Conversion Stories

By DEBRA SPARK

WRESTLING WITH ANGELS
New and Collected Stories
By John J. Clayton
616 page. Toby Press. $27.95.

“It would please me,” writes John Cheever in the “Preface” to his famous collected stories, “if the order in which these stories are published had been reversed and if I appeared first as an elderly man and not as a young one who was truly shocked to discover that genuinely decorous men and women admitted into their affairs erotic bitterness and greed.” The quote, though it hardly describes how Cheever’s stories do appear, articulates an inevitable fact: volumes of collected stories tell a story apart from all the stories within their pages. They tell of an evolving sensibility, of course, but also of individual transformation. This couldn’t be more distinct in John J. Clayton’s Wrestling With Angels: New and Collected Stories, which includes three short story collections, as well as five uncollected stories, and depicts something like a man’s religious conversion.

Because I am the sort of person who skips the review, if I know I’m going to see the movie, I waited till I’d read all 616 pages of Clayton’s new book before perusing his preface, which speaks of his religious yearnings and Jewish identity. Given this, I had the surprise of reading a volume, published by a press devoted to books of Jewish interest, with, initially, no discernible Jewish content. Indeed, Clayton’s 1984 Bodies of the Rich (which comprises the first third of Wrestling) reminded me of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness with its honest portrayals of melancholy and frustrated desire in mid-century—pre-therapy!—mainstream America. Clayton’s early characters have a certain innocence in the face of manic-depression and divorce, no vocabulary for experiences that are, for them, quite singular. Thus the bewilderment of Peter, in “An Old 3 A.M. Story,” as his juggles his blue-color job and tender evening attentions for his children, while his mentally ill ex-wife lives out her irresponsible fantasies in Manhattan. Clayton’s characters are equally naïve in the face of their pleasures. “New York stunned him,” admits Chris, the protagonist of “Bodies Like Mouths.” As a part-time student at Columbia, Chris boards in an Upper West Side apartment and finds himself enmeshed in the complex and dissolute lives of his fellow boarders and landlords. Meanwhile, he’s entranced by the sensual hum of the city, the swell of love for which he can’t quite find a container. “Love flesh,” he thinks at one point. “He wanted to hold his life, shining, in his hands, and he didn’t know where else to look, how else to sanctify it: breast flesh, leg flesh, curve of hip into thigh.” If the erotic segues into the ineffable in Bodies of the Rich, things have changed by Clayton’s 1998 short story collection, Radiance. There, the desire is for transcendence itself, and Clayton’s characters are more recognizably Jewish. They occasionally mention a prayer or refer to their European history. A Yiddish phrase crops up now and then. Still, there’s nothing overwhelmingly Jewish in these pages, save for the desire for transcendence coupled with a feeling, or wish for a feeling, of oneness with things. In “Open-Heart Surgery,” life comes to the protagonist Ned through his heart—the literal organ—as if there were suddenly no membrane between him and the outside world. This perception makes Ned, in his own mind, perhaps, but certainly in the mind of others, crazy. Also, perhaps more in touch with the truth.

There’s a dilemma, Clayton comes to realize, in one of Radiance’s metafictional stories: “How do I talk about the world that God makes and makes and continues making? Michael invites God into the world; I invite God into a ‘realistic’ story. The form is strained; it wants to see Michael as ‘disturbed.’” Clayton is correct in his analysis of his own work. There is something uncomfortable about his protagonists’ longing for God. It seems vague and, at times, even tiresome to the other characters and, perhaps, at moments, to the reader.

By the final collection, though, Clayton’s characters use Judaism as a container for belief. Apparently, by narrowing their inchoate feelings into a specific tradition, they discover what it is they mean to say, using Jewish thought to explore the interpersonal conflicts that have been in all Clayton’s stories, notably the conflicts between parents and children, and husbands and wives. Into all this, Clayton adds a clearer concern with morality—with right action in the face of social problems—and a clearer concern with grief. The characters in the final book are frequently mourners. They are also often more aware of their particular Jewish history. At the same time, Clayton’s characters are oddly solipsistic in their practice. Though they may have a rabbi or two as friends, they are frequently the only person in their respective households who wants to pray and maintain a religious life. As such the characters remain troubled—searching in their own lives, while downright pushy (and even oblivious) when it comes to how to integrate their spiritual longings with those who don’t believe as they do. In one scene, a newly religious father goes to an upscale party thrown by one of his son’s business partners. Feeling—quite legitimately—repulsed by the excesses of the gathering, the father goes off to daven on a nearby cliff, a reproach to the gathered and an embarrassment to his son. On the one hand, the father has found his belief system. On the other, he has not found the very thing that Clayton’s characters have been searching for all along: a way to speak to their loved ones. In “Voices,” an almost Malmudian tale in which Sam Krassner, a Ph.D. in psychology, debates how best to deal with a possibly suicidal black patient and her murderous husband, Sam acts (it seems) both correctly for his patient and in opposition (always, it seems in opposition) to the needs of those most close to him.

In the end, God is part of Clayton’s family. But that hardly makes things clearer for the believers of this book, since all along Clayton’s characters have been trying to figure out their spouses, children, and parents, to determine how to connect and what is required of them. Clayton’s collection as a whole confirms what the individual pieces convey: the mishpocha is the angel with whom we must wrestle.