Context
Reading Douglas Woolf’s Ya! & John-Juan
Robert Creeley
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: 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.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?
SELECTED WORKS BY DOUGLAS WOOLF
Fade Out. Black Sparrow Press, $16.95.
Future Preconditional: A Collection. Out of Print.
HAD. Out of Print.
Hypocritic Days and Other Tales. Black Sparrow Press, $17.95.
Loving Ladies: To Maine and Back & Beyond. Out of Print.
On Us. Black Sparrow Press, $12.50.
Signs of a Migrant Worrier. Out of Print.
Spring of the Lamb. Out of Print.
The Timing Chain. Tombouctou Books, $7.00.
Wall to Wall. Dalkey Archive Press, $7.95.
Ya! & John-Juan. Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95.
