Word: shaw
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SHORT STORIES: FIVE DECADES by Irwin Shaw Delacorte; 756 pages...
...introduction to his collected stories John Cheever recalls a crusty, idiosyncratic editor at The New Yorker. But, adds the author, "since the men he encouraged ranged as widely as Irwin Shaw and Vladimir Nabokov, he seems to have done more good than anything else." Cheever may be the only person in the world who would mention these writers in the same sentence. There are many who would not mention Shaw at all. Alfred Kazin's massive study of American fiction, On Native Grounds, has no room for the author. Edmund Wilson's definitive survey, Classics and Commercials, gives...
...which is fine with the author, who shuttles between Switzerland and New York. At 65, he cherishes few illusions. "I am," he says simply, "a product of my times." Shaw spent five decades writing big movies and novels (The Young Lions, Lucy Crown) and unprofitable short fiction, because "in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned...
...ignored. In the '30s Shaw sang a chant of social significance; the tales are filled with laborers and struggling families indistinguishable from Clifford Odets or Arthur Miller characters. But by the '40s he had found his own voice, a Shavian mix of irony and poignance. Since then the supple prose has been, like Cheever's, dominated by sexual themes and by the attempt to lend common experiences and ordinary people a secular grace...
...Shaw's typical mode, and one that too many critics and readers have taken literally. A revision is overdue. The experience of going through these resonant tales, remembers the author, was some thing like what is supposed to happen when a man is drowning, as scene after scene of his life passes before his eyes. If the drowning man is devout, it can be imagined that in those final moments he examines the scenes to determine the balance between his sins and his virtues with a view toward eventual salvation. Since l am not particularly devout, my chances...