A Modern Way to Die

A Modern Way to Die, new and improved, a foreword to the second edition

The texts that comprise A Modern Way to Die, Small Stories and Microtales, first published in 1991, appeared, as noted in the book’s original foreword, in the absence of big things to say […] guided only by the precarious optimism of the pen, before the form had a name. Some two decades into the game I am still guided by the same essential principle. I try not to impose my will, but allow each narrative impulse to carry on for however long it likes, letting each sentence decide where it wants to go. In the beginning, that is to say when drafts of the texts compiled here, most written in the Seventies and Eighties, still huddled untapped in the pages of various notebooks, uncertain of just what they were, knowing that they did not fit in any of the then prescribed modes of verbal expression, I was too embarrassed to show them to anyone. But the words wanted out.

Some people helped along the way. I read one raw narrative nugget aloud to my brother, the sculptor and graphic artist, Harold Wortsman, whose opinion I trust. (He would later pay me the ultimate compliment of giving the book a face, i.e. designing its cover.) The poet and art critic, Jonathan Goodman, an old friend, told me that the shorter texts had a name and a tradition, that they were called prose poems, and that people had been writing them in Europe for more than a century. Then a French friend, Brigitte Ouvry-Vial, at the time a member of the editorial group in charge of assembling the literary journal Semiotext(e), accepted for publication the narrative that would become the title story, A Modern Way to Die, alongside texts by the likes of the Surrealist German writer Unica Zürn, French experimental filmmaker Chris Marker, and the Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman. Other stories subsequently appeared in the marvelous multilingual, Swiss journal 2 Plus 2, along with work by two of my favorite writers, Julio Cortazar and Paul Bowles.

I read at various Downtown venues and received a positive response. And in 1985 a short selection of my tales won the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award.

Around that time, I had been translating short texts from the German by the Austrian modernist Robert Musil, from his last book issued in his lifetime, Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten, my English take, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, published in 1986 by Eridanos Press. My copyeditor for the translation, Thomas Thornton, attended a few of my literary readings. From time to time he would ask if I had found a publisher. No, I replied, my queries having invariably been ignored or rejected. One day he called and asked yet again if I had found a publisher. I told him to stop taunting me, and hung up. But Thomas called back. You don’t understand, he said, I’ve just been named director of the American arm of a German-owned press with an office in New York, Fromm Publishing International, until now devoted to modernist classics in translation. I want to bring out your stories as our first original English language book.

So I hauled out my notebooks, tightened and typed up selected tales, heaped them on the living room floor, sorted them into piles, and assembled the manuscript that would become A Modern Way to Die.

When Thomas asked me to solicit blurbs, I gave him the names of a couple of literary longshots, and two responded, the late Hubert Selby, Jr., of Last Exit to Brooklyn fame, whose laudatory reply is reprinted as a prefatory note to this second edition, and the late prose poet Russell Edson, with whom I began a long correspondence.

Edson wrote: It’s refreshing to come on Peter Wortsman’s pieces. They read like dreams…with the penetrating logic found in dreams. …Most of us are better storytellers at night than in the light of day. But, somehow, Peter Wortsman, in the light of day, seems able to connect the power of the dream narrative to conscious language to create unique works that walk a curious line between fiction and poetry.

And Selby replied: It’s a fantastic book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have never read anything quite like this, but my enjoyment was due to more than just novelty, it was a response to marvelous writing, wonderful craft, and the breath of imagination… It certainly deserves as wide an audience as possible, and I hope it gets what it deserves.

Reviews were mixed, some laudatory, like the one by A. Scott Cardwell in The Boston Phoenix, that concluded: [Wortsman] hangs with the masters. Another by David L. Ulin in The Los Angeles Reader called the collection remarkable for the diversity of material as well as the skill with which it is presented. … Wortsman achieves a level of spontaneity…to which most writers can only aspire. Others tore it to shreds, one suggesting that its paper be better used to make brown paper bags at the supermarket.

But the responses from readers over the years moved me more than I can tell.

Like these words from a student in Florida:

"hello. i have been sitting at this computer looking for any information on the author of A Modern Way to Die, by peter wortsman… i found your name and went to a directory search where i found this address. i am hoping this you… i bought your book last summer when i was in Wyoming from a Barnes and Noble bookseller… i just saw the cover and decided that i should give you a try. i am very glad that i did. over the past year i have read and re-read your book over a dozen times. it is amazing. i was prepared to write some great letter to you, but now that i sit here and stare at this screen with your book in my lap i can only think to say thank you. thank you so much for entertaining me with your writing on bus rides, plane rides, rainy evenings, late at night, during school lectures, among many other times. my copy of your book is worn down on the edges.

Sincerely,

An addicted reader,

Alexandra O.

And the mysterious request from a Capuchin monk in the Philippines:

"Pax et bonum!

"i write you from across the Pacific to inquire if you’re the same person who wrote ‘A Modern Way to Die.’ a friend gave me that book as a gift and it inspired me to write creatively. i had long since lost that precious book to a flood, along with a boxful of other prized tomes. ever since, though, my best efforts at finding a copy at various bookstores have been frustrated.

‘it would be a great consolation for me to discover that i had at least found the author after so long a time. it would even be a greater joy if you can help me find a way to receive another copy of your book, if you are indeed the same Peter.

‘either way, whoever you are, may God bless you!

your little friar in Christ,

Brother Jose

Of course I sent signed copies to both.

It has been wonderful, too, to hear from my peers in a genre now dignified with a name.

Grand flash fiction master Robert Scotellaro wrote:

You are a writer way ahead of the times. A Modern Way to Die would now be considered a tome of ‘flash fiction’ before the term was invented. I’d purchased it many years ago and was impressed with, and even stunned at the possibilities you presented with your stellar works. Satisfying and powerful, it remains a favorite collection.

And my friend and fellow practitioner of note, Pete Cherches, gave this assessment:

This collection of small tales predates the in-vogue term flash fiction, but it’s surely one of the cornerstones of the tradition. With compressed prose where the short story meets the prose poem, Wortsman continues in a vein mined by an internationally diverse cast of authors, including Cortazar, Kafka and Edson.

I’ve since produced a novel and a travel memoir, had a couple of stage plays performed, and published two other books of these short bursts. No genre of writing is half as satisfying. I keep coming back to it as to a first love. It is the fumbling form most closely aligned with the actual contour of dreams.

Peter Wortsman

New York, 2019

Foreword to the first edition

These small stories appeared in the absence of big things to say, propelled nonetheless (like the rubber-band-ice-cream-spoon-powered rain puddle boats of our childhood) by the same urge to move, in miniature; to make waves; to push the world aside and skid across its surface; to get from the mundane suffocating here to the blessed over-there; to strike out, albeit on a limited journey, without map or compass, without destination, guided only by the precarious optimism of the pen.

I. Small Stories

1. SCREAMS

A Modern Way to Die

Once there was a war that no one could see. No bombs exploded. Nobody shrieked. People just dropped dead suddenly. Inexplicably. In the kitchen, in the bedroom, on their weary way home from work. Some said it was heart attack, but too many succumbed to the mysterious affliction for that theory to hold. Others swore it was something in the air: a poison wind from the east, a cosmic inversion.

Though never openly discussed—cloudy weather was the favored euphemism—everyone secretly feared being next, and there were those who went so far as to wish it, just to put an end to the unendurable anxiety. But man has an uncanny ability to adapt and make the best of things.

Children started the game, adults followed suit, and soon everyone was at it, picking out prospective victims from the crowd. The talented few, able to point with a deadly accuracy, earned the epithet golden fingered, and the best of these could command sizable fees to perform in public. Concert halls and stadiums were hired. People flocked to see their favorites.

Prize fingers, as the papers liked to call them, were invariably shorter than their poster effigies, and despite the blindfold (government regulations), they strode confidently straight to centerstage. Some went in for arabesque antics: twists and turns, and Latin incantations—but the truly great worked with sparse gestures in absolute silence.

A raised palm hushed the crowd. The thumb and three fingers bowed, and the forefinger seemed to grow as it swept out over the sea of anxious eyes, drawn like a compass to the next malignant north. Sometimes a scuffle ensued—the way baseball fans struggle for possession of a homerun or a foul ball, only in reverse: nobody wanted to catch it. But the issue rapidly resolved itself (to the wild delight of spectators) with a sudden squirm and a frenetic hiss, like that of air leaving a balloon. Ushers carted off the corpse, and those seated the closest wiped the sweat off their brows and invariably claimed they’d had their eye on him or her from the start.

Of course there were fakes as there are in every art, individuals lacking in any genuine talent who climb the latest bandwagon for fame and fortune. They hide behind a lot of hocus pocus—and rumor had it that certain charlatans stooped so low as to plant hitmen in the audience to discreetly dispose of predesignated targets on cue.

A great favorite, whose reputation is still the subject of some debate, had black eyes and a finger that drove the women wild. Old maids and teenage girls alike swooned at the sight of him.

Ladies! . . . Gentlemen! he whispered, the microphone turned up to capacity, Look your neighbor in the eye! Can you see? Can you tell? Who is going to be next? Married women shivered, husbands studied their wives, even young lovers regarded each other with new interest.

Take me! . . . Take me! cried the most fervent fans, as the drumroll marked the moment.

What followed at one particular performance has become legend. Eyewitnesses swear that a little boy high up in the bleachers broke the shell of silence. Hey, Mister! he cried out, but the master had reached the climax of his act and refused to be disturbed. People tried to still the child. The drumroll swelled, the master’s finger swayed. Mister! the little boy yelled—heads turned in shock and wonder at the child’s audacity—Mister! he