BOOK REVIEW : Hersey’s ‘Fling’ With Short Fiction : Fling and Other Stories by John Hersey (Knopf: $18.95; 174 pages.)
The title is working overtime here, describing the adventure Hersey himself is enjoying as well as identifying one of the longer stories. After a distinguished half-century as a novelist, essayist, professor and general literary luminary, he’s turned to short fiction with 11 stories embodying some of his particular concerns.
Two of them--”God’s Typhoon” and “Why Were You Sent Out Here?”--introduce Hersey the old China hand. In “God’s Typhoon,” he’s recalling an incident from his boyhood in Tianjin, where he grew up in the foreign missionary colony. Here he’s about 10, spending the summer at the seaside resort of Petaiho while all around, the warlords battle for territory and the 15th U.S. Infantry and the Royal Marines struggle to keep the Westerners safe.
Hersey’s best friend is the timid son of a fiercely eccentric English clergyman whose greatest pride is the arboretum of specimen trees he’s planted in this remote enclave, a serene paradise protected even from his family by “No Trespassing” signs--Dr. Wyman’s personal heaven. “God’s Typhoon” offers not only a super picture of expatriate life in China before the Sino- Japanese war but also a witty account of the events transpiring when the two boys defy the Rev. Wyman.
“Why Were You Sent Out Here?” is an encounter between a brash young Army colonel and his aging counterpart, both deployed to China after World War II “to monitor the truce between the Gissimo (generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) and the Commies,” the time and place providing a perfect crucible for testing the personalities of the two men.
The actual “fling” of the title story is an excursion across the Mexican border by a seriously ill but gallant woman, her husband and a friend. Hersey has recaptured the flippant style of a ‘20s flapper, a tone ironically underlining his narrator’s present plight and contrasting poignantly with her madcap carefree past. That decade-old holiday sustains her now, when both the heroine and the lighthearted world she loved both have changed drastically.
“The Announcement” shows Hersey in a Louis Auchincloss mode, subtly chronicling the impact of an entirely different sort of person upon an extremely traditional New England family. Elegantly satiric, “The Announcement” is a miniaturized comedy of manners describing the tensions that result when a staid middle-aged man brings his intended bride to Thanksgiving dinner at his mother’s house. “Bev has a funny little stammer, he had said to his mother on the phone after accepting for both of them, as if that would explain all about Beverly in advance,” though of course the stammer is not the issue at all, merely a hint that Bev is from an alien ethnic background.
In this same mood, “Requiescat” re-creates a funeral at New York’s society memorial chapel, a unique place immediately recognizable to anyone who has read the New York Times obits. “I put it to Margaret that services at Thurston’s were like big parties publishers give for hot authors at Four Seasons--big winners and burnt-out cases scouting each other, new outfits on display, envy on the loose, nothing to do with a figure like Moose.” Moose is the narrator’s deceased friend, a renegade bon vivant who would have loathed every moment of the proceedings, from gladioli to hypocritical tributes.
You’re hearing from a whole new John Hersey here, one who rivals every social satirist from Jane Austen to Kingsley Amis. “It was beautiful,” the widow (one of Moose’s four wives) says. “Did you see that Lenny was there? I was so happy.” “Happy?” asks our narrator. “That was a funeral. Remember? Moose died?”
“The Captain” reminds us that Hersey is a Compleat Angler by avocation, the author of “Blues,” a lyrical account of bluefishing. He’s on land again in “Affinities,” posing convincingly as a bail bondsman confronted with a dognaper. He ranges even further afield in “The Blouse,” this time managing to sound utterly authentic as an unwed mother, no small feat for an eminent septuagenarian man of letters. The other three stories demonstrate his versatility still further; a fling for all concerned.
Monday: Carolyn See reviews “Springs of Living Water” by Karen Lawrence.
