other relatives, observations on village life, an attack on hunting (in general, and specifically of otters and foxes), and a history of English lace-making. Baldwin (127) captures the strengths of the book in noting its "warmth, charm , and wealth of detail...Bates is perfectly at home with his subject, and his prose moves with the grace and sinuous ease of the river he writes about." Contains: The Twin Rivers, A Boy's Brook, The First River, Fish and Fishermen, The Flood, The Frost, The Second River, Water Flowers and Water Creatures, Flowers of Childhood, The Water-Mill, The Lace-Makers, Otters and Men, The Rivers of England, Down to the Sea. With two exceptions, the essays appeared only in this collection: the "The Lace-Makers" was published in 1934 in serial form and an abridged version of "Otters and Men" was separately published in 1947. [nature, rural, essays, northamptonshire] (1/05)
"A Dream of Fair Women." Story (1964). 10 pp./ca. 3300 wds. A printing apprentice, having "taken his pills and done a stiff and dedicated three quarters of an hour on his stretching-and-exercising machine--both the pills and the machine were guaranteed to increase your height by several inches, expand your chest and make you live longer," relaxes on a deck-chair in the garden and has elaborate and vivid dreams about women. His previous object of infatuation, the large and mature Mrs. Fortescue, carried on a "fevered, paradisiacal, tormenting affair" with him in the South Pacific, but today he instead fantasizes that the young and aloof Miss Sumpter flies with him to the Greek Islands, where they make love on the beach. Finding it "inconceivable that that realistic episode could have failed to get through" to Miss Sumpter, he rushes to the fruit shop where she works and awkwardly attempts to make conversation with her, coldly rebuffed at each turn. Returning home, "cooled and impotent," he starts a dream about yet another woman. A mildly comic vignette about an uninteresting adolescent. In The Fabulous Mrs V (1964).[coming of age, exercise, fantasy, sex] 7/07
The Duet. Story (1935). London: Grayson & Grayson, 1935. Grayson Books (No. 1). 23 pp./ca. 3580 wds. Horace, son of a choirmaster, eagerly awaits the arrival of two guest singers for the choral festival. When they arrive, the enormous Madame Lottie Stronheim and the towering Erasmus Greene ignore him and his efforts to obtain their autographs; instead they flirt and eventually retire to her room; through the keyhole, Horace observes Erasmus "running his fingers across the ribs of Madame Stronheim's stays as though he were playing a harp." Later at the concert, "the deep harmonies of the duet rolled and thundered through the chapel, and the audience, overpowered, sat transfixed in wonder," but Horace reflects not so much on the singing as on what he saw: "He was beginning ... to have an idea that there were a great many things in the world that were not quite what they seemed to be." With humorous descriptions of the two singers seen through the eyes of the boy, this is a charming piece on the sensitive emotions of a child among adults and a loss of some of his innocence, surely reflecting memories of Bates's childhood home, with his choir-director father, Albert Bates.[music, coming of age] (1/05)
"Dulcima." Novella (1953). 76 pp./ca. 22,000 wds. A powerful tale of a pitiful girl in rural England, whose manipulation of both an old widower and a young forest worker has tragic results. With slow and expert pacing, Bates builds the story in almost mythic style; the girl's character determined by her squalid upbringing, the elements of sex, money, and alcohol also making inevitable the sordid conclusion. The sacrifice of the gentle keeper, who innocently steps into the center of Dulcima's vortex, provides yet another motif that gives the story weight of a kind suggesting a Greek tragedy. Baldwin (189) considers the work one of Bates's finest novellas, observing that it "reveals the dark underside of the psyche that, in other circumstances, might be capable of love and generosity. Bates himself called Dulcima 'a tragedy of the underdeveloped,' an apt description, since it deals with aspirations and instincts, which, failing to find mature expression, become warped and destructive." In 1972, EMI Productions released a film adaptation of the work by Frank Nesbitt (who also directed), starring Carol White and John Mills, and produced by Basil Rayburn. In The Nature of Love (1953), Dulcima (1971, published as a monograph by Penguin Books in association with Michael Joseph). [love, sex, rural] 6/05
"Early One Morning." Story (1965). 18 pp./ca. 4500 wds. A particularly poor farce, involving a man attempting to reclaim his wife's escaped budgerigar and his neighbors -- a bored housewife whose day is enlivened by the extended hunt for the bir, and her husband, a sour man resentful at the disturbance of his morning routine. In The Wedding Party (1965). [pets, comedy] 7/07
"The Earth." Story (1940). 15 pp./ca. 3550 wds. A simpleton named Benjy is set up by his parents in keeping hens; he proves surprisingly successful, earning enough money to first buy a neighboring plot of land, and then to buy the land and house long rented by his parents. Becoming the most successful poultry farmer in the area, he marries one of his workers, and when the newlyweds and parents clash, he ruthlessly turns them out, abandoning them to town lodgings: "They stood as if they had alighted in a strange place, were not sure of themselves, and did not know what to do." Vannatta (56) notes that Benjy is not simple-minded but "rapaciously single-minded. His entire psyche devoted to the war between profit and loss, Benjy is modern, acquisitive, corporate man in his purest state, without emotion or sentiment." He also notes that the parents are lazy, putting faith in religion rather than in hard work, and that the story is an "interesting and unusual analysis of the changing economic and social face of rural England." In its themes of changing ownership and attitudes towards the land, the story bears comparison with a number of Bates's works of the thirties, including In View of the Fact That and Day's End. Egg-raising features prominently in another story published in the same year, The Loved One. In the Atlantic Monthly (January 1940), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974). [rural,simpleton/idiot, land ownership, economics, social change, poultry, family, sons, greed] (1/05)
"The Easter Blessing." Story (1927). 9 pp./ca. 1920 wds. Helena, a doctor’s wife, at church early to decorate for Easter service, is asked for food by a woman with “scraps of straw” on her back. She rushes home to gather food for the woman, crossing paths with her husband on the way and unable to convey to him her distress and urgency. Returning to the church, the woman has gone, leaving Helena to meditate during the service about the relevancy of the hymns and offerings. At home, while clouds darken the sky, she is filled with self-reproach and sadness. Her husband returns from calls in a full hailstorm, and she learns of the suicide of a woman in Low Pond, a starved and near-naked woman whom her husband examined and returned “home.” Exclaiming “Thank God,” Helena attempts to explain to him her connection with the woman, only to have him comfort her without understanding. A somber portrait of a sensitive woman, constrained by church and marriage, and a reflection of Bates's early rejection of religion (see Vannatta 19). In The Bermondsey book (March-May 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940).[religion, marriage, death, charity, rural](1/05)
"Easy Exotics." Essay (1963). 10 pp./ca. 3600 wds. One of seventeen contributions to this "Collection of Original Essays on Some Aspects of Gardens and Gardening," in which Bates discusses examples of "the limitless possibilities of growing unusual and beautiful things in moderate temperatures." In A Book of Gardens (ed. James Turner, London: Cassell, 1963, pp. 3-12).[gardening]6/10
"The Eating Match." Story (1956). 8 pp./ca. 2300 wds. A typically outrageous story told by Uncle Silas, interrupted by comments from his "housekeeper" ("a very tart old stick of rhubarb"), involving a boastful and large man challenged by Silas to an eating contest. Silas wins by secreting most of his food in a bag; the loser's swollen belly was so severe that they "had to keep butterin' on it for two more days." In Evening Standard (15 August 1956), Sugar for the Horse (1957). [silas]6/05
Edward Garnett. Essay (1950). London: Max Parrish (in association with Chanticleer Press, New York), 1950 (December). 87 pp./ca. 20,000 wds. with plates and illustrations. A volume in the series "Personal Portraits," edited by Patric Dickinson and Shela Shannon. Citing correspondence, Baldwin (170) says that the writing of this memoir of Edward Garnett "began in 1948 and occupied much of 1949" and brought together Bates, Rupert Hart-Davis, and David Garnett "once again into fruitful collaboration, with H.E. supplying the basic text and the others offering corrections, ideas for revision, and help with technical matters." Half biography, half autobiography, and with numerous letters from Garnett to Bates transcribed (and in one case reproduced), the slim volume shows Garnett's tremendous influence on the neophyte writer from the countryside; it also depicts Garnett's personal qualities as well as those of his wife, Constance, through numerous anecdotes of evenings at Garnett's London flat and visits to "The Cearne," the Garnett home and gardens in Kent. Baldwin (170) accurately characterizes the work as "a lively and often touching portait of a man who in his later years appeared to his young proteges like a great gruff bear, but who understood better than any critic the writer's need for patient, thorough, and constructive criticism...a stylish, humorous, affectionate, and glowing tribute to the man who had largely shaped Bates's career."[essay, garnett, writing] (1/05)
"Elaine." Story (1953). 9 pp./ca. 2940 wds. A couple bicker in a train compartment, the woman a "pretty tigress that did not smile" and the man argumentative and fussy. The title refers to a woman mentioned in conversation, and an obvious source of irritation, although anything more specific is left to the reader's imagination. The narrator, after fruitlessly attempting to make some sort of contact with the girl, simply observes both the man's abuse and her willingness to accept it. As Vannatta (82) notes, the story is a perfect example of Bates's trademark technique of nearly plotless vignettes that focus on atmosphere and characterization: at story's end "narrator and reader are none the wiser, except that we know that we have confronted one painful and degrading aspect of passion." In Evening News (3 September 1953), The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [5/05]
"Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree." Story (1939). 10 pp./ca. 1890 wds. A man remembers summer escapades when he was six and the town idiot about twelve; the younger lad believes various impossible tales from Arty, including one about an elephant's nest at his uncle's farm. Setting out one day to see it, "all the time I had a feeling of being sorry for him, of knowing that he was simple, and yet of trusting him. I wanted too to make a discovery that I felt my father and mother and sister and perhaps other people had never made. I wanted to go home with a story of something impossible made possible." Recalling his disappointment and the ridicule of his family on returning, he then jumps forward twenty-five years, noting that Arty has not changed: he earns enough money and bread from a job "that a boy of six could do," gets his hair cut, and walks happily to the countryside to see the elephant's nest. Bates attempts to idealize Arty's simplicity, claiming that "Arty understands what perhaps the rest of the world is trying to get at" but he does so in a way reminiscent of his worst fairy-tales for children, without any of the mature depiction of real life more typical of stories of the late thirties. For another story about a simpleton, see "The Idiot." In John O'London's Weekly (14 April 1939), The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).[idiocy, fairy tale, boyhood](1/05)
Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree. Stories (1989). New York: New Directions, 1989. 210 pp. A posthumous collection. Contains: Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree; The Captain; Italian Haircut; The Little Jeweller; Chateau Bougainvillaea; The Disinherited; The Greatest People in the World; The Major of Hussars; Thelma; Go, Lovely Rose; The Kimono; Love in a Wych Elm; Let's Play Soldiers; Great Uncle Crow; The Watercress Girl; Coconut Radio; The Trespasser.
"The Enchantress." Story (1958). 21 pp./ca. 10,500 wds. A long tale, of particular interest because of its autobiographical elements: the narrator, while not named Richardson, nevertheless resembles that Bates-like narrator of Love for Lydia in being an aspiring writer, a lover of flowers, and, later in the tale, a Royal Air Force officer writing pieces very like Bates's Flying Officer X stories; the setting, like other works Bates placed in fictional Evensford, is based on Bates's Rushden in the Nene valley, and features youthful courting and dances described in a manner very similar to events in Love for Lydia. The story concerns Bertha, a girl who from an early age has a capacity to enchant and capture one man after another by becoming the perfect complement to his needs. Although perhaps weak as a story, because Bertha's attachments from age seventeen until her fifties are, for the most part, simply recounted one by one, it nevertheless contains charming writing, especially in the passage relating the her brief involvement with the narrator. As a light entertainment about a pleasure-loving woman who takes life easily, the story recalls some of the spirit of Bates's Uncle Silas tales as well as the Larkin family novels, the first of which appeared also in 1958. Published with the title "Summer Enchantress" in Argosy (April 1958, xix:4:56-76), then as "The Enchantress" in Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories/The Enchantress and Other Stories (1961), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963). [love, sex, evensford, autobiography] 6/05
The Enchantress and Other Stories (1961). Stories. American title of the collection Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories.
"England Living and England Dead." Essay (1932). 1 pp./ca. 900 wds. with two photographs. Continuing an account begun in "A Cotswold Day", Bates complains about towns bearing the "stench of the arty-and-crafty disease which has begun to attack the north limb of Cotswold," while praising the outlying countryside and Stow-on-the-Wold as "the most memorable of all Cotswold towns, simple, dignified, honest-to-God." In The New Clarion (September 10, 1932, i, 14, 319). [nature essay] 1/09
"The English Countryside." Essay (1942). 5 pp./ca. 1600 wds. One of twenty essays originally broadcast as talks by their authors over the "Empire Service" of the B.B.C., for the most part in a series called "To Talk of Many Things." The talks were intended "to give listeners an occasional relaxation from news Bulletins, War Commentaries, and the like," and they were transmitted over short-wave to listeners world-wide. Other speakers included J.B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole, and W. Somerset Maugham. Bates relates a morning country walk in 1940, reflecting on various sights and sounds, wartime crops (with an indication that he is addressing above all English soldiers abroad), and mushroom picking. He closes with a delightful anecdote about ducks and wasps, and brings together the qualities of a successful talk (in contrast to a written essay) delineated in the editor's introduction. In The English Spirit (ed. Anthony Weymouth, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. pp. 35-39).[rural] 11/09
"The English Forest." Essay (1937). 20 pp./ca. 3500 wds. One of forty-five essays covering such things as castles, notable roads, and the varied regions of Britain. Enhanced by eleven photographs, Bates's account begins with the definition of a forest and the question as to whether any have survived in England; he moves on through the beasts of the forest, hunting traditions, forests as captured in English literature, and the possibility of a land reforested in the future. In Romantic Britain (Ed. Tom Stephenson, London: Odhams Press, pp. 227-36). [nature, forest] 9/09
"The Englishman's Spring." Essay (1950). 4 pp./ca. 1950 wds. An introduction to a volume of "68 evocative camera studies collected and edited by B.J. Bradley" in which Bates touches on recurring themes of his nature writing: the passionate attachment of the English to their countryside, the qualities that distinguish that countryside ("almost all we cherish and hold dear and stoutly maintain as unique in our countryside, is the result of interference by man"), the artistic component in English gardening, the "special arrangement of pub, church, cottage and cottage garden, great house and mill, general shop and what I might call doctor's Georgian" of an English village, and the beneficial revolution brought to rural England by the automobile. In In England Now, Spring (London: Avalon Press, 1950, pp. 8-11). [nature, countryside]11/09
"Escape." Essay (1952). 6 pp./ca. 2000 wds. An introductory essay to eight accounts of escapes from enemy territory by Royal Air Force pilots, gathered in a compilation to benefit the Royal Air Force Escaping Society and its work of helping widows and orphans of those who assisted escaping airmen. Bates discusses the"veil of language and the cloak of behavior" developed in the R.A.F. to cope with the abnormality of wartime service, qualities that made pilots "singularly unprepared for capture" (because of an ability to envision being shot down and captured) but also, once captured, gave them "pure cussedness...a simple blind, stubbord refusal to be subjected." In Escape or Die (London: Evans Brothers, 1952, pp. 11-15). [pilots, war] 11/09.
"Every Bullet Has Its Billet." Story (1939). 16 pp./ca. 3620 wds. A painfully awkward exploration of psychological tension between a young woman, her obsessively-doting mother, and their two boarders, the newly-married and aristocratic Lieutenant and Mrs. Bronson. The daughter forms a friendship with Mrs. Bronson full of adulation and imitation. Occasionally socializing with both the husband and wife, she riles her jealous mother, who falsely accuses her of an unhealthy alliance with the man. With previously unknown desires stirred by this suggestion, the girl attempts to secrete a lock of her hair in his uniform, is caught in what appears to be a compromising situation by her mother, and the couple moves away. Later the girl learns that each is dead, the man in battle, the woman "hit, while sitting in a cafe, by a stray bullet...She began to feel that she was going about with a bullet in her own heart, and was only gradually beginning to understand, by the pain of longer silences between herself and her mother, who had fired it." With obvious stereotypes in the obsessive mother and the innocent daughter, the story has the tone of an exercise in personality theory. In The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974).[t:coming of age, jealousy, girlhood, motherhood](1/05)
"The Evolution of Saxby." Story (1953). 25 pp./ca. 6930 wds. A first-person narrative about a marriage of a cold, controlling woman who buys, decorates, and sells one home after another, and her helpless and disturbed husband who wants only to settle down and have a garden. Bates depicts this eccentric and twisted pair, their house, and their prospective buyers in a series of vivid, darkly comic, and almost surreal scenes. Baldwin (193) finds it an "outstanding story with a quietly social theme," seeing the husband (Saxby) as a "victim of modern life" who descends to "neurotic fantasies...a sadly homeless and rootless casualty of upward mobility." Bates very powerfully captures what would now be called a codependent relationship, the narrator wondering "how long he had wanted to be free of her and how long he had wanted her to die. I wondered how many times he had wanted to kill her and if ever he would kill her--or if he would remain, as I fancied he would do, just bound to her for ever." In Lilliput (Jan-Feb 1953), The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E.Bates (1963), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [marriage, neurosis] 5/05
"Exhilarating." Essay (1950). 1 pp./107 wds. Two paragraph, possibly solicited by the editor, reading: "There is nothing at all in the whole world of sport and pastime quite so exhilarating as skating. It has every virtue that a sport should have, no vices, and just a pinch of the salt of danger. It asks for no team, no clubs, no opposing sides, no petty competition, no snobbery of dress or behaviour. With a pair of skates a man can get as near to being a bird as he ever will without going up into the air; a divine feeling, easy, exhilarating, untiring. [new paragraph]There seems to be more friendliness and laughter on a stretch of ice than anywhere else inthe world." A second contribution to the same volume was "The less I like poetry." In Spice of Life (London:, compiled by J. Thurston Thrower, p. 44). [sport] 11/09
"The Fabulous Mrs. V." Story (1963). 22 pp./ca. 7100 wds. A tale reflecting the Midlands in the 1920s, and thus bearing some similarity in theme and atmosphere to Bates's semi-autobiographical novel Love for Lydia. Baldwin (212) notes that the theme of a "repressive mother who turns her daughter into a wallflower while she shamelessly flirts" was explored more profitably in the novella Death of a Huntsman. The tale captures well the rapport between the narrator and his buddy and the stultifying atmosphere of country wealth and tennis matches; more significant is the narrator's awakening self-awareness as he distracts the mother with false attention, thus allowing the daughter to elope: "I felt I was the vain, impudent, contemptible cockatoo...I had never before seen anyone broken and dead in spirit. Nor had I even remotely suspected that I should one day match her in vanity and I could only stare mutely in return, watching her nurse, in shattered silence, her own private heart of darkness." In Woman's Own (April 1963), The Fabulous Mrs V (1964).[mothers, daughters, midlands, love, sex] 7/07
The Fabulous Mrs V. Stories (1964). London: Michael Joseph, 1964. 192 pp. One of four late story collections that together constitute a significant decline in Bates's work. Comedy plays a large role, perhaps partly reflecting Bates's pleasure and success with the Larkin chronicles, and two of these delightfully express a Larkin-like philosophy of "live for today;" four others however are unsuccessful farces. The serious tales all contain traces of Bates's skills of observation and dialogue, but none compares with his earlier work. The collection also contains two of Bates's "Tales of Tahiti." Vannatta (91) characterizes this and the other late collections as generally offering nothing "new thematically or stylistically." Contains: And No Birds Sing, The Fabulous Mrs. V, A Couple of Fools, The Ginger-Lily Girl, Afternoon at the Chateau, A Party for the Girls, The Cat who Sang, The Trespasser, The Diamond Hair-Pin, A Dream of Fair Women, A Nice Friendly Atmosphere, The Lotus Land.
The Face of England. Essay (1952). 128 pp./ca. 16,000 wds. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1952. "With 40 photographs in colour by A.F. Kersting." A lovely blending of some of Bates's best writing about the English countryside with photographs of a variety of natural and manmade scenes. Bates revisits many themes of his previous volumes of nature writing, such as the influence of the railroad and the internal combustion engine (both in autos and in farm machinery) on country life, social changes in the countryside since the two wars, the temperment of the English farm laborer, the sprawl of country housing both inland and on the coasts, the spirit of different villages and cities, English gardening both modest and grand, and the way in which "a land reflects its people...but it is perhaps even truer that a people reflects its land." Bates remains optimistic throughout, finding most of the changes brought about by technological and economic development to be to the benefit of country life. He finds the continuous process of change to be "a preservative. Through the incessant impact of change our land cannot decay. It is possible that we lose a vista here, a haven there, a piece of the picturesque, a morsel of pastoral somewhere else; but the measure of loss is itself minute against the virility of the life we gain." Perhaps because the format of the volume required Bates to distill his thoughts on these topics into eleven short essays, the book has a particular grace and power that is not as evident in his longer discussions of country life. Baldwin (184) notes that "because the geographic scope of the book is wider than usual, it lacks the intimate detail and leisurely pace of previous country books, but it is nevertheless full of delightful description and original observation, overall a balanced and sane look at a subject that was increasingly one for passionate debate." MS: King's School, Canterbury, Hugh Walpole Collection.[nature, country life, social commentary] (4/05)
Fair
Stood the Wind for France. Novel (1944). London: Michael
Joseph, 1944 (November), Boston: Little Brown, 1944 (May). 270 pp./ca. 85,000
wds. This novel, Bate's seventh, was a turning point in his career in three
respects: his professional contacts and status, his popularity and financial
rewards, and lastly, his literary focus and subject matter. Working for the
first time with a literary agent, Laurence Pollinger,
and, following negotiations that freed Bates from his long-term publisher Jonathan
Cape, Bates was propelled to a series of contracts for the novel, with new
publisher Michael Joseph, with the Saturday Evening Post for American
serial publication (18 March - 6 May 1944), and with producer Alexander Korda
for film rights that included advances or fees that Bates would later describe
as "unbelievably fat" and leaving him "almost for the first time
in my life, free of financial anxiety" (World in Ripeness
33). Building on the wide distribution, exposure, and popularity of the
"Flying Officer X" stories, Bates could report
a year after publication that Fair Stood the Wind for France had world
sales of about 400,000, had been translated into four languages, had been twice
serialized, and was both a Book of the Month and Book Society choice (Bates,
quoted in Baldwin, 161). Eads
notes that a four-part television adaptation aired on the BBC in 1980 and a
dramatization was premiered at the Royal Theatre, Northampton, in 1986.
On referral from one of his officers, Bates interviewed a pilot, shot down over
France, who dramatically escaped and returned to his squadron. "The
seed given me by the Wellington pilot was seed only; it now had to be sown and
nurtured in the soil of imagination...I saw the entire story as one epitomising
the youth of two countries, on the one hand England almost alone in battle,
on the other France alone in humiliation and defeat. I wanted to extract
from this, if possible, the beauty, the pride, the courage and, if the word
is not now too suspect, the patriotism of the young of two civilised countries..." Bates
remembers writing "very nearly half the novel" at his home on a fortnight's
leave from service, then completing it "at week-ends, in odd moments, in
a few days of leave" (World in Ripeness 23-24).
Although sworn to secrecy regarding his initial conversation (due
to security regulations concerning escapes from the Continent), by the time
the book was completed, none of Bates's concerns regarding clearance for the
book or about a possible government claim for the profits (as it was written
during Bates's Air Ministry service) materialized. The book would be followed
by three other war novels (The Purple Plain, The
Jacaranda Tree, and The Scarlet Sword), all
set in Asia, after which Bates would return to his pre-war focus of the English
Midlands.
The story is told through the eyes of the downed pilot, Franklin, as he and
his men find refuge with a French family, as he falls in love with the daughter,
as his injured arm is amputated, and as the lovers escape together through Vichy
France to Spain. Vannatta (58-61)
notes that "scenes such as Franklin's amputation and the equally understated
but brutal scene of Francoise's father's suicide save the novel from being the
sentimental, melodramatic romance which a bare outline of the plot might suggest."
He praises Bates's skillful characterization of Franklin as "alternately
jealous, destructively prideful, self-interested, often stupid" and "saved
from doom only by luck and the tireless courage and sustaining faith of Francoise,"
and says this "elevates the novel above the tired Hollywood 'grade B' romance
of the strong silent warrior escaping into the sunset with his love." He
also notes that the novel "bears the same economic, descriptive style,
the same effective if not profound characterization, the same indirection and
understatement to heighten tension" as Bates's earlier work and, indeed,
Bates would later say that he always strove to "keep the style of the novel...clear
and vivid in its pictorial simplicity" (World in Ripeness
31). Bates took pride in the accuracy of his descriptions of southern
France, which he had never seen, and of the amputation, noting that "I
met admirers of the book who took one look of astonishment at me and marvelled
that I still possessed both of my arms" (World
in Ripeness 33).
The broader themes raised by the novel, characterized by Vannatta
as "beauty and tragedy, triumph and death, youth and degeneracy" and
by Baldwin (161-163) as "the morality
of cooperation and resistance, and the larger questions of good and evil, including
the possibility of faith, in a world gone mad" are not satisfactorily pursued
and addressed, a fact that Baldwin considers "symptomatic both of him [Bates]
as an individual and of the society which bought his book in such large numbers." Lacking
religious faith himself, the best his novel "can offer is an admonition
for compassion and a promise of romantic love...nevertheless, it shows an author
deeply concerned with the problems of his day." At novel's end, Franklin
holds Francois as she cries for "the agony of all that was happening in
the world...And as he realized it there were tears in his own eyes, and because
of his tears the mountains were dazzling in the sun."[war, love, sacrifice,
youth](1/05)
Fair Stood the Wind for France together with two short stories. Novel and stories (1971). London: Longman, 1971. Contains: Fair Stood the Wind for France, Yours Is The Earth, A Silas Idyll.(1/05)
The Fallow Land. Novel (1932). London: Jonathan Cape, 1932 (3 October). 328 pp./ca. 103,200 wds. New York: R.O. Ballou, 1933. Dedication: "To Violet & Vernon Dean." Bates's fourth novel, completed in May 1932 and started in either late 1931 or January 1932. The first of a string of novels set in the English Midlands before and shortly after the first World War (followed by The Poacher, A House of Women, and Spella Ho), it depicts three generations of a farming family, and especially the protagonist Deborah Loveday, in struggles with both the land and with their personal defects. Deborah marries the hot-tempered Jess Mortimer, who leaves her shortly for a life of dissipation. She oversees the farm with his aged father, raising a son Benjamin, with his father's recklessness and coarseness, and his younger brother David, sensitive and weak. A large cast of supporting characters includes the eccentric but kind employer of Deborah at the novel's beginning, Mrs. Arbuthnot; Mrs. Mortimer, a nag to her husband and a doting slave to her son Jess; her husband, Abraham, dull, patient, and devoted to the land; the doctor Starling, a friend to Deborah; and the weird Twelvetree family, including the daughter Anthea who marries David just before his death in the war. In the end, Deborah, after decades of valiant struggle with the farm, and especially with one particularly uncooperative field, has never thrived but has only survived life. Bates would later write of the novel: "The setting ...was precisely that part of the Nene Valley where I had grown up with my grandfather [George Lucas] as a boy; and in a sense it was his story, his struggle...Novels such as [The Fallow land] are not written today; nor could they be. They are, in a sense, historical novels, portions of a world that has vanished as surely as the world of my boyhood street games has vanished" (Blossoming World 91). The novel was highly praised by reviewers and sold well. Vannatta (43-45) discusses the novel at length, noting Bates's gift in portraying English country life in vivid detail but criticizing the novel's characters as each being defined by a single character trait and thus tending to caricature rather than being well-rounded; he ascribes this to Bates's vision of his characters as being controlled by determined forces outside of their control. Even the main character, who endures throughout the novel, does not grow as a person. Thus the novel becomes a battle of Deborah against the land, and the reader is never in doubt as to the outcome: "Up to a point in the novel we share Deborah's disappointments and rejoice in her momentary successes; but Bates seems so intent in piling calamity after calamity and misery after misery on her head that after a time our feelings become deadened. By the end when Deborah, old and broken, lies on her deathbed and still can talk and think only about work and the land, our sympathy has turned to impatience." Baldwin (104-106) writes that in this novel "Bates finds his true metier as a novelist; one might say he had finally discovered the kind of novel he was born to write. It is in the tradition of rural fiction..." He notes similarities to the previous novel, Charlotte's Row, in its focus on the "unromantic side of life" and on both the "personal and impersonal forces which combine to produce tragedy." Included in these are the various defects of character noted by Vannatta and the "social, economic, and technological changes that revolutionized English farming between 1890 and 1920." Baldwin also notes that in choosing the genre of rural fiction, Bates was further isolating himself from the literary movements of his time. [rural, land, family] (1/05)
"The Far Distant Journey." Story (1953). 10 pp./ca. 2550 wds. A six-year-old boy accompanies his father on his "first far distant journey, through strange countryside, into another county, to a place he did not know." Bates skillfully captures the heightened sensitivity of the experience through its particulars, the boy responding to new sounds, smells, and sights as they change trains, dine at a cafe, take a tram and walk through an unfamiliar town. Eventually they arrive at a shop, a taxidermy owned by the boy's aged and impoverished aunt and uncle (undoubtedly based in part on Bates's visits, with his father, to his uncle Joseph Bates's taxidermy shop). There, father and aunt cryptically discuss a tragic family situation, intentionally shielding the boy but also the reader from completely understanding it. Having left them some money, the father takes his son home, the boy asking many questions in an attempt to make sense of the conversation he has heard. The father is silent and preoccupied, conveying the sadness of an adult world that awaits the boy. First published with the title "The Far Journey" in the Evening News (9 February 1953), then with the final title in The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959).[boyhood, bates family] 2/06
"The Far Journey." Story later titled "The Far Distant Journey."
"The Father." Story (1928). 7 pp./ca. 1460 wds. A piano-tuner has learned of the suicide of his only child, a 27-year-old professional singer in London. Making the rounds in his village, he receives comfort from various people, despite their knowledge of his quarrel with and cruelty towards his daughter.. A skillful and poignant glimpse at grief, regret, and compassion. In The New Adelphi (June 1928), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[music, father/child, death, loss](1/05)
William Fathers, reporter for the Northamptonshire Chronicle and Bates's employer for several months in 1922. Fathers is depicted as a revolting drunk named Bretherton in Vanished World (128-140), Love for Lydia, and in the story "Millenium Also Ran."(1/05)
Fawley Achievement. Essay (1951). London: Esso Petroleum Company, Limited, September 1951. 40 pp./ca. 4000 wds. Illustrated by Roy Coombs. One of two company histories (see Pastoral on Paper) written by Bates in a style similar to his non-fiction war title, There's Freedom in the Air. Why Bates took on such work at a time when his fiction was hugely popular and lucrative is not clear. The frontispiece states that "this book commemorates the official opening on September 14th, 1951, of the new Esso Refinery at Fawley, Hampshire; and is intended as a tribute to the vision, skill, and energy of all those who helped to plan and build it." Much as Bates praised the heroism and dedication of pilots in his war writings, here he pays tribute to the discipline, enthusiasm, and cooperative spirit (especially between the British and American workers) required to enlarge an oil refinery. After first setting the location of the refinery in language more typical of his nature writing, Bates outlines the history of oil internationally and specificially in England, moves on to the vast project of planning and constructing not only a refinery but housing and services for its workers, and finally details several important management decisions that contributed to the speedy completion of the project. Written long before any economic and environmental concerns regarding dependence on oil, Bates unapologetically lauds the multi-million-pound effort to increase British production of refined oil products tenfold in a matter of several years; in fact, in a closing that returns to the landscape at Fawley, he notes thousands of trees planted by Esso to screen the refinery on the landward side, and speculates that it will in most ways be "leaving a traditional existence undisturbed." [work for hire, non fiction, oil, company] 4/05
"Fear." Story (1927). 7 pp./ca. 1480 wds. Richard, a young boy, and his grandfather take shelter from thunderstorms in a mountain hut. Terrified by the darkness, the smells within the hut, and the rain, the boy begs to return home to his mother but is comforted by his grandfather and falls asleep. He awakens free of fear and observes with joy a shooting star; the grandfather however is provoked into meditation on the death of his wife, his age, and his inevitable death. Walking down the hill, the happy boy is perplexed by the seriousness and sadness in his grandfather, who is unable to shake his fear of death. An insightful glimpse at fear as experienced at two different stages of life. Bates would later cite the opening sentence ("On the horizon three separate thunderstorms talked darkly to each other") as an example of his early successful efforts at economical prose,"getting more atmosphere into ten words than Hardy ... and his kind could often get into a page," (Blossoming World 63). In National and Athenaeum (26 March 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[childhood, age, rural, death](1/05)
The Feast of July. Novel (1954). 224 pp./ca. 63,000 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1954; Boston: Little Brown and Company, in association with The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1954. A fine late novel, continuing the backward glance at Bates's Northamptonshire roots of Love for Lydia (1952), but hearkening back in style, topic, and setting to the even earlier novels of Bates's pre-war period. Bates takes an unexceptional and familiar topic -- a girl, seduced by an older and married man, who searches for him and eventually again crosses paths with him in a tragic ending -- and creates a moving and stylistically simple tribute to the country life and shoemaking culture familiar to him from childhood, once more utilizing the fictional world of Evensford and its surrounding area. Bella Ford finds refuge with the Wainwright family, based on Bates's great-grandfather on his father's side (Mr. Lawrence, also a town lamplighter) and his large brood of children (Baldwin 19), and is the object of attention from all three Wainwright sons, each of whose distinct temperaments is sensitively and effectively drawn by Bates; Bella eventually settles with the volatile and sensite Con Wainwright, whose temper leads to murder and imprisonment. The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright, an upright and reformed drinker and a long-suffering wife, are excellently developed, as is the effect on the household stirred by Bella's arrival. The book is also the story "of the hardships endured by these residents of Rushden [the Lawrences] in the 1880s: how they eke out a living by shoemaking, harvesting, and gleaning; endure a depression in their trade; and take from country life and festivals [such as the Feast of July] the pleasures that make their lives endurable" (Baldwin 191). As Vannatta (96-97) notes, the novel "is not the first Bates work that seems strongly indebted to an author whom Bates largely detested: Thomas Hardy: the naive girl made pregnant by the slick villain, the rural setting and seasonal rhythms, the inevitable violence, the flight with the lover and his eventual capture--all are variations on Tess of the d'Urbervilles." However, he notes that while Bella is to some extent an innocent victim, she is also "proud, strong, resilient...and her survival is not numb and bovine, but conscious and resolute." Baldwin (191) finds the episodic structure more characteristic of the short story, making it an "un-novelistic work." "The characters unfortunately remain static, so that their story progresses like moves on a chessboard. Relations among them do not lead to deeper levels of understanding or insight; motivations for actions are sometimes unclear at best." A 1995 movie version powerfully captured the atmosphere and characters of the novel, but inexcusably altered the ending by hanging Con Wainwright, rather than having Bella wait for his release from prison. [shoemaking, sex, pregnancy, rural] 7/05
"The Ferry." Story (1940). 18 pp./ca. 4240 wds. A fisherman named Richardson takes a room on a stormy night with the owner of a ferry, a woman in her sixties who also looks after her demented sister. He drives up river to help a team of men digging and hauling dirt to strengthen the "level" and returns to the pub to find the woman arguing with her sister about the storm and her imagined "second Flood." Hearing the owner claim that she could never sell up and move, and that "I wish there'd be a flood...like the one in the Bible...That'd be the end of it," he is left with a feeling of melancholy. Another in the Bates tradition of depicting people on the fringe of society, living without happiness or hope, but with little empathy established for any of the characters. Bates used the name Richardson for the reporter in Love for Lydia. In The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947). [richardson, sisters, madness, underlife] (1/05)
"Finger Wet, Finger Dry." Story (1936). 9 pp./ca. 2200 wds. The title is the phrase used by the narrator to promise secrecy as his Uncle Silas tells a very tall tale of an adventure with a woman, hiding in the cellar when her husband arrives, being forgotten by her for a week, and subsisting on stewed nails. A finely paced, delightful story, with much suggestive dialogue and rogueness in Silas's telling. In John O'London's Weekly (9 October 1936), Story (January 1937), The Best Short Stories of 1937, Something Short and Sweet, My Uncle Silas.[silas, boyhood, sex] (1/05)
"The Fire Eaters." Story (1957). 10 pp./ca. 2600 wds. Like "The Foxes," a recollection by Uncle Silas of a battle with a parson and the forces of religion ("'Unbuggin' popery! 'Unbuggin' money-mekking game"). When Silas and his rowdy friends are challenged by a young parson, they attend church "sitting in the front pew...like a row of innocent owls," but in the midst of the "celebration of the Jubilee of our dear Queen" they burn an effigy of the parson, along with most of his furniture and clerical outfits. Questioned by his nephew as to whether this wasn't excessively harsh treatment, Silas is disgusted: "If you never liked somebody you 'umbuggin' well said so. You let 'em know... I don't know what the 'nation's coming over everybody nowadays. Everybody's stopped enjoyin' theirselves. Everybody's gittin' too 'umbuggin' soft by half." Closing the second Silas collection, for the first time offering liquor to his nephew, he says "It's about time you had a mouthful o'wine...'Git the bottle down." In Sugar for the Horse (1957). [silas, church] 6/05
"The First Day of Christmas." Story (1968). 10 pp./ca. 15,900 wds. The morning of Christmas Eve, Archie Burgess sits in a pub, hoping his "friend" Flo will join him despite a lover's tiff two days prior. Three drinkers chat about women in a colorful, crude manner while Archie's thoughts of Flo grow more fond and sentimental. Seeing Flo's shoes pause outside the pub before moving on, Archie is torn between pursuing her to ask her hand and burying his grief in drink. A sad portrayal of isolation and loneliness, typical of Bates's work, and featuring saucy dialogue that Baldwin (217) calls "a brilliant exercise in verbal counterpoint, as fine a piece of narrative craftsmanship as Bates ever achieved." In The Wild Cherry Tree (1968). [love, loneliness] 10/07
"Fishers." Story (1941). 8 pp./ca. 2400 wds. Bates's first story of the second World War, preceding his R.A.F. stories by a year, concerns two privates awaiting action by fishing in the English countryside, the sounds of air battle and machine guns increasingly in the background. Butcher, a "little broad-faced Cockney with stubby hands" looks up to the experienced fisherman Jackson, "a young office-clerk with dark hair and refined features," and in time feels joyful gratitude for his trust and friendship, and for the chance to share in Jackson's plans to marry, travel, and build a home (replete with fishpond). One night Jackson shares photographs of his girlfriend, but shortly afterwards is killed by a bomb; holding him in his arms, Butcher reflects on "the girl, the eternally charming smile, the house with the live-bait in the fishpond, and the everlasting sunlight...And thinking of them he knew suddenly that at last, for him, the war had begun." Reflecting the air war in the summer of 1940 in southern England (described by Bates in War Pictures by British Artists, No. 3, R.A.F. and in The Blossoming World, 166-168), the story captures the deceptive peace, tension, and impatience preceding full British involvement in the war. In classic Bates fashion, it does this in the highly personal portrait of the parochial Butcher, whose perspective and life will be forever altered by his friend, and the war to come. In The Listener (16 January 1941), Best Broadcast Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1944, pp. 99-106). [war, fishing, friendship] (1/05)
"Fishing." Story (1928). 5 pp./ca. 1270 wds. A sketch of two old friends who, on an evening walk, recall fishing for eels as boys. They are inspired to find their old lines and try it again, promising to return at four in the morning to retrieve their catch. The story closes with the eel-lines empty and the men having overslept their rendezvous. A sweet evocation of boyhood and age in nature. Vannatta (21) notes "a wry humor uncharacteristic of the collection (Day's End) as a whole." David Garnett, in the introduction to Thirty Tales, notes that the story "could hardly be shorter and could hardly be slighter, but it is a complete and perfect little work of art, full of humour and containing a profound reflection on human life. Its subject and the music of its last line: 'But along the river-path nobody comes,' give it something of the quality of one of Waley's translations of Po-Chui-I." In the Manchester Guardian (3 February 1928), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[age, fishing, boyhood, humor] (1/05)
"The Flag." Story (1951). 11 pp./ca. 3100 wds. This "study in the declining aristocracy of postwar Britain" (Baldwin 183) portrays a Captain -- depressed and bitter at the state of his mansion, social life, and marriage -- as he shows his ruined estate, damaged by billeting soldiers, to a guest. The narrator, a nonjudmental and diffident observer similar to many semi-autobiographical narrators in Bates's work, declines to join the Captain as he puts away drink after drink; he observes the complete dependence of both Captain and wife on their gardener/handyman, with whom the wife is conducting an affair. Vannatta (78-79) discusses Bates's use of atmosphere, symbols, and characterization to create a powerful view of "the English landed gentry who are being crucified...by shifting cultural and economic patterns" and whose demise is hastened by their own ineffectuality. In Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987).[war, gentry, flowers, alcohol, social change] (1/05)
"The Flame." Story (1926). 5 pp./ca. 1070 wds. One of Bates's most popular stories, an unsentimental portrayal of a waitress named Lil, monotonously handling the orders for tea and sandwiches. Asked by another waitress to take her shift, she refuses, as she anticipates the arrival of a date for the evening. But when he is more than a half-hour late she agrees, only to see him arrive to take the other waitress out to a show and supper. Unlike many of the other stories in Bates's first collection, the emotions of Lil are understood through dialogue and action without being actually described. Bates would later reflect that "more than forty years later it is still a story of which I am not ashamed... But it too went off unsuccessfully on its wanderings: finding, like Joyce's Dubliners, no sponsors, a fact perhaps not surprising in that it was looking for one in a world where stories still had to have plots or to conform to rigid house-rules designed to satisfy the specific appetites of specific readers. My little harassed waitress ... didn't need a plot" (Vanished World 161-162). Bates also notes Edward Garnett's comments on first reading the story: "The Flame shows that you have mastered this form of the short sketch. It is beautifully felt and written. You must do others in this style -- terse, with not a word thrown away" (Blossoming World 19) and mentions that just at the time that Garnett interested Leonard Woolf of The Nation in the story, Robert Lynd of The Daily News also accepted it for publication (Bates having submitted it for a competition, which however he did not win). In The Nation (27 March 1926), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963, and the only tale selected by Bates from Day's End and Other Stories), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987).[t:working class, shop, betrayal, shattered dreams] (1/05)
Flower Gardening: A Reader's Guide. Essay (1950). Cambridge University Press, for the National Book League, 1950. 24 pp./ca. 2300 wds. One in a series of subject bibliographies; on the back cover are listed twenty-three titles, ranging from "parliament" and "ballet" to "home handyman" and "cricket" and including essays by C. Day Lewis ("Enjoying Poetry"), Elspeth Huxley ("Colonies"), and A.A. Milne ("Books for Children"). In Bates's seven-page essay, which is followed by a fourteen-page annotated bibliography prepared by Miles Hadfield, he writes knowledgeably and enthusiastically about books from the fifteenth century on, mostly maintaining a scholarly distance but not hesitating to insert the occasional personal opinion or the fact that he once "found the twenty-eight volumes of the edition of 1796 [of Sweet and Sowerby's gardening books] for six guineas. Its illustrations, I remember, worked out at a halfpenny a time." [t:gardening, books] (1/05)
"A Flower Piece." Story (1931). 11 pp./ca. 1713 wds. Two girls (one about six or seven years old, another slightly older) pretend they are ladies at tea. The elder is intolerant of the younger's errors in imagination and acting, and after a while the younger girl suggests that they "go out and get violets and be real people." She wanders away, offending the other; later she wishes to join her friend in a dance but is rebuffed. Reminiscent of "The Peach-Tree" in portraying the unkindness and fragile emotional world of childhood, the story is also typical in avoiding an obvious message: at story's end the young child disappears with a "spasm of sadness" across her face, leaving nothing "to interrupt the gaiety of the dancing child, the flowers about the earth and the blackthorn tree scattering its shower of lovely stars." In the New Statesman and Nation (10 October 1931), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), Thirty Tales (1934), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963).[childhood] (1/05)
Flowers and Faces. Memoir (1935). London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1935 (June). Engravings by John Nash. 53 pp./ca. 17,680 wds. Commissioned by the small Golden Cockerel Press, this long essay, in eight sections, expresses Bates's passion for flowers and gardening, his fond memories of early family and boyhood, and the saga of the acquisition of the Granary and the creation of its gardens. Initially Bates hastens to "establish myself as a man springing from a common and humble people" in contrast to the "young gentlemen of genteel education who I imagine hoe in silk lavender shirts and patent boots." He pays tribute to "my family, the obscure Midland shoemakers & fishermen & poachers and butterfly-hunters who thought more of flowers and freedom than they thought of respectable firesides and bread and butter." He praises the English working-man's "love of flowers, for the indomitable passion & desire for colour and blossom which asserts itself wherever they are." Two sections recall visits to the home and garden of his great-grandmother Mrs. Lawrence and make the point that love, more than horticultural knowledge, makes the garden; remembering himself "while I sat by the tock-tocking grandfather clock and ate a sugared mince-pie and gazed at the faces and flowers in the golden lamp-light" Bates feels the "half-sweet pain of lost but remembered joy." Moving on to his search in 1930, with his new wife, for a "small cottage...a modest, solid quiet place in which to live and work and grow flowers," Bates recounts their decision to buy a Kentish granary, convert it into a home, and tame the wild acreage into a splendid rock and flower garden (later told again in Blossoming World 71--?). In the process, he writes eloquently of the pleasures of white flowers, growing from seed, and the formal garden. Quaintly and often humorously written, the book refers very specifically to a variety of plants, flowers, planting techniques, and other aspects of gardening; it is the first of Bates's many non-fictional paeans to the natural world.[gardening, family, auobiography] (1/05)
The Flying Goat. Stories (1939). London: Jonathan Cape, 1939 (1 September). 320 pp. Dedicated "To Richard Church." Containing seven previously unpublished stories, and nine that had appeared in periodicals, this collection shows Bates in a variety of modes: attempts, not very successful, to address social issues in four tales; a short slapstick sketch; a number of tales addressing romantic, family, or marital tension; one typically successful Uncle Silas tale; and three that hearken back to Bates's boyhood and Midlands roots. While a number of the stories seem heavy-handed in their message and belaboured in their execution, there are strengths in the boyhood tales "The White Pony" and "The Ship" and in the troubling tale "The Ox." Baldwin (138-139) notes the significant advance sales and positive reception received by the book, while at same time citing criticism by Graham Greene and others of pieces that seemed too "neatly packaged" or on too obvious themes. Vannatta finds the volume "without a doubt Bates's most forgettable work," speculating that financial insecurity and lack of widespread recognition forced Bates to overproduce. Contains: The White Pony, Every Bullet Has Its Billet, A Funny Thing, Chateau Bougainvillaea, The Ship, Perhaps We Shall Meet Again..., The Machine, I Am Not Myself, The Flying Goat, The Late Public Figure, The Blind, Shot Actress--Full Story, The Dog and Mr. Moreney, The Wreath, Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree, The Ox.[1/05]
"The Flying Goat." Story (1951). 11 pp./ca. 2135 wds. A humorous and slight sketch, involving two men sharing tall tales in a saloon. The principle tale involves one Jethro Watkins, a euphonium-playing Salvation Army member whose prayers for a flying goat are answered, and who then proceeds to demonstrate the miracle in circuses and public stunts. An unsuccessful attempt at slapstick, bearing some resemblance to stories of Uncle Silas (especially "A Funny Thing"). In The Flying Goat (1939), Twenty Tales (1951). [tall tales, regligion, music, slapstick]
Flying Officer 'X' Stories. Bates's service as an officer and story-writer for the Royal Air Force is described at length by Bates in The Blossoming World (176-182) and The World in Ripeness (5-41), and by Baldwin (145-171). Bates wrote to his long-time friend David Garnett, who was already working at the Air Ministry, about possible military service; after a preliminary meeting with Ministry Librarian John Nerney, Bates applied for a commission in the reserves and then, at a meeting with Nerney, Harald Peake (Director of R.A.F. Public Relations), and Hilary St. George Saunders (deputy librarian at the House of Commons), was presented with "not only a truly remarkable proposition but one utterly unprecedented in any of the armed services at any time." Asked to "illuminate the troubled business of war in a way that will bring war and its participants vividly, excitedly, even painfully alive," Bates in turn requested and received "utter freedom in time and movement." Accordingly, under the wing of a new unit of R.A.F. Public Relations, Bates received officers' training at Uxbridge in October 1941, and then was posted to Oakington air base for almost three months; following the success of his initial stories, he was reassigned to Tangmere, in Sussex. In both stations, he perfected a method of gathering story ideas from comments overheard or received buying drinks for the pilots. The first book compilation won unanimous praise; "with their quiet understatement and matter-of-fact tone, they sounded deeply honest and trustworthy. Reviewer after reviewer hailed the truth and beauty of these little sketches" (Baldwin 154).
More than half of the twenty-four stories that appeared under the pseudonymn "Flying Officer X" are portraits of individual pilots narrated by an observer who, like Bates, is on the inside of the air force without himself being a pilot. These portraits tend to recount the personal history of a pilot and to convey the very individual qualities and forces that motivate him. The other stories might be characterized as vignettes involving one or another aspect of air force life, again usually narrated by an admiring but uninvolved observer; two of these stories, including the novella-length "How Sleep the Brave," contain significant action and suspense. The earliest stories are the strongest, in part undoubtedly due to the less-successful second assignment at Tangmere; among them are "The Greatest People in the World," "The Young Man from Kalgoorlie," and "It's Just the Way It Is." Stories Bates wrote immediately prior to the war were frequently dreary, moralizing, or overly discursive; having been assigned a purpose and goal for his war stories, Bates appears to have applied his ample experience and skill in a manner that is fresh and uncomplicated. Baldwin writes that Bates "perfectly matched the stoicism and tight-lipped endurance of the men he portrayed...by his customary devices of simple language, vivid description, and understatement." In addition, he notes that in these stories "Bates finds a vehicle for one of his most deeply felt beliefs--that the real heroes of the war, as of life generally, are the ordinary people whose heroism is unseen." He also acknowledges the tendency towards formulaic construction and shallow characterization, but concludes that "as fiction written to order, these stories are of surprisingly high quality;" Vannatta (58) concurs that "they are surprisingly good for commissioned propaganda pieces...If the cynical post-Vietnam-era reader might find the consistently understated 'good show' courage a bit cloying and a bit of a sentimental pose, surely it is preferable to the inflated bravado in which a lesser writer might have indulged." Novelist Anthony Burgess, in his introduction to the posthumous collection A Month by the Lake & Other Stories, noted that "It was not patriotic writing of the kind that the Great Patriotic War produced in Soviet Russia; it was low-keyed as to sentiment, far from flag-waving, essentially human and quietly compassionate."
The stories appeared in five collections: the initial English collection of nine stories in 1942 (The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories), a second English collection of six stories in 1943 (How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories), an American edition of 1943 containing most of the contents of the two English collections plus nine other pieces (There's Something in the Air), a 1944 one-volume edition duplicating the contents of the two English editions (Something in the Air), and finally a 1952 edition duplicating the contents of the 1944 one-volume publication with the addition of three pieces (The Stories of Flying Officer 'X'). The author is given as "Flying Officer 'X'" in all but the last; however, the 1943 American editiion includes "H.E. Bates" in parentheses after the pseudonymn. Three stories in the style of these works, but not included in the collections or with the pseudonymn, are "Happy Christmas Nastashya," "The Three Thousand and One Hours of Sergeant Kostek," and "From this Time Forward." Bates's response, on learning that the first book of stories would be printed in 100,000 copies was "never having heard of a book, except the Bible and Gone with the Wind, selling such figures, I nearly fainted" (The World in Ripeness, 30); such exposure immediately brought Bates a significantly expanded audience and elevated status as an author.
"For the Dead." Story (1933). 6 pp./ca. 1350 wds. Two widowers, making obligatory pilgrimages to the graves of their wives, find themselves side-by-side, unwillingly goading each other to a pretence of reverence and respect. With the excuse of heavy rain, they end their ritual, and hurry "away from each other with angry relief and impatience, as though they never wished to see each other again." A dreary and cynical glimpse at two old men. In the New statesman and nation (30 December 1933), The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), Thirty-one Selected Tales (1947).[death, widowers, graveyards] (1/05)
"For Valour." Story (1951). 6 pp./ca. 1900 wds. The narrator, on a visit to "have a look at the old airfield" some years after the war, visits with the keeper of a cafe with accomodations. She relates how she bought the business just after her son became a pilot: "Idea of keeping it warm for him, you know...It was warm all right...Too warm sometimes." Showing him the medals received after her son was killed over Arnhem, she complains that "I earned the money for him and now he's not here. I didn't care how I earned it--well, you got to earn it somehow." Her tales of countless visiting soldiers, and now commercial travellers, suggest prostitution; her bitterness is reflected in the effect of pressing her hands into her face while talking: "the coy girlishness had gone from the eyes; and on the mauve, crusty cheeks were two small rows of scars where the rings had bitten hard on the flesh." In a style reminiscent of Bates "Flying Officer X" stories and of a quality no lower than some other tales of the period, Bates never chose to include this story in of his published collections. In Modern Reading (No. 20, Winter 1951-52, London: Modern Reading, ed. Reginald Moore). [pilots, war, mother/son] 5/05
"Foreword." Essay (1950). An exhibition catalog introduction, on a topic not normally associated with Bates, who writes of the theory of Pointillism (or "scientific impressionism"), the major proponents of the genre, and the little-known exponents represented in the exhibition. While mainly listing the artists, Bates also expresses his pleasure in the paintings when he writes of their "freshness, the brilliance, the immense luminosity ...the quivering sparkle of gardens seen in intense sunlight after rain...the effect of lyricism, of air, of joy in light and earth and sky and sun." Bates wrote a similar foreword for a Redfern Gallery exhibition in 1954 called Plaisirs de L'epoque 1900. In Pointillists and their Period (London: Redfern Gallery, 1950, pp. 3-4). [art] 11/09
"Foreword." Essay (1951). 2 pp./ca. 600 wds. The compiler of this "Festival Handbook" writes that he has "lifted" Bates's five paragraphs from something "that has been written...for inclusion in the book of 'The Boy Will Do'" (a play performed for Higham Ferrers Drama Week in 1951). No evidence of that book has been discovered; it is possible therefore that this is the only publication of these reminiscences of Bates's boyhood in Higham Ferrers. Bates closes in a plea for preservation: "Leave it alone, therefore: the unique group of eccliastical buildings, the 18th century houses, the College, the pubs, Wood Street with its limes, the incomparable Square with the Chestnut Trees. It can only grow in beauty." In Souvenir of the 700th Anniversary of the First Borough Charter and of the Festival of Britain (1951). [autobiography, Higham Ferrers)
"Foreword." Essay (1953). 4 pp./ca. 1450 wds. A pleasant consideration of the role that the Reader's Digest may have played in combatting modern "temptations towards a life of easy illiteracy" (telephone, cinema, radio, television) by satisfying human inquisitiveness, and particularly curiosity about other people. He mentions in particular articles about the volcano Krakatoa and astronomy, as well as a piece by H.L. Mencken. In The Reader's Digest Omnibus (London, 1953, pp. ix-xii). [literary criticism] 11/09
"Foreword." Essay (1954). 3 pp./ca. 550 wds. In this second introduction to an exhibition catalog of the Redfern Gallery in London (the earlier one for an exhibition of Pointillists), Bates notes that "one cannot help feeling, that l'epoque 1900 had more elegance, enchantment and a sheer unashamed sense of pleasure than our own." In words similar to those in the earlier exhibit catalog preface, he notes that most of the painters, English or French, are little known and that the exhibit therefore offers the "pleasures of discovery." In Plaisirs de l'epoque 1900 (Redfern Gallery, 1954). [art] 11/09
"Foreword." Essay (1956). 5 pp./ca.1200 wds. Bates writes of his optimism in the 1930s, shared by Elizabeth Bowen, for the future of the short story and of factors leading instead to a current decline of new story writers. He attributes this to a more general "famine in writers of imagination," and distinguishes a "decade of writers too greatly given to genuflection, communism and general vituperation" with writers for whom "the short story is close to poetry -- indeed, at its best, is poetry." In Pick of To-day's Short Stories 7 (London, 1956, pp. 9-13). [literary criticism] 11/09
"Foreword." Essay (n.d.). Three paragraphs published posthumously, and described under Higham Ferrers, A Pictorial History.
"40 Years a Writer." Essay (1965). 4 pp./ca. 2300 wds. On his sixtieth birthday, Bates recalls his beginnings as a writer, discusses the financial challenges for writers at all times, and describes his war-time literary work. With two photographs, one of Bates with actor Gregory Peck. In Weekend Telegraph (London, 14 May 1965, pp. 47, 49, 51, 52).[autobiography]6/10
A Fountain of Flowers. Essays. London: Michael Joseph, 1974. 96 pp./ca. 23,000 wds. Bates's last work of nature writing focuses on specific flowering plants, their scents and names, plant discoveries and history, and related topics like birds and planting from seed. Similar to his other gardening works, the book rarely strays into the kinds of observations on society, nature, and modern life that characterize his other non-fictional work. The preface and twenty-four essays express Bates's philosophy that "true gardens" are not made "wholly of professional skills or tomes of encyclopaedic knowledge or even of green fingers: but love." Sixteen pages of color plates by Patrick Matthews are of special interest in consisting partly, or possibly completely, of photographs of Bates's own garden, including one photograph of the family home in Kent. Published posthumously and written in the last months of Bates's life, Baldwin (229) speculates that "it must have been sheer willpower that saw him through the writing of his last work of nonfiction."[gardening, nature, non-fiction] 1/08
"The Four Beauties." Novella (1966). 48 pp./ca. 13,000 wds. A reminiscence of newspaper reporter Richardson (who appears also in Love for Lydia), and thus reflecting Bates's experiences with the Northamptonshire Chronicle. As with most of Bates's fiction hearkening back to his youth in Rushden, the tale is delightful in its lush atmosphere and details of country life and customs; however the structure, consisting of the narrator's romantic involvement with each of three lovely and highly-sexed daughters, as well as their mother, is weak and rambling. The tale shares with some of Bates's late work, and his comic work in general, a celebration of the sensual life. Vannatta (122-123) notes that this love triangle plus two lacks the "sordidness and violence" elsewhere evident in Bates's treatment of love", and praises the "rarefied, dreamlike ambience which Bates has employed so effectively in the past." He also notes that Richardson, far from provoking jealousy amongst his lovers or censure from the reader, seems to be "little more than a plaything of girls...whose wiles are as ancient as Eve; " thus offering further comparison to Richardson's complicated relationship in Love for Lydia. In Woman's Own (23, 30 April 1966), The Four Beauties (1968), The Best of H.E. Bates (1980).[autobiography, rushden, love, sex] 9/07
"The Four Beauties." Novellas (1968). London: Michael Joseph, 1968. 192 pp. Bates's last collection of novellas contains a slight comic piece, an action-packed South Seas adventure, a semi-autobiographical remembrance of a young reporter and his loves, and an exploration of a dark love triangle. While the title tale bears some of the atmosphere of Bates's best remembrances of the past, the only truly strong work in the collection is "The Simple Life." Contains: The Simple Life, The Four Beauties, The Chords of Youth, The White Wind.[10/07]
"The Foxes." Story (1957). 10 pp./ca. 2670 wds. An Uncle Silas recollection, providing a forum for Bates's life-long dislike of the church (see also "The Fire Eaters"), involving a battle between Silas and a parson: "he wur always at me to git me to live it different. Wanted to git me to reform...when a man's 'happy what sense is it a-trying to git 'im to start all over again and be miserable? 'Ithout [without] they're miserable, some folks, they don't think they're good." Silas of course prevails in the end, having out-foxed the parson in a matter concerning a fox and the parsons hens. In Sugar for the Horse (1957). [silas, church] 6/05
"Free Choice: Free World." Story (1943). 5 pp./ca. 1420 wds. A touching "Flying Officer X" story concerning the Koussevitksies, a Lithuanian couple who run a restaurant in England and take to the narrator, "a gentleman who like bortsh." Although never served anything but sausage and potatoes, he finds common ground with them in remembering one of their countrymen, a Mr. Markus, "a free man, making a free choice, entering a war he had no need to enter" (Lithuania not being at war). He happily reports one day that Markus is not dead but a prisoner of war; Mrs. Koussevitksy exclaims that "when war is over we will have bigga celebration!" In There's Something in the Air (1943), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952). [war, lithuanians, officer x] (1/05)
"From My Garden -- All Seeds Bright and Beautiful." Essay (1971). 1 pp./ca. 1000 wds. Bates makes the case for growing plants from seed, including trees and shrubs, and runs through a wealth of seeds available in one of his favorite seed catalogs . In Living (London, October 1971, v. 10, p. 12). [gardening] 5/10
"From My Garden -- The Scents of Summer." Essay (1971). 1 pp./ca. 900 wds. A delightful meditation on the wonders of scent, blending personal reminiscence, anecdotes, and a mention research on the relation of scent to creativity. In Living (London, June 1971, v. 6, p. 12). [gardening] 5/10
"From This Time Forward." Story (1943). 6 pp./ca. 2880 wds. A story much in the mold of Bates's "Flying Officer X" stories, but neither appearing in those collections nor with that pseudonymn. The narrator relates a visit to the aristocratic mother and sister of a dead pilot; the sister is convinced that her brother lives and in the course of the conversation, contradictions in their memories of the pilot are revealed: he remembering an arrogrant, callous, and hot-tempered youngster, she recalling a "clean and virgin idol of youth who cried over the death of a dog." At story's end, the narrator tries to put aside all the differing images and think of the boy "when alone, flying by night, when no one could see his face or guess his thoughts;" the mother admits that "I sometimes think...I never knew him at all." The tale differs from most of the other war stories in taking place at a countryside home, and in presenting a more complex and unflattering view of the pilot and the family's emotions; in this respect it comes across as much like one of Bates's non-war tales as one of those written as wartime propaganda. In Printer's Pie -- A Miscellany by Leading Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1943, ed. Leonard Russell, pp. 41-46.)[war,pilots, death, loss] (1/05)
"The Frontier." Story (1950). 22 pp./ca. 6300 wds. An excellent and well-constructed story of post-war India, concerning a weary and lonely owner of a tea plantation facing "Quit India" signs and a changing political and social landscape. A man "overwhelmed by his own inadequacy," he makes a half-hearted effort to seduce a young nurse; later when she joins him in pursuit of a worker charged with murder, it is he who is shot and killed by the fugitive. The title refers both to what he considers "the birth of another nationalism in a world diseased by nationalism, the creation of yet another frontier" and to the psychological borders demarking old and new. Vannatta (80) writes that the nurse, "tired, bored, cold, hardened by her experiences," represents the new order that will survive, the "unutterable loneliness" that is the one of the "cold, callous products of war." In Pick of To-Day's Short Stories (Second Series, ed. John Pudney, London: Odhams Press, 1950), Argosy (December 1950), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), H.E. Bates (1975). [t:Asia, India, war, lonliness] (1/05)
"Fuchsia." Story (1939). 7 pp./ca. 1520 wds. A laid-off tannery worker, now dependent on the wages of his independent and fun-loving daughter, questions his identify and purpose in life. While strolling the shops, he finds himself drawn to a "small pink and white fuchsia in a pot" called Ballet Girl, "his eyes alight for a moment with happiness, with a momentary illusion it was clear they could not sustain." A weak glimpse at a man diminished and a family in disruption. In The Spectator (22 December 1939), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).[family, unemployed, youth, fatherhood] (1/05)
"The Fuel-Gatherers." Story (1928). 15 pp./ca. 3170 wds. Six women fill sacks with wood on an autumn afternoon. Fifteen-year-old Rachel and aged Rebecca fall behind, to the disgust and impatience of the others, especially the self-appointed leader, a tall dominating figure. The four proceed to a forest, off-limits, derisively scorning Rachel for staying with the elder woman. A prose landscape, in which the innocence of both the young and old women is contrasted with the coarseness of the other four, and at the same time the stillness and beauty of the hillside are contrasted with the gloominess of the forbidden forest. A sensitive portrayal of the emotions of Rachel, full of hope and love, and Rebecca, lonely and dreamy, and of the comfort they provide each other; at end, the opening "quiet magic benediction of autumn" is matched by Rebecca's vision of "serene majesty." In Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[age, youth, nature] (1/05)
"A Funny Thing." Story (1938). 10 pp./ca. 2050 wds. An escalating bragging match between Uncle Silas and Uncle Cosmos, replete with much colorful dialogue and the signature punch line, in which Silas traps Cosmos into a corner, slyly acknowledging that the stories of both of them were complete fabrications. Cosmos is modelled on Bates's paternal grandfather Charles Lawrence, who was "known about Rushden as a dapper and dashing figure who spent his holidays in the south of France, where he reputedly had a number of mistresses" (Baldwin 18). The tale was skillfully adapted for television in the series My Uncle Silas. In the Daily Express (28 February 1938), The Flying Goat (1939), My Uncle Silas (1939).[t:Silas, bragging, tall tales, sex, Bates family] (1/05)
David Garnett, son of Constance and Edward, a writer of short stories, and a lifelong friend of Bates; Bates's initial visit to the Garnett home is humorously related in The Blossoming World (47-52). Garnett played a role in Bates's assignment to the Air Ministry during World War II, and although he was harshly critical of Bates's 1939 failed novel San Fairy Ann, the friendship endured and they successfully collaborated on the tribute to David's father, the 1950 publication Edward Garnett. Bates expressed his appreciation of Garnett's fiction in an introduction to the Garnett story "A Terrible Day." (1/05)
Edward Garnett, Bates's first editor, had tremendous influence on his early works and development as an author. Their relationship is described in detail in the book-length tribute Edward Garnett as well as in various passages in the first volume of Bates's autobiography, The Blossoming World (esp. 12-36).[continue]
Mr. Gaul, master of Latin and Scripture at Kettering Grammar School, noted by Bates as being particularly ineffectual at classroom management ("Grammar School, Kettering" p. 26), and inspiration to at least some degree for the story Pensioned Off. (1/05)
"George Moore -- and some literary propagadists." Essay (1933). 1 pp./ ca. 900 wds. Bates commemorates Moore on his death 21 January 1933, as England's most poetical novelist and one of its most impudent and beautiful story tellers." He distinguishes Moore as a "pure artist" in contrast to Galsworthy, Shaw, and Wells and notes that Moore's personal style and views were "the greatest obstacle to his work's wider appreciation and popularity." In New Clarion (ii, 38, 229, 11 February 1933). [Moore, literary criticism' 1/09
"A German Idyll." Story (1932). Waltham Saint Lawrence, Berkshire: Golden Cockerel Press, 1932 (26 April). 48 pp./ca. 9240 wds. Dedication: "To Karl." An account of Bates's trip to Germany with Charles Lahr and others in 1927. Karl's (Charles's) reunion with family in the town of Iben, feasting and drinking at the local inn, and a hesitant romance between Richardson (Bates) and the landlord's beautiful daugher Anna, are richly and sensitively rendered. The travellers depart, Richardson reflecting that Anna had "appeared briefly and wonderfully and had vanished, like the rainbow. He knew he would never see her again and he wondered if he would remember her...He wondered also if she would remember him." Rhys Davies confirms Bates's account, adding that "H.E. Bates, offering to escort a girl home, found her watchful aunt dogging their long walk at a discreet distance" (Print of a Hare's Foot, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969, p. 172). Bates discusses the trip and the story in Blossoming World (54-57). Published in a limited edition and the later in the collections The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), Thirty-one Selected Tales (1947), Selected Stories (1957).[germany, autobiography, richardson, romance, youth] (1/05)
"The Ginger-Lily Girl." Story (1955). 5 pp./ca. 1700 wds. The second of six brief newspaper "Tales of Tahiti;" in this one the narrator gently recounts the plight of a ugly and disfigured Tahitian girl; she is deluded in thinking that an American pilot named only "John" will soon come and take her to New York to get married. In the Evening Standard (18 October 1955), The Fabulous Mrs V (1964). [tahiti, love,natives] 6/05
"A Girl Called Peter." Story. 13 pp./ca. 3700 wds. Peter is a "big ungainly girl," raised in a household devoid of femininity, who at twenty-three has had "the final moments of girlhood... beaten out of her." While working her horse near an abandoned mansion, she meets a young surveyor with hands "long-fingered and narrow, more like the hands of a girl" and with an appreciation of the "exquisite scent" of limes; this meeting makes her "aware of being unbearably lonely, more and more unsure." Seeing him twice more, she feels "even more all the hideous flapping ugliness of her muscular body;" the man however, is both comparatively feminine and fascinatingly masculine: "from the back there was nothing by which to tell that he was not a girl, compact and slim-hipped, and it was only when he stood beyond the dark water, grinning, ready to dive again, that the masculine shape of him was startlingly, beautifully revealed." Like many other Bates works, this sensitive portrait of confused youth leaves the main character unable to break out of her emotional prison, in this case a sexual straitjacket. The story however is flawed by inadequate explanation of the repressive parenting of Pete's father. In Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951). [youth, gender] (1/05)
"The Gleaner." Story (1932). 7 pp./ca.1425 wds. A poetic and noble tribute to an old woman, "the last of the gleaners, last survivor of an ancient race," gleaning the cornfields as she has done since childhood, crying as she struggles to lift her sack, and tasting the salt of her tears, "the salt of her own body, the salt of the earth." Baldwin (110) characterizes the woman as "so vivid in portrayal that she becomes all gleaners everywhere, a symbol of woman's tireless labor and the dependence of all life on the soil." In the New Statesman and Nation (5 November 1932), Now and Then (Spring 1933), The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940). [rural, farmworkers, age](1/05)
"Glossary of R.A.F. Slang." Essay (1943). 2 pp./ca. 130 wds. A list of twenty-four words or phrases, such as "popsy," "prang," and "W.A.A.F," that appear in the "Flying Officer X" stories, along with definitions for the benefit of American readers; the glossary appears only in the 1943 American edition of war stories, There's Something in the Air.[drop?] (1/05)
"Go, Lovely Rose." Story (1953). 9 pp./ca. 3110 wds. An overprotective father makes a fool of himself, searching for his nineteen-year-old daughter in his pajamas and slippers when she is out late. The story ends both humorously and kindly, with the father approving of her highly respectable date and, in relief, filled with "a sensation of extraordinary self-satisfaction." Bates vividly captures the alternating feelings of helplessness, panic, and anger on the one hand, and foolishness on the other, familiar to any parent of a teenage girl (Bates's eldest child, Ann, being 21 when this story was published). In Evening News (27 October 1953), The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).
"The Goat and the Stars." Story (1940). 7 pp./ca. 1640 wds. A fable-like critique of religion, in which a young farm-boy innocently misinterprets a church announcement regarding Christmas Eve gifts ("No Gift too Large. None too Small. Give generously..This Means You."). Offering his favorite kid-goat, he holds it in his arms in a pew, only to be met with laughter and to be told that "you got the wrong idea. A goat's no use to anybody." However, in an interesting twist, the boy is not overly troubled by the event but is glad not to lose his goat. But he is troubled that "there was no snow on the ground. There were no bells ringing, and far above himself and the little goat the stars were still." Reminiscent of early and flawed attempts at fairytale fables, the story seems a simplistic condemnation of church and society. In The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Twenty Tales (1951).[youth, religion, fable] (1/05)
The Golden Oriole: five novellas (1962). London: Michael Joseph, 1962; Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1962. 208 pp. A late collection of novellas that Vannatta (119) accurately notes as varying in quality as much as in tone. Two comic stories, one of which ("The World is Too Much With Us") displays Bates's mastery of the genre, contrast sharply with the successful atmospheric title story, a complex psychological tale ("The Ring of Truth") and the bleak "Quiet Girl." Contents: The Ring of Truth, The Quiet Girl, The Golden Oriole, Mr Featherstone Takes a Ride, The World is Too Much With Us.
"The Golden Oriole." Novella (1962). 29 pp./ca. 7000 wds. A psychological exploration of a fragile and troubled woman, compared favorably by Vannatta (119) to the early "dreamlike ambiance" of "Alexander" and other boyhood tales. The woman, girlishly innocent, is frozen in a stultifying and unconsummated marriage to a man who keeps her as his "princess" on a throne. Her conversations with a virile admirer are highlights of the tale, as she wakens to a long-suppressed sensuality. As both Vannatta and Baldwin (209) discuss, the themes of hiding and discovering pervade the story: husband and wife engage in a childish hide-and-seek game each evening, one which enters into the affair as well; the woman puts off her lover until it can "happen like a discovery" rather than "deliberately;" and in a conclusion found by Baldwin as "wrapping it up too neatly and exonerating Bates from facing the full implications of his central character's psyche," the lover dies and leaves the woman "suddenly naked," with "no way of hiding any longer." Vannatta summarizes that "after discovering that the fantasy world of her marriage suffers in comparison to true passion, Prinny also discovers a more bitter truth: no Eden exists to insulate us from the harsh world of reality." The title stems from a vivid dream shared by the woman's lover, in which he catches a rare bird and it talks to him (interestingly, Bates alludes to the rarity of the bird in chapter 3 of another novella of this period, "An Aspidistra in Babylon"). In The Golden Oriole (1962).[psychology, love, sex] 6/07
"Gone Away." Story (1928). 9 pp./ca. 1830 wds. Richard, a young boy, is at home, ignorant of his grandfather's death and the funeral taking place in the nearby cemetery. He grows increasingly bewildered by the absence of his grandfather and the cryptic answers of an old woman preparing refreshments. Finding his grandfather's trousers, handkerchief, and watch in the upstairs bedroom adds to his confusion and, upon the arrival of his parents and the funeral party, he repeatedly asks after him, expressing his desire to go fishing again with him. None of the adults answers him truthfully and in the end, "catching sight of his mother's white, plaintive face against the breaking sky, he burst into weeping." A sympathetic portrayal of a boy's emotions, and of the insensitivity of adults in handling his needs. In Day’s End and Other Stories (1928).[boyhood, death, grief] (1/05)
"The Good Corn." Story (1955). 17 pp./ca. 4700 wds. A tale of a childless farming couple, the wife's emotional breakdown at the death of a calf, the husband's weakness in sleeping with a hired girl, and their loving reconciliation as they adopt the newborn baby. Bates's exploration of their sadness, confusion, and deep love are richly interwoven with the seasons, flowers, and rituals of their country existence. In Argosy (October 1955), The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974). [rural, marriage, affair] 6/05
The Good Corn and other stories. Stories (1974). London: Longman, 1974. 198 pp. A posthumous collection selected and edited by "Geoffrey Halson, M.A., head of the English Department at Hounsdown School." Compiled for instruction purposes, the volume includes an editor's introduction, notes on the stories, points for discussion, suggestions for further reading, and lists of other writings by Bates as well related recommended readings. Contains: Love in a Wych Elm, Let's Play Soldiers, Every Bullet Has Its Billet, The Station, Chateau Bougainvillaea, Time to Kill, The Loved One, The Ox, The Good Corn, Mr Penfold, The Maker of Coffins, The Little Jeweller, Where the Cloud Breaks, Colonel Julian.
"The Grace Note." Story (1936). 7 pp./ca. 1420 wds. A humorous tale of a family of brass players, the Chipperfields, of their devotion to music, their jealousy and stubbornness, and of a single "grace note" that dashes their dreams of a Chipperfield band and rends the family apart. In the Fortnightly Review (May 1936, 145:541-547), Hotch Potch (ed. John Brophy, The Council of the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital: 11-19). [music, family, humour, first person] (1/05)
"Grammar School (Kettering)." Essay (1934). 13 pp./ca. 3276 wds. Bates's memories of his five years at Kettering Grammar School, in a compilation edited by Graham Greene that included essays by W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, L.P. Hartley, Sean O'Faolain, Anthony Powell and others. Bates portrays his experience as "utterly useless and dreary," and the instructors as "hopeless, teaching by rule of thumb without a spark of intuition or imagination." He has praise only for his literature teacher, Edmund Kirby. Reflecting on his refusal of an offer of a schoolmaster post as "one of the most sensible acts of my life," he closes: "It was not, indeed, until I left the school that my education began." Later, Bates would write "I am fully aware that my comments on Kettering in Greene's anthology The Old School aroused consternation, ire and indeed wrath in certain devoted Kettering breasts when the book first appeared. I cannot help this; the experiences of others are not mine; my eyes and mind record for themselves, unaffected by the prejudices of others" (Vanished World, 78-79). See also education. In The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands, London: Jonathan Cape, 1934. (1/05)
The Grapes of Paradise. American title of the novella collection An Aspidistra in Babylon.
The Grapes of Paradise. Novellas (1974). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with Michael Joseph, 1974. 320 pp. A compilation of previously-published novellas, not to be confused with the 1960 collection An Aspidistra in Babylon, which was retitled The Grapes of Paradise in its American edition. This volume contains all four novellas from that earlier collection, as well as all four novellas contained in the 1957 collection titled Death of a Huntsman (Summer in Salander in America). Contains: Death of a Huntsman, Night Run to the West, Summer in Salander, The Queen of Spain Fritillary, An Aspidistra in Babylon, A Month by the Lake, A Prospect of Orchards, The Grapes of Paradise.[11/07]
"The Grapes of Paradise." Novella (1956). 63 pp./ca. 18000 wds. The narrator relates the tale of a fellow traveller in Tahiti, and which reflects the lure of island life-- its pace, food, and especially women -- and the truth in the expression, ruefully quoted as "two weeks there are too long, and a year not long enough." The fairly simple story of callousness, jealousy, and violence depicts an Englishman misusing a native woman, nearly losing his life in the process. Bates offers nothing to like in either the man, superficial and selfish, or the woman, uncommunicative and possessive, but the story offers the suspense and tight structure of an adventure, and in this way represents a diversion from Bates's more typical depictions of cultured society. In John Bull (10,17 March 1956), An Aspidistra in Babylon/The Grapes of Paradise (1960), The Grapes of Paradise (1974).
The Grass God. Novella (1951). London: John Murray, 1951 (Cornhill Supplement No. 1) 96 pp./ca. 21,200 wds. A bleak portrait of Fitzgerald, a soulless landowner who is unfeeling in his treatment of his tenants and his wife, and clueless in conducting a summer affair with a young beauty. While the reader is not entirely unsympathetic to his entrapment in a miserable marriage, his behavior towards his wife and others suggests his complete responsibility for his failed relationships and amply justifies his desserts in the end: the departure of both wife and mistress. Baldwin (188) writes that “the story comments acutely on postwar mores, but falls short of illuminating anything beneath the surface of its characters.” In The Nature of Love (1953).[sex, marriage, landowners] (1/05)
"A Great Day for Bonzo." Story (1957). 66 pp./ca. 17,800 wds. In a volume otherwise containing short nostalgic vignettes reflecting Bates's childhood, this novella-length piece is experimental in style and darker in subject. The narrator recalls a day-long adventure with two other children, in which they unintentionally find themselves involved in an ugly domestic conflict, with overtones of death and tragedy. A dog belonging to one of the adults holds the long sequence of events together, but the story lacks the concise power of Bates's other tributes to childhood, instead attempting an almost dreamlike stream of narration that is only arguably successful. However, Baldwin [make link] (200) finds that "Bates brilliantly manipulates the point of view, keeping it limited to a child's perception yet fully developing the conflicts and passions the children do not comprehend." In Argosy (October 1957), The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), A Party for the Girls (1988).[boyhood] 3/06
"Great Uncle Crow." Story (1959). 10 pp./ca. 2450 wds. A lovely vignette of a visit by the boyhood Bates, with his grandfather, to his eccentric uncle, a man known as "the most remarkable fisherman in the world...[a] masterpiece of a man." In a river hut pieced together with beer barrels and sheet tin, the three enjoy watercress, moor-hens' eggs, bread, butter, and spring water, while the men continuously take swigs of "neck-oil" to keep their gullets from rusting. Although a hoped-for fishing trip is postponed, the boy goes home happy with tastes, sounds, and laughter of the afternoon. The story resembles the Uncle Silas tales in depicting an admiring boy and an uncle who loves his drink, food, and freedom. Uncle Crow is based on Bates's much less entertaining Uncle Rook, whom Bates would describe in Flowers and Faces (9-10) as "a tall gloomy sepulchral man...[who] looked about as likely to catch a fish as an elephant." Calling it a "marvelous piece of nostalgia and warmth," Baldwin (20, 200) notes that the boy is "fascinated not by the heroics of fishing but by his uncle's simple way of life, for Crow is an English Thoreau, living by his own Walden in a world where the 'sun was a gold plate in the sky.'" The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), Seven by Five/The Best of H.D.Bates (1963), The Poison Ladies and Other Stories (1976), The Best of H.E. Bates (1980), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [bates family, boyhood]. 2/06
The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942) London: Jonathan Cape, 1942 (September). 80 pp. "To Hilary St. George Saunders." This first collection of "Flying Officer X" stories contains nine tales, all of which were included (along with the six stories of the second collection, How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories) in the 1944 Something in the Air collection. All were also included in the American 1943 edition called There's Something in the Air. Contains: It's Never in the Papers; There's No Future in It; The Young Man from Kalgoorlie; It's Just The Way It Is; The Sun Rises Twice; No Trouble At All; A Personal War; K for Kitty; The Greatest People in the World.
"The Greatest People in the World." Story (1942). 13 pp./ca. 3120 wds. One of the best of Bates's "Flying Officer X" stories, and the title story for the first collection of those pieces. Bates tells a touching tale of a boy whose poor farming parents sacrifice greatly to fund his education. In a lecture on the R.A.F. he hears a "remark that was to affect, and crystallize, his whole life," namely that those who fly are "the greatest people in the world," and he determines to become a bomber pilot, with the complete support of his parents. Bad weather and technical difficulties sabotage his first three assignments, and he is plagued by nightmares of disaster, a loss of confidence, and then finally the news that his parents have been killed in a raid. Their deaths clarify his purpose and dedication; returning from a very successful flight, he looks down on a couple working in the fields: he remembered his own people...as they lived, simple and sacrificing, living only for him, and he saw them alive again in the arrested figures of the two people in the field below: as if they were the same people, the same simple people, the same humble, faithful, eternal people, giving always and giving everything: the greatest people in the world." There are similarities between the pilots in this story and another "Flying Officer X" story, "The Bell."In The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942), There's Something In The Air (1943), Something In The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [flying officer x, pilots, death](1/05)
"Greetings from Our Readers." See "More Greetings from Our Readers."
"Growing 4,400 Alpines in Birmingham." Essay (1968). 3 pp./ca. 1700 wds. One of four by Bates in a series called "Gardens of Ideas" (preceded by "Undersoil Heating for Sub-Tropical Treasures" and followed by"Conservatory Revived," and "Jungle Rarities in Norfolk"). Bates reports on a visit to the Birmingham garden of Roy Elliott, containing over 4000 varieties of alpine plants from thirty countries. In the Daily Telegraph Magazine (London, 15 March 1968, pp. 52-54).[gardening]6/10
"Halibut Jones." Story (1968). 13 pp./ca. 2800 words. A late tale hearkening back to Bates's Rushden boyhood and in the style of the Uncle Silas tales. Halibut is a lying, sponging loafer who charms food, drink, and money out of elderly women; the dialogue, in which Halibut dodges every mention of work, is mildly humorous. In The Wild Cherry Tree (1968).[rural, handyman] 10/07
"Hands Old and New." Essay (1939). 2 pp./ca. 600 wds. Bates reviews two books: Sunday Bugles, a collection of short stories by H.A. Manhood, and The Three Women, a novel by James Miller. Bates deftly identifies strengths and weaknesses of both authors, in the case of Manhood a consistent record of books displaying a twisted and distinctive prose style by an author more suited to poetry, and in the case of Williams, a promising first-novelist showing "plenty of punch and colour, and is full of a competence and warm enthusiasm that are a pleasure to feel," but also displaying lack of confidence as an author. In Now and Then (Spring 1939, pp. 39-40). [literature] 6/10
"Happy Christmas Nastashya." Story (1942). 3 pp./ca. 1540 wds. A vignette similar in style to "Flying Officer X" stories that was published only in a military journal, bearing the byline "Flight Lieutenant H.E. Bates," and unlike Bates's other war tales, situated not in England among R.A.F. pilots but in Russia among partisan soldiers. On a "bitterly dry, windy Russian plateau," the narrator meets a band of soldiers, and converses with a young girl soldier. He watches her as the group begins a journey to blow up a bridge; they wave to each other and "in that moment, above all, my heart was cold." An inconsequential piece with little merit. In the Royal Air Force Journal (London, No. 2, December 1942, pp. 20-22).[war] (1/05)
"A Happy Man." Story (1939). 6 pp./ca. 1760 wds. An uncharacteristic Uncle Silas story, dwelling not on Silas's antics and escapades but on the friendship between Silas and Walter Hawthorn, a distinguished veteran of foreign wars retired to a quiet life of gardening. Bates shares his love of flowers in describing the contrasting tastes of the two gardeners, Silas growing "huge and wonderful...roses into which he could bury his face," and Walter growing tiny forget-me-nots and roses "no bigger than a thimble." One day on their walk for a midday pint, Walter shows signs of dementia, hallucinating flowers in his buttonholes to be medals and Silas to be his General, playing with flowers like a child, and mistaking his garden for a mirage. The tale ends poignantly with Walter taken away to an institution, flowers in hand, "and in that moment it seemed to Uncle Silas that Walter Hawthorn was a happy man." This and another story of this period, The Wreath, express Bates's fondness for the aged, and portray a more gentle and poignant side to Uncle Silas. In My Uncle Silas (1939).[silas, gardening, flowers, age] (1/05)
Hark, Hark The Lark! Title of the American edition of When the Green Woods Laugh.
Bernard Harris. Bates relates his meeting with this educated and broad-minded Methodist clergyman in 1927 in Blossoming World (59-61), a meeting that featured Bates's tirade against organized religion and Harris's mild-mannered response. Harris purchased manuscripts of some of Bates's short stories, but more importantly, his brother successfully marketed other manuscripts at a time when Bates badly needed cash. Harris officiated at Bates's wedding in 1931 and inspired characters in A House of Women and the Larkin family series (Reverend Candy).(1/05)
"Harvest." Story (1927). 8 pp./ca. 1650 wds. A pregnant mother of four reflects on the new life growing inside her. Watching the children play in a familiar field, she is burdened with her loss of innocence and faith, but is roused by the children's need for her help in carrying a heavy basket of gathered fruits and vegetables. A densely atmospheric portrait, which richly integrates the natural world with the emotional ambivalence of the mother; it is discussed at length by Vannatta (15-18), who calls it "a story so beautifully simple yet fundamentally profound that Bates many times equaled yet never surpassed it." In The New Adelphi (December 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[motherhood, pregnancy, nature/emotions, rural](1/05)
"Harvest Moon." Story (1934). 9 pp./ca. 1770 wds. In the full-moonlight barley harvest, a boy of nine and girl of fourteen explore both the countryside and their emotions. He wishes to play "Indians," but she, with an awakening sexuality, is not interested. At story's end, she has a "look of injury and pride;" he, not comprehending, eventually lays back "in the fragrant barley with a sense of great elation, very happy." A very effective short piece that captures the magic of the night as well as the complicated emotions of these two young people. Baldwin (115) calls the piece a "lyric prose-poem of delicacy and charm." In the New Statesman and Nation (20 January 1934), Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Selected Stories (1957), The Poison Ladies and Other Stories (1976).[check quote, elation not elations] [harvest, rural, youth, sexuality, coming of age] (1/05)
"The Heart of Autumn." Two paragraphs included in a 1941 anthology The House of Tanquillity (sic) that were selected from a chapter of the same name in Through the Woods.
H.E. Bates. Stories. London: Harrap, 1975. Edited by Alan Cattell. 192 pp. A posthumous selection of previously published stories for classroom use (with an introduction and discussion questions, as well as notes on biographical, literary, and bibliographical topics). Includes: How Vainly Men Themselves Amaze, Nina, And No Birds Sing, The Earth, Let's Play Soldiers, The Revelation, Queenie White, Squiff, A Threshing Day for Esther, A Couple of Fools, The Frontier.
"The Hedge." Story later titled "Cut and Come Again."(1/05)
"The Hedge Chequerwork." Essay (1939). 17 pp./ca. 6000 wds. In one of ten essays by different authors on features of the English landscape, featuring ample photographs, Bates focuses on the Midlands of his birth, which he characterizes as "this plain homely pudding pattern of elm and grass and hedges [which] is the basis on which the entire English countryside is built. It is the very thing which makes the English country what it is: something different from any other country in the world." He touches on topics that he will further explore over his writing career: his childhood, town squares, the more dramatic topography elsewhere in England, architecture, the interplay of both society and industry in the changing countryside, and hedges themselves -- their birds, flowers, and caretakers. In The English Countryside: a survey of its chief features (ed. H.H. Massingham, London: B.T. Batsford, 1939, pp. 38-54).[nature] 9/09
"Hemingway's Short Stories." Essay (1941). An excerpt from Bates's book The Modern Short Story, published in the 1961 book Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology (Ed. C.H. Baker, New York: Hill and Wang).
Mrs. Hensman, teacher of art, music, and English at the upper school of the Newton Road school in Rushden, and an important early influence on Bates. She encouraged him in his writing, was a friend of the Bates family, and "had a great influence on his early years and may even have been responsible for awakening his earliest desire to write" (Baldwin 31-32). Baldwin also notes that she served as the model for the woman delivering books to Lydia in Love for Lydia.(1/05)
"Here We Go Again." Story (1942). 4 pp./ca. 875 pp. A very brief Air Ministry story which portrays a group of R.A.F. pilots in the "intelligence room" being briefed on the night's operations; reticence, humor, and a mundane schoolroom atmosphere belie the life-and-death assignments; in vain, the narrator looks "into the faces of the crews for a sign of tension, expectation, courage, great events" and confirms the orderly's comment that it is "a very dull affair." Not the typical wartime portrait of pilot bravery and dedication, but a slight glimpse at the business of war. In Lilliput (July 1942), There's Something In The Air (1943).[flying officer x, pilots, war](1/05)
"The Hessian Prisoner." Story (1930). 48 pp./ca. 6770 wds. London: William Jackson Ltd., 1930. In The Vanished World (95) Bates writes of a German prisoner-of-war who assists a local farmer named Sam in 1916; "I taught him a few rudimentary words of English. Perhaps it isn't altogether odd that I should remember Johann with such clarity and some affection, since I have over and over again been convinced that this young fair pawn, one of millions moved remorselessly hither and thither in a bloody game of chess, sowed in my mind the first of my doubts on war's futilities. We all grew very fond of Johann and he of us." Johann is recreated in this story as a lively, humorous, and strong young man who quickly melts the distrust of his aged English "masters" and becomes loved as a son. The sadness in Johann's separation from mother and homeland, and the couple's grief at his death from a farm accident are utilized in a gentle condemnation of war. Considered by many as one of Bates's best stories, it reflects his established talent in creating atmosphere, with a growing ability to cast realistic and convincing characters. Also in The Black Boxer Tales (1932), Thirty Tales (1934), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949). [war, rural](1/05)
Higham Ferrers, A Pictorial History (prefatory paragraphs). Essay (n.d.) 1 pp./ca. 230 wds. These posthumously published paragraphs may belong with the introduction to Souvenir of the 700th Anniversary of the First Borough Charter and of the Festival of Britain In Higham Ferrers in being excerpts from an unidentified essay about Higham Ferrers. In these paragraphs Bates writes: "Higham Ferrers has a very special place in my affections: not because I was born there, but because almost all the really golden days of my childhood seem in retrospect to have been spent in and about it...So deeply ingrained is this ancient little borough in my mind that at least half-a-dozen of my novels and many more of my stories are set either wholly or partly in it, and it still delights me to feel that the countryside I describe in those pages, nostalgically recalling the lark-song of childhood and the call of yellow-hammers on burning summer afternoons, was the same countryside that Henry the Fifth's great Archbishop, Chichele, knew centuries ago." In A Pictorial History (Rotary Club of Rushden, 1984, p. 5). [autobiography]6/10
"The Holiday." Story (1927). 7 pp./ca. 1630 wds. A young couple and their baby boy return by train from a holiday in Scarborough, by the sea. They disembark at York, and the husband finds tea and "pinches" a slab of cake before, in the rush of people to catch the next train, he is separated from his wife and she goes on without him. While anxiously waiting and worrying, he remembers the pleasures of the holiday, asking "why should it ever end, where was the justice of it?" Discovering that he has both railway tickets, his anxiety increases, but upon arrival the couple clutch each other and begin to "talk of home in whispers." At day's end, the husband, unable to sleep, imagines the breathing of his wife and child as the sound of the sea. He relives the "joys of the week that had passed," and as worry and regret slip away, he lies awake longing for the sea and wondering "will it ever come again?" A suspenseful and dramatic sketch, full of the innocence and inexperience of the young couple, and evoking a sense of dreamlike wonder at its conclusion. In The Blossoming World (18) Bates quotes a letter in which his editor, Edward Garnett, praises the story (originally called "Once"), saying "It is beautifully rendered, the woman's absorption in the baby and the man's absorption in both...all is beautifully felt." See Vannatta (21-22). In The New Statesman (1 January 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934). [youth, marriage](1/05)
"The House by the River." Story (1976). 11 pp./ca. 2800 wds. A very unsuccessful tale, understandably not one that Bates chose to publish in his lifetime, that features a transvestite who calls himself Miss Waterfield in an apparent homosexual relationship. Bates's previous explorations of homosexuality ranged from sensitive to awkard; this seems to have little point or structure. In The Yellow Meads of Asphodel (1976). [homosexuality] 11/07
A House of Women. Novel (1936). London: Jonathan Cape, 1936 (7 May). 324 pp./ca. 68,000 wds. Dedicated "to Rupert Hart-Davis." New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936. This third of four novels treating the changes affecting the English Midlands between 1880 and 1920 (preceded by The Fallow Land and The Poacher and followed by Spella Ho) has five "books:" "The Angel," "The Farm," "Frankie," "A House of Women," and "Change and Decay." It tells the story of Rosie Perkins, barmaid at the Angel pub, as she marries into an established farming family, contends with the jealousy and condemnation of two sisters-in-law, and has a tragic affair with her brother-in-law Frankie. Her passionless marriage becomes unbearable when her husband returns wounded from the war; family strife and economic forces finally bring the farm to bankruptcy and, at novel's end, lacking a better option, she returns to running a pub. Like the protagonist of The Fallow Land, Rosie leaves town life for marriage and an endless struggle with farm, family, and social changes. Vannatta (46-47) finds the similarity to the earlier novel so strong that "we can hardly conclude that it marks an advance in Bates's skills or interests as a novelist" but acknowledges that Bates has become a "skilled, polished prose stylist" with a highly-developed "flair for language." Baldwin (120-122) finds that, more than in previous works, the story naturally grows from the emotional lives of the characters, so that there is an integration of "internal and external events, joining plot and character into an architectural unity." He cites problems in proportion and construction and faults Bates for not more successfully setting the social and economic context of the book's events: "The novel succeeds as personal and family history: its characters are lively, full-blooded, and convincing. But their story is insufficiently related to the larger forces that bear on the characters' destiny, making the book seem parochial." The book was very favorably reviewed and considered by some his best novel to date, although critics noted the lack of new subject matter. [farming, land, family] (1/05)
"The House With the Apricot." Story (1933). 42 pp./ca. 12,190 wds. A rich and intense psychological study of a woman's life, hopes, and illusions. The narration, by a young travelling man, occurs in three scenes and establishes a deep mood in the manner of "Alexander" and "The Woman Who Had Imagination." The title stems from an analogy between the apricot tree of the family house, beautiful but barren due to lack of root-pruning, and Angela, the wealthy, sensitive, and attractive woman of the house, burdened with the care of her senile father. The narrator is asked by Angela to deliver a note to one Abel Skinner, who is revealed to be a dissipated and violent-tempered failure of a farmer, drunkenly braying coarse songs. But in Angela's presence Skinner "disguises" himself as a bespeckled and dapper man with a "kind of clerical affability," a man who drinks little, sings hymns with her at the piano, and has long ago secured her engagement and the expectation of her wealth. Bates unsentimentally and compassionately reveals Angela falling in love with an illusion and projects the prospect of her misery when she is eventually freed to marry Skinner. "As she stood at the gate and shook hands with me & wishes me a good journey she looked at me with shining eyes, full of radiance and triumph. She was in love! She had everything." Baldwin 116) refers to the story as one of the "most sensuous and lush that [Bates] ever produced." It is colored with glorious descriptions of flowers and the countryside; Baldwin notes that it was inspired by a walking tour of the Cotswolds in August 1932 with Bates's friend Harry Byrom. In The House With the Apricot and Two Other Tales (1933), Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940). [rural, love, family, walking, deceit, lost women] (1/05)
The House With the Apricot and Two Other Tales. Stories (1933). London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1933 (December). 61 pp. Dedicated to Malachi Whitaker (a writer friend of Bates). A limited edition of 300 copies. Contains: The House With the Apricot, The Man From Jamaica, The Pink Cart. (1/05)
"The House with the Grape Vine." Story (1959). 9 pp./ca. 2200 wds. A poignant glimpse at a boy's love for his father and of his attempt to connect with a part of his father's boyhood, a grapevine on a farmhouse in their industrialized town - "lines of hard-baked bricks that were more like boxes than houses, and here and there a factory that was like a taller darker box with the iron limb of a crane hanging like a gallows outside." Seeking out the long-disappeared grapevine -- a symbol of a difficult and lonely childhood that the father recalls with great unhappiness-- the boy is captured by the current owner, an old hag who threatens him with the police; "that is why he too hated that house and, because of it, loved his father so much more." The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959).[boyhood, father, rushden] 2/06
"How Sleep the Brave." Novella (1943). 51 pp./ca. 15,800. The longest of Bates's "Flying Officer X" stories, in eleven numbered sections. A somber and heartfelt account of a plane downed in battle, and of its crew reaching land after sixty hours in a dinghy. It successfully alternates some of the most vivid description and action in all of Bates's war stories with meditations by the narrator about his failed life and marriage, and about the grief of one of his mates over a child killed in an air raid. The gruelling conditions of war, the trust and camraderie of a squadron, and the absolute focus of attention on the task at hand are all dealt with effectively in this compelling tale. In How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories (1943), Something in the Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952).[flying officer x, war,action] (1/05)
How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories (1943). London: Jonathan Cape, 1943 (August). Dedicated "To John Pudney." This second collection of "Flying Officer X" pieces is in two parts, the first containing the novella-length title-piece, the second containing five short stories; all were included, along with the contents of the first "Flying Officer X" collection, The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories 1942), in the 1944 Something in the Air; only four (excluding the title-piece and "Croix De Guerre") were included in the 1943 American collection There's Something in the Air. Contains: How Sleep the Brave; The Beginning of Things; The Disinherited; Croix De Guerre; Yours is the Earth; There's Something in the Air.(1/05)
"How Vainly Men Themselves Amaze." Story (1968). 29 pp./ca. 6400 wds. In this combined coming-of-age and love-triangle story, Bates portrays an eighteen-year-old on holiday with his parents at the seashore, where he is both the plaything of a seductive married woman and the admirer of her nanny, a lovely girl his own age. Bates captures the pain of youthful innocence and longing as it confronts adult cruelty. Another work of Bates's later years, "The Simple Life," features a similar relationship. In Woman's Own (12 March 1966, with the title "Sands of Time"), The Wild Cherry Tree (1968), H.E. Bates (1975).[coming of age, love triangle]
I Am Not Myself. Story (1939). Limited edition (35 copies) printed by the Corvinus Press, 1939 (June). 64 pp./ca. 6300 wds. A long tale, in five numbered sections, in which the narrator visits an old school friend at the rural home he shares with his father, aunt, and sister. In the course of several meals, a cribbage evening, and outings in the snow, the father is revealed to be mentally traumatized by a mining disaster, and the daughter to be living a fantasy life incorporating two china dogs, an imaginary fox, and stories of foreign travel lifted from books. Oddly attracted to each other, the narrator concludes that her eccentricities don't matter, but is then exposed to a more dramatic instance of her sickness. He departs, in shock and feeling "a little mad myself." Although the tale creates a somewhat surreal atmosphere, its various props and incidents are not effectively tied together, resulting in an unsatisfying and quirky piece. Also in The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.D. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957).[t:madness, eccentricity, cribbage, love] (1/05)
"The Idiot." Story (1926). 8 pp./ca. 1740 wds. Taddo, a mentally retarded boy who is taunted by the other children in church, accidentally knocks a shilling from the collection plate into his lap. Confused, he flees the church just as a thunderstorm erupts. Feeling the storm as a menacing force intending to expose and punish him, he seeks solace in the woods and tries to bury the coin but it is exposed twice by the rain. Late at night he desperately knocks on the house of the minister and insists that he, bewildered by the boy's request, accept the shilling. Taddo then feels the "calming earth, the sweet air, the fresh-smelling trees and the stars ...all whispering to him: 'The storm is over, the storm is over.' And he began to sing." A particularly strong early story, sympathetically portraying the emotions of a helpless and sensitive child, and reflecting Bates's youthful rejection of religion (see Vanished World 179, where Bates says the story was inspired by his last visit to church). Discussed by Vannatta (19-20). In The New Statesman (23 October 1926), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[t:idiocy, religion, boyhood, forces of nature, rural] (1/05)
In the Heart of the Country. Essays (1942). 150 pp./ca. 40,000 wds. London: Country Life Limited, 1942. Illustrated by C.F. Tunnicliffe. Bates's fifth book of non-fiction nature-writing and his second set of essays illustrated by Tunnicliffe (the first being The Seasons & The Gardener, and a subsequent one being O More than Happy Countryman) visits familiar topics, but all touched by the presence of soldiers, planes, urban evacuees and by reflections on how the war will affect the English countryside. As in previous books, Bates writes eloquently and lovingly of the seasons, birds, fish, and especially flowers of his Kentish home. He ponders both the timelessness of the countryside and the inevitable changes brought by technological changes and world events. In his discussions of the effect of war raids on birds and the weights of birds, he repeats topics covered in his Country Life newspaper columns (gathered in the book Country Life); he also makes occasional allusions to his childhood, his uncle Rook, family outings (and the family name), a visiting brother-in-law, and in the essay "Victorian Garden" a reminiscence of the scene captured in his highly successful story "Alexander." The essays were included, in revised form, as part one of The Country Heart. Contains: Sudden Spring, Fisherman's Luck, Overture to Summer, Fruit Blossom Time, "Clouded August Thorn, Strange Battlefields, The Great Snow, A Summer Spring, "...Bring Forth May Flowers," Victorian Garden, Wealden Beauty, The Strangeness of Fish, The Parish Pump, Flowers and Downland.[nature, war, rural life] (1/05).
"In the Middle of Nowhere." Serial title of a story published later as "The Middle of Nowhere."
"In View of the Fact That." Story (1927). 6 pp./ca. 1300 wds. An unsuccessful landowner, Dan Cordon, is surrounded on both sides by the successful Cowper family and is pressured to sell his parcel. Still angry at the hard bargain that led to his father selling twenty-four acres to the Cowper father, Dan, supported by his wife, vows to fight for his land. The story shifts to a Parish Council meeting above a pub called "The Bell," attended by the young Robert Cowper, ambitious to become both chairman of the council and owner of the Cordon land to gain increased status. The meeting is disrupted by a drunken and screaming Cordon, driven "mad this afternoon on having a note come" (regarding the potential sale). Cordon collapses and dies; the members awkwardly note that he was a quiet and respectable man, and Cowper closes the story with "God rest his soul." A simplistic portrayal of the helplessness of the small landowner against the momentum of consolidation and wealth, with a theme similar to that of "Day's End," and a title drawn from legal terminology quoted by the Council chairman at the end. In The Spring Song and In View of the Fact That (1927).[greed, farming, rural change] (1/05)
"Innocence." Story (1932). 6 pp./ca. 1215 wds. A humorous and colorful sketch of a naughty young boy, who lusts after the raspberries in a neighbor's garden and is then trapped between the rage of both the owner and his mother. In John O'London's weekly (27 August 1932), Full score (1933), The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940). [childhood, humor] (1/05)
"Introduction" [to The Beach of Falesa, by Robert Louis Stevenson]. Essay (1959). 10 pp./ca. 3100 wds. Bates relates details of a visit to Western Samoa and to Valima (where Stevenson lived at the end of his life) to establish that the novel "is by no means as far-fetched as it might seem." He then discusses at length the difficulties inherent in writing a "very short story" or, in the case of Stevenson's work, a novella, eventually praising the author for utilizing "selection, compression, restraint, economy, impressionism; the oblique ray of light, the sudden cut, the inch or two of canvas left unpainted." He finds as well that Stevenson "is swift to build, in a few sentences, an atmosphere...he is clever, if not indeed masterly, at the impudent, thrown-in sentence...he never lets his story drag." Acknowledging that Stevenson "is neither Tolstoy nor Maupassant," he says that the work "aspires to be nothing more than what is sometimes known as a rattling good yarn -- and what is wrong with that?" In The Beach of Falesa (Robert Louis Stevenson, London: The Folio Society, 1959, pp. 9-18). [literature]4/10
"Introduction" [to Green Mansions, by W.H. Hudson]. Essay (1957). 6 pp./ca. 2500 wds. One of several opportunities taken by Bates to praise Hudson writing, joining the 1932 essay"A Traveller in Little Things" and a mention of Hudsonas the "greatestof our nature-writers" in Blossoming World (28). Bates describes a style that is "almost biblically simple, sensitive, fastidious, visual, captivating," and a "person of the strongest visionary instincts, of the most powerful poetic sensibility." He analyzes the pace of the novel, and the challenges Hudson may have experienced with his half-bird, half-woman character. In doing so, Bates reveals some of his own priorities as a writer regarding atmosphere, character creation, and style. In Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (W.H. Hudson; London: Collins, 1957, pp. 11-16). [literary criticism; WH Hudson] 2/10
"Introduction" [to Six Stories by various authors]. Essay (1965). 11 pp./ca. 3500 wds. Bates discusses challenges posed by the novella form before briefly explaining his choice of novellas by De Maupassant, Chekhov, Max Beerbohm, James Joyce, Hemingway, and himself ("The Cruise of the Breadwinner") , in each case revealing qualities that valued throughout his writing career. In Six Stories by various authors (Selected by H.E. Bates, London: Oxford, 1965, pp. vii-xvii).[literature]6/10
"Introduction" [to The W.A.A.F. in Action]. Essay (1944). 6 pp./ca. 1450 wds. Bates introduces this volume of photographs of Women's AuxiliaryAir Force women at work by briefly discussing the minor participation in war by women prior to World War I, the formation of women's corps in that war, and the crucial role of women in the current war particularly both Battles of Britain). Displaying prevailing attitudes, Bates notes that while W.A.A.F. "girls" serve in more than sixty trades that would astound "the ardent feminist of 1870," much of the work is still "domestic" and the women are "still unmistakably feminine." In The W.A.A.F. in Action (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1944, pp. 7-12). [war] 11/09
"The Irishman." Story (1934). 12 pp./ca. 2350 wds. A boy sitting with his grandfather on a rainy afternoon narrates an interchange between the "Spriv" -- a "large florid, purplish-faced man, with the arrogant strut of a cock pheasant and a big straw-chewing mouth that never opened except to lie and boast of his own doings with the gun or the trombone or to sneer at the littleness of other people" and his lying equal, a little Irishman full of tales of hunting, walking, and musical exploits. Tricked by the stranger, the Spriv "looked red and suspicious, then uneasy, and at last angry, as though he had an idea we were laughing at him." A comical piece in the tradition of Mark Twain, first titled "The Spriv" in John O'London's Weekly (7 July 1934), and then as "The Irishman" in Cut and Come Again (1935), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), evidently reflecting a reconsideration by Bates of the story's "twist."[boyhood, humour, irish, rural] (1/05)
"An Island Princess." Story (1955). 8 pp./ca. 2500 wds. The fifth of six brief newspaper "Tales of Tahiti." The narrator humorously and vibrantly describes an unusual boat trip and a boisterous fellow passenger, whose easy laughter and camraderie belie her sadness in love and life. Elements of the story are included in Bates's account of his travels in Tahiti in the third volume of his autobiography (World in Ripeness, 138-140). In the Evening Standard ( October 1955, with title "The Laughing Princess"), Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (1961).[tahiti, travels] (6/05)(6/07)
"Italian Haircut." Story (1936). 11 pp./ca. 1670 wds. A humorous telling of the narrator's experience with an Italian barber, replete with comic Italian-English dialogue and the amusing application of an electric device, ointment, and spirits to the author's scalp. Although an insignificant story, Baldwin (126) notes that it is "an exercise of pure comedy, something Bates had rarely attempted outside the Uncle Silas stories" and therefore represents Bates experimenting with new themes and techniques. In John O'London's Weekly (20 June 1936), Something Short and Sweet (1937), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Twenty Tales (1951), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [barber, humour, first person, dialogue] (1/05)
"It's Just the Way It Is." Story (1942). 7 pp./ca. 1980 wds. About his first "Flying Officer X" story, Bates would write: "I met the Wing Commander of No. 7 Squadron, a tough young man who viewed with a certain suspicion, if not indeed resentment, the writer from Air Ministry. Nevertheless we talked; and as we talked I solved the first of my problems: I would play the game of eavesdropping. Accordingly, that morning, I got my first story, unwittingly given to me by the unsuspecting Wing Commander who, in an unguarded moment, let fall some remark to the effect that the worst of his problems was that of writing to relatives of men killed or even of seeing them in his office as they turned up, pitifully hoping, perhaps, that by some wort of miracle he would conjure their beloved ones back from the dead. 'It's Hell,' he said, but then that's just the way it is'" (The World in Ripeness, 16-17). "Clear, pictorial simplicity was, I felt, the right and only way that this story, and indeed any others, should be written. I wrote it the following day, in a couple of hours, and posted it straight off to Hilary Saunders [the head of Bates's unit], half-dreading what he might have to say about it. In no time there came back from Whitehall a stream of delighted cries and I was able to breathe again." In the story, the grieving parents arrive angry and distraught; their interview with the Wing Commander, in which they learn of their son's dedication and reputation within the force, leaves them grateful: "They walk steadfastly, almost proudly, and the man holds the umbrella a little higher than before, and the woman, keeping up with him now, lifts her head. And the Wing Commander, watching them from the window, momentarily holds his face in his hands." Later in The World in Ripeness (126) Bates mentions writing a film-script of the story for director Leslie Fenton, and of "my one and only appearance as a film actor in the guise of a dead navigator being carried on a stretcher from a shot-up bomber." The film, which appears never to have been released, is mentioned by novelist Anthony Burgess in his introduction to the posthumous collection A Month by the Lake & Other Stories: I remember seeing a brief film made from it when I was a soldier during the war -- one of the short movies put out by the Ministry of Information to precede the main feature. I was deeply moved, and I'm moved again when I re-read the story." Burgess goes on to comment that in the story "narrative style is pared to nothing; everything is left to dialogue; it may well be too subfusc a piece of writing to please Americans brought up in a more ebullient tradition, but it represents what a lot of British writing of the period was like. Paradoxically, it owes something to Hemingway." In the News Chronicle (2 February 1942), The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942), There's Something In The Air (1943), Something In The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [war, flying officer x, death, pilots] (1/05)
"It's Never in the Papers." Story (1942). 5 pp./ca. 1280 wds. Bates's second "Flying Officer X" story creates a colorful character behind the dry facts that might appear in newspaper accounts of air force operations, a constantly "brassed-off" twenty-five-year-old pilot, "cherubic, grinning, bouncing, handsome, too irresponsible and altogether too like a schoolboy to be engaged in the serious business of flying an expensive bomber." After a particularly dangerous engagement, and an equally frivolous acrobatic celebration the following evening, the narrator says "I understood why he flew, and why he flew as he did, and I understood the man he was." In the News Chronicle (9 February 1942), Forum (4 September 1942), The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942), There's Something In The Air (1943), Something in The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952).[war, flying officer x, pilots] (1/05)
The Jacaranda Tree. Novel (1949). 224 pp./ca. 83,000 wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1949 (January); Boston: Little Brown (An Atlantic Monthly Press Book), 1949 (January). Bates's second novel of the Far East (following The Purple Plain and preceding The Scarlet Sword) depicts the escape to India of various residents of a Burmese village. Bates, in The World in Ripeness (76-77, 109-110), notes that while "I had seen the terrain and the people of The Purple Plain and had absorbed the electrifying atmosphere of central Burma through not only my eyes but the very pores of my skin, I had seen not one inch of the far distant territory over which the long and tragic trek to India had been made in bitter and horrifying circumstances when the Japanese had occupied Singapore and invaded Burma in 1942." He proudly relates a conversation with a survivor of that retreat who found his description completely accurate, as evidence of the success of his "imagination and instinct." He also recounts meeting, on his arrival in India, a heavy-drinking man who "was a planter in Burma...on the long march to India when the Japs moved in...His sorrow...rose from the fact that his personal bearer, a mere boy, had died on the journey. The severance of this deep personal bond, born of mutual love and loyalty, had had so great an effect on him that he had been crushed into a state of morbid melanchoia." In the novel, the servant survives, as does his sister (who is the planter's mistress) and the planter (Peterson) himself; three English characters remain in Burma to provide humanitarian service, and the remaining English evacuees all die due to their individual temperaments and relationships.
Baldwin (168-169) calls "the real subject of the book...not war but colonialism and its attendant virtues and vices;" indeed, the British characters range from the compassionate Miss Ross, Mrs. Betteson, and Dr. Fielding to the racist and superficial Portman couple, Mrs. McNairn, and Betteson. He notes that some details of the book were "derived from a diary [Bates] purchased from one who survived the retreat." While praising Bates's ability to describe "steaming jungles, pitiless wastelands, hordes of fleeing refugees, obscene vultures, and the stench of rotting flesh," he finds that the "characters do not match the setting in vividness and reality; they fall too neatly into types...The novel's theme is achieved by manipulating character types and not by dramatizing conflicts between fully realized individuals." Vannatta (69-71) finds that characteristics suggested by the earlier novel, The Purple Plain, are evident in full in this novel: "Bates comes closer than ever before to the facile conflicts and resolutions of the best-seller." With a plot that "could not help but be diverting, even exciting," he finds serious defects in both tone and characterization. The British characters, introduced in a style that Vannatta finds "has more nearly the flavor of an English comedy of manners...than a serious study of civilians caught up in the horrors of war," are for the most part superficial and unengaging. "In the end, every character whom Bates has caused us to dislike gets killed off -- every single one -- and each character with whom we sympathize, save one, survives." The character of Peterson is for Vannatta a confusing mystery, an unhappy drunk for reasons unstated, but at the same time extremely competent; "he learns nothing essential about himself, about Burma, about life in general during the course of his struggle because he apparently had no questions in the first place." Eads (66) notes "a total of 74,423 copies were sold. A Book Society choice issued on first publication by The Book Society Ltd," although that figure must refer only to the original Michael Joseph publication, since Bates himself (World in Ripeness, 110) cites higher sales than The Purple Plain, which Baldwin (163) cites as selling over 850,000 copies. [world war II, colonialism, india, burma, asia] (1/05)
"Joe Johnson." Story (1944). 12 pp./ca. 3350 wds. The title character, a fruitseller who has slowly risen from pushing a barrow to riding a horse and cart and, at last, to having his own shop, is an inexperienced simpleton "who never hurt a soul." He develops an obsessive infatuation with a much younger woman who passes by his shop. She is cool and disdainful, but accepts his gifts and attention and over time exploits his uncontrolled devotion to the extent that he loses his customers and business. She takes up with another man and he finds himself once again with horse and cart in the "street trade." Neither character is believable: Joe loses control of a hard-won life over a woman who gives him no satisfaction; she is heartless and mercenary, and her reasons for starting up with a man who does not interest her are never made clear. In Best Broadcast Stories (London: Faber, 1944), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951).[romance, simpletons, shopkeepers] (1/05)
"John Clare." Essay (1935). 2 pp./ca. x wds. This review of The Poems of John Clare (edited by J.W. Tibble, London: Dent, 1935) touches on some of the themes addressed in Bates's first published essay, in 1921, "Northamptonshire Men of Letters, No. 1 John Clare; The Peasant Poet (1793-1864)." Bates praises the "spirituality which was the most touching and impressive characteristic of Clare's years of lunacy: a characteristic which sets him eternally side by side with Blake and Vaughan." In the London Mercury (May 1935, xxxii: 187, pp. 73-74). [literature]6/10
"John Clare; The Peasant Poet." Essay with full title Northamptonshire Men of Letters, No. 1 John Clare; The Peasant Poet (1793-1864).
"Jonah and Bruno." Story (1935). 11 pp./ca. 2300 wds. A classroom tale involving an arrogrant and dictatorial teacher, a rebellious smart-mouthed student, a violent disciplinary scene and fight, and the eventual humiliation of the teacher by an intervening soldier, all of which reflects, as do other of Bates's school stories, his generally negative experiences of education and especially of certain male teachers (see "education"). In Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940).[school, teachers, boyhood] (1/05)
"Jungle Rarities in Norfolk." Essay (1968). 4 pp./ca. 2100 wds. One of four by Bates in a series called "Gardens of Ideas" (preceded by "Undersoil Heating for Sub-Tropical Treasures," "Growing 4,400 Alpines in Birmingham," and "Conservatory Revived"). Bates reports on his visit to the 30-acre garden of Maurice Mason, a farmer and the collector of some 20,000 species of plants gathered during his worldwide travels. In the Daily Telegraph Magazine (London, 10 April 1968, pp.42-45).[gardening] 5/10
"K For Kitty." Story (1942). 5 pp./ca. 1270 wds. Like most of Bates's "Flying Officer X" tales, this is a portrait of a pilot, in this case an Australian who "was quiet, modest, friendly, and as tough as hell," and who had come to "know, trust, and finally get fond of" his Stirling plane named 'K for Kitty.'" The plane and crew are nearly destroyed in a raid but land safely, only to have the plane literally fall apart "as if the kite had blown home held together only by strips of sticky plaster and string." The next morning the narrator and the pilot examine the wreckage "in amazement and unbelief;" long afterwards, the pilot stands with "the attitude of a seaman who looks across empty water, for the last time, and sees his ship no longer there." A simple, straightforward, and successful example of Bates's war stories. In the News Chronicle (9 March 1942), The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942), There's Something In The Air (1943), Something In The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952). A section of the story, with alterations, was published under the title "The Risk" in Wings of War: An Air Force Anthology (ed. F. Alan Walbank, London: B.T. Batsford, 1942, pp. 139-140.). [flx, war, pilots, australian] (1/05)
"Kent Incomparable." Essay (1952). 1 p./100 wds. A single paragraph, possibly taken from a previously published essay. "Kent is like a mistress: infinitely lovely and variable, surly and delicious, warm and treacherous, infuriating and unforgettable; a county that witholds, through its people, the real marrow under-the-bone friendship that you find in the cooler wifely bosom of Midland clay. And having said this let me add at once, after the manner of that poet who could not make up his mind about t'other dear charmer, that there is no other county where I would rather live, no other county where I think I ever shall live, and that I am prepared to defend its beauties...with my dying breath." In In Praise of Kent, An Anthology for Friends (Compiled by S.A. Walker, London: Frederick Muller, 1952, p. 1). [Kent]5/10.
"Kent is My County." Essay (1952). 4 pp./ca. 1900 wds. Bates pays tribute to his adopted home: the "ceaseless variations" in vegetation, the "bristling air" from the sea, the positive influence of Cockneys visiting each year to pick hops and apples, and the fact that Kent was relatively untouched by the industrial revolution. Accompanying photographs (some in color) depict rural scenes, activities, and crafts, as well as Bates sitting in his garden. In Illustrated Magazine (London: Odhams Press, 19 July 1952, pp. 22-25). [kent, rural] 11/09
"A Kentish Portrait." Essay (1933). 2 pp./ca. 1700 wds. Bates draws a vivid portrait of a young Romney Marsh man who assists him with his garden. His humorous and detailed observations on Alfred's demeanor and appearance, work habits, and thick accent would later return in Bates autobiography (The Blossoming World, 101-103). In the New Statesman and Nation (28 October 1933, 513-514).[gardening, autobiography] 1/09
"The Kimono." Story (1937). 32 pp./ca. 8000 wds. A long, five-part, first-person narrative by fifty-year-old Arthur Lawson, looking back twenty-five years on events occurring in 1911. The young Arthur, respectably married and offered an appointment with a prominent London firm, finds himself so attracted to the sensuous and sexually-insatiable Blanche Hartman, kimono-clad daughter of the owner of a sweet shop and cafe, that he abandons all to live with her incognito, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. Returning from war service, he learns that Blanche has taken on other lovers, which she continues to do even when he gives up outside work to run the shop. The arrival of her father from prison, and his thefts from the till, eventually lead Arthur to conclude that "I am in a prison far more complete than any Hartman was ever in. It is a bondage directly inherited from that first catastrophic passion for Blanche." By chance learning that his wife is deathly ill and wishing contact with him, he reflects on the turn of events and his choices so many years previously, "and thinking and wondering, I sat there and cried like a child." Vannatta (42) comments that Bates addresses the issue of natural desire versus inhibition in a "complex, less clear-cut" manner than in other stories: the story "offers a thematic combination of Othello and The Sun Also Rises. To paraphrase Shakespeare, Arthur lusted not wisely but too well after a woman who, like Lady Brett Ashley, simply could not help her promiscuity. It's the way she's made." Baldwin (126) notes that the story was written in response to an editorial request for submissions involving missing persons. Bates himself, in an introductory essay to the collection Country Tales (1938), would write that although the story was written upon being "invited to write a story round an idea," he instead wrote it "in defiance of the idea. It is a straightforward story in which character and atmosphere are predominant and the idea almost completely subservient. The characters, as living characters should, have swallowed up the plot." He goes on to say that when the story and its companions (the other stories about missing persons) "came to be serialized in a Sunday newspaper 'The Kimono' was banned." The eleven submissions of "short stories on the familiar broadcasts for missing persons" were published in Missing From Their Homes (London: Hutchinson, 1940), which included stories by E.M. Delafield, Anthony Berkeley, Louis Golding, Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes, Graham Greene, Phyllis Bentley, Arthur Machen, A.E. Coppard, R.H. Mottram, and L.A.G. Strong. In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Twenty Tales (1951), Selected Stories (1957), Seven by Five/The Best of H. E. Bates (1963), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [missing persons, marriage, adultery, 1st person] (1/05)
"The King Who Lived on Air." Story (1929). 10 pp./ca. 2220 wds. A ridiculous fantasy involving an indolent king, insensitive to the suffering of his people, who discovers compassion before dying in a state of spiritual exaltation. For other fantasies see "The Seekers," and "The Peach-tree." In Seven Tales and Alexander (1929). [fairy tale/fantasy] (1/05)
"The Lace-Makers." Essay (1934). 9 pp./ca. 2420 wds. Bates pays tribute to the art of lace-making that flourished in central England. Containing detailed information on a topic not otherwise treated by Bates as well as colorful quotations from country lace-makers, the piece later became part of a collection of essays related to the rivers Ouse and Nen and the rural cultures in their valleys. In the New Statesman and Nation (28 April 1934), Down the River (1937). [rural life, lacemaking] (1/05)
Charles Lahr. A London bookseller and supporter of writers who assisted Bates in the early years of his career financially, personally (often providing Bates with a place to stay), and as publisher of both Spring Song, and In View of the Fact That in book form and of a number of stories in Lahr's journal The New Coterie. Bates met him while working briefly in London at the Bumpus Book Store, and Lahr's Progressive Bookshop was a hub for young writers where Bates met many of the important writers of his generation. Lahr and his bookshop appear in the tale "Sally Go Round the Moon," and "The Palace" reflects an affair of Lahr's during the war. "A German Idyll" tells of the trip abroad Bates took with Lahr and others in 1927; four years later Lahr would introduce Bates to Louis Sterling, purchaser of many of Bates's manuscripts. Their relationship suffered when Lahr was imprisoned in 1935 and Bates attempted to argue his case in the story "No Country," much to Lahr's dismay (see Baldwin 111-112).(1/05)
"Lament for a Lost Poet." Essay (1933). 1 pp./ca. 775 wds. Bates praises recently deceased John Galsworthy for his early short stories and lambasts him for the falling quality of his Forsyte novels. In New Clarion (25 February 1933, ii, 38, 229). [galsworthy, literary criticism]1/09
"The Landlady." Story (1937). 19 pp./ca. 4750 wds. A dissatisfied housewife takes in lodgers, a young father with his daughter. Tension rises as her efforts to establish a rapport with them, and to learn about their lives, fail, and she takes her frustration out on the girl both verbally and physically. A sexual encounter with the man however leaves her "elated, clairifed, a new woman. The necessity for knowing things, the anger at not knowing things, had both been destroyed." The daughter's face, however, is hard "with the crystallization of many emotions: fear, hatred, unbelief and some proud dumb notion of revenge." A bleak portrait of empty and unhealthy lives. In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Twenty Tales (1951).[family, fathers, daughters, sex] (1/05)
"Landscape Lost." Essay (1957). 2 pp./ca. 1370 wds. Bates recalls Kent when he first settled there in 1931 -- untouched woods and heaths, three "great houses" and a church, and a working paper mill -- and reflects on the changes of twenty-five years: the houses and church gone, the open land increasingly developed, and a "housing estate that resembles an army barrack block." While noting the strange fact that "this prosperous countryside is littered with empty houses," he laments that "presently people escaping to the countryside must inevitably, it seems, have no countryside to escape to." In The Spectator (22 November 1957, cic, pp. 669-670). [rural change] 11/09
"Lanko's White Mare." Story (1928). 17 pp./ca. 3700 wds. A masterful early work, capturing the bond between man and horse as well as the flavor of fairground life and people. Lanko, "the quoits man," and his white mare understand each other completely, he "trusting her to walk wherever he wished merely by a touch on her side" and she knowing "his touch unmistakably, for he had given it her with the same unfailing gentleness and care for nearly fifteen years." One morning, running late in taking her to water, he is impatient with her slow pace. Interpreting the laughter of the other men as reproaches, he uncharacteristically hits her, and when she will not drink, further loses his temper and kicks her. Harnessed and bearing his "pots and pans, his food, and the red and white striped awnings and poles of his stall" she moves slowly, breathing hard, and Lanko realizes that she is ill. She collapses and, filled with remorse for his impatience and anger, he desperately tries to save her, gently encouraged by the other men despite the inevitability of her death. At the story's end, he reminiscences about their lives together as he holds her head in his hands. First published as "The White Mare" in the London Mercury (May 1928). Published "with considerable changes" as "Lanko's White Mare" in Seven Tales and Alexander (1929), Thirty Tales (1934), Twenty Tales (1951).[man/animal relations, horse, circus/fair](1/05)
"The Lap of Luxury." Story (1976). 21 pp./ca. 5600 wds. A year after the end of war, two former pilots, Maxie and Roger, return to France, where they plan to trace the escape route Maxie took from a German prisoner of war camp. They soon go different ways because of an argument, and Robert is given refuge by a lovely and rich French widow. They become lovers but, after nearly a year he feels imprisoned in a "Lotus Land of mornings in the garden, half-playing, half-working at trivial tasks, long wine-coloured afternoons and evenings of music prolonged by wine." The dream is ended when a stranger appears and is greeted with passion by the woman; while not her husband, this ending is renascent of a very similar scenario in "The Tiger Moth," a story that also features a character named Maxie (who keeps a shell as a good-luck charm, just as this Maxie carries a rabbit's foot). In the 1964 story "Afternoon at the Chateau" Bates also portrays two soldiers revisiting the France, and one is named, as in this story, Maxie. One senses that this posthumously-published tale was an unedited draft, as the character of Maxie is nearly unnecessary, and the arrival of the lover lacks Bates's usual skill. In The Yellow Meads of Asphodel (1976).[pilots, prison, love, deceit] 11/07
Larkin Family novels. [This entry is not completed] An immensely popular series of comic novels consisting of The Darling Buds of May (1958), A Breath of French Air (1959), When the Green Woods Laugh (1960), Oh! To Be in England (1963), and A Little of What You Fancy (1970). Bates closes the final volume in his autobiography (The World in Ripeness, 147-152) by recollecting the inspirations for the series, and by placing the novels in the context of both post-war England and his own personal philosophy. He recalls the real junkyard in the midst of nature that he passed frequently near his home in Kent; he recalls also seeing a family -- a father, mother and many children sucking at ice-creams and eating crisps in a "ramshackle lorry that had been recently painted a violent electric blue"-- and these he joined together in a short story, having long had a mental block against setting a novel in Kent (despite numerous novels in his boyhood Midlands home), but soon enough "it seemed to me a thousand pities to confine such a rich gallery of characters to a short story." Bates describes his family as "gargantuan of appetite, unenslaved by conventions, blissfully happy. Pop is further revealed as a passionate lover of the countryside...He yields to no many in his warm, proud love of England...The Larkins's secret is in fact that they live as many of us would like to live if only we had the guts and nerve to flout the conventions." Bates goes on to cite the novels as reflective of the vast changes to the English countryside in the 1950s but, more significantly, he notes that "it is not to be denied, moreover, that there is something of myself in Pop Larkin: a passionate Englishman, a profound love of Nature, of the sounds and sights of the countryside, of colour, flowers and things sensual; a hatred of pomp, pretension and humbug; a lover of children and family life; an occasional breaker of rules, a flouter of conventions....Pop is in fact an expression of my own philosophy: the need to go with the stream, never to battle against it." Baldwin (220) however, reminds us that Bates also differed from Pop in important ways, such as his literary, gardening, and artistic interests, among other things. Baldwin also notes a third source for the novels: "scrap metal man who sent his sons to King's Canterbury" when Bates's sons were there.
What Bates calls "the comedian in me" had previously found expression in a small number of stories and essays, and then more significantly in two volumes of Uncle Silas tales (tales in the second collection first appearing only one year prior to The Darling Buds of May). As noted by Baldwin (198), Bates thought of the series as an antidote both to the literary trends and the solemnity and oversensitivity of the times.
The first book was very successful, appearing first in the United States and then in Britain, where it sold "40,000 in the first two months" (Baldwin 199). Film rights were sold prior to publication and Bates also worked on a stage version. While response from the public andthe popular press was uniformly positive, literature critics, especially as the series continued, generally condemned the series as trivial and undeserving of Bates's talents.
The Last Bread. One-act play (1926). London: Labour Publishing Company, 1926 (May). 18 pp./2350 wds. Bates’s first published book, issued as part of the “Plays for the People Series.” Dedicated “To Edmund E. Kirby in deep gratitude” and containing a one-paragraph introduction by Monica Ewer (series editor). Bates later referred to the play as “my angry-young-man broadside” in which “I had caustically poured some of my bitterness about the post-war twenties, not having read Knut Hamsun’s Hunger for nothing” (Vanished World 188; Blossoming World 8, 24). Jim, on strike from work, his wife Emma, and their young dauther Rose, struggle with poverty, being reduced to their last sixpence, candle, and morsel of bread. [play, poverty, social commentary] (1/05)
"The Late Public Figure." Story (1939). 34 pp./ca. 6990 wds. Stacey, a newspaper editor preparing an obituary for his employer, learns that in addition to the respected career and service to a variety of civic and religious organizations, the man was a miser, a cutthroat landlord, the father of an illigitimate child by a secretary, a collector of erotica, and a man who weekly booked hotel rooms under an assumed name, accompanied by one "wife" and later another. In the course of his investigation, Stacey meets several colorful characters, including a neurotic sister and two bitter employees. The story joins two others and a novel in recollecting Bates's experience on the Northamptonshire Chronicle, but is otherwise an overlong and heavy-handed attempt at social commentary. In The Flying Goat (1939), Twenty Tales (1951).[journalism, social commentary, hypocrisy] (1/05)
"The Laugh." Story (1926). 1 p./ca. 1854 wds. Two brothers, David and Abel, anticipate the arrival of their Aunt Juley, "worth six thousand pound," but Abel's sweetheart Ellen Cape is disgusted by his greed and hypocrisy. Taunted by her on his way to the train station, Abel chooses love over money and misdirects the aunt, only to find on his return home that she has arrived after all. At the story's end, knowing that he must confront the consequences of his trick, he hears a sound from a nearby thicket: "an early owl? a jay? an animal? a laugh? ... A laugh? And, wondering, young Abel went in." An early story, displaying humor and a gift for dialogue and timing, and depicting quaint rural ways. In the New leader (London, 16 July 1926, xiii: 40, p. 10).[t:love vs. money, humor, rural] (1/05)
"The Laughing Princess." Story (1955). Early title of a story later called "An Island Princess."
Charles Lawrence, Bates's paternal grandfather, born around 1870 and died around 1949. The eldest of thirteen children, he had an "undeniable and fatal attraction for women...short and not particularly handsome, he may fairly be called a lady-killer, having caused my father's mother, a beautiful, proud, highly sensitive girl devoted to the world of nature, to die of a broken heart - literally - at the age of twenty-one" (Vanished World 7). Baldwin (18) describes Lawrence as "a somewhat mysterious character, known about Rushden as a dapper and dashing figure who spent his holidays in the south of France where he reputedly had a number of mistresses." Bates further mentions that Lawrence "had his own boot and shoe-making business [Knight and Lawrence, of which he was part owner], from which he not infrequently slipped away to the smoother, easier, more seductive life of warmer climates, notably the Mediterranean and later, permanently, to Australia [in 1910]...largely on the grounds of ill-health" (Vanished World 7, 67). Lawrence met Emma Bates around 1887 and when she was with child "would have married her but was prevented from doing so by a jealous and possessive mother who refused to let the wedding take place" (Baldwin 19). Bates wrote that "I think I saw him perhaps twice or three times in my life, so frequent and prolonged were his journeys about the world, and on neither occasion did he offer a word or sign of recognition" (Vanished World 9). After the death of Emma Bates and of her mother, H.E. Bates's father Albert Bates went to live with Charles and his wife Elizabeth Lawrence. Lawrence appears as Uncle Cosmo in Bates's story "A Funny Thing." (1/05)
Lawrence, Mr. and Mrs., Bate's paternal great-grandfather and great-grandmother, described by Bates in (Flowers and Faces 18): "My great-grandmother must have been born somewhere about 1840, so that she was between seventy and eighty when I knew her... She had thirteen children, bringing them up on some such damnable pittance as, I shouldn't wonder, thirteen shillings a week. I ought to point out that her husband held an important position: he was the town lamplighter." Besides Charles Lawrence (Bates's paternal grandfather), the Lawrence children included Tom, George, Arthur, Alfred, Annie, and Nell, all of whom are captured in the Wainright family in The Feast of July (see Baldwin 19). In Flowers and faces (25-26) Bates would fondly recall Sunday visits to his great-grandmother's house. (1/05)
"The less I like poetry." 1 pp./64 wds. A mere paragraph, possibly solicited by the volume editor, in which Bates writes: "The older I get the less I like poetry. I do not say I dislike poetry. Only that the older I get the less I like it, and the more I find that music takes its place. It becomes clearer to me that the composer begins where the poet ends. Keats soars heavenward, but Schubert has already gone beyond him into some celestial stratosphere." A second contribution to the same volume is "Exhilarating." In Spice of Life (London:, compiled by J. Thurston Thrower, p. 89)[poetry] 11/09
"The Lesson." Story (1926). 6 pp./ca. 1210 wds. A music teacher, Miss Stephens, is unable to focus on her choir-work, having just received a rejection letter from her lover. She recalls the early days of their romance, and the joy with which she taught sentimental songs to the students. Now, letting go of her dreams of marriage and anticipating perhaps twenty more years of music teaching, she returns to the classroom, instructing "Higher! Open your mouths. You must have freedom! More freedom! Freedom!" A sad depiction of a woman betrayed, with no hopes for her future. In the Manchester Guardian (1 June 1926), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928).[t:school, music, betrayed dreams] (1/05)
"Let's Play Soldiers." Story (1958). 16 pp./ca. 4130 wds. More serious in tone than most of the other boyhood reminiscences in The Watercress Girl, this story captures the excitement of young lads playing at battle during World War I, as well as some of the interactions of social class in an industrial town like Bates's Rushden. Having vanquished the enemy and "killed" a prisoner of war, the narrator comes home to face a real death, that of a eighteen-year-old neighbor in battle. Escaping to his backyard tent with a candle and a spur won from his "prisoner," the boy reflects on his day; after returning the spur to its owner the next morning (by order of his father), he runs home as hard as he can: "afraid of the enemy we had conquered and the soldier I had killed." As with all of Bates's most successful work, the tale explains little but finely captures the emerging consciousness of the boy. It was one of Bates's three favorites from the collection. Vannatta (84) considers the story a good example of Bates capturing how "innocence and naivete translate to ignorance and misapprehension, not bliss." In Argosy (December, 1958), The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), Seven by Five/The Best of H.D.Bates (1963), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974), H.E. Bates (1975), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [boyhood, war, rushden] 2/06
"Li Tale." Story (1943). 4 pp./ca. 940 wds. A very short and unconvincing "Flying Officer X" story in which an over-inquisitive and insensitive civilian tries the patience of the narrator and his three military mates as they drink "li tales" in a bar; at best, the tale demonstrates the impossibility of outsiders understanding the realities of flying, fighting, and losing comrades in battle. In There's Something in the Air (1943).[officer x, pilots, war]
"Library Book Royalties: Easing an Author's Financial Problems." Essay (1969). One of many letters responding to an article in the Times by Michael Holroyd called "Oh Lord, Miss Lee, how long?" on the failed history of attempts to introduce a Public Lending Right scheme to remunerate authors for library usage of their works (February 15, 1969, p. 17). Bates's letter is the first under the headline "Library Book Royalties: Easing an Author's Financial Problems," although his letter is untitled; he considers it "scandalous" that the proposal has been "pigeon-holed" and thus delayed. In the Times (February 21, 1969, p. 9). [writers] 5/10
"The Lighthouse." Story (1951). 24 pp./ca. 6160 wds. A fine treatment of an affair between two married people: a woman relaxed and easily juggling her weekend husband with a temporary lover, the man on break from an unhappy marriage and filled with "jealousy and weakness and fear." As Baldwin notes (183), it is a tale of "changing sexual mores, the tension and misunderstanding that result from a middle-aged man's insistence that sex means love and a younger woman's 'modern' attitude that the two are separable." The woman's carefree attitude anticipates the sexual license more humorously portrayed in the Pop Larkin novels. Throughout the tale, the nearby lighthouse is an image of sexual energy, excitement, and -- because periodically a new lighthouse must be built due to the expanding shore -- the element of constant change and adjustment in life. In Argosy (May 1951), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963).[marriage, affairs, sex][check pop larkin link]
"Lilies and Coal." Essay (1938). 5 pp./ca. 1400 wds. In this "intentionally uninformative article," Bates anticipates his many later gardening essays in recollecting childhood garden experiences, praising some of his favorite flowers, extolling the virtues of growing from seed, and advocating "that all gardening should be in essence quite simple, boastless, catholic, unsentimental, a medium of pleasant exercise for the spirit." In My Garden: An Intimate Magazine for Garden Lovers (February 1938, pp. 163-167). [gardening] 9/09
"The Lily." Story (1933). 11 pp./ca. 2257 wds. The first of three stories written in 1933 introducing the comic figure Uncle Silas (see also "The Wedding" and "The Death of Uncle Silas"). The narrator introduces his 93-year-old great-uncle, vigorously gardening at his idyllic country cottage, displaying a vast capacity for food and drink, and bickering with his cantankerous housekeeper. Only in the last two pages does the tale of the lily come out, revealing Silas's devilish humor and way with the ladies. In The Listener (22 February 1933), The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), My Uncle Silas (1939). [silas, age, sex] (1/05)
"The Little Farm." Story. 38 pp./ca. 10,900 wds. In this fine rural tale with a flawed conclusion, Bates sensitively portrays Tom Richards, a simple, illiterate farmer, in his search for a "companion housekeeper," and the joy he experiences as Edna Johnson brings health and life to his lonely house, his finances, his kitchen, and eventually his bed. However, his sly farmhand Emmett, threatened by her careful bookkeeping and the end of his thieving, discovers that Edna is in fact a married woman. She disappears, leaving only a note that, in a perverse twist, Emmett pretends to read to Tom, instead leaving Tom to believe that Edna has embezzled his money. A strong tale involving three well-developed characters, but the reader must question both Edna's inability to tell Tom the truth, and Tom's unquestioning acceptance of Emmett's lies. In The Saturday Book, 1941-1942 (1941), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951), The Best of H.E. Bates (1980). [farming, bachelor, love, rural] (1/05)
"Little Fish." Story (1935). 9 pp./ca. 1880 wds. A controlling and overcritical schoolmaster and his badgered son, on their weekly Saturday morning fish-shopping, stop for cocoa at a restaurant. The father makes a scene that embarrases his son: "For five years he had seen his father behaving like that, glaring, snapping, terrifying everyone in spasms of half-theatrical anger." But noticing the presence of one of his superiors, the father becomes furtive and apprehensive, "filled with an increasing and almost pathetic desire to be noticed, to attract the attention of the big man in the corner." Departing completely ignored, the schoolmaster "in a spasm of anger and disappointment" lashes out at the boy, who however had seen "something about his father he had never seen before." A tight and effective snapshot of a miserable man torturing his son, and the first signs of the boy's understanding. Reflecting Bates's negative experiences of education and of certain male teachers, this tale shares certain characteristics with "Jonah and Bruno" and other school tales as well as with other coming-of-age stories. (see "education"). In Cut and Come Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940).[education, coming of age, father/son] (1/05)
"The Little Fishes." Story (1956). 9 pp./ca. 2300 wds. The narrator goes fishing with his Uncle Silas, excited by Silas's tales of pike "as big as hippopottomassiz;" while Silas consumes large quantities of "neck-oil," the boy is urged to keep quiet and not be "a-ompolodgin' all the time." Eventually a large fish appears but, all the bait gone, Silas falls in the river trying to catch it by hand. In Evening Standard (17 August 1956), Sugar for the Horse (1957). [silas, fishing] 6/05
"The Little Jeweller." Story (1940). 29 pp./ca. 6850 wds. A long five-part story that follows a bachelor shopkeeper from heart attack to confinement in a hospital mental ward. His reflections on his life, his fear of death, his struggles as he is surrounded by a sister, a lawyer, and doctors, and his desperate attempts to regain normal reality are matched by several surreal dreamlike scenes. One theme, shared by several other stories in The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories, is the lonliness and regret of an over-careful life. In Life and Letters To-Day (April 1940), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [age, death, insanity, regret] (1/05)
A Little of What You Fancy. Novel (1970). London: Michael Joseph, 1970. 220 p./ca. 53,000 wds. The last of the five Larkin family novels (and the last Bates novel) is, until more than halfway through, much more serious than any of its predecessors. Pop Larkin's heart attack leads to an uncharacteristic depression; neither the romance of Primrose and Reverend Candy nor Edith Pilchester's drowning of her grief in drink distract from a somberness striking in an otherwise comic series. However, with the Barnwell sisters announcing their fund "for saving England" from a tunnel to France (including a road through the Larkin property), Pop is revived. The remainder of the book, including the obligatory banquet at the end, displays the usual Larkin joy of life and features a particularly delightful character in Angela Snow's father, a Queen's Counsel who charms Ma and the other women. Bates suffered two heart attacks in 1966 and, like Pa, was attended by a "gorgeous New Zealand nurse" (Baldwin, 220). [larkin]
"A Little War." Story (1933). 8 pp./ca. 2570 wds. A humorous tale, in which a scuffle between two boys over an "ice-cornet" leads to a general melee involving their parents and neighbors. Set in "a communal courtyard, a playground and a gossiping place for a dozen families" (which Bates must have experienced or at least seen growing up in Rushden), the story depicts boyhood in a manner reminiscent of Mark Twain, and also colorfully reflects the dialect and spirit of a working-class neighborhood. In Charles Wain: a Miscellany of Short Stories (1933), New Clarion (1933). [boys, families, rushden, comedy] (1/05)
"London's Doorstep (Off the Highway in Kent)." Essay (1933). 1 pp./ca. 1200 wds. Bates describes a Sunday excursion available to "city dwellers and office prisoners" from Charing Cross to the Kentish countryside where he lives. He finds "a bit of Scotland, a taste of North country, a glimpse of a German forest, a view as in Somerset -- all in a day, and all in country lying on the very doorstep of London." In New Clarion (11 February 1933, p. 4). [travel] 1/09
"Loss of Pride." Story (1976). 8 pp./ca. 2000 wds. A posthumously-published Uncle Silas tale, in which Silas cooks "taters" and shares his homemade wine with his nephew, the narrator, and delightfully recounts how he and his friends dealt with an obnoxious braggart and womanizer. Getting him drunk, they drop a hot potato down his trousers, after which "he sort of went downhill. Took to the beer very bad. Went to the dogs. Never boasted about women no more." Possibly the tale was not published in Bates's lifetime or included in any of the Silas collections because it displays Silas's typical trickery in a slightly more graphic and mean-spirited manner than elsewhere. In The Yellow Meads of Asphodel (1976). [silas] 11/07
"Lost Ball." Story (1959). 10 pp./ca. 3000 wds. Accurately described by Vannatta (86) as an "excellent but painful little tale" with an atmosphere as bleak as the theme. A fussy and obsessive golfer, searching for a lost ball, encounters a young woman at the wind-swept beach. Their conversation reveals that she is troubled, perhaps suicidal, but the man, despite her aid in finding his ball, chooses not to reciprocate in helping her. A fine tale that exhibits Bates's skill in portraying isolation and a society without cohesion. In The Cornhill Magazine ( Autumn 1959), Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (1961), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963).[alienation]6/07
"Lost World of Fancy." Essay (1954). 3 pp./ca. 2400 wds. A quite detailed discussion of the street games, played under the lights of Rushden shops, during Bates's youth -- games specific to night-time, daylight, girls, boys, and the different seasons of the year. Bates describes many of the games, including those related to apprenticeship to different trades and a leap-frog game called Mopstick, and closes with acknowledgment that "another war, a million motor cars and a Welfare State have produced streets in which children cannot play and, what is perhaps worse, children who have not the slightest desire to play in them even if they could." Bates would write about street games in his autobiography (Vanished World, 47) and in the story "Sally Go Round the Moon." In Everybody's Weekly (London, 27 March 1954, pp. 24-25, 46). [street games] 11/09
"The Lotus Land." Story (1955). 6 pp./ca. 1800 wds. The first of six brief newspaper "Tales of Tahiti;" in this one the narrator accompanies an American doctor as he fruitlessly attempts to fight disease in the native hovels, all the while noting the contrasting beauty of the natural setting. Bates would retell his encounter with the doctor in the third volume of his autobiography (World in Ripeness, 136-137). In the Evening Standard (17 October 1955), The Fabulous Mrs V (1964). [tahiti, autobiography] 6/05
Love for Lydia. Novel (1952). 320 pp./ca. x wds. London: Michael Joseph, 1952; Boston: Little Brown and Company (An Atlantic Monthly Press Book), 1953. Dedication "to Laurence" (Pollinger, Bates's literary agent). Adapted for television in 1976. The only fictional work that Bates himself called autobiographical, although certainly most of his work was based at least in part on events in his life, is set in the town of Evensford, identical in numerous details to Bates's Rushden, and is narrated by Richardson, equally identical in many ways to the young Bates: his living situation, his unsatisfying work as a local reporter (based on Bates job at the Northamptonshire Reporter), his subsequent job in a warehouse (allowing much time for writing), his stint in London at a bookshop (Bumpus's Bookshop), his hobbies (ice skating, flowers, walking), a father who leads a choir (Albert Bates), and, most of all, his temperament. "In personality they are nearly identical: quiet, shy, bookish, but sarcastic and occasionally cruel. Both are vague, uncertain, given to dreaming" (Baldwin 185). Further rooting of the novel in real events is established by Bates twice in his autobiography (The Vanished World, 136-138 and World in Ripeness, 116-118), where he remembers a reporting assignment at Rushden Hall (the model for the novel's Aspen house) and also recalls a passing glimpse of "a tallish, dark, proud, aloof young girl in a a black cloak lined with scarlet" at the Rushden train station; "I surmised, rightly or wrongly, that she came from the Hall." Strangely, in twice citing the two memories as an example of the need for "a fusion of negative and positive" in the writing of novels, Bates in one telling calls the girl the positive element (the hall being the negative) and in the next telling, reverses himself.
That Richardson alone of the young people at the core of the novel has no given name only emphasizes the diffident and detached aspect of his character; he and four others revolve around Lydia, the sheltered and selfish Aspen daughter "who becomes a Circe figure, a fatal temptress disrupting everything and everyone around her, precipitating their downfall and hers" (Baldwin 185). The novel chronicles her affairs with Richardson and two of the other young men, both of whom by novel's end are dead; Richardson and Blackie, a brooding mechanic who also admires Lydia, survive, and in the process join her in reaching maturity through tragedy, concluding that "they must learn to give, share and sacrifice if good is to emerge from the suffering they have endured and caused" (Baldwin 186). As Vannatta (93-94) writes, it is a novel of "a young man's struggle to understand and resolve himself to a formidable world of change and uncertainty...The novel ends in his committing himself to Lydia in a far more mature and lasting fashion than he was capable of at the story's beginning." These themes are developed in a series of colorful scenes, involving ice-skating, country walks, social engagements (including a village celebration of Lydia's twenty-first birthday at the Aspen house ) and, primarily, rural dances in various outlying towns -- music, dancing, and drinking vividly capturing Bates's Midlands in the jazz age (recalled by Bates in The Vanished World, 164-166). Alcohol in fact is central to the death of one of the young men and to Lydia's inevitable breakdown and convalescence in a sanitarium.
Although principally a coming-of-age novel, the work also addresses changes to midland England and its people, both during the novel's events in the early 1930s and in subsequent years, and thus hearkens back to Bates successful novels of the 1930s; in exploring romantic relationships, social mores, and changing values it pursues the themes of Bates's later, less successful, wartime novels. Lastly, in setting these themes in fine descriptions of a countryside Bates loved well, and in vividly evoking its seasonal changes and their effect on its inhabitants, Bates returns to his pre-war fiction as well as his non-fictional nature writing. Baldwin (186) explores the important role of nature and the seasons in the novel; he writes that in it Bates successfully balances the conflict of determinism and free-will, having created "passive victims of forces beyond their control" in his naturalistic, pre-war novels, and having created ones who "controlled their fates, or at least assumed that they could" in his romantic, post-war, novels. It "is Bates's most satisfying and aesthetically complete novel...It does not offer simple, pat solutions to the problems it raises nor does it evade them. The universe may still be indifferent to human aspirations, and circumstances (including blind luck) may intrude on the choices people make, but beyond this, the characters control their own fates." [love, youth, coming of age, midlands, autobiography] (5/05)
"Love in a Wych Elm." Story (1954). 15 pp./ca. 3850 wds. A boyhood remembrance, set in Evensford, of a wealthy and colorful family with seven lovely daughters. The narrator recalls his first glimpse of womanhood, at the age of nine, in the much older Hilda, "a magnificent figure of a girl," as she prepares for a dance and he fastens her necklace: "I was agreeably and mystically stunned." Later, pretending to get married to her nine-year-old sister in a grove of wych-elms, he is "oppressed by a sensation of anti-climax. Something about Stella, I felt, had not quite ripened. I had not the remotest idea as to what it could be except that she seemed, in some unelevating and puzzling way, awkward and flat." Bates magically captures the imaginary games and dreams of the two children, as they play in the loft with "chest-developers" and talk of their future aristocratic life together. In Woman's Own (1954), Argosy (September 1959), The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). [boyhood, evensford, autobiography] 6/05
"Love Is Not Love." Story (1940). 25 pp./ca. 5750 wds. An exploration of turbulent emotions as a young secretary becomes involved with a farmer with a wooden leg. She experiences great happiness joining in his efforts, with his mother, to survive on the farm, but prompted by the reappearance of a former suitor, decides she cannot marry a man so handicapped. But in a dramatic closing, she admits her love and consents: "the tears were rising bitterly in her eyes and she made a slight cry of pity and terror as she beat her hands on his arms and shoulders." A sympathetic portrayal of the complexity of love. In The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Stories (1957). Reprinted with the title "Verdict from the Heart" in The Saturday Evening Post (5 July 1947).[love, farming, handicap] (1/05)
"Love Me Little, Love Me Long." Story (1950). 10 pp./ca. 2300 wds. A slight tale, included in book publication only once, many years after its magazine appearance. A diffident man named Richardson (a name Bates used for similar characters in Love for Lydia and "The Ferry," and for himself in "A German Idyll") visits an old flame who is now married with children. Her eagerness to enter into an affair belies the fullness of her rural family life, the abundance of the luncheon he shares with the family, and her insistence that "we never lack for anything here. We have everything we want." With characteristically rich references to the natural world, Bates offers a sad reflection on a married woman. In Argosy (May 1950), The Wild Cherry Tree (1968).[marriage, rural] (1/05)
"The Love Letters of Miss Maitland." Story (1976). 18 pp./ca. 4800 wds. One of a large number of stories by Bates about a person tortured by lonliness and longing, in this case a woman who creates an imaginary romance with her doctor and, on the verge of her deception being discovered, commits suicide. The descriptions of her holidays in Ireland and of her Irish hosts are lovely. Posthumously published in The Yellow Meads of Asphodel (1976).[lonliness, suicide] 11/07
A Love of Flowers. Essays. London: Michael Joseph, 1971 (June). Illustrations by Pauline Ellison. 160 pp./ca. 40,000 wds. Bearing abundant and beautiful ink drawings, this book returns to Bates's lifelong passion for gardening addressed in The Country Heart (1949) and The Seasons and the Gardener (1940). Bates cites his garden as key to his recovery in 1966 from two heart attacks and pneumonia, and in this book he speaks of individual flowers as good friends, meticulously referring to their characteristics and needs, and in the process demonstrating his thoughts on garden design, the seasons of a garden, hybridisation, the use of greenhouses, the expertise of nurserymen, and other topics. He also includes practical advice on a variety of topics related to gardening and plant selection. He revives discussion of Mr. Pimpkins, an exasperating hired man with a zeal for pruning, from the 1943 O More Than Happy Countryman and the 1952 Country of White Clover. Baldwin (225) notes that "such is Bates's love for his subject that the book is a pleasure to read even if one barely knows a snapdragon from a rose. The prose is lively and clear, the tone light, even humorous, and the descriptions of flowers are entrancing."[gardening, flowers, nature-writing] 5/08
"A Love Story." Story (1930). 12 pp./ca. 1930 wds. An early story, uncharacteristically told in the first person, of the narrator's cherry-buying outings, "over a stretch of meadowland and through a wood" with his love, seventeen-year old Christina Verney. An old couple asks them to return the following day for the cherries; they relate the achievements, awards, and death, from a horse kick, of their son Elijah, and during the telling a dark-haired girl in her twenties appears, "watching and listening. The grave dreaminess of her face, her unbroken silence, her apathetic pose, arrested me by their air of mystery." Walking home, the narrator is moved to express to Christina his "admiration and love" but his mood is interrupted when she remarks that Elijah was merely a drunkard who "was pitched out and broke his neck." On their return for the cherries, they hear the same stories but this time the onlooker's hands are "clenched rigidly, with an intensity of angry bitterness which gradually passed over her whole frame...At last there swept over her face a spasm of impatient fury, as if she thought the repetition of each word maudlin and hollow, as if she longed to snatch the whip from my hands and lash out for ever their blind, foolish faith in him and beat into them at last the truth of his degradation and death." Walking back, the narrator seizes Christina's hands "and began to speak to her urgently and tenderly, overcome by a strange fear lest it should be too late." Sharing the growing maturity of the other stories in Bates's third collection, this mood piece tenderly explores the complexities and contradictions of love, youth, and loss. In Everyman (3 April 1930), Now and Then (Winter 1930), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), Thirty Tales (1934), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949).[love, youth, loss, death, parents, rural] (1/05)
"The Loved One." Story (1940). 20 pp./ca. 4560 wds. A poetic portrait of a lovely woman with a smile mesmerizing to all men. Married to a hopelessly unsuccessful and small-minded entrepreneur, she finds herself strangely drawn to a railway signal-man whom she sees from a distance every afternoon. Having never exchanged words with him, she finally beckons him towards her, with a "smile that was like a concentration of all the remote, tenderly captivating smiles she had ever given. It went across the track with an intimate and secret swiftness that held the man momentarily spellbound." As he runs toward her, "as if this was the moment he too had been waiting for," he is killed by an oncoming train, leaving her stuck in her unhappy marriage, having "lost her way of smiling." Bearing the simplicity and sympathetic treatment of emotion characteristic of many earlier stories, this tale however suffers from an awkward and abrupt ending. The obsession of the husband with selling eggs is matched by the egg-raising talents in another story first published in the same year, The Earth. In The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974).[marriage, love, death, eggs] (1/05)
"The Lover's Pocketbook (Introduction)." Essay (1954). 3 pp./ca. 780 wds. Bates praises the joyful and sentimental celebration of love in this volume of cartoons by Raymond Peynet. Calling the French artist's characters the "nicest lovers in the world," Bates contrasts the tender eroticism and poetic depictment of romance with the somber, anxious, and blatant quality of much contemporary literature, music, and film. In The Lovers' Pocketbook, les amoureux de Peynet, edited by Kaye Webb with an introduction by H E Bates, London: Perpetua, 1954).[art criticism, love] 12/08
Loyalty : A Play in One Act, unpublished, 1926 (no text survives). Broadcast by the B.B.C. at least six times between January and April 1926 and performed twice in Bate’s hometown of Rushden in March of that year. The Radio Times of 2 April 1926 describes the piece as a "fanciful fragment" and lists the following participants: Howard Rose, producer, Miriam Ferris playing Aunt Matilda, Mabel Constanduros playing Mrs. Peach, Henry Oscar playing Mr. Peach, Michael Hogan playing their son David, and Phyllis Panting playing a girl named June. The skit is set in a room in a provincial house, with the table set for tea and a fire burning in the grate, on a rainy Saturday afternoon. A review in the Rushden Echo of the live performance described the play as a “skit on those who make a fuss about seeing Royalty” that was both comedy and drama, and which was followed by a brief statement by Bates to the audience. The review especially noted the character of June, who "introduces the feeling of youth calling to youth, and the point of the play appears to be that this call is of far greater moment to the universe than the passing of transitory Royal Personages." Bates later referred to the play as "Loyalties" and mentions that the B.B.C. offered him "the staggering sum of ten guineas" for it (Blossoming World 24). [play, social commentary, youth] (1/05)
George William Lucas, Bates's maternal grandfather and the most significant figure in his early years. "I grew up...in my maternal grandfather's pocket, bonded in a great warm mutual affection, neither of us able in the other's eyes to do the slightest wrong" (Vanished World 8). A skilled hand-craftsman of shoes and boots who received special orders from London, a volunteer fireman, and a superb storyteller, he abandoned shoemaking several years before Bates's birth and moved from Higham Ferrers to farm five acres about a mile outside of town. Although the farm was "wickedly heavy, impossible to touch in winter, drying out to a surface of cracked concrete in summer" and "almost meant a sentence of penal servitude for my grandfather for the rest of his life it afforded me the foundation on which all the joys of my childhood, together with all my feeling and love of the countryside, is based" (Vanished World 17-18). He and his wife, Priscilla Bird Lucas, had two daughters Lucy Elizabeth Bates, Bates's mother, and Florence Lucas. Bates's experiences with Lucas, ranging from fruitpicking expeditions to planting potatoes, directly led to works such as "Alexander," The Fallow Field, and The Poacher and less directly influenced virtually all of Bates's depictions of the English countryside. More importantly, as analyzed thoroughly by Baldwin (21-25), Bates inherited many of his core values and pleasures from his grandfather: a love of stories; a freedom of opinion in politics and a concern for the poor; a disdain for organized religion; a love of nature and a comprehensive knowledge of flora and fauna, soil and farming; and the ability to observe nature in great detail and subtlety. "Essentially, Lucas's legacy to Bates was to instill in him an abiding love for the slower, unmechanized, and somehow more colorful world of turn-of-the-century rural England" (Baldwin 23). Lucas, responding to a fire in a boot factory around 1908, saved a baby from a cottage in which he himself had been born; that baby, Marjorie Cox, would be re-introduced to Lucas by Bates many years later: "if my grandfather approved and liked her all would be well. To my great delight he liked her instantly" (Vanished World 187). Bates married her in 1931. After the death of his wife in ???, Lucas declined and Bates recalls "more leisurely business, gathering water-cress, fishing, black-berrying, gathering herbs" (Vanished World 180). blossoming 84-5 wedding sorrowful field. dates?? link to silas? (1/05)
"The Machine." Story (1938). 8 pp./ca. 1550 wds. Waddo sits eight hours a day at a stitching machine in a boot factory. He also helps the narrator's family out with harvesting and threshing, all the time urging them to purchase farm machines. Bearing much similarity to other Bates superhuman threshers (see The Mower) in his speed and swagger, Waddo swings "a scythe with a masterly and precise beauty that no machine could ever have shown;" at the same time he is enamoured of machines that do the "work of scores of men." In the concluding threshing scene, Waddo, excited over the rats escaping the sheaves, slips and disappears into the threshing drum. "There was no answer; and in a world that stood still we knew that the machine had claimed him." A forgettable, predictable sketch that touches on the changes to boot-making and farming in Bates' Midlands. In John O'London's Weekly (5 August 1938), The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947). [t:harvest helper, boot making, mover, farming, humor, machinery] (1/05)
"MacIntyre's Magna Charta." Story (1942). 7 pp./ca. 1610 wds. One of the less successful of the "Flying Officer X" pieces, this vignette captures a Canadian full of pretended disdain for the slow-moving laws and institutions of England, saying that "all I need is one hell of a good big bomb" to end the war. In a hotel lounge, he fights a civilian in defense of the honor of a female officer. The narrator reflects on the sacrifices all are making in the war effort, and concludes that he would like MacIntyre close by if in need of help, "for MacIntyre has a Magna Charta of his own. And it involves things so deep, so simple, and so clear that perhaps it would be foolish to put them down." As the tale leaves ambigious whether the pilot had a legitimate issue with the civilian or not, he comes across as a somewhat primitive and unappealing character, unlike the majority of those in Bates's war stories. In the News Chronicle (2 March 1942), There's Something In The Air (1943). [officer x, pilots, canadian, war] (1/05)
"The Mad Woman." Story (1934). 9 pp./ca. 2400 wds. A comic sketch of two bored lads who spy on a local lunatic. The account of their wild speculations, their suspense and fear, and the stories they concoct after their adventure gently and humorously captures the absurdity of their age in a manner reminiscent of Mark Twain. In Lovat Dickson's Magazine (November 1934, iii:5:pp. 568-576).[boyhood, insanity] (1/05)
"The Major of Hussars." Story (1947). 22 pp./ca. 5900 wds. The narrator, staying at a hotel in the Swiss mountains with his wife, describes their interactions with an eccentric retired major of nearly sixty and his twenty-five year old wife. Describing a group train trip to the top of the Jungfrau mountain as "one of those excursions on which enemies are made for life," the narrator follows the mismatched couple until their departure, the major "with his wrong teeth in [and wearing] the most painful sort of smile." Written in an unsuccessfully droll and bemused style, the story seems nothing more than a snapshot of an eccentric old man and an inexplicable marriage. In The Saturday Book, Seventh Year (London: Hutchinson, November 1947), Pick of To-Day's Short Stories, 1st Series (London: Odhams Press, 1949), Colonel Julian and other Stories (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), The Best of H.E. Bates (1980), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).[old age, marriage] (1/05)
"The Maker of Coffins." Story (1955). 11 pp./ca. 2900 wds. And old lady receives her eldest son, a coffin-maker, on his weekly Sunday visit; Bates lovingly paints a picture of their lives, their intimacies as they chat, eat, and he plays the fiddle. Vannatta (82), notes that "as he plays, both think of the past and future, and both know that he will soon be making a coffin for her;...this unassuming tale...encompasses the past and the future in a serene, elegiac examination of the present moment." Baldwin (193) similarly finds it a particularly successful tale, "dealing in an original way with the familiar theme of communication...Little is said, but words are superfluous; the points of contact are made through food and music." In Argossy (May 1953, pp. 37-42, with title "The Tune of Love"),The Daffodil Sky (1955), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987). [rural, mother/son, music] [5/05]
"The Man from Jamaica." Story (1932). 8 pp./ca. 2740 wds. The narrator, a young boy tending his grandfather's cows, meets another boy, who calls himself Dodfish. Dodfish proves to be a finely-dressed, charismatic liar who regales the narrator with "grand, incredible, impossible" tales of his life in Jamaica: attacks by savages, dangerous lions, and abductions by foreigners. Over the course of the summer, the boys meet and Dodfish told "the finest stories in the world...heaping lie upon lie, while I listened, as it were, with the very soles of my boots, never doubting him, the magic of his voice and the colour of his tales acting on me like hynotism and wine together." Years later, having learned that "he had fooled me every minute of those summer mornings," the narrator recognizes Dodfish at a dance, charming an adoring partner with the same lies: "I saw the girl raise her face and gaze at him with an expression of rapturous belief, not doubting a word, just as I must have looked at him, too, in the days when we kept cows together." A charming tale of boyhood innocence, rural summer laziness, and gypsies, with a recurring Bates character of the devilish but endearing trickster. In John O'London's Weekly (2 April 1932), The House with the Apricot and Two Other Tales (1933).[boyhood, rural, trickster, gypsies] (1/05)
"The Man in Action." Essay (1942). 5 pp./ca. 2350 wds. A lengthy report on the amazing exploits of a particular fighter pilot is preceded by a more general discussion of the public's incomplete concept of the pilot's life, in part due to intentional understatement and unwillingness to "shoot a line" (call attention to oneself), and a delineation of the various types of pilots and planes. In Flying and Popular Aviation (Chicago, September 1942, xxxi, 3, pp. 130-3, 225-5, 230), The Spitfire Log (London: Souvenir Press, 1985, pp. 88-93).[pilots]9/09
"A Man in the House." Story later titled "The Common Denominator."
"The Man who Half-made Christmas." Essay (1932). 1 pp./ca. 1160 wds.An entertaining appreciation of the works of Charles Dickens, and his mastery of characterization, creation of atmosphere, and style. Bates explores how Dickens effectively uses atmosphere and style to create memorable characters , despite the fact that those characters are "flat, as flat as omelettes... they are types -- types which we recognise as soon as they appear on the page." In The New Clarion (December 3, 1932, i, 26, 606). [literary criticism, dickens] 1/09 [dickens]
"The Man Who Loved Cats." Story (1937). 10 pp./ca. 2580 wds. A lecherous professor seduces an innocent sixteen-year-old girl when she visits his home for tutoring; he has seventeen cats, and states that "cats and women go together. They were made for the same thing -- for petting and loving and stroking." The light, almost humorous, tone contrasts with this disturbing but hardly memorable portrait of a perverted and manipulative man. In the New Statesman and Nation (March 1937), Something Short and Sweet (1937), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).[education, teachers, sex,cats, abuse] (1/05
"The Man Who Loved Squirrels." Novella (1971). 73 pp./ca. 21,000 wds. A fine late work that joins the familiar theme of the tragic love triangle with Bates's love of country ways. Spile Johnson strips poles for stiles and fences, working alone and living in his childhood home with an overprotective and cunning mother. He otherwise finds company only in the forest's squirrels until his routines are uprooted by a chance meeting with a traveling London woman. The slow growth of a secret relationship between them, as well as the increasing suspicions of his mother, are expertly developed with Bates's characteristic utilization of nature, as well as sparse dialogue loaded with underlying emotion. While the woman is playfully affectionate, and they indeed become lovers, she also calculatingly exploits him for new clothes, shoes, and a coat to be made of the very squirrels he has lovingly befriended for years. When his mother oversteps in her attempts to control him, and when a man purporting to be her husband threatens him with litigation, Johnson is pushed past his limits: he murders the mother and submits himself to the police. As noted by Baldwin (227) the tale bears similarity to another fine novella, Dulcima, in its weave of psychological complexity and perverted love. In Argosy (May 1971), The Song of the Wren (1972).[love triangle, rural, murder] 10/07
"The Manchester United Disaster." Essay (1958). 4 pp./ca. 1200 wds. Bates's tribute to seven athletes who were among the victims of an airplane crash in Munich on 6 February 1958. He relates the role of Matt Busby, manager of the Manchester United team, in nurturing young players (who came to be known as the Busby Babes) who transformed football after the War, cites player Duncan Edwards as an example of the team's maturity "both in physical strength and artistry," and notes the "pure class that made them, I think, as admirable in defeat as they had so often been in victory." In The Football Assocation Year Book (1958-59, London: The Football Association, pp. 55-58), The Footballer's Fireside Book (1961), The Footballer's Companion (1962). [sport]4/10
"March Buds." Essay (1935). 2 pp./ca. 1200 wds. One of many brief nature pieces in The Spectator, this one glorying in a host of unopened buds in springtime. In The Spectator (22 March 1935, cliv, 5569, pp. 472-3). [nature] 6/09
"May in the Woods." Essay (1936). In a much expanded and revised version, this appeared as "Flowers and Foxes" in the anthology Through the Woods, which was published in October 1936. In the Fortnightly Review (June 1936, cxlv, pp. 721-724). 3/09
"Men Who Fly Above Fear." Essay (1943). 2 pp./ca. 1200 wds. A brief discussion of the specialized lingo of war pilots, and its reflection of "the calm confidence born of the conquest of fear." Posted about two years after Bates's induction into the RAF as a writer of the Flying Officer X stories, the piece discusses the reticence of pilots, following a code that "compels them roughly to be unimpressionable, inarticulate, self-effacing," and that imposes a language that calls success a "piece of cake," an airplane a "kite," a girfriend a "popsie," and avoids mention of death with the phrase "there's no future in it." Bates notes that these unoriginal, "rather silly" forms of speech have "none of the inventive virility of American or colonial speech," but are nevertheless adopted by pilots from every country as a "rule of understatement...a curious language invented not to reveal but to hide." As to what is being hidden, Bates briefly discusses how flying combines "fear, fatigue and exaltation...to produce friction sufficient to burn away the clutter of unessential things. Fear...is the dominant emotion...There has never been a pilot, I think, who under all that laconic exterior and monosyllabic speech, was not afraid, and who was not an infinitely better pilot and man because of it." In the New York Times Magazine (5 September 1943, pp. 8-9).[pilots] 11/09
"The Middle of Nowhere." Story (1968). 21 pp./ca. 4600 wds. In a long tradition of tales about life's underdogs, Bates paints a poignant portrait of Francie, a young widow and cafe owner, as she discovers love with an Irish drifter, only to find her happiness shattered by the cruelty of her customers. Both she and her lover display a passivity and a resignation to both loss and unhappiness that is pervasive in Bates's work. In Argosy (July 1968, with title "In the Middle of Nowhere"), The Wild Cherry Tree (1968).[love, loss] 10/07
"A Midland Portrait." Essay (1934). 2 pp./ca 1600 wds. With a title matching an earlier piece in the same journal ("A Kentish Portrait"), this memoir has more the style and atmosphere of Uncle Silas tales that Bates published in *journals beginning in 1933 and in My Uncle Silas in 1939. Bates describes a neighbor, Quintus, who is obsessed with a sow belonging to Bates's grandfather, George William Lucas, and who takes summer evening walks with his hens, thus creating a fondly comic piece comparable to others presented by Bates as fiction. In the New Statesman and Nation (7 July 1934, viii, 176, New Series, 12-13).[george lucas, silas, comic] 1/09
"The Mill." Story (1935). 64 pp./ca. 13,420 wds. Considered one of Bates's best stories, this lengthy tale, in eight numbered "sections," relates the predictable tragedy of a young girl in service, sexually exploited by her employer and sent home pregnant. Bates paints rich characters in the passive and helpless Alice, the garrulous Mrs. Holland, her dark and cunning husband, and her sensitive and compassionate son, and he deftly uses imagery of the derelict mill-yard, the flowing mill-stream, and innumerable dead fish to illuminate the emotional drama. Alice, until the final page, seems "incapable of pain, even of emotion at all...Her eyes were remarkable in their everlasting expression of mute steadfastness, the same wintry grey light in them as always, an unreflective, almost lifeless kind of light." Only on return does she think tenderly of the son and feel the pain of her situation: "Her eyes...registered the suddenness and depths of her emotions. They began to fill with tears. It was as though they had come to life at last." Vannatta (39) notes that "at no point is her agony greater, yet oddly enough, this is the most optimistic part of the story. The aspect of the story which causes the reader to feel such despair is not the circumstances of Alice's life but rather her dumb, passionless, indiscriminating acceptance of good and bad." Bates noted the inspiration for Alice in the daughter of a travelling greengrocer who called on Bates and his family (The Blossoming World 86-87): "It seemed to me a face moulded out of yellow clay: a face born to tragedy. I believe it is true that Hardy saw his Tess only once and also in a cart, in a country lane, and from that fleeting experience, haunted also by a face, created his celebrated novel. Soon I was to create mine shaping it into a story called The Mill, a story that was not only far and away the best thing I had written up to that time but the story that firmly and beyond doubt established my reputation as a writer of stories and revealed me at long last as a fully conscious writer, wholly aware of what I was doing, a master of the craft I had worked at so relentlessly and intensely." Baldwin (115) notes the additional inspiration of a ruined mill near Rushden, and says that the story's theme was "so forbidding...that H.E. had trouble placing it with a magazine;" he quotes Bates's response to a complaint about its bleakness from an otherwise avid fan to the effect that a quality of static, emotionless negativity was his goal: "It's a study in emotionlessness! Of two kinds of emotionlessness, the girl's and the Hollands', and the effect they have when they touch each other." In Come and Cut Again (1935), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), A Party for the Girls -- Six Stories (1988).[girlhood, sexual exploitation, rural] (1/05)
"Millenium Also Ran." Story (1934). 15 pp./ca. 3150 wds. Reflecting Bates's months working for the Northamptonshire Chronicle, this tale depicts a young reporter whose most important duty is to stamp horse-race results in the afternoon edition. He visits the coroner and police in search of news and then has a disquieting encounter with the widow and mother of a recently-deceased newspaper salesman. Idealistically attempting to eulogize the deceased with a passionate denunciation of social evil, and then further attempting to impress the widow by investing her husband's outstanding pay in a horse named Millenium, the story ends bleakly, with the money lost and the reporter humbled. In The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), Thirty-one Selected Tales (1947).[newspaper, reporter, death, youth] (1/05)
"Misunderstanding." A story elsewhere published with the title "Where the Cloud Breaks."
The Modern Short Story. Essays (1941). London, Edinburgh, Paris, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1941 (July). New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1941 (December). 2nd edition, London: Michael Joseph, 1972 (with new preface). 232 pp./ca. 53,000 wds. Dedicated "to A.J.J. Ratcliff." Indexed. In Bates's only book-length work of literary criticism, he discusses writers principally from Russia, the United States, France, and Ireland, and in doing so pays homage to his own chief literary influences. Tackling various attempts at a definition of the short story, and distinguishing it helpfully from the novel, Bates concludes that it "has an insistent and eternal fluidity that slips through the hands." In ten chapters, he proceeds to lovingly explore the strengths and weaknesses of writers from Nicolai Gogol and Edgar Allan Poe to the new crop of English and Welsh writers of the early 1940s. He writes enthusiastically of the American tradition that includes Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Sarah Orne Jewett, O. Henry, and Jack London, dwelling particularly on Stephen Crane, before a central chapter in which he compares Checkhov and Maupassant in such aspects as moral content, compassion, simplicity of construction, and the demands they each place upon the reader. Briefly discussing Tolstoy, Wells, and Kipling, he proceeds with greater affection to Katherine Mansfield, A.E. Coppard, Joyce's Dubliners, and the American renaissance of Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, and William Saroyan. He closes with an appreciation of D.H. Lawrence and a roster of contemporary English authors writing after the first world war. In the course of these literary portraits, Bates explores the elements of a fine short story, and thus states his own deeply-felt goals as a writer: simplicity, implication rather than description, absence of moral teaching, and a high responsibility placed on the reader. In the original preface, he pointedly excludes his own work from discussion, wishing instead to conduct "a critical survey of the modern short story as a whole" and not focus on his stories or methods. In the preface to the 1972 edition, Bates notes his mistaken prophecy of a renaissance for the form after the second World War; he decries the "era of the Angry Young Men, the Permissive Society or the Parade of Pornography" and especially what he calls the school of "tell all," which he considers antithical to the spirit of the short story. Baldwin (146-148) notes that the book was "more than ten years in the making," referring to articles Bates wrote for journals such as The Bookman and John O'London's Weekly. He calls it "fluently and engagingly written, with acute and telling observations on the nature of the form," but with "no unifying theme holding together the various ideas and observations that Bates tends to drop casually; it is a book without a thesis and essentially without a plan." He notes authors ignored or maltreated by Bates, but also acknowledges the strength of "observations and judgments [which] ... show the critical eye of one who practices the form." The book was well-received, selling well enough to justify a revised edition; its publication by Thomas Nelson was a point of contention, however, with Bates's publisher Jonathan Cape, with whom Bates had agreed to consult before publishing elsewhere. An excerpt from the chapter "American Renaissance" was published as "A Note on Saroyan" later in 1941 in Modern Reading ( September 1941, pp. 27-30); similarly, the chapter called "Tchehov and Maupassant" was reprinted in slightly altered form with the title "Artichokes and asparagus" in Life and Letters Today (London, October 1941).[literary criticism, short stories] (1/05)
A Moment in Time. Novel. London: Michael Joseph, 1964; New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1964. 248 pp./ca.80,000 wds. A woman's reminiscence of one year in her life, at the time of the Battle of Britain in 1940, of her coming-of-age as well as that of her circle of friends, of the the effect of war on English country life, and of the spirit and lingo of the Royal Air Force pilots interacting with the rural life of Southern England. The novel's strengths are also its weaknesses; Bates casts his characters and their experiences in war in the gentle haze of Elizabeth's backward glance, lending the novel a lightness of tone and subtlety regarding her personal concerns, thus preventing a deeper exploration of the dark side of war. Even the realistic depiction of death and injury is softened by the tone of age remembering events of youth. Nevertheless, given its scope, the novel successfully brings together Bates's intimate knowledge of the world of pilots, and especially the individual psychological makeup of each one; his lifetime effort to track the changing English countryside in the wake of social and technological change; and his equally serious focus on the complexities of human relationships and love. The storyline is simple, as the cushioned existence of young Elizabeth, her grandmother, and uncle is disrupted by the requisitionng of their home by the military, and as she blossoms in a social world of young soldiers -- becoming briefly infatuated with one, then falling more deeply for a second (whom she marries but who is killed in action) -- and their women companions. Many of these young characters mirror those of Flying Officer X stories (the pilot on a personal mission, the pilot who gets into brawls in the pubs, the pilots from Eastern Europe), while the uncle, farmboy (whom Elizabeth marries in the end), and the mansion itself suggest Bates's highly successful Love for Lydia, and the fun-loving Doll brings to mind the Pop Larkin novels. In a number of minor details, the novel allows Bates an opportunity to draw upon p102-106). ast work (an anecdote about fish responding to a bomber attack, the allusion to the phrase "Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori" (previously a chapter title in O More Than Happy Countryman), and such phrases as "It's just the way it is." Bates creates a particularly fine character in Elizabeth's grandmother -- wise, understanding, and unmeddling -- and sympathetically depicts the grief of a homosexual for the loss of a fellow pilot. Baldwin (212) finds the novel a missed opportunity for Bates to make "important insights into the special quality of those times and people," whereas "instead, the novel is a slender story" with characters largely "cut from cardboard." Vannatta (104) notes that Bates's intention for the novel was probably something weightier than its predecessor, A Crown of Wild Myrtle, a light "summer read," but says that "because the aim of the novel is greater...its flaws are also magnified." He finds that Bates "succumbs too often" to "nostalgia and sentimentality" in his treatment of the "grim reality of those early days of the war...we cannot help but feel that Bates's ultimate goal is glorification, not faithful depiction." As noted by Baldwin (155), the setting of much of the story is a mansion assigned to Royal Air Force officers that is based on Shopswyke House, a Georgion mansion to which Bates was assigned in Tangmere while writing many of his Flying Officer X stories.The novel was televised in a serial production beginning 4 September 1979 directed by Renny Rye.[Kent, war, coming of age, pilots, gay] 5/08
"The Moment that Changed My Life." Essay (1972). 1 pp./ca. 1000 wds. In one of a series "in which six famous writers describe their great moments of self-discovery," Bates vividly recalls the role of his Kettering School English teacher, Edmund Kirby, in Bates's growth from lethargy to "ambition" that "shone like a beacon. I knew that I not only wanted to be, but had to be, a writer." The essay includes phrases from a similar account of Kirby's influence in Vanished World (102-106) which was published in 1969. In Woman (16 September 1972, lxxi, 1839, p. 42).[autobiography]5/10
"A Month by the Lake." Novella (1960). 72 pp./ca. 21,000 wds. A comedy of errors, set at Lake Como prior to the second World War, and revolving around two middle-aged vacationers unable to express their affection for each other. Bates pleasantly interweaves a magic show by the retired British major, depictions of the Italian countryside, and a variety of colorful characters as the man gives up a foolish infatuation with a much younger girl, the woman ceases to attempt to arouse his jealousy through a pretended involvement with a young man, and, in the end they are "prepared to share a new life. The optimistic ending is not forced or manipulated but is an earned vision; their new wisdom purchased at the price of suffering and humiliation...[It] remains one of Bates's most sensitive novellas" (Vannatta, 118). A movie version starring Edward Fox,Vanessa Redgrave, and Uma Thurman, was directed by John Irvin in 1995. In An Aspidistra in Babylon/The Grapes of Paradise (1960), The Grapes of Paradise (1974), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987).[love, jealousy, age, italy, novella, movie]
A Month by the Lake & Other Stories. Stories (1987). New York: New Directions, 1987. 212 pp. A posthumous collection a four-page introduction by Anthony Burgess, in which the English novelist appreciates Bates's mastery of a variety of literary forms and notes his "variety of tone, the manner in which the vocabulary expands or contracts to fit the subject, and the faultless ear for human speech. Noting that "Bates's affection for ordinary people is one of his shining virtues," he adds that "I would never suggest that Bates opened up new territory, but he achieved such sovereignty of what literary land he inherited that he deserves the homage of our uncomplicated enjoyment." Contains: A Month by the Lake, The Flame, Time, Sergeant Carmichael, It's Just the Way It Is, The Flag, Elaine, Country Society, The Evolution of Saxby, The Maker of Coffins, The Cowslip Field, Death and the Cherry Tree, The Butterfly, Where the Cloud Breaks, Mrs. Eglantine, The Chords of Youth, The Song of the Wren.
"More Greetings from our Readers." Essay (1947). Simply a paragraph, one of many submitted to The Countryman magazine on its 20th anniversary, in which Bates writes: "The Countryman has established itself as the indisputable touchstone on all matters of the countryside. It is more than a magazine; it is a very human cyclopedia of rural feeling and thought. Its attitude and contribution to our time are even more needed now than when it began its career a quarter of a century ago." The heading indicates that previous issues included similar congratulatory sentiments (note that Eads called it "Greetings from our Readers"). In The Countryman (Spring 1947, xxxv, 1, p. 14). 11/09
"Morning Victory." Story (1943). 5 pp./ca. 1140 wds. Differing from most of the "Flying Officer X" tales, which feature colorful conversation and portrayals of individual pilots, this tale is more of a prose-poem on the actions of two squadrons of Spitfire planes. Bates praises their cooperative efforts, even in the midst of inter-squadron rivalry over a dispersal hut. In its descriptions of the beauty of the planes and the morning, the piece hearkens back to earlier nature stories such as "The Gleaner." In There's Something in the Air (1943).[flying officer x, war, pilots] (1/05)
"The Mother." Story (1926). 4 pp./ca. 690 wds. A brief depiction of an aged mother, whose life revolves entirely around her youngest son Abel, unmarried and living at home in his thirties. An unexceptional fragment; one of four in Bates's first story collection that deals with the aged. In the Manchester Guardian (7 August 1926), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Thirty Tales (1934).[aged, motherhood, village] (1/05)
[Movies: Uncle Silas, Purple Plain, Love for Lydia--television, Larkin family, Dulcima, Feast of July, Triple Echo]
"The Mower." Story (1931). 23 pp./ca. 3830 wds. A farmer, slow and stiff in manner, his wife Anna, and their young son get help in the mowing of their fields from the lusty and energetic Ponto: "He swung his scythe with a long light caressing sweep, smoothly and masterfully, as though his limbs had been born to mow." The heat of summer, the sensuality in Ponto's limitless strength and consumption of beer, and the sexual tension between Anna and Ponto create a powerful atmosphere centered around the mower, independent and unrepressed. At the end of the day's work, her husband commenting on Ponto's rollicking song that "He's a Tartar. He's a Tartar," Anna's "dark face was "filled with the conflicting expression of many emotions, exasperation, perplexity, jealousy, longing, hope, anger." Generally acknowledged as an early masterpiece of writing and mood. Ponto bears similarity to Pike in a "Threshing day for Esther," and a mower from Bates's childhood, named Smack, is described in much the same terms (Vanished World 15, 56). In This Quarter (September 1931), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), Thirty Tales (1934), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), The Poison Ladies and Other Stories (1976). [check quote many emotions,] [rural, mower, sexuality, drinking] (1/05)
"Mr Featherstone Takes a Ride." Story (1962). 41 pp./ca. 10,000 wds. A comic story featuring an amoral and easy-going swindler named Niggler (who bears some resemblance to Pop Larkin) and an innocent hitchhiking philosophy student (with traits in common with Mr. Charleton, again of the Larkin series). Niggler's astonishment at his companion's exposition of metaphysics and philosophy is particularly entertaining. But Featherstone's philosophy is no match for the ever-shifting shenanigans of Niggler, who "is such an artful and cheerful confidence man, however, that he brings more happiness than sorrow to his victims, showing that most of us love nothing so much as our own delusions" (Baldwin 209). Bates notes the source of the story in a 1941 incident in which he, like Featherstone, "loaned" five quid to a hitchhiker who "weighed [me] up in about three minutes flat: the easy, dead easy touch...The incident of my Cockney friend and his confidence trick never left my mind, and more than twenty years later I turned it into a story...for which an editor paid me 250 guineas, thus showing a fair profit on a morning in which I too had been taken for one" (The World in Ripeness 12-13). The story features a favorite Bates character, a pipe-smoking and masculine-dressing lesbian (with her partner). Vannatta (121) notes the relish with which Bates handles the comic story here and in the Larkin novels, which readers find "greatly entertaining or merely infantile...there seems to be no middle ground." In The Golden Oriole (1962).[comedy, lesbian, trickster] 6/07
"Mr. Livingstone." Story (1937). 10 pp./ca. 2500 wds. A tightly-written portrait of a young city woman, who with her new husband has moved to the country with idyllic dreams, and of the dishonest hired hand who continually thwarts her. In a climactic closing, she attempts to fire him, but realizes that he is simply a symbol of her larger dissatisfaction, that "she was, after all, up against something besides Mr. Livingstone. And it seemed worse because, in her misery, she did not know at all what it was." In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).[marriage, rural, unhappiness, hired hand] (1/05)
"Mr. Penfold." Story (1940). 20 pp./ca. 4670 wds. A tale of repressed communications and misunderstandings, in which the title character, a "painfully shy, retreating" travelling draper and haberdasher, calls weekly on a war-widow and her daughter. The widow, having long given up hope that Mr. Penfold might "for once unfold and give himself," catches him taking an interest in her daughter, and this precipitates the daughter taking lodgings elsewhere. At story's end, the salesman learns that the daughter is pregnant and soon to be married; he feels despair, "that behind his lifelong shyness something terrible was at last preparing to explode and shatter him." Baldwin (144) notes the story as one of the better in an otherwise flawed collection -- "typically Batesian" in its theme, "the blindness people can have toward each other's emotional needs...related with delicacy and tact." In Harper's Magazine (January 1940), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974). [romance, mother/daughter, relationships] (1/05)
"Mrs. Eglantine." Story (1955). 6 pp./ca. 1750 wds. The third of six brief newspaper "Tales of Tahiti." The narrator describes a sad British divorcee; she waits for her French lover to arrive and marry her, but, knowing that both the French authorities and the man's parents oppose the match, she drinks from morning until night. Bates would retell his encounter with the woman in the third volume of his autobiography (World in Ripeness, 144-146). In the Evening Standard (19 October 1955), Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories/The Enchantress and other Stories (1961), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963), A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987).[tahiti, travel, english abroad] (6/05)
Mrs. Esmond's Life. Story. London: E. Lahr, 1931. 32 pp. Dedication: "To Sheila." Limited edition of the story elsewhere titled "Charlotte Esmond." (1/05)
"Mrs. Robert Lusty." Letter (1962). 1 pp./146 wds. In this letter printed in the obituaries section of the Times, Bates recalls Joan Lusty, who worked at Bates's publisher Michael Joseph Ltd., as a "woman of both charm and firm convictions...a lively, intelligent and lovable companion." In The Times (London, July 7, 1962, p. 10). [literary life]5/10
"Mrs. Vincent." Story. 11 pp./ca. 2744 wds. An unflattering portrait of a sour woman, with twenty "wasted" years in India behind her, as she entertains a young injured pilot who is angry and "oppressed by a sense that his life had reached an empty, pointless ditch." They discuss his injury and subsequent suicide attempt, the dust, filth, and heat of India, and the half-white Indian girls who interest the pilot and disgust the woman. Baldwin (182) places the tale in the context of Colonel Julian and Other Stories as one in a series of studies of oddballs, but one which is "done unsubtly" with an effect that is "unhappy." In the Atlantic Monthly (August 1946), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951). [asia, war, india] (1/05)
"My Beginning." Essay (1933). 4 pp./ca. 1000 wds. Bates is one of ten young authors included in this "handbook" by book-collector John Gawsworth (pseudonymn of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong); the others are Stella Benson, Thomas Burke, Frederick Carter, John Collier, E.M. Delafield, Liam O'Flaherty, Oliver Onions, Dorothy M. Richardson, and L.A.G. Strong. Gawsworth provides detailed bibliographical information (collation, binding, signatures, and notes) for every published work of each author, in Bates's case 19 titles up to the publication of The Fallow Land in 1932, including even three minor Christmas cards published privately. Bates's essay fortells both Love for Lydia and his autobiography in relating his misadventures as an aspiring journalist with the Northamptonshire Chronicle, describing his daily visits to the police station and the coroner, the filth of the newspaper office, and a boss whose morning "breath was rank and powerful and his eyes already bleary." Bates explains that he wishes to dispel "the notion that I am a countryman and a pure-bred countryman at that...I am...town-bred, and I have lived a town-life for twenty-five years, though I am not denying that I have hated very nearly every minute of it." He also wishes to warn the aspiring young writer "not to enter into the realm of journalism with the insane notion, as I did, that he will learn to write there." In Ten Contemporaries: Notes Towards Their Definitive Bibliography (Second Series) (John Gawsworth, London: Joiner and Steel, 1933), Literary Digest (January, 1947).[autobiography, journalism, reporter] (1/05)
"My Best Novel." Essay (1950). 1 pp./ca. 350 wds. One of twelve novelists invited by the Islington Public Libraries to address the topic of "my best novel," Bates claims that "I have never read one of my novels" due to a dislike of the finished product. He however cites two short stories ("The Mill" and "The Cruise of the Breadwinner" as "works of whose quality I am most jealous and on which, in bad moments, I feel I shall never be able to improve," his first novel The Two Sisters as never failing "to astonish me, whenever I open it, by its intuitive maturity," and his Burmese novels (The Purple Plain and The Jacaranda Tree) as things of special attachment because of the unusual circumstances leading to their creation.[autobiography] 11/09
"My Cottage that was a Barn." Essay (1933). 4 pp./ca. 1100 wds. A brief account of the long search for a home in Kent, ending in the discovery of a granary in February 1931 that becames Bates's home for the remainder of his life. Bates describes the initial inspection, during the rainy season when the building "was like a derelict ship standing in a sea of mud," the planning process, and the completion in about six months of "a beautiful, neat, snug place that looked as though it had never been a farm-building." The article reflects Bates's pride in combining the rural and literary worlds, and his delight in his garden: "what was once the farmyard is a blaze of purple and white and lavender and rose and gold." In The Countryman (July 1933, 7:2, pp. 357-60), reprinted in slightly edited form in The Countryman Book (London, 1948, pp. 121-123 under the heading "Concerning Authors' Cottages"). [Kent, rural](11/09)
"My Father and I." Essay (1969). The title given to extracts from the first volume of Bates's autobiography, The Vanished World, which were printed in Argossy (London, January 1970, xxxi, 1, pp. 58-61).
"My Grandfather's Farm." Essay (1944). 6 pp./ca. 2400 wds. Bates describes the George Lucas farm of the Midlands where he spent many boyhood days, now buldozed into a vast air-force base run by Americans. He contemplates the resulting deep ties created between two peoples, and then reminisces about the German war-prisoner "who worked on this hillside, on our farm" from 1914 to 1918 and bemoans that his return home apparently had no effect on his country's thirst for war. Bates wrote about this prisoner, Johann, in The Vanished World (95) as well as in the fictional account "The Hessian Prisoner." Overall, this short piece is a touching tribute to the collaborative efforts of Allied forces in the English countryside. A year later, Bates would publish an update on the land called "They Have Left the Farm." In the Royal Air Force Journal (October 1944, ii, 10, pp. 344-346), Slipstream, A Royal Air Force Anthology (1946). [autobiography, war] 11/09
"My Poacher." Essay (1935). 2 pp./ca. 700 wds. A marvelous testament to Buck, a recently deceased shoemaker/poacher known to Bates as a child. Buck exemplified all of the traits captured in Bates's novel The Poacher and mentioned as well in the autobiographical Vanished World: remarkable athletic abilities, a rich and spontaneous humor, and a tenderness with children. In The Countryman (London, April 1935, xi, 1, pp. 122-123).[poaching]9/09
My Uncle Silas. Stories (1939). London: Jonathan Cape, 1939 (27 October). 192 pp. Drawings by Edward Ardizzone. In the preface, Bates says that the character of Silas as well as a number of the stories are firmly based on real events in the life of Joseph Betts, "late husband of my maternal grandmother's sister Mary Ann." Certain stories he claims to be "so near to reality that they needed only the slightest recolouring on my part" (namely "The Lily," "The Wedding," "The Revelation," "Silas the Good," and "The Death of Uncle Silas"). Others he says "have been inspired by that sort of apocryphal legend which is the inheritance of every country child who keeps his ears cocked when men are talking." He says that the publication of "The Death of Uncle Silas" produced a "larger volume of correspondence than any full-length book of mine has done before or since," in which the "resurrection of Uncle Silas" was demanded. He characterizes Silas as "the original Adam, rich and lusty and robust" and "a protest against the Puritanical poison in the English blood." He notes that "to those who find these stories too Rabelaisian, far-fetched, or robust, my reply would be that, as pictures of English country life, they are in reality understated." He closes by finding no reason why the character of Uncle Silas should not produce more stories, and expresses the hope that in that case "it is my great hope that I shall again be lucky enough to have the collaboration of Mr Edward Ardizzone whose crabbed and crusty pictures are so absolutely and perfectly in the spirit of every page they illustrate;" indeed, the 1957 Sugar for the Horse is an additional collection of Silas stories, illustrated by Ardizzone.
Baldwin (110, 139) notes that in Uncle Silas, Bates first makes use of an "ironic narrator," departing from the "Chekhovian objectivity" characteristic of his work in general. He notes that "the Uncle Silas stories exemplify Bates's belief that literature, like Mozart's concertos or Paganini's caprices, may be sunny and airy and yet as artful as serious tales" and he praises the "unusual coherence and unity" of the book, "in spite of the varying techniques and themes explored in the tales." He discusses how Silas, as the narrator of most of the stories, "creates his own fable and becomes thereby a folk hero of his own making...The tension between the real Silas and the rhetorical facade makes him seem larger than life and yet believable." With the added "objectivity" of stories narrated by Silas's great-nephew, "Bates achieves a portrait that is both mythical and realistic, a man whose genuine attributes cannot be completely distinguished from his legendary ones." Vannatta (51-54) notes that the dual sources of the stories (real incidents in the life of Joseph Betts and rural folk tales) "account in part for the delightful mixture of comic realism and tall-tale myth," but he also points out that Bates is beholden to the "American local-color tradition of the nineteenth century" characterized by "indigenous characters often exaggerated to comic proportion, idiomatic dialogue, and situations which smack of the tall tale." In particular, Vannatta notes the influence of Mark Twain, who, in "How to Tell a Story" makes a distinction between stories made humorous by the content versus the manner of the presentation; the Silas tales, like those of Twain, depend greatly on the manner of telling for their success. Concerning the character of Silas, Vannatta notes that "ironically, in battling the inhibiting myths of religion and false morality, Silas himself becomes the closest thing to a figure of mythic proportions in Bates's work." Vannatta also helpfully characterizes the stories as falling roughly into three classes: those involving sex, those involving Silas in "a bragging, drinking, shooting, or athletic match" with a rival, and those involving "Silas in some orgiastic situation carefully calculated to outrage his Puritanical antagonist." It should be noted that three stories however are uncharacteristically poignant without slapstick: "A Happy Man, "The Death of Uncle Silas," and "The Return." In a fine introduction to a 1984 Oxford Press edition of the stories, V.S. Pritchett sets them in the broader context of Bates's gifts in the short story genre, finding that Bates avoids farce with Silas through the use of the "passive, wondering audience" of the boy and the fidelity of style to the "techniques of rural story-telling...Uncle Silas is in fact the scandalizing village memory at work." Bates further discusses Silas and Joe Betts in several prose works, including Edward Garnett (51), and The Blossoming World. Bates would write additional Silas stories after the two published collections: Shandy Lil, A Teetotal Tale. Contains: Preface, The Lily, The Revelation, The Wedding, Finger Wet, Finger Dry, A Funny Thing, The Sow and Silas, The Shooting Party, Silas The Good, A Happy Man, Silas and Goliath, A Silas Idyll, The Race, The Death of Uncle Silas, The Return. [VS Pritchett comments, reviewers][check end of vannata quote bates's work] [need blossoming pages] [silas] (1/05)
"My Uncle the Tortoise." Story (1939). Originally published with the title "The Race" in the collection My Uncle Silas (1939), this story was retitled for serial publication in the Argosy (June 1943).
The Nature of Love. Novellas (1953). London: Michael Joseph, 1953 (autumn). 240 pp., Boston: Little, Brown and Company (An Atlantic Monthly Press Book), 1953. Dedication "To W.Somerset Maugham." As Baldwin (188) notes, some reviewers felt that Bates's first published collection of novellas might better have been titled "The Nature of Desire" or "The Nature of Lust" "for there is no genuine love in these naturalistic tales." However, he goes on to observe that the fine tale "Dulcima" as well as the other two stories all address the unnatural consequences when human beings are deprived of love and beauty: "In an oblique way, the title 'The Nature of Love' is perfectly apt." Vannatta (109), in similar fashion" notes that the stories have an "unrelenting pathos" that affords "hardly a glimpse of a peak among the dismal valleys. Indeed, The Nature of Love is a curious title for the collection, unless we infer that Bates does in fact have a bleak conception of love...The bitter, painful, humiliating thing that the characters substitute for love serves only to make more wretched their already miserable lives...If love appears in the stories in any form, it is only an inferred ideal which casts a mocking light on the characters and their sordid lives." "The Grass God" first appeared as a separate monograph, and "Dulcima" was later published separately as well. Contains: "Dulcima," "The Grass God, " "The Delicate Nature." 6/05
"Never." Story (1927). 6 pp./ca. 1290 wds. A young girl plans to escape the suffocation of her family home and go to London. Her emotions on leaving the house and all its memories, while walking to the station, and subsequently on discovering that she has missed the train and must return home, are sympathetically described. She assures herself that "this isn't the only day" but the reader knows that now she will never leave. In the New Statesman (26 June 1927), Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), Country Tales (1938), Country Tales (1940).[youth, lost dreams, rural](1/05)
"The New Writer's Cramp: Taxation Threatens Literary Paralysis." Essay (1952). 1 pp./ca. 1800 wds. A complaint against tax policies that unduly affect creative artists, including authors. Bates notes that author royalties fluctuate more than the earnings of most others, and addresses the high taxes on a sale of a copyright, film license, or serial license. In passing, Bates notes that "I should have found it incredibly hard to keep going during the first 10 lean years of my career if it had not been for the generous kindness of a famous and wealthy bibliophile [Lewis Sterling] who showed his faith in me by purchasing some of my original manuscripts -- a demonstration of faith, alas, given to very few now." Later in 1952 Bates would write another iece for the Daily Telegraph called "What Future for the Young Writer?" In the Daily Telegraph (London, 4 August 1952). [social commentary] 8/09
"A Nice Friendly Atmosphere." Story (1964). 19pp./ca. 6100 wds. A long comic tale somewhat reminiscent of the Larkin family novels: The eccentric Barclay family, while not appreciating food and liquor like the Larkins, nevertheless exists wholly outside of the norm. Over lunch, the precocious children discuss philosophical issues and behave in quite unusual, even disturbed, fashion. A lunch guest, naively adopted by Mr. Barclay as a victim of social injustice, is in fact a crook, who at the end of a completely indigestible meal, departs with Mrs. Barclay's diamond ring with the promise to return the next day with its value in money. Oblivious that they've been duped, the family gaily continues in their innocent and unusual pursuits. A pointless and weak late tale containing mildly entertaining dialogue. In The Fabulous Mrs V (1964). [family, criminal, food] 7/07
"The Night Battle of Britain." Alternative title for "The Night Interception Battle 1940-1941."
"The Night Interception Battle 1940-1941." Essay (1944).67 pp./ca. 36,500 wds. One of two unpublished essays commissioned and owned by the Royal Air Force. A statement accompanying a photocopy of the essays in typescript form (the other being "The Battle of the Flying-Bomb") reads: "The original material in this book is the property of the Royal Air Force on whose behalf it was prepared by H.E. Bates whilst commissioned as a Flying Officer (Later Squadron Leader). The original material forms exhibition material, itself part of a wider exhibition entitled "H.E., Give Them Their Life." Concerning this, the first of the two essays, the statement continues: "Story One, The Night Battle of Britain. In 1942 Air Marshall Portal R.A.F. (later Lord Portal) personally instructed H.E. Bates to write the story of the Night Battle of Britain, and the account is a harrowing tale of the major switch in German Luftwaffe tactics from the day war of the Battle of Britain to the night horrors of the Blitz. Having read Flying Officer Bates's story, Air Marshall Portal decided that R.A.F. interests would not be best served by publication, and for half a century it has remained in official archives, unpublished." Bates wrote in The World in Ripeness (335-37) of being invited to lunch by Portal and of being asked to write a history of this "perilous affair whose near catastrophic events had already been allowed to slip back into a darkness as Stygian as that in which it had in fact been fought in the winter of 1941...The pamphlet was duly finished but, though approved in high places, was never published. Today it is safely filed away in the Public Records Office, from which it will doubtless never emerge." Eads lists the title "The Night Interception Battle 1940-1941," and describes it as "approximately 30,600 words...typed on eighty-four sheets of foolscap paper and [containing] thirteen chapters," with location "Public Record Office, Key, Richmond, Surrey, filed in AIR 20/4870. It is dated, with corrections and amendments, April and October 1944." The photocopy examined for this entry is called "The Night Battle of Britain," has 67 pages, ten chapters, no corrections, amendments, or dates, and with an estimated 36,500 words; it also bears the stamp of the East Northamptonshire District Council. Although the essay opens with colorful examples of wartime events, somewhat in the style of the Flying Officer X stories, it then is a history of war stretegy, the glitzes of 1940-1941, the Observer Corps, scientific work on new technologies (such as searchlights, radiolocation, radar, and improved aircraft), and of the evolution of piloting during the war. Neither a technical nor a bureaucratic report, but an engaging account for Bates's fellow-countrymen, and with sections that Bates would cover elsewhere in published pieces such as The Battle of Britain, "Escape," and There's Freedom in the Air.[war, pilots]6/10
"Night Run to the West." Novella (1957). 48 pp./ca. 10850 wds. Displaying Bates's usual mastery of atmosphere, this novella features a dark, greedy, and ultimately despicable woman who is plotting the death of her invalid husband. Seen through the eyes of her lover, a decent truck-driver who is innocently drawn into her web before discovering the truth, and ending with validation of both his and the husband's essential goodness, the tale avoids the sinister ending that the reader anticipates. Vannatta (114-115) discusses in detail the interesting twists of the tale, as the reader sympathizes initially with the two lovers and their lonliness, then with the old man who turns out to be likeable and fond of his young wife: "Although the three characters end approximately where they began -- sadder but wiser, perhaps -- we feel that the undertone of the story has been comic, not tragic." In Death of a Huntsman/Summer in Salander (1957), The Grapes of Paradise (1974).[marriage, invalids, truck-driver] 7/05
"Nina." Story (1928). 9 pp./ca. 1990 wds. A seventeen-year-old girl becomes infatuated with the suitor to her widowed mother. At first offended by his inattention to her but then exhilarated by what she mistakenly takes to be his love, she is dashed by the knowledge that he does in fact love her mother. A tender portrayal of the innocence and naïveté in a young heart. In Day’s End and Other Stories (1928), H.E. Bates (1975).[youth, romance] (1/05)
"No Country." Story (1937). 8 pp./ca. 1970 wds. An unexceptional courtroom story, depicting the injustice of a German bookseller framed for his political views, based closely on the trial of Bates's friend Charles Lahr. Baldwin (111-112) discusses in detail Lahr's arrest in January 1935, the confession manipulated from him by the police, the efforts by Bates and others to help him, and the sentence of four months imprisonment; he also chronicles Lahr's displeasure at the story, despite his advocacy of "politically engaged and socially relevant" literature, possibly because it "publicized an event which he preferred to keep secret." In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947).[politics, lahr, social commentary] (1/05)
"No More the Nightingales." Story (1951). 12 pp./ca. 2980 wds. A slight tale of sexual tension at harvest-time, between a farmhand and the land owner, a woman who usually stays in London. Flawed by unclear suggestions concerning both their common history and her near-grown son, the story, drawing its title from her mistaken mention of hearing nightingale song (long after their season), captures the lost and unsettled nature of the woman's spirit. In Argosy (April 1951), Colonel Julian and Other Stories (1951).[harvest, sex] (1/05)
Northamptonshire Chronicle. Several months after quitting school in December 1921, Bates worked as a reporter in the Rushden area, serving at the Wellingborough branch of the Northamptonshire Chronicle. The trivial local events Bates was required to attend, a drab workplace, and an employer that Bates disliked immensely made for an unpleasant experience that Bates describes in detail in Vanished World (128-140) and in the essay "My Beginning." Whether Bates's depiction is factual is questioned by Baldwin (47-49), especially in regard to William Fathers, a veteran reporter who was hardly the drunken and incompetent boor that Bates makes him into as "Bretherton" in Vanished World and Love for Lydia. Bates lasted only a few months before resigning in disgust. His reporting experiences are reflected in the stories "Millenium Also Ran," "The Late Public Figure," The Four Beauties," and "Shot Actress, Full Story." (1/05)
"No Trouble At All." Story (1942). 7 pp./ca. 1790 wds. A depiction of the atmosphere in an Air Force station, as pilots gather in the mess ante-room awaiting the return of remaining planes. The narrator converses with the W.A.A.F. receptionist and with various pilots including that of "K for Kitty" (in which the dangerous landing of that plane, resulting in its destruction, is recounted in terms similar to the story "K for Kitty"). Piecing together the day's raid from photographs and accounts, all are encouraged; but when the receptionist says "A wonderful show, sir," the narrator "paused and looked at her in astonishment. I wondered for a moment how she could possibly know." Asking her, she replies that "You can tell by their faces, sir;" "Now we were looking at something that could be read nowhere except in their eyes and expressed in no language but their own...'Yes, sir' she said, 'No trouble at all.''" As with Bates's other Air Ministry stories, this simple account lends a human and personal flavor to the minimal conversation and reticence of the military environment. In The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942), There's Something In The Air (1943), Something In The Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952).[war, pilots, officer x] (1/05)
"Northamptonshire Men of Letters, No. 1, John Clare; the Peasant Poet (1793-1864). Essay (1921). 2 pp./ca. 900 wds. The earliest known prose piece by Bates, written at 16, displaying a sympathy with the literary temperament and an appreciation of Clare's poems, most of which were written while in a mental asylum. The essay is well-constructed, but rife with literary cliches. In the Kettering Grammar School Magazine (6, December 1921, pp. 11-12). [literary criticism] 2/10
"A Note on D.H. Lawrence." Essay (1932). 1 pp./ca. 1000 wds. In this early essay, Bates addresses myths and controversies surrounded Lawrence, and praises his style as poetic: in "pages in any book he wrote -- in them one finds prose as quivering and lucent and rich with colour as Keats's poetry." He concludes that "it is not unlikely that posterity may accept him not merely as the greatest imaginative novelist, but the greatest novelist of our generation." Bates would devote attention to Lawrence in 1941 in The Modern Short Story. InThe New Clarion (London, i, 8, p. 174, 30 July 1932.) [literary, D.H. Lawrence] 1/09
"A Note on Saroyan." An excerpt from a chapter in The Modern Short Story published in the journal Modern Reading published some five months after the book.
"A Note on the English Short Story." Essay (1934). 4 pp./ca. 1000 wds. A brief exploration, anticipating Bates's 1941 Modern Short Story, in which he discusses the absence of English short story writers until after World War I, when "for the first time in English literature the short-story became something more than a novel in miniature." In Lovat Dickson's Magazine (February 1934, pp. 145-148). [short story, literary criticism] 4/09
"The Novelist's Ear." Essay (1936). 6 pp./ca. 2500 wds. A passionate call to novelists to listen to the speech of real people, reflect that in their writing, and thus document it for future historians. He notes that, with the exception of D.H. Lawrence and Charles Dickens, English novelists employ a stilted, lifeless, and standardized speech that bears no resemblance to the "speech of everyday life." In contrast, he praises the "vital crispness" in the novels of Faulkner, Hemingwayand other Americans. Throughout his career, Bates was praised for his use of rural dialects and idiom in the creation of strong characters and atmosphere. In the Fortnightly Review (March 1936, cxlv, pp. 277-282).[literary criticism]4/09
"Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal." Story (1958). 23 pp./ca. 7050 wds. A poignant portrait of a sheltered and uncultured butcher's wife exposed to a new tenant in the countryside -- a flamboyant homosexual enthusiastic about decorating, cooking, and throwing large parties. Bates effectively captures social change in post-war rural England, exposing the shallowness of uppercrust society. He also returns to one of his strongest themes of his pre-war work: the weak, damaged, or otherwise miserable individual, in this case a woman who is briefly enticed out of her self-imposed shell (in which she hides behind a cape that she believes saved her during the war), but is in the end hurt by the insensitivities of the man and his friends. Baldwin (206) calls it "one of Bates's most memorable stories" with two "brilliantly realized characters in a drama about ultimate loneliness. The story's title, taken from a Tennyson poem with the same title, forms an ironic commentary on the lovelessness of its two central characters." Vannatta (87-88), noting that the story "draws together the major themes that have attracted Bates in the later years: the changing society, numbing loneliness, and the failure of passion," asks "how far has postwar England fallen in Bates's estimation?...The landed gentry...has by now been replaced entirely by rich, snobbish, intellectual fops who have no intimate, working relationship with the land or its people. True passion has withered to its husk, concupiscence, or merely gossip about concupiscence. And Bates's beloved nature...has devolved into a plastic rose." In Argosy (January, 1958), Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories/The Enchantress and Other Stories (1961), Seven by Five/The Best of H.E. Bates (1963).
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and other stories. Stories (1961). London: Michael Joseph, 1961 (April); Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1961 (with title The Enchantress and Other Stories). 208 pp. Twelve stories in a range of settings but mostly addressing "a postwar world of enervating change, crushing loneliness, and wasted passion. Not one of the stories ends happily" (Vannatta 86). Baldwin (205) rightly points out the strength of those stories set in the rural Midlands (including one fine boyhood tale) and Bates's continuing "powers of portraying believable eccentrics and victims...Together with The Watercress Girl, this volume should have put Bates once more into the forefront of modern short story writers, but apart from a handful of enthusiastic reviews, few noticed the artistry of these quiet, unassuming stories." Contains: The Enchantress, Lost Ball, Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, The Place Where Shady Lay, The Yellow Crab, Daughters of the Village, Where the Cloud Breaks, Mrs Eglantine, Thelma, The Snow Line, The Spring Hat, An Island Princess.
O More Than Happy Countryman. Essays (1943). London: Country Life Limited, 1943. 104 pp./ca. 39,000 wds. Illustrated by C.F. Tunnicliffe.