Collected Stories. Carol Shields

and impossible birds sitting in branches.

      I can’t help wondering if these prospective buyers, these people looking for God only knows what, if they’ll enter this room and feel something of his fragile presence alive in a fragile world.

      Well, we shall see. We shall soon see.

       The Metaphor Is Dead—Pass It On

      “THE METAPHOR is DEAD,” bellowed the gargantuan professor, his walrus mustache dancing and his thundery eyebrows knitting together rapaciously. “Those accustomed to lunching at the high table of literature will now be able to nosh at the trough on a streamlined sub minus the pickle. Banished is that imperial albatross, that dragooned double agent, that muddy mirror lit by the false flashing signal like and by that even more presumptuous little sugar lump as. The gates are open, and the prisoner, freed of his shackles, has departed without so much as a goodbye wave to those who would take a simple pomegranate and insist it be the universe.

      “Furthermore,” trumpeted the cagey professor, warming to his thesis and drumming on the lectern, “the dogged metaphor, that scurfy escort vehicle of crystalline simplicity, has been royally indicted as the true enemy of meaning, a virus introduced into a healthy bloodstream and maintained by the lordly shrewdness of convention. Oh, it was born innocently enough with Homer and his wine-dark sea (a timid offering, perhaps, but one that dropped a velvet curtain between what was and what almost was). Then came Beowulf, stirring the pot with his cunning kennings, and before you could count to sixteen, the insidious creature had wiggled through the window and taken over the house. Soon it became a private addiction, a pipe full of opium taken behind a screen—but the wavelet graduated to turbulent ocean, and the sinews of metaphor became, finally, the button and braces that held up the pants of poesy. The commonest object was yoked by adulterous communion with unlike object (bread and wine, as it were, touching the salty lips of unreason like a capricious child who insists on placing a token toe in every puddle).

      “Initially a toy of the literati,” the fiery professor cried, “the metaphor grew like a polyp on the clean chamber of poetry whose friendly narrative lines had previously lain as simply as knives and forks in a kitchen drawer and whose slender, unjointed nouns, colloquial as onions, became puffed up like affected dowagers, swaying, pelvis forward, into a Victorian parlor of cluttered predicates, where they took to sitting about on the embroidered cushions of metonymy and resting their metered feet on quirky mean-spirited oxymorons.

      “Once established they acquired an air of entitlement, the swag and flounce and glitter of the image boxed within another image, one bleating clause mounting another, sometimes marinated in irony, other times drenched in the teacup of whimsy. Grown fat with simile and the lace of self-indulgence, the embryo sentence sprouted useless tentacles and became an incomprehensible polyhedron, a glassine envelope enclosing multiple darting allusions that gave off the perfume of apples slowly rotting in a hermit’s cryptic cellar. There followed signs of severe hypochondria as these verbal clotheshorses stood contemplating one another and noting the inspired imbroglio lodged beneath each painted fingernail. The bell had clearly sounded. It was time to retreat.

      “And now,” the professor essayed, stabbing the listening air, “like light glancing off a bowling ball, the peeled, scrubbed and eviscerated simplicity of language is reborn. Out onto the rubbish heap goes the fisherman’s net of foxy allusions. A lifeboat has been assigned to every passenger—and just in time too—and we are once again afloat on the simple raft of the declarative sentence (that lapsed Catholic of the accessible forms) and sent, shriven and humble, into orbit, unencumbered by the debris of dusty satellites, no longer pretending every object is like another; instead every object is (is, that frosty little pellet of assertion that sleeps in the folds of the newly minted, nip-wasted sentence, simple as a slug bolt and, like a single hand clapping, requiring neither nursemaid to lean upon nor the succor of moth-eaten mythology to prop it up). With watercolor purity, with soldierly persistence and workmanlike lack of pretence, the newly pruned utterance appears to roll onto the snowy page with not a single troubling cul-de-sac or detour into the inky besmudged midnight of imagery.

      “But, alas,” the ashen professor hollowly concluded, “these newly resurrected texts, for all their lean muscularity (the cleanly gnawed bones of noun, the powerful hamstrings of verb) carry still the faulty chromosome, the trace element, of metaphor—since language itself is but a metaphoric expression of human experience. It is the punishing silence around the word that must now be claimed for literature, the pure uncobbled stillness of the caesura whose unknowingness throws arrows of meaning (palpable as summer fruit approaching ripeness) at the hem of that stitched under-skirt of affirmation/negation, and plants a stout flag once and forever in the unweeded, unchoreographed vacant lot of being.

      “And now, gentle people, the chair will field questions.”

       A Wood (with Anne Giardini)

      THE OTHER EVENING Ross AND STANLEY arrived at the rehearsal hall in time to see Elke go through her violin concert to be performed at the end of the month. It has taken all these years for recognition to come, though she began composing when she was sixteen. How serene she looked in the middle of the bare stage. But she was wearing that damned peasant skirt; Ross had begged her not to dress like that. It made her look like a twelve-tone type. It made her look less than serious.

      “Isn’t she magnificent!” Stanley said, breathless. “The coloring! The expression! Like little gold threads pouring out.”

      “She’ll never be ready,” Ross said. “She should have been working all summer.”

      “You’re hard on her. Don’t be hard on her. She’s human. She needed to get away.”

      “We’re all hard on each other, all the Woods are hard on each other. Papa used to say, ‘A Wood will only settle for standards of excellence. A Wood asks more of himself than he asks of others.’”

      Stanley hadn’t thought of poor Papa for some months, and now he joined in. ‘“A Wood knows that work is the least despised of human activities.”’

      “Shhhh,” Ross said. “She’s starting her Chanson des Fleurs.”

      “‘A Wood values accomplishment above all,’” said Stanley, who, now that he had started, couldn’t stop. “Shhhh.”

      The first searching notes of the song were spirited from the instrument. Elke heard each note as a reproach. She hadn’t yet seen her two brothers in the back row; the lights at the top of the stage were on, blinding her. The song was coarse and coppery, not as it sounded when she wrote it. Why did she write it? How could she expect substance to come out of nothing?

      The violin dug uncompromisingly into the soft flesh of her neck and chin. Today the bow seemed malicious and sharp. These benign forms—she had let them take her over and become something else. The song, mercifully, ended, and so did her dark thoughts.

      “Bravo! Encore!” Stanley’s voice rang out. Was he here then? If only they’d shut off the lights. Why would they need them on so long before the actual concert? Today wasn’t even a real rehearsal. How has Stanley tracked her down? If only it could be hoped that he hadn’t brought Ross.

      “Stanley?” Her wavery voice. It was a good thing she hadn’t been trained as an actress. “Was that you, love?”

      At the restaurant Elke was drinking red wine instead of white because Ross said it was more calming for her; she could scarcely afford to have one of her spells with the concert so near at hand. And only one glass, said Ross, then she must go home and get a good night’s sleep.

      Stanley watched her closely, thinking how regal she was. The long Wood nose. The Wood eyes. An almost-Wood chin, but less resolute than his or Ross’s, which was perhaps a good thing.

      “Well,