A Card Trick, by Tessa Hadley

 SUMMARY

This is a capital story of the collection; with it, Tessa Hadley won the 2005 O. Henry award.

Gina, a 47-year-old scholar and writer, is revisiting Wing Lodge, the house where John Morrison, her favourite novelist, whose works she has deeply studied and about whom she has written a book, lived during the last and most productive years of his life.

There she remembers her holiday at her mother’s friend (or client), Mamie. Mamie has a glamorous family of three boys and a daughter. Although Mamie belongs to the high class, she and her children are natural, free and easy, frank, kind and welcoming; but they aren’t much into culture, literature and art, and haven’t gone to university, so their academic education is a bit limited; however, they aren’t silly and can have interesting conversations. In the other hand, Gina is very clever about these subjects, and she’s a very good student, but she’s socially clumsy and shy; moreover, she feels awkward in her body, because she’s tall and a bit plump.

There, in their house near the beach, she spent two weeks, but she didn’t go much to the beach, neither did she take part in their open-air entertainments; instead, she pretended to study to prepare her exams and spent most of the time alone in her room; but, when the family is away, she roams the house searching and prying and making herself comfortable with food, drink, cigarettes and lying on the sofa.

One day, believing she was alone at home, she discovers that Josh, the less glamorous of the brothers is at home. She had some feelings for him. Gina doesn’t know what to do and spends a lot of time shut in her room.

But the last day of her holiday there, she feels a lot more confident. One of the sons is in London, Mamie and two other children have gone to see some friends, and Tom is staying at home building houses of cards; as he cannot finish a difficult one, Gina offers to show him a card trick. The boy is astonished and enraptured at the trick. For Gina, this meeting is a kind of symbolic sexual encounter.

The next day, she went back home and never again met anybody of Mamie’s family. Afterward she will know that Mamie got divorced and, after some time, she died, and one of her sons also died drowned; so perhaps a glamorous family has also their misfortunes.

But now, as she remembers this fortnight in a coastal village, she isn’t that awkward 18-year-old girl any more: she’s a tall woman, perhaps not beautiful, but “statuesque”, who has had some success in her field and feels confident with her life and her body. In John Morrison’s house she gets emotional when she sees a manuscript with a scene that has been erased in the published book: a middle-aged woman, daughter of the man just dead in bed, declares her love to the doctor who has taken care of him until the last moment; the doctor, who is married, feels disgusted and, amazed, rejects her.

The end of the story is a bit mysterious. Something (and insect, the lady guide) calls her attention, and the memories of that holiday come back to her, and she regrets that isolate life of hers when she could cheat someone to be her friend. Maybe, as she’s now a public person, she can play tricks no more to anyone.

QUESTIONS

-Why Gina’s appearance is important for the plot?

-What is Wing Lodge? (Compare to Lamb House). Have you ever visited a house of a famous person? Do you like visiting museums? Somebody said museums were like churches: do you agree?

-What can you say about Mamie and her family?

-Is a friendship between people of very different social classes possible? Why do you think so?

-Do you follow a diet? For your health or for your body shape / weight? Do / did you trust your diet?

-What are A levels and S levels?

-Is it usual that rich people don’t go to university? Do you think everybody should go?

-Do you know who were Walter Gropius, Conrad, Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Mansfield, Pound?

-What kind of books do you imagine John Morrison wrote?

-What different talents (from the protagonist) did Mamie’s children have?

-Do you feel curiosity about how authors write? (I mean technical aspects: computer, pen, with music…) Do you know any singular case?

-What does “a Spartan boy carrying the fox under his shirt” refer to?

-What are “Honey” and “19”?

-Can you describe Tom?

-What do you know about “Derek and the Dominoes”?

-What good memories do you have about your holidays?

-“It was her mother fault”. What do you think of your parents’ responsibilities for our successes and failures?

-“It feels more sympathetic”. What can this mean when talking about a pack of cards?

-What do you think it’s the best way to break the ice in an embarrassing situation? For instance: “Charming day, isn’t it?” “Pray, don’t talk about the weather. Whenever people talk about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.”

-Do you know an easy card trick?

-What is it the meaning of the card trick for Gina’s maturing?

-How did Gina change over the years?

-What kind of novel was “Winter’s Day”?

-What books did made you cry?

-At the end, who is the victim in this sentence: so that your victim wouldn’t be able to put a card down wrong?

 

VOCABULARY

clothes-wise, Laura Ashley dress, pinafore, hair slide, toppling, glass-topped wicker table, raid, S level, awe, duffers, retakes, disingenuous, pushbike, wetsuit, fitting, sundial, gnarled, conkers, sparely, ferreting, off-handedness, frowsty, herbs, scuttled, fry-up, double declutching, sec, loo, tipsily, estate hands, drawn out (coffee), till, entropy, takeover, longhand, overspill, floundering

Lifeguard, by John Updike

Lifeguard: review

Lifeguard: analysis

Lifeguard: academic task

Lifeguard: audio

Your next reading is Lifeguard, by John Updike (author of The Witches of Eastwick), page 539.

It’s a very difficult story for its vocabulary and its imagery. Also, it has no action, it’s only a meditation about God and saving lives and souls the young lifeguard does.

In order to help you in this reading I’m going to give some information about different people that appears on the first pages:

Tillich, Father D’Arcy, Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain are philosophers who speculate about religion, mostly about catholic religion and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Kierkegaard, I suppose you know; Berdyaev was a Russian writer with deep religious convictions; Barth was a Calvinist theologian; Cardinal Newman, a protestant Anglican converted to Catholicism. I can’t think it’s necessary to say anything about Pascal, Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Graham Greene are catholic writers in the Anglican world of Great Britain.

Biography, by Rafel Martínez

John Hayen Updike was born on the 18^th of March,1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He was the son of teachers, and he was raised in a white and Protestant middle-class environment, which influenced greatly his later literary work.

As a teenager, John Updike started to like literature and writing influenced by his own mother, who also instilled in him a deep love for art. His father was a high school teacher who, having suffered the adversities of the 1929 crisis, supported the whole family with great sacrifices and a meagre salary.

Subsequently, Updike studied at Harvard University thanks to a scholarship. When he finished his studies, he moved to the United Kingdom and started to study Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford.

His work as a writer explores regularly  human motivations about sex, faith, the ultimate reason for existence, death, generational conflicts, and interpersonal relationships.

Updike's most important work were the series of novels about his famous character Harry Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest and the novel of evocations and remembrances of the same character, Rabbit Remembered). Of the tetralogy, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest allowed him to win two Pulitzer Prizes in 1982 and in 1991.

In his long and long literary life, he was the author of numerous works.

Apart from award-winning series like Rabbit, he wrote Henry Bech's books, 1960-1971, and also he wrote plays: Buchanan Dying (1974); novels: The Witches of Eastwich, (1984; made into a movie 1987), Scarlet Letter Trilogy (1975), The Asylum Fair (1959), Couples (1968), Coup d'État (1978); short stories: The Lifeguard (1932), The Same Door (1959), What I Have Left to Live (1994), Tears of Love (2001), My Father’s Tears and other stories (2009).

He also wrote poetry, essays and memories.

For several years his name was among the candidates for the Nobel Prize.

He remarried Martha Ruggles in 1977. His first wife was Mary Pennington. He was the father of two daughters and two sons.
John Updike died in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January the 27th, 2009, at the age of 76, after years of battling with lung cancer.

Analysis of Lifeguard

This work by John Updike was first published in the magazine The New Yorker, on June 17th, 1961.

Of the prolific work of J. Updike, I hope and wish to read some of his most recognized works. Because, in this work, the author shows the life, dreams and desires of a young man, with a rich and very literary prose, which when reading it seems simple, but which hides and speaks of the deepest and most complex thoughts of the human being, that they turn this short story into a literary work that looks like fiction, but is actually a living and existentialist story.

To begin with, John Updike seems to be playing with the word of the title LIFE-GUARD.

Life, (other synonyms): existence, being, entity, goods ...

Guard, (other synonyms): protect, cover, stand guard over, watch over, look after, keep an eye on…

For the author, the protagonist, in his two facets of life, always tries to see his fellow men as beings that need his help and his qualities to save them.

The boy who waits for the call, as he refers to at the end of the story, and who until then had not reached him and who had studied for 9 months the books and biblical texts, is longing for the day when he’ll be able to address his parishioners and transmit the word and work of God to them.

And, on the other hand, when summer comes, he has a job as a lifeguard on a beach for 3 months, and when he climbs to his watchman turret, he has thoughts that from his height he dominates all the beachgoers who depend on his vigilance and help, as if he was a divine entity who sees his acolytes from above and can observe and save them.

But he also feels sorry for the older people whose life is ending, and he feels sorry too for the women who lost their feminine forms after bringing several children to this world, and he cannot help being pleased and desired, when, with his skin tanned by the sun and with his athletic figure, the young women approach the stairs of his watchtower.

I admit that I have had to read the story several times to make sense of it, and I hope I have understood it.

It is not a work that I would recommend, but it has made me work hard, and for that I am grateful to have chosen this work.

Questions

What's a "student of divinity"?
What does it mean: "I disguise myself in my skin"?
What are "teenage satellites"?

What does he refer to with "umber anthers dusted with pollen"?

When do "theologians surmount the void"?

Do you know the story about "the man who on the coast of Judaea who refused in dismay to sell all the he had"? Look up Mark, 10.

Explain "a sheet of brilliant sand painted with the runes of naked human bodies".

Why "the humanism has severely corrupted the apples of our creed"?

"Scabs of land upon we draw our lives to their unsatisfactory conclusions are suffused by science with vacuous horror"?": What is it?

Explain the parable: "Swimming offers a parable..."

Where is the irony? "I'm not yet ordained, I'm too disordered."

"The cinema of life is run backwards..." Why backwards?

"brazen barrel chests, absurdly potent bustling with white froth." What's this "froth"?

Why when "children toddle blissfully into the surf" does he "bolt upright on his throne"?

Who "lift their eyes in wonder as a trio of flat-stomached nymphs parades past"? And why?

Can you imagine this: "a girl is pushing against her boy and begging to be ducked"?

What do you know about the "section aurea"?

Can you see "the arabesque on the spine" in a musical instrument?

Define "mesomorph, endomorph and ectomorph".

Why do you think that "to desire a woman is to desire to save her"?

What do you know about Solomon and Sheba?

Explain the image: "no memento mori is so clinching as a photograph of a vanished crowd".

"Is it as a maiden, matron or crone that the females will be eternalized"?

What is it the "Adjustments Counter"?

"Mankind is a plague racing like fire across the exhausted continents". What do you think of this pessimistic point of view?

Can you understand this image: "the sea itself is jammed with hollow heads and thrashing arms like a great bobbing blackwash of rubbish"?

Do you think is possible to obey this commandment: "Be joyful"?

Has he ever saved anyone? How do you know?

What do you think of philosophy? Is it something deep with difficult language or is it something trivial with difficult language?