Review: Shirley Jackson ‘The Night we all had Grippe’

What an amazing short story.

What a beautiful, lyrical piece of Americana.

Originally published in Harper’s Magazine in the January, 1952 edition with a four-frame illustration.

It was the lead story from ‘Man in the Fictional Mode’ Volume 2 from the wonderful ‘Man’ Literature series that made its entrance into American schools in the early 1970s.

I hated school until the day I discovered these books.

They were banned in some districts due to ‘at that time’ politically incorrect themes.

Shirley Jackson, most famous for her dark piece: ‘The Lottery’, switched gears for this funny slice of family life.

The story has this bizarre precisely mechanical and almost rhythmical circular cadence, contrast to Lovecraft’s bizarre but equally rhythmical ‘Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ or Roald Dahl’s frenetic narration in ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’.

The subject matter of ‘Grippe’ is common to many, but not usually captured in such campy detail.

Grippe is inspired by James Thurber’s ‘The Night the Bed Fell’.

I especially like the fact that the parents each had alcohol and cigarettes at their bedsides. Unthinkable today.

Her epic opening line: ‘We are all of us, in our family, very fond of puzzles.’ sets the tone for the rest of the story.

In the end the little blanket disappears and the mystery is gained not solved:

‘It was a blue patterned patchwork blanket, and has not been seen since, and I would most particularly like to know where it got to. As I say, we are very short of blankets.’  “Shirley Jackson Novels and Stories” at p. 626

‘Man in the Fictional Mode’ Volume 2 is one of the greatest compendiums of 20th Century short American Fiction I have ever seen.

The only ones that rival it are Ray Bradbury’s ‘Illustrated Man’, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Welcome the Monkey House” and Lauren Groff’s “Delicate Edible Birds”.

If you haven’t read this story, if you haven’t read Shirley Jackson, if you haven’t read the ‘Man’ series and you fashion yourself an American writer, or a writer of Americana, please help yourself and do all of the above.

Peace,

The Botendaddy

Kerouac vs. Camus

As a child, the world of the 1950s no longer existed, but you could find vestiges of it in the people, the cars, the buildings, small town way of life, the artifacts, a ghost of it was still there on the American landscape. but none of it exists now. How many of the older kids who went to search for America in the 60s and early 70s did it because of Kerouac or had gone to Morocco because of Camus.

I loved the World War II generation personified by Vonnegut, I love the beat generation, I was too young for the flower children and almost too young for the Disco generation. I hated that I was born too late. I have always hated my own era, the lack of nuance, the lack of soul, the mystery like a black and white film.

I’ve been re-thinking Kerouac and Camus.

To some degree Kerouac is also a French writer, his original manuscript for ‘On the Road’ was supposedly written in French. He certainly has some of the same French-Catholic ethos, and he is  claimed by Francophone Quebec rather proudly…

Contemporaries, I don’t know if they were aware of each other.

Both French expatriates, in a fashion, Camus from France to Algeria by way of generations, Kerouac from France to Quebec to Lowell Massachusetts.

Existentialists? Not to the degree of Sartre or Genet.

Neither Camus nor Kerouac favor the <<être-en-soi>> or the bad faith which comes by seeking to define oneself, nor  do they favor the Genet ‘liturgical drama’ view of coming of age or awareness…

In both Camus and Kerouac, we see a search for higher meaning, for Kerouac it was a metaphysical search for the inner meaning of his Catholic faith, with Camus it was more pointed illustration of social commentary in a near-expressionist style, possibly exposing the anomie which as impetus for social change.

Kerouac, essentially the Jackson Pollock of writers, words thrown at the typewriter on an endless scroll, like Pollock’s throwing of paint on the canvass, (albeit, we know, per L.G.), that he also carefully re-edited his work) yet Kerouac was not an expressionist in the sense of Pollock or Brecht. Kerouac is a narrator, his words almost like a camera, a collage or scrapbook of still shots. With Camus it more like a play.

When I think of both Kerouac and Camus, the word I think of is atmospheric, mindscape, radically different styles, yet part of the psychic underpinning of the beat generation and the flower children…

Sadly, now they are only ghosts, the current revival helps with the movies ‘On the Road’ and ‘Big Sur’.

I ask, again, as there is no good music (that has been allowed to become popular to be fair), the great poet, and virtually no great writers of Americana except for Lauren Groff. If there is we would have heard from them. Where are the writers who seek experience for inspiration? Who has the notebook to keep a scrawl of is it all done on soulless tablets? It’s so bad that some modern writers are actually causing a renewal of the typewriter. The old artists knew that the means of expression was as important to the work as the words themselves. If you are out there, please start writing, get it out there. Your generation needs you.

Review: The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

What an utterly fantastic book.

The finest novel in American Literature in a long time.

The themes are very intricately interwoven.

I won’t be able to review this book right away.

It will take too much time, so I will break with tradition and revise this review over time.

Although I will level some of my harshest criticism to date against poor Lauren’s work, I qualify it with this: her writing in this work is utterly brilliant. This again will be a work of American literature that will be examined in Literature classes for at least the next 50 years.

The ending words are epic and will endear the book to me forever. The best simple phrase in American Literature since “So it goes”.

It is an absolute must-read for anyone who loves true American Literature.

I will say this, it is a remarkable ode to Cooperstown. We all needed that.

All we ever get is: “huh that’s where the baseball hall of fame is and such”.

Now, thanks to Lauren Groff, we can build on the old mythology with a new one. She gives us back our sense of mystery and history in Cooperstown. She pulls us back behind the hall of fame era.

What I like:

The elaborate geneological research. The time in the library.

The juxstaposition of modern day with past character development.

She draws in Cooper, his family and his characters and makes them into real people for the purposes of the story.

She gives us our very own Loch Ness Monster. I really like the monster.

She loves the Yankees (this is truly hip)

She channels Erica Jong with her: “Yes I am feminist but I actually like men style” which is very refreshing and recalls the Jong perspective of female sexuality. Botendaddy’s theory is you can be feminist or even lesbian yet not hate men. If you hate men, then you have unresolved issues or are pursuing another agenda.

What I don’t like:

The whole super-cool, super-hip academia thing is very derivative of Michael Chabon (whose writing I utterly detest). Note: Botendaddy has been involved in several university research projects and I love the Academic environment. Both of Botendaddy’s parents were archeologists at one time. Again, Groff is a vastly superior writer to Chabon.

The thinly-veiled academic snobbery-no one is truly complete unless they went to Harvard or Stanford.

The neo-I’m against organized religion but only if it’s christianity. (I’m not a Christian, but I find a lot less to fear in them and their various representations be they Mormon, Catholic Protestant than I do in some other faiths). But the lake monster, it’s pure goodness, it’s love of people even though they could harm it, the rebirth, could it be an unintended metaphor for Christ? Does Groff separate Christ as a being from the church as a social construct?

Review of Lauren Groff’s ‘Delicate Edible Birds’ by E.H.P.

I am proud to present the first Guest Review on Botendaddy from Julian.

A literary game: look at the last word of a book and see what it says about the rest of the work.  The last word of Lauren Groff’s story “Delicate, Edible Birds,” and of the collection it names, is safety.  In every story in this book, with the exception of the comic “Sir Fleeting,” a character is threatened with sexual abuse, death, or both.  In the title story, set during the Nazi invasion of France, a peasant farmer captures a group of war correspondents, threatening them with starvation or worse unless the one woman among them has sex with him.  In “Lucky Chow Fun,” the heroine’s sister disappears from their house: meanwhile, unnoticed by them or by other people in their village, several Chinese girls have been forced into prostitution, and two have died. 

 Even the sparest narrative here is built with rich description.  Here is a passage from “Sir Fleeting,” one of the lesser stories in the collection:

. . . The butterflies seethed over the streets, turned buildings into shuddering things, turned the most stoic of people into sleepwalkers, marveling at the delicate dreams at their feet.  [. . . ] Lulu tried to set up her easel before birds fluttered down and plucked off every simmering beast.  We left her there, and [. . . ] walked around the city for hours until, with another gust of wind, the butterflies rose as one and vanished.  On the ground wings lay broken, trampled, and in the trees sparrows sat puffed, eyes closed, sated almost to bursting.  (202)

The gorgeous details in these stories can be contrasted with the spare narrative of the late Grace Paley in her collection Enormous Changes At The Last Minute.

The stories are also ornamented by allusions to history, science, and literature.  What may seem like one tale suddenly becomes another.  “L. DeBard and Aliette” is about a poet in 1918 whose lover’s father forcibly castrates him.  This gains another level of meaning with comparison with a celebrated 12th century love affair.  Sometimes the unspoken adds an ominous tone to the story.  A few pages into the story “Majorette,” I read about a tiny baby who is born to parents who had a shotgun marriage and smoke and get drunk, into a house with worn-out ceiling tiles that snow asbestos, and I thought, Oh, no, and I dreaded what was going to happen next.  But I kept reading. The style, as with the other stories here, was compulsively readable. And the ending wasn’t as dark as I had feared.

The book is a major work of fiction.  Some people would call it a great work.  But I think Ms. Groff wouldn’t play King of the Hill.  The story “Delicate, Edible Birds,” for example, may be offering a parallel between the dilemma of its heroine and the Fall of France.  But it does not press it, as other authors might.  It emphasizes the uncertainty of listening to a family saying things half heard in a language one doesn’t know, and the dark beauty of the land.

Julian EHP, is a published poet with a Master’s Degree in English. She is the Grandaughter of a British Naval Captain who commanded a ship at Gallipoli, and the daughter of a man who served in the OSS in the Pacific in World War II and later taught at Harvard. Her mother, an accomplished painter and a Canadian, served in the US Foreign Service in World War II and she spent time in Morrocco and Bosnia.

Review: Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff

The reviewer’s state of mind: it is a cold, windswept night, the trees are bare and spring has not yet come to the northeast. I fell a sense of saddened melancholy, almost Poe-like, wistful, yet in comfortable acceptance of my fate.

I have a place in the pantheon for Groff’s ‘Delicate Edible Birds’. I have been reading Vonnegut’s ‘Welcome to the Monkey House’ at the same time. I loved this book when I was a kid. Vonnegut was the voice of the disaffected World War II generation, my father’s generation. Now I read the book and I suddenly don’t understand it anymore. It’s meaning has passed by, like its generation. Vonnegut’s New York only exists in a few fading memories. Enter Groff. Delicate Edible Birds is not her answer to ‘Welcome to the Monkey House’, but like it or not New Yorkers, it is the answer of this generation.

The namesake story is brilliantly wound together, a gang of tough film-noir reporters led by a gutsy 40s broad. The story is an old one though. It is the story of the rebel who was captured by the Spanish King. “If you don;t tell us where is Bolivar, we will kill ten women and children.” What does the rebel do? He is not a utilitarian, but an idealist. If I tell you where Bolivar is you kill Bolivar and then keep on killing more women and children, so my answer is no. The others plead with him to consider the women and children, to have a heart but he is not moved. In the end he too is shot.

Bern is in the same predicament, but she is morally equivocal, much more so than the rebel. She is not a rebel, she is a reporter. She is asked to sacrifice some of her dignity on behalf of her compatriots. She needs her story, that is where her dignity is defined. Her cohorts are weak, like the rebel’s cohorts, but in the end, will she give in?

If you don’t read this compilation, you are missing something very important in American Literature today. Groff may be the only real thing out there right now. I am not impressed by the current generation of writers. They just don’t get it and they just don’t have it. I would say she is the new Vonnegut, but that isn’t fair to her. I would say she has the potential to take his place in this generation of writers. This is a very refreshing return to real American Literature. If you don’t believe me, then read the book.

“Delicate Edible Birds” by Lauren Groff

Hyperion, NY, NY 2009

Highest Recommendation

This Review Copyright 2009 The Botendaddy