Ann Beattie and the Late History of the American Short Story

This discussion will draw 100% from Ann Beattie's new book, see above. This book reprints in chronological order all 48 stories Beattie has published in the New Yorker since April of 1974. In this single volume we can observe the evolution of one of our master story writers, one who was a prime mover in the late lamented renaissance of the short story. As I read it, and really as I read her work over time, I thought I observed Beattie’s evolution from chronicler of the boomer generation to authentic master adapting to and riding out the storm of time – and it has been a storm. I think this is the kind of evolution and adaptation such committed artists do and how their art changes shape and continues on, growing better and deeper and smarter.

I arrived in Charlottesville in August of 1974 to begin a Charles Stewart Mott doctoral fellowship at UVa, and there was a rumor that Ann Beattie was in town. She’d already been in the New Yorker once by then, her first appearance, April ’74. Starting in August of that year I was in Charlottesville for a year and eleven months, and by the time I left, she’d been in the New Yorker seven times. People do forget that in those days the New Yorker frequently contained two short stories per issue. But still!

Here is Ann Beattie’s first New Yorker story opening:

When Ellen was told that she would be hired as a music teacher at the high school, she decided it did not mean that she would have to look like the other people on the faculty. She would tuck her hair neatly behind her ears, instead of letting it fall free, schoolgirlishly. She had met some of the teachers when she went for her interview, and they all seemed to look like what she was trying to get away from—suburbanites at a shopping center. Casual and airy, the fashion magazines would call it. At least, that’s what they would have called it back when she still read them, when she lived in Chevy Chase and wore her hair long, falling free, the way it had fallen in her high school graduation picture. ‘Your lovely face,’ her mother used to say, “and all covered by hair.” Her graduation picture was still on display in her parents’ house, next to a picture of her on her first birthday.

It didn’t matter how Ellen looked now; the students laughed at her behind her back. They laughed behind all the teachers’ backs. . . .”

“A Platonic Relationship”

April 8, 1974

I remember enjoying this story. By ’74 I was six years married, I’d taught high school for a year, then been drafted (Germany for some reason, not Vietnam), then paid my compulsory dues to unemployment for a year (because they didn’t hire the vets upon their return), then had gone back to school. I can’t resurrect from memory when it was, but sometime early in the 23 months I was in Charlottesville, I learned from a dependable source exactly where Ann Beattie lived. It was in a nice neighborhood with fairly big houses, the kind that sometimes are turned into law offices. I would walk my big malamute Shadrak in that area sometimes (and with increased frequency once I knew she lived there). A few times in the late evening as I passed by I’d actually rather theatrically genuflect in her front yard. I never saw her there, but I did keep my eyes peeled as I strolled by looking in the windows (kidding), though just being in her neighborhood was really enough. When I first actually met her, in the fall of 2000, I told her all about this, including the bit about genuflecting, and she advised me she didn’t live in that area, that those houses weren’t really residences but had all been converted to law offices. Grrrk.

In 1974, the whole baby boom was living in college towns getting graduate degrees. Many of us were back from the army, and Watergate was in the news. We all drove Chevy Vegas, Ford Pintos, AMC Gremlins, and VW bugs. We all owned Smith-Coronas and Olympia typewriters, and lusted after IBM Selectrics with a correct key. We still had our guitars from college. We were writing poems, novels and songs, or at least that's what we told each other over beer. People were still getting killed in Southeast Asia, but it was nearly over (it would be years before "The Things They Carried" and writing that had perspective on the war). We were streaming into the U. of Iowa writers workshop. In writing, and a lot of other fields but not teaching, men were still courting the illusion they were in charge.

In “The Platonic Relationship,” Beattie’s protagonist, Ellen, leaves her husband because at the age of 32 she thought there had to be more to life than being a lawyer’s wife; so she took a teaching job and sank into it the way one really has to to be a good teacher, and she move out on her husband. Probably not knowing what hit him, he helped her move into her own place, and before long she had a roommate, a guy named Sam who was strange but thought she was pretty, and before long Sam had also befriended Ellen’s husband saying he wanted to go to law school, and after a few months of friendship, Sam abruptly left on a new motorcycle bound for California and Ellen’s husband wasn’t able to find his mother’s jewelry box. Ellen was happy to be on her own teaching, and still liked Sam because he thought she was pretty, and the story concludes with neither Ellen nor her husband knowing what hit them. In those days, the youth culture was teeming, everyone in first marriages, with no children quite yet, and the bonds and boundaries of marriage were being stretched every which way. Nixon was in office and people still didn’t trust anyone over thirty even if THEY were over thirty. The women’s movement was on the move, and thus chess pieces on the board were moving differently than they ever had. The generation of the Summer of Love, the War on Poverty, pot, free love, the Civil Rights Movement, and the loud and tumultuous anti-war demonstrations on the moral argument, was careening into adulthood on the skids; there was a moral compass, in theory, but as the pragmatic realities came to bear in their lives and the generation began the entropic journey to becoming their parents only worse, there was also cultural confusion. Twenty five years later, we got two boomers for president, Clinton and Bush, both, like me, a year older than Ann Beattie and representing, at the turn of the century, a baffling exact 50-50 split in the philosophy and political orientation, right and left. 50-50! Beattie’s story fixes a point in time when that split becoming manifest but wasn’t quite showing. Her flat style would not comment on the big picture because our focus was definitely on the trees and not the forest.

Here’s the first paragraph from Beattie’s second appearance in the New Yorker:

Silas is afraid of the vacuum cleaner. He stands, looking out the bedroom door, growling at it. He also growls when small children are around. The dog is afraid of them, and they are afraid of him because he growls. His growling always get him in trouble; nobody thinks he is entitled to growl. The dog is also afraid of a log of music. “One Little Story That the Crow Told Me” by the New Lost City Ramblers raises his hackles. Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” brings bared teeth and a drooping tail . . . If the dog had his way, he would get Dylan by the leg in a dark alley. Maybe they could take a trip—Michael and the dog—to a recording studio or a concert hall, wherever Dylan was playing, and wait for him to come out. Then Silas could get him. Thoughts like these (“fancy flights,” his foreman called them) were responsible for Michael’s no longer having a job.”

“Fancy Flights”

October 21, 1974

In this selection, Beattie’s signature first person/present tense makes its initial appearance in a story of hers in the New Yorker. Ann Beattie, as I said, appeared in the New Yorker 7 times in two years after she first broke in. The New Yorker had been through a giant John Updike phase in the sixties, Updike being six years older than Ray Carver and fifteen years older than Beattie. Beattie was a genuine boomer, and, think about it, the New Yorker had to transition. A giant generation was coming and college kids didn’t normally subscribe to that magazine; their parents did. I think the giant push with Ann Beattie was brilliant but, if not at all intentional, then certainly fortuitous. In ’74 I already had a Harper’s and Atlantic subscription (thanks to Duke Rank, my first college advisor), but in '74 I was buying the New Yorker off the shelf or we were getting it from my wife’s parents, long time subscribers (and my wife thus a long-time John Updike afficianado). In those days it seemed like Beattie was always in the New Yorker, and her stories about long haired girls and tall skinny boys, rock’n’roll and weed and young people’s angst and malaise, supplied parental units with a study guide and handout on us, their kids. The term minimalism had already been applied to Beattie and Carver and others, though it was never a term Beattie accepted as accurate about her. But the style must have driven the older generation crazy--it would explain nothing, just lay it out there as if to say, "Here it is, folks, what you've created!"

In 1975 the Pushcart Prize (Best of the Small Presses) was first published. You can be assured this is because the baby boom was writing and submitting and there wasn’t room for everybody in the New Yorker. Writers like Joyce Carol Oates, already well established, became great advocates for the small presses and the rising optimism that one could get published if one was persistent and good. Writers, make no mistake, were modeling on the stories in the New Yorker. As it says in the fly leaf to her new book, there was actually a term "Beattie-esque." I do remember that.

My favorite story of Beattie’s has long been “Waiting,” which I’m sure I read in the New Yorker when it came out. Ann Beattie told me in 2000 that her favorite story of her own was “The Burning House.” At the time of our first conversation, her big new and selected collection was out, Park City (1998), but the title of her previous collection of stories (1995) was The Burning House, after the story which was first published June 11, 1979 followed immediately by “Waiting” the next week!

In the story “The Burning House,” Amy is occupied by doing dishes and snatching a moment with her lover, Johnny, on the phone when he calls just to hear her voice, a very loose thing to do that predicts the lid coming off before too long. In the other room, her husband is holding court with his men friends, and in the shreds of conversation that she hears, she knows he too has a shadow life that is pulling at him. In bed, alone together, in the final scene of “The Burning House,” Amy asks for clarity on their situation:

“I want to know if you’re staying or going.”
“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake—you’ve’ surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker; if they’re gay ... like Reddy Fox, even if they’re six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars."
He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

“The Burning House”

June 11, 1979

Beattie has often been called the chronicler of the post-counterculture boomer crowd, and in “The Burning House” we can feel the sacrament and legal arrangment called marriage sorting out all crazy as men and women struggled to find a new balance. The pill was a new reality and with it freedom. The human potential movement was driving us all crazy. All things were both possible and not, and the International Year of the Woman had been established in ’75 -- in ’82 the Equal Rights Amendment would fall only three states short of ratification. That was some of the Big Picture change that was causing an earthquake in middle class American boomer marriages.

In the more ghostly story “Waiting,” the young wife who is the first person protagonist is selling a piece of furniture. People are calling in on the house phone to come over and look at it. One lady has come to buy it. As we track through their negotiations, we understand that the young wife is blue on this day; her husband left a few months ago for no reason that is actually stated, except to play in a band. He was going to take the dog with him, but she stopped that saying the dog wouldn’t survive the trip, so off her husband went alone. Again, we don’t know why. In first person present tense we move forward as if with blinders on, what happens next, what happens next. In this point of view there is no looking around, planning, or even contemplating what’s going on or why. The next thing just happens. The young wife looks down and her dog is not reacting to her. She tries to get him to move, but he won’t. She’s sold this important piece of her life, and now is making lunch and the dog has apparently died in his sleep right there on the linoleum. She goes out on the front porch. Male friends have been looking in on her since her husband left. One of her favorites, Ray, has come over and she’s on the porch and he kindly says he’ll make them both some lunch, and she’s happy about that. As he’s going in, she tells him, “...

If there’s anything wrong, just fix it.” In other words, if you happen to spot my deceased dog, please handle it. And here’s the New Yorker ending.

I look back at the house. Ray, balancing a tray, opens the door with one hand, and Hugo is beside him—not rushing out, the way he usually does to get through the door, but padding slowly, shaking himself out of sleep. He comes over and lies down next to me, blinking because his eyes are not yet accustomed to sunlight.
Ray sits down with his plate of crackers and cheese and a beer. He looks at the tear streaming down my cheeks and shoves over close to me. He takes a big drink and puts the beer on the grass. He pushes the tray next to the beer can.
“Hey,” Ray says. “Everything’s cool, OK? No right and no wrong. People do what they do. A neutral observer, and friend to all. Same easy advice from Ray all around. Our discretion assured.” He pushes my hair gently off my wet cheeks. “It’s OK,” he says softly, turning and cupping his hands over my forehead. “Just tell me what you’ve done.”

“Waiting” June 21, 1979

I never have been able to understand what this ending establishes. I think there is no definitive answer. Some may find it maddening. Ray, too, is puzzled—what’s going on with this woman and her husband? We can imagine a number of possibilities, and to effectively keep the ending open effectively opens the story to various takes and several biases and orientations. This is realism. There are not always answers to what’s going on, and at the moment of the ending of the story, the young wife isn’t likely to want to or be able to say. But we recognize the family of dilemmas being referenced. And wouldn’t it be the shits if right in the middle of it Hugo croaked? So her crying could be joy. Joy! How often do we see that in an Ann Beattie New Yorker story of the seventies.

It was these stories of the ‘70s that helped cause a resurgence in the short story, a literal renaissance of the short story, that was much talked about in’80s. The New Yorker helped cause a renaissance and I’m sure caused a renaissance in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and at the New Yorker itself, not to mention the explosion of AWP and the MFA program movement, not to mention the establishment of the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the blizzard of competitions we see now which replace subscriptions as a way for magazines to raise the cash to continue. In 1986 Ray Carver was the guest editor of Best American Short Stories, and in 1987 it was Ann Beattie. If they ever were minimalists (I think they were), by then they weren’t anymore. By then Raymond Carver was dry and had a hold of his own career and craft—witness his lush story “Errand,” his last one, paying homage to Chekhov and at the same time staring his own death straight in the eye.

And Ann Beattie was no longer the chronicler of the boomer generation. As one reviewer put it, the generation no longer needed a chronicler to explain them to themselves. Instead, Beattie continued to evolve, continued to write from the perspective of her generation as it moved through its time. In “Find and Replace,” one of the last stories of the 48 in the New Yorker stories volume, the first person protagonist, named “Ann,” travels to Fort Myers to see her mother. It’s the first time she’s seen her mother since her father passed away. During this visit, her mother breaks it to her that she’s moving in with a man who lives next door, a man who was a good friend of Ann’s parents while both were living and who spoke at her father’s funeral. It is clear that her mother continues to desire connection with the world, and full-grown adult Ann feels that as a waft of a double loss and a betrayal. The author of this story is not the long haired hippie girl literary lion of 1974. It is the grown woman who’s kept on with the times, as we see in this paragraph from the first page of “Find and Replace”:

On a globally warmed July day, I flew into Fort Myers and picked up a rental and set off for my mother’s to observe (her terminology) the occasion of my father’s death, six months after the event. It was actually seven months later, but because I was in Toronto checking out sites for an HBO movie, and there was no way I could make it on June 25, my mother thought the most respectful thing to do would be to wait until the same day, on month later. I don’t ask my mother a lot of questions; when I can, I simply try to keep the peace by doing what she asks. As mothers go, she’s not demanding. Most requests are simple and have to do with her notions of propriety, which often center on the writing of notes . . .
My mother has a million friends. She keeps the greeting card industry in business. She would probably send greetings on Groundhog Day, if the cards existed. Also, no one ever seems to disappear from her life (with the notable exception of my father). She still exchanges notes with a maid who cleaned her room at the Swift House Inn fifteen years ago—and my parents were only there for a weekend . . .
Anyway, all the preliminaries to my story are nothing but that: the almost inevitable five minutes of hard rain midway through the trip; the beautiful bridge; the damned trucks expelling herculean farts. I drove to Venice, singing along with Mick Jagger about beasts of burden. When I got to my mother’s street, which is, it seems, the only quarter mile long stretch of America watched by God, through the eyes of a Florida policeman in a radar equipped car, I set the cruise control for twenty and coasted to her driveway.

“Find and Replace”

The contemporary details, the hectic pulse of travel and urban life, the shelters we seek in good sound systems in the cars, and the realistic depiction of the relationship to our parents once life has gone on—this is not the voice of a chronicler of the generation, rather one of someone who’s in for the ride, who’s writing to digest and understand. (You can hear Ann Beattie read this story aloud at: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/winter-2010/find-and-replace.)

The reviewers don’t rave much. And the New Yorker has stopped publishing her stories. The New York Times Book Review of the New Yorker stories volume said that the short story is a marginalized form and thus Ann Beattie is a marginalized author. Barely a month later the New York Times listed Beattie’s book one of the five best fiction books in their list of Ten Best Books of 2010.

Here are the last lines of a review by Nathan Heller of Ann Beattie: The New Yorker Stories in Slate (posted Dec. 10, 2010): . . .

This is formally self-conscious work—as readers, we're forced to study how the story's elements and motifs hang together—but it is also an effort to break past the conventions of literary storytelling, to mimic the disorderly, superstitious process of searching for meaning and direction in the brambles of personal experience. What these recent stories manage to convey is the aesthetics of consciousness: the feeling of being a mind in motion in the world.
Today, those quieter, more subjective portraits have replaced generation-channeling as Beattie's virtuosic skill—in part because the boomer generation has, at this point, been channeled as broadly as the BBC. What's startling in The New Yorker Stories isn't how her work has fallen behind the times. It's how persistently she's kept ahead—first using fiction to bring legibility and emotional direction to a society that needed both, and then, when that goal lost its urgency, turning her attention to interior life and formal innovation on the page. More than perhaps any writer of her generation, Beattie has remained tuned to the literary needs and intimations of middle-class life. Her latest lesson on the boomer zeitgeist is the most poignant one so far: acknowledgement that, even at the moment when we reach our highest point, the world moves on.

Nathan Heller

Slate

Dec. 10, 2010

Argentina and the Southern Cross

We arrived in Argentina June 21, a few hours after it turned winter there. While Bali is about 10 degrees south of the equator, Buenos Aires is 35 degrees south. One evening in San Antonio de Areco, where the gaucho picture above was taken (there were festivities going on and I was putting the dodge on dancing), several us went out far out away from the out buildings on the ranch and, standing next to the fence for a giant pasture, we looked up and scanned the sky to see if we could spot the Southern Cross. I didn’t know what proportion to look for. Would I have to sort of glue it together in my mind like I do the Big Dipper, or would it jump at me at a glance, like Orion’s belt. Well, it jumped at me. The Southern Cross hangs in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere like a crucifix on the wall at home when you were growing up. I know, not everybody's Catholic, but 92 percent of Argentina is. It is a beautiful, stately four star configuration (technically five star but the key cross figure is the four points you’d expect to form a t shape). It was not small but it was rather compact, so the entire effect of it hits the eye at once and with startling force. That was the evening of our first night in the country, after eleven days in the city, Buenos Aires.

Most of the people in our group knew cities, and Buenos Aires is beautiful and European in flavor, but it's a typical city in more ways than not. While Argentina is big in square miles, almost half of its 36 million people live in the city and province of Buenos Aires. Suffice it to say, it was good to get out of town.

Like Bali, probably like the US, too, if I think about it, in some sense Argentina has become an attraction, a tourist stop-off, and when you go there, there are, as they say, places to go, things to see, and like a good tourist, you check them off one by one. The result is seeing the Argentina someone has fashioned for you to see, like a photograph of it instead of the thing itself. In fact, progress has taken the country beyond gauchos and the tango, and, as in the US, the new generations are making their own new Argentina, but part of that new Argentina is that many people are employed to show these artifacts of Argentina's past to those who come visit and to represent them as Argentina. The Buenos Aires tourist literature tells you where to go for tango lessons and to see "real" gauchos. In Bali, you can read in similar literature where to go to see quaint villages, and when you get to them, there they are being professionally quaint and performing the Bali version of quaintness. It's okay. There is a real Bali, with amazingly beautiful people, but they know new money when they see it and are lithe enough to go for it. Somewhere there is a statistic about the money being made in Bali, and at the top of the list of activities that make it, you won't find rice farming. If that's how human beings worked, there would still be a lot of Americans interested in 4-H and running a hardware store in Kansas. No, there's a lot of money to be made on the story of America. There's a whole town in South Dakota that exists on the historical concept of Wild Bill Hickock, promoting the myth and selling U. S. Marshal's badges with a Colt .45 sized hole in them, nevermind Bill was shot in the back. Nevermind Argentina is past gauchos, the Balinese don’t love poverty more than they love tourists, and we in the new Americana are past cowboys and Indians. As Bali is willing to risk rapid deterioration of its beauty in order to sell its beauty to a withering stream of tourists, the US is willing to forgive the ruination of the gorgeous waters of the Gulf to keep the oil flowing in its veins. I digress again....

But do I? If I really went out into that pasture to see the Southern Cross for the first time, what was even more awesome than that constellation was the night sky itself. We’d been in Buenos Aires quite a while and the sky, as above all modern big cities, was dulled out and muted by ambient light in polluted air. Out in the country, away from lights, the sky was sparkling and pristine. I’d been terribly worked up by the Gulf oil spill, and I didn’t realize how much so. I think I began to believe nothing was clean and bright anymore. When was the last time you looked at the Milky Way, our galaxy? The pasture gave us a big flat gentle winter breeze, the great smell of the land, earth, like we remember it, a sky so vivid you could almost imagine we hadn’t yet ruined everything for ourselves. The irony. If word were to get out about the beauty of the sky at the edge of this beautiful pasture somewhere in Argentina, the inevitable would happen again – we’d go there in droves, stomp it, pave it, buy postcards of it.

I'd go back to Argentina. I'd try to find a writing place there, far enough from the city that ambient light wouldn't snuff my hope, close enough so I could get into town and see the art. The only way to get through the skrim of self-conscious promotion of an image of real Argentina (or anyplace) is to live there a while. I am curious and want to see Argentina's really real life, its day to day people and work and art and stories. You and I know there are great stories there -- in fact, though the lens will be different, we probably even know what those stories are. Half the fun is knowing they're half universal, half so specific to this beautiful country they could take place nowhere else.

I’ve been writing stories set in these places I’m visiting. As with the Bali story, I'm finding myself writing an ex-patriot fiction (I can’t get myself to presume to write from the point of view of a store-keeper in Ubud or a young person from the pampas now living in a suburb of Buenos Aires, so the ex-pat gambit is on again), and even so there's research to be done so that the story is organic to Argentina. Research. The core lesson of writing (for me) always elbows its way forward as I'm industriously making notecards and loving "information." It is: write the story while researching. The story can't be mulled and figured out in advance, and thus what well-targeted research is needed can't be predicted -- in novels this is, or could be, different. In stories, the story itself will arise from the writing of it. I'm sure there's a metaphor for this in the tango. In the metaphor, one of the dancing partners is the writer, the other is the writing on the page. And, you know, it switches back and forth. :-)

Bali

I've been working on a story set in Ubud, a sort of artists' community in the southern center of the island. Many expatriots have flocked to Bali, and Ubud is the place of choice for most who do. The challenge of my story is to fully realize the little I know and the lot I feel about Bali. We say in writing that often "place" is a character, influencing the goings on of a story in its unique way, such that the blend of place and people and "what happens next" makes a unique potion that would be fundamentally different in all ways if you simply changed the place. In theory this is obvious, of course. Place changes everything. But once in a while, as on this trip, the idea hits with force. My challenge is to make Bali organic to the story.

The religion of the island is key to all things there. It is lived and breathed. The island is not diverse. The Balinese are 92 percent the same as each other. Among their many challenges, one is not having to deal with competing interests from immigrants. They do have to deal with progress and development, as tourists storm the island, but the Balinese have to a large extent changed themselves to grow their incomes and their island economy -- have changed themselves from poor rice farmers to entrepreneurs finding ways to cash in on world interest in their island. Of course big development is there, in the south central part of the island, Denpasar and environs. The environment in the tourist places is being spoiled by litter and high demands for water and land.

Inland however the burgeoning population is focused on work, family, prayer, and community. People have motorbikes for transportation, and they have their cell phones and their ipods and their blackberries and the flat screen TVs. Their villages are very old, many of them, and some are new and fairly modern. As progress arrives, it is religion and family that enables the culture of Bali to hold steady. The women are strong; the men are resourceful.

Cooperation and togetherness, a respect for others, is real and apparent. If someone on the crowded streets (motorbikes by the thousands, not many cars) happens to pass a car and on-coming traffic is close, the driver being passed slows down and the passing vehicle is allowed to duck into the left lane. If that vehicle couldn't get in in time, the oncoming vehicle simply moves over so all three cars can pass each other three abreast, no problem, happens all the time. The slow down and stop for pedestrians as well as dogs and chickens and motorbikes parked with their rear ends on the right of way. No one gets annoyed. They simply watch out for each other and yield to one another appropriate to the situation.

In my very few days in Bali I witnessed the famous Balinese generosity, smartness, and goodness. That's the big news I got from being there. I might have begun to think those qualities were disappearing from the earth, and they aren't. I know exactly how this will work in my Bali story.

The Long Short Story Revisited

Last year at just this time, the Solstice, I wrote a short piece on the Long Short Story, and this is a Part II to that. This is the same post as you'll see on the new philipfdeaver.com, so you could read it in either place. Posts at the two sites won't always be redundant, but this is long overdue. This piece began as a lecture at Spalding.

I believe I can say that I was one of the first literary writers you sort of know to use a personal computer. It was an Osborne I, and the word processor (what an outrageous term that was at the time) was WordStar, a true miracle of its day. (William F. Buckley once called WordStar his “brother.”) Wow. Our retyping ourselves hell was over. I hope whoever figured WordStar out is living well today or has risen to sit at the right hand of God if that seat isn’t taken. Anyway, an inheritance from my grandmother, $2000, fixed me up with one of the first portable computers. It was 1982 and I was thirty six.

Because I’d been a writer a long time by then, who spent many long years typing and retyping (not a bad way to learn the craft), the computer was an astonishing leap forward. From Model T to Cessna 210, turboprop with a retractable gear and pressurized cabin – that’s the degree of change. I remember in Murray, KY standing over the shoulder of someone who was demo-ing an Apple desktop (Apple I?), the late 1970’s. I watched that cursor, sort of yellow, dance across the black screen. I watched text get moved around on the page, words inserted. In that one Kubrick movie, the opening sequence shows cavemen, who were way more monkey than human, suddenly discover using tools. In Murray that day, watching that guy, forgive me, “word process” (geeeez it’s still pretty ugly that term), I felt like I was watching the second opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Soon after that, we hurled into, as the man said in “Pulp Fiction,” a time of transition. The first story I wrote on the Osborne, I mean to say actually composed on the computer, was an autobiographical dump using baseball as the ostensible subject. The story was “Infield.” I never imagined it would be in any book, much less my own. It was a long story from the start, roughly 8,500 words. (With the computer, the average length of my stories leaped by a whopping 5,000 words.) This limited the market, because the literary magazines were geared for, actually dictated, a rather standard length of a short story, 3 to 5 thousand words. You could get by with 6,000, though they might ask you to cut. You would endure a short chat with the editor, who had you so very over the barrel, about how the story was fat in the beginning and a little confusing there in the middle and not tight enough in the end, and – basically — take out two pages, he’d tell you, and it’d be all fixed, would perfectly, no MIRACULOUSLY, coincide with the space he had in the magazine! The sneakily fine Florida Review was the first to take a really long story of mine, “Dakota Feed and Grain,” named after at restaurant in Murray. Roughly 1990. That story was 10,000 words. The editor, your friend and mine, the estimable Russell Kesler. The Florida Review never even commented on the length.

When I won the Flannery O’Connor Award, that collection contained stories that were first crafted pre-computer but were refined and grown using WordStar and also stories composed by hand and then worked to final form with WordStar and, finally, some stories, “Infield” being the first, written and evolved entirely on the computer. I hadn’t planned for it to be so long. It bloomed at my fingertips. It was like mainlining a story. Most of the real work was in revision, sculpting the first draft to final, but hell, on the computer you COULD revise, thoroughly – and still make it to work by 8 o’clock.

I’m calling this blog, which almost certainly is about the fiction form best termed the “novella” – I’m calling it “The Long Short” (as in the Long Short Story), but it turns out one person’s short is another’s long: I found this review by Janet Maslin in the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago, an article called “Bite Size Legal Trouble and Suspense,” about Grisham’s new book Ford County, which travelers in airports are already waving around because that’s how it goes with John Grisham. Maslin says, “John Grisham had some story ideas that he didn’t think could sustain full length narrative [full length narrative! – like “Brokeback Mountain” wasn’t a full length narrative but a broken little chip off some fully legit full length narrative block]. So [I’m still quoting Maslin] he did what he customarily does: whatever he wants to. Was anyone at Doubleday going to argue with that? Mr. Grisham took seven of his unused plot ideas and turned them into a sharp, lean tale free of subplots and padding [emphasis mine – implication: novels contain padding]. At an average length of over 40 pages[she goes on to say], these narratives are shorter than novellas but longer than conventional short stories….” [Janet Maslin has some version of the precise measure short and long well in mind, very impressive, mysterious to the rest of us – These next lines, get ready for them, they are hurtful to a starving short story writes – Maslin writes:], “For a fledgling author, this format would be a tough sell. For Mr. Grisham, it’s a vacation from whatever grueling work goes into the construction of fully rigged best sellers. The change invigorates him in ways that show up on the page.”

Maslin apparently doesn’t see (this from me, a story writer) what the “change” is that invigorates Grisham. It’s the change to the long short form, baby. The long story is a real form, like a sonnet, like a portrait (in painting), like a still life – the short story, long or short, isn’t detritus conveniently made into something or other from the notebook between bestsellers. It’s the short long for John Grisham, and the long short for me, and for many of you, and for Andre Dubus and Richard Yates and Alice Munro and Andrea Barrett and F. Scott Fitgerald and Stephen Crane and Robert Stone and Ann Beattie. It’s all the same thing, man, art in words. Yeah, formerly — Doubleday exists for John Grisham, because Doubleday is novels, and novels are John Grisham, and that’s fine but we’re talking about the NBA here, lottery winners, 50 or 60 literary lottery winners in the American literary world, but in 2010 there are millions of writers and only thousands of readers [I exaggerate but not much to make my point], and the day is coming to an end when Doubleday tells us what size of picture to paint because of what size of wall they like to hang things on.

You recall it was magazines that sustained the short story, back when we had magazines. But you could also, most assuredly without stretching it, say it the other way, that the short story sustained the magazines. It was a time when readers outnumbered writers. The sea change was afoot before the computer but our beautiful little laptops sealed the deal, make no mistake about it.

One of the stories in my Flannery collection, the newest at the time I won, was “Forty Martyrs,” a giant at upwards of 40 pages, and the Flannery O’Connor series editor, Charles East (rest in peace: he’s just died Oct. 1, a great, kind, good man) suggested I take it out because it made the book too long. I did, and this is not a criticism of Charles – it was the right thing, the book galleys were 275 pages without “Forty Martyrs.”

That was in the ‘80’s. In the ‘90’s, “Forty Martyrs” became the anchor tenant of my novel-in-stories, all of the stories in it 8,000 words or more. When I wrote my novel, Past Tense, about how the past haunts us, I gave it 75 page chapters. I call it a novel-in-novellas. To give it some kind of form, I tried very hard to make each chapter exactly 75 manuscript pages, not by fattening the short ones and trimming the long ones, but just by targetting that as I wrote — how different is that from giving a poem fourteen lines iambic and a rhyme scheme? Form is good. Grace and form have been in fiction all along.

Yes, I make the leap that the long short story, which I’ll arbitrarily define as a work of fiction longer than 7,000 words and shorter than a novella (aah hahaha – good one, I kill me), or maybe I could vaguely define it as a story so long most magazines couldn’t print it – anyway, I’ll make the leap that the short story became a real form with the appearance of the magazines, or at least that their existences were symbiotic, and that the long short story, although it existed before, became a real contemporary story form after writers began to compose on their computers. At first editors saw the long story as full of fluff and fat that needed cutting. Later when they too worked almost exclusively on the computer, you didn’t hear that so much. It coincided with, within ten years, a wave of magazines going under, and newspapers soon to follow, so editors had bigger fish to fry than to complain if an established writer came knocking with something longer than the editor had in mind. This is probably an established fact, that the use of the computer by writers helped the longer story to be an option though it put pressure on an already to the breaking point magazine publishing industry, so it all comes down to Philip Deaver’s grandmother and the Osborne I, just kidding; but sometimes it’s fun to contemplate one’s personal involvement, even if minute, in the establishment of an established fact.

In the ‘80’s, suddenly if something was short and otherwise trimmed down (I’m speaking in generalizations to make a larger point), it was called “minimalism,” and even the minimalists revered the work of Alice Munro which was invariably long (though she reportedly has never felt much compulsion to write a novel – I think she has one). But by 1990, not so much minimalism anymore, and half the writing world was on Macs and the other half on PCs. Ray Carver’s last story “Errand,” gracefully long and lush, clearly was rendered unminimally after he was out from under the mothy wing of Gordon Lish. (The recent biography of Carver reveals he'd been free of the Lish influence for a number of years by the time he died.)

The lengthening of the literary short story isn’t all because of the publishing industry’s going slack or the rise of the computer. The final short story of Joyce’s Dubliners is a masterwork of all time, “The Dead,” not usually thought of as a novella not because of its length but because it focuses on a group of characters moving through a single evening, which will get it classified for sure as a long short, not a short long. The final short story of Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories was “Brokeback Mountain,” a story that must be over 10,000 words (someone out there will know or can find out). Laura van den Berg’s title story for her new collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is also over 10,000 words. Nancy Zafris, the new Series Editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award, observed to me recently that a current winner of the prize has a story 68 pages long, surely pushing the Flannery O’Connor Award high-end limit. This summer Alice Munro placed a story in Harper’s that was called a novella on the cover of the magazine, and Munro regularly places long stories in the New Yorker. Her collections are full of long stories, she’s known for her winding road plots and for stories that depend partly on the passage of considerable time for some of their impact and resonance. Does the fact that so many well-known contemporary story writers cite Alice Munro as their exemplar and ideal mean that long stories are experiencing increased acceptance, that if you are a writer of stature your long story might be allowed to take up all those expensive hard copy pages within a magazine? Does the slow rise of digital publication mean the gradual reconsideration of traditional length limitations, all else being equal even though, elephant in the room alert, all else isn’t equal? Could it be that, in this time of there being (here comes the elephant) millions of writers and only thousands of readers, and all the millions of writers are bamming out their work on high powered laptops – could it be that the tendency of the computer-era writer is to write longer not just to write longer but because it’s a natural form and they’ve got just the technology to achieve it still make it to work by 8 o’clock (because they will have to have a day job)?

In the past it was axiomatic that the reason you didn’t write a long story or a novella was because “there’s no place to publish it.” It seems apparent to me that the hard copy magazine markets that publish short fiction are getting more friendly to the longer story (they are less frequently accusing writers of “losing control” and/or writing fat), and perhaps if we can agree that online markets for stories are growing in number, markets that don’t even think in terms of numbers of pages, perhaps the world in general is getting there, and perhaps John Grisham knows it. Is that optimistic enough for ya?

Many of you know that I follow the work of Richard Ford. I’ve read his every published word – okay, except for that first novel — and it’s my opinion that his stories are much better than his novels which are pretty danged good. I first heard from him the quote I always use in these lectures and once thought was his, but he advised me came from Randall Jarrell, definition of a novel:

A novel is a long work of fiction that there’s something wrong with.

Ford over the years has been a spokesman for the short story, and has edited two volumes for Granta plus, I believe, one of the Best American Short Story anthologies. If you have never seen it, please read Ford’s hilarious and spot-on introduction to his reverent acknowledgement of the long short in his Granta Book of the American Long Story, now eleven years old, containing great ones from Peter Taylor, Jane Smiley, Philip Roth, William Styron, Stanley Elkin, Andrea Barrett, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates of course, Barry Hannah, and Edwidge Danticat. I hope Granta does it again one of these days and that Ford, who better?, edits it.

I believe that Updike’s stories are better than his novels, and Robert Stone’s are awful good too, and Ray Carver of course and Andre Dubus and Alice Munro, they’re devoted to the form, and I do believe we must cease to view the short story as a form fledgling writers use to become real writers so they can write novels and that bestselling writers use to dump the growing detritus in their notebooks-of-gold between their gleaming bestsellers. If you have some doubt of this, read “The Dead” again (not a bag of fluff rendered fat with a word-gushing laptop but a masterwork in the long short story form by an author capable of writing both short short and long long) an exquisite beauty in and of itself, a master work that renders

at worst silly,

at best moot,

a discussion of the long and/or short of it.

Erotica and Her Sisters

I’m pasting below a letter I received today from the only genuine writer of erotica I know, who graduated from the Stonecoast MFA program the same semester as her pal, the estimable Susan Lilley. I asked her in my note to help us find the path to real literary erotica and away from Ms. McNaughty. I hit paydirt, as you will see. Here’s the reply of Ann Rosenquist Fee:

OH PHIL, what timing!! I’m at the Minneapolis airport with a few hours to spare, waiting for a fellow Stonecoast grad to arrive from New York so we can teach, tomorrow at the Loft Literary Center, a one-day workshop called Sex on the Page. The class is a product of our final Stonecoast presentation, in which I presented Ann’s Theory of Erotic Truth (an original blend of theories from French philosopher Georges Bataille and erotica writer/editor Susie Bright), and then my co-presenter, Ellen Neuborne, and I used that as a lens to help students judge what works and what doesn’t in their own and others’ erotic scenes, and then showed how to use that lens to create the most powerful, efficient and relevant erotic scenes possible in service to story. In short, our theory mandates that in order for erotic art to succeed, it needs two things: 1) an element of transgression, either in content or form (and we mean REAL transgression, smart transgression, not purportedly naughty sex, which doesn't surprise us at all, really -- transgression as in a conventional narrative that suddenly becomes a panting list of phrases and fragments when a kiss is described, because such a break in form embodies and shows-versus-tells how the character experiences this moment differently than, say, walking down the street) and 2) a fecundity, a transcendence, a fertility to the scene that both slams the reader into his/her own body and also sends them to an entirely other place, which, in sum, should be more/different than what porn achieves, and always in service to the larger story.

Here ere are some suggestions straight from the outline I’m prepping right now.

Texts that get at the theory…
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Susie Bright, Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression
Susie Bright, The Sexual State of the Union
Jean Paulhan’s foreword to Story of O
Diana Widmaier Picasso, Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic

Examples of powerful and artful erotic writing…
Best American Erotica collections edited by Susie Bright (especially 2006 with “Talk About Sex: An Orientation” by Jamie Cat Callan)
Any Cleis Press erotica collection edited by Alison Tyler
Judy Blume, Forever
Cris Mazza, “Is It Sexual Harassment Yet” from Normal: Fiction Collective Two (1998)
Anais Nin, House of Incest
Pauline Reage, Story of O
Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

And here's the link to the Loft class description...

http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://www.loft.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_id=2166

…in case you decide Rollins or some other entity needs Sex on the Page. Ellen and I are pitching it to conferences around the country – we were thrilled to have the Loft as our first taker.

Hello to superstar Susan, please, and to Paul next time you’re in touch. Writerly vibes to you all…

Ann

On Finishing

I was talking with some people last night at the great Bloomsday celebration at yours and my favorite indy bookstore, Urban Think, in Thornton Park, and someone was saying that he knew a writer who writes first drafts on a typewriter, then puts them on the computer as a second draft. Why haven't I ever thought of that? I'm so much more friendly to the keyboard than my own legendarily bad handwriting. One reason I have never thought of that is that first drafts usually go in my notebook which one would think is a place for handwriting, but sometimes I do a first draft on the computer, print it out, edit it by hand, and tape the edited copy into my notebook. So already it, the notebook, isn't a place solely for handwriting. I paste, tape, and post many different things in there. Typed drafts would be fine.

I should go on ebay or craigslist and see if I can find an Olympia portable in great condition. It would be a real adjustment, reintroducing into the household the steady click clack ding zing bang. When I was growing up in the big house (shown here), I had a desk in my room that instead of setting on the floor like an ordinary desk was bolted to the vertical oak studs behind the plaster wall, the easier to clean beneath it. From sixth grade, I was up there in my room typing, and I had my grandfather's serious Royal upright, battleship gray and weighing in at four hundred and twenty two pounds. When I would throw the carriage (sorry to the young pups -- you had to be there), the whole house would shake. You've heard of teenagers playing music too loud in their rooms. My parents would have given anything if I'd preferred Gracie Slick and the Beatles on the hi-fi instead.

I read Updike one time saying that when he first started writing, he just liked to see all those words of his on a page, and a lot of what he was doing in his stories had to do with filling the page up, and he said he was always supremely satisfied to roll a page out of the typewriter that was completely filled with his words. In fact, it was always a little disconcerting to him to take a page out that was not "finished." To him, “finished” meant filling the available space. When he was young, that is -- later, finished to Updike had the meaning it has to the rest of us -- finding the end of our story, completing the writing of it so that the draft has a beginning, middle, and an end.

I might look around for a typewriter, or oil up the old family Hermes, that we used to use for addressing envelopes before we learned how to do that on the printer. The Olympia was a great typewriter, not talking about the electric. I remember buying my first Olympia in Champaign, '66. I had a second one, '71.

In my mind, there is some connection I haven’t understood yet between typing on the typewriter and finishing. Somehow the levels of effort for typing accurately to avoid excessive retyping and for squaring away the content in a story were one thing. On the computer keyboard, the writing is supremely easy, revision so easy it is sometimes too easy, and the arc and heart of a story become the main concentration which, separated from the process of writing, seems to come along slower. Who’d have thunk it?

My experience with this may not be the common experience. To comment on this precise thing, you’d have to have done plenty of time doing creative writing on a typewriter, and with that understanding I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing. Over the past five years, I’ve seemed to have developed a habit of robust starts that come to not very much. A story idea that comes along goes into a partial first draft satisfactorily, but I don’t give it the time, or lose the enthusiasm, and the next thing you know it’s on the back burner or abandoned entirely. This habit came along without my spotting it as a pattern until recently.

I know enough about me and writing to know how to address this. In writing, word by word, line by line, story by story, there is always a balance between the application of discipline and logic and the “go with the flow” surge of instinct and impulse. Both angles on the text are needed, discipline and instinct. The author is in charge. Therefore, as the author, if I notice I’m not finishing a lot of stuff and it concerns me, the fix is to break the habit by finishing no matter what. Well, I’ll tell myself, it may not be worth finishing. Well, MAKE it worth finishing, I’ll reply. I’m trying to make this a practical, workable observation on finishing, so I’ll take the ideal out of it. Everything can’t be finished or made worth finishing. To which I think to myself, yeah, but let’s improve the average.

I know that can be done, because I do keep a lot of my unfinished drafts, and years later I’ll take a look and miserably observe that the draft had a lot going for it and I should have finished it. Sometimes it is hard to get one’s self back in some bygone mode to finish an old start. It should be tried when one arrives on the idea that he has to begin finishing more. But the lesson in looking back on the junk pile of starts that were worthy but given up on is mainly to reaffirm something the typewriter years taught us, that writing is work, that the good stuff is hard to do which is why the few rewards for the good, finished work are so sweet.

No magic. I’ve got a 6,000 word story troubled by unresolved autobiography and some other torments, and word back from my trusty first readers isn’t good. As usual, they’ve seen into the piece perfectly, spelling out its issues (which far outweigh it). Finishing is far off. It will involve pushing. It will involve reading the piece over and over until I understand my own motives and edit out the crap and spot strands that aren’t being pulled through. And press on—I’m in a covered wagon, westward ho the long trek. My horses and ox are being hoisted up Scott’s Bluff, in Nebraska, which looks like a big obstacle. The ferryman has my wagons on the river. I’m hoping to get to the ocean. I don’t know it, but between me and finishing, there’s the Grand Tetons.

On another burner I’ve got a big story, culminating piece of an otherwise pretty successful book manuscript. I know the problems. First readers have helped, but I knew the problems all along. The piece, at the conceptual level, was risky, but that’s what I wanted and every time I reread it it’s still what I want. Onward. It’s summer.

There’s probably a science to finishing a story. Maybe a seven step process. Or a twelve step process to address the habit of not finishing. Nevermind. We know what to do. Lean into it. Read it again for all its possibilities. Don’t be afraid. Get a little joy. Work in the morning earlier, well before the sun is up. Leave the radio off. Take the coffee black. Work to finish. Retype the goddamn thing! Let it be messy—not every piece we write will be a masterwork, but the process of finishing grows us in the art, make no mistake—takes us to the next level where the good work is.

The Writer Paul Freidinger on James Wood and How Fiction Works

The writer Paul Freidinger is my guest on this site for the first time -- first, I hope, of many. We both grew up in Central Illinois and probably played basketball and baseball against each other in the early sixties. Astoundingly, Paul had a poem in the same Florida Review as my "Wilbur Gray Falls in Love with an Idea," in the mid-eighties, and still we didn't actually meet and shake hands until four or five years ago. In addition to being a serious and remarkable poet, Paul is a gargantuan reader and reviewer of contemporary fiction. You would not, I think you'll agree, if you read the piece below a thousand times, peg him as a Cub fan. Enjoy.

For the last few years I’ve followed the reviews of contemporary fiction by James Wood whenever I’ve had the chance. I have to say I usually feel younger than he is although I am older by more than fifteen years. I feel younger because reading him leaves me with the sense of being vastly inexperienced in comparison to his depth of understanding the pantheon of Western literature. My lack doesn’t diminish the sense of pleasure and insight I receive when I read his reviews. In light of this, it took the gift of his recent book How Fiction Works to be motivated to read it. I’m left with the impression it should be required reading for any writer or anyone who has a serious interest in literary fiction.

I am not intending for this to be a full-length discussion of the book. I would hope to discuss other parts of it in the future. For now I would like to focus on a small section which I think a reader could apply to any book he or she may be reading. I should preface this by saying I hate the term “literary fiction,” and that distinction only serves to marginalize writers and readers alike. When I was young, I always wondered what made a book a classic. As I grew older, I decided a classic was simply a great story told in a superior way. I can also confess that I often disagree with Wood, as many qualified critics do. I think the value of his book is that it offers practical models to approach a wide variety of modern fiction.

I should point out that Wood is impressively grounded in the classics and the evolution of the novel and has a thorough grasp of Western philosophy. In his book he focuses on Shakespeare, Flaubert, Proust, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Austen, Henry James, Joyce, among others, attempting as he goes to trace the evolution to the modern novel and the use by authors of free indirect style. He speaks highly of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, J.M. Coetzee, and V.S. Naipaul. Contemporary writers he likes include people as diverse as Ian McEwan, Norman Rush, Marilynne Robinson, W.G. Sebald, Josè Saramago, Roberto Bolaño, and Alexsander Hemon. He argues in favor of a realist fiction which respects the lineage of the tradition of those named authors, but he isn’t above embracing certain postmodern writers, as long as they don’t diverge into “hysterical realism,” narrative in its lightness that is neither unbearable nor grounded in the realm of a character’s possible life.

Of the current novelists, I want to draw attention to this one quote as a simple way to assess a book. Wood explains at length:

The novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author’s own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character’s presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we would call language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. In this sense, the novelist is a triple writer, and the contemporary writer now feels especially the pressure of this tripleness, thanks to the omnivorous presence of the third horse of this troika, the language of the world, which has invaded our subjectivity, our intimacy, the intimacy that James thought should be the proper quarry of the novel, and which he called (in a troika of his own) “the palpable present-intimate.”

As it turns out, I read Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence at the same time I was reading How Fiction Works. About Rushdie’s Fury Wood wrote that “playful self-indulgence is a sign of an author in terminal decline.” The Enchantress of Florence is no less an example of this. I feel certain Wood would say it has a hard time staying grounded, that the author falls in love with his own cleverness, that Rushdie can’t be serious long enough to write the novel he is capable of. As a reader-reviewer, I can easily agree that Rushdie the author overpowers his characters. I wouldn’t say this is one of his best books. On the other hand, I would say that Rushdie remains a unique practitioner of fiction, suited as no other current writer is to articulate how Hinduism and Islam are bound and simultaneously antithetical and the tragic way Western Civilization continues to misunderstand Asia and create problems on a world stage born of our own ignorance. He is a brilliant story teller to boot, and for all of its faults, I loved The Enchantress of Florence.

Wood takes issue with two other books of which I am fond: Delillo’s Underworld and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I took the effort to track down Wood’s reviews of both books, and he pronounced both of them failures. He charged Underworld with having no center and being populated with dead characters. The Corrections, he went on to say, was a distillation of DeLillo’s book, concentrated on a single family’s dynamic, but suffering from the same lack of authenticity, the same absence of “living, breathable” characters. I love both of these books, and they have become part of my own ontology, part of the way I experience the world. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t evaluate some experience by the means I learned in reading DeLillo and Franzen. For me they are examples of how fiction can teach us to live, to judge experience, to gain a heightened sense of receptivity. I empathize with the characters easily, and I was sad to see both come to an end. Again, I would like to say that, in retrospect, James Wood helped guide me through them, after the fact, and reading his reviews helped me appreciate them more; perhaps, more because of their flaws. I have read two novels by Norman Rush and disliked them intensely. I read them because of Wood’s recommendations. An odd thing happened for me with Rush. Wood aptly demonstrates how Rush creates a style of language by cobbling it together in an unusual way. It turns out that he articulated something I attempt with my own writing: the process of forming a language with different registers that contain within them a kind of tension, perhaps unlike any ordinary spoken language, but one that forces a reader to pay attention and see the world from a new perspective. I guess my argument here is that one needn’t subscribe wholly to the church of James Wood to learn from him, and that poets have as much to gain from him as fiction writers.

I’ll continue with one last comment on the dangers, as Wood sees them, of a writer adopting the “language of the world.” Here, Wood cites David Foster Wallace as the poster child for good intentions gone awry. About Wallace’s use of this style, Wood fires, “the language of his unidentified narration is hideously ugly, and rather painful for more than a page or two.” He goes on to say,

the risky tautology inherent in the contemporary writing project has begun: in order to invoke a debased language (the debased language your character might use), you must be willing to represent that mangled language in your text, and perhaps, thoroughly debase your own language... In other words, the novelist’s job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring. David Foster Wallace is good at becoming the whole of boredom.

Whether or not you the reader buy his assessment, I think any writer today grapples with the challenge of how to use language effectively. I think Wood reveals himself in this prejudice, and I can list any number of reputable writers who would ignore his advice. Ignoring his advice would not minimize the writer’s task.

I will say, in ending, that this is one small component of Wood’s rubric. I’m advocating the value to a reader of intentionally assessing a writer’s language and whether the characters’ voices are true to themselves or simply an author’s desire to convey his own conceits at the expense of a character’s personality. I’m suggesting a reader examine whether a writer can resurrect our daily language and give a character an authentic voice, or whether he becomes a victim of the superficial, to the degree of being unable to make us care enough about that character to complete his story. The rest of Wood’s book takes one deeper into the formation of a novel and what is essential to its success. He offers equally sound advice as he takes the reader through the essential elements of the novel. Give it a chance, read the book. It might make you a better reader. It might even cause you to reconsider your own writing.

*All quotes are from James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

Richard Bausch's "Design"

Reading this Richard Bausch story again, a favorite of mine for fifteen years (another of the stories my good friend the writer Mary Burns pointed me toward) (and having met Bausch himself since the last time I read it), I’m as pleased as I was the first time. This story appeared in the 1990 Best American Short Stories anthology, and, in fact, Bausch had two stories in that volume. I think he and Alice Munro are the only authors ever to pull that off (someone give me a shout about this if you know). It is so perfect that this story, which then was entitled “A Kind of Simple, Happy Grace,” is one of Bausch’s honored two that make up that achievement. James Wood, in his fine book How Fiction Works, sometimes seems not to have a clue about how fiction actually works, and I think it is because he’s so taken by the craft aspect, which can be talked about at length. Only God knows how the art aspect works, and that part is so mysterious and magical even God hasn’t bothered to write a book about it. Perhaps Wood's intention (I’ll confess here I’m not through the book though I am through the section on characters in fiction) is to explore the question How Fiction Works rather than answer it. I haven’t read as much fiction as Wood has (very few people have – he’s amazing), but I’ve written more of it, and I can tell you the word “works” in his title is tricky. Anybody who ever ran a workshop knows it. It’s avoided. Works for who? What constitutes working? The word, when you think of it, is intentionally vague. “Well, I dunno, it just works, works for me anyway.” That kinda thing.

In the chapters where Wood is pondering character, he turns to the traditional terminology of round characters and flat ones (well, not so traditional – the terms, Wood advises us, come from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel), and he (Wood) concludes all characters, even the best ones in the best fiction, are somewhat flat, because they can’t be round, because round characters are “real.” Real people are round characters, and fiction can’t go that far in creating characters, so in fiction they’re all a bit flat. And for damn sure, you aren’t going to have any round characters in short fiction because it’s too short to make them even a little bit round! Take a look (How Fiction Works, p 128), I think he really says this.

We have to find our way to stories. We tease them up from the subconscious by following a trail we hope we’re seeing but maybe not and maybe that’s okay, just keep going. The trail is mostly made up of characters who emerge as we write. In the back of the Best American Short Stories anthology in which the story we’re talking about appeared, Bausch reported that one summer it came to pass that he had to drive to work on “a route that led [him] past several churches, ranged within sight of each other in the lovely hills beyond McClean, Virginia.” He said that from that landscape he began to imagine a story about two men from different denominations and that the story would somehow involve them finally coming into “a sort of helpless embrace.” Bausch had no idea what the embrace would be about, who they men were, or how the story would get there. He couldn’t know that because he didn’t know the men yet. I love this, the story and understanding the background of it. What story was whispering to Richard Bausch from this landscape? After many blind alleys, he finally found it. He says it took him seven years to write. “So simple,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest idea why.”

“Design” begins with the Catholic priest Father Russell watching from his window the aging Baptist minister Reverend Tarmigian raking his leaves across the way even though the leaves weren’t finished falling and the old man was in no condition to be doing it. Tarmigian, ailing, pale and just a little dottering, didn’t seem at all well even from a distance, and Father Russell was going through a bad time, worried about everything, including but not limited to the old minister on the opposite side of the deep gully separating their churches. To get from one to the other one had to walk down to the sidewalk by the road, and walk over there, crossing the gully on a sidewalk bridge. Finally, having watched the old man struggle in his work, Russell had to go over there, even though through the years he’d actually avoided contact with the Reverend, idle conversation, waste of time, a whole flock on the right side of the gully to worry about, plate full, can’t take on the scene that’s going on over on the other side. So guilt came to roost. Time to go talk.

I think Tarmigian is one of the most interesting and fine characters I’ve seen in contemporary short fiction. I love this man, bright eyed though dying, still raking the leaves of the massive churchyard, still carrying the mulch up the hill to the cemetery where his wife, dead twenty years, was buried. Pausing there to pray a while, and back down the hill to work. Teasing Father Russell for being so worried about him. What are characters in fiction? James Wood asks rhetorically as he opens his discussion on character development in his book. But it isn’t even a question worth asking, is it? It’s like asking, What are people for? One might as well ask what are atoms in a compound? What are rivers through a field?

While parrying Father Russell’s concern about his well being, Tarmigian lapses into preacher shop-talk, telling him that recently he’s been counseling a couple who have been married 52 years and want a divorce. Tarmigian is on the one hand wryly amused, on the other hand enthralled by the question. He tells Russell, it’s like the woman suddenly slaps herself on the forehead and says, what were we thinking? Fifty two years! The couple can’t agree on what television show to watch. Damn sure they don’t want to sleep in the same room! Those are just a couple of the points of contention, but fifty two years is the main thing – when marriage was invented, nobody ever dreamed two people would have to co-habitate until they were blue in the face. One farts a lot, the other is stone deaf, years ago they went beyond knowing each other well into the region of knowing each other too well, then past that into the zone of once again not knowing each other at all. This is what hard labor and crusades and disease were for, to kill off one of them, most likely the male, mercifully of course, we hope, in some regular civilized death way, but one of them has to go. Read the fine print! Until death do us part!

Father Russell, in the story, makes three trips over to Tarmigian’s place, worried about him. In the second trip, Russell has traipsed over to the very frail Tarmigian’s side of the gully to get him to stop working and go to a doctor. Russell is having a crisis, ostensibly so worried about Tarmigian that he can’t sleep, though we, the reader, can see this is a case of classic projection and Russell is easily as worried about himself. Celibacy! He’s forty three, alone, coming unstuck from reality. He has is own neurotic past to deal with and he can’t deal with it by himself in his creaky old rectory, nobody can!, his flock’s going walkabout all over town, the past haunts even those of us who aren’t neurotic, his faith-tormented present isn't feeling so great either, and his prospects looking ahead are pretty grim if you ask me (and for sure he'd agree, in this mid-life mood of his). Imagine the storms inside this man. And don’t forget, for a priest, this kind of worry about self is masturbation pure and simple – self indulgence – so he’s (convinced himself he's very) worried not about himself but about the guy next door. And also. Russell is a good guy and really IS worried about the guy next door.

Tarmigian meantime is on Russell’s last nerve, seeming to push his worry to the limit. In this second trip over, Russell comes into the church and finds Tarmigian, normally dottering even on terra firma, teetering at the very tip top of a rickety ladder painting the upper regions of the interior of his church. You have to know Richard Bausch to know how he loved writing this, so funny I’m laughing in my chair right now. When Tarmigian coughs, the ladder tips this way and that, and he coughs a lot. One hand’s fully bandaged from a mishap with the sharp lid of a paint can, and that’s the hand Tarmigian holds on with – the paint brush is in the other one. Father Russell fairly seizes up watching all this.

In the third visit of Father Russell over to Tarmigian’s place, when the priest arrives, Tarmigian is nowhere to be found, and Russell places himself in a pew in Tarmigian’s church and waits. Russell is a wreck, on the edge of a breakdown, worried about Tarmigian's health and, of course, himself. He's shaking and upset, holding back tears. He really wants to go to confession to this old minister, his father in a way and his brother in another way and in yet another way his priest, but Baptists aren’t into the sacrament of penance, dang. Finally Russell hears Tarmigian’s voice, out on the front walk with someone, talking loudly as he strolls into the church. He's walking into the church with an old woman, and the old woman is deaf. Tarmigian sees the priest sitting there and welcomes him, introduces him to the woman, who turns out to be guess who, the woman of the 52 year marriage on the rocks, and asks her to settle a moment in a back pew while he talks with the priest who seems to be wigging out. As they talk, the woman shouts she can't hear what they're saying and that she's deaf as a post. Meantime Tarmigian is calming the priest. The woman yells a couple more times, "Hey, what's going on over there. I can't hear a thing. I am stone cold deaf!" Tarmigian is aware she's trying to figure out what they're talking about, these two men of different cloths – what an odd thing. “What’s going on?” she shouts. It’s puzzling. She can see one of them is upset. "Hey!" she shouts, kindly, but just letting them know she's lost as to what's happening. Tarmigian, ever more frail, talks Russell down best he can, telling him to relax, all's well, it gets like this sometimes, don't worry – "I'm fine,” he assures the priest, “don't worry about me," etc. Russell is in tears. They are a few feet away from the deaf woman in the pew who's watching them but can't hear them. Finally Tarmigian says to Father Russell, turned away so his lips can’t be read, something like, so, are you gonna be okay? and then he says, "C'mon, let's shake hands so she sees us -- no, wait," he says, "let's embrace. Let's give her an ecumenical thrill." And they do. Of course, in the story, the hug is way more important than just performance for a deaf onlooker. We’re in Russell’s third person limited point of view and he feels the skeletal remains of his wise and kindly old Baptist neighbor, experiences the embrace as confession, and nearly collapses in the old man's arms. Tarmigian, we assume, experiences it as fellow reverend and father figure to the young priest, as spiritual healer and marriage counselor to the old woman.

Under that different title, you can find the story in the 1990 Best American Short Stories. I recently read it in my copy of The Stories of Richard Bausch. I wish James Wood would read “Design.” What is character in fiction? It’s art. It’s a bunch of words the artist makes live and breathe so it’s a round character we’re better for having met, this old minister Tarmigian. The author found this man among the churches in the landscape he was driving through at the time. He imagined an embrace and found his way to it. Inspired, he knew just the brushstrokes to give us and exactly when to stop. He got two stories into the 1990 Best American. This one took him seven years. That’s how fiction “works.” So simple.

Updike’s “A Constellation of Events”

I’m reading the formidable writer and critic James Wood’s new book How Fiction Works, and the first twenty five percent of it (that’s how far I’ve gotten) is devoted to one of my favorite things, third person limited point of view, which he, from a different school of thinking and a different angle of comment, calls “free indirect style.” Wood is a writer my pal, the poet, essayist and Central Illinoisian Paul Freidinger, has really latched onto, in the New Yorker and really all over the place (including an interview with him conducted by the Kenyon Review that came out on their website about the time mine did – get on kenyonreview.org and find it in their archive). Wood’s astonishing contribution is the breadth of his reading and his continuing command over all of it.

Anyway, James Wood traces free indirect style (I like this expansion of the concept of point of view to the level of “style,” and when you think of it, of course, per the quote I’m about to show you, point of view IS style – something I’ve never thought before) to Flaubert. In the quote below, Wood’s simply helping us understand what he’s pinpointing with the term “free independent style”:

The tension between the author’s style and his or her characters’ styles becomes
acute when three elements coincide: when a notable stylist is at work, like
Bellow or Joyce; when that stylist also has a commitment to following the
perceptions and thoughts of his or her characters (a commitment usually
organized by free indirect style or its off-spring, stream of consciousness);
and when the stylist has a special interest in the rendering of detail.
Stylishness, free indirect style, and detail: I have described
Flaubert, whose work opens up and tries to solve this tension, and who is really
its founder.

Of course, John Updike, contemporary realist master, is a prose stylist, more articulate than most of us by double, and so there’s a problem. When he’s writing in free indirect style, he’s under an awful lot of pressure for his point of view character, mainly, to have the Updikean eye for detail and flare for language. This would be a rare Yankee suburban WASP bored cop, housewife or businessman, indeed. Yet Updike has to sell us on the reality of this character so that we aren’t distracted when the character pleases us with his spectacular observation or precision articulation of detail (he doesn’t want the reader to stop and think, “wait a minute, who’s talking here – the character or the author?”).

Free indirect style allows the “style” of the story to free float hopefully quite unobtrustively between the voice of the author and the voice of the character so that the reader isn’t distracted or bothered but buys in – just as the good reader dutifully performs that grandest of mental gymnastics, the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

John Updike’s little beauty of a story “A Constellation of Events” can be found in this collection (Trust Me) along with “Poker Night,” “Leaf Season,” “Getting Into the Set,” and “Deaths of Distant Friends” – all of these latter stories frequently anthologized but never “A Constellation of Events.” If you have attempted to read Updike’s novels and haven’t been drawn to them, there is quite likely a good reason for that, relevant to this discussion if only we had time. You could come to your own conclusions, and they’d be right, if you’d give Updike’s mid-career stories a try instead of one of the novels, next time you’re so moved. The stories in Trust Me, as usual with him, first appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, and the Atlantic, mostly in the late seventies through the late eighties – that’s “mid-career” for Updike, a time when critics finally admitted he’d grown into his much touted vocabulary and his somewhat muscle-bound talent for metaphor and simile.

“A Constellation of Events” is told from the point of view of the wife of an insurance executive, living in suburban Hartford, CT. She, Betty, is recalling four days in a certain February that made a sort of constellation if you looked how they dotted a calendar. On that first day, some certain day in the winter when the fields were full of new snow, she and her husband (Rob) pulled together a few friends (and their young families – toddlers, adolescents, etc.) to go cross-country skiing. There were three couples plus kids in the entourage. Updike writes: “They all met at the Pattersons’ field in their different-colored cars and soon made a line of dark silhouettes across the white pasture.”

Like the three stars in the belt of Orion, snow skiing has a way of bringing the illusion of order (in the form of a single file line) to a random group of individuals. But among them there were two people who were having an affair, and while the other adults mostly knew it, they pretended that everything was regular and relatively fine. Betty, our third person limited point of view character, took on the role of helping those who were bringing up the rear, including the slightly slumping, vaguely depressed, cuckolded husband (Rafe) as well as Betty and Rob’s own daughter who was (a) too young for skiing and (b) didn’t have the right equipment. Rafe had the right equipment but the skis were set wrong, and he kept popping out of his bindings.

Out in the country, broken off from the rest of the group, Rafe and Betty, struggling with stragglers and equipment, manage to get each other’s attention. They find commonality in a book Rafe’s reading which he loans her. There is an afternoon together to discuss the book, and before long this unlikely duo is finding even more commonality on the naugahide of the couch in Rafe’s law office downtown.

The story is short, probably 3500 words or about 12 pages in the printed collection. It begins with Betty bored but in a good mood about her marriage. All signs are her husband is bored as well, no signs he’s straying as Rafe’s wife is with some other guy. Rob and Betty aren’t at the end of their marriage but they are in the desert-like middle of it. There is no sign that this private lapse of Betty and Rafe’s will cause an end to either of their marriages, but it will cause hurt, infinite confusion, and long-lasting disorder, and Rafe and Betty know it and say it to each other, and they ask each other if they really want that, and they both seem to say “yes.” In the frame of the story, Betty, staring at the calendar later on, looking at the distribution of those four sunny winter days among the squares that formed the month of February when all this happened, thinks of the days as a miracle, no matter how it all turned out.

Why have I been drawn to this story over the years? It is Updike’s style and insight, not the story line. It is his assumptions, cagily attributed to Betty in a free indirect style that allows him to launder his views through a fictional character. It is the inexorable progress of the situation through these few days we see and Betty, too, comes to understand, what she wants to do. It amazes her, in retrospect, that she was capable of this sudden switch in direction. Updike writes at the end:

And though there was much in the aftermath to regret, and a harm that would
never cease, Betty remembered these days – the open fields, the dripping eaves,
the paintings, the law books – as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not
scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.

To appreciate this story we must understand that Betty, a good person, precisely the sort you know and are friends with, could actually believably do this U-turn, and maybe even that you know what she might feel like later if she did.

In mid-career, Updike had grown into his language, his metaphors, his stories. The novel is a whole different issue, for all authors. It is a gigantic project, enormously demanding. It takes time from our limited lives, a couple of years to write if you write steadily, maybe three, and after all that it might suck anyway. It’s in the stories, perfectable in their scale and scope, that you can see the masters handle the rough air of our lives through their characters whom they first have to sell us (with the skillful use of free indirect style) can talk and observe like the masters but also can live and love and be like you and me.

Richard Ford's "Reunion"

It sounds tricky, of course, but one of the themes in my own work is "what happened to men after what happened to women." I attempted to talk about this in my interview with Nancy Zafris, archived on the Kenyon Review site -- didn't do a very good job of it. The idea is that prior to the women's liberation movement men and women were raised, literally, to relate to one another in certain ways. When the change came, in the 1970's so goes my version of the story, there was an earthquake in the culture as old v. new smashed and ground against one another and as women in the full flush of new possibilities and a scramble for opportunity flexed themselves against their generation of men who were startled and puzzled by how all this was to affect them. Not talking about the men who resisted these changes for women, trying to protect their realm or simply trying to keep things the same so they knew who they were. Talking about those many men who were very happy at these new changes, still are, but did not anticipate the full array of implications. The baby boomer generation that gave us the "summer of love" in '60's was suddenly the generation of divorce. There was a huge scramble. A lot of full grown adults, more than usual by far, were single, or were behaving that way. There was a shakeout going on. It was fairly big and not subtle.

Richard Ford's story "Reunion," from his great collection A Multitutde of Sins, captures a moment, a chance meeting, of two men as they crossed the big main floor of Grand Central Station. One of the men, recently divorced, was waiting for his daughter to arrive on the train. The other was a man who'd had an affair with the divorced man's wife before the divorce. There had been a bad scene in the past, in which the husband caught the two in a hotel and open-hand slapped the guy silly. So that was the history of the two, not having seen each other since, when a couple of years later they chance to cross paths down on the main floor of the giant train station. They exchange polite hellos, neither of them ready to fight some more, but the maneuvers, body language, alpha behaviors, fully deploy. The (ex) husband has a psychological leg up on the other, because the last they met he'd slapped him around. The other guy (Johnny, our bad boy point of view character) has an interest in scoring a couple of points to at least get back to even, even if it's subliminally just by dominating this ostensibly nonconfrontational moment and scene. The (ex) husband finally says for him to leave. He says, "I'm due to meet my daughter right now and for obvious reasons I don't want her to meet you." So Johnny starts to recede, and the (ex) husband says something to him as he departs. He says, "Just so you know, nothing happened here today. Nothing happened." This was his way of saying, "If you were here to even the score, you didn't get it done."

The story is over moments after that. Johnny does a small swirl of narration to try to moderate the appearances of his intent. That is the climax. I suppose there is nothing new about menfighting over a woman. But when you read the story you understand that one reason she and her two men were now alone in this world has to do with forces bigger than marriage and adultery and family and even ego and narcissism and character and good and bad. It's geothermal, somehow, continental plates shifting. The story shows a specific instance of how certain underpinnings, or what used to be underpinnings, are iffy now, culture cracked and consensus gone, at least in our urban society if not in Pinkneyville, Illinois yet, causing a misery of uncertainty and a lot of rough games between people who aren't "bad" but who end up being villains in someone else's story.

Hell, I don't know. There is so much more to this story than what I'm saying -- I'm just trying to make an ordinary point. I'll continue to try to express this in paraphrase, but the wonder of the short story as an art form, and the wonder of Richard Ford's story collection A Multitude of Sins and, for me, this one story, "Reunion," is the SHOWING instead of paraphrasing. As a writer, I think when i've read this one, how can I write something that makes a reader feel what this story made me feel? And whatever that is, how could I ever tell it, let alone show it.

The Long Short Story

These days I'm thinking a lot about the long short story, in the terms Richard Ford established -- a long short story being just short of a novella in length. Whereas the novella is "designed" with an arc like a novel, the long short story has an arc like short fiction. We know the boundaries between these forms are rough and fuzzy. But for discussion, the long short story would be no longer than 15,000 words. The idea is that it is a long work of fiction that is not long enough to be bound in book form by itself. Normally the long short story is too long for the litmags, but fits nicely in a collection of stories, often serving as the anchor tenant. "Brokeback Mountain," in Annie Proulx's famous story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories might be an example (although most of those stories are pretty long and I think "Brokeback..." played in the New Yorker). I'm not sure, but many Alice Munro stories have the long arc I'm thinking of, for example her "Passion" and "Silent" from the Runaway collection. I have a notion that online publishing might be perfect for the long short story, often as engaging and absorbing as a novel and at the same time with that graceful story arc that requires only an hour to read yet allows complexity and more than one turn before coming in for a landing. Can you name some other authors who write these or specific stories that fit this description?