David Rose's "Flora": Best British Short Stories 2011

I have been rereading the stories in the Best British Short Stories  series, beginning with the first volume, 2011. In his Introduction, Nicholas Royle says that short stories often get "short shrift" from readers because many have little point to them. He says there has to be something: an "epiphany, or a change of heart, or pace or tone; a twist, perhaps, a revelation that calls into question everything that came before."  I agree, for I have little patience with pieces that are merely parts of novels, slices of "life," or experimental finger exercises.

Royle says he would rather be left with questions than answers after reading a story, with a "vague feeling of uncertainty rather than one of satisfaction at how neatly everything has been tied up." He wants the story's questions and ambiguities to remain with him." Most writers I have read would agree with that, and so do I.

Thus, it seems appropriate that I begin with the first story, David Rose's "Flora," which indeed left me with a satisfying feeling of uncertainty. I have read the story several times now, and am still pleasantly puzzled by it. I was first attracted to the language of the first-person narrator, who uses such language, in nineteenth-century formality, such things as "remonstrated," "contrived," and "sustenance." When he comes across a young woman sketching in the Kew Gardens, he is curious about her. He runs into again enough times to use the word "fate," which he says he has never believed in.

I am always interested when "fate" is evoked in a story, for since a story is obviously a "made" narrative, everything that happens in it happens for a reason, at least a narrative reason.

I am also always interested when a character in a story makes a general statement about the nature of reality, for it usually suggests that the generalization has some thematic significance. The narrator tries to save a Japanese maple from a fungal growth, but becomes taken by the strange beauty of the fungus, "the subtlety of its opalescent colors, the intricacy of its structure." He wonders "Are we right…to divide Nature as we do?"  There would be no reason for a character make such a statement in a short story unless it has thematic significance, for this is not a novel in which a narrator has lots of narrative time to ponder things in general just to show us he is a thoughtful and dependable storyteller.

Soon after this observation about the fungus, the narrator sees the girl again and notices how rough her elbow is, from "propping bars" he thinks then "mentally rapped his knuckles" for his prejudice, and further reflects that what he was feeling was closer to "tenderness, almost pity for that nonchalantly uncared-for patch of skin."

When he sees her again and finds out she is interested in studying botanical illustration, he thinks of the fungus and the little patch of dry skin as similar in their appeal and offers her the use of his library of botanical books, for he feels "absurdly happy" with his garden and feels obligated to share it with someone.

When the young woman comes to use his books, he first brings her coffee and chocolate cookies, as if she were a child, but later realizes that a martini, crackers, and a dish of olives would be more suitable. He also discovers that she has a male friend, although she tells him he is not her boyfriend. The man is older than the girl, but the narrator is glad that someone loves her. He watches them in the garden from his bedroom window, sometimes with binoculars.

Then an "incident" occurs; he hears a "little scream" or a "moderate cry" and sees the man stamping "almost viciously" on something on the grass." Later that evening he looks and only finds the outline of something "lozenge-shaped and sharp stamped into the lawn."

He never sees the man again and soon the girl stops coming also; he is hurt that she did not say goodbye. When he goes into his library, he notices a book out of alphabetical sequence.  When he takes it out he finds a hair, like a minuscule bookmark. When he lays the book down, it opens to the middle with the illustrations flapping like a "lantern slide show," (which finally locates the story in the nineteen century). He notices that tendrils have been added to one of the engraved plates in pencil. "They were almost obscene in the outline they limned." He takes down other books and finds they too have been altered. He also notes that the books have letters inscribed in red on the bottom edges. When he rearranges the books in correct order with the bottom edges facing him, they spell—with gaps where they had been replaced out of sequence—"on ly win ter is tru ."

At first he felt a "shock of desecration." Now he feels a "wearying sadness."  He puts the books back in the bookcase, locks the glass door, and throws the key away.  It lands under the desk. "After some thought, I retrieved it, and hung it, with the spare, by the clock, in the hall."

And that's the last sentence in the story.

There are at least two kinds of mysteries in stories. First, there is the mystery of fact or detail, something left out or not explained.  In this story, the  two mysteries are the lozenge-shaped outline of what has been stamped in the lawn and the meaning of what is spelled out by the letters on the books: "on ly win ter is tru ."

The second kind of mystery is the mystery of motivation: why a character does something that seems strange or perverse or simply unmotivated or unexplained. In this story, the most obvious mystery is why the girl alters the botanical illustrations. The other mysteries are why the man angrily stamps something in the lawn and the mystery that makes this a story--why the narrator is interested in the young woman and feels fated to have met her.

The only clue we have to the mystery of the imprint in the lawn is that it is lozenge-shaped, which suggests a diamond, and since the narrator refers to it as a "sharp" outline, we might guess that the object the man has stamped into the lawn is a diamond ring, presumably one he has offered to the girl as a proposal of marriage, which she has turned down, perhaps because he is too old for her. We can make these presumptions based on details in the story, but cannot know for sure if we are correct. I am hesitant to make such a presumption because I don't see how a diamond could make an indentation in a lawn; it would have to be quite large, would it not?

Why the woman alters the illustrations and what this means to the narrator are, of course, the most puzzling mysteries of motivation in the story.

The mystery of motivation is one of the most common challenges to understanding a short story, for the drive toward significance in a short story is often more pressing than the drive toward verisimilitude. Consequently, ordinary human motivation is sometimes overridden by aesthetic motivation.  The story's insistence on significance is more pressing than its insistence on realism or ordinary human understanding.

That goes against the grain of many readers, for they are more likely to think of the behavior of characters in a story as being like the behavior of real people in the real world rather than "characters" in a fiction there to serve a certain "function" rather than to be "real-like." One of the problems many folks have reading short stories is that they have a limited notion of what "reality" means, usually thinking it simply means the ordinary stuff that happens to ordinary people in an ordinary world. But this is just not the case in short stories, for we are actually reading about invented characters in an invented narrative who, even as they seem somehow real and driven by everyday human motivation, are at the same time functions of a story that "means" something.

In "Flora," we have a botanist whose life is governed by careful observation and preservation of the natural world. However, as he observes, sometimes he is drawn to, or interested in, or curious about, deviations from that natural world—like the fungus that threatens the tree in his garden or the roughness on the young woman's arm.

A thematic convention that often occurs in the short story is that of a man who lives a formally precise life, a life of science, a life of exactness, who deserves to experience a disruption of that precision.  "Flora" may be that kind of story. The central character has no life of his own except the life of his observation of the natural world, which he finds predictable and precise, even though he suspects there is something that always threatens that precision, like the fungus, which has a kind of beauty, albeit destructive.

He is drawn to the young woman and watches her relationship with an older man, perhaps seeing acted out some desire which she cannot fulfill. Without admitting his own needs, he watches his desires played out in the actions of the man stamping the ring into the ground. The theme of the story demands that the girl make clear to him that his notions of what is natural and precise and predictable are susceptible to being undermined, even, as he says, "desecrated."  Consequently, the theme of the story mandates that she make human changes in the precision of the natural images that make up his life.

Even as the narrator believes that the life of his garden, the life of the natural world is real and true, she reminds him that only winter, only the frozen image is true, only Keats' "cold pastoral" is true, for only beauty is truth and only truth is beauty, and that is all you can ever know or ever even need to know. Artifice, as Oscar Wilde loved to remind us, always triumphs over nature. Thus, "on ly win ter is tru ."

I apologize for going on so long about this story.  I obviously cannot do this for every story in the five volumes of Best British Short Stories, for it would take months that I do not have. However, this story provided an irresistible introit to whatever discussions follow, for it seems such an epitome of what makes the short story form so fascinating to me.

I always told my students that if they read a story that did not seem to make sense to them, the fault would more likely to be theirs that that of the author. I am still puzzled by David Rose's story, but that is my fault, not his.  I would appreciate hearing from any of my readers who has a more satisfying explanation of its mystery.

David Rose has a new collection just out entitled Posthumous Stories, which includes "Flora." I have just ordered a copy and look forward to reading it.  I thank Nicholas Royle for introducing him to me.

Blossoming of Interest in the Short Story in England

       

One of the most interesting, and promising, trends in the short story in the past few years is the blossoming of interest in the form in England. 

It has long been an unchallenged assumption in short story criticism (what little there is) that English readers, critics, academics, and therefore publishers, have  seldom, if ever, been interested in the short story—always preferring the bigger, more socially important, more encompassing, and more profitable, novel.

Because the short story does not deal with unified social values, the form seems to thrive best in societies where there is fragmentation of values and people. This fragmentation has often been cited as one reason why the short story became quickly popular in early nineteenth century America. In 1924, Katherine Fullerton Gerould said that American short story writers dealt with peculiar atmospheres and special moods, for America has no centralized civilization. "The short story does not need a complex and traditional background so badly as the novel does," argued Gerould.

 Wendell Harris and Lionel Stevenson have suggested somewhat the same reason for the predominance of the novel in English literature. Stevenson points out that as soon as a culture becomes more complex, brief narratives expand or "agglomerate" and thus cause the short story to lose its identity. The fragmentation of sensibility did not set in in England until about 1880 at which time the short story came to the fore as the best medium for presenting this fragmentation. Wendell Harris also reminds us that the nineties in England were known as the golden age of the short story and notes how with the fragmentation of sensibility, perspective or "angle of vision "becomes most important in fiction, especially in the short story in which, instead of a world to enter as in the novel, the form presents a vignette to contemplate. 

Harris has also noted that from Fielding to Hardy, fiction was defined in England as "a presentation of life in latitudinal or longitudinal completeness." This concept of narrative paralleled man's intellectual concern with society; thus the short story was thought to be insignificant in England until late in the nineteenth century when the appropriate vision for it arrived. The "essence of the short story" says Harris, "is to isolate, to portray the individual person, or moment, or scene in isolation detached from the great continuum  at once social and historical, on which it had been the business of the English novel, and the great concern of nineteenth century essayists, to insist." As Frank O'Connor has noted, whereas the  novel can adhere to the classical concept of a civilized society, "the short story, remains, by its very nature remote from the community  romantic, individualistic, and intransigent."

However, thanks to the energy of such writer/editors as Nicholas Royle, writer/teachers as Ailsa Cox, and critic/reviewers as Chris Power—to mention only three that come to mind right away—the short story has begun to generate more interest in England. Short story prizes such as the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award, and the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize give short-story writers something to aim for, while such web/blog sites as the Short Review, The Short Story, Thresholds, and Short Stops keep short stories in the eye of the public. Under the masterful editorship of Ailsa Cox, Edge Hill University publishes a very fine academic journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. There is even a National Short Story Day (Dec. 21), and an annual Small Wonder Short Story Festival.  With the exception of the U.S.-based International Short Story Conference which occurs once every two years, and the journal Short Story, there is nothing in America to compare with these efforts.

During the summer I have been reading the first five volumes of Best British Short Stories, ably edited by Nicholas Royle, and bravely published by Salt Press.  I don't know how well the volumes for 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 have been selling, but obviously well enough to carry on for five years so far.  Royle has talked about how he started the series in a 2011 post on the website Thresholds. I thank him for providing me with several weeks to good reading this summer.

Now that I have read all the stories in the first five volumes (over 100 altogether), I plan to read them all again in the next couple of months and write blog posts on as many of them as I can, focusing on what makes them such fine examples of the short story form.

I have been commenting on Best American Short Stories  and O. Henry Prize Stories  for several years on this blog.  The O. Henry 2015  volume will be out in early September, and the 2015 volume of Best American Short Stories  comes out in October.  I will, of course be reading and commenting on those stories during the Fall.

And just to keep myself happily busy, I have started reading the six volumes of Best European Fiction (2010—2015).  The 2016 volume is due out in early October.  I will be posting blog essays on many of those stories before the end of the year also.

I know there is no guarantee that the stories in these "Best" volumes from American, England, and Europe really represent the "best" stories published in a given year.  There are always human variables when something is labelled the "best," not the least of which who is doing the labelling, and who is doing the publishing. However, when a knowledgeable editor has the stamina to read hundreds of stories and make decisions about them, and when a brave publisher has the vision to publish a volume that he or she knows is not going to sell that well—then it is not a bad place to start reading the short story.

I hope you will read with me in the next few months as I try to be the best reader that these best stories deserve.

Subtext: An Old Concept with a New Name: Example of Stephen Crane's "An Episode of War"

Charles Baxter's collection of critical essays, Burning Down the House, is, like other good books about writing, very much about reading. He also has a small book in the Graywolf "Art of" Series, (which he edits) entitled The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, which he says is largely based on a number of "close readings," mainly of short stories, in which he acts as a "critic-sleuth," trying to reveal how writers get at the "half-visible and the unspoken," which constitute what some critics like to call "subtext."

I said in an earlier blog that I was suspicious of the word "subtext," for it seems to me to be merely a new term for an old concept. And Baxter admits that he is certainly not the first to argue that a good story is energized more by what it implies than what it states—"the half visible and the unspoken." Chekhov once said that it is always better to say too little than too much, although he coyly said he was not sure why. And of course, there's Hemingway's famous claim that if a writer of prose "knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

Subtext, as used by recent critics and writing teachers, refers to the complex significance that underlies or inheres within a story—some sense of human mystery that transcends mere plot and character configuration. Many other writers have talked about it. A story, Flannery O'Connor says, "is a way to say something that can't be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate."

And Eudora Welty once said: "The first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again. Every good story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful." 

More recently, Robert Boswell, talks to aspiring writers about subtextual implication in his book The Half-known World: “If the writer’s goal is ‘literary fiction’ [one of his or her responsibilities] is the creation of a half-known world. To accomplish this, the writer must suggest a dimension to the fictional reality that escapes comprehension.”

Subtext, the way Baxter uses the term, means the story as significance rather than the story as event. For example, in John Cheever's story "The Swimmer," while the surface text is about a man swimming home through backyard pools, the subject of the subtext, according to Baxter, is about impulses that become repetitive addictions leading to the derailment of ordinary life.

Chekhov's "Lady with the Dog," says Baxter, is on the surface, about a man who has an affair, whereas its subtext is about a man who discovers that what he thought he wanted is not what he truly wants at all, but rather something he had not asked for or even known about. J. F. Powers' story "The Valiant Woman" is, on the surface about a priest and his housekeeper, whereas its subtext is about what Baxter calls the "grievous injustices" of marriage.

Many writers who are also in business of teaching others how to write use the concept of subtext. David Baboulene, who says he is working on a full-length book on subtext, has published two books on the nature of story in which he introduces the importance of the concept. In  Story Theory, 2014, Baboulene says his great discovery about subtext is that a writer does not work with subtext, that "it's entirely wrong-headed, as a writer, to even think about subtext."  What a writer does is create "knowledge gaps" in the story so the reader can create the subtext. Baboulene's basic definition of story is "any form of communication that includes knowledge gaps in the telling."

The idea of an underlying meaning in a story has been around at least since Edgar Allan Poe's discussions of the short story. Poe was the first to make a distinction between plot, or "what happens next" and pattern, or "what the story means. He distinguishes between the usual notion of plot as merely those events which occur one after another and arouse suspense and his own definition of plot as an overall pattern, design, or unity. Poe emphasizes that by "plot" he means pattern and design, not simply the temporal progression of events. Only pattern can make the separate elements of the work meaningful, not mere realistic cause-and-effect.

There is little doubt that Poe was, if nothing else, a thoroughgoing formalist, always more interested in the work's pattern, structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world. For Poe the overall design was not a pre-established intention, totally in the mind of the writer before the work's composition, but rather that the pattern of the work was achieved in the actual working out of the work.

The 1842 Hawthorne review is of course the central document for understanding Poe's contribution to the theory of the short story.  What is most important in the literary work is unity; however, unity can only be achieved in a work which the reader can hold in the mind all at once.  After the poem, traditionally the highest of high literary art, Poe says that the short tale has the most potential for being unified in the way the poem is. The effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design, which is also synonymous with its theme or idea.  Form and meaning emerge from the unity of the motifs of the story.

According to the Russian formalists, we can think of details in a story that are there merely to give us a sense of actuality as being relatively "loose" and even dispensable, or at least changeable. Details that are in the story because they are relevant to its meaning or overall rhetorical effect we can think of as being relatively "bound" to the story, that is, intrinsic and not easily detachable or changeable.  Trying to determine which details in a story are "loose" and which are "bound" is one of the most important skills for reading stories effectively. One of the most important ways we can determine which details are bound and which are loose is by applying the principle of redundancy or repetition:  if a certain detail or kind of detail is mentioned more than once or twice in a story, we might suspect that it is relevant in some way.

The circulation in American universities of the central ideas of the New Criticism, also called "formalist," "contextual," or "objective" criticism, was mainly due to the publication of two highly influential literature textbooks in the 1930s by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: Understanding Fiction and Understanding Poetry. The most basic and pervasive premise of the New Criticism was that the meaning of a work is not equivalent to what the artist "intended" when he wrote it, for poetic language is so highly connotative that the ultimate meaning of a work of art exceeds any original intention. To get at a work's meaning the reader had to engage in a close analytical reading. The assumption was that the work was a highly unified object that communicated something significant about human experience by the choice and arrangement of its individual parts.

New Critics felt that the work's theme was too complex to be reduced to some discursive idea purposely placed within the poem by the author, which could be plucked out by the reader like a raisin from a cake. In a central essay on the subject entitled  "The Language of Paradox," Cleanth Brooks argued that whereas the scientist wants to freeze language into widely-agreed upon denotations, literature is always breaking up these agreements in perpetually new ways. The primary device for achieving this constant break-up is metaphor, and metaphor, argued the New Critics, is by its very nature always ironic and paradoxical. Thus the values sought after in poetry by the New Critics were those of complexity, irony, tension, and paradox.

According to Russian Formalists Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky, when approaching fiction one must make an initial distinction between the series of events which a writer takes as his subject matter and the specific structure that results when the writer presents the completed piece of fiction to the reader. Although one may be tempted to think of both these series of events as the same, formalists saw the former as merely the raw material, whereas the latter is the transformation of the raw material by means of purely literary conventions or devices.  The Russian Formalist notion of narrative structure that later proved highly influential is the concept of a "motif" as being the smallest particle of thematic material in a story, organized in strategically justifiable ways which the Russian Formalists call "motivation."

As I say, this is all old stuff, but every once in a while, a critic seems to discover the concept as if it were brand new. One example I ran across in doing the research for this blog was an article by Dan Shen entitled" 'Overall-Extended Close Reading' and Subtexts of Short Stories," English Studies 91 (April 2010). Shen, Changiang Professor of English at Peking University, notes that close reading, after being discredited for a time as conservative and limited, is showing signs of return. This should not be surprising, given the fact that regardless of what critical trend sweeps through graduate programs—theoretical, social, political, biographical, etc.—it is inevitable that there will always be a return to a close reading of the literary work.

Shen proposes what she calls "overall-extended close reading, "which she says is particularly useful in  investigating "subtexts of short stories." She suggests the following three parts of her so-called "new" methodology: (1) examining "local elements in relation to their global function, taking into account the interaction among textual details in different parts of the narrative; (2) taking into account the socio-historical contexts of the work; (3) paying attention to intertextual relations by comparing the text to related texts.

Anyone familiar with modern literary criticism since the New Criticism will see that this proposal is hardly original, for it simply suggests that close reading should not ignore a social and an intertextual context.

Shen chooses Stephen Crane's story "An Episode of War" to illustrate her "new" strategy, arguing that previous critics' failure to consider the interaction among "local elements" in the story and insufficient attention to intertextual and extra textual relations have resulted in a failure to perceive a "most essential subtext" in the story, whereas her "overall extended close reading" has enabled her to see a "macrostructural satirical strategy—"feminization" which  consistently deprives the protagonist and his comrades of masculinity as a most important cornerstone of traditional heroism."

The "local elements" Shen picks out in the story—the lieutenant dividing coffee, a simile of a girls boarding school, his crying out when shot — what she calls all typical feminine behaviors dramatize the soldier in the story as being like a "weak and vulnerable female."  She also notes several similes of child-like behavior, e.g. "Don't be a baby," which she calls "childization," which reinforces the "macrostructure" of feminization.  She concludes that this feminization strategy has eluded generations of critics because of the "bondage of conventional interpretative frames," (whatever that means).  She cites a Crane poem and  his story "Mystery of Heroism" to provide a social and intertextual context for his attitude to war.

I mention Professor Shen's discussion of subtext in Crane's "Episode of War" to illustrate that simply because a critic adopts a new term does not mean that said critic has access to the underlying significance of a story.  I suggest that Professor Shen's picking out references to traditional "feminine" behavior simply refers to a common cultural cliché that if a man does not face an injury with a stiff upper lip and a straight face, he risks being called a "sissy," or in some circles he is referred to by the vulgar metonymy whereby men reduce women to their genitals.

In a piece I published a piece on Crane's story "An Episode of War" some forty years ago, I suggested a "reading" of the "subtext," (without using that term) that integrated many more of what Shen calls "local elements" in the story than the simple cultural cliché of being a "sissy" and thus justified the story as embodying a much more universal theme typical of Crane's philosophic point of view in such stories as "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," and others.

Although the title of Stephen Crane's short story "An Episode of War" obviously points to an event somehow related to a national conflict, the central character, a lieutenant, is not engaged in a war activity when the story opens. He is simply dividing coffee for his men.  Instead of using his sword as an instrument of war, he is using it as a tool to perform an everyday household chore.   While engaged in an activity of ordered, "mathematical," normality the lieutenant suddenly cries out, and the situation is ordered and normal no longer. 

At this crucial point the story presents a frozen scene in which the lieutenant can only gaze "sadly, mystically" at the "green face of a wood," while the men stand "statue like and silent, astonished and awed by this catastrophe which happened when catastrophes were not expected."  As is usual when one is struck unexpectedly, the lieutenant looks quickly at the man near him "as if he suspected it were a case of personal assault."  When he realizes that the man next to him is not the guilty party, he looks further for a cause.  But all he sees is "the green face of a wood."  And indeed the answer to the question:  "What struck the lieutenant"--the question that the lieutenant, the men and the reader ask at this point--can only be:  "the green face of a wood."   

Crane's control of the details of this situation further suggests that the wood is the enemy.  He not only refuses to show us the person who fired the shot; he does not even say that the lieutenant was shot at all.  All we see is the blood that mysteriously appears on his sleeve.  Furthermore, it is the wood, not the supposed enemy behind it, that is called "hostile."  In fact, the wood dominates this first section of the story.  As the lieutenant begins his trip back through the lines for medical aid he stares at it once more; and the reader is forced to focus on it also as the men in silence "stared at the wood, then at the departing lieutenant; then at the wood, then at the lieutenant."

The wood as enemy is suggested by two more indirect references in the second section of the story.  When the lieutenant goes back through the lines, he sees a general on a black horse gazing over the lines of the blue infantry “at the green woods which veiled his problems.”  And at the end of this section, as the lieutenant turns his eyes toward the battle itself, he sees crowds of men standing and firing away, not at a concrete, observable enemy, but at the “inscrutable distance.”  With the piling up of such images of the wood as a "mystery," as "hostile," as something which "veils" one's problems, as "inscrutable," as something one can only gaze at "sadly, mystically"; we begin to realize that the lieutenant's enemy is the most general human enemy, that the "war" in which he is engaged in is the "war" in which human beings are always engaged--a war that, in our everyday ordered activities, we often forget.  The green face of the wood that strikes the lieutenant and gives no answer is the blankness we all face when something unexpected and mysterious confronts us..

Moreover, the lieutenant's confrontation in section one of the story is not only with the blank mystery of meaningless attack, but also with the ultimate extension of that mystery--the absolute mystery of death.  The men shy away from him as if his "hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence."  They "fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown."  The results of such a confrontation are that the lieutenant becomes, at the same time, both lowly and dignified.  The familiar sword he was using to divide the coffee becomes a strange thing to him.  Puzzled with what to do with it, he looks at in a " kind of stupefaction, as if he had been endowed with a trident, a scepter, or a spade."  The very metaphoric transformation of the sword suggests both implications--the royal dignity and authority of the scepter and trident, as well as the lowly earth-bound subservience of the spade.

Although "a wound gives strange dignity to him who wears it,"  and "men shy away from this new and terrible majesty," the lieutenant "wears the look of one who know he is the victim of a terrible disease and understands his helplessness."  Now we realize that the terrible disease of which the lieutenant is a victim is the same disease of which all human beings are victims --the disease of simply being human and therefore susceptible to the mystery of the uncontrollable world outside and the ultimate mystery of death.     

In the third section of the story, the lieutenant, having reached help behind his lines, faces a different response to his wound.  Instead of being treated with the awe due royalty, as he was earlier, he is now treated with the scorn due a child who has been careless enough to get himself into trouble.  The doctor's response to the lieutenant is the final manifestation of his isolation.  Because he sees wounded men every day, the lieutenant is not special or royal as he was before.  Just the opposite, he is beneath the doctor, "on a very low social plain."  The lieutenant becomes merely an object that must be tended to precisely because he is a frail and "brittle" human object susceptible to the "hostile" world outside.  In this story, the lieutenant is the only one who has faced the significance of the “green face of the wood,” and it is this that isolates him from all the others.

The lieutenant finally rebels. He fears the loss of the arm will make concrete a much greater loss he has been moving toward throughout the story--the loss of his familiar and ordered place in the world.  But his rebellion makes no difference; and as he gazes at the schoolhouse door, "as sinister to him as the portals of death," we confront again the "veil" or "curtain" referred to earlier in the story that hangs before the revelations of all existence.  We do not enter these "portals" with the lieutenant and thus do not know what "revelations" are made to him.  The loss of the arm is as mysterious as the wound itself.  Instead, the story jumps ahead to a scene perhaps several months later.  As his sisters, mother, and wife sob for a long time at the sight of the flat sleeve, he stands shamefaced and says, "Oh, well. . . I don't suppose it matters so much as all that."  And Crane sums up the story by saying, "And this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm."  Both statements are obviously ironic, Crane's understatement giving us the clue to the irony of the lieutenant's disclaimer. 

We realize that this has not been a story of how the lieutenant lost his arm.  That event occurred outside the given details of the story.  The story itself presents the experience that led up to the amputation.  The lieutenant realizes, just as we do now, that the women are only crying over the physical loss of the arm.  To them this is what the story is about.  But the lieutenant now realizes that the physical loss is not so important.  What is really important is the experience the lieutenant has gone through--an experience structured as a short story called "An Episode of War."  And this story is about the lieutenant's confrontation with the mystery of the world and mankind's precarious situation in it.

I suggest that Professor Shen's singling out references to so-called "feminization" is a reduction of the mysterious significance of Crane's story. According to the New Critics of long ago, one of the principle criteria of determining what Shen likes to call "subtext" is to do a "close reading" of the entire story, not merely trace a single cultural metaphor.

The concept of subtext is indeed an important aspect of what distinguishes a great short story from a simple narrative, but it certainly is not a new notion just because it has a new name.

Parallel Metaphoric Stories in Jerome Charyn's Bitter Bronx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With her cropped hair Dee looks like Peter Pan.

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

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

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

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

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

She could have "walked out of a dream."

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

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

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

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

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

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

E. L. Doctorow, Sweetland Stories

E. L. Doctorow, author of Ragtime (1975), Loon Lake (1980), and Billy Bathgate (1989), has died at the age of 84. Although he is much better known as a novelist, he did publish a number of short stories, his best collection, in my opinion being Sweetland Stories in 2004

 Acknowledging that the novel has always been his typical rhythm, Doctorow, in an interview after the publication of this collection of stories, said that while editing Best American Stories: 2000, he discovered that many authors were not writing the tight epiphanic Chekhovian story, but rather were going back to the more leisurely plot-based story typical of the nineteenth century. The result of this realization are these five long stories, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker.

I have discussed one of the stories in this collection, "Jolene," along with the film version of that story, in an earlier blog.  I offer the following comments on other stories in Sweetland Stories in Doctorow's honor.

The stories are primarily plot-based, recounted in a seemingly artless, casual tone--three told in first-person by deluded male narrators and two narrated in third person by ironic storytellers.  What is arguably “sweet” about these stories is the naiveté and innocence, thus ultimately the self-delusion, of the central characters as they seek to achieve the American dream, find transcendence in a savior, or uphold their ideals in the face of political chicanery.

“A House on the Plains” is a comic/horror, con artist story, told by the slow-witted son of a “merry widow” mother. After the father, who the mother says was pretty smart, “for a man,” mysteriously dies, the widow thinks it best that she and her son leave Chicago for a small town in Illinois where no one will jump to conclusions.  Once settled, she takes in three orphans from a New York social organization and ominously declares soon after that if they don’t come up with some money before winter the only resources they will have is the insurance she took out on the three children.

The mother, a bigger-than-life, pragmatic believer in the American Dream, advertises for immigrant men, particular Swedes and Norwegians, to join her in a partnership in a bountiful farm in the Midwest.  However, one by one the men who visit her disappear as her bank account increases from their insurance policies.  When the brother of one of the missing men arrives and begins to ask uncomfortable questions, the mother, nonplussed, formulates an escape plan that, despite its appalling results, is treated as blithely as the rest of the horrors in this comic tall tale.  Quite simply, she cuts off the heads of the nosey brother and her housekeeper to make it look as she and her son have died in a fire and   frames her handyman for the arson.

The story ends with the handyman in jail, Mama in California, and the narrator son reunited with his sexual partner from Chicago. The fact that three orphans, several innocent men, and the housekeeper are all dead is, of course, just part of the comic tone of this tall tale that makes us admire Mama for her achieving the American Dream of financial independence.

Doctorow has said that “Baby Wilson,” chosen for Best American Short Stories 2003, was inspired by his seeing a young woman in a long paisley dress walking along the Coast Highway in Southern California.  Although Doctorow says he is not sure why he made her into Karen Robileaux, the kidnapper of a newborn baby, he thinks he must have decided as a premise for the story that while a man would kidnap a child for ransom, a woman would want the child for herself. 

The story is told by Lester Romanowski, Karen’s shiftless boyfriend.  When she brings the stolen baby home, she declares it is her own newborn child that she is giving to Lester to be his son.  Lester decides he is going to reform himself into a person who makes executive decisions.  He wins some money at gambling, procures six fake credit cards and goes to sleep thinking what a “great country this was.”

 In a family van he buys with an American Express Gold Card, Lester and his “imitation wife and child” head west, of course, to California.  With the sun lighting their way like a “gold road,” he has a revelation of a new life for himself, where he will become a dependable father with a full-time job.  However, his dreams are dashed when he hears on the radio that the family of the kidnapped child has received a ransom note. Can you believe the evil in this world? he asks Karen, who articulates the theme of the story by saying that she has faith that people can be redeemed. 

 Lester and Karen drop the baby off at a church and head to Alaska, another place where people live and let live, a place where nobody asks too many questions.  When Karen gets pregnant, Lester declares himself alert and “ready for inspiration.”

“Walter John Harmon” is also a story about self-delusion.  The narrator, a former lawyer who has joined a religious group lead by an uneducated garage mechanic named Walter John Harmon, insists that he and his wife are not cult victims, and allows his wife to take part in a “purification” sex ceremony with the cult leader. 

The Community survives because many of the followers are lawyers, accountants, public relations experts, and computer specialists, who know how to keep the outside world at a distance.  The story focuses on the means by which Harmon maintains his charismatic hold on the Community and how the members protect themselves from the outside world.

The followers’ need to believe is so strong that even when Walter John deserts them with the narrator’s wife, the Elders, using the vague language and zany logic of philosophic sophistry and Messianic Christianity, argue that this immersion in sin and disgrace is a beautiful paradox of a prophecy fulfilling itself by means of its negation.  The narrator basks in the glory of his unfaithful wife who has been chosen to join Harmon.

Discovering half-burned papers in which Harmon has laid out plans for a wall to be built around the compound, a task the Community finds difficult since all their estates have been placed in Harmon’s name in Swiss bank accounts, the destitute group undergoes a harsh winter.  The story ends ominously with the narrator planning to build the wall, noting that the plans, in spite of Harmon’s lack of military experience, provide the Community with a clear and unimpeded field of fire.

“Child, Dead in the Rose Garden” follows the conventions of a political mystery.  Told by a White House Special Agent, B. W. Molloy, the story recounts the implications and effects of the discovery of a dead five-year-old boy in the Rose Garden of the White House.  Only five months from retirement, Molloy, a twenty-four year veteran of the FBI, gets the case.  Suspecting a symbolic act by terrorists, the administration wants the investigation to be kept secret, and Molloy finds himself running into obstructions from the head of the White House Office of Domestic Policy, who insists that the body was never found, that the event never happened.   Molloy, however, perseveres and flies to the boy’s home in Houston, only to find out that the child’s immigrant parents are being detained by the INS.  Further investigation reveals that the boy’s father was a gardener for a wealthy Texan, been a strong supporter of the President. 

The source of the mystery turns out to be the man’s daughter, Chrissie Stevens, who engineered the placement of the boy, who died of natural causes, to shock those that run things into some sense of responsibility.  After warning the Office of Domestic Policy at the White House that if the boy’s parents are not released by the INS, he will give the story to major newspapers, Molloy resigns from the Bureau and writes a letter to the Guzmans telling them that their son will lie in an unmarked grave in Arlington National Cemetery among others who died for their country.

These are entertaining and diverting stories that explore the nature of individual human hopes and the national mythos of the American Dream told by a master storyteller.

James Kelman and the "Art," Not the Social Message, of the Short Story

One of the many benefits I enjoy from writing this blog is that I occasionally get a message from a fellow-fan of-the-short-story calling my attention to a writer that I have neglected.

A few months ago I received some correspondence from Brian Hamill, submissions editor of the new Scottish journal thi wurd, asking me if I had read the stories of James Kelman, a writer he, and others, call the greatest Scottish writer currently at work on fiction both long and short.

I am embarrassed to say that I had read only two Kelman stories, "Home for a Couple of Days" because it was in The Oxford Book of Scottish Stories (1995), edited by Douglas Dunn, and "Some Thoughts That Morning" because it was in the Clocktower Press collection edited by Duncan McLean entitled Ahead of Its Time (1998). I took another look at the two stories and recalled them as relatively simple, even inconsequential stories—one about a young man who has come back to his home town after an absence of a couple of years to find, not surprisingly, that things have changed and the other, as the title suggests, just some random "thoughts" by a guy on a subway and generalizing about the "great swaths of hypocrisy in the world."

But when a reader of this blog recommends a writer to me, I take it seriously and follow up. Maybe I was just not reading as carefully as I should have. So I ordered copies of Busted Scotch, a selection of 35 Kelman stories previously published in his collections in Scotland, but not so well known in the U.S., and The Good Times, his first book after he won the Booker Prize in 1994. I started reading. I also started reading some background material on Kelman and some reviews and academic criticism of his short fiction. Right away, a couple of issues about Kelman's use of the short story as a form caught my attention..

First there is the issue of language and culture. Kelman has been blasted by some for his overuse of four-letter words, even going so far as to count how many times "fuck" is used in his prize-winning novel.  In his acceptance speech for the 1994 Booker Prize, Kelman insisted that his culture and its language have the right to exist and added, "A fine line can exist between elitism and racism. On matters concerning language and culture, the distance can sometimes cease to exist altogether." This connection between elitism and racism bothers me, for it seems to justify a common notion espoused by postcolonial and cultural critics—that if you place a high value on "art" as being aesthetically valuable rather than being socially polemical and possibly useful, you are definitely elitist, and may indeed be racist. Because I have always refused to value fiction as a container for socially significant content, I have been accused of being "elitist" and, by implication, racist.

James Wood, one of the judges of the Booker prize that contentious year Kelman won has said that although Kelman's claim that verbal elitism approaches actual racism may seem "politically overwrought," he adds  that the "overwrought" negative reaction to Kelman's win—with one judge calling How Late It Was, How Late "crap" and one critic saying the author himself was an "illiterate savage"—may justify Kelman's claim.

I am not so sure that one bad diatribe deserves another.

In his New Yorker review of Kelman's collection If It Is Your Life, Wood says Kelman's strongest work is in the short story form rather than the novel. Other critics and academics agree that it is Kelman's short stories, rather than his novels, that will assure his place as a writer. In an article in Journal of the Short Story in English, academic critic J. D. MacArthur says Kelman told him that everything is in his short stories. "If people looked at the short stories they wouldn't ask me the questions they do about the novels."

Adrian Hunter, in his essay on Kelman and the Short Story in the Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (2010) says that Kelman "approaches the short story not as a condensed, attenuated or unelaborated novel, but regards its shortness as a positive quality. However, instead of focusing on Kelman's mastery of the short story as an art form, Hunter insists that Kelman is attracted to the short story because its "atomistic, discontinuous quality" seems so suitable for stories about a working class that is "powerless and sundered." Kelman is drawn to the short story, says Hunter, because it is a "form that in its very brevity tends towards the fragmentary, inconclusive, atomistic… perfectly calibrated to the portrayal of a working class that has….become…isolated.."

This notion that the short story is an appropriate form for the expression of a Marxist view of the plight of the working class is a popular one recently, and has provided some academic critics vitae fodder in an era when the study of "culture" has surpassed the study of literature in English departments around the world. Although Kelman has stated his allegiance to postcolonial thought, I am not convinced that his form and language are in the service of exposing, to use Hunter's words, "superstructural economic forces" of the plight of the working class, of being on the "wrong side of the labour-capital equation."

The short story has never had a political agenda, has never been politically polemical, has never succeeded as "realism," in the Zola/Howells sense of emphasizing social content rather than aesthetic form. I have never read or heard a short story writer who has argued otherwise.

In his long background piece in Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 2000), Stephen Bernstein says the "smallness of event" in Kelman's fiction is a conscious strategy, "part of a thoroughgoing socialist commitment." But Kelman's own remarks on this issue, quoted by Bernstein, does not support this oversimplification of his work.

Kelman says the whole idea of the "big dramatic event, of what constitutes 'plot' only assumes that economic security exists." What Kelman is actually talking about here is similar to what Frank O'Connor says in the opening chapter of his book The Lonely Voice. As an example of the relative unimportance of economic security or social injustice to the short story, O'Connor cites the difference between America and Ireland's success with the short story and England's relative failure with the form and preference for the novel, which he attributes to the difference in the national attitude toward society.  In America the attitude toward society, O'Connor suggests, is that "It may work." In England, as "It must work." And in Ireland as "It can't work."  The novel, says O'Connor, can "adhere to the classical concept of a civilized society, of man as an animal  who lives in a community."  But the short story, he says, "remains by its very nature remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent."

The problem with critics of Kelman's fiction is that although they seem to recognize that he is more powerful as a short-story writer than as a novelist, they seem stumped about how to describe that success—that is, without attributing to Kelman's short stories the kind of realism, social commentary and socialist polemic they find so readily in the novel but which seldom appears successfully in the short story. I suggest that it is doing Kelman a disservice to try to read his short stories as if they were like novels in their social or socialist significance.

I would like to offer some suggestions about a few of Kelman's short stories as just that-- short stories—not sections of novels or novelistic in either technique or theme.

Kelman writes stories that are deceptive in their simplicity. Take the three-page piece in The Good Times, entitled "My eldest." It is a first-person pov of a man at the beach with his wife and three children.  He is sitting on a boulder on the shore staring out to sea in a reverie. Nothing seems to be happening in the world.  But you sense something is going on, something that cannot be easily described or explained.

The story breaks into three separate but related elements: (1) the physical world that the narrator feels and sees; (2) the world of his wife and three children that relate to him; (3) the world of his reverie.

(1)   First there are the water insects that scuttle over his shoes, for which he does not feel anything.  Then there is the little boat in the wide expanse of the ocean. He also sees a green yacht, but it has nothing to do with him. Then there is evidence of a fire.

(2)   His children are behind him, but he intentionally stays in his reverie.  His eldest is in his line of vision, but it is as if he didn't care if he saw him or not. He senses the boy is frightened and trying hard not to be uneasy. The other son and the daughter are only incidental to him; when he teases his daughter his wife smiles, "wiping out the previous bad feeling." When he says he feels like swimming over a submarine, he winks at his elder son and tells him to come to him.  But the boy turns and runs off.

(3)   Although the physical world around him and his family are part of his experience, it is what he thinks about that is central to the story, or rather the process of his thought, for he is not really thinking about anything in particular.

(a)    The wide expanse of the ocean makes him think of the elements, life and death, which makes him think of the old graveyard; when he takes off his tee shirt and throws it back over his shoulder he thinks of the kind of luck he carries, neither good nor bad.

(b)   The  remnants of a fire makes him think of those that had been there, and he thinks if he swam out, he would not drown, unless he had a hopeless cramp or hit some hopeless undercurrent—"things that were hopeless."

The story, it seems to me, like many short stories, is about the isolated self, and the self in this story is intensely self-conscious of this isolation, even meditates on it.  It is as if the eldest son senses the father's strangeness and separation, and it frightens him.

"The Good Times" is another one of these very brief stories about the awareness of aloneness. A man wakes up during the night and senses the strangeness of the house he is in.  He thinks (and thinking is what the story is about) that his lungs are caving in and his flesh is dissipating into a vapour and his belly is full of wind. When his wife is awakened, he feels that unless she takes him with her into her dreams, he will remain alone, wondering what will happen to himself for the rest of his life. When she goes back to bed, he thinks of all his personal possessions, most of which are useless. He says, truth be told, he is fond of his ailments and even fond of his nightmares, because they are the stuff of life. He dreads going back to bed, but thinks it was probably the same for his wife, and he could just lie there and listen to her breath, watching her eyelids twitch.  The story ends with the line, "But these are the good times."

Kelman is very good at creating the subtle sense of isolation in the mind of his male characters, a budding realization of the inevitability of aloneness—a theme typical of the short story as a form.

Although Kelman seems drawn to these very brief impressionistic pieces in his collection The Good Times, he also writes more conventional plotted stories as well.  Perhaps the best known and one of the best liked is "Greyhound for Breakfast," from his 1987 collection.

The central character Ronnie is a fairly typical Kelman character.  He is out of a job, waiting for his monthly handout from the government, short on funds, a bit of a loser.  He drinks a bit too much and hangs out with his mates at bars. In this story he has bought a greyhound, although he cannot afford it, and he is leading it about town avoiding going home to tell his wife what he has done. He visits some bars where he hopes to get a positive reaction to his purchase from his friends, insisting that the intends to race the dog and making his money back. His friends are not so encouraging, Ronnie's son has gone off to London to find work, and he is not happy about it. One of his friends says, "Your boy goes off to England and you go out and buy a dog."

Ronnie becomes angry with his friends and continues to wander about, thinking about how to justify what he has done and how he will confront his wife with the news. He sits and talks for a few minutes with a man and watches some children at play near a pond, expressing some concern that they might get fall in the water or get hurt. As he thinks about how to tell his wife, he thinks that the one thing he was always good at is making excuses.

He thinks of the greyhound as a sort of metaphoric parallel to himself and others—running around a track trying to catch a pot of gold.  He thinks his son is like that. He thinks everyone is racing, or maybe it is only him in a foolish race. His thoughts about the dog and his foolish purchase, his son, and his wife intensify as he continues to wander and postpone going home, worrying about what will happen to his boy in London, wondering what he will says to his wife, until he thinks he will just tell her something or other, "what the fuck he didn't know, it didn't fucking matter; what did it matter, it didnt fucking matter."

Ronnie is a sympathetic character who tries to find ways to give himself some worth, ways to protect those he loves, ways to find acceptance from his friends, ways to make a success of his life. Kelman does a fine job, it seems to me, of creating a character and a basic situation that represents a general human sense of struggle, helplessness, loneliness, desperation. Ronnie, like many men, wants to be a good friend, a good father, a good husband, a good man.  But often one does not know how to do all that.  It sometimes seems too much, just too damned much, and one thinks that no matter what one does, it doesn't really matter.

I thank Brian Hamill for getting me to reread James Kelman. I am sorry that I am not as familiar with his work and with Scottish short fiction in general as I should be.  I hope to remedy that in the near future. I also thank Brian for sending me a copy of the second issue of thi wurd, Summer 2014, which contains, among other delights, Brian's own story, "The Snib," a wonderful "I Am Your Brother" story. The interview with Alan Warner is certainly worth reading, although it might be a bit depressing for the aspiring writer. Warner laments that people just don't buy enough good new books of fiction and poetry nowadays because they are so expensive, noting for example that he went into Waterstones recently and bought two hard backs by favorite writers and paid fifty quid for them. The sad case for many writers is that they spend two or three years working on a book and then publishers have to remainder them because they cannot afford the storage cost; thus they end up pulped. Practically no writers of good fiction can make a living doing so. He noted that James Kelman, who he called "our greatest living Scottish writer," only made about 15 grand last year. Like Warner, I also find these facts "depressing and unsettling."

I wish the editors of thi wurd much luck in their efforts to promote the publication of good fiction in Scotland.  

Happy Birthday, Alice Munro

To celebrate Alice Munro's 84th birthday today, I am posting the first few paragraphs of my new essay on Munro, which will appear in a book to be published in Canada soon.  I will give you the publication information and date when I receive it.

Living in the Story:

Fictional Reality in the Stories of Alice Munro

Charles E. May

Professor Emeritus

California State University, Long Beach

Throughout her distinguished career, Alice Munro has frequently been asked by reviewers and interviewers, "Why do you write short stories?" behind which, of course, always lurked the reproach, "Why don't you write novels?" Although she is no longer nagged about her narrative choice of the much maligned short story, reviewers and interviewers have shifted to a new tactic. Instead of chiding Munro for not writing novels, they now try to account for the success of her stories by claiming that they are like novels, not like short stories at all. How else to account for how great they are? Two or three such claims should be sufficient to underline the point:

"No one else quite constructs short stories that have the slow, rich emotional depth of novels."" (Lockerbie)

 “You get, in fact, all the complexity and nuance of a novel, concentrated within several dozen pages.” (Springstubb)

"Each story reads like a novel; each is a vast canvas of complicated characters, tangled events and quietly turbulent revelations.” (Changnon)

Munro definitively answered the impertinent "Why do you write short stories?" question back in 1986, when she said that originally she planned to write a few stories to get some practice and then to write novels, but shrugged, “I got used to writing stories, so I saw my material that way, and now I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel" (Rothstein). And now everyone, even, I dare say, her agent and her publishers, are glad she never did.

Given my long-time interest in the genre, I have always been very gratified by Alice Munro's suggestion that there is  a "short-story way" of seeing reality and delighted with her persistent denial that her stories are like novels. She has said she is not drawn to writing novels because she doesn't see that people develop and arrive anywhere, but rather that they live in flashes, from time to time (Hancock)--an image that echoes Nadine Gordimer's famous argument that the short story as a form may be better equipped than the novel to capture whatever can be grasped of human reality where contact is like the" flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness" (180).

Munro has said, "I'm after the intensity of moments and layers of meaning that come from short stories. I want these moments to be bright and clear and also filled with density and mystery. I couldn’t get that from the novel form… I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come from in a novel, and I do in a short story" (Rothstein). On another occasion, she used a metaphor to describe this short-story excitement. “I can get a kind of tension when I’m writing a short story, like I’m pulling on a rope and I know where the rope is attached. With a novel, everything goes flabby" (Struthers).    

Still, it seems that reviewers can find no other way to explain the complexity of Munro's works except by lumping them together with that "flabby," or, as Henry James once called it, "baggy," monster--the novel. Can we blame her then for not being able to resist a sly jab at short story naysayers in a fairly recent story in Too Much Happiness entitled “Fiction"--in which the central character buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party and is disappointed to find out it is a only 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” (52).

Jonathan Franzen scolded critics and judges for the international neglect of Munro a few years ago by chiding, "The feeling in Stockholm is that too many Canadians and too many pure short-story writers have already been given the Nobel Prize." We are all happy now that Alice Munro is safely inside the Nobel gates of Literature—even if she does only write short stories. In one of her first interviews after winning the prize, she graciously said that the award was not only a wonderful thing for her, but a wonderful thing for the short story in general, and she hoped it would bring new readers to the form (Smith).

Despite critics'' insistence on the "novelistic" nature of Munro's stories, the qualities of her work that are so compelling are actually the very qualities that have always made great short stories so powerful: for example, the short story's transformation of seemingly trivial and unrelated material into a tight, thematically-significant pattern. Fellow short-story master, Deborah Eisenberg has said that one of the joys of Munro's writing is "the apparently casual narrative that turns out to have led inexorably to some inescapable juncture." 

And another fellow short-story writer, Lorrie Moore, noted, "The particular and careful ways Munro's themes are laid into her narrative trajectories cause them to sneak up upon the reader" (41). As I have argued for many years, this has been one of the dominant characteristics of the short story form since Gogol, Poe, Hawthorne, Maupassant, Chekhov. Like the stories of her predecessors,  Munro's fictions build toward a tightly unified thematic pattern, not the construction of a mirror in the roadway.