Short Story Wednesday: Carolyn See on William Kotzwinkle's JEWEL OF THE MOON

Book Review: Mixed Bag of Stories From Kotzwinkle
By CAROLYN SEE
FEB. 13, 1986 12 AM PT

Jewel of the Moon by William Kotzwinkle (Putnam’s: $14.95)

Suppose you’re a 19-year-old girl, and smart as well as beautiful. You can have any basketball player you want, but a sky-high intellectual with John Lennon glasses gives you a book for Christmas--”Le Desire Attrappe par le Coeur,” Pablo Picasso’s only play--and now smartypants (your classmate) has a birthday coming up. What do you do about it, since you know he’s already read everything, in that insistent undergraduate way of his? Scoot on out to your nearest independent bookstore and buy him a copy of William Kotzwinkle’s Jewel of the Moon.

No one’s read it yet, it looks spooky and delicious and the author’s picture on the back looks like a combination of Merlin and Lennon himself. Direct the intellectual’s attention particularly to “Sun, Moon and Storm,” which chronicles the life of the artist Antonio Correggio as he painted his masterwork on a cathedral dome for venal theologians who care nothing for genius. . . .

Or, suppose you’re 19 and beautiful as well as smart. The basketball center on the college team has been hanging around, giving you woof-eyes and you think he’s pretty cute, so--in Math, probably--you hand him “Jewel of the Moon,” wrapped carelessly in newspaper. “No big deal,” you tell him. “No biggee. Just read ‘Victory at North Antor.’ When I read it, I don’t know why, I thought of you.”

Jumble of Stories

What we are addressing here, then, is a book of short stories, wildly different, thematically chaotic, attractively written. The stories are a jumble. No one (outside of the author) seems to have given them much thought or attention: A lax publicity release announces that only two of these stories have been published before: “All the others are being published for the first time,” but the author’s agent has countered that nine of these have already seen print.

And no one seems to know what to make of them. Again, the publicity release quotes Kurt Vonnegut: “William Kotzwinkle’s materials seem to come from way down deep.” Well, OK, but don’t most writers of fiction scramble around, dredging up their materials from “way down deep”?

The truth may be that these stories are so varied in tone that if you like some, you probably won’t be able to stomach the others: the volume is a mixed review. For instance, the title story is an erotic myth of creation, a god and goddess on a steamy honeymoon of sorts, creating the universe.

Again, in “Fana,” a tale of a Middle-Eastern dancing girl who is the very embodiment of the winking universe, the same themes are suggested: “There waited a white camel bearing a noble sheik. In the hoof-beats of the camel Al-nujum heard the drumming of time, and in the eyes of the sheik he saw the race of man. The sheik’s own heart was a flame which no man could extinguish, and here Al-nujum was inclined to rest--but Fana undulated once more.”

Clearly, here is a man who holds the sexual act in high regard, and who could argue against that? But readers who dote on this silken-pillow literature can’t be expected to like “Victory at North Antor,” which depicts life in a working-class high school, in a fiendish small town, in the middle of Northeast nowhere--a town where the adults live in mill shacks and have, as vocational opportunities, “the button mill, the pillow factory, or the sewer works.” Is it possible for there to be heroism in such grim and forgotten worlds? Certainly, for some--and that heroism heartens even the inarticulate gnomes still locked inside these hells of the imagination.

Great Fun to Read

“Victory at North Antor,” with its rich cast of characters--Shrimp Sondoni, Tootzi Zonka, Tony One-Punch and Franky Plunger--is great fun to read, as is “Star Cruisers, Welcome,” in which an invincible space ship full of invincible aliens (who literally eat Earth for lunch) makes the mistake of landing in the South Bronx, where the ship is taken apart, with terrific casualness, by a gang called the Walton Avenue Baldies, who sell their space parts to the local fence and break out the space booze.

A wonderful story, but where does that leave the lavender intricacies of Fana and Zahir and Al-nujum? It seems that this slim volume literally isn’t big enough for Fana and Tootsie Zonka.

More than 100 years ago, as they never tire of telling us in literature classes, Wordsworth and Coleridge got together and decided that for a project they’d work--separately--on making “strange things familiar and familiar things strange.” Thus, that host of golden daffodils from Wordsworth, and that Ancient Mariner from Coleridge. But, for the sake of their own fevered minds, they didn’t try doing both at once, as does Kotzwinkle. Never mind. Give this book to nice male undergraduates of every stripe. They’ll appreciate the culture and like the sex; they may grow their hair long, and buy a monocle like that pixie author on the back.

From the FictionMags Index:

Jewel of the Moon by William Kotzwinkle (Putnam, December 1985, 0-399-13113-2, $14.95, 160pp, hc, oc)
    Collection of 15 stories, only five of them previously published [possibly more accurate than either figure provided to See, but still in need of confirmation, particularly since 7 are given previous publication credits here.--TM]. Most are very short fantasies.
• 9 · The Day Stokowski Saved the World · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 15 · The Curio Shop · William Kotzwinkle · vi Omni September 1980
• 21 · Jewel of the Moon · William Kotzwinkle · ss Viva November 1973
• 41 · Postcard Found in a Trunk · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 49 · Sun, Moon, and Storm · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 65 · Tell Her You Love Her with a Ring from Dave’s House of Diamonds · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 69 · Disturbance Reported on a Pipeline · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 77 · Mr. Jones’s Convention · William Kotzwinkle · ss Penthouse (US) November 1974
• 87 · Fading Tatoo · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 93 · Victory at North Antor · William Kotzwinkle · ss Penthouse (US) May 1975
• 113 · A Man Who Knew His Birds · William Kotzwinkle · ss Omni February 1985
• 123 · Letter to a Swan · William Kotzwinkle · ss Transatlantic Review #58/59, February 1977
• 133 · Star Cruisers, Welcome · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 141 · That Winter When Prince Borisov Was Everybody’s Favorite · William Kotzwinkle · ss
• 151 · Fana · William Kotzwinkle · ss Penthouse (UK) September 1972

For more Short Story Wednesday posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Mason, briefly, about this collection.

Kotzwinkle reviews and mentions on this blog. Carolyn See on this blog.

FFB: THRILLERS: 100 MUST READS edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner (Oceanview Publishing 2010); Carolyn See, RIP

Carolyn See, RIP. 

The novelist and scholar and regular book reviewer for The Washington Post  in the years I lived in the DC area (and so much more interesting to read than Jonathan Yardley, whom IIRC the Post had retrieved from the ashes of The Washington Star, and ashen he remained) died on Wednesday, the LA Times reported, and in the fiction-magazine discussion list I'm often happy to be a part of, we were pointed to The Rumpus's not terribly well-proofread OCR scan of this article by See, posted in 2009 and not the worst unintended obituary anyone's ever written for themselves even though mostly a memoir of her father, who wrote a number of porn novels after some years of being (sometimes savagely) stymied in his literary among other ambitions, and her first great intellectual inspiration after him, academic scholar Helen Gardner. And, more offhandedly, her life-partner for the better part of three decades, John Espey. Lisa See is See's daughter, but if you know who Lisa See is, you probably know that. David Pringle suggested this was worth reading, and John Boston seconded...I agree, and you might as well even if you're not so very sure who either See or Helen Gardner have been.

By the time I finally got around to my copy of Golden Days, See's sf novel (published in one of the several New Fiction lines various publishers hoped to catch your attention with in the '80s, in this case it was a mass-market series from Ballantine/Fawcett; most were in "quality paperback" format which is now more likely the default for any bound paper publishing), it was time for one of my six or seven residence changes in my years in Northern Virginia, and it went into one box or another. Perhaps, or definitely, past time for it to come back out.

Thrillers is consciously in the mode of everyone else's "100 Best" books; editors Morrell (best known as the creator of Rambo, in the 1972 novel First Blood,  recommended here by Steve Berry's short essay) and Wagner explicitly cite the example of Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: The 100 Best Books, and that one has had a lot of company, both since and beforehand (though Morrell, a notable horror as well as suspense-fiction writer among other flavors of work, had an essay in the cited volume and I suspect it looms large in the memory...it's also one of the few to get a direct sequel). Like some, and unlike others, it draws on a range of writers to choose their favorite examples, and arranges them chronologically by date of subject's publication; in this case, the short-essay contributors are members of International Thriller Writers, for whose benefit the book has been published and which has been given the copyright.  Unlike many such books, however, the editors (and the aforementioned Steve Berry) contribute a couple/few several-page entries each, with the rest on a one recommendation per contributor basis (some such volumes give us only one choice from each contributor, others are completely written by one or two critics); also slightly unusual, two of the selections are short fiction amid the novels and occasional novella and one is Edgar Wallace's version of the script for King Kong, and three of the five Our Historical Antecedents cited works are epic poems (Homer's are given a double-header essay, along with Beowulf) while the other two are the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (with a nod particularly toward Plutarch's recounting) and Macbeth; Katherine Ramsland chooses "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, and Thomas Monteleone handles Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window." Beyond that, the rather wide range of what can be classed a thriller is explored, most of them suspense novels, but also science fiction, horror, adventure fiction (historical and otherwise), at least one nearly straightforward mystery, and R. L. Stine opts for P. G. Wodehouse's Summer Lightning (in the interests of demonstrating, as Robert Bloch was wont to do in  dccades past, the kinship of humor and the frightening). At this point, if you've waited this long, you can begin arguing with what has been represented and what hasn't; Robert Bloch's work isn't cited, nor is Shirley Jackson's, which was brought home by the inclusion (as the only 1959 example) of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (which I still need to read, but '59 would've been a hell of a year with only Psycho and The Haunting of Hill House to its credit; certainly the cinema isn't complaining); Robert Levinson (co-creator of Columbo among much other work) does the honor there. 

Some of the contributors are matched with exactly the item you'd expect (Max Allan Collins with One Lonely Night, Raymond Benson with From Russia with Love), some are less unsurprising but not startling good choices (Joe R. Lansdale writes up The Postman Always Rings Twice and Bev Vincent opts for a Thomas Harris novel rather than a Stephen King). The 1970s-1990s are overrepresented in contrast to other decades (not terribly surprising, given the age of most of the contributors), and that only The Da Vinci Code is cited post-2000 likewise (the editors note that they wanted to wait and see on books published in this century). That last, and that only The Green Ripper is cited as an example  of John D. MacDonald's work, are among the more questionable choices, but this kind of book is meant to spark some arguments, pay back to great influences on the writers contributing and pay forward to the readers who might not yet have caught up with the items under discussion nor thought of them in quite the manner suggested...pretty much what we do with Friday Books, only with no concern whatsoever for citing the items not nearly Forgotten...the latter need to be included, in fact. Though that no one suggested an anthology, not even one of Robert Arthur's or Harold Q. Masur's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: volumes, is a crying shame. But you do go from Deliverance to The Bourne Identity and many likely stops between.

The far more reasonably prompt examples of our citations are toted up at Patti Abbott's blog (she, and her daughter, will be popping up in such projects as subjects sooner rather than later, I suspect).