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Rob Swigart's review of 'The Tokyo-Montana Express'
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Review of 'Still Life with Woodpecker' by Tom Robbins and 'The Tokyo-Montana Express' by Richard Brautigan

by Rob Swigart?

Usually we think of the very good and the very bad as far apart, the very bad somewhere down on the bottom, beneath sight or contempt, and the very good as a lofty and visionary peak where esthetic rapture dwells. But I think now that the very good and the very bad are not far apart at all, but close together, and that some writers work close to that line the way a bullfighter works close to a bull's horns. Too close, and its very bad — gored by the horns of sheer tastelesness. Just close enough and it is truly sublime.

A couple of recent books have suggested these notions: Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker, and Richard Brautigan's The Tokyo-Montana Express.

Both books were surprises. Here were two popular and important writers associated with the sixties' counter-culture. Like the Beats? before them, these writers were romantics: intuitive, irrational, concerned with extravagance both of behavior and perception.

But this is a matter of style, really. One supposes there are romantic bullfighters and classical builfighters, and that it is how close to the line they work which determines the quality of the performance.

Robbins used to work close to the line. He worked quite close in Another Roadside Attraction, and although he got nicked once or twice, they were just superficial flesh wounds, quickly healed. After Even Cowgirls Get the Blues he was probably carried out of the ring on a stretcher, bearing one ear and the tail. But now, in Woodpecker, he is bleeding all over the sand. He crossed the line; he was fatally gored, and that was that.

Was he careless? Indifferent? Foolish? It doesn't matter, he's been gored by page one and never recovered; he continued the fight a walking corpse, swishing his cape with simulated life. I suppose most people know this by now, but that isn't what I want to talk about. I want to talk about that line. That immeasureable line, and about fear.

The fear is what the other bullfighters feel when someone is killed in the ring. They gather at the cafe in that merciless plaza sun and speak together in hushed tones. "Did you hear about...?" "Yes." "It was over in an instant." It is the fear of failure, of it could have been me, of next time...? Because the very bad is waiting there, in the crazy angle of the next bull's horn, the way his head tosses to the left in a Hemingway story. There it is, and there is nothing to be done. Someone was gored, one moment alive, smiling from his dust jacket assured, his cape back from the cleaners, a new uniform with real gold glittering in that pitiless sun; women moan in the stands for him, faint with admiration and humid lust; the sand is clean and freshly raked, and a hush has fallen over the crowd, for he is one of the truly blessed, one of the greats with grace and poise and power.

Next moment he's just meat.

There is slow head-shaking there in the plaza cafe; grim, abstracted looks. Why did he do it? How could it have happened? He was so skillful so sure of himself. Then the analysis: he lost touch, grew fat and overconfident, let himself get out of shape. Too many parties, too many women and expensive drugs. Sloppy and careless.

After that, the other bullfighters, even the students, get angry, and the anger is at themselves as much as the one who is gone. We don't work close enough to the line, we don't take enough risks, that's why we don't please the crowds. He started working closer to the line, and the loud admiration, the repeated "Oles!" forced him ever closer until suddenly there he was, on the other side with the very very bad, the horn of plenty skewered through his innards. We can still hear the catcalls, see the crowd throwing the remains of box lunches or fruit rinds at the body stiffening on the sand before they all go home in disappointment.

I thought that with Brautigan's Tokyo-Montana Express it would be as if I were going to the bullfights in a small Mexican border town on a three-day pass from the army. I expected a stand-off, with twilight gathering over the ring and the audience at last tossing rented pillows at the exhausted contestants before heading home through that desolate evening traffic. I had read one or two other Brautigan books and wondered what the fuss was all about. Surely his proper arena was that small and dusty bowl in Juarez. To me his popularity had been inexplicable, like Tiny Tim's.

I was wrong. Here were passes that were understated, even subtle. A quiet, compassionate and serene style, working quite close, Manolete? in Nuevo Laredo. Not always close, of course, not consistently brilliant in that quiet, unpretentious way. Not always possessed of that sense of quintessential Japanese sabi, or wabi, or shibumi, that self-effacing expertise and quiet "poverty" so important to this style. But often enough there is something memorable, an anecdote or a fancy one wants to share, pass on or make ones own. When I finished the book was dogeared with stories I wanted to reread. Stories that seem to work quite close and never get gored.

The curious thing was I expected him to die, to be skewered and bleeding before the trumpets had finished, dragged off, and the next contestant out there in the ring. Instead, I found myself applauding the small motion, the brief compassion or revenge or observation. Brautigan's real strength is in these quick but detailed anecdotes of a writer surprisingly free of arrogance or conceit, surprisingly graceful.

This does not tell us where that line is, why some writers cross it, or even why Manolete got out there in the ring and died almost before this young malformed bull got to him. Woodpecker is as dead as its author, its characters ghosts of earlier books, metaphors disconnected, lackluster, both desultory and arrogant. Robbins quotes himself in the same breath with Camus?, as if they were somehow up there together, above the crowd.

He says, "Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end." Tom Robbins apparently is unaware that he has answered Camus' question in the affirmative.

This sounds spiteful. In fact it is; and fearful. The crowd cried for more, and I am a member of the crowd. So we cried for more, and the man acted as if he were doing us a favor to turn his back on the very bad, to walk around the ring gesturing at the audience as they cheered and threw flowers at him; to be run through while be smirked bravado at us.

Does the line have to do with the crowd? Do the expectations of the audience affect the book itself, or should we somehow, as in New Criticism, treat each book separately from its author, a unique and hopefully perfect object in and of itself? Is Still Life With Woodpecker disappointing because we expected too much? We expected Manolete and got some grubby espontaneo leaping from the stands into the ring to make a couple of passes before the picadors dragged him off?

Certainly fans do expect something. And the fans have lined up at bookstores to buy Woodpecker. I don't know whether they are disappointed or not, but I did try thinking about this book as it were by someone else, someone whose work I did not know.

It is still a bad book. Over the line. But clearly it is not over the line because the author was working too close, was trying hard, but because he absolutely did not care.

Then it occurred to me.

Still Life With Woodpecker is not by Tom Robbins at all!

Still Life With Woodpecker is by someone else, a clone, perhaps, or his drug dealer. That's someone elses body out there, collapsed on the sand, waiting for the meat wagon. Tom Robbins is too busy doing other things to write books like this!

What a relief!

There have always been great writers who worked close, and they had their lapses, too, moments when first one foot, then both feet were over, and the bull bore down. But they recovered, stepped back. They knew it was there, and if concentration fell off for a few moments, for a book or two, it was because they were trying something new, some complex and elaborate pass of the cape that had never been done before; or possibly because they were tired, in an inferior ring, facing second-rate bulls, and had too many debts, responsibilities, anxieties. They would be forgiven in the end. They would live to fight again with the old style and grace. That, at least, is what the whispering at the plaza cafe is all about, the rueful drawn looks, the despairing shake of heads. But the wings of fear have brushed over us all.

The line beckons, and writers should answer the call, should dare to work closer, fans or no fans. It is concentration on the moment, the task at hand, and not a response to the crowd's chants of muerte, muerte muerte that is important.

This kind of fiction, this outrageous play with language, these screaming metaphors, this surreal sense of the absurd predicament of late Twentieth Century America, is about that line, I think, that moment when the best becomes the worst in an instant. Because it is not simply a moment in literary criticism, it is also an interface, a fault line, perhaps, in American culture itself, that place just the other side of what is great, a supremely tacky place, but a central locus in America: Las Vegas, say.

The line is responsible for this extended Hemingway? bullfight metaphor, for this kind of book is Hemingway's stepchild — the emphasis on the extraordinary, on grace under the pressures not of death any more, but of drugs, free love, outlaw community. Robbins' hero is an acid rock outlaw, a mad bomber (based on a real bomber, one who killed, inappropriate for a heroic role). What might have been good about the sixties drug culture and political activism is here empty echo of someone else's ethic. The Grateful Dead?? Willie Nelson??

And, like Hemingway, often sentimental.

There is a deep emptiness in Woodpecker, an absence of engagement, of character, of emotion and relationship, of language. The distressing thing is not so much the emptiness itself, as the apparent ignorance of it. This would be a proper subject for this book, as it is a proper subject for our time, but Robbins doesn't appear to know it.

A chill wind blows across the sundrenched plaza when this void is sensed. Because it is not so much the emptiness, nor even the lack of awareness as it is the fear this calls up in all of us. For this could happen to anyone! The crowd calls for more, the publishers call for more, and there isn't any more: only the death of talent, the demise of spirit, the end of everything. But the lure of the quick buck is there, and the quick buck is just that, quick.

Quick as the horns of the bull; it must be caught as deftly, and if the publisher insists on the quick buck, then the author must help him out, must, in fact, want it himself. After all, those bucks pay for the ranch, or the kid's education, the horse or the fishing trips, cars or cocaine.

Otherwise, there is, perhaps, only silence or exile forever from the New York Times best-seller list. So the temptation is great to provide the publishers, and then, perhaps, the crowd with what they want — anything. Old stories, grocery lists, cancelled checks, discarded ideas, poison pen letters, hallucinations and fever dreams. But it is vital here to close the eyes, to ignore the void, to stuff the fear. To commit, in other words, a kind of emotional and artistic suicide.

The fear is there in all of us, in anyone who must perform. In part it is the fear of not being able to do it again, of not coming close to the line, of, in fact, falling short; so it is not really the fear of crossing the line, it is the terror of producing a bad second book, or fourth book, or nineteenth book. And when someone dies in the ring like this, everyone feels the cold wind.

Brautigan fell under the lure of having to perform, to answer the cries of the crowd; he crossed the line, and recovered.

Recovery may depend on a kind of humility. It may depend on a sense of belonging, no matter how strong the rebellion. Many American writers are Hemingway's children. Whatever one thinks of Hemingway as an ancestor, he is American, and he gave us the bullfight as a metaphor.

Hemingway is there in Trout Fishing, and in the Montana sky, in a closeness of observation and simplicity of language. Themes and landscapes are similar and they are, even when they appear foreign, American themes, American landscapes. The Tokyo-Montana Express mixes the hippy interest in the east with the Montana sky, the New Mexico desert.

The best stops on The Tokyo-Montana Express have an authentic gentleness and lack of sentimentality, an acknowledgement of ambivalence and paranoia, spite and the hunger for revenge which is the result of an evolution begun in the fifties with the Beats. The prevailing mood then was that the military-industrial complex mentality blamed it all on "them" the Russians, the Communists, fellow-travellers: them. Then, in the sixties, "they" became the military-industrial complex itself, those paranoids in Washington, or Detroit, or Dallas. The great discovery of the seventies was to look inward, and to discover that "they" in fact, were us.

So I applaud him, for here is an unflinching appraisal of himself and his culture, not so much with the wisdom of hindsight as with an acceptance of growing older, of responsibility: things rejected in the sixties' rush for liberation. Since I too am growing older, I appreciate Brautigan's efforts; and since so many of the media heroes of that time have become stockbrokers or est devotees or professional talk-show guests, it is good to know that with one writer from the sixties at least, Socrates' dictum has come back into fashion. Brautigan has returned to the study of himself, and has gotten to know what he is studying with grace and humor.

While Robbins appears to hand us a facile philosophy of sexual liberation, lubricated peachfish and psychedelic rapture, of what was indulgent and ultimately false from the sixties, Brautigan often gives us a homely and valuable truth.

I hope Robbins can recover, as I believe Brautigan has. But Camus' question hovers overhead, that question of self-destruction, whether on the horns of fame. success, drugs or mere contempt. But I hope he recovers. because while I sit here in the middle of December and stare out at the cold gray clouds, I am also seated in that plaza sun sipping strong drink because of the fear, the hot breath on my neck.


American Book Review? 3,3
March/April 1981



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