Glancing furtively around in the hopes that no one saw, but also to hope that some sympathetic person may have, Tom (or Eggbert, or Winston, or Merriflower, or, hell, why not… Cuthbert Diogenes Allen?) leaned against the wall a bit as he stood up… Working to look at least a bit intentional, he straightened the wrinkled brim of his fedora, and kept walking, trying to keep his tipsy gait to a minimum, but most likely looking all the more obviously drunkardly for the attempt. Though he wasn’t one to look upon the bright side, to trod the sunny-side of the street, he did feel a bit of relief that his fall had not torn this, his last remaining suit, and that the dirt that was now caked upon it was a similar shade of brown to the fabric.
Though it had just but rained, the dirt upon the street still seemed dry, yet clotted. He found that his shoe toes were repeatedly getting caught in this dirt, due to his lack of compassion for the dirt, his shoes, and his day in general. It had been another failure. Another ten hours at Eine Kleine Leeretasse, propped up in the small table at the window, where he could be just as easily spotted by passerby, as he could pretend he didn’t care if he was, many sheets of pedestrian, yet gruelingly slaved over, writing denied (yet stored, crumpled in his pockets, just in case a day came when they become a moment of brilliance) while dropping his last pennies for strong coffee, then further more for a little bit of bourbon, and finishing off his last pack of Dunhill’s in the process… The process of no progress…
At least, unlike many multitudes of other sad and failed souls, Cuthbert didn’t actually exist anywhere but in the sparse and spontaneous edges of my momentary vision, so his ills were of little worth, and would soon be long forgotten.
Inspired by failed attempts to think of anything to do with some books that contain the symbolic remnant of my lack of authorship, I have decided to take a look at them, en masse, and di-re-gress over this territory.
My initial statement of this, interlude 1, is thus. Whilst a child, well, mayhaps a pre-teen, I was an avid reader of hard sci-fi, dark fantasy and Tintin books. I didn’t have any interest in Grown-up literature. However, there were three books that I saw amongst my mother’s books that I felt intrigued by: Henderson the Rain-king, the Dwarf, and A Clockwork Orange. I eventually read all of these, but it is the first with the most relevance here (the Dwarf will definitely appear later in this series). Saul Bellow’s Henderson was the first “adult” book I ever read and, at least in my mind, it set my “literary” eye for years to come. Through him I developed a fascination with post-war central/east European man-writing. Saul Bellow’s prime writing took place in the two decades following the second world war and, though he was from Canada, his parents had emigrated from Russia. Hence his connection to what I catalogued as “post-war eastern European literature”. So I guess it started here. While I continued to read sci-fi, I kept a fondness for that book and upon reaching adulthood, and the inclination to buy books, the books that I was led to by my interest in Bellow were the books that I pursued. Of course, living in the envisions of (and later, in the employ of) Powell’s Books was extremely helpful. Coincidentally, the founding of Michael Powell’s original bookstore was financially assisted by Saul Bellow…
Interlude two is that when I was 21-22, I spent quite a bit of time at the home of a science fiction writer (Steve Perry). I was there enough that he mentioned me in the acknowledgements of the book that he had been writing (The Albino Knife), just two spaces after their hairdresser. Being impressed with the lifestyle of a professional writer, I decided to abandon my goal of being a teacher of medieval eastern European history, and instead become a science fiction writer. So I wasted much spare time over the next few years attempting to write that, before I decided try my hand at a darker, more philosophical, literary direction… Creating my own, overly self-conscious, version of post-war European literature, or as I referred to it in the email earlier today that led to this blog post “dry depictions of the struggles of worn-suited, tobacco-reeking, lonely and middle-aged European men, trudgeingly suffering through making their way in “life” by expressing their brilliant philosophic observations about the brutal mundanities of drab realities via their clunky portable Royal typewriters and ink and smoked stained fingers, to the undeserving, downtrodden masses that surround them.” Which I did not succeed at…
However, over those years, I did accumulate a nice, albeit not large, collection of this post-war European-style literature. I have given away a bit of it already, and am currently hauling about a couple more boxes to dump but, before it’s all gone, I may as well write up a bit on it and the authors that I envied.
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