George Chambers — The Bonnyclabber [1971] & The Last Man Standing [1990]

George Chambers, born in Peoria, Illinois in 1931, is a former professor of English at Bradley University, and author of the beautiful little artefact The Bonnyclabber, a concrete novel (of sorts), published in 1971 in a collaboration between December and Panache magazines, illustrated with surreal and eerie pencil sketches from William B. Mulstay. The word ‘bonnyclabber’, according to various dictionaries, is from the Gaelic and translates into ‘sour milk’, or in the verb form, ‘to curdle’. Opening with three blank pages and a series of footnotes, starting ‘op. cit., p.734’, the novel makes clear its unflinching assault on linear conventions, leading into a sing-song nonsense story: “la la lalala la, with my bow and arrow/where the hunting is good.” Taken as a sequence of fragments that might cohere into something larger (if that matters), the novel is entertaining, even if one’s hope of a larger coherence fades somewhere into p.59. Featuring strange typographical arrangements (one in the shape of nipples), tagless and punctuationless dialogues where basic spellings and meanings are debated, newspaper cuttings, surreal stories (often on the topic of warfare), and typewritten letters, the novel presents a maelstrom of sometimes violent and sexual images, which when accompanied by the cubist illustrations, several of a recurring topless female, makes for an unsettling experience where the reader is forced to take a whole new approach to reading and thinking. As Raymond Federman writes in Critifiction: “By rendering language seemingly incoherent, irrational, illogical, and even meaningless, these works of fiction negate the symbolic power of language so that it can no longer structure or even enslave the individual into a sociohistorical sceanrio prepared in advance and replayed by the official discourse on television, in the mass media, in the political arena, and in literature.” (p.33). More than ever do we need novels like this. Chambers’s second (and final) novel, The Last Man Standing, is more obviously a novel, and on that old chestnut of chestnuts, the dead father. Split across four days, covering the protagonist’s arrival to attend the funeral, the novel is separated into mini-sections that summarise their content, i.e. ‘Chores’, ‘Tableware’, ‘Songs’, etc. The protagonist’s siblings are ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’, unnamed, and his mother is ‘Agnes’. The novel consists of literal descriptions of the protagonist’s actions, childhood flashbacks, and surreal fantasies. More conventional in approach apart from the formatting (the text is arranged like a playscript), the novel serves up a melancholy portrait of an unlikeable father whose influence is imprinted on his children for the worse. The protagonist’s sexual approaches to the housekeeper seem of more importance than sorting out the family’s affairs, telling of potential domestic chaos to follow back home. On the whole, this short novel is more banal, however, the Vietnam war resurfaces as a topic, suggesting perhaps Chambers’s participation and flagging up the autobiographical content of the work (it is probable his father passed around this time), which for the nosier reader adds an extra dimension in which to poke around. He should have written more.

Editions:

Paperback, 1971, December-Panache.

Paperback, 1990, FC2.

Bibliography:

Novels:

The Bonnyclabber, 1971, December-Panache.

The Last Man Standing, 1990, FC2.

Short stories:

ɸ Null Set and Other Stories, 1977, Fiction Collective.

The Scourging of W.H.D. Wretched Hutchinson and Other Stories, 1995, Summer House.

The Twilight of the Bums (with Raymond Federman), 2008, Stacherone Books.