Hypocritic Days & Other Tales
By Douglas Woolf
Black Sparrow Press, 399 pages, $25, $15 paper
Wall To Wall
By Douglas Woolf
Dalkey Archive, 190 pages, $7.95 paper
On Us
By Douglas Woolf
Black Sparrow Press, 127 pages, $5 paper
If that estimable enterprise the Library of America manages to retain its vigor, one day we may find ourselves holding a squat little volume-some 800 pages ought to do it-titled “Douglas Woolf: Novels and Tales.” But then it’s just as likely that the work of an author so important yet so randomly known will, over time, simply disappear from the face of the earth-making Woolf a one-man, ex-post-facto entry on the endangered species list.
Thus it’s a particular pleasure to welcome Black Sparrow Press’ “Hypocritic Days & Other Tales,” which gathers Woolf’s first novel, a host of long-out-print stories (at least five of which find him at the top of his form) and a valedictory novella, “The Timing Chain.” Added to the novels “Wall to Wall” and “On Us,” this suddenly doubles the amount of available Woolf and lends practical savor to this attempt to explain what the man and his work were about.
Born in New York City and raised in Larchmont and Connecticut, Douglas Woolf (1922-1992) had a dappled background. His was a family of some means, achievement and social standing-his father was a world-renowned expert on Persian rugs, his stepmother was the granddaughter of Thomas Edison, and he was at Harvard with Norman Mailer and Jack Kennedy-but somewhere along the way a fracture occurred. Severe marital and parent-child strife is a frequent theme in his early work; and the poet Robert Creeley once said that Woolf “had literally rejected a patrimony that would have made things much easier.” (That event may be alluded to in “Hypocritic Days,” when Woolf writes, after a hostile dentist tells the novel’s main character to “spit out the blood”: “His wish was to refuse the command, to dispose of his own blood as he saw fit.”)
Also crucial was Woolf’s experience as a young American Field Service ambulance driver in North Africa in World War II. In “Wall to Wall” a monologue by the book’s hero, Claude Squires, gives us a glimpse of what Woolf found there:
“There was nothing unusual about the truck parked by itself a little beyond the camp, it was an ordinary open-bed truck, Dodge, similar to the old-fashioned garbage truck. . . . No garbage truck I’d ever seen had smelled like that. I knew at once what was causing it, but I walked over for a look anyway, or perhaps because. The driver must have been waiting in chowline with everyone else . . . so I was all alone. . . . He had a full load of soldiers in his truck, thrown in, their arms and legs and heads in various positions and attitudes that I’d never seen before. They were mostly French, a few Arabs, and despite their uniforms they didn’t look very important any more. Later I learned that if you watched men die, especially if you’ve known them at all, they still look important afterward no matter what you have to do with them, but I was inexperienced then.”
Elsewhere in “Wall To Wall,” we see where this has led, geographically and emotionally:
“It was to places like (Arizona) that they had sent him all over the world in defense of New York, until he had come to believe that the concrete caverns and towers he seemed dimly to remember, the pale people themselves, were no more than childish fantasies he had dreamed for himself. . . . It was his loss alone that he could not play at their game with them, but he could not.”
So Woolf, who thought of the wolf as his totem animal, became what he called a “migrant worrier”-living an itinerant life (ice cream man, caretaker, seller of his own blood, etc.) that usually allowed him, his first and second wife and his two daughters to barely scrape by. But it gave him the room he needed to write; and nowhere in his work is there a trace of romanticism or self-pity about the choices he made.
Woolf’s first novel, “Hypocritic Days,” about a group of Los Angeles teenagers gathered around a brilliant cripple, was published on a shoestring by Creeley in 1955; and it and the stories that appeared in little magazines of the period led Grove Press to publish Woolf’s second novel, “Fade Out,” in 1959. This noble, heartbreaking book (words that fit much Woolf wrote) tells of two friends in their 70s-a retired bank teller, Dick Twombley, and a huge former boxer, Behemoth Brown-who flee the nasty offspring with whom they’ve been living and head for Arizona.
“Fade Out” had a peculiar fate: It was runner-up for the Prix Fromenter, an international literary award that would have brought Woolf the impressive sum, by 1959 standards, of $10,000. Later, in translation, it became a best seller in Poland, though one suspects that few dollars made their way to the author from behind the Iron Curtain. Finally, Woolf believed that “Fade Out” was the uncredited basis of Paul Mazursky’s 1974 film “Harry and Tonto,” which earned a best actor Oscar for Art Carney. The resemblances between the novel and the film are undeniable, but at this distance all one can say is that the experience inspired the surrealistic Hollywood episode in “On Us” (1977) and added to the air of paranoia that hovers about Woolf’s mental landscape.
His aficionados commonly regard “Wall To Wall,” published by Grove in 1962, as Woolf’s best novel; and the ease and shapeliness of this tale-in which a young writer drives from the West to the East Coast-make it the book most likely to convince readers new to Woolf that he is a major artist. But “Wall To Wall” also marked the end of a phase in his career.
The heroes of “Wall To Wall” (Claude Squires) and “Hypocritic Days” (Charles Ashton, a would-be poet) are both rather callow fellows who haven’t accomplished much in the realm of art or elsewhere, while the man at the center of most of Woolf’s future fictions would be a fairly direct projection of the the man who wrote them. Rather than narrowing the focus of Woolf’s work or making it self-indulgent, the near identity of author and hero in “Ya!” “John-Juan” (both 1971), “On Us” and “The Timing Chain” (1983) seems to have been a release-allowing him to create two astonishing identifications with non-human life, the novella “The Spring of the Lamb” (1971) and the story “HAD” (1977), both in the Black Sparrow collection.
As things stand, “Fade Out,” “Ya!” and “John-Juan” remain out of print. Of the shorter works, the Black Sparrow collection lacks only the complete text of “Notes for an Autobituary” and “Cougher,” a calm, terrifying story that invites and withstands comparison to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.”
Woolf’s work is single-minded in impulse-like Swift, a more obviously enraged but related ironist, he sets out to depict commonly ignored or denied principles of order. (“In the long run, it’s the thing we hide that counts,” says Charles Ashton to his father in “Hypocritic Days.”)
On the other hand, Woolf commands a generously varied range of tone. Moments that are almost jokes: “He picked up his double martini and drained off one of them” (“Hypocritic Days”); “She believed in the old-fashioned virtues, such as sewing samplers, preserving fruits, and putting your husband to bed in an inebriated condition” (“Mr. Weatherwax and Psyche”) typically shade off into passages that seem like straightforward description but find the language playing sly little games with itself:
“. . . his father stepped nimbly into the frontroom, wearing that embarassed, depreciatory smile which seemed to beg no compliments for having landed on both hind feet from some overhead trapeze” (“Hypocritic Days”); “People who talk on public telephones acquire the eyes of owls, and prefer to use them peripherally. When looked at straight they turn their heads, which they’d rather not” (“The Timing Chain”); “. . . they reached the jagged, painful shadow of a concrete stadium, all cracked and crumbled from standing thirty to forty years in the center of an oval parking lot” (“John-Juan”); “The door of The Caboose was open, for air or welcome-or neither one. As Lou stepped in, so people glanced. This was not a family restaurant. The old men hunched in separate booths. A pale mother sat in another one, opposite her weeping daughter. A young man sat at the counter. The one behind it was small and hot. Lou sat down in front of him, beneath the fan, and he moved off to stand in front of the other man” (“The Timing Chain”).
Full of torque and curiosity, such sentences imply a particular kind of narrative motion-one that poet Edward Dorn identified when he wrote that each of Woolf’s first three books is “the occasion for an Odyssey.” In terms of plot, that is almost literally the case in “Fade Out” (Dick Twombley and Behemoth Brown begin in New York City and end up in an Arizona ghost town), “Wall To Wall” (Claude Squires drives from Los Angeles to New England) and, especially, “The Timing Chain” (Lou Webb departs the Rocky Mountains on an expedition to Boston that comes close to exhausting his resources and leaves him wondering how he can make it back home and whether he will be welcomed if he gets there).
But the odysseys of Douglas Woolf are literal in another sense, too: One feels he doesn’t know where a given work will take him until the writing gets him there, that he just won’t impose a preordained frame over a thought in progress.
This has nothing to do with the supposed virtues of spontaneous prose, for Woolf was a scrupulous craftsman. Rather, it means that when he went in search of systems of order, he knew that the quest must be radical-without recourse to, as fellow novelist Paul Metcalf once put it, any “you-be-patient-all-this-will-come-around-to-have-a-meaning devices.”
One of Woolf’s favorite tactics makes this clear: the way so many of his fictions begin with one foot in the air and then prolong almost beyond reason that step into near emptiness. Here, for example, is the beginning of “HAD”:
“It was a good job. He had made it of clover grass, interlaced with violet, a formula of his own. He had lined it well with down. No string. She had helped of course. Had. Over the years they had developed a way of aerating the down which he had not seen used before, though no doubt by now some were copying. It was accomplished by collecting the down in a leeward place, fluttering it with the wings. . . . He had always thought to show the children how it was done, so that the way would not be lost or misconstrued, but the children were always gone so soon.”
This is understood to be the story of a bird about the time one gets to “wings.” But though they may seem similiar, Woolf’s temporary mystifications are quite unlike that familiar journalistic trick in which, as in the old Dragnet series (“It was 10:45 a.m. We were working Robbery on the day watch. . .”), definite articles are tagged to as-yet-unnailed-down nouns or pronouns to create an air of immediacy and portentousness.
As critic John Russell has explained in his essays on the non-fiction novel, when such devices are put to use by hard-core practitioners like Tom Wolfe or Truman Capote, the goal is to flatter the audience, to con us into thinking that we and the writer are already wised up and working together on something big. But Douglas Woolf leaves things up in the air because he hopes that the feeling will be truly mutual-that we will not only help guide them back to earth but also agree with him as to when and how to do so. “To my first friend” is the dedication Woolf attached to “Wall To Wall.” Relationships of that sort are what his work proposes.
