Call If You Need Me (30 page)

Not only is this maybe the largest trout in America, it has the mark of Cain on it, the mark of the misbegotten, the rogue, the wounded. It is blind in one eye. “It was opaque, white, pupilless; it looked like the eye of a baked fish.”

So just
how
big? you’re still asking. Bill slips up on the fish where it is lying with its blind side next to the bank. He’s brought Mrs. Humphrey along to corroborate this part of his tale, clever fellow, and hopes that none of his readers will be unchivalrous enough to doubt her word on the matter. Bill and Mrs. Humphrey get down on their bellies and Bill uses a carpenter’s sliding rule. He tells us the fish is a little over forty-two inches in length, that the girth corresponds to his own thigh. He estimates its weight at thirty pounds, maybe larger. I God!

Bill is in thrall to this fish but is determined to kill it nevertheless, this fish that fills him with both pity and terror. (You don’t
catch
a fish this size, you
kill
it.) He is a patient man with nothing very much else to do, it seems, and so he spends mornings, afternoons, and evenings watching the fish and observing its habits:

There is a boy who comes every day to the creek to watch Bill fruitlessly cast and cast his fly. He thinks Bill’s dumb. He tells him so. They have little conversations about the fish and, by extension, the world at large. The boy is there on that fateful last day of the season (now is when you want to hear the music from Tanglewood) when Bill hooks into the Big One, Old Cyclops himself. The boy silently watches the brief, uneven contest, then, shaken, cries out angrily: “You had him and you let him get away!”

“The literature of angling falls into two genres,” Humphrey writes, “the instructional and the devotional. The former is
written by fishermen who write, the latter by writers who fish.” This is a devotional book, filled with a loving and rare regard for the mysteries of this world, and the other. It is a fine companion book to Humphrey’s earlier work on salmon fishing,
The Spawning Run
.

I’ve been an admirer of Donald Barthelme’s stories since college, when I read his first collection,
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
. Everyone I knew at that time talked about Donald Barthelme, and for a while everyone tried to write like him. Donald Barthelme was our man, man! Some of those people are still trying to write stories like his, and with singular lack of success. His chief imitators were then, and are still, students of writing at colleges and universities across the country. The influence of Barthelme’s stories has been considerable, but not always salutary, on young and not-so-young writers.

The imitations—no other word will do—are easy to recognize. Once in a while you see them in print somewhere, but most often you see them handed in in depressing numbers at writing workshop classes around the country where Barthelme stories are often studied and held up as models for young short story writers.

In these short fictions à la Barthelme, there is, almost without exception, a serious lack of interest and concern on the part of the author for his characters. The characters are dropped into silly situations where they are treated by their creators with the most extreme irony, or even downright contempt. They are never to be found in situations that might reveal them as characters with more or less normal human reactions. To allow the characters to express any emotion, unless it can be ridiculed, is unthinkable. It is impossible for the characters even to see, much less accept, responsibility for their actions. There is a feeling that anything goes in the stories, that is, nothing in the story has to make sense, or has any more pertinence, value, or weight than anything else. This world is on the skids, man, so everything is relative, you know. Usually, the characters have no last names, often (as with the stories in
Great Days
) no first names either. The authors are determined to write fiction free from the responsibility of making any sense. They take it as given that there is no sense whatsoever to be made of this world, and so they are free to have their characters speak and act without any of the normal restraints of moral complication and consequence. In a word, there is absolutely no value to anything.

The imitators have picked up everything easy and obvious from Barthelme but they don’t have his great talent, his genius for finding startling, original ways to say things about love and loss, triumph and despair. Disappointment and heartbreak are rife in the land, God knows, but if a writer writes about such matters and populates his fiction with whining, self-pitying creatures eaten up with unspecified angst, bitterness, and complaint, well, it isn’t enough. Barthelme
is
different. His characters are never contemptible or mean-spirited. He can move you, and often make you laugh at the same time, can stir that emotion Camus called simply “fellow feeling”—notwithstanding the fact that the stories Barthelme writes are often the strangest-looking vehicles ever to come down the road.
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
was followed in 1967 by the little experimental novel
Snow White
. Then, in 1968, the strange and wonderful collection
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
;
City Life
, more stories, in 1970.
Sadness
, another fine collection, appeared in 1972.
The Dead Father
, a novel, was published in 1975;
Amateurs
, yet another book of stories, in 1976. With these original works, Barthelme made a place for himself in the national literature and in so doing did honor to the practice of short story writing.

So I’m sorry to say I don’t like his new book of stories,
Great Days
. The book isn’t a profound disappointment, but it is a disappointment nevertheless.
Great Days
isn’t going to cause one
to lose regard for Barthelme, or detract from his considerable accomplishments, but it isn’t going to help him along either. There is not a story in the collection of sixteen that has anywhere near the power, the complexity, the resonance of stories from his earlier collections, stories such as “The Indian Uprising,” “The Balloon,” “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” “See the Moon?”, “The Sandman,” “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,” “Brain Damage,” “Sentence,” “Views of My Father Weeping.” Seven of the stories in
Great Days
are “dialogues” between nameless pairs of male or female characters (although the gender is not always clear), disembodied voices stripped of everything save the willingness to babble.

From time to time Barthelme does engage your intellectual, literary fancy, and there are some funny, kooky one-liners here, but there are for a fact no innovative breakthroughs in this book, and he does not write about anything close or dear to the human heart. This last is the most serious drawback in the collection. The absence of anything remotely resembling the human in these stories is troubling. In this book he seems to be moving farther and farther away from what most concerns us, or what, I suggest, should concern us the most.

The two most interesting pieces in the book are not in the dialogue form. One is “The King of Jazz,” starring Hokie Mokie and the challenger for the title, Hideo Yamaguchi, “the top trombone man in all of Japan.” The other is a hilarious tale called “The Death of Edward Lear,” a comic deathbed scene in which the nineteenth-century nonsense-verse writer has sent out invitations to witness his demise at “2:20
A
.
M
., San Remo, the 29th of May, 1888.”

In too many of the other stories the author is, I hate to say it, sounding like Donald Barthelme imitating Donald Barthelme. The technical virtuosity and the inventiveness are there, but most of the inventions seem strained this time around and bear little resemblance or relation to anything like “fellow feeling” and so, ultimately, are uninteresting in the extreme.

Jim Harrison is the author of three novels—
Wolf, A Good Day to Die
, and
Farmer
—as well as several distinguished books of poetry.
Farmer
, the best of his novels, is a fine, realistic study of a solitary man who hunts and fishes the good country of northern Michigan, earns a living off the land he works, has a love affair with a schoolteacher, reads a few good books, is exceptional only in that he is a decent, interesting man of some complexity—a man Harrison obviously feels close to and cares about. It’s an honest book, scrupulously written.
Legends of the Fall
is a collection of three short novels—more properly, novellas—and appears four years after
Farmer
. It is Harrison at the height of his powers, and a book worth reading.

The best of these three works is a beautifully rendered story of just over ninety pages called “The Man Who Gave Up His Name.” It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, covering what might seem all-too-familiar territory: a change of life for a man in his early forties. But I think this novella can stand with the best examples the form has to offer—novellas by Conrad, Chekhov, Mann, James, Melville, Lawrence, and Isak Dinesen.

Nordstrom is the hero of “The Man Who Gave Up His Name.” (All of the leading roles in these novellas are played by
heroes
—no other word will do. By the same token the bad guys
are
bad.) Nordstrom is a troubleshooting corporate executive in Los Angeles with roots, like all of Harrison’s heroes, in rural areas of the Midwest. He gives it all up, career and family, and moves to the East Coast to take up a different kind of life—going to cooking school, for one thing. He has begun listening alone at night to stereo music as varied as Merle Haggard, Joplin’s
Pearl
, the Beach Boys, Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring
, Otis Redding, and The Grateful Dead. The life he gives up is one that he didn’t so much lose faith in as one which he totally lost interest with. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he is overcome with the feeling of “What if what I’ve been doing all my life has been totally wrong?” Nordstrom has a wife, Laura, a splendidly interesting woman in her own right who is involved in film production, and a daughter, Sonia, a student at Sarah Lawrence. During Sonia’s engagement party in New York City, which Nordstrom attends, he has a seemingly harmless altercation, after a few lines of cocaine, with a sinister trio: a black pimp and shake-down man named Slats, his white girlfriend Sarah, and their pal, a tough named Berto. After the extortion attempt, Nordstrom throws Berto from a hotel room window. Then he heads for the Florida Keys and a six-day-a-week job as fry cook for a little diner. He spends his mornings fishing for tarpon, and late at night after work he dances alone to his transistor radio. I don’t know how to put this without sounding corny, but Nordstrom has found his measure of happiness on this earth.

I can’t begin to do justice to the nuances of character and honest complexities of plot in this work. The writing is precise and careful. Ezra Pound may or may not be right in his assertion that fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing. John Gardner would likely disagree, but I think Gardner, too, would approve this story, not only for the beauty and accuracy of its language, its minute description of felt life, but for its wisdom and the lives it illuminates—including our own.

Each of these novellas is concerned with those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action. In “Revenge,” Cochran, left for dead off a backcountry road in northern
Mexico, is found and nursed back to health by a medical missionary named Diller. As Cochran slowly recovers his health, we are shown how he got himself into this fix: it was over a woman, another man’s wife. Tibey (means “shark”) Baldassaro Mendez is a rich, ruthless businessman who made his first million in narcotics and prostitution. Cochran, a tennis pal, falls in love with Tibey’s wife, the beautiful, cultured Miryea—they meet in Tibey’s library over a leather-bound copy of Garcia Lorca’s poetry. After several trysts in Cochran’s apartment in Tucson, Cochran and Miryea try to go away for a few days to Cochran’s cabin in Mexico, but they are trailed by Tibey and some of his henchmen. Cochran is beaten nearly to death, his car and cabin burned, and then “Tibey takes a razor from his pocket and deftly cuts an incision across Miryea’s lips, the ancient revenge for a wayward girl.” Now, several months later, Cochran’s twofold quest begins: to have his revenge on Tibey, and to locate Miryea.

Tibey has put her into the meanest whorehouse in Durango, Mexico, where she is forcibly administered heroin. But she recovers enough to stab a man and is then moved to a secret asylum for “terminally insane women and girls.” Several violent deaths later, part of a plot that often strains at the seams, Tibey and Cochran patch things up long enough to proceed to the asylum where Miryea is dying from, we can only assume, a broken heart.

Medical science cannot save her now. In the most primitive scene of a most primitive story, Cochran places a coyote tooth necklace around the dying woman’s neck. Then: “she sang the song he knew so well in a throaty voice that only faintly surpassed the summer droning of a cicada. It was her death song and she passed from life seeing him sitting there as her soul billowed softly outward like a cloud parting. It began to rain and a bird in the tree above them crooned as if he were the soul of some Mayan trying to struggle his way back earthward.”

Miryea then expires—no other word for it. Despite this
embarrassment, the epilogue that follows this scene is curiously moving, and the story itself is eminently worth your time.