Stories that matter
You wouldn’t know it from the quietude in which he works, but poet and scholar Gemino H. Abad has been putting together one of the most formidable literary projects this country will see in this decade. All by himself — and taking full advantage of his recent retirement from full-time teaching — Jimmy has been continuing the comprehensive anthology of Filipino short stories in English that the late Prof. Leopoldo Yabes compiled in three volumes, covering the genre’s first three decades from 1925 to 1955.
Jimmy’s first contribution to that series — Upon Our Own Ground, to be published very soon by the University of the Philippines Press — is a volume spanning 1956 to 1972, and comprising 82 stories that he culled from many hundreds more. Those years were some of the best for the Filipino short story in English, marked by the emergence of writers like Greg Brillantes, Kerima Polotan Tuvera, and Gilda Cordero Fernando. The Ravens were making their mark in Diliman, and soon beyond it; a steady stream of writers was heading for America, and when they came home they brought new ideas — among them, the writers’ workshop; the Tiempos began the Silliman workshop in 1962, and UP followed suit in 1965. It was the Age of Aquarius and of experimentation in the short story — where, for a while, sheer linguistic wizardry ruled the roost.
At the same time, the storm clouds were gathering on the political front; the Huk rebellion had abated but in its stead rose a new groundswell of protest against issues ranging from the Vietnam War and the US bases to grinding poverty, massive corruption, and militarization, culminating in the declaration of martial law in 1972.
Thus, the 82 stories Dr. Abad has chosen reflect those exciting and challenging times. I myself began writing and publishing stories just shortly after that period, so that these stories were my own models, the ones I looked forward to reading in magazines like the Free Press and the Graphic, and this was the company of writers I fantasized joining.
Jimmy had a favor to ask me, which I’m happily obliging. He’d like to secure formal permission from the following authors (or their heirs) for the use of their stories in the anthology. “I’ve tried but have really found no way to contact them or their heirs,” Jimmy says. “Even if their works are already in the public domain, or are no longer covered by copyright, grateful courtesy is still owing to them or their heirs.”
Those 17 authors and their featured stories are:
• Estrella D. Alfon, “Man with a Camera,” 1958
• Lilia Pablo Amansec, “Dream Tiger,” 1961
• Eugenio Alexis R. Baban, “A Bride Across the River,” 1961
• Leopoldo N. Cacnio, “The Taste of Dust,” 1962
• Ines Taccad Cammayo, “People of Consequence,” 1970
• E. Vallado Daroy, “Go Pluck a Butterfly,” 1970
• Lina Espina-Moore, “ Onga,” 1970
• Lazaro M. Espinosa, “Irma,” 1963
• Jose T. Flores, Jr., “Happy Birthday Hiroshima,” 1965
• Alice A. Francisco, “The Fugitives of Love,” 1960
• Delfin Fresnosa, “Requiem for a Simple Man,” 1967
• Ligaya Victorio Fruto, “Yesterday,” 1968
• Antonio S. Gabila, “Home from the Wars,” 1956
• Albina Manalo-Dans, “The End of One Maytime,” 1961
• E. P. Patanñe, “Siren Song,” 1960
• C. V. Pedroche, “To Walk Again,” 1964
• Almatita Tayo [Alma de Jesus, pseudo.], “Naked Songs,” 1965 (also called “A Song for Sebastian”)
If you are among the writers on this list or one of their heirs, kindly get in touch with Dr. Abad directly at his e-mail address: jimmyhabad@ yahoo.com. Meanwhile, I eagerly await Jimmy’s work on the second volume of his new series, which will cover 1973 to 1986.
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Speaking of stories, I brought a very interesting and useful book to my graduate fiction writing class last week to read from. Now, reading from books isn’t my usual style of teaching — imagine a roomful of people nodding off halfway down the page — but I thought that this particular material was too provocative not to share.
The book was Writers and Their Craft: Short Stories & Essays on the Narrative (Detroit: Wayne State U, 1991), edited by Nicholas Delbanco and Laurence Goldstein. It had been given to me as a gift by Nick Delbanco, my writing professor at the University of Michigan, and it had lain for years in that Great Black Void into which books, pictures, and CDs somehow vanish without a whisper when you’re not looking. When it resurfaced, I thumbed through it again, and was surprised to realize that it was saying the same things I’ve been telling my classes about writing “stories that matter” — stories that raise the bar, both technically and substantively, that don’t merely repeat or do well what a hundred other writers have already done, that boldly aspire to greatness.
The first part of the book consists of a forum among predominantly American writers addressing the question of what they think about contemporary American fiction. Here’s a sampling of what I shared with my class, and never mind that some of these names may be unfamiliar to us. Mind what they say. They’re very opinionated — thankfully so — and I might have a quibble or two with their observations (I think, for example, that some of them almost deliberately ignore the powerful writing of such people as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker). But they all point to a malady that seems to afflict not only American writing but recently ours as well, in the tepid, safe, immemorable prose (or otherwise the overwrought derivative fantasy) that passes for imagination. (I’m italicizing the most significant points.)
Stephen Dobyns: “Film and TV have offered a serious challenge to fiction by taking over the traditional methods of storytelling: the linear unraveling of an emotionally engaging narrative. Even if a movie isn’t better than a book, it is often more entertaining…. It seems that fiction writers should be offering alternatives to TV and film…. It is not that film is wrong or TV is wrong or that it is wrong to make movies from books. It is just that fiction cannot use the same narrative methods and strategies as film. It can’t compete with film and TV. It can’t be made up of language that tries not to call attention to itself, where the language works as a kind of invisible window. A piece of fiction can’t release its information in the same way that a film does because a film can do it better. But much fiction continues to attempt this, which is why so many stories and novels read like treatments for film scripts.
“What fiction has that cannot be duplicated or improved upon in film is language and a greater variety of strategies, voices, and tones. A story or novel, no matter what it is about, is first of all a piece of language. That language should not be merely serviceable; it should be unique. All the energy and beauty and emotion and idea of the work should swim within that language like fish in a river. The language should be unduplicable.”
Edward Hoagland: “I don’t have much to say about contemporary American fiction. We’ve got lots of good, serious writers around but no great ones, no geniuses — we’re in a trough right now, as far as geniuses go. (Isaac Bashevis) Singer seems to me the last one alive. We can’t help that; genius is an accident of birth; But I am tired of minimalist fiction, or ‘dirty realism,’ or whatever term the repetition of Anderson-Farrell-Dreiser-Garland-Crane travels under nowadays.
“What would be new from many of our contemporaries would be some demonstration of faith and joy. I don’t mind pessimism. God may be dying, but I do suspect that there was a God, and most current fiction doesn’t think so. One can even believe that the world is about to blow up and yet still be transported with joy at being alive sometimes.
“Also, we remain incredibly provincial. Three-fourths of the human race lives on continents never visited by most of our writers, including the more prosperous, peripatetic ones. They buzz back and forth between Michigan and London, instead; visit nowhere that Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t go.”
John Clellon Holmes: “I still wait, mostly in vain, for the big novels that so pulse with human riches, fair and foul, that one’s life is enhanced for having read them. I still look, again mostly in vain, for the great styles that make a collection of characters and events mysteriously cohere into a world, that peculiarly mesmerizing way with language that is the ultimate vehicle for a writer’s vision. I find no Faulkners, no Fitzgeralds, in American writing now; no Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Yukio Mishima. No one seems seized by the big emotions anymore, neither the writers nor the people they create. We shy away from the oversize passions as if they were uncool. We work within our successes, no longer going for the risks that result in the important failures. Well-crafted, cautious, safe, instantly gratifying, the fiction of today seems to do little but reassure us in a sulky and unexamined pessimism about the human condition. Cleverness, bitterness, and irony seem to at once vitiate and express the extent of our energies.”
Laura Furman: “In her essay ‘The Novel Demeublée,’ Willa Cather spoke out against the overly furnished novel, one stuffed with a catalogue of journalistic details or unnecessary physical sensations, and she called for an imaginative art that works through ‘the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it.’ When Cather wrote her essay fifty years ago, perhaps much of the prose she read was too fleshy, or at least fat with details she didn’t admire. Now I would say that there is much fiction that is too slim or unfurnished and that its bareness masquerades as meaning.”
I’ll share more of these comments with you some other time. Right now I’m remembering Nick Delbanco — himself the author of 15 books of fiction and non-fiction, and as sharp a writing teacher as you can hope for — sitting me down in his room for a post-workshop conference and trying gently but firmly to restrain my Pinoy penchant for lyrical flourishes: “Mind the narrative line, Butch, mind the narrative line!”
And that, of course, is what my students now have coming out of their ears.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.
