Year: 2009

Wrinkles, by Charles Simmons

Excerpt

When he first slept all night with the woman he had fallen in love with he stayed awake in order not to miss the pleasure of her presence. When they moved in together sleep became a problem: she complained that he woke at night, lay tense, and thereby woke her; or he snored or tossed and thereby woke her. Now he sleeps in another room, about which she also complains. He feels that the difference between sleeping and waking is diminishing: when asleep he is aware that he is asleep, and when awake he often falls into reveries. Up and in company after 10 p.m. he will nod, particularly when drinking. Only once in a while will he sleep through the night; he will never sleep so deeply that he does not know where he is on waking. His dreams will most often be confused, extensions of the day’s concerns. Near the end of his life, after not dreaming of his father for years, he will have a dream in which his father taunts him for looking old.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Wrinkles'Charles Simmons published five novels over the course of thirty-five years, none of them over 230 pages long and even those pages were printed in well-spaced lines and moderate print. And of all of these, Wrinkles is the slightest, sparest. There are 44 chapters or pieces, each between three to five pages long. Each takes a single topic: clothing; smoking; mathematics; movies; doctors; parents; sleeping.

The excerpt above, from the sleeping pieces shows Simmons’ structure for all of them, which is unique, to my knowledge, to Wrinkles. Each begins by describing experiences, emotions, and thoughts that occurred to Simmon’s protagonist in the past–his childhood, his young manhood, his early married or working life. Then it tells us what is happening in the present. Finally, it projects ahead to what will happen between now and his death.

Simmons’ character has no name, but we do learn the basic facts of his life: he was born, lives, and will die in New York City. He is white, divorced, somewhere in his early fifties, a writer and sometime literature teacher. Had Simmons chosen to take a conventional approach to his story, it’s hard to see how it would have held much interest to anyone. He has some troubles and some successes and much that is neither, and there is little drama, at least as far as we are shown.

The lack of narrative distraction allows Simmons to focus on telling details–the amount of his childhood allowance (five cents, later raised to fifteen); the feel of the wool material of his Army uniform; the taste of a cigarette; a bird that accidentally flies into his apartment; one of his professors reaching out and touching his hand. All the details and incidents are related in a spare, objective prose–examined “are held as if before a jeweler’s glass,” as one reviewer wrote. (In an odd coincidence, in searching for Simmons’ other titles, I discovered that a century before him, another Charles Simmons had published something titled A Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, which is an apt description of Simmons’ style in Wrinkles).

Everything, in fact, in Wrinkles is so carefully chosen and so lightly treated that the work comes to resemble poetry as much as prose. Not that this is a delicate or fragile life: Simmons’ hero has cheated, lied, stolen, smoked, boozed, shirked onerous chores and been expelled from a school. He wrestled in high school and was good at it. He goes to see “Deep Throat” with a famous woman film critic he meets at a party. He will wonder if he would have had more sex if he had not masturbated.

The details accumulate and the novel becomes a mosaic, where the individual pieces gives the reader a clearer and clearer sense of the man. And this is what, in the end, makes Wrinkles a remarkable work of art, a truly original and beautifully realized portrait of a largely unremarkable life with its share of wrinkles, warts, and blemishes. Which is what most of ours are, too–and which is why many readers will find at least a few passages that will cause them to pause for a moment and consider their own reflections.

Find a copy

Wrinkles, by Charles Simmons
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978

“The Gospel at Colonus” now available on DVD

The Gospel at Colonus DVD

I’m going to shift my spotlight away from neglected books for the first time to draw attention to the long, long-overdue release on DVD of the 1985 PBS “Great Performances” production of the Lee Breuer/Bob Telson landmark show, “The Gospel at Colonus”. Recently, I was talking to an acquaintance about memorable theater experiences. He and his wife had seen “The War Horse” at the National Theatre in London, and he said the first sight of the horse puppet, designed by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, sent a shiver up his spine.

I told him I had the same reaction to the opening moments of the theatre production of “The Lion King,” when the dancers, in Julie Taymor’s incredible costumes, begin to come onto the stage from the wings and through the aisles. “I think there have only been three or four times I’ve had that reaction something in theater,” I said, but my mind instantly went blank when I tried to think of the others. And then it hit me: “The Gospel at Colonus”, of course.

It was in 1990, when my wife and I went to see Breuer’s revival of his 1985 production for the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. About 10 minutes into the show, Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama enter from the left wing, dressed in shining silver tuxes. They are the collective, choral Oedipus. “Daughter, lead me on,” Fountain calls out, and Jevetta Steele, playing Ismene, begins to lead them in a classic sufferin’ gospel show trudge, toward center stage. From the right wing goes out a shout: “Stop!” The Soul Stirrers, as the defenders of Colonus, all dressed in deep burgundy suits, with Sam Butler, Jr. on guitar in the lead, begin moving out to stop them. “Stop, do not go on,” they sing. “This place is holy. You cannot walk this ground.” A vocal battle of sorts then erupts, as the Oedipi come on and the Soul Stirrers push back. With each step, the tension mounts. Behind, a large gospel choir sways back in forth to the rhythm of the march. Butler and Fountain come face to face, duking it out: “Can’t do it!” “I’ll do it!” “Can’t do it!” “I’ll do it!” Finally, in frustration, Fountain lets out with a wild, falsetto howl that slices right through to the heart. I had tears in my eyes, it was so thrilling.

I had first heard about “The Gospel at Colonus” in the Village Voice back in 1983, when it opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the academy’s Next Wave Festival. I was intrigued at the whole concept of the show: an interpretation of the ancient Greek tragedy, “Oedipus at Colonus” in the music of modern American black gospel. I was already a big fan of black gospel music. But the fact that Breuer had been able to enlist the participation of not just the Five Blind Boys but the Soul Stirrers left me dearly wishing I was living on the right, not the left coast.

Fortunately, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan fame was also a fan of the show and arranged to release an original cast recording on Warner Brothers Records in 1984, and I swooped my copy up the moment it hit the racks. I copied it to cassette (remember them?) and played it over and over in the car. Some critics have written that “Stop! Do Not Go On” is the only memorable song from the show, but having listened to the album at least a hundred times over the last 20+ years, I think this is unfair and seriously wrong.

Virtually even number is good enough to take its place alongside the best gospel tunes of the last fifty years. “How Shall I See You Through My Tears?”, Ismene’s plaintive cry for her long-lost father is matched Oedipus’ desparate wish that the Lord would “Life Me Up (Like a Dove)”, so that “I could look with the eyes of the angels/For the child that I love.” The joyous resolution of the choir’s answer to Oedipus’ plea to find a resting place: “Live where you can/Be happy where you can.” The stunning oratio of “Numberless Are the World’s Wonders”, in which the singer lists all the powers of man, spiralling up to a series of “From every wind/He has made himself secure”, only to end with the chorus reminding us, “From all but one/In the late wind of death he cannot stand.” And the stomping, rousing celebration of the peace Oedipus finally finds: “Lift Him Up.” These songs are among the most moving I know.

Although “The Gospel at Colonus” only ran for about two months when Breuer took it to Broadway in 1985, he’s managed to stage a number of revivals at fairly regular intervals, so that by now, the show has been performed over 1,000 times. A second recording of the songs from the show, with mostly the same cast members as the first, was released in 1985 and is now available on CD (although I personally prefer the Warner Brothers version).

PBS recorded a performance in Houston in 1985, when Morgan Freeman was still playing the speaking Oedipus, and showed it on their “Great Performances” series. This was briefly available on VHS tape, but it’s effectively been out of reach until a month or so ago, when NewVideo finally issued it on DVD. Given the show’s record, this release may disappear just as quickly as all the past revivals and recordings, so I urge everyone to buy or rent a copy and see while it’s still available. The video quality is not the best, being just a digitized version of the first release without any apparent touch-up. But the power of the music, the performances, and the visual impact of the staging easily overcomes this shortcoming. Until you have that once-in-a-lifetime chance to see it live, don’t stop and do go on to see it now on DVD. Your life will be richer for it.

“The Gospel at Colonus”

Book by Lee Breuer
Based on “Oedipus at Colonus,” “Oedipus Rex,” and “Antigone” by Sophocles; Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” and “Antigone” adapted by Robert Fitzgerald; Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and “Antigone” adapted by Dudley Fitts
Music by Bob Telson
Available from New Video (ISBN: 1-4229-1948-X)

Mine Enemy Grows Older, by Alexander King

The 'controversial' cover of 'Mine Enemy Grows Older'Every writer who’s ever been featured on Oprah’s Book Club follows in the footsteps of Alexander King. When he published his memoir, Mine Enemy Grows Older in 1958, he was, in the words of a Time magazine reviewer, “an ex-illustrator, ex-cartoonist, ex-adman, ex-editor, ex-playwright, ex-dope addict.” His book probably would have taken a quick trip to the remainder tables–had it not been for a lucky and path-setting break: on the second of January, 1959, King appeared on “The Tonight Show”, hosted by Jack Paar, to plug his book. As Russell Baker put it years later, “After charming millions on the Jack Paar show, Alexander King came up out of the basement and took off like a 900-page bodice ripper.”

Mine Enemy Grows Older is King’s rambling and very much tongue-in-cheek account of his first fifty-some years. Born in Vienna (as Alexander Koenig), King emigrated with his family to New York City in his teens. With a little bit of art training and a great deal of moxie, he worked his way through dozens of jobs, from decorating department store windows and painting murals a Greek restaurant to illustrating radical newspapers.

Cover of Alexander King's 'Is There Life After Birth?'It was as an illustrator that King’s career finally took off. Throughout the 1920s, he was caught up in the convention-flounting wave of Mencken, The Smart Set, and the Jazz Age and became a much-in-demand illustrator for new, unbowdlerized editions by such scandalous authors as Flaubert, Rabelais, and Ovid. He then worked as an art editor, first for Vanity Fair and then for Henry Luce’s transformed Life magazine. Unfortunately for King, he developed a serious kidney problem that led to a doctor’s prescribing morphine as a pain killer.

At the time, morphine was controlled but legally available in pill form from most pharmacies. And like any addictive drug, it also encouraged a thriving black market, with shady MDs writing scrips on demand for junkies like King who could scrape up enough cash. Eventually, King’s addiction led to his being arrested and convicted on federal drug charges and sent to a narcotics rehabilitation hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. He was able to clean up, get back into painting, and reestablish some of his connections with the publishing world in New York, which led to a contract from Simon and Schuster for Mine Enemy Grows Older.

It probably would have ended there had not King’s wry and outrageous banter on Paar’s show. He was just the sort of taboo-breaker Paar’s audience was looking for: funny, opinionated, unconventional, urbane. Frank and April Wheeler of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road would have loved him. Take this account of King’s reaction to being stuck in a room in Lexington with nothing to read by an issue of the Saturday Evening Post:

It was a waking nightmare of the most sinister dimension and variety. My whole past life was insidiously evoked, ruefully demonstrated, and mercilessly indicted. It suddenly came to me that the reason my three marriages had smashed up was, simply, that they had been frivolously ratified on the wrong kind of mattresses; I realized with unshakable conviction that my social and financial calamaties had been caused by my improperly sanitized apertures; and, as I went on reading, it became brutally clear that all through my life I had washed only with soap substitutes, had worn unmasculine underwear, and had never decently neutralized my offensive bodily effluvia.

For seventy-two hours I wallowed in accusations and self-reproaches, and when the nurse finally let me out of my isolation cubicle I was a psychic tatterdemalion.

I remember saying to the doctor who interviewed me that rather than have another such weekend, I would prefer to spend three days on an army cot, lashed to a belching, gonorrheal Eskimo prostitute, who had just finished eating walrus blintzes.

Funny stuff, for sure. Practically every page of Mine Enemy Grows Older is filled with this sort of caustic, ribald bird-flipping humor. For fifteen to twenty minutes on a talk show it must have seemed like revolutionary stuff. By the end of the book’s 374 pages, however, it has grown monotonous and tiresome.

That didn’t stop Simon and Schuster from releasing four more books by King between 1960 and his death in 1965: May This House be Safe from Tigers (1960); I Should Have Kissed Her More (1961); Is There A Life After Birth? (1963); and Rich Man, Poor Man, Freud, and Fruit (1965). All sold well, though each time in diminishing numbers. There was something about King that really appealed to readers and viewers at the time. My grandparents, life-long Republicans and firm upholders of middle-class values, had two of his books on their shelves, and kept them with the small number they moved to their retirement apartment. Nor did it keep Paar and then Johnny Carson from bringing him back for dozens of appearances.

The 'safe' cover of 'Mine Enemy Grows Older'My theory is that King’s was a safe form of revolt. He mocked convention, but he didn’t exactly offer an alternative–nor did he suggest that people grab torches and set fire to police stations. He was like a Brother Theodore who could write. He introduced America to the term, “raconteur” and opened a door for other talk show guests–including Truman Capote. After a long day at the office and an evening of westerns and sitcoms, a bit of King’s “acid appraisals of modern art (‘a putrescent coma’), advertising (‘an overripe fungus’) and people in general (‘adenoidal baboons’)” (to quote Time’s obit of King) was a refreshing bit of outrage before turning in for the night.

Simon and Schuster were happy to exploit this sense of dabbling in forbidden fruit. After “The Tonight Show” appearance, the publisher released subsequent printings with two covers–a “shocking” one (above) featuring one King’s Dali-esque paintings and, to prevent any awkward glances, a conventional one (right) with a safe grey cover.

King still has a few fans, as you can see from the reviews posted on Amazon. For me, his books, like his art, is colorful, vivid, but ultimately superficial.

Other Opinions

• Gerald Frank, New York Herald Tribune, 7 December 1958

This is a scandalous, wonderful, and strangely moving book. The publishers, for want of a better word, describe it as an autobiography. Actually it is less autobiography than memoirs, less memoirs than a series of immpressionistic self-portraits and wildly hilarious anecdotes done so vividly that the book all but leaps in your hands.

• Bernard Levin, The Spectator, 4 December 1959

Alas, funny though the anecdotes, or some of them, are, this is the emptiest book to appear for many a year, and even if it were not written almost entirely in the same breathless, sweaty prose, it would still be a waste.

• Raymond Holden, New York Times, 4 January 1959

The reader who has a strong stomach and is not irritated by the author’s verbal juggling and sometimes painful name-calling will be made either happy or morbidly excited…. [T]here are sandwiched in between its horrors some anecdotes and personal narratives of rare subtlety and humor. Whether one regards this as autobiography or fiction (the two are not really so far apart), it is at once a story of degradation and depravity and a sensitive and often kindly commentary on human life.

Locate a Copy

Mine Enemy Grows Older, by Alexander King
New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1958

Robert Chandler recommends the works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Robert Chandler, translator of Andrey Platonov’s Happy Moscow, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate write to recommend “[A]nother great, and still more recently discovered, writer from the 1920s and 30s: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky”:

I included one of his stories, ‘Quadraturin’, in my Penguin Classics anthology Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics). There is also a small anthology of his work published by GLAS: Seven Stories.

And NYRB Classics are bringing out another volume [Memories of the Future] in the next few months.

His work is translated by Joanne Turnbull, and her translations are very, very good indeed. [Turnbull won the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize for Seven Stories.–Ed.]

There is a bit about him at the Complete Review.

You can read his short story, “Quadraturin” online at the Glas website (http://www.glas.msk.su/krzhizhanovsky.html) and another, “Yellow Coal”, at OpenDemocracy.net. You can also read about Krzhizhanovsky on Wikipedia and Ellis Sharp’s blog.

Cook’s Ingredients, from Reader’s Digest Home Handbooks

Cover of 'Cook's Ingredients'
I love to cook, and I’ve always tried to apply in the kitchen the advice of the composer Charles Ives, who once said to a listener who was booing a piece of modernist music, “Stop being such a God-damned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?” Well, when it comes to food, I believe in standing up and using my tastebuds like a man.

There are plenty of opportunities to do that here in Belgium. Even our small local grocery and the corner store often have things on display that send me home to research what they are and how to cook them. Since 1990, one of my most useful references has been this book, published by Reader’s Digest, of all companies. Produced by Dorling Kindersley, Cook’s Ingredients is a model of DK’s image-intense approach to information.

Although it comes with the diminutive label of “pocket encyclopedia,” it packs into 230-some pages an invaluable wealth of information. Starting with vegetables, ending with meat, and covering fruit, herbs, spices, grains, dairy products, fish and fowl in between, the book covers just about every ingredient you’re likely to find in any good grocery store and plenty of those you’re not. Over 60 different types are shown in the seven pages on pasta. For each item, there is a pristine studio photo and a sentence or two about its origin, taste, production, or use.

Lungo Vermicelli - Riccini - Gramigna

If nothing else, it’s been terrific to have on hand when we have to send one of the kids to the store for scallions or a bag of orzo. Open it up, point to the picture, and say, “This is what you need to get.” We learned this lesson after one of the boys came back with a green cabbage instead of head of iceberg lettuce.

I do keep a couple of other guides: The New Food Lover’s Companion is more comprehensive but lacks illustrations; Waverly Root’s Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World is more entertaining to read, if not the most efficient reference; and the CIA’s 7.8 pound behemoth, The Professional Chef, looms over them all. But for every one time I look at any of these, there are ten times I’ll thumb through Cook’s Ingredients.

I see that there are used copies available for as little as 35 cents plus postage on Amazon. C’mon now, folks: surely you can fork out that for the sake of a book that can hold its place in the kitchen for a lifetime–something few books beside Joy of Cooking can do.

Cook’s Ingredients, Adrian Bailey Contributing Editor
Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest Books, 1990