"...nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." --Ernest Hemingway






My last post introduced you to the four groupings of short stories that have really jazzed me over the years.  They were not in any way hierarchical, that is, Group I doesn't mean Top Shelf.  Actually, I'm pretty sure I ordered them alphabetically by first name when I started and then mixed them up so as not to be too orderly.  (And me, having worked in the Lincoln Jr. High School and Orville H. Platt High School libraries.)

Now this is the second post, and so it's the second group; not second-best.  I don't get paid to rate the writers, I don't get paid.  This is a sheer Love-of-Writing flag that I'm waving.  I'm encouraging you to read them.

II.  Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor, Franz Kafka, G.K. Chesterton, Grace Paley, Guy de Maupassant, H.H. Munro (Saki), H.P. Lovecraft

#1  Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)

It wasn't until I started college that I began to read all of Hemingway's stories.  One that grabbed hold of me so profoundly was "Big Two-Hearted River."  I found a stripped copy of the Nick Adams Stories in a Five and Dime store in Meriden (Conn.), after I'd moved back there during the summer of 1975.  They'd made a great impression on a highly impressionable young man.  



#2  Eudora Welty
(1909-2001)

"..When I did begin to write, the short story was a shape that had already formed itself and stood waiting in the back of my mind.  Nor is it surprising to me that when I made my first attempt at a novel, I entered its world--that of the mysterious Yazoo-Mississippi Delta--as a child riding there on a train: "From the warm window sill the endless fields glowed like a hearth in firelight, and Laura, looking out, leaning on her elbows with her head between her hands, felt what an arriver in a land feels--that slow hard pounding in the breast." -[from One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty]

#3  Franz Kafka
(1883-1924)

"...we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” [Franz Kafka]


#4  Flannery O'Connor
(1925-1964)

"From my own experience in trying to make stories 'work,' I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace."  [Flannery O'Connor]

#5  Frank O'Connor
(1903-1966)

Q: Why do you prefer the short story for your medium?
Frank O'Connor: "Because it’s the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry—I wrote lyric poetry for a long time, then discovered that God had not intended me to be a lyric poet, and the nearest thing to that is the short story. A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has."   [The Paris Review, Autumn-Winter 1957]

#6  G.K. Chesterton
(1874-1936)

"I like detective stories; I read them, I write them; but I do not believe them. The bones and structure of a good detective story are so old and well known that it may seem banal to state them even in outline. A policeman, stupid but sweet-tempered, and always weakly erring on the side of mercy, walks along the street; and in the course of his ordinary business finds a man in Bulgarian uniform killed with an Australian boomerang in a Brompton milk-shop. Having set free all the most suspicious persons in the story, he then appeals to the bull-dog professional detective, who appeals to the hawk-like amateur detective. The latter finds near the corpse a boot-lace, a button-boot, a French newspaper, and a return ticket from the Hebrides; and so, relentlessly, link by link, brings the crime home to the Archbishop of Canterbury.”  [G.K.Chesterton as quoted in Illustrated London News, May 6, 1911]


#7  Grace Paley
(1922-2007)

Q: How do stories begin for you?
Grace Paley:  A lot of them begin with a sentence—they all begin with language. It sounds dopey to say that, but it’s true. Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant. A story can begin with someone speaking. “I was popular in certain circles,” for example; an aunt of mine said that, and it hung around in my head for a long time. Eventually I wrote a story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” that began with that line, though it had nothing to do with my aunt. Another example: “There were two husbands disappointed by eggs,” which is the first sentence of “The Used-Boy Raisers.” I was at the house of a friend of mine, thirty-five years ago, and there were her two husbands complaining about the eggs. It was just right—so I went home and began the story, though I didn’t finish it for months.  ...The sound of the story comes first."  [The Paris Review, Fall 1992]


#8  Guy de Maupassant
(1850-1893)

"A man forced to spend his life without ever having the right, without ever finding the time, to shut himself up all alone, no matter where, to think, to reflect, to work, to dream? Ah! my dear boy, a key, the key of a door which one can lock — this is happiness, mark you, the only happiness!"  [from Maupassant's The Question of Latin]


#9  H.H. Munro (Saki)
(1870-1916)
"Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess's salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II.
He classified the Princess with that distinct type of woman that looks as if it habitually went out to feed hens in the rain.  Her name was Olga; she kept what she hoped and believed to be a fox- terrier, and professed what she thought were Socialist opinions. It is not necessary to be called Olga if you are a Russian Princess; in fact, Reginald knew quite a number who were called Vera; but the fox-terrier and the Socialism are essential."  [from Munro's Reginald in Russia]

"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; "in the meantime you must try and put up with me."  Framton Nuttel endeavored to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing." [from Munro's The Open Window]


#10  H.P. Lovecraft
(1890-1937)

"I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me. Far from the shore stands the grey lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet."  [from Lovecraft's The White Ship]