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The Elevator and Other Stories
The Elevator and Other Stories
The Elevator and Other Stories
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The Elevator and Other Stories

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Maude Hutchins first came into prominence— brilliant writer, painter, sculptor that she is—with A Diary of Love, in 1950. This was a charming story of a young girl's coming of age, told with a kind of eighteenth century aristocratic, or agrarian, frankness of tone, filled with a delicate sensuality which was at once touching and witty—which was on the side of the pagan gods, as I said once, and written with the pen of a mischievous angel. This book is still, and is likely to remain, a minor classic, which, now that we have been able to digest the erotic writings of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller without apparent harm to our moral sensibility, should have its own revival. (As a matter of fact, A Diary of Love has been selling steadily: it has had at least five hard-cover printings, and an equal number of paperback editions; it has been translated into Danish, Italian, German and, shall we say, English.) But Mrs. Hutchins would resent, I know, any description of her work as “erotic.” The curious thing about her writing, so remarkably open about all forms of personal behavior, was the prevailing tone of candor. If nothing human was foreign to her, everything human was a constant source of delight, of pleasure and gaiety. In the present collection, moreover, Mrs. Hutchins has opened up an altogether new vein both of her own talent, and very possibly in American literature itself. After our great tradition of Naturalism and Realism, starting around 1890 and reaching its peak and climax in the famous books of the 1920's and '30's, we have had Symbolism (in the works of Anais Nin, for example); we have had Surrealism in such advance-guard experimentalists as John Hawkes, or Jack Jones. We have had a whole body of psychological fiction, whose purest practitioner is perhaps Conrad Aiken. And these experimental movements have in turn permeated and colored our continuing and central tradition of native realism: the reports of whose death, like Mark Twain's in his own day, are both premature and exaggerated. Mrs. Hutchins' new stories contain elements from all these literary movements. They are dream-tales, usually about psychological states of mind, centering around the theme of Time, using elements of both Symbolism and Surrealism, but always—and that is the point—specifically Hutchins-like. And that is to say, they are profoundly human and recognizable, almost always witty and entertaining, if sometimes they are also discomforting, chilling or disturbing. It is a rather weird world which is projected in these stories; a psychological world that may even startle the conventional Freudians. Just as in the typical logic of dreams, the macabre may suddenly turn into the bawdy and hilarious, the comic into the grotesque or the ominous. I know of no other such stories in our contemporary writing as well-written as these are, or animated by such a distinctive artistic vision of life or death; of fantasy and reality.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherOlympia Press
Release dateNov 10, 2015
ISBN9781626576896
The Elevator and Other Stories
Author

Maude Hutchins

Maude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins is considered one of the foremost practitioners of nouveau roman in the English language. Hutchins is best known today for her sexual coming-of-age novel Victorine. Hutchins published several experimental poems and plays in the 1930s and 1940s - including Diagrammatics (1932) with Mortimer Adler, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Hutchins first novel, Georgiana, appeared in 1948, the year of her divorce, and was quickly followed by A Diary of Love (1950), Love Is a Pie (1952), My Hero (1953), The Memoirs of Maisie (1955), Victorine (1959), Honey on the Moon (1964), Blood on the Doves (1965) and The Unbelievers Downstairs (1967). She published stories and poems in the New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Harper's Bazaar and other popular magazines, and later collected some of her short fiction in The Elevator (1962). As a trained and popular artist, Hutchins had many gallery shows, including several at the Albert Roullier Galleries in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Wilderstein and America Fine Arts society galleries in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Grand Central Art Galleries, the St. Louis Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, the New Haven Paint and Clay club, and others. She also was picked, along with two others, to represent Illinois at the third annual National Exhibition of American Art. In addition to this honor, some of her work was exhibited at a show of modern art at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Maude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins died on March 28, 1991 in Fairfield, Connecticut.

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    The Elevator and Other Stories - Maude Hutchins

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