Call If You Need Me (26 page)

The new stories that are included here, stories which were written after
Cathedral
and after I had intentionally, happily, taken “time out” for two years to write two books of poetry, are, I’m sure, different in kind and degree from the earlier stories. (At the least I think they’re different from those earlier stories, and I suspect readers may feel the same. But any writer will tell you he wants to believe his work will undergo a metamorphosis, a sea change, a process of enrichment if he’s been at it long enough.)

V. S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.” First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that will illuminate the moment and just maybe lock it indelibly into the reader’s consciousness. Make it a part of the reader’s own experience, as Hemingway so nicely put it. Forever, the writer hopes. Forever.

If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or our intellects will have been moved off the peg just
a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, “created of warm blood and nerves” as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

This collection of eleven poems and two short stories from Syracuse University’s creative writing program—work from both graduate and undergraduate writers is included—is a writing sampler from the program. I think it’s good work, and I’m willing to stand behind my choices. Another editor might have chosen, indeed, would have chosen, some different poems as well as different stories. But that’s one of the things that help make teaching creative writing interesting and this particular writing program a most interesting one to be associated with: we’re all of us, students and faculty, different kinds of writers with different tastes, as unlike one another as you’d want to imagine.

What we do all have in common is an uncommon love of good writing and a desire to encourage it when we see it. We share as well, all of us, a willingness to talk about our ideas of writing, and the courage to put those ideas into practice. We find we’re able to talk, sometimes even sensibly, about a piece of writing—in some cases work so new it’s just come out of the typewriter the week before. We’re able, because of the special circumstance of community, to sit around a seminar table or a table in a beer-and-pizza joint, and talk about what’s good or bad in a story or poem, to praise this and discourage that. Sure, bad poems and bad stories turn up in writing classes, but, Lord, that’s no secret or disgrace: bad writing can turn up anywhere. The most common forni of badness is the writer misusing the language, being careless about what he is trying to say and how he is trying to say it or using the language only to convey some kind of fast-forward information better left to the daily papers
or the talking heads on the evening news. When he does this, the other writers around him will say so, if their opinion is solicited. If the emotion in the poem or the story is sheer hype, something trumped up, or just confused and smeary, or if the writer is writing about something he really doesn’t care about one way or the other, or if he doesn’t have anything much to write about and is simply finding that overwhelming in itself, be it a poem or a short story, why then his fellow writers, the other students and the faculty, will call him to account. The other writers in the writing community can help keep the young writer straight.

A good creative writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time. I think he can save a bad writer a lot of time too, but we don’t need to go into that. Writing is tough and lonely work, and wrong paths can be easily taken. If we are doing our job, creative writing teachers are performing a necessary negative function. If we are any good as teachers, we should be teaching the young writers how not to write and teaching them to teach themselves how not to write. In his
ABC of Reading
, Ezra Pound says that “fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” But if you take the word “accuracy” to mean honesty in the use of the language, saying exactly what you mean in order to achieve exactly the results you want to achieve, then honesty in the student’s writing can be helped and encouraged and maybe even taught.

Writing is hard and writers need all the help and honest encouragement they can get. Pound was a writing teacher for Eliot, Williams, Hemingway (Hemingway was taking instruction from Gertrude Stein at the same time), Yeats, and dozens of lesser-known poets and fiction writers. In turn, Yeats—by Pound’s own admission—became Pound’s writing teacher in later years. Nothing odd about this. If they’re any good, creative writing teachers are always learning from their students.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not an apology for nor by any means an attempt at a justification for the existence of creative writing programs. I don’t think they need one in the slightest. As
I see it, the only essential difference between what any of those other writers did and what we’re trying to do here at Syracuse University is that we’re simply involved in a more formalized endeavor. That’s all. We have here the makings of a literary community. Every creative writing program around the country that’s worth its salt has a sense of itself in this manner, a sense of a literary community at work. You know what I’m talking about. (But a lot of writers don’t get along well in the community. That’s fine too.)

In a creative writing program there exists, or most certainly should exist, this sense of a shared community, people banded together with fairly similar interests and goals—a group of kinfolk, if you will. If you’re in a writing program and want to partake of it, it’s there. But the mere fact of this group just being there in the same town or city can help palliate a little the young writer’s sense of loneliness, which sometimes borders on a feeling of genuine isolation. There’s always a feeling of dread excitement that fills you when you go into the room where it’s done, or not done, and sit down in front of the empty page. It doesn’t help to know that your fellow writers are doing the same thing, maybe even at the same time. But it does help, I’m convinced, that if something comes out of that time spent in that room alone, you know that there is somebody there in the community who wants to see what you’ve done, somebody who’ll be pleased if you’re doing something right and true, and disappointed if you’re not. In any case, he’ll tell you what he thinks—if you ask him. Of course, this is not enough by any means. But it can help. Meanwhile, your muscles will grow stronger, your skin thicken, and you can begin to grow the winter coat of hair that might help sustain you in the cold and difficult journey ahead. With luck, you’ll learn to steer by the stars.

The next best thing to writing your own short story is to read someone else’s short story. And when you read and reread, as I did, 120 of them back to back in a fairly short span of time (January 25 to February 25), you come away able to draw a few conclusions. The most obvious is that clearly there are a great many stories being written these days, and generally the quality is good—in some cases even exceptional. (There are plenty of stories that aren’t so good, by both “known” and “unknown” writers, but why talk about these? So what if there are? So what? We do what we can.) I want to remark on the good stories I read and say why I think they’re good and why I chose the twenty I did. But first a few words about the selection process itself.

Shannon Ravenel, who has been the annual editor for this series since 1977, read 1,811 short stories from 165 different periodicals—a big increase over previous years, she tells me. From her reading she sent 120 for my consideration. As editor, my job was to pick twenty stories for inclusion. But I had liberty in making my selections: I didn’t have to take all or, conceivably, any of the 120 that arrived one morning by Express Mail—an event that brought conflicting emotions, as they say, on my part. For one thing, I was writing a story of my own, and I was nearly finished with it. Of course I wanted to go on without interruption. (As usual, when working on a story, this one felt like the best I’d ever write. I was loath to turn my attention from it to the 120 others that waited for some sign from me.) But I was also more than a little interested in knowing just which 120 stories I now had in my possession. I leafed through the stories then and
there, and while I didn’t read any of them that day, or even the next, I noted the names of the authors, some of whom were friends or acquaintances, others belonging to writers I knew by name only, or by name
and
some prior work. But, happily, most of the stories were by writers I didn’t know, writers I’d never heard of—unknowns, as they’re called, and as they indeed are to the world at large. The magazines the stories had come from were nearly as diverse and as numerous as the writers. I say
nearly
. Stories from the
New Yorker
predominated, and this is as it should be. The
New Yorker
not only publishes good stories—on occasion wonderful stories—but, by virtue of the fact that they publish every week, fifty-two weeks a year, they bring out more fiction than any other magazine in the country. I took three stories that had first appeared in that magazine. The other magazines I selected from are represented with one story each.

In November 1984, when I was invited to serve as this year’s editor, I made plans to begin my own list of “best” come January 1985. And in the course of my reading last year I came across a dozen or so that I liked exceedingly well, stories that excited me enough to put them aside for a later reading. (In the final analysis, being excited by a story is the only acceptable criterion for including it in a collection of this kind, or for publishing the story in a magazine in the first place.) I kept these stories in a folder with the intention of rereading them this January or February, when I knew I would be looking at the other 120. And most often, in 1985, when I read something I liked, something that stirred me enough to put it by for later, I wondered—a stray thought—if I’d see that same story turn up in Shannon Ravenel’s choices.

Well, there was some duplication. A few of the stories I’d flagged were among those she sent along. But most of the stories I’d noted were not, for whatever reasons, included among those 120. In any event, I had liberty, as I’ve said, to take what I wanted from her selections, as well as include what I wanted from my own reading. (I could, I suppose, if I’d been willful, or out of
my mind, have selected twenty stories entirely of my own choosing, had none of the stories she sent pleased me.) Now—and this is the last set of figures, just about, that you’ll hear on the matter—the breakdown went as follows: of the 120 stories I received in the mail, I selected twelve, all beauties, for inclusion. I found eight other beauties from my own reading.

I’d like to make claims for these twenty as being
the
best stories published in the United States and Canada in 1985. But since I know there will be some people who won’t agree with this and since I know, too, that another editor would have chosen differently, with possibly two or three notable exceptions, I’d better say instead that I believe these twenty are among the best stories published in 1985. And I’ll go on to say the obvious: under someone else’s editorship, this would be a different book with an entirely different feel and composition to it. But this is only as it should be. For no editor puts together a collection such as this without bringing to it his or her own biases and notions of what makes a good story a good story. What works in a short story? What convinces us? Why am I moved, or perturbed, by this story? Why do some stories seem good the first time around but don’t hold up on rereading? (I read every story I’ve included here at least four times; if I found myself still interested, still
excited
by the story after I’d read it a fourth time, I figured it might be a story I wanted to see in the book.)

There were other biases at work. I lean toward realistic, “lifelike” characters—that is to say, people—in realistically detailed situations. I’m drawn toward the traditional (some would call it old-fashioned) methods of storytelling: one layer of reality unfolding and giving way to another, perhaps richer layer; the gradual accretion of meaningful detail; dialogue that not only reveals something about character but advances the story. I’m not very interested, finally, in haphazard revelations, attenuated characters, stories where method or technique is all—stories, in short, where nothing much happens, or where what
does
happen merely confirms one’s sour view of a world gone out of control.
Too, I distrust the inflated language that some people pile on when they write fiction. I believe in the efficacy of the concrete word, be it noun or verb, as opposed to the abstract or arbitrary or slippery word—or phrase, or sentence. I tried to steer away from stories that, in my terms, didn’t seem to be
written
well, stories where the words seemed to slide into one another and blur the meaning. If that happens, if the reader loses his way and his interest, for whatever reason, the story suffers and usually dies.

Abjure carelessness in writing
, just as you would in life.

The present volume is not to be seen as a holding action against slipshod writing or poorly conceived and executed stories. But it does, by virtue of its contents, stand squarely against that brand of work. I believe it is safe to say that the day of the campy, or crazy, or trivial, stupidly written account of inconsequential acts that don’t count for much in the world has come and gone. And we should all be grateful that it
has
passed on. I deliberately tried to pick stories that rendered, in a more or less straightforward manner, what it’s like out there. I wanted the stories I selected to throw some light on what it is that makes us and keeps us, often against great odds, recognizably human.