As he was reading over the work to be included in his ”Collected Stories,” Harry Mark Petrakis was understandably tempted to revise a few of the older stories, change a word here, a sentence there, tone down some passages that now seem florid. ”These are stories that were written over a span of 30 years,” he says, ”and I think I`m a tighter writer today, more of a craftsman.”
And yet Petrakis resisted the temptation to rewrite, explaining: ”I`m not the same person at 63 that I was at 33. My vision of life has altered, deepened really; I saw things one way then and I see them radically differently now. I was afraid that once I started changing things, it would become an endless task, so I decided it was best not to open that Pandora`s box. Now it`s as if the stories have been preserved in concrete, errors, flaws and all.”
That doesn`t mean that Petrakis is displeased with the 34 stories in the volume, which gathers the contents of three previous story collections, plus six that have never appeared between hard covers. ”Heaven forgive me,” he says, ”I think they`re good!”
The naturally exuberant Petrakis can easily be forgiven such mild outbursts of hubris, for he has a lot to be immodest about. In the three decades since the publication of his first story, ”Pericles on 31st St.,”
he`s become a natural resource: the country`s premier Greek-American storyteller, whose writing is distinguished for its quiet lyricism and its robust humor. In addition to the four volumes of stories, he`s written seven novels and two works of autobiography, which have brought him numerous prizes. If Petrakis has any regrets about his ”Collected Stories,” the most memorable of which deal with Greek-Americans in his old South Side
neighborhood, their humble triumphs and tragedies, it`s that there are relatively few of them. ”I can`t help but feel some remorse because if I`d been properly disciplined, there`d be more.”
That`s a regret that many readers–those who feel Petrakis` short fiction is his finest work–will share.And like the author, they will have divided emotions about ”Collected Stories,” since it`s likely to be his last collection. Petrakis says he`s all but abandoned the writing of short stories, except for those rare occasions ”when something impels me to return to it, like one returns to the memory of an early love.”
”I began by writing stories,” he says, ”and I love the form. You really have to come to grips with the essence of language the same way a poet does. There`s labor in that, but also a satisfaction. As tight as you try to make it, a novel sprawls, but a short story can be done in a couple of weeks and encompass the totality of experience.”
In recent years, Petrakis has been working, but working ”damn little,”
on a sequel to ”A Dream of Kings,” one of two novels that brought him nominations for National Book Awards. Instead, he`s been devoting much of his time to a ”commissioned biography” of industrialist Henry Crown, which may not be as emotionally gratifying as fiction but, unlike short stories, it helps pay the bills.
It isn`t that there aren`t a lot of outlets for short fiction these days, Petrakis says; it`s just that they pay little, if anything, for them. ”For a professional freelancer, who has to live off the money he earns for his work, these aren`t plausible markets. Also, when you write a story it`s got to be sent out to magazines, and it may take months or years before it`s accepted. So you tend to allocate your time to the novel, where you have a contract.”
When he received a finished copy of his ”Collected Stories,” whose black jacket bears a spare but striking image of him in white ink, Petrakis says he sat down and read them all again. ”They brought back to me the fragments of experience from which the stories originated, and I was, I confess, intemperately moved by them, as I recaptured those aspects of my life. There`s a durability to the book, a sense in some way of cultivating a garden that`s beyond the reaches of your own death.”
