Jim Grimsley

Guests on Earth by Lee Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I can’t claim to have read all of Lee Smith’s books – she is terrifically prolific – I found this one to be a quietly powerful read. She is a consummate southern writer whose career has spanned decades, and one feels her command of her craft in this historical novel about the fire that killed Zelda Fitzgerald – told through the eyes of another inmate in Highland Hospital. It is a strong book that conveys the depth of her research, and she chooses to present Zelda on her own, among the people that she encountered in the hospital. Her famous husband is hardly here at all. This makes it tempting to remark that the idea of Zelda feels incomplete without F. Scott in the picture – but that’s precisely the problem with her life and with the attitude toward women altogether, that it takes a man to complete them. So that in the end I think this may be the truest look one could have at Zelda herself. The book does little that is expected; the characters simply hold the page as happens in good fiction. I doubt that this will be remembered as Smith’s best book, but for me it is proof of the breadth of what she can accomplish. She has written so much so well. If there is a problem here it is that Zelda overshadows the other characters, which tips the book out of balance. But the choice to put her in the background was the right one, and the story resonates, particularly if one knows anything about Asheville, which has some powerful literary ghosts.

City of Night by John Rechy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I picked this book to write about this morning, I noticed that a lot of my friends have written about it, which is natural, since this is an iconic gay male novel, born out of an era in which writing of this blunt honesty was nearly impossible. This is the kind of book that Grove Press was known for, edgy and hard. It is also the kind of book that people speak of as hard, edgy, frank, which means that the writer treats sex in a particular way; at least I find that to be true most of the time. There are not a lot of parallels to this book; it is reminiscent of other writers who deal directly with erotic matter, but it is born out of one man’s hard-won experience. The ideas about gay sex that Rechy wrote about fell out of fashion in the aftermath of HIV; he was an advocate for hustler sex, anonymous sex, public sex; the world he writes about is that night-driven world that gay people occupied in that same era. It is a hard era for people to comprehend and is easy to dismiss as a time when men were closeted and full of self hatred. The fact that the closets and the self hatred were the natural outgrowth of trying to find intimacy in the shadows and corners of the world is harder to see. Rechy does not write about those ideas. He simply presents the world of the hustler, the world of the drag queen, the scenes of gay bars in New Orleans, with the sensibility of a natural inhabit of all these milieus. He does so with force and brilliance and a good strong dose of messiness. The writing is extravagant, self-involved, and true. It’s almost pointless to call this book a classic; it is a singular novel that only got itself born because of the force of the writer and his unswerving vision. He wrote many other novels, most of them not successful; but a few of them are essential – Numbers and The Sexual Outlaw come immediately to mind. Much as I love this book, I have never been able to face rereading it. I suppose I don’t want to spoil my first impression of it, when everything Rechy had to say was vital to my understanding of myself.

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Shirley Jackson occupies a territory that lies between so many kinds of writing that her books are hard to categorize, and our world does not deal well with anything that can’t be labeled in a word or two. There is no easy jargon to describe what she does as a writer. She is called a writer of horror but anyone reading the novels that are better known than this one might wonder what all the fuss is about – no blood, no vampires, no ghosts. The implication that there might be ghosts. The certainty that the surface of a place – like Hill House, or in this case, the home of Natalie Waite – undulates with the presence of something unsettling just beneath. Here is writing of a fine, highly literary quality with a vision that one struggles to find a word for – odd? eerie? There is nothing about Jackson that can be taken lightly; her paragraphs are marvels of complexity, her sentences perfectly formed, and her ability to observe a scene, to dissect it, is surgical. She brings to the adolescence of Natalie a disturbing sense of something having been wrong in her relationship with her family, her father, all along, and yet how does one define it? Then in the latter part of the novel it is as if the world dissolves into something increasingly formless. I have met young people like this poor girl, lost in families that have strangled their being, and have been grateful for the relative indifference of my own parents. God save us all from parents who want to shape our every thought and moment. I would be satisfied to praise this novel more highly if I were certain what it was. But as writing it is about as fine as a person can want. She is not Stephen King (whom I also admire); her idea of horror is far more subterranean, and, indeed, I wonder whether she found herself surprised to be described as a writer of horror fiction at all. Her purposes are much deeper than that. It will be good to discover more of her.

The chronicle of retirement has been convoluted and eventual and it is not over yet. I am still testing out the days to discover how best to use them. There is the overarching fact of my mother who shares the house with me, and from whom I will always need instruction in the basics. She is a woman who likes clean hands, swept floors, and tidy habits, along with wall art that consists mostly of flowers in vases. She is the baseline. It’s my job to adjust to her. But there is also the return to rural North Carolina, where I grew up and with which I am still familiar. We are living in the town where my mother’s friends are, and where her church is, and where people are much as I remember them from my early years.
There are probably a lot of people like me who have a vocation that does not have much to do with the job, and I feel lucky about having that, but at the same time there is unease with it. I will always write, that’s true, and I don’t feel much change in the impulse. Maybe I feel freer to do it, and the return to North Carolina is reminding me what my real material is – my truest material, I mean. Just listening to my cousins tell stories about what we all remember from the days of our grandparents opens up my head to the possibility of all that fertile stuff. It’s likely I strayed too far from the material that I really understood in the years when I was trying to figure out what publishers wanted. In my forties I wanted to stop writing about the miseries of family and poverty. But now I think that’s what I’m meant for.
So I am retired but I am not. I no longer have to teach, and at the end of the summer I will no longer be on anybody’s payroll. But every morning I will wake up with the feeling that there is something I need to do to justify my existence. What I have to be mindful of is that the writing is the point. I have no idea how much I will be able to publish in the future. Even if I were not aging and losing relevance – I just spent twenty five seconds searching for the word “relevance” – publishing is volatile and might go in so many directions after the pandemic. If, indeed, there is an “after” to all this.
The writing is the point. Keeping up a conversation with people is the point. Staying alive to see what the next thing will be. Finishing another novel, and another one, until something, some inner voice, says, okay. That’s it. You’re done with that now, too.
I’ve been employed since I was fourteen years old, as best I can recall. It’s an odd thought, no matter what I do with the writing, to think that my working, paycheck-earning life is over. It’s too large to get my head around. But I’ll adjust.

Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I started this book I was sixteen or seventeen, had checked it out from our high school library, and read it with interest because I was already enamored of the Greeks and armies marching here and there, the conquest of Persia; it was a cousin to fantasy, which I was also reading at the time. The early life of Alexander was engaging and clear; I was enjoying Mary Renault’s prose, which I could recognize as better writing than I was used to in my science fiction favorites. Then came the entry into the book of Hephaistion and his love of Alexander, when they were schoolboys being tutored by Aristotle. I was absolutely struck dumb by the fact that two boys were in a book in love with each other. I had never read anything like that and had figured out that my own feelings were supposed to be hidden and not shared with anybody. The story was transporting even without the addition of this element, but the fact that I could identify with the book so closely made an impression that was thrilling. I have read the book several times over the years, not nearly as many times as I read its sequel, The Persian Boy. Renault is an extraordinary writer who found in this material something that touched the best writer she could be. Of all the historical writers I’ve read, I love her best.