Context N°18
by Jeremy M. Davies
I had been an admirer of Dalkey Archive for a good while—not suspecting that I would work for them a few years down the line—and it was their logo that attracted me to The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman, along with the natural question, “Who the hell is W. M. Spackman, and why does he deserve a Complete anything?” I had never so much as seen a Spackman book before, but Stanley Elkin’s blurb—and this was in St. Louis: the city of Elkin, the city of Gass—was seduction enough. I brought it home, and as with many another omnibus edition, began the serious work of putting off doing anything more than admiring its heft.
When I finally did open it, I read not from the beginning, but from the middle—another symptom of the omnibus syndrome—and, as usual, found that I had been a fool to wait. Open to any page of his Complete Fiction and you will be struck dead by a turn of phrase, a lyric description, some gorgeously stylized dialogue—and all just a wee bit off, made strange by his delectably odd manner of deforming simple statements with deadpan qualifications. (Of an interminable lovers’ spat, the narrator shorthands: “And so on and on. As they went on down into the second cool bottle. The conversation becoming still less worth setting even ceremonially down.”)
His writing has an uncanny elegance: he writes like an aspirant to the ribald comedies of seduction that blossomed during the Restoration, though never with recourse to their crudity. He is our lusty, hetero Firbank: a maker of bibelots, sculpted little gewgaws that, when skimmed or flipped through, seem like forgettable trifles, but when engaged with all of the reader’s attention reveal the full density of their textures.
No one page offers an easy point of entry, a pastoral paragraph in “plain American which cats and dogs can read” (though Spackman’s prose is American through and through: just a vernacular that was never actually spoken, a hodgepodge of Quaker clarity and the cussedness found in the jokier prose of Pound; stolid straightforwardness steeped in modernist quirk), but Spackman is the least intimidating of authors. He approaches us on familiar ground, and then helps us see just how strange that ground really is. Not an “experimental” writer in the familiar sense, he makes even the parry and thrust of predigested “romantic” dialogue—and his novels are as full of this as those of Henry Green—alien, compelling, and hilarious:
“Because dammit,” he hurried on, “this outlandish whatever-it-is, relationship, hardly know what, between you and me—total absence of any term from the language if you want my opinion! And I include Freudian technicalities!” he ended with violence. “Now dammit can I get you a sherry?” he in part shouted, springing up again. . . . “The thing is, to take these things calmly, in the name of heaven!” he made her see. . . . “In a word, my lovely little thing, you and I really do have to get our, huh, our mutual history into some kind of handle-able order my God!”
It’s not hard to see why Stanley Elkin would be attracted to this: yes, it’s affected, twee, precious, but my God it’s weird, having what Elkin called “the queer protuberant salience of the obliquely sighted”—the “strange displacement of the ordinary” that turns merely competent reportage into something that rankles and sticks in the mind—and it has it at the level of each individual sentence, making Spackman’s narrative statements not so much a tool for carrying meaning as a means of carrying a tune. You have to be open to it: let it persuade you and teach you how to hear its melody.
Like his prose, Spackman is an anomaly. William Mode Spackman was born in 1905, lived eighty-five years, and the best of his delicate comedies were all written in the last third of his life. Each of them touches, with variation and nuance, on the same themes: the thrill of seduction, the fleeting pleasure of new love, the slow and never quite complete quiescence of desire as a man grows older, and, particularly in my favorite of his novels, A Presence with Secrets, the basic unfamiliarity between us and even our closest intimates—though he is never portentous, never dour. He’s more likely to attract the opposite criticism, that he’s too frivolous and light. But like Firbank and Green—with whom he shares just enough similarities for one to be tempted to issue an opportunistic “movement” name—he was a supreme stylist who could make the most trivial of narrative soufflés into succulent delights.
Further giving the lie to any accusations of frivolity, Presence is a tightly structured triptych, giving us three scenes from the life of a typical Spackmanian “marauder”—read “rake”—and painter named Hugh Tatnall.
The first section is narrated in a coy postcoital third-person, as Hugh wakes in bed with his new lover-of-the-moment following a riot in Italy (“For they had not taken refuge in this room to make love good god! but in a hairsbreadth run for it out of the path of that headlong mob suddenly on their very heels . . .”). The second is in first person, the recollections of a doting female cousin; and the third, “A Few Final Data During the Funeral,” is made up of the thoughts of a fellow marauder, now old, attending Hugh’s quiet, Quaker memorial.
The book is, among other things, a delirious performance: Spackman and his characters talk around Hugh, defining him by his absence, and in the process illuminating the fact that every life is—as Steven Moore points out in his excellent afterword—itself a “presence with secrets”: secrets that are inevitably lost with death, but that continue to tease and charm. At the root of all the bed-hopping and urbane flirtation that Spackman renders with such impeccable eccentricity—the shy then yielding women; the flustered, sputtering men-on-the-make—is his frustration with and delight in the basic unknowability of the texts of each others’ lives: how sex can be driven as much by the lust for knowing, for experiencing a closeness to new and ultimately inassimilable information, as it is by the more obvious dividends.
It’s about as charming a defense of infidelity as you’re likely to find. Hence Spackman’s focus on new loves, when his characters feel themselves drifting into a new affair, illicit or otherwise; his concentration not on the “stark act,” but, like some gruff and coy Philadelphian Schnitzler, on the various meetings and afterglowings: those moments of luxuriance when lovers really meet one another, and discover the boundaries of their access.
Pre- or post-, his characters spend most of their time talking—trying to define their relationships, and making rules for one another about as enforceable as Caligula’s victory over the sea. Their romances start to fade the instant they begin, and the unpleasantness that follows, when it’s sketched in, can’t ever compete for our or the author’s attentions. In Spackman’s world we may only speak with any surety about new loves and loves remembered with fondness. If this tendency towards fickleness and nostalgia in his imaginary lovers bears an unsettling resemblance to the true nature of we hopelessly adulterous and sentimental primates, it’s worth repeating, here and as always, that this particular zero-sum game is only really winnable in art.
