100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “There he is,” Emily shrilled, above the din. “There he is! There he is! There he—” And waved a futile little hand. It wasn’t so much a wave as a clutching. A clutching after something beyond her reach.

  “Which one? Which one, Emily?”

  “The handsome one. The handsome one. There!” Her voice quavered and died.

  Jo put a steady hand on her shoulder. “Point him out,” he commanded. “Show me.” And the next instant. “Never mind. I see him.”

  Somehow, miraculously, he had picked him from among the hundreds. Had picked him as surely as his own father might have. It was Emily’s boy. He was marching by, rather stiffly. He was nineteen, and fun-loving, and he had a girl, and he didn’t particularly want to go to France and—to go to France. But more than he had hated going, he had hated not to go. So he marched by, looking straight ahead, his jaw set so that his chin stuck out just a little. Emily’s boy.

  Jo looked at him, and his face flushed purple. His eyes, the hard-boiled eyes of a loop-hound, took on the look of a sad old man. And suddenly he was no longer Jo, the sport; old J. Hertz, the gay dog. He was Jo Hertz, thirty, in love with life, in love with Emily, and with the stinging blood of young manhood coursing through his veins.

  Another minute and the boy had passed on up the broad street—the fine, flag-bedecked street—just one of a hundred service-hats bobbing in rhythmic motion like sandy waves lapping a shore and flowing on.

  Then he disappeared altogether.

  Emily was clinging to Jo. She was mumbling something over and over. “I can’t. I can’t. Don’t ask me to. I can’t let him go. Like that. I can’t.”

  Jo said a queer thing.

  “Why, Emily! We wouldn’t have him stay home, would we? We wouldn’t want him to do anything different, would we? Not our boy. I’m glad he volunteered. I’m proud of him. So are you, glad.”

  Little by little he quieted her. He took her to the car that was waiting, a worried chauffeur in charge. They said good-by, awkwardly. Emily’s face was a red, swollen mass.

  So it was that when Jo entered his own hallway half an hour later he blinked, dazedly, and when the light from the window fell on him you saw that his eyes were red.

  Eva was not one to beat about the bush. She sat forward in her chair, clutching her bag rather nervously.

  “Now, look here, Jo. Stell and I are here for a reason. We’re here to tell you that this thing’s got to stop.”

  “Thing? Stop?”

  “You know very well what I mean. You saw me at the milliner’s that day. And night before last, Ethel. We’re all disgusted. If you must go about with people like that, please have some sense of decency.”

  Something gathering in Jo’s face should have warned her. But he was slumped down in his chair in such a huddle, and he looked so old and fat that she did not heed it. She went on. “You’ve got us to consider. Your sisters. And your nieces. Not to speak of your own—”

  But he got to his feet then, shaking, and at what she saw in his face even Eva faltered and stopped. It wasn’t at all the face of a fat, middle-aged sport. It was a face Jovian, terrible.

  “You!” he began, low-voiced, ominous. “You!” He raised a great fist high. “You two murderers! You didn’t consider me, twenty years ago. You come to me with talk like that. Where’s my boy! You killed him, you two, twenty years ago. And now he belongs to somebody else. Where’s my son that should have gone marching by to-day?” He flung his arms out in a great gesture of longing. The red veins stood out on his forehead. “Where’s my son! Answer me that, you two selfish, miserable women. Where’s my son!” Then as they huddled together, frightened, wild-eyed. “Out of my house! Out of my house! Before I hurt you!”

  They fled, terrified. The door banged behind them.

  Jo stood, shaking, in the center of the room. Then he reached for a chair, gropingly, and sat down. He passed one moist, flabby hand over his forehead and it came away wet. The telephone rang. He sat still, it sounded far away and unimportant, like something forgotten. I think he did not even hear it with his conscious ear. But it rang and rang insistently. Jo liked to answer his telephone when at home.

  “Hello!” He knew instantly the voice at the other end.

  “That you, Jo?” it said.

  “Yes.”

  “How’s my boy?”

  “I’m—all right.”

  “Listen, Jo. The crowd’s coming over to-night. I’ve fixed up a little poker game for you. Just eight of us.”

  “I can’t come to-night, Gert.”

  “Can’t! Why not?”

  “I’m not feeling so good.”

  “You just said you were all right.”

  “I am all right. Just kind of tired.”

  The voice took on a cooing note. “Is my Joey tired? Then he shall be all comfy on the sofa, and he doesn’t need to play if he don’t want to. No, sir.”

  Jo stood staring at the black mouth-piece of the telephone. He was seeing a procession go marching by. Boys, hundreds of boys, in khaki.

  “Hello! Hello!” The voice took on an anxious note. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” wearily.

  “Jo, there’s something the matter. You’re sick. I’m coming right over.”

  “No!”

  “Why not? You sound as if you’d been sleeping. Look here—”

  “Leave me alone!” cried Jo, suddenly, and the receiver clacked onto the hook. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” Long after the connection had been broken.

  He stood staring at the instrument with unseeing eyes. Then he turned and walked into the front room. All the light had gone out of it. Dusk had come on. All the light had gone out of everything. The zest had gone out of life. The game was over—the game he had been playing against loneliness and disappointment. And he was just a tired old man. A lonely, tired old man in a ridiculous, rose-colored room that had grown, all of a sudden, drab.

  1920–1930

  Series editor Edward O’Brien wrote, “In Boston, I am below the salt with the Beacon Hill Yankees and above the salt with the South Boston Irish. There’s no place for me.” In 1919, after traveling in France and Rome, he settled in Oxford, England. But he continued to travel—in Italy, where he befriended Ezra Pound; in Paris, where he met James Joyce. O’Brien soon met the woman who would become his wife, Romer Wilson, a British writer known primarily for her biography of Emily Brontë.

  He continued to balance a large number of projects with The Best American Short Stories: books of poetry and religious prose poems, biographies of Gauguin and Nietzsche. In 1922 he began coediting The Best British Short Stories.

  In 1923 O’Brien met Ernest Hemingway, a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Toronto Star. Hemingway lamented that his wife, Hadley Richardson, had lost a suitcase of his manuscripts. He was despondent and wanted to quit writing. O’Brien asked to see Hemingway’s only two remaining stories and elected to publish one, “My Old Man,” in that year’s Best American Short Stories. It was the first and last time that O’Brien broke his own rule of selecting only published stories. And it was Hemingway’s first major publication.

  The 1920s were a fertile time for literary American short fiction. As O’Brien wrote, “Even the best stories were built like Fords fifteen years ago, while now there are probably forty or fifty young writers who see life freshly, render it clearly, and write without a thought of pandering to editorial prejudices.” Sentimentality on the page was replaced by what O’Brien termed “saturation in the physical scene.” Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Ring Lardner “communicate to us with nearly complete disinterestedness as well as personal interest what the senses of sight and hearing have brought to them in the circles of the world in which they move.” O’Brien went on to write, “[Hemingway] conceals the tenderness of his heart by an attitude of bravado . . . This is a very common and beautiful attitude in American youth since the war.”

  O’Brien questioned the number of American writers living in Paris during t
he 1920s, worrying that so many artists living in close proximity created “sterile inbreeding”—a certain sameness in their fiction.

  The Best American Short Stories gained some popularity, but fans of commercial fiction objected to O’Brien’s “obscure” taste. Critics railed against his “dull, predictable” choices, stories that delivered anything but the “living truth” he promised in his forewords. They thought he was losing touch with the essence of American culture by living across the Atlantic. They also found his tone elitist. In almost every foreword he bemoaned the current fads of short fiction as well as the hazards of commercial editors and publishers. Some critics labeled Irvin S. Cobb, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, and Konrad Bercovici, whose work was featured in the book, “perverting” influences. One even reacted to the idea of an anthology of the short story: “Overindulgence in the short story is a dissipation which produces an inevitable reaction; it leaves the mind in a jerky state . . . the perfect short-story is like champagne, scarcely able to be taken in as the sole article of diet.” O’Brien’s response was “The public . . . is beginning to have an opinion of its own and much more discrimination than the editors and critics who wish to legislate for it.”

  O’Brien championed small literary journals, especially those in the Midwest, like Prairie Schooner and The Midland. In 1929 he wrote presciently, “Two generations ago, Boston was the geographical centre of American literary life, one generation ago New York . . . and I suggest that the geographical centre to-day is Iowa City.” Seven years later the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the country’s best writing programs, was founded.

  O’Brien and his wife had a son, Johnny, in 1924. Not long after, Romer was diagnosed with cancer and grew sick. In 1930 she passed away. Her death coincided with the onset of the Great Depression.

  1921

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON

  Brothers

  from The Bookman

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876–1941) was born in Camden, Ohio, and dropped out of school at fourteen. He worked a variety of jobs, joined the National Guard, and finally settled in Chicago. After serving in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, he found work selling ads and writing copy for an advertising agency and later as a sales manager in Ohio. He often told friends that he was a businessman until the day he abruptly stopped dictating a letter, left his office—and soon his family—and never went back.

  Anderson is the author of the renowned story collection Winesburg, Ohio, as well as poetry, essays, criticism, and novels, including Dark Laughter, Tar, A Midwest Childhood, and A Storyteller’s Life. His unadorned style and modernist stories about alienation in small-town America influenced countless future writers. Anderson spoke out against the plot found in so much of the fiction of his time: “‘The Poison Plot,’ I called it in conversation with my friends as the plot notion did seem to poison all story telling. What was wanted was form, no plot, an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at . . . The Short Story is a result of a sudden passion. It is an idea grasped whole as one would grasp an apple in an orchard. All my own stories have been written in one sitting.”

  When Anderson and his wife moved to New Orleans, they hosted William Faulkner and Edmund Wilson. Anderson portrayed the city in Dark Laughter. The book was a bestseller, his only one while he was alive.

  Anderson was an early supporter of Ernest Hemingway, who was outraged when critics compared his style to his mentor’s. When one critic named Anderson “America’s most interesting writer,” Hemingway quickly wrote a novel, The Torrents of Spring, which spoofed Anderson’s work, and the friendship was over.

  Throughout his career, series editor Edward O’Brien referred to Anderson as having made “the most permanent contribution to the American short story.” Anderson died in 1941 while on a cruise to South America.

  ★

  I AM AT MY house in the country and it is late October. It rains. Back of my house is a forest and in front there is a road and beyond that open fields. The country is one of low hills, flattening suddenly into plains. Some twenty miles away, across the flat country, lies the huge city, Chicago.

  On this rainy day the leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are falling like rain, the yellow, red, and golden leaves fall straight down heavily. The rain beats them brutally down. They are denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.

  Yesterday morning I arose at daybreak and went for a walk. There was a heavy fog and I lost myself in it. I went down into the plains and returned to the hills and everywhere the fog was as a wall before me. Out of it trees sprang suddenly, grotesquely, as in a city street late at night people come suddenly out of the darkness into the circle of light under a street lamp. Above there was the light of day forcing itself slowly into the fog. The fog moved slowly. The tops of trees moved slowly. Under the trees the fog was dense, purple. It was like smoke lying in the streets of a factory town.

  An old man came up to me in the fog. I know him well. The people here call him insane. “He is a little cracked,” they say. He lives alone in a little house buried deep in the forest and has a small dog he carries always in his arms. On many mornings I have met him walking on the road and he has told me of men and women who were his brothers and sisters, his cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law. The notion has possession of him. He cannot draw close to people near at hand so he gets hold of a name out of a newspaper and his mind plays with it. One morning he told me he was a cousin to the man named Cox who at the time when I write is a candidate for the presidency. On another morning he told me that Caruso the singer had married a woman who was his sister-in-law. “She is my wife’s sister,” he said, holding the little dog closely. His gray watery eyes looked appealingly up to me. He wanted me to believe. “My wife was a sweet slim girl,” he declared. “We lived together in a big house and in the morning walked about arm in arm. Now her sister has married Caruso the singer. He is of my family now.” As some one had told me the old man had never been married I went away wondering.

  One morning in early September I came upon him sitting under a tree beside a path near his house. The dog barked at me and then ran and crept into his arms. At that time the Chicago newspapers were filled with the story of a millionaire who had got into trouble with his wife because of an intimacy with an actress. The old man told me the actress was his sister. He is sixty years old and the actress whose story appeared in the newspapers is twenty, but he spoke of their childhood together. “You would not realize it to see us now but we were poor then,” he said. “It’s true. We lived in a little house on the side of a hill. Once when there was a storm the wind nearly swept our house away. How the wind blew. Our father was a carpenter and he built strong houses for other people but our own house he did not build very strongly.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “My sister the actress has got into trouble. Our house is not built very strongly,” he said as I went away along the path.

  For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for the deed. The tale runs something like this—

  The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged, worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman, and lived with his wife and his wife’s mother in an apartment in Thirty-Second Street. He loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy stolid-looking man with gray eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop, had a desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out sheets containing the record of the work done by each man in his department. When he looked up he could see the girl sitting at work at her desk. T
he notion got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely. He did not think of trying to draw close to her or of winning her love. He looked at her as one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in October when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold. “She is a pure, virginal thing,” he thought vaguely. “What can she be thinking about as she sits there by the window at work?”

  In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his apartment in Thirty-Second Street and into the presence of his wife and his mother-in-law. All day in the shop and during the evening at home he carried her figure about with him in his mind. As he stood by a window in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central railroad tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there beside him. Down below women walked in the street and in every woman he saw there was something of the Iowa girl. One woman walked as she did, another made a gesture with her hand that reminded of her. All the women he saw except only his wife and his mother-in-law were like the girl he had taken inside himself.

  The two women in his own house puzzled and confused him. They became suddenly unlovely and commonplace. His wife in particular was like some strange unlovely growth that had attached itself to his body.

  In the evening after the day at the factory he went home to his own place and had dinner. He had always been a silent man and when he did not talk no one minded. After dinner he, with his wife, went to a picture show. When they came home his wife’s mother sat under an electric light reading. There were two children and his wife expected another. They came into the apartment and sat down. The climb up two flights of stairs had wearied his wife. She sat in a chair beside her mother groaning with weariness.

  The mother-in-law was the soul of goodness. She took the place of a servant in the home and got no pay. When her daughter wanted to go to a picture show she waved her hand and smiled. “Go on,” she said. “I don’t want to go. I’d rather sit here.” She got a book and sat reading. The little boy of nine awoke and cried. He wanted to sit on the po-po. The mother-in-law attended to that.