This daring novel is structured as a series of alphabetical entries, complete with definitions, dates, verbatim dialogue, lists of objects, and cross-references, that the reader can use as he pleases. The dates of various events, given within the entries, carry the narrative forward, so that the reader is made aware of the ultimate fortunes of the characters by means of a multiple, interior chronology.
In the book, the author has delineated a literary community whose main points of concentration are New York City, Hoboken, New Jersey, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The people are familiar enough--bohemians, failed poets, celebrities who maintain ties with their lesser-known peers, and the endless "artistic" hangers-on that such communities inevitably attract. What is not so familiar is that the author has contrived not only to write a book that is flashingly funny, he has endowed this community of letters with the bitter addenda that make his humor all the more poignant.
The basic story is of the desperate and unhappy love of Tom Jones, a young, aspirant poet, for Sadie Massey, a well-off girl who has flung herself into the several bohemias available to her, and embraced, with equal fervor, drugs, alcohol, art, and sexual promiscuity. Their love affair, and the background of mutual friends and enemies against which it is set, reveals a cross-section of urban artistic life that is limned with a clarity and acuteness that borders on the photographic.
Richard Horn is a native New Yorker. Encyclopedia was written over a two-year period when the author lived in Mexico. For the past year he and his wife have been traveling throughout India, and he is well into a second novel based on his Indian experiences.
Richard Horn’s Encyclopedia (1969), in which alphabetized notations (filled with cross-references worth following) weave an ambiguous fiction about human interrelatonships, paradoxically disordering by reordering and thus forcing the reader to pursue his or her own path in experiencing the fiction. (Why haven’t we heard from this author again? He seemed too sophisticated to be a one-shot. Someone once suggested Horn’s name might be a pseudonym for Gilbert Sorrentino, who worked as an editor at Horn’s publisher around that time; but Sorrentino’s own novels are not quite so good.) - Richard Kostelanetz
"There is a good bit of fun in the doing, particularly in watching the author contort his entries to tell the rudiments of a situation. (...) Unhappily, the book has all the gripping development and vitality of the latest Britannica." - Edward M. White, The Los Angeles Times
"The writing is formidable and formed, despite the formlessness of its vehicle. (...) Surprisingly, the style works. But the story Encyclopedia conveys is banal and ultimately a bore." - Tom Rettew, The Morning News
Yet another forgotten sixties novel from an author who seems to have published nothing else, 1969's "Encyclopedia" by Richard Horn lives up to its title in that the narrative is relayed by a series of alphabetical entries spanning the years 1965-1967, concerning the affairs of a group of New York-area poets and writers. The entries aren't your standard encyclopedia listings; instead, you get entries like "Straight Left Jab, A," and "Rita Meter Maid Handbags." Likewise the main characters are given their own listings, which provide brief biographical details as well as clues about what happens to them after the narrative proper. Cross-referencing is the order of the day; I flipped through this book more than one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels I devoured as a kid. This really heightens the interactive aspect of the novel. You'll be reading about, say, Sadie Massey (the boorish harlot-in-training, rich NYC girl whom our mediocre hero Tom Jones lusts after), and then flip to and fro through the pages, glimmering additional details about her. Horn, in his short intro to the novel, explains that cross-referencing is key to gathering the narrative; you can't just read from listing to listing. So all this is novel and exciting: an interactive entertainment decades before the internet.
Only problem is, the story and its characters are about as mundane as standing in line at the post office.
I use "story" in its most liberal sense. This novel is really more of a haphazard collection of what seems to be the author's personal memories over the years 1965 to 1967, with listings derived from lines of dialog between various characters, and events ranging from hanging out at bars to poetry readings. Nothing much happens.
The plot which can be excised concerns Tom Jones, a poet (and we get several lines of his and other characters' lines) who, after having an affair with Valerie Johnson, the wife of his instructor, moves to Putney, MA and becomes involved with the aforementioned Sadie Massey. Sadie features all those stereotypical tropes we know so well of the sixties socialite ultra-hip chick, sleeping with anyone or anything, engaging others in brainless banter, and invoking ire in the reader. The cluster of artists and poets who surround these two are an execrable lot who drone back and forth about the usual sixties topics: sex, drugs, the "new, electronic music" that's so hip with the kids. The crux of the plot (and this is revealed in the first few pages) is that Sadie eventually leaves Jones in Fall of '66, going to Europe with the older, successful author Blacky Falis (a bitter curmudgeon I bet was modeled on Norman Mailer). Throw in a brief cameo by Neal Cassady (to whom the novel is dedicated), another fictional author who seems modeled on Ginsburg (who factors into the book as well), and lots of talk about the relativity of art, and you have what seems to be the memoirs of someone who was on the inside, who knew a lot of the movers and shakers of the time.
This raises the question of who Richard Horn was (and is). The author's bio on the inside back jacket flap reveals that he and his wife had recently been India, with Horn working on a novel about his experiences there. Yet the promised novel seems to have never been published. In fact it seems like nothing else came out by the author; I've come across some Fifties-style design books published in the 1980s by a "Richard Horn," but I don't think it's the same guy.
So was this a pseudonym of another, better-known author? Or was Horn unable to secure a second book contract, only to become yet another sixties author (like Lee Richmond, William J. Craddock, Dow Mossman, countless others) who was never given the chance to fulfill his early promise?
"Encyclopedia," needless to mention, is out of print. It only seems to have had one edition, the original hardcover release from Grove Press in 1969 (the novel's very short, I should mention - a little over 150 pages). I can't see the day that it's back in print. It's such a snapshot of its age, a frieze of its time, that I can't see the modern reader relating much to it. Too late for the Beatniks, too early for the hippies, "Encyclopedia" is stuck in that short period of the mid-sixties of Beatle boots and Bohemian hipsters. What I'm saying is, it's not what one thinks of, these days, when one thinks of "THE SIXTIES."
So then, a brave experiment which is rewarding in its own right (with the focus on dates and places, I suspect you could piece together all sorts of hidden revelations if you took the time with it), but which is failed by its mundane characters and story. Mildly recommended to other devotees of Sixties Lit, but in no way a forgotten classic.
It gets a bonus point for mentioning Gaddis's "The Recognitions" as "the best in English," though. - Joe Kenney @ amazon.com
A work of fiction, Richard Horn's novel nevertheless also lives up to its title, as it is presented in encyclopedia-format: the chapters proceeding alphabetically, each with one or (usually) more entries (that are in turn also presented in alphabetical order). Encyclopedia is not all-encompassingly encyclopædic -- it's a slim work if 165 pages, the total number of entries probably somewhere around three hundred; it doesn't even have entries for the letters Q and X -- but what there is is presented true to form. As a Preface explains, however, this work is different from the familiar encyclopedia in that:
It is not an encyclopedia or encyclopedic dictionary of general knowledge, but of particular knowledge, and it is not derived from any previous encyclopedia.
(Horn suggests: "Such a work is called on the Continent a hand encyclopedia", though this does not seem to be a common usage or term.)
What stands out immediately is that the entry-terms are largely not those one would expect in any sort of traditional encyclopedia and, even more so, that the entries themselves then are defined and explained in very personal, local, and particular terms. So, while the first entry is a more general one, the definition/explanation itself then focuses on a specific incident rather than more general description:
ABORTION: self-induced by SADIE MASSEY (Aug. 3, 1966) in Ptn, Mass.; induced by an ampule (100 mg) of ergotamine tartrate injected intramuscularly and pethadine, a synthetic morphine; Massey was assisted by TOM JONES, who believed himself responsible for the embryo. Massey said, "Up to two months this is the safest and easiest way. More girls should know about it."
Horn also emphasizes in his Preface:
In this book the cross-references are of the utmost importance. These cross-references are indicated by ITALIC CAPITALS. Furthermore, a person, place, or thing which has its own entry in this volume, when first mentioned in an entry other than its own, is in SMALL CAPITALS. The cross-references are not used recklessly; every possible effort has been made to guide the reader through only the relevant material, and to insure that the information under the other heading will be useful.
The novel is thus not built up in a straightforward sequential way, but rather with its pieces arranged in a very neat -- alphabetical -- but largely counterintuitive order. Many of the entries are dated, helping readers (re-)arrange a chronology of events, and, as promised, Horn does cross-reference related entries, but cause and effect are nowhere near as clear as they are in conventional fiction.
There are also separate entries for each of the individuals that figure in the story, but in this way the cast of characters is only introduced piecemeal and, being presented alphabetically, not in the order of appearance or importance (though, of course, readers can easily jump ahead and look up the basics about each character as soon as they are named, beginning with Sadie Massey and Tom Jones).
As with the incidents and objects that rate entries, the person-descriptions vary greatly in what and how much information is provided. The first -- Lane Anderson -- is the most detailed and traditional (if, as such, also very impersonal), with everything from his home address and telephone number to an entire curriculum vitæ, complete with a three-page listing of each poem he has ever published, and where. Other entries are more specific and revealing about specific aspects of the person's life, or limited to certain parts of it.
The range of entries is great and amusing, from food ('JAR OF SPANISH OLIVES'; 'THREE BOILED POTATOES' (yes, listed under 'T')) and meals to statements, poems, and letter-headings ('DEAR DR. LORENZ,') to general-specific descriptions ("RAINY AFTERNOON (July 26, 1966) in Ptn., Mass."); one is a: "LIST OF BOOKS, on TOM JONES'S bookshelf (606 Comml. St.) Ptn., Mass. (June-Oct., 1966)". The variety ranges from 'ORGIES' to the number 'NINE' to a game of 'MONOPOLY' to one that begins and asks:
WHY IS EVERYONE SO CRAZY ? question raised and answered (Aug. 21, 1966) by TOM JONES in Ptn., Mass.
Most of the action takes place in 1965 and the summer of 1966; a great deal involves sex and drugs; several of the characters are writers, of varying success, with quite a few poems also presented in full. It is very much a novel of the mid- to late-sixties -- down to Jones having a first edition of "FIXER, THE", by Bernard Malamud. The novel is dedicated to Neal Cassady, and there's a longer entry given over to a declamation of his (while wearing the: "UNMATCHED BOOTS (PAIR)" of that entry).
In his Preface -- writing as 'Editor-in-Chief' (rather than author) --, Horn suggests that:
We feel we have performed a service for the modern American reader by ordering the data of particular, daily life in a form already familiar in grasping the entire range of general knowledge (and most specialized fields), and thus affording the reader a new perspective from which, perhaps, he may better his understanding.
The 'particular, daily life' is of its place and time, and the presentation of it certainly a different, and arresting, way of looking at it.
In the entry on the "NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW" ("wadded into ball and thrown (Aug.23, 1966) into the fireplace") Jones quotes from Percy Lubbock's 1921 The Craft of Fiction (the author's name misspelled -- intentionally ? -- in the text as 'Kubbock'):
"As quickly as we read a book, it melts and shifts in the memory; even at the moment when the page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it ? A cluster of impressions, some clear points emerging ... is all we can hope to possess." Jones asked Falis why someone hadn't written a novel made up entirely of these "clusters of impressions," since they were all that remained, regardless of the manner of composition.
This is the closest Horn comes to explaining, in the novel itself, what he is doing in Encyclopedia, which is ultimately such a 'cluster of impressions'. The novel succeeds as such -- but also largely only at that level, as the story -- the intermingling of the characters and the consequences -- is, for the most part, not particularly compelling. Almost disarmingly true to life in its bits and pieces -- the episodes and events recounted in Encyclopedia feel quite authentic --, that isn't enough to make them, or any story pieced together from them, truly engaging, beyond the effort of piecing things together. (In that way it is of course very true to life, which, in simple description, is often very boring.) Ironically, Encyclopedia is simply not encyclopædic enough: a larger, denser net of terms and cross-references likely would have made a greater impression. than the somewhat limited cluster on offer here.
Encyclopedia does largely succeed on its own terms; as such, it's an interesting play-on-form, as well as reflection of and commentary on both the place and time of its writing, as well as American writing itself (especially the experiments of those times; one couldn't hit the nail more on the head than this being first published by Grove Press in 1969).
Encyclopedia is ultimately more a curiosity than a good read, but it is, and remains, of interest.
- M.A.Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/usx/hornr.htm
Tough Poets Press, 2023
New edition of Richard Horn's forgotten literary oddity (and his only published novel), Encyclopedia, originally published by Grove Press in 1969.
A brief description from the October 24, 1969, TIME magazine review: "The hapless love affair of hopeful poet Tom Jones and wealthy, bohemia-bound Sadie Massey is cross-referenced in brief, satirical, encyclopedic passages from ABORTION to ZOO CAFETERIA."
The narrative is entirely multilinear, and the author's preface advises the reader not to read it from beginning to end, but rather to explore the book following the cross-references.
". . . a nice smattering of sex and on the whole is quite enjoyable."— St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 7, 1969
"The author's treatment of the subject, the inventive structure of the book make it something with which the student of the novel ought to become familiar."— Green Bay Press-Gazette, November 30, 1969
"There is some excellent comedy in the book and some of the descriptions of the swinging scene are extremely entertaining. Horn also has a very considerable gift as a parodist."— The Province (Vancouver, BC), October 25, 1969
"It's a daringly original idea, but it comes off successfully and effectively. . . . Author and publisher alike are to be commended for their venture into the use of such an extraordinary device."— Argus-Leader (Sioux Falls, SD), November 2, 1969
"Surprisingly the style works."— The Morning News (Wilmington, DE), November 6, 1969
"Richard Horn has it."— The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 4, 1970
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.