I feel guilty for neglecting my blog for the past several months. I can only plead a variety of the usual
reasons: other work commitments, family responsibilities and pleasures, a few
health issues common to my age, etc. etc.
But now that it is May 1, the beginning of Short Story Month--a
celebration that has never really caught on with writers or readers, but one to
which I feel bound to contribute—I will try to compensate for my neglect by
taking another look at the stories in the two collections that I have always
read and commented on in the past—the 2017 issues of The O. Henry Prize Stories and The
Best American Short Stories. I will comment on as many stories from the two
collections as I have time for this month—focusing on those that I thought were
the best of the best and also commenting on those that did not engage me--trying
to explain the reasons for my responses. The first is:
Wil Weitzel, “Lion”—originally appeared in Prairie Schooner—O. Henry
Prize Stories
I like this story about a young graduate student who lives with an old
retired professor. Instead of the old man telling the young student a story, as
we might expect, the student tells the teacher a story--about a boy whose
family has a lion for a pet until it grows too powerful and has to be released
back into the wild.
As we often expect from a story within a story, there seems to be a
parallel--between the student’s relationship with the old man and the boy’s relationship
with the lion. I have been thinking about the story this week as my wife and I
take our 3-year-old grandson to his preschool in the morning. He often wants to hear a recording of Peter,
Paul, and Mary singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and he wants to hear it repeated
over and over again; it is a great pleasure to watch him in the rear view
mirror, nodding in time and singing along. As I sit here and read and reread “Lion,”
I am reminded how important it is to hear a rhythmic pattern repeated over and
over—a chant, a prayer, a mantra, a poem, a short story—until the pattern seems
to get synchronized with your mind—pulling loose things inside of you together
and becoming magically meaningful.
In his comments on the story at the end the O. Henry collection, Wil
Weitzel says he wrote the first version
of the story fast because he did not want to think too hard about it or get
tripped up by the words—as if it was the rhythm of the story rather than the
individual words that mattered. When he
worked on the revision, he said the tried to add logic and clarity, but it did
not seem right, so he gave up trying to rationalize the story.
The result is a story that works the way short stories—especially very
short short stories—often work—by transforming the characters and events into
emblems of something that transcends the everyday. When the story begins, the old man has died
and the young man bathes him and prepares him for burial--completing the
process that had already begun when he began to live with him. The old
professor seems “as old as old trees, their bark haggard and worn.” I know that image. Once, I paid a visit to an old writer/teacher,
who had a powerful influence on me when I was young. He lay in a hospital bed, and I placed my
hand on his—a hand that was supple and translucent, as if he had already begun
the process of being transformed from mere flesh into spirit or monument, or
relic, or manuscript. He died two days
later. I did what all students try to
do: I wrote about it, and the tribute
appeared in a Kentucky journal called Appalachian
Heritage. And this is what Wil
Weitzel does in “Lion”—trying to work his way through to the significance of a
young man’s search for the lion, trying to tell the story.
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