Context

I would rather read than write—and even among temptations to write, critical articles rarely figure. But sometimes there is compensation for against-the-grain effort in the occasion to read the whole work of an author I admire, re-read, that is, and as a whole, what earlier appeared as installments.

I hope no one will suppose that I am interested in Jaimy Gordon because she was once my student. That was long ago and, besides, it was clear from the beginning that she had nothing to learn from me.

Her oeuvre is rather small (still, of course, unfinished): there are to date three novels, a novella, a book-length poem, and enough shorter work in a variety of genres to fill, if collected, another volume.

Jaimy Gordon was born in Baltimore, went to college at Antioch, afterwards lived in California, was one of the first students in the graduate writing program at Brown, stayed on in what turned out to be a short-lived program to get the degree Doctor of Arts. (Only three altogether were ever granted—the other two went to Hank Hine and Gayl Jones.) After a few more years in Providence, working a while for the State Arts Council, she left to teach at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where she runs the creative writing program.

I’m sure she has lived elsewhere. At some point, for instance, there was a stay in West Virginia. She is not easy to keep track of.

She Drove Without Stopping (1990—I am not keeping to chronology) seems to follow the main stops of its author’s itinerary. In this novel, Jane Turner immediately presents herself as thinking of murdering her father. It is a Bildungsroman, in which Jane tries every way she can think of to eliminate her father, which is impossible, since her father is part of her.

On page 31, the narrator moves from first to third person and becomes "The Adventuress." Still a child, she has begun to experience her own life as a story told. Throughout her account, it is often repeated that she was the "happiest of infants," a happiness blasted by the sense that her father has rejected her. At twelve (many of her most important memories go back to this particular age), she

raised her head, having sniffed something in the air, and then she felt something warm and fragrant, but distinct, brush her as it passed by. It was her spirit, which had seemed so beautiful to her in the beginning. And it still did, but it was going on without her. Jane, amateur of horror, saw what had happened. She was the opposite of possessed; she was vacated. And when escape began to beckon to her during this period, the idea was always to catch up to the happiness she had been born to.

This sense of vacancy is central to Jaimy Gordon’s work, as it is liable to be to an "amateur of horror."

Jane suffers from what the romantics called "dejection": seeing without being able to feel what is seen. So her reactions are an outsider’s:

When Jane was twelve an odd thing happened: she got scared that when she heard someone had died, she might laugh.

Jane rushed through adolescence with her own face averted.

And sex becomes "feeling a kind of unlimited desire," for which there is no suitable object.

She even began to wonder if it wasn’t a sham, this pairing of human women with human men, an expurgated copy of what you were really looking for.

She leaves college (this is in Ohio) to squat in a vacant house in the country, an unprotected place "where anything could happen to you. That is what she wished, for anything to happen to her." But the anything that happens to her (among other things, a rape) is always, while it is happening, already in some sense a story. Her lover Jimmy is usually drunk, but

Not for a minute did she believe that Jimmy was an authentic drunk or she herself an authentic tramp. She knew these were merely floorshows whereby each soul made itself visible, rooting up its unspeakable unrest and joining it to a convention the world understood only too well—anything to take on an outward shape.

Jimmy is nearest to being someone she can be with, but finally he is

not her type because, she realized suddenly . . . no man was her type. Every man stood in the way of some vague, fantastic solitary adventure.

This reappears, on the surface or under it, in all of Jaimy Gordon’s work. Her characters seem always in deep emotional agreement with Rochester’s famous complaint to his wife of "so great a disproportion ‘twixt our desires and what is ordained to content them."

In the end, Jane remains an "adventuress" but returns to first person and is content to murder her father in words, in writing.

The Bend, the Lip, the Kid (1978) is, as the subtitle has it, "real life stories." It is actually one story. Or rather, one poem—in a fluent free verse. It is not a "novel in verse," not exactly a narrative even, but a story does emerge in the sixty-odd pages.

The central character, "the Lip," is called Jaimy (well, but Jaimy Gorton). On one side of her is McMagus, "the Bend," now in the Rhode Island State Prison, "doing his fourth of 10 to 15 for a bank job." (The author did, in fact, spend many hours giving lessons in creative writing to the inmates of this adult correctional institution.) McMagus has a theory—an obsession—that the shape of his penis, bent so as to make sex "difficult," has made him a criminal.

On her other side is "the Kid," Dennis, alias Dionysos, a young hood just out of jail, who lives with, and off of, the Lip for two years. Their sexual relation is what the book celebrates (bendless, apparently) and though at the end it is meaningless, for the Lip it is the closest she can get to reality. (In She Drove Without Stopping, the main character will come to think of "sexual love as an organizing principle, a zone where she would believe in at least one thing.") "I’m the sole survivor of meaning," Jaimy (Gorton) says. And in this poem "all of the meanings end in real life."

The Bend, the Lip, the Kid seems to me a major work, one that should be more widely known. It is not only a very good poem, but a work which, if put with her fictions, sits well with them and enriches them.

Her other work in verse is not as important. The Fall of Poxdown (1972) is a mock epic, The City Planner & the Mad Bomber (1976) a satire. All her poetry, and much of the prose, is patterned after traditional—or archaic—genres. This is true also of her plays. Foetid Taters (with James Shreve, 1978) is a parody of the Greek play Philoctetes. The Rose of the West (1976) is "A Text for a Masque." She has inserted a mummer’s play into She Drove Without Stopping, and, years earlier, presented one in Roger Williams Park in Providence to celebrate the spring equinox.

I think she may never have published her play The Lettuce Vampire. A pity.

The short story, though she has written some lovely ones, does not seem to appeal much to her. "A Night’s Work" (collected in Best American Short Stories 1995) she developed from an entry in Stith Thompson’s index of folktale motifs. Private T. Pigeon’s Tale (1979) has a similar feel. Certain folk motifs have a special place in her work, for instance that of the "grateful dead." Many of her short fictions are actually studies for novels in progress.

Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue (1979), in length between a story and a novel, is one of her most delightful works. It has a precise historical setting: General Burnside has returned from the American Civil War (he was the North’s worst general, by some margin) to build his house, be elected governor of Rhode Island, and become famous for the cut of his whiskers ("sideburns"). Having, after four years of marriage, no child, he engages P. Mariam Wishey, "pioneer of gynecology," to examine his wife. (I would like to think Wishey is historical, but I’ve yet to find a reference to him.) This situation is complicated by the ghost of Burnside’s nephew, who disappeared during the battle of Fredericksburg—the General’s great fiasco—and by the fact that Mrs. Burnside is not (as everyone in the story seems to assume) asexual. It is a tightly constructed and very funny story in limpid prose.

Circumspections and She Drove Without Stopping move in historical time, albeit different centuries. Other work is either vaguely contemporary (The Bend, the Lip, the Kid; Bogeywoman) or in once-upon-a-time. Shamp of the City-Solo (1974) takes place in a sort of alternate or parallel world, familiar but unplaceable.

Hughbury Shamp, a teenager with a yen for fame—note: all three novels are Bildungsromane—follows three masters whom he introduces at the beginning of his first-person account, an echo of Marcus Aurelius starting his meditations. Someday a scholar will track down the echoes and allusions in Shamp, classical, biblical, historical, casual—more, I’m sure, than in The Waste Land. She has admitted to being, at that time, deeply into seventeenth-century writers like Browne and Aubrey, as well as Urquhart’s Rabelais and Burton’s Thousand and One Nights. One may suspect she dipped also into the earlier melancholy Burton and Euphues and even the often despised Sartor Resartus. In other words, with Shamp she joins the tradition of English prose analogous to what poets called "strong lines" as opposed to "plain style." This puts her at odds with most contemporary novelists, but leaning towards someone like Djuna Barnes or the Gaddis of The Recognitions.

Shamp takes place in Big Yolk, which sounds like New York, but is really a mindscape. There is a deserted subway and a "Sump" whose first description is typical:

Beyond us the Sump rolled mosquito-flecked in its trench. Behind lay a long stretch of acid pine barren, creased with superhighway, pocked with gas station. Lest they fall upon it, swarms of raindrops clung tremulously to the air.

Here Shamp’s first master Shipoff builds a depot and lays plans to take over Big Yolk, the "city solo." Everything in the book is somehow just not quite what one knows, and yet recognizable. Shamp swears, for instance, "by Chrust!"—and, strangely enough, it sounds right.

The fame that Shamp is after can only be got by a display of rhetoric, by soloing at the city-solo. This, after many vicissitudes, he does, thus outdoing his three masters, and is rewarded with a hotel in his honor. As in each of Jaimy Gordon’s three novels, there is at the end a surprising success and a continuing hunger. Shamp refuses to move into the hotel he is offered, but lives in the deserted subway, claiming "one real pleasure, and that is my joy to be quit of whatever, to have nothing but my hole and the meadow [which he can see] at the far end." He addresses the hotel itself: "You are my fame. I am your vacancy."

Her latest novel, Bogeywoman (1999) is the triumph of another style, and another alternate world—but closer to our world than Shamp. The geography is real, the time vague but not mythical.

Ursula Koderer tells the story, first person, of her realization that she is lesbian, of her expulsion from a girl’s camp in Maine, her incarceration in a Baltimore insane asylum at seventeen, her escape from the asylum with Gulaim Zuk (a mysterious Central Asian psychiatrist—"Her body," Ursula tells us, "was similar to Central Asia"), a flight into the Great Dismal Swamp where Zuk disappears, a return to Baltimore to find some songs she wrote in the asylum have become famous. This is a bare sketch; I have omitted weirder items. The novel is punctuated by the phrase "HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE," used as a heading within each chapter and as title for the final chapter. It is also the principal line in the asylum songs (performed by a group of inmates who call themselves the Bug Motel).

But Ursula’s language makes everything different, in the way that Shamp’s—swearing "by Chrust"—does. The canonical authorities in this asylum are Sigmund Food and Margaret Meat (and one notes that the psychiatrists—or rather the "dreambox mechanics"—say the same). Those names, like everything in the book, echo the motif of hunger.

Bogeywoman is, among other things, an amazing example of what can be done with voice. It is extremely risky to have a narrator both naïve and strangely knowledgeable, but Ursie’s voice, a composite of common street talk and unique quirks, is flawless. Bogeywoman’s voice establishes a world that is, not only plausible, but unmistakable.

Jaimy Gordon’s language is never the same; she has a different prose for each of her books, from one fiction to the next. Always playful, it is not Joycean. Its playfulness is much more in the vein of Queneau (towards Zazie rather than toward Ulysses). Its literary influences are extremely broad, medieval to baroque to current and including much folk material. (In She Drove Without Stopping, I get here and there, furtively, the idea that she would like to pull her style down a bit and become a novelist-like-the-others, something her exquisite sense of style will always make problematic. John Hawkes faced a similar problem.)

The love that gets Ursula "out of there" is what drives all Jaimy Gordon’s writing. It is love as hunger—love, not without an object, rather with many objects, a world of objects, none of them (nor even all of them together) adequate to that desire.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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