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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting,
VISIT OUR AFFILIATED ART GALLERIES Summer
2003, Volume Two, Number
Three, Third Edition
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HOMAGE TO RICHARD FORD
The following is from Ford’s first novel, A Piece of My Heart, published in 1976. Ford was 32. When he had worked for Rudolph and had lived in the shack on the sluice gate and listened to the radio at night, he had liked to walk out in the dusk with his shotgun, step across the bridge over the barrow pit, and stand on the old man’s levee and s hoot bullbats against the orange twilight, where they showed up like razors, gauging shots to hit two birds crossing and spin them into the moss trusted reservoir like elm seeds, slapping the surface with their wings until they drowned. And in the morning, he went across the pit and down the levee to close the pumps, and he would look out into the strumpy water and see nothing but black turtles stretched along the deadfalls, sunning themselves in the milky light, and hear the grasshoppers buzz in the grass and there would be no sign of the bullbats, though they always came in the evenings in greater numbers than before. Immediately
one knows he is in the presence of a major talent. Whether or not that
talent will deliver over a long period of time is yet unknown, but it is
there, and it will be of great interest to watch his career unfold, his
talent increase. Not that it is lacking much of anything at this early
stage. Of
course he is a Southerner. He is from Jackson, Mississippi, and a
graduate of the state university, in Oxford, with a branch at Jackson.
He grew up seeped in the traditions of the old South, the writings of
William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. And his first novel has a huge debt
to Faulkner. It is chocked full of countryside which they shared. And
Faulkner’s style has heavily influenced Ford; how could it have not? At
the same time a fresh major talent is emerging. In this first novel,
Ford’s lusty female, Buena, owes a lot to Faulkner’s Eula Varner in The
Hamlet, and practically acknowledges the debt in the intentional
similarities of their names. She
also serves as an in-joke for those who have done their literary
homework and can see what fifty years or so have done to their heroine.
Women now are demanding orgasms and know how to achieve them; there are
various recipes for achieving them, and they are no longer victims or
passively the object of a man’s lust. They have lusts of their own,
and insist upon having satisfaction. Ford has a lot of fun here, and so
do we. The
novel is much more than a lust story suspended between skillful
anticipation of a climax that will not occur until the last pages of a
fascinating narrative, and if we are keen at all to the nuances of
Ford’s storytelling we won’t want to have it any sooner—even
though we may suspect that it will be an anti-climax. A great
story-teller will string us along with yarns and having us at his mercy
with hilarious diversions and side-trips that may be headed anywhere
except straight ahead. There
are jokes which we’ve all heard before and can see the punchline
coming, but, hey, that’s okay. He is a young writer, with a story to
tell, many stories, in his own convincing (if sometimes overly long)
manner. The gag, when an exhibitionist shows himself off to a
knowledgeable young woman, “What’s that? It looks like a penis, only
smaller” is not new, and needs somebody like Bernadette Peters to tell
it to make it truly hilarious, but Ford can be excused for biting, for
it was evidently new to him. And a good joke is not greatly diminished
in being skillfully retold. If
one can see a climax coming, does that make the climax any less
significant? Not if it is well done. And everything Ford does is well
done. This
novel is the story of two men, Robart Hewes and Sam Newell, who have
nothing at all in common except that they are stranded on an island
together and must make the most of a bad deal going worse. They are
encamped at Mark Lamb’s swamp camp that is leased for the major
purpose of providing turkey and duck hunting to a group of wealthy
businessmen who are so self-important that they forget to call up and
tell their host that they are not coming this year. This is not a fraction of the story, however, and the cast of ancillary characters is rich and fascinating. There is the ex-baseball player Landrieu, a huge black who is referred to to his face by the N-word, as we call it today. Ford uses it as it has always been used in the American South, as descriptive and neutral and fondly familiar. There is Lamb’s wife, who is glued to the radio and a solitary Spanish-speaking radio station she can barely comprehend. And, back on the mainland, Gaspareau, who has no larynx and speaks through a vibrator at a hole in his throat. He is an employee of Lamb and maintains his Lincoln Continental on dry land and arranges for ferry service to Lamb’s lodge. And,
far in the background, is W.W., sometimes just called W., who is Buena's
husband, a talented baseball player doomed (good Faulknerian word to use
here) to always play minor league ball, despite a major talent, or so we
are told, because Buena likes it that way, and despises him and his
friends, and cuckolds him deservingly, but who gets his comeuppance in
the end. Or almost does. So much for lipservice to Ford’s plot, and apologies if I haven’t gotten it all straight. He is a storyteller, and the telling sometimes gets in the way of the narrative and, nearly always, in the way of the chronology. So we are back in Faulkner Time, when the past is always present and never “past,” in the sense of being over or done with. It is fate who delivers justice and injustice alike and unevenly. Fate is inescapable. This makes for a kind of persuasive realism and irony. I
think a bitter irony may be a good way to characterize Ford and his
writing. He is a true joy to read, and I include a few samples of his prose below. An ordinary writer often has trouble getting a character from one room to another without lighting a trail of cigarettes. Ford can make a simple bucolic scene come alive as very few other writers can. This
makes following him from scene to scene, sentence to sentence, a trip in
itself. Quote
is from A Piece of My Heart, p. 237 At
the foot of the bluff the road commenced out through a tall shadowy
bottom where most of the big trees were dead or in a state of corruption
, except for sprigs of green isolated in the barren crows where the
sunlight kept them alive. The roots had elbowed through the oaty ground,
and the trunks had a pale brownish veneer banding the bark three feet
off the ground, and there were no limbs on the larger trees nearer than
thirty feet from the ground. There
was, too, an unanticipated air change in the bottom, a cool insularity
and practically a solemnity, he felt, the high interlock of dead
branches and higher foliage tangled and interwoven and causing the
underneath to be protected and sequestered from the island proper. [p.
259] The
wind began to post off the lake. He could see the sock sprung out in the
air field, the funnel showing east. The clouds had blackened and were
revolving fast and moving the air in different directions through the
trees and under the house. Elinor [a dog] woke, winded, and relocated
herself behind one of the pilings. [p.
270] A single crag of blue sky was just apparent where the rain had passed and left the air clean. The sun was below the plan of the fields, refracting a bright peach light behind the rain. He let the truck swagger down the side of the levee into the fields and onto the bed that was draining water off the high middle. I hope to add to this essay on Richard Ford as I pick my way through the handful of novels and short story collections I haven't previously read. (More on Ford to follow, as I inch my way through his work this sunny summer.) Robert
C. Arnold BACK
ISSUES |
Seven Reasons Why The Seattle P-I Should Remain The P-I and Just About As It Is. Joel Connelly, Susan Paynter, John LeVesque, Bill Virgin, Regina Hackett, Art Theil, David Horsey. Anyone want to buy the Seattle P-I? It's for sale. Yep. Price undisclosed and maybe not even sincerely up for grabs, because the Hearst Corp., with bottomless pockets, is the most likely buyer, if any can be found. And the proposed sale is probably a legal gimmick in the latest round of jousting to either end or continue the joint operating agreement that has given the city two newspapers for so many years. It would be a crying shame (boo-hoo) to lose the P-I, the most vital of the pair. True, the Seattle Times now offers a sizable read during one's morning coffee, but it is dull as unbuttered toast. It has moved into the P-I's traditional territory as only an oligarch can in its attempt to stifle competition and to attain a monopoly. Which is a shame, for all but a controlling tiny percentage of the Times is owned by the San-Jose based Garnett chain. Frank Blethen of the Times, technically the family owner, is adamant in shooting down its rival, whatever the cost, and has manufactured a case of three-consecutive years of financial loss, to justify his case, even though a newspaper strike resulted in one year of those losses, and the others may have been "encouraged" by bookkeepers to abet the third. Why else would the Times want to keep out a citizens' group of respectable leaders who are lobbying for a two-newspaper city? To those who say this writer may have a hidden personal interest in the P-I, let me state that I was fired (1977) from the P-I's newsroom. Of course I was fired from the Time's newsroom (1950), also. So, fair's fair. Robert
Arnold Who Wants to Live in a One-Newspaper Town? Not I. So I was glad to see Superior Court Judge Greg Canova rule in favor of letting a citizens' committee intervene in the public interest in the lawsuit filed by the Seattle Post-intelligencer against the Seattle Times's action to end the joint operating agreement, which has permitted the city to enjoy two newspapers for so many years. Not that the rule will assure anything, of course. The court will do that. But we think the Times' publisher wants a monopoly, and we (the reader) will suffer, and we will be left with "the good, gray Times," instead of the more spirited, interesting, and objective P-I. "Eliminate your competition," is the first law of cold-hearted business. Imagine, if you can, a Times that is even more what it has been all these years, without the P-I pressing it for accuracy, fairness, and objectivity. I can. Actually, I live in the country, but the choice up here is even worse. It is competition, too, that makes both papers deliver to the hinterlands. "Don't give up a customer, no matter what it costs you." That's the ticket. Featured Poet, W. S. Merwin
TO THE BOOK Go
on then of
course you are not finished never
mind whoever
I was Below, from his 2002 translation of the Middle-English poem, Sir Gwain and The Green Knight: ["]It
would have been better to have proceeded more prudently and from The River Sound, his long poem "Lament for the Makers," that is, other poets now dead. Two that some of us also knew: then
the sudden news that Ted and another: and
James Wright by his darkened river and from his wonderful long poem, "Testimony," another reflection on Wright: my
life was never so precious These are good examples of Merwin's verse. The rhymed lines sometimes sound like doggerel, except for the fact that they are finely tuned and tight. The free, "unstoppered" verse tends to run on syntactically, and the reader briefly feels disoriented, until he realizes that all the normal rules of grammar and rhetoric still apply. For those who still feel annoyed by Merwin's technique, I offer the following assortment of periods: . . . . ., and some commas: , , , , , , , Feel free to sprinkle them in, wherever and whenever you feel the need. But, remember, you will be testifying to your own--shall we call it?--lack of attention. And your failure to read this excellent poet carefully. Two from The Moving Target: INVOCATION The day hanging by its feet with a hole in its voice And the light running into the sand Her
I am once again with my dry mouth THE POEM Coming
late, as always, How
many time have I heard the locks close and because Merwin tends to write long, I can only include the marvelous start of this poem from The Mask of Janus: HERONS As
I was dreaming between hills I
became the quiet stone and two from Green With Beasts: DOG DREAMING The
paws twitch in a place of chasing BACKWATER POND: THE CANOEISTS Not
for the fishermen's sake from the Drunk in the Furnace:
Surely
that moan is not the thing and a more recent poem, one in the more recent style (for which I've issued you a number of periods, or full stops, to be used (like aspirin) according to need: PEIRE VIDAL I
saw the wolf in winter watching on the raw hill and still no period? Okay, I agree; none is needed. And I apologize for the short lines, and the line spacing for so narrow a column width, but it is a great poem, and the poem comes through beautifully, with no loss of meaning or intent because of this formatting situation. Not many poems would. Anybody wonder who Piere Vidal was? I looked him up on Goggle and found he was a Twelfth Century troubadour. Google asked me if I wanted a translation from the French, and it had been a long time since I took the graduate reading exam in this language, so I said, "Yes." What I got was curiously interesting. I repeat it, verbatim: "Peire Vidal ( ... 1183-1204 ... )
"Peire Vidal is the most
original troubadour of this period. It accepts and is made pass itself
for a little insane. It is a large traveler. Its poems inform us about
itself, thanks to allusions of which it has sparse its work. He left the
lower middle class of Toulouse. The
monk of Montaudon says to us that he was "a
pellicier" (furrier). Nice,
eh?
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THAT OLD FISKETJON GANG OF THINE For one brief shining moment, Binkie, we experienced A Literary Moment. It was back in 1968, and The Gang had gathered at Tess and Ray's place, Sky House, at Port Angeles, Washington, ostensibly for a fishing trip, but really to renew old friendships and to compare notes on how everything was going on the personal and literary scene. Nearly all were writers. One was an editor for a prestigious publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf; the others were four of the best fiction writers of their generation. They knew it, recognized each other as peers and as their main competition. Yet they sparked each other, and make one another better than he might have been. Raymond Carver, Robert Stone, Tobias Wolff, and Richard Ford. Add to this group Toby's brother, Geoffrey and Editor Gary Fisketjon, to whom, nearly two decades later, and Carver long dead, Ford acknowledged in an afterward to his fine short story collection, A Multitude of Sins: "I wish to express, for the thousandth time, my gratitude to Gary L. Fisketjon, Bill Buford" an editor at the New Yorker ". . . and L. Rust Hills," the long-time fiction editor at Esquire. It is seldom that a finished writer pays such tribute to his editor, but Ford did, and does. Such help and encouragement is important to a writer and helps sustain him through hard times. Below are some of Gary Fisketjon's protégés, and lists of their work. They comprise some of the best writers of the past half-century:
Richard Ford Women With Men Ford is one of the finest writers we have, and acknowledges Raymond Carter as not only his "pal" but an indirect influence, making certain it is not thought that this group of men writes out of its collective experience, or even personal experience, but carefully crafts its fiction artistically, no matter how much it may seem to some readers and critics that their stories are drawn nearly directly from life. Ford says this is a destructive assumption. {See featured article, left column.] Tobias Wolff
The Night in Question Tobias dedicated his memoir of the war in Viet Nam (In Pharaoh's Army) to his brother, Geoffrey, who "gave him books." Both are skilled writers and, along with Ford, sometimes seem to resemble each other in their world view and personal lives. Sometimes it seems as if they could have written each other's stories. That is, they sound much alike. This would be a detriment, except for the fact that the stories are so good. They ever called themselves, The Gang, and would probably resent it, but they got together whenever they could and kept in frequent communication. As gang-members sometimes do. Often they planned watery gatherings. When they were on the East Coast, say, at Cornell, where several of them taught, at various times, they went sailing on Toby's boat. They liked to fish. It was a time for fun and relaxation. It was also a chance to recharge their batteries before the next literary effort. Toby has published less than I had thought. The Barrack's Thief collection reprints all the stories from In The Garden of the North American Martyrs, and adds one more, the title story. This is a dirty trick, perhaps one forced on him by an eager publisher. Yet the story is excellent--really a novella of seventy some pages. It alone is probably worth the price of the book. His recent work is fresh and strong. No repeats in later books. Each story is a carefully crafted gem. He is one of our best.
Geoffery Wolff The Duke of Deception:
Memoirs of My Father Older brother of Tobias and a fine writer in his own right. A bit more scholarly and biographical in his interests. (See above.) Both sons have written telling accounts of their charming, scoundrel father, who walked out on his family, then entered back into the boys' lives at various points, before he died early. The Duke of Deception is Geoffrey's version of what went on. (Toby describes it in a late chapter In Pharaoh's Army.) Raymond Carver Cathedral and his collected poems, Known primarily as a writer of short stories, when he was dying of lung cancer, and the companion, then husband, of poet Tess Gallagher, Carver wrote a lot of substantial poetry. It has been collected and published by Knopf. Yet it is his fiction that made him famous in literary circles and to his peers. His titles were particularly arresting, and his best books took on the catching title of a good short story and gained from it. "Cathedral" is one, "Where I'm Calling Form," another. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is noteworthy enough a title to make him memorable without having read him. He was called "The American Chekhov," but the name was later aptly applied to his friends, The Gang, as well. They wrote remarkably taut short stories that owed a lot to Hemingway, as well as Carver. Themes of isolation, alienation, loneliness, and frustration distinguish their fiction. This is expressive of the human condition, not just the American experience. Carver says it about as well as anybody has. Robert Stone
Damascus Gate The war in Viet Nam was central to the experience of young writers coming into maturity in the Sixties and Seventies. Carver did not serve and was older, but the others did, and wrote about it. Stone's novel, Dog Soldiers, is considered a war novel, and draws on those years, but is really about the heroin traffic in Southern California. Veterans of the war, disillusioned as all veterans are constitutionally, live a nihilistic existence and live only to get high and to make money they don't know how to spend well. The book was made into a successful move, "Who Will Stop The Rain," which hints at this naturalistic determinism and tragedy. Yet it is all highly sophisticated and desirable. Stone's biography says that he was born to a schizophrenia mother, abandoned by his father, and attended Catholic School. He says he quit high school because he drank too much beer and was "militantly atheistic." In such a situation, a writer often enlists in the Navy, and Stone did. He returned after four years, attended NYU, read Kerouac and Ginsberg, got married, fathered a daughter, went West, palled around with Ken Kesey, and started writing seriously. About the time Carver was hitting his stride, Stone was, too. He won a Faulkner Foundation award for best first novel and got a Guggenheim. He joined the others of The Gang in being Writer in Residence at a number of welcoming universities, including Stanford.
And now we come to the c[l]ub master, or gang leader, Gary Fisketjon, who knew and encouraged them all, this band of renegade writers who, one after another, found fellowships, publishers, and universities that welcomed them into the heart of literary society. What a paradox.. I know little about him accept he chain-smokes unfiltered Camels and has been described as a cross between Maxwell Perkins and Steve McQueen. (That would be an odd mating to have observed!.) He is from Oregon and wears country/western garb, even in Manhattan. This is mostly hearsay. I had a pleasant exchange with him about ten years ago, over a book, and one with Rust Hills of Esquire, ten years before that, over a short story he published. Maybe someday I will write about them .in Kingfisher Journal.. Sooner rather than later, I suspect. Robert
Arnold,
books
NORTHWEST MYTHOLOGIES, The Interactions of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson, by Sheryl Conkelton and Laura Landau, Tacoma Art Museum, in association with University of Washington Press, 2003; full cloth, $40
This is a poor title for a great book. Well, okay, a good book. These four superb artists comprise what is known, ever since September 1953, as the Northwest Mystics. Life Magazine named them in a featured article. But the authors of this new book seem to have gotten the words "mystic" and "mythology" mixed up. They do not have a common root or common meaning. The artists are, unarguably, somewhat mystical in their combined efforts. Comprising a mythology they are not. [Now, Coyote, Big Foot, and Paul Bunyan are mythological figures, Northwest ones, but they never existed. Tobey, Graves, Callahan, and Anderson assuredly did.] We have long needed a comprehensive book on these important painters. When Delores Tarzan Ament's book, Iridescent Light, The Emergence of Northwest Art, came out in 2002, I thought we had it. High on persons and personalities, it was light-weight when it came to understanding the art these men produced and how it was made. We learned a lot about them, thanks to Ament's research and, especially from Mary Randlett's sharp, homey photographs, who was helped a lot by her mother's strong personal relationships will all four painters and her daughter's ability to visit with them and photograph them more or less informally (even though most of the photos look posed.). But the book was lacking in the art department. And it seemed determined to avoid discussing the artists' personal relationships, some of which were homosexual. (Only Graves's "encounter" with Neil Metzler in Callahan's Granite Falls cabin was mentioned in the book. Perhaps this was because Metzler happily and proudly described it to the book's author.) Conkelton and Landau have produced the book we had wished for, well, up to a point. It is the expensive catalog for the Tacoma Art Museum's current show, and was intended to be a tribute to the new building and its display capabilities. The book concentrates on the painters interactions between the early Thirties to the early Fifties, some twenty years. And then it stops, ostensibly because the four men had drifted far apart, and this comes as a huge disappointment, for the case could have been made (and was) that they had parted company at various earlier periods, then come (often reluctantly) back together out of friendship sometimes but more often need. Of course such a book might go on for another 50 years, and I wish it had, for it is so good. But I know how these artists all continued to produce mature work, two of them into their nineties. (Anderson and Graves.) Tobey, the eldest, died in 1976; Callahan had just taken a bold new turn in his painting and was producing huge, wavy canvases of personal joy. And Morris Graves, during that period, had turned to delicate tempera paintings of transcendent flowers. Anderson painted up until the time he died. That Anderson and Graves were lovers should not come as a surprise, but Ament super-discretely avoided the subject, though it was mystically alluded to in the correspondence that was readily available to her through her access to her mother's papers and other documents in the UW's archives. In the Conkelton/Landau book it seems to be tactfully discussed and related naturally to the excellent painting both these men produced during their youth traveling together. Such talent! And what mutual respect. The book is important in its main mission, which is to show how personal relationships pollinated each other's work and strong influences flowed back and forth. Often it is difficult to tell one man's work from another during the same decade. Two or more picture juxtaposed cleverly can be confusing to someone who thinks he knows their work well. And there are many influences from outside the group. The color plates are the best I've seen. Marquand Books, Seattle, and C&C Offset Printing, Hong Kong, are doing fine work. It is nice to handle a book bound in cloth, one that opens flat on the table and is so well sewn that its pages don't begin to fall out when it is fully laid out to read. I've seen about 80 percent or more of these pictures before, either at a gallery or reproduced in a book, but they shine forth anew, my old friends do. Conkelton and Lanau have done a thorough job of researching the material, as the copious footnotes attest, and when they don't find a source make keen guesses. The two women have worked together before, and with Martha Kingsbury on the catalog to the excellent Henry Gallery exhibition, What It Meant to be Modern, in 2000. That book too stopped about 1950. One hopes the three of them put their heads together again and bring their next effort up closer to the Twenty-first Century. We'd all benefit from the experience. Robert Arnold, Editor/Publisher
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