I have steadily been reading neglected wafer-thin books since the start of this year’s reading group, but I have been remiss in posting about them. In January, I wrote about John P. Marquand’s minor 1945 novel, Repent in Haste, in the perspective of two other slim books, Philip Hamburger’s John P. Marquand, Esq. and George W. S. Trow’s In the Context of No Context, on Neglected Books: Link. I also began to read my way through John O’Hara’s novellas, a project still underway that I will write about later. But before February becomes a distant memory, let me catch up on the best of that month’s neglected slivers.
The Sun Beats Down: A Novella of the Cuban Revolution by Humberto Arenal, translated by Joseph M Bernstein (Hill and Wang, 1959, 96 pages)
A frustrated group of young people decides to signal their contempt for Bautista’s dictatorship by kidnapping Kid Mexico, a champion boxer who’s come to Havana to fight a Cuban favorite. Arenal, who spent a decade as a reporter in New York City before returning to support Castro, writes in a blunt, telegraphic style that moves the action along at the speed of an 85-minute film noir.
He based the story on the actual kidnapping of the race car driver Juan Manuel Fangio shortly before the Gran Premio race in February 1958. It reminded me of the intensity and violence of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s bullet-sized history of Cuba, View of Dawn in the Tropics. This is Arenal’s only novel yet translated into English.
Be-Bop, Re-Bop by Xam Wilson Cartiér (Ballantine, 1987, 147 pages)
In prose that hums with the energy of a hot jazz solo, Cartiér’s unnamed narrator takes us through three episodes in her life. Her father, Double, loses his job as a postal clerk and dies of a heart attack and the girl finds herself in the line of fire as her mother, Vole, vents her anger over his failures. Then, as a young married woman, she wonders whether it’s her husband or the inertia of her St. Louis neighborhood that is making her feel trapped. And finally, separated and living with her own daughter in San Francisco, she deals with loneliness and poverty–but also the intimidating feeling of independence and inadequacy:
Aw, don’t be paranoid, I think at the time; yet aren’t we all so paranoid now that the only real transition between our passages, the only continuity between our panicky personal paragraphs is polymer paranoia-splice glue that pastes our puzzle pieces into a collective point of view. Paranoia’s our only plot line, and it eats away out theme of existence through random corrosion, a built-in deficiency.
A vibrant, experimental, and woefully neglected novel.
A Dragon’s Life by Walker Hamilton (Gollancz, 1970, 128 pages)
Walker Hamilton’s first novel, All the Little Animals, gained critical acclaim for its story of an itinerant young man with mental challenges, and Hamilton’s own love of walking and hitch-hiking shows here, too. A poor, aging stage actor, having been rejected for the part of a cartoon dragon in an advertising campaign, walks out wearing the dragon costume and proceeds to spend the next few days wandering through the dreariest parts of the suburbs and countryside around London. He takes to calling himself Samson Swanlord, fails to impress a band of young boys, falls victim to a robber in even direr straits than himself. It’s a bit like a grimly comic version of Dante’s journey through the seven circles of Hell, only in this case, Hell is England in the 1960s:
I let my eyes wander over the warehouses that flanked the track. The sheer walls rose windowless on either side around the bridge, blackened brick, bare except for a few very old advertisement panels, their coloured enamel flaked off in places so that the rusted metal patches almost obliterated the wordings. They were crude, Victorian calls to cough mixtures and soap and beverages and tobacco, naive, and yet with a kind of pawky optimism that made me feel a weakling. I tried to picture the salesmen of those days, but nothing came. They were gone and their products were gone, and the scabbed images in enamel stood for memorials, although even they would go soon, and then there would be nothing at all.
A Dragon’s Life was issued posthumously. Hamilton died within days of finishing the book. All the Little Animals was made into a film starring Christian Bale and John Hurt in 1998 and was reissued by Freight Books in 2012, though it appears to be out of print again. A Dragon’s Life has never been reissued, but the two novellas about outsider life would likely find a receptive audience today.
Sorry Meniscus: Excursions to the Millennium Dome by Iain Sinclair (Profile Books, 1999, 90 pages)
I read this stiletto-sized skewering of the folly of London’s Millennium Dome, recommended as one of Michael Orthofer’s top-rated wafer-thin books, immediately after finishing A Dragon’s Life and I had to wonder if Sinclair had been influenced by it. The two writers share the same bitter, disillusioned sense of London’s missed opportunities–but also its promise, if freed from the greed and incompetence of the powers that be:
The 19th-century colourists…baulked at Bagby’s Marsh…. They knew its story and knew that any proper human settlement needed its back country, its unmapped deadlands. The Peninsula was where the nightstuff was handled: foul-smelling industries, the manufacture of ordnance, brewing, confectionery, black smoke palls and sickly sweet perfumes. The cloacal mud of low tide mingled deliriously with sulphurous residues trapped in savage greenery; the bindweed, thorns and dark berries on the riverside path.
In light of what England has had to endure in the 20+ years since Sorry Meniscus came out, there’s almost something faintly nostalgic in this taste of the mendacity and mediocrity that was to follow.
Fire Sermon and A Life by Wright Morris (Harper & Row, 1971/1973, 155/152 pages)
Wright Morris is, in my opinion, the least-appreciated great American writer of the 20th century. How under-appreciated? Well, the last book-length critical study of his work was published in 1985 and his only biography, Haunted: The Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris by Jackson Benson, was self-published. Fire Sermon and A Life are among his finest works, a pair of novellas that tell the story of the last weeks in the life of 82-year-old Floyd Warner. We first see him through the eyes of Kermit Oelsligle, the eleven-year-old boy who’s come to live with him after his parents were killed in an accident:
It is a long city block to the grade school exit where the old man gleams in the sun like a stop sign, and that is how he looks. He wears a yellow plastic helmet and an orange jacket with the word STOP stenciled on the back of it. The flaming color makes the word shimmer and hard to read. He might even be a dummy—the word GO is stenciled on the front of the helmet—but anyone who knows anything at all knows it’s the boy’s great-uncle Floyd. He’s actually pretty much alive but those who don’t know it cry out shrilly, “Are you a dummy, Mr. Warner?”
Floyd Warner is a man of set habits and few words and he and Kermit had achieved a truce of sorts, living in the oldest trailer in a trailer court full of old people in a seaside California town. But then Floyd’s sister Viola (“who had faith enough to save half the people in hell”) dies and the two have to travel to Nebraska to deal with the estate. They hitch up the trailer to Floyd’s 1928 Maxwell and creep their way east.
They manage a few hundred miles a day, mostly traveling after the sun goes down, but Floyd finds himself relying more and more on Kermit, who ends up doing most of the driving. After passing a couple of hippies a dozen times or more along the way, Kermit stops to pick them up, which infuriates Floyd, but he hasn’t the energy to kick them out. And so the four of them make it to the mostly-deserted town, surrounded by prairie, where the farmhouse where Floyd grew up and Viola died stands, full of abandoned furniture. One of the hippies knocks over a lit kerosene lamp and the place burns to the ground.
Disgusted with everything, Floyd unhitches the trailer and drives off in the Maxwell. At this point, Fire Sermon ends and A Life begins. Now Floyd travels south and west, to the New Mexico ranch he bought as soon as he could be rid of Nebraska and where he and his wife lived until she died of cancer nearly forty years earlier. With his old, slow car, he has to drive the back roads, but that suits his temperament:
It was a comfort to Warner to be off the freeway and back on a road where the turns were at right angles. One reason he had put the car up on blocks in California was that the winding roads were confusing. In the space of ten miles the sun in his eyes would be around at his back. The lack of any right angles made it difficult for him to find his bearings. With the angles gone, what did a man have left but up and down? It now occurred to him that up or down pretty well covered his available options, up to heaven with Viola, or straight to hell with everybody else.
As he passes through Kansas, he picks up George Blackbird, a native American just discharged after serving with the Army in Vietnam. Neither he nor Blackbird are talkers, but Blackbird’s company starts to open Floyd up to the richness of the life he mostly let pass by:
Gazing in the direction from which he had come, he seemed to see his life mapped out before him, its beginning and its end, its ups and its downs, its reassuring but somewhat monotonous pattern like that of wallpaper he had lived with, soiled with his habits, but never really looked at.
A Life transforms as we read from a terse, sparse comedy to a mythic journey. Floyd Warner, the old man unsatisfied and unimpressed with the people and places he’s spent his years with, finds a resting place in an ending that is both bleak and beautiful. Like his fellow Nebraskan, Willa Cather, Wright Morris writes things that are so simple on the surface and so deep and complex underneath (though unlike Cather, Morris can be laugh-out-loud funny). This was the third time I’ve read Fire Sermon and A Life and they only grow richer with each reading.
