Story Playlist 14: The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891) When Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s infamous “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published, the short story caused a furor. Readers, including doctors, feared that the act of reading it could induce madness. What a powerful spell this story must have cast in its day, before the common currency of creepy TV shows and horror films. Yet it is equally effective today, and still feels shiny and new despite the old-fashioned tone of the narrative voice.

The key to Gilman’s story is the unreliable narrator—a technique with a rich tradition. In general, readers expect to trust the narrator to tell the story as it is. In fact, all stories, even those that claim to be eye-witness factual accounts, are told through the filter of the teller, and that filter is often clogged with the teller’s own past and agenda. The “teller” in the case of non-fiction is always the author—but even a scrupulous journalist or historian may have an agenda or thesis that drives the telling. In fiction, the telling is complicated by the narrator—not the author, and sometimes a character. Ishmael tells a different version of the story of Moby-Dick than Captain Ahab would, or the native harpooner Quequeg. Herman Melville chose Ishmael as the teller of his tale, and Ishmael is a great deal less unreliable than Ahab. But how much trust should we put in the literal word of the narrator of first-person fiction? Our instinct is to take the word at face value, and that is what Gilman uses to warp our fragile little minds.

The tale is simple. The narrator and her husband, John, a doctor, rent an elaborate country manor house for the summer, getting it for a suspiciously low price—we are encouraged to think that it might be haunted. The narrator, who records her thoughts to create the narrative we read, has been suffering from a nervous depression, and her husband thinks rest is the best thing for her. They set up in the old nursery of the house, which has some odd features to it that largely go unanalyzed (though not unnoticed) by the narrator. There is no furniture in the room, just a bed that is nailed to the floor. She guesses that the room was first a nursery, then a gym, because there are metal rings on the walls. We might see through her oversight and consider this the room of a mental patient, but Gilman does not spell this out and the narrator seems not to put two and two together. For her, the room’s main feature is its yellow wallpaper, a disconcerting color, indeed discolored in grotesque ways in patches, some of it torn from the wall, and patterned with non-repeating, non-linear shapes that draw the eye, but frustrate attempts to decipher regular patterns.

As the summer progresses, the narrator constantly expresses, on paper, her discomfort with the room, and seems morbidly obsessed with the wallpaper. Her husband—and doctor—a loving, father-knows-best type, insists that moving would just mean a surrender to her neuroses, and she should stay right here. The wife begins to have hallucinations (or are they hauntings?), seeing a woman moving behind the thicket of lines in the yellow wallpaper, and some times escaping to creep around the room, or at times visible on the paths outside the house.

The reader has only the narrator’s views to go on, and Gilman’s narrative is intentionally confusing, from moment to moment unclear as to whether the narrator is, herself, a mental patient and is hallucinating everything, whether she was mad to begin with or is being driven mad by her husband’s care, or whether she is susceptible, in her nervous condition, to supernatural activity at hand. The only clear thing is that her husband, who she deems well-meaning, is making things worse for her, combining affection with condescension, and treating her like a “little girl.” In this he mirrors the general attitude of male doctors towards female patients in an age when female sexuality, expression, and creativity was largely frowned upon and seen as destructive to the “natural place” of women as subservient heads of domestic activities and little else.

The story turns dramatically on a single letter: I. The narrator has spoken of another woman trapped within the wallpaper who at times creeps out from it, then, all of a sudden, near the climax of the story, after saying she would almost like to leap from the window, the narrator speaks as though she has crept out of the wallpaper herself, and wonders if all the creeping women “have come out of the wallpaper as I did.” The effect is chilling, and we fear a nasty end, as the narrator mentions her hidden length of rope—might she hang herselff? She has managed to lock herself into the room, and her husband is at the door trying to get in. She tells him where the keys are, and then . . .

The story drew such a response that Gilman felt compelled to publish an explanation of why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In her willingness to open up about having lived for three years in a “melancholic” state—what we would call depression—Gilman demonstrated how radically advanced she was for her time, as such admissions could bring a stigma. It was not done, in the 1890s, to speak openly about one’s mental turmoil, and Gilman was brave to do so. Like too many women at the time, and like her protagonist, Gilman had been deemed “hysterical”: a misogynistic diagnosis that essentially considered women a bundle of coiled nerves who could best be helped by what her doctor prescribed as a “rest cure.” Her main point was how misguided was the all-too-common diagnosis of male doctors at the time, who suggested that female nervousness and “hysteria” were due to too much intellectual behavior and use of the imagination, which could not be healthy for women. Her doctor prescribed rest, harmless “domestic activity” and “no more than two hours per day of intellectual activity.” Most of all, she should stop writing.

Gilman tried this therapy and found herself worse off than ever. It was only when she roundly ignored this advice, and returned to writing, that her burden lifted. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an expression of Gilman’s own state of mind, but also an excoriation of doctors who advised creative women to repress their imaginative powers. In her essay, Gilman notes that she wrote the story not to induce madness in the reader, but to ease the discomforts of the imagination and to point out the well-meaning insanity of prescribing women to be less creative than their own intelligence calls for them to be, and of trapping women in a paternalistic fantasy that denies them the liberties of their own natures.

And yet the story is not a tale of liberation but of an abject descent into a very dark realm indeed, creepy as the worst fever dream.

Story Playlist 13: Baby Shoes

Ernest Hemingway: “Baby Shoes” (?) Mark Twain, quoting Pascal, once wrote in a letter to a friend, “My apologies for the length of this letter, but I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” It is indeed often more difficult to write shorter, as it requires more editing to clip away the extraneous branches until you are left with a streamlined creation. In this view, the best writers are the most concise, eschewing baroque phrases and paragraphs, removing anything that is not integral to the advancement of plot and character.

Ernest Hemingway is the preeminent example of minimalist fiction. His sentences are spare, adjectives hard to come by, his prose straightforward to the point of mockery. But it is clean, fast, honed, and hard to do as well as “Papa” did it, loading feeling and detail into each deliberate word. There are many fine examples of his good, clean prose, but none as distinctive as “Baby Shoes,” the world’s shortest really good short story—which may or may not have been written by Hemingway.

The story is so short that I can quote its entirety here: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Six words tell a novel’s worth of back story, all of it “told” in the white space between the letters.

It is perhaps easiest to begin with “Baby shoes. Never worn.” What is implied by this amalgam of four floating words? A couple was pregnant, excitedly so, and purchased, or were given, baby shoes in anticipation of their child’s eventual use of them. As a new father, I know that shoes are not strictly necessary for babies until they begin to walk, or at least crawl, so we do not know whether the child died before birth, as in a miscarriage, or whether some time after birth; we can only surmise that the child never reached the age to wear the shoes. That alone is a powerful image, touching on a fear that strikes a universal chord in anyone who has ever been a parent, or who can imagine being a parent. The breathless excitement for nine months at the prospect of having a child (and this story suggests that it was the couple’s first child, since the shoes are not hand-me-downs) crashes against those inexorable words, “Never worn,” sounding so much like “nevermore” in their finality, suggesting a life snuffed out before it had a chance to begin.

The implied situation is absolutely devastating. Yet all that emotional turmoil lurks in the shadows behind four simple, undramatic words. We do not know if a couple placed the ad, or a single mother. But the fact of placing such an ad implies acceptance of the idea that this was the one shot to have a child, and that the opportunity will not come again. It might catch the mourning couple at a temporary moment of hopelessness, or it might reflect a hard decision suggesting hopelessness as a long-term emotional state. They will not keep the shoes, not even as a bittersweet souvenir of what might have been, and not to be passed on to another child in the family. They want the shoes gone, and with it, one imagines, the memory.

And so the other two words to be considered—“for sale”—are also loaded. The very fact that a couple would take the time to place an ad to sell the baby shoes suggests either they are desperate to be rid of all ties to the lost child, or, perhaps, that they are so desperate for money that they will sell even their sentimental keepsakes. We are not told which is the case, and are left to imagine a variety of scenarios, settling on whichever we find most suitable. The space left to our imaginations, always a far more fertile hunting ground if stimulated by skillful texts, is the true genius of this shortest of short stories.

Here we have a worthy predecessor to the recent trend in “flash fiction,” those short bursts of text written in one sitting and readable in a minute or so that try to contain a full story in miniature. What makes “Baby Shoes” novelistic is the implication that the characters, whom we never meet, have changed—and change is one of the basic requirements of a satisfying story. In six words, this story implies that the characters, once thrilled at the idea of having a child, have allowed the tragedy of the child’s premature death to change them—understandably, of course, and palpably. When the story takes place, when the couple writes the ad that is the six-word story, we understand that the change has already taken place, and we can imagine the state of the parents, before and after the tragedy. And, as with flash fiction, the story takes place in our reading of it: the ad and the story are one. We read the ad, we infer the story.

There is some mystery as to who actually wrote this shortest of short stories. It is popularly attributed to Hemingway, and it sounds appropriate that the master of streamlined prose should take his skill at suggestion and inference to this level. It’s said that Hemingway, at lunch at New York’s Algonquin Hotel (in an unspecified year), made a bet with his fellow diners that he could write a novel in only six words. At $10 a piece, his friends challenged him. Hemingway wrote the six-word story on a napkin and collected his winnings. It’s a neat story, and suits Papa’s legacy. But versions of “Baby Shoes” predate Hemingway in his prime.

A 1917 article in The Editor magazine, by William R. Kane, suggested a story about a woman who had lost her child, with a proposed title of “Little Shoes, Never Worn.” A 1921 satirical version of the idea appeared in Judge magazine and replaced baby shoes with a baby carriage. So, even before Hemingway was Hemingway, the story was around, and Hemingway—18 in 1917, the year he graduated high school and went to work at the Kansas City Star—was already interested enough in journalism and writing to have possibly heard of Kane’s suggestion. Whether or not Hemingway wrote it—on a napkin or anywhere—we might say he popularized it or finalized it, and that “Baby Shoes” became better-known, once linked to his name. To me, the story sounds like Hemingway, after having downed a good quart of aged, minimalist whiskey.

Sometimes the legend feels more right than documented history permits.

Story Playlist 12: The Dead

James Joyce: “The Dead” (1914) Joyce is one of the authors we literary folks are supposed to like. Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, turning more tricks with the styles of prose fiction than anyone knew were in the bag. It is also the novel people like to say is their favorite, because that sounds good to say (I said it was my favorite while in college). In truth, Joyce’s work is hard to love, but certainly easy to be impressed by. He writes in literary puzzles, games that well-read individuals can play against him. He always wins. There is a chapter in Ulysses structured to mimic the evolution of English prose from translated Latin through Middle English to the different identifiable styles of famous Anglophone authors. The idea is that you play the "Name-That-Authorial-Style" game that Joyce has set up for you. This sort of thing sounded very cool to me during my grad school, clove cigarettes, emo music period. Now, as a mature(-ish) writer and professor, it’s both impressive and mildly annoying. Joyce is a genius, for certain, but perhaps not the sort of guy you could love, or even enjoy as a dinner guest.

But there are things I love about Joyce. The last page of Ulysses, culminating in Molly Bloom’s reminiscence about a sexual encounter, is heavenly prose-poetry. The last page of “The Dead” is likewise a gorgeous reinvention of what English can do. In fact, the last one-third of “The Dead” is incredible, but what’s the deal with the first two-thirds?

The bulk of the 15,000 word short story (which some consider a novella, due to its length) is a wash of intentionally-mundane conversation at an annual dinner and dance party hosted by the elderly aunts of our protagonist, Gabriel Conroy. As a reader, I understand the reason for this segment of the story: we see Gabriel as insecure and socially-awkward, and we observe the banality of those at the party (whom we might consider to be examples of “the dead” referred to in the title). All this mundane detail helps to set up the real meat of the story, when Gabriel returns to a hotel with his wife, whom he suddenly desires more than ever, only to learn a secret about her past that makes him realize that he knows her less than he thought. But as a writer, I would have asked Joyce why we need a good 10,000 words to set up this banal contrast to the last 5,000 words. The whole could have been accomplished in a tenth of the space. My eyes glazed over as I read on and on about who said what at the party, none of it interesting beyond a few strokes of Gabriel’s awkwardness. Inflicting this section upon us in order to get to the good part seems like another Joycean trick. He wants us to glaze over, because glazing over is what Gabriel does while stuck in the midst of a party he’d rather not attend. It’s clever—making us suffer with Gabriel—but it doesn’t make for the most fun reading.

That was my initial reaction, at least. But I was sure that I was missing something, and of course I was. It took some research on my part, and words of encouragement from my editor at the New Haven Review, for me to fully appreciate what the first two-thirds accomplishes, and the reason to admire it, and not to just see it as a means to set up the ingenious, soaring final third.

The real interest of the first two-thirds of “The Dead” comes down to Joyce’s virtuoso use of what’s called “free indirect speech.” This is a fancy way of describing what today is an entirely common narrative technique, but which Joyce pioneered in English: the use of third-person narration to provide the essence of first-person perspective. The omniscient narrator takes us inside the head of his protagonist to describe what the protagonist thinks. By way of example, here is a sentence written in four ways: third-person direct speech, third-person indirect speech, first-person narration, and third-person free indirect speech.

Direct speech: He stood in the batter’s box and thought of hitting a home run. “What if I can knock one out of the park?” he wondered.

Indirect speech: He stood in the batter’s box and thought of hitting a home run. He wondered to himself, What if I can knock one out of the park?

First-person narration: I stood in the batter’s box and thought of hitting a home run. What if I could hit one out of the park?

Free indirect speech: He stood in the batter’s box and thought of hitting a home run. What if he could knock one out of the park?

The last example features the omniscient, third-person narrator stepping into the character’s head and asking aloud a question that the character is actually asking himself. Melding across the boundary between omniscient third-person and subjective first-person narration was one of Joyce’s preeminent technical advances, and what he was able to make this technique do was truly revolutionary. It may seem like a subtle distinction to more casual readers, but it certainly gets the lit majors excited, and provides authorial fireworks for the astute reader to marvel at during the otherwise rather dull initial section of “The Dead.” We marvel not at what is said and what happens in this section, but at what Joyce as a very much present author is capable of, if we take the time to notice such narrative effects.

Now, it is interesting to note that my full appreciation of “The Dead” required an intervention. It is hard to grasp on one’s own, even for a seasoned reader, just as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are the sort of books that are probably best read as part of a course. I can’t imagine settling down on a beach with a piña colada in one hand and Finnegans Wake in the other. But with concentrated examination—and maybe with a literature professor as your co-pilot—pearls rise out of the sand.

What’s undeniable is that “The Dead” is impressive for its expression of male lust, and for showing a wife as object of such lust, and for the mixed interior thoughts and emotions of Gabriel when he gets his much-desired wife back to the hotel room. His hunger for her is foiled as she cries over a memory of a first love, of which Gabriel was unaware, a memory triggered by a song sung at the party. From the moment Gabriel and his wife close the hotel room door, “The Dead” lights up like a lantern in the darkness. Circa 1914, it was certainly risqué to write so openly about sexual desire and private emotions, even within the confines of marriage. Joyce paints a picture of great tension, cycling us through Gabriel’s sine wave of feelings, frustrations, childish pouts, and ultimate acceptance of what his wife experienced before he arrived in her life. The story ends with a cascade of a final page, written in lyrical, rhythmic prose that flutters on the page like the snowflakes drifting to the Dublin streets outside the darkened hotel window in which Gabriel stands.

“The Dead” is Joyce in microcosm: brilliant, with strokes of great beauty, ingenious, and frustrating, but with the good over-powering the dullness. A view that can only come from reflecting back on the reading experience, which might be why Joyce is such a favorite of professors in the first place. For reading Joyce is not a Sunday stroll in the park, but an experience that requires work—and rewards the effort.

Story Playlist 11: A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily” (1930) Okay, Faulkner, you got me. There I was, reading your short story, thinking that we had a nice, southern, lightly Gothic character study on our hands. Then, on the last page, you pulled a fast one and not only surprised me with your ending, but thoroughly creeped me out. In a good way. In fact, the last image in this story is the creepiest I’ve read over the course of this project—and this is not a horror story!

Faulkner is a master of haunting, slightly surreal, loaded images. Of his work I’ve only read As I Lay Dying, and I loved it. The images in that novel (the old woman hearing her own coffin being made by her son beneath her window, then the family carrying the coffin on a shaky carriage across a river) haunt better than any ghost, so I was hoping for more of the same. Faulkner is often called a “Southern Gothic” writer, which implies not only a setting in the Deep South, but also an element of darkness, perhaps even of the grotesque. On my playlist, Southern writers, like Faulkner and Eudora Welty (both from Mississippi) and Flannery O’Connor (from Georgia), are well-represented and have major reputations as short fiction authors. So, obviously, the southern setting of “A Rose for Emily” did not surprise me, nor did the first 90 percent of the story.

It begins with the story of a wealthy single woman, Emily, who is an odd recluse, much-discussed but little-seen, living alone in a grand home, never socializing. Her only companion is an old black servant. Emily refuses to be given a street address when post is first introduced to the town, and refuses to pay taxes; a previous mayor officially relieved her of her tax obligations, but newer administrations wish to enforce them. Those who pass her house glimpse her occasionally on the ground floor, and she seems to have boarded up the top floor, but little else can be said for certain.

The narrator is a member of the administration of the town, one of many curious who come snooping when Emily finally passes away. The old black servant, now very old, silently lets in the funeral-goers and then disappears. The narrator and other administrators explore the stuffy, moldy, grand old house and find a single upstairs room locked. Forcing the door, they find inside a bedroom that looks as though inhabited by a gentleman, with discarded clothing, a hairbrush, cufflinks laid out to be put on, but all corroded by time and covered in a film of dust. And, on the bed, there is something sinister, beautiful, moving, and haunting . . .

I’ve noticed, over the course of this project of mine, that the majority of the stories I’ve included feature a) creeping dread, b) eerie atmosphere (which often accompanies creeping dread, but not always), and c) a “flip,” “kicker,” or “twist” in the last line that turns the story you’ve just read on its head. Now, I know that I tend to prefer that kind of story, as, like a lot of people, I enjoy the fascination of scary fiction. But I also know that the stories I’ve chosen were culled from a variety of lists, syllabi, recommendations of fellow writers, and anthologies of the greatest works of short fiction ever written. I had only read about a third of the selected stories prior to this project, and I read no summaries of the stories before adding them to the list. While this is hardly a scientific study, there seems to me to be a very large percentage of stories with those three aforementioned components—all of which I tend to associate with “thrillers,” and not with literary works in general. It surprises me that these features should appear so often in landmark short fiction. Or is that why these stories make the lists in the first place?

Though I chose Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” as a “classic” and because I loved As I Lay Dying and wanted to try out his short fiction, I knew nothing about the story and, to be honest, I was less than enthused by the title. That probably sounds silly, but one can be put off by a title just as easily as urged forward. I expected a character study about some kind of genteel Southern belle with a touch of the gossipy aspects of Southern Gothic, and dressed up in Faulkner’s fancy writing. That’s just what it seemed I got, until I reached the last page and, bam, I got the chills. Hats off to Faulkner for surprising me like that, and injecting me with a syringeful of the creeps: in short, doing everything I love a story to do, but which I was not expecting from this particular story.

Short Story Playlist

Thus far, we’ve posted the first ten of Noah Charney’s ruminations on the stories in his “playlist.” Here is the essay in which Noah announces his intentions and provides the full list; the list includes links to the individual posts as they go up. Professor Charney welcomes comments on his posts, either in our comments section or at his facebook email: noah.charney1@facebook.com -- Eds.

Story Playlist A short story project amid the renewed interest in short fiction

Noah Charney

Life is short and there is a lot to read. I comfortably finish about thirty books a year, reading for fun, without it feeling like hard work. That means that I might have a good thousand books or so in my future. The quantity of books out there is simply too daunting to consider, with around 300,000 new books self-published only last year, to say nothing of those published by established houses. These numbers are best let wash over you, maybe provoking a momentary sigh of dismay. Clearly, a plan is needed. How best to determine which books to include in the finite number I can read in my lifetime?

I’m interested in the quality books, the must-reads, the “classics:” ancient, old, modern, and contemporary. From Homer to Beowulf, from Chaucer to Boccaccio, from Walpole to Swift, from Twain to Poe, from Joyce to Hemingway, from Carver to Dahl to Murakami, there are canonical authors I’ve never read, or read too quickly, too young, or too little. I’m more interested in experiencing at least one fine text by the great writers, than in covering the pantheon of great books. As a writer, I understand that reading is the best training that I can undertake to improve my own craft. Writing without extensive reading is to exercise a muscle, but without understanding the diverse actions that muscle is capable of. Reading great authors inspires, refuels, energizes, and teaches, as well as adding moves to your repertoire. I would love to read every book of merit that’s ever been published, but the laws of time and biology are against it.

Good thing I’ve come up with a plan.

Recently, a number of high-profile publications, from Esquire to The New York Times, have cautiously celebrated the re-vitalization of short fiction. The year 2012 saw a handful of exciting new short story collections from bankable authors (some best-known for their novels) like Karen Russell (Vampires in the Lemon Grove), Nathan Englander (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank), George Saunders (Tenth of December), Ron Rash (Nothing Gold Can Stay), and Jess Walter (We Live in Water), to name a few. These collections have been both critically acclaimed and have sold well—a rarity. Short fiction collections often receive praise, but rarely sell anything like novels. The only exceptions are stalwarts of any genre, who happen to publish short fiction collections as well as novels: Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, Haruki Murakami. Such authors boast legions of fans who will buy anything they publish, from novels to story collections to dishwasher instruction manuals. The real excitement, emanating from publishers particularly, is that now lesser-known authors, first-time authors, and novelists publishing short story collections for the first time, are all encountering both critical kudos and good sales. The short fiction genre, until recently proclaimed dormant, if not dead, seems to be rising once more.

If that makes short fiction sound like a zombie, that’s not my intention. Perhaps we might rather say that, from a publishing perspective, short fiction was simply comatose for a time. A few decades ago, a short story in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, or any of dozens of other magazines could launch a career, or fund a young writer while they wrote their first novel. A promising short story might prompt a publishing house to come calling with an offer of a book contract, based only on the potential shown by that one story. Stephen King off-set his meager income working at an industrial laundry by selling scary short stories to a host of magazines (Cavalier, Moth, Contraband) that no longer exist, just barely supporting his young family, before his first novel, Carrie, made him an international best-seller. Since King’s youth, three things have happened that changed what short stories were capable of, career-wise.

First, most of the literary magazines that once paid a few hundred bucks for a short story have folded, or gone digital, or effectively closed the short fiction arm of their publication. With the Internet Age came a proliferation of good writers who were willing to write for free, in exchange for being published and thereby reaching some imprecise number of readers out there in the digital universe. It is not hard to get short fiction published in a magazine these days, but is nearly impossible to get paid a dime for it. Even the once-mighty short fiction stalwarts, like Esquire and Harper’s, rarely publish short fiction anymore. Only The New Yorker remains a fixture on the short fiction scene, publishing a story prominently in every issue. High-profile venues for individual short stories, therefore, have slowly disappeared, replaced by hundreds, if not thousands, of small-scale online magazines with limited, diffused readership. With so many semi-pro magazines out there, each with a few thousand readers, the chances are slim that any single published story will garner much attention.

Second, short story collections stopped selling well, falling far below novel sales, and often below non-fiction. In response, publishers grew hesitant to release short story collections, unless they were by well-established authors. The collections they did publish were not given the benefit of muscular publicity and marketing schemes, which means they were doomed from the outset (it’s no secret that the amount publishers invest in marketing largely determines which books sell well). In the Internet Age, young authors were encouraged to focus on novels, as short fiction would not pay the bills or spark renown, either singly in magazines, or gathered in story collections.

Third, especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century, publishers determined that readers wanted a lot of book for their money, and so began to favor longer novels, or fatter-looking normal-length novels. I have a copy of Daniel Silva’s The Defector that is the size of a concrete block, but which appears to have been printed in size 16 font, triple-spaced. I read it in two days, and suddenly felt like a speed-reading wizard—another intention of the publishers. You feel accomplished, and eager to jump into the next book, when you quickly finish a big book, even if its length is padded-out. Doorstop novels proliferated, and when short story collections were published, they were usually “Complete Works,” in order to make them as large and long as possible. None of these three factors encouraged the writing or sale of short stories, or the publishing of first collections.

This state of affairs may be changing, and this very season feels indicative of a renewed interest in the short story. This is due to two primary, linked factors. Alas, magazines have not suddenly renewed their focus on short fiction, nor have they begun to pay for it. A single short story is still unlikely to win a young author their first book deal. But the eBook era, coupled with our collectively shorter attention spans in the face of the number of distractions that vie for our limited attention, means that short stories can now thrive once more.

With so many digital gadgets and apps and TV programs and newspapers and magazines competing for the spare half-hour we might have to ourselves, on the train, waiting in line, relaxing in bed, we have become skittish of longer commitments of time. This even manifests itself in article length. We have a new term, “long reads,” for proper feature articles of longer than 2,000 words. As a writer for magazines myself, I know that the preferred article length for online consumption is a measly 800 words, while even print magazines are hesitant to ask for more than 2,000 words, with a 1,200 word  cap fairly standard. This means that readers are happy to commit to an 800 word article, but are less inclined to tackle anything much longer. Because magazine and newspaper editors think we want this, we have been trained to want it—I now set aside the longer feature articles in my Sunday New York Times, preferring to browse the shorter pieces. Enough ink has been spilled about shortening attention spans, blamed on quick-cut editing in television, bite-sized videos on YouTube, and so on, but how can a possibly alarming decline in tolerance for long-form reading help writers?

It may re-invigorate the short story. While we might hesitate to commit to reading a 400-or, god forbid, 600-page novel, we can reasonably expect to finish a short story in one sitting. The payoff is different of course, approaching the last line of a 10-page story versus a 600-page novel, but that sense of accomplishment, completion, satisfaction is similar—it’s a high that avid readers might equate with crossing the finish line—whether marathon or sprint. We feel accomplished, our time well-spent, happy that we can check another box on our to-do list. Book publishers recognize this, the appeal of completion, and have responded by offering “singles.” Publishers like The Atavist and Byliner specialize in nonfiction that takes less than 90 minutes to read. Kindle’s eBook Singles series follows a similar pattern for fiction, publishing individual works that are halfway between a long short story and a novella (all under 120 pages in length, the general cut-off separating novel and novella). The short story, like the mini-essay, becomes a vehicle for a single purpose, idea, or turning point. It is like a lyric poem to an epic poem: it sustains, over a shorter period of time, with perhaps more intensity, a finite world, concept, thought. Even its more complex and riddle-bound embodiments (like the puzzle-box stories of John O’Hara, each one of which begs for a book group to pick it apart) feel digestible, at once satisfying and easy-to-commit-to. A great burger, as opposed to a 15-course tasting menu.

The second factor that has propelled the growth of the short is the ability to buy digitally—instantly and cheaply—and download directly to a reading device. Printing costs for an ultra-thin book of 40 pages are not much less than printing a book of 200 pages, but a publisher could not get away with charging for the short work anything like what they can for a 200-pager. Such a tiny printed book would feel wastefully slender, an unsatisfying hankie of text. With eBooks, however, the length is immaterial—when we download something, the file looks just like any other. We also have the illusion that we haven’t paid for it, since our credit card info is already loaded into our Amazon or iBookstore account, and we simply click a button to purchase and receive the digital book on our reader.

The costs for these “singles” are small, usually a dollar or two, so they are as easy to buy as a track on iTunes. Short stories may begin to have the appeal of hit songs. You could buy the whole album for a more substantial price, but that may be more than you’d care to commit to. You can instead buy only the tracks you want, for 99 cents each, and then create your own playlist. You lose out on the feel of the album as a whole, but relatively few bands bother any more creating albums meant to be listened to all the way through, in one sitting, to convey a complete thought or idea. The era spawned by The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper is coming to an end, and there aren’t many in the vein of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, U2’s Achtung Baby, and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust these days. Most albums are assemblages of individual songs, and can be sold as constituent parts. Even if the artist feels differently, the consumer can access work piecemeal, creating personal playlists. Such freedom of selection might inspire the desire for do-it-yourself short story collections.

We have not yet reached the stage when Amazon will offer the purchase of George Saunders’ new story collection either as individual stories, at 99 cents each, or the whole thing for $20, but surely that is on the horizon. And it may not be a bad thing. Story collections, like albums, are rarely complete thoughts, necessary to read from cover to cover, in the order presented. The beauty of each story is that it is, in itself, a complete thought, a faceted gem in your palm. Collections are at their best when they are coherent, but most are simply a collection of individual stories, often first published elsewhere, and often written over many years, with no concept or character that links them together.

These observations led me to the idea of a short story playlist.

In 2011, I read twenty-seven books. I considered that a pretty fair number, a bit less than one a fortnight (a book every thirteen days, if you’re keeping score). Last year I was determined to better that record, aiming for thirty—I ended up with thirty-eight (a book every 9.6 days), and felt pretty darn good. Not being in the least obsessive, I keep a tally in the back of my Moleskine datebook, a manual journal to which I stubbornly and lovingly cling, despite my various iApparati.

I read more than your average American: about ten times more. One in four Americans read zero books last year, and the average American read three. Three books a year may seem like very little, but with Americans watching an average of 28 hours of television a week, or 14,560 hours per year, who has time for books?

Despite being well ahead of my fellow citizens, I feel under-read, particularly when it comes to the “great authors.” I love reading, but what I love even more is finishing what I read—getting to the end. The act of getting to the last page, drinking in that often memorable or explosive final sentence gives many of us a visceral pleasure. Which is where short fiction comes in. Despite other commitments, distractions and, occasionally, boredom, we know we can get to the end, without feeling that we must commit ourselves to days or weeks, when the siren song of thousands of new articles, songs, videos, TV shows, films and, dare I mention, real-life friends and experiences also shout for our attention.

Combining my wish to read more authors in order to become a better writer myself; to finish more texts, and enjoy that high of completion; to investigate what happened to the short story, why it seems to be making a comeback, and how 21st century reading habits can help it to thrive, we come to my Story Project.

I will read a short story each day, for a month. I will read the story at night and then, the following morning, re-read it and write a short essay about the experience—being sure to stay within the magical 800-1200 words of today’s online attention span. I will comment on what I liked or disliked about the story, why it and its author are worth reading, what makes the story and/or its author unique and, most importantly for me, what I learned as a writer by reading it. I’m approaching this as a month-long master class in fiction, in which I will learn at the feet of fellow writers who all happen to be masters of short fiction. At the end of the month, I will focus my collected thoughts and lessons into a longer article (a “long read”), reflecting on the experience, and what I learned about the short story as a genre, one that seems poised for a renaissance.

But I don’t plan to stop there. As this is the story of a writer reading stories to learn how to write better stories, its natural conclusion would be for me, after ingesting 30 great stories by 30 fine writers, to put what I’ve learned into practice. I will write my own short story, the first I’ve written in years, to bring my Story Project to its natural climax. This story will be published, along with an analysis essay: talking through my decisions, and why I wrote the story as I did, in the vein of a DVD with a “director’s commentary” feature.

How did I assemble my playlist of 30 short stories? I’m an old hand at learning from fellow writers. For the past year, I’ve written a weekly series for The Daily Beast called “How I Write.” Each column is an interview with a writer I admire, with unusual, odd-ball, and targeted questions about the writing life and writing techniques, tricks of the trade, likes and dislikes, behaviors and quirks. Many of these authors have since become friends, and it’s great to swap stories with them about life in the writing trenches. My original all-inclusive list of short stories was based on recommendations by my fellow authors (who were universally thrilled by the project, and eager to recommend unusual stories I might not otherwise consider), tips from English professors, and a large helping of the universally-acclaimed “classics” of the genre—the kind of stories that appear in numerous collections, and are mandatory reading in many literature classes and writing classes. In order to keep the list length reasonable, I’ve only considered stories originally written in English. No story can be more than 50 pages in length. I have personal preferences, too. I like stories with a sense of creeping dread that urges you to read on. This doesn’t mean, necessarily, horror stories or thrillers, but those tend to be my favorites, so I lean toward suspenseful stories, regardless of genre. My goal is to quickly expand the number of authors whose work I’ve read, but also to juxtapose a wide variety of writing styles side-by-side, read on consecutive days, so that the memories are fresh. While I will read them in chronological order of publication, I will be looking for ways to arrange the list according to other criteria, as one does with a playlist or—and I’m dating myself here—a “mix tape.”

My initial list was around sixty stories long. That’s two months’ of reading—not a lot, but my concept for the Story Project is one month, so I had to trim. Some of the stories I’d read before, but, as exemplars of the genre, are worth re-reading specifically for the project. The scariest thing I’ve ever read is H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” Yes, it’s over-written and, yes, the idea of an alien color pattern floating in the air doesn’t sound particularly horrifying, but just thinking about it gives me a pleasurable sense of heebie-jeebies. The second-scariest thing I’ve ever read is Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn,” but it strikes me as a clean act of horror alone, whereas the story I prefer to include in my list, “One For the Road,” is not only frightening but is also far more literary, with the feel of a centuries-old folktale, but one which Carl Jung could write a dissertation on, with this curdling moment when a father, who ran for help when the family car was stopped in a snowstorm, submits to his familial instincts and rushes to help his wife and children, though we know that they have become vampires, glowing eyes in the snowbound darkness. These two stories are included in my list because one informs the other. By gathering “singles” that respond to one another, either actively or through the eyes of a modern reader in the midst of a project like this, I hope to learn more from the collectivity of the story “playlist” than I could reading each “single” alone.

With assistance from the editors of the New Haven Review, I’ve come up with the following list:

1. Ambrose Bierce “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne “The Minister’s Black Veil” 3. Mark Twain “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” 4. Edgar Allan Poe “Fall of the House of Usher” 5. Washington Irving “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 6. Rudyard Kipling “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” 7. F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” 8. W. W. Jacobs “The Monkey’s Paw” 9. H. P. Lovecraft “The Color Out of Space” 10. Edith Wharton “Roman Fever” 11. William Faulkner “A Rose for Emily” 12. James Joyce “The Dead” 13. Ernest Hemingway “Baby Shoes” 14. Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” 15. John Cheever “Reunion” 16. John O’Hara “Good Samaritan” ["Graven Image"] 17. James Thurber “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” 18. Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find” 19. Raymond Carver “Cathedral” 20. Shirley Jackson “The Lottery” 21. O. Henry “The Gift of the Magi” 22. Isaac Asimov “Little Lost Robot” 23. Roald Dahl “Man from the South” 24. J. D. Salinger “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” 25. Joyce Carol Oates “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 26. Stephen Millhauser “Eisenheim the Illusionist” 27. Woody Allen “The Whore of Mensa” 28. Annie Proulx “Brokeback Mountain” 29. Stephen King “One for the Road” 30. Nathan Englander “Free Fruit for Young Widows”

I’ve read, at some point, nine of those thirty. Those that I’ve read were largely assigned in high school or college (Jackson’s “The Lottery” being the poster-child of high school assignments), and I’m curious to revisit them as an adult, and as a professional writer, to see what all the fuss was about. Englander’s “Free Fruit for Young Widows” stupefied me when I read it in The New Yorker. I hadn’t even planned to read it through—I was just browsing the magazine, scanned the first paragraph, and was drawn into its vortex of wonderfulness. I’m curious as to whether I can identify its roots, if I read it last, after twenty-nine other, older “greats.” I know Roald Dahl from his children’s books, but I’ve heard how creepy his grown-up fiction can be, and I’m curious to try him out for this reason. Other stories were recommended by fellow writers or professors and represent a playlist that I feel will be cohesive, even if it is heavy on my personal preference for tales of horror, suspense, and creeping dread.

This is by no means definitive—it’s just the thirty that have been selected for this particular project. I’d welcome suggestions as to what else should be on the list, or what I should read, once this initial project is done. This list is only in chronological order—lining up my “playlist” of short stories is something that can only be properly done once they’ve all been read. The result will be a more coherent list, somewhere between a college syllabus and those carefully-curated mix tapes we used to make for potential sweethearts back in the Bronze Age of cassettes and high school crushes. The later ordering of the stories will provide form and lucidity to a list that could seem haphazard. If we imagine this playlist of stories as its own collection, readable and even publishable as a unit, then its order is paramount to our bringing an assemblage of “singles” and making of them a rational album—which I think the best story collections do. Having only read a few of the listed stories ahead of time, those I particularly wish to revisit will, I expect, be enlightened and will enlighten other stories that they influenced or were influenced by. There would be no Lovecraft without Poe, and no Stephen King without both past practitioners of the art of literary horror. “A Good Man is Hard To Find” and “Cathedral” inspired just about every short story writer to come after them. The most recent of the stories, “Free Fruit for Young Widows” should reflect the stainedglass light of all of the previous stories, as Englander is a voracious reader and student of his art form.

The New Haven Review will post my response essays to each story on its blog, and publish the final article at the end of the project, with my reflections on the experience. The resulting short story that I will write myself, and its accompanying director’s commentary, will be published later, as an eBook single.

I’d love for you to join me, and read along with the stories I cover, to send comments, and to make suggestions on the NHR blog. In the end, I hope that this Story Project will both satisfy my desire to read more authors, and help fuel the renewed interest in short fiction in general, while also suggesting the values and limitations of short-form fiction.

Story Playlist 10: Roman Fever

Edith Wharton: “Roman Fever” (1934) Among the best tricks employed by masterful short story authors is a last line that completely changes our view of everything that came before it. When the last line is a reversal that turns the tables on the dominant character, there can be a special tang, a final kick.

“Roman Fever” introduces us to a pair of matronly Society women, Mrs. Delphin Slade and Mrs. Horace Ansley. Both are widows who have known one another since they were girls; in time, it becomes clear that Mrs. Slade—Alida—made the better match than did Grace Ansley, as Delphin Slade was a very prominent figure in his time. Each woman has a marriageable daughter they have traveled with to Rome. We meet them as the girls—Babs Ansley and Jenny Slade—go off on an outing with eligible bachelors, leaving the mothers to share the late afternoon sun at a restaurant overlooking the Colosseum. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley have lived in much the same orbit, but were friendly when they were about their daughters’ ages, decades ago, on a holiday in Rome.

Surprised to encounter each other after so much time, and in such similar circumstances, they seem to share companionable silence, thinking fondly of the same old times. The story is told mainly from the point of view of Mrs. Slade and the reader is lulled into thinking that this is a character study about the slightly condescending matron, who seems to have a chip on her shoulder regarding the sweeter, quieter Mrs. Ansley, who sits calmly knitting. The resentment seems to stem from the dynamic between the older women and their respective daughters, based on a maternal rivalry, perhaps. Mrs. Slade seems to admire Babs Ansley as the more “brilliant” daughter, as compared to her own merely “perfect” daughter. But there’s something more hinted at, for Mrs. Slade seems somehow affronted by Mrs. Ansley, and Mrs. Ansley harbors a silent superiority toward Mrs. Slade.

The slow build of the story derives from the manner by which Mrs. Slade eventually brings up what is bothering her. She broaches the topic by reminiscing about how their grandmothers warned their mothers of the dangers of visiting the Forum and Colosseum basin at night for fear of contracting “Roman fever.” When Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley were girls, the warnings were less effective—though the drop in temperature in the area was still a concern—and young couples would sneak into the closed ruins as a place for illicit trysts, perhaps made more exciting by the risks. Mrs. Ansley, we learn, went out after hours on that fateful trip in the women's youth, contracted pneumonia, and was bedridden for months.

The best short stories urge us on by their pace, letting us absorb details and making us want to see how they add up. Wharton’s story, after a leisurely opening, moves quickly through three revelations, each more surprising and more revealing about the relationship between these two women.

(Stop here and read “Roman Fever,” if you haven't read it, before resuming!)

First, Mrs. Slade reveals the great secret she has been harboring all these years. She knows why Grace went out at night to the Colosseum. Mrs. Slade quotes, verbatim, a letter that Ansley received that night in Rome from Alida’s fiancé Delphin Slade, asking Grace—addressed as “my one darling”—to meet him in the Colosseum after closing. Grace had immediately burned the note, and is genuinely shocked that Alida knows its contents. Mrs. Slade reveals that she wrote the note. She had hoped that a frustrated rendezvous would keep Grace away from her betrothed, about whom she was clearly uncertain. It was generally known that Grace suffered from throat problems and we may infer a certain touch of Poe in a jealous woman sending her rival out into the damp and cold of the Colosseum on a fool’s errand.

Grace went to the Colosseum, became ill, and was put out of commission for a time, then swiftly married Horace. Alida married Delphin, as intended. The revelation, ostensibly an apology for deceiving Grace to the detriment of her health, lets us feel that Mrs. Slade has the upper-hand. She was victorious then, and she has now destroyed Mrs. Ansley's treasured memory of the letter. The one detail, we may suppose, that gave Grace her sense of superiority was her knowing something about Delphin that Alida did not.

Had “Roman Fever” ended here, it would be a satisfying short story, a tale of intrigue and confession. But Wharton has more in store. As we take in Mrs. Slade’s words, demure Mrs. Ansley turns the tables. She did, indeed, go to the Colosseum that night, as the letter indicated, but Delphin was there to meet her! She had replied to the letter, which Alida had never considered, and so Delphin met Grace for an illicit evening in the ruins—all along, Grace Ansley has known something Alida Slade did not suspect.

Mrs. Slade, one-upped beyond belief, quickly tries to save face: Mrs. Ansley had only the letter (and possibly the rendezvous, if her story is to be believed); Mrs. Slade married Delphin and had him for life. Mrs. Ansley concedes that, but replies, “I had Barbara.”

With her killer last line, Wharton flashes the ultimate revelation: that Babs Ansley is actually the daughter of Slade’s husband! Grace was impregnated that night in the Colosseum, and her “pnuemonia” and hasty marriage were subterfuges to mask that fact. Mrs. Ansley leaves the stage victorious, and Mrs. Slade has been cut down to size, leaving us to think about how superior Babs Ansley is to Jenny Slade, how “brilliant.” Wharton’s subtlety knows no bounds, as she makes the final line do all its work through implication. Readers who missed that "Babs" is short for Barbara may find the line quizzical and need to return to the opening where the latter name appears early when Mrs. Ansley murmurs an unheard rebuke at her daughter. In any case, “I had Barbara” does all it needs to when spoken in this context to Mrs. Slade, and the attentive reader knows exactly how the latter must take it.

“Dialogue,” Elizabeth Bowen once said, “is what characters do to each other.” Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” is a sterling illustration of that idea.

Story Playlist 9: The Colour Out of Space

H. P. Lovecraft: “The Colour Out of Space” (1922) This was Lovecraft’s own favorite short story, out of hundreds he wrote. He penned it the same year he wrote an essay on horror fiction, and it embodies his theories about the genre, among whose godfathers he singles out Hawthorne and Poe. “Colour” was written just before Lovecraft's other most-famous story, “The Dunwich Horror,” which narrowly came in second for my choice of which Lovecraft story to include in the Short Story Playlist project.

Both stories involve similar settings—backwoods nineteenth-century New England—full of dark, twisted forests, backwards beliefs, superstitious locals far from the light of Reason, and creepy goings-on. Lovecraft writes—often over-writes—in a Victorian style that was old-fashioned in the 1920s but somehow maintains a certain appeal in our terse, economical times. His long, adjective-laden description of landscape lulls you into a mood receptive to his desolate realm of inbred Puritans who live among shadow-casting trees “which no axe has felled.” The fun o f a Lovecraft story is about mood, the slow build, a creepy canvas in which his limited action takes place. His stories aim to give you the willies rather than make you jump out of your seat. But such tales linger and wind around the imagination in a pleasantly dreadful way.

The concept of a color from outer space may not strike terror into your hearts, but it should. In the skillful hands of a master wordsmith like H. P. Lovecraft, the concept matters less than the execution. “The Colour Out of Space” is one of my favorite stories, and among the scariest I’ve ever read.

The action takes place in the oft-visited Lovecraftian land of Arkham, somewhere in rural Massachusetts. The story is told through layers, which was a popular tactic in late Victorian and Edwardian supernatural fiction—as if a tale told by a skeptical narrator makes a paranormal story more acceptable, with the re-teller/narrator standing in for the reader’s natural inclination to disbelief. We learn the story of the “colour” from an unnamed surveyor, our narrator, who has been hired to prepare the ground around Arkham to be flooded for a man-made reservoir. The area to be flooded—which belonged to the Gardner family—is referred to as the “blasted heath,” a phrase that Lovecraft recognizes as both wonderful and over-the-top, so he has his narrator comment on the poetic term—cribbed from Macbeth—used to describe an ash-gray area that was once the Gardner’s land, but now looks like a post-atomic bomb-zone.

The narrator learns of the “strange days” from locals in passing, but cannot get more out of them, except to be told not to speak with Ammi Pierce, the nearest neighbor to the blasted heath. So of course he inquires of Ammi, and learns that the “strange days” were only a few decades prior. Ammi, as the friend (as his name suggests) and neighbor of the Gardners, checked on them and learned, piece by piece, of the abnormal goings-on, and was witness to the family’s disintegration into madness, disappearance, and death.

A meteorite landed in the garden of the Gardner family and was visited by professors from the nearest university, who were baffled by its qualities. It seemed to be shrinking, though made of metal, and at its center was a sort of colored globule, though of no identifiable hue known to man. When the samples disintegrated along with the meteor, the scientists soon gave up. But the Gardner farm suffered some odd changes . . .

After a brief flush of over-sized harvests, the produce proved inedible, and the wildlife around the farm was fleetingly seen to have grown to bizarre, unnatural dimensions. The mother of the family went mad and was confined to an attic room, then the three sons in the family disappeared, two of them after having been sent to draw water from the nearby well. There seemed to be something lurking within the well, sapping the energy of all living things around it.

Ammi was there to witness the final disintegration (literally) of the last of the Gardners. In a scene that is as good and gripping as writing gets—and may be only paralleled by a similar scene of revelation in “The Dunwich Horror”—Ammi forces himself to mount the creaky wooden box stairs at the Gardner home to look inside the locked attic door at whatever is left of mad, incarcerated Mrs. Gardner, who could only crawl on all fours and scream and scream. (I get goose bumps just writing about it, and I re-read the story with glee.) After showing us Ammi witnessing the death of the last of the Gardners, Lovecraft finishes off his story with another good horror-story trope: the helplessness of “the authorities.” Ammi goes to town for help and, against his will, returns with the coroner and the police. There the team of authorities is trapped in the house, their horses having bolted for fear of whatever is down the well. Having sucked the last of the life out of the area, the “colour” launches itself from the well back into space, and yet … Some part of “it” remains at the bottom of that well, where the skeletal remains of two of the Gardner boys, and of a deer and a dog are found. The “something that remains” is a good feature—horror stories and films often have a false ending, like a Beethoven symphony, with one more little terror at the very end to suggest that, even when we think it’s over, it ain’t yet over.

It is with relief that Ammi, decades later, learns of the reservoir that will cover the blasted heath—all that remains of the Gardner farm and the well—forever. But our narrator has heard enough, having turned from a skeptic to a firm believer. He resigns his position as surveyor so that he will not have to return to Arkham, ever. But we readers gladly return to the world of Lovecraft, his occult or alien horrors in dark, Puritanical New England forests is a world adored by lovers of the creepy.

Lovecraft is a master of the slow build, the ominous occurrence, the signs that forces beyond our comprehension are at play. He invented some now-popular cult figures who have entered, if not the general vocabulary, then certainly the imagination of all writers of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi who follow after him. Such items as the Necronomicon, the Cult of Cthulu, the concept of squid-like aliens, the very idea that an ancient race of aliens inhabited the Earth long before human beings evolved come from Lovecraft’s fertile and fervid imagination. He easily combines genres that never needed to be distinct, but tend to be today. Science fiction and horror did not mingle prior to Lovecraft, and for some reason those who are into sci-fi tend not to care for fantasy, and vice versa, and horror is also usually seen as a distinct field. In reality, all these genres should, and can, intermingle. The occult and the extraterrestrial should not be mutually exclusive.

“The Colour Out of Space” shows how the genres of fantasy can coexist in a world where something “satanic” easily tips into something literally out of this world. Lovecraft’s stated goal with this story was to create wholesale a new sort of monster, and the fact he turns a floating, nondescript color into an object of terror is an impressive indication of his “unholy” powers.

Story Playlist 8: The Monkey's Paw

W. W. Jacobs: “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) “The Monkey’s Paw” is one of the scariest stories ever written, a classic of the subgenre of tales of wishes gone wrong. Who wouldn’t want to see a son one never expected to see again, to welcome him home? What if you had just buried him?

Mr. and Mrs. White host a military man who has recently returned from colonial India. While there, he acquired a mummified monkey’s paw, which he shows his hosts, telling them that it will grant its owner three wishes. Thinking this a marvelous find, the Whites are enthusiastic. But the military man warns them that he intends to dispose of it. He got it from a colleague who had all three wishes come true, and his third wish was for death. The military man spells out the lesson that the Whites will learn, if they should choose to use the paw. “It had a spell put on it by an old fakir, a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did it to their own sorrow.” He hurls the paw into the open fireplace, but Mr. White retrieves it, ignoring the man’s warnings.

Part of the pleasure of this foreboding and rather heavy-handed opening is that it provides its own warning—the Whites will surely be lured, as we might be, by the seductive idea of wish-fulfillment. But there always seems to be a catch in these stories, whether the wish-granter is a genie emerging from Aladdin’s lamp (Arabian Nights), a magic talking fish (Indian folktale), an elf living in a fallen tree (Grimm fairytale), or a wrinkled monkey’s paw. From the very start, we know that the wishes will lead to trouble. We read on with the appealing sense of dread, while a part of us wonders what we would wish for, trying to contrive wishes that could not possibly turn against us.

Why three wishes? In fairy tales, and in rhetoric, all things tend to come in threes. We have Cicero to thank for the way we construct arguments. He codified the idea that a good debate argument or essay should begin with an introduction, go on to make three arguments in support of the thesis, and conclude by reiterating the introduction and concluding. It always seems to be three wishes, just like it’s three little pigs, three blind mice, and three billy-goats gruff. Jokes almost always feature a punch-line on the third repetition of a situation (the first time he did this, the second time he did this, but the third time…) Two feels too few, four too many. I wonder if humans are wired that way, with three being this magic number, or whether, from the time of Cicero forward, we have grown accustomed to three as a magic number? Either way, it is always three wishes, and it is always the third that wreaks havoc. In this case, it is the second wish that the Whites will come to regret, and the third will save them.

For the Whites, wish number one comes out fairly well. The sum of £200 would cover the remaining payment for their home, and the Whites wish for this cash as a sort of test, to see if the paw works. It does but, as we might have expected, not in the way the Whites hoped for. Whoever or whatever is the God of Wish-Granting is an evil, vengeful type of Old Testament Yahweh, granting something but with a devilish angle that makes the wisher regret the request. For the Whites learn that their son, Herbert, has been killed, falling into the machinery at a factory, and in compensation they receive from the company for damages a check for . . . £200.

Distraught with grief, the couple tries desperately to undo what they’ve done. They can’t take back the wish, so they wish Herbert back to life with wish number two. Mr. White is reluctant to do so—he recognizes that horror accompanied the granting of the first wish. But Mrs. White convinces him. After all, what else have they to lose? After the wish is made, there is a long pause and it appears that nothing has happened. Then comes a knock at the door.

Mr. White realizes how the wish-giver, with his macabre sense of humor, could bend the wording of the wish into yet another horror. The delay between the wish and the knock at the door is because their son was buried at a cemetery some distance from their home. He has broken out of his tomb and slowly walked home, and is now banging on the door. Mrs. White is distraught, and rushes downstairs to open the door. Mr. White is torn—he loves his son, but the “thing” at the door is not their son, but his freshly-buried, maimed corpse. Before his wife can open the door, in a breathless flurry, he makes the third wish, and the walking corpse of their son disappears.

The suspense in this thriller is intense. From the moment of the second wish to the rectifying third wish the reader is sitting on a hot poker. But what sells these evil little story with its folk-tale trappings, is the character-study at its heart. There is palpable grief at the loss of the son, combined with the guilty recognition that it was greed and the foolish act of tempting fate that led to that loss. Then there is the overwhelming desire to undo a recent catastrophic accident, to turn back time, and to see again the mourned son, thought lost forever. This feeling sends Mrs. White down those stairs, seeing in her mind’s eye only the son she loves. But, because this is a horror story, we are also forced to imagine, with Mr. White, what they will find if they open that door. Something much worse than grief at what must be.

Such very real emotions, channeled through a supernatural story, are what make the plot so powerful, and make “The Monkey’s Paw” one of the most indelibly chilling stories ever. Once you read it, you won’t forget it.

Be careful what you wish for.

Story Playlist 7: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” is a work of magical realism, though it was written before that critical term came into use. The principle is simple: what would happen if a baby was born as an old man and “grew up” in reverse, getting younger and younger, until he “died” as a newborn? It’s a wonderful idea, rife with comic potential and also allegorical possibility. In Fitzgerald’s hands, the story succeeds with a sense of gentle satire and no need for much in the way of flash.

Fitzgerald’s writing is spare and cool, with a somewhat cartoonish sense of the absurd. The absurdity of the story is heightened by the matter-of-fact method of presenting its facts. One has a sense throughout that the characters themselves are rolling their eyes at the absurdity of their situation, as when the doctor at Benjamin’s birth cannot bring himself to speak outright to Mr. Button about his son’s condition. With quick and masterful sketches, Fitzgerald provides some enduring situations: wrinkled old Benjamin in a bonnet, shaking a rattle to please his parents, when he would rather be sharing a cigar and a chat with his grandfather (who is, emotionally, the same age as “baby” Benjamin); Benjamin late in life, appearing as a young child, in the care of his now-adult son, Roscoe, who feels like his father is growing in reverse on purpose, just to spite him, and should have stopped the process at some point; Benjamin in his fifties setting off with a commission as a general in the First World War, only to be turned away at camp because he looks like a twelve-year-old boy.

The tale is most touching at its end, where it even triggers an element of longing in the reader. When we die in old age, we die with a full knowledge of impending death, with all of our memories of those who died before us held in a thread-bare sack (emptier the less our memory stays with us). Benjamin Button, on the other hand, grows younger and younger, losing memories and consciousness, but not in the way of Alzheimer’s, a condition that is upsetting because we are conscious of what we are losing, frustrated at what we fail to recall. Benjamin, rather, loses his memories in the way one sponges away the writing on a blackboard; it’s as if the life he lived hasn’t happened.

The story’s matter-of-factness subverts emotional effects. Fitzgerald is more interested in having fun with such elements as the proverbial disparity in the maturation of the sexes: Benjamin finds in Hildegarde a college girl happy to marry a man of eighteen who looks and acts fifty; but when Benjamin reaches fifty and looks eighteen, alas, his wife has become a frumpy matron in his eyes. There’s also much sport when Benjamin, thrown out of Yale as too old when he’s young, becomes in his maturity a wonder on the gridiron for Harvard, besting the Crimson’s staunchest rival.

Fitzgerald could have gone into more depth, to add perhaps melodramatic interest in Benjamin’s mental state around the point at which his sense of the diminishing future and his youth coincide. The reader is privy to none of Benjamin’s thoughts about how, when he becomes too young to play ball for Harvard, he must realize he will die in about ten years. We might expect some consideration of the fact that counting backwards means that Benjamin can determine the years he has remaining, doing away with the blessing that we generally do not know, precisely, when we will die. But to expect Fitzgerald to explore that might be to demand existentialism before its time. Instead, we simply see Benjamin grow ever younger until, absolutely unconscious as to what is happening and what has happened, he takes joy in kindergarten pastimes and finally becomes a newborn and passes away. The void of unknowing is powerfully rendered, and the point seems to be that the tabula rasa of birth and death may be one, an idea that may sound pretty good for those of us who fear death. Fitzgerald conjures the old idea that “an aged man is twice a child,” but subverts it as Benjamin had never been a child until the end of his life.

The flippancy of Fitzgerald’s style maintains an emotional distance, creating the kind of magical realism that treats the absurd and uncanny as plausible. We are allowed to paint what allegory and message we will onto the canvas prepared by Fitzgerald, who seems mainly interested in the reversal of the natural order and, like many modernists, in finding a way to thematize time’s relativity in a linear narrative. Oddly, “Benjamin Button” seems both of its time and ahead of it.

Story Playlist 6: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Rudyard Kipling: “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" (1836) To begin any tale with an announcement 1) that what you are about to read or hear is a story, with the implication that it is invented, and 2) that the narrator will be an overt presence leading you through the tale, is to set a tone that is decidedly unpopular in contemporary fiction. Most fiction published today tends to rely on the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of readers. The narrative voice attempts to disappear into the background, presenting a story without the filter of the overt narrator. The only times that we are aware of a narrative voice as such is when the author over-writes.

Right from the start, Rudyard Kipling tells us that we are about to hear the story of a brave little mongoose who saves a family from cobras. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is the most popular tale from The Jungle Book, a two-part collection of stories of humans and their relations with partially-personified animals. The tone is intelligent and playful, ideal for children who might like to believe that animals think like humans do, and enjoyable for adults. Among modern writers, relatively few opt for demonstrative narration to tell their tales, though some do. Salman Rushdie, for instance, is a novelist who feels like a story-teller. The narrator, whether or not introduced formally or speaking to his audience directly, is an overt presence, constantly reminding us that we are reading a work of fiction. In Kipling’s case, the story-teller guise makes the story feel more apt for children, whom we can imagine gathered round the narrator, gazing at his knowing eyes and sweeping gesticulations.

I first encountered Kipling’s story in the form of Chuck Jones’s 1975 animated film version, which I loved. For better or worse, it was with the animated Rikki in mind that I read Kipling’s original version. The tale is of a young mongoose, orphaned from his family when a flood washes him out of his nest. He is aided by a British family, recently moved into a bungalow in India, who find and resuscitate him. The bungalow has been long empty, during which time a pair of cobras, Nag and his wife, Nagaina, have enjoyed complete rule of the garden. The two cobras plot to kill the family, and thereby reclaim their territory.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, as he is called because of the sound he makes, is partially personified. He has animal instincts, but he appreciates the assistance and affections of the British family in a human way or, to be precise, in the way that we humans would like to believe that wild animals might appreciate our affections. He becomes a sort of house pet, cuddling up to his new family, as well as acting as their bodyguard.

Darzee, a bird in the garden, tells him about Nag who then obligingly arrives. He and Rikki confront each other and then Darzee warns Rikki that Nagaina is about to strike him from behind.  Rikki instinctively attacks but, being still immature, doesn’t do any real harm to the snake. The cobra couple escape, leaving Rikki to brood.

Shortly after, Karait, a dust brown snakeling as poisonous as a cobra but more dangerous because more easily overlooked, attempts to strike the boy Teddy. Rikki attacks the creature and leaves him for dead. Kipling’s fight scenes are gripping, with plenty of action clearly described, but with a tone that never loses its charm for children, as when he speaks of Rikki wanting to eat the snake “after the custom of his family at dinner.”

Later, a melancholic musk rat warns Rikki that Nag and Nagaina are up to no good, and in a brief horror-story moment, Rikki hears the distant scratching sound of the snake’s rough body against bathroom tiles. Rikki investigates and overhears Nag and Nagaina discussing their plan to regain control of the garden by killing the family, mentioning as well their eventual offspring from eggs hidden in the garden. Nag hides in the water jar to await the man’s bath in the morning while Nagaina withdraws. Rikki attacks and in a ferocious fight, Nag is killed with help from the father’s gun. Rikki is praised by the man for having saved all their lives.

While Nagaina mourns her dead husband on the rubbish heap where his carcass was thrown, and Darvee sings Rikki’s praises for the deed, Rikki enlists the help of Darvee’s wife to feign a broken wing and distract Nagaina long enough for Rikki to destroy her eggs. The plan seems to work. Rikki rushes to the hidden eggs and destroys them all, biting off their tops and crushing the baby cobras within (in a brief glimpse of something more gruesome than one might expect in a children’s book). But then Darvee’s wife calls to him, shouting that Nagaina has gone onto the verandah where the family is having breakfast.

With one last egg in his mouth, Rikki rushes to the bungalow to find Nagaina dancing before the pale, terror-stricken family. Rikki uses the last egg to lure Nagaina away from the family, but Nagaina grabs the egg and rushes for the hole in the garden that is her lair. Bravely, or foolishly, Rikki chases the cobra into her lair. There is a long wait, as the narrator warns us that few mongooses ever survive an encounter with a cobra in her den, and Darvee sings a song of mourning.

Oddly enough, my recollection of the animated film version of this story was that Rikki kills Nagaina, but is bitten in the process and dies a hero’s death. But in Kipling, Rikki does emerge unscathed from the lair, and has saved the family and the garden from the cobras. The tale is ideal in length, action, exoticism, and tone—just about the perfect short story for children.

Kipling’s sense of local color came to him easily, as he was a wonderfully well-traveled writer. Born in India, he studied in England, worked in Pakistan and India as a journalist, then traveled the world, residing for a time in Vermont and South Africa, before settling in England. He won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, the first English-language writer to win and, at 42, the youngest still.

Some have searched for allegory in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and, I suppose, we could do the same. A white British family moves into an Indian bungalow and, with the help of an Indian “pet” mongoose, drives out the evil Indian former residents of the area. One might see an analogy to English imperialism, with which Kipling is often identified, notably for poems like “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). We could look to the awful moment when Rikki kills the cobras’ offspring in their eggs, surprisingly graphic, as an image for genocide, and see Rikki himself as a running-mongoose lackey of his colonial overlords. But as Freud once said, “Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.” Kipling has given us a wonderful children’s story, celebrating the bond between humans and animals, and that’s good enough for me.

Story Playlist 5: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) Washington Irving’s marvelously spooky tale of revenge, set in early New England, is the best-written story I’ve encountered in the first week of my short story project, and yet it is the earliest. Poe and Hawthorne are fine writers, but seem both stuffy and over-stuffed, like pillows with too much goose-down inside, what with their murderer’s row of adjectives and contorted word orders. Sure, that was high literature during their time, but reading it now feels old-fashioned in a way that Irving (and Ambrose Bierce) do not. Irving’s story predates Hawthorne and Poe, but feels fresher. It would not seem out of place in a contemporary lit journal. The balance of humor to action to description is just right, making Irving a truly timeless author.

His story has also haunted readers since its publication, and has inspired countless variations. Ichabod Crane is an awkward, gangly school-master in a rural Dutch settlement of 18th century New England (specifically in what was once North Tarrytown, NY, and which renamed itself Sleepy Hollow, NY). Despite his physical oddness, Crane has a way with the ladies, and his eye falls on Katrina van Tassel, the Rubenesque daughter of a local wealthy farmer. Vying for Katrina’s affections is the local macho male, Brom Bones (if this were set in the 1990s, Brom would be captain of the football team and destined for fraternity fame). Brom and his gang of lads toy with Crane, but there’s a real feeling of competition for Katrina. Ichabod teaches Katrina singing, and therefore has an “in.” He also has a vivid imagination, and gets the jitters on his trips home from dinner and fireside stories at the homes of the locals.

Crane receives an invitation to a big party the whole community will attend. At the party, Katrina seems to favor Crane over Brom’s muscled and manly courtship display, and the skinny, turkey-necked Crane looks to have won her hand. As the party winds down, several guests, including Brom, tell of their encounters with the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian mercenary whose head was blown off by a cannonball during the Revolutionary War, and who was buried in the local graveyard. By night he roams the lonesome forest roads, returning each morning to his grave. In true alpha-male fashion, Brom claims that he raced the Headless Horseman, and was winning too, when he crossed a covered bridge near town, at which point the Horseman disappeared.

With these stories planted in Crane’s percolating imagination, the party disperses, and Crane heads home. Along the dark road he wonders if his mind is toying with him, as he hears strange sounds and fears he is being followed. Turns out he is. The Headless Horseman comes charging out of the woods and begins to chase him. As Crane flees, he recalls Brom’s experience of having escaped the Horseman by crossing the bridge into town. If only he can reach it, he might just escape. Crane gallops to the bridge and crosses it. He looks back to the Horseman, reared up at the far end of the bridge. But the Horseman lifts his severed head, which he has carried by his side, and hurls it across the bridge at Crane.

The next morning, Crane is nowhere to be found. But on the town side of the bridge there is a shattered pumpkin. Brom goes on to marry Katrina van Tassel and, as Irving notes, “was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin, which led some to suspect that he know more about the matter than he chose to tell.”

Irving leaves us with a proto-Scooby Doo mystery. Is the Headless Horseman real, as many in Sleepy Hollow believe? Or did Brom Bones decide to do away with his rival and embody the legend himself, posing as the Horseman in order to dispose of Ichabod Crane? Such question-mark endings are popular in more recent fiction and film, stories in which it is up to the reader to determine whether something supernatural has taken place, or whether the supernatural appearance is a cloak to cover over natural means and motivations.

Unlike Scooby Doo, Irving doesn’t feel the need to spell out the ending, openly unmasking the culprit behind the supernatural occurrence. His rhetorical means of implicating Brams is a bit more subtle. By the same token, he doesn’t completely disabuse readers who want a supernatural experience, by providing an authorial explanation. A clear-cut ending allows you to close the book and consider the case closed along with it. You can get on with the next text on your list, or consider what groceries you need to pick up the next day. Stories like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” refuse to allow this, prompting you to hold off on that next book, and lie in bed with the lights out, wondering whether the Horseman was Brom Bones or the ghost of a headless Hessian. Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” lets the reader eat his cake and digest it too, giving a lesson in the value of hints over statements.

Story Playlist 4: The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) Live burial was a significant fear circa 1839, when Edgar Allan Poe’s renowned story of Gothic horror was first published. In the days before medicine could clearly distinguish between a comatose state and death, it was not uncommon for doctors to declare patients with no apparent vital signs to be dead, when in fact they were merely in a coma. Alternatively called premature burial, live burial, or vivisepulture, such cases inspired a widespread fear of being interred before one had expired. For those with an irrational fear of premature burial we have the medical term taphephobia. Apparently, George Washington suffered from taphephobia (although in his time the fear was not so irrational): he ordered his servants to wait two days before burying him. Since the 1890s, medical advances permitted greater certainty about time of death, and the instances of premature burial, as well as a common fear of it, declined.

Scholars have suggested that some of our ghoulish horror stories may originate in instances of premature burial. Whether we’re talking about zombies (from Haitian folklore), vampires (from Eastern Europe), or other embodiments of the walking deceased, such legendary creatures might be given a semblance of reality when villagers spotted the occasional animated “corpse” of a premature burial, escaped from the tomb and scaring the wits out of anyone who witnessed a graveyard exodus. In an attempt to prevent premature burial—and to cash in on taphephobia—so-called “safety coffins” were invented, including an 1882 patent for a coffin with a breathing tube that doubled as a signal device. A Belgian count witnessed the revival of a friend’s daughter, just as her coffin was being lowered into the grave. He went on to patent a safety coffin that mechanically detected movement within. A burial vault in Pennsylvania was built with escape hatches that could be opened only from the inside. Creepy!

With this in mind, it’s not so surprising to find the theme of premature burial amply illustrated in the stories of Edgar Allen Poe (he even has one called “The Premature Burial”), but nowhere more strikingly than in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The unnamed narrator, a former school friend of Roderick Usher, is invited to spend some weeks at the family’s ancient manor house. The story opens with a well-known description, in wonderfully over-written detail, of the façade of the house, which seems to be crumbling and ruinous, though no stones are out of place. Nietzsche’s phrase, “When you stare into the abyss, know that the abyss is staring back at you,” seems apt for Poe’s description of the House of Usher: twice within one page, the narrator likens the windows of the house to eyes.

Like the family’s estate, Roderick Usher seems to his friend to be decrepit, suffering from an unspecified illness that might be mental or moral but which creates almost hysterical hypersensitivity. The narrator has a single meeting with Usher’s sister, Madeline, who, it seems, is even more sickly. Usher himself has become obsessed with the paintings of his ancestors, as emblems of a family history of aristocrats suffering from debilitating illnesses. Poe implies that Usher is a hypochondriac, suffering the symptoms of a disease that is all in his mind, grown out of his morbid condition. Shortly after the narrator’s arrival, Usher tells his friend that Madeline, his beloved twin sister, has died. The friends place her coffin in a basement room once used for the storage of gunpowder, and thus lined with non-reactive copper.

Usher’s condition worsens and he grows ever more nervous, paralleled by strange sounds that the narrator begins to notice, seeming to come from somewhere far off in the house. There is a pseudo-comic moment at the climax when neither Usher nor the narrator can sleep. The narrator reads Usher a melodramatic story and, as sounds are referred to in that story, similar sounds resound throughout the house. Usher swivels his chair to face the door, anticipating a climactic revelation. The door bursts open, and his sister Madeline, who was buried alive and has escaped from her coffin and burial chamber, is upon them. Usher and Madeline both die, and the house itself cracks and crumbles, and the narrator alone is left to tell the tale.

Is the story melodramatic? Absolutely. Over-written? You betcha. But I’ve loved Poe since I gorged on his horror stories in my early teens. I also (unfortunately) tried to emulate his writing style, which, if ripe in content, is over-ripe in wording. Other writers of the time, such as Ambrose Bierce and Washington Irving, seem positively minimalist in contrast to Poe’s prose as-over-egged sauce. But Poe’s prose conveys the sense of decay, dis-ease, and dread that is the theme of so many of his renowned stories, from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” to “The Pit and the Pendulum,” to “The Cask of Amontillado” all, incidentally, like “Usher” with a slow buildup to an instantaneous crescendo as climax. “The Tell-Tale Heart” sees a murderer tormented by the illusion that the heart of his victim, buried beneath the floorboards, still beats—he is so plagued by the imagined beating heart that he goes from calm to hysteria in moments, while under police questioning. “The Pit and the Pendulum” features an elaborate execution device in a dungeon, in which the victim is strapped in place on a plinth in total darkness, surrounded by a deep pit while a bladed pendulum swings back and forth over him, slowly descending to the point at which it will slice him through. The nervous tension of the prisoner’s attempt to escape builds to a sudden deus ex machina. “The Cask of Amontillado” sees a jealous man, in the midst of a party, lure his rival to the wine cellar to show him a particularly fine bottle of Amontillado dessert wine. The lengthy “prank” is turned to horror at the moment the final brick is set in place, walling the enemy into the wine cellar forever.

The real horror in all of these stories is not the murderous action itself, but the psychological trauma that surrounds it. In the case of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the psychological torment is suffered by the executioner. In “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” it is the torment of the victim, anticipating his slow demise (or the reader, empathizing with the victim’s demise).

The moment of overt horror in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is when the undead Madeline, in her burial clothes, bursts into the bedroom to confront her brother/executioner. That’s the “boo!” or “gotcha!” scare, Hollywood film-style. The more interesting and subtle stab is the understanding of what has wracked Roderick Usher for the past few days, since his sister’s “death.” We feel that Usher realized that he had buried his sister alive early on, but he did nothing to rectify the situation. It is unclear as to whether he buried her alive knowingly, as a form of execution, or whether he genuinely thought she was dead. We can’t determine if he made a mistake, in which case the sounds of her escape are real, or if he is suffering from hysteria at her death. The fact that the narrator hears the sounds gives them reality but until the last moment we don’t know what their source is, and since Usher dies at the revelation of his sister’s moribund but living condition, we never learn what Usher actually knew. Was he hearing his sister trying to escape her punishment or was he being haunted by a woman he believed to be dead?

There is some suggestion of an incestuous relationship between the twins, and we might look to the gruesome tradition of Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome, buried alive with a single candle, a loaf of bread, and a jug of water if they broke their vow of chastity. Usher’s idealization of his sister, and the suggestion that they may have been closer than was natural, might lead us to believe that this premature burial was an intentional execution due to his guilt over what had passed between them. But such guilty secrets, if they exist, never come to light outright. I find the other interpretation, in which Usher is less villainous and more psychologically torn, more intriguing. He buried his sister, genuinely thinking that she had died, and mourning her. It was only after the fact that he began to wonder if he had erred. But he could not bring himself to check, for fear of what he might find were he to do so. Then come the sounds of Madeline breaking through the screwed-down coffin lid, and then scraping open the copper-covered iron door of the basement burial chamber, before coming to confront her brother.

The horror is in knowing that you have done something horrible, yet unable or unwilling to try to right it. Usher’s shift from anguished victim to passive executioner may be more disturbing than the idea that he is a calculated executioner all along. Though in either case, the idea pertains that “evil deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.” Usher, we suspect, was nearly mad by the time the narrator enters the story and everything he does is generated by his morbid condition, his obsession with his degenerate ancestry, and his unhealthy relation to his dying sister.

But, again, Poe’s theme of premature burial is not simply his own dark imagining. In fact, scholars have identified a historical event that likely inspired “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Usher House, a building that stood until 1800 on the Lewis Wharf in Boston, is said to have been the site of a revenge-burial. A sailor was caught having an affair with the young wife of the house’s owner. The husband locked the pair into the room in which they were caught and, shades of “The Cask of Amontillado,” walled them in. In 1800, when the house was demolished, their skeletons were said to be found together in the rubble. Whether true or apocryphal, the story made the rounds in Boston in the 19th century, and Poe would surely have been familiar with it. By making the Ushers brother and sister, Poe adds a more sinister incestuous theme, richly thrilling even for pre-Freudian readers and perhaps even more uncanny for audiences today.

Story Playlist 3: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Mark Twain: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) In Mark Twain’s first big hit story, the narrator, on behalf of a friend, goes to ask an overly-talkative barman named Simon Wheeler about his friend’s former acquaintance, Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley, who may or may not have stayed in the mining camp at which the barman works. Wheeler doesn’t know Leonidas W. Smiley but he does recall a Jim Smiley, and he quickly launches into a story about the latter.

Twain’s short, short story—only 2,631 words—is the narrator’s word-for-word recollection of Wheeler’s monologue about Jim Smiley’s gambling escapades. Smiley would bet on anything, even that a friend’s wife would not recover from illness. He didn’t care what he bet on, or which side he took, as long as he could make a bet. He once had a dog named Andrew Jackson that developed a technique to win dogfights bloodlessly, grabbing hold of his opponent’s hind legs with his maw without biting until the opponent had to give up. Knowing of Andrew Jackson’s strategy, an opponent set an invalid dog, missing its hind legs, against Andrew Jackson, and Smiley’s prize dog lost.

Later, Smiley takes an interest in training the story’s eponymous hero which he named Dan’l Webster. He spends three months teaching the frog to jump until he is pretty sure that Dan’l Webster can jump better than any other frog in the county.

An unnamed bettor appears and Smiley engages him in a $40 bet (no small change back then) that Dan’l Webster can out-jump any other frog. The bettor takes a good look at Dan’l Webster and comments, “Well, I don’t see no p’nts about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” He wants in, but laments that he has no frog of his own—indeed, if he had brought his own jumping frog, we might wonder about his sanity as much as we do about Smiley’s. So Smiley offers to catch him a frog to use in the competition.

While Smiley is off in the woods frog-hunting, the bettor decides to hedge his bets, just in case this Dan’l Webster really is as good as his owner claims. He spoon-feeds buckshot into Dan’l Webster’s mouth until the frog is full, then places him gently on the ground. Smiley returns with a frog for his opponent, which he places beside Dan’l Webster. Each bettor prods his frog’s rear end to send it jumping, but only the newly-caught frog jumps. Dan’l Webster remains stock still. Smiley is confused, but pays his loss. As the bettor walks briskly away, pleased with his victory, he restates, “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s better’n any other frog.”

Smiley notices that Dan’l Webster “’pears to look mighty baggy,” and might not be well. He lifts him up and exclaims, “Why, blame my cats, if he don’t weigh five pound!” Turned upside-down, the frog belches buckshot. Smiley realizes he’s been had, but the stranger is long gone.

Wheeler is then interrupted in this uninvited story by business at the bar. He tells the narrator to wait, and when he returns, he begins the story of Jim Smiley’s next escapade, involving a one-eyed cow. But the narrator, having realized that his errand to learn about Leonidas W. Smiley is fruitless, slips away before he can be cornered again.

Quite aware of his tale’s irrelevance, the narrator begins his story with a warning, directed at the audience, that let’s us know his tale, far from satisfying the errand and any curiosity about Reverend Smiley, will be “as long and tedious as it should be useless to me.” The narrator even wonders if his friend sent him to speak to Simon Wheeler as a sort of prank, knowing that he’d be roped into listening to a pointless, if charming, story.

Part of the humor of Twain’s text is in the narrator’s use of dialect, with words spelled out to imitate his characters’ pronunciation: “Dan’l” for “Daniel,” “p’nts” for “points.” Today, this is viewed as a dangerous technique as it can misfire and seem to condescend to characters or make them regional stereotypes. Twain gets away with it, in part because we sense that the sound of his speech is key to the character of Wheeler the raconteur and Smiley, the archetypal bet-maker. Much of the story’s charm relies on its folksy, I’m-gonna-tell-you-a-tale oral tradition.

Twain’s stories deliberately court the feel of an old man in a rocking chair, telling you a story on a cricket-infused summer night, with iced tea in beaded glasses and mosquitoes round your ears. Twain made a great deal of money by performing his stories, essentially story-telling on stage, and key to his success was his genius at approximating the mannerisms of speech, the way that phrasing and word choice create character. But along with reproducing the homey way that unschooled people speak, Twain captures the way that anecdotal story-tellers can spin yarns apropos of little and keep it up indefinitely.

The narrator’s tale allows him to play straightman to a lonely old man who is pleased to find an interlocutor, even an unwilling one. Wheeler “backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair.” Smiley is a pure caricature, relentless, none-too-clever, and all-too-eager to display his failings, not only with the dog, Andrew Jackson, but with his celebrated frog, Dan’l Webster. A gambling addict, Smiley has the time and wherewithal to dedicate three months to frog-training, only to be bamboozled by a cleverer stranger. If we enjoy Wheeler’s company, then we should be curious to know what Smiley got up to with his one-eyed cow.

Twain himself rewrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” several times, giving it different titles, and it was widely translated. He wrote an essay about the writing of “The Jumping Frog Story,” and he even demonstrated his anti-Gallic sentiment by retranslating into English the French translation of the story, retaining the French grammatical structure to humorous effect, in his “The Jumping Frog Story: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil.” Twain was a master at making one effort earn multiple times, as evidenced by at least three versions of this story published in books and magazines, his on-stage performances of it, and his addition material in the form of an origin essay and his re-translation from French.

In his 1903 essay, “Private History of the Jumping Frog Story,” Twain tells how pleased he was to learn that a similar story about a frog had appeared as an ancient Greek fable, along the lines of Aesop. Of this he wrote, “I think it must be a case of history actually repeating itself, and not the case of a good story floating down the ages and surviving because too good to be allowed to perish.” He would later learn that this rumor was mistaken—there was no ancient Greek fable about a jumping frog, but his own story had been adapted by a Professor Sidgwick in his book on grammar, Greek Prose Composition. The idea that the story has ancient origins suggests that Twain’s version might be either an allegorical or a moral tale with a didactic purpose, as with Aesop’s fables.

And yet Twain’s apparent confusion about an ancient antecedent sounds a bit like a shaggy-dog—or buckshot-filled frog—story itself. Is the uncertainty surrounding the origins of folk tales the point, or is Twain simply ribbing us with the possibly of allegory—in which animals take on the names of important American personages? Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, while certainly historically significant individuals, are also figures of folk lore and tall tales. Is there an allegory behind Twain’s story, or merely fun with the very notion of moralizing fiction? There may be less to it than meets the eye, but the “Jumping Frog” story is undoubtedly charming, funny, was hugely popular a good fifty years after its first publication, and has been duly “celebrated” ever since.

Story Playlist 2: The Minister's Black Veil

Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) René Magritte, the surrealist painter, once said, “a face is not a face unless it’s facing you.” Some of his best-known paintings feature an anonymous businessman with his back turned to the viewer, or a businessman in a bowler hat whose face is covered with a large green apple, or a young man facing a mirror that reflects the back of his head. These effects are disconcerting. Faces make us feel we know someone—recognizing them, reading emotions and back stories into the contours of a visage. Masks unnerve us. We might assume it hides something horrible, but at least it alienates us from the familiar. To enjoy the creepiness of Halloween is all well and good, but imagine how upsetting it would be if your child’s little friend, who looked so cute in his Friday-the-Thirteenth hockey mask, refused to take it off for the duration of his sleepover at your house…

Magritte created mysterious paintings that begged to be engaged with, the visual riddles within them solved—and yet Magritte offers no solution. Magritte went a step further, and even denied reasonable solutions proposed by art historians. For example: Magritte suffered a formative trauma in his youth. His depressive mother drowned herself, and young Magritte saw her corpse, with a wet, white nightgown pulled over its face. Later in life, Magritte frequently painted a women without faces and figures draped in cloth. It takes neither Sigmund Freud nor Sherlock Holmes to link Magritte’s trauma to this ghostly mother-figure in his paintings. Yet Magritte denied any such interpretation.

Magritte’s paintings draw in the viewer to make us active investigators into the mystery of the painting, but then leave us with an unsolved mystery. Such is the effect of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s much-analyzed short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil.” We do not know if Magritte ever read it, but if he had, he would surely have approved.

“The Minister’s Black Veil” takes place in the late-18th century New England of Hawthorne’s parents’ Puritan generation, and it deals with themes of guilt and innocence and sin, with who is chosen for the afterlife, and with the reactionary and hypocritical actions of the upright citizens of the new United States of America. Hawthorne provides a simple set-up, but one layered with clues to the “solution” of the overt mystery of the story—if only we know how to read between the lines of text.

Mister Hooper, a Puritan minister, is quiet, staid, but well-liked and admired by his congregation. One day, without any explanation, he appears at Sunday prayer wearing a black veil made of double-thick crepe, the sort that a woman might wear at a funeral. It hangs over his forehead and down to his mouth, and it flutters gently as he breathes. In that week’s sermon, he preaches about “secret sin,” but all his congregation can do is wonder at the veil. They immediately find it repulsive, “awful,” disconcerting, though they do not know why. Mister Hooper even smiles, as if nothing is the matter, but no one dares to ask him directly why he wears the veil.

Hooper’s choice of mask is wonderfully creepy. There is a cross-dressing element to it (the mesh black crepe is decidedly feminine), and funereal. When asked, at first playfully then seriously, by his fiancée Elizabeth to remove the veil, he refuses, stating that he must wear it until his death. He offers no explanation and, understandably, Elizabeth leaves him. He pleads with her not to leave him lonely, but he could hardly expect her to stick around.

Hooper confides in no one and offers no explanation beyond the general ministerial concept of bearing a sort of cross for the sins of others, doing so in an overt manner. Indeed, his wearing of the veil makes him a more effective minister, with throngs coming to hear his sermons (both to stare at him and to hear him speak) and those with their own burdens seeing, in his veiled person, someone in whom they can confide.

The question that prompts the reader to read on impulsively: why does the minister wear the veil? It is a question Hawthorne chooses not to answer, though there are clues from which we might cobble together a solution. Certainly the story can be read as an allegory, but Hawthorne is no surrealist; we may seek a rationale for the veil within the context of the story.

Critics have picked apart this story, among them Edgar Allan Poe. A master of detective stories himself, Poe noted, early on, that the minister’s veiling was a mystery for readers to solve. First, we must assume that the wearing of the veil has meaning for Hooper. Hooper’s desperate pleas to Elizabeth not to leave him, despite his refusal to remove the veil, suggests at once the desire for self-punishment (no one is making him wear the veil), and a desire for companionship as he carries his cross.

The next question is, why now? Hooper showed no inclination to odd behavior before he showed up at this Sunday service wearing his black veil. The timing must, therefore, be significant. After his first appearance with the veil, Hooper had to preside over the funeral service of a young woman. As he leaned over the open coffin in prayer, the veil slipped forward. Hawthorne describes Hooper reacting with horror, as if he were afraid to show even the dead body what lay beneath the veil. A superstitious woman at the funeral claims to have seen the corpse in the coffin shudder when Hooper’s face was momentarily revealed to it. Others claim to have seen the ghost of the young woman walking hand-in-hand with Hooper en route to the burial ground.

This provides our best clue as to why Hooper has decided to punish himself. First, a veiled sermon on secret sin, and then the funeral in the afternoon. These two factors lead to a noted correspondence with the story of Reverend Joseph Moody (1718-1753) of York, Maine. According to his own diary, written in code in Latin, Moody accidentally killed a friend when the two were young. Moody’s father required his son to sit through the night beside the friend’s corpse, as a means of atonement. Moody took the idea of atonement to an extreme. From the time of his friend’s funeral, Moody wore at all times a “black handkerchief” over his face, even while preaching in church. He was nicknamed “Handkerchief Moody” for his trouble. It is a safe bet that Moody’s haunting true story inspired Hawthorne’s brilliantly creepy work of fiction.

Taking Moody’s story as a backdrop, we return to Hawthorne’s mystery. Without warning or confiding in anyone, Hooper wears a black veil, preaches about secret sin, then recoils at showing his face above the corpse of a young woman over whose funeral service he must preside. Some say that they saw the ghost of the young woman walking hand-in-hand with Hooper en route to the graveyard.

Add it all up, and we’ve got a potential back story. Hooper did something for which he feels he must punish himself. The act of veiling leaves him, literally and figuratively, alone for the rest of his life, all interactions filtered through wearing a woman’s funereal veil. He tells no one why he wears it, not even his fiancée. He has an unusually strong reaction to the corpse of a young woman he must bury.

What Hawthorne does not overtly state, but what is implied, is that Hooper either had an illicit affair with this deceased young woman, and/or he was complicit in her death. The affair is implied by the vision of Hooper hand-in-hand with her ghost. Hooper was engaged to Elizabeth, and adultery was a serious sin in Puritan New England. But Hooper’s strong reaction at the funeral, and his choice to wear the veil beginning with the day of the funeral, coupled with the inspiration of Handkerchief Moody’s story of manslaughter, suggest that Hooper was also somehow responsible for the woman’s death. We cannot know more than this, and of course this all only suggested. Hawthorne states relatively little, but leaves clues in the silences, in what is not said, that allow us to piece together a plausible solution. And what we cannot know for certain is far more suggestive and enduring than a last line that removes our doubts and conjectures with a neat explanation, tying off the story into a bow.

Examples of this can sometimes frustrate: viewers loved the TV series Twin Peaks and Lost, but neither began with a solution to their myriad mysteries in mind. When the shows had to end, writers struggled to come up with a satisfying solution (it’s hard to write a whodunit when, from the start, you didn’t plan who did it) and, according to many viewers, they failed to satisfy. But such open-ended mysteries prompt discussion of allegorical and symbolic meanings. Hawthorne, far advanced for his time, shows the power of unresolved mystery.

Story Playlist 1: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

In the Summer 2013 edition of NHR, Noah Charney describes his decision to create and read through a “playlist” of 30 great short stories, written in English. Here on the website, we will be posting his reflections on each of the stories in turn. For the full list, see the essay “Story Playlist.” Noah welcomes comments on his comments, and feel free to suggest other stories that might be included.—Eds.  

Ambrose Bierce: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890)

It is always difficult to write about a work, particularly a short work, without including spoilers. This is no exception.

If you’ve not read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” you should really put this down, go read it, and then come back. The story is only about 3,000 words long, but packs a wallop into its few pages. You’ll want to read it twice. I know I had to.

We love magic tricks, whether in film or fiction. Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek” provides just such a magic trick, in the flip in its final line. Something happens in the last line that reverses our expectations and prompts us to immediately read the story again, to make sure that we understood the ending correctly, and also to check that the author did not “cheat.”

When it works, the “flip” is a hugely popular author’s trick, akin to an illusionist’s sleight-of-hand. Think of a film like The Sixth Sense, or take The Usual Suspects.

The first 9/10ths of Bryan Singer’s film, written by Christopher McQuarrie, leads us to think of the quasi-legendary criminal known as Kaiser Söze as a powerful, charismatic strongman, whose story is being hesitatingly told by Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey), a hunched, stuttering, limping low-man-on-the-totem-pole of criminal life, crippled by cerebral palsy. It seems that the haughty detective interviewing Kint has bullied him into confessing the truth, and is in complete control of the interview.

The great pleasure at the end of that film is when we suddenly realize, in tandem with Detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palmintieri), that in fact Kint has been controlling the interview, cobbling together on the fly a plausible story, using words and names that he sees scattered around the detective’s office to weave a web of fiction. Detective Kujan realizes this too late, as Kint is already out of his office and on his way to disappearing from the law’s reach. The director then lets us in on one further secret that some of us may already have guessed: Kint is not an invalid at all. He is, in fact, Kaiser Söze.

As soon as I finished watching The Usual Suspects the first time, I immediately had to watch it again. I wanted both to see if I had understood it correctly, and to ensure that I had been legitimately fooled by the flip at the end. Was there enough foreshadowing of the ending? Absolutely. The film is laden with clues, once we know what to look for. The flip is honest, and brilliant. It takes an absorbing crime film and makes it an ingenious one.

This first thing I did, upon reading Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” was to double-check the publication date. That’s right, 1890. The story feels so modern—had it been published in 1990, I would not have been surprised. And that’s largely because of the “quick-cut” of Bierce’s flip.

Here’s the story: During the American Civil War, a southerner named Peyton Farquhar is about to be executed by hanging, for a failed attempt to sabotage a bridge near his Alabama home. As he is about be hung from Owl Creek Bridge, Farquhar looks down at the river below and imagines his escape. If only he could free his hands, he could slip the noose off his neck and dive into the river, evading the bullets of the soldiers standing guard.

Farquhar’s mind then leaps back to before his arrest. While making conversation with a soldier dressed in Confederate grey, Farquhar had learned that the Union Army would shortly try to cross a railroad bridge near his home, and that the bridge might be sabotaged by burning the driftwood that had gathered around the pylons supporting it. In a miniature flip—one that might cause us to question appearances—Bierce tells us that, while appearing to Farquhar to be a Confederate, the soldier was actually a Union scout in disguise. With that, we can put two and two together and understand that Farquhar, who had been itching to help the war effort, attempted the sabotage suggested by the enemy scout—and was caught in the process.

Back at the bridge, the plank on which he stands shifts, and Farquhar drops toward the river, the noose around his neck, his hands still bound.

Here Bierce freezes time and toys with our sense of perception. The world slows down, as Bierce describes everything that Farquhar feels and thinks in the few seconds of his freefall. Suddenly, Farquhar feels the noose snap tight, but his neck does not break. Before he is strangled, he feels the rope tear above him, and he plunges into the river. Perhaps implausibly, he manages to free his hands from the rope that binds them, while rising to the surface of the water, then dodges the first volley of bullets from soldiers. He then evades a cannonball fired at him and floats downstream and around a bend, just as a cannon-load of grapeshot pierces through the trees above him. He runs through the thick woods until, without knowing how he found his way, he is again at home, where he falls into his wife’s arms.

Had the story ended there, Bierce would have provided a wonderful adventure story, an escape from certain death and a homecoming, punctuated by the incredible realism of death (or near-death) in Farquhar’s mind. We see what he sees, feel what he feels, in an ultra-sensory experience marvelous in depicting the heightened clarity and subjective time-sense of Farquhar’s distress. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” would still be remarkable, and deserve its place in all the classes that assign it as a great example of story-telling.

But Bierce provides us with one more treat, the aforementioned flip. Just as we see Farquhar return home, improbably escaping death and running to his wife’s arms, Bierce whops us on the head with this: “Peyton Farquhar was dead: his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge.”

The entire escape occurred in Farquhar’s mind in the seconds of his free-fall, before his death.

It is important that Bierce makes his last line its own paragraph. If it did not stand alone, distinct from the previous paragraph, we might be thoroughly confused. We need that ever-so-brief pause that comes between the end of one paragraph and the start of the next. That pause is a key tool, governing both time and space. The space indicates the end of one place, where Farquhar is alive, and another, where he is dead. And the time it takes for our eyes to navigate the blank space takes us out of one narrative, that is still going forward with the “happy-ever-after” of the Farquhars, and into another, where a life has ended.

What Bierce offers us is a complete reversal of what we expected to read next. That flip encourages us to return to the start of the story, to make sure that the flip was legitimate. In retrospect, there are a number of clues that should have given us pause, and made us wonder what was really happening: the improbabilities of surviving the drop with one’s neck in a noose, of the rope breaking, of being able suddenly to free one’s bound hands, of dodging rifle fire, of the cannon being fired at Farquhar when we were told it was trained on the bridge, not the river, of Farquhar finding his way home through the woods. And there’s the tease of the false-flip, when Farquhar imagines how he might possibly escape, while he still waits, bound, upon the bridge. We think we see an example of mind over matter, that what the hero imagines comes to pass, only to realize that life, in Bierce’s hands, doesn’t work that way.

In case we were in danger of misunderstanding the situation, Bierce’s last line specifies that Farquhar suffered a “broken neck,” so there can be no confusion as to whether the last line could be the start of his surprise escape—it is, in fact, the end of it.

Games with time are popular now, as seen in films like Memento and Donny Darko, a film which uses a flip with time indebited to “An Occurrence.” Bierce showed his truly avant-garde prescience to write such a complicated yet hyper-realistic story more than a century ago.

The end of Bierce’s life might have been inspired by one of his stories. A renowned journalist for a variety of San Francisco newspapers, Bierce was covering the revolution in Mexico, accompanying Pancho Villa’s army as an observer, when he disappeared. Last noted in Chihuahua, he was never heard from again, his body never found. This mysterious disappearance has inspired a number of works of fiction and film, its suggestion of the uncanny worthy of an Ambrose Bierce story.

Strange Bedfellows

David Rabe, Girl By The Road At Night, NY: Simon and Schuster, 228 pgs. One could say that David Rabe is obsessed with the Vietnam War.  Best known for a trio of award-winning plays in the '70s that deal with that conflict and its effect on those who fought in it, Rabe has more recently turned from theater and taken up fiction-writing and now, with his latest novel, returns to the war that made him famous.  We could say that he does so because he knows he can write about it well -- Rabe served in Vietnam in the mid-'60s -- and because, perhaps, it's a part of our history that never goes away.

I found myself questioning that last supposition in the early going of this poetically spare, episodic novel.  Is Vietnam a national obsession still, or is it Rabe's more than ours?  Perhaps more to the point -- regardless of what you think of the war and its era -- is the question: is there anything more to be done with it?

It may be an unfair question, but when you see the novel's rather taciturn and self-involved protagonist Joseph Whitaker, on the eve of his depature into the army, hanging around in DC hoping to get laid by a war-protesting flowerchild, you might be excused for thinking it all a bit too familiar.  But when Whitaker drops in on his former girlfriend, now involved with a new guy, he begins to come alive a bit more, taking on dimension due to a feeling of unfinished emotional business that could lead him to more interesting experiences.

Rabe alternates the chapters depicting Pfc. Whitaker's misgivings about service in the war and his general lot in life with chapters that introduce us to Quach Ngoc Lan, a Vietnamese prostitute plying her trade at Madame Lieu's, where GIs can get their jeeps washed and their junk moved simultaneously.  Rabe is very effective at rendering how the GIs view these locals, but there aren't many surprises here amidst the general racism and, occasionally, grudging appreciation of what would've been thought of as "oriental mystery."  But gradually the interiority of Lan, attenuated as it may be by lack of education and a rather elemental sense of life, becomes louder and louder for the reader as her pidgin English -- where Rabe gets to show his command of dialogue -- comes to seem not a limitation so much as a unique form of communication.  Her motives and her actions are often glimpsed through the viewpoint of others, but Rabe's greatest achievement is making us feel not that we know Lan but that we would very much like to.

Is Lan the all-too-familiar whore with a heart of gold, and Whitaker the GI who tries to save her from a world they never made?  Frankly, Rabe's tale is not as far from that soapy terrain as some readers might like, or, alternately, doesn't wallow in it to the degree that others might wish.  There is a connection between the two and it might mean something, but Rabe keeps us furnished with enough sense of the grim realities of the setting to prevent us from expecting any improvement for either of them.

But what the interest of Girl hinges on is not its depiction of prostitution and the war -- as forms of exploitation that put both Whitaker and Lan in something of the same position as expendable vassals -- but in its willingness to look unsentimentally at the power that even a minimum of communication and connection can provide between people who are strangers to one another and, to some extent, the situation in which they find themselves and each other.

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows" Shakespeare said, and the journalist Charles Dudley Warner famously stated that "politics makes strange bedfellows"  Rabe's novel takes for granted that the politics of the war and the misery it gives rise to create a condition that might throw together unlikely bedfellows, and the novel's best effect is making us believe they might have something to offer each other.

David Rabe reads at RJ Julia Booksellers, Wed. June 23, 7 p.m., $5, which may be used toward purchase of the book; 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT; www.rjjulia.com

Our First Reading Experiment

Evelineby James Joyce read by Bennett Lovett-Graff [Click title to download]

Digital sound recorder in hand, we consider this the first of, we hope, several experiments in sound recordings of the written word by and from the New Haven Review.

In this case, attached as an MP3, and thus playable on your computer or downloadable to your iPod or the MP3 of your choosing is James Joyce's short short story, "Eveline," appreared in 1914 as part of his short story collection Dubliners. We think hardly more need be said.

Sweets to the Sweet

Katharine Weber, True Confections, Shaye Areheart Books, 274 pp, $22 Katharine Weber’s True Confections takes the form of an affidavit by Alice Ziplinsky, née Tatnall, aka Arson Girl, a New Haven resident who has become the de facto head of Zip’s Candies, through a series of events -- both mishaps and good fortune -- that make for a sprawling, juicy tale in a relatively small compass.

Weber’s fifth novel is Alice’s first person account, offered for legal reasons, of her employment at Zip’s Candies, of her marriage to Howard “Howdy” Ziplinsky, and of her involvement in the family business, and, like the candies Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos that are the legacy of founder Eli Czaplinsky, Alice’s narrative creates textures that tantalize, tastes that surprise, and a memorable “mouthfeel.” Alice is intelligent, humorous, informative, but also slightly askew, perhaps even actionably unreliable.

Along the way, Weber furnishes engagingly deft sketches of New Haven and environs -- she has a feel for the city in its town and gown dichotomy, and provides glimpses of the city that used to be through evocation of the fortunes of the fictional, but highly realistic, Zip’s Candies.  In the tale of a little, local company that must compete with the big name, real companies -- like Hershey and Mars -- Weber finds an apt figure for the fortunes of small businesses and small cities in the 21st century.  We often find ourselves in a detailed subculture -- the world of candy manufacture and marketing -- that Weber, in the voice of Alice for whom every aspect of the business fascinates and who has “perfect pitch for the candy business,” delivers with great gusto.

Weber also provides a lot of fun by, as it were, peeking through Alice’s narrative with material that the narrator seems not too comfortable with, or perhaps may even be distorting for her own purposes.  What is the true story of the fire, blamed on Alice, that burned down a schoolmate’s home in 1975?  What exactly were the problems with her marriage to Howdy and why did he run off to Madagascar?  And what of the alleged intrigues against Alice by her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law Irene?  How sympathetic do we find Alice, the gentile in the Jewish family business, who becomes, by her own insistence, the one most concerned with the family legacy and her fond, deceased father-in-law’s wishes?

Loyalty is the key.  The successful candy bar is supported by a consumer belief that he or she is honoring family traditions, so that loyalty is all bound up with nostalgia for childhood experiences either actual or longed-for.  Ideally, too, the consumer has a sense of entitlement to self-indulgence driven by an ambivalence toward guilty pleasure.  I mention all these things because my knowledge and experience in the candy manufacturing business in general, and with Zip’s Candies in particular, should be above question, but they have been questioned . . . The questions Weber raises through Alice aren’t all simply personal either.  Should we, today, consider a candy line founded on characters in Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo racist?  Is Alice painfully naive when she doesn’t think of the ramifications of packaging two chocolate Sammies on either side of a white chocolate Susie?  Or is it the world -- Weber gives a quick glimpse of the blogosphere and its ability to create urban legend at will -- that has gone askew?

The book is at its best when Alice is delineating, with story-within-story spirals, her relations with the Ziplinskys -- particularly revealing are her dealings with Sam, her father-in-law, and the way she brings her and Howdy’s children into the business.  The story of Eli’s brother Julius and the Nazi plan to ship Jews to Madagascar is fascinating but somewhat intrusive into the narrative, as Julius is a character who is never “real” to Alice, since she never meets him, and the story, ostensibly told to explain why the Ziplinskys have holdings in Madagascar where their cacao and other ingredients come from, seems material that could have been worked into a gripping novel in its own right, but which seems a bit outside the range of Alice’s voice, despite her admission that she is largely inventing what she can’t reconcile with those few facts she knows.

It’s largely the voice and direct experience of Alice that are the winning ingredients here, for she is the one who makes of her immersion in the candy business the basis for all there is to know about life, a way to take charge of the past, the family, the business, and, ultimately, the future.  As Weber’s inscription from Anne Sexton would have it: “Even crazy, I’m as nice / as a chocolate bar.”

Katharine Weber will be appearing at Mitchell Public Library in Westville at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 13th, and at RJ Julia Booksellers, in Madison, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 21st.

Performance Anxiety

Philip Roth, The Humbling, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 140 pp, $22.00 In The Humbling, Philip Roth has created a three-act tragedy for famed stage actor Simon Axler, now in his mid-sixties.  In act one, “Into Thin Air,” Axler mysteriously loses his ability to act, his wife leaves him to his misery, and he finally checks himself into a psychiatric clinic.  In act two, “The Transformation,” in his seclusion in rural NY, he begins an affair with Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the forty-year-old daughter of old acting friends.  Pegeen has been a lesbian since college, and the affair with Axler, which occurs after her lover had decided, with no input from Pegeen, to undergo an operation to become a man, surprises them both.  Finally, in act three, “The Last Act,” Axler must cope with Pegeen’s termination of the affair, an event he had more or less expected but which he had convinced himself wouldn’t occur.

Laid out thus schematically, it’s easy to see the trajectory of the novel, but it takes a bit more delving to see what’s at stake in such a tale.  Roth brings to the story a serious and powerful grasp of final things that has driven his other recent short, emphatically focused novels Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007); all evoke the rueful feeling of aging and of no longer being able to take for granted one’s gifts and one’s ability to fulfill one’s desires.  An actor unable to act makes the predicament of age become not only an artistic problem, but allows Roth to push at the basis of social interaction.  For the idea of self that keeps us coherent is a role, or a series of roles, we have learned to play.

The notion that how we play our social and sexual roles is amenable to change, and that we can create all sorts of new frissons by opting for other possibilities, is the theme signaled by Pegeen Mike’s sudden change of sexuality.  In exploring “the transformation,” Roth, whose fiction is firmly planted in the contested realms of sexual politics, has fun with the notion that gender is a role, and that a lesbian, as a phallic woman, creates new sexual possibilities with other women and with men, if she so chooses. The fluidity of desire becomes very heady for Axler, but also, because of his vulnerability in losing his metier, emotionally dangerous.

But Roth is enough of an ironist to avoid the simple reading of Axler as castrated male (loss of acting ability) who finds recovered potency as clinging, aging “sugar daddy” to a woman-loving love object who allows herself briefly to become his “make-over,” from tomboy to Prada-wearing femme fatale, only to abandon him.  It’s not that that reading isn’t present, it’s just that it’s too apparent to the characters themselves.

What is more telling is that the break-up occurs after Axler helps fulfill Pegeen’s fantasy of a threesome with Axler and another girl, Tracy, a drunken pickup.  Axler gets to witness Pegeen wield a strap-on dildo to fuck Tracy, and become “a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal.”  The scene takes place to underscore that Axler, formerly the hero in the world of sexuality, is no longer “the god Pan,” and that that role has been taken, in our time, by the polymorphously perverse women of the world.  As an ironist who sees that the surest way to misery is to let a man get what he wants, Roth makes Pegeen’s sexual virility a blow to Axler rather than a turn-on.

For Axler there is no irony in his situation with Pegeen, even though he knew she was playing against type from the beginning.  But for Roth, who sees that, for men of Axler’s generation, losing the comforting roles constitutes the loss of their magical selfhood, the irony is that Axler ends up where he started.   Pegeen, as the new god Pan, giveth and taketh away -- and who would base his well-being on such fleeting transformations is, as they say, in for a world of pain.

But Axler was already in a world of pain, contemplating suicide, due to the loss of his gift.  The transformation of Pegeen he engineered merely lets him play at being a director, casting her as the object of desire he most needs.  The fact that she involves her parents in her life when she begins her affair with him indicates the extent to which Pegeen really isn’t playing the character Axler has cast her as, but is in fact playing with some oedipal urges of her own.  All of this is plain to him, as Roth’s narrator, wonderfully attuned to Axler’s inner voice, makes clear.  And yet Axler persists.  If only to forestall death with one last manifestation of the pleasure principle.

In this, his thirtieth book, Roth, whose first book was published fifty years ago this year, demonstrates again his astonishing ability to delineate the prickly realities of desire.  Few authors come close to his ability to chart evenly, with comic touches and gripping pathos, the ups and downs of women’s effect upon men.  If that means his women are primarily occasions for male reflection, and that his fiction is generally a one-sided dissection of libido, it’s still true that nobody does it better.

Supreme Fiction, or Calvino Revisited

Just for fun I recently re-read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979; trans. 1981), which I first read around 1983 and was enchanted by.  My memory of the novel has always been a reference point whenever anyone discusses fictional sleight-of-hand, as with Borges, or Cortázar, or Barth, or what-have-you.  Calvino’s version of fictions that fold in on themselves provides a send-up of the reader’s dependence on a text -- a text that is never simply a story -- while at the same time conjuring the extent to which people become the texts they read or write. One could say it’s a novel that treats the status of being 'a reader' as a certain kind of identity, as a defining characteristic, and Calvino is charming in his evocation of the oddly personal communality of that status.  What’s more, he’s willing to put that very relation -- his relation to his own readers -- at stake by treating us as hopelessly hooked on whatever he chooses to do with his narrative, which involves several tales within the tale, stories that actually comprise the opening pages of the novel we (or rather, 'you,' dear reader) are attempting to read, a novel initially called If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

In other words, we read with a second-person character who is reading a series of openings to novels we (and he) never get to finish because something always happens to the text.  These proferred novels are of a variety of types and are almost equally interesting, as far as they go, but they are also meant to be page-turners, things we won’t put down till we see how it all comes out.  And we won’t ever know.  The story of what keeps happening to interrupt our reading of this succession of novels is the story that 'you' are engaged in: involving the Other Reader (an attractive and arguably more knowledgeable female counterpart to the masculine 'you' of the story); the Other Reader’s sister; an Ian Fleming-like novelist; and a novelistic forger. It all ends with our happy couple -- you, the reader, and your female counterpart, the Other Reader -- settled in bed together as you finish If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

The closure of reading is where real life begins -- we step from the page to our own imaginative version of our lives.  Calvino perpetrates his fiction on the premise that the reader of fictions merely wants fictions to go on and on, if not one kind of story then another, if only to keep the mind engaged in play rather than in 'reality.'  And Calvino wisely brings his novel to a close before the proliferation of openings becomes tiring, and before the characters, who never become 'real' characters, begin to bore us with their lack of particularity.

Why I enjoyed the novel is because Calvino maintains its pace so well and builds up its comedy through a readerly frustration he expects us to enjoy, even as he takes us on a tour of various literary genres.  But I value the novel because it seems to me that at its heart is a clear-eyed appraisal of the ruse of fiction (or, if you will, 'creative writing'), of how it applies conventions to give us 'the reality effect' it aims for, and how, mutatis mutandis, all such details can easily be something else, if only we are reading a different kind of story with different conventions.

The reality is all in the mind's eye, so to speak, or, even more to the point, all in the terms, the language, the conventions of depiction that we trust to render what we find ourselves in the midst of.  Without an acceptance of artifice, we have only opposing subjective 'takes' -- otherwise known as opinions or anecdotes -- on what we suppose to be 'reality,' and Calvino archly sees that, ultimately, editorializing is a blow against the art, or artifice, itself; such literalism is a refusal to suspend disbelief in any world other than the one one knows to be the case.  A world that can only exist, in print, through the subterfuge of writing.

Calvino’s approach is a great joke -- but without malice -- on all those who want to 'lose' reality in a fiction (thus all the interruptions), but also on all those who can’t abide a fiction that doesn’t correspond to ‘reality’ (thus the infinite regress of stories which come to include the story of the readers themselves).  Bravo, Calvino!