Feeling around for Feeling

All fiction, however intellectual, propagandistic, or political, is based on emotional foundations. Even such a notably novel- and short-story-of-ideas writer as Aldous Huxley, after riding his wit and curiosity to remarkable heights, saw the need for such incursions into the emotional smorgasboard as professional and romantic jealousy, guilt, revenge. Through experience with reading, we have the opportunities to take sides with and against characters who respond to things that seem calamitous, often going against the grain of the author's intent, not so much out of perversity as the simple fact of being attracted to one whose response seems to jibe with our own sense of what is correct and effective.

As we approach our own writing, we are drawn to authorial voices that seem to agree with our own, but even there, care and consideration are needed. You, for example, have fought a running internal battle with writers such as Huxley, Isherwood, and Auden, admiring their smarts or, to put it another way, envious of the moral choices they made and the chances they took in service of those choices, while edging more toward the noir writers whose characters seemed more grounded in the everyday mystery rather than the more cosmic ones. Isherwood was particularly vexing because he seemed to be able to do both, and while there is no credible argument to support Huxley and Auden having no sense of humor, Isherwood first and foremost was able to laugh at himself, telling you endearing stories about ways he attempted to appear humble and rumpled, the better to seem humble and spiritual.

The passive nature of the expression "care and consideration are needed" should not detract from the importance of the observation; you need to chose words and movements with care lest they emerge too elaborate for your own taste, too operatic perhaps or too wallowing in self-pity or sentimentality. John Steinbeck has not been accused of sentimentality for mild reasons; there were places where he was pulled in beyond the boundaries of restraint. Philip Roth may, on the other hand, never be accused of sentimentality, nor may he be accused of over elaboration.

This is what you are working toward, the right choice of words and actions to evoke, not describe, the response you float out for each character. Two towering examples of such splendid restraint occur in music you admire. Each is the adagio section from a concerto. Look or, rather, listen, to the adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major, then move into more modern times, the early twentieth century, to be specific for Joaquin Roderigo's Concerto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra. Each is a wrench yet neither topples into literal and figurative opera of Canio's aria, "Vesti la giubba" from I Pagliacci. Wherever there is performance, be it dance, singing, architecture, poetry, short stories, charcoals, or even trompes l'oeil, you watch for signs of deliberate choice and restraint. Naturally, you reflect the same tastes in real life. If you did not, there would be unresolved conflict you'd need to sort out and deal with.

The Fatal Flaw

fatal flaw--a physical or psychological trait given a character; a handicap that informs the behavior of a character in a novel or short story; the Ugly Duckling writ large, the more-intelligent-than-others writ small; an often-imagined deficiency experienced by a front-rank character that is in fact not noticed by others.

If he'd been fashioned with a nose of ordinary length and configuration, Cyrano might well have had to enlist Christian to act on his love for Roxanne, but the forces that shaped him (and his nose) also had undeniable effect on his way with words as well as his way with a sword. And to look at the flaw of the inner person, let's suppose Macbeth had been content to accept the promotion from King Malcolm and let it go with being Thane of Cawdor, or that Miss Rebecca Sharp had not been so, shall we say upwardly mobile. What then of Macbeth or Vanity Fair? We could also look at Antigone and her determination to bury her brother, but just as well we can look at her uncle, who is determined that Antigone's brother not be buried. Without the willfulness of uncle and niece, Antigone would not have been put to death, seriously undercutting the impact of the story.

As Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain democratized crime, brought it away from the estate and gated community, into the city, John Steinbeck notably applied the fatal flaw to Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, and even more notably to the characters of Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men. Lennie is big, powerful, and simple-minded; George is small, quick-witted, a bit of a martyr. He has become Lennie's protector and in so doing has mortgaged his own ambition of becoming a rancher.

The flaw, whether the inner of psychological origin or the outer of injury or growth or general appearance, literally effects the direction and outcome of the story and as an adjunct, the reader's reaction to the afflicted character. From the beginning of Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, we are presented with a self-serving protagonist, Randle P. McMurphy, whom we see using his feigned mental state to avoid incarceration in a prison. We watch him warily to see where his game will take him, in the process buying in to the process of growth. We know from experience in reading that characters in a novel cannot stand still--they either grow forward or spiral downward. McMurphy's fatal flaw becomes his compassion, his empathy, which trumps his own self-serving pleasures and extends to his fellow inmates.

Joe Buck and Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo come steamrolling out of James Leo Herlihy's The Midnight Cowboy with fatal flaws, Buck's being a romantic naivete similar to Emma Bovary's, Rizzo's a one-two punch of a leg crippled by polio and an incipient consumptive cough. As in the explosive ending of Cuckoo, the payoff of Cowboy provides a plausible-but-unexpected flash of warmth and light for the survivor and, however uncomfortably, for the reader.

The novel is about characters orbiting to resolution, which is defined by growth. The fatal flaws are inertial forces, propelling the characters to their release-through-understanding or their descent into a relinquishing of the power to rescue themselves. Writers inflict fatal flaws upon some characters in order to inject the explosive emotions of epiphany and awareness into the story

Novella

novella--a literary form of greater length and complexity than a short story; a prose narrative of at least 15,000 words and as many as 40,000; a narrative of greater length and thematic structure than a novelette.

Although there have been some longer short stories with more than one point of view (See Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood for examples), this facet may be a way of drawing the arbitrary line between short story and novel more deeply; a novella could easily support more than one teller of the tale. A novella could also support more thematic density than a short story, leaving word length as a major boundary market between the novel, which begins at about 50,000 words.

Novellas are widely believed to have originated in Italy, probably at the hand of Bocaccio, who gave it a satiric bite and thus invested the form with a tradition of edge or corrective humor, which passed along to Chaucer who put the form to work and to rhyme in his Canterbury Tales. Given their own edge and relative shortness, chick lit could be argued into this tradition of providing outgoing characters whose reach to readers is based on their non-traditional approaches to the traditions held up to them by a conformist society.

One of the older American novellas was Herman Melville's Billy Budd, which spoke to the naivete of a young person. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is a poignant novella about friendship among a group of farm workers, taking its thematic title from a Robert Burns poem in which "the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley (go awry) and leave us naught but grief and pain for promised joy." It remains a stunning blend of tragedy and the reach for a satisfying life. Yet another facet of the thematic potential in the novella is found in Philip Roth's early Good-bye, Columbus, which returns the medium to the sharp edge of satire, directed against classism.

Because of its in-between size, the novella is not a comfortable fit for most book publishers. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea first appeared in a magazine. The Roth novella appeared as a book, but the publisher added five short stories to provide greater bulk.

Arguably a writer who finds the length of the novella suited to his dramatic visions, Jim Harrison has produced a large number of them, his publishers bunching them in triads for book publication. His most recent collection of novellas is 2005 package,The Summer He Didn't Die.

Hint for writers: All the writers named herein have long since given up writing to a particular word length, rather they write for the story, regardless of its length or brevity. Should a novella emerge, it can be bundled with one or more others, used as a feature for a collection of stories, and simply mounted as an electronic publication.

The Politics of Concept, the Concept of Politics

concept-driven story, the--a dramatic narrative focused on theme; a novel or story whose plot appears to emphasize a particular subject such as revenge, redemption, or poverty while still providing dramatic structure.

Novels such as Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle may be seen as examples of the concept-driven story, and although equally at home in the categories of speculative fiction and cautionary fiction, so too are Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell's 1984, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Each of these deals with burning political and/or social issues to the point where they have become more than snapshots of a particular era but rather have assumed the status of museum-quality prints, hung in galleries.

Unless a concept-driven story has more to it than the potent dramatization of theme, it runs great risk (as many fictional protagonists do) of being caught in the bog of disaster, which is to say it forgets its debt to story. Alissa Rosenbaum, she who became Ayn Rand, is an unfortunate example of this forgetfulness, beginning her career with The Fountainhead, which took on the theme of art for art's sake to great popularity and, to many critics, to great extreme. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a thirteen-hundred-page-plus novel, articulated her Objectivist philosophy in extraordinary detail, allowing her to express anti-communism, anti-fascism, and anti-welfare-state views in unbridled gallop, reaching a full, Libertarian crescendo in which she deplored any kind of state at all.

In this regard, Rand may be regarded as the right of Upton Sinclair's left. Although they were roughly contemporaries, Rand is probably the better--and more favorably--known, but the reputation comes from her philosophy and argumentative skills rather than her dramatic skills.

The point here is that story is the freighting device for the message. For the concept-driven story to have an audience in the first place, it must eventually have characters who become memorable not because of the smirks they produce but because of the heart tugs. Compare, for instance, George and Lenny with Howard and Domenique or, for that matter, John Gault.


See plot-driven story
See Character-driven story

Ante Up

As George Orwell notes in his comprehensive essay on Charles Dickens, this author was a serious muckraker, a class and social critic, a fierce gadfly of The Industrial Revolution, and yet he attracted considerably more readers than he did political enemies or detractors. Orwell didn't make this comparison, I did: John Steinbeck went after many of the same targets as Dickens, digging, I believe, deeper and wider, certainly adding such subjects as race, migration, immigration,women's rights, scientific investigation, and politics into his examinations. Further, he, more so than Dickens, portrayed the middle classes. For his efforts, he was branded as overly sentimental and naive, a brand that at first blush I naively thought was the result of anti-intellectualism and academic jealousies, but have more recently come to believe is the more insidious effect of a concentrated Conservative (note capital C) effort at discrediting him because of his alleged left-leaning sympathies. This last observation is a distraction from my intent in raising the issue; it will be dealt with later as I begin to pursue the evidence of a smear against Steinbeck for the unwanted vision of behavior he excavated in his major works.

The intended thrust is that Dickens and Steinbeck produced individual and aggregated identifiable works because of the characters they chose, how they allowed their characters to behave, and the results they achieved in helping others to see life as they did. Although each wrote in different times and of differing places, each had a particular filter over his work. Similarly, Mrs. Woolf wrote of a particular class of the social structure, some few years ahead of her more or less American counterpart, Mrs. Wharton. And to add a kind of thematic balance, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner established in their respective works a kind of regional calculus that reminded us how the very specifics of a place and the individuals within that regional specificity caused them to be transsubstantiated into universal truths.

All prologue to the question for the individual, what do you bring to the table? What's your ante to get into the game of being a writer? Do you prefer fictional locales that are, on their face unreal? Do you do so from fear that greater specifics will bring you trouble? Do you write novels set in the distant future so that individuals who read them will not be likely to recognize themselves and thus spare yourself the embarrassment of having them confront you? Was that me in your novel, I who bore you and endured you while you were learning how to tell these very stories that dare show me as who I am? Why, pray tell did you in your last novel or in an earlier short story name a junior high school after me?

Sometimes, if we read carefully, we can see authors at play, using friends names in one way or another. I have been a suspect, a protagonist, a corpse, a Marine Corps recruiting officer, and a Bronx detective in the works of friends and a number of less respectable personae in the works of shall we say less than friends. My dear friend Barnaby Conrad has found his way into a number of my stories as Conrad Burnaby, thought to be a purveyor of replica watches and automotive chop shops. Digby Wolfe appears often as himself, a bemused Englishman who at an early moment in is career had to go on stage to warm up the audience before the Beatles. Brian Fagan, a world-class archaeologist, appears as Major Fagan of the Salvation Army. When called upon to read a short story in Steve Cook's modern lit class, I chose a story in which he appeared in a mandatory group therapy session as the result of a bureaucratic mishap, and in more than one story, Duane Unkefer is referenced as living unhasseled by the police in his 1968 Pacer, thanks to his weekly classes for wannabe writer cops. So we know what I bring to my work, which is mischief at the very least, if not a kind of noirish romanticism.

These visions you have need not be humorous or dire or dreary or overly optimistic; they needn't be parody or satire or dark horror, but they must reflect or refract some semblance of your vision, all the while projecting a world, a universe, a solar system palpably real and plausible. It is said of some times, times such as the present in fact, that they trump in their quotidian display any attempt to parody them. It is said of some times that the unthinkable not only came to pass, it set up branch offices and is seeking an employable staff. Nevertheless we must look beyond the very incidents we create to see how, by exaggeration, we can evolve our drama into satire, mindful in an absurdity of its own that such drama will eventually come to pass.

Outrage and absurdity are every bit as Darwinian as the so-called deadly sins.

It remains for us to pick a target which we will weave into our work. But weave we must if we are to keep up with the unyielding tenacity of our human condition and render it in drama for all to see.

Fast Boats and Slow Politicians

You can do it with a hyphen.

Change a noun into a verb.

Sometimes, you don't even need the hyphen; just go ahead and use the noun as though it conveyed purpose, inertia, agenda.

The example I'm thinking of now is a combination of an adjective, swift, with an object, boat. Swift boat. Ordinarily, that evokes an image of some yare, fleet craft, plying its way through the waters. In recent years, we have associated the construct with the military service of a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, a candidate who at one point served as a command officer on a swift boat, a fifty-foot, all aluminum craft. An adjective plus a noun.

By adding a hyphen to the adjective noun combination, a wealthy Texas Republican turned the noun to a verb; he swift-boated John Kerry by alleging that Kerry's military service and decorations were based on a series of lies and deceptions, thus undercutting his qualifications to be POTUS, presumably because he was a wealthy Texas Republican, although the wealth and Texas domicile may not inform his motives.

Said wealthy Texas Republican was instrumental in forming SBVT, Swift Boat (still a noun) Veterans for Truth, which is in many ways a hoot because the truth this organization sought was the truth of an imaginary fictional world where individuals performed in accordance with a different set of reality boundaries. SBVT was so successful in creating a fictional impression that others, often but not necessarily wealthy Republicans, saw it as a means for undercutting the progress of a noun (person, place, or thing) seen as contrary to their own agenda.

Journalists and TV talking head sorts soon pounced on this tactic, revising history, as a means of confronting nouns with agendas that do not seem in accordance with their own cherished or financially held beliefs. Accordingly, Charles Darwin, his theories of evolution and natural selection, to name but one example, was swift-boated.

This is all prologaminous to the swift-boating I address, an anomalous swift-boating to be sure, a lovely example of post hoc ergo propter hoc in action. The perpetrators in this swift-boating are not wealthy Texas Republicans, they are literary critics and academics. Their target, John Steinbeck, whom they accuse of rampant sentimentality, the effect of which, they argue, is a pernicious on all of literature and all of our collective psyche. They have also gone after Jane Austen, liking her to a one-trick pony who knows only social satire, although they would never dare say such a thing about Evelyn Waugh, because he smoked big fat cigars and said disparaging things about Labourites and children.

Steinbeck is seen as enjoying too much the denizens of Tortilla Flat and Sweet Thursday, of making Rose of Sharon Joad too empathetic, of having Tom Joad's famed soliloquy go on a beat too long, of being sympathetic to Lenny and George, of knowing which heart string to tug. As a consequence of such things, Mr. Steinbeck will be around for some time, far longer than the judgments of the critics who took with such eclat to jumping on the bulk of his work as though it were a funeral pyre.

As to the wealthy Texas Republicans and other swift-boaters, who will also likely be with us for some time because of their embalming-while-alive with the bile of conservatism and troglodyte ideology: Can we honestly say that we are better now then we would have been had the SCOUS not ruled as it did on Bush v. Gore or for that matter, if the young Swift boat lieutenant had become POTUS

If evolution in literary matters continues without interference from book burners and intransigent critics, we will undoubtedly have Mr. Steinbeck in our midst for some time; we can only hope that political evolution follows the paths of strength rather than fear.

Horse Latitude

1. A happy combination of a watering trough for horses at Parma Park and a chance remark by LK provide--provoke--the trifecta, the combination that will be perfect for this week's book review, which falls on the Golden Oldies side of the coin, which means a dip back into the past. Thus Faulkner's Spotted Horses, Steinbeck's The Red Pony, and Chapter XXIV of Roughing It by SLC, the iconic tale of the Genuine Mexican Plug Horse. Although I have in the past engaged in research related to the relative speeds of various horses over various lengths, I am not a horse person. These three tales, two pure inventions and one Twain reportage, could change my mind.

2. Another happy chance sent me down the lower part of Milpas Street, whereupon I passed the store that displayed the pinatas I was so pleased to see yesterday. Around the block and into a freshly vacated space to see that apparently the display is changed every day. Hot dog! Or should I say, Hot horse? Today's display, as you will note, includes a horse

3. Lovely discovery: Pure-bred Australian Cattle Dogs have a white blotch somewhere on their forehead. Said blotch is called a Morgan, supposedly after one of the pioneer breeders of the ACD. How do I know this is not an urban myth? I asked the man--an ACD owner--who imparted this information. Because, he said, my brother breeds ACDs and all forty-five of his current crop have Morgans; it is a sign of ACD authenticity.

Sally, he noted, is enough--half--ACD to have a Morgan, a sign that the ACD genes are dominant in her.

4. Haruki Murikami, an excellent novelist (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, etc) claims he learned everything he needed to know about writing from listening to music, and most of that is jazz.

5. A hungry customer approached the hot dog stand at the Yoga Center in downtown Santa Barbara. "What'll it be?" the attendant asked.

"Make me one with everything," the customer replied.

The attendant shook his head. "Can't do that," he said. "You already are."

The Short Story

At the moment, the most famous American invention is intransigence. There was a time when we were known for positive things: jazz, bourbon whiskey, baseball, basketball, and, some would say, the short story.

There can be no question about our intransigence as it relates to such painful subjects as Iraq, foreign policy, womens' reproductive rights, the right to privacy, guns, and so-called faith-based initiatives. Such intransigence comes from distrust, which is generally used by those in power to manipulate those who wish to be in power.

On a happier scale of measurement, there is little question about jazz, which also extends to bebop; bourbon, baseball, and basketball. Arguments about the origin of the short story, even if they become acrimonious, are still lively and instructive, as opposed to our intransigent position at the table, which is not only acrimonious, it is frustrating and frightening.

My take on the origins of the short story sets its birthplace in the early tales of Washington Irving, relishing in its infancy and gaining coordination in the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose early collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, were reviewed by Edgar Allen Poe in an iconic moment where Poe, as though he were taking dictation from Aristotle, fresh off his Poetics, set forth a standard for what the short story could and should accomplish.

While Poe was writing some of his own ventures into the short form of fiction, a young man in the Midwest was busily listening to tales, some of them fanciful in origin, others as rooted in heritage as jazz was rooted in the blues. In time this young man extended his range of interests and activities to the West, where he lived and worked among miners, cowhands, and the vast undifferentiated audience of unlettered men, waiting for the beginnings of The Industrial Revolution.

Do I need to tell you that the young man took on the name Mark Twain?

In one way or another, Twain helped spread the allure and effect of the short tale from its oral tradition to the printed page, influencing writers throughout Europe and stirring up additional interest here. In what I shall claim as my own invention, the blog leap, a convenient compression of time, the American version of the short story was off and running, championed by the likes of Jack London and not to forget the short story writer we are always too quick to forget, Rheingold "Ring" Lardner.

Like Twain, Lardner used regional dialect and attitudes, a true sociologist as well as a ranking humorist. Before Lardner, our baseball heroes were all good-natured man, perhaps under read but by no means lacking in acuity. After Lardner, we began to see them for all their humanity and bigotry and superstition, at once making them more real and more heroic.

Meanwhile, in Europe, a famous mentor was working with a famous student. Gustave Flaubert was willing to mentor Guy de Maupassant, provided de Maupassant followed Flaubert's instructions to the letter. One such letter was that de Maupassant was not to even consider sending his stories to potential publishers until he had one hundred of which Flaubert approved. De Maupassant quickly provided the hundred stories and Flaubert, after making editorial suggestions , ultimately gave his approval. Within ten years of that approval, de Maupassant had become synonymous with the short story, a sky rocket in the literary heavens.

The modern short story--the twenty-first-century short story--is no longer American; it has a world view and an international pedigree although many argue that another short story writer, Ernest Miller Hemingway, gave the form a considerable boost. Well, maybe so, but you'd also have to factor in John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, Bernard Malamud.

Not to forget those two estimable Canadian writers, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, also keeping in mind the Brit, Somerset Maugham, and from Ireland, James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, and arguably the most emotionally and technically deft writer at work today, William Trevor. The Russians have added to it, and we also get the Wasabi bite of Haruki Murikami from Japan, as well as, ah, she is splendid, Jhumpa Lahiri, from beautiful downtown Cambridge (Mass., not England), but with a Bengali flavor.


In spite of protestations from literary agents and publishers, new collections not only appear sporadically, they appear in ever increasing numbers, attesting to the bottom-line mentality in which demand creates supply.

Having invented the blog leap of time to make a point, the point I'm after is the way the short story in addition to its already solid dramatic structure, has begun shaping the long form, the novel. At the forefront is a collection of short stories that began to take on their final form in The Lion's Den, the Saturday morning workshop I co-hosted with Leonard Tourney before he moved off to take a post at BYU. Jean Harfenist's A Brief History of the Flood (Knopf, 2003) appeared as neither fish no fowl; it is not a novel, but they more or less let the browser think it is. Every one of the chapters was placed as a short story in a literary journal. Arranged in a more or less chronological order, A Brief History can, indeed, add up to a novel. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine becomes another example, taking us away from the more or less conventional novel format of a single narrator or a select group of narrators to a kind of ensemble cast effect.

Because of its length, a novel has the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to portray change. A short story simply doesn't have the room, and so it doesn't deal with change so much as it takes us up to a point of awareness which the protagonist may or may not experience (see , for instance, "The Peacock," or "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver). Thus the short story is a living, breathing example of opaqueness and ambiguity; the modern novel, although unlikely to tie up all relevant loose ends, has the space to be more attentive to resolving a theme. For convenience sake, you might consider the short story as a concerto to the novel as a symphony. In dramatic terms, the short story is more like the one-act play, the modern novel more of a piece with the modern two-act play.

Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood get past conventional and editorial discomfort with a short story having more than a single point-of-view; William Trevor writes so well in omniscient point of view that he is effective with it in short fiction as well as the novel.

If you were to look at the point of origin of stories appearing in the three major best-of-the-year collections of short stories, you'd be sure to discover that the great majority first appeared in The New Yorker, with the likes of Granta, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Paris Review as also-rans. The Gettysburg Review would be more likely to place candidates were it not for the fact of its editor producing a continuing stream of editorials best described as self-indulgent.

Many of the short stories of Annie Proulx that appeared in Open Range rank among my favorites, and because of my long association with universities and because of my politics, and because of the author's ability to evoke complex feelings I have a special fondness for Tobias Wolfe's "In the Garden of the American Martyrs."

The 2006 edition of The Best Mystery Stories contains at least four short stories that demonstrate how the demands of the mystery genre are not necessarily a lead weight, holding the short story down.

Many of today's younger--under forty--short story writers are bringing the energy of their discovery to the form, using it as a building block for learning to write in the longer form, but investigating the dramatic potential as a step-ladder to their own voice.

Ever have the experience of blowing a paper bag full of air, twisting off the top, then using that air-filled bag as a weapon to scare someone by popping it unexpectedly behind them?

The many times I did that as a kid, I never thought I'd be using the memory of the experience as a metaphor for the short story. A finite container, filled with one's own breath, suddenly brought to a surprising explosion. What a lovely metaphor for an art form that may help America earn back a reputation that has been too long in the unemployment line.