SSW: new stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Jess Walter; rather new ones by Amalialú Posso Figueroa and Anne Carson, and an older essay by William Saroyan: Short Story Wednesday

From Harper's, August 2023: "The Return" by Joyce Carol Oates, and

reprinted from The Massachusetts Review, Spring 2023: "Fidelia Córdoba" by Amalialú Posso Figueroa (as translated by Jeffrey Direman and Shanna Lee)

and, reprinted from The Stinging Fly, Summer 2023: "Happiness" by Anne Carson

from Ploughshares, Summer 2023, "The Dark" by Jess Walter

from Story, June 1962: "Saroyan's Paris" by William Saroyan

Although chosen by not quite random selection, with no foreknowledge of their content, from the current issues of Harper's and Ploughshares, the stories by Joyce Carol Oates, "The Return", and by Jess Walter, "The Dark", are both about surviving one's spouse, and how to keep on. This is somewhat unsurprising in a new story from Oates, as it deals with a woman who has survived both her first and second husbands, the first after a long-term marriage, the second after 13 years, who is visited by the protagonist, a long-term woman friend, after a long period of lack of communication between them. The protagonist is Maude, the twice-widowed friend is Audra, and there's probably nothing accidental about the similarity of their names, even given the mild discomfort that has delayed, though also the guilt and curiosity that are driving Maude's visit to Audra...whom, as it turns out, is in a sense haunted by a sort of specter of her second husband, Thad. The story is largely a long meditation on how those who have died might not leave one, particularly if one continues to live in their formerly shared residence, a converted New Jersey farmhouse...while not quite delusional, Audra is constantly of late aware of a sort of not-quite-supernatural, not-quite tangible revenant of Thad who visits and wonders why the grounds have gone so unattended, why the food in the house is so little to his liking. It's a graceful sort of mix of reminiscence of and memorial to the flawed, often irascible and much-missed Thad (and perhaps Oates's own second husband Charles Gross); Maude isn't sure what to make of it all, even by the time of her departure. 

The Jess Walter story seems considerably less a matter of pulling one's own viscera out and rolling them through the platen, while telling the story of a widower, who's wife of forty years had died two years previously, and who asked only two things of her husband in her last days...that he not introduce any new romantic interests to their adult children at least for a year, and that he Beware of blond women in their 60s. They had had a happy and often playful life together, and he finds that even after the first year is up, he doesn't feel a great desire to seek to play the field again...but by the end of the second year, he tries to explore opening up his romantic life again, at first with a mildly embarrassing online matching-service date, and then with one that goes along a bit better, after some tips and other help from his more tech-savvy son. This story leans a bit more into humor, while also dealing with the small insecurities as well as major heartbreak of surviving one's spouse, and not being too sure of much of anything in the wake of that experience. I've read considerably in Oates's fiction over the decades, and a bit of Walter's, both engaged to some degree with the crime-fiction community (Walter's 2005 Citizen Vince won the Edgar Award for best crime-fiction novel of the year in 2006); and Oates has also written no little in horror and related fiction, much as the guest editor of the Summer 2023 Ploughshares, Tom Perrotta, is best known for three of his novels, which have been successfully adapted for film or television, the dark fantasy The Leftovers and his earlier crime-fiction-adjacent, at least, Election and Little Children. Perrotta, in his editorial to the issue, notes how much the recently late Russell Banks's The Sweet Hereafter (another novel that at very least comes close to crime fiction) influenced aspects of The Leftovers, something Perrotta hadn't realized till rereading the Banks novel after his death. 

The other two short stories in the Harper's issue are reprints from recent issues of other, smaller-circulation magazines, the Irish magazine The Stinging Fly, and a translation of a vignette by Colombian writer Amalia Luisa Posso Figueroa, who signs her given names more often as Amalialú, from The Massachusetts Review, which recently hosted Posso Figueroa and her translators doing a reading of the story; sadly, the vignette seems a bit arch and slight to me, if not in any way painful to read, and not bereft of poignancy...I wonder if I would like it better in the original. Canadian poet and academic Anne Carson's historical fiction  "Happiness" involves a young Irish woman, enslaved after capture by raiding Norsemen, and how she adapts to the less than harmonious household she's turned over to, and finds a sort of release when she's tasked, by the man of the married couple who hold her, with writing poetry for him to recite at gatherings of the men in his settlement. Deft and interesting. 

Perhaps not the most cheerful lot of stories, but William Saroyan's 1962 consideration of his current situation, as a 53yo writer living in Paris, is an amusingly irascible assessment of how little of the Moveable Feast  post-WW1 exiles found remained, and how little of Paris he has a handle on; he is kind enough to provide sketches, as well, which more resemble mobile-sculpture than anything else. "There isn't a more majestic city, and you can have it. There couldn't possibly be a more delightful people, and you can have them, too. The reason is that it isn't working. Nothing is working. [...] The thing that isn't working appears to be the human race." Plus ça change...

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday entries, please see        Patti Abbott's blog

SSW: Jean Goldschmidt: "The Testament of Uncle George", STORY: THE MAGAZINE OF DISCOVERY, May 1967, edited by George Dickerson; Dennis Etchison:"The Pitch", WHISPERS, October 1978, edited by Stuart David Schiff: Short Story Wednesdays

 This issue can be read here.

The Etchison story can be read here.

Jean Goldschmidt's "The Testament of Uncle George" and Dennis Etchison's "The Pitch" are disturbing if also extremely ultraviolet/gallows-humorous stories, about the results of rather bad family dynamics, to put it mildly. Goldschmidt's was written at the beginning of a very short career, abruptly terminated by a 1971 traffic accident that killed her and her husband James Kempton about four years after their marriage; her husband was Murray Kempton's son. Her story was published in the first (perhaps only?) Scholastic Magazines-owned issue of Story, given a new subtitle and with this issue once again Volume 1, No. 1, purchased in 1966 from the Burnetts with Hallie Burnett now officially a Consulting Editor and Whit Burnett demoted to Advisory Editor and still the "Director of the STORY College Creative Awards", one of which was bestowed upon the Goldschmidt story for 1967.  Etchison's is the product of a writer in a successful midpoint of his career, if not as successful as he deserved; it was published in the horror and fantasy magazine Whispers, probably the most influential horror-fiction magazine of its time, and was reprinted in Gerald W. Page's The Year's Best Horror Stories volume for the following year, despite not being an actual horror story, any more than Robert Bloch's Psycho was, but instead an intense yet somewhat offhanded suspense story, as a number of Etchison's stories were. Similarly, Goldschmidt's story involves a young woman, Gwendolyn, alienated from her family (her father dies when she is very young; her mother marries her husband's brother, though not out of 19th Century tradition, and soon gives birth to a half-brother/half-cousin to the young woman, before divorcing her second husband and leaving Gwendolyn in the care of various family, their son Rudy with his father (who revels in the name George Washington Bridge while publishing Irving Wallace-style novels as "G. W. Bridgeport"), before she conducts various affairs which end poorly, and then commits suicide. Gwendolyn and Rudy, long separated, finally meet in their late teens, and have a multiply unfortunate romantic affair. 

Etchison's story features a loner who is nonetheless a very adept demonstrator and pitchman for several kinds of slicing and dicing food-processing devices...one who tolerates no sort of condescension nor rudeness directed at himself, and who seems oddly reticent to demonstrate the knives that are to be sold with the devices, and never takes off his gloves. It seems that as a young boy, his mother, overbearingly monitoring his piano practice from the kitchen, once was too incautious in how she let him know of her displeasure. Things do not come to what would be considered a conventionally happy conclusion in either story, either in the slow build of the strangeness of the Etchison protagonist, who likes to go by "C-Note", nor between Gwendolyn/Wendy and her uncle and her brother/cousin, told in a somewhat showily arch but not off-putting manner, as each of her characters tries and fails to find a comfortable role in day-to-day society.

These two writers began as essential contemporaries, with Etchison beginning to publish in the campus and then professional press in 1963, Goldschmidt in 1966 and with this story in '67; Etchison had his own rather less drastic bad luck in 1971, when the publishing house that was to issue his first collection went bankrupt just as his book was going to press, just after publishing the first edition of Karl Edward Wagner's first collection, Darkness Weaves. Etchison began to write scripts and novels by the late '60s, based as he was in Los Angeles, and began to edit anthologies, including both those devoted to horror and related work as Cutting Edge and Metahorror, and the much more eclectic small press anthology Lord John Ten, celebrating a decade of the Lord John Press's various interests. While Goldschmidt contributed to various magazines and The Village Voice during her foreshortened career...a retrospective of her work and some brief memoirs, My View is Incomplete, was published in 2001 with an introduction by Grace Paley. Etchison published a career retrospective, Talking in the Dark, in 2001, but continued to publish until shortly before his death from cancer in 2019. 

In a sense, one can see how both of their work grew out of some similar influences, such as Robert Bloch and Shirley Jackson (and Evelyn Waugh), but notably both the younger writers, in these stories among others, start at a point a bit beyond where the characters in the most typical work of Bloch or Jackson might still be attempting to pretend to be somewhat conventional or not prone to disconcerting urges; there's little pretense thus among the characters in these and other works by the '60s kids, who are also drawing in part on such writers as Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, and fellow, slightly older '60s kids Joyce Carol Oates and Barry Malzberg (the latter two at Syracuse rather than at Etchison's Berkeley or Goldschmidt's Sarah Lawrence), or the slightly elder Carol Emshwiller and Patricia Highsmith. 

Etchison might be the single most influential writer of his generation on the current horror and suspense-fiction field, in the way he explores characters who are not anchored to conventional empathy nor to consensus reality any more than our more disturbing fellow citizens are; I shall have to read more of Goldschmidt's small body of surviving work, to see if she would've likely continued to take a slightly more antic approach to the same sort of neo-Gothic that fascinates Oates, and not too dissimilar from that which has driven the darker visions of Kate Wilhelm, Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood or Octavia Butler.

For more of today's short-fiction reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

The Fictionmags Index listing for this issue of Whispers:

Whispers [#11/12, v3 #3/4, October 1978] ($4.00, 132pp+, octavo s/b, cover by Lee Brown Coye) 

• 13 · Chorazin · Manly Wade Wellman · ss
• 28 · Whom He May Devour · Manly Wade Wellman · pl
• 39 · Witch Whisper from Stratford · Manly Wade Wellman · ar
• 43 · Keep Me Away [Hal Stryker] · Manly Wade Wellman · ss
• 54 · Here There Be Demons: A Folio · Alan Hunter · pi
• 62 · Night-Knell · John Bredon · pm
• 63 · The Doll Who Ate His Mother by Ramsey Campbell · Stephen King · book review
• 69 · Strange Eons · Robert Bloch · excerpt from forthcoming novel (Pinnacle 1979).
• 79 · The Hell You Say · Ray Russell · vi
• 81 · Ghost of a Chance · Ray Russell · vi
• 83 · William Blake · John Bredon · pm
• 84 · Vanessa’s Voice · Brian Lumley · ss
• 94 · Klarkash-Ton · John Bredon · pm
• 95 · Averoigne: A Folio · John Stewart · illustration
• 103 · Heading Home · Ramsey Campbell · ss
• 107 · Edgar Allan Poe · John Bredon · pm
• 109 · Whispering in the Dark · John Taylor Gatto · ar
• 115 · The Pitch · Dennis Etchison · ss
• 121 · Monstro Ligriv · John Bredon · ss
• 124 · Conversation Piece · Ward Moore · vi

Index to the Story issue forthcoming...

FFB: THE STORY OF STORY MAGAZINE by Martha Foley (assembled and notes added in part by Jay Neugeboren), W.W. Norton 1980

Jay Neugeboren, in his introduction to the published form of Foley's memoirs in progress at the time of her death, notes the dire state she found herself in, barely getting by on her royalties from editing Best American Short Stories (after four decades at that desk, she had taken over from the founding editor, her friend, after he was killed in England by Nazi bombing from the air), mourning the death of her son (who had been a drug addict, apparently a heroin junkie), isolated and ailing. Which seems very strange indeed, given the breadth of her early career, before and during founding and editing Story (or, as she always refers to it, STORY...all caps and in italics), and leaving Story to take on the BASS position and divorcing Whit Burnett, who kept the magazine they had co-founded (and ran it into the ground, though also saw it revived fleetingly twice before his death and the eventual revival of the title for a decade by the Writer's Digest people).

Incomplete as the account is, Foley had packed a lot of living into her first decades, beginning her memoirs with a reminiscence of lonely and abused childhood after her parents became seriously ill and had to place Foley and siblings with resentful relatives (or other surrogates), but loving the legacy of the library her parents had assembled, which traveled with the younger Foleys. Not long after high school, Alice Paul finds Foley doing some small tasks at the Socialist Party hq in New York, when coming over with other Women's Party activists looking for reinforcements to protest that antifeminist crusader, Woodrow Wilson, returning from Europe (particularly amusing when we consider how famously his wife would be the voice of the, and probably the acting, President in his ill last years (he is easily among our most overrated Presidents); Foley, Paul and the other protestors were jailed but not processed, and Foley's firsthand career investigating the corruption of the larger society had begun. She would be drawn into journalism, working with Cornelius Vanderbilt in Los Angeles (and serving as one of the key editors on CV's paper there), meeting Whit Burnett and moving with him to New York and then onto foreign correspondence for major papers in Paris and Vienna, and beginning to publish Story in the face of the early 1930s narrowing of the short-fiction markets, particularly among the more intellectual and arty generalist magazines (Mencken and Nathan's move from the fiction-heavy The Smart Set to the essay-oriented The American Mercury being a key impetus, another being the closure of the key experimental little magazine transition to fiction, rather than poetry, just before Foley and Burnett took the plunge). Meanwhile, Story would publish the first stories, and later work, of folks ranging from John D. MacDonald to J. D. Salinger, Zora Neale Hurston to William Saroyan, (almost) Ernest Hemingway and his inspiration, Gertrude Stein (neither of whom Foley was ever terribly impressed with as people) to (definitely) Nelson Algren (whom she liked enormously till his public rudeness about his affair with Simone de Beauvoir), Carson McCullers to John Cheever, Kay Boyle to Erskine Caldwell, Peter de Vries to Norman Mailer. While building this legacy, she developed long friendships the likes of fellow reporter and historian William Shirer and a banker turned writer/publisher who was going by Rex Stout (and introduced him to the model

note Foley credits her son with co-editing

for Nero Wolfe...Foley suspects Stout modeled Archie Goodwin on himself). 

And as incomplete as this review is under the current circumstances, most of this book is written in great good humor (with the necessary seriousness brought to many issues of the times, and nostalgia never allowed to go unchecked) and touches on the careers and Foley's interactions with many more folks than I cite here (hell, Neugeboren, in going through the notes and the completed majority of the manuscript, finds himself wondering what happened to such Foley discoveries as A. I. Bezzerides--apparently no film buff, Jay). Eminently rewarding, as well as sobering as one considers how Foley's late life was spent. 

Please see B. V. Lawson's Friday review and the list of other reviews for this week.