Difficult Lives: Thompson – Goodis – HimesJames Sallis
Gryphon, paperback, 101 pages, $15.00
ISBN: 1 58250 029 0
Saint Glinglin
Raymond Queneau
Translated by James Sallis
Dalkey Archive, paperback, 184 pages, $11.95
ISBN 1 56478 230 1
Gently Into The Land Of The Meateaters
James Sallis
Black Heron Press, hardback, 162 pages, $21.95
ISBN 0 930773 58 6
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
Fate sometimes has a way of decreeing your time has come, and the sudden arrival of all things James Sallis on better stocked bookshelves in recent months can only be cause both for celebration and serious financial outlay – there is nothing here that you can afford to overlook.
Let us deal with the ostensibly easy stuff first. Difficult Lives is the long promised reprint of a 1993 book of extended essays on three of ‛crime fiction’s leading players: black supremo Chester Himes; poet of misanthropy Jim Thompson; and the strange strange David Goodis with his extraordinary failure. First and foremost it’s a primer, sketching in backgrounds and picking through recurrent themes. And, I suppose, I’m being unfair in singling out Goodis’ very literary strand of failure – each of these authors, as Sallis acknowledges, celebrated the worm in the apple; the rust on the American Dream. (‘Tawdry – with just a hint of transcendence.’) It's just that Goodis seems to have lived it harder and fallen further, taking his perverse secrets (rejecting Hollywood to return to the childhood home, trawling bars for obese black hookers) to the grave. His (essential) books are a palimpsest, a rearranging of furniture aboard the Titanic. He deserves a book of his very own. Thompson already has one, of course, and Himes is now the subject of Sallis’ imminent critical biography. New readers start here.
Saint Glinglin, on the other hand, furthers the impression of Jim Sallis, polymath. Queneau, as Sallis’ introduction makes clear, was a precursor of the European experimental writing tradition that encompasses everything from surrealism to Oulipo, and writers like Georges Perec (who famously wrote an entire novel without benefit of the letter ‘e’) and Milan Kundera.
Originally published in French in 1948 and taking as its elected text ‘the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father,’ Saint Glinglin alights upon a string of stylistic conceits – soliloquy, interior monologue, quasi-biblical verse – to speak of the return of the prodigal to a strange land where rain never falls and every Saint Glinglin’s day is marked by a bizarre crockery festival. Drawing (far from invidious) comparison to Joyce, Queneau’s text is by turn absurdist, lyrical, ironic and allusive, forever pulling literary tricks, from fracturing syntax to imposing bizarre self-constraints which, in his capacity as translator, Sallis endeavours to retain. (The book insists that the letter ‘x’ be forever banished in favour of an awkward ‘ss’ assembly.) ‘I have never seen,’ Queneau once explicated, ‘any essential difference between the kinds of novels I want to write and poetry.’
The results may be playful and (god forgive me) witty, but Queneau’s innate skill ensures that
Saint Glinglin never collapses into smug self-satisfaction. The novel survives both as ‘ludicrous, and intellectually stimulating’, and as an engaging and intensely readable narrative in its own right. Nothing here is sacrificed on the alter of formalism. Nor, equally, is much sacrificed to period;
Saint Glinglin remains as fresh in this translation as any contemporary novel. A very special book indeed.Which brings us to the meat (sic) of our particular trawl with some elegance. Standing in lieu of an autobiography, Gently Into The Land of The Meateaters is an exemplary collection of essays at once both recognisably part of the Sallis canon and a world apart from his fictional forays. A world apart in the confessional, often raw examination of his life and the concerns that govern it. But, equally, recognisable both for the unalloyed grace and precision of his writing, and the undoubted vein of compassion and erudition we see mirrored in his justly celebrated Lew Griffin sequence.
‘For a few years there he was Dylan Thomas,’ he writes, ‛a doomed minor poet. Then in quick succession a blues musician, political radical, expatriate editor, science fiction star. He tried very hard for a number of years to become French. He turned himself, almost, into a madman.’ The book finds Sallis writing on writing, on art, on music, often painfully on relationships, and, most sourly, on America itself. But mostly, one way or another, about himself. ‛There is no design; there are only patterns – patterns that art and ritual extend, that they elevate,’ he decides. Which doesn’t quite stake his place in the litany of failure alongside Himes, Goodis and Thompson (in Europe, at least, he is rightfully recognised as a major literary talent) but surely inspires a greater understanding of the course his compatriots steered.
This, then, is a portrait of the artist as flawed man. Talking about people loved and lost, his time in hospital, and his time alone in the city and the people he meets along the way. ‛Hearts of The City’, from 1985, is about people met along the way, brilliantly reflecting back the damaged prose of Raymond Carver (and, by extension, Chekov) without a hint of pastiche. In a literary industry in thrall to the Carver copyist, this is a rare gift. His advice to students is simple: ‛Write about things that hurt you, write about things you don't understand.’
That’s really his mantra. The mind behind these twenty-two brief pieces (from 1983 to 1996) is always investigatory, never aphoristic. You don’t come to this book for a handout, but come away strangely uplifted and always entertained. ‛Poetry: A Beginner’s Manual’ and ‛Taking The Stage’ (about time served in a country band) are wistful comic writing. And the book – like the life it, almost by default, celebrates – is suffused with music. For him, ‛from a walkup flat off Portobello Road in London to a psychiatric hospital even deeper in the mythic American South, music would go along, as inseparable a part of my life as breath itself.’
‘Artists are only people who watch and listen intently,’ he concludes, ‛who try to understand and then, knowing always they will fail, try and tell what it is they’ve seen and heard.’ Jim Sallis tries harder and tells us far more than most.