The Best American Short Stories 1979

Contents

Introduction

A SILVER DISH Saul Bellow
AN EXILE IN THE EAST Flannery O'Connor
HOME AND NATIVE LANDSean Virgo
A SHORT WALK INTO AFTERNOON Kaatje Hurlbut
SHADRACH William Styron
THE WEDDING WEEK Rosellen Brown
A PARTY IN MIAMI BEACH Isaac Bashevis Singer
THE QUAIL Rolf Yngve
SOME MANHATTAN IN NEW ENGLAND Peter LaSalle
PLAISIR D'AMOUR Lynne Sharon Schwartz
FALLING OFF THE SCAFFOLD Lyn Coffin
SPELLING Alice Munro
SEASONS Rugh McLaughlin
LIVING ALONE Robley Wilson, Jr.
THE MIDDLE PLACE Mary Hedin
THE QUARTERBACK SPEAKS TO HIS GOD Herbert Wilner
TRIP IN A SUMMER DRESS Annette Sanford
THE EYE Paul Bowles
PAPER COVERS ROCK Jean Thompson
THE MISSING PERSON Maxine Kumin
FINISTERRE Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
A LINGERING DEATH Silvia Tennenbaum
HOME IS THE HERO Bernard Malamud
THE NEW MUSIC Donald Barthelme
SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED Jayne Anne Philips

Biographical Notes
The Yearbook of the American Short Story

Reviews

• Publisher's Weekly, September 3, 1979, p. 89
• Harper's Magazine, September 1979, pp. 99-100

Introduction

This volume lays claim to being a collection of the "best" North American short stories published in the past year, and of course it is a claim most gracefully made with some qualifications. Though Shannon Ravenel read 1494 stories published in some 153 periodicals, and out of these 1494 stories selected 125 to send along to me, it is obviously the case—given the unstable, even protean nature of small-press publishing in America—that we were unable to read each story published in 1978. In TriQuarterly's recent 750 page special issue, Michael Anania estimates that there are approximately 1500 little magazines being published at the present time. Not all of these publish fiction, of course, and not all of these will survive more than a few issues, but the fact of their existence constitutes a staggering challenge to anyone who purports to be bringing together an anthology of short stories that are both excellent and representative. And there is the matter, too, of subjectivity in selection—Shannon Ravenel's and my own—for which we cannot apologize but about which, a little further on, I will explain.

Months of reading and rereading and brooding and indecision, letters back and forth between Shannon and me (though our tastes coincided in remarkable ways, they were, of course, hardly identical) . . . and here it is, the collection of twenty-five stories, each memorable in its own way, all of them distinct in voice and vision. Some are quite clearly and forthrightly modest, excellent "minor" fiction—two or three (there could not be more, probably, in a given year) strike me as small masterpieces. Confined within the covers of this book, which has become, over the thirty-six years of Martha Foley's distinguished editorship, a publishing tradition, they will—and should—quarrel with one another. Even if my tastes in fiction were not so catholic as they are I would have sought out, for this occasion, stories whose "voices" differ greatly from one another.

An anthology of the best fiction published in North America in any given year must be a kaleidoscopic affair: one might compare it to a museum gallery in which works of art of greatly varying sizes, techniques, and styles—modest line drawings, immense polychromatic oil paintings, water colors, lithographs, pencil sketches—have been hung side by side and are competing for the viewer's attention. A museum gallery so arranged would be an aesthetic error, an affront to the senses as well as to the intellect, but an anthology that sets out to reprint representative work must be as various, as democratic, even as motley as possible—within the limits set, of course, by the standard of excellence claimed by the title. And so it is the case that while certain periodicals are represented year after year, and with just)fication—The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly—I have made an attempt to bring in more of the little magazines, some of them, such as Quarterly West and Gallimaufry, quite unknown to me, and many of them, I suspect, unknown to the general reader. Among the twenty-two periodicals represented are three published in Canada —The Malahat Review, The Ontario Review, and Weekend Magazine —and more Canadian periodicals appear in the "100 Other Distinguished Short Stories of the Year" list selected by Shannon Ravenel. The reader with a particular interest in the wide variety of creative work being written and published in North America is advised to consult the TriQuarterly volume and William Henderson's yearly anthology, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

*

So much has been said in recent years about the function of art, particularly of fiction—that it should serve society as a moral force, or that it should stand apart from society as an end in itself, with no moral function whatsoever—that I would like in this preface to make a statement, necessarily abbreviated, about the writer's freedom; and I would like to present the stories I have selected as illustrations of the essential health and sound judgment that characterize the writer's freedom.

Though much is routinely said about the troubled state of contemporary fiction—as it is said, routinely, about the troubled state of contemporary politics, religion,-morality, education, and television—it seems to me self-evident that we are living in an era of particularly well crafted creative work, whether fiction or poetry. More good work is being done by more gifted writers than ever before More magazines are being published; more public readings (of prose as well as poetry) are being given, often to packed auditoriums. I know that it is fashionable to lament the passing of a literate order—I know that one is supposed to worry aloud about the malefic effect of the media and "eroding standards" in public schools, and the fact that notorious nonbooks or ghostwritten concoctions are best sellers while the sales of an award-winning collection of poems are distressingly low. Yet it has always seemed to me that such observations fail to take into consideration that the audience for serious literature at any given time has been fairly limited, and the audience for difficult literature has always been extremely limited. Decades ago, people say, there was a far larger market for short fiction—The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, among others, paid high prices for stories—while today the market has been severely curtailed. Once upon a time a writer such as Scott Fitzgerald could make a handsome living by his short stories, but today he would certainly have to produce novels if he wanted to survive. The laments are familiar: we have heard them many times. But what they fail to acknowledge is that mass magazines of the twenties and thirties were primarily interested in slick, formula fiction, the sort of thing that now goes directly into television and would never qualify as "serious." The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's were the television of their time, and if writers such as Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, O'Hara, and others could make a living from them, it was perhaps to the detriment of their art. (See Faulkner's Selected Letters, for instance, which makes dismaying reading: he exhausted himself churning out stories he considered trash for the high-paying Post, in order to finance the writing of his novels—which were, of course, commercial failures.)

In the past, "experimental" writing was not welcome in any of the mass-market magazines, whereas today self-consciously experimental work (for whatever it is worth: one can see that much of it has degenerated into a new sort of formulaic fiction) can appear anywhere—in magazines once considered conservative, such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, as well as in such periodicals as Partisan Review, The Paris Review, the new Georgia Review, the new Mississippi Review, and innumerable others with small circulations. The audience for serious fiction has definitely increased: it has certainly become more sophisticated. Whereas at one time only meticulously crafted fiction in the Jamesian or Chekhovian mode was considered acceptable—because obviously "literary"—we now have a cultural climate hospitable to fictions that may take the form of surrealist monologues or Dadaist fantasies, or, in the case of gorges, fanciful commentaries on nonexistent books. A gap of sorts has widened between what might be called traditional fiction, with its emphasis on psychologically "realistic" characters in recognizable settings who are moved, usually with some direction, through time and space, and what might be called meta-fiction: prose that aspires to the bodiless condition of poetry, or pure sound, the "new music" of Barthelme's story, which is no longer entirely new, though its dissonances and relentless non sequiturs make claims of newness. ("There are certain criticisms," Barthelme's eloquent voice says, "the Curator of Archetypes thinks I don't quite cut it, thinks I'm shuckin' and jivin' when what I should be doing is attacking, attacking, attacking . . .")

Short fiction, in my opinion, can aspire to any condition whatsoever: as an editor of this volume, and as a chronic reader, I have no prejudices except that a story, as a construct of words, make some claim for uniqueness. I was deeply moved by Saul Bellow's "A Silver Dish," one of the most beautiful, and beautifully crafted, stories I have come across in years; it seemed to me so incontestably masterful a work that I wanted to organize the entire anthology around it. Yet I see no difficulty in choosing as a companion piece for it the laconic, chill, passionless "The Eye," by Paul Bowles, which reads as if it had no narrator at all, and aspires to a condition of sheer narrative bereft of character—a tale told by no one in particular about no one in particular (its "hero," never directly glimpsed, is dead before the story opens), which nevertheless possesses an uncanny suspenseful power. Bellow's story, like Bowles's, is anecdotal, even conversational; one might see Bellow's as a brilliant variation on the stereotypical New Yorker reminiscence, a lesson in sheer genius, performed in Bellow's inimitable voice. (For Bellow's fiction is all voice: one can hear its rhythms, its nuances and would recognize the Bellow sound anywhere.)

Had there been meta-fictions of comparable uniqueness among this year's published fiction I would have been grateful to reprint them, but it seems to me that meta-fiction's ironies have begun to run out, or to repeat themselves with dismaying frequency. (Nearly every "experimental" story one encounters today reads like an undergraduate imitation of Ionesco, or Beckett, or gorges, or one of their American counterparts. Postsixties "fictions" have dwindled into patterns as rigid as 0. Henry's, in which an arbitrary proposition—a dwarf elephant, for instance, has been elected President of the United States—is threaded through with exotic motifs or mock symbols—a Yamaha grand piano, a tap-dancing team from the forties, Salvador Dali's waxed mustache, let us say —in a story of not less than five pages or more than eight. Presumably someone reads these "fictions," but not more than once, for they dissolve sadly on a second reading, and often midway through the first, when their single parodic theme becomes transparent. But so uncertain are editorial standards today that I came across a version of Robert Coover's high-spirited "The Babysitter" set in a zoo, and, in a highly respectable magazine, a diluted recycling of Shirley Jackson's classic "The Lottery," both of which were presented by their editors, if not by their authors, as original works.)

In his introduction to last year's The Best American Short Stories Ted Solotaroff, by way of explaining both his own background (as editor, over a ten-year period, of New American Review) and his professional standards for the "best" stories, said some important things about the state of contemporary fiction. Like many of us, he had seen the short story undergo a violent metamorphosis in a single decade—so violent a metamorphosis that it became more or less unhelpful to draw a line between fiction and nonfiction. Writers boldly experimented with fictions that presented themselves as essays, often on absurd or nonexistent subjects; there were fictions in the form of questions-and-answers, or interviews, or rambling monologues in the style of Beckett's nameless narrators; there were false memoirs, meditations, recipes; even the liner notes (fictitious, of course) to a record album. In short, all that wasn't Conspicuously poetry might be considered prose—whatever poetry'' and "prose" now meant. (A special issue of TriQuarterly billed itself "Post-Wake": and, indeed, the fictions published were by a variety of writers all of whom sounded as if Finnegans Wake had been in a way their own, and they were doomed to self-conscious pseudo-Joycean posturings of the kind literary critics now call Post-Modernist.)

It was revealing, however, that in selecting twenty-odd stories for this volume, Solotaroff thought it most pragmatic to limit his definition of "story" to a fairly conservative model. With such a dizzying profusion of fictional forms to choose from he decided he wanted "genuine" stories and nothing else—"stories with a strong narrative movement that clearly gets somewhere, preferably to a point that is both unpredictable and right." This definition I thought a particularly astute one, though it might eliminate stories that repudiate motion in favor of stasis, and certain gemlike works (in this volume, Rosellen Brown's "The Wedding Week") that aspire to the condition of poetry. But it is good to know an editor's preferences, even if, as in the case of Solotaroff, he sounds more conservative than he really is. (For the 1978 Best American Short Stories contained highly idiosyncratic work—genuine stories, certainly, but told in arresting ways, in a wonderful variety of voices.)

When asked to speak in public about the short story, or about fiction in general, I often hear myself saying—if I have been unable to avoid the vaporous topic—that fiction, the story, all of art itself, cannot be determined. Definitions are quite meaningless. One can say that a novel is this or that, based upon the novels one has happened to have read; one can say that the short story must be this but not that, it "must" have an ending, or characters, or a coherent linear development; one can say anything at all. But commentary on art can help only to elucidate already existing art: it cannot prescribe, and it certainly cannot predict. Art is an expression of imaginative freedom. Not all artists, of course, enjoy freedom—not all artists are worthy of their art, in fact. But art itself comes before any of its commentators, be they helpful or censorious. Plato's small-minded malice in wishing to rid the wellregulated State of its poets is often quoted, and sometimes in an approving way, but I see no reason to refrain from noting that Plato's vision of the well-regulated State (and, indeed, of the wellregulated cosmos) is about as appealing to most of us, poets or nonpoets, as the prospect of spending the rest of our lives in straitjackets or solitary confinement. Plato meant to eradicate from the State all change, all innovation, all imaginative thinking—he aligned himself with political tyranny, which was, of course, his option. We need not ban Plato and his disciples from the poet's state: only, let their ideas be freely contested.

The short story, as it is one of the many manifestations of the human spirit, simply cannot be defined. Art is: it springs forth from the soul, usually in mysterious ways; and it addresses itself to an audience, sometimes in humility, very often in arrogance. Anyone who attempts to define art reveals himself first of all as lamentably conservative, and secondly as a critic or commentator rather than as an artist. (When great artists—among them Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, Kafka—speak of art they are usually struggling to define their own practice, and to set it against the practice of their contemporaries and predecessors.) If I say that this volume's spare, terse, almost too elliptical " Home and Native Land," by Sean Virgo, seems to me an unusually effective story, I am not saying at the same time that Virgo's practice of his art should be raised into a principle for others. If I say that William Styron's wonderful "Shadrach"—so rich it has the feel of a novel—is an unforgettable story, I am not saying that Styron's art is superior to that of, say, Jean Thompson in "Paper Covers Rock," which seems to me an unsettling work of fiction in many ways, not least because it captures, in its muted, passionless tones, a lifelessness at the core of our world's "liberated" life that is appalling. I said earlier that the stories' many voices quarrel, and this is true enough—but they also constitute a larger harmony.

Unlike Ted Solotaroff, I am not especially disposed to stories with a strong narrative movement, nor do I particularly want or need fiction to have characters, or a clearly evoked setting, or, in fact, much of a "point" at all. I suppose I want simply the sense, which the writer conveys only through the skill of his language, that something unique is being offered. Some illumination, some droll observation, the authenticity of what itfeels like from a position alien to my own: the fiction can be straight autobiography or absolute fantasy, it can attempt to delineate, in detailed prose, the experience of suffering the literal deterioration of one's heart (as in the late Herbert Wilner's "The Quarterback Speaks to His God''), or the experience of terror in a modern city (as in Maxine Kumin's parablelike "The Missing Person," in which apprehension —one might call it neurotic—is refined into art), or the experience, presented only obliquely, and breezily, of living alone, in Robley Wilson Jr.'s `'Living Alone." Narrative movement is buried in Louis D. Rubin Jr.'s "Finisterre," and characterization too is minimal: but the evocation of place, the feel, the texture of Rubin's World! Bear with the fourteen-year-old protagonist's experience, and it will become your own, so meticulous, so thoughtful is the writer's art.

Rubin's art, like that of Mary Hedin in "The Middle Place," is slow to reveal itself. Sensing beforehand that there will be no surprises—the fiction will not explode into meta-fiction, it will not coyly question its own reason for being—the reader simply succumbs to the spell of its language, and thus lives the life of the story along with the fictional characters. Lynne Sharon Schwartz's beautifully modulated "Plaisir d'Amour," like Peter LaSalle's brilliant "Some Manhattan in New England," is fantasy securely grounded in naturalism; or is it naturalism subtly grounded in fantasy . . . ? (Last year's Best American Short Stories contained a story by Schwartz, "Rough Strife," that seems to me even more powerful than "Plaisir d'Amour." And I must confess a predilection for Schwartz's fiction, since I am an editor of The Ontario Review, in which both these stories first appeared.)

The art of Bernard Malamud's "Home Is the Hero" is an art that hides itself. Malamud is a highly sophisticated stylist, whose fantasy and surrealism are seamlessly employed in narratives that otherwise have the appearance, and the authenticity, of straightforward naturalism. He moves from one plane to another so adroitly, with so little self-conscious fuss, that one can be deceived into thinking that his achievements come easily. So too with Isaac Bashevis Singer's "A Party in Miami Beach" (and another fine story, "The Bus," included in the list of 100 other distinguished short stories of 1978), in which autobiography and fiction appear to be blended. Malamud presents his hero's experiences in language that is part his hero's and part Malamud's (see, for instance, the story's fascinating conclusion, in which Dubin wanders, lost, in a snowstorm), while Singer appears to have refined himself out of existence, allowing his characters their long, rich, manic, monologues.

Another art that disguises itself in artlessness is that of Alice Munro in "Spelling" (and in a companion story, "Characters," on the distinguished-stories list). In earlier works, Munro brought to near perfection the kind of story that summed up a life in carefully chosen scenes; here her tone is one of scrupulous meanness (to use Joyce's phrase), life is reduced to a gesture or two, and emotion is withheld. These are strange, unsettling stories that might appear to the inattentive reader to have no "point." They are naturalistic works so intensely evoked, with so little apparent sentiment, that they have the passionless force of prose poems, in which images, not characters, are drawn. Narrative movement, though it can certainly be traced, is hardly the issue here.

Similarly with Silvia Tennenbaum's poignant "A Lingering Death," in which the shadow of death, thrown back upon an immensely rich and complex life, has the paradoxical effect of illuminating that life: and with what rigorous, faultless language! "A song of praise escaped from her mouth"—so the utterly believable Amalie slips into the oblivion of death; yet her story is not at all self-pitying or depressing. (And it doesn't harangue us like Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan 11yitch, which it peripherally resembles.) Lyn Coffin's "Falling off the Scaffold" has, in a sense, no characters at all, only the projected personae of two people unknown to each other; yet it respects the contours of reality and gives us, in a most unusual form, a story about illusion and self-deception, timely in its relatedness to current thinking about male-female roles. "Trip in a Summer Dress," "The Quail," and "A Short Walk into Afternoon" are exquisitely rendered stories about deliberately modest subjects, subjects that cannot be described in language other than their own: their "stories" are simply beside the point. One must read them with care and sympathy to appreciate their achievement.

"Seasons," the title of Ruth McLaughlin's delicate, haunting, and finally rather disturbing story, might well serve as a subtitle for this volume. For most of the stories I have discussed, as well as Flannery O'Connor's "An Exile in the East" and Jayne Anne Phillips's "Something That Happened," focus upon arrested moments in the seasons of a protagonist's life that illuminate the entirety of that life, or of the life of someone close to him or her. It seems to have occurred in our modern tradition that the most popular of literary stories (in contrast to mass-market fiction) employ the synecdochic method, in which the near-at-hand serves magically to summon forth the whole, the universal. Sometimes the Chekhovian or Joycean "epiphany" is made fairly explicit, as in "The Middle Place"; sometimes' as in Alice Munro's and Sean Virgo's stories, it must be inferred. One might argue for a traditional, even classical structure behind the enigmatic dialogue of talking heads in Barthelme's The New Music," and it isn't unreasonable to suspect that Barthelme shares with a number of others in this volume certain obsessive cares about the nature of language in a culture of relentless novelty.

"An Exile in the East"—which admirers of Flannery O'Connor's fiction will recognize as an early version of the magisterial "Judgement Day"—was written in 1954 and published, for the first time, in The South Carolina Review of November 1978 (it was found among O'Connor's papers at Georgia College). Written between "The Displaced Person" and "The Artificial Nigger," "An Exile in the East" shares concerns with both, and with the visionary pathos of "Judgement Day." Yet it is a far more human story—virtually the most "realistic" of all O'Connor's fiction. That it was ultimately transformed into "Judgement Day" should not obscure the fact that it is a complete story in itself, and that in 1954 Flannery O'Connor considered it important enough to be included in her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. (It was later pulled from the collection to make room for a newer story, "Good Country People," which O'Connor evidently preferred.) In this poignant story the themes of racial conflict, spiritual exile, and loneliness are treated unsentimentally through the person of old Tanner, one of O'Connor's most sympathetic characters, one with whom she evidently felt a deep kinship.

Perhaps it is the case that most successful stories, in this volume or elsewhere, employ a synecdochic method that allows the particular to evoke the universal. O'Connor's exiled Tanner cannot state the degree of his loneliness, but his human suffering is made dramatically clear by the story's artful understatement. Another exile, the breezy, chatty Max Flederbush of Singer's "A Party in Miami Beach," speaks in entertaining monologues on the subject of Jewish concentration-camp survivors who now sit, by the hundreds, awaiting death in Miami Beach—"in a certain sense, it's worse here than in the camps. There, at least, we all hoped"—and his suffering is no less poignant for being floridly overstated.

Old Morris of Bellow's "A Silver Dish," idiosyncratic as he is, is at the same time emblematic of all fathers. No matter that he is a singular and singularly maddening, old man—he is simultaneously all old men; and his son, Woody's, grief becomes, through the subtlety of Bellow's art, our universal grief for all that we must lose, despite the desperate strength of our love. That we cannot preserve those whom we cherish, but must, in the end, surrender them to death: this is the hidden meaning of Bellow's story, the foundation that supports, but never intrudes upon, the irresistibly entertaining material.

It is not my prejudice that a story, to be complete, must so deftly employ the synecdochic method that one is reading both about an individual and a universal condition, but certainly such fiction has the power to move us greatly—it is really fiction as a kind of communion.

*

Though I have set forth with apparent confidence and, I hope, with reasonable clarity, my standards in choosing these stories, I want to say too that I found the task challenging; it was not at all an easy one. Certain stories, of course, immediately struck me as marvelous—I wanted at once to show them to other people, to share them, to talk about them. Others impressed me as well worth preserving in an anthology of this nature, but it was difficult—very difficult—to draw a line between those that would be reprinted and those that, because of space limitations, would have to be rejected. (If the anthology could have accommodated thirty-five stories the situation would have been far more congenial.) Many of the stories I reluctantly excluded from the volume are, it might be argued, as good as any included, and perhaps in another year, or in another few weeks, I will reread one of them and regret my decision. So be it. My position as this year's editor of The Best American Short Stories amplifies the frustrations I ordinarily feel as an editor of The Ontario Review, which receives more good material than it can possibly publish; and I suspect that my experience is shared by most editors. Ours is, doom sayers to the contrary, not only a highly literate age: it is also a highly literary age. More people are writing, and writing well, than ever before in our history, and there are simply not enough channels of publication open to them. When critics say smugly that the state of contemporary prose or poetry is poor, one really should challenge them to list the books and periodicals they have actually recently read. To how many magazines do they subscribe? Do they know that the Kenyon Review has returned? Have they discovered the gorgeous new Bennington Review, the new Agni Review, and others such as Canto, Fiction, Antaeus, Exile, Story Quarterly, The New England Review, Ploughshares, Pequod, New Letters . . . ?

It is to be hoped that the reader, approaching this anthology, will honor the important differences between the writers by not reading the stories one after another as if the book were a novel.

Run hurriedly together, the voices of Bellow and O'Connor and Virgo and Hurlbut and the rest will lose their distinctiveness, and consequently their art; and the reader will be cheated of the revelation each story offers. Properly executed, the act of reading is not only a creative act; it aspires to the condition of what might be called a mystic communion. "A book is an ax," says Kafka, "for the frozen sea within." And so indeed it is.

Joyce Carol Oates