More Alive and Less Lonely
Page 9
He was also superbly right, a fact I’ve butted my head against in my own attempts to write about Edward Dahlberg and Nathanael West, each of whose chimerical essence finds itself encircled in a wizardly fashion in the pages of Something Said (in the piece on West, written in 1967, Sorrentino even manages to predict the presidency of Ronald Reagan!). “The critic is either subsumed in his criticism, the latter becoming, relentlessly and imperceptibly, a kind of natural effusion of the collective intelligence; or he is forever identified as ‘the one who said that…’ and reviled for such rank stupidity”: that’s from Sorrentino’s introduction, in which he apologizes for participating in what he calls “a mug’s game.” Well, I don’t know if the “collective” has yet reached Sorrentino’s stratum of intelligence, but (from my angle of view as a now middle-aged reader, writer, and teacher of fiction), as per his evaluations, we’re certainly still contending with the magnitudes of Gaddis and Calvino, not troubling too much with Larry Woiwode and John Gardner. The book is, of course, helplessly personal, not-so-quietly-outraged, and blackly funny. Sorrentino’s long point, if you’re willing to listen, was always that a true embrace of life’s absurdity led not to a sterile or abstracted ivory-tower Modernism, but to a riotously humane embrace of culture per se, and Something Said ends, probably not accidentally, with two traditional jokes, one Italian and one Irish. For Sorrentino, a writer is merely a man decorated with evidence of his persistence in the face of it all. The decorations are more than enough.
—The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 2011
Steven Millhauser’s Ghost Stories
Among the impostures of book reviewing, the suggestion that a book is encountered in a vacuum of preconceptions is one that’s best debunked in the case of a “New and Selected Stories.” Here’s a career capstone for a writer good (and industrious) enough to rate the honor, a writer not only still walking the earth but also still adding goodies to the pile. It’s no time to play dumb. If you weren’t already reading the fellow, what business would you have weighing in now?
I’m a Steven Millhauser fan. Three of the four books from which the “selected” stories in We Others were selected are sitting on my shelves; additional stories I’d already met in magazines. If this kind of a book is a story-writer’s crown, it’s also a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled from the bodies of others. This review, then, is its pale twin: My own New and Selected Feelings About Steven Millhauser, stitched together to resemble a book review.
That Millhauser is a quiet, enigmatic master of the medium-long-to-long story (he’s also written three volumes of novellas, not represented here); that his characteristic method mingles dreamlike and often morbid or perverse fantasies with meticulous realist observation; that his prose temperature is coolly feverish, drawing equally on Nabokovian rapture, Borgesian enigma and the plain-spoken white-picket-fence wistfulness of Sherwood Anderson; that he writes about magicians and inventors in stories that are themselves presto-chango contraptions; that he peppers his largely well-mannered dream worlds with little salacious uprisings, luscious peeps into the sexy-mermaid part of his imagination’s carnival: these things I’d have said going in. But Millhauser’s also protean. Although his stories have much in common only with themselves, he seems to demand fresh terms of himself for each project he begins. Generalizations will take you just so far.
The new stories come first. Three of these have an amplitude that makes them real advances in Millhauser’s art, but they’re also terrific lenses for gazing at the retrospective selection that follows.
The title novella, “We Others,” is a painstakingly gradual grown-up ghost story that makes explicit Millhauser’s allegiance to the tradition of Henry James (as opposed to that of, say, Hemingway). Many of Millhauser’s stories suggest they are allegories of the artist’s existential condition, but rarely so forcefully as in this story’s opening lines: “We others are not like you. We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more reckless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold. We live at the edges of ourselves, not in the middle places. We leave that to you. Did I say: more watchful? That above all. We watch you, we follow you, we spy on you, we obsess over you.”
The speaker’s a ghost, a dead person who’s stuck around to haunt the living. Millhauser is the master of what might be called the Homeopathic School of Fantastic Writing: just the barest tincture of strangeness, eyedropped into the body of an otherwise mimetic story. The payoff for this withholding of weirdness can be a reader’s intensified complicity in defamiliarization: a sensation of slippage into the unreal just as we know it ourselves, from our dreams and fantasies. In Millhauser, the effect is often also deeply mournful, as in this devastating slowfuse emotional tragedy—“The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” rewritten with an exquisite attention to the incommensurateness of loss that’s truly worthy of James. (It is also worthy of James that this story of being posthumous-yet-alive can be read against the fate of a living writer who finds himself entombed within a “New and Selected Stories.”)
“The Next Thing” describes a super department store of the future, one that undermines (literally, since the store consists of a vast basement) the life of the American town where it appears, having arrived first as a fad and diversion and then increasingly become a new mode of being for the town’s citizens. “The Next Thing” forms an explicit dialogue with Millhauser’s earlier story “The Barnum Museum,” a fantasia of a vast and magical institution that adapts to the desires of its visitors. “The Barnum Museum” is quintessential Millhauser: it exemplifies his interest in microcosms (dioramas, stage shows, dream worlds and so on) that loom into macrocosms, then threaten to rival or even engulf the reality that gave birth to them.
In Millhauser’s hands, this recurrent motif is a versatile and suggestive mirror-symbol, fluently alive to interpretation. It glints with aspects of Plato’s Cave and Borges’s Library of Babel—and now, like those earlier images, it can’t help seeming like an emblem of our new thing, the virtual life. Millhauser also seems to tease at virtuality in “The Wizard of West Orange,” in which an unnamed Edisonian inventor struggles to bring into being a tactile medium to rival the phonograph or Eastman’s film apparatus. The effort draws one of the inventor’s assistants, the story’s narrator, into an aching disillusionment with his former “blind skin”: “A new life beckons. A shadow-feeling, an on-the-vergeness. Our sensations fixed, rigid, predictable. Must smash through. Into what? The new place. The there. We live off to one side, like paupers beside a railroad track.”
Yet for all the ambivalence Millhauser excavates from his “new” things—the carnivals and aliens, the Barnums and Edisons who blow in to topple our complacencies, to tempt and usurp—he may seem a little too certain of the stability that’s overturned by his marvels. “The Next Thing” feels brave and inspired because Millhauser damps his signature romantic luster as he frames the cold costs of enchantment; but the story also made me wonder if his halcyon, bittersweet town—an updated Bedford Falls, from It’s a Wonderful Life, overrun for the hundredth time by Pottersville—wasn’t too much of a default setting. Here on our permanent frontier, we like telling stories in which innocence has been abruptly torn from us, just a day or a decade before. And Millhauser, a controlled writer if ever there was one, mostly adapts this to his own fine uses. Yet every once in a while it might be seen as driving him instead.
Not least because “The Slap” appears to refute this small reservation, the collection’s opening story is my favorite among the new offerings, and may even rival “Cat ’n’ Mouse” and “A Visit” in my Millhauser hall of fame. A town—a Millhauser town, of course, but a degree more contemporary, less varnished with yearning—finds itself the victim of a serial face-slapper. The story, from there, goes boldly nowhere. Rather than developing or resolving the action, Millhauser chooses simply to portray the brutal daily presence of rage and distrust in a community discovering itself and unsure what to think, yet unable to avert its eyes.
In “The Slap,” this gesture is a Millhauserian mirror of unprecedented ungenerosity: it shows us only ourselves.
—The New York Times, 2011
IV
Lost Worlds
The Mechanics of Fear, Revisited
In a piece called “The Mechanics of Fear,” published in The New Yorker in 1976, Greil Marcus made a case for John Franklin Bardin as a greatly neglected American noir writer—at the time Bardin was being brought back into print by Penguin in The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus. Marcus wrote: “Drawing partly on his own mother’s madness and the uncertainties of a Depression coming-of-age, he made paranoia his subject: Bardin’s protagonists solve the mysteries in which they are implicated or perish in them.” Twenty-odd years later, despite Penguin’s and Marcus’s efforts, Bardin was just as obscure when an editor at Vintage Books and I discovered our mutual fascination with his first three books, those reprinted in the Omnibus. At the time I joked that the way to best reintroduce Bardin would be to republish The Deadly Percheron in something I off-handedly called The Vintage Book of Amnesia. I argued that Bardin was, with Philip K. Dick and Steve Erickson, one of the greatest and most recurrent practitioners of “amnesia fiction,” a hitherto unidentified genre. That joke eventually became an anthology, in which a chapter of The Deadly Percheron appeared, though I’d originally hoped to include the entire book. So, perhaps consider this introduction a belated enclosure of Bardin’s bizarre and enthralling first novel within the sphere of that project.
Paranoia and amnesia make heavy companions, but the tone of The Deadly Percheron’s opening chapters is anything but. Instead, the book comes off like a brisk blend of Damon Runyon and The Twilight Zone. At the start, the pedantically reasonable psychiatrist Dr. George Matthews meets a new patient, Jacob Blunt, who, though by appearance young, sane, and clear-eyed, claims ludicrous hallucinations and wears a flower in his hair. On hearing Dr. Matthews’s pat explanation of psychosis (“A person who is mentally ill often lives in a world of his own imagining, an unreal world,”) Blunt exclaims, “I am nuts, thank God! It isn’t really happening!” This contradiction is the first of what will become an obsessive sequence of reversals; Bardin captivates the reader’s interest by a flourish of happenings and motivations seemingly impossible to explain, showing a fondness for bald paradox rivaled only by A. E. Van Vogt, G. K. Chesterton, and Borges. Like those others, Bardin arouses everywhere our suspicion that, along with his characters, he’s making it up as he goes along.
Hearing Jacob Blunt’s exclamation, Dr. Matthews thinks: “This was unusual; I had never before met a neurotic who admitted wanting to lose his mind.” Admitted may be the key word. For when at Blunt’s moonish instigation Matthews finds himself whirled into what seems an innocently hectic adventure, tinged with Bohemian New York whimsy involving Americanized leprechauns and other droll non sequiturs, it is impossible not to detect an occult appetite in the narrator for novelty, crisis, disorder. If George Matthews doesn’t knowingly “want to lose his mind,” he’s nevertheless driven, from the first page, by an unacknowledged yearning to shift into Jacob Blunt’s irrational universe. Dr. Matthews is also, from the first, weirdly susceptible to his careening emotions: he likes and dislikes people at the drop of a hat, and has his feelings bruised by the leprechaun’s refusal to let him participate in Blunt’s shenanigans. He also tends to an abrupt and swooning eroticism, fixated on legs and skirts in a manner that hints at the fetishism of a Bruno Schulz or R. Crumb. In short, Dr. Matthews’s existence as a prestigious Manhattan therapist rather begs to be overturned.
The tension here is the familiar and thrilling malign urge underlying all film noir—the sensation that the complacent surfaces of post-war American life were brimming with irrationality, subversion, and vice, ever ready to erupt. Yet for the first few chapters George Matthews’s smug certainties seem to be sufficient to the task of containing, or repressing, the book’s disturbances. Jacob Blunt’s merry paranoia, and the whiff of conspiracy that surrounds him, is kept at a comfortable arm’s length, treated with psychiatric platitudes even as it veers into a murder plot. The reader may initially suspect Bardin of purveying a wild goose chase, albeit one with some of the color and brio of Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock or perhaps a minor Hitchcock film like Saboteur, or Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai.
Yet, whether Dr. Matthews was itching for trouble or not, he can’t have had in mind the torments for which he is bound. Beginning in Chapter Four, Jacob Blunt and his dray horse vanish from the scene, and The Deadly Percheron gets personal. The reader, with George Matthews, is plunged into a classical noir nightmare of dissolution and estrangement, as implausible as it is emotionally vivid. Bardin’s genius is for the waking nightmare, lucid, outwardly reasonable, yet vertiginous, with a tinge of hysteria. His only rival in this mode is Cornell Woolrich, but Bardin’s a more felicitous writer than Woolrich, and his anarchic commitment to panic is more absolute (even if, like Woolrich, he’s drably bound to the implausible logical final explanations that mar the work as the slapdash last-minute happy endings mar so many film noirs).
In The Deadly Percheron’s consummate middle passage, Dr. Matthews allows himself to be transformed into the homeless drifter, John Brown. First, Matthews conspires with his own unseen tormentors, pretending to accept an outcast identity in order to fool the benighted staff of the sanatorium in which he has been imprisoned (they present him with Freudianism at its most obstinately cryptological, i.e., the more you protest that a certain thing is true, the more certain we are that you are in denial of something else). Then, in the devastating Chapter Five, “In Which a Man Runs Down” (the chapter-title takes on at least two meanings), on earning his release Matthews is confronted, in a shop-window’s reflection, with a stranger who turns out to be himself:
What made him really fascinatingly ugly was the wide, long, angry red scar that traversed his face diagonally from one ear across the nose and down to the root of the jaw at the base of the other cheek. It was an old scar that had knit badly and in healing had pulled and twisted at the skin until the face it rode had the texture of coarse parchment and the grimace of a clown. One cheek, and the eye with it, was drawn sidewise and upward into a knowing leer, the other drooped, and with it a corner of the mouth, as if its owner were stricken with grief. The skin’s color was that of cigar ash, but the scar’s color was bright carmine. I pitied the man, then was embarrassed to look around at him: surely, he must have seen me staring at his reflection! But as I had this thought I noticed that his glass emptied itself of coca-cola just as I sucked noisily at my straw.
Meeting his disfigurement, Matthews accepts the John Brown identity not as an imposture but as a deeper reality uncovered. His amnesia is a condition of shame, and his former life becomes irretrievable, a kind of bluff that the revelatory logic of noir has called. The presentation of John Brown’s life as a cafeteria counterman at Coney Island, including the almost allegorical clarity with which he inventories the carnival folks he befriends while working there, bears all the descriptive gravity the Manhattan psychiatrist’s milieu lacked. Here, as Marcus suggests, is the trauma of the Depression leaking up through the veneer of middle-class complacency. Similarly, as noted by scholar Kenneth Payne, the gothic details of torture and flight that slowly emerge out of the fog of Brown/Matthews’ amnesia seem a kind of European concentration camp horror come to roost on the American shore.
Everything Bardin presents in these middle chapters persuades. Sonia, Brown’s damaged and abject Coney Island lover, is wholly real
and poignant, whereas Sarah, Dr. Matthews’s wife, is never anything other than an idea, the notion of a desirable life incarnated in a name. By this time the reader has been enlisted in a study deeper than a murder mystery: whatever paltry rationalizations are offered, this book presents a nightmare of affliction and complicity, one unfolding according to the deeper operations of the dreamlife. At one point, attempting to parse the malicious and absurd plot that enfolds him, Bardin’s narrator muses, “Murder might be termed the ultimate practical joke; similarly, a practical joke might be called the social form of murder.” I was reminded of the British psychoanalytic critic Adam Phillip’s pregnant formulation: “Businessmen are criminals disguised as artists; criminals are only failed artists.”
The Deadly Percheron and Bardin’s next two novels were poured onto the page in a period of less than three years. Bardin himself seemed to understand what he’d accomplished, though he showed no propensity for repeating the trick. Offering Grahame Greene, Henry Green, and Henry James as his influences (I adore the overlapping names, as though even that citation was enslaved to some unconscious punning instinct), he gave in 1980 the following statement: “A novel is a detector of mined experience. As a soldier walks a mined field with a contraption in front of him that buzzes when it’s over a mine, so a novelist, such as I, elaborates a contraption that when the reader experiences it may warn him of the mines of his own emotions. I draw no distinction between the novel and the detective novel: there are only good and bad novels.” Julian Symons, introducing the 1976 reissue, said: “He belongs not to the world of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, but to that of Patricia Highsmith or even that of Poe.” Marcus, perhaps even closer to the mark, insisted Bardin’s true affiliation was with the B-movie poets of film noir, most of them European exiles: Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Max Ophuls (I’d add Jacques Tourneur). In his commitment to a vernacular American surrealism, rooted in the materials of noir, I’d also suggest Bardin points ahead, to Charles Willeford, Paul Auster, and David Lynch. Bardin’s contraption is a sturdy one, and more than half a century later, his mine detector shrieks with what it finds.