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- - - - Copyright Baltimore City Paper
- - - - Writers In Residence: Local literary lights Madison Smartt Bell . . . Provincial Prose More Words from the Odd Couple of Baltimore Letters By Michael Anft - - - - Anything Goes
I.
- - - - They may have set up shop on the same side of the street, but you'd be forgiven if you've never mentioned authors Madison Smartt Bell and Stephen Dixon in the same breath. The former writes sweeping and shimmering historical novels with considerable formal derring-do, when he isn't penning smaller slice-of-life tales. The latter channels the blood and bile of his life through an old typewriter and fictionalizes it, often refitting and retrofitting a story several times before a reader's eyes in an exercise that is improvisational but not terribly jazzy. Bell is the novelist-as-observer-and-unearther, and one of the best this country has at it; Dixon is the novelist-as-gutwrenching-interpreter-of-the-self. The Cliff Notes version: Bell, outward-looking; Dixon, inner-directed. Yet their career arcs meet at a tangent or two. Both live and teach in Baltimore (Dixon at Johns Hopkins, Bell at Goucher College), and the city has a place in both their oeuvres. Each is in the midst of writing a trilogy. And taken as a pair, the two are cited by outsiders--if not all that regularly--as this city's contemporary lions of high lit. The paths of Baltimore's literary odd couple have also intersected on the mundane plane of publishing, with both releasing books in recent months. The first installment of a three-part, quasi-autobiographical examination, Dixon's I. (it's "one," though it could work as a personal pronoun as well) collects a chain of stories into something resembling a novel. As usual, the lines between autobiography, novel, short story--sometimes even between typing and writing--are blurred by the author's obsessive devotion to craft and his use of it to turn himself and his unvarnished life inside out. Bell's latest, Anything Goes, breaks stylistically and thematically from his trenchant historical trilogy on the Haitian Slave Revolt of 1794 (as told so far in All Souls' Rising and Master of the Crossroads; the final installment is due in 2004). Instead of wrestling with something as difficult as racial strife, Bell throws readers a curve: a coming-of-age tale about a bassist in a bar band, complete with a 10-song CD of tunes penned by the author. . . . and Stephen Dixon smile, sort of, for the dust-jacket camera. Given past readings of these writers, one would have been forgiven for thinking that Bell's book would be the better of the two--the storytelling craft found in the Haiti novels is that good. Dixon's difficult and Sisyphean tales of domestic disasters and strange events, on the other hand, almost always seemed like little more than exercises in postmodern anti-manners. But there's a reason why readers (well, a few of them, at least) pick up Dixon's books, and that's to be occasionally surprised and enlightened. So--surprise--Dixon wins this battle of the titans. Formally fascinating and engaging viscerally and intellectually, I. qualifies as the better-conceived and more substantial novel--or whatever it is. Set in a home in suburban Baltimore, with an occasional stay in or drive to New York, I. examines the life of a man a lot like Dixon--a college writing professor with two daughters and a wife who suffers from multiple sclerosis. As always, Dixon makes us spectators--at times it feels like we're full participants--in his (or I.'s) life, as the protagonist ends up at a kitchen typewriter (he tells us) pounding out his interpretations of life's events, sometimes multiple, metafictional versions of them: I'm sitting here with my shirt off, typing on my typewriter, wondering if I should write this in first person, a form I haven't used in a while and don't like much. . . . My shirt's off because I came back from a jog about ten minutes ago and the shirt was wet with sweat. But I don't want to get up and get a shirt in the other room because by the time I sit down again I could lose my train of thought. This story, "Detours," goes on to tell us, in an almost organic way, about I.'s angst over getting a shirt, over how he acted the night before a trip back from New York when he "blew his stack" again, and how he heard his wife and kids beg him to calm down. Then he again mulls over the value of first-person narrative, ponders apologizing, considers psychotherapy, and, finally, wonders why he hasn't got a shirt on as it snows outside and why he's writing about it: "No other purpose but to get it out and down on paper and to think about what you're writing and to read it after it's written . . . and also for you to perhaps get something from what you did last night that might end up being more than just a reminder of how you acted and felt, even if right now you don't think it's much, if anything at all." Even if all this under-the-microscope stream of consciousness weren't so autobiographical, it would still qualify as searing and wrenching literature. Dixon doesn't spare his unnamed protagonist (he calls him "He" or "I." throughout the book) any judgment in these 19 stories. An impatient, angry, often obsessive type, the hero is fully fleshed out, and so is his pain. (A pain mirrored, perhaps, by Dixon's dumping by his longtime publisher, Henry Holt. After 15 publishers, including Holt, rejected I., noted autobiographer and publisher Dave Eggers picked up the book for his McSweeney's imprint.) I.'s wife comes across as a chronic sufferer, both because of her disabling condition and her husband's crankiness in caring for her. He throws fits over having to clean her messed wheelchair, over sex, over just about anything. Dixon plays games with this (although that description hardly seems apt, given the subject matter and the care he takes in explaining it). He puts himself in her place and her wheelchair so both he and his readers can take a harrowing test drive ("The Switch"), then replays their meeting-and-courting days from about a dozen angles in the book-closing and utterly engrossing "Again." By this point, Dixon has us in the palm of his hand. I. is riveting, ambitious fiction. By comparison, Bell's Anything Goes seems piffling and clichéd. Set in the outskirts of Nashville, Tenn., and in various motels and look-alike roadhouses, the book bobs along winsomely enough for its first half, largely on the big heart and sad-sack past of Jesse, the 20-year-old, bass-thumping hero. As Bell lays out Jesse's saga--he's a "melungeon" (a person of dark skin but undetermined ethnicity), son of a delinquent mother and a brutalizing father, and a frustrated guitarist who has dreams of being more than a cover-band bassist--Bell's tale rings true. His depictions of band life and the ennui of the road hit the mark more often than not. Meanwhile, Jesse's struggles with scheming women; the band's autocratic leader, Perry (who outright bans songs written by band members); and his confusing relationship with his father and his father's girlfriend all make for tension worthy of a Bell novel. For all that, Anything Goes never really seems to go anywhere. The cast of stock rock 'n' roll characters Bell surrounds Jesse with does little to enliven the book's second half, during which the action lags and the predictability of the womanizing guitarist, et al., weighs the story down like a rusty old anchor. By the end of the book, Bell wants us to be cheering on this bunch of hard-bitten but essentially noble creatures in their attempt to overcome Perry's edict against originality and, hence, set the world on fire. But by then the story's narrative arc has become a cliché as well, leaving Bell fans to look forward to what will hopefully be a more satisfying literary conclusion in 2004. - - - -
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