Josephine Carson, Dog Star and Other Stories
with an Introduction by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Santa Barbara Review Publications

Jack Foley

Josephine Carson is seventy-nine years old, but you wouldn't know it from this delightful collection of witty, elegant, meticulously-written stories. Her people suffer but they do it in gorgeous sentences:

Sometimes he sounded like a woman. His mother, maybe.

Now she is in an agony of hope and despair, of frustrated knowing, suddenly half-awake to the idea that the world has ruined her life.

The light sank like a last breath.

Carrie found the rack, the scalding of feet, the severing of tongues and the guillotine impressive; and the large engravings of mutilated bodies spellbinding.

Carson has published three novels, Drives My Green Age, First Man, Last Man, and Where You Goin', Girlie as well as a book of non-fiction, Silent Voices, the Southern Negro Woman Today (1970). Some of her stories have been heard on National Public Radio. She has also written poetry and plays, and has spent many years teaching.

She is, in short, an immensely well-kept secret. If you're looking for fine writing, exquisite sensibility, wit, and genuine style, Dog Star would be a fine place to start; it's also a good introduction to Carson's work.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's knowledgeable opening essay asserts that Carson's stories revolve around "our split second decisions that come only later to reason." They are also deliberate evocations of mystery: we know a little but only a little, and there are constant small astonishments: "Eve whispered, ‘What's the matter with you?' Carrie covered her eyes with two small fists."

One character—like many of the central characters here, an older woman—complains that the great novels she loves "all began...with the presumption that people all had access to one another. And it wasn't true. People don't have access to others, she thought. She did not." These stories grant us momentary access to imaginary real characters, but Carson is not so foolish as to believe that she has exhausted the subject: access is always tentative, enigmatic, limited. The same character asks,

And what did she want? Life? In what sense did she lack life, a life? She had to admit that she lacked at least a life worthy of her imagination and energy, or—no, admit it, be cruelly honest as only the lonely can be—she simply lacked a life. The novels she'd been reading had made her crave the world.

Does a writer's involvement with the fictional mean that she lacks a life, that it is all "make-believe"? Or is the fictional precisely her passageway to life, "real" life? This is of course an unanswerable question—each assertion is probably true—but in Carson's hands it achieves great resonance. Another character realizes that "She had a life. He realized he hadn't believed it till now." Still another exclaims,

Sex. My god! Eileen! Remember sex! All that gasping! Oh, how can my mad jesuitical, terrible and beautiful and haunted and excited and killing and ecstatic life, and all my thinking and feeling—all that caring—how can that merely—die out? TELL ME THAT, EILEEN! HOW CAN IT?

How can life "merely—die out"? Yet it does. "Having" and "losing" a life are two sides of the same coin. The writer inhabits both worlds: like her characters, she is lonely, her attachments fade; yet her writing memorializes her life. In the title story someone describes the Dog Star, Sirius as having "an unseen companion." The person who says it is himself an "unseen companion" to the story's central character, a woman whose still-young husband is in the last stages of death by cancer. (He will soon be an "unseen companion.") But the phrase has resonances that go beyond the specifics of the story. A writer's characters are "unseen companions"—interestingly, Saint Paul describes faith as "the evidence of things not seen"—and so are her readers. In the midst of life's transience and loneliness, the fact of being read is a genuine comfort. "My dear!" says Edith Wharton to the woman who laments the lack of life, "Please control yourself. Why, you're my ideal reader! Absolutely ideal! We live our whole lives waiting for readers like you!" Carson understands the distances between people and in many ways asserts them: separation (divorce, death, emotional distance) is a primary fact of her world. Nevertheless she finds comfort in the possibility of the genuine interest of those people—readers—whose actual lives remain, like hers, inaccessible. Though friends and lovers may fail her, the interest and, indeed, the "kindnesses" of strangers cut across isolation. Like Scheherazade's, her storytelling is a way of keeping even death—the greatest of separating forces—momentarily at bay.

A good many themes emerge in Dog Star. The theme of feminine rage ("The criminal woman intrigued her") is especially prominent and is most fully explored in the brilliant story, "Invaders." On the first page the protagonist is explaining to her son about her car door, "You have to slam it, Darling." Later she thinks about an unwanted intruder (an "invader"), "[I] should have shoved him aside and slammed the door on him." At the conclusion of the story she sees "something large and dark...in deep grass." Realizing that the thing—"A possum? Maybe a badger"—has eaten sizeable amounts of her garden, and identifying it to some degree with the boorish visitor who has just left, she lashes out at it. Again the word "slam" appears:

"You pig!" she howled. Eyes hardly focusing, she lifted the post shakily, and hurled herself at the snoring lump. Its still claws flickered as she smashed the board down without taking aim. Involuntary spasms seized the limbs. She whacked blindly, howling at the thing that had begun to grunt with each blow. Then she slammed at the head till she heard the skull crack and saw blood—at the nose, the ear. When a gargled cry broke from the flooding mouth, she froze, her own mouth open in dry heaves.
Finally she dropped the post and backed away, whimpering, stumbling, about to faint. The animal was still.

(The word "animal" also echoes throughout the collection: "all the deep knowledge and cunning of the dying animal"; "this powerful animal hero," etc.)

Other themes include the need for a savior and his constantly unsatisfactory manifestations (the savior is often a father of some sort, frequently a doctor, but in one instance it is a woman): "All those long years she had believed that something somehow would come to her rescue, would wake her up...." Loneliness and not being in love are also themes: "They are—ah! They are in love. And I am not." The possibilities of a powerful imagination are constantly being demonstrated, as is manipulation, getting others to do what you want in the way you want them to do it: "Oh, with what smug genius we women can sometimes keep secrets!...It's in our nature to keep them; it's a kind of pregnancy." The relationship between mothers and children (particularly daughters but also sons) is a constant concern, as is the split between the "urban" and the "natural." For the most part, Carson's characters are upper middle class, articulate, educated people—these are, in the best sense of the term, New Yorker stories—but one marvelous piece, "Judgement," is in dialect:

Well, there comes Cecil. I do believe I can see that shiny car a way off yonder on the ridge there. And it ain't any too early neither. I been setting here since I sent for him about ten o'clock this morning and here it is not a hour from sunset. But now I'm not sorry I had this day to myself because I believe that I've done worked my way through it and now I'm ready.

The stories are full of interesting turns, and though there are fine descriptive passages they seem to be essentially speech-driven. They are like good talk. Reading them one is reminded a little of those interesting persons who inhabited the Algonquin Club's Round Table in New York City. When one of Carson's characters tries to define "her type of friend," she conjures up a vision of people who are very much like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Wollcott, etc.:

She began to brood on and try to define for herself her type of friend. The dapper, confident, fun-loving and intelligent man her husband had almost been before dying of acute alcoholism; the chatty and clannish, ingrown women her three sisters (two of whom were now dead and one of whom had Alzheimers) had been. People who have fun and talk a lot together, and who think.

As I suggested earlier, many of the primary characters in Dog Star are "older" women—women in their fifties, sixties, or even in their eighties. Yet they are beautiful, attractive, even sexually alluring. Does it require a woman writer to tell us that? The attractiveness of older women is a secret that Hollywood isn't likely to reveal to its legions of fans. Josephine Carson tells us about it in very convincing, touching, open-hearted ways. And there are other secrets she knows, too. Dog Star is full of them.

Jack Foley