Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale
Read Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale Online
Authors: Chuck Kinder
Tags: #fiction, #raymond carver, #fiction literature, #fiction about men, #fiction about marriage, #fiction about love, #fiction about relationships, #fiction about addiction, #fiction about abuse, #chuck kinder
HONEYMOONERS
A Cautionary Tale
Chuck Kinder
Published by Chuck Kinder at
Smashwords.
Copyright 2014 by Chuck
Kinder.
Smashwords edition, License
notes.
A new edition with an
introduction by Jay Mclnemey
and including The Lost
Chapters & The Lost Love Letters.
Previously published by
Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh 2009, First Carnegie
Mellon Classic Contemporaries Edition.
Honeymooners was first
published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2001.
The author wishes to express
his gratitude to Jay Mclnerney for his permission to reprint the
Introduction.
The author wishes to thank
Tom Moran for the artwork on the cover.
This book goes out
for
my old coach
Richard Scowcroft
&
Diane, always
Diane
Contents
The Lost Chapters & The Lost Love
Letters Introduction:
Please Say Who This Book Is About,
Please
The Seven Warning Signs of
Love
The Garden City of the
Northwest
The Shadow in the Open
Door of the Future
Lost Chapters
and Lost Love Letters
The Lost Chapters & The Lost Love
Letters Introduction:
Please Say Who This Book Is About,
Please
Chuck Kinder’s Honeymooners
is a Rabelaisian buddy movie of a book that is either an
old-fashioned roman a clef or a postmodern experiment in the
blurring of fact and fiction. In tone, method and period it
resembles nothing so much as Frederick Exley’s brilliant
fictionalized autobiography, A Fans Notes.
Once upon a time - as
recently as the years covered by this tale of the post-Beat
literary world - the legacy of New Criticism demanded that
reviewers treat poems and novels as self contained vessels. But
since then, literary commentary - at least the kind in our racier
general-interest periodicals - has evolved to a stage where gossip
about the author s life, his advance and his movie prospects is
considered to be coextensive with the universe created by his words
on the page. Not so coincidentally, during the 90’s the memoir
seemed poised to annihilate the novel as a genre. While Kinder’s
publishers have, admirably, refrained from exploiting the
lit-gossip aspects of this book - except to call it “long-awaited”
– it’s difficult to ignore them. Indeed Kinder leaves the door
between fiction and memoir wide open. Let me explain.
It’s undoubtedly possible to
read this book without knowing that Kinder was a close friend of
Raymond Carver. But many of those who pick up this volume about two
bad-boy American writers in the making will recognize the general
outline of Carver s life, as well as the plots of fiction written
by the late master of the American story. Anyone who knew Carver
will be continually delighted and horrified at Kinder’s eerie
resurrection of the man, who’s called Ralph Crawford here (Jackie
Gleasons Ralph Kramden being the other archetype). At one point
Crawford tells his friend Jim Stark, who is loosely based on Kinder
himself, “Will you please pass that joint, please,” echoing Carvers
most famous title as well as his distinctive manner of speech. So
little does Kinder wish to disguise his sources he even attributes
well-known Carver short stories to Crawford.
To add to the confusion,
Kinder, who teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh and has
published two previous novels - Snakehunter (1973) and The Silver
Ghost (1978) - has been reported to be the model for Grady Tripp,
the blocked writer in Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys (1995),
the man played by Michael Douglas in the recent movie version.
Honeymooners had, by Kinder’s own account, a more than 25-year
gestation. The book once ran to more than 3,000 manuscript pages;
it now appears at roughly one-tenth that size.
With this background in
mind, I commend Honeymooners to nearly everyone except possibly
the parents of young men with literary ambitions. Like the candy
mint that is also a breath mint, it can be enjoyed as either a
novel or a memoir. Or, if you prefer, as a metafictional object.
Whatever. If Honeymooners doesn’t make you laugh, cry and cringe
with sympathetic embarrassment, then you should probably adjust
your medication immediately.
Honeymooners is set in the
Bay Area, post-Haight-Ashbury, where Stark and Crawford have landed
as graduate writing fellows at Stanford University. Jim has
already published a novel about his hardscrabble childhood in West
Virginia; Ralph, whose origins are equally humble, is just starting
to make a name for himself in the literary world with his short
stories, even as his personal life slides into a chaos of debt and
alcoholism. Ralph is having a torrid affair with a young woman from
Montana whom Jim, engaged as a go-between, eventually woos and weds
for himself.
Ralph is married to the
flamboyant Alice Ann, his childhood sweetheart, who abets both his
writing ambitions and the profligate, self-destructive behavior
that will eventually destroy their marriage. Like the couple in
Carvers story What Is It? the Crawfords are forced to declare
bankruptcy; Ralph writes a story about his wife selling the family
car the day before the court hearing. In between the hair-raising
binges, Ralph dries out at an institution, as does the protagonist
of Carver s “Where I’m Calling From.” The Crawfords have two
unnamed teenagers, referred to by Ralph as “those criminal,
thieving kids.” Theirs is a squalid love story in many ways, but as
portrayed by Kinder, it ultimately has a tragic grandeur. In the
end even the most skeptical reader is almost inclined to credit
Alice Ann s hippie-dippy notion that she and Ralph have been
together through dozens of lifetimes. It feels as if several are
portrayed here.
Characters named John
Cheever, Ken Kesey, S. Clay Wilson - even Cynthia Ozick! - wander
through these pages: one of the funniest scenes involves a bibulous
dinner with Cheever in Iowa City. Ralph, the worshipful young
writing student, invites Cheever out to dinner, only to have his
credit card returned to him in pieces; years later, as they plan to
walk out on the check in another restaurant, that is the only
detail of the dinner upon which Ralph and Alice Ann can
agree.
Anyone looking for insights
into the process of creation will be disappointed; it’s a mystery
how and when Crawford or Stark finds the time or the energy to
write between parties and hangovers. But for all the addled wit and
hairy masculinity of his main characters, Kinder’s prose has the
range to encompass the tenderness of romantic love and the longing
for the infinite that haunts these men. Some of the most effective
passages reflect the point of view of the women doomed to love
these literary outlaws - although at times the transitions between
moments of farce and wistful romance can be jarring. One sometimes
senses the palimpsest layers of multiple drafts.
Like Carver, Kinder creates
a kind of poetry out of the cliches of everyday American usage and
hackneyed figures of speech (I suspect this was a shared language).
Water is always going over the dam or under the bridge. Dozens of
geese are cooked. Nails are hit repeatedly on the head. Crawford,
especially, attempts to impose some kind of order on the chaos of
his life with an endless string of cliches - a habit Stark lampoons
in a speech at yet another drunken party, ostensibly celebrating
the acceptance of his latest novel.
“He wanted to take this
opportunity, Jim said, to thank old Running Dog Ralph Crawford for
all the little words of encouragement Ralph had given him during
those dark, discouraging days Jim was struggling to complete his
new novel, soon to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Stay
the course, Ralph had suggested to Jim when Jim was feeling
defeated. Never say die, Ralph had recommended. All's well that
ends well. The end justifies the means. It’s not over until the fat
lady sings.... In many ways Jim had old Ralph to thank for the
big-bucks sale of his new novel soon to be published by “Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.”
Ralph and Alice Ann finally
part ways; Ralph eventually remarries; he and Jim stay in touch
even as geography and Ralph’s growing fame come between them. Stark
- with his Montana sweetheart - drifts into the kind of becalmed
middle age he tried so strenuously to avoid; given his previous
behavior, survival itself seems like a triumph. The two friends
hook up for a last nostalgic road trip together, setting out from
San Francisco, scene of former triumphs and debacles, where Ralph
reads to a large crowd a story about Chekhov’s death, which was to
be the last story he ever wrote.
Which brings us back to
Carver. On one level this book is a kind of gonzo eulogy for a
great American writer. While it depicts a more innocent era of
literary enterprise, its mixed modes of fiction and memoir seem
strangely appropriate to our own self-conscious cultural
landscape.
—Jay Mclnerney
Ralph and Alice Ann had been
mere kids and mostly innocent of any adult sense of dire
consequences when they first met, fell head over heels in love, and
married, using the pressures of pregnancy only as an
excuse.
Ralph was eighteen, fresh
out of high school, and working in a sawmill to save college money,
when one summer evening, after an afternoon of driving around
drinking beer, he and some pals pulled into a thunderbeast theme
park on a whim. They sat there for a time in the gravel parking lot
in Ralph’s old rattletrap Ford polishing off their beers and lying
about babes. Ralph sipped his suds and stared up at the blue face
of a brontosaurus looming above the trees like some strange, low
moon with unfathomable yellow eyes.