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Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
By flipping the known world on its head, the relentlessly contrarian author of "Son of the Morning Star" and "Deus Lo Volt!" has become that rarest of writers: Dangerous.
Jul 18, 2000 | I knew a guy who lost his mind reading Evan S. Connell. This happened in graduate school. I was 23. He was maybe 25. I wanted to be a poet. He wanted to be, I don't know, Claude Levi-Strauss, Lyotard, Baudrillard. We had nothing in common; his using literature to make leaps into pseudo-science and psuedo-philosophy seemed all wrong to me. He often laughed at my mushy-gushy "free-verse-ness," as he called it. And yet we liked each other, talked endlessly, late into the night, arguing, laughing, taking opposite, rigid stances on everything, then insisting on paying for the next round with our paltry fellowship cash.
The last conversation I had with him was about Connell's underground classic, "Diary of a Rapist," which I had not read. On the bar table between us was a dog-eared Ecco Press paperback copy. He had written all through it. The semester seminar he was taking, if I remember correctly, was "Lacan and the Problem of Language." He took these seminars seriously. Tonight he was on edge, more so than usual, giving me the dark summary of the novel. But then, without taking a breath, he was talking about his dreams and lowered sex drive, his loss of juissance, and a lack of signification and some sort of inability to ever achieve a solid cognitive structure that could incorporate a master signifier, a first cause, that was not God.
He told me more about the novel: individual scenes, the terse language, the relentless delusions of the narrator/diarist, how it just gets darker and darker and more spiritually desperate until the guy presumably (it's up for debate) kills himself because of guilt, remorse and self-loathing -- and then, wham, suddenly he was babbling again about wanting to devise the first truly atheistic discourse. That was his real goal in life, he'd realized: to kill God once and for all, theoretically speaking.
I wrote the whole thing off to him fucking with me, some kind of performance. Shortly after this, however, he left school and moved back in with his parents in a Texas suburb for "rest." Then I started reading Connell, figuring that if someone lost it reading one of his books they had to contain something, some dangerous magic, that most novels didn't.
I begin with this anecdote because A) it was my first experience with Connell and B) I believe it illustrates -- perhaps overillustrates -- a truth about Connell's work, about its perfectly controlled savagery, its relentlessly contrarian stance and its ability to flip the known world on its head, all the while almost affectlessly easing you into it. If you read Connell closely, you see that he is perhaps our most subversive writer, one who does not mistake irony or a hip knowingness about this particular cultural instant -- or even a straight formal subversion of literary convention (which usually just reminds the intelligent reader of convention) -- for originality. He may actually be that rarest of things: dangerous.
"Diary of a Rapist" belongs to what I would call the modern, domestic part of the extraordinarily daring, varied, brooding and original Connell oeuvre, an oeuvre filled with violence and people losing it, one that Roger Shattuck once referred to in the New York Review of Books as fiction in extremis.
Connell wrote "Diary" at the age of 40. It was his third critically acclaimed novel and his sixth book. However, at the time, despite the accolades and already having published the bestselling "Mrs. Bridge" seven years earlier, he was working as an interviewer in a San Francisco unemployment office. After spending time as a student at Dartmouth, the University of Kansas and Columbia University, then as a pilot in the Air Force, then living in Europe in the early '50s, he settled in San Francisco to live a bachelor's life and write full-time. He remained there for 35 years until he moved to Santa Fe, N.M., in 1989, where (having never married) he continues to reside. However, as any "full-time" writer can attest, it's not so much the writing as the subsisting that can be tough, particularly through those long middle stretches of projects when the last check is way back in the past and the next one can't even be seen on the horizon. Connell has always expressed a distaste for teaching and lecturing, even giving readings. So he did what the writer Hilary Masters once told me to do: Take the most mindless, insipid, mechanized, soulless job you can find; be a drone so you can save all of your energy for writing. Thus the San Francisco unemployment office in the tumultuous '60s: drone city. The job, however, proved to be a wellspring of dark inspirations.
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