In Which We Describe How To Walk Through The World

Being R.V. Neuman

by WILL HUBBARD

I am sitting in Gucci, a Midtown barbershop named not for the Florentine fashion icon but for Maritzio Gucci, the shop's septuagenarian proprietor and sole stylist. Gucci is roughly 12'x12' and boasts the striated green marble and mirroring of a men's restroom in an opulent hotel. But Mr. Gucci, for all the glitz of our surroundings, is warm and gregarious, speaking to me of his notable clientele with the visibly conflicted pride of a child showing a perfect test score to his less fortunate classmates.

I am not here for a haircut. Instead, Mr. Gucci's shop is simply the most recent attraction on my week-long whirlwind tour of the haunts and habits of novelist Robert Vernon Niman, or "R. V. Neuman" as it appears on the spines and dust jackets of his books. His latest, A Month Or More, is slated to appear in early 2009 and will, if we can believe the author's cryptic musing from Mr. Gucci's chair, "draw out something from the blood of this country that none knew existed before, either in violence or in love."

the author in Peru, circa 2003 (photo: Langdon Mackerley)

Niman is not an easy man to track down, and at 6 feet 7 inches tall, with deep emerald eyes and jacknifing black eyebrows crowned with grey, he is an even harder man with which to talk. Most days I have found him outfitted in a simple white polo, tartan wool slacks, and either a camel-hair or navy blazer depending on the ferocity of the early autumn chill. His cordovan loafers shine in even the lowest lights - "a man should wear cordovan, period" - and I cannot help but feel like his bumbling apprentice as I'm tugged into one Old Manhattan bistro after another.

But for all Niman's warnings, A Month is not much of a departure in content or style from his previous efforts. The setting - as in 1994's witty if oblique Honey, and 2003's Stones In The Cellar - is blue-collar, south-east Bakersfield, California, the gritty neighborhood of the author's birth and upbringing. The sentences are long but crystalline, beguiling as they are unaffected. One slips into the gnostic dream of Niman's world as though the way has been lubricated: initial violence gives way to a resigned and fluid motion forward and down. "Your first fifty pages are like birthing a child, but after that, absolute bliss!," Niman squawks in the high, mildly Southern and distinctly mocking tone of voice he often uses to parody his readers.

Mr. Gucci trims Niman's paltry tuft of bang with a surgical exactitude, the last step of what has revealed itself to be a rather laborious and intricate haircut. To me, the author looks more or less exactly as he looked before - vaguely aristocratic, detached but in control, intimidating as a lion. He has never married ("or divorced!"), and has lived the last two decades since returning from a twelve-year, meandering tour of the continent of Asia in a small but comfortable studio apartment two and a half blocks off Central Park West. He enjoys neither walking in the park nor going to the cinema, preferring to spend time between writing bouts aboard his tiny motorboat - named for his first novel, Nowhy To Run - on the Hudson. "The fishing was better when the river was a dump; now I mostly make large, irregular figure eights and wait for the sun to go down behind New Jersey."

For the most part, Niman refuses to talk about his childhood in Bakersfield. His mother Cindy ran a business that supplied temporary catering staff to events in wealthy people's backyards; the author's one (and by his own reckoning poorly-researched) biography casts his mother as strong-willed but lacking imagination, pushing her son toward a career in the forest service rather than encouraging his obvious literary talents.

Nothing is known about Niman's father, and when in 1995 an interviewer pestered him about the subject, Niman famously smashed his tumble of white-wine and Fresca (still his preferred drink) and began whispering a string of skittering negations - "Never... Not... Nil... Nohow... Non..." - that would obsess and frustrate critics for years to come.

Bakersfield Model-A Club

Not wanting to add to the myth, I have skated the subject all week hoping for a voluntary offering. I am particularly interested in the possible relation of Niman's father and A Month's fiery, winsome, and somehow blandly Protean protagonist, Marcellus, a paterfamilias a la Faulkner's Sutpen faced with the task of retrieving his family's good name after a spate of suicides, a child conceived by first cousins, and a massive wildfire that has completely destroyed the natural habitat of the winger-wasling, a virtually extinct and fantastically beautiful species of bird that drew, owing greatly to the oral lore of the wizened inhabitants of a nearby Native American reservation, the meager but steady tourism that kept his beloved city afloat.

Ironically, it is Mr. Gucci that provides my entrée into the subject of Niman's father. He asks him while lathering his lightly-stubbled face for a shave, "This is one of the thickest beards I've ever seen. Signor, your father had a great beard too, yes?"

Niman, eyes closed and head tilted back, does not stir; has he heard the barber at all? For a long moment I am tense, wondering whether to build on Mr. Gucci's ignorance in hopes unravelling the enigma of the novelist's early days in Bakersfield. Just maybe, more than ten years after the tumbler and whispering incident, Niman is ready to talk.

And he does: "Turn to the middle section...Must be around page two-thirty or two-thirty-five....The paragraph begins 'All of us waited in the kitchen' or something like that." I understand that he wants me to open my advance copy of A Month or More and read the passage aloud. I am wary of what is in store for Gucci and I, but excited to be reading to a great writer from what may well be his masterwork. I begin:

All of us waited in the kitchen, some under the table and some over near the pantry, while Marcellus bundled the remaining sacks and dragged them to the curb. The light fell out of the one grimy window above the sink, and by the time his first tired footstep fell on the stairs leading up to the porch, the house was a dark, deep blue. Though I cannot speak for the others, the sound of Marcellus' boots on the dry wood and the creak of the screen door as he pulled it slowly open were not regular sounds, like a cat or a pot of tea might make. It was as if Marcellus were walking in my mind and not through the world, as though the sound of him were nothing but the sound of my own thoughts runnin' into one another. And when he joined the others under the table I knew it had always been, and would always be that way.

"Serpentine Drive", the old way from Los Angeles to Bakersfield

I look to Mr. Gucci, who has stopped shaving the author somewhere during my monologue. The old man is looking down at the half-lathered face, rapt in a limp but enveloping admiration he doesn't quite seem to understand. Niman himself says nothing.

Recalling our first moments in the shop, I ask whether the passage, or the book as a whole, deals primarily with violence or primarily with love. Mr. Gucci is just finishing with the blade, and begins to towel off the writer's face, which to me looks exactly as it did before. Looking up at Gucci, then at me, his mouth forms a smile at first sarcastic but melting as a moment passes into one of genuine pleasure. He chuckles as he rises to his feet, and looking into the mirror to inspect the job, says, "Violence or love? That I can't answer. Because thankfully, finally, I cannot tell them apart."

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in New York City. He can be reached at whubbard at gmail dot com.

portrait of the author as a young man

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In Which We Enter The World of The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Robots In Disguise

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

dir. Wes Anderson

87 minutes

It never occurred to me that someone would want to adapt Roald Dahl's hateful children's classic The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but Wes Anderson for whatever reason felt the need. He rewrote it with Noah Baumbauch to become more generically like the rest of his films, which was a fine idea from anyone's point of view.

Wes Anderson and Baumbauch are able to write two kinds of jokes. Both are generally funny, although they are hitting at levels down from previous years. This is probably due to our slow economy and cannot be blamed on either of the writers.

The first kind of joke involves adding slightly more information than is necessary. The excess amount of speech creates the humor, because the speaker is extending the nominal goodwill of his compatriots. An example of this kind of joke in The Fantastic Mr. Fox occurs when Mr. Fox begins to plot out his mischief. He repeatedly references the fact that he is recording his own speech on the subject to his opossum colleague. The comedy proceeds largely out of the unexpectedness of the comment and its placement in the scene.

Woody Allen is generally acknowledged to to have invented this kind of joke, although others argue that he stole it from Neil Patrick Harris by using Julie Kavner's vagna as a time warp.

The second kind of Wes and Noah joke revolves around some physical or emotional tic and the ensuing reaction. Although some people believe this variety of humor is unrealistic because it ignores the previous knowledge familiars should have with each other, a movie is perfect for this because the audience itself is genuinely unfamiliar. I mean, some people still don't understand The Sixth Sense or Godard's Week End.

In Rushmore, Anderson's second feature, these elements were blended into a swarthy protagonist and an incredibly new feeling aesthetic. In The Darjeeling Limited, these elements were largely included as a means for disrobing Natalie Portman and making the horrifying task of viewing Adrien Brody act more palatable.

Although Wes is an incredible master of production design, making a stop-motion animated feature would seem to strand him impossibly out of his depth. Then again, the guy prefers to be photographed with Marc Jacobs whenever possible, it is best not to underestimate this sort of person not matter how many retarded profiles of he and his assistant one is forced to consume.

Wes seemed to determine to tighten his occasionally florid directing style here, and except for the inevitable drag of trying to extend a short book into a feature, he does a nice job. At a budget of only $30 million, the film is a bargain, and although he had to abandon his collaboration with Henry Selick, the visuals of The Fantastic Mr. Fox (from the team behind the criminally underrated Corpse Bride) are predictably awesome.

His self-effacing yet wildly overconfident Dignan of a protagonist this time is voiced by George Clooney, which is incredibly distracting. (Clooney's about as good a voice actor as he is an actual actor.)

Mr. Fox moves into the base of a tree after consulting with a realtor, but it isn't long before he wishes to relieve the local farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean of their chicken, geese, and cider. His battle against three farmers isn't too interesting. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is more about the interplay between his family, highlighted by the tender but contentious relationship between his adopted nephew's wild talents and his son's lack thereof.

Mr. Fox's teeth are insanely creepy, and there's something downright scary about the entire cast of rodents - cute as they can be, at times they seem more likely to cause nightmares in children than to provoke any kind of wonder. This incidentally was the complaint about the Dave Eggers-Spike Jonze adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. On the surface it would be ludicrous and bizarre to make a movie that neither children or adults can enjoy fully, especially since the essential point of the incredibly high grossing Twilight series is the exact opposite. On the other hand, at least it keeps Bill Murray from turning into Hunter S. Thompson.

The poster for the film touts "Dig the Life Fantastic." In the actual film, this credo is disposed of fairly quickly. Perhaps without knowing it, Wes made a film about the degrading nature of poverty. Wisely understanding that films on that subject rarely attract viewers, he tried to make the film as joyful as possible. For the most part, he succeeds. There are moments of utter abandon that are sure to become iconic: the complicated variation of baseball and cricket the foxes play, the battle with a rat voiced by Willem Dafoe, the film's magical wolf scene.

No one makes the kind of movies Wes Anderson makes. He now has more than a coterie of fans who have caught his films on television and go see his movies out of a sense of duty. In The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes has strayed from what was ostensibly a personal sequence of films and applied the genius of his attention to everything: donuts filled with goosemeat, kids reading comic books, radios on their hips.

Such an act is startlingly compulsive, but this again is no surprise. Only after he has made something familiar into something unrecognizable can he find some equivalent of peace.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here.

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In Which It Was The End of Richard Brautigan

The Dreamer

by EDWARD DORN

The sensationalism surrounding the death of Richard Brautigan has been odd. It has met all the qualifications of National Enquirer prurience - calculation, decay, disease, drek sexuality, and a fate conveniently beyond explanation. Richard would have enjoyed that part of it because he was drawn to such style of coverage, and, in fact, might have had it in mind, since he arranged for his body to rot for several weeks before the likelihood of discovery.

The first thing to understand about Richard's mind was that he idealized the common intelligence. That's why he was abruptly popular, and why, in the end, he was systematically forgotten: the people who were surprised by him never abandoned their hatred of him, and the ones who loved him, never a large number, never abandoned him. Even toward the end you could meet people who thought So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away was the truest account of growing up ever written. The only trouble with his admiration of the National Enquirer audience was that they never heard of him. He was condemned, and he knew it, to be one of us.

Last fall, when the news of his suicide came through the wire, there was a blizzard of speculation. A lot of the turbulent guesswork was simply the confusion of the strange man's friends. They felt the triumph of an adversary's death. And, in fact, it was a strong coup. Literary personalities overwhelmingly die in the presence of at least one other person. To die as he did, with calculation, with everything working - lights, radio, telephone machine on in a house with a Do Not Disturb sign - was a disturbing afterthought to a public not yet accustomed to free-market euthanasia.

The comparisons with Hemingway are quite erroneous: Brautigan was not a shotgun man. The pronouncements that women drove him to it are equally off the mark. He mostly got along with women better than men: He was more confidential with them and more friendly toward them. The fact that he was disappointed in marriage had to do with his alienation from humanity in general on a constant basis.

He looked to men for the kind of respect that the exclusiveness of marriage denied. The aesthetic which led him to prefer Japanese women was at the heart of his essential lack of interest in domestic routines. His views on these matters are very eloquently expressed and recorded in Sombrero Fallout, a deeply lyrical presentation of the contrast of American and Japanese traits.

He was a roamer, always looking for the odd sign and the direct encounter, and he was naturally dubious of explanation and analysis, because he felt the phenomenon itself was complete. And so did his readers, during the early years of his success. He didn't write fiction so much as observation, honed and elevated so as to catch the light emanating from the most presumably insignificant of details.

The only respect in which he was a Christian was the interest he shared with Christ in professional women.

He was a true macho in that his challenges were thrown at men. He loved sharp argument, the nastier the better. He craved for verbal content to reach a point where he was compelled to say, "Watch it! You're going too far." Those who knew him well, and who played that game with him, took it as a compliment if that theater of combat was reached. Although his writing is not violent, there was no end to his search for the bounds of violence. To Richard Brautigan, the idea of fate itself was comic. That attitude has always made as many enemies as friends.

He has no history of morbidity. All his writing - the lonely, wry, preoccupied, lapidary miniatures he published as poetry, or the space boldness of his micro-prose - was devoted to coaxing life to live up to its obvious possibilities. Death was a fact to him, not just another attraction. Richard could be vicious, but he was not sour. He had too much pride for that.

Brautigan saw himself and often referred to himself as a humorist. That's a designation not much used about anyone anymore, since everybody in the whole nation has become a comic. But it has been a rare thing when an artist has identified with any tradition in this century. There is a distant similarity between Brautigan and Twain. It consists almost solely in a natural innocence in regarding the evil disposition of mankind.

But whereas Twain's treatment of the condition is streaked with acid intelligence, Brautigan's is amazingly tolerant, if not gleeful, and resembles an anthropologist's understanding more than that of a literary man.

Contrary to what is often claimed, Richard spoke easily of his childhood and its tribulations. He was without recrimination, so his stories were saucy versions of the School of Hard Knocks. His work appealed to those who had decided not to mock their chains but to pick them up and carry them out of the hippie slums of the West Coast back to the Rocky Mountains, much as the disappointed seekers of '49 gradually made their way following silver rather than Gold to the East again.

One night in August 1980, Richard delivered a little talk and read from his work in Boulder. There were about a thousand old-timey people from the hills to hear him. He was very impressed that forerunners like Billy Sunday and William Jennings Bryan had spoken there. He liked those old echoes. The audience of freckled, ginghamed children and their homespun fathers obviously loved him, and he openly returned their regard. It was a touching reunion filled with gentle, reflective laughter.

That summer in boulder was special in a number of ways for Brautigan, and he was fascinated with the town itself. It represented many elements of the new life, the untested but already discernible motion of the '80s at the brink. He was impressed with the liberal sprinkling of beautiful women in the crowds. He stayed at the Boulderado for about a month and felt at home in the ornate, turn-of-the-century ambience. In 1980 the hotel was still a little rough-edged, although some of the present amenities were in place then. The heyday of the hotel in Richard's terms would have been slightly earlier, in the '70s, when the clientele was a loose traffic of waywardly successful odd-balls with specific intentions if they could ever "get it together."

Boulder became even more absurdly intruiging in his estimation. He glowed with possibilities and talked about new writing projects. Fishermen came and went. There was a fair amount of talk about fishing the in-town course of Boulder Creek. And then, eventually, he took Masako off to Montana. They didn't live happily ever after, but they were very happy for a while.

Brautigan and Michael McClure, circa 1966-1967, in San Francisco.His second wife, Akiko, related how she saw him inadvertently in North Beach very shortly before his suicide. The sight of him was so affecting she following him along the street and into Vanessi's, an old and still classy Italian restaurant on Broadway, near the crossroads with Columbus Avenue of San Francisco's bohemian quarter, and haunt of sailors and internationalists, and except for the Mission and Presidio, the oldest inhabited part of the city.

She stood there by the door, she said, until Richard saw her. He closed his eyes. In this sign she thinks he saw her as a ghost. But as everyone knows, if you're lucky enough to see a ghost, you open your eyes. What Richard actually saw, from the testimony of his own record, was yet another instance of the distortion of the dream he had had. It was the final judgment of the truly poor that everything be perfect.

Edward Dorn died in 1999. The essay is taken from Dorn's collection of stories, essays, and verse, Way West.

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