I Have Snakes in My Fingers

In 1929, the French writer Jean Giono published his first novel.  Originally called Colline, in 1930 it was translated into English under the title Hill of Destiny, the last two words of which, once you've read the book, turn out to be utterly meaningless. They should have stopped at Hill, which in fact is what "colline" means in French. And that blunt stamp of a word -- without even a "the" -- also helps to prepare the reader for the strange starkness of Giono's brief story.

In fairness to whoever chose Hill of Destiny for the English translation, I can sort of understand, or anyway I have a theory about, why they did, however much the decision may reek of confusion and cynicism. One of the unusual things about Hill (which has just been reprinted by NYRB Classics, under that title) is that, while I don't for a second believe Giono was thinking along these lines, the fact is that his book, which comes in at just over 100 pages, reads, at least on a plot level, as a kind of environmental horror story, one of those "the Earth shrugs us off" pulp classics that were popular in the 1950s through, say, the 70s (and are becoming popular again now). It was impossible, frankly, for me to read Hill and not think of it as a work of horror, and I believe, at least now, almost ninety years after its initial publication, that facet of it is one of it's chief pleasures. That this take on Hill would probably make Giono, who died in 1970, roll over in his grave is not something I have any control over.

All of the action in Hill takes place in an area called the Bastides, "the remnants of a hamlet" which is located "in the frigid shadow of the mountain range of Lure." Early on, Giono lays out his dramatis personae, and does so concisely, there not being all that many personae:

Married couples live in two of the houses:

One belongs to Gondran le Mederic. He married Marguerite Ricard. Her father, Janet, lives with them.

One belongs to Aphrodis Arbaud. He married a woman from Pertuis.

They have two little daughters, one three, one five.

Then there are:

Cesar Maurras, his mother, and their young welfare worker.

Alexandre Jaume, who lives with his daughter, Ulalie. And finally, Gagou.

So they're an even dozen, plus Gagou, who throws off the reckoning.

Gagou is a mentally handicapped man who comes by his name through saying no other word than "gagou," Which is a genre trope -- in fantasy, not in horror so much, but anyway think of Hodor from  A Song of Ice and Fire and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings (Gollum says a lot, but his name derives from a meaningless, hacking noise he makes). Anyway, his place in Hill is not quite the same as that which is occupied by Martin and Tolkien's characters.

Presently, Janet, Gondran's father-in-law is obscurely injured -- is he caught in a flood of sluice waters? Does he have a stroke? Whatever the case, he becomes an invalid who regularly spews forth a barrage of insane words, which nevertheless strike some, especially Gondran and Jaume, as obscurely, but terrifyingly meaningful. He says to Jaume:

"The toad that lived in the willow has come out.

"It has the hands and eyes of a man.

"A man who's been punished.

"It made its home in the willow, out of leaves and mud.

"Its belly is full of caterpillars. But it's still a man.

"It eats caterpillars, but it's a man, you only have to look at its hands.

"It runs its little hands over its belly to check itself out: 'is it really me,' it's asking itself, 'is it really me?' It has good reason to ask, and then it cries when it's certain it really is him.

"I've seen it crying. It's eyes are like kernels of corn, and the more it cries the more music it croaks through its mouth. 

"One day I asked myself: 'Janet, who has any idea what he did to be punished like that, to be left with only his hands and his eyes?' 

"These are things that the willow would have told me if I knew how to talk its language. I tried. But there was nothing doing. It was as deaf as a fence post."

Later, a cat appears, and Jaume speaks to the men in the hamlet. He tells them that he's seen this cat before, many times before. Every time he's seen it, two days later something terrible has happened, including the suicide of his wife. Most of the terrible things would be referred to now, literally or figuratively, as "acts of god": floods, lightning strikes, etc. And perhaps, the suicide of Jaume's wife applies there as well.  Eventually, the men of the hamlet decide that Janet is not simply raving, nor is here merely a dark prophet: they come to see him as the agent of their potential destruction, and plans are made for dealing with him.

Hill becomes most literal about its intentions in a section when Gondran goes hunting. He has no particular goal other than to bring back food, yet in the course of things he senselessly kills a lizard. After graphically describing the act, Giono writes:

He thinks about Janet and he cocks his eye at the little pile of brown dirt still twitching over the crushed lizard.

          Blood, nerves, suffering.

          He's caused flesh and blood to suffer, flesh and blood just like his own.

          So all around him, on this earth, does every action have to lead to suffering?

          Is he directly to blame for the suffering of plants and animals?

          Can he not even cut down a tree without committing murder?

          It's true, when he cuts down a tree, he does kill.

          And when he scythes, he slays.

So that's the way it is -- is he killing all the time? Is he living like a gigantic, runaway barrel, leveling everything in his path?

So it is really all alive?

Janet has figured this all out ahead of him.

Everything: animals, plants, and who know, maybe even the stones, too.

So, he can't even lift a finger anymore, without unleashing streams of pain? 

Giono's biography presents him as a very political artist -- a lifelong pacifist, including during World War II, he was falsely accused of collaborating with the Nazis -- and this first novel shows that off as well. His depiction of the natural world in Hill is fierce and unforgiving regarding what he viewed as the destruction of it by humanity. So fierce and unforgiving, in fact, that his argument seems to be, as implied in the passage quoted above, that nothing anyone does, not even taking a step or taking a breath, will not bring death down on something. It's hard to react to that in any way other than choosing between continuing on as you were, or sitting still until you rot. As such, if Hill is an activist novel, it fails: what exactly do you expect me to do, then?

As a bleak piece of horror writing, though, Hill is quite effective. Eventually, there is death as the curse proves real, and a bitter irony at the end that fits the tradition of Poe and Saki and Roald Dahl and EC Comics. It's not a rare thing to use genre (if that's even what Giono was consciously doing) as a prop for Something Meaningful. It's also not rare to use horror to express hopelessness.

The Passage of Time and the Indifference of the World

When the French writer Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, I remember Peter Englund, secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards that particular prize, said of Modiano's work: "I don't think he's difficult to read. You can read him easily, one of his books in the afternoon, have dinner, and read another in the evening." That struck me as a little bit condescending, to Modiano or potential new readers or both, but it's true that Modiano's books do tend to be quite short. Since winning the prize, his fiction, once rare in the US, began to to flood the shelves (relatively speaking), and one book, Suspended Sentences, gathers together three of Modiano's works that were originally each published as an individual volume in France. All three bound together maxes out at 212 pages (the shortest book, Afterimage, is only 60). Already this year, I've read four of Modiano's short novels (over a little more than two months, which admittedly isn't at quite the clip Englund suggested), from three different translators. And what has struck me so far is something Modiano, whom Englund has called "a Marcel Proust of our time" (which is less condescending), himself said, in the midst of his charming confusion immediately after winning the Nobel, which is that "I have always felt like I've been writing the same book for the past 45 years."

Which is very Proustian of him, not to mention, from my very limited experience, true. Curiously, none of the four I've read have very much to do with the Nazi occupation of Paris, which is known to be one of his two major themes (though its shadow is there in Afterimage and Suspended Sentences, from which the larger volume takes its title; my only real experience of his take on the subject is through his screenplay for the Louis Malle film Lacombe, Lucien), but all four are absolutely awash in the problem and sadness of memory. That's the book he's been writing for the last 45 years, and what other book could possibly take so long to write?

The other two Modiano novels I read recently are a pair that have just been released by NYRB Classics. Their titles, at least in English translation, not only hint at the theme of memory but also point to memory's unavoidable sub-theme: In the Café of Lost Youth, from 2007, and the most recent Modiano book I've read, and Young Once, which from what I can tell could be the title of all of Modiano's books. As a summary of an artistic philosophy, Modiano couldn't do much better. From what I can tell, the literal translation of the original French title, Une Jeunesse would be A Youth. That's not so bad either.

I'll start with the more recently published of the two, though. Set in the 1950s, the story is told by four different people over the course of four long-ish chapters. The first voice, a nameless young student (who we are perhaps to think of as Modiano himself) introduces us to the important elements. There is a café called the Condé that is unique and beloved among a group of loyal, somewhat eccentric patrons.

First of all, some details about the Condé's regulars are necessary. Well, they were between nineteen and twenty-five years old, with the exception of a few customers such as Babilée, Adamov, and Dr. Vala who were approaching fifty, but no one paid any mind to their ages. Babilée, Adamov, and Dr. Vala still clung to their youthfulness, men we might describe with the melodious and obsolete moniker "bohemians." When I look up "bohemian" in the dictionary, I find: A person who leads a wandering life, without rules or worries about the next day. Truly a definition well suited to those who frequented the Condé. Some, like Tarzan, Jean-Michel, and Fred, claimed to have had numerous run-ins with the police since their adolescence, and La Houpa had escaped from the Bon Pasteur Correctional Facility at sixteen. But we were on the Rive Gauche and most of them lived in the sheltered world of literature and the arts. I myself was going to school. I didn't dare tell this to them, and I didn't often mingle with their group.

The central figure among the Condé's regulars is a young woman named nicknamed Louki (everyone who is accepted by the old regulars as a new regular gets a nickname). She's a mysterious woman, but what's interesting is that Modiano uses certain noir tropes, like the mysterious woman, and even the private detective -- this is the occupation of the second narrator -- without it ever becoming that. Louki, whose real name is Jacqueline Delanque, isn't a shady character with mob ties. She's simply an unhappy young woman who is desperate to find something to lift her out of the buzzing uncertainty of her life. The private detective is on her trail because her husband, named Jean-Pierre Choureau, wants to find her. He's not a bad man, and she's not a bad woman. But she just walked away. At one point, the detective, named Caisley, working from a variety of evidence, including an obsessive notebook of the comings and goings of the Condé's regulars compiled by one of their own, says:

Sunshine. I was lost in my thoughts. Jacqueline Delanque could count on my discretion, Choureau would never learn anything of the Hotel Savoie, the Condé, La Fontaine Garage, or this person named Roland, doubtless the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket mentioned in the notebook. "Louki. Monday, February 12th, 11 p.m. Louki, April 28th, 2 p.m. Louki with the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket." Throughout the pages of the notebook, I had underlined her name each time in blue pencil and recopied all the notes that concerned her on loose sheets. With the dates. And the times. But she had no reason to worry. I wouldn't go back to the Condé.

The fourth narrator is the man Rolan mentioned in the above passage, and that last chapter is the really heartbreaking one. But curiously, the third narrator is Louki herself -- it's not common for the mysterious figure who everyone wonders about to have a voice in their own novel. But here she does, and by doing so Modiano makes her more than a simple mystery, without taking the mystery away. In the Café of Lost Youth is a novel that is less about the act of looking back than the other Modiano books I've read, it seems more present, but the climax (seen from the point of view of the last narrator, the man who loves Louki) is blunt and upsetting enough to seem like a sad memory. Which is what the book is -- it's not present, after all. It is looking back.

Young Once, meanwhile, is all memory. It's the story of Louis and Odile, a married couple, each on the cusp of their thirty-fifth birthday when we meet them in the 1980s, when the book was published, but who exist for the vast majority of the novel as twenty-year-olds taking their first steps into adulthood. Which is both an accurate and a simplistic way of putting it. Set mostly in the early 1960s, for a while we follow Louis and Odile as they live their lives as strangers to each other. Louis has just been discharged from the military and enjoys the charity of a possibly shady man named Brossier, who will eventually get Louis work with a definitely shady man named Bejardy. At the same time, Odile has been picked more or less out of a crowd by a music producer named Bellune. Odile does indeed have ambitions to be a singer, and Bellune, a kind and honorable man, takes her under his wing. But soon after she's recorded a few songs for a potential album, the melancholy Bellune commits suicide and Odile is set adrift into the darker realms of the music business, where she is pressured into sex by men who could but do not do anything for her career.

In the four Modiano novels, it's rare to come across an incident, early in the story, as dramatic as Bellune's suicide, and indeed much of Young Once follows what I take to be his usual pattern, which is to send his characters through a series of mostly everyday experiences, meeting an assortment of people who "don't move the plot along," with everything covered in a lightly foreboding and perhaps heavily melancholy atmosphere. That sense of foreboding comes from Modiano's use of noir tropes -- remember the detective in In the Café of Lost Youth; in Young Once there's the certainty that Louis is working for a criminal. Perhaps for Modiano this is part of the subject of memory: the memory of films he saw and crime novels he read long ago. But instead of the threat of violence hanging in the air, as in those books and movies, there's the sense that one day we'll be much older than this, and our memories will remind us only of what's been lost.

Bellune kills himself because of things it is now too late to do, or correct. Louis and Odile are too young to even fully despise the bad things that happen to them. It's just one thing and then the next thing; plus they have each other. For them, everything is the present. The past is not worth mentioning. And what's fascinating about this book, and if I went back I could probably find this in all the Modiano I've read so far, is that there's nothing about the future. Well, there is one mention of it. Early on, Louis, during one of his many stretches of idleness, is alone in his room:

Ever since the interminable days he had spent in the barracks infirmary, he'd had the habit of listening to his transistor radio in its green leather case. Lying down, looking at the ceiling, he would think about the future, or in other words about nothing...

The Kind of Face You Shoot: If You've Got the Money, Honey

James M. Cain began his seminal 1934 debut novel The Postman Always Lives Twice, a book that defines and practically created an entire genre, this way:

They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

I could almost stop there, but no. Cain goes on:

I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave me a cigarette, though, and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.

One gets the sense that this narrator is not employed, and probably hasn't been for a while. He just drifts into whatever situation is next for him, and the next temptation which, when indulged, will either satisfy or destroy him. But he's barely thinking like that. His thoughts run to the primal: he needs food now, so he will look for it. As it happens, he will get a job, which will also bring him next to temptation, and death, and, well, you know. That's what having a job gets you, I suppose

I don't believe it's reaching to claim to hear an echo of Cain in the opening paragraph of Elliott Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel, published exactly twenty years later, in 1954:

I'd been roughnecking on a drilling rig in the Atchafayala River for better than sixteen weeks, racking the big silver stems of pipe, lugging the sacks of drilling mud from barge to shore, working with my back and guts and letting my mind coast. It needed a lot of coasting. Down around six thousand feet we twisted the pipe off in the hold and they abandoned the well, paid us off, and said to come back in two months, maybe three months.

Tonally, this is sort of the "gainfully employed" version of Cain -- it's a reverse, in other words, as we will learn that Chaze's narrator (who, eventually, after quite a while actually, we discover goes by the name "Tim Sunblade," which...) is not drifting towards a job, but happily away from one. Cain's guy, Frank Chambers, will very soon cadge a meal from the guy who subsequently hires him, and who he will subsequently murder, but we're not immediately privy to the darkness just under his surface. As far as his personality goes, the first impression is one of a guy just trying to get along. Chaze's Tim is a bit different, in that when, still on page one, he talks about being complimented by the driller who hired him for the job that just ended, strongly implying that if Tim comes back and keeps up the hard work he'll be promoted, Tim let's us know that "It was all I could do to keep from laughing in his face."

If Chambers is stumbling into a job and then into the arms of Cora, the dangerously ravenous wife of his boss, and thereon into Hell, Tim is moving with great deliberateness into the arms of the frighteningly cash-mad Virginia (she's a prostitute, and he hired her), but he also doesn't need her to entice him into a life of crime. He's already a criminal, in fact a prison escapee who since escaping has been building towards carrying out the armored car robbery planned by Jeepie, a fellow escapee from Parchman who was killed by prison guards before he could get on the other side of the wall. And that plan has always involved the murder of one of the armored car attendants. "You can see it for yourself," he tells us. "Alive he was nothing but trouble." He's prepared to willingly dive into Hell.

Black Wings Has My Angel has been largely unavailable for about forty years (though not quite so unavailable as many think; in 2012 Stark House reissued the novel, pairing it in one volume with Bruce Elliott's One is a Lonely Number). It's just been reprinted by NYRB Classics, and in his introduction to that edition Barry Gifford talks about his plan to publish it, during his stint as editor of Black Lizard Books during their great 80s heyday, was thwarted by a new batch of editors with final say who didn't believe Chaze's novel was up to snuff. Having read it now myself, I can't view that decision as anything short of ludicrous. In just about 200 pages, Chaze is able to tell his story, which includes a tormented, highly sexual, violent and romantic relationship with Virginia, a complicated drunk who seems alternately joyous and disturbingly avaricious, as well as the carefully planned armored car heist and its aftermath, as well as any number of digressions. About, for example, Tim's time spent working at a factory that made sugar-beet trucks, which he takes for a variety of reasons while working on the heist. There's a whole little short story in here about two of Tim's co-workers, and Chaze fits it into the greater whole with a lot of grace and dark humor.

It's Chaze's prose, though, that is the real show here. Gifford claims that of the Chaze novels that he read after being knocked out by this one, none came close to the power of Black Wings Has My Angel. I can't imagine that the man who wrote this never wrote anything else worthwhile, however. Check out this passage, for example. Tim comes home to find Virginia gone, which happens more than once, and since her timing is especially bad in this instance he goes searching for her in the bars of downtown Denver. At one point, Chaze writes:

From time to time I had a drink and that helped. I remember in one bar down the street from the Denver Post there were six or eight newspapermen at the bar, loading up between editions. You can spot them anywhere. They talk in headlines and they drink gravely and their faces are clean and their fingernails full of carbon. They have many private jokes. They are about the only people I know who are the same out of college as in college, in small towns and big ones. These fellows listened politely when I asked the bartender my stock question. Tall blonde, good shape, very good lips and legs. Drinks whisky neat at times -- water chaser. You seen her? Then one of them volunteered the statement that there was no such woman and all the others nodded. 'Pretty women do not drink whisky neat,' he said. 'They defile it. They perfume it. They dump fruit salad in it.' They all nodded again. It was enough to make you sick. My uncle's a newspaperman. All by himself he's enough to make you sick. Here we had five of them.

Note, among other things, the way the number of newspapermen goes for "six or eight" to five, as though Tim doesn't give a shit how many there were -- one's too many, and one more might as well be a thousand more. Chaze was a newspaperman himself, by the way, which might go without saying.

Black Wings Has My Angel would seem to refer to Virginia, in the classic femme fatale tradition, and it very well may. But what's interesting is that Tim doesn't get sucked into a moral abyss by Virginia. They're both rotten people, but from page one of the novel (and before that, even) Tim had a plan to commit murder. As far as I can tell, Virginia didn't. She's possibly insane, and almost certainly has the kind of death wish that such characters in such novels and films often do, but murder is brought to her; she doesn't bring it to Tim. So the angel of the title must be, I'd say, the angel of death, whose wings, if it exists, must of course be black, and who is always the double-dealing guardian angel of men like Tim.

In the last chunk of the novel, Chaze introduces some curious and rather nutty plot machinations which are hard to swallow (one of them doesn't even end up mattering at all, which to me counts as a plus) but which fit into the usual themes of fate and karma that are the bread and butter of the classic American crime novel. In addition to those plot details, there are also a few bits of imagery that are just this side of bonkers, and may actually be on that side. One of them is so absurdly direct and appropriate, if you will, that if someone ever translated it into a painting, there would be no other title for it than "Crime Novel." It's so exactly right that it is exactly right. If you get me.

Rather a Hard Life

Daniel Handler once pointed out that among the strangest things to be found in Michael Tolkin's hugely strange 2003 novel Under Radar was that it "has a witch in the first sentence who never shows up again." Similarly, maybe two-thirds of the way through Barbara Comyns' second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths from 1950, a ghost appears for a few sentences and is then gone and forgotten. I would be inclined to dismiss this visitation as the dream of our narrator, Sophia Fairclough, except that the ghost is seen and remarked upon by a second person. At least according to Sophia, who I'm inclined to believe, as she'd seemed pretty honest up to that point.

Otherwise, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is essentially a realist novel, though one which makes room for character names like Peregrine Narrow and Bumble Blunderbore. Though the novel is far from soaked in such flourishy character names -- those are, I believe, the only two -- I believe the reference to Dickens is clear. When reading the name "Bumble Blunderbore," let's not forget Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist, though the two would seem to serve different purposes. But anyhow, the story of Sophia Fairclough's life is a story of poverty, heartbreak, sadness, and tragedy, and so Comyns seems to me to be nodding back in the direction of Britain's, and perhaps history's, foremost chronicler of the terribleness of life. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is not otherwise Dickensian, however -- apart from its considerable brevity, the title itself suggests this is a novel which is not only picking up almost directly where Dickens left off (Dickens having died in 1870, Woolworths having been founded in 1878) but one that has a wryness to it with which Dickens, though himself a writer possessed of a rich sense of irony, may not have recognized. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths isn't a funny novel, and it's not nakedly striving for social reform through satire. Its wryness, and Comyns', comes from simply having been around the block a few times.

The novel, which has just been reissued by NYRB Classics, begins like this:

I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.

This is being said to us by Sophia Fairclough, our narrator, as I've said, many years after the main action of the novel, which comprise the worst years of her life up to that point, have occurred. Sophia is consciously, even self-consciously, telling us her story. In the first stretch of the book, there are several, I don't know if you'd call them post-modern exactly, but anyway references to the fact that first person narrators must be telling us all of this stuff somehow. The most explicit of these comes when chapter nine begins like this:

This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is partly because there isn't any conversation. I could just fill pages like this:

'I am sure it is true,' said Phyllida.

'I cannot agree with you,' answered Norman.

'Oh, but I know I am right,' she replied.

'I beg to differ,' said Norman sternly. That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people's books. I know this will never be a real book that business men in trains will read, the kind of business men that wear stiff hats with curly brims and little breathing holes let in the side. I wish I knew more about words. Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school. I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since. All the same, I am going on writing this book even if business men scorn it.

Perhaps you've detected a certain frustration in that passage, from Comyns no less than Fairclough. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is considerably autobiographical. In the novel, Sophia marries Charles Fairclough, an aspiring painter from a broken but not unwealthy family. Sophia has two siblings, a brother and a sister, but the rest of her family is gone "for one reason or another." In life, Comyns' first marriage was to John Pemberton. Pemberton was an artist, and Comyns an art student at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. The marriage was brief, but it brought Comyns into the world of people like Dylan Thomas. Even though Comyns herself claimed that "The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty" (that's on the copyright page) it's easy to regard that claim as disingenuous. The monstrous laziness and selfishness displayed by Charles in the novel may or may not correspond to John Pemberton, but the artistic ambition of the fictional couple must correspond on some level with that of the real one. Then again, who cares? What matters is, in the first chunk of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths Sophia and Charles Fairclough fight to be allowed by Charles' divorced parents to get married, and when this is achieved their lives immediately begin to disintegrate.

It's worth noting that it's true, as Chapter Nine indicates, that there is very little in the way of dialogue in Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, and such dialogue as there is is contained within paragraphs, as opposed to being separated out (which would beef up the page count, as Sophia implied). That doesn't mean that Comyns' novel resembles something written by, say, Thomas Bernhard, but it does mean that the story is written in a style that doesn't focus on individual scenes of drama, or is a story even much interested in progression. Sophia's life, like history, is just one damn thing after another, so that major events (deaths, marriages, ghost) are often presented with the same level of significance as more minor ones (being taken out to lunch, getting a pet, getting a part-time job). It's all one life. There's no build, as such. She's telling it to us, and it's in the past for her.

Given the above, it's difficult to describe Our Spoons Came from Woolworths in terms of plot. Most of the story is a chronicle of struggling with poverty, the blame for which must fall pretty much entirely on Charles, who sits at home and paints and paints and paints, and who we're told is not without talent, but who also lazily and obliviously eats the small, poor birthday cake that Sophia made for their child, Sandro, before Sandro ever even laid eyes on it. This drives Sophia to actually strike Charles, but this reaction is rare. Mostly she's ashamed. Mostly, she feels disgraced. Everyone else, however shitty they may be, is rather comfortable with the fact that they are correct. Sophia enjoys no such confidence. During the years of poverty, this is as good as things get:

As the year went on our poverty got worse and worse. Charles just painted away and didn't notice unless there was no money for cigarettes. Then he would borrow a few shillings from Francis to buy some and he would be happy again. I was out working so much he had to look after Sandro nearly every day, but he was more reconciled to him now.

Please note the word "reconciled" to describe a father's relationship with his infant. There is much in Our Spoons Came from Woolworths about pregnancy and childbirth, and the fear of pregnancy and the dangers of it. Much of it, of course -- most of it -- is also about poverty. Having nothing, living with nothing, being happy to get a break on milk. Comyns is never ostentatious about this (as Dickens would have been, which I do not in any way hold against Dickens). Add a baby, or babies, to the poverty, yet remove any gilded language that you might expect from such material, and you have Our Spoons Came from Woolworths:

After Christmas things became grim again. No more book jackets came Charles's way and my model work was irregular and poorly paid, and the expenses were heavier now Sandro was weaned. We seldom had a fire and the light got cut off because we had not paid the bill, so we bought a little lamp for two-shillings-and-elevenpence and it gave quite a pretty light. We went to the electric light people and asked for the money we had given for a deposit back. It was nice to think they owed us money instead of it being the other way round. They gave us the deposit money less what we owed them and it paid for our food for a week. These days we lived on vegetable soup and bread. Sandro had milk and an occasional egg as well.

"...and it gave quite a pretty light." That perhaps offers a nutshell-account of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths better than anything else could. It's not so much that Sophia is naive or passive, or even optimistic, although at various times she's both. It's that she's young, and wants things to be nice, although she's no Pollyanna. How could she be, when her poverty and loneliness, in a life that includes a husband and children and a love affair, is so relentless? I was surprised while reading Our Spoons Came from Woolworths to be reminded of post-apocalyptic novels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road (and even horror/survival novels like Scott Smith's The Ruins). I realized the connection between such books, where in one a free lunch at a restaurant by an admirer or a kindness given by a landlord, and in another the divvying up of a single tuna fish sandwich among a half-dozen starving people, or sudden discovery of a fully-stocked bomb shelter by a father and son who've lived for many days on nothing, is pretty much unshakable, and as a regular reader of books that fall into all these categories I should have picked up on them before. And it's not the parts where the characters have nothing that grind you down -- it's the brief periods where the smallest things seem like decadence in comparison. The power of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is that that one day was the best day he could have hoped for.

Barbara Comyns was a great writer. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is the third by her I've read, following The Vet's Daughter and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, each of which made my "Best Books" list in respective years (in which I read them, that is). Yes, she's forgotten, but there's no reason she should be. She's coming back in print, slowly but surely. Give her a look.

The Kind of Face You Slash: Thinking Won't Get You Anywhere

The first time I learned the name William Sloane was in 1988, when in the introduction to Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's seminal Horror: 100 Best Books (and yes, I bring this book up a lot, there's a reason for that) it was pointed out that Harlan Ellison (yes, I bring him up a lot too, leave me alone), was originally going to contribute a piece about Sloane's 1939 novel The Edge of Running Water, but, according to Jones and Newman, Ellison reread the novel, one he'd loved in his youth, and found it to be rotten. The essay Ellison ended up writing to the book was about Clark Ashton Smith, and one can hardly question that choice, but why did Sloane slide into the gutter for him? Having read Sloane now, I'll be honest: I don't know.

The opportunity to familiarize myself with Sloane was afforded to me through the release by NYRB of The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror. This volume, originally published in 1964, collects the only two novels that Sloane, mainly a publisher and editor by trade, ever wrote. These are To Walk the Night from 1937, and the aforementioned The Edge of Running Water. He also wrote a number of plays, and, according to Stephen King, in the typically chatty and rather interesting introduction he wrote for the NYRB edition, at least one short story that anybody has been able to track down, but as far as prose fiction goes, that story, called "Let Nothing You Dismay," and these two novels are it. This would make more immediate sense if Sloane had fallen off a bridge in 1940 or so, but he lived until 1974. I'm not going to speculate, but there is an interesting, though by no means off-putting, similarity between the two stories. Though I said I wasn't going to do this, it's possible to wonder if he believed he'd written one book twice. I would argue that he didn't, or that both novels are good enough that it doesn't matter, but why keep barking up this tree that may well not even be the one I'm looking for? But it's interesting. In some ways, you could even say the later novel, The Edge of Running Water, picks up where the earlier To Walk the Night leaves off.

The easiest way to get a sense of what Sloane was up to in a short period of time is to watch The Devil Commands, the adaptation of The Edge of Running Water starring Boris Karloff and directed by Edward Dmytryk that came out in 1941. That film isn't the subject of this post, but even though it whittles a 240-some page novel down to a 65-minute film, it's surprisingly faithful, and the gist, more or less, of that film and of Sloane's fiction is the mad scientist who is driven by either good intentions or understandable emotional turmoil. Sloane's doomed characters are the clear descendants of Victor von Frankenstein..

However, in Sloane's first novel To Walk the Night, the one full-blown scientist is dead, or nearly dead, and soon fully dead, when we first meet him. In fact, we know about all of the deaths in To Walk the Night within about the first twenty pages. The main characters are our narrator, Berkeley Jones and his best friend Jerry Lister, who we learn rather quickly has committed suicide. As the novel begins, Berkeley, nicknamed Bark, is travelling to visit Jerry's father, who knows of his son's suicide, but not the details. Bark is terrified by the prospect of telling him the full truth, but eventually he realizes that he must; perhaps in doing so he and Dr. Lister can figure out what it all means. But that, of course, is what terrifies Bark. The horror began, as even Dr. Lister knows, when the two friends were back at their alma mater, some years previously, for a football game. While there, they decided to visit Professor LeNormand, Jerry's one-time astrophysicist mentor. But they find the man dead, his body bent into an insane posture, and on fire, yet when extinguished strangely cool. When they learn from the authorities that LeNormand was married, Jerry is shocked -- the controversial scientist who'd made enemies with his article "A Fundamental Critique of the Einstein Space-Time Continuum" cared only for his work. But soon the young men meet LeNormand's wife, a stunning woman named Selena who behaves strangely and doesn't seem, in Bark's estimation, to have any idea how to dress, and after a while -- but not long enough, many believe -- Jerry begins romancing her. Along the way, Selena exhibits surprising powers of prediction, continues to behave as though everyday situations are new and confusing to her, and to generally strike Bark as rather frightening, if not quite malevolent. The plot of the novel by this point has shifted all the major characters back to New York City (of which Sloane seems rather fond, which is fine, if this didn't often contrast with a not-quite-but-close sneering attitude towards places that aren't New York City), but there will be two major geographical shifts: one back to the college town where we began, and where the chief of police has summoned Bark because he's made no headway in the death of LeNormand, and wants to share a bizarre theory about connections between Selena (whose alibi at the time of her husband's death is obviously water-tight) and a young mentally handicapped woman who went missing some time ago; and the other to a small town in Arizona, where Jerry and his eventual wife Selena move so he can carry on LeNormand's work, and where he finally commits suicide.

That last bit may sound like I've given away too much, but this is all revealed in Bark's initial conversation with Dr. Lister. The fact that the reader is naturally anticipating the suicide yet Sloane is still able to make it shocking is, I'd say, impressive, but I think I know how he did it. This will sound like an insult, but I don't mean it to be: the suicide is one of the very few visceral moments in the novel. The mystery of To Walk at Night is intriguing, and Sloane's willingness to spend time on things like parties and night's out, and on Bark's reckless, alcoholic behavior as his nameless panic over his Jerry's relationship with Selena, is unusual for writers in this genre, even back in the 1930s. To Walk the Night is by no means a long book, but once he's set everything up, Sloane is in no hurry to cut to the chase. Furthermore, Bark isn't merely a personality-free tube through which Sloane funnels his plot. He's weirder and more obviously troubled than Jerry, I'd say. His mother's weird too -- I won't get into all of that, I have another book to get to, but notice the bit where Bark admits to feeling "unfilial" towards her. And ask yourself, is the effect achieved here what Sloane was going for? And if so, what a weird thing to plunk down in the middle of this particular novel.

More about that book in a minute. When I said that The Edge of Running Water picks up where To Walk the Night leaves off, I meant that the later book takes the work of the mad scientist further, and gives it a definite purpose, which the essential unknowability of To Walk the Night doesn't allow for. That this purpose is taken from Mary Shelley is neither here nor there -- she gave Fankenstein a pretty huge goal to pursue, and it's only natural that other scientists would be driven that way, too. I'm talking about death, of course, and the defeat of death. In The Edge of Running Water, we again have a narrator, less strange than Bark though not quite an everyman, named Richard Sayles. Sayles was once good friends with, and (once again) the student of an eminent professor and scientist named Julian Blair. Once a beloved figure with a great mind, the sudden death of Blair's wife Helen sent him into a spiral that led him to move to a small town in New England called Barsham Harbor. There, five years after last seeing him, Sayles finds him, having been summoned to visit and lend assistance on a mysterious project Blair is deep into, living in a big house with his late wife's young sister, Anne, and a large, suspicious, unpleasant woman named Mrs. Walters. You should know that Sayles was also in love with Helen but he never got in the way of her relationship with Julian Blair, and Anne, when last he saw her, was fifteen, so now she's twenty. You can probably see where that's heading.

A bit more plot-driven than To Walk the Night, though not aggressively so, The Edge of Running Water has an ambling way about lining up and following the paths of its various mysterious. It's not hard to guess what Blair is trying to do before we're told outright. Obviously, he wants to communicate with the dead, and possibly destroy the barrier between life and death. Blair, looking terribly worn down, thin and unhealthy, when Sayles finally lays eyes on him, is more determined than ever to do this, and he claims to be making strides. This is something Sayles can't believe, but Blair refuses to show him any evidence yet. When Sayles learns that Mrs. Walters is a spirit medium, he's even more appalled. Then, all of a sudden -- or not "all of a sudden"; like To Walk the Night, the fates of various characters are told to us early on, and it's our job to find out why they end up the way they do -- The Edge of Running Water turns into a whodunnit. Or rather, a how'dithappen. Blair's lovable housekeeper, Mrs. Marcy, dies, suddenly, apparently from a fall down the stairs. But Sayles and Anne, who were outside when it happened, heard a terrible noise, one both Anne and Mrs. Marcy had heard before. Both Sayles and Anne are positive in this case it wasn't thunder, though a storm was boiling up at the time:

It happened as we passed the maple tree under which we had been lying earlier in the afternoon. Between one step and the next I found myself stopped, as if I had run into a wall, or come to the edge of an unexpected cliff and halted instinctively. For a second I did not understand why I had brought up short, and then I knew. It was the thing Anne and Mrs. Marcy had tried to describe to me. By the time I was fully aware of it, the noise had stopped, but the echo of it was still in my ears...From ahead of us somewhere -- I felt certain that it was from the house itself -- had come such a sound as I have never heard in any other place. It was a deep and indescribable thing, as single and yet as multiple as the noise of a tempest or the roar of a rock slide. An instant after it had reach us there was a sharp rush of wind and a stinging splatter of rain across my naked back, so that I checked my stride only momentarily and was running again toward the blurred loom of the house ahead in the same second, perhaps, that I had paused.

When he and Anne reach the house, they see Mrs. Marcy at the bottom of the stares, with Blair and Mrs. Walters standing over her. It should be noted that the read is fully aware by now that Mrs. Marcy will die, but she's not officially declared dead for several pages yet, which in terms of suspense is a strange move. But then again, this is a strange book, as was To Walk the Night before it. It's a better novel, too (apart from Sloane's seeming hatred of small-town people, which gets a workout here) -- the title The Edge of Running Water turns out to be a great one. Not only does it simply sound good (better than To Walk the Night, a title I was constantly forgetting as I read it), but it ultimately has a meaning that is sad, poetic, and eerie, all at once. Still, I think it's the curious nature of the plot progressions that I'll eventually find so memorable. It's almost like a straightforward mystery story (and with an inquest scene that goes on forever, though this didn't bother me, I have to say) in many ways, but with this cloud of otherworldly terror hanging over everything. 

And of course it's that terror which is the whole point, right? What is going on with Selena, and what was LeNormand doing that Jerry was trying to finish before killing himself in Arizona? And has Julian Blair found a way to end the separation between life and death? Of course, it was H. P. Lovecraft who wrote "And with strange aeons, even death may die," but in context, this wasn't exactly something he hoped for. Neither does Sloane. ("Death is good," said Val Lewton.) NYRB calls To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water "Tales of Cosmic Horror," cosmic horror being the subgenre of horror that is most directly associated with Lovecraft. He pretty much started it all, didn't he, with his Old Ones, the horrible gods who live in outer space (roughly speaking), and he did it before Sloane had written a word. Lovecraft in fact died the same year that To Walk the Night was published. 

Stephen King notes the connection between Sloane and Lovecraft in his introduction for NYRB, but only in passing. He brings it up mainly so that he can mark the difference in the two writers' prose styles. King has always given off the air of being somewhat skeptical of Lovecraft's greatness, because of his prose. He says that Sloane is closer to Chandler. I'd say he's not that close, but the examples King pulls from Sloane (such as this from To Walk the Night: "Maybe the Italians can live happily on the slopes of Vesuvius, but I am not that sort of person") do sound more like The Long Goodbye than "The Dunwich Horror."

This is no small thing, though horror fans, I must say, do seem to devalue good prose. They can get behind good purple prose, maybe (and I like that stuff myself, and when Lovecraft was at his best, that's what he wrote, better than a lot of writers), but good clean prose tends to get lumped in with the garbage. Sloane was very good, and he actually provided fewer answers to the questions raised by his horrors than Lovecraft did. Sure, Yog-Sothoth is a kind of metaphor, but Sloane doesn't even give his readers that much. There is something above us that is dangerous. There is something beyond us that is terrible. We don't know what it looks like or what it's called or what it wants or even if it hates us. Perhaps killing us is just an inevitable side effect of its perpetual motion. That's what Sloane is willing to send us off to bed thinking about.

Men in Other Towns

The actress Susan Tyrrell died in 2012. She was 67 years old, and she was taken by a disease called essential thrombocythaemia, a condition that had already taken her legs below the knees in 2000. Within the name of her disease, that word "essential" seems almost like a mockery, because what could be less essential in the life of any individual than an illness that whittles you in half, just to begin with? But she died, Susan Tyrrell did, who'd appeared in a wide variety of films, including Paul Verhoeven's lunatic medieval bloodbath Flesh + Blood, the rather less violent Big Top Pee-wee, and a variety of other things besides, including the Amicus-esque horror anthology From a Whisper to a Scream and the oddball cult 80s comedy Tapeheads, which as a much younger man I must have watched God alone knows how many times. Tyrrell was living with her niece when she died, and as she wasn't a movie star, hers was a passing that went largely unremarked upon.

In 1972, when she was about twenty-seven, Susan Tyrrell appeared in the film Fat City, directed by the by-then legendary John Huston. Fat City would wind up being one of a series of films that Huston made in the 1970s which proved that while he was in his 60s, John Huston was entirely capable of keeping up with, and occasionally even outdoing those arrogant little shits like Scorsese, Coppola, and you know the rest. Fat City would be his first declarative and confident statement on the matter, following as it did forgotten failures and bewilderments like The Kremlin Letter, A Walk with Love and Death, and Sinful Davey. How the 1969 novel Fat City by Leonard Gardner made it to him I don't know, but Gardner would go on to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of the one novel he's ever written. Or ever published. That's me being optimistic.

It's a curious thing, when you regard the idea of a "cult status" as it pertains, respectively, to films and novels. A cult film tends to be genre -- horror, crime, and so on. No worse for that, God knows, but interestingly distinct from the cult novel, which can be pretty much anything. It can be a strange crime novel like The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers, or it can be a work of capital L "literature" such as the kind of novel that is academically beloved, embraced for its poetry by other writers and some readers, but culturally weirdly set aside to be read by only certain people, but by no means forgotten because we like you, we'll get to you, just sit tight, A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. In his very brief introduction (though partly due to its economy it is one of the best such introductions I've read in a long time) to the recent, and desperately needed, reissue of Fat City from NYRB Classics, Denis Johnson relates an anecdote about a writer friend of his encountering Leonard Gardner reading a boxing magazine in a drugstore, some time after his novel had been published and been reverently passed around and worshiped by other writers, both aspiring and accomplished, if not by other segments of the population:

"Are you Leonard Gardner?" my friend asked. "You must be a writer," Gardner said, and went back to his magazine. I made him tell the story a thousand times.

Set sometime during the 1950s, the novel begins like this:

He lived in the Hotel Coma - named perhaps for some founder of the town, some California explorer or pioneer, or for some long-deceased Italian immigrant who founded only the hotel itself. Whoever it commemorated, the hotel was a poor monument, and Billy Tully had no intention of staying on. 

Tully is almost thirty, an ex-boxer and drunk who when we meet him has not recovered from the divorce that devastated him. He lives in one hotel after another, in Stockton, CA. One day he aimlessly wanders into a boxing gym where he meets a young man, Ernie Munger. They spar, and Ernie beats him. Billy recommends that Ernie head over to the Lido Gym and talk to Ruben Luna, Billy's old trainer and manager. "Don't waste your good years," Billy tells him. Ernie goes, and Ruben accepts him into the world of amateur boxing, and driving in cars crowded with other boxers and corner men up and down California, into Utah and other places, for a night of fights. Tully, meanwhile, decides he's not too old, and he starts trying to get back into shape, though he still drinks, and makes his living, such as it is, as a day worker, picking walnuts or chopping onions clear and filling sacks with them. But he, too, is soon back in Ruben's orbit, though in the course of this short novel, Tully and Ernie will rarely meet again.

Fat City is I suppose what you'd have to call plotless, in that the events of the novel occur with the same sense of understandable randomness as do the events of everyday life. There are no detectable mechanics at work, shaping the author's sense of what the lives of these men should become. Though of course on some level such mechanics are there, they pretty much have to be, but I could neither hear nor see the gears turning. A novel that worked like that would not find room for a chapter about another of Ruben's fighters, a teenager named Wes Haynes, whose impact on the lives of Ruben, Tully, and Ernie is at best negligible, but whose life Gardner starkly lays out as a return trip from a fight, with Ruben and other boxers, wheezes to a sleepy end, and Haynes is almost startled to find himself back in his own neighborhood, wondering what is happening to him.

...Wes saw a low building in the fog with Regale Pale glowing in blue neon in a window and was overcome with dejection. He had made no secret of his training. Acquaintances at school spoke to him as though they believed he was a professional, and he had not cared to correct them. He had believed he would be one soon enough -- because it had seemed the natural and inevitable thing for so many years, because against all contrary evidence, and simply because he was himself, he felt he could never be dominated. Now he felt he should have known all along that he was nothing. Boxers were men in other towns, in big cities far from this car parked in the darkness alongside the highway between fields of vegetables. Resting his cheek against the cold window, he thought of killing himself, but years ago, standing beside his father's legs in a crowd on a night sidewalk, he had seen a dead man profiled in a puddle of blood, his eye dumfounded, and Wes knew that if he was going to be killed he was not going to do it himself. They would have to come and get him and he would club them and choke them and shoot them and then he would run.

Tully and Ernie both meet women. Ernie meets another young woman name Faye, and they both lose their virginity on a night that ends with Ernie falling into icy water while trying to find wooden boards to use as traction so that he can get the car in which they had sex unmired from the mud. Tully, meanwhile, meets Oma, another drunk, a juicehead, a woman who, when Tully meets her in a bar, is going out with Earl, a black man (Oma is white) who Gardner writes as a man who has to put up with a person like Oma. Nothing he says will result in anything but shit from her, though she claims to love him. Even as she claims to love Earl, a thing she claims to Tully, she's drifting towards Tully. When Earl ends up in jail, Gardner charts the fragmented hypocrisy of someone who only drinks:

"And he didn't mean it. He just gets so nervous. You don't know what you have to take when you're interracial. Every son-of-a-bitch on the street has to get a look at at you. And Earl's really a peaceable man. He's even-tempered. He didn't hurt that guy and he didn't want to...He's just not made that way. He's the sweetest-natured man in the world...He's so jealous. I wouldn't put it past him to be out already, spying on every move I make."

Jealousy is quite the theme in Fat City. It's the unacknowledged engine. Even if nothing especially comes of it, Ernie can't shake the belief that Faye, the woman he never wanted to be bound to, but once done can't help judging and suspecting at the same time he loves her with a childish desperation, may find a more satisfying man, and is looking for one almost every day. And there's Oma, who spends her drunken hours kicking out at what she believes are the jealousy-based behaviors of Earl and, later, Tully, yet she's also constantly paranoid that she herself is being betrayed. Not just sexually -- at one point Tully simply walks out the door and she, who has to dress first before she can follow him, can't bear the idea that he might drink in a bar without her.

In John Huston's 1972 movie, made from a script by Gardner himself, Tully is played by Stacy Keach, an actor who was about thirty-years-old during filming but who in my experience has never looked younger than forty-five (making him physically perfect for Billy Tully). Keach plays Tully just right, with hope cut by hopelessness, optimism hand-in-hand with total despair. The opening of Huston's Fat City is a masterpiece of tone-setting (among other things) as the plot (once more, such as it is) kicking off because Keach's Tully can't light his cigarette, which compels him to not only put on pants, but actually leave his hotel room. Yet as he exits the place, Keach lets an energy creep in. In the film, Tully is less gutted by divorce than the Tully in the novel -- this doesn't ruin the character, but instead simply lets him breathe differently. So when he leaves the hotel, wanting only fire for his tobacco, he manages a happy to him, but pathetic to us (but who are we?) little dance. Maybe if I get a large-enough skinful of booze in me, I can make something happen.

And I have to say, the sweat of booze is on the film just a bit more than it is on Gardner's novel. Gardner's Fat City is not quite a booze novel (in the same way that it's not quite a boxing novel), though, certainly not in the way that Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend is a booze novel. Both in the novel and the film, Ernie isn't much of a drinker. Neither is Ruben, who in the book is what in film terms you'd call the "third lead." The drinkers are Tully and Oma, but in the film not only is Ruben (a terrific Nicholas Colosanto) pushed to a supporting role, but Tully's drinking overwhelms Keach, and Susan Tyrrell's Oma nearly overwhelms the whole thing.

I don't mean to dispense with Ernie, the film's Ernie. He' splayed by a very young Jeff Bridges, and it's a fine performance. However, here Ernie's relationship with is wife Faye (Candy Clark) doesn't carry the strain of his juvenile hypocrisy, so plainly and brilliantly, and even sympathetically, stated by Gardner in his novel. For whatever reason, Gardner the screenwriter found too much, enough, all you need, of life in Tully and Oma (it's just possible that the hard-drinking Irishman Huston guided things this way) so that the frustrations of being a drunk (Tully) who lives with someone (Oma) even drunker than he becomes the film. Boxing isn't quite ancillary at this point, but it almost is. Look at the scene where Tully makes steak and peas for himself and Oma, and begs Oma to eat. Watch Oma's introduction, when her companion is Earl, played by Curtis Cokes (a boxer in a boxing movie, not playing a boxer). When they sit down and Oma begins rambling out to Tully her irrational, rude, two-faced nonsense about Earl, look at Cokes -- this is the best kind of pay-off when casting a non-actor. Cokes doesn't pour a bunch of ticks or mugging expressions into his performance. He just keeps his face blank, because this is a guy who's lived a lot of time with Oma, and if she wants to talk to another guy, fine, maybe I can just relax and have a beer in peace for once.

But more than anything, look at Susan Tyrrell as Oma. Look at the shot of her sitting at the sad little table in the awful little hotel room where Keach's Tully will try to cook her steak and peas. She's playing solitaire and drinking something bright red, which means you know it's sweet, and so the ensuing headache will be a real son of a bitch.

The novel Fat City doesn't have a villain, but if you had to pick somebody to qualify, you might pick Oma. She's such an infuriating, hair-pulling presence, her unbearable behavior off-set for the reader only by the fact that Tully ain't much better. Yet in Huston's film, not only is Oma almost more appalling, she's also that much sadder, that much more of an unbearable drain on our sympathies. There's a scene in the film where Tully and Oma have really hit it off, the two of them drunk, in a bar. Tully head-butts a jukebox. This proves something to somebody, he supposes. Oma has been drinking all day, longer, probably, than Tully has been. Anyway, they leave. It's bright daylight outside. They're both drunk in bright daylight. Oma hesitates, and Tully asks her what's wrong. She says "I don't know...I guess I'm drunk." The sadness with which Susan Tyrrell delivers this line is not merely interesting. It's Oma's whole biography. Because listen, I can imagine a person whose definition of the the phrase "over the top," which has become a synonym for "worthless," would encompass Susan Tyrrell's performance as Oma. Watching Fat City again for the first time in many, many years, I realized that Tyrrell's work here may well be called, now, "cartoonish." When considering such critics, I'll refrain from speculation (I realize I'm kind of making them up anyway), but I will acknowledge that for all Tyrrell does to make Oma not just frustrating but also heartbreaking, and my God she is that, she's also comic. How can she not be all of these things? As an acting exercise, imagine playing someone who is not only always drunk, but who has been always drunk for many years. That was Susan Tyrrell's job on Fat City, and what she does is extraordinary. So is what Keach does, but look at Tyrrell's face. She clowns it up, but that's the result of someone who is perpetually hammered trying to live among people who aren't. Tyrrell ruthlessly plays Oma's effort to be part of a day-to-day society she'd realize has rolled right on by her if she was ever sober. Which she never is.

Susan Tyrrell, as I've said, passed away in 2012. She'd stopped acting after her disease had redefined for her the meaning of the word "essential," which means over a decade away from performing. I don't know anything about those years of her life, but I watch her in Fat City and I see one of the great performances. One that was nominated for an Oscar, which must have been nice. And then what? We forget. "History is the judge" is bullshit, because history forgets about 80% of the great stuff. I don't trust it and never have. If it's going to render Leonard Gardner's novel Fat City a cult favorite that may disappear again in ten years, then no thank you. If it's going to forget Susan Tyrrell's performance in John Huston's Fat City, then no thank you. But no one's forgotten anything yet. We all will eventually though, so I guess for this great artist all we can do is hope that the prayer of one of Susan Tyrrell's final diary entries, written just months before she died, came true:

I demand that my death be joyful and I never return again.

Megalopolis

Speaking about Argentinian literature, Jorge Luis Borges once said "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature." I learned this from the back cover of the new NYRB Classics edition of Ocampo's selected stories called Thus Were Their Faces.  In the introduction to that book, I learned from writer Helen Oyeyemi that Argentina's National Prize for Literature was denied to Ocampo because the judges deemed it "too cruel." This, a footnote clarifies, was in any case Ocampo's own read on the matter. Regardless of the cause, winning that prize would have probably lifted Ocampo, who died in 1993, to greater international status. Because Borges's word is not enough, I suppose. The point being that from what I can tell, very little of Ocampo's fiction or poetry has published in the United States, or even translated into English, until now. The NYRB volume of stories, which comes out on Tuesday, will be accompanied by another book, a selection of her poetry. Borges' enthusiasm wasn't based on nothing.

In fairness, sort of, one reason why Ocampo's fiction might have has a difficult time finding a publisher in the US is that much of her work, to judge from Thus Were Their Faces, was of the short-short fiction variety -- that is, many of her stories range from about two to maybe five or six pages long. Borges's stories were like that too, for the most part, and maybe once such dense fabulist from Argentina was enough for the US literary world. When I do the The Kind of Face You Slash series, the month-long review of horror fiction I do (almost) every year, I always read a fair number of very short stories, and at least in that genre, which is not one to which Ocampo's writing bears no resemblance, the problem is often that the writers plows heedlessly through an idea that could have used some more room to breathe, and God knows why they did that, or the point all along was to grind out a couple of pages of abstract mood, which is not my favorite thing to read (although the success of the stories covered in both examples depends, as always and forever, on the talents of the writer). It's a strange form that can feel very unnatural, and can be broken by the stories being forced into it.

The contents of Thus Were Their Faces are laid out chronology, and cover a span of over fifty years, from 1937 to 1988. The shortest story is two pages (there are more than one of those) and the longest, admittedly, is about sixty (there is only one of those), and all together a total of forty-two stories were collected. Not once did I find a story that seemed unfinished, or plowed through heedlessly. Granted, there are a few of the densely abstract variety, and I'll confess here that those stories did little for me.  All of them come from the later years. In stories like "And So Forth," "The Music of the Rain," "Sheets of Earth," and "(Com)passion," the fantastical and weird elements over which Ocampo was capable of exerting such control can feel watery, the stories gone from my head before I'd started the next one. But typically, this isn't the case. Outside of Borges, I've never read fiction of such brevity that nevertheless felt as complete as, for example, "The Perfect Crime," which packs domestic tension, class resentment, a horrific crime, and an unreliable narrator all into barely four pages, or in "Forgotten Journey," Ocampo's crystallization of the young heroine's dawning realization that the facts of human biology are essentially grotesque into three.

Like Borges, if Ocampo had been American I believe she would have been considered a genre writer, Ocampo especially, as her stories sometimes flirted with or openly embraced genre conventions. One of the best stories in Thus Were Their Faces is "Men Animals Vines" from her 1970 collection Days of Night. In this story, the narrator is stranded in the jungle following a plane crash. He's the only survivor, and the environment threatens to drive him mad:

At night there are fireflies and deafening cicadas. A soft penetrating perfume seduces me: Where does it come from? I don't know yet. I think it's good for me. It comes from flowers or trees or herbs or roots or from all of those at once (maybe from a ghost?); it is soothing perfume. Smelling like a dog -- will I turn into a dog? -- I tear at the leaves, the plants, the wildflowers that I encounter.

The flora is -- is it? -- the big threat here, and so, surprisingly, although the title might tip it off, "Men Animals Vines" falls into the "deadly vines" horror subgenre. If you are so inclined to categorize it, anyway, which you needn't necessarily be, but even so. Look also at "Friends," about two boys, one of whom has a terrible power that warps him. It is, in fact, not entirely unlike Jerome Bixby's classic 1953 story "It's a Good Life," though, among many other differences, Ocampo's ending is a long way from Bixby's (which shouldn't be taken as a knock on either).

In terms of genre, one of Ocampo's most interesting stories in Thus Were Their Faces is the novella "The Impostor." One of two stories taken from her 1948 collection Autobiography of Irene, "The Impostor" kicks off much as Patricia Highsmith's 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley: Armando Heredia's father is concerned about the way his son is living and so sends another young man, our narrator, to the family ranch, where Heredia is living along with a few servants, to spy on him and report back. Interestingly, in the classic tradition of many eerie stories, this narrator is unnamed for much of "The Impostor"'s 60 pages, but then near the end he gets a name. The name isn't a twist or any kind of revelation -- he just hadn't seen the need to tell us until there was a contextual reason. At any rate, he's disturbed; not, perhaps, homicidal, but paranoid, in a way that makes him a good, or maybe terrible companion to Heredia, who frequently suspects the narrator of being a spy, and threatens to kill him. The narrator puts Heredia off with various sincere explanations for his strange behavior, that, even when accepted, still leaves their friendship within a sinister cloud:

I tried again to explain to him that it was a matter of dreams. I made a list of objects and people that I had met in dreams before meeting them in reality; I described them in great detail. I told him about several dreams, with no luck; they were vague, monotonous, and had no fantastic virtues. They were dreams that served as the basis for deeper reflections -- only to me were they real...

Heredia accepted that I hadn't been snooping around the house. By evening we were reconciled. Lighting our way with a lantern, we climbed a narrow green staircase and into the attic to look for a whip...Heredia wanted to show me a jewelry case and trunk where various old family keepsakes were stored. He wanted, with some ill will, to show me the awful palace of the bats.

This is all heading towards an ending that some may consider quite modern, and I suppose it is, in a sense. The modern version of this ending, however, is a cheap one, and has been made so by time and overuse. In 1948, and in the hands of a writer like Ocampo who isn't using it as a means to simply jerk people around, I'm reminded of the power that such endings once hand, and can still have if they're backed by conviction. As a result, "The Impostor" doesn't lose any of its creeping strangeness after the final lines are read, but becomes sad in addition to that.

In "The Impostor," there is some small element of clairvoyance to the proceedings, which turns out to be a favorite conceit of Ocampo's. You'll find some form of it in many of these stories, but it's used most brilliantly in "Autobiography of Irene," which imagines the ability to see into the future as an overwhelming experience that supplants memory -- there is a terrible and ingenious logic to this -- so that this amazing power is one never to be desired, and "The Doll," which uses passionate melodrama as a kind of origin, or a prelude to a story Ocampo didn't write. That Ocampo wrote last line of "The Doll," whereas it never would have occurred to me, is the kind of thing I could become quite jealous of.

And there is, of course, lots more. If the selection of four stories from Ocampo's 1987 collection And So Forth, which comes near the end of Thus Were Their Faces, turned out to be my least favorite, this matters little given how strong, varied, and copious the rest of the book is. Plus, the book closes out (nearly) with "Cornelia Before the Mirror," a long story told almost entirely in dialogue, which may be, probably is, actually a fractured monologue. Given its structure, it's kind of a tour de force of clarity, when you think about how it could have gone, and it also boils the madness and loneliness and the longing for death that is the make-up of so many of Ocampo's men and women down to its essentials, while bringing old metaphors, like mirrors, back to life. Which is something I hope Thus Were Their Faces will do for Ocampo herself.