I’ve interviewed Elizabeth McCracken before about her story collection, The Souvenir Museum, on the Book Public podcast.
But I’m focusing on this latest episode of the podcast on one story from that book—"Birdsong from the Radio."
I love all genres of literature, of course, but the short story is a form that I return to again and again. Sometimes the allure for me is that stories say what we sometimes just cannot find the words for.
We don’t have language for the worst things that happen to us or for the uncanny or even for beauty.
Stories help us say the unsayable.
Scholar Charles E. May reminds us in his essay “The Birth of the Modern Short Story,” that short stories “originated with the human need to narrate the perception of the spiritual eruptions in the midst of the profane everyday world.”
Iona, in Anton Chekhov’s story “Misery,” feels the primal need to vent his grief—the fact that his son has died. He is cut off in mid-sentence or else a listener changes the subject.
In the end, Iona sits in a stable with his little mare and asks her to imagine her little colt perishing, asks her to sympathize with his tragedy. The horse breathes into his hand. What has she said back to him? What else does he say in her ear? It is the story itself that says the unsayable.
In Elizabeth McCracken’s short story “Birdsong from the Radio,” when Leonora’s three children die in an auto accident, she turned into an animal. Writes McCracken, “Not everyone who stops being human turns animal, but Leonora did.”
In an interview, McCracken cited the Greek myth of Lamia as one inspiration for this story.
Lamia was a Libyan queen who fell in love with Zeus. She incurred Hera’s wrath each time she gave birth to a child. Hera either murdered the baby or made Lamia kill the baby herself. Lamia begins stealing babies from other mothers and eats them. Her unequaled wickedness disfigures her face. She becomes a child-eating monster.
What is also arguably monstrous is the inability of those around Leonora to help her through earlier episodes of obvious mental distress that caused her to be impulsive enough to “eat” her children, to bite them, to nuzzle and bite them and to take her children out tobogganing on frigid winter days without coats or gloves.
Instead, the neighbors were quick to simply say that “she never took care of her children.”
Not only was she aggressive in showing her ardor for her children, nipping at them, hugging them too tightly and doting on them without good judgment to help her see to their well-being, but they could hear her “shriek from all the windows of the house.”
Neighbors perceived a problem with Leonora, recalling a family history that included a great grandfather in an asylum and an aunt who committed suicide. They surmise that this family story finally had “Leonora’s chapter.”
She eschews the doctors' pills and treatments and keeps eating her children, biting them and pawing at them, until “they were afraid of her.”
Their father, Leonora’s husband, Alan, must make the painful decision to take the children and move away from Leonora.
He makes sure she has her disability checks and says they will return if she agrees to get help.
A nanny hired by Alan, a “good girl” who made a bad choice on her twenty-first birthday, still drunk from a night of celebrating, drives the children home from school one day, and they all die in a car accident.
What follows is the continuing metamorphosis of Leonora into a kind of animalistic creature. McCracken describes the way the “top of her back grew humped with ursine fat, and she shambled like that, too, bearlike through the aisles of the grocery store at the end of the street." She was “panda-eyed,” “eagle-toed” and “lion tailed.”
This is the Kafkaesque transformation that helps us understand and give a voice—an entire story—to what is “unsayable.”
Even while it seems to pull at our sense of reality, the absurdity and scale of such a loss is reality.
The precursors of the short story are based on mythology and folklore. The rejection of reality we see in a story like this one is precisely what myths are based on.
“Birdsong from the Radio” holds this fact. There is a timelessness about it and a goading sense of a suppressed lexicon for what is too horrible and unthinkable to say or communicate.
In short stories, characters are motivated by something they simply cannot articulate and that those around them, like Leonora’s neighbors and well-meaning spouse, simply cannot understand. Charles E. May reminds us that "the obsessional defense is a common characterization we see in short stories."
We see the reality and the truth of a situation, even if it is not explained.
Leonora loves her children so much that she cannot do more than say she wants to eat them. Leonora is also so devastated by their deaths that she turns into an animal, one that, like Lamia, continues to devour, if not children, then the life-giving symbol of bread. In the case of this story, she eats the golden knobs of a braided challah, saying the name of each dead child as she does so.
When Leonora had been at her most agitated, the children slept in the same bed together, believing that they could fend off their mother who might “at any moment … spread her arms and pull them from the sheets through the ceiling and into the sky, the better to harm them elsewhere.”
Alan implores Leonora to go back to bed, to “listen to the radio and fall asleep.” Alan adds “You never need be lonely with a radio!”
For the children, however, the radio was something where you could listen to “grown-ups” talking, but they did not listen back.
It seems a proper symbol for a story like this where the children have no way to articulate what exactly is wrong with their mother. There are radios in every room. The specter of the insensible “grown up” is there, too, but it doesn’t just present a menace to the children, but also to Leonora.
After the children have left, she distracts herself with the radio. She “intended to get herself upright and go looking for them.” She goes into every room of the house and turns on every radio, “but then she thought she could hear … the voices of her children.”
The problem was that “she could never tune them in clearly, and slowly the noise behind the newscast turned feral, howling, chirping, shrieking: a forest empty of children.” That is when her own reality sets in: “Then she knew they were gone.”
Even after she turns off the radio, turns the knobs as far as they will go, disconnects the radio from the outlet on the wall or “knocked the batteries from the backs” of them, she could still hear “the voices of strangers,” a “burble,” or “someone muttering.”
She emerges from the bed as an animal believing that she is dead and is “operated by animals.”
She heads to the bakery to eat her children, to bring them back to life in this way, recalling the children, yeasty, warm, and sweet.
Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” that “What story does is to show us how to deal with all that which we cannot understand.”
If we fail to comprehend Leonora or her tragedies, the story remains for us as an unarticulated truth about a resonant reality.
Other elements can remain realistic, objects of verisimilitude that can concretize details or formalize a structure in a story, help us see and begin to understand what isn't even directly articulated.
Once at the bakery, a teenager who has waited on Leonora before “started angling the loaf” into the bag as she asked for it. Even when she says she does not need the bag, “he handed it self-consciously across the counter.”
The small detail of compassion, or at least the rules of the give-and-take of everyday life, ground us in the real world where Leonora eats the bread but “not like an animal.” She eats it “knob by knob” and so slowly, it takes her four hours.
Other children in the bakery say hello from a distance, but Leonora does not want to eat them, even if she would not mind a “nibble, a kiss, in the old way.”
Five years later, the father of the nanny who perished with the children appears at the bakery. He wants Leonora to be “redeemed.”
She tells him it is “too late” and that her “Soul’s gone.”
Here is Iona’s horse who knows but doesn’t know. Who can imagine but has no idea. The man can sympathize, as he has lost someone, a child, too.
But Leonora is not ready to “transcend” as “some people could.” More than anything she feels "thankful to remember that she was a monster” because that is how she has existed in the world where she lives.
Joy Williams has said that she far prefers the short story to the novel. The writer of the story can “transmute and disturb” not explain. The writer “loves the dark … cherishes the mystery.” Stories are a moment in time, perceived as myths. We do not need to know why Bartleby prefers not to.
We do not need to know what else Iona said in the horse’s ear as she munched on her hay. We do not need to know why a woman wants to eat her babies—only that she cannot ever live without that yearning.
"Birdsong from the Radio" can be found in the story collection, "The Souvenir Museum" by Elizabeth McCracken.
