The King of Ypres, by John Buchan

 

John Buchan Society

A BIT OF HIS BIOGRAPHY
He was born in Perth (Scotland) in 1875. He was the eldest son of a church minister. He studied at Glasgow University and at Oxford, became a lawyer, got married and had four children.
His uninspiring life changed when he went to South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century to help with the post-Boer war reconstruction. As a result of his experiences there, he wrote an adventure book, Prester John (1910).
When he came back to London, he went on working as a lawyer –he wrote legal treaties– and also for Nelson’s publishers.
Then it came the WWI; he volunteered, but couldn’t go to the front because of a duodenal ulcer and had to do his tasks in the rearguard in the military intelligence recruiting propagandists. But his most valuable contribution to the war was his History of the War in several volumes.
As a politician, he was a conservative unionist, and he was appointed General Governor of Canada, and in this post, he signed Canada’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939.
He died of a cerebral thrombosis in 1940.
As a writer he is a very singular case among the literary world: he wrote only for his own entertainment, he didn’t look for fame or academic distinctions, neither he wrote for the love of art. His idol was Walter Scott (a Scotsman as himself) and he tried to emulate his novels. So, his literary ambition was below what a literary critic is waiting for. Bucham is known mostly for Hitchcock’s adaptation of his novel The Thirty-nine Steps (1915). He wrote this novel when he was recovering from his ulcer; he said he was writing only a “shilling shocker”. He thought writing had to be only a delightful hobby, because if you wanted to make a profession of it, then it would become stale and tarnished.
Another of his novels was Hunting Tower (1922), about a Russian princess imprisoned with her jewels, bolshevists, robbers and some more people who wanted to get her and them.

 

SUMMARY

Peter Gabraith, a Scottish soldier, had a very bad week in the trenches of WWI. He suffered of a lot of discomforts and was in want of a long rest, but, although he was in the middle of the war, he hadn’t met any German to fight with. Then his battalion retreated to the Belgian village of Ypres for a pause.

There, he was expecting to get some rest, but as there was a lot of noise, he looked for a quiet place to go to bed and found a very deep cellar in which he slept soundly. But, when he awoke the next morning, he found out that his battalion wasn’t there, that they had forgotten him.

He was a bit confused, but most of all, he was hungry and thirsty, and while he was thinking how to get some breakfast, a man came out of a room of the house he slept in with the pockets full of booty. The man, a thief, tried to attack Galbraith, but he, a rugby player, beat him down and shut him in a cupboard. He started to feel that, as there were no more soldiers, there was a bit of chaos in the village, and marauders and robbers were at large.

He found a bar where he was hoping to get some refresh, but the place was a total riot. The landlord, seeing he was an English soldier, asked for help. Galbraith, using some amount of violence, restored the order emptying the bar of miscreants. Finally, he could order his breakfast.

With his hunger somewhat abated and seeing so much disorder, he decided to go and look for the mayor and ask to put the place under control.

In the street, he found more rioters: two men were attacking a woman. Galbraith rescued her killing one assailant and scaring away the other. As he told her his intentions, the woman, mademoiselle Omèrine, informed him that the mayor had run away. Then they met a priest, and the three organized a meeting with the woman’s father, the doctor, three old men and an old soldier with only an arm. They form a Committee of Public Safety and appointed Galbraith as the provisional mayor. The Scotsman organized patrols and beats and edicted some bans, and after a few days, Ypres became a safe city again... in the middle of a war. The few honest citizens still living in Ypres were very happy with Galbraith ways, and mademoiselle Omèrine gave him the nickname of le Roi d’Ypres.

He almost acted as a dictator, but he kept the law and the order.

But near Ypres the war went on, and one night, a German shell fell in a street and killed mademoiselle Omèrine.

Galbraith was very sad and angry with the Boches and became aware that his job was being a soldier and wining the war. Moreover, he wanted to revenge Omèrine’s death. He understood that he wasn’t really a mayor, that he was a deserter and that when his company found him, he would be arrested, tried and shot. So he decided to resign his post, but the Committee didn’t accept his dismissal at all.

Finally, the English battalion came back again to Ypres, a decorous and orderly village by then. Galbraith guess was right and he was arrested, tried but…, although they found guilty, there was no penalty for him, and even his Commanding Officer congratulated him in secret for his services in Ypres.

In the end, Galbraith went back to the horrible trenches, but he would be very satisfied if he could kill fifty thousand Germans to make up for the death of mademoiselle Omèrine.

 

QUESTIONS

-Professional authors write worse / better than non-professional authors?

-Is it a real truth that an important proportion of young criminals become policemen when adults? Or at least, that outlaws when young respect law and order when adults?

-Do changes in our position in life modify our character?

-Do we need authority to behave rightly? Is man a wolf to man? Do we all have a beast inside?

-Against wars, is deserting the best option?

 

VOCABULARY

din, puddler, dottle, billets, come to grips, shelling, frowsty, pasty face, shivered, wroth, miscreants, émeute, fathom, wastrels, scragged, posse, beats, looters, rounded up, Draconian, dicing, upshot, cutting knots, catch it in the neck, Harry Lauder, chaff, riding roughshod over

 

dialectal words:

Wipers = Ypres

that yin = that one

ken = know

mair = more

the day = today

thae = those

sae = so

canny = careful

my lone = on my own

mitchy = very

speir = ask

nae doot = no doubt, sure

when rotters = a pack of rats

sodger = soldier

Angel's Laundromat, by Lucia Berlin

Comments on Berlin's works

Review of A Manual...

Another review

Guide to Berlin's stories

A video about her life and works

Written by Pere Vila

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Juneau, Alaska in 1936, Lucia Berlin led a largely rootless childhood because her father, Wendell Theodore Brown, was a mining engineer and the family moved nearly every year, from one mining town to the next, throughout North America. It was not until World War II, when Brown served overseas as a naval officer, that Berlin’s mother, Mary Emma Magruder, was able to settle temporarily with her two daughters in her native Texas. They spent the war years in El Paso, the town where Berlin’s parents first met when her father was a student at the Texas School of Mines and her mother was studying drama.

When Brown returned from naval service after the war, the family moved to Santiago, Chile, where Berlin spent her adolescence. She suffered from a variety of health problems throughout her life and was particularly plagued by a curvature of the spine, which eventually destroyed one of her lungs. The frequent displacements of Berlin’s early life, combined with the double scoliosis that prevented her from indulging in many of the pastimes of youth contributed to her cultivation of a rich interior life.

Berlin returned to the United States to earn a B.A. in Spanish and in English, and a M.A. from the University of New Mexico. It was during this time that she met her first husband, but he abandoned her when she was pregnant with their second child. She married and divorced two more times, and had two more sons with her third husband. She eventually raised all four boys on her own. A Manual for Cleaning Women, her first chapbook, was published during the late 1970’s, when Berlin supported her family by cleaning houses.

In the 1980’s Berlin lived in Oakland, California, and continued to publish stories in magazines. She collected many of these works in full-length volumes. The best of the tales from the first half of her writing career appeared in her 1990 collection entitled Homesick: New and Selected Stories, published by Black Sparrow Press. This landmark volume won an American Book Award, and Berlin was also the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jack London Short Story Award.

In 1994, Berlin moved to Boulder to teach creative writing at the University of Colorado, and she soon established a reputation there as an effective teacher. Health problems forced her relocation to California in 2000, and she died on her birthday, November 12, 2004, in Marina del Rey.

 

SUMMARY

Angel’s Laundromat is the opening story in Lucia Berlin’s posthumous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women.

The story contrasts the working-class atmosphere of a run-down laundromat in Albuquerque with the narrator’s glamorous past, exploring themes of alcoholism, class, and shared human connection. Similar to other Berlin’s stories, the narrator jumps from one vignette to the next in rapid succession while sprinkling in some background history during the process.

The story opens by comparing Angel’s Laundromat to The Campus, a sterile, air-conditioned laundromat across town favoured by middle-class graduate wives who listen to soft rock. The narrator avoids this polished place. Instead, she travels across town to Angel’s, a gritty spot filled with Pueblo and Apache Indians, travelling people, and struggling individuals. This contrast highlights her affinity for the marginalized and the raw reality of working-class life. In the laundromat there is an Indian named Tony, an elderly alcoholic Apache who struggles to put dimes into the machine due to his shakes. He usually sits next to Lucia, the narrator, staring at her hands, so she too looks and sees “Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands”. There is so much psychological truth packed into just these sentences: discomforting self-awareness, recognition of the effects of time and aging, an insight about race, and lastly, the sense of being used up with work done. Like many of her stories, it is about lives that brush one another in passing. She and the Indian eventually joke and chat together, but one day he’s gone and Lucia can’t remember when it was that she realized she never saw that old Indian again.

But Angel’s Laundromat is also disjunctive, as disorganized and random as memories in places of washing and waiting, muggy places, tiny places that serve an underclass of people, students and bedsit dwellers, the poor, the old, the indigent, and she, “Lu-chee-a”, as the Indian calls her, is among them. It is in this sense that the story is both aimless and easy; it does not strain to be more than itself and in this way, it evokes the looseness of a certain sort of life, a life lived bumping around on the bottom no matter where you began. It doesn’t matter what you are, either a woman who once mixed with Prince Aly Khan, or a man who has been dispossessed of his status as an Apache chief, now you are there and that’s all there is.

QUESTIONS

-Try to find information about: Zuni belt, Lady Bird Johnson, AA, Good Hygiene, Hamm’s can, Muzak, Zero bar, Okies, Vina del Mar, Prince Aly Khan.

-Try to get the meaning of these jokes: "A guy is bending down tying his shoe and another guy comes along and beats him up and says: ’You're always tying your shoe!’" And "A waiter is serving ans he spills beans on somebody's lap and says: ’Oh, oh, I spilled the beans.’"

-Why do you think that group therapies (like Alcoholics Anonymous) are effcient? Or aren’t they?

-Do you think suicide has to be penalized? Give reasons.

-Have you ever been in a laundromat and used its services? Can you tell us any anecdote?

-In your view, what is the best way to retort clichés?

VOCABULARY

Suds, super, DUZ, leaf, dimes, passed out, pressing room, cots, cross my eyes, dog tag, busted

A Rose for Emily, by Wiliam Faulkner

 Audiobook

Movie (Angelica Huston in it)

Written by Glòria Torner

SUMMARY
A Rose for Emily is William Faulkner’s best-known short story and, therefore, the most frequently anthologised. And it is also his first short story published in a national magazine, The Forum, in 1930, and, one year later, collected in These Thirteen. It was written during a period of great productivity of the author (1927-1931).
This story, with a non-linear structure, is narrated in the first-person plural, representing the voice of the people who give their opinions on the events, and it is divided in five sections.
Section I. Flashbacks. The ending and the beginning of the story.
The story begins at the end, after the death of Mrs Grierson, at the age of 74. That day, all the village, Jefferson, came to her funeral with respect and curiosity. People knew she didn’t let anyone inside her house, for decades, except her old negro servant, called Tobe.
Her house was once splendid, but, over the years, the aristocracy of Jefferson she belonged to decayed slowly. And now, of this house only remained the traces of grandeur.
In the old days, after Emily’s father died, the town mayor, Colonel Sartoris, made an exception for her —he decided she’d never have to pay taxes on the house. But time passed, and different people came into positions of power.
Ten years after the death of Colonel Sartoris, when Emily was sixty-two years old, the new mayor didn’t see the necessity to honour the agreement and decided to send Miss Emily a notice that she’d have to pay the taxes. She refused to pay, and a group of aldermen paid her a visit. Miss Emily’s old manservant let them into the parlour. The house was dirty and dusty and Emily appeared both overweight and wasted away, “she looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water and of that pallid hue”. She didn’t invite anyone to sit. Instead of that, she remained in the parlour’s entryway and listened to the men explain their purpose. Against all their protests, she informed them and repeated that she has no taxes in Jefferson, and told them to see Colonel Sartoris. Of course, he was long dead.
Section II. Going back on the plot
Two years after his father’s dead and some time after her sweetheart had deserted her, the villagers were asking the authorities to do something because a terrible smell was emanating from the house. But they couldn’t get it, because there was no law requiring the cleaning of a house’s interior. Therefore, the neighbours poured quicklime around this nauseating house.
Section III. Homer Barron’s introduction
After her father’s death, Emily, about forty years old, was ill for a long and she reappeared as a lonely woman. Suddenly, her life will change.
Homer Barron, a contractor and foreman of a crew of workers, comes to Jefferson to build sidewalks, and he begins a relationship with Emily. She is in love with Homer, her ideal man. The women of the town gossip about this relationship because they consider him far beneath him. However, Emily always maintains the same attitude, haughty, arrogant and cold, towards the neighbours.
One day, Emily is seen buying poison. The pharmacist asks her several times if it is for rats, but she, simply, replies she wants arsenic.
Section IV. Emily’s hate and madness
The collective narrator, “We”, highlights gossip, social pressure and a lack of empathy. This voice describes now how is Emily and what happens in her house. As always, telling the story without order, villagers talk about out Homer Barron: “he likes men”, he is gone, he is back… Finally, it seems that they want to be married because she has bought the wedding gear, men’s clothes and, even, a nightgown for him to sleep in.
Her cousins visited Rose when she was seeing Homer. One day, after her cousins’ visit, Homer Barron disappeared and no one knew ever anything about.
The villagers don’t see her again, except, from time to time, when they catch glimpses of her silhouette through the curtains.
Section V. Final twist. The horror. The surprising truth behind the mystery
The story returns to the beginning, the day of the funeral. After the burial, the neighbours went up to her second-floor room. They had to break down the door and there they found Homer’s skeleton, lying in Emily’s bedroom, decorated like a bridal suite. Now with the sentence “a grey hair was found on the pillow next to Homer’s corpse”, we know that she has been sleeping with his corpse for years.
Finally, Emily has killed the object of her affection, so he will not abandon her, and she will live forever with her corpse.
The main themes
Isolation and Patriarchal Control: loneliness, mental decline, madness and decay through the sordid and sad life of Emily Grierson.
Tradition vs Progress: the story describes the deterioration of Southern aristocracy, the social pressure, culminating in the murdering of her lover, Homer Barrow. She refuses to accept changes.
Southern Gothic Element: death, necrophilia, the final image of her iron-grey hair near her pillow.
Symbolism: the house —the decadence; the Yankee north Homer Barron —the ideal man; Emily’s hair grey and other dark colours —sadness; the smell —the unpleasant part of the story and, of course, the rose —symbol of Emily’s faded dreams of love and marriage.
As many times in the story, we finish repeating the same sentence written in the story: “Poor Emily!”.
If we want to read an author similar to William Faulkner, we can choose Flannery O’Connor, with her story A good man is hard to find.

QUESTIONS
-There's a character in the story without much relevance, the servant. According to your opinion, why is it so?
-There's case of necrophilia in the story. Most of sexual paraphilias are taboo. Do you know any and what are they about?
-The story is about lifestyles that die. With every new generation something dies. What will die with our generation? Do you particularly like the phrase "the good old days", or you prefer to forget them?

VOCABULARY
frame house, scrolled balconies, eyesore, bemused, sluggishly, spare, horse and foot, teeming, slunk, lime, locusts, vindicated, riggers, cuss, kin, fallen out with, craned, imperviousness, blowing off, cabal, remitted, doddering, valance curtains