I’m not the best short-story writer in the world. But I can tell you what I am. I’m a short-story reader. It’s one of my favorite forms. Some say it’s essentially an American form, like our musicals. Oklahoma! Guys and Dolls. But of course there’s de Maupassant and Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Isaak Babel, where do we stop, the Irish storytellers, O’Faoláin, O’Connor, O’God, those Irish know how to tell ’em! And how about our Latino friends, Carlos Fuentes, Borges, García Márquez …? An endless list of wonders. Short stories are great for good-night reading, and on planes and trains—easier to read a short story than a novel in a subway. I don’t only mean that a short story is short—a twenty-, thirty-minute read. A short story is also something you can reexperience, relive, reflect on—whatever you want to do with it—while waiting for your plane to be called, or letting your watch warn you that your ferry from Orient Point is approaching New London. That would distract you from thinking about a novel, say 1984 or The Old Gringo. But it gives you just enough time to ask yourself, Why did I like that story? Why did it hold me? What does it make me think about? Good stories are to enjoy. Tell me a story, Daddy. Well, once upon a time … Fun. But very good stories do more. First they entertain you, then they add to knowledge you already think you knew. They stretch you. Aesthetic aerobics.
Any collection of short stories or tales is a kind of map, with lines indicating where the traveler has journeyed, and this group of tales is no exception. There are Hollywood stories, not because “Hollywood” lends any special glamour to this assemblage—quite the contrary—but because Hollywood happens to be this writer’s hometown, where he was raised, where he ran a mediocre half-mile for L. A. High, put out a daily newspaper there and learned to meet deadlines, and where he first began writing the poetry that soon convinced him he should try his hand at prose.
The Hollywood tales in this book are not particularly happy ones because no one is happy in Hollywood unless he or she is very successful, and no one in Hollywood can stay very successful. As this is written, I can think of at least three of Hollywood’s most brilliant directors, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, and Robert Wise—with all their Oscars and all their marbles—who can’t get a job. Apparently it’s okay to run a country at seventy-five or over, but direct a movie? The kids in short pants running the studios will tell you, “Forget it!”
There are a number of Mexican stories, because I have not only kept an apartment in Mexico since 1960 but left a part of my heart there indefinitely. Sentimental? Damn right. One day in the plaza of an old village I saw a scribe at a typewriter that looked like a relic of the 1910 revolution quietly typing a letter being dictated to him by an illiterate borracho whose complexion suggested the chemistry of red peppers, tequila and uncontrollable temper. As I watched them, “Señor Discretion” began to write itself into this book. A minor archaeological rip-off in Taxco, followed by chance associations with some serious pre-Columbian digs, provided still another little Mexican play on moralities. And the counterintelligence story, as extreme as it may read, actually came to me through a glass of Dos Equis in a pungent Mexican cantina, extravagantly named the Transatlantico, where a Mexican cop in the grip of tequila añejo was closing in on a pair of unsuspecting peasants from the mountains. So, picaresque these Mexican tales may be, but I had to hold back several more to try to keep this book in balance. The trouble with Mexico is you trip over the picaresque. Even their philosophers, like Octavio Paz, have to dig deep into their seriousness so as not to become pícaros.
Some of these tales spring from hobbies, like deep-sea fishing and boxing, and some from lifelong obligations, like having to keep up with the waterfront. And a few are country stories, like “Say Good Night to Owl,” because my novels have always been the city novels of a country boy. Los Angeles was country when I was growing up amid palm trees, fig and pepper trees, and the blossoms of grapefruit and oranges. I have lived on farms in Bucks County and beaches on the west coast of Florida and now on eastern Long Island.
A great blue heron just flew by my window. Where was it going, in the dead of winter? The germ of a story, or a tale. That’s how they begin. Of course a large bird flying by your window is simply a fact. An odd or interesting fact. A paragraph for Audubon magazine. What would make it a story? Well, if this large pale-blue bird is an anthropomorphic creature, he could be a symbol of a lost soul in a changing world. Why hasn’t he gone south to the warmer climes self-respecting blue herons expect and deserve? Is he a symbol of the greenhouse effect: He thinks or senses that our winters are getting warmer? Is he a metaphor for climatic aberration leading to social alienation? Or could this be the story of a bird whose mate has been killed by man or some other marauder? Many birds, from racing pigeons to swans, mate for life. Will this one continue to search for his lost mate until he freezes or starves to death? Or will a human sympathizer get involved? Will he or she try to get to the bottom of this mystery of the great blue heron who chose to stay, or simply was left behind? How does the human character we’ve brought into the story cope with this problem? Do the intervention and the coping change it from a fleeting event to a story? The possibilities, we begin to see, are limitless. A story is not an event, but a series of related events, one drawing on the previous one, and building to a climax. It doesn’t have to be a big payoff climax like a smoochy clinch or a screeching car-chase at the end of a movie. It can be quiet and almost deceptively uneventful. Chekhov comes to mind as the master of such an ending, and so does Hemingway, whose novels may date a little but whose short stories are still wonderful on rereading. Any student of the short story would do well to study their endings.
Short stories have played an important part in my life. My childhood in Hollywood was enriched by my father’s enjoyment in reading to us (his children) from the classics on Sunday mornings. Very un-Hollywood, you might think, for Father ran a big movie studio when I was in grammar and high school. But short-story writing, oddly enough, had helped us get to Hollywood: B.P. (all big producers used initials in those days) had won a New York City high-school short-story contest. It helped him get a job as a copyboy with Franklin Pierce Adams, F.P.A. (forgotten now, famous columnist then), on the old, still-lamented New York World. One day my sister Sonya (a gifted but underpublished short-story writer) found a copy of Father’s prizewinning story in the attic of our house in Hollywood. It was called “The Man from the North” and it was terrible, worse than Jack London when he was bad. But at least it was a story, with a beginning, middle and end, and it drew a picture, it set a mood and it had a theme, even if rather a simplistic one.
“The Man from the North” did two good things: It established Father as a professional who became one of the movies’ first “photoplay” writers, and it encouraged his own appreciation of short stories, an interest that he (and our mother, a would-be librarian) passed on to us through reading aloud and urging us to read everything from O. Henry and Stephen Crane to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.
In my early teens, I was in thrall to the Russians and my first short story, “Ugly,” was written under their influence—about an outcast in Eastern Europe, so disfigured that he only ventured to appear in public at carnival time, when he could wear a mask and disport in disguise. I was also in thrall, you might say, to my father’s writers. When sound and the need for dialogue turned Hollywood upside down, B.P. threw a net around as many eastern writers—novelists, playwrights, even poets—as he could pull in. Out came Herman Mankiewicz, who had collaborated with George S. Kaufman and was later to write Citizen Kane, Ben Hecht, John V. A. Weaver and Edwin Justus Mayer, who had written two Broadway plays—The Firebrand and Children of Darkness—that were surprisingly successful considering their wit and poetry. And B.P.’s favorite, Vincent Lawrence, another Broadway playwright, earning twenty-five hundred dollars a week in Hollywood, cynical but conscientious about the movie work he had contracted to do, and at the same time devoted to the art of the printed word. When Vinnie got drunk, he would lapse into near-total recall of The Great Gatsby, and it was eerie to hear him recite the precise opening, or the haunting coda.
In my late teens I showed a story called “Busman’s Holiday” to my father, a fairly tough critic, who thought it good enough to try on Vinnie Lawrence. A tall, gaunt, driven Scotsman who still kept reaching for creative perfection, for what he called “that blue sky-rack,” Vinnie was down at his writing shack, in Topanga Canyon, built out on stilts over the ocean.
“V-V-Vinnie,” I stammered, “I just finished a story and D-D-Dad thought I—I—”
“OK, laddie, don’t tell me about it. Lemme read it for myself.”
Vinnie, my hero, took my story, retreated to the bedroom and shut the door. I stepped out onto a long, narrow balcony above the white water of the waves crashing against the rocks. I watched the aquatic commotion below, paced the precarious balcony and, every few minutes, glanced at my watch. Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty … When half an hour had passed, I began to worry. The story was a mere seventeen pages. Vinnie was a fast reader. What if something terrible had happened to him? He was high-strung, worked hard on top of drinking hard, and was under all sorts of pressure. Jesus, maybe he was dead!
I went to the bedroom door and knocked. Gently at first. “Vinnie … Vinnie …” Then harder and harder: “Vinnie! Vinnie!” After a long pause, he opened the door. He looked terrible. Blotchy white. Holding his throat. Then he grabbed me in that fierce way I was used to. “Laddie,” he burst out, “you know what you did to me, laddie?” Without waiting for an answer, he gave it to me: “That story is so lousy it made me throw up.” That’s what had taken so long. Not the reading, the retching.
Now that, my friends, is criticism. I still don’t think “Busman’s Holiday” was that bad. I’d find things to praise in it if I were teaching a creative-writing class again. But I have passed on this Vinnie Lawrencism to my students as an example of what writers should be ready for when they remove their clothes in public—which, as every writer knows, is not unrelated to the telling of tales in and out of school.
Despite Vinnie Lawrence, or maybe thanks to his help, I learned from those youthful experiences that I enjoyed telling stories, stories that fired my imagination, and that I had an urge to tell my friends, or readers. As for style, I discovered I was something of a chameleon. Not that I copied anybody or wrote to please anybody. But my style was decided by my subject matter. If What Makes Sammy Run? was a tough story, it demanded a tough style. A more contemplative subject, like The Disenchanted, would obviously demand a “softer,” more subjective style.
This book of tales is written in what may seem quite different voices: tough, whimsical, realistic, quixotic. My way of writing is to choose a subject that appeals to me and then reach for the voice (in my repertoire) that serves it best. A shoemaker doesn’t always make the same kind of shoe. There are plain, snub-toed shoes for hard walking, and fancy-toed, shiny shoes for dancing.
Readers of these tales, and an earlier collection, Some Faces in the Crowd, will either enjoy or accept the fact that I favor what may be called today the old-fashioned story; in other words, like my father’s “The Man from the North,” they tend to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Camp-fire stories, I call them. Maybe they go all the way back to the caves. Or forward to Chaucer, and then fast-forward to Mary McCarthy, Cheever and Updike. I love McCarthy’s “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit,” just as I do “The Bear” and “In the Penal Colony.” And somewhere you have to find a place for Welty and Katherine Anne Porter, for the uncanny ear of John O’Hara, for a solid, reliable teller of tales-with-a-purpose like Irwin Shaw, and for the magic of Salinger, who has made himself—but fortunately not his stories—disappear.
This haphazard roll of short-story writers is called not only to suggest their originality but their craftsmanship. The live stuff of creation balanced in the hands of people who know how to use the tools of their craft. F. Scott Fitzgerald had that, and Dorothy Parker and Pietro di Donato, briefly, as in his short story “Christ in Concrete.”
Someone who didn’t have it as a rule, but only accidentally, or subconsciously, was William Saroyan. I will never forget first reading him in Story magazine. Ah, Story! For twenty-five dollars, if you wrote a story those connoisseurs Whit Burnett and Martha Foley accepted, you broke into Story. We all read Story. Established and newly discovered short-story writers every month! Not just one or two as in Harper’s or The New Yorker or Esquire. An entire magazine devoted exclusively to the short story.
It was the dream of every aspiring writer to make the cover of Story (where the contents were boldly listed). Its Intercollegiate Short Story Contest gave me my chance. One of the winners was “Passport to Nowhere,” now included here. Since it fell into a fancy category Story liked to call “novellas,” it earned the mighty sum of fifty dollars. That I had to wait eleven months for my check in no way dimmed my exultation. Acceptance by Story was the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for neophyte writers. Thanks to a combination of nepotism and early promise, while still in college I had a job lined up as a reader and junior writer with David O. Selznick, the ebullient producer of Gone With the Wind, who had been my old man’s assistant at Paramount, and for whom I had done a little film-writing the summer before I left for Dartmouth. That I could report to D.O.S. as a published short-story writer (in a few other “little” magazines besides the Story breakthrough) helped check my sensitivity to the nepotism issue, for I had been openly critical of the family favoritism practiced at Universal, MGM and other major studios.
But back to Saroyan in Story: The first time I read his “Seventy Thousand Assyrians” and “Aspirin Is a Member of the NRA,” I knew I had discovered a new voice. I don’t mean I had discovered him for the world, I mean for myself. Yes, there were beginnings, middles and ends, but they were beautifully hidden in a style all his own. Since my father was a movie producer as well as someone with a taste for good prose, I showed him Saroyan’s stories. He urged me to find him and offer him a job as a dialogue writer. I tracked Bill down in San Francisco and offered him B.P.’s two hundred fifty a week. Story wasn’t even covering Bill’s two-dollar racetrack bets, so he grabbed the job. Soon he was writing movie scenes by day and his own stuff by night.
In Hollywood, Stanley Rose, who owned our favorite bookstore, had a small printing press, and he and I got the idea (well before Random House brought out The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze) of publishing a collection, the first, of Bill’s short stories. (Bill wrote at least three pieces a day. I call them “pieces” advisedly because some were stories, some little sketches, some of them merely creative doodling.) I thought I had separated wheat from chaff, worked up a table of contents, and Stanley and I were ready to go—when Bill dumped at least two dozen more pieces on us. I went through them, selected and discarded, drew up a revised table of contents, and—you guessed it. It kept happening, more and more from Bill Saroyan: now and then a little gem of a story or a poignant tale, but mixed in with his very own, original style of rambling. The master storyteller could also be a master rambler and the trouble was, he never knew the difference.
Bottom line: Our book, which would have been the first Saroyan, never got to press. A lot of what I took out, Bill later poured into Inhale and Exhale, a short-story volume that our long-suffering Random House editor, Saxe Commins, tried in vain to pare in half.
For Bill Saroyan, an enfant terrible writer all his life, even in half-defeated, half-defiant old age, inhaling and exhaling was all the stimulus he needed to start writing whatever popped into his fanciful head. This writer was always slower and needed more, first the faces, then what Fitzgerald wisely equated with plot: characters in action; finally that good old beginning, middle and end. And beyond the structure that holds it all together, there should be something more, the reason you’re telling this tale. If characters-in-action equals plot, then plot-to-a-purpose equals theme. Take the theme away and we’re just out there juggling for the hell of it.
Meanwhile, end of the overture, up with the curtain, on with the juggling—only in this case, instead of barbells or bottles, we’re using people we know, in places we’ve been.
Or, as the late and too-soon-forgotten “Wild Bill” Saroyan would put it, “Love, here is my hat.”
Budd Schulberg
Brookside
Quiogue, Long Island
N.Y. May 16, 1989