The Sea-God’s Herb

CATHARSIS IN BEBOP: GILBERT SORRENTINO, THE FINAL NOVELS, & THE REDISCOVERY OF FEELING

Even in death, Gilbert Sorrentino goes his own way. The Abyss of Human Illusion, published posthumously in 2009, caps his output at twenty novels, but the math is complicated. Till cancer took him in 2006, Sorrentino never quit rejiggering what constitutes a novel. Thus his ’09 title isn’t some hash of the papers he left behind. Abyss appears with a forward by the author’s son Chris (himself a novelist), in which he admits to minor emendations but insists that the work was finished, its final adjustments made by hand. The argument’s persuasive, but not nearly so much as the text, which everywhere bears the old man’s trademark.

This is another novel without narrative—fifty Roman-numeral’d prose shards, otherwise discontinuous, in which form rather than content generates momentum. A few pieces appeared in ’07 in the magazine Golden Handcuffs, but in hard copy, we see that each is a bit longer than the previous. Abyss begins in flash-fiction and ends in three or four-page summaries of failure in various forms, something like the digressions establishing background in a conventional novel. Dream passages occur at what seem to be regular intervals, another touch of a guiding authorial hand, but even in dreams the material’s drawn from the ordinary. A structure that recalls Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has none of Calvino’s fantasy. A few lines of “Commentary” follow each section, and these if anything underscore the fiction’s basis in the real, as in this gloss on “highball:” “In this instance, Canada Dry ginger ale and Seagram’s 7 blended whiskey. The term ‘highball’ is no longer in general use.” Everywhere, the text goes out of its way to name names. In the process, naturally, it also punctures pretension and so supplies plenty of humor, never more so than when the subject turns to art or literature. Even the two artists of genuine gifts, here, exemplify what’s fraudulent about their calling. They live out the melancholy recognition implied in the book’s title.

A melancholy anyone can recognize, too: that of feelings never expressed. Old or young, the people in this text deny what they want; ill will and discouragement accumulate till they quash the life force. All about bringing what’s hidden to light, Abyss has no place for a bad sentence, though it weaves through diverse perspectives and rhetoric high and low: “He was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.” Then too, Sorrentino’s final quintessence sets its most moving anecdotes in his imaginative homeland of mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn. The players may transfer to Manhattan, but they never escape the beaten-down working class among whom the author was raised, and toward whom his brutal honesty is a form of empathy. He does urban realism as metafiction.

The man dedicated his career to the assault on expectation. In some cases he attacked head-on: no other serious writer generated such creative energy out of savaging the publishing industry. As early as 1971, referring to mid-Manhattan’s Powers That Be in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, he sneered, “You could die laughing,” and he went on dying for another thirty-five years. Nor was he reluctant to bite the other hand that fed him. Though he taught for almost twenty years at Stanford, his “Gala Cocktail Party,” from Blue Pastoral (1983), won a Pushcart Prize for its skewering of phoniness in the Academy.

In an essay on William Carlos Williams—his enduring inspiration—Sorrentino insists, “America eats her artists alive.” The culture, that is, celebrates creative spirits who produce “trash.” “Writing is most admired when it is decorously resting…the more comatose, the more static a mirror image of ‘reality’ the better.” So the great majority of his countrymen “employ language and techniques inadequate” to the times, creating drama via hand-me-down emotional signals, interactions across “a sea of manners.” In John Updike, to name one of his bête noirs, catharsis was nothing but a papier mâché of chewed-up and regurgitated convention. Trash.

Such contrariness finds its most direct expression, naturally, in the essays of Something Said, first published 1984 (expanded and reissued 2001). Getting beyond the sham that passes for represented reality also animates his dozen books of poetry, the best perhaps Corrosive Sublimate (1971), as well as the stories collected in The Moon in Its Flight (2004). Still, when it comes to the man’s novels, the work on which his reputation depends, one has to ask—well, how’s he do catharsis?

Innovative as he was, Sorrentino never suggests that a reading experience of two hundred pages or so can depend entirely on formal qualities. He recognizes that a booklength work in a language-based art form can’t help but engage the passions, and his rave review for William Gaddis’s JR bears a title that’s all about the passions: “Lost Lives.” His complaint about the common run of contemporary novels lies elsewhere, in the notion that they perform an emotional charade, as dated as the Gibson girls that decorate a creaky carnival ride (to borrow a pertinent metaphor from John Barth’s “Lost in a Funhouse”). All right then—what does he offer instead? Does his work construct a new apparatus for finding what hurts and making us share it?

Born in 1929, the product of immigrant Brooklyn factory workers, Sorrentino studied the literature of the English Renaissance, before and after a stint in the Army. He never took a degree, however, and he’s best appreciated as an autodidact who served his New York apprenticeship amid “an incredible artistic ferment” (to quote from a 2001 article in The Review of Contemporary Fiction). A jazz buff and a regular at the Cedar Tavern, the hangout of the Abstract Expressionists, Sorrentino moved in circles that included, by end of the 1950s, both Williams and the other figure with whom he’s most closely identified, Hubert Selby, Jr. He helped edit two cutting-edge magazines, Neon (where Selby was co-editor) and Kulchur, while paying work came with Grove Press and elsewhere. The first collection of poetry appeared in 1960, and his debut novel in ’66.

The author made revisions for a new edition twenty years later, but from the first The Sky Changes was notable for its prose. Even a brief sample conveys its striking combinations, coarse yet subtle, extending deep sympathy yet casting a cold eye:

They had another drink, and C told him how happy he was that his wife and P had finally decided to make it together, because he was good for the kids, and the husband agreed. So they lied warmly to each other and their friendship resumed where insanity and despair had cut it off.

Such a sample also demonstrates how Changes does without full names or direct quotation while also toying with chronology and Authorial intrusion. Nevertheless the novel presents a recognizable crisis, a divorce story. Then in 1970 and ’71, moving at a formidable clip, the author produced Steelwork and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.

These establish the mode at which he excelled: the community portrait. Portraits of misery, what else? Both books, however, fillet out any trace of bathos with deft cuts of hilarity and frankness. Also helping defeat sentimentality are the disrupted time sequence and, going further than Changes, the absence of any central narrative. Rather both novels achieve the equilibrium of a great bebop workout, in which every fresh racket loops back eventually to the head. Not for nothing does Steelwork begin with the Charlie Parker rave-up, “KoKo,” its “great blasts of foreign air” disrupting the afternoon of two young men in Brooklyn, 1945.

Brooklyn, to be sure: Sorrentino would seem autobiographical if his work weren’t so discontinuous, the solos of Steelwork scattered across fifteen years of depression and war and amid half a hundred players. “Gibby” and others recur, occasionally, but a more fitting model than the Bildungsroman would be the American immigrant tragedy, the stuff of Henry Roth. Among Sorrentino’s people, up by your bootstraps does nothing but expose you to worse punishment (indeed, Steelwork remains his most violent novel). But then Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things rejects even that typology, as it crosses the river to join the turn-of-the-’60s Manhattan art world. Or the world that it wishes it were—everyone’s on a budget and most prove to be frauds. Here Sorrentino works with a smaller group and a central consciousness, an unnamed narrator spinning loose-limbed anecdotes. This author figure fully comprehends what a bunch of losers he’s got as friends, even before they begin to betray each other. He needs only a single paragraph from an old letter to realize that one of the group, the short-story writer, Guy, has genuine talent. But the narrator sees as well that Guy’s a tormented closet case, without the spine to stand up to the Brahmins of publishing. In the end, the author can transcend his context only via his text.

Both books interpolate all sorts of borrowed language. Sorrentino’s natural poetic intensity opens up to allow bits of journalese, advertising, ethnic slurs, whiskey blather, and the sweet nothings of loveless sex. The shreds in the latter novel’s patchwork tend to be more colorful, the combinations more gleeful, a difference implied in the titles. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things comes from Williams, Kora in Hell, and the text also repeatedly references the poet’s famed passage “[i]t is only in isolate flecks that/ something/ is given off” (from “To Elsie”). Indeed, those lines might speak for everything Sorrentino wrote, though he would touch his old mentor for a title only once more, in his penultimate work A Strange Commonplace.

“To Elsie” is, among other things, a miracle of empathy. The poet gives expression to a reality far more brutish than his own, and Sorrentino’s assemblages from ’70 and ’71 share the same purpose. They forge wincing connections with their battered creatures, all the more striking when it also fetches a startled laugh. The work moves us to pity and terror, no less, Imaginative Qualities especially, though none of the wannabes who populate the book possess what Aristotle would call tragic stature. A signal case occurs when the omniscient storyteller struggles to make sense of Bunny, a pretty hanger-on, briefly and brainlessly married to Guy:

It would’ve been better had I simply not got involved with Bunny, she’s hopeless. I’ll bet you a dollar that she gets a job in a publishing house assisting a hip young editor…. She’s one of those bright, lovely, intelligent people who should never have been born. We’ll finish with her postmarital career by putting her in a Connecticut motel one December afternoon, with a gang of young, creative professionals, half-drunk. She’s in the middle of a laugh, those perfect white teeth. They’re all watching the Giant game. Bunny, who is now called Jo, suddenly recalls Guy’s absolute contempt for football: “For morons who like pain.” She looks around at her friends and hands her empty glass, smiling, to her escort. Her heart a chunk of burning metal. She will marry this man.

The scene, in narrative terms, comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. We never again encounter these young creative morons. Yet within the fiction’s abstract-expressionist whole, the moment’s a climax, its agony piercing. And within the career of the author, this pair of novels presents a creative peak.

Fifteen more books followed, none much resembling what E.M. Forster would call a novel, but two or three often mentioned as Sorrentino’s greatest. Chief among those would be his next big project, Mulligan Stew in 1979. His longest standalone work at nearly four hundred and fifty pages, the novel afforded his lone brush with wider recognition, in part because the means of publication courted controversy. The book appeared on Grove Press, where Sorrentino had been employed, and the text was prefaced by the rejections the manuscript had received elsewhere (names were changed, but thickheadedness left untouched). Reviewers, predictably, couldn’t resist, and most were respectful. Almost thirty years following its publication, in a brusque New York Times obituary, Mulligan Stew was the only Sorrentino book mentioned by name. It’s also the lone title that Frederick Karl examined, free of deadline pressures, in his critical omnibus American Fictions 1940-1980. Karl’s response was mixed overall, but not when it came to the novel’s madcap lists. He understood the usefulness of this device, first indulged in Steelwork but here exploited to the hilt: now enumerating the clutter of an old barn, now the inventory of mail-order sexual aids.

Lists provide a sort of safety valve when an iconoclast means to tell a story. In the Stew, Sorrentino presents a metafictional switcharoo in which the novelist Tony Lamont declines into madness while his characters attain freedom and power. A more ordinary Big Book would shape the reversal around mounting tensions and confrontations, but this one embodies the breakdown of “lonely, lonely Lamont,” by and large, with lengthy rounds of parody. The lists function as part of the comedy. They free the man behind Lamont from the sort of narration he found counterfeit and embalmed, even as they send him into verbal performances not unlike those found in a conventional climax. The novel closes with just such a bang, six pages of gifts (to people never mentioned previously), tokens perhaps for Lamont’s parting: “To Helena Walsh, the goatish glance of the cockeyed lecher; to Twisty Abe DeHarvarde, shimmering hose of glittering glows.”

Astonishing lists, and Frederick Karl grasped their purpose, but he found other elements of the Stew disappointing, indeed “unimaginative.” The tangle of underappreciated authors invented and actual wore him out, as did all the “fraternity-house male-female antics.” Such misgivings, from our present perspective, seem right. Sorrentino isn’t comfortable spending so long with just one character, and his comic games start to feel like he’s drumming his fingers—especially compared to the impact of what he delivered next.

What impresses one most about Aberration of Starlight isn’t its squib from Philip Roth, or its appearance the short list for the 1980 PEN/Faulkner Award. Rather, what stands out is its anomalous material, very nearly straightforward realism. The prose is flexible as ever, but within careful restraints; the present action occupies a single weekend in New Jersey, and the voices, both interior and spoken, are those of a few New York wage slaves at a cheap resort. It’s the end of summer 1939, and a Holocaust looms for these people as well, though this gloomy little masterpiece generates suspense not with war stories but via a literary experiment. Its devastation coheres only as we work through four successive points of view. Their order has the inevitability of aging: first a boy, then his divorced mother, her Saturday-night seducer, and the boy’s grandfather. The text’s brief spate of pornography feels apropos, unlike in the previous novel, since the character enjoying the fantasy is a salesman on the road. As for the actual sex, it may be Sorrentino’s most fully rendered, though unhappy and deluded, the participants more fragile than they’d ever admit: “She was covering herself up too, smoothing her dress. …‘I love you,’ he whispered, and they kissed again, chastely, but…[h]e wasn’t complaining, hell no. A hand job from a doll who’s almost a nun on the first date? Tom had no beef, kiddo.”

For the author, however, what mattered proved to be the experiment. Over the next twenty years, Sorrentino’s prose not only embraced radical alternatives to plot but also eschewed character tensions or other gateways to mimetic connection. Granted, he’d always flirted with such extremes. Between Imaginative Qualities and the Stew, he brought out the pamphlet-sized Splendide-Hotel (1973), its title drawn from Rimbaud and its form based on the alphabet. Hotel has a swift and satisfying zaniness, but its author took his recreation far further, throughout the 1980s and ’90s. With all due respect for Robert Coover (more respectful about narrative) or Kathy Acker (more direct in her social critique), it’s fair to say that, starting with Crystal Vision in ’82, Sorrentino subverted fictional norms more thoroughly than any American of his stature. By 1997, the late philosopher-critic Louis Mackey (himself a boundary-blurring figure, with cameos in two Richard Linklater movies) could claim that Sorrentino had brought off “the ultimate postmodern novel.”

In Fact, Fiction, and Representation: Four Novels by Gilbert Sorrentino, Mackey provides an exegesis of the ‘80s threesome Odd Number, Rose Theater, and Misterioso, and he argues that these small-and smaller-press publications amount to the “culmination” of the author’s project. The novels have since been repackaged on Dalkey Archive as the opus Pack of Lies (Dalkey keeps most Sorrentino in print), and indeed, it will be many generations before literary evolution produces a more bizarre adaptation. These scattered dregs of a murder mystery prove delightful at the level of the sentence, full of panache in a breathtaking variety of tonal hues. Any number of passages set you chuckling, and comedy is part of the trilogy’s raison d’etre, given how Sorrentino’s downbeat vision tended to constrain him whenever he worked in a realistic mode. But it’s comedy without humanity. The sexual hijinks have a sterile affect, involving names rather than people, names often recycled from earlier books. As for narrative coherence or its surrogate, an attentive reader will detect the occasional hint of pattern, but it takes an acolyte like Mackey to divine each fiction’s organizing principle. The climactic Misterioso is nothing so inviting as the eponymous Thelonius Monk tune. Rather, it’s arranged according to an obscure seventeenth-century catalogue of demons, their names and others’ worked into a double-alphabet, one proceeding backward and the other forward.

Pack of Lies does amount to a culmination, but one of baroque idiosyncrasy. For my money the more rewarding distillation of this author’s sensibility came a few years later, in the three books that preceded Abyss. These were Little Casino in 2002, Lunar Follies in ’05, and A Strange Commonplace early in ’06. Each seems a legitimate candidate for that hard-to-determine honor, The Best of Sorrentino, and Little Casino returned him to the PEN/Faulkner short list. Nor does the posthumous novel (though a bit weaker overall) reject what distinguishes the previous three, namely, their reassertion of emotional content, even in constructs that have no truck with convention.

Each exhibits great skill at stylistic modulation, but none indulge the excesses of Stew or Lies. Sorrentino’s done with sex-capades, his new plot-surrogates instead sophisticated yet apprehensible. The texts provide the sense of perceiving and completing a whole, a central pleasure of the medium, though via devices far from ordinary. That sense derives in part from devices like the number and the titles of chapters, and I’ll talk about one such case in a moment. But the developmental and unifying elements also include, for instance, the recurrent suicide fantasies of Strange Commonplace. Four decades into his vocation, that is, this tireless innovator found ways to approach the passions as yet another territory of the new. About those passions, to be sure, Sorrentino remains a cleansing agent; he strips away the veil of politesse and exposes what his people would prefer to deny. Nevertheless, his last books value the identification with another’s suffering as a core purpose for art made of words. In Abyss, an old writer finds he can’t quit despite his sober awareness that his work “proved nothing, changed nothing, and spoke to about as many people as one could fit into a small movie theater.” Still he continues “to blunder…until finally, perhaps, he would get said what could never be said.”

But before I blunder myself, turning all warm and fuzzy, I need to test my hypothesis against Lunar Follies. If I mean to say that in his final novels Sorrentino recommitted to something like opening a window on the soul (the very idea!), then this effort from ’05 presents my steepest challenge. As the title implies, the book is out there. Plot, protagonists, chronology are nowhere to be found. Casino and Commonplace revisit the broken families of mid-century New York, their meager lives undergoing biopsies of two or three pages each. Strange Commonplace brims with haunted figures; it makes a lovely valediction. But Lunar Follies hardly has people in it at all.

The book collects trash, the kind of thing its author spent a lifetime contending against. The “folly” refers to the detritus of the art world, as Sorrentino dreams up catalogue copy for exhibits beneath contempt, as well as numbskull reviews, vicious gossip, and so on. There’s also an academic deconstruction, hopelessly clotted. Stranger still, each chapter or whatever you’d call it is titled with the name of some lunar landmark, some fifty-three mountains and seas, arranged alphabetically. Nonetheless, this mooncalf wears a leer we know well. From the first page, “It’s on to the snow-chains story; the heat-wave story; the story of the tough coach and his swell young protégé; the killer-hurricane (with puppy) story…”—it’s on, that is, to brief but scorching rounds of parody, in contexts always easy to grasp. In this opening instance the butt of the joke is narrative itself, story, and that’s a pertinent target, certainly. But throughout the rest of the text the particular art form matters less than the degradation it suffers, in one piece of poshlost after another, where the wit swiftly clusters and explodes. As Sorrentino’s moon illuminates his detested “sea of manners,” it’s more satire than parody, it invites participation. Likewise, though the book is densely intertextual (as one might expect given the subject), a reader doesn’t need to catch all the isolate flecks to appreciate the fun. Consider, for instance, the list of personalities in what appears to be a photography exhibit. The chapter has an Italian name, “Fra Mauro” (the moon highlands where Apollo 14 landed), and the exhibit is titled “Our Neighbors, the Italians:”

Familiar Carmine, who cursed out a Puerto Rican mother, hey, why not, they breed like animals.

…Benign Giannino, who once read a book for fun.

Garish Richie, who has a mouth he shoulda gone to law school.

Exuberant Frankie Hips, who don’t mind moolanyans if they mind their fuckin’ business.

No-nonsense Gil Sorrentino, who worked a dig at ethnic solidarity into nearly every one of his books… Wisecracking Sorrentino, who was rarely so eager to have you follow his snarling tune. Yet it’s not the rhetoric of Follies, but rather the structure, that best demonstrates how the writer developed new apparatus for catharsis. Most of the book’s longer sections, wouldn’t you know it, occupy the passages named after those wide-open spaces called the moon’s seas, and since these start with the letter S, the novel reaches a kind of climax, with its late entries among the most complex. Among the least comical, too. “Sea of Clouds” touches on “regrets” and “gravestones” before concluding “Don’t see nothing too goddamn funny here;” other “Sea” chapters offer little or no satire, instead casting shadows of mortality over the project they’re concerned with. So they create, of all things, an epiphany, a pang of insight. In this surrogate climax, the elements dramatize how paltry would be the gain, a few bucks or a few strokes, from even the oiliest con. They assert, with Flaubert, that of all lies, art is the least untrue.

To argue that Gilbert Sorrentino’s book-length prose was ultimately about what’s true might seem a dubious exercise. In the first place, anyone can see that his novels never pandered to the market place, and in the second, the last thing I want is to pester him in his grave. To him the T-word was a signifier long perverted by abuse, and so he constructed his novels to enlarge their field of discourse, to put as much distance as he could between himself and that abuse. Maybe, by dint of that wide-ranging exploration, he also located some fresh ground where once again truth could be itself, vulnerable and volatile. That’s my contention, anyway: that this author came home now and then, and when he did he found it a place of greater power and durability precisely because he’d first gone on so far an odyssey.