Before They Were Novelists: 3 Killer Short Story Collections

I don’t think anyone would argue with the fact that even a rather mediocre dental hygienist makes more money in a given year than most writers make in a decade. Generally it is only the best of the best, the luckiest of the luckiest, or the most connected of the most connected who can do so well as to make a living off of their craft. And that’s the novelists. In a modern world where the screen (phone, TV or computer) is so ubiquitous that your local barbershop is likely to have 40 or more flat inches on their wall to help you pass the time, it seems fair to say that most writers would struggle to pay their cell phone bills if they tried to earn a living by exclusively writing short stories.

The temptation then is to leap to the conclusion that the short story is dead. And yet the New Yorker as I’ve heard it, continues to pay short story legends like Alice Munro and William Trevor a special fee to have first access to any story those writers send out – that’s how valuable these works are. And when the magazine does select a work for publication, even a dental hygienist would envy the purchase price. Then you get Francis Ford Coppola, who in 1997 started a magazine devoted to short stories and design. Zoetrope: All Story is based on the great director’s love of fiction and his belief that so many great movies come on the backs of great short stories. This would seem to bode well for the form’s future. So too does the inclusion below of two writers who came to the English world’s attention over the last decade not from their novels, but on the back of their debut story collections.

Perhaps you are only familiar one, two or all three of the world-class writers listed below as novelists. If so, you might want to also consider their masterful work in the short form, where narrative and poetry so often collide, and where a twist ending shocks the heck out of you in the best way possible – that “Usual Suspects” like turn that you never saw coming but when it comes you say, Of course!

The rest of this article, like most all the others I'm writing these days, can be found at Indigo's Fiction Blog. 

The 4th of Salinger's Nine Stories: "The Laughing Man"

[The 1st and most famous one is: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish".]

At the risk of alienating a few die-hard Salinger fans, I'm skipping the 2nd and 3rd stories in Salinger's Nine Stories to proselytize "The Laughing Man," because like all the arts that tickle my fickle fancy, this story is melancholic at the same time as it is an adventure, it has longing while being very funny, and in grand Salinger fashion it is as observant of the human condition as most any small child, as articulate about it as most any literary giant.

And what else is fiction for but to capture the otherwise elusive nature of what it means to be human, and have a heck of a good time doing it?
 

The Man, The Myth, The Chief
At first glance "The Laughing Man" may seem like a "normal" Salinger story as it centres, in part, around a young person, in this case a nine-year old boy from New York who is part of an extra-curricular "organization" known as the Comanche Club. Everyday after school, this boy, our narrator, and a group of other boys would be picked up by school bus and taken, most often, to Central Park. There, "weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season." The driver of the bus and organizer of all the sporting events or other outings was known to the Comanches as the Chief. He was also one John Gedsudski, a law student at N.Y.U.

But the man who was a great athlete and is a law student, is both myth and legend to the boys when he is the Chief. And the story that the narrator is looking back on manages to mix a perfect blend of genuine fascination and childlike awe with a kind of gentle humor at how seriously things like a Comanche club (we, the modern reader rightly shudder at the name) were back then. To the boys, the Chief was, "an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptous first-aid man. Every one of us, from the smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him."

It goes further than that, though, when we learn in a parenthetical aside, a Holden Caufield-like digression that, as in all Salinger's stories, can be the spot to drop a bright bit of humor or, in the case of "The Laughing Man," a touch of something even more spirit nourishing.

If our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on the tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head, though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard and, however tearfully, opened my lunch for business, semi-confident, that the Chief would fine me. The Chief always found us.)

The Magic 
If this were just about a bunch of boys and their fearless leader (and his inevitable imperfections) it would be a good story that no one would remember some 60+ years later. What so elevates "The Laughing Man" to the lofty heights of the resonant, is that it, quite literally, works on two levels. Perhaps the narrative's greatest pleasure of all is its story-within-a-story.

The Chief, it turns out, is a great storyteller. The Comanches are suitably floored by this to the nine-year old degree of taking story time as necessity. On the Comanche bus after a game or, when waiting, for example, for the Chief's new girlfriend, they (and we the reader) hear the Chief tell the story-within-the-story, the story of the Laughing Man, a kind of fantastical, adventure story quite unlike anything else Salinger ever wrote.

In other words, in the frame of a literary and very New Yorker-like short story we get something out of a comic book, something that literally takes the reader back to when they were a nine-year old. 

The magic of "The Laughing Man" (and here I'll momentarily disregard what Picasso said; cause this story really does put a spell on you) is that both the story within and the story without are equally captivating in their own right. This, in my reading experience, is rather rare, as so often the story within should be the story throughout, or otherwise not exist in the first place.   

The Laughing Man Comic Book Adventure Story
The origin story of the Laughing Man is that as a child he was kidnapped and disfigured by Chinese bandits. His face is grotesque to say the least: "... A face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oral cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh-sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like ... some sort of monstrous vacuole." In turn, the bandits force The Laughing Man to wear a mask made out of poppy petals. As ever Salinger peppers these details with little winks to the reader. The bandits chose a poppy mask so they could smell the Laughing Man and know where he was. He wreaked of opium. 

In Marvel-like compensation for his disfigurement, the Laughing Man has special abilities, and within a story that is a wistful but also a very funny return to childhood and, as it turns out, a kind of young love, we get an adventure story, but an adventure story Ala J.D. Salinger.

Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandit's hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.

[For an all-time reader favourite of the Nine Stories visit J.D. Salinger's "For Esme--With Love and Squalor"] 

Great Short Story: J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" II

The First of Salinger's Nine Stories
 Continued from J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" Part I

THERE IS NO MAGIC IN ART, so said Picasso. Instead the great painter claimed that art is just a pile of tricks, one piled on top of the other. The more tricks, the better the art; the better the art, the more there seems to be some sort of magic in it. Whether you believe in magic or not, one of Salinger's greatest tricks was his blending of the literary with the pulpy.

Jerome David (Jerry to his friends) had always set his sights on the illustrious New Yorker. But early on he couldn't get published there and had to settle for "lesser" publications known as the Pulps, magazines like Story magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Among these pages there was no time or interest in high-brow, pretentious investigations into human blah blah blah. Stories had to be fast, had to have twist endings and had to be real page-turners. The benefit of this early education was that as Salinger's stories matured (ie. as The New Yorker started to accept his work) and he produced master works like "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," so rich in depth of character and insight, they retained the fun, suspenseful edge the pulps had required of him.

In this way "Bananafish" is like a perfect movie. Fun enough to want to watch Saturday night. Deep enough to stay with you well beyond Sunday brunch.


THE STORY THAT AFFECTED ALL THAT CAME AFTER IT
If you've only read The Catcher in the Rye you might not know that all but two of the stories Salinger published subsequent to his only novel (he went on publishing a good fifteen years after Catcher, albeit at a pace that even Stanley Kubrick could lap), are about the Glass family. This obsessive and remarkably unique literary investigation into a small number of related imagined characters that spanned some 18 years of one writer's life all started with "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which centres around a character named Seymour Glass, the oldest sibling in the Glass family, older brother to Franny, Zooey and Buddy, the narrator of Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters.

THE STORY
It'll sound droll, if not downright dull to summarize the story, but it seems necessary to mention that "Bananafish" is plot-wise primarily just a pair of conversations. The first is a phone call between a daughter in a hotel room and her mother back home. The second conversation, between a man and a little girl, happens on and near the hotel's beach. Sounds innocent enough when crammed discursively into a pat little summary like this, a pat little summary, I'll add, that's been careful not to give anything away.

To not give anything away but to hint at it, I thought I'd give you a taste of character in a story written by the creator of Holden Caufield, who of the 100 best characters in American fiction, according to Book Magazine, ranked second after Jay Gatsby [sic].


THE PHONE CALL WITH MOTHER
In the opening of "Bananafish," Muriel Glass, on her honeymoon with Seymour in Florida, is alone in her hotel room. Seymour is at the beach. Waiting at the story's beginning to put a call through (1948, remember) to her mother, Muriel "uses" the time. 

She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex if Fun-or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole... She was a girl who for a ringing phon dropped exactly nothing... With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon.

When finally the call does come through, Muriel's mother takes quick control of the conversation. Her first three lines on the phone to her daughter are:
1. "Muriel? Is that you?"
(Muriel says it is and asks how her mother is.)
2. "I've been worried to death about you. Why haven't you phoned? Are you all right?"
(Muriel says, "I tried to get you last night and the night before...")
3. Are you all right, Muriel?"
(Muriel keeps moving the phone away from her ear. She says, "I'm fine. I'm hot. This is the hottest day they've had in Florida...")

AT THE BEACH WITH A MAN AND A LITTLE GIRL
The second half of the story starts off on the hotel's beachfront property. A little girl, Sybil Carpenter is bored, being forced to listen to a boring adult conversation between her mother and her mother's friend.

"See more glass," said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. "Did you see more glass?"
"Pussycat, stop saying that. It's driving Mommy absolutely crazy. Hold still, please."  
Mrs. Carpenter was putting sun-tan oil on the Sybil's shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, wing-like blades of her back. Sybil was sitting insecurely on a huge, inflated beach ball, facing the ocean. She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.

With her mother's permission, Sybil sets off and walks over a quarter of a mile to find Seymour Glass, whose lying on the sand.

"Where's the lady?" Sybil said.  
"The lady?" the young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. "That's hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser's. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room ... Ask me something else, Sybil," he said. "That's a fine bathing suit you have on. If there's one thing I like, it's a blue bathing suit."
Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. "This is a yellow," she said. "This is a yellow."

The possibly mentally unstable young man, recently back from the war, goes on to take Sybil out into the sea for a swim.

What happens after that I dare not say. Just read it.

[Salinger's The Laughing Man: click it for the next of the Nine Stories I love.]

Great Short Story: J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" I

The First of Salinger's Nine Stories 
[Introduced Here]

When perhaps the world's most famously reclusive writer died my father didn't write J.D. Salinger a letter. The Catcher in the Rye was not the reason my dad chose his profession (academia). And, as far as I know he has never read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, never mind reading eight of the Nine Stories I'm here to speak about. But when you mention Salinger's name, my father always brings up "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948), the story that opens Nine Stories.

My dad (Aba), it turns out, has good taste. This is probably the most famous short story ever published in The New Yorker. 

When Aba was just David and a teenager growing up in South Africa, a counselor at his (Habonim) sleepover camp read the famous story aloud to him and his fellow campers. I imagine the boys in their bunks on a humid night, clutched to the end of their beds' rusted metal frames, waiting to find out what happens next. Now a story, half of which is a phone conversation between a recently married bride and her mother wouldn't exactly seem a teenage boy's cup of tea. But then the best of anything is always so good as to break down the boundaries between man/woman, adult/child (think french fries, think a Van Gogh painting).

Inspired by this counselor's fireside idea, I read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" aloud to a couple sets of friends when I was still living in Japan. (Said friends were not in bunk beds at the time). For perspective, in case you were picturing me regularly reading stories to strangers at my local Starbucks, the only other time I read aloud to people that aren't my wife, is when they are kids or when, more than a decade ago, I worked at a camp with autistic children (read them Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

I've heard Salinger described as having a ventriloquist's ability - the way that he can inhabit the voice and nature of his characters. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" this includes: a little girl, a potentially mentally unstable man, a rather overbearing mother, and her rather superficial daughter. Each voice sounds right, sounds real. For the actor in me you can see why it would be a lot of fun to read aloud.

For the reader in you, Part II will, I hope, entice when you hear the sounds of those characters voices, and get a hint of the drive and depth of one hell of a brilliant yarn.

Click Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish Part II to continue reading.

Raise High the Short Story Form, Salinger and Nine Stories: An Introduction

Many have already proclaimed that with series' like "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men," we're in a golden age of TV (again). TV today is arguably churning out better quality stuff than what's being put up on the big screen. And considering how much the middle budget picture (think "A Few Good Men," think "American Beauty") - what has consistently been Oscar's bread and butter - is being squeezed out by studios investing most all their money into one or maybe two "tent-pole" movies a year (think "Avatar") this leaves only enough room for small budget fall and spring crap (think horror, think Jennifer Aniston vehicles).

Sick with cold last weekend and watching way too many "Mad Men" episodes it dawned on me that these high quality television series' are the closest the screen gets to a novel, in that they have the scope, and time, to delve deep into multiple characters and subplot. This being the case, I realized, conversely, that a feature film is actually closer in form to the short story, as movies can only deal with so many characters and they only have a couple hours in which to tell their tale.

For proof, here, some examples of movies based on short stories:
Minority Report
Brokeback Mountain
Memento
Rear Window
2001: A Space Odyssey
Rashomon
Psycho

I say all this to defend an art form that struggles for readership (assuming you're last name isn't Lahiri). I say it also for those of you not big on the form, who might have overlooked what can and should be packed into a 17 or 26 page story. I say it because as you may know J.D. Salinger was my first favourite writer (I sound like a kid talking about his firstest bestest ever friend) and yet I've only really written about The Catcher in the Rye. This is akin to being a die hard Beethoven fan and only every discussing the 9th, ignoring all the rest (including the 5th). For many Salinger fans, myself quite possibly included, it is, in fact, the short story form where Salinger was best. He certainly deserves to be called a master of the form. This is how he learned his craft; it's how he achieved his early fame; it's where Holden Caufield was first conceived of as a character. It's also where he wrote some of my all-time favourite stories.

I'd like, over the next few weeks, when not posting about movies and other books, to introduce you to/remind you of Salinger's Nine Stories. A few, like "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" are so famous and craft-perfect, as to deserve their own posts. Others I'll skip right over. This won't dreidel (to use one my father's favourite verbs) on forever. Don't you worry, sunshine. You might even like it.

For the first and most famous one click "A Perfect Day for Bananafish".