High Five:
Rafael Alvarez

(In this issue's High Five, author Rafael Alvarez recollects his "five favorite short stories of all time as they occured to me on a jet plane before Thanksgiving 2005."

1. A Crown of Feathers. Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1974.

"...if there is such a thing as truth, it is as intricate and hidden as a crown of feathers..."

This is the line upon which Singer's story of dazzling apostasy and fatal penance ends. It strikes me as the only durable blueprint for fiction itself.

2. Hands / "Winesburg, Ohio" / Sherwood Anderson, 1919.

The great off-ramp of homegrown literature that showed Faulkner and Hemingway the way out of the 19th century, Winesburg, Ohio, hit American letters at the dawn of the Roaring 20s like the wallop of a Babe Ruth home run. Of the 21 connected stories in Winesburg, the brief tale "Hands" is the first and my favorite.

"The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands," writes Anderson, "is worth a book in itself..."

Which is what I have long known about my grandmother's pink rosebush, the white plastic radio humming in a Smith Island crab shack, and the yellowed newsprint from August 16, 1977, taped to the walls of Miss Bonnie's Elvis Bar once and forever at the corner of Fleet and Port streets.

In atmosphere—"...a long field that had been seeded for clover but produced only a dense crop of mustard weeds..."—the story echoes the natural beauty in the films of Terrence Malick.

In content, "Hands" reminds me of every conversation I ever had with the book collector and writer John Mason Rudolph, a Baltimorean I met in the autumn of 1988 on a pilgrimage to Anderson's grave in the Blueridge mountains near Marion, Virginia.

Rudolph, who died in Baltimore in late 2005, exhorted me to write "from your guts," to forget what had been written before and "get out of the way of the story" so it has room to move.

"Bang!" he'd say of work that met the criteria, "it runs!"

In "Hands," disgraced former schoolteacher Wing Biddlebaum—whose hands were so full of flight (and, it was whispered, fancy) they could pick 140 quarts of strawberries in a day—preaches to the town's young reporter George Willard the way Rudolph once preached to me.

"You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams," says Biddlebaum, the town mystery for more than 20 years. "You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them."

The story ends as Willard leaves Wing—"one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness"—to figure out for himself what the wounded man was talking about.

3. The Complete Short Stories of Tom Nugent
Uncollected, 1980-to-present

Some people, when they want to entertain a certain someone at home, play a record that's been important to them. Others settle in for a good movie. Me? I pace up and down in front of them and read Tom Nugent stories out loud, peeking over the printed page to watch them swing through every emotion they have and some they didn't know they had. Nugent, who helped me land my first by-line in the Baltimore Sun in 1978, has published most of his startling fiction on his own dime; collecting narrative on index cards until there is enough to take to the printers, where he throws a credit card on the counter and orders presses to roll.

After the books arrive at his home—once Baltimore ("You always love the city where you've died," he has said of Crabtown eternal), and for about the past decade, rural Michigan—Nugent forwards them to libraries around the United States.

This has taken the form of novel from the 1980s—"You Might As Well Dance"—to town crier styled broadsheets to "Dispensations From Reality," a collection he published under the Kerry Press imprint in 2001. Here's a brief glimpse of what has landed on public library shelves from Dundalk to Detroit.

The passage is taken from "A Portrait of a Soul Struggling With Itself" and concerns the fate of an alcoholic named Dale.

"...did he straighten himself out? Did he clean himself up, land a good job, make some dough, move out to Randallstown...rent one of those cute Colonial Village two-bed-roomers with the mini-sundeck and potted ferns? Did they give Dale a polyethylene lounge chair with his name on it over at the community pool?

"Or did he hang on in the greasy Calvert Street shit hole, listening to the Golden Oldies and guzzling vodka and gnawing at his fingers and memorizing the King James?

"Did he die of a brain seizure during his ninth de-tox at Maryland General?

"Did he graduate to drunk heaven . . . a sun-washed boardwalk, the surf rolling toward the sand, bright gulls riding the thermals, a bag of Utz 'salt & vinegar' chips crackling in his idle hand?

"What happened to Dale?"

The better writers rarely spell it out.

"Here are the blanks," writes Nugent, "if you wish you may fill them in."

4. Van Gogh's Room at Arles. Stanley Elkin, 1993.

Although I've spent most of my life devoted to the short story, I tend to enjoy, and often write, tales that edge toward the novella. "Van Gogh's Room at Arles," is the title story of three long stories published by Elkin in 1993 and now available through Penguin.

"Van Gogh's Room" has all the elements for which Elkin - do not put an "s" at the end of his name or risk the wrath of his ghost—is well regarded.

[But never quite as well as he would have liked in his lifetime, a dirty bit of literary envy many writers harbor but have not the courage or the indiscretion to admit, which Elkin did more than once. As Hampden's well-read Joe Mooney —"...the World Book Encyclopedia made me the asshole that I am..."—likes to say: "Thank God we're okay."]

Cynthia Ozick, who wields one of the fiercest minds in letters, blurbed "Van Gogh's Room at Arles" thus: [Elkin is] an inimitable sword-swallower, fire eater, and three-ring circus of fecund wit and inexhaustible comic artistry..."

All of which is on display in spades in this tale of a community college professor struggling to find level ground amongst his more honored academic rock stars while staying in Van Gogh's famous room in the south of France. A running sideshow to the main plot is the hero's efforts to hide from the Club of the Portraits of the Descendents of the People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

Peter Genovese, the son of a Highlandtown barber who grew up to teach English and writing in St. Louis, where for many years Elkin taught at Washington University, met the older writer on a few occasions.

"He was a cheeky old dude but in some ways I liked him better than [Howard] Nemerov," who also taught at Washington University, said Genovese. "Both were characters but Stanley wouldn't hesitate to tell you where he stood on things, and usually that was someplace interesting."

Elkin was struck by multiple sclerosis in 1973 and spent the last two decades of his life in a wheelchair before his death at age 65 in 1995.

"I only sent him one of my writing student[s] over the years because she was the only one good enough and strong enough to survive his critical commentary," said Genovese, noting that Elkin simply shit-canned manuscripts that didn't grab him.

That student was Naama Goldstein, author of the short story collection "The Place Will Comfort You," published by Scribner in 2004. The home page of Goldstein's web site carries this quote from her mentor: "You make a hat where there never was a hat. That's the pleasure, it seems to me, of writing."

Trust me when I say that Elkin returns the favor with "Van Gogh's Room at Arles."

5. The Swimmer. John Cheever, 1964.

"...it seemed, in his way, to be his...as the lover, particularly the illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an authority unknown to holy matrimony..."

This is not the type of story I am usually drawn to. It does not concern Catholics or Jews or immigrant families from either of those faiths nor is it set in a city. The characters are of a kind that I never met until my kids began attending private schools in North Baltimore. Yet it is riveting: both weird and unsettling, crafted with the tongue and groove fineness for which Cheever is known.

The swimmer of the title is Neddy Merrill and he returned to my imagination in his soaking wet bathing suit a few days before Thanksgiving 2005. Of Neddy, Cheever says: "He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure."

I remembered Ned while flying to Boston from Beaumont, Texas, where I'd just seen the great Johnny Winter perform with his brother Edgar in their hometown. In the bleeding heart of the Red Sox Nation, I would see my daughter appear in a Wendy Wasserstein play - "The Sisters Rosensweig"—just weeks before the playwright's death. Neddy Merrill would meet me there.

First published in the New Yorker, "The Swimmer" is one of 61 tales in the Stories of John Cheever [Knopf], which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1978. A beat-up paperback copy sits on my shelf of 20th century American fiction on Macon Street and the same edition happened to be in the apartment afforded my daughter by the Huntington Theater.

Cheever waited for me on a dusty shelf, it's red cover with the big "C" calling out from a long row of Reader's Digest condensed books and a copy of "The Hard Boiled Virgin" (1926) by Frances Newman. I gawked at Newman's sapped and stony visage for a moment, plucked the Cheever and lay down to read "The Swimmer" once again.

It is near perfect in its slow and steady description—told as Neddy swims his way home by pool-hopping across upper-middle-class suburbia—of delusion and the price it exacts upon the deluded.

[An equally unsettling movie of the story was made in 1968 by the director Frank Perry with Burt Lancaster—who wears nothing but swim trunks throughout—in the lead role. Perry's wife, Eleanor, adapted the story for the screen.]

For me, much of the beauty lies in the pitch-perfect normalcy fading around Neddy on a Sunday afternoon as he swims from pool-to-pool in an Olympic event with but two participants: the swimmer and his psyche.

"...he heard the noise of a radio from the Bunker's kitchen where someone was listening to a ballgame on a Sunday afternoon..."

To access some of the pools, Ned has to trespass. To get permission to dive into others, he must charm a former mistress upon whom his charm is dead or make nice with former friends and business associates at a cocktail party to which he hasn't been invited.

Don't mind me, says Ned either directly or through body language that droops as he completes his task, exhausted. I'll just take a quick dip and be on my way.