NOTES FROM THE HENHOUSE: On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing, by Elspeth Barker
If you took to your bed after the death of Flaco, the photogenic Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and enjoyed a year of freedom and celebrity before slamming into 267 West 89th Street (I think he was aiming for the Eldorado), do not under any circumstances pick up the work of Elspeth Barker.
Not that this would constitute a heavy load, at least not physically. Barker, who died in 2022 at 81, published only one novel, “O Caledonia,” 30 years earlier: about a lonely, literary girl’s violently curtailed coming-of-age in rural Scotland. (Let’s hear it for the late bloomers — including Flaco.) A new collection of her essays and shorter fiction, “Notes From the Henhouse,” has been gathered like little eggs by her eldest daughter, Raffaella, also a writer, from previously published work.
Reviewing “O Caledonia” in brief for The New York Times, Michael Steinberg acknowledged the lush atmospherics but recoiled at the protagonist’s penchant for quoting obscure Greek and Latin poetry, concluding that her murder at age 16 “has some aspects of a mercy killing — at least for the reader.”
Indeed, just about the only character troubled by her death is a pet jackdaw, Claws, who “in desolation, like a tiny kamikaze pilot” — like Flaco — “flew straight into the massive walls of Auchnasaugh,” her eccentric family’s turreted dwelling. Many other fauna perish as well, including a frog accidentally impaled on a garden fork.
But other critics, and prize committees, liked the book, for which the phrase “mordantly funny” might have been coined, and over the years it has found a devoted audience, among women especially, some of the same who also savor the work of the Brontë sisters and the castle books of Shirley Jackson and Dodie Smith.
Born Elspeth Langlands, Barker drew from her own upbringing in Kincardineshire, where she was the only girl attending the preparatory school her parents ran. She studied at Oxford but didn’t graduate, worked as a bookshop clerk and waitress and married George Barker, a poet more than 25 years older who fathered her five children.
With remarkable financial hubris, or indifference — call it “boy math” — he had had 10 previously, with three other women, inspiring in one longtime paramour, the Canadian author Elizabeth Smart, another cult classic evocatively titled “By Grand Central I Sat Down and Wept.”
There are a few short stories here, notably “The Dance,” about a child’s trip to Portugal, but it’s hard to pry them apart from the nonfiction, considering the darkly “Fantasia”-like scenes Elspeth inhabited: toads popping out of slippers; planting “a pansy freaked with jet, only to find that on a second blooming the white pink became a dingy pink pink and the pansy unfreaked, never to freak again.”
Even more freaky: “Each autumn, in the churchyard, a solitary specimen of the brazen mushroom Phallus impudicus rears from his grave,” she noted of the libidinous George. “That would amuse him.”
If “O Caledonia” is a slow intoxicating swoon of a book, awash in dew, dotted with mildew and swathed in the purple silk its author favored, “Henhouse,” at a ragged 216 pages, is more like hopscotch in and out of an invigorating cold plunge bath. As a writer and person, this other Ma Barker had the unusual quality of being able to both shock and soothe.
My favorite prose piece is “Packing for India,” about sisters’ deathbed vigil for an older mother. Old and sick with cancer, she suddenly starts pouring out extraordinary stories about her subcontinental childhood, including, most ghastly, her unnamed nursemaid dying on a boat back to Scotland and being dropped into the sea wrapped in a Union Jack flag. Usually looking mortality square in the face, Barker here elides the moment of expiration, focusing instead on a coveted pair of — O symbolism! — red shoes.
“I find death absolutely unacceptable and I cannot come to terms with it,” she writes in one essay, in what could have been a paraphrase of Mary McCarthy’s thoughts on the subject. “I cannot believe that all that passion, wit, eloquence and rage can be deleted by something so vulgar as the heart stopping.”
Even at humanity’s supposedly most hallowed moments, she reminds us, our baser instincts cannot be beaten down. Humor, originally meaning the kind of gross body fluids toward which Barker is entirely unsqueamish, might be the most divine. “You’re on your own now, baby,” her husband tells her “more than once and gleefully” when he himself is terminal. One can imagine the late, great Richard Lewis, Prince of Pain, saying the same to Larry David.
She was an atrocious driver on those winding country roads, as was her widower in a different way, and her writing about this is hilarious.
But never mind the people who dot this jagged landscape: “Henhouse” is, at its heart, a menagerie, about people’s uneasy coexistence with various species. (Barker’s writing career started with a magazine article about hens.)
Parrots bite two generations of female children, causing them to vomit into the cage — “a delightful moment of mother-and-daughter communion,” she notes dryly. Horses escape a train and tortoises scrabble in their box. Barker’s affinity with animals is a kind of synesthesia; in childhood she associated jealousy with jellyfish. There’s an entire essay about a pet pig named Portia. “Their day is gone,” remarks someone mournfully, of its species. “Like the alligators in New York.”
Why did urban dwellers care so much for Flaco, and not the rats — not even Pizza Rat — and roaches? Was it simply because he was rare and pretty? Is that moral? Remember that lobsters, now considered a delicacy, used to be prison food.
I’m digressing wildly, Tom Swifty intended. But these small, absinthey sips of Barker are a break from one’s usual mental cage.
NOTES FROM THE HENHOUSE: On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing | By Elspeth Barker | Scribner | 216 pp. | Paperback, $18
