The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. - book reviews

"The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age."

- Boris Pasternak

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

- Samuel Johnson

Andrew Levy's book is an immensely enjoyable read, one that presents the reader with an exhaustive historical treatment of that particularly American literary invention, the mass-marketed short story magazine. However, your final reaction to this book is likely to depend on whom you agree with, Pasternak or Johnson, and thus whether you see writers as alienated individualists or clubby entrepreneurs.

Levy, begins at the same place everything about the American short story begins, with Edgar Allan Poe. While it is generally accepted that Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) established both a definition of and an attitude toward the American short story, Levy believes that Poe might better be considered the inventor of the American short story magazine. Levy quotes Poe's letters and journals at length, demonstrating that Poe's ultimate aim was to "found a magazine of my own." Poe dreamed of creating a magazine that would offer "high" culture to an expanding middle class, a population drawn to the magazine precisely because it represented their social aspirations rather than their social realities. Levy points out that the truly lasting American magazines have in fact followed Poe's plan, The New Yorker being perhaps the most obvious example.

Levy describes his book as primarily a study of the commerce of the short story, of "what Poe thought about his checkbook, and how his checkbook became the short story." Yet his most interesting assertion has less to do with sales than with national character. He argues (in "The Land of Definition") that the American magazine stands in a metonymic relationship to the American story, in that the magazine's paradoxical assertion of both disposability and lasting value represents perfectly the most persistent criticism and praise made of the short story. One would like to see an entire book devoted to a study of this relationship.

Furthermore, if the economic foundations for the short story's development are the heart of his book, then we cannot dismiss what Levy thinks of the modern writing workshop, which has in effect created today's Writing Industry:

The most striking aspect of the modern workshop system, for instance, is the extent to which it ensures the continued health of the short story.... The workshop system ... is an alternate economy, enclosed and complete....

Levy's assessment of the robustness of the contemporary short story thus rests entirely on his faith in the workshop system. But this is a faith I find naive and an argument I find unconvincing.

For instance, what is missing from the otherwise fine analysis of the development of mass-market magazines is a sufficient differentiation among kinds of magazines, and the kinds of stories that fill them. We are left wondering if experimental magazines have ever achieved the appeal of the more middlebrow publications such as Saturday Evening Post and The Atlantic. If not, then it might be claimed that the short story as a commodity has gone through an economic evolution rather than a revolution, an evolution that has weeded out its extremes and resulted in the survival of, if not the fittest, then the least offensive.

Not that Levy doesn't anticipate this criticism: "It is easy to lament the development of [the writer's] network, to speak of standardization and the death of the individual voice." But he then goes on to misrepresent the very weakness he has so rightly named: a "confluence of writerly authority and middle-class respectability ... [that] allows for thousands of individuals to write fiction that deliberately eschews popular values.... It institutionalizes the marginal voice."

Exactly what is marginal about an institutionalized voice? And secondly, what is writerly about middle-class respectability? Levy wishes to make a connection here between the marketplace and the "high culture" of our literary traditions, asserting that the short story is a "place that offers certain forms of cultural capital in certain amounts, and attracts individuals to the extent that they seek that particular algorithm." The clash of tropes here is disorienting, but informative, for they suggest a "formulization" of the short story, a reduction to its economic necessities and demographic warrants. And while such a study is certainly to be gone about in the way Levy has approached it here, one could draw exactly the opposite conclusions from the same data: that the workshop system and its "alternate economy" are in fact nominalizing. It could be argued that the workshop system is responsible for the "success" of the minimalist knockoff story so ubiquitous that many incoming writing students believe it to be the only way to write; that all those marginal-but-institutional voices have in fact fused into a single voice. And indeed, for Levy the workshop was a place where the solitary work of writing became communal: "we tacitly accepted the idea that our writing could be done in groups. In short, we were not loners." But of course individuals produce literature, not committees. Pasternak was right: Writers are loners.