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BAR IN BROOKLYN: Andrei Codrescu's stories have been scattered in various literary journals, from The Paris Review to the Hot Water Review. They are now gathered for the first time in "A Bar in Brooklyn," Black Sparrow Press, a collection that spans an intense and creative time from 1970 until 1978. Prefaced by the author. |
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WORD
TO THE READER My first fictions in English date to 1970 when I wrote and rewrote a novel called "How I Became Howard Johnson," and kept a fictitious journal alongside a real one. The novel was an attempt to make myself over into my new language and I was excessively sensitive to criticism. When the three friends who read it pointed out various flaws, I rewrote the whole thing. Since I used a manual typewriter and only type with one finger, the rewriting was endless. In 1971, "How I Became Howard Johnson" was bought by a publisher in Berkeley. This was a respectable children's book publisher who decided, for reasons having to do with his hippy son in Amsterdam, to publish "hip" adult fiction. The man didn't understand a word of my book, which he bought along with six other titles, in the hope of luring the wayward son back to the family business. My novel was surreal, full of odd syntactical constructions, fresh impressions of America, and long conversations between baffled (or stoned) protagonists. The manuscript underwent thorough copyediting, typesetting, and jacket design. The week before it was supposed to go to press, the wayward son returned from Amsterdam and showed no interest whatsoever in his father's "hip" conversion. The guy was a a junkie, interested in heroin not literature. Daddy canceled the whole hip venture and there went "How I Became Howard Johnson," never to see the light of day again. The fictitious journal was started in New York in 1969 and was continued through 1971 in California. I wrote the entries in the morning in coffee houses. They described the day as if it already happened, noting in minute detail various adventures. In the evening I wrote the real journal, noting the day's events as they had actually happened. The idea was that, years hence, I would compare the two diaries and see how fiction held up to reality. Years hence I did that and, to my surprise, I could barely tell what was fictional and what was real. Life in those days had a fictional quality about it anyway. The fictional diary might note, for instance, an encounter with a mysterious young woman in a dress shop where I helped her make a decision, then aided her in trying out the dress. In the real diary I find a similar encounter, brought on perhaps by the earlier fantasy, or pre-existent in some way. In 1973 I wrote a series of surreal story-poems and published them in a mimeograph chapbook titled "Why I Can't Talk on the Telephone." The stories were attempts to explain my awkwardness with the telephone but were aimed, more generally, at the interface between humans and machines. In those days, machines hadn't quite taken over humans as resolutely as they have now. The machines under my scope were things like typewriters, telephones, television, electrical appliance (and electricity itself), airplanes, and the immortal Vegeomatic which made its first appearance in television advertising around that time. In 1973-74 I also wrote another novel, called "Meat from the Goldrush." It was a book influenced by GM Marquezë "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which had just appeared in English. In my book, a family of Eastern European butchers figure out a way to transport bodies from history with the help of a time machine. These bodies, fresh from battlefields, are then converted into delicious cuts of meat to which everyone in America becomes addicted. The citizens begin to eat their own ancestors and history becomes circular and it short-circuits. This novel fared surprisingly well with editors I sent it to, and it came very close to being published by Harper & Row. "Meat from the Goldrush" remains my good friend Pat Nolan's favorite fiction of mine. In those same years, my friend Tom Veitch and I, resolved to write a thousand-page novel called "The Hippie Termites." We wrote together every day for about four months, just like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, but had to give up at around 250 pages because our "hippie termites" were beginning to run dry. A beautiful comicbook of several chapters of "The Hippie Termites" was illustrated and published by the late, brilliant Greg Irons. The writing of brief stories ("minute stories"), prose poems, and even nearly conventional short stories, went on right alongside my "real business," which was the composition of poems. I always looked on fiction as a form of relaxation, a vacation from the rigorous art of modern verse. In a scale known only to true artists, fiction comes much lower on the rung of creation than poetry. At age sixteen when being a poet was the highest calling available, a fellow teenage poet looked me earnestly in the eyes over a cup of cognac-laced Turkish Coffee at Flora Cafe in Sibiu, Romania, and said: "If you ever write a novel, I will never talk to you again." He hasn't. Even then, however, I was secretly harboring dreams of fiction. By the time my poet friend had threatened me in that manner, I had already penned some adventure stories and I was working my way into some absurdist fiction a la Urmuz, the great Romanian absurdist and granddaddy of Dada. In 1975 I published a slightly fictionalized memoir entitled "The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius" with the prestigious house of George Braziller. I did not consider this a true work of fiction though, because I had used too many true facts of my life. My true break in fiction proper came in 1973 when George Plimpton accepted my novella, "Monsieur Teste in America" for The Paris Review. George had his assistant, Fayette Hickox, call me up to ask me to cut the story in half because it was much too long. "The only thing this long we ever published was Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" George told Fayette to tell me. I said that we should discuss this and I suggested that we meet at The Lion's Head in the Village. Fayette got there before George and said, "My God, I think this is the first time George came downtown in ten years!" George showed up eventually and we had a few drinks and I defended my story, and then George said, "OK, we'll run the whole thing." So there it was, in The Paris Review, as long as "Goodye, Columbus." The next year I published another novella there, almost as long, entitled "Samba de Los Agentes." These two novellas are collected here. I found the form of the novella congenial. Half way between a short story and a novel, it was just the right size for what I had to say. In France, novella-size books of 100-120 pages are called "novels" and accorded the dignity of that form. American publishers, for some reasons (practical ones, no doubt) loathe such short books. The American novel is supposed to be thick, voluminous, filled with long stretches of character-development. What's more, American publishers prefer these thick volumes to be realistic, drearily realistic, as if American readers were school children and they had to be pedagogically numbed by the tedium of description and the minutiae of psychology. Unfortunately, this penchant for the realistic Big Book has become a self-fulfilling mode: American readers have been rendered child-like and disciplined, unable to make leaps of imagination, or fill in for themselves what they already know only too well. I have also collected here two other novellas, dealing with one of my constant themes, the mystery of polymorphous sexual magic. "Three Simple Hearts" refers to Flaubert's "A Simple Heart," and at one point I'd hoped, like Flaubert's "Three Tales," to gather three novellas in a single book. There are four novellas here instead, alas. The stories that follow these novellas are all written from the point of view of women. They are shorter and more experimental because I was working out various modes of access to the female psyche, and I didn't yet feel at home inside its voices. These fictions, novellas and stories, were written between 1970 and 1978 and represent themselves well, although some of their concerns can be found in later novels, notably, "The Repentance of Lorraine," "The Blood Countess," and "Messiah." The esthetic hierarchy established in my adolescence has not been entirely toppled. Poetry is still the highest of the arts, but much is possible in the more generous spaces of fiction.
Andrei Codrescu |
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