Guest post by Kelly
(photo: New York Times)
There are books you hold gingerly, somehow aware that they
exclude a charisma, demanding respect if not immediate understanding. That’s
the feeling on first encountering Robert Stone's Dog soldiers, a book that has as much to offer now as when it was
first published.
(New York Times)
Robert Stone died last week. He was seventy-seven and in his
time had written eight novels, two short story collections and a memoir. Not a
huge count. Contemporaries
such as Larry McMurtry, who attended
the same university writing programme as Stone, have
published well into the double digits. Hard living had something to do with
that, but the fact is Stone's books are monoliths. Volumes carved out of hard
truths, unflinching in their attempt to appreciate the harsh reality of his
time and place. They must have demanded a great deal from him.
(Buddenbrooks)
You can see some of the
character which drove the creation of those books in online interviews. There
is one from toward the end of his life. Stone is at a promotion event for his
last novel, Death of the black-haired
girl. He looks exhausted, flattened by the years and the chronic pulmonary disease from which he eventually died. His thoughts are unfocused and seem to wonder. The book
he holds trembles along with his shaking hand. The host mentions Graham Greene
and Stone suddenly springs into relief. He’s filled with piss and vinegar,
furious scorn;
“I
hate Greene. I hate Greene’s soul. I hate his guts. I hate everything he
represents. I hate his hatreds. I hate his contempt’s. I hate his falseness. I
really have a deep despising of Greene….So my feeling about Greene is really
one of considerable despising, as I’m sure his would be about me. I mean Graham
Greene was a really good writer, there’s no way around that. I wish I could do
something about that….I don’t feel unconnected to Greene but my connection to Greene
is really one of hostility and rejection, because I think he made claims to
knowledge and to insight that he was not properly entitled to…”
The rant is not without
humour, Stone has a twinkle in his eye as he delivers it, but at the core is contempt
for lack of truth. It’s pure and it’s the opinion of a man that does not write ‘entertainments’.
(Salem
Press Inc)
The knowledge at the centre of
Stone's rancour is probably esoteric as much as political. Greene's problematic
Catholicism does not match up with Stone's search for a truth, (or, probably, with
Ston'es early life experience in a Catholic orphanage after his mother was
hospitalised with schizophrenia.) His novels are full with questers, mystics but
theirs is not a guilt ridden struggle with conscience, or a way of getting your
leg over, but rather a search for transcendental reality. It’s a quality which became more developed as Stone's career
progresses and is most apparent in novels such as Outbridge reach, Damascus
gate and Bay of souls. In his
Paris Review interview Stone described himself as a theologian but it would
probably be closer to the mark to say his inclinations were gnostic, not
interested in theory but, rather, direct spiritual experience.
In a memoir on The Jewish Daily Forward website Abe Mezrich
talks of Stone's fascination with the Kabballah. Mezrich attributes Stone's
attraction to the teaching that God is a force withdrawn from the universe,
likening it to Stone's own experience of being abandoned by his father soon
after birth. The rooting of the numinous in concrete, painful experience is one
which Stone returns to again and again in his writing. The process is perilous,
dangerous and quixotic, the cost is huge, but for Stone this is where the spark
is found.
(The
Morning News)
Stone was also concerned with
place. His novels are set in Central America, Mexico, Jerusalem, Haiti, Vietnam
and the open Atlantic Ocean. Even in the American novels settings are marked,
New Orleans and California in the late 60s. Places with character. Places with
their own mythologies. There is a romance in their portrayal, appreciation of strange dangers and exotic attractions, of the tiny details and customs
that make up their charisma. Stone himself admitted that his luck of
productivity could be at least partly attributed to his wanderlust, something
that it is hard to begrudge given the tantalising lucidity in which he presents
these locales.
(Interview
Magazine)
Though there was pleasure to
be had in his sense of place, that satisfaction was always eclipsed by serious purpose. Stone
was concerned with those areas for their political significance, for the ready
example they offered of 20th century American adventurism and its consequences. It seems a
pity that we are to be robbed of his vision just as his novels reached the cusp
of our modern world. The Death of the
black-haired girl portrays the post 9/11 world but does not touch on the
many wars in the Middle-East or the moral fallout of these conflicts on the
world and American society. It seems that had he lived and produced one more
novel Stone might have shown that we have not learned much over the course of
his lifetime. That we have come full circle and back to the Dog soliders years.
-Kelly
-Kelly
Links
The TotalAntitotalist Robert Stone - InterviewMagazine interview
Available
form Auckland Libraries
Nice piece kelly. I'll be reading some robert Stone...
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