As it seems so often many true artists must die to
earn their recognition, so it was with me and Robert Stone.
In my mind, when I learned this time last year
Stone had died, he was a mean old drunk who as a young man had
written a couple of novels. I'd read one—Dog
Soldiers—and had not been able to get
very far in the other, his first novel, Hall
of Mirrors. I remembered Dog
Soldiers as compelling but bleak. Hall
of Mirrors was giving off the same
artfully crafted sense of doom when I started it, and I just wasn't
up for another downer. Life moved on. There were plenty more downers
to come, more than enough as I see it, but without Hall
of Mirrors.
Never got back to Stone. I recall seeing his name
once in a feature article. He'd been recognized in a bar drinking
alone, somewhere tropical, I believe, looking uncommunicative. When I
saw his name again, on novelist Ed Gorman's blog, it was accompanied
by news of his death at age 77. Gorman lauded Stone
as suffering from “the Graham Greene problem--yes he was a
brilliant novelist but he was also a brilliant storyteller. There are
Those who distrust this combination, notably, as William Goldman
maintains, The Nobel Prize Committee.”
The New York Times obituary Gorman included mentioned that Stone had
published a memoir “about his years in California as one of Ken
Kesey’s Merry
Pranksters.”
The connection with Kesey was something I hadn't
known. I clicked over to Amazon, found the memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, on
Kindle for $1.99 (since inflated to $10.29), bought the download with
another click. Read it that night. Was delighted to find Prime
Green is a helluva lot more than
memories of hanging out with Kesey. In the vernacular of the time, it
blew my mind. This part won my heart: While in New Orleans with his
pregnant bride and looking for work Stone was smitten by the
attractive daughter of a Christian road show's proprietor who offered
him a job. He accepted the offer, then went home to his wife.
I looked over at Janice. And I thought, She’s done it to herself,
committed to all this too young; she was just a kid. Committed to a
louse like me, she’ll find out what a selfish creep I am. She can
pass the baby to her parents; they could help her, and she could have
a life. And in turn I could have a life and cross those continents
and oceans to where life was richer. To embrace fate, to live out the
cruel rituals of life at the core of the flame, to do and to see
everything. Oh, wow! To have the courage to be brutal and to reject
convention and compromise...
I snuck another look at her, and indeed she
looked beautiful. And being so young, she looked innocent and
trusting. She looked as though she loved me. So. At that moment I
knew that I was not going anywhere. I loved her and that was fate. If
I stood up to leave, my legs would fail, my frame wither, my step
stumble forever. All my strength was subsumed by this rash, so
unwise, too early love. There was no hope, except in this woman.
I felt infinitely relieved, happy for a moment
as I would hardly ever be. I thought: This rejoicing shows my
mediocrity. Just another daddy Dagwood bourgeois jerk. Because if I
had been destiny’s man, I thought, I would have walked— strided
away with my bus schedule and my backpack, ready to ride from
Chickasaw Lake to the Great Slave. But I was not, I could not, not
any more than I could fly. I guess I also knew at about that moment
that I would never leave her, not ever, that this thing was forever.
Your great soul, your world historical figure, would have walked. Not
Bob. Not your daddy, children. Leave your mother? No.
They remained together for the next fifty-five
years, to his death.
After Prime Green
I read A Flag for Sunrise
and Death of the Black-Haired Girl.
I'm completely hooked. Eventually I shall dig Hall
of Mirrors out of whatever box it's
stashed in with the hundreds of books I've yet to unpack since my
latest move two years past. Stone wrote Hall
in New Orleans after resigning himself to his “mediocrity.”
Mediocrity, my ass. I'm re-reading Dog
Soldiers now. It's not the same book, I
tell you! And I'm not the only one who feels this way. “A Robert
Stone book repays multiple re-readings,” Madison Smartt Bell wrote
in The New Yorker. It “will always reveal new facets on a second or
third approach, will always give the reader something substantial and
new—which cannot be said of very much else in our fin
de siècle fiction.”
Moments ago, re-reading the “funny little
fucker” sequence in Dog Soldiers
affected me so profoundly I started pronouncing the words aloud,
alone in my apartment. I remained stunned by its power well after
closing the book and driving to the public library, where I sit at
this instant, still under its spell.
Another New Yorker writer, Thomas Beller, attended
a reading by Stone in 1992 of a scene from his new novel at the time,
“Outerbridge Reach.” Beller was struck by a moment in which the
author became emotional. Stone “read another passage, in which
Browne comes ashore in the middle of nowhere and discovers a
burnt-out shack, carbon black, on which strange graffiti has been
scrawled. He sees a stick covered in white flaking paint on the
ground, and, deciding to make a mark, he writes a phrase. I don’t
recall the exact words, just that I found them a bit sentimental.
Stone, however, was moved. His voice became gravelly with emotion,
and his face flushed red. I was surprised by this, and then
embarrassed, both by the nakedness of the line that the character
scrawls, its near cheesiness, and the nakedness of Stone’s emotion
about it. I thought that he might weep.
“Thinking about the reading...this week after
hearing of Stone’s death, it occurred to me that I should look up
what, exactly, he had read in “Outerbridge Reach” that got him so
emotional—what it was that Browne had scrawled onto the shack with
his white stick. Looking in my copy of the book, I found this: “Be
True to the Dreams of Your Youth.”
[find more Friday Forgotten Books reviewed at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog: http://tinyurl.com/338ftrx]
I read HALL OF MIRRORS a few years ago and found it remarkably prescient about the rise of right-wing talk radio and its ability to stir up listeners with no regard for consequences. I have another of his books on my tbr list (the title escapes me right now, it's about an attempt to adapt Kate Chopin's THE AWAKENING). I live in southern Louisiana, so Stone's books set there are of more interest to me than some of his others.
ReplyDeleteThe guy was a phenomenal writer. I'm working my way through the entire oeuvre.
DeleteWell, Rush Limbaugh's a piker compared to Father Coughlin.
DeleteTrue dat.
DeleteI must have tried Hall of Mirrors five or six times, but couldn't get into it. What I do know is that I still have my old paperback copy in a box probably in my garage.
ReplyDeleteYou and me both, Kent. I may end up downloading the Kindle version rather than dig thru all my stored books.
ReplyDeleteI read OUTERBRIDGE REACH when it came out. The story of a man setting out in a sailboat on a solo, around-the-world trip was terrific.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen Redford's movie All is Lost yet, Elgin, but I can't help wondering at the apparent similarity with Outerbridge Reach.
DeleteYes, I was thinking of that film, too, when writing my comment. You should definitely check it out.
DeleteMostly I read what nonfiction he was publishing in the likes of ROLLING STONE (IIrc) at the turn of the '80s, and only scraps since. Time for me to gather more books!
ReplyDeleteRemarkable to pretend the narcissism of a Kerouac is The Way of Really Living. Or even to convince one's self thus.
Especially considering their chemically hurried denouements--Stone, emphysema; Kerouac, cirrhosis.
DeleteMathew, I was not familiar with Robert Stone's fiction until now. Thanks for spotlighting the author and work I will certainly look for his books.
ReplyDeleteYou won't be disappointed, Prashant.
Delete