Parallel Metaphoric Stories in Jerome Charyn's Bitter Bronx

My primary reason for writing these blog essays over the past seven years is to encourage myself to continue to discover basic characteristics of the short story as a form--primarily in order to develop techniques for reading short stories as complexly and fairly as possible.

When I discuss the stories of a single author, for example, when a publisher, agent, or author rep sends me a new collection, I try to do so from the perspective of what is generically characteristic about them--as well as what makes them unique.

When an author rep sent me Jerome Charyn's recent collection Bitter Bronx, I read the stories with pleasure and then began reading them again while doing some research to give me some perspective on Charyn.

I have to admit I was not very familiar with Charyn's work, for he is not best known as a short-story writer. I first ran across him way back in 1969, when I started teaching, in two volumes he edited for Collier books: The Single Voice and The Troubled Vision.

 The Single Voice contains short stories and excerpts from novels by such writers as Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, John Barth, and Donald Barthelme, as well as the title story of Charyn's first short story collection, "The Man Who Grew Younger," a comic/Yiddish story in the tradition of Sholem Aleichman. If you want a pretty good overview of American fiction in the sixties, this collection provides it. You can find used copies online. The Troubled Vision  included novellas and novel excerpts, such William  H. Gass's "The Pedesen Kid," Norman Mailer's "The Man Who Studied Yoga," and James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues."

In one of the few reviews of Charyn's first short-story collection The Man Who Grew Younger and Other Stories (in The Stanford Daily where he was teaching at the time), the reviewer said it was a pity he is so "ill at ease in the short-story form." I am not exactly sure what that means, since the judgment depends on what the critic thinks the short story form is. Charyn has never claimed the short story as his favorite form, although he is indeed a highly versatile writer. He is, in the old-fashioned term," a man of letters," having written thirty novels, three memoirs, plus graphic novels, plays, and biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Joe Dimaggio, and Quentin Tarantino.  The man writes (and teaches writing) for a living.

The thirteen stories in Bitter Bronx might suggest that Charyn has returned to the short story form, for they are fairly recent, having originally appeared between 2007 and 2010 in such places as The Atlantic, The American Scholar, Epoch, and The Southern Review. I remember reading the opening story "Lorelei" when The Atlantic was still publishing short stories (and I was still a subscriber).

One of the primary characteristics that I noted when I read the stories in Bitter Bronx, was that although on the surface they appear to be realistic memoirs, they seem also to be structured by a metaphoric pattern. Some reviewers, taking their cue from Charyn's introduction about growing up in the Bronx, have emphasized this memoir-style. One called them a "nostalgic elegy to the Bronx of the past" in which it is hard to tell where fiction starts and nonfiction begins, and another noted the stories were "suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place" combined with a keen eye for detail with Charyn's "lived experience."

However, Wendell Jamieson in The New York Times suggested that some of the stories have a "touch of magic realism," and Donna Seaman in Booklist described them as "bewitching urban folktales." It seems to me that if you read the surface story, they do seem to be realistic memoirs, but if you read the metaphoric parallel text, they seem to be folk tales.  Bernard Malamud was probably the most accomplished practitioner of this type of dual tale.

"Lorelei" is a good example of the technique.  It is the story of a grifter named Howell who has spent most of his life conning widows out of some of their money. When he decides to retire back in the place in the Bronx where his father was an apartment superintendent, he encounters the woman he knew when they were both children. The story seems to follow a relatively simple "biter bite" structure, if it were not for the pattern of metaphors that seem to underlie the story.  Here are some examples of the metaphoric parallel pattern:

The widows are "birds of prey" who grasp at Howell with "forceful talons."

The superintendent tells Howell the apartment is like "being on your own planet."

The landlord Hugo Waldaman is the  "paterfamilias of the whole tribe" who live there.

The child Naomi looks like a witch in her mascara. She "bewitched" Howell.

Howell's mother, whose mother has arms that moved like "magical sticks, abandoned the "cave" they lived in and ran off with a "devil of a man" with "silver teeth."

Naomi is "voluptuous" at thirteen, having "vampirized" the charms of her mother.

She wiggles out of her clothes and lies with Howell as if both were "entombed."

As she grows older she develops eyes like "tin telescopes," a little duchess who is confined to a wheelchair that is like an aluminum throne.

Naomi's father has a razor-sharp mustache, like "Smilin' Jack," Howell's favorite character in the funny papers."

The effect of this pattern of imagery is to take the story out of the realm of the real and into the world of grotesque fairy tale with two-dimensional symbolic characters living in a fantastic castle that threatens to swallow Howell up and hold him enthrall forever. If the story is based on Charyn's actual childhood experience, then it is the experience of dream and imagination, not the physical reality of the Bronx.

In "Adonis" and "Archy and Mehitabel," a young man is "captured" to be a model and a prostitute for war widows, who sleep in the coffins of their slain husbands, by a Dracula-like man, who looks like he is made of whitewash and who lives in a world of frosted glass.

But the most interesting characters in the stories are women who are much more fantastic creatures than ordinary females. Angela, an ex-con in "The Cat Lady's Kiss," fancies herself a character from a 1940s film who turns into a ferocious cat when a man tries to kiss her.

Marla Silk is the central character in three stories: "Silk and Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla." She paints her face white like some "Egyptian queen." She becomes obsessed with a Little Sister, missing so long she felt as she had had been visited by a strange goblin or ghost. Marla's mother, a "half-mad bird of prey," calls the sister a "monster" she had to expel from her loins. Later the sister, a little demon, who had to be put in a gilded cage, is a character in a Kafka story or a fable in a picture book. Men in the stories are like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  or "satanic creatures."

Although a  photographer provides the central narrative device in the story "Dee," as usual in Charyn's stories in this book, a photograph is never a realistic depiction of its subject. The central character, Diane Arbus, known as a "photographer of freaks," befriends an eight-foot giant named Eddie Carmel, who works in a circus sideshow. One of Arbus's most famous photographs is "A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx in 1967." The image pattern in this story creates another fairy tale of the fantastic. Here are some examples of how the story transforms actual historically real people into figures of fable:

Dee's father is a trustee at a Hospital that looks like a beleaguered castle.

Dee searches for shadows and ghosts "and for the shadow of herself.,"

With her cropped hair Dee looks like Peter Pan.

She tries to capture the Jewish giant with her viewfinder, but she is a haunted ghost and he is outside whatever a ghost could govern.

She is a waif with cropped hair who lives in a pauper's castle.

Eddie is like a "figure out of some fairy tale."

Dee had been born a princess, but is now a princess of nothing at all.

She feels like Alice in a wonderland that is both familiar and remote.

She could have "walked out of a dream."

She is a huntress who has unmasked the quiet dignity of dwarfs in rooming houses and has captured mothers with swollen bellies in the backwoods, but has failed with Eddie.

The technique of creating a metaphoric/fabulistic story that parallels the realistic surface story is a traditional one for the short story. It suggests that no matter how "real" the characters and events seem to be in a short story, there is usually what some critics like to call a "subtext" that supports the significance of the story.

I am not particularly fond of the term "subtext," for it is often used by contemporary critics as if it were a new poststructuralisti discovery, when it actually was observed quite successfully by the so-called formalist New Critics. 

Charles Baxter, in his book, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Greywolf Press, 2007, says a subtext  "propels readers beyond the plot of a novel or short story into the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken."

What is curious about Baxter's discussion of subtext is his insistence that writers have to use a great deal of surface detail to suggest this unspoken and unseen, and the stronger the presence of the unspoken and unseen the more gratuitous details are required, signifying a "world both solid and haunted" adding that "haunted" is the apt word, for he asks us to think of the essays in his small book as the reports of an investigator examining a few stories looking for "the ghosts moaning beneath the floor."

I will talk about the notion of "subtexts" in another blog post soon.  In the meantime, if you want a good example of the use of subtext by an accomplished writer, check out Jerome Charyn's Bitter Bronx. 

Short Story Month 2010: Atlantic Monthly Stories

When I was in high school in a little town in the mountains of Kentucky in the late 1950’s, I worked afternoons and holidays at East Kentucky News, a wholesaler who distributed magazines, comic books, and paperbacks to newsstands, drugstores, and small grocery stores in the Eastern Kentucky area—Pikeville, Paintsville, Louisa, Prestonsburg, etc. My life as a serious reader had already begun when I started work there, so it was a pleasure to browse the shelves for Mentor books and Signet Classics.

Our biggest selling magazine was TV Guide, which we bound in bundles by the hundreds. However, for the whole of the Eastern Kentucky area, we distributed only five copies of each issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I realize that those serious readers in the mountain communities who read The Atlantic Monthly probably received their copies by U.S. Post, but still the gap between those five Atlantic copies and those hundreds of TV Guides was not lost on me. I knew that The Atlantic was directed to an audience smart enough to appreciate the articles and stories it published. When I went to college at Morehead State University, “Where the Mountains Meet the Bluegrass,” and took a short story class with that most excellent of all Eastern Kentucky writers, James Still, I was not surprised that many of his stories had appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

This past week, as I read the seven stories in the Atlantic Fiction 2010 Supplement, I was more than a little disappointed to discover that the magazine that had been publishing quality fiction for so many years had now given in to the demands of marketing and was publishing the kind of stories that used to be relegated to the big circulation slicks. They are all easy reads, even pleasurable reads--just not challenging literary experiences. It is hard for me to believe that if The Atlantic receives approximately 5,000 stories a year, they could only come up with these seven quite ordinary ones.

One of the problems of publishing all the year’s fiction in one supplement issue instead of monthly is the demand to make the stories in that one issue diverse and appealing to a large audience. Facing this demand, what are editors to do?

Well, they have to provide a mix of established writers (to give some class), new writers (to encourage new talent), and at least one third-world writer (for political correctness).

Jerome Charyn has published enough books to hold up a wall, and T. C. Boyle, although younger, is stacking his books up fast and furiously. Stuart Nadler is a recent graduate of (you guessed it), the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, while Amanda Briggs is at work on a collection of short stories, Ryan Mecklenburg is at work on a novel, and Katie Williams’ first novel will be out in June. E. C. Osondu is a Nigerian who got his MFA from Syracuse and is currently teaching in Rhode Island.

Here are a few comments on the seven stories. Caution! These are spoiler comments. If you want the experience of reading the stories the first time in a pristine linear fashion, stop now and come back later. For me, the significant reading of a short story is always the second reading, when I know everything that has happened and can focus on what is more important—what it means and how it works.

Jerome Charyn, “Lorelei”—An experienced writer who knows the conventions of fiction well, Charyn builds this predictable little story around the myth of the Lorelei, those beautiful Rhine maidens who, like the sirens of Greek legend, lured sailors to their death. The protagonist, somewhat of a shape shifter with several different names, is a middle-aged Don Juan grifter who preys, albeit somewhat honorably, on aging widows. When he tires of this life and returns to an apartment building of his youth near Yankee Stadium, he discovers that Naomi, a woman he was smitten by when they were both very young, still lives there, although in a wheelchair, with her too solicitous father. Charyn liberally makes use of allusions to fairy tales and comic books, describing the father as Smiling Jack, the protagonist’s favorite character in the funny papers, and Naomi as a little duchess sitting on an aluminum throne. As expected from the title, Naomi is the Lorelei who threatens to lure him back to her and her father’s lair, where “They would swallow him alive.” So, of course, he runs for his life. It’s an ordinary, conventional, well-made story that only seems exotic and interesting on the surface.

E. C. Osondu, “A Simple Case”—The protagonist Paiko is arrested on a raid on a brothel while he is waiting for his girlfriend Sweet to finish having sex with her last client. When the police Sergeant gets a call about a robbery, he throws Paiko in with a bunch of misc. miscreants and “arrests” them as the robbers. The story focuses on Paiko’s encounter with the other prisoners in the cell, primarily the President of the cell, known as the Jungle Republic. To determine whether he should be admitted into this community of thieves, he tells a story about a dispute with a woman over a handbag he tried to sell her at his market stall. The President who says Paiko is a good storyteller, uses his influence to get him released. When he returns to the brothel, he finds his girlfriend has gone to Italy. So he gets a new girl. That’s it! That’s the story. A competently, but flatly-told tale of local color in a Lagos jail, complete with third world corrupt officials, powerful criminals, and cheating prostitutes.

Ryan Mecklenburg’s “Hopefulness” centers on a man whose wife has left him for a neighbor. The first-person protagonist is a block captain of the Neighborhood Watch, a job he can devote all his time to since, conveniently, a couple of years ago he won five million dollars in a lottery pool at work. The heart of the story is the central metaphor of the house where the “other man” lived, which is now in foreclosure. Piece by piece, the neighbors steal the furniture and vandals wreck the house, all of which the protagonist fails to report because of his anger at the man who ran off with his wife. It’s a readable story with an obvious thematic linkage around a central metaphor—a technique often found in short stories since Bartleby’s wall and Roderick Usher’s House.

Stuart Nadler's “Visiting” is about a divorced man who takes his son to meet his dying father in another state. Most of the story is typical tense dialogue between the father and son during the car ride, but the thematic payoff comes when the father refuses to go to the door to see his father and sends his son instead. The father has never forgiven the old man for dragging a fork across his arm when he was eighteen, leaving a scar. In the final scene as the father and son sit in a restaurant, the son says he saw numbers on his grandfather’s arm in the same place as the father’s fork scars. The whole story depends on this final recognition, such as it is, reinforcing the protagonist’s knowledge that “he was still not as tall as his father. He never had been.” As father and son stories go, this one lacks thematic significance, for it is not clear how we are to understand meaningful differences between the three generations; moreover, the final recognition, such as it is, does not seem earned by the narrative.

Katie Williams, “Bone Hinge”—O.K., you gotta have at least one kind of outré story for spice. This one is about two Siamese twins joined at the back, which makes for exploring lots of metaphors of duality and schisms. However, let’s not fool ourselves, the central ploy here is the sexual suggestiveness of the fact that one of the girls is in love with a young man that she wishes to run away with and marry—which of course means that she must drag her sister along to unwilling participate in her every encounter. The story is told by the unattached sister, that is, the one without a boyfriend, and it is her “meanness” and cynicism that energizes this bit of exploitation.

And finally, there’s T. C. Boyle, (There is always T.C. Boyle, it seems, who is surely trying, hopelessly, to rack up more publishing credits than Joyce Carol Oates, who also has a piece in this Atlantic Supplement). “The Silence” is a stretch, as is often the case with Boyle. It’s about this guy on a silence retreat in the Arizona desert with his emaciated young wife and several other pooh-bahs and pundits, living in a yurt, avoiding scorpions, living on hummus and pita bread. The story opens and ends with a dragonfly, a water bug that is not supposed to be out here in the desert, in between which the wife is bitten by a rattlesnake and must die because, well, hell, you know, they are on a retreat and they can’t talk and the car is on blocks and there’s nobody else around and well, hell, you know, that’s karma, or something. Boyle is a sleight-of-hand artist, with lots of stuff up his sleeve, whose hand at the end of it is quicker than the eye. You either shake your head in disgust and walk out of the theatre or else you just say, ah, shit, and give in to him.

Tell me, Atlantic, and tell me true. Out of some 5,000 stories you received this year, are these the best you could come up with?