If Morning Ever Comes (1964)

Anne Tyler’s first novel was published when she was 22, which is impressive in itself. She had not yet discovered Baltimore—this is set in North Caroliina, where she was raised. Many of the elements we associate with Tyler are here, but not yet quite in focus. It’s about a big family of misfits and emotionally wounded. Some tend toward the isolated eccentric brooders she would later sharpen to a fine edge. Others are the natural healers and binding elements of families, dysfunctional by nature but, again, not quite as sharply drawn. In fact, many of her characters here tend toward more undifferentiated blends of these two favored Tyler types. The Hawkes family is big—six girls and one boy, Ben Joe. Ben Joe (not to be confused with banjo) is 25 and has just started law school at Columbia, but he worries about his family living in the small town of Sandhill, North Carolina. It’s November and he skips a week of school to take the train down to visit them. Various antics ensue. His older sister left her husband in Kansas and has shown up in Sandhill with her baby. Their father was a doctor who kept a mistress and died of a heart attack at her place. Their mother is bitter and depressed. Their grandmother is kooky. Tyler would get much better with kooky characters. The other five sisters have some distinguishing traits—two are twins, Jenny is on the road to becoming isolated and eccentric—but they’re more like a blob of sisters. It’s a very short novel, which is part of the problem. Tyler has a good reason for the family to be big but there’s little time to detail them all. I read this in my first flush of infatuation with Tyler (ca. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist) and was disappointed. I was better prepared for it this time and enjoyed it for what it is, a pretty good novel by a young writer with lots of potential and limited life experience. Tyler got better with seasoning but she was always a natural at novels, learning the craft early. If Morning Ever Comes is strictly for Tyler completists. It’s not her best by a fair shot but it’s not her worst either. Don’t ask me what her worst is. I like them all even if just a little.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Les parapluies de Cherbourg, France / West Germany, 91 minutes

Director/writer: Jacques Demy

Photography: Jean Rabier

Music: Michel Legrand

Editors: Anne-Marie Cotret, Monique Teisseire

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Nino Castelnuovo, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey

Maybe I’m late to it, but I like to think I like musicals as much as the next guy, especially those classics from the 1940s and 1950s, often from the MGM studio. But I’m not sure I’ve seen many that are as willfully dedicated to the conceits of the genre as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with the possible exception of the 2012 Les Miserables. There is no spoken dialogue here, only singing—every last doggone line. It’s possible there was some straight dialogue in Les Mis, I can’t recall for sure. I was too busy resisting any charms it might have had. But I know for sure there is no dialogue in Umbrellas. In both, necessary exposition can be dialed all the way down to some dialogue that is merely sing-songy chant, but generally no one is talking and everyone is always singing. That takes some getting used to.

The unusual and memorable color palette of Umbrellas is another feature that tends to stick in memory, along with the general weirdness. Let’s be clear. This is a really weird movie. The colors are bright and unnatural but also strangely muted, verging on sickening blasts of pastel, ideal for single frames and screenshots. What makes this movie work as well as it does—something about it I didn’t entirely catch the first time through several years ago—is how expertly it works its self-conscious tropes. Set in a romantic harbor town far from Paris, the story is divided into three parts. “The Departure” details the puppy-like intrigue of two adolescent lovers, Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), whose union is disapproved by Genevieve’s mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon). “The Absence” focuses on the changes for them after Guy is drafted and goes to the war in Algeria for two years, leaving behind a forlorn would-be bride. And “The Return” is the resolution, set a few years later. In other words, boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, and a happy ending. Well, maybe we’ll have to call this one bittersweet—it’s nonetheless fully on the romance spectrum.

“Where the Woodbine Twineth” (1964)

Davis Grubb’s story was evidently a hit in its time, published originally as “You Never Believe Me” and the same year under the present title in a collection of Grubb’s stories. Then the following year it was adapted for an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (directed by Alf Kjellin). Unfortunately, at the moment that production is a property of Peacock and hard to see if you’re not subscribed (but a nice sample of nearly 12 minutes can be found on youtube). Grubb is perhaps best known for writing the source novel for the 1955 Southern gothic film, The Night of the Hunter. I would say the story is also more of a Southern gothic than horror, strictly speaking, with indeed much the same vibe as The Night of the Hunter. In many ways they feel like fairy tales or perhaps fables. The phrase “where the woodbine twineth,” meanwhile, has murky origins and even definitions. I like the one that says it comes from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, where it is used as an evasive answer to mean “obsolete” or “dead.” Typical Southern effusive overdoing it. Others look for and find fragments of it in older sources, including Shakespeare. The story has a little of the modern style—acknowledging racism exists, for example—which doubtless explains its TV adaptation in 1965. It is actually quite old-fashioned Southern business and even retrograde in its casual acceptance of child mistreatment. Eva is an orphaned girl now under the care of her Aunt Nell, who does not understand her and has no patience for her vivid imagination (and/or psychic abilities, as the story attempts to both eat and have its cake in terms of the supernatural). Nell is even seen shaking Eva at one point. It’s a sad story when you think about it, even Dickensian. Eva is lonely and has many imaginary friends, but Nell disapproves of all that. Eva’s descriptions of her encounters do sound a bit dissociative. Nell thinks it’s unhealthy or morbid. Eva’s interactions are so vivid that Nell thinks she hears others talking with Eva. The story turns and races for its end when her grandfather gives her a gift he bought in New Orleans—a large African-American doll that Eva dubs Numa, claiming her arrival was foreseen by her other imaginary friends. Or faeries and whatnot, now that we’re into it. Numa is a nice touch, taking the story to its next level and ultimately the twist end. In terms of the shock twist ending sweepstakes, it’s not bad. It holds out not only until the last paragraph, but until the final clauses of the last sentence, to deliver it. On the other hand, you might have already guessed it and checked the last paragraph for verification (something I never do, by the way). The problem, starting perhaps about here in the ‘60s, is that shock twist endings themselves can get to be a bit rote. Much the same is true for the Hitchcock episode, as I recall, as well as various others and also Twilight Zone and the underrated Night Gallery episodes while we’re at it. That youtube clip is a good representation of the show, which had a kind of stillness that wasn’t common then and isn’t seen very often now, a matter of budget as much as direction, I would guess. It was always a nice mood when I watched the late-night reruns of them.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

“Heavy Set” (1964)

This Ray Bradbury story, first printed in Playboy magazine under Ray Russell’s editorial regime, comes with a few surprises. It is recognizably Bradbury’s Midwestern sing-song voice, but the details are quite dark, not science fiction or wistful or elegiac at all, which I normally associate with him. “Heavy Set” works on subterranean levels, like Robert Aickman or Dennis Etchison. The main character Leonard is nearly 31 and living with his mother. He’s a bodybuilder, working out constantly with weights and such. He hangs around with high school kids who admire him and call him “Heavy Set.” The girls want to go out with him, but he always seems to have excuses to get out of it. It’s Halloween and he’s having a party, dressed up like an English schoolboy, “the mean little boy,” carrying a giant lollipop. It reminded me of Herbie Popnecker from ACG Comics in the ‘60s. The story is set in California and Leonard is also a surfer, by the way. He’s having the party at “the beach,” not at his mother’s place. It seems strange for Leonard to be having a party. Some interpretations of this story have him as intellectually disabled. It doesn’t read that way to me, although something about him is definitely not right. He’s sullen, withdrawn—not the type to throw a party. And it turns out to be a disaster. Not even half the people invited show up and Leonard is the only one in costume. The center of this story is the relationship between Leonard and his mother, which is not healthy. They seem to be all each other has. Whether it’s incestuous is not clear but my guess is sadly yes. It definitely radiates an aura of needy and creepy impulses. While Leonard is away at his party his mother worries he will never come back, without a word, that she will just never see or hear from him again. This story feels deeply unpleasant on multiple levels. It plays with us, teases us, then shanks us with the worst suggestions when Leonard comes home from the party upset. He talks to his mother about it, but he's still upset. He spends hours on the punching bag, until after 3 in the morning. Then he comes into the house and gets into bed with her. It seems to be something new but possibly it’s happened before. She pretends to be asleep. He’s still working out with hand grip strengtheners which squeak in the dark. The last line notes it’s still “a long time before dawn.” But this scene that tremors with terrible potentiality is just the capper. All the details here are increasingly weird and disturbing. Nothing seems real but it’s not a dream. The phone rings at strange times. It’s that kind of story and it’s amazing.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Read story online.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Italy / France, 137 minutes

Director / writer: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Photography: Tonino Delli Colli

Music: Bach, Mozart, Luis Bacalov, Blind Willie Johnson

Editor: Nino Baragli

Cast: Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Susanna Pasolini, Marcello Morante, Mario Socrate, Settimio Di Porto, Otello Sestili, Rossana Di Rocco

The first time I saw director and screenwriter Pier Paolo Pasolini's treatment of the Jesus story was not long after I saw The Last Temptation of Christ. I thought if one art film director (Martin Scorsese) can do it, so can another. But St. Matthew was too slow for me, too ponderous and queasily pious. I didn't think much of it. Another look, just a few years back, went much better. I was impressed with the tone and pacing, and it felt immersive—didn't seem too long. By then, long after Pasolini's strange death, a recut, colorized, and much shorter version had become available, but I stuck with the original. This third time I thought more seriously about looking at the recut for comparison purposes, but alas that's the one they're charging money for and I remain deeply suspicious of it. I suspect the miracles and piety made the cut, but perhaps not so much the wanton ranting (by Jesus, with lines straight from the Bible) and all the general anti-business rabble-rousing.

The third time was not exactly the charm. Once again it seemed too slow and I was often bored and easily distracted (why do the armor chest plates of the Roman soldiers have defined abdominals? how did Mary age 50 years or more in 33 years?). Maybe my fidgety watch had as much to do with Italian neorealism or a mediocre print or incoming email as the subject at hand. Last Temptation gave me a way in to the Jesus story for the first time, although I admit it still doesn't make much sense to me. My favorite part is when he is praying in Gethsemane and obviously afraid to die the way he's going to die. He feels most human to me in that moment. Pasolini's Jesus—the Book of Matthew's Jesus—is more calculating and pro forma at Gethsemane, as he is with most of his other activities, such as riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Enrique Irazoqui, a nonprofessional actor, does a creditable job as the big-talking warrior type of Jesus, with an urgent message on a mission of his father's.

Nova Express (1964)

This short novel by William S. Burroughs is approximately where things start to get weird, at least in terms of any supposed trilogy. It's confusing enough The Soft Machine was more like a sequel to Naked Lunch (whatever that means exactly). Now there's no agreement about what's next in the Nova trilogy (alternately called the Cut-Up trilogy). Most sources designate this the second, but Burroughs himself said the order didn't matter—didn't exist. Well, Nova Express was published second anyway and that's good enough for me, but note that some claim The Ticket That Exploded is second. As part of the "Nova" trilogy it makes more sense to me for Nova Express with its title to be either first or third. I guess that's another reason to make it second. To make matters more complicated, revisions to all three novels (and more) have occurred since my 1980s Grove Press mass market paperback. Do I dare hope for some—any—clarity in those "restored text" versions? I just wanted to read an old paperback before getting rid of it. The method of cut-up reportedly used for Nova Express is described as "fold-in." That makes me think it's a put-on based on the old Mad magazine feature by Al Jaffee, which started the same year Nova Express was published. It's also possible that Burroughs or some assistant literally folded pages in from his massive Word Hoard manuscript. Why not? Overall, I don't think it works as well as the cut-up in Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, which does not work that well except randomly in shards. But who's to say? Also, thinking of a later book, Exterminator!, there is a thin line in Burroughs between novel and short story collection. Nova Express improved for me when I started thinking of it as a collection of stories, though only the last of them, "PAY COLOR," stood out particularly. There is more science fiction concept here—something about viruses. As a result, Nova Express got a nomination for a Nebula award, which is kind of amazing all things considered. It's possible I could have got more out of this, but my engagement with Burroughs tends to happen in the immediacy at the granular level of the sentences and their nouns and verbs. Trying to get your arms around anything bigger, even paragraphs let alone true narrative threads (as opposed to rhythmic devices), feels a little like a fool's errand. I still see this title getting coughed up on lists of best SF, but beyond maybe 20 pages of good sentences scattered toward the front and back, you could fool me.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

"The Student's Wife" (1964)

Although this is a fairly early story for Raymond Carver, published when he was about 26, his elliptical and fragmented approach is already apparent. You keep getting the feeling there are things we're not being told, forgotten by the narrator in his rush to tell it, whatever exactly "it" is. The student in this story might actually be a student but we get little indication of that beyond the title. He is the husband and his wife appears to be a housewife. She has insomnia and comes off as insanely needy. Women might well see it another way. Her husband, it appears, reads poetry to her every night before bed to help her sleep (perhaps the only sign he is a student). But it's not helping her this night, and after a certain point the guy just wants to sleep. She wants him to stay awake until she falls asleep but he can't. She finally gets up and looks at magazines all night. It's a pretty good sketch of insomnia—all the random things you do, thoughts you have, the almost sleeping and then waking, the preoccupation with sleep that is finally preventing it. Her distress grows worse and worse. She experiences the bleakest sunrise of her life, and at the end of the story is seen on her knees beseeching God to "help us" even as her husband "looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his arms flung out across her side of the bed, his jaws clenched." It's quite a crescendo for nothing evidently going on. Something obviously is. This husband and wife may not know any better than us. It could well be their marriage is coming apart, a popular midcentury theme. But we really don't know. Why can't she sleep? Why doesn't her husband care (and why is "jaws" plural)? How bad is it? The story is haunted by a sense of unnamed and perhaps unnamable dread, which also seems about right for its time. It was originally published in the Carolina Quarterly, an academic journal, but it also feels like it could have gone somewhere more commercial, even a women's magazine. Or almost—it might be a bit arty. Even with the gaps and missing information there is always something that feels authentic to me about Carver at these feverish pitches he can reach. With "The Student's Wife" it's like he's exploding the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf dynamic from the inside. These people are too repressed for knockdown battles. Yet at the end of the story they are both clearly knocked down—not by each other but on their own, on separate paths. Carver is good at this even this early.

Note: I started on reading Carver's stories with Where I'm Calling From, the late best-of collection and the last one he had any hand in before he died. That was for convenience because I already had a copy. I still was only dimly aware of the issue of Gordon Lish's editing, but know better now that it most severely altered what is perhaps Carver's most regarded collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The issue of Lish's editing is complicated, but in Where I'm Calling From we see Carver reclaiming and/or reworking himself some of those pieces. The Library of America collection has both versions of What We Talk About—the edited version that was published along with the version submitted by Carver under the title Beginners. I'm going to get to some of that as I go, looking at versions of those stories side by side. For now, I feel pretty good about Where I'm Calling From. It has what we can call Carver's final word on some of the stories from What We Talk About, plus a handful of stories unpublished before 1988 and a solid best-of from the whole of his career. If you don't know him it is probably the best place to start. I'll be using the titles and most of the versions from there.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

The Penultimate Truth (1964)

I circled back to this Philip K. Dick novel when I saw it on an Esquire list, early in the present political regime, of "essential books to prepare you for what's next," which included the usual suspects by George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Sinclair Lewis, etc. There's a lot of Dickian muddle to the tale in this novel, whose picture does not immediately come clear. By pieces, we understand we are in a post-apocalyptic Earth after a nuclear war Cold War nightmare style has made the planet surface uninhabitable. Underneath, billions live in so-called ant tanks—the "ant" is for antiseptic, though it obviously recalls the ant farm toys popular circa 1964. The underground people work on the war effort, waiting for the day those above signal it's safe to return. But on the surface there is actually no war, only a complicated ongoing propaganda campaign to keep most people working and living underground and afraid to come to the surface. Inevitably some do. They are captured and herded into crowded apartment complexes. The surface is controlled by wealthy people who live on giant private estate parks, called "demesnes," a term that goes back to the origins of feudalism. As an allegory, the three classes are thus physically arrayed: the working class laboring underground, the middle class huddled into urban states that cannot be escaped, and the upper class living great lives of pleasure on country estates. There actually was a World War III, but it didn't last long and left most of the surface habitable. Obviously Cold War dynamics motivated the underground living, a logical extension of fallout shelters. So that's the context into which Dick injects his usual cast of bumbling, confused everymen and everywomen. The tale is good at illustrating basic home truths, most notably how easy it is to maintain a huge fraud once it is in place. One thinks now, after these past 40 years, of how pernicious and persistent the "common sense" wisdom of the free market remains, for example, trickle-down economics as merely an unexamined article of faith. It's like spinning plates on top of sticks. Once you get it started you can keep it going if you're skillful enough, and deceitful enough. And then the applause. Good one for Dick binges.

In case it's not at the library.

Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

For the most part this Philip K. Dick novel dispenses with the usual distortions of reality via time travel or drugs, though mental illness is prominent. In the future, Earth ("Terra") has expanded civilization to the richly populated Alpha Centauri system four and a half light-years away. Alpha Centauri has many habitable planets and moons, many of them populated by Alphanes, an insect-like breed with license plate numbers for names. But Terrans managed to get a toehold in one moon, Alpha III M2 by name, which they used to house the exiled mentally ill. But then, in the last war, it came under Alphane control, which enabled the Terrans exiled there to live as they choose. The story involves a plot on Earth to take back control of it, a mission headed up by the CIA using simulacrums controlled remotely. Dick imagines that the mentally ill Terrans on Alpha III M2 would organize themselves by diagnosis. The "Pares" are paranoid schizophrenics, "Heebs" hebephrenics (a type of schizophrenia), "Manses" manics, "Deps" depressives, etc. They are not always easy to make out from group label or behavior—the Heebs felt Rastafarian without the patois, for example—and I'm not sure any of this would be likely to ever happen, but all right. My favorite character was Lord Running Clam, a slime mold that is not only sentient but telepathic, and not only telepathic but manipulative. My love for him starts with his name. Another point I liked was a supernatural power of one character, Joan Trieste, to run time backward for up to five minutes. She works for the police department and is detailed to emergency scenes where she is able to bring people back to life if she can get there fast enough. She carries the Dick version of a beeper. Evidently her strange power only works in a localized way. I'm not as sure about certain aspects of Alpha III M2, or the strange relationship at the center of the story between a CIA agent with a moral compass and his wife without one. She's a marriage counsellor—one of the best in the business. Huh?! Inevitably there is also a TV variety show host with an uncertain agenda. Clans of the Alphane Moon probably doesn't stand with Dick's best, but even in the din of the meaningless event it does have some of his sharpest ideas.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Christian Roommates" (1964)

Read story by John Updike online.

John Updike's story is a slice of life out of the Harvard freshmen dormitories of approximately the '50s. It's charming and a pleasure to read—published originally in the New Yorker—but just to be clear, it's a slice of life out of the Harvard freshmen dormitories of approximately the '50s. The two main characters are Orson Ziegler, a premed student from South Dakota, and Harry Palamountain, who goes by Hub. They are called the Christian roommates the way other pairs are called the Jewish roommates, the Negro roommates, the writer roommates, and so on. Not all the labels fit these late adolescents perfectly. Ziegler is a conventional rock-ribbed Republican protestant. Hub is interested in religion and philosophy, but he's hardly hemmed in by any one sect or creed, or even Christianity. He practices something he calls "Yoga," and also meditates, prays, and elaborately attempts to stay open to all things. The story was published before hippies, but Hub is in line with certain strains of Thoreau by way of the beats. There are nearly a dozen characters here and the best part of the story is its strong sense for that age of stepping out on your own. Some of these guys—they are all guys—don't even last the first year. Others stay together as roommates all the way. At the end of the story we get little bios of how things turned out, like the end of American Graffiti: "Fitch returned, made up the lost credits, and eventually graduated magna cum in History and Lit. He now teaches in a Quaker prep school. Silverstein is a biochemist, Koshland is a lawyer," etc. I'm a little surprised I haven't read more Updike—his natural chatty style is the kind of thing that can appeal to me (Salinger, Roth, etc.). But then I look at the privilege on display here and I remember. The only way this works is to accept its class-bound terms. The third-person narrator is basically above it, comfortable in the class that intimidates all these boys one way or another. And yet this narrator has little to say about class formally. That would be gauche, I guess. Even within its narrow constraints—the Harvard freshmen dormitories of approximately the '50s—there is easily recognized human behavior in this story, which works to redeem the patronizing superiority at least a little.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

He Who Hesitates (1964)

This is one of the more formalist experiments that show up in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. If it's not entirely pulled off, well, at least he was trying. That restless creativity is also something to like about him. The experiment is also probably the reason that it's very short—hard to sustain. What we have is the point of view of a temporary visitor to the city, Roger Broome, a craftsman in wooden goods such as salad bowls and utensils. He encounters five of the detectives, which is way too much coincidence, all things considered. From the beginning he has something on his mind, or his conscience, and he keeps intending to go to the police. But [the title]. For much of it we have no idea if he's committed a crime, or what, which is clarified later. It depends on many things that don't seem very likely to me. For example, that a woman would notice an abandoned refrigerator in the basement of an apartment building had been stolen. Then that the police would investigate to the extent of canvassing the building. There's a general nod in the direction of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which makes sense for its time. It's also interesting to watch McBain telescope his detective caricatures to the barest terms: Hall Willis "the short one," Cotton Hawes (Broome hears it as "Horse"), with red hair and white streak, Meyer Meyer, bald, Steve Carella, with a beautiful deaf wife, radiating a sense of decency. (McBain always does favor Carella, doesn't he?) There's even a kind of sickening twist at the end. It probably made a good proposal pitch. It's fun to review the premise as now when I'm writing it up. But it never really transcends the bounds of its concept. What we appear to have in the end (spoiler alert) is a psychopath. As everyone knows, psychopaths are going to do what psychopaths do. It's literary license to do practically anything. That's one problem, though the sense of grim chill might arguably merit it. Mostly I missed the personalities of the 87th Precinct detectives, who played in the background, as they had to. Even at that, they were a little too loud and omnipresent. File this one under noble failed experiment, and don't even think about reading it first in the series. Really.

In case it's not at the library.

"A Poetics for Bullies" (1964)

Story by Stanley Elkin not available online.

Stanley Elkin might appear to be 50 years or more ahead of our current preoccupations with bullying. But I'm not so sure. The first-person narrator is named Push, and he is a self-declared bully. He contrasts himself with bullies who beat up their victims, claiming they are more "athletes" than bullies. His style is mocking and tormenting through trickery, and he throws out a handful of his favorites at one point, most of which I happen to remember well from growing up, usually on the receiving end: making a match burn twice, the Gestapo joke, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Hard. That's all good, and Push often reminded me uncomfortably of people I have known—even been. Then into this fiefdom one day comes a tall and patrician boy named John Williams, who is unafraid of Push. In turn, that makes Push a little afraid of him, or something. This is our central conflict, and I thought it was weak after how vividly Push had introduced himself. Williams is a world traveler, and probably rich. He has many fascinating stories to tell. All the kids love him, and his behavior helps to make them less afraid of Push. In turn, Push becomes even more intimidated by Williams. I didn't like this turn in the story—it turns it into a type of practical moral illustration. Push is a coward even though he denies it specifically early on, attacking the idea that all bullies are cowards. Yet in the end he is plainly a coward. I do agree with the cliché all bullies are cowards, but that's beside the point. I don't need to have it diagrammed for me. Besides, Push is more of a winning character than repulsive. He's charming, funny, well spoken. He's a bully but somehow that's forgivable. Maybe he doesn't seem so bad, or maybe it's the radiance of his self-awareness. Williams somehow has supernatural powers to intimidate Push, but we have to accept it as a given. We don't feel his powers much, though he does tell interesting stories and is somehow ingratiating. But that's not enough. From perfect self-awareness to almost no self-awareness is an unexplained sea change for Push in this short story. I don't believe it, and I don't think I understand the point. I like Push but I don't mind seeing a bully lose, so I think my stubborn loyalty to him suggests Elkin might be hedging his bets on making Push so bad. He's more like rapscallion, and that keeps him sympathetic enough, and that's what I don't get. Please don't tell me this is about bullies being redeemable. Next you'll be talking about racism against whites.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"The Swimmer" (1964)

Read story by John Cheever online.

This John Cheever story, according to Wikipedia, "is probably Cheever's most famous and frequently anthologized." That surprised me a little. I knew the 1968 movie version with Burt Lancaster, which I saw on TV in the '70s and thought was strange, but I somehow never tracked back to the story until recently. It was a complete surprise to me—it's like a full-blown phantasmagoria out of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust. It opens on what feels like a typical Cheever scene, a warm Sunday in midsummer someplace in the suburbs, where Neddy Merrill ("Neddy Merrill") is attending a friend's pool party. He realizes that the wealth of that neighborhood had become such that enough people he knows have swimming pools now that he could figuratively swim all the way home from the party, and he sets out to do that. He enters backyards, flops into the pools, swims their lengths, and moves on. Some pools are crowded with people at more pool parties, people who know him and hail him and offer him drinks. Some are abandoned—one is even empty. Merrill tries to remember the rumors he'd heard about that family, who are gone now apparently. Midway, Merrill notices a maple tree shedding red and yellow leaves. He assumes it must be blighted as fall is still weeks and months away. Next, he reaches a stretch of busy roads and no swimming pools. The people in cars jeer at him, wearing only his swim trunks. From then on, the scenes are increasingly forbidding, harsh, cold. Some of his friends say they're sorry for his troubles, but Merrill doesn't care to know what they are talking about. Increasing signs of the passage of time occur. It's fall now—or more blight. Merrill has no idea what people are talking about when they offer their sympathies, or when they are unexpectedly hostile. He keeps plunging in and swimming the pools, but we are more acutely aware than ever of his vulnerability, wearing only swim trunks, and the pointlessness of his mission in the face of all the strange evidence. The whole thing plays like a dream, with its pivots and dislocations. It starts outs as suburban parties echoing through the mind of the sleeping dreamer, before the turn to anxieties and other monsters from the unconscious. What starts out as a lark starts to look more like lunatic behavior, derangement, psychic collapse. When he finally arrives at his home no one and nothing is there. It's just an empty house where he lived once. I don't think I'm giving anything away here? It's not exactly a twist ending, playing off expectations. If anything, it's a twist middle. It feels like a dream, reading it, and it sticks with you. I liked the movie, but this story is way better.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)

Gertrud (1964)

Denmark, 116 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Hjalmar Soderberg, Carl Th. Dreyer
Photography: Henning Bendtsen, Arne Abrahamsen
Music: Jorgen Jersild
Editor: Edith Schlussel
Cast: Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Rode, Baard Owe, Axel Strobye

I have to say I think the degree of critical regard for filmmaker Carl Th. Dreyer seems remarkable, especially given how unknown I suspect he is at large. His most famous and lauded project is a silent movie from 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which very nearly perished of its own obscurity and lack of commercial success. His next-best, according to critics, is the strange and unsettling Ordet, from the '50s, which practically gets lost in its own religious obscurantism. Dreyer made a few other movies as well, including an early talkie vampire movie, though not many.

It's apparent even from these few pictures that Dreyer and his gaudy middle initial mostly dwelt in realms of the spirit. But for his final movie, made when he was in his 70s with his reputation fully restored, and thus something of an anticipated public event, he picked up his strange fixations and fastidious approaches and moved them to worldly realms of the secular. Gertrud Kanning is a middle-aged woman arrayed with four lovers, let us call them past, present, future, and future imperfect. But Dreyer (an illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper) doesn't let go of his religiosity so easily, and Gertrud is no libertine. "Ascetic" is probably going too far, but "austere" seems to fit the tone of Gertrud and Gertrud about as well as anything.

Ax (1964)

It's bloody murder in this edition of the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain. And no surprise, the murder weapon of interest features a blade, as anyone reading the entire series should know well what a fetish knives grew to be for McBain. This is not the first he's used them, but the lumberjack's tool of the trade takes the story well beyond the pale. It's another shorty, under 200 pages, so it mostly focuses on the one case, a tenement janitor found in the basement of his building brutally slain (yes, there are details). Of more interest to me are the civil rights undertones to the action, which fit with the time frame. But it's still dated. The novelty is manifest in the attempt to view Negro characters as fully equal and deserving of respect, which slides over too easily into displays of patience and indulgence. The characters mean well but I'm less sure about the author, who somehow conveys the idea it's all a bit ridiculous. This made me wonder if McBain, like his and my hero Jack Webb, wasn't at bottom a right-wing crank. I suspect it's so, based on his treatment here of civil rights as vaguely comical and other factors across the series. But a cursory Internet search didn't turn up much and in a way I don't want to know. With an uneducated Negro in Ax as one of the "obvious" suspects, and his treatment that way by characters such as Steve Carella (as usual, the main detective), attempting to show equality, it's too often slightly wince-worthy. The story is ridiculous too, with shady hoods and crap games, a family of extreme eccentrics for the victim's family, and some sort of scam involving firewood (and fireplaces?!) for tenants in the tenement. Carella is out front, with Cotton Hawes loose-limbed at his side. For as silly as it is, it's a reasonably tight story. It's #18 overall in the series, a point at which McBain and everyone was beyond counting, but I thought I'd mention it. A lot of what makes McBain good is there in place. The month is January—he knows how to elaborate and use the moods of the weather. The case is brutal, and hard to solve ("hard to solve"). And the detectives are good men—actually, there is a bad cop in this one. Carella can't stand him, of course. On the personal side, we get a scene or two in the warm Carella household, with Teddy and the twins. A good man, a good home, but a cold and brutish world, into which he must go. Careful with that ax, Eugene.

In case it's not at the library.

The Zap Gun (1964)

Philip K. Dick himself called this novel "a turkey"—and it's true, it's probably not his best, although it does have my favorite of all his character names in Lars Powderdry. This near-future tale was written at the peak of the Cold War and one of its weaknesses is that it doesn't seem able to imagine much beyond that. But nonetheless it has many nice Dick touches along the way. To save money on defense spending, for example, the US and USSR have secretly conspired to roll out fake new weapons, dreamed up by psychics in trance states. That's Lars Powderdry's work, in fact, as a "weapons fashion designer." Almost incidentally, halfway along and offstage, aliens appear and begin to attack Earth (New Orleans, specifically)—now what are the humans going to do? Crises in Dick novels, though they arise continually as in most fiction, are by and large beside the point. The problem isn't so much the invading aliens as how the fraudulent governments plan to cover up their decades-long malfeasance in the area of national security. Events meander about. Powderdry has any number of intrigues to manage, and some love affairs too. This occupies a good deal of the narrative. We never get much sense of who the aliens are or what they want, beyond vaguely taking slaves. Toward the end there is a bum's rush of events, including a time travel puzzle and more or less total collapse of government. I came away a little confused about the intentions of The Zap Gun—Cold War satire seemed most likely, but at that it's a little obvious, with too-easy insights. Maybe it was more dangerous in its time? There's a murky love story in all this too, with Powderdry falling for his Soviet counterpart, Lilo Topchev (another excellent character name, which put me absurdly in mind of the Bravo reality TV show). I'm sympathetic with anyone's attempt to satirize the defense industry and its self-serving lies and exaggerations, but The Zap Gun is loaded up with distractions no matter what it is: invading aliens drama, time travel paradox, cheerful polyamory anecdote, gratuitous paranoia exercise, meditation on psychic powers, and so on. Eventually the aliens are defeated by development of an electronic child's toy which engages, develops, and then betrays the player's sense of empathy. Emotional treachery is yet another familiar Dick note. It makes me wonder again about Dick's writing process—it sometimes feels like he enters fugue states, riffs on a handful of his favorite themes, and hopes something comes of it. Because certain remarkable and unforgettable things actually did come of it it's almost surprising when nothing or very little does (though I am reading probably only a fraction of his catalog). The Zap Gun might be more for the hardcore fans.

In case it's not at the library.

Kwaidan (1964)

Kaidan, Japan, 161 minutes

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

Writers: Yoko Mizuki, Lafcadio Hearn

Photography: Yoshio Miyajima

Music: Toru Takemitsu

Editor: Hisashi Sagara

Cast: Rentaro Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama, Tatsuya Nakadai, Keiko Kishi, Katsuo Nakamura, Osamu Takizawa, Ganjiro Nakamura, Noboru Nakaya

Kwaidan was released very late in 1964 (December 29, thus barely skating in on the criteria of my ongoing Movie of the Year project) and went on to make something of a splash in art film circles, winning a Jury Prize award at the Cannes film festival the following spring and also getting an Oscar nomination in 1965 for Best Foreign Language Film. The way it proceeds, and the timing of its release—coming at about the time that Rod Serling's Twilight Zone was finally being put in the ground for good—makes me think it might have had some influence on a later Serling project for TV, Night Gallery.

First and most obvious is its anthology structure. Kwaidan is composed of four shorter pieces, most of them about 30 minutes long with one dominating for an hour. The stories are unified by tone, mood, and some general thematic elements but otherwise unrelated—different casts for each. More than that both Kwaidan and Night Gallery represent a kind of intellectualized horror, taking the usual elements that send people screaming around and hiding their eyes and abstracting them into deliberately realized, highly stylized bits and pieces: with harsh discordant music that can feel more like sound effects, strangely colored lighting, filters, and makeup, and weird stories of regret, loss, cruelty, and hopelessness, often with ghosts, vampires, witches, and such. It's not often outright scary, but usually at least a little unnerving, and always impressive as production design.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is an exhilarating mash of religion, hallucinatory drugs, and tried and true science fiction concepts. In the 21st century, planet Earth is so overheated it is dangerous to go outside for any period of time without protection. The United Nations is a totalitarian if somewhat benign world government, conscripting individuals from the heaving planet and forcibly resettling them on other orbiting bodies in the solar system. (As a side note, I think it's interesting that even as late as the '60s Venus was still considered potentially habitable.) The conditions on those colonies are dreary and harsh. UN authorities mostly look the other way on a rampant abuse of drugs there to cope. The most popular drug among colonists is CAN-D, which appears to enable a consciousness to inhabit miniature landscapes kept like dollhouses or model railroad dioramas, which users build and collect details for like a hobby, nostalgic comfort regions where they may dwell as long as the drug lasts, a few hours at a time. Meanwhile, our hero Palmer Eldritch has returned from a mission beyond the solar system with a mysterious new drug, CHEW-Z ("Be choosy, chew CHEW-Z" is the advertising tagline planned for its marketing launch). Its effects are similar to CAN-D, but much more powerful, and sinister. The range of issues Dick attempts is ambitious: religion, politics, and drugs, to name the most obvious. He is best at narrating the drug experiences, keeping us on track through bizarre, ever-unfolding terrains of experience. It always feels like at least a solid head trip mind fuck, and surprisingly often like a hallucinogenic drug experience. These episodes are weird, funny, scary, often quite lucid, and convincing. Dick constantly threatens to go obvious with the religious themes but then tends to hold back at the last minute, which at once affirms the dignity, power, and danger of religion. And the dystopian science / political vision of humanity's impulse at large to control and overrun is what grounds it all in given reality. His sure hand at managing these elements makes the case, as they say, for Dick as unimaginably far ahead of his times—consider the global warming detail alone. In that regard, and also on the drugs and corporatism, he's still well ahead of even our own times, more than 50 years later. Recommended.

In case it's not at the library.

Pop. 1280 (1964)

Jim Thompson published many more novels after Pop. 1280 which I still don't know, but somehow Pop. 1280 feels like the right place for me to stop. In many ways it is the inevitable resolution to his most celebrated and best-known novel, The Killer Inside Me—and in many ways it's much better. Killer is where Thompson hatched the idea of a sociopathic sheriff of a small Texas town who spouts endless clichés and homilies even as he lives the life of a depraved libertine. But I think Pop. 1280 may be where he perfected it. Unlike Killer's Lou Ford, who is vaguely troubled by his behavior and labels it "the sickness," sheriff Nick Corey of Pop. 1280 more accepts it as a given of the human condition. Better him than anyone else, seems to be his basic credo, never doubting for a second that anyone else in his position would be anything else. There's some tendency for Thompson to compress his cynicism into glib incident, for example in the whisper campaign Corey effortlessly launches against his opponent in an upcoming election, working obvious variations on Mark Twain's wonderful story, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." And much of the shocking cruelty of Killer is underplayed in Pop. 1280 too, which I miss. But nowhere is Thompson's worldview so curdled into such an expert latticework of foul human behavior. Sheriff Corey plays it straight always, outside of this narrative, and people just step up and voluntarily treat him wrong, thinking he is a nincompoop. And so, when he takes his various revenges, we are implicated, we are nearly always at least a little on his side, satisfied when as we see him deal out their come-uppances. Even as Nick Corey's veneer of self-serving rationalization is transparent we believe enough in his justifications to minimize any moral concerns we might think to entertain as the action flashes past. Corey's own words to live by, which he repeats over and over, speak exactly to that: "I ain't sayin' you're wrong, but I cain't say you're right, either." The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 also represent a familiar dynamic in many careers of the big ones, and nearly all of them who lived long enough. First there is the moment of great discovery, the raw innovation, and later there is a grand statement consolidation of the gains. Inspiration drives the first, experience the latter. Think of Highway 61 Revisited and "Love & Theft", think of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, think of The Clash and Sandinista! These two books by Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, belong with them.

In case it's not at the library.

A Moveable Feast (1964/2009)

In 1975, I might have liked A Moveable Feast best of all the books by Ernest Hemingway I read. But among people I knew who disliked him it was singled out for additional revilement for its various self-aggrandizing qualities. So I wasn't sure what to expect many years later, and after disappointments with revisits to two of his more highly regarded novels. As it turns out, my interest in memoir trumped my growing suspicions that Ernest Hemingway is a charlatan, and I enjoyed it as much I had the first time. It's Hemingway's usual wooden-block alternations between description and dialogue, and his usual stoic nonsense, but it's also gossipy and fun, sometimes malicious (notably his acid treatment of Ford Madox Ford, which is cruel). On that score, Hemingway's description alone of a conversation he overheard between Gertrude Stein and, presumably, Alice B. Toklas, makes the book. His memories of F. Scott Fitzgerald are good too, providing views new for me into Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Hemingway's admiration for The Great Gatsby is so sincere and unqualified—he also praises Tender Is the Night, but I have the impression he was almost in awe of Gatsby. I like how Hemingway judges Fitzgerald as a writer, which in turn makes him willing to put himself through the agonies he describes, trying to be Fitzgerald's friend (and remembering always that the first presumption with Hemingway should probably include acknowledging the usual, and obvious, self-aggrandizement, which is real). I also like everything about Ezra Pound here, starting with his very appearance at all. Mostly he comes across as a kind of well-dressed, well-mannered beatnik, which is interesting. Even more interesting, Hemingway omits any discussion at all of Pound's World War II adventures on the side of the Italian Fascists and the consequences suffered.

On the other hand, noting the multiple dates of publication (and also that Ernest Hemingway died in 1961), I think it has to be said that A Moveable Feast is now officially a mess. Hemingway never felt he had it done before he died, and the first edition was the result of his fourth wife Mary's compositing among the fragments. The latest version from 2009, "The Restored Edition," was composited by Sean Hemingway, Ernest's grandson by his second wife, Pauline; among other things, Sean and his father (another of Ernest's sons) felt Pauline was not treated fairly in the first edition. In fact, the memoir mostly features Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, though there is some discussion (briefer and more elliptical in "The Restored Edition") of their breakup and of Pauline. I'm not about to get into the middle of such internecine conflict. Both editions are essentially the same book, and they are both very good. There might be more material in the latter edition, and I particularly liked the Fragments section appended at the end, where you get a nice feel for how Hemingway worked, like watching multiple takes of the same scene from a movie one after the other. The best way to read A Moveable Feast now just might be to read them both (though note: the earlier one appears to be a little harder to acquire, which is probably only going to get worse).

In case it's not at the library.