By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
One-and-Twenty Tales by William Baer (Mockingbird Lane Press, 2015), 168 pp.; $14.95. Available at www.amazon.com.
This is a collection of short, intriguing short stories situated in the mainstream of ordinary life with true-to-life, believable characters that capture the human condition in its strange turn of events and unexpected ironies.
Written in the first person, each story presents a different character narrating an incident in his life that bears retelling because of its illumination of some vital truth that comes alive in the hurly-burly of daily experience.
In the first tale, The Story, a writer returns home to his family’s Nebraska farm to comfort his dying mother. Introducing himself as a writer and conversing with a friendly farmer familiar with the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, the narrator finds himself in an awkward situation when the farmer makes a simple request: “Tell me one of yours.” Condescending, the narrator wavers and evades the question: “Well, they’re not really the type you tell.”
As a complex avant-garde modern, the narrator cannot conceive of a simple good story with universal appeal. When the farmer offers to tell his favorite story about an ailing mother troubled about creating a joyous Christmas for her children, the narrator reacts with scorn, “wondering how I could have been so affected by such an unsophisticated and traditional exercise in sentimentality.”
As the narrator ponders the reality of his mother’s death and regards his homecoming visit as a final farewell to a beloved parent, he realizes that no member of the family has read any of his published stories. When his mother requests a final wish — the pleasure of hearing her son read aloud from his work — the narrator fumbles his way through a banal story about a professor and his mistress — a story that puts his mother to sleep because of its lack of human interest.
As the narrator confronts the stark reality of his life and career, a moment of self-knowledge brings him to his senses: a professional writer has no stories that give instruction and delight to simple ordinary people.
He offers no good story that delights and instructs the farmer, he reads a tale that holds no appeal to his mother, and he remembers the remarks of a student who withdrew from the writing program at a college because “no one here really writes stories. It’s all exhibitionism and vanity….Everything is trendy and pretentious and soulless.”
Yearning to offer some special token of gratitude for a beloved mother, the writer tries again to grant his mother’s last wish. This time he narrates the tale the farmer recited to the professional writer about a sick mother’s effort to provide a merry Christmas for her children, the story he regarded as an “exercise in sentimentality.”
This time the mother not only remains awake but also feels touched, responding, “That’s beautiful….Tell it to others.” The irony, twist, and surprise ending of The Story render it as masterful a tale as O. Henry’s short stories.
In another equally fascinating tale the narrator (Jack), a lonely man, receives a letter from a former fiancée that he almost married 18 years ago. She writes, “I write only to assure you of my permanent devotion and my simple faith that you will seek me out again. I will wait for you forever, ready and willing to forget the time we’ve lost.”
When Jack travels two hours to the lady’s home, assuming he is responding to the letter, he introduces himself as “a friend of Kathleen Wallace” to Karen, Kathleen’s daughter who greets him at the door assuming he is a complete stranger.
The letter hinted that Kathleen had never married. When Kathleen’s cousin, Emily Dawson, then introduces herself to Jack and speaks of Kathleen’s happy marriage, the narrator wonders if “this was all some kind of elaborate plot or revenge.” He learns, however, that Kathleen and her husband died five years ago in an automobile accident.
As Jack and Emily share their fond recollections of Kathleen Wallace, Emily recalls that “Kathleen had been thrown over by a reprobate in her youth,” who ended the engagement to marry a more socially prominent woman. Emily mentions Kathleen’s one embarrassing “indiscretion” — the letter Jack received that day which immediately prompted his journey. Although the letter had been sealed, it had never been destroyed or mailed all these years but used as a bookmark that Emily noticed a few days ago.
Inquiring about the letter, Emily learns that Kathleen’s daughter found the letter and by mistake assumed the letter needed more postage and mailed it. As the narrator hears Emily reminisce about these details from the past, he — feeling like a complete fool who “came here as if in a dream” but “ended up in a terrible nightmare” — then produces the very letter with utter embarrassment.
As he apologizes and prepares to leave, Emily urges him, “Please stay a while.” As they continue their friendship and conversation throughout the evening, Jack finally says good-night and asks, “Could I come again sometime?” He leaves wondering and hoping if, after 18 years of contrition for the worst mistake of his life, “I might now be worthy of such a kind and generous woman.”
The letter Kathleen never sent, the letter Karen sent by mistake, and the letter Jack regarded as a joke led not to Jack’s second chance with Kathleen but to a new life with Emily. The strange concatenation of all these odd circumstances and strange coincidences recalls the proverbial wisdom that “wherever there is life, there is hope” and G.K. Chesterton’s remark that the more coincidental things appear, they less coincidental they are.
All the stories in this collection capture the strange nature of truth that eludes predictability, reduction, or manipulation. A manuscript sent from England to a literary agent in New York entitled In Exmoor Valley and composed in a “quirky, traditionalist writing style” by R.D.B. wins an Academy Award with a cash prize. However, the author has been dead for over a hundred years, and the so-called screenplay appeared in a portion of a Victorian classic, Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore. The explanation for this odd sequence of events is not plagiarism or literary fraud.
The wife of a descendant of Richard Blackmore found the original tale, changed a few of the details, and sent it to the literary agency in New York with the hope of winning the award and using the money for a struggling children’s hospital. None of the editors or critics detected the screenplay as “The Romance of Exmoor” that appeared in the novel of 1867: “But what could be said of a so-called ‘literary man’ (myself) who couldn’t even recognize the plot of a well-known Victorian classic?”
The narrator, embarrassed at his ignorance as a critic and editor, decides to earn a second college degree at a college with a Great Books curriculum and writes an essay on Lorna Doone. Even the most educated make fools of themselves.
Mark Twain’s famous remark that “truth is stranger than fiction” captures the spirit of this story and many others in this collection. Reality is not something small, measurable, or predictable or something that conforms to man’s theories or assumptions. Reality — ordinary life — while commonplace and familiar and filled with probability never ceases to amaze with its ironies, coincidences, and mysteries.
Good stories like these in One-and-Twenty Tales remind readers that the structure of reality is larger, more complex, and more artful than man’s simplistic ideas.
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(Dr. Kalpakgian is a professor emeritus of humanities.)
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