"The Collected Stories"

By Evan S. Connell

Counterpoint

675 pp.; $30

There is a kind of story people tell, drunkenly in bars at night or stone-cold sober on daytime television talk-shows, that folds the whole of life into a usable packet--a master-story that makes it all make sense: "I do the things I do, I am the way I am, because I had a broken home, or because I was a middle child, or because I come from Tennessee, or because I didn't win my school game, or because . . ."

The story-writer Evan Connell knows that people tell such stories. His characters are always on the hunt for them: swapping them with one another, demanding them from one another, trying them on for size. But, at the same time, Connell refuses to believe in master-stories, refuses to believe that stories master life. And that makes storytelling a hard row to hoe. It may be the best measure of just how good a writer Connell is that he usually finds a way to tell his stories anyway.

With the success of his 1984 nonfiction account of General Custer, "Son of the Morning Star," and the recent filming of his 1959 novel, "Mrs. Bridge" (combined in the Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward movie with its 1969 sequel, "Mr. Bridge"), Connell has at last begun to receive popular recognition outside the academic writing community. The publication of his "Collected Stories"--56 stories in all, running from his late-1940s stories about naval pilots to a sour 1995 New Yorker satire on the life of a literary lion--may owe something to this recent surge of recognition. But it gives the reader an excellent chance to judge his lifetime of work.

Born in 1924, a year before Flannery O'Connor and seven years after J. F. Powers, Connell is one of the last remaining representatives of that first generation of American writers to attend college writing programs. Reaching a judgment about his 40 years of writing would be easier had Connell arranged his collection of stories chronologically, and longtime readers of his fiction equally with new readers would have been grateful had he taken a reflective moment to compose brief prefaces or notes. But what emerges from this collection nonetheless is his sense of the power of fiction to reveal life in meaningful snatches, his sense that stories can present moments of life as revelations.

Especially in his early stories, but indeed from time to time throughout his career, Connell indulges the "realistic absurdism" that (in the wake of Ernest Hemingway) dominated the world of 1940s and even 1950s American story writing--using the narrative techniques of American realism to declare the absurdity of life, straightforwardly telling a story whose only moral is the impossibility of stories having morals. "I've often thought about this without deciding what it means, or where it could lead us," the Marine Corps captain narrator ends a horrifying war story Connell wrote in 1966. "Maybe you'll come to some conclusion that has escaped me." In a 1957 story, the absurd Henrietta--a laughing young woman from Nebraska bustling through Paris knowing only how to say "yes"--laughingly agrees to her own absurd decapitation in the Bois de Boulogne.

Though it reflects his refusal to use stories as symbols, synecdoches, or master explanations of human types, this sort of heavy-handed irony is Connell at his weakest and most self-indulgent. At his best, with his technique of momentary illuminations, Connell rejects the power of fiction to master life with stories while simultaneously reclaiming for fiction the power to tell the truth.

"Mrs. Bridge," his classic account of an affluent household in midwestern, small-city America, remains Connell's finest work--indeed, it may eventually come to be recognized as the classic American novel of the era. Several of the pieces in his "Collected Stories," however, stand as small masterpieces. The 1954 story "The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge" is somewhat weaker and crueler than the later novels for which it formed the foundation, less sympathetic to Mrs. Bridge's vagueness and incompetence, more reproachful of Mr. Bridge's overbearingness and unconscious brutality. But the several stories about Muhlbach, a successful businessman and widower raising two children in the distant suburbs, are each nearly perfect, and one--"Saint Augustine's Pigeon," a series of incidents in Muhlbach's travels through New York City one night in search of companionship--shows with astounding clarity the revelations of which Connell's technique is capable. So, too, the stories about the wanderings of a footloose and perpetually broke American named "J.D." work beautifully, especially the collection's final story, "The Palace of the Moorish Kings." J.D.'s friends back home in the States, receiving his occasional reports, form a bemused Chorus to the stories--wanting so much to find in J.D.'s shapeless adventures abroad a master story that will explain their own lives as well as his.

Evan Connell is not a kind author, and his stories are often cruel to his characters. From a technical point of view, the finest piece in "Collected Stories" may be the 1993 "Cantiflas and the Cop," an account of a lunch during which a businessman tries to make sense of an unprovoked punch he just received from a beggar on the street--tries to master the incident with a story. But as the account proceeds relentlessly to reveal the self-deception of the lunching men, Connell is more cruel and unforgiving than he needs to be. It is a truth he shows us in these men's lives, of the sort that Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers often uncovered in their stories. But O'Connor and Powers both sought as well a way to find something worthy of love beneath that truth, while Connell seems not to love his characters enough to seek out their redemption.

Connell has turned in recent years more and more to nonfiction, prompted perhaps by his success with "Son of the Morning Star." His technique of telling a story with illuminating flashes has proven just as capable of historical biography as it is of fiction. But Connell seems kinder in his nonfiction than in his stories, more willing to forgive than to use his flashes to illustrate moral failing. If his "Collected Stories" finds the audience it deserves, we may hope Connell returns to the world of fiction and concludes his long career with some more stories like "Mrs. Bridge," stories that promise human hope beneath human failing.

Rarities excited him. The enchanted glade. The sleeping princess. Avalon. We, too, had hoped for and in daydreams anticipated such things, but time taught us better. He was the only one who never gave up. As a result he was a middle-aged man without a trade, without money or security of any sort, learning in the August of life that he shouldn't have despised what might be called average happiness--3 percent down the years, so to speak. It wasn't exhilarating, not even adventurous, but it was sufficient.

Now, at last, J.D. was ready to compromise.

--"The Palace of the Moorish Kings"

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS and CULTURE