I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive by Steve Earle

Steve Earle has long been a favourite singer of mine, back to his days with The Dukes and Copperhead Road et al. He’s led an interesting life, to say the least, and is a very committed political singer - check out John Walker's Blues if you want evidence of that. It’s no real surprise that he’s turned his hand to writing fiction. I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive, his first novel (a collection of short stories was published back in 2001), is an intriguing piece of work, ultimately a failure, but a very interesting failure for all that.

The title of the novel comes from a Hank Williams song, and Hank himself is a character in the novel, or at least his ghost is. I would say central character, because in the early stages of the novel he clearly is but, as the novel progresses, his role and purpose become as insubstantial as his ghostly body.

The novel centres on Doc, one of those drop-out good-guys beloved of much American fiction. Think Larry “Doc” (yes, another Doc) Sportello in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Even Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. These are intelligent people who deliberately live among the poor and the dispossessed and place themselves on the verges of decent society. To me, there’s always something vaguely patronising about such portrayals, and so it is with Steve Earle’s incarnation of Doc. These characters always live the same impoverished, drug-addled, crime-ridden lives as the people with whom the commingle, but the difference is that they know it, they know they are living in dissolution and are doing so as a positive choice, whereas the poor schmucks who really belong there don’t realise the futility of their lives. It’s so much horseshit, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said. Characters such as these have no basis in reality. They’re designed to allow the author the luxury of getting dirty with the trailer trash while bypassing the worst manifestations of their trashiness, such as not being very nice people, or educated, or reasonable. These pseudo-characters take as their template the incomparable Buddy Suttree, a man who deliberately lives among the poor and the dispossessed of Knoxville. But the difference is that Suttree really does live the life. When he has money he squanders it on drink. When he gets drunk, he winds up in hospital with a floor buffer wrapped around his head and his skull fractured, or lying in an alleyway being pissed on by a black man. That's Suttree. There’s no sense that Suttree is better than these people, that somehow because he’s really educated and smart he’s only slumming it and actually has the potential to transform these poor people’s lives. Suttree’s the real deal. These imposters are lightweights.

Anyway, Doc is a de-registered doctor who operates as an abortionist in the red-light district of San Antonio. He’s addicted to morphine and is being haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams, for whom he provided substances when the singer was still alive. That’s a promising set-up. The ghost of Hank Williams – inventive, unusual, lots of scope. And Hank, it emerges, is not a particularly amenable ghost either. He has a malevolent streak and may not wish Doc unadultered good health. Excellent - it would have been easy to descend into hagiography but Earle takes the worst excesses of the real Williams's character and expands on them for fictional gain. From here, though, this promising narrative just descends into something of a mess.

Instead, into the drama comes Graciela, a beautiful Mexican girl straight out of central casting. Graciela is a mysterious girl, seemingly gifted, with a touch that is more than just soothing: she actually heals with her hands. The story shifts again and she becomes a modern saint, a layer-on of hands who begins, quietly, to transform the neighbourhood.

I haven’t mentioned John F. Kennedy yet, and his assassination in Dallas, which is a major plot incident in the novel. Or the pugilistic priest. Or Graciela's stigmata. Or the jaguar spirit. Or the also straight out of central casting overweight, corrupt police officer. But I’m becoming too critical, because all of this is a good read, rattling along at a gripping pace. It’s just that it doesn’t bear scrutiny.

What is interesting, though, is the way the novel confronts abortion. That’s a pretty loaded subject in America, particularly in Texas, and Earle is pretty fearless in his criticism of the Catholic Church’s approach to the subject. Earle has the ability and the interest to write a good, serious work on this subject. I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive isn’t it. But it has enough about it to suggest that Steve Earle has a future in fiction.

Here comes Lester

James Franco is now filming Child of God. This may not be the most interesting YouTube video in the world, but those of you who don't know the name Lester Ballard yet, I assure you you will in a year or so when the film comes out.

After all, everybody loves a murderous necrophiliac troglodyte, don't they?

National Library Day (2)

And Julian Barnes has written an additional scene for his 1998 novel, England, England, in which the battle for libraries turns violent.

I must be honest, however much I wanted to like this, it really is terrible. It's didactic, cartoonish nonsense which does nothing to improve the debate.

If you want to know about the power of the printed work, just read Farenheit 451 or A Canticle for Liebowitz.

National Library Day

Today is National Library Day, when we mourn the slow death of the public library movement in the United Kingdom. As usual, it's readers and writers who are doing most of the campaigning, not the spineless public librarians who have allowed this disaster to befall us.

Julia Donaldson, the Children's Poet Laureate has written a poem for the day.

Dorothea Tanning

Leonora Carrington died fairly recently, and now another very long-lived female surrealist has died, Dorothea Tanning. She was a brilliant artist, and this is one of my favourite paintings.

The Collector by John Fowles

John Fowles’s The Collector dates from 1963 and in some ways it is dated. In characterisation, in particular, its central characters are, to a large extent, archetypal sixties sorts. Given that one of them kidnaps and imprisons the other in a cellar this may seem an unusual – and provocative – suggestion but, for all Frederick Clegg’s weirdness, he is at core just a typical, inadequate social misfit of the sort commonly found in 1950s and 1960s literature. In the 70s, the type became bastardised and cheapened into simple buffoons, caricatures of their more philosophically rendered postwar predecessors. And Miranda, the girl who is imprisoned by Clegg, is a bright, almost independent gel, the sort who in those heady years of the 1960s are beginning to throw off the shackles of sexist society and will pave the way for the feminists of the seventies and eighties and the free spirits of the nineties and noughts but who are at that point still, fatally, trapped in a kind of middle class, straight-laced sense of the order of things. So we have archetypes, characters who are products of their time. And therefore, you might suppose, the events of this novel couldn’t happen today.

But they could, and this is what makes Fowles’s novel so frightening, and so special.

Frederick Clegg, a City Hall clerk and butterfly collector, wins the football pools and realises that with his new-found wealth he can live a new life. He has become obsessed with a young art student, Miranda Grey but, lacking any social abilities, is unable to do anything to engineer any sort of communication between them. Rather, in the manner of his collecting of defenceless butterflies, he decides to capture and imprison her. This he does, showing meticulous attention to detail and a facility for planning that would be impressive were it not being put to such malign purposes. His belief is that, if only Miranda can come to know him, she will realise what a good and honest person he is, how much he is devoted to her, and she will naturally grow to love him, too. It is, of course, a hopelessly impossible notion, a lunatic dream, but Clegg believes in it completely. And his love for her is genuine, too, albeit in a twisted, stuntd way. Even as the days and weeks of the imprisonment go by, and the situation deteriorates, he cannot quite relinquish hope that she will come to her senses and see the beauty of his nature and prostrate herself before his undying love.

The first section of the story is told by Clegg himself, in a chillingly dispassionate voice, like the overseer of some minor experiment of no great consequence to anyone but himself. Of his captive, despite his real and heartfelt obsession for her, he can permit no genuinely human feelings: he seems incapable of seeing her as a living entity in her own right, rather than as a totem of his own misguided feelings. She is doubly trapped: literally so in her sealed cellar, and mentally so through Clegg’s inability to perceive her as anything other than the chimera of fractured love he has turned her into. You fear for the girl.

The second section is told through Miranda’s diary of her captivity and, through this, the terrifying and desperate nature of Clegg is fully revealed. He adores her but cannot express love. He wants her but cannot bear intimacy. He is stunted in every imaginable way. For Miranda, a bright, intelligent, questing young woman on the verge of a fulfilling adult life, this containment by a man so dull, so soulless, in a world that is lifeless, stultifying, hopeless, is too much to bear. She craves escape but Frederick, for all his lunacy, is not given to carelessness. She feigns illness. Finally she really succumbs to illness but Frederick at first will not, then cannot do anything to help her. The reader can only observe, helpless and dismayed, as events take their course.

The final section, a short and chilling coda, is told by Clegg again. And in this, finally, the truest reflection of his nature is revealed to us. Innocents beware, there are among us people of unspeakable cruelty.

There is, throughout The Collector, a philosophical and psychological quest for understanding of human nature. The two protagonists, captor and captive, master and slave, are trapped in what can only ever be a danse macabre because no dance of life is available to them in which they could each participate. One cannot exist without the other – Miranda ponders at one point what would happen to her if he died and realises that she, too, would die – but nor can they ever happily co-exist. They are incompatibles manacled together by the vagaries of life and tragedy is the only possible outcome. Clegg is simultaneously sexually attracted to and repelled by Miranda. She wants to understand him but craves escape. Both of them are trapped in an impossible existence. Neither is capable of finding release. We are in a world of terrible isolation and dangerous incomprehension, ensnared between good and evil.

Fowles once declared – but later renounced it as an unfulfilled hope – that he wished to alter the society in which he lived. In this, he is therefore the opposite of a writer like Cormac McCarthy, for whom “the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

Although McCarthy and Fowles could, then, be said to reside at opposite poles in their perception of human nature, experience nonetheless draws them closer together. In the end, both writers would probably ascribe to Nietzsche’s observation:

For every strong and natural species of man, love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and anger, affirmative acts and negative acts, belong together. One is good on condition one also know how to be evil; one is evil because otherwise one would not understand how to be good.

In the claustrophobic cosmion of The Collector we begin to see some of what McCarthy hints at in his dismissal of the prospects of improving the species, and we understand the duality that is at the core of all of us. This is why The Collector remains a terrifying and worrying book: because Frederick Clegg exists and must exist. What’s more, he exists, in some small way, in all of us. But so, too, does Miranda.

Uncle Charles Principle

I've written before about this, but I was working with a group of learners tonight and it came up again.

The Uncle Charles principle is a particular occurrence in Point of View when the POV effectively slips out of omniscience into the particular, subjective view of a character.

It was so named by the American critic Hugh Kenner after Uncle Charles in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. In the opening of part two of the book, Joyce writes:

"Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse...."

Another critic objected to this as poor language, citing the word "repair" as archaic and pompous. Exactly, said Joyce. This is exactly the sort of word that Uncle Charles would use, and it is therefore entirely appropriate. In other words, it is as though the narration is now coming through Uncle Charles.

Another example can be found in Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield:

Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting–from nowhere, from the sky. Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again.

That "Dear Little Thing!" is clearly Miss Brill speaking, but it isn't in quotes. For the moment the narrative has slipped entirely into her point of view.

Cormac McCarthy, of course, takes this to extremes, as he does with most things, particularly in Suttree which is full of instances when the third person narrative not only adopts the Uncle Charles principle but actually steps entirely into the first person, and the omniscient narrator and the main protagonist, Suttree, become one. Yet another twin for that most reluctant of twins, Buddy Suttree. In this example, Suttree is shown some old photographs of long lost kin and the experience is so traumatic we are drawn into his own, horrified thoughts, so that by the end of the passage we are in first person:

She came with the tea, a tall vase full, chocked with ice, a curl of lemon. He ladled sugar in. Between the mad hag’s face and this young girl a vague stellar drift, the wheeling of planets on their ether trunnions. Likeness of lost souls haunt us from old chromos and tintypes brown with age. Bloodless skull and dry white hair, matriarchal meat drawn lean and dry on frail bone, a bitter refund ashen among silk and lilies by candlelight in a cold hall, black lacquered bier on sawhorses wound with crepe. I would not cry. My sisters cried.

It's a hard technique to get right. Suttree is a masterpiece of writing.

Cormac McCarthy film script

Well, he has a habit of surprising people. We've been patiently waiting for the publication of his next novel, The Passenger and, instead, Cormac McCarthy has submitted to his publishers a spec film script.

And the surprises continue. It has a contemporary setting, apparently, which is most unusual for McCarthy. Only The Sunset Limited has a contemporary setting. And it has two female lead characters, which is unheard of in McCarthy. (Apparently, The Passenger will also have a strong female lead; perhaps McCarthy is finally finding his feminine side...).

McCarthy has a mixed record with film scripts. The Gardener's Son, on HBS many years ago, was scripted by him and is a fine piece. Cities of The Plain, however, started as a film script and it wasn't too good. And the film script version of No Country For Old Men is simply risible.

Burns Day

Robert Burns's birthday today.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

Genre and literary fiction

In a recent journal article, Andrew Hoberek discusses genre fiction and literary fiction, and a tendency, in recent times, for the latter to reclaim the ground of the former. There is, he suggests, a return to genre fiction, and he cites examples of McCarthy’s No Country and The Road, plus the work of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead and even Pynchon (his latest, after all, not specifically mentioned by Hoberek, is a stoner crime novel, not only a genre novel, but a sub-genre novel).

This move, Hoberek suggests is a return to the pre-modernist canon of literary respectability, and it may even call into question how separate these two literary histories are:

From Henry James, the twentieth century, and eventually the creative writing program, inherit a commitment to both realist representation and continual stylistic innovation. What gets lost is the ability of a writer of James’s stature to pen something like The Turn of the Screw (1898), let alone the even more insistently generic fictions of James’s contemporaries like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson – lost, that is, until the recent embrace of genre models by authors nonetheless committed to their status as writers of serious fiction.

There is an implicit criticism here of MFA programs. I think there’s a lot in that – there is undoubtedly a certain style of writing that is instantly recognisable as being produced from the MFA cauldron - overwritten, overstylised, somewhat predictable. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. The fault may originally lie in the programs but the remedy must come from the writers - who should, of course, insist on setting their own course. And the way that McCarthy, Chabon et al have produced their own individualistic work, not tied by convention or expectation, is presenting a lead.

How to freak out a librarian

William Gibson on writing

This is from an interview in the New York Times with William Gibson, author of Neuromancer:

About how he has written so many books, he says: “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”

I think the man is correct. There's not really any other way to be a writer than to write.