by Lorin Stein
In the end, it doesn’t take much to instruct the reader on what to see in a fictive world. There’s a complex mimetic and aesthetic formula at work, of course, and one wrong move and a story can implode, or explode, but at the same time the truth is that it only takes a few words to put characters in motion through a fictive landscape, to give the reader everything that is necessary in order to see. Carver opens in the kitchen, moves to action—pouring a drink—and then we follow as the narrator gazes out the window to see the bedroom suite in the front yard. In less than a beat, we’re pulled into a deep, internal thought: his side, her side. All this in a little more than sixty words. After a space break, a girl and a boy appear in the yard, poke around. She stretches on the bed, and they kiss. Lights go on, up and down the street. Another space break, the man arrives with a sack of sandwiches, beer, and whiskey, and then from that point everything leads to the older man and the younger woman—woozy and drunk—dancing together.
The critic Hugh Kenner once made the point that the short story—starting perhaps with Hemingway, or perhaps Joyce—went from being mainly an entertainment convention to a form of high art. (I shudder at the phrase high art as much as anyone, but there’s no other way to put it.) At that point, the short story began to lean on poetics, to demand as much of the reader as the writer. The old adage—everything matters!—became deeply true when it came to reading a story. For example, Carver understands the poetic power of space breaks if used properly. Suddenly, at the very end, the story hinges, folds itself opens, spreads out over time. Weeks have passed and the girl is recalling the night from a vast distance. The vast distance is indicated by a few blank lines on the page. For me, personally, that final space break is the secret of this particular story. The final space break folds it over. It’s that simple. As a reader you’re left both reading the end and remembering the beginning in a simultaneous, crystalline, twist of the gut and heart. At the risk of redundancy, let me say: A good short story—any good story—is like one of the cave paintings in Herzog’s movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The essential mysteries of the human condition, of the fact that we can make art at all, are reduced to a few strokes, a primal essence, bare-boned, stark, pulled out of the dimness with the flickering light of a flaming torch, which in contemporary times takes the form of a highly sensitive, poetically minded reader flickering his/her soul—across the text. Carver, who has been mistakenly pegged as some kind of simpleton, self-taught, uneducated, a working-stiff writer was, in fact, well-read, educated, and deeply sophisticated. He worked with great care and intellectual intensity. But he was also smart enough—in an age totally hung up on authenticity of authorial sources—to carefully nurture his back story, to strike a public stance that kept early readers from seeing that he was as radical and experimental—with some early help from Gordon Lish’s blue pencil—as Picasso. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing. He understood the power of those space breaks.
Raymond Carver
Why Don’t You Dance
In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom—nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.
His side, her side.
He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.
The chiffonier stood a few feet from the foot of the bed. He had emptied the drawers into cartons that morning, and the cartons were in the living room. A portable heater was next to the chiffonier. A rattan chair with a decorator pillow stood at the foot of the bed. The buffed aluminum kitchen-set took up a part of the driveway. A yellow muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down over the sides. A potted fern was on the table, along with a box of silverware and a record-player, also gifts. A big console-model television set rested on a coffee table, and a few feet away from this, stood a sofa and chair and a floor lamp. The desk was pushed against the garage door. A few utensils were on the desk, along with a wall clock and two framed prints. There was also in the driveway a carton with cups, glasses, and plates, each object wrapped in newspaper. That morning he had cleared out the closets and, except for the three cartons in the living room, all the stuff was out of the house. He had run an extension cord on out there and everything was connected. Things worked, no different from how it was when they were inside.
Now and then a car slowed and people stared. But no one stopped.
It occurred to him that he wouldn’t either.
*
“It must be a yard sale,” the girl said to the boy.
This girl and boy were furnishing a little apartment.
“Let’s see what they want for the bed,” the girl said.
“And the TV,” the boy said.
The boy pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the kitchen table.
They got out of the car and began to examine things, the girl touching the muslin cloth, the boy plugging in the blender and turning the dial to MINCE, the girl picking up a chafing dish, the boy turning on the television set and making adjustments. He sat down on the sofa to watch. He lit a cigarette, looked around, and flipped the match into the grass. The girl sat on the bed. She pushed off her shoes and lay back. She thought she could see the evening star.
“Come here, Jack. Try this bed. Bring one of those pillows,” she said.
“How is it?” he said.
“Try it,” she said.
He looked around. The house was dark.
“I feel funny,” he said. “Better see if anybody’s home.”
She bounced on the bed.
“Try it first,” she said.
He lay down on the bed and put the pillow under his head.
“How does it feel?” the girl said.
“Feels firm,” he said.
She turned on her side and put her hand to his face.
“Kiss me,” she said.
“Let’s get up,” he said.
“Kiss me,” she said.
She closed her eyes. She held him.
He said, “I’ll see if anybody’s home.”
But he just sat up and stayed where he was, making believe he was watching the television.
Lights came on in houses up and down the street.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if,” the girl said and grinned and didn’t finish.
The boy laughed, but for no good reason. For no good reason, he switched on the reading lamp.
The girl brushed away a mosquito, whereupon the boy stood up and tucked in his shirt.
“I’ll see if anybody’s home,” he said. “I don’t think anybody’s home. But if anybody is, I’ll see what things are going for.”
“Whatever they ask, offer ten dollars less. It’s always a good idea,” she said. “And, besides, they must be desperate or something.”
“It’s a pretty good TV,” the boy said.
“Ask them how much,” the girl said.
*
The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sandwiches, beer, and whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. He saw the television set going and the boy on the porch.
“Hello,” the man said to the girl. “You found the bed. That’s good.”
“Hello,” the girl said, and got up. “I was just trying it out.” She patted the bed. “It’s a pretty good bed.”
“It’s a good bed,” the man said, and put down the sack and took out the beer and the whiskey.
“We thought nobody was here,” the boy said. “We’re interested in the bed and maybe the TV. Maybe the desk. How much do you want for the bed?”
“I was thinking fifty dollars for the bed,” the man said.
“Would you take forty?” the girl asked.
“Okay, I’ll take forty,” the man said.
He took a glass out of the carton. He took the newsp
aper off it. He broke the seal on the whiskey.
“How about the TV?” the boy said.
“Twenty-five.”
“Would you take fifteen?” the girl said.
“Fifteen’s okay. I could take fifteen,” the man said.
The girl looked at the boy.
“You kids, you’ll want a drink,” the man said. “Glasses in the box. I’m going to sit down. I’m going to sit down on the sofa.”
The man sat on the sofa, leaned back, and stared at the boy and the girl.
*
The boy found two glasses and poured whiskey.
“That’s enough,” the girl said. “I think I want water in mine.”
She pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.
“There’s water in the spigot over there,” the man said. “Turn on that spigot.”
The boy came back with the watered whiskey. He cleared his throat and sat down at the kitchen table. He grinned. But he didn’t drink anything.
Birds darted overhead for insects, small birds that moved very fast.
The man gazed at the television. He finished his drink and started another, and when he reached to turn on the floor lamp, his cigarette dropped from his fingers and fell between the cushions.
The girl got up to help him find it.
“So what do you want?” the boy said to the girl.
The boy took out the checkbook and held it to his lips as if thinking.
*
“I want the desk,” the girl said. “How much money is the desk?”
The man waved his hand at this preposterous question.
“Name a figure,” he said.
He looked at them as they sat at the table. In the lamplight, there was something about their faces. It was nice or it was nasty. There was no telling which.
“I’m going to turn off this TV and put on a record,” the man said. “This record-player is going, too. Cheap. Make me an offer.”
He poured more whiskey and opened a beer.
“Everything goes.”
The girl held out her glass and the man poured.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very nice.”
“It goes to your head,” the boy said. “I’m getting it in the head.” He held up his glass and jiggled it.
The man finished his drink and poured another, and then he found the box with the records.
“Pick something,” the man said to the girl, and he held the records out to her.
The boy was writing the check.
“Here,” the girl said, picking something, picking—anything—for she did not know the names on these records. She got up from the table and sat down again. She did not want to sit still.
“I’m making it out to cash,” the boy said.
“Sure,” the man said.
They drank. They listened to the record. And then the man put on another.
Why don’t you kids dance? he decided to say, and then he said it. “Why don’t you dance?”
“I don’t think so,” the boy said.
“Go ahead,” the man said. “It’s my yard. You can dance if you want to.”
*
Arms about each other, their bodies pressed together, the boy and girl moved up and down the driveway. They were dancing. And when the record was over, they did it again, and when that one ended, the boy said, “I’m drunk.”
The girl said, “You’re not drunk.”
“Well, I’m drunk,” the boy said.
The man turned the record over and the boy said, “I am.”
“Dance with me,” the girl said to the boy and then to the man, and when the man stood up, she came to him with her arms open.
*
“Those people over there, they’re watching,” she said.
“It’s okay,” the man said. “It’s my place,” he said. “We can dance.”
“Let them watch,” the girl said.
“That’s right,” the man said. “They thought they’d seen everything over here. But they haven’t see this, have they?” he said.
He felt her breath on his neck. “I hope you like your bed,” he said.
The girl closed and then opened her eyes. She pushed her face into the man’s shoulder. She pulled the man closer.
“You must be desperate or something,” she said.
*
Weeks later she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. These crappy records, too. Will you look at this shit?”
She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, but she couldn’t get it all talked out. After a time, she quit trying.
Issue 79, 1981
Lorrie Moore
on
Ethan Canin’s The Palace Thief
There is a kind of long, fate-obsessed story of which Ethan Canin has become an American master. His accomplished handling of time—sometimes seeming to take a life in its entirety, exploding then knitting it together slightly out of sequence to better reveal the true meaning of an experience—results in fictions of tremendous depth, wisdom, and architectural complexity.
In “The Palace Thief” narrative time is woven whole by the mournful voice of a man looking back at the debilitating confines of his life. He is like a monk in a moral hair shirt, sitting on the edge of an extremely narrow (Procrustean?) bed. Images of cells, prisons, slavery show up in the story to underscore the service to the rich and powerful that has constituted not just this man’s livelihood but his entire spiritual existence. His lack of self-pity is a kind of blind spot—and the sly coincidence of his expertise in ancient Rome is not lost on the reader. Canin does not sentimentalize his protagonist and make him more respected, admired, or powerful than he is. The story keeps the ruling class in their golden palaces and will not allow into the story the reassuring sop that the rich do not always win—or anything that would let us imagine that. (One sometimes forgets that in the tale of David and Goliath, David quickly becomes a figure of power and might: not here where the smallness of one man remains so no matter what authorial fondness is draped upon him.) It is Melville of whom we may be reminded: Bartleby the Scrivener or Billy Budd or Benito Cereno are perhaps the models. Canin lets his narrator look behind the images and events that may prompt our awe, especially those attached to power and social class but also those attached to service, devotion, the enforcement of justice—not to leave them smashed and demolished but to reassemble them with a tempered and diminished faith. By the end the story allows us to see even more than its protagonist and narrator can.
The unworldliness of schoolteachers, from Miss Jean Brodie to Mr. Chips, is hardly without literary precedent—but it is a trickier task in shorter form. And what it means to be an American teacher of the privileged in the twentieth century has its own angles and puzzles. The compression of this long story summing up not just one life but several is an ingenious accomplishment. Moreover, it contains Canin’s special skill at mixing public and private events—part of the national experience too often ignored by our writers. Canin’s fiction is always a construction of vital surprise, what the literary critic James Wood has called “livingness,” and is set forth in perfectly textured prose. He is interested in the moment when a person’s life turns, or his destiny is defied, or his character is revealed or anatomized for the inexplicable thing it is. He makes time rush forward like Gatsby’s car or Ahab’s ship, while his men remain children in the bodies of the old. It is heartbreaking business, and, here, expertly done.
Ethan Canin
The Palace Thief
I tell this story not for my own honor, for there is little of that here, and not as a warning, for a man of my calling learns quickly that all warnings are in vain. Nor do I tell it in apology for St. Benedict’s School, for St. Benedict’s School needs no apologies. I tell it only to record certain foretellab
le incidents in the life of a well-known man, in the event that the brief candle of his days may sometime come under the scrutiny of another student of history. That is all. This is a story without surprises.
There are those, in fact, who say I should have known what would happen between St. Benedict’s and me, and I suppose that they are right; but I loved that school. I gave service there to the minds of three generations of boys and always left upon them, if I was successful, the delicate imprint of their culture. I battled their indolence with discipline, their boorishness with philosophy and the arrogance of their stations with the history of great men before them. I taught the sons of nineteen senators. I taught a boy who, if not for the vengeful recriminations of the tabloids, would today have been the President of the United States. That school was my life.
This is why, I suppose, I accepted the invitation sent to me by Mr. Sedgewick Bell at the end of last year, although I should have known better. I suppose I should have recalled what kind of boy he had been at St. Benedict’s forty-two years before instead of posting my response so promptly in the mail and beginning that evening to prepare my test. He, of course, was the son of Senator Sedgewick Hyram Bell, the West Virginia demagogue who kept horses at his residence in Washington, D.C., and had swung southern states for Wendell Wilkie. The younger Sedgewick was a dull boy.
I first met him when I had been teaching history at St. Benedict’s for only five years, in the autumn after his father had been delivered to office on the shoulders of southern patricians frightened by the unionization of steel and mines. Sedgewick appeared in my classroom in November of 1945, in a short-pants suit. It was midway through the fall term, that term in which I brought the boys forth from the philosophical idealism of the Greeks, into the realm of commerce, military might and the law, which had given Julius Caesar his prerogative from Macedonia to Seville. My students, of course, were agitated. It is a sad distinction of that age group, the exuberance with which the boys abandon the moral endeavor of Plato and embrace the powerful, pragmatic hand of Augustus. The more sensitive ones had grown silent, and for several weeks our class discussions had been dominated by the martial instincts of the coarser boys. Of course I was sorry for this, but I was well aware of the import of what I taught at St. Benedict’s. Our headmaster, Mr. Woodbridge, made us continually aware of the role our students would eventually play in the affairs of our country.