Lorrie Moore: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

One of the many interesting things about the twentieth-century journey of the short story is how, when owing to the replacement of magazine entertainment by television it lost much of its commercial luster, the short story reacquired or resumed or just plain continued its artistic one. It reached back to (or kept going with) the great Russian stories as well as those of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio . A bold and complex story — such as a J. D. Salinger one included in this series sixty-five years ago and which was originally published in Good Housekeeping in pre-TV 1948 and would have trouble finding a home in a housekeeping magazine now. Are there even housekeeping magazines now? In 1957, with television in full swing, Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing,” proudly reprinted here, was published in the Pacific Spectator . The short story was pretty much freed from sitting side by side with ads for soup and spaghetti and has been securely reattached to its project as art. It can be argued — and has been — that novelists as great as Updike and Hemingway have often done their best work in the short form. One can feel in their short works that these writers become simultaneously laser-eyed and loose-limbed, concentrated and unburdened; one can feel them emotionally intent and also a little bit on fire in the confines within which they must tell their tale. The ordinary citizens and the fresh vernacular of Hemingway and Anderson continue straight through the decades and help fashion literary heirs in Grace Paley and Raymond Carver.

All this great art, however, does not keep the American short story from being occasionally a popular form again; “a renaissance” cycles through every two decades or so. And anthologies that have been canon-making, archeological, and preserving — especially the ones in this series — become even more culturally important. A short story writer is not a rock star. Yet sometimes nonetheless story writers have been put on tours by their publishers, with the hope that a story collection might sell as well as a literary novel — that is, not all that well. A short story writer is sent out on the road to see who her readers actually are in order to console them.

Now, a short story writer on a book tour is a reassuring cultural idea, even if the writer is pretty much dragging herself around from town to town, like an old showman with a wizened mummy and a counting dog. She is out catching flu and greeting her audiences and answering their questions, and she will find herself bombarded with queries regarding the defining characteristics of the short story “form,” questions regarding the difference between novels and short stories, and questions about the mysteries and power of the short form. Such a writer should come prepared — why has she not been given talking points to read from? — but too often the whole matter is not given much rehearsed thought at all but instead prompts fresh (that is, improvised on the spot) and contradictory utterances. Such a writer may while considering these questions begin to scratch her temple, her sleeve, her chin and eyebrow, as if she has caught fleas from the counting dog. Here are the differences, she might say, ticking (ticking!) off things that have just popped into her head. Or she might say, completely guessing, perhaps there are relatively few differences between novels and stories. Perhaps the differences are exaggerated, like the differences between men and women often are, just to make things sexier. The short story writer on tour may find herself stalled and pulling cat hair off her latest recently purchased black outfit even though she will remember as she is doing this that the cat died over a year ago.

On a tour the short story writer becomes a character in a short story (and so the inner workings of the thing are occasionally, glancingly exposed). Though it is her own story, she sometimes feels like a minor character within it. She contemplates possible answers to the audience questions she knows are coming, questions about the writing life. It is hard to feel still like a real writer, traveling through so many airports — including one with a scanner that indicates she has explosives in her head. She is taking so much Dramamine it is difficult to recall what life at the desk was once like. Ah, yes — it was and remains a mysterious process. That is what she remembers best. She has no time for research or contemplation, and so every evening when the Q and A begins, it seems she is assembling her responses from scratch.

What makes and defines a short story? She clears her sore throat: “A story is an intimate narrative composition thoughtfully assembled with illustrations but no argument.” The short story writer on tour clearly has no confident idea.

She blunders ahead. “A quick incisive collision with the unexpected,” she says, fumbling for Kleenex.

The Somali driver awaiting her at one of the airports is holding up a sign that says MARIANNE MOORE. There is only her, or rather she, the author of a story collection.

“I will have to do,” the writer says.

What is the difference between a short story and a novel?

The Somali driver puts away his MARIANNE MOORE sign, smiles and says, “I am the captain now!” The short story writer guffaws.

How does a writer know when she has a short story or a novel? This is what readers, or more likely struggling writers, seem to want to know, though she herself has seldom asked that question. She feels it is rather self-evident, and if not self-evident, well then, lucky you. You may have both.

Fibrous asparagus from lunch is stuck in her one remaining wisdom tooth and the person she is about to read with has excellent teeth and has written a book narrated from the point of view of a dentist.

What is the difference at the sentence level between a novel and a short story?

Somewhere, in some bookstore, while she is thinking of answers to this question, a fly lands smack on her forehead, as if to express its opinion about the nature and substance of her thoughts. Perhaps it too has detected explosives.

In Seattle she cannot take her eyes off the amethyst-encrusted manhole covers. Taking the world in in its entirety: did not Chekhov say that is a requirement, even of short stories? Observe, observe: love can be deceiving. This is the theme not only of sad true pop songs but also of the work of one of the great Russian masters of the short story, as well as the Canadian master, Alice Munro. A short story is about love. It is always about love. And yet it is not a love story.

When does a story turn into a novel, or vice versa?

Never, the writer thinks. At least never for her, though that would be a wonderful surprise for her agent if it did.

Another writer waiting in a radio station green room where the short story writer is also waiting is carrying a plastic 3D replica of a female pelvis, though the program they are participating in is a radio program. The woman with the plastic pelvis is going on first to speak of female incontinence. She has written a book on it. The story writer feels bereft not to have such an interesting and practical topic for discussion; she feels deprived not to be holding a multicolored, anatomically correct plastic pelvis herself. One can never look too hard for metaphors; perhaps a replica of a human pelvis is precisely what a story is — something that listeners will not be able to see but that she could describe and that perhaps would give the story writer some jocularity, protection, weaponry. Chekhov was a doctor, she could say repeatedly. He believed in the exploration, the experiment, the questioning of received wisdom that is both medical science and fiction!