The 40s: The Story of a Decade (106 page)

W
riters are conflicted about “Zeitgeist.” Sharing a sensibility with your literary generation is, to a working writer, pretty much an annoyance: vanity demands you sound like no one but yourself. Yet, as the decades pass, having sounded like your peers—having channeled, however unconsciously, the spirit of the age—is what will tend to secure your spot in anthologies like this one. And being remembered, placed, and ranked, these are things that all but the most independent writers come to worry about, eventually—perhaps a little more than they should. Even the great individualist Vladimir Nabokov was glad when publishers sent him anthologies (“homing pigeons really, for all of them contain samples of the recipient’s writings”). Although, when called upon—by no one but himself—to rate the stories in
55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940–1950
, he gave only two an A+: his own and Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (which was not available for inclusion here). Nabokov had a theory that you could only ever expect, from any anthology, “two or three first-rate stories.” I think that honest readers, writers, and publishers would probably agree with that strike rate. But most of us derive a lot of enjoyment from stories in the B+ to A grade range and, if we are students of the craft, learn something from them, too. Personally I find it hard to learn a lot from A+ stories, much as I love and admire them. Not easy to glean tips on construction when gazing upon a thing so perfect, with no visible joins, like a naturally occurring crystal.

Nabokov is Nabokov and Salinger Salinger. Let’s leave them for a moment at the top of the class. Now, what about everybody else? Is there a voice of the forties? Well, how the hell am
I
meant to know? Isn’t that something a fella oughta, well, consider for himself? I mean, if he really wants to
understand
anything? Oh, I’m not saying you can’t hear a certain rhythm in the dialogue, a self-conscious snap and crackle in the way
some of these stiffs speak. I suppose I’ve got ears just like anybody. And I guess if you really
wanted
you could sure as hell chalk it up to the beloved memory of a half-dozen movie idols of the period, like Spencer Tracy, say, or good old Jimmy Stewart; but it might just as well be the intimate echo of soldiers wisecracking in some abandoned hay barn not far from Omaha Beach, or—if you want to get really
smart
about it—the long shadow of the newly imported Dr. Freud, interpreting everybody’s private dreams and poking all around in a fella’s private business like a
goddam sneak.
…

Dialogue was the thing, in the forties. Many of the writers in this anthology did some work in Hollywood, and almost all of them found their work adapted for film, sooner or later, though the results rarely satisfied. It’s one thing to have gabbing fools safely embedded in the adamantine marvel of your prose, but take away the adamantine and what’s left? A lot of fools, gabbing. I find I want to say “holy fools.” A robust sense of morality hangs over these stories. They are almost all engaged with—to steal the title of another Shirley Jackson story, not included here—the possibility of evil. The demented young man in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” would surely find biblical connections throughout, starting with the titles (“Graven Image,” “Act of Faith”), and proceeding to the various Old Testament parallels within the stories themselves. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Let he who fears the Babelian hordes listen in on John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio.” Meanwhile, over in England, V. S. Pritchett takes Jacob’s ladder and turns it into a domestic incident: resentful stepdaughter removes stepmother’s staircase to Heaven.

Of course, there was a war on, and devilish behavior was everywhere. When you see that righteous little man in Carson McCullers’s “The Jockey,” calling out a bookie, a trainer, and “a rich man” as they sit down to an elaborate meal in a hotel restaurant (“You libertines”), the incident, small as it seems, takes on a peculiar magnitude. Here is the jockey, angry for his crippled jockey friend. And here are all the little men of this world sent off to risk life and limb at the behest of the rich and powerful. It’s the same controlled ethical disgust you find in Shirley Jackson’s notorious vision of small-town ritual murder.
The evil that men do.
But registered in an oblique style, and all the more forceful for it. Those “Patterns of Love” admired by William Maxwell (and published two months to the day after victory in Europe)—are we to take them as the first, uncertain steps toward a peaceful, humane future? In that sweet
and subtle story, a lonely man, Arnold, is visiting a happy family, the Talbots, who in turn are always “visiting” him in his guest house, along with the family dog, a Great Dane, name of Satan. The two younger sons often fight. But not always:

Only one of these stories, Irwin Shaw’s, looks directly at the face of Cain, but in it we join the noncommissioned officers Seeger, Welch, and Olson after the action, at the end of the war, Shaw being interested in what we would these days call “post-conflict trauma.” Trauma itself—now such a familiar tool in the writer’s arsenal—was, in the forties, still something to be wrangled with, fresh theory rather than (generally) accepted fact. For E. B. White the talking cure is not to be taken too seriously (“ ‘Ever have any bizarre thoughts?’ asked the doctor.… Ever have any bizarre thoughts? What kind of thoughts
except
bizarre had he had since the age of two?”). Nabokov’s opinions on the subject, meanwhile, are well known, and his perfect gem of a story, “Signs and Symbols,” is another repudiation of the Freudian habit of placing, as Jessamyn West puts it elsewhere in this book, the mysteries of life in an orderly manner:

My italics. If I could gather these writers of the forties under one banner it would be their shared desire to protect faulty, small, vulnerable, and yet beautiful phenomena from the forces of destruction. E. B. White
wants to save the second tree on the corner—“saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy”—from the deadening theories of his therapist. Elizabeth Taylor wants to protect the first shoots of new love as they grow out of somebody else’s grave. Cheever, like all writers, wants to preserve the voices of passing strangers. And Frank O’Connor—despite his present reputation as a writer of neat little tales that all end in epiphany—wants to tell a shaggy-dog story that allows for the possibility that an “insignificant little gnat” like Freddie or Stevie Leary can yet continue to exist, if only because they have been remembered, by the narrator, “with extraordinary vividness.” People forget, and time is violent, and sometimes the “times” are violent, too, in the nonmetaphorical sense. In the forties, the left-hand column of the human ledger was long, longer than seemed possible. Still, these writers found a few luminous things to put down for us on the other side, and we have not yet forgotten the favor.

“E
ver have any bizarre thoughts?” asked the doctor.

Mr. Trexler failed to catch the word. “What kind?” he said.

“Bizarre,” repeated the doctor, his voice steady. He watched his patient for any slight change of expression, any wince. It seemed to Trexler that the doctor was not only watching him closely but was creeping slowly toward him, like a lizard toward a bug. Trexler shoved his chair back an inch and gathered himself for a reply. He was about to say “Yes” when he realized that if he said yes the next question would be unanswerable. Bizarre thoughts, bizarre thoughts? Ever have any bizarre thoughts? What kind of thoughts
except
bizarre had he had since the age of two?

Trexler felt the time passing, the necessity for an answer. These psychiatrists were busy men, overloaded, not to be kept waiting. The next patient was probably already perched out there in the waiting room, lonely, worried, shifting around on the sofa, his mind stuffed with bizarre thoughts and amorphous fears. Poor bastard, thought Trexler. Out there all alone in that misshapen antechamber, staring at the filing cabinet and wondering whether to tell the doctor about that day on the Madison Avenue bus.

Let’s see, bizarre thoughts. Trexler dodged back along the dreadful corridor of the years to see what he could find. He felt the doctor’s eyes upon him and knew that time was running out. Don’t be so conscientious, he said to himself. If a bizarre thought is indicated here, just reach into the bag and pick anything at all. A man as well supplied with bizarre thoughts as you are should have no difficulty producing one for the
record. Trexler darted into the bag, hung for a moment before one of his thoughts, as a hummingbird pauses in the delphinium. No, he said, not that one. He darted to another (the one about the rhesus monkey), paused, considered. No, he said, not that.

Trexler knew he must hurry. He had already used up pretty nearly four seconds since the question had been put. But it was an impossible situation—just one more lousy, impossible situation such as he was always getting himself into. When, he asked himself, are you going to quit maneuvering yourself into a pocket? He made one more effort. This time he stopped at the asylum, only the bars were lucite—fluted, retractable. Not here, he said. Not this one.