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The Grapes of Paradise: Four Short Novels
Excerpt from The Grapes of Paradise
A great deal of this, I must point out, has changed now. During the war bombs ripped out the entire centre of the collar and you can still see the dirty scars made by Shells on the grassy slopes above the town. But two things remain exactly as they were when I lived with my mother there and, in the long' blistering summer of 1921, when I was eighteen, I first met an officer in the guards, a man of forty, named Captain Archie Blaine. The first thing that has never changed at all is the castle itself. It has the imperishable and inviolate air that belongs to great churches and high mountains. But sometimes.
A great deal of this, I must point out, has changed now. During the war bombs ripped out the entire centre of the collar and you can still see the dirty scars made by Shells on the grassy slopes above the town. But two things remain exactly as they were when I lived with my mother there and, in the long' blistering summer of 1921, when I was eighteen, I first met an officer in the guards, a man of forty, named Captain Archie Blaine. The first thing that has never changed at all is the castle itself. It has the imperishable and inviolate air that belongs to great churches and high mountains. But sometimes.
- GenresShort Stories
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1964
2 people are currently reading
48 people want to read
About the author
H.E. Bates
278 books191 followersHerbert Ernest Bates, CBE is widely recognised as one of the finest short story writers of his generation, with more than 20 story collections published in his lifetime. It should not be overlooked, however, that he also wrote some outstanding novels, starting with The Two Sisters through to A Moment in Time, with such works as Love For Lydia, Fair Stood the Wind for France and The Scarlet Sword earning high praise from the critics. His study of the Modern Short Story is considered one of the best ever written on the subject.
He was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire and was educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he was briefly a newspaper reporter and a warehouse clerk, but his heart was always in writing and his dream to be able to make a living by his pen.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands of England, particularly his native Northamptonshire. Bates was partial to taking long midnight walks around the Northamptonshire countryside - and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and its people and this is exemplified in two volumes of essays entitled Through the Woods and Down the River.
In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. It was in this phase of his life that he found the inspiration for the Larkins series of novels -The Darling Buds of May, A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh, etc. - and the Uncle Silas tales. Not surprisingly, these highly successful novels inspired television series that were immensely popular.
His collection of stories written while serving in the RAF during World War II, best known by the title The Stories of Flying Officer X, but previously published as Something in the Air (a compilation of his two wartime collections under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X' and titled The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave), deserve particular attention. By the end of the war he had achieved the rank of Squadron Leader.
Bates was influenced by Chekhov in particular, and his knowledge of the history of the short story is obvious from the famous study he produced on the subject. He also wrote his autobiography in three volumes (each delightfully illustrated) which were subsequently published in a one-volume Autobiography.
Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener and wrote numerous books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life. After the death of H. E Bates, Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at age 95. They raised two sons and two daughters.
primarily from Wikipedia, with additions by Keith Farnsworth
He was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire and was educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he was briefly a newspaper reporter and a warehouse clerk, but his heart was always in writing and his dream to be able to make a living by his pen.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands of England, particularly his native Northamptonshire. Bates was partial to taking long midnight walks around the Northamptonshire countryside - and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and its people and this is exemplified in two volumes of essays entitled Through the Woods and Down the River.
In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. It was in this phase of his life that he found the inspiration for the Larkins series of novels -The Darling Buds of May, A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh, etc. - and the Uncle Silas tales. Not surprisingly, these highly successful novels inspired television series that were immensely popular.
His collection of stories written while serving in the RAF during World War II, best known by the title The Stories of Flying Officer X, but previously published as Something in the Air (a compilation of his two wartime collections under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X' and titled The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave), deserve particular attention. By the end of the war he had achieved the rank of Squadron Leader.
Bates was influenced by Chekhov in particular, and his knowledge of the history of the short story is obvious from the famous study he produced on the subject. He also wrote his autobiography in three volumes (each delightfully illustrated) which were subsequently published in a one-volume Autobiography.
Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener and wrote numerous books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life. After the death of H. E Bates, Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at age 95. They raised two sons and two daughters.
primarily from Wikipedia, with additions by Keith Farnsworth
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 4, 2017
I will definitely be reading more by this guy. These short stories were fantastically told universes I was often grateful to be visiting. Bates' ability to paint a picture with every sentence is on display page after page. I can still picture it all and I fear later in life I might mistake his stories as my own memories.
July 1, 2018
Bates, renowned for his short stories, shows you why in this collection.
In Summer In Salander [1955], he evokes the quiet, hot local life in a single paragraph:
'In the street outside men would sit on dark door-steps and spit golden melon seeds into gutters, coughing with tubercular mournfulness. The flash of an open-air cinema down the street would drench the plumb-black air above the surrounding courtyards with continuous gentle fountains of light, above little explosions of applause and laughter. In one of the old houses behind the hotel a woman would lull her baby to sleep with a prolonged soft song that was probably as old as the moon-curve of the fishing boats that lined the shore.' (p.84, Penguin 1975)
This commencement, after a typically evocative Batesian description of the lethargic heat and torpor suffered by the English émigré, is continued by the description of the condensed, suffocating cauldron of heat that is the bay, as the little launch approaches with Manson and the girl. With her black hair, long body, long cream gloves and determined self-sufficiency, the scene is set for a chance meeting of two lonely, longing strangers to discover a new dimension on the limited island. But colour it has, oppressive heat it has, yet our minds extend outwards to the vast cool sea, and we infuse the exhausting oppression with a life of our own imagining - and desire.
So Bates sets the scene, paints the scene, evokes it. Within a couple of pages we are ready for the chance encounter, we are plunged - with less, yet gratifyingly effective preamble - for the chance meeting of Manson with Miss Vane, the major and Miss Bentley, of Franklin and Françoises (Fair Stood The Wind For France [1944]). He does this so well, that you are drawn deep into his stories as the wide-eyed male is drawn into the house of the fanciful woman, into the farmhouse, into the woods, into the bay and the hotel, up the mountain, across the sea. Bates tells much the same tale in different settings: the truck driver in Night Run To The West [1957] by chance stopping at the extended house of the hopeful Lisa; the shy businessman, Harry Barnfeld, meeting the daughter of a decades-old flame, as she rides through his land, in Death Of A Huntsman [1957]... Bates does this often, but always with a strong sense of scene, of place, of atmosphere, of colour, of climate, of character, weaving the same meme of story within new scarves of colour.
But, unlike the satisfyingly happy and hopeful ending of Fair Stood The Wind For France, Bates' novellas and short stories typically end in a forlorn mess amidst the waste of human emotion injected into such miserable failures. Indeed, it is this abject point about the amount of uselessly expended energy that a man and a woman spend in just coming together which impresses after more extended reading of his shorter works. And I can but agree with him, it is a dissipated waste, this messy inception of romance, with all its vast promise and subtle chains and manly challenges and womanly wiles dangled and trained. Such a pompous farce. Bates presages just such a wasteful chase at the beginning of Summer In Salandar as Manson watches the large funeral cortège - like black beetles - chasing the dead along the coastal hill; a pointless chase, just before he chases Miss Vane up the mountain to prove his own manliness and to conquer her, to own her. It seems that should a woman dangle even the hint of a handkerchief out of the open window of a passing train carriage, a man, seeing it flap in the wind like a semaphore, must chase that train to its inevitable destination and flop there at her knees, exhausted, spent, foolish from the hot blood pumping in his head.
Bates loves this theme. He plies us with his invention of the same theme repainted, and even though the theme irritates us, the paint he uses delights.
These short stories seem to become more delightful as you progress; perhaps the editors designed the order that way, yet it is also probably that you are getting into Bates more and more. In the quartet which originally appeared as Death Of A Huntsman in '57 (and by Penguin in '64), Bates turns his slightly sour morbidity about the messiness of casual affairs into something both amusing and ultimately piquant, in The Queen Of Spain Fritillary [1956]. Here, he not only writes frivolously in the style of I Capture The Castle (Dodie Smith, 1942) or Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons, 1932), but does so from the first person view of a seventeen-year-old girl who unwittingly teases her host into an unforeseen situation. For Bates to both write from such a point of view and to do it successfully (like Pratchett through the eyes of Tiffany Aching in that series), is a pleasant gibe in these days of the over-serious hung up on the excess of political correctness, whom I find, regardless of the potential seriousness of such excesses, do spoil life like big brothers in waiting.
A little H. E. Bates even in novella form is always a delight, not least because he defines tendrils of human intimacy and motivation seemingly so laughably remote from oneself, yet coloured in ways that make the perpetrators both foolish and familiar, that we are laughing and grimacing at ourselves for the times we have chased our desires up and down the nearest mountain, to no avail but forlorn and abject humiliation. Yet the heat and sweat of such preposterous circumstances are balanced by the fondness of the surroundings he places us:
'All these things were attractive in themselves but they had nothing to do with what I had started to feel. What I felt had nothing particularly to do with beauty, with the charm of the yellow rose above the doorway, the flowerless magnolia cool in the heat, or the drenching fragrance of the long row of limes. It had nothing to do, either, with that curious sensation people often experience with places, and with houses especially: the sensation, not always pleasant and sometimes uncannily disturbing, that they have been there before. What I felt was a rather startling sense of communication...' (The Queen Of Spain Fritillary, Death Of A Huntsman, p175).
With Bates, I always feel so wistfully stirred.
In Summer In Salander [1955], he evokes the quiet, hot local life in a single paragraph:
'In the street outside men would sit on dark door-steps and spit golden melon seeds into gutters, coughing with tubercular mournfulness. The flash of an open-air cinema down the street would drench the plumb-black air above the surrounding courtyards with continuous gentle fountains of light, above little explosions of applause and laughter. In one of the old houses behind the hotel a woman would lull her baby to sleep with a prolonged soft song that was probably as old as the moon-curve of the fishing boats that lined the shore.' (p.84, Penguin 1975)
This commencement, after a typically evocative Batesian description of the lethargic heat and torpor suffered by the English émigré, is continued by the description of the condensed, suffocating cauldron of heat that is the bay, as the little launch approaches with Manson and the girl. With her black hair, long body, long cream gloves and determined self-sufficiency, the scene is set for a chance meeting of two lonely, longing strangers to discover a new dimension on the limited island. But colour it has, oppressive heat it has, yet our minds extend outwards to the vast cool sea, and we infuse the exhausting oppression with a life of our own imagining - and desire.
So Bates sets the scene, paints the scene, evokes it. Within a couple of pages we are ready for the chance encounter, we are plunged - with less, yet gratifyingly effective preamble - for the chance meeting of Manson with Miss Vane, the major and Miss Bentley, of Franklin and Françoises (Fair Stood The Wind For France [1944]). He does this so well, that you are drawn deep into his stories as the wide-eyed male is drawn into the house of the fanciful woman, into the farmhouse, into the woods, into the bay and the hotel, up the mountain, across the sea. Bates tells much the same tale in different settings: the truck driver in Night Run To The West [1957] by chance stopping at the extended house of the hopeful Lisa; the shy businessman, Harry Barnfeld, meeting the daughter of a decades-old flame, as she rides through his land, in Death Of A Huntsman [1957]... Bates does this often, but always with a strong sense of scene, of place, of atmosphere, of colour, of climate, of character, weaving the same meme of story within new scarves of colour.
But, unlike the satisfyingly happy and hopeful ending of Fair Stood The Wind For France, Bates' novellas and short stories typically end in a forlorn mess amidst the waste of human emotion injected into such miserable failures. Indeed, it is this abject point about the amount of uselessly expended energy that a man and a woman spend in just coming together which impresses after more extended reading of his shorter works. And I can but agree with him, it is a dissipated waste, this messy inception of romance, with all its vast promise and subtle chains and manly challenges and womanly wiles dangled and trained. Such a pompous farce. Bates presages just such a wasteful chase at the beginning of Summer In Salandar as Manson watches the large funeral cortège - like black beetles - chasing the dead along the coastal hill; a pointless chase, just before he chases Miss Vane up the mountain to prove his own manliness and to conquer her, to own her. It seems that should a woman dangle even the hint of a handkerchief out of the open window of a passing train carriage, a man, seeing it flap in the wind like a semaphore, must chase that train to its inevitable destination and flop there at her knees, exhausted, spent, foolish from the hot blood pumping in his head.
Bates loves this theme. He plies us with his invention of the same theme repainted, and even though the theme irritates us, the paint he uses delights.
These short stories seem to become more delightful as you progress; perhaps the editors designed the order that way, yet it is also probably that you are getting into Bates more and more. In the quartet which originally appeared as Death Of A Huntsman in '57 (and by Penguin in '64), Bates turns his slightly sour morbidity about the messiness of casual affairs into something both amusing and ultimately piquant, in The Queen Of Spain Fritillary [1956]. Here, he not only writes frivolously in the style of I Capture The Castle (Dodie Smith, 1942) or Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons, 1932), but does so from the first person view of a seventeen-year-old girl who unwittingly teases her host into an unforeseen situation. For Bates to both write from such a point of view and to do it successfully (like Pratchett through the eyes of Tiffany Aching in that series), is a pleasant gibe in these days of the over-serious hung up on the excess of political correctness, whom I find, regardless of the potential seriousness of such excesses, do spoil life like big brothers in waiting.
A little H. E. Bates even in novella form is always a delight, not least because he defines tendrils of human intimacy and motivation seemingly so laughably remote from oneself, yet coloured in ways that make the perpetrators both foolish and familiar, that we are laughing and grimacing at ourselves for the times we have chased our desires up and down the nearest mountain, to no avail but forlorn and abject humiliation. Yet the heat and sweat of such preposterous circumstances are balanced by the fondness of the surroundings he places us:
'All these things were attractive in themselves but they had nothing to do with what I had started to feel. What I felt had nothing particularly to do with beauty, with the charm of the yellow rose above the doorway, the flowerless magnolia cool in the heat, or the drenching fragrance of the long row of limes. It had nothing to do, either, with that curious sensation people often experience with places, and with houses especially: the sensation, not always pleasant and sometimes uncannily disturbing, that they have been there before. What I felt was a rather startling sense of communication...' (The Queen Of Spain Fritillary, Death Of A Huntsman, p175).
With Bates, I always feel so wistfully stirred.
September 14, 2021
Terrific book of longer short stories (hardly the ‘novellas’ claimed) being a combined reprint of two earlier books. Whether they are set in the English countryside or in foreign lands, they grip the reader from beginning to end, often leaving you to work out what has happened, or is going to happen after the last full stop.
March 20, 2025
Not for me this one.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews