My father told me that the way to deal with suicidal feelings, should they arise, was to postpone any decision. This pits despair against its equal, procrastination. Time sorts things out just well enough. —Ian Stone, son of novelist Robert Stone
Robert Stone (1937–2015) is one of the finest novelists of our era. Names like Melville, Conrad, and Dostoevsky are routinely dropped by way of critical comparison and literary kinship. He has been a personal favorite up there with Jim Harrison (1937–2016) and Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) since I came upon his third novel, A Flag for Sunrise (1981). I had no idea until I looked up the dates that 1937 was such a banner year for births of American novelists.
Madison Smartt Bell's new biography of Stone is a real treat. An accomplished writer himself with thirteen novels to his credit, including his Haitian revolution trilogy, two collections of short stories, and a biography of Toussaint Louverture, Bell (b. 1957) knew Stone in passing in the 1980s and the two became friends in the nineties. The personal connection enriches this exhaustively researched and honest portrait that does not shy away from Stone's flaws and failings. Bell does his subject justice.
Growing up in New York, Stone lived with his single mother in single room occupancy hotels, and perhaps from time to time on the streets, and later in a Catholic orphanage. He never knew his father, and it seems his mother knew the man little better than her son did. She suffered from mental illness never diagnosed, maybe schizophrenia, possibly bipolar disorder. For a considerable part of Stone's youth it was the two of them against the world.
Booted out of a Marist high school during his senior year after a declaration of atheism, he served a stint in the Navy, then returned to New York at age twenty-one and attended New York University, where he met his future wife in a freshman English class. Although he never received a degree, a professor was sufficiently impressed by his writing to suggest that he apply to Wallace Stegner's writing workshop at Stanford, whose alumni included Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey. Kesey was still living in the area when Stone showed up in the early sixties. The two met and became friends. Stone was on the periphery of the Merry Pranksters scene documented by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when it took shape around Kesey but not an integral part of it, which is not say to that he stood aloof from alcohol and drugs.
An autodidact, Stone read widely, thought deeply, and possessed a formidable intellect. The success of his novels, with Dog Soldiers garnering a National Book Award for Fiction (1975), led to invitations to teach in writing programs at Johns Hopkins, Yale, and elsewhere even though he never finished college himself. Teaching provided a stable source of income to supplement the writing, at which Stone was diligent but not always adept at meeting deadlines. Despair and procrastination are qualities with which he was intimately familiar.
A Memory of Robert Stone, published in the New Yorker, after Stone's death in January 2015, conveys the abiding respect and regard Bell held for his friend as a person and as a writer. In it Bell rightly notes that Stone's "fifty-five-year marriage to the wise and forbearing Janice Stone has got to be one of the most successful in all literary history." Michael Herr (Dispatches) called her "the patron saint of writers' wives." She was according to Bell a talented writer herself and contributed to Stone's books as copy editor and plot consultant and in countless other ways.
There is much more to the story of course, and Bell covers it admirably. Allow me to break off with this from his New Yorker piece:
All Stone narratives feature different kinds of people in leading roles—in fact there is unusual variety among his characters—but somewhere will almost always be included a man whose idealism has been blunted by bitter experience, who fronts an articulate cynicism beneath which flows a deep current of anger, and whose vestiges of authentic hope are carefully concealed.… Bob Stone was one of the most widely read people I have ever met; his erudition was so great that I only learned from his obituary just how little formal education he had had.
A Flag for Sunrise and Damascus Gate are my favorite Stone novels, a cut above Dog Soldiers, which is certainly intense—well, they are all intense—and a page-turner. It may be time to pick them up again.
The troubles. Saturday night a demonstrator was fatally shot during a pro-Trump rally in downtown Portland. That it was only a matter of time before something like this happened makes the escalation of violence no less disturbing. The word "reportedly" crops up throughout news reports about the incident. Details are yet to be nailed down.
The victim was a member of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, which makes periodic pilgrimages to downtown Portland to rumble with antifa. He may or may not have sprayed someone with bear mace immediately before being shot. A 48-year-old man who identifies himself as antifascist and "100% ANTIFA all the way" is reportedly under investigation for the shooting. He is also reported to be estranged from his family, in debt, and has stolen his mother's seizure medication.
- Maxine Bernstein, Man under investigation in fatal shooting after pro-Trump rally allegedly took loaded gun to earlier Portland protest, The Oregonian/OregonLive, updated August 31, 2020, orig. August 30, 2020
- Madeline Holcombe, Shawn Nottingham, & Eric Levenson, Man killed in Portland shooting identified by police as Aaron J. Danielson, CNN, August 31, 2020
Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty took to Twitter to renew her campaign to pressure Mayor Ted Wheeler to make her police commissioner, a position presently held by the mayor. Wheeler has said he does not intend to step down. I lack the imagination to conceive a scenario where putting Hardesty in charge of the police bureau could possibly go well.
While on the subject of protest and violence: Kyle Rittenhouse is a foolish, 17-year-old kid who got in over his head in a place where he had no business being. There have to be consequences for his actions. But it is the moral defectives who put out the call for militias to come to Kenosha who should have the hammer dropped on them. The same goes for people who use protest as a cover while they play at revolution with pyromaniacal intent to burn it all down naïve in their faith that a better world will rise from the ashes.
Recommended reading
Lizzy Acker shows another side of my city with a nice little feature about aspects of Portland that give us reason to try to put the pieces back together (10 Portland things coming to your city if Biden wins, as Trump warns (commentary),The Oregonian/Oregon Live, August 28, 2020). Among them:
- the Benson Bubbler water fountains
- legendary food carts
- Tillikum Crossing, a magnificent bridge dedicated to pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit, no cars allowed—and far from least, great for running!
- the unipiper, a guy who rides around town on a unicycle playing bagpipes in a Darth Vader mask (I've sighted him in my neighborhood)
- Voodoo Doughnuts
Check out the article for nifty photos.
Three new blog posts convey my impressions from the conventions. Links are below in the usual place.
As always, thanks for reading.
Keep the faith.
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