Lennon, Brian. "'To ask about a word'." Review of The Novellas of Hortense Calisher. The Boston Book Review 5.1 (January/February 1998): 42.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

"Something in a novella," Hortense Calisher notes in her introduction to this collected edition of her work in the form, "says Stop." It is a fuzzy category: more sustained than a short story, less sustained than a novel. What else defines it? German, French and Italian preserve a generic distinction between the mid-length work (Novelle; nouvelle; novella) and the longer (Roman; romanzo), whereas speakers of English, in which this distinction has been lost, tend to define the middle category solely by reference to the ends: the novella as a "longer story," as a "short novel." And in Germany at least, a whole body of contemporary novella criticism has developed out of the initial efforts of German Romantic writers to speak for their own work. (This is not to deny iterations of the novella in English. Heart of Darkness is usually considered to be a novella, as are Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, Daisy Miller and Washington Square.)

The Novellas of Hortense Calisher collects seven such intensive explorations, all but one of which appeared in earlier volumes of Calisher's work dating back to 1963. It is a motley grouping, reflecting the contrapuntal phases through which the author has propelled her work, and it emphasizes her refusal to pander to tastes. Since her first publication in The New Yorker in 1948, Calisher has published a steady stream of novels, novellas and short-story collections (as well as autobiographical works) that range in style and tone from the staid postwar New Yorker formula (Craft; Calm; Impersonality) to an ornate and obsessively reflexive mode derived from James and Woolf -- and in content from the suburban anomie of Swarthmore-educated horse-breeding-fortune heirs to the adventures of an extraterrestrial visiting Earth.

A Calisher subject is a creature of multiple selves. Sometimes, as in Tale for the Mirror, the earliest novella in this volume, psychic multiplicity is a psychological real -- in the simultaneous attraction to city and suburb, to risk and safety, to origin (many a Calisher character is, like the author herself, a native New Yorker who has also lived in the bucolic villages along the Hudson River and "upstate") and exile. Tale for the Mirror presents a bourgeois city couple who have moved out to a bedroom community "for the children's sake," and who, despite what they regard as their urbanity, develop a xenophobic distrust of the exotic new-age healer who has moved onto the property next door.

At other times, this self-fracturing of the self is sur- or irreal. The Last Trolley Ride, which begins innocuously enough as a tale of upstate small-town life, gradually entangles two friends and roommates, both named Jim, in a sexual intrigue with two sisters -- each marrying the sister the other desired. And in The Man Who Spat Silver, the narrator encounters a full-fledged Doppelgänger in a man she meets on the street and invites to a bar: a man, it turns out, who remains invisible to everyone save herself. Splitting, in this case, entails not only the violation of the self's molecular integrity, but of its atomic identity as well. As Calisher notes archly in her introduction to this novella: "A person reports on the self, in both the first-person-singular and the third -- sometimes switching gender as well. People do that."

Hermaphroditism and the "initiation" of transport from identity are also themes of The Railway Police, the story of an independent professional Manhattan woman (who happens to be congenitally bald) who, after witnessing a vagrant being thrown off a commuter train by police, sets out to become a street beggar herself. It is a mysterious piece of work, through which class is displaced by gender and general metaphysics -- as here, when the narrator, having disposed of wigs, uptown apartment and bank account, takes up residence on a public bench in a downtown park:

I sat down on it, weary, not gay any more, but not sad either, perhaps in just that state of mind when the noumenon stops nagging and not-so-blind young phenomenon gets its chance. Or perhaps it was just that in the bad sections of New York the old lampposts are so beautiful. This one hung its long, graceful urn against a sky dark as the inside of a much larger urn that enclosed both of us.

I lay for a while on my elbow. Before me, the ordinary phoenix-fire of day was rising. We are born, we live and we die; crouch and adore. I watched the waterbugs streak like lizards from the Chinese restaurant, the men stride like catamounts, from plain doors. In the inexhaustible doubleness of the world, are there signals everywhere, wild as grass, that unite us? Or must we unite them?

A word on Calisher's style. Baroque, rococo, filigreed, Jamesian, elliptical, convoluted, bizarre, even "freakish" -- the prose is all this and more, and it is natural that it should acquire fierce detractors (of which there are many). Calisher's narratorial voices are utterly saturated in consciousness, and while there are times when her formulations are wrenched, only partly translated from the divine lizards of thought into English, these are outnumbered by the occasions on which such thought, emerging from language, arrests:

The river was in a quiet mood today, scarcely breathing, one of those days when its translucence gave a double depth to the air and moved like a philosophy behind the trees.

It could be merely a falter, a pause in that vast territory which humans could never persuade themselves was not human, one of those illuminated moments when unseen kinships brushed one like lepidoptera passing, when birds flew south from a north they did not see as misery...

Operating, here, is the deep love of language -- and of its capacity, when lovingly pushed, for partial incursions into those unsayables of which each one of us is aware that we must pass over in silence. To deny that is to uncover nothing more, perhaps, than the resentment (to which Wittgenstein himself would later admit) of those who unfairly believe themselves incapable of such extreme affection. Which (extreme affection) is precisely what the narrator of The Man Who Spat Silver constructs, while sitting in Harry's Bar with her double:

"That an adage?" he says.

And my heart melts, as it half did when he asked -- That a quote?

As it does toward any who will pause in their own maybe far-flung destinations -- to ask about a word.

The story of a literary translator in her middle age who, while walking on the East Side, at long last encounters "the one," this final novella is a meditation, of perhaps Proustian depth if not scale, on the interminable displacement of desire. Reflections of language, and of translation, revolve in the engine of a love story that may or may not be merely the narrator's confrontation with herself. The rest, as they say, is memory. 

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