Irwin Shaw Appears on a Shelf in Wyoming

My first contact with Irwin Shaw was through the movie version of The Young Lions. I was a kid and my father must have thought the movie would be educational or distract us enough so he could watch it. Or maybe he wanted to see the movie but my mother insisted we all go. It was set in World War II and I didn’t understand what was happening. There was a lot of mushy stuff that got in the way of the battle scenes in the North Africa desert. One side gets slaughtered. Marlon Brando is the star and, if I remember correctly, he’s an upper-class German who comes from a long line of military men and serves out of a strong sense of duty even though he scorns his Nazi overlords.

I never read the Irwin Shaw novel that spawned the movie. I’ve read one Shaw novel, Rich Man, Poor Man. I read it in the 1970s when the miniseries of the same name was hot. It was Nick Nolte’s first big role. He was the fiery “poor man” of the title. The novel was no great shakes, but it was well written and compelling. But today, I remember more TV moments than I do novel moments.

 Not so with Shaw’s short stories. He wrote so many memorable ones: “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” “Sailor off the Bremen,” “Main Currents of American Thought,” “The Eighty Yard Run.” When his book of stories, Five Decades, came out in 1978, I snatched up a copy. I read the stories I was familiar with, and many of the others. Some time during the eighties I begrudgingly lent my copy to a priest friend who was off to Guatemala. I never saw him or the book again. As I gathered other story collections that clicked with me, books by Rick DeMarinis, Lee K. Abbott, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Ron Carlson, I regretted the absence of Shaw’s book. He must have been an influence on these writers. Their styles and subjects were different, but they all have that ability to make you deeply care for characters in the abbreviated span of a short story.   

The other night, I was scanning the library shelves at the Jentel Foundation, where I’m a resident this summer. I spotted Five Decades and said come to papa (probably should have saved that line for a Hemingway discovery). I tucked myself into bed and immediately read an old favorite, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” It still has the ability to tear my heart out. The story is set in Manhattan on a Sunday morning some time in the 1930s or 1940s. Michael and Frances, a young married couple, walk down Fifth Avenue on a warm November day and life seems grand, to use an expression from that time. Frances wants to spend the day together – just the two of them. They are supposed to get together with another couple for a ride in the country but they agree it will be just them today.

Then Frances abruptly confronts Michael. “You always look at other women….At every damn woman in the City of New York.” Michael denies it, of course, even while he’s ogling another pretty woman in passing. An argument ensues, bitter words are exchanged, and they find a bar to go into. Many brandies later, they decide to see their friends after all and go for that ride in the country.

That’s it. A relationship disintegrates before our eyes. All in seven pages. The story’s timeless, which is why it keeps showing up in anthologies. You can diagram this story on the classroom smart board. Rising action, conflict, falling action, the end. Simple yet not so simple, especially for all of us who write short stories. Such economy of scale is hard to pull off.

In Five Decades, I read old favorites and some I didn’t remember. “Gunners’ Passage” is a longer story. It’s set in North Africa during World War II. Bomber crews are at a base, waiting to go back to combat or head home. A gunner named Stais is going home after his bomber crashed behind enemy lines and then he escaped in a dramatic rescue. Whitejack is a talkative Southerner whose plane is off to India. They talk while they wait. The story drips with that malaise evident in war stories by other fine writers – Hemingway, Tobias Wolff, Mark Helprin. It’s a malaise punctuated with horror, as Stais reluctantly tells his tales, and then Whitejack hears that his best friend’s plane has disappeared into a cloud bank. I got a sense that, as I read the story, other G.I.s waited at other bases in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen. Some are returning home, others are going into the fight. I believe they could read Shaw’s story and immediately relate to it.

This book by a world traveler (now deceased) may be my companion as I hunker down in a Wyoming valley for the next month. There’s a danger that my stories could get a little less Shay and a lot more Shaw. There are worse things.

-- Michael Shay, June 17, 2006