Painfully beautiful writing– Mary Gaitskill
James Nulick considers Scott Bradfield (a love story)
October 1989. I’m 19 years old. I’m walking in downtown Cedar Rapids, a stranger to the land, the people. The buildings are very dark. It is cold, and the smell of burnt grain lingers in the air. Cedar Rapids is known as the City of Five Smells, due to Ralston-Purina, Quaker Oats, Post and General Mills being in the city. It is a satanic mixture of Cap’N Crunch and dog food. The smell lingers in my nostrils, scorches the inside of my head. I am too young to duck inside the welcoming doors of a dive bar that beckons me, its entrance the eyes of an old whore sizing up my crotch. Alcohol or sex? Though I’m 19, I have access to neither. Across the street is a B. Dalton. I push through the doors, in a bad mood, expecting to find only garbage romances for a garbage town.
On the rack are familiar names… Danielle Steel (Portuguese Baroness of Letters), Tom Clancy, Barbara Taylor Bradford… the usual guilty suspects. But nestled next to the Barbara Taylor Bradford is a book with a weird, semi-translucent cover. I pick it up, glance at the title, and weigh the heft of the book in my hand. It is compact and heavy. I assume the cover to be designed by Chip Kidd, but when I look at the back inside jacket flap, I see that the cover was designed by Barbara De Wilde and Carol Devine Carson. Ok, so not what I expected. I study the author photograph, taken by Jerry Bauer (who had also photographed my spiritual doppelganger William T. Vollmann for the back of his first novel You Bright and Risen Angels), and I am perplexed by the oddly unassuming photo. Who is this guy? Then I begin reading…
Mom was a world all her own, filled with secret thoughts and motions nobody else could see. With Mom I easily forgot Dad, who became little more than a premonition, a strange weighted tendency rather than a man, as if this was Mom’s final retribution, making Dad the future. Mom was always now. Mom was that movement that never ceased. Mom lived in the world with me and nobody else, and every few days or so it seemed she was driving me to more strange new places in our untuned and ominously clattering beige Ford Rambler. It wasn’t just motion, either. Mom possessed a certain geographical weight and mass; her motion was itself a place, a voice, a state of repose…
As I type these words, some twenty-five years later, they still ring a bell in my head, each word falling exactly into place, as I remember it, as if I’d written the words myself. But of course, I didn’t write the words. Scott Bradfield did.
A writing professor once told me, that is, me and twelve other students in the workshop, that when one is writing a novel, as you come to the end of that novel, and you are pursuing that elusive last chapter, write the last chapter. After you have finished your novel, throw away that last chapter. That is the end of your novel. And also, always remember: the reader has come this far with you… they deserve a killer line. Your ending must be a killer line, unforgettable, unmovable, a block of concrete in the middle of the highway.
I have always pursued the killer line, with thanks to my writing professor, as if constantly trying to please an absent father figure, and I am happy to see other writers doing the same thing. In The History of Luminous Motion, Scott Bradfield pulls this off brilliantly.
March/May 1991. I’m 21 years old. I have been suspended from college, college in New York, for an asinine prank. I get a stupid job, a night job. So I work at night and try sleeping during the day, but it doesn’t work. The days and nights blend together. I lose track of time. I feel edgy, unsculpted, unfinished. I decide to read The History of Luminous Motion again. This is rare, because I never read books twice – there are so many other books to read. But I pick up Luminous Motion. I read the first words, in the small dusty silence of my room, my room that sits twenty feet from my mother’s room down the hall, and the words speak to me, once again. The words feel very familiar, like home, which is odd, because The History of Luminous Motion is about the absence of home, the search for it.
As I began reading, the walls disappeared and the floor dropped out from under me. It was a total, a complete – reading experience. The distractions of life did not compete with my total immersion in the book, an experience that would very likely never happen today, for today we all have our digital leashes to contend with. Was I really reading this? Or was I experiencing it? My lack of sleep began to cause hallucinations. I would get into my car and drive to the dusty corner store in my very small town, and buy a Coke, and a small bottle of rum, and chat with the man behind the counter, and then I went home and said hello to my mother and her boyfriend. Once again I opened the door to my small bedroom and the walls disappeared and the floor dropped out from under me and I took a swallow of Coke from the can and opened my bottle of rum and poured the rum into the can. I lay on my dusty bed, my dusty sheets, and picked up where I left off. I’ve been living with Rodney and Beatrice for a while now – I feel as if they are real, as if they are my friends. I completely identify with Phillip, though I am fourteen years older than he is. But I have been there. I know abandonment, I know loneliness – I understand the constant search for home.
There is a photograph of me from 1978, third grade, eight years old. The only memorable thing that happened in 1978 was Jonestown. I am the same age as Phillip Davis in The History of Luminous Motion in the photo. I look like a Hispanic version of Phillip Davis (German father, Mexican mother). My hair is unkempt; my eyes know more than they should. They look past the photographer, as if he is beyond the frame, invisible.
I knew time travel, as did Phillip, the narrator of The History of Luminous Motion. I also knew life as witnessed from a tow truck bench seat, as my father traveled from accident site to bus station, to the lonely motorist broken down on the side of the road. I believed in The History of Luminous Motion because it felt true, despite the Ford Rambler flub. I was finally able to forgive Scott Bradfield for not knowing his cars because, as I have gotten older, I have come to realize that none of us knows anything, except the most important thing of all – that we will someday be dead. That much is certain.
Phillip’s mother has a Ford Rambler, it is how she travels from place to place. But Ford Rambler is incorrect. Rambler was manufactured by American Motors. For a long time I found it hard to believe Scott Bradfield could make such a mistake. I was, after all, a salvage lot boy, I knew cars. Didn’t Bradfield do his research? Only much later did I concede that perhaps Bradfield called it a Ford Rambler due to legal issues? Or was it a dissociative device, designed to put the reader further at odds with their knowledge of the world?
Who was Felicia? Why did I immediately think Mexican girl? Who were the Haddonfield Craftsmen? Who was Mary Gaitskill?
Does Scott Bradfield speak Spanish?
March/May 1992. I returned to college in Iowa, after New York decided I was unwelcome. I had learned a few things over the summer. Rum tastes better with Coke when it is poured directly into the can. Summer jobs are ridiculous past the age of 21. Working at night destriys the body and the soul, and those who work at night are often unsculpted and incomplete, and live between the shadowy blend of darkness and light. I have been there –
I was the editor in chief of my college’s literary magazine, the Coe Review. I wanted our 1992 issue to be big – 1992 was my senior year and I wanted to go out on a good note and have a blast doing it. The 1992 issue would feature Robert Coover, William T. Vollmann, and of course, Scott Bradfield. I mailed Scott Bradfield – an actual letter, typed out on a typewriter in the editorial office, which was really just my writing professor’s office – and mailed it off to Bradfield, who was teaching at the University of Connecticut at the time. I asked him if I could reprint a story from Dream of the Wolf. A week or so later, I received a response from Mr. Bradfield, giving me permission. I still have the letter –
We were a small literary publication and we wanted to treat the people we published with respect. As I recall, we paid Scott Bradfield $150. We paid William T. Vollmann $150. Robert Coover received $300… all money from the general fund, issued on checks by the college. Do literary magazines even pay writers anymore?
The issue came out, and I was happy with it. I wanted to say thank you, in some small way, to Scott Bradfield, who had written a novel called The History of Luminous Motion, and when I read the novel when I was lost and 21 years old, it saved me. Saying thank you to Bradfield was important. My college and my writing professor, Charles Aukema, allowed me to do so.
Derek White of Calamari Press reprinted The History of Luminous Motion in 2013. I thought it was a grand gesture, and a loving one. The History of Luminous Motion would once again exist for nights when college kids are alone, reading in bed, when girlfriends and boyfriends are absent, when the library is closed… when it is spring break and you are alone, wishing for the week to hurry up and end, and dreading the emptiness of a walk across an abandoned campus. It is a book best read on nights that are unsculpted and incomplete, between the shadowy blend of darkness and light.
Do people still love books? Do they seek them out? Do books continue to change people’s lives? Do they allow freedom from the here and now, if only for a short time? I want to be free again, free to love things with passion, to pursue things with passion, obsession, and not have all the adult weirdness attached to it – the weight and knowledge of death. To be a kid again, collecting shiny rocks, riding skateboards, pursuing the things I love with diamond-hard focus. Hanging with friends under the porch light in high summer as the sun is coming down, friends stooped over Cokes and bicycles, having no idea summer will soon end.
I’m a cubicle monkey but I’ve entertained the thought of going into business for myself. Escaping corporate slavery and purchasing a tow truck and opening a little business of my own, maybe calling it Clyde’s Towing, in honor of my father. To be on the road, perpetually, as Phillip and his mother are perpetually on the road. It wouldn’t be a Holmes 440 like my father had, it would be something slick, something modern, perhaps a Jerr-Dan flatbed. I would rent a small scrap of land for storage, somewhere in an anonymous, industrial area. An area where boys disappear into the cabs of cars, and girls are unsafe. I would have a small office, just big enough for a cash box and a computer. I would have two Doberman pinschers to keep the lot secure. I would name them Mocha and Cinnamon. I would finally be free of the corporate treadmill, like Phillip is free of a father figure throughout much of The History of Luminous Motion. I would disappear into the night, toward an unknown destination, a driver waiting for me by the side of the road, the hood of their car open, their weight shifting from left foot to right as I open the door and walk toward them.
***
Interview with Scott Bradfield, which originally appeared in The Believer
Scott Bradfield is the author of The History of Luminous Motion, which was recently reissued by Derek White at Calamari Press. It was originally published by Bloomsbury in 1989. His other novels include What’s Wrong with America, Animal Planet, Good Girl Wants it Bad, and The People Who Watched Her Pass By. He has written four short story collections: The Secret Life of Houses, Dream of the Wolf, Greetings from Earth,and Hot Animal Love. And two books of criticism: Dreaming Revolution, and Why I Hate Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Bradfield lives in London, England. I conducted this interview via email.— Brandon Hobson
BRANDON HOBSON: Can you talk a little about how Derek at Calamari came to rerelease The History of Luminous Motion? Was it his idea or something you’ve been wanting to do?
SCOTT BRADFIELD: It was one of the few instances of serendipity I’ve enjoyed in the world of so-called Literature. For years (decades even), I genuinely believed that world would beat a path to my books and stories, but eventually, as everything I wrote went rapidly out of print and stayed there, I wised up and started assembling them in e-format editions, with my son doing the jacket designs, and composing these new afterwords, if only to remind myself where I was when I originally wrote them, and what in the world I was thinking about. Since I have no clue how to work scanning software, I ended up retyping the entire published edition of History into my computer, and endlessly copy-editing it against the Vintage paperback edition, which is the sort of mindless, dull, unimaginative work I’m pretty good at. Writing brief afterwords, on the other hand, has turned out to be much harder.
About the same time that I was posting the first e-versions of History at the various available venues (Amazon, Kindle, Kobo), a young guy asked me to answer the proverbial question, “Why do you write?” and while I normally avoid such questions, I perversely wrote him something incredibly brief along the lines of “I have no idea why I write,” which is true, and when my answer was posted on his website, I suddenly heard from Derek at Calamari, who not only followed the site, but who remembered History as a book he had discussed with his brother in another life. Within weeks of my gratefully agreeing to have Calamari republish History, Derek had formatted, designed and illustrated the new edition, and it arrived on my doorstep in hard copies. (I usually wait twice as long to wait for publishers to turn down one of my books!) As we all know, the big city process of publishing books can take years to accomplish - and rarely with such pleasing results.
BH: How did History originally get published by Knopf? Did you know Gordon Lish or another editor there?
SB: I never knew Lish. History was purchased by Sonny Mehta shortly after he took over at Knopf in 1988. At that point, the book had been rejected by almost every British editor. I was living and reviewing in London at the time, my first book of stories was being published in the UK, and, as I recall, my indefatigable agent, Anne McDermid, shoved the manuscript in Sonny’s hands as he was coming through the office. Apparently he read it on the plane and made an offer a few days later when he landed in New York. He put a big promotional effort behind it before publication, and while it did pretty good for a first novel, it didn’t do as well as they had hoped. Knopf published my first US collection, Dream of the Wolf, a year later, but when I eventually sent them my second novel, What’s Wrong with America, they didn’t even reply to the submission. New York - the city of big ups and big down.
BH: One of the things I really like about Phillip is how he has all these strange, outrageous ideas that seem to be borderline psychotic. Why did you decide to write from the mind of an eight-year-old rather than, say, a teenager?
SB: I am not especially good at remembering the actualities of the world I inhabit, but I have pretty strong associative memories of how it feels to live in that world, and to wonder at its weird machinations, at any age. I enjoy entering the viewpoint of characters who are as different from myself as I can get - children, elderly women, animals, a sexy death row murderess - and to imagine how these disparate individuals see the world’s cruelty and beauty and vastness. Perhaps teenagers don’t interest me as much as children do since I still feel (even at 58) to be a fairly adolescent personality, especially in my enthusiasms, and I find myself an uninteresting fictional character. Phillip possesses all the qualities I admire in a person - imagination, loyalty, passion, intelligence, endurance. He just doesn’t know how to make the best use of these qualities, or to make himself very happy. He keeps learning the wrong things too well from the wrong people. We all make terrible mistakes in our lives. Some of Phillip’s mistakes may just be a bit more terrible than others.
BH: I can see that. I think his character continues to fuck with me in the way maybe a David Lynch character does. I’m left wondering why I’m so drawn to him, questioning why he’s so damaged and deranged yet completely likable in the darkest ways. Part of this is his abnormally mature voice. Was this voice much of the drive of the novel for you, or was it more of the dysfunctional family?
SB: For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself. The basic premise of History - as is often the case when I write - kicked around a long time in my head, but it wasn’t until I heard Phillip’s way of speaking that the story took off. I’ve always liked the fact that fiction takes all these pretty unquantifiable human feelings and experiences and projects them onto the page in ways that make interior human sense, even when they aren’t entirely believable, and the fact that Phillip could communicate these childlike (to me) feelings and sensations and philosophies is what made his story so interesting. Like a lot of people, what Phillip knows is sometimes amazing and maybe even profound, but what he doesn’t know often hurts him. I can’t think of a more philosophical time in a person’s life than when they are children. It’s the one time when ideas are really beautiful and amazing and all-encompassing. They are life.
BH: Are you still writing novels and short stories? What plans do you have in terms of your work?
SB: In terms of a “career,” I never have long-term plans, and certainly don’t want to spend several years, say, writing a “long” novel. I write every day, stuff I like or want to make into something I like. I’ve published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which still give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them! I have a new novel near completion which, like my last one, The People Who Watched Her Pass Her By, suggests that my work is getting progressively gloomier, unlike myself, since I feel like a progressively happier man. Go figure. Every time I start off a book or a story I feel like I’m developing a new style or approach for that individual story alone, and it sometimes feels as if readers are looking for the same style/approach from the same writer over and over again, which hasn’t helped me in the publishing biz. But since I enjoy what I write, it keeps me going.
BH: Do you feel comfortable talking about what you’re working on anything right now? Another novel or collection on progress?
SB: I’m always working on something. At the moment I’ve got a new collection of stories sitting in my computer waiting for me to develop the audacity to submit it to publishers so they can tell me they don’t like short stories. And a new novel which awaits simply enough attention divided from my current teaching to tidy it up - and another coming along in draft. My venture into e-self publishing means that I finally made a home for a collection of my essays and reviews, entitled Why I Hate Toni Morrison’s Beloved: several decades of reading unwisely. (Weirdly, it’s been selling surprisingly well on Amazon and Nook.) And a very short e-chapbook type deal entitled Confessions of an Unrepentant Short Story Writer. See I don’t just keep writing short stories nobody reads — I actually congratulate myself for doing it! I’m getting old and ornery. Thank god.
Brandon Hobson’s writing has appeared in The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, NOON, New York Tyrant, Post Road, Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. His novel is forthcoming from Calamari Press in 2014.
***
Ignore everything they told you in School – Scott Bradfield on Nabokov –
h
A car is not a home – http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/24/books/a-car-is-not-a-home.html
Calamari Press – http://www.calamaripress.com/History_of_Luminous_Motion.htm
*
p.s. Hey. This weekend the d.l. called James, who is better known further and wider from here as novelist James Nulick (Valencia, 2015, Distemper, 2006), has penned and put together a beautiful paean to a beloved book. I've never read this book, for no good reason, despite having been almost seduced years ago by its super mysterious and sensual original cover, but now I see the error of my inexplicable ways, thanks to James, and plan to fill in that blank post-haste. Perhaps you'll be like me, or perhaps you've read the book. In either case, please make some noise around here and pass it along to your guest-host. Thank you, and thank you even more, James. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! Cool, fellow addicts. It's a good addiction, isn't it? Fun and fuel for the future. Oh, I have to go research the amusement park there that closed. I wonder if I know it. I'm a total scourer of related things. When amusement parks close, there's a special and great tragedy. Maybe sort like when you realize Santa Claus is a lie. But dead amusement parks are very charismatic in their tragedy. Like Santa Claus. I'm glad you got that non-favorite work done. I didn't yesterday, although I'd planned to. I'm bad. I did see some art, or, well, two shows, one very good (Oscar Tuazon) and one very disappointing (Brian Calvin). And I saw a movie, 'Midnight Special' by the guy who made 'Take Shelter', which I had liked, but I didn't like 'Midnight Special' very much. Oh, well. What's your weekend like? ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, David. ** Steevee, Hi. Aw, thanks. 33 1/3 actually approached me years back and asked if I wanted to do the book for GbV's 'Bee Thousand'. I was broke at the time, and writing non-fiction is a very laborious process for me, and they pay very little, so I said no. Then, during a period when I was sort of okay financially, I wrote to them and asked if I could do a book on Cheap Trick's 'All Shook Up' album, which was produced by George Martin, and which is the least acknowledged of their great records, and they said no. Shame. Now I just don't have any room in my brain or time to do a book like that. I would love to interview Cheap Trick for somewhere. I did read your article yesterday when I saw it pop up on Facebook. It's a very, very excellent piece, and important, I think. I was happy to see Ira Sachs share and praise it. Everyone, Steevee has written an extremely excellent and must-read piece on the difficult current state of foreign film distribution in the US for Roger Ebert's site that I very, very highly recommend to you. Use some of your weekend to read it. Go here to do that. ** Tosh Berman, Thanks, bud. Yeah, as I told Steevee, I wish they'd accepted my bid on 'All Shook Up'. I probably should have proposed a book on one their first four and acknowledged masterpiece albums, 'cos I think their thing is doing albums that are consensus greats, but alas. I could not believe they didn't accept your Sparks proposal. I was utterly shocked. They do good things, but they are also foolish, foolish people. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick. Yeah, I did it. I kept my word or whatever. Ha ha, thank you for the potent St. Patricks Day happiness. I didn't even know SPD had happened. There must not be very many Irish people in Paris or something. Happy weekend! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Benster. Did you watch it? Was it good? Very exciting about the imminence of the guest-post! I'll do the hawk-eyes number on my box. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff! Yeah, I think 'More' and 'Beyond the Clouds' are among the epitomes of 'period pieces' or time capsules, to be more generous. I'm so very happy, as you can imagine, that 'Knight of Cups' had such a great impact on you! I've been surprised and pretty pleased that a handful of American critics have recognized and hailed the film. Great, great, yeah, I'm still bowled over by it weeks later. Thinking a lot about fiction construction in regards to it. Mm, I don't have a particular sequence or sequences isolated in my head. That's why I need to see it again. It just became this kind of overall thing afterwards. I really, really loved how the camera/editing would be roaming and searching everything so restlessly and then it/Malick would pause on something and stay with it for longer than usual, and sometimes the thing he paused to consider seemed very random but then would end up helping coalesce the film's relationship between meaning and lack of meaning. That aspect of it really blew me away and is the thing that keeps lingering in me. The ending is very halting and strange, yeah, I agree. Ultimately, I trusted the difficulty he had finding the right moment to stop. It seemed in keeping with what the film was doing, but, yeah, I know what you mean, and I remember that underwater moment, and I felt, ah, 'the end' when it happened. Anyway, I'm super super happy that you liked it so much! ** Unknown/Pascal, Hi. I ... think you can watch the stuff on MUBI whenever you want? Or you used to be able to. Great site. I hope you can. I haven't seen 'Anomalies' yet. I'm totally with you on 'Synecdoche, New York'. I think Kaufman might be the best writer of films extant. And I loved the 'Synecdoche' direction too. I need to see the new one. I've heard mixed things about it, yeah. Thanks for thinking of rereading 'Try'. I almost never reread my books. Sometimes when I feel kind of lost, I'll pick up a novel and read a bit of it to reassure myself that I can do things. I'm about to reread 'The Marbled Swarm', or at least go through it, because it's about to be published in France and I need to re-familiarize myself for the interviews and stuff I'll have to do. Do you reread your older work? ** Jonathan Bryant, Hi, Jonathan! Love! Me too! Love! One of my brothers loves Oingo Boingo. I don't know them very well. I saw them live once when they opened for XTC, and the crowd hated them, and someone in the audience threw a can of paint on Danny Elfman mid-way through the set, and he did not like that one little bit, and they stormed offstage. I'm also not up to par with They Might Be Giants. I saw them play once in their very early days when they were in the performance art scene in NYC. Wow, you know your Dodgers. Yeah, the Mattingly thing, gotcha. I think my favorite all time thing/era of the Dodgers was that season and a half when Eric Gagne was God. I once tried to get a magazine to let me interview Vin Scully and only ask him for his thoughts on Eric Gagne. The magazine said yes, but Scully said no. When I first moved over here, I did follow the seasons pretty closely and went to games when I went 'home' to LA, but it's hard. Games are on in the wee hours of the mornings here. And there's not a soul I know here who even knows anything about baseball much less has any interest in it. I really should get on board this season. Plus, it's the sublime genius Vin Scully's last year, I think. The A's are not in peak form right now? I'm sorry. See, I'm totally kind of lost on current baseball. It's sad. Thanks doing 'God Jr'. I hope it treats you okay. Have a fine weekend, sir! ** Okay. Let James's love for Scott Bradfield's novel wash over you and infect you between now and Monday when I will see you again.