Short stories I wish that I had written. This week: “The Silver Crown” by Bernard Malamud - The Altamont Enterprise
Short stories I wish that I had written. This week: “The Silver Crown” by Bernard Malamud - The Altamont Enterprise |
- Short stories I wish that I had written. This week: “The Silver Crown” by Bernard Malamud - The Altamont Enterprise
- Obituary: Robert Kimmel Smith - Publishers Weekly
- Ange Mlinko · Just a Diphthong Away: Gary Lutz · LRB 7 May 2020 - London Review of Books
| Posted: 16 Apr 2020 12:00 AM PDT  Author's note: For years, I have been telling my English classes that someday I wanted to edit an annotated anthology titled "Short Stories I Wish I Had Written." I do not have any publishers beating down my door to get such a volume into print, but since we are all stuck in our homes these days, this seemed a good time to share some of my appreciation of these stories with Enterprise readers. For the next few weeks I will offer brief appraisals of these works, some of which are available on line but all of which can be found in various popular anthologies. **** Bernard Malamud is best known for his short stories and novels such as "The Assistant," which deal with middle-class Jewish people trying to maintain both their identity and their faith in the increasingly secular modern era, many set in New York and written in the long shadow of the Holocaust. His novels "The Fixer" and "The Natural" became best-sellers. I first encountered his short story "The Silver Crown" many years ago when I was teaching college English at New York University's Bronx campus — which has since been sold to Bronx Community College. The school was in a neighborhood almost exactly like the one in "The Silver Crown," even including a tiny synagogue on 183rd Street frequented mostly by elderly men, many of them undoubtedly survivors of the Holocaust. This fact gave the story an extraordinary immediacy to both me and my students and lent its fantastical elements that indefinable quality known as "verisimilitude." Set in the mid-1950s, the plot centers on a young Jewish high school biology teacher named Albert Gans, a solitary bachelor who has had a couple of rather emotionless one-night stands with women on the faculty of the school. As the story begins, he is trying to deal with the grave illness of his father, with whom he has never been on very good terms and about whom he has deep feelings of guilt. Doctors are at a loss to treat or even diagnose the old man's illness, though one has suggested cancer. "Of the heart," the old man suggests — summing up in three words his relationship with his son. Albert has little connection with his Jewish heritage and as a man of science he has no belief in religion or mysticism. He is thus at a loss as to how he should deal with his father's illness. And when a woman with whom Albert once slept suggests to him that he seek out a faith healer he at first rejects it outright. Anyone who has ever strolled the streets of New York will have been approached by people handing out leaflets for all sorts of things: "Gentlemen's Clubs," esoteric religions, psychics, going-out-of-business sales — and spiritual healers. It is thus only a coincidence — or is it? — that within a day Albert encounters on the street a strange, seemingly autistic woman who hands him a leaflet advertising a certain Rabbi Lifschitz who purports to heal illness through the crafting and invocation of silver crowns. Albert at first dismisses the whole concept, but as his father grows weaker and Albert's guilt increases he decides to visit the rabbi and find out precisely what these "silver crowns" are all about. Then begins an eerie series of encounters with the old man in his simple, even impoverished flat, dimly lit and lined with musty books and featuring stained window shades that resemble "faded maps of ancient lands." The rabbi presents the appearance of an aged scholar and at odd moments appears to have the power of ESP. He is the father of Rifkele, the autistic woman Albert met on the street, and although her behavior is that of a small, petulant child, the rabbi tells Albert that in her own way, God has made Rifkele perfect. The rabbi's Eastern European-accented conversation is filled with wise sayings indicating a deep religious faith — and he tells Albert that for a certain sum he can make a silver crown like those that guard the Torah scrolls in synagogues. However, these have the power to heal the desperately sick — the caveat being that the donor must have love. The rabbi produces scrap-books filled with handwritten testimonials from scores of people praising the rabbi's crowns for their miraculous healing effects on loved ones. And when Albert indicates he has doubts about the process, the rabbi replies, "We doubt God and God doubts us. Of these kind doubts I am not afraid," assuring Albert that, if he loves his father, the crown will work. But Albert never gives the rabbi — or himself — that assurance. Despite his skepticism, over the course of a couple of days, Albert is drawn into the rabbi's mystical world but insists on seeing one of the crowns before he puts down close to a thousand dollars, which is the price of the silver from which the crown will be made. The rabbi at first insists that he never shows the crown since the purchaser's faith should be sufficient. But he then reluctantly agrees to show one to Albert and does so in a stunningly beautiful and eerie sequence that appears to leave no doubt that the rabbi is a saintly man with access to supernatural powers. And Albert purchases the crown. Yet almost at once his and the reader's doubts begin to creep in. Why does the rabbi have two prices for crowns — one for $986 — and a smaller one for $401, either of which must be paid for in cash? Why do the rabbi and Rifkele appear on the street coming from religious services dressed in new and expensive-looking clothing? Why does the rabbi no longer attend services at the small side-street synagogue but go instead to a wealthy synagogue on the Mosholu Parkway, which is described as a "palace?" Malamud never answers these questions, but cleverly deals out equal amounts of evidence indicating that the rabbi is precisely the saintly intermediary he claims to be — or a smooth-talking con-man. But the crux of the story is the rabbi's insistence that, for the crown to work its miracle, Albert must love his father. The final episode begins when Albert wakes up with the conviction that he has been the victim of a swindle and heads off to angrily confront the rabbi, leading to a shocking conclusion. Like life itself, the story offers no certainties but, with its affirmation of the power of love and in its exploration of the tantalizing, mysterious topic of religious faith, it leaves the reader with much to ponder — and a story to savor again and again.  |
| Obituary: Robert Kimmel Smith - Publishers Weekly Posted: 28 Apr 2020 02:37 PM PDT Writer and children's book author Robert Kimmel Smith, widely known for such popular middle grade novels as Chocolate Fever and The War with Grandpa, died on April 18 at his home in Manhattan of natural causes. His wife, Margery Nathanson, confirmed that he had suffered from Alzheimer's disease since 2015. He was 89. Smith was born July 31, 1930 in Brooklyn, N.Y. and grew up near Ebbetts Field, able to walk to games in the bleachers and cementing his lifelong love of baseball. An early reader, Smith told Something About the Author that he was so enamored of adventure tales of pirates and the Wild West that he saw authors as heroes. He began jotting down his own stories in grade school and continued that pursuit into high school, at which point he told his parents of his ambitions to become a writer. "They said, quote, 'There's no way you can ever make a living,' " Smith recalled to SATA. Heeding his parents' urging to have a career to fall back on, Smith enrolled at Brooklyn College to begin pre-med studies. But he quickly realized college wasn't a good fit, and dropped out. Soon after, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Germany where he told SATA "there was a very fine post library" he could use, and where he and some fellow soldiers wrote musical revues and formed a barbershop quartet. Back in New York following his discharge from the Army in 1953, Smith met Claire Medney on a blind date. "She loved books and reading as much as I did," he told SATA. After that first date, Smith and Medney both told their mothers they had met the person they were going to marry. The pair wed in 1954 and settled in Brooklyn, again near Ebbets Field. They would eventually welcome a daughter and a son. Smith worked as a traveling salesman among other things during the mid 1950s before landing a position as a copywriter at advertising firm Doyle, Dane, Bernbach in 1957. "That's where my education in writing really began," he said in his SATA interview, noting that he benefited from the discipline of sticking to a deadline. Smith rose through the ranks in advertising, becoming a copy chief at Grey Advertising and then in 1967 forming his own firm, Smith & Toback, with partner Harvard Toback. Throughout his ad agency years, Smith sold several pieces of short fiction to magazines under the pseudonym Peter Marks, all the while holding on to his dream or writing a novel. He has credited his wife Claire, who became a literary agent at Harold OberAssociates, with being his best editor and great supporter. On January 1, 1970, Smith embarked on a new career path and became a full-time writer. The first manuscript he completed was inspired by a humorous story he had been telling his then-seven-year-old daughter Heidi about a boy who loved chocolate more than anything else. The result was Chocolate Fever, which was published by Coward McCann and Geoghegan in 1972. The book has remained in print over the years and has sold more than two million copies. With that first book under his belt, Smith was writing at full steam, publishing a trio of novels for adults with Simon & Schuster starring Sadie Shapiro, a wisecracking septuagenarian known for her knitting, as well as the more serious Jane's House (Morrow, 1982) about a husband and family grieving the untimely death of their wife and mother. It was produced for television in 1994 in a movie starring James Woods and Anne Archer. Smith also wrote several plays and television scripts during this fruitful period. By the early 1980s, Smith again focused on writing for children. The War with Grandpa (Delacorte, 1984) tells the tale of Peter, a boy who is not happy about relinquishing his bedroom when his widowed grandfather comes to live with the family, so he declares war. The novel won 11 IRA-CBC Children's Choice state reading awards and has been adapted as a feature film starring Robert De Niro as Grandpa, slated for release later this year. Delacorte plans to simultaneously publish a movie tie-in edition. Claire Smith died of lung cancer in 1998. In 2000, Robert Smith married Margery Nathanson, former director of design services for the New York City Department of Transportation, gallerist and collector of Latin American folk art. Their family recalled in an obituary note that Smith serenaded Nathanson at their wedding ceremony and continued to do so during the two decades they shared together living in Manhattan.  |
| Ange Mlinko · Just a Diphthong Away: Gary Lutz · LRB 7 May 2020 - London Review of Books Posted: 29 Apr 2020 04:48 AM PDT  After reading five hundred pages of Gary Lutz, I opened Google Maps and took a long, hard look at the state where he was born: Pennsylvania, the 'Keystone State', although it's shaped more like a ticket stub fished from a back pocket, is entirely recognisable in his descriptions. 'I lived in a town that had sourceless light falling over it at all hours.' 'You pictured the address numerals of the houses having been painted over by accident again and again, and people not giving their backyard gardens a chance.' 'Every afternoon, I walked the girl to the centre of town. There were eight streets that led to it, and for each approach to the two blocks of shops and vaguely public-looking buildings, I assigned the town a different name: Townville, Cityton, Burgborough, Townburgh, Boroville, Cityboro, Burghton and Town City.' Lutz was born in Allentown, studied at nearby Kutztown State College and now lives in Greensburg, where he teaches at a satellite campus of the University of Pittsburgh. His faculty bio tells us that the 64-year-old assistant professor 'teaches EngCmp 1150 (Grammar and Copyediting)' with occasional workshops and independent study courses in short fiction. 'This fall I have thus far graded 863 writing assignments,' he told the Paris Review in 2011, 'and if everybody turns in all of the remaining work, I will have graded 1026 by the end of the semester.' Gary Lutz, doing the Lord's work teaching composition to state university undergraduates in Townborocityburghton America, is also another kind of saint: the writer's writer's writer, known for crafting sentences that adhere to grammatical guidelines but swerve away from idiomatic usage. His descriptions range from Joycean-onomatopoeian ('borborygmic high jinks') to Nabokovian-synaesthetic ('Her hair had gone gruff') to stand-up humour ('Men, women, were maybe not her type'). The Complete Gary Lutz collects five books of short fiction and nine new stories, beginning with Stories in the Worst Way, published in 1996 by Knopf and reprinted twice (in 2002 and 2009) by small presses for Lutz's loyal fanbase. His stories often have ingenious titles like 'SMTWTFS', 'Onesome', 'Esprit de l'elevator' or 'Chaise Lozenge'. We are carried from hook to hook, like the insomniac narrator who 'crossed each night by linking one minute securely to the next, building a bridge that swung through the dark'. The pleasurable surprises in these stories have little to do with plot or character. They are lexical, metaphorical and often very droll, which is enough to distract the reader from the spectacular denudation of the lives, couples and truncated families portrayed. Here, in this landlocked, hilly Pennsylvanian grisaille (which could well be an outpost of Central Europe, Moravia maybe), a narrator is interminably, indeterminately, in middle age: 'I was just doing the weary thing of being in my forties'; 'I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself'; 'Forty I was, and then fortier, fluking through my annual reviews'; 'At the time of which I write, my middle forties, people were expected to provide their own transportation.' Male and female narrators are interchangeable; sex or gender is no more than window-dressing on bodies that locate equally interchangeable objects of desire, men or women, girls or boys, almost always nameless, living in apartments together or alone, in wretched marriages or in the wake of vituperative divorces, commuting in cars that double as personal offices and trash receptacles, going to McDonald's or anonymous coffee shops and diners and, most of all, going to work: 'I was a flask-shaped man in a velour shirt sitting at long lunchroom tables in business schools, cosmetology schools, junior colleges, community colleges. My business was buying used textbooks and crating them off to a distributor.' 'I found work teaching Oral Business English.' Most of these jobs are entry-level office jobs, temp jobs, jobs in oversurveilled cubicles under fluorescent lights and sprinkler fixtures, jobs that entail the heavy use of photocopiers – the only respite from sitting at desks that cut one's upper body from the lower, and place one's hands and forearms in permanent view. Pressed shirts and khakis are uniform. ('Everything he now wore smelled rainily of the iron.') Lutz's narrators may be descendants of Bartleby the Scrivener, though incapable of his transcendent 'I prefer not to.' The sterile vocabulary of offices is subtly deployed to show how deeply it structures our perceptions: 'I have probably got her features collated all wrong in memory anyway.' Lutz deforms clichés and common idioms: 'What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life?' 'I've been within an inch of my life.' 'I hated them for beating me to what my life boiled down to.' 'I was a great many far cries from myself.' Now that Microsoft Word (not to mention HR departments) has made it apparent how much of our communication is dependent on template and boilerplate, we may start to question the moral underpinnings of the entire concept of communication: 'There were hidey-holes in whatever she said.' In his acknowledgments to this book, Lutz proclaims: 'To Gordon Lish I owe everything.' Asked about Lish's influence on his work in a 2006 interview, Lutz recalled 'nosing about in bookstores in the mid-1980s' and being 'struck by certain slim books of prose fiction in which the sentences all but protruded from the page':
Lish, now in his eighties, is a shadowy editorial presence in the background of a host of American writers, some commercially successful and some, like Lutz, cult figures, who came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison. One of the best accounts of Lish's influence is in David Leavitt's roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:
Within a few pages, a student Flint has peremptorily thrown out of class lodges a spurious complaint of racism 'phrased in the acid, impersonal language of lawsuits'. Yet we are also told that 'You'll never meet anyone who takes writing more seriously than I do.' Leavitt, who took Lish's class as a 19-year-old at Yale and wrote the novel twenty years later, admits through his alter ego: 'He was right. I never have.' Flint/Lish has a first principle: 'Get on with it.' By that he means: 'Remember that when you ask someone to read a story you've written, you're asking that person to give you a piece of his life. Minutes – hours – of his life.' The second principle is 'the belief that all human experiences, no matter how different they might seem on the surface, shared a common grounding'. Lutz takes both principles to heart: he has never written a novel, preferring stories that are usually just a few pages long and in which individual sentences, as he puts it, have 'the force and feel of a climax'. But any sentence must also 'sound as if it has always existed, as if cribbed from everyone else's inner history ever'. In his work, there are none of the markers of privilege beloved of other middle-class American fiction writers – no Brooklyn brownstones, sojourns to Europe or octopus-eating. Nor are there clichés of maudits – addiction or recovery, prison or church membership. The semi-anonymity of the narrators, the gender fluidity, the middling nature of the lives lived, seems to be an attempt to approximate common denominators. Lutz's most expansive statement on his work comes in a lecture he gave to students at Columbia in 2008, published in the Believer under the noirish title 'The Sentence Is a Lonely Place'. He credits Lish again and amplifies a couple of concepts – 'consecution' and recursion – that drive his style:
Poets, especially poets who use rhyme and other constraints, are given to this sort of 'craft talk': language as matrix, or generatrix, is pregnant with itself – you just have to devise ways to midwife it. Thus, when Lutz writes 'I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself,' the word 'filthy' is just a diphthong away from 'fifty' or 'fifties' (following on 'forties'). Or take 'secretaries and paralegals and telemarketers … in their toyish cars'. 'Toyish' is perfect, though we suspect that it began as the more prosaic 'Toyotas'. Lutz often invokes the phrase 'consummated language', a rhyme with 'consummated marriage', as when one sentence 'begin[s] to make overtures to another sentence'. This idea of the writer orchestrating a mating dance is particularly interesting in the light of his characters' sex lives. Heterosexual marriage is pretty awful in Lutz's universe. In 'That Which Is Husbander Than Anything Prior', the narrator remarks: 'In bed, I kept my nose stuck in a book that listed pairs of words people often confused. It was something the husband had brought into the house early on, in a violent bout of furnishing. For instance: intimidation versus intimation. Only, I did not necessarily see where the versus came in.' Even when the characters, in the ultra-modern way, attempt to 'open up' their marriages, as in 'Carriers' or 'Pulls', the results are squalid. The sex writing is the most untitillating – utilitarian – I have ever read. For the lover of language, or its recursion, it's the intercourse between like and like that rejuvenates, whether it's between men in toilets (there's a lot of that), or father/uncle and daughter/niece, or brother and sister. Incestuousness, in other words, is a running theme, and rather than arising from realism it seems to arise from linguistic confluence – or rather, consecution. In 'Eminence', a catamite narrator tells us: 'There was a father, for instance, who wanted me to help save his daughter from him, or else he wanted to be saved from her –' The story ends with a description of freewheeling genitalia: 'We let the things shy off from ourselves, boggle out the way they always did, twitch and dodge and stickle a little, until they were kissing unassisted.' In 'Divorcer', the narrator wants to say one thing about marriage but blurts out another:
Sex and sounds are wedded in their recursion. There is a metaliterary layer to this. It can't be a coincidence that one daughter's breasts are 'limited, unloaded'. That someone has a sister named 'Loo'. Or that in 'Onesome' a put-upon man soliloquises:
Could that name be Lolita? In 'Meltwater' we get the neologisms 'girlettes' and 'feminatrices'. In 'Daught' we're told a daughter is 'a person, pushedly female, who daughts'. If you remain unconvinced of the Nabokovesque, consider the pungent sensuality on offer in 'The Daughter':
This gives way to a nightmarish vertigo that ends the short tale:
Both Lolita and Ada echo throughout and, via the forensics of female bodies, there's an echo of that other Pennsylvanian who wanted to be Nabokov: John Updike. Deservedly famous among Lutz aficionados is the tour de force index that comes at the climax of the final story in his first collection, 'Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been':
It continues in this vein for half a dozen pages, a thorough mix of morbid fixation and linguistic bravado. The typesetter's double zeroes stand in for those unloaded breasts. Lutz's prose is licentious in the archaic sense – a double libertinism. But I shouldn't give the impression that his Nabokovian flights lift this overcast world into jouissance. Quite the opposite: with Lutz, the materiality of words is not all downy lip and butterflies: it's as likely – think of the stalactite in the girl's nostril – to be nauseating. He has a vivid description of the detritus that gets stuck in the pages of books, by a narrator married to a librarian, and for him those traces of food and bodies are no more disgusting than language itself – 'all the words available to me have already gone through too many mouths.' And if words comprise a kinship network, it's not necessarily an improvement on human ones, as the '-ton-town-boro-burgh' dweller understands: 'The extended family was exactly that – a bloodline carried too far.' Take the butterflies that make their appearance in the story 'Contractions': 'I would occasionally let an unlipped, falsetto ''hi'' butterfly out of my throat and into the nets that the women's squeeching hear aids unreeled into the dead air.' Nothing could be less lovely. Nabokov, who inscribed his own name where he could, as Van Veen in Ada for instance, would appreciate that a 'lutz' is 'a jump in skating with a backward take-off from the backward outside edge of one skate to the backward outside edge of the other, with one or more full turns in the air'. I take this definition from my Apple dictionary, whose wording, so much more awkward than the OED's, perfectly describes the backward-outside-and-reverse athletics that Gary Lutz performs on the page.  |
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