71-7547

REA, Paul W esley, 1943- A TEACHER'S GUIDE TO THE MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORY.

The Ohio State University,Ph.D., 1970 Language and Literature, modern j University Microfilms, A XERQXCompany, Ann Arbor, Michigan

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED A TEACHER* S GUIDE TO THE MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Ohio State University

By P au l Wesley Rea

Ohio State University 19TO

Approved by

A dviser Department of English Education ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Professors Wilfred Eberhart, John Muste, and Donald Bateman, whose encouragement and guidance have facilitated the comple­ tion of this project.

i i VITA

February 23, 194-3 Born - Detroit, Michigan

1960-1965...... B.A., Eastern Michigan University

1965 ...... Teacher of English, Roseville High School, Roseville, Michigan

1965-1966 ...... M.A., Uayne State University; Substitute Teaching, Detroit Puplic Schools; trip to Northern European countries. 1966-1970 ...... Teaching Assistant, English Department, O.S.U. Two trips to Europe. 1970 ...... Teaching in the English Depart­ ment, University of Northern Colorado.

i i i CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...... 1 CHAPTER I - THE EMERGENCE OP THE SHORT STORY AS A LITERARY GENRE...... 9 Willa Cather "The Sculptor's Funeral" ...... 36

"Paul's Case" ...... 39

Ring Lardner "Alibi lice" ...... 43 "H aircu t" ...... 45 Sherwood Anderson "Hands" ...... 48 " I Want to Know W h y " ...... 52

"The E g g "...... 56 "I'm a Pool" ...... 60 P. Scott Fitzgerald "Winter Dreams" ...... 63

Aosolution ...... o7 "Babylon R evisited" ...... 70

William Faulkner "A Rose for Em ily" ...... 74 "That Evening Sun" ...... 79

"Barn Burning" ...... 82

"Delta Autumn" ...... 86

\ E rnest Hemingway "The K i l l e r s " ...... 90 "H ills L ike White E le p h a n t s " ...... 93 "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" .... 98

"The Short Happy Life of Francis K a c o a b e r" ...... 102

"The Snows of K ilim a n ja ro " ...... 105

iv CHAPTER I I I - -MASTERS OP THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES Katherine Anne Porter "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" . . . 110 "Flowering Ju d a s" ...... 114

John S teinbeck "The Chrysanthemums" ...... 119 The Red P o n y ...... 122 William Saroyan "The Daring Young Man. on the Flying Trapeze" ...... 127

James Thurber "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" . . 131

Eudora Welty "Why I Live At The P .O ." ...... 135

"Powerhouse" ...... 139 "The Demonstrators" ...... 144

Robert Penn Warren "Blackberry W inter" ...... 149 William Carlos Williams "The Use of Force" .... 153

Shirley Jackson "The L ottery" ...... 156 CHAPTER IV - CONTEMPORARIES Flannery O'Connor "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" . . 160 Ralph Ellison "King of the Bingo Game" ...... 165 James Baldwin "Sonny's B lues" ...... 168

Saul Bellow "Looking for Mr. Green" ...... 172 J.D. Salinger "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" . . . 176

Bernard Malamud "The Magic B arrel" ...... 180

Philip Roth "Defender of the F aith" ...... 185

"Eli, the Fanatic" ...... 189

John Updike ...... "A&P"...... 193 CHAPTER V - CONCLUSION AND CONFESSION...... 199

BIBLIOGRAPHY . k...... 205 *

V INTRODUCTION

I write this, in 1970, in the midst of what I believe is a benign revolution in educational thinking.

Given impetus by the youth movement's cry for relevance in subject matter and for genuineness in method, and led by older humanists such as Carl Rogers, John Holt, Neil Postman, and Charles Silberman, this re-thinking (together with my own experience) has led me to believe strongly that liberal education must be reconceived and re-activated. I believe that education simply must reach and interest

students, and that it can best do this if it allows them to see that what they are learning holds real significance

for their own present and future lives. Education will once again interest young people if it addresses itself as directly as possible to helping them begin to understand themselves and the confusing world in which they must live. For these purposes, modern literature is particular­ ly useful because it records, in language that makes it accessible to a young reader, modern man's attempts to comprehend and live with the characteristic conditions of modern life—alienation from god and man, the breakdown of traditional beliefs and values, the individual's feelings

1 2

of impotence before the enormous forces threatening to control and even destroy him and his species. Modern fiction is more useful for these educational purposes than modern poetry, since the latter has often become too difficult for the untrained reader. Though modern fiction can also be complex and obscure, it is less like­ ly to completely baffle the inexperienced reader. Once the student has begun to appreciate literature, thereby developing his sensitivity to language and expanding his awareness of the kinds of problems engaging modern artists, he can read modern poetry with greater satisfaction and understanding. My experience leads me to believe, with Marshall McLuhan, that we are entering an electronic age in which various media Increasingly compete with print for a person's attention. The increased sales of books not withstanding, young people are spending less time reading and more time viewing and listening than their parents did. Acid rock now preoccupies the TV generation. Truly fine films appear as regularly as excellent books, and a film requires only a few hours of a person's time. While I believe that films are enormously valuable for liberal education, and though I urge schools and colleges to build libraries with viewing centers and the complete works of

Godard and Antonioni among their holdings, I still believe that modern fiction should become the single most formative 3 influence for the young person seeking to prepare himself a psychic survival kit. At this time, the cinema lacks the variety, availability, and repeatability which lit­ erature can offer the student. If modern fiction seems best suited to present educational demands, and if it is true that most young people are less willing to spend great amounts of time reading, it follows that students should read modern short fiction. By doing so, they can begin to involve themselves in the issues of modern life, which are treat­ ed fully in short fiction, just as they are in novels, and they can also heighten their abilities to respond emotionally, and intellectually to literature and life. If they deem it important, they can build a sense of contributions of the major modern literary figures. How­ ever, for students seeking education for personal growth, literature must not become an end in itself. Unfortunately, many teachers have difficulty meeting the needs of their students, for this is exactly what literature has become for them—a body of knowledge to be conveyed to someone else, not an experience to be shared. Therefore I preface this Guide with a warning, lest it be misused. In no way do I wish to encourage polite deference to authorities with the "right” answers, for teachers and students must constantly be teaching themselves to read literature more meaningfully. Nor do I want teachers to hide behind the august critics cited in my commentaries, 4 for students must learn, above all else, to inquire and react individually, to learn to raise and answer their own questions. How can a teacher who presumes to have all the acceptable opinions expect his students to learn to trust their own eyes and ears, which should offer rather different impressions? I consider any teacher who builds lectures from these materials to be abusing them; I have gathered them to emancipate the teacher from his anxiety that he may not have "enough to teach," in short, to free him to interact spontaneously and non-authoritatively with other students of literature and life. Confident that he is well prepared, this teacher can contribute to his perceptions a discussion, allowing students to offer and explain theirs, but not dominating or centering it around himself. This is very difficult for the teacher accustomed to conventional pedagogical roles to do. But only through such a classroom medium can students get the message that their questions and thoughts count too—one that is very important for them if they are to grow into confident, fully functioning human b ein g s.

As a literature teacher in a high school and at a university, I have been consistently astounded by the way teachers crave critical interpretations of the works they are teaching. Often we drag out our yellowed notes on Hoby Dick, scramble for the library, or, if we are less energetic, simply borrow a colleague's well-annotated text. 5

None of these methods is very satisfactory to the busy, conscientious teacher, since they seldom yield criticism of the kind of quality sought. Moreover, much meaning gets lost from writer to critic to professor to teacher

to colleague to student. More seriously, both teacher and student depend on critical pronouncements rather than building their own critical tool kits. Ideally, the teacher of literature should both know the most important critical interpretations of the work he is teaching, and possess the critical expertise to read literature for himself. Since few English teachers can meet these standards for ail works, this Guide aims to provide the secondary materials which teachers want and need. Similar guides exist for the novel, but none has so far appeared for the short story, which often proves to be the most threatening genre because teachers have studied it the least. By studying the way in which pro­ fessional critics operate, teachers can learn to be more critical and therefore come to depend less upon them. To encourage teachers to st^dy critical approaches as well as conclusions, I have deliberately included critical con­ clusions drawn from a number of differing critical approaches. The reader will find mythic criticsm of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "Blackberry Winter," and "The Lottery," Freudian criticism of "I Want to Know Why" and "The Use of Force," and essentially scholarly approach exemplified in the treatment of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." 6

Short stories present particular problems to the teacher seeking secondary material because they are less often taught than novels in college literature courses, and because critics often concentrate on an author's longer fiction. Teachers' manuals, critical anthologies, and

casebooks of criticism offer only limited assistance.

Manuals are often hastily written, and many texts do not have them; critical anthologies and casebooks typically

present commentary stressing only one aspect of the work- character, form, style, theme—at the expense of the others.

In response to this situation, A Teacher's Guide To Modern American Short Story is designed to provide important secondary material not now readily available in any other source. The Guide does not present questions—most anthol­ ogies provide an ample number—but it should raise them. Nor does it furnish biographical sketches of authors, which are available enough to both students and teachers, though

it does occasionally bring in additional historical or bio­ graphical information from letters, Journals, or biographies that illuminates particular stories.

By offering a number of ways of looking at a story, the Guide intends to lead the reader toward a position of critical relativism, away from dogma, and thus to encour­

age the controversy essential to education. Students can best learn to develop inquiring minds, capable of handling ambiguity, if their teachers raise as many questions as they answer. Therefore the Guide strongly discourages

imparting a myriad of interpretations at the expense of 7

student response, and seeks to equip teachers to respond most fully to the literature and their students. In the Guide "modern" pertains to authors who wrote

their most Important short fiction after 1905, thus exclud­ ing Henry James and Stephen Crane, however modern in sp irit their work may he. Here a "short story" is a piece of fiction less than fifty normal printed pages in length. Novellas and short novels are not treated. The stories were chosen chiefly on the basis of the number of times they appeared in anthologies, and, when space lim itations

forced further choices, an attempt was made to represent different kinds of stories by the same author. The first chapter summarizes briefly the develop­ ment of the short story as a literary form, emphasizing the contributions of nineteenth century masters such as Poe, Hawthorne, de Maupassant, and Chekhov, while only alluding to the developments of the twentieth, which are treated in subsequent chapters. While its primary purpose is to indicate the short story's growth.into a major l it ­ erary genre, it also includes brief remarks about writers

such as Tolstoy, who wrote several superb stories but did not contribute real innovations, and Kipling, who merits attention because of his immense popularity rather than his literary genius. Because of its brevity, the chapter relies on literary abstractions such as realism and natural­ ism which are defined succinctly in Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman, A Handbook to Literature. Revised Edition. 8

The second chapter, "Classic American Moderns," treats stories by Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, P. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. The third chapter, "Masters of the Thirties and Forties," concerns Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, James Thurber, William Saroyan, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, William. Carlos Williams, and Shirley Jackson. Chapter Four, "Contemporaries," includes discussions of stories by the following Post-War w riters: Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow,

J. D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Phillip Roth, and John Updike. Chapter Five sketches the development of the American story during this century. The categories implied by these chapter headings seek to place writers alongside their contemporaries, and therefore on occasion do include stories which, because their authors wrote them earlier or later than most of his work, appear under a rubric indicating a period of time earlier or later than their actual date. Reflecting the extraordinary performance of American short story writers, and the high proportions of American stories in most American-published anthologies, this study concentrates on American writers, attempting to cover thoroughtly the most important model stories of one nation. I f te a c h e rs and stu d e n ts deem i t su c c e s s fu l, i t may lea d to a sequel on the modern English and Continental short sto ry . CHAPTER I

THE EMERGENCE OP THE SHORT STORY AS A LITERARY GENRE

Defined as "a prose narrative of limited length,'* the short story is as old as literature. Tales and stories have expressed the storytelling instincts of nearly every society since the beginnings of recorded history. There are, for instance, The Tales of the Magician from ancient Egypt, the Old Testament stories and New Testament parables from ancient Israel, the Panc..j.tantra fables from Persia and India, the Thousand And One Nights from Arabia, the myths and legends of Greece and Rome retold by Ovid and A puleius, th e bawdy t a l e s o f th e G esta Romanorum from medi­ eval Italy. Most of the stories in these collections originated in the folk imagination and the oral tradition; and few readers read them as the work of literary artists.

The notion that a tale or short story could be a work of art emerged only during the nineteenth century. During the first decades, and apparently prompted by romantic tastes, collections of fantastic and Gothic tales written by literary men began to appear. Volumes of such tales flowed from the pens of E.T.A. Hoffman and others in Germany. However, Hoffman's fiction did not merely p resen t

9 10

. . . the superficial horrors and stage properties of the Gothic novel. It was a probing of the night-side of human conscious­ ness, of the fantastic elements of ordinary reality rather than an imaginary world substitut­ ed for reality.' In this respect Hoffman is an important precursor of Poe, who also drew on the romantic milieu but based his fantas­ tic or supernatural tales on credible realities. Washington Irving, also influenced by German romanticism and emotionalism, appealed to tastes for

remote and strange places in his tales, which he called

"sketches" because of their focus on setting and atmosphere. Though his sketches include ghosts, castle clocks clanging at midnight, and other stock Gothic devices, Irving was

at his best a serious artist, not merely an entertainer. He occasionally brought his daydreaming, water colorist’s art to perfection. In a letter to Henry Brevoort, written in 1824, Irving calls the tale a higher form than the novel because a writer cannot get away with dull or sloppy w rit­

ing in a tale, which must be "continually piquant . " 2 Thus Hoffman and Irving were the first of several writers, including Poe, Hawthorne, Balzac, Merimee, Gogol, who

together, in response to the rise of periodicals, develop­

ed the short story as a literary form.

^Lillian H. Horstein, ed., The Reader1s Companion to World Literature (Hew York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1956, p .211• 2 Letter to Henry Brevoort, December 11, 1824. The Life and Letters of 'Washington Irving, ed., Pierre H. Irving (New York: A.3. Barnes', l8o9 ), I I #4-5. 11

Poe sharpened Hoffman's contrast of fantastic event and realistic setting, and heightened Irving's effect. In his famous review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, however, Poe became the first to maintain that tales belong to "the highest region of a rt," implying the highest kind of formal discipline.-^ Poe stressed the "unity of effect" in the tale, which he believed "affords unquestionably the fairest 4 field for the exercise of the loftiest talent. ..." His tales exhibit this characteristic concern with structure, especially climax, and with style, especially word-color. Poe also, however, stressed that unlike the lyric poem, which also strives for singleness of impression, the tale aims for "truth." By "truth" Poe seems to mean both "verisimilitude to objective reality" and "psychological realism." An odd combination of realist, symbolist, and sensationalist, Poe seems to have most admired psychological verisim ilitude. Complimenting Hawthorne's "Wakefield," for instance, Poe observes that "the force of Mr. Hawthorne's tale lies in the analysis of the motives which must or might have impelled the husband to such folly . . . ."° Poe's own tales,

/-\ HAmnl TJa'mVq 3james0 n i i l C O A A. « Harrison, HCLL J. JLO l/U y edC U i y *tO Eel Allen Poe (Hew York: P. de Fai 1

4 Ib id .

5 Ibid., p. 108-9.

6 I b id .. p. 110. 12

reflecting his penchant for sensuous poetry and for the

extraordinary, consistently reveal his fascination with psychologlal abnormalities. His tales fall into two general types: the horror t a l e , such a s "The T ell-T a le H eart" or "The P a ll of the House of Usher," and the mystery tale involving either a crime ("Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the other M. Dupin mysteries) or a scientific puzzle ("The Gold Bug"). Poe’s horror tales of atmosphere and effect influenced later impressionistic writers such as Harte and Crane, Poe's crime mysteries presaged the detective stories of Dayle and Gambrain, and his tales of scientific ratiocination led to the science fiction stories of H.G. Wells. Poe effected great changes; before him, a short story was

simply one that was not long, and a tale was most often merely a crude entertainment; after him, the short story became an art form attempting to have a single effect through directness and concentration. Attacking "the heresy of the didactic," Poe shifted emphasis to craftsmanship and atmospherics, and thus became a seminal influence on modern literature. Hawthorne began writing tales in the late 1820's, publishing several, including "The GentleBoy," in a gift book, The Token, in 1832. Along with popular magazines, such giftbooks and ladies' annuals encouraged the early American short story writers by providing them with markets for their work. 13

The short story familiar to the young Hawthorne was romantic narrative of the lcind practiced in the annuals, and it was in the school of the annuals that he began to write. Griraness, for example, appealed to him as to the rest of his generation.‘ Romantic and conventional only in limited ways, Hawthorne's tales were strange enough and serious enough not to sell w e ll. Uni!,ike Poe, Hawthorne was much concerned with moral meanings and with the problem of evil. In tale after tale his special interest lay with the psychological effects of sin and furtive guilt, and he sacrificed surface reality for the moral and psychological implications, "the truths of the human heart," lurking beneath. Hawthorne, unlike Poe, was a didactic writer who did not hesitate to collar his reader in order to preach about pride or some other moral enemy.

In order to take his reader inward, showing him the deadly patterns of sin, guilt, and expiation, Hawthorne devised emblematic descriptions of external realities which reflect inner realities. The sketch became symbolic; nature mirrors human mental and moral conditions; plants strangely wither or burst into flame, or shafts of light penetrate darkened churches, objectifying the mental state of the character and implying a moral order in nature. This characteristic method involves symbolic descriptions

^Henry Seidel Oanby, The Short Story in English (New

York: Henry H olt,1909), p. 246. 14 which do not convince realistically but succeed allegorically. Steeped in Spencer and Bunyan, Hawthorne wrote brillant allegories, but is not a symbolic writer in the modern sense because he trusts too‘little to the symbols themselves, not allowing them to evoke responses directly. '.fith their witches’ sabbaths and poisoned gardens,

Hawthorne’s tales are not realistic; yet many do combine allegory with realistic historical details which produce verisimilitude, and most do offer the psychological realism Poe praised them for. Blending realism and romance, Hawthorne created a nevr form. Some aspects of this blend-- allegory, obvious symbolism, didacticism, and lack of

surface realism--led to few later developments, while other aspects, such as historical and psychological realism, symbolic description, and local color, influenced numerous later writers. For a number of reasons, English writers did not contribute much to the early development of the short story. For one thing, the novel was immensely popular, and periodicals ran chapters rather than tales. Moreover, during the 1330’s and ’40’s, publishers often ignored anything shorter than a volume of fiction, and preferred two or three. Most importantly, the novel of manners and society which had dominated English fiction for a century could not easily be truncated. H.E. Bates rightly observes

that the short story languished in England because ". . .no single writer applied to it a technique different than the 15 novel, and the Victorian novel was moralistic, explicit, and ornate."®

Since in Russia a middle class readership for fiction evolved more slowly, and the influence of romanticism re­ mained less pervasive, Russian writers were less bound by popular tastes and literary tradition. These and other conditions during the 1830 's fostered the innovations of

Gogol and Turgenev, founders of the short story equal in importance to Poe and Hawthorne. Gogol, Bates argues, marlcs the switch-over from romanticism to the thing which, for want of a better expression, we still call realism; he marks the beginning of the wider application of visual writing, of vivid objectivity, of that particular faith in indigenous material which is to-day the strength of the American short story.° In his two-volume collection of stories of Ukrainian life appearing in 1832, Gogol exhibits a sort of poetic yet photographic realism. Rationalistic, earthy, exuberant, profoundly sympathetic yet hilariously humorous in their portrayal of peasants, Gogol's stories influenced the early realists—Turgenev, Balzac, and Flaubert—and through them scores of later writers. Yet like Poe and Hawthorne, Gogol had his roots in romanticism; in his best-known story, "The Overcoat," the ghost man from whom the coat was stolen haunts the town and the pompous official who refused him help. The story uses the old

®The ilodern Short Story (London: Thomas llelson & Sons, 1941), p. 23-4.

9Ibid.. p. 26. 16 device of the mock-heroic to create a new mode, neither satiric nor heroic but fusion of both that is ideally suited to Gogol's sympathetic but distanced portrayal of a poor soul. In this story, the Little Man and the banality and ugliness of his life becomes, for the first time, the matter and manner of short fiction. Thus Gogol is the literary ancestor of Turgenev, Orane, Joyce, and countless other realist-artists. Turgenev's Snortman1s Sketches, written from 1647 to 1851 , are still tougher, more terrible pictures of Russian serfdom embellished with lyrical nature passages.

Again, there is a profound feeling for the Little Man. The serfs appear sturdy and intelligent in contrast to the aristocrats, who lack dignity. Actually disguised tracts for the abolition of the Russian feudal system, these stories, which soon appeared in SJnglish and French trans­ lations, interested later writers with social and political concerns. Bates summarizes the importance of Turgenev's Sketches. That volume alone, with its poetry, its sensuous reaction to natural beauty, its passionate nationalism, and its sympathy with the underdog, was a landmark in the progress of the short story comparable only to the publication of Boule de Suif, The Tchehov stories, Sherwood Anderson's Uinesbur^, Ohio, and the stories of Mansfield and Hemingway . ' 0 Thus one cannot assert that the short story originated in

10lbid., p. 34-5. 17

America and spread to Europe; rather one should say that in the nineteenth century many forces—romanticism, realism, naturalism, formalism, and lyricism—worked and clashed to make the short story what it was. In his Piazza Tales, written during the early 1850's,

Ilelville furthered the symbolic tendencies of the American

Renaissance. Some of these Tales are really symbolic sketches containing little narrative action. In "The Tartarus of Maids," for instance, Ilelville employs numerous sexual symbols to establish parallels between the valley and the female body and between the machines in the paper mill and male sexuality. The river flowing through the valley is blood-red, and the m ill's production process parodies human reproduction.^ The suggestion seems to be that women are enslaved by sexuality as well as by men and m achines.

In his best stories, however, Ilelville forces his symbols to grow unobtrusively out of his realistic details, much as he had done in many se c tio n s of Moby D ick.

"Bartleby the Scrivener," a brilliant symbolic-realistic tale of this kind, evokes its effects by using suggestive details, such as "dead walls" and "dead letters," which are generally plausible on a realistic level. The reader can believe that partitions exist between desks in a

1 1 i'Tewton Arvin, Herman Ilelville (Hew York: '.Tilliam Sloane A sso c ia te s, 1950)",' p. 2^8. 18 copying office in a"way that he cannot believe in blood- red brooks. In "Bartleby, " too, Ilelville successfully employs the device of having a narrator reveal himself in telling of others and himself. This device allowed Melville to distance himself from his subjects and themes, which often grew very directly out of personal experience. Thus M elville's tales foreshadowed the use of narrators in the realistic-symbolic fiction of Joyce, Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In San Francisco, about 1870, Bret Harte was con­ tributing important new elements to the short story.

Growing out of the American tradition of the journalistic tale, usually told in dialect, Harte's stories appealed immensely to stay-at-home readers back East, and were followed by the comic realism of George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain. Turning away from genteelism, Harte introduced new subjects and new attitudes toward them. In "Outcasts of Poker Flat," for instance, he depicts the essential goodness of a prostitute and a worldly gambler who have been ejected from Poker Flat by the local moralists. Yet despite these realistic elements, neither Harte's plots nor his characters are very credible. Few mortals, whether outcasts or not, have hearts of un­ tarnished gold, and surely "The Innocent" is not a typical frontier character. Harte's stories and characters lack depth. 19

Harte's work is rightly associated with local color, its which along with,humor accounted for its sensational popu­ larity. As editor of the Overland Monthly. Harte "like a good journalist . . . knew the formula: people, humour, movement, colour, suspense, surprise, the touch of senti­ mentalism, the laughter behind the tears.Yet Harte did,

by popularizing daring stories of local color with surprise endings, add considerably to the growth of a then young genre.

Flaubert, like Turgenev and Melville, is known mainly

for his novels, but his short stories, written mostly toward

the end of his career, exhibit his characteristic exact

observation, objective tone, and insistence on "le mot juste." Flaubert's stories in fact often seem like.shortened novels;

his "A Simple Heart" treats the entire adult life of Felicite,

whereas Melville treats only the final few weeks of Bartleby*s "life." Most short stories concentrate on such a crisis in a character's life.

In Three Tales, which appeared in 1877, Flaubert mini­

mized the romantic flamboyances s till evident even in Madame Bovary. w ritte n two decades e a r l i e r . As RenS W ellek claim s

"A Simple Heart," like Madame Bovary, treats the life of a humbler person with complete objectivity with concrete imagination, clear in every detail. We see and smell the interiors of the houses and farms, and can visualize the scenes of almost Dutch sim plicity.*3

^^The Modern Short Story, p. 53.

^Maynard Mack et al., eds., World Masterpieces (Revised ed.; How York: Horton, 1966), II, 6587 20

Like "Bartleby," "A Simple Heart," may be read simply as a realistic story of a poor soul; the realistic surface detail even encourages it. However, to read either story this way is to miss a richness of further meaning, such as Flaubert's suggestion of a pathetic secular saint, used to satirize religion as primitive magic .* 4 This "saint's legend" quality, subtly implied in "A Simple

Heart," appears more overtly in Tolstoy's The Death of

Ivan Ilych. and later in Kafka's "A Hunger A rtist."

Tolstoy first built his reputation on his Sevastopol

Tales, war stories based on his experiences in xhe Crimean War. These stories strip war of its glamour, but do not evince Tolstoy's later pacifist attitudes. After writing his novels, Tolstoy underwent a religious conversion in

1879 » and returned to the short story, often using it to preach his new dogma-free Christianity. Like Melville and Flaubert, Tolstoy is a minor figure in the history of the short story who he neverthe­ less contributed a few masterpieces. Nearly a short novel in length, The Death of Ivan Ilych ranks with the greatest fiction in literature. Employing a flashback technique after a harshly satirical opening scene, Tolstoy holds back nothing in showing how Ivan's life and death were "most ordinary, and therefore most terrible," Tolstoy is superbly

l 4 Ibid., p. 658 21

concrete and realistic; the descriptions include the

smells of decay and death, and compare in inpact with

Flaubert's details of Emma Bovary's suicide. Like "A Simple Heart," Ivan Ilych seems to be a realistic saint's life, for just before his physical demise, Ivan recognized almost mystically that his entire adult life has amounted to a spiritual death, and that in death he begins to come

spiritually alive. T o ls to y 's same sense of clim ax and same fondness

for moral parable are also evident in "How Much Land Does A Man Need?" This story is less powerful, less realistic, and more didactic; the Devil connives to snare a greedy landowner, and does so by tempting him to grab for more than he needs. At the end, as the greedy man dies seeking more land, Tolstoy comments ironically and didactically that all the land a man really needs is the six foot plot for burial. Clearly the work of a passionate moralist and reformer, the story demonstrates Tolstoy's typical abhorrence of greed and jealousy, and suggests his distrust

of land reform and free enterprise. In sum, the concrete realism and surprise endings of Tolstoy's stories place

them within the main stream of nineteenth century short fiction, but their overt didacticism ties them to the long Blbllcal-Christian tradition of legend and parable. Chekhov in a sense invented the modern short story,

} influencing countless later writers, and he remains the

most important single writer of the genre. After beginning 2 2 his career as a journalist and a producer of three hundred potboilers, Chekhov began in 1386 to devolop the new kind of stories for which he became famous. By Chekhov's time, Poe's theories of the short story had n e a rly become dogma because so many w r ite r s had w ritte n stories according to Poe's formula. Chekhov broke the"rules" of plotting, which emphasized episode, climax, and resolution, and invented his own more dense and therefore more poetic sort of story. Chekhov suffered from a fortunate mania for brevity and sought to tell the truth with a few carefully chosen significant moments. Typically, as in "The Party" and "Eniraies", he concentrated on depicting convincingly only a day or two of crisis in a character's life, and often sought to delete the normal beginning and end of the story, leaving more to the readers imagination. Yet Chekhov's stories are exquisitely structered, and often do, as in

"The Kiss," move toward a climax or even a surprise ending, though not one that neatly solves the problem.

Chekhov also merits acclaim as one of the progenitors of modern"objectivity.""Let the jury judge them," he urged in a letter to A.S.Souvorin, "it's my job to simply 15 show what of people they are." He avoids the patent moral judgement which Tolstoy makes about Ivan's society, yet he also lacks Tolstoy's intensity. Readers nurtured

1 ^ •^Louis P rie d la n d , e d ., L e tte r s on th e Short S tory, The Drama, and Other Literary Topics by Anton Ohekhovy trans by Constance Garnett (Hew York: WintonrBalch, & Co., 1924), p. 64. 23 on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky mistook Chekhov's moral distance for moral indifference, whereas in fact he consistently concerned himself with ethical questions, though not often in conventional terms. In "Enemies," for instance, he subtly condemns the doctor for his pride and prejudice and the deceived aristocrat for his inability to see that another man's grief runs deeper than his own wounded pride. Moreover, in this story Chekhov is less than totally

"objective," for he generalizes and moralizes about his situations, something that few modern writers would permit themselves to do. Claims about Chekhov's objectivity, then, are relative to his contemporaries. In his attempt to portray life just as it is, Chekhov evinces sim ilarities with the French naturalists, who also sought detachment, and who, like Chekhov, often exposed less attractive slices of life. Like the naturalists, Chekhov was a social critic. The Russia of his stories, Wellek points o u t, . . . seems to be nearing its end; there is a sense of decadence and frustration which heralds the approach of the catastrophe. The aristocracy still keeps up a beautiful front, but is losing its fight without much resistance, resignedly. Officialdom is stupid narrow-minded, . . . The peasants live subject to the lowest degradations of poverty and drink . . . . 16 Yet Chekhov avoids idealizing the peasantry, as most Russian writers of his centuty had done.

1^World Masterpieces, p. 671. 24

Using Chekhov’s work as a starting point, modern writers have further simplified the short story by sketch­ ing impressions of a character or scene, evoking a mood, and reducing nearly all plot or movement to dialogue. The search for compactness and objectivity, plus reaction to the contrived plotting and discursiveness of Poe, 0. Henry, and others, explains these modern technical developments. Thus Chekhov’s stories, with their "objectivity," brevity, and controlled social criticism, have served as models for innumerable twentieth century writers. Maupassant and Chekhov are often compared, and not without reason. Both began to writer about 1880, both were realists influenced by the naturalists, and both treated country scenes involving peasant types and city scenes of the petty bourgeoisie. However, on close examination, these authors are found to have many differences. Bates claims, for instance, that . . . whereas Maupassant's peasants give the repeated impression of being an avaricious, hard, logical, meanly passionate, and highly suspicious race, Tchekov's give the impression of a good-humored laziness, dreamy ignorance, kindliness, of being victims of fatalism ,.of not knowing quite what life is all about.1’ Maupassant, who profited from Zola's teachings, shared with the naturalists a deep pessimism about humanity, often show­ ing characters motivated by greed, lust, and other bestial m otives.

^ The Modern Short Story, p. 77. 25

In some stories, such as "Boule de Suif," Maupassant adopts a misanthropic tone in exhibiting the materialism and egotism of the "beau monde" in contrast to a chubby prostitute, who shares her food and drink, dares resist the conquering Prussians, and compromises her defiance only when blackmailed by the aristocrats. In "Hautot, Pere et Fils," however, the tone is sweet and gentle, the criticism less severe and more selective.

Such later work is typically less bitter. More than Chekhov, Maupassant allows his presence as narrator to show, often making direct appeals to his readers, frequently doing more telling than dramatizing, and even putting a theme into a character1s mouth. More­ over, the s itu a tio n s in some s to r ie s seem c o n triv e d . The prostitute in "Boule de Suif" seems an improbable companion, even in wartime, for the town gentry, who appear fully as wicked as she does virtuous. Maupassant’s realistic surface detail produces verisimilitude, but his contrived situations and plots and his overly good or bad characters do not. More "happens" in a Maupassant story than in Chekhov story, but Maupassant's plots, especially his surprise endings such as that of "The Necklace," sacrifice plausibility for effect or didactic point. The stories of

Chekhov and Joyce, with less apparent beginnings and ends and less extraordinary events, run less risk of seeming artificial. 2 6

Yet at their best, Maupassant's stories are fast- moving, sensuously provocative, highly entertaining, and packed with insights. Despite the improbability of its plot, "Boule de Suif" is a powerful achievement, with its easily indentifiable characters and shockingly realistic glimpses of what it was like to find a hated enemy occupying one's town and country. The story's revelation of the banal evils of war is superb. .Robert Louis Stevenson was the first important writer of short stories in England. T.O. Beachcroft observes that Stevenson "... has little taste for quiet realism. He goes for strong effects. 'My sole interest,' he wrote, 'is in the moral and the dramatic;' and it is 18 moral questioning he dramatizes." "Markheim," Stevenson's best known story, exhibits the nightmarish vacillations of a mind obsessed with guilt. Yfith this psychological approach to character, as well as with his controlled suspense and interest in evil, Stevenson demonstrates clear kinship with Poe. Like his fellow Victorians, however, Stevenson often wedged moral arguments into his stories, particularly at the end. Stevenson's greatest gifts were his deft psychological touches, such as his use of associ­ ative links, and his ability to create effects, though often at the expense of credible plotting.

^®The English Short Story (Londons Longman's Green, 1964), I I , 27

Though less favored by modern taste than Stevenson, Kipling nevertheless demands attention in a treatment of the history of the short story. Kipling’s colorful, masculine, nationalistic tales of British-Indian encount­ ers were enormously popular in their day and influential afterward. Fred Lewis Pattee explains that Another shaping force came with the ’nineties — doubtless created by the spirit of the ‘nineties: Rudyard Kipling, East Indian journalist and cosmopolitan reporter, who almost alone, both in England and in America, swung the short stor^form into new orbit. The decade was

Kipling liked to use narrators. In his earlier work, he used narrators with the mentality of a British colonial officer; in later tales, he effaced this prominent persona and substituted, as in "The Man Who Would Be King," the frame tale device. Kipling in fact liked and used various cunning devices for provoking suspense; his playing upon the reader’s curiosity about the final outcome, and his fondness for climax, place him in the tradition of Poe, Harte, Maupassant, and 0.Henry. Kipling mastered the "formula" story which evolved from these writers, and which literary men,-as well as editors of popular magazines, considered to be the stand­ ard of good form. Accepting the contrived plots, petty heroism, narrow nationalism, and trivial wisdom which exasperate modern readers, Henry Seidel Canby could in

^ The Development of the Modern Short Story (New York: Harper, 1923), p. 339. 2 8

1909 praise Kipling as "the most vigorous, versatile, and 20 highly endowed among contemporary wrltei*s. ..." Fortunately, tastes change. Professor Brander Matthews, Doctor of Classical Letters at Columbia, figures prominently in the establish­ ment of these conventions of the "formula" story. In 1884, he was among the first to argue that the short story constituted a new genre, different in kind as well as in length form the novel. Expanding and dogmatizing Poe's principles of form, climax, and effect, Matthews claimed that a short story must have greater originality, compres­ sion, unity of impression, and brilliancy of style than the novel. Matthews thus posited the unities of time, place, character, incident, and mood. Though Matthews' theories drew much criticism , they did, by the end of the century, contribute to the hardening of the formal concepts which so many modern writers have deliberately violated. Limiting though these conventions may have been, it is significant that Matthews did encourage people to see the short story as separate lit­ erary form with great freedom of subject matter. Like the novel, the short story suffered from an inferiority complex during its adolescence. Just as the novel was associated with the sentimentality or bawdiness of certain novels, the short story became associated with the mediocrity of

20The Short Story in English, p. 330. 29

the mass circulation magazines which sponsored it during 21 the nineteenth century. The techniques of fiction also interested Henry James, whose realism, evident in both his criticism and his fiction, had considerable impact on modern writers.

James wrote about eighty stories, many of them running between thirty and sixty thousand words. James excelled at these "nouvelles , 11 such as "The Birthplace," "The Lesson of the Master," and "The Pupil," and deserves credit as a

pioneer of this intermediate form. Thus most of James' stories are actually shortened novels, for James appears to have been uninterested in the unity of effect, swift movement, or single incident narrative associated with the short story. James opens "The Birthplace," for instance, with several pages of minutely deliberate exposition, and there is little dialogue or drama until the middle of the

sixty page story. Even F.W. Dupee, a James scholar, admits that To the history of the short story he contribut­ ed little or nothing except in talcing the form seriously and writing well in it. He had no part in the limbering-up of the form which was to give rise to such tales as Ohelchov's "The Kiss" or Joyce's "Araby." These would probably have impressed himpas inconclusive and hence inartistic. . . . Yet James worked with Chekhov, Joyce, Crane, and Conrad,

21 William Peden, The American Short Story (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1964), p. 3 . 22 Henry James (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951), p. 174":; 30 to effect a shift in interest from man’s external to his internal world. Whereas James followed in the mainstream tradition of European realism (Turgenev, Flaubert, et al.), other important American short story writers of the eighties and nineties began to follow more in the tradition of the”

French Naturalists. Ray B. West estimates the influence of naturalism, perhaps neglecting to consider connections in them e.

Briefly, however, it might be said that literary naturalism made less of an im­ pression upon the history of the short story than it did upon the history of the American novel. In the first place the short story because of its length demanded a greater preoccupation with . techniques than the naturalist* . . . was willing or able to grant. ^ Though it is true that the naturalists seldom exhibited great deftness of technique, and that the massive documen­ tation practiced by Zola and Dreiser stood opposed to the short story, it is also true that the objectivity, social protest, and deterministic philosophy of the naturalists did change the course of the American short story after 1890 . Judged by the severity of his indictments of America,

Hamlin Garland was one of the foremost literary radicals of his day. By 1883 he.had published two volumes of stories

23 Hollis Summers, ed., Discussions of the Short Story (Boston: Heath, 1963), p. 33* 31 of "veritism," by which he meant truth to the woeful economic and spiritual privations endured by pioneer settlers on Middle Border farms. In "The Return of the

Private," for instance, Garland debunked the romance of war by showing a soldier ruined by the forces released by the Civil War. Garland viewed the problems deterministical- ly, and often structured his stories of protest so as to make the reader feel the strains of a trapped character against the fettering forces beyond his control or under­ standing .

However, Garland in much of his work alloyed his candor, protest, and determinism with bland genteelism, Horatio Alger endings, sexual squeamishness, and lapses into sentiment or moralizing. Thus Garland's stories suggest affinities to both the French naturalists and the prevailing genteel mode. Combining the N aturalist's view that man is an animal with his own misanthropy, Ambrose Bierce seized upon one essential feature of frontier life—"the cheapness with 24 which human life was valued." The characteristic shortness of Bierce's stories itself their singleness of purpose and unity of impact. Given the brevity and the techniques Bierce employed, it is fair to conclude, with Fred Lewis Pattee, that Bierce does "almost nothing toward humanizing and making

24 Clifton Fadiman, "The Portrait of a Misanthrope," The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Citadel, 1946), p. xvi. 32 individual his characters. The death of the central figure in his tale, and he invariably dies, is simply the death of a p e rs o n ." 2^

Bierce’s bitter and cynical outlooks led him to develop new techniques for rendering violence. In "Chick- araauga," for instance,

we do not see the fighting at all or hear it: we see rather a group of mangled men crawling along in silence to a water hole like black b e e tle s . 26

In this story Bierce connects the violence of nature, the violence of the planter past, and the violence of the Civil War. Bierce developed a stark, unsentimental new kind of war story, fusing the candor and cynicism of the naturalists with the psychological horror of Poe, Stevenson,and the tradition of the tale of effect. For Bierce, though, the primary effect is the surprise or shock ending, and as Pattee su g g e sts, "many of h is s to r ie s begin when th e l a s t sentence e n d s." 2^ Bierce's work seems to have encouraged Stephen Crane's obsession against sentiment, disinterest in love themes, shocking treatment of war, and use of shock endings. Like Bierce, Crane was a journalist, and moved from his newspaper experience to fiction relying to an unprecedently high degree

2^The Development of the American Short Story, p. 303.

2 6 Ib id . . p. 3 0 5 .

2? I b id . 33 on visual effects. ' In Crane's stories, "impressionism is pushed to the extreme; the picture becomes everything . " 23 Every detail is vivid and accurate, and often symbolic too. Crane included subtle satiric touches in his other­ wise realistic sketches. His characters often have no names, which suggests that the reader ought to regard them as re­ presentative types, or even caricatures. "The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky," for instance, offers at the same time a realistic glimpse of the Wild west which Crane saw on his trip and a parody of the local color story which glorified or sensationalized the frontier. The story sets up an ironic contrast between "Scratchy," the boozing galoot who recognizes the significance of marriage to .the sheriff, and the townfolk, who cower from Scratchy but could en masse oppose their sheriff's new marriage. Though slight satiric exaggeration exists in some of Crane's stories, truthfully and objectively told, could carry its own weight of meaning and feeling without sentimental heightening. Though Crane's creed of truth and objectivity probably stemmed as much from his experience as a journalist as from Bierce or the naturalists, Crane's work is marked by naturalistic tenden­ cies. "The Blue Hotel," for example, Implies an inexorable, determined outcome, given the violent and passionate personalities of the. belligerants. In these ways, and with

2 3 Ibid., p. 3. 34 an almost unique visual sense of place, Crane in a couple of dozen stories was able to add a new objective yet impressionistic poetic irony to the short story. His influence has been considerable. Crane was if anything a revolutionary writer who broke with the conventions established by Brander Matthews and others. As the most advanced of the avant-garde, Crane stands far above Garland and Bierce, the other leaders of the revolt of the nineties. Like most men ahead of their time, and like most challengers of dearly-held pieties such as that of military heroism, these rebels were not well received by the editors and audiences of their time, yet they remained the most advanced short story writers when

Sherwood Anderson began to do similar things two decades l a t e r . In the entertainments of 0. Henry, the popular formula story reached its apogee. 0. Henry's stories— brief, swift-moving, chatty, and often culminating with a surprise—enjoyed sensational popularity leading to many imitations. Yet because they appeared in syndicated magazines and Sunday supplements at the rate of nearly one per week, their literary quality is rarely high. At his best, as in "An Unfinished Story," 0. Henry concentrates on a crisis moment in his character's life, using her responses to char­ acterize her and to criticize the exploitive labor conditions which have driven her away from reality and into fantasy.

But even the best stories often suffer from over-structur­ ing, in their perfect symmetry, coincidences, and contrived 35

endings, and from "clever" or trite distracting asides by the narrator. 0. Henry was no subtle artist, but he did allow the short story to reach a larger audience than it ever had before. Thus by the turn of the century, only sixty-five years after Poe, two basic kinds of short stories had evolved. One was the popular magazine story, written according to the formula of Poe and Matthews and characterized by contrived plots, surprise endings, surfact optimism, senti­ mentality, and subjective authorial commentary. The most successful practicioners of the formula story, Kipling and 0. Henry, encouraged modern writers either to imitate certain devices or to search for a different kind of story. The avant-garde story of Ohekhov and Crane, influenced by realism and naturalism and characterized by implicit rather than overt social criticism, by realistic plots and the omission of unnecessary background materials, led to the later experiments by the masters of the modem story—Joyce, Anderson, Mansfield, and Hemingway. The rest of the Guide

attempts to indicate in detail how the short story has developed in America.;, during our own c e n tu ry . A summary

of these developments appears in the "conclusion" to this stu d y . CHAPTER I I

CLASSIC AMERICAN MODERNS m ia Gather (1873-1947) Miss Cather's whole body of work is the attempt to accommodate and assimilate her perception of the pioneer's failure. Rear­ ed on a Nebraska farm, she saw the person­ al and cultural defeat first hand. —Lionel Trilling, in Malcolm Cow­ ley, ed., After the Genteel Tradi­ tion (Carbondale, Illinois: South­ ern Illinois Press, 1936), p. 49. "The S c u lp to r's F uneral" 1903 Willa Cather told many tales of heroic or artistic failure, among them "The Sculptor's Funeral" and "Paul's Case," both of which are.early stories,. In the former the pioneer spirit—fondness for nature, non-conformity, search­ ing independence of mind—survives only in the artist, causing his alienation and withdrawal from the conforming and commercial so c ie ty in to which he i s born. As Howard Mumford Jones a s s e r ts , reg ard in g th e e a rly s t o r i e s , again and again, tension in these tales arises from the desire of the artist to pursue beauty and the necessity of the craftsman, if he is to l iv e , to make some p ra c tic a l adjustm ent to the everyday world..'

VThe Bright Medusa (Urbana, 1 1 1 .: University of Illinois Press, 1932), p. 15.

3 6 37

Whereas for James the artist's problem involved searching for truth and refinement, for Gather it was one of striving for artistic success and personal fulfillment despite un­ sympathetic, uncomprehending, and often hostile surroundings. Harvey Merrick succeeded in escaping Sand City philistinism, in getting a liberating education, and in

distinguishing himself as one "with the word at his finger­ tips." But his determination not to compromise, which did bring him artistic success, also brings him down as a person. With art as his only means of expression, he suffers acute alienation, even from his fellow artists. Counterpointing the sculptor is Jim Laird, the lawyer, whose ability to compromise proves to be his ruin. He did not flee the town, and though he knows what he is doing, he succumbed to the pettiness, cynicism, and materialism of the raw hinterland. He too is a man apart from men, and in addition must live with a sense of moral failure and attend­ ant alcoholism. In his explosive phillipic which climaxes the story,-he indicts himself along with the rest of American commercial society. Laird could stand up to condemn, but never found the courage to live by his insights. His accusatory speech, though perhaps an overly patent statement

of the story's theme, does extend Gather's meaning beyond the fate of Harvey Merrick, and with its note of self-pity

and self-mockery does further characterize Jim Laird. The sculptor's mother typifies the smothering pro­ vincialism of the townspeople blasted by Laird. A hardened 38

old pioneer ■woman, she according to Laird "made Harvey's life a hell for him when he lived at home," causing him to distrust women even more than men, and crippling him for human relationships. The hard work necessary for pioneer survival hardened her, freezing maternal feeling. Harvey expressed this emotional paralysis in one of his has reliefs, which depicted the conflict between his own needs to share his delight in a butterfly he caught as a boy and his mother's practical determination,, learned on the frontier, to persist with her work. She experiences difficulty with her feelings. For example, when Harvey's body is carried home she bursts into an orgy of affected grief, only to lapse into petty rancor at her maid soon afterward. "Coarsened by the fiercer passions," she cannot transcend her personal disappointment in her son: "My boy, my boyI And t h i s i s how you come home to me I" Like the other citizens of Sand City, she believes that Harvey has failed, not realizing that her own moral and spiritual

f a i l u r e s are much more s e rio u s . As seen by John Randall III, "The Sculptor's Funeral" is "as bitter as any of the literature of the revolt from

the village," and illustrates the "sharp dichotomy between everyday life and pursuit of the ideal," which in Cather's early stories means the life of artistic creation. Most importantly, the artist, the uncorrupted pioneer, pays a high price for his achievement; as a result of his sensi­ tivity, he must break with his family and community, and 39

as a result of these ruptures, he begins to doubt all human

ties. Like Joyce, Cather thus recognized both the glories 2 and the dangers of the artistic life.

" P a u l's Case" 1905

One gets the impression that Miss Cather, like Dreiser1s chemist, is mixing certain ingredients and watching the inevitable explosion. No character in the story can effectively ask what is wrong with him or the w orld.

—D anforth Ross, The American Short Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961), p. 29.

Written at a time when the influence of the French natural­ ists was being felt in America, "Paul's Case" exhibits a number of naturalistic elements. Paul is crushed by powerful, indifferent forces, symbolized by the train, which blacked out his visions, forcing him to drop "back into the immense design of things." This final line of

Uie story implies a material universe and an absence of any afterlife, both of which were basic tenets of scientific

naturalism. Like Joyce and Dreiser, Cather showed the effects of the banal ugliness and monotony of petty bourgeois life when imposed on a sensitive spirit. She allows the reader to feel Paul's estrangement from his family and teachers, from the theatre people he admired, and from the burghers who sat idly on their front porches,

2 Landscape and the Looking Glass (Boston: Houghton M ifflin , 1 9 6 0) , pp. 25=7. 40 chatting about "their sons’ progress at school, . . . and the accounts they had saved in their banks." No one under­ stands Paul, the boy who was troubled and queer. Paul protests against his drab environment, flamboy­ antly sporting a red carnation, refusing to conform, and retreating into the realms of fantasy and art—especially music and theatre—for his only moments of youth. Unlike Harvey Herrick, however, Paul is not a creator but only a spectator. When his father forces Paul to quit his job at the theatre, Paul is completely lost in Pittsburgh, and decides to escape, which requires that he steal for money. "Until now, he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something .... But now he had a cu rio u s sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner." Thus Paul's pitiful estrangement, his frustrated quest for beauty, his defiance, and his struggle with fear receive Cather's sympathy, and t h e i r causes come in f o r im plied c r itic is m . However, Cather does not portray Paul uncritically. She depicts him not simply as a pathetic victim, but as a weak and immature boy who exacerbates his own problems. He lives only by his senses, and refuses to make any adjust­ ments to reality. He becomes trapped in New York because he cannot delay indulging his glorious fantasies at the Waldorf, where he makes no provisions for his future or for escape. His.ushering job encourages his infatuation with the plushness of the theatrical dream world, leading 41 him to scorn snobbishly anything besides the glamor and glitter he has glimpsed. Like Gatsby, Paul finds the very rich irresistibly fascinating, but unlike him can not take any effective steps toward joining them. Paul's experience at the theatre also heightens his

fondness for self-dramatization and self-deception. Posing

in his dandified attire, constantly smiling and lying to cover his despair, Paul drops his mask only when he falls asleep, as he once did at school, allowing a teacher a glimpse into his unhappiness. Paul's enemy is the real,

which he cannot bear, and which he fears will intrude into his fairy tale. He dreads, for instance, that an electric railway will spoil the exotic possibilities of Oairo before he can experience them. For Paul, modern reality destroys the beauty of the actual world, forcing him to seek beauty

in art and artifice. Paul is unable to appreciate the natural beauty of flowers; only the costly roses grown be­ hind glass can satisfy his senses. Like Flaubert, Gather reveals both the ugliness of actuality and the romantic

longings which make it totally unacceptable. The suggestion that beauty implies artificiality

links the story with the "decadent" school of ' 9 0 ' s r a th e r than with the naturalism. Many details in the story assert a certain fatality about such refined beauty, the best example being that Paul's "pupils were abnormally large, as though he were.addicted to belladonna." In a sense, Paul is addicted to "belladonna," which connotes 42 artificiality (it is used as a cosmetic) and deadly beauty.

Beauty invigorates Paul temporarily, but in the end, by encouraging his retreat from the world, it leads him to

destruction. The major symbols--such as the train, representing mechanical-commercial civilization, and the red carnation, signifying Paul’s romantic revolt in search of beauty in life—appear too frequently and too obtrusively to function optimally. Yet in the story Gather does distance herself from her protagonist; she views him with a dual vision differing from her uncritical presentation of Harvey Merrick in "The Sculptor’s Funeral." Her portrayal of Paul is complex and ambivalent, and therefore more mature. Paul is weak, unable to stand much reality or to persevere, and he has adopted high society's superficial notions of beauty.

But he is also a pathetic soul striving for some happiness in soulless surroundings. Emphasizing the latter viewpoint, David Daiches writes: "Paul's Case" explores the strange shapes the desire for beauty can take when an atmosphere of genteel ugliness removes all normal opportu­ nities for aesthetic growth and stifles and distorts all natural sensitivities J> Like much of the literature of our century, the story demon­ strates modern man's estrangement from the real world and consequent withdrawal from it.

% illa Cather (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1951), p. 99. 43

Ring Lardner (1385-1933) His studies, to be sure, are never very pro­ found; he makes no attempt to get the primary springs of human motive; all his people share the same am iable s tu p id ity , the same tr a n s ­ p a re n t v a n ity , th e same shallow sw inishness; they are all human Fords in bad repair alike at bottom. But if he thus confines himself to the surface, it yet remains a fact that his investigations on that surface are extra­ ordinarily alert, ingenious and brilliant— that the character he finally sets before us, however roughly articulated as to bones, is so astoundingly realistic as to epidermis that the effect is indistinguishable from that of life itself. —H.L. Mencken, Prejudices. Fifth Series (Mew York: Knopf, 1926), pp. 51-2.

"Alibi Ike" 1915 To savor fully the piquancy and irreverence of Lardner's satire of America's national pastime, the reader will find useful the following cultural history, summarized by Gilbert

S eldes: In 1910, when Lardner began to write about baseball, . . . it was still in its romantic era, on the threshold of glorification. In the East we still heard of Rube Waddell • waving the entire outfield to the bench as he prepared to strike out the last three men; heroic figures like Christy Matthewson had their pictures on cards in boxes of cigarettes; for the Midwest in time there were Tinker and Evers and Chance; . . . and all of these more than great players, they were great men, almost legendary in their qualities. 4

^"Introduction," The Portable Ring Lardner (Hew York: Viking, 1946), pp. 3-2TT“ 44

Into this hall of fame stepped Ring lardner with the news that baseball players were more than normally ignorant, infantile, and mean-spirited. It was no easy trick for

Lardner to spoof the national game while enjoying sensa­ tional popularity, but this is exactly what he did by being a great entertainer, and by sparing the actual heroes themselves. Only they (in this story, "ICid" Gleason, "Rube" Marquand, Lawrence Doyle, Harry Sallee, Ty Cobb,

"Rube" Benton, and "Red" Ame^), protected by libel laws, escaped the direct criticism heaped upon the fictional p la y e r s . Lardner successfully captured the baseball lingo, and humorous dialect effectively in the tradition of Mark Twain. Lardner's unique talent lay in his ability to catch and render repartee, as Otto Fredrich suggests. This kidding, in fact, is the basic language Y°u Know Me. A1 and of most of Lardner's works, just as it is the basic language of the society that Lardner dramatizes. In theory, it is a humorous language, but this is an ill-tempered humor, for the language of kidding represents a compromise between Americans conflicting-demands of aggressive­ ness and friendliness .-5 The humorous dialect, then, suggests a realistic approach, but its content quickly takes the story away from realism. The dialogues read like vaudeville scripts, with Carey, the manager, launching quip after quip, and

^Ring Lardner (Minneapolis i University of Minnesota, 1965), p. 1 2 . 45 with Ike as the stupid straight man. Ike's alibis are absurdly imaginative ("I'd of been up here a year ago, . . . only I was bent over all season with lumbago"), yet he seems too obtuse to see that such excuses only arouse the scorn and ridicule of his teammates. Ike cleverly wins at poker, but stupidly forgets the excuses he has offered only hours earlier. Ike is so preoccupied, the narrator opines, that he is unable to understand Carey's jibes, let alone to counter them. Furthermore, Ike's infatuation with

Dolly, resulting in his slump and the astounding end to his alibis just when he most needs them, plus their resumption just as his play improves—all these seem more like contrived attempts at irony or surprise than realistic touches. Thus the story succeeds as a lively satirical sketch, but not as a serious or consistent attempt at characterization. And it is perhaps more distinguishable from life itself than Mencken would have us believe.

"H aircut" 1925

The tall tale, told in humorous dialect and popular­ ized by Josh Billings, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain, had by Lardner's time become American literary tradition.

Just as he had done with baseball, Lardner took a popular American specialty and used it for his own satiric purposes.

Otto Fredrich points out that Lardner "attacked the whole idea of American folk humor" with an early brand of "black" humor, which encourages laughter at the essentially evil or 46 terrible.^ In "Haircut," for instance, the narrator tempts the reader to laugh at Jim Kendall's little notes to husbands in nearby towns, knowing that such pranks could cause great grief or even rupture all but the most stable marriages. Thus, rather than regarding humor as the remedy for evil, as it was for Ben Jonson and the classical humor­ ists, Lardner strips away the pretensions of "good clean fun," showing that the practical joker and his audience 7 are anything but innocent. In a psychological interpretation of the story, Melvin

Goldstein maintains that Jim Kendall is a failure--at his job, as a husband, and as a suitor for Julie. He is active­ ly d is lik e d by many in the town, and though admired by many too, he lacks real friends. A lonely and bitter man, Jim uses humor—always at someone else's expense—to express his hostility toward others and himself. His jokes become bolder as he needs stronger doses for his "kicks," and as he struggles to maintain and build his reputation for his one talent. In these strivings, too, Jim is bound to fail, causing him to feel further guilt. Melvin Goldstein believes that like all practical jokers, is basically sadistic, and sadism is frequently the result of a great feeling of guilt accompanied by an equally great desire for punishment to Q relieve that sense of guilt." Subconsciously, then, Jim

6Ibid.. p. 45.

7 I b id . Q "A Note on a Perfect Grime," Literature and Psychology. XI (1961), 65-7. ------47 wanted one of his daring pranks to backfire. Prom this psychological viewpoint, one can understand why the story is especially satisfying since readers oan indulge their own hostile feelings toward a sadist who acts only slightly more viciously than they have at times. More­ over, as Brooks and barren observe, "... we have the satisfaction of seeing the biter bit. . .," yet "we might still feel that this main action, taken by itself, is some­ what oversimple and predictable, even to moralistic and too obviously an illustration of brutal arrogance being paid off.One questions, however, whether Jim, who Jokes about getting "canned" at work and about his own futile desires for Julie, should be termed "arrogant" in any unqualified sense. According to Margaret ICasten, who svirveyed her four freshman sections, many students regard Jim as a "card," and believe that his death was the accidental ending to a "funny story." Like many of Lardner1s original magazine readers, students often fail to see the deadly grimness of the satire. Hot only is Jim ICendall guilty, but so are the barber, who thinks that Jim was "all right at heart," the listener, who says nothing, and "the boys," who egged on Jim by honoring him on Saturday nights in the barber shop. Once the reader recognizes that the narrator, who is clearly not Lardner, incriminates himself, it becomes

^Understanding Plction (2nd Bditions Hew York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1959), "pV l'45. 48 apparent that-the narrator is irritating him into response by taking a view annoyingly contrary to his own.1^ For this reason Brooks and Warren conclude that the character- narrator technique deepens the story, making its ultimate meanings possible, and allowing Lardner to reveal that "brutality and evil thrive by a kind of connivance on the part of those who do not directly participate."1 2 The problem exposed in the story is the very one which Lardner himself, as a satirist and a reputed misanthropist, repeatedly faced-- the problem of human feeling, which laughter seldom can re s o lv e .

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)

His world, like the world of nineteenth century romanticism, depended upon his faith in a n a tu ra l moral o rd e r which could be known only after the artifical. layers of social and religious custom had been removed or pene­ trated by a child-like intuition.

—Ray B. West, J r . , The Short Story in America 1900-1950 (Ohicago: Henry Regnery, 19527, p. 44.

"Hands" 1916

Anderson's fiction, and especially Winesburg. Ohio, in which "Hands" appears, centers on the human need to transcend self and loneliness, to mingle with the other, '.we.11 in creation. Like many of the Winesburg stories, "Hands"

*^Understanding Fiction, p. 145.

12I b id . depicts with loving sympathy a "grostesque," a lonely and isolated figure distorted by the repression and inhibition of American puritanism, which remains especially strong in the Midwestern towns. When first published in 1919,

Wines burp:. Ohio outraged believers in the myth of the re­ spectable small town. Wing Biddlebaum, whose first name suggests flight, or escape, is described by Anderson as a man "in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized.11 In other words, Wing has lived a half-life of unfulfillment.

Aged beyond his years, and broken down like his veranda, Wing has for twenty years suppressed his need and ability to teach and to love. As a young and ingenious teacher, he reached out to his students, incurring the wrath of the " l o c a l s ,11 who c y n ic a lly b e liev e d th a t Wing made homosexual advances toward their sons, and therefore drove him out of town. Such violent reactions to suspected homosexuality often reveal the guilt and sexual insecurities of their perpetrators. At the end of the story Anderson compares

Wing to a priest offering the Eucharist, suggesting that he is a frustrated priest of love, a Christ-like teacher persecuted for attempting to love. Indeed Wing functions as a spiritual leader to his pupils and to George Willard. The effects of being misunderstood, of being regard­ ed as a village curiosity, have been immense. They include estrangement, inhibition, and great fears of human contact, though suprisingly little overt bitterness. Wing endured 50 these for twenty years before attempting, in the central incident of the story, to reach out again, in order to re­ gain his former physical creativity and in order to love and teach again. Expressing himself and his insights into conventional town life , Wing, lilce Wash Williams and ICate Smith in Winesburg, Ohio, advises George to accept the unconventional life. '"You must try to forget all you've learned,'" said the old man, "'You must begin to dream."' This advice admittedly reflects .Anderson's own faith in intuition and imagination, which manifest themselves in his particular brand of impressionistic realism.

Tragically, Wing's attempt to overcome his fears and his sense of guilt ("he felt that the hands must be

to blame") ends in further frustration. His emotional scars are too deep, and since Wing cannot cope with his anxieties, he becomes once again a man apart and misunderstood. He must again keep his hands in his pockets, disconnecting body from soul. Critical controversy centers around the question of whether or not Wing is a homosexual. Bayard Raymond, like most commentators, believes that Anderson intended 'Wing to

be a sensitive, loving person mistaken for a homosexual, and that his overly obvious defense of Wing lessens the tragic import of the story. ^ Austin Wright, on the other

13»/jjhe Grammar of Hot Reason: Sherwood Anderson," Arizona Quarterly, XII (Summer, 1956), p. 139* 51 hand, maintains that the gentleness indicated in "Hands” is only part of what is important in Wing Biddlebaum; equally important are his exceptional naivete, his fear of society, his disastrous inability to understand the strain of homosexuality in h im s e lf. 3ut is Wing a homosexual, or does he simply fail to under­ stand the natural homosexual impulses present in most men?

The majority of the details associated with 'Ting—his low voice, his masculine habit of poundins his piston lilce-hands, and his priestly qualities—all seem to Indicate that

Anderson sought to defend Wing against the charge of homo­

sexuality. wring's persecution and rejection by respectable townsfolk remain whether Wing is seen as a deviate or not. Just as Wing is a trapped bird beating his wings, the narrator himself, as Brom Weber notes, “struggles to be free of the lim itations imposed on him as a Winesburg 15 grotesque.” Adopting a tender, Innocent tone, the narrator reveals that he shares many of Wing’s deep, un­ expressed feelings. His frequent intrusions urge the read­ er to understand that he cannot set forth the full story of

Wing Biddlebaum1s hands, one which if sympathetically told would ”tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men." "It is a job for a poet," he concludes, implying that he too finds it impossible to express himself fully.

^The American Short Story in the Twenties (Chicago: Universl*ty of Chicago Press, 196T 7, p. 334. ^ Sherwood Anderson (Winneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,“*1964), p. 24. 52

Thus both Wing and his biographer exemplify the main themes of the story--isolation and inhibition. Small town society has crippled Wing's delicate, expressive, talented hands, making them a source of guilt and anxiety, and ren d erin g them u s e le s s f o r human communion.

"I Want To Know Why” 1918

Under the influence of Twain, Anderson brought his own vision of the puzzled boy or boy-man to near perfection in a handful of tales that combine a care­ fully controlled point of view with painstaking attention to the subtle­ ties of the colloquial diction of the narrator, who betrays both a touching naivete and a sound sensitivity to the confusing paradoxes of the adult world. —Rex Burbank, Sherwood Anderson (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 97* Along with W. B. Yeats, Anderson was one of the last romantics. Much of his work indicates that he drew upon the whole nineteenth century romantic tradition, not Just upon Twain, however strong that influence may have been. Like the romantics, Anderson sought the primitive, the intuitive, and the non-conventional in terms of refined, rational, genteel white society. Maxwell Geismar discusses Anderson's "pagan underworld.” Horses and horse racing (before the day of the syndicates and mobs) were s till to Anderson the symbol of the pagan and plenary state, the natural life which industrialization, science, and finance ..capitalism, all conspired to deform or destroy.1®

^"Introduction,” Sherwood Anderson: Short Stories ed. Maxwell Geismar (New York: Hill and Wang, 19&2), p. xvii. 53

The narrator, like Huck Finn, is a pure and astute adoles­ cent much in tune with the clean sensory delights of the natural world--the horses, the aromas of bacon and coffee

early in the morning, etc. Tex Burbank notes that the

boy's values relect a hierarchy of natural purity which

is precisely the opposite of the conventional social hier­ archy: the stallion is more admirable than the gelding, the swipe and the trainer closer to the horses and therefore more pure than the owners.^ Similarly, Ray B. West Jr. asserts that for Anderson ugliness was "primarily an absence

of the beautiful, or a distortion of it--or, to use one of 18 Anderson's favorite words, a 'grotesque.'" In addition to contrasting the beautiful and pure nat­ ural world with the ugly and tainted social world, Anderson, like Lawrence, felt a need to heighten this contrast by showing the glories of the instinctive life. (Hence the

special sanctity of animals in the works of both.) For

example, in the first of the two moments of intense perception which the story counterpoints, boy, man, and horse experience

a moment of s u p r a - r a tio n a l, n o n -lin g u a l communion j u s t be­ fore the race. To the boy, and to his friends, horses represent a morality of simple responsiveness, through instinct and Intuition, leading to the self-transcendence so important to Anderson.

^Sherwood Anderson (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 98.

^ The Short Story in America 1900-1950. p. 52. Poliowing his interest in the non-rational, Anderson was one of the first American writers to respond to Freud's work urging the importance of the unconscious. Anderson's characters, such as Ning Biddlebaum and the narrators of several stories, often search vainly for their own motives. In a brilliant reading of "I T,7ant To Know Uhy," Simon 0. Lesser—a sensible Freudian critic—claims that the story communicates its meaning unconsciously since a great deal of its meaning is sexual. In Lesser*s view, the narrator, who is apart from his own father, wants to adopt Jerry

Jillford as a kind of second father. This is evident in the language the boy uses to describe the trainer's treat­ ment of Sunstrealc, and in the feelings leading the boy out to see Jerry the night of the race. (."I was just lonesome to see Jerry, like wanting to see your father at night when you are a young kid.")1^ Lesser also believes that Jerry's sexuality shocks the boy because adolescents often attempt to deny the sexuality of their parents, whom they idealize. The disclosure of Jerry's sexuality wounds the boy more deeply than Jerry's bragging wounds him because it "disqualifies the trainer for the kind of relationship the boy had desired—a relation which would be washed of 20 all competitiveness and enmity."

^Fiction and the Unconscious (New York: Vintage, 1957). p. 229.

2° I b i d ., pp.’ 231-2. 55

Irving Howe also explains the story in sexual terms. Like many stories of initiation into life, it depicts a young person’s shock and resistance to the cynical or sordid adult world. The boy resists his sexual awakening, which he has postponed by his idealized and sublimated feelings for horses. Seeing Sunstreak as "a girl you can think about but not see,1' he "fears the prospect of all adult sexuality," which can never be as pure as his relation to horses. A new ambiguity faces him—"life can never again be so simple and fraternal."2* The shock jades the boy’s world--"At the tracks the air don't taste as good or smell as good." Howe further explains the boy's agitation and bewilderment: "Not that the man can love both the horse and the contaminated woman, but that he can apparently love both in the same way, is the source of the boy's sorrow."22 Brooks and Warren, who agree that this is the boy's essential discovery, see the story as illustrating the conflict of values between the track and the grandstand. The boy senses that society's attitudes are unjust because they devalue Negroes and horse people, both of whom he finds more honest and valuable: the boy has begun to question some of the accepted values and codes of the society in which he lives. . • .he feels that something is wrong with people who cannot love horses simply because gambling goes on at the tracks.2-5

P 1 Sherwood Anderson (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951), p’: "1557 22I b id . 23 Understanding Fiction, pp. 325-6 • 56

But at the end he learns that "the horse is no longer a satisfactory symbol for the things he admires," since the • finely bred horse, unlike the man, "cannot do other than Oh. be 'spunky,' 'honest,' and 'brave.'"

The story represents Anderson's attempts to break ■with the artificial formula story requiring suspense, climax, and a clear beginning and end. Instead Anderson simulated brilliantly the oral narrator, young and confused, who looks back on his own perplexing experiences. Clearly the story means more than the narrator understands, yet he does recognize, as a sensitive person seeking trust and closeness, that perfect spiritual harmony with any one person cannot be maintained indefinitely.

"The Egg" 1921

. . . the Puritan pioneer had successfully eliminated pleasures, in favor of things and technical processes. By the time there were more than enough of 'things' to go around he had lost his capacity to feel life as a whole and his spiritual energy flowed in only one direction, 'that of utilitarian- ethics.' So the puritan in history had created not only giants but monsters . . . he was a lost child in a maze of ill-consider­ ed and unanswered questions regarding 'the full life.' —F re d e ric k J . Hoffman, The Twenties (Revised E d., New York: The Free Press, 1965), p. 31 .

2AIbid.. pp. 328-9. b l

Whereas the narrators of many of Anderson's stories are naive adolescents, the narrator of "The Egg" is an urbane adult who poses as innocent for the purposes of irony and satire. This narrator does not adopt the lyric­ a l " to r r e n ts o f sp rin g " s ty le which Hemingway b eliev ed to be too "poetic" and sentimental. Instead the narrator tells his parable with a poker face, pretending that it is only his family history without wider significance. He sustains this ironic tone remarkably.

Turning away from the conventional formula story, Anderson has his narrator include a considerable amount of background, which comprises most of the story, before he finally relates "the triumph of the egg." The reader can see a young man, age. thirty-four, leaving his peaceful, non-competitive life as a farm hand, seduced by the American dream of success which his more ambitious and genteel wife planted in his ear.

Something happened to the people. They became industrious. The American passion for getting up in the world took possession of them. It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a schoolteacher, she had no doubt read . . . of how Garfield, Lincoln and other Americans rose from poverty to fame and greatness. . . . The teacher who lived far from instinct and the soil, re­ ceives especially satiric treatment; urging her husband to "get ahead," she claims that for herself wants nothing. She is a prototype neo-puritan, "a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled gray eyes." 58

Once in control, the dream twists father, mother, and son into "grotesques," represented by the deformed chickens which become the father's "greatest treasure," and which ride on the seat next to him while mother and son trudge the eight miles on foot. The father's bald head becomes a broad road, emblematic of the downward path to opportunity he has chosen to pursue, and linked asso- ciatively (and ironically) with the road followed by Caesar and his legions. This sort of mock-heroic symbolism appears again when the narrator links his father's egg trick with the famous one performed by Christopher Columbus.

The mother, too, becomes a "grotesque." She has only one child, perhaps because she and her husband give up their sex lives in mad pursuit of their, goal. Her sterility and killing intellect are also associated with the disastrous chicken farm, which is literally and figur­ atively her child, or rather brainchild. The narrator, her only child, mocks the farm by commenting that most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. He also reveals that he too has become deformed, beginning with his restrained, unhappy childhood, and culminating with his fear of being seen hopping about on one leg like a chicken. After conditioning by his stern and ambitious

parents, he experiences guilt at feeling gay. The story contrasts the father's enjoyment of free­ wheeling Saturday nights he enjoyed before he set out to get ahead, with his perverted, self-conscious, forced 59 entertainments at the "Eat Here" restaurant. Perhaps overstating his point, Austin Wright argues that there is a "gross misconception of humor at the heart of the father's trouble."2-* Indeed the father's crass misuse of freaks and parodies of nature approaches black humor; it further indicates his own distortion, which is really the heart of the problem. Maxwell Geismar sees still broader social signifi­ cance in the egg, the central symbol. "The source of life itself has become deformed here; or rather, the society which advocates 'success' as the primary human value will come to cherish—and exploit—even biological deformity."

By conforming to.the "success" ethic, the father increases the already strong American tendency to develop a feverish anxiety to please at any cost to oneself, since "success" depends on pleasing. Prom Geismar's viewpoint, one can also see "The Egg" as another attempt to treat the "living dead" theme expressed so magnificently in Joyce's "The Dead," M ellville's "Bartleby," and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych. Artful despite the narrator's seeming artlessness, the story is rich in ironies, including the misfortunes following from the mother's overpowering ambition. It stands

2^The American Short Story in the Twenties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 196T 7, p. 33V.' oA Op. c i t .. p. x v i. 60 as one of the best satiric parables of "the American passion, for getting up in the world, and, as James Schevill notes, it represents "the triumph of the egg as an expression of

the fate of modern m a n .2 ^

"I'm a Fool" 1923

Significant sim ilarities exist between "I Want To

Know Why" and "I'm a Fool." Both stories, for instance,

deal with one of Anderson's principal concerns, those irrational depths of human behavior that a person cannot

explain to himself. In both of the young narrators there is a conflict (growing out of a search for beauty) between

the creative imagination and the everyday world. Anderson, placing paramount importance on the imagination, struggled to understand why it and beauty were repressed in American l i f e . Charles C. Walcutt regards "I'm a Fool" as an example of Anderson's impressionism, which shows that reality, "the thing at the heart of life," is not what is ordinarily re-

p Q presented. Anderson, like Crane, attempted to capture the impression of reality striking the consciousness of a character. In "I'm a Fool" the narrator responds to beauty around horses, in the countryside, and in the grandstand as well. Ironically., his heightened esthetic sense leads

^ Sherwood Anderson. His Life and His Work (Denver: University of Denver Press, 1951), P» 164.' p Q American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minne­ apolis, University of Minnesota Press7 1951), p. 233. 61 to his sense of social inferiority; tension between his esthetic attraction to horses and the demands of his middle class family diminishes his self-confidence and creates guilt feelings about his love for horses and nature. Anderson understood poignantly how the boy was not merely bragging to the girl about Burt's ride, how at the same time he was allowing his fancy to fly. As a writer of "imaginative" autobiography himself, Anderson understood his narrator well, portraying him with characteristic gentle sympathy. The story also resembles "I Want To Know Why" in that it is a sort of dramatic monologue, with the narrator revealing a good deal more about himself than he realizes. He is a greater fool than he knows, and his gay loquacity contrasts sharply with his serious moral predicament. He says "you can stick colleges up your nose for me," yet later, intrigued by a bourgeois belle with a "swell" name, he tries desperately to ingratiate himself with middle class people in the bar and grandstand. The narrator simply does not realize that he is insecure- and dissatisfied with the life of the sentient primitive; he blames his foolishness

on drinking. As in "The 3gg," Anderson shows how seductive "success," slickness of dress, and smooth manners can be to someone who, as an outsider, does not recognize their superfic iality . The narrator of "I'm a Pool" can be seen as the narrator of "I Want To Know Why" four years grown up. 62

By age nineteen he has lost or repressed some of his child­ like fascination with the sensory world, since it separated him from most adults and most of his peers, and because he realizes that he cannot remain a "swipe" all his life. He gradually becomes aware that he is "different," and that to seek further human community he must look beyond the track. These factors, plus his sexual, esthetic status needs, drive him to flashy clothes and dreams of great houses overlooking the Ohio River. In his innocence he sees nothing wrong in his sister's fear that she may not be hired if she is disgraced by a brother connected with horse racing, and nothing amiss in the wine bottle hidden away from the vigilant eye of the Presbyterian prohibitionist. Despite these fine satiric touches, both stories, though different in tone, treat similar tragic experiences—the loss of love and beauty.

"I'm a Pool" has evoked negative critical response, especially from Irving Howe, who claims that this story fails because the surface of the narrator's musings is "too coy for the character he is supposed to reflect,." that "the monologue is inconceivable from the lips of 'a big lumbering fellow of nineteenl'who has learned to drink and 'swear from fellows who know how.1" ^ Though usually one of

Anderson's most perceptive and sympathetic readers, Howe

^ Sherwood Anderson, pp. 154-5. 63 here seems to misunderstand the blend of Innocence and worldliness so often present in an adolescent. It Is possible, too,that the insecure narrator is bragging and feigning sophistication to his listener, who can sense that he is protesting too much.

Charles Walcutt observes that the story presents

the looseness of an actual oral narrative, and that "the rambling story represents the ignorant and disorganized character of the narrator." The meaning grows out of the impressionistic form, and the reader can sense the angered,

self-justifying character of the narrator. Walcutt also believes that the story "shows how the absence of 'manners' makes it impossible for him to establish an easy intimacy with the girl."^° This view needs more evidence, since

the boy has learned respectable manners at home, but if it is accurate, it places the story in the tradition of American literature protesting against the lack of estab­ lished manners.

P. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) "Winter Dreams" 1922

Often dismissed by critics as only a better than

average magazine story, "Winter Dreams" is (like most of Fitzgerald's work) not without its flaws. Sergio Perosa

30 American Literary Naturalism, p. 233. 64 argues that the story does not carry the emotional weight it intends, producing sentimental pleas for response, and that "there is a deadly monotony of diction."-^2 The story runs longer than many, and would be more effective without

those scenes which simply reinforce an impression. Fitz­ gerald handled nearly identical basic plots and themes in

The Great Gatsby, in which he solved the problem of cumber­

some interruptions by having Nick narrate, thus allowing

Nick's comments on Gatsby to seem natural. The eighteen-year span, plus the dominant seasonal imagery, allow Fitzgerald to treat two of his favorite

themes--time and change. Arthur Mizener explains: Into "Winter Dreams" he got all the acute sense of the destructiveness of time, which was his strongest feeling as a young writer—the sad­ ness of Judy Jones' loss of beauty, the greater sadness of Dexter Green's discovery that he had lost the ability to feel this loss . . . . This loss of the ability to feel deeply is the story's theme.

Even before the final revelation, Dexter begins to feel that "so much of ecstasy had gone from him." The shattering of Dexter's dreams devastates him

at thirty-four because he has until this time in many respects

lived in the future. After forming his "winter dreams" when he was fourteen, he remained attached to these romantic visions of everlasting beauty a la Sherry Island. He

32The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald translated by Charles Matz and the author (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 5 8 - 9 . ^The Far Side of Paradise Revised Ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1965), p. 212. 65 remained an innocent sophomore, growing, at least .on a conscious level, only increasingly apathetic to Judy her­ self once it became impossible to win her.

Dexter is a typical Fitzgerald hero. He is the privileged outsider, looking into the dance at the country club where he caddied as a lower middle class boy, and where he can never feel entirely comfortable even when he becomes rich. But he is driven to follow his dream, allow­ ing himself to fancy glittering things and glamorous people, though without simply seeking status. His dreams represent a reaction to "winter," which "shut down like a lid on a box," and which in the story stands for a depressing time of starkness without glamor. In contrast,."there was something gorgeous about fall," which represents fancy

(gesturing to audiences and armies), reminiscence ("the fleeting brilliant impressions of summer"), and ecstatic changes in mood ("October filled him with hope"). Thus, like Gatsby, Dexter lives in the past or the future, seldom in the present. Judy Jones, a thoroughly nasty rich beauty, appears to incarnate the smouldering resentment that Fitzgerald carried after being jilted by Zelda, whom he once called

"the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia." Judy represents the sort .of ungodly but inexpressibly lovely rich girl who, consistently in Fitzgerald, proves irresist- able to idealizing lovers, many of whom come from lower social levels. Since beauty was predominantly visual to 66

Dexter, Judy's cynical and sophoraoric schemes did not keep him from surrendering a part of him--his esthetic imagi­ nation—to her. His feelings toward her are consistently romanticized, not sexual, though she uses sex to maintain control and to keep distance between herself and her suitors. This early story, then posits the danger of the beautiful but damned woman, a danger which, along with those of drink and debauchery, became characteristic of Fitzgerald’s subsequent fiction. Fitzgerald constantly intermingled the themes of social aspiration and romantic love, showing how, in the impressionable mind of a sensitive young man, an ambition for attaining the glamor of the country club chimera can stem from an inflated and illusory quest for imperishable beauty. Part of Dexter's tragedy, as James E. Miller observes, is that his illusion largely wastes his vitality because it "failed to become more than his private posses­ sion.Dexter's dream blinds him to the simple facts of physical decay, which show especially early on a woman who derived most of her satisfactions from manipulating men.

Once she marries, she can no longer do this, and therefore her appearance deteriorates rapidly. True to type, too, she loves her husband, who treats her badly, but could not love her suitors, who entertained her lavishly. The story is in many of these ways unmistakably American, and some

■^F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and Technique (New Yorks New York University Press, 19^4), p. 103. 67 critics believe that it debunks the American Dream. Frederick J. Hoffman, for example, claims that "Fitzgerald experimented with the notion that success conferred . . . an inclusive privilege," and "he concluded that money ..IS brought only a limited number of things."^ "Winter Dreams," like nearly all of Fitzgerald's work, is autobiographical to an exceptional degree. Judy Jones clearly resembles Ginevra King, whose letters he kept all his life, and who, when he met her again in Hollywood twenty years after their parting, still attracted him im m e n s e ly . ^6 Fitzgerald knew better, but inevitably in the man and in his work these persists, as Alfred Kazin argues, a tension between what his mind knew and what his spirit longed for and adhered to; between "his disillusionment and his irrevocable respect for the glory of the world he d e sc rib e d .

"Absolution" 1923

Fitzgerald was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away f o r , some id e a of s e l f . —Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imapdnation (Garden City,' H.Y.': Anchor, 1953), p. 242.

55The T w enties, pp. 135-6n.

5%izener, p. 5 2 .

57On Hatlve Grounds (Hew York: Anchor, 1956), p. 245. 68

Intended to be a picture of Jay Gatsby's early life, "Absolution" depicts Rudolph's growing moral commitment to the imaginary world of Blatchford Sarnemington which corresponds to Gatsby's genesis from his "Platonic conception of himself." The story clearly associates Blatchford with freedom, imagination, sex, sin, and fertility, all of them in opposition to the dark and "muggy" Church.

In essence the story parallels the spiritual struggles of Father Schwartz and Rudolph, both of whom are lonely incurable romantics seeking imaginative freedom, beauty, and glamor. Whereas the priest's crisis first manifests itself through his weeping at night and his association of sensuousness with "complete mystical union with our Lord," the boy's fantasies are evident as he becomes Blatch­ ford, allowing a "suave nobility" to flow upon him. At first Rudolph only "reserved a corner of his mind where he was safe from God" for Blatchford, who is his "alter ego" embodying all he aspires to be, and at first, before encountering the boy, the priest "had reached a point where the mind runs down like an old clock." But by the end of the brief period covered by the story, the reader understands that the priest has slumped under the weight of the fear and guilt aroused by his pagan thoughts and heretical deeds. And at the end the boy breaks away from the childhood guilt he felt about his sexual curiosity and about his family's lack of success. He emerges on "the lonely secret road of the adolescent." He shows "the 69 intensity of his belief in the world of his imagination;" he is free to dream and to become Blatchford. Though the Catholic Church produces most of the boy's guilt and fear, the American "success" ethic contributes

too. The boy's father feels inadequate because he does not

compete, because he is too skeptical and unpredictable to

succeed in "hierarchic industry." The father feels himself a failure because he (literally) worships the "Empire

Builder" and the "success" standards it entails. Sensing his father's feelings, and feeling guilt himself, Rudolph wants to believe that he is not the son of his poor parents, and to proudly rebel against the stigma attached in America to poverty and failure to compete. Therefore the boy's

Blatchford connotes financial success, and the priest's vision includes "glimmering" expensive clothes and neon l i g h t s .

All this implies that boy and priest are innocent,

or at worst that they sinned for the greater glory of God.

However, several commentators point to Fitzgerald's own

Catholic training and interpret the story theologically.

Henry Piper sees the story as boy's "first encounter with evil,"3® and D.S. Savage believes that it presents a re­

versal of theological paradise, a "profane vision which is also the theme of The Great Gats by and Tender Is The Night."39

Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and tfinston,"“ 1 9 6 5), p. 104. -^"The Significance of F. Scott Fitzgerald," in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection Critical Essays ed. Arthur Mlzener (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963), p. 151. 70

While it is true that the priest's vision of the "glitter­ ing" amusement park is perhaps profane, and that its beauty- wili not stand close inspection, it is difficult to damn the pair for their thoughts, or even for their deeds. After all, as the priest declares, "apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previously perfect faith." Moreover, the tone of the story seems to consistent­ ly favor the boy and the priest and to criticize the Church and the boy's family. In view of Fitzgerald's skepticism and penchant for irony, it seems more probable that the boy and the priest had undergone an absolution of repression, drabness and stagnation.

"Babylon R ev isited " 1930

Writing after Zelda's collapse and his own convales­ cence in a Swiss sanitorium, Fitzgerald doubted his own fitness to care for nine year old Scottie, and experienced guilt about his earlier excesses. The story is the best of several providing new perspectives on the Twenties and anticipating the spiritual fatigue of Tender Is The Night. Fitzgerald's only major work written after the crash. As

Richard Lehen observes, Charlie resembles Dick Diver of Tender in that both are trapped between misspent, unfulfill­ ed pasts which they still long to relive and hopeless futures which drive them into the past.^

4o wFor a brief discussion of exact parallels between the story and the novel, see Richard D. Lehen, F. Scott Fitz­ gerald and The Craft of Fiction (Carbondale7 111.: Southern Illinois Press, 19&5), p. 14V. 71

Host of the story is devoted to Charlie’s reminis­ cences, which manifest his sense of personal responsibility for his fate and those of his wife and child. Charlie feels acutely guilty, particularly when confronted by Marion, who seems to represent the puritan conscience re­ juvenated by the excesses of the Twenties. To assuage his guilt, Charlie gives a street tramp a twenty franc note, and in a double entendre line at the end, asks a waiter, "How much do I owe you?" A heavy air of guilt and penitence hangs over him and over Paris, the modern Babylon.

But this is not to say that Charlie has, before the end, fully forsworn his earlier wallowings in sin and luxury. Commenting on Charlie's inability.to really change,

James M. Harrison notes that Charlie sees that the old, wild gay way of life was foolish, cruel, and empty; yet it still appeals to him. He feels its temptation despite his firm desire to demonstrate his 4.; solid virtues and make a home for his daughter. Charlie's nostalgia and his return to the Ritz to inquire

after his old friends indicate his unwillingness to break morally with the wreckage of his past, however much he may deplore its consequences. Significantly, when his past

returns to frustrate his plan, it does so because he obeyed his impulse to give his address to his unreformed drinking cronies. Hence Charlie is thwarted not by external forces

^"Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisted,'" Expllcator VVI (1958), Item 20. * 72 from the present or past, nor by simple accident, but by his own present failure to remain apart from the people and places of his memories. Charlie's deep ambivalence—a Claudius-like splitting of the personality into irreconcilable halves--provides the

central internal conflict of .the story. Like Claudius, Charlie is torn between desire for redemption and love of

sin. John V. Hagopian interprets the story more fully in

such Christian terms: Helen in the dream is a Beatrice figure, just beyond Charlie's reach because he is in Purgatory, where he must remain to repent more fully his sins if he is to win his Honoria. Charlie's choice between good and evil appears symbolically as the Cafe's of Heaven Ap and Hell yawn at him in Monmartre. Seen from a Christian point of view* Harion also comes in for moral censure, since she envied Charlie's former wealth and refuses him forgiveness. The story abounds in symbolism, Christian and other­ wise. Ash-grey Paris suggests exhaustion and repentance, while "one drink a day" represents Charlie's self-deluding moral compromise. There are repeated images of dissolution, dissipation, and decay, and several of suspension which imply a pendulum (time) and the dangling of Charlie and

Honoria between two worlds. The Ritz represents the past

^2"A Prince in Babylon." Fitzgerald Newsletter No. 19 (Fall, 1962), p. .1-3. 73 impinging on the present, and the snow, a major symbol which neatly frames the tale, stands for the realities of change and death which Oharlie begins to accept only at the end of the story. Fitzgerald structures the story symmetrically, allowing it to follow a basic exile's return and re-exile pattern, and rendering Charlie's gradual growth away from foolish nostalgia toward genuine moral rebirth through suffering. The story succeeds because it uses symbols unobtrusively, because it is tightly structured, and, as Henry Piper comments, "because it focuses upon a single incident—a husband's effort to expiate his sense of guilt for his wife's death by asserting responsibility for their small daughter.

Commentators differ about the outcome of Charlie's struggle. Most apparently believe that Charlie will succumb to temptation, and will therefore lose, once and for all, any hope of regaining his honor or child. Others, myself among them, maintain that at the end of the story Charlie begins to repudiate fully his earlier irresponsibility, as is implied in his lament that "I have lost everything

I wanted in the boom." It is true, however, that Charlie makes no searching examination of the causes of the evils to which he has been a party. The story is ironic in that the reader can see what Charlie cannot see

Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and W inston, 9 6 5 ), p. 1 6 5 . 74 about himself--that' he has not c h a n g e d enough. Moreover, as Andrews '.fanning notes, an "irony of regret" characterized

Fitzgerald, a "sense of the enormous beauty of which life, suitably ornamented, is capable;" yet at the same time he saw "the worthlessness of the ornament and the corruptibility „AA of the beauty." This conflict is fundamental to Fitzgerald and to this story, which represents his final judgment of the generation he came to symbolize.

William Faullcner (1397-1962)

Faulkner's creative gifts seem not essentially those of the short story writer, just as they are not essentially those of the lyric poet. . . His imagination is expansive. . . The epigram­ matist and the writer whose natural form is the short story have in common the intellectual precision and discipline necessary for the bald statement so apt in its inclusions that we do not regret the absence of what it excludes.

--Hyatt H. 'Waggoner, William Faullcner: From J e ffe rs o n To The World (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1959), p« 195* "A Rose For Emily" 1931 Among short story writers, Faullcner will surely endure, though he may not prevail. The short story did not ideally suit his "expansive" imagination, fondness for exploring multiple points of view, or tendency, especially in his later work, toward a rhetorical, periodic style.

^"Fitzgerald and His Bretheren," in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 60. ~ 75

Yet lik e Hemingway lie le a rn e d to p re se n t h ig h ly su ggestive images and actions, and wrote several stories which are acknowledged masterpieces. Faullcner omitted from the final version of "A Rose

For Emily" several passages of explicit comment, plus a conversation occupying more than two pages of typescript indicating that she willed her house to her Negro servant 45 and that she anticipated the hubbub her death would stir.

Had these passages been retained, the story would have lost some of the shock impact it now has. Faullcner1 s tech­ nical skill is also apparent in his use of the less than omniscient narrator, who as Emily's neighbor "stands at the farthest possible position from the heart of the story and still is within it." ^ With its carefully foreshadowed yet shocking revelation at the end, its controlled point of view, and its ability to suggest theme through atmosphere, the story is a technical triumph. Yet as Irving Howe claims, Perhaps one's sense of the story's limitations can be summed up by saying that finally it calls our attention not to its represented material but to the canny skill with which Faulkner manipulates it. ' Though the story falls in the tradition of Gothic horror, it is in substance far superior to most horror tales.

45 ■^Michael M illig a te , The Achievement of N illiam Faullcner (London: Constable, 1966), p. 2 6 3 . 46 / Kenneth P. Kempton, The Short 3tor.y (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947*)» pp* 104-6. 1 1 1 1 am Faulkner: A C ritical Study Second Edition. (New York: Vintage, 1952)7 pr'"2o5.’" 76

On one level, it is a classic study in abnormal psychology. Emily does not make distinctions between what are normally considered subjective illusion and objective reality. She refuses to let reality intrude into her rose-tinted world. In declining to pay her taxes, she does not recognize the authority of the mayor, and instead refers the committee to Colonel Sartoris, who has been dead for ten years. Apparently the kindly Colonel is still alive for Emily, just as her father and her lover were when she took no steps to bury them. The "iron-gray" hair on her pillow implies that she continued to sleep at Homer's side even after his body decomposed. Though psychotic in these respects, Emily evokes the reader's sympathetic response. She remains an island of the past, apart from other humans for nearly forty years, largely because of her father's practice of chasing away numerous suitors whom he considered deficient. She is the product and victim of her family background. Like her father, she is a person of indomitable w ill. She overwhelms the tax committee and the clerk in the pharmacy, who expects her to at least offer an excuse for buying poison. She prefers not to. A proud woman who scorns public opinion, she inexorably resists Homer, the town, the changes which have made the modern world, and even the forces of dissolution. For her struggle Emily deserves a rose of recognition; but there is mordant irony in her rose too, for her love is perverted, not pure, and she wins 77 her "victory” only at the high cost of becoming more a monument than a human being.

Emily seems to receive Faulkner's approbation be­ cause she resists the disintegration of aristocratic by values, symbolized by Oolonel Sartoris andAher hobby of giving china painting lessons. However, Faulkner's attitude toward Emily, like the community's, seems ambiva­ lent as Brooks and Warren suggest.

On the one hand, the community feels admiration for Miss Emily—she represents something in the past of the community which the community is proud of. They feel a sort of awe of her, as is illustrated by the behavior of the mayor and the committee in her presence. On the other hand, her queerness, and the fact that she is hopelessly out of touch with the modern world—all of these things make them feel superior to her, and also to that past which she represents.

By implication Faulkner undercuts both Emily and the modern town in the opening paragraph of the story, which compares Emily's decrepit mansion with "the gasoline pumps," calling it "an eyesore among eyesores." Understandably, most interpretations of the story emphasize Faulkner's great themes—time and the past. Sister Mary Bride believes that the story exhibits not just a woman who in the very process of dissolution clung to an ideal, but that its also displays the "revolting spec­ tacle of an aging and Impotent culture couching with a

^ Understandlnp; Fiction, p. 353. 78 modernism which its' nobler components rejected."^ Homer is indeed an unaristocratic modern Northerner whose infidelity implies that he does not live by the heroic code of the past. In linking the story of Faulkner's entire Yoknapatawpha saga (something one should always strive to do in reading Faulkner), one is led to see the story as an imaginary exploration of one rather extreme solution to the problem of s o c ia l and m oral decay. Whereas Q uentin Compson cannot accept this change, and Caddy and Jason join it, Emily pulls her blinds not even acknowledging its occurence. Emily's solution is unsatisfactory, like all the rest in Faulkner, because the decay occurs not only outside her bastion of stability, but within as well. Her doom is assured not just by unprincipled moderns, but by her father's violations of love and familial feeling. There are termites in the great houses. Irving Howe concludes that the story "presents a generalized parable about the decay of human sensibility from false gentility to genteel perversion."50 Emily's view of the past—that it is a beautiful meadow of tradition, separated only by the narrow bottleneck of recent years— does not allow her to draw upon it for spiritual sustenance.

^"Faulkner's 'A Rose For Emily,'" Explicator. XX (1962), Item 78. 5°William Faulkner: A Critical Study, p. 264. 79

"That Evening Sun" 1931 On one level, "That Evening Sun" is a magnificent horror story, a tale of effect in the tradition of Poe and Stevenson. Once underway, it relentlessly builds tension and climaxes when the Compsons leave Nancy hopeless and forlorn in her shack. In ever sharpening contrast to Nancy's growing hysteria is the petty, Uncomprehending behavior of the Oompson children, who continue their bicker­ ing about race—the very cause of Nancy's unhappiness—as they leave her alone. Showing some perception of Nancy's plight but no involvement in it, Quentin asks his father "Who w ill do our washing now, father?" Faulkner employs this technique of two simultaneous but contrasting conver­ sations with exceptional success, making the reader feel, as Nancy does, that life's trivialities continue, oblivious to fear and impending tragedy. From another viewpoint the story is, as Evans

Harrington believes, a psychological study of the "mental and emotional disintegration of a human personality under pressure of tremendous fear."51 As a woman and as a Negro, Nancy has been taught that she is nearly worthless, and therefore, as pressures mount, she claims sincerely that "I ain't nothing but a nigger. It ain't none of my fault." Harrington sees this claim as the key to Nanoy's personality:

51"Technical Aspects of William Faulkner's 'That Evening Sun,'" Faullcner Studies. I (Winter, 1952), 54. 80

. . . one feels that her adultery, her shame­ lessness, her opium addiction, and her ferocity—as well as similar characteristics in the other Negroes in the story—may be explained by the characteristic attitude of southern Negroes that nothing they do matters, and therefore they will escape retribution since they are only Negroes. One therefore reads Nancy's repeated assertions that she is just a Negro, at the time she is most terrified, as the habitual invocation of the god of anonymity. . One might also assert that Nancy manifests the psycho­ logical effects of racism: a negative self-concept and a tendency, after being blamed for so much for so long, to offer an excuse in any tense situation. However, the story demonstrates that in many respects it is actually none of her fault. She sells herself..to. a white man, causing no reaction from ruling whites, but when she becomes so brazen as to expose Stovall as the father of her child and demand back payments from him, then, even though he assaults her, she is jailed. She falls victim to racism, which blocked Jesus from working, there­ by forcing her to seek the employment which ruptures her marriage. As a Negro she is helpless against the assaults of anyone—whether Stovall, the jailer, or. Jesus—who chooses to do her harm.

The reader observes in the Compsons the character­ istic white attitudes under which the Negroes must live. Except for Benjy, who has not been born, they are clearly

5 2 I b i d .. 59. 81 the same family whose continued decay and failures to love are so magnificently chronicled in The Sound and The Fury. Jason at age five is already fearful, hateful, very prejudiced, and deferent to his parents. Oaddy, Jason's tormentor, is the most daring, defiant, and extroverted of the brood, and Quentin is at eleven the least prejudiced and the most sensitive. Mrs. Compson is selfish, unfeel­ ing, and conventional ("I can't have Negroes sleeping in th e bedroom s"), w hile Mr. Compson i s a g e n tle man who senses Nancy's anxiety and would like to help her. Because of his wife's pressures, however, he actually does very little . The Compsons appear alm ost e x c lu siv e ly through d ialo g u e, rather than through narration or description. As Irving Howe points out, the story "is a triumph of direct present­ ment;"^ it introduces several points of view, and allows the reader to view Nancy, the central interest, in several kinds of relationships. The story therefore tests the moral stamina of the Compsons and finds it wanting. They cannot help Nancy because their egotism and racial sterotypes will not allow them to genuinely care for her. The story is also a tour de force in terror. Relying mainly on dialogue, Faulkner involves the reader deeply in Nancy's struggle with fear.

53 Nilliam Faulkner: A Critical Study, p. 266. 82

In the final scenes, as Nancy speaks loudly to "Mr.Jason" hoping desperately to deceive her husband, or as she fran­ tically fumbles to entertain the children enough to get them to stay, the reader ■wrings his own hands in sympa­ thetic despair. As Olga Vickery remarks, "Faulkner's refusal to dramatize the conclusive action seems both to intensify the dominant emotion and project it beyond the story itself "That Evening Sun" is deeply moving and true; it represents one of Faulkner's most successful interweavings of the themes of sex, violence, and racism, and offers a reading experience of the highest order.

"Barn Burning" 1939 Once intended as an introduction to The Hamlet. "Barn Burning" exhibits unusually strong affinities to Faulkner's work as a whole. It is written in a characteristic Faulknerian style, with long, sometimes "rhetorical" sentences, and with moral abstractions solidly imbedded in image and action. It contrasts two social classes—the Snopeses, representing the poor but rising "white trash," and the Sartorises, representing the declining landed aristocracy. In treating the interactions of these classes, Faulkner demonstrates his characteristically complex moral v is io n .

5"rThe Novels of William Faulkner (Revised Edition: Baton Rouge: Louisianna State University Press, 1964),p.301# 83

Like Flem Snopes in The Hamlet. Abner Snopes has committed the worst crime in the Faulkner canon—losing his essential humanity, and disregarding the integrity and feelings of others close to him. Ab is severly crip­ pled emotionally (his wounded foot is a synecdoche for the whole man), and is incapable of fam ilial feelings toward his wife and children. Rather he rules them tyrannically, using blood loyalty to suppress any insubordination, and controlling his family by keeping them in such an insecure position that they will need his protection. Yet Ab refuses to submit to any authority himself. Perhaps oversimplifying Ab's motives, Oharles Mitchell argues that "all of Abner's efforts are directed at reliving the past when authority imposed lim its on his will by shooting him in the heel."^^ in sum, Ab exercises absolute control over his "niggardly fires" and his mule, but, like his unfenced pig, does not inhibit his urges to defy and destroy. As Mitchell suggests, "ironically the defense of his freedom imprisons him more securely in his w ill: Abner can only choose to step in the pile of dung."-^

However, Ab is not entirely a rebel without a cause. Under the closed, almost feudal system of the South, poor whites such as the Snopeses could not easily accumulate enough money to escape from tenant farming, and even if

55»ihe Hounded Will of Faulkner's Barn Burner," Modern Fiction Studies. XI (1965), Ho. 2, 185.

5 6 Ibid., 187. 84 they were able to escape and buy their own land, they lacked the hereditary amenities necessary to enter Sartoris society. To this degree, then Ab is a sympathetic character, for he does demonstrate "wolfish independence, and even courage" in attempting to live near the bottom of a rigid social hierarchy. He is a many-sided characterization revealing Faulkner's complex moral vision. The reader's response to Major de Spain is also ambivalent. As a Sartoris, de Spain is associated with truth, and as the lord of a great white house, he exhibits his magnanimity in dealing with Ab's act of contempt involving the imported rug. He appears in person rather than sending a servant to deliver a message to Snopes, endures insulting behavior when he arrives, and offers to settle the rug case at an eighty per cent loss to himself. He does, however, condescend to Ab ("You never had a hundred dollars. You never w ill"), and does benefit from and perpetuate a system which enslaved blacks and exploits poor whites. While Faulkner evinced an especial feeling for the noble values of the old aristocrats, he was also sensitive to their failures to live by them. By having Lula de Spain notice the soiled rug before she notices Ab, for instance, Faulkner undercuts the moral authority of the Sartoris class. The Sartorises do, however, on the whole emerge in a more favorable light than the Snopeses; they do at least affirm a moral code, while Ab Snopes does not, other than warning "Don't tread

on me." 85

Sarty Is, as’ his name suggests, caught between the two cultures. He has been trained to feel the pull of blood ties, yet as he develops moral awareness, his father's deceit and destructiveness become increasingly unbearable to him. He sees that even when given a fair chance to change, his father cannot live peaceably, and that the great white house, which he associates with truth, honor, order and justice, offers a much more appealing way of life. Hence seeing the house and the "largesse” of its owner, Sarty is led to adopt the moral code they represent.

His father's actions seem increasingly wrong to him, especially since they are directed at the very symbols of the code. Literally and symbolically, he must pull away from his family to protect and live by what he believes to be the higher code. Yet in the final paragraph Faullcner describes him as "stiff,” connecting his act of rebellion with those of his father. Like Huclcleberr.v Firm, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” and "The Bear,” the story depicts a young boy's moral initiation into life. It is, as Irving Howe maintains,

"painful to read in the way any story must be which records a boy's discovery that he is trapped in the soiled, and 57 dishonest world of his elders.” Yet there is also the joy of watching a young person turn away from the evil

57 Vfilliam Faulkner: A Oritlcal Study, p. 266. 86 around him and set out to make a fresh start. Whether he will he able to continue to live by his ideals in the cynical modern world is another question, one which Faulkner later answers negatively in Go Down, Moses. As Edmond L. Volpe points out, "throughout Faulkner's fiction, twenti­ eth-century society is seen as the enemy, encroaching upon the individual's integrity and strangling humanistic v a lu e ."58

"Delta Autumn" 194-1

The rape of nature, the mere exploitation of it without love, is always avenged be­ cause the attitude which commits that crime also commits the crime against men which in turn exacts vengeance, so that man finally punishes himself. —Robert Penn Warren, "William Faulkner," William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, eds. (Hew York: Harbinger, 1960), p. 116. "Delta Autumn." The story's title itself suggests the ending of a Journey or era, plus the nostalgia accom­ panying such an end. Appearing near the end of Go Down.

Iloses. a collection of interrelated stories, the story picks up and redefines two of the book's major themes—race relations and the destruction of the wilderness.

58The Reade rrs Guide to William Faulkner (Hew York: Hoonday, 19^77 P« 21. 87

More than half a century has elapsed since the time at the close of "The Bear," the preceding story, and Uncle Ike, now in his seventies, laments that all has changed utterly. Man has hacked away at the wilds, and killed the once bountiful game. Most significantly, the annual autumn hunt, which had once been a common ritual of renewal,

has deteriorated into a mere diversion. The code of the woods that Ike learned from Sam Fathers has become a

cynical Joke in the minds of Roth and Legate. The killing of the doe effectively betrays Ike's failure to teach the code to the younger hunters, and, through the double entendre of the word "doe," links the hunting and racial- sexual themes of the story. Faulkner deliberately associates Roth's violation of the code of the woods with his repeated violations of the mulatto woman in the human realm. Viewed as a postlude to "The Bear," "Delta Autumn" refutes or qualifies several of the apparent affirmations made in "The Bear." Using Ike as the primary case in point,

it raises doubts about whether loving feelings toward nature necessarily lead to loving attitudes toward human

beings. As Edmund Volpe observes, "the social man, the product of his social donditioning, is stronger than the natural man, exposed and nurtured by Sam Fathers."59 The

59Ibid., p. 2 5 0 . 88 mulatto puts Ike's moral idealism to the test, revealing its bankruptcy. '"Old man,' she said, 'have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don't remember anything you ever knew or felt about love?'" This question, which Ike cannot answer, climaxes the thematic development of the story and of Go Down. Moses. There are several causes for Ike's failure to love. John M. Kuste maintains that Ike fails because he gives his love to the doomed and non-human wilderness and shuns human contacts.

The answer to this, developed painstakingly by Faulkner through all seven stories in the book, is that in his relationships, the white man has not known or felt anything about love, and has been unable to understand what he has heard . 60 Arthur F. Kinney argues that Ike's moral failure results from his false theory that war and miscegenation are God's forms of communal penance, and from his false practice of giving money or material objects (such as the hunting horn) to atone for sins. The M cOaslins want s a lv a tio n too e a s ily , .and their concern turns into cowardice. Ike doesn't spend a life of penance—he runs from the guilt-ridden line of the McOaslins into a useless dream world of emulating Christ.0' It is true that Ike's theory of communal penance apparently encouraged him to believe that any mixing of the races

^°"Ihe Failure of Love in Go Down. Hoses. " Modern Fiction Studies. X (1965), 372. ^utley, Francis L., Lynn Z. Bloom, and Arthur Kinney, eds., Bear. Han, and God (Hew York: Random House, 1964), p. 3 9 0 , 89 was evil, and that,' as Faulkner himself commented, Ike should have done more than merely repudiate the land.

Michael Milligate further suggests that11 Ike a t th e moment 62 of confrontation can muster only the traditional reactions;" i.e., he has bought uncritically the conventional wisdom of Southern racism. In sum, Ike repudiated his legacy, breaking with the sins of his forefathers, but neither renounced nor opposed the sins of his own time.

As the whites, symbolized by Ike, decline in moral and spiritual fiber, the Negroes, represented by the 63 mulatto girl, seem to have gained it. ^ The Negro will endure, Faulkner seems to say. The Negro, the reminder of white guilt, the incarnation of the curse that led the

South to economic and moral ruin, comes to Imprison the whites in their own taboos, which will not permit a white to respond naturally and humanly to a Negro, even if she be a blood relative. If indeed there is communal penance, this imprisionment may constitute it. In "Delta Autumn" Faulkner shows that no Moses, however principled and well- meaning, can expiate or eliminate the burden of accumulat­ ed guilt which follows the white man even into the sacred wilderness.

62 The Achievement of William Faulkner (London: Constable, 1 9 6 6), p. 211.

6 3 Muste, p. 377-8. 90

S rn e st Hemingway (’1899-1961)

The War i s but one of many circum stances which has led vast numbers of thinking men, in our time, to distrust abstractions and idealogies. A disposition to behavior­ ism in fiction has carried with it an in­ disposition to the use of adjectives and metaphysical terminology. Our artists in fiction have tried to see how far they can go with a mere notation of objective facts.

—Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction; 1920-1940 (Hew York: Macmillan, 1 9k1), p. 111.

"The K ille r s " 1926 One suspects that "The Killers" appears in anthol­ ogies more often than any other story not only because it is one of Hemingway's very best, but because it typifies his early work especially well. The story sports the now legendary "Hemingway style," or at least the one characterized by simple co-ordinate, lucid, unadorned sen­ tences and much terse, controlled dialogue. Florid rhetoric ’ and windy speeches are the exact antitheis of this early style. Hemingway axed away decoration, abstraction, and prolixity, seeking what H.E. Bates calls "direct, pictorial contact between eye and object, between object and reader. Avoiding long descriptions, Hemingway used a very few suggestive concrete details,' such as the arc light and the wall, to control emotion in a way that Anderson and -

^The Modern Short Story: A C ritical Survey (London: Thomas N elson, 1 9 4 3 ) PP« 168-97 91

Faullcner could not." Hemingway's rigourously objective,

"hard boiled" manner itself conveys the impression that powerful emotions must be checked—and cannot be indulged— so as not to get out of control. Reading the early Heming­ way is like listening to a veteran discuss his recollections of Bougainville in a few cautiously chosen words. However, as Brooks and Warren suggest, the directness of Hemingway's style "seems to imply that the use of the intellect, with its careful discriminations, may blur the rendering of experience and may falsify it. . "The Killers" is also typical in that, as Joseph

Warren Beach observes, Hemingway's "favorite situations in his best stories are those involving death and danger,

. . . because there the emotions involved are so unequivocal, and there is little opportunity to waste words on them." Again and again in the Nick Adams stories, one faces the effects of disorder and violence on a young and sensitive mind; one witnesses the initiatory wounding of Nick as he encounters life "in our time," with all its chaos and violence. Nick's contact with the "absurdity" of impending violence and evil agitates him so much that he cannot remain in summit to be reminded .of what he has seen.

Oarlos Baker remarks that Ole Andreson stands for "a whole widespread human predicament, deep in the grain

^Understanding Fiction, p. 311.

^American Fiction; 1920- 194-0 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 97. 92

of human experience," and that the killers may represent

fascists ’'who have overcome the Andresons, the victims ■who have given up the fight for liberty,"67 it is indeed true that Ole remains passive, perhaps losing an opportunity to live longer or at least to resist nobly. But it also seems true that, as Clinton, Oliver claims, "for the early Hemingway, nothing is important in his world save strength and the skill

to survive in a universe that is utterly meaningless . "6 8

Are we then, to regard Ole as a Bartleby figure who gives up and drops out? Oliver himself sees Ole as a stoic hero,

"an undefeated m a n ,"69 and Phillip Young, one of Hemingway's most astute commentators, suggests that Ole is a "code hero" who demonstrates that "you lose, of course; what counts is how you conduct yourself while you are being destroyed."7° Ole Andreson clearly does seem to prove his courage by demonstrating, in Hemingway's phrase, "grace under pressure," and by risking bodily harm as a boxer. Ole does not jump when Hick enters his room. Out of fatigue and despair, but with new resolve to die like a man, Ole has stopped running from his enemies.

67Hemingway: The Writer As A rtist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 123. ^ M ic h a e l Timko and C lin to n P. O liv e r, e d s. T h irty Eight Stories: An Introductory Anthology (New York: Knopf, T W , p. 71.

6 9 Ib id . . p. 7 6 . 7°E rn est Hemingway (M inneapolis: U n iv e rsity of M innesota Press, 1959), P. 11. 93

In addition to learning from Ole's example, lick also discovers society's inability to protect the lives of its members'll and the unwillingness of many members,

such as Sam, to do anything to come to the aid of another. Others, like George, will do something as long as the risks are minimal. Only naive but concerned Nick active­

ly attempts to avert a murder. The three represent in­ creasing degrees of involvement, and differing ways of

dealing with evil. Nick discovers the evil of fear, the irrationality of evil, the obscene casualness of the pro­ fessional killers, and the way that normal life, represented by Mrs. Bell, can go on oblivious to evil and suffering; as N.H. Auden wrote, "how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster."7 2 All of these shocking discoveries wound Nick, rudely initiating him into modern l i f e .

"Hills Like White Elephants" 1927

E rn est Hemingway r e c a l l s t h a t when he f i r s t began to write and his stories were being steadily refused by the magazines, they were returned "with notes of rejection that would never call them stories but always anecdotes or sketches."

7^Austin M. Wright, The American Short Story in the Twenties (Ohicago: University of Chicago Press, 19^1), "p. 34. ^"Musee Des Beaux Arts," Selected Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1933), p.' 49.' " Like many Dubliners' and Winesburgers, the girl lives with fears and feelings that she cannot express and that others do not perceive. She masochistically suffers from "the futility of her desires" for womanly fulfillm ent,73 and like Catherine in A Farewell To Arms struggles in a "biological trap."

Revealing her active Imagination and her wish to divert the conversation away from her problems, she remarks that the dry hills in the distance resemble white elephants; failing to perceive either her needs or the resemblance, her literal-minded companion replies that he has never seen a white elephant and drinks his beer. The irony is that a white elephant is in the East a sacred animal, and hence in the West becomes something apparently of great value which is actually a drain on one's resources. It therefore seems to suggest the baby "Jig" is carrying. The white hills, symbolizing breasts, and the river, an archetypal emblem of female fertility, are in this way associated with the eternally feminine traits of imagination and errationality which the girl embodies in the story. In stark contrast, the man is too insensitive to comprehend her feelings. His logicality will not allow him to understand why a woman wants to have a baby, so he explains—no doubt having done so many times before—the "simple operation" in clinical terms, omitting any mention

73The American Short Story in the Twenties, pp. 371-2. 95 of the possible dangers involved. He even wants to biclcer logically; when the girl charges that he "wouldn1t" have seen a white elephant before, he retorts that "just be­

cause you say I wouldn't doesn't prove anything." His desire to avoid fatherhood fits with the carefree but purposeless life the couple has been living, a life of endless touring, of "trying drinks and looking at things."

I t a lso lin k s th e s to ry w ith Hemingway h im se lf, who lik e so many of his heroes seemed little interested in family

situations. There is an irony in "Papa" Hemingway.

The central conflict—between female intuition and imagination and male retionalism and verbalization—is temporarily and paradoxically resolved by the American's "rational" badgering, which angers his companion, making him feel guilty about forcing her to go through with the abortion. He takes the baggage away from the platform where passangers are awaiting the Madrid express, and stops in the bar to recompose himself and look at the people who can "reasonably" wait for a train. Why can't’ a woman be l ik e a man? he m uses. Like Anderson and o th e r contem poraries, Hemingway

distrusted intellectuality as a means to solving human problems, and demonstrated new interest in feeling and intuition. Unlike Anderson, however, Hemingway had a pen­ chant for emotion that did not betry a traditional romantic attitude toward life. On the contrary, Hemingway detested 74 sentimentality. Though Hemingway did not normally

^Austin Wright, p. 3 7 3 . glorify feeling and intuition as female attributes, his criticism of the man 1s"meddling intellect,” which nearly killed the baby, symbol of life, and which clearly contrib­ utes to the spiritual deadness from which the couple suffer in differing degrees, clearly links the story with the rest of Hemingway canon. However, Lionel Trilling believes that Hemingway did not attack mind itself: it is not so much reason as it is rationali­ zation that he resists; "mind" appears simply as the complex of false feelings. . . "Mind" he sees as a kind of castrating knife, cutting off people's courage and proper self-love, making them "reasonable," which is to say dull and false. For Hemingway p h y sic a l and s p i r i t u a l v i t a l i t y la y with the "primal emotions," which the American, and through him the girl, have gradually allowed to atrophy. Like The

Waste Land and many other works of the time, the story comments bitingly on the vacuity, sterility, boredom, and sense of loss haunting the twenties in particular and modern Western life in general. The stark, barren style is appropriate to this theme. The story is also a comment on the h e d o n is tic , ir re s p o n s ib le liv e s le d by many among

Hemingway's expatriate crowd during the twenties. The excessive drinking (four beers, three "Sweets of the Bull" in less than an hour) connotes the couple's need to escape, and along with the hotel stickers, becomes a symbol of

^"Hemingway, and His Critics," Carlos Baker, ed. Hemingway and His C ritics: An International Anthology (Hew York: Hill and tfang, 19^1), p. 66. 97

their life style. In reading this story, one concludes that Hemingway's attitudes toward "the moveable feast" shifted as he aged. Like many of the early stories, "Hills" centers on the theme of romantic illusions, showing that the good life is not one of aimless play, and that young couples often find conflict and boredom rather than eternal bliss and erotic fulfillm ent.^

’.'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" 1933

Whereas "Hills Like White Elephants" violated the conventions of narrative fiction by relying almost entirely on dialogue, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" broke the con­ vention that a story should depict a single incident important in a change in one or more of the characters. Nothing much happens, and no one changes. It is essentially neither narrative nor dramatic; the setting, as the title implies, carries an unusually large burden of meaning. The three short conversations in the usual concise Hemingway manner contrast the egotistic, confident, m aterialistic young waiter with the less selfish older waiter, who under­ stands why the old man needs a quiet place to spend his nights and would like to provide such a sanctuary for men, young and old, who cannot sleep at night. Hemingway links

the older waiter with the old man by having the waiter stop at a coffee bar where he too avoids going to bed.

7%obert W. Lewis, Jr., Hemingway on Love (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 9. (One should make connections w ith Nick Adams and Jake Barnes, who cannot sleep because they fear that their minds will return to the terrible experiences of the War.) Both waiter and customer postpone going to bed, for there, the potential for intimacy being greatest, the sense of alienation is the most acute. The story counterpoints the fears and loneliness which the older men associate with bed and the security and sexual activity, alleviating loneliness, which the young waiter and the soldier find t h e r e .

Bari Rovit rightly asserts that "the story radiates around Hemingway's ability to make the experience of nada ("nothingness") palpable and convincing to the reader."*^ Hemingway does this in five ways: by using the setting to suggest the desperation of the sold man: by showing the lack of community, even among the people at the clean, well- lighted place; by implying that getting drunk is a justifi- < able escape from nada: by weaving the word "nothing" ironically into the dialogue; and by writing the story in a s trip p e d down s t y l e .

Resolving the controversy about an apparent incon­ sistency in the third dialogue, Warren Bennett observes that the line "You said she cut him down," which had follow­ ed "I know" in earlier editions, now appears after "His

^E rnest Hemingway (New York: Twayne, 1963), P» 111. 99 neice looks after him.” By giving the knowledge of the old man's attempted suicide to the older waiter instead of the younger, this correction, made by Scribner's in the 1965 edition of Hemingway’s stories, at last eliminated the logical inconsistency which had attracted so much critical attention starting in 1959. (One commentator even ventured to say that Hemingway intended the inconsistency in order to force the reader into the kind of existential meaning­ lessness vrith which the older men must live.) Bennett justifies Scribner's change by proving that all of dialogues in the story follow a pattern of "serious question, verbal irony by the older waiter, dropping the subject, and then a serious reply." One of the older waiter's jokes ("You have no fear of going home before your usual hour?) implies

the fragility of matrimonial security, which could be severed by adultery, and also establishes the "love wound" motif which becomes a counterpart to the war wound motif. Eventually, the confident young waiter must also face de-

ITT Q spair and loneliness. Is the story to be read as an existentialist docu­

ment? Joseph tf. Gabriel believes so—that the older waiter's bitter mockery of the Lord's Prayer is a religious act apotheosizing the nada resulting from his denial of 79 Christianity. On the other side of the question is

nrQ ' "Character, Irony, and Resolution in 'A Clean ’fell- Lighted Place,'" American Literature. XLII (March 1970), p. 72-8. 79 "The Logic of Confusion in Hemingway's 'A Clean tfell- Lighted-Place,'" College English. XXII (1961), p. 545. - 1 0 0

R.W. Lewis, Jr., who argues that the prayer Is not the story’s central point, since any pure nihilism,by definition, would be unreliable, and since the waiter does find some security in the light and order of the c a f e .80 The l a t t e r i n te r p r e ­ tation seems most tenable, since Hemingway concretizes security in the setting of the story. Moreover, in admiring the "dignity" and skill of the "clean" old drunk, the older waiter reveals himself as one of Hemingway's code heroes, who live by a very few values, such as courage or empirical verifiability, which they are able to affirm despite their skepticism. The story does debunk traditional religious forms, which are hollow and no longer serve to get man through the night. Man must supply his own light. The prayer, as Ray B. West, Jr., asserts, almost nostalgically contrasts modern emptiness with the forms of past spiritual plenitude..

But the story also makes a limited afflrmatlon--that man can fin d some s e c u rity and order in a p la d e ’where he can \ be around, and thereby (to a limited degree)-commune with, other human beings with similar religious needs. Brinking at such places becomes a secular communion, one of the r i t u a l s which Hemingway saw as n e ce ssa ry to psychic survival in the midst of disintegration and chaos.

3°Hemingway on Love, pp. 14-5.

81 The Short Story in America. 1900-1950 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), p. 97. 101

Earl Rovit sums up this non-existential view of the story: the clean and pleasant cafe is a lightened island within the darkness and confusion of the city. It is a place where those without the illusions of belief (religion, youth, confidence, family ties, insensitive indifference) can come, can sit, can drink with dignity . 8 2

The cafe is a "clearing" offering some degree of security to a few: but there is a bleak irony in the fact that man has been limited to such limited affirmations and sanctuaries. Most men must find other ways to live with the nada, and some will do so, as the young waiter does, by taking their chances with love and money, while others, like the soldier, take solace in sex. The relationship between customer and prostitute epitomizes the meaningless of n ad a.

"The Short Happy L ife of F ra n c is Macomber" 1935 Hemingway's African stories—most notably "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"—depart markedly from his earlier short fiction. They are highly autobiographical yet highly imaginative embodiments of Hemingway's own safari exper­ ience during 1934-5. They are written in a style more l y r i c a l and u sin g lo n g er sen ten ces than Hemingway had previously been known for. Instead of the wounding and

initiation situations of the earlier work, these stories

82]grnest Hemingway, pp. 114-5. r o2

in tro d u c new s u b je c ts , such as man-woman c o n f lic ts and the problem of moral manhood in middle age. Edmund Wilson observes that in "The Short Happy Life" Hemingway brings war between men and women right out into the open and has written .a terrific fable of the impossible civilized women who despises the civilized man for his failure in initiative and nerve and then jealously tries to break him down as soon as he begins to exhibit any.°3

Indeed Margo Macomber r e p re s e n ts Hemingway's s p e c ia l antipathies toward aggressive women, particularly American women, whom Wilson, the English guide, calls "the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory

and the most attractive and their men have softened or

gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened." Indeed, too, Francis Macomber, representing American manhood, does at first appear ineffectual. As R.W. Lewis has Indicated, Macomber's first name is both masculine and feminine, and Wilson thinks of him as a "beggar" and a "sod," Britishisms meaning "bugger" (homosexual) and sodomite.®^ Accustomed to the everyday world, his courage untested except in combat with Margot, Macomber falls his first test of fortitude, thereby incurring the contempt which manifests itself in Margot's mocking remarks and in her affair with Wilson. As he lies awake being cuckholded, Macomber effects a spiritual rebirth; he resolves to establish his

Q^The Wound and the Bow (Boston: Houghton M ifflin, 194-1), p. 240. / ^ Hemingway: The Writer as A rtist, p. 189. 103 moral manhood on the following day's hunt. Margot is an egotistical bitch. She continues in her marriage of convenience only because Macomber has great amounts of money, and because middle age has tar­ nished her beauty, making her less likely to remarry easily. As Oarlos Baker suggests, she and her husband 85 contest for the possession of his soul, and until his rebirth toward the end, she clearly has the upper hand.

Many critics conclude that Margot kills her husband because she sees that she can no longer dominate him. (She shoots him with a "Mannlicher" rifle!) Others, such as Leslie Fiedler, see Margot as one of Hemingway's "bitches," and conclude that she shoots her husband for alienating the affections of Wilson, the guide, who begins to respect or Macomber at the end. Still others, notably R. W. Lewis, Jr., believe that Margot is ambivalent about Francis' new virility and that she shoots him by accident. If this latter interpretation sounds naive, one should remember th a t Margo was probably n o t a crack shot and t h a t th e buffalo's body fe ll only two yards from Macomber*s.

P h illip Young p o in ts out t h a t th e s to ry " i s , among other things, a detailed description of the process of

learning the code."^ Here—as in much of Hemingway— the code values skill, discipline, and courage. Wilson

^Hemingway; The Writer as A rtist, p. 189•

Love and Death in the American Hovel Revised Edition (New York: Delta',”" 195677 P» 318. Oiy Ernest Hemingway (New York: Rinehart, 1952), p. 42. 104

Is the code hero. Though he adopts the moral standards of his customers, and consorts with degenerates, Wilson the professional hunter lives by a strict code which prohibits shooting from a vehicle or allowing a wounded beast to lie dying where it may injure someone else. His code will not permit endangering natives to protect a white man. Macomber commits the unpardonable sin of cowardice, but quickly learns the code and dies upholding it. Whatever Margot's motives for shooting him may have been, he would have not have been killed had he not stood his ground when the beast charged. Thus despite Hemingway's concern with emotion and distrust of intellect, in this story Macomber conquers passion (animal fear) and acquires disciplined spiritual force.

"The Snows of K ilim an jaro" 1936 This story has drawn an inordinately large amount of critical attention, no doubt in part because of its ambiguity and its close paralells to the life of its creator. Phillip Young proves that the story is excep­ tionally autobiographical, and that it is an "inventory, a stocktaking" of Hemingway's life up to age thirty-seven, "a fictionalized purge. . . of a whole set of guilty 88 feelings." The flashbacks bring in Hemingway's own past, and Harry's obsession with death was shared by Hemingway h im se lf.

8 8 Ibid., p. 46. •1-05

Harry can be seen as Earl Rovlt suggests, as an incarnation of Hemingway's fantasies of transcending his own past.®^ Harry is egocentric, hypocritical (he lies

to Helen for the sake of his own security), and hateful of Helen, whose riches have put him in an inferior role, and,

so he believes, seduced him away from his morality and

creativity. He blames her for the fat grown about his soul, but as John Killinger maintains, "it was the luxury his wives brought him that ruined him, not the wives themselves."^ Ultimately, he is responsible for choosing w ealthy women. However, once Harry does overcome his lifelong fears

of death, Hemingway in a stroke of wish-fulflllment depicts him as a morally superior being, elevating, him to the celestial snows of the mountaintop. Vfhereas Faulkner

consistently saw the past impinging on the present ("there's .

no such thing as 'was'"), Hemingway seems to b e lie v e th a t

one final moral triumph is sufficient for redemption. In "The Short Happy life of Francis Macomber," too, achieving dignity in the end seems to be what counts, not the previous conduct.

This lack of moral Justice—which may well be one of the points—also appears in the fate of Helen. Earl

^Ernest Hemingway, p. 37.

^Hemingway and the Dead Sods :A Study in Existentlallsm University of Kentucky Press, 19^0)7 p. '44. ,106

Rovlt emphasizes this point:

Helen, on the other hand, Is honest, generous, and reasonably Intelligent; yet she is left at the end of the story with the unbandaged leg that she cannot bear to look a t.91

It is probable, though, that Helen behaves "selflessly" out of her fear of being left alone, especially if, as R.W. Lewis,

Jr. claims, she and Harry are not m a r r i e d . 92

The mountain and the leopard symbols remain points of critical debate, with the only agreement being that they are not especially integral to the action and therefore lose dramatic force. The majestic mountain may represent death, or "the whiteness from which the American author tries so vainly to flee, the blank whiteness or sterility."93 it may, as Charles C. Walcutt believes, represent "Truth," the un­ defined ideal for which he (Harry) has struggled. " ^ Or it may symbolize immortality, since according to Hemingway's epigraph to the story, the "House of God" is located near its western summit. Taking this viewpoint further, Lewis regards the story as a mythically patterned journey to the Sacred Mountain, involving clouds of locusts, rainstorms, e t c . 95 'While some commentators b e lie v e th a t th e fro z e n leopard's carcass represents Harry, who died heroically but

91 Ernest Hemingway, p. 37. 9gHemingway on Love, p. 103.

^ Love and Death in the American Novel. p. 319. 94"Hemingway's 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,1" Exolicator. VIII (1949), Item 43.

^ Hemingway on Love, p . 110. 1 0 7 fell short of his Ideals, others believe that the leopard contrasts with Harry, who lies rotting without immortality, or at best only what he earned as a writer. The story associates love and death, Eros and Thanatos.

The five flashbacks, depicting scenes which Harry never got to write about, all pertain to death or love, or the re­ lation between them.^ The relation is complex; Harry did not write of love because "he did not want to hurt anyone," but in avoiding love he hastened his own spiritual death; linking love and decay, Harry exclaims that "Love is a dunghill," "And I'm the cock that gets on it to crow;" and when his first wife leaves him, he is unable to "kill" his loneliness with a prostitute. But not much more than an association between love and death seems to emerge from all t h i s .

Structurally, the story is one of Hemingway's most interesting because it attempts, in a much more conventional style than those employed by Joyce or Faulkner, to capture a character's psychic processes. The flashbacks are vivid and clear, and the only flaw, other than the heavy symbolism, involves a minor switch in conventions at the end. Whereas all of Harry's daydreams had appeared in italics, his actual dream does not. This trick makes possible the story's shock ending. Edmund Wilson comments on this surprise: "The reader is made to realize that what seemed to be an escape by plane . . . is only the dream of a

^Ibid.. pp. 100-106. dying m a n ."97 As in "A Glean, Well-Lighted Place," the contrast between religious longings and existential realities seems painfully real. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is more than another parable of the artist pulled down by society; it is a patent expression of Hemingway's consist­ ent concern with the struggle to gain human dignity in a world of indignities.

^The Wound and the Bow, p. 239• CHAPTER I I I

MASTERS OP THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES

Katherine Anne Porter (1891- )

Most good stories are about the interior of our l iv e s , but K atherine Anne P o r te r 's stories take place there; they show the surface only at her choosing. Her use of the physical world is enough to meet her needs and no more; she is not waste­ ful with anything.

—Eudora Welty, "The Eye of the Story," Lodwick Hartley and George Gore, eds. Katherine Anne Porter: A C ritical Symposlum (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969), p. 102. "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" 1929

"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" resembles "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" in its poetic stream-of-consciousness treatment of a mind at the approach of death and in Its movement from consciousness to unconsciousness, from the present to various memories which conjure latent desires and fears. In both stories images flow through the pro­ tagonist's mind rather than appearing in descriptions of external circumstances, and in the former, recurrent color imagery—particularly light and dark imagery—suggests life and reality, both of which Granny has evaded, and death, which she meets at the end of the story.

,109 110

Granny Is a proud puritan-pioneer woman. She is proud to have "kept a better house" and to have "got more work done," proud that she has her house in order when she dies, and too proud to tolerate Cornelia's condescension. t She is also proud to have nursed the sick and "fenced in a hundred acres once." "Digging post holes changed a woman," she muses, thinking of why her beauty, has faded.

Hers is the pride of self-justification, revealing her need to compensate. Her stoic self-determination has extracted its toll, hardening her heart and making her less able to love and therefore more alone. On the other4 hand, it has allowed her to build a somewhat satisfactory

life out of the ruins of her jilting, and helps her to die with dignity. As George Hendrick has noted, "Granny tried to delude herself into believing that there was nothing wrong with her, just as she had deluded herself about being able to f o r g e t h er j i l t i n g ." * In re p re s s in g th e memory of h er jiltin g by George ("she had prayed against remembering him"), Granny has in fact been driven by the jilting, by her need to prove her worth to herself and others. She has weathered much in her unsuccessful search for love: "Granny has been betrayed not only by her hope for secular and divine love, but also by compulsive efforts to believe

*Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Twayne, 1965), p. 91. I l l

A in her rigidly 'ordered1 service to the family." In her delirium, "her repressed unconscious floods to the surface. Hapsy is symbolically equated with. George, with George's child, with h e r s e l f . "3 Of her children, it is Hapsy she cares most about. In short, as William L. Nance observes, th e s to ry studies the meaning of time by investigating the way in which the individual mind preserves, blends, and reshapes experience. A good example of this is the heroine's confusion of death with childbirth, a parallel which, while valid enough, casts a bit more light on her basic attitude toward sex and m arriag e.

The emphasis falls on Granny's strength of will, her attempt to overcome grief, and the final revelation of her hidden emptiness only emphasizes her achievement, . . . she keeps her hard-nosed determination to the end, when she blows out her own lig h t.5

The story turns on the co-incidence of Granny's first full recollection of her first Jilting, and her second Jilting by the Holy Bridegroom (Of. Christ's parable, Matthew xxv; 1-13). She and a priest await a sign both times, but none appears. Her faith in God, like her faith in George and in life, lies shattered. The second Jilting is unbearable because it represents what she feared most—"losing her soul

2Charles A. Allen, "Katherine Anne Porter: Psychology as Art, Southwest Review. XLI (1965), p. 227. 3Ibid.. p ..226. ^Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 19o3), p. 44. 5Ibid.. p. 45. 112 in the deep pit of hell." "There is nothing more cruel than this," she moans. Thus when she blows out the light, taking her own life before death takes it, she expresses her bitter­ ness at the Lord's betrayal by committing the gravest sin, suicide, against the Holy Spirit. This is the sin of despair, reflecting the loss of faith, Granny's last illusion. Yet as Harry John Mooney, Jr. notes, "Granny's death reveals the fortitude which carried her through life, and her absolute refusal to capitulate to a private sorrow which has none- £ theless dominated her life." Whereas in the past her attempts to order completely have failed (her love letters remain undestroyed), she at least wins an ironic victory in death. In describing the orderly preparation of a household for an ending, in ex­ posing self-delusion, and in attempting to render the effects of fear and repression, the story parallels Henry James' "The Beast in.the Jungle." Both stories show the terrible predicament of the Individual without self-knowl­ edge, and both explore the false pride which leads to frustration and spiritual suffocation. In fact, Porter greatly admired James and seems to have drawn on his description of the ordered household, since close parallels exist between the two passages. Mis Porter's story pro­ vides exceptional psychological penetration and verisim ili­ tude, making death and betrayal about as real as literature

6The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1957), p. 50. 113 can make them. At the end, the reader can nearly feel the dissolution of a human spirit into the darkness.

"Flowering Judas" 1930

Christian morality in a world where traditional values are threatened is at the heart of all these stories; and they are, ultimately, complex fables in which the tensions be­ tween the old order and the new provide a dramatic framework for the events. — Ray B. W est, J r . , K atherine Anne Porter (Minneapolis: Univer­ sity of Minnesota Press, 1963)* p. 9. "Flowering Judas" drops the short story conventions of anecdote and atmosphere, and instead concentrates on delineating character, and particularly the inner life of

Laura. Without employing the stream-of-consciousness tech­ niques (except in Laura's dream) that Miss Porter so often uses, the story succeeds powerfully in allowing the reader to glimpse the inner workings of two antagonistic yet similar personalities. The story achieves its exceptional suggestibility by weaving a rich tapestry with the imagery of Christian atonement. As in Eliot's early work, which clearly influenced the basic conception of the story, the connections are associative rather than logical. According to the quietly ironic narrator, "3raggioni loves himself with such tenderness and amplitude and eternal charity" that he and his followers are deceived into believing that he is a "lover of humanity." Though committed 114 to improving the lot of mankind, he, like so many revolu­ tionists, treats the humans about him badly. He betrays one fellow revolutionary, allows others to remain in prison, and deserts his wife. The movement has become a convenient abstraction, allowing him to justify anything he wishes to do. Ke is, as Charles Allen says, a cruel and

"callous Christ"7 who cannot conquer his egotism or his past, both of which encourage his taste for tooled leather, silver studded ammunition belts, and silk hose. Hating himself because he cannot be a true proletarian (e.g. contentedly wear the machine made garments that he expects the workers to wear), he projects his hostility outward, toward his associates and toward the society he wishes to destroy. He is indeed a false and "hungry world savior."

However vain, indolent, unsympathetic, and egocentric

Braggioni may be, he also "typifies the warm-blooded people among whom Laura seems so out of p la c e .I f h is dress emphasizes his sensual corpulence, it also reveals his feeling for beauty and his eye for style.' If he can allow his wife to weep for him while he serenades other women, he can also weep with her as she washes his feet in a purification ritual, or perhaps a parody of one. Braggioni clearly has both his animal and his romantic sides, though the former seems to dominate. Like most romantics, he is an unhappy man.

7"Katherine Anne Porter: Psychology as Art," 227.

®Nance, 24. Laura resembles him in a number of respects, one of them being her romantic ties with the past, which conflict with her political commitments. She too likes fine things which are not made on machines, and is therefore also a false revolutionary. She too has fitted her life to an abstraction ('She wears the uniform of an idea,and has renounced vanities"), hiding body and self behind her nun-like attire. Like Braggioni, she has been "wounded by life," in her case because she not allowed herself to respond to it."Laura's predicament is that she cannot free herself from her early religious training and beliefs, so she cannot give herself wholly to the revolutionary cause,or to any person. Nor can she love divinely, as a communicant in the Ohurch. She does not believe, as her visits to"some crumbling little church" show, yet she remains frozen by the repressions of religion, using it to justify her refusuals to respond to amorous o v e rtu re s. Though her Concious mind will not admit it, she longs tp love, wishing she were Braggioni's wife, and throwing a rose, classic symbol of love, to the youth by the fountain, symbol of life and renewal. But as she looks down upon Eugenio in the garden, she can see only his shadow, suggesting that she cannot accept him as a flesh and blood human being.

^Ray B. West, Jr., Katherine Anne Porter (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1963,175?. 10* 116

In her nightmare, she discovers that her present life is a bad dream fraught with conflict and betrayal. Only in a dream—surely one of the most visually evocative passages in modern fiction—can Laura express her subcon­ scious feelings for Eugenio, and her guilt at having "murdered" and betrayed him. In fact, as William L. Uance points out, the Judas tree is not merely an emblem of personal betrayal, for it "reminds her that by 'confusing love with revolution' she has betrayed not only Eugenio but also the cause which both she and he have served."10

She discovers that she loves him, and that her failure to reveal her love to him and thus to give him something to live for robs her of happiness with him and leaves her that much more alone.11

As if this newly exposed failure and loss were not enough to bear, Laura must also face the end of her illu ­ sions about religious belief, which are also belied in the dream. She is, like Judas, a betrayer because she is unable to believe. She has aided a suicide, and she eats his "body and blood" in a sacrament of betrayal. At this point of the story parallels the mood and meaning of Eliot's "Gerontion," from which it derives its title: I am an old man, A dull head among windy spaces. The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger

10Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Re .lection, p. 28.

111bid.. p. 26. In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided to be drunlc Among w h isp e rs. (11. 15-23) As in the poem, there is no communion, no rejuvenation, no rain, and ironically Eugenio can only lead her toward a waste land, a "desert of crumbling stone." Her death wish, too, reveals her disbelief, for suicide is the ultimate sin.of despair. Once Laura has glimpsed these things which erode her self-delusions about being a devout Virgin and a dedicated revolutionary, she becomes afraid to sleep ag ain .

Charles Allen finds additional significance in Laura's self-recognition:

The dream vision highlights Laura's ambivalent fear of and desire for death and her guilt feelings about her betrayal of herself and the world. . . . Laura says "no" to any situation involving faith,love, and l i f e i t s e l f . 1^

Laura wanders in waste land, outside of religion, revolution, and love. In these ways, and as a tale of self-delusion, betrayal, and the desire for death, and of the difficulty of growing beyond the past and of finding "moral reality" in an age of political and religious disillusionment, "Flowering Judas" is typical vintage Porter. It is about the rebels of the twenties who turned away from traditional belief, but it is also about the search for belief which still haunts the modern world.

^2"Katherine Anne Porter: Psychology as Art," p. 228. 118

John Steinbeck (1902-1969)

"The Chrysanthemums" 1937 A teacher of "The Chrysanthemums" must ascertain which of two published texts is before him. According to an article by William R. Osborne, neither of these has yet become definitive. Text 1, which first appeared in Harper1s in 1937, seems "to minimize the sexual element and might suggest that her (Elisa's) feeling for the tinker is that of an enraptured romantic who imagines that her views are reciprocated, who feels momentarily the strength that comes from a shared, intuitive response to nature."1-^ Text 2, which is printed in The Long Valley and The Portable Steinbeck, and which will be cited here, differs slightly but significantly, particularly in its sexual imagery. Mordecai Marcus probes the mind of the Elisa of the latter version:

The plowed and waiting earth symbolize Elisa Allen's desire for fructification, for she has no child and her devotion to her chrysanthemum bed is at least partly an attempt to make flowers take the place of a child.14

Elisa has "planter's hands" which move Intuitively, almost instinctively, and allow her to become one with plant and earth. When she feels that her creations go forth into the world, she exults in her "sexual and maternal triumph."1-*

^"The Texts of Steinbeck's 'The Chrysantemums,'" Modern Fiction Studies, XII (1966), 482. ^"The Lost Dream of Sex and Childbirth in 'The Chrysan­ themums,"' Modern Fiction Studies XI (1965), 55. 15 • I b i d . 119

Later, when she discovers that her offering has been cast into the road, she temporarily turns away from femininity, retreating from her failure as a woman, and inquires about the masculine world of boxing. But at the end,when she recognizes that her masculine tendencies will not free her,

she "cries like an old woman because she has given in to passivity and potential dessication . . . All the possibilities for a rejuvenating bond with another skilled hand are lost, leaving Elisa in her December world. The

tinker's calculating exploitation of her nearly mystical feelings for nature wounds her deeply, driving her further from human society.

E lis a i s a proud woman, a s h e r comments about h e r chrysanthemums show, but much of her pride is in fact a reaction to her dissatisfactions. Her masculine manner of gardening and her interest in the tinker's way of life connotes her silent rebellion against the passive, restric­ tive role required of her as a housewife, and her description of the stars ("driven into your body"), plus her reaching out for the tinker's trousers, clearly suggest her sexual dissatisfaction. Since she is proud, and since she embodies the freedom she lacks and seeks, she is especially

mad and hurt when she realizes that she has been outwitted by the very man whose l i f e s ty le means so much to h e r in the obscure corners of her fancy.Her pride has been

l6 I b id . 17 'Joseph Warren Beach, "John Steinbeck:Journeyman A rtist," Steinbeck And His C ritics: A Record of Twenty Five Years ed. E. W. Tadloclc and C.W. Wicker (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957)» p* 33. 120 hurt, and her Ideals shattered; her mind then dumps to

prize fights, in which people do not disguise their attempts

to hurt one another. Her husband is not an oppressive spouse, for he freely allows his wife to meet with visitors such as the

tinker, takes her into town regularly, and even considers taking her to the fights if she wishes to go. As he demonstrates twice near the end of the story, he is exceptionally alert to changes in Elisa's mood. Thus Elisa's unfullfilment and isolation occur even in a good marriage, and seem inherent in the human condition. Sensitive though her husband is, he can never know how the

chrysanthemums on the road hurt her. When human beings damage one another, Steinbeck seems to say, they arouse

fears which pinch the buds of future human communion and

communication, but even when they do not hurt one another, only very limited contact is possible. One suffers alone, even in the best of circumstances, and this is perhaps more sad to contemplate than the fact that most "normal" people cannot understand one another. As Warren French observes, the story "deals with a subject that . . . especially infuriates Steinbeck: the manipulations of 13 people's dreams" for personal profit. The extent to

/ which the tinker's crass manipulation of a person's desires has become accepted practice in the business world is also depressing to ponder.

^ John Steinbeck (New York: Twayne, 1961), p. 33. 121

The Red Pony 1937 His great possession as a writer was not interest in craft or experimental spirit; it was an unusual simplicity, a natural tenderness and ease in his relation to his California world. —Alfred Kazin, On ITatlve Grounds (Garden City, H.Y.: Anchor" 195^), p. 306, I-Iany critics Edmund tfilson and Stanley Edgar Hyman among them, have dismissed Steinbeck’s The Long Valley stories as exercises in animalism, attempts to identify humans with animals. This view—more accepted than accurate --simply does not describe these stories or those composing The Red Pony, which appeared among them. Steinbeck's own statements about his intentions are more useful:

I want to create a child's world not of fairies and giants but of colors more clear than they are to adults and tastes more sharp and queer heart­ breaking feelings that overwhelm children for a moment.

Later, in 1953, Steinbeck recalled that The Red Pony was written a long time ago, when there was desolation in my family. The first death had occurred. And the family, which every child believes to be immortal, was shattered. Perhaps this is the first adulthood of any man or woman. The f i r s t to rtu re d q u e stio n ‘‘Why1 and then acceptance, and then the child becomes a man. The Red Pony was an attempt, an experi­ ment if you wish, to set down this loss and acceptance and growth.20

^9stelnbeck and His C ritics, p. 38. 20Ibid.. p. A. 122

Clearly, then, one should regard The Red Pony as an episodic novelette or a group of closely related stories dealing with the growth of a pre-adolescent boy, and illustrating his felt union with plants, animals, and people living near the earth in harmony with them. Unlike many s to r ie s o f i n i t i a t i o n in to l i f e , The Red Pony does hot expose or satirize the weaknesses of adult society; instead it shows a boy's acceptance of the basic experiences of life—sex, birth, youth, age, death, and violence.

In "The Gift,'" the first of the three sub^stories, ten-year-old Jody is a submissive, dependent child ("It didn't occur to him to disobey the harsh note of the triangle calling him to breakfast") who is secure and con­ fident under adult authority. He learns that "authorities" can be fallible—that even Billy, who "wasn't wrong about many things," can be very wrong about important ones. As

Warren French points out, Jody's "possession of and respon­ sibility for the pony is the first step toward Jody's be­ coming an adult, toward differentiation from the mass 21 represented by the boys who come to admire the pony." "The Great Mountains" relates animal death to human death, expanding Jody's experience. As the story opens, Jody has matured to the point where he is bored, and finds himself torturing or killing animals for sport. He destroys the thrush as an early assertion of his power, especially

2^John Steinbeck, p. 89. his power to defy, but he soon feels guilt, pondering "what older people would say if they had seen him kill it." Early in the story Jody evinces his need to explore the mysterious, savage Santa Lucia mountains to the west, which come to be associated with Gitano, and therefore with the past and death. For Jody, Gitano's rapier is "a thin ray of dark light," a link in "some fragile struc­ ture of truth;" it symbolizes Gitano's past, which interests Jody but which will ever remain a mystery to him. Jody learns to care about a rejected, mistreated old man who asks simply to be allowed to die near where he was born, in the mountains. Some readers sense a triumph in Gitano's defiance of Carl and proud exodus with his rapier.

As the old man rides the old horse into the dry, towering mountains, Jody, watching the black speck as he lies in the lush grass near the tub, becomes full of "a nameless sorrow." Speculation varies as to the meaning of this phrase. Peter Lisca believes that "this sorrow comes not from grief but rather from an emotional perception of that whole of which Gitano, Old Easter, the rapier, and op the Great Mountains are parts. ..." Hence Jody's sorrow is "nameless" in the same way as that of the child in Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child."

22The Wide iforid of John Steinbeck (New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 95. 124

Warren French, on the other hand, maintains that the sorrow results from Jody's “recognition that adults, too, have their problems, that they become worn out, useless and ox unwanted, and frustrated by an indifferent nature." J In "The Promise," Jody again learns how life and death are inseparable since as Peter Lisca points out, "the mare's suffering and death are the price of life and give to Jody a new sense of his responsibility to that 24 life." Jody sees the violence of sexuality, and becomes more responsible for the mare than he had been for the pony. He likewise does his chores more conscientiously. But as he takes on more responsibility, he is less willing to defer to authority. He plays a practical joke on his mother, sneaks out at night to see the mare, and refuses to go outside the barn when Billy orders him to do so at the end. Jody has commitments, and must defy adults to keep them.

The principal, almost archetypal authority figure is of course Carl Tiflln, who is seldom referred to as "Jody's father" or anything similarly intimate. Carl is a "disciplinarian," a hard, demanding man who "hated weakness and sickness, and held . . . a violent contempt for helplessness." With no compassion, and even with malice growing from his own guilt at lacking compassion, Carl

John Steinbeck, p. 91• 2^The Wide World of John Steinbeck, p. 103. 12$ refuses comfort to Gitano, claiming that he should get help from his relatives in Monterrey. He is reasonable when reason is utterly inappropriate, as when Jody rages at the buzzard. Carl is a brilliant sketch of a very typical American type—the self-righteous neo-puritan who is overly rational, authoritarian, cold to those close to him, and unsympathetic to any human infirm ity, which he believes to be a sign of moral weakness.

Billy counterpoints Carl, and serves as Jody’s real father. "It is easier to talk to Bill Buck." Living close to the earth, Billy understands Jody’s feelings for animals, and teaches him how to treat them. He represents the kind of warm, earthy, skillful, feeling primitive which Steinbeck treats with special understanding and fondness. Unlike Carl, Billy grows along with Jody, admitting his fallibility, and even (ironically enough) refusing to promise anything in "The Promise." Billy knows what the pony and the colt mean to the boy, and makes great sacrifices to avoid disappointing him. Billy and Jody accept the almost Transcendental oneness of life and death. Arnold L. Goldsmith explains:

The basic rhythm unifying The Red Pony is the life- death cycle .... The most obvious example of Steinbeck's conscious effort to present the black cypress tree and the water tub. Whereas the cypress is associated with death, the never end­ ing spring water piped into the old green tub is the symbol of the continuity of life .2^

25"Thematic Rhythm in The Red Pony. " College Bullish. XXVI (1965), 392-3. 1 2 & .

Steinbeck accepts affection, anguish, and reverence for the natural world of which man is but a part, suggesting that its benevolent forces, however tied to destructive ones, in the end make life very worth-while.

William Saroyan (1908- ) William Saroyan's contribution to the American short story is a considerable one indeed. He brought to the American literary scene fresh­ ness of vision, simplicity, spontaneity, and gaiety. He possessed a sympathetic understand­ ing of little people, a distinctly personal lit­ erary style, and a contagious sense of humor. He exerted a beneficial influence against the pretentious, the overwritten, the too fancily- plotted short story. Like Mark Twain, he opened the windows and aired the room at a time when fresh air was badly needed. —William Peden, "Saroyan With Trumpet and Tremulo, " Saturday Review. XXXIII (February "4, 1950), 15-6.

"The Daring Young Man on the Plying Trapeze" 1933 When Saroyan published this story and thereby burst into the literary limelight, it was apparent to all that he had "broken the rules" to create a startlingly new kind of story. Following the stream-of-consciousness developments of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and others, Saroyan

applied these techniques to the short story, breaking with the conventions of grammar-and logic as well as others peculiar to the short story. The entire first paragraph, for instance, is a richly suggestive stream of details, lacking connectives and adding up to something less than a conventional sentence. In its attempt to present the 12-7 mind of a person on the verge of death, the story resembles several by Katherine Anne Porter, which also employ dream sequences, and the Quentin section of Faulkner*s The Sound and the Fury, which likewise traces the wandering of a suicidal young man on the last day of his life.

The two sections of the story, labelled "Sleep" and "Wakefulness," contrast the unconscious and conscious states of the young man's mind, revealing his problems, their relation to the external world, and his ways of coping with them. In this dream, "that living death," he finds that "we meet ourselves and the far earth, God and the saints, the names of our fathers, the substance of remote moments." Comprising the mental flow of subconscious associations are allusions to ancient Rome, Babylon, Egypt, and Israel, civilizations which fell but are remembered, and to classic literature—Finlandia. Dostoevsky, Shake­ speare, and, very significantly, to T.S. Eliot. Freed from the problems of everyday life and survival, his mind gravitates to "the deep song of man," and derives spiritual sustenance from man's great artistic achievements, or what Eliot called "tradition." In contrast to Eliot's "hollow men," however, the young a rtist does find meaning in the past, where he can identify with kindred spirits. Like Quentin Compson's, mental stream includes images imply­ ing death ("the tap dancing of doom," and "the caged panther staring"), implying time ("the alarm clock"), or both death and time ("the river Kile"). ,128-

In sharp contrast, "Wakefulness" gives the sense of the paltriness of the present ("Where is my tie?"), of "the superficial truth of reality." The penny suggests this triviality, as well as the economic basis of the young man1s suffering. As an artist, he cannot support himself, and even when he stoops to offer himself as a typist, he still cannot find employment, and must endure the humiliation of futilely seeking it. Neither embittered nor emboldened by the ironic sight of an old man feeding birds while humans starve, he will not succumb to the thought of begging. He also resists any threat to his privacy of the soul, therefore rejecting the Salvation Army, or to his dignity, not even considering any illic it means of obtaining the money he must obtain to remain alive. The story succeeds, as Howard R. Floan notes, in conveying "a stoical aloofness without diminishing one's fe e lin g s f o r th e p rec io u sn e ss o f 'th e sw ift moment of life.'" As an artist, the young man is aware that his life has been "largely artless," and is determined that "there should be as little imprecision as possible" in his exodus. He prays for grace on the ironic flying trapeze. However, artistic dangers lurk beneath any attempt to create a parable of the artist against the world; autobiographical impulses, always especially strong in Saroyan,cause problems

26 William Saroyan (New York; Twayne, 1966), p. 25. in distancing. Ploan perceives that

this oneness with his character, . . . despite the force it imparted to the story, proved to he the source of its greatest blemish. Although Saroyan assured his reader that the young artist knew no self-pity, one finds it hard to exonerate Saroyan himself from the charge. . . .The tragedy implicit in the alienation of the young artist must derive ironic force from the fact that he does not see himself as tragic, or even as pathetic. Its effec­ tiveness depends upon a double vision: the author must provide a view which includes but exceeds what he allows to his narrator. Because Saroyan fails to keep himself apart from his fictional speaker, however, he cannot sustain this double v i s i o n .^7

Saroyan does, however, use the numerous allusions to objectify, thus avoiding the self-pity possibly involved with reference to a personal past. These recollections, mostly involuntary, function religiously, assuaging fears of death without logic or orthodoxy. The young man’s spirit, though unalive in an empty sky, was somehow p e r f e c t. But th e sky was not really empty, for one felt that the entire scene . was enacted before an assembly of great universal spirits like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky who wit­ nessed the young man's martydom and who lent dig­ nity and consolation to an otherwise pathetic, meaningless incident.2a Though such recollections imply a bookish life, they also suggest the myriad and rich possibilities of human experience. This contrast between promise and denial generates the emotional force of the story. In 193?, it seemed particularly timely to those who felt ironic about the disparity between the privations suffered because of economic ills .29

27lbld.. pp. 25-6. 28Ibid., pp.' 24-5.

29Ibid., pp. 22-3. The constant awareness of human potential, and of the presence of nullification and death, constitutes a dis­ tinctive note in the voice of William Saroyan. His great theme urges man to live to the fullest while he can: "Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive .... You will be dead soon enough .."3°

James Thurber (1894-1961)

"The S e c re t L ife of W alter M itty" 1940

Superseding the roistering Mike Finks of the frontier, the dominant trend of modern American humor, at least in the arts, has centered upon the inadequacy, impotence, and defeat of the little man, the anti-hero. The Charlie Chaplin films of the twenties and thirties exemplify this tendency, as do more recent novels such as Catch 22 and films such as The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy. The comic a rtist faces the problems of treating essentially tragic and pathetic material in such a way that it appears to be distorted or exaggerated and therefore humorous. This involves consider­ able distortion indeed when, as is often the case, the

originals are themselves grotesques. Yet unlike most traditional satire, which conservatively ridicules deviations

29Ibid., pp. 22-3. 3°Quoted from the Preface to The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Hew York: Handom House, 1934). 131 from accepted standards, modern humor often satirizes the causes of distortion, which are very often the commonly accepted norms or values from which the anti-hero has deviated. Thus Mitty's compensatory fantasies poke fun at his Hollywood conceptions of m ilitary honor, courage, professional skill, etc., making these "virtues" themselves appear comic. The characters in the dreams say trite things in trite situations, humorously indicating the poverty of Mitty's imagination, or at least the extent to which it has been numbed by cultural conditioning.

Thurber structures the story meticulously, according to several consistent techniques. One of them, pointed out by James Ellis, involves having Kitty make amusing mistakes. In the first fantasy, for instance, Mitty imagines himself as the fearless commander of an absurd Navy hydroplane whose eight engines reach an incredible 8500 revolutions per minute, whose No. 3 turret provides more flying power, and whose cockpit begins to ice while the plane is still on the ground. Moreover, the word "hydroplane" usually means "boat." M itty's heroic longings appear ridiculous, since he obviously lacks even the most rudimentary knowledge of aviation and navigation. Thurber employs this same technique in the second- fantasy, in which Mitty imagines himself as a renowned physician in an operating room. "Obstreosis of the ductual tract. Tertiary" sounds very medical, but in fact "tertiary" both suggest the third stage of syphilis, a disease that Mitty would never dare attribute to "a millionaire banker and close friend of Roosevelt." "Coreopsis" again sounds like medical jargon, but actually is the name of several types of garden flower, not of a disease. "Streptothricosis, while it occasionally infects humans, is usually found only in cattle. In the third fantasy, as Mitty fancies himself as the greatest pistol shot in the world, he reveals his lack of any sophistication about weapons by confusing a Webley-Forsby .455 pistol with a Vickers-Maxim automatic machine gun. A pistol with a diameter of 50.80 would have a ludicrous barrel diameter of over four feet. In his last daydream, in which he sees himself as a World War I bomber pilot, Mitty allows "Richthofen's circus," an actual aerial maneuver, to become "Rlchtman1s circus." Trying to be cavalier, Mitty inadvertently changes "Aupres de Ma Blonde," a slightly risque, notably inelegant French folk song, to "Apres de Ma Blonde," which is more suggestive and which exposes M itty's misunderstanding 31 of French.

Thurber also employs two Joycean techniques: the catalyst stimulus which triggers, by association, another mental Impulse, as the newspaper account of Nazi bombings leads Mitty into his fantasy about bombing; and the "leit­ motif," such as the "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" which Mitty imagines as the sound of a plane engine, an anesthetizing

3“*James Ellis, "The Allusions in 'The Secret Life of Walter M itty,'" English Journal, LIV (1965), 310—13* 133 machine, and "the new flame throwers." Phrases such as this and "right arm in a sling" connect the conscious with the unconscious and contribute humor by appearing in new and often incongruous contexts. Thurber further resembles Joyce in showing the pettiness of Mitty's actual life—driving his wife to her hairdresser's, parking the car, and remembering the over­ shoes and puppy biscuit. Amid such triviality, Mitty's grandiose dreams constitute an escape from, even a qualified victory over, banality, the enemy of the spirit, the imagination, the heroic, and the significant. As Robert Elias notes,

when ifalter Mitty faces the firing squad, 'erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the undefeated, inscrutable to the last,' the victory has its limits. It is not only private—one that cannot give him a place in society; it is ridden by cliches of pulp romances and Grade 0 movies, Nonetheless, it is a victory, even if qualified, that contributes to self- perservation.-^ Given the nature of a life "measured out in coffee spoons," modern man must estrange himself from the real world, withdrawing into fantasy. Mitty is seeking a realm where he can maintain his self, Thurber seems to suggest.

Like Monroe in Thurber's "The Catbird Seat," Mitty responds to the American emphasis on success. Robert

Morshberger generalizes about Thurber's heroes:

32"James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual," American Scholar, XXVII(1953), 361. In a society that believed . . . that success Is a sign of strength and salvation and that failure is the mark of weakness and unworthi­ ness, they become abject and disconsolate.33

Even more than Prufroclc, HI tty represents the dilemma of modern man, frustrated by banality, powerlessness, and meaning­ lessness, and feeling himself superfluous except in his day­ dreams. Hitty is the protoypal modern man, so estranged

from the actual world that he must withdraw into a world of fantasy. The story also develops one of Thurber1s f a v o r ite th em es--th e c o n f lic t of man and woman—by showing Mitty at the mercy of his overbearing, boring, and unimagi­ native wife.

Eudora Welty (1909- )

If Frank O'Oonnor is right in stating that the short story is 'the art form that deals with the individual when there Is no longer a society to absorb him and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner lig h t,1 then Eudora Welty is the quintessential modern short story w r ite r . —Alfred Appel, Jr., A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of* Eudora Wei tv "(Baton Rouge: Lousianna State Uni­ versity Press, 1965), p. 49. "Why I Live At the P.O." 194-0 Hiss Welty is known for her strangely humorous stories, and "Why'I Live At the P.O." probably helped her establish

this reputation. Much in the manner of Sherwood Anderson, the story takes the form of a rambling, colloquial dramatic monologue resembling the traditional oral narrative. About

33James Thurber (Hew York: Twayne, 1964), p. 19. midway through the story, for instance,.the narrator attempts to recreate a conversation with her mothers "’This is the way she looks,1 I says, and I looked like this." Leaving the communication vaguely, with "Like this" the narrator implies that she assumes that the reader is a listener who can look up to see what kind of face she did make. Her monologue sports countless cliches, circa 1940, which in addition to exposing her lack of imagination, suggest that she is speaking spontaneously, with no time to be more original, rather than writing, which would give her more time to thinlc. Welty makes brilliant use of cliches and brand names to mirror humorously the mentality of the entire family, whose favorite pastimes are Casino and

Old Maid. Much of the irony, of course, stems from the narrator's very failure to thinlc, or to know herself. One senses a dichotomy between what she tells the reader to beleive and what the details lead one to conclude for himself. Though she claims in the opening sentence that all was well before "sister Stella-Rondo Just separated from her husband and came back home a g a i n ," th e r e s t of th e s to ry makes i t apparent that an intense sibling rivalry between the sisters has smouldered underground for years, and that • Uncle Rondo's failure to write to her family for two years does not comment favorably on the family's closeness. There is also humor in the reader's growing aware­ ness of the inconsistencies in the narrator's account. While she claims that Stella has turned various family members against her, the reader suspects that Stella merely repeated all the uncomplementary things which her sister has actually said. Her lies become transparent upon care­ ful reading. She claims that she criticized Uncle Rondo for wearing Stella's kimono because "If Stella-Rondo

couldn't watch out for her trousseau, somebody had to," she abviously was not merely being "considerate" to her sister. In fact, she deeply resents her sister's chance to get away and her glamorous wardrobe, finding the family's uncritical acceptance of Stella's tall story unbearable. Her vanity is wounded, and she seeks opportunities to

indulge her self-pity. Actually, the family's free acceptance of Stella is one of its few signs of health. Deep sadness lurks behind the humor of anyone so

desperately in need of sympathy as she, or behind a family so estranged and unfamilial.

If there is anything terrifying about all this, it is not the unquestionable psychosis or even the speaker's alienation, but the exposure of human pettiness, unwittingly burlesqued in the language of an ethically insensitive narrator. Undoubtedly, the postmistress of China Grove has been grievously hurt by people quite as insensitive as she is. . .

■AiL J J.A. Bryant, Jr., Eudora Uelty (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1968), p. 8.’ 137

The sympathies of Louis Blackwell lie with the narrator, who she believes becomes more an individual, and not with the family, which Blackwell sees as an oppressively conform­ ist group which insists on blanket acceptance of family foibles and peculiarities. Thus the sister cannot express her feelings and because it denies the facts of the situation.^5 Blackwell argues that

the family is at least as warped in its behavior as 'the girl' and it is far more interesting because the pattern of pseudo-mutuality in family relationships is the root of the girl's schizophrenia.^6

According to this view, then, the sister had to break from a family which should not tolerate any avert challenges to its attitudes. However, it seems safer to say that an unusual action by one member of the family invariably re­ sults in compensatory reactions by other members. One questions, too, whether the narrator herself could tolerate "deviant" behavior as well as her family did. On one level, as Alfred Appel explains, "the story is a farcial treatment of the often obsessive Southern concern with "kin"—a subject Hiss tfelty takes seriously elsewhere."^ On another level, it is an ironic self-

35HEudora tfelty and the Rubber Fence Family," Kansas Magazine. (1965), 75-6. 36 Ibid., p. 74. Louise Blackwell bases her interpreta­ tion on the Synne Report: "Pseudo-Mutuality in the Family Relations of Schizophrenics," Psychiatry. XXI (May, 1953;, 205- 220. 37 A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Sudora ,'elty (Baton Rouge: Louisianna State University Press, 19o5;, p. 49. '138

revelation of-private terror and desperation, since the whole is an overly rhetorical attempt at evoking pity and justifying self. "The Lady doth protest too much." She ends up alone in her own "home," but her monologue itself indicates that she is not free from the psychological bond­ age of her family.

"Powerhouse" 194-0

In her "Introduction" to Miss Welty1s stories, Katherine Anne Porter observes of her friend that "always, from the beginning until now, she loved folk tales, fairy

tales, old legends, and she likes to listen to the songs and stories of people who live in old communities whose

culture is recollected and bequeathed o r a l l y ."38 This

statement holds significance for both the method and the matter of "Powerhouse." The story is, especially at the beginning, an oral monologue telling as much about the narrator as it does about Powerhouse and his band. The narrator1s stereotypes dissolve into understanding as the story progresses. The first few pages clearly establish

that Powerhouse brings great excitement to Alligator, Mississippi, and that the townsfolk, represented by the narrator,. regard this event as a curiosity. ("Remember how it was with the acrobats") to be studied carefully, noting all the peculiarities. People do not see Powerhouse

Selected Stories of Rudora Welty (New York: Random House, n.d.), p. xiv. as a person. Ilany of the traits first noticed by the narrator are really projections of. his already-held attitudes toward Hegroes. Thus the narrator's descrip­ tion pays particular attention to the precise color of the entertainers, inaccurately depicting them as bestial,sexy,

"obscene," and joyous. Using such stereotypes, presuming to understand the f e e lin g s of the jazz man ("You know how it is with them—llegroes—band leaders—they would play the same way, giving all they've got, for an audience of one"), and failing to understand any mode of behavior which escapes the received categories, the whites confine Power­ house to isolation and deny his humanity. Uelty wrestles with this inscrutable otherness in many of her stories, and especially in "A Curtain of Green," one of her finest. "Powerhouse" is a ritual of exorcism, culminating as Powerhouse assumes the stance of a prayer-meeting preacher in the cafe. With plot minimized in favor of dialogue, symbol, and musical form, "the actual story is not about the death of Powerhouse's wife, but about the inner turmoil which gives rise to his grandiose fantasy."39 The fantasy establishes the problem of the story, and its exorcism serves to relieve fear and superstition. Powerhouse may even enjoy imagining Gypsy killing herself out of love for him, and, as Alfred Appel argues, "he kills Gypsy, the

39Appel, pp. 155-6 14g embodiment of his unrealized love, to exorcise his own

death w ish ." 40 S im ila rly , Ray B. West, J r . , b e lie v e s th a t Uranus Knockwood may be a "p sy ch o lo g ical defense a g a in s t his superstition,"4^ a folk image of the devil on whom

Powerhouse can blame any failures, actual or imaginary. Powerhouse must exorcise this evil spirit of death and

doubt, and he does so when he "identifies" Xnockwood. Powerhouse also overcomes his fears and renews his

individuality through the act of artistic creation, which allows one way of being understood by a few individuals

in his band, if not by the uncomprehending audience. As West has shorn, Welty develops the story in a musical pattern, setting up a series of motifs, such as the song titles, which counterpoint loneliness and love. Responding to Powerhouse, each of the band members in turn repeats his own "theme," allowing Powerhouse to improvise musically his composition about his wife. For Instance, Little

Brother, the mystic, consistently accepts the fiction, 42 while Scoot, the literal-minded cynic, doubts it. With this counterpointing of "themes," the story resembles a

jazz composition, and one might even say, with Danforth Ross, that 'by the end of the story we have participated 4 "5 in a pagan love song . . . to Powerhouse1s wife."

40Ibid., p. 157. 41 "Three Methods of Modern Fiction:Ernest Hemingway, Budora Welty, and Thomas Mann," Pollege Bnglish, XII (1951), 2 00. 4-Ibid.. pp. 199-201 . 43 The American Short Story, p. 42. l4 l

tfest believes that the story presents the situation of "the artist in general, of whom Powerhouse in this story is the all-encompassing symbol" who "gives form to the n 44 doubts and fears of the race. Powerhouse embodies the fears of all races—he appears "Asiatic," "Jewish," and

"Peruvian." Benjamine tf. Griffith, on the other hand, sees Powerhouse as the a rtist who attempts to communicate without language, through music and signal, but who is only partly successful, and therefore remains a man apart, alienated from even his own race, symbolized by the admirers in the bar. Further, in another sense, Powerhouse is a Promethean figure, bound by his art to his piano (at one point he looks over the end of the piano, as if over a cliff1) just as the Titan was chained to a rock on a precipice of the Caucasus. Several critics have noted such mythic elements in the story.

These mythic parallels, plus the fact that Powerhouse is presented in heroic terms ("fingers about the size of bananas," etc.), suggest an American folk hero, a Negro cultural hero in an oral tale. Powerhouse captures folk feeling, and understands "the blues," as defined in a

seminal article by Ralph Ellison: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal existence

^"Three Methods," pp. 200-201. 'Powerhouse' As A Showcase of Eudora Melty1 s Methods and Themes," M ississippi Quarterly. MIX (1966), 34. 142

alive, in' one's aching consciousness, to finger its ragged grain and transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic l y r i c i s m .

Miss Welty comprehends the sorrow underlying the gaiety of the jazz, and the need of Negroes to wear the mask that whites expect them to wear. She links the story to blues singer Bessie Smith, whose "Homeless Blues," mention­ ed in the story, catches the spirit of cultural disinfran- chisement and aimless mobility experienced by Powerhouse, Bigger Thomas, and the protagonist of Invisible Man. Rootlessness is basic to the Negro experience, and con­ sequently to the blues. Unlike Kiss Welty, however, the whites at the dance do not understand, for they fail to respond either to the joy, which they take at face value, or to the sorrow which the band communicates in its own medium. Ultimately, though, as West maintains, the story transcends race. Is it a comment upon the Negro race; their combination of imagination and reality, be­ lief and skepticism, primitivism and creative­ ness? These are certainly her contrasts. In her final 'meaning,1 however, she is going be­ yond the Negro and making it apply to all cases where the man of genius combines within himself the extremes. This, she seems to say, is what genius consists of, the ability to operate with­ in the widest possible lim its. The artist com­ bines the primitive imagination with his sense of reality.4'

46"Richard W rig h t's B lu es," A ntioch Review. V (Summer, 1945), 199-200. "Three Methods," 201. 1 4 3

But it is also his -genius that Isolates him from even the people of his own race, represented by "Sugar-Stick" and the locals. At the bottom, "Powerhouse" explores Welty's basic themes, the separateness and alienation acutely felt by an artist or by anyone forced to fit stereotypes.

Hiss Welty overcomes these problems, making them and her­ self understood in a way that Powerhouse could not.

"The D em onstrators" 1966 As a Southern writer who set most of her stories in small Mississippi towns, Eudora Welty consistently sought to render the sights, sounds, and smells of an objectified place. And faithfulness to place accounts for part of her special effectiveness as a regional writer. As she indicated in her essay, "Place in Piction," an author's feelings tend to be strongly evoked by an intimately-known place. "The Demonstrators" embodies complexly ambivalent feelings toward an historic, tightly knit Southern community undergoing the stresses of the mid 1960's. Tufts of cotton catch alongside the road, pear tree leaves clutter the lawns, and the crepe-myrtle is about to drop its leaves. The reader can feel the delta autumn, and more importantly can sense th e mood of the town as the long summer of w hite supremacy weakens under pressures for social change, symbolized by the draft card burner and the civil rights worker from the North. 144

«

The Sentinel1s account brilliantly reveals the self- righteous, racist mentality of the South. In a time when race had become a major preoccupation, the controlling whites sought to maintain their illusion that "our darkies are well treated and content." Hence the paper points out that there was "Ho Racial Content Espied" in the killings, and that the pick was found near "the new $100,000.00 Negro school." Sheriff Vince Lasseter is more overt: "That's one they can't pin the blame on us for. That's how they treat their own kind. Please take note our conscience is clear." The sheriff's unnecessary protests of innocence in this case suggest that his conscience is anything but clear, and since his mind has already leapt from two individuals to the generic "they," perhaps it should not be. He seems ready to justify further brutality to any

Negro simply because two Negroes were brutal to one another. The Negroes remain vulnerable, protected from neither civilian nor police brutality.

Miss Nelty's perceptions of Negroes are equally acute. After holding an exhibition of her photographic studies of Mississippi Negroes in 1936, she wrote a number of stories which, from a white viewpoint, seem to offer deeper insights into Negro life than those of any other white writer with the possible exception of Faulkner. The bedside scene in the Negro home is superb; the dialect rings true, and the

special thought patterns of the Negro sub-culture are render­ ed perfectly. The doctor finds that to his surprise the 145

Negroes do not honor him, as he might expect from the Jim Grow past, but instead they treat him as an outsider, and even as an intruder. They too have generalised, treating him as an extension of the white establishment even though he has offended it by allowing civil rights worlcers to use his home. His non-medical questions about the circumstances of the wounding no doubt heighten their su sp ic io n .

The Negroes are more curious than disturbed by the v io le n t a c t, perhaps because v io le n ce i s n o t uncommon among them. They seem to accept injury and death as parts of life,

and their Fundamental old time religion ("Sister Gaddy yet into gates of joy?") malces even death seem.attractive,

especially when "this life" has not been good. In their house, no one minds when a child cries "I bid that" as the

doctor removes a necklace from a dying person, or when guinea pigs run wild in the same room as the victims. Find­ ing that his authority is not heeded, the doctor looks about for someone to put in charge, and selects "the old pipe- smolcing woman in the boiled white apron." Affronted at not being recognized as an individual the doctor has known, and at his ordering her around, she reacts with a fury, calling the doctor's competence into question. Perhaps

"they all look the same" to the young doctor, who apparent-, ly has not had much personal contact with Negroes. Yet despite this culture shock, the doctor leaves the house only after drinking from the misshapen cup and seeing 146 i the castoff dresses which once belonged to women in his own family. He is sensitive enough to see the significance of these links between the generations and the races, and leaves feeling the unity of life. Though he at first fails to recognize both Ruby and Lucille as people he has known, once he does, he comes to sense the interrelatedness of all human life in the town. Minutes later, meditating at the crossing, he ponders the divisiveness of the times: And suddenly, tonight, things had seemed just the way they used to seem . . . Has it the sensation, now returning, that there was still allowed to everybody on earth a self—savage, death-defying, p riv a te ? In short, he realizes that the bounds of the self divide men from one another and that this individuality, possess­ ed by every man, unifies all men. Ruth M. VandeKieft's discerning discussion of the story investigates this selfhood-separateness problem in detail. Most of the characters the doctor meets on his night journey are demonstrators asserting their existence as individuals in a society and at a time that classifies people into groups. Miss Marcia Pope, the traditionalist, ''rejects the modern palliative, the tranquillizer, and . . . will go on teaching her 'civics' . . • and declaiming her

Shakespeare and Virgil, to the end of her days," which may come sooner because of this stance. The young man who burns his draft card demonstrates his moral outrage at war and conscription. Ruby, even when surrounded by her noisy kin, remains absorbed with dying: "every gesture and expression •147 shows how she demands the dignity and privacy of her final human act. "4-8 Like Ruby, Love refuses to die without dignity and privacy, even when left for dead by his people. Love is the last and best of the demonstrators. A strong, violent man, he fights for his very life . . . His final plea, to the only man who might save him, seems less for protection from the law than for privacy: "Hide m e."49

In this story, a demonstration may be a private act, an assertion of self to oneself. Taking this theme.into consideration, one becomes aware that Welty’s decision to have the doctor serve as a center of consciousness is highly advantageous. The doctor is himself at the psychological center of the town, having relations with nearly all its citizens, yet his insights and feelings remain his own. No one in the town will ever know. Seeing people and events through his own eyes, the reader is forced to put aside, for a moment at least, his own preconceptions about the kind of people and events the story presents. In sum, this fictional technique allows tone to subtly shape reader response to the subject matter, allowing the author greater "objectivity." Welty refuses to take sides, and allows no character, regardless of race, sex, or age, to stand immune to criticism. She refuses to crusade, for reformers must simplify and generalize, and that is the very opposite of what she believes her art ought to do.

^"Lemonstrators In A Stricken Land," The Process of Fiction, ed. Barbara McKenzie (New York: Hareout Brace, 1969), p. 344.

49Ibid.. p. 346. 1'48

Robert Penn Warren (1905- )

"Blackberry Winter" 1946 "Blackberry Winter" might be cited as a story which incorporates and combines almost all of the thematic concerns of the Southern group. It is a story of the type which Warren himself has called "the story of initiation," but one which goes further, perhaps, than any other contemporary short story of its kind in defin­ ing the nature of evil which confronts men. . . .

—Ray B. W est, J r . , The Short Story in America: 1900-1950 '(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), P. 77-8. In Hay of 1946, while living in Minneapolis far from his native Tennessee, Warren found himself in a retrospective mood (not uncommon among Southern w r ite r s ) as th e snow began to fall again, covering the lilac blooms. Indulging his nostalgia, he followed a chain of associations back to a similar regression from the warmth of spring which he experienced in his boyhood. He had been reading M elville's poetry that spring in Minneapolis, and remembers being profoundly impressed by "The Conflict of Convictions," a poem about the coming of the American Civil War. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the war, Melville said, would show "the slimed foundations" of the world.->u In 1946, directly after the discovery of the concentration camps, Warren sensed the depth of M elville's meaning, and out of it grew the image of filth, usually hidden, washed

50 Robert Penn Warren, "Blackberry Winter: A Recollection," Understanding Fiction, p. 3 6 9 . .149 by the storm from under Dellie's cabin to foul her

i ordinarily clean yard. As this image, plus those of death and disorder all serve to show, the story does not romanticize pastoral hardships. Many of Warren's images express an entranced horror with nature. Death is real. Yet there is also a sense, as Winston Weathers points out, of the archetypal timelessness of “First Paradise'1 in the story. It includes, for instance, the archetypes of the good parent, the Sacred

River, on whose banlcs a crowd watches a death symbol, and the Mysterious Stranger, complete with anonymous face, incongrous costume, and associations with the river and woods from which he appears.^1 These archetypes suggesting timelessness heighten the numerous images of death and dissolution, implying the possibility of absolute order or certainty in either the natural or human worlds. Man cannot ally himself with nature, for it is not his ally; it is inscrutable. This sense of mystery, also inherent in the "abnormal” behavior of Dellie and Big Jebb, is the traditionalist's answer to the rational optimism of reform­ e r s .

At nine, living in what appeared to be a timeless natural realm, the boy believes that "time is not a move­ ment," and that things are "solid in time like the tree

^"Blackberry Winter' and the Use of Archetypes," Studies in Short Fiction. I (1963)» 45-51. 15® that you can walk around." He has lived in the comfort of certainty, never thinking that his mother would ever be dead. Into this timeless world of the child intrudes the tramp, rooted in the alien city, the time-obsessed world of the adult. This preoccupation with troublemakers from outside and with time stands as part of Warren's complex t r ad i t i onal i sm: For Warren, in short, Jeffersonian liberalism, Darwinian science, and American industry com­ prise an unholy trinity that has spread its infection throughout the modern world, frag­ menting our universe, inducing a chaos of be­ liefs, destroying the possibility for a stable society, and threatening the existence of the human personality itself.52

Guilt, too, comprises part of Warren's traditional mind, as Paul West notes. This symbolic infidelity the adult narrator has come to regret; like the speaker in several of Warren's early poems he is saddened that as a boy he responded poorly to the beleaguered de­ votion of his parents.55

In a story of initiation, what the initiate learns is of course important to the meaning of the story. The last

section of this story, spoken by the adult narrator, drives home the theme of the violence of time. Humans and human relationships cannot endure unchanged. The boy also learns that there are times when nature and human nature get out of control, causing parental love to seem like hate,

520hester Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties, p. 199. 53pLobert Penn Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1964}, p. 54. 151

as when the Negro woman, undergoing change of l i f e , s tr ik e s her son for his minor offense. The narrator has experienced his own blackberry wixiter, being thrust violently from the warmth and security of childish innocence into the chill adult knowledge of evil and instability. He resists such impingement, defying his mother and the weather to continue to go barefoot. As Warren reveals,

the privilege itself was important, a declara­ tion of independence from the tyranny of winter and school .... It carried you back into a dream of nature. . . .54

The tramp, out of place in the country, widens the boy's understanding of evil. According to Warren, the tramp represents "a creature altogether lost and pitiful, a dim image of what, in one perspective, the human condition is ."55 Though to the boy he appears excitingly free of home and school, to the adult narrator he is lost and home­ less, condemned to wander the earth. The narrator knows, for he has "followed" the tramp during his life, wandering from place to place, "in the imaginative recognition, with all the responsibility which such a recognition entails,

of this last, mean, defeated, cowardly, worthless, bitter being as somehow a m an."56 Accordingly, the narrator must live by this vision of common humanity, recognizing that brotherhood requires

52hjnderstandlnre Fiction, p. 640.

55I b id .

56Ibld., p. 642. 152 associating oneself'with, perhaps even embracing, the cowardly and contemptible, or perhaps also espousing, as Warren apparently did., a conservative political position which would attempt to protect men from one another. He must also live with his guilt at having been blind to his family and its undramatic aging. But ultimately, as the story gradually shifts its emphasis from "the lyricism of nostalgia to the jags and injustices of human relationships,""*7 it exposes problems which no commitments to love or law can ever overcome.

William Oarlos Williams (1883-1963)

"The Use of Force" 1938

Ray 3. West, Jr., has claimed that Dr. William's ro stories are "almost willfully incomplete," and in several senses they are. As an imagist-symbolist poet, Williams sought concentration and suggestiveness, forcing the reader to become involved in the process of extracting meaning. Though as a poet Williams often relies on evocative description, in this story he includes almost no description of setting at all, making the reader focus his attention on character and motive.

The g irl's parents, who are ashamed, embarrassed, and prone to condescending cliches ("look what you've done.

57I b id . 58 The Short Story in America, p. 83. 1 5 3

The nice man * . .Il), annoy the doctor at first, but gradually become background as the story, like the doctor,

* zeroes in on the g irl’s mouth. Whereas they are one-dimen­ sional figures, the doctor and the child, as Robert B. Heilman suggests, are more fully drawn. More than merely frightened, the girl defends herself against what she believes is personal violation, suffering from a sense of shame of being sick, and perhaps for embarrassing her parents as well. For these reasons, she becomes actively hostile, and leads the reader to a more general level of m eaning. A kind of self-defense, heroic in its own way, may serve ibo conceal a danger to both oneself and others. Or again, the very state of af­ fairs which needs disclosure may itself lead to an intense concealment.59

In a much more limited way, then, the story touches on one of the great themes of The Scarlet Letter and Prime and Punishment.

Himself a physician, Williams adds interest to the story by relating it from a point of view relatively novel in fiction—that of the doctor. He is sharply aware of his own motives—duty and, later, a desire for physical victory—and even of his own tendencies to rationalize them: The dammed little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one s self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. All these things are true.

^Modern Short Stories: A Critical Anthology, p. 373. 154

But a "blind, fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives.

What the doctor does not recognize, however, is the sexuality under his persistence. His emphasis on the girl's beauty, his associations with the girls in the photogravure sections, his phrase "she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury," and use of phallic objects all point to this very Freudian connection between sex and violence. Just when the mind seems to be most honest with itself, it is stopping short of the most shocking truth, using "hidden" motives to hide the real one. Again, then, ’Williams leaves in­ complete ’what appears to be fully explicit. It is this suggestibility that allows the story to function as a parable on the use of force in general— on the kind of hostility, love of conquest, and madness that the use of force brings into play, whatever the apparent necessity of or justifi­ cation for vigorous action. The story also implies the tyranny of determination, of passionately involved willfulness, which keeps the doctor from returning an hour later and locks tragic figures on a self-destructive course. In the final analysis, then, the story is both a symbolic parable and a realistic por­ trayal, by means of a specific dramatic situation of the basic workings of human nature.

6oIb id 155

Shirley Jackson (1919-1965) "The Lottery" 1944

"The Lottery" is Indeed an unusual story, which is perhaps the main reason for its great popularity. In it, there is no conflict, little plot, and mimimum character interest. Aside from Mr. Summers,who represents the out­ wardly jovial, civic-minded type, and Old Man Warner, the dogmatic, moss-backed reactionary, the characters sire not sharply distinguished from one another.

Olearly the Intent of the story, then, is tilted toward effect and theme. Jackson constructs the story masterfully in leading up to its primary effect—shock. Up to the final six paragraphs, it is a matter-of-fact sketch of small town life, narrated in a deadpan manner which enhances the contrast at the end; as Brooks and Warren claim, "the horror of the ending is counter-balanced by the dry, even cheery, atmosphere of the scene. Jackson has prepared for the shock ending by having the boys unobtrusively gather stones, by having Mr. Adams mention that in another village "they're thinking of giving up the lottery," and by Mrs. Hutchinson's emotional outburst.

Then, too, Old Man Warner's fierce attempt to find scape­ goats ("Pack of Young Pools,") for the changes which outrage him foreshadows the passions underlying the stoning of the scapegoat ritual at the end.

^ Understanding; Fiction, p. 76. 156

All this malces for fine construction, hut one wonders whether, as Robert Heilman suggests, Jackson has not simply taken the ancient scapegoat motif and plunged it into an otherwise realistic account of contemporary American life. For most of the story, we are made to feel that what is happening on this June morning is perfectly credible on a realistic level. However, the ending, lacking the passion which seems necessary to initiate and sustain such a blood ritual, and presenting the Hutchinson family as unconcerned about the death of one of its ’ members, distinctly shifts the conventions of the story from realistic to symbolic. It is difficult to imagine, realistically, little Davy Hutchinson casually throwing stones at his own mother, however conformist Americans may be. "The question here is whether the shock 'seizes stage,1 so to speak, and so crowds out the revelation to which it should be second­ ary."^ The answer to this is a tentative "Yes." The story would have been more successful had it given the sinister along with, instead of after the innocent, Heilman a s s e r t s .^ 3 Yet throughout the story there are definite clues that the reader should regard the narrative as a parable. The black box (archetypal symbol of evil) has been built out of wood left over from the one (suggesting original

^2llodern Short Stories, p. 335 63Ib id . sin, or the roots of evil in the past), and is kept by various persons in the community (implicating the whole town in the evil). Seymour Laimoff notes that several details parallel Fraser's discussion of "The Scapegoat" in The Golden Bough. Just as the rite traditionally occurred at the time of the summer solstice, the story takes place on June 27, only six days afterward. Just as one of the purposes of the rite was to insure fertility, there are several mentions of crops, culminating with % Old Han Warner's "Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.'" Just as the ancient rite sought to shift the burden of the sufferer's sorrows to another, Mr. Summers, whose marriage lacks fertility and 64 who suffers a nagging wife, leads the ceremonies. Therefore on a mythic level the story shows sav­ agery existing just beneath modern man's civilized veneer, and provides an anthropological explanation for it. On another level, it exposes "the awful doubleness of the human spirit—a doubleness that expresses itself in the blended good neighborliness and cruelty of the community's r action." Even"civllized" people are fully capable of being so cruel as to stone another person to death, as Mazantzakis movingly shows in Zorba the Greek. But the

Greek novelist does .what Miss Jackson fails to do—make

Jackson's. 'The Lottery,'" Bxpllcator, XII (1954), Item 34. 65 Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction, p. 76. the story so credible that the reader must face a felt truth about human nature, not one abstracted from a parable. One can even arsjue that an idea is not a "truth" until it is felt, since it becomes "true" by being acted upon, not merely held intellectually, and felt truths are much more likely to be acted upon. CHAPTER IV

CONTEMPORARIES

Flannery 01 Connor (1925-1964) The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audi­ ence. When you can assume that your audience holds the same b e lie f s you do, you can r e la x a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock . . . —Flannery O'Connor, The Literature of the United States, ed. Halter Blair et, al. Book Three, Third Edition (Glenview, 111., Scott, Foresman, 1969), p. 631* "A Good Man Is Hard To F in d ” 1955 Miss O'Connor is often associated with "the

Grotesque” in modern fiction, particularly that of recent American Southern w riters beginning with William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter, and including Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, and Carson McCullers. Among well-known short stories, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find” perhaps best illustrates the essential characteristics of "The Grotesque."

1 5 9 160

It involves the characteristic pathology, violence, and horror, and, though its tone is basically gay, its numerous allusions to crime, criminals, graveyeards, secret panels, and accidents, all foreshadow the terrible

events which occur at the end. As Miss O’Connor makes clear above,’’the Grotesque" involves distortion, through which the writer makes the

grotesques she has found in life appear as grotesques to

an audience used to seeing them as normal. Their distortion is only ours writ large, she suggests. Most of the characters in the story are indeed grotesques. The Bailey children, more tactless, selfish, and willful than most, seem to represent the lack of moral fiber of the new generation. Their traits appear exaggerated, but they also seem terribly common and average. Similarly, their

grandmother is more than usually preoccupied with her appear­ ance as a lady and more than usually prone to preach rather

than practice, but she is also a typical modern woman. Until she reaches out to the Misfit with forgiveness and compassion, trying to comfort him as she might one of her

own children, she has remained apart from others, such as the Negroes she views with a calloused eye along the road or the foreigners she blames for American problems. Until the very end, her life of gentility, petty egotism, and respectable piety has remained superficial. Like many characters, in American literature, she has not looked deeply into the problem of evil; her moral vision remains myopic; l6 l

she can naively inform the Misfit that "you could be honest if you'd only try." Ironically, at the very end, when she has judged herself by denying Christ in a last desperate attempt to save her life, she does finally make a gesture to love toward her fellow non-believer.

In contrast to her, the Misfit has struggled with ultimate moral philosophical, and religious questions. He constitutes one of the ironic inversions which commonly appear in the literature of "the Grotesque," one enlisting

the reader's sympathies in a direction opposite to that in which they would normally run. Though an outcast and a

criminal, the Misfit is sensitive to familial infidelity, and reddens when Bailey curses his moth. The incongruity results from the fact that despite his crimes or abnormalities, he is trying to live "the examined life." as his father long ago discern- • ed, whereas the "average" family satirised by Miss O'Connor could't care less about an examined life .1 The Misfit represents a special kind of religious fanatic who has investigated Christianity, found it wanting because he cannot overcome his skepticism, yet cannot free himself from obsessive reaction to it.

The Misfit also reacts ironically to Christ. Like Christ, he has suffered unjust punishment, but in sharp

contrast his response is not loving kindness. He believes that much evil is Jasus's ora fault, for He "thrown every­ thing off by coming only once," thereby forcing skeptical,

1 Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, "Flannery O'Connor, A Realist of Distances," The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor cd. Marvin J. Friedman and Lewis Lawson T¥ew forks Fordham University Press, 1966), p. 175* 162 secular modern man ‘to doubt His miracles and therefore His very existence. As a result, the Misfit feels that he is free to "enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can," which for him involves doing as much "meanness" as he can. Therefore he also represents the unbelieving amoral modern man first presaged by Dostoevsky’s famous

"Grand Inquisitor.” He finds, though, that this ethic of sadistic hedonism offers him neither satisfaction nor salvation. Adding to his religious confusion, and largely causing his existen­ tial meaninglessness, is his disbelief in any cosmic justice. In Kafkaesque fashion, he feels guilt and endures punish­ ment for offenses that he cannot identify.. Expressing his sense of the malignancy of cosmic forces, he claims that "crime don’t matter," since "sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it." He therefore calls himself "the Misfit" because "I can't make what I done wrong fit what I gone through in punishment." He does, of course, sin immensely, but he shares the guilt with the Grandmother, and, ironically, occasions her partial redemption: The grandmother becomes worthy by recognizing her participation in evil as the M isfit's symbolic mother, and the. Misfit is revealed as an outrageous shocking representative of mankind suffering and protesting against a world of injustice.2

2Carter W. Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969')7 p . 229:------l6% ‘

As in much of 01 Connor's work, salvation comes only through evil, and one must love what shocks and offends. "The Grotesque," often a response to moral or social decay, also manifests itself in the story’s treatment of this common theme. "A good man is hard to find," laments Red Sammy. "Everything is getting terrible." The Tower, his restaurant, is a wreck of the spirit offering no security. Its owner states what the entire Bailey family demonstrates—that as traditional manners and moral dis­ integrate, only selfishness remains to guide conduct. This tenable conservative position has interested most of the modern Southern w riters, and many others as well.

Thus the Misfit is "an enlarged drawing of the despair, the murderous impulses, and the greed for pleasure which characterize the unbelieving man."3 He is also, however, a satanic figure who chooses to oppose God; the collection of stories in which the story appears is prefixed by the following epigraph from St. Cyril of Jeruselum: "The dragon is by the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you." The Grandmother leads the family off the road, where anti-Christ and his accomplices devour them all, ex­ posing the selfishness and lovelessness of the modern world.

^Louise Y. Gossett, Violence in Recent Southern Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 19^5), p. 81. 164

Ralph Billnon (1914- )

"King of the Bingo Game" 1944

Written just before Ellison began work on Invisible Man, one of the finest of modern novels, "King of the Bingo Game" i s

an excellent introduction to the novel, for it employs the techniques of gothicism and macabre humor that one finds in the larger work; and like Invisible Man it develops the themes of protest, identity, pride, and freedom.

The protagonist of the story, like that of the novel, is nameless and feels alien to his new Northern surroundings; "If this was down South," he thought, "all I'd have to do is lean over and say, 'Lady, gimme a few of those peanuts, please ma'am,' and she'd pass me the bag and never think nothing of it. . ." There is no real freedom for Negroes up North, for they become more competitive and lose their sense of belonging.

They are also rootless in the North, and, with the lure of equality on white terms, they often adopt white standards which encourage them to despise their negritude:

"All the Negroes down there were just ashamed because he was black like them. He smiled inwardly, knowing how it was. Most of the time he was ashamed of what Negroes did himself." As in the novel, we find a Negro caught between playing the game "whitey's" way, and losing, or trying to set up new rules, and thereby alienating himself from both whites and blacks. But it is the latter alternative,

^James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross, eds., Dark Symphony (New York; Macmillan, 1963), p. 252. though it involves further alienation, which promises a new identity. Staring into the "vague faces glowing in the bingo lights gave him a sense of himself that he had never known before." He forgets his name, given to him by a slave owner, and wants to become a prophet and martyr for his new identity, based upon control of his own destiny. Again there are sim ilarities to Invisible Man. which Ellison c a lle d a

memoir of a man who has gone through that experience and now comes back and brings his message to the world. It is a social act, it is not a resignation from society but an attempt to come back and be u s e f u l .5

The story also resembles the novel in its blend of realism and surrealism. It opens realistically, revealing the effects of social problems such as hunger and poverty, but quickly blurs into symbolic daydreams, such as those of running desperately to avoid being run down by relentless trains. As Emanuel and Gross point out, the setting for these techniques and themes is particularly appropriate, for the modern movie house invites fantasies of the Southern Hegro in the story, a man close to psychological breakdown. For this man, the bingo .game is life, and he is inevitable a loser . b The movie promises eroticism, but does not really offer itj the bingo game seems to be a way out of p o v erty , but i t is not, since one must steal several tickets in order to have any real chance to win. The movie and the Wheel of fate

■’Allen Geller, "An Interview with Ralph Ellison, " Tamarack Review. XXXII (1964) , 11. 5 Dark Symphony, p. 252. are fixed against him, and his reaction, predictably, is irrational and self-expressive protest. Moving through his ecstasy of awareness, his rebirth, he becomes intoxicated with his new sense of power, even proclaiming ’’This is God I" As Marcus Klein sums it up, The s to ry i s f i n a l l y about a man in a w orld of flickering, mocking perspectives, in a movie theater, who earns a sudden, sneaking blow from behind. His madness at the bingo wheel has something to do with that of Malraux.s Baron Olappique at the roulette table. There can be little doubt that Ellison was thinking of it. The Baron, too, discovers Fortuna in the wheel and, more particularly, he finds that through the wheel's agency he is for the first time embracing his own destiny, actually possessing himself, and the wheel ironically therefore is a kind of suicide for him.' In asserting himself, the hero goes mad, and is struck down for his hubris, his failure to keep his place in the scheme of things. Thus the story begins by depicting, much in the style of the protest literature of the thirties, such agonies as a man's inability to afford a doctor for his dying wife, but it moves toward a classically tragic portrayal of a man who, taking arms against his troubles, disintegrates mentally and succumbs to superior forces. The story offers, then, a prophetic paradigm of the s tru g g le s of many b lack men f o r id e n tity and freedom .

7 After Alienation! American Hovels in Mid-Oenturv (Cleveland: World, 1964), p. 106. 167

James Baldwin (1924- ) Whatever reservations we may have about Baldwin's Individual works, he still emerges as one of the few really compel­ ling literary figures of the day, urging us to believe, as few artists have succeed­ ed in making Americans believe, that the writer can be a political and social force in a culture. --Theodore Gross, "The World of James Baldwin," Critique. VII (1964-5), 140. "Sonny's Blues" 1960 Baldwin's fiction, though usually less highly admired than his intense essays, is at its best both finely wrought and immensely meaningful. Whereas in some of his fiction Baldwin fails to distance himself from his materials, in "Sonny's Blues" he achieves aesthetic distance by giving Sonny "the self that Baldwin only escaped from by rushing g into religion." and making the narrator represent what he himself might have become if he had entered a middle class profession such as teaching. He also gains objectivity by having the narrator, who comes to understand.much of what Baldwin wants the reader to understand, also reveal more than he is himself aware of. In telling the story of his struggle to help and understand his brother, the narrator reveals a good deal about himself. As the story opens, the news of Sonny's arrest jars the narrator into recognition of his neglect of his brother,

Q Brian Lee, "James Baldwin: Caliban to Prospero," The Black American Writer. Vol. I, ed. W.V.E. Bigsby (Deland, F la,: Everett Edwards, Inc., 1969), p. 176. whom he had vowed to watch over. Struggling with his paroxysms of guilt and fear, he admits that "I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn't wanted to know." To ease his guilt feelings, he gives five dollars to one of Sonny's friends, who is sincerely concerned with letting Sonny's brother know what has happened, yet cannot pass up a chance to "hustle" a dollar. The narrator also finds himself guilty of never bothering to look into this man's desperation, part of which stems from his own guilt for having encouraged Sonny to try his first "horse." The first episode establishes one of the major themes in the story—the necessity of escape from realities too bitter to bear. Discussing Sonny and his generation, the narrator explains that they were filled with rage. All they knew were the two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darknessof the movies, which had blinded them to that other dark­ ness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other • time, and more alone. Such images of escape abound in the story: the boys seek to escape the darkness of the street, the teachers flee the school as soon as the last bell sounds, the narrator avoids the realities about his brother, Sonny's friend wants to commit suicide, and Sonny escapes into drugs, the service, and jazz. Consistently, the light and the dark imagery reveals the dual bind of the ghetto, showing men trapped between the light of reality, which they cannot stand, and the darkness, in which men wander alone, like the father i # whose brother lay mashed and dying in the road. All of these escapes, then, are attempts to live with enormous suffering. Though no believer himself, Sonny understands why the people need the storefront salvation offered by the revivals, and tosses some change into the plate, supporting their "opiate," which serves a purpose identical to his own. The connection between religion and drugs becomes clear in Sonny’s remark about the revival: "’When she was singing before,1 said Sonny abruptly, 'her voice reminded me of what heroin feels like sometimes—when it's in your veins." As the narrator learns, jazz is the most satisfying way of coping with the sorrow and the loneliness, for it allows the musician non-verbal expression, and establishes a communion among those who play and those who hear the music. Jazz is Improvised creation, with the artist re­ sponding to the sounds and gestures of his co-creators,

"dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air." Throughout the story, knowing that he will be mis­ understood or judged by his brother, Sonny has not been able to communicate verbally. He pleads with his brother to listen to him play.

You walk these .streets, black and funky and cold, and there's not really a living ass to talk to, and there's nothing shaking, and there's no way of getting it out—that story inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize that nobody's listening. So you1ve got to l i s t e n . 170

The narrator does listen to Sonny, as do the other members of the band, and Sonny feels that he is "part of the family again," attached to his own family, the band, and the .family of man. It is a triumph for them both, as the narrator recognizes. "I understood at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that we would never be free until we did." Yet the joy is transitory, for "that world waited outside, hungry as a tiger." Though no salvation, jazz can offer an artistic opportunity to transcend one's aching consciousness. Even at the end, there is no indication that the narrator ever comes to anything near full self-knowledge. He never recognizes his own paternal, judgemental approach to Sonny, or his bourgeois attitude emphasizing postpone­ ment, will power, and respectability. Having accepted the moral and social terms of white society, he cannot under­ stand the hipster world of Charlie Parker, or that of his brother, who challenges these terms in his search for new black identity. Sonny is a young llegro caught on the one hand between the degradations, the slumminess of Harlem, and on the other hand the bourgeois, w hite am bitions of the r e l a t i v e s among whom he finds himself. Sonny's problem is pre­ cisely one of racial Identity. . . .9 Through jazz he transends what divides black men, expresses his own inner anguish, and connects himself with his brother

^Harcus ICLein, .ifte r A lie n a tio n : American Hovels in Ilid-Century (Cleveland:' T?orld, 19b4-/, p. 173. 171 and the heritage of his people. His brother, too, begins

to listen, and to understand, on an emotional level, his own connections with "that long line, of which we knew Mama and Daddy." Thus the story cmodies the search by

Negroes for identity through re-establishment of their own values, culture, and racial past.

Saul Bellow (1915- ) In a time when every major social phenomenon has shown the same drift toward human effacement and individual anonymity, Bellow has faced, in every­ thing he has written, the problem of the relation of man and his society.

—Chester Bisinger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago; University of Chicago, 1963), p. 34-1. "Looking for Mr. Green" 1951 Set in the thirties, "Looking for Mr. Green" does on one level present starkly the frustration wreaked by the particularly excruciating social and economic conditions of the period. University-trained whites have become shoe salesmen and petty bureaucrats, while city ghettoes teem with rootless refugees from the South. These Negroes fear "the man," suspecting any white, while white merchants,

such as the Italian grocer, distrust and resent these more recent immigrants from the South. Hence the story depicts

the misunderstanding and prejudice which are particularly acute among members'of minority groups, which are often themselves the victims of prejudice. The story is also a tale of urban decay. Rebuilt

only a half century earlier, much of Chicago is crumbling, rusting, and even, in abandoned places,, returning to prairie, With the poverty, fear, prejudice, and anonymity, the picture of the blighted city is complete and shocking, rivaling the sordid scenes painted by the naturalists. But Bellow's concern with issues of social gravity does not put him in the ranks of the naturalists or social realists like Dreiser or Farrell, As Bisinger asserts above, Bellow's main concern lies with the individual, and thus he owes more to Dostoevsky and Kafka than to the naturalists and their followers. As John J. Clayton points out, Bellow's characters are at once members of and alienated from society and the human race: "Bellow rejects the tradition of alienation in modern literature, and his fiction emphasizes the value of brother­ hood and community; yet his main characters are all masochists and alienatees,Mr. Grebe's hunt for Mr. Green, then, "becomes the attempt to prove that the ordinary individual's life is meaningful." While it is important to Grebe that Mr. Green is a cripple who will need his welfare check, what primarily motivates his quest is his need to believe in the possibilities of life—"only if Green exists can Grebe feel that his own existence, almost as marginal as

Green's,' is m eaningful.*

10Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man (Bloomington: Indiana University, Y9^8), p. 3. 173

Stailca and Field further develop this theme with

their protests that "I, one person, matter." In her attempt to become a single needy person in the eyes of welfare department bureaucrats, and to resist circumstances, Staika inspires Grebe. No, what Grebe saw in h e r, the power th a t makes people listen, was that her cry expressed the war of flesh and blood, perhaps turned a little crazy and certainly intensely ugly, on this place and condition. And at first, when he went out, the spirit of Staika presided over the whole district for her; he saw her color, in the spotty curb fires, and the fires under the El, the straight alley of flamey gloom.

Winston Field, too, needs to be heard and recognized: "'You got to know who I am,' the old man said. 'You're the

government.'" Grebe senses the old man's hunger for

conversation, and listens patiently to his plan to "fetch

respect" for Negroes, a scheme anticipating the need, ex­ pressed during the sixties by Negro leaders, for Negro

heroes who merit prestige and respect. Bellow demonstrates uncanny skill—especially for a short story writer—in describing convincingly the texture of experience while at the same time conveying the moral- philosophical complexities of the experience. Reacting to Raynor, the utilitarian who faults his Grebe for studying

Glassies instead of preparing for bad times, Grebe sets out to find the spirit behind the crumbling matter of the city. In his urban world the surfaces of life and like very though rubber, resilient but inpenetrable; man bounces off them but he cannot get underneath them. The urban world, further, is in constant flux, and its law is deterioration and growth in a cycle so rapid that it brings chaos to human lives. This 17^

story repeats the idealism of Augie March. Reality 1p becomes that which we agree to accept as real . . . However, are there great realities which arise regardless of human consent, regardless of human w ill, Grebe wonders, "Why is consent given to misery? And why so painfully ugly? Because there is something that is dismal and permanently ugly?" Despite their idealism, Grebe's metaphysical meditations cannot resolve these questions, but they are important because they do indicate to Grebe that philosophy is not, as Raynor charged, anachronistic in modern life, even during a depression. Brutal economic facts are not the only reality; and concern for the individual is not impossible in a mass society. These are the realities, based in hope, which Mr. Grebe hunts and eventually consents to accept in the form of Mr. Green. Grebe never sees him, but he believes in him. In these ways Bellow expresses both his belief in man, following one of the major streams in American literature, and his abiding sense for passing things, leading him to the metaphysical speculations in his work and that of certain

other post-war writers. But then too Bellow is saying something quite non-philosophical—"seize the day." This

theme is .evident in the epigraph, taken from Ecclesiastes 9:10: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with might for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom,

1 P Chester Eisinger, "Saul Bellow: Love and Identity," Accent. XVIII (1953), 200. 175

In the grave, whither thou goest."

J. D. Salinger (1919- )

"Uncle Uiggily in Connecticut" 1948 Many of Salinger's stories, first published in the

Hew Yorlcer, epitomize the tight, polished fiction of Eastern suburban life which has become associated with the magazine. Jack Lugwig writes that

Salinger1s fiction is in tune with the urbanity of the Hew Yorker's talk-of-the-town pieces, its gentlemanly, not-too-professional inquiry into science and contemporary personalities, its wry cartoons, its up-to-the minute stylishness in dress, drink, and vacation. His Christian sym­ bolism is recognizable and unfervid, his Zen properly unshrill. ^ This opinion of Salinger—a common one these days—fails to acknowledge that Salinger was indeed a fresh and contemporary voice speaking for and to Ivy League rebels during the fifties and early sixties, and that Salinger's charged dialogues captured the idiom of their time astonishingly well. Though the surface of Salinger's work may make it seem dated or even "camp," beneath the surface it is still pertinent. Ho mere sociologist of manners, Salinger is a social critic of religious insight; he uses the medium of social realism to explore close personal relations and individual spiritual failures. His primary concerns are the loss of innocence and the failure of love. He develops

13 ^Recent American Novelists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1962), p. 23. 175 these and related themes in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," and other stories in the collection entitled Nine Stories. The innocence theme is carried by Eloise, who is maudlin, calloused, and superficial, and by her daughter Ramona, who despite her mother, retains a degree of child­ like spontaneity and imagination. The hysteria of Eloise focuses on her lonely and sensitive daughter, Ramona, who could be the illi- gitimate daughter of lfalt, and is certainly the living reminder of the vision Eloise has compro­ mised and the innocence she has lo st.'4-

Walt turns out to be one of the Glass brothers, killed in 194-5 after serving in the Pacific, whom Eloise once loved fully and freely. She cannot forget him, and therefore feels apathy toward her husband and hostility toward her daughter, who represent Walt's innocence, and her own. Salinger seems to illustrate the necessity but futility of trying to forget. In "Uncle Wiggily". . . we have Salinger's first sign of awareness that this sense of loss-ought to be overcome; the first sign, in other words, that remembering too much is a bad thing. Eloise, for example, resents her daughter's habit of in­ venting invisible playmates . . . to take to bed with her at night. Unconsciously, Eloise knows that Walter, her first lover, is an invisible as Ramona's b o y frie n d s. She fo rc e s Ramona to move into the middle of the bed to prevent her daughter from lying with an invisible lover as she has had to lie with one. . .^

14-ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 268. 15william Wiegland, "J.D. Salinger's Seventy-Eight Bananas," Chicago Review. XI (1958)» 10. fl$7

The imaginary names of comic book characters, symbolizing fantasy and innocence, link Walt ("Uncle Wiggily") with Ramona ("Jimmy Jim m ereeno," "Donald Duck," e t c . ) , so th a t the reader understands Eloise's embrace of her daughter's glasses as a lament for the innocence lost when her genuinely humorous, "nice" lover never returned. Married

to a bore, Impoverished by petty gossip, and hardened by the loss of her lover and faith, Eloise cannot love her child "until she is stirred by memories of the dead Walt

Glass's indomitable buoyancy of sp irit."1^

'Warren French sees the innocence theme developed by opposing worlds, discriminated by the adjestives Salinger uses so commonly—"phony" and "nice." The "phony" world is the one in which Eloise travelled in college, and

the one in which she lives in suburbia. The opening

paragraph, with terms such as "fouled," "soiled," and "burned," suggests a withering of the spirit, as does Eloise's aggressively insensitive treatment of her old college crony.

Furthermore, the bleak winter weather and the sterility of the neighbors also maintain the pervading 'Waste Land atmosphere. All this is the antithesis of the "nice" (i.e. innocent) world of kindness, spontaneity, love, and imagi­ nation which the flashbacks recreate. In addition,

^Kenneth Hamilton, J.D. Salinger! A Critical Essay (Grand Rapids, Mich.! Eerdman's, 1967), p. 31. i7S

the contrasting worlds are epitomized even in the title of the story, which combines "Uncle .figgily," borrowed by Walt from Howard Garis's children's stories about a whimsical rabbit to apply to the "nice" Eloise, with "Connecticut," the chosen gathering place of the phony Madison Avenue exurbanites that Holden Caulfield later rails against,1'

The final line in the story, .then, depicts her recognition of what has happened as the "phony" world has overcome her

"nice" world, and of how her unhappiness is destroying her c h ild . Salinger's having Walt killed by a freak accident rather than in action may, as French claims, emphasize "the indifference of the universe to man1s ideas of good and evil,"^® and therefore seems to indicate that Eloise has herself compromised her innocence in order to exist in upper middle class society. French concludes that

man does not retain his "niceness" because he does not have the intelligence, the wisdom, or the fore­ sight to retain it while attempting to meet the de­ mands that the world makes upon him.*9

One pities Eloise, especially her pathetic attempts at humor and at fantasizing that she is a hold-up artist or a stripper. Yet one also feels that, despite the cosmic indifference, grief, and social pressures, Eloise is herself in part responsible for being such an egotistic bitch to every human being she encounters. Walt maintained his self in the Army

17"jhe Phony World and the ITice World," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VI (1963), 23-30. l8Ibid., p. 27. 19I b ld . ■ 17*9

(where he advanced in a different direction than everybody else), the most oppressive of human environments, and Ramona survives in alien surroundings through her fantasies. Thus mother and daughter and tfalt—all people—are wounded; are re p re se n te d by the Howard G aris r a b b it "always com plain­ ing about his rheumatism."^

Bernard Malamud (1914— )

The first and most obvious quality of his fiction is its "goodness". . . It is the product of a sen­ sitive yet enduring heart, vulnerable where it counts, and deeply responsible to its feeling of what transforms a man into a mensh. Behind it is a wry version of pain, and also of hope. —Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary Amer­ ican Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 160.

"The Magic B arrel" 1958 Beyond its "goodness," the most distinctive feature of Malamud's work: is its rare combination of the tragic and comic modes. Sometimes, as in "The Je w b lrd ," .comedy d is ­ solves into tragedy, but more often, as in "The Magic Barrel," overpowering pity for the human condition is lightened with irony and humor which seem to say we all suffer, so we might as well not take ourselves too seriously. This combination of laughter and pain, plus frequent use of Jewish folklore and character types, links Malamud1s stories to

PO ^Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, The Fiction of J.D. Salinger (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 195^)7 p. 22. 1 8 0

Eastern European Yiddish tales. The humor can talce the form of gentle satire of the values of a community which esteems commitment to the faith but also thinks in terms of dowries, status occupations, and how well a person is Americanized. There is surely an in­ congruity in a society which claims to believe in the power of love but which continues the custom of arranged marriages.

Salzman's used car salesman's approach to match-making comes in for mock-heroic ridicule when Leo imagines him as "perhaps a cloven-hoofed Pan, piping nuptial ditties as he danced his invisible way before them, strewing wild buds on the walk and purple grapes in their path . . . . " There is also pathetic humor in Leo's romantic yearn­ ings for excitement and love in hopelessly commercial Depression Brooklyn, and in the "desperate innocence" motivating him to trust a bouquet of violets and rosebuds out to the prostitute standing smoking beneath a lamp post. Then, too, there is the comic grotesquerle of a marriage broker who constantly smells like fish, plus the magical elements in the story, such as this commercial cupid's powers to appear and disappear into his office in the air. Yet even with this humor and magic, the story never loses its profound dignity, or its sense that the problems of its people are very real indeed. Furthermore, as Sidney Richman notes, "If the ironies undercutting the story preserve it from a kind of mythic schmaltz, the myth preserves the story Q 4 from the i r o n y .1 Malamud i s always asking how people live with such great suffering, and humor and fantasy seem to be his answers.

In addition, these mythic and magical qualities are appropriate to Leo's fairy tale-lilce quest for love, and to his symbolic entry into a transient, ambiguous world where Sod no longer lights the way, Salzman, his mortal guide, offers one way of living in such a world: . . .by his fearlessness, his agility, his unex­ pectedness, Salzman is a figure who holds on in a world where uncertainty, evanescence, and un­ reliability are the rule. He live the truth of this world. The H ebraic w orld Salzman has known i s f a l l i n g a p a rt; h is own daughter, imbued with the American belief that "to be poor was a sin," has fallen into what he regards as a much greater sin in her attempt to escape poverty. In an ironic sense, then, she is "well-Americanized." Leo, too, no longer believes in "the law" of traditional Jewish life.

Salzman tries to hold on as things fall apart, as the sub­ culture he represents disintegrates under the pressures from and the temptations—secularism, materialism, conformity, etc.—of the larger society without.

These tensions pull even harder at Leo, who is younger than Salzman, Godless, isolated, and knowing the letter but not the spirit, Leo is lost. He has been a good

21Bernard Malamud (New York: Twayne, 1966), p. 123. 22Harcus iClein, After Alienation, pp. 279-30. 182

Jewish boy who became a rabbinical student only to discover that his years of diligent study have cut him off from life . Ironically, he must turn away from his holy studies to pursue his spiritual quest. "Unloved and loveless," he speculates on whether he has failed to love God because he has failed to love man, and draws consolation, indulging his feelings of self-pity, by thinking that "he was a Jew and that a Jew suffered." He feels shame for his cultural heresy in disapproving the "match-making institution," a basic part of traditional Jewish life. Knowing that his dream of fulfillm ent through becoming a rabbi has' led him into complete alientation, yet still feeling guilt at not meeting his parents' expectations, Leo falls into despair. This period of despondency is crucial, for it forces him to follow his feelings, to reach out to life as it is, represented by Stella. The effect of, if not the moral intention in, his taking this carnal young lady, is that he clutches the lyrical relief at something, as an alternative to nothing. The girl has .momen­ tary but sensual and palpable presence, as nothing else in Leo's life and landscape has. ^

The moral intention, according to Klein, grows from Leo's initiation under Salzman, who "will eventually trick Leo into knowing that love and life and lowliness and death in h a b it the same p l a c e ."24-

23Ibid., p. 278.

24Ibid., p. '277. 183

This Is the condition to which Leo Finkle aspires and which he calls his redemption. His meeting is with life itself, and the moment of the encounter achieves an ultimate rapture because of the aware­ ness it brings him, like an illumination, that the joy and pain he had longed to embrace, end had been willing to embrace as sin, need not be condemned.25

This view linking the story with the tradition of the saintly-prostitute motif in Western literature, also ties it to the tradition of neo-Hasidism, represented by Ilartin Buber, which olds that "man may be purified of sin and P(C everyman may be redeemed."^0 Advocates of this view, then accept the validity of Leo's hopes for salvation through

Stella, whose name means star, and point to Malamud1s other f i c t i o n to show th a t Malamud never giv es up on anyone, no matter how lowly or tainted. Other critics, however, believe that the prostitute simply underscores the impossibility of rejecting the flesh, or that Leo's naivete about love leads him into illusory hopes of finding a wife, and through her, salvation. It is d i f f i c u l t to b e lie v e th a t i f Malamud had in ten d ed the re a d ­ er to view Leo's romantic-pathetic gesture as one of humil­ ity and redemption, he should have ended the story with Salzman chanting "prayers for the dead." There are,as Richman suggests, better reasons for these: Salzman could

oc ^Lionel Trilling,ed., The Experience of Literature: Fiction (Hew York: Holt, Rinehart, Rinehart, and Winston, W T T P . 387. 2^0hester Eisinger, "Saul Bellow: Love and Identity," Accent. XVIII (1958), 182. be praying for his daughter, for his own failure as a i father and guilt in tricking Leo, for Leo's hopeless quest for love, or for all of these reasons.27' The striking tableau that ends the story is a micro­ cosm f o r the r ic h am biguity of the s to ry i t s e l f : The conflicting forces are held in poetic sus­ pension . . . Finkle with the bouquet, Salzman reciting the prayer, and Stella dressed in white with red shoes. Each point on the triangle en­ lists the reader's sympathy, but each is also treated with a basic i r o n y . 28

These ironies, though artistically useful in many ways, do render precise analysis more difficult. However, the central meanings are clear—that orthodox Jewish culture can only resist but not halt change, that such flux produces con­ flicts among values, that not to experience suffering is not to be ready to live and love, and that this life offers possibilities, at least, for redemption.

Philip Roth (1933- )

"Defender of the Faith" 1959 While Malamud seems p rim a rily concerned w ith having the Jewish tradition survive in modern life, Roth character­ istically writes about the modern Jew spiritually adrift between his ethnic past and a future which demands a new moral stance. In dealing with these problems besetting the Jew in transition, Roth has often satirized, or at least

^ Bernard Malamud. p. 122,

2^E arl H. R o v it, "Bernard Malamud and the Jew ish L it e r ­ ary Tradition," Critique. Ill (i960), 6. 185 treated ambivalently, both orthodoxy and complete assimila­ tion, thereby offending members of the Jewish community who have adopted one or the other of these identities. Because he is neither orthodox nor assimilated,

Sheldon Grossbart is a complex, ambivalent characterization.

Olosely tied to his orthodox immigrant family, to whom he genuinely wishes to remain close, Sheldon is nevertheless a wheedling, scheming private who attempts to manipulate

Sergeant Marx's feelings about being a Jew. ftp He resorts to such devices as "That's what happened in Germany" . . . "They didn't stick together" in order to get his way. Overly conscious of being different and Jewish, he demands special privileges to go to Temple, but when he arrives, he parodies the service, and, referring to the "G.I. party" back at the barracks, cackles "Let the goyim

clean the floors." Though initially successful, Sheldon's

shrewd maneuvers eventually prove disadvantageous as he

pushes too hard. While it may be true that the attempts of many German Jews to "become" Germans only exacerbated

their sufferings, this does not justify Sheldon's misuse

of Jewishness for his own personal ends. This too breeds h a te .

However, Sheldon has his attractive side too. He is genuinely interested, in improving the lot of the other Jew­ ish recruits, not just his own, as one observes when Sheldon risks his own weekend pass in order to get passes for

the others. Though his emotionalism often leads him

into excesses, symbolized by his frequent crying, he is a -186

person who feels deeply the sufferings of his people and

the bonds among them. Sergeant i-Iarx mocks him by calling him a "regular Messiah," but in a sense he is, for he believes that "the Messiah is a collective idea," calling for each Jew to "give a little, that's all." In his opposition to the Army's suppression of individual and ethnic differences, he is,.like Marx, a defender of the faith. Marx is Sheldon's alter ego; the Yiddish word leben links them as searchers for identity, but their searches - have taken them to opposite psychological extremes. During h is th re e y e ars in the Army, one of them in combat, Marx has necessarily repressed his feelings of Jewishness and "shut off all softness I might feel for my fellows." He feels nothing when Captain Barrett makes an ugly remark about "niggers." He distrusts his feelings, and when he senses that Sheldon is playing upon them, he will not acknowledge them. Later he discovers that his heart really has become hardened:

I tried to look squarely at what I'd become involved in, and began to wonder if perhaps th e stru g g le w ith G rossbart w a sn 't as much my fault as his. What was I that I had to' muster generous feelings? A childhood memory, long beneath his consciousness, leads him back to the emotional richness of his Grandmother, who had taught him that "mercy overrides justice." He further recognizes that he too Jm IH&mi on lies to avoid committing himself to his people and thereby offending his military

superiors. And in a final recognition, he realizes that to seelc pardon for his act of vengeance is to pardon him­ self, to avoid full acceptance of the blame. He discovers in his heart that he is neither more nor less than human. Though Marx has l o s t any s p e c ia l sense of Jew ish identity, his decision to send Sheldon to the Pacific can be seen as a defense of the faith. The solution is one that sacrifices the interests of one not very liltable member of the tribe to .an abstract principle of absolute justice. The con­ cerns of Judaism are consequently translated from simple self-preservation to a prophetic version of u n iv e rs a l j u s t i c e . 2° Alfred ICazin believes that this decision culminates in a typically American conflict between personal integrity and group pressures, between the need to assert self and natural loyalties. The story, Kazin asserts, rise's to an unusual level .of moral complexity in affirm­ ing his [Marx'si own deliberate hardening of heart. In punishing the soldier so severely, Sergeant Marx was affirming his own—not altogether admirable but candidly mature—acceptance of his own raw human limitations, and the reader was left with a deep­ ened sense of the necessary and painful decisions on which life rests.3° Though Marx's w ill power does allow him to triumph over his neurotic need to apologize, it is not clear that Roth favors his restraint over Sheldon's feeling. Irving

Malin notes this moral complexity. The epigraph to Goodbye.Columbus is.a Yiddish proverb. "The heart is half a prophet." Roth uses it to suggest that feeling is so uncon­ trollable th at'it can prevent complete under­ standing: pity becomes self-pityj pure emotion

2^Dan Isaac, "In Defense of Philip Roth," Ohioago Review. XVII (1964), ii-iii, 91. ^Contemporaries (Boston: L ittle Brown, 1962), p. 259. 1'88

becomes sentimentality. The line between healthy and sick feeling is very thin; we need courage and reason to walk it.

■While Eli the fanatic and other characters in Roth find'wis­ dom in "letting go" by following their feelings, and while Marx is an emotional cripple, it is not certain that Roth condemns Marx's rationality, 'for his very survival in a hostile land has depended upon his ability to repress. Roth sets up a head-heart dialectic, but does not take a side, and perhaps is wise, aesthetically and morally, in not doing so. He takes two essentially worthy approaches to life, and shows the extreme or distortions toward which each may develop.

"Eli, the Fanatic" 1956 Whereas in "Defender of the Faith" Roth treats the reason vs. emotion conflicts in the sphere of ethical be­ havior, in "Eli, the Fanatic" he deals with this same con­ flict in larger spheres, encompassing the ultimate question of spiritual life in scientific mass society. The Jews of Woodenton, a wooden upper middle class suburb of New York, have fled the ghetto in order to integrate with gentiles. After centuries of persecution, they have found acceptance and peace, and naturally oppose anything that threatens to undo these achievements* However, in order to assimilate,

31 Jews and Americans (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press), p. ib^. to win acceptance of Christians, these modern Jews have had to minimize their overt Jewishness, and psychologically turn away from the glories and sufferings of their ethnic p a s t.

For their security, they have paid a terrible price. Eli alone recognizes this: "It's the commuting that's killing,” he admits, revealing, at the beginning of the story, that neither his job nor his marriage nor his life in

Woodenton is satisfying. He loved her when life was proceeding smoothly— and that was when she loved him. But sometimes Eli found that being a lawyer surrounded him like quicksand .... The trouble was that sometimes the law didn't seem to be the answer, law didn't seem to have anything to do with what was aggravating everybody. And that, of course, made him feel foolish and unnecessary. Civil law, the formalization of common sense, conformity, and compromise, represents the modern tendencies which Eli struggles against, and allows the suburbanites to rationalize their fears about the boarding school. E li's wife caricatures these and other modern tenden­ cies. Psychoanalysis, representing a rational, analytic approach to life and love, has become her fashionable religion. In_stead of trying to find out where her husband is in his struggle for identity, she merely lab%s his be­ havior and presumes to understand him in the same all-accept­ ing way that her analyst accepts her. She rationalizes her hostility toward him ("What do you care—it's only me I'm being hostile towards"), thereby excusing herself for not •190 understanding his feelings. Clearly she does not under­ stand him at all when she asserts that the only problem that they have is finding a name for their baby. Together with Ted, who uses an X-ray machine to fit shoes, and the i other modern Jews who have attempted to forget the past, she stands for the rationalistic, commercial, scientific approach of life which seems to be leading to the bovine conformity of a Brave New Norid. In opposition, of course, stands the sagging old mansion of Talmudic teaching, peopled by displaced persons from Europe who resist Americanization. Through his contacts with Tzuref and the others, Eli comes to realize that he

and the modern Jews are also D.P.'s: Home is really alien, and in his shaky way, he understands that he does not belong there. His wife and friends constantly refer to normalcy or modernity; they refuse to accept mystery—let alone holiness. Eli is caught in the middle; he d a n g le s . ^ Eli vacillates between the two communities until he sloughs off his new skin for an older one; paradoxically, he finds a spiritual home amongst the homeless. Gradually adopting the feelings and garments of "the greenie," Eli becomes, like Sheldon Grossbart in "Defender

of the Faith," a mad crusader who "moans" at man's suffering and inhumanity. Through the oblique Talmudic teachings of

Tzuref, Eli discovers that a higher, heartfelt divine law

■^2Malin, Jews and Americans, p. 30. 191 he practices, and that this divine law requires suffering. From the example of "the greenie," he comes to see what suffering has meant to his people, and why their redemptive past should not be ignored; from the pupils at the school,

"holding hands and whirling around in a circle," Eli senses th at re a l community does ex ist among his own. He discovers a new "felt" reality, a new sense of himself. As Irving Malin observes, "the reality may seem very far from Israel, but in our mixed-up world, Roth is saying, such reality is

■2 - 2 better than rigid modern exile."

However, E li does not resolve his id e n tity problems by simply putting on the old clothes of orthodoxy; he himself endures the suffering which the clothes have come to repre­ sent, pushing himself to the very brink of lunacy. He wanders up to the Yeshiva, but the assistant, still wearing Peck's suit, casts him out by point­ ing in the direction of the town. Their appear­ ances and roles reversed, pondering on who is who, Eli silently recognizes and endures what Tzyiref - has had the black clothes sent to him for.-'4

As in Malamud1s The Assistant, the conversion to a Jew is semi-conscious, developing not from any rational concept but from an awakening of feelings of sympathy, love, and guilt, which together produce the suffering that leads to a sense of self. This can occur only after he has endured the misunderstanding and rejection of his own people.

Eli's rebirth coincides with the birth of his son,

33I b id ., pp.. 30-31. ^oolartaroff, "Philip Roth and the Jewish Moralists," 92. linking past and present. 701116 peeking at the baby for the first time, he passes the full test of his new identity. As he screams "I'm the father," he finds himself precisely in the position of the orthodox Jews on the hill. Judged insane and taken away, E li is given a sedative: "the drug calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the black­ ness had reached." Scientific rationalism can make life more comfortable, but it cannot meet the dark religious needs of the soul or numb their cogency. Even in a scien­ t i f i c age, dominated by the crass modernism of Woodenton, the human heart has the power to discover and recreate the felt self. In his quest for self, his journey to the mountain,

E li becomes the fan atic whose madness is preferable to the sanity of normal modern Jews.

John Undike (1932- ) "A&P" A quick reading of "A&P" immediately suggests affinities to two other Important works of post-war fiction: Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, exposing adult mediocrity and oppression, told by a slangy, self-dramatizing young narrator who suffers a profound disharmony between his inner self and his social milieu; and Updike's own Rabbit. Run, in which the young hero, like Sammy in "A&P," is mainly a creature of instinct whose decisions and values follow impul- sively from his sensory impressions. In thfcse «*»««, Sammy is a romantic. For him, to see is to know. He reacts 193 with either immediate rapture or instant disgust to the appearances of the shoppers in the market. With an artist’s eye for beauty, and an embittered romantic’s awareness of the ugly and the banal, Sammy tends to idealize and appeals of the girls, and to notice only the pin curlers on the housewives. His aesth etic response becomes his moral re sp o n se . 35 Updike’s subtle judgment on his method of m orality grows from the sty le i ts e l f ; here and elsewhere in h is work, he infuses the commonplace with a sense of wonder, Implying th a t even a blue Falcon sta tio n wagon, seen through mystic eyes, can offer a sensory treat. How­ ever, Sammy is too conditioned by status values to feast unselectively upon all concrete realities.

Sammy expresses h is c re a tiv ity through humor and con­ crete metaphor. His observations—like Holden Caulfield's— often achieve their humor from their flip dismissal of adults:

"She's one of those cash register watchers, a witch about f i f t y with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know i t made her day to tr ip me up." Sammy studs h is commen­ tary with HiHo crackers, discount records by the Carribean Six, and other concrete details conveying the banal atmos­ phere of the A&P and the causes for his revolt against it. Often too, he sees creatively, coining fresh,satiric metaphors; thus he sees Queenie's shoulder bones as "a dented sheet of

35j .a. Ward, "John Updike’s Fiction," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. V (1962), 34-. metal tilted in the light,” and the sunshine on the parking lot ”skating around on the asphalt,” etc. Though his im agination helps him transcend, on occasion, the commonness of the supermarket, it is still too much with him. His problem with this world is not so much that it is “phoney” or corrupt, but that it is too mundane and commonplace. Into what Sammy perceives as a humdrum world of conventionality and sheep-like housewives, walk the three lightly-clad girls. Seeking any chance for excitement, Sammy lets his eyes caress them admiringly, and slightly lasciviously. In such spiritually impoverished

surroundings, lacking any real stimulation, Sammy, Stokesie, and old McMahon drift into sexual fantasies, expressed In cute, ribald asides, such as ”1 guess she just got it (the suit).” Updike is able to make the sexual joke seem innocent in fact, in another story, "Lifeguard,” he has the narrator, a m ystical young d iv in ity student, comment as follow s: "What prigs the unchurched are. Are not our assaults on the supernatural lascivious, a kind of indecency? . . . I fe e l th a t my lu s t makes me glow • . . ." Updike apparently intends no moral judgment on the employees who savor the beauties of the three unusually-attired customers. The narrator, and the story, seem in open revolt against the New

England-Puritan moral tradition, represented by the manager and by the old lady who, according to the narrator, would have been burned "over in Salem.” 195

The story also comments upon two varieties of middle

class life, seen through the biased eyes of the narrator. What most engages his Imagination is the glamor which he

imagines "Queenie" to embody. He contrasts her cocktail world, where "men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring

snacks on toothpicks," with his own serious, inelegant home, where guests "get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses." Sammy finds the petit bourgeois life he has known at home and at work rather lacking in comparison to upper middle class life, which he perceives

to be more free and glamorous. In characteristic adolescent fashion, he senses all of the disadvantages of the life he has known and none of those inherent in that which he longs

to believe offers more of what he wants out of life. He does not see th a t the urbane commuter may be ju st as driven as the priggish small town supermarket manager. Thus the narrator demonstrates that the innocence may involve youth­

ful ignorance; but he also indicates that innocence as a saving grace does not necessarily Involve naivete about many worldly matters.

Embarrassed and repulsed by the manager's Sunday school superintendent approach to the girls, Sammy lets his long-contained feelings of disgust surge forth; he feels that he can no longer be part of such an operation, and must affirm the innocence of the girls and do something heroic to win their favor. But alas, his chivalric gesture 196

to aid the girls brings him out on a parking lot devoid of life except for "some young married screaming with her children." Bather than opposing evil by arguing with Mr. Lengel, Sammy simply withdraws, and associates himself with

what he believes to be the good. He discovers, however,that though it is easy to run, it is not easy to find the good or to evade the omnipresent vulgarities which oppress such a sensitive person. The world will be hard on him, for a f i r s t commitment to re v o lt w ill lik e ly lead to more. But

in innocently seeking h is s e lf and the good l i f e , Sammy makes a commitment, id en tify in g him self with the youth, daring, freedom, and glamor that the girls signify for him. By having the narrator tell his own story, Updike * adds the ironies that result- from having him reveal more about himself than he realizes. All customers, he thinks, resemble "sheep" or "scared pigs in a chute." People that snack on h erring and drink hard liq uor are never du ll lik e his parents or the people in the market. "You never know how girls' minds work," he muses, suggesting that it is not the g i r ls ' minds which most in te re s t him anyway. However, fresh his use of language or his vision of the concrete world may be, he occasionally lapses, unknown to himself, into

horrible triteness. As a dramatic monologue, the story continues one of the main traditions in American fiction. Like similar adoles­ cent monologues w ritten by Twain, Anderson, Yfelty, and

Salinger, upon which the story apprently draws, it succeeds 197

in capturing the colloquial idiom, in exposing the ugly- moral litter which adults have accepted as normal, and in recreating the sensitive, uncompromising, young mind which this litter distresses. The story is not, however, simply about "an apprentice saint and his indignant love for this "36 bad world.Sammy has traces of the social climber and the -plcaro about him, and we wonder whether moral concerns alone motivated his grand gesture. The very complexity of his motives brings him closer to life.

^Donald Barr, "Ah, Buddy: Salinger." The Creative Present ed.Balakian and Charles Simmons (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963),p .28. OHA.PT Eft V

COilOLUSIOil AHD CQKFESSIOH

"Poetry should be at least as well-written as prose," Ezra Pound once quipped. Indeed the twentieth century has seen the short story moving toward stylistic perfection-- that is, to say, toward poetry. In the craftsman's hands of Ernest Hemingway, the modern short story was stripped of all ornament and abstraction, and whittled down to the hardness of bone. Thus the concreteness of imagism, the most pervasive influence of modern poetry, also manifests itself in the modern short story. That fiction has approach­ ed modern poetry in its density and suggestiveness is best illustrated by the stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora tfelty, and John Updike, himself a poet as well as a writer of fiction. Though in general the modern story has not yet reached the high degree of associativeness characterizing the work of symbolist poets such as Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, or Dylan Thomas, the sto rie s of Porter, Hemingway and many others do often require that the reader allow himself to make non-logical connections among images or allusions.

Hew Critical terms such as "irony" and "paradox," most

198 199 successfully applied to analyzing lyric, poetry, now assist the reader of the modern short story; The "Hew Critics" themselves, with their close attention to texts, no doubt have inspired short story wTiters1 present concern with sty le and form.

In our time fiction has developed unprecedented technical excellence. The Hew Yorker school of writers— Salinger, Roth, Updike, and others—consistently produces stories more polished than many of the acknowledged master­ pieces of the past. Salinger's and Updike's stories sire usually tighter and more "readable" than those of Twain or Anderson, though they are not necessarily better as literature. Writers before Hemingway were less concerned with writing per se. For Twain, Cather, D reiser, and Anderson, w riting served as a means, not an end, for they were primarily social critics using their pens to force their readers into aware­ ness of the social, moral, or spiritual problems of the time. Another even more important group of writers were essentially searchers for new sources of order and vitality. Even a conscious s t y l is t lik e Hemingway sought new ways of life by reducing it to its simplest terms of life and death, of sensation and feeling, of a few values to be lived by. The simplicity of the famed "Hemingway style" itself r e fle c ts th is attem pt. Lawrence turned away from the urban centers of inhibition in search for rejuvenation through blood-consciousness. Joyce, though admittedly fascinated by language, struggled to unknot himself from the stringent

social and religious conventions of Ireland, freeing himself in h is coursings in myth and dream. For these and other writers, writing was in part verbal exploration of the possible paths out of the Waste Land. Their different purposes led them to invent new techniques synthesizing symbolism with realism-naturalism, and producing the ad­ vantages but not the limitations of social realism. The technical virtuosity developed by these writers for their new materials has influenced nearly all subsequent serious short story writers. After them, more than before, the short story became an art form. Though the fiction of the thirties was marked by a return to proletarian realism and naturalism inveighing against the social and economic i l l s of the Depression, the fiction of the last three decades has, on the whole, continued to concern itself with the individual conscious­ ness as an end in i t s e l f , not as a means to social c ritic ism . Howard H. Harper Jr. comes to this same conclusion discussing post-war fiction in generals Like Hemingway and Faulkner, our best contempory writers are moving away from the traditional social orientation of American fiction. This is not to deny the value of th e ir work as social commentary; i t is the best commentary we have. But most of them feel that man's social problems are sympto­ matic of more basic cosmic and psychic problems.1

* Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow. Salinger. Mailer. Baldwin, and Updike (Chapel H ill: U niversity of North Carolina Press, 1957)> p. 192. 201

Contemporary fiction exhibits a more profound disenchant­ ment with social values than the fiction of such writers as Twain, Dreiser, Fitzgerald and others who were often rather ambivalent about the American values they attached.

If the contemporary story concerns itself with private rather than public issues, it perhaps does so because non-fiction has become so effective in treating the latter. Yet the "ultimate assumption is still a traditional one: that man, despite his inevitable and perhaps inexplicable suffering, can find salvation."2

With the rise of non-fiction, the advent of television, and the growth of the significant film in America, serious fiction met a severe challenge, especially for the attention of younger readers. As a result, the literary fiction that is read most often has tended to be short and slickly executed. Unfortunately, however, many critics still regard the short story as a sub-form, inferior to the novel, and many have «* become unjustly suspicious of fiction with highly polished surfaces, unfairly concluding that there is not much substance beneath. Today the American short story stands in an increasingly favorable position with respect to the novel, which a t the moment seems on the decline, threatened lik e all literature by the synaesthesia of the newer media.

2Ibid.. p. 198. 202

In the "Introduction," I expressed my commitment to liberal education and human growth; here I will discuss the relation of this project to my own. I must confess that before I began work on th is study, I dreaded spending an enormous amount of time on what I feared would be d u ll, over-specialized sub-field whose main recommendation was that no one had yet chanced to plow it. Fortunately, I have found that dissertations need not be so. The faculty members who have assisted me, and those directing the dissertations of other students whom I know, have granted considerable freedom in subject matter and viewpoint. They have not forced me to reproduce their opinions, or even to follow their particular interests or strengths. All this speaks favorably of these individuals, their departments, and of Ohio State University. Contrary to my expectations, this project has become one of the most positive growth experiences of my educational career and therefore of my l i f e . I had complacently assumed that "I know how to write a seminar paper, so why repeat the excercise?" It may seem ironic that a humanist should underestimate his own human potential as he urges others to develop theirs, but this is exactly what I did. I failed to recognize that, by committing myself to articulating my thoughts on a variety of quite different pieces of literature, I could widen my critical range. It is one thing for a critic to write about works to which he is immediately akin, but it quite another to 203 challenge one's ability to read well by forcing oneself to write about items which have already been selected by others who chose them for their anthologies. The former method, followed by most graduate students and facu lty members, is apt to produce expert criticism, since the critic writes only about that which he feels especially qualified to comment. But the latter method, though it may not always lead to the most expert criticism, does encourage the growth of critical expertise; lilce living in an international student hostel, i t forces one to expand h is vocabulary of approaches and responses to stimuli which he could, in the safety of more familiar surroundings, dismiss as foreign to him. Perhaps students should be encouraged to comment on the readings which "turn them on" the le a s t.

Preparing this study has, then, continued my liberal education, teaching me to read more perceptively, organize material more tightly, and write more lucidly. Moreover, by reading around in the fiction by and the criticism about a number of w rite rs, some of whom I knew next to nothing about, I broadened my understanding of modern American literature and life. I found several of my glib generali­ zations crumbling beneath the weight of new evidence. Since this is the very sort of humane learning which I intend the Guide to foster, I feel especially gratified to have had this opportunity to fulfill my potential as a person and hopefully as a liberal educator as well. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Gross, Seymour L. "Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisited,1" College English. XXV (1963), 123-135. Gross, Seymour L. "The World of James Baldwin," C ritiq u e, VII (1964-5), 139-49. Gullason, Thomas H. "The Short Story: An Underrated Art," Studies in Short Fiction, II (1964-5), 13-31. Hagopian, John V. "A Prince in Babylon," Fitzgerald Newsletter, No. 19 (1962), 1-3. Hagopian, John V. "Tidying Up Hemingway's Clean Nell- Lighted Place," Studies in Short Fiction, I (1964), 5 3 9 -4 6 . ' .

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•“■Hagopian, John V., and Dolch, Martin, eds. Insight Analyses of American Literature. Frankfurt: Hirshgraben, 1962.

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