3 books by H.E. Bates
Requirements: Epub reader, 6.00 Mb
Overview: H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.
His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
Genre: General Fiction, Short Stories
Something Short and Sweet
Something Short and Sweet, H. E. Bates’s sixth collection first published in 1937, demonstrates his mastery of character and form. Richard Church, writing in John O’London’s Weekly, stated that this collection confirmed his belief that Bates "is an immortal…Here is a creative artist whose technique in the art of the short story is comparable with that of the great masters in this form."
The title story explores the intricacies of the relationship between a forty-year-old evangelist and his twenty-year-old assistant. ‘Cloudburst’ and ‘Spring Snow’ are vignettes of human struggle in a rural context, similar to much of Bates’s earlier work. ‘Finger Wet, Finger Dry’ and ‘The Sow and Silas’ continue Bates’s success with the antics of Uncle Silas.
The Morning Post commented that "each story stands out individual and distinct…In each the theme has been worked over, walked round, sifted, considered, a stance as viewpoint selected, the ultimate significance determined."
The Four Beauties
First published in 1968, The Four Beauties is Bates’s last collection of novellas offering a mixture of comedy, adventure, a semi-autobiographical piece and an exploration of a dark love triangle.
‘The Simple Life’ is set at a country cottage offering the joys of a humble existence, and focuses on a bitter alcoholic wife who finds temporary pleasure in a seventeen-year-old boy.
A reminiscence of newspaper reporter, reflecting Bates’s own experiences at the Northamptonshire Chronicle, ‘The Four Beauties’ concerns the narrator’s complicated relationship with three lovely and highly-sexed daughters, as well as their mother. A television adaptation Country Matters was aired in March 1973.
‘The Chords of Youth’ sees Bates revive the character of Aunt Leonora, first introduced in the 1965 story ‘The Picnic’, in this comic novella in which she entertains a visiting German, mistaking him for an old flame. Linguistic confusion, abundant food and wine, and a pompous English bureaucrat contribute to the humorous unfolding of the story.
In contrasting tone, ‘The White Wind’ is a late novella featuring a young man coming to terms with life’s realities, with considerable action and violence and an irascible man serving as the captain of a boat. The element of a dedicated doctor vainly trying to get Pacific islanders to take their medicines is based on Bates’s own Tahitian travels.
The Song of the Wren
Published in 1972, The Song of the Wren contains some light entertainments in the style of the Uncle Silas tales, alongside some more serious stories concerning thwarted love, love triangles, and, in two of the cases, the violence that comes out of psyches twisted by love.
‘The Song of the Wren’ features the intriguing Miss Shuttleworth as she spars with a young sociologist conducting a survey on various issues, leaving him dumfounded by her apparently mad behaviour and no more appreciative of nature than when he started.
She appears again in ‘Oh! Sweeter Than the Berry’ where she proves herself more than a match for a visiting minister. Convincing him to try one homemade potion after another, she engages the tipsy Reverend in a theological debate until, stunned, he wobbles away and falls to his knees to pray for her.
Taking a darker, more abstract turn ‘The Man Who Loved Squirrels’ is a tale of a woodsman who works alone and lives with his mother, finding company only in the forest’s squirrels. A chance meeting with a traveling London woman disrupts his life and ends in tragedy.
‘The Tiger Moth’ depicts an affair between an airman and a schoolteacher, whose husband is missing in action. The tale hearkens back to Bates’s war-time Flying Officer X stories in style, flight accounts, and pilot jargon.
The bonus story ‘Music for Christmas’, first published in 1951, is a comic portrayal of provincial rivalries, involving a musical snob with London tastes, a north Midlands woman favouring local talent, and, relaying gossip and innuendo between the two, a grocery deliveryman.
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