Paul West — Colonel Mint [1972]

Prolific Derbyshire-born novelist, memoirist, poet, and critic Paul West changed tense on October 18^th (2015). His vast corpus is intimidating for the newcomer, and no fervent Westites exist at present to help us navigate the five decades’ worth of fiction and non-fiction. The Review of Contemporary Fiction published an issue in 1993 on West and Alexander Theroux, after which West penned ten published novels (and various unpublished ones), however, this might help the reader to find a footing. I chose Colonel Mint as the cheapest out of print West available (a large swathe of West is oop), and this proved a fortuitous selection. West’s first two decades seem to have been spent writing verbally dextrous comic fiction of a surreal nature, from the Alley Jaggers trilogy (West’s “British” period), to novels with fantastic titles like Caliban’s Filibuster written after West’s lifelong exile to America. This hilarious and shocking comic novel concerns the titular hero: an astronaut who witnesses the sighting of an angel from a spacecraft’s window. Upon his return he is isolated and interrogated by Lew R., whose task is to expunge the sighting from Mint’s mind. Among his techniques include the assassinations of two fellow astronauts, lowering Mint into a “five-foot-high tea-chest full of thick black ooze reeking of rancid fruit, cowsheds, and drains”, a sequence of violent sexual encounters with Connie Langoustine, a series of staged hallucinatory episodes, and continual poking from a strange taser-like gizmo named the Brabazon. The star of this novel is West’s athletic style, which compliments the surreal and baffling sequence of scenes presented: in terms of humour, we are closer to the overt sexism of Terry Southern and his ilk (each male character has plentiful sex with the unprotesting Connie), however, the satirical message here is sound: the Colonel could not tell the world he had seen an angel in space, for the implications for America and the world would be too large. The novel never strikes a tone of pathos, remaining in its frenetic comic mode throughout, but West plants this pip of pathos in our heads regardless. If one can excuse the period humour, Colonel Mint is a raucous and outrageous entertainment with a point in there somewhere (never too important). West moved into historical novels for the remaining two decades. In 2003, he suffered a severe stroke, from which he recovered (an experience chronicled in his wife Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love), publishing two non-fiction titles but not finding a home for the novels he wrote in the period. Here is the excellent obit in the New York Times. And here is West’s one appearance upon KCRW’s Bookworm. And here’s to more plundering of his works!

Editions:

Hardback, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Hardback, 1973, Calder & Boyars.

Bibliography:

Novels:

A Quality of Mercy, 1961, Chatto & Windus.

Tenement of Clay, 1965, Hutchinson.

Alley Jaggers, 1966, Hutchinson.

I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon, 1970, Harper & Row.

Caliban’s Filibuster, 1971, Doubleday.

Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas, 1972, Harper & Row.

Colonel Mint, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Gala, 1976, Harper & Row.

The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, 1980, Harper & Row.

Rat Man of Paris, 1986, Doubleday.

The Place in Flowers, Where Pollen Rests, 1988, Doubleday.

Lord Byron's Doctor, 1989, Doubleday.

The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, 1991, Random House.

Love's Mansion, 1992, Random House.

The Tent of Orange Mist, 1995, Scribner.

Sporting with Amaryllis, 1996, Overlook Press.

Life With Swan, 1997, Overlook Press.

Terrestrials, 1997, Scribner.

OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday, 2000, Scribner.

The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, 2000, New Directions.

A Fifth of November, 2001, New Directions.

Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun , 2002, New Directions.

The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11, 2003, Voyant Publishing.

Short fiction:

The Universe and Other Fictions, 1989, Overlook Press.

Graeme Gibson — Perpetual Motion [1981]

Graeme Gibson was one of the novelists at the helm of the Canadian avant-garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s (there being no scene thereafter), alongside his wife Margaret Atwood, Chris Scott, Steve McCaffrey, Gail Scott, Audrey Thomas, and numerous others. His own output is slim: four novels and two non-fiction titles on birds and wildlife, plus one collection of conversations (Eleven Canadian Novelists). Five Legs from 1969 is the seminal modernist opus, utilising the then-popular stream of consciousness lark (with Communion its partner). This is Gibson’s third. A remarkable and bizarre tackling of the historical novel, Perpetual Motion concerns Robert Fraser, a man from Mad River, Ontario in possession of a mastodon skeleton obsessed with creating a perpetual motion machine in spite of his banausic (a word that recurs often in this novel) background. Mixing poetic description and close character narration, alongside a more ponderous tone (with strange shifting of tenses), the style here is unique, refusing to allow the reader to sink into the familiar furniture of the conventional historical novel and keeping him or her perplexed and concerned as the focus and timbre shifts over 280-odd pages, from 1860 to 1879. The Fraser clan is the focus, alongside the cast of oddball characters that populate the father’s life, among them the Irish creep Rochefoucault Hackett, the unprankable Eddie Shantz, and the eccentric Prof. Carruthers, whose tale of a Royal banquet inside the Iguanodon provides some the funniest material in the novel. The depressive and disturbed materfamilias, the robust daughter Annie, amd feral son Angus provide the familial baggage and heart of the matter. Set-pieces include a startling hanging scene, a mass cull of wild pigeons, and the bone-rattling finale when the machine is tested to a packed crowd. The rumbling of the industrial age, the harshness of the rural life, the bawdy backchat of the barrooms, and the psychodrama of the family are rendered vividly by Gibson’s brilliant hand in an elliptical and fabulous work. The character name Robert Fraser is reused in his final novel, Gentleman Death (perhaps mirroring the use of Felix Oswald in his first two novels), where he appears as a novelist. Praised by Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, and Timothy Findley, this novel is one of the better ways to spend six hours. Gibson retired from the fiction-writing biz in 1996 (Atwood, however, is still at large. There is no God).

Editions:

Hardback, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Hardback, St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

Paperback, Bantam, 1984.

Paperback, Penguin, 1988.

Paperback, New Canadian Library, 1997. Reissued 2010.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Five Legs, Anansi, 1969.

Communion, Anansi, 1971.

Perpetual Motion, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Gentleman Death, McClelland and Stewart, 1993.

Alexander Trocchi — Sappho of Lesbos [1960]

First released in America in 1960 through Castle Books under the editorial pseudonym Michel Darius, bearing the subtitle ‘The Autobiography of a Strange Woman’, this is the one erotic title of Trocchi’s not to be released as part of Maurice Girodias’s erotic series for Olympia Press in Paris. The novel is a ‘found document’ translated from the medieval Latin by an “old gentleman” who located the manuscript in Soller, Mallorca, and sent his translation to America via Italy “just before his death.” This manuscript was lost, however, so Sappho of Lesbos is a “prepared version of what purports to be” an authentic autobiography, presented in the 1986 Star Books paperback by Alexander Trocchi himself (with the subtitle ‘An Amorous Odyssey’). The novel is similar to Trocchi’s other ‘erotic’ novels, i.e. not overly erotic at all and more picaresque adventures with occasional tame sexual or sadomasochistic scenes, with more literary language than the reader of a cheap pornographic paperback might expect. Trocchi handpicks various popular beliefs about Sappho’s life for his novel, such as her marriage to the wealthy merchant Cercylas (named Cercolas here), and that she hurled herself from the Leucadian cliffs out of love for ferryman Phaon. In this version, however, she faked her own suicide to leave Lesbos and live with Phaon (a relationship that itself turns out to be ill-fated and leads Sappho to abandon men for a life of Sapphic pleasures, some of which are politely (and weirdly) described in the novel, such as: “Virginia’s long flanks were soon interlaced with my own and the soft petal of her mouth fed on my trembling lips with all the gentle passion of her sex. Her caressing fingers moved smoothly like trembling feathers at my sensitive skin. I felt the dark sliding motion of my blood in all my limbs as they trembled at the edge of ecstasy and, breathing deeply, my lips fastening at her slender neck, was the willing witness of the sultry uncontainable movement of my own loins as fire darted there, up . . . hair on hair in a strange noctural breeding, the rise of juices, the threshing heats of flesh, and my desire like a needle of mercury in a capillary tube expanding, and then the secret burst, the thin clear bubble of blood under the weight that transported me to deliverance! Ah, Virginia!” (p107-8) This positions the novel on the side of a Sappho as a feminist icon. Her brother Charaxus is depicted as a controlling buffoon and a lover named Alexander (wink) appears as an heroic rescuer during one of the frequent swashbuckling scenes. Fragments of poems in imitation of Sappho are also included. This isn’t a hoax on a par with Trocchi’s ‘fifth’ volume of Frank Harris’s My Lives and Loves, which was accepted as real for a humorous while. All of Trocchi’s novels are worth reading as the content surpasses the standard blandness of erotica (in this novel’s case the sex scenes are the worst scenes) and reaches always for more literary respectability—the Olympia novels were published alongside Lolita, after all. His two essential works are Young Adam and Cain’s Book. The others are out of print or available in shocking bootleg ebook forms (to be avoided).

Editions:

Hardcover, Castle Books, 1960.

Paperback, Universal-Tandem Publishing Co. Ltd., 1960 (1971?)

Paperback, Star Books, 1986.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Helen and Desire, Olympia Press, 1954.

The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis, Olympia Press, 1954.

My Life and Loves: Vol. 5, Olympia Press 1954.

Young Adam, Olympia Press, 1954.

White Thighs, Olympia Press 1955.

School For Sin, Olympia Press 1955.

Thongs, Olympia Press, 1955.

Sappho of Lesbos, Castle Books, 1960.

Cain’s Book, 1960, John Calder.

Steve Katz — The Exagggerations of Peter Prince [1968]

Part of the Fiction Collective crew of avant-garde reprobates alongside Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, Clarence Major, and Jonathan Baumbach, Steve Katz and his inventive novels have received a short shrift from the reading public. In addition to writing seven novels, Katz also published three poetry books, five short story collections, an erotic novel for Grove Press under a pseudonym (Posh, 1971, as Stephanie Gatos), and co-wrote a filmed screenplay (Hex, 1973, starring Keith Carradine). His recent memoir-in-fragments, The Compleat Memoirhhoids shines a light on his various non-literary preoccupations, including, among others, t’ai chi and fine art. This novel was released in the exuuuberant dimensions of a coffee table book, and proceeds to challenge the reader’s expectations as to what a novel can do, much in the manner of Federman’s more typographically insane Double or Nothing. The plot takes a conventional “hero” (Peter Prince) and runs him through various set-pieces, interrupted by the novel’s peculiarities: Vonnegut-like scribbles and weird colour-inverted pictures; one long section split into three (and later four) columns, where the reader is encourage to “choose their own adventure”; sections X’ed out by the author as unsatisfactory; a mock-TV format with marginalia; parts interrupted by the author’s impudent electric fan; specially designed typographical installations; and cartoon adverts. This sounds an exhausting pot pourri, but for the most part, The Exagggerations of Peter Prince is a standard comic novel in the sixties black humour camp, with Peter Prince as the philandering antihero who never has to account for his assholish actions, similar to the Sukenick hero in Sukenick’s Up, also released that year (to more acclaim). There are long chunks of the novel unbothered by the amusing metafictional play, and as a die-hard metafiction addict, I could have used further exagggerations to keep me interested outside the ramshackle plot. This novel is as far out as Katz ever went (a perfect counterculture artefact), focusing on surreal comedic prose for his short works, and later in life, straight autobiographical writing for his trilogy, starting with Wier & Pouce (a far less interesting endeavour than his exxxperiments). As a fantastic work of metafiction and bold slice of exploratory publishing, this novel begs a place on any self-respecting out of print book hunter’s shelves. No exagggeration.

Editions:

Hardback, 1968, Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Novels:

The Lestriad, 1962, Edizioni Milella.

The Exagggerations of Peter Prince, 1968, Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Saw, 1972, Knopf.

Wier & Pouce, 1984, Sun & Moon.

Florry of Washington Heights, 1987, Sun & Moon.

Swanny’s Ways, 1995, Sun & Moon.

Antonello’s Lion, 2005, Green Integer.

Short stories:

Creamy & Delicious, 1970, Random House.

Moving Parts, 1977, Fiction Collective.

Stolen Stories, 1984, Fiction Collective.

43 Fictions, 1992, Sun & Moon.

Kissssssss: A Miscellany, 2007, FC2.

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.

Eugene Wildman (Ed.) — Experiments in Prose [1968]

In a Greenwich Village loft one summer in 1968, a hotshot editor named Eugene Wildman sat puffing on his pot to the music of the Mothers [of Invention], while numerous far-out artists limned their visions for the Future of Text in All Media. Among the hepcats present, Bruce Kaplan posited that transcripts of protests in the name of peace were the future, that the docu-novel must flourish; John Mattingly said that prose descriptions of stageplays formatted with creative tabulations were the hippest beat; Jochen Gerz said that words in large fonts printed on paper, or even random letters splattered across paper, was the revolution daddio; Charles Doria said concrete poems snaking up and down the page were the come shot; An Pei said repeated baby babble made for a bright new babel; Herb Dupree said writing shit down without even reading over what had been was written was bound to bloom; Jean Francois Bory said collages of Egyptian imagery and naked women with huge embossed letters were the bankers; John E. Matthias said stories with Ancient Greek characters about Anglo-Saxon grammar were what the common man craved; Shouri Ramanujan said faux-lyrical blather in an elevated style was the prize-bagger (how right she was!); Alain Arias-Mission said that four characters in an Oedipal drama speaking simultaneously was the ticket; Ronald Tavel said a 70-page absurdist farce riddled with terrible puns and sexist humour is the route to riches; William Hunt said boring prose with no notable innovations at all is the secret to enshrinement (how right he was!); Odessa Burns said a stageplay featuring the protracted killing of Kafka is what rocks; Richard Kostelanetz said the word ‘rains’ printed in various fonts and positions on paper is something someone somewhere might believe constitutes art; Steven Katz said three of his least inspired fictions showcasing no notable talents powers the skidoo; Richard Astle said a failed attempt at a computer-program-inspired hypertext in the (pre-)manner of Brooke-Rose and Roubaud prickled the interest; Tristres Delarue said a clunking issuetastic play about race (one of several in this collection) was the whizzer; Robin Magowan said slavish adherence to sub-Joycean wordplay was the one path to pleasure; and Julien Blaine said pictures of tall buildings with a dot atop each was something to do with literature. Some time around 3am, Wildman commissioned a book to be printed and in the morning the book arrived. To much shakings of heads and regrets. Wildman would release two ‘concrete’ novels in the two subsequent years, Nuclear Love and Montezuma’s Ball, each a testament to the baffling bravery of the American avant-garde of the period, also out of print. 

Editions:

Hardback, 1968, Swallow Press.

Alexander Zinoviev — The Yawning Heights [1979]

Some satirists point lean and mean heat-seeking missiles at their targets and annihilate them with the sharpness of their wit and erudition. Others, such as Mr. Zinoviev, pen “sociological novels” of staggering length (816pp in a small font), taking apart the Soviet communist regime in a sequence of deadpan accounts of life under the ultimate ‘-Ism’, a fictitious Russia named Ibansk populated by a series of Iban Ibanovich Ibanovs, known by their functions, such as ‘Dauber’, ‘Writer’, ‘Schizophrenic’, ‘Artist’, etcetera. The ‘novel’ comprises a series of titled fragments exploring the satirical world through philosophical paradoxes, high-level logic (Zinoviev wrote various academic texts on logic), fast-paced dialogues that end up unpeeling one’s brain in their complexities, and other amusing scenes and set-pieces involving the ‘characters’, each of whom speak in the same formal voice of the narrator. Each section packs in ideas and premises to the hilt, making it onerous to select one passage to showcase the author’s satirical prowess. The sections featuring ‘Artist’ and ‘Writer’ were some of the funniest to me, criticising the intellectual bind all pre-perestroika artists around the time faced in the manner of such titans as Bulgakov (The Heart of a Dog) or Olesha (Envy). Framed as a ‘found document’, located “on a newly opened rubbish dump”, the titular section proves the most humorous (the humour here is too deadpan for thighs to be slapped or coffee to be spluttered—painful identification the reserve of those who lived in Russia through such a regime), containing more ribald material (scatological poems), and dialogues that lend the novel an oomph and readability, something the book begins to lack due to its absence of structure or plot (or any conventional novel architecture). As a consequence, the book loses steam into its final third (I read up to p.613 before throwing in the towel), and as impressive and ambitious a novel this is, the inclusion of so much material written in the same tone drags the book down into the boring and repetitive. Zinoviev’s novel was published in Switzerland in 1976 (in Russian), and for this affront to the regime, the author was kicked from his lecturing post and the Academy of Sciences, and “offered” the chance to leave Russia. He moved to Munich. Praise around the novel has been copious. Among the lovers, Clive James, who called the novel “a work vital to the continuity of civilisation”, and a NYRB writer said “Zinoviev will, I predict, be read by millions . . . in the tradition of Hobbes, Voltaire, Swift, Orwell.” This prediction has not come to pass (the “sociological novel” never blossomed into a school outside Zinoviev’s works, although the approach here is Swiftian in the extreme), but there is still time for the satirist to rise and be read through his more concise works. His novel-writing ceased in 1986, after which he focused on non-fiction works with titles like The Global Suprasociety and Russia and The Confessions of a Dissident and so on, like a proper ‘Intellectual’. A shame. Let the power of this epic satire rise and ascend to the pantheon!

Editions:

Hardback, The Bodley Head, 1979.

Paperback, Penguin Books, 1981.

Bibliography:

Novels:

The Yawning Heights, The Bodley Head, 1979.

The Radiant Future, Random House, 1980.

Homo Sovieticus, Gollancz, 1985.

The Madhouse, Gollancz, 1986.