The Ever Quotable Norman Mailer

It started with Nick Adams.

I discovered Nick while reading through the collected stories of Ernest Hemingway a while back, and it is his voice, more than any others in the Hemingway corpus, that sticks with me years later.  Nick Adams is in many ways Hemingway’s alter ego.  Like Hemingway, Nick grew up in a rural part of the Midwest that still felt like (that still was, perhaps) Indian territory.  Like Hemingway, Nick had a doctor for a father.  Like Hemingway, Nick’s father commits suicide when Nick is a boy – this is the subject, by the way, of one of Hemingway’s most arresting Nick Adams stories, “Fathers and Sons”.  As Nick grows up, and the stories progress and begin to slightly contradict one another (these are distinct stories, after all, and were never meant to be a coherent novel) his life grows murkier.

The Nick Adams stories, though published as a complete volume in 1972 – years after Hemingway killed himself in a manner similar to his own father – were never meant, I think, to be read in one sitting.  The Nick Adams stories were written over a period of decades – during, not coincidentally, Hemingway’s most productive and most fruitful period – and they are each one of them distinct, many of them gems.  They can be read together, that is certain.  But part of the beauty of these stories is how well they stand on their own, each one highlighting a facet of Nick’s character, a specific moment in time.  A day, as it were, in the life.

Don’t get me wrong.  It is a pleasure to piece these stories together, to chronologize them and evaluate them – and the character of Nick Adams – fully.  But the real pleasure of these stories, for me, is in realizing that while they do not exist in solitude, they can and do stand alone as complete works of art.

Nick Adams hooked me on the episodic short story.  By which I mean, as it should by now be obvious, the tale of an individual told over several loosely related episodes.  Finishing a story – a good, well-written story – about a character both well developed and personally intriguing, and knowing that another story about that very same character is out there somewhere, has become, for me, one of the best feelings in the world.

One of the finest modern practitioners of the episodic short story was the late Leonard Michaels.  Though Michaels is most well known for his 1981 novella of male angst, The Men’s Club, in my opinion his greatest achievement came near the end of his life, when he started chronicling the fictional life of a mathematician named Nachman.  Nachman, a professor at Berkeley (where Michaels himself taught) is a lonely, trusting man who understands the most complex equations but cannot begin to comprehend the subtleties of human interaction.

Michaels, along with his character Nachman, pulls you in from the very first sentence of the very first story, and never lets go.  Here is that first sentence, of the eponymously titled story, “Nachman”: “In 1982, Raphael Nachman, visiting lecturer in mathematics at the university in Cracow, declined the tour of Auschwitz, where his grandparents had died, and asked instead to visit the ghetto where they had lived.”

There may be a better first sentence to a short story in existence, but I don’t know what it is.

The Nachman stories, like those of Nick Adams, stand well (stand very well indeed) on their own.  Pieced together, though, they really are something of a masterpiece.  The seven Nachman stories Michaels completed before his untimely death can be found at the end of Leonard Michael’s Collected Stories.  They are well worth the price of the book.

In my opinion, the most promising episodic short story sequence currently being published is being written by Nathaniel Bellows.  Bellows is the author of On This Day – a beautiful, painfully moving novel of a pair of siblings who lose both parents in the same year – as well as a magnificent poetry collection, Why Speak.  While I am a great fan of all of Bellows’ writing, it is his Nan stories that really blew me away.

Bellows has a strong New England sensibility.  With his vivid evocations of cold Maine winters and lonely, ice-strewn landscape, the poet he most consistently reminds me of (in content if not in form) is Robert Frost.  Wisps of Emersonian self-reliance – as well as, perhaps, tacit acknowledgments of self-reliance’s limits – also carry through his work.  In his Nan stories, Bellows takes that lonely New England self-reliance and brings it to New York in the character of Nan, a magnificently drawn Columbia University undergrad who comes from a sheltered, broken (in ways that I won’t ruin for you here) lower-middle class Maine family.

Nan, like Bellows, comes from upstate New England.  Also like Bellows, Nan comes to Columbia to study literature and to become a writer (Bellows received his MFA from Columbia).  Nan, like Michaels’ Nachman, has a fundamentally good although somewhat naïve personality.  In these stories, she faces a world, often complex and underhanded, that she does not (at first, at least) really understand.  The beautiful imagery of the stories, as well as the slow-paced, heart-piercing development of Nan’s character, make these stories not simply delights but, I would argue, necessary reading.

The three Nan stories that have so far been published – here is a link to the first one, published in the excellent literary magazine Post Road – are uniformly fantastic.  According to Bellows’ website, there are at least four more Nan stories awaiting publication.  I am sure I am not the only one who eagerly awaits piecing the rest of the puzzle of Nan’s life together.