I’m not very good at writing short stories, which makes me admire the geniuses of the short form all the more. A good short story – like a good column – aims for its ending like a rifle shot. And just as the “crack!” of a rifle echoes long after the bullet has struck its mark, the emotional impact of a great short story continues to pile up long after the final sentence.
My list of the greatest short story writers would include Kafka, Hemingway, Carver, O’Connor, and Chekhov. Chekhov occupies a special place of honor for me. I once spent a whole summer studying his short masterpiece, “Lady with the Lapdog,” going so far as to make my own crude translation by looking up practically every word in the Oxford Russian dictionary.
What did I learn from my summer of Chekhov, other than the limits of my language skills? I wish I could say that I cracked the code of the great short story. Alas. Instead I learned that a great work of art is irreducible; that its power derives from mysterious and unfathomable sources; and that an important part of the answer to the question, “Why is this story so devilishly good?” is that you can’t explain why it’s so devilishly good.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn important lessons about your craft along the way. “Lady with the Lapdog” is the story of a man named Gurov, an aging lothario who seduces a young lady at a posh resort. But unlike all of Gurov’s previous affairs, this one ends up ensnaring the hunter as well as the prey. Gurov realizes that he’s in love for the very first time in his life. This is not good news. Both he and his beloved are married to other people. The story ends with the two of them earnestly trying to plan a future together, a future that would seem to be impossible.
Gurov’s storm of self-knowledge is precipitated by a glimpse of himself in a mirror where, seemingly for the first time, he sees an aging man looking back at him. Chekhov writes, “His hair was already beginning to turn gray.”
That gray hair, a symbol of his waning powers, his mortality, the colorless future that suddenly stretches out before him, hits the reader with tremendous force. But why? One answer lies in the way that Gurov’s gray hair has been foreshadowed by many other uses of gray up to that point: his lover’s beautiful eyes are gray; the fence around her house is long and gray; his favorite dress of hers is gray. The fact that he sees himself, at last, in the color associated with his beloved, which happens to be the color of tragic human limitations, is just one of the many ways the story builds to its climax.
Gurov’s epiphany – that he’s wasted most of his life on loveless pursuits – comes as the shattering of an illusion. He sees in the mirror the aging banker the world sees, not the dashing seducer he imagines he still is.
Lately, as tendrils of gray have been creeping into my own hair, I’ve been having my share of Gurov moments. The latest was just this week.
I was a guest at a wedding in Maine. The groom was a family friend, a fine young man in his twenties. Let’s call him “William.” From 1994, when William was ten, until a few years ago, when he moved to California, I saw him once a year at Christmas. He was always shockingly good company, even through his teenage years. We talked about video games, books, movies — even girls. Despite the difference in our ages, I always felt we were contemporaries, co-conspirators at the “children’s table.”
Fast forward to William’s wedding, which took place on the edge of Casco Bay in Portland, on a hot, dry day, with schooners plying the waves in the background. The bride descended from the footpath in a haze of satin. The groom beamed. The maids of honor fussed with their strapless dresses. The groomsmen adjusted the lapels of their seersucker suits.
Most nervous of all was the best man, who was fretting about his wedding toast. Afterwards, standing in line for the buffet, I congratulated him.
“There was no reason to be nervous,” I said. “Your toast was perfect: heart-felt, thoughtful, and funny. Everything a toast is supposed to be.”
He smiled. And then he said three words that stabbed me in the chest like a carving knife. “Thank you, Sir!”
Sir? Sir? Respectful, yes. Appreciative, yes. But it made me feel a million years old. Kind of like staring into a mirror and seeing a raft of gray.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 28 July 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
