Chicken
Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Concerto
for Horn and Hardart Dept.: At Ang Lee's film The
Wedding Banquet, I watched goggle-eyed at
how many plates Lee kept a-spinning on sticks.
The Chinese landlord marries a tempestuous tenant
to hide his homosexuality from Mom and Dad when
they come visiting from the home country. The
landlord's live-in lover, temporarily demoted to
best friend, orchestrates hospitality with bad
Chinese and wilting goodwill. The bride becomes
pregnant on the wedding night and the groom's
parents rejoice; this is the grandchild they've
always wanted. The lover winces in pain.
The couple of
convenience bursts into tears in their bed. An
abortion is planned. Then in the film's last ten
minutes the bride decides against the abortion,
the Chinese father confesses to the lover that he
speaks perfect English and has known his son's
secret all along; then landlord, lover and wife
decide to raise the baby together. One by one
descend the die in their machina
to batten down all hatches--I wouldn't see
another happy ending this forced and
disappointing until Ron Howard's The Paper
a year later. "It's a comedy,"
said one of my friends by way of justification,
and she was right; that was an important part of
thinking about the film. As a simple-minded
entertainment, it had the right to flout
possibility and ignore consequences. But it
fooled me into thinking it was drama, something
with real winners and losers, before it sliced
out its own heart and threw it to the front row
like one butter substitute-sopped hanky.
Claude Rawlings of
Body and Soul, Frank Conroy's
long-awaited long novel, comes with a god planted
in his machine. Genius goes hand in hand with
having no real problems, and therein lies the big
problem. With no obstacles or convincingly
portrayed hardships on Claude's path to greatness
as a pianist, Conroy's own genius for detail,
mood and evocation can't redeem this portrait of
the hero as Hot Wheels hot rod shoved impetuously
over Life's game board. It's a fairy tale,
the author says; well, fine. But he'd fooled me
into thinking it was a modern novel, with
achievement obtained in exchange for sacrifice.
He also needs to draw better dragons.
Conroy writes
about pain and escape. The pain he coats in wry,
analytical amber, sealing it trilobite-like for
study at a distance. In Stop-Time, his
l967 autobiography and the answer I usually give
when asked for the best book I've ever read in my
life, escape is release from physicality, the
"stop-time" in the title; it is
precious, since Conroy has no power to slip out
at will. He works around or through his useless
parents, the father and sister who went mad,
marking time spent away from the "one still
point" of transport. And then: "Waking
in a white room filled with sunshine... I don't
know who I am, but it doesn't bother me. The
white walls, the sunlight, the voices, all exist
in absolute purity."
But pain and
escape will not separate; the body raises doubt
in the spirit ("I get so uncomfortable
floating around like this that I almost
gratefully accept the delusion that I've lived
another life, remote from me now,") and the
spirit creeps into things like yo-yos: "To
be really good one simply had to give up one's
desire to dominate the yo-yo and instead let the
ghost take over. See how easy, was the
implication."
Conroy's wrestling
match with the two found him trying to die in a
skidding car. Don't worry, he stopped in time.
The young Frank's disbelief in self-improvement
made a pedal tone under the experiences through
which he obtained self-improvement. Claude
Rawlings might share that (nonarticulated)
unease, but he's on a lucky streak only slightly
more improbable than that of Bill Gates (the pie
seen round the world notwithstanding)'. Claude's
mother, a cab driver, loses her mind--but the
author sends a black ex-con with a heart of gold
to save her. The boy receives secrets of jazz
from a speedfreak bebopper who drops dead after
dropping off the chord changes. Low-cost musical
tutoring comes from the kindly music man the next
block over, and a grand piano comes free of
charge from an reclusive composer.
Which is to say
that Claude's life has no narrative tension--no
crisis points, no real possibility of failure--an
attribute shared with the real professional life
of Bill Gates life and the ficticious
professional life of Forrest Gump. It is simply a
journey up a ladder; a list of Boy Scout Merit
badges after the Boy Scout died, or failed to be
born.
Conroy tries
dichotomizing Claude's loathing of the physical
world (body) and yearning for musical spiritual
transport (soul) but the boy's slack success
recalls the indifferent certainty of singer Dean
Martin, who, in the words of Steven Shavrio's
book Doom Patrols, "never spent
time rehearsing, and...usually, in his stage act,
couldn't even be bothered to finish singing a
song that he had started." "According
to Zen," Shaviro continues, "an art is
performed to perfection only when it is unclouded
by restless desire, freed of anxiety and of
forethought. [Martin] had no worldly
entanglements to overcome. Since he really didn't
give a fuck, everything just came all right, all
by itself." Which is to say Dino didn't have
to let his ghost take over; he was born haunted.
This is not the creativity myth Conroy intends to
tell. His forgetfulness gives us right from the
start, a vacant master swaddled in acolyte's
rags.
Is he still on top
of his game prose-wise? If only he weren't this
book wouldn't hurt so much. The heart of Claude's
escape spills out of paragraph one: "He
would climb up on the table and spend hours
peering through the bars, his child's mind
falling still in contemplation of the ever
changing rhythms and tempos of legs and
feet..." The first eleven pages are gently,
effortlessly engrossing, where Conroy's
disciplined brushwork gives life to a bushwacked
apartment, the neglectful, alcoholic mother, and
the piano in the back room, the short-sized
sixty-six key out-of-tune touchstone. This is
Conroy's technical mastery, found in Stop-Time,
in the short stories of Midair, in his
essays (sadly never collected in book form):
reality caught in meticulous metal flake, a
Zen-sifted storm.
Conroy's emotional
mastery arises from his repeated capture of the
spiritual realm, turning and returning with
new-sounding words springing from new contexts,
all clear and finely ringing. Body and Soul
is some gorgeous church bell prose chiming sadly
to the soul of a vending machine. So read this
book--but read Stop-Time first, and pray
that the author, fast approaching sixty, can try
again in time. If not, his own ending can never
be made happy, not by Ang Lee, Ron Howard, or all
the spring-driven gods on anyone's pages.
E-Mail
Andrew
Hamlin
