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STORY: "My First Love Affair" by Sholom Aleichem
FROM: MY FIRST LOVE AFFAIR AND OTHER STORIES (Dover, 2002) Trans. Curt Leviant
BASICALLY: An impoverished young tutor has a pupil so lazy that he must write love letters on the pupil's behalf to the pupil's fiancé. In the process, a heartfelt romance blossoms, but as the wedding day draws near, how will the poor tutor confess that he is the one the fiancé truly loves?
1. He Tantalizes and Taunts with Titles
In my copy, "My First Love Affair" spans pages 129-146. What I'm saying is, it's not that long. But Aleichem divides the story into eleven numbered sections, each with its own subheading. They have sly titles like "My Boss' Tall Tales Rock Me to Sleep" and "Material for an Epistolary Romance." (Today's divided story write-up is inspired by this format, you see.) It's an interesting choice—for one thing, I think it mirrors, a little bit, the idea that the story unfolds for the protagonist letter by letter as he writes to his pupil's fiancé and reads her responses. But letter-writing doesn't actually come into play until the story's sixth section. Section 1 discusses how the "power of pull" (knowing the right people) helped the tutor obtain his post, Section 2 covers the "tall tales" of his boss, Section 3 includes a meditation on types of liars and tells us which one his boss is, Section 4 is self-explanatory—"The Boy Eats Like an Army While his Tutor Starves," and Section 5 has the pupil blackmail his tutor into playing checkers and "Sixty-Six" instead of conducting lessons. As short as it is, this story has an episodic feel that allows the reader to be entertained by each separate foible that's satirized.
2. Some of What's Worth Knowing
Sholom Aleichem was the pseudonym of Shalom Rabinovitz (1859–1916), an important writer of Yiddish plays, stories, and novels, whose works inspired FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. (You know the wry voice of Tevye that dominates FOTR? That's straight out of Aleichem.) He is totally so much fun, you guys. "My First Love Affair" lampoons while it humanizes and wraps suspense around a punch line. What Aleichem handles most masterfully is voice—his stories, though written and literary, read like oral tales. This quality reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen, many of whose stories (like "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Mermaid") are so powerful and timeless that they frequently get lumped in with tales that possess a true oral heritage (e.g., "Little Red Riding Hood"). Aleichem reads nothing like Andersen, but he has a great gift for channeling a humorous, self-deprecating personality that seems archetypally Jewish.
3. How to Build a Joke
Writing teachers love to harp on about avoiding the pitfall of a bad ending. They are not wrong! If an entire story is built on weird occurrence after weird occurrence, ending it with "And then he woke up!" (or something equally abrupt) will make the reader feel cheated and angry, as though the writer has been too lazy to wrap up his own conundrums. Similarly, a punch line at the end, while good for a momentary laugh, tends to have an overall deflating effect. A punch line suggests that the story wasn't important in its own right, but served only to set up the laugh at the end. And "My First Love Affair" builds gloriously, but to an ending that is basically just a joke. It's a funny joke—I did, actually and truly, laugh out loud when I realized what was going on—but still just a joke. And yet, it works. Here, the story is not deflated, it doesn't feel like a cheat, and I'm fascinated by how Aleichem pulls this off.
It goes back, in part, to those five introductory sections I mentioned above. By the time we reach the question of the letters in Section 6, the tutor is a fully-realized character. His fixation on his own experiences leading up to the main conflict—how he got the job, the state of his poverty, the way that everyone in this well-off household continuously spouts lies—keeps the reader's focus firmly grounded in his point of view, wondering how events will affect him. This focus continues as the tutor begins ghost-writing his pupil's love letters and intensifies as the tutor begins to worry about the approaching nuptials. If Aleichem had begun with Section 6, when the tutor first begins writing to the fiancé, the reader wouldn't have understood what was at stake for the tutor and become invested in his emotional journey into love.
4. I Don't See What You Did There
In other entries on this blog (see here and here, for example), I've referred to the way an author seems to distract us from what she's doing in order to pull off something else. It is hard to see how the distraction is done and, precisely for this reason, so gratifying when it's done well. When reviewers refer to an author's "sleight of hand," this is probably part of what they mean. Aleichem's sleight of hand has him creating a suspenseful situation in which the audience wants to know, along with the narrator, how the tutor's love will come to light. Two entire sections—"9. The Wedding Preparations—My Foolish Dreams" and "10. The Guests are Welcomed"—are devoted to increasing this suspense. Wrapped in a cloud of suspense in one direction, the reader is far less likely to see a joke coming from the other.
There's another reason the joke works, too. Throughout the story, the narrator gripes about the ease with which everyone, his pupil and his boss and his boss's wife, all tell lies: "[My pupil] looked so innocent that I suddenly felt like spitting into his face and shouting: 'God Almighty. What Liars you people are. One lie after another. One lie greater than the next!'" He just barely comments, however, on his own speedy slide into dishonesty. When the punch line hits at the story's end, it completes the cycle of lies and takes it to its most absurd level. This is the really brilliant thing, the technique to note. Instead of undermining the story, the final punch line unifies it.
Aleichem makes it look easy, but that's just more sleight of hand.
STORY: "An Unwelcome Guest" by Garth Nix
FROM: TROLL'S-EYE VIEW: A BOOK OF VILLAINOUS TALES, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling – Oh, this book! It is so pretty! Sweet little leafy patterns on the pages and fancy shiny stuff done to the cover.
BASICALLY: A funny fairy-tale reimagining in which a perfectly respectable evil witch must outsmart the machinations of a loophole-exploiting freeloader named Rapunzel.
Well, it's been quite a week. Between Melissa making me think hard thoughts with her smart comments (she actually went and read one of the stories I talked about!!! I am changing the world, one extremely patient and supportive and literate friend at a time!!!) and Mike catching on to my nefarious plot to destroy his life, I really needed a breather. And "An Unwelcome Guest" was just the thing.
Let us ruminate for a moment upon the advantages of a great opening.
"There's a girl in the south tower," reported Jaundice, the witch's marmalade cat. "The same one as almost got in last year."
"Well, go and bite her or something," said the Witch. She was busy stirring a huge bronze cauldron. She had twelve coworkers coming for lunch and was mixing up a batch of jelly that had to be poured into an architectural mold and put in the ice cave before eleven.
Are you ruminating upon this wonderfulness? I certainly did not ruminate while I was reading—I was hooked. Look at the modest characterization that crops up right away (just look at it!). We've got an orange cat named "Jaundice," which is a nice counterpoint to the Witch who never receives a formal name. (This is a tricky thing, I think, in retellings… It often irritates me when an author takes it upon themselves to specify a name for an established fairy tale character. I'm all like, WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT? Unless they do it well, in which case I'm all, WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?) By the way, "Jaundice" turns out to be even more tongue-in-cheek than it seems at first, because the cat's real name is Jenny—
"Don't call me Jenny!" spat the cat, her back arching in agitation. "My name is Jaundice! I am the evil servant of a wicked witch!"
The cat-name thing comes up again a little later when Jenny/Jaundice has to explain that the "Fangdeath" she's talking to on the phone is actually Decima's cat, Bluebell. Anyway, the feline companion trope is given new life and so is the witch trope—I love the idea that she's got colleagues and is on a tight schedule. (There's a hilarious moment soon after when the Witch stops stirring for a second and some frogs manage to escape the jelly with "a sudden series of pops.") The tropes themselves are still exploited—we don't have to have these concepts explained to us—but they're employed in such a way that we know this story's going to be funny.
Nix orchestrates his jokes brilliantly. He's got a cat name that's funny unto itself, so we don't look for the next joke ("Fangdeath") that relies on it as a setup. There's the jelly mold thing, which is again funny on its own, so we're not looking for the next punchline that takes advantage of it. He's basically making clever one-offs do double or triple duty in his story. And there are subtler jokes, too—like the fact that the Witch has twelve coworkers coming, meaning they'll have the right number for a traditional coven of thirteen, or Rapunzel's three "suitors" who show up later and get blinded by thorns (in a nod to the original story) and then revert to their natural mice-forms (three blind mice—get it?).
I wasn't totally thrilled by the story's resolution, which involves some sort of not-very-explained shadowy being that's apparently been inhabiting the body of Rapunzel and making her act this way. It just didn't feel necessary to explain the story's events. But the whole thing carried on so well throughout that it didn't really matter. Nix brings in all kinds of fun bits—like Rapunzel's helplessly handwringing parents, some household "dust-fey" on their cockroach steeds, a cornucopia oozing with a wealth of ice cream and lemonade—and keeps the momentum going. It's so entertaining that I almost wish all the stories in this book were Nix's. (But only ALMOST. I'm really looking forward to checking out Neil Gaiman's poetic take on Sleeping Beauty and my beloved Kelly Link's dark Cinderella.)
STORY: "The Fiery Wooing of Mordred" by P.G. Wodehouse
FROM: Young Men in Spats (The Overlook Press, 2002) – I got this copy (the very one pictured above! photographed by me in the sere wasteland that is my backyard!) years ago for free when I worked in a bookstore. Nice paper, good cover, stripey endpapers. Overlook Press should feel at liberty to send me any more free copies of books they might have on hand. I will do random quality checks. I AM HERE FOR YOU, publishers.
BASICALLY: A hilarious send-up of true love and gross negligence by the guy who invented Jeeves. Mordred Mulliner falls in love with Miss Annabelle Sprockett-Sprockett, but must compete with superior chaps for her affections. Probably he should not set her ancestral home on fire.
"Lull." "Levitation." "Lechery." I just started my year of stories, and already I'm in a rut. Hey world, it's an extravaganza of enigmatic L-words from literary ladies! Sure, it was exciting for a time, but here's a palate cleanser for you—some pure and sweet entertainment. First of all, just say the title out loud to yourself a few times. The Fiery Wooing of Mordred. The Fiery Wooing of Mordred. Fiery! MORDRED! The FIRE-y WOO-ing of MOR-dred. The fahry woong of morderd.
Okay. Stop that now.
But it's pretty great, right? Wodehouse has an ear for the ridiculous name (Algie Fripp is good, but I think Sir Murgatroyd approaches sublime) and the wisdom not to overdo it. The story is consistently hilarious, but one senses that the narrator is on the side of his hero:
Smattering Hall destroyed Mordred's last hope. It was one of those vast edifices, so common throughout the countryside of England, whose original founders seem to have budgeted for families of twenty-five or so and a domestic staff of not less than a hundred…Romantic persons, confronted with it, thought of knights in armour riding forth to the Crusades. More earthy individuals felt that it must cost a packet to keep up. Mordred's reaction on passing through the front door was a sort of sick sensation, a kind of settled despair.
I was interested in the way that this story is set up by a frame tale, but apparently that is a Thing That Wodehouse Did. Mordred's tale is recounted by his uncle, but when the story ends, we don't return to the frame and the uncle. Nonetheless, the opening is distinctly amusing on its own terms.
For once I'm going to be all tip-toey around the ending. It's a kick and I don't want to ruin it. Besides, I'm not sure how to dissect Wodehouse's humor without sounding like an ass. So I do recommend you read this, but purely for the pleasure it affords.
