Junot Diaz, Michael Byers, Charles Baxter, Joan Wickersham--Best American Short Stories 2013

I love a good love story.  I don’t mean those faux romantic fictional fluffs that you often see at the movies or on television.  I mean a story that explores the mysterious complexity of love.

When I started this blog, almost five years ago, the profile program asked me what my favorite book was. I wrote, without hesitation, The Great Gatsby.  I was reminded what a classic love story it was when I saw the recent film version, which was just frothy cinematic display, until Gatsby came face to face again with Daisy, and from that point, it was all about that boyish look on his face and his effort, Tom Sawyer-like, to impress Daisy. It didn’t matter that she was not worthy of his adoration; that wasn’t the point. That’s never the point. For example, there is only one moment in Wuthering Heights when Cathy is worthy of the mad passion of Heathcliff—when she says “I am Heathcliff.”  The love object is not the result of evaluation but rather obsession.

When the profile program asked me my favorite movie, without hesitation, I wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is, to my mind, a brilliant exploration of the fiction/reality complexity of being in love. The character Jeremy Irons plays is no match for the magically mysterious fictional construct that Meryl Streep creates so brilliantly that one never knows when the French Lieutenant’s woman is acting and when she is….what? Well, when love is concerned what else is there but acting?

What’s all this preamble about love stories about?  I want to talk a bit about four love stories of sorts in the 2013 Best American Short Story collection. And since one of those stories is Junot Diaz’s “Miss Lora,” for which I have expressed my distaste in an earlier blog this year, I thought it would give me one more chance to try to explain why I thought it was an inferior story—certainly not a story deserving of all the awards that Diaz has received this past year for it and the collection in which it appears. So far in my reading of the 2013 BASS, it is the only Elizabeth Strout selection that disappoints me. And she doesn’t give me any clue in her introduction why she chose it except to praise the vividness of the character Lora. However, since I respect Strout’s work, the fact that she chose it as one of the “Best” has forced me to go back and read the damned thing one more time—the sixth time.

The other three stories I want to talk a bit about, are Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” Michael Byers’ “Malaria,” and Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel, or The News from Spain.”

I think the basic problem I have with “Miss Lora” is that the central character, a sixteen-year-old Dominican Republic male, has no depth of feeling.  He just wants to have sex.  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But if it is the only motivating force of a piece of fiction, we are apt to call it “pornography.” Nothing wrong with that either--except when the work is parading as something better than that, something meaningful or culturally relevant.

And Miss Lora herself, although we do get a bit of a backstory about her past sad life, is primarily just an older woman that Yunior can have sex with—what more about her do we really know than that? So what really happens in this story? A sixteen-year-old boy admires his older brother, who has recently died of cancer, because he was such a successful sexual predator. The boy’s girlfriend will not have sex with him, so he is delighted to hook up with an older woman who will. What sixteen-year-old horny boy wouldn’t? They have sex for a time; he graduates from high school, becomes involved with another woman and then graduates from college. Miss Lora disappears. It means nothing.

I have been accused of having a blind spot about this story, but so far, no one has told me why they think it is such a great piece of fiction. I assure I am no prude and am not put off by the explicitness of some of the sexual description. It’s just that the story offers me nothing complexly human.

  If Elizabeth Strout happens to read this, I hope she will tell me why she thinks it is one of the “Best.” Yes, the “voice” is an interesting mix of educated jargon and street patois.  But the story is so hollow, so cynical, so meaningless. Nuff said.  Never for the rest of my life will I say another word about “Miss Lora.” I hope Diaz is laughing all the way to the bank.

Diaz’s Yunior may be just the kind of guy that Susan, the central character of Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” secretly desires.  Although she goes out with the kind ones, the considerate ones, what her roommate calls the “humane” ones, what she really seems to wants is a bit of a ”troublemaker.” She meets and marries a kind and considerate man, Elijah.  When they go to Prague on their honeymoon, they encounter on the street a madwoman, who Susan imagines tells her that in the future she will be terribly jealous of her good-hearted husband “because of the woman in him.” And this announces the story’s theme.

When they have a son they name him Raphael, the name of another angel. Soon after they bring him home from the hospital, Susan comes into the nursery and finds Elijah holding a bottle of her breast milk in his left hand with the boy cradled in his right arm. Baxter says, “A small twig snapped inside her” and, finding it hard to breathe, Susan tells her husband there is something about this she cannot stand, insisting that she is the mother here, and that she does not want him to feed the boy. “With one part of her mind, she saw this impulse as animal truth, not unique to her, but true for all women.” She shouts at him that this is her territory and that he must put the child down immediately.

Elijah angrily leaves, and Susan falls asleep watching television, dreaming about her experience in Prague. When she wakes up, Elijah is standing over her with blood on the side of his mouth, but he is jubilant, telling her a story about seeing two men attacking a young woman and him charging in to rescue her by beating the men off, breaking the jaw of one of them. When she wipes the blood off his face and knuckles, she cannot believe his story. She tells him she loves him and then tucks him in bed as she would a child. The story ends with her looking in the mirror as she brushes her teeth. She does not recognize her own face, but she does recognize her milk-swollen breasts and her smile when she thinks of ”sweet Elijah bravely fighting someone, somewhere.”

This is not a highly complex story, for it seems a little too governed by its theme—the puzzling conflict women perhaps experience about nice guys vs. somewhat dangerous characters. Baxter explores several aspects of this conflict. Whether it is an “animal truth” deriving from the primitive need a woman had for a strong masculine male to protect her and her child or a socially instilled bit of claptrap, I like the way Baxter carefully sets the situation up. If you read it, please let me know if you think the story is true, or false, to a basic human truth.

I have to admit right up front that I was predisposed to like Michael Byer’s “Malaria” before I read it because I loved his first collection of stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, published in 1998 when he was only 28 years old.  I especially liked “Dirigibles,” which is a wonderful love story about a couple much too old for Byers to understand, except by the wondrous magic of authorial empathy. And indeed authorial empathy is what the story is really about.

I can understand why Elizabeth Strout was drawn to the first-person pov voice of this story, for Byers creates convincingly the rhythm of mind of the central character, Orlando, who is twenty and, as he says, unadventurous. The story focuses on his short relationship with a girl named Nora and her older brother George. The title comes from the fact that George tells Orlando that he caught malaria while in Ecuador, although Orlando knows that George has never been to Ecuador. “Everything changes" when George is arrested naked in the middle of the high school athletic field. Nora says he is hearing voices and she begins to worry that she is hearing voices also. Orlando admits that he does not know what to do about all this, since he has little experience with women and believes that “frictionless amiability” is his best way of handling things.

Orlando’s grappling with his relationship with Nora and Nora’s relationship with George makes him feel that for the first time he has an idea of ambition, that he could “be something in particular, rather than just me in general.”  But he does not know what to say to anyone about George’s delusions and Nora’s fears that “wouldn’t sound hollow and ridiculous.” He knows that his own life up to this point has been “featureless,” “free of pain,” and thus he has no training in delivering sympathy. The primary focus of the story ends with Nora trying to reassure Orlando that there was nothing they could have done about George.

But the story does not end until a final section some years later, after Orlando has married, and he is at home alone with the flu; in his fevered condition, he feels he is in a different world and senses a “hideous estrangement from the plain objects of everyday life.” He says he feels not only alone, but as if he were the only human left in the world. He knows his problem is that he does not know what he was supposed to do about George, asking: “What is George Vardon to me?”  He wonders if one is supposed to do anything; he thinks maybe what he is telling is just a story of something that happened to him or to George, concluding, “It’s really George’s story, that is, but naturally he can’t tell it, and neither can I.”

I like this story because it is such a conscientious and thoughtful exploration of our relationship to the “other.” Maybe I am prejudiced in its favor because it reaffirms much of the argument in my recent book about what Frank O’Connor saw years ago as a basic thematic impulse in the short story. The answer to Orlando’s question “What is George Vardon to me? is perhaps the answer that O’Connor says Gogol poses in”The Overcoat”: “I am your brother.”

I have to confess that I am not familiar with Joan Wickersham, although the Contributors’ Notes say that her work has appeared before in Best American Short Stories. Her most recent book, from which “The Tunnel or the News from Spain” is taken, is entitled The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story. I liked this story so much (and since I am such a sucker for a love story), I just ordered a copy). Wickersham says that the book is a “suite of asymmetrical, thwarted love stories” in which the title “the news from Spain” means something different in each story, but “acquires more resonance” (hate that overused word) as the book goes along.  I will talk more about that when I get the book and read it.  As for “The Tunnel,” there are multiple love stories involved here, although the primary one is the love story between Rebecca, age 45, and her mother Harriet, who is living, unhappily, in a nursing home.

The narrator of the story sums up the relationship between Harriet and Rebecca as one in which Harriet needs attention and Rebecca needs to feel like a hero. But more than this, they have discovered that they like each other and are having a good time together. Now that her mother is dying, “in some unexpected way she and Harreit had fallen in love.” Almost on the periphery of this love affair is the ten-year relationship Rebecca has with Peter and a short new relationship she has with Benjamin, who comes into her bookstore and buys a set of Chekhov stories.

This story is more “novelistic” that I usually like, lacking the language-based poetic focus and economy that make for a great short story, but it is so intelligent and sensitive about the various complex aspects of love that I find I can’t resist it.  It is not a story I will read over and over, but I did enjoy the experience of reading it the two times I did.

David Means, Lorrie Moore, Bret Anthony Johnston: Best American Short Stories 2013

I am currently reading the 2013 Best American Short Stories, selected by general editor Heidi Pitlor and guest editor Elizabeth Strout. I am happy to say, at least so far in my reading, that they seem to have been selected on the basis of their excellence as short stories. 

And what other basis of selection might there be for a collection entitled “The Best American Short Stories?” In my opinion, too often in the past, the BASS collection has been built more on the principal of making a book that would be most appealing to those who want a book, rather than those who want the “best" stories. That is, often the stories had to be representative of gender, race, cultural concerns, contemporary subject matter, etc.; they had to be varied and diverse, conscious of relevant content and well mixed in terms of style—not too much of the same, you know, or else risk boring the fickle reader, who is often happier wandering through the diverse world of the novel than being captured by the focused world of the short story.

But this time, if you are familiar with contemporary short story writers, just a look at the table of contents should convince you that the criteria for this collection is the excellence of the work as a short story, not the relevance or variety of its content. Here are stories by great short story writers--writers who know the technical secrets of the form and how to maximize brevity. Here are stories by Alice Munro, Steven Millhauser, David Means, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders (Hell, those names alone would be worth the price of admission), as well as stories by Antonya Nelson, Jim Shephard, Elizabeth Tallent, Gish Gin, and Charles Baxter, not to mention more recent writers who have already made the short story their own, such as Daniel Alarcon, Michael Byers, Bret Anthony Johnson, Sheila Kohler, Suzanne Rivecca, and Kristen Valdez Quade.  A collection featuring these writers should convince you right away that this is indeed a collection that emphasizes the short story as a form, not just fiction as a content carrier.

I realize that Heidi Pitlor chose the first 120 stories, but I am guessing that Elizabeth Strout, who chose the top 20 is largely responsible for the focus on short story form in this collection. Her Introduction seems to confirm this. She says right up front, “If you wonder why I chose the stories I chose, I would say it had a great deal to do with voice.” She approvingly quotes from the opening story by Daniel Alcaron: “I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters.” Strout makes no apologies for the fact that, as she says, “I did not choose a story primarily based on its subject,” adding that if the voice does not work the subject matter is not important.

As a result of Strout’s focus on form rather than subject matter, it should be no surprise that some stories deal with similar subjects, with no fear that the reader will snort that the stories are redundant or too much alike.  The first three stories I want to talk about are David Means’ “The Chair,” Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unexpected Animals,” and Lorrie Moore’s “Referential”-- all three of which deal with parents’ relationship to children

However, as important is that relationship is, these stories use this “content” to explore more universal human mysteries.  All three stories are quite short—between four and seven pages—and all three depend, as Elizabeth Strout reminds us , more on language, rhythm, and voice than on mere content.  Indeed, in these stories, as in most short stories, content is transformed and mere surface reality is penetrated to reveal secrets, mystery, even magic.

Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unsuspected Animals” is closest to recognizable reality. This is a third-person pov story about a man whose fifteen-year old son is in a relationship with a seventeen-year old girl who, in a description that lets us know what the father thinks about her, has “a reputation, a body, and a bar code tattooed on the back of her neck.” 

The dinner conversation about wildlife the girl and the boy’s family have seen in strange situations—a macaw riding on the headrest of a car’s passenger seat, goats in the tops of peach trees—sets up the central metaphor of the story suggested by its title. The father cannot understand what the girl sees in his son, since he has only recently been playing with model airplanes.  Indeed, the unspoken mystery of the story, concealed beneath his ostensibly fatherly protection of his childlike son from this experienced woman, is his own sense that what the girl needs is a man, not a boy, a man, of course, like himself, although this is something he could never admit to himself.

When he stops the car on a deserted road and tells her to cut the boy loose, that she “has been to the rodeo a few times” and that she can do better, that she is too much for his son, he even feels pleased with his superior tone and how much he thinks he sounds like a father.  The girl knows him better than he knows himself, for when he says there is no mystery in his stopping with her alone in the middle of the night, she says “There’s mystery all around us. Goats in trees. Macaws in cars.”

The incongruity of the father in the car with his son’s girlfriend is made all the more extreme by the girl’s superiority to the father’s naiveté. When he keeps insisting that she turn the boy loose, leave him be—that this is the only “takeaway tonight,” she makes it all more complex by asking him to consider what might happen if a girl came home dirty and crying. She asks him to consider if the girl might keep it to herself and it be a secret between the two of them when she marries his son and she bears his grandbabies. “These are bona fide mysteries,” she says.

He watches her jump quickly out of the car and dash across a creek, and he wants to see her as an animal he has managed to avoid, “a rare and dangerous creature.” He feels disoriented and short of breath. “He knew he was at the beginning of something, though just then he couldn’t say exactly what.”

This is a classic short story ending, with the sudden appearance of an animal when animals were not expected, coalescing the central metaphor, and the central character, who thought he knew his motivation but discovers that he did not know it at all, when he has engaged in an action based on mysterious desires that changes his life in ways that he has no way of predicting. The mystery of motivation is, as I have discussed many times, a central dynamic of the short story as a form. Bret Anthony Johnston explores it masterfully in this story.

David Means’ “The Chair” turns the narrative screw that moves his story farther away from action in the world and closer to reality as a construct of consciousness. This is a first-person pov of a man who says at home in the suburbs with his five-year-old boy while his wife goes off to work in New York City each day.  He is a man who thinks a great deal about the significance of what he does, indeed so much so that the story is more about what he thinks or what he thinks he thinks, than what he does. The initial motivation of the story is his thinking about what is involved with being a parent, which involves having an ideal image in his mind of the best way to live and trying to impose that ideal on his son, but at the same time being glad that his son resists becoming what his father tries to impose on him.

It is the rhythm of this meditative voice that makes the story move as the man considers “the sublime nature of taking care of his boy” and feels the “pristine clarity of the innumerable potential teaching moments.”  And, as usual in the short story, it is this focus on meaningful moments and what they mean that makes the story work. The narrator not only thinks about what he thinks, he also thinks about what he might think in the future about what he thinks now. As Henry James knew well, it is the rhythm of thought and the action of the mind doing the thinking that best reveals the complexity of humans in conflict.

Part of the conflict in the man’s mind is his thoughts about his wife, who has what he calls a Helen of Troy face, a beauty that gives her “a density that was prone to the pull of the city, I thought I think.” The man uses this self-reflexive reference to his thinking several times in the story, saying “I used to think, I think,” reminding us of the mysterious nature of consciousness.

He imagines his wife entering her building in the city, going up in the elevator, while he stands looking out the window of his home, feeling they are riding on an apex, with her career on one side and his own deep solitude on the other.  It is not that he feels jealous of his wife’s going out in the world or that he resents staying home with his son; it is not that he distrusts his wife or chaffs against his responsibilities as a care-giver. It is all this, but more than this.

The one physical action in the story occurs near the end when the boy ignores the father’s warning and goes too near an embankment. The man says, “In a moment he’d be looking back at me, I was thinking, the wind in my hair, feeling, as I moved, a good, manly sense of dominion over everything. This is mine, I was thinking, I think. This is my chance of glory of a sort perhaps I was thinking. I don’t remember.”

When the boy falls over the side of the embankment into the black sand, and the father must come down and lift him back to safety, he says, as he has said throughout, “It’s the chair for you, little man”--warning a punishment that he prefers to the usual “It’s time out for you.” The boy then leans over and offers his hands to the man, and for a few seconds there is a moment of what he sees as “astonishingly pure love.”  But then he takes the boy home and makes his sit in the chair, and when the boy squirms, he says “Your time’s not up.  Your time’s not even close to being up.”

It is a story that cannot be summarized, but must be read, aloud if possible, or at least with your lips moving to internalize the subtle rhythm of a father being supremely aware of the complexity of caring for his son when he is thinking about it, more when he is thinking about what he is thinking. 

I read Lorrie Moore’s story “Referential” before I read her discussion of its origins in the “Contributors’ Notes,” and I kept thinking that I had read the story before, although, for some reason, I missed it when it first appeared in The New Yorker.  The visit to a deranged son, the bottle of different jams, the mysterious phone calls at the end—all seemed so familiar, but I could not quite grasp where I had read the story until the last line when the woman in the story answers the third and final phone call and. hearing nothing on the line, wonders what would burst forth—a monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.  And then, I literally smacked the heel of my hand against my forehead and said to myself, in the words of a character in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Mockingbird”--“Idiot!” I often talk to myself in lines from short stories.

Of course, this is a story about a story. The reference to a monkey’s paw is to W. W. Jacob’s famous story of the same name.  And the lady/tiger reference is to the most famous trick ending story of all time, Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger.’ Then I remembered Vladimir Nabokov’s famous story “Signs and Symbols,” which suddenly seemed to be the same story entitled “Referential” I had just been reading.  Hell, I had even included Nabokov’s story in a textbook I edited some twenty years ago, Fiction’s Many Worlds, in the section named “The World of Story.” In the Introduction to that section I quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once said, “Stories only happen to those who know how to tell them,” suggesting that it is not the content that makes a story, but rather the technique, the language, the style, the rhythm—all that is other than, but the same as, the story.

And sure enough, when I turned to the Contributors' Notes, Lorrie Moore says a rereading of Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” last year led her to a “narrative dance” with the story, with her as the hat rack and Nabokov as Fred Astaire.  Like most writers, Moore became obsessed with the story and felt compelled to write a tribute to it.  It reminds us that stories often come from stories, some very specifically so. In my textbook, I include Guy de Maupassant’s story “Confessing,” followed by Isaac Babel’s tribute to that story entitled “Guy de Maupassant.” I also include Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose,” followed by Doris Lessing’s tribute to that story, “Homage for Isaac Babel.”

Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” is about a deranged boy who has a mania that everything around him is a veiled reference to himself, that all is a pattern, and that he must always be on guard to decode things.  The primary changes Moore makes to Nabokov’s story is to make the mother in the story go to visit the boy with a reluctant lover rather than with her husband.  The result of this is to thrown the drama of the story more on to the mind of the woman than the Nabokov story does.


At the end of Moore’s story, the woman answers the second phone call and pretends that the caller id on the phone indicates that the call is coming from the man’s apartment.   Although it is an invention, his response makes it true, when he says he has to go home and diffidently leaves her.  And at the end, she is completely alone; the third phone call, with no one on the line, emphasizes her isolation. Usually, in tribute stories, the tribute moves the story farther away from reality into symbolic significance. However, here, Moore’s tribute pushes Nabokov’s story away from his aesthetic exploration of referentiality back to the original referent itself, that is, the woman’s loneliness and despair about what to do about her son.

More discussions of BASS 2013 in a few days.  If you are reading these stories (and if you love the short story, you will be glad you did), please let me know what you think about them.

Happy Halloween, 2013--Walter de la Mare's "Creatures" and "The Riddle"

Happy Halloween, everyone. I am working on a critical history of the British short story and thought in honor of Halloween this year, I would post a brief discussion from the draft of that book on a couple of the best-known spooky stories of the late great Walter de la Mare.

 

In his study The Short Story in English, Walter Allen calls Walter de la Mare the most distinguished of the writers who made the Edwardian age a "haunted period" in English literature (88).  Part of the reason is the poetic "dignity" of de la Mare as opposed to what is often called the "crude Gothicism" of his contemporaries.  David Daiches says in The Present Age in British Literature that de la Mare's particular escape from external reality does not lead him to self-indulgent dreaming but often to "a magical brooding over the sense of loss and mystery that lies at the heart of experience" (186). Lord David Cecil in The Fine Art of Reading calls de la Mare a symbolist for whom the outer world is only an "incarnation of an internal drama."  He says de la Mare is concerned with the most profound human issues, particularly the central issue of whether the world has any objective existence or whether it is a reflection of the mind which alters depending on the mood and character of the observer (222). It is obvious that these comments suggest the basically romantic nature of de la Mare's work and thus align it emphatically with the short story genre itself.

 

Walter de la Mare's most basic characteristic, which makes his work stand out from the work of his contemporaries is what Cecil calls its poetic and lyrical nature, a characteristic which many seem to feel is lacking in the stories of the other Edwardian writers.  Most particularly, this poetic nature seems reflected in what Cecil calls de la Mare's fascination with the elfin and the odd and his "curious bias toward the miniature" (220).  As opposed to other Edwardian short-story writers, de la Mare, says Cecil, uses ghosts not as devices to arouse shudders, but rather as symbols of the eternal world of the spirit.  Children are often used in his stories because they, living largely in the imagination, are less likely than adults to believe that the material world is the only reality.  For de la Mare, only the imagination makes reality significant, and what we call external reality itself is like a dream.

All of these characteristics, which are actually characteristics of the short story genre itself, can be seen most readily in de la Mare's two best-known and most anthologized stories, "The Creatures" and "The Riddle," neither of which have received much critical comment.  "The Creatures" is built, as many short stories are, on the model of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the conveyor of the tale to the reader is made to listen to a tale told to him by a stranger he meets on a railway car.  The story the stranger tells is in many ways like a set piece; he begins by establishing his philosophic position about the nature of reality and then narrates an experience that seems to illustrate the position.  The basic philosophic point of view is the one that Cecil says characterizes de la Mare's work--that the world is a dream created by consciousness.

The story recounts an experience in the teller's past when he chanced upon one of the talented few who seem to be aware of the imaginative  nature of reality; the meeting occurred when he himself wandered in search of "that unforeseen nowhere for which the heart, the fantasy aches."  In his travels he hopes to get lost, for "How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?" and stumbles into a "country of dream" wherein reason is left behind, and in solitude the spirit "realizes that it treads the outskirts of a region long since called the Imagination."

His encounter with the region's inhabitants--a bent-up woman, a dark gaunt man, and their two dwarfish children--seems very similar to the kind of experience that H.G. Wells uses in "The Country of the Blind" but which Turgenev makes more meaningful in "Bezhin Meadow."  The realm is some country half-way between reality and imagination, yet the people who inhabit it seem real.  The teller realizes, for example, that the man is one of the small tribe of the aloof, such as hermits, lamas, fakirs and such.  The children appear as if "animal and angel had connived in their creation" although they are actually dwarfish. The narrator feels he has come back to the borders of Eden--"gazing from out of dream into dream, homesick, 'forsaken.'"  However, the problem of the story, as is usual in such stories, is that the nature of the reality of the creatures is not made clear.  On the one hand, they seem real yet strange; on the other hand, the narrator feels that he has entered for a few moments into a "strange region of consciousness."

After returning from the otherworldly region, the narrator asks a pig-like woman of the village about the farm he has visited; her response makes the status of the strange people even more problematical and ambiguous.  When the woman asks if the narrator has seen any of the Creatures, the narrator is startled, for the ambiguity of the word suggests that the creatures are indeed inhabitants of another realm of reality, that is until the narrator realizes that Creatures is the name of the host and that Maria and Christus are the names of the two gardeners. The woman's story is of a man--a stranger and a pilgrim--who came there in the past and made his home at the farm.  She also tells, as part of what the narrator calls her "absurd story," of a woman from the sea who was either dumb or inarticulate who gave birth to two children who were simple, "naturals."  She tells the narrator that the woman is buried in the neighboring churchyard that he might visit.  When he does visit it, the last words of the story list what is written on her stone:  Feminina Creature.

This final ambiguity about the nature of the creatures--that is whether they are creatures from another realm of reality or whether they are actually people named Creature--is the central ambiguity of the story itself.  The question remains unresolved, for the inscription on the stone of the woman could suggest her name as well as her status--that is as an image of the Jungian anima figure who suggests imagination and unitive knowledge itself.

"The Creatures" is a story about the ambiguity that results when reality and dream, consciousness and unconsciousness seem to interpenetrate and remain inextricably entangled.  The journey the narrator makes is both to a realm of reality and to a realm of consciousness.  The Creatures are indeed creatures, for they have isolated themselves away from the external world to live within their own self-constructed imaginative world.  What happens in this story, just as it happens in Turgenev's "Bezhin Meadow," is that the narrator stumbles into the world of the imagination, into the world of folk song and story; for within that very world are those that have transformed themselves into the characters or creatures of story.      

De la Mare's other often-anthologized story, "The Riddle," is an unabashed parable, for the riddle exists not within the story, but is the story--a puzzle that readers must solve themselves.  Once again the puzzle focuses on whether the characters are real or exist in some realm of reality other than the natural.  de la Mare was once asked if the children died and if he meant to make the grandmother a sinister figure, to which he answered that the children did die and that he did not make the grandmother any more sinister than she appeared to be.  Such a question can only arise if one takes the characters to be real rather than representative.  However, even if one takes them to be representative, the events of the story make it difficult to understand what exactly it is that they represent.

The story begins like a fairy tale in which the children come to visit the grandmother and she tells them that they may play anywhere in the house except in the room where an old trunk sits.  Of course, as is typical of such fairy stories, it is to the old oak trunk that the children go first, and one by one and then two by two they disappear into it.  The clue to the meaning of the disappearance of the children lies within the means by which they disappear.  At first, Henry goes into the chest when he has memories of his mother who used to read to him.  Then Matilda goes into the chest singing songs about the absent Henry.  Harriet and William go into the chest while pretending to be Sleeping Beauty and the Prince who comes to awaken her.  Dorothea and James go in while playing a pretend game about being Eskimos fishing.  Finally, Ann, the oldest, goes into the trunk during a dream after she has been reading a story about fairies and gnomes.

 It seems clear that the children's entrance into the chest comes in the midst of experiences outside the present world of everyday reality--in memory, in fairy tale, in play, and in dream.  Consequently, one need believe that the children die or that the grandmother is evil, but rather that the children's disappearance into the trunk marks an abrupt departure from reality via the world of fantasy and play into another realm that inevitably takes them away from the grandmother.  At the end of the story, the old woman's mind is a "tangled skein of memories--laughter and tears, and little children now old-fashioned, and the advent of friends, and long farewells."

The story must be read in a different way from "The Creatures," for here, we cannot take the characters literally, but must see them as metaphors for the boundary line that separates the world of childhood from the world of external reality.  The fact that the grandmother and the trunk are the vehicles for this significance is not made clear in the story, except by the suggestion that she herself is the conventional figure of the conventional fairy story which the children inhabit in their childlike world.   

 

Stinging Fly Press--Mary Costello's The China Factory and Colin Barrett's Young Skins

I admire the small journals and small presses in England, Ireland, Canada, and America that treasure the short story and keep it alive publishing stories by both newcomers and established writers, even though the chances of those stories being widely read are slim. No doubt, Alice Munro's recent win of the Nobel Prize for Literature, based solely on short stories, is a source of encouragement to writers, editors, and publisher. But there is only one Alice Munro.

One of those small journals/presses that I have grown to respect ever since it published Kevin Barry's There Are Little Kingdoms in 2007 is The Stinging Fly Press, which is  run, I suspect, on a relatively meager budget with Arts Council support in Dublin by Declan Meade. Declan, recently asked if I would be interested in reading two recent collections of stories published by The Stinging Fly—Mary Costello's The China Factory, which got on the longlist for the Guardian First Book Award and earned much praise from Irish writer Anne Enright in The Guardian; and Young Skins, by Colin Barrett, which recently got very good notices in The Sunday Times and The Irish Times.

Yes, of course, I would.  I cannot resist the Irish voice—which I hear every day from my lovely Irish wife and that I heard  over many a Guinness in the year we spent in Dublin on a Fulbright Senior Fellowship several years ago. The Irish cannot, it seems, resist telling a story.  And I cannot resist listening to them.

Mary Costello and Colin Barrett represent two quite different Irish social contexts and two quite different Irish voices. Costello's view of human reality is what reviewers like to call "sensitive," while Barrett creates a world that reviewers like to call "hardscrabble." Costello's characters--mostly women—are educated, with decent jobs, who get married, have kids, become lonely and have affairs.  Barrett's characters--mostly men—are uneducated, drink, shoot pool, screw around, and do drugs. 

These are readable, well-written, engaging stories, albeit sometimes a bit predictable. While certainly more than a notch above popular simplistic plot-based stories, they are somewhat below the delicately woven stories of the top-of-the-line short story writers, such as William Trevor and Alice Munro. But then, for both Costello and Barrett, these are their first collections.  I expect more to come.

The title story of Mary Costello's collection focuses on a seventeen-year old girl who spends a summer before going to college in a factory that makes fine bone china—you know, dishes, cups, saucers, etc. She is brighter and more ambitious than many of the other women in the factory, but given the Irish distrust of folks that put on airs," (This is a common Alice Munro theme), she must keep secret her fantasies of long future days "among library stacks and the sound of page turning and my pen racing furiously across white paper."

The only person she knows at work is a man named Gus, with whom she catches a ride each day.  He is a lump of a guy that the other women in the place call a "freak," saying he is like "something out of a zoo." While the narrator thinks of lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry, "Dapple-dawn-drawn," he reads Hopalong Cassidy and Riders of the Purple Sage.

There is no doubt that the narrator is going to be an English major and will probably try her hand at writing fiction or poetry someday. She even talks like an English major, saying things like "My heart took fright," which she would never be able to get away with saying out loud in the factory. To her English major mind, Gus, who works in the kilns is often "purple-faced and sweating," as if he'd drawn the clay up from the bowels of the earth."

This is a story held together by thematic tension between the fine bone china and the dirty red clay from which it is made; between the sensitive, bookish young woman whose hands grow hot and pink and swollen from sponging off the china, and the hulking Gus whose sweat threatens to come seeping through his jacket to drown both of them as he drives her to work.

It's obvious nothing is going to happen between these two radically different characters, but it is necessary that something happens to redeem Gus from his mere physicality and make the narrator realize that airy poetic transcendence cannot exist apart from physical reality. To that end Costello invents a mad man—someone whose mind is so obsessed that he threatens physical life. He drives up to the factory and, spouting fundamentalist religious notions about the Day of Judgment being at hand, takes a shotgun from his car and fires into the air. Gus, of course, is the only one who remains calm and goes over to the man, speaking to him quietly, getting him to lay down his gun and walk away.

A few years later, the narrator in her beloved library and lecture halls, thinks of Gus touching the madman's shoulder, and thus "the rarity of any human touch." In her senior year of college, she gets a letter from her mother saying that Gus has died in a particularly grotesque way: (reminiscent of a Eudora Welty story) he went out on a cold winter day to get water from a barrel and had a heart attack, falling in; the water froze and that's the way they found him.  The narrator, English major that she is, thinks of that day when Gus touched the man, wondering if when he reached out his hand, "was it to the man or to the madness he spoke?"

It's a well-done story, thematically significant and technically tight--worth reading more than once.  And Mary Costello is a writer worth reading again.  I recommend her to you. Yes, indeed, as reviewers have said, she is sensitive, but there is more to the promise of her stories than mere craft and sensitivity.

I must admit I have chosen to discuss "Kindly Forget My Existence," the final story in Colin Barrett's Young Skins, not only because the title is a line from James Joyce's "The Dead," but also because it is not about young men who drink, play pool, screw around, and do drugs.  Rather, it is about two older guys who run into each other in a pub while waiting for a funeral to start and talk about their past with the woman who is being buried, a singer in their old band twenty years ago, with whom they both were lovers, and who was the ex-wife of one of them.

The Irish are great at talk, especially in pubs, but this is not just a "bit of craic." (Oh, by the way, if you do not remember the line from "The Dead," it is when Gabriel has finished carving the bird and people are beginning the meal, and he says "kindly forget my existence" as he sits down to eat before his "three graces" tributes to his hostesses.)

The two men in Barrett's story are Owen Doran and Eli Cassidy, former bandmates.  The third man in the story is the barman, an Eastern European with a scarred Adam's apple, who spends most of the story down below doing inventory. The two men admit their cowardice at not going to the funeral, although Eli does sneak up to the cemetery where their old singer and lover, Maryanne, is being buried.  Doran, who says "mortality's a skull-fuck," tells Eli that he has entered the "era of grand onanistic solitude."

Much of the story tells the background of Doran and Eli's up-and-down  (mostly down) experiences with their band and their relationship with Maryanne, whose marriage to Eli was tainted by drugs and which only last fourteen months.  After Eli tells Own about watching Maryanne's family going into the service while hiding behind bushes near the church, the bartender, the third character in the story—actually the character who makes this more than just about two guys talking in a pub while avoiding the funeral of an old lover—shows up from the depths of the pub, like a denizen from nether regions.  His name is Dukic, and his has his own story to tell—about his experience in the war in Bosnia.

Dukic tells Doran that he reminds him of a man he once saw during the war who was trying to get to a woman and a child in the street, but cannot because of sniper bullets.  Although the woman and child are already dead, the man runs out to them and is killed also. He says that he had forgotten the man in the street until Doran walks in and reminds him. When the three men go out to smoke, Eli tells the barman that he has a wife and kid also and wants to know if the barman was the sniper who did the shooting.  But the barman only says, "It was a story."

When the funeral procession passes, Doran and Eli join it although they had not intended. When the barman goes back inside, he finds Eli's coat hanging on a stool. Although an hour or so later, some of the mourners come in for a drink, Doran and Eli are not with them.  The next morning the coat is still there unclaimed, and although the barman thinks that someday the man will come back for it, "the man never did."

I like this story; it is cooler and quieter than the other stories in Barrett's collection, which are often violent and  rough. "Kindly Forget My Existence," like many of James Joyce's stories, depends on talk, which Barrett does very well.  The  story conveys very delicately a sense of inevitable loss. It is not easy to communicate the subtle effect of death. I admire Barrett's ability to do so with such restraint and power.

 I recommend Young Skins to you.  And I urge you to support the good work Declan Meade does to promote the short story as a form at which the Irish have always excelled