‘The Station’ by H. E. Bates

M. John Harrison (who wrote the story ‘Small Heirlooms’, included here) once lent me Seven by Five, a chronologically organised selection of Bates’s short stories. “Your mission,” he told me: “show me the point beyond which everything he touches goes rotten.”

You see, at some point (and long after ‘The Station’ was first written) Bates worked out what it was he was good at, and it killed him stone dead. He stopped exploring his preoccupations and he started fetishizing them. How else could it have happened, that the author of Love for Lydia ended his career wearing the clown nose and big shoes of the “Pop Larkin” series?

In ‘The Station’, a lorry driver and his mate park up at a service station that the new road has forgotten. (You’re right to do a double-take: James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice puts almost exactly the same material through the engine of pulp fiction.)

The waitress is alone. She’s young, beautiful, snapped up at nineteen; her husband is away. (See what I mean about The Postman…?)

There’s a plum orchard out the back and the waitress goes and picks some plums so the drivers can have something sweet to eat. Then the lorry drivers pick some for themselves. They may as well, the plums are ripe, they won’t last long.

The drivers eat the plums. They drink their coffee. They pay and leave, and glancing back, they can see nothing of the station

“but the red sign flashing everlastingly out and on, scarlet to darkness, The Station to nothing at all.”

It’s the single most erotically charged story I have ever encountered. And I’m not talking about a moment in the story, or two, or three, or a special glance, or a particular word — I’m talking about the eroticism infusing the entire story.

What a feat this is probably doesn’t need going over. The erotic is slippy — we slide off it, again and again, into something else: power, politics, pornography, farce–

Farce is interesting: the English found a way of nailing the erotic in place with farce, and called it bawdy. If you want to know what the anima looks like, go look up a beach-shot of Barbara Windsor circa 1969.

But I digress. (You see? Slippy…)

‘The Station’ is what Bates could achieve when his talents had reached their full ripeness. And just like that, the season turned, the plums rotted, and the waitress grew disappointed, or frustrated, or bitter…

Or maybe none of those things! How about she was happy, and contented, and fulfilled, and — God help her — what if she just lived a long time?

That’d do it. That would be enough. Scarlet to darkness. Bates-as-Eros to Bates-as-silage. Genius to nothing at all.

First published in Argosy, January 1935, and collected in Cut and Come Again, Jonathan Cape, London, 1935

‘The Kimono’ by H. E. Bates

I have a strange hardback, The Best of H.E. Bates, published for the American market in 1963, with a preface from—of all the unlikely American writers to introduce H.E. Bates—Henry Miller. (It seems clear to me that the sorts of American readers who would’ve liked Bates would’ve turned tail at Henry Miller’s name, and Miller fans would’ve been nonplussed by Bates squarely-made, well-made, often rather straightforwardly English stories.)

I bought it more than twenty years ago on a summer’s day in Provincetown on Cape Cod. My not-yet-wife was then working as an au pair. Provincetown is of course an American vacation spot of long standing, a terminal vacation spot—you must go back the way you came—and the Cape is written about by writers as far from one another as Thoreau, Henry Beston, Cookie Mueller. So maybe the place of purchase is the only real reason why I thought of ‘The Kimono’ for this list. Or maybe I thought of this Bates story—the only one from that thick book to linger in my mind—because it’s a story that hinges on very hot weather.

Or perhaps I’m sending it because it’s a story about people who are never really on holiday, and so for whom the idea of escape becomes unbearable. Arthur Lawson narrates: a very middle-of-the-road type from Nottingham, in great, big, new, vast 1911 London to interview with a firm of electrical engineers. Arthur becomes lost and goes into a shop for an ice in a drab part of London. In the shop there’s a woman bending over a broken cooler. She’s wearing a poorly fastened kimono. That’s all I can say—I’ve already said too much. But I’ve never forgotten it, and never let the book slip away, entirely on account of that one story. Or maybe when and where I bought it, which, at this remove amount almost to the same thing.

First published in 1936 and collected in Something Short and Sweet, Jonathan Cape, 1937 and widely thereafter. Picked by Drew Johnson. Drew’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s, VQR, The Literary Review, New England Review and elsewhere. You can read his full Personal Anthology here.