Context
Reading W. M. Spackman
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.
