Friday's Forgotten Book: HIGH HUNT by David Eddings

High Hunt was published in 1973, the year we pulled out of Viet Nam.  Lost the war, and finally admitted it.  We even ended the draft, though much too late for me.

Republicans were still in office that year.  Nixon would resign before the next year was out.  American jingoism dipped to a low ebb, and American male machismo looked for somewhere to else stand.

The movie adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance came out in 1972 and may have been an influence.  Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, was then working on The Hunting Hypothesis, which would be published about the same time as the 1976 Fawcett Crest paperback edition of High Hunt . 

 High Hunt was the author's first novel, in part a coming-of-age novel with a young man's issues written large.  I read High Hunt after it first came out and thought it grand; rereading it now, I see my younger self reading it too.

There are many similarities between High Hunt and Deliverance, though the latter is the much greater work of art, greater in theme, more poetic, and more tightly written.   Some passages of High Hunt now seem either hastily written or too long labored, darlings the author should have excised altogether.  But the parts I either missed or thought too boring to remember back then are more interesting now.

Indeed, there is much here to admire.  It deals with issues concerning the masculine ego, but it is a family saga too with much to say about fathers and sons and the nature of male camaraderie.  Michael Cimino's Viet Nam movie, The Deer Hunter, now makes an interesting companion piece.

David Eddings did not become a successful author until many years later.  His string of fantasy epics became best sellers and brought him some critical recognition too. 

We don't know what Dickey thought of High Hunt, if he read it, nor what David Eddings thought of The Deer Hunter.  I'm not suggesting undue influence connecting these works of art; they were signs of their times. 

But High Hunt has something that makes it stand apart from the other works mentioned here, and that's a hopeful ending.  The protagonist has come to see the ultimate emptiness of masculine rituals, and has asked his love to marry him.  The end of the novel seems to suggest that the search for true love is the highest hunt of all.

As sappy as that may sound, it works for me.

THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY by James Jones

May is a green month, the emerald month, the month of spring growth, the month of becoming.  James Jones' novel, The Merry Month of May, is a timepiece set in the calendar events of May, 1968, a time of youthful exuberance and social change, with the politics of sex and violence played out against the student revolt in Paris, France during that tumultuous year.

It is a complicated novel, a novel of spiritual evolution, filled to the brim with lush literary and philosophical nuances that you might not grasp at first reading, unless you have also read Steven R. Carter's excellent study, James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master.   I discussed this a couple of months ago in a blog on the trinity in literature.

Last week novelist Bill Crider selected James Jones' A Touch of Danger for his Forgotten Book Friday review (link).  A fine review, but you should know that it too is structured in accord with James Jones' spiritual ideas of the transcendent.  The protagonist, Lobo, is a lone wolf, an animal man who, at age fifty, is struggling with his long-denied connections to the rest of humanity.

In the scene where Lobo meets the murderer, it is wolf meeting wolf, despite the civilized trappings which disguise them.  The clues are in the wording of the descriptions.

The first edition of A Touch of Danger provided a detailed map of the island on the frontispiece.  The epigraph is a quote of Achilles from Homer's Iliad, wishing that gall would vanish from men's minds.  Which is to say, ego.

Jones explained his philosophy to Carter.  He saw the spiritual evolution of man as going from animal man to mental man to spiritual man, with a diminishing of ego at each stage.  You can also think of this trinity as id-dominated, ego-dominated, and spiritually-dominated.  Or, as I detailed in an earlier blog, in numerous other ways.  These things are universals and can be seen in all of the author's many books including his justly famous war trilogy, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle.

In his novels, Jones was more interested in the big issues, the human universals, than in the local politics of the day.  Frank McShane, in his excellent biography of Jones, says that he was rereading Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus during the writing of Whistle.  I suspect that Conrad's novel was also in part the inspiration for the narcissistic character of Samantha in The Merry Month of May.  It is clear that he was not a racist, yet he used her race as a symbol of the Other, as Conrad did originally.

I'd also like to recommend Kaylie Jones' Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir.  Long an accomplished author herself, in this book she discusses her memories of the literary figures which passed through her father's house.

Friday's Forgotten Book: KILL YOUR DARLINGS by Terence Blacker

Kill Your Darlings  by Terence Blacker, first American hardcover edition published by St. Martin's Press, New York, 2001.  It was published the previous year in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

I was reminded of this forgotten comic gem by Declan Burke's recent blog, at this link, discussing the flak over the tentative title of his next book, Kill Your Babies, which was suggested to him by Raymond Chandler's musing over comments originally made by William Faulkner.  Faulkner said that, as a writer, you must sometimes "kill your darlings," your favorite bits of prose, when editing your own work.

A number of other writers have subsequently picked that up as a title, including Max Allan Collins in his 1984 bibliomystery about a lost Hammett novel.  The title in Terence Blacker's noir thriller carries a double meaning and jells well with the irony within.  He doesn't use it as an epigraph, but he uses it well in the concluding chapter.

His novel has no epigraph, in fact, but there are numerous quotes throughout the text which might serve, including these from page 16:

"The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art." --Bernard Shaw.

"Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise.  There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato or a Mme Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon.  Perhaps Louis Althusser was enacting a necessary axiom or lyrical proof, when on the morning of November 16, 1980, he throttled his wife." --George Steiner

"I believe that all those painters and writers who leave their wives have an idea at the back of their minds that their painting or writing will be the better for it, whereas they only go from bad to worse." --Patrick White

These quotes serve as foreshadowing, forearming the reader for the comic noir that lies ahead.  And Blacker's humor gets blacker as he goes along.  In places the novel made me think of the dark parts of John Cheever's Falconer.  That dark.  But unlike Cheever's novel, there is comedy here as well.

The protagonist is a fine writer whose talents are unappreciated while the inferior work of others gets rewarded every day.  He devises a scheme to achieve recognition, but as with any Faustian pact in which the ends justify the ethical hedging of means, things wryly go awry.

And the writing is superb, loaded with insights and humorous asides and gossip about authors.  In my opinion, this forgotten novel ranks up there with James Hynes's The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel and Francine Prose's Blue Angel: A Novel and so many others that now spring to mind.  Academic noir ought to be recognized as a separate genre.  Down these dark halls of academia a writer must go who is himself not mean.

Terence Blacker has his own wikipedia page, at this link, and it lists this novel but doesn't say anything about it.  I have not yet read any of his other books, but it's about time I did.
________
Forgotten Book Friday is a national holiday, or should be, observed by the collected authors and bloggers on their own blogs, organized by author Patti Abbot, at this link, and many other little known gems are to be found by backtracking the friday links.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Jonathan Lethem's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s.

My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone.

(If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I’d have to be Mumbles.)

In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they’re smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle.

Only—here’s the rub—when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks in the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear.

That’s when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It’s an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah’s flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
_______


No Jonathan Lethem book is yet forgotten.  His books have earned him an ardent cult of fans, and indeed many mainstream readers consider him a cult novelist.  But Motherless Brooklyn, his murder mystery from which the opening appears above, is one that deserves a much wider appreciation.

It was first published in October, 1999, and the blurbs on the back call him promising,  "one of the most original voices among younger American novelists."  The black-and-white dustjacket, credited to Amy C. King, shows the blurry figure of a man walking down the road, the words MOTHERLESS and BROOKLYN at right angles like the street sign at a crossroads.

On the title page, the font looks temporary, parts of it have vanished.  Under the title are nine winding dots, like stones on a path.  These dots are reproduced on the cloth spine of the first edition, though not on the dustjacket.


The protagonist, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette's syndrome.  His mind floods with words and he compulsively mumbles them under his breath, or sometimes barks them intermittently, or sometimes shouts them out.  His brain malfunctions in this way, and he can't control it.  Potential readers who find this off-putting and turn away are missing out on Lethem's playful language and marvelous humor inside a genre-loving murder mystery. 


For in his dreams and in his written voice, Lionel is free of his compulsions and very witty, very insightful.  People are always underestimating him, calling him a freak, but he is not so different than any of them.  In the first chapter, he muses about the character, George Bailey, in It's A Wonderful Life, as being an everyman.  Then Ullman is introduced--as a shadow character, yes, but on another level as the concept of all men, everyman.


Lionel's nervous tics are more pronounced, often extremely so, but he too is representative of everyman.  The restlessness of western man is to be seen and heard everywhere, in a flood of words.  The constant background chatter-thoughts of the undisciplined mind, the monkey mind, is an excitable trickster.  It prevents us from seeing clearly.


The oldest and most famous traditional Chinese novel addresses this.  Monkey: A Journey To The West is a parable involving a monkey, representing the the modern mind.  The monkey is always accompanied by a pig, representing the animal nature of man, always present.

It is a monkey mind culture, as we are reminded everyday in the choice of news in an average newscast, told to an everyman taking in soundbites and constantly flipping channels with his remote, while someone else gabs into his phone on one ear.

In this quest parable, which is often published in three volumes, the chattering monkey mind is always getting himself into trouble.  He was the orchard keeper of the gods--something that might have inspired Cormac McCarthy's title--and, as in Genesis, he eats the forbidden fruit.  He gathers knowledge, including the knowledge of his own temporary existence, and a subsequent fear of death.

    
In the parable, the monkey mind evolves into a buddhist, learning to control his wayward thoughts.  And that is one of Lionel's quests in Motherless Brooklyn:  he longs for self-control.  Another quest is to see Ullman, who never quite comes into view.

I've heard some people complain that they did not like the ending, but I think that these were young readers still in the grip of that possessive blood lust that passes for love in this country.  Obsession is not love--if it were, stalkers would have it.  No, true love is that which is always willing to let go for the sake of those we love.  

I'm not going to spoil the murder mystery for you.  You'll have to find that out for yourself.  But I will tell you that Lionel gets better in the course of the novel, by working on himself and becoming more aware and compassionate of those around him.  For me, it is a feel-good-ending.

We might all be better off if we all learned how to calm our monkey minds.

This is a tag-along to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book series.  Participating blogs offering forgotten books include:

Joe Barone

Paul Bishop
Paul Brazill
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Cullen Gallagher
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
K.A. Laity
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Steve Lewis/Tina Karelson
Todd Mason
Kevin McCarthy
Eric Peterson
David Rachels
James Reasoner
Ron Scheer
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple

FRIDAY'S LITTLE KNOWN GEMS: A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC by Barbara Hunt and THE OUTSIDER by Colin Wilson

This is a literary string-along to Patti Abbot's FRIDAY'S FORGOTTEN BOOKS series, here.

Last week, I meant to discuss Barbara Hunt's intellectual noir, A Little Night Music, but it was a late scratch because I had just read her other books, giving me a better understanding of her, and I needed some time to put it in perspective, to distance the work from the author.


A good author to study in tandem with Barbara Hunt is Colin Wilson, and a good book to read A Little Night Music in light of, is Colin Wilson's study, The Outsider, which was published nine years later.  First, let's examine the novel. 

First edition:  published by Rineheart & Company, Inc., New York, 1947.

Dustjacket:  The title is white in small letters against black.  In the dimness, we can see three supports (of Chicago's El, I surmise), dimly illuminated by three lights, possibly the two headlights of a car and a streetlight.  The author's name is in blood red, with the banner below in white: "Author of Sea Change."  In the night sky above, at the top of the book, there is the blood-red illustration of a rose, looking surreal and out of place, but its significance is that the author gives one of her two main characters the ability to smell death, and it smells like roses.  On the black spine, the title is in blood-red and the author's name in white.


From the epigraph: "It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.  And whosoever attempts it...enters into a labyrinth...becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience..."  --Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil

A table of contents shows that there are ten chapters, each carrying a musical title.  They are First Theme, Second Theme, Counterpoint, Marching Song: An Interlude, First Theme And Variations, Leitmotif, Second Theme And Variations, Scherzo: An Interlude, Counterpoint, and Fugue.

Barbara Hunt's style here has a good mixture of exposition and dialogue.  The book has 244 pages.  I tend to prefer large print, and although the print here is not large, I still found it easy to read.

Opening lines:  "Gavin MacDowell stood half-way up the ladder, suspended between the ceiling and the floor. He looked down on shafts of dust with the electric light beams shining through them, prismatic. From his situation in the shadowy dimness above it, the dust seemed almost solid, and its opalescent translucency conferred splendor, an exotic quality of mystery, upon the tables of dingy untidily stacked books."

The opening shows MacDowell as a clerk in a used bookstore in post-World War II Chicago.  He is sixty-seven years old; he is sick and knows that he will die soon, but he cannot afford to quit his job unless he should sell his own rare book collection.  Besides, he loves books and enjoys working with them.  He is a man of the middle way, always trying to help people, generous to their faults, compassionate to their suffering.

The opening sentence shows him halfway between the ceiling and the floor, as if suspended in time. In the third paragraph, we read: “He felt the floating sensation he always had when he stood high up on the ladder and moved it, as if he were being borne gently through space, his body light, kindred of the air, his soul expanding softly. There was something ghostlike about it, something marvelous and unreal: the shafts of dust beneath him seemed solid, but his own body did not. It was a strange shifting of values, like the sort of thing that happened to one in dreams.”

We sense in him an everyman bodhisativa or an everyman christ, becoming reconciled to death.  He is a widower, his beloved wife, Magda (short for Magdalene?), having  “died so that their daughter, Hester, might be born.”  In the first chapter, we seem him interacting with customers.  One of them is an archetype of materialistic man buying The Art of Salesmanship and How To Win Friends And Influence People.  And we see Gavin’s spiritual nature in contrast.

There is also a lot of backstory given on Gavin in the first chapter. His religion is undetermined but we’re told that his dead wife was the daughter of Slavic Jews. Through a flashback to his childhood, we see that Gavin himself was born into a family of Scots weavers. The father died and the mill wants to put 6-year-old Gavin to work as an indentured servant, to grow up in the company.  In a beautifully written segment that runs several pages, the author shows the cruelty of laissez-faire capitalism as it once existed.  It reminded me of the very similar situation of Kentucky’s coal miners, where once everything they were paid went to the company store, and there was no way out.

In the second chapter, the novel's other main character is introduced, Henry J. Stubbs, a veteran returned from the war who rejects materialism for the life of the mind.  There is a very humorous scene where Henry, in a rebellious mood, throws his radio out the window and into the street.  He then goes out into the Chicago night and discusses things with the gathering crowd.  Henry believes that, through math, he go beyond Einstein and solve death and the riddle of eternity, birth, life, death, and rebirth.

Henry meets Gavin when he takes his rare edition of The Hound of Heaven to the bookstore where Gavin buys it from him.  The two then engage in philosophical discussions that continue off and on for the remainder of the book.  At times, the dialogue shares the nature of Waiting For Gardot,  Sunset Limited, and Dinner At Andres. 

Henry's arguments involve a number of philosophers, including Plato and his theory of forms which I encountered again this past week when reading Susan Froderberg's Old Border Road.  Henry seems rather crazy, for his sense of reality does not match those around him.  He sees others as phonies, as J. D. Salinger's protagonist would say so often later in Catcher in the Rye.  He yearns to get behind the facade, and feels alienated in the isolation of his vision.

Some of Henry's arguments in the novel are exactly those which appeared nine years later in the opening chapter of Colin Wilson's The Outsider, published in 1956 to great acclaim.  Wilson's non-fiction study is the greater work, of course, a synthesis of ideas from the great philosophers and authors of the preceding century.  But its statement was seen at the time, as Kingsley Amis wrote, that "The Outsider is the man who has awakened to the chaos of existence, to the unreality of what the literal-minded take to be reality."

The Outsider was at first praised to the high heavens.  Colin Wilson was hailed as the supreme new intellectual of the day.  But then it was learned that he had a previous marriage, and was in fact a poor father to his two children.  The tide of celebrity quickly turned into a tide of red paranoia.  Partly the reaction was anti-intellectual, "anti-egghead," partly it was political, conformist, and anti-communistic, and partly it was an anti-Oedipal reflex in line with the new accusatory buzz words against youth: "juvenile delinquency," "angry young men," and "rebels without causes."

The case against him is detailed here, link, and you can read Colin Wilson's own account of it in his memoir, The Angry Years: A Literary Chronicle.  Colin Wilson went on to author over 100 books, yet he never again approached his early popularity.  The Outsider: An Inquiry into the Nature of the  Sickness of Mankind in the Mid-Twentieth Century remains a formidable work.  Many of his other books, including a number of his best novels such as The Philosopher's Stone, were attempts to scientifically explain the occult.


Which brings me back to Barbara Hunt.  I think that her novel, A Little Night Music, is a little known gem, as a novel of ideas, as a bibliobook, as a meditation on death, and as a parable of intellectual life in a materialist world.  But most of her other books, and apparently her life itself, focused on the occult.  She was born in 1906 in Chicago.  After a teacher diagnosed her as having a learning disability, she was home-educated by her grandfather, and she later attended the University of Chicago.  She spent over a decade in Fall River, Massachusettes, and later wrote a book about mill life there, sympathetic to the workers.  So she was about forty years of age when she wrote A Little Night Music.

Thereafter, she used the name Barbara Hunt Watters.  She says that she married a chemist who was an astrologer, and she would herself become one of the leading astrologers in Washington, D. C.  Some of the capitol's horoscope columnists were said to be her students, link, including Svetlana Godillo, who wrote the astrology column for the Washington Post.

Among Barbara Hunt Watters' other books during this period were An Astrologer Looks at Murder, Horary Astrology and Judgement of Events, and Sex and the Outer Planets, in which she provides charts and readings for the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, Eugene O'Neill and others.  She died after a heart attack in 1984.

Books For January: Susan Froderberg, Alan Glynn, Sven Hassel, Raymond L. Atkins, Barbara Hunt, Nevada Barr, William Kent Krueger, George Sheehan

I read good books all year long, but I'm also something of a seasonal reader.  Gardening books tend to be put off until the spring, hunting books until hunting season, and some Halloween and Christmasy books that I didn't get to last year will be put off until the holidays come around again.


This last year, mystery writer Patricia Abbott (pattinase) started the FRIDAY'S FORGOTTEN BOOK feature on her blog, and a number of other writers joined in the project.  Her summing up of the reviews of these books, with links, is here.  My sole contribution was a review of Ed McBain's Money, Money, Money: A Novel of the 87th Precinct (87th Precinct Mysteries), which The Rap Sheet carried as a part of its THE BOOK YOU HAVE TO READ series. 


Besides Forgotten-Book-Fridays, in this space I intend to celebrate Off-And-Running-Mondays, Transcendental Tuesdays, Western Novel Wednesdays, Literary-Analysis-Thursdays, Freezing-Weather-Fridays, Sports Book Saturdays, and Southern-Gothic-Sundays.  Among others.


Just a few of the books I've tentatively scheduled to post about in January include:


Barbara Hunt's A Little Night Music, not to be confused with the Stephen Sondheim musical of the same name, although there ought to be clowns.


This is a 1947 hardcover that is a little-known gem, way ahead of its time, being obscure to begin with and long out-of-print.  Never mind her other books, which were of hoary scope and witchy horrors.  She wrote like an inspired intellectual angel in this one.  On forgotten-book-friday, I'll post a long synopsis and analysis of the book.  This is one that the NYRB needs to pick up and reprint in a new edition in its series of rediscovered and significant books.


This is the month I'll read Sven Hassel's Legion of the Damned (Cassell Military Paperbacks).  My copy is the 1957 first American edition, the first and most autobiographical in a series of novels which became famous in Europe.  The author, under his real name, was a reluctant conscript in a German penal company, fighting for his life with the Nazis against the Russians in the dead of winter.  This seems like the best month to read such a novel.





Raymond L. Atkins' Sorrow Wood has a wonderful dustjacket, a falling down barn, gothic and surreal, with almost metalic blue floral designs in its title font.  A southern gothic novel with social satire and reincarnation, it says.  We'll see.


William Kent Krueger's Heaven's Keep: A Novel (Cork O'Connor Mysteries) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a long time.  January seems like the right time to read this snowy novel that seems to include thoughtful mystery and heartbreaking longing.





I've saved Alan Glynn's Winterland for January.  It comes highly recommended by Emerald Noir novelists Declan Burke and Adrian McKinty, whose blogs I follow almost daily.  They say it's a paranoia novel that reminds us once again of the corrupting influence of bureaucracy.


Nevada Barr's Winter Study (An Anna Pigeon Novel).  I didn't get to this in my naturalism reading binge in November, but this will fit as well in January.  Last year, I read Nevada Barr's Seeking Enlightenment... Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Guide to Religion, and she soars in my estimation.  The title may be misleading; it is a very insightful and spiritual book.  A bit like reading Marilynne Robinson.





I've sent for Susan Froderberg's Old Border Road: A Novel, off of this review, link.  She writes with the rhetorical word-magic of Cormac McCarthy, they all say.  Well, I'm willing to be convinced.  I may read it later this week.


I also plan on reading Scott Spencer's newest one, Man in the Woods.  A thriller-of-conscience and a dog story too.





Once a runner, always a runner, but January is the time to start getting in shape again.  I plan to start by being inspired by George Sheehan's  Running & Being: The Total Experience once again.  Other running, fitness, and diet books will no doubt follow, most of them with literary nuances.


The next significant holiday at our house is Valentine's Day, which we celebrate Groundhog Day (Special 15th Anniversary Edition) through Valentine's Day itself.  But that involves next month's reading, so more on that later.