In my third choice, “Writing in the Dark” by Sandra Dorr, we meet a girl whose father fought in World War II. Through the girl’s relationship to her father we experience the terror and uncertainty of war, and the gap between what a child knows and what children are asked, often unreasonably, to endure in the lives of the parents they join. The story is a sensual and suggestive portrait of a family complex which includes the father’s mother, Clara, who has been left childlike by mental illness, yet who, in the narrator’s imagination, retains an unassailable richness and vitality of being. Here again we sense the importance of young writers who are often moved to reveal extremities, realities at either end of the spectrum—the gratuitously cruel or the phenomenon of innocence preserved against odds.
For short stories, all three of these stories are somewhat long, as are several others chosen by the editors, and it leads me to make a generalization about this collection and perhaps about story writing in America at large in 1988. It seems to me that there must be a healthy ambition afoot to extend the reach of stories past the ten-to-fifteen-page manuscript, perhaps toward a scope which takes advantage of what have been more novelistic strategies. In many of the stories included here we get a sense of characters more fully drawn and placed within a community or an extended family spectrum. The time-sense is less truncated than in the so-called “traditional narrative,” and we experience instead a feeling of times intersecting and overlapping for which added length seems a prerequisite. Primary and secondary characters as well as alternate lines of action are more likely to be developed in the longer short story.
When I think of three of Chekhov’s longer stories which I admire—“In the Ravine,” “The Lady with a Lapdog,” and “Ward No. 6” (which is sometimes called a novella)—I realize that the incentive to aspire to the rangier story has been there all along. It’s possible that the constraints of the so-called “well-made” poem experienced in the last several years have also begun to be felt in the arena of the short story to some degree. That is, if this collection is any clue to what’s developing, young writers may have begun to prefer—or at least to explore—a more elastic territory for the short story, one that also dispenses, to some degree, with conclusiveness, and opts instead for the strengths of what we might call the tapestry of relationship and event. Granted, some unwieldy and patently boring stuff may be one of the hazards of such ambition. But, for the writer with guts and talent, the results can sometimes be invigorating for the whole prospect of the short story. In an essay on writing, I once advised story writers to “Get in, get out. Don’t linger.” I still think that holds as a pretty fair rule for the short stories I most enjoy reading. But we like to find ourselves surprised and liberated from our so-called “rules of thumb,” so it’s in such a spirit that I discover myself in a state of curiosity about the emergence of the long short story, a form I’ve worked with from time to time myself. I see this longer form as an important characteristic of the best stories in this anthology, and they have set me to wondering what is ahead for the short story in its current period of growth.
At the same time I focus on longer stories I realize there is no lack of fine representation here for the short story which holds to around fifteen manuscript pages and under. Ursula Hegi’s story, “Saving a Life,” about a young woman who dares herself toward the painful undertow of her dead mother’s passion for swimming in the river, has a wonderful economy and physical exactness about it. Michael Blaine’s “Suits” is a charmer. Its narrator is lively and wistful in a way that makes us remember when we were young, somebody’s niece or nephew, son or daughter, and life was more overheard and conjectured about than lived. “In the Garden” by Gordon Jackson brings together elements of mystery with those of the quotidian. It involves a young man’s loss of innocence when he realizes the promiscuity of the young girl who has just put the moves on him in the dark during a power outage at the Big Boy where they work.
Each of these stories centers around a loss which is made palpable and moving in a few scenes. In each there is something the narrator passionately desires. In other words, the stories I’m talking about are stories which had to be written, and this is already a high recommendation. The editors tell me they have made these choices in order to honor new and emerging writers. I too look at this anthology as a chance to experience new writers who are gaining a purchase on subject matter that belongs particularly to the young—stories which question and reevaluate the legacies of their elders. At the same time, I’m sensing the freedom of the young, that willingness to take chances; and this, truly, is a breath of fresh air for us all, writers and readers alike.
BOOK REVIEWS
Big Fish, Mythical Fish
The big ones always get away. Think of Nick Adams’s lunker in “Big Two-Hearted River” and those heartbreakingly big line-busting trout in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It. Think of the archetypal fish story of them all, Moby Dick. The big ones get away, they have to, and when they do it brings you to grief. Usually. This new book by William Humphrey is the tale of a man who hooks and then loses the Big One, but who does not come to grief. Instead, he finds his life enlarged and enriched by the experience, and so are we by the telling.
In the best fiction—and William Humphrey has written his fair share—the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the “moved” character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world. At the end of My Moby Dick, when the author tells us he is a changed man, we believe him. We have watched from beginning to end his dealings with a fish the size and appearance of which seem an awesome reminder of God’s presence in this world. It is a fish that causes the author to know love, fear, admiration, and a profound sense of the mysteriousness of this life.
It was given to “Bill”—as the author calls himself—and to no other man, to bear witness to a brown trout, “very possibly the record trout”—very possibly the largest brown trout in this world, or the next. I God! (That’s an expression some of the east Texas characters in Humphrey’s fictions are fond of using when they want to express amazement—or disbelief.)
Just how big is this fish? Where in the wide world is this extraordinary pursuit taking place? How come we’ve never heard of Bill’s fish before now? Something this big should have made the newspapers, not just the record books.
All this took place some years ago, Bill tells us, in the Berkshires, on a little slip of a stream dear to the hearts of Melville and the Hawthornes by the name of Shadow Brook. Bill speculates that the great fish must have washed downstream from a lake called Stockbridge Bowl during a flood. Stockbridge Bowl is near Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Once while Bill is casting for the big fellow he hears the distant thunder of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” rolling down from Tanglewood. “The music seemed to be coming from light-years off and so vast was the number of voices in the choir that had been assembled, it sounded like the hosts of heaven: ethereal harmony, music of the spheres.” Bill writes like this when he’s under the big fish’s influence. Listen:
Out of the water he rose again like a rocket—out and out, and there still was more to him, no end to him. More bird than fish he seemed as he hovered above the water, his spots and spangles patterned like plumage. I half expected to see his sides unfold and spread in flight, as though, like the insects he fed upon, he had undergone metamorphosis and hatched. His gleaming wetness gave an iridescent glaze to him, and as he rose into the sunshine his multitudinous markings sparkled as though he were studded with jewels.… Then, giving himself a flip like a pole-vaulter’s, down he dove, parting the water with a wallop that rocked the pool to its edges.
Not only is this maybe the largest trout in America, it has the mark of Cain on it, the mark of the misbegotten, the rogue, the wounded. It is blind in one eye. “It was opaque, white, pupilless; it looked like the eye of a baked fish.”
So just how big? you’re still asking. Bill slips up on the fish where it is lying with its blind side next to the bank. He’s brought Mrs. Humphrey along to corroborate this part of his tale, clever fellow, and hopes that none of his readers will be unchivalrous enough to doubt her word on the matter. Bill and Mrs. Humphrey get down on their bellies and Bill uses a carpenter’s sliding rule. He tells us the fish is a little over forty-two inches in length, that the girth corresponds to his own thigh. He estimates its weight at thirty pounds, maybe larger. I God!
Bill is in thrall to this fish but is determined to kill it nevertheless, this fish that fills him with both pity and terror. (You don’t catch a fish this size, you kill it.) He is a patient man with nothing very much else to do, it seems, and so he spends mornings, afternoons, and evenings watching the fish and observing its habits:
I logged his comings and goings like an assassin establishing his victim’s routine. He came always to the same feeding station, an eddy at the tail of the pool where a tiny feeder stream trickled in, like an old regular of a restaurant to the table reserved for him.… When I had fixed the hours at which he issued from his lair beneath the bridge, then I was there, prone on the bank beside his spot, waiting for him to come to breakfast at dawn, to dinner at dusk.
There is a boy who comes every day to the creek to watch Bill fruitlessly cast and cast his fly. He thinks Bill’s dumb. He tells him so. They have little conversations about the fish and, by extension, the world at large. The boy is there on that fateful last day of the season (now is when you want to hear the music from Tanglewood) when Bill hooks into the Big One, Old Cyclops himself. The boy silently watches the brief, uneven contest, then, shaken, cries out angrily: “You had him and you let him get away!”
“The literature of angling falls into two genres,” Humphrey writes, “the instructional and the devotional. The former is written by fishermen who write, the latter by writers who fish.” This is a devotional book, filled with a loving and rare regard for the mysteries of this world, and the other. It is a fine companion book to Humphrey’s earlier work on salmon fishing, The Spawning Run.
My Moby Dick by William Humphrey. New York: Doubleday, 1978.
Barthelme’s Inhuman Comedies
I’ve been an admirer of Donald Barthelme’s stories since college, when I read his first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Everyone I knew at that time talked about Donald Barthelme, and for a while everyone tried to write like him. Donald Barthelme was our man, man! Some of those people are still trying to write stories like his, and with singular lack of success. His chief imitators were then, and are still, students of writing at colleges and universities across the country. The influence of Barthelme’s stories has been considerable, but not always salutary, on young and not-so-young writers.
The imitations—no other word will do—are easy to recognize. Once in a while you see them in print somewhere, but most often you see them handed in in depressing numbers at writing workshop classes around the country where Barthelme stories are often studied and held up as models for young short story writers.
In these short fictions à la Barthelme, there is, almost without exception, a serious lack of interest and concern on the part of the author for his characters. The characters are dropped into silly situations where they are treated by their creators with the most extreme irony, or even downright contempt. They are never to be found in situations that might reveal them as characters with more or less normal human reactions. To allow the characters to express any emotion, unless it can be ridiculed, is unthinkable. It is impossible for the characters even to see, much less accept, responsibility for their actions. There is a feeling that anything goes in the stories, that is, nothing in the story has to make sense, or has any more pertinence, value, or weight than anything else. This world is on the skids, man, so everything is relative, you know. Usually, the characters have no last names, often (as with the stories in Great Days) no first names either. The authors are determined to write fiction free from the responsibility of making any sense. They take it as given that there is no sense whatsoever to be made of this world, and so they are free to have their characters speak and act without any of the normal restraints of moral complication and consequence. In a word, there is absolutely no value to anything.
The imitators have picked up everything easy and obvious from Barthelme but they don’t have his great talent, his genius for finding startling, original ways to say things about love and loss, triumph and despair. Disappointment and heartbreak are rife in the land, God knows, but if a writer writes about such matters and populates his fiction with whining, self-pitying creatures eaten up with unspecified angst, bitterness, and complaint, well, it isn’t enough. Barthelme is different. His characters are never contemptible or mean-spirited. He can move you, and often make you laugh at the same time, can stir that emotion Camus called simply “fellow feeling”—notwithstanding the fact that the stories Barthelme writes are often the strangest-looking vehicles ever to come down the road. Come Back, Dr. Caligari was followed in 1967 by the little experimental novel Snow White. Then, in 1968, the strange and wonderful collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; City Life, more stories, in 1970. Sadness, another fine collection, appeared in 1972. The Dead Father, a novel, was published in 1975; Amateurs, yet another book of stories, in 1976. With these original works, Barthelme made a place for himself in the national literature and in so doing did honor to the practice of short story writing.
So I’m sorry to say I don’t like his new book of stories, Great Days. The book isn’t a profound disappointment, but it is a disappointment nevertheless. Great Days isn’t going to cause one to lose regard for Barthelme, or detract from his considerable accomplishments, but it isn’t going to help him along either. There is not a story in the collection of sixteen that has anywhere near the power, the complexity, the resonance of stories from his earlier collections, stories such as “The Indian Uprising,” “The Balloon,” “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” “See the Moon?”, “The Sandman,” “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,” “Brain Damage,” “Sentence,” “Views of My Father Weeping.” Seven of the stories in Great Days are “dialogues” between nameless pairs of male or female characters (although the gender is not always clear), disembodied voices stripped of everything save the willingness to babble.
From time to time Barthelme does engage your intellectual, literary fancy, and there are some funny, kooky one-liners here, but there are for a fact no innovative breakthroughs in this book, and he does not write about anything close or dear to the human heart. This last is the most serious drawback in the collection. The absence of anything remotely resembling the human in these stories is troubling. In this book he seems to be moving farther and farther away from what most concerns us, or what, I suggest, should concern us the most.
The two most interesting pieces in the book are not in the dialogue form. One is “The King of Jazz,” starring Hokie Mokie and the challenger for the title, Hideo Yamaguchi, “the top trombone man in all of Japan.” The other is a hilarious tale called “The Death of Edward Lear,” a comic deathbed scene in which the nineteenth-century nonsense-verse writer has sent out invitations to witness his demise at “2:20 A.M., San Remo, the 29th of May, 1888.”
In too many of the other stories the author is, I hate to say it, sounding like Donald Barthelme imitating Donald Barthelme. The technical virtuosity and the inventiveness are there, but most of the inventions seem strained this time around and bear little resemblance or relation to anything like “fellow feeling” and so, ultimately, are uninteresting in the extreme.
Great Days by Donald Barthelme. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979.
Rousing Tales
Jim Harrison is the author of three novels—Wolf, A Good Day to Die, and Farmer—as well as several distinguished books of poetry. Farmer, the best of his novels, is a fine, realistic study of a solitary man who hunts and fishes the good country of northern Michigan, e
arns a living off the land he works, has a love affair with a schoolteacher, reads a few good books, is exceptional only in that he is a decent, interesting man of some complexity—a man Harrison obviously feels close to and cares about. It’s an honest book, scrupulously written. Legends of the Fall is a collection of three short novels—more properly, novellas—and appears four years after Farmer. It is Harrison at the height of his powers, and a book worth reading.
The best of these three works is a beautifully rendered story of just over ninety pages called “The Man Who Gave Up His Name.” It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, covering what might seem all-too-familiar territory: a change of life for a man in his early forties. But I think this novella can stand with the best examples the form has to offer—novellas by Conrad, Chekhov, Mann, James, Melville, Lawrence, and Isak Dinesen.