Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

So the man picked me up, but I said I had to wait on Uncle Rodney, and the man said that Uncle Rodney would be all right, and I said, “But I want to wait for him here,” and then one of the men behind us said, “Damn it, get him on out of here,” and we went on. I was riding on the man’s back and then I could look back and see the six men in the moonlight carrying the blind with the bundle on it, and I said did it belong to Uncle Rodney? and the man said, “No, if it belonged to anybody now it belonged to Grandpa.” And so then I knew what it was.

“It’s a side of beef,” I said. “You are going to take it to Grandpa.” Then the other man made a funny sound and the one I was riding on said, “Yes, you might call it a side of beef,” and I said, “It’s a Christmas present for Grandpa. Who is it going to be from? Is it from Uncle Rodney?”

“No,” the man said. “Not from him. Call it from the men of Mottstown. From all the husbands in Mottstown.”

VI

Then we came in sight of Grandpa’s house. And now the lights were all on, even on the porch, and I could see folks in the hall, I could see ladies with shawls over their heads, and some more of them going up the walk toward the porch, and then I could hear somebody in the house that sounded like singing and then Papa came out of the house and came down the walk to the gate and we came up and the man put me down and I saw Rosie waiting at the gate too. Only it didn’t sound like singing now because there wasn’t any music with it, and so maybe it was Aunt Louisa again and so maybe she didn’t like Christmas now any better than Grandpa said he didn’t like it.

“It’s a present for Grandpa,” I said.

“Yes,” Papa said. “You go on with Rosie and go to bed. Mamma will be there soon. But you be a good boy until she comes. You mind Rosie. All right, Rosie. Take him on. Hurry.”

“Yo don’t need to tell me that,” Rosie said. She took my hand. “Come on.”

Only we didn’t go back into the yard, because Rosie came out the gate and we went up the street. And then I thought maybe we were going around the back to dodge the people and we didn’t do that, either. We just went on up the street, and I said, “Where are we going?”

And Rosie said, “We gonter sleep at a lady’s house name Mrs. Jordon.”

So we went on. I didn’t say anything. Because Papa had forgotten to say anything about my slipping out of the house yet and so maybe if I went on to bed and stayed quiet he would forget about it until tomorrow too. And besides, the main thing was to get a holt of Uncle Rodney and get my twenty quarters before we went back home, and so maybe that would be all right tomorrow too. So we went on and Rosie said, “Yonder’s the house,” and we went in the yard and then all of a sudden Rosie saw the possum. It was in a persimmon tree in Mrs. Jordon’s yard and I could see it against the moonlight too, and I hollered, “Run! Run and get Mrs. Jordon’s ladder!”

And Rosie said, “Ladder my foot! You going to bed!”

But I didn’t wait. I began to run toward the house, with Rosie running behind me and hollering, “You, Georgie! You come back here!” But I didn’t stop. We could get the ladder and get the possum and give it to Grandpa along with the side of meat and it wouldn’t cost even a dime and then maybe Grandpa might even give me a quarter too, and then when I got the twenty quarters from Uncle Rodney I would have twenty-one quarters and that will be fine.

The New Yorker was established in 1925, and in its early years published short stories that were typically comic. The magazine’s reputation for publishing only humor caused critics to pay less attention to its stories, although pieces by Dorothy Parker, Emily Hahn, and Morley Callaghan did appear in The Best American Short Stories over the years. In 1940 Katharine White, fiction editor for the magazine, decided to publish an anthology of stories. In a memo to her boss, White wrote, “What this book should be, as I see it, is a distinguished collection of short stories which, though we didn’t set out to do it, we seemed to have amassed during the years. It would be mostly savage, serious, moving, or just well-written fiction with some that are funny in part.”

White’s anthology brought the desired recognition. In 1941 alone, series editor Edward O’Brien chose three stories from the magazine to appear in The Best American Short Stories . Four appeared in the next volume. O’Brien’s vision meshed with White’s definition of a “ New Yorker short story,” a story that traces a development of character or situation “free of the burden of plot.”

O’Brien died in 1941 of a heart attack. His mother was probably the only one who knew of the heart condition that had plagued him most of his life. She had stayed near him, to the despair of his wives, throughout the years, most likely to monitor his health and well-being. His death was widely reported, even during this time of war.

A decade before his death, O’Brien had suggested to Martha Foley that she and Whit Burnett would be the logical successors for his job should anything happen to him. When he died, Houghton Mifflin approached Foley about taking over the job, and in 1941 she parted ways with both Burnett and Story and began editing the series.

Like O’Brien, Foley had grown up in Boston. She had dropped out of Boston University, become a copy editor in New York and, soon after, a journalist in California. Like Burnett, she wrote fiction. O’Brien had chosen many of her stories to appear in The Best American Short Stories . Foley was an ardent feminist and socialist; when she was twenty, she was arrested and jailed for protesting about women’s rights at a rally for President Woodrow Wilson. She had bright red hair and smoked from a cigarette holder.

When she took the helm of the series, she defined a good short story more loosely than O’Brien had: “A good short story is a story which is not too long and which gives the reader the feeling he has undergone a memorable experience.” Perhaps, given O’Brien’s mixed reception in his early years of overseeing the series, this generality served as insurance against future critics.

Foley paid tribute to O’Brien in each foreword. She also supported small and regional magazines. She was equally opposed to commercialism and agreed that the series should be a vehicle to promote literary stories. She wrote, “Unfortunately most people never see these [literary] magazines because few ever appear on newsstands, owing to a monopolistic distribution system and the usurpation of all the media by advertisers in the last half-century.” Though the general popularity of short stories had begun to wane, Foley noted that the overall literary quality had improved. In her first foreword, she declared that “the lifelessly plotted story, with the forced happy or trick ending, is dying, slowly but surely dying.”

Foley’s reading process was less orderly than O’Brien’s. She kept a supply of colored index cards and on each wrote the author’s name, the title of the story, the name and date of the magazine, and a few words to jog her memory about the story itself. Those she found superlative were given orange cards; those “quite good” got blue cards; “above average” stories got white. “The others I try to forget.” She read in fits and starts, never on regular days, and often she found herself weeks behind.

Foley had a keen eye for fictional trends. In 1943 came “a multitude of stories obviously written with the word ‘escape’ in the minds of their authors and often so labeled by the editors seeking them. And, because their authors are so desperately and self-consciously in flight from any reality, the stories themselves lack significance.” She later noted in that year a preponderance of “non-realistic” or fantasy stories, some with overtones of “mysticism”: “In modern atom-bomb-inventing, airplane-traveling, electrically powered United States of America the newest widespread literary development is, of all things, a re-emergence of the old-fashioned ghost story!” She observed that writing had become more sentimental after the war: “Writers are no longer afraid of their emotions.” Foley posited, as O’Brien had, that the best writing about a war comes a generation later: “It often has been noted that the great stories of the last World War were not written until after the conflict had ended. There had to come a distillation of the profound events writers, like their countries, had undergone.”