Best Short Stories
Looking over this year’s O. Henry and Martha Foley collections of best short stories, one sees that it is not charity which has caused the editors to favor stories from the so-called “little mags,” for that is where, with one, perhaps two exceptions, the most interesting stories from both volumes come from. The one exception is Jean Stafford’s perfectly executed New Yorker story, “The Warlock,” in the O. Henry volume. But even this story about an upper-class Boston lady who takes a cruise boat to the Caribbean in order to convalesce from a nervous breakdown brought on by worry about her husband’s love, even this story settles for a facile ending which the authors of the best “little mag” stories do not allow themselves. The lady’s upper-class sensibilities are, in her nervous state, exacerbated into a comic irritation at the coarseness of a hearty Irish lady with whom she shares a cabin, and into a macabre fear of the exotic character of the ship’s doctor, a Cuban and the “warlock” of the story. Her fear of the doctor, a projection of her own sexual worries, threatens her with another breakdown when a cable arrives from her husband assuring her of his love, and she recognizes the whole experience as a hallucination. The experience is, in the end, dismissed.
The other story, Faulkner’s Mademoiselle story, “By the People,” also in the O. Henry, is an exception if you happen to like the Master’s yarns about crude rural pranks. This one is, once you have made your way to it through the opaque prose, shrewd in its political understanding. It is about a Southern demagogue who cannot be defeated by rational appeal to the public, but who gets his come-uppance at a big open-air political meeting where a wiseacre rubs his legs with some damp switches from a clump of bushes favored by dogs. The demagogue’s consequent attracttiveness to dogs ruins him politically.
If, however, the “little mag” stories more than hold their own against the stories from the “slicks,” it cannot be said that they show any advance over them technically. It is a long time since anything new has been done with the short story—which is why the avant-garde magazines have lost much of their function, while the short story itself is dying of the mechanical expertness with which it is nowadays reproduced. The only technical innovations in these collections are in Arthur Granit’s COMMENTARY story, “Free the Canaries from Their Cages!” which has the distinction of being the only story to appear in both volumes. Granit introduces a relaxed and even naive narrative style (he is not afraid to say “our hero”) which makes his story about poor Jews in Brownsville during the depression perhaps the best and certainly the most refreshing of them all. Granit also has a new way with dialogue. Take for example the scene where Usher’s “rich” aunt tries to persuade his mother to give him a Jewish education:
“Your pots don’t shine enough!” she said.
“Maybe it’s the Brillo I’m using!” said Usher’s mother.
“Something smells here!” said the ‘rich’ aunt, adjusting the tablecloth.
“I’ll open the window!” said Usher’s mother.
“It’s time the boy received a good Jewish education!” said the ‘rich’ aunt, opening the closet to see if everything was properly arranged.
“And with what will I pay for it?” said Usher’s mother.
“Israel will perish unless he gets an education! . . . Anyway . . . I never heard of a Jewish boy not getting a Jewish education! It could only happen in Brownsville! Everything happens in Brownsville! It could never happen in Boro Park!”
“All right! I’ll shine up the pots!” said Usher’s mother.
The same words convey both humor and pathos. The dialogue is at once both realistic and ritualistic; it helps tell the story and at the same time helps evoke the emotion of what is concurrently a kind of lyric poem.
These stories are for the most part still taking place in that “waste land” which T. S. Eliot projected after World War I as the spiritual habitation of our time. The heroes grope for meaning in a world without valid moral or social distinctions, without even any mores or manners, any generally recognized way things are done. In Jack Kerouac’s exciting Paris Review story in the Foley, “The Mexican Girl,” the vacuous middle-class narrator from New York picks up a Mexican girl on a California bus and they go on a spree together. The narrator goes Mexican for a while: “I was a man of the earth precisely as I had dreamed I would be in New York,” but it is mere tourism, mere exploitation of a foreign culture for a thrill and to fill one’s vacuity. In the end he leaves the Mexican girl and goes back to New York with money an aunt sends him. There is no more meaning in the parting than in the meeting.
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It is certainly not accidental that so many of the best stories are about minority groups. For the minority culture offers definable mores which, in the more serious stories, can then be used to accentuate the lack of mores in the majority culture. Quaintness, of course, the mere display of local color is the danger in writing about minority cultures; and Nathaniel LaMar succumbs to this danger in writing, in the Foley’s “Creole Love Song” from the Atlantic Monthly, about Creole superstitions in New Orleans. When the young doctor who sets out to convert the Creoles from their superstitions is instead converted by them, this reader at least could not help feeling that a trick was being played upon him in the interest of local color. Marjorie Anais Housepian, instead, in the charming Paris Review story, “How Levon Dai Was Surrendered to the Edemuses,” also in the Foley, manages to poke fun at the folkways and accents of an Armenian colony in New York while preserving the integrity of the characters. Levon Dai, who has gone out to a remote place called Iowa (“Who knows what they cat in Iowa,” says one of the New York relatives), has become engaged to Shirley Adams—Shiran Edemus, the relatives call her. When the relatives break the terrible news to Levon’s ancient mother, “Edemus—Greek name, isn’t it?” she says. “We cannot be old-fashioned about these things. The Greeks are fine people. They cook much the same way we do.” The miracle is that our laughter is not patronizing, that the characters emerge with an archaic dignity which makes the “Americanized” reader feel miscellaneous and unanchored by comparison.
The writers who deal with the majority culture give it meaning through odd points of view. The point of view most commonly employed is that of childhood. Certain elemental facts, which have ceased to have meaning as cultural facts, have meaning restored to them through the naive experience of a child. In George P. Elliot’s Hudson Review story, “Miracle Play,” which won Third Prize in the O. Henry collection, a six-year-old boy learns through direct experience first about the death of the body and then about the immortal life of the soul. Granit’s “Free the Canaries from Their Cages!” combines the subjects of minority culture and childhood. As naively accepted by the boy, Usher, traditional Judaism and secular socialist idealism come into comic conflict with each other and into pathetic conflict with reality itself. “Everything should be free!” Usher cries after having been fired from Grossman’s grocery for having put this idea into effect by smuggling extra food into customers’ bags. He and his friends rush to free Usher’s canary from its cage. But the bird, “Oh! so sad and small,” is frightened by the boys and will not leave its cage; in trying to force it out, they kill it. The “canary” is the little man who is crushed by tradition and destroyed by the ideology which would free him from tradition.
Like Granit, Flannery O’Connor writes about tradition and the break with tradition. Her two Kenyon Review stories—“The Artificial Nigger” in the Foley and “Greenleaf” which won First Prize in the O. Henry—are about the Southern tradition, which is itself a minority culture offering definable mores or at least the memory of definable mores. The Southern tradition is in these stories the dimmest of memories; yet it offers all the meaning there is, the meaning by which we recognize everything else as chaos. In “Green-leaf” an elderly widow, who against the opposition of her sons clings to a dimly remembered duty to maintain the family farm, is mocked and goaded to her destruction by her tenant farmer, Greenleaf; she dies in the test of strength by which she tries to assert a dimly remembered authority over him. His name is significant, for Greenleaf is the natural man winning out over civilization.
Granit is concerned with the pathos of the natural man who goes down before ideas, whether traditional or revolutionary. But in Miss O’Connor’s stories, the idea saves—without ideas there is no humanity. For all that the main force of her irony—and this makes her irony even more complex than Granit’s—is directed less against the encroaching chaos than against the inadequacy of the ideas by which her characters try to protect themselves against it. In “The Artificial Nigger,” Mr. Head, an old man from the back country, tries to suppress his ten-year-old grandson’s inquisitiveness about Atlanta by handing the boy barely articulate scraps of that Southern mythology which centers around the inferior status of Negroes. Again the name is significant, for Mr. Head represents intellect, memory, tradition as against experience. When they go to Atlanta, they see evidence of the Southern mythology only in ads (“Southern Maid Flour,” etc.) and the Negroes they meet are so much more worldly than they as to make them feel inferior. Lost in a Negro section, they fall into panic; and Mr. Head, at a moment when the boy is in trouble, denies any relationship to him.
Now their lives are stripped of all meaning and relationship. Mr. Head “felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation.” They are saved, however, when they see stuck up against a wall the plaster figure of a Negro, looking both young and old, happy and wildly miserable. The figure is absurd and tragic; they do not know what it means, yet it has a mysterious coherence the contemplation of which restores meaning to their lives. The story is ultimately about Adam’s Fall into the analytic knowledge which decomposes the world and the subsequent redemption of mankind through the concrete symbolism (the Crucifixion, the Negro on the wall) that puts the world back together again.
One wonders in the end whether there has been enough story to justify such a formidable weight of meaning. The weight of meaning rather smothers the life out of Miss O’Connor’s stories, but this is their only fault. Hers is the most impressive intellect in these two volumes. Her symbol of the “artificial nigger” represents perfectly, both in style and meaning, the aim of so many of the other contributors to these volumes. For it is now I think possible to discern as characteristic of the 1950’s a style which is comic because it is deadly serious—a style beyond illusion and disillusion, which pits every idea against its opposite in order to assert in the end a mysterious coherence which reconciles all ideas, the coherence of life itself.
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