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It is a beautiful, 80-degree November day in Austin, Tex. Encamped on the west flank of the capital grounds is a veritable caravansary of large white tents, through which flows a boisterous stream of book buyers, dealers, writers, fans and gawkers. This is the Texas Book Fair. Inside the capital building, in rooms usually reserved for the wheeling and dealing of legislative committees, panels of writers sit under the Texas state seal and expatiate upon their craft. On the short story panel this afternoon there sits a writer who, by his accent, betrays a definitely Yankee origin: Daniel Stern.
Stern, a short man with weary eyes, radiates a veteran writer's worldly wisdom. He is explaining the epiphany that turned him, 10 years ago, from the writing of novels to the refined art of the short story. He quotes Frank O'Connor: "You can name several famous novelists who aren't artists, but you can't name a famous short story writer who isn't an artist." Then he reads from a story of his that won an award from the Texas Institute of Letters, "A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief." The story is about an "unregenerate New Yorker" named Kraft who suddenly finds himself teaching at a school in Texas.
It is hard to resist the autobiographical inference. Stern, born on the Lower East Side, observer and participant in the New York art scene since the early '50s, has indeed landed in Texas. For several years he's held the endowed chair at the University of Houston formerly occupied by Donald Barthelme. Like the story's Kraft, Stern is an echt New York Jew who has been embraced by the Lone Star State. Two of his novels -- Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die, one of the first American novels to deal with the Holocaust, and After the War, an inside look at the postwar New York literary and art scene -- were reprinted by Rice University Press (now taken over by SMU Press, under a consortium agreement with other Texas university presses). His first two collections of short stories -- Twice Told Tales, which was originally published by the Paris Review Press, and Twice Upon a Time -- have similarly been reprinted by Rice. His latest book of short stories, One Day's Perfect Weather, which completes his "trilogy" of short stories -- Borges-like variations on the themes of classics from literature, philosophy and music -- was recently published by SMU Press. In addition, some of his novels are being reprinted by Syracuse Press, including his most noted one, The Suicide Academy. Suddenly, most of Stern's backlist is in print.
As Stern says, "With these short stories, I've reached another noise level." Although he has received critical attention before -- Anaïs Nin published an essay on The Suicide Academy -- the short stories, written in the second half of Stern's career, at a time when most writers are coasting, have won him inclusion in major anthologies, praise from such lit-crit heavy-hitters as Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom and routine spots in such top short story outlets as the Paris Review.
A Zelig-like Life
In the series of incarnations that is Stern's life, literary rebirth comes as little surprise. The writer seems to have been born with a sixth sense for the culturally significant moments of the last half century.
His father was a clothing presser, the son of Jewish Hungarian immigrants. "He loved opera," Stern recalls, "and used to go and stand, for whole operas, in the back, because he couldn't afford a ticket." Stern's real artistic impetus came, however, from his uncle, a dentist and an amateur musician. It was his uncle who bought Stern his first cello and encouraged him to go to the famous High School of Music and Arts. There, Stern was classmates with Morton Feldman, who later became one of America's foremost avant-garde composers. It was through Feldman that Stern met John Cage and made his entry into the art crowd at the Cedar Tavern, in the days of the abstract expressionists. Stern has a small but permanent niche in that history: he played Feldman's cello piece for the soundtrack of Hans Namuth's famous documentary of Jackson Pollock. "Everybody got a Pollock drawing for that except me," Stern notes ruefully. "I was bumming around and didn't have any place to keep one." Similar reasons kept him from accepting art work from the young Bob Rauschenberg and other artists of the time. "Otherwise, I'd be talking to you from my home on the Riviera."
In his musical phase, Stern was associated with well-known names in jazz, too. He played in the string section of Charlie Parker's band and toured with Gerry Mulligan. He also briefly played with the Indianapolis Symphony, then decided he didn't like living in Indianapolis, came home and was persuaded by his artistic uncle to take a class at the New School in creative writing. The class was taught by Hiram Haydn, an esteemed editor, working at the time for Bobbs Merrill. Stern's first novel was accepted by Haydn. The experience taught him a lesson in the hard financial realities of novel writing: he earned approximately $1000 on the novel, which, even in 1950, was too little to live on.
Stern re-created the spirit of that time in a later novel, After the War, which is set during the late '40s, in an era of leftist factionalism. Stern says he is now, like many of his generation, a "leftist in art." But back then, even Miss Americas could be socialists, as Stern found out when he dated an ex-Miss. She'd been married to a famous comedian, and so she was able to introduce Stern to the more progressive side of Hollywood when he attended a Yaddo-like writer's colony in Los Angeles. Later, he was to revisit Hollywood with a bit more clout, as the vice-president in charge of promotion for Warner Bros. in the early '70s. Stern's first encounter didn't bewitch him enough to make him want to stay, although he later drew on material from his visit for one of his best short stories, "The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels." Instead, he went back to New York, where he met his future wife, Gloria, on a blind date.
Gloria was the widow of one of Lionel Trilling's favorite students. It was through Gloria that Stern wound up at one of Trilling's soirees, where he met the formidable Diana Trilling. "Diana was protective of Gloria. So she gave me the third degree, asked me where I went to school. ˜High School of Music and Arts,' I said. ˜No, where did you go to college?' " Stern grins. He is quite proud of the fact that his ˜college' was Charlie Parker's string section, even though, in his life, he has managed to teach at Wesleyan and Harvard and is now a full professor. He must have passed Trilling's test, in any case. But there was another obstacle to marriage, which was his bohemian income. "I'd never had a job before," Stern says, implying a nine-to-five position. So he went to a friend, who got him hired as a copywriter at McKann Erikson, an advertising firm.
Stern was again in the right place at the right time, rising through the ranks during the '60s when advertising boomed. He was one of many creative people at McKann who had a "secret life" as an artist. He was also an early protester of the Vietnam War, and he was at the famous protest at the Pentagon in 1967. So he was in good shape to take on the job of promoting the movie Woodstock when it came out, which was his first assignment at Warner Bros.
Meanwhile, Stern's "secret life" had been paying dividends. Several novels were published to critical acclaim and sold moderately well. Then, in 1969, The Suicide Academy raised his literary profile considerably. Working at Warner Bros., Stern had little time to build on his success, but writing a page or two at night, he finished his most experimental novel, The Rose Rabbi. Although Hollywood has seen many an actor turn writer, or film exec (with a little help from ghostwriters) turn memoirist, Stern's might be a unique case: a real writer turned successful Hollywood executive. He even sat on the Warner Bros. board of directors. Eventually, he left in a dispute over a $4 million shortfall.
Instead of plunging back into business life, he and Gloria spent a year in Paris. The Sterns were habitués of James Jones's salon on the Île de Paris, which was given fictional treatment by Jones's daughter, Kaylie (later Stern's writing student at Wesleyan), in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. Stern's year off resulted in a bitter novel about his time at Warner, Final Cut. "I now think I didn't have enough distance with that novel," he tells PW.
In 1979, the Sterns returned to New York, and Daniel found a job working for CBS's promotions department. Around the same time, he and Gloria began holding their own salon, "having string quartets in our apartment once every ten days or so." It all started when Daniel told Gloria he was going to buy her a fur coat for her birthday. "Gloria said she didn't want a fur coat. She wanted the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, in our home." The invitation list gradually encompassed a who's who of New York's literati.
All was not well, however, at CBS. The first signs of the lean and mean years of corporate restructuring were showing in the mid-'80s. "While I was struggling for my life at CBS, I started writing these short stories. I was a little nervous, since nobody had done anything like them. So I sent three to Joyce Carol Oates, for her Ontario Review. She wrote back taking one, saying these were wonderful stories." Indeed, Stern's short stories are unusual. "I'd been reading Borges, whose stories are almost para-literature, and I went, instead, to existing literature, and said to myself, Let's see if I can transform that."
In his tales, Stern pours his vast experience -- and his Jamesian gift for developing the seed of a real-life anecdotal situation -- into the framework of his favorite works of art, not counterfeiting their style or substance but using them as correlatives to experience. Thus in "The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling," Stern filters his own recollection of an emblematic Trilling party through the consciousness of an unnamed narrator who attends it with a fictional character, Katherine Eudemie, an aspiring writer. Eudemie, on the periphery of the circle of New York intellectuals, is defeated by her own lack of talent, making her life an ironic footnote to Trilling's meditation on cultural authenticity.
Georges Borchardt, Stern's longtime agent, was enthusiastic from the very beginning about his short stories. They seemed to strike a nerve in the literary world just as Stern was experiencing dispossession from the business world. In a sense, after nine novels, Stern was beginning all over again as a writer. "It's as if I was waiting all these years to find a condensed, electric voice," he says.
After leaving CBS, Stern served as the director of humanities at the 92nd Street Y, where he presided over talks given by Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney and many others. He also won the Rosenthal Award for Literary Distinction from the American Academy of Letters. When the literary talks at the Y were downsized somewhat, Stern was recruited by Robert Brustein to teach dramatic literature at Harvard University.
Then the University of Houston came calling, and the Sterns moved to a high-rise in Houston where they now live most of the year, though they still keep a summer house in the Hamptons. The University of Houston's creative writing department is justly considered one of the best in the country, and his teaching responsibilities keep Stern in touch with young writers. He publishes a small magazine, Hampton Shorts, where he has given some of his students their first exposure. For now, the consummate rover seems happily settled in academia.
Stern plans on bringing out another short story collection next year. He has a novel in progress, too, but he's more ambiguous about its future. "I'm on the horns of a dilemma about writing a novel. If it d sn't have the same electrical condensation as the short stories, I'm not going to publish it. The stories are the kind of thing I'm going to write forever."
Gathman writes for PW, the Austin Chronicle and Green Magazine. He also edits the Webzine Calumny and Art. (camag.freeservers.com)
