Leah, New Hampshire: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams
Contents
Introduction by John Irving
Author’s Note
Goose Pond
The Skier’s Progress
The Survivors
Horned Pout Are Evil
The Snows of Minnesota
Paranoia
The Buck in Trotevale’s
The Orphan’s Wife
All Trades, Their Tackle and Trim
Voices
The Fisherman Who Got Away
The Old Dancers
Ancient Furies
The Voyage of the Cosmogon
Certainties
Introduction
by John Irving
THOMAS WILLIAMS was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1926; at age ten, he went with his divorced mother to New York City, where he attended Staten Island Academy, the Little Red School House on Bleecker Street and the High School of Music and Art; at fourteen, he moved to New Hampshire, where he died of cancer in 1991. Except for Army service in Japan and university studies in Chicago, Iowa City and Paris, Mr. Williams was very much a New Hampshire man, as his Author’s Note to this collection attests. (Leah, New Hampshire, is a fictional town; its denizens—old-timers, newcomers and tourists—and its enduring landscape are the common ingredients these stories share.) Although I was born in New Hampshire and didn’t move away from the so-called Granite State for twenty years, and I have since lived in Vermont for twenty more, I would never profess to understand New Englanders as Tom Williams understood us.
He was an outdoorsman, a sportsman, a hunter and a fisherman, a conservationist and an environmentalist—and a man who built his impressive house of wood and stone with his own hands (and with the help of his wife). He was a college professor, too—my personal favorite at the University of New Hampshire. But if he would correct you when your language was vague, he was also instructive during a walk in the woods: he knew what sort of moss or fern you were standing on, and the name of the tree you were leaning against; he knew the birds and the animals, and—astonishingly—he was also one of those men who understood how mechanical things work. He knew engines, he knew tools, he knew guns.
He was contemptuous of those of us who drive a car without knowing the first thing about what makes it run; he was outspoken on the subject of people who toy with firearms without knowing enough about how to handle them; he was critical of those would-be athletes who shamelessly sport the newest and best equipment but who cannot control their skis or deliver a second serve with authority. This definitive lore (of all he had taken the trouble to learn, in the most careful and correct detail) is vitally a part of his fiction. But what I admire most in these stories from Leah, New Hampshire—and in Mr. Williams’s novels—is how much he knew about human nature, and how much he fathomed psychologically about people. And what Tom Williams knew especially well was what is darkest and most hidden in us; I don’t mean only the Conradian fascination with abomination, which Mr. Williams brilliantly explores and consistently exposes under a fresh light, but also those telling revelations of our smaller weaknesses—our unspoken lies to ourselves, our most cleverly concealed embarrassments, the hypocrisies we successfully hide from others. In this sense is Mr. Williams a wonderfully old-fashioned writer: he reveals moral truths about ourselves; he makes discoveries about us, of an often painful nature.
I don’t mean to imply that he is a cruel writer, for he writes about what is violent and deceitful in our nature out of the most passionate affection for humanity—even for our darkest side. And he is also old-fashioned as a fiction writer in this sense: real characters populate his stories, and they develop and become known to us—much better understood by us, finally, than are most of the people we actually know. This revelation of character occurs in the context of a narrative that gains momentum; in other words, he is that dinosaur among contemporary writers of fiction, an actual storyteller, and in these stories something of real interest actually happens. In short, these stories are about something. They are not merely exercises of “voice,” or other self-conscious displays of the writer’s ability with the language. Mr. Williams’s ability with the language is considerable, but it is—quite correctly—the content of his writing that impresses; he doesn’t need to show off with words because he’s interested in showing us bigger things. (Even so, and even in the offhand context of his Author’s Note, Thomas Williams shows us how comfortably the language yields to him: “In the fall,” he writes simply, “the deer are the color of the spaces between the trees.” )
In describing the fictional landscape of Leah, Williams writes: “Around the town, on old asphalt and dirt roads, are tar-paper shacks, and moldy house-trailer slums; in New Hampshire the brush and the trees grow quickly and screen these places from those whose theories, political, economic, and aesthetic, would be damaged by too much ugliness.” That human weakness, to hide “ugliness,” is a theme with him, and Williams was no fan of “theories” ; as for literary theory, he called it “an interesting game in itself, all but separate from the problems a writer tries to solve. Theory can be dangerous to art because theorists have a tendency toward dogma.” His work is altogether rational, more pragmatic than theoretical; it is as planned and painstakingly crafted as a good stone wall—the kind without mortar. Williams liked stone walls; upon discovering this evidence of human habitation in woods now reclaimed by brush and trees, he speaks of these walls as “a reminder of mortality, of the dogged energy of the dead.”
And this is the quality of his writing to me: lucid, terse, unfancy, which well befits a man who always knew what he meant—Tom Williams was never merely groping for ideas. He writes with inspired common sense.
The oldest of these stories, and surely the most often anthologized, is “Goose Pond,” originally published in Esquire in 1957; more than half of Williams’s stories were published in Esquire or The New Yorker from the late 1950s through the 1960s. “Goose Pond” is an absolutely perfect short story about a fifty-eight-year-old man trying to come to terms with his wife’s death, his sudden loneliness and his awareness of his own eventual death; this is serious stuff, but written with an exquisitely light touch.
Robert Hurley’s children think that their father needs to be rescued from his loneliness and grief, but it is not the company of his children or his grandchildren that Hurley needs or seeks; he wants to be more alone, to reassure himself that there is a rightness to this passage from life to death that he has just experienced. On a trek into the woods, Hurley kills a deer with a bow and arrow; then he beds down for the night near a pond where the geese bed down, too. “Each one its own warm life deep in the cold sky, and they called to each other, kept close and on course together, facing with disciplined bravery that impossible journey.” Thus Robert Hurley finds the correctness of life’s essentially “impossible journey” that he is looking for.
The newest of these stories, and the last short story Tom Williams wrote before he died, is “The Voyage of the Cosmogon,” which is published for the first time in this collection. The story will remind the reader of an old New Yorker story also collected here: “The Snows of Minnesota.” In that earlier story, Williams describes the painful relocation of a fifth-grade boy from Minnesota to New Hampshire. His parents are extremely sympathetic characters, but the lonely boy nonetheless feels homeless; following a huge snowstorm, he constructs an elaborate snow fort, a secret network of tunnels under the snow, which his father correctly recognizes as the ten-year-old’s attempt to rebuild his life in Minnesota. But in “The Voyage of the Cosmogon” the world has darkened; this time the relocated boy is an eighth-grader, and his mother, a single parent, is not sympathetic—she’s a woman of sluttish insens
itivity engaged in a sordid affair with a married policeman.
The fragility of life is thematic in many of these stories, perhaps best described in a former Saturday Evening Post story from the 1960s, “The Old Dancers,” in which a shy, elderly couple—a second marriage for both—attempt to cope with the woman’s minor illness, requiring only a medical examination and a small surgical operation; she considers both an invasion of her privacy. “Each had lived too long in a house of shouting and tears, and now they were careful of each other, careful about such things as nakedness, and the shutting of doors.”
In one of the newer stories, “The Fisherman Who Got Away,” this fragility is felt even in the act of catching a fish. “His rod quivered—a snag or a hit. A fish, he knew as he picked it up, because it moved a little to the side, undulant, like a heartbeat, a small spasm of opinion.” Even from the fish’s point of view, life is fragile. “Beneath the water the cold muscles fought for life against this fragile extension of his touch. How sickening it must be to be pulled by the invisible—like having a fit, epilepsy, a brain spasm. What did the fish think pulled him so hard, and what part of him said no?”
But the reader can never assume that lugubriousness lies at the heart of Williams’s thinking; the humor and the irony are broader than that, and often best glimpsed in his precise introduction of minor characters. In “Voices,” the main character’s mother is supporting “a young man she’d met at an Arthur Murray Dance Studio, a dance instructor named Stavros whose arms were raw from the abrading operations necessary to remove the tattoos he had decorated himself with in an earlier, less classy life.…She’d bought Stavros a business he’d been interested in, a series of ancient popcorn vending machines, the kind with a bare light bulb to keep the popcorn warm, in rundown Washington, D.C., movie houses. The problem was crickets, which liked popcorn and invaded the machines. It was disconcerting to patrons when they felt the frantic soft bodies of crickets in their hands, or mouths.”
In “The Skier’s Progress,” Williams describes a local ski hero who preys upon unhappily married women and young, inexperienced girls; he writes: “On the back of his electric-blue Bogner stretch pants there can be found a dark circle as big as a dime; a few days ago, at a party, he sat on a fragment of Vienna sausage. He knows the spot is there, and he is a little worried about the direction in which he turns. It seems to him that there is always something he half tries to conceal—his bit-ten fingernails, the little spot on his pants. He has resigned himself to such nagging imperfections, and if he thought too much about them he might realize that they reflect his own opinion of his immortal soul.…Like many libertines, he believes in the existence of another race of human beings, so different from himself—the ones who are faithful and honorable, to whom love and sex are exquisitely the same, who stand immaculate in the sight of heaven. He feels that somehow he has been excluded from this race, and that he could no more enter it than he could grow wings.”
In another story, a man who feels guilty for his intention to marry a younger woman contemplates “a past that included some dangerous experiments with ugliness, and too much indifference to the coldness and cruelty of the world” ; he marries her anyway, of course—and he continues to feel guilty. (The story, “The Orphan’s Wife,” although it is as well written as the other stories collected here, is my least favorite; it feels too big and cumbersome to be a short story at all—it reads more like the unfinished business of a novel in progress. But perhaps it stands out to me in this respect only because the other stories are so very fine.)
In a story about a fiction writer, Williams confesses to the familiar fear that writers have of their real-life subjects. “Like those who fear dogs only to excite in all dogs an immediate, aggressive affection, I seem doomed to be the chosen confessor of those who have systematized their delusions. I wonder if they know how much they frighten me.” (This story was published in Esquire under the title “Paranoia,” but it is actually an excerpt from Williams’s National Book Award-winning novel, The Hair of Harold Roux.) The surprise in the story is that the writer is more to be feared than his subjects. “We use each other, the materials of reality, our experiences, everything at all in our ’encapsulated delusional systems.’ Even in my apprehension I sense my kinship with G., and cannot wholly condemn his mad attempt to make his own satisfying order out of chaos. I, too, am driven by a similar horror vacui. Though I would call my work by another name, I will use G. and all the rest for my own purposes, use them coldly and without mercy, more coldly than their own warm needful selves could ever understand.”
A New Yorker story from the 1960s, “The Survivors,” is also excerpted from a novel—in this case, Whipple’s Castle. (When Williams died, he was at work on a novel about David Whipple, the young protagonist of Whipple’s Castle; David had moved away from Leah. In the unfinished novel, David Whipple is in his sixties; he is moving back to New Hampshire.) “The Survivors” explores “the irrational guilt that all survivors feel.” David’s best friend was killed in a bicycle accident when they were both schoolboys; now a grown man, David confronts the silence that endures between himself and his best friend’s father. “We stood there in a kind of deadlock, looking at each other. Then, with tolerance and complicity, we slid our soft glances apart.”
And several stories pursue the justification of hunting, or killing game; it is a subject that Williams worried over all his life. He never picks easy targets; he is not merely creating those knee-jerk Bambi-lovers who see the killing of any wild animal through tear-glazed, Disneyesque eyes. Rather, he picks good arguments against himself; then he comes down hard, in favor of the killing. The least impressive of these stories is “All Trades, Their Tackle and Trim,” in which Williams seems to be deliberately baiting the anti-hunters among his readers. (In another story, a character says, “I am not a snake-poker” ; in this story, Williams is clearly poking a snake.) The best of these arguments-within-a-story is incomparable, although Williams is slightly disparaging of “The Buck in Trotevale’s” in his Author’s Note, in which he calls the story “not wrong, but slightly odd” ; he goes on to say that the story “approaches sentimentality, the death of force.” But to me it is from this proximity to sentimentality that the story derives its dangerous ambition, its uncomfortable reality. It is my personal favorite among these stories, and it pokes a lot of snakes by creating a so-called moral certainty and giving it stunning, symbolic expression; then, always subtly, the story undermines the exact same “certainty.”
In a story titled “Certainties,” Mr. Williams concludes: “There are few dark places left on our maps, and we need that dark, if only to leave behind us all our rigid, belittling geometries, signs, and boundaries—certainties that diminish us, that tell us by the numbers exactly where we are, and that things are merely what they are, not what they can seem.” The power of these stories from Leah, New Hampshire, derives from the “dark places” that Thomas Williams so skillfully uncovers; yet we never feel diminished by these stories—instead we feel remarkably whole, completely illuminated. Mr. Williams has shown us more than our ugliness; he has also revealed those passions and misgivings that make us worthy of each other’s sympathy.
Author’s Note
LEAH IS an imaginary town in the State of New Hampshire, a state that can be cruel, especially to its poor, or sick, or old. In its public, or collective, stance, it can act as a skinflint and a buffoon among its neighbors. Its people, however, like most Americans, can be decent and generous if, for a moment, they forget dogma, forget “conservatism,” and sanctimony, and the myths of an imaginary history. To me Leah quite often seems to be a real town in an imaginary state I have to prove over and over again in order to believe in its beauty and its paradoxes. Given the land, the history, the strange politics, the town settles into its valley beside its river and, at least for me, is there.
Right now, at one o’clock in the afternoon, I see the mountain, the lake, the wild brook in the woods, the October light that
is nearly level as it crosses the valley. The famous colors have gone, and the old golden ones are going. Then, in a week or so, the hills will be the color of gray branches tinged by purplish winter buds, with green-black pyramids here and there meaning spruce or white pine, balsam fir or hemlock. The names of the trees are still known in Leah. In the fall the deer are the color of the spaces between the trees.
Leah was once mostly field and pasture, but now it is nearly all woods below its ledgy mountains. In the woods you find stone walls, always a reminder of mortality, of the dogged energy of the dead. Most New Hampshire towns are large geographical areas, with a center—a village—somewhere in the vastness of the township. Some towns haven’t any land at all, like the town of Cascom, which is a small center within the township of Leah. Or Northlee, which is the county seat in Saxon County, and is also within the township of Leah. That’s where the two colleges are—Northlee State College, formerly a teachers college, and Northlee College, which is private, famous, and expensive. Northlee is five miles north of Leah, but in Leah.
I can’t remember when I decided to use Leah for the name of a town, or exactly why, except that as a child I had the dangerous Protestant habit of reading the Bible without much knowledge, without exactly knowing what the Bible was. Jacob cheated his brother Esau, the hunter, out of his birthright. Jacob, the smooth one. Jacob was tricked by Laban into marrying Leah, thinking he would get beautiful Rachel. Leah, as the Lord saw, was hated. As I remember they were all selfish and vicious, and the Lord’s pronouncements didn’t make much ethical sense either. My father, a Midwesterner, looked into his own heart and found goodness, so his God, like him, was gentle and fair-minded. My own more Eastern revelation I found in the tale of the soldier who, with the best of intentions, steadied the Ark of the Covenant and was struck dead for his presumption.
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