Samar Farah Fitzgerald's "Where Do You Go?" and Rolf Yngve's "The Quail"--also Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?"

One of the stories in the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories that intrigued me, but that I did not have a chance to discuss in December, is Samar Farah Fitzgerald's "Where Do You Go?"  The story reminded me of another story I once read, which is not unusual, of course. The story I recalled is Rolfe Yngve's "The Quail," which I included in my short story textbook several years ago.

It was not the style of Fitzgerald's story that struck a chord with me, but rather the similarity to Yngve's  basic theme of a young couple coming in contact with, and thus being significantly contrasted with, an older couple.

Yngve's story is quite short—about three pages in my text book anthology--and focuses on a simple object that takes on symbolic significance—the quail of the title. Basically, the story is about a young couple who, during the first spring of their marriage, are visited by eight quail who come to eat in their elderly landlord's garden. They are still within the honeymoon phrase of their relationship, and their life seems quite idyllic.  They feed the quail, while the landlord and his wife rail against them for eating their seedlings. The seasons pass until winter when the quail disappear.  The young husband discovers that the elderly landlord has trapped them and eaten them; he does not tell his wife.

The question that my students and I discussed is whether the story makes effective use of the symbolic object or whether it is a bit too rigged and predictable.  The dichotomies in the story are quite explicit: old couple and young couple, romance and reality, the beautiful and the practical.  The fact that the quail arrive during the first spring of the couple's marriage is sufficient to indicate the symbolic value of the birds. 

The fact that the protagonists are referred to only as "the couple" or "the tenant and his wife," while the antagonists, if such they are, are only called the landlord and his wife is sufficient to indicate the fable-like nature of the story.  The language, with its short simple declarative sentences, also suggest that what we are reading, in spite of the fact that the characters seem "as-if-real," is an illustrative fable, not a realistic story.

Given the fact that the romance of early married life inevitably gives way to the practicality of everyday reality, there is no other way that the story could end than that the quail are transformed from being the symbolic center of a romantic idyll for the young couple to being merely food for the older couple. 

Samar Farah Fitzgerald's "Where Do You Go?" is also about a young couple, Vega and Henry, who, in the spring of their second year of marriage, move out of the city to a house they buy in a neighborhood mainly occupied by elderly couples, widows, and divorcees. The young wife begins taking walks with an old man with emphysema man who smokes cigarettes secretly; the young husband begins do small odd jobs for the old man's wife.

Fitzgerald's story, at eighteen pages, is considerably longer than Yngve's story—the added length creating more of an "as-if-real" quality to the story--in contrast to the fable-like nature of Yngve's story.  But I wonder if this difference in generic style is the only reason that Fitzgerald's story is  so much longer than Yngve's.  It makes me reconsider Chekhov's famous injunction about short stories:  "It is better to say not enough (or too little) than to say too much."  But then, Chekhov added teasingly, "because, because, "I don't know why."  Well, if Chekhov didn't know why, then who does? Even after all these years of studying short stories, I am not sure I do.

The short story, as I have argued many times over the years, is a form that is more often structured by a meaningful theme than by mere mimesis. The form originated as an illustrative fable and, in spite of the Renaissance shift to realism, still has something of the parable about it.  The novel does not have the same heritage and thus, in contrast to the short story's thematic need to be controlled by what Poe called a "single effect," has a tendency to be, what Henry James called, a "loose, baggy monster" (no offense intended).

By this criteria, I ask myself the following questions:  Does a short story have to be limited or controlled or structured around a central theme? Can't it just be about "something that happened"? Can't it just be a story of an event or an action?  Moreover, if it is structured around a central theme or "effect," can it not be "loose" enough to include details that have nothing to do with that central theme?  Can't there just be details that suggest that this is a "real" event, taking place in a "real" world, involving "real" people?

Rolf Yngve's story "The Quail" is so tightly controlled around the theme of young and age, romance and reality, that there is little or nothing in it that is not about that theme.   However, there may indeed be details in Fitzgerald's story that have little or nothing to do with the theme of youth and age.  But, could that not mean that Fitzgerald's story is about more than the theme of youth and age?  Or could it mean that her story is a more complex treatment of that theme than Yngve's?

I think the novelist, faced with the need to write a "long" work, often includes details that just "occur" to him or her at the time—interesting and intriguing, or clever and amusing—but that have little to do with the theme of the story.  This, I would call the "novelistic" temptation.  However, the short story writer more often tries to resist that temptation, ruthlessly cutting out everything that does not seem to advance or explore the significance he or she senses is at the heart of the story.  For example, in Fitzgerald's story the narrator  introduces a bartender who tells Vega about freezing his leg in dry ice so it could be amputated. You can find on line a true story of a man named Baz who did that.  It's a well-known intriguing obsession,  but is it relevant to Fitzgerald's story?

Another aspect of the novelistic temptation is to provide a social/historical/cultural context for the story, as well as a biographical background context for the characters.  For example, Fitzgerald provides a four-page section devoted to the story of how her young couple met and married. We know little of the background of Yngve's couple. Do we need to know the background?  Well, maybe in Fitzgerald's kind of story, we do, but in Yngve's we do not.

Moreover, there is something else going on in Fitzgerald's story.  Since the couple have moved from the city, her young woman has been having "inexplicable episodes of disorientation," which her husband suspects may be panic attacks.  The young husband starts having dreams that he is looking for his wife in "crabby caves under the lake, and he begins to worry that she might indeed disappear someday.  One of the young woman's attacks take place in the supermarket--an attack that brings on the most thematically mysterious sentence in the story: "But it was only a matter of time before that feeling, the knowledge that something was coming for her—and for Henry too, coming for them both—would return."

We don't really know what this ominous sense of the impending means, although the possibility of having a child is suggested, as well as the possibility of falling out of love and the possibility of mortality. The story ends with the couple at a party, when the narrator once again refers to  some inevitable time coming: "It was going to be different for each of them, they both knew that.  Vega would become unreachable, impatient and sullen as a teenager.  Henry would cry and, if his wife was still alive, he'd draw her into his weak arms."

When they go home, they make love, slowly, bringing "each other along."  The next morning, Henry puts his hand on Vega's stomach and "looked at her hopefully.  She nodded 'yes,' although it was impossible to know yet for sure."

"The Quail" is clearly an accessible story; the structure, technique, and meaning are all quite clear.   The question that might be posed is: Are we completely satisfied by a story that is so satisfying?  Or do we prefer a more puzzling story? 

"Where Do You Go?" is a less taut story, more realistic than fable-like, more discursive than economical.  Which is the more complex story?  Is it really better to say too little than too much? Is it necessary to provide a bio-background to the characters in the story? Does a story have to has a theme? 

AT the risk of making these questions all the more difficult to answer, I suggest a third story about a young newly-married couple coming up against the future, challenging the hopeful promise of Browning's "Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be."

"Why Don't You Dance?" the first story in Raymond Carver's controversial collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is characteristic of the qualities of his short fiction at the high point of his career.  The story begins with an unidentified man who has, for some unexplained reason, put all his furniture out on his front lawn.  What makes this event more than just a mundane yard sale is the fact that the man has arranged the furniture just as it was when it was in the house and has even plugged in the television and other appliances so that they work just as they did inside.  The only reference to the man's wife is the fact that the bed has a nightstand and a reading lamp on his side of the bed and a nightstand and reading lamp on "her" side of the bed; this is Carver's typical unstated way of suggesting that the man's marriage has collapsed and that his wife is no longer around.

The story begins its muted dramatic turn when a young couple who are furnishing their first apartment stop by and begin to inspect the furniture.  As the girl tries out the bed and the boy turns on the television, their dialogue is clipped and cryptic, reminiscent of the dialogue of characters in a story a by Ernest Hemingway.  There is something a bit unsettling about watching the young couple try out the man's furniture--the girl lying on the bed, the boy watching television, for it suggests a new story beginning to be enacted on the remnants of an old one.  "I feel funny " the boy says, and well he should as the girl tries to seduce him into this new story in the making. The girl plays the role more willingly, lying on the bed, inviting him, asking him to kiss her; the boy sits up making believe he is watching the television. 

When the man returns from a trip to the store, the dialogue continues in its understated and laconic way as the couple make offers for some of the furnishings and the man indifferently accepts whatever they offer.  The man turns off the TV and tells the girl to pick out a record; but she does not know the names on the labels, for they belong to another milieu than hers.  In the epilogue of the story, weeks later, the girl is telling someone about it, about getting drunk and dancing in the man's driveway.  "She told everyone.  There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out.  After a time, she quit trying."  The story ends with the common short story motif of the ancient mariner, as the girl must tell the story--the manifestation of the repetition compulsion--over and over again until it can be, if not understood, at least integrated. 

           

The story is an embodiment of the way that modern short fiction since Chekhov has attempted to embody inner reality by simply describing outer reality.  By placing all his furniture on his front lawn, the man has externalized what has previously been hidden inside the house.  When the young couple arrive, they embody the ritual process of replacement of the older man's lost relationship with the beginnings of their own, creating their own relationship on the remains of the man's.  However, the story is not a hopeful one, for the seemingly minor conflicts the dialogue reveals between the two young people--his watching television and her wanting him to try the bed; her wanting to dance and his drinking--presage another doomed relationship just like the one that has ended.  Indeed, there is more to it, as the girl senses, but she cannot quite articulate the meaning of the event, can only, as storytellers must, retell it over and over again, trying to get it talked out and intuitively understood.

It's a puzzling story, probably made all the more puzzling by Gordon Lish's cut-and-slash editing—a story that truly challenges Chekhov's dictum about brevity.

I would be glad to hear from any of my readers about these issues—especially Rolf Yngve and Samar  Farah Fitzgerald.

T. C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood, “Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House,” and Ian McEwan’s “First Love, Last Rites”—Memory Piece vs. Meaningful Story

In his brief  “This Week in Fiction” chat with New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/this-week-in-fiction-t-c-boyle.html), T. C. Boyle says that his current story in the magazine, ”Birnam Wood,” is based on a remembered event: ”I lived in that shack and I lived in that mansion with the pool table, too. This is fiction, but there are autobiographical elements here as well. I think of it as a memory piece.” Indeed, “Birnam Wood” may be a “memory piece,” but is it a story?”

In response to my blog post on Alice Munro’s recent New Yorker story “Amundsen” last week, I am happy to say that several of my readers joined the discussion with comments.   T.C. Boyle’s new story provides me with an opportunity hopefully to advance that discussion with Jon, Steve, and Jay--which seems to center basically on the issue Jon’s argument for “maintaining that basic sense of the author having created characters we respond to in a flesh and blood sort of way. Otherwise, it seems like we become one of those types who read fiction, not as an inherent pleasure, but as a necessary chore just to offer an object for dry analysis.”

Well, I certainly would not like to think of myself as “one of those types” who read fiction not for pleasure, but as an onerous opportunity for a “dry analysis.”  Jon says that he has “met people who say they don't really like to read, but only do it because they enjoy analysis (they're usually coming from the perspective of one of the "isms.”)  And certainly I am aware that in the world of academic criticism today, there are those who are more interested in theory or social issues than in literature, but I have never been accused of that.

Jon seems to advocate that we should relate to characters as if they were real people engaged in actions that simulate actual events in the real world.  And indeed, this is what T. C. Boyle seems to suggest about his recent “memory piece,” that is, that “Birnam Wood” recounts something that happened to him--after a fashion.  Boyle is a natural old-fashioned storyteller; as I have noted in this blog before, he knows how to tell a plotted tale in an engaging and entertaining way.  I have sat in a theatre full of people and watched him hold the audience spellbound as if they were huddled around a fireplace in an old Irish cottage.

However, in this new piece in The New Yorker, he seems to have chosen to write something less like a story and more like a remembered event.  I would like to compare “Birnam Wood” to a couple of well-known stories by Ian McEwan and Raymond Carver that also focus on a male/female couple in a certain place at a certain time experiencing both union and conflict. 

“First Love, Last Rites,” the title story of Ian McEwan’s debut collection (his master’s thesis, by the way, supervised by Malcolm Bradbury in the MA program in creative writing at University of East Anglia) generated quite a bit of buzz and controversy when first published in 1975, when he was twenty-four.

“Chef’s House” first appeared in Raymond Carver’s third book, Cathedral, after, we presume, he had broken away from the insistent editing of Gordon Lish, although not, obviously, from the taut style Lish had taught him. 

I have no idea if “First Love, Last Rites” is based on an actual event in Ian McEwan’s life, but clearly “Chef’s House” is based on an actual event in Carver’s life—a temporary reunion with his estranged wife Maryann.  In fact, Maryann has said that when she read “Chef’s Wife,” she was “almost offended that the could call it fiction.  All he was doing was writing an account of what happened there.” However, this may only indicate that Maryann was unaware of the importance of style in transforming something that merely happened into a fiction that means something.

David Means, a very fine short storywriter, whom I have discussed before on this blog, reads “Chef’s House” and talks about it with Deborah Treisman on the New Yorker podcast at http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/10/18/101018on_audio_means

David Means, a Carver fan, disagrees with Maryann’s assessment.  Regardless of what actually happened when Carver and his wife made one final effort to reconcile, “Chef’s House” differs from that remembered event by being a story, not a “memory piece,” like T.C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood.”  And what makes it different than a “real event,” involving characters in a “flesh and blood,” way is what David Means calls the story’s “style,” that is, all the language choices the writer makes about what to include and what to leave out that creates a meaningful form or pattern with significance, theme, meaning.

I would argue that Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House” and Ian McEwan’s “First Love, Last Rites” are short stories because they create a meaningful thematic pattern, whereas T.C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood” is simply a “memory piece” because it has no meaning at all, but is just about “flesh and blood” people in an “as-if-real” event.

Rather than offering extended critical analyses of the style, language, form, and theme of the Carver and McEwan stories, I will simply make a couple of brief comments on what I think makes them stories rather than “flesh and blood” “memory pieces” and urge the reader to read them or reread them and compare them to T.C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood.”

McEwan establishes a metaphor at the beginning of his story that persists throughout of a creature scratching behind the wall.  During sex, the male narrator has fantasies of making a creature grow in his girlfriend’s belly—not a child but a creature “growing out of a dark red slime”—eggs, sperms chromosomes, features, gills, claws.  He is caught like an eel in his fantasy of this primeval force, feeling that he and his girlfriend are also creatures in the slime.  When they finally encounter a large rat, the narrator associates it with the smell of his girlfriend’s monthly period.  When he splits the rat open, five small fetuses fall out, and he sees one quiver, as if in hope. His girlfriend carefully folds them back into the rats’ womb and closes the flesh over them. Many early readers of the story were repulsed by “First Love, First Rites,” but McEwan has said that he has always thought of it as an affirmative story about pregnancy.

And indeed, the story does end on an affirmative note as the couple decides to pull themselves out of the slime, clean up the room and go for a walk, and the narrator presses his palm against her belly and says, “yes.”  Birth and death are inextricably intertwined in the story—a story of life in all its hopeful beauty originating in the slime of the primeval swamp.

In contrast to McEwan’s thickly textured story of blood and creatures, slime and sex, Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House” is lean and clean, depending only on a single metaphor of the house itself and the delicate and difficult borderline between hopeful stability and a fall into the abyss.  Carver’s first New Yorker story, “Chef’s House” is also one of the few Carver stories told from a female point of view.  The first-person narrator, named Edna, receives a phone call from her estranged husband, Wes, who has rented a furnished house north of Eureka, California from a recovered alcoholic named Chef; Wes tells Edna he has stopped drinking and wants her to join him so they can start over.

The idyllic summer, during which Edna and Wes only drink soda pop and fruit juice, takes three paragraphs of the story, but is enough to suggest it is a romantic return to the old Wes, the Wes she married.  When Chef tells them his daughter’s husband has left and that she needs a place to live, Wes gets “this look about him,” a look that Edna knows well and knows the summer is over.  When Edna tries to get Wes to accept this and “go easy,” she finds herself talking about the summer as if it were something that happened years ago.

The central thematic point in the story occurs when Edna tells Wes:  “Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time.  Just suppose.  It doesn’t hurt to suppose.  Say none of the other had ever happened.  You know what I mean?  Then what?”

But Wes says he does not have that kind of “supposing” left in him.  When Edna says she did not throw away a good thing and come six hundred miles to hear him talk like that, he says he cannot talk like somebody he is not. “I’m not somebody else.  If I was somebody else, I sure as hell wouldn’t’ be here.  If I was somebody else, I wouldn’t be me.   But I’m who I am.  Don’t you see?”

As Wes sits patting his chin, like he was trying to figure out the next thing, Edna looks around at Chef’s living room, at Chef’s things and thinks, “We have to do something now and do it quick.” But given who Wes is, there is nothing to be done.  The fact that it is Chef’s house and Chef’s things and not theirs is brought home to Wes, and he must give up the fantasy of the summer that it all belonged to Edna and himself.  Wes goes to the window and pulls the drapes, “and the ocean was gone just like that.” Edna goes to the icebox for the last of the fish they had caught and she things, “We’ll clean it up tonight…and that will be the end of it.” 

As David Means says, “Chef’s House” is an “incredibly intimate story” that evokes a painful sense of loneliness.  It suggests Nick Carraway’s realistic reminder to Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s brilliant novel that you cannot repeat the past and Gatsby’s incredulous response—“can’t repeat the past.  Of course you can.”  The fact that the reader feels so sympathetic to Edna and Wes’s effort to repeat the past is a result of Carver’s quiet, restrained style.

T. C. Boyle’s “Birnam Wood” has neither the metaphorically thick thematic significance of Ian McEwan’s story, nor the tautly restrained thematic significance of Raymond Carver’s story.  It is simply is a “memory piece” about a couple who move from a damp shack to a lavish apartment the size of a basketball court, but whose relationship falls apart because of the male narrator’s foolish bit of bravado with another man.   Boyle’s follow-up to Deborah Treisman’s question about why he chose the name “Birnam Wood,” with its Macbeth allusion for the story—that just as all seems well for Macbeth since Birnam Wood could never come down to Dunsinane, all should be well for the couple since they have such a great place to live—seems shallow and unconvincing.

Why the couple break up seems primarily due to the narrator’s resentment of his girlfriend—anger that she will not get “off her ass and find a job,” anger that she did not keep her eyes open to find the house while he was driving and she was bitching, condescension that she might not be able to hold down a job as a hostess.  He says he wants to break down her strong-willed nature, maker her dependent on him, but at the same time hold up her end.

When he meets the guy in the bar who is attracted to his “old lady,” he says his feelings were complicated when he says, “She can be a real pain in the ass…. Sometimes I think she’s more trouble than she's worth.” But it is not complicated—just ego-proud guy talk.  When the man shows up at their place with a bottle of tequila, the narrator says he wants to do something right for a change, to confess, tell her that he loved her, but he does not; she takes one look at him and knows that he has betrayed her. 

The story ends predictably when the girlfriend, in revenge for the betrayal, welcomes the stranger and the narrator walks across the frozen lake and looks in the window of a couple getting ready for bed.  What he feels is probably what Gatsby felt when he looked in the window and saw Daisy and Tom Buchanan in an intimate conversation.  Boyle’s narrator knows he is on the outside looking in at a relationship that he, by his own immaturish behavior, has lost.

“Birnam Wood” is a story about “flesh and blood characters,” a “memory piece” about something that perhaps actually happened, but that does not make it a story—just something that happened to real people, something that Boyle has failed to transform into a meaningful fiction.

Biographies and The Author's Real Life: J.D. Salinger, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro

I don’t often read author biographies unless I have a special reason for doing so. Last year when I was working on a book on Flannery O’Connor, I read Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. And recently when I broke down and bought an e-reader, I read Kenneth Slawenski’s J. D. Salinger: A Life, just to see how I liked reading a book that way. I just finished reading Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life because I have always been a great fan of Carver’s short stories. I am now about half way through Robert Thacker’s Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, for I am currently working on a book on her stories.

Having been educated in the era of the New Criticism, I have been taught that a writer’s personal life is not a particularly relevant context for his or her art. I found nothing in these four biographies to change that view, although I must admit that I enjoyed sinking into the details of the lives of Salinger, O’Connor, Carver, and Munro. I found Salinger’s never-ending battle to keep his life private compelling, Carver’s battle with alcoholism, lack of money, and finally cancer heart-breaking, and O’Connor’s battle with lupus tragic. I have not read enough of the Munro to make a judgment yet. I will come back to it later.

Of the four, Carver and Munro’s stories are the most closely tied to their personal experiences? Indeed, Carver drew so closely on events in his life that his first wife MaryAnn has said that some stories are little more than transcriptions of something that actually happened. However, other than finding it interesting that a story is based on a life event, I do not think that that knowledge helps me appreciate the story, since in my opinion a story is an artifice made up of language and thus can only be understood by understanding how the language works to create an experience. The raw experience on which the story might be based means nothing until the artist makes it mean something. And when it means something, it does so by virtue of the language, not by virtue of the event.

I remember when my kids were small and I used to tell them stories, they would often ask, “Daddy, did that really happen?” And one of the most common questions from the audience at author readings is, “Was that story based on an actual experience?” This common concern with the relationship between the fiction and the fact, wherein the reader’s first interest is whether the event “really happened,” reflects a misunderstanding about the basic relationship between language and events in the world.

Stories are not made up of events in the world; they are made up of language carefully constructed by the author. It is not the similarity between the fictional events and the factual events that the reader should be interested in, but rather the difference between the two kinds of events. This is an old formalist notion that makes a great deal of sense to me. When you attend to the differences between real events and fictional events, you attend to the conventions and literary devices that constitute the work’s “literariness,” to quote a much maligned formalist notion, and it is the work’s literariness that constitutes its “meaning.”

One conviction that Salinger, O’Connor, Carver, and Munro share--often repeated in all four of these biographies--is that their “real life” lies in their writing. When they are not writing, they are chaffing to get back to writing. All four were consumed with writing from early childhood and remained obsessed with writing throughout their lives. Alice Munro, who will turn eighty next month, is still working on stories. At least we hope so.

Thus, it seems ironic to me that author biographies, which necessarily focus on events in the real world, are never really about the real lives of the authors—only their external experiences: O’Connor’s life on the farm, Salinger’s experiences in the War, Carver’s drunken binges, Munro’s divorce and remarriage. If you are a fan of an author’s work, reading about their lives in the real world may be interesting, but when their real lives begin—that is, during the process of writing—the biographer can only say, “She published this or that,” or “He worked on this or that.”

Occasionally, the biographer will note that a certain event—Carver and MaryAnn’s attempt to patch up their marriage, for example—was the basis for a certain story. But the process of writing the story—what the author would call his or her “real life”—plays little or no part in the biography itself.

You can’t really blame the biographer for this. He or she has no way to access the mystery of the writing process, except from author interviews and essays. And even then, there is no guarantee that the author understands the mystery of the creative process and thus can give the reader a glimpse of his or her “real life.” One of the best efforts to do this is, in my opinion, Henry James's Notebooks and Prefaces.

I am currently reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast—mainly because when I was in Paris for a few days recently, my hotel was on the left bank, not far from where Hemingway and his wife Hadley rented an apartment. It was a pleasure to read about Hemingway’s walks in that area, discovering the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, having a drink with James Joyce at a café where I also sat and sipped a café creme. Hemingway worked on his writing at the cafes during this time and resented any time his "real life" was interrupted. But all we know about that real life is the phrase, “I worked."

I just ordered Ron Carlson’s little book Ron Carlson Writes a Story: From the First Glimmer of an Idea to the Final Sentence, in which he, according to a blub, “invites the reader to look over his shoulder as he creates the short story ‘The Governor’s Ball’.” I will post some remarks on A Moveable Feast and Carlson’s book in my next blog entry.

Twelve Short Story Gift or Wish List Suggestions for the Twelve Days of Christmas

If you love the short story and celebrate Christmas by exchanging gifts, then what better gift to give than a truly great collection of stories by one or more of the very best short story writers of the twentieth century? Or if someone has asked you for a gift idea, and you do not have all the following collections, send this list to your friend with your choice starred; you can’t lose on any of them. Short stories are truly the gift that keeps on giving, for unlike novels, you can read them again and again, year after year. My reward for posting this? Your gifting and reading pleasure.

Unless marked otherwise, the following prices are for paperbacks from Amazon, who, for my money, consistently has the best prices.

Flannery O’Connor,
Complete Stories $12.24
This is the collection that won “best of best” of National Book Awards. Challenging but unforgettable stories.

Eudora Welty
Collected Stories $10.88
Shortlisted for the “best of best” of National Book Awards. This is the one I voted for. Welty’s mythic world and unerring use of language are national treasures.

John Updike
Early Stories $13.57
A big fat book of crisp Updike stories from early in his career. Some of his best.

Alice Munro
Selected Stories $11.53
Runaway $10.20
Some of the best early Munro stories, classics of the genre, and, in my opinion, her best more recent collection.

Andre Dubus
Selected Stories $10.85
Dancing After Hours $11.76
The best of vintage Dubus and his memorable final collection.

William Trevor
Collected Stories $19.80
Selected Stories $23.10 (hardcover)
The first is a delicious fat volume of most early Trevor stories. The second includes stories from his last four collections. Not to be missed.

T. C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle Stories $13.60
Ah, he’s a lot a fun—lightweight and a showman, but still passes the time pleasantly.

Annie Proulx
Close Range $10.20
Bad Dirt $11.20
Fine the Way It Is $10.20
These are the three Wyoming Stories collections; they show what a truly great short story writer Proulx is.

Tobias Wolff
Our Story Begins $10.85
This is a selection of his vintage stories, plus a few recent ones. The early ones are better, but Wolfe is always worth reading. A master of the form.

David Means
Assorted Fire Events $5.44
The Secret Goldfish $5.58
The Spot $15.64 (hardcover)
These are David Mean’s three best books. If you haven’t read him, take advantage of Amazon’s cut-rate price on the first two.

Raymond Carver
Collected Stories $26.40 (hardcover)
This is the classic Library of America collection. Gotta read Carver again and again.

Bernard Malamud
The Complete Stories $13.60
Still one of the best short-story writers of the 20th century. Even Flannery O’Connor liked him.

Happy Holidays, whatever your holiday, and thanks for reading "Reading the Short Story"

Carver's Collected Stories and the Gordon Lish Controversy

The recent release by Library of America of Raymond Carver’s Collected Stories has once more raised the issue of just how much of Carver’s first two collections, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, (1981) were Carver’s and how much were the result of the editing of Gordon Lish.

This is old news. Eleven years ago, D. T. Max did a long piece for the New York Times magazine entitled “The Carver Chronicles,” for which he examined the manuscripts of stories edited by Lish in the Lily Library at Indiana University. You can read the piece at: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/09/magazine/the-carver-chronicles.html

The accepted mythos about the difference between Carver’s bleak first two collections and “his more generous” last two, Cathedral and Where I’m Calling From, is that he stopped drinking and met Tess Gallagher. It is a story that Gallagher herself has defended.

However, as D. T. Max’s study of the manuscripts at the Lilly Library attest, the real difference between early Carver and late Carver has to do with Gordon Lish, who published Carver’s first story in Esquire and his first book at Knopf. As one example, Max describes how Lish took Carver’s simple anecdote about a waitress reflecting on her encounter with a fat man in her restaurant and transformed it into the haunting story, “Fat” that opens Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

I have not seen the original “Fat,” but have taught the Lish edited version that appeared in Carver’s first book many times. Here are some of my notes for teaching that story:

The challenge in reading “Fat” is trying to determine what the narrator actually sees in the fat man and trying to determine why he is so strange--his fatness, his puffing, his use of the royal “we.”

The other characters try to use terms such as “a fatty” to reduce him, simplify him, stereotype him. The narrator cannot do this. Is there something special about her? The thing about a storyteller is: Some things seem to them to be significant, meaningful things that seem just weird or ordinary to non-storytellers. “Fat” is a story about a storyteller trying to tell a story in such a way that the teller and the listener understands that significance. The narrator says, “I know I was after something. But I don’t know what.”

She says, “Rudy, he is fat, I saw, but that is not the whole story.”
The problem is: What is the whole story?

When the fat man says Thank you, she says, “’You are very welcome,’ and a feeling comes over me,” we ask: What is the feeling?

Rita says, “This story’s getting interesting now,” just after the narrator quotes the fat man as saying, “No, if we had our choice, but there is no choice.” But the narrator says this is when the story is over. It sounds as if we are going to get the background, the motivation, the reason he is so fat. But the storyteller is not interested in where he is from or why he is what he is. Cause is not the issue here.

Why does she say, “waiting for what?” Why does she feel her life is going to change? Is this a genuine feeling or a bogus one? What does one have to do to make a change in one’s life? Why would the fat man stimulate the change? She doesn’t want to be fat. She doesn’t want to say, “There is no choice.” What kind of change does she face? She sees the fat man as one who is trapped in his own flesh. We are all caught within our flesh. But just to be the physical presence that we are--does that mean we are so limited within ourselves?

The fat man’s fatness is just a reminder of that trap of the flesh. The storyteller knows he is trapped. Why does she feel terrifically fat when Rudy is on top of her? Why is he so small? Is it good that she feels fat? Is it a negative that Rudy seems so small?

"Fat” explores both the positive and negative sides of the flesh and the body. If we lived in a world of sacred reality, the fat man would be a god. But living in the world of the physical and the real, he is trapped in his flesh.

Rita says it is a funny story; the storyteller says, “I can see she doesn’t know what to make of it.”

I do not know what Carver’s original version meant, if anything, but Lish’s edited version is a haunting story about the mysterious universal reality of flesh and the spirit.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was very well received by critics and nominated for the National Book Award. Carver won a Guggenheim and was hired to teach at Syracuse University. There is little doubt that this reception was due in no small part to the editing of Lish.

It was when Carver began putting together his second book, which he wanted to call Beginners, that he started to object to Lish’s editing. Carver wrote to Lish and asked to be let out of his contract with Knopf because of the way that Lish had transformed Beginners into What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver wrote to Lish:

Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no one had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing that your versions are better than some of the ones I sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it…. Tess has seen all of these and gone over them closely. Donald Hall has seen many of the new ones…and Richard Ford, Toby Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, too, some of them… How can I explain to these fellows when I see them, as I will see them, what happened…Please, Gordon, for God’s sake help me in this and try to understand…I’ve got to pull out of this one. Please hear me. I’ve been up all night thinking on this…I’ll say it again, if I have any standing or reputation or credibility in the world, I owe it to you. I owe you this more-or-less pretty interesting life I have [but] I can’t take the risk as to what might happen to me…. My very sanity is on the line here. I feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another book.”

Well, Lish had his way with What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. However, ironically, the book so solidified Carver’s reputation that when he begged Lish not to make any severe changes in his third book Cathedral, Lish had to give in, although he was not happy about it and wanted to make his contribution to Carver’s work public. He was advised by friends, such as Don DeLillo, to keep quiet—that Carver was already too much loved, that it would make reading his work too ambiguous, that readers would resent Lish for complicating the reading of his work.

All this can be read in D. T. Max’s piece, so the revelations in the new Library of America volume are not really new. However, because of recent reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, which focus almost entirely on the fact that the book contains both the Lish-edited versions of Carver’s stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love alongside the stories as Carver originally wrote them in the collection Beginners, the debate has been raised again more publicly.

The review in the Wall Street Journal by David Propson and the review in The Los Angeles Times by David Ulin sum up rather nicely the different opinions about which of Carver’s stories are the best—Lish or non-Lish.

Propson says: “One measure of Mr. Carver’s achievement is that, before his career was lamentably cut short, he found a more mature sensibility than the minimalist posturing that Mr. Lish had imposed on his work.” After breaking with Lish, Propson says, in Cathedral, Carver’s work loses its chilly edge, an “appealing development,” with a “newfound sense of generosity and even humor on display.”

David Ulin believes that the pared-down Lish versions of many of the stories are better than the original stories, although he believes that the restored version of “A Small Good Thing,” which appeared in Cathedral is a much better story than the Lish-edited version,“ The Bath,” which appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

In my opinion, anyone who calls Carver's stories in his first two collections "posturing" or suggests that his later stories are more "mature" just wants short stories to read more like novels, with lots of rumination, explanation, exposition, sentimentality, and mere detail.

The issue gets complicated by non-literary matters. Not many people seem to like Gordon Lish, especially for his high-handed attempt to hijack Carver’s work, work—work that he obviously recognized as very promising, work he perhaps could not write himself. However, everyone seems to love Carver. He just comes across as a big huggable, bear like sort of guy.

I like Carver’s stories very much. I remember in 1981 when I first discovered him. Someone asked me to review What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I had never read Carver before, but was so amazed and delighted with his stories that I later read everything he wrote. I taught upper division seminars on Carver’s work several times, covering all of his fiction—from his amateurish undergraduate stories written at Sacramento State and Humboldt State in California up to his very fine tribute to Chekhov, “The Errand.”

As I have written before in this blog, I think many of Carver’s Lish-edited stories are better than many of the longer, “more generous” stories in Cathedral and Where I’m Calling From. However, I also like the later Carver stories. I am just not sure that Carver could have written them without the earlier editing by Lish. The fact that Lish helped Carver hone his craft by editing it does not take away Carver’s art for me. I think Carver is one of the best short-story writers of the twentieth century. But I am not sure he would have made it without the initial help of Gordon Lish.

Reading Like a Writer, Reading Like an Editor

The July 20th issue of The New Yorker includes three letters about Louis Menand’s “Critic at Large” piece on the rise of creative writing programs in the June 8^th & 15^th issue. Allyson Stack from Edinburgh, Scotland, writes that creative writing programs teach young writers to be their own editors since publishing companies no longer have the time or money to shepherd younger writers along. “A good creative-writing program,” argues Stack, “will aim at making students better editors by requiring them to read intensively, exhaustively, and endlessly—and to read far more than one another’s work.”

Stack reminds us that reading a novel (or a story) with an eye toward writing one is a very different task from reading it with an eye toward writing a term paper, a review, or a lecture. The aim of creative writing classes should be, Stack concludes, “not so much to produce novelists or poets as to produce more astute readers of novels and poetry—which is to say, better editors.”

Stack’s argument for writers being taught to read like editors does not sound that different from Francine Prose’s argument in her book Reading Like a Writer that everyone should read like writers.

Prose’s central point is that to be a good reader, one must be knowledgeable of, and sensitive to, those elements of writing that constitute the craft: words, sentences, character, dialogue, and details. Prose reminds us of something that students of literature often find it hard to accept—that subject matter is not all that important, that what the writer most often wants to do is write really great sentences.

Over and over, Prose urges the reader to focus on words, rhythm, and pattern–not subject matter. By relentlessly insisting on the importance of language and form, Prose reinforces what William H. Gass has argued in Finding a Form: that the artist's "fundamental loyalty must be to form.” Every other diddly desire," insists Gass, "can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day."

Prose’s insistence on the importance of language and literary form seems so obvious it is difficult to see how anyone could deny it. But of course that the excellence of writing depends not on its content but its language and form is denied in classrooms around the world every day. In fact, the very idea of artistic form and excellence is often challenged in many of those classrooms as elitist.

Prose admits that many of her students complain that reading great writers makes them feel stupid. And indeed, a quick look at the hundred-plus list of “Books to Be Read Immediately” that Prose appends may have that effect. In addition to the “classic” writers who put off modern students--Austen, Babel, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, James, Joyce, Kafka, Mansfield, Melville, Proust, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Twain, and Woolf--there are a number of intimidating contemporary “writer’s writers” as well--Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, William Trevor, and Joy Williams.

In her Gold Medal acceptance speech at the 1999 National Book Awards, Oprah Winfrey told a little story about calling Toni Morrison and asking, “Does anyone ever tell you that sometimes they have to go over the sentences several times to get the full meaning of what you’re really saying.” Morrison wryly and wisely replied, “That, my dear, is called reading.”

Writing that requires going over the sentence several times to get the full meaning is usually the result of the writer’s careful editing, which most often means following Chekhov’s advice that it is better to say too little than too much, or the famous advice of Strunk and White in Elements of Style: “Omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words.”

Perhaps the best-known example of the relationship between a writer and an editor, in which the issue of omitting needless words is crucial is the writer/editor collaboration of Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. In my opinion, Carver’s stories that show Lish’s influence in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk When we Talk About Love are much better stories than the “more generous” stories that appeared in Cathedral after he had repudiated Lish.

Critics who have scolded Carver for his minimalist shortcomings have done so for the same reasons that in previous generations they criticized Poe, Chekhov, and Sherwood Anderson. Clearly, those who spent much of the eighties scorning Carver's so-called cryptic tales for the same reasons that previous critics have criticized the short story in general, were more comfortable with the later, more explanatory versions of such stories as “The Bath” and “So Much Water Close to Home.”

However, Carver adds explanatory information to “A Small, Good Thing” that adds nothing significant to the original version entitled “The Bath.” For example, in “The Bath” the parents are trying to fasten on to some term that will categorize and thus normalize the son's condition, but each time they use the term “coma” the doctor simply says “I wouldn't call it that.” In “A Small, Good Thing.” Carver puts into the doctor's mouth a verbatim definition of a coma from Webster's New World Dictionary as a state of “deep, prolonged unconsciousness,” which does nothing to clarify the essential mystery of the boy's inaccessibility. In “The Bath,” when orderlies come in to get the boy for a brain scan, “they wheeled a thing like a bed.” However, in “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver uses the word “gurney”--certainly a more informative term, but one that loses the sense of disorientation the parents feel.

This addition of such bits of information serves unnecessary and distracting polemical purposes in the long version of “So Much Water Close to Home.” In the short version, when the wife reads about the death of the girl in the newspaper, she sits thinking and then calls and gets a chair at the hairdresser's. In the long version, we are told what she is thinking: “Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any difference any longer. Look at what has happened. Yet nothing will change for Stuart and me.”

Chekhov would never have approved of Carver's added explanation, which sounds more like a freshman composition essay than the muddled emotions of a woman who has identified with the image of a dead girl floating just beneath the surface of the water.

I agree with Francine Prose that the best way to teach reading is to teach students to read like writers and with Allyson Stack that the best way to teach writing is to teach students to read like editors.

I would love to hear from writers who have been in MFA programs and teachers who have been in graduate literature programs on the issue of how to teach good reading and good writing.