Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the 'New(ish) Books’ post - these are more discussions than ‘reviews.’ As is my habit now, I’ll also mention a new post up on
- a pretty fascinating discussion of literature and technology by .Best,
Sam
THE BEST SHORT STORIES 2022 (THE O. HENRY PRIZE WINNERS) - ed. Valeria Luiselli
A bit dispiriting. The idea of reading a collection like this is to 1) get a sense for new directions that the short story might take; and 2) be exposed to new writers.
And on both of those counts, the 2022 O. Henry Prize Winners come up a bit short. The stories split into a familiar binary. On the one hand, there’s a gritty realism —which is more or less the same no matter the widely divergent origins of the stories in this collection. And then, on the other hand, there’s a magical realism, or fabulism, that often struggles to establish the rules of its fictional universe.
And the stories that really click are both by very famous writers — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Zikora’ and Vladimir Sorokin’s ‘Horse Soup’ — although even fame is no defense against lazy writing, as attested to by some oddly half-baked stories by Joseph O’Neill, Olga Tokarczuk, and Lorrie Moore.
In terms of aesthetic lessons, what stands out are a few paths to avoid — the dead-end of the pandemic story (Lorrie Moore’s ‘Face Time’ and Eshkol Nevo’s ‘Lemonade’); the egregious fabulism of Michel Nieva’s ‘Dengue Boy’ (an insect boy sent to school as if there is nothing wrong with him); the too-obvious political tie-ins of Christos Ikonomou’s ‘Where They Always Meet’ (a cloak-and-dagger meeting with Stalin’s granddaughter); and the facile attempt to shock of Francisco González’s ‘Clean Teen’ (on an affair between a lonely teenager and his drunkard teacher).
So, in terms of thinking about potential directions for the short story, there is surprisingly little to go on from this collection. ‘Zikora’ and ‘Horse Soup,’ are both really terrific stories, one firmly realist, one in a kind of magical realism, expressionist dreamscape. It’s hard to explain why either one works quite as well as it does — except that Adichie and Sorokin are both supremely gifted, confident writers. I’m not quite sure that I buy the guiding premise of ‘Zikora’ — that the narrator Zikora’s boyfriend, a D.C. lawyer, could appear to be utterly loving, conscientious, committed, and then, upon the birth of her child, prove so diffident that he blocks her number when she calls him too often. But the boyfriend seems mostly to be a plot device to get to an unvarnished description of pregnancy and childbirth without any of the mollifications of romance. “I know how I was supposed to feel but I did not know how I felt,” Zikora recounts of the birth of her son. “It was not transcendent. There was a festering red pain between my legs.” And concludes, “Here in this delivery room we are reduced, briefly and brutishly, to the animals we truly are.”
I suppose the conclusion to draw from ‘Zikora’s’ success is that there really, still, is remarkably little writing about childbirth from a woman’s perspective — and little that’s written with the steeliness that Adichie brings to the subject, the matter-of-fact discussion of her postpartum depression. The last page, in particular, is a tour de force — Zikora, so cosmopolitan, with such a rich inner life, stripped of all illusions that life is anything other than a constant suffering abetted only by the solace of the handful of people who genuinely care for you. “I saw a future dead with the weight of his absence,” she reflects, thinking of her ex, and bursts into bitter tears when her mother tells her that she will help take care of the baby. “Tears were so cheap now,” Zikora thinks, unwilling to be sentimental even within her relief.
If ‘Zikora’ is highly personalized and truncated, ‘Horse Flesh’ is expansive — an elegy, really, for the entirety of Soviet life and, in particular, for a certain species of ‘Soviet man.’ Olya, the protagonist, encounters Burmistrov, recently released from a labor colony, in 1980. Burmistrov, “bald, with crazy, watery, greenish-blue eyes, his face not just pale but deeply ghoulish, as if he were bearing witness to something terrifying, contrary to his very nature,” upsets Olya’s traveling companions by paying a tremendous sum of money to watch Olya eat. This relationship continues for years — Olya and Burmistrov meeting once a month, Burmistrov paying, Olya eating, and the sight of her eating sending Burmistrov into raptures — and it turns out to be most significant relationship for both of them, for Olya the connection with Burmistrov lasting far longer than her relationship with various boyfriends, for Burmistrov the tie to Olya, the sight of her eating, proving far more stable than any of his various, rather haphazard, changes in social status.
I’ve had a few misses in reading Sorokin — felt that he was too preoccupied with shock for its own sake — but ‘Horse Flesh’ is a story that could only be written by a master. That mastery is obvious, above all, in Sorokin’s easy whimsicality — Olya’s original boyfriend tuning out from a stressful conversation and thinking, without prompting, of “what might come to pass if, suddenly, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie got together and decided to form a band”; Olya entering into a cafe described as being “filled with cigarette smoke and ugly people.” And that whimsicality, a constant jerking-around of his points of attention, allows Sorokin to land, discreetly, his main themes. Burmistrov, certified weirdo, describes himself as “a totally normal Soviet man,” and, without Sorokin’s belaboring that point, we are able to take Burmistrov at his word. And the story’s real conclusion — Olga driving around Moscow in the 1990s in Burmistrov’s jeep with his chauffeur and security guard and “suddenly realizing that she was truly happy” — somehow appears both out of nowhere and is deeply earned. Again, I’m not completely sure what the aesthetic lessons are to draw from ‘Horse Flesh’ — maybe that this style of magical realism is not to be worn lightly, as it is in other stories in the collection; that the strangeness and magnetism of Burmistrov works only because it’s pegged to a genuinely momentous event, the collapse of the Soviet world and the emergence of a new, and deeply bizarre, dispensation.
As far as discoveries go, I’m only half-persuaded by Yohanca Delgado’s ‘The Little Widow From The Capital.’ Almost everything in the story’s setup strikes me as not-quite-believable — the withered old widow who’s 30 (!), the widely-flung rumors throughout New York City of this single lonely figure arriving from the Dominican Republic, the narrative technique of having an entire apartment building speaking with one voice. But the image of the widow sewing up the lips of a wayward lover is arresting — as is his compliance in agreeing to the punishment in his eagerness to access the widow’s money — and there is something undeniably powerful in having a fairly straightforward story of immigration and heartbreak shifted into the realm of legend.
David Ryan’s ‘Warp and Weft’ is more clearly a winner. It’s written in a style I’m a bit suspicious of, both mathematical and sentimental, David Mitchell-esque — you can hear the soundtrack of it a bit too clearly. Still, he takes on big emotional game — recounting the moment in which a child first learns that his parent is dead — and does so with grace and compassion. The story is very short and narrated as a fugue — five vignettes of different people somehow proximate to a construction accident. Each vignette is tightly-controlled, each with its own stark emotional center — a young man considering suicide (“a man sits in front of a dead television screen imagining his own suicide so deeply that, though he’s never owned a gun, his reverie has put a dream pistol in his hand”); a pair of strangers making love and being compelled to conceive by the sound of sirens outside their window (“something between them embraces, something silent and deeper than they know, yet…and at this moment — though the couple doesn’t yet know it — they will never be stranger to each other, or happier again, in their lives”). In a writer’s note, Ryan explains that the story grew out of a writing exercise involving fugue and counterpoint — “I was interested in how one self-contained vignette might speak into the ear of a series of other short vignettes, each with their own narrative weave, their own beginning, middle, and end,” he writes, “the work laced up in the uncanny silence, the hidden impulsive glow of the bones.”
That does help in understanding why ‘Warp and Weft’ works as well as it does — that fundamentally, at some level, it’s a technical exercise; and, just as much as the emotional charge of the story, Ryan is interested in exploring the resources of his form. There’s no great need, Ryan is submitting, for the short story to have a unified point of focus or a single storyline. It really is possible for a very short story to tell five different stories all at once, for each of them to be compelling, and each connected by something that’s more complex than exposure to a single tragic event; and which has more to do with the disparate characters, in their subconscious ways, being part of the same dreamscape.
ISAAC BUTLER’s The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned To Act (2022)
This is one of these books where I’m more enchanted by the introduction than by anything in the text itself. Butler lays out a thesis which views acting techniques as a microcosm of identity, so that acting ‘naturalism,’ which was associated with Eleonora Duse in the 19th century and with ‘the system and ‘the Method’ throughout the 20th, are set, in a sort of permanent war of the ideals, against ’symbolism,’ which runs on a separate track from Diderot to Sarah Bernhardt to Laurence Olivier. That dichotomy, Butler suggests, is nothing less than a competition for the soul of the culture-at-large: what is held up as exemplary in acting turns out to be paradigmatic for everybody else of how they should be, how they should conduct themselves — and the great cultural throughline of the 20th century is discernible most clearly in the evolution of acting techniques, in the rise of naturalness and casualness, in the emphasis on personal history and psychic trauma, in the interest in being low-key, improvisatory, cool.
In acting, that movement can be glimpsed in a series of startling performances — in the messianic aspect of the Moscow Art Theatre’s tour of America in 1923; in the disjunction between the acting of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in the film of A Streetcar Named Desire; and, above all, in the before-and-after split frame of comparing the stylized acting of the ‘30s or ‘40s with the Method-inflected acting of New Hollywood in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And that evolution — which might seem a bit technical or trivial — closely parallels sweeping cultural phenomena, the shift of a society in which men wear suits to a society in which men wear blue jeans; a society in which elocution, deportment, a certain aristocratic sensibility are prized to a society that’s all about a rough-around-the-edges egalitarianism.
Those changes occurred, really, in a staggeringly brief period of time — ‘the 60s’ is the shorthand for them — and Butler, without being too heavy-handed about this, makes the case that acting technique, as much as anything else, was responsible for that shift. That the ‘naturalistic style’ had been worked out in a sort of laboratory form in Stanislavski’s Moscow Arts Theatre, in the experiments of the Group Theatre in the 1930s, in the acting classes of a handful of Method acolytes, and then spread in explosive fashion from there to the culture at large via Brando, via James Dean (whom Butler calls a “xerox” of Brando), via a string of wildly influential shows and movies from Marty to The Graduate to The Godfather. As Butler writes, “The Method is a transformative, revolutionary, modernist art movement, one of the Big Ideas of the 20th century.” And the book’s subtitle reveals its real ambition — The Method isn’t really about how actors learned to act; it’s about how ‘the twentieth century learned to act,’ how the Method burst out of the tight-knit, endlessly-contentious theater communities in which it was developed and became, really, the point of reference for how the culture-at-large modeled itself.
But that ambition is too great to be contained within any single book, and Butler for the most part sticks to a much safer objective — a fairly standard (and very valuable) show business book, treating the Method, as he puts it, as a biographical subject.
And, as biography, it’s engrossing subject matter. There are three points of orientation in the history of the Method — each with its own geographical center'; each ‘handed off’ to the next at a distinct moment in time; and each bustling with its own anecdotes and larger-than-life personalities.
The first turn of the wheel is in Russia, in the development of the Moscow Arts Theatre through the creative partnership of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko. What’s most interesting here is the extent to which Stanislavski’s ‘system’ evolved and was never really one thing — much as ‘the Method’ seemed to exist in at least three distinct versions in its American incarnation. The MAT’s first critical breakthroughs, at least in Butler’s telling, had little, actually, to do with acting technique. On the one hand, there was an extreme verisimilitude in scenography — with Stanislavski deploying the company’s ‘secret weapon,’ a scene painter named Simov, to create sets that were significantly ahead of their rivals. On the other — and this was more significant going forward — there was an ability to create, largely through force of personality, an ensemble out of the somewhat disparate collection of the MAT’s actors. As Butler writes, “The harmonious ensemble of the MAT was a pre-‘system’ invention. If anything it was the ‘system’ that had destroyed this ensemble.” But there is a glimpse of what was to come in the ‘breaking’ of an actor named Darski as part of the rehearsals for The Merchant of Venice in 1898. “In his letters to Nemirovich, Stanislavski wrote that Darski’s rehearsal room behavior was a brave front hiding a gradual internal capitulation already in progress,” Butler writes. “After days without sleeping or eating, Darski came in and spoke ‘one successful line, simply delivered,’ after which he was putty in the director’s hands.”
That breaking of Darski — an old-style, 19th century tragedian — was, in some sense, where ‘the Method’ truly originates. By 1906, Stanislavski, feeling that he was going through the motions during a tour, decided, essentially, to rip up everything he thought he knew about acting and to start from scratch, placing acting on new, rational foundations — to do to himself what he had done to Darski. And, without pushing his case too much, Butler regards this clearly as being one of these seminal turns in 20th century consciousness — surprisingly parallel to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Gurdjieff’s ‘work,’ as well as, more distantly, to revolutionary turns in literary and artistic modernism or in physics. The key point is that the pursuit of ‘naturalism’ turns out to be anything other than intuitive. The accumulated habits of adults — their default orientations to the world — are understood to be conventions; and the way to truth, and simplicity, lies in a convoluted and even brutal process, characterized at critical stages by the subject’s surrender to an external teacher. Butler is probably right to link this turn in Stanislavski’s thought to his friendship at the time with Sulerzhitsky, a Tolstoyan who saw in theater “the potential to realize Tolstoy’s ideals.” ‘The system,’ as it developed under Stanislavski in the 1900s and 1910s, was really closer to a religion than to the theatrical harmonization and ensemble-building of Stanislavski and Nemirovich’s first reforms in the 1890s.
For Butler, the great question underlying The Method is whether these techniques, as developed by Stanislavski and refracted to America through a half-dozen teachers, are beneficial or not to actors. And, as it turns out, the jury is still very much out on that. Butler himself had a scarring experience taking ‘the Method’ too far when he was acting in college — finding himself locked into the psyche of his characters and unable to get out of them — and that experience becomes the impetus for his book. In Stanislavski’s time, a schism had developed within the MAT — with the majority of the company feeling that ‘the system’ engendered artificiality and resulted in all sorts of psychic distress, not least in a mid-performance nervous breakdown experienced by Stanislavski himself in 1917. Those disputes about ‘the system’ would materialize again in America — above all in the lifelong rivalry between Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, Stanislavski’s leading American disciples. In the most bracing anecdote in the book, Adler, upon Strasberg’s death, concluded the requisite moment of silence for him by saying, “It will take the theater decades to recover from the damage that Lee Strasberg inflicted on actors.” And, probably, the most amusing anecdote is the story of a much-anticipated symposium in New York in the 1960s in which several representatives of MAT were invited to clear up for once and for all what Stanislavski had meant by terms like ‘affective memory’ and ‘imagination’ and how important each of them were to his method — and it turned out that the Russians themselves, who had spent a lifetime working with Stanislavski, had no idea and emphatically contradicted one another. “If it isn’t clear now, it never will be,” Stella Adler said sadly.
But I have a feeling that Butler, however carefully he parses the different interpretations of Stanislavski’s thought, may be missing the point. It wasn’t really so much about a replicable, transmittable system. It was more about force of personality and its cultic, religious aspects. So many of the central figures in The Method turn out to be wild-eyed narcissists, and I don’t think that’s exactly an accident. The main point about ‘the system’ or ‘the method’ is that it results in intensity — actors end up seeing acting as something well beyond a craft or a performance but as a consciousness-altering exercise. “The Method just works, I can’t explain it, but it does,” said one adherent in the 1960s, and I suspect that that’s a more fair assessment of the Method’s validity than any attempt to differentiate between the effectiveness of its competing strands. Any of the ostensibly contradictory schools of thought could be perfectly helpful in helping any actor develop a role; what mattered most was the tremendous conviction and intensity that it instilled in actors (unless, as did happen, it psychically broke them first).
The next turn of the wheel for the Method is its arrival in America, in dramatic form, in the MAT’s 1923 tour. That tour led directly to the creation of both the American Laboratory Theatre and then the Group Theatre and it set up a startlingly clear chain of transmission back to the fount of knowledge. Two of Stanislavski’s actors, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, settled in America. The most ambitious New York actors studied with them, and that experience led directly to the acting principles encoded in the Group — the emphasis on naturalism-as-created-through-strenuous-effort, the emphasis on an ensemble, and, above all, the view of theater as a religious calling. Butler spends considerable time on the rifts within the Group, the period of ascendancy of Strasberg and his focus on ‘affective memory’; the heresy of Stella Adler, studying privately with Stanislavski in Europe, and returning claiming that Strasberg had gotten it all wrong; and then the personality clashes and money problems that kept the Group from riding off into the sunset as some sort of national theater company. But, as Butler acknowledges, “The Group was an impossible machine, jury-rigged from mismatched parts, held together by the magnetism of belief,” and what’s really astonishing about the Group is not that it broke down but that it ever existed at all.
The final turn is the adoption of the Method in a wave of Hollywood movies. Again, the lines of transmission are very clear — Group members like John Garfield and Elia Kazan developing an edgier Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s; actors who’d trained with Group teachers, above all Montgomery Clift, Rod Steiger, and Marlon Brando, sweeping away American film and television audiences — but the story gets messier once Butler drills down into the details of what techniques, exactly, the different actors took from the Method. In Butler’s telling, Brando, who did more for the Method than anybody else, seems to have almost been born a gifted ‘method’ actor as opposed to learning the techniques from anybody. The lineage is somehow clearer with James Dean, who in Butler’s amusing account, blatantly ripped off Brando and Clift and created an ‘authentic’ voice in a way that was erstatz Method.
But when the perspective is zoomed out — away, for instance, from the Strasberg/Adler spat — the story is more vivid and haunting. By the 1970s, The Method’s triumph was complete. The Godfather, for instance, is a Method film — and it’s almost uncanny to realize how little aesthetic distance separates the cast of The Godfather from the MAT touring company that landed in New York in 1923. As Butler puts it, “The Method succeeded because of its ability to pierce images, revealing the subtext they described.” Or, in other words, ‘the Method’ represented a critical strand of 20th century thought — which manifested in ‘modernism,’ just as it did in the ‘naturalism’ of the Beats and of the ‘60s counterculture, which fought stridently against artifice, presentationalism, camp, and which emphasized, always and ever, the primacy of lived-in human emotion. The fact that that ethos took over Hollywood in the midst of Hollywood’s gilded age is something like a miracle — and speaks to the real power of naturalism in art, no matter exactly how the critical techniques are defined.
There’s a somewhat haunting passage in which Butler describes Lee Strasberg’s style in conducting his Actors Studio classes. “Strasberg’s appeal lay in the way he tailored his feedback to each individual actor and her needs, and in his remarkable eye for inauthenticity and cliche,” Butler writes. “Members of the Studio frequently compared him to a jeweler peering at them through some kind of magic loupe.” It’s clear, as Butler painstakingly details, that there were dark sides to Strasberg’s approach — there was the cult of personality, the lack of pragmatism, the indifference to the psychic well-being of any of his pupils. (Adler not only ended her moment of silence to Strasberg by mourning the damage he had done to American theater but, upon first hearing of his death, replied, “Good riddance. He will finally stop destroying actors.”) But all of that, is to some extent, trivia. The point is that there was a strength and truth to the Method, as there had been to Stanislavski’s system, and as there is for that matter to psychoanalysis. What really matters isn’t so much the results — although those are palpable in the evolution of 20th century acting techniques — as the conviction that there is some purer way of being buried beneath social conventions and that the route to that ‘higher self’ is through authentic emotion.
Damn, your book reviews are so good—intellectual and precise but also in a common language that transcends literary elitism.
Your finishing motive here defies jingoism and jingles. You could have been munchausen by proxy invaded by the actorly moxie.
Give us in the far flung future a send up of three Noirs. Wouldn't Dianne Keaton have been a nervous making money cheat? Wasn't William Holden a lucky captire by the manneredism st the studios. But i will be reading to find out why last winter i lost the ability to suspend disbelief except for Tennessee Williams. But maybe does not matter since french cinema still can be relied on for a satisfying alcohol of women, money, and natural pathe. Pity, in English a fine word.
Not to worry about the souls of men and women who submit themselvrs to Ohenry stories without the edge of Saki stories. These authors have a posse. And most everybody enters into reading collections with grains of salt. My little finger is spiderly high as i criticise my social superiors. Palahniuk has aposse. We cannot everybody deal with the likes of tge Cretan lier like he does, but we all should want to spend an hour a day in the thought mode of problem solving. It feels good it is good for us.