My Short Story Addiction

Working My Way Through The Greats

I’ve always loved short fiction. Even as a child I couldn’t walk out of a bookstore without a pile of short story collections. As a 10 year-old I made my way through all of Ray Bradbury’s great stories three times. He was something beyond a science fiction writer. He resided in the in-between as a writer. Just when you thought that you had him pegged, he would open up different territory. I remember reading the group of stories that made up The Illustrated Man collection, then reading Dandelion Wine, which felt like a long short story. From science fiction to the mystery of childhood.

From there somehow I discovered that there was a whole series of short story collections that were marketed as Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Having been an ardent fan of the television series of the same name that came on at 11pm, I came across this series which at least ostensibly, were selected by the great director. There was the same kind of series that seemed to be curated by Rod Serling, who of course created The Twilight Zone television series. Who were these writers?? The level of the writing in these collections was extremely high. I’m not sure whether some of them were adapted into short story form after being written as possible scripts for the shows, but these were the days in the early sixties when the standard of writing for episodic TV was incredibly high, with writers like Paddy Chayefsky and others working as one-off TV writers. People actually read in that time, and there was a market for television that was literature.

I think that the next writer whose short fiction I became obsessed with was John Cheever. He seemed to build all of his stories around the dark and afflictive side of human nature, and dark emotional subtext of suburban life in particular. I grew up in the middle-class neighborhoods of suburban San Gabriel Valley, and his stories, set in rural New York and Massachusetts had a powerful metaphorical resonance for me. Over the years I must have worn out 3 different copies of “The Stories Of John Cheever”. That beautiful red cover! It was through those great stories that I was later able to see what was so stunningly powerful about Chekhov’s stories.

In my adolescence I was living through my own late 50’s Cheever story, living on our block with the Irish motorcycle cop’s family across the street, their next-door neighbors the ex-middle-weight boxer / bailbondsman’s family, the Sunday afternoon Brew 102 guzzling Water and Power guy who used a strap to keep his kids “in line” up the street, then across the street to the family of the salesman who bought a big new Cadillac sedan every year. There was the intrinsic loneliness of housewives who were “homemakers” because for a wife to work could be perceived as an indication that the husband didn’t make enough money. The Anne Sexton at Mclean’s era where a valium was the way for them to get through the feeling that they needed something more than making dinner every night to feel relevant, but didn’t quite know what to do about it. The neighbors’ parties where one of the wives might sit on someone else’s husband’s lap for a bit too long.

From Cheever I went to John O’Hara’s accounts of Gibbsville, the fictional suburban town. Similar territory, but perhaps even more conversational, streamlined, and economical in his honest description of the booze- soaked small-town country club set.

I loved novels as well, especially the compact and beautifully economical books by Graham Greene, Hemingway, and Nabokov, but always seemed to land back in the world of short stories, on each jag seemingly discovering a different lynch-pin writer for me to go through and explore thoroughly. I think that it was the year after I graduated high school that I read “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please” by Raymond Carver, which completely turned me inside out. His minimalism got close to songwriting, which was the principle tool that I used to articulate the romantic melancholy of adolescence. With Gordon Lish’s editing, every sentence counted. Every syllable counted. Take one out, and the whole structure seemed like it would collapse. “Cathedral”, then “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, each just seemed to cut deeper than the last.

At a certain point I began to use the yearly collections of the The Best Short Stories to discover which writer’s work would send me down a different rabbit-hole. I discovered masters like Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Kaye Gibbons and Ethan Canin this way. These were razor-sharp songwriters. They all managed to carve out their own language and technique of storytelling, with their own

intuitive and individual sense of rhythm in their sentence structure. Somehow the smaller canvas that they work with always has made the real masters of the form strike me in an especially intense way.

Listen to the beginning paragraph that Ethan Canin wrote in “Emperor Of The Air”:

“Let me tell you who I am. I’m sixty-nine year old, live in the same house I was raised in, and have been the high school biology and astronomy teacher in the town so long that I have taught the grandson of one of my former students. I wear my father’s wristwatch, which tells me it is past four-thirty in the morning, and though I have thought otherwise, I now think that hope is the essence of all good men.”

He wrote that book of straight-shots while he was in medical school. Reading these short story writers, I learn something about songwriting and how to make a sentence resonate by coming at it sideways. I think that in many instances there is more room to move in songwriting than I think there is, and somehow these writers working in short fiction

remind me of this.