Stories that cry from the heart

Press, 11 January 1986, Page 18

Stories that cry from the heart

Heart Attack, and other atoriea. By Joy Cowley. Hodder and Stoughton, 1985. 133 pp. $16.95. (Reviewed by Owen Marshall)

“The heart cries out for the past. The mind remembers the inconvenience of it. The heart says, give me the ecstasy. The mind says, what about the pain?” So speaks Dr Varadan in Joy Cowley’s story ‘All About Love.” It indicates more of the real concern of her collection than does the title story which is one of the less successful.

Nevertheless, that title is well and deliberately chosen to represent the selection as a whole. Cowley herself says that her stories begin “with an attack of the heart,” and that “the intellect can know little about them until the work is finished.” Janet Frame’s collection of stories “You Are Now Entering The Human Heart” comes to mind. There are many interesting comparisons to be made of intention, technique, and achievement between these two writers, but this review is not the place. Normally, I dislike an author’s prologue to either novel or short story collection. What the work itself does not have, the writer must trust to find within the reader, free from any promptings. And so often an introduction makes claims which the fiction itself is unable to confirm. Yet Cowley’s short prologue is interesting not so much for what she says of the stories, as for what she gives of herself. The element of prophecy for example is intriguing. She has found her stories to be premonitions, convincing her “that the artist is medium rather than creator.” In a

moving passage she describes how her story “The Silk” became in time a precise account of her own experience. “The Silk” is Cowley’s best-known story. It was first published in the New Zealand “Listener” in 1965, and has since been widely used in anthologies. I recall reading it in the first collection of Listener short stories. It was one of the best in distinguished company. “The Silk” emobides most of Cowley’s strengths as a writer and a few of her faults. How surely she opens a story at its centre: “When Mr Blackie took bad again that autumn both he and Mrs Blackie knew that it was for the last time.” At her best Cowley also has admirable skill with the apt, significant image: “Mr Blackie, on the other hand, settled into bed as gently as dust.” She has a command of local idiom which is completely assimilated into the pattern of language she employs. “The Silk” is a story of pathos, and succeeds because of the fine balance Cowley is able to maintain; the emotion is not shied away from, but not paraded either. It is understandable that she comments it has been the most influential of all her stories.

“The Kite,” with its wise simplicity; “Rural Delivery,” with its fine characterisation; “The Machinery of Dreams” (where is the jaunty photograph that accompanied its first publication in “The Summer Book 2?”) “God Loves You, Miss Rosewater,” (“... and the bumble bees growled in

the rows of broad bean flowers behind him.”) — these are excellent stories. It is not a surprise to learn that Cowley wished to be a painter, that influence is strong in her writing. She herself refers to the final story in this selection, “The Machinery of Dreams,” as “paintings of events in a year of my youth.” The artists’ eye is usually an asset to Cowley the writer, but it can be a weakness when indulged, as in “Apple Wine.” At times Cowley’s preoccupation with external description, her pursuit of subtleties of light and shade, colours and textures, are at the expense of other elements of the story and hinder the vital movement. The surface tension of the short story is different to that of the novel. There are also stories, “The Woman Next Door” is one, in which Cowley seeks to create moral indignation and fails because the targets are too blatantly identified; too easily assailed and defeated. This collection will be well received. The best of its stories are fine indeed, and accessible to a wide readership. I make no comment on its place in the modernist, post-modernist debate; that is often of less interest to writers and readers than to the critics. What is important is that a story works — that a spark is generated which can leap from one mind to another, whatever the dynamo may be. Joy Cowley remarks that children “can take the fiction of living and convert it to the truth of myth.” So too can writers.