Kyle Minor Studies “A Field Guide…”

Kyle Minor won honorable mention for both fiction and poetry in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly competition, and second place for nonfiction in the 2004 contest. He’s currently working on a memoir, a novel, and a book-length poem, excerpts from all of which have turned up in journals such as Quarterly West, Mid-American Review, River Teeth, and the McSweeney’s website. All this before he’s even completed the M.F.A. program at Ohio State… In this contribution to our ongoing series of essays by short story writers, Kyle takes a close look at one of his favorites: Wallace Stegner’s “”A Field Guide to the Western Birds,” which can be found in Stegner’s Collected Stories.

I love bombast. Fireworks. Language that walks the tightrope while cannon fire fills the air all around. Barry Hannah, Jonathan Lethem, Cormac McCarthy. That sort of thing. Dazzle. Energy. Power.

But there are other kinds of power. I’ve lately been reading again through Andre Dubus, Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, Wallace Stegner. Our contemplatives. I could throw out some words, capital-A Abstractions like Dignity, Gravity, Transcendence. Words we use when we try to approximate the readerly sensation that begins faintly at the tips of our toes or in the burnings of the soft cartilage of our ears, and moves slowly toward the center of our bodies, building in intensity, building to the crescendo of the newly aching heart, the loosened tear ducts, the head bowed under the weight of the terrible knowledge that what is complicated is also true.

I’m most taken with Wallace Stegner’s long story “A Field Guide to the Western Birds,” the story that introduces us to retired literary agent Joe Allston, narrator of many of Stegner’s finer novels, including The Spectator Bird.

“The memoirs are what made a birdwatcher out of Joseph Allston,” our narrator writes about himself. But make no mistake. This is no story about birds, nor is it about writing memoirs. It’s about, instead, an aspiring concert pianist and his would-be patron, and the frauds they inflict upon one another (and, in the process, upon all those, like Joe Allston, who have been summoned to attend their little psychodrama of a tryout concert party). Allston is both participant and observer, but it is the latter role that really suits him.

He’s a little cranky about it, though. No one can know the mind of the other. Allston spends his days trying to figure out the mysteries of the birds and his evenings trying to figure out the deeper mysteries of the people around him. Their “beagle-running, rabbit-chasing, patio-building, barbecueing . . .”

He contemplates the lies he has seen the concert pianist perpetrate this very evening: “Why would he? What made him? Was he lying at first, lying later, or lying all the time? And what is more important to me just then, where in God’s name does he belong?”

Of course there is no good answer. Not for concert pianists or their patrons or Joe Allston or you or me. It’s almost time for bed. He faces his wife of forty years. “I don’t know whether I’m tired, or sad, or confused,” he says. “Or maybe just irritated that they don’t give you enough time in a single life to figure anything out.”

Not much happens in the story. Just one little incident dropped into the middle. Stegner starts slow, with the birds, and builds to an anticlimax that is completely interior and utterly incomplete. Some uncharitable soul might call it a sittin’-and-thinkin’ story.

But how else do we make heads or tails of the world around us? We sit. We think. We watch the birds. We allow ourselves to go down into the deep places, the parts of our own selves we barely understand, the places where memory lives. Then we press on those memories, hard, and compare our experiences to our other experiences, compare the people we know to ourselves.

And then what do we know? Well, one thing, maybe. We can’t know. But perhaps we can find some assurance, then, in being. Or, more likely, one part assurance, one part doubt. The calm lives alongside the anxiety; the good times are never far removed from the trouble. And maybe it’s all right. Or, at least, it is what it is. Or, at least, it is.

See how the abstractions begin to break down? “A Field Guide to the Western Birds” is not reducible to plot summary, synopsis, theme, and so on. It is that best kind of art that must be taken whole for what meaning can be found within. I promise you this: It will break your heart.

6 February 2006 | selling shorts |