Introduction

It is perhaps the height of optimism to try to structure an issue of a literary magazine around some single subject or theme. There is clearly the notion that, floating around out there, waiting to be beckoned, are the requisite ten or twelve or fourteen fine stories which will exactly fit, which will make an anthology, rather than just Volume something, Number whatever, out of this edition. And perhaps it's symptomatic of a kind of ingratitude, too, or so I've always thought. After all, shouldn't you be happy enough -- ready to weep with joy, one would think -- to find the requisite ten or twelve or fourteen stories about anything under the sun that you truly liked?

And so when DeWitt Henry suggested
time to me for the Fall fiction issue -- because he had noticed, he said, that it seemed a preoccupation of mine, the way the impact of an event or a situation played itself out over time -- I was a little reluctant. Probably no more than I would have been at any other suggestion. But it seemed at the moment more a limitation set on what I was looking for than a promise of what I might get.

Well, fine, I said. Time, okay. Yes, I supposed it was a kind of preoccupation, at least some of the time. At least in some of my work.

And then, of course, as can happen once you've heard an idea and played with it, you begin to embrace it.
Time. Of course, time. Inevitably. DeWitt was exactly right about my own work. And I began to see that all the short stories I'd cared most about used time in an integral way, as a structural element, really. And so when Don Lee, the managing editor, called to ask me for a little help -- what, exactly, was I looking for, what did I
mean when I said time as a structural element? -- my conversion had already been accomplished, I was able to offer examples in enthusiastic abundance. Nearly any Alice Munro story, I suggested, but "White Dump," let's say, in particular, in which the alteration of the chronology of events as well as the jumps in perspective are almost impenetrably baffling until you realize that what Munro is presenting fictionally is the sense of inevitability: the seeds of this event contained in that, the result of another event implicit already in the way it begins to play itself out.

Or the Chekhov story "The Student," in which Chekhov steps outside the narrative frame near the end to comment on his self-important main character forgivingly, "He was only twenty-two" -- and thereby makes us complicit in a particular way of seeing time's passage: foolish optimism and innocence ending, the inevitability, with age, of disillusionment and betrayal; but perhaps also the possibility of the very understanding that allows for the forgiveness Chekhov is expressing.

Or "Across the Bridge" by Mavis Gallant, which leaps forward several decades in the last sentence and offers us the remarkable, unexpected outcome which makes us want to reread the whole story to see how it could have contained this unnoticed possibility.

Anything like those, I told Don, with the optimism of the convert.

And slowly the stories began to arrive in the mail, two or three to a package at first, then in heavy envelopes of ten or more, trailing me around as I traveled this spring. Some, as it turned out, had been submitted earlier to another editor who had liked them but didn't have room for them, submitted with no notion whatever of satisfying my thematic or structural requirement. And some were from people who'd never inquired about whether there
was such a requirement, simply thought an editor might like their stories. Some were aimed right at my issue, the writer claimed, and some explained how. Sometimes Don would note on a submission, "I think this is exactly what you're looking for." Sometimes there'd be the equivalent of a shrug. Implied: maybe you can make the
time connection here that I can't, but meanwhile, I think you might like this.

And the truth was that in each category of submission there was about the same percent of stories which seemed to have anything on their minds at all that had to do with time. But what was striking to me as I read and reread my way through all the stories was that DeWitt's intuition had been correct -- I was most drawn to, most interested in, those stories which might fit into this time-centered issue, different as those stories were one from another, different as their ways of connecting to our theme were.

Some, in fact, did use time as a structural element in the story in some way close to the way I'd envisioned. At the end of "A Man of Substance," for example, Mary McGarry Morris takes a leap forward into a world beyond the main character's life and presents us an appalling revelation of its meaning to others. "My Father's Bawdy Song" and "From Shanghai" both jump years in time in their narrators' lives at the end, to offer -- explicitly or implicitly -- a more adult perspective on the meaning and events in the story. "Photopia" moves backward in time at its close to give us the surprise of a completely unexpected remembered event, and the comment which that makes on the nature of memory itself. And "Other Wars" moves forward in time so that the narrator can be openly speculative about what she has recorded in the story, and about what the true meaning of that recording -- even perhaps of the nature of fiction -- might be.

"Nerves" by Ann Packer and "Crooked Letter" by G. Travis Regier are both stories centered around memories, and main characters whose relations to those memories change in the course of each story. Janet Desaulniers's "Never, Ever, Always" offers at its start several events from the narrator's past whose import is woven into the present of the story and gives it a deeper meaning.

In two other stories there's a nearly dizzying confusion about time and sequence, about what's memory and what's happening in the present of the story. In "Kid Gentle," this is brought about by Jenny's solitude, by her need to make sense of her life in that solitude; in "Insomnia," by a powerful combination of alcohol and obsession.

In "Fur," Fei Lo lives surrounded and immobilized by the past. During the course of the story he comes to painful terms with the present, indeed with the future, with his own age and needs. "Shining Agate" works thematically in nearly the opposite way, its glib anthropology student coming to understand and appreciate something about the way the past lives on in the present among the people he's observing.

And there are two stories here whose characters seem to live in a kind of timeless suspension: "Lovelock" by Fred Leebron, whose main character, West, coming from nowhere, going to nowhere, stops and retraces his steps in the story, commits an act of conscience, and so enters time; and Cecilia in "The Life of the Mind," who feels that her past as Andy imagines it is more interesting than her own life.

But every one deals somehow with time, every single one.

And yet, surely any one of these writers could argue with me that, more than making use of their time structurally or thematically, he or she is making use of some other element -- voice, say, or sexual need. Cultural differences, or the acceptance of death.

Of course, that is true, too. Having been anthologized myself as a "New England writer," as a "writer of the new American family," as a "writer of the erotic" (and as a
Ploughshares writer, several times), I've felt the impulse to argue with however I'm being categorized, even as I'm grateful to the category, or to the accident of fitting into it -- whatever, so long as I'm published.

But it's not just a matter of resistance to categories. As with any group of fine stories, these stories
are more different than like. In fact, the way they deal with time is, in many cases, quite incidental to a story with primarily other concerns. But the sometimes almost accidental presence of time as an element, however marginal it may have seemed to the writer, gives all these stories a weight and authority, a sense of consequence, if you will, that comes more or less directly from that presence. Because they are all also dealing with another kind of consequence: with what follows closely, necessarily, on something else. We're made who we are over time, these stories argue. By the things we remember, by the memories we try to push aside. We live in time, with the consequences of our histories, of our behaviors and choices. Sometimes the story suggests that we need to be open to the past; sometimes it seems to be saying that we must recognize the implications of the present, that we must understand where we are going in the future. Several seem to deal with the experience of a kind of
weightlessness, timelessness -- but even these are stories which take note of that, rather than just reproducing it: they watch a character shift, marginally, into a life of consequence. They compare a character's insubstantiality with the imaginary substance of a screenplay, or a falsified memory.

Can I make a rule, then, that stories which encompass time, structurally, thematically-however-necessarily carry this authority, this weight? I suppose one objection might be that all fiction makes use of time. There is always the earlier
now of the story as opposed to the later
now. There is always, at least implicitly, the
then.

The difference, I think, lives in the will of the writer to subordinate one
now -- one
then -- to another. It seems to me it was likely Hemingway who introduced into American prose the lack of subordination, even in sentence structure, that has become the trademark of what might be called the affectless new fiction. But of course, in Hemingway's fiction you got to see, with varying degrees of explicitness, the source of the anomie, the wounding moment that accounted for the carefully and beautifully balanced neutrality of the shimmering prose.

And certainly the more artful of our fiction writers manage to suggest a source, too. But there has grown up virtually a school of writers who seem to work in this way tonally and structurally without having asked themselves what such a tone or structure might imply; who have found a voice without thinking about what it is they're already saying by using that voice; or what it is they'd like to say, period. And a characteristic of this school is the numbed, undifferentiated
now-ness of their narration, a
now-ness which doesn't point beyond itself to any source, any origin, any deeper meaning.

To move beyond this present-tense recital of events -- as these stories do -- to selectively shape a presentation of events playing out over time; to point to the connections, the results, the meaning, is to deal with consequence. And, I'd argue, to make consequential fiction. It seems to me, then, that in so casually accepting DeWitt's suggestion, I guaranteed myself stories with a certain
gravitas, a certain moral seriousness. This would have been a far more difficult thing to ask for -- certainly more pretentious -- than for stories that somehow made use of time. I'm as grateful, then, for the accident of happening on this theme as I did, as I am to the experience of reading these fourteen powerful stories.