Context N°22
1972 was a difficult year for the novel. This might—and perhaps should—be said of all years and times, since the novel is forever, genetically, finding everything a struggle and all things difficult (I think we’re supposed to be worried when the novel does not do this). But 1972 was particularly special in its overshadowing, domineering, mattering way. It was a year that refused to cede an inch to the make-believe. The merely imaginary might finally have seemed trifling up against some of the defining and grisly moments of the century that collided that year and chewed up every available dose of attention in the culture. 1972, in short, produced the Watergate scandal, the Munich Massacre, and Bloody Sunday. Nixon traveled to China in 1972, and the last U.S. troops finally departed Vietnam. It wasn’t clear that a novel had leverage against all of this atrocity, deceit, transgression, and milestone, let alone a novel posing as a ship’s log, narrated by a widowed ship slave who has witnessed logic-defying architecture, radical ecological invention, and faked a pregnancy while being banished—by her alcoholic, abusive husband—from all land and humanity.
Forget that painting (or sculpture, or the better poetry) was never asked to compete with the news, or to be the news. The novel’s weird burden of relevance—to reflect and anticipate the times, to grab headlines, to be somehow current, while not also disgracing the language—was being shirked all over the place, and Stanley Crawford, already unusually capable of uncoiling his brain and repacking it in his head in a new, gnarled design for every book he wrote, was chief among those writers who seemed siloed in a special, ahistorical field, working with private alchemical tools, producing work just out of tune enough to disrupt the flight of the birds that passed his hideout.
Architectural dreamwork, end-times seascapes so barren they seem cut from the pages of the Bible, coolly-rendered Rube Goldberg apparati, and the crushing sadness that results when you tie your emotional fortunes to a person whose tongue is so fat in his mouth he can barely speak, mark this little masterpiece of a novel. Cast as a soliloquy in the form of a ship’s log, a grief report from someone who has no good insurance she will ever be heard, the novel moves fluidly between its major forms: love song, a treatise on gardening at sea, an argument against the company of others, and a dark science expo for exquisite inventions like a hybrid lichen that makes things invisible. Published by Alfred A. Knopf under the editorial guidance of Gordon Lish, the fiction world’s singular Quixote—a champion of innovative styles and formal ambition—there may have been no better year in which to tuck such an odd, exquisite book. Instead of rushing for relevance and breaking the news, Crawford was taking the oldest news of all—it is strange and alone here, even when we are surrounded by people, and there is a great degree of pain to be felt—and reporting it as nautical confessional. The result, now thirty-six years later, seems to prove that interior news, the news of what it feels like to want too much from another person, will not readily smother under archival dust.
To be sure, Crawford’s focus in Log—the special toxins that steam off of a marriage—was happily at-large in the literary work of his peers (possibly so much at-large that its shadow is still staining the ground on which we walk), but while most of Crawford’s contemporaries were staging their loveless, white-knuckle relationship fiction in a spume of alcohol, boxed up in fresh suburban sheet rock, Crawford put his unhappily married couple, the Unguentines, to sea, rendered them as solitary (if not so innocent) as Adam and Eve, and he cursed them to be so awkwardly fit for human behavior that every kind of congress had to be reinvented and mythologized anew. If The Mrs Unguentine is so large and equipped it seems more like an island, it is also a floating stage for human experimentation, beyond the strictures of society, and the novel itself is a playbook for rethinking just what two people are supposed to do together when most of the livable world is out of reach. And to make their dilemma special, so we could see the nosedive of the Unguentines’ failed love through a crystal lens that Crawford ground himself from his own blend, he canopied the bad marriage with a fantastical dome, a literary invention so beautiful it doesn’t hog the spotlight so much as become a kind of distorted monocle through which to see this experiment in isolation, gardening, and love go terribly, terribly wrong.
This may have been the first time that readers could sample a collision of such radically different literary sensibilities as Ingmar Bergman and Jules Verne: the bleak, life-loathing (affirming, loathing, affirming, who knows anymore) sensibility of the great artist of domestic cruelty, Bergman, with the wondrous vision and spectacle of Verne, the adventure story mad scientist. Call it Scenes from a Marriage on a Mysterious Island, because The Mrs Unguentine is more landmass than boat, a garden of Eden with very little joy and not one dose of shame, where the only solution to the endless pain of love is to hurl oneself overboard, which Mr. Unguentine does, only to keep courting his woman from the deeps, or from the dead, it isn’t really clear. Faking his own death just to reset the romance and return to courting? Colossally cruel or intensely romantic, or maybe both? This was the highest drama, a marriage on the rocks set in the weird colors of, if not science fiction, then really strange fiction that hews as much to ship design and greenhouse invention as it does to characters. The aloof approach to the sanctity of marriage, what indeed at times can seem like a satire of bad marriage fiction (she wants to talk, he wants to work and be alone, she wants kids, he drinks, he hits, she lies, he disappears), lulls us into susceptibility for the deep magic that occurs on this boat, and it would prove to be Stanley Crawford’s perfect art in later books to stage his deeply human stories—stories about the failure to love properly or deeply or at all—in bizarre, defended, solipsistic worlds.
Crawford’s description of the dome, secreted into the text with bored, offhand logic, introduces a theme that would later become a long-standing obsession (in such books as Some Instructions [1978] and Petroleum Man [2005]): patriarchs who cruelly show their love through radical inventions and the construction of ingenious, if useless, systems. If these men cannot much speak or love or hug, if they can’t be basically kind and open and interested, they can impart information, a syllabus wrenched from an arcane mind, with the hopes that it will be received as the ultimate loving gift. As much as we hear of Mr. Unguentine’s failure at human interaction, the entire ship’s design seems somehow his best act of love. Every bit of rigging and composting is a shrine. He will take his wife away to sea and never explain why, or even speak. He will fashion a secret identity for himself that brooks no interruption or interrogation. But in return he will build her a more fascinating world than any she could expect on land, even while depriving her of the basic things she wants. It’s a complicated way to show love, full of spectacle, vain performance, and ego. The irony is so entirely not lost on Mrs. Unguentine that she’s crushed by it.
In Crawford’s memoir of farming, A Garlic Testament (1992), he remarks of himself that, as a young man, he “developed a craving for what I called the real.” It is his pursuit of this goal, in a body of work that is as rigorously inventive as it is obsessed with the human tragedy, that has marked him as a writer attuned to the most potent, and timeless, possibilities in literary fiction.
