Story Playlist 26: Eisenheim the Illusionist

Stephen Millhauser: “Eisenheim the Illusionist” (1998) In creative writing courses, you’re inevitably told a golden rule of good fiction-writing: show, don’t tell. Don’t tell us that a character is greedy. Instead, show him acting in a greedy way, and allow the audience to understand this characteristic. But rules are meant to be broken, and a whole subsection of stories are written in the oral, story-telling tradition. We’ve already encountered a few of them over the course of this short story playlist: Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog” story comes to mind, in which Twain employs a first-person narrator to retell the story told to him by a character in the story—a layer cake of narration. Other authors employ a manner that is meant to be read as an historical account. Stephen Millhauser’s “Eisenheim” story is one of the latter: a fantastic tale told with a sense of both objective reporting and the hearsay of legend. Where the staid creative writing professor might urge Millhauser to involve us in Eisenheim’s life and thoughts and actions, the story as told gives an external, reportorial view of the events.

In contemporary times, we have grown accustomed, perhaps, to stories that aim for the immediacy of film: a little scene-setting, then tell what happens, with as much neutrality as possible. Millhauser adopts a more antiquated style to mimic the time—late nineteenth-century Vienna, mostly—where the story takes place. The best contemporary stories carry their audience away to another world, with the reader forgetting the teller as they follow the action. Older stories tended to be more narrated, creating an implied author that stands for the veracity of the tale. Millhauser exploits this device to recreate as much as possible the outlook of the times his characters live in.

Eisenheim is ostensibly the greatest stage magician of his time. His tricks are so amazing and inexplicable that he is thought to have real magical powers. The narrator tells us that he has pieced together as much as he could of the life and strange end of Eisenheim, based on newspaper reports, interviews with witnesses, and whatever tidbits he could find. Because of this hybrid story-teller/pseudo-journalistic style, nothing in Eisenheim’s story is directly dramatized. There is no dialogue, direct or indirect, and no effort to inhabit the minds of the characters. There is enough detail to carry us away to a foreign place and time, as Millhauser effectively suggests a parallel between the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire and the rising interest in stage magic, séances, and the paranormal within it.

Millhauser made a choice. He could have dramatized the story of the rise of Eisenheim, the leading illusionist of fin-de-siècle Vienna and beyond. Instead he uses the report format, which takes some of the dramatic kick out of what he tells. We are given a play-by-play explanation of some of Eisenheim’s magic tricks, including the mechanism of how some (but not all) of them worked. This sucks the magic right out of the magic tricks. It is more clinical, and less wizardly, to be told that Eisenheim did this, that, and the other thing, and that the crowd was amazed. Would it not have been better to show the trick, in detail, as if we were viewing it, and then we could share the crowd’s awe?

Perhaps, but since the theoretical backdrop to the story explores the fascination with the supernatural within the hyper-bureaucratic, pragmatic, and crumbling Hapsburg Empire, the intention is to separate us from Eisenheim’s contemporaries, not to make us a part of their world. While this trick may “work”—like one of Eisenheim’s illusions—to create an engaging story, the narration seems a bit dryer than I might have liked, a bit too detached and clinical. It wasn’t quite a tale told by a bard before a blazing fire, nor a piece of twentieth-century sharpened prose, but rather a somewhat dated, if interesting, report on a pseudo-historical personage. I guess I liked the story, the character of Eisenheim, and the striking way he engineered his end, foiling Walter Uhl, the intriguing policeman and amateur magician who tries to arrest him when his mix of reality and illusion is deemed too subversive, better than the way the story was told. I actually found myself wishing that the Pulitzer-prize-winning Millhauser had written a novel about Eisenheim, to fully inhabit the world he only suggests here, especially with regard to the possibly fascinating figure of Uhl, about whom we learn too little.

There is a wonderful core to Millhauser’s story, but more could be done with it. Neil Berger must have felt the same way. His film The Illusionist (2006) is based on Millhauser’s story but adds much more plot. The film is not better, but the character of Uhl (a great performance by Paul Giamatti) is satisfyingly fleshed-out, and a love interest for Eisenheim takes a passing detail in Millhauser’s story and makes it into an exciting subplot involving the Crown Prince. It is worth reading the story first, and then seeing the film on the same evening, to consider whether what the film-maker did to expand the story was a) beneficial, b) matched what you might choose to do, if you were tasked with expanding the story, c) even necessary, for I’m sure many will find the story quite sufficient. I liked it very much, but, like a creative writing teacher, I wanted more showing, less telling.

Story Playlist 25: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Joyce Carol Oates: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966) Joyce Carol Oates begins her most famous story with the self-absorbed personality of Connie, a 15-year-old girl in a small town in 1960s America. Over the last two decades, authors (encouraged by publishers) have felt the need to start stories and novels and even history books in medias res, right at the center of the action, to hook the reader, before stepping back to fill out the back story and develop character. Gone are the days of Balzac’s Pere Goriot, which opens with some thirty pages that simply describe the exterior of a country inn. Balzac would never find a publisher these days. Perhaps today’s attention-deficit readers are too impatient to wait through a slow burn? If they aren’t engrossed by page two—paragraph two?—they are unlikely to buy the book.

But to understand Connie, it’s crucial to see Connie’s discontentment with her family, her teenaged sullenness, and the kind of life she leads, where the highlight of her week is a burger and Coke at a drive-thru where the older kids hang out. While there with another boy, she is spotted by an odd-looking loner with wild dark hair in a gold-painted convertible, who leers at her and says, “I’m gonna get you.”

Sometime later, Connie’s parents and sister head out to a barbeque, and Connie insists on staying home. Oates prepares the scene in such a way that, although it is a bright, sunny Sunday and nothing bad has happened yet, we will Connie to go with her parents, not to remain home alone. This is due to tone and non-explicit foreshadowing, with Oates’ prose underscoring Connie’s vulnerability. And so that sound of a car coming up the gravel drive is chilling to us though only a curiosity to Connie. Until she sees it’s the gold convertible. Inside sits the boy from the drive-thru acting as if she should be expecting him. He introduces himself as Arnold Friend, and he’s politely aggressive; he knows her, and knew she’d be alone and knows where her family are. At first, perhaps, Connie finds this intriguing, but Oates lets us feel her unease as well. She’s clearly been accosted by strange men before and is not a wide-eyed innocent; she knows what Friend wants.

Still playing the friendly small-town boy—though Connie insists he’s “not from around here”—Friend introduces Ellie, his silent partner in the car who sits with his transistor tuned to the same hip radio station Connie has on in the house. Friend, outside his car and moving around it, points out the inscriptions on it: his name, and some cryptic numbers—33, 19, and 17—and a few slangy phrases. He doesn’t explain the numbers, but the curious reader can decipher their meaning, with a little work: they refer to a Biblical passage, Judges 19:17, in which a stranger is asked the questions that provide the story’s title.

As they converse, Friend is clearly not taking no for an answer, and we see how trapped Connie is. Our fears for her increase when she realizes that Friend is not a boy at all but nearer thirty and his friend is even older, perhaps forty. Friend moves oddly and tends to lean on things and Connie notices that his boots seem not to be filled by his feet, which creates a sense of freakishness that Oates doesn’t overplay. We imagine his feet are perched, satyr-like, in stuffed cowboy boots that lend him an illusion of height.

When Friend flatly refuses to leave, Connie retreats, threatening to call the police. Friend warns her that he will not enter the house unless she picks up the phone, and insists that she will come out to him voluntarily. We might find an element of the supernatural in this—by some accounts, vampires cannot cross a threshold unless they are invited, so Friend’s comment echoes the kind of hypnotic power vampires commonly exercise in legend and horror films. Friend finally threatens to wait outside and kill Connie’s family if she does not come out. After a freak-out moment in which she picks up the phone and simply screams without dialing, Connie becomes numb to what is happening. She continues to hear Friend’s efforts to be reassuringly seductive—telling her he understands her better than her family does and that the purpose of a sweet girl like her is “to give in,” but in a disembodied way, as though it were happening to someone else. She crosses the threshold into a fate left to our imagination.

The tension in the dialogue between Connie and Friend is huge and masterful, provoking that wonderful internal “Don’t do it!” reaction on the part of the reader. My grandmother literally shouts “Don’t go in there!” at the TV screen during moments of tension in films, and to feel that sensation in a short story is to struggle not to skip ahead, to remain in the sickening state of fear Oates creates. As Friend plays cat-and-mouse with Connie, we can also see Oates toying with the reader: “Arnold Friend” sounds suspiciously like “are no friend”; the stuffed boots and the hypnotic patter turn Friend into some sort of hybrid monster, part vampire, part satyr, part incubus (a sort of vampirical demon who hunts for sex rather than blood); the cryptic use of the Biblical quotation might suggest an allegorical dimension, or at least a twisted sense of the Bible’s commonality, as when the Misfit discusses Jesus with the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” And, for those who like to look beyond a story to its sources, there is a true crime element as well, since some of the story’s details come from the case of Charles Schmid.

In 1961, Schmid (Smitty to his friends, lovers, and victims) murdered a number of young women in Tucson, Arizona. Schmid was socially adept, murdering women who he knew, in some cases girlfriends, rather than prostitutes or abducted strangers, as is often the case with serial killers. By all accounts he was charming and knew how to appeal to the natural insecurities of girls to draw them out, making them feel appreciated, before his sociopathic streak kicked in and he killed them. Oates read about Schmid, including his custom-made cowboy boots that he stuffed with paper to make himself taller, in a Life magazine article about the Tucson killings. What intrigued her was the victim’s point of view, which is what she recreates brilliantly in her story, giving us a wondrous layer cake: part horror, part true crime, part allegory, part character study—and all ingenious.

Story Playlist 24: A Perfect Day for Bananafish

J. D. Salinger: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is just about perfect. It is a story that is easy to misread, because the treasures are in the details, a Christmas tree hung with baubles that are barely visible among the pine needles and tinsel. In fact, I had to read it three times to feel that I “got it,” and I’m still not sure if I got all there is to get.

At first glance, the story seems to begin in a banal manner, then becomes awkward, cute, creepy, before an explosive last paragraph that makes you flip quickly back to the beginning, to see if you might find foreshadowing that would have clued you in to the conclusion. It is there, of course, as it must be in all good stories—none of your deus ex machina business, but an honest surprise ending.

The story is divided into two sections, plus that whammy of a coda. The first section features Muriel Glass on a long-distance call with her mother. Muriel is on holiday in Florida with her husband, Seymour, who was a soldier in the recently-ended Second World War. Muriel is a dismissive, unconcerned, and rather oblivious socialite who stuck with Seymour throughout the war, and doesn’t seem to realize that he returned a changed man, damaged goods, as so many poor, shell-shocked soldiers did (Salinger himself was one, and it is easy to project his biography onto Seymour Glass).

It took me a few reads of this opening sequence to catch what was actually going on, because Salinger ingeniously presents it to us as a straight dialogue, with almost no authorial interference, and a lot of interrupted sentences, as when two people are talking over each other or cutting each other off. Muriel’s mother is quite frantic with concern for her daughter, and refers to a number of incidents involving Seymour’s instability, and in each case we can only infer what happened. “The trees. That business with the window. Those horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing away.” After a second read, I conjectured that Seymour had been involved in an accident with his father-in-law’s car, perhaps involving trees, that may have been intentional. He may be suicidal (“business with the window” and “plans for passing away”).

We also learn, obliquely, that he was recently released from a psychiatric hospital—too soon, according to one doctor. In the hotel, Seymour’s appearance prompts a psychiatrist on holiday to approach Muriel about him, but she treats the conversation dismissively. Salinger creates tension through the mannered dialogue between a concerned mother and her strong-willed daughter, who seems to want to ignore her husband’s issues since his return from combat. She also accepts that he mocks her, thinking it’s cute that he called her “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948,” and seems most concerned that she knows nothing about the book by “the only great poet of the century” that he sent her from Germany, and which was in German. From the mother’s insistent questions, despite casual comments on fashion and gossip, we sense Muriel’s husband is a ticking time-bomb.

The second section is where it gets odder—more playful but also creepier. A little child, Sybil Carpenter, is sent off to play while her mother goes for a martini (promising to bring Sybil the olive). Sybil heads straight over to Seymour, who is lying on the beach in his bathrobe. Seymour is charming with the young girl, but we may think it odd that a grown man is playing with a little girl unrelated to him, with no other adults around. Their interaction is friendly but their relationship clear. Seymour speaks familiarly to the child, but in a bantering way. When the girl mentions her father’s imminent arrival, Seymour says he has been waiting for him, but we can’t tell he is teasing her or if he actually knows her father. Sybil seems comfortable with Seymour—who she refers to as “see more”—and that’s reassuring. But when he kisses her foot while she’s on a raft in the ocean with him, she is startled. It’s then that he says they must go. There seems to be a sexual undertone that is disturbing, highlighted by the weird idea of “bananafish,” an imaginary fish that Seymour suggests he and Sybil look for in the water. It’s when she says she saw one that he kisser her foot, suggesting a spontaneous gesture of tenderness toward her. If we like we can consider the sexual overtones of the bananafish, certainly a phallic image as described by Seymour: “I’ve known bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas…after they eat so many bananas they can’t get out of the banana hole…they die.”

Why is Seymour on the beach in his bathrobe? His reticence to disrobe is dismissed by Muriel as shyness at being pale, but we sense that’s just an excuse for her mother, who thinks there must be something more to it. Muriel offers another explanation: “[Seymour] says he doesn’t want a lot of fools looking at his tattoo,” to which her mother replies, “He doesn’t have any tattoo! Did he get one in the Army?” Now, that detail seemed to be often ignored by other readers of the story—at least I could find no mention of the tattoo in a Google search—but, after several reads, it occurred to me that the sort of tattoo one would get during World War Two that one wouldn’t want “a lot of fools” staring at, is a numerical tattoo from a concentration camp. An identification with Nazi prisoners—according to his daughter, Salinger was among U.S. soldiers who entered a liberated concentration cam—would further underscore the sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that Seymour suffers from. And yet the reference is subtle, and seems to elude most readers.

In the final part of the story Seymour returns to his hotel-room, where Muriel sleeps on a twin bed. In a master-class showing how to build tension and shock in one sentence, Salinger first leads us to believe that, as per the fears of Muriel’s mother, Muriel is going to be the victim of Seymour’s violence.

He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies caliber 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

That last sentence is a demonstration of skillful misdirection. By telling us Seymour looks at the girl, we assume that Muriel is the one “aimed” at, an assumption that Salinger cultivates until the final three words.

In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Salinger’s readers must work, like detectives, to first recognize clues that might not seem to be clues, then use them to decode the enigmatic story, piecing together what the clues mean. A writing professor of mine once said that about 2/3 of your readers should “get” a great story the first or second time through. That means that 1/3 will need assistance in order to “get it” all, or they might not get it all—and that’s okay. “Getting it” is not requisite to enjoying the story as a whole, but each hidden attribute that you “get” feels like a miniature conquest, and enriches the overall experience.

Salinger is notoriously hard to “get,” in the sense that he lets quizzical actions and statements remain so, prodding the reader to get on his wavelength but explaining very little. My favorite novels and, particularly, short stories are those that offer up riddles that close reading will solve, opening like flowers to reveal the beauty of the story and the author’s ingenuity. And yet some writers are so good you admire their work even when you can’t determine exactly what they’re getting at with every detail.

The Changing Same

Like more than a few of us, I suspect, I had never seen a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It’s one of those classic texts that it’s easy to be pretty sure we know all about without bothering to see it. I do recall reading it aloud, round-robin style, in English class in 11th grade. A budding literary sophisticate, I scorned much of it, and I can still remember my main objections: its normative assumptions about what makes for “regular folks” in the good ol’ U.S. of A. seemed to me not only dated but insufferably corny. If you went to school any time after 1964, it was simply too hard to accept a town that’s all-white, and where the “other” is signified by Polish Catholics across the train tracks. Sure, the actual setting of the play is the end of the 19th century to the eve of World War I (and it was first produced in the era of fascist sympathies pre-WWII), and Wilder is quite aware that the world he is depicting was already history. Still, for any child of the Sixties, the play was simply too retrograde, its fond evocation of how parents repeat themselves in offspring just, y’know, Squaresville, man. And that’s one of the things about Our Town—it tends to, and is intended to, inspire thoughts about how time passes and about the changes and the sames of ye olde status quo. There’s a priceless moment where the elderly presider over the local soda fountain reminisces about how it was once possible for a dog to take a nap in the middle of Main Street in the middle of the afternoon, undisturbed. Ah, the good old days—now there’s horses and carriages everywhere and even those encroaching horseless carriages! While no one in a contemporary audience would remember anything like that, we all have similar recollections that date us. Who still remembers milk delivered to the door? Newspapers routes? Wilder wrote the play not to preserve the past, conservatively, but to show that whatever we know as “normal” is going to go the way of all flesh right into the graveyard, eventually.

Which is a way of saying: Don’t judge a play by its first Act. Sure, Our Town starts homey enough to fit squarely in some kind of Will Rogers-type recollection about what life was like when everyone in town knew everyone else’s ancestors, but by the end it has let in the space of the beyond. Back before outer space was the answer to our striving beyond the quotidian earth, it was possible to let “eternity” be the common Unknown looming over us all, and Wilder does a good job of bringing the time beyond time into the play—by making it just as homely and familiar, but with a key difference. The dead know what we don’t know, and what they know reveals at last what has been implicit all along: the perspective of the Stage Manager is “from beyond the grave”—like poets and saints, seeing the length of an individual human life as the speck in the span of the ages that it is.

The New Haven Theater Company’s production, directed by Steven Scarpa, in a spare playing space in a big, high-ceiling room at the English Building Market, its set consisting of two groups of three chairs and a quartet of black monoliths that look like pillars holding up the sky and like monuments to the dead, gives us a straight-forward rendering of Wilder’s script that lets us appreciate how much specificity there is in the play’s seemingly generic approach. Grover’s Mill is a town with an identity, and it's great the way the NHTC production lets us imagine the town the way the play wants us to.

Helping greatly with that task is our Stage Manager (Megan Chenot). Rather than the usual benign old codger who is supposed to keep us apprized of the whos and whats of the town, Chenot has the fresh forthrightness of those tour guides you might see leading a bunch of prospectives, their families, and random shutterbugs around Yale’s campus. She’s got the skinny on everything and delivers it all with the kind of amused forbearance we expect from grade school teachers. It’s like the whole town is her “class” (us too) and she wants to lead them along the path to greater knowledge, no matter how painful it may be. Chenot creates a very warming, reassuring effect, and that helps, particularly as there’s likely to be much sniffling and wiping of eyes by the time Act Three ends.

Other reflection on this well-cast show—special mention of the perfect match of Mallory Pellegrino for the role of Emily Webb. The heart of the play comes in Act Two when Emily and George Gibbs, the boy next-door, finally realize what their lives have been leading to. Pellegrino shows just the right mix of bashfulness and smart-girl knowingness not only to win over George—the town’s top athlete, bound for agricultural college—but everyone else as well. It’s a moment that seems so sincere and intimate it justifies everything the Stage Manager is trying to show us.

Other fine touches from this familiar ensemble: Margaret Mann’s comic turns as a professor eager to take us back to the Pleistocene in explaining the town’s interest, and as everyone’s maiden aunt in the wedding scene, gushing with the kind of fulsomeness that makes cliché both comical and real; Christian Shaboo, as George, seems young enough to be as unselfconscious as George is; George Kulp and Susan Kulp play the Webbs with a familiarity that seems as if we’re actually in their home, and the awkward, prenuptial visit of George to his future father-in-law is comic, and almost lets in lots of things best left unsaid; as Doc Gibbs and his wife, J. Kevin Smith and Deena Nicol have a more weary hominess than the Webbs—with the Doctor having to make housecalls (who remembers that ancient custom?), and his wife fantasizing about a trip to Paris as though it were on the other side of the earth; the families’ breakdown at the graveyard feels genuine rather than stagey, a big plus; Peter Chenot, as deliveryman-about-town Howie Newsome, is as real as the imaginary (to us) carthorse he leads around.

Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of Wilder’s play is when George and Emily, in their respective bedrooms in their respective parents’ next-door houses, try to set up a means of surreptitious communication, if only to study together. Do we need look any further for an early version of the urge to text and share files? And when the Stage Manager comments on the fact that most people end their lives married, it’s a rather obvious reflection that—in these parts, anyway—more people than ever, even those who eschew heterosexual coupling, have that opportunity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I reckon.

Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Steven Scarpa Produced by George Kulp Production Design by Drew Gray Stage Management by Mary Tedford

Cast (in order of appearance): Megan Chenot; J. Kevin Smith; Sam Taubl; Peter Chenot; Deena Nicol; Susan Kulp; Christian Shaboo; Josie Kulp; Spenser Long; Mallory Pellegrino: Margaret Mann; George Kulp; Donna E. Glen; Erich Greene; Jim Lones; Rick Beebe; Jesse Jo Toth

English Building Market 839 Chapel Street

2013, September 19, 20, 21; 26, 27, 28 8 p.m.

Queen for a Day

The curtain has gone up on the new Yale Cabaret season—Cab 46—and the debut show is We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, written by YSD students Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, and Emily Zemba, and directed by Kerwin. The show has a lot of what makes Cab shows work—a sense of the audience’s proximity, a showy self-consciousness, and a lot of moxy. The play is not so much a whodunit as a howwasit, involving a late, beloved drag queen, Edie (played with show-stopping flair by Seth Bodie), a mummified, gunshot body in her apartment, and a gun. What the hell happened?

Well, of course, the entire subculture of which Edie was a reigning queen has its conjectures, so we meet a variety of possibilities—some plausible, some comically outrageous (my favorite was Edie in full Mae West drag getting the drop on a bandanna-ed bandit)—with all the enacted scenes employing the genre markings of any drama queen’s inner cinema; the bottom line: “he done her wrong.”

The real fire of the show is in the musical performances (original songs, and accompaniment as Charlie the Piano Guy, by Joel Abbott). Bodie/Edie could’ve sung more, for my money, and bravo to Ato Blankson-Wood, looking like a Grace Jones impersonator, for taking the passed baton from Lena Horne’s “The Man I Love” and scoring. Then there are the big, uplift moments, some with lip-synching, that have the audience clapping and cheering. Yes, despite murder and death, this show is a celebration of what Iggy calls “Lust for Life.”

Christopher Ash’s stage set is Warholian with its projections of Edie and it’s glitzy “everybody’s a star” aura; the other queens seem to recall tropes from the 70s and 80s as well—my favorite is the über-slinky Cabaret-like Mistress of Ceremonies played by Tom Pecinka, with her tale of carnations—and there’s a trio of comic turns by James Cusati-Moyer as a blonde ditz, complete with New Yawk squawk, in Daisy Dukes, a leather-skirted conchita hot for fun, and a hilarious Pacino take-off as one of Edie’s more aggressive paramours. Kristen Ferguson works best as the tersely barking flatfoot stumped by this cold case. And Christopher Geary rounds out the cast as a speculative intimate with a place in his bitchy heart for some of the loveable oddities of Edie in her prime.

Apart from all the comedy and song and dance, Bodie really shines in an intimate boudoir moment where Edie takes the entire audience into her confidence—we’ve all been given envelopes containing little icons that she lovingly identifies by the names of the queens they stand for. It’s perhaps the most Warholian moment of all—the idea that, without a historical sense, a scene, a subculture, an art-form, a performance, an identity will be forgotten as if it never was. Well might the other queens rehearse the stories of Edie’s alleged act of violence—she not only had a gun, but a heart and a memory. Viva La Minx!

We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun Written by Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, Emily Zemba Directed by Kelly Kerwin

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Producer: Emika Abe; Sets, Lights, & Projections: Christopher Ash; Costumes: Grier Coleman; Sound, Original Music: Joel Abbott; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Set/Technical Assistant: Samantha Lazar; Tango Consultant: Joel Abbott; Photographs by Nick Thigpen courtesy of Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

September 19-21, 2013

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.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Ever have that experience where you feel almost taken hostage by your host? Sorta like a “guestage?” That’s the situation facing Tom (James Leaf) and Diane (Mariah Sage), two teachers—a prof, she earns twice his salary, he’s only a poet and high school teacher—who have car troubles on a road-trip. When we meet them they’ve been brought to the home of Ivan (Daniel White) and Ruth (Irina Kaplan), husband and wife—he, big, burly, effusively and physically friendly; she, kittenish and confiding—after an afternoon of drinks at a roadhouse.

Ivan is the sort of host who thrives on some hopped-up idea of copacetic encounters, looking for openings and outpourings. Ruth just seems ecstatic at having some longed-for company even if she’s shy about playing the hostess (it means having to cook and clean, y’know). We can tell that days on the road seem to be exposing the faultlines in Tom and Diane’s relationship, while Ivan’s status as a member of a Special Operations Unit—a military mercenary, in other words—and Ruth’s as an ex-stripper make them, one would imagine, interesting interlocutors for two teachers at large.

If the idea of two couples downing vast amounts of liquor and talking, squabbling, confessing, and flirting far into the night makes you recall George and Martha hosting Nick and Honey, that’s fitting enough, since this kind of theatrical evening probably dates—in its sense of unspecified unease—from Albee’s play of the early Sixties, but Steven Bellwood’s play, directed by James Leaf, is far less arcane in the kinds of “games” going on, though one is never quite sure, with Ivan, if or when his sense of grievance might turn into something ugly. Nor, for that matter, Diane’s, who seems to play with the idea of, Martha-like, exposing her partner’s frailties.

Tom, the less developed character here, has a tendency to crib lines from Eliot or Shakespeare, and even taking a psilocybin mushroom doesn’t make him more loquacious, or interesting, for that matter. He’s sort of the witness more than anything, though Leaf gives him some fire when he tries to argue for Ivan's trustworthiness against Diane’s fears for Ruth’s safety. Kaplan’s Ruth is at times clueless but—as a former professional stripper—she also knows how to be tough and how to flaunt her sexiness. Ruth is given two pathetic moments, and that’s perhaps one too many—the first, in the first act, might recall “the bit about the kid” in Virgina Woolf, in an oddly literal way; the other precipitates the climax and comes a bit out of nowhere.

Bellwood seems to want to play on the educated classes’ discomfort with the less educated, a discomfort that can be protective, projective, and quite misguided. Ruth’s role in her marriage is stronger than Diane assumes it is, blinded by her own intimidation when faced with preachy Ivan, his domestic arsenal, his jokey Obama mask, and his “what you need is a real man” innuendo. Played by Daniel White with large-as-life gusto, Ivan is the live-wire here and our time in his home may make us uncomfortable, but he’s really just trying to have a good time. In the end, the others just aren’t up for it, particularly Diane who, as played by Sage, maintains a brittle sense of timid intelligence and a belief that others just aren’t as smart as she is. More could be done to express what we’re to make of her attachment to Ruth, but as it is, Diane is the character who stands to be changed most profoundly by what takes place.

The staging—all on one level in the first half, and with a provocative split between levels in the second—is surprisingly intimate given the large, multipurpose room at the Whitney Arts Center—and the cast swiftly establishes a naturalistic rhythm that gets us from awkward-but-well-meaning strangers meeting to exposures, both purposeful and unthinking, that make us worry where it’s all going.

The Specials is entertaining, suspenseful, and full of the kind of unease common not only to being strangers in a strange home, but also to being strangers in our own land.

“Who’s afraid of guns and drugs and the Big Bad Wolf, Martha?” “I am, George, I am.”

Three more shows: Friday and Saturday, Sept. 20 & 21, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3 p.m.

The Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue, New Haven

The Specials by Steve Bellwood Directed by James Leaf Produced and Assistant Directed by David Pilot

Cast: Mariah Sage, James Leaf, Irina Kaplan, Daniel White

Co-producers: Margaret Carl, Annia Bu, James Leaf, Steve Bellwood; Stage Manager: Beatrix Roller; Assistant Stage Manager, Set and Costume Designer: Lisette Lux; House Managers: Baileigh Rae Massey, John Roeller, Claire Gabriele; Publicity: Jane Mills

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?

We're All Townies

As Steve Scarpa, of the New Haven Theater Company, sees it, Thornton Wilder is “our own.” And if that’s so, his town is our town. That play, one of the truly iconic American plays, is the latest project of the NHTC. Scarpa, who directed the play before in Shelton, finds himself now, five years later, reflecting on how the play’s big theme is the “idea of memory.” And, on that note, it’s worth remembering that Wilder is buried in his family plot in Mt. Carmel Cemetery, marked only by a little plaque, that he graduated from Yale in the class of 1920, that he lived for several decades in our environs (Hamden), and that he was a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and that his classic play, which treats American small-town life sub specie aeternitatis, is, this year, 75 years old.

That’s kind of hard to believe, since the play, in some ways, seems like it should date back much further—to the Twenties, at least, even to the previous century—but, in fact, Our Town represents ideas that Wilder was picking up from that era—the period of late Modernism—including the style of Gertrude Stein’s cubist masterpiece The Making of Americans, and the meditation on the changing same that is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, then known as “Work in Progress.” Wilder was an early enthusiast of Joyce’s work and penned an essay about it. The idea of evoking a place—for Joyce, Dublin, for Wilder, Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire—through a historied sense of time is a common feature that shows the modernist influence in Wilder’s best-known work.

In staging the play, Scarpa finds himself more than ever aware of how New Haven, where he was born, has changed in his own lifetime, making Our Town’s sense of both a place’s permanence and impermanence very much a hometown concern. As Scarpa sees it, Wilder’s play is about a place that could be any place, but that doesn’t make the town a generic Anytown, U.S.A. Rather it’s a universal place, and reminds us that, no matter where we hail from, we remember a place through a particular sense of time.

For the New Haven Theater Company, that sense of time and place is also important. The close-knit group has lived and worked together for some time now—more than one married couple can be found in the cast, and, in the case of the Kulps, their daughter is also involved. That means the generational sense so important to the play is not only thematic, it’s also an element of the company. That feature of NHTC is important to Scarpa, for, though this production does include non-members who auditioned for parts, the company’s ensemble sensibility—that sense of short-hand between actors who know each other well—makes his job easier and more fun. Fun that extends to the audience—many the friends, families, and co-workers of the NHTC actors, in their regular lives—who can look forward to seeing who so-and-so is this time.

One interesting element of the casting: The Stage Manager—the part Wilder himself played and which is perhaps best known as a vehicle for Hal Holbrook—will be played by a woman: Megan Chenot. Scarpa finds that the change in gender gives the play a different tone—more engaging and personable—but that it also makes the Stage Manager’s managing of Emily’s marriage a more nuanced occasion. The play, Scarpa stresses, isn’t as sentimental as maybe our own memories—many of us read it or saw it produced in high school—make it out to be, and that means adapting the play to our time may well be in order.

Scarpa hit upon the idea of doing the play while researching Wilder’s papers in the Beinecke for an article about New Haven turning 150. That piece provoked another, in the Arts Paper, about Wilder, and the idea of re-staging the play came from there. The New Haven Theater Company tends to be a shape-shifting affair without a permanent performing space, and finding the right spot can be a chore. This time they’ve been able to use a big, empty room at the back of English Building Market, next to the Institute Library, on Chapel Street, a location that is not only a bit of New Haven history but which, by virtue of the antiques and heirlooms it sells, offers a serendipitous step into memories of other times.

Drew Gray, relative new-comer to NHTC, is responsible for transforming the room into a stage-set. Gray expected an easy task as the play famously asks for “no design” and is meant to be a theatrical space, such as would be found in any real theater. Not being in a theater, per se, means “something needs to be there,” Gray says, and he hit upon the idea of musical notes. Music is directly referenced in the play, such as the hymn “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds,” and Gray set out to create “abstract shapes to sculpt the space” so as to recall music.

Gray has also incorporated ideas he first encountered in Super Studio, a conceptual design studio in the 1970s. Their idea of “life without objects” is one that Gray finds serviceable in his design concept where most of the setting takes place in the mind, not in actual furniture and props. He has introduced two ten-foot columns or pillars to break up the space and, with changes in lighting, create shadows for effect. It’s a case of making “the scenery disappear into the scenery” Gray says, and that sounds high concept enough to serve both the modernism of Wilder’s vision as well as its timeless sense of classical civilization.

Both Scarpa and Gray stress that Wilder was about more than just making a feel-good paean to Americana. The play, Scarpa says, is “both funnier and sadder” than many viewers might expect, and that the NHTC’s effort is to “make something beautiful” that will live up to Wilder’s intention to add America’s “moral, decent” values to what Wilder saw as the long march through history to civilized behavior.

Given that Wilder first staged the play 75 years ago—in 1938—with the world on the bring of World War II, it’s worthwhile to reflect on how far along we are on that march, now.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder Directed by Steve Scarpa

English Building Market, 839 Chapel Street September 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28 8 p.m.

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.

New Local Theater

Now that we’re safely past Labor Day and gaining on the ostensible last day of summer (somewhere around the 21st), theater is coming alive again in New Haven. This coming weekend and the following a new play called The Specials has its run on Whitney Avenue in New Haven.

Written by New Haven playwright Steve Bellwood, The Specials presents a meeting/confrontation between two couples: an academic couple, Tom and Diane, are taking a roadtrip and spatting when their car breaks down. Another couple comes to their assistance: Ivan, an ex-military man, and his wife Ruth, an ex-stripper. Is it the classic comedy of unlikely bedfellows, or is something more harrowing in store? Expect the unpredictable as the couples get to know each other and, one suspects, themselves. According to producer David Pilot, the show is about “healing as much as about confrontation.” The question behind it all is the question of what, if anything, provides social cohesion in our increasingly polarized America.

Pilot is a writer, director and filmmaker, who has taken part in the New York International Fringe Festival and, most recently, his play Hans: A Case Study—from a famous case of Freud’s—was staged at the West End Theatre in New York in 2012. He and playwright Bellwood, a member of Theatre Artists Workshop in Norwalk and a performer around New Haven as a “stand-up storyteller,” have been collaborating on musical monologues. Bellwood encountered director/actor Leaf—who directed a performance of Beckett’s Catastrophe at the Institute Library last year and acted in the New Haven Theater Company’s production of Urinetown—at Never Ending Books, the duo became a trio, and they set about to stage Bellwood’s play. For the production, Pilot has teamed with co-producers Annia Bu, an award-winning actress from Cuba, and Margaret Carl, twenty-five-year veteran of numerous local companies including Elm Shakespeare, the Arts and Ideas Festivals, and other productions with Pilot at the company Jackdaw-Pike.

In addition to Leaf as Tom, the cast includes Mariah Sage (Diane), of the New Haven-based company Theatre 4, Daniel J. White (Ivan), who has acted in Bridgeport and at the Westport Community Theatre, and Irina Kaplan (Ruth), an MFA candidate at the Actors Studio Drama School who has worked at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre and at Classic Stage Company in New York.

The play will be presented at The Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue, New Haven Sat. 9/14 at 8 p.m. Sun. 9/15 at 3 p.m. Fri. 9/20 at 8 p.m. Sat. 9/21 at 8 p.m. Sun. 9/22 at 3 p.m.

$15, suggested donation

A reception, as the culmination of Jack-Daw Pike's indiegogo campaign for funds to produce local theater, will be held on October 5th, 7-10 p.m., at Luck & Levity Brew Shop, 118 Court Street, New Haven.  The evening will feature free music, film, poetry, and even a theater quiz and secret prizes.  For more info, see the contacts on the poster above.

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.

A Cab of Many Colors

Every year the Yale Cabaret enstates new artistic directors—Yale School of Drama students whose vision of and commitment to theater will guide the choices of shows for the coming season. For Cab 46, almost ready to kick-off this month, the people running the show are three dramaturgs—Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin—as co-Artistic Directors, and Shane Hudson, as Managing Director. All have previous background with offerings at the Cab—particularly, for the ADs, The Twins Would Like to Say, the penultimate production of Cab 45. Dibo and Dubowski co-directed the play and Kerwin was the production’s dramaturg. Those who saw the play will remember its use of the entire space of the Cab (there was no “back stage”) and its encouragement that the audience move about during the show, which was staged, at times, in different locations simultaneously. Hudson has already become a familiar face at the front desk of the Cab, particularly during the Yale Summer Cab of 2012.

The tag words for this year’s Cab are “invention – urgency – artistry,” and the three ADs stress “risk” as an element of what they’re looking for in choosing the shows that will be staged this year. Being “allowed to fail” means having the luxury to try out approaches, plays, collaborations that might be something less than a “sure thing.” If everyone only does what they’ve already done and know they’re good at, all sense of exploration, innovation, and challenge goes out the window. As regulars of the Cab know, there’s always a mix of amazingly spot-on shows and shows that reach for something they might not grasp, this time ‘round. There’s also a beguiling sense of not knowing what you’ll get until you arrive and the show starts. The Cab’s mystique is largely predicated on the unexpected and the untried before.

The questions that Dibo, Dubowski and Kerwin—sounding a bit like a law firm or agency when you say it like that—ask of their colleagues, in the application process, apply to time and place. “Why here?” is a question about the use of the specific space and implies a sense of community as well. Why the Cab, both as a uniquely intimate and amorphous space, but also, why the Cab, in the sense of its audience and its larger context within the School of Drama. D,D,K are committed to tapping the unique ability of the Cab to serve their colleagues in YSD as the premiere locus for artistic investigation.

The complimentary question, of course, and one that every theatrical venue should ask when setting up its season is “why now?” The “here and now” of any play is what convinces audiences that they should be present to see this particular show and not some other.The Cab shows, in their short lives (only three nights for each play), arrive with a sense of urgency, a sense that the story to be told is worth all the sweat and toil for such an ephemeral run.

With shows that are completely generated by graduate students—usually in a mix of already existing plays and plays originating before our very eyes—the Cab can’t get us in the door with stars and celebrities. The venue’s allure has to do with the possibility of discovery: what future greats may even now be honing their talents for audiences at a ridiculously low price? (A non-student flex pass of 9 shows makes each show cost $10, which is the standard price for students.) A host of top notch theater people have worked at the Cab in its 46 illustrious years: Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Christopher Durang, Anna Shapiro, to name but a few. We’ve no doubt that their fellows can be found working with devotion on the “passion projects” at the Cab (no show at the Cab counts toward graduation for any of its participants; these shows are all ends in themselves—unless they go on to future development, as some do).

This year, the ADs have instituted a deviation. Usually the ADs of the Cab reserve a few slots for their own projects. Our three ADs have chosen to waive that perk but have replaced it with a different kind of participation: each approved play will have one of the three ADs assigned to it as Creative Producer. That role will be a vantage from which to offer notes before a show goes up, and, more importantly, to facilitate the show in any way necessary. The role of CP lets D, D, or K have a creative role in how a project shapes up—not that ADs are traditionally hands-off entirely about the shows they accept. The CP role will mean that the ADs are a bit more invested in each show than might sometimes be the case.

As students of dramaturgy—the text-based, historical consciousness of the theatrical community, we might say—Dibo, Dubowski, and Kerwin have paid their dues: both Dibo and Kerwin have worked in Chicago with the famous Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as other innovative companies, and Dubowski has worked with Headlong Dance Theatre in Philadelphia, and at the Yale Rep as dramaturg on last year’s comic satire American Night: The Ballad of Juan José. Dibo and Dubowski also collaborated on Cab 44’s The Yiddish King Lear, and the trio have worked on thesis shows and Carlotta Festival shows at YSD. In other words, D,D,K have run the gamut of the kinds of shows YSD produces as well as having experience with the kind of theater that takes place off-the-beaten-track.

And now the first three shows . . .

Cab 1: September 19-21: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun by Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, and Emily Zemba; directed by Kelly Kerwin. Using live music—including a tango—to tell the tale, based on a real story, of a fictional legendary drag queen, Edie La Minx explores “the grit behind the glam.” Edie, it seems, not only has a gun, she also has an unexplained mummified body in a garment bag in her apartment, complete with a gunshot wound to the head. Who is it, and what’s it mean for Edie? Seth Bodie assays the role of Edie (those who braved the biggest blizzard in recent memory last winter to see the First Annual Yale Cab Drag Show may remember Seth’s performance, which may or may not be relevant to the role of Edie). The show purports to have the lively and unpredictable elements so crucial to season kick-offs, and that’s reason enough to see how it plays.

Cab 2: September 26-28: The Dutchman by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; directed by Katherine McGerr. Jones’ play was incendiary in its time, making free use of “the n word” and exploring the vexed issue of inter-racial attraction and antagonism on a New York subway in 1964—the year after Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. In these “post-racial” days of the Baraka administration, an event like the murder of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman (to say nothing of more distant events such as the O.J. trial in the ‘90s) shows us that, in the U.S., race is never “in the past.” McGerr has done notable work at the Cab in staging already existing plays that featured the grisly (Howard Benton's Christie in Love), the timely (Arthur Kopit's Chamber Music), and the unpredictable (Nassim Soleimanpour's White Rabbit/Red Rabbit).

Cab 3: October 3-5: The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; conceived and directed by Gabe Levey. If you’ve been around YSD in the last few years, you probably know Gabe Levey—his Andy Kaufmannesque one-man show, Brainsongs, in Cab 44, or his comic role as the Shoemaker/Puppet-master in the Summer Cab’s enactment of Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, or perhaps his memorable turn as a young girl in a pinafore in Margot Bordelon’s thesis production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine last spring. This time he’ll be directing Third-Year playwright Kate Tarker in play that promises one of “the world’s most renowned motivational speakers” and a pitch to put the "you" in “universe.” Levey and Tarker share a penchant for the techniques Christopher Bayes teaches in his clown classes at Yale (Bayes is the comic vision behind such recent Rep hits as The Servant of Two Masters and A Doctor in Spite of Himself), so this show will be nothing if not funny.

Another innovation of Cab 46 will be the use of actual images from the productions in the support materials, such as the playbills at the shows, and a logo that provides grounds for seeing this as “a Cab of many colors.”

The remaining seven shows of the first semester will be previewed here some time in October, and, until then, see you at the Cab!

(photographs by Christopher Ash; courtesy of the Yale Cabaret)

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.