Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
This excerpt is from “The Changeling”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories
Another short story about writing. Sugar is full of them. In “The Changeling” we meet Josephine – a writer. Her husband left her for another woman. Her son is now 18 or 19. Her son had gone to a private school – and Josephine had taken up the habit of befriending or “taking in” Lost Boys … boys far away from their families, boys with no families … whatever. The story begins with the headmaster of the private school asking if she would take in a student in need – his name is Henry Smee. The headmaster says to her that he IS the spitting image of “Simon Vowle” – the adolescent boy who is the “star” of Josephine’s most successful book, The Boiler-Room. Josephine takes him in. And so begins the story. What is really interesting to me about this Josephine character is: the degree to which she has play-acted all her life. It’s kind of devastating when you realize it. She is full of terror (this is what she writes about too – it sounds to me like her books are Robert Cormier-esque) … and yet her play-acting self is breezy, calm, organized … but once Henry Smee comes to live with her, the facade begins to crumble. She has been “found out”. I’m not writing about it very well – you should just read the story. But here’s an excerpt.
Excerpt from “The Changeling”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories
The subject of Josephine’s writings was fear. Rational fear, irrational fear, the huge-bulking fear of the young not at home in the world. Every writer, James says, discovers his or her subject matter early and spends a lifetime elaborating and exploring it. That may or may not be generally true, but it was certainly true of Josephine Piper. Her characteristic form was the long novella: her characteristic hero a boy, anywhere between infancy and late adolescence, threatened and in retreat. Some of these boys were actually mutilated or killed, driven away in cars with no inner door handles, rushed stumbling through urban jungles at knife-point, ritually tormented by gangs of other boys in public school dormitory or state schoo playground. If they were hurt it was always fast and unexpected: the subject was not violence but fear. Often they were not hurt: they suffered from a look, an exclusion, a crack in a windowpane, a swaggering bus conductor keeping order on the top deck because he himself was afraid for his life. Josephine’s work had been compared to Kafka as well as to Wilkie Collins and James himself. The Boiler-Room, whose central figure was Simon Vowle, was a surreal story of a boy in a boarding school who had built himself a Crusoe-like burrow or retreat in the dust behind the coiling pipe-system of the coke-boiler in the school basement and had finally moved in there completely, making forays for food and drink at night. It had a macabre end: Josephine Piper did not let her characters off. It had been described, with the usual hyperbole, as the last word on institutional terrors in schools. Josephine Piper could make an ordinary desk, a heap of football boots, a locked steel locker, tall and narrow, bristle with the horror of what man can do to man.
She recognized fear in Henry Smee, though she had no idea what he was afraid of, or whether his fears were real or phantasmagoric. She recognized something else too, from her own experience; the inconvenience, to the pathologically afraid, of an excessive gift of intellectual talent. Poor Henry could not but enjoy a grammatical dispute or the strict form of complex music: he perceived order and beauty, he remembered forms and patterns, he was doomed to think. He could not take up hiding as a way of life. She herself had been afraid as a child – where else could such knowledge have come from? – and had been so clever that it had had to be noticed, she could not hide it in silence and stammering,s he had had to read and remember and in the end, as Henry was now doing, to go out at least temporarily into a world where these things mattered.
He developed an inconvenient habit. He would not speak, over breakfast or supper, and Josephine slowly ceased to persist in questionings that received monosyllabic or nodding answers. But he roamed the house at two, at three in the morning, in his pyjamas and dressing gown, and once or twice she came down, fearing intruders, to find him sitting in the kitchen, with a mug of Nescafe, staring at the stove. On these occasions, though he did not confide in Josephine, he showed an extraordinary willingnes to talk. He would talk very quietly, so that she had to strain to hear him, offering, she imagined, the flotsam and jetsam of his thoughts, disconnected observations about the use of learning Latin quantities, or the economy of Stravinsky, or a longish disquisition on the Cambridge syllabus, with a parenthetical remark that he hoped that he didn’t have to share supervisions, he found it hard to be in a room with more than one person at once. This was the most personal thing he said, and yet, yawning and low in blood-sugar, Josephine was aware that he was telling her as best he could what or how he was. The trouble was that she did not want to know. What she could face about what Henry was telling her she already knew. And fear is infectious.
Fear is perhaps also hereditary. Josephine’s mother had had a mild and for others disagreeable case of agoraphobia, which had worsened as she grew older, with what josephine’s father, bewildered, socially embarrassed, lonely, called indulgence. When Josephine was five or six her overwrapped mother would take her overwrapped daughter as far as the local school and had been known to go as far as the public library. By the time Josephine was fourteen, at boarding school, Josephine’s mother rarely ventured outside her bedroom, and became giddy even in the back garden. She had never said – Josephine had never supposed it would be worth asking – what she feared, and her daughter had been left to imagine. She remembered her mother veering in agitation out of a bus queue in which they had been standing side by side in uncompanionable silence, running up the road, dropping books and paper bags of plums and carrots. What was frightening about bus stops? It was more understandable that the doorbell should arouse terror. Josephine, who had had to negotiate the Kleen-e-ze man, the meter-readers, the doctor himself, saw all these as menacing. How much more menacing were the laughing large girls in the school dormitory, who threw pillows, who launched themselves on each other’s beds, who ragged and mocked the thin child she was, shaking in her liberty bodice? She had been saved, if she had been saved, by the solitary and sensuous pleasure of writing out her fear. Already in the boiler-room at St Clare’s School she was writing clumsy tales of justified terror, of bounding packs of girls who accidentally squeezed the last breath out of their pathetic prey, of lost, voiceless sufferers locked in cupboards and accidentally forgotten. The boiler-room had been thick with coal-dust: a scree of coke sloped up to a closed and cobwebbed window under the area and the pavement. If she opened the boiler door the flames hissed and roared and the coke-dust glittered here and there. She collected things: a blanket, a bicycle lamp, an old sweater, a biscuit tin, a special box for pens, a folder that lived there. She squeezed into her burrow, through pipe-gaps too narrow to take a larger girl or member of staff. Sometimes she sacrificed bad writing to the boiler, whose angry red turned briefly golden. When she wrote about Simon Vowle the coke-smell came back in its ancient fustiness and bitterness. Simon Vowle was an exorcism. The woman who could make and observe him was not doomed to relive her mother’s curious arrested life – was not?
