Ask any thoughtful reader—a student or teacher of literature, a critic or another writer, and you will find agreement: Chekhov is the greatest short story writer who ever lived. There are good reasons why people feel this way. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote—few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.
People sometimes speak of Chekhov’s “saintliness.” Well, he wasn’t a saint, as anyone who has read a biography of him can tell you. What he was, in addition to being a great writer, was a consummate artist. He once admonished another writer: “Your laziness stands out between the lines of every story. You don’t work on your sentences. You must, you know. That’s what makes art.”
Chekhov’s stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. They present, in an extraordinarily precise manner, an unparalleled account of human activity and behavior in his time; and so they are valid for all time. Anyone who reads literature, anyone who believes, as one must, in the transcendent power of art, sooner or later has to read Chekhov. And just now might be a better time than any.
Fiction of Occurrence and Consequence
(WITH TOM JENKS)
The excellent becomes the permanent.
ARISTOTLE
When we began the work of assembling short stories for this book, one of our criteria—unspoken, but there nonetheless—was that a story’s narrative interest would be one of the deciding factors in our selections. We also felt that we were not out to be democratic in our selections, or even representative. There was only so much space in the anthology after all, and a limit to the number of stories we could include. Decisions had to be made that were not always easy. But aside from this, however, we were simply not interested in putting before the reader further samples of what some have called “postmodern” or “innovative” fiction, and others have hailed as “the new fiction”—self-reflexive, fabulist, magical realist, as well as all mutations, offshoots, and fringe movements thereof. We were interested in stories that had not only a strong narrative drive, with characters we could respond to as human beings, but stories where the effects of language, situation, and insight were intense and total—short stories which on occasion had the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world.
A tall order, indeed. But isn’t it true that with any great, or even really good, short story (or any other singular work of literary art), just something like this does often happen? We think the thirty-six short stories included herein are ample evidence that it is possible for stories to produce such salutary effects; and in our selections we aimed for work that aspired to nothing less—stories of consequence that in some important way bear witness to our own lives. In any event, in light of our sensibilities and according to our criteria, time and again we found ourselves moved and exhilarated as we read and selected the work that follows.
It’s our view, and one not held lightly, certainly not defensively, that the best short stories of the past thirty years can stand alongside the best of those of earlier generations—the several generations of writers represented, say, in Short Story Masterpieces, that excellent book edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine. In its way, this present collection may be seen as a companion volume to that earlier book. Most important in this regard, the bias of this collection, as in the other, is toward the lifelike—that is to say, toward realistically fashioned stories that may even in some cases approximate the outlines of our own lives. Or, if not our own, at least the lives of fellow human beings—grown-up men and women engaged in the ordinary but sometimes remarkable business of living and, like ourselves, in full awareness of their mortality.
In the last thirty years there was, on the part of many writers, a radical turning away from the concerns and techniques of realism—a turning away from the “manners and morals” that Lionel Trilling correctly saw as the best subject matter for fiction. In place of realism, a number of writers—writers of considerable skill and stature, some of them—substituted the surreal and the fantastic. A smaller and less talented group mixed the weird and the far-out with a relentless and sometimes disquieting nihilism. Now it seems that the wheel has rolled forward again and fiction that approximates life—replete with recognizable people, and motive, and plot, and drama—fiction of occurrence and consequence (the two are inseparable), has reasserted itself with a reading public that has grown tired of the fragmentary, or bizarre. Fiction that asks that the reader give up too much—in some cases deny—what reason, common sense, the emotions, and a sense of right and wrong tell him—is seemingly in retreat these days.
No one should be surprised then at the resurgence, not to say new dominance, of realistic fiction, that most ancient of storytelling modes. This book might be seen as a celebration of, and a tribute to, the lasting power of narrative short fiction. We further feel we have gathered together some of the best stories recently produced by this oldest of literary traditions, work that we like to think has as good a chance as any, and better than most, of withstanding “the tooth of time.”
A notable difference between Short Story Masterpieces and this book is that fully a third of the thirty-six stories in the earlier collection are by writers from England and Ireland. When we were establishing some ground rules to determine how we planned to go about selecting stories for this anthology, we decided early on to include works by American writers only. There was, we felt, plenty of significant work on this side of the Atlantic from which to choose. We also decided not to include stories by writers who were already included in Short Story Masterpieces. Thus, Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever, some of whose best work was published after 1954 (the year Short Story Masterpieces appeared), were reluctantly left out.
In one respect, at least, it would seem that life was simpler in the literary world of the early 1950s: Warren and Erskine didn’t have to talk about “postmodernism” or any of the other “isms”—including “realism.” They didn’t find it necessary to explain the reasons that lay behind their choices, or articulate their taste and methodology. They simply discussed good and great stories—masterpieces, by their definition—and masters of the form. The word masterpieces meant something in those days and signaled a benchmark of excellence that most readers (and writers) could agree on. No one had to debate the concept itself, or the wisdom of applying such a term to select examples of serious, imaginative writing. The editors found two dozen stories by American writers, spanning fifty years or more of American life and literary endeavor, and they put these stories alongside a dozen stories by their English and Irish counterparts of roughly the same period. They had their book. We limited ourselves to American writers only, as has been noted, and our selections cover thirty-three years—1953 to 1986, to be exact—surely the most climactic, and traumatic, period in American literary history. Traumatic, in part, because it has been a time during which the currency of narrative fiction has fluctuated wildly and been variously assailed from several quarters. Now is as good a time as any, perhaps, to try to reestablish the term masterpiece as it applies to singular stories with a narrative durability, within a discernible narrative tradition.
As we considered the merits of each story, we asked ourselves at how deep a level of feeling and insight the writer was operating. How compelling, and coherent, was the writer’s sincerity (Tolstoy’s word, and one of his criteria for excellence) toward his material? Great fiction—good fiction—is, as any serious reader knows, intellectually and emotionally significant. And the best fiction ought to have, for want of a better word, heft to it. (The Romans used the word gravitas when talking about work of substance.) But whatever one wants to call it (it doesn’t even need naming), everyone recognizes it when it declares itself. When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself. At this moment, i
f the writer has succeeded, there ought to be a unity of feeling and understanding. Or, if not a unity, at least a sense that the disparities of a crucial situation have been made available in a new light, and we can go from there. The best fiction, the kind of fiction we’re talking about, should bring about this kind of response. It should make such an impression that the work, as Hemingway suggested, becomes a part of the reader’s experience. Or else, and we’re serious, why should people be asked to read it? Further—why write it? In great fiction (and this is true, and we mustn’t fool ourselves that it’s otherwise), there is always the “shock of recognition” as the human significance of the work is revealed and made manifest. When, in Joyce’s words, the soul of the story, its “whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.”
In his “Introduction to the Works of Guy de Maupassant,” Tolstoy wrote that talent is “the capacity to direct intense concentrated attention on the subject … a gift of seeing what others have not seen.” We think the writers included in these pages have done this, have directed “intense concentration” on their subject, seeing clearly and forcefully what others have not seen. On the other hand, considering some of these stories and their insistence on depicting the “familiar,” we think something else is just as often at work—another definition of “talent,” perhaps. We’d like to suggest that talent, even genius, is also the gift of seeing what everyone else has seen, but seeing it more clearly, from all sides. Art in either case.
The writers in this book have talent, and they have it in abundance. But they have something else as well: they can all tell a good story, and good stories, as everyone knows, have always been in demand. In the words of Sean O’Faolain, a contributor to the earlier book, the stories that follow have “a bright destination.” We hope readers will be affected by more than a few of these and will perhaps find occasion to laugh, shudder, marvel—in short, be moved, and maybe even a little haunted by some of the lives represented here.
On Contemporary Fiction
I’m interested in the diverse brands of work being done these days in the short story form by a large and increasingly significant number of writers. Many of these writers, some of whom are quite talented and have already produced work of real distinction, have publicly declared they may never write any novels—that is to say, they have little or no interest in writing novels. Should they? they seem to want to add. Who says? Short stories will do nicely, thank you. If money enters into it (and when, at some bottom-line level, does it ever not?), it ought to be said that advances presently paid for collections of short stories are as large, though some would say as modest, as those paid for novels by writers of comparable stature. An author who publishes a collection of stories can expect to sell, generally speaking, roughly the same number of copies as his or her novelist counterpart. And, besides, as anyone can tell you, it’s mainly the short story writers who are being talked about these days. Some people would even say it’s where the so-called “cutting edge” is to be found.
Has there ever been a time like the present for short story writers? I don’t think so. Not to my knowledge, at any rate. It wasn’t long ago, as recently as ten years back, say, that a short story writer had a distressingly hard time trying to place a first book. (I’m not saying it’s an easy matter now, I’m only saying it was even harder ten years ago.) The commercial publishers, expert in ascertaining what the public wanted, knew there wasn’t an audience out there, felt sure there wasn’t a readership for short fiction, so they dragged their corporate heels when it came to publishing stories. That unrewarding enterprise was, they figured, better left—like poetry—to a few small independent presses, and an even fewer number of university presses.
A vastly different situation exists today, as everyone knows. Not only are the small presses and university presses continuing to publish collections, the truth in fact is that first collections (or second or third) are now regularly issued in significant numbers by large mainstream publishers—and just as regularly, and prominently, reviewed in the media. Short stories are flourishing.
To my mind, perhaps the best, certainly the most variously interesting and satisfying work, even, just possibly, the work that has the greatest chance of enduring, is being done in the short story. “Minimalism” vs. “Maximalism.” Who cares finally what they want to call the stories we write? (And who isn’t tired to death by now of that stale debate?) Short stories will continue to attract more attention, and more readers, insofar as the writers of them continue to produce work of genuine interest and durability, work that merits the attention, and approval, of increasingly large numbers of perceptive readers.
The current profusion in the writing and publishing of short stories is, so far as I can see, the most eventful literary phenomenon of our time. It has provided the tired blood of mainstream American letters with something new to think about and even—any day now, I suspect—something to take off from. (Where it’s going, of course, is anybody’s guess.) But whether or not such a claim can be permitted, the fact is the resurgence of interest in the short story has done nothing less than revitalize the national literature.
On Longer Stories
After reading, over a period of days, the nineteen stories chosen by the editors of this collection, I asked myself, “What am I remembering? What should I remember from these stories?” I think this has to be one of the tests of first-rate storytelling: are voice, situation, character and details handled so that they are memorable? And maybe, just maybe, even indelible. It so happens, in this case, that humor also played a large part in lifting the story I chose for first place out of the ranks of some otherwise fine and vigorous work. When I say humor I am not talking about “ha-ha” funny, either, although that sometimes enters in. Who doesn’t feel the world brighten when they’ve had a few good from-the-belly laughs? But what I’m appreciating here is the irreverence of the young which leads to a special kind of lightness and hilarity as soon as it comes into contact with so-called “adult” seriousness.
In “The Expendables,” by Antonya Nelson, the story I selected for first place in the collection, we see clearly too what it is that the best young writers have to offer—a kind of pizzazz, the love of undercurrent, of voyeuristic intensity, a bewildered fascination with ritual as it has been undermined in our time, yet sustained, too, in an oddly moving way. We also witness familial relationships from the bottom up.
The narrator of this story, a young man in charge of parking cars at his older sister’s second wedding (this time to a mafioso character), is someone trying to get a bead on what it is to grow up and make life-changing decisions. He’s aware of lives lived quite differently from those of his household as he observes an extended family of Gypsies who live across the street. On the day of his sister’s wedding, there happens to be a funeral going on at the house of the Gypsies. The young man sees a coffin carried in and later he watches the cortege move down the street toward the nearby cemetery. Probably the energy and mystery of these juxtapositions—wedding and funeral, the business world of the young man’s hotel-owning father which borders the inexplicable mingling of the Gypsies on their paved-over lawn—go a long way toward adding dimension to a story which is disarmingly frontal in its telling. Add to this the narrator’s spontaneity of spirit and his uncanny sense of times past, present and future as they overlap, and you begin to see what’s special in this story. There’s a strong sense of scene coupled with the interior negotiations of the narrator. This leads to first-rate passages like the following in which the speaker cruises his cousin’s Spitfire through the cemetery where he first learned to drive:
The roadway was one lane and curved through the various sections of dead people the way I imagined the German autobahn cutting through that country. Everywhere we drove, crows flew out in waves before us, as if from the sheer power of the Spitfire’s engine. It was dark enough to turn on the headlights, but I liked driving in the dusk. I felt I could actually be headed somewhere instead of only in a
long convoluted circle.
Here, without the writer’s having laid it on, we are brought as readers to acknowledge the “convoluted circle” as it relates to life-and-death matters at large.
There are things that make the best stories hold up under a second reading, and one of these has to do with the inner circuitry between the actions and the meanings. In the story I’ve been discussing, one of these moments comes when the narrator notices how “pasty” his sister, the bride, looks. Her ex-husband then tries to reassure her, and, through him, the writer makes a verbal bridge to the neighboring funeral scene: “We’ll rouge you before the big event,” the ex-husband tells Yvonne. “We’ll rouge you good.” It’s one of the pleasures of reading—picking up on the crossovers in the weave, and the best writers are working, as the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor says, not just horizontally, but vertically too—all of it effortlessly, intuitively.
How compelling is the voice in the story at hand? That’s another test of mine. Like most readers, I turn away from a whine or from the overly self-involved. I don’t waste time on smart alecks either. There has to be something at stake, something important working itself out from sentence to sentence. But, as with Chekhov’s stories, I prefer the light touch in this matter of how consequence is delivered. In “The Expendables” the central dilemma isn’t really the sister’s wedding to a jerk, but a sense of her disappearance as someone the narrator felt close to in his childhood who “always knew exactly what you meant when you said something.” It also more deeply involves the young man’s sudden glimpse into his father’s defeat so that the son actually takes on the father’s hardships for a few desperate moments: “I was him, I was my father and his life was happening to me.”
Likewise, in the story I’ve ranked second, “Bringing Joboy Back” by Paul Scott Malone, a strong aspect of the writing is how it draws the reader into a life whose burdens we begin to experience with empathy. The story negotiates a world all too familiar for women and for the black woman of this story in particular, a world in which trust and unspoken loyalties are sacrificed by male characters who use and misuse this female legacy as if it were their birthright. Hardly a new theme or revelation, but Malone makes it poignant by creating in Ruby, the main character, a woman we don’t just feel sorry for, but someone in whom we may recognize a striving against odds which intersects our own lives. A richness of texture and an ear for dialogue make this story stay in my mind. It is also encouraging to see a man representing a woman’s situation so confidently and truly, just as I felt glad to find a woman assuming fully the voice of the young man in “The Expendables.” A writer’s ability to shed and assume sexual identities other than his or her own has inevitably to affect what we know and discover.
Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Page 22
