by Lorrie Moore
He was staring at her. She saw something in his face that mixed with the buzzing of the hornets and fascinated her so that she could not move, could not even try to tease him into smiling too. “It wasn’t never money I wanted,” he said.
“Pa, why don’t we go home?”
“I don’t know what it was, exactly,” he said, still squatting. His hands touched the ground idly. “I tried to think of it, last night when you called and all night long and driving in to town, today. I tried to think of it.”
“I guess I’m awful tired from that bus. I . . . I don’t feel good,” Helen said.
“Why did you leave with that man?”
“What? Oh,” she said, touching the tip of one of the weeds, “I met him at Paul’s cousin’s place, where they got that real nice tavern and a dance hall . . .”
“Why did you run away with him?”
“I don’t know, I told you in the letter. I wrote it to you, Pa. He acted so nice and liked me so, he still does, he loves me so much . . . And he was always so sad and tired, he made me think of . . . you, Pa . . . but not really, because he’s not strong like you and couldn’t ever do work like you. And if he loved me that much I had to go with him.”
“Then why did you come back?”
“Come back?” Helen tried to smile out across the water. Sluggish, ugly water, this river that disappointed everyone, so familiar to her that she could not really get used to a house without a river or a creek somewhere behind it, flowing along night and day: perhaps that was what she had missed in the city?
“I came back because . . . because . . .”
And she shredded the weed in her cold fingers, but no words came to her. She watched them fall. No words came to her, her mind had turned hollow and cold, she had come too far down to this river bank but it was not a mistake any more than the way the river kept moving was a mistake; it just happened.
Her father got slowly to his feet and she saw in his hand a knife she had been seeing all her life. Her eyes seized upon it and her mind tried to remember: where had she seen it last, whose was it, her father’s or her brother’s? He came to her and touched her shoulder as if waking her, and they looked at each other, Helen so terrified by now that she was no longer afraid but only curious with the mute marble-like curiosity of a child, and her father stern and silent until a rush of hatred transformed his face into a mass of wrinkles, the skin mottled red and white. He did not raise the knife but slammed it into her chest, up to the hilt, so that his whitened fist struck her body and her blood exploded out upon it.
Afterward, he washed the knife in the dirty water and put it away. He squatted and looked out over the river, then his thighs began to ache and he sat on the ground, a few feet from her body. He sat there for hours as if waiting for some idea to come to him. Then the water began to darken, very slowly, and the sky darkened a little while later, as if belonging to another, separate time, the same thing as always, and he had to turn his mind with an effort to the next thing he must do.
1970–1980
The 1970s saw continued frankness about sex in short fiction, although a scarcity of love stories. Many characters confused love and lust, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sexual revolution and the mood of experimentation. This was the “Me Decade,” as Tom Wolfe called it.
Some writers began to experiment with surrealism and new forms. Series editor Martha Foley believed that “a danger confronting the experimental writer is to forget that style and content should be indivisible.” Influential magazines that published cutting-edge fiction, such as Ontario Review, Fiction International, and New Letters, were founded at this time. Donald Barthelme’s stories appeared five times in the series, but Foley’s taste clearly tended toward realism. She never chose stories by John Barth and only two by Robert Coover.
From 1958 to 1971 Foley’s son was listed as coeditor of The Best American Short Stories, although many people were skeptical about his actual involvement. David was an aspiring painter and was known as a lost soul. He died in 1971 as a result of addiction. His death sent Foley into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. In 1975 she moved to a two-room apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, and became isolated. She was barely able to survive on the $6,000 a year that she earned as the series editor. Again and again she was criticized for her narrowing tastes and predictable choices—Joyce Carol Oates appeared seven times in thirteen years, Peter Taylor six times in ten years.
In 1977 Foley died of heart disease. There was no memorial service or funeral for her. She had named no next of kin and had no living relatives. She left many of her own short stories incomplete, as well as the manuscript for a novel and a draft of a memoir, which was finished by Jay Neugeboren and published as The Story of Story Magazine in 1980.
None of the in-house editors at Houghton Mifflin could agree on how the series should continue. Heated discussions about creating a panel of judges and arguments about whom to approach to fill it ensued. The editors finally decided to ask the critic and editor Ted Solotaroff to oversee the series, but he said no. He did propose that they invite a different writer to steer the volume each year. Houghton Mifflin agreed, and Solotaroff signed on as the first guest editor.
Shannon Ravenel, a young editor who had known Foley at Houghton Mifflin, was asked to serve as the annual series editor. Ravenel had grown up in South Carolina, mostly in Charleston. She said, “I had a mixed raising in ‘low country’ and ‘up country’ South Carolina.” An avid reader since childhood, she had sought work in publishing; “In college (Hollins—all girls) my major (English literature) professor and advisor, Louis Rubin, told me I should NOT go back to Charleston, get married and spend my life socializing and belonging to the Junior League. He told me that I should be an editor (I liked ‘workshopping’ my fellow creative writing students’ work much better than I liked writing my own).” After college Ravenel had moved to Boston and gotten a job in Houghton Mifflin’s trade editorial department as a secretary. “And three or four years into it I was beginning to scratch my way into an editorial job by asking if I might read the literary magazines that the department subscribed to that nobody else seemed to read. Doing that, I ‘discovered’ a couple of new writers that Houghton Mifflin eventually published and I was on my way. I also had the gall to suggest a few stories to the venerable Martha Foley who told me to mind my own business!”
Years later, after Ravenel married and moved to St. Louis, “far from the publishing world which I sorely missed.” She accepted Houghton’s offer to become the new series editor. She would choose 120 stories, from which Solotaroff would select 20. “The first year in my role as series editor,” she said,
I had no magazines, as Ms. Foley had died so recently and the subscriptions were still all in her name (and in her apartment). I scuttled around and found as many as I could in the college and university libraries in St. Louis and managed to submit the tear sheets of 120 of my favorite stories to Mr. Solotaroff, from which he selected his 20 “Best.” Martha Foley had listed many, many other selected titles in the back matter of her volumes—she read all stories published in English, by writers both American and not, and had several categories for her listings. I decided that since the book’s title was Best AMERICAN Short Stories, I would read only work by North American (I read as many Canadian magazines as I could persuade to give me subscriptions) writers and list only 100 “Other Distinguished American Stories” in my back matter.
Ravenel secretly dreaded the complexities of working with a guest editor but admitted that “there is nothing like success to change the directions of one’s ambitions.” Sales of the book quadrupled once the guest editors came on board.
Many writers who were approached for the role of guest editor declined. When asked, Peter Taylor wrote, “I’d love to read those stories and select my favorites, but then I know too well how I would put off writing the preface. And finally I would do a hurried, lousy job of it! The trouble with being old and wise is that you know ev
erything about yourself too well.” That same year Walker Percy replied, “It’s an honor, but I’ve got too much to do to read all those stories. You might be interested to know that we have a little book club that meets biweekly. We read and discuss 3 or 4 short stories. Just finished Raymond Carver’s 1986 BASS. Going to Anne Tyler next.”
1975
DONALD BARTHELME
The School
from The New Yorker
DONALD BARTHELME (1931–1989) was born in Philadelphia but grew up in Houston, where he began writing for the Houston Post. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and arrived in Korea on the day that the Korean Armistice Agreement, ending the Korean War, was signed. When he returned to Houston, he spent time listening to black jazz musicians in the city’s clubs, which influenced his later writing.
Barthelme published eleven short story collections in addition to four novels, a children’s book, and nonfiction. He contributed regularly to The New Yorker and lived in both New York and Houston, where he taught at the University of Houston; he was known for forbidding his students to write about the weather. He won a National Book Award for his children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine; a Guggenheim Fellowship; a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award; and many other honors.
Barthelme’s stories gained momentum by their accumulation of detail rather than by any traditionally structured plot. Critic George Wicks called Barthelme “the leading American practitioner of surrealism today . . . whose fiction continues the investigations of consciousness and experiments in expression that began with Dada and surrealism a half century ago.”
★
WELL, WE HAD all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that . . . that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems . . . and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.
It wouldn’t have been so bad except that . . . Before that, just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes—well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that . . . you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.
With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably . . . you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe . . . well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander . . . well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.
Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.
We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.
We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then . . . And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar—that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely, because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.
And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think; nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the school, particularly, I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.
The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.
I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.
One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don’t like it.
I said, that’s sound.
They said, it’s a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.
I do like Helen but I said that I would not.
We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.
I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the window.
They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.
I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.
1978
STANLEY ELKIN
The Conventional Wisdom
from Amer
ican Review
STANLEY ELKIN (1930–1995) was born in Brooklyn, where his father sold costume jewelry, and was raised in Chicago. After two years in the U.S. Army, he taught in the English Department of Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Elkin was the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including Mrs. Ted Bliss, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, The MacGuffin, The Magic Kingdom, and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers. His novel George Mills won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, and he was nominated three times for the National Book Award. Critic Josh Greenfeld called the author “at once a bright satirist, a bleak absurdist and a deadly moralist.”
In 1972 Elkin was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He died at the age of sixty-five of heart failure. He had just completed the novel Mrs. Ted Bliss, for which he posthumously received his second National Book Critics Circle Award.
★
ELLERBEE HAD BEEN having a bad time of it. He’d had financial reversals. Change would slip out of his pockets and slide down into the crevices of other people’s furniture. He dropped deposit bottles and lost money in pay phones and vending machines. He overtipped in dark taxicabs. He had many such financial reversals. He was stuck with Superbowl tickets when he was suddenly called out of town and with theater and opera tickets when the ice was too slick to move his car out of his driveway. But all this was small potatoes. His portfolio was a disgrace. He had gotten into mutual funds at the wrong time and out at a worse. His house, appraised for tax purposes at many thousands of dollars below its replacement cost, burned down, and recently his once flourishing liquor store, one of the largest in Minneapolis, had drawn the attentions of burly, hopped-up and armed deprivators, ski-masked, head-stockinged. Two of his clerks had been shot, one killed, the other crippled and brain damaged, during the most recent visitation by these marauders, and Ellerbee, feeling a sense of responsibility, took it upon himself to support his clerks’ families. His wife reproached him for this which led to bad feeling between them.
