`The Stained-Glass Windows of Knowledge'

I took Stories from The New Yorker: 1950-1960 out of the library as an experiment in nostalgia. By the time I started reading the magazine almost a decade later, around 1968, its signature fiction writers were Donald Barthelme, with his postmodern bric-a-brac, and the great Isaac Bashevis Singer, neither of whom is represented in this anthology. What impresses me about the collection is how much first-rate fiction was produced in the often maligned nineteen-fifties, and how many of its best writers published in The New Yorker.

Of the 47 stories included, eight were written by writers whose names I don’t recognize (Calvin Kentfield?), and many were written by favorites – Vladimir Nabokov (“Lance”), Saul Bellow (“A Father-to-Be”), V.S. Pritchett, J.F. Powers, William Maxwell, Daniel Fuchs, John Cheever, Peter Taylor (represented by one of his best stories: “What You Hear from ‘Em”), Philip Roth (“Defender of the Faith”) and Eudora Welty. By my reckoning, the only major short story writers of that era not included are Flannery O’Connor and Bernard Malamud, neither of whom published in The New Yorker. The selection is so variegated, so resistant to critical ghettoizing, the myth of the monolithic “New Yorker”-style story looks laughable (or at least it did until the nineteen-seventies).

I’m not the only reader to esteem some of the stories included in the anthology. In 1973, shortly after he published Transparent Things (which I remember receiving as a gift for Christmas 1972), Nabokov published a brief essay, “Inspiration,” in the Saturday Review. In it he mentions the glut of fiction anthologies shipped to him by publishers eager for the master’s blessing in the form of a fulsome blurb. Naturally, most of the fiction was dreck but, Nabokov says, “almost in each of them there are at least two or three first-rate stories.” He took to grading stories (“an A, or a C, or a D-minus”), much as he had the term papers of Cornell undergrads:

“Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below andparenthesize briefly the passage -- or one of the passages – in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.”

Of the six stories he names, two are included in The New Yorker anthology: “The Country Husband,” by Cheever, and “The Happiest I’ve Been,” by John Updike. Of the former he writes:

“`Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.’ The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemedby the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.”

And of the Updike:

“`The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.’ I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”

The other stories Nabokov singles out for praise are “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J.D. Salinger (who is represented in The New Yorker anthology by “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”); “Death in Miami Beach,” by Herbert Gold; “Lost in the Funhouse,” by John Barth; and “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by Delmore Schwartz. The only ostensibly postmodern story in the bunch is the Barth, which is also the dullest and least substantial (though closely rivaled by the Salinger).

Of course, The New Yorker also published reams of eminently forgettable fluff during the nineteen-fifties. Mercifully, John O’Hara doesn’t show up in the anthology. And remember that A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, those nonfiction masters at The New Yorker, were working at the height of their powers during those years. Can anyone think of a magazine during a comparable period that has produced so much that remains worth reading? Here’s how Nabokov, who famously sought “aesthetic bliss,” concludes his rhapsodic essay:

“I must add that I would be very pleased if a Professor of Literature to test his students at the start or the close of the term would request them to write a paper discussing thefollowing points:

“1. What is so good about those six stories? (Refrain from referring to `commitment,’ `ecology,’ `realism,’ `symbols,’ and so forth).

“2. What other passages in them bear the mark of inspiration?

“3. How exactly was that poor lap dog made to howl in those lace-cuffed hands, close to that periwig?”