THE SHORT STORY-FOUR COLLECTIONS
Phillips, Robert
BOOKS THE SHORT STORY--FOUR COLLECTIONS ROBERT PHILLIPS lss Dreams BeMss Respmssib| Rgles and Oltker Stotqes DBLMORE SCHWARTZ New Directions, $3.95 paper [202 pp.] Elbow Room JAMES ALAN...
...The Mistake," perhaps the least ambitious piece, is nevertheless a perfectly realized one, a story in which the final sentence says everything, resoundingly...
...Curtis Harnack had written several novels set in the American Mid-West and a book about !ran before his last book, a series of memory pieces titled We Have All Gone Away, reached my attention...
...What w~ have, then, is a new book composed of eight Schwartz...
...He maps oat l~is own future in terms of "stepladders or subgoals," climaxing with an affwmation of the Good Life to be lived i.n Los Angeles: Billy smiled and gave several agreeable nods...
...Oates's best and most interesting work...
...Lookahere," he said, "How :bout runnin' cross the road and get me a hot sausage sandwich, heavy on the mustard, and a big orange soda...
...Ever since her misceRaneous collection, The Wheel of Love, Joyce Carol Oates's story collections have been more than "mere" collections: they have been carefully constructed totalities, works in their own right...
...In a state of weakness he signs a paper to commit her to a mental institution...
...The latter type have been celebrated (celebrated...
...The Translation" (in which one man's conception of his beloved, a foreigner, is shown to ,be only a manifestation of his, translator's skill) is highly original...
...Certainly the stories are structured upon visible conflicts: North versus South, rich versus poor, respectable versus unrespectable, educated versus ignorant, hardheads versus progressives...
...Most of the stories are that pointed and heart-breaking...
...Further Confessions" (in wbich one man outwits fate...
...In his por,trayal of Nora Kemp's life, telescoped within so few pages, Harnack shows himself to be a masterful creator of character...
...It is between the well-wisMng narrater and one Billy Renfro, whom the former visits in prison as a favor to his mother...
...Veal" rather than to the chains and clanks of Wal, pole or Mrs...
...Bring me a side of fries, hold the salt...
...tween the two are works which make it clear that Schwartz wrote two distinctly different kinds of storyL-poeti~ parables, and stories of social commentary...
...Billy chewed steadily...
...at least, by Atlas and by Irving Howe, in their prefatory pieces and elsewhere...
...Night-Side differs considerably from her early novels in that almost aH the violence is mental rather than actual...
...and "Daisy" (a .study of the untenable position in which the "sane" are placed when their next-of-kin are judged "insane" --they are, in short, asked to play God...
...On the other hand, Atlas is quite right to drop "A Bitter Farce," which also appeared in The World Is a Wedding...
...It would be good to remember that one of his greatest poems, "Starlight's Intuition Pierced the Twel've," is a rumination upon the thoughts of Christ's apostles...
...A.nd in the more dreamlike, parablelike, nonsociological stories, the title story, "SOREENO," "The Track Meet," "The Statues," and "The Commencemerit day Address," Schwartz's writing shimmers longer and has more universal targets...
...It was delicate and immensely talented, founded on sentiment but never sinking to semimentality...
...Oates manages to reconstruct the dreams and nightmares which afflict us all, reminding me of Henry James's statement, "The extraordinary is most e~traordinary in that it happens to you and me...
...What is striking is how Ms...
...While I fail to share emhusiasm for these, they deserve being reprinted to demonstrate Schwartz's range...
...It was then, and remains, a mere anecdote on amisemitism...
...This is true enough...
...lust look at yourself/" I tried once more to stand up, and awoke, and found myself standing up, staring, in a sweat of confusion and dread, not at the sky but at the looking-glass above the chest of drawers next to my dishevelled bed...
...One story, "White Blood," occupies almost half the book...
...I will say that Night-Side contains some of Ms...
...The author ,has said that each of the twelve narratives has to do wi.th "breakirrg free of stereotypes, whet,her of race, status, or sensibility...
...these include '~l'he World Is a Wedding" Commonweal: 599 and "New Year's Eve...
...For me, too much has been made of Schwartz's "Jewishness...
...Bonham in his rage and Daisy in her in.firmity recall James Joyce and his da.ughter, Lucia Anna, vcho (in the words of Joyce's biographer, Richard Etlman), "was to affect Joyce's li.fe much more deeply than he would have believed possible...
...i~ day forward," he had shouted at them, "let everyone be free of pain...
...I asked...
...Yet because (unlike many well-meaning but unreadable black writers) McPherson has never taken the color of his skin as an excuse for not learning the craft of fiction, his (ales ultimately become not so much about the black condition as the human condition...
...Do you hear...
...The title story is as gr.i~ping as an oldfashioned thriller...
...There is only one misfire---"Widows and Orphans," a slow revelation of a seemingly bountiful and kind person of achievement who is shown to be, in fact, a firstclass bitch...
...The others (except perhaps the wistful "The Gift") show no trace of the irony and obsessiveness of his earlier moral and philosophical tales...
...He writes of ditticult struggles for survival, yet his sense of humor allows him to dwell on moments which otherwise might prove unbearable...
...All 18 tales are concerned with borderline reality, what the author has called "Chat mysterious realm of the paranormal...
...Now we have Harnack's Under My Wings Everything Prospers, which drops the guise of memoir and is presented as a collection of seven stories...
...Of the unpublished stories, perhaps "Bank Night" might have found a place here...
...Seeing her, he had burst into tears and demanded that she be released in bis custody ar once...
...I looked hard at him and wanted to weep...
...With their climaxes of Joycean epiphanies, these dream parables prove Sch, wartz to be a highty original and d.istuTbing fiction writer, as this passage from the conclusion of "The Track Meet" shows: " . . . You don't escape from nightmare by waking up, you know...
...BOOKS THE SHORT STORY--FOUR COLLECTIONS ROBERT PHILLIPS lss Dreams BeMss Respmssib| Rgles and Oltker Stotqes DBLMORE SCHWARTZ New Directions, $3.95 paper [202 pp.] Elbow Room JAMES ALAN MePI-ItERSON Atlantic-Little, Brown, $7.95 [242 pp.] U~/er Mll l~Vissjs Everwtht~ Prospers CURT,IS HARNACK Doubleday, $7.95 [216 pp.] N~htiSide JOYCE CAROL OATES Vanguard, $10 [370 pp.] The new interest in the life and work of Delmnre Schwartz, generated by James Atlas's recent biography and Saul Bellow's roman ~ clef, Humboldt's Gilt, has produced an audience for this useful compilation of many of Schwartz's short stories...
...Is~ that all you want...
...These conflicts are also at the heart of "A Loaf of Bread," perhaps the book's best story, concerning a small ghetto shopkeeper and his strife with the changing community...
...The face I saw was livid and swollen with barbarous anger and unbearable shame...
...No," he answered, looking out over the crowded room...
...Crossing the Border is a meditation on just that...
...I:ndeed, if one had any doubts about Mr...
...Daisy" explores this relationship in ~he l, ives of Bor~ham, "an artist, and Daisy, his talented but disturbed daughter...
...Night-Side is not, however, a book of the occult...
...But it is the opening story ~r truly dazzles...
...All come to play in one marvelous story, "The Faithful," concerning an old-fashioned black barber who refuses to cut the new Afro styles...
...They endure...
...Let there be no more agony infl, icted on human beings--do you hear...
...From the beginning he has written about ~vhat he knows best --the "Black Experience" in America...
...It is impossible to "rev~iew" 18 stories in this space...
...Oates's newest collection is also more than a grab-bag...
...15 September 1978:602...
...In its final fusion of myth, tableau, and drama, in its total reversal of the expected, in its encitement of pity and terror for its protagonist, LaVonne, .the author has created a hauming work which deserves to be widely known...
...Edited and with an introduction by Atlas, it preserves almost every story of Schwarez's worth saving, inclucling two which appear in a book by Schwartz for the first thne--"The Commencement Day Address" (originally published in 1937 but never collected) and "SCREENO" (completed but never even typed-up )by Schwartz...
...stories, beginning with the deservedly famous and much-anthologized "In Dreams Begin Responsibilir dreamlike meditation upon consciousness and one's "inability to alter the past...
...The tRle is <ironic: few of Harnack's protago15 September 1978:600 nists "prosper...
...Indeed, they contain .images and epiphanies as strong as in many of his best poems...
...Fro.a...
...And if what occurred on the field were merely imaginary and unreal and merely your own private hallucination, then the evil that has terrified you is rooted in your own mind and heart...
...No more of this!~no more...
...The plot seems too patenr modeled upon the likes of The Bad and the Beautiful and All About Eve...
...An example of McPherson's synthesis of humanity and humor is found in the following exchange, from the story, "The Story of a Dead Man...
...The Goddess concernod women .and girls...
...Loog at yourself...
...Somehow, I:he shorter stories have more bite...
...The Commencement Day Address," as a matter of fact, contains aH the seeds and much of the l~nguage of one of his most famous poems, "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," which perhaps explains why Schwartz chose not to include that particular story in either of his collections...
...Radcliffe...
...really could argue with only one exclusion from this story collection, that beir~g "l~he Statues," from Schwartz's The World Is a Wedding, a beautifaal, strange and moving parable which be'lorrgs somewhere fairly near the top of any list of Sch~vartz's fiction...
...Atlas's acumen as a critic (there could never be any doubt as to his ability as a biographer) .the present volume rests such thoughts...
...1oyce Carol Oates's ghostly tales are related to the tradition of realism of Daniel DeFoe's "True Rela,tion of the Apparition of One Mrs...
...Elbow Room is his second collection in eight years...
...And "Madness" is a leisurely chronicle of one woman's flight from and first acceptance of mental disorder...
...I'll make you hear...
...Unlike Schwartz, James Alan McPhersoa has devoted practically all his writing to the short story...
...The narrator is sententiously attempting to urge Billy toward some of the "broader options available to the man in possession of saleable knowledge...
...The only book of reminiscences to which it could be compared is Glenway Wescott's Goodbye, Wisconsin...
...Mentor" concerns everyone's failure to live up to the expectations of others...
...and culminating in ".SC'~NO':~-~a totally unknown story which atso occurs in the theater of the dream...
...The disarray of Lucia Anna Joyce's mind and ,its possible soarces in Joyce's own strange and nomadic life is at the 'heart of this accomplished tale, one of the ~st in an important collection...
...Of the stories in Schwavtz's second collection, Successful Love, Atlas is correct again to reprint only '~l'he Track Meet...
...My Son, Stuart," depicts one father's discovery of his own son's callowness and emptiness...
...Like the rest of us," Low said scornfully, "you not only know more than you think you know but more than your are willing to admit...
...And, unlike Schwartz, there is no division in his subject matter and technique...
...Other fine pieces are "The Sacrifice" and "Exile" (in which alter-egos or exterior projections of interior conditions lead the protagonists to their fates...
...Voice of the Town" seems to me a minor masterpiece...
...With this single exception, Elbow Room 'is a book of singular achievemerit, and deserves the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction just awarded it...
...Marriages and Infidelities was an appropriate title for the plots of the stories it contained...
...It is to Atlas's cradle that he has recognized the value of each and 'added them to the Schwartz canon...
...Possibly too ambitious for its length, it is "about" crossing lines----color lines, social lines, the line between adolescence and adulthood, moradity and promiscuity...
...The collection reveals 50-year-old Harnack's remarkable grasp of the ideas and language of today's youtlger generation as well as that of his own...
...But when my conversation came to dwell on the wonders of Los Angeles, he interrupted suddenly...
...It is also about that old theme, appearance versus reality...
...Yet at least half the point of these seems to be knowing one is a hit at Paul Goodman and his circle, the other a depiction of the old Partisan Review crowd...
...With the exception of "Th0 Blessing" (the volume's weakest story), these are interior tales---stories of individuals hauated by their own uneasinesses and anxieties...
...At the very least, they display his legendary wit ("Let your conscience be your bride" and ".I love my wife, but Oh you Id.') Schwartz's sociological stories have also been praised for their portrayal of the Jew in the new world, "the world of our fathers...
...Afterward he perceives .l~he terrible things they 'have done to her: How she had suffered, and for Commonweal: 601 what cause...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 18
