THE DAFFODIL SKY
by H. E. Bates, 1955

The story collection The Daffodil Sky has been called the crowning achievement of H. E. Bates's later years. The title story exhibits the hallmarks of his earlier writing, yet it is colored by an increasing maturity, a sensibility altered by World War II, and a recognition of the inescapability of time's passage.

Like many of Bates's stories "The Daffodil Sky" is highly charged visually, marked by "the direct pictorial contact between eye and object, between object and reader," a quality Bates admired in Hemingway and discussed in The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey. In the first few paragraphs alone Bates evokes a spectrum of colors (dusky yellow, prussian blue, "a strange sharp green," "stencillings of silver," "a stormy copper glow"), not to mention the impact of a farmer's cart full of plums, peas, broccoli, apples, and daffodils. The text is suffused not only with visual images but with an intensely sensory contact with the environment: skin "cold and wet with splashes of hail," the smell of "steam-coal smoke and stale beer and cheap strong cheese," the sound of pike "plopping in the pools of the backwater."

Much of Bates's work is characterized by stark, stripped down plots that turn on situations rather than on a series of developed events; this is one reason, perhaps, that his short fiction was often more successful than his many novels. "The Daffodil Sky" takes place within the space of a few hours, the time frame ruptured by a flashback. The color of the sky is the controlling image, the shuttle that moves back and forth weaving past and present. Bates is known for his striking nature imagery, and here it is the coursing clouds, the discolored sky, and its sudden clearing—"fresh and brilliant, shot through with pale green fire" like daffodils—that trigger for the nameless narrator the memories through which his story is revealed.

While waiting out a storm in a pub he once haunted, the narrator asks after Cora Whitehead, a woman he once knew. Bates (whose short fiction, according to critic Dennis Vannatta, often "works by inference rather than exposition") gives the reader no initial clue to the complexity of the narrator's relationship with Cora. He remembers his instant physical attraction to her in a similar rainstorm many years ago—the "racing flame" of her "running hot through his blood and choking his thinking." One of Bates's recurring preoccupations, for which he has been compared to D.H. Lawrence, is the conflict between passion and repression, the ways in which culture and psychological inhibitions strangle natural impulses or, conversely, the ways in which passion short-circuits propriety or reason.

Indeed, the central event revealed in the flashback is a murder. The narrator, a young farmer, recalls the days when his life seemed full of promise. The man from whom he rented his land proposed to sell him the property; having insufficient funds he accepted Cora's offer to go in with him on the deal, an offer contingent on the help of a friend of hers, Frankie Corbett. Overcome with the vision of his future the narrator rather impetuously asked Cora to marry him and then became "blinded with the stupor of a slow-eating jealousy," which intensified with Cora's pregnancy. Unable to tolerate the thought that the child might be Corbett's, the narrator confronted him one night on the street. The ensuing violence between them led to Corbett's death, and the narrator, apparently, was sentenced to jail.

The story ends with the narrator returning to Wellington Street to "have the last word," to tell Cora what he thinks of her having testified against him. He is a man of 40 years now, Bates tells us, his dreams long ago "eaten by the canker." A young woman opens the door. The narrator is struck by how little Cora has changed; he feels "the flame of her stab through him again exactly as it had done on … the day of the daffodils." Slowly, however, he realizes that this is not Cora but her daughter. It is pouring rain, and the girl, whose mother is not at home, offers to get an umbrella and walk the stranger at her door back to the bridge where he can get a bus. He accepts, and this nonevent, so typical in Bates, is the situation upon which the entire story hinges.

The text becomes filled with sexual imagery—the "rising steam of rain in the air," the heat and thickness, his blood beating in "heavy suction strokes in his throat," the girl's arms "full and naked and fleshy" like her mother's. She is coy and seductive; he is desperately attracted to her even as he considers telling her who he really is. Looking at the "haunting yellow sky," overcome, sickened by "an awful loneliness," he is, apparently, just about to proposition her when a rather phallic train comes "crashing and flaring" under the bridge where they have stopped; the girl waits for it to pass and asks the stranger, whose body is shaking, whether he had intended to ask her out. Instead, the train passed and the storm clearing, he settles for a drink with the girl who is perhaps his daughter, steering clear of the bridge blocked with a notice, stating symbolically, "Bridge Unsafe. Keep off. Trespassers will be prosecuted."

Clearly there is the suggestion here of incest, only one of the many boundary issues in the story. There are many violations: Cora violates, perhaps, fidelity; the narrator violates the law; reality violates dreams; the present violates the past. Although Bates has been compared to Maupassant, his endings are often more ambiguous than ironic, an ambiguity echoed in the title. The reader is left unsure which sky controls the landscape—the "pure and clear" sky and the "fierce, flashing daffodil sun" of the narrator's youth or the dusky yellow sky "with spent thunder" that the narrator finds upon his return to town. The importance lies perhaps in a recognition of complexity: appearances are deceptive; things both are and are not what they seem; past and present intersect, become confused, coexist. Both inner and outer landscapes are wracked by storms of violence, passion, and loss, but nature also offers the "light of after-storm, … a great space of calm, rain-washed daffodil sky."

—Deborah Kelly Kloepfer