100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Page 3
A novel puts many things in the air at once, a complicated machine that its author then tries to land safely—though more than one novel has had an author parachute out of it, leaving it to circle in the sky on its own: space junk that may or may not have some immortality to it. There are many places with such ghostly items flying around in the atmosphere. Most countries, it should be said, are nations of novelists. At one literary festival I attended recently in England, a couple were consulting their program. “Who is reading next?” asked the husband.
“I believe it’s a new American short story writer,” said the wife.
“Really,” the husband said, then, after perusing the program further, closed it abruptly. “I need a new American short story writer like I need a hole in the head.”
Well, we all know what he means.
And yet why not a hole in the head? A new little garden space for planting, a well-ventilated, freshly lit room in the mind? Do we not want to feel the tops of our heads come off, as Emily Dickinson said a poem did for her? A story does not intoxicate or narcotize or descend and smother. It opens up a little window or a door. And the world gets in it in an intimate way. Art is when one becomes “aware of an unfolding,” said Matisse. And stories unfold. That is pretty much one thing they can be counted on to do, if they are any good.
The American world we see reflected historically in the short story, as captured in the heroic century-long endeavor that is The Best American Short Stories, is one of predictably astonishing and thrilling variety. From 1915 to 2015: in this volume we see America in all its wildnesses of character and voice. James Baldwin’s sorrowful valentine to brotherhood and jazz in “Sonny’s Blues”; a child’s desperate religious questioning in Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” and John Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers”; the adult defiance of an unreasonable God in Stanley Elkin’s “The Conventional Wisdom.” We see the psychological aftermath of war in stories by Robert Stone and Benjamin Percy. Lives of crime are given all sorts of unexpected angles in Eudora Welty, Mary Gaitskill, and Edward P. Jones. And sometimes the landscape is not only American but those places on the globe that have fed the American experience. Included here are Hemingway’s France, Fitzgerald’s France, Sharma’s India, Lahiri’s India, Ireland conjured by Katherine Anne Porter’s aging, heartbroken immigrants. Israel sticks its head in the door in the work of Nathan Englander; the Dominican Republic lives everywhere in Junot Díaz’s New Jersey. China is both sharply and hazily recalled by David Wong Louie’s resilient refugees. Uncontainability rounded up and contained in a small container. The short story captures and cages, though first it seeks, just as the reader seeks. Within these pages are Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia and ZZ Packer’s Georgia. We go to them all to see how other people make sense of things in their own individual voices and ways, to see what has hounded their hearts and caught their eye. Jamaica Kincaid’s loveless Caribbean child-narrators who speak their quiet rage and loneliness in formal, contractionless speech; Joyce Carol Oates’s uncertain families whose estrangement is enacted in neogothic violence: in the work of both of these authors, time-swept cultures allow youth and their parents to hate each other as easily as to love. Or sometimes children are betrayed in the ordinary ways, as in Fitzgerald’s famous story “Babylon Revisited.” There is the hilariously weary existentialism of Donald Barthelme’s teacher in “The School,” trying to spin his lesson so as to keep the children more childlike. There is the Holocaust seen and spoken of from the margins and from the hypothetical future, by Nancy Hale and Nathan Englander. There is war in the Mideast viewed and absorbed from slightly closer in by the characters in the Tobias Wolff and Benjamin Percy stories. And there is the oddly cheerful and degraded language uttered by the denizens of George Saunders’s capitalist dystopias.
We read short stories to see—quickly—how other people manage, what they know, what they are saying, what, privately, they are thinking and doing. According to Saunders, short stories are “the deep, encoded crystallizations of all human knowledge. They are rarefied, dense meaning machines.” The meaning is seldom pretty, sometimes hard to believe, and not always precisely factual. But it is the truth of dreams: when, working in an inspired way, the imagination merges a moment of action with a moment of interiority and a moment of truth is born; with luck and skill, there is the perfect voice to speak it, the perfect gesture to perform it. Put together over time, these stories cause an entire world to be glimpsed through the hearing of it. This is where the story owes its powers to poetry and plays: it is (perhaps) an aural art made from visual observation. Hence its origins around the spiky wattage of a campfire.
How do you know when you’ve come to the end?
An anthology is a small gathering of flowers from a large field. That is the word’s etymology from the ancient Greek as well as its action. It is not a contest, and this anthology especially is not one. Many favorite American short stories will be found here, and some will not. As with any cultural institution, this will be for various reasons. Perhaps the stories were not in this grand but fallible series to begin with. Perhaps John Updike put them into his Best of the Century book (we decided on no overlaps, but picking over his gemlike crumbs, I still found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best story, Flannery O’Connor’s best story, James Baldwin’s best story). Perhaps a story just plain could not fit into the very limited space Heidi Pitlor and I had available—only a handful of stories per decade. Perhaps the lovely Heidi mischievously hid some from me. Perhaps some were being held hostage by the Salinger estate and guarded like national security secrets. (Could we publish a Salinger story even in completely redacted form, like a Jenny Holzer exhibit? We would have had better luck with the Defense Department.) Often if the story was very long—the Best American series can proudly claim to have awarded Carson McCullers’s “The Ballad of the Sad Café” a place within its pages—the adhesive weaknesses of the bookbinding glue for this anniversary volume prevented us from including it. (Nor did the problematic bookbinding glue help us readhere the wads of hair we had torn from our heads in editorial anguish.)
Although a mechanism of literary canonization, a short story anthology, like the beautiful game of soccer, contains some of the unfortunate facts, restrictions, and hauntings of life: the score does not always reflect the playing. For it to be any good, its intentions must be quixotic, as the very word best implies, and one takes one’s hat off to it with gratitude and awe. Some favorite stories of mine—by Annie Proulx, Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg, Rick Bass, T. C. Boyle, Thomas McGuane, Susan Minot, Tony Earley, Amy Hempel, Amy Tan, Michael Cunningham, Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Ethan Canin, Stuart Dybek, to name but a few—are not here, for one of the several aforementioned reasons. Missing as well are Toni Cade Bambara’s exuberant child noticers, whose encounters with the adult world express the worried questions we all should ask ourselves regarding its injustices. Also missing are Karen Russell’s roaming vampires in the lemon grove, whose float, drift, and deathless hunger express the artist at society’s peripheries, thinly disguised as an ordinary citizen (a timeless literary illustration but one there is no room for except in this sentence). Absent too are the stories of Don DeLillo, whose great work as a novelist has too often eclipsed his brilliant shorter work.
But we could wring our hands forever. The powerful stories that are here—owing to the steady presence of a diligent and questing hundred-year-old enterprise—are full of heat and song and argument, depictions of life and its traps, its home fires and circling passions. This volume is also a celebration not just of authors but of the editors and readers who experienced the stories here in the way they were intended: as serious art. What has been gathered reveals a scrutiny of the editorial eye as well as a devotion to talent, diversity, originality, and our deep history as storytellers. A bouquet of beautiful, piercing, lonely voices. Perhaps a chorus. Along with a purposefully stray measure of “O Canada,” these pages comprise our own literary version of a national anthem.
L.M.
1915–1920
At the turn of the twentieth century, short stories were a preferred form of entertainment in the United States. This was a boom time for magazine publishing, owing in part to developments in offset printing technology as well as to the Postal Act of 1879, which had granted magazines discounted mailing rates. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Delineator, all of which published short stories, sold more than a half million copies per issue. The authors of these stories were well known at the time and often well paid.
A certain formula became evident: a predictable plot tied up neatly with a happy ending. Most short stories were folksy in tone and told in a breezy third-person narration of homespun heroes, lovable detectives, or quirky salesmen, the literary equivalent of the Norman Rockwell paintings beside which they sometimes appeared.
In 1906 the poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite published the first of his annual surveys of American poetry in the Boston Evening Transcript. Over the following years he became a mentor to a young poet and playwright, Edward J. O’Brien. Braithwaite’s editor at the Transcript suggested that the newspaper publish a companion to the poetry surveys, an annual survey of American short stories, and Braithwaite, overextended at the time, enlisted the help of his protégé.
O’Brien had grown up in Boston and since childhood had been a devout reader. He suffered from a heart condition, and during long periods of illness, he’d surrounded himself with books by Poe, Thackeray, Dickens, Dumas, and Balzac, among others. Because of his condition, which he kept largely secret throughout his life, he was unusually pale. Cecil Roberts, a poet and editor, said, “He had such a pathetic air, with his ill-dress, attenuated body, his wistful blue eyes, and unkempt appearance.” O’Brien did, however, benefit from all his reading. He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen, attended Boston College, and transferred to Harvard, but he soon dropped out. He wrote, “I decided not to entrust my education to professors any longer, but to educate myself as long as life lasted.”
When he began his new venture with Braithwaite, O’Brien was well aware—and wary—of the reign of commercial short fiction. Authors and readers had also begun to object to the formulaic writing that was flooding newsstands. Even some fiction editors had grown concerned. For example, Burton Kline wrote, “As an editor I have a feeling that some of the writers who should be railroad presidents or bank directors are getting in the way of real writers that I ought to be discovering.” O’Brien decided that this new survey would be a chance to showcase literary fiction. He wrote to hundreds of magazines of all sizes, informing editors of the project and asking for free copies of the year’s issues. He was surprised by the many responses, and near the end of the year he wrote, “We underestimated the number of stories. There are about 800 in all.” Months later, he guessed that he had read 2,500 stories that year.
Eventually O’Brien submitted a proposal for an annual anthology of American short stories, edited by him, to a Boston book publisher, who loved the idea. He laid out his criteria in his first foreword and reprinted it nearly verbatim each year. He vowed impartiality and defined his views of substance and form: “A fact or group of facts in a story only obtain substantial embodiment when the artist’s power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth . . . The first test of a story . . . is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts or incidents . . . The true artist, however, will seek to shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skillful selection and arrangement of his material, and by the most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.”
Authors like Fannie Hurst, Maxwell Struthers Burt, Benjamin Rosenblatt, and Wilbur Daniel Steele appeared several times in the early years of The Best American Short Stories. These and other contributors—Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Edna Ferber—ushered in a new and unflinching realism in American short fiction, as well as humor and more subtle characterization. Burt wrote, “I do prefer the ‘I’ narrator greatly. It does away with the ‘Smart Alec’ omniscient narrator of the third person, which seems to me the bane of most American short-stories.”
O’Brien was almost pathologically organized, a trait likely necessary for the amount of work on his desk. He created an extensive tracking system and in the book featured indexes of every American and British story, story collection, and relevant article published each year, among seemingly endless other lists and summaries. He even included a necrology of writers.
Despite his work, commercial short fiction continued its reign on newsstands through the decade. In fact, O’Brien felt that the quality of literary short fiction lessened during the First World War. In 1918 he wrote, “If we are to make our war experience the beginning of a usable past, we must not sentimentalize it on the one hand, nor denaturalize it on the other.” He guessed that it would be many years before writers could write about the war with any objectivity. (He was called before a draft board but was exempted on physical grounds.)
1917
EDNA FERBER
The Gay Old Dog
from Metropolitan Magazine
EDNA FERBER (1885–1968) was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and began her career at seventeen as a newspaper reporter. She wrote her first fiction while recovering from anemia and gained fame from a series of short stories—later novels—about Emma McChesney, a traveling saleswoman.
A regular at the Algonquin Round Table, Ferber was well known for her sarcasm. She never married. In her novel Dawn O’Hara, a character commented, “Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.”
Ferber’s best-known books include Show Boat; the Pulitzer Prize–winning So Big; Cimarron, a story of the Oklahoma land rush; and Giant. Her fiction often featured powerful female protagonists and characters struggling against prejudice. In her foreword to Buttered Side Down, the collection that included “The Gay Old Dog,” Ferber wrote, “‘And so,’ the story writers used to say. ‘They lived Happily Ever After.’ Um-m-m—maybe.”
★
THOSE OF YOU who have dwelt—or even lingered—in Chicago, Illinois (this is not a humorous story), are familiar with the region known as the Loop. For those others of you to whom Chicago is a transfer point between New York and San Francisco there is presented this brief explanation:
The Loop is a clamorous, smoke-infested district embraced by the iron arms of the elevated tracks. In a city boasting fewer millions, it would be known familiarly as downtown. From Congress to Lake Street, from Wabash almost to the river, those thunderous tracks make a complete circle, or loop. Within it lie the retail shops, the commercial hotels, the theaters, the restaurants. It is the Fifth Avenue (diluted) and the Broadway (deleted) of Chicago. And he who frequents it by night in search of amusement and cheer is known, vulgarly, as a loop-hound.
Jo Hertz was a loop-hound. On the occasion of those sparse first nights granted the metropolis of the Middle West he was always present, third row, aisle, left. When a new loop café was opened, Jo’s table always commanded an unobstructed view of anything worth viewing. On entering he was wont to say, “Hello, Gus,” with careless cordiality to the head-waiter, the while his eye roved expertly from table to table as he removed his gloves. He ordered things under glass, so that his table, at midnight or thereabouts, resembled a hot-bed that favors the bell system. The waiters fought for him. He was the kind of man who mixes his own salad dressing. He liked to call for a bowl, some cracked ice, lemon, garlic, paprika, salt, pepper, vinegar and oil, and make a rite of it. People at near-by tables would lay down their knives and forks to watch, fascinated. The secret of it seemed to lie in using all the oil in sight and calling for more.
That was Jo—a plump and lonely bachelor of fifty. A plethoric, roving-eyed and kindly man, clutching vainly at the garments of a youth that had long slipped past him. Jo Hertz, in
one of those pinch-waist belted suits and a trench coat and a little green hat, walking up Michigan Avenue of a bright winter’s afternoon, trying to take the curb with a jaunty youthfulness against which every one of his fat-encased muscles rebelled, was a sight for mirth or pity, depending on one’s vision.
The gay-dog business was a late phase in the life of Jo Hertz. He had been a quite different sort of canine. The staid and harassed brother of three unwed and selfish sisters is an under dog. The tale of how Jo Hertz came to be a loop-hound should not be compressed within the limits of a short story. It should be told as are the photoplays, with frequent throw-backs and many cut-ins. To condense twenty-three years of a man’s life into some five or six thousand words requires a verbal economy amounting to parsimony.
At twenty-seven Jo had been the dutiful, hard-working son (in the wholesale harness business) of a widowed and gummidging mother, who called him Joey. If you had looked close you would have seen that now and then a double wrinkle would appear between Jo’s eyes—a wrinkle that had no business there at twenty-seven. Then Jo’s mother died, leaving him handicapped by a death-bed promise, the three sisters and a three-story-and-basement house on Calumet Avenue. Jo’s wrinkle became a fixture.