Madness, Road Tripping and Me

 Kh and I have had some discussion - email and over the telephone - about the chapters of "Chasing Ashes" I am trying to turn into a novella.

He wrote the following in response to my forwarding to him This Week in Books: The Landlords of Literature:

Seriously, if you want to do this fictional/historical mix that is your business, and since as you explained last night, he's still mad, you can have them in the backyard drinking vodka and philosophizing about the stars.He's just a delusional man at peace with himself. 

I may have sent my friend around the bend. What has twisted him up is my insisting the narrator is sane and that Edgar Allan Poe, Omar Khayyam, and Captain Ahab has taken up residence in a small Indiana city. Along for the ride as the narrator's mental health counselor is Dr. Pangloss. All of which I drop into the reality (or is it a reality) of modern America.

This Bob Dylan song inspired me as well Dylan's Desolation Row, Tangled Up in Blue, and Rosemary, Lily, and the Jack of Heart.. 

So, it may not be my character that is mad, but myself. Here I am a 63 old white male, felon, former lawyer, with on story published, thinking he can do something strange, out of left field, that anyone will want to read. It is not who I think I am, but what have I got to lose?

I probably less trouble imagining fictive characters thrust in the historical world. I have been enamored of Sherlock Holmes since I was a kid. I used to have a copy of Nicholas Meyer's Holmes pastiches. The most famous of these being The Seven Percent Solution had Holmes being treated by Sigmund Freud. Ellery Queen published the first of the Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper novels, A Study in Terror. I would count these as much an influence as any literary fiction.

I would blame Somerset Maugham for putting himself into his fictions. Clive Cussler did this in one of his novels. Then there is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, with a young Philip Roth recounting life during the Lindbergh Presidency. I read The Eyre Affair and a few more in the series by Jasper Fforde while in prison. (I saw today this review from Book-Blog, Anthony Horowitz, The Sentence is Death, for another example.) However, I have not been so interested in autofiction. That seems like an even harder sort of job, and I am not finding my life so interesting. Besides, I can do more with a character than I can with myself.

I cannot discount the influence of Alasdair Gray's Lanark. The influence has been two-fold: 1) that one can write from the literary hinterlands; and 2) its transitioning from the allegorical to the realistic, pointed for me to the limitations of the realistic novel. I will admit any resemblance if of a very pale nature.

The story hangs on the narrator making a trip through southeastern Indiana. KH made a reference to On the Road. I have read On the Road twice. I still don't get it and cannot really see the influence of On the Road. I do have Kerouac and Dean Moriarty as characters in one scene. I did so because they're among many examples of Americans making a road trip. More relevant to me is the idea of America in flux.

Then there are the movies. Those Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies where he is alive and well and fighting the Nazis come to mind. There were others whose influence has outlives their titles.

Also, influential are items like Sean Nam's review, The Bulgarian Psychiatrist – Thomas McGonigle in Full Stop. Which makes me wonder if I went deep enough with what I am doing, and gives me a target:

...As he shows in The Bulgarian Psychiatrist, McGonigle answers only to the cogency of his own emotions: the impulse to hack away at the human veneer, to get past the dross and into the marrow of the bone, to achieve writing that, as the French confessionalist Michel Leiris once described for himself, enacts “a drama by which I insist on incurring, positively, a risk—as if this risk were the necessary condition for my self-realization as a man.”

 KH said the thing was not really for him, that he was more attuned to Hemingway.

That got me to thinking about my own stuff and why I did not think a purely realistic novel would work, or that i wanted to see if it would work. It seems to me Hemingway marks off the death of one culture, the culture that was killed off by the First World War. Here I am thinking principally of The Sun Also Rises. What I do not feel is the either/or of culture. Instead, I feel a pluralism of cultures. 

Then there is the question of history. I do not recall Hemingway being all that interested in history. I will presume there was an assumption between Hemingway and his readers that they had a shared view of history – it was something to escape (just like Buck Mulligan in Ulysses). Not that the short story, which Hemingway is a master, allows for much except for the immediate action, but there is no real history in For Whom the Bells Toll. Fiction as journalism is what I call it.

What interests me are the cultural trappings, the history, each of us carries with us. Ideas, as I once read in William James, lead to action. I cannot think of any Hemingway character interested in ideas. Cojones, yes; ideas, no. John Dos Passos's characters in The USA Trilogy have more ideas, and they act upon them. I will go out and say F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby addresses all these items, without confronting them where they might undermine the romantic notion of Gatsby. I propose that America is an idea populated by ghosts.

I seem to carry with me images and ideas of our American past—Natty Bumppo and Bob Dylan; Thoreau on his pond and Andrew Carnegie; and so on. Some ideas I feel operate as concrete characters. And that's what I have done.

Whether it works, we will see. I still think the idea of the novel portraying reality needs to include the intangibles of reality, including ideas.

Where we get our ideas and how we act on those ideas inform our reality. A writer like Hemingway seems to me to portray the consequences of actions. We can evaluate the values underlying those actions by way of their consequences. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is in my mind as I write this. What I do not recall are the characters considering their ideas. I do not think of this as my reality.

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