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Helping
Limited edition of this short story, one of only 100 copies signed by Stone, hand set in Centaur type and printed letterpress on Rives BFK paper at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. Bound in Japanese decorated paper covered boards, with slipcase.
- GenresShort Stories
40 pages, Hardcover
First published June 8, 1987
41 people want to read
About the author
Robert Stone
30 books250 followersROBERT STONE was the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.
His work was typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.
A lifelong adventurer who in his 20s befriended Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and what he called ‘‘all those crazies’’ of the counterculture, Mr. Stone had a fateful affinity for outsiders, especially those who brought hard times on themselves. Starting with the 1966 novel ‘‘A Hall of Mirrors,’’ Mr. Stone set his stories everywhere from the American South to the Far East. He was a master of making art out of his character’s follies, whether the adulterous teacher in ‘‘Death of the Black-Haired Girl,’’ the fraudulent seafarer in ‘‘Outerbridge Reach,’’ or the besieged journalist in ‘‘Dog Soldiers,’’ winner of the National Book Award in 1975.
His work was typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.
A lifelong adventurer who in his 20s befriended Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and what he called ‘‘all those crazies’’ of the counterculture, Mr. Stone had a fateful affinity for outsiders, especially those who brought hard times on themselves. Starting with the 1966 novel ‘‘A Hall of Mirrors,’’ Mr. Stone set his stories everywhere from the American South to the Far East. He was a master of making art out of his character’s follies, whether the adulterous teacher in ‘‘Death of the Black-Haired Girl,’’ the fraudulent seafarer in ‘‘Outerbridge Reach,’’ or the besieged journalist in ‘‘Dog Soldiers,’’ winner of the National Book Award in 1975.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 12, 2025
Helping is one of the short stories from Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winner...
10 out of 10
This reader has been exhilarated by the magnificent A Flag for Sunrise http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/02/a... and before that by the equally fabulous Dog Soldiers http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/03/d... and thus he had been expecting much from the collection of short stories Bear and His Daughter, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and the tales are mesmerizing indeed, contrary to the rule of ‘lower your expectations’
Helping – this tale has Chas Elliot at the center, a Vietnam War veteran that had been badly affected by his experiences there and we could say that the situation is made worse in the ‘present of the narrative’ by the fact that he has to deal with negative people and their traumatic (if sometimes invented) stories…the positive, happy people have all the advantages, such as they live longer, have more successful private and professional lives (the list is much longer), but there are jobs that require negativity, or that comes with the assignment, such as lawyers, detectives, traffic controllers, financial analysts (indeed, the legal profession has the highest rates of divorce, depression and suicide in America)
Chas Elliot has a man sent to him by ‘shrinks’ (they do not like it when he calls them that) and Blankenship will pour his venom and negativity onto his social services man to the extent that Elliot will soon become a case himself and he comes close to disaster, after hearing Blankenship lie about his dreams of Vietnam…as the main character keeps saying, Blankenship had never been to Vietnam, he comes from a family of ‘strolling litigants’, people who ‘slip off ice cubes’ and who go on to extort and what they cannot extort, they steal…
As a consequence of this interaction, but mostly because he had been so traumatized in Vietnam, the eighteen months of sobriety and the adherence to Alcoholic Anonymous are abruptly ended and Chas Elliot goes on a bend, drinking and making his wife, Grace get drunk as well (he does not ask, push or say anything to that effect, but when she sees him drinking, she knows the danger is imminent and deadly, he can easily get in jail and do something terminal) indeed, Grace had had a case in court, involving a three year old, with broken fingers, who has a biker parent and a fat mother, both abusing him and pretending he is some evil entity…the boy will die, Grace is convinced of that, and when the father calls to insult, threaten that he will come and make ‘the bitch’ pay, Elliot takes the shotgun and it looks like there will be a bloody confrontation with the monstrous father and his fellow bikers…
Miserere as the name suggests (Miserere is a psalm in which mercy is sought) has religion at the core, and Mary Urquhart is more than a believer, for some (perhaps including the priest she deals with) she is a fanatic, a zealot, who used to be an alcoholic and now she is helping the poor in New Jersey and has found meaning, probably as a result of an epiphany of sorts, in the life dedicated to others…
She is called on the phone by a friend, and also a strong believer in the precepts of God, with little room for interpretation and tolerance for abortion say, Camille Innaurato, who has a terrifying scene waiting for Mary, namely four fetuses, with unseparated fingers, and one had a dace ‘which looked like a Florida manatee’s’…the information had been passed by Camille’s brother, who works with the police, and they come from one of the abortion clinics that do not have their own incinerators and end with a company handling medical waste…
Father Frank Hooke is called, but he has more than qualms about this, he had mentioned before he does not think it is legal and correct and now he is again voicing his concerns and when the women arrive (after driving there and Mary reciting…poems on the way, including from Blake) he states that he thinks the women that have abortions have that right and they are wrong, especially Mary with her proselytizing campaigns, the crusades in which she talks to the pregnant women (she had had success, and after such sessions, some of those would go on and end their pregnancies at the appropriate end of term)
Father Hooke has a strong, crucial and definitive point in the mind of this viewer, when he asks a rhetorical question – do you think that the neighborhoods you know need another one million unwanted black children…he did not mention only black, I guess, but I forgot what else he included in that speech – and indeed, it is something that had been indicated before, and the Monty Python sketch comes to mind, in which Terry Jones is the mother of about ninety-seven children, a hyperbole evidently, and they keep coming, though there is no space for them and clearly this is not something to contemplate…
Mary on the other hand had had her share of tragedy and apocalyptic disaster, for her three children had drowned while skating on the lake and though their father had gathered them all around in the freezing water and screamed out for help, people who heard it thought it is a joke and then they would be found all clustered together…this calamity had clearly had a devastating impact on the woman that finds meaning in helping others, and those poor babies aka fetuses get redemption (in her belief, as a ‘freethinker’ I do not share her conviction)
She lambasts the priest and becomes insulting and mean, calling him a ‘worthless pussy’ and telling him that ‘he is afraid to become the nice, little homosexual’ and this unfortunately shows the vile side of the woman…yes, we can see she had been traumatized and she is infuriated that the priest refuses to give the fetuses the last rites or whatever they would be called in a case where they had died before seeing a priest, and this would condemn them to eternal limbo, deny them paradise, in the view of the bigot…
They walk away and then she calls a priest from Central Europe, who is described in terms that remind me of the clergy here (we are after all close to Central, indeed, we sometimes think or wish we were that and not Balkan, or just East European) first off, the head of the church, who is an obnoxious, satanic really, if we consider his acts, figure who drives in a Maybach (I mean this is the ultimate proof of devil worship, to live in a rather poor country and enjoy opulence, he could at least use a hugely expensive Mercedes, and not opt for the limousine fit for a tycoon, considering these are money collected by people who struggle to make ends meet, most of them) and then priests I met at various funerals and then services that are required six weeks, three months and then forever, after the death of a relative…not that I believe in that, but they require me to pay for it, or else be damned as a renegade son…
10 out of 10
This reader has been exhilarated by the magnificent A Flag for Sunrise http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/02/a... and before that by the equally fabulous Dog Soldiers http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/03/d... and thus he had been expecting much from the collection of short stories Bear and His Daughter, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and the tales are mesmerizing indeed, contrary to the rule of ‘lower your expectations’
Helping – this tale has Chas Elliot at the center, a Vietnam War veteran that had been badly affected by his experiences there and we could say that the situation is made worse in the ‘present of the narrative’ by the fact that he has to deal with negative people and their traumatic (if sometimes invented) stories…the positive, happy people have all the advantages, such as they live longer, have more successful private and professional lives (the list is much longer), but there are jobs that require negativity, or that comes with the assignment, such as lawyers, detectives, traffic controllers, financial analysts (indeed, the legal profession has the highest rates of divorce, depression and suicide in America)
Chas Elliot has a man sent to him by ‘shrinks’ (they do not like it when he calls them that) and Blankenship will pour his venom and negativity onto his social services man to the extent that Elliot will soon become a case himself and he comes close to disaster, after hearing Blankenship lie about his dreams of Vietnam…as the main character keeps saying, Blankenship had never been to Vietnam, he comes from a family of ‘strolling litigants’, people who ‘slip off ice cubes’ and who go on to extort and what they cannot extort, they steal…
As a consequence of this interaction, but mostly because he had been so traumatized in Vietnam, the eighteen months of sobriety and the adherence to Alcoholic Anonymous are abruptly ended and Chas Elliot goes on a bend, drinking and making his wife, Grace get drunk as well (he does not ask, push or say anything to that effect, but when she sees him drinking, she knows the danger is imminent and deadly, he can easily get in jail and do something terminal) indeed, Grace had had a case in court, involving a three year old, with broken fingers, who has a biker parent and a fat mother, both abusing him and pretending he is some evil entity…the boy will die, Grace is convinced of that, and when the father calls to insult, threaten that he will come and make ‘the bitch’ pay, Elliot takes the shotgun and it looks like there will be a bloody confrontation with the monstrous father and his fellow bikers…
Miserere as the name suggests (Miserere is a psalm in which mercy is sought) has religion at the core, and Mary Urquhart is more than a believer, for some (perhaps including the priest she deals with) she is a fanatic, a zealot, who used to be an alcoholic and now she is helping the poor in New Jersey and has found meaning, probably as a result of an epiphany of sorts, in the life dedicated to others…
She is called on the phone by a friend, and also a strong believer in the precepts of God, with little room for interpretation and tolerance for abortion say, Camille Innaurato, who has a terrifying scene waiting for Mary, namely four fetuses, with unseparated fingers, and one had a dace ‘which looked like a Florida manatee’s’…the information had been passed by Camille’s brother, who works with the police, and they come from one of the abortion clinics that do not have their own incinerators and end with a company handling medical waste…
Father Frank Hooke is called, but he has more than qualms about this, he had mentioned before he does not think it is legal and correct and now he is again voicing his concerns and when the women arrive (after driving there and Mary reciting…poems on the way, including from Blake) he states that he thinks the women that have abortions have that right and they are wrong, especially Mary with her proselytizing campaigns, the crusades in which she talks to the pregnant women (she had had success, and after such sessions, some of those would go on and end their pregnancies at the appropriate end of term)
Father Hooke has a strong, crucial and definitive point in the mind of this viewer, when he asks a rhetorical question – do you think that the neighborhoods you know need another one million unwanted black children…he did not mention only black, I guess, but I forgot what else he included in that speech – and indeed, it is something that had been indicated before, and the Monty Python sketch comes to mind, in which Terry Jones is the mother of about ninety-seven children, a hyperbole evidently, and they keep coming, though there is no space for them and clearly this is not something to contemplate…
Mary on the other hand had had her share of tragedy and apocalyptic disaster, for her three children had drowned while skating on the lake and though their father had gathered them all around in the freezing water and screamed out for help, people who heard it thought it is a joke and then they would be found all clustered together…this calamity had clearly had a devastating impact on the woman that finds meaning in helping others, and those poor babies aka fetuses get redemption (in her belief, as a ‘freethinker’ I do not share her conviction)
She lambasts the priest and becomes insulting and mean, calling him a ‘worthless pussy’ and telling him that ‘he is afraid to become the nice, little homosexual’ and this unfortunately shows the vile side of the woman…yes, we can see she had been traumatized and she is infuriated that the priest refuses to give the fetuses the last rites or whatever they would be called in a case where they had died before seeing a priest, and this would condemn them to eternal limbo, deny them paradise, in the view of the bigot…
They walk away and then she calls a priest from Central Europe, who is described in terms that remind me of the clergy here (we are after all close to Central, indeed, we sometimes think or wish we were that and not Balkan, or just East European) first off, the head of the church, who is an obnoxious, satanic really, if we consider his acts, figure who drives in a Maybach (I mean this is the ultimate proof of devil worship, to live in a rather poor country and enjoy opulence, he could at least use a hugely expensive Mercedes, and not opt for the limousine fit for a tycoon, considering these are money collected by people who struggle to make ends meet, most of them) and then priests I met at various funerals and then services that are required six weeks, three months and then forever, after the death of a relative…not that I believe in that, but they require me to pay for it, or else be damned as a renegade son…
December 10, 2020
Charles "Chas" Elliot, a Vietnam war veteran, who has been sober for fifteen months, and doing his best to maintain has a session with a patient named Blankenship who is a thief, liar, and leech, and this meeting causes a triggered response and Elliot finds himself longing for a drink. What happens next is a measured struggle against himself and the world around him.
January 30, 2025
Okay. Short story. But so good. Wanted to recommend it all to you. Also I set my Goodreads challenge too high.
March 4, 2015
I really liked the language and the style. This story was a bit "out of time and out of syntax", with the fantastic element of borrowing someone's dream, drinking addiction and mesmerising mix of emotions all in all.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews