Another guest post from Richard Grayson, who has done a nice job of reminding we readers that there were people writing stories in the 70's too!
As an inveterate lover and scribbler of short stories, I’m
enormously grateful to Dan for his yeoman efforts and to the others who
contributed their appreciation for many wonderful collections. As they
should be, nearly all of them have been literary short stories.
But those of us old enough to qualify for senior discounts
in movie theaters remember the widespread popularity of middlebrow, commercial
short stories that lacked many of the qualities we associate with
“literature.”
I grew up reading the commercial short fiction of O. Henry, Saki, and Damon Runyon
and the popular, mass-culture stories in the general-interest magazines that
came to our mailbox: Saturday
Evening Post, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal
and others. But those magazine outlets have long disappeared and with it,
the market for commercial, non-literary stories.
They still appear on amateur websites and in community
college creative writing workshops,
but generally – outside of the horror and thriller genres, especially when
written by bestselling authors
like Stephen King
– you can’t find them in periodicals and not in books from New York publishers or small presses.
Which is too bad, because even these stories carry small
delights for readers. One of the last non-literary story collections that
I enjoyed was 1978’s The Sunset Gang by Warren Adler,
a businessman and prolific writer who’s had a long career writing commercial
novels, some of which became Hollywood films. He’s best known for the
divorce classic, War of the Roses.
It’s one of those books that hit me just at the right time
in my life: in 1981, I was thirty and had rented a condo in Sunrise Golf
Village in South Florida, where most of my neighbors were forty or fifty years
my senior.
Set in a now-almost-extinct culture, the Florida retirement
villages filled with Northern, mostly Jewish Americans born in the early
decades of the twentieth century, The Sunset Gang’s Sunset Village
presents in ten vignettes a cast of elderly characters not quite ready to die
(mostly) but living in an artificial environment divorced from the world in
which they grew up and raised their families.
The New York Times Book Review found the book’s dominant tone
“sentimental” if “well-meaning” and “humorous” but didn’t deny the book’s pure
entertainment value. Three of the stories were later presented as a
three-hour trilogy on PBS’s
American Playhouse
series, including “The
Detective," in which a long-married couple who have grown
apart come together again as they pursue a neighborhood thief.
My favorite story in the collection is the first,
"Yiddish," in which a Yiddish club is formed to relearn and converse
in the lost language of their grandparents and parents. Bill and Jennie,
married to others not interested in the language, join the club on the same day
and fall into an adulterous relationship in which they, using the rules of club
meetings, call each other by their Yiddish names, Velvil and Genendel, and
decide to divorce their spouses after nearly 50 years of marriage. The
ending of “Yiddish,” like most of Adler’s stories, may be a bit slick but it’s
satisfying.
Even the Times Book Review said The Sunset Gang’s
final story, “The Home,” has real impact:
“We watch in awe as Sophie Berkowitz, home from the hospital
after breaking her hip, overhears her married children talking about placing
her in a nursing home because she is no longer mobile, and in enormous pain and
with the greatest effort, walks by them in her walker as if getting around was
the easiest thing in the world.”
Slickly commercial stories might be the equivalent of potato
chips, but if they lack literary nutritive value, the sheer pleasure they
provide can be worth the almost-empty calories.
I think and am sorry to say it is a serious omission to leave out Jewish writers who have had even less attention because they don't fit into the model of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. The work of Grace Paley, Lynn Sharon Schwartz and other Jewish writers who were very different and found a voice that did not fit what has become very stereotyped as belonging only to a few was real force i the 70's. It's hard for me to believe the Woody Allen and Philip Roth version of the devouring Jewish mother and the Jews who are presented as Yiddish-speaking only have gained so much recognition. Many Jews were extremely intellectual, political, and alive in ways one rarely sees anymore in fiction. Without Grace Paley, that voice would have been altogether buried.I hope readers will not miss them. A wealth of Jewish literary history would be lost.
Just felt like I had to soeak out.
Posted by: Leora Skolkin-Smith | May 31, 2009 at 09:22 AM