The Short Story

And Other Stories.
by John O'Hara.
Random Home. 336 pp. $5.95.

Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories.
by Saul Bellow.
Viking. 184 pp. $5.00.

Under the Boardwalk.
by Norman Rosten.
Prentice-Hall. 131 pp. $4.95.

A House Divided.
by Sara.
McGraw-Hill. 227 pp. $5.95.

The Seance and Other Stories.
by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 276 pp. $5.95.

Journal/Nocturnal and Seven Stories.
by E. M. Broner.
Harcourt, Brace & World. 269 pp. $5.95.

Through the Wilderness and Other Stories.
by Dan Jacobson.
Macmillan. 214 pp. $5.95.

It is almost as difficult to generalize about the short story as about the novel, except to say that its shortness offers special possibilities for concentration and intensity. More than any other form, it is suited to the crisis in experience, the turning point, the place at which event, character, and milieu coincide and reveal themselves in a single effect of meaning.

There seems to be no reliable way of making this happen, but one sure way to prevent it from happening is to be garrulous, as John O'Hara is in his new book, And Other Stories. The new stories are generally more than twice as long as those in his collections from the 30's and 40's, and the ironies on which O'Hara's short fiction turns—the social and sexual humiliations, the little revelations of private squalor—are simply too thin to support the larger structures.

O'Hara's stories have always depended heavily on dialogue, a rapid-fire of banalities that sounded exactly like people talking; it could discriminate the syntax of the small-town editor from that of the midwestern fraternity boy, the Yale man, or the young executive, and put a whole social and economic history into a fateful mispronunciation. Now the dialogue arrives in page-long expository hunks—the characters talk not to each other, but to the reader, telling him things the writer wants him to know and apparently cannot find another way to convey. O'Hara's people say absolutely everything that comes into their heads; the dialogue has lost its power to suggest the unspoken. Thus the characters seem to have no insides. They are as flat and hard and fully visible as plates, utterly without resonance.

Through the years O'Hara has written again and again a kind of story that might be called the sex surprise, in which the denouement is the revelation that the heroine is sleeping with someone unexpected: her husband's brother or best friend, her best friend's husband, etc. This genre reaches an apotheosis in a short novel in this volume, “A Few Trips and Some Poetry,” which follows the sexual history of Isabel Barley from her adolescent petting to her final avatar as an aging dike. The sole interest of the story derives from seeing whom Isabel will connect with next. The heroine in these stories is always “nice”—rich and socially acceptable—and the point of view is usually that of a young man who is shocked and disillusioned. The repetition of the pattern reveals a fascination with the brutal charm of upper-class women, and a deep-seated disbelief that nice girls really do it. “Isabel, how many men have you actually slept with?” the narrator asks, and the fact that the answer is supposed to be engrossing seems touchingly old fashioned.

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The six short stories collected from a period of seventeen years in Mosby's Memoirs, by Saul Bellow, have the intelligence and oblique comedy of Bellow's novels. Yet taken together they do not make much impact; they seem the work of a mind whose attention has been turned elsewhere during the time they span.

The first story in the book, “Leaving the Yellow House,” is about a ratty, cheerful old woman in Utah, tough-talking and frail, who breaks her arm in a drunken accident and must reconcile herself to giving up her only possession, her yellow house. The story captures the terrible tenacity of the old woman, the whole quality of her existence raveling away to emptiness, and yet the subject seems too far from the author really to engage his feelings, or ours. Similarly with “The Old System,” whose theme is more Bellow's own. Here a distinguished geneticist, recalling the life-long quarrel between two of his cousins, is prompted to reflect on Jewishness, on the “crude circus” of Jewish feeling that he has rejected for the study of molecular processes. Through his lucid consciousness the events of the story come to us, beautiful, elegiac, and, as in “The Yellow House,” rather remote.

In two very funny and charming stories, a familiar Bellow hero appears, the lovable schlemiel with his comic ineptitude and defenselessness screwed up to the pitch of farce. In a third story, “Mosby's Memoirs,” the story of the schlemiel, Lustgarten, is told by a man who does everything right, the diplomat Willis Mosby, whose pompous style is unfortunately almost unreadable. All three of these stories convey a feeling of the fundamental oddness of everything, as if human life were only a fleeting smile on the face of Being. The same sense of some irrevocable confusion at the heart of existence comes out in “Looking for Mr. Green,” in which George Grebe spends a day trying to deliver a relief check to an elusive, ultimately invisible Negro named Tulliver Green.

For all their charm and intelligence, one finishes these stories with rather a blank feeling, a sense of something withheld. What is missing is the charge, the emotional density, that should fill up the shape marked out by the story's idea. One is aware of most of them more as conceptions than as experience.

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A review quoted on the jacket of Norman Rosten's Under the Boardwalk, a series of autobiographical sketches dealing with a Coney Island boyhood, claims that it belongs in the tradition of Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson. This is only too true; Rosten might almost have read the review before writing the book, so thoroughly assimilated is the experience it describes to the conventions of a literary prototype: the story of the boy learning about life. The narrator's childhood self is given glimpses of love and hate, good and evil, passion and pathos, all kept under control by the idea that boys are basically healthy little animals who can't bother their heads too long about these things.

Through a mist of reminiscence come occasional flashes of reality—a sullen and taciturn father, a crazy grandmother, violent family quarrels that must have been terrifying. But the boy's emotions are neatly wrapped up in the Eternal Questions: “O the answers I needed!” he sighs. Ambiguity disappears in a kind of gee-whiz prose, and after each disturbing experience the boy goes back to the boardwalk, to steal pretzels, peek under ladies dresses, and watch the lights of the ferris wheel, imposing on reality the clichés of snub-nosed freckle-faced boyhood and losing himself in the nostalgia and sentiment that are defenses against true memory and feeling.

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The sentimentality that informs most of A House Divided, by a writer who calls herself Sara, derives from a different set of clichés. It is a kind of feminine sententiousness that originates in a masochistic version of the white-goddess myth, in which women bear the burden of all the world's loving and suffering and get their principal reward in life from thinking about their role. “Men work, and women weep,” says the heroine of the title piece, a short novel about a housewife who goes to a writers' conference to find an identity apart from her wife-and-mother-hood and instead has a mental breakdown. This story is, frankly, just awful, beginning with long expository passages about the problems of women and ending in portentous descriptions of states of altered perception—“A luminescent starfish of a sudden glistening thrice enlarged and with a breathing vividness from out the marine patterns of the curtains.” The whole exudes the air of improbability that often surrounds stories about events that actually happened. Straining after energy and poetry, the prose piles up participles, knocks out subjects, and suppresses prepositions in the most distressing way: “The car pulled out the drive.” In the rest of these stories about hung-up housewives, the syntax is even more manic, at times becoming truly incomprehensible.

The last part of the book consists of four stories about a Jewish family, so much better than the others that they might almost be the work of a different writer. The best of them is the marvelous “So I'm Not Lady Chatterley, So Better I Should Know It Now” (originally published in COMMENTARY), about a young Jewish boy and girl who grimly lose their virginity together before the boy goes off to be killed in the war. Moving and extremely funny, it avoids sentimentality by its refusal to make of the encounter or the characters any more than they are, and by a kind of grittiness of texture, a hard particularity of detail that mercilessly specifies the dismal, urban Jewish milieu. All the bitterness and frustration of being young in that time and place are expressed in its tough, flavorful, elliptical idiom.

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The advantages and limitations of working within a well-defined cultural tradition appear in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Except for three moving stories of elderly Jews in America, the best of these being the title piece, all of the stories in The Seance are set in the shtetl, the Eastern European Jewish village, with its dense and brilliantly animated life, its exaggerated types and heightened style. It is an animistic world in which men, beasts, and spirits are made of the same living substance; one of the stories is narrated by a rooster, an articulate wiseacre like Chaucer's Chaunticleer, and another by the Evil One himself. But the fantasy in Singer's tales does not seem naive, because it is so firmly grounded in psychological and social reality. The world of spirit always maintains its connections with the universe of matter, like the dead woman in “The Letter Writer” who appears to her granddaughter in a dream and gives her a recipe for fried chicken. A complex and perverse psychology is taken for granted in these stories, and the writing often conveys the wild energy of obsession and hallucination. This world in which there is a law for everything seems governed, paradoxically, by a kind of indomitable craziness.

Reading these brilliantly colored tales of talking beasts and spirits, one wonders at some point what relation they can have to our lives in the present. The world they describe has been fixed and immobilized by death. Singer's vision of experience comes out of this irretrievable past, and its disadvantage is that it is not likely to change or evolve, but simply to re-combine its elements. This is the price paid for the narrative clarity and moral assurance of the stories. But while we read them their integrity commands a total imaginative assent; and the world they celebrate—utterly lost—is in itself infinitely precious and worth preserving.

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The title piece in E. M. Broner's first book of fiction, Journal/ Nocturnal, is a short novel about the day and night sides of its heroine's life. The day side is her children and her husband, a professor and Vietnam war protestor, the night side her affair with her husband's friend, who favors the war. The pages of the novel are divided into two columns, with the journal entries on the left and the nocturnal counterpoint on the right. As the conflict between the two halves of the page intensifies, the night side exerts an increasing pull on the heroine's life. Invaded by darkness and disorder, she has a breakdown, recovers, and then dies, in a symbolic and almost comical way.

The story, which is the best in the book, is formally extremely interesting, using a number of alienating devices to distance and control material that could conceivably, if handled otherwise, have produced the sudsy emotion of Sara's short novel about a woman's breakdown. The language is precise, grave, and rather formal; the division of the page also distances and stylizes, as though the story were looking at itself, with an effect of slight depersonalization, reproducing the heroine's sense of alienation and unreality. At moments of emotional crisis, the language often becomes consciously literary and artificial, and the result is a kind of tense and concentrated elegance of expression.

What is most impressive about “Journal/Nocturnal” is its translation of the public atmosphere generated by the war—the hatred and impotence and poisoned feeling—into a private emotional conflict. The allusions to contemporary events and figures—Saigon and Hue, Fanon and Bly, SDS and Dow Chemical—do not seem modish and reportorial, but rather like gravely approaching heralds of some inevitable disaster.

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Some of the stories in Dan Jacobson's Through the Wilderness are plainly autobiographical, and the unpretentious first-person narration makes it appear as though understanding what happened to oneself and making a good story of it were the easiest things in the world. In the best of the first-person narratives, the weight of the experience comes to rest on the narrator himself, as in the powerful “Through the Wilderness” (which first appeared in COMMENTARY as “Boaz the Israelite”). Set, like most of Jacobson's stories, in South Africa, it treats the narrator's relationship with an old African named Boaz, the leader of a sect of black Israelites, and through Boaz with his own equivocal Jewishness. The idea of the faith of Israel strangely breathed into these disinherited blacks is extremely moving, and so is the fanatical figure of Boaz, with his one yellow eye. All of these stories end in a recognition of moral ambiguity and contradiction, as if the writer had been educated to honesty and humility by the final irreconcilable tragedy of his country.

The freshness of Through the Wilderness is not in formal innovation, but in acute moral vision. Like Singer's stories, Jacobson's grow out of a deep moral assurance; like Broner's, they are fully involved in our world. Their literary qualities are finally human virtues as well: intelligence, moral insight, humor, and compassion. And it is these things, after all, that we come to the short story to find.