Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Foley championed the rise of “minority literature,” especially black writers. She also kept a close eye on opportunities for women in fiction, as well as on the role of female characters. She was offered a job hosting a feminist radio talk show, and her speech coach, Ludwig Donath, a well-known Austrian actor, connected her with a Viennese friend who rented Foley a small seaside house in Santa Monica. Here she met Berthold Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Charlie Chaplin. Foley wrote about the Chaplins’ visits to her friend’s house, about Oona Chaplin “silently knitting afghans.” She later regaled friends with stories about Greta Garbo and their occasional lunches of “cottage cheese and a salad” while discussing Garbo’s childhood.

Foley guessed that TV would threaten magazine and book readership and deplete audiences at movie theaters. Writers such as Gore Vidal and Horton Foote began to earn decent money — and fame — by writing teleplays. J. D. Salinger, whose first story had been published in Story , never allowed the televising of any of his stories. When Foley chided him, saying, “If all good writers take your attitude, television will be as bad as Hollywood,” Salinger replied, “The writing was on the wall before the wall was even there.”

NANCY HALE (1908–1988) was born in Boston, the daughter of two renowned painters. She studied as a painter but also pursued writing and published her first story in the Boston Herald when she was only eleven. After she married, she moved to New York and became a writer and editor for Vogue . She later became the first female news reporter for the New York Times . At the same time she wrote the novel The Young Die Good , as well as short stories, some about women struggling to maintain their independence. She divorced and moved with her new husband to Charlottesville, Virginia. At this time she wrote her best-known novel, The Prodigal Women . She also published many stories in The New Yorker; in 1961 alone, she sold the magazine twelve stories.

Hale’s husband taught at the University of Virginia while William Faulkner was writer in residence there, and Hale and Faulkner socialized frequently. In an essay she described meeting Faulkner for the first time at a cocktail party and saying to him, “The first sip of whiskey is much the best, isn’t it?” to which he replied, “Uhh-huuh… Why, down home, when I come in of an evenin’, and walk in by the fire, and sit down there with a drink of whiskey in my hand, I tell you there’s nothin in the world like that first sip runnin down my throat.’” She wrote, “We were off. After that we never had any silences when we met at parties. Simple, sensuous experience was what Faulkner wanted to talk about… the sounds of tree toads at night in summer, the way it smells when you wake up to fine snow.”

Hale, the founder of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, won a Benjamin Franklin Award for short story authors, an O. Henry Award, and a Henry H. Bellamann Award for literature.

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THE LONG, CLEAR American summer passed slowly, dreaming over the Connecticut Valley and the sound, square houses under the elms and the broad, living fields, and over the people there that came and went and lay and sat still, with purpose and without, but free; moving in and out of their houses of their own free will, free to perceive the passage of the days through the different summer months and the smells and the sun and the rain and the high days and the brooding days, as was their right; without fear and without apprehension.

On the front lawn of the white house on the riverbank, the two little boys came out every morning and dug holes and hammered nails into boards and pushed around the express-wagon filled with rocks. Their skins were filled with the sun, with the season, and they played all day, humming tuneless songs under their breath.

Up the road at the gardener’s cottage of the big house where nobody lived, the gardener, who was unmarried, a short stout man who was a Jewish refugee, tended the borders of the garden and painted the long white fence and worked on the driveway; in the summer-morning sun he sang, too, in German, as he did his slow, neat work. In the evenings after supper when it was dusk and the only light left was in the red sky on the other side of the river, he would come walking down the road to the house on the riverbank, to call on the German governess who took care of the two little boys. His footsteps could be heard walking, hard and quick, down the road. Fräulein would be sitting on the stone front steps. He would stop short in the road in front of her, dressed in his clean clothes, his body round and compact, and his black hair brushed down, and bow. “Good evening,” he said. Fräulein said, “How are you?” Then he would come and sit beside her on the steps and the conversation would continue in German, because although he could understand sufficient English, Mr. Loeb could talk hardly any.

Fräulein was friendly to him because she was a friendly woman, but always a little superior because he was a Jew and she belonged to a family of small merchants in Cologne. She was sorry for him because he was a refugee and because he had been in a concentration camp in Germany, and it was necessary to be kind to those who had suffered under that Hitler, but a Jew was a Jew; there were right German names and wrong German names; Fräulein’s name was Strasser. She did not mind speaking her mind to him on the subject of the Nazis who were ruining Germany. There were no other Germans about, in this place, as there were in the winter in New York, who might be on the other side; to them she had only praise to speak of Hitler, for her family was still in Cologne and people suffered at home for what was said by their relatives in America — if it came to the wrong ears. But Mr. Loeb was a Jew and safe to talk to, to tell exactly what she thought of those people, those Nazis. He never said anything much back, just listened and nodded; his face was round and florid.

In the evenings Mrs. Mason, the children’s mother, sat in a garden chair out on the lawn and listened to the crickets in the marshes and watched the red fade beyond the river. Or, if it was one of the nights when she could not enjoy the evening sounds, the smells, when a little of the tension and fear clung to her mind and twisted it about, she would sit inside the living-room, on one of the chintz-covered chairs under a light with a book. She read all sorts of books — novels, detective stories, and the papers and magazines that were full of the news about Europe. On the bad nights, the nights when peace was not quite at her command, she noticed that whatever she read seemed curiously to be written about her… to fit her situation, no matter what it was meant to be about. And especially all the books, the articles, about the Nazis. She did not know if it was morbid of her, but she could not help feeling he had stood for the thing that was the Nazis, that spirit, and she had been a country being conquered, a country dominated by those methods. It was so like; so very like. When she read of those tortured in concentration camps, of those dispossessed and smashed to the Nazi will, she knew she felt as those people felt. She had been through a thing that was the same in microcosm. Her life was a tiny scale model of the thing that was happening in Europe: the ruthless swallowing the helpless. By a miracle, by an overlooked shred of courage, she had escaped and was free here. She was a refugee like that man out there talking to Fräulein who had escaped, too, by another miracle, for only miracles saved people from that spirit. In refuge, peace and assurance were coming back slowly like strength to a sick body, and the fear, the terror that was once everything, was draining away drop by drop with the days of safety. The same thing must be happening to him, the man out there; confidence and a quietly beating heart, in this calm summer country where there was nothing any more to fear.