On the third or fourth day, nearing the end of the book, I came to the little passage where Chekhov’s doctor—a Badenweiler physician by the name of Dr. Schwöhrer, who attended Chekhov during his last days—is summoned by Olga Knipper Chekhov to the dying writer’s bedside in the early morning hours of July 2, 1904. It is clear that Chekhov has only a little while to live. Without any comment on the matter, Troyat tells his readers that this Dr. Schwöhrer ordered up a bottle of champagne. Nobody had asked for champagne, of course; he just took it upon himself to do it. But this little piece of human business struck me as an extraordinary action. Before I really knew what I was going to do with it, or how I was going to proceed, I felt I had been launched into a short story of my own then and there. I wrote a few lines and then a page or two more. How did Dr. Schwöhrer go about ordering champagne and at that late hour at this hotel in Germany? How was it delivered to the room and by whom, etc.? What was the protocol involved when the champagne arrived? Then I stopped and went ahead to finish reading the biography.
But just as soon as I’d finished the book I once again turned my attention back to Dr. Schwöhrer and that business of the champagne. I was seriously interested in what I was doing. But what was I doing? The only thing that was clear to me was that I thought I saw an opportunity to pay homage—if I could bring it off, do it rightly and honorably—to Chekhov, the writer who has meant so much to me for such a long time.
I tried out ten or twelve openings to the piece, first one beginning and then another, but nothing felt right. Gradually I began to move the story away from those final moments back to the occasion of Chekhov’s first public hemorrhage from tuberculosis, something that occurred in a restaurant in Moscow in the company of his friend and publisher, Suvorin. Then came the hospitalization and the scene with Tolstoy, the trip with Olga to Badenweiler, the brief period of time there in the hotel together before the end, the young bellman who makes two important appearances in the Chekhov suite and, at the end, the mortician who, like the bellman, isn’t to be found in the biographical account.
The story was a hard one to write, given the factual basis of the material. I couldn’t stray from what had happened, nor did I want to. As much as anything, I needed to figure out how to breathe life into actions that were merely suggested or not given moment in the biographical telling. And, finally, I saw that I needed to set my imagination free and simply invent within the confines of the story. I knew as I was writing this story that it was a good deal different from anything I’d ever done before. I’m pleased, and grateful, that it seems to have come together.
On Where I’m Calling From
I wrote and published my first short story in 1963, twenty-five years ago, and have been drawn to short story writing ever since. I think in part (but only in part) this inclination toward brevity and intensity has to do with the fact that I am a poet as well as a story writer. I began writing and publishing poetry and fiction at more or less the same time, back in the early 1960s when I was still an undergraduate. But this dual relationship as poet and short story writer doesn’t explain everything. I’m hooked on writing short stories and couldn’t get off them even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.
I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact—so crucially important to me back at the beginning and even now still a consideration—that the story can be written and read in one sitting. (Like poems!)
In the beginning—and perhaps still—the most important short story writers to me were Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Frank O’Connor and V. S. Pritchett. I forget who first passed along a copy of Babel’s Collected Stories to me, but I do remember coming across a line from one of his greatest stories. I copied it into the little notebook I carried around with me everywhere in those days. The narrator, speaking about Maupassant and the writing of fiction, says: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
When I first read this it came to me with the force of revelation. This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images, as well as the exact and correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn away his eyes from the text unless the house caught fire. Vain wishes perhaps, to ask words to assume the power of actions, but clearly a young writer’s wishes. Still, the idea of writing clearly with authority enough to hold and engage the reader persisted. This remains one of my primary goals today.
My first book of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, did not appear until 1976, thirteen years after the first story was written. This long delay between composition, magazine and book publication was due in part to a young marriage, the exigencies of child rearing and blue-collar laboring jobs, a little education on the fly—and never enough money to go around at the end of each month. (It was during this long period, too, that I was trying to learn my craft as a writer, how to be as subtle as a river current when very little else in my life was subtle.)
After the thirteen-year period it took to put the first book together and to find a publisher who, I might add, was most reluctant to engage in such a cockeyed enterprise—a first book of stories by an unknown writer!—I tried to learn to write fast when I had the time, writing stories when the spirit was with me and letting them pile up in a drawer; and then going back to look at them carefully and coldly later on, from a remove, after things had calmed down, after things had, all too regrettably, gone back to “normal.”
Inevitably, life being what it is, there were often great swatches of time that simply disappeared, long periods when I did not write any fiction. (How I wish I had those years back now!) Sometimes a year or two would pass when I couldn’t even think about writing stories. Often, though, I was able to spend some of that time writing poems, and this proved important because in writing the poetry the flame didn’t entirely putter out, as I sometimes feared it might. Mysteriously, or so it would seem to me, there would come a time to turn to fiction again. The circumstances in my life would be right or at least improved and the ferocious desire to write would take hold of me, and I would begin.
I wrote Cathedral—eight of these stories are reprinted here—in a period of fifteen months. But during that two-year period before I began to work on those stories, I found myself in a period of stocktaking, of trying to discover where I wanted to go with whatever new stories I was going to write and how I wanted to write them. My previous book, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, had been in many ways a watershed book for me, but it was a book I didn’t want to duplicate or write again. So I simply waited. I taught at Syracuse University. I wrote some poems and book reviews, and an essay or two. And then one morning something happened. After a good night’s sleep, I went to my desk and wrote the story “Cathedral.” I knew it was a different kind of story for me, no question. Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly.
The new stories that are included here, stories which were written after Cathedral and after I had intentionally, happily, taken “time out” for two years to write two books of poetry, are, I’m sure, different in kind and degree from the earlier stories. (At the least I think they’re different from those earlier stories, and I suspect readers may feel the same. But any writer will tell you he wants to believe his work will undergo a metamorphosis, a sea change, a process of enrichment if he’s been at it long enough.)
V. S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.” First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that will illuminate the moment and just maybe lock it indelibly into the reader’s consciousness. Make it a part of the reader’s own experience, as Hemingway so nicely put it. Forever, the writer hopes. Forever.
If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story
and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or our intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, “created of warm blood and nerves” as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.
INTRODUCTIONS
Steering by the Stars
This collection of eleven poems and two short stories from Syracuse University’s creative writing program—work from both graduate and undergraduate writers is included—is a writing sampler from the program. I think it’s good work, and I’m willing to stand behind my choices. Another editor might have chosen, indeed, would have chosen, some different poems as well as different stories. But that’s one of the things that help make teaching creative writing interesting and this particular writing program a most interesting one to be associated with: we’re all of us, students and faculty, different kinds of writers with different tastes, as unlike one another as you’d want to imagine.
What we do all have in common is an uncommon love of good writing and a desire to encourage it when we see it. We share as well, all of us, a willingness to talk about our ideas of writing, and the courage to put those ideas into practice. We find we’re able to talk, sometimes even sensibly, about a piece of writing—in some cases work so new it’s just come out of the typewriter the week before. We’re able, because of the special circumstance of community, to sit around a seminar table or a table in a beer-and-pizza joint, and talk about what’s good or bad in a story or poem, to praise this and discourage that. Sure, bad poems and bad stories turn up in writing classes, but, Lord, that’s no secret or disgrace: bad writing can turn up anywhere. The most common forni of badness is the writer misusing the language, being careless about what he is trying to say and how he is trying to say it or using the language only to convey some kind of fast-forward information better left to the daily papers or the talking heads on the evening news. When he does this, the other writers around him will say so, if their opinion is solicited. If the emotion in the poem or the story is sheer hype, something trumped up, or just confused and smeary, or if the writer is writing about something he really doesn’t care about one way or the other, or if he doesn’t have anything much to write about and is simply finding that overwhelming in itself, be it a poem or a short story, why then his fellow writers, the other students and the faculty, will call him to account. The other writers in the writing community can help keep the young writer straight.
A good creative writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time. I think he can save a bad writer a lot of time too, but we don’t need to go into that. Writing is tough and lonely work, and wrong paths can be easily taken. If we are doing our job, creative writing teachers are performing a necessary negative function. If we are any good as teachers, we should be teaching the young writers how not to write and teaching them to teach themselves how not to write. In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound says that “fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” But if you take the word “accuracy” to mean honesty in the use of the language, saying exactly what you mean in order to achieve exactly the results you want to achieve, then honesty in the student’s writing can be helped and encouraged and maybe even taught.
Writing is hard and writers need all the help and honest encouragement they can get. Pound was a writing teacher for Eliot, Williams, Hemingway (Hemingway was taking instruction from Gertrude Stein at the same time), Yeats, and dozens of lesser-known poets and fiction writers. In turn, Yeats—by Pound’s own admission—became Pound’s writing teacher in later years. Nothing odd about this. If they’re any good, creative writing teachers are always learning from their students.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not an apology for nor by any means an attempt at a justification for the existence of creative writing programs. I don’t think they need one in the slightest. As I see it, the only essential difference between what any of those other writers did and what we’re trying to do here at Syracuse University is that we’re simply involved in a more formalized endeavor. That’s all. We have here the makings of a literary community. Every creative writing program around the country that’s worth its salt has a sense of itself in this manner, a sense of a literary community at work. You know what I’m talking about. (But a lot of writers don’t get along well in the community. That’s fine too.)
In a creative writing program there exists, or most certainly should exist, this sense of a shared community, people banded together with fairly similar interests and goals—a group of kinfolk, if you will. If you’re in a writing program and want to partake of it, it’s there. But the mere fact of this group just being there in the same town or city can help palliate a little the young writer’s sense of loneliness, which sometimes borders on a feeling of genuine isolation. There’s always a feeling of dread excitement that fills you when you go into the room where it’s done, or not done, and sit down in front of the empty page. It doesn’t help to know that your fellow writers are doing the same thing, maybe even at the same time. But it does help, I’m convinced, that if something comes out of that time spent in that room alone, you know that there is somebody there in the community who wants to see what you’ve done, somebody who’ll be pleased if you’re doing something right and true, and disappointed if you’re not. In any case, he’ll tell you what he thinks—if you ask him. Of course, this is not enough by any means. But it can help. Meanwhile, your muscles will grow stronger, your skin thicken, and you can begin to grow the winter coat of hair that might help sustain you in the cold and difficult journey ahead. With luck, you’ll learn to steer by the stars.
All My Relations
The next best thing to writing your own short story is to read someone else’s short story. And when you read and reread, as I did, 120 of them back to back in a fairly short span of time (January 25 to February 25), you come away able to draw a few conclusions. The most obvious is that clearly there are a great many stories being written these days, and generally the quality is good—in some cases even exceptional. (There are plenty of stories that aren’t so good, by both “known” and “unknown” writers, but why talk about these? So what if there are? So what? We do what we can.) I want to remark on the good stories I read and say why I think they’re good and why I chose the twenty I did. But first a few words about the selection process itself.
Shannon Ravenel, who has been the annual editor for this series since 1977, read 1,811 short stories from 165 different periodicals—a big increase over previous years, she tells me. From her reading she sent 120 for my consideration. As editor, my job was to pick twenty stories for inclusion. But I had liberty in making my selections: I didn’t have to take all or, conceivably, any of the 120 that arrived one morning by Express Mail—an event that brought conflicting emotions, as they say, on my part. For one thing, I was writing a story of my own, and I was nearly finished with it. Of course I wanted to go on without interruption. (As usual, when working on a story, this one felt like the best I’d ever write. I was loath to turn my attention from it to the 120 others that waited for some sign from me.) But I was also more than a little interested in knowing just which 120 stories I now had in my possession. I leafed through the stories then and there, and while I didn’t read any of them that day, or even the next, I noted the names of the authors, some of whom were friends or acquaintances, others belonging to writers I knew by name only, or by name and some prior work. But, happily, most of the stories were by writers I didn’t know, writers I’d never heard of—unknowns, as they’re called, and as they indeed are to the world at large. The magazines the stories had come from were nearly as diverse and as numerous as the writers. I say nearly. Stories from the New Yorker predominated, and this is as it should be. The New Yorker not only publishes good stories—on occa
sion wonderful stories—but, by virtue of the fact that they publish every week, fifty-two weeks a year, they bring out more fiction than any other magazine in the country. I took three stories that had first appeared in that magazine. The other magazines I selected from are represented with one story each.
In November 1984, when I was invited to serve as this year’s editor, I made plans to begin my own list of “best” come January 1985. And in the course of my reading last year I came across a dozen or so that I liked exceedingly well, stories that excited me enough to put them aside for a later reading. (In the final analysis, being excited by a story is the only acceptable criterion for including it in a collection of this kind, or for publishing the story in a magazine in the first place.) I kept these stories in a folder with the intention of rereading them this January or February, when I knew I would be looking at the other 120. And most often, in 1985, when I read something I liked, something that stirred me enough to put it by for later, I wondered—a stray thought—if I’d see that same story turn up in Shannon Ravenel’s choices.
Well, there was some duplication. A few of the stories I’d flagged were among those she sent along. But most of the stories I’d noted were not, for whatever reasons, included among those 120. In any event, I had liberty, as I’ve said, to take what I wanted from her selections, as well as include what I wanted from my own reading. (I could, I suppose, if I’d been willful, or out of my mind, have selected twenty stories entirely of my own choosing, had none of the stories she sent pleased me.) Now—and this is the last set of figures, just about, that you’ll hear on the matter—the breakdown went as follows: of the 120 stories I received in the mail, I selected twelve, all beauties, for inclusion. I found eight other beauties from my own reading.
Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Page 20
