Rick Bass’s For a
Little While: New and Collected Stories has just won the 2016 Story Prize,
for which Bass will receive $20,000. It
contains eighteen stories previously published in book form and seven stories
new to book form. The paperback version, which I just ordered, will be available
o March 21. I will comment on the new stories in a couple of weeks, but in the
meantime, here is a brief discussion of one of my favorite Bass stories in For a Little While, “The Hermit’s Story.
“The Hermit’s Story,” a magical tale about the entry into an
alternate reality, begins with a sort of poetic overture about the blue color
of an ice storm. The narrator and his
wife have gone to the home of Ann and Roger for Thanksgiving dinner. The power is out, and after the two couples
eat pie and drink wine before a roaring fire, Ann tells a story about an
experience she had twenty years before up in Saskatchewan with a man named Gray
Owl who hired Ann to train six German shorthair pointers.
After Ann has trained the dogs all summer and into the fall,
she takes them back to Gray Owl to show him how to continue to work them. She and Gray Owl take the dogs out into the
snow, and Ann uses live quail to show Gray Owl how the dogs will follow the
birds and point them. They work the dogs
for a week until they get lost in a heavy snowstorm, drifting away from their
home area by as much as ten miles. When
they come to a frozen lake and Gray Owl walks out on its surface and kicks at
it to find some water for the dogs, he abruptly disappears below the ice.
Ann decides to go into the water after Gray Owl, for even if
he is already drowned, he has their tent and emergency rations. However, when she crawls out on the ice and
peers down into the hole where Gray Owl disappeared, she sees standing him
below waving at her. When he helps her
down, he says that what has happened is that a cold snap in October has frozen
a skin of ice over the shallow lake and then a snowfall insulated it. When the lake drained in the winter, the ice
on top remained. Ann goes back to the
shore and hands the dogs down into the warmth created by the enclosed space
beneath the ice.
The world under the ice is a magical one, the air unlike
anything they have ever breathed before. The cold air from the hole they made
meets with the warm air from the earth beneath the lake to create breezes. Although the ice above them contracts and
groans, they feel they are safe beneath a sea watching waves of starlight sweep
across their hiding place. When they
build a fire from cattails, small pockets of swamp gas ignite with explosions
of brilliance.
The two head for what they hope is the southern shore, the
dogs chasing and pointing snipe and other birds. They finally reach the other shore and walk
south for a half a day until they reach their truck. That night they are back at Gray Owl’s cabin,
and by the next night Ann is home again. The story ends with the narrator
considering that Ann is the only one who carries the memory of that underworld
passage. He thinks that it perhaps gave
her a model for what things are like for her dogs when they are hunting and
enter a zone where the essences of things.
When “The Hermit’s
Story,” appeared in the 1999 Best American Short Stories collection,
Rick Bass said in his contributor’s note that as soon as he heard about a
frozen lake with no water in it, he knew he wanted to write a story about
that. Because he was trying to train two
bird dogs at the time, he made up a bird-dog trainer as a sort of wish
fulfillment and had her go up to Canada and fall into such a lake.
Such an event alone, as dramatically potential as it might
be, does not, of course, make a story.
What makes the event a story is Bass’s exploration of the symbolic
significance of the magical world into which the characters enter. That magical world is presaged even before
they break through the ice with the blue world of the ice storm described by
the narrator in the opening paragraphs in which the blue is like a scent
trapped in the ice. It is further
emphasized by the fact that the storm has knocked out the electricity, creating
a world of darkness. In the midst of
this cold, blue, dark world, the two couples sit before a fire, creating the
classic setting for a story to be told.
When Ann and Gray Wolf work the dogs in the snow of
Saskatchewan, they travel across snowy hills, the sky the color of snow so that
it seems they are moving in a dream.
Except for the rasp of the snowshoes and the pull of gravity, they might
believe they had ascended into a sky-place where the entire world was snow. All this is preparation for their descent
into the improbable, magical world underneath the frozen lake. When they look up, the ice is clear, and they
can see stars as if they were up there among them or else as if the stars were
embedded in the ice.
The closest the narrator can come to articulating the
meaning of the experience is to suggest that it perhaps was a zone where the
appearances of things disappeared, where surfaces faded away and instead their
very essence was “revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed.” Much like a magical journey in a fairy tale,
the experience under the ice is a journey into a realm of dream and desire,
which suggests that the world is a much more magical and mysterious place than
we usually think.
Style is especially important to this story, for without
Bass’s poetic descriptions, his rhythmic prose, and his suggestions about the
mythic significance of the experience it would be merely an interesting
anecdote, depending solely on the unusual nature of the frozen empty lake. The opening paragraph, by repeating the
reference to the color blue and the fictional metaphoric phrase “as if,” sets
up the entry into the fairy tale world.
This “as if” metaphoric quality also is used to refer to Ann’s transformation
of the dogs from wild and unruly pups into well-trained hunting dogs, “as if”
they are rough blocks of stone with their internal form existing already,
waiting to be chiseled free. If the
training is neglected, they have a tendency to revert to their old selves, “as
if” the dogs’ greatness can disappear back into the stone.
Although often metaphoric, Bass’s style is not flowery, but
rather simple and straightforward. He
does not tell the story in Ann’s words, but rather has the narrator retell it,
thus filtering the story through two points of view. Neither Ann nor Gray Owl talk much during
their experience, and when they do it is in the simple straightforward language
of people reduced to basic states. In
telling Ann about the lake, he says “It’s not really a phenomenon; it’s just
what happens.” And when she asks if he
knew it would be like this, he says, “No.
I was looking for water. I just
got lucky.” Although there is no
indication, other than his name, that Gray Owl is Native American, his dialogue
reflects the common literary convention of having Native Americans speak in
short declarative sentences.
Bass, a naturalist who has written nonfiction books about
the Yaak Valley in Montana, also devotes much of the story to his fascination
with the natural world of, as well as the dogs and the birds they hunt. For example, when the birds flush out snipe
from the cattails underneath the ice, Bass spends at least two pages pondering
the presence of the birds, wondering if they had been unable to migrate because
of injuries or a genetic absence. With
the curiosity of the naturalist, he wonders if the snipe had tried to carve out
new ways of being in the stark and severe landscape, holding on until the
spring would come like green fire. If
the snipe survived, the narrator reckons, they would be among the first to see
the spring; they would think that the torches of Ann and Gray Owl were merely
one of winter’s dreams.
The fairy-tale, folklore nature of the story persists
throughout, with the narrator considering at the end that Ann holds on to her
experience as one might hold on to a valuable gem found while out for a walk
and thus containing some great magic or strength.