What I Was Afraid Of by Eric Hanson, Part Two of my review as continued from HERE
TARTARUS PRESS 2021
My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/r-b-russell-tartarus-press/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
AN INTRODUCTION TO FICTION
“People looked at me as if I’d arrived on a bus from Omaha or someplace like that. Medicine Hat. Tulip Springs. Posey Junction. Elbow Lake.”
A young man as narrator and budding writer arrives in New York, and this is a sophisticatedly charming, wittily literary and poignant classic, yet another classic following the previous one! — and, so, where did this book come from that edits my own death? My chest not broken yet on the curb by a cab, but near enough by dint of a more endless period of accidental dying…
Seemed apt in this book’s sporadic context, at least in part, that I now recall this narrator claiming, in response to someone who claimed he had slept with Greta Garbo, that he once slept with Babe Ruth…
“Ambrose Bierce embraced me. ”
The young writer during a local monsoon enters a restaurant to be faced by the gradual entry — for dinner, somewhat outdoing him for available tables — of a panoply, nay, a cornucopia of writers, most of whom I have heard, many I have read, and all of which our young writer seemingly emulated. He even has a heart to heart with Joyce Carol Oates. Also a liquid autograph from Updike.
Later a journey, following his endlessly lethal accident, as if in Mort, toward, here, a marriage à trois with Gore Vidal and Oates, if not Joyce. Unless I was misled. Or simply mistaken. One author surprisingly not mentioned as attending this story as a fiction truth, a story perhaps emulating him most, is O Henry.
“The floor was a lake.”
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Ambrose Bierce Embraced Me
From lake as floor to…
UNDINE
“There was a family tradition with housemaids, just as Birdsong said. Mother knew nothing about it, or chose not to. She had her own war work. The men were practical. The maids always lost their heads.”
…and if you fit that into the growing context of this accretively numinous work, you will have at least some clue as to the ineffable retribution of housemaids upon a family and its men, all growing up through the Blitz and Hun invasion, and what was placed in the pond or lake, what enforced young were drowned already dead, and what later vengeful eroticism to the point of utter self-sacrifice by a housemaid to redeem such young. Statues of flesh seen buried or drowned in the ground. A story that is oblique, from boy to man and back again, and one wonders if the lake was as bottomless as it seemed, like our cheating mind itself? And whether nightjars fly overhead.
An ever sidious book.
“The boy sometimes wondered if the nostrils gave birth to the moustaches.”
BLACK SEDAN
“…cupping his elbow with his hand.”
I don’t think I have ever before experienced such a carefully rehearsed and re-rehearsed dream of recurring events and recurring refrains about them. It is utterly hallucinating and hypnotic, poignant and relentless yet with a gently undulating hidden beauty of yielding oneself to it, of unrequited love and a girl whose back of the neck one has studied when a boy oneself…with an elevator, a group of people having cocktails, a man one should recognise but doesn’t, and a place where all the houses are in their set places, and a lethal road accident, either involving a dog once circling on a rope or someone you loved as a child and never loved as an adult? Sedate and ever re-hearsed. In denial or opening oneself to its still hidden meaning, if not beauty.
“A hand cups his elbow.”
DRESDEN
“Breakable things become very valuable when they don’t break.”
A delightfully strange story of the narrator’s hip operation after playing, at age 40, a childhood game of kickball. And of the concept of anaesthetic amnesia by hindsight. And the surgeons debated, during the operation, about what they found contained inside him. To tell you anything else would be a spoiler, but the museum that the narrator walked for its post-operative walking exercise provision was seen more for the context of the museum itself rather than for what it contained, until he found what his body once contained instead of bodily joints.
Mariupol and Dresden alike?
Any body of creatives still has to do day jobs, even today, I guess.
“The rarest skills in that century were engaged in frivolous things and paid trivially. Architects did theater scenery, fine painters were little more than servants and surgeons were barbers.”
EQUILIBRIUM
“We all live along a continuum, moving toward an indefinite future, and as we move we recalculate continuously, multiplying our needs and hedging our obligations in order to increase our present happiness and minimize our presentiments of the future.”
This work is full of such wisdoms and the reader is soon able to share its Benignly Mathematical Tontine of Perfection and Inertia as a Utopia of Existence and Economics of Resource in Scarcity. Should one understand the words as well as be in a position to read them without introducing a potential glitch.
***
“Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it’d lose even its imperfection.”
– Haruki Murakami
INSURANCE
“I decided Wednesdays must be pretty hard out in the middle of Nebraska.”
The pattern of death and life, the ‘gravity’ between people, magnetic gravity, that is, not gravity as seriousness, but there is humour, too, involving the same connections that I’ve found working miraculously within the literary gestalt. Here an O Henry type tale of an Insurance salesman keeping the link with those he has sold life policies. And the pattern of complications and intentions created by a car breakdown and a narrator who cashed in his policy for a mid-life crisis sort of trip. And a sexual fling linked to a killing as part of some different pattern. Needs to be read to absorb the patterns … all seasoned with three, yes, three separate crucial ‘elbow’ leitmotifs i.e. an elbow explicitly cocked like a gun, elbow connected with flames, and a banged elbow (you couldn’t make it up!) … plus an arm yanked almost from the shoulder…
Minor Points of Anatomy
A symphony of three movements, a triangulation of the coordinates of confusion, like a sort of senile dementia it felt to me, even confused by what is believed in all one’s life about politically correct or incorrect things and human dislocations, especially mental health, things that go in and out of fashion or concern, how people once helped each other, a confusion so confused it somehow becomes clear and clearer, to the extent that this triangulation embodies confusion itself, including a car with diseased bodily innards under the bonnet, being caught out peeing in public because your bladder is now so weak, the nature of the person one lives with even to the extent that person may be or may not be you yourself with recognisable hair in the mirror, plus a holiday resort where children play ping pong and a patronising old man who pontificates like me on what is on the TV, and having one’s soul snatched out and scrunched up to make you feel empty. So confused it makes my review confused, yes, even incorrect. There’s a first time for everything, I’m afraid.
What I Was Afraid Of (part of a memoir)
“…this notion of connectedness is the stuff of fiction.”
I do not usually review non-fiction, but this genuine unmissable tour de force (almost as long as a novel!) seems important to this book’s stories in various ways, even if it does not explain my own earlier relationship with both Pilbeam and Hanson! Seriously great stuff with which I fully resonate, explaining things that I had not really understood before about my own childhood thoughts, and I can also now see that the writer is of exactly the same generation as myself, and although he was in America and me in England, the parallels are obvious. I even watched Amos ‘n’ Andy on my own family’s small black and white TV. And Perry Mason.
A tour de force that affects me deeply, about the mœurs of the times, its fears concerning death and religion (I went to Sunday School myself), worries about certain world events, and the nature of cinema thrills, childhood recurring dreams brilliantly described, and racial matters, health and safety, and attitudes to events in the Second World War (including the fire bombing of Dresden) and the new Nuclear threat, and American Politics involving Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon. There is even a Lewis Street involved, and a whole list of his childhood fears that include WRINKLED ELBOWS (explained later in connection with a gingerbread house Grandmother of his). And the black sedans as harbingers of death or of suspicious strange ‘strangers’.
Nothing was the same, and everything was the same.
“And is it all connected?”