Short stories can have a greatness, short as they have to be. Several knocked by socks off when I was still in high school. Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and Saki’s “The Open Window” and O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge” spring to mind. But there is no greatness in this or my other collection, nor was there meant to be.
My own stories may be interesting, nonetheless, as relics from a time, before there was television, when an author might support a family by writing stories that satisfied uncritical readers of magazines, and earning thereby enough free time in which to write serious novels. When I became a full-time free-lance in 1950, I expected to be doing that for the rest of my life.
I was in such good company with a prospectus like that. Hemingway had written for Esquire, F. Scott Fitzgerald for The Saturday Evening Post, William Faulkner for Collier’s, John Steinbeck for The Woman’s Home Companion!
Say what you want about me, I never wrote a magazine called The Woman’s Home Companion, but there was a time when I would have been most happy to. And I add this thought: Just because a woman is stuck alone at home, with her husband at work and her kids at school, that doesn’t mean she is an imbecile.
Publication of this book makes me want to talk about the peculiar and beneficial effect a short story can have on us, which makes it different from a novel or movie or play or TV show.
[. . .]
Imagine that it is 1938 again. I am sixteen again. I come home again from yet another lousy day at Shortridge High School. Mother, who does not work outside the home, says there is a new The Saturday Evening Post on the coffee table. It is raining outside, and I am unpopular. But I can’t turn on a magazine like a TV set. I have to pick it up, or it will go on lying there, dead as a doornail. An unassisted magazine has no get up and go.
[. . .]
While I shop for a story, my eyes also see ads for automobiles and cigarettes and hand lotions and so on. It is advertisers, not readers, who pay the true costs of such a voluptuous publication. And God bless them for doing that. But consider the incredible thing I myself have to do in turn. I turn my brains on!
That isn’t the half of it. With my brains all fired up, I do the nearly impossible thing that you are doing now, dear reader. I make sense of idiosynchratic arrangements, in horizontal lines, of nothing but twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten Arabic numerals, and perhaps eight punctuation marks, on a sheet of bleached and flattened wood pulp!
But get this: While I am reading, my pulse and breathing slow down. My high school troubles drop away. I am in a pleasant state somewhere between sleep and restfulness.
OK?
And then, after however long it takes to read a short story, ten minutes, say, I spring out of the chair. I put The Saturday Evening Post back on the coffee table for somebody else.
OK?
So then my architect dad comes home from work, or more likely from no work, since the little yellow bastards haven’t bombed Pearl Harbor yet. I tell him I have read a story he might enjoy. I tell him to sit in the easy chair whose cushion is still dented and warmed by my teenage butt.
Dad sits. I pick up the magazine and open it to the story. Dad is tired and blue. Dad starts to read. His pulse and breathing slow dovn. His troubles drop away, and so on.
Yes! And our little domestic playlet, true to life in the 1930s, dear reader, proves exactly what? It proves that a short story, because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment.
[. . .]
Reading a novel,
Pages 3-5.