Deep in the human heart, stirrings of loneliness

Unlike Chekhov, who called medicine his lawful wife and literature his mistress, Arturo Vivante gave up medicine entirely when, as a young doctor in Rome, he began to sell his stories to the New Yorker and decided writing was his true calling. Both professions require attention to the dimensions of suffering and pain, although Vivante seems to have been drawn more to the pain of the psyche than to the pain of the body. In “Solitude, and Other Stories,” Vivante muses on the essential loneliness of our human existence and our yearning for connection. He describes with delicacy and passion those precious moments when we reach out to another person, or, in some cases, to another creature of nature, and there is a vivid response.

Many of the tales in “Solitude” are narrated by an itinerant professor who, like Vivante himself, travels far from home to teach at colleges across the United States. In “The Cricket,” the professor is alone in a college-owned house where there is no other creature but a cricket. He is attuned to the cricket’s noises; he comes to depend on the sound and its variations. “The shrill, piercing note had a ubiquitous quality. It filled the room the way its companions outdoors filled the night. The only difference was that outside a choir was playing; this was a solo. And his only company. Playing for him.” When another professor arrives and in total indifference stomps on the cricket, the narrator is horrified.

In “Reflection,” a middle-aged man admires the beautiful hair of a young woman sitting in front of him on a train. He recalls how his wife has criticized him for his interest in young women, and his daughter once called him a fool for admiring, at a funeral, a girl with “a magnificent shock of red hair.” He thinks: “Why should one ignore beauty at whatever age, of whatever age, and anywhere, anytime, even at a funeral service?”

“Crosscurrents” describes a man who is low in spirits and without energy but longs to engage in life. Set in Cape Cod, where Vivante has lived for many years, the man lies in bed and feels the wind beckon him to go sailing. “But still he lay, anchored by a sense of inertia and dejection to the bed.” When finally he goes out to sail, “[h]e felt more alive in this shaky old boat than in the safety of his bed. Did speed, instability, danger make one more aware of life than stillness, security, safety? If so ... sail out into the open sea. Yes, leave all sluggishness behind.”

Vivante is a master of capturing the essence of a moment. In “Doves” he describes the courtship of two pigeons, “their iridescent plumage glorious in the sun ... their beaks joined as in a kiss.... Then she stood still and crouched while he hopped behind her .... The union lasted no more than a few seconds, but in that time, hidden by the softness of their plumes, in momentary darkness, the fluid of love and life was duly transmitted.”

Love is a primary force in these stories, although not necessarily the love of a man and his wife. Often, the man, far from home, seeks the comfort of an available woman. In “Osage Orange,” the narrator thinks of a line from a novel: “I’ve never had anything approaching a successful love affair,” and he remembers a night he spent with a woman -- “It had been no affair. It had been merely a night -- not even a whole night.... Later, in the extreme moment of passion, she gave a cry that seemed to him to fill not just the room and house but the whole town, and to go out like a wave ... it was a cry, he thought, ‘such as made the world in the beginning,’ primeval, belonging to no time and to all time.”

In “Company,” the traveling man comes home for a weekend to see his wife, although “[h]er visits to his bedroom became rarer and rarer, till, some ten years ago, they stopped altogether.” He finds his wife petting the cat and he longs to be petted by her in so tender a way. She rejects him and says, “Well, you wanted it this way

Vivante’s stories shine with intensity and passion; they tell the stories of the human heart in prose that is lyrical and luminous. Though he has sold 70 stories to the New Yorker and published two novels, his work has not brought him the recognition it should have. In “The Italian Class,” the teacher muses, “Why publish or write? Why try to make a work of art of words, notes, colors or clay?” Perhaps the art evident in these stories can help explain why. *