Publishing is almost as notorious for its misleading packaging as the recording business. We may never know what Doubleday’s remit to the Paul Bacon design studio was for Sylvia Wright’s A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, but the vaguely romantic cover that was supplied in response represents in not the slightest way the book’s contents. For one thing, this is not a novel but a collection of three novellas. And three novellas that in no way resemble the sort of narrative a fan of Georgette Heyer or Anya Seton might expect.
Sylvia Wright doesn’t even pretend to know how to write such a book: “How do you make fiction?” she asks in the opening line of “Fathers and Mothers,” her opening novella. After contemplating fiction’s components — information, characters, plot — she confesses within a page or so, “I cannot grasp this craft.” And in the subsequent 180-some pages of the book, she makes no attempt to.
Although one can detect the influence of Nouveau Roman at some points, Virginia Woolf at others, there is no deliberate imitation here. In fact, it would be easier to place A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding in the context of the wave of American experimental fiction just then making itself known in the work of Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, and others. Except even that suggestion is misleading, since Wright’s career as a fiction writer (well, even though she claimed not to grasp the craft, it’s the most convenient label we have at hand) was too brief to allow any sort of network of influences to form. None of the three pieces in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding were published previously and this is her only work of fiction.
Sylvia Wright was not a naïf, though. Soon after graduating from Bryn Mawr, she learned about both novel-writing and publishing when she and her mother worked with Mark Saxton to turn the 2300-page manuscript left by her father, Austin Tappan Wright, into publishable form. Though its bulk (over 1,000 pages even after editing) put off many readers, Islandia (1942) became, and remains, a cult favorite, a blend of utopianism, fantasy, romance, and what today we’d call steampunk.
She translated that experience into a job on the staff of Harpers Bazaar, eventually earning her own monthly column of humorous observations on life. A couple dozen of these were collected and published in 1955 as Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts. Many have titles like, “My Kitchen Hates Me” and “How to Make Chicken Liver Pate Once.” But one piece has worked its way into our vocabulary: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.”
In it, Wright recalls learning a Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray,” as a child. In particular, she memorized the lines, “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” Only, in the balland, that last phrase is actually “And layd him on the green.” “I saw it all clearly,” she wrote:
The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark-brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark-green dress embroidered with light-green leaves outlined in gold.
“It made me cry,” she writes. When she did finally learn the correct wording, she clung defiantly to her version. It was better. And this led her to champion her invention: the mondegreen. For Wright, mondegreens are not errors. They are portals into other worlds:
If you lay yourself open to mondegreens, you must be valiant. The world, blowing near, will assail you with a thousand bright and strange images. Nothing like them has ever been seen before, and who knows what lost and lovely things may not come streaming in with them? But there is always the possibility that they may engulf you and that you will go wandering down a horn into a mondegreen underworld from which you can never escape.
Wright got her mondegreens from poetry, newspapers, and advertisements. Popular music lyrics have been a rich source for them, even when many of us didn’t know they had a name. And Wright was right in viewing them as transformative. A mondegreen, for example, turns Jimi Hendrix’s ode to LSD, “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss the Sky,” into a celebration of homosexual love: “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.”
And perhaps the notion of mondegreens is a clue to understand what Sylvia Wright is doing in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding. In the first novella, “Fathers and Mothers,” the reader can reconstruct a straightforward story: a Greek mother and father are sharing an apartment in Boston with their son, his American wife — the narrator, but only sometimes — and their infant grandson. The father is suffering from lung cancer. They have come to America to get the best medical care. After months of treatment, the father dies. The family returns to Athens for his funeral.
But that’s what’s happening in the background. In the foreground, the thing that attracts Wright’s attention is how her in-laws (in real life she was married to a Greek man, so presumably this is somewhat autobiographical) deal with their new world. Part of that new world is cancer and sickness and too many hours in the hospital. Another part is America is another part. They are Greek. At home, they can glance out their apartment and see the Acropolis. Ancient Greece and modern Greece are intertwined.
So naturally, one would expect similar things in America. “Have there been preserved here some of the songs and stories of the old Indians, so that one can get a sense of their rhythms, their sonorities?” the mother-in-law asks. A natural question. Except that even today, most Americans would be stumped to indicate any aspect of the culture of our indigenous peoples that hasn’t been processed through Longfellow, the Boy Scouts, and Hollywood. All we know is the transformed version.
The mother-in-law, in particular, is the transformative agent in this family. When not at the hospital, the father-in-law spends most of his time lying limp on the couch. The mother-in-law is the one questioning norms, pushing for routines to be changed, not being satisfied by the status quo. “Now, if this were a story,” Wright observes, “a real story instead of whatever it is, then this could be interpreted and the story shaped to advance through the interpretation.” And those interpretations “would serve the delicious purpose of turning the mother into the villain.”
But which is the truth? The interpretations — the mondegreens — or “the information,” as Wright refers to one of her elements of fiction? The tension between the two alternatives runs like a motif through all three novellas. In the second, “Dans le Vrai” [In truth], the “story” is about the narrator’s visit to her sister and nephew in upstate New York. It’s the late 1950s or early 1960s: the great Federal interstate highway system is in the midst of being built. The characters go to see a section under construction nearby, a great excavated gash through the countryside.
Then, suddenly, the narrator announces, we’re in a new story, a story within a story called “The Thruway.” Or is the narrator the story?
I am the Thruway. I live in a new world in which I must stretch myself to touch, to contain immeasurably unexpected combinations. I will link discrepancies. No, I will be discrepancies, encompass contradiction, and out of that compute what meanings — what secrets — out of what snail-like and dreary settled pasts will now freshly dart what pleasures in rooms without shapes, corners, of dimensions I cannot now imagine. Ah, yes, I will be reconciled — No, not be reconciled, never be reconciled, that will be the strength — but action — one’s life will be —
Following Sylvia Wright through her fictions is like watching someone trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have the same color but just ever-so-slightly different shapes. She takes a piece of “the information,” places it against reality, sees where it fits … but also where it doesn’t. And so she sets that piece down and tries another. Which way does the mondegreen work? Which represents truth? The piece or the rest of the puzzle?
If this makes A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding sound maddening … well, it is. But only in the sense that Sylvia Wright refuses to accept the simple solutions. She is every bit as perceptive into the gestures and mannerisms and pretences of individual characters as Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, and there are plenty of moments of just the sort of pleasure one gets from reading about the interactions of human beings in more conventional fiction.
But she also reminds me in some ways of one of the most challenging and frustrating writers that ever lived, Dorothy Richardson, who puts such extraordinary effort into trying to get her impressions right — and yet always adds, “Yes, but there’s still something more.” Despite its extraordinarily odd title, A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding may be the best work of fiction I’ve read this year.
Sylvia Wright died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 64. She published no other books after this, though she left an unfinished biography of her great aunt Melusina Fay Peirce, wife of the philopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce.
Oh, and a shark-infested rice pudding is the punchline of a joke. You’ll have to read to book to get it.