One thing that’s fascinated me as an adult is how often the traditional concept of family and reality come into conflict. Tolstoy suggested that all happy families are alike, but from my experience unhappy families often are, too, for in an unhappy family there’s usually at least one person who’s dying to get out. And I’m not sure that Tolstoy got it right about happy families, either. Some of the happiest families I’ve encountered are the untraditional families created when strangers find a bond that’s stronger than any blood ties.
Stanley Baron’s slim 1961 novel, The Kindness of Strangers, is an example. Set in Cannes in the off-season, the story is about two people who find themselves forming an odd and unexpected family when their paths accidentally cross. Milly Grace is a wealthy 40-ish American, the surviving mistress of a man who loved her deeply but never married her. Milly’s days are filled with monotonous luxury: massages, beauty treatments, a drink at a seaside cafe, a dalliance with an occasional good-looking young man. As the book opens, this monotony appears soon to be broken with the visit of the son of the only relative she still keeps in touch with, and Milly feels an uncomfortable obligation to rekindle family ties long grown cold.
Poujovkine (an implausible name) is a Russian pianist, exiled since the revolution, who lost his wife and daughter during the Second World War, when he was touring the U.S. and they were swept off to a concentration camp. His days are filled with worries about money, health, and a fading career whose sunset is brought closer when a theater owner cuts off an engagement due to poor sales at the box office. He fears that this represents, effectively, his annihilation. Without an audience, he thinks, “The performing artist had nothing. Nothing plus nothing minus nothing divided and multiplied by nothing.” The sole interest that consumes him is playing the dandy, dressing in suits “so flamboyantly British that the effect could only have been achieved by a Continental tailor.” What friends he once had have all been lost: “deported, killed, displaced.”
When Milly finally meets her cousin’s son, he turns out to be callow, rude, and only concerned with wheedling a hand-out. She turns away, feeling that she is now completely alone, an adult orphan. This is when she encounters Poujovkine, who collapses in front of her, seemingly from a heart attack but in fact just overwhelmed by panic. She kneels to comfort him and finds herself feeling the first real connection she’s had to another human being since her lover’s death. Poujovkine feels that bond as well — not a sexual attraction but a sense of having found someone who will never lose track of him.
And that’s it. Poujovkine will return to his cheap hotel. Milly will motor off to Monte Carlo with the handsome young Italian she’s hired as a driver/companion for the evening, even as she tells herself that she’s at the start of a long relationship with the pianist. We are left to speculate what will become of this odd family of two strangers. One reviewer described the meeting of Milly and Poujovkine as “a collision of butterflies,” and it’s exactly that inconsequential and fleeting. Writing in the Hackensack Record, Russell Thacher, who devoted a remarkable amount of column space to the book, admitted that “Depending upon what you look for in a novel,” readers would either find it “a delightful and rewarding piece of work or a fairly inconsequential little story that begins nowhere and gets not very far.”
While Stanley Baron — who evidently spent most of his time after the end of the war in Europe — is a fine observer of characters and national characteristics, I felt he missed writing a consequential little story by about 80-100 pages. In a short story, the denouement can be carried off in a handful of paragraphs. In a novel, even one of under 200 pages, we have a right to expect a little more. Otherwise, all the build-up of the previous chapters seems to culminate in something like pulling the cork from a bottle of champagne that’s gone flat.
Stanley Baron’s first novel, The End of the Line (1951), was about the complicated relationship of an American diplomat in Paris and his wife, and his subsequent novels appear to have been set in France and England. All My Enemies (1952), a spy novel, was compared to Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” and The Facts of Love received generally favorable reviews. Baron’s last novel was A Woman of Thirty, whose plot (the gradual deterioration of a woman after she seduces an older man when she’s 15) seems to have dissuaded British reviewers (the book wasn’t released in the U.S.) from giving it more than a few sentences’ notice. I have been unable to find much more information about his life and work.
Hello Brad
There are a few details of his life on the back cover of the dust jacket of The Kindness of Strangers – which you probably already knew about.
Very intruiging indeed. Maybe i’ll get lucky and find it in a library. The Russian name I decided to pronounce poo-JOFF-kin :-) Cheers!