Ben Loory Keeps an “Appointment in Samarra”
I’ve been dipping into Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, the debut story collection from Ben Loory, whenever I get a chance these last few weeks. His short-short stories are the perfect length for reading on quick subway rides, and the dazzlingly weird details ensure that each one will stand out in your mind: The one where the duck falls in love with a rock, the one where a woman becomes infuriated by the popularity of a book filled with blank pages, the one about the man who self-published his poem, the one where the man refuses to move out of a graveyard even though the dead keep trying to drag him off to some unknown fate… and dozens more like them. For his guest essay, Loory’s chosen to write about a weird story that’s become even more well-known than the novel named after it—one that’s inspired him as a reader as much as it did as a writer.
I grew up in a house filled with books. My parents were both English teachers. They’d met in graduate school, in a seminar on Milton. We didn’t have a television. Over dinner, my dad would lecture us about Joyce; my mom would counter with Virginia Woolf. I remember learning all about T.S. Eliot and the objective correlative when I was seven years old.
Of course, I wasn’t interested in books like that. I was interested in books about space. Space, and ghosts, and monsters, unsolved mysteries… and then, when I was ten, I discovered Tolkien. From there it was off in fantasy for years; I went through everything I could get my hands on. And from there I verged on into horror, then into crime, and came out one day through detective fiction. At that point (this was when I was finished with college), I made the leap from Dashiell Hammett to Ernest Hemingway. I remember thinking it was an important moment. It felt like I was growing up.
I remember finding a list one day—it wasn’t too long after that. It was the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best English-language Novels of the Twentieth Century.
I’m going to read all of these, I said.
And so that’s what I did. I read Faulkner, Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence. I read Jean Rhys, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen; I read James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Those books led to others that weren’t on the list; I read everything by every author I liked. After each book I’d call my parents and talk to them about it. Either one of them or the other; sometimes both.
This went on for a couple years. My parents and I talked a lot about style. And I found a lot of favorites as I went—I really liked Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica. I really liked Tobacco Road and The Magnificent Ambersons. I really liked Catch-22. I really liked Ragtime and Under the Net. I really liked A Handful of Dust.
Then one day, something happened: I picked up John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samarra. It was one of the few books on the Modern Library list I still had never read. I remember opening it up, ready to start, and reading the opening epigraph. It’s a single paragraph—a retelling of an ancient tale, done by W. Somerset Maugham.
31 August 2011 | selling shorts |
