by Steve Aylett
The book did badly with the critics. Its moral demanded a grave so sophisticated it would have been easier to keep it alive, but Lint’s speculations upon ‘a society different enough to have a different corpse decay rate’ had overstepped the mark. The mainstream ignored him like a cat. Meanwhile Cameo Herzog, now a reviewer for the New York Times, told everyone Lint was ‘as vague as an embalmer’s answer’. Lint thought it was the only funny thing Herzog ever said and repeated it to everyone, once dressing up as a turtle to enhance the impersonation. This was to step up a one-sided feud that would span years and create publicity for both without any real effort on Lint’s part.
Making notes for the book Slogan Love, Lint was becoming a master of double-jointed sentences that could go in any direction at any time. The world of Slogan Love is one of necessity unmet. ‘An optimist has nothing but miracles to rely on,’ he wrote, and portrayed streets clotted with rotting bodies. Into this land walks Isou, declaring a philosophy called Haagenti. ‘We have limitations to remind us that someone somewhere hates us with a passion,’ she tells the city council who, about to abscond in a helicopter, are annoyed at her sudden appearance. They are required to listen in poses of exaggerated focus. ‘Success in a zoo is still failure,’ she tells them.
‘Sometimes even a cat wants to act stupid and stagger about,’ the mayor complains.
The farcical nature of the book, in which people lock one another in rooms and run around gathering what they might need when they reach a safe outpost, ends with Isou herself reaching the roof and ascending in the helicopter, her blank face seeming to scorn the enraged, impotent bureaucrats below. At the same moment several identical helicopters arise from administrative buildings elsewhere in the city, containing identical women.
Lint toyed with the book for a while as he worked up the incredibly strange I Blame Ferns. Dodging creditors, Dean Rodence was changing addresses on a regular basis without telling anyone where he was going. After one of his absences he complained bitterly at Slogan Love going out as an Ace Double with Jim Dewar’s Quantum Strumpet. Lint told him he would give him the next one. He was already working on two—I Blame Ferns and Nose Furnace.
Ferns follows Jaen Amober from the moment he awakes, eavesdropping on the theories that flare through his brain. ‘The average person happens to think about lobsters perhaps once a month. Now tell me a chef hasn’t got something wrong with him!’ His obsession with chefs allows some room for thoughts of ships (‘Ships like vast zipper fastenings—it won’t work’), exile (‘Exile is relief disguised as penance’) and pigs (‘Pigs are all about expediency’). Though Lint denied it, scholars have suggested that Amober is a schizophrenic attempting to draw meaning from everything which meets his eye—‘Eyes are the sphincters of reality’ says Vaneigem—thus the pages are rammed with data. ‘Modern architecture is about endurance on all sides,’ says Amober as he walks through the city. ‘Has there ever been a neutral sky?’ he asks, looking up. ‘No one is more beautiful than the romantic partner of an oaf,’ he observes, seeing a happy couple. ‘Pasta is a triumph of consensus over self-respect,’ he says, passing a bistro. ‘Bandy arms like an orangutan,’ he sneers, observing an orangutan at the zoo. ‘Excessive confrontation is a kind of evasion,’ he thinks, watching a cop.
He returns again and again to the subject of chefs. ‘All day long the chefs are unaffected by my words,’ he grieves, crossing the road. Has he after all become a lobster’s shell stuffed with human meat, as he had feared in his early years? ‘Ambiguity is what a dog leaves behind when it gets in the car,’ he reflects. Catching sight of a fern bush in all its complication, he is torn with horror at its skeletal darkness. ‘I am your life’s fragile sick zigzag,’ he hears it whisper.
Right at the end of this day-long voyage, Amober enters the rear of a restaurant, pulls on his bib and hat and starts dicing carrots. The final sentence, ‘Here he stood, sorting tasty biology for slobs.’—is one of the most dreamlike and weightless in literature.
Lint had just put on something particularly slutty to take the manuscript around to Rodence, when a parcel arrived containing a slab of bloody meat and a note, in Rodence’s hand, saying WARE CAN I BE?
Exasperated with this nonsense (and not realising that Rodence was directing him in code to his new office in the meatpacking district), Lint sought out a fleet publishing house which didn’t mess around or withhold money.5 Ginsberg put him in touch with the Olympia Press in Paris, run by the unbelievably dodgy Maurice Girodias. Ginsberg assured Girodias that ‘blame’ was American slang for ‘fuck’ (and the book does appear in his 1959 catalogue as I Fuck Ferns). Lint never received his advance from Girodias, who later sold Ferns to Ace. The Ace edition’s cover erroneously stated that Lint had been the author of Quantum Strumpet. ‘It’s times like this,’ Lint told Alan Rouch, ‘I wish I was indifferent. Or a seal.’
8
SPARKING MAD
Critical reaction · Nose Furnace · Rouch rumble · reverse template · Cheerful When Blamed · coast to coast · for the birds · everything is plentiful here
‘The narrator appears to be constructing a raft with which to escape our interest,’ stated Cameo Herzog in his 1958 review of Nose Furnace, ‘and in this the finished structure succeeds admirably.’ Herzog had finally given up on his unpopular Shadow-style superhero, The Bailiff, and was to be seen shuffling down Forty-Second Street muttering about the cash value of his forehead. Bitter in lean times and fearful of loss in palmy days, he took to review work like a chimp to a centrifuge. Disregarding the merits of Jelly Result was one of his first duties for the New York Times, but like so many of Lint’s works, Nose Furnace was like a red rag to this sad man. He was baffled and enraged by the so-called ‘eel prejudice’ exchange near the start of the book, to which every character refers back with enigmatic addenda:
‘And don’t come back until you’re prejudiced against eels.’
‘Eels, eh? In sunshine?’
‘Sunshine? Well, wherever you find them.’
‘In sunshine?’
‘All right.’
‘Chew them up?’
‘Eh?’
‘Chew them up?’
‘Okay, whatever you say—chew them up, chew ’em.’
‘Chew the eels?’
‘Okay.’
‘I will then—see you later.’
‘Yeah, take it easy.’
‘All I need to know is,’ Herzog emphasised, ‘does he think we’re fools with nothing important to do? The man says, “I am turning into a draped bundle of kelp—adore me.” Must we do so? Must we help this drawling layabout to pay off his gambling debts while he purportedly becomes a sea weed?’
Lint marvelled at the rage he could incite without effort. When Rouch tried to bring him and Herzog to amiability in the West End, Herzog referred to Lint as a ‘lugubrious obstacle’. Lint responded characteristically, as he recalled later: ‘Rather than be doomed and exhausted by my own explanations, I carved the shape of a bell into the chair.’ Herzog would thenceforth describe Lint as ‘sparking mad’ and, sustained by a war chest of unimaginative sarcasm, attack him at every opportunity.
As the cream horn of the high pulp crowd, Lint made himself a hostage to fortune by talking back to books, breaking into antique stores to carve spooky puppets from the priceless wares, wearing a stupid fur-lined jacket, and saying ‘Here come my unhappy countrymen’ whenever friends approached. Rouch urged him to simmer down, for the sake of the pulp community. This from a man who once pitched a novel with the words ‘Discreet knock at door, enter to discover the hero in diapers. Bingo.’
Lint often inveigled Rouch into his schemes. Ducking down an alley, they would dress up as ants and beat the hell out of anyone who approached. Lint later described it as a guerilla tactic to re-institute the lost significance of psychogeographical space. One such alley gave Lint an unusual insight, a superdeep template that reversed past the zero inch marker into negative. The neon vision ended up in a story called ‘
The Undismantled Fella’. Following the theory that everything in the world was made of information, the hero looks into walls but is surprised to find that the information therein is nothing to do with being a wall (‘the atomic stuff therein didn’t know it was a wall’). Some is about infinitely slow friction, much is impossible to categorize and the rest is incomprehensible. He winds up in cranky corners, assailed by frazzling dimensional site lines which carve past his eyes with the smell of scorched air.
Before Nose Furnace appeared in the States, a Lint story collection, Cheerful When Blamed, had appeared with Rich and Cowan in Britain. They would take a second collection, Mask of Disapproval, around the time Lint parted company with Terrible in 1960. But a few copies of Cheerful made their way unheralded to the States and Herzog felt all the more bitter and threatened by Lint’s apparently easy and prolific output. Lint himself had forgotten about Cheerful and later claimed never to have seen the article condemning it in the Boston Globe.
Cheerful When Blamed contained a pretty good selection of Lint’s fifties-era stories, many having first appeared in Baffling, Terrible, Stupid and Just Plain Awful up to 1956. Among them were ‘Badge of Honor’, describing those imprisoned for killing mimes, ‘Microdestiny’, in which everyone must wear ‘corpuscle identity skirts’ or be shot at a checkpoint, ‘The Tenth Defacement’, which features rounded crab-like creatures which are basically sprung human kneecaps escaping to their independence, and Lint’s attempt at an Asimovian short story, ‘The Robot Who Couldn’t Be Bothered’. Most of the stories were gimmicky and this helped Herzog consolidate his criticism of Lint in the broadsheets. But though he may have pushed his luck with ‘The Rustic Intensity of Benny’s Truss’, Lint touched a nerve with his take on religion, ‘I’m Not Listening’. Lint would often point out the discomfort natural selection provides for the well-intentioned, while providing pleasure for the deadly and the low. ‘Euphoric corpses allow for no prophet,’ he mused in his notes. ‘Birds despise laws that profit by their absence.’ In the story, God shows up at the expected moment of an eclipse and chirps, ‘I cancelled the planetary conjunction—it’s too, too tedious.’
Cameo Herzog, who held the opinion that ‘hens fail to speak because the New Testament says so’, was incensed at the story and most of his Globe article was taken up with an attack on it and its author, a slobbering maniac who had famously ‘married his own hair’. He commented that Lint’s philosophy was ‘a lacy circuit of which the genius of total enigma can make anything. It is a mere percolator twist in the common knowledge.’ This work, he said, was the product of a botched mind. ‘The childishness of such remarks as this: “When sin made its way even into Eden, it’s no wonder certain realities had to be acknowledged.”!’ Herzog reserved special ire for the portrayal of a priest who would point at things with his elbows just to be special. ‘So cruel to eliminate my afternoon with this gibberish, when I was quite prepared to take it seriously. Lint’s madness is beyond dispute.’
Though Herzog’s own works were brazenly recycled bullshit, Lint never bothered attacking them. The one time Lint attempted a review piece, it was an account of the new Egyptian display at the Milwaukee Museum in 1960. ‘Every single exhibit was epically pointless,’ he wrote. ‘The flat tones of old mummy-britches made me moan to my lover, “Kill me darling, so I can die by something lusty rather than fading like Edwardian curtains. I am in hell!” At that point even the mummy’s curse would have struck me as a blessing. We were loudly discovered behind an old jar, grabbing at each other in an effort to stay awake.’
The lover he was grabbing behind the jar was Madeline Botis. In 1960 Lint woke up in Berkeley and decided to live there—he could see a palm tree and a funny dog from where he lay. Visiting the Caper Club, he saw Botis performing ‘Newspaper Does Not Absorb Blood’ and fell for her immediately, suggesting to her that they get married in front of god and everyone. He had to be wrestled from the stage so that she could finish the agonised recital.
A week later Alan Rouch got a letter from Lint saying he should come over: ‘away from Herzog and his graph paper barricades. Everything is plentiful here. Blue skies, bloodshot eyes, and tremendous scope for skylarking. Outrun a carrot, falter, find yourself steadied by it in a sportsmanlike way. Become only briefly ashamed. The lesson is a longterm one. Be brave.’
9
TURN ME INTO A PARROT
Sigil train · alien designs · quantum punchline · craw wafers · bug hunt · first lines · ‘we are imperiled’ · tough
In Berkeley, Lint tried to blend strict writing discipline with the new demands of married life. His afternoon schedule was interrupted only by his ‘time of worship’, which was in fact the hour during which he knelt with his face buried between Madeline’s legs. ‘As far as I’m concerned her eyelids wrap fruit,’ he wrote to Marshall Hurk, ‘(a good thing).’
This routine produced the last big burst of Lint stories before his move into full-time book writing. In ‘The Pernoctalian’, Sam Kallat lays out a model train track that coincidentally forms a demonic invocation symbol when activated. The satanic fiend that appears is scruffy, patriotic and anxious, and appears to be based on Richard Nixon. It seems to believe its purpose is to pump gasoline, and asks Kallat if he needs diesel. In ‘The Neck Century’ human forces cancer across the galaxy, boring everyone they meet. The aliens they encounter always find a way to excuse themselves, claiming a death in the family or ‘matters at present beyond your comprehension’, and then hide at home until humanity has moved on. Sci-fi fans at the time complained at the forms taken by Lint’s aliens, as he rarely went for the apple-green-headed Martian type. In regard to the preoccupied invaders of ‘Wellmade and Unseen Save by Angels’, Lint commented in Bloody Fantastic Idea: ‘Imagination wholly determined the creatures that issued from the nebulae, so I thought I’d make them huge boiled-candy prairie dogs. We first see them in a solemn glowing department store. They don’t give a damn about the pants. Right off, I liked them.’ More prairie-dogs showed up in ‘Whiskers are Never Colossal’. At this time Lint went through a phase of describing everything as ‘colossal’, mangling perfectly good stories with this perversion. For instance, ‘The Colossal Bastard’ (published in Why?) is about the moment that God creates humanity. ‘I’ll just fill it with blood and push it out there,’ he decides, then returns to telling a long, involved joke to Satan. The joke is so complicated that it has several interlocking punchlines, resembling overall a bit of Escher architecture. The first man, dimly overhearing part of this quantum punchline as he is discarded into the world, spends the rest of his life trying to reconstruct it, and thus a dozen political and religious systems are set into motion. ‘An Ominous Mirth’ begins with city officials expressing indignation at an elated wretch and his ‘untoward glow’. Imprisoning the man, they find the city transformed into a cold white rose garden dotted with heavy gold infants. ‘I think we can dispense with counterrevolution, don’t you?’ smirks the derelict. In ‘Tesseract’ the world awakes to find that a titanic hooked bauble hangs from the sky. A soldier volunteers to get his lip caught on the thing, and gets dragged into a hyperdimensional fluorescence of clarity and cures. But these do not translate back to his own world—when he returns, he finds himself holding a dense stone and talking gibberish. In ‘Can We Please Move On?’, human expressions finally turn around and refuse to cooperate with people’s stupid reactions.
Alan Rouch meanwhile, living in a treehouse in Lint’s yard, invented the appalling ‘craw wafers’, crackers made from flaked lobster shell. He had become disenchanted with the pulp world and when he declared that ‘The only new tale is a leopard in love with baloney’, Lint wrote the story ‘Baloney Leopard’, in which a colossal leopard attacks a bunch of Mars colonists and, alarmingly, will not be bought off with offers of baloney.
‘Brokenhearted or pigheaded?’ the colonists ask. ‘You can’t be both.’
‘Oh yeah?’ the leopard roars. ‘Watch me.’
Though trash by anybo
dy’s standards, the story proved to be the first of a loose series including ‘Consolation Hedgehog’ and ‘The Jarkman’, collected in the slender volume I Eat Fog (Furtive Labors, 1962), Lint’s belated fulfilment of his Rodence contract.
‘We go look at the ocean,’ Lint wrote to Hemingway, who was on his last legs in Idaho and was still baffled as to who Lint was. ‘Surfers stick to its surface like black insects,’ said Lint. And this set off an image of upper dimensional beings stuck to our dimensional surface and spinning a hyperthick snare which manifests as a 3D arachnid form. Lint’s novel Turn Me Into a Parrot is basically a domestic bug-hunt made apocalyptic with meaning. Readers would later recite the unnecessarily precise exchange in which Bobbi Watts warns Lucius Arlen of a spider in the house:
‘The little spirit is nocturnal, will invade the bathroom. The uncertainty is bothering you.’
‘It was imposed by you.’
‘I executed the feeling.’
‘That’s what I mean. What’s the score with you, man?’
‘Well I found out that people are doing their own feelings all the time and this is my answer.’
‘Making people jittery and nervous.’
‘Everything in its place.’
When a horrible larva is found in the cupboard, it seems the upper spider’s snare has indeed caught something—a meaning as baffling as those in ‘Tesseract’. Arlen roasts the semi-transparent treasure for Sunday lunch and the meal is convivial. The central portion of the book consists of Watts having sex with a kind of customised cabinet containing many drawers and compartments. It becomes clear that this was the skeletal extrusion of a multidimensional chigger. Arlen becomes tired at these constant inconveniences and lodges a formal complaint to the upper bandwidths. The complaint is given a cursory reply. ‘The corner spindle of a spider, so what?’