Something Childish but very Natural, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY

This is a love story between Henry (17) and Edna (16). They are very young, so we have to suppose very inexperienced about love, but also very pure and innocent.

Henry is a clerk in an architect office, and he thinks he’s great into books, although he hasn’t read many, and he doesn’t have many. Edna is a student in a training college; she wants to be a secretary.

One day, at Charing Cross station, Henry almost misses his train because, as it has a stop of ten minutes, leaving his hat and a portfolio in his carriage, he gets off to look at the books in the station bookstall and, when he is reading a poem from a book, he hears the station master announcing that the train is leaving, and Henry has to hurry up. He runs to the nearest carriage and dashes into it. But it’s not his, and he feels embarrassed because there is another passenger, a girl, and he has not his hat on. He notices the girl’s hair and falls in love with it. In the end, he gathers courage to say something, and they begin a bit of conversation. And when Edna points to the mark his hat has left on his forehead, he feels he’s definitely in love with her. He asks her to meet again, and she tells him that she takes the same train every day.

So they meet again, and they start a kind of love affair, they tell each other about their jobs, their families… He asks her to see her hair, and reluctantly she takes off her hat, but she doesn’t allow him to touch it.

And during their courtship, he can’t even go near her and, much less, kiss her. However, Henry isn’t angry with her, he is patient and understanding and can wait. Edna knows that he wants some more closeness and understands his desires, but, at the moment, she can’t bear being touched. She prefers keeping some distance between them, as if they were still children, and not already teenagers. But they both dream being together, living together, and they imagine having a house and behaving like husband and wife.

But after a time, Henry is a little tired of waiting for a kiss or a caress, he hungers for physical contact. One day, in an excursion, when they stop to have tea, the landlady offers them a cottage to rent. They go and see it, and they like it very much. They can figure it could be their home. Eventually, Edna lets him hold her, and tells him she has wanted all day to tell him that he could kiss her. They decide to rent the house.

But when Henry waits for Edna the day they have to begin to inhabit the cottage, she doesn’t come. Instead of her, there comes a little girl with a telegram for Henry. We don’t know what is there in the message, neither whose it is from, although we can imagine. He opens it, reads it, and the world around him gets wrapped in darkness.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why do you think the girl doesn’t want any physical contact?

-In your opinion, a romantic mood, is it only possible when you are young?

-Do you think love without sex is going to work? Or is this idea sexist?

-What can be the meaning of the Swiss cow-bell, the silver shoe and the fish hanging of Edna’s bangle?

-Why is hair so powerful a sexual symbol, according to your view?

-“Have you ever been in love before?” is a very unusual declaration of love. Do you know any other singular one? E.g., this one.

-Some people say love is a kind of illness that only lasts three years. What is your opinion?

-Can children be in love, or is love something you only find in teenagers and adults?

-When they are at the tea house in the country, and the woman offers to rent a cottage, do you think Henry has planned it previously? (remember he had been there often)

-And when the woman asked if they were brother and sister, why does Henry answer yes?

-When they are in the cottage, do they really kiss? Why do you think so?

-What does the telegram say? What is Henry going to do now?

 

VOCABULARY

soot, spangle, pap, clutched, marigold, wreath, utter, curb, training college, nests, loathsome, winding up, raked out, caretakers, heather, jonquils, Bags I

 

Something Childish, but very Natural, poem

Film (from minute 29:48)

AUDIOBOOK

ANALYSIS

VIDEO PRESENTATION

Phosphorescence, by Tessa Hadley

 

SUMMARY, by Josep Guiteres

Graham Cooley is 38 years old, has a degree in physics, is married with children, is a competitive chess player and loves quantum mechanics and quarks.

One Friday, at the university, where he works as a physics professor, a course on food hygiene was held, and he saw a woman with shiny grey hair, a belligerent jaw, a turned-up nose, and a wide mouth. It was Claudia, a woman who he had met one summer at his parents’ house in West Wales, when Graham was 13 years old.

Graham told his wife Carol that in college he saw a woman he hadn’t seen in 25 years. At night, when Graham and his wife were in bed, he told Carol that when Claudia was on holiday at his parents’ house, she had made advances toward him. His wife ended the conversation saying, what would you think if a man did to your daughter what Claudia did to you?

Graham took Claudia’s address and went to her house. He introduced himself saying that he was Graham Cooley and that she and her family had been on holiday at the Cooley’s in West Wales. Claudia remembered, she looked at his face and told him that he was handsome and that she always had good taste in men.

She invited him into her house, they sat down, and he put his hand on Claudia’s knee and reminded her that, on the last night she was at his parents’ house, he took her and her two young daughters by boat. He told her that she had sat in front of him while he rowed; the water that night was full of phosphorescence, tiny sea creatures that glowed in the dark, and that she put her feet on top of his and rubbed them all the time. Once he said this, he kissed her, put his hands under her clothes and she didn’t stop him.

Graham got home very late, his wife was waiting for him, and, for a moment, he thought that Carol might suspect something, but he immediately thought, I am her husband, the physics professor who loves quantum mechanics and a puritan. Nothing happens here.

QUESTIONS

Describe Graham’s family

Talk about Graham.

What can you say about Claudia?

Do / did you play board games? What is your favourite? What kind of player are / were you? Do you have any anecdote?

When do children start dressing as adults?

Do you think our children know better about sex than us?

Do you think that in our time swearing has increased its intensity? Aren’t “shit” and “bloody” a little soft?

In your opinion, why did Claudia choose Graham, and not Tim or Alex?

At first Graham thought Claudia was old, but then, when he saw playing badminton, not so old, even young. How do you calibrate the age of a person? Is there a kind of touchstone?

How does Claudia approach Graham?

Why in a moment wasn’t Graham able to look at his mother?

Do you think our generation have overprotected children?

“He suffered like an adult, secretly.” Do adults suffer in secret? In which cases?

How did Graham / Claudia change over the time?

What do you think about telling your past to anybody (a new friend, a partner, your children)?

Graham’s wife thought that his experience with Claudia was horrible. Does Graham agree? Do you agree?

How was it possible that Claudia didn’t remember him and their story?

Did he have a “trauma” because of Claudia’s seduction?

In your opinion, did Graham cheat on his wife?

How do you think the story would go on?

What do you imagine it’s the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

daps, reslating, chalet, meadow, overspill, Dormobile van, making it all up, toddler, snap, suntan, soothed, scooping, shuttlecock, halter top, gritty, sandpapery, scorch, racing demon, humming, waxed, plug, rewire, flip-flops, hog, six-form college, foyer, pugnacious, brash, dregs, blare, droop, mews, stone-flagged, batik, tans, sag, tinged, GCSE moderation

Keys, by Graham Swift

Summary and analysis, by Elisa Sola Ramos

Briefly, the summary of the story is an incident of everyday life: John, a 47-year-old architect, accompanies his wife to the station to catch the train: she has to go to see his brother who is dying. John doesn’t go with her because he can’t stand his brother, and makes a secondary excuse that he has work. She doesn’t mind that he doesn’t accompany her, either. Just after leaving the woman, he realizes that he has left his keys in his zip-up jacket pocket inside the house and finds himself locked out of the house. Then, he notices that the neighbour’s housekeeper is there, and he knocks on the door for her to help him into his house. They make love.

As in many of Graham Swift’s stories, an incident of everyday life (in this case, forgetting the keys) serves to reflect on one’s own life. In our story, being shut out of the house helps John to see his own life from a distance, as if he was a stranger. And this is what John does: a 47-year-old architect, with a comfortable life and married to Clare, shows us a conventional slice of life of a well-to-do middle-aged couple, and we see the loneliness of the characters at every moment. Clare doesn’t count on him when it comes to her family (“He’d be peripheral. He was just a husband.”) and John had an affair with his colleague - or superior - at work and didn’t tell his wife, even though she knew (“she had her inklings”). The couple leads a conventional life, with jobs that are not perfect, and they are burdened with their loneliness.

The other character is the cleaner, a girl no more than 25 years old, foreign, with little command of the language. There is a great distance between John and the cleaner, to highlight the man’s power over the woman: age, purchasing power, culture... It’s a full-fledged league, but both characters are completely alone, they are strangers to their own life. They meet at a given moment and make love, but they make love to themselves because they never break the distance that separates them, at no time do they communicate.

Weather is an essential element in the story. As in many of the stories we have read, time is another character. In fact, it is the element that creates the right atmosphere. With a short story, this is very useful, because a few words create an atmosphere. In this case, the rain draws a curtain between him and his own life. It begins that four drops fall and ends that it rains in torrents and torrents, and that gives the tone and context of the story.

As always, a good image illustrates the entrance of the blog: an old and unpainted heart as a keyring, like the relationship between the two main characters. What really brings people together? Does John need Claire to appease his predatory instincts, his “stray animal inside him”, to get the stability he wants, against his impulse? Does Claire need John for her strength, as opposed to her brother and family? Why do people stay together if they feel lonely? It is the great question of our story.

QUESTIONS

What kind of goodbye do you prefer? A short one? A long one? When it’s you who goes away? When it’s you who stays?

What do you think of families? What is it better for a person, relatives or friends?

“He was just a husband.” Do you think a husband will always be peripheral? They say the first person old widows forget is their husband. Is it true?

“Weak men got ill and die.” Do you think character and constitution decide over life and death?

For you, what is a feeling? Are feelings logical? Can you control your feelings?

What is your opinion about saying always the raw truth?

Did you lose your keys any time? Do you have a story about this?

What will happen to the residents of Neale Road?

Ugly names: can a name be ugly? Can a name decide if a person is attractive or plain?

What do you know about Moldova?

Do you think we have an “animal inside us”?

Is a paraphilia to need to make love in any other’s house?

What is your opinion about the famous sentence: “No news, good news”?

What do you imagine it is going to happen then? Is Clare going to know about it? If yes, is she going to pardon him? Is their marriage going to last long?

 

VOCABULARY

spared, forecourt, got on with, spared, stifling, spot, inklings, riddle, terraced, manhandling, squirmed, tackle, put up with, unremitting, none-the-wiser, feral, bucketing, proneness, have that one there, sanctuary, knuckle down

The Best Days, by Graham Swift

The Best Days, by Dora Sarrión

Sean and Andy are two friends who attend the funeral of Daffy, their former headmaster of Holmgate School, where they had studied six years ago.
It was a grey afternoon and there’d been a solemn and silent moment when the hearse departed, but then, someone had called out “Bye Daffy!!!” and the atmosphere was broken, it was almost like joyful liveliness. People started waving to each other, hand shaking, smiling, speaking. Everyone was freshly aware of being alive in the world and not dead in it.
The two friends spotted in the crowd who assisted to the funeral an old school friend, Karen, whom they both were in love with when they were students.
Karen turned up with her father, who was clearly a bit drunk, and her mother, who was wearing an outfit that was almost identical like his daughter, both were dressed in a vulgar and inappropriate way for a funeral, almost like whores. In Andy’s opinion, the mother “looks a right old baggage”.
These words bothered Sean, because, although deep down he agreed with Andy, he had an experience in the past that brought back him memories about Karen's mother, which were themselves embarrassing, but also pleasant, even exciting.
Sean remembered that, one day, while he was travelling on the bus where Karen was also, he noticed that she had forgotten her bag on the seat when she got off the bus. So he picked it up and decided to deliver it to her house, hoping to see her.
But she wasn't there, Sean found only her mother, who invited him to "come in and wait for her". Sean hesitated for a moment, but in the end he came in.
Suddenly, he found himself in Karen's mother arms and, without being able to avoid it, he lived his first sexual experience with her.
The author mixes several topics in his story:
Death: The atmosphere that usually surrounds funerals is contradictory, on the one hand people usually show sadness and pain for the deceased person but on the other hand, when the coffin is no longer present, they feel relieved and a great joy for the fact of being alive.
The loss of youth, reflected in Karen's mother: Sometimes, it's difficult to recognize the deterioration that the pass of time produces in our physique, and we insist on not accepting that reality, although we know that we cannot hide it even if we disguise ourselves as young people.
Memories: Over the years, when we think back to experiences that we lived in the past, many times they appear in our memory in a blurred way, in a form of sensations, smells, colours, music or phrases. Sometimes, we don't recall the events as they happened, but we can remember the emotions they produced in us. Sean keeps in his mind his first sexual experience, summarized in a sentence, which would stay with him until the day he dies.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

Sean

Andy

Clive Davenport

Karen Shield

Do you have fond memories of your primary or secondary school? Have your opinions changed, positively or negatively, in the course of time?

Do you think unemployed people spend their time doing things that when they were employed couldn’t do?

Graham Swift like to emphasize situations talking about the weather. Did you find an instance of this in this story?

Why do you think a funeral is a good occasion for gathering people?

What kind/class of people attended the funeral? How do you know?

Why does the narrator describe their suits as “interview suits”?

Do you think she had left her bag in the bus on purpose?

Why do you imagine Karen and her friend did at Cheryl Hudson’s?

When the narrator says the “TV was on”, did he want to mean something else?

There are some details to show us that Mrs Shield isn't drunk. What are these? Why does the writer insist on this?

“Had she done this before?” What’s your opinion?

Mrs Shield is very practical: how does the writer show this?

What do you know about In Praise of Older Women, by Stephen Vizinczey, or Elogio de la madrastra, by Vargas Llosa, or about the film Ce que le jour doit à la nuit?

Would you have another point of view of the situation in which the boy was involved, if instead of a boy it had been a girl, and instead of a woman, a man?

After making love, he tried to work out his bearings. Does this feeling have any relation to the saying “Post coitum omne animal triste est, sive gallus et mulier”?

Was Sean a bit in love with Karen’s mother? How do you know?

Can you imagine how the life would be going on for the mother, the daughter, Sean and Andy?

Were those days for Sean the best days?

What is Sean’s moral lesson?

 

VOCABULARY

hearse, spillage, turnout, blustery, daffy, milling, makeshift, grim, barn, craned, drag, stance, abuse, rebuke, outbreaks, drab, flouncy, headpiece, tarty, fetching, sight, smothered, cutely, perky, unredeemed, scruff, blunt, cocky, old baggage, curb, the big V, tugged, goody-goody, delve, primness, sternly, fluffy, deed, ducking, cluttered, glow, bearings, peck, daubed, slab, goggling, prat, lovey-dovey, preening, big-time, jump, get the hots

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?

D'accord, Baby, by Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi at the Wikipedia: click here 

A short review of the story: click here

A short review of the book: click here

A longer and more critial review of the book: click here

Some films:

 

From the story: restaurant Le Caprice:

"The classic St James’s restaurant, Le Caprice is close to the Royal Academy, Burlington Arcade, Bond Street and moments from Piccadilly, Green Park, Mayfair and the West End. A full à la carte menu is served from midday throughout the afternoon, featuring classic British, European and American favourites, prepared with carefully sourced seasonal game, meat and fish, and boasting a renowned list of desserts."  44 € - 67 €

 

 

SITUATIONS / TOPICS (quotations from the text)

Maoist intellectual

Le Caprice

Emerson's:...

How could a man have come to the middle...

... and went into the shower

Soho

Remembrance of Things Past

West London

off-licence

Paris in those days

The food was good...

It was already too late

He thought of a time in New York...

A black eye...

Will you tell your father I saw you?

...life could not be grasped, but lived

 

 VOCABULARY

clear out, viciously, be eager, flinch, quizzical, read, make it to, cuckold, cool, meaner, coup, betsit, odour, fittings, raffish,