Mimicking the masters, feebly. From the Spring of last year.
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In the style of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”
Akaky Akakievich was seated at the far end of the table, from where he could catch a glimpse of the kitchen as the door swung open and closed and the platters, piled with all the supping things, came floating through. At the sight of a particularly delightful torte, he jumped a little in his chair and bumped the arm of his dining companion, who, Akaky Akakievich saw as he turned to extend an apology, was hovering with his nose very near the surface of the table at Akaky Akakievich’s left. He seemed not to have noticed the disturbance. There was no one on the opposite side of the man – in fact, there were no other chairs this far from the host, who sat, reveling, at the head of the table – and Akaky Akakievich privately thought that this, very possibly, was a fortunate thing. The man was dressed in such finery befitting to the most senior of clerks; his jacket was blue with velvet lapels (and here Akaky Akakievich felt a sudden pang of longing for his own coat, which he pictured in his mind, luminous in the dark of the crowded cloak room), and at each wrist a gold button shone, engraved with some complex figure Akaky Akakievich could not make out. But beneath the fine jacket the man wore an unpressed shirt, half-unbuttoned and revealing a pneumonic chest, lined with blue veins and thin white hairs, curly, the same kind that made a ring on the crown of his head. His nose, so close to the table, was crooked and made no pretense of being otherwise; it might have been the nose of an old warhorse, the worse for the wear, or else the inherited nose of an unhappy line of people. Why it hung so perilously close to the table, Akaky Akakievich could hardly guess. The man was gazing directly in front of his nose, where there was nothing, as far as Akaky Akakievich could see, beside a small green-gray stain on the linen cloth. And all through supper, even after the pastries were served (Akaky Akakievich’s heart leapt at the torte, which was more extravagant than he could have imagined), the man kept his head bowed over the spot. He did not say a word, even when Akaky Akakievich made some good-natured remark on the weather to-night; but he kept up a low monotonous groan, which rumbled as a low tenor to the clinking of toasts and chirping of ladies in gowns. When he was red in the face after his second glass of champagne, Akaky Akakievich clapped the man on the back, saying Sir, what an evening!; and the man rumbled more loudly than ever, before suddenly dropping off to sleep in front of a bowl of prune-and-ice cream pudding.
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In the style of Katherine Mansfield and based on Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling”
On those trips to the market, Olenka could scarcely contain herself for joy. Of course she related as much as she could of the schoolwork, the teachers, the pupils at lunch, all that Sashenka had told her; but the raptures she felt over the boy! “He is the handsomest child in all of Russia!” she would cry to the ladies. “When he sleeps it is like – like – ah well!” And she would drift off into some private reverie unknown to the other women, for whom she felt a small, sad pain of sympathy, for certainly they could not feel such joy as hers (His pale lashes as he dreamt so soundly – oh, he would grow to have such a lovely wife!). Then she would think of her younger years and the days after each husband’s death – of how quickly she would exchange one set of opinions for another. It was too much! Frightfully silly! And oh, how the neighbors always responded in such surprise! Now this formlessness had gone, and such meaning glowed at her from every dawn, converging in some untoppable bliss, full of light, which she could hardly describe. It was all she could do to keep from falling into a swoon as she looked out upon a table of plums; she thought of Sashenka and the great feeling of meaningfulness swelled in her chest and the light of the sun grew whiter, and –
Oh, if I could be such a mother…!, she thought, and the thought slid over her with heaviness in the heat of the day.
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In the style of Franz Kafka
It is lately all the vogue to style one’s hair flat against the face, long and hanging straight like so many dying blades of grass. It used to be otherwise; fortunes were dispensed to build hair to the most towering glory; but today that is all quite distasteful. Therefore when Milena Procházková wandered into the salon one weekend afternoon her throat was tight with fear; she wore her brown blouse not even fully buttoned up, for the strain would have been too much, though her mother had wagged her finger upon her leaving at what she thought was provocativeness in a young woman’s heart; though in fact Milena Procházková was the whitest flower among all her girlish peers, and her thoughts were crowded with things that indeed could be said unto the open air but then, of course, no one but she herself would understand. She sat down in the whirling chair at the furthest wall, where the mirror was fogged by the boiler in the closet room next-door; and she asked the stylist, who wore a violet streak in the fringe across his forehead and a silver earring in his nose, to be blindfolded before the procedure went forth. Of course the stylist could not produce a blindfold, but wrapped Milena Procházková in a great black cape of crinkled cloth; and ducked her small head into a shining black tub, which was hard and full of hot water; the shampoo scrubbed into her scalp smelled too fat and too sweet, as if it had been overfed on all the ripest flowers; dreadfully, the bottom of Milena Procházková’s stomach turned. After some minutes with her head pressed to the tub, during which the girl kept her eyelids pressed tightly shut, and you could see her tiny eyelashes flutter, the stylist pulled a sopping head from the black bowl and produced a black spider comb from the pocket of his apron. In a whisk he dragged it through the dripping hair, intent to dispose of the knots that were collected at the nape of the neck; and in a sudden swallow of air the bundle of hair dropped to the floor, where it lay in a diminutive brown mound; and the eyelashes squirmed in unease as Milena Procházková’s pallid face glowed bare in the fogged-up mirror.
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In the style of Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”
Lisa, Praskovya Fëdorovna’s daughter, who very much resembled her mother, sat with her fiancé outside the door to Ivan Ilych’s room. Impatient and enamored, she pulled at the thread of her evening gown while casting a faint smile toward Fëdor Petrovich. It was evidently a meaningful gesture, and no words passed between them for some minutes. Lisa heaved one sigh then another from her bosom, where a fly soon after landed, a black speck on plump and uncolored flesh. The girl gave a shout and waggled her fingers in front of her chest, moving them in an uncoördinated waltz before the vulgar wings. Fëdor Petrovich made to slap the fly from her chest, but Lisa shrieked at the assault; in any case, Fëdor Petrovich had a weak hand and was loath to upset the curls in his hair, which indeed had just been set earlier in the day. On the whole it was an unpleasant circumstance: neither could resolve the question, quite vexing, of how to rid themselves of the fly and yet avoid its death. After a moment the insect flew away. “How terrible,” Lisa fairly sang, straightening her gown. “What a loathsome sight!” And she commenced to speak on the opera and what a lovely soprano voice Sarah Bernhardt undoubtedly had.
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A continuation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”
All of this – the account of Akaky Akakievich and the stolen overcoat and the corpses – was transcribed in a neat, straight hand by a young and tidy clerk working in a certain government department, as we had agreed to call it. The clerk, being fond of precision, was known for his zealous and unbending work, and we can take it in good faith that not even a pronoun was altered. How fantastic reality can be! With something like tenderness, the clerk carried the quire of white government paper to the corner of the office and bent over, filing it away in a drawer. His superiors did not applaud him, but neither did they laugh; the clerk smiled inwardly at how fine the document had turned out. The ink bottle on the desk needed filled. All in all, one thought, it made for an interesting, nice little case.
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On Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf had an odd eccentric appearance that made people stare at her in the street. [How quickly we make to read people! The human face holds more than a surfeit of mystery for us.] Her writing may have been her double – unsteady in its logic, bending the form of truth as fiction had known it before – square plots, shapely people, a scheduled time for tea then off off! to the next appointed activity in a sequential beginning-middle-end. No, in Virginia’s writing it is the Spring; and each word is a blossom in the mouth: The woods flit and fly – in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses (115). In her own word, primroses – the beauty that is at once unmistakable but oh, so delicate! However can a petal fall if not by a phrase, so tragic, dropping some flickering note of despair? Well, my world’s done for! And there is the fall of an egg, the crack of a shell. What do I stand on? What do I know?… Who am I? Life’s bare as bone (121). Is it possible to give words to sorrow, the sorry thought of existence when we uncover how wrong we’ve been! – hardly it would seem, but Virginia crawls inside a hollow bone and lets the whiteness speak grief enough. Or if it is not the bone, then it may be the grey thread of a patchy glove, the green cardboard boxes of too many solemn rooms, the spot on the window of a passing train – the thousands of domesticities, aglow with meaning to a narrator drunk on the epiphany of gesture, the poetry of prose. Who could be such a fine interpreter of glance as she: such an expression of unhappiness on the poor woman’s face – and there is almost a symbol of human destiny with it (112)! The poor woman never knew such valor. And here is the beauty in it! When the forgotten or the squalid attain so much loveliness of words, what transformation ensues! – some indelible combination of the reproach of the world and the splendor of rhododendrons, a fling of red and white, for which [we] starve and strive (118). It is munificence most singular, the hum of a perfectly spun phrase. Surely Miss March – whose secret world we would never have known! – sees the truth in this. But why does the beauty of everyday things escape us so often? We do not find the meaning in them. Yet Virginia must and her characters may follow, with all the perception of a writerly writer’s creation of voice. And it is translated to us, but at first we think it is an inscrutable form – for what winding paths do these phrases traverse! Maybe this is the thing – so many hyphens, such tangled thought will give us pause. Meaning, deep and shining, is not at once clear to us. And if we have no recourse to meaning, what is there? Our ears linger on the cadence of phrase and we swallow, not without joy and not without fear, the thick and real beauty of white light [that] splutters and pours, plate-glass windows, chrysanthemums, milk carts at the door (121). The wor[l]d makes such poetry – and how! A bird squawks outside my window – and there is great sadness in it. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves (121). A place where the littlest thing is not too crude. There is ripeness in every thing; the flowers in our hair, unnoticed till now, scatter to the wind – by the shudder in our bones.
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An alternate ending to Anton Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog”
The weight of Anna Sergeyevna’s young body collapsed onto Gurov, as she went on weeping. He was faced toward the window, over which the thick green curtains were drawn but for a two-inch bar in the middle. Now apart from the small whimpers, there was silence in the room for many minutes; and Gurov stroked his fingers along her back again and again. Meanwhile he gazed ahead, at the thin bar between the curtains, and the night outside showed as a solid strip of black. The solidness of the sight affected him, and there came to his hands a quick, frenetic rhythm, which was danced out irrationally on Anna Sergeyevna’s back. As the minutes passed, the dance kept on and his gaze grew ever more fixed, while the black bar of the window seemed to expand, vaulting horizontally and then through a perpendicular, resolving into some three-dimensioned form of black light. Its surface was glassy and Gurov’s reflection was shining there, hovering monstrously against the dark. With a gasp he saw himself then, the large white eyes clouded by vanity, the dancing fingers afflicted by a restless curse. The black figure grew and grew, and the pale eyes swelled, magnified on the wall.
Suddenly, a gust of wind blew by, rattling the window. In a shock of agitation the black form exploded to pieces, the pale eyes disappeared; and in a tinkle a silver tea platter crashed to the floor from the corner; and in the heaviness of the burst, Gurov’s fingers went limp on the woman’s back.
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In the style of Eleanor, a character in Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”
For me, a trifle. Miss Woolf has made little show of the inner life. But why should I mind, really? In the end, it is a practical affair. Doesn’t one brood on the internal too intensely, for too long? The author must have some sense about her. It is silly to speculate when there are children to be tended to, and when history is ghosts lying under the trees. I spoke my memory aloud to Simon, and that was all that was needed. Five minutes squared away, by my watch. I don’t allow myself to linger for too long on the more precious moments, for what end is there? It is all that remains of a happy existence, these lovelier memories… how thoughtless to dull them by overuse. In any case, Simon inhabits his own world sometimes – what could he see of the water-lilies? It is economy. My words are like feathers on the air; shadows of words are even paler. Yes, she is a practical one, if a bit enamored of snails, and I don’t grudge her for it. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert. Now, if you don’t mind, I must be getting along – it is late and really I must be putting the children to bed.
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In the style of Katherine Mansfield’s “Carnation”
On languorous days like this one, Alice spent the afternoon lolling in the grass. It was an idle time for the town, in this middle part of the country, and if a war had ended only four years back, now there was a great blanket of stillness falling over everything. Alice plucked a flower from the grass. Girls her age were fond of making daisy chains, to use as crowns in their hair. Alice found the custom especially distasteful and now, thinking no particular thought, she crushed the stem, a pale green curve, beneath her thumb. The heat of the air weighed heavy. Lying on her back, Alice licked her fingers, chubby and white, and pulled the flower to pieces; she was eating the thing petal by petal, imagining to herself little red explosions as each blossom fluttered down to her tongue.