Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Years later, after Ravenel married and moved to St. Louis, “far from the publishing world which I sorely missed.” She accepted Houghton’s offer to become the new series editor. She would choose 120 stories, from which Solotaroff would select 20. “The first year in my role as series editor,” she said,

I had no magazines, as Ms. Foley had died so recently and the subscriptions were still all in her name (and in her apartment). I scuttled around and found as many as I could in the college and university libraries in St. Louis and managed to submit the tear sheets of 120 of my favorite stories to Mr. Solotaroff, from which he selected his 20 “Best.” Martha Foley had listed many, many other selected titles in the back matter of her volumes — she read all stories published in English, by writers both American and not, and had several categories for her listings. I decided that since the book’s title was Best AMERICAN Short Stories , I would read only work by North American (I read as many Canadian magazines as I could persuade to give me subscriptions) writers and list only 100 “Other Distinguished American Stories” in my back matter.

Ravenel secretly dreaded the complexities of working with a guest editor but admitted that “there is nothing like success to change the directions of one’s ambitions.” Sales of the book quadrupled once the guest editors came on board.

Many writers who were approached for the role of guest editor declined. When asked, Peter Taylor wrote, “I’d love to read those stories and select my favorites, but then I know too well how I would put off writing the preface. And finally I would do a hurried, lousy job of it! The trouble with being old and wise is that you know everything about yourself too well.” That same year Walker Percy replied, “It’s an honor, but I’ve got too much to do to read all those stories. You might be interested to know that we have a little book club that meets biweekly. We read and discuss 3 or 4 short stories. Just finished Raymond Carver’s 1986 BASS. Going to Anne Tyler next.”

DONALD BARTHELME (1931–1989) was born in Philadelphia but grew up in Houston, where he began writing for the Houston Post . He was drafted into the U.S. Army and arrived in Korea on the day that the Korean Armistice Agreement, ending the Korean War, was signed. When he returned to Houston, he spent time listening to black jazz musicians in the city’s clubs, which influenced his later writing.

Barthelme published eleven short story collections in addition to four novels, a children’s book, and nonfiction. He contributed regularly to The New Yorker and lived in both New York and Houston, where he taught at the University of Houston; he was known for forbidding his students to write about the weather. He won a National Book Award for his children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine; a Guggenheim Fellowship; a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award; and many other honors.

Barthelme’s stories gained momentum by their accumulation of detail rather than by any traditionally structured plot. Critic George Wicks called Barthelme “the leading American practitioner of surrealism today… whose fiction continues the investigations of consciousness and experiments in expression that began with Dada and surrealism a half century ago.”

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WELL, WE HAD all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems… and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that… Before that, just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes — well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably… you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe… well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander… well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.

We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then… And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar — that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely, because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.

And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think; nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the school, particularly, I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.