“Words are our reflex. We spend our lives putting things into words,” says the narrator in Hortense Calisher’s “Little Did I Know.” (From Extreme Magic, a collection.) She recalls how, as a girl at college, “I was drunk on language, the way you see kids get on jazz at Birdland. I ran all over the pasture, wondering how I could ever eat all the books there were. … And the words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes, and hung them like bangles in my mind.”

Like all good fiction-writers, Miss Calisher puts something not only of herself but of all of us into her work. Few of us don’t remember that phase of youth. And we continue to recognize emotions as we read on, though they are less easily definable and have never, perhaps, been described before. The narrator is telling of the spring when she was really in love, “the last spring in which she really lived,” when she saw the lyricism of the season slowly ebb from the affair, until love at last came to an end because she couldn’t bear her young man’s literary point of view: “Why did he always have to remove himself from everything, from the most important things, by putting them into quotes!” Wryly, she rubs this in, knowing as she looks back that this is her sin, too: that it won’t be long before she outdoes Ben in the same offense. A day of crisis brings her to decision. She can support her distaste no longer, and writes to him, breaking everything off, after which:

I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was the holy time, a beautiful evening. A dusky wind was blowing, and the west was the color of a peach. … A few foghorns were sounding on the river, and I wondered idly whether I would ever be able to set down exactly the emotion that sound always called up in me—as I had tried and failed to do so many times before.

And after a while, as I leaned there, the words came, began to shimmer and hang in the air about me. … So I sat down at the desk again—what I wrote was published the next year. The world stretched all before me that evening, in profuse strains of unpremeditated—life. But I left the window, and began to write about it.

Writers all know this self-impatience, even self-disgust, this sense of estrangement from first-hand experience because we can’t help removing ourselves from things by putting them into quotes. Sometimes I wonder if other practitioners—painters or musicians—feel equivalent misgivings. Perhaps not: ours are intimately connected with words, and they don’t use those particular tools. Other writers have expressed the thought, though in very different form: Elizabeth Browning with “Yet half a beast is the great God Pan / To laugh, as he sate by the river, / Making a poet out of a man,” and Francis Thompson, “The poppy hangs in the wheat its head, / Heavy with dreams as that with bread.” But Hortense Calisher has evoked the old fear in fresh form and brought it home to us.

Ultimately, by the way, Miss Calisher herself succeeded in finding words for the emotion called up by foghorns on the river, in a story called “The Sound of Waiting.” (In the Absence of Angels, a collection.)

For such feats of evocation Hortense Calisher has sometimes been called a writer’s writer, an appellation that does not please her because it seems somehow limited, and that adjective certainly cannot be applied to her. It was her scope I noticed when I read her first published story, “The Box of Ginger” in the New Yorker in 1948. The style was unabashedly individual, the vocabulary was full; these were refreshing qualities at a time when most young writers, still in Hemingway’s thrall, were reining themselves in and holding themselves down, deliberately employing the most poverty-stricken language possible. Miss Calisher knew where she was going, but would not be hurried. To make her point she took the way that seemed best to her, no matter if it wasn’t a short cut. Impressed, I kept looking out for more of her work. A few years later I met her, when she came to England as the holder of a Guggenheim fellowship.

I may seem rather nervously eager to explain that I have met Miss Calisher. If so, it is because of an incident that occurred long ago in New York. I met Miss Amy Loveman of the Saturday Review, and asked her if she would permit me to review a certain book that was due to be published within the next few weeks. In England, I assure you, we often request the privilege of reviewing such books as we think might interest us because they treat of subjects within our fields of knowledge. Nobody in England, as far as I know, has ever suspected that such a request might mask depths of corruption, would-be logrolling and the like, but in America things are evidently different. This book, as I remember, was about Chinese villages: I was studying Chinese villages at the time. I swear to God I didn’t know the author. I swear I meant no harm. But Miss Loveman jumped as if stung, and glared at me.

“Oh dear no,” she said sharply. “We never let anyone review books they ask for.” And she hurried off as if to escape contagion.

Well, I resented it then and I still do, but the incident has left me rather jumpy, and I want to make it crystal clear that I admired Hortense Calisher’s work long before we met and became friends. Long before, Miss Loveman.

Miss Calisher, a tall, graceful woman with an individual type of beauty, much humor, and tremendous vitality, had told the committee—or whatever they are—who decide on the Guggenheim fellows that she wanted her grant so that she might go abroad for a year and think. This seemed a good reason to them, and they gave it to her. Away from household worries, she went back on her first resolve and began to write False Entry before she went home: there is a good deal about England in the novel. It is a long, tight book, remarkable for many reasons, not least that the narrator is a man. As far as I know no critic has complained that False Entry fails to convince on this particular point, but on other scores there were adverse comments by critics who—I think—didn’t like having to work at their reading. For False Entry is packed, and moves along so subtly that unless you pay close attention you lose the thread. It’s not the usual easy reading: and some people were puzzled by it. Others, however, were enthusiastically in favor.

The narrator, Pierre, is a man who has always been lonely. In a foreword he muses on his peculiar gift, an extremely retentive memory, and this passage gives the novel its title. “My own strange history of third-hand listening and remembering … has at least given me one bit of truth to hold for myself. … I know that there are certain people in the world … who either have never met me or do not even know that I exist, about whose lives I yet know enough, or so much, that I could claim entrance into their pasts with the most beautiful legalities of detail. … I am certain that every person, even the most commonplace, if he could but search and construe his memory, holds within his orbit of power at least one other person to whom he could do the same.” There are many people within the boy Pierre’s own orbit, including the Ku Klux Klansmen he trips up, months after they have committed an atrocity they had thought hidden, and the book gives a remarkable picture of the Southern town where these things are supposed to have happened.

J. N. Hartt in the Yale Review called False Entry a beautifully written novel. “Both in style and disclosure it is vivid and luminous, and its powerful moral argument is given an expression as dramatic as it is poetic.” The brilliant Brigid Brophy said, in London, “Hortense Calisher is an American of European sympathies, taut artistry and stupendous talent.” As for False Entry, “You can nibble round for twenty or thirty pages before you are suddenly in, hurtling through its exciting plot, dazzled by its delicacy and stunned by its sheer Dickensian creativeness.”

The author was seven years writing False Entry, which was published in 1962, and its slow development was due not only to its length but to the complications of life. She had to bring up two children; they are now adult. Even so, work is often interrupted by the necessity of earning: nowadays, she teaches, and at one point went to the Far East on one of those cultural errands sponsored by the State Department, lecturing as she moved about. Much of her consecutive work has been done at Yaddo. Moreover, her method is slow: she thinks everything out before putting it down, and does this so thoroughly that she scarcely ever finds it necessary to change what she has at last written. I find this hard to credit—I, who do my thinking as I write, and try out at least three versions of everything before I can be satisfied—but it is true. She could never have developed this technique if she hadn’t as retentive a memory as her creation Pierre.

“Oh yes, I remember everything,” she said when I asked about it. “I inherited that faculty from my father. My brother did, too. Total recall.”

As many of the stories indicate, she grew up in New York, spending her childhood in a large West Side apartment. Her father, a prosperous, kindly businessman, supported large numbers of relatives. The place was seldom free of his elderly sisters, cousins, and aunts, drinking coffee and eating cake while they shook their heads forebodingly over Mr. Calisher’s open-handedness.

“I went to the local public school,” said Miss Calisher. “PS 46, at 150th and Amsterdam. Parents object nowadays to their kids going more than five blocks to school, but we lived at 161st and Amsterdam, and I walked twelve blocks to school every day, and nobody thought anything of it. Moreover, it was what we would call today a desegregated district: a lot of Negroes lived in the neighborhood, but it wasn’t a talking point at all. Yet I was a very protected child. My mother wouldn’t let me play in the streets unless somebody was there to keep an eye on me.”

“You mean you didn’t grow up in the South?” I asked. She shook her head. “Then where did you get the material, the atmosphere, for that part of False Entry? I would have sworn—”

“Oh well, my father was a Southerner, and I was brought up on his stories. Like everyone on his side of the family he was a born storyteller, and I must have taken on a good deal of the color of it, the feeling, from the time I could understand words. We did visit his home town once. Then after I married, my husband had to go to Alabama and I went along, and stayed there a few weeks, right in the neighborhood I’ve described in the book. I remember that it didn’t seem strange even at the beginning: I felt as if I knew it.” She paused and reflected, smiling. “You know, it was perfectly natural that I should write. Most writers must come from anecdotal families like mine. There must be some little bug like me in all those groups, sitting there listening to everything at family dinners, tucking it away. That was me. My father and his relatives all had a great zest for storytelling, and of course I did, too. I wrote my first story when I was seven, in a notebook. One of the aunts sneered at it. … I’ve been angry with the critics ever since. They don’t know it, but they’re all my Aunt Mamie.” She gets angry, too, she confessed, at the blithe assumption made by many of those who edit book-review columns, that a female writer must automatically be reviewed by a female. “I’ve no objection, you understand, to woman reviewers themselves: it’s the attitude behind this custom that I resent. For a woman not to get a woman reviewer is a step up in the literary hierarchy.” After all, Aunt Mamie was a woman.

The gloomy prognostication of the aunts was justified when Mr. Calisher’s affairs fell on evil times. So did most other business affairs, of course—it was during one of the small depressions that preceded the large one of the ‘thirties—but to them, the family troubles were due solely to the crazy generosity of Hortense’s father. To earn enough money for college, Miss Calisher joined one of Macy’s training squads and held all kinds of jobs at that emporium, including the lofty position of section manager. Even after she started attending classes she worked at Macy’s as a Saturday salesman, but she hated it, and when a year was up she resigned.

“I told them nobody should work for a company unless he wanted to be president of it, and upon mature consideration I’d decided I didn’t want to be president of Macy’s. Then I rushed shrieking back to academe.” She had studied Latin for four years at Hunter College High School—hard work, but she feels now that it gave her a good grounding in English grammar. At Columbia Graduate School she took a master’s degree. Soon afterwards she married.

The big Depression hung over those early years. She and her husband and two children lived in a big, old-fashioned house in Nyack, near the river: on weekdays she commuted to Manhattan, at weekends tried to make up domestic arrears. She held various jobs, the longest lasting being that of feature-writer for a fashion magazine. It was a demanding schedule, but somehow she found the time and energy to write; her stories began appearing in the New Yorker in 1948, as I have said. The idea of False Entry was in her mind and she applied for the Guggenheim.

Miss Calisher’s second novel, Textures of Life, was greeted with general applause, a fact she considers with mixed feelings, since she knows she didn’t work half as hard on it as she had on the first book. However, the reason for the public’s preference is clear enough to other people: Textures treats of something immediately familiar to everyone, friction between generations. A boy and girl marry. The girl is in violent rebellion against her widowed mother in her snug little uptown flat. She herself, she is determined, will never be caught like the older woman in a mesh of things: she has tremendous scorn of property and security. Her young husband is of like mind, and resolves never to follow the usual ways of the world, getting and spending and so on, though his relations with his widowed father are not bad. Greenwich Village is too far uptown for these children. They find a loft in a nearly derelict building near the Battery, and move in there. But life brings responsibilities and involvements. Imperceptibly, they change. There is a child; the little girl develops a terrifying ailment. The young couple compromise, compromise further, until there comes a time when resentment against their elders has been burnt away. They are grown up. … I’m afraid that this outline makes the book sound like a soap-opera, but it isn’t one. Reading it, we feel that same delighted recognition that is one of Miss Calisher’s best effects, and are left with a tinge of regret for the light that failed.

Since finishing Textures, Miss Calisher has written several stories that are too long to be called short stories but are too short for novels: she calls them “novellas.” Of one of these, Extreme Magic, David Broff in the Saturday Review says “The rhythms of literary recognition are hard to fathom, but there seems little doubt that Hortense Calisher’s reputation is in the ascendancy.”

Recently she said, “I’m planning a new full-length novel about the reaction of people to the Two Cultures—you know what Sir Charles Snow has said about it, especially that bit about the second law of thermodynamics. But then, all my novels are about people and the Two Cultures.” She paused a moment, and added, “And so are everybody else’s.”

Ellen Cronan Rose (25 October 1975)

[In the following review of The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, Rose commends Calisher's narrative skill, but finds fault in her linguistic indulgences and emphasis on style over substance.]

An oeuvre, as every critic knows, is the body of an author’s work and in the autobiographical Herself, Hortense Calisher says that “if a writer’s work has a shape to it—and most have a repetition like a heartbeat—the oeuvre will begin to construct him.” The 36 short stories of Hortense Calisher constitute an oeuvre and construct a portrait of the artist that her seven novels and four novellas neither modify nor significantly augment. In collecting them, Arbor House has given us an opportunity to see and assess that portrait.

It appears, in cameo form, in the most engaging of the stories, “Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra,” originally published in Ladies Home Journal and first collected in Tale for the Mirror (1962). Ostensibly a fantasy, the story is a revealing self-portrait of the storyteller Hortense Calisher, here disguised as the diseuse Arietta Minot Fay. Mrs. Fay is the last of the Hudson River Minots, a family distinguished by its unique and now outmoded talent for entertaining. “No Minot had ever had a salary.” Instead they had attached themselves to various wealthy patrons as “jesters, fonctionnaires attending the private person only,” prized for their wit, intelligence, charm, that je ne sais quoi called style. The widowed Mrs. Fay, her bank account standing at a somber ＄126.35, needs to find a rich husband; the Minot in her requires him to be a patron as well, who will appreciate her talents.

Watching Arietta Fay identify and capture her patrons, we are watching Hortense Calisher at work. Like the Minots, Calisher is “not a knave, beyond a certain French clarity as to the main chance.” She has entertained her patrons superbly for 25 years, perhaps because—like the Minots—she has “attached herself to honorable patrons” who read The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar and the best of the women’s magazines. Arietta Fay procures a patron and a subsistence by her uncanny tact as a storyteller. Calisher’s Collected Stories are a dazzling display of that tact at work.

The successful jester knows his patron, supplies his demand even before it is articulated. As Calisher says in Herself, “when you write under the likelihood that a magazine will take your work, you will not be able to prevent taking your tone from it.” Reading the Collected Stories, you can identify the wry sophistication and sardonic detachment of the New Yorker stories, the well-bred and tasteful sentimentality of those that flattered the readers of Mademoiselle and Charm. Always you are conscious of the general public, represented for me by the anonymous librarian who pasted on the flyleaf of Queenie her handwritten judgment that “Hortense Calisher always writes well.”

If Hortense-Arietta has an Achilles heel, it is just that. “Words!” she exclaims in “Little Did I Know,” another story with a diseuse heroine. “I was drunk on language. I collected words in all shapes and sizes, and hung them like bangles in my mind.” In Herself she admits that this may lead “to a rhetoric which, loving its own rhythms, may stray too far from sense,” as it does when, in “The Rabbi’s Daughter,” a baby gazes at us “with the intent, agate eyes of satisfaction.” What is agate about satisfaction? What is satisfying about agate?

This rhetoric endangers the bulk of Calisher’s fiction, the stories and novels representing “those flights from the subscribed-to-ordinary” that Calisher says are for her “the heights of literature.” There remains a small and precious residue. Even Arietta Fay must have had some private moments, when she wasn’t spinning tales for her patron.

“Imagination, which speaks in dithyramb, can never equal the rough, fell syllable of memory,” says the narrator of False Entry. Calisher’s tongue is restrained by the stringencies of memory in her autobiographical fictions, the Hester-Kinny Elkin stories that replicate her family, and the two novels, False Entry and The New Yorkers, that imaginatively build on that foundation. In the Elkin stories, that Calisher wisely put at the center of this collection “where they may radiate” (and do), verbal felicities are at the service of memory. Adjectives do not pirouette, but evoke the smells and tastes and atmospheres of childhood. In the best of these stories—“The Gulf Between,” “The Sound of Waiting,” “The Middle Drawer”—personal memory is transformed into universal truth as the child becomes “us” and the parents “them” in an eternal drama of growth and mutability.

Comparing the Elkin stories to the tales told by Arietta, one wonders why Calisher deserted the syllables of memory for the dithyrambs of the entertainer. Like Mrs. Fay, she performs superbly, knowing “every periphrasis” of her stories, “every calculated inflection and aside,” every knack of pleasing. But even Arietta Fay knows that “in this taxable world,” patrons are hard to come by and that the decline of the private patron signals the decline of “his factotum.” Can a world which rations its fuel and chastens its cuisine afford a retainer who dines on her charm? Calisher’s oeuvre, represented by the Collected Stories, constructs a portrait as exquisite as the full-length portrait in ivory of Arietta’s forebear, Yves Minot—and just as out of date.