I have known Tom Whalen for more than 40 years. He is one of our best fiction writers, poets and a perceptive and authoritative critic of both literature and movies... We both miss George Garrett and were recently exchanging notes about his work. Tom, some years ago, published this review of Garrett's last novel that was sadly not much reviewed. I hope this essay will send people to one of those important novels that can change how you think about novel writing and the act of criticism. In the novel Garrett's quotes from a Thomas McGonigle's article "A Writer's Life" that Garrett commissioned for the Dictionary of Literary Biography and which is available at the Notre Dame Review website.Whalen has written other essays on Garrett which I will hope to reprint.
University of Alabama Press,
2004
By Tom Whalen (whalen.t@gmail.com
The epigraphs for George Garrett's Double Vision underscore immediately the
title's implied dialectical shiftings between fact and fiction: "Anything
processed by memory is fiction," says Wright Morris, to which Garrett
opposes Naipaul's "I would prefer fact."
In the novel's first paragraph we
encounter the author, in all but flesh, speaking to us straight up as one
George Garrett, recently having undergone an MRI and suffering from myastsemia gravis, a disease
characterized by "double vision, drooping eyelids, muscle weakness and
fatigue, occasional problems maintaining balance"—in general the body does
a sort of slow fade. Our narrator is at
the kitchen window looking for a crow he has heard caw: "most likely a
handsome fellow [. . .], a glossy shard of darkness, at this moment far from
the fellowship of his black caucus . . ."
There is the sound of the crow, its "[r]eedy, repetitive
caw." There are the nutbrown facts
of its location: "He is out there high and all alone in the budding
branches of the sweetgum tree next door.
Peter Taylor's sweetgum tree, close by the toothpick fence marking the line
between his place and mine." But we
can't see the crow, only hear it, "he is long gone." As is, the next paragraph tells us, Peter
Taylor, to which depends the paragraph (complete): "Death is much on my
mind these days."
But look again at the novel's
apparent straightforwardness and casual clarity, for beneath them lie, as
behind any mask, a wealth of deceptive shiftings. Double
Vision is the tale of a writer/professor (retired) named George Garrett
writing about, in part, his late next door neighbor, the writer Peter Taylor,
their similarities and differences (that divide "between his place and
mine") while at the same time in superimposition (double vision) writing
about his fictional counterpart, novelist and retired professor Frank Toomer's
relationship with his famous-writer neighbor Aubrey Carver. Both Garrett and Toomer have been given an
assignment to write a review of a biography of their respective neighbors.
As in his Elizabethan trilogy Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered
from the Sun and his novels set in contemporary time, most recently The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against
You, Garrett explores the relationship of truth to the "liar's
craft" of fiction and the treacheries fame can effect on the self. Double
Vision, besides being a testament to old age and disease ("the crummy
and depressing little radiology waiting room full of sweat smell and sad
humanity"), is a meditation on fame and its close cousin oblivion. In it, memory merges with fiction, fact with
fantasy, and behind the elegiac tone lies a ghostly, welcoming laughter.
The novel's third epigraph comes
from Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A
Documentary Life and concerns that "Patriarch of shifters," the
Elizabethan (and short-lived, 1558-92) "university wit," poet,
pamphleteer, playwright, drunkard and poseur Robert Greene: "With Greene
we cannot always separate fact from fiction in the fantasies he composed on
autobiographical themes, or the legend made of him by his
contemporaries." The crow that caws
to the narrator and reader at the beginning and off and on throughout the book,
besides a real crow on the page and in the air, wears the feather of
allusion. The first reference to
Shakespeare in print can be found in Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte (1592),
when he tweaks that jack-of-all-trades, "upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers, [. . .] the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."
George Garrett's Double Vision is a brilliant,
post-modern/Elizabethan marvel, a clear-eyed take on the writing life and its
practitioners living and dead. It's also
a tribute to Peter Taylor, a diatribe against America's historical amnesia, a
self-interview, a book review ("In a larger sense, I suppose, we can
therefore consider this whole piece, fact and fiction tangled together, as a
kind of an extended book review."), yet another academic novel ("The
'academic novel' has been kicking around for more than half a century, a
well-explored and well-exploited genre, good ones and bad ones and (surprise
surprise) mostly mediocre . . ."), a sifting and sorting of the past
("Feeling stronger than I have been, feeling a little more energy, I have
decided to try to straighten up my attic office, years out of control."),
cultural commentary ("public events, in their edited versions and repeated
images, seem to possess the demonic power to trivialize what is best about us
and to bring out the worst in almost everybody."), a satire
("Consider: if Jonathan Swift was right, that happiness is 'a state of
being well-deceived,' then what do you make of a whole nation and its people
being dedicated to 'the pursuit of happiness'?"), a postcard to the world:
Though I have loved you and lost you, times
beyond counting, still I write again upon this instant, being in receipt of all
your ordinary music, to inform you that I can't live without you. I intend, by God and hell or high water, rain
and sleet and snow and the wild spins of the wheel of fortune, to come back for
more of the same.
Double
Vision may seem to have, as Garrett says of his house in Charlottesville,
Virginia, a "sense of being all casually cobbled together," but in
its structure, development, doubling motifs and bright connections it is
anything but casual. Double Vision gradually shifts from
George Garrett reflecting on his life and the lives (and deaths) of other writers
(Greene, Taylor, Larry Levis), to his fictional Frank Toomer writing about
Aubrey Carver and realizing he cannot write the review of Carver's biography,
but instead must think again about writing a novel on Robert Greene. Then, in a masterful dissolve, we're in the
1590's at the moment Greene is tossed out of the Fighting Cock into a muddy street of London.
Damn
the rain and the mud and the coarse laughter of strangers at this antic man in
his cloak of goose-turd green rising up now from the mud as if he had been
buried there and were rising again from among the dead intending to frighten
folks out of their wits. The cloak is
all besplattered, his long hair and his pointy beard, naturally red enough to
play the part of Judas Iscariot without any color or cosmetic, are covered with
the mud and his face as dark as any African Moor's.
The writer puts on the mask of a
writer writing about writing, but the mask finally dissolves, vanishes, and all
that's left is fiction, words on the page as present as the "cloud of
presences" Garrett felt around him one night. "I felt the presence and nearness of all
my dead, close kinfolk and others too, friends and lovers of long ago and most
mostly lost to memory by now."
Neither we nor Garrett knows what
that "something" is that the crow "calls out [. . .] loud and
clear." "A lone crow, a
fragment of the night perched up high in a huge old tree, has called out
something, a message I cannot decode or translate, and then flown
away." The important thing is that
it called us to the window and, though we can't see it, we know it was
there.
--
Tom Whalen
First published
in The Texas Review Vol. XXV, Nos. 1
& 2, Spring/Summer 2004.
