told stories to show and dramatize morality. And through the rest of the day, in other classes, they told us stories, in their worthy attempt to teach us about the earth and its people, the living and the dead. They were not southerners. Two were from France; and Pancho Villa had sent one out of Mexico, in a freight train carrying nuns and Christian Brothers and priests. He told us that story too.
When I left Louisiana in 1958 to become a Marine lieutenant, I met real southerners, drawling Protestants who had never eaten a crawfish. They told stories. So did everyone else I knew. We were all very young and there were a lot of babies and, often, after parties, some people of both genders spoke with amusement and sometimes derision about the young mothers gathered at one part of a room, talking about babies. Even now, because I have many young friends, and also two very young daughters, I hear this amusement or derision after parties. I confess to taking part in the amusement, now and years ago, in Quantico, Virginia, and Camp Pendleton, California. I was wrong.
The mothers were not talking abstractly about infancy and early childhood. They were telling stories about their children, so that a listener could see and hear and perhaps even smell and touch the child who was not in the room, not even in the house, but at the motherâs home, usually in the care of a teenage girl. The mothers were also talking about their motherhood, and to convey those deep emotions and physical and spiritual changes in their lives, they chose what we have always chosen with our friends: they told stories with concrete language, with words that appeal to our senses. We talk abstractly with people whose love or affection or respect we donât want, so we keep them at bay, we do not tell them any of the stories that are part of the collection of stories that is our earthly lives.
In one life, there are so many of these stories and they are so different from each other, that I have come to mistrust a particular sort of novel: the sort that attempts to tell the whole story of a human life or human lives. Unless the novel ends in death, and even then I remain unconvinced: for, with a few magnificent exceptions, those novels by the very nature of their form â they must, finally, end â have left out enough stories to make at least another book.
Years ago, when I believed or at least hoped it would work, I spent some time in marriage counseling. The counseling did not work because it was one last try at keeping two people lovingly in the same home and, unlike baseball and other pursuits, like writing fiction, a last act of will to stay married usually comes too late. What we did in the counselorâs office was tell stories. A good counselor wonât let you get by with the lack of honesty and commitment we bring to abstractions. And when we told these stories we discovered the truths that were their essence, that were the very reasons we needed to tell the stories; and, like honest fiction writers, we did not know the truth of the stories until we told them. Or, more accurately, until the stories told themselves, took their form and direction from the tactile language of our memory, our pain, and our hope.
Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.
1986
A S ALUTE TO M ISTER Y ATES
R ICHARD YATES IS one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in most nations of the world. I have been his friend for thirty-three years, and he has most often needed
When I left Louisiana in 1958 to become a Marine lieutenant, I met real southerners, drawling Protestants who had never eaten a crawfish. They told stories. So did everyone else I knew. We were all very young and there were a lot of babies and, often, after parties, some people of both genders spoke with amusement and sometimes derision about the young mothers gathered at one part of a room, talking about babies. Even now, because I have many young friends, and also two very young daughters, I hear this amusement or derision after parties. I confess to taking part in the amusement, now and years ago, in Quantico, Virginia, and Camp Pendleton, California. I was wrong.
The mothers were not talking abstractly about infancy and early childhood. They were telling stories about their children, so that a listener could see and hear and perhaps even smell and touch the child who was not in the room, not even in the house, but at the motherâs home, usually in the care of a teenage girl. The mothers were also talking about their motherhood, and to convey those deep emotions and physical and spiritual changes in their lives, they chose what we have always chosen with our friends: they told stories with concrete language, with words that appeal to our senses. We talk abstractly with people whose love or affection or respect we donât want, so we keep them at bay, we do not tell them any of the stories that are part of the collection of stories that is our earthly lives.
In one life, there are so many of these stories and they are so different from each other, that I have come to mistrust a particular sort of novel: the sort that attempts to tell the whole story of a human life or human lives. Unless the novel ends in death, and even then I remain unconvinced: for, with a few magnificent exceptions, those novels by the very nature of their form â they must, finally, end â have left out enough stories to make at least another book.
Years ago, when I believed or at least hoped it would work, I spent some time in marriage counseling. The counseling did not work because it was one last try at keeping two people lovingly in the same home and, unlike baseball and other pursuits, like writing fiction, a last act of will to stay married usually comes too late. What we did in the counselorâs office was tell stories. A good counselor wonât let you get by with the lack of honesty and commitment we bring to abstractions. And when we told these stories we discovered the truths that were their essence, that were the very reasons we needed to tell the stories; and, like honest fiction writers, we did not know the truth of the stories until we told them. Or, more accurately, until the stories told themselves, took their form and direction from the tactile language of our memory, our pain, and our hope.
Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.
1986
A S ALUTE TO M ISTER Y ATES
R ICHARD YATES IS one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in most nations of the world. I have been his friend for thirty-three years, and he has most often needed
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