The Whistle, by Eudora Welty

 

About Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Foundation

Interview with the authoress

Places in the Heart (film)

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, and died when she was 92.
Jackson is now a city with more 70% of Afro-American people, while in the 60s it was the other way round; so the city has experienced considerable changes in demography and, accordingly, in politics.
Eudora Welty lived all her life in Jackson, save when she studied at Columbia University, New York.
She had a calm life in Jackson, despite all the racial problems, so her stories contrast vividly with the stories by Faulkner or by Richard Wright.
As a child, she was an insatiable reader, and she wrote her stories without any particular encouragement. She started writing for a Southern magazine and then, thanks to the persistence of a literary agent, for the Atlantic Monthly and for The New Yorker.
She won the Pulitzer Prize when she was 64 years old for her novel The Optimist Daughter. 
She wrote mainly short stories, but also novels and her autobiography. Besides, she was a photographer and published a book of photographs about the Great Depression.

SUMMARY, by Josep Guiteres

Jason and Sara Morton were a married couple, both 50 years old, who leased a farm belonging to Mr. Perkins, who lived in Dexter, a town that handled the farmers’ business in the surrounding area.

The Mortons’ farm consisted of a house where the couple lived, and a farmland where they worked, primarily growing tomatoes.

The weather and climate descriptions depicted winters as bitterly cold, chilling to the bone; springs with changeable weather but usually very cold, producing hard frosts that left the fields completely white; and summers with good weather, the time when the farmers in the region, including the Mortons, transported their tomatoes to Dexter from where they were distributed to different parts of the country.

The place where the Mortons lived was solitary and isolated.

It was a spring night, and the Mortons went to bed, just like any other night, but it was bitingly cold. The only sounds were Jason’s breathing and the crackling of the wood in the fire. Sara lay awake, thinking about the couple’s lives and the weeks passing without exchanging a single word between them. Their lives were so monotonous that they had nothing left to say to each other. They were tired, poor, enduring hardships and loosing part of their harvest because of the frost. She remembered the town of Dexter during the harvest season, when farmers arrived by different routes with carts full of beautiful tomatoes to be loaded onto trains bound for Florida: it was a festive atmosphere: music, drinks, tomato fights. But now, the fire died out, and despite the cold, Sara fell asleep.

In Dexter, there is a large whistle that they blow when frost threatens; the locals call it Mr. Perkins’ whistle.

Tonight, the whistle blew. The lights in the houses of the region came on, and men and women came out of their homes into the fields to cover the plants to keep them from freezing. Sara woke Jason up, and they went outside and covered the plants with blankets. Jason used his jacket and Sara covered the rest of the plants with her dress.

They went back inside the house. Since it was very cold, Jason poured kerosene on a small pile of firewood and lit it. Then he added a cherry log. When the wood burned down, Jason placed a chair with a broken seat on top, followed by the 30-year-old kitchen table.

When the fire died down, Sara said, “Jason”, and he said, “Listen…”, and they fell silent again. Outside, as if trying to extract something more than their lives, the whistle continued to blow.

QUESTIONS

-The story is very rich in images. Try to find them and discover their meaning.

-Being rebellious is something one have in their nature, or it is something one acquire when one grows old? What is the turning point? When do people decide their situation is unfair and have to do something about it?

-Some people say that working in a garden or growing vegetables is a relaxing activity, and people who live in a city or have a stressful job dream of a house in the country with a garden. Do you have a garden? What are the pleasures of a garden?

-Shareholding, tenancy... what do these systems have of fairness and unfairness? If you owned land, what would you do? And if you were a tenant?

VOCABULARY

sleazy, pallet, limp, shipping, dime, darned, sorghum, blunted, kindling, split-bottomed

Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure, by Evelyn Waugh

 

Audiobook

Written by Begoña Devis

 

BIOGRAPHY
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born in West Hampstead, London, on October 28th, 1903, into a middle-class family. In 1910, he began his studies at a preparatory school and later continued at Hertford College, Oxford University, where he distinguished himself for his intelligence and love of literature. From a young age, Waugh showed a great interest in humanities, which allowed him to lay the foundations for his future literary career.
In 1928, he married Evelyn Gardener, from whom he divorced two years later, coinciding with his conversion to Catholicism. In 1937, he married Laura Herbert, with whom he had three children.
Throughout his life, the politics and social transformations of the United Kingdom significantly influenced his work. Waugh, born during a time of radical change in Europe, experienced the transition from Victorian England to modern society, marked by the World Wars, the rise of materialism, and the dissolution of old social structures. This is clearly reflected in his vast and varied body of work, characterized by a profound critique of society and its flaws. His first major literary success came in 1928 with the publication of Rossetti (about Dante Gabriel Rossetti), a work that solidified his reputation as a literary critic. However, it was in fiction that Waugh left his deepest mark. His novels, which combine elements of grotesque comedy with sharp observations on human nature, made him one of the most prominent authors of his time.
Many of his books are inspired by his travels: through the Mediterranean in 1929; Africa in 1930; South America in 1933, and Abyssinia in 1935. He participated in World War II and in 1944 was stationed in Yugoslavia, returning to London at the end of the conflict. In 1947, he visited the United States and Jamaica; and in 1958 he travelled again through Africa.
Remembered especially for Brideshead Revisited, many of his novels satirically reflect the lack of values ​​in British high society and aristocracy, particularly in London. He also used dark and satirical humour in works such as A Handful of Dust and Decline and Fall. Besides being the author of numerous novels, he also wrote short stories, biographies, and the first volume of his unfinished autobiography, An Incomplete Education.
He died in Combe Florey, Somerset, on April 10, 1966.
 
SUMMARY
In that short story, the narrator, a young woman from an upper-middle-class background, with little life experience yet, and with a seemingly simple way of expressing herself, but devilishly complex due to her lack of good use of grammar and the most basic rules of written expression, tells us through letters to a friend (completely unknown to the reader) about the cruise she is taking with her parents and her brother through the Mediterranean starting from Monte-Carlo.
The best thing to do, in my opinion, is introducing you to the characters in the story:
Father: Obviously, he’s the one paying for the trip. He doesn’t like things not going his way. He meets a lady (Lady Muriel) with whom he enjoys strolling and chatting, but with whom he eventually gets angry.
Mother: She goes practically unnoticed. She buys shawls and souvenirs, such as an animal made of lava, in the various places they visit.
Brother (Bertie): At first, he seems to have intellectual interests because he went to Oxford and has some books on the Baroque period, but in reality, he’s a reveller, a gambler, and a heavy drinker who constantly gets into trouble and ends up having to apologize to almost all the travellers.
The purser: He lives a cynical life with cocktails and a gramophone. He’s not surprised by anything that happens during the trip, which greatly annoys our narrator.
Robert: a young man she meets on the first day, and who tries to flirt with her. She doesn’t seem interested, but ends up hooking up with him.
Bill: A tiresome old man who goes around telling everyone about his miserable life because his wife (who never appears) has humiliated him in front of a foreigner. Now he hates foreigners. People try to avoid him.
Miss Phillips: A bitch. Always stiff and impeccably dressed, she seems to be looking for a man, initially the second officer, who hates her. The purser says there’s always someone like her on cruise ships. Only Bill can stand her, though she ends up engaged to Bertie.
Others: A very embarrassing honeymoon couple, a clergyman, a lovely pansy with a camera (Arthur), with whom she will also have an affair, and many families from the industrial North.
In her letters she explains how at first she didn’t write anything because things started badly, and she only wanted to write about the good things; how they had problems because the trip from Victoria Station to Monte-Carlo wasn’t included in the price and her father lost money on currency exchange; how her brother got drunk nonstop, started dating Miss P. only to break up with her, and finally apologized to everyone for his behaviour; how her father and Lady Muriel were good travel companions, but eventually had a fight; how there was a ball and people was dressed in the most extravagant ways; how Bill ends up boring to everyone with his story, so even Lady Muriel says she starts liking Bill’s wife; how the letter-writer trusts the purser, but later he disappoints her, and she stops talking to him; how she ends hooking up with the man she met the first day, only to eventually break up with him, confirming her first impression; how she hooks up with the pansy photographer, who cries when they reach land... and some other things you’ll have to read because it’s very tiring to explain, really. Paraphrasing Rajoy, “It’s very difficult todo esto”.
 
OPINION
Given the writer’s tendency to satirize the upper class, it’s clear his intention here is to expose the emptiness of their lifestyle. These are people who can afford a long Mediterranean cruise and visit numerous places, such as Italy, Israel, Egypt, and Libya, countries brimming with culture and art that they neither can nor pretend to appreciate, nor do they know how to truly enjoy what they are seeing. All they care about is flirting, arguing over trivialities, or getting endlessly drunk. The narrator's disjointed, chaotic, and incredibly superficial way of telling the story only serves to accentuate this sense of absurdity and emptiness.
As for my contribution, I found that short story devilishly difficult to read, understand, and summarize. I will never trust the topics which are in our presentations schedule again.
 
QUESTIONS
-Have you been to a cruise? Tell us a bit of your experience.
-The narrator sometimes uses expressions to hide the real words and not to be rude. When do you think it’s necessary to use euphemisms? In which topics do we normally use them?
-The girl who writes the letter is a bit candid. Do you think being candid is a feature of the temperament, or it’s something product of an education?
-What is exactly a cynical man? Usually, it’s a negative adjective: do you agree? What do you know about the cynicism in philosophy?
-What do you know about “old lang syne”, that is “Auld Lang Syne”?

 

VOCABULARY

S.S., rough, porter, wrong, sleeper, purser, plastered, odd, corking, lousy, gave him the raspberry, welsh rabbit, deck games, unpop, askance, paper streamer, matey, steward, Demon Drink, bitched, unreticent, dubious, tarts, bitch

The Pier Falls, by Mark Haddon

 The Guardian 

Again The Guardian

Wikipedia

Mark Haddon website

SOME DATA ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haddon was born in the UK in 1962. He’s an illustrator and writes books for children.

He has worked with people with physical and mental disabilities, as autism, and has been praised for his empathy. He’s a declared atheist and vegetarian.

He’s married, has two children and lives in Oxford, where he graduated in English.

His famous book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was published at the same time in two different collections, one for children and another for adults. With this novel, he won the Whitebread Award in 2003 (Whitebread is a food brand) for stories based in the UK and Ireland.

He also won The Guardian Commonwealth Writers prize, but before that he had rejected the Order of British Empire.

More books by him are The Real Porky Philips, about a fat boy, Titch Johnson, Almost a World Champion, about a boy who overcomes his image as a loser, and The Pier Falls, a collection of short stories.

In 2016, he had heart problems, and some years later he had sequels from the COVID, and that affected his writing abilities for a while.

THE PIER FALLS (New Statesman, 2014)

This story describes with minute precision the fictional collapsing of the Brighton West Pier in a summer afternoon in 1970. Actually, this pier was closed in 1970 because it wasn’t safe for visitors. It was built in the 1860s for the entertainment of tourists, and since then, it had undergone several reforms and enlargements. It was the second pier built there (the first was demolished), and afterwards another one was erected, the Palace Pier. The West Pier reached 340 metres in length and was 94 metres in width. There was a fun fair, arcades and a concert hall that could hold 1400 people, so it was a very impressive structure.

After it was closed, there had been several attempts to restore the construction, but it was too expensive. It suffered a pair of fires and, in the end, it was demolished, although they couldn’t do it completely and some parts of it remain standing.

SUMMARY

The narrative is a cold description of the facts, it doesn’t ooze any emotion and it has a deadpan tone. Most of the characters are strangers, anonymous; what isn’t anonymous are the pieces and fasteners of the structure (struts, plywood, rivet, girdle, girder, beams, poles…), as if a technician was explaining the mechanical details. But, amid this sheer description of the facts and these impersonal people, we find some sparks of life and emotion that give to this detached report a human dimension.

The tale tells us the crumpling of the central part of a pier, the deaths of the people falling through the gap, the people in the section near the beach running away from the pier in panic, the rescue of the people stranded at the sea end of the pier, the recovery of the bodies and people fallen into the sea, and the people’s reactions after the accident.

We find the first detail that disconcert us in the sentence, “The word Royal is missing an o.” It’s a trivial detail that grips our attention because it is something so tangential. The letter “o” isn’t between quotation marks nor in italics, so at first sight you don’t catch the meaning. What has to do a missing “o” with the disaster? Perhaps was it an omen?

And then, there is something that announces the tragedy: “Nine minutes to five”, a simple statement telling us the time in the middle of a description of something that had to be permanent, the place. Anyone can imagine here a scene from the film Jaws: the action has stopped a second, and we know that a catastrophe is upcoming.

Then another premonition, clearer this time, about a rivet, is inserted. But the world goes on: the dolphins swim in their pool. And now again you can imagine a cinematographic scene: “The noise stops and there’s a moment of silence.” Silences contrasting with noises will be the soundtrack of the text. No music at all.

And next to this coldness, instants of pure terror flash to us, as when the man “wriggles like a fish.” The narrator starts reporting every now and then the time and the number of the casualties with exact precision.

But this was only a kind of introduction, because the biggest disaster comes now, when the belvedere collapses carrying forty-seven people with it. At this moment, however, we can identify one of the few men that have some identity, the arcade manager, a young man who has never been to London.

The magnitude of the tragedy are stated now with this sentence: “Three couples […] trapped in the ghost train [...] find themselves watching the end of the world.”

This mixture between what is extraordinary with everyday situations is what surprises the reader. Someone said that, in writing works, all literary devices can be reduced to these: repetition (e.g., a metaphor is a repetition of the same idea with other words) and opposition or contrast (here the narrator contrasts common with uncommon situations).

Another example of these contrapositions is when we see people trying to be heroes rescuing people (that is a magnificent behaviour), near the reality of people’s common actions or attitudes: “a man takes three photographs” and “he has opened the doors to January sale” (not any sale). The superficial persists along the apocalyptic.

The narrator also knows that emotions and suffering lead to confusing ways of expressing feelings, like when the people cheers a man that has finally caught his spaniel and has taken him ashore, or when “everyone is thinking how they will tell the story to their friends”, or “it’s exciting to think oneself as a potential target [of an IRA bomb]”, or when people want to be selected as a help by the victims reaching the beach. A man risks his life diving to the water 20 metres down, and his wife, who then couldn’t find him, won’t forget him for a long time; a boy who has lost his parents invents a story that says they are living in France…

But if there is a clear hero in all the story, this is the nurse. Perhaps heros are beings who don’t exactly belong to our society, who don't match with the ordinary. In our case, she is a black woman in the middle of white western people; her name is Renée, and that means that perhaps she's a French woman amid British people; some people think that she is so alien, that they wonder if she is using voodoo. Definitely, she is a heroine: she and the boy she helps will stay in touch with one another for the next thirty years. There was another who would have liked to be considered a hero, the arcade manager, when he says (mentally) about himself, “I stayed at my post.” But he’s been rescued along with other people, and he disappears from the story.

And then, after everybody has been rescued and the victims moved away, all goes back to normal life again. Everybody meditates about the accident and considers that it would be more understandable if it was caused by a bomb: then it would have had an explanation, a justification. They remember that they had been in the same pier an hour ago, that same morning, or yesterday, so they are lucky to be alive and not dead.

The incident is closed and the everyday life comes back definitely to the city when, at 5 a.m., the TV crew arrives to the spot and start telling jokes. Now, “the pier is already becoming something you walk past.”

As an epilogue, we can mention the girl who ran away from his parents’ and they will never know that she died there. Three years later, a skull appeared on the beach. Whose was it? Some people were “more dead” than others.

QUESTIONS

-Sure you’ve been witness to some disaster. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

-At the end of the film Speed, where there’s a lot of tension between the two protagonists because their lives were at stake, they wondered if a relationship product of a heavy critical situation will last. What is your opinion?

-Sometimes we think that journalists are like scavengers (feed on carrion): they are always in search of disasters. Do you believe that another kind of journalism is possible?

-Do you think that trying to rescue people is something connatural in us, or that some people are readier to risk their lives to save anyone from danger than others?

VOCABULARY

mackerel, trawler, gaudy, awnings, saunter, portly, ride shotgun, rivet, fritters, redwood, judder, struts, scrabbling, belvedere, listing, spars, tread, prise, wind-cheater, spinal board, winchman, girders, Hornet, shorthand, helter-skelter, chipboard, Reaper, trip switch, prom, pipistrelles