CALISHER, Hortense

Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 20 December 1911. Education: Hunter College High School, New York; Barnard College, New York, A.B. in English 1932. Family: Married 1) H. B. Heffelfinger in 1935, one daughter and one son; 2) Curtis Harnack in 1959. Career: Adjunct professor of English, Barnard College, 1956-57; visiting professor, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1957, 1959-60, Stanford University, California, 1958, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, 1962, and Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1963-64; writer-in-residence, 1965, and visiting lecturer, 1968, Univeristy of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; adjunct professor of English, Columbia University, New York, 1968-70 and 1972-73; Clark Lecturer, Scripps College, Claremont, California, 1969; visiting professor, State University of New York, Purchase, 1971-72; Regents' Professor, University of California, Irvine, Spring 1976; visiting writer, Bennington College, Vermont, 1978; Hurst Professor, Washington University, St. Louis, 1979; National Endowment for the Arts Lecturer, Cooper Union, New York, 1983; visiting professor, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 1986; guest lecturer, U.S.-China Arts Exchange, Republic of China, 1986. President, PEN, 1986-87. President, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1987-90. Lives in New York City. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1952, 1955; Department of State American Specialists grant, 1958; American Academy award, 1967; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1967; Kafka prize, 1987; National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement award, 1989. Litt.D.: Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1980; Grinnell College, Iowa, 1986; Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, 1988. Member: American Academy, 1977.

Publications

Collections

Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher. 1975.

The Novellas of Hortense Calisher. 1998.

Short Stories

In the Absence of Angels. 1951.

Tale for the Mirror: A Novella and Other Stories. 1962.

Extreme Magic: A Novella and Other Stories. 1964.

The Railway Police, and The Last Trolley Ride (novellas). 1966.

Saratoga, Hot. 1985.

Novels

False Entry. 1961.

Textures of Life. 1963.

Journal from Ellipsia. 1965.

The New Yorkers. 1969.

Queenie. 1971.

Standard Dreaming. 1972.

Eagle Eye. 1973.

On Keeping Women. 1977.

Mysteries of Motion. 1983.

The Bobby-Soxer. 1986.

Age. 1987.

The Small Bang (as Jack Fenno). 1992.

In the Palace of the Movie King. 1993.

In the Slammer (with Carol Smith). 1997.

Other

What Novels Are (lecture). 1969.

Herself (memoir). 1972.

Kissing Cousins: A Memory. 1988.

Editor, with Shannon Ravenel, The Best American Short Stories 1981. 1981.

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Critical Studies:

In Don't Never Forget by Brigid Brophy, 1966; article by Cynthia Ozick in Midstream, 1969; "Ego Art: Notes on How I Came to It" by Calisher, in Works in Progress, 1971; article by Kathy Brown in Current Biography, November 1973; interview in Paris Review, Winter 1987; The Fiction of Hortense Calisher by Kathleen Snodgrass, 1993.

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There has always been a suspicion among short story writers seeking publication in The New Yorker that there exists such a beast as " The New Yorker story." The official editorial stance of the magazine is that, like everyone else, it is looking only for high-quality writing. Nonetheless, several strictly urbane, generally female writers have over the years published such a great number of their stories in the magazine that one must conclude that, if there is not a New Yorker story per se, there are certain types of stories one can expect to find in its pages. Hortense Calisher writes such short stories.

For 50-odd years Calisher has steadily published fiction in The New Yorker, the most prestigious commercial venue available to writers of short stories in the twentieth century. Like most short fiction writers of her time, she has also proved her worth as a writer of the novel. But her 1969 collection The New Yorkers established her as a soundly minted Manhattan writer. By that time she was firmly established as one of the premier highbrow fiction writers of the period.

The titles in the collection reveal a writer's unconscious hatred of having to name one's own stories; only one story has a title of more than six words. This unconscious disdain for the need to cater to the public's desire for a clear identity carries over into the stories themselves. In the collection it often seems that Calisher is writing with a vengeance, seeking to annihilate the need for telling any stories whatsoever. In "Finding a Girl," for example, Calisher dabbles in the depraved—incest, drug deals—all within two pages, only to have the third-person narrator intrude in the last line to declare that this is a scene "without intellect." The reader apparently is to accept prima facie that the aloof and absent narrator's pronouncement on a story that needs no telling is an outward and visible sign that intellect does exist, although not among the tawdry and addicted.

The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, published in 1975, remains the best collective representation of her early and middle work. The book contains her first collection, In the Absence of Angels (1951), in its entirety, and it is, as Calisher says in the preface to its 1975 reissue, "full of beginnings." The beginnings on the part of the characters generally tend be aborted, and the endings of the stories often return the character and the reader back to the beginning, which, à la T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," is to "know the place for the first time." The characters in the early stories reflect a world that Calisher knows well and travels within. There are the dry, well-buffed, and ideal freaks to be found among the upper-class East Coast and New York of the late 1930s and the 1940s. Tidy alcoholic ladies with well-educated, socially useless sons; daffy, lonely old men seeking medical treatment; British colonials severed from their past by the war and its reversals; and young women themselves becoming self-consciously aware that they have been shaped and developed by circumstances of birth and education—these are the types of characters Calisher works so well with in the early stories. There is, however, little technical innovation. The limited third-person narrator and the first-person narrator are standard. Thus, while one does not read a Calisher story to see the most recent narrative trends, one does read her stories for their technical perfection and her skill with language.

Although her stories may be too highbrow for the casual reader, Calisher shares, through her subject matter and her treatment, something of the grand tradition within which such writers as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jean Stafford, and Eudora Welty have worked. Calisher shows a particular sensitivity to inward ("domestic" simply is not suitable for describing her work) female experience—the life of the senses, of the emotions, and of the habitats within which women most frequently dwell.

In addition to her fiction and novels, which have become more and more erudite over the years, Calisher has long been a mentor to younger writers. Her editorial selections for the 1981 The Best American Short Stories confirmed her commitment to writers of sophisticated fiction working with technical craft foremost in mind, but she also showed a taste for young writers coming of age at the time. Elizabeth Hardwick, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike were there, of course, but so too were Walter Abish, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, Bobbie Ann Mason, Elizabeth Tallent, and Larry Woiwode. In her introduction Calisher acknowledges the abundance and variety of short fiction writers that had come to the fore since her own youth. She credits politics, regional developments, and economics with what she regards as the specifically American tendency to "sustain" the short story form. Although she notes a lack of the "city-based" story made famous by those of her own generation, she also notes the conspicuous absence in the 1980s of stories written by and about blacks. She does not believe that such stories are not being written or are unpublishable, but instead she takes a jab at the editorial policies of the type of magazines the prizewinning stories are culled from. In this way she reveals that, though hers may be an upper-crust world, as an artist she regards it as simply another neighborhood one must pass through.

Calisher, then, is not an innovator of the short story form. She is, however, an impeccable stylist, a cynic with a heart, and as down-to-earth as she can be arch.

—Susan Rochette-Crawley

See the essay on "The Railway Police."