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Two Views of Bridgman’s first book
You gotta love a writer who releases his first short story collection with promo material stating, "While he is convinced that the short story is both the preeminent literary prose form and his true métier, when pressed Mr. Bridgman will also quietly admit to having begun work on a novel."
Such is the case with the semi-mysterious P.W. Bridgman (a pen name) who has degrees in psychology and law. Standing at an Angle to My Age (Libros Libertad $20) is the Vancouverite's first story collection in the wake of some prestigious publishing credits in the U.K.
Here follow two reviews of that collection. The first by critic and biographer David Stouck appeared in B.C. BookWorld. The second by novelist Roberta Rich appeared in The Advocate, a publication of the B.C. legal profession.
====
Not all authors hanker for publicity. A precious few adopt pseudonyms and avoid the limelight like the plague. P.W. Bridgman, a nom de plume for someone who works in the field of law, is one such anomaly. There is no Facebook page.
No self-merchandizing whatsoever.
In P.W. Bridgman's first fiction collection, Standing at an Angle to My Age (Libros $20), the very shortest stories, referred to as "flash fictions,"; compress within as few words as possible a setting, a way of life, and the potential for dramatic action.
"The Mars Hotel"; encompasses in less than a page, and in language as taut as an Emily Dickinson poem, a lover's journey that began with his mother's proffered finger until, "javelined by Airbus from London to Paris,"; he is united with his beloved.
In just two-pages, "Trading Places"; charts two English couples over a lifetime in terms of education, health and class.
Among the experiments is the telling of a story backwards. The machinery of plot is put into reverse in "Turning in the Trap,"; wherein the narrative of a soldier's long, unhappy marriage and his suicide are presented in brief segments each dated earlier than the preceding one.
The title for "Ad Te Clamamus, Exsules, Filii Hevae,"; another one-pager, can be translated as "To thee we do cry, poor banished children of Eve."; The context here is Catholic guilt. The speaker/narrator sits at the dinner table with Nuala, her six-year-old brother and their father, while the mother hurriedly ladles out lamb broth soup. The exact relationship between the speaker and Nuala is not defined-but the concluding sentence suggests menacing possibilities framed by sin and violence. The Irish father mutters "Jay-sus, Mary and Joseph."; The speaker observes the older man's thick fingers "roughly tapping the table in synchrony with the beating of our newly post-coital, runaway hearts.";
The longer pieces are also foremost about the craft of writing. The selection of the right word is thematic as it was for short story writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, or Ivan Bunin (the now almost forgotten first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for literature).
"Our Secret"; is a mother-daughter story in which the daughter learns the story of her paternity, the perfectly-crafted sentences convey a way of life in northern Ontario that is hard-bitten but intensely alive.
"De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum"; is a father-son story in which a late middle-aged man from B.C. revisits the wartime scene of his Manitoba childhood with a painful clash of cultures between his fiery Irish Catholic mother and his pacifist Mennonite father.
Both these stories have the dimensions of large tragic novels pared down to their essence.
The skills of an adept satirist are evident in the lengthiest piece in the collection, "Cake, Bang and Elm,"; structured around two points of view: the narrator as an observant child in London, England, and as an adult college teacher from Canada. The child's view is registered in the cartoonish Dickensian names of the characters he meets and hears about in London: Mr. Cake, Mrs. Paper, Mr. Boil, Jack Cat, Mr. Gland, etc. The adult, returned many years later, comes to see these bizarre figures in a wholly different light.
"So and Not Otherwise"; is a lively satire of academic life at UBC, its aspirations and shortcomings, including some splendid farcical moments.
Both these stories slip free of satiric conventions and conclude in a gently serious vein.
The stories in Standing at an Angle to My Age, while sometimes set abroad, are nonetheless markedly Canadian, some with specifically B.C. settings and references. They inhabit a wide range of genres and modes, but are distinguished by the steady craft of an elegant literary stylist. Bridgman's carefully polished stories perform agile narrative feats: one page evokes a full-length short story; ten pages read like a novel. Each piece is an experiment and P.W. Bridgman a writer of exceptional talent.
The stories 'The Mars Hotel' and 'Suitably Framed' each placed in Spilling Ink fiction competitions; both appeared in 2011 in the Scottish anthology, Story.Book, published by Unbound Press of Glasgow. 'The Mars Hotel"; was also shortlisted for the U.K. Bridport Prize, flash fiction category, in 2010.
The volume has been fittingly produced by Libros Libertad with careful attention to design layout and typography. P.W. Bridgman has begun work on a novel.
by David Stouck (2013)
====
Standing at An Angle to my Age is a collection of eighteen short stories written by the mysterious P.W. Bridgman. Like B. Traven, author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre and other tales of valour and greed, P.W. Bridgman guards his anonymity jealously. The only clue to his identity-and I am sticking my neck out by using the masculine pronoun-is a quote from his Spartan website: "P.W. Bridgman is a writer of literary fiction living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He has earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology and a degree in law as well.";
Whoever Bridgman is, I salute him. My first and only foray into short story writing was a class I took many years ago labouring under the delusion that writing a short story would be a snap, compared with writing a novel. I thought it would be like the difference between a quickie ex parte chambers application and a long, arduous trial. [Will an ex parte application ever feel quite the same?-Ed.]
Foolishly, I assumed there was ease to be had in brevity. My bravado extended to supposing that emotions could be captured, flash-frozen, savoured and then passed from reader to reader like a bite of cake being passed from one mouth to another-and all this in the space of a measly ten pages or so. My class left me with an undying admiration for those who, like Bridgman, have mastered the genre. Short stories may be short, but easy they ain't.
There is an inherent challenge in reviewing a short story collection, particularly one as diverse as this. The breadth and width of these stories are impressive. They range in setting from the Okanagan Valley and the English Department at UBC to Ireland, London and Paris, and in time from the Second World War to the present. The cast of characters is an assortment: male, female, old and young, rich, poor, kind, cruel.
The prose is spare, each word chosen with surgical precision. The enigmatic Bridgman knows how to craft a sentence. Phrases such as "a well-tethered Catholic";, "small, moist hands";, "curled up like a fiddlehead under the coverlet"; and "an airbus javelined me from London to Paris"; resonate long after the book is finished.
In the coming-of-age story, "The Meaning of Life According to Fred W. Kane";, a shy, bookish boy trying to find his footing in the world is "poised like a pearl diver on the brink of adulthood";. His mentor, Fred W. Kane, has a contagious calmness that works for the boy better than any therapy could.
The dialogue is wonderful. For example, the cadence of Northern Ireland speech rhythms is beautifully captured. In "Cean Dubh Dilis"; the saintly mother says to her husband in gentle reproof, "Catch yourself on, Lorcán...is that the example you want to be setting?";
The opening line of "The Mars Hotel"; is a good example of the use of rhythm and tempo to impart a feeling of slowness and then increasing speed. Read it out loud and you will see what I mean:
Down, down the long avenues and grand boulevards, across the wide sweeps of French lawns sprawling in supplication at the feet of imperious French municipal buildings, along the sidewalks rain-shiny and earthy of smell, by the open doors of rue Cler merchants selling cheeses and olives, my quickening footsteps cadenced by a quickening heartbeat carry me past the art dealer, the patisserie, and the betting house, finally to the Mars Hotel and to you.
Clearly, Bridgman is a student of poetry.
The characters, on the whole, are tender, given to simple acts of kindness, not outward displays of rage or violence except those that have been carefully staged, as in "Cake, Bang and Elm";, the story of two men simulating a fight to conceal their homosexuality. "In Trading Places"; a working-class woman, an invalid, is being tended to by her social superior, a solicitor's widow, for unexplained reasons. What is the nexus between the two? Guilt? The need to control? Compassion? The reader is left to decide.
There is a quiet heroism in many of the characters, particularly the female ones. In the lead story, "Ceann Duhn Dilis";, a mother takes an old, demented man into her home. When her second child is born, she has "to feed the two of them side-by-side";. It is a touching example of the type of loving patience that is difficult to sustain in the day-to-day cauldron of life, especially among families who have limited incomes and are crammed into small council flats. Her kindness is rewarded when, just before the old man dies, he plays "Dear Dark Head"; on a borrowed harp.
And then there is the mother in "Open Secret";, who suffers a stroke but manages to pin a note to her blouse for her daughter to find-a note that reveals the girl's true paternity. This was my favourite of the collection, a lovely tale of mother and daughter joining forces against a tyrant of a stepfather before the mother dies. The tale ends on a wistful note as the daughter, watching from her bedroom window, sees the doctor talking to her stepfather, announcing her mother's death.
"So and Not Otherwise";, set at UBC's Department of English, is the tale of a relationship between a diffident doctoral candidate and his adviser, a dipsomaniacal Brit from Balliol with a huge contempt for his students, his colleagues and himself. It elegantly describes the jealousies, petty back-biting and self-congratulatory elitism of a university department. The language, tone and vocabulary skewer academic pretence neatly. The student, explaining to the professor what attracts him to university life, says: "It's the fact that someone like you can carry on exactly how he pleases and it will all be tolerated, sort of, at least, because he can do something extraordinary."; The two characters are foils for each other, the professor a thinking, feeling, exuberant, misguided mess of a man and his student, with "his pale freckled hands";, the Jesuitically rational student.
"Sir"; is about an authoritarian teacher who delights in humiliating his students, abusing them in every way, including sexually. The teacher is unremittingly nasty, the story told through the eyes of one of his beleaguered pupils. Does the boy learn anything from his experience with the teacher? We don't know.
And then tucked in, here and there, like Oreos in a lunchbox, are several pieces of "flash fiction";. For the uninitiated, flash fiction is a story which takes about as long to read as it does to smoke a cigarette, or to walk a dog around the block or eat an ice cream cone. To establish character and setting in barely one and a half pages requires great dexterity. These pieces were, I confess, the least satisfying of the collection. This was, I suspect, for the simple reason that if you have an idea you think is good enough for a story, why not develop it? Flash fiction often comes across as a fragment of something larger, something that should continue but for some reason does not.
However, one of the flash fiction pieces is an exception: in the space of a page and a half it gives an Alice Munro-like spark of insight capturing a tiny moment, giving a small ping of epiphany, which leaves the reader with the feeling, "Yes, I have felt just that emotion, too."; "Ad Te Clamamus, Exsules, Filii Hevae"; is one such story. Here a group of friends and family are gathered around a table, eating a meal fraught with unnamed tension. We do not learn the reason for the unease until the last line, which delivers the bomb: "...the thick fingers of his right hand roughly tapp[ed] the table in synchrony with the beating of our newly post-coital, runaway hearts.";
I do, however, have a few grumbles. Titles in general often puzzle me, and I confess last more than most. The titles within the collection often seemed unnecessarily obscure and often as not did nothing to provide a clue to the author's meaning. What purpose is served by entitling a story "De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum"; except to make the reader wish she had paid closer attention in Latin class?
Another complaint. There are a few stories in which the pace is slowed down by too much narrative, too many descriptions of weather and clouds and not enough dialogue and conflict. As the late, great Elmore Leonard said, "I try to leave out the parts that readers skip."; Mercifully, these moments are few.
Bridgman is a rare bird. At a time when most writers are prostrating themselves before the public in their eagerness to sell books and have praise heaped upon them, Bridgman remains aloof.
Bridgman, ostende te!
by Roberta Rich (2013)
====
978-1-926763-25-5
Such is the case with the semi-mysterious P.W. Bridgman (a pen name) who has degrees in psychology and law. Standing at an Angle to My Age (Libros Libertad $20) is the Vancouverite's first story collection in the wake of some prestigious publishing credits in the U.K.
Here follow two reviews of that collection. The first by critic and biographer David Stouck appeared in B.C. BookWorld. The second by novelist Roberta Rich appeared in The Advocate, a publication of the B.C. legal profession.
====
Not all authors hanker for publicity. A precious few adopt pseudonyms and avoid the limelight like the plague. P.W. Bridgman, a nom de plume for someone who works in the field of law, is one such anomaly. There is no Facebook page.
No self-merchandizing whatsoever.
In P.W. Bridgman's first fiction collection, Standing at an Angle to My Age (Libros $20), the very shortest stories, referred to as "flash fictions,"; compress within as few words as possible a setting, a way of life, and the potential for dramatic action.
"The Mars Hotel"; encompasses in less than a page, and in language as taut as an Emily Dickinson poem, a lover's journey that began with his mother's proffered finger until, "javelined by Airbus from London to Paris,"; he is united with his beloved.
In just two-pages, "Trading Places"; charts two English couples over a lifetime in terms of education, health and class.
Among the experiments is the telling of a story backwards. The machinery of plot is put into reverse in "Turning in the Trap,"; wherein the narrative of a soldier's long, unhappy marriage and his suicide are presented in brief segments each dated earlier than the preceding one.
The title for "Ad Te Clamamus, Exsules, Filii Hevae,"; another one-pager, can be translated as "To thee we do cry, poor banished children of Eve."; The context here is Catholic guilt. The speaker/narrator sits at the dinner table with Nuala, her six-year-old brother and their father, while the mother hurriedly ladles out lamb broth soup. The exact relationship between the speaker and Nuala is not defined-but the concluding sentence suggests menacing possibilities framed by sin and violence. The Irish father mutters "Jay-sus, Mary and Joseph."; The speaker observes the older man's thick fingers "roughly tapping the table in synchrony with the beating of our newly post-coital, runaway hearts.";
The longer pieces are also foremost about the craft of writing. The selection of the right word is thematic as it was for short story writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, or Ivan Bunin (the now almost forgotten first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for literature).
"Our Secret"; is a mother-daughter story in which the daughter learns the story of her paternity, the perfectly-crafted sentences convey a way of life in northern Ontario that is hard-bitten but intensely alive.
"De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum"; is a father-son story in which a late middle-aged man from B.C. revisits the wartime scene of his Manitoba childhood with a painful clash of cultures between his fiery Irish Catholic mother and his pacifist Mennonite father.
Both these stories have the dimensions of large tragic novels pared down to their essence.
The skills of an adept satirist are evident in the lengthiest piece in the collection, "Cake, Bang and Elm,"; structured around two points of view: the narrator as an observant child in London, England, and as an adult college teacher from Canada. The child's view is registered in the cartoonish Dickensian names of the characters he meets and hears about in London: Mr. Cake, Mrs. Paper, Mr. Boil, Jack Cat, Mr. Gland, etc. The adult, returned many years later, comes to see these bizarre figures in a wholly different light.
"So and Not Otherwise"; is a lively satire of academic life at UBC, its aspirations and shortcomings, including some splendid farcical moments.
Both these stories slip free of satiric conventions and conclude in a gently serious vein.
The stories in Standing at an Angle to My Age, while sometimes set abroad, are nonetheless markedly Canadian, some with specifically B.C. settings and references. They inhabit a wide range of genres and modes, but are distinguished by the steady craft of an elegant literary stylist. Bridgman's carefully polished stories perform agile narrative feats: one page evokes a full-length short story; ten pages read like a novel. Each piece is an experiment and P.W. Bridgman a writer of exceptional talent.
The stories 'The Mars Hotel' and 'Suitably Framed' each placed in Spilling Ink fiction competitions; both appeared in 2011 in the Scottish anthology, Story.Book, published by Unbound Press of Glasgow. 'The Mars Hotel"; was also shortlisted for the U.K. Bridport Prize, flash fiction category, in 2010.
The volume has been fittingly produced by Libros Libertad with careful attention to design layout and typography. P.W. Bridgman has begun work on a novel.
by David Stouck (2013)
====
Standing at An Angle to my Age is a collection of eighteen short stories written by the mysterious P.W. Bridgman. Like B. Traven, author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre and other tales of valour and greed, P.W. Bridgman guards his anonymity jealously. The only clue to his identity-and I am sticking my neck out by using the masculine pronoun-is a quote from his Spartan website: "P.W. Bridgman is a writer of literary fiction living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He has earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology and a degree in law as well.";
Whoever Bridgman is, I salute him. My first and only foray into short story writing was a class I took many years ago labouring under the delusion that writing a short story would be a snap, compared with writing a novel. I thought it would be like the difference between a quickie ex parte chambers application and a long, arduous trial. [Will an ex parte application ever feel quite the same?-Ed.]
Foolishly, I assumed there was ease to be had in brevity. My bravado extended to supposing that emotions could be captured, flash-frozen, savoured and then passed from reader to reader like a bite of cake being passed from one mouth to another-and all this in the space of a measly ten pages or so. My class left me with an undying admiration for those who, like Bridgman, have mastered the genre. Short stories may be short, but easy they ain't.
There is an inherent challenge in reviewing a short story collection, particularly one as diverse as this. The breadth and width of these stories are impressive. They range in setting from the Okanagan Valley and the English Department at UBC to Ireland, London and Paris, and in time from the Second World War to the present. The cast of characters is an assortment: male, female, old and young, rich, poor, kind, cruel.
The prose is spare, each word chosen with surgical precision. The enigmatic Bridgman knows how to craft a sentence. Phrases such as "a well-tethered Catholic";, "small, moist hands";, "curled up like a fiddlehead under the coverlet"; and "an airbus javelined me from London to Paris"; resonate long after the book is finished.
In the coming-of-age story, "The Meaning of Life According to Fred W. Kane";, a shy, bookish boy trying to find his footing in the world is "poised like a pearl diver on the brink of adulthood";. His mentor, Fred W. Kane, has a contagious calmness that works for the boy better than any therapy could.
The dialogue is wonderful. For example, the cadence of Northern Ireland speech rhythms is beautifully captured. In "Cean Dubh Dilis"; the saintly mother says to her husband in gentle reproof, "Catch yourself on, Lorcán...is that the example you want to be setting?";
The opening line of "The Mars Hotel"; is a good example of the use of rhythm and tempo to impart a feeling of slowness and then increasing speed. Read it out loud and you will see what I mean:
Down, down the long avenues and grand boulevards, across the wide sweeps of French lawns sprawling in supplication at the feet of imperious French municipal buildings, along the sidewalks rain-shiny and earthy of smell, by the open doors of rue Cler merchants selling cheeses and olives, my quickening footsteps cadenced by a quickening heartbeat carry me past the art dealer, the patisserie, and the betting house, finally to the Mars Hotel and to you.
Clearly, Bridgman is a student of poetry.
The characters, on the whole, are tender, given to simple acts of kindness, not outward displays of rage or violence except those that have been carefully staged, as in "Cake, Bang and Elm";, the story of two men simulating a fight to conceal their homosexuality. "In Trading Places"; a working-class woman, an invalid, is being tended to by her social superior, a solicitor's widow, for unexplained reasons. What is the nexus between the two? Guilt? The need to control? Compassion? The reader is left to decide.
There is a quiet heroism in many of the characters, particularly the female ones. In the lead story, "Ceann Duhn Dilis";, a mother takes an old, demented man into her home. When her second child is born, she has "to feed the two of them side-by-side";. It is a touching example of the type of loving patience that is difficult to sustain in the day-to-day cauldron of life, especially among families who have limited incomes and are crammed into small council flats. Her kindness is rewarded when, just before the old man dies, he plays "Dear Dark Head"; on a borrowed harp.
And then there is the mother in "Open Secret";, who suffers a stroke but manages to pin a note to her blouse for her daughter to find-a note that reveals the girl's true paternity. This was my favourite of the collection, a lovely tale of mother and daughter joining forces against a tyrant of a stepfather before the mother dies. The tale ends on a wistful note as the daughter, watching from her bedroom window, sees the doctor talking to her stepfather, announcing her mother's death.
"So and Not Otherwise";, set at UBC's Department of English, is the tale of a relationship between a diffident doctoral candidate and his adviser, a dipsomaniacal Brit from Balliol with a huge contempt for his students, his colleagues and himself. It elegantly describes the jealousies, petty back-biting and self-congratulatory elitism of a university department. The language, tone and vocabulary skewer academic pretence neatly. The student, explaining to the professor what attracts him to university life, says: "It's the fact that someone like you can carry on exactly how he pleases and it will all be tolerated, sort of, at least, because he can do something extraordinary."; The two characters are foils for each other, the professor a thinking, feeling, exuberant, misguided mess of a man and his student, with "his pale freckled hands";, the Jesuitically rational student.
"Sir"; is about an authoritarian teacher who delights in humiliating his students, abusing them in every way, including sexually. The teacher is unremittingly nasty, the story told through the eyes of one of his beleaguered pupils. Does the boy learn anything from his experience with the teacher? We don't know.
And then tucked in, here and there, like Oreos in a lunchbox, are several pieces of "flash fiction";. For the uninitiated, flash fiction is a story which takes about as long to read as it does to smoke a cigarette, or to walk a dog around the block or eat an ice cream cone. To establish character and setting in barely one and a half pages requires great dexterity. These pieces were, I confess, the least satisfying of the collection. This was, I suspect, for the simple reason that if you have an idea you think is good enough for a story, why not develop it? Flash fiction often comes across as a fragment of something larger, something that should continue but for some reason does not.
However, one of the flash fiction pieces is an exception: in the space of a page and a half it gives an Alice Munro-like spark of insight capturing a tiny moment, giving a small ping of epiphany, which leaves the reader with the feeling, "Yes, I have felt just that emotion, too."; "Ad Te Clamamus, Exsules, Filii Hevae"; is one such story. Here a group of friends and family are gathered around a table, eating a meal fraught with unnamed tension. We do not learn the reason for the unease until the last line, which delivers the bomb: "...the thick fingers of his right hand roughly tapp[ed] the table in synchrony with the beating of our newly post-coital, runaway hearts.";
I do, however, have a few grumbles. Titles in general often puzzle me, and I confess last more than most. The titles within the collection often seemed unnecessarily obscure and often as not did nothing to provide a clue to the author's meaning. What purpose is served by entitling a story "De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum"; except to make the reader wish she had paid closer attention in Latin class?
Another complaint. There are a few stories in which the pace is slowed down by too much narrative, too many descriptions of weather and clouds and not enough dialogue and conflict. As the late, great Elmore Leonard said, "I try to leave out the parts that readers skip."; Mercifully, these moments are few.
Bridgman is a rare bird. At a time when most writers are prostrating themselves before the public in their eagerness to sell books and have praise heaped upon them, Bridgman remains aloof.
Bridgman, ostende te!
by Roberta Rich (2013)
====
978-1-926763-25-5
Submitted on November 28, 2013 in By David.
