. Spinning .

The morning has me still thinking about him, and as I go my morning rounds along the web, I find another mention of him, on The Great Lettuce Head–he who started me on the McCarthy’s path.  And a comment on my last post from Mark at Clear Lake Reflections that has me thinking and rethinking the way I read a novel. 

I used to read for entertainment.  To immerse myself within the context of the story and the character.  Then I learned to break it down, to seek out the structure and the meaning.  Maybe it was money wasted on years of study, but in Suttree, while off the top of my head I would say that the river formed the motif, just running on in a constancy that started out the story with a drowned suicide, and throughout the book held everything within it from sustenance in fish and mussels, to moving characters about, to all the excrement and unwanted bits of life that people threw within its waters.  Much like life itself, containing all and continuing, despite what is put into or pulled from it.  But while I might pick this out in rethinking, I did not consider it while reading.

I read now for entertainment, to find my way around a world I would not have known.  I also have learned to read simultaneously for writing.  That’s why I have shared the bits of McCarthy and Dorothy Parker when either the language is a thing of beauty, or a technique is noted that makes me bow my head in admiration.

I don’t think I will ever read a work of fiction to find the underlying social redemptive statement.  I will, in afterthoughts that a good book leaves insistently pulsing in my mind, remember certain points made, go back and reread, discover more.  Eventually, if asked, I can analyze the theme.  But sometimes, in a book such as Suttree, there is so much going on in story, so much to spin one’s head with language and its use, that I needed to immediately share and record the experience. 

More later…

One point was made at the Wesleyan conference that I hadn’t considered:  That the necessary change as a result of the event or series of events is not necessarily one that takes place within the protagonist, but in fact, may happen within the reader.

At the end of McCarthy’s novel, Bud Suttree does undergo a change, though we don’t know where he is headed mentally as he leaves Knoxville.  He doesn’t either, not really.  But he knows that he doesn’t want to spend any more time in the lifestyle he had been living for the three years since he had turned his back on another, comfortably wealthy lifestyle to which he was born.  I don’t know if he would have made this move if the neighborhood hadn’t been leveled while he was facing some serious demons brought to his bedside by typhoid fever, but he is once again in control of himself.  He has been devastated by the deaths of people he cared about, people who struggled every day to get through every day.  He helped where he could.  It took its toll on him, and brought back memories of his childhood that we could only guess at.  Events are hinted at, and we can only guess at the trauma it induced in a child, the despair and revulsion it grew in a man.

I will miss Bud Suttree.  He is a good man.  I wish him luck.

Thirteen pages to go and McCarthy is whipping us up into a Godalmighty climax that should leave us exhausted.

Drugs, good or bad, would be hardpressed to produce worse nightmares than those in Suttree’s head.  Methinks McCarthy had a helluva good time writing this ending, opening the gates to let out the full force of creativity in all its most extreme depravity and want.

Uh-oh.  I am down to the last thirty pages, drawing it out as long as I can, unwilling to let go.  McCarthy is disposing of his characters, one by one.  You knew this is where they’d go, where their lives were headed.

And I fear for Cornelius Suttree.

I’m sorry, but Suttree is just one of those books you just have to share…

Leonard’s just out of the workhouse where he spent some time when they found out about his father.  Yep, the old man surfaced, dragging his chains up with him.  And this is where both the story and the writer get to me.  The story makes me laugh; McCarthy makes me ashamed of my own writing.

Leonard finds Suttree and asks him seriously if they can repossess his father’s grave because his mother’s gotten three payments behind on it.  Now that’s funny.

Anywhere else, written by anyone else, this would be unbelievable.  But I am so used to Suttree’s world, a witch’s brew of odd characters perpetually living hard lives and hitting even worse luck as they go along, that this is totally within the realm of the reality of this story.  McCarthy has innoculated me against incredulity, and yet gives me booster shots of conflicts that can still surprise me.

Your protagonist must make the reader feel sympathetic they say.  There is no doubt that I feel something for Bud Suttree.  I stood by him all the way, watched him get drunk and saw him safely home.  Went along with his life of leaving so much of his potential untapped because I believed him that he was, if not happy, content with what little he had, even if that contentment or better yet, tolerance, was based on maybe not so accurate assertions to himself that that was all he wanted, all he needed, all he deserved.  Almost with a vengence he would blow any extra money at all on something useless like a suit, or transitory like a steak dinner, or the psychologist of the common man, booze.  Then he met a woman, lived with her, saved the money she earned by whoring, and bought a car.  Not any car, a Jag.  Cream colored convertible with red leather interior and black and burlwood dash.  And the silver cat stretching in a run on its nose.  Life as Suttree knew it was changed.

Now he realizes that he is indeed unhappy, unfulfilled.  He’s had the things he lived without–turned his back on in his youth–and they only serve to make him know himself a little better.  He is lonely.  One early summer day he and his ladyfriend take a ride out to the countryside.  This is when he knows it. 

"Suttree knelt in the sand and skipped a stone.  A curving track of ringshapes.  The far shore lay deeply shadowed.  The siltbars delicately sutured with the tracks of wharfrats.  She had knelt beside him and nibbled at his ear.  Her soft breast against his arm.  Why then this loneliness?"

He wonders if she was ever a child, realizes he knows her body well, isn’t bothered enough by the fact that so do many, many others, in fact, she keeps them both by taking off to the big cities for days or weeks at a time to hustle and brings home the money.  He knows that he doesn’t know her, doesn’t love her, and yet, when he turns to her and finds her crying, doesn’t ask her why.

So maybe I don’t know Suttree very well either, and yet I care about him.  Am I jealous of his woman?  She seems so nice and caring, and I too felt it was what he may have needed.  Or the Jag?  The relationship, needless to say, is going bad.  I’ve stopped at the point where in the middle of the street in front of the bar they have a fight.  She kicks out the windshield of the car, damages the dash.

And for an instant, I hate her.

First off, this is Spinning post number 2001.  Neat eh?   Or is it time to shut up?

But not before I share this, a technique I found Dorothy Parker exercised in "The Lovely Leave" that of the fuchsia plant the protagonist bought that Parker described first as "graceful magenta bells" and followed her mood subsequently naming them as "vulgar" and finally, "exquisite."

And this tonight, in "Suttree":  "A wan midwinter sun hung low and oblong under the leeward fishshaped clouds.  A sun hotjowled and squat in the seeping lavender dusk.  Down this narrow street where the chinese sign glows green.  She is waiting, cupboarded in one of the high booths."

Has McCarthy ever described even the cleanest, brightest corner of Knoxville as anything near a notch above dismal?  Suddenly, because Suttree has gotten himself laid by a very nice, attractive woman, albeit prostitute, his world is described in the hopeful way that Suttree himself feels.

Either I’m an idiot making more of this than lies within the words, or McCarthy has just one-upped Parker.

At long last I read the words that have been pointed out to me many months ago: 

"Am I a monster?  Are there monsters in me?"

There is a bond I feel with Suttree, not of lifestyle or way of thinking, but something that has me want to cradle him at times like this.  He has been hurt in life and has risen above it.  He has hurt others.  But Suttree has a conscience.  He is aware that by his actions he sets his course, and accepts it to ride the waves.  But every now and then something happens in his life, something that makes him wonder, something that makes him doubt himself and take more blame than he deserves.  At the moment he speaks the words, he is in the midst of a thunderstorm, challenging lightning to strike him; perhaps challenging God, or himself.

Wanda has been killed by a landslide.  She was the oldest daughter of Reese, the family Suttree’s been staying with a while in hopes of finding some wealth through musseling, then staying on because he has nothing better going back at his place on the river, then staying on, perhaps, because he has found love of sorts, a lust and caring in this girl-woman, and then she dies.  This is when he leaves the family and returns back to his home on the river, but things have changed.

Does Suttree blame himself for Wanda’s death, just for her being with him?  When Suttree helped Leonard dispose of his father’s long-dead body, Suttree went to church, and then went to the woods and stayed there for a few weeks.  I think he needed to find something that was good in life, something away from the despair and hurt that surrounded him among the lives of his friends.  I think he needed to feel clean and fresh; the things he does, the things he sees, have filled him to the bursting point, are just a bit beyond his control. 

There’s more to Suttree, and there’s less to him.  But still I want to hold him and tell him he’s all right.

And here I thought Dorothy Parker was good; here’s McCarthy’s Suttree when they finally find their way back to camp: 

"He lay down in his blankets.  It was growing dark, long late midsummer twilight in the woods.  He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad.  He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm.  My life is ghastly, he told the grass."

Wow.

How’s this for imagery: 

"They crossed a pasture where grackles blue and metallic in the sun were turning up dried cowpats for the worms beneath and they went on past the back side of a junklot with the sun wearing hard upon them and upon the tarpaper roof of the parts shack and upon the endless fenders and lids of wrecked cars that lay curing paintlorn in the hot and weedy reeks."

Now "they" is Suttree and Reese–a family man who talked Suttree into following him downriver with promises of great wealth from mussel pearls, which didn’t quite pan out–and they are making their way back home early on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night filled with booze and whorin’. 

Can’t you just feel their achin’ heads and wayward walkin’? 

One of McCarthy’s techniques, as I see it, is to set the pace of an event and give it its import and meaning by sentence length and punctuation–or lack thereof.  The above is truly a run-on sentence (and I love McCarthy for it!) unbroken by commas and yet the mouthful is still just enough to read without becoming tiresome.  The necessary breaths of the reader are limited to the reader–McCarthy doesn’t tell us to stop before each "and" unless we need to.  And, if we don’t need to, the pace we keep is exactly the same as that of Suttree and Reese as they weave their way home.

Though Suttree went along for the ride a couple days last week, I finally got the chance to spend more time with him last night.  I find that now I smile in amusement at Harrogate’s doings, as one does with a friend one has come to know well enough where the escapade is expected though the outcome is never predictable.  He has blown himself up underground in tunnels beneath the town–and escaped with his life–in another outrageous plan.

One thing I didn’t write about here, and perhaps it is because I’m still touching the words in solemn attempt to understand, was Suttree’s retreat to the woods.  I think I know the reason, and I think I know what he got from it, but I believe it was more of a McCarthy method to give us some access into his character’s mind.  To leave us alone with him for a while, to reconnect and watch over him.

I am at that horrid three-quarter mark in the book where, if the book is good, you are starting to regret that it will end.  Very seldom do I read a book this slowly, and it was wisely done in this case as it is interspersed among others.  It is almost as if, had this book been the sole focus of a week, I would have fallen into it and died.  It has enough power to bring me back into its depth without losing the sense of the characters, the story, as I dabble elsewhere.  It is like a secret cave of childhood where we hide fantasies and ourselves from the rest of the world.

The ragpicker, tired of living, with Suttree. 

It won’t be long, he said.  An old man’s days are numbered.

And what happens then?

When?

After you’re dead.

Dont nothin happen.  You’re dead.

You told me once you believed in God.

The old man waved his hand.  Maybe, he said.  I got no reason to think he believes in me.  Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could.

What would you say to him?

Well, I think I’d just tell him.  I’d say:  Wait a minute.  Wait just one minute before you start in on me.  Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know.  And he’ll say:  What’s that?  And then I’m goin to ast him:  What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway?  I couldn’t put any part of it together.

Suttree smiled.  What do you think he’ll say?

The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth.  I don’t believe he can answer it, he said.  I don’t believe there is an answer.

Suttree fits in with those around him; he is educated yet has many of the same needs and wants of his friends but seems to bring out intellectual discussion in them as he might philosophize with his own peer group.  It is a simpler life, but simple represents the basics of life as a struggle and one’s ultimate death. 

Suttree has a tie with religion, one that brings him stumbling into the Catholic church where he had served, it seems, as an altar boy.  This, after being conned into helping Leonard dispose of his father’s body.  First he gets drunk, then he visits the church, quietly slipping into a pew, looking around as memories flood in (I had a similar experience recently in visiting my own church of my childhood) and falling asleep.  But is it his past that he needed to see or is it God?  When a priest awakens him, Suttree refutes the priest’s statement that it is God’s house.  What does he mean?  To Suttree, is God more likely found down by the river or in the whorehouses and bars?  Or does He exist at all?  Is it belief or hope, or guilt, or just learned behavior that drew him in?

With Cormac McCarthy, his characters have many sides, many devils, many virtues hidden in their flaws.

Oh Lord, this is great.

Ole pimply Leonard wants Suttree to help him unload his old man who has been dead for six months and left in the back room so’s they can still collect his welfare and medical checks.

After listening patiently to all the facts, Suttree suggests that Leonard instead "Get Harrogate to help you.  Loonies ought to stick together."

I suspect this doesn’t end with Suttree leaving the diner…yep, I’m right.  I had to peek a couple pages ahead and spotted "Leonard…"

Gotta go.  Hafta see what he’s up to. Or officially, how this conflict reaches a closure.

(Am studying my fool head off, but needed a break from carbs.)

McCarthy has just introduced the new character of Michael into Suttree’s life.  Michael is an Indian whom Suttree spots out on the river one day, fishing in a "skiff composed of actual driftwood, old boxes, stenciled crateslats and parts of furniture patched up with tin storesigns and rags of canvas and spattered over with daubs of tar."   Michael has also caught the biggest catfish Suttree has ever seen.

This slow friendship develops, as is McCarthy’s manner, with focus and then most likely will pop up again and again from this point onward.  But one thing that has occurred to me is that I’m very curious about Michael and what sort of character he is. 

With the pack of river rats that comprises Suttree’s world and McCarthy’s story, I want to know more, find myself watching the new man closely.  This, after coming straight off Harrogate’s get-rich-quick scheme of slaughtering forty-two bats and bringing them in to the clinic where he expected to get paid for them.  They were tested and found to not be rabid, so he didn’t get paid because the doctors got wise to him, but they were also very curious about how he managed to kill so many–bats are eaters on the fly. 

I’m getting used to Harrogate, and await his next escapade with high anticipation. 

And now, I wonder what’s up with Michael, he who stands there with dripping box-less, headless box turtle as a dinner offer.

I need to get more into the underlying meanings of Suttree, but right now I’m still taken by the writing and the essentials of place, character, arc, etc.  Let me give you an example of McCarthy’s dialogue, between Harrogate (watermelon man) and a junk dealer.  Harrogate brings an old Ford hood to be matched if possible at the junkyard, telling the man that he wants another just like it.  The man walks away, and when Harrogate goes after him, finds him back in a drunken drowse on his cot:

"Hey, said Harrogate.

I ain’t got time to mess with you, the junkman mumbled.

Listen, said Harrogate.  I need two alike to make a boat out of.

The junkman removed his arm from his  face and looked at the ceiling.

I wanted to get em welded together and tar up the holes so I could have me a boat.

A boat?

Yessir.

How do you sons of bitches find me?

It ain’t but just me.

All you crazy sons of bitches.  I wish I could catch whoever it is keeps sendin em down  here."

This dialogue not only reveals a strange ingenuity in Harrogate, it reveals his admiration of Suttree, his wish to make his little hole in this part of Knoxville extend to the river. 

McCarthy progresses his plot not through his descriptive setting.  The scene expands as we follow the characters about but remains a constant thread woven as the backdrop to the story.  It moves, and yet remains in place; a place for them to fall back on, or into.  The characters seem to grow within it, and as they deal with each other, they are changing–both inwardly by the interaction and to the reader as they are revealed.

But they are always grounded in the world McCarthy has set out for them.