This is the fourth and final bit of discussion about Pinckney Benedict's title story from his collection (which can be pre-ordered from Press 53 now), Miracle Boy and Other Stories. It also contains, at the end, some comments about his story from the author himself.
Notes: 1) If you click on the names of those in the conversation, you'll be taken to their various blogs or websites, and 2) these conversations contain spoilers.
The previous three sections of this conversation can be found here, here and here.
Charles May
Just a quick correction: "Miracle Boy" first appeared in Esquire. Like a good little
prof, I clipped it out and filed it in my Pinckney Benedict folder, but like a bad little professor, I was too lazy to check the folder or the book last night when I sent my email to you all. And on a related note, Francine Prose's book, Reading Like A Writer, includes more excerpts from and discussions of short stories than novels. Short stories always require closer, more analytical reading, i.e. more reading like a writer, than novels, don't you think? Which makes me again pose the question: Do folks have to "learn" how to read short stories in a way they do not have to "learn" how to read novels?
Stacy Muszynski
Hot questions from the, what was it, Charles, "the stupid white guy"? (Literati. What a scream.) Going back to your first question, does it benefit non-pro readers and writers learning how to read like pros.... I'd say it's a beautiful thing that not everybody does this warping thing the so-called pros do. Someone's got to keep the perspective, play it where it lays, while we're mucking around in motive and form and analysis.
Perhaps one answer to your question, Do folks have to "learn" how to read short stories in a way they do not have to "learn" how to read novels is shows in sales of short story collections and novels. Perhaps, too, taste, understanding and therefore reception changes from place to place. I wonder if there's a world map highlighting this very thing.
John, your mention of teaching and studying story endings (by O'Connor, Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Kafka, Borges, Lahiri, Carver) makes me ask this of the gorup (and likely readers who read this): whose tutelage do you see in the stories we've been discussing. For me the Hemingway rides high in "Border." Anyone else have eyes and ears for others...?
Steven McDermott
Before succumbing to the black hole lines of inquiry (inquisition?) about reading etc. raised by John, Charles and now Kyle, I'll just throw out there that I can't help but respond to stories from four basic perspectives: reader, editor, writer & lit/phil critic.
A story most succeeds for me as a reader if it keeps the other three perspectives on hold until I've finished the story. Did it engage me so much that it made me forget that I'm an editor, writer, and critic? It's rare for a story to capture me in the same the way that I read as a child. I value that most highly.
As an editor of a literary journal I just can't help also treating every story I read as if it were a submission by asking - if it were a submission, how would I respond? I suppose that's partly how an editorial aesthetic grows.
As a writer I'm always studying the "how'd they do that" as I read, looking for things to try or to avoid in my work.
I studied philosophy before going over (as my philosophy department adviser put it) to the dark side to study literature, so certain markers in fiction will put my critical brain on point. Once that happens the other perspectives fade to black and I'm into arguing a point of philosophy or literary criticism.
As anyone who read the old Storyglossia blog knows, I most enjoy discussing stories from the perspective of a writer. But I'm not adverse to jumping in from any of these reading perspectives.
Dan Wickett
I swear next week I’m going to go first, just so something I say sounds slightly original, and so when the smart comments come pouring in, my own gibberish might be forgotten. When originally reading “Miracle Boy,” which I read first as that’s where it falls in the collection (to reply to John – that’s how I tend to read all short story collections, assuming that the author, and his/her publisher, ordered them purposely), one thing I noticed how was Benedict used flashbacks in the story to give us information about the fathers (including the one that is no longer around – Lizard’s). Or maybe even how he slipped into omniscient narrative in four sections, these three flashbacks, and one other, the description of how Geronimo and Eskimo Pie were punished, to allow the reader to view the father’s throughout the story.
The first flashback, the one that tells us how Miracle Boy became to be known, allows the reader to see his father in action, jumping from the Agri-King, pulling the boy from the machinery, discovering his son’s lack of feet, tourniqueting them, climbing into the silage wagon and finding the feet, sobbing the entire time.
The second omniscient section explains how “Geronimo and Eskimo Pie got a hiding from their old man.” Kyle nicely quotes from this section, earlier as well and notes that it ends with Geronimo’s notion of the “difference between a house with a woman in charge and one with a man.”
The second flashback takes place minutes before the accident that removes Miracle Boy’s feet (“…he is not Miracle Boy yet—that is minutes away.”). One thing that stuck out big to me in this section was “…and his old man chatters and rasps and seems to want to talk.” Miracle Boy’s old man might utter two dozen words in the entire story, yet prior to the accident he was a chattering dad, one looking to get his son into conversation.
The final flashback concerns Lizard and has been discussed earlier by Stacy and Kyle for sure. Before his father left his wife and Lizard, he used to make wooden toys for the boy, and yet, the making of at least one of these toys, the Jacob’s Ladder, led the old man to believe his son a simpleton.
The first two flashbacks were especially interesting to me because they show what Miracle Boy’s father was like before he, certainly not purposefully, was responsible for the horrible injury to his son. Aside from the fact that he hasn’t bailed on his son, like Lizard’s dad, there isn’t much of the modern day father of Miracle Boy left of the version that the omniscient narrator let us see. He’s not much of a talker at all. He doesn’t seem to be quick to take action, or be the sobbing type. With these flashbacks, Benedict allows us to see just how the accident affected this man.
His flashback to Lizard’s dad perhaps explains his lack of presence in the family’s lives now. The idea of raising a child that is a “simpleton” frightens some into leaving. It also got me to thinking a bit about fatherhood, and our (I say as a father) hopes and expectations for our children, and how they rapidly grow, change, shrink, expand, etc. over the course of our raising the children. While Lizard’s dad worried that his son was a simpleton, and possibly left due to this very reason, Miracle Boy’s father has stuck by his son, through a horrible injury and recovery process, and the fact that it seems if there’s a child not quite all there in the story, it’s Miracle Boy. The two flashbacks, which I’m not taking any quotations from, don’t really give the reader an idea of how all there Miracle Boy was before the accident. However, I believe at least two descriptions of him from those passages that in the current (quoted from below) do show him to perhaps be closer to what Lizard’s father is referring to when he suggests his own son is a simpleton:
… but Miracle Boy went right on, drinking and watching Dinosaurus! With an enraptured expression on his face, occasionally belching quietly. Sometimes his lips moved, and Lizard thought he might be getting ready to say something, but he and Lizard never swapped a single word the whole time.
and
Miracle Boy brushed past his old man, who took a deferential step back. He came to the door and pressed his pudgy hands against the screen. He looked at Lizard with wide curious eyes.
As to Kyle’s questions at the end. I’ve been reading Benedict since a week after Town Smokes hit stores (or, was ordered from stores). The fact that there’s been nothing from this man, published with just his name on the cover, since (are you kidding me???) 1993’s paperback version of Dogs of God, amazes me. I’m sure you know that this collection, or at least a version of it, has been slated for a few years now with a NY publishing house, one that had some trouble with the differences between memoir and fiction not too many years ago. I don’t know how they let this one go a) so long without publishing, or worse, b) just plain go.
I also wonder if Benedict’s endeavors to write a novel, and his long-time teaching of screenplay writing, might have affected his own approach to what can be fit into a short story?
Pinckney Benedict
Thank you to everyone for the generous gift of your thoughts on my work. It’s a bit disconcerting, after working for quite a long time (the better part of two decades) in relative isolation – and a writer is truly isolated who spends most of his time publishing in literary magazines and annual anthologies – to see so much vigorous, learned discussion of my work all gathered together in one place. It feels like one of those dreams where you’re in some professional environment, and you find yourself draped only in a too-small towel. Exciting but also embarrassing.
“Miracle Boy” came about primarily as an evocation of a couple of terrors from my childhood. The first was riding on the fender of the various Allis-Chalmers tractors on my family’s dairy farm. We owned three Allis-Chalmers tractors, in various horsepowers and configurations, but I used the Case Agri-King for the story because I love that name: Agri-King! It’s kind of how I think of my dad, who still runs – with my older brother – the farm in the Greenbrier Valley: He’s the Agri-King!
The fenders on those tractors were slick and not really made for riding on, and the fields over which we rode – my father always driving of course – were rutted and rough, and falling off always seemed to me to be a distinct possibility. Falling off meant more than just a pretty good drop onto hard ground, though. We were always pulling some kind of implement, mower or hay-rake or haybine or, as in “Miracle Boy,” silage chopper, and a fall meant going into or under the thing.
It seems like every farming family we knew had members who were missing fingers, limbs, eyes, from agricultural accidents, and I had a morbid terror of losing a limb (or limbs) in this way. Oddly, I never worried much about dying; it was the idea of being maimed that haunted me. The accident that takes the hand of the father of Geronimo and Eskimo Pie – a hydraulic fencepost driver, a hand left carelessly on top of the post – actually happened on a nearby place when I was a boy, to a guy ever afterward known down at the barbershop as Lefty. I knew with perfect assurance that something like it was going to happen to me (for the record, it never did), but that wasn’t the kind of thing that you could tell your dad when he instructed you to climb up onto the tractor’s fender because you were going somewhere, to mow or rake a field or to chop some corn. And the lure of being with my father while he worked (at the side of the Agri-King!) was so exciting that I wouldn’t have stopped riding the fender even if I’d thought it might have been permissible to do so.
And I vividly recall when I started reading in the papers – I was old enough to be driving the tractors myself then, no longer riding on the fender – about people whose amputated limbs were being surgically reattached, and seeing the name “Miracle Boy” affixed to one of the stories – I think he got his arms lopped off and managed to call the paramedics by using a pencil held in his teeth – and thinking to myself, Holy cats! That’s amazing. Stoicism in action. One day I’ll write about that.
The other terror (which was also a thrill) was climbing up into a treehouse made by my older brother and his friends when they were in their teens, when I was eight or nine. It rested in the crotch of a tree that was nothing but trunk, straight up, for perhaps twenty-five feet, before it divided and branched out. The ladder they had devised consisted of a line of sixty-penny nails driven straight into the trunk of the tree. I’m not particularly physically brave – as my all-consuming horror at the idea of falling off the tractor perhaps illustrates – and climbing up that series of nails to gain entrance to their hideout (with its cache of tattered porn magazines, so worth the climb!), was as painful and as exhausting as anything I’ve ever done, except for perhaps the descent that followed. For the story, I combined that experience with many days of fence-building, pounding nail after nail into square locust posts (locust is as hard as iron! at least when you’re driving nails by hand), to imagine how Lizard managed to make his way up the utility pole.
Miracle Boy himself is based (as much as he’s based on anyone specific) on a guy named Doug G________, who lived in my hometown in southern West Virginia. He was a couple of years older than I was, and had been horribly burned a few years before I ever met him. He looked melted, truly. I was fascinated with him, as were all of the kids whom I know. I wish I could say that my interest in him was kindly or generous, but I really just wanted to look at him up close, to see what burns like that actually looked like. I knew that it was rude to stare, and so mostly I saw Doug in brief glimpses, when I thought I could look without being detected. There were lots of rumors about how he had suffered such terrible injuries. The one that was repeated most often is that, while his family home was burning down, Doug (quite young, maybe six or seven at the time) had grabbed his infant sibling (brother, sister, they seemed interchangeable in the various tellings of the tale) and hustled the baby outside. The house was engulfed in flame, and Doug, shielding the baby with his own body, had been grievously burned. A hero!
He seemed a nice enough guy, though I never got to know him well. Quiet and aware that his appearance was gruesome and unnerving, but he never seemed to want to hide himself. I always (in that smug way that one feels such emotions) pitied him until one time, when I came home from college, I saw him briefly (he was easily recognizable, as you can imagine – an adult-size version of his candle-wax boyhood self) and he was driving a beautiful white ’69 Chevy Z28, rocking that classic 302 V8 mill with twin Holley carbs (290 horsepower from the factory, my ass! more like 400). At that moment, I understood that – whatever his misfortunes had been – he owned a much more badass car than I ever would, and I had no cause to pity him any longer. (At the time I was driving an old Ford Mach 1, which is not nothing, but it’s not a ’69 Z28, and I’m a GM guy at heart anyway.) He probably, and rightly, pitied me.
One of the keenest critiques I’ve ever received of “Miracle Boy” came from a friend of mine – a guy who runs feeder cattle up on the highlands of Bath County, Virginia – to whom I gave the story not long after it was written. He read it, handed it back to me, and said, “That must have been one very tall boy.” If you’ve ever seen the way the cutting heads are set on a silage chopper, you’ll know what he’s talking about. It’s also true, as he knew but kindly did not point out to me, that Miracle Boy’s feet would never have survived the trip through the chopper and up the spout and into the wagon in any condition to be reattached. I recognized these facts, of course, but still chose to write the story as I did, because I like the way it works as it is, and because that’s just the sort of throw-caution-to-the-winds son of a gun I am. If it suits the story, I don’t much care if it fits the world.
I prefer the story to the world, and always have, which is probably why I do what I do.
Comments