Stacey Levine | Mice 1961 / 2024

how to save characters from traditional fiction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stacey Levine Mice 1961 (Portland, Oregon: Verse Chorus Press, 2024)

 

Fiction writer Stacey Levine’s fifth major work of fiction is a superlative blend of genres recounting the experiences of two sisters, Jody Marrow and “Mice” Huberman—obviously the spawn of different fathers—who have been forced to live together after their mother Candy’s death in the working-class Miami neighborhood of Reef Way. Jody has a job which permits them to barely survive, but Mice, a girl with a mild case of albinism, seems incapable of doing any kind of activity except building miniature radios and out-racing the gangs of high-school girls and others who daily try to corner her, mock her, and threaten worse—both actually rather time-consuming activities.

    It is 1961, the time of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time of cold war hysteria. And some of the feelings generated by Mice’s appearance is a result of the feelings of “otherness” it arouses in the poorly-educated neighbors.

      One might describe the first fourth of this fiction, in fact, as a tale of outsiderness, a struggle for one young shy girl, who much like the tortured gay boys of later LGBTQ films, is simply attempting to go about her life while keeping the female and other neighborhood bullies away, and simultaneously quelling her beloved sister’s increasingly bourgeois demands that she take a job in the nearby bookmobile under the domain of a woman named Florence.

      Many of the early pages of the work, in fact, are devoted to the “irritation” that Mice’s presence causes the neighbors. As the narrator observes:

 

“As I pieced it together, few locals, in the weeks after the sisters arrived to the neighborhood, saw Mice. But after a time, neighbors slowly grew to know about the girl and immediately expressed irritation toward her. As Mice began to traverse the neighborhood during the evenings, neighbors blazed as if horrified to see her, overall full of objections to her tender, chapped looking hands and the outer ears so peel-thin, devoid of the rolled tops that characterize others’ ears. A number of neighbors chewed with enjoyment over the girl’s weird, abrupt, off-topic speech, too, confirming for each other that wariness, when it came to Mice, was the best approach. To pity the girl was also reasonable, they implied, in light of her hopeless appearance: the all-whiteness, clumsy, exploratory demeanor, and small blue eyes that twitched near-constantly.”

 

     In her all-white appearance, Mice attracts the fear and hostility of the world around her almost as if she stood in league with Herman Melville’s terrifying White Whale, or the horrifying hieroglyphs at the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym signifying the word “White.” In US literary culture, one must remember, an all-white world, representing “absence,” is far more horrific than a mixed and colorful society, which despite the values spouted by some dictatorial politicians throughout our history, is what US culture has been from the start.

     Other than her sister, Mice’s seemingly only friend is an older neighbor named Lance, who collects crystal radios and encourages her to build receivers so that she might hear the coded messages of Russian spies and the Americans who plan an invasion. Every day he pumps her for any information that she might have heard, interpreting even a woman mentioning numbers as a spy reading out coded signals.

     Soon after, Mice is trapped in a first floor window-well by mean school-girls who spend most the time talking drivel amongst themselves before every so often returning their attentions to their trapped “mouse.” But they, like everyone else in the neighborhood, soon depart, as they prepare for a big party at the local bakery, which nearly everyone but Lance plans to attend. Jody has insisted that Mice be there as well, mostly to talk to Florence about a possible job at the Bookmobile.

      The rest of Levine’s fiction shifts into a grand dialogue fiction, through which we not only get the opportunity to thoroughly come to know all the neighbor figures, but to hear their strange and often impenetrable palaver, filled with colloquialisms, clichés, and endless conversation stoppers as they spout and stammer their way through the long afternoon and evening with all the intelligence of normal American chit-chat. Anyone who loves the colloquial language of our country will adore their stream-of-unconscious blather that takes up topics ranging from cranberry salad to God.

      As critic Northrup Frye long again argued in his still revelatory critical study Anatomy of Criticism, the dialogue genre is closely related to the literary anatomy, the kind of fictional work that takes us, as in Petronius’ Satyricon, from the lowest of the social orders of a culture, in this case, perhaps represented by the local school janitor who men are sent to fetch and bring to the party, to the highest, in Levine’s community, represented, perhaps, by the Gruelins a wealthy brother and sister who have swooped down into the neighborhood from Paris and elsewhere presumably because their father hopes to set up a new “plant” in the neighborhood.

      When she discovers Mice has not come to the party, however, Jody almost ruins the first hours of the grand pot-luck as she hovers between self-pity and worry about her sister's whereabouts, until finally the narrative gets rid of her by shuffling her off to a bedroom upstairs and into the arms of the local detective, Denny, who has to come to report that he found their kitchen stove turned on, which might have caused a major fire or explosion, something clearly that Girtle, the girl’s servant-protector, seems almost to desire.

       Meanwhile downstairs Larry the beatnik attempts to play some serious jazz (Charles Mingus) against pleas from the others for music to which they can dance. Fruit salads fall from platters onto the concrete, and spaghetti goes flying. But the real fun of this melee exists in the endless flow of constantly interrupted conservations. One of the best, reminiscent of Gilbert Sorrentino’s great fiction Mulligan Stew occurs in a woman’s discussion with the local poet, which will have to serve of dozens of such delightful tidbits throughout Levine’s work:

 

“What are you doing dear?”

“Oh hello Gabby.” The Artist removed small eyeglasses. “I’m finishing a poem. Free-form.”

“Marvelous!”

“I’ll read it aloud tonight for the poetry circle.”

“What’s the title?” Mrs. Fox peered at the oversized page.

“Lilacs and Gym Shorts.”

“You’re terribly artistic.”

Eyebrows shifting with feeling, The Artist read the first line: “In that we are growing…” But Mrs. Fox had already left, sailing down the hallway with her pastry bags, past the counter and out the front door. I ran to the window, glimpsing in the passage seat a plump, motionless husband in shadow as the car spun away.”

 

     When Mice finally does arrive, Jody is nowhere to be found, and that oddity of Reef Way is suddenly taken up first by Eve Gruelin whose brother wants to hire Mice as basically a plaything for his sister. Soon after an utter stranger to the party, Kenny Anther, takes a real liking to Mice, trying to get her to dance with him. But even here, Mice’s endless questions begin to drive him off, and before the evening is over he leaves her since she seems intent on leaking his apparent secret, that he truly is a “government hireling,” a flyer come to Miami to possibly attack Cuba.

      By party’s end, as Anther attempts to quiet the usually silent Mice, she escapes into a cornfield, this time perhaps to never return to the sociable world in which she has discovered she will never be welcome, freed at last from all, including fictional, restraints.

       Stitching up all these various tableaux in the role as narrator has been Girtle, a kind of simulacrum of the author herself, who attempts to girdle up her central figures, keeping them out of harm’s way— particularly when it comes to the traditional narrative patterns in fiction featuring women. As Girtle explains, she also is an outsider, an escapee from Children’s Home, someone who recognizes that she has finally grown up into adulthood, however uncomfortable that role may be. In previous fictions, such as Frances Johnson, as well, Levine has clearly been terrified for the arrival of the “perfect man” to which the fiction usually marries off the heroine. In this fiction, Girtle describes such a man as “the helper,” the male who takes over the narrative as he leads away the heroine into the space outside the fiction.

      Throughout this work, where poor Girtle is forced to sleep on the floor and mostly hide-out from the other characters, the narrator fears the arrival of “the helper,” who would also, obviously, displace her, taking over her role as the reader’s imagination is called forth to finish the tale after the close of its last pages. In this book, Girtle is finally convinced that the “helper” is Kenny Anther, particularly since he appears to literally be courting the character nearly everyone else in the story evades, as I mentioned, with irritation and fear.

       But Levine’s final narrative proves even her (or at least Girtle’s) own fears wrong, as Anther suddenly takes a swerve to become the someone Lance had long been warning Mice to be on the lookout for. And in this case, instead of falling in love with the male and dancing away with him to some impossibly happy future, he drives the central character, Girtle’s special charge, off into her own kind of freedom, a world which also lies outside of the book.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2024

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (September 2024).

Marion Meade | Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney / 2010

imitating sirens

 

“He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.”

                                                      —Nathanael West, The Day of the Locusts

 

Marion Meade Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)

 

As biographer Marion Meade makes clear in this dual study of two individuals destined to die in each other's arms, there was perhaps no more unlikely couple on the earth. Eileen McKenney, the sister to Ruth McKenney whose series of New Yorker sketches My Sister Eileen had made her sister a household figure—and in the years after her death would become even more known through a long-running Broadway play, two movies, Leonard Bernstein's musical adaptation Wonderful Town and a television series—was, at least superficially, an innocent out of Ohio, brought up in Midwestern normality. The two sisters' plucky determination to "make it" in New York would become almost a template for hundreds of other such stories, films, and plays about Midwesterners and others trying to adapt to the big city.

     Nathan Weinstein, the young man who later transformed himself into the writer Nathanael West, was, on the other hand, born to some wealth in that city, the son of a builder of numerous Harlem and West Side high rise apartments still visible today. As a child, Nathanael was a shy boy, found most often hiding away to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other major novelists. But despite his bookish ways, he skipped years of school, dropping out before graduation. Although he hid out in the New York Public Library in order to read, he later harbored terrible grudges against the place and imagined how he might set that great institution on fire. Although it's clear from Meade's commentary that the boy was far from popular with his peers, and in later years, evidenced by several of his central characters (including the notorious Miss Lonleyhearts), was likely a highly conflicted gay man,* the young Nathanael frequented whore houses, developing an ongoing battle with gonorrhea.

     Indeed, it would be hard to find an individual of more contradictions than West. With ill-fitted body parts betrayed by "congenital hand tremors" which manifested itself in other physical problems—clumsiness, poor coordination, difficulties in using a knife and fork and dressing himself, and an abnormally slow gait—he loved the out-of-doors, taking up, later in his life, bird hunting (particularly doves). Despite his inability to graduate from high school, he illegally entered Tufts University, and when he was dismissed from there, took over another student's identity (in a situation much like today's cases of identity-theft) to attend Brown University, from which he managed to graduate. A dreamer and ne'er-do-well at heart, he nonetheless managed for many years two of the most prestigious of New York's residence hotels. Although his "spidery penmanship...lurched between script and print, the 'gaunt caps and lank descenders' wobbling downhill across the page," West was determined to take up writing, and produced four brilliantly bitter satires before his death in 1940. The shy boy later became close friends with a host of notables, including S. J. Perelman (who married his sister, Laura), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Bennett Cerf, William Faulkner, John Sanford, and Josephine Herbst. Although he made hardly any money from his books, he lived a pleasant life from screenwriting, seriously devoting himself to Republic Studio's grade-B movies, including It Could Happen to You, Born to Be Wild, Five Came Back, and Let's Make Music.

      On the distaff side, the two sisters, at least in their fictions, were well-adapted innocents trying to make a go in the city; but in real life Ruth attempted suicide several times and found living with her step-mother so impossible that she was sent away from home. Although Eileen was portrayed as a slightly empty-headed beauty who had her choice of hundreds of men, she was a good conversationalist with strong, political viewpoints, and sexually, she later discovered, frigid.

     In short, both of these remarkable figures were not at all what they seemed, each having a sort of inner force that, despite their complex problems, attracted people to them. As one of West's characters in his early fiction, The Secret Live of Balso Snell notes: "...I', fed up with poetry and art. Yet what can I do? I need women and because I can't buy or force them, I have to make poems for them.". No one could really imagine that the two might get on, but for a few months before their tragic deaths, they seemed to live a delirious fantasy that contradicted everything in West's art and life. In some senses both of them were "imitating sirens," Ilene pretending much of her life to be a great attraction for the male sex, through his writing, Nathanael shrieking out about the injustices of American life.

     Having now reread all of West's fictions in light of Meade's amiable, yet revealing biography, I think that one might see West as kin to another great American satirist, Flannery O'Connor. Despite West's secular personality, there is something in his surreal-like works that shares with O'Connor's apocryphal visions of life. Both grew up apart from the worlds in which they lived, both were "strange birds"—both were obsessed with birds, West to kill them, O’Connor to raise them— despite their ability to draw renowned friends. Both died at the height of their powers, after writing just four works. The characters in their oeuvres include a wide range of fanatics, preachers, unhappy and dangerous homosexuals, and just plain desperate people, none of whom are loveable, but who represent an impossible desire to discover love and meaning. That such things are unattainable for such outsiders is inevitable given these authors’ powerfully bleak visions.

     Well known as an outrageously poor driver, West took Eileen on a short hunting trip just before Christmas and on the 22nd of December crashed into a car near El Centro, California, killing them both along with Eileen's two-year-old daughter, sitting in the backseat. Four nights later, the play My Sister Eileen opened at New York City's Biltmore Theater, with Shirley Booth, Jo Ann Sayers, Richard Quine, and Morris Carnovsky; it would run for 864 performances. Although ignored in his lifetime, West's books, particularly Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locusts, would eventually be seen as American classics.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2010

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2010/2011).

 

*One of West's favorite childhood pastimes was to watch the gay couples having sex in Central Park's "Brambles," he and his friends leaping down with shrieks at the moment of orgasm.