Writing Can Be a Daunting Business: The Life and Career of Martha Foley -- Garbo

 

Martha Foley did at least two amazing things in her life. One was to co-found and co-edit Story magazine with her then-husband Whit Burnett.

 Story and the people who wrote for it has enough cultural history to fill a two-volume book -- make that three volumes -- but today I'm focusing on the other big accomplishment in Martha Foley's life. For 35 years (or 37 years according to another source) Foley edited a short-story anthology called The Best American Short Stories. (This annual publication from Houghton Mifflin is not the same thing as the Prize Stories volumes from each year the O. Henry awards are given out. I'll have a post about this other set of story anthologies another time. )

While looking up stuff about Martha Foley, I found a very touching 1979 tribute to Martha Foley, by writer Jay Neugeboren. The article ran in the New Yorker, and you can read it online by going HERE. I found out that Foley had started out in the 1920s and 1930s working for newspapers in the U.S. and abroad; she wrote for The Times of London as well as the Paris Herald. 

I was also charmed by this passage in Neugeboren's tribute:

"...among old clothes and rags, letters, bills, lamps, dishes, pieces of a telephone, cameras, photographs, we found several unpublished manuscripts: a novel (Martha had written many prize‐winning and widely anthologized stories herself ), a completed draft of a book on the craft of writing..." 

Jay Neugeboren. a year after the New Yorker profile appeared, published Foley uncompleted memoir, using her title, with an introduction and afterword. I just ordered a used copy from eBay. 

 

I hope the rest of the unearthed papers, along with the three dozen cartons of index card notes Foley had written out about the stories she'd read and judged, are in some university's holdings where biographers or inspired manuscript-finishers might find them. I was intrigued by the apartment-contents listing "pieces of a telephone," by the way. This was in 1977, so I'm wondering if a rotary dial and a curly handset cord were involved.

The New Yorker profile gives us a little bit of Foley's process in deciding what made it into a volume of The Best American Short Stories: 

  Although Houghton Mifflin had reduced the annual number of stories to 20 (instead of the 30 reprinted in the 40's and 50's), she always wound up with at least 100 stories she wanted to use. “I put the 100 stories in a pile on a table and I suffer over them,” she said. “I do the best I can, but I'd hate to argue a case against those I reject."

Jay Neugeboren is sad in his writing about the end of Martha Foley's life. She'd been his champion, teacher, and mentor, and he felt she deserved more than to be living in two rooms at the age of eighty, short on money and friends. But when you're eighty, you've often outlived most or all of your family and friends, and those who are left are preoccupied with their own concerns. Foley didn't finish her memoir or some of her other manuscripts, because she used her time to help other writers instead. At the same time, she did write and publish, fiction and nonfiction. And at the end of her life, Martha Foley did have help with tasks, from typing to helping with cleaning and doing errands by car.

While roaming the internet, I read another good article about Foley. It is on the website Open Library.  That's where I found the picture at the top of this post. The Open Library biography focuses much more about Foley's work than on her life, so it's a good balance with the New Yorker piece.

One last fun fact about Martha Foley: She gave us the word "novella," which she created as an alternative to "novelette," a word she disliked.

Research for these blog posts is something I enjoy, and one reason is that I really, really love my local public library. It's wonderful that there's a link between all the libraries in my state. Interlibrary Loan used to be a complex thing, and not popular with all libraries, but here in Maine there are city libraries, a small town libraries, and college libraries, and various other ones as well. It's so handy that I can use a website to see what I can borrow, as long as I'm willing to wait a bit for it to come by truck to my city.

Happily, I was able to go to the front desk and pick up the 1947 edition of The Best American Short Stories. Martha Foley dedicated this volume "To the Editors of the 'Little Magazines' of America."

Other readers must have agreed with me over the decades. Look at all the date stamps !

 

If your library system doesn't keep older books on the shelf, you can find some volumes of The Best American Short Stories over at Internet Archive

I'd written the title of this post before I came across this Encyclopedia.com entry about Foley. Here's a bit about Foley and Burnett's early years: 

Foley had recognized a need for a magazine devoted to short stories, and in the spring of 1931 she and Burnett published the first issue of Story magazine. The couple made no profit on the 167 mimeographed copies but were undaunted; their magazine was a literary "crusade" more than a business venture.

They were "undaunted." I like that.