Quote of the Day (Kay Boyle, on a Child Viewing New York on a Cold January Night)

“There is a time of apprehension which begins with the beginning of darkness, and to which only the speech of love can lend security…. It may begin around five o'clock on a winter afternoon when the light outside is dying in the windows. At that hour the New York apartment in which Felicia lived was filled with shadows, and the little girl would wait alone in the living room, looking out at the winter-stripped trees that stood black in the park against the isolated ovals of unclean snow. Now it was January, and the day had been a cold one; the water of the artificial lake was frozen fast, but because of the cold and the coming darkness, the skaters had ceased to move across its surface. The street that lay between the park and the apartment house was wide, and the two- way streams of cars and busses, some with their headlamps already shining, advanced and halted, halted and poured swiftly on to the tempo of the traffic signals' altering lights. The time of apprehension had set in.”—American novelist, short-story writer, poet, educator, and political activist Kay Boyle (1902-1992), “Winter Night,” originally printed in The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1946, reprinted in Thirty Stories (1957)

I chose this quote for today not only because it relates to this point in the year but also because it combines vivid description of a time and place with compassion for the dilemma facing “little girl”: another night without her divorced mother, who is working constantly to make ends meet.

Within 10 pages, “Winter Night” opens up, as good stories do, to something much larger: a world far beyond that of Manhattanites readjusting to life after WWII.

Kay Boyle had seen much of the worst of the war before America’s entry, as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. In this story, she introduced readers—many of whom still knew little about those caught up in the European maelstrom—to the refugees who found themselves on America’s shores.

It’s an imaginative leap into the life of a migrant—a fictional instruction that Americans can use as readily in our time as in Boyle’s.

Chances are, if you’re like me, you may have heard, glancingly, about Boyle without having read any of her nearly fifty books (novels, collections of short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction). 

That enormous output resembles more that of European authors (like Georgy Girl author Margaret Forster, whom I profiled earlier this month in this post) than American ones who labored on only a few books spread out over years or who flamed out after a short but exciting creative spurt.

The “time of apprehension” in the opening paragraph refers to the hour that seven-year-old Felicia waits for her mother in their apartment, fearful of being left alone.

But the “sitting woman” who comes to mind her, it becomes clear, has experienced her own “time of apprehension.” In telling Felicia about another little girl who loved the ballet, the sitter exposes the horror of the Final Solution: fathers gone off to “another place,” remaining family members separated in weekly deportation roundups, constant hunger and lack of necessities, and mothers’ desperate covert messages passed along on trains begging surviving women to look after their children.

Nowhere are the phrases “concentration camp” or “death camp” used, but Boyle’s postwar readers could have easily inferred that was being discussed in the babysitter’s quiet narration.

At the end of the story, Felicia’s mother finds her daughter and the babysitter asleep in each other’s arms. Boyle hints that this is only a temporary remedy for lonely Felicia, who’s enduring a parade of sitters who are “no more than lonely aunts of an evening or two who sometimes returned and sometimes did not,” and for this one, forever traumatized by the horrors she’s witnessed in the war.

Surprisingly, considering Boyle’s considerable body of work, it’s not easy to find any of her books in many libraries. (My local system, covering 77 libraries, contains single copies of only three of her books.) I was only able to find this title in a 1977 Reader’s Digest anthology, Great American Short Stories.

As more writers compete for slots on college curricula, it’s likely to be even harder to locate examples of Boyle’s work—unless feminist scholars succeed in placing her in more American literature courses.  Judging by the skill she displayed in this story, she deserves to be far better known.

Flashback, November, 1964: O’Hara Reaffirms Short-Story Mastery With ‘The Horse Knows the Way’

The publication of the latest short fiction collection from John O’Hara, The Horse Knows the Way, in November 1964 should have been cause for unalloyed delight for author and publisher alike. Its 28 tales, like his other work, not only garnered unusually high sales for short fiction but cemented his status as a master of the form.

Instead, O’Hara inadvertently provided more fodder for his detractors. In a foreword, describing his need to get down on paper all he knew about how the people of his town lived, he concluded, “I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.”

More than a few critics, however—led by those in the highly influential New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review—transposed the key words at the end to read, “not afraid to do it.”

Just the kind of braggadocio you’d expect from O’Hara, they noted.

Predictably, that observation only increased the fury of a man who perceived slights everywhere he turned. It also reinforced why he requested that his publisher, Random House, officially release his books on Thanksgiving: Because, unlike reviewers in the more high-profile Sunday Times Book Review, he would get a respectful hearing from the paper's daily critic, Charles Poore (who thought highly enough of his work and character that he delivered the eulogy after O'Hara died in 1970). 

Worse, like so much else associated with this gifted but touchy writer, the mangled quotation originated from anything but a close reading of O'Hara's work.

Consider, for instance, Adrian Mitchell’s dismissal of the volume in The New York Times Book Review: “It’s not the flat, monochrome characters but the author’s flat, monochrome vision of their world which is so often discouraging.”

But this largely forgotten British novelist, poet, and critic missed what other authors (including E.L. Doctorow, whose left-wing politics was diametrically opposed to that of the increasingly conservative O’Hara’s) have picked up on: that, while O’Hara’s prose might be prismatic, his presentation is anything but. 

With abrupt, often stunning endings, his stories send readers scurrying back through these works, trying to pick up on the clues they missed earlier.

It was true that O’Hara could be his own worst enemy: openly craving the Nobel Prize, for instance, or an honorary degree from Yale University, an institution of higher learning he’d been unable to attend because of the financial complications following the death of his father. Asked why the school had never awarded him that degree, the president at the time, Kingman Brewster, responded simply, “Because he asked.”

But at his best—and the stories in The Horse Knows the Way are consistently good—they fulfill his intention of trying to tell the truth about his time.

Roughly speaking, his short stories occur in three locales, the places where he had spent most of his time: New York, Hollywood, and Gibbsville, PA (the fictional stand-in for his hometown, Pottsville). Like much of his other Hollywood fiction, an example from The Horse Knows the Way, “The Answer Depends,” spotlights the kind of actors who populate much of the fare on Turner Classic Movies.

But my favorite stories from the book are set in Gibbsville, whose physical and emotional geography he knew with bone-deep understanding. These are the stories to seek out in this volume: "At the Window," "The Hardware Man," "The Victim," "The House on the Corner," "Aunt Fran," and "All Tied Up."

“For a while, at least,” O’Hara warned his loyal readers, “this will be my last book of short stories.” It wasn’t so much that he had descended into sloth, however, as that he decided to focus his energy on other projects.

One, the novel The Lockwood Concern, which appeared the following year, at least earned some critical plaudits as among his better entries in the long form in the last part of his life.

The other activity, a syndicated column for Newsday, lasted only a year, and did nothing but swell his reputation for bumptiousness and bellyaching about his lack of respect.

Fortunately, he returned to the short story genre in 1966 with Waiting for Winter, whose title strongly hinted at his increasing concern for aging and mortality.

The Horse Knows the Way appeared midway through a decade of flabbergasting productivity in the short-story form for O'Hara: from 1960 to 1968, seven collections of 137 tales, bringing his career total to more than 400. 

Other writers (like my favorite, F. Scott Fitzgerald) impress with their shimmering style, but they never took the measure of so many people from so many walks of life as O'Hara. These late stories, like his earlier ones, rely heavily on dialogue. 

But, because O'Hara feared that younger readers would be more likely to miss the resonances of his tales set decades earlier, they are often more ruminating, even melancholy, as in this passage from "The Answer Depends":

"I don't try to follow the plot lines of Ned Revere's films. In a few minutes after one of his pictures has begun to roll, I am in a daze of recollection, of remembering Ned as a gay companion: irresponsible, Quixotic, romantic, attractive to men as well as to women, and with no illusions then as to his stature as an artist."

Surveying where life has left them, the narrator, a retired actor named "Bobby," concludes: "I don't know who is better off: me, at my TV, with memories as fresh as the news in the morning paper, or Ned, scornful of those pleasant and profitable days, and with the lingering bitter taste of that one success on Broadway."

Quote of the Day (Damon Runyon, With a Female Example of ‘The Underworld Complex’)

“Waldo Winchester says the underworld complex is a very common complex and that Basil Valentine has it, and so has Miss Harriet Mackyle, or she will not be all the time sticking her snoot into joints where tough guys hang out. This Miss Harriet Mackyle is one of these rich dolls who wears snaky-looking evening clothes, and has her hair cut like a boy's, with her ears sticking out, and is always around the night traps, generally with some guy with a little mustache, and a way of talking like an Englishman, and come to think of it I do see her in tough joints more than somewhat, saying hello to different parties such as nobody in their right minds will say hello to, including such as Red Henry, who is just back from Dannemora, after being away for quite a spell for taking things out of somebody's safe and blowing the safe open to take these things.”—American short-story writer and sportswriter Damon Runyon (1880-1946), “Social Error,” originally printed in Furthermore (1938), republished in New York Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell (2011)

If the name in that quote sounds very vaguely familiar, it’s because the socialite described here shows up as one of the characters in the not-terribly-well-known 1989 film Bloodhounds of Broadway, a mashup of several Damon Runyon short stories including “Social Error,” and featuring Julie Hagerty (pictured) as Miss Mackyle.

Runyon is best known for the musical Guys and Dolls, adapted from two of his other stories. He made a tidy sum in the Thirties and Forties with Hollywood transferring some of his properties to the screen, not always successfully.

I think you really must read his words on the page rather than seeing them on a screen to appreciate their unusual quality.  Films convey the funny patois of his characters but not the danger and menace that sneak up between the colorful phrases, like “tough joints,” “blowing the safe open” and “Dannemora” (for readers outside the tristate region, an upstate New York maximum security facility).

Runyon himself had something of an “underworld complex.”  Much of the considerable money he earned as a New York sportswriter and short-story writer was spent at the racetrack, where he met many gamblers and absorbed the speech patterns that later figured so prominently in his work.

Some of those people turned up as thinly disguised people in his stories, including:

*Bat Masterson, who became Sky Masterson;

*Walter Winchell (Waldo Winchester);

*Arnold Rothstein (Nathan Detroit);

*Texas Guinan (Miss Missouri Martin);

*Harry Morgan (The Lemon-Drop Kid);

* Otto Berman (Regret);

* Frank Costello (Dave the Dude);

*Johnny Broderick (Johnny Brannigan)

I haven’t been able to discover the original inspiration for Harriet or Red Henry, but they must have been something else.

Quote of the Day (Chris Offutt, Distinguishing Between a Short Story and a Novel)

“A short story is like taking a small boat to sea and traveling along the coast. You can hear the sounds and see the lights of shore. A novel is like taking a ship straight out into the ocean until there is no land in sight.” —American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and essayist Chris Offutt quoted by Bradley Sides and Chapter16.org, “Human Drama: Q&A With Novelist Chris Offutt,” Pursuit Magazine, July 21, 2023

Quote of the Day (O. Henry, on Dixie in The City That Never Sleeps)

“While Coglan was describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was ‘Dixie,’ and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table.

“It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the ‘rebel’ air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long–shot winners at the New Orleans race–track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a ‘fad’ in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, you know.

“When ‘Dixie’ was being played a dark–haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft–brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.”—American short-story writer William Sidney Porter, aka “O. Henry” (1862-1910), "A Cosmopolite in a Café," in The Four Million (1906)

Recently, I have taken to dipping into more of the short stories of the writer we know as “O. Henry.” I don’t know how much the younger generation has been exposed to him in high school or college, but when I was growing up he was nearly inescapable, cropping up constantly in anthologies (especially his Christmas tale “The Gift of the Magi,” which I discussed in this post from over 13 years ago).

As a matter of fact, more certainly than the presence of a New Yorker-style short story, there is an O. Henry one: i.e., one featuring an ironic, usually witty, reversal.

Those surprise endings became a trademark for the writer. The problem, such as it is, boils down to this: When read in bulk, the novelty wears off.

And when I write “bulk,” I mean bulk. The collection I’m reading now is called 100 Selected Stories. This paperback is substantial, totaling more than 700 pages.

But even here, it only begins to tap the writer’s astonishing output. Estimates of the number of his short stories that I’ve seen on the Internet range from 300 to “more than 600”—all collected in nine volumes published from 1904 to 1909, the year before his death.

So yes, after reading one of these stories after another in rapid succession, you are so sure a surprise is coming that it ceases to be surprising.

But, as I’ve been discovering by reading him in a collection as well as in viewing a DVD of a largely forgotten 1957 TV series, The O. Henry Playhouse, starring the great character actor Thomas Mitchell, other traits of the author besides the surprise twist come to the fore.

The quotation at the start of this current post, for instance, brought me up short. It highlights one of his less remarked upon but equally rare skills, as a social historian.

While plying his trade as a short-story writer in the early 1900s, O. Henry set many of his tales where he lived, in Manhattan—or, as he put it, “Bagdad-on-the Subway.”

The city was coming into its own as an international melting pot, and the writer was there to chronicle it all, from society swells in elegant restaurants and hotels to fleabag dumps on the Bowery.

O. Henry depicted all these characters without snobbery. He would have felt himself the least inclined of anybody to judge: After all, he carried with him the secret stigma of serving three years for embezzling from a bank in Austin, Texas, in the 1890s.

One last point: this passage also reveals O. Henry as a Southern writer. Such fiction is more than just novels and short stories written by and/or about people who live below the Mason-Dixon line, or in the states comprising the vanished Confederacy. The other quintessential element of such works is storytelling.

O. Henry’s yarns came from sitting around listening wherever he went. But, as a longtime resident of Texas who started using his pseudonym in New Orleans while briefly on the lam for his crime, he also had an affinity for Southerners.

Being too young to have fought in the Civil War for his native state of Ohio, he would not have heard the “Mosby rebel yell” emitted by the “dark-haired young man” with a shudder, but with curiosity, and maybe even affection.

(For more on O. Henry as a social historian with a Southern affinity, I urge you to read David Madden’s August 2014 article in the Citizen-Times of Asheville, NC—the city, incidentally, where O. Henry is buried, near his second wife and daughter from his first marriage.)

Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on Writing the Short Story)

“When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.”— American fiction writer, essayist and screenwriter Truman Capote (1924-1984), interviewed by Pati Hill, “Truman Capote, The Art of Fiction No. 17,” The Paris Review, Issue 16, Spring-Summer 1957

Part of the reason I did not enjoy the just-concluded “FEUD: Capote vs. the Swans,” is that it did not practice the concision and control that Capote recognized as essential to the short story.

Instead, the mini-series about the imbroglio surrounding his controversial “Answered Prayers” moved slower than the author’s Southern drawl.

How unfortunate. Before fame, depression, and substance abuse got the better of him, Capote applied sustained effort not just to fiction but also to non-fiction, such as his New Yorker pieces “The Muses Are Heard” and “The Duke in His Domain,” a profile of Marlon Brando that is a masterpiece of malice.

Was Capote a “genius,” as he proclaimed? Perhaps not. But American literature would be poorer without the likes of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” and “A Christmas Memory”—none with the epic sweep of a novel, but all swift, sensitive, and memorable short fiction.

Quote of the Day (William Trevor, on the Short Story as ‘An Explosion of Truth’)

“If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.” —Irish short-story master William Trevor (1928-2016), interviewed by Mira Stout for “William Trevor, The Art of Fiction No. 108,” The Paris Review (Spring 1989)

Quote of the Day (‘Saki,’ on the Difference Between the Young and the Old)

“The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.” —British (Burman-born) short story author Hector Hugh Munro, aka Saki (1870-1916), “Reginald at the Carlton,” from Reginald (1904)

A century ago yesterday, the British author Hector Hugh Munro lost his life, as did so many other soldiers of a literary bent, in the killing fields of France during WWI. (“Put that bloody cigarette out!”, he warned one of his men, afraid that it might catch the attention of a German sniper. Unfortunately, those last words of his proved all too correct.)

At 45, however, unlike poets Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, he was able to leave a relatively sizable literary output because he wrote prolifically. His heavily anthologized short stories range from the mischievous (“Tobermory,” on the surprising things a cat comes out with once taught how to speak) to the macabre.

In the British paper The Guardian, Stephen Moss offers a fine assessment of why Saki may be due for a revival due to his “brutal dismantling of human stupidities.”

Quote of the Day (Sean O'Faolain, on the ‘Punch and Poetry’ of Stories)

“The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.”—Irish man of letters Sean O'Faolain (1900–91), foreword to The Short Story (1948)

If you read almost any major anthology of Irish short stories, then you are bound to believe that Sean O'Faolain—who died on this day 25 years ago in Dublin—packed quite a bit of “punch and poetry.” William Trevor, himself a significant short-story writer, ranked him with Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor as "the three most influential Irish writers in the genre since Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen established Ireland at the forefront of the modern short story."
 

In each of four decades, O'Faolain produced at least one major story collection, as well as four novels, biography, criticism and travel books. A soldier in the struggle for Irish independence (and radicalized enough by that experience to change his baptismal name, John Whelan, to its more Gaelic form), he would later criticize conservative aspects of the republic born from the conflict, including censorship, Church restrictions and the narrowness of middle-class life. His life was chronicled in a memoir by his novelist daughter Julia.