The austerity of painting stripped down to reveal the threadbare lives of the artists; domestic strife heighted to the point of sublimity; personal memoir caressed by the ancient lunacy of myth; comic-book characters trespassing at the gates of high modernism; the love of books and cats. Frederic Tuten’s trajectory through letters has been uncategorizable, heteroclite, and consistently at odds with the prevailing fashion—so much so that he comes across less as a member of any extant school of literature and more as a Dada or Pop artist who happens to work primarily with words. His new story collection, The Bar at Twilight, is his showcase, revisiting every strand of his bibliography with the benefit of hindsight and at the peak of his powers.
J. W. McCormack, “The Books I Read” at BookForum, July 14, 2022
It took four stories, read over the course of the last fourteen years (all from Pushcart; BASS ignores Tuten, for some reason), to get me to take this look at his other work, his 2022 collection of short stories (plus a final memoir as a coda). I kept writing the same comments for each story: some variation on, “I shouldn’t like this story, but I do”: stories about artists and writers, joined with tales of high-end couples who don’t seem to do anything but leave, come back, and cheat on each other. For one, I wrote: “It’s something like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf written by Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker: thin veneers of humor softening harsh exchanges, sentences that can go either way depending on delivery and context.” In another post, I called them icebergs, stories with layers of concealed depth that I’m not sure I recognize. The artists and writers referenced are, for the most part, less than familiar to me. I don’t understand the relationships at all. And yet, I’m mesmerized by the prose: I, who’ve never before claimed to be spellbound by a sentence because I prefer themes and personal impact and structural tricks.
I shouldn’t like these stories, but I do. In fact, I’m practically obsessed with them.
No one was as sure, as steady, as magical, as mysterious, as sexy, as comforting, as life-giving as anything or anyone I found in the novels I took home. All my life there were disasters in the street, sadness on the subway, heartbreak and betrayals in and out of bed; the world was a disaster, but once I walked into my apartment and saw about me my books on their shelves, I was, I am, safe and maybe even brave.
“Coda: Some Episodes in the History of my Reading”
In his review, McCormack sees many of the stories as being paired, but I prefer to see them in groups. Prominent are the artist-plus-relationship stories: Someone is writing about, or contemplating, the work of an artist – Montaigne (“The Tower”), Delacroix (“Delacroix in Love”), Hawthorne (“In the Borghese Gardens”), Cézanne (“The Veranda”), Rousseau (among others in “The Lives of the Artists”) – alongside an episode from a marriage and/or affair.
My wife had left me some months ago to live with a man who owned a small but successful taxi fleet that sped through the fancier regions of the Hamptons. I had met him a few times at parties and benefits under the summer tents. I liked his red pants and tasseled moccasins and that he said, “If you ever need a cab, use my name with the dispatcher.”
“He just got divorced,” my wife whispered at the punch bowl after he had turned to a woman who called out the man’s name in capitals. “He’s interested in buying one of your paintings. I told him they were great.” I was happy when she left me and was unhappy when she returned, each feeling canceling out to the other, so I was left neither happy nor unhappy, but with a strange sense of benign resignation.
“Delacroix in Love”
Look at all that’s packed in there. I don’t know much about the Hamptons, but my impression is it’s very high-end. Owning a taxi service is not likely to command that much respect from people who, I would imagine, run Fortune 500 companies and own far more prestigious outfits. Yet this guy has confidence to spare, acting as if using his name with the taxi dispatcher is on a level with dropping his name at the hottest club or the swankiest city hotspot. And then there’s calling out a man’s name “in capitals” – without using the name, hollowing out the supposed respect. I’m not sure what red pants and tassels indicate – are they suave, or tacky? – but then there’s the description of the emotional experience of being left and returned to as if in an accounting ledger.
Elsewhere in the story, he uses the cat Pascal – the name appears in “The Tower” as well, but that seems to be a different cat, though a similar situation – in a particularly delightful way: as a symbolic substitute for the wife, a symbol of captivity, and of release.
Then there are the scenes-from-a-marriage stories: the titles give these away “The Café, The Sea, Deauville, 1966” an “The Restaurant. The Concert. The Bar. The Bed. Le Petit Déjeuner.” Cats – and perhaps a dog – wander in and out of theses stories. While most of the stories seem to have some element of autobiography (I’m guessing, how would I know), a few – “Winter, 1965,” and “Nine Flowers” – seem more pointedly self-directed.
The Longines Conquest, with a green lizard strap, burned his wrist. His wife had given him the watch some birthdays ago – “for the man I love,” she had said – and it told him the wrong time to punish him for his infidelities and it made him think of death three times a day and at night after dinner and again before slipping under the bedcovers.
He could always blame the tricky watch for his being late, but Natasha would know he was lying.
“The Café, The Sea, Deauville, 1966”
I find “Deauville” one of the more perplexing stories – I’m not even sure how many people are in the relationship, two, three, more? – but the watch, and the presence of Alfred – the café owner? manager? another party in the ménage-à-x? – have some magnetic force over me, as I read and re-read these sentences and scenes.
And then there are the surreal, the absurdist, the allegorical stories. I don’t know the definitions well enough to pick a term but they’re clearly not realism. Strangely enough, it was with these stories I was most smitten.
When a story starts with the sentence, “What I like most in art is disquietude,” as does “The Garden Party,” you have to expect something’s up. We start in a luxurious setting – big houses, flowing gardens – but wait: “my view of Main Street in the near distance, and beyond that the shopping mall on a hill, and beyond that a highway, choked with cars and trucks, bordered by a forest of young trees gasping for air”. In his Conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum, Tuten emphatically denies addressing social issues, but they sometimes sneak in anyway. Then there’s the orange rabbit spinner by the pool, deliberately chosen for its disquieting note. And, oh, yes, the fire, the fire that starts on a neighbor’s porch, and goes from there. Firemen come to the garden party house to fill their pails with water from the pool:
“Please don’t throw your cigarettes in the pool,” my wife asked the firemen in what I thought was a seductive voice.
“Let’s get started, boys,” the chief said. The men lined up, filled their pails, and, in a file, took turns splashing water on the burning house.
“The fire’s traveling to your second floor,” Alice said.
“It’s a crisp and orderly fire,” I added.
“Yes, it’s a fire with precision, which I prefer to the chaos of the fireplace,” Jan said, looking exceptionally youthful.
“So few people appreciate nuance,” my wife said. “That’s why we cherish you as neighbors.”
“The Garden Party”
It’s that This-is-Fine meme in short story form. The story is from the catalog of an art exhibit by actor/comedian/artist Martin Mull titled, “Endgame” which features a pre-meme meme.
“L’Odyssée” likewise begins with an attention-grabber: “Then I made me way into the house itself and found it all in shambles.” A story that starts with “Then” must come from somewhere. It comes from our protagonist having been kept captive as the strong man in a travelling circus where he was guarded by a one-eyed man whom he blinded to escape… and yes, it’s Odysseus, but it’s also… Popeye, with Olive Oyl as Penelope. Count the references. I’m told there are also hints to James Joyce, but I’ll have to take that on faith.
Why Popeye? This story was also part of a catalog from an art exhibit, the “Popeye” series by Jeff Koons. Tuten, who is a painter himself, weaves the Odyssey right into it; it’s amazing.
My absolute favorite stories in the book, the ones that win Tuten a place in my heart forever, are two closely related stories in this non-realism vein.
“The Snow on Tompkins Square Park” features a man, waiting for his girlfriend to meet him at a bar. Common enough, of course. But this is not your run-of-the-mill bar.
A man limped into a bar. He folded his stubby hands on the counter. The bartender, Aloysius, a blue horse, said, “What will you have?”
“A glass of water, please.”
“We serve horses here, and people who look horsey. You aren’t and you don’t.”
“I’m waiting for my girlfriend, she’s very horsey.”
“Well, in that case,” the bartender said, “cool your heels.”
…
He moved to the edge of the bar to make space for other customers but none seemed to be coming. He looked about the room. A table of three horses. They looked at him not unfriendly but not friendly, looked at him in a dispassionate way, he thought. One horse, a red filly, gave him a warm smile, showing him all her teeth. Some were drinking a dark beer in glass buckets and there were bowls of oats set on each table but no one was eating.
The bar had no TV and no radio. The woman he was waiting for made him unhappy. She had always made him unhappy, she would always make him unhappy.
“The Snow on Tompkins Square Park”
Being a child of the sixties and a flaming libtard in a time when we just might see, if we haven’t already seen, the re-emergence of slavery, I immediately went to racial discord and harmony. But, no. It’s not just that Tuten decries social issues; it’s that it’s a bigger field than that.
To see that field, let’s check out the snow on Tompkins Square Park, which is where the title points us. Louis – the man in the bar – takes a walk with Red, the filly who smiled at him. It’s beginning to snow.
“I used,” he said, “to love to read about famous horses. That’s how I came to like them. Like the Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver, or King Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus, or Quixote’s horse, Rocinante.”
“I don’t read much,” she said. “I’m not for the life of the mind, like Aloysius or Jake, who’s always reading – and I don’t mean for the odds.”
“I never knew that horses liked to read.”
“That’s sad. Sad that you don’t know a thing!”
He was afraid he had hurt her feelings, his not knowing this about horses, so he said, “I always wanted a life without misfortune. So it’s been a life without much range.”
She said nothing. He the same. The snow fell on them and around them and whitened the black branches of the naked trees and the black tops of the park’s iron railings. Red said, “I always like the snow and the way it tells us new things.”
“I like the way it makes everything quiet for a while,” Louis said, wanting to add to the conversation.
It was darkening, the snow deepening and swirling like little white tornadoes.
“It’s getting cold now. I’m going back to the bar,” she said. “I can enjoy the snow through the window.”
“The Snow on Tompkins Square Park”
There’s got to be some racial content here – the snow whitening black things, ignorance of the habits of those outside one’s in-group. But when they come back indoors, the blue horse who is the bartender more clearly defines the parameters of the widened field:
The bartender thought about it and said, “I have something here, something very old, from the days when the Greeks fermented their wine with grapes from a sacred mountain grove, grapes that sucked iron power from the sun.”
“That mountain,” Jake said, “where Plato threw dice with the gods.”
“Oh! That wild man in love with horses,” Patch said. “Did he ever know we horses dreamed him his ideas?”
“We read and we write and we dream. We dream the books that all the books in the world come from. We dreamed books before the Earth got cool. We dreamed books before the invention of Time,” Jake said.
Sally, her head on the bar counter, looked up and said in a sloppy voice, “It’s always life in the past you talk about, but where are we now tell me?”
“The Snow on Tompkins Square Park”
And here’s where I started thinking, it’s about civilizations. The Egyptians, Scythians, Greeks, Romans, the Caliphate, the Mongols, all towering powers at their heights, all gone now, having left behind legends and learning which we sometimes overlook because we’re so impressed with right now and cute cat videos on our new iPhone (and now, AI images drifting across a screen near you). The remnants of those civilizations that form the basis of humanities that are being sidestepped en route to a fortune as an app coder sit in a bar on Tompkins Square, the last place they’re welcomed.
But wait, there’s more. “The Bar at Twilight” starts:
He walked into the bar, twilight at his heels, and without thinking ordered a scotch, neat. He surveyed the room and its vacant tables. He was glad there was no TV, no music, blasting or otherwise. No colored lights brightened the liquor shelves or gave hope to the dim mirror. Nothing was there wishing to appeal, to please, nothing of false cheer and hollow welcome. But he had left his home hoping to find a bar to lift up his spirits and this was not it.
“The Bar at Twilight”
He tries to figure out a graceful exit strategy. “Ghostly photographs of horses covering a wall had already sunk his spirits” – ghostly is our first clue that we’re not at any ordinary bar.
The bartender speaks.
But before he could turn to leave, she said, “I have a single-malt scotch for you. Been mellowed in stout oak barrels for fifty years in the depths of a Highland castle, lulled to sleep at bedtime by the bagpipe’s lullaby, and woken by a soft drum roll at dawn.”
She poured him a shot.
He took a sip, out of courtesy. Then another. He looked around the room, which now appeared like a misty glen with a salmon-crowded brook running through it. Finally, he said, “This is the most extraordinary scotch I have ever had.”
“The Bar at Twilight”
I’m not a scotch drinker, but I might have one of those.
It’s the same bar, but not; his name is Louis, but he’s not the same Louis. There is a Red, but Red is a cat. The bartender is a woman – “neither tall nor short, neither blonde nor brunette, neither young nor old,” a woman without qualities?
And in walks a centaur.
I won’t reveal more, except to say it carries forth the previous story and perhaps expands it from the parade of lost civilizations to the Twilight of the Gods. And it ends exactly as you’d want it to end.
A significant part of this collection is the evangelism of the reader, wanting to spread his love of particular books and artists to others. He makes me want to read Under the Volcano (for a few minutes, at least), and to check out Georges Simenon. And, of course, more Tuten. But mostly I just want to read these again.
The other day I came across a quote by Clarice Lispector (another name on my list that I somehow never get around to): “You don’t understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.” These are stories – sentences, words in sentences – that I hear with my whole body.
I shouldn’t like these stories. Yet I do. Makes me wonder what else I’ve been overlooking.
* * *
- Book review by J. W. McCormack: “The Books I Read” on Bookforum, 7/14/22
- Author’s website
- Art Exhibit Catalog featuring “The Garden Party”: Martin Mull: Endgame (2015)
- Art Exhibition Catalog, Jeff Koons “Popeye” series, featuring “L’Odyssée
- Frederic Tuten Presents The Bar at Twilight, in conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum
- Blog post, “Winter 1965”
- “Winter, 1965” story available online at BOMB.
- Blog post, “The Veranda”
- Blog post, “The Restaurant, The Concert, The Bar, The Bed, The Petit Déjeuner”
- “The Restaurant, The Concert, The Bar, The Bed, The Petit Déjeuner” story available online at BOMB.
- Blog post, “The Tower”
A Just Recompense 