Greetings, friends. I was planning on writing about Tom Robbins today anyhow. But when I read David Brooks’ column in the New York Times today - “When Novels Mattered” it sort of struck a chord with me. So here goes.
In wading through Ron Chernow’s 1,037-page biography of Mark Twain, (which I stupidly carried with me on the plane to KC and back — heavy words!) and considering that the best-seller list now seems to be all women romance writers except for the chronically garrulous James Patterson (Can’t anybody go visit him and tell him to stop writing books with Bill Clinton, for God’s sakes!), you do wonder where the novelists are?
And yeah, I know there’s Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver but they don’t speak to me, if you catch my drift. Sue me.
Once we lost Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins, Raymond Carver and Phillip Roth, where are their successors? Yes, I know they’re all men and I suppose you could suggest my reading tastes are sexist. But I really enjoyed Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and I still do read Peggy Noonan and Maureen Dowd all the time, not to mention bunches of wonderful female writers on Substack! I’m sorry, but their words hit me and still do.
So yeah, I wish I could be reading those guys, along with Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger and that Twain fella, particularly to help us make sense of the current mess our world is in. And it is a mess. Which is where a Tom Robbins, I think, would help.
He was, and I think he would enjoy this tag, what I would call an “outlaw novelist.” He was someone who would concoct the most outrageous plots — stealing the body of Jesus — and write novels with such a lively, hilarious, out-in-left-field-there’s-no-ballgame style that would make you laugh and, believe it or not, think! I read the aforementioned book — “Still Life With Woodpecker” — in one sitting, lying on my couch, laughing all the way through it. Then I got up, went in the den and wrote a short story that actually got published in a Boston flyer/newspaper that subsequently went under, almost immediately. Not sure it was all my fault.
But Robbins, undoubtedly fueled by substances that I would abhor, was just a delight and as original a writer as there is. He’s not for everyone, certainly and reading him is a wild roller-coaster ride. But it was FUN. And with all the horrifying tragedies and ridiculous political situations we find ourselves in — “Vlad’s very nice but it’s meaningless…” (DUH!) and fighting and dying all over the planet for no logical reason, Robbins’ higher view of things, if you know what I mean, might lighten all of our loads.
The University Press of Mississippi published a book of conversations with Tom Robbins in 2011 that I found in a Washington, D.C. bookstore. And I was reading it the other day and laughing out loud — yes, LOL!
“Q: Looking back at your early life, what spurred your gift for storytelling?
ROBBINS: “I’m descended from a long line of preachers and policemen. It’s common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way to convince otherwise rational people that they’re factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally. Moreover, I grew up in the rural South, where, although television has steadily been destroying it, there has always existed a love a colorful verbiage. My father was a hillbilly raconteur. My mother dabbled in prose and was an avid reader. By the age of five, I was so smitten with the magic of words that I’d already made up my mind to be a writer. A good little boy gone bad.”
OR, in a response to a question about where his one-liners come from.
ROBBINS: Usually, my witticisms are composed on the spot. They’re simply intrinsic: an inseparable, integral part of my writing process — doubtlessly because humor is an inseparable, integral part of my philosophical worldview. The comic sensibility is vastly, almost tragically, underrated by Western intellectuals. Humor can be a doorway into the deepest reality, and wit and playfulness are a desperately serious transcendence of evil. My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters then it is to, say, the satirical gibes of Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and metaphysical function.”
Ahem. This is someone with a fresh, crisp, the word I used before, writing about him fits, an UNTAMED style. I might add, an INTENTIONALLY UNTAMED style. Or maybe COMPULSIVELY, INTENTIONALLY UNTAMED style. Hahaha.
With our banning books that never ought to have been banned in the first place, a President that has made an astonishingly effective art out of lying his ass off — and evidently, all is forgiven — and our newspapers and TV stations cowering under the threat of one of his endless, unrelenting lawsuits (And some he actually wins!) it would be nice to find a writer out there who could help us look past this current morass, someone who could ignite our collective sense of humanity and compassion instead of blaming people for this problem or that problem and as always, attacking the weakest among us. If there is, I haven’t read him. Or her.
There likely won’t be another Tom Robbins, who grew up in a time where imagination, freedom, discovery, curiosity was encouraged, maybe even preached. And his body of work, while it certainly wouldn’t fall into the literary masterpiece category — way too wild for that — was a refreshingly alternate way to look at the world and life and love and joy and happiness.
I wish these weren’t dark times — try and watch the news for a week and conclude they aren’t — but they are. For me, anyway, reading a bit of Tom Robbins’ fiction or, delightfully, even these interviews, points us in a different direction. I think he’d like that.
THE STORY THAT FOLLOWED (I may regret this)
Here, for the first time in many years - is the story that followed me reading “Still Life With Woodpecker.” Be kind… I was just a kid.
Peter and Paul were out making mounds to God sent us Bob Dylan and Johnny Rotten. It was not an easy decision. God could have just as easily sent Letters but it wouldn’t have worked. He could have just as easily opted to send St. Peter, the rock of the church, but wisely figured that wouldn’t have worked either. Who wants to see or listen to a rock?
It was time to try something desperate. Man was refusing to listen, and it had begun to get to Him. God stood up, chuckled out loud (causing thunder to rumble wickedly below) and sent us Bob Dylan. “Let’s see how they like this,” He said. He said it with a grin.
Bob Dylan came to us from a town in Minnesota. It was a little mining town, unimportant to most, not unlike Bethlehem must have been centuries before. Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman but God decided that Zimmerman was too ethnic a name. God wanted something more universal. So he chose Dylan and sent it to the young singer shortly before he began to play the coffee houses in Greenwich Village. Though he was completely unlike any that had come before him, Dylan quickly became The Thing. Beatniks, college professors, all sorts of people rushed into Gerde’s and other folk houses to hear the young man sing. “Something about him,” they said. Sometimes they even listened to him. “To preach of peace and brotherhood. Oh, what might be the cost? A man he did it long ago, and they hung him on a cross.”
Just as he’d been instructed, Dylan gave no credit to any other living soul. As far as he was concerned, he had no influences. “When I write a song,” Dylan said, “I don’t even consider that I wrote it. It’s just like it was there all along and I sorta took it down with a pencil.” Nobody ever asked him who he thought wrote it in the first place so that he could copy it.
As Dylan got more and more popular, people began to pay more attention to what he did when he wasn’t on stage than when he was. They began to dress like him and wear their hair like him and talk like him. They began to gossip about him and he didn’t even have a Mary Magdalene. He had Joan Baez. Still, in spite of all the madness, Dylan tried to warn them. “Well, your clock is gonna stop at St. Peter’s gate. Ya gonna ask him what time it is, he’s gonna say ‘It’s too late. Hey, hey, I’d hate to be you on that dreadful day.”
Dylan’s hair really began to sprout. It circled wildly from his head, as if the ideas circulating around inside were so radical and relentless that they wouldn’t let his hair lie down and take a rest. People in the press began to ask Dylan what he was trying to accomplish. What was he trying to do? Change the world? Change the idealism of the world? Did he believe in God? God smiled at that one. He sent Dylan a great response. “Well, we all know God is a woman,” Dylan said. “Well, you take it from there.” They did. Dylan had a good laugh on that one.
By 1966, Dylan had built up a considerable following. He had nearly as many people buying his records as were attending Methodist services. He kept himself on God’s good side by being respectful. He never made Lennon-esque remarks like he was “bigger than Jesus.” He just made his music. But as his audience grew, something odd happened. They listened less.
“The kingdoms of experience in the precious wind they rot. While paupers change possessions, each one wishing for what the other has got. And the princess and the prince discuss what is real and what is not. It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden.” Dylan began to worry. He began to wonder if he was really reaching people.
Media persons continued to bombard him with questions on the meanings of his songs. Explain yourself, they told him. He responded cleverly. “I know what my songs are about,” Dylan told one interviewer. “Oh, some are about four minutes, some are about five minutes, and believe it or not, some are about eleven or twelve.” Dylan and God had a good laugh on that one.
Dylan began to feel the time was right to make a more obvious pitch to his listeners. He was scared. They didn’t understand his highly complicated literary allusions anyway, and he figured that maybe they’d get more of an idea of what he was singing about if he tried to direct a lot of his his songs towards the spiritual bent in man. God wasn’t sure about it, but said OK.
“Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark, make everything from guns that spark to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark. It’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred.”
God felt that was a bit harsh. It was very discreet, Dylan agreed, but, he added, these people have got to wake up. God nodded. “Why not try some humor?” He asked. “What about telling ‘em God was a woman?” God said, “That’s not a joke. They just thought it was. Try a song.”
“God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’ God said ‘No.” Abe said ‘What?” God said ‘You can do what you want Abe but the next time you see me comin’ you better run.” Abe said ‘Where you want this killin’ done?” God said ‘Out on Highway 61.”
The critics and those who claimed to understand Dylan, didn’t. God felt bad. God tried to cheer up Dylan and Himself by giving Dylan an almost No. 1-hit, the only one he’d ever have until he was almost 80. It still didn’t work.
Apparently, people just couldn’t follow the subtle, elliptical songs of Bob Dylan any more than they could understand the de-hymenizing wiggles of Elvis Presley or the frightening Devil-in-the-flesh piano banging of Jerry Lee Lewis. They screamed, yelled, cheered and adored them but they didn’t understand them.
One morning Dylan went out for a ride on his motorcycle and God tripped him and broke his neck. He wanted him to have time to think and thought Dylan could use a rest. Dylan spoke to God every day while he recuperated. He promised Him that he had a plan. A complex plan. A better plan. A foolproof plan. God was reluctant to believe him at first, but Dylan was persistent. God also figured He owed him one more chance.
“I dreamed I saw “St. Augustine, alive as you or me. Tearing through these quarters in the utmost misery. With a blanket underneath each arm and coat of solid gold. Searching for the very souls whom already have been sold. ‘Arise, arise’ he cried so loud in a voice without restraint. ‘Come out ye kings and queens and hear my sad complaint. No martyr is among ye now whom you can call your own. So on your was accordingly but know you’re not alone.”
“There,” Dylan thought. “They must have got that one.” “I hope so,” God said. They were wrong. God was depressed. Dylan was depressed. Their plan, so well thought-out, had failed miserably. God had been afraid of this. He’d even managed to convince Dylan to put an escape clause in his album. God felt saddened that Dylan had to use it.
“Oh the leaves began to fallin’ and the seas began to part. And the people who confronted him were many. And he was told these few words which opened up his heart. ‘If ye cannot bring good news then don’t bring any.”
God was disappointed in Bob Dylan. He spent some years trying to decide what to do with him. Should He stick with him? He didn’t know. God told Bob “I’ll get back to you.” He never did. Instead he thought for a while and decided to send us Johnny Rotten.
It wasn’t an easy decision. He would have easily preferred to send St. Paul or St. Peter. But people still wouldn’t have listened to them. God knows they wouldn’t listen. That was why he decided on Johnny Rotten. “By gum, I think I’ll do it,” He said, slapping His knee. “If this doesn’t get them, nothing will.”
He was very direct in His instructions to Rotten. “Tell them the truth. Don’t hesitate once or I’ll strike you down faster than you can say ‘Jehovah.’ Rotten nodded his head quietly, looking solemnly at the floor. Suddenly, he began to feel an electrical surge of confidence rippling through his bony chest, only to come roaring out from between the snaggle-toothed green stalactites and stalagmites that sprouted from the top and bottom of his ugly sneering cave of a mouth.
Rotten wasted no time and told the truth in the first line of the first song he ever recorded. “I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist. Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it..I wanna be anarchy…the future dream is a sharpened scheme…I wanna be anarchy.” People laughed. God shook His head and said, “This is going to be tougher than I thought.”
England panicked. The record sold out in practically every store in London. Crowds jammed the tiny, sweaty little halls that Rotten and his group, the Sex Pistols, would play. They cheered him. They adored him. He spat at them. Johnny and God had a good laugh at that one.
Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols quickly became the talk of London. In a matter of weeks, Rotten’s name was known throughout the English-speaking world. The press began to poke and prod him. “Are you a nihilist?” they asked. “Why do you wear ripped clothes?” they asked. “Why do you spit at your audience?” they asked. “You were raised a Catholic, were you religious?” “No,” Rotten told them. “Being raised a Catholic is enough to make you not religious.” Johnny and God had a good chuckle over that.
“Well, whare are you for, Mr. Rotten?” they asked. “Don’t you support anything?” “How about some of the music some of the other groups are making? Aren’t they advocating what you’re advocating?”
“Go into it totally or not at all,” Rotten told them. “I can’t beat people not knowing things totally. Just spouting out ignorant, half-assed statements that don’t mean fuck-all. I mean, you’ve got to understand what you’re talking about.”
But they didn’t understand. He was frustrated. He was desperate. He tried to tell people the Sex Pistols didn’t matter. “Don’t ask us to explain ‘cause we’re not aware. And don’t pretend ‘cause I don’t care…Stop a cheap comment, ‘cause we don’t feel. We’re so pretty oh so pretty vacant.” But compared to earlier songs, the words were hollow and God’s temper had grown short. God rebuked Johnny. “How can you expect people to believe that you don’t care when you sing songs like ‘Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save The Queen” as if your soul was being burned? How can you expect people to believe you don’t care?”
God had him there. He had stopped telling the truth. He had told the truth as God had wanted him to, but only for a little while. He had never expected that telling the truth would be so hard. Wasn’t that what one was supposed to do? Tell the truth. But how could anyone know what the truth was?
With television, radio, newspapers, magazines, records, all communicating their respective versions of the truth, how could anyone tell which was correct? Could anyone tell what the pure, undiluted, indisputed truth was? God said that he should just know and that He’d get back to him. He never did.
Once the Sex Pistols broke up, Johnny Rotten knew that God was through with him. Just like Bob Dylan had known when he wrote the song “Peggy Day.” “Love to spent the night with Peggy Day…love to spend the day with Peggy Night” Dylan had sung. The world had winced. So had God. But oddly enough, both continued, in their respective ways to be faithful to Him, long after they figured that He wasn’t interested any longer.
First, Dylan announced he was a Jew. Then he retired for a couple of years. Then he had come back in 1974 and very nearly told the truth, performing his old songs, and then, very nearly told the truth in an extraordinary album that nearly tempted God to bring him back into the stable.
But Dylan couldn’t get God back on his side. “Blood on The Tracks” couldn’t do it and though he continued to make statements like “All I know is I’m doing God’s work,” God refused to take him back. At last report, Dylan had become a born-again Christian and was trying to wangle his way back into the spotlight by recording two albums with heavily religious overtones. But God was not impressed. He was flattered, to some degree, but not particularly impressed. He’d always prided Himself on being subtle and Dylan was being anything but subtle.
Johnny Rotten changed his name back to the original, John Lydon. “He ought to be able to tell the truth with a name like that,” God thought aloud, and Lydon tried. Even if it meant suffering through the interminable tours, concerts, interviews and relentless prodding and poking by media spears. Lydon was willing to make the sacrifice. “What am I doing back here>” he asked an interviewer after his first concert appearance months. “Doesn’t the crowd understand that I can’t lead them anywhere? That they shouldn’t look to me to save the world?” God smiled faintly when He heard that one.
“Of course, I’m trapped,” Lydon told the interviewer. “All of us are. The only reason I’m doing this is because I fucking care.”
Almost before Lydon had finished the sentence; the heavens split, thunder boomed and lightning flashed. He looked up. A continent away, Bob Dylan did the same.
Gary! Did you read my Dylan-Rotten story, too?
Suing you