FrontPorch ARCHIVES
Issue No. 1 Nov. 2006 featuring: Roddy Doyle Charles Wright Heather McHugh Charles D’Ambrosio and more
www.frontporchjournal.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Heather McHugh - Creature Pressure 3 Charles Wright - 18 5 Roddy Doyle - The Taxi 8 Charles D’Ambrosio - Seattle, 1974 12 Nick Courtright - Review of Scar Tissue 13 Bearden Coleman - Review of Smonk 15 Tom Grimes - Interview with Roddy Doyle 16 Bearden Coleman - Interview with Tom Franklin
POETRY Heather McHugh
Creature Pressure DEAR GOD, IF I have to live at least let me not forever have to see in my mind’s eye (nor ever once in the actual flesh as on TV) the likes of this furred familiar, hauled by neckchain, eyeballed there in the circle in the public square, this one miserable monkey, made alert by a yanked leash toward a keeper’s knife. Full of riveted misgiving, there he has to meet his maker. First he’s nicked at the neck—and must emit a cry so bystanders can tell how sharp the situation really is. But that’s just foreplay, because then the knife-arm does a three-foot thrust directly at the creature’s gut— the beast recoils, of course, then has to freeze in that unthinkable contortion (with neck still caught up close to his tormentor’s gaze). They stay like that, for just a while, so we’ll believe our eyes. The monkey’s quivering. As long as he is quick he’ll have to do another show. (The moment he is slow— no sweat. Another monkey can be bought.) And people crane to see, not necessarily because they’re cruel—perhaps even because they’re not— they do avert their gazes, now and then, only to gawk again. Eventually the monkey is allowed to pass a hat. (Those who have cried give extra. That’s the pure perverseness of the plan.) It seems despite it all, I’m not allowed to stab the man.
1
continued on pg. 2
Heather McHugh- continued from pg. 1 II. Alone or no, alas, it’s not all one to me. Three was unbearable. Autocracy or nunnery—but not the kaffe-klatsch. I fur the drawing room against the artsy semblances, and rear no kin. And there in the spyglass, such a relief, that swatch of car-ferry departing with its log-books, watchwords, flap of merry old souls and border cop—and yes! I see them too, the panting sidekicks, pets on vacation, rhinestones at their gullets... Fare thee well, mankind! Godspeed! Chop-chop!
2
Charles Wright
18 Editor’s Note: Wright’s poem, section “18” of a longer work in progress, came in an envelope. We scanned it for you, as is, cross-outs and all.
3
continued on pg. 4
Charles Wright- continued from pg. 3
4
FICTION Roddy Doyle
country. He’d grown up always knowing that, and it had said it in the guide book he’d read on the plane. And all those hijackers on The News when he was a kid – ‘Take me to Cuba’. It was America’s greatest enemy. It was nearly the last of the old-fashioned communist states. So, he hadn’t expected to find the country full of salesmen.
The Taxi YOU LIKE CUBAN music? said the taxi driver. He hadn’t started the car yet. Bernard hadn’t even told him the name of the hotel.
-You want cigars?
-I like good Cuban music, said Bernard.
-Want the best cigars?
-I have good Cuban music, said the driver. -For you.
-Want a beautiful girl? Very beautiful for you. He’d been hearing it all week. On the bus here from Havana a few days ago, the bus driver had stopped at the side of the road. He’d plugged in a microphone and introduced himself as the best bartender in the world. He recommended his pina coladas. Drinks with alcohol would cost 2 pesos, and 1 peso without. He waited, then started the bus again and brought Bernard and four other passengers to Varadero.
Then he turned the key and the car was full of the same shite Bernard had been hearing all week. The driver took the car past the market stalls and the gang of cops on the corner and turned left onto the main road. -Hotel? said the driver. -Paradisus, said Bernard. -How much?
Bernard hated pina coladas. And he hated knowing that he had enough money in his pocket to feed and clothe the bus driver’s family for a couple of years. It was the type of money he always carried at home, but here it was a fortune.
The driver pointed at the meter. -Meter, he said. He tapped the cd player.
He loved the country but he was sick of feeling guilty.
-You like?
The car went over a hole and the cds began to slide out of the glove compartment. Bernard caught them and pushed them back in.
Bernard didn’t answer. The driver turned it up. -This is a special cd, he said. -Very special.
-You want? said the driver. -Which?
He leaned across and opened the glove compartment. The taxi was the only car on the road. The road was good and new looking; there were no potholes ahead. He straightened up behind the wheel. He’d left the glove compartment open.
Bernard didn’t want to say No. -Your mother likes this music? Bernard didn’t answer. His mother was dead but he didn’t want to say that. He knew it wouldn’t stop the driver.
There were cds inside, like the ones Bernard’s kids burnt for their friends at home. It was a little display – three different covers in a row.
-Cuban music is best, said the driver. -Yes?
-10 pesos, said the driver.
Bernard looked out the window.
Bernard said nothing.
-Where you from, my friend? said the driver.
-For your wife, said the driver. -Best music. Bernard was getting used to this. It was a communist
5
-Ireland, said Bernard. continued on pg. 6
ery Saturday. It was what a doctor earned here in two weeks. It was a pint and a packet of Pringles. It was survival.
Roddy Doyle- continued from pg. 5 Everywhere else he’d been in the last ten years, in every other country, the response had nearly always been the same. ‘Ireland? Ah, Roy Keane.’
It was a pain in the arse. -Ladies, said the driver. -They love this music. Yes?
Not here, though.
Bernard had the Buena Vista Social Club at home, and one of the Ruben Gonzalez records, and he played them both now and again. He used to play them a lot more; his ex-wife had hated them. But this stuff in the taxi, it was like the German disco music that was big when Bernard was a kid. It was the music he heard in the gym in Dublin, when he went there.
-Ireland? said the driver. -Shannon? You know Shannon? -Yeah, said Bernard. The driver thumped his chest.
He didn’t want anything to do with it. He didn’t even want to pretend – just buy one off the man and throw it in the bin back in his hotel room.
-I been there, he said. –Beautiful country. Shannon Airport. Twenty years from here. He was smiling.
He didn’t know why he was angry.
-They like Cuban music in Shannon.
But he was angry.
Bernard looked out the window again.
And he did. He did know.
-Good Cuban music, my friend, said the driver. -You like. You said.
-I doubt it, he said.
Bernard looked out, as they passed a queue at a corner. A lot of old women, and younger women holding kids. They were waiting for food. Rice and bread, maybe chickens. Bernard was going back to the hotel for as much as he wanted to eat – he was starving. But those people would be waiting for hours. He’d seen it in Havana as well, people in a line outside an ordinary looking door. Not a shop, or anything that he’d have recognised as a shop. Queuing for their rations.
He looked at the driver, and he looked away again. At the hitchers on the edge of the town.
Bernard nodded. He didn’t look properly at the driver.
-No, said Bernard. -It’s crap.
-Good music, said the driver. -You said.
Why did he say that? He didn’t know. It wasn’t like him; he didn’t think it was. Being rude like that, aggressive.
-What you say? said the driver. -What you said there, said Bernard. -About women liking this music. -Yes, said the driver. -For sure.
-That’s right, he said. -I like good music.
-10 pesos, said the driver.
The hitchers were another surprise. Bernard hardly saw any these days in Ireland. But there were crowds of them here, at the edge of every town, all along the roads. Women, men — a lot of black people — kids on their own. None of them looking desperate or tired. And none of the back-packers you’d see in other countries. There were even soldiers here, waiting. Going home? He couldn’t tell.
That was 10 pesos convertible, about the same as 10 euro. It was what Bernard gave his youngest son ev-
It was guilt. That was what had him on edge. Being cornered. It was having to face the fact that he was rich.
He hated this. He was no good at it. Haggling, or whatever it was called. Saying No. They were at the edge of the town. The hitchers were there, on the side of the road, and on the road itself.
6
came out of his hut. He shook hands with the security man. They spoke briefly in Spanish.
The music stopped, suddenly. Bernard didn’t look. He heard the glove compartment opened, right under his face. But he didn’t look. He heard it shut.
-Your room number, said the taxi driver.
There were beautiful women on the side of the road. And the sea behind them. It was Paradise, really. But what was it for them? They weren’t looking at the sea. The taxi was going straight past them.
The security man had bent down. He was looking in at Bernard.
It was a life he’d never witnessed before. And that made him feel bad too. He was going home in a couple of days. He’d have his tan and his photos.
The security man stood back up. He tapped the roof of the taxi.
-3412, said Bernard.
The music was on again. Changed. It was ‘Chan Chan’, the first track on The Buena Vista Social Club.
Cubans weren’t allowed into the hotel, unless they worked there. Although Bernard had seen Cuban women with older European men, on the beach and at the swimming pool. He’d wondered how that happened, how it was arranged.
-Very good, said the driver. -Yes.
He was stupid.
-Yes, said Bernard.
The driver stopped at the entrance. He pointed at the meter.
Enough. He was being stupid.
The driver nodded.
-11, he said.
-Very special cd, he said. -10 pesos.
Bernard took out 20.
-I have it already, said Bernard.
He waited for the change. He’d give the man a tip but he wanted the change first.
The driver looked at him. Not like he’d been caught, or he’d lost the argument. He was looking at Bernard, like Bernard was a bit thick.
Then he changed his mind; he was still being stupid.
-10 pesos, he said again.
-Keep it, he said.
-I have it already, said Bernard again.
-Thank you.
But he knew; he knew as he spoke. It wasn’t the cd; it wasn’t about the exchange. It was the money. The driver didn’t want to beg for it.
The driver looked at Bernard. -This is a very beautiful country, he said. -But it is hard. Goodbye.
He looked at Bernard.
-Bye, said Bernard.
-10 pesos, he said again.
He held out his hand. The driver took it. They smiled.
And Bernard heard anger for the first time since he’d arrived in Cuba.
Bernard got out of the car.
-Too much for us. Nothing for you. He wasn’t looking at Bernard now. He was staring ahead, at the straight road. They were near the hotel. They turned off the main road. The driver slowed at the gate. He rolled down his window as the security man
7
NON-FICTION Charles D’Ambrosio
in the head. You make yourself clever and scoffing, ironic, deracinated, cold and quick to despise. You import your enthusiasms from the past, other languages, traditions. You make the voyage first in the aisles of bookstores and libraries, in your feckless dreams. The books you love best feature people who ditched their homes in the hinterlands for scenes of richer glory. Pretty soon the word Paris takes on a numinous quality and you know you won’t be silent forever. Someday you’ll leave.
Seattle, 1974 Author’s Note: When I started this essay I did what I always do when I’m nervous—reached for a book. I have this idea that I can’t write legitimately about my life without elevating it. My impulse is always to graft something learned and a bit more edifying onto the embarrassing facts. My original bookish idea for the essay was to reference Walter Benjamin and work up a fancy comparison between nineteenth century Paris and Seattle, and then suggest, along the way, that my aimless wanderings as a teenager made me a flaneur or boulevardier. I loved the idea. It seemed so—literary. When I got a draft down and read things over, I realized that the portrait I’d drawn, of a cornball dandy in waffle-stompers, couldn’t have been more untrue. So I went back to the drawing board. Dropping the High European culture of books, I found the right energy the minute I started talking about the small-time celebrities—the clowns and car dealers—of my early days. After I made this switch a lot of the starch went out of my prose, too—I found a new, much more fluid music for the sentences the minute I quit lying to myself. — Charles D’Ambrosio
Meanwhile, the only city I really knew was a dump worse than anything Julius Pierpont Patches (local TV clown) ever dreamed of, sunk in depression and completely off the cultural map, no matter what outlandish claims local boosters made for the region. And they made many. In a highly cherished book of mine (You Can’t Eat Mount Rainier, by William Speidel Jr., Bob Cram illustrator, copyright 1955) I read “What with the city’s leading professional men, artists, writers, world travelers and visiting VIPs always dropping into the place, [Ivar’s] has become the spot where clams and culture meet.” Huh? Artists? Writers? To explain, Ivar’s is a local seafood restaurant and Ivar himself was a failed folk singer in the tradition of the Weavers. Back then there was an abundance of clams and a paucity of culture, but even more than this disparity, I’d somehow arranged it in my head that clams, salmon, steelhead and geoducks were actually antithetical to and the sworn enemies of culture. No one wrote about them, is what I probably meant. Perhaps clams and culture met, once, in 1955, but then of course 1955 stubbornly persisted in Seattle until like 1980, and in between time you felt stuck mostly with mollusks. The culture side of the equation was most prominently represented by a handful of aging rear-guard cornballs. Like Ivar himself.
THE INITIAL SALVOS in my hankering to expatriate took the predictable route of firing snobby potshots at the local icons of culture, at Ivar with his hokey ukelele and Stan Boreson and Dick Balsch with his ten-pound sledge bashing cars and laughing like a maniac all through the late night, etc. (Actually I thought DB was cool and so did a good many of my friends. He had the crude sinister good looks of a porn star and once merited an admiring squib in Time. In his cheap improvised commericals —interrupting roller derby and the antics of Joannie Weston the Blonde Amazon—he’d beat brand new cars with a hammer, so to me he always seemed superior to circumstance—our old cars just got beat to hell by life, whereas Dick Balsch went out on the attack. It was a period when a lot of us hero-worshipped people who destroyed things and even now I wonder where DB’s gone and half hope he’ll come back and smash more stuff.) Anyone born in geographical exile, anyone from the provinces, anyone for whom the movements of culture feel rumored, anyone like this grows up anxiously aware that all the innovative and vital events in the world happen Back East, like way back, like probably France, but before expatriation can be accomplished in fact it is rehearsed and performed
8
If you were a certain type, and I was, you first had to dismantle the local scene’s paltry offerings and then build up in its place a personal pantheon remote from the very notion that clams and culture really ever do meet, anywhere, at a time when, all arrogant and hostile and a budding prig, you believed culture was the proprietary right of a few Parisians. That an old warbly-voiced yokel like Ivar might pass for culture, or that “Here Come The Brides” might signify to the world your sense of place, seemed a horror, an embarrassment. I went incognito, I developed alibis. For starters I took to wearing a black Basque beret and became otherwise ludicrously francophile in my tastes. Mostly, however, I couldn’t find solid purchase for my snobisme. Not that
I didn’t try. I’d have liked to be some old hincty Henry James but couldn’t really sustain it. Still, you badly wanted things delocalized, just a little. Even if you had to do it first just in your head, with issueless irony. You looked about. With a skeptical eye you sized up the offerings. You wondered, for instance, why it was that suddenly in Seattle there was an aesthetic love of statues. You wondered, what is it with all these replicas of people around the region? A brass Ivar and his brass seagulls, some apparently homeless people (brass) in the courtyard of the James Sedgewick Bldg. (as if a real, non-brass loiterer could actually rest awhile on those benches unmolested), and then, last, least, a hideous band of five or six citizens (cement) waiting for the bus in Fremont. Like a bunch of gargoyles walked off their ancient job guttering rain, they’ve been waiting for the bus twenty or thirty years now. If you’ve lived here long enough (like a week) you know the rain of today is the rain of tomorrow and the rain of a million years ago and if you stand in that eternal rain long enough and often enough you start to feel replicating the experience rubs it in your face. I’ve stood in the rain and waited for buses or whatever and it wasn’t a joke, not that I understood, at least. You’re standing there, you’re buzzed, you’re bored, you’re waiting, you don’t have a schedule, the rain’s pounding around your head like nuthouse jibberjabber, and from this incessant and everlasting misery someone else works up an instance of passing cleverness, then casts it in concrete for all time?
exile. You could probably dismiss this as one of those charming agonies of late adolescence, but let me suggest that it’s also a logical first step in developing an aesthetic, a reach toward historical beauty, the desire to join yourself to what’s already been appreciated and admired. You want to find your self in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance. For reasons both sensible and suspect folks today are uneasy with the idea of a tradition, but the intellectual luxury of this stance wasn’t available to me, and I saw the pursuit of historical beauty, the yearning for those higher essences other people had staked their lives on, as the hope for some kind of voice, a chance to join the chorus. I was mad for relevance, connection, some hint that I was not alone. I started scribbling in notebooks in part just so I’d have an excuse, a reason for sitting where I sat, an alibi for being by myself. Seattle in the Seventies was the nadir of just everything. A UW prof of mine, a yam faced veteran of SDS, inelegantly labeled us the phlegmatic generation. The word apathy got used an awful lot. I quite sincerely believe Karen Ann Quinlan was the decade’s sex symbol. Seeking an alchemic dullness in quaaludes and alcohol she actually found apotheosis in a coma, that’s what made her so sexy (i.e. compelling) and symbolic to me. I’m not trying to be ironic or waggish here. Objects restore a measure of silence to the world, and she was, for those ten wordless years, an object. Her speechless plight seemed resonant, Delphic. The reason I remember her as such an emblematic figure is her coma coincided with my own incognizant youth. The Seattle of that time had a distinctly comalike aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything, one dog abarking, one car acranking, one door aslamming etc, and then an extravagant, unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing. The kind of expansive, hardly differentiated, foggy and final nothing you imagine a coma induces. I read the silence as a kind of Nordic parsimony. An act of middle-class thrift. A soporific seeded into the clouds. All the decent dull blockheads were asleep, and you could no more wake them to vivid life than you could KAQ. Being alone at night in Seattle began to seem horrifying, there was just so much nothing and so little of me.
Those stone citizens, silent and forever waiting, are like my nightmare. I badly wanted to escape my unwritten city for a time and place already developed by words, for Paris or London or Berlin and a particular epoch as it existed in books. I wanted Culture, the upper case sort. Books fit my minimum-wage budget and afforded the cheapest access. Fifty cents bought admission to the best. I purchased most of my early novels and poems from a woman who, I recall, only had one leg. Later there was Elliot Bay Books, which offered both a bookstore and a brick walled garret in the basement. You could loiter without having to skulk. You could bring your empty cup to the register and ask for refills. And you could read. Those books, more than any plane ticket, offered a way out. Admittedly it was a lonely prescription, an Rx that might better have been replaced by a 100 mg of whatever tricyclate was cutting edge back in the Seventies. But who knew about such things? Instead I’d hide out in basement of Elliot Bay or in the top floor of the Athenian and in my sporadic blue notebooks track a reading list—Joyce, Pound, Eliot et al.—that was really little more than a syllabus for a course on
9
You know how the story goes—I went away, I came back, blah blah. I now see the personal element in all this, the comic note, and I also realize the high European graft doesn’t readily take to all American subjects. The predominant mental outlook of people I grew up with depended largely on a gargantuan isolation. When I finally went away I was always careful to tell people... continued on pg. 10
Charles D’Ambrosio- continued from pg. 9 I was from Seattle, Washington, afraid they wouldn’t know where the city was, which suggests the isolation of the place was permanently lodged in me. Finding myself at last in the warm heart of culture, in New York or Paris or even LA, I returned, like some kind of revanchist, to the cold silent topography I knew best, the landscape of my hurt soul. I first read Raymond Carver because in paging through his second collection at a bookstore I noticed a familiar place name— Wenatchee—and latched on to the work solely based on that simple recognition. Ditto Ken Kesey. And then there was the discovery of Richard Hugo, a great epic namer, who beautifully described himself as “a wrong thing in a right world,” and noted the oppressive quiet of the city the way I had, so that it seemed we were brothers, and offered to me a liberating emblem far better suited to my ambitions as a writer than a girl in a coma. These are probably just the humdrum dilemmas any writer encounters, and that I should express any keen pain at the difficulty of finding a subject and a voice is, I realize, kind of carping and obnoxious. It comes with the territory, after all. And yet it is still some form of familiar silence that I struggle against when I write, something essential about the isolation. As Graham Greene wrote: “At that age one may fall irrevocably in love with failure, and success of any kind loses half its savour before it is experienced.” For me the city is still inarticulate and dark and a place I call home because I’m in thrall to failure and to silence—I have a fidelity to it, an allegiance, which presents a strange dislocation now that Seattle’s become the Valhalla of so many people’s seeking. The idea of it as a locus of economic and scenic and cultural hope baffles me. It a little bit shocks me to realize my nephew and nieces are growing up in a place considered desirable. That will be their idea, rightly. That wasn’t my idea at all. Vaguely groping for a diluted tertiary memory, people used to say to me, I’ve heard it’s nice out there, and I’d say, Seattle has a really high suicide rate (I was kind of an awkward conversationalist). But really I didn’t know if it was nice; it never occurred to me to wonder. I’d shyly shrug and mumble out of the conversation, saying I didn’t know, it was home. Seattle does have a suicide rate a couple notches above the national average and so does my family and I guess that earns me the colors of some kind of native. I walk around, I try to check it out, this new world of hope and the good life, but in some part of my head it’s forever 1974 and raining and I’m a kid and a man with a shopping cart full of kiped meat clatters down the sidewalk chased with sad enthusiasm by apron-wearing boxboys
who are really full-grown men recently pink-slipped at Boeing and now scabbing part-time at Safeway. Today I go in search of an older city, a silent city. Early in the morning the painted signs on the buildings downtown seem to rise away from the brick in a kind of layered pentimento. The light at that hour comes at a certain angle and is gentle and noticeably slower and words gradually emerge from the walls. Your Credit Is Good. The Best In Raingear. There is a place I can stand on Westlake Avenue and read the fading signs and recognize many of the names of people I grew up with. I’ve got my own people buried in the ground. I cross the Aurora Bridge and think special thoughts and know my brother’s black wellingtons are buried in the shifting toxic silt at the bottom of Lake Union. That brother’s alive, and I thank God for certain kinds of failure. New silences layer over the old. I hope this brief superficial essay hasn’t simply circled around a peculiar woundedness. Folks double my age and older often run down a conversation tracking a vanishing world that will, with the passing of their memory, vanish entirely. This is something more than benign senescent forgetfulness. So be it. Nowadays I feel like an old timer in terms of estrangement. I don’t know what determines meaning in the city any better than these old people with their attenuating memories. Probably traffic laws, the way we still agree to agree on the denotation of stop signs. I went away and in my absence other things have sprung up. Good things. It’s a new place, but there’s an old silence bothering me. And now when I write I feel the silence pressuring the words just like the silence I felt as a kid, walking around town, with nowhere to go. It used to be I’d wander down the alley around the corner from the Yankee Peddler and see if Floyd the Flowerman was in his shack. FF sold flowers out of a homemade shack, a lean-to patched together out of realtor’s sandwich boards and such and propped up against what’s now a soap shop, and he was a big fan of police scanners, of the mysteries of other people’s misfortunes as they cackled over the airwaves and received, at least briefly, a specific locus, a definite coordinate within the city. This oddball interest in fixing the detailed location of pain and disaster fascinated me. I’d say it prefigured the job of a writer, if the conceit weren’t so obviously tidy. I can’t now tell if Floyd was crazy. Probably he was just sixties jetsam, tossed overboard by the era and living like a kind of alley cat Brautigan “made lonely and strange by that Pacific Northwest of so many years ago, that dark rainy land . . . .” That wet black alley, and then the queer miracle of his white shack, those floodlit plaster buckets filled with red gladiolas, sunflowers, pink carnations,
10
and then Floyd the hippie holdover tuning his scanner into instances of tragedy, dialing up meaning and its shifting vectors. One night when the bus just wouldn’t come, Floyd and I walked in the rain down Stone Way to watch a house burn. He was very hepped up. The cold rain on our faces warmed to tear-temperature in the heat of the burning house. I wish time would collapse so I could be watching flames and ash rise from that house and also see my brother falling through the air below the bridge. Obscurely I know this is a wish that Time, like a god, might visit us all in our moment of need. But Floyd’s gone and that brother’s got a metal plate in his pelvis and walks a little funny and myself, I wander around at night, taking long walks to clear my head before sitting down in front of my typewriter, walking for an hour or two as all the new and desirable good floats before me like things in a dream, out of reach, and I peer through the windows of new restaurants and new shops and see all the new people but I don’t go in, probably because I feel more in my element as the man who is out there standing in the rain or just passing by on his way home to write.
11
R E VIEWS
Scar Tissue
world serves as one of his most consistently impressive attributes: seemingly all of existence is on call for his contemplation, as the mountains, birds, flowers, lakes, and animals which abound in his poems serve to illuminate the particular gorgeousity of even the most mundane of natural occurrences.
Charles Wright, Scar Tissue Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006, 73 pages, hardback, $22.00 CHARLES WRIGHT HAS long been recognized as a modern-day poet-prophet, a mystic trapped in a man’s body who shares his wisdom with seemingly no struggle. In his latest collection, Scar Tissue, Wright continues to build upon an already daunting bibliography by combining the man-in-the-world qualities of his early work with further development of the spirituality he has fostered most furtively since his 1997 Pulitzer-winning collection, Black Zodiac. The poems of Scar Tissue are instantly recognizable as later Charles Wright fare, with long lines and regular use of indentation to punctuate unfinished thought. Still in place is Wright’s familiarly understated sense of humor, which sneaks up at moments when he seems to be at his most sincere, announcing that “When the mind is exalted, the body is lightened the Chinese say, / Or one of them said.” This humorous sensibility allows the universe’s grand comedy to emerge even when its confusions are most acute. The ease with which his language fuses the perceived realities of the world with the unknown, inexplicable, or merely quandary-causing has acted for years as his strongest poetic tool, but one at times wishes Wright would trust his line breaks as much as he trusts his lines” while each line announces a resounding and complete issue, the breaks tend to be syntactic and overly reliant on commas. Despite this, Wright’s poems often resonate with such knowing and beauty they lend only the nitpicker room to complain. In The New York Times, reviewer Joel Brouwer chastised Scar Tissue for not stating a direct thesis, and for the suggestion that “the idea of horses [are] more important...than the animals themselves.” But defiance of expectation and reluctance to reveal definition are precisely why the collection succeeds: it is a study of the difficulty of quantifying the physical world’s relation to the world of the unseen. Wright recognizes this, acknowledging that “Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique, / A method of measure, / a scaffold for structuring.” By adapting an attitude which only at first glance seems reductionist, Wright demonstrates his embrace of consciousness and language. But this reassessment of nature’s stature is not belittlement, as Wright’s scope of insight into the natural
The title poems of the collection comprise its center thrust, and bring home the human mind’s incongruous perception of the world’s ways. Announcing that “Time, for us, is a straight line, / on which we hang our narratives. / For landscape, however, it all is a circling / From season to season, the snake’s tail in the snake’s mouth,” Wright crystallizes the temporal nature of human experience, while at the same moment acknowledging that it is not necessarily the most accurate manner of perception. By questioning the solidity of the apparently solid and the ethereality of the apparently ethereal, Wright seeks the zipper interlocking the seen and the unseen while knowing true integration will remain in a place he can never conclusively understand: Our lives, it seems, are a memory we had once in another place. Or are they its metaphor? The trees, if trees they are, seem the same, and the creeks do. The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way, And the clouds, if clouds they really are, still follow us, One after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place. With Scar Tissue, Charles Wright succeeds in discussing the questions which no one can answer, and in this there is a certain protection: he is not didactic, he is not overzealous, and he will have a hard time finding anyone who can prove him wrong. Ultimately, the grace of the collection is in its honesty, its consistently surprising language, and its humane modesty. Citing that “Whatever is insignificant has its own strength,” Scar Tissue admits that the world is a confusing, indefinite, and astounding place, and that to try to pinpoint any of it is to commit an injustice. --Nick Courtright
12
Smonk Tom Franklin, Smonk Publisher: William Morrow 2006, 272 pages, hardback, $23.95 Woe to the faint of heart! The weak in constitution! Tom Franklin’s second novel, Smonk, may be the most bloody and profane book this side of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. And while the novel’s sundry perversions are enough to make Humbert Humbert blush, Smonk maintains a rare laugh-out-loud, read passages to your friends, humor. Smonk is a western of sorts, meaning there are horses and gunplay and sheriffs, but all resemblances to that form stop there. Primarily set in the town of Old Texas, Alabama, and peopled as it is with witches, a oneeyed dwarf, Civil War refugees, and a group dubbed the Christian Deputies, Smonk reads more like a novel by Flannery O’Connor than it does one by Louis L’Amour. Franklin centers the story on three dissimilar characters whose pasts are intertwined and whose fates head toward collision. E.O. Smonk is a one-eyed dwarf whose physical ailments include syphilis, the clap, gout, low blood sugar, neuralgia, ague, and malaria. Under his beard lies a goiter. A white glass ball, “two sizes two small,” fills the void of his missing eye. As the novel opens, Smonk rides into town on his mule to attend his own murder trial. But there’s foul play afoot. Smonk has walked into a trap. The angry mob in the courtroom—a saloon converted for lawful purposes when the need arises—has gathered to kill E.O. Smonk without the proper justice of the law on their side. Smonk, sniffing out the sabotage, fights his way out of the mob, not only by wielding his derringer and sword, but by spewing blood and shooting his glass eye from its socket. A massacre of Peckinpah proportion follows, and nearly every male citizen of Old Texas is killed, though E.O. Smonk walks out of town unscathed. But he’ll be back, no doubt. The book also follows the travails of a young androgynous whore, Evavangeline. A tough gal—sort of an unholy version of Portis’ Mattie Ross from True Grit— Evavangeline kills a man then shoots an overgrown mole off his face to keep as a souvenir. Mistaken for a man and accused of homosexual relations, Evavangeline is pursued for acts she did not commit by a morally-inclined, but not legally sanctioned, group of men called the Christian Deputies. Led by head deputy Phail Walton, a blue blood Yank, the Christian Deputies attempt to detain Evavangeline in order to
give him (Evavangeline) “a whooping.” But Phail Walton knows, after all, that Evavangeline is no man. For his part, Walton is consumed with stalking the whore from some need that lies between religious piety and his own repressed sexuality. It’s through Walton that Franklin delivers his darker passages of humor. During a struggle with lust that’s thrown Walton into a spiritual crisis, Franklin describes Walton’s relationship to his “member” as something
he wouldn’t even touch…would merely let it protrude and perform its task; and if it ever betrayed him and became engorged in his pants, he would pinch the purple turtle’s-head end, like Mother used to, and it would recede. When he has a night emission he would slam his fingers in the door come dawn and drink a pint of his own urine.
In such passages, you sense that Franklin is having so much fun with his characters, finding such glee in lurid detail, that it seems improbable that he’ll keep up the manic pace. But, much like Charles Portis’ Dog of the South, Smonk is entertaining throughout. And as the paths of E.O. Smonk, Evavangeline, and Phail Walton converge back to Old Texas, Alabama, each comic episode increases in hilarity. Each perversion drops further into baseness. And every act of violence is countered by another more horrifyingly brutal. Smonk is a challenge to the reader’s threshold for vulgarity and savageness. The more squeamish reader will simply put the book down, while others will revel in the book’s ugliness. Either way, by allowing no room for ambivalence on the part of the reader, Smonk succeeds in eliciting a visceral reaction that rarely comes from modern literature. After all, what are we to make of such a world where redemption is scarce and the proclivity to kill is a prized virtue? It seems Franklin is laying waste to all things sacred in order to clear room for something new. Perhaps Franklin is calling into question the reader’s own moral fortitude by forcing the reader into a world gone so wrong that he must either join the debauchery or face extinction with his archaic notions of right and wrong. Evavangeline seems to be making a case for this reading when she reacts to Smonk’s sexual advances:
13
It’s evil, she said. But when she looked at Smonk a strange thing happened. continued on pg. 14
Smonk- continued from pg. 13
Somehow he didn’t seem evil and he wasn’t ugly and misshapen and old and bloody. He was her daddy…Her guts felt like they shifted in his direction… Her hair stood on end, her skin tingling. er nipples hot knobs.
E.O. Smonk is evil, all right. And one thing is for certain: whatever Franklin is saying, he is shouting it loud, grabbing us by the collar and demanding we listen. In this, he succeeds. Franklin’s previous two efforts—the collection of stories Poachers and the novel Hell at the Breech—garnered praise from Richard Ford, Philip Roth, and Dennis Lehane, while amassing Franklin a rabid fan base. Smonk, too, is being met with praise. But even the most dedicated Franklin-head will be unprepared for the depths of depravity the author dives headlong into with Smonk. And from this Franklin fan to the next, or to those considering investigating the hype, I say: this trip into Franklin’s demented world beats the hell out of any you’re likely to take anytime soon. After all, Peckinpah’s dead. McCarthy’s stopped writing westerns. And Portis hasn’t put out a book in fifteen years. The time is right to usher in a new master of calamity: Tom Franklin. - Bearden Coleman
14
I N T E R E VIEWS
Interview with Roddy Doyle Editor’s Note: Excerpt from Tom Grimes’ interview with Roddy Doyle, first published in the Summer 2006 issue of Tin House. TG: Music is an essential part of your life. Does music affect your work not only in terms of content, but in terms of structuring your narratives and writing sentences? RD: Yes, music seems to be essential. Cleaning the kitchen is fine if you’re listening to Wilco. I’m a great admirer of Radiohead. I loved OK Computer, and what they did after it—Kid A and Amnesiac—“difficult” music, when they could have gone for something more world-conquering. And Hail to the Thief is a masterpiece. It’s a bit like Highway 61 Revisited, a different experience every time I hear it. There’s nothing quite as exciting as finding new music. I had heard of Moondog and knew that he was admired by many, but I actually heard his music for only the first time last Saturday. (I went to see Bob Dylan the same day, by the way. How much joy can one heart take? “Play it fuckin’ loud.”) I think Moondog is extraordinary, and I think it’s equally extraordinary that I can think that at the age of forty-seven—like I used to think about Steely Dan when I was sixteen. I found my thirteen-year-old son listening to The Ramones recently. Life has never been so good. I listen as I work. But I rarely “listen,” if that makes sense. I don’t listen to lyrics; I don’t sit back and admire. I just play it as I work. At first, I played music because I had a long day to fill and I thought music might help fill it. This was after I gave up teaching and starting writing full-time. My first four novels, including The Commitments, were written music-free. Then I began to play classical music as I worked. My ignorance of classical was almost total, but even so, virtually everything I played seemed already familiar. This piece had been used for a bread commercial; that piece was the theme music for some television show or other. Some of it fairly captivated me—Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and Mozart’s Requiem, for example—but a lot of it I found dull. So I began to root around in the “contemporary” section. And Philip Glass and Steve Reich and Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars and many others started filling my day and actually they began to do much more than that. For big chunks of the day, I’m concentrating on the words in front of me—choosing the next one, deciding on the final shape of a sen-
tence. I might be playing music but often the music has stopped and I haven’t noticed. But perhaps equally as often I need music to get me going. When I was writing A Star Called Henry I played two pieces of music almost incessantly in the last six months or so of writing. They were After Extra Time, by Michael Nyman, and Music with Changing Parts, by Philip Glass. Those pieces were like my petrol; their rhythm is somehow in the book. Their energy was what I was after. That was the case too with Steve Reich’s Different Trains. But I also loved the way he used the voices—the pieces of sentences, the fragments of sense—in a loop over the almost overwhelming music. I thought it was astonishing. I know: music is music and prose and prose, but I wanted to attempt something a little bit similar in Oh, Play That Thing. The rhythm would drive the story forward, but repeated words and phrases would bring it back and, sometimes, forward—would remind the reader of previous events, would somehow hint at future events, would knit them together. So music, in those two instances, has become more than a way of filling a long day or of masking outside noises. I have to emphasize, though, that essentially it’s me and the page and the words on the page. But even there, on paper, music is useful. In my book The Woman Who Walked into Doors, the narrator, Paula Spencer, recalls music as she recalls events from her life. Frankie Valli was singing “My Eyes Adored You” when she first talked to her future husband. As she remembers a childhood event, “Take a Giant Step” by The Monkees, comes into her head. Her life has a great soundtrack, except for the 1980s, when she was being beaten by her husband, or recovering from beatings. The absence of music there is important. She hears something from the ’80s, and it means nothing to her. Which is why in the new novel, Paula Spencer, when Paula gets a stereo for her kitchen, the first CD she buys is by U2. They’re from her city, and her part of the city; they’re only a few years younger than she is. But she missed them. As they were off conquering the world, she was on the kitchen floor, trying to get up. So she buys How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. And she loves it.
15
An Interview with Tom Franklin
FP: What’s down the pike? TF: The aforementioned novel. It’s shaping up into what it’s going to be. I hope.
FP: In Smonk, you tap into the archaic language and rhythms of the King James Bible. Yet, you don’t use the Bible the way, say, Cormac McCarthy does. You seem to be having more fun with it. What was your thought behind using the Bible the way you did? Did you grow up reading it like most good boys from the South? TF: If by that you mean do I feel guilty for writing this, then Yes. What’s always fascinated me about the Bible—one of many things—is how earthy it is. How violent. How gothic. Here go Lot’s two daughters into the cave where the old man’s hanging out. They get him drunk and sleep with him. And earlier, by the way, two cities were destroyed, all their citizens killed. And we’re hearing this in church. About McCarthy: I think he’s being lampooned a bit here, but so are others. This book’s got its sillinesses, and its homages. One thing I love about the McCarthy novels and particularly Blood Meridian is how they look on the page, how the words look, without quotation marks, with minimal punctuation, just plain biblical. And he’ll have a character say “ye” instead of “you,” to show a hick accent (“I seen ye”) and that looks biblical, too. King James biblical. I stole all that. FP: The reviews Poachers got from Roth and Ford weren’t too shabby. That had to be a pat on the back. But now that you have two novels under your belt, do you think you’ll ever go back to short fiction? TF: I will. Am, I mean. Have been. I’ve published a few stories lately. Got a half-dozen others in various messy situations. If I can think of a long one, I’ll have just about another collection. But I have to do a novel first. The quotes from Roth and Ford: I was the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell, and he wrote me a letter. He graciously agreed to let me use lines from it on a book jacket. Ford just wrote me a letter, via my editor, out of the blue. We’d met, but he’d have no reason to remember, but he too was generous, and wrote the quote after sending the letter.
FP: So you were an extra on Deadwood. How did that come about? Did you get to say the perfunctory “fuck” on camera? Is Ian McShane as much of a bad ass in person as he is on the show? TF: I’m friends with Earl Brown, who plays Dan Dority on the show. He and I have co-written a screenplay based on my story “Poachers” and he’s in the process of making William Gay’s novel Providences of Night into a movie. He, Earl, also wrote an episode of Deadwood last season. He asked William G. and me to come visit the Deadwood set, knowing we were both huge fans of the show. William wound up not going; I went. As for saying “fuck” or “cocksucker,” no, I didn’t get a line and, truth is, I’m barely in the scene where I’m an extra. I’m there for a second, second and a half, then gone. It’s sad. But lord did I have a good time. But I didn’t meet Mr. McShane, as they weren’t shooting any of his scenes that day. I did get to sit at Swearingen’s desk. And I met William Sanderson, and Molly Parker, and several others including Brad Douriff, who plays Doc Cochran and who, ironically, got me some eye drops when all that L. A. dust got to me. FP: Okay, this next one is for personal reasons. When I started grad school I was surprised to find fiction students who were down on Charles Portis. It seems that the character Walton in Smonk, the leader of the Christian Deputies, must be influenced by Portis. So, what would you say to these students who bashed Portis? And am I anywhere close on my assessment of Walton? TF:Who’s down on Portis? Nobody who’s down on Portis is a real writer. Walton is definitely my Portis homage. The way he quotes everything is a direct steal from Mattie Ross in True Grit. What to say to students bashing Portis? Just grow up. Learn to be quiet until you’re smart enough to talk. You’re dead on about Walton. FP: You dedicated Smonk to Barry Hannah. I thought of Never Die while reading Smonk. What’s your relationship with the man?
16
TF: Never Die was an influence, too. I’m a huge Hannah fan. I’m shocked to be in the same town with him, the legend. One day a grad student said to me, “I saw Barry standing outside Kroger in sweat pants, smoking.” Man, I love this town. I see Barry at school, where he scowl-smiles at me on his way to smoke. Or we go fishing and don’t catch anything. Or at a reading, or in a bar, or at lunch. He’s a great guy and kind. He’s the one who showed how every sentence ought to count. FP: What are your guilty reading pleasures? TF: Nonguilty: Jack Pendarvis. The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure. Amazing book. Also reading a lot of George Pelecanos. Guilty? Nothing really. I can justify reading almost anything. TV is where guilt comes in. Or movies. When you watch Dumb and Dumber for the fiftieth time, you start to wonder where your priorities are.
17
CONTRIBUTORS Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Dead Fish Museum, The Point, and Orphans, a collection of essays. He is currently the William Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. ___ Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into succesful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. Doyle’s novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary award in 1993. Doyle grew up in Kilbarrack, County Dublin. He spent several years as an English teacher before becoming a full-time writer. ___ Tom Franklin is the New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. He teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. ___ Heather McHugh grew up in Virginia; her memories of front porches date from there, in the clutches of kudzus and suckles... Since 1984 she has been Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle; she also regularly visits the summer residencies of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her most recent books are Eyeshot (a collection of poems), Glottal Stop (a translation of Paul Celan, with Nikolai Popov as co-translator), and Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, a collection of literary essays. ___ Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, teaches at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville.