Short Story Month 2014: William Trevor

As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available.  Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. 

This mystery of motivation is as true of Trevor's first collection The Day we Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories, 1967 as of his last collection forty years later, Cheating at Canasta, 2007.  In honor of one of the two best short-story writers in the world today, I offer a few comments on the stories in that last collection.  I only hope there will be another.

In  “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Cahill, a nineteen-year-old Irish man takes a couple of young Spanish tourists, seeking a blessing on their marriage, to a statue that was once thought to shed miraculous tears.  However, the miracle of the statue has since been discredited, and the Dublin man who told them about it was only lying to get them to buy him drinks. Cahill knows all this, but wants the fifty euro he charges to drive the couple out to the statue.  On the way back, a young female child, who has a habit of doing such things, runs out in the road and into his car. Cahill does not stop.

When the child’s body is found in a quarry half a mile from her home, the mother, a dressmaker, who has borne the child out of wedlock, begins to stalk Cahill, hinting that she saw him hit the girl.  Cahill imagines that he walked back to the site of the accident and carried the body of the child to the quarry, but he knows that it was the mother who has done this.  The mother urges Cahill to leave his girlfriend and invites him to come home with her. Cahill, afraid, without knowing what he fears, cannot dismiss the connection between him and the dressmaker.  When he tries to understand this, he is bewildered, but he knows that one day he will go to her.  The story suggests that it is possible that death and guilt, as well as birth and love can unite two people.

Guilt, secrets, and obsession also dominate “Folie À Deux.” Wilby, a divorced man in his forties, is in Paris, indulging in his interest in rare stamps.  At a café, he sees an employee who looks like a man named Anthony who Wilby knew as a boy, a man who disappeared years before and who everyone assumed was dead.  Wilby recalls a significant event that has bound them together in guilt.  Once the two boys, out of curiosity, put Anthony’s old dog Jerico in a small boat and pushed him out to sea, just to find out what he would do. They hear the dog howling and later see its body when it is washed up on shore.

Although this does not seem to affect Wilby so much, it profoundly changes Anthony, who becomes quieter and more withdrawn.  Later when Wilby runs into Anthony again at school, he discovers that Anthony is even more remote and strange; Wilby does not befriend him again, even though he feels guilty about this.  Like Cahill in “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Wilby’s guilt is muddled by bewilderment.  When he goes back to the café and realizes that it is Anthony, Wilby knows that he will return to his own safe, tidy world, but this morning he likes himself less than he likes his childhood friend. 

The mystery of motivation and secrets of the past also energize “The Room.”  A forty-seven-year-old woman named Katherine is engaged in an affair, perhaps in revenge, for her husband’s involvement with a prostitute, who was murdered and for whom he was a suspect, nine years before.   Katherine lied for her husband then, in partial repayment for her inability to have children, providing him with an alibi, although it seems quite clear that he did not kill the woman.  

When the man with whom she is having an affair asks Katherine why she loves her husband, she says that no one can answer that question and, in a statement central to Trevor’s success with the short story, asserts that most often, people don’t know why they do things. For the nine years since the murder, she has not asked her husband about the girl, but knows that her alibi for him has given her release from any restraint.  The story ends with her knowledge that the best that love can do is not enough, for what holds people together is often guilt, debt, secrets.

What makes people do what they do and the mysteries of what holds them together or tears them apart is also central to “Bravado.”  Five young people are on the way home late at night—the leader Manning, his cohorts Donovan and Kilroy, Aisling, his girlfriend, and a second girl named Francie. When Dalgety, a boy they scorn as a geek, urinates in someone’s yard, Manning, who always likes to play the big fellow, knocks him down and kicks him. The next morning the boy is discovered dead.  Donovan and Kilroy are sent to jail for eleven years, getting off easy, for they did not know that Dalgety had a weak heart. 

Manning disappears, but writes to Aisling several years later, telling her he has changed.  Aisling finishes school and gets a job but never marries.  At Dalgety’s grave, she begs for forgiveness, for she knows that the beating was done to impress her, to deserve her love, and watching it she had felt a momentary pleasure.  She sometimes thinks she will run away from the shadow of bravado that hangs over her, but she is also now a different person and feels that she belongs to where the act took place.

Guilt and the mysteries of the past have a wider compass in “Men of Ireland.”  A fifty-two-year old man, Donal Prunty, returns to the small village in Ireland where he was born after having spent several years in England “on the street.”  Prunty goes to the parish priest, Father Meade, for whom he served Mass when he was a child and tells him about hearing the old stories of priest abuse with other men--the “hidden Ireland.”  When he accuses Father Meade of abusing him, the priest knows he is lying and wonders if he is confusing him with another priest, his brain addled because of methylated spirits.  Although he insists that no finger has ever been pointed at a priest in this village, still he goes to a drawer and takes paper notes and gives to him.

After Prunty leaves, the priest does not blame him because you cannot blame a hopeless case, and he feels guilty for not being able to reach him as a boy as his mother has asked of him.  He knows that no honorable guilt and no generous intent have made him give Prunty the money, but rather that he has paid for silence.  He accepts that the petty offense of Prunty is minor beside the betrayal by the Church and the shamming of Ireland’s priesthood. 

The inexplicable nature of love and human need dominate such stories as  “An Afternoon,” in which a young girl meets a man in a chat room and then arranges to meet him in person.  She obviously needs the attention of the man and seems to trust him, although the reader is suspicious of his thoughts, discovering gradually that he has met young women like this before.  He is solicitous of the girl, winning a necklace for her in a carnival type game and giving her drinks.

 However, his plans, whatever they are, are foiled, when his aunt, with whom he lives, drives up, telling him to remember that he is on probation.  The girl goes home, and hears her mother and the man she lives with having a fight.  In face of this, the girl, even though she now knows the man planned to take advantage of her, still thinks of him tenderly.  She kisses the necklace he gave her and promises she will always keep it with her.

“The Children” begins with the perspective of Connie, a child of eleven, whose mother has just died.  It then shifts to a woman named Teresa, forty-one, whose husband left her several years before.  Two years later Robert, Connie’s father, asks Teresa to marry him.  Connie takes her mother’s books up on the roof to read them, although it is really pretense, for she is too young to understand them.  She worries that all her mother’s books will be sold, so she wants to know what every single one of them is about.  Five days away from the wedding, Teresa comes to see Robert and they decide to cancel the wedding.  Realizing that nothing is as tidy as they had thought, and that no rights cancel other rights, they both know they have been hasty and careless.  Robert accepts that time will gather up the ends, and that his daughter’s honoring of a memory was love that mattered also. 

"Cheating at Canasta"  opens with a man named Mallory, an Englishman in his middle years, at Harry’s Bar in Venice, famous as a hangout of Ernest Hemingway.  It has been four years since he was last here with his wife Julia, who is now afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.  As a last request, she has made him promise to go back to Harry’s, but he is not sure if this trip is really meaningful.  However, when he hears an American man ask his younger wife why she is crying, he becomes interested in their quarrel.  When they leave, he tells them the reason for his trip, feeling ashamed that he has come close to deploring this tiresome, futile journey.  He recalls letting his wife win at canasta, even though she was not sure why she was happy when she won.  As the couple leave, the man smiles, hearing his wife’s voice say that shame isn’t bad, nor is humility, which is shame’s gift.

These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored.   They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

The Antisocial Nature of the Short Story: William Trevor's "An Idyll in Winter"

I wish to thank my fellow blogger Trevor Berrett at http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews

for calling my attention to a William Trevor story, “An Idyll in Winter,” published last Nov. in The Guardian, that I missed.  You can find by clicking here

After reading the story, I read Trevor and Betsy’s responses on mookse and gripes and wrote a brief response of my own.  However, the story and the responses reminded me of several issues about reading the short story as a form that I often discussed with my students when I was teaching.  It has always been my studied opinion that the short story does not usually present characters as if they were real people in the phenomenal world, and that the short story, when it is most successful, does not deal with social issues, but with universal human experiences.  I offer a couple of examples of this below before discussing William Trevor’s “An Idyll in Winter.”

Monica Wood, “Disappearing”

My textbook collection, Fiction’s Many Worlds, includes a first person point of view story by Monica Wood entitled “Disappearing” that focuses on a young woman who diets and swims to lose weight. When my students and I discussed this story, my students wanted to talk about the social issues of obesity vs. compulsive dieting to achieve a runway-model type image.  However, reading the story as being about a particular young woman suffering from an eating disorder, was, I tried to convince them, reading it in too limited a way. Although anorexia might indeed be the diagnosis of the protagonist if she were a real person in the real world, or even a realistic character in a novel, short stories, I argued, urge the reader to understand the protagonist's situation as universally human.

The basic motivation of the woman in the story is suggested by the title; she wishes to disappear.  Since such an action is physically impossible, the reader might want to consider the story as the depiction of either a symbolic action or an hallucinatory one.  The vehicle that embodies the protagonist's desire or hallucination to lose the body, or disappear, is water, for floating in the water is an appropriate metaphor means of escaping gravity.  For one hour a day the young woman is thin as water, transparent, invisible.

As she becomes thinner and thinner, she drops all things away that might keep her out of the water and the water out of her.  The psycho-logic of the story is that if it is good to lose physical weight, then it is best to lose all weight, to give up all things associated with the body. To become one with the water is to lose the physical self completely. This is a metaphysical goal, not a physical or a social one.

Events in this first-person story lose their hard edges as scenes in the external world and take on the subjectivity of the teller. This highly charged subjectivity is further emphasized by the relative inarticulateness of the speaker. Instead of trying to probe and rationalize her behavior and motivation, the woman describes her actions in simple sentences or fragments.  However, she does know, at least intuitively, what drives her, even though she cannot explain it, for she tells her friend and her husband that she is not just interested in losing weight, and she knows they cannot "imagine" what she is doing or why. 

Although it is easier to use this story as an “excuse” to talk about the social issue of female body image or the clinical problem of anorexia, my students were only able to do this by ignoring the tone, language, and voice of the story, in short, by forgetting about the story itself in order to talk instead about some real-life social “issues” which pre-existing terminology made them more comfortable to categorize and discuss.  Needless to say, I fought such evasion and oversimplification—sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain”

One of the most difficult stories I taught in the last few years before I retired was Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” because my students wanted to avoid discussing the story itself and talk instead about the social issue of homosexuality. However, both Ennis and Jack, the two young men in the story, insist that they are not homosexual, and neither of them have sex with other men in the story.  The two men seem crave that time on Brokeback Mountain when their embrace satisfied “some shared and sexless hunger.”

Annie Proulx takes a creative chance here because she knew that many readers would try to simplify the story by classifying Jack and Ennis as homosexuals, or else latent homosexuals (a term that experts are more and more classifying as meaningless), or even bisexual, another meaningless term.  But such easy classifications will not serve here. When Jack and Ennis deny their homosexuality, they mean it.  Ennis wonders if the feeling they have for each other happens to other people, and Jack says “It don’t happen in Wyoming.”

However, this prejudice against homosexuality is less a social issue of homosexual intolerance in Proulx’s story than it is a typical literary impediment that gives famous love stories their tragic inevitability, such as the feud between families of Romeo and Juliet. The story ends not with a message about the social intolerance of homosexuality, but rather with a poignant image of Ennis creating a simple memorial to Jack with a postcard picture of Brokeback Mountain and two old shirts the men wore when they spent their first summer together.

The technical challenge Annie Proulx faces in “Brokeback Mountain” is how to write a love story between two men without falling into the clichés and conventions of a homosexual story, in short without social baggage and easy stereotyping.  Proulx achieves this by creating a fable-like style for the story, with little or no attention paid to a realistic social context.  Instead, the story focuses on the passionate love affair between Jack and Ennis against a stark landscape, much like that of the heath in Wuthering Heights.  Proulx focuses almost entirely on the encounters between the two men as mysterious passionate couplings and tender concerned sharing. By refusing to make judgments and by treating the relationship of the two men with dignity and respect, Proulx succeeds in making the reader believe in this love affair between two men without classifying it narrowly as a homosexual story.

William Trevor, “An Idyll in Winter”

William Trevor’s “An Idyll in Winter” is an idyll in two senses of the word; it describes a brief romantic interlude, and it is also a traditional literary form with a romantic theme, much like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous Idylls of the King.  We know that Trevor has Tennyson and other Victorian writers in mind in this story, for when Anthony stops at a village inn on the way home from seeing Mary Bella, he dreams of her as a child reciting for him: “Willows whiten, aspens quiver/Little breezes dusk and shiver,” which are lines from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”  Anthony wrote the word “idyll” for Mary Bella when she was a child; she loved the word then and loves it even more now when he returns. Like Cathy and Heathcliff, they both know that the moors and the house called Old Grange are where together they belong.

“An Idyll in Winter” is an exemplary love story, following all the traditional conventions of this genre.  The fact that Anthony and Mary Bella meet when she is twelve and he is twenty-two has nothing to do with pedophilia, either explicitly or implicitly; it is a metaphor for one of the most essential elements of a love story—the forbidden.  As  Denis de Rougemont says on the first page of his book, Love in the Western World:

“Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.  What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion.  And passion means suffering.  And there we have the fundamental fact.”

William Trevor’s story has all the elements of the classic Victorian love story: a beautiful, romantic, young girl; a handsome, romantic tutor from outside; a lonely Grange on the moors; a father who is killed out riding because of a broken heart; the rustic men over which the young woman presides. The context for their love is all the stories that the young tutor teaches her in the schoolroom—the conventional place where one learns—the romantic histories of Jeanne d’Arc, the Tudor Queen Elizabeth, Charlemagne, Marie Antoinette; and the fiction of the Victorian era: the world of the Marshalsea prison from Dickens, Dorlcote Mill of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Wildfell Hall of Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Haworth Rectory, which was the home of the Bronte sisters, and finally, the most magnificent romance of all—Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.  Indeed, what Anthony experiences on the moors he finds very “Heathcliffian.”

(A personal sidebar here:  When I was in graduate school, my major field of study was Victorian Literature.  I spent three years studying Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Dickens, Eliot, the Brontes.  I taught the Victorians for several years.  The tone and style of Trevor’s story sounds very familiar to me, as does his fabulistic plot and characterization.)

In the classic love story, one does not make a conscious choice about anything; one is rather caught up, swept away, overcome, driven to madness.  There is nothing ordinarily human about Heathcliff’s passion for Cathy.  For that matter, there is nothing ordinarily human about Gatsby’s love for Daisy or Tristan’s love for Iseult.  By ordinary human standards of good sense and everyday reality, all such love stories are stupid and destructive.  They detach themselves from the everyday world and create a secret world of their own.  Read Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog” again.

The fact that the romance in William Trevor’s story begins when Mary Bella is only twelve emphasizes that romance begins in the imagination, not in any act; it also emphasizes what Trevor calls “a child’s unspoilt charm.”  The summer they are first together is one in which both are immersed in the romance stories of history and fiction.  But since a love affair between a twenty-two-year-old man and a twelve-year-old child would be distasteful, they must be separated until they are adults and “what had been impossible…now was not.”

But now that what was impossible is possible, another forbidden element must be added, for love stories always demand the impediment to fulfillment—the classic one of adultery, as in Tristan and Iseult. To which is added the additional element of the child Amelia, who refuses to eat after her father leaves. The hospital says there is nothing particularly unusual about a child responding this way to distress, and Anthony, a practical man of maps, says there is nothing “mysterious to be discovered” about it.  But for Mary Bella, the knowledge of the deserted wife and the waning child infuses a sense of reality into the romance that she finds difficult to bear.  She thinks that as in the schoolroom, whereas “once Jeanne d’Arc had ridden into battle, as precious stones had glittered on the great high collar of Elizabeth Tudor, so shadows now were more than shadows.  The knife that so cruelly and so often fell, the heads that rolled into a mire of blood, the treachery of plots, through their own drama became reality.”  Romance cannot tolerate reality.

Truly a man of maps in all their accuracy and precision, Anthony says, “We are here, we are together…. We live with consequences.  We have to, and we can.” And this is indeed the difference between living in romance and living in reality.  When Nick tells Gatsby he can’t repeat the past, he says, of course you can.  When Starbuck tells Ahab to give up his hunt for the white whale, Ahab says he would smite the sun if it offended him.  Although Mary Bella tells herself that Anthony is right, that people live with what happens to them, she feels pity for the damaged woman and a child that had been damaged.  Even when the child begins to return to normality and Anthony says the awfulness of that time is over, Mary Bella knows it isn’t, “since memory would not allow it to be over…the damaged do not politely go away.”  While Anthony says all this is foolishness, Mary Bella knows that when his patience has worn itself out, there would be indifference, then disdain, and then contempt. She tells him, “How blurred the edges are: what we can do, what in the end we can’t.” 

And then one morning, he is gone—back to his wife to whom he will tell lies of mercy to convince her that love was only a “wild infatuation that did not last and now is over.”  Mary Bella knows he will not come back, that there will be no “tawdry attempt at revival.”  She only wishes that the men who work for her—a sort of tragic chorus--will know that her love for Anthony is still there “among her shadows…She wishes they could know it will not wither, that there’ll be no long slow dying, or love made ordinary.”

And this indeed is the aim of romantic love, for it is never ordinary.  It either ends in death or in a retreat from reality back into the imagination--the only place where it has a chance to survive.

The Secret Life in the Short Story and William Trevor's "The Women"

Although many readers agree that Alice Munro and William Trevor are the two greatest short story writers in the world today, Munro, whose most recent book, Dear Life, has been on bestseller lists for several weeks, is the more active of the two and usually attracts more attention than Trevor when one of their stories appears in The New Yorker.

Trevor has not had a story in that magazine since “The Woman of the House” on Dec. 15, 2008, whereas Munro has published most of her Dear Life stories there in the past few years. (My blog entry on “The Woman of the House” is in my archives)

Although Munro’s stories, especially those in The New Yorker, often attracts a lot of blog review attention, Trevor’s new story, “The Women,” which appeared on January 14, 2013, has attracted very little, with the Irish Writing Blog opening with “it’s fair to say that the reaction to William Trevor’s latest New Yorker story has been a bit mixed.”

Indeed, on his blog, Clifford Garstang has called “The Women” a simple cliché story about an unwed mother who has given up her child and then later tries to find her, concluding that although William Trevor may be one of our greatest short story writers, “this one seems to have been written in his sleep.” So there, Mr. Trevor, wake up!

The writer on the blog entitled “New Yorker Story Critiques Blog,” says he/she likes the premise or the plot of the story, but “finds the execution lacking,” with lots of digressions and superfluities that “bleed the main story arc of tension.”  The blogger says he/she tried skipping over the offending sections and found the story “much improved.”  So there, Mr. Trevor, get yourself a decent editor and do it his/her way instead of your own!

On the other hand, there is the always thoughtful blog “The Mookse and The Gripes,” graciously managed by Trevor Berette, which opens with, “It was a beautiful thing to find a new William Trevor story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker.  Obviously reading the story more attentively than Clifford Garstang and the anonymous New Yorker Critiques blogger, Berette says “The Women” is about the kind of quiet sadness that does not go away as we age, admiring the “careful style that brings us so close to the source of pain and the desire to turn away from it that makes this such a powerful story…It’s the secret pain that these people feel they cannot share, so carefully rendered, that makes this story come to life.”  Indeed, and what also makes the story a classic of the genre.

I recommend that you take a look at the extended debate about Trevor’s “The Women” on “The Mookse and the Gripes” blog.  The reader Betsy provides a detailed close reading that tries to account for the story’s sense of secrecy and mystery by accusing the father of abuse of the daughter, similar to that in Nabokov’s Lolita.  Berette doesn’t think the background is that “sinister,” but Betsy is not to be denied, suspicious of the father/daughter travel in Europe and the priest who has arranged for the transfer of the child from unwed mother to unhappy father. Berette agrees there is something “haunting” about the story, even something a “bit creepy,” but does not think it is parental abuse.  Then reader Ken joins in, trying to mediate the debate over the something “sinister” in the story, concluding that the story is about the ambiguity of how lies can both serve us and harm us and others.  Betsy remains “concerned” for the young Cecilia.

Sensing that the debate about what is “secret and sinister” in the story has run its course, reader Ken concludes that the story is “endlessly interesting,” and (perhaps because it has created so much debate about the mystery behind the story), a “masterpiece.”  A new reader, Roger, agrees. And the debate ends with Betsy somewhat relieved about her fears of child abuse, hoping there will be another William Trevor coming along soon.

I summarize this little debate on The Mookse and the Gripes blog not only because I so enjoy good close readers energetically engaging with a complex short story, but because the sense of the sinister and secrecy and mystery evidenced in “The Women” seems to me to be so typical of the kind of human reality that the short story as a genre does so well.

I wrote a piece a few years ago about this “secret life” aspect of the short story as a genre, and would like to share a few passages in the hope that I might provide a context for understanding William Trevor’s story as well as the lively debate on The Mookse and The Gripes blog.

A central problem for short-story writers in the nineteenth century was how to use newly developed eighteenth-century conventions of realism to communicate spiritual meaning formerly explored allegorically in the mythic romance.  In the older tale or romance form, characters functioned as psychic projections of basic human fears and desires; in the new fiction, the characters had to be presented as if they were real.  Early nineteenth-century writers solved the problem by combining conventions of allegorical romance and realistic fiction.  In "Young Goodman Brown," for example, Hawthorne joined allegorical and realistic elements in an ambiguous mix of dream and reality in which his protagonist sometimes seems motivated by the demands of the allegory and sometimes by the demands of his own psyche.

            In "The Fall of the House of Usher," Edgar Allan Poe presented an “as if” real character entering the hermetically-sealed world of the artwork dominated by an obsessed and ultimately metaphoric character.  And in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Herman Melville moved closer to realistic conventions by beginning with what appears to be the "real world,” only to have that world invaded by an emblematic character who transforms reality into metaphor.  The problem for all three of these early narrative experimentalists was how to bridge the gap between romance conventions, in which characters embody psychic states, and realistic conventions, in which characters possess individual psyches. By rejecting the supernatural and suggesting the strangeness of life as a function of individual psychology, the nineteenth-century short story no longer presented the drama of the clash between the sacred and the profane as existing in realm of the spiritual, but rather in the minds of the individual.

However, it is not until the end of the nineteenth century that Chekhov, the great master of the short story, perfected the form’s ability to present spiritual reality in realistic terms by focusing on the essentially mysterious and hidden nature of the basic human desire to transcend the everyday and live in the realm of spiritual reality.  Critic Peter Bitsilli has suggested that the complexity of Chekhov's characters leads us to feel there is something about them we do not understand, a something hidden from us, a something that is part of Chekhov's appeal.  Although the theme of the basic desire of the secret self could be illustrated in any number of Chekhov’s short fictions, the paradigmatic statement can be found in one of his most famous stories, “Lady with the Dog.”  Near the end of what seems to be merely an anecdotal tale of adultery, the central male character agonizes over the division he senses in himself.

He had two lives:  one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life, running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest, and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his “lower race,” his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open.

 In Chekhov’s great story, the secrecy of Gurov’s idealized desire constitutes true reality for him, just as the sacred constituted true reality for primitive man and woman.  Indeed, in the modern short story, idealized human desire--unsayable, unrealizable, always hovering, like religious experience in the realm of the "not yet"--replaces the sacred revelation embodied in primal short-fiction forms.  When Anna leaves, Gurov thinks it has been just another episode or adventure in his life, nothing left but a memory that would visit him only from time to time.  But she haunts him, and he imagines her to be lovelier and himself to be finer than they actually were in Yalta.  The story ends with the couple agonizing about how to avoid the secrecy and to be free of their intolerable bondage.  “How?  How?” Gurov asks.  But, of course there is no answer, no way that the romantic, spiritual ideal they store up in their ghostly hearts can ever be actualized, except, of course, as it is manifested in the short story—as the immanent, the “not yet.”

             James Joyce confronted the quintessential problem of the modern short story in "The Dead": How is it possible for a realistic narrative to convey meaning and significance?  It is the same problem that Chekhov had to deal with--how to arrange concrete details in such a way that they develop into a pattern equivalent to theme.  Joyce's achievement in this story, its contribution to the development of the short story as a genre, can be best understood if we see its most basic theme as the difference between the kind of reality that realistic prose imitates and the kind of reality that romantic prose reveals. 

              Thematically, the conflict in "The Dead" that reflects its realistic/lyrical split is the difference revealed to both Gabriel and the reader between public life and private life, between life as it is in everyday experience and life perceived as the objectification of desire. The party portion of "The Dead" is the story of Gabriel's public life, and his only psychic interest is what kind of figure he is going to cut publicly.  However, throughout the party period of the story, there are moments--particularly those moments that focus on the past, on music, and on marital union--when reality is not presented as here and now, but as a mixture of memory and desire.   Thematically, the basic issue the story poses is:  In which one of these realms does true reality reside?   Gabriel's discovery at the end of the story is not only that his wife has an inner life inaccessible to him but that his own life has been an outer life only. Filled with desire and the memory of intimacy, wishing Gretta to at one with him, Gabriel is annoyed that she seems so distracted.  When he discovers that she has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he tries to use his typical public devices of irony, but the very simplicity of her story undercuts the effort, and he sees the inadequacy of his public self. 

             In the much-discussed lyrical ending of "The Dead," Gabriel confronts the irony that the dead Michael is more alive than he is.  "Generous tears" fill his eyes because he knows that he has never lived the life of desire, only the untransformed life of the everyday.  The ending, in which Gabriel, awake and alone while his wife sleeps beside him, allows himself to lose self and imaginatively merge into a mythic lyrical sense of oneness, makes it possible for the reader to begin the story over again with this end in mind.  "The Dead" is not a story that can be understood the way most novels are read--one thing after another--but the way the modern short story must be read--aesthetically patterned in such a way that only the end makes the rest of the story meaningful. 

             The theme of the inaccessibility of the private life and the inadequacy of public life is most emphatically explored in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio The most frequent remark made about the characters in Winesburg, Ohio is that they are psychic deformities, cut off from society, adrift in their own consciousness.  The story that most centrally focuses on Anderson’s effort to explore the secret life of his Winesburg grotesques is “Hands.”  Anderson’s suggestion that the secret of Biddlebaum's hands is a job for a poet is part of the basic change in the short story signaled by Chekhov.  Anderson struggles with the problem of the prose writer trying to communicate something subtle and delicate, feeling the words are clumsy, for all he has are the events and explanation.  What he needs is a way to use language the way the poet does, to transcend language. 

              The hidden, secret self is a persistent characteristic of the modern short story as a genre, understood by writers who know the form well and have mastered it.  This could easily be illustrated in any number of well-known stories by Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, and other modern masters of the form.  For example, in Munro’s best work, the hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere and tone, is always about something more enigmatic and unspeakable than the story generated by characters and what happens next. 

            William Trevor’s “The Women” is a story about how “fragments make a whole,” about loss, melancholy, uncertainty, secrecy, need, desperation, desire for the truth, fear of the truth, being of two minds, playing roles, being haunted by the past, having regrets, hating the truth, making something better than the truth, abandoning “stern reality for what imagination more kindly offered.”  The story ends with Cecilia not knowing the truth, for her father has chosen not to tell her, and thinking that the two women have invented this “shadowland” and kept it alive in the “bluster of daring and pretense.”   Although Cecilia knows this is a flimsy exercise in supposition, both tenuous and vague, she reaches out for its “whisper of consoling doubt.” 

.

The hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere, tone, and mood is always about something more unspeakable, more mysterious, than the story generated by the reader’s focus on characters and on what happens next.  The genius of the short story form is that whereas they often could indeed be the seedbeds of novels, they do not communicate as novels do.  And if we try to read them as if they were novels, they will never haunt us with their sense of that mysterious secret life within all of us.

Happy St. Patrick's Day--William Trevor--Cheating at Canasta

The corned beef cooked in the slow cooker last night. The potatoes, carrots, onions, and cabbage are cooking now. The Guiness is chilling nicely in the fridge. I will make a loaf of Irish soda bread later this afternoon. And then, we will eat and drink and be merry. I hope your St. Patrick's Day is as good as mine. In honor of the day, I am posting a discussion of the last collection of my favorite Irish author, William Trevor. I have not seen any stories by him in the last two years, but I hope he is still writing them. He is one of the two most brilliant short story authors writing today. He has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.

As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force.

A classic example is Trevor’s “The Dressmaker’s Child,” in which Cahill, a nineteen-year-old Irish man takes a couple of young Spanish tourists, seeking a blessing on their marriage, to a statue that was once thought to shed miraculous tears. However, the miracle of the statue has since been discredited, and the Dublin man who told them about it was only lying to get them to buy him drinks. Cahill knows all this, but wants the fifty euro he charges to drive the couple out to the statue. On the way back, a young female child, who has a habit of doing such things, runs out in the road and into his car. Cahill does not stop. When the child’s body is found in a quarry half a mile from her home, the mother, a dressmaker, who has borne the child out of wedlock, begins to stalk Cahill, hinting that she saw him hit the girl. Cahill imagines that he walked back to the site of the accident and carried the body of the child to the quarry, but he knows that it was the mother who has done this. The mother urges Cahill to leave his girlfriend and invites him to come home with her. Cahill, afraid, without knowing what he fears, cannot dismiss the connection between him and the dressmaker. When he tries to understand this, he is bewildered, but he knows that one day he will go to her. The story suggests that it is possible that death and guilt, as well as birth and love can unite two people.

Guilt, secrets, and obsession also dominate “Folie À Deux.” Wilby, a divorced man in his forties, is in Paris, indulging in his interest in rare stamps. At a café, he sees an employee who looks like a man named Anthony who Wilby knew as a boy, a man who disappeared years before and who everyone assumed was dead. Wilby recalls a significant event that has bound them together in guilt. Once the two boys, out of curiosity, put Anthony’s old dog Jerico in a small boat and pushed him out to sea, just to find out what he would do. They hear the dog howling and later see its body when it is washed up on shore. Although this does not seem to affect Wilby so much, it profoundly changes Anthony, who becomes quieter and more withdrawn. Later when Wilby runs into Anthony again at school, he discovers that Anthony is even more remote and strange; Wilby does not befriend him again, even though he feels guilty about this. Like Cahill in “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Wilby’s guilt is muddled by bewilderment. When he goes back to the café and realizes that it is Anthony, Wilby knows that he will return to his own safe, tidy world, but this morning he likes himself less than he likes his childhood friend.

The mystery of motivation and secrets of the past also energize “The Room.” A forty-seven-year-old woman named Katherine is engaged in an affair, perhaps in revenge, for her husband’s involvement with a prostitute, who was murdered and for whom he was a suspect, nine years before. Katherine lied for her husband then, in partial repayment for her inability to have children, providing him with an alibi, although it seems quite clear that he did not kill the woman. When the man with whom she is having an affair asks Katherine why she loves her husband, she says that no one can answer that question and, in a statement central to Trevor’s success with the short story, asserts that most often, people don’t know why they do things. For the nine years since the murder, she has not asked her husband about the girl, but knows that her alibi for him has given her release from any restraint. The story ends with her knowledge that the best that love can do is not enough, for what holds people together is often guilt, debt, secrets.

What makes people do what they do and the mysteries of what holds them together or tears them apart is also central to “Bravado.” Five young people are on the way home late at night—the leader Manning, his cohorts Donovan and Kilroy, Aisling, his girlfriend, and a second girl named Francie. When Dalgety, a boy they scorn as a geek, urinates in someone’s yard, Manning, who always likes to play the big fellow, knocks him down and kicks him. The next morning the boy is discovered dead. Donovan and Kilroy are sent to jail for eleven years, getting off easy, for they did not know that Dalgety had a weak heart. Manning disappears, but writes to Aisling several years later, telling her he has changed. Aisling finishes school and gets a job but never marries. At Dalgety’s grave, she begs for forgiveness, for she knows that the beating was done to impress her, to deserve her love, and watching it she had felt a momentary pleasure. She sometimes thinks she will run away from the shadow of bravado that hangs over her, but she is also now a different person and feels that she belongs to where the act took place.

Guilt and the mysteries of the past have a wider compass in “Men of Ireland.” A fifty-two-year old man, Donal Prunty, returns to the small village in Ireland where he was born after having spent several years in England “on the street.” Prunty goes to the parish priest, Father Meade, for whom he served Mass when he was a child and tells him about hearing the old stories of priest abuse with other men--the “hidden Ireland.” When he accuses Father Meade of abusing him, the priest knows he is lying and wonders if he is confusing him with another priest, his brain addled because of methylated spirits. Although he insists that no finger has ever been pointed at a priest in this village, still he goes to a drawer and takes paper notes and gives to him. After Prunty leaves, the priest does not blame him because you cannot blame a hopeless case, and he feels guilty for not being able to reach him as a boy as his mother has asked of him. He knows that no honorable guilt and no generous intent have made him give Prunty the money, but rather that he has paid for silence. He accepts that the petty offense of Prunty is minor beside the betrayal by the Church and the shamming of Ireland’s priesthood.

The inexplicable nature of love and human need dominate such stories as “An Afternoon,” in which a young girl meets a man in a chat room and then arranges to meet him in person. She obviously needs the attention of the man and seems to trust him, although the reader is suspicious of his thoughts, discovering gradually that he has met young women like this before. He is solicitous of the girl, winning a necklace for her in a carnival type game and giving her drinks. However, his plans, whatever they are, are foiled, when his aunt, with whom he lives, drives up, telling him to remember that he is on probation. The girl goes home, and hears her mother and the man she lives with having a fight. In face of this, the girl, even though she now knows the man planned to take advantage of her, still thinks of him tenderly. She kisses the necklace he gave her and promises she will always keep it with her.

“The Children” begins with the perspective of Connie, a child of eleven, whose mother has just died. It then shifts to a woman named Teresa, forty-one, whose husband left her several years before. Two years later Robert, Connie’s father, asks Teresa to marry him. Connie takes her mother’s books up on the roof to read them, although it is really pretence, for she is too young to understand them. She worries that all her mother’s books will be sold, so she wants to know what every single one of them is about. Five days away from the wedding, Teresa comes to see Robert and they decide to cancel the wedding. Realizing that nothing is as tidy as they had thought, and that no rights cancel other rights, they both know they have been hasty and careless. Robert accepts that time will gather up the ends, and that his daughter’s honoring of a memory was love that mattered also.

The title story opens with a man named Mallory, an Englishman in his middle years, at Harry’s Bar in Venice, famous as a hangout of Ernest Hemingway. It has been four years since he was last here with his wife Julia, who is now afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. As a last request, she has made him promise to go back to Harry’s, but he is not sure if this trip is really meaningful. However, when he hears an American man ask his younger wife why she is crying, he becomes interested in their quarrel. When they leave, he tells them the reason for his trip, feeling ashamed that he has come close to deploring this tiresome, futile journey. He recalls letting his wife win at canasta, even though she was not sure why she was happy when she won. As the couple leave, the man smiles, hearing his wife’s voice say that shame isn’t bad, nor is humility, which is shame’s gift.

These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

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"

Short Story Month 2010--Best American Short Stories: 2009 and O. Henry Award Stories: 2010

The Best American Short Stories 2009 came out in Oct. last year; The Pen/O.Henry Prize Stories: 2010 came out in April of this. With twenty stories in each volume and priced on Amazon at about ten bucks each for the paperback, they are the two best bargains out there for any lover of the short story form. You may not like every story in the collection, may even shake your head in wonder that a given story was chosen as one of the ”best” of the year, but you will find God’s plenty in these two books, and I guarantee it will be twenty dollars well spent.

While celebrating May as Short Story Month, doubling my blog efforts by reading the Atlantic Special Issue and commenting on stories for Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers blog from Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming, I have also been reading the new Best and the new O. Henry. I will only comment briefly on my favorites among these forty to whet your appetite, while trying to avoid spoilers.

Annie Proulx’s “Them Old Cowboy Songs” from her third (and final, she says) Wyoming Stories volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, was chosen for both volumes. Proulx bookends the stories in her book by citing its title in the first and last tale. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity. Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.” The way it was, and often still is, is vicious. Whether the story takes place in the late 19th century or the early 21st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and Rose, aged 16 and 14, try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few, and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.

Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge,” which originally appeared in The Southern Review, also makes it in both volumes. Rash says the story combines a family tale of his grandfather leading a search for an old woman who wandered away from her mountain farm in the 1930’s with an image of a man running from something, although he seemed too old to be running. Rash says he soon began to understand that the man was running from a world he no longer understood. “Into the Gorge” is a short, relatively simple story, told with just enough restraint to suggest legend, without laying on too strongly the social theme of the Appalachian Mountains being invaded by the restraints and regulations of the modern world.

One advantage the O. Henry collection has over the Best volume is that it contains a story each by the two very best short story writers still practicing that underrated art--Alice Munro’s “Some Women” and William Trevor’s “Woman in the House.”

Although Alice Munro has insisted in more than one place that she does not write as a novelist does, many critics and reviewers have tried to give her fiction the dignity they think belongs only to the novel by suggesting that her stories are “novelistic” and therefore more complex than short stories. In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.

“Some Women” begins with the narrator saying how amazed she is sometimes at how old she is, but focuses on her experiences when she was thirteen-years-old and hired to help care for a young man named Bruce, a veteran of the war, who is dying of Leukemia. He is staying in the house of his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. His wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, seems to be living on the fringes of his life and his illness. Old Mrs. Crozier’s masseuse, Roxanne, bursts into the house like a dynamo and takes an interest in Bruce, who plays the role of a kind of ailing Fisher King, a sort of sacred prize in the center of the women. A usual with the short story, “Some Women” amasses its weight on its ending when Bruce turns the tables on Roxanne and Mrs. Crozier, finding the comfort he needs in his neglected wife.

Alice Munro’s short stories are complex and powerful not because they are “novelistic” and not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination. More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today.

William Trevor, by universal critical agreement, is one of the best short-story writers practicing that underrated art form. The twelve stories in his most recent collection, Cheating at Canasta, reaffirm that he has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.

As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force.

“The Woman of the House” is about silence, about not saying, about the basic mystery of human personality, about Chekhov's famous comment that in the short story, it is better to say too little than too much, even though he admitted he was not sure why that was true. The story is a fine example of the short story form's focus on basic and universal human characteristics, even though I know that the word "universal" is not appreciated by postcolonial and other cultural critics, who seem more concerned with what separates us than what unifies us as human beings.

These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

Daniel Alarcon has stories in both collections, “The Idiot President” in the Best and “The Bridge” in the O. Henry. I liked “The Bridge” best for its haunting exploration of the death of a blind man and his blind wife in Alarcon’s native city of Lima, Peru. Alarcon says that the story began with an anecdote of a fallen pedestrian bridge and the accidental death of a blind person, but that as he began the story he had no fixed sense of where it was going or where it might end, which, he says, he has found to be the most exciting way to write. It’s an interesting observation about the writing process that I wish others would comment on, for I have heard many writers say the same thing.

One story in the Best collection that I had read earlier is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Yurt,” from her elegant little collection Ms. Hempel Chronicles. Caught between two worlds, Ms. Hempel is young enough to understand the lyrics of her students’ favorite songs, but old enough to feel she should be shocked by them. Although she loves her job and her young charges, she fears she may be doomed to always repeat the seventh grade.

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is another one of those precocious Iowa Workshop graduates, who, like her alter ego, served a brief term teaching seventh and eighth grade before moving on to graduate school. The publishers of this, her second book, know better than to use the label “short stories” on the cover or in the promotional material, hoping readers will assume this too is a novel. But make no mistake. Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a collection of very fine stories, tightly organized, lyrical in style, metaphoric and mysterious, linked by their focus on the pains and pleasures of the young schoolteacher who gives the book its name. Ms. Hempel’s relationships with her students, her fellow teachers, her brother, and her father are all delicately drawn. Her efforts to be a good teacher, although she is never quite sure this is what she is meant to do, are heartfelt and convincing. She will make readers remember fondly one of those teachers they loved.

I thought the O. Henry volume was stronger this year than the Best volume, or maybe I just liked more of the stories in the O. Henry volume. “The Headstrong Historian” by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is wonderfully told tale in the accents of the traditional storyteller, and “A Spoiled Man” by Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a powerful story about a favorite subject of short fiction-the little man—told with such consummate control that what is classically causal sounds everyday casual. I posted a couple of blogs about Mueenuddin last year when his debut collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which has won or been short-listed for several awards, came out.

Being the old Kentucky boy that I am, I can never resist a story by Wendell Berry, and, his Atlantic story “Stand By Me” is, as always, a pleasure. It’s also a pleasure to discover a new writer, who has been around a while. James Lasdun has published several books, but for some reason I never had read him before. His story “Oh, Death,” from his most recent collection It’s Beginning to Hurt, may not have the same elegiac power as the Ralph Stanley song from which it gets its title, but it makes the heart tighten a bit for all that. That opening stanza of the Stanley song never fails to make me fear that inevitable “good night,” against which I fully intend to rage.
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim

Lasdun, born in England, but living now in upstate New York, says that one element he brought to the story to give expression to the powerful emotions the event on which it is based aroused in him was the “mountain music” the narrator has become infatuated with, concluding, “I hope something of the wild energy and pathos, the joy and melancholy, of that music has found its way into the story.” I think it has. I just ordered a copy of It’s Beginning to Hurt and look forward to reading all the stories in it. That’s another wonderful thing about reading the stories in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award Stories—the discovery of great writers you somehow missed, an error that you want to correct right away.

William Trevor's "The Woman of the House"

My intention in writing this blog is not just to comment on stories I have read, but to explore basic characteristics of the short story, identifying issues that might be controversial or debatable enough to stimulate conversation with my readers. I probably will discuss new stories or new collections for the most part, because I hope to encourage my readers to read new stories. Otherwise, the short story as a form will continue to remain largely neglected and unread.

One of the most important sources of new short stories in American publishing continues to be The New Yorker. I stopped my subscription to The Atlantic when they decided after so many years to stop publishing short stories. The special summer fiction issue, since it is not available to subscribers, but must be searched out on the Barnes and Noble or Borders magazines racks, does not reach as many readers as the regular monthly issue of The Atlantic. I still cannot understand why they do not have space for one story per issue. I continue to subscribe to Harpers, who still publish one story per issue.

One of the great pleasures of getting The New Yorker each week is the occasional publication of a story by the Irish writer William Trevor or the Canadian writer Alice Munro, who, in spite of advancing age, continue to publish in The New Yorker because the magazine has first refusal rights for their work.

I have yet to read a critic or reviewer who does not agree that Trevor and Munro are the two greatest short-story writers still publishing. However, no one has ever really talked about what it is that makes these two such masters of the form. I have an article in the Canadian journal, the Wascana Review about why I think Alice Munro is so good at the form. “Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?” Wascana Review 38 (2003): 16-28.
I will talk about Munro another time, hopefully when she publishes her next story in The New Yorker.

The Dec. 15 issue of The New Yorker has a story by Trevor entitled "The Woman of the House." I thought I would try to suggest a few of the characteristics of this story that are unique to the short story.

The plot of the story is quite simple. Two young men are hired by a Irish man to paint his house. Before they finish painting the house, the Irish man disappears and it seems clear that his wife hides the fact of his death so she can continue to receive his pension check. The two men finish the house painting job and leave. That is all that actually happens in the story. Not only is the plot minimal, but we do not know much about the characters. What we do know is this: The two young men are European and speak little English. They are usually taken to be Polish, but they are not. The Irish man is crippled and restricted to a wheel chair. The "woman of the house" may be his wife, but this is never specified. In the past, she has often had sex with the butcher in the village in exchange for free meat. Now, she is obese and getting older and less attractive to him.

So what is the story about? Not the plot, which is mildly interesting, but not engaging. Not the characters, who we know too little about them to really be involved with them. Then what?

To discover what this short story is about, we must look at details repeated so often in the story that they creates a thematic pattern. I suggest the following.

The two young men seldom speak, communicating by nods and gestures.
When the woman of the house goes out to the shed to be fondled by the butcher, they do not speak.
She never tells the crippled man about the money she gets back from the butcher, hiding it in a Gold flake tin.
When the crippled man disappears, what is noticed by the two young men is the silence in the house.
When the two young men investigate the newly dug garden, "They did not say this was a grave, or remark on how the rank grass, in wide straight path from the gate, had been crushed and had recovered."
The story ends with the woman, and the two young men, keeping silent about the disappearance of the crippled man, knowing no one would miss him for no one ever comes to the house.

So, what does this all add up to? What is the story about?

I think it is about silence, about not saying, about the basic mystery of human personality, about Chekhov's famous comment that in the short story, it is better to say too little than too much, even though he admitted he was not sure why that was true. The story is a fine example of the short story form's focus on basic and universal human characteristics, even though I know that the word "universal" is not appreciated by postcolonial and other cultural critics, who seem more concerned with what separates us than what unifies us as human beings.

I hope you read the story and offer your own comments on what the story is about and what makes it such a great story.