Marvin Cohen — The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club and Other Parables [1973]

Où est Marvin Cohen? A tousle-haired New Yorker who from a period spanning 1967 and 1978 penned surreal and whimsical fictions, many in the form of ‘dialogues’ between two unnamed interlocutors, and found himself published in prestigious magazines along the lines of Ambit and The Transatlantic Review. Several collections appeared in hardback from famous outfits such as New Directions and André Deutsch (US & UK publication), and one novel was released from a lesser-known press. It seems this Marvin Cohen was a notable scribbler for one fleeting period. His minor star has turned to a black molten lump scorching the contents of a Brazilian favela and little information as to his whereabouts and fate can be found, although he appears to still be alive and kicking and a PEN member. This assemblage of short fiction represents the two modes of Cohen’s writing: short ‘dialogues’ with titles such as ‘On the Clock’s Business and the Cloud’s Nature’ and ‘The World is Cluttered With Objects’ which operate in the manner of an Ionesco or Beckett script, turning language on itself with an eschatological hopelessness, revelling in the absurdity, rather than despairing. The longer stories such as ‘Saving Art for Tourism in One Tragic Lesson’ and ‘Love by Proxy of Solitude’ fare less well on the reader’s patience: Cohen’s knack for bending language into new shapes frustrates as one encounters his strange tics: his repetitions, random exclamations, and taking abstract nouns and bestowing them with abstract qualities (“Open to whisper of love’s quiet reason, cooling rampage of love’s sour fever?” / “Bugles blared out the creeping closer of danger’s crawling demon.”) His focus on creating abstractions locks the reader from the content and pulls the focus to Cohen’s dancing prose, pirouetting on each page into unique variations, often humorous, never beautiful. The strongest of the long pieces is the title one: the ‘Love Club’ is where a series of eloquent men congregate to make lyrical orations on love, rated by applause by the members: this sort of self-conscious winking at literature’s state of exhaustion is mingled with a sincere and surprising celebration of capital L-O-V-E love.The nearest (or most obvious) comparison point is Donald Barthelme, particularly in stories like ‘Listening to Herman’, mixing the flip whimsy, astute and wry observation, and verbal heft of that long-gone short fiction master. That particular piece features a line that seems to pass a verdict on Cohen’s own work: “Severing themselves from meaning, they floated in vocal clusters, sound hazy in vapors of dull abstraction.” Minus the ‘dull’, of course. The strongest material here showcases Cohen’s fondness for paradoxes and intellectual riddles. Time for a retrospective, methinks.

Editions:

Hardback, 1973, New Directions.

Hardback, 1973, Rapp and Whiting.

Paperback, 1973, New Directions.

Bibliography:

Short Fiction:

The Self-Devoted Friend, 1967, New Directions.

Dialogues, 1967, Turret Books.

The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club and Other Parables, 1973, New Directions.

Fables at Life’s Expense, 1975, Serendipity Books.

The Inconvenience of Living, and Other Acts of Folly, 1977, Urizen Books.

How the Snake Emerged from the Bamboo Pole, But Man Emerged from Both, 1978, Oasis Books.

Novels:

Others, Including Morstive Sternbump, 1976, Bobbs Merrill.

Maggie Ross — The Gasteropod [1968]

Triumphant bagger of my alma mater’s fiction award, Edinburgh University’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1968, this sombre work concerns a deranged collector of shells whose unusual relationship with his menopause-bound wife Dorothea is revealed in slow, foreboding chapters throughout the course of the novel. The humourless flat first-person narrator and his exacting and meticulous descriptions of room interiors, his strained and bizarre relationships with his wife, her lover, and the other peculiar weirdoes that haunt their house in St. John’s Wood comprise the ‘story’, and the stylistic blandness on show is perfect at creating the mood of snail-like stasis required to prop the plot. The narrator, having married rich woman Dorothea, loses interest in his somewhat agoraphobic (she is never diagnosed thus) bride, leading her to take fashion designer Max into her house as a lover to make her tasteless dresses out of resentment while her husband tinkers with his shells. As Max plans to remove Dorothea from the airless mausoleum of their home, the narrator produces a series of unflattering photographs, showcasing Dorothea’s physical decline: a matter of sick-minded fascination to him. For sheer creepiness, this narrator is on a par with Misard in Zola’s La Bête Humaine, a rail worker who takes pleasure in the slow poisoning of his wife (although his motives are financial), however, this narrator has more aesthetic motives in mind (cash-flow not being an issue), and taunts Max with revealing shots of his aging bride. A slow-building and effective chiller that ruminates on the process of aging and the perils of shacking up with little creeps who collect shells and have no emotions. The author released her first novel in thirty years recently, The Villa Rouge, about Battle of Britain pilots and their marriages (more Sunday evening drama than adventurous avant-garde effort [Ross was featured in Giles Gordon’s Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction anthology alongside B.S. Johnson, Gabriel Josipovici and Ann Quin among others in 1975]). Seek this dark and sinister little wonder instead.

Editions:

1968, Hardback, Barrie & Rockliff: The Cresset Press.

1969, Hardback, Viking.

1970, Paperback, Penguin.

Bibliography:

Novels:

The Gasteropod, 1968, Barrie & Rockliff: The Cresset Press.

Milena, 1983, Harper Collins.

The Villa Rouge, 2015, MacLehose Press.

Chris Scott — Bartleby [1971]

In the wrong hands, Tristram Shandy can prove fatal. As a callow undergraduate whelped on the navalgazing torments of Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Camus, I was not ready for the onslaught of Sterne’s masterpiece, and over a frenzied year or two, I wrote an imitative novel parodying the literature of exhaustion. I had napalmed all hopes of penning a middlebrow bestseller, and locked myself into the experimental cage forever. Then there are those staid souls who, like Dr. Johnson, dismiss the book as an amusing oddity, and are content to write pastel-covered tales of Courage in the Face of Evil. Brit-born Canadian Chris Scott belongs in the former camp, having written this staggering act of impish homage to Tristram Shandy as his debut novel, thereafter purging himself with novels that riff on genre fiction, finding the need to cleave to familiar forms after such formless madness. A précis of the plot will prove impossible, since there is no plot to précis. The novel’s hero, openly cribbed from Melville, is a precocious five-year-old with an unparalleled amorous capacity, and the novel chronicles his attempts to locate his missing ward. Making use of imitative Sternean English, the various interruptions and insertions and digressions, the novel plays around with the picaresque form, Dickensian grotesques, and the notion of authorship in the wake of Barthes. A full-on assault on good taste, the novel is not for the squeamish. De’Ath is a necrophiliac open about his sexual assault on corpses, and the bawdy humour (from the masculine perspective) passes into the sexist (the virgin maiden is ravished by the five-year-old hero, there is a ten-page paean to the naked female form), which explains this novel’s out-of-print status for 45 years. Like the finest self-indulgent metafiction, the novel mingles characters from other books, pinching from Beckett, Vidal, and Melville, and demonstrates some A-grade wordplay and devilish twists of tongue. The principal pleasure of Bartleby (aside from all those listed things), lies in Scott’s fantastic language, and despite the absence of plot and manic sense of unhinged improvisation, the novel keeps the reader in love with each euphonious turn of phrase. His grotesques, especially De’Ath, are also rendered with panache, and his obsessive riffs on authorship, narratorship, and whatnot, make this something of an ur-text for the self-eating prospect of self-referential postmodernism. Bartleby plays with this, revelling in the comedic properties of this notion, but never endeavours to explode the form. Scott’s next novel is called To Catch a Spy, which is perhaps one of the most vanilla of titles possible, suggesting a complete repentance from this mode. Unlike B.S. Johnson’s Travelling People, a far milder Sterne homage, Scott was not hellbent on reinventing the wheel. This novel is proof indeed that Barth et al were not the only ones exhausting literature: our Canadian friends were part of the revelry too, and sadly omitted from the history books.

Editions:

Hardback, 1971, Anansi.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Bartleby, 1971, Anansi.

To Catch a Spy, 1978, Viking.

Antichthon, 1982, Quadrant Editions.

Hitler’s Bomb, 1983, McClelland & Stewart.

Jack, 1988, Macmillan.

Paul Ableman — Vac [1968]

The blurb on the 1968 Gollancz hardback of Vac states “Mr. Ableman has absorbed the influences of some of the greatest of writers—Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett—to produce a book that is entirely his own.” This bold assertion is impossible to refute (less Sterne, more Joyce and Sam), and his third novel is a peculiar, linguistic afrodizzyact with a sentimental heart, taking an unconventional marriage and a philandering character-as-author as its focus. Ableman was a curious mixture of avant-garde adventurer and timeclock-pusher, meeting Maurice Girodias in the 1950s, mixing with that pornographic Parisian demi-monde, publishing one novel (I Hear Voices) with Olympia Press, then back in Britain worked on sitcom scripts, novelisations (including one of Warlords of Atlantis as Paul Victor), and companions to shows such as Last of the Summer Wine, Dad’s Army, and Shoestring for the BBC. This unfortunate career move has no impact on the power of the prose on show in this surreal and bracing novel, and comparisons to Flann O’Brien (if Flann hadn’t been so frightened of women) are also in order. The blurb attempts to frame the novel as a “scrapbook compiled in great chronological diversity”, which helps the reader to imagine a shape on what is a chaotic, comedic, and thoughtful gambol through a series of set-pieces involving the narrator’s friends, lovers, and wife, narrated in staccato prose where each phrase is melodious and unique, reading like a stylised internal monologue (although the novel switches between first, second, and third person modes, uprooting each attempt to pin down this sneaky text). In between these scenes are what appear to be excerpts from other books, such as ‘Mother and Whore’, outlining the theory that wives are first whores then mothers, and “one must return to mother to live.” The “scrapbook” frame posits the probable notion that this novel is a novel about writing a novel (something Francis Booth has asserted about Ableman’s 1969 book The Twilight of the Vilp), so in the tradition of all writers-as-narrators, nothing here is to be trusted. The opening and closing sections differ in tone, providing a sincere if less dazzling rumination on marriage and parenthood, what this novel seems to be “about”, if we must reach for something as tiresome as a concrete meaning. A terrific work that demands to be read. Ableman’s novels have been re-issued in the print-on-demand Faber Finds series, at prices too steep to bag new readers, so I will elevate this man’s oeuvre to out of print status.

Editions:

Hardback, 1968, Gollancz.

Paperback, 2014, Faber Finds.

Bibliography:

Novels:

I Hear Voices, 1958, Olympia Press.

As Near as I Can Get, 1962, Neville Spearman.

Vac, 1968, Gollancz.

The Twilight of the Vilp, 1969, Gollancz.

Tornado Pratt, 1977, Gollancz.