by Jim Harrison
Quails are supported by the universe
(I wonder if that means subsisting by God).
A quail has seized God by the neck
With its black bill, because there is no
God greater than a quail.
(Peter, Christ, Judas: a quail.)
A quail's egg: idle philosophy in solution.
(There is no wife better than a quail.)
I dropped a quail's egg into a cup for buckwheat noodles,
And made havoc of the Democratic Constitution.
Split chopsticks stuck in the back, a quail husband
Will deliver dishes on a bicycle, anywhere.
The light yellow legs go up the hill of Golgotha.
Those quails who stood on the rock, became the rock!
The nightfall is quiet, but inside the congealed exuviae
Numberless insects zigzag, on parade.
1972
The Dreadful Lemon Sky, by John D. MacDonald
The new John D. MacDonald, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, is the sixteenth in the Travis McGee series, the color in the title reflecting yet another shade in MacDonald's spectrum of what in an old-fashioned sense must be called “evil.” It is not so thrashingly acerbic and bawdy as some of the other McGees but easily compensates by moving even farther toward the autumnal coolness of Chandler, Hammett and Cain.
This is not to say that The Dreadful Lemon Sky will disappoint MacDonald addicts. The earlier Dress Her in Indigo (1969) might easily be thought of as the pinnacle of brazen seaminess, and later on we noticed a chill of deliberation in A Tan and Sandy Silence (1972) and The Scarlet Ruse (1973). The colors have become a trifle less gaudy, but the punch is more lethal. There is much less of the “we” against the “they,” and the recognizable demarcations between criminal and citizen have tended to blur into “all of us.”
But then MacDonald could never be confused with the escapism that dominates the suspense field. You would have to be batty or ignorant or a masochist to read a MacDonald novel for pure amusement. The core of The Dreadful Lemon Sky deals with the Florida narcotics trade—quite real by virtue of the juicy opportunities along the extensive coastline. But the nondopers among us are not let off the hook, covered as we all are by the corruption of business power, pointlessly stupid narcotics laws, and human greed right down to the bacon-and-eggs peddler in the corner diner. As an aside, it would be easy to mention this writer's vast readership if I were not so mindful of just how wrong fifty million or so Americans can be on a bleak November day; MacDonald is across-the-board democratic and if you're not covered in this book you will be in others.
I have often questioned the attraction of this writer, since I'm not much taken by others in the field, or by any lightweight books for that matter. I meet all sorts of poets and novelists who have the MacDonald vice, even those who, like myself, have no tolerance for mysteries. No one makes extravagant critical claims, but they all readily admit that MacDonald is a very good writer, not just a good “mystery writer.” He far surpasses the critical conventions of the suspense category. (One is reminded of the nervousness attached to thinking of Peter Matthiessen, Ed Hoagland or Annie Dillard as “nature” writers.)
The other, perhaps more obvious, attraction is that MacDonald is a prodigy with sixty novels and five hundred short stories written since he gave up a business career twenty-five years ago. I remember as a young writer being disgusted when I discovered that Simenon wrote many of his wonderful novels in eleven days or less. Of course, any moron with the energy can write a novel in a hurry, but there are so many examples of good work being done at breakneck speed—Hemingway drafted The Sun Also Rises in six weeks and To Have and Have Not in less; Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in ten days; Durrell wrote Balthazar in less than three weeks; and Miller's Alter Retour New York was a letter to Alfred Perles of a few days’ composition.
So perhaps more purely literary writers admire MacDonald's fertility, his ease of producing at great speed works within a specific genre that don't at all seem limited to that genre. In the overwhelmingly autobiographical phrase of a literary writer, something Gottfried Benn said comes to mind: “We are papering our walls with our own skin and we can't last.” A gifted literary writer like Joseph Heller may spend a much-bandied twelve years on a novel, and one may wish secretly that he would move to Walla Walla and do a quickie.
It is interesting to note the way certain characteristics of the hero in the Travis McGee series facilitate plot. McGee has all the grief of a moralist. He simply can't stand the way things in our republic have gone from awful to worse, but he hesitates to preach about it. His morals, in short, are not “situational.” He does not seduce women. He is kindly, he listens, he responds to their problems with great openness and with little concern for their faults. If he ends up with a page or two lay it is usually because it is good for everyone involved. This openness, as opposed to the closed shop of the usual existential hero, gets McGee into a stupefying array of ugly situations. His sidekick at the Bahia Mar Marina, where he lives on a houseboat won in a poker game, is Meyer, a freelance economist. MacDonald used Meyer to reveal all sorts of fantastic and arcane information about the greasy venality of certain business types. Sometimes one suspects that Meyer is MacDonald himself.
Often when McGee cleans up a particularly hideous mess it remains a mess: In Dress Her in Indigo the nice rich girl turned hippie is returned to her hypocrite father as a lesbian heroin addict. In The Dreadful Lemon Sky some fine people get their heads blown off. It is a “winner take nothing” world, where blood flows with the smell of “sheared copper” and where you will likely as not finish dead whether you are good or bad or indifferent.
McGee is not an anti-hero type, nor is he allowed any of the macho, fascist qualities that a Spillane and others of that silly ilk offer their heroes. MacDonald's world is a real world: the new Florida, where condominiums put up yesterday are somehow seedy today, where the operators and lawyers live in a cold porcine splendor that an honest sybarite like Balzac or even MacDonald recognizes as nickel-dime formica. It is a visceral commonplace world full of blasts of oxygen, crazy discourses on fishing, alcohol, marijuana, denatured sexuality, the burned-out uniformity of the young at play, the exacerbated efforts of the old to retire with grace like plucked turkeys in the subtropical sun.
The palpability of MacDonald's world is just as convincing in the non-McGee novels, the forty-four outside the series. Two of my favorites are A Flash of Green (1962) and Clemmie (1958). A Flash of Green seems to me the first and best of all novels with an ecological base. It concerns the raw, nerve-exposing effort of a group of people to save some fine tidal lands and flats from the developers. Curious to his genre, MacDonald has a pointillist reverence for the world outside: weather, the ocean, fauna; mammals own their proper share of it. Attention is paid to the way people eat, drink, take showers, sleep. For some strange reason people scarcely ever eat in American novels.
Clemmie is a desperate, harrowing novel about a man inadvertently driven to his limits by his wife taking a vacation, and how he out of loneliness falls in love with a younger woman. It is a desolately uncomfortable novel of passion. Like The Dreadful Lemon Sky, both books are without that convenient sacrificial goat, the Italians and their club of ruffians, on whom we easily lay our guilt. Everyone can see himself in The Dreadful Lemon Sky. The vision is immediate, painful, recognizable, with just the right load of pleasure to keep you going, like waking on a beautiful summer morning with a terrible hangover and thinking while shaving that at least you are alive.
1975
The Snow Walker, by Farley Mowat
Depending on one's immediate mood a lot can be found wrong in the writing of Farley Mowat: all sorts of laughable excesses from sloppy style, overweening sentimentality, a kind of conbrio enthusiasm for windmill tilting, to the sort of verbal keening one associates with a traditional Boston Irish wake, with the whiskey flowing so freely one forgets just who is dead and why.
This is not so much a disclaimer as an announcement of fact, and in Mowat's very particular case the fact doesn't matter. Of Farley Mowat's nineteen or so books I've read twelve, and after a few weeks mulling over the latest it seems to me that The Snow Walker is his best. The precious sniping of the “literateur” is simply not relevant here.
The Snow Walker is a book of tales about the Eskimo, stories ranging from the ancient to the overwhelmingly modern. It is passionate, harsh, with a mythic density that puts a great strain on the reader. In fact, the reader will assuredly come up feeling more than vaguely unclean. History is forgetful but ultimately unforgiving, and in The Snow Walker Mowat draws us into the beauty and anguish of an extirpated culture; perhaps more than culture, a microcosmic civilization. The beauty of the tales purge, exhaust, draw us out of our skin, but the pain involved is so deep that we feel the nondirectional remorse that characterizes modern man on those rare occasions when he has the wit and humility to turn around and look at his spoor.
In the reading of this book we should first of all forget all the Brotherhood of Man nonsense. We have nothing in common with the Eskimo and they nothing with us other than our accidental simultaneity on earth. It is not profitable to look for similarities, to make a stew of us all to get us off the hook in the usual ritual of breast-beating. Honesty counsels while breast-beating is masturbatory. The simple fact is the Canadian government has no better track record with the Eskimo than we with the American Indian in our mutual courses of empire. Despite all the understandable cha-cha of the Bicentennial Year it is healthier to admit we got off the boat and murdered a civilization, as did the Canadians. So many absurd efforts are made to avoid this truth—currently the Army wants Wounded Knee rewritten as a battle rather than a massacre. Maybe this presages “The Battle of My Lai.” Certain children will never appreciate these niceties because they are dead. They were dead when we gave the Mandan blankets infected with smallpox as surely as they were dead when the Canadian government conducted some of its scandalous social experiments with the Eskimo. “Ah, Cedric, let's move the buggers to another island this year and see if they can't hustle up something more for the fur trade.”
Before we came along the Eskimo were a strange lot. It was not so much that they were alone but that no one had ever joined them in the most hostile environment on earth, so they had no concept of what “alone” was. And no one is sure how many centuries they managed to endure in the tightest survival units imaginable, but “survival” is a euphemism within the frame-work of the Eskimo's closeness to the earth. The land and sea and the Eskimo owned each other with a degree of intimacy we cannot conceive, a fabled relationship with a visceral quality that is Siamese. One of the grandest things about the ocean is that it can kill you. And as Mowat tells his tales, the immediacy of death assumes a grace totally unknown to us.
The main character of The Snow Walker is the cold and the snow. The “snow walker” itself is death. We have an old man telling Mowat a tale going back so far that it recedes into the bottom layer of a glacier—how men with metal helmets with horns on them and wearing breastplates came in a long boat one year. They had blond beards, sang songs, and taught the Eskimo how to build the crossbow. There are tales of starvation, cannibalism out of love, the giving of one body to another with the poignancy of the Eucharist. There are tales so simple and strong that you read them backwards to make sure you haven't been tricked into feeling a story in your stomach for a change. There is a tale of a man and an arctic fox in a suicide pact. There is a tale about a woman named Soosie that exceeds any story I've ever read, save in Kafka, for convincing bureaucratic horror. There is a tale that is a Romeo and Juliet for grown-ups—romanticism loses its perversity and becomes convincing. In The Snow Walker Mowat is presenting the essence of his thirty-year obsession with the Arctic and its people.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, in the United States in 1976, it is a curious habit of ours to wait for the future when it has happened already, like some genetically foreordained intrusion we would rather not notice. We don't have to live in Buck Rogers bubbles. We already live in them, only they are squares. The true native populations of earth recede into the mist of history. They were engaged in their environment rather than shielded from it. As the Eskimo died as a viable culture an atomic submarine passed under them without their knowledge. Reading about the Eskimo has become a science fiction about the past. Nothing useful in the utilitarian sense can be learned from them, unless you choose to look at them as Buddhists of the snows, who knew how to live. Their life so perfectly marries dream and nightmare that we retreat from their nakedness back within the safety of a book.
1976
The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen
It is a curious thing to advertise for an audience for so private, so idiosyncratic a journey. Not that The Snow Leopard was written in scorn of an audience, but one feels sure it is the same book Matthiessen would have written had its later publishing been impossible. The Snow Leopard is a heraldic book, full of ghosts and demons and largely unfamiliar mythologies; a well-veiled, lowercase Buddhist text set in the virtual top of the world, the Himalayas. It is a book totally devoid of comforting banalities—no kitchens, lingerie, politics, newspapers or clocks other than the timeless clock of the seasons (it's not very helpful to ascribe dates to 10,000 successive Octobers). Like all truly good books it is about death, and the imminence of death is fresh and lively, if you will, because we are drawn hypnotically along into a landscape where neither the beasts nor men are familiar.
On the surface the book is structured simply on the diary of a trek into the Tibetan Plateau of Nepal. In the autumn of 1973 Peter Matthiessen accompanied the zoologist George Schaller (author of the esteemed Mountain Gorilla and The Serengeti Lion) on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, “walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred and fifty miles or more to the Land of Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau.” At Crystal Mountain Schaller and Matthiessen hoped to study the bharal, the Himalayan wild blue sheep, protected there from slaughter by the grace of the local Lama. The main complication (an understatement) of the trip was that Schaller needed to study the sheep in their November rutting season when they were most active and accessible, so the hike of over thirty days accompanied by a half-dozen Sherpas and bearers was made in the onset of the mountain winter, with some of the passes to be crossed exceeding in height anything to be found in our lower forty-eight states.
On this particular level the whole trip appears utterly foolhardy. An appendicitis attack or even a minor stumble would very likely be fatal. These are not necessarily major considerations for a scientist like Schaller, but Matthiessen voices them along with his desire to see a snow leopard, a nearly mythological beast, the least accessible of the great cats, perhaps the least accessible mammal on earth. In fact the book could be easily read on the level of a natural history thriller, the manner in which The New Yorker excerpted the text, rather understandably in lieu of the difficulty of the core of the book. And the book succeeds admirably as a fabled nineteenth-century action-adventure yarn: vast gorges, impassable rivers, wolves racing across glaciers, crazed village mastiffs, precipitous cliffs with half-foot-wide trails, the hint of the yeti, or Abominable Snowman, blizzards, snow blindness, thievery, harrowing cold and exhaustion. But then that is only partially what the book is about, and the reviewer finds himself as a decidedly minor-league John Huston, wondering how to suggest that this beloved Moby Dick is so very much more than a whaling romance.
Peter Matthiessen must be our most eccentric major writer. The fact that he is not readily identified as a major writer is only due to a critical lapse, what with former and potential critics giving themselves over to quasi-ecstasy cults, sexual confession, and the sandlot politics of The New York Review of Books (above the quarters of which float the anglicized ghosts of Ché and Fanon). Literature has oddly become the least fuzzy of co
ntemporary arenas, but the bleachers are largely empty. In New York City last April I overheard a fat wag in a chichi boîte say that contemporary literature had surpassed homosexuality as a victimless crime.
Matthiessen's eccentricities are not those of language but of thought. His style is nonexotic and owns a studied Brahmin grace and wit, though the wit is rather more discomfiting than funny. He writes cleanly and beautifully with musical density, a nordic resonance coming out of surprising economy. But he is the odd creature who makes us understand how despite the obvious and perhaps over-discussed talents of Bellow, Mailer, Updike, Pynchon et al., they are the philosophically mundane products of university-based thought in the forties and fifties. This is much less a denigration than an observation about a lack of variety.
Matthiessen is a Zen Buddhist, in a manner more consequential to his work than Bellow's Jewishness, or the neo-Barthian (Karl, not John) Protestantism of Updike, the frazzled existent of Mailer. This morning in a small tourist cabin in Montana looking out over the cordillera of the Absarokas with only The Snow Leopard on hand I rehearsed my favorites among Matthiesen's other books: Wildlife in America, The Cloud Forest, The Wind Birds, The Tree Where Man Was Born, and the novels, At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga. It has never been fashionable critically in our time to be concerned with the natural world outside of man's presence (witness the long search for serious readers by McPhee, Hoagland and Abbey who have generally succeeded with their least efforts). Oddly, in none of the above Matthiessen books is “Zen” even mentioned, though it certainly could be sensed by anyone familiar with this particular form of Buddhism. But it is nonobtrusive, and the writing, characterized by Olympian austerity as it is, avoids the personal. You are left with the notion of how deeply and to what a vast extent Matthiessen's work surpasses the genre he is identified with, but the man himself remains a puzzle until The Snow Leopard.