Prize Stories, 1960: The O. Henry Awards.
It had been a while since I'd read a good story set at Christmas. Maybe I just don't pick up the magazines at the right time, or maybe today's secular left-wing cabal of publishers and editors don't recognize Christmas as a proper theme for a story anymore. Okay, it's probably not that, but I don't know for sure. On the other hand, back in1960, when the editors of the O. Henry Prize stories collection were doing their thing, two stories set around Christmas managed to get into their book, which I recently picked up at a used bookstore in Dinkytown. Now, they're not really about Christmas. One is set on Christmas day, the other uses a Christmas gift as a plot stimulus. But still - tis the season, and all.
The first story, the one that won First Prize in the O. Henry stories that year, is called The Ledge, and it was written by Lawrence Sargent Hall. You needn't worry if you've never heard of him before, I hadn't either. He was a respected scholar at Bowdoin University as well as a writer of fiction, and this story has been in over 30 anthologies.
In this story, a fisherman takes his son and his son's friend out duck hunting on Christmas day. It's off the coast of Maine, where low tide leaves large ledges in otherwise open sea, and as they are gathering ducks they rest a skiff on one of the ledges. The skiff drifts away, leaving them stranded on the ledge. Soon, the tide starts coming in, and the with rising water they eventually drown. (Sorry to be a spoiler.)
As I said, it's not really about Christmas, unless you want to read religion into it. But it's a good story, told in a sparse Yankee voice filled with foreboding doom. The people are nameless, their characters a rough sketch of noble peasantry, the tale an unremitting parable of man v. nature, pride falling before circumstance and generosity under adversity, the Christmas angle all but forgotten by the end.
The other story was written by Elizabeth Enright, who I also knew nothing about. She was, despite my ignorance, a popular author of children's books, and a well-respected adult writer whose work regularly appeared in all the journals of the day. Her story A Gift of Light displays all these talents, along with a gift for social conscience and wit.
In the story, a woman buys a Christmas gift for her housekeeper's son: A flashlight that lights red, green, and white. The boy loves the gift and goes out for a walk with it. It draws the attention of thieves, who recruit the boy for his small size to crawl over a fence and let them in to an affluent apartment complex, where they rob the place and then are chased by police. The boy returns home. He's lost the flashlight but gained ten dollars, his share of the job. This is a wonderful, light story with much deeper implications of class and race, and a microcosm of any large American city in that magic, Eisenhower era, just before America awakened and found itself in the mess of the 60's.
I know, I know - it's a cop-out cliche to say that the late 50's were a simpler time, but for the most part the stories in this collection draw their effectiveness from being earnest and uncomplicated. Their style is uniformly classical: Past tense narration, omniscient knowledge, objective facts, within a moral framework both comforting and slightly claustrophobic. There's a sense that all the writers adhered to old-school concepts of their role as an author: They exist only to get the story out there, to be invisible, and not muck around with calling attention to themselves.
In 1960, Faulkner and Hemingway were alive but dormant as writers; John Cheever had been publishing for seven years, and would soon be joined by Philip Roth and John Updike to begin their long run as alpha males of American literature. To Kill a Mockingbird was one year away, as was Tropic of Cancer. And yet the O. Henry collection of 1960 is devoid of big names. Save for Philip Roth's Defender of the Faith (which you should definitely read if you care about American fiction at all), there is not a single name I recognize in this collection. So I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading these stories, but I wasn't dissappointed at all.
