This has been a busy week that proved yet again, as though
it might still need proving, the relentlessness of life, which shows scant
respect for the concept of retirement.
This is the last week of the eighth decade of my life. It already has included an oh-so-close
bicycle accident that had my spouse for many hours in the Emergency Room and
left her for the time being looking like a war casualty, and her family members
shaken. Less dramatic has been my
attempt to get my vegetable garden properly laid out as I dodged between thunderstorms. Also, I am in the terminal push of final
revisions on a scholarly book that must be returned to the press within a few
weeks.
Under these
circumstances, naturally, I need to tell you about the latest addition to my library—a
library to which further additions are theoretically forbidden. But I happened upon a practically new copy of
the Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson’s Novels & Stories and got it, against any rational expectation,
with a single-digit bid.
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)
The short
story is, in my opinion, the queen of prose genres, and certainly one of the
great genres of American literature in particular. I grew up reading O. Henry, whose collected
volumes lay strewn about my grandfather’s house in Arkansas. In my early reading years, when ours was a
nation of magazine-readers, most popular American magazines published short
stories. That is part of the world we
have lost. Short stories are a wonderful
introduction to the world of fiction. I
would never have developed my love for Henry James if I had been obliged to
read The Golden Bowl cold-turkey,
without being coaxed to the big novels by degrees, through short stories and
then The Turn of the Screw. I certainly read a few of Jackson’s stories
at their original publication
Jackson
wrote one of the most famous short stories in the English language: “The
Lottery” (1948). You probably have read
it, but if you haven’t I am not going to be the one who tells you about
it. To this day it appears to hold its
instantly established record as the most controversial story ever published in
The New Yorker. In the volume just acquired the editor concludes
with an appendix (“Biography of a Story”) in which Jackson gives her bemused
account of the story’s reception. Not
untypical of the letters received at the offices of The New Yorker was one that begins thus: “Never has it been my lot
to read so cunningly vicious a story as that published in your last issue for
June. I tremble to think of the fate of
American letters if that piece indicated the taste of the editors of a magazine
I had considered distinguished.”
But the
story that captured my attention this week was one I had not before read:
“Seven Types of Ambiguity,” which originally appeared in Story magazine in 1943. This
is a very “in-group” title, the group in this instance being literature
professors of my generation. For Seven Types of Ambiguity is a
once-famous book of literary criticism published in 1930 by the English “New
Critic” William Empson, then a wunderkind
of twenty-four. Jackson was twenty years
my senior, but she was also an English professor and married to another. She must have been teaching at Bennington
while I was studying at Sewanee in a quite similar English department where names
like Empson, Ransom, Warren and Wellek were confused with Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John. How very different are things
today. Sic transit gloria mundi.
William Empson (1906-1984)
The Empson
book is brilliant, ingenious, and deeply annoying in equal measures. His categories do not always on mature
thought prove to be inexorable. One
could expand his “method,” if you want to call it that, to seventeen or seventy
types of verbal ambiguity, or perhaps reduce the seven back to one. But
none of this matters in Jackson’s story, where the book’s role is thematic in a
way sufficiently signaled by its title alone.
The setting of the story is a
large old New England second-hand bookshop.
Two principal characters are an intellectual and impecunious young man
in whom I can easily recognize my younger self, and a middle-aged man in whom I
fear to recognize my older self. The
young man would love to buy a used copy of Seven
Types of Ambiguity but makes do with reading it by fits and starts during
frequent visits to the bookshop. The
older fellow wants to buy up several yards of nice sets of classic writers at
one fell swoop. This story, too, has a
“surprise ending” illustrating perhaps the “banality of ambiguity” but
perfectly in tune with the mood of my own week.
I still hear people asking—usually somewhat obliquely—some form of the
question “What exactly is it that literature is good for?” If one has to ask the question, one is probably
unable to receive the answer, which is—also somewhat more obliquely posed—“to help
make sense of life”. For life, as you
may have noticed, has its ups and downs and puzzling uncertainties.
