Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, William Maxwell and the lasting influence of Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries"

Mary Gaitskill's first book, Bad Behavior (1988), has become a classic of a particular kind. It is a collection of short stories many of which have strong sexual themes including bondage and sadomasochism.  They are blunt, sometimes funny, and fierce. Like James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, Bad Behavior set a high and provocative bar for Gaitskill which she has happily met with several other collections of stories and three novels. While accomplishing all of that Gaitskill has also written many essays and reviews. Perhaps the most famous of these is "The Trouble With Following the Rules", which appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1994.   An intensely personal essay about date rape, victim culture and personal responsibility, it created a huge stir and much conversation and argument. 

That piece is included in a new collection of her non-fiction, Somebody With a Little Hammer,  a terrific collection filled with provocative and insightful responses to literature, music, film and well, life.  Some personal favorites include the aforementioned essay, a trenchant piece on various book covers for Nabokov's Lolita, her diary of the 2008 Republican Convention including a characteristically caustic view of Sarah Palin, a thoughtful rumination on Linda Lovelace and the moving memoir, "Lost Cat".

The title essay drew my attention immediately because the image "somebody with a little hammer" is found in the most quoted  paragraph in Anton Chekhov's memorable story, "Gooseberries".  Like many, perhaps most of her peers who write short stories, Gaitskill is drawn to Chekhov and mentions him frequently.  Chekhov is considered the master of the form, and his many stories peer into the human soul finding complication, bewilderment, longing, laughter and heartbreak, frequently all in the same paragraph.

Gaitskill's essay, written in 2006, focuses on an act of selfishness she observed on her street during a time when she was teaching "Gooseberries".  It was shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and Gaitskill read the beginning of the famous paragraph to her students

Just look at this life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies.....Yet in all the houses and streets it"s quiet, peaceful; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, or become loudly indignant.  We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don't see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere  behind the scenes.

She laments that her students seemed unmoved by the Chekhov, and surmises that his thoughts seem dated to them.  But her next thought contradicts this. "Images of suffering people have become so routine (I'm thinking of Katrina again) that you can't help but see them even if you don't live in a neighborhood where you encounter them in the flesh.  I think, though, that the students' very indifference, if that's what it was, indicates that Chekhov is still right, that no matter what we literally see, on television or in life, we nonetheless will ourselves not to see what we don't wish to see--or to feel."  Gaitskill then returns to the precipitating event and describes her anger and frustration and then shares the conclusion of the Chekhov paragraph

 At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him-- illness, poverty, loss--and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now.  But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as the wind stirs an aspen--and  everything is fine.

She readily admits that Chekhov's sentiments might seem terribly old-fashioned, and hints that he subverts them at the end of his story.

That theme is picked up and expanded greatly by George Saunders in an interview in Harper's from this past February (you can read it HERE).  Saunders, perhaps the most inventive of the current generation of short story writers, was interviewed on the publication of his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. He speaks at length about "Gooseberries" and how Chekhov frequently subverts our expectations within his stories. 

It's basically a story of two friends who get caught in a rainstorm while they are out hunting, and they go to a nearby house of someone they know ...one of the friends, Ivan, tells a story about his brother, who had an obsession with owning a small estate, and with eating gooseberries that he grew...... Ivan's story builds in intensity, and by the end he's making this beautiful, passionate case for why happiness is a confusing, undesirable emotion.  In his telling, it's almost a delusion to be mindlessly happy when others are sad.... (Saunders then quotes the end of the same paragraph that Gaitskill uses) I've quoted this line on book tours, trying to explain why I don't mind writing dark fiction: One role of literature, I'll tell them, is to be the guy with the hammer, saying, "Look we're all pretty happy right now, but let's not forget the fact our happiness doesn't eradicate the suffering of others."  It's a beautiful insight about the lazy nature of happiness--and for a few minutes I think we are meant to think that this stirring speech by Ivan is the whole point of the story.  In a way, it is.  Except, on the next page, we see that Ivan's audience is bored and disappointed by the story.  They wish he'd had something better to say,   and the whole evening ends on a flat note. But then there's this wonderful little reversal at the end, a mysterious and beautiful turn.....(he then quotes the end of the story).....Ivan leaves his unclean pipe out all night, keeping his friend Burkin awake.  And that's how Chekhov gets away with putting his real feelings about the oppressive nature of  happiness into a character's mouth.  Without irony, without condescension, he just lets the character have his say.  But then, here, Chekhov destabilizes the beautiful rhetoric of the previous section by showing another side of the guy who made that impassioned speech: He's also self-obsessed and  thoughtless enough to burden his friend with a smelly pipe. It's a great double whammy.  You get the beautiful, articulate case against happiness, and then you get this complicating overtone of selfishness in the person who just made that beautiful speech.

Saunders goes on at length about "Gooseberries" and how it is structured. It is a wonderful interview and I urge you to read it, but I will urge you even more to read "Gooseberries".  I have read it over and over since first encountering it in my 20's, and it informs my world differently on each reading.  Chekhov's mature plays, written towards the end of his too short life (he died of tuberculosis at 44), are masterful examples of the art of play-writing.  APT is producing Three Sisters this season.  But if you want to immerse yourself in the complexity, the perplexity, the heartbreak, the laughter, the cruelties and simple pleasures of the everydayness of life without a shred of the judgmental, then read Chekhov's stories.  And then, re-read them.

William Maxwell, the revered fiction editor of the New Yorker for 40 years, and author of many tender, I would argue, Chekhovian novels, wrote in a 1973 letter to Sylvia Townsend Warner,

 ......Emmy (his wife) and I walked all over the island, knee deep in wet Queen Anne's lace.  I climbed up into the Martello tower and the gun emplacement, and she, not liking heights, wandered off and found a seagull's nest with three eggs in it. I would tell you what they looked like if I weren't absolutely sure that you already know.  The goats stared at us, the view in all directions was sublime.  In my next life if I don't succeed in being a story by Chekhov called "Gooseberries" I shall be an island.

Maxwell was a deep admirer of Chekhov and their sensibilities matched in their uncanny powers of observation of daily life and quiet struggle.  In the introduction to his superb short novel, They Came Like Swallows, Maxwell speaks of a room in which he wrote as a young man

 .......The third floor, reached by an outside stairway, was a little study with a brick fireplace, white wicker furniture covered with a cheerful cretonne, and a desk facing a window.  I went there once at the end of winter and found, between the cushions of the chaise lounge, the dry odorless body of a dead squirrel.  It had come down the chimney, been unable to get up again, and died there of hunger and cold.  If I had understood and allowed myself to feel the full implications of this lonely death I would have become, in that instant, a mature novelist.

That might have come from Chekhov's notebooks.


In "Lost Cat", her lovely short memoir in the present collection, Mary Gaitskill weaves two indelible stories.  One is of the loss of her cat, Gattino, and searching in vain for it for months.  The other concerns her complicated relationship to two children, a brother and sister, whom she first encounters through New York City's Fresh Air Fund.  The young woman eventually became the inspiration for Gaitskill's 2015 novel, The Mare.  These stories, blunt and heartfelt, entwine and deepen and reflect on each other over fifty pages.  At the end, Gaitskill returns to Chekhov

I once read a Chekhov story that described a minor character as "trying to snatch from life more than it can give"; maybe I have turned into such a person, unable to accept what is given, always trying to tear things up in order to find what is "real," even when I don't know what "real" is, unable to maintain the respect, the dignity of not asking too much or even looking too closely at the workings of the heart, which, no matter how you look, can never be fully seen or understood. The thought makes me look down in self-reproach.  Then I think, But life can give a lot.  If you can't see inside the heart no matter how you look, then why not look? Why not see as much as you can?  How is that disrespectful? If you are only given one look, shouldn't you look as fully as you can?

I think Chekhov would answer, "Look. Look again."






We carry The Essential Tales Of Chekhov Deluxe Edition
edited by Richard Ford, which contains the short story "Gooseberries".

Two Old Coots, Russo and Ford

Collectively, Richard Ford and Richard Russo have been writing for 70 years.  Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, in 1976, and Russo his first, Mohawk in 1986. Between them they are known as master observers of ordinary lives who tell unadorned stories.  They each have new books this month, and characteristically each is blunt, tender and wise.  I know (believe me, I will be 69 in June) that aging white guys are out of favor in the literary world, and I don't begrudge that sentiment or the years of feeling overlooked that created it, but these two coots can still bring it, and they deserve our attention.

Russo, who turns 68 in July, has spent much of his storied career writing about small towns in the Northeast and their complicated inhabitants. His characters are funny, heartbroken, frequently inebriated, loaded with misplaced wishes and fully aware of their own short-comings. In addition to Mohawk he has written seven other novels including the Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls, and Nobody's Fool, and then just last year, Everybody's Fool.  The latter two are set in the fictional North Bath, NY and feature one of the great irascible charmers of American fiction, Donald "Sully" Sullivan, who was immortalized by Paul Newman in the 1995 film of Nobody's Fool.  

His terrific new collection of two novellas and two stories is called Trajectory.  Emotionally we are on familiar ground as his characters struggle to make sense of both the present and the ever-intruding past.  But these characters differ in that they are more firmly middle class types, teachers, retired professors, a high school principal, a writer/screenwriter, and in "Intervention", a seller of real estate recently diagnosed with cancer.  With Russo's characteristic warmth  the stories weave through webs of memory, silent long-held grudges, misunderstandings and complicated family issues. They each resolve uneasily, but with a hard earned bead of hope. 

 Here is an example of how he does it from near the end of the first story, “Horseman.”   A college instructor struggling with a student who plagiarized realizes it has brought up, again, a much examined period from her own student days.  Through the present struggle she starts to form a new perspective on her past.

In the other essay she'd find what Bellamy had noticed in hers, an absence.  An implied writer.  A shadow.  A ghost.  "But I do exist," she'd told him that day, however meekly, fearing he meant to convince her that even that wasn't true, when in reality he was merely urging her to discover that last elusive thing, a self worth being, worth becoming and finally worth revealing.  Yes, even though she knew what awaited her in those essays, she would at last read them.  She owed Bellamy that much.  He'd given her an assignment, and she intended to finish it.  After which, she suspected, he would haunt her no more.

In 1986 when Russo published Mohawk, Richard Ford, now 73, published his third novel, The Sportswriter. The title character's name was Frank Bascombe, and in him Ford found his most universal voice.

He wrote three other books with Bascombe at the center, and one of them, Independence Day, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. 

Ford's new book, Between Them, is a memoir of his parents.  "My Mother, In Memory" was written shortly after her death in 1981, and "Gone, Remembering My Father" is recent, finished a year ago, 55 years after his father's death in 1960.  These are beautiful haunted pieces.  They are filled with half-answered questions, surmise, and finally, a deep sense of mystery about these people who choose to have a child, him, quite late in the marriage.  Ford clearly loves his parents deeply and is grateful for the life he has that they provided, even indirectly.

He is a lover (as are many great writers) of the short stories of Anton Chekhov who in story after story validated the lives of ordinary men and women.  In this beautiful book, Richard Ford does the same for his parents.  He leaves an unsentimental record of two otherwise overlooked lives. Here is how he ends the memoir of his father,

But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father.  Much of these things I've written here.  Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their father's orbit and sight.  My father did not experience this.  And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it.  The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that "...my loss was that I never spoke to him as adult."  Mine is the same--and also different-- inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become.  And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss-- we must all make the most of the lives we find--there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue--qualities that merit notice in us all.  For his son, not to have  left this record would be a sad loss indeed.

These are books by two deeply humane and uncluttered writers.  They have been working at the craft for many years.  They do "make the most of the lives they find", and we are the better for them

Lessons in Shakespeare or "Will in the Bard-O"

There are new books this Spring focusing on three of Shakespeare's greatest creations: Sir John Falstaff, here principally observed through the lens of Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2; Hamlet, in this case both the character and the play, and Rosalind, the heroine of As You Like It.  All three books are hugely entertaining and deeply knowledgeable.  Collectively they serve as a great whistle wetter for the coming APT season. (There, you see what happens when writing about Shakespeare?  A delirious giddiness takes over and it seems perfectly apt to say "whistle wetters")



Harold Bloom, 87, long a champion of Falstaff, offers one more passionately argued paean to Sir John"s central importance in Shakespeare's creation of deeply human characters.  Bloom tells us he first fell for Falstaff at age 12, and it was nearly 20 years ago in his seminal book on Shakespeare, subtitled "The Invention of the Human" when he laid out many of the arguments found in this new slim volume.  He has sharpened his arguments, and the book serves as a wonderful introduction to both Henry IV and Henry V  as well.  Here is Bloom at his fiery best.  

"Falstaff is as bewildering as Hamlet, as infinitely varied as Cleopatra.  He can be apprehended but never fully comprehended.  There is no end to Falstaff.  His matrix is freedom but he dies for love."  You may not agree with all of Bloom's assertions in this book, but his erudition and passion for his subject are irresistible.

In 2012, Dominic Dromgoole, the former Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, had the patently insane idea of taking a production of Hamlet to every country in the world.  Two years later, on the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, the journey began.  Over the next two years, culminating with a closing performance on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, his company of 12 actors and 4 stage managers performed in 197 countries only missing North Korea and Syria.  Dromgoole's wonderful book documents this seemingly impossible accomplishment.  We learn much about the play, more about the personalities and places and particular hardships, and crucially,  the belief in the power of a cleanly told and vivid story.  Here is Dromgoole after watching the final performance before the actors departed,

The show was there, the story was told, and it had a gracious modesty in  world.  Too great a immediate success would have induced a grandiosity which would have been a nightmare to tour.  'See, see how great we are' is not an attitude to take on the road - it's not an attitude for anything really...... The show was not perfect, but it worked.  It told the story, it carried the language and delivered it, and it presented the life within the story.  This is not always what people mean by theatre these days.  There is a difference between a car that works, and an exploding car with balloons on it.  A car that works ferries people from A to Z, conveying them from where they begin to a different place, and along the way it shows them scenery, whether beautiful, sad or strange.  A lot of theatre these days seems to be watching a car festooned with balloons explode, then bursting into applause and waiting  for a blogger to deconstruct the event.  Having been taken nowhere.  Our show didn't dazzle or explode, but it worked.  And it felt ready to wander.

The final book is a biography of a fictional character.  Rosalind is one of the greatest heroines in the English language and in her 417 year life span to date she has inspired many other brave, articulate and passionate fictional offspring.  She is wonderfully complex, playful, deeply emotional, highly skilled verbally, and full of intellect and longing. It is the longest woman's part in Shakespeare, and one that every serious Shakespearean actress hungers for.

Angela Thirlwell blends sharp scholarship with a Bloom-like love of Rosalind to create a memorable mix of theatre history and passionate exploration of both the role and actresses who have played her.  In 1962 as an early teen Thirlwell saw Vanessa Redgrave play the part and fell in love with both the character and the play.  Over all the subsequent years she has seen many actresses take Rosalind on and interviews many of them.  This gives the book an engaged energy of performance that makes it different from other similar studies.  On page two of her Prologue Thirlwell lets us know, deliciously, what will follow.

I love Rosalind because she is merry and mischievous, impetuous, empowering and brave.  Her play is about love.  It's for everyone and anyone who has ever loved, either unrequitedly or to joyous fulfillment.  Every kind of love is in this play, from carnal to divine: not only heterosexual love, but also homoerotic love, the love between friends, between women, love across generations, brotherly love and  sibling rivalry, the love between parents and children.  Rosalind faces up to love inside out and it spectre of rejection that all lovers fear. 

Taken together the three books are a besotted graduate seminar in Shakespeare and so much more.  Don't be late for class!