Overton's Overture

This volume has not been easy. A few stories have been wonderful, but many have been narratively and ideologically frustrating. Today's story was perhaps the most challenging to finish. If this blog is unsuccessful at everything else, I hope, at the very least, it can provide an account of my relationship to each story. This is the final post for the volume dedicated to "Romance." The slipperiness of that categorization has provided us with tales of fraught love, impossible dedication to the sea, and idealizations of other people. Amidst the wide range it has been hard to find a through-line However, what I think links these tales together is a focus on the capacity of an individual to dedicate themselves to something beyond all expectations. In " The Star Spangled Manner " we learned of how Bill Emlow's negotiation of his British and American identity was used to help him find love with Lady Angela. In " The Token " Epes Calef's life

It’s about brevity. The compact form and the intensity of twists, turns and meaning in the short stories in this collection has given the sen of peeking into a life. Perspectives have changed, of course, but this second volume has relied on two major modes of dress. In some stories readers have been called out in the 2 nd person, in others the tale has been framed by one character speaking to another. Reading Overton’s stock of stories has become a part of my daily routine and it feels often that I am spending some time overhearing a conversation—listening to someone detail something they once heard or experienced. Sometimes I close the book and am furious, other times I’m perplexed. Usually, I am trying to think of what I could write here. "The Gilded Pheasant" by Stephen Morehouse Avery ( certainly not the same Steven Avery that was the focus of the Netflix series Making a Murderer ) imports that sense of overhearing and structures the story around it. If you were

It was all a dream. Whether those words make you think of the wisdom of Biggie or the famous ending to that towering work of German Expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), I've always been fond of the multiple possibilities encased the phrase. For most of my teenage years those words were my obnoxious response to friends who feared that I might spoil a movie or television show they hadn't seen:  "See so then Tony Soprano walks out of the room and…" "Don't say anything I've got the episode taped!" "Oh, it's all a dream." Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) That the concluding twist of a story could be the revelation that it was only (or that it was all) a dream is, at this point, so rote and hackneyed my response was always met with a raised eyebrow and a guffaw (in the light way akin to "foh.") Played on to the point of absurdity, the twist can now seem somewhat surprising, as it does in

Things were always going to be different when they looked back. It was not always clear how but in the midst of twenty-five years, life had changed and the friendship built between George Potter but his attorney continued to grow. Though the attorney worried about George’s social life, he was excited to participate in the 25 th anniversary celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Potter. He’d been there for their wedding and he would be there for this fete. George had set everything up—the event would look exactly as the wedding had a quarter of a century ago. George was still a bit romantic and his longing for the past coincided with his eagerness for the future. That wedding is the central conceit of Octavus Roy Cohen’s 3 page story "To Love and to Honor." A clinic in the economy of storytelling, the romantic engagements of George Potter are relayed through his friend and attorney who fills in all the details we need to know, and some that we don’t (George had a "very excelle

I’ve begun with firsts in the last two posts and I will continue that here. Today’s story is the first by a German author so far. Paul Heyse’s “The Fury” is a strange little tale that replays yesterday’s relationship between violence and sexual desire in more explicit detail. Though set in Naples “The Fury” reads like a gothic exploration of how two individuals with elaborate interior lives decide to be together. "The Fury" was first published in English as part of this collection from 1878 The seeming pitter-patter of the day is prolonged past the point of onomatopoeia. Turning from detail to detail, it appears that life is moving drab or slow but Heyse’s characters have internal lives overflowing with contradictions, questions and wonders. With a subdued style that still seems to have a kind of breadth, I was reminded of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest . Religious desire for salvation and the quotidian structuring of sensibility are topics for both Heyse

In the last post I expressed that my surprise at how long it took to find an author like Joseph Hergesheimer; in today’s post I am frustrated that only now—in the fifteenth post—have we come to the first story written by a woman.   “Purple and Fine Linen” was written by May Edginton, a British writer whose work Hollywood frequently adapted. Stars like Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur moved across the screen in the various cinematic translations of Edginton’s work which began in 1912 with the short Double Cross and ended in 1936 with The Manhattan Adventure . More than a dozen films had their story sourced from Edginton’s work. Accomplished directors like Frank Borzage worked on one film while Alfred Hitchcock was the art director for Dangerous Virtue , which began as a play by Edginton.  Unexpectedly but disturbingly it is hard to find information on Edington other than the most basic notations: she lived from 1883 to 1957. This lack of information i