The story goes—speak of Burning Tree!—that the publisher’s bossman was playing golf with a legal iron, and while fairwaying (certainly not while on the green), he described the book to his eagle. You’ll land in a trap, the Kingpin was told. Since the Bigman’s loyalties to the party opposing Nixon were well known, the legal mashie warned that the Topper could be sued for malice as well as libel and invasion of privacy. The decision to publish was reversed as quietly as possible (don’t tell the author) so that the Head Honcho might receive, undisturbed, a freedom of the press award from New York City journalists.
The truth had to be wrung once more from the formerly enthusiastic editor, who then watered Coover well. Of course the book was not going to be published, because it was an immmoral work. With three m’s. That bad. Why? Look at it this way, came an answer: Suppose you had written the book about Eleanor Roosevelt instead of Richard Nixon. The editor, proud of his rationale—a triumphant non sequitur—was not amused by Bob’s offer to work Eleanor in.
Looking for a home, The Public Burning went on a long and unpleasant odyssey from one set of corporation lawyers to another—from Siren to Circe to Polyphemus—racking up refusals—five, ten, fifteen, more—there aren’t as many major publishers left as had the opportunity to say no in their lawyer’s Latin. Like a spill of oil, rumors of impeding suits began to pollute the book’s possibilities. Backstairs shenanigans increased. Everywhere, front stairs stood unused. Until finally a fine publisher bit. The phone rang. Bob picked up. Bob’s agent reported: It’s a done deal. Why was the author reluctant to pop a cork just yet?
The phone rang again—minutes later. Bob picked up, but his heart sank. Bob’s agent now said: It’s an undone deal. The publisher’s ear had been tickled by a spiteful tongue, on whose tip was another legal warning.
The tunnel of love is not yet just ahead. It is the Valley of Despond and Misery’s Mountains that loom. There was one editor left with any worth to turn to, and Coover explained to him the nature of the threats that had been made against the manuscript. The head of the publishing company, a neophyte as well as someone important’s nephew, was persuaded that the book would make only the right waves, and wash lots of ruck ashore. Contracts were finally drawn and actually signed. Who should be away on summer vacation during all of this progress but the firm’s chief lawyer? Who, of course, cried “ruination” when he got the news. However, there was that damnable pair of signatures. The contract had to be honored. A few changes, which the publisher had to insist on (to retain its honor), arrived in Coover’s mail: six to ten pages of them in uninviting single space, like an invasion of ants. The opening “request” was that all living persons be removed from the novel. Perhaps they might be ceremonially murdered in Times Square. But somehow on the q.t., so that no one would ever know they’d been there.
Push back the furniture now for acrimonious discussions. These delayed the book a year. By now, Bob had his own lawyer and the text was fought over like the fields around Verdun. One doesn’t have to be an author to imagine Coover’s state of mind by this time, for he could no longer trust the intention behind any suggestion. Meanwhile, publisher number one wanted its advance back. Coover’s present publisher—reluctant, angry, and frustrated—would not only not advance him the necessary money (spent in a distant decade) but threatened to pauperize him if the company were sued, so Coover had to borrow against his slim estate a sum sufficient for any of us to live a year on, a debt that took ten years to pay off.
Fearing an injunction, which would halt publication after production costs had been met, the firm announced The Public Burning’s August/September appearance, and then pushed it out of the house during May/June, where it sold well enough its first week to reach the New York Times best-seller list. That was not good, for it was felt that if this infamous book became widely read, legal action would be certain. The novel’s name was removed from the publisher’s catalog, no advertising was permitted, and copies were quietly withdrawn from the stores.
The book probably wouldn’t have been sued anyway, but—look around—what book? It was nowhere to be found.
This book has suffered a seemingly endless series of intolerable blows. Yet in hindsight … in hindsight what a convincing confirmation of one’s work, what joy to have unsettled the nerves, and exposed the craven hearts of so many immmoral minions, stalwarts of their glorious high-minded industry!
Now at last, The Public Burning will reemerge like the groundhog and see its shadow. And the reader will get to know the real Richard Nixon, and learn to understand Uncle Sam, who, even young, was “… lank as a leafless elm, already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics …” and he will discover just how the world works here, because The Public Burning is an account of what this country has become. It is a glorious, slam-bang, star-spangled fiction, and every awful word of it is true.
MORE DEATHS THAN ONE
Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not tell, but literally pieces together, the torn-apart body of a story: that of the multiple murder of a young, handsome, wealthy, womanizing Arab, Santiago Nasar, who lived in the town where Gabriel García Márquez grew up. The novel is not, however, the chronicle of a young and vain man’s death, for that event is fed to us in the bits it comes in. It is, instead, the chronicle of the author’s discovery of the true course of the story as well as, simultaneously, a rather gruesome catalog of the many deaths—in dream, in allegory, and by actual count—that Santiago Nasar is compelled to suffer. Had he had a cat’s lives, it would not have saved him.
It is his author who kills him first, foretelling his death in the first (and in that sense final) sentence of the novel: “On the day they were going to kill him …” We are reminded immediately of García Márquez’s habit of beginning his books in an arresting way, perhaps a by-product of his long journalistic practice. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad …” One Hundred Years of Solitude commences, and The Autumn of the Patriarch is no less redolent with death or its threats: “Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidental palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows …” Santiago Nasar’s death is first foretold in the way any fictional fact is, because the fact, of whatever kind, is already there in the ensuing pages, awaiting our arrival like a bus station.
Santiago Nasar also dies in his dreams—dreams that could have been seen to foretell it, had not his mother, an accomplished seer of such things, unaccountably missed “the ominous augury.” Before the day is out, his mother will murder him again. Unwittingly, and with the easy fatality we associate with Greek tragedy, Santiago dons a sacrificial suit of unstarched white linen, believing that he is putting it on to honor the visit of a bishop, just as he has celebrated the day before, along with the entire town, the wedding that will be his undoing. So attired, he stands before his mother with glass and aspirin and tells her the dreams she will misunderstand. Santiago Nasar is then symbolically slain and gutted by the cook when Nasar takes a cup of coffee in his mother’s kitchen and has another aspirin for his hangover. His father has mounted this woman, and she is remembering Santiago’s father as she disembowels two rabbits (foretelling his disembowelment) and feeds their guts, still steaming, to the dogs.
The cook’s daughter does not tell Santiago that she has heard a rumor that two men are looking to kill him, for he continually manhandles her, and she wishes him dead; the town, it seems, knows, too, and participates in the foretelling. Attempts to warn Santiago are halfhearted: People pretend that the threats are empty; that the twin brothers bent on his death are drunk, incapable, unwilling; that it is all a joke. But Orpheus has his enemies in every age. Dionysus was also torn to pieces once, Osiris as well. The women whose bodies Santiago Nasar has abused (the metaphor that follows him throughout, and that appears just following the title page, is that of the falcon or sparrow hawk) await their moment. They will use the du
plicities of the male code to entrap him. The girl whose wedding has just been celebrated goes to her bridegroom with a punctured maidenhead, and he sends her home in disgrace, where she is beaten until she confesses (although we don’t know what the real truth is) that Santiago Nasar was her “perpetrator.” And had not her twin brothers believed that the honor of their family required revenge, Nasar would not have been stabbed fatally, not once but seven times, at the front door of his house, a door his mother, believing him already inside, had barred.
The coroner is out of town, but the law requires an autopsy—the blood has begun to smell—so Santiago Nasar is butchered again, this time while dead. The intestines he held so tenderly in his hands as he walked almost primly around his house to find a back door he might enter in order to complete the symbolism of his life by dying in the kitchen he had his morning aspirin in—those insides of the self of which the phallus is only an outer tip—are tossed into a trash can; the dogs who wanted them, and would have enjoyed them, are now dead, too.
Santiago Nasar’s mother’s last sight of her son, which she says was of him standing in her bedroom doorway, water glass in hand and the first aspirin to his lips, is not, we learn, her last. Her final vision, which she had on the balcony of her bedroom, is of her son “face down in the dust, trying to rise up out of his own blood.”
One man is dead, and hundreds have murdered him. The consequences of the crime spread like a disease through the village. Or, rather, the crime is simply a late symptom of an illness that had already wasted everyone. Now houses will decay, too, in sympathy. Those people—lovers, enemies, friends, family—who were unable to act, now act with bitter, impulsive, self-punishing foolishness, becoming old maids and worn whores, alcoholics and stupid recruits, not quite indiscriminately. The inertias of custom, the cruelties of a decaying society, daily indignities, hourly poverties, animosities so ancient that they seem to have been put in our private parts during a prehistoric time, the sullen passivity of the powerless, the feckless behavior of the ignorant, the uselessness of beliefs, all these combine in this remarkable, graphic, and grisly fable to create a kind of slow and creeping fate—not glacial, for that would not do for these regions, but more, perhaps, like the almost imperceptible flow of molasses, sticky, insistent, sweet, and bearing everywhere it goes the sick, digested color of the bowel.
Gregory Rabassa has rendered García Márquez’s rapturous reportorial style in poignant, precise, and stabbing English. Chronicle of a Death Foretold, like Faulkner’s Sanctuary, is about the impotent revenges of the impotent; it is about misdirected rage; it is about the heart blowing to bits from the burden of its own beat; yet the author, Santiago Nasar’s first murderer, goes patiently about his business, too, putting the pieces back together, restoring, through his magnificent art, his own anger and compassion, this forlorn, primeval, little vegetation god, to a new and brilliant life.
OPEN ON THE SABBATH
1
The Franchiser
You do not write a foreword to the novel of a friend, and the man, among men, you admire and love most, with an easy conscience or a restful mind. To place any words ahead of a work like this is the act of an upstart, an interloper, an interventionist; so I shall say briefly what moves me most when Stanley Elkin’s prose becomes my consciousness, and simply hope that others will be drawn to it, and find, if not my pleasures, others equally important and enduring.
Stanley Elkin puts his imagination to work by placing it like a seed within the soil of some vocation. Vocation: That is no trade-school word for him. What is your name? Where are you from? What do you do? Among those who survey the habits of Americans, there are many who find these questions, which are likely to be among the first beckoning blanks we fill in on forms, and the first we put to strangers, indicative of our indifference to the essential self. Should men and women, after all, be defined in any important way by their work? The answer is, of course, yes; otherwise, the activities that largely support our lives and consume our time would be unfriendly, foreign, and irrelevant to us. Our occupation should not be something we visit like the seashore in summer or a prisoner in a prison, despite the fact that the work may be unpleasant and dangerous and hard, like that in a mill or a foundry or a mine. Even if it is like speaking a foreign language we haven’t mastered, that incapacity itself is totally defining.
In Boswell, Elkin’s first novel, the occupation was that of a celebrity seeker, but it may be a merchant’s, as it is in A Bad Man, or a bail bondsman’s, as it is in the brilliant novella of that name. Again, a gloomy grocer may be his concern, or a debt collector, the disc jockey of The Dick Gibson Show, or a franchiser like Ben Flesh—jobs that are often seedy or suspect in some way. Elkin does not wonder what it would be like if he were a professional bully, or an elderly ragman, though new to the nation, a peddler trundling a cart down the street and crying “Regs, all cloze.” He does not say, What if I were running my own radio show?—and then write. His fictions are not daydreams; there is no idleness in them, no reveries. They are not acts of ordinary empathy, either, in which the novelist listens in on some way of life and then plays what he hears on his Linotype. Instead, Elkin allows the activity itself to create his central characters, to find its being in some gainly or ungainly body, and then he encourages that body to verbalize a voice.
Voice: For Elkin, that’s no choirboy’s word. Just as in Beckett, the logos is life. There is not a line in The Franchiser that doesn’t issue from one. And what is this occupation it speaks for, but acts and their names, agents and their frailties, the textures of their environments? … things, words, sensations, signs—all one. And the mouth must work while reading him, must taste the intricate interlace of sound; wallow, as I now am, in the wine of the word. With the whole book to follow, one is still compelled to quote:
He loved the shop, the smells of the naphthas and benzenes, the ammonias, all the alkalis and fats, all the solvents and gritty lavas, the silken detergents and ultimate soaps, like the smells, he decided, of flesh itself, of release, the disparate chemistries of pore and sweat—a sweat shop—the strange woolly-smelling acids that collected in armpits and atmosphered pubic hair, the flameless combustion of urine and gabardine mixing together to create all the body’s petty suggestive alimentary toxins. The sexuality of it. The men’s garments one kind, the women’s another, confused, deflected, masked by residual powders, by the oily invisible resins of deodorant and perfume, by the concocted flower and the imagined fruit—by all fabricated flavor. And hanging in the air, too—where would they go?—dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays, divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.
“Irving, add water, we’ll make a man.”
And this is precisely how Elkin makes a man—out of the elements he lives in, the body he is confined to, the world he works in, the language he knows.
From time to time, the voice halts, fills its trunk, and sprays us with speech. How long has it been, how far back must we go, to encounter such speeches, such rich wild oratory? If I were to hazard a guess, I would say we should find it again in The Alchemist, in Volpone, in Every Man in His Humour, and if that seems an extreme claim, simply compare Jonson’s characteristic rodomontade (as wonderful as the word that is supposed to condemn it) with the piece you will shortly encounter, the speech that begins: “How crowded is the universe … How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap.” And goes on: “A button you could be, a pocket in pants, a figure on print.” And on: “I am talking of the long shot of existence, the odds no gambler in the world would take, that you would ever come to life as a person, a boy called Ben Flesh.” And on: “You weren’t aborted, you didn’t end up in a scum bag. You survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio, mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD. God bless you, boy, you’re a testament to the impossible!” And on, page after page: “Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regu
lations celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out—all the cousins in from the coast. Wiped out.” Until it ends:
So! Still! Against all the odds in the universe you made happy landings! What do you think? Ain’t that delightful? Wait, there’s more. You have not only your existence but your edge, your advantage and privilege. You do, Ben, you do. No? Everybody does. They give congressmen the frank. Golden-agers go cheap to the movies. You work on the railroads they give you a pass. You clerk in a store it’s the 20 percent discount. You’re a dentist your kid’s home free with the orthodontics. Benny, Benny, we got so much edge we could cut diamonds!
Central to the theme and movement of the book, this harangue is one of fiction’s finest moments.
A Temple of Texts: Essays Page 26