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".