Review: A Matter of Small MomentAuthor(s): William AbrahamsSource: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Winter, 1977), pp. 111-115Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27543198 .Accessed: 29/09/2011 06:42

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ARTS AND LETTERS 111

A MATTER OF SMALL MOMENT

WILLIAM ABRAHAMS

I have borrowed my title for this chronicle, this survey, this sampling of

recently published collections of stories, from the title of Nancy Huddleston Packer's excellent first book. Does not that phrase, small moment, at least suggest the nature of the form, something small in time and space and place that?at its best?offers upon rereading and reflection further meanings, deeper significance, richer rewards; in short does it not prove to be of larger moment than one had at first concluded? "No," a rude voice (my own?) replies, "a story is . . ." But here I break off. I dislike generalizations?admittedly the critic's stock-in-trade?and I am wary of attempts to define or categorize that

most elusive of genres-the short story. Imagine, if you will, a writer who brings you a page of seven un

rhymed, unmetered lines of irregular length and who asks you to read his or her Shakespearian sonnet. With perfect objectivity (and ac curacy) you reply: "That is not a Shakespearian sonnet." But now imagine the same writer bringing you the same page and saying "Here is a story I have written." Objectivity is beside the point, for

whatever a writer chooses to call a story has come to be accepted as

Russell Banks, Searching for Survivors. Fiction CoDective, 1975. 154 pages. $3.95 pb; Joe David Bellamy, editor, Superfiction, or the American Story Trans formed: An Anthology. Vintage Books, 1975. 294 pages. $3.95; Raymond Carver,

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?. McGraw-Hill, 1975. 250 pages. $8.95; Daniel Curley, Love in the Winter. University of Illinois Press, 1976. 118 pages. $6.95, $2.95 pb; Andrew Felter, To Byzantium. University of Illinois Press, 1976. 116 pages. $6.95, $2.95 pb; William Goyen, The Collected Stories of William Goyen. Doubleday, 1975. xiv + 296 pages. $7.95; Mark Helprin, A Dove of the East and Other Stories. Knopf, 1975. x -4- 180 pages. $6.95; Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites. Random House, 1975. 166 pages. $6.95; Leonard Michaels, I Would Have Saved Them If 1 Could. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. 188 pages. $7.95; Philip F. O'Connor, A Season for Unnatural Causes. University of Illinois Press, 1975. 116

pages. $6.95, $2.45 pb; Nancy Huddleston Packer, Small Moments. University of Illinois Press, 1976. 150 pages. $6.95, $2.95 pb; William Peden, The American Short Story: Continuity and Change 1940?1975. second edition, revised. Houghton

Mifflin, 1975. vin + 216 pages. $7.95; J. F. Powers, Look How the Fish Uve. Knopf, 1975. 190 pages. $6.95; Isaac Bashevis Singer, Passions. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. 312 pages. $8.95; John Stewart, Curving Road. University of Illinois Press, 1975. 128 pages. $6.95, $2.45 pb; Barry Targan, Harry Belten and the

Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. University of Iowa Press, 1975. 280 pages. $8.95, $5.95 pb; Gordon Weaver, Such Waltzing Was Not Easy. University of Illinois

Press, 1975. 132 pages. $6.95, $2.45 pb.

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a "story," even the twenty-six letters of the alphabet arranged in con

ventional sequence?think of the beautiful simplicity of ending a story with the letter z, nude and unadorned. Subjectivity enters: "I have read your story, and I think it is very poor," you say.

In the circumstances one can sympathize with the editors of an

thologies intended for classroom use who feel obliged to arrange their stories by category and whose task is made more difficult since there are no

agreed-upon categories beyond the all-inclusive "new." It is

interesting to notice that Joe David Bellamy in his anthology Super fiction, or the American Story Transformed (1975) places Joyce Carol Oates in the slot of "Neo-Gothic," whereas in Anti-Story: An anthology of experimental fiction (1971) edited by Phillip Stevick she is more formidably niched as "Against Mimesis, fiction about fiction." In

Bellamy, John Barth comes under "Metafiction?Technique as Sub

ject" and so too does Donald Barthelme; in Stevick, Barth is "Against Mimesis" and Barthelme, "Against Meaning, forms of the absurd." The category for William H. Gass in Bellamy is "Myth-Parable"; in Stevick it is

"Against Event, the primacy of voice." Evidently, as Wallace Stevens has told us, there is more than one way of looking at

a blackbird; and I am relieved that I don't have to enter into competi tion with Messrs. Bellamy and Stevick as an inventor of categories, for of the fifteen authors being chronicled here, none are represented in AntUStory, and only one, Leonard Michaels, is in Superfiction?as a

"Neo-Gothic," not the category I would have chosen for his superb story "Manikin." On the whole, I agree with William Peden in his short, sensible, and very useful survey The American Short Story

when he writes: "A bit too much, it seems to me, has been made of the importance and originality of the new experimental fiction/

"

This is not to say that there are not worthwhile stories in both anthologies, and I am especially grateful to Mr. Stevick for reacquainting me with

Tomasso Landolfi's "Gogol's Wife," as original and astonishing a story

now as when I first read it some fifteen years ago in the pages of Encounter. This experience, or rather this reexperience of Landolfi, points a moral, trite but pertinente that novelty and originality are not to be thought of as interchangeable, that a story whose chief daim to our interest is its newness and its novelty will have its moment of

chic, and then be of no moment whatever. I see that I am falling into the generalization trap. Let me extricate

myself with a set of facts. Here are fifteen collections of stories: seven have been published by trade publishers; one by a writers' coopera tive whose books are distributed by a trade publisher; and seven by university presses. This last seems to me a development of consider

ARTS AND LETTERS 113

able interest, and perhaps even of some significance for the future of the short story in America. I trust it will not seem unduly crass to

speak of publishing matters in a journal in which the level of discourse is

usually so exalted that one would never suspect that between the

writing of a work of fiction and its appearance in book form falls the shadow of a complex and costly process. The more awareness, the

more understanding of this the better, I would think, especially by

people whose lives and sometimes whose livelihood are affected by it. Anyway it is hardly a secret that too many excellent stories appear briefly, for a week or a month or a quarter, in a little-known or well known magazine, and thereafter will elude all but the best informed of readers. With a few notable exceptions volumes of short stories are

among the least lucrative items in the bookshops, and while publishers have tended to be more altruistic than cigarette or automobile manu

facturers, it is easier to turn down with regret what one would bring out with a loss. So that the advent of the university press into a field that needs all the recruits it can get is a welcome, if belated develop

ment. After all, courses in the writing of the story have long held a

respected place in the syllabus of the English department at most American universities; and the writer who is also a tenured faculty member is now the rule rather than the exception. The propriety is not in dispute; but I think a writer in the Nation goes too far when he claims "the university press has been presenting an alternative to the excessive commercialism of the literary market."

It is true that hundreds of novels are published each year that reek of "commercialism," but there are others?admittedly a minority?that do not; and where collections of stories are concerned, literary rather than financial judgments are decisive. The collections being consid ered here would seem to bear this out: those that have come from the university presses have undeniable literary merit, but so do those from the trade houses; if pressed to discover a difference, I would say that the former tend to be more conservative and less adventuresome than the latter.

Statistics must be used gingerly when the sampling is as small and fortuitous as this. That only one of the fifteen authors, for example, should be a woman signifies nothing: it is quite likely that in the next

batch to come along the proportions will be exactly reversed. I find it more interesting, and heartening, that six of the collections are first

books: those by Raymond Carver, Mark Helprin, Ian McEwan, Nancy Huddleston Packer, John Stewart, and Barry Targan. (I am speaking here of first books of fiction. Raymond Carver and Barry Targan have both published books of verse. ) It would be difficult to find six first novelists in a season who could approach them: they are not appren

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tices but presences. But then?to be fair!?a first novel is a trying-out, whereas a collection of stories, even a first collection, represents a kind of culmination, the gathering together of stories written over a fairly extended period and often widely published in magazines. Raymond Carver's stories began to appear in 1963, and he makes acknowledg ments to sixteen magazines, ranging from Esquire and Harpe/s Bazaar to Northwest Review and Sou'wester. But apart from being the authors of first collections, how astonishingly varied these writers

are?nothing less like a school can be imagined?and, in that respect at least, how representative they are of the "situation" of the short

story in our time. Here are three excerpts (actually beginnings) from three authors:

Frances Benedict's husband, Emery, was a lawyer. Successful Frances herself might yet become anything, having tried nothing. She was only thirty-three. She had three children and live-in help at home. Sleeping. She was nothing among strangers at a rich

man's party. She said to Emery, "Notice how new money smells like a cross between wet copper and Cashmere Bouquet?"

"Please don t," said Emery. "Cash, cashmere, coppers, copper, and a can of room freshener

I think they call it wafting in from the downstairs drains."

Boston is a city of libraries and darkness, winter darkness, when

lights shine through a cold mist or the clear air. If the wind has come from New Hampshire it is possible to see every star from every street and in the day the blue of the sky is absolute. But if the wind is off the sea the entire city is dark and close, the spark ling crystals not faraway stars but luminous white ice and snow.

You can see the snow fall even in the dark, and though there is

complete silence each descending particle has its own sound.

I can see now our cramped, overlit bathroom and Connie with a towel draped round her shoulders, sitting on the edge of the bath

weeping, while I filled the sink with warm water and whistled? such was my elation?"Teddy Bear" by Elvis Presley, I can re

member, I have always been able to remember, fluff from the candlewick bedspread swirling on the surface of the water, but

only lately have I fully realized that if this was the end of a par ticular episode, in so far as real-life episodes may be said to have an end, it was Raymond who occupied, so to speak, the beginning and middle, and if in human affairs there are no such things as

episodes then I should really insist that this story is about Rav

ARTS AND LETTERS 115

mond and not about virginity, coitus, incest and self-abuse. So let me begin by telling you . . .

(The first excerpt is by Nancy Huddleston Packer, professor of Eng lish at Stanford; the second, by Mark Helprin, a twenty-seven-year old American who served in the Israeli air force, also the British mer chant navy; the third, by Ian McEwan, a twenty-seven-year-old Lon doner, the only English writer in this sampling.)

I would wish for these writers an audience sufficiently catholic in taste to welcome each of them, and to hear in their so sharply con

trasting prose the sound of the individual voice. It is what one listens for and hears in any writer of authentic gifts; it is to be heard, imme

diately and identifiably in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Passions, haunt

ingly in William Goyens Collected Stories, with bursts of feverish

energy in Leonard Michaels's I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, with a clear-edged intelligence and poetry in Russell Banks's Search

ing for Survivors?indeed, it is to be heard, in differing degrees of in

tensity, in each of these fifteen collections. Ideally one ought to read them all at one's leisure?not as an assignment?browsing among them and returning to them, certainly not consecutively, story by story and book by book, as though they were substitutes for novels. One could do worse than to assemble from them one's own imaginary anthology? a

story, say, by each author. Such a book would have been assembled with no purpose beyond giving pleasure, which it would abundantly do; but beyond that it would refute the notion of the death of the story. The contrary evidence is here.

9

Article Contentsp. 111p. 112p. 113p. 114p. 115

Issue Table of ContentsThe Sewanee Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Winter, 1977), pp. i-xxx, 1-190Volume InformationFront MatterCurrent Books in ReviewReview: Wanton Life, Importunate Art [pp. ii, iv, vi, viii, x]Review: Wit and Brevity [pp. xii, xiv, xvi]Review: Divide, Divide [pp. xvi, xviii, xx]Reprints and New Editions [pp. xx, xxii, xxiv]Review: New Translations [pp. xxiv, xxvi]

FictionThe Prophet [pp. 1-24]Amazing Grace [pp. 25-45]Adultery [pp. 46-103]

Arts and LettersReview: Fables and Fabliaux of Our Time [pp. 104-110]Review: A Matter of Small Moment [pp. 111-115]Review: Gifts, Prophecies, and Prestidigitations Fictional Frameworks, Fictional Modes [pp. 116-125]Review: Recent Commonwealth Fiction [pp. 126-134]Review: The Literature of Atrocity [pp. 135-143]Review: The "Scrutiny" Phenomenon [pp. 144-152]Review: Deep Metaphors and Shallow Structures [pp. 153-166]Review: Perspectives on Modern Drama [pp. 167-180]

The State of LettersEncausticsNot to Forget Carl Sandburg... [pp. 181-189]

Back Matter