100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Read online

  Hey, we knew that.

  But now there is empirical proof for others. In the words of Lorenz Hart, “When you’re awake, the things you think / Come from the dreams you dream / Thought has wings and lots of things / are seldom what they seem” (“Where or When”). He also wrote, “The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore,” a condition familiar to any writer at her desk. There’s always room for a little Broadway.

  Short stories are about trouble in mind. A bit of the blues. Songs and cries that reveal the range and ways of human character. The secret ordinary and the ordinary secret. The little disturbances of man, to borrow Grace Paley’s phrase, though a story may also be having a conversation with many larger disturbances lurking off-page. Still, the focus on the foregrounded action will be sharp and distilled as moonshine and maybe a little tense and witty, like an excellent dinner party. Writers go there to record hearts, minds, manners, and lives, their own and others. Even at a dinner party we all want to see rich and poor, life and death, the past and the present bumping up against each other, moral accomplishment jostling moral failure. Readers desire not to escape but to see and hear and consider. To be surprised and challenged and partially affirmed. In other words, to have an experience.

  It is difficult for a short story to create a completely new world or a social milieu in its entirety or present an entirely unfamiliar one or one unknown to the author—so little time and space—so stories are often leaning on a world that is already there, one that has already entered the writer’s mind and can be assembled metonymically in a quick sketch and referred to without having to be completely created from scratch. To some degree the setting is already understood and shared with the reader, although the writer is giving it his own twist or opinion or observations or voice. To someone unfamiliar with such a thing, for instance, the zombie apocalypse might have trouble fitting into this genre, despite the short story’s great range of subjects, lengths, voices, and techniques. The short story’s hallmark is compression—even if the story sometimes extends to near-novella length. The short story needs to get to the point or the question of the point or the question of its several points and then flip things upside down. It makes skepticism into an art form. It has a deeper but narrower mission than longer narratives, one that requires drilling down rather than lighting out. Like poetry, it takes care with every line. Like a play, it moves in a deliberate fashion, scene by scene. Although a story may want to be pungent and real and sizzling, still there should be as little fat as possible. In its abilities to stretch, move through time, present unexpected twists and shapes, the short story is as limber as Lycra but equally unforgiving. (It is interested in the human heart, of course, an artificial version of which was first made in the 1970s from the fabric of a woman’s girdle—a fun fact and a metaphor for inventiveness, which will become clearer if one walks around the block and thinks about it a little.)

  The abundant, crazily disparate imagery that comes to mind when considering and generalizing about the genre demonstrates what story writers all know: the short story is pretty much theory-proof. One pronounces upon it with spluttering difficulty. An energetic effort may send one into a teeming theme park of argument, mixed metaphor, tendentious assertion. It has been said that the short story is the only genre of literature that has remained premodern. Here I suppose the speaker is thinking of the campfire tale, and the telling of something in a single sitting: in this paradigm a story retains some of its primitive delights. The size remains organic to the occasion.

  But the short story has also been declared the very first modernist literature (with which I am more inclined to agree). As a record of rebellious human consciousness, of interiority and intersecting intents, it is second to none in power and efficiency. And perhaps the original writer of this modern short story would be Chekhov, with his casting out of moral lessons and his substitution of sharp psychological observations (without express judgment) of the human world. He was a doctor and believed in medicine’s experimental side. He was a doubter who stayed interested in his encounters.

  On the occasions I have been asked to pronounce on and define short stories, which are my main mode of literary expression, I have looked at the story’s objectness and the act of its creation and grabbed at rather repellent analogies of a medical, romantic, or pediatric bent. Stories, in this vein, though abstractly, become human biopsies, or love affairs, or children left on the doorstep to be quickly fed and then left on someone else’s doorstep. Sometimes I have referred to short stories as puppets or pets or visitors violating the three-day fish rule, and a general derangement of mind and metaphor has set in in the pronouncing. I have likened them to clones, unvaccinated dogs, and poison bonbons. The scattershot defining of such a familiar, miraculous, homely, and elusive thing always has some frantic desperation in it.

  One of the many interesting things about the twentieth-century journey of the short story is how, when owing to the replacement of magazine entertainment by television it lost much of its commercial luster, the short story reacquired or resumed or just plain continued its artistic one. It reached back to (or kept going with) the great Russian stories as well as those of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. A bold and complex story—such as a J. D. Salinger one included in this series sixty-five years ago and which was originally published in Good Housekeeping in pre-TV 1948 and would have trouble finding a home in a housekeeping magazine now. Are there even housekeeping magazines now? In 1957, with television in full swing, Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing,” proudly reprinted here, was published in the Pacific Spectator. The short story was pretty much freed from sitting side by side with ads for soup and spaghetti and has been securely reattached to its project as art. It can be argued—and has been—that novelists as great as Updike and Hemingway have often done their best work in the short form. One can feel in their short works that these writers become simultaneously laser-eyed and loose-limbed, concentrated and unburdened; one can feel them emotionally intent and also a little bit on fire in the confines within which they must tell their tale. The ordinary citizens and the fresh vernacular of Hemingway and Anderson continue straight through the decades and help fashion literary heirs in Grace Paley and Raymond Carver.

  All this great art, however, does not keep the American short story from being occasionally a popular form again; “a renaissance” cycles through every two decades or so. And anthologies that have been canon-making, archeological, and preserving—especially the ones in this series—become even more culturally important. A short story writer is not a rock star. Yet sometimes nonetheless story writers have been put on tours by their publishers, with the hope that a story collection might sell as well as a literary novel—that is, not all that well. A short story writer is sent out on the road to see who her readers actually are in order to console them.

  Now, a short story writer on a book tour is a reassuring cultural idea, even if the writer is pretty much dragging herself around from town to town, like an old showman with a wizened mummy and a counting dog. She is out catching flu and greeting her audiences and answering their questions, and she will find herself bombarded with queries regarding the defining characteristics of the short story “form,” questions regarding the difference between novels and short stories, and questions about the mysteries and power of the short form. Such a writer should come prepared—why has she not been given talking points to read from?— but too often the whole matter is not given much rehearsed thought at all but instead prompts fresh (that is, improvised on the spot) and contradictory utterances. Such a writer may while considering these questions begin to scratch her temple, her sleeve, her chin and eyebrow, as if she has caught fleas from the counting dog. Here are the differences, she might say, ticking (ticking!) off things that have just popped into her head. Or she might say, completely guessing, perhaps there are relatively few differences between novels and stories. Perhaps the differences are exaggerated, like the differe
nces between men and women often are, just to make things sexier. The short story writer on tour may find herself stalled and pulling cat hair off her latest recently purchased black outfit even though she will remember as she is doing this that the cat died over a year ago.

  On a tour the short story writer becomes a character in a short story (and so the inner workings of the thing are occasionally, glancingly exposed). Though it is her own story, she sometimes feels like a minor character within it. She contemplates possible answers to the audience questions she knows are coming, questions about the writing life. It is hard to feel still like a real writer, traveling through so many airports—including one with a scanner that indicates she has explosives in her head. She is taking so much Dramamine it is difficult to recall what life at the desk was once like. Ah, yes—it was and remains a mysterious process. That is what she remembers best. She has no time for research or contemplation, and so every evening when the Q and A begins, it seems she is assembling her responses from scratch.

  What makes and defines a short story? She clears her sore throat: “A story is an intimate narrative composition thoughtfully assembled with illustrations but no argument.” The short story writer on tour clearly has no confident idea.

  She blunders ahead. “A quick incisive collision with the unexpected,” she says, fumbling for Kleenex.

  The Somali driver awaiting her at one of the airports is holding up a sign that says MARIANNE MOORE. There is only her, or rather she, the author of a story collection.

  “I will have to do,” the writer says.

  What is the difference between a short story and a novel?

  The Somali driver puts away his MARIANNE MOORE sign, smiles and says, “I am the captain now!” The short story writer guffaws.

  How does a writer know when she has a short story or a novel? This is what readers, or more likely struggling writers, seem to want to know, though she herself has seldom asked that question. She feels it is rather self-evident, and if not self-evident, well then, lucky you. You may have both.

  Fibrous asparagus from lunch is stuck in her one remaining wisdom tooth and the person she is about to read with has excellent teeth and has written a book narrated from the point of view of a dentist.

  What is the difference at the sentence level between a novel and a short story?

  Somewhere, in some bookstore, while she is thinking of answers to this question, a fly lands smack on her forehead, as if to express its opinion about the nature and substance of her thoughts. Perhaps it too has detected explosives.

  In Seattle she cannot take her eyes off the amethyst-encrusted manhole covers. Taking the world in in its entirety: did not Chekhov say that is a requirement, even of short stories? Observe, observe: love can be deceiving. This is the theme not only of sad true pop songs but also of the work of one of the great Russian masters of the short story, as well as the Canadian master, Alice Munro. A short story is about love. It is always about love. And yet it is not a love story.

  When does a story turn into a novel, or vice versa?

  Never, the writer thinks. At least never for her, though that would be a wonderful surprise for her agent if it did.

  Another writer waiting in a radio station green room where the short story writer is also waiting is carrying a plastic 3D replica of a female pelvis, though the program they are participating in is a radio program. The woman with the plastic pelvis is going on first to speak of female incontinence. She has written a book on it. The story writer feels bereft not to have such an interesting and practical topic for discussion; she feels deprived not to be holding a multicolored, anatomically correct plastic pelvis herself. One can never look too hard for metaphors; perhaps a replica of a human pelvis is precisely what a story is—something that listeners will not be able to see but that she could describe and that perhaps would give the story writer some jocularity, protection, weaponry. Chekhov was a doctor, she could say repeatedly. He believed in the exploration, the experiment, the questioning of received wisdom that is both medical science and fiction!

  Once more: What is the inspiration for a short story versus the inspiration for anything else, say, a novel?

  A short story is about love. Yet it is not a love story.

  She barely makes her connection in Houston. Dehydration. Where is her Gatorade? In some airport or other she falls down the escalator, the wheels of her suitcase having got stuck and pulled her backward. When someone some evening in some city somewhere asks her whether being “an author” is what she had expected it would be, she starts laughing and cannot stop. She places her head down on the lectern, attempting to collect herself but keeping her eyes open to look for a glass of water.

  How does one know when one’s idea is suited for a story rather than a novel?

  She has no plastic pelvis to show or tell. She is thinking up titles to her next story: “Dicey in the Dark!” “I Don’t Remember You Already.” “Two Meats for Dinner.” “Intelligence on the Ground.” And “The Fish Rule Does Not Apply to You.”

  Is the story form harder to write than a novel?

  The lectern at a West Coast library—what city is she in today? She has crisscrossed North America in a demented way—has a sign facing the speaker that says PLEASE REPEAT QUESTION. Probably it’s acoustically good advice, but it makes the Q and A sound as if the writer is in a bad romantic relationship, acting preemptively evasive and on the defensive, as when one person asks, “Where were you last night?” and gets the answer “Where was I last night?” How appropriate for a short story writer on tour! She is doing the dialogue of a love affair on the rocks, where one person asks, “What is going on?” and the other replies, “What is going on? That is your question?”

  “Do you ever Google yourself?” someone asks.

  “Do I ever Google myself?”

  “Yes, that is the question.”

  “That is the question?”

  “Would you like another?”

  “Would I like another question?”

  Why is she changing the subject? Why is she sounding defensive? Why can’t she answer a simple question? Why does she keep repeating the question?

  “When you write, do you ever have particular people in mind?”

  “Actual people?”

  “Or hypothetical people.”

  “Am I thinking of someone else?”

  “Yes, is there someone else that you are thinking of?”

  “Is there someone else?” There is always someone else. “Do you mean generally or specifically?”

  “So there is someone else? I mean, where were you last night?”

  “Do you mean generally or specifically?”

  A short story is about love. But it is not a love story.

  In Philly the short story writer on tour wakes up not knowing where she is—she has no idea where she was last night—and, unable to interpret the room, she literally gets out on the wrong side of the bed and bashes her foot against a chest of drawers (oh, a metaphor for a story collection), permanently loosening then losing her large toenail. Later, in another city, she will put the toenail under her pillow, hoping for a new pair of shoes from the Cobbler Fairy. Perhaps she has gone mad.

  When you’re writing, how do you know when you’ve come to the end?

  How does one know when one’s come to the end? One loses a scarf, sunglasses, two umbrellas, three cotton nightgowns across a large geographical area; perhaps one will be thrown into the federal slammer for interstate littering.

  What would you say is the role of the short story in today’s world?

  What would I say? Or what should I say?

  The short story is the human mind at its most adventurous. It must be shared.

  Everyone remains so nice. How can she not help but speak in facile, dimwitted remarks inflected with the faux-faded memory of continental philosophy: if the individual is a fiction, then what better place for him to reside than in fiction? Et cetera. But she believes in the human mind part.
/>   What practitioner ever had a good working theory of the short story? Only the great Irish writer Frank O’Connor and his admirable and intriguing positing of the story as the life and voice of one individual within a societally submerged population. “The lonely voice” is as original and astute and as good as it gets yet still doesn’t cover everything (not Hawthorne, Coover, nor T. C. Boyle), though it gets very close. And if one were to take it as a prescription and write only stories that are the quasi-exiled voice of that marginalized individual, a writer would do very well.

  The short story, of course, is a genre, not a form—it comes in so many different forms—even though its distinctiveness from the novel, say, is primarily one of length, and so a formal one. Shape and structure are naturally essential. When one looks out at the problems of life, and of the world, the problems, as well as the solutions, tend to be structural. When one looks at the success of a sentence, a joke, or an anecdote, it hinges upon structural decisions. Changing the structure changes the story. A short story writer is building a smaller house so fewer troublesome people can get inside. Perhaps the short story allows for fewer things to go wrong in this manner, because of its structural constraints but also because of its demands. Perhaps this is why some have remarked that the story has to be “perfect,” and novels are necessarily not, because that is not the novel’s aim. “Conciseness is the sister of talent,” said Chekhov himself. And perhaps it is also genius’s kissing cousin—in strappy shoes so elegantly thin it’s as if they were drawn on by a pen.

  Yet there are so many different sorts of stories: look at the tremendous variety in subject, shape, and tone. When one assembles a hundred years of them, one is looking thrillingly not just at literary history but at actual history—the cries and chatterings, silences and descriptions of a nation in flux, since short story writers have from the beginning been interested in the world they live in, its cultural changes, societal energies, the spiritual injuries to its citizenry and what those injuries may or may not mean. And North America—a collection of provinces, states, and conditions—has done a first-rate job of claiming and owning and sponsoring the short story, with all due respect to Ireland and nineteenth-century Russia. It may be the apprentice narrative form of choice, but that is only sensible. Student writers are encouraged to practice it, take a stab at it, rather than accumulate drawersful (yearsful) of novels. But the short narrative also remains a true master’s art. It is a string quartet, which is often preferred to a composer’s longer works. A short story is not minimalist, suggested Angela Carter. It is rococo, with trills and grace notes and esprit.