Dow Mossman, Stones of Summer, 1972
Originally published to glowing reviews in 1972, Dow Mossman's extraordinary debut is a sweeping coming-of-age tale that developed a passionate cult following. It recently inspired the award-winning documentary film "Stone Reader," described by Peter Rainer of "New York" magazine as 'a marvelous literary thriller that gets at the way books can stay with people forever.' Rendered with breathtaking artistry and emotional depth, "The Stones of Summer" captures the beauty and pain of postwar America. Its vivid evocation of culture-void Iowa in the '50s and '60s reveals in layer after layer of richly observed detail the maturation 'the very soul' of an artist. Its rediscovery was the catalyst for one filmmaker to confront his faith in the power of great literature to endure, and it can now be embraced by readers everywhere.
The Stones of Summer, first printed in 1972, quickly went out of print after its publisher Bobbs Merrill filed for bankruptcy. Because of this (and, it is speculated, a subsequent lack of marketing), this "marvelous book" (reviewer John Seelye in The New York Times Book Review, saw minor sales. According to Moskowitz’s documentary, Mossman was also briefly hospitalized for a nervous breakdown while completing the novel, which may have also impeded its commercial success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stones_of_Summer
First published in 1972 to glowing reviews, Dow Mossman's coming-of-age story in America's great midwest tracks the maturation of aspiring novelist Dawes Williams. This epic "great American novel" draws from Salinger, Heller, and Faulkner in its stream-of-consciousness style and remarkable characters. Chronicling 1949 through 1968, Dawes reflects upon America's evolution from the end of WWII to the hippie revolution. Narrator Scott Shina portrays dozens of characters with dexterity and talent. Light on plot but heavy on metaphysical insight, THE STONES OF SUMMER transports readers with true emotion.
The great "lost" novel is available again-after more than 20 years--And now there's a movie tie-in! Originally published to glowing reviews in 1972, Dow Mossman's first and only novel is a sweeping coming-of-age tale that spans three decades in the life of irrepressible 1950s teen Dawes Williams. Earning its author comparisons to no less than James Joyce, J. D. Salinger, and Mark Twain, this great American novel developed a passionate cult following-even as it went out of print for more than 20 years. But Mark Moskowitz's recent award-winning film Stone Reader, a passionate and deeply personal tribute to the book and its author, revived interest in Mossman's magnificent achievement.
After its 1972 publication, this sprawling, modernist Great American Novel–style epic garnered its author critical comparison to Faulkner, for its saga of rural dynastic decline; Salinger, for its mood of youthful alienation; and Joyce, for its labyrinthine, cryptically allusive, stream-of-consciousness renditions of the private psyche. The episodic coming-of-age narrative follows budding writer Dawes Williams from boyhood on his grandfather's greyhound ranch, through a feckless Iowa adolescence of drinking and joyriding, to a mentally unstable adulthood in which, through rants against propriety, positivism and the establishment and a terminal bout of countercultural dissoluteness in Mexico, he becomes the voice of the 1960s' lost generation. The real action, though, is the development of Dawes's writerly sensibility, his—i.e., the author's—knack for transmuting the dross of reality into the gold of literary metaphor. But Mossman's own lyrical, metaphorical sensibility tends toward pseudo-profundities ("[h]er body was an inward fall, a deep spiral of musky sea lying easily within itself"), abstractions ("[s]he had a metaphysical eye, as blue as perfect nightmares"), and a synesthetic scrambling of sensory categories ("[h]e felt he could not listen to the light anymore, that it stood off in the distance, wordless with impossible opinion"). Long out of print before this reissue, the novel has generated a cult following among those who find in its inchoate but intense imagery the very portrait of the young artist's soul. But many readers may find the book's hallucinatory prose—"In the beginning there was me, green smoke and oatmeal, conscious light, all looking for a shoe to rise from"—interesting but self-indulgent, and the plot insufficiently gripping. - Publishers Weekly
Dow Mossman wrote one great novel in 1972 and vanished - until a documentary-maker tracked him down. Now literary lions Nick Hornby and Dave Eggers are putting their weight behind the resulting film.
Do you remember that novel you bought years back and never got around to reading? You tried the first few pages but, as the saying goes, you couldn't get into it. Sometimes you'd catch a glimpse of it on your bookshelves, sitting there in silent reproach. Shouldn't you have another go at it? Yet each time you looked for the next book to read, that particular novel was never the right one, you were never in the appropriate mood to face it, never had the necessary energy to take it on. Life was always too short and that book - just look at the size of the thing - was simply too long.
There is probably no reader of novels to whom that experience would seem unfamiliar. I myself endure such a relationship with a small library of big books that, over the decades, I have bought and not finished or, more often, not started. Sometimes I can even persuade myself that the special majesty of these tomes relies on my not reading them, that to do so would spoil their virgin perfection (the same logic applies, as it happens, to the various novels I have also not written).
I don't think the filmmaker Mark Moskowitz is or was prone to this particular line of warped reasoning. A middle-aged American bibliophile, he avoided the unread novel on his bookshelf for three decades, purely because he had found it close to impenetrable when he last attempted to read it in 1972. Then, one day a few years ago, in a rush to make a plane, and with no other suitable book at hand, he took it with him on his journey. As he read, he was enveloped by an overwhelming recognition of the exceptional, as if he had discovered a lost masterpiece and could not understand how or why it had come to be lost or, indeed, if it really was lost.
The book was The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman, and Moskowitz was so enthralled by its rich, lyrical prose that he became convinced that the fact he had never heard of the author could only be due to an oversight on his part. He checked the internet to see what other works Mossman had written. Nothing. What's more The Stones of Summer was out of print and only a handful of secondhand copies were in circulation. Moskowitz bought them all.
He could find no information about Mossman or his book other than the New York Times review that had originally sent him to his local bookshop as a young student in 1972. Presciently, the review suggested in its opening paragraph that the extraordinary accomplishment of this debut novel was 'a frightening thing, for the author may remain forever awed by the force and witness of his first production'.
Intrigued to the point of obsession, Moskowitz decided to make a film about tracking down Mossman. It took him more than two years and a great deal of his own money but the outcome is a documentary called Stone Reader that has become a cult classic in the States and will be shown over here this month.
Not the least of the film's achievements is that it has led to the republishing of The Stones of Summer, the re-emergence of Mossman from three decades of obscurity, and refocused attention on the magical and redemptive power of fiction. It also explores how that power, while inspirational for the reader, can destroy the writer.
In America, literary figures have lined up to pay tribute, and screenings, such as one organised by author Dave Eggers, have become open celebrations of the secret pleasures of reading. One unanticipated side-effect of all the hoop-la is that original copies of the novel have become collectors' items, trading for $12,000 a go in internet auctions.
It was on a trip to the States that Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and How to be Good, read about the film in an LA freesheet. He, too, was enraptured and earlier this month he arranged a screening in London.
'The film,' he says, 'is a very tender and engaged piece of work. It's not without its crudities and contrivances, but it's compelling, and anyone who loves books - especially American books, as I do - can't help but respond warmly. It mentions [Frederick] Exley [author of A Fan's Notes] and [Kurt] Vonnegut, and there are interviews with Leslie Fiedler and Frank Conroy, who wrote the brilliant Stop-Time and isn't terribly well-known, and that would have been enough for me. But there's the mystery element to it, too - you can't wait to meet the guy.'
But wait you have to. As one false lead follows another dead end, the audience becomes involved in a search that is not just for a disappeared writer, nor simply lost books in general, but the elusive reader in all of us who cries out to be embraced by the voice and thoughts and insights of a kindred soul.
'Mark has been very clever about not making any specific claims for this book,' Hornby says. 'He seems to acknowledge that he could be wrong about it and, by doing so, the film becomes more about the personal passions we all have. What's great about books - and films and music - is that once they're out there, they have a good chance of connecting with someone who identifies completely with every single creative decision, who believes the artist is speaking for and to them.'
Nick Fraser, the series producer for Storyville who bought Stone Reader for the BBC, says that what impressed him about both Moskowitz and the film is the belief they share in the importance of fiction. 'As I get older,' says Fraser, 'I read fewer and fewer novels but Mark's appetite is unsated.' He wonders if Moskowitz's usual business, making commercials for politicians, might have something to do with this. 'If you spent all day around those people, you'd need to turn to fiction at night.'
Added to which, some novels are best read by an older audience. In one scene, Moskowitz interviews Robert Gottlieb, the fiction editor who bought Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Moskowitz recalls how he devoured the book when he first read it, then waited impatiently for its successor, Something Happened. It proved a disappointment to Moskowitz, who found himself lacking the necessary experience of life.
'It's not a book that should be read by anyone under 30,' he tells Gottlieb.
Gottlieb dryly agrees, then adds: 'But it should be read by everyone over 30.'
This, I think, is a telling insight into the changing relationship between reader and novel. Like us, books mature. As a teenager, I had almost precisely the same experience with Catch 22 and Something Happened, although now I think the latter is the superior novel. Our passions evolve and all a writer can hope is that his passions so happen to chime with those of his potential readership at the right time - which is usually, but not always, around the time the book is published.
That did not happen with Mossman. Perhaps he was a victim of passing fashion. The 500-plus page coming-of-age, stream-of-consciousness, Vietnam-era novel may have enjoyed its finest day already by 1972. He was certainly unfortunate with his publishers, who were bought out by a large corporation with a crudely economic agenda.
Whatever the explanation for The Stones of Summer's failure, the experience of writing it had left the 25-year-old Mossman in a vulnerable state. His tutor on Iowa University's creative writer's programme was Irish-American novelist William Cotter Murray. An entertaining old cove, he directs Moskowitz to Mossman with mischievous merriment. Murray told me he had enormous trouble getting Mossman to finish the novel. 'I thought the damn thing would go on for ever,' he says. 'Either it would kill him or he'd kill it.'
In the event, Mossman suffered a breakdown and spent a period in a psychiatric hospital. The book marched swiftly into oblivion, which Mossman says 'flattened my tyre', and he followed not far behind, scuffing around the country as a manual labourer, before taking up a trade as a welder. Moskowitz eventually traces his quarry to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and finds him divorced, living alone in his childhood home with a job bundling newspapers.
'I thought if I did find him,' Moskowitz tells me, 'he would be crushed and disenchanted.' Neither of those words apply. In fact, he turns out to be such an individual character that it's not easy to think what words do apply to him.
When I asked Murray what his impression was of Mossman when they met more than 30 years ago, he said that he was a 'country boy'. Insofar as it's possible to describe Mossman, that will probably do. But perhaps it's also worth remembering that The Stones of Summer was semi-autobiography and ran to a couple of hundred thousand words.
If he used to write in a stream of consciousness, he continues to talk in a torrent. On screen, with his walrus moustache and manic enthusiasms, he makes a wild, welcome contrast to the eloquent concision of the talking heads that go before him, and on the phone he retains the same disarming ability to improvise with jackknife digressions. You don't follow his conversation so much as get washed along in its serpentine wake.
He seems to be enjoying his new found celebrity on the film festival network. He tells me about meeting Bertrand Tavernier at one screening and how the director insisted his novel should be translated into French. He recalls how he used to stay up all night as a boy reading books on his porch, and tells me his great-grandparents came from Lancashire.
He thinks films and books should never be compared - 'they're not apples and oranges, they're apples and lawnmowers' - and that the camera 'is the coldest thing in the universe'. In among all this, he refers to Cervantes, Casanova, Shakespeare, Joyce, Woolf, James M. Cain, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor and probably another half-dozen writers I don't pick up on.
He thought it was a 'junk call' when Moskowitz first phoned him. Now, he says: 'I consider him a brother, one of the very few I've ever had.' They remain in close contact, and Moskowitz has managed to protect the author, while also reintroducing him to the world at large. The filmmaker helped negotiate with Barnes and Noble to get the book republished. 'Most of the offers were pretty small but Mark got a good deal,' says Mossman.
The contract does not involve a second book. Although Mossman has compiled extensive notes on two novels down the years, he would not savour the pressure of expectation. Moskowitz was also worried about how he would handle the pressure of public attention.
'I said to him,' Moskowitz remembers, "You need to think about what you want to say to people. You might have 15 minutes of fame." He said, "I have no problem. I know exactly what I'd do. I just want to tell people how important books are to me in my life."'
I can't imagine that Mossman put it as briefly as that. Not that you doubt that it is the belief of the novelist, just as it is the message of Moskowitz's film. In the end, it's an uplifting story about a man who got lost by trying to write the perfect book and and was finally found by the perfect reader.
- Andrew Anthony
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/aug/03/fiction.features2
GS: Oh, I was just asking if you feel overall that The Stones of Summer has said everything you wanted to say in fiction.
DM: Oh, yeah! So anyway, I did all of that and it was nine years later. It was an absurd box, it was 900 pages. I don’t even know where I got the box, I can still kind of picture that. This editor and the guy Carl Brandt. They came through and I had no idea what was even going on. [William] Murray came up to me one day and said, “I gave your manuscript to these two people who got interested in it and they took it back to New York,” and I talked to that editor briefly and she said, “If you come to New York, come and see me.” So that was my last semester, and I graduated mid-year, it was January. So I headed for New York and I went through Indianapolis for a reason, and I stopped because the guy Dunker was in his first year playing for the ABA. He was playing for the Indiana Pacers. So I wound up staying there till the playoffs. They always made it to the playoffs. They were the best team in the ABA. I was friendly with him and I was sleeping on his couch. He had this three-level apartment. So that became a habit. I went through 10 years of his career and every time I’d always wind up over there. But anyway, by the time I went to New York, it was ‘69. I missed Woodstock only because I had this sense that I hated mobs but I had a chance to go up in a sound truck. It’s a long story I’m not gonna get into. But I messed around there and I loved New York. I used to walk up to the library every day, and on a good day, I’d walk up to about 90th Street, you know from down in the Village there? Tenth Street and 9th Avenue down there, which I got lucked out, I got a free apartment there. A guy I knew in Cedar Rapids was in Africa and this thing was empty and he wanted me to watch the stuff he had in his apartment. Anyway, I had a free place to flop for about all summer. God, it was great. I finally made my way up there and talked myself into going up the elevator and I opened the doors and it was just a huge typing pool that was right out of that early, what the hell’s the name of that, the film with all of the New York office pools, you know, it’s just infinity. King Vidor’s The Big Parade or The Crowd, maybe. I walked in there and she had me coming from one thing to the other in the back and she looked at the elevator which just opened up into the whole complex, and she said, “Dow where have you been?” (laughs) Just like that, “Come on in here!” We walked into her office and I talked to her for a few hours and I guess I talked her into, I got an advance. Brandt got involved and, anyway, then I went to Montreal and I knew I had to rewrite the whole thing. Richard Wright [Dow’s friend who took his author photo for the novel] went up there, he’s in that movie. It started snowing and I went home and did an 11-month rewrite and I never left my room and I finally cracked toward the end of it. It was like an hour per page. It was all I did. My mother would bring me stuff on a tray and I’d eat lunch and I had my typewriter and my window was kind of like, I could see the winking light of the Roseville Hotel about 15 blocks down. That was all I could see outside my window pretty much. I’d sleep and I’d work on that. Every three months I’d go down to Iowa City for a couple of days and I finally really, I talked to her on the phone and this was the age where they had great phone lines that were free and I’d mail her 100 pages here and 100 pages there, and I guess they were re-editing it. And IT&T told her she could have 550 pages and that’s what they were going for. They didn’t change anything but they put a lot of blue pencils here and there. I don’t even remember now what all was in it, or how valuable it was but [Betty Kelly Sargent] cut quite a bit out of it. She kept it in order, then later I found out that there were three assistant apprentices helping her. They were working on it.
Dow Mossman’s author photo, taken by his late friend Richard Wright
GS: She had three assistant editors?
DM: Yeah, I don’t know if they were even hired. I know the name of one of them. Mary Judd. She wound up in The Metropolitan. I met her briefly about 30 years later.
GS: I remember in the documentary you said you felt the publisher basically stole the manuscript from you because you were still trying to work on it.
DM: I was conscious at the time that they took it away from me and I probably would’ve worked on it for the next 20 years probably, but, I mean, you can’t do that. I also wanted to get out of town and I was tired of being a student. If that thing would’ve made the money even comparatively to what it made the second time, I would’ve gone to Europe. If worst came to worst, I would’ve bummed around England and played some snooker. (laughs) That was my only interest. That game was alive in England and I just noticed that last night on my iPad. I sat and watched two hours of snooker matches. God, those guys could play. That’s what I would’ve done. I know that for a fact. The other thing, I drifted back to Indianapolis. In a way it was good and in a way it wasn’t. For off and on those 10 years I worked in my buddy’s…I’ve known him since 7th grade, that’s the only person I’ve known that long in my life, actually, but he had a saloon. - George Salis
Fifteen years ago, Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line famously resulted in freeing an innocent man from prison. Last year, in what is arguably a comparable turn of events, Mark Moskowitz’s documentary Stone Reader rescued a forgotten American writer from obscurity. Moskowitz’s scruffy and warmly personal film recounts his obsessive search for Dow Mossman, the author of a long out-of-print 1972 novel, The Stones of Summer. For the last three decades, it turns out, Mossman has been living where he was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and working the kinds of blue collar jobs—welding, bundling newspapers—that writers are supposed to have before they publish their big novel, not after. And make no mistake, at nearly six hundred pages The Stones of Summer is a big novel. Its ambition and scale are matched only by the monumental mystery of why no one seems to have ever heard of it.
Hermetically sealed for thirty years, Mossman’s weird lyricism ("the lawn was a wet bowl stirred and thickened, a lilac’s throat") is startlingly fresh and pungent. If not a lost masterpiece, it’s clearly the work of an enormously talented writer. The novel’s three sections follow a classic coming-of-age trajectory from idealized youth, to troubled adolescence, to an adulthood blindsided by drugs and instability. Virtually without plot, the narrative is constructed of richly textured anecdotes and set pieces, many of which Mossman has said are autobiographical. The protagonist is named Dawes Williams, the state is Iowa, and the hometown is coyly rechristened Rapid Cedar.
The early chapters are chockablock with vivid characters. Dawes’s profane grade-school chum Ronnie Crown is expelled for assailing their teacher, Miss Wilma Spent, with crude sexual epithets. The eight-year-old Crown later confesses that he has no idea what the f-word means. "I still can’t figure out," says Dawes, sounding not unlike a wry Peanuts character, "how they could expel you for a word if you didn’t know what it meant." Mossman’s novel is a flurry of words, a logorrheic avalanche. His intoxicating voice is ideal for conveying the enchantment and sensuality of a recollected childhood: "The thick, white moon ran like a round, naked rain through the dry spines of the trees." Languid Augusts are whiled away on a farm where Dawes’s quick-to-rage uncle Arthur raises greyhounds. The finest writing in the novel is a rollicking ten-page depiction of an epic croquet match between Dawes and his uncle that turns deadly earnest.
But as the pages pile up with precious little momentum or suspense propelling them forward, the law of diminishing returns settles in somewhere around the middle of the book. The scenes of teenage pranks feel protracted and repetitive. There’s an interminably unpleasant chapter in which Dawes and his pals set about humiliating one of "the doggy girls of Waterloo" living in a nearby town. Mossman’s galvanic prose struggles mightily but fails to elevate the predictability that overtakes the material: Dawes’s growing rebelliousness, his lost weekends with a beer-guzzling carload of boastful buddies, and his fumbling toward romance with the aptly but improbably named Summer Letch ("her hair was thick and rich as heaven"). The spectacular automobile crash that closes section two doesn’t touch as deeply as it might because the occupants of the car have been too thinly developed and differentiated as characters.
The final third of the novel, chronicling Dawes’s dissipation in Mexico, is both a tour-de-force and something of a slog. Instead of the timeless quality of the novel’s opening section, the concluding pages reflect the nadir of 1970s literary pretentiousness. There are poems and epigrammatic excerpts from Dawes’s notebooks ("family understanding, indeed all of the great middle-class virtues, are not what they are cracked up to be"), and long passages from a novel-in-progress, and letters from a buddy in Vietnam. Much marijuana and Mexican beer are consumed. Dawes intimates that he’s suffering from schizophrenia, but it’s presented less as an illness than the sort of oracular "divine madness" espoused by R. D. Laing during the era. According to Moskowitz’s documentary, Mossman was briefly hospitalized for a nervous breakdown while completing The Stones of Summer. Ten years in the writing, the book may have in the end depleted the author’s psychic reserves. Despite its flaws, it’s an impressive debut novel. The significant achievement is Mossman’s voice. And the good news is that he is writing once again. – Bob Wake
https://culturevulture.net/books-cds/the-stones-of-summer-dow-mossman/
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