Toby Olson | Walking, A Love Story

the long walk to the lover’s bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Toby Olson Walking, A Love Story (Seattle: Occidental Square Books, 2020)

 

For over five decades now Toby Olson has been writing fictions that superficially appear to use basically realistic plots and a delight in a Dickensian-like world of coincidence. His newest work, Walking, a love story published this year, contains both of these elements.

 

     On the other hand, there is always something surprising about an Olson work, something that cracks open that seemingly mimetic shell, pushing his works into the 20th and 21st century. One of his earliest fictions, for example, The Life of Jesus, published in 1976 (originally by New Directions and reprinted by my own Green Integer) is, through a childhood imagination of Christian iconography, basically a surreal-like work seen through the lens of American realism.

     In Dorit in Lesbos, Olson takes us on a magical travel voyage to the Greek islands which, in its whirl of inter-relationships and evil doings transforms it from a realist work to a kind of whirlwind fantasy. Write Letter to Billy (Coffee House Press, 2000) is so intertwined with familiar relationships and with a past murder-mystery that the book, in its concerns with the psychological interstices of family life and its presentation of its hero as a kind of murder detective, pulls it out of what we basically think of as realism into more contemporary pop-fiction genres.

      Often in Olson’s fictions, sexuality is twerked or even hidden in a way that few 19th century fictions dared to explore. In The Bitter Half (University of Alabama Press/FC2, 2006) the hero is a cross-dressing prison inspector, who first sleeps with a young, escaped prisoner while perceived as a male, and later invites him into her commune-like society as her heterosexual lover.

      So too is this strange alteration of dark and sunny sexuality at the center of Olson’s newest work, Walking. The endless “walker” in this case, named, at least temporarily Aphrodite, is also the storyteller, slowly revealing the horrific sexual acts of her own father, who as a dollmaker used his creations to stimulate sexual arousal while in the real world torturing and murdering unknown women whom he accidently encounters.

      Her own story is a complex one, with a childhood of being horrified by the intense looks into which her father embraced her, his later supposed suicide, and his reappearance as a strange visitor named Hephaestus (the Greek god of fire, metalworking, stone masonry, and sculpture—an ugly man whom, for that that very reason, was married by Zeus to Aphrodite). Such a marriage is certainly what this father might wish as a consummation of his desires, a sexual encounter with his own daughter.

     Yet, in Olson’s retelling of the Aphrodite myths, his always walking hero also tells the story of and controls the actions of all the fiction’s other characters, most of whom end up in a Day of the Dead celebration at the Sea Burst hotel (clearly a reference to Aphrodite’s own birth) iu an unnamed beach town that has assimilated a population of Chicanos. Like Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds and Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew (both of which works Olson refers to in his brief afterword, the characters she creates also quickly get out of hand, developing their own plots and incorporating new characters which she has utterly no desire to deal with.

      Since the characters of this tale apparently are all creations of Aphrodite’s imagination, they all magically link up in other ways as well. Ned, a New York artist, like Aphrodite’s father, uses mannequins and dolls in his art installations, reminding us subliminally of the art of Hans Bellmer, whose mannequin-limbed dolls also bring together a sense of fascination and repulsion.

      The local doctor, Ram Chopra, on hand for holiday accidents, has lost his wife in a never solved murder, which for years he was accused of committing. But in the course of the fiction we discover, along with Chopra, that the true murderer was actually Aphrodite’s father, now self-named Hephaestus.

      Oddly enough, there is another woman staying at the Sea Burst, Lisa James, Ned’s sister, whose husband was also killed, and who went to trial for his accidental murder. The two quickly fall in love, almost at the same lightning speed that the former heterosexual Ned falls in love with the Sea Burst’s piano player, who we have formerly seen in Philadelphia, Bo Bogardus.

     Meanwhile, Ned and Lisa’s mother Edna Hobby is charmed by the precocious young son, Charly, of the local veterinarian. The young Sherlock, also attempting to learn magic tricks, entertains Edna for an entire afternoon, which washes over her as a kind of redemptive force, given that the man she was to have married returned to his former wife just before the wedding. Later, the hotel manager, Angelo Camp falls in love with Edna.

     In the interim, however, lured to a small stone castle by the evil Hephaestus, Lisa goes missing. All are worried about her, but it takes her new lover, Ram, to discover that she is now hidden away in the Rapunzel-like edifice wherein Hephaestus has locked her up in order to torture her before he murders.

     With some difficulty, Ram breaks open the door, saves his new lover and almost joyfully and calmly strangles the murderer of his own wife, burying the body in the sand several feet away from the stone formation. The strange detective pair of Charly and Edna uncover the body the next morning and even peruse the nearby castle, Edna recognizing that her daughter has been there given the evidence of a Djarums cigarette butt, the brand Lisa smokes.

     They report their discovery to the police, who later arrive at the Sea Burst to question them; but they reveal so little that Ram and Lisa are never connected to the stranger’s death.

     Other relationships develop among the leftovers of the holiday, and even Aphrodite transforms herself into Sara Brown to enter a budding relationship with Ernesto, Charly’s father the veterinarian,.

     By the end of this work, we almost want to sing out The Beatles “All You Need Is Love” or, at least, Wilco’s “Love Is Everywhere”—but  as the goddess of love has already warned us, “Beware, so too is hate and mayhem hiding in the shadows. You have to carefully work to find love or have it blessed upon you by a force like Aphrodite, and even then it often needs the fanning of Eros’ flames.

     And, in that sense, Olson’s newest fiction might be described as a kind of love sonnet of redemption for all of those who have lost love and felt they might never discover it again.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2020

 

 

 

Toby Olson | Tampico

talking to the dead

by Douglas Messerli

 

Toby Olson Tampico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008)

 

Toby Olson’s tenth work of fiction, Tampico, is made up of not only a series of stories about the past and death, but is told by dying men, John, Gino, Larry, and Frank, who live at “the Manor,” a decaying hospital where these former veterans have been stashed until their deaths. As the soil beneath a nearby lighthouse and the manor nurse Kelly’s home gradually crumbles and slips toward the sea, the question one might ask is whether or not these men will outlast their temporary haven or the house fall in upon their heads. There are plans afoot to close the manor down, which might leave these old and sick men with nowhere else to go.

 

     As these figures offer up their pasts to one another, they become a closely knit community, reliving each other’s lives even as their own lives slip away.

      The most romantic and dashing of their tales is the one told by John of his youth in Mexico, where, as a pilot flying supplies for an oil company in and out of Tampico, near the Gulf of Mexico, he meets the revolutionary General Corzo and his cohorts, Calaca and others, and where he falls in love with a powerful native woman, Chepa, who takes him into her isolated home as her lover. John’s tale has a near swash-buckling quality as he recounts Chepa’s dogs, died blue, yellow, and red, and various adventures, including a meeting with the General—with whom the oil company representative attempts to negotiate an important deal—interrupted by a violent storm which ends in a ship of men and women, all dressed as figures celebrating the Mexican Day of the Dead, nearly drowned as the ship flounders and begins to sink near shore.

     Yet all of their stories, in one way or another, are exciting adventures involving sex, struggle, and possible death.

     Frank tells the story of his mother, a God-fearing farm wife, who when her husband travels to move his farm equipment to another part of the state, has sex in the chicken coop with a young hired hand—an event which Frank, a young boy at the time, accidentally witnesses:

 

                 They were on the floor together, off in a corner on blankets, and the

                 the chickens were watching them. I had the door half open, and I must

                 have heard something, her voice possibly, or seen the chicken light at

                 the end of its cord where she held it, wavering. I stopped there, just 

                 inches before the door’s squeak, and heard the muffled grind of grain 

                 under the blanket where his heels shuffled and a tapping that was the 

                 long electrical cord striking the floor as she bucked over him, riding him, 

                 facing me, but not seeing me.

 

The event results in the mother’s hate of her son, and three days later, at the age of 34, she falls to the floor at the kitchen sink, dying of a heart attack.

      Peter, younger than other men, tells his story beginning with the day he learned he was HIV positive. A heterosexual, who has evidently contracted the disease from a woman he is met, Peter has recently retired as a policeman and is beginning a new career as a detective. One of his first jobs involves a mysterious man, Gordon Strickland, who asks him to join him on a trip to bring documents to a dealer in Boston, but a second job temporarily intrudes as a young woman calls him, clandestinely meeting with him as she seeks his help to escape her violent husband and their house. The two jobs become intertwined when he meets Strickland’s assistant, Carlos, who, eventually moving in with him, helps him fend off an attack from the husband of the woman he has helped.

     Larry, a gay man also dying of AIDS, tells of his work one summer on a farm in Utah, where a nun, the daughter of the farmer, also lived. One day while working, another young man, Matthew, a beautiful boy, “lean and articulate in his bony structure, smooth-chested, a mop of blond curls like a city flapper,” suddenly falls into a hole, trapped by a stump and the exposed root system. Together Larry and the nun struggle to save him, first as the nun tries to dig him free with the tractor; later, as they struggle to save him from strangulation, undressing him and rubbing him with grease to help him get free. 

      Gino, the oldest of the group, tells perhaps the most horrifying tale of all. Years before, at eighty-two years of age and living in an isolated farm-house, Gino is visited by his estranged daughter and two male friends, demanding money. When he refuses her, she and her friends surround the house, boarding it up from the outside and setting it on fire. Gino is saved only through his clever tactic of immersing himself in a bath filled with water as it falls from the second floor as the house begins its collapse:

 

            I turned back then and the house was gone, no longer obscuring sight of the

            rise above it, and I saw the oak tree shimmering above the ruins in the last

            thin clouds of rising smoke. And before I saw down on the ground, then lay

            down, I think I heard the sound of sirens in the distance, though it could have

            been my own voice, searching for this place of dead ambition that has been 

            within me since.

 

   In short, each of these men recounts stories and stories within stories of love and hate woven through with what we all must ultimately face, death itself.

    Rather than leaving his dead men to die, however, Olson gathers these storytellers (John, Frank, Larry, and Gino) for one final exciting voyage to Tampico, where John will attempt to reclaim the house that Chepa left him decades before.

     As anyone who has read a novel by Olson knows, however, there are bound to be numerous Dickensian-like coincidences and intertwined relationships before the story comes to end. And Tampico does not disappoint.

     We have already discovered that the nurse, Kelly—whose sex throughout the book is never revealed—has traveled to Tampico with his/her mother years ago after the death of the father. There an aunt tells them that their father had another name as well, Calaca, whom John has described in his story as one of General Corzo’s soldiers.

     Meanwhile Carlos, the man whom Peter has befriended years earlier, finds in Stickland’s secret cupboard papers which will Chepa’s Tampico house to him. Arriving in Tampico to claim his bequest, he encounters the other men—whose voices he suddenly recognizes, having heard them during their discussions at the manor as he lay in a delirium in another Manor House room. They gather, all of them, at the house, until the next morning an Indian guide, Alma, arrives, offering to take them on a final last voyage—inland over a few days’ rough terrain. When they finally reach their destination, they discover an Indian Shangri-La, a utopian world ruled by Chepa, where Carlos suddenly meets up with his father, Manuel and wife, Ramona, who, it turns out, is Gino’s daughter. Soon after, we discern that Carlos is John’s grandson!

      Returning home, the men create, evidently through oil profits, their own utopian hospital, buying up the old Manor, and transforming it into well-lighted rooms, replete with canopy covered beds and warm spaces that bring the patients into easy contact. This incredible story—the only way to describe Olson’s magical tales of enormous interconnectedness—ends with a champagne celebration on the Manor’s lawn, the Indian guide Alma snapping a photograph of these living-dead men (an image Olson compares to the art of José Guadalupe Posada) embracing Chepa’s yellow Chihuahua:

 

                 They moved in their bodies for a moment, adjusting their bones under

                 their skins. Then they stood perfectly still in the picture that was the

                 picture before it was taken. …A dull thud of explosive then a brief

                 white light, and for a moment all their faces were illuminated skulls,

                 empty in dark sockets, but their teeth in those perpetual and wise grins.

 

The seemingly unrelated tales they have been telling have suddenly become an interwoven story of their loves and life. The past, through death, has finally been married to the present.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2008

Revised, Los Angeles, April 2, 2008

Toby Olson | Write Letter to Billy

possibilities of coincidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Toby Olson Write Letter to Billy (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2000)

Years ago—as a university colleague and a regular dinner companion—I told Toby Olson that his fiction reminded me, in some ways, of the paintings of Frederick Edwin Church, one of the notable Hudson River School painters of the 19th century. As in Church’s landscapes, Olson’s fictions pictured everything with the utmost detail and, consequently, seemed to give all its subjects—animate and inanimate—equal importance; as in Church’s paintings, where each leaf and blade of grass is represented with as much attention as the largest objects of his canvases, so in Olson’s writing there is a strange lack of proportion. It’s an American concept, I argue; everything is as important as everything else; there is no sense of hierarchy, no difference nor differance.

      I don’t know if Olson remembers our conversation, but in his next novel, Dorit in Lesbos, he named his major character Jack Church, and the hero’s uncle, Edward Church, was a painter who painted with the same painstaking detail: “...I saw the subtle art, the supple roundness and the actuality of the flesh tones, even the blemishes, the realism of the nails, and the way fingers intertwined....” Indeed, in this novel the elder Church paints subtle emblems and signs into his work, layering the painting so that the objects reveal things hidden behind them. As in his previous novels (with the exception perhaps of his first, poetically-conceived fiction The Life of Jesus), Dorit was a highly detailed book. Nearly everything was in the minute details of the language.

     Write Letter to Billy is no exception. Following the familiar plot structure of most of Olson’s novels, this work begins with a call to the narrator informing him of a relation he knew little about–in this instance it is a daughter, of whose existence he has known nothing–which leads to a voyage through the familial past–in this case, with daughter in tow–that is both a mystery and an adventure that may redeem his future life. This basic Olsonic structure is an almost abstract pattern of movement that propels his fictions, and makes them the exciting mysteries which his admirers so enjoy. Fleshing out this basic structure, however, are all the details, thousands and thousands of details about everything from how to deep-sea dive to the minute aspects that he recalls of his mother’s face; from the detailed mechanical constructions of his now dead father, to childhood memories of, this time round, Los Angeles and its environs. Together the two, the familiar story pattern and uninflected detail of present and past, go hand in hand to create some of the finest writing of American realism today.

     But as readers of Olson’s novels know, there is another pattern engaged in nearly all of his works, a pattern revealed in the very title Dorit in Lesbos. As American as Olson’s writing is (so completely antithetical to the more European-inspired metaphysical mysteries of Paul Auster or Raymond Federman, for example) Olson’s work is also very Dickensian in the sense that, while on the surface everything is very orderly, visible, contained, explained, internally—internal both to characters and the story itself—all is coincidence: not “chance” as in Auster’s works, but the old fashioned, plot-driven contrivance of coincidence.

       Write Letter to Billy is almost a prose poem to the possibilities of coincidence. Led on by a list he finds in the boxes that remain of his dead father’s possessions, Billy and his teenage daughter Jen set out on their visit to Laguna Beach to explore a long ago mystery of the death of Susan Rennert. Along the way, Billy discovers that as a child, exploring the maze of interconnecting concrete tunnels meandering under the Los Angeles streets, he, oddly enough, had visited the dead girl’s home and kissed her in a nearby abandoned house. Later, he and his daughter discover photographs that link the dead woman to his parents and to his mother’s jewelry which Billy has subsequently passed on to the young Jen. It turns out that the girl he had kissed was the dead woman’s cousin, raised as a twin sister, and that the cousin–are you ready for this?–has been engaged in a long-time relationship with Billy’s twin brother, whose existence is a complete surprise to him. Nicholas Nickleby move over!

     For that is only the beginning. Estelle Rennert (who has murdered her mother—actually her aunt—and caused the death of her sister—actually her cousin, except that she and Susan unknowingly shared the same father) wants the necklace she has sold to Billy’s mother years before back; it’s worth a great deal of money. So while they hold Jen as ransom, Billy is sent from Catalina off to Laguna Beach to retrieve it. But his intentions are different; by putting his diving skills to work, he is determined to climb aboard the boat as it leaves Catalina harbor and surprise the villains (Estelle and Billy’s own twin brother). But a fall into a cliff-side cave, the rope dropping below him, ends all his good intentions. He is trapped in the cave. Attempting to escape through a small chimney-like structure at the cave’s back he discovers an old suitcase partially blocking the would-be exit. But this is not just any suitcase, but is his father’s, left nearby when the family had gone to this same spot years before, when the father, setting up a strange metal contraption emitting a high-pitched noise (beyond the range of human ears) had attracted all the buffalo into the nearby meadow and drawn the famous flying fish of Catalina’s waters up the cliff in masses! The suitcase contains a strange construction that enables Billy to fly, Daedalus-like, to the ship’s deck, knocking over his twin and, combined with the perfectly timed arrival of the police helicopter, sending Estelle over the edge—both psychologically and physically catapulting her into the ocean, like her sister before her, to drown.

     It’s a shame to have to reveal to readers this much of the plot, but it’s hard to explain the effect, let alone the intention of Olson’s novel without the evidence. For as my brief summary makes clear there is, as any detective worth his salt would perceive, something is wrong with this picture. On the one hand, Olson has loaded his fiction up with the slow accumulation of detail, detail that seems to give everything its equal existence and meaning, its crystalline and clear definition as a work of realist art. But then, out of the shadows, he has pulled something else, a kind of fantasy, an incredible story alike a child’s tale. Olson is no sloppy artisan. So, what to make of the two opposing elements so intricately woven together into this often brilliant friction?

     Those who have followed Olson from his earliest novels (Seaview, The Woman Who Escaped from Shame and Utah) to the most recent (Dorit in Lesbos and At Sea) will not be surprised at my descriptions of the elements of fantasy and coincidence in his detail-driven works. It is the sheer accumulation of the coincidence here—the absolute incredulity of the storyline—that makes this work different.

     Obviously, the story here–while often emotionally moving–is made, by its series of events, highly comic; and there is almost the feel about the work, in its focus upon an all-American, sensitive but near psychically dead, adult-adolescent hero, of the comic-book exploits of Captain Marvel or Superman. As the young girl’s mother asks near the end of the novel, “She’s made a fucking god of you. What did you do to her?”

     And that is precisely the question the novel asks, not of the young daughter, but, perhaps, of Billy himself. What has the world done to make him such a caricature of himself, or, rather, what has the past done to him? This novel is, indeed, a book of the past, a book that questions memory, a book that explores how each of us creates an imagined reality, particularly of our pasts, which ultimately determines our futures, our lives. How can we ever change if we can never quite know who we were, who we have become?

     Billy’s adopted parents–and don’t we all in some way, musn’t we all believe that our own parents are not our true heritage?–represent two compelling American types. His mother was an actress, an actress in the way Katherine Hepburn portrayed Mary Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a woman—as a family friend describes her—of “the teatah.” Moreover, like Mary Tyrone, his mother is a not-so-secret addict, not of morphine as in O’Neill, but of alcohol. Like many such a type, she is all sensitivity, all emotion, all self-consuming in her tireless activity of playing to the invisible audience she imagines surrounding her. Even motherhood is, for her, a kind of theatrical activity, a kind of burden bound with its own secrets (it is she who will not tell Billy of his twin brother) to entertain her life. Her all-adoring husband is a type himself: the inventor, a kind of garage-bound madman in the mold of Edison or Bell or the Wright brothers—except none of his inventions, save the flying Deadulus suit, ever functions. To her imaginary theatrical career, he plays the failed scientist: the Frankenstein always seeking a monster-son. Even his list of his detailed research into Susan Rennert’s death is a failure, is a compendium of wrong turns, misunderstood connections, uncompleted desires: “Write letter to Billy.”

     These figures, quite obviously, are two variations of the elements that compel American dreams: the contradictory and often opposing forces of the scientific and the creative, of the imaginative and the money-driven get-rich schemes of America past and present. One has accomplished only the slow accumulation of detail based upon the search for and evaluation of data; the other is all intuitive, dominated by irrational action and coincidence. These, of course, are the magnetic poles of American culture—and of Olson’s novel.

     In the end truth can be recognized only when both elements are given their due: Billy—and it is right of Olson to insist upon his remaining a Billy, a child-like adolescent, instead of a William—must combine his father’s attention to all the little pieces and parts with the absurd and always unbelievable elements of accident and coincidence to come to an understanding of the past. But, as Olson makes clear at the end of the book, this is not really Billy’s narrative, but is Jen’s, the daughter, told through his words. The reality, ultimately, is that of a young, maturing girl, and accordingly, it is a comic vision, an unrealistic one. Isn’t it always the way of youth, when it is healthy and blessed, that it sees the future full of magical, fantastic and heroically achieved deeds; that Icarus can fly with Daedalus again?

 

Los Angeles, 2000

Reprinted in My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009).

  

Toby Olson | The Bitter Half / 2006

the poetics of in and out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Toby Olson The Bitter Half (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press/FC2 [Fiction Collective 2], 2006)

Before memories of high school humor overwhelm any of my readers, let me assure them that, despite any associations evoked by this essay’s title, my subject, Toby Olson’s new novel, The Bitter Half, portrays no acts of sex. The sexual activities of which it hints take place off-stage in this dark comedy. The ins and outs of my title might be said to relate to everything except the act of sex. 

     The major character of this fiction, Chris Pollard (whose last name is defined through dictionary quotes in the frontispiece of the book) is a consultant in the field of prison escapes—a job which Pollard has invented at a time in the Great Depression when any job, let alone a newly created one, is as sparse as the vegetation around the Pearce, Arizona border prison where the fiction begins. Pollard has been asked out to evaluate the prison for flaws, particularly since its population of mostly Mexican men has escaped on a regular basis and, most importantly, because the prison now houses a young man, little more than a boy dubbed by authorities as “the kid,” who is a legend to inmates for his escapes from the most notorious of prisons. Pollard and the boy exchange only a few words, but within those moments an unspoken relationship between the two has been established.  Pollard has several suggestions for prison security, but recognizes that the job is primarily a “boondoggle,” a political formality to protect the authorities when “the kid” makes his move, which, the moment the inspector has completed the job, the boy does, escaping to a nearby Mexican border town where most of the previous prisoners have been hunted down and returned to incarceration.

    Pollard has gone there out of curiosity and desire for a drink; encountering the escaped prisoner, the elder listens to the story of the young man’s life into the early morning hours. The tale the boy tells is revealed gradually in bits and pieces throughout the fiction, but a quick summary may help to show why Pollard makes no attempt to contact authorities and even warns the kid that, if he truly intends to get away, he should move on. It is clear, however, that the boy wants to be recaptured, to bask in the prison guards’ and inmates’ wonderment at his accomplishments.

   The son of a drunken and abusive stepfather, his life has been changed in a series of horrible events: as the father drinks himself into a stupor, the boy’s baby sister begins playing with the father’s whip and tack; momentarily coming to, the father observes the child’s actions, and in his anger and confusion, picks up an iron as he moves toward the child, the object of his fury. The family’s beloved dog, Buck, leaps up, grabbing the baby in his mouth, rushing off into the woods with her, the kid following after; although he comes upon the dog and the child’s bloodied doll, his sister is nowhere to be found. Upon his return to the farm he discovers his mother murdered—evidently by the father—and, when a few weeks later the father is also found dead, the son presumes he has been killed by the dog, while the authorities immediately assume the kid has committed both acts, perhaps doing away with his baby sister as well. He is brought to “justice” and imprisoned. He escapes, but is jailed again and beaten. So the pattern begins.

   Pollard and the boy share a bed for the night, and in the morning, as Pollard begins the train journey back to Wisconsin, the prison inspector recalls their encounter, a description that serves as a haunting leit motif throughout the work:

 

“We fell asleep…, and I think I remember him turning, my own movement toward him until I had formed into a chair and he was sitting in it.”

 

    It is quite apparent that the two not only now share a budding romance, but that they are bound together by their respective roles in life—the young man playing the role of an escape artist—a man who has spent nearly his entire young life moving from a position of being outside to being inside—with Pollard, an authority on that transformation, moving perpetually between the two. Both are figures damned, it appears, to eternal transition, a circular movement between in and out. 

    Quite obviously, as any prescient reader may presume, the author also presents us with figures who, in their apparent homosexuality, are instinctual outsiders working and living within a world of brutal masculinity. And, in that sense, both are doomed to feel as if their real lives must be locked away as well.

 

     Olson, however, has never been a novelist of easy presumptions, and he soon demonstrates that Pollard is not what he appears to be, that in truth—and I reveal this information to those who have not yet read the book with the assurance that Olson’s fiction, unlike Neil Jordan’s 1992 movie The Crying Game, does not depend upon the viewer’s misperceptions—Pollard is not a man but a woman in man’s dress, a rather wealthy woman in fact, who has been forced into pretension in a world that would never allow her admittance to the position she enjoys were she to reveal her sex.

   Lest this same potential reader presume that Pollard is an unhappy lesbian, the “bitter half” tucked away in frontier isolation, let me also allay such fears. Although Chris Pollard is a self-sufficient woman who spends much of her time in a cabin in the woods enjoying fishing and other outdoor activities usually (alas) associated with male-only pleasures, she also oversees a beautifully joyful home where her cook-butler-advisor-friend Danker serves up delicious meals and wherein she entertains the locals from adjoining farms and the nearby town, including her best friend, a hilariously foul-mouthed entrepreneur who—dressed for the role—runs the Bo Peep candy shop. Despite the dark overtones of her avocation, it is clear that Chris and her friends are caring and loving individuals, who go out of their way to help the few of the poverty-stricken, homeless, and wandering hordes who make it that far north. Indeed, Olson almost overstates Pollard’s liberal-minded normalcy, presumably so that no one can possibly pity this figure.

    In his presentation we recognize, moreover, that Pollard is, in reality, a total insider, someone at ease in the world whose journeys into prisons are a trek to exotic locations outside of her everyday life and experiences. What may seem inside, accordingly, is suddenly reversed, and the very role prisons play, that of incarceration, is obliterated in her visitations.

    The author makes this absolutely clear in the wonderful chapters devoted to Pollard’s visit to “the house of brutality and suicide,” a southern prison where mostly black prisoners, shackled together for work in chain gangs, are routinely beaten and tortured. Pollard tours this prison, housed in what was a former viscount’s mansion, with its curator, Hans Bonnefoy, the grandson of the viscount, discovering in its twisting and turning confines half dead men, rotting in their bloody wounds. But the kid has escaped from this seemingly impenetrable fortress as well, and now others have followed his lead; it is Pollard’s purpose to discover how these escapes have been accomplished.

    In his novels, Olson’s characters have often bordered on being super-heroes (figures such as Jack Church in his Dorit in Lesbos and Billy in Write Letter to Billy immediately spring to mind), and here he reveals that Pollard is not only a clever analyst, but a master ninja who, donning black, invisibly joins the shadows as she stalks the prison cells to uncover the secret pattern of suicide and escape that pervades this bloody hall of horrors. She uncovers the method of escape, but in her newfound hatred of her role of would-be informer, comes to share the prisoners’ objective. She is only too ready to return to “normal” society and give up her job—in short, to escape.

    As Olson soon reveals, however, there is no true escape to be found. Discovering a lump in her breast, Chris is imprisoned again, this time in a hospital where the surgeons’ knives remove both her breasts and radiation leaves her head permanently hairless, transforming her physical appearance into a figure close to the one which she has previously imitated. With this transformation, once again, the boundaries of in and out—is she more like a man now in or out of costume?—are crossed.

    As in Olson’s other fictions, moreover, The Bitter Half is chock full of coincidence—and with an entire populace on the move, it is almost believable—culminating in the arrival on her farm of a young group of itinerants who propose being paid for performing circus tricks. Like a troupe of medieval performers out of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, they preview their somewhat amateurish acts. Having previously postponed her annual gathering due to her illness, she takes on these acrobats, juggler and loquacious impresario as the centerpiece for a planned costume party. I won’t describe the numerous machinations of plot that weave together Bonnefoy, the kid’s sister, and dog Buck, with various other characters into this celebratory event. I have long ago stopped scoffing at such chance encounters. Like Dickens, Olson takes up the various strands of his tale and places them within Pollard’s confident hands. When a neighboring landowner, who had once hoped to marry Chris, shows up to the party dressed in drag and gracefully dances the night away with Bonnefoy, we hardly bat an eye! For the figures of this novel, we now perceive, all shift in and out—of prison, society, sexuality, love, and reality.

    At fiction’s end, we await only the arrival of the kid, who—this time with Pollard’s unwitting help—has escaped once again. We can only hope that this is a final escape from the cold world in which he has so long been confined, that the kid will come home to sit in “the chair” Pollard’s body has promised him.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2006

Reprinted from The American Book Review, XXVIII, no. 2 (January-February 2007).

  

 

Marjorie Perloff |The Vienna Paradox

davy crockett's hat

by Douglas Messerli

 

 Marjorie Perloff The Vienna Paradox (New York: New Directions, 2004)

At dinner one night at Marjorie Perloff’s house—an event with just a handful of couples as opposed to her usually larger affairs—the conversation turned to the subject of what those around the table, all quite renowned in our fields, had done before embarking upon our current careers. I can’t recall large parts of this friendly dinner conversation—which I believe included the artists Susan Rankaitis and Robert Flick, Marjorie’s daughter Nancy, a curator at the Getty Museum, and her husband Rob, scholars Renée Riese and Judd Hubert, and Howard and me—but I do remember reminding Marjorie that she had once told me that early in her career she had been so desperate for a job that she had applied at small colleges such as Beaver College (now called Arcadia University). Knowing of Marjorie’s erudition, her brilliant writing and teaching abilities, and gift of language(s), the idea of her teaching in that self-advertised pastoral place of peace and quiet in the Philadelphia suburbs was unthinkable for everyone in the room.

 

    Marjorie laughed, admitting that as a young housewife she’d had numerous jobs, even producing German titles for American films. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to translate the humor of Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz’s The Long, Long Trailer into German. How do you say, as Lucy does, “turn left right here, which leads Desi to swerve right?” “I also worked on Davy Crockett,” Marjorie admitted, “I still have a coonskin cap!” We broke into delighted laughter, while she went to find it in a nearby closet.

     The very thought that this great woman of academic renown had once worked on the very movies that I had attended as a child with my entire family was a revelation. As a family unit we shared perhaps only four movies (the other two being White Christmas and The Ten Commandments), and the idea that Marjorie had in any way had been connected to the other two films seemed almost miraculous; I remember feeling at the time that it may have been the only thing in our backgrounds, outside of the classroom camaraderie of teacher and student, that connected us!

     Soon after, the conversation turned to Marjorie’s childhood. We all knew that she had been born in Austria, the daughter of highly educated parents, and that she had escaped with her family via train on the night of March 13, 1938, the day the Anschluss (Austria’s political annexation by Germany) took effect. “My parents simply could not believe that the Austrian government could possibly submit to the Germans,” she reported. When asked to describe that shattering event, Marjorie demurred. “I can hardly remember anything. I was just a child at the time. I can only recall my mother telling my brother and me to be very quiet.”

     The publication of her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, accordingly, was more than just an event of interest for those of us close to this remarkable woman; it seemed a sort of personal answer to our dinner time questions.

     That book’s reproduction of the first two chapters of her childhood travel journal, “Die Areise” (“The ‘A’ Journey”) poignantly reveal the mixed feelings of a six year-old girl experiencing the excitement of events, but perhaps not recognizing their intense danger and significance; she translates:

 

 

“On the Train”

 

“On the train, we went to sleep right away. But my cousins, as is typical of them, complained they didn’t sleep all night. In Innsbruck, we had to get up and go to the police station where they unpacked all our luggage and my poor Mommy had to repack everything. There was such a mob and we had to wait so long that Mommy said she would unpack a book and I sat down on our hatbox and read. When we finished, we went to the station restaurant where we had ham rolls that tasted very good. And as I was sitting in this restaurant, I didn’t yet have any idea that later in America I would write a book. Well, I hadn’t experienced much yet but, just wait, there will be more!”

 

     Perloff compares that charmingly innocent view of the family’s circumstance with a letter from her mother sent two days later to her sister in London, in which the family’s terror is quite clearly elucidated: the intense planning and packing up of family possessions, the sleepless night of March 12th, the “incessant shouts of ‘Sieg Heil!,” the sound of bombers flying overhead and vehicles rumbling through the streets, the hurried goodbyes, the tears. The same events of the young daughter’s travel journal are far more dramatically detailed in her mother’s recounting:

 

     So we finished packing and left in the evening: my father-in-law, Stella, Otto, Hedy and Greta, and Aunt Gerti. Those who didn’t have the same last name had to pretend not to know one another. This applied to the children as well: they were not allowed to speak and in fact didn’t speak. We traveled comfortably second-class as far as Innsbruck. The children slept. In Innsbruck, there was passport control: for Jews, the order was, “Get off the train with your luggage.” Aunt Gerti was allowed to continue. Evidently, they took her for Aryan although no one asked. We were taken by the S.A. to the police office, across from the railway station. There, we were held in a narrow corridor, heavily guarded. One after another, we were called into a room where our passports were examined, our money confiscated (since the rules had been changed overnight). They took 850 marks and the equivalent in schillings. We didn’t care the slightest. Our thought was only: will they let us travel further? Will we be arrested? Then all of our luggage was unpacked piece by piece. Finally, we were allowed to leave. …Back on the train, we passed one military convoy

after another going the other way. At 10 in the evening, we arrived [in Zürich]. …Here we are deciding what to do next.”

 

     This letter alone might have been a scenario for a film.

     But Perloff’s profound memoir is more than another story of escape from Nazi control. For Marjorie is less interested in how her family escaped, than she is in why they and others like them had waited for the very last moment to leave their beloved home; how their seeming assimilation as Jews into the anti-Semitic Austrian culture so completely misled these brilliant individuals; and, just as important, how these assimilated Austrians readily adapted themselves to their new American situations.

     Gabriele Mintz was born to Ilse Schüller Mintz and Maximilian Mintz in 1931. Her early childhood took place in the comfort of the Ninth District of Vienna near the University and Votifkirche (the neo-Gothic cathedral built in the mid-19th century on the sight of the attempted murder of the young kaiser Franz Joseph), the neighborhood she herself describes as “Austrian upper-middle-class.” Their apartment on Hörlgasse contained a high-ceilinged nursery painted white, heated by a large porcelain stove; a dining room and adjacent salon with floor-to-ceiling bookcases; and a maid.

      Gabriele’s father, Maximilian was a lawyer with a passion for poetry and art, which he shared with a circle of friends known as the Geistkreis, which included noted economists Friedrich Hayek (the group’s founder and a major influence on American Libertarianism), Gottfried von Haberler, Oscar Morgenstern, and Fritz Machlup, legal scholar Herbert Fürth (also a partner in Maximilian and his father’s law firm), art historians Otto Benesch and Johannes Wile, musicologist Emanuel Winernitz, political philosopher Erich Voegelin (with whom the father continued to correspond from 1938 to the late 1950s), the phenomenologists Felix Kaufmann (also a member of the famed “Vienna Circle”) and Alfred Schütz, the historian Friedrich Engel-Jansi, and the mathematician Karl Menger (former tutor to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg and, later, founder of the Austrian School of Economics). The group, in Perloff’s words, devoted “evenings to the theater, opera, concerts, and their own areas of reading.” But the group’s influence—with its interweaving memberships with other such Vienna groups: the earlier “Menger circle,” the first “Austrian school,” and the “Vienna Circle”—made it influential to 20th century thinking.

      It must have been difficult for Gabriele’s mother, Ilse, to accept the role of silent hostess, serving coffee and cake before discreetly leaving the room at the Geistkreis meetings in Hörlgasse 6. For she, like her husband, was a “proud intellectual,” with a doctorate—a degree also attained by her two sisters—in economics. Some of the reviews of Perloff’s memoir refer to her mother’s role in her later life in the United States as a “housewife.” But in fact, she took a second doctorate in economics at Columbia University, later combining teaching at Columbia with a position, alongside noted economists Martin Feldstein (later president of that organization and chief economic advisor to President Reagan) and Milton Friedman (winner of a Nobel Prize) at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A search of the NBR website still calls up several essays by Ilse Mintz on such subjects as “Determination in the Quality of Foreign Bonds,” “American Exports During Business Cycles, 1879-1958,” and “Cyclical Fluctuations in the Exports of the United States Since 1879.” I recall Marjorie’s humorous dismay in our early friendship in Washington, D.C., when, after discussing Pound, O’Hara, and David Antin, she observed, “Of course, my mother is distressed that I’m not reading Goethe.”

      The young Gabrielle’s grandfathers were even more illustrious figures in Viennese culture. Her maternal grandfather, Richard Schüller, born in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic, traveled to Vienna to study law with Karl Menger, later serving as the Austrian representative to the League of Nations. In the Austrian government, he served first in the Department of Commerce and later in the Foreign Office under chancellor Dollfuss (and the successor upon Dollfuss’s murder, Kurt Schuschnigg), a position from which he negotiated major trade agreements and foreign loans for the Austrian government (including a trade agreement with Mussolini). Schüller escaped Nazi-controlled Austria at the age of 68 by hiking through the Alpine pass into Italy. Her paternal grandfather, Alexander Mintz, was an eminent Justitzrat (King’s counsel) who, in his youth, was a member of the noted literary coterie meeting at the Café Griensteidl that included Arthur Schnitzer, Hermann Bahr, and Peter Altenberg.

      In short, one could not imagine a family more involved in Austrian cultural life. How could they be so oblivious to the problems—particularly after Dollfuss’s murder? Perloff analyzes the problem first within the perspective of her own family: Richard Schüller was asked by his government superiors to allow himself to be baptized (he refused “the honor”); his brothers Hugo and Ludwig became Lutherans, the latter committing suicide in 1931 upon the collapse of his bank; and a distant cousin, Robert, was a devoted Nazi who after the Anschluss was sent to his death in Auschwitz. Perloff then considers these issues in the context of accounts such as that of art historian Ernst Gombrich (colleague of Perloff’s uncle, Otto Kurz) of the physical assault against Jews in the university, long before the Anschluss, where it became increasingly common for Nazis to beat up Jewish students, sometimes defenestrating them so that upon the sidewalk they might be charged (if they survived) with disturbing the peace (an incident also described in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento story, “Julia”). How could they tolerate these assaults and still describe themselves as Austrians? she wonders, a question reverberating, quite obviously, back upon her own family’s acceptance of their disintegrating Viennese life.

     Ultimately, she suggests that they saw their assimilation through a cultural lens that did not include ethnic and racial concerns. Since they shared cultural interests such as their love of Goethe, Stefan George, and others, they perceived themselves as Austrians without realizing that for their countrymen in general they remained racially “outsiders.” Their allegiance to the Germanic tradition blinded them, in a crucial way, to the religious and ethnic differences embedded in German and Austrian thought.

      Gombrich’s statement that he doesn’t “believe that there is a separate Jewish cultural tradition” may signify his failure to comprehend the deeply ingrained ideas of his countrymen, but it simultaneously points to the reason why many Austrian Jews, including Perloff’s parents, were able to quickly readjust their lives to their new American experience, were able to reinvent themselves as émigrés. While recognizing and disdaining the anti-intellectualism of their new home, Perloff’s parents quickly adapted to their now “lower middle-class” situation. Her father abandoned law to become an accountant, and despite now having to cook all meals by herself in their one-bedroom apartment, Marjorie’s mother still found time (and energy) to return to university studies.

      Gabrielle, moreover, like young immigrants everywhere, adapted to her life at an even faster rate. Within a month of her arrival in a new country, she switches from German to English in mid-sentence of an autobiographical entry:

 

Abe rim September musten [sic] wir angemeldet werden. Ich und

eben der Hansi [the son of Professor Felix Kaufmann, of Geitskreis

fame, and his physician wife, Else] kamen erst in de erste A, mein

Bruder in die drite [sic] A und meine Cousinen in die vierte B.

But my Kronstein cousins went to another school. After three days

I and George [as Hansi is now called!] skipped to 2A.

 

She has not only skipped a whole grade in three days, but crossed the language barrier as well. When Gabriele graduated high school, she changed her name to Margie, and later Marjorie.

     Much of The Vienna Paradox recounts the education and transformation of its author from an Austrian-born child to a professor of contemporary poetry—answering some questions we had begun to ask at that dinner-time conversation years earlier. She recounts her education at P.S. 7 and at The Fieldston School—sponsored by the New York Ethical Society—as well as her later graduate education at Catholic University. She mentions also her early employment at the Bettmann Archive and her short-lived job as an M-G-M title writer, which included her work on The Long, Long Trailer and Kiss Me Kate. But Davy Crockett and his hat has disappeared from the narrative, replaced in her memoir by her recollection of composing rhymes for Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Song” of Rose Marie, a job which earned her a “trapper’s hat.” Was my memory wrong? Had my desire for connections been so strong that I had transformed Nelson Eddy into Davy Crockett? It hardly matters; as we know, memory is often unreliable, and the story was the same. Most likely Perloff’s research of the events of her life had revealed something different from what she herself had recalled that long-ago night.

     Over time perspective changes. As she relates of her 1955 return to Vienna, the city “looked like a set for The Third Man,” “I tried to find Hörlgasse 6…but something got mixed up and [we] took a photograph of the wrong house.” “From my vantage point in 1955, none of this seemed very real.” Perloff, accordingly, has little patience with those who perpetually tout the superiority of pre-war Viennese life over their new American lives in the present. The young Gabrielle clearly grew up more involved in American popular culture, perhaps, than her Iowa-bred student—and with the advantage of a cultural heritage that deepens and enlivens her observations on American literature and art. And in that sense Perloff is herself a “Vienna paradox.”