Short Story Month - Guest Post - Peter Selgin

The following guest post is from Peter Selgin, an author Dzanc Books has the pleasure of announcing has a new novel out in stores now!  Life Goes to the Movies - look for it!  He's also published a Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award winning collection, Drowning Lessons, and let's us know what stories influenced him.

"I've actually written about six short stories that have influenced me most, and these happen by no odd coincidence to be stories that I press upon my students regularly. You can find my breakdown posted oat Flavorwire, or on my blog, Dreaming on Paper:

http://flavorwire.com/4715/exclusive-peter-selgin-tells-us-about-his-favorite-short-stories#more-4715

http://dreamingonpaper.blogspot.com/2009/01/six-stories-that-influenced-me.html

Of the six stories that I name, if I had to pick a favorite it would be Ivan Gold's "All You Faceless Voyagers" from his acclaimed 1963 collection, Nickel Miseries, upon which critic Lionel Trilling based his judgment that Gold would become one of the most important writers of his generation—a judgment that ran afoul of Gold’s drinking (twenty years came between Gold’s first and his next book, the novel Sick Friends).

To my way of thinking, though, if the man had produced nothing more his first book alone would rate him an “important writer.” How many writers today could or would dare to herald a story with an epigram from Don Quixote, and then lead off with the following sentence:

The world may kill you.

From there Gold guides the reader on a nickel tour of death around the world, circa 1960:

All around them things were happening to the purpose. Camus was seventy-two hours from the finish in a fast car and a week removed from official interment in the Times Literary Supplement, a generally favorable comparison with the author of Howard’s End. In Cologne the same day an eighty-year-old Jew was threatened with sainthood through the mails upside-down on a cross, and admitted to anxiety from behind bolted doors to a sympathetic press. In California, a still-young man having a resemblance to Manolete entered the stretch after twelve years amidst law books, reporters, and piped Guy Lombardo, awaiting painless death for certain crimes against social society, and much troubled the governor, the State Department very briefly, and the overseas press. The only thing to fear besides fear itself was the lunatic and the fast car and the ostrich’s substitute for bravery.

With mortal headlines disposed of, the story begins aboard a “one-funneled boat built in 1910 called Jorge Segundo,” where a second-class passenger is viciously assaulted in his cabin (smelling “intensely of socks”) by a lunatic who claims himself a “citizen of the world.” The violence of the tale is matched by the virtuosity of Gold’s sentences, which spiral, pirouette, careen and cartwheel across the page—yet always land beautifully on their feet. No one writes like this any more. Gold’s command of his voice and of the apocalyptic world-view it attends is so assured, so rock-solid, one is hardly aware of the pyrotechnics of his prose. For all their acrobatics the sentences glide by on greased ball-bearings.

But I don’t mean to single out Gold’s sentences as if they were anything but part of an organic whole that is absolutely right for his world, a world where irony and danger come together like the ends of two live wires; the resulting charge jolts the reader while making it impossible for him to let go. Then again if it’s perfect prose you’re looking for, you’ll find it here and in all of Gold’s fiction—perfect but also as heady in its smoothness as a good single-malt whisky (unlike the vacuum-cleaned prose produced like yard goods in writer’s workshops). Come to think of it, Gold does serve, for me, as a corrective for much that is lacking, pretentious, or insipid among practitioners of contemporary American literature, so many of whom drink the same water.

But I have drifted into mini-rant. To my students I say: find your own writers to admire. Search the shelves of old libraries and used book stores. Blow the dust off of covers and read the first paragraph or page. Read authors no one else reads. Fall in love, but tell no one. There is nothing like having a secret affair with a writer. I fell in love with Gold this way, hot off the dusty shelf of Griffin Books on Fourth Avenue. True, others, Lionel Trilling among them, had been there first. But for a while I thought of him as mine alone."

--Peter

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

I love that last paragraph. I spent countless hours in the Graduate Library at UM (while in theory studying and doing Statistics homework) pulling bound copies of old literary journals off of the stacks - finding stories not collected yet by authors like Greg Johnson, Pinckney Benedict, Lon Otto, TC Boyle, Madison Smartt Bell, William Hollinger, Lorrie Moore, Bo Ball, Peter Lasalle, and countless others.