O Youth and Certainty!

In 1975-76, in the benighted days before e-mail, I corresponded almost daily with a friend who lived in another part of Ohio and whom I saw in person only rarely. Temperamentally, we were at odds. He sipped, for instance, and I chugged. We once set out on a pub-crawl across Cleveland, loosely based on Hart Crane’s like-minded wanderings 50 years earlier, and it was Phil who called a cab and I who retched on a sidewalk somewhere off East Ninth Street. What brought us and kept us together was books and our arrogance about them. Between us, we were certain we had read everything worth reading.

Phil once challenged me to name the three greatest short stories ever written – not “favorite,” mind you; “greatest.” Americans in their early-20s think in superlatives. My nominations came to mind immediately: Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart,” Faulkner’s “Red Leaves” and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Spinoza of Market Street” – all worthy candidates. Today, however, I would drop the Faulkner without hesitation and the Flaubert with regret. The Library of America’s recent publication of Singer’s three-volume Collected Stories makes choosing even a baker’s dozen of his best confoundingly difficult. So, let’s chalk in a reserved spot for Singer (maybe “A Crown of Feathers”).

Next, we need one Henry James. Again, the choices are many – “The Middle Years,” “In the Cage, “The Altar of the Dead” – but I’ll be strong: “The Beast in the Jungle.” This is not a young person’s selection. Only the middle-aged feel the pangs of regret for opportunities lost and the bitterness of self-delusion, and understand that such things can color an entire life.

For the coveted third spot, the winner is: Isaac Babel’s “Guy de Maupassant,” though it could just as well be “Salt,” or “My First Goose,” or “Di Grasso.” I choose “Guy de Maupassant” for its humor, sexiness and its most often quoted line: “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place” (Peter Constantine’s translation).

Of course, I have omitted Chekhov, and this is unforgivable, but I already have no room for Joyce, or Tolstoy, or Turgenev, or Hawthorne, or Kipling, or Cheever, or J.F. Powers, or Peter Taylor…Things were so much easier when I was 23.