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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [108], (1) Lines: 0 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [108], (1) 10 Nicholas Howe A Lover of Stories Nicholas Howe is the son of Irving Howe. He has been professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley since 2002. Formerly he taught at the Ohio State University, the University of Oklahoma, and Rutgers University. The following short piece appeared in the Dissent memorial issue devoted to Irving Howe (Fall 1993). My father moved in a world of stories. He told his own in World of Our Fathers and A Margin of Hope; he wrote about those of Faulkner and Hardy, Anderson andWharton, Dreiser and Sholom Aleichem, Leskov and George Eliot, T. E. Lawrence and Pirandello, Delmore Schwartz and Raymond Carver,Tolstoy and Umberto Saba—the list amazes as much for its diversity as its length. With Ilana, his wife, he collected the shortest of stories, and together they made an anthology—Short Shorts—unlike any ever done: one that could satisfy his belief that very few pieces would not be better if cut by 20 percent. With this love of stories he welcomed my wife, Georgina, into the family, surprised but always delighted to have a novelist for a daughter-in-law. His love of stories, his hope that he might make some sense of the world through them, gives me a way of talking about his complexity and yet also his simplicity as a man and writer. So let me tell you a story about him, a story that helps me understand the wholeness of his life’s work. In the fall of 1986 he came to visit me in Oklahoma, and we took a road trip to the Wichita Mountains, about two hours southwest of Norman, where I then lived. These mountains rise up from a prairie that matches the mind’s-eye view of Oklahoma: flat, dry, windswept, treed with a scattering of cottonwood and blackjack oak. These mountains are part of a wildlife refuge that holds, among other animals, a vast herd of buffalo; in an irony my father found delicious these buffalo descend from a few that had been A Lover of Stories 109 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [109], (2) Lines: 31 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [109], (2) shipped out to Oklahoma in 1905 from the Bronx Zoo. As we sat in the November sun eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, my father talked of the landscape and the way its hard vastness evoked fundamental qualities of American life. If he seemed out of place there, with his city clothes and his New York quickness, the place itself was not alien to him; it had for years been part of his imaginative landscape. After lunch we drove deeper into the Wichitas and visited Holy City, a stage set made from native red granite where the locals put on a passion play each Easter. For the rest of the year the Stations of the Cross stand gaunt and eerie against the blue Oklahoma sky. The story of the place tells of an émigré Austrian pastor who was sent out to tend the souls of Indians and who came to feel, in a moment of hallucinatory loneliness, that the landscape of the Wichitas bore an exact resemblance to that of Judea. Gazing at the scene, savoring its story, smiling at our being together there of all places in the world, my father turned to me and said with wonder: “It’s straight out of Flannery O’Connor.” I never felt closer to him than at that moment, for with that one sentence he gave me the story that would help me live in that alien landscape. It was his way of telling me he understood. As we drove back to Norman that afternoon, we passed through a series of small towns that seemed to be losing their place in the landscape. My father asked the same question as we passed through each of them; it was the question he asked wherever...

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