Customer Reviews

I See You

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What was going on with Charlotte Armstrong when she put together the volume she called I SEE YOU? She must have been in one of those moods where she longed to be taken seriously, to be recognized as more than a genre writer. These moods struck her from time to time, usually to grand results, but sometimes it wasn't such a great idea. I'm a big fan of her two "straight" novels, THE TROUBLE IN THOR and THE SEVENTEEN WIDOWS OF SANS SOUCI, but there's no denying that as she grew older, her style got more and more mannered, nearly pretentious, and she got to be all about wisdom--paralleling the mood of the nation, I suppose, in the 1960s when we started importing every kind of spiritual wisdom from Zen Buddhism to Carlos Castaneda. I SEE YOU (1966) is a very different sort of book from her first, classic collection of short stories THE ALBATROSS; the jacket copy boasts that it is a seven ages of man book, and it's true, the first story is about an infant confronting a clown at a circus (and being scarred for life) and the final story, the title tale, takes place in a nursing home, its heroine an elderly woman who's just about given up her lease on life. To run the gamut from infancy to old age Armstrong had to repeat two stories from THE ALBATROSS, so it's funny to see two of her classics, THE ENEMY and MISS MURPHY, standing in respectively for "childhood" and "adolescence," whereas in the original we just thought of them as infinitely clever and touching crime stories with a twist. Here they have to carry a symbolic weight they don't really support.

The tragic thing is that, in order to make this happen, she had to edit out some real winners, stories that remain uncollected to this day, because they did not fit her chronological scheme! Someone should print a book of Armstrong's uncollected tales: for ten cents I'd do it myself!

But at the end of the day I SEE YOU would be a book to cherish just for the fact that in it Armstrong reprinted "Motto Day," a long short story that might be the very best thing she ever pulled off in any medium, and not a crime story at that. Four disaffected young people (not as young as they used to be, around 30) decide to change their lives by pulling a penny apiece out of a tobacco tin, each penny wrapped in a motto, or cliche, a guide to living, and they vow to live by the mottoes they get for 12 hours on a Monday. Only 12 hours--how much trouble could they get into, how much of a commitment is 12 hours? The answers surprise me every time I read this magnificent, juicy story.

This isn't Charlotte Armstrong's usual fare. One or two of these stories could be called mysteries, but most aren't. They're dated, as you'd expect, but marvelous in their own way. One story utterly puzzles me; the rest show a splendid grasp of human nature. They'll surprise you.