Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Short Stories

Five Decades

Irwin Shaw

Many thanks to my editor, Kathy Anderson, for her invaluable assistance and advice

To Arthur Stanton

Contents

Introduction by Irwin Shaw

The Eighty-Yard Run

Borough of Cemeteries

Main Currents of American Thought

Second Mortgage

Sailor off the Bremen

Strawberry Ice Cream Soda

Welcome to the City

The Girls in Their Summer Dresses

Search Through the Streets of the City

The Monument

I Stand by Dempsey

God on Friday Night

Return to Kansas City

Triumph of Justice

No Jury Would Convict

The Lament of Madame Rechevsky

The Deputy Sheriff

Stop Pushing, Rocky

“ March, March on Down the Field ”

Free Conscience, Void of Offence

Weep in Years to Come

The City Was in Total Darkness

Night, Birth and Opinion

Preach on the Dusty Roads

Hamlets of the World

Medal from Jerusalem

Walking Wounded

Night in Algiers

Gunners’ Passage

Retreat

Act of Faith

The Man with One Arm

The Passion of Lance Corporal Hawkins

The Dry Rock

Noises in the City

The Indian in Depth of Night

Material Witness

Little Henry Irving

The House of Pain

A Year to Learn the Language

The Greek General

The Green Nude

The Climate of Insomnia

Goldilocks at Graveside

Mixed Doubles

A Wicked Story

Age of Reason

Peter Two

The Sunny Banks of the River Lethe

The Man Who Married a French Wife

Voyage Out, Voyage Home

Tip on a Dead Jockey

The Inhabitants of Venus

In the French Style

Then We Were Three

God Was Here But He Left Early

Love on a Dark Street

Small Saturday

Pattern of Love

Whispers in Bedlam

Where All Things Wise and Fair Descend

Full Many a Flower

Circle of Light

A Biography of Irwin Shaw

I am a product of my times. I remember the end of World War I, the bells and whistles and cheering, and as an adolescent I profited briefly from the boom years. I suffered the Depression; exulted at the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt; drank my first glass of legal 3.2 beer the day Prohibition ended; mourned over Spain; listened to the Communist sirens; sensed the coming of World War II; went to that war; was shamed by the McCarthy era; saw the rebirth of Europe; marveled at the new generations of students; admired Kennedy; mourned over Vietnam. I have been both praised and blamed, all the while living my private life the best way I could.

I have written stories in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, on Fifth Avenue, in the New Yorker office on 43rd Street, in Connecticut, Cairo, Algiers, London, Paris, Rome, the Basque country, on ships, in the Alps, in the Mojave Desert, and bits and pieces on transcontinental trains.

All these things, in one way or another, are reflected in my stories, which I now see as a record of the events of almost sixty years, all coming together in the imagination of one American. Of course there are gaps. Other writers have filled many of these but some remain and will never be filled.

Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful? I once told a class I was teaching that writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football. The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn’t deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game.

In a preface to an earlier collection I described some of those pleasures. Among them, I wrote, there is the reward of the storyteller, sitting cross-legged in the bazaar, filling the need of humanity in the humdrum course of the ordinary day for magic and distant wonders, for disguised moralizing that will set everyday transactions into larger perspectives, for the compression of great matters into digestible portions, for the shaping of mysteries into sharply edged and comprehensible symbols.

Then there is the private and exquisite reward of escaping from the laws of consistency. Today you are sad and you tell a sad story. Tomorrow you are happy and your tale is a joyful one. You remember a woman whom you loved wholeheartedly and you celebrate her memory. You suffer from the wound of a woman who treated you badly and you denigrate womanhood. A saint has touched you and you are a priest. God has neglected you and you preach atheism.

In a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned.

Originally this book was intended to contain all of my stories, but when the count was made the total came to eighty-four, and to include them all would have meant a formidably bulky and outrageously expensive book. Since my publishers and I agreed that we did not wish to produce a volume that the reader could neither carry nor afford, we fixed on sixty-three stories as a reasonable number and began the sad process of winnowing out the ones we would leave behind. It was a little like being the commander of a besieged town who knows he cannot evacuate all his troops and is forced to decide who shall go and who shall stay to be overrun by the enemy. And the enemy in this case might be oblivion.

The experience of going through the stories was also something like what is supposed to happen when a man is drowning, as scene after scene of his life passes before his eyes. If the drowning man is devout, it can be imagined that in those final moments he examines the scenes to determine the balance between his sins and his virtues with a view toward eventual salvation. Since I am not particularly devout, my chances for salvation lie in a place sometime in the future on a library shelf. These stories were selected, often with doubts and misgivings, with the hope that a spot on that distant shelf is waiting for them.

—Irwin Shaw

1978

T he pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him. The center floated by, his hands desperately brushing Darling’s knee as Darling picked his feet up high and delicately ran over a blocker and an opposing linesman in a jumble on the ground near the scrimmage line.