By Bill Marx

“To sit day after day and write about people maneuvering through this complex world is, in itself, an act of affirmation, even if their stories are sad.”

Readers may be forgiven for thinking of Arts Fuse Senior Contributor Roberta Silman as a novelist rather than a short story writer. She has published five novels, Boundaries (1979), Beginning the World Again (1990), and Summer Lightning (2022) among them. Her first collection of stories, Blood Relations, was published in 1977. Her talent was immediately noticed: it won Honorable Mention for both the PEN Hemingway Prize and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.

Critic Melvin Maddocks praised Silman’s prose in that volume for its astute sense of detail: “The houses people live in, the food they eat, the woods they walk through are so particular, so present. And with the same observant exactness the great joy and suffering are present that come from being attached to places, to things, and above all, to other people.”

Over the decades, Silman has published stories in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other magazines. Now comes a second gathering of stories, Heart-work, and it brings the same “observant exactness” to its looks at the knotty intricacies of domestic life, its crises and celebrations, defeats and victories. I emailed Silman a few questions about the collection. I was interested in how her approach to the short story had changed over the years and the impact of cultural shifts in family life on her writing.

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The Arts Fuse: You have written five novels. This is your second volume of short stories. What’s gratifying to you about the form?

Roberta Silman: What I find gratifying about the form is that you can hold a story in your head. You can see the end, and even if my anticipated end changed in the course of writing a story, and it often did, writing a story seemed a manageable pursuit. I was a young mother when I started writing stories in 1964. At that time, my first child was a toddler, and two more children came in 1966 and 1968. The story seemed a plausible place to start, and it was clear that many writers, especially the women, had started with stories. So had my slightly older contemporaries, Philip Roth and John Updike. Although there are stories that are more resonant than many novels, stories in general have more modest ambitions.

There is also breathing room between stories. I remember getting an idea and writing furiously and neglecting everything but the absolute necessities and then catching up on everything after the story was written. There were also days when I thought I would start on a new story and some family emergency arose; yet, two weeks later, the story was still there, small enough to be still simmering in my brain, waiting to be written.

AF: How and when did you begin?

Silman: At the time I started writing, the advice was: Write what you know. At 30, what I knew was life in a Jewish family in the middle of the 20th century. I also knew about growing up, going to college, falling in love, working at a magazine, which is what I did for several years before I had my first child at 26. And although lots of women at that time were choosing to continue to work and making arrangements for nannies and helpers to bring up their children, I saw staying home with my child as an opportunity to try my hand at fiction. I was also lucky enough to live in London for a year — 1963-1964 — because my engineer husband Robert Silman was invited to work for a great London engineering firm, Ove Arup, so I had that experience under my belt. By the time we came home from England, I was ready to try.

I worked for several years without publishing anything. In 1972, my husband suggested I apply to a new program at Sarah Lawrence, which was an MFA in Writing. Until then, he had been my only reader, and he wisely thought I needed to show my work to other people, besides the editors who were sending me rejections. Encouraging rejections, but still rejections. Grace Paley read my work, and Sarah Lawrence took me on as a graduate student. I worked with Grace and the poet Jane Cooper and got my MFA in 1975.

My first published story appeared in The New Yorker in 1973. It won the National Magazine Award. My first book was my Master’s Thesis, a collection of stories, Blood Relations. But even after I started to write novels, some characters would come to me and, as mysterious as it sounds, I would know immediately that they belonged in a story. Thus, I have always written stories along with the novels. An example is the most recently written story in Heart-work: “Bed and Breakfast.” It came to me during Covid, so I put aside my fifth novel, Summer Lightning, which I was finishing up at that time, and wrote Vera’s story and went back to the novel.

And finally, I must share with you that when I was finishing my MFA with Grace, she and I would talk about the possibility of my writing a novel. Grace said that she thought one could write a novel as a series of stories. Although she did not follow her own advice —  she never wrote a novel — I have lived by her words. To this day, I think of a novel as a series of stories, which then often become scenes. So, for me, the stories — where clarity and precision are paramount — were a way into the novels.

AF: Who were your models?

Silman: My models were Katharine Anne Porter, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty — “Why I Live At the P.O.” is a masterpiece — Elizabeth Bowen and Nadine Gordimer, Willa Cather, as well as Joyce’s Dubliners, D.H. Lawrence — his “Odour of Chrysanthemums” inspired my “Scent of Lilacs” — Frank O’Connor, V.S. Pritchett, and I.B. Singer. After I went to Sarah Lawrence to work with Grace Paley I learned to love Isaac Babel and William Trevor. Over time, Hemingway’s stories have come to mean more and more, and I am especially fond of A Moveable Feast, which is really a collection of stories. And I love The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.

AF: The earliest story here was published in 1977, the latest in 2021. In what way would you say that your approach has changed? You often focus on the alternately gratifying and thorny intricacies of domestic life. But the appearance of Proust and Nabokov in the 2021 tale “Alphabet of Joy” exudes a surreal playfulness.

Silman: Over the years, I have become bolder about inhabiting people who come completely from my imagination. The story “The Alphabet of Joy” is actually a sequel to a story in my first collection, called “Company” which was written in 1975 while I was working with Grace. It was also read years later on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space and on NPR. Both stories have dead writers interacting with Mona, the protagonist. I think “Company” and “Alphabet of Joy” show how important my writer ancestors are to me and illustrate how literature can not only nourish one’s soul, but also help one to survive.

Although I loved being a young mother, bringing up young children can be lonely. I found Mona — or she found me — during that time. At the end of “Company” when Mona imagines talking to Rilke, she is still very lonely. Years later, I realized that I wanted a happy ending for Mona, so after my husband and I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and stayed a few nights at Phantom Ranch, I imagined Mona with Proust and meeting Nabokov. I tried to find a home for this story for a long time. I finally made one last effort and sent it to Sudip Bose at The American Scholar in 2021, and he took it.

And it seems only fair to confess that the image of Nabokov twirling his butterfly net came from real life. When I was at Cornell in the 1950s and Nabokov was teaching there, I used to take long walks in the late afternoon, and I would often see Nabokov out searching for butterflies. He knew me by sight, but I was not his student because my advisor told me to audit his classes rather than take them for credit, “because, you know, Roberta, he doesn’t have a Ph.D.” It seems utterly ridiculous now, but, happily, Nabokov’s lectures are available in book form, and I have read and re-read them over the years. They have probably taught me more about writing than any other written source. And the “playfulness” you refer to in your question comes from Nabokov’s advice that the writer must be an “enchanter.”

In another story in Heart-work called “Mooning After Rembrandt,” I followed Nabokov’s advice and called on my love of Rembrandt. After I read the fabulous novel Rembrandt by Gladys Schmitt, I imagined the character Linc Edelman, who is miserable after his marriage falls apart, talking to Rembrandt. I realized that Lincoln needed Rembrandt as much as Mona needed Proust. More proof that our writers and artists from the past help us to survive.

AF: The characters in Heart-work wrestle with issues of love, forgiveness, nurturing, and mourning — learning how to approach daily life with generosity of spirit. Have modern issues—like work-life balance, social media, or changing gender roles — affected the view of marriage and family dynamics in your stories?

Silman: The world is certainly changing very fast, and our notions of how to negotiate love, marriage, work, and gender are certainly very different from when I grew up in the 1940s and 50s. But I think that if we hold onto our self-respect and respect for others, these challenging changes can be met. I think that these stories I have written, along with my novels, don’t shy away from what is difficult, but, in the end, as I have written about so many of the things I have actually witnessed, I have come to believe that the human spirit may be more resilient than we imagined. And by educating ourselves, we can expand our views of what love means and support and nourish those who choose new paths, like gay marriage or transitioning to a different gender. My long life has taught me that, as a people, we veer towards wanting happiness and contentment for those we care about.

Yet, if we are going to cling to a generosity of spirit, we need to face an important erosion of it right now. One of the most important changes I see since I was young is the way we regard money and those who have it and those who don’t. I am appalled by the inequities in our society and even more by the way people who are poor or of modest means are treated.

This started during the Reagan years when money began to be revered in ways it never had been before. To be a solid member of the middle class was not enough. We made movie stars of people who had hedge funds. We passed Citizens’ United and let money invade our politics. Now we have to get back to a place where people are admired and respected for their intelligence and values and contributions to society, not for their possessions or their ability to make money. In the story “Heart-work” the father, who is based on my father, says to one of his grandchildren, “Money is nothing, a form of barter. Green wampum.” The path we have been following is wrong; there must be more sharing and more equity in our society.

AF: You have said that “believing in love as the connector among human beings is a form of optimism which I have been lucky enough to have as a bastion of my life.” Do you see these tales as carrying messages — infusions of optimism in an increasingly embattled world?

Silman: I don’t think fiction has an obligation to deliver a message, but I think writers call on their lives when they are creating characters and plots and settings. A writer friend long ago told me he wrote to affirm life. I am not sure that most writers have that kind of clear impulse. But to sit day after day and write about people maneuvering through this complex world is, in itself, an act of affirmation, even if their stories are sad.

And it seems to me that the glue is love. To be loved is a great privilege. To love is an even greater privilege. I have had both: First, in a stable childhood, and second, in a long marriage to someone who not only loved me but also encouraged me to follow my dreams from the time we were very young — we met at 17 as freshmen at Cornell. I have been blessed with children and grandchildren and know the pleasures of loving and encouraging them. Although there have been tragedies in my life, as there have been in the lives of many of the characters in these stories, having deep attachments to other people can give you hope.

So, yes, I guess these are infusions of optimism.

AF: What are you working on now, and how does it connect with your earlier work?

Silman: Although my father encouraged me to major in History with an eye towards law school when I went off to college, I soon fell in love with the English Romantic poets and decided to major in English literature. That Romantic foundation may be why I am, by nature, an optimist.

But after college, my interests expanded into world literature, especially Russian lit. Nadezhda Mandelstam memoirs about her husband, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned were very important to me. I actually learned very elementary Russian in the 1990s, and that deepened my interest in the poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, as well as Pasternak and Tsvetaeva. So, my next, and probably last project, is a novel called The Russian Lesson which takes place in the tumultuous years in Russia — 1913 through 1922. It tells the story of a young American journalist in St. Petersburg who thinks she is in love with her young American colleague and actually falls in love with a young Russian. Along the way she interacts with Akhmatova and the parents of the writer Nabokov. The father, V.D Nabokov, was a great statesman and editor and believer in democracy and defender of the Jews, and he and his wife Elena Nabokov serve as the paradigm for a great marriage.

This new project connects with my first novel Boundaries, whose protagonist also loved the Russians. And since some of the characters in it are real people, it also recalls my novel Beginning the World Again, which was also historical and had people like Oppenheimer and Groves and an important fictional character based on Niels Bohr in it.

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Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.