Best American Short Stories 1982

Why BASS 1982? Well, it's the oldest one in my collection. And also because it was edited by John Gardner, on whom I had a young writer's crush many years ago. I finished his novel Mickelsson's Ghosts in my basement bedroom and said to myself, I want to be a writer. Or, rather, need to be a writer. Something in its urgent, dense philosophy I barely understood, and its world-spanning ambition sparked a desire to create novels and worlds, to describe characters and their personal moral dilemmas. So I set to work. I thought he was that good. Twenty years later, I'm still scribbling in my spare time, and a bit ashamed of this adoration - Gardner, it turns out, in both his work and his life, was preachy, didactic, melodramatic, and had a patchy personal life that included adultery, bullying, and debt.

So he is for many reasons, some good, some not, little remembered now. He's best known as the author of Grendel, a short re-telling of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster. But back in the early eighties, Gardner had built a solid reputation as a dense, earnest novelist and amazingly dedicated teacher whose proteges included Ron Hansen and Raymond Carver, whom he had taught at Chico State College.

Gardner was almost as famous for the stir he caused with his book On Moral Fiction, which argued that novels should serve a higher purpose than mere entertainment. This was back before the only questions facing American literary fiction were 'Is it dead yet?' and its corollary 'can the eBook save publishing?' John Gardner was one reason no one asked that question. His faith in genuine art was what kept him going, his endless revisions and questioning of his own work and the work of others fueling a fierce determination that there was a higher truth out there, and that one more revision would make it all come clear.

And so he got his shot at Best American Short Stories. The stories he collected in 1982 are good, but uneven, and the inclusion of several of his proteges smacks of cronyism. Two of the stories he selected were from his own magazine, MSS, which he edited for some twenty years. One of them, The Courtship of the Widow Sobcek, by Joanna Higgins, is a good story, but one so closely hewing to Gardner's vision of fiction he could have written it himself. It's about an old man, first generation Pole, a cantankerous character not unlike the old man of Gardner's novel October Light. In Higgins's story, he brings his curtains to the Widow Sobcek for cleaning, and becomes enamored of her, taking his curtains to her once a month, to the amusement of the small town where they live. The other story from MSS, The Cafe de Paris, I found gimmicky and mostly unreadable.

On the other hand, the inclusion of Carver's magnificent story Cathedral in 1982's BASS would never be considered an act of nepotism. In fact, to have left it out would be a criminal act. But reading it with Gardner's editorial presence in mind, you can definitely see the influence, or, if you will, a convergence of attitude.

Cathedral is on the surface a bizarre and thin conceit for a story. It's narrated by a gruff, middle-class man whose wife's blind friend comes for a visit. And that's all that happens. They end up watching a special on tv about cathedrals of Europe, and the narrator tries to describe them to the blind man, but he ends up tongue-tied, and essentially blind himself. The story ends with them trying to draw cathedrals together on paper bag, the narrator with his eyes closed.

The wife wakes up and sees them and doesn't know what's going on, but she can't know, she wasn't there for the journey, which is the point of the story, how religious ecstasy is a blind path, and connections between people are inexplicable and mysterious. It's a classic Gardner theme, but also a classic Carver obsession.

There are other good stories here, such as Mary Robison's quiet, uneventful Coach, and some more experimental pieces such as Alvin Greenberg's "The Power of Language is such that a even single word truly taken to heart can change everything," which is about a floating island whose sole inhabitant is convinced the wild pigs are becoming sentient. So, overall, this a good artifact of a time when American fiction was in a transition from the anarchic experimentation of the seventies to the stoic minimalism that would define the eighties.

It's clear Gardner had some conflicting emotions about editing this collection. He concedes in the first sentence of his introduction that people will disagree with him about whether these are the best stories, and he goes on and on about how his wife and Shannon Ravenel, then the series editor, hounded him into certain selections. There's also the back-story of him rejecting every single selection Ravenel sent his way, and insisting she FedEx him every periodical she'd selected from, overnight, two days before the reading deadline. He had a perhaps irrational distaste for New Yorker stories - all knife-flash and no blood, he says of them, a statement I generally agree with. Also, he willfully dismisses the best-known writers of the day - Updike, Beattie, Barthelme, etc., by saying all of them - every single one - had on 'off year.'

I think the truth is, Gardner loved the underdog. He loved to find good stories by unknowns, stories by people the world might never hear from again. Like James Ferry, whose story "Dancing Ducks and Talking Anus" deals with complex issues like Vietnam vets (still a burning issue in 1982), Native American spirituality, domestic abuse, and love. It also keeps a strong, narrative, knowing and mystic voice; all this despite a horrific central act - a self-administered sulfuric acid douche by an abused woman - that would cause most readers, editors, and writers to dismiss this story with barely a notice, if not downright revulsion. You can hate this story for that reason alone, and I wouldn't blame you, but beyond that there is beauty here, and Gardner saw it, and his selection of it is what makes others, years later, give it the chance he almost didn't himself.

Gardner, whatever difficulties he caused, knew what he was doing. He knew Updike, Roth, Beattie, and all the other heavy hitters would get their due anyway - they were the lions, and weren't going anywhere, with or without one year of BASS. In fact, for the rest of the decade you couldn't swing a cat without hitting something by Updike, or some kind of minimalist Carver clone, but James Ferry, whose story was as serious and moving as anyone else's despite its pedigree, would possibly never get a chance like this again. And it's true: he vanished into the weeds, this story the only evidence of his literary existence I can find. But it's enough. People - mostly Gardner fans and BASS collectors - still find this story and respond to it, and that's all any writer can hope for.

As for Gardner. In the fall of 1982, not long after this collection (and Mickelsson's Ghosts) was published, days before he would be married, John Gardner died in a motorcycle accident in northern Pennsylvania. There's a small cultish following with its own web ring, and his books go in and out of print depending on mood. There's a lot more to say, and I don't have time right now; maybe I'll get to it later...