In an essay called “The I Without a Self,” W.H. Auden tells us about a rumor “which if true might have occurred in a Kafka story.” That is that Kafka, without knowing it, fathered a child. …more

My lung was fair at least out there, here where I’ve been for the last fortnight. I’ve not been able to see the doctor. But it can’t be so bad considering for instance that I was able – holy vanity! – to chop for an hour and more without getting tired, and yet was happy, for moments.  – Letters to Milena (1917) …more

Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then feels the need for some kind of contact… …more

That Václav Havel’s death was overshadowed by Kim Jong Il, that loopy coward, is a joke that might have made Havel, the writer, laugh. Idiot tyranny finally pays him back a little.

Over New Year’s (yeah, a lonely voice likes to party), I re-read one of Havel’s plays, “Largo Desolato,” …more

I mourn him like a lost brother. I’ve no right to say this. It’s ridiculous. Yet some voices, we convince ourselves, can’t be lived without. …more

I confess I like reading stories about people who are more depressed than I am. Other people’s misery has a way of lifting the soul a little.  Happy stories?  They’re even duller than happy families. …more

An excerpt from Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner, our November Rumpus Book Club selection (which is already receiving wonderful reviews, so now’s a great time to join the RBC if you aren’t already a member): …more

There are few things more riveting than watching people gossip in a language you don’t understand. …more

Greatest American short story writer? Ever? For me, it’s not even an interesting question. Welty in a landslide. …more

Two boys are fighting. Neither is especially interested in beating the other up but once these things start, sometimes you’ve got no choice but to go ahead with it. …more

I spent most of today re-reading Andre Dubus’s “Voices From the Moon”.[1] It is one of those stories. When you finish it you concentrate a little harder on your own breathing because you feel a little more alive. Because you’re reminded that you’ve got only a finite number of breaths left. …more

I’ve been hearing the short story is dead again. The real money is in novels. Screenplays! A short story? Why don’t you go and write a haiku while you’re at it. …more

“The Arizona law is not the problem. The problem is that we continue, on all sides of the political spectrum, to not listen to those most directly affected by immigration policy: immigrants themselves.” …more

In honor of Governor Mark Sanford and Michael Jackson’s (bless his Indiana soul) favorite holiday, today’s Lonely Voice is devoted to dads …more

The lonely voice is coming to you today from San Francisco General Hospital. I’m in the cafeteria. I come here sometimes. It’s a nice place to be distracted and the pudding is good. I’m thinking about Chekhov, or trying to, I keep getting distracted. Chekhov died of tuberculosis. As a doctor and as a writer, he was always preoccupied with death but I wonder whether toward the end of his life, when he was continually coughing up blood, if he wasn’t more curious about it than ever. Not for his own sake. It wasn’t Chekhov’s own death that obsessed his imagination to the end – it was the death of his characters, his people.
…more

This happens sometimes. I got murder on the brain this morning. …more

Some stories cut so close you can only tell them in shards. Try getting at it directly and the thing – call it some kind of unspeakable personal tragedy – breaks apart on the page. …more

One of the great stories of my adopted city, San Francisco, is without a doubt “Around the Dear Ruin” by Gina Berriault. It also might be one of the saddest and cruelest.

I’ve probably read this brief story twenty, maybe thirty, times, and each time I am taken in by Leo Brady’s bottomless sorrow, his love for a woman who never, ever loved him back. And then, always, every time, I am surprised by his scornful attempt (in the kitchen of the old studio apartment on Columbus Street, above the Garibaldi Club, sitting there with Eddie) at claiming some kind of victory over Clara Ruchenski because, in the end, he’s alive and she isn’t. But this doesn’t work either. Even when she’s dead, Clara wins.

After a while, he spoke to the floor. “It’s over me like a ton of water, the things I don’t know.”

Like a ton of water. The things I don’t know. That about says it. As each year goes by, I know less. Clara’s been dead how long? Since the fifties? But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m talking about this Gina Berriault story as though you’ve read it. And I talk about this story like it was one of my own memories, like it happened to me. But isn’t this what happens with those stories that we hold close? They become ours. We may not have even been alive when they were even written, but they’ve become ours, and we lug them like all our other memories, good, bad and otherwise – because we simply have no choice.

So this story didn’t happen to me, and yet it did. I remember it. A shabby studio, Columbus Street, North Beach, San Francisco, a woman in a bed, nearly raving.

And Clara is still dead, and still on my mind.

Leo Brady comes home from many months at sea. He’s excited to see his new wife, Clara, whom he married shortly before shipping out…But don’t get any illusions of a joyous reunion. Berriault demolishes any expectation of Leo’s happiness in the first paragraph:

My sister married Leo Brady because he was a merchant seaman and made good wages, and because he was gone most of the time. She and her five year-old boy had been living on the sales of her cable car etchings that tourists to San Francisco picked over in the little art galleries and bookstores, and on the sporadic sales of her oil paintings. They were married a few days after he came from sea, and a week later his ship sailed again for the Orient. In the six weeks he was away, the steamship, the steamship company sent her, at his request, all his wages. But the day that he returned was unrewarding for Leo.

Unrewarding. Yes, very much so. The story is told by Clara’s brother Eddie, and on the day in question, Leo’s return to the scene – Clara is lying in bed. She’s 26 years old, and sick, very sick. Yet she refuses to allow either Leo or Eddie call a doctor. Clara has such a hold – love mixed with fear – over both her husband and her brother that neither of them would dare to defy her. She’s in an extraordinary amount of pain, and yet, to the last, she hangs on to her sense of humor. “Going?” she says to Eddie. “Okay, and always remember to contradict your teachers. It makes good biography.”

Clara is one of those people, you know them, whose magnetism is so intense it can hardly be contained. Everyone seems to want to be near Clara Ruchenski. Even on her death bed, she’s a force of nature. And what could be more fascinating than the great unknown artist’s unraveling? Eddie and Leo can’t take their eyes off her. They are gathered around their dear ruin and all they can do is watch, listen, as Clara, increasingly delirious, delivers screed after screed. In one amazingly merciless speech, she describes Leo. She’s talking to Eddie, but Leo’s right there in the room, beside the bed, his black fedora in hand, shoes off so as not to disturb the patient by clomping around in his boots. Leo’s a lug of a guy.

“How simple are his wants. All he desires is to identify himself with artists. He married Clara Ruchenski because she’d had an exhibit in some dank little gallery and sold a painting once a year. How happy he was on our wedding night. I thought people didn’t get that happy anymore, not since before the Flood when everybody was a brute with a big, smiling face. No, no, I’m wrong!” she wailed, tossing her head from side to side. “I take it all back. I never did think like that about Leo. I’m not a snob. Please, Eddie,” she begged, “you know I’m not. You know me, don’t you, Eddie?”

Leo and I stood up

“I don’t hate him, Eddie. I mean I wouldn’t if I weren’t married to him. He’d be a big, sweet guy with respect for artists. That’s the way I used to think, and I slept with him a few times, too.”

A page later, Clara is dead. Leo takes a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge and scatters her ashes in Muir Woods. Even so, Clara’s voice echoes across the remaining four pages, and in my memory. How can anyone forget someone like Clara? Eddie tells us that his sister was terrified by the idea of obscurity and anonymity. It’s easy to cast stones at her, but, lets be honest, what artist – anybody really – can’t relate to the fear of dying unrecognized, your life’s work hauled out to the curb on trash day? The best you’ll do maybe is a tiny obituary paid for by your family? Whether you’re an artist or an accountant, how much of what you do will last? Clara’s young, far too young, but not so young not to believe in her soul that her dreams are going nowhere.

And yet this story is, ultimately, not about the artist’s ego; it’s about how we mourn. A brutal story turns oddly tender. The most devastating moment has to be when her five year-old son Mark comes home from school holding his little red school bag and Clara, clinging to life at this point, doesn’t recognize him. She is yelling out the window at the Chinese boy who is sitting in front of the fish and poultry shop across the street killing pigeons. One after the other, the boy is pulling pigeons out of a box and slashing their throats and Clara can’t take it anymore. “…her voice thin, bewitched, like that of a pigeon granted a human voice in the last moment of its life.” The kid watches his mother and weeps.

It emerges after her death that Clara Ruchenski died of an apparently botched back alley abortion. She was bleeding to death internally in that bed as she ranted. Leo tells Eddie he can’t understand it. He can’t see why she would have wanted to get rid of his child so badly that she’d risk everything. We could have afforded nine kids, Leo says. “She didn’t need to worry.” Leo will never understand very much. He’s just like Clara says, a big, sweet limited guy with a good job who loved to love artists. And in the end, like I say, he’s alive and she’s not, and yet he still can’t stop thinking about her – loving her. But Leo doesn’t have to get it. We get it. Clara’s gone. Whoever she was or wasn’t, whatever truths or lies are told about her, she’ll always be gone from now on. But not gone too. That’s the amazing thing. Grief – Leo’s, Eddie’s, Mark’s, mine – keeps her power intact. Everything else – including the question why we’ll never shake her, she who lived only a few glorious pages in a book I put back on my shelf – is a ton of water.

**

“Around the Dear Ruin” from Women In Their Beds (Counterpoint Books, 1996)

photograph by Gabriele Basilico

I sometimes wonder if the precarious place that short stories hold in the world of publishing (and reading) is because good stories are inherently threatening. They can cause a lot of trouble in a few pages and knock a reader’s complacency for a serious loop. Good short stories often implicate the reader directly. Consider Alice Munro. For me, part of what makes Munro so powerful is that in story after story she tramples our own conventional morality by exposing us for what we so often are – lying hypocrites – human, complicated, sometimes even kind lying hypocrites – but lying hypocrites nonetheless. We love her for it – even when she is telling us uncomfortable truths about ourselves that we mostly ignore on a day to day basis.

I’ve pledged to use this space as a forum to speak a little about stories that have meant something to me and I intend to do this again today. But will you permit me a brief detour into politics, specifically the politics of torture? This past Sunday Clark Hoyt, Public Editor of the New York Times, spent an entire column discussing which of two adjectives is most appropriate to describe waterboarding in the newspaper. Should we call it ‘harsh’ or ‘brutal’? After much discussion, he decided ‘brutal’ wasn’t out of line. For the record, the Times defines waterboarding as a near-drowning technique that entails “water poured over the mouth and nose to produce a feeling of suffocation.” Both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have described waterboarding as torture. Further, the Administration has acknowledged this form of torture was not only sanctioned by the lawyers in the Bush White House who not only found ways to rationalize it legally, but also that it was carried out in at least two instances.

Obama’s problem now, however, is a tough one. Do we prosecute those men and women (and doctors) who carried this out – torture or whatever we are going to call it? – and the lawyers who gave legal cover – or do we simply chalk this up to a kind of temporary September 11th mentality, promise not to indulge in any of this stuff again and move on? Politically, I know, the later is a sound choice. Obama has enough problems right now. Why litigate the past? I see where he is coming from, as a supporter and as a citizen.

But this reader of short stories wonders. Because stories complicate. Stories make different, more complete demands on the truth. As a reader of short stories I wonder about a more complicated truth than what we might call political reality. What about getting to the bottom of why we did this? And when I say, we, I do mean we. . We as a country. Did we as a country commit torture? And if so, how? If so, why?

Last week I re-read a story by the fearless Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia called “Death and the Knight”. I think it might be instructive here. It appears in English translation in the collection Open Doors (Vintage Books, 1993). Written the year before Sciascia’s death in 1989, “Death and the Knight” is a story about a police deputy investigating a murder – but it’s more a mediation on helplessness in the face of absolute power. At one point a character – who himself will soon be murdered says:

There is one power, which is visible, identifiable, and numerable, but there is another, which is without name or without names, and which swims underwater. The visible power is in permanent conflict with the underwater power, especially at moments when it has the gall to break the surface with vigor, that is to say with violence and bloodshed…

Of course, the quote could be interpreted as an allusion to the mafia and Sciascia is famous in Europe (lesser known here) for his many books on Sicily and the mafia (sometimes called metaphysical detective novels) but this late story is different, even for Sciascia, and reaches into far murkier areas and is, finally, more about the mind than killing. It’s about what the minds of pliant bureaucrats (and a pliant public) can justify and what the mind of one man can defy.

The police deputy is a man buried by a lifetime of reading. Not a cliched bookish cop, but someone literally paralyzed by what he’s read, even at one point, confusing a description from a Carlo Gadda novel with something he’s lived through himself. Books have begun to define the contours of his reality – even as it becomes clear that the deputy himself is slowly dying of cancer.

The story’s initial murder has something to do with one of the most powerful businessmen in Italy – a man called simply “The President” but the police investigation led by the deputy’s chief centers on a mythical terrorist group invented to obscure The President’s involvement in the killing. The deputy soon comes to understand that the actual truth will never come out because no one – his chief especially – is particularly interested in it. And worse, the idea of it is frightening. And yet, and yet…. the deputy, perhaps due in some way to his obsession with literature, with stories, insists, to the end, that he has no choice but to continue his lonely, reckless quest to link The President to the murder. A reader winces as the deputy keeps investigating after warnings that he ought to stop for his own good. Sciascia nearly drops any pretext of an actual mystery in the case. This is no longer a detective story. The great mystery becomes – and this is why the story is so compelling and unusual – Why won’t the deputy quit?

Why? Why keep digging around? Can’t he just leave well enough alone? What skin is it off his back? There are moments in the story you want to shout, Stop. Enough. I get it, I get it. Save yourself. Or at least let your own cancer kill you not –

At one point the police deputy insults a journalist (referred to as the Great Journalist) – as uninterested in what actually happened as his boss on the force – “Have you never heard of the love of truth?”

The Great Journalist answers: “Vaguely.”

Political truths tend, maybe, to be vague. Story truths, deeper truths, are harder to stomach.

Late in the story, the deputy thinks, “Morphine is wonderful: it is essential to take it when you cannot stand any more…”

The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between a pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life. It’s all a matter of how you feel the pain. Read a great story and there it is—right now—in your gut. A novel gives you some time between innings. A story is complete, remorseless. Which is why I am always a little annoyed when the short story is re-discovered, yanked up out of the soggy ground—and pronounced relevant—it’s alive! Most recently in a nice piece by A.O. Scott in the New York Times. And it was a nice piece, and Scott, before he went back to reviewing films, said good, important things about some great old story writers, Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever and a great new story writer, Wells Tower. I’m just not sure this annual resurrection party is necessary. The story is here; it’s always been here. And those of us who can’t live a day without it know what I’m talking about. We need our fix, our daily stab of pain—maybe to feel alive at all.

So in honor of the story, I thought I’d, as long as Steve indulges me a little space, write a few words about one story every week or so. I’ll be looking at stories from all different time periods and countries and cultures. My thoughts will be probably be as random as my reading. The title “The Lonely Voice” comes from Frank O’Connor’s book on the short story, one of the few books about the short story that I can stomach. And even Frank O’Connor himself has hard time getting the essence of things sometimes. Because the thing about stories, and this might be the exact reason they so often fly under the radar is that few things are harder to talk about than why a particular story is great. It’s like trying to explain love and not love. It goes back to that pang. Lets say you see a face in a crowd. This face reminds you of someone, someone from a long time ago. Explain with a bunch of babble that moment of recognition? And then worse, infinitely worse describe that moment of unrecognition? It’s not her, it’s not him, no—she, he—is long long gone –

Even so I’m going to try talk a little about certain stories that have meant something to me.

Today, I’ve been thinking about Peter Taylor. The Tennessean wrote some of the most beautiful and subtle stories in English. (See “In The Old Forest” And “Dean of Men”). To my mind one of the most beautiful and subtle of all his stories is one that might not get enough attention. It’s called “Allegiance”. It’s so subtle you could read it and wonder what the hell just happened. To even try and give the plot is to fall into Taylor’s trap. Even so, I’ll do my best, briefly. A young GI is in London. Something to do with the war. Maybe he’s in it. It’s not exactly clear. All we know is that he’s in uniform. And in this story there’s war and there’s war. World War II is peanuts. The war in question here is the most brutal kind—a civil one—a war within a family. This young American GI receives a note from his aunt, his mother’s older sister, a woman who has long been estranged from the rest of the family. Apparently there was a rift between the two sisters, the narrator’s mother and this aunt. We aren’t told what this rift was about. All we know is that this rift resulted in hatred.

Here in her little drawing room, the marble mantel lined with her famous figurines, the Japanese screen shielding her diminutive writing desk, and a lampshade dull gold stamped with fleur-de-lis, I feel myself withdraw momentarily to the bosom of a family that has been nursed on hatred of the mistress of this room.

Why doesn’t Taylor ever tell us the source of the rift between the sisters? The narrator claims he doesn’t know. And maybe he’s telling the truth. But the point is, at least I think the point is—it’s doesn’t matter. What matters here is loyalty and loyalty is not about plot, about who did what to whom when, it’s about character. It’s about whose side are you on.

The afternoon tea continues. The aunt talks on. The narrator listens silently—and doesn’t listen. What she’s saying doesn’t matter at all. What counts is that he’s come to her house, this son of her enemy. After all these years her sister’s son is here, right in front of her.

“If these were normal times, nothing would please me more than to offer myself as your guide to England and the English. But how futile to speak of it even. You are in London on some terribly official business no doubt, or on a leave so short that it will be over before you’ve got round to half the things you want to do. Likely you do not even want to understand this country. You want to accomplish your mission and get yourself home again. I have been thinking as we sat here that you might be wondering how a person could herself to know… I know how you silent people are. You have more thoughts than the rest of dare suppose. I should hate to have to answer all the questions in the minds of people who have sat quietly while I talked on. And if I tried I could answer this one least of all. My answer, I don’t know. But you must have observed that everyone has some aunt or other who has simply pulled out…pulled out on the family with not so much as a by-your-leave. I’m just another of those aunts that people have. The world’s full of them”

Do me a favor, would you? Go back and re-read that paragraph. I know it’s a little long, but will you? Something weird, no? (And if you read the whole story, you will see that is more than weird, it’s kind of amazing.) The narrator is silent. He’s never asked any question at all. He’s taken the upper hand, as silent people do. You know them. You might even be one of them. I envy silent people. There are times I can’t seem to shut up. How much do we miss when we can’t shut up? And so our narrator takes her in, listens and doesn’t listen…And so she presupposes a question, the question. Why did you do whatever you did?

And yet she dodges the question, the question he never asked. And she talks on, bobbing and weaving. Because this fight’s not over. And the narrator finds himself, in spite of everything, enjoying himself. It’s here where the story reaches for another level, a level I can’t describe here on the Internet. Or even here in my closet where I write, I can’t describe it. But at some point—in all his silence and listening and not listening—the narrator betrays his mother, his family. It’s nothing he says. It’s nothing he even thinks really. It’s just this tiny feeling of enjoyment. A little bit of joy in some old woman’s apartment in London during the war. And then—she flattens him. I won’t tell you how but she does. In this story, the upper hand of silence gets crushed. But like I say, it’s subtle, a slow kill in just a few pages. You might, like the narrator himself, already be out on the stairs with your military coat over your arm, before you even realize it.

**

(top picture by Ben Brown)