Philip Wylie - The Gladiator (1930)

 

I gather that much has been made of this novel as a precursor to Siegel and Shuster's Superman, or this is at least the reason for my having heard of it. The Gladiator was published in 1930 and features a man who leaps tall buildings with a single bound and can lift rocks of several tons. His skin is impervious to bullets and his hair is described as so black that it seems almost blue. It's hard to miss the parallels with the star of Action Comics, and although the first issue didn't appear until 1938, Siegel and Shuster had been working on the character since at least 1933. Nevertheless, once we're past those parallels already listed, the association becomes tenuous. One early version of Superman had powers bestowed upon him during the experiments of an irresponsible scientist, much like Wylie's Hugo Danner, but the argument remains thin.

Of course, the notion of progress as something which must surely apply to the future of human evolution was very much a hot topic when The Gladiator was written, meaning it taps into a popular theme more than it originates, and those persons then most visibly - or at least memorably - obsessed with such themes included those writing for early science-fiction magazines such as Hugo Gernsback's Astounding Stories.

Strangely, The Gladiator gets off to a thoroughly putrid start very much in the spirit of the misanthropy found in the worst of Astounding. Our amateur scientist is an unappreciated genius married to an unpleasant nag of a wife. Family values are emphasised with the sort of toxic conservatism typical of young male writers who haven't had much life experience but nevertheless presume themselves above the common herd; and Abednego Danner, our crusading scientist, routinely drowns any kittens left over once he's done with his experiments because he's above mere sentiment. His experiments, as you may have guessed, are geared towards the creation of a superhuman. He succeeds, and so his son is born effectively invulnerable with inhuman strength.

Just as I'd begun to wish I'd picked something else to read, the superbaby becomes a child and the novel reveals itself to be something quite different to that which was seemingly promised in the first chapters.

From his earliest day that longing occupied him. He sought to hide his strength. He hated to think that other people were talking about him. The distinction he enjoyed was odious to him because it aroused unpleasant emotions in other people. He could not realise that those emotions sprang from personal and group jealousy, from the hatred of superiority.

Our boy, you see, is afflicted with superhuman ability more than he is blessed, and this theme dominates so much as to dispel any similarity to those sunnier cartoon people who fight crime and right wrongs with a big, big smile. If The Gladiator foreshadowed anything in the world of comic books, it would have been Stan Lee mashing caped books up with romance comics to produce the angst-ridden superheroes of the sixties and beyond, but even there the parallels are superficial, traditional comic book superhero angst serving mainly to add depth and contrast to the three colour antics. Here the angst is probably nothing less than a measure of the gulf which exists between ideology and that to which it is applied, because the dreams of supermen can only ever be a distraction.

His tragedy lay in the lie he had told to his father: great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness, its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes, the relief of visible facts, the hope in rationalisation, the needs of skin, belly, and womb.

I'm therefore assuming that the wince-inducing Gernsback-isms of the first chapters are deliberate, ultimately serving as a refutation of the mania from which they were born, and it's probably no coincidence that our main character is named Hugo.

Reaching maturity, the aforementioned Hugo does his best to make his way in the world, but his physical superiority sabotages everything he does to the point of leaving him destitute, struggling to make a living at a carnival sideshow. He struggles at college, accidentally kills an opponent during a game of football, before finding himself drawn into the first world war - the ultimate refutation of meaning, ideals, and ideology.

The Gladiator delivers a deliberately contrarian opener before settling into an intense and genuinely gripping philosophical debate with more than just a flavour - as well as the literary flair - of H.G. Wells at his best, savoured with pulpier touches and moods that remind me of John Fante and Céline, of all people. So I'm not saying this is superior to the caped comics which followed, but that it's such a different animal as to render comparisons mostly pointless. It's not much less than a retort to pretty much every lie we told ourselves for the duration of the last century.

Agitation

Alexandrine Ogundimu Agitation (2022)
This approximately continues the story from Ogundimu's Desperate and is, I would guess, at least partially autobiographical by some definition, because the detail seems too painfully well observed for it to be otherwise. I don't recall Desperate as being particularly lacking in any sense, but Agitation nevertheless seems to take it up a few notches, whatever it is, relating a thoroughly grim narrative yet without itself being grim, refusing to push buttons or play the usual sympathy cards. In this respect it reminds me a little of John Fante, although this may simply be because I read The Road to Los Angeles fairly recently.

I'm almost hesitant to mention that Ogundimu is a transwoman and that V, the narrator of Agitation, is an autogynephile, because although this is an element of the story, it's simply one component of the whole, but one which might be seen to eclipse everything else given the current climate of social media - which would be misleading and a disservice to the author. Indeed, the subject is such that I'm reluctant to elaborate beyond that Agitation sheds a refreshingly honest light on the matter; and by honest I mean unflinching and entirely free of the usual one size fits all empowerment horseshit which I doubt really helps anyone. This isn't porn, but neither is it an indictment or even dirty laundry, so thank Christ someone has the guts to write this stuff without doodling pink fucking unicorns in the margin.

The Road to Los Angeles

John Fante The Road to Los Angeles (1936)
It wasn't until I happened across this one in the second hand book store that I realised Fante had written a number of novels centred around Arturo Bandini, his fictional struggling novelist. This one features a much younger Bandini than Ask the Dust, and it's a very different novel, its tone seemingly informing Bandini's lousy personality. Where Ask the Dust maintains a sense of realism which patently inspired and is comparable with Bukowski, this one is just plain wild. My guess is that this younger Bandini represents a vicious satire on more or less every writer Fante ever met, and I recognise the type, much to my regret. These days he can't stop himself from name-dropping in all those endless repetitive posts on Twitter about who he's submitted a pitch to this week as though the rest of us have any reason to give a shit, or another blog post about what it's like to be a writer, or writing tips from the guy who can barely form an original or cohesive sentence as he vanishes up his own arsehole over and over and over. He's all plans and announcements and declarations but no action. He's got a literature degree and he may be just twenty-two but he already knows fucking everything and will happily tell you where you're going wrong, drawing on the great wealth of his worldly experience in fucking Sussex.

I said to Mona, 'Bring me books by Nietzsche. Bring me the mighty Spengler. Bring me Auguste Comte and Immanuel Kant. Bring me books the rabble can't read.'

Mona brought them home. I read them all, most of them very hard to understand, some of them so dull I had to pretend they were fascinating, and others so awful I had to read them aloud like an actor to get through them.

I've known and even been edited by this barely coherent shithead*, so it's massively satisfying to watch Fante rip the piss out of him for 155 harrowing pages. It's horrible, but absolutely necessary, and I need more by John Fante.

*: Relax, Stuart. I don't mean you.

New Writings in SF 2

John Carnell (editor) New Writings in SF 2 (1964)
It seems oddly fitting that I should come to this directly after reading Ask the Dust wherein Fante's Arturo Bandini acquires sufficient literary stock as to attract the attention of a hopeful:

It was a manuscript of some sort. I took it from her hands. It was a short story by Samuel Wiggins, general delivery, San Juan, California. It was called Coldwater Gatling, and it began like this: 'Coldwater Gatling wasn't looking for trouble but you never can tell about those Arizona rustlers. Pack your cannon high on the hip and lay low when you see one of them babies. The trouble with trouble was that trouble was looking for Coldwater Gatling. They don't like Texas rangers down in Arizona, consequently Coldwater Gatling figured shoot first and find out who you killed afterwards. That's how they did it in the Lone Star State where men were men and women didn't mind cooking for hard-riding straight-shooting people like Coldwater Gatling, the toughest man in leather they had down there.'

That was the first paragraph.

'Hogwash,' I said.

I somehow had one of these myself a couple of years ago, a guy who worked with my wife and sent me the first chapter of his fantasy novel.

Mental concentration and discipline are important attributes for a wizard. They are requirements if one wishes to be a successful and long-living wizard. Such was the case for Hailaden, whose eyes and mind were focused on the soft white glow before him. The crystal orb, roughly a foot in length but looking like a large odd-shaped egg, sat in its small wooden pedestal in front of him. In its light, the lines on his face and the gray in his beard diminished, and his countenance took on an almost youthful appearance.

It wasn't so much that it lacked ideas of any value, but that the grammar was often just so fucking weird and crap as to render the thing almost incomprehensible. The author didn't seem like a bad guy, and I felt he might be able to tell a decent - if admittedly not wildly original - story if he could just get hold of his sentences; so I spent a couple of days going through the thing, pointing out what didn't work, which passages were too long, unnecessary, or lacking clear purpose, which sentences read as though translated into Japanese, then Swahili, then back into English. He thanked me for the time I spent then explained to my wife that I simply hadn't understood because I'm a science-fiction writer and therefore unfamiliar with the conventions of his chosen genre.

All this crap belongs - in my mind - to a genre I have labelled dinnerpunk. The label now seems ridiculous and crappy, which in turn probably makes it entirely fitting. It refers to fiction written by a person who shouldn't be writing fiction, usually an Alan Partridge level bore who has noticed how all those arty farty types and fairies seem to get published and has therefore decided that it can't be all that hard. He comes up with a story whilst smoking his pipe in the garden as a long-suffering wife prepares dinner, and it will usually be a load of half-assed and oddly parochial espionage bollocks, and there will almost always be a character identified only as the Colonel. People will look at other people and ask 'you can't mean,' their question curtailed by an ominous 'yes! I'm rather afraid that is exactly the situation, old top.'

New Writings in SF, of which I gather there were a couple of volumes, boldly published original short science-fiction tales which hadn't already seen in print in the usual magazines. Of the eight stories here, the first five are the worst kind of creaking dinnerpunk, G.L. Lack's Rogue Leonardo for one example.

Trafford smiled at the young curator. With her severe straight smock and short tightly curled hair she was typical of the rising generation of women, many in positions of responsibility by the age of twenty-five, giving their husbands time for research.

...or John Rankine's Maiden Voyage for another:

He liked the way her bottom moved in the tight blue-grey cheongsam and he was wondering if he ought to pinch it, when the debate was cut short by their arrival at the bronze doors which filled the end of the white passage.

Jesus.

Where Dag was tall and lanky, he was short and inclined to be spherical. In fact in a spacesuit he looked rather like an old time advert for Michelin Tyres.

Do you see what I mean?

To be fair the last three stories are decent, notably Steve Hall's faintly peculiar and experimental A Round Billiard Table, but otherwise this is the stuff which people who don't read science-fiction think science-fiction is like, which is why they don't read it and which is quite understandable.

This felt like a fucking route march for the first hundred or so pages. John Carnell used to edit New Worlds, so I expected better.

Ask the Dust

John Fante Ask the Dust (1939)
I first heard this guy's name on crackly old tapes of Bukowski readings in which Chuck occasionally took a break from burping, swearing, or describing a memorable hangover to tell his audience that they should be reading John Fante. Not knowing the name I assumed he was some younger, up and coming dude whose works had struck a chord with the Mighty One; but it turns out that it was the other way round, Fante being an earlier writer, one whose fame should perhaps have extended further than it did and who had served as an inspiration to Bukowski.

I had this book in my possession over ten years and somehow never got around to reading it, otherwise I would have realised the above. Rob Colson, one of the Seaton Point authors, lent it to me and then we lost touch; and shit happened, and we eventually found touch and I'll hopefully be seeing him for a pint in a week or so; and so of course it occurred to me that I should maybe get around to reading the thing before I return it.

It's not hard to see how Fante influenced Bukowski's writing. It's the same tight prose, clipped, functional and yet conveying nuances of mood and psychological subtext with a poetry that might be lost in any more floridly composed narrative. Similarly Fante's world is one of hacks, bums, and losers somehow maintaining their dignity regardless of shitty circumstances. There's a kind of romance, but nothing so cheap as sentiment.

I'm assuming Ask the Dust is at least partially autobiographical given that the main character is a struggling author lugging his typewriter around a succession of cheap rooms and dive bars, and although the territory is familiar from the novels of his more famous successor, the narrative follows quite a different course to the sort of thing Bukowski tended to write. Our boy is living off the precarious fame and earnings of having a short story published in some magazine when he falls into a love-hate relationship with a Latina working in a bar. Surprisingly though - at least to me - the guy's first short story leads to a second, then a novel and a big fat cheque with which he buys a house; but the riches seem sketchy and insubstantial, just background detail to his strained relationships with women and the not entirely appreciated admiration of Sammy, who also wants to be an author, but who writes the worst shit you've ever read. Ultimately our boy's success doesn't seem to add up to much.

Cliché though it may seem, Ask the Dust is a tale of beautiful losers, or at least losers who somehow retain their dignity in the face of adversity, and declaring it a lost twentieth century classic wouldn't be an understatement. That said, it's not without problems - our author's success doesn't feel entirely convincing, particularly not the part in which he suddenly buys a house, and Camilla's decent into reefer madness reads a bit like one of those public information films of the fifties warning about the debauched existence of the dope fiend - although that may be something to do with Fante just wanting to get published; but then neither of these details really get in the way of this being an exceptionally well written book; so Bukowski was right, just like always.