Jack Spicer's Detective Novel: The Tower of Babel
Jack Spicer
Talisman
169 pp.
ISBN: 1-883689-04-x
Available from Powell's Books.
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Jack Spicer's detective novel is amusing, insightful, snappy and fun, but
it's not a detective novel. The Tower of Babel takes place in the
mid-1950s and tells the story of an East Coast academic poet named Ralston
who, after attending a revelatory football game, decides to go to
California. He's alternately lured and repulsed by the new "Beat" scene --
referred to in the novel as "the San Francisco Renaissance". This isn't his
first time in California; he was a student at UC Berkeley on GI Bill money after
returning from WWII. And, having been away for seven years, the poet is also
alternately lured and repulsed by his old friends. He's lured and repulsed,
alternately, a lot.
This is a nifty narrative ploy because it gives the author a chance to spoof
both the young poets creating the scene and an older generation
desperate to claim a connection with the new hipsters. These folks are
wonderfully created; Spicer draws them so vividly and nails their characters so dead-on that you
can still see them hanging out in every major metropolis from Austin and
Indianapolis to San Francisco and Jersey City. Here are a few favorites:
Rudolf (Rue) Talcott:
A young, reportedly brilliant poet who becomes fixated on the main character
Ralston. Rue tears up an issue of the Partisan Review that contains a
poem by Ralston. Rue presents a poem to Ralston, inserted in the mouth of a
dying fish. Ralston tears up poem.
Henry:
Old friend, also a WWII vet, whom Ralston visits to get caught up on the
local gossip. For years Henry has maintained a one-sided correspondence with
Ralston. He realizes that Henry is a virtual recluse and fears that he
couldn't possibly be the right person to dish dirt. Henry is far cannier
than one might think and explains how he keeps up to date without ever using
a telephone:
"I always write them letters -- even if they live as near as three blocks
away from here."
Ralston felt a pang of guilt. "What if they don't answer your
letters?" he asked with a fixed smile.
"That's the diabolical part of it. No one can answer all the letters
-- so they feel guilty. He wrote them all for me with only one arm they say.
So they finally sit down and write a real letter than contains real news --
more than I could get in fifty conversations or a thousand phone calls."
"And if they don't?"
"If they don't, they come to visit me like you did. And tell me
everything because they feel even more guilty when they face
me."
Madelaine:
Sex goddess every man in the book desires. She is a horrible cook, doesn't
bathe often enough, and is so unconventional as to actually be faithful to
her husband. At one point Madelaine and Ralston end up in a bar where
Ralston gets into a conversation about Alice in Wonderland with a drunken,
Irish, Jungian analyst:
"Madelaine let her mind wander. It was not that conversations like this
bored her but that she had heard so many of them -- using a book or a play or
even a movie to dig with at the roots of big meanings. And she had never
seen any of them change anybody's behavior or make anybody wiser or safer or
happier. She wondered whether, if the world were entirely made up of women,
there would be such conversations."
Well Maddy, forty-five years on we're still wondering.
Seshumi Hashiwara:
A Zen Buddhist monk invited to a dinner party. He turns bitter after the
thoughtless host and hostess presume he's a vegetarian and run out of
sirloin steak before he gets any. He spends the rest of the party holding
the guests hostage to hideously long and wretched "jokes" about men who
commit incest with their daughters and crickets who aspire to become a
Bodhisattva.
With all of these terrific characters (and more) meandering around the plot
and the city, what's with the pretense that this is a detective novel
anyway? True, a crime does occur, and Ralston does sort of get involved in
solving it, but it's not compelling -- even Ralston isn't particularly
interested in it. The resolution of the mystery (and alas the novel) is
abrupt and useless.
As the author is long dead (he passed away in 1965), we can't ask him.
Clues reside in the ponderous afterward by friends of the author, Lew
Ellingham and Kevin Killian. (Note to Lew and Kev -- it's really stinky and
pretentious to spend the bulk of the afterward apologizing for Spicer's
taste in leisure reading and trying to provide insightful literary criticism
of the "text").
Happily for all those who appreciate a good read -- which this book certainly
is -- it appears that a desire to cash in motivated its creation. Spicer was a fan of
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (as well he should have been). Noting
how their books sold, he figured that by writing about the vivid places and
characters he knew, then throwing in an assault, he could earn some money.
And while Tower of Babel doesn't hold a candle to any of the hard-boiled classics and Spicer
didn't get a red cent -- as he was near thirty years dead by the time it
was published -- we should be grateful. Yet again the quest for filthy lucre
provides delight for readers lucky enough to get their hands on a copy of
this entertaining book. It's not a detective novel.
-- Kristen St. John
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About the Publisher:
Talisman House will soon release The World in Time and Space:
Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry 1970-2000: Essays on the
Revolution in American Poetry and Poetics at the End of the Twentieth
Century. As edited by
Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue, it's one of many Talisman House books that
are on any cool kid's wish list. Talisman House also publishes A Journal
of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. They want everybody to get the word
"poetics" stuck in their heads all day.
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