A Peculiar Constitutional

Here it is, my twelfth short story of 2010.  I'll be back soon with another.  I'm almost done with my second novel, so hopefully you'll start hearing about that in the near future, too.





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Enjoy this one, it was quite fun to write:

            My wife and I often take a constitutional with our feline companion, Chester, most evenings after I arrive home from work.  This particular evening in question, I was intrigued by an invitation my wife received from our mutual friend, Miss Harriet P. Stander. Miss Stander had requested our presence this evening for a rendezvous on her front porch for beverages in order that we might behold a marvel in her possession that she assured us simply couldn't be described in words. 

            The sojourn to Miss Stander's house was perhaps a mile on foot and as Chester, my wife, and I walked, we had a lovely conversation abut assorted things of various natures.

            My wife marveled at the weather and the sorts of flowers in bloom.  I myself pondered aloud about the status of politics and the upcoming election.  Chester, meanwhile, offered us a fascinating epiphany he'd had regarding the meaningless of life and the ever-expanding nature of the universe and cosmos.  It was all a bit over my head, but the sciences had never been my strongest suit.

            Chester was a devilishly intelligent cat that often confounded me with the depth of his learned philosophy. 

It was no wonder I enjoyed his company.

My wife enjoyed him for altogether different reasons.  She was barren, you see, and Chester tolerated quite admirably her predilection to groom and pamper a child-sized creature of intelligence.  It was her life's goal it seemed to always make sure that at all times Chester had tied snugly around his neck an ornately ribboned bowtie.

Were I a jealous man, I might be upset about the time spent gossiping between the pair while my wife manicured his hands and pedicured his feet. But he was a cat and such notions were absolute poppycock.  He was a handsome cat, to be sure, but still just a cat.

We arrived promptly at Miss Stander's to find that she'd been waiting for us on her porch with mint juleps and iced tea.

"Mister Book, Missus Book."  She greeted us politely, but considered Chester and a look of consternation arrived on her face like a train pulling into a station.  "Chester," she added with coldness.

Chester and I both tipped our hats politely at Miss Stander and my wife offered a doubly polite curtsy. 

"Mister Book, might you and your feline companion care to sit while I have a private word inside with Missus Book for a moment?"

I nodded to Chester and he bowed low, answering for us both, "We'd be most delighted, Ma'am."

"Wonderful." 

She and Missus Book awayed through the front door.  Chester began to speak as soon as he was confident they were out of ear-shot.  "I'm not quite sure she likes me, James."

"Pish posh.  I wouldn't say that, Chester.  She's had us all over before."

"True, to be sure, but something in her demeanor was indeed disconcerting."

"In all truth, she did seem at least modestly discombobulated by your presence."

"Discombobulated indeed." 

"Perhaps she has guest over with an allergy to cats?"

"Hardly likely."

It was then that my wife and Miss Stander came from within her lovely abode.  Chester and I stood up quickly and remained standing until they took their seats on the porch to either side of us.

"I do hope everything is all correct, Ma'am."

"All correct, indeed, Mister Cat.  I have spoken things over with Missus Book and she has promised me that you will be on your best behaviour."

"You wound me, madame.  Have you know my behaviour to ever be less than best?"

"No, Mister Cat, which is why I've agreed to let you stay for this exhibition."

"I appreciate your honesty, Ma'am.  I assure you that my behaviour will never have been better."

"Would you all like a drink before we begin?"

We all agreed that beverages would be delightful and she passed around cold, sweating cups.  Chester and I opted for the mint juleps while the ladies opted for the iced tea, though Miss Stander assured my wife that there was a healthy dose of bourbon in the tea.

The four of us sat there, fanning ourselves in the heat, sipping our libations and discussing nothing in particular until Missus Book politely asked what it was the invitation to come over was all about.

"Well," Miss Stander answered, "The oddity I've come across is so amazing I just had to show it to you.  Merely telling you about it would not do it one bit of justice.  And it's so adorable it just makes my heart melt."

"You've certainly piqued my curiosity, and I'm sure Missus Book's as well."

"Mine is aroused to no end," Chester added.

"Of that, I have no doubt, Mister Cat."

"Well what is it, then, Miss Stander?"

"Best just to show you."

Miss Stander rose from her chair and went inside her house to retrieve her unspeakable curiosity while the three of us remained outside, sipping our drinks.  I could tell by the crooked smile on my wife's face that she had at the very least some inkling about what we were about to behold.

Chester licked his lips and speculated, "I'm wondering if it has anything to do with a natural enemy of the Felis Catus."

"And why would that be, Chester?"

Chester put his drink down on the table and rested his furry paws on his rounded belly.  "Well, James, why else would my presence which is normally welcomed with open arms be met with such incredulous apprehension?"

            "And you think some manner of fish or bird or rat might be the object of her mystery?"

            "What else could it be?"

            "But there's nothing inherently spectacular or marvelous about any of those things.  Perhaps it's something else.  Those are much too mundane to be wondrous."

            "Maybe a new style of Nepeta cataria she's cultivated?"

            "Anything is more logical than a simple animal."

            "We'll see, James.  We'll see."

            "Oh, would you two stop arguing?  Whatever it is, no matter how mundane or stupendous, we'll all smile and nod and treat it with a healthy and polite sense of awe as befits Miss Stander's hospitality."

            "Yes, love."

            "I can agree to that, Lilly."

            It was another moment or two before Miss Stander appeared back on the porch, her hands cupped around the item of our intense mental acquisitiveness.

            "It's certainly smaller than a bread box..."

            She sat down in her chair and placed the oddity on the table.

            It was indeed truly wondrous and words fail me.  Chester was right to a degree in his initial conjecture of a natural enemy of a feline.  The small animal running about on the tabletop was indeed mouse-like, but it was a natural aberration, a mutated variant on a standard mouse that made it bizarre and worthy of a circus sideshow, but was at the same time alluring and awe-inspiring.

            The mouse, if you could call it that, had soft white fur all around and a pink tail.  Clearly it was albino, but that wasn't the most astounding thing about it.  It had three legs but two heads and two sets of pink little eyes.  Its hind legs were proper, but its heads were propped up beneath a lone leg centered beneath them.  As it scurried around the table, every other step would cause it to pop up as though it were an acrobat.

            It was indeed a sight to behold.  The mouse was adorable, unique, and an amazing bit of nature brought to the civilization of Miss Stander's home.  Our proverbial jaws dropped.

            Except for Chester. 

            I had to admire the cat.  His claws were dug into the side of the chair as though he was being propelled by automobile at great speed.  His mouth was wired shut and he was perfectly still save for the even breathing in his chest and his eyes darting back and forth, following each and every movement of the two-headed mouse like a predator.

            It was no wonder Miss Stander was wary of Chester's presence.  This twilight visitation would sap him of any and all willpower for weeks to come.  Self-restraint was a difficult skill to master, and as intelligent and well mannered as Chester was, he was still very much a slave to his own instinct.

            "You all right Chester?"

            Through clenched teeth he made a sound in the affirmative.

            I was very proud of him.

            "Isn't this just the cutest, most amazing little thing you've ever seen?"

            "Very much, so," my wife replied. 

            "Where did you find him?"  I asked

            "Well, I was out in town and was doing some shopping for trinkets and knick-knacks as I often do on my Saturday afternoons, you know, just to get out of the house and there was a Chinese street vendor in front of my favorite store selling odds and ends.  And Manfred here, that's what I call him, Manfred, was in a cage and for sale."

            "Fascinating.  He truly is an amazing creature.  I can see why you'd want to purchase him."

            "Are you sure you're all right, Chester?"

            He hadn't moved an inch since Miss Stander revealed Manfred.

            "Mm-hmm."

            I didn't believe him.  Though felines don't sweat, I could have sworn that Chester had water beading at his brow from his concentrated effort to remain calm and civil.

            Missus Book thought it better to keep the conversation going while the wily little thing bounced about on the table.  Perhaps by engaging in conversation, Chester might have an easier time keeping his thoughts away from murder. "He is amazing, to be sure.  Is he a talking mouse?"

            "I must say I don't know.  He hasn't said a peep, but that's not to say he's not a talking mouse."

            It was then I thought to interject my comments, "I've met many a talking animal and many that never utter a word, but it's my considered opinion that all the animals in the world are talking animals, some of them are just too shy to say so.  What do you think Chester?"

            Chester eased up a bit.  He was always pleased when he was asked for his opinion and this time was no exception.  "Well...  It's a well-known fact that all animals, human or otherwise, have the cerebral capacity for speech.  But are there not humans that can't speak also?  Is it a matter of choice?  Or is there an underlying biological problem there?  Who really knows?"

            Chester gave us that food for thought and as I was about to offer another point, we were all distracted by an eruptive sound reminiscent of a cannon from my years in the trenches.

            The sound startled poor Miss Stander so much that most of her iced tea ended up on the front of her dress and the wooden slats of the porch.  "My heavens!"

            Missus Book stood with a kerchief, doing her best to sop up the mess on Miss Stander's dress.  

            The sound rang out again and it was a trifle easier to pinpoint the direction of it.  It was clearly coming for a northeasterly direction and for a moment I wondered if the city proper had come under attack by some unknown force.  "Dear Lord.  I wonder if we really are under attack."

            We stood there for a full minute, waiting for the thunderous booming to come again, but it seemed to have subsided and things calmed down a bit.  We all took our chairs once more and grabbed our drinks for sipping.  The mint julep was quite refreshing.

            "I wonder what it was," Miss Stander stated in a voice that matched her rattled demeanor.

            "I'm sure it was nothing.  The factory is in town in that direction, perhaps there was a problem there."

            Another long draught of my mint julep was just what I needed to settle down from all the excitement and speculation, but Miss Stander's level of arousal shot right back up again.  "Where did he...  Where has it gone to?"

            "What?  Where has what gone to, Miss Stander?"  I looked about and for the life of me couldn't imagine what she was missing. 

She ducked her head beneath the table and got low to the floor, looking beneath the chairs.   That's when I noticed what was missing from the table.  It was her marvelous, two-headed, three-legged mouse Manfred that was gone. 

Miss Stander stood then and it seemed obvious.  Her face turned beet red and from her throat came a sound like a teapot boiling over.  Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she fainted, collapsing to the floor of her porch.  There was the tinkling of broken glass as her iced tea shattered over the ground.

It was then that Missus Book and I looked over to our feline companion.  Chester's cheeks pulled back and he flashed us a sly, sharp-toothed grin that dripped with guilt.

"What did you expect?  I might be a talking cat, but I'm still just a cat."

Best Short Story Collections of 2010

It is New Year’s Eve, 2010. I have have looked over the “Best Books of 2010” lists of the major newspapers, networks, and magazines and list below the short story collections chosen for those lists, along with my own comments on those I have read.

The Washington Post listed only “Best Novels” in their fiction category, as if short stories did not exist.

The Village Voice listed no short story collections in their fiction list.

The San Francisco Chronicle listed only one: Selected Stories by William Trevor.

Publishers Weekly listed only one: Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates.

Los Angeles Times’ David Ulin listed only The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

The New Yorker listed only Barry Hannah’s Long, Last, Happy.

Slate listed only The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie

Atlantic chose Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg & What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy

National Public Radio listed Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li & The Collected Stories Of Deborah Eisenberg. They listed Patricia Engel’s Vida as one of their “best debut collections.”

The Guardian asked individual reviewers to list their favorites:
A. S. Byatt picked Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
Roddy Doyle picked Amy Bloom's collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Pankij Mishra, who asked: “Is short fiction with its necessarily fragmentary form and brisk epiphanies, better placed than the panoramic novel to capture the weird disjointedness and partial visions of modern life?” adding he was more captivated this year by short stories than long novels. Mishra chose: David Means's The Spot; Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

The New York Times’ 100 Notable books included ten short story collections:

Double Happiness by Mary-Beth Hughes
Fun with Problems by Robert Stone
Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr.
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
Selected Stories by William Trevor.
Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates.
What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy.
Wild Child by T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Spot by David Means.
Vida by Patricia Engel.

Of all those listed above, here are the ones that I have read, with a brief comment on each:

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
The short story’s lack of room to ruminate about so-called “big” socio-political issues is one reason the form is not popular with so-called “serious” critics who prefer genres that generalize. The kind of complexity that fascinates masters of the short story is not captured by using more and more words but by using just the right ones. Good stories, like good poems, don’t pontificate. The best stories f Deborah Eisenberg, who has been called a master of the form, reflect her continuing conscientious effort to provide a structure and a syntax for feelings unspeakable until just the right rhythm makes what was loose and lying around inside clench and cluster into a meaningful pattern. Eisenberg is indeed a master of the short story. She succeeds much more often than she fails because she brilliantly exploits what the form does best. It’s only when she seems to be seduced by the public demand for the novelistic that she breaks faith with the great masters who have preceded her.

Selected Stories by William Trevor
This is an anthology of stories from Trevor’s most recent collections. As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. Trevor’s stories are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the European Union, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. These are luminous, restrained stories. Every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.

The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie ranks second only to Raymond Carver as being responsible for the renaissance of the American short story in the 1970s and 80s. Seen as the spokesperson for her generation, Beattie has been alternately praised for her satiric view of that era's passivity and criticized for presenting sophisticated New Yorker magazine characters unable to understand themselves or others. Beattie's people seldom know what makes them do the things they do and have no real sense of purpose or destiny; thus instead of engaging in deliberate action, they more often seem acted upon. Beattie's characters seldom experience the kind of epiphany of awareness we have been accustomed to in twentieth century short fiction from James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson up through Eudora Welty and Bernard Malamud. Moreover, since many of her stories are told in present tense, her characters seldom engage in meditation or attempt a search for meaning, and there is little cause for her narrators to indulge in exposition or exploration. Beattie, especially in her early stories, seems to follow the Chekhovian-inspired dictum in one of her own stories: "Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it."

Wild Child by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Since the appearance of his first collection The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1979), T. Coraghessan Boyle has published over a hundred stories, and, as this new collection is ample evidence, he is still the consummate showman—an old-fashioned yarn spinner who can mesmerize an auditorium audience of several hundred as though they were hunched wide-eyed around a campfire. Like the true professional he is, Boyle seems compelled to convert everything he experiences, reads, sees on television, or hears about into a story by the transformative process of “what if.” What if the California La Conchita earth slide of 2005 got in the way of a guy trying to get a liver transplant to Santa Barbara? What if a man bought a boa constrictor for a pet and then became so fond of the rats he bought to feed it that he got rid of the snake and let the rats take over? What if a rich couple’s dog died and they reincarnated it by cloning? What if a poor Mexican kid could feel no pain and his father exploited him like a sideshow freak? Of the fourteen new stories in this collection, some, especially those dealing with children, such as “Balto,” “Sin Dolor,” and the title story, are wisely and carefully controlled and thus emotionally irresistible. Others, such as “Admiral,” “Bulletproof,” and “Ash Monday,” exemplify a significant satiric point. Still others, such as “La Conchita,” “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado,” and “Thirteen Hundred Rats” are just clever excuses for stories. All in all, it’s a good mix of the meaningful and the merely amusing.

Fun with Problems by Robert Stone
One of the most critical differences between the novel and the short story is that whereas in the former the plot can wander and the writer can ramble almost aimlessly, in the latter, the action has to have some end-oriented intention on which the writer must focus scrupulously to give the story a unified thematic significance. The reader can perceive this difference immediately when reading a short story by a writer who is more comfortable writing novels. Such is the case with several stories in Robert Stone’s Fun With Problems. Stone has written some impressive novels in his career, e.g. Dog Soldiers (1975), but only one decent short story, “Helping” from his only other story collection Bear and His Daughter (1997). It’s not just that most of the stories in Fun With Problems are peopled by unpleasant drinking and drug-taking male throwbacks to the old days when Stone hung out with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in the 1960s—“Wine Dark Sea” about a free-lance journalist who gets drunk by six and often overlooks deadlines and entire assignments, “The Archer,” about an artist and university professor who goes after his wife and her lover with a crossbow while dressed in jockey shorts, and the title story wherein an aging attorney seduces a young woman trying to stay sober into drinking again--it’s that they are so haphazardly and indifferently written.

The Spot by David Means.
This is David Means’ fourth collection of short stories, and his publishers are probably tired of trying to get him to plunk down on their desks the manuscript of a novel. In an interview after the publication of his award-winning second collection, Assorted Fire Events (2000), Means said he feels that if you're really good at something you should keep doing it. The Spot, a collection of thirteen new stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Harper’s, and other places, is just one more piece of evidence that Means is very good at what he does. Since his first collection, A Quick Kiss of Redemption (1993), Means has largely moved away from Chekhovian realism, taking more chances with experimental narrative structure. Pursuing tactics begun in Assorted Fire Events and made more evident in his last collection, The Secret Goldfish (2004), Means takes increasing liberties in The Spot with storytelling techniques to explore the nature and importance of storytelling itself. David Means’ unerring ability to transform the seemingly casual into the meaningful causal is what makes him a master of the short story, placing him in the ranks of other great short story writers such as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro, who stubbornly resisted pressure to desert their chosen form for the more highly prized novel.

Here are the ones I have not read, but will order:

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
Vida by Patricia Engel.
Double Happiness by Mary-Beth Hughes
What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy
Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom

I will probably not buy Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah, because I have read all of Hannah's early stories, and this collection only contains four new oness. I will probably not buy Sourland because I have already read several of these stories in periodical publication, and because I just do not care for Oates.

Happy New Year to my readers!

Hatchet

I'm sorry it's been a while.  I've been swamped at work and working on the new novel.  This was written and ready to go in November but I never had a chance to type it up until tonight.  December's is already written, too.  I'm hoping to type it up tomorrow so it's up in 2010.  I've already got an idea for January, so this might be a great couple of weeks for short story reading.





I don't even know how to feel about it at the end.  I was having very weird dreams that led to writing this.  



And don't forget to check out my collections available for the Kindle. 

            It had been a full night and most of a day since we'd been trapped in the basement of my mother's house.  There was one door leading up and out and bars over windows to small to escape from.

            We had to barricade our one escape route to keep my mother and sister out.

            "I don't know long we'll be able to stay here."  Leave it to my little brother to state the obvious.

            "I know.  But what else can we do?"

            "I don't know."

            I shouldn't have come here.  He called me and asked me to come check on our mother and sister.  They'd come home from a shipping trip with a fever that put them both down in bed with a vengeance.

            "They're not responsive.  I know you're busy, but I want to know if you think I should take them to a doctor."

            Without observing them firsthand I could tell they needed to see a doctor, but I think my little brother needed me more than they did.  I could hear it in his voice.  It was long after I came over that everything went to hell.  Whatever infection they'd contracted gave them a bloodlust that made them kill our middle brother and forced us to take refuge in the basement with our five-year-old sister. 

            And for the last twelve hours we'd been left through a sleepless night, trying to come up with a plan in an unfinished basement with a constant banging and rattling on the door.  We knew the gurgling and screaming was what was left of our loved ones, but that only made it that much more unsettling. 

            What had happened had gone down so fast that I'm not even clear about what did happen.  I know if I had to do it all again, I certainly wouldn't have left my cell phone in the car.  There were no means of communication in the basement, in or our.  No TV.  No phone.  Nothing.  We had no way of knowing how widespread this was, I had no idea how to call my wife and children to make sure they were okay, I had no way to do much of anything. 

            My best guess was that this fever hit a lot of people, otherwise my wife would have sent the police here to bail us out.  But who knows.

            On the plus side, we had plenty of food and water if it came to that.  The food storage and water heater were secure in the basement.  My mind had come up with plenty of long term survival ideas (for example, we could cook with an open flame on the concrete floor as long as we were careful and the windows were cracked to let out the smoke), but I wanted to get out of there as soon as I possibly could. 

            I also had a hatchet.  It was a holdover from a campout my Dad had taken us on when he was still around.  It was rusted and had spent the last two decades in a tool box next to the furnace.

            The hardest part was reassuring Leigh, our little sister, that everything was going to be okay.  Thankfully, she was sleeping at the moment.  The time she was awake was spent going through boxes of old family photos and wondering out loud what had happened to her mother.

            Anthony checked Leigh once more and put a blanket on her, an old cotton one from my childhood with E.T. and Elliot on it.  Then he came over to me, sitting down and wondering aloud what we were ever going to do.

            "You know what we have to do."

            "You really think no one's coming?"

            "I have no idea.  But I'm sure someone would have come by now."

            "It's only been since yesterday."

            "I know.  I think if anyone was coming it would have happened by now."

            "Then why are we still here?"

            "I don't know.  I'm going crazy.  I haven't even talked to Jenny or the kids since before I came here, since before all this..."

            "You really think this is happening everywhere?"

            "I can't think of any other reason we haven't been bailed out of this."

            "And you really think...?"

            "Yes, Tony.  I do.  Will you stop asking me fucking questions?  You've seen as many movies that start just like this as I have."

            "So you don't think there's another way?"

            "No."

            "I can't do it."

            "And you think I can?"

            We'd had the same argument over and over again for the last few hours.  He couldn't do what needed to happen.  Obviously Leigh couldn't.  And if I ever wanted to get to my wife and children again and have my remaining siblings survive, I was going have to do it myself.  I would have to bludgeon what was left of my mother and sister to death with a dull hatchet.

            I alternated between finding the resolve to do it and wanting to wait it out because I wasn't sure if I was capable of the violence that the situation required.

            "How long do you think they'll keep on that door?"

            "I don't know, Anthony.  I have no idea.  I have no answers.  You know as much as I do."

            On cue, the scratching at the door grew louder.  I looked up the stairway and tried to remember times I had down here that were less horrific... 

...Reading a comic book atop that old bean bag, only to be interrupted for my mother's call to dinner...

...Skipping school with friends and sneaking down here to play Mario Kart on the old big screen we used to have down here...

Perhaps the most poignant and sweet memory of this basement was sneaking down here with my wife before we were married and making love, silently in the dark.

All of those memories and a hundred more would be shattered into tiny pieces.  After the end of this ordeal, all of it would be eclipsed by this terror.  It would turn all of my memories here into a horror film.

In the end, it wouldn't be a choice at all.  If I wanted to get my brother and baby sister out of this, if I ever wanted to see my wife and infant children again, I would have to find the strength.

Never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream that my life would depend on my ability to warm up to the idea of chopping my beloved mother and little sister into hamburger with an axe.

"And you won't?"

Vehemently, Anthony shook his head.  He was always much more of a momma's boy than I was.  It was no surprise that he'd leave me to do the dirty work. 

It was then that the scratching at the door stopped.  Anthony and I shared a scared look and listened hard to find a clue as to what was going on.

"Maybe they collapsed," Anthony whispered to me.

I shrugged.

Knowing full well he wouldn't volunteer and forcing him would be the same as sending him to his death, I hefted the hatchet, taking on the responsibility myself.  "I'll go first.   You grab Leigh and stay close behind.  If there's a problem, I'll take care of it, but you get to my car."

I handed him the keys. 

"Okay."

"You get her in the car and you wait for me."

He seemed in shock.

"Anthony?"

He took a breath and finally nodded his head in the affirmative.  I could only imagine what was running through his mind.  None of it was pretty.

"It's just like that game we used to play with the NERF guns."

Anthony scooped Leigh up in his arms, stirring her awake.  "What's going on?"

I kissed her on the forehead, "We're leaving, sweetie."

Looking down, I considered the axe in my hand and looked back to Leigh, and then to Anthony, "You keep her eyes covered."

He nodded again.

"We have everything we need?"

Once more he nodded.

I paused to give them both a hug, both to bolster their strength and mine.

With that, I took the lead, creeping slowly up the stairs as quietly as possible, Leigh heavy Anthony's arms behind me doing the same.

As quietly as I could, I pulled the boards we'd used to barricade the door and lay them down on the stairs.  Each squeak and squawk of a nail or the wood giving made my hair raise, my teeth clench, and my blood boil.  Once the boards were removed, I delicately put my ear to the door, trying hard to hear what might be happening on the other side. 

It was of no use.

We'd be going into this situation blind.  How could we be sure our family members were still even out there?  What if some other band of wandering undead stumbled into our house and...and...?

I was grasping at straws.  I didn't want my mother or my sister to be out there.  It was just wishful thinking.  If it were strangers behind that door, there wouldn't be any issue and my heart would not be so heavy.  Bludgeoning an anonymous zombie would be infinitely easier than what I was likely to face.

Behind the door was dark.  It was twilight outside and the different swaths of orange and blue light painted the living room with an eerie glow.  The only thing more unsettling than the light was the lack of sound.  It was as though the world was on mute. 

Anthony crept up behind me, Leigh in his arms, staying close. 

Step after careful step we came out into a room we'd both spent too much time in, watching television, playing games, spending family time together...  But now everything was dead quiet.

I knew there was something wrong when I felt my foot slip beneath me.  I'd stepped into a puddle of thick tar that I realized was a collection of infected, coagulated blood the color of midnight.  Reducing my voice to a whisper, I pointed down at the mess and told Anthony to watch out.

Leading away from the sludge was a trail of the dark liquid, heading in the direction of the front door.  "I think they're gone.  Let's get to the car."

Each step we took toward the door doubled the anxiety welling in my stomach.  Every bit of me wanted to cry and be done with all of this all at the same time. 

At long last, we reached the threshold of the front door and I turned the knob, pulling the door open. 

The car was there, just like I'd left it, but that didn't matter because there was a horrible screeching and gurgling coming from the kitchen and heading our way fast...

I shoved Anthony and Leigh out the door toward the car, shoving the keys into his hands.  "Go!"

Sending him on his way, I turned around and blocked the doorway with my body.  What was left of my mother and sister wouldn't get what was left of my family without killing me to do it.

Seeing them was harder than I thought it would be.  Huge chunks of their hair was missing, their mouths were oozing the thick blood like drool.  I couldn't be sure if it was their blood or if they'd eaten some other rotted thing.  They limped and hobbled toward me just like you'd expect them to.  Their eyes were a pale, milky white all the way through and all the love they once held were gone.

Their pace quickened and the noises they made grew louder.  It was low in the throat, like the growl of a cat.

I decided I didn't want to be around for much longer so I made a dash for the car. 

Anthony had made it inside with Leigh, but had locked the doors.  I pulled up on the handle at the same time he tried unlocking the door for me twice in a row, dooming me to my fate.

"Open the fucking door!"

But the cat growling had grown into screeching and they were on directly behind me.  I couldn't open the door to the car while they were this close and risk exposing the others.

The axe must have weighed a hundred pounds at that moment.

Knowing I had to do it, I tried to banish every thought of love and caring I'd ever had for my mother and sister.  My only chance was to summon every ounce of hate and loathing that I could muster.

But I loved them.  Hate and loathing weren't something I had just laying around for these people. 

By this time I'm sure I must have been crying like a baby.

The blade went into my sister's temple and all I could think of was all the times she tattled on me as a child, but it wasn't good enough.

I needed something worse than that.

My sister fell backward and it was my mother's turn.

Her hands were raised, coming for me, I tried to dodge and the hatchet connected with her neck limply.  The rage I could muster was in trade for all the times I'd been grounded. 

But it wasn't enough.

Her forward momentum brought her into the car where Leigh was seeing this, shrieking and crying like any five year old in this situation would be expected to do.  Anthony tried his hardest to shush her and cover her eyes, but she was hysterical.

I found the anger to finish my sister by the fury of what I'd been forced to do.  I connected the full force of the axe into her forehead, cleaving her head in two.  She dropped to the ground, down for the count.  I hoped, anyway.

My mother and I turned for each other.

And I hit her with every bit of hurt I could muster for every embarrassment I ever suffered at her hands.

But she still kept at me.

Once more I hit her.  In the bloody, flailing arm, I got her.  This time, it was with the anguish I felt when I thought of losing her.

But it wasn't enough.

I hard to reach.  Deep down.  There was something still holding me back, but then it came...  Like a flood, washing over me, letting it all go.

I hit her with the pain I felt every time I watched her do nothing when my father would attack me senselessly, viciously, before she left him.

With the force of every injury she ever watched him inflict upon me I smashed the axe through her.  And again.  And again and again and again.

I was a wild animal.  A caged jungle cat who'd finally been let free and lashed out at the keeper keeping him.

It wasn't until I looked up to see Anthony and Leigh crying, still locked in the car that I thought to stop.  My hands were covered in the thick tar to my forearms and my face was bleeding tears.  

            "I'm sorry," I said aloud, softly.  "I'm sorry."

            Like a fool, I dropped the axe and was finally able to get into the car.

            Leigh crawled into my lap.  I held her and we cried and cried and cried.

            It would have been an understatement to say that this might have been the worst day of my life.  But things would get better as soon as I found my wife and children safe...

            They'd have to, right?

            

Christmas Stories: "A Christmas Memory" and "The Dead"

It’s Christmas Eve, 2010. I wish every one who celebrates Christmas or any other winter festival a most happy holiday.

I will post one more blog before the end of the year: my usual survey and commentary on the annual “Best of 2010” “Notable,” “Favorite” Books listed by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, etc. etc. etc. I will comment why I agree or disagree with the short story choices and note with mea culpas those short story collections I have somehow failed to read so far.

Now, my Christmas blog:

There are basically two types of Christmas stories, it seems to me: stories of nostalgia and stories of conversion. The nostalgia stories, best represented by Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” and Jean Shepherd’s “A Christmas Story,” are, of course, memories, memoirs, anecdotes, recollections--most often told by an adult recalling childhood.

The conversion stories include Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and such film favorites as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street.” They focus on some spiritual event that causes someone who is bitter or skeptical to be transformed into a selfless believer in the human community.

Nostalgia Christmas Stories: “A Christmas Memory”

Dylan Thomas once said, “I like very much people telling me about their childhood, but they’ll have to be quick or else I’ll be telling them about mine.” I know what he means. I have written many recollections of my own childhood, several of them about Christmas. (There’s no stopping me when I have a possible audience; here I go):

I was the oldest of the family, with two brothers and two sisters. We grew up in a beat-up little old house in a valley known as “The Nars,” a corruption of the word “Narrows.” The house perched precariously on the hillside above U.S. 23, which was just above the C&O Railroad tracks, which was just above the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River—all about two rural miles southeast of the small town (pop. 4,200) of Paintsville, Kentucky.

We were poor, but Christmas, of course, was always rich. My favorite gifts on three different Christmases were an erector set, a Red Ryder Daisy air rifle, and a portable phonograph. In the late fall, my brothers and I always nervously gathered black walnuts from a huge tree in a neighboring pasture (occupied by a very mean and very large bull); we would split open the green husks, getting our fingers black from stain, and array them on the roof to dry out. On Christmas Eve, we would crack them on the hearth of the small fireplace, and when we awoke the next morning, mom and dad, (who had stayed up all night making mysterious preparations) had set out on the mantle plates of fudge full of the walnuts. Lord, Lord, I could go on and on. But I won’t.

Although I like Dylan Thomas’s recollection of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” my favorite nostalgia story (and as his comment on the previous blog indicates, also the favorite of my son Alex) is Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” What makes the story hard to resist is the present-tense voice of the boy describing his elderly friend” “I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins…. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.”

The story begins: “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago…A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window…’Oh my,’ she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, ‘It’s fruitcake weather!’”

As much as I love the story—the voice and the relationship between the boy and the woman as they gather the ingredients (especially the bootleg whiskey from the Indian, Mr. Haha Jones) and prepare the fruitcakes to send to “people who’ve struck our fancy,” including President Roosevelt—this may be a rare case in which a film adaptation is even better than the written story. I cannot read this story any more without hearing the high pitched twang of Truman Capote doing the voiceover, and I cannot visualize the characters without seeing the wonderfully expressive face of Geraldine Page playing the boy’s “best friend.” The way she presses her lips together, squeezes her eyes close, and cocks her head coyly to the side breaks my heart every time.

And like my son, I cannot read the story or see the film, without my eyes tearing up. I know it is sentimental, but I don’t care. When the two of them fly those kites at the end of the story, and the voice tells us it is their last Christmas together, I choke up quite pleasurably. When the boy walks across a school campus in an early November twenty years later, he can hear her voice saying “Oh, my, it’s fruitcake weather.” And he looks up, searching the sky. “As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.” Oh, my! Like all good nostalgia Christmas stories, “A Christmas Memory” recalls a time when life was simple and good, and filled with love.

Conversion Christmas Stories: “The Dead”

Conversion Christmas stories are, of course, also about love—about an old Scrooge or an old Grinch, filled with bitterness and bile, undergoing a spiritual transformation to understand the central message of Christmas--love, charity, selflessness. I very much enjoy Dickens’s "Christmas Carol." My favorite of the many film versions is the 1950s black and white version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge. I have an old VHS tape version that I watched with my family the other day.

However, the most complex Christmas conversion story, as my friend Dex correctly identified in a comment on my previous blog, is James Joyce’s “The Dead.” The events of the story do not take place on Christmas, but probably on January 6, which marks the Feast of The Epiphany, or the Twelfth Day of Christmas--the day the three Wise Men visited the Christ child. Joyce, who had already formulated his theory of epiphany from Aquinas in his first novel, Stephen Hero, perhaps purposely centered his final story in Dubliners on the day of the epiphany. The story combines both the nostalgia Christmas story and the conversion Christmas story.

The first section, which centers on the party given by the Morkan sisters in their dwelling on Usher’s Island, centers to a large extent on the past—the tradition of the party, the old singers from the past. The final section, when Gretta tells Gabriel that Michael Furey died for her, he comes to see the significance of the ultimate act of love—to die for the other. When Gretta says, “I think he died for me,” the Christ story is evoked. In practical, profane terms, for the young Michael Furey to stand out in the rain and die of pneumonia seems childishly absurd. However, it is precisely acting like a little child rather than a practical adult that marks the radical difference between the everyday world and the world of the spiritual.

Anyone reading “The Dead” for the first time might be hard pressed to understand its fame and influence. The narrative and description in the first two thirds of the story suggests that the story will end naturalistically with the end of the party. However, it is with the end of the party, of course that the lyrical nature of the story begins to emerge. Thematically, the conflict in "The Dead" that reflects its realistic/lyrical split is the difference revealed to both Gabriel and the reader between public life and private life, between life as it is in everyday experience and life perceived as the objectification of desire.

The party portion of "The Dead" is the story of Gabriel's public life, and his only psychic interest is what kind of figure he is going to cut publicly. However, throughout the party period of the story, there are moments--particularly those moments that focus on the past, on music, and on marital union--when reality is not presented as here and now, but as a mixture of memory and desire. Joyce's achievement in this story, its contribution to the development of the short story as a genre, can be best understood if we see its most basic theme as the difference between the kind of reality that realistic prose imitates and the kind of reality that romantic prose reveals.

Thematically, the basic issue the story poses is: In which one of these realms does true reality reside? Gabriel's discovery at the end of the story is not only that his wife has an inner life inaccessible to him but that his own life has been an outer life only. This is all the more devastating to him because on the journey to the hotel, he has indulged in his own self-delusion about their relationship: "moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.... Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy."

Filled with desire and the memory of intimacy, wishing Gretta to at one with him, Gabriel is annoyed that she seems so distracted. When he discovers that she has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he tries to use his typical public devices of irony, but the very simplicity of her story undercuts the effort, and he sees the inadequacy of his public self. Michael Furey, who has romantically been willing to give his life for love of another, challenges Gabriel's own smug safety much the same way that Bartleby challenges the narrator in Melville's famous story “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

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

There are two basic modes of experience in prose fiction: one that involves the development and acceptance of the everyday world of phenomenon, sensate, and logical relation--a realm that the novel has always taken for its own--and the other that involves an experience that challenge the acceptance of the real world as simply sensate and reasonable—an experience that has dominated the short story since its beginnings. The novel involves an active quest for reality, a search for identity that is actually a reconciliation of the self with the social and experiential world—a reconciliation that is finally conceptually accepted, based on the experience one has undergone. The short story more often focus on a character who is confronted with the world of spirit, which then challenges his or her conceptual framework of reason and social experience.

“The Dead” is my favorite Christmas story, for it is a great short story, a classic short story that delicately and definitively does what all great short stories do.

As a postscript, I must share a personal note about “The Dead.” Fifteen years ago, my wife, her Irish mother (who had just lost her husband to a heart attack), my pre-teen daughter, and I spent a year living in a suburb just south of Dublin. I had a Fulbright Senior Fellowship and taught courses in short story theory and the American short story at University College, Dublin, and Trinity College. It was a sad year in some ways (I lost my mother to a lung infection at Easter that year), but it was also a wonderful year in many other ways. It was a fine experience for my daughter, attending an International school with children from Ireland and countries all over the world. It was good for my mother-in-law to spend the year in her home country after the death of her husband. It was good for my wife to get in touch with her Irish family and her heritage of Irish culture. And it was good for me in too many ways to enumerate here.

However, one of my most memorable experiences was walking down along the Liffy and looking up to the second storey of the house at Usher’s Island, and from there walking to O’Connell Street and down to the Grisham Hotel, where Gabriel stood and looked out the window at the snow, which was general all over Ireland, falling softly upon all the living and the dead.

O. Henry and "The Gift of the Magi"

In the first decade of the twentieth century, O. Henry was the most popular short-story writer in America. By 1920, nearly five million copies of his books were sold in the U.S. What was the secret of his success? Partially, it was the personality of the man whose voice was heard in the stories, a personality with which readers could identify and who spoke to some universal human need. William Saroyan once wrote that Americans loved O. Henry, for “He was a nobody, but he was a nobody who was also a somebody, everybody’s somebody.” One of the underlying assumptions of O. Henry’s stories is that there is some order in the world, some poetic justice that follows a plan. Everything happens for a reason in an O. Henry story, and everything fits into the overall pattern. Furthermore, O. Henry exploits a universal romantic wish that people are basically good and unselfish and possesses an inherent dignity.

O. Henry combines two different aspects of the short story that contributed to his success—the oral voice of the raconteur derived from frontier humorists and a highly patterned structure originated by Poe. Combining the local color and melodrama of Bret Harte with the ironic reversals and empathy for ordinary people of Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry staked out his own territory of New York City and developed a storytelling voice more polished than the usual barroom wag who always seems to have one more tale to tell. He was a talented storyteller who would slap you on the back and stand you to a drink and a marketing specialist who knew exactly what buttons to push to make his audience react. He never really took himself seriously as an artist, preferring instead the title “journalist.”

O. Henry polished and formalized the kind of ironic reversal stories that Boccaccio innovated during the Renaissance. Russian Formalist critic of the 1920s, Boris Ejxenbaum, was one of the first to recognize that what O. Henry had discovered was something about the short story that was unique and characteristic of the form. In his brief study, O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story, he argued that the short story is a fundamental or elementary form. Basing his theories largely on the stories of O. Henry, he suggested that the short story was constructed on the basis of some contradiction or incongruity and amassed its whole weight toward its ending. Whereas the novel ended with a point of letup or unraveling, the short story "gravitates toward maximal unexpectedness of a finale concentrating around itself all that has preceded."

The late nineteenth century focus on realism that made novels so popular and well respected marked a decline of interest in the short story that early nineteenth-century writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe had stimulated. O. Henry’s facility in creating snappy, comic and sentimental stories renewed the public’s interest in the form. As a result of his success, many other writers sought to emulate him and many academics began to study the characteristics of the form. One result was the creation of short-story handbooks—quasi-academic treatises that attempted to teach others how to write a short story. In the best early history of the form, Fred Lewis Pattee listed “ten commandments” of the short story codified in these handbooks and taught in college courses and correspondence schools, all of which were derived from the stories of O. Henry.

As a result of O. Henry’s success and the handbooks that sought to reveal his method, the short story became formalized and static. Finally serious readers and critics called for an end to it, filling the quality periodicals with articles on the "decline," the "decay," and the "senility" of the short story. Even Edward J. O'Brien, probably the greatest champion of the form America has ever had, wrote his book The Dance of the Machines in 1929, censuring the mechanized structure of American society and the machine-like short story that both sprang from it and reflected it. The short story did not recover from this O. Henry formalization until the seemingly unstructured stories of Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, and Sherwood Anderson gained popularity in the 1920s.

O. Henry’s most famous story, “The Gift of the Magi,” translated and reprinted every Christmas around the world, was written in three hours to meet a deadline that O. Henry had ignored for several days. Here’s the way I have heard about how the story was written.

Near the end of the year in 1905, O. Henry was commissioned to write a Christmas story for the World newspaper. He kept putting it off and missed the deadline. The man hired to illustrate the story went to O. Henry to try to get some idea about the story so he could do the drawings. But O. Henry had not written anything. He told the illustrator to draw a picture of a poorly furnished room. He continued: “In the room there is only a chair or two, a chest of drawers, a bed, and a trunk. On the bed, a man and a girl are sitting side by side. They are talking about Christmas. The man has a watch fob in his hand. He is playing with it while he is thinking. The girl’s principal feature is the long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back. That’s all I can think of now. But the story is coming.” A few hours before final deadline, O. Henry told his editor to lie down and rest. He started drinking a bottle of Scotch and began. Three hours later, he had “The Gift of the Magi” finished, and they set up the type right away.

The plot alone—a young woman sells her long beautiful hair to buy her husband a fob chain for his prized watch, only to discover that he has sold his watch to buy a set of tortoise shell combs for her vanished hair—is sufficient to make the story a classic about the spirit of Christmas. But it is also O. Henry’s avuncular storytelling voice and his use of a scenic film style that makes it so accessible and irresistible. The story opens on a scene right out of a pantomimed melodrama of the young woman Della in her modest apartment crying because she has no money to buy her husband a Christmas gift, that is, until she thinks of the brilliant yet terrifying idea of selling her long beautiful hair to a wigmaker.

When the young husband comes home and sees his wife with her hair cropped off, the reader has no way of knowing that the peculiar expression of his face is not shock at her changed appearance, but rather bemused recognition that she will be unable to use the gift he has purchased for her. When he opens the combs, the reader sighs at Della’s grand but seemingly worthless sacrifice. When she gives him the watch fob, Jim just flops down on the couch, puts his hands under the back of his head and smiles, telling her simply that he sold the watch to get the money to buy her the combs. The story then ends with O. Henry’s little homily about the wise magi, who invented the at of giving Christmas presents, suggesting that the two “foolish children” of his “uneventful chronicle” who unwisely sacrificed for each other the “greatest treasures of their homes” are indeed the wisest of all, for “They are the magi.”

This is one of the few significant Christmas short stories I am aware of. Great writers seldom write about Christmas.

Next week I will talk about three other Christmas stories: Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” and a third one—the most famous of all, and the best of all Christmas stories. Can you guess what it is? (not Dickens’s A Christmas Carol).

Please make some suggestions as to why you think there are few Christmas short stories, although there are many, many Christmas movies.

Cast a vote for your favorite Christmas story. Can you think of Christmas stories I have forgotten?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terrence Holt's In The Valley of the Kings and Edgar Allan Poe

I have just finished reading Terrence Holt’s debut collection, In The Valley of the Kings (Norton, 2009). Holt started writing these stories while earning MFA and PhD degrees in English from Cornell. One of them, “Charybdis,” appeared in The Kenyon Review thirty years ago and was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories. He taught creative writing and English lit for ten years before earning an MD degree from the University of North Carolina, where he now teaches and practices medicine.

Holt is a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, telling an interviewer that he has loved Poe’s stories since grade school, adding that he often needs a voice “that can blur the lines between rationality and lunacy,” which he says turns out to sound a lot like Poe. Holt concludes, “I’m happy doing anything that makes people think about Poe.”

Since I am also one of those who started reading Poe in grade school, and who has since taught graduate-level seminars on Poe’s work and written a book about his contribution to the short story, reading Holt’s stories got me to thinking about Poe again. I would be happy if this blog entry makes you think about Poe and sends you to Holt’s stories, which I think get their energy from some of the primary sources of the short story as a form.

Poe was never highly respected among my colleagues in graduate school or at the university where I taught. I remember one professor asking me what in the hell I found to talk about in a semester-long course on Edgar Allan Poe, saying he had a hard time filling up one class meeting in his American Literature class on that adolescent-minded, alcoholic drug addict and child molester.

Because two of Holt’s stories--“Charybdis” and “Aurora”-- involve space travel to Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, and two others--“ Ό Λογος" and Apocalypse”—center on a futuristic end of the world, the old genre issue of science fiction rears its Hydra head.
I suspect that Terrence Holt’s stories will raise the same kind of issues that Poe’s stories have always raised. When one writes “genre” fiction such as detective stories and science fiction, one risks being called light weight entertainment, appealing only to a small group of fans, such as Star Trek trekkies, but never having the respectability of serious literary writers.

In a Boston Globe interview last year, Holt said he avoids the science fiction label, noting that for him generic distinctions between what’s real and what’s fantastic doesn’t make much sense, since it’s all fiction. “And as part of a larger tendency to isolate things that make us uncomfortable, I think such distinctions are dangerous.” Holt says that it makes perfect sense we named everything in the cosmos after the gods. “When you set a story there you get a free pass into the realm of myth.”

And it is indeed the world of myth and mystery and magic that interests Holt. He says that he is interested in the limits of our capacity to understand ourselves. “For me, these stories are more than anything else about where stories come from, and where they take us. They’re about the moment-by-moment process by which our brains convince us that the world exists, and the gaps in that process as well. Those flaws in the illusion are what I want to capture. They’re the chinks in the structure where mystery gets in and haunts our lives—and through which one day we slip into eternity.” All this sounds very much like Poe, for whom the function of story is not to mirror external reality but to create a self-contained realm of reality that corresponds only to the basic human desire for total unity.

In a New York Times review last September, William Giraldi suggested that Holt’s people are beyond the help of science, quoting one of his characters who says, “Science is a consolation only to the ignorant.” Giraldi asks, “What do we clutch at in place of science? What sustained and deceived us long before science, and what will we return to once modernity becomes an antiquated future? Mystery, magic, myth; the allegories and fables that crowbarred open our psyche.”

The “Power of Words” (which is the title of one of Poe’s stories) is central to Holt. Central is the opening story in Holt’s collection, entitled Ό Λογος” a Greek word that means “The word,” as in “In the beginning was the word” in John 1.1. The word of the title appears mysteriously on a young girl’s body, creating some sort of infection that kills her. When it is seen by others, they die also, and the disease then spreads to plague proportions that threatens the end of the world. Thus, instead of the beginning, it is “In the end was the word.”

The story also has a Latin head note: Videtur quod Auctor hic obiit. Some medieval manuscripts dealing with the Black Death end with the author's last prayer, "Videtur quod Auctor hic obiit" which means, "It seems the author died here." A similar “final word” motif is suggested by the head note for “Charybdis”: a quotation from Poe’s early prize-wining story that launched him on his career, “MS Found in a Bottle,” in which the narrator says that he will continue to write in his journal until the “last moment” when he will enclose the MS in a bottle and cast it within the sea. The story is not one of Poe’s best-known stories, but it is one of his most self reflexively complex.

Holt makes another reference to “Ms Found in a Bottle” in the story “Eurydike,” a futuristic version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Another isolated space traveler recognizes a word out of endless rows of empty letters on his screen, the word “discovery.”

In “Ms Found in a Bottle,” the narrator says a feeling for which he has no name takes possession of his soul--"a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.” Such feelings are the sense of being "captured by the incredible" which is both the very essence of dreams, as Conrad's Marlowe insists in The Heart of Darkness, as well as the essence of story itself; for no "relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams." This realization is what the narrator refers to when he says a "new sense--a new entity is added to my soul." Moreover, this is what constitutes the unintelligible letters he unwittingly daubs on the sail, which, when the sail is put in use, spell out the word DISCOVERY. For the discovery the narrator makes is the discovery that dominates Poe's art and thought throughout his career; it is the discovery of the power of the imagination and thus the power of story.

Like the narrator, Poe himself felt impelled by a "curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of those awful regions . . .. It is evident that we are hurrying on to some exciting knowledge--some never-to-be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction." As Poe's masterworks "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Eureka make clear, the end of the imaginative journey is both the source and the end of life itself, for it is ultimate non-being. We imagine the narrator of "MS. Found in a Bottle" lost in his fantasy, penning the last words--"going down"--and tossing his letter into the sea, from whence, eternally detached from its author, it is taken up by countless readers as a "dead letter" only to be made to live again continuously.

If the novel creates the illusion of reality by presenting a literal authenticity to the material facts of the external world, the short story attempts to be authentic to the immaterial reality of the inner world of the self in its relation to eternal rather than temporal reality. If the novel's quest for extensional reality takes place in the social world and the material of its analyses are manners as the indication of one's soul, as Lionel Trilling says, the field of research for the short story is the primitive, antisocial world of the unconscious, and the material of its analysis are not manners, but dreams. The results of this distinction are that whereas the novel is primarily a social and public form, the short story is mythic and spiritual. While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophic framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical. The novel exists to reaffirm the world of "everyday" reality; the short story exists to "defamiliarize" the everyday. Storytelling does not spring from one's confrontation with the everyday world, but rather from one's encounter with the sacred (in which true reality is revealed in all its plenitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is revealed in all its vacuity).

In the short story we are presented with characters in their essential aloneness, not in their taken-for-granted social world. Such an understanding of the two different realms of the short story and the novel helps to account for one of the best-known discussions of the subject matter of the short story--Frank O'Connor's intuitive analysis in The Lonely Voice. The novel, says O'Connor, can "adhere to the classical concept of civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community . . .; but the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community--romantic, individualistic, and intransigent. This is why, O'Connor says, the short story always presents a sense of "outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society. . . . As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel--an intense awareness of human loneliness." We must approach the short story, O’Connor says, in the mood of Pascal’s “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

All of Holt’s narrator protagonists face the silence of infinite spaces, the mystery of pushing the consciousness to such extremes that physical reality disappears. To read Holt’s stories is not only to be returned to Poe, it is to return to the primal origins of story itself.

Chekhov's "Lady with the Pet Dog"

Today (November 16, 2010) marks the second anniversary of my blog “Reading the Short Story.” It is also the day my second short story has been published. It is entitled “Down Under” and is available at Marco Polo Quarterly at the following address: http://www.marcopoloquarterly.com/downundercmay.html

In the two years I have been writing this blog, I have tried to post at least one brief essay each week. Today is my 114th entry. To mark that occasion, for I dearly love to mark occasions, I am posting a brief discussion of one of the most admired short stories in the history of the form, Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” (as translated by Constance Garnett; translated by David Magarshack as “Lady with Lapdog”; also translated as “Lady with the Pet Dog,” “Lady with the Little Dog” and others).

I also will comment briefly on three modern tributes to the story: “The Lady with the Pet Dog” by Joyce Carol Oates, “The Man with the Lapdog” by Beth Lordan, and “Reading Chekhov” by David Means.

At the end of the nineteenth century Anton Chekhov, the great master of the short story, perfected the form’s ability to present spiritual reality in realistic terms by focusing on the essentially mysterious and hidden nature of the basic human desire to transcend the everyday. Critic Peter Bitsilli has suggested that the complexity of Chekhov's characters leads us to feel there is something about them we do not understand, a something hidden from us, a something that is part of Chekhov's appeal. That something, I suggest, is Chekhov’s understanding of the connection between the old romance form’s focus on spiritual reality and the modern short story’s focus on the secret inner desire of the individual to participate in that reality.

Although the theme of the basic desire of the secret self could be illustrated in any number of Chekhov’s short fictions, the paradigmatic statement can be found in one of his most famous stories, “Lady with the Dog.” Near the end of what seems to be merely an anecdotal tale of adultery, the central male character agonizes over the division he senses in himself.

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

In "The Lady with The Dog"--a paradigm for the story of the illicit affair--it is never clear whether Gurov truly loves Anna Sergeyevna or whether it is only the romantic fantasy that he wishes to maintain. What makes the story so subtle and complex is that Chekov presents the romance in such an understated and objective way that we realize there is no way to determine whether it is love or romance, for there is no way to distinguish between them. Although Gurov feels that he has a life open and seen, full of relative truth and falsehood like everyone else, he knows he has another life running its course in secret, a true life, and the false only was open to others. "All personal life," he feels, "rested on secrecy."

At the end of the story, Gurov and Anna wonder how they can free themselves from their intolerable bondage, but only Chekhov and the reader are aware that there is no way to free themselves, for the real bondage is not the manifest one, but the latent bondage all human beings have to the dilemma of never knowing which is the true self and which is the false one. Although it seems to the couple that they would soon find the solution and a new and splendid life would begin, at the same time it is clear to them that they had a long way to go and that the most complicated part of it was only just beginning. Indeed, what seems so simple is indeed complicated.

This division between public life and secret life corresponds to the distinction anthropologist Mircea Eliade makes between the two modes of being, sacred and profane, experienced by primitive man. “The man of the archaic societies,” says Eliade, wished to live as much as possible in the sacred, for the sacred is equivalent, “in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being.” The realm of the sacred, or what Ernst Cassirer calls “mythic reality,” is the central subject of the short story. What Cassirer calls “the momentary deity” and Eliade calls the “sacred” is something that manifests itself as wholly different from profane or everyday reality. Eliade uses the term “hierophany” to designate the momentary disruption that marks the sacred, the paradox of which is that by “manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself.”

This phenomenon is well known to writers who have made the short story their primary fictional mode. Raymond Carver suggests it most emphatically when he notes, "It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power.” As Flannery O’Connor says, "The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible.... His problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him.”

As 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 so than in the novel, the short story most often deals with phenomena for which there is no clearly discernible logical, sociological, or psychological cause. As Welty says, the "first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initial obscures its plain, real shape." To Conrad’s Marlowe, sitting Buddha-like on the deck telling the story of Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness,” the "meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

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

Beth Lordan, professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University, had just returned from a spring semester in Ireland when she wrote “The Man With the Lapdog,” the first story in her “novel-in-stories,” But Come Ye Back, about an American man and his Irish-born wife retiring to her homeland where the sea is near and the butter has a taste to it, but where he hates driving on the wrong side of the road and doesn’t care for the Guinness.

Although each story in But Come Ye Back is a perfectly formed independent fiction, the separate parts create an even greater whole. And the reason is the reader’s gradual discovery of, and growing concern for, the central characters. As you read each story, you experience shifting allegiances. At one point Lyle seems like a gruff curmudgeon and his wife long-suffering; at another, Mary seems to be shrewishly sharp tongued and Lyle quietly self-sacrificing.

Like most couples who have lived together for many years, Lyle and Mary chaff against each other, find it difficult to say how they really feel, and occasionally fantasize about how it would be to be with someone else. For Lyle, it occurs when he meets an American couple on holiday and discovers that the husband is dying of cancer; he imagines meeting the wife again later, but, as opposed to the famous Chekhov story of illicit love from which “The Man With the Lapdog” gets its name, he quietly values his own relationship.

In the final scene, when Mary goes for a walk with Lyle and they meet the American couple, Mary exhibits the gracious sympathy and hospitality the Irish are famous for by inviting them home for tea and putting her arms around the young American woman. As they part, Mary says, “Such lovely people,” and Lyle, who has rejected taking up Irish idioms, presses his arm against her side and says, “They are so. And it’s a sad thing, it is.” Lordan’s story is a delicately-done love story about those daily irritations and fantasies that tear at married couples and those occasional luminous moments that remind them of what holds them together.

Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (in High Lonesome) is not so delicate. Told from the point of view of the Anna character in Chekhov’s story, it is a modern story of adultery, focusing on a period six months after the lovers have broken it off. It is marred by Oates’ ignoring Chekhov’s famous dictum, “It is better to say too little than too much.” Oates has her female protagonist examine and ponder and wonder endlessly, even, predictably, making a half-hearted suicide attempt. The couple torment themselves with recriminations and shame; the cuckolded husband helplessly tries to hold on.

The basic problem I have with Joyce Carol Oates’ stories is that she does not seem to really like her characters, and she does not respect the intelligence of her readers, feeling compelled to explain everything and to center relentlessly on some thematic idea she wishes to convey. Too many of her stories are aesthetically astute but emotionally cold, resonant with the influence of literature but empty of the mystery of life.

Oates writes a great deal and seemingly publishes everything she writes. It is a fact of her literary life that makes one suspicious that in spite of the serious surface of her work she is a one-woman industry. There is no doubt that she knows the short story form well--has studied it and practiced it more than most living writers. However, her work is often imitative and repetitive, and many of the stories seem to spring from a dispassionate artistic "what if" than from a passionate involvement in the lives of her characters.

Too often, Oates' stories read like creative writing assignments. And indeed, students who want to learn how to write short fiction could do worse than read the stories of Joyce Carol Oates and imitate what she does. For she is a complete craftsman who can mimic the conventions of the form. However, as John Barth has his Genie and the archetypal storyteller Scheherazade say in his book Chimera (1972), telling stories, like making love, takes more than good technique; while both heartfelt ineptitude and heartless skill have their appeal, what one really wants is "passionate virtuosity." No matter how well a writer knows the conventions and techniques of a genre, without a deeply felt sense of human mystery that compels the great writer to write, the result is apt to be bloodless. Oates is certainly a virtuoso, but does she have passion?

David Means’ story “Reading Chekhov,” from his new collection, The Spot, is also a version of “Lady with a Pet Dog.” The story is told in brief sections that move back and forth between the man, who is a 35-year-old part-time student at a seminary, and the woman who is married with a twelve-year-old daughter. They know they are part of the overall tradition of adultery; they read “The Lady with the Pet Dog” together and compare themselves to Chekhov’s lovers.

Means has a very perceptive understanding of the subtleties of adultery, and it doesn’t hurt that his characters here are made intelligent about, and sensitive to, what they are involved in. While lace curtains spread a lattice across her body that he traces with his fingers, “from her belly—with its cesarean scar to her chin—“ he says that adultery is multifaceted: “It’s shapeless but at the same time has a rudimentary figure, like a snowflake; an abundance of clichés surround it and yet it’s unique, an entity different each time.” This, of course, is the challenge to writing a good story about adultery, as Chekhov well knew.

Means creates an irresistible trope of the woman’s skirt, which is charged with static electricity, “clinging in wavelets to her thighs, riding along her crotch, sliding up with each step as she climbed the stairs to his apartment.” When they walk down toward the river off the promenade, he lets her go ahead a few yards “so he could watch her hips shifting beneath her skirt, the movement of her rear against the silk fabric, light-and dark-blue daisy-shaped flowers.”

It is at this point that the story shifts, for her pumps make her unsteady on the soft ground and she twists sideways to the right and falls into the weeds, breaking a bone just above her ankle. She must lie to her husband as to how the accident occurred; and as she sits at home letting the bones heal, she apparently decides to end it. Her explanation to him about the importance of her marriage and her daughter seems so stilted she makes up something specific: “I went last night check my daughter, and she was uncovered and sleeping facedown and I looked at her back, the bones of her back, and they were, well, they reminded me of the bones of a sardine. You could chew and swallow them and not even notice.”
And it is indeed such specificities, both real and imagined, that characterize the affair. Here is how the story ends:

“Much later she’d hold specific memories of it…. She beheld a certain dignity in the exactitudes: the smell of cut flowers at a bodega, rubber bands bright red around their stems; the dusky light off Broadway on summer afternoons; the heavy wall along Riverside Park, cool against their claves, as they sat holding hands during lunch, turning now and then to glance down through the trees to the river, which was broken into shards, blue against the green.”

Like Borges, who once said that a short story may be, for all purposes, “essential," or Andre Dubus, who said he loved short stories because “they are the way we live," or Alice Munro, who once told an interviewer that she doesn’t write novels because she sees her material in a short-story way, David Means-- like Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley--sees the world in a short-story way.

One doesn’t go to David Means for plot that rushes to its inevitable end or for easily recognizable character, like the folks you meet every day. One reads David Means for some scary, sacred, sense that what happens is not as important as what it signifies. One reads David Means for mystery and the paradox understood by the great short story writers from Poe to Chekhov to Carver--that if you remove everything extraneous from a scene, an object, a person, its meaning is revealed--stark and astonishing.