Story Playlist 23: The Man from the South

Roald Dahl: “The Man from the South” (1948) Most folks know Roald Dahl for his wonderful children’s books, like The BFG (Big Friendly Giant), James and the Giant Peach, or Matilda (now a Broadway musical), but Dahl led a number of lives. He was a spy during World War Two, and an older generation knows him for his razor-sharp, creepy short stories for adults, the most famous of which is “The Man from the South.”

The story is simple. Our narrator, an Englishman on holiday in Jamaica, is joined poolside by a man dressed in a white suit and cream-colored hat, who speaks with a Spanish accent (“the” is both written and pronounced “de”). This Man from the South (i.e., South America) engages in a bet with a young American sailor, who is trying to show off to an English girl he has just met. The sailor offers to bet a dollar that he can light the Man’s cigar outdoors on the first try with his Zippo-style lighter. The Man makes a counter-bet, offering his new Cadillac if the boy can successfully light his lighter ten times in a row. The sailor is intrigued and asks what he would have to forfeit, if he fails. The Man replies that it is something small that he would not miss—the pinky finger of his left hand.

As soon as the counter-prize is stated, the general tension brewed by Dahl in the slightly-awkward back-and-forth of the Man and the sailor leaps up to a higher level of dread that prompts the reader’s heart to leap with it. What seemed playful becomes sinister.

Our nervousness at the situation is contrasted by the bright and playful environment in which it takes place—poolside at a sunny Jamaican resort. The narrator expresses his dismay at this bet, as does the English girl, who thinks it is foolish. But the young sailor takes the bet anyway. Why is not clear, though he rationalizes that he’s never needed his pinky and would certainly like a Cadillac. Why the Man would want a pinky finger is not asked.

The narrator is roped into refereeing, and they adjourn to the Man’s hotel room. There the Man asks a maid to bring him nails, a hammer, and a meat cleaver. He hammers the nails into the hotel desk so that he can tie the sailor’s hand down to it. The sailor offers his hand, clenched but with the pinky extended, so the Man can lop it off before the sailor has second thoughts, should he lose the bet. The Man hands the car keys to the narrator, and the sailor begins flicking his lighter.

Dahl produces a wonderfully-tense countdown of successful lightings of the lighter, until we reach the ninth. Just then a woman bursts into the room, sees what is happening, and berates the Man in a flurry of Spanish. The bet is cancelled. The woman explains that this Man is her husband, and he is mentally unstable. He has taken 47 fingers and lost 11 Cadillacs—and all the Cadillacs were hers, and not his to bet. She then adds that everything that was once his is now hers, that she won it after hard work. Dahl then provides a marvelous kicker of a last line, when we see that the woman has only two fingers on one of her hands.

The story works beautifully, providing natural tension, and it is no surprise that it has been made into short films on several occasions, including by Alfred Hitchcock (starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre). What we are to make of the bizarre scene and the dynamic between the woman and her mad husband is another question, one which, happily, Dahl does not answer for us. To answer it would be to remove the mystery, and the sustenance of an enduring mystery based on a haunting situation is far more powerful than a mystery that is “explained away.”

Magritte is my favorite painter, because his paintings, with evocative titles, draw the viewer into a sense of a mystery to be solved—but then he does not solve it. David Lynch is the nearest approximation on-screen, with Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive two famous examples of engrossing mysteries that Lynch, arguably, never bothered to conceive solutions to. The goal is to draw us into the mystery, encourage us to seek its solution, but never to give us the satisfaction of feeling that we have solved it. To solve it would be to dismiss it, to move on. By never offering a solution, we remain haunted by the mystery. And after all, all great artists hope to haunt us.

Story Playlist 22: Little Lost Robot

Isaac Asimov: “Little Lost Robot” (1947) In general, I’m no fan of sci-fi, although I don’t avoid it. It just never did it for me. I was more in the fantasy realm after an childhood engaged in avid bouts of Dungeons & Dragons (and for some reason it seems that sci-fi and fantasy fans are never one and the same). But I had always heard of two great sci-fi short story authors who were considered great exemplars of the genre in which they wrote: Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. So I was eager to sample a work by each.

From the start of Asimov’s “Little Lost Robot” I knew that I would like it, and that the fact of it involving the future and robots was largely incidental and not requisite to the enjoyment of the story. It was sauce on a great piece of meat, not sauce used to hide the poor quality of the meat it dressed. Asimov writes in an assured, if old-fashioned, manner and immediately draws the reader in by starting in medias res. As so many great detective stories do, this begins with experts being called in to solve a problem. In this case, the experts are a pair of mutually-antagonistic robopsychologists, including ornery Susan Calvin (a recurring Asimov character), who are tasked with finding a lost robot.

“Little Lost Robot” introduces Asimov’s now-famous “three laws of robotics,” established by scientists to protect humans against their own creations. The First Law is that a robot cannot harm a human, and must intervene if a human is in danger. The plot hinges upon the fact that a mining corporation has tinkered with a small group of robots and trimmed the first law, cutting out the second clause, because robots were interfering with the human miners, who needed to be exposed to blasts of radiation, too brief to be harmful, in order to conduct the mining. One of the robots who was tinkered with has suddenly disappeared, and now seems to be hiding among the 62 other physically identical robots who work for the corporation. Calvin fears that the robot could possibly endanger a human, while still following the first half of the First Law, by not deliberately harming a human but also not intervening to prevent harm. The robopsychologists must develop a test to determine which of the 63 robots is the outlier, without having to destroy them all and cost the corporation millions.

It’s a great setup, and I should pause for a moment to express just how influential Asimov was as a writer. He invented the term “robotics,” as the study of robots. He didn’t invent robots, of course, but so many of the ideas we have about robots, particularly in fiction, emerged from his pen. Just like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead which established “rules” about how zombies are depicted in fiction, Asimov established, back in the 1940s and 50s, some by-now familiar tropes about robots—specifically, he foresaw just how much we would rely on them, and what could logically go wrong with our over-reliance on them in the future.

After interviewing the miners, Calvin finds one who, in a fit of anger, told the robot in question to “get lost,” which was meant metaphorically but was taken literally by the robot as an instruction. So the robot hid among the other robots. Asimov adds psychology to the robots, so that Calvin begins to believe the robot’s sense of superiority to humans keeps it in hiding, priding itself on outwitting them. She arranges for a human to be put into what appears to be a dangerous situation, in which a weight is falling upon them. Each robot with the second law programmed in place will be compelled to rush to save the human, even at risk to themselves. While Calvin is on the right track, the renegade robot is ahead of her. He has spoken with the other robots, rationalizing with them that they would be unable to save the human and thus die for nothing.

The situation is multifaceted, with an engaging mystery that has profound implications. Eventually Calvin manages to outsmart the robot, but not before Asimov’s main theme has been sounded: if robots become too intelligent, and if we rely on them too much, a) they might become too independent, and b) they might take over. It’s the theme of countless films, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Terminator, but Asimov was the first to employ it, decades before it was a cliché. The implications of robots becoming too human is still present for today’s scientists, and our over-reliance is well-documented. We no longer bother trying to remember things, as our computers remember for us. If our computers one day were to become hostile to their “masters,” or were to suddenly forget everything we’ve saved in them—well, a phrase about a creek without a paddle comes to mind.

Story Playlist 21: The Gift of the Magi

O. Henry: “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) Whether or not you’ve read this story, you’re probably familiar with its broad strokes. A husband and wife with very little money struggle to come up with Christmas gifts for one another. They each possess a single item of great value that they treasure and admire. She has gorgeous long hair, and he has inherited an elegant pocket watch. Without other options that feel satisfactory, the woman’s love prompts her to sell her hair, in order to buy a handsome platinum chain for her husband’s watch, to replace the leather strap he has been using. She gives him the gift on Christmas Eve, when he returns home from work and sees her shortened hair, and his reaction puzzles and concerns her. He then asks her to open his gift: a set of jeweled combs for her long hair, combs that she had long admired from afar. He sold his watch in order to buy her the combs. Thus the husband and wife each sold the object that they most prized, in order to give each other something appropriate as a compliment to what the other most prized. But each wound up selling the treasure that the gifts were meant for, resulting in a pair of elegant, but at the moment useless, Christmas gifts. Their love for one another has been proven, and the story is a happy one, but the key component that it demonstrates is situational irony.

I had heard this story told in a slightly butchered fashion long before I read it. It is often used as the exemplar of an ironic situation, irony being a word that few can define but many can give examples of. This precise plot was the example I was taught in school, in lieu of a dictionary definition of “irony. One definition of irony is “humor based on opposites; something humorous based on contradiction; incongruity.” The humor component, however, is not strictly necessary, or at least is in the eye of the beholder—it would be easy for the couple in the story not to see the humor in their situation. O. Henry, we suppose, wants his readers to see it, perhaps at his characters’ expense.

Thankfully, the tone of O. Henry’s story is remarkably easy-going, even Brechtian in its refusal to tug at the heartstrings until they snap. When I had heard the story spoken aloud, I thought it was about a homeless couple who have nothing in the world but their inherited treasures—this adds a layer of saccharin that is not accurate. Our couple is low-income, but functional, making the whole a bit lighter.

What is most remarkable is how O. Henry has crafted a story that has entered popular mythology. That people know of the plot without having read it is truly noteworthy, and I believe it is the first story on my list that exists outside of the context of the story itself. The theme of live burial in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” is riffed off of and quoted in film and fiction. The evil cobra and good mongoose in “Rikki Tikki Tavi” are known largely via the animated film of the story. O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” exists in the cultural oxygen for folks who have never seen a film version of it, never read it, and think that O. Henry is just a candy bar. That is a remarkable feat, and it’s hard to imagine an author who would not relish creating something that has, in its way, become an example for a rhetorical effect, demonstrating how we understand, or at least explain, situational irony. How many writers can claim to have given dramatic form to a definition?

Story Playlist 20: The Lottery

Shirley Jackson: “The Lottery” (1948) What new remains to be said about the most-anthologized short story in history? Shirley Jackson’s classic story, it seems, is read by every American high school student, and is analyzed in classes across America with a batch of cookie-cutter teacher questions. At what point did you realize that the lottery in the story was one that people did not want to win? What are some elements of foreshadowing employed by the author (the pile of stones that children gather, the “black box” in which lots are drawn that recalls a coffin)? What might this story refer to, considering its publication shortly after World War II? And so on. Predictable questions, perhaps, but for a story that is universally read (at least by American students), it still packs a wallop.

The villagers of a small American community, some 300 strong, gather on the annual day of the lottery—an event that will not take long, they’ll be home in time for lunch. Children gather stones in the town square, and men and women arrive separately—we are in a sort of non-specific Puritanical settlement, the sort about which Hawthorne wrote in “The Minister’s Black Veil.” The man who runs the lottery arrives with a coffin-like black box containing slips of paper, one for every villager. A single slip is marked with a pencil-drawn dot. Whoever draws that slip is “the winner.” We realize by the end of the story that the winner is actually the loser—selected by the lottery to be stoned to death in the town square by the other villagers, who can still make it home in time for lunch.

Despite the grim facts of the lottery, the villagers take it for granted, and even pooh-pooh the rumor that some neighboring villages have given up the annual lottery tradition altogether. It is implied that the villagers feel this tradition is necessary to their culture, if not their livelihood, but Jackson does well not to explain this. As we see the lottery in action, we and the villagers are relieved when children do not “win,” and the eventual victim is a wife and mother distinguished largely by her nervousness, while the rest of the villagers are resigned to take the lottery as it comes—although perhaps anyone who “wins” would break down and get edgy. What is most striking is the matter-of-factness with which the whole gruesome process unfolds. Villagers chat with each other, joke, call each other on a first-name basis, as if this were normal and quotidian, albeit not something you look forward to—maybe like a dentist’s appointment.

It’s shooting ducks in a barrel to list the allegorical merits of such a story. Given the publication date (1948), high school English students would likely mention the Holocaust, a perfectly good association. Some might refer to German citizens and soldiers following the orders of the Nazi regime without questioning even the most grotesque commands. Conformism and passivity in the face of horror is what it’s all about, and you don’t need the Second World War (alas) to find examples of it.

Jackson’s decision not to focus on a single protagonist, not to step within the minds of the characters, not really even to provide a narrative arc, but simply to let an ingenious, horrifying concept play out is an interesting one. That she avoided specifics makes the story that much easier to see as an allegory. It’s like one of those Baroque paintings of Justice. Shown in her allegorical form, Justice is presented as an idealized female in a toga, wearing a blindfold and carrying scales in one hand, a sword in the other. We recognize this figure as allegorical, in part due to the fact that she is non-specific. If the painting showed a portrait of a specific queen, dolled up with the accoutrements of Justice, then we would be pulled in two directions, one biographical, the other allegorical. This story, like the idealized painting, is unabashed allegory, focusing our attention on the form presented to us, at the expense of telling a more traditional narrative story in which we cheer for a protagonist and see that protagonist change over the course of the tale.

Jackson did a rare thing with “The Lottery.” She created an archetype that has no evident literary predecessor, but which has influenced pop culture hugely since its publication. There are cultural parallels to its concept—the Spartans culled newborn babies who did not seem physically perfect, for example. There are a number of Greek myths about a princess being sacrificed to appease a monster, as in the legend of St. George and the Dragon. But the idea of a lottery, which Jackson tricks us into thinking you want to win for the first two-thirds of her story, and the numbed normality of the villagers who submit to—and even seem to actively support—this annual execution, struck a chord that still reverberates. Popular fictions like The Hunger Games, which begins with a lottery whose winners are forced to fight for their lives on national television, rely on Jackson’s tale. Creating an archetype that enters the common oxygen is the dream of many a writer. The same goes for writing a story that is considered so good and powerful that it is required reading for every student throughout an entire nation.

Jackson is a wonderful novelist, too little known beyond this story. The Haunting of Hill House is the best haunted house book ever written, hands down, with an oft-quoted opening paragraph that has been sung to the rafters by modern masters of the scary, like Peter Straub and Stephen King. “The Lottery” is less palpably “written” than most stories I’ve read in this project, based as it is entirely on incident—but an incident with a repetitive, allegorical significance, and that makes it distinctive. There is no character development, and most of the characters, aside from the man who runs the lottery and the nervous, ultimate “winner” of it, are barely presented to us, in just a few broad strokes. We cheer for no one, aside from eventually hoping that no one “wins,” once we realize that you do not want to win this sort of lottery. No one changes over the course of the story. The basic premises of good, satisfying fiction seem to be missing. Instead we have a wholly original, killer (literally) concept. The text is merely a method for presenting the concept. And the concept is ingenious because it is not explained away, leaving its readers to make of it what they will.

Story Playlist 19: Cathedral

Raymond Carver : “Cathedral” (1983) Raymond Carver’s most famous short story could not be simpler. It seems, on the evidence of the stories in this playlist, that, with rare exceptions such as Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” aside, the strongest short stories are the most straightforward. Something happens and, because of it, something (or someone) changes.

In “Cathedral,” the taciturn narrator is pressed into hosting an old friend of his wife’s, a blind man whose own wife recently passed away. Robert, the blind man, and the narrator’s wife became friends when she worked as an aid for him and over the years they developed an intimacy by sending each other tapes on which they talked about their lives. The narrator is somewhat sullen about his wife’s intimacy—dating back to her first marriage—with this blind man with his big beard and loud voice. In the course of a long evening, with many drinks and a joint shared, the narrator comes to accept Robert, and then to be enlightened by him. The change in the narrator, as he tempers his bigotry toward the handicapped, his passive racism, and his chauvinism toward his wife, is the payoff of the story. The key to that change is a simple act of empathy.

The narrator tries to entertain Robert after a big dinner as his wife gets drowsy. Eventually he turns on the television. He expects Robert to retire to the guest room, but the man keeps him company as the wife dozes between them on the couch. A documentary on the middle ages comes on, and at times the camera simply shows pictures of cathedrals. The narrator wonders whether Robert knows what a cathedral is, and how he might possibly describe it to him. He tries to do so in words but cannot. Robert suggests another tactic.

“Go ahead, bub, draw. Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you.” The narrator sketches a cathedral and Robert places his hand on the narrator’s, following the movements of his hand on the paper. After a time, Robert suggests that the narrator close his eyes as he draws. This moment marks the turning point, as the narrator tells us pointedly, “It was like nothing else in my life up to now.” He keeps his eyes closed even after, and the change within him has already taken place. “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” He has been drawn into an empathetic situation with the object of one of his many prejudices. By voluntarily accepting a temporary blindness, the narrator recognizes the strength required to live with such a handicap, and his respect for Robert soars. He no longer considers him as a blind man, but as a man.

As soon as a blind person was introduced, my metaphor alarm went off. Since Homer, at least, the blind have been thought to possess a sort of second sight to compensate for their lost sense, to “see” what others cannot. Blindness is a powerful vessel for metaphor, and it is fitting (if a bit predictable) that a literally blind character should help a figuratively “blind” character to see things more clearly. In its plot, the story is predictable, but, in Carver’s hands, the text is sculpted so simply and cleanly that no heavy-hand is felt. The story is about as perfect as a story can be. There is a flawed protagonist, a stranger enters his life against his wishes, and through their interaction the protagonist sheds his flaw and becomes a better person. A change in the protagonist is a fairly basic requisite for any narrative, from short stories to novels to films. A change for the better usually results in a feeling of justice and satisfaction for the reader at the story’s end.

One could tango about the metaphorical power of a cathedral as the vehicle that brought about the narrator’s change, as a way to throw some religious symbolism into the tale—Robert asks the narrator at one point if he is religious and the narrator claims he doesn’t believe in anything. In some ways, the choice of a cathedral is more about choosing something that is not mundane (it would not work as well if the narrator had drawn a sailboat, for instance). Perhaps there is something of a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment in the narrator’s “conversion,” and doubtless many a student essay has been written on the symbolism of the cathedral in Carver’s story of that title. But my interest is in the simple telling, the simple plot, and the minimalist elegance of an assured hand whose pen can make a sighted man see.

Story Playlist 18: A Good Man is Hard to Find

Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953) If you Google “great short stories,” or the syllabi of just about any high school or college short story course, this is one of the first tales you’ll spot on every list. O’Connor is, in a way, both over- and under- sung. Aside from “A Good Man,” there is little else by her that is regularly read or that could even be name-dropped. Who but her fans and well-read lit profs could name another work by O'Connor? It’s a shame, because she deserves to be read, and read more broadly.

And her most famous story might not send people in search of more. It’s not an easy story, either to read or to interpret. It certainly leaves ample room for teachers to draw students into discussion but, despite this fact, I am hard-pressed to say something meaningful about it, no matter how well I liked it. There is no key or legend that cracks it open cleanly, and perhaps it is the more satisfying for this fact.

We are introduced to a grandmother who begrudgingly accompanies her son Bailey Boy, his wife, and their three children, on a holiday from their Georgia home to Florida (she’d rather go to East Tennessee—and who wouldn’t?). The grandmother opens the story by complaining that an escaped murderer named The Misfit, who is still on the loose, is headed for Florida. One suspects right away that we will be running into him later.

We first see the family dynamic at home—the grandmother seems to be suffered by the family rather than loved—and the tone sounds like a darker and more profound version of Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” complete with southern dialects (though here rendered in a more legible way than in Welty’s sing-song version). The next morning they all bundle into a car, with Grandma smuggling along her beloved cat, hidden in a hamper at her feet. En route to Florida, but still in Georgia, Grandma gets it into her head that they are near a plantation house she once visited in her youth.

She knows that if she asks to detour to see the house her son will refuse, so instead she mentions that the house had a secret panel, supposedly with a fortune in silver hidden during Sherman’s March. The children take the bait and proceed to harass their parents with requests to visit the house and seek out the panel, until Bailey Boy submits. They follow a dirt road that Grandma points out to them. Just as she begins to realize she’s gotten it confused, and that the house she remembered is actually in Tennessee, Grandma’s cat hops out of the hamper, latches onto Bailey Boy’s shoulder, and the car crashes.

To this point the mood had been lightly comic, about an elderly busy-body and her ill-mannered family, but now it turns darker. A car winds towards them on the horizon and three men step out, carrying guns. We immediately think that this is surely The Misfit, though it takes the family a bit longer to realize. Grandma blurts out that she recognizes him, and he replies that it would have been better for them if she had not. As Grandma converses with the wonderfully polite and self-reflective outlaw, his two associates escort first the males and then the females into the woods, and shots ring out each time.

It is a brutally drawn-out scene, in which the violence takes place “off-camera” in the woods while Grandma and The Misfit discuss the merits of Jesus, but the hopelessness of the scene makes it hard to read; it is gripping, pummeling. Grandma’s tactic is to reason with The Misfit, appealing to his good instincts and the fact that he comes from good people, but her entreaties and her invocation of Jesus do not sway the eloquent outlaw. The Misfit finally shoots Grandma after she reaches out to him, saying “you’re one of my babies.” When one of his men seems to enjoy himself while dragging off her corpse, the Misfit cuts him short saying, “it’s no real pleasure in life.”

What to make of the story? While it behooves a column like this to offer up an interpretation that “solves” the puzzle laid out by the author, there is no overt puzzle here and so no solution. It is simply a masterfully-written, engrossing story of bottled and uncorked violence and the humans who enact it. Though I may sound like a teacher cheating his students, go read the story, then tell me what you think. The other stories in this series have immediately made me think of what I wanted to say in this column. This one was so good, but somehow different, less of an enigma, so that I have little to say beyond how much I liked it.

Story Playlist 17: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

James Thurber: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939) I’d guess that relatively few of us are living the life of our dreams, which is why we dream in the first place. We all have a secret life of sorts, a world or worlds into which we step when “real life” gets us down. The more mundane our real life, the more that secret world offers a welcome escape. Day dreams come to us during waking hours when our mind drifts, bored by whatever occupies us. If life is consistently boring enough, we might have a hard time leaving our fantasy retreats.

New Yorker staple James Thurber introduces us to mild-mannered Walter Mitty in medias res: we’re in the middle of what seems an exciting World War II adventure film, as the Commander pushes up the speed of a hydroplane in freezing temperatures. The scene dissolves at the sound of Mrs. Mitty’s voice—cautioning her husband not to drive so fast—and we’re with the Mittys as they run errands in placid Waterbury, Connecticut. With a light and humorous tone, Thurber lets a series of fantasies add excitement to Mitty’s mundane activities. In each of the fantasies, Mitty is the hero, the focus. This is a far cry from reality, in which Mrs. Mitty “wears the pants” and in which Mitty is ashamed at failing husbandy tasks, like not having the skill to remove snow chains from his own car’s tires.

Shopping while his wife visits the hairdresser, Mitty inhabits a series of adventures in which he is the protagonist: the Commander in the hydroplane; a level-headed doctor faced with medical and mechanical emergencies; a defendant in a murder trial; a World War II pilot about to undertake another perilous mission. In each case, the fantasy arrives from some real life cue: Mitty, hearing a newsboy shout about a local trial, is “on trial” when he can’t remember the other item his wife told him to buy; he becomes a pilot in response to a headline about the threat of the Nazi air force. While giving us cartoon-like glimpses of Mitty’s imaginative realm, Thurber also creates an everyday world where his hero cringes beneath the judgment of policemen, parking attendants, and even random passersby—such as a girl who overhears him muttering about “puppy biscuit”—the item he remembers to buy after, in his fantasy, he is called “a cur!”

Like O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi,” Thurber’s story is so much a part of our common oxygen it has entered the dictionary, with “Mittyesque” a term for someone who prefers fantasy to reality. It is perhaps not a stretch to think that Thurber chose the name “Mitty” for its similarities to the word “mitigate,” meaning to “lessen something, to make something less harsh, severe, or violent.” “Walter” sounds a bit like “alter,” as in “alternative reality,” giving a sense of Mitty's character—if we want to think of him as heroic rather than hapless—as one who can alter and mitigate the banalities of life through his gifted imagination. Like any creator of fictions, we might say.

As a writer of fiction himself, Thurber clearly enjoys the sound of words, particularly nonsense words. He heightens the humor of Mitty’s imaginative flights by showing that Mitty actually knows nothing about the complicated, high-pressure situations he commands in his fantasies. Official-sounding but meaningless words populate Mitty’s foray into surgery, where he invokes “streptothricosis” and “obstreosis of the ductal tract” and the onset of “coreopsis,” all invented but sounding plausibly like real medical terms. And much like many an earnest writer, Mitty has his own motifs: whenever a machinery-sound is required, Mitty imagines it as “ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa,” a wonderful use of onomatopoeia that may also be found outside the boundaries of this story, having—like the name of its fictional originator—entered the popular imagination.

The life of a Walter Mitty might look very different, were it to take place in the digital age. It will be interesting to see how the new 2013 film of the story deals with the fact that we no longer day-dream as we once did. Time once spent in our inner worlds is now spent engaged with the virtual world: texting on cellphones, listening to mp3s, reading on a screen, browsing the internet, watching films or film clips. Rather than lull our spare moments in the cooling waters of our imaginations, we turn at once to our electronic devices. In a sense, our minds have grown lazy. We no longer know how to amuse ourselves in our own thoughts. Were he alive today, Walter Mitty would not exist in the form in which Thurber envisioned him, though the way in which the real world intrudes on Mitty’s thoughts is rather akin to how our surroundings can still bring us up out of our various virtual realities. And one might still kill time by reading “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” on a kindle or smartphone, devices which, in a sense, make Mittys of us all.

Story Playlist 16: Graven Image

John O’Hara: “Graven Image” (1943) It takes a man’s man to admit that he doesn’t understand something, especially when the man in question—me—is a professor. But I don’t understand as much as I’d like to about the stories of the scandalously under-sung John O’Hara, but I love them, admire them, and want desperately to know more.

O’Hara is all too little-known, but was a stalwart of New Yorker fiction, beginning in the 1920s and into the 1960s; in fact it’s been claimed he “invented the New Yorker story.” Of his longer fiction, he is best known for his novel, Appointment in Samarra, which sounds exotic (I read it expecting some sort of international spy novel), but is actually about the intrigues among patrician socialite couples in suburban American—also an exotic locale, but not quite what I had in mind. O’Hara’s fiction balances on a tightrope, telling you just enough to figure out what he means (most of the time), offering up a puzzle with about 80% of the pieces filled in, and leaving it to the reader to imagine how the rest of it should look. As I read his stories I understand their subtlety, their nuance, the layers of information conveyed (if you know how to read them), but I’m also aware that I have to work to understand them, and I rarely feel that I “get” them 100%. This is the opposite of beach-reading. It’s more of a hike, but one with spectacular views during your ascent.

There is little razzle-dazzle in O’Hara’s worlds. Nothing supernatural or macabre, no murders, no heists. He paints chessboards of social interaction, specifically, social interaction in the post-war-to-Mad Men era of New York and its environs. His characters are defined by the schools they attended and their social milieu. They duel with words and jockey for power, cut each other down, and hunt in packs.

“Graven Image” is an exemplary O’Hara story, bullet-sized (a slender three pages). The setting is during FDR’s wartime cabinet. An unnamed Under-Secretary, described simply as a “little man,” meets with Browning, a former Harvard classmate, who lunches with him in hopes of asking him for a job with the administration, even though Browning is a Republican. Over the course of lunch, we realize that the Under-Secretary comes from a lower social class than does Browning, who was a member of the elitist Porcellian Club at Harvard. Club members carry a gilded pig, the “graven image” of the title, as a symbol of their past membership, and it is said to open doors. The Under-Secretary would have liked to have been a member, but was never invited, and is still sore about it.

Browning manages to charm the Under-Secretary during lunch, playing to the “little man’s” ego, to the point where the Under-Secretary is prepared to call in a few favors and get Browning the job he seeks. Browning is thrilled and they toast to celebrate, the Under-Secretary sipping a cordial, Browning downing half his Scotch. Loosened by the drink and the good news, Browning admits that he had been nervous about asking the Under-Secretary for help because of the Porcellian issue. Then he lets slip: “I don’t know why fellows like you—you never would have made it in a thousand years, but …” And without looking up from his drink, Browning realizes he’s put his foot in his mouth, and says the now-famous line, “but I’ve said exactly the wrong thing, haven’t I?” Indeed he has, as the Under-Secretary replies, before leaving. Browning has lost the chance at the job, and the Under-Secretary leaves, “all dignity.”

Along the way, O’Hara treats us to a series of hidden codes, hidden in plain sight. The doorman at the restaurant where Browning and the Under-Secretary dine is the victim of a version of special privilege on the part of the Under-Secretary, and gets a passive-aggressive revenge, mirroring the later incident over lunch. The doorman asks the Under-Secretary how long he will be, stating that if he won’t be long then he’d allow his driver to keep the car in the crescent driveway, rather than obliging him to park it. The Under-Secretary, rather pretentiously, replies “Leave it there anyway.” The doorman later mumbles to himself, “It was a long time coming. It took him longer than most, but sooner or later all of them …” And then O’Hara cuts him off.

We must infer what he is talking about. My best guess is that the doorman refers to people in positions of power who start out nice and humble, but eventually grow into their big britches. Perhaps the Under-Secretary was kind and deferential to staff in the past, but has since become just as haughty as those Porcellian members the Under-Secretary felt alienated from. There is also the suggestion that the alienation from an elitist club forced a reaction in the Under-Secretary to batten down his own hatches and alienate others in retaliation. These subtle tugs-of-war are the arrows in O’Hara’s quiver, and the puzzles he lays out. His narrative voice never explains away what’s going on. He always shows, rather than tells, and expects the patient and thoughtful reader to figure out the rest.

The outstanding puzzle is just what about the Under-Secretary made it impossible for him ever to be admitted to the Porcellian. I first thought that the Under-Secretary must be Jewish, as Harvard only occasionally accepted Jews before they, like other Ivy League schools, turned over a new leaf and focused on diversifying their student body. The Porcellian very occasionally accepted Jews, and it was not until 1983 that the first black student was accepted, and that was only because he had studied at the elite prep school, St. Paul’s. The Porcellian, founded in 1791, lost much of its Boston Brahmin influence around the turn of the last century, but it was still a bastion of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, like Browning. Whether the Under-Secretary could “never in a thousand years” have been accepted at the club because he was Jewish, possibly because he was Catholic, or simply because he came from a working-class background, is not clear.

Which non-WASP social group does Browning mean, when he says “fellows like you?” The answer is probably buried in the text of “Graven Image,” but it is a buried treasure I was unable to unearth. But with O’Hara’s stories, the process of digging in the ground is such intelligent fun that the occasional gold coin that remains buried beyond our reach is par for the course—it means we have something to dig for, to read for.

Story Playlist 15: Reunion

John Cheever: “Reunion” (1962) I came to “Reunion” by John Cheever after I interviewed novelist Justin Cronin. It was the first story he thought of when describing his routine of reading good prose to warm up before he starts to write. Unfamiliar with Cheever’s work, I expected a far more effortful prose than I found. And, while I tend to prefer the more Baroque among writers, there is much to be said for a writer like Cheever who is content to recede into the shadows behind his words, to watch how they play out. Edgar Allan Poe he ain’t.

A young man—the narrator—who has not seen his father for the three years since his parents’ divorce, meets him during a 90 minute layover between trains at Grand Central Station. The young man, Charlie, introduces the tale as “the last time I saw my father.” He describes his initial enthusiasm about the meeting and is proud just to be seen with his father, as they search for a place in midtown to have lunch. In restaurant after restaurant, the father acts like a condescending ass, and the young man is content never to see him again.

It’s a simple story, brief and simply written. There are no ten-dollar adjectives, or even five-dollar adjectives—heck, there are hardly any adjectives at all. It doesn’t so much feel written as breathed onto the page. The writing is not the least bit flashy. It is organic, oxygenated, with not a single term or turn of phrase that makes you realize there’s a writer behind it (no odd use of “oxygenated,” for example). It just is. But does it work? In its way, absolutely.

“Reunion” is about father-son relations, and feeling awkward. Charlie is, at first, so happy to see his father that he wishes someone would take a photograph of their meeting. His father embodies manhood, smelling of whiskey, after-shave, and wool. And the father seems pleased, too. But then, in one restaurant after another, the father, bemoaning the fact that they don’t have time to visit his club, orders Beefeater Gibsons, and does so in a way that condescends to, and insults, the waiters. He is so tactless in order to relish the power play between patron and “domestic,” asserting himself by using belittling language. After a handful of these encounters, the father insists on buying his son a newspaper for the train ride ahead, and proceeds to insult not just the newspaper vendor, but the papers themselves (“disgusting yellow journalism”). The son thanks him for the thought and leaves, and that’s that.

It is tempting to read Cheever himself into the father. Cheever was known as a man who liked his drink and could be an ass when drunk. But I always feel that it should be of secondary interest, to draw comparisons between the author and his characters. The work should stand alone, in a vacuum, and be just as interesting. The story is memorable and it makes you feel. The main feeling is awkwardness at witnessing the spectacle of the father’s overt condescension, the wasted opportunity for both the father and son in the father’s ridiculous behavior. But, to be honest, this struck me as over-the-top, sociopathic in a way that I found unbelievable. Maybe that was Cheever’s intention, but it did draw me out of the story in a way that seemed a shame.

With so little in the way of reflection by the narrator, the reader is left to infer a great deal of back story lurking in the white of the page. The father’s relationship with Charlie’s mother ended a while ago, but surely there were countless similar encounters she endured. The son’s anticipation at his reunion with his father, who he may have thought surely could not be as bad as his mother made out. And the young man certainly changes over the course of the short tale, from ebullient about meeting his father to—we may infer—deciding it is best never to see him again. It’s all implied, simply and briefly, the silences of what Cheever does not explicitly say almost louder than what he wrote.

This makes “Reunion” a good story for young writers who, if they are anything like me, tend to over-spice the proverbial soup, thinking that “more is more.” More description or, these days, more style (even if the style is conspicuous minimalism). There is much to be said for prose that does not feel written. In this sense, Cheever was a master among non-writers.

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.