The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  FROM The New Yorker

  FIRST READ-THROUGH: you are biking through the Cotswolds when you come across the thing. Spring of '63. Twenty-one years old, in your junior year abroad at the University of York, after a spring term green with Chaucer, Milton, Byron, and Swinburne. (Remember Swinburne?) Year One of a life newly devoted to words. Your recent change, of course, has crushed your father. He long hoped that you would follow through on that Kennedyinspired dream of community service. You, who might have become a first-rate social worker. You, who might have done good things for the species, or at least for the old neighborhood. But life will be books for you, from here on. Nothing has ever felt more preordained.

  Term's out, and it's time to see every square mile of this island. Bicycle clips, a Blue Guide, a transistor radio, and skin-hugging rain. Villages slip past on valley roads as twisty as the clauses in Henry James. The book turns up in a junk shop in an old Saxon market town whose name you will remember as almost certainly having an m in it. Among the rusted baby buggies and ancient radios you find old cooking magazines, books on fly-tying and photography, late-fifties spy novels with cardboard covers worn as soft as felt.

  The thing pops out at you: To the Measures Fall, by someone named Elton Wentworth. There's nothing else like it in the shop. It's a fat tome with rough-cut pages in a deluxe, tooled binding. The dust jacket has disappeared, but the front matter suggests that you know all about Mr. Wentworth already. Born in 1888, the author of twelve previous books and the winner of awards too numerous to mention.

  The first line reads, "A freak snow hit late that year, two weeks after the sand martins returned to the gravel pits near the South Downs." The next few paragraphs sketch out a hard-pressed town, Wotton-on-Wold, much like the one you are in, with the m in it. On [>], the author reveals the date: 1913. On the last page, a village search party finds the body of a young amputee captain who served at the Somme lying at the bottom of said gravel pits. Only seven years have passed, but the lilting opening cadences have darkened into fragments from another world.

  The book seems to be a sweeping portrait of rural England before and after the First World War. You check the title page: copyright 1948. Aside from two bold exclamation points at the end of Chapter 1, the pages are unblemished, perhaps unread.

  Pencilled into the upper right hand of the inside front is a price: 10/6 d. Exorbitant. You draw seven pounds a week for student expenses. A three-course Chinese dinner on Station Road costs four shillings, and lunch in the canteen is half that. A 12-inch LP runs only a pound, and even a two-minute call to the States is cheaper than Mr. Wentworth's book. Half a guinea for a used novel you've never heard of? Robbery. But something about that opening is too strange for you to resist. Besides, you've just devoted your life to literature. You graze the start of Chapter 2, in which Trevor, a spindly farmer's son with Addison's disease, baffles his parents by insisting on going to university. You need to know how this beginning can reach so macabre an end.

  The shop's owner is a beaked old man with a gray hairline like a cowl slipping off his head. It's humiliating to bargain with him, but you're desperate.

  How much do you offer the junk-store owner for his used book?

  You are, by the way, female. Lots of folks think you shouldn't be out biking alone, even in the Cotswolds. See [>] of Mr. Wentworth's epic.

  How much would you have offered for the book had you been male?

  ***

  You buy the book, lug it around on the rest of the bike tour, drag it back up north with you, but somehow fail to read it. When summer ends, and with it your English idyll, you're shocked to discover how many essential novels you've bought and haven't got around to reading.

  Now the problem is packing them all into a suitcase that is lighter than forty-four pounds. You could mail them to the States, but they'd cost more to ship than you spent to buy them. You resort to the time-honored system of three piles:

  Keep for all time.

  Suspend in Purgatory.

  Cast forever into the outer darkness.

  By the evening before the homeward flight, To the Measures Fall is stuck stubbornly in Purgatory, along with Wheelock's What Is Poetry?, James Purdy's Malcolm, The Bull from the Sea, by Mary Renault, John Braine's bestseller Life at the Top, and Updike's The Centaur, which has got mixed reviews. Life at the Top might be tricky to get hold of in the States. Who knows how long Updike will be read? Malcolm, on the other hand, is already on every undergraduate syllabus in the country. Renault, guilty pleasure, is the one you'd really love to have in your carry-on. The further adventures of Theseus and Hippolyta, with sun-drenched temples, earthquakes, and human-god miscegenation: how better to fill eight hours of captive reading? But your bag will hold only four more volumes.

  Choose which two books get dumped forever.

  Wentworth makes the cut, if only as a souvenir of that magical cycling tour. Weirdly, browsing through the bookshop in the Oceanic Terminal at Heathrow, you notice a reprint of one of his earlier novels, about coal miners in Wales. It's a Penguin, with that orange spine that's synonymous with great books. There's a jacket blurb from Winston Churchill calling Wentworth "this island's Balzac ... our much revered, much imitated national asset," and another from Dame Edith Sitwell, DBE, calling him "England's most distinguished living author of the novel of community."

  "National asset" makes Wentworth sound like a hulking stone country house given away by pauperized aristocrats for tax deductions. And "most distinguished" feels a bit dated, against a backdrop of Mods, Rockers, the Angry Young Men, and Beyond the Fringe.

  Still, two immortal literary lions have praised this man to the skies. What an incredible deal, getting that first edition for eight shillings. Clearly the balding junk-shop owner didn't know what he was selling. Far out over the Atlantic, as you approach Greenland, a twinge of conscience hits you. What good is all the cultivation in the world if you use it to cheat ignorant people?

  How much should you have paid the shopkeeper? Exceed his proposed price, if necessary.

  Back in the States, you look up Elton Wentworth. He isn't England's most distinguished living anything. He died right around the time that you realized you'd sooner sell cigarettes from a shoulder tray than go into social work. In addition to sheep in the Cotswolds and coal in Wales, he did Lincolnshire fishermen and three generations of Brummie factory workers. He wasn't England's Balzac; he was the James Michener of the Midlands.

  You read the first hundred pages of To the Measures Fall, hacking your way through thickets of dialect. The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlinghetti, and Bellow—writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit. So the First World War was a bad scene. Aren't we over that yet? And what was Wentworth doing, bringing out a book wrapped in Edwardian nostalgia three years after Dachau?

  You graduate in the spring and pack up your worldly possessions again, just as the U.S.S. Maddox fires on three patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, letting Johnson widen a war in a country that, until recently, was as fictional to you as Wentworth's South Downs.

  Does the book go to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or the twenty-five-cent pile at your graduation lawn sale?

  You survive two years of graduate classes, the General Comprehensive Test (flubbing the question on Tobias Smollett), marriage to a Faulkner guy, and a grueling four-hundred-book Special Field Exam on "The Electra Complex in Postwar American Prose," a subject that you begin to hate long before your committee can lob the first question. All the while, there's Biafra, Black Power, the levitation of the Pentagon, My Lai, back-to-back assassinations, the siege of Chicago, street warfare, and city centers burning in an annual summer ritual. Drugs are everywhere, making people see God or murder their families. Books go surreal, psychedelic, and sometimes you wonder whether they're causing the
mayhem or just profiting from it.

  The dissertation—your baggy monster—becomes a four-year excuse to read everything except those writers you threaten to write about. On a hot June Thursday, early in the new decade, right around the time when five men break into the DNC headquarters in D.C., you find yourself patrolling your own shelves, like a hopeful bidder at an estate sale. It's a shock to come across that deluxe binding, which you distinctly remember throwing out a long time ago. The Cotswolds: cruel joke. Elgarian imperial residue.

  You take it down and browse. You stop to fix dinner for your husband, who, an invalid of high modernism, cannot fix it for himself. But you're back at Wentworth until four A.M., when you end up at the bottom of the South Downs gravel pit, 1920, your throat feeling as if you'd been taking swabs at it with a pipe cleaner. You don't know what hurts more: the swirling moral turbulence of the book or the belated discovery that everything you thought about it was wrong. You missed it all: register, mood, irony, ambiguity, subtleties of characterization, narrative arc, even basic plot points. You can't read. It's like finding out, at thirty, that you're adopted.

  You're not yet sure that it's great literature. But the thing took you underwater and held you there for the better part of thirteen hours, and two days later you're still winded. Its single, hisfory-slapped village is a whole world, whose heft and weight and strange sinuous tangle of syntax stands for nothing but itself. Its portraits—particularly that of Sarah, the mother of doomed Captain Trevor and the furtive wife of idealism-scarred Francis Beck—seem so clearly ripped from microscopic observation that it's cheating to call them fiction. This story is not your life. It's not your time or place. It's just a scrap of torn diary floating up from a scorched past. What does the thing want from you?

  Give the book a final grade:

  Fail

  Low Pass Pass

  Pass with Honors

  Highest Distinction

  You make your husband read it. You do the Lysistrata thing until he does. This is a mistake, as he reads it way too fast. "Very well done," he reports, wanting his sugar cube. "Skillful. First-rate social realism. Why haven't more people written about this guy?"

  It isn't skillful. It isn't social realism. You read it again, taking a week this time. Now the book gets more troubling. More weirdly allegorical. You can't put your finger on what bothers you. Something to do with hoping against your better judgment. You lie awake on a hot August night wondering how a thing might be good and real and true for a while, then made irrelevant, or worse, by later events.

  You've got very close with your thesis adviser. In fact, if you remember right, you're sleeping with him. The two of you are in an actual bed somewhere, in the dark, a luxury you can no longer imagine how you managed. Maybe it's an OPEC, oil-crisis thing: turn off the lights when not in use. The two of you are playing that old favorite: which classic would you never dare admit to anyone but your lover in the dark that you haven't read? You offer Silas Lapham and he ups the ante to Billy Budd and you try to trump with The Sound and the Fury, which he blows out of the water with Huck Finn. You ask him if he's ever read any Wentworth. He just snickers, thinking it another game.

  You obsess about the thing. You read all the criticism. Most of it damns itself with due diligence: "Trevor Beck and Erikson's Theory of Psychosocial Development"; "Wool, Surplus Value, and Class Unrest in Wentworth's Wotton-on-Wold." No article has an insight strong enough to explain why you should be reading it rather than the book again.

  You learn all kinds of things about Elton Wentworth, some of which you wish you hadn't. Blacklisted for pacifist activity under the Defence of the Realm Act. Went to Russia between the wars and came back extolling the enlightened social state. Right up until Munich, a prominent appeaser. But come September 1939, he turned British superpatriot and personal propagandizer for Churchill, which helps explain the latter's jacket blurb. After the war, he fought decolonization tooth and nail, in a series of interviews with dozens of natives on three continents who all declared the British Empire the best thing ever to happen to its colonial subjects. At the age of eighty-one, he was jailed for three months for participating in violent demonstrations against nuclear weapons.

  In short, the author of that autonomous, ungrudging, unjudging book with no villains and fewer heroes, in which every moral position is plausible but flawed, was himself a hopeless, card-carrying, repeat-offending true believer.

  Grade Elton Wentworth's public performance. Separate marks for form, style, and intent.

  In one of the Wentworth biographies, you come across a photograph of a note to Wentworth from Sir Winston himself. The letter's signature vaguely resembles the inked scrawl that you've never paid attention to, on the inside front cover of your copy, underneath the penciled price that now fills you with shame. The signature in the reproduced note reads "Winnie." The drooping, obscured squiggle in your copy looks more like "Hump-hump Clunluch."

  You are insane, of course. Hallucinating from overresearch. There is no way on any likely earth that a book belonging to one of the century's most famous personages could end up in a junk shop in the Cotswolds. Winston Churchill, Nobel Laureate in Literature, wasn't about to write his name in his bloody books. If found, please return to House of Commons, London.

  You try to erase the penciled price, for a better look. But you succeed only in smearing the signature. You look up every occurrence of Churchill's signature on record in the university's library. There is a similarity. The book gives you nothing else to go on, except the two bold exclamation points at the end of the first chapter. The one on the right seems distinctly Churchillian.

  You'd take the book to an appraiser, but you get paranoid. This is exactly the kind of scenario in which the naive get bilked. On your next trip to the city, you show it to an antiquarian whom you've bought from many times. He listens to your theory with a tight, embarrassed smile. He says that even if you did get the signature certified—which could cost considerable blood, toil, tears, and sweat—the simple signature, without any further marginalia, might not greatly increase the book's value. Given the dicey nature of the scribble, you may not want to pay for appraisal. But he's willing to give you fifty dollars for the copy, for a good customer. Fifty bucks could buy two years of used novels.

  Deal or no deal?

  You keep the copy, for reasons that reason doesn't understand. But two and a half months later you wipe out on literature altogether. You're out of time in the graduate program, and still no diss. Your husband says no kids until you finish, but you can't finish. The thesis isn't even embarrassing. Psychoanalytic readings reek of ... six years ago, and this new poststructural stuff gives you hives.

  You crash and burn. The house goes to pot. You glue yourself to the Watergate hearings for weeks. The whole mad circus is like a Dickens serial saga. You talk to the screen, cheering and hissing. You even develop a little thing for Sam Ervin.

  You get a job adjuncting at a nearby college, intros and surveys. But drumming up enthusiasm for Wharton and Cather is murder. These days, it's all Pynchon and Barthelme, Coover and Gaddis and Gass. The canon goes up in smoke. You realize, belatedly, that you're a co-opted, false-consciousness servant of Empire, a capo of privileged heteronormative white paternalism, but it's too late to retool. Around the fall of Saigon—plagued by those films of people on the embassy rooftop clutching the runners of escaping helicopters—you bail out into law school. It's the only practical choice. And doesn't law, at bottom, involve the same act of eternal verbal negotiation as reading?

  The marriage breaks up under the pressure of 1L. Your only recreational reading for the next two years is the Congressional Record. You get a good job, with a decent boutique firm, specializing in intellectual property. None of your dozens of bright, well-read colleagues have ever heard of Wotton-on-Wold.

  You marry again, this time for real, to a big police-procedural fan in corporate litigation. At the last possible moment, you have kids. Three of them: one reader and tw
o watchers, who get their ABCs from purple and green televised puppets. Nothing will ever light up the cortex faster than cathode rays. Yet, with your reader daughter, the whole awful, gut-wrenching seduction happens all over again. Urban ducklings, Wild Things, Purple Crayons—it doesn't matter. Your daughter, glazed-eyed and body-snatched, chants "Read, Mommy, read," like she's off in Neverland already, even before the first verb. And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old, while something inside you cries, "Woman, woman, let go of me."

  A few years pass, and still your daughter is reading furiously. You'll lose her eventually, to the rising flood of film: the swelling archive of video that offers whole new republics of visual democracy. Who knows how long the page will hold her attention? Do you rush her into the good stuff while you can? Maybe, if you time things right, the whole crumbling Edwardian stage set of Wotton-on-Wold will strike her as some kind of hyper-Narnia.

  When should you push Wentworth on Jane?

  1. Never too early.

  2. Never too late.

  3. Never gonna happen.

  Your children become the heroes of their own plots, timeworn narratives in unrecognizable new bindings. The eighties pass while your energies are spent elsewhere—on building up the collegetuition war chests, on making partner, on helping companies copyright common English words. You still read for pleasure: all kinds of things. The hunger remains, but, as with sex, the costumes must grow ever more elaborate to produce the same transport. You're caught somewhere between reading for recognition and reading for estrangement.

  Mostly what you read are reviews. Too few hours left to do more than scan the books that you know you'd love. At least you can read what the gatekeepers say about this fall's lineup. And, often, imagining a book from its synopsis beats what you do manage to slog through.