Sams in a Dry Season
By Ivan Gold
Houghton Mifflin, 244 pages, $19.95
Though there are many kinds of novels about alcoholics, all of them
(including this one, in the jacket copy) get compared with Malcolm Lowry`s
”Under the Volcano”-a comparison that is usually irrelevant. Lowry`s Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, belongs to that dedicated minority among drunks, the career men and women who know very well that they are destroying themselves, and very often why.
For most people, including many alcoholics, this atypical stereotype-which embraces the bum sleeping next to his pint in the doorway, like Francis Phelan in William Kennedy`s ”Ironweed”-assures them that if they are still holding down jobs and wearing a tie there is no way they could be lushes, no sir.
Ivan Gold`s Jason Sams is a member of that second and far more numerous tribe of alcoholics; and like many a drunk it has taken him more than 20 years to resurface (he made his first appearance in Gold`s first novel, ”Sick Friends”). Alcoholics of Sams` sort might admit that their lives are in ruins, but they fight, sometimes to the death, against acknowledging that the cause of it all is the same thing that gets them through the day. Like any other addict, the alcoholic has only two real concerns-getting high and getting by-despite all such frills as spouse, job, kids or writing that novel. Gold became famous in the literary circles of Eastern colleges 37 years ago for a publishing a story about a gang-bang (”A Change of Air”) in the Columbia Review that critic Lionel Trilling, then teaching at Columbia,
”could scarcely believe . . . had been written by an undergraduate, for it had a sureness of touch, a richness of detail, and a sense of performance such as are hardly ever to be seen in the writing of very young men,” as Trilling said on the bookjacket of Gold`s 1962 collection ”Nickel Miseries,” which included ”A Change of Air.”
As it happens, in ”Sams in a Dry Season,” Jason Sams also publishes a book of stories, ”Just Desserts,” in that year, and in 1969 he too brings forth a novel, ”Slow Dying.” But in 1972, neither of these volumes impresses Fanny Wallenda, the psychiatrist Sams consults for aid with a writing block.
”Your verst book vaz aggzezzible, though nod verst-rate, despide vad Lionel Drilling had to zay on ze cover,” she says after reading his work.
”Your zecond book is far verse. . . . He is an algoholic, this Jazon Zams. Und zo are you. You must go to AA.”
But it will be another four years before Sams-and presumably Gold, who here explicitly blows his fictional cover-is ready to spend his life ”chasing God in church basements.”
Ordinarily, it would be impertinent for a reviewer to assume any identity between the author and the main character of what is very likely an autobiographical novel. In this case it`s important not only to do so but also to emphasize the novel`s point-to-point correspondences with what is known of Gold`s life and work, because it`s all part of a brilliant narrative strategy that might well make ”Sams in a Dry Season” the first of a new literary genre, the frankly semi-fictionalized confession that contains both a fictional and a ”real” authorial self.
In any case, making the distinction between the two is the hinge that opens the door to the novel`s meaning and impact. This assurance is necessary because at first the reader is likely to groan at all the symptoms of a roman a clef coming on, not to mention Gold`s familiar (though masterly) use of page-long run-on Faulknerian sentences.
We`re likely to have the same reaction as Sams` old friend, the architect Pisacano, who also appeared in the earlier novel, when Sams tells him the subject of his new book: ”Myself, my life”: ”You did that one already! You want a movie, don`t you? There`s no backing for a one-character movie.”
Gold might well have called this novel ”The Found Weekend,” because it stands in probably intentional opposition to Charles Jackson`s ”The Lost Weekend,” which told how one of the career men mentioned above failed to make it to the haven that Sams/Gold safely reaches after a weekend trip to his native New York in 1976.
Sams has just been gently fired, because of his drinking, from a job teaching creative writing at a Boston college and has decided to revive his moribund literary career by going to New York alone, leaving behind his embittered second wife and only son, and trying to hustle his new editor, who replaces an endlessly indulgent and suddenly deceased old friend at his publishing house, into still another advance on a book Sams has not even begun to imagine, much less write.
His failure to lever a cent or a promise out of the hard-eyed Maduras is the first of several shocks that Alcoholics Anonymous calls ”hitting bottom.” Another is the death of a favorite uncle, his father`s identical twin, which his ever-loving family didn`t bother to tell him about, ”knowing how busy you were writing.” And overall Sams encounters a thinly veiled mixture of charity, contempt and brutal frankness that finally makes him realize that (surprise!) people are treating him like some kind of drunk.
The multiple consciousness of the lush who makes all kinds of allowances for his ”problem” in his life yet refuses to admit it, the self-loathing intertwined with self-indulgence, the whole complex behavior and thinking pattern of his doomed last-ditch stand to salvage both his hefty daily ration of booze and his self-respect-all this is perfectly rendered by a fluent and supple style that brings several time levels to bear on the events of Sams`
found weekend.
The turgid, unchanneled stream of an alcoholic`s mostly painful memories continually washes over Sams: ”The past wasn`t prologue, for Jason; his history was some spectral film he wasn`t even sure he`d been awake for,” full of horrors and humiliations that make him writhe whenever they pop like corks to the top of a polluted pool.
Readers who, unlike Fanny Wallenda, admired the mannered brilliance of
”Nickel Miseries” will find here what are probably the stories behind the stories of ”Kimiko`s Tale” and ”Taub East,” which are about Army service in occupation Japan, as well as of the much-anthologized title story, ”The Nickel Miseries of George Washington Brown,” which is the best story about basic training ever written.
But the real payoff is that Gold has found a way to render hitting bottom by having the third-person narration about Jason Sams yield to and mingle with an ”I” and ”me” that we are meant to understand as Gold abandoning the fictional alter ego on which he had projected the responsibility for his drinking.
Alcoholics Anonymous has been done and done again, but never better than here. And those who relish the wild, woolly and sometimes horrific gallows humor of AA testimony will find the best meetings ever put on the page-not to mention a completely realized personal and artistic triumph for Ivan Gold. Sams` dry season looks very much like Gold`s harvest.
