Squaring the Circle, by O. Henry

Audiobook

Squaring the circle (geometry)

Line of beauty

SUMMARY

The story deals about a feud between two families, or clans, along many years. The typical example of a feud is the perpetual quarrel between Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet.

In our story, the clans are the Folwells and the Harknesses. The spark of the quarrel was the death of an opossum dog, a minor incident. From that moment on, they were killing each other until only a member of each family stayed alive, Carl Harkness and Sam Folwell.

As Carl didn’t like the idea of pursuing the feud, he went away preventing Sam’s retaliation. At the beginning Sam didn’t know where Carl had gone, but when he discovered he was in New York, he decided to go there, look for him and finish the quarrel. He didn’t take the rifle: it was too conspicuous; instead he grabbed a pistol, a weapon with a more appropriate size.

So there he went. But it wasn’t easy to find Carl’s hideaway. He only knew that he drove an express waggon round the city.

Sam had lived in the country all his live, so all that he had seen was Nature, and according to the narrator’s theory, Nature is circular, and Art (or anything made by humans) goes in straight lines; so Sam was lost in New York because all the ways went in straight lines, right angles, sharp corners and squares. And the people he met while looking for his enemy weren’t nice at all; so he felt very uncomfortable there.

But at the end he found Carl coming along a street towards him. Carl was unarmed.

What was the fight’s outcoming?

 

QUESTIONS

-What is your opinion about the narrator theory in reference to circles and squares?

-What is the relation between the title and the story?

-Do you know any other classical or literary feud?

-For you, what would be the best way to stop a feud?

 

VOCABULARY

round, evened, laying out, pruning, washpot, butternut, pink, haft, rote, smote, ourn, passel, bedeckings, bootless, locust club, scowling, newsy, pelted, kith and kin

The Buyer from Cactus City, by O. Henry

Audiobook

Movie (only the first scenes)

SUMMARY, by Glòria Torner

As many others stories by O. Henry, this one, The Buyer from Cactus City, is placed in Old South settings and New York, with an exposition of the life of ordinary people, using local colours and a realistic dialogue.
The story begins with a description of Cactus City (Texas), a rich town of twenty thousand people where the important building from Navarro & Platt is located. It’s a big store full of different things you can buy.
Every year, the older partner, Navarro, is going to New York to buy new merchandises for his emporium. But this year, as he feels a little tired, he wants to stay at home. Then, he orders his junior member, called John Platt, to make the trip to the Big City, (New York) to buy for his department store goods, especially, women’s suits.
Two weeks later, Platt, a wealthy and handsome Westerner, called ironically “Mister Texas”, a ranch man who has become a businessman, arrives in New York and enters the wholesale trade from Zizzbaum & Son, located in Broadway, to purchase some things for his business. Old Zizzbaum receives Platt, who is not impressed by New York. For that reason, Zizzbaum tells his son, Abey, to show him different places of Broadway that evening.
The next day, Zizzbaum, who wants to encourage his customer in sales, calls a sophisticated model from his trade, Helen Ashley, and commands her to try on different dresses in front of Platt. The model, aware of her duty part, agrees. Immediately, he finds her very beautiful. At that moment, the narrator says: “Platt felt for the first time the wonderful bright light of romance and glory descend upon him.”
Following with his plan, Zizzbaum arranges a dinner at 7:00 p.m. between John, the customer, and Helen, her employee. Now, John notices that Helen is his ideal. He is a young, rich business Westerner in love with a model. He imagines and tells her he will buy a beautiful car and a house, but she, disgustedly, replies she “has heard that before”.  For Helen, this evening is just following her working day and, frankly, she informs Platt she is only out with him to play this role, otherwise she’ll lose her job.
Platt insists and declares his love and gives her a diamond ring he has bought. Misunderstanding him, she reacts by getting angry because she believes he wants to abuse her. Immediately, she wants to leave the restaurant telling him to take her to the boarding house where she lives. There she slaps his face. But the persistent Westerner, who only wants about marrying her, increases his infatuation looking for an honest, sincere relationship and... just then a ring falls at her feet, but it isn’t the same ring: she sees that it is actually a wedding ring.
As many times in the stories of this author, the plot goes on in one direction, and just when the reader thinks they can predict the ending, finally, it turns to another different direction.
Surprise ending?  Does she change her mind because she realizes her mistake? Is there a change of reaction when she wants to know where is Cac, Carac, Caracas City?

QUESTIONS

-Do you think a mercenary marriage could be happy? And a marriage without romantic love?
-In your view, is the girl in the story, Helen, treated like an object by her boss? In your opinion, are some jobs (like models) offensive for people’s dignity?
-Helen doesn’t mind going away to live in an unknown place. What conditions you wouldn’t agree with for a marriage, or for a job?

VOCABULARY

obtain, be sneezed at, tan, shied, whirl, lay-down collar, wholesale, smuggled, crowbait, incidentally, oilily, evening gown, tulle, Don’t get fresh 

Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie, by Beryl Bainbridge

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Begoña Devis

Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was born in Liverpool in 1932, and she was an English novelist known for her psychologic portrayals of the lower-middle-class English life.
At the age of 14, she was expelled from the Merchant Taylor’s Girls School, when she was caught with a “dirty rhyme” (as she later described it) written by someone else in her gymslip pocket. She then went on to study at Cone-Ripman School, a boarding school near London, where she found she was good at History, English, and Art. The summer she left school, she fell in love with a former German prisoner of war, Harry Arno Franz, who was waiting to be repatriated. For the next six years, the couple corresponded and tried to get permission for him to return to Britain so that they could marry, but permission was denied, and the relationship ended in 1953.
The following year, she married Austin Davies. She had two children, but the marriage was short, and Beryl soon found herself a single mother. In 1958, she tried to commit suicide by putting his head in the gas oven. In his own words, “When you are young, you have those ups and downs.” She had a third daughter with Alan Sharp in 1965. Sharp, a Scotsman, was at the start of his career as a novelist and screenwriter; Bainbridge would later let it be thought that he was her second husband; in truth, they never married, but the relationship encouraged her on her way to fiction. She began writing to help fill her time, mainly recounting incidents from her childhood. His first novels were very well received by critics and were successful among readers, although they did not bring her much money. Her first novel, Harriet Said... was written around this time. It would be the third that he would publish, since many editors rejected it, and one of them went so far as to claim that the protagonists were “almost incredibly repulsive”.
She was the author of eighteen novels, two travel books, two essays, two volumes of stories and five works for theatre and television. She was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, and in 2011, she was awarded the posthumous prize (she died in 2010) for her literary work. In 2008, The Times included her in the list of “The 50 most important writers since 1945”. The Guardian called her “a national treasure.”

SUMMARY

When Mrs Henderson arrived home, her husband asks her how much the woman she worked for as a maid had tipped her for Christmas. “Nothing at all”, answered she. “We have theatre tickets instead.” “Thank you very much”, Mr Henderson said ironically.  “The kiddies will like it”, she replied, “it’s a pantomime. We have never been in a pantomime.”  Their son Alec, who was still living with them, explained to them that it wasn’t a pantomime, but a play with fairy tale elements, which was about boys lost in Never-Never land. “It’s written on several levels”, he added.

“I’ve been a lost boy all my live”, muttered Charles Henderson when he heard his son. And he was right, in fact, he still is: His son doesn’t respect him - he calls him Charlie, knowing how much that bothers him - and his wife never seems to listen to him. He feels isolated. And as for other important things, he has lost almost everything: his house, his garden, his open spaces. They moved ten years ago, and now they have a house with a bathroom with hot water and good plumbing, but that’s not enough for him. At night, when Charles returns from work and enters that flat - which for him is like the cabin of an aeroplane, high and closed, not being able to take him anywhere - he looks out the window and can only see sky and clouds, and sometimes hundreds of stars. Then, he wonders: “Is life just about taking a good bath?” And besides, “Does a man need so many stars?” He had enough with the only one he could see from his outside toilet. “It’s quality that counted, no quantity”, he thought.

Finally, the day arrived, and everyone went to the theatre: Charles, his wife, his son Alec, and his daughter Moira with her children. One of them, Wayne, who was also characterized by his mischief, got into trouble as soon as they left the house, in the lift. The situation got worse because Alec drove madly. Furthermore, when they passed through the old Charles neighbourhood, he looked longingly at the open fields, and remembered the stream where they fished and the esplanade where people played football. Alec only saw a grimy suburb and laughs at it. “What fields? What stream? Never-Never land”, he mocked him. Charles started to feel sick, his stomach to hurt, but no one seemed to care about that.

During the first act, everything seemed strange, there was an actor playing a dog, and Charles didn’t really understand who or what Tinkerbell was. During the acts two and three, Charles dozed. All was confusing to him, he was dreaming he was fishing in the canal and there appeared a big crocodile with a clock ticking inside it. He had pain in his arm.

His confusion increased when Alec claimed that the fact that Wendy’s father and Captain Hook were played by the same actor was an allegory of the fact that every father wants to kill his children. However, according to Charles, the reason was the savings that this entailed. But who wants to argue with Alec? Indeed, he would like to strangle his son when he says those things.

During Act Fourth, Charles was getting worse and worse. He asked his wife for a peppermint, but she silenced him, everyone seemed engrossed in the play. Charles dozed, confusing things that happened on stage with memories from when his son was a child, like the fear he felt one day when Alec came home late. Suddenly, something dramatic was happening on stage: Tinkerbell was fainting and everyone looked devastated. Charles saw how his entire family, even his wild grandson, were moved to tears watching the flickering of the fairy’s light descend. What was happening? His heart was beating so hard that he though Alec was going to scold him for making noise.

Finally, while the entire audience applauded passionately at Peter Pan’s demand “If you believe, clap hands, clap hands, and Tinkerbell will be alive”, Charles died. His last words were “Help me”, to which his wife replied “Shut up”, while clapping frantically for Tinkerbell to come back to life.

PERSONAL OPINION

This short story is written on several levels, just like it happened in Peter Pan, according to Alec, or at least it touches on several aspects, such as:

- The class difference. The rich may find it degrading to give money to the poor, but for them, it is more than a necessity.

- The change in life and values after the II World War, when people went from living in the countryside to living in the city, and the capitalism is gaining more and more strength.

- The generational conflict, represented by Charles and his son Alec, who despises his father’s values, ridicules his way of thinking and treats him with open contempt.

- The loneliness you can feel even surrounded by the people you love, especially when communication has long since broken down.

- The irony of sometimes letting ourselves be carried away by what is happening in fiction, causing those feelings of drowning out what we should feel in real life.

For all these reasons, I liked the story and found it very interesting, especially because of the last question I pointed out. Do our own lives seem so uninteresting to us that we are more interested in what happens on stage, or on TV, or in the movies? Is it perhaps a way to escape from our feelings?

I’m sure we’ll talk about it in a while.

QUESTIONS

-Debate: What are your politics about giving / not giving tips?

-What about presents: do you prefer giving money, or presents? When you buy your presents, do you always ask for the “present receipt”?

-What can you tell us about the personality of the characters?

-“One star was all a man needed”. What do you think the real necessities of a person are?

-Driving is a singular experience for every person: in your opinion, what is the most important skill for a driver? What do you think of the French campaign “Drive as a woman”?

-What do you know about Peter Pan? In your view, is childhood so happy as the cliché says? Do you think everybody would rather be a child and not an adult?

-In your opinion, what is the relation between the title and the story?

-According to you, what is the meaning of Charles’s death and the end of the story? 

VOCABULARY

pantomime, head nor tail, smutty, putting up with, by heck, mouthing, outlandish, foregone, (give it) houseroom, bashed, exalted, sideboard, on a par, fiddling, rumpus, turn, belt up, slum, pandering, cosy, carry-on, coddled, yawning his head off, tantrums, tiddlers, moth balls, engrossed, cotton, heatedly, codswallop, throttle, fly off the handle, dangling

Analysis

British Council activities about the story

Interview with the writer

British Council again

Prezi presentation

Another interview with the writer