WILLIAM HJORTSBERG: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the novelist and screenwriter William Hjortsberg is online at the Guardian, you can link to it here. It will appear in the paper paper at some point. As far as I have seen, apart from a nice one in the Livingston Enterprise, this is the onliest one that has appeared in the press, and that is a shame. I remember enjoying the comedy of Alp and the audaciousness of Gray Matters, and then being shocked at the change of tone in Falling Angel, which surely is a classic.

It's probably best to read the obit as published before continuing here. Although the obit is basically as I wrote it, there were a lot of small trims, and one big one which we will get to. Given the laid-back of the life of the man his friends knew as 'Gatz' (which was excised from the piece) I thought it might be worthwhile to patch up those little details which I thought rounded out the story. Because, as Louis Cyphre might say, the devil is in the details. For example, I don't know why but I thought it important to say that the Johnny Favourite whom Cyphre hires Harry Angel to find had been a famous crooner, which makes his disappearance even harder to fathom.

Many of the bits cur were those small details that give you a sense of a person. When Hjortsberg was little, his father had a country house in the Catskills, where young Bill learned to fish, something he would continue to do when he settled in Montana. At Dartmouth, he used a photographic memory to allow him to work in the pizza joint nights while going to college in the days. He and his buddyTom McGuane won Stegner Fellowships at Stanford: this was probably the most prestigious creative-writing programme in America: before McGuane and Hjortsberg it had included Ken Kesey, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Peter S Beagle and George V Higgins (though its 'hit rate' isn't as impressive afterwards). Before starting at Stanford, Hjortsberg and his wife Marian travelled in Europe and Central America; this comes up in a couple of books, including the recent Manana, which I will review here soon.

It also comes up in Toro! Toro! Toro!. I had to explain to the Guardian desk that the title was a play on Tora! Tora! Tora!, which had been a movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; I was then asked by the desk to explain what Tora meant: tora (which means tiger) was the code word to signal the attack was underway; an acronym for TOtsugeki RAigeki, usually translated as 'lightning attack'.

I mentioned the unlikely influence of Per Lagerkvist's The Dwarf on Alp. I told the story of when Tom McGuane advised Hjortsberg to take up screenwriting, he said 'it's like taking candy from a baby', which was an echo of Herman Mankiewicz's famous 1925 telegram offering Ben Hecht $300 to come out to Hollywood: "'Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around." I also noted that the screenplay Nomad was constantly being optioned, so although Hjortsberg had few movie credits, between options and doctoring, he kept earning. 

Hjortsberg's first marriage and a brief second one both ended in divorce. In 2000 he was set up with Janie Camp by the western writer Richard Wheeler and his wife, two more of the Montana gang. This seemed somehow fitting, because Gatz was really at the centre of the gang; his son Max married Jim Harrison's daughter Anna, which made them sort of royalty. Having written Harrison's obit for the Guardian (you can find it here), I felt like it was something I should mention. 

There's a picture of Richard Brautigan sitting round a table with McGuane and, I think Jim Harrison, and a couple of bottles of bourbon. The other people aren't facing the camera but I wonder if one of them is Hjortsberg. He spent two decades researching that Brautigan biography, and though I was not tempted to read it then, I am now. We forget not only how important a writer Brautigan was, for a brief time, but also how very talented at his peak, with his combination of minimalism and surrealism (or what Robert Bly would call 'leaping'). His life was also one of extreme difficulty, and though such a big book seems the antithesis of Brautigan's work, I am getting the sense that karmatically, his life may have demanded it. Or it may just have been an obsession, but either way it makes sense. 

It's odd that I should think Hjortsberg in later years resembled Noam Chomsky a bit. He died from pancreatic cancer. He had finished the sequel to Falling Angel, and was going to call it Burning Angel, except James Lee Burke, another Montana-based writer, published a novel with that title. Burke apparently told Hjortsberg to use it anyway, but the book will be published under a different title, which he wouldn't tell interviewers.

He did, however, respond last year when an interviewer asked him for some 'parting words', which was a prescient if not ominous query. Hjortsberg told him "live every day to its fullest. Suck it in. It's all so brief". Which is a good way to end an interview, or a life, or an obituary. It was how I ended mine, though sadly, it's not how it ends in the paper. I'm still trying to figure out why. RIP.

UP ON THE TIN ROOF: JAMES LEE BURKE'S TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN

This somewhat-dissenting view on The Tin Roof Blowdown never appeared in Crime Time's now-defunct print edition, and I've rewritten it somewhat after having visiting New Orleans last fall, which reinforced my original feelings about the book....

When it appeared, The Tin Roof Blowdown was greeted as perhaps Burke’s ‘best-ever’, and you can see why: the most poetic of crime writers takes on the greatest natural and man-made disaster of the new century, Hurricane Katrina. Dave Robichaux investigates the shooting of looters in the nicer sections of New Orleans during the big storm, and the disappearance of a junkie-priest from the darker side of the Big Easy. Given that Dave is prone to long internal monologues and musings, and that his life seems dedicated to re-visiting the miseries of the Vietnam War, the rest of his personal history, and the dark past of the American South, and given that a hurricane tends to throw up lots of debris, one could anticipate that this might prove a daunting task for Dave. And in the end it does for Burke as well.

The title, with its allusion to Tennessee Williams, suggests a certain decadence, a certain amount of decay, of impotence in the face of reality. But the novel stops short of examining these hard questions. Partly because there is too much about this book that not only recalls Dave’s previous speculations, but also his old criminal nemeses. Not content with the immediate crime, the shooting of looters, which forms the moral core of the story, nor with the bigger questions of nature's destruction and the political malfeasance which helped it on its way, Burke again draw on the appearance of a figure whose almost supernatural evil appears to exist primarily to taunt Dave with temptation. Perhaps he figures he has to do this again in order to have a villain of Robicheaux-worthy proportions, but really, you'd think George Bush and his feeble FEMA guys were evil enough for that. And that really is a shame, because the novel, at heart, wants to be the story of the hard-working man, apparently trying to defend his home, finding himself unexpectedly and unwarrantedly threatened by nature itself, and that is the dilemma which would make it most compelling. That and a little subtle insight into the social politics of race. Instead, most of what we get is a trip through familiar Louisiana Robicheaux territory, with the usual familiar Clete Purcell sideshow.

If I sound harsh, it is the harshness of disappointment, because I did indeed expect much more from Burke, whose previous Robicheaux, Pegasus Descending was one of his best (see my review in Crime Time 50). But here the material, threatening to overwhelm him, seems to have gotten subsumed into some of Dave’s obsessions, and he wanted Dave's obsessions to rise to the fore. Thus every time he begins to vent against the politics which left New Orleans more than usually unprotected against the storm, or slowed aid to the largely black, poor, and Democrat-voting city, he quickly directs the vented steam into Dave's more personal, directions. And when he gets into the most compelling of Dave's own stories, he again veers away, into the kind of spooky violence that has marked late Robichaux, venturing almost into John Connolly territory. There are large parts of the novel that are, in fact, McGuffins, and the reality is a hurricane is simply too big and too strong to be relegated to acting as a McGuffin.

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke,
Orion, 2007, £12.99, ISBN 9780752889160