Foreword

Abstract

FOREWORD The stories in this issue represent major new talent in fiction. David Schanker's "Real Estate in New Jersey" is a fresh and beautifully weird story in a voice reminiscent of Kafka's. Gerald Duff takes us on a night-hunting tale in the back country of Texas; Patrick McGrath anatomizes a bizarre crime in the England of the 1930s; and Margaret Kaufman's "Ruby's Gift" visits a little town in Arkansas, where a child learns an invaluable lesson from a distant aunt. Catherine Dai's "The Fox Fairy at the FRA" concerns a few moments in the lives of three people in a bar in Taiwan, in which an oddly intimate social encounter implies a larger story. In her interview of Kent Nelson, Susan Robertson talks with one of America's best short-story writers. Sharman Russell's memoir-essay "The Mimbres" describes what it is like to live beside a mean river in the desert. The poems by Andrew Hudgins are from his new book After the Lost War. Spoken in the voice of the poet Sidney Lanier who soldiered for the South during the Civil War, these dramatic monologues focus on a few splendid moments of reflection in a life fraught with tragic, humbling events. Along with the title sequence from Saints and Strangers, Hudgins' first book and runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, these poems are among the most exciting pieces ever published by the Missouri Review. This issue's Found Texts are the letters of Sinclair Lewis to his first wife Grace Hegger Lewis, here published for the first time. Readers of Main Street, Arrowsmith, or Elmer Gantry are sometimes surprised to learn how formidable a character their author was. He wasn't just a prolific writer but a compelling personality as well. In fact, if one had to choose one American novelist to suggest for the Hall of Impressive Literary Personalities, Lewis might well be the one. There has never been an American author of any kind who succeeded so grandly on so many fronts. His work habits were enviably regular. He almost never left a project unfinished. His approach to writing was systematic to an extraordinary degree (he drew floor plans of his characters' houses, complete with lists of furnishings, whether the novel used the house or not). He was adventurous in seeking out new subjects—the New Woman, small town life, scientific research, doctors, and preachers were only a few of the subjects he wrote about. Lewis was offered the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith; and he was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize. In sale of books he was the most popular novelist by a long shot in the decade of the twenties; quite aside from his fiction he was capable of a stunning personality—witty, inventive, on occasions wildly entertaining. One of many anecdotes about him tells of how one evening at a party at Curtis Brown's house Lewis extemporaneously delivered a long, remarkably good, blank-verse "Saga of the American West." The descriptions of Lewis give the impression that he was like Robin Williams, with an unbridled capacity for mimicry and nervous, leaping mental energy. He sometimes went overboard, hopping from one thing to another almost with Tourette's Syndromelike compulsiveness. Margaret Anderson described him as "a man condemned to perpetual vitality." A man is not a list of accomplishments, of course, and Mark Shorer's biography of the great Realist demonstrates that Lewis's problems were almost as large as his accomplishments. Alcoholism haunted him, nearly killing him soon after he received the Nobel Prize. According to many observers, the effect of alcohol on Lewis was toxic to an unusual degree. When he hit the bottle too regularly he became so obnoxious that at one point he was even barred from the 21 Club, despite his Nobel Prize. Lewis had a tremendous urge to play the role of an "operator." Much of his self-promotionalism was of the mundane and often pitiable variety—desperately bragging on himself or losing control when someone didn't seem to understand how important he was— but he also undertook grand coups, sometimes without success. His refusal of the...