Douglas Woolf, Ya! & John-Juan, Harper & Row, 1971.
Well-respected throughout his career, Douglas Woolf created some of the most startlingly original works of the twentieth century. The two novels collected here create a dreamlike vision of America where helplessness prevails and the actions of the sane seem tinged with madness.
Ya! takes place during the Christmas reunion of a penniless novelist and his teenage daughter at the nightmarish home of a super-American family; John-Juan begins with an amnesiac who finds himself in a Mexican border town with only his pajamas and watch before becoming part of a surreal and somewhat frightening community organized around "runners" that collect trash along the highways.
Two short novels about the road and guileless, imperturbable guys bumming it for reasons they either can't or prefer not to recall. The first, Ya/, named for the broken neon of the Yale Hotel, Al's fleatrap base of operations, moves in fits and starts, through random episodes, toward the fixed point of Al's reunion with his young daughter. It's a miserable, grueling business and with nothing else to go on, one assumes that Al is a fated outsider -- either very poor or very stupid. But then be arrives in affluent civilization and we find out otherwise -- and also begin to understand his easygoing acceptance of the alternative he has chosen. In John-Juan the logic lies in the movement itself. John-Juan has awakened in a Mexican town, in pajamas and slippers, remembering nothing. He's first chased by gangs of children and beggars; then the chase evolves into a race between himself and an evidently friendly Senor. And then, at the Senor's cue, the race turns into a running two-man clean-up team, picking litter from the roadside. This is John-Juan's introduction to the village of Sonorla and its peculiar system and he literally takes it in stride. Only later, when he crosses the border alone on a mission for the village, does he feel the shock of difference, as if he's suddenly entered a different world or a different novel. Since nothing in either story is allowed a precedent, everything from the ordinary to the bizarre seems to happen on tire same level of mildly surprising probability. The writing is assured, with a distinctive flavor, two short beers bought dear. - Kirkus Reviews
"Woolf's great qualities are a comic vision...and an independence of approach... He has discipline and a sense of style." - Robert R. Kirsch
"Woolf's work is single-minded in impulse - like Swift, a more obviously enraged but related ironist, he sets out to depict commonly ignored or denied principles of order." - Larry Kart
Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall. Dalkey Archive Press, 1984.
Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, Wall to Wall traces a modern Ulysses in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side -- the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border -- before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In Wall to Wall Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, Wall to Wall has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.
Douglas Woolf, Fade Out. Black Sparrow Press, 1996.
read it at Google Books
"A first novel by an excitingly good young writer," said LJ's reviewer of this title, which tells how a retired bank teller and an aged ex-prize fighter escape the protective custody of family and the old people's home. "This is caviar, but it is also a simple, appealing story" - Library Journal
Douglas Woolf, Hypocritic Days and Other Tales. Black Sparrow Press, 1994. read it Google Books
Douglas Woolf was a writer's writer: his tales of serene down-and-outers, belated frontiersmen, and cross-country spiritual seekers were much admired by fellow-artists Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and Paul Mazursky. "He was so gentle," wrote Creeley shortly after Woolf's death in 1992, "so particular to the ways people live together. It is in his intimate focus, in the unobtrusive detailing of gesture, conversation, place, that his genius is clear."
Woolf's quiet genius is on display in each of the twenty-seven short stories in Hypocritic Days, a career-spanning collection edited by his literary executor, Sandra Braman. Take the title story, for instance: it's a kind of improvised, Laurel-and-Hardy dance between a washed-up Saratoga horse jockey and his large, slow, uncommunicative son, both characters stepping lightly, in tandem, as they negotiate the boy's awkward passage from teenager to young man. Or "Bank Day," in which Woolf tenderly depicts an impoverished young couple expecting their first child, full of hopeful, high-minded plans for the future even though they subsist on a diet of cat food and cold coffee. None of his characters ever lose hope, despite the horrors and despairs surrounding them, and not because they are fools but because, in the words of Robert Creeley, "they have the talent, and the pleasure, of making in this world a place of their own."
Douglas Woolf, Future Preconditional: A Collection. Coach House Press, 1978.
Douglas Woolf, HAD.
Douglas Woolf, On Us. Black Sparrow Press, 1976.
Douglas Woolf, Signs of a Migrant Worrier. Coyote's Journal, 1965.
Douglas Woolf, Spring of the Lamb. Jargon Society, 1972.
from Woolf's Guide to New York an autobiographical novel by Douglas Woolf
Conventional criticism bridles precisely at invention's starting-line:
we can look for the new and valid beyond what criticism envelops. The neglect of Douglas Woolf's work, persisting more than a decade beyond his death, pays perverse tribute to its originality. As David Matlin shows above: if we read Woolf with attention, we'll experience his work reacting with precision and with almost too much feeling to the primary breakdowns (aka issues) of the last century.
In tapes held at the University of Delaware Library (home of the Woolf archive), Woolf calls Thoreau the dominant author of the 19th century, and Beckett of the 20th. If Walden is autobiography doctored by fictions exemplifying meaning, Woolf's stories and novels are fictions wounded and infected by autobiography. Their relentless attention to the logistics of being-like lodging and feeding-are the draining of meaning from Thoreau's exemplary simplifications, translating them to an environment of absurdity, to which humans can react with amoral mania or hurt withdrawal.
To put it baldly: a primary assumption of Woolf's work is that Beckett's landscape is a realistic rendition of the United States.
Woolf rarely writes in the first person (unless the narrator is an
animal), but the consciousness of the narrator distorts, through
systematically sustained metaphors, conventional facts and data.
We could call this technique deliberating pathetic fallacy, were the objects responsive to the narrator's perceptions. But it is their unresponsiveness that forces the narrative and the narrator to be so alert, so ready to retreat into a verbal re-creation of an absurdly hostile environment.
The seeming weirdness of Woolf's fictions is the realistic story of the struggle between a reasonable and reasonably innocent being and that being's encounters with the 20th-century mundane. It is no accident that a primary source of critical appreciation for Woolf has been poets who grasp Woolf's formal and verbal accuracy.
Woolf's Guide to New York is an unpublished novel that he calls "autobiographical." It takes the narrator back to his region "of origin," so that he encounters not only today's experience but also his whole life's adjuncts to today's experience. After remembering wrenching post-butterscotch-sundae-partings from Grand Central, he can return to his perceptions of sustenance, the gathering of which he chronicles like Thoreau, but the contents and circumstances of which are as absurd as transcendental:
He could dab as long as he wanted today. The butterscotch must surely have changed, but it was impossible to say in what way. The sweetness still clutched the throat; the battle between hot and cold took place in the front of the head. No, neither he nor the butterscotch had changed in those ways. Face it, he said to the mirror, you're enjoying this more than you used to because now you're in need of it.
Yes, he's indeed "facing it:" all the meanings, judgments,
self-judgments, feelings-plus the accurate, literate, slightly desperate good humor necessary to go on (Beckett) are present in this paragraph. So that at the end of this episode, when the packed
narrative has taken Ray through the grotesqueries of his work and his firing his neglectful publisher, when he has retired sore-legged from his daily self-judgments and self-exams, when the sounds of his
copulating neighbors have retreated, his rest is disturbed by a police
raid.
But Ray feels OK, because "at least they hadn't caught him sticky-mouthed." An obvious narrative would fasten on the sordidness, the fear and annoyance of the late disturbance. But we'd learn nothing new from that. What Woolf brings us in those last few words are the lonely Ray's feeling so complicit, so close to the sounds because they make him feel...what? They make him feel he's vulnerable to parental correction for not wiping his lips after the butterscotch.
What a wonderful illustration of what David Matlin calls above taking "quietly unusual narrative chances." Butterscotch at Walgreen's may be about as commercial as an evocative madeleine could become, but as continuing metaphor AND fact it completes not only one of many "artistic" unifications of this episode, but it also conveys the hurt consciousness of the boy the narrator will not relinquish. Woolf's art conveys multiple perceptions of the same event with grace, tact and accuracy, since we realize also that "lonely old men" can get "sticky-mouthed" in hotels like that less innocently. ***********
Note: David Matlin's essay responds primarily to the Dalkey Archive Press re-issue of Ya! and John-Juan in one volume, introduction by Robert Creeley. Creeley's piece and Sandra Braman's After Words to Hypocritic Days and Other Tales (Black Sparrow, 1993) are the best introductions I know of to Woolf's work. In addition, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring, 1982, devoted half an issue to Woolf's work.
The Woolf archive resides in the highly cooperative University of Delaware Library, where the unpublished novel Woolf's Guide to New York, and many other important works and sources of information await attention. Publishers and others should contact his literary executor Sandra Braman at sbraman@wi.rr.com.
Douglas Woolf's work challenges us: if we are serious about American fiction, and maybe ourselves, we will read and re-read it. It is funny, sad, utterly original and lively. There is nothing, as Gilbert Sorrentino has written, cheap about it. It ranges from relatively simple narratives "by" animals to novels capturing wide ranges of object-matter. The trajectory of its darkness is impounded by John-Juan, a hell-bath that can be seen as the American "In the Penal Colony." - Lou Rowan
narrative chances like Douglas Woolf; chances so quietly animated that
a new intensity appears lying wholly outside the codes and models of
the "experimental" or the "post-modern." Henry James identified
intensity as "the freedom to feel and say." In both Ya! and John Juan
such freedom becomes an act of curiosity applied directly to every word
without prescription or rule. Douglas Woolf's work also risks what
James called "the health of the novel" in terms of the "variety of
paths" the novel might arrive at and discover and in doing so creates
an object that is at once listenable and so wide awake before its
substances that the reader becomes unknowingly sharpened and startled
by the management of the materials and what one man can bring alive by
the invention of a new scale that changes us in our reading.
I don't know of any two novels that capture the moods, the
repositories of dread and wonder, the rupture of a Cold War America
spewing its promises, its nightmares, its precariousness, its
hallucinations hanging under the frozen star fields the way these
novels do. They come to their truths as if the world/desertions which
have become our common heritage happened so long ago they no longer
have any of their sanction. In that posthumous world the "root of
beauty is" and can be once again "audacity" as Pasternack said,
audacity as it is presented in these novels, with, how can I possibly
say it before the withering facelessness of our ironies and cynicisms,
a gentle, intimate, courage giving rectitude which Woolf draws out of
the swamps of our unrelenting betrayals as if it were, to quote the
closing sentence of Ya! "Down below, the snow was beginning to pile a
little bit," and nowhere and no other time to be, the carriage of the
Novelist's nerve wholly its own in stark ambivalence and living charms,
resembling nothing else and going to the marrow.
Ambivalence itself, particularly in John Juan, reminds me of the
region I call "Home." It is the "Border" with its three sister cities,
Tijuana, Mexicali, San Diego, and the huge desert spaces which can rip
up identity, bodies; the life-beginnings and the life-endings that make
this region so fragile, so powerfully rotten and beautiful, and so
strange. Woolf's characters are the ones constantly running, constantly
transforming as are the "migrants" who can't really afford a stable
identity since such identities get hunted down for arrest, or slavery,
or murder, or the abstraction of being sent back to villages where
there is no water, no future except the immediate future of hypothermia
or heat exhaustion on a sun-eaten hill in the Yuha Desert and you'll
die for sure and dry up into a mummy and experience reappearance in
Plaster City or Bombay Beach on the shores of the Salton Sea where all
the steady and unsteadiest last chances seem to converge for their
sundown dance.
This is a shadow world constantly patrolled, illuminated, as if it
were now the newest quick-draw prison space. The most remote mountains
are filled with used toilet paper, discarded plastic bread wrappers,
cans, forks, coats, shoes and other "items" which indicate a point
reached of disorientation, desperation, despair, and amnesia. Take off
your shoes, pardner, in these wilds and your numbers fall to zero.
Follow a "Tarantula Hawk" on its hunt for the big spiders and you may
find a skeleton or two just over the ridge from your house. The crisis
of environment and population has a secret, unexpected mix in this
world of huge boulders, waterlessness, scorpions, rattlers, lip eating
winds and the Border Patrol hounding and scouring every inch of outland
suburbia and wilderness that makes up this place called "The Border."
Woolf get its dilations, its hungers, its swirling, paranoic, amnesiac
litter cast up on beaches and arroyos and the agents who will carve the
captives into a mosaic of humiliations only an artist with Woolf's hand
and eye can make into the truths we may not be able to live without
before the new regalia of starvations now upon us. - David Matlin
Reading Douglas Woolf:
Douglas Woolf was an uncannily reflective person—as though he chose to take his color and shape from the surrounding world rather than to force upon it his own determinations and judgement. However, what he did exercise, unremittingly, was an acute perception, his witness, his recognition, his fact in being there, wherever there was or might be. In the seeming chaos of his incessant shifts of place and employment, he was persistently and minutely practical, however unlocated he may have seemed to others in more usual lives. Choosing to be a writer or, more to the point, finding that he was a writer and had to be one, he practiced an almost religious avoidance of other, over-reaching patterns such as professions or familiar vocations must argue. The doctor or the carpenter is real, long before anyone is actually there as a specific person. Just so the teacher, the nurse, the soldier or anyone society has thus made a name for. There is no name simply for Douglas Woolf. Even that name itself seems often curiously unreal. If I am to be responsible to this extraordinary person’s life, I must briefly rehearse its details, such as I know them, a scatter of particular memories of our all too few meetings, letters, mutual friends such as his exceptional Grove Press editor, Donald M. Allen, others such as the writers Edward Dorn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, the people who were his family. In some ways Douglas Woolf was as elusive as the proverbial woodland creature, known to be there but rarely if ever seen. I know he was son of a successful New York businessman, that his mother had difficult bouts of mental illness, being occasionally hospitalized at McLean’s near Boston, that he had driven an ambulance for the American Field Service in North Africa during the Second World War and had also been in the Army Air Force, that he had gone to Harvard, dropping out before graduation. But having said that, the trail grows cold or rather grows increasingly singular—-Good Humor man in Tucson, sweeper of a municipal racetrack in Spokane, householder in an abandoned miner’s cabin in Wallace, Idaho. I was in touch with him in all these situations but it was very hard to join the symbolic dots so as to make some defining picture.
Our first contact was entirely by chance. Living with my family in Mallorca in the early fifties, together with my wife, Ann, I had begun the Divers Press, which published collections of poetry and translation by Paul Blackburn, Charles Olson, Irving Layton, Robert Duncan and myself among others. I thought of the press as a chance to publish that work of contemporaries which had all too little hope of being published. But other than the first edition of my stories, The Gold Diggers, we had found no prose. Then, altogether unexpectedly, a manuscript arrived in the mail, a novel no less, Hypocritic Days by Douglas Woolf.
In some ways it was an obvious “first novel” insofar as the construction had a wandering impulse at times. There was no tight, determining hand seeing to all details if that’s ever the imagined necessity. But the people in the story were almost heart-breakingly present, the ex-jockey father, Chick, with the large son, Charles, the tenderness and confusion between them, the nudges of affection and pain—”Chick moved silently around him with sideways face to remove his dish. ‘Sit down, there, Big Fella,’ he said, ‘we still have our dessert.’ ” It was so gentle, so particular to ways people live together, and if it was otherwise the complex passage from teenager to adult in the proposedly garish world at Hollywood’s edge, it was in the intimate focus, the unobtrusive detailing of gesture, conversation, place, that Douglas Woolf ’s genius was clear. One gets some sense of this, thinking of what he’s said of his need to write: “If there were only one reader left in the world, I would write to that one as lovingly as I do now.” “Lovingly” is the apt word. There is always a story to tell in his writing, always the people to be found there as I did “Chick” and “Charles.” So we published the book in January, 1955, in several hundred copies, a compact format with a cover by the Japanese poet Katue Kitasono, the font our standby Mercedes with Futura heads. It was hardly a best seller. I remember being delighted that someone in Connecticut ordered twenty copies. It turned out it was his mother. The novel itself is dedicated to his wife Yvonne.
Perhaps the reason for his unsuccessful sales is that it has never been easy, and may, in fact, be impossible, to make a simple characterization for this writer. At times he is compared to Jonathan Swift but that seems to me displacing of both. Woolf is not angry, or certainly not in the same way as Swift. His intent is not, as I read him, satire in the first place anymore than it was Richard Brautigan’s, who shares with Douglas Woolf both the insistent gentleness of manner and also his “loner” life. If one were to make them persons of a group, to include Mark Twain, Nathaniel West, Stephen Crane and Malcolm Lowry for starters, then perhaps one gets a little closer. However “comic” these writers may at times seem, they are not laughing. They all seem finally to be just where they have placed their diverse characters, in a world without appeal, without relief or response.
In like sense, I never felt that Douglas Woolf was making anything up, certainly not as some fantasized or invented “reality.” Given the order of things, “worlds” such as those to be found in either Ya! or John-Juan will happen as facts of thought itself. What was it Descartes said? “I think, therefore I am.” That credo can become with equal simplicity, “I think, therefore it is.” The poet William Carlos Williams put it most succinctly in saying, “A new world is only a new mind.” Our “world,” or “worlds,” are what we think they are, neither more nor less, and so we go about our daily businesses, determined in our purpose, convinced in our rightness. That’s what thought’s for—to make a world possible.
So if one finds oneself in a world with no memory of how one came to be there, wearing solely pajamas, then one continues as thought and one’s experience and the case provides. Left here, right there. Toothbrush for teeth and good health. What’s different then in Douglas Woolf ’s relation to these curious matters, how, in this case, does “John/Juan” serve him as a writer? How does this truncated but vivid character take place in the reader’s own world? I think suddenly of Nathaniel West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” becoming entangled with his own sad respondents, of Stephen Crane’s young soldier in a thicket of trees, hearing the large cannon ball coming toward him, and of Malcolm Lowry’s drunkenly poignant “Consul,” collapsed in a corner of some garden, urinating, as he tries to explain his situation to the person who has discovered him. What matter discretion, call it, in any world where all is, even tossed out bottles and cans stuffed with shit and wadded Kleenex? The padding, swooping “runners,” who would collect all such, burying it for subsequent salvage, are heralds of present environmental concerns no doubt. But it is rather Douglas Woolf ’s construction of this curiously ambivalent cluster of survivors, of their apparent “queen,” of their intensive ordering of all significant details of human life, their equal abstractness, absence of relations among themselves, even “good” and “bad” a vague appellation they cannot themselves control except by doing what they are told to do.
It is John-Juan’s own particulars which most define the world then realized: the absence of a usual history caused by amnesia, the physical way he is persuaded or pulled to move in a kaleidoscopically changing company of others, the incessant distortion of any locating habit of language, his prized watch disappearing into the vagina of a teasing young woman just met, and his dress, one battered set of pajamas. What can he do? Go with the flow, as one says, and consider. No doubt this curious stage would make a useful ground for any imagination of satire writ as large as one might hope to manage. However, there seems to be no satire, no necessary condemnation, even of the malevolent border authorities who end the chaotic and surreal story by pounding him thoroughly, breaking his bones. It’s as though the author had taken the various bits and pieces of an all too real life and thought then of how they might conjoin in some place that only the mind could propose, some border—familiar enough from Douglas Woolf ’s passing in and out of Mexico—where a redefinition of who and what one thought one was is always in order, in fact, required. The echo of name sounds familiar—Robert or Bob, Bill or Willy. Is the person changed? Heavens no—or it would not be the case for said person, just for all else surrounding? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. . . .” They would think of something to call it.
In Ya! the autobiographical grounding seems to come forward markedly. For example, the extraordinary sequences having to do with the protagonist Al’s meager job “at Portal 8″ in “the Coliseum” selling “Pipsi” (he first calls it “Pepsi”) must come from Douglas Woolf ’s own transient employment in like circumstances. There is a painfully meticulous tracking of money, most particularly of coins, all through the novel, endlessly reiterated budgeting, balancing of one coin’s expenditure against a small cache of others saved for “hockey” in some hazy future. The pacing, the calculations of what’s in hand, the purchases made so poignantly are, as one reads of them, heartbreaking.” ‘I’ll take one of those,’ Al said, whipping out twelve cents.” Yet it would be utterly beside any point apparent to say that that effect only is either this book’s intent—so to move the reader to some compassionate response—or the general disposition of the writer, to bring us into some box of apposite guilt and displacement. Paradoxically there is no advice to be found, which says, for instance, the reader should practice Al’s terrifying virtues, be humble, find pleasure in the absolute minims of survival, go on foot even through such drifts of mid-winter snow as have caused the highway to close and trucks and buses to stop moving. Our hero walks on, or rather contrives to slide as follows:
This was a lazy mode of travel, once one got the swing of it. Eyes closed, knees raised, slide downward on a wave, partway up to its next gentle undulation. Now crawl to the nearest treetop, hang there a moment. Shove off again, gliding each time a little farther. The proud sun stood at his back, to guide and not to blind him. The highway lay to his left, not far away. The undulating telephone wires were visible! He swung onward, paralleling. Ahead, treetops stood out against purest blue, beckoning him to the summit. If he could slide uphill this well, imagine sailing down the other side. Thus he did not much mind slithering on his belly the last steep half mile.This beckoning world seems a veiled paradise of unexpected kind. I know I am not out there myself, hands chapped and raw, worn pants stiff with frozen snow, shoes, if any, caked blocks in which, somewhere, I presume are my still surviving feet. And my tenderly secured packages! Christmas, after all, is just around the corner and I am on my way to see my only beloved daughter. Who would not feel all possible?
Again the father “Al” approaches his destination with such a deliberation of means. Careful not to arouse curiosity, as one says, he contrives to complete both his shopping and the last miles to where his daughter lives with the aggressively successful relatives. This is to be Al’s shamed entrance into the world of all that he cannot manage or provide. But his angel, the daughter he has come to see, not only receives him with recognition and securing love but then chooses to escape the drear company with him. When they are at last free, as it were, he is hit by hunger, realizing he had not thought of food for them both. But she has brought unexpected sandwiches taken from the relatives’ hoard, so that their hunger is amply fed. “Not bad for your first night, 88! Maybe tomorrow would be better. You never lose hope. . . .” It is just about with these words that the novel ends—happily. That old hotel with its battered sign, reading at night YA because the LE had blacked out, was trying to tell us something after all. YA!
One never does quite lose hope—despite all the horrors and despairs surrounding. If I am persuaded that Douglas Woolf is neither a satirist nor an ironist primarily, it is because the worlds his various characters find themselves in are, each one, places which do not apply to any other world so simply. They are there where they are and he has found means to live in them because he believes, as I do, that they are not merely reflections of some anterior “real” world. If one were, for example, even for a minute asked to think of our present world as anything other than a malignant joke, a satire upon the very principles it claims as its authority, what would he or she manage to offer in response? Is it to be finally, as e. e. cummings wrote, “listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”? It is Douglas Woolf ’s immense and consistent acceptance of what he’s been given, his fascination with what can be made of it, so that the salt left in a small bag of peanuts has use, the peels of an apple, and this is just where his story begins, always. It is not Robinson Crusoe’s. The hero is not headed back at last to civilization and wealth. It is like Cervantes or rather his ageless friend, Don Quixote, who even when defeated still hears the echoes of his transforming dreams. I know there are good guys and bad guys in Douglas Woolf’s books, and he makes sure we know which is which. But his pleasure, and therefore mine, is in making the world, any world, a place still of one’s own.
- Robert Creeley
Ed Dorn's Douglas Woolf
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