(Originally published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. I, No. 1, Spring 1981)

ADAM AND EVE ON A RAFT – SOME ASPECTS

OF LOVE AND DEATH IN MULLIGAN STEW

by Kenneth Tindall

Outside, the harsher storm of nations threatens
Earthbound beauty. Sweetest when most bound,
Fallible human love in deluge-time:
I'll stay to drown with you if you will let me.
You'll waste no glance where, proffering their ice-floes
Of monumental deathlessness as rafts,
Ageless odes irrelevantly float.

Peter Viereck: "To Womanly Beauty in Motion"

Miss Ashe was a Galway publican. Her establishment was very tiny: a bar with two stools, a table with two chairs, and a tiny room upstairs with a double bed which she let by the night. The meals she made herself, the local fare of mutton chops with boiled potatoes. There was only one pork butcher in the city. In 1958 Miss Ashe was an elderly woman with white hair, slim as a bird and of unimpaired mind. She remembered a Galway boy named William Joyce, who during World War II acquired fame for himself as Lord Ha Ha. And she remembered James Joyce the author, who came there with his Nora while they were courting. The river Corrib hurtles in its bouldery course through the middle of Galway and fills the city with the noise of its waters. Nora was an Oughterard girl.

Oughterard is a small town on the shores of Lough Corrib, fourteen miles west of Galway. There was a pub in the town, with a thatched roof and no electricity: the turf fire, the pints the woman drew from an oak firkin, the talk and the songs by the light of a candle. West of Galway is a geographical concept. Out there the land is so poor that the potatoes grow in soil contrived from a combination of beach sand, seaweed and donkey dung. Further west, on the coast, is the town of Clifden where the Owenglin River, which has its origin in the Connemara mountains a few miles away, torrents through its rocky chasm into the sea. There used to be a publican in Clifden named Mr. Joyce, who opened early and was clean shaven. A little to the south is the village of Balleyconneely, with the ruins of Bunowen Castle, and Doon Hill with its natural and dramatic amphitheater. There is a ruined Martello Tower on Doon Hill. What can you see, looking southward and westward from the Martello Tower on Doon Hill? You can see where the Armada wrecked. You see Wherune Island, Hen Island, Carrickacummer, Illaumurra, Horse Island, Cromwell's Sound, Illaunamid, all of it Slyne Head and beyond that is Brendan's ocean.

The people have a religion. That is obvious. Still further south from Clifden is the fishing village of Roundstone. You have seen gangs of navvies building the paved road, their only laborsaving devices compressed air and dynamite. They are all ages, men from the farms and villages of the district and there are many of them. Most of them are bachelors. They all have names. Cranly, say. You find yourself in a pub in Roundstone when the navvies come in for their knockin-off time pint. The turf fire, the talking and the songs. Then old Cranly notices the stranger and comes up to you and asks, earnestly and in a friendly way, if you've ever had a woman. If your name is Stephen Dedalus you might reply by asking him, "Does God like Jewish girls?" Anyway, you might ask yourself how many mother's sons of whatever religion have ever had a woman and, more acutely, how many men know that a woman gets wet in the fitta for a man she desires? Has Cranly, quaffing his pint, ever suspected the natural refreshment of a woman's wetness that Gregory Corso, in "Marriage," calls the bath of life?

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait – bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

It is this marvellous moisture that Stephen and Leopold didn't find in their night Dublin carousing, for doesn't everybody know that prostitutes don't get wet for their customers? Nor does the girl being raped become wet for her rude forcer. It is this virgin spring, this spa-of-the-bower that is the poet's watering place, the humid thoughts of old men in dry months and the angelic chorus drowning men are said to hear, so that isn't that what the eunuch really meant when he said to Philip, "See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?" (Acts 8:36) Here are your waters and your watering place, says Robert Frost, and "...water from sweet wells/Wells we sunk too deep for war" says Wilfred Owen.

Gilbert Sorrentino's is not an aleatory ear playing on the pitch of Schoenberg's numbers racket, nor is his sensibility the web of Henry James's spider living in the bass drum that the clown is banging as he laments from the ruins of Monte Cassino. No wonder the publishers were dodgy about the book, which turns out to be the Moby Dick of American humor. It is a strange and scary new kind of fiction that seems more to allow comfort in alien reality than reassure us with a glimpse of our humanity. We don't want to recognize the images, we balk at admitting the implications of this fiction, one of which is that it is creating our reality and us simultaneously and continuously as we read it and remember it. Another is that we have fictionalized our lives to the point where a possible difference between being and nonbeing is immaterial. Mulligan Stew is more than a hilarious vision of human affairs. It is a vision of the limits of language as the language of a world that doesn't use one, whose creatures act and interact by their associative faculty as though we were Klein bottle and Moebius strip beings changing our reality on inclination like attire and now and then evacuating into the next dimension. I would call Mulligan Stew topological writing. Its aims and techniques, if they become widespread, will mean for literature what Cubism meant for painting. Mulligan Stew concerns itself with the topology of time. It explores and demonstrates the idea of simultaneity. Sorrentino has succeeded in this one book in accomplishing something Lawrence Durrell was getting at in his Alexandria Quartet. In Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive (a Gurdjieff book, incidentally) one of the characters, De Selby, says that time is a plenum:

One might describe a plenum as a phenomenon or existence full of itself but inert. Obviously space does not satisfy such a condition. But time is a plenum, immobile, immutable, ineluctable, irrevocable, a condition of absolute stasis. Time does not pass. Change and movement may occur within time.

Sorrentino, on the other hand, demonstrates that time is a plurality, that it is exploitable and self-proliferating like Li'l Abner's schmoos.

Abner Doubleday. Is he someplace in Stew? Is Ambrose Bierce there, returned from Mexico in the guise of Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau? Are the children singing at the end of the book while Wozzeck drowns himself, or while the German soldier at Stalingrad is making himself a woman of snow? Stew is rather like Fibber McGee's closet. James Joyce might have written such a book had he arisen out of the American experience, or Franz Kafka. Kafka among the publishers.

The Church of Adam and Eve in this American Finnegan's Wake is the couple Ned Beaumont and Daisy Buchanan, who are having an illicit affair something like Blazes Boylan and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. This type of relationship is consistent with Gilbert Sorrentino's books as a whole, the assless man shining in their pages, if not like an angel of adultery then like the specter of under-insurance. This isn't merely a pet gripe of Sorrentino's. The cuckolds in his books are none other an Ubu roi, and the physics in them is 'pataphysics. (Definition: "'Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments." See Evergreen Review, Vol 4, No. 13, May-June 1960.) Ned and Daisy are carried away and are lost in a dark river of iniquity whose apotheosis is a blue cocktail called "blue ruin." For a coign of vantage, let us see how another writer has used the themes of the blue cocktail and the dark river.

...They went, all four of them, to the American Bar, which was in the buttery. It was deserted except for a white-faced, white-coated little man who stood behind the gleaming counter, with eyes that shone more brightly than silver or polished mahogany or crystal beakers, and stared with a wild surmise at two glasses on the board. One shone with a liquid palely blue as April skies, the other more nobly glowed with a darker hue, the color of darkest bluebells in a wood.

"I've done it, sir," said the little man in a hoarse, self-wondering voice. "Oh, Mr. Keith, I've done it. I've done it twice, both of them different."

"Done what?" asked Keith.

"Blue cocktails," said the little man. "Nobody's ever made one before, not proper blue, like these. Mr. Keith, I'm an inventor!"...

"They're like butterflies," said Joan, holding one up in either hand. "Can I taste them?"...

...gravely, intent on his task as an alchemist seeking the elixer, the aurum potabile, Holly poured his chosen liquors into a long silver shaker, added broken fragments of ice, screwed down the top, and, like a man with a palsy, shook. His hands were clenched on either butt, his muscles were taut, his face set like a mask. And all this time his audience watched him silently as if a conjuror were at work, and where paper flags had gone in and the doves of peace might emerge. Then the rapid shaking changed to a long swinging movement like an old-fashioned concertina-player swinging his instrument to spread its melody wider, more powerfully. And at last he was done. He set six glasses on the bar and poured into each a liquid, at first cloudy blue like the sky at morning, that slowly cleared to a hue ineffable and serene...

This is from British author Eric Linklater's novel Poet's Pub, which I think was at one time published in a Penguin edition. The Orkney Edition here was published by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1952.

The villain of the story is an American named Mr. Wesson, who is an industrial spy who steals from another American the secret of manufacturing synthetic petroleum. For the action in Poet's Pub this character poses as a collector of rare books. By threatening to throw acid in a young woman's face he forces her to steal a car and drive him to Glasgow, where he intends to catch a boat for New York. A great chase ensues, surely one of the classic car chases in adult fiction. The automotive participants (the book was first published in 1929) include a Bentley, a maroon-colored Isotta-Fraschini limousine, a Morris-Cowley, and a huge blue open-topped charabanc named The Bluebird. Up hill and down dale through the English countryside the chase goes on: the Yorkshire moors, the border country, Hadrian's Wall, Scotland... Then, "in a cloudburst of evening"

...Somewhere at the bottom of the hill a river sang its drinking song, and the wind harped wildly in the birches. The road blurred before him, seeming to split in two.

Joan shouted "Left, left!" but it was too late.

The car skidded over shingle, bumped across a rock, and ran straight into the river till a boulder stopped it. Mr Wesson sat dazed while the water lipped the top of the door and presently flowed over and all around him. The engine had stopped and the river-song was heard more clearly. The water was cold.

Mr Wesson suddenly remembered van Buren's papers, found his attache case, and held it above his head out of the river's reach. He sat thus for some moments, like Patience in a reservoir, thinking.

Joan struggled to open the door beside her, but found it difficult because of the pressure of the stream outside. She was laughing hysterically and at the same time her teeth were chattering with cold, so that she seemed to be pronouncing the second letter of the alphabet with incredible reiteration. The black river swirled past them...

Wesson finds himself trapped in his pursuer's Scotland home.

...His face hardened and his heavy eyebrows half-hooded his expressionless eyes. He took a small bottle from his pocket and with his thumb forced out the cork.

"Stay right where you are," he said harshly. "I've got a little bottle of vitriol here, and if anyone moves an inch it goes straight into Miss Benbow's face."

...The dogs had watched intently this strange performance, the terriers alert and questioning, the deerhound still and suspicious. Now, when Wesson threatened Joan, he leapt forward with a growl in his deep throat. The terriers followed, shrilly yelping.

Mr. Wesson saw bright eyes in a rough grey head, white teeth shining, and a glimpse of a red mouth. His right hand dropped and he shot the contents of the small brown bottle into the deerhound's face.

The dog's growl turned into a high-pitched ululation, he checked in mid-air, dropped to the floor, and with frantic paws rubbed at his eyes.

Mr. Wesson pushed Joan aside and darted through the door.

"You damned swine!" roared Saturday, and snatching a gun and a handful of cartridges from the table sprang after Wesson.

Mr Wesson is captured, and Bran the deerhound is found to be uninjured for the little bottle contained only tincture of iodine.

The coffee in the Army. The American language of today is different from Melville's, or Mencken's. It has become a language dominated by the media and whose development has reverted to effete and deliberate wordsmiths and the panic-button ejaculations of attenuated subcultures. Where the man's chillum is a replica of an Early American silver nutmeg grater (Edward Underhill ca. 1780) and the woman's cocaine spoon is in the form of a platinum lacrosse racquet, where an automobile advertisement in The New Yorker calls a Jaguar "the schizophrenic car" and where its passengers are a power generation comprised of Captain Midnight and Daughter of Darkness. What can be said in this language, festooned with padlocks like Wonder Woman's mask of silence? What's the story in Mulligan Stew? Is the book a call for help, like a deep space probe? There may be a draft call in it, in what the language may be intended to invoke, what Bob Dylan in "Mr. Tambourine Man" called Evening's Empire.

Mulligan Stew isn't a murder mystery. The homicide in the book is merely an altercation between chimeras, like a Max Ernst collage, like the Spaniard firing a pistol at the movie screen at the flickering image of Asta Nielsen. No, 'da story is the seduction of stompin' Ned Beaumont by the two hussies Corrie and Berthe. Perhaps they are irresistible in the mathematical sense of being Pythagorian quantities and he and Daisy the value to be obtained. Adam and Eve drown in the river of darkness and go to the realm of the Blue Ruin:

...three cocktails that gleamed, in their spotless glasses, like the summertime sky itself, a flawless, perfect blueness inhabited the potables, and a not displeasant petillance sparkled therein, at, if one may so coin the phrase, the "soul" of the drink... (Stew p. 365) (The edition of Mulligan Stew referred to here is the original Grove Press edition of 1979. The work was recently reissued by Dalkey Archive Press.)

And if it's simply drinking water they want, why it is provided through the offices of the same two Rosy Rottoncrotches to whom they are now totally beholden:

"Jou perhaps theenk that jou are dreenking to a superfluous amount? Why, then, allow me to give jou oll a glass o' pure water!" And with a great flourish of nervous stick-shaking, each drink on each table was changed, in the batting of an eye, to a glass of water...and it was plain, cool clear water, the species the Sons of the Pioneers once celebrated... (Stew p. 372)

This is more than a pollution problem. I am reminded of the old colored Greyhound bus driver who used to say, "Now lift up your feet, folks, 'cause we're crossin' the Mississippi River." Ned Beaumont was a very confident guy "who once stomped around in exceeding waves of vibrant life itself" but who is utterly undone by the two cool ladies. Mulligan Stew is meticulously conceived and written, and it is my suggestion that it is a discourse on the irresistible attractive force of "black holes" in outer space, and may even be intended as a homeopathic analogue, together with Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, of the same phenomenon: "If a massive star collapsed to a sufficiently small volume, light could not escape from it .... A black hole is a region of space into which a star (or a collection of stars or other bodies) has fallen and from which no light, matter or signal of any kind can escape..." (Roger Penrose: "Black Holes." Scientific American, May 1972, p. 38).

But that's kind of far-fetched, unless you regard "black holes" as a Department of the Prince of Darkness, for it seems that poor Ned is the victim of witchcraft. The mesdames Delamode and Corriendo are stregi. They even identify themselves as such. The symbols sewn on their garments (Stew p. 367) are a sloppy-handwriting variant of the signature prescribed for participants in ceremonials of black magic, according to "The Key of Solomon," one of the ancient grimoires, or grammars, of witchcraft. (From The Secret Lore of Magic – Books of the Sorcerers by Sayed Idries Shah. Fredrick Muller Ltd. London, 1957.)

The next symbol to appear, which Corriendo draws on the blackboard on page 369 of Mulligan Stew, is the signature, or seal, of the devil Baal, one of the seventy-two spirits of Solomon, from "The Book of the Spirits," another old grimoire. Baal is "the name of one of the most powerful of all Kings of Demons. He may present himself as a man with a human head, or that of a cat or toad. Occasionally he is seen with all at once. Speaking in a hoarse voice, he gives knowledge of all kinds, and tells the means to obtain invisibility."

On page 371 of Mulligan Stew Madame Delamode inscribes on the blackboard the seal of Seere, "a powerful Prince, whose greatest power is that he can cause anything to happen in the twinkling of an eye. Like most of the other spirits, he can be used for good or evil processes. He appears as a man with long hair, upon a winged steed."

The one on page 372 is the seal of Hagenti. "A bull with wings is the normal appearance of this mighty President of the demons. His specialty is transmutation of metals into gold, and wine into water." Methinks this beverage is beginning to acquire a chalky undertaste. On page 373 we see the seal of "Ose, another President, who favours the form of a large and graceful leopard. Like the previous spirit, he is able to transform people into whatever form they will. He causes delusions and insanity if required. Those who have been changed by him may not know it, and continue to behave as they normally do, in spite of their altered appearance. Things which are secret and hidden, especially hidden knowledge will be revealed by him, as well as the more prosaic knowledge of all arts and sciences."

Phoenix, whose seal appears on page 374 of Mulligan Stew, "has a pleasant appearance (that of a bird) and an equally delightful voice (like a child), but some hold that he is not to be trusted at all. Others maintain that this Marquis obeys the magician's every order. His specialty is poetry and letters."

"Paimon has the rank of King, and directly under the Supreme Devil. Those who know his seal (Stew p. 377) and call him in accordance with the ritual of this Lemegeton, we are informed, can gain any honour from him. He confers the power to dominate all men, will produce useful familiar spirits to serve the magician, can teach at once all the arts and sciences. Paimon comes like a king before the circle, riding a camel, and with a numerous court in attendance. The sorcerer is cautioned in some texts not to fear his terrible voice, which is alarmingly loud."

And on page 383 of Mulligan Stew we are presented with the seal for Sytry, "a Prince, with a human body and wings, with the head of one of several kinds of wild animal. His province is exclusively that of love and lust. He will cause, for example, a man to love any woman, or vice versa. Again, he will compel women to display themselves in the nude before him who calls him."

Is this, then, the evil which lurks in the hearts of men? It's only part of it. It is seven seals, a selection of seven devils more or less adaptable, in Mulligan Stew, for use in nightclub entertainment. The recipes and rituals of traditional Satanic magic are often so unwholesome, meanwhile, as to bespeak the need for a vigilant public health authority and the necessity of open caskets at funerals. Other devils have other specialties. One of them, Frutimiere, is said to be capable of causing a girl to dance in the nude until she dies. And there are military devils, such as Eligor, who will start wars and cause armies to be collected, and Sabnack. "Sabnack is another spirit who appears as a warrior, again with the head of a lion, and on horseback. This Marquis of the Demons is in control of fortifications and military camps, and also presides over wounds, which he can cause to become uncurable. Some writers have called him Saburac." There is "Lerajie, a Marquis. He carries a quiver and bow, and wears a green habit. His main operations are to cause wounds to delay healing. In addition, Lerajie will start battles when commanded by the magician." And finally "Bifrons. This Earl appears as a monster, and remains such until told to transform his terrible appearance into something more human. Among the subjects which he can teach without any difficulty are astrology and mathematics, the knowledge of magical herbs and stones. Those who desire to perform magic with corpses call him, especially to transfer the body from one place to another."

...whether or not many witches succeeded in doing mischief, it is indisputable that at least some of them intended to do so and believed themselves capable of doing so, and it was in fact for these crimes that they were arraigned...rather than for holding anti-Christian revels. In short, as might be expected, witchcraft attracted many of the worst elements in society, in the same way as, in our own time, Fascism, another religion of power, has attracted the natural thug and criminal to its ranks along with more idealistic people .... Religion seeks to transcend this world, magic to control it. A moralist might take the view that religious concentration on something beyond this world leads man to a greater freedom, whereas those who are intent on dominating this world become enslaved by their own practices... (Gillian Tindall: A Handbook on Witches. Arthur Barker Ltd. London, 1957.)

The popular song quality of the characters in Mulligan Stew is practically a definition of the urge in ordinary people to fictionalize their lives, people who "keep wishing they were someone else, walking down a strange new street." And it it is ordinary people, or people who are weighed down by ordinariness, who have recourse to magic and witchcraft or at least loyalty to those things, for people are loyal to what they feel is effective for them. They identify themselves with the glamorous, with power entities, because it has been made nearer at hand to them than the vocation which is love. The individual who can levitate has no need for a "flying ointment":

... "The fat of yoong children, and seeth it with water in a brasen vessell, reseruing the thickest of that which remaineth boiled in the bottome..." (Ibid., p. 109)

T.S. Eliot said that Dante, Rabelais and Shakespeare share the world between them. Gilbert Sorrentino is so good a writer that Mulligan Stew gives the impression of being a combination of the three, just as it may give the impression of having been written by Donovan's brain. I think, however, that the idea was to imply as its "spiritual" author Dr. Faustroll. Faustroll smaller than Faustroll. ("What is 'Pataphysics?" Evergreen Review. Ibid.) Meanwhile, we ought to consider why both Thomas Mann and Ira Levin made use of the name Adrian for persons who were in pact with the Devil.

Adrian (m.): Latin Hadrianus, "of the Adriatic"; the name of a Roman emperor and of several popes, one of whom, Adrian III, was beatified .... It is possible that the introduction of the name into England may have been due to its adoption by Nicholas Brakespear (d. 1159), the only English pope, who took the name Hadrian IV. (The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names)

In New York City, at 5:10 PM Friday the 3rd of August, 1973, the University Hotel, the old Broadway Central, collapsed into the street. From the New York Times, August 4th, 1973:

"She was having a chicken sandwich. I was gonna have a drink. I heard this loud explosion. "Mamma, I think the subway just exploded," I said.

The speaker, 70-year-old Theodore Gilbert, paused a moment.

After that look down the suddenly daylit hallway, Mr.Gilbert recalled, he turned back to his wife and said:

"Hey, baby, put some clothes on. The building just fell down."

...Fire Chief O'Hagan attributed the accident to the age of the hotel and the weakening of its structure by decades of vibrations from subways and heavy traffic. Although the manager of the hotel, Joseph Cooper, first called the police to report ominous rumbling of the building at 5:06 PM, the first actual collapse was at 5:10 and the second came 10 minutes later .... In a century of life in downtown Manhattan the Broadway Central went from a gathering place of the famous and wealthy to a cesspool of squalor and crime .... In its heyday, shortly after the Civil War, deals involving millions of dollars were made. On its grand staircase, Jim Fisk, the railroad magnate, was shot in 1872 in a romantic triangle .... Many of the meetings that led to the formation of major-league baseball were held in the hotel in its prime. Diamond Jim Brady was a frequent visitor and famous stars of the theater dined there .... In recent years the hotel housed a complex of six theaters at its rear known as the Mercer Arts Center. The hotel went through still another phase in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies when a restaurant in the building, called the St. Adrian Company, became a hangout of hippies, many of them apparently affluent...

"Good night, Mr Wesson. I'm glad it was only iodine."

Copyright © 1981 by Kenneth Tindall