Tender Only to One

Nicholas Pashley was a bookseller and a freelance writer and editor in Toronto.

Tender Only to One, the first appearance in book form for this young Ottawa writer, is a collection of 23 short stories — stories brief enough, for the most part, to be more accurately described perhaps as vignettes. Nearly half of them deal with prominent painters (Van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Bonnard, Monet, and Emil Nolde), although Robert Louis Stevenson and numerous purely fictional creations appear as well.

Taylor’s painters are captured near the ends of their lives, their energy and inspiration spent. In a letter to Theo, Van Gogh writes, “The pursuit of happiness is over, and I must now try to maintain my courage because I have the intolerable discomfort of calmly observing myself slip into madness.” Degas laments, “Something in my mind has given up, gone limp.” Gauguin loathes his filthy, bug-ridden hut in the Marquesas Islands, while Nolde in 1947 decries the stupidity of our century and lives in an isolated wooden house on the North Sea.

This sense of isolation runs through the stories. Every Saturday a woman watches her farmer neighbour pass by her home. Years ago he deflowered her in his parents’ barn, but he has not spoken to her since. Now, crippled by a stroke, the old woman sits at her window and wonders why. In another story, a shabby old man keeps albums of Polaroid photographs he has taken of young girls. A lonely woman is told by a psychiatrist that her hair loss is due to anxiety, although otherwise there are no outward signs. “Many people,” he tells her, “seem calm on the surface, but there’s a tension within, invisible to the untrained eye.”

It is this invisible tension that Richard Taylor examines in his stories. His writing is laconic, almost excessively so. The terse style (“lean,” the dust jacket calls it) captures the solitude of Taylor’s characters, but too often little else. His longer stories are, for this reviewer, more successful at presenting character and context than the very short pieces that dominate this collection.