Reflections on A Month of Short Stories

We're all forced to read a lot of short stories in school, from those elementary level "Reading" or "Language" segments of our day right on up through secondary English studies. Those of us who go on to be English majors tend to love novels. How many of us read as many short stories in adulthood as we did when we were young? 

Yet, there are certainly plenty of us writing short stories. It's just what so many of us writers do, and while we all read novels (yes, all writers--if someone says "I'm a writer" but doesn't read, then that someone is lying to you), we don't all spend as much time perusing short fiction, despite the fact that we want some magazine somewhere to publish all the stories we've written. Don't we owe it to ourselves to read some regularly, then?  

This, coupled with a random piece I stumbled across on Arts.Mic called "14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time It Takes to Eat Lunch" inspired me to read a short story per day throughout the month of July and blog about each one. The fourteen suggestions from the online article were, overall, just OK, in my opinion (though definitely short! you can read them in the time it takes to eat a few bites of your lunch!) but to fill out my month I also delved into a Norton anthology and The Best American Short Stories of the Century as well as a book of Kafka's collected stories that I had from the library. 

And now, we shall examine the results of the 30 stories from 27 authors (I allowed myself a holiday for the 4th!) of my July project: A Month of Short Stories (and Their Authors).I gave them each a grade, and I'm happy to report that no one failed; the grade distribution was like this:

A+: one, A: five, A-: six, B+: seven, B: four, B-: three, C+: four

My short story champion is "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell. It was so well-done! A rural couple of a previous era (the story was published in 1917) are drawn into the death of a neighbor; there's a sheriff, a home without its residents, an element of mystery, a decrying of sexism, a subtextual plea for people to be nicer to one another... I adore this story. It's, as we like to say, deep. 

There were several great stories that received an A but I think my other favorite, thus perhaps the best of the As or perhaps just the one that most spoke to me, was Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen." Oh my, do I like that one. It packs a punch in thematic ways I totally dig. I was also impressed by Ring Lardner, adored Katherine Anne Porter's writing (as always), and managed to give an A to both Chekhov and Faulkner, who have tormented me in the past. Really, my sixteen-year-old self  who read them previously was probably just tormented anyway, and I projected it onto those guys. It's interesting to read them in the cold, hard light of adulthood. 

All right then, so here's the list of my July short stories, by grade: 

A+  "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell

A  "To Room Nineteen" by Doris Lessing

A  "The Looking Glass" by Anton Chekhov

A  "The Golden Honeymoon" by Ring Lardner

A  "Theft" by Katherine Anne Porter

A  "That Evening Sun Go Down" by William Faulkner
A-  "In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka

A-  "The Judgment" by Franz Kafka

A-  "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf

A-  "The Gate-Keeper" by Francois Coppee

A-  "Little Selves" by Mary Lerner

A-  "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin

B+  "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood
B+  "The Road From Colonus" by E.M. Forster

B+  "A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka

B+  "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros

B+ "Adams" by George Saunders

B+ "The Other Woman" by Sherwood Anderson
B+  "Reunion" by John Cheever

B   "Clay" by James Joyce

B   "The School" by Donald Barthelme

B   "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway

B   "Double Birthday" by Willa Cather

B-  "The Last Night of the World" by Ray Bradbury

B-  "Zelig" by Benjamin Rosenblatt

B-  "Pygmalion" by John Updike

C+ "The Sock" by Lydia Davis

C+ "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro

C+ "Blood-Burning Moon" by Jean Toomer

C+ "Wild Plums" by Grace Stone Coates

Those were the original grades I gave them, and as I think back over the month, they are still for the most part how I feel.  Of the C-plussers, "Blood-Burning Moon" I at least have to give credit to for being a decent story, structured, with substance, etc., but I just didn't really enjoy it. Those other three at the bottom of the list were pretty weak. Two of the B-minuses, also nothing to write home about, are already faded in my memory, but I remember Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World" really well, so maybe it should be bumped up to a B for being so vividly rendered?  Lots of B and B+ stories, definitely. 

What was the best thing about this project? Well, probably that I found myself reading stories by fantastic authors. In how many given months of your life do you spend time with even one of those classic, prize-winning, critically acclaimed, famous, sometimes beloved, sometimes loathed, solidly-entrenched-in-the-canon authors, let alone a dozen of them? (Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Chekhov, Kafka, Forster, Joyce, Cather...) along with other 20th century stalwarts (Lessing, Updike, Atwood, Cisneros, Saunders, Bradbury, Cheever) and fantastic past writers whose stars have faded a teensy bit but definitely need to be revived (Glaspell, Lardner, Anderson...)? It's a great experience! 

What was the worst thing? Well, the hardest thing was definitely those few days that I didn't get around to reading a story until late in the evening; I was tired, it was 11:30, but I had to read a story and get something up on the blog about it before the day was done. Luckily, I had that "14 Brilliant Pieces..." article, whose stories were almost all very short, and on those days I clicked through to one of those, whereas on the other days, when I did my story in the morning or afternoon, I tended to go to the books that risked bringing me longer stories. 

Did I notice any patterns among my favorites? I suppose one could point out the feminism of my two favorite stories I read this month, Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" and Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen." Actually, all of the top-grade stories, the As and A+, had to do with marriage--"Theft" perhaps less than the others, but with it still in there a little bit. That's an interesting pattern I wouldn't have predicted. 

A C+ for Alice Munro, who recently won the Nobel Prize?!?!  What can I say? "Boys and Girls" didn't impress me much. Don't worry; I'm going to give her another chance. I just didn't care for the story, despite its apparent effort to challenge gender roles. It just left me reeling from all the acceptance of fur farming it oozed. 

Did I read anything else during month? Of course! This is one of those things like how busy people sometimes get more extra stuff done, like by forcing themselves to schedule a workout, and errands, and whatnot, they manage to fit it all in, unlike the person having some lazing days who thinks s/he has enough time to get to it all and then never does. Because I had to read my short story every day, I would often get that done and be pumped up for more reading time. I love to read anyway, but I was definitely focused on my reading plans. In July I also read Little Women (parts one and two, as they say), a couple of mysteries, two bios (of Martin Amis and Emile Zola -- this literary blog's A & Z from my original blog reading project, how about that!) and a few other things. 

Am I going to repeat this project? Well, I'm actually continuing with the rest of the stories in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, although I'm not forcing myself to blog about them and I am trying to do three or so per day, in order to get through them all before having to return the book to the library. And I have a couple of other books of short stories from the library right now, too, that I am working my way through (Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories because I-came-across-it-why-not? and a book of Polish short stories in anticipation of my upcoming trip to Poland -- fingers crossed, as I'm trying to raise another $500 for Habitat for Humanity here in order to take that trip). 

What other reading projects do I have going right now? Well. First of all, I'm still reading a poet or two a day from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, the Full 3,000-Year Tradition), and I am also continuing to read Pulitzer-winning novels, my A-to-Z follow-up "semi-finalists," and a bio of every president in order to see where we went wrong, a project obviously conceived and begun during the Dubya administration; I'm on FDR. 

And with that, let's get back to our reading, shall we!

A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors Goes On July 6th: Doris Lessing

now reading: F Is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton, among other things

Today it was time to pluck a Norton* from a crowded shelf and read a short story found therein for my read-a-new-story-every-day-for-the-month-of-July project.
(*this forever reminds me of Paul Gagne and Rosa and the "What's a Norton?" conversation at Cambridgeside Borders....ahhhhh, so good!) 

Today's Story: "To Room Nineteen"
Author: Doris Lessing
My Rating: A

I loved this story. If it is not perfect, it is definitely existentially heartbreaking. I think that for many 21st-century readers it can be difficult to look back at a feminist 1963 text without being patronizing, dismissive, wistful, idealist, or some combination of those. (I mean, look at how many ostensibly bright young things blithely declare that they are "not feminists"--and look at how many journalists continue to ask them that question.) That is rather sad. If you approach "To Room Nineteen" with an open literary mind, you just might hear it speaking some hardcore truth at you.

As Lessing herself says in the opening line, the Rawlings' marriage was a "failure in intelligence." The many levels on which this is true unfold as the story goes on: the intelligent/pragmatic approach to marriage, determined to shrug off any emotional messiness by negating the very possibility of emotional messiness, which is done by letting everything just simply be okay, not acknowledging that there is a wronged party; the failure to use Susan's skills in her chosen profession while she raises small children; the failure to discover the truth about one's partner's activities, whether through direct questioning or sleuthing. But Susan's "practical intelligence" for the sake of her family, household, the whole construction is what ultimately fails the most.

There were a few moments while reading this where my intense connection to what Lessing says filled me with that joy that can only come through reading something wondrously true. First of all, the passage in which Matthew and Susan's marriage is described as "like a snake biting its tail" where you can't figure out about which point to say "For the sake of this is all the rest." (p. 2371 in the Norton Anthology of English Literature Third Edition Volume 2, 1974, if you're interested)  was beautiful:

Children? But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a wellspring to live from. Or they shouldn't be. Matthew and Susan knew that well enough.
Matthew's job? Ridiculous. It was an interesting job, but scarcely a reason for living...
Their love for each other? Well, that was nearest it. If this wasn't a center, what was? (still on p. 2371)

I love this for stating so succinctly something that is so obvious and yet, if you say it aloud today to, you know, parents? Or grandparents? Or the blogosphere? you're likely to get ridden out of the internet on a rail. What? Children aren't your life reason for being? Are you insulting stay-at-home moms? How dare you? etc. etc. Note the distinct lack of anyone ever claiming -- still, fifty years later -- that children are any man's reason for being. Note also how well Doris Lessing puts it. Note further that she then eliminates Matthew's job as a reason-for-being candidate as well. She is searching for something more, for an essence that is deeper than what fabricated ideas of Marriage and Home and Relationship and Earning a Living can tell or give us.

But what I love even more is that this isn't about children at all. Everyone wants to make it about that because, as Simone de Beauvoir reminded us, it's a lot easier to ascribe divine mumbo-jumbo to childbearing and raising than to dishes, cooking, and gardening. But it's not about that. Doris Lessing, through this character Susan Rawlings, explains a need that is so simple and so deeply felt, so fundamental, that it becomes impossible to explain, agonizingly so, because that just makes it worse that no one understands it:

Yes, this was what was wrong with her: she needed, when she was alone, to be really alone, with no one near. She could not endure the knowledge that in ten minutes or in half an hour Mrs. Parkes would call up the stairs: "Mrs. Rawlings, there's no silver polish. Madam, we're out of flour." (p. 2378) 

"Yes!" I practically screamed at the pages in my hand. "Yes, yes, yes! I just want to be alone--and be really alone when I am alone! Why can't I just be alone for a little while! And why is it wrong to want so desperately to be alone?"

Basically, every time I try to explain this to anyone (usually Brian) I fail miserably. And I'm not even sure forcing anyone to read "To Room Nineteen" would help because they would get so caught up in the marriage/children/household aspects of it and that, my friends, is the missing of the whole point. It's not that this Woman/Wife/Mother/Homemaker wants to be alone and therefore we should all be understanding and supportive while admitting that being a mother is the toughest job in the world. It's not any of that at all. It's that this woman (this woman. herself. period.) wants to be alone. But you can't see that, because you are forever defining her as this Woman/Wife/Mother/Homemaker. It's like that internet meme you might have seen that rejects the "She's important because she's someone's mother/sister/daughter/wife" by crossing out everything from the second apostrophe on: "She's important because she's someone's mother/sister/daughter/wife."

How can we not acknowledge here Virginia Woolf, who emblazoned the room-of-one's-own notion onto personal literary consciousness (and every self-respecting writer's psyche, to boot)? And how can we not further acknowledge Virginia Woolf through Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which so marvelously channeled her and also echoes Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" themes, as Cunningham's woman chooses life?

Think about Virginia Woolf in The Hours, and you see that it isn't about children and motherhood. It's about a person. My conversations with Brian about "a room of one's own" invariably end with me lamely trying to explain why it's hard for me to write (full-time freelancing) and work from home when he's at home or when we don't even have our own home and as we circle 'round and 'round trying to hone in on why I can't create I find myself stuttering, "But then I have to think about when we're eating lunch..." or something equally not at all to the point.

Forget about the writing in a room of one's own. Don't people just want to be alone with themselves, ever? Apparently not, as evidenced by the inability to put down the smartphone for five seconds...always seeking something outside yourself...is this not a rejection of your life?

The character Susan Rawlings questions herself when she thinks the word "bondage." Surely, she reasons, neither she nor her husband can actually feel bound because they still have, sort of, a happy marriage, "lying in each other's arms content." (p.2380)  Obviously, she concludes, there is something wrong with her.

No, her state (whatever it was) was irrelevant, nothing to do with her real good life with her family. She had to accept the fact that after all, she was an irrational person and to live with it. Some people had to live with crippled arms, or stammers, or being deaf. She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own. (p.2380)

Clearly, at this point I fell irrevocably in love with "To Room Nineteen." I am not alone in the world, I conclude, in feeling as I do... although I don't see myself progressing exactly as Susan Rawlings does, or even nearly. Just understanding her. And maybe doing one or two things the same.

If you can understand what Susan feels about solitude, you can understand me. It has nothing to do with children, or being "trapped" in a marriage, or anything remotely like that. It has to do with questioning everything, and wondering why the world does something to you when you're in a relationship. It has to do with trying to fathom solitude. It has to do with being. Is everyone asking themselves these questions? Is it just women? Writers? Tormented souls?

I can't even say "Where have you been all my life?" to Doris Lessing, because I totally know about her and her unmistakably important place in literature, and feminism, and feminist literature (words that shouldn't rub you any way at all, least of all a wrong way). I've even written about her and The Golden Notebook before. But let's just say that her story "To Room Nineteen" makes me want to rush out and devour everything she's ever written. Joyous literature!