Short Story Month - Guest Post - Richard Grayson III

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.”  

The Sunset Gang is a guilty pleasure, a satisfying collection of workmanlike tales.  It was out of print for decades but was recently reprinted by Adler’s Stonehouse Press, which also has published his recent collection of stories, New York Echoes.  I heard him read a tale of senior citizen revenge at that East Village literary mecca, KGB Bar, and even the twentysomething hipsters seemed to enjoy it.

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.

Comments

[Leora Skolkin-Smith]

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.