Mark Dunn: Ibid (Harcourt 2004) [IBR2023]

Dear Brother Clay:
….I am torn over what to do. These notes, while extensive, are still, by definition, subordinate to the lost text – a text which I do not wish to invest another two years of my life attempting to reconstruct. While the notes illuminate the dusty crepuscular corners of this man’s life, they tell its story only through sidebar and discursion. The book, therefore, becomes a biography by inference.
.… Publishing these notes by themselves allows me the opportunity to examine the role that each played in the man’s life, in ways that I could not in the original text. There is a certain freedom here – stitching as I am upon the fringes of that life the kind of colorful piping that usually defines the whole garment. On the other hand, can the cloth of a man’s life truly be defined by it’s embroidery?
Your brother,
Mark

I often fear that I am attracted to what others regard as literary gimmicks. It’s true that while, say, oddball narrative points of view – first person plural, second person – can have great effect when used in some circumstances, they often show up as a naïve writer’s attempt to “try something different” (yes, I speak from experience) and thus are less part of the construction of a narrative and more, well, gimmicks. Same for unusual overall structures and techniques: telling stories backwards, self-referentiality, using an inanimate object as a narrator. Or, the story that becomes a joke, or was a joke to begin with (my personal favorite being F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Thank You For The Light,” a story originally rejected by TNY and printed some eighty years later, a story that resonated very deeply with me, though it was dismissed by pretty much everyone. I’m guessing the scoffers never desperately wanted a cigarette – or a drink, or a quickie with a hot stranger – and found themselves frustrated until by some miracle someone took mercy on them.) Or maybe I do just like gimmicks.

I knew this book was a gimmick going in. After all, I knew Dunn’s earlier book, Ella Minnow Pea, was likewise a gimmick, but I loved it anyway, and it turned out to have more depth than I’d expected. I’d hoped the same for this one: a book in end notes, the only copy of the main text having been accidentally destroyed.

Alas, no.

Things started well. A trio of epigraphs show different delights of footnotes* from a wide variety of sources. A series of letters, one of which is quoted above, explain the circumstances by which the book was written, sent to a publisher, and destroyed (that any author would part with the only copy of a manuscript is completely implausible, but the absurd details of its destruction – an editor who works in his bathtub, a child who sticks his fingers into pears before throwing papers into water – creates an enjoyable atmosphere of goofiness that takes itself utterly seriously) gives enough background to let us proceed.

And we’re off with a bang with the first end note:

Epigraph Grover Bramblett, The Quotable Sanford and Son (New York: Ebony and Ebony Press, 1984), 215.

This may seem a bit anticlimactic, but it is a beginning, not an end. It is also something of an anomaly. The rest of the book uses sentences from the text, in bold, followed by commentary and/or sources, with the structure of each end not becoming more regular as the book goes on. But an epigraph is itself an anomaly. And, for the sake of anyone who is as gullible as I (or, to look at it another way, as willing to accept the improbable should facts support it), there is no Quotable Sanford and Son, though there probably should be. For that matter, there should be a whole series of such compilations, both tongue in cheek (The Quotable Flying Nun, Boy Meets World, White Shadow) and serious (Mad Men, Odd Couple, West Wing). But it serves its purpose: to get us off to the races.

The races, in this case, are the life story of Jonathan Blashette, born in 1888 with three legs. In spite of this, he had a relatively normal childhood until he was tempted into a travelling circus sideshow, which turned out to be exactly as abusive as you might think, though it’s all discussed with a levity that makes it all seem like fun. Jonathan is freed from his contract by a lawyer (well, sort of, without benefit of the formality of degrees and such) and returns to school, grows up, falls in and out of love, goes to war, and founds a lucrative business manufacturing deodorant, with rather Gump-like tangential dealings with the rich and famous. In fact, the whole story vaguely resembles the Gump film. This might be coincidental, or might be subtle payback: Dunn’s lawsuit against the producers of The Truman Show, claiming they’d lifted the idea from an off-Broadway play he’d staged, was settled with undisclosed results.

The notes themselves present a huge cast of characters, some with tenuous ties to Jonathan himself, and often outline preposterous comments and/or actions. A few samples might be helpful:

And yet on the whole, Jonathan was generally well-regarded and with the help of friends and family adjusted easily to his unique anatomical circumstances. Several years were to pass before Thaddeus Grund arrived with his invitation for Jonathan to join his Traveling Circus and Wild West Show. This relatively quiet interstitial period in the boy’s life was disrupted only on those rare occasions in which a visitor to town might gasp or emit an unguarded, “Dear me! Three!” The only concrete exception to this “era of good feeling” for the boy came when Emmaline and Addicus were asked by indelicate roustabouts, many of whom Addicus would bring home for Sunday dinner, “If that’s where the third leg goes, where the hell’s the pup’s little willy?” Upon such occasions Emmaline would usually sweep Jonathan up in her arms and fly indignantly from the room while Addicus was left to explain to his uncouth guests that his son’s third leg branched off the left leg like the limb of a tree, “the willy hanging free like wisteria.”

That was, of course, the obvious question from the start, it seemed to me (I, too, am sometimes twelve), and I’m glad someone asked it so it could be answered.

Izzy and Moe shot straight with their new employee; he was hired because they thought the extra leg would bring in a few extra customers. Several years later the Pettiville haberdashers would be famously confused with federal agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith who became celebrated during Prohibition for donning elaborate disguises to infiltrate speakeasies and bootlegging operations. As a result, Izzy Feldbaum received a bullet in the spleen courtesy of a Capone caporegime who had mixed up his Izzies. Unaware at the time that the attempt on his life had been a case of mistaken identity, filled bomb took a reporter from his hospital bed, “If he wanted the suit, he should take the suit. What I need less is a hole in the kishke!” Pettiville Press, 22 July 1927.

It should be evident that these notes require some tolerance of digression. I happen to love digression. But it’s also like a puzzle: putting together the overall flow of Jonathan’s life from isolated sentences and extraneous information. Or you can just read the notes as individual anecdotes.

When Jonathan starts his deodorant business, Dandy De-odor-o, he must of course hire employees. Three notes tell something of this process:

2. Jonathan hired him halfway through the interview.. Chief chemist Hiram Diles would remain employed for the next forty-two years in Dandy De-odor-o’s Research and Development Division.
3. Jonathan hired him on the spot. Chief financial officer Charleton Caldwell would remain a part of the Dandy De-odor-o corporate family for the next forty-five years.
4. Jonathan hired him after several months of harassing phone calls, an extensive letter-writing campaign and at least one episode of drunken stalking. Ironically, it was Harlan Davison who was to become Jonathan’s most trusted lieutenant and, in time, his best friend….

In spite of his strange anatomy – or, who knows, because of it? – Jonathan had several intense romances. Two of those ended in tragedy:

23. Jonathan received the tragic news later that night. Patrick Alderman, Tears for the Shawmut, 255-66. Fate had indeed played another cruel trick on Jonathan. Once again the setting for tragedy was (amazingly) Boston. Whereas six years earlier Lucile Moritz’s young life had been snuffed out by a tsunami of molasses, Winnie was now meeting her end in a different, yet equally freakish Beantown accident. Like Lucile, Winny was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jonathan knew that she liked to dance, but was unaware that the Charleston had become such an obsession with her that her frequent travels would inevitably draw her inexorably and often foolhardily to the hottest night spots in town. 1925 was the peak year for the popular dance, and Winny (as Leggio notes in her biography) made a special effort to get to the Pickwick Dance Club – the hotspot in Boston for “doin’ it, doin’ it.”
The official postmortem was unequivocal: the roof collapse was attributed to “unnatural stresses” placed upon the building’s structural members by the feverish, swivelling, swaying, flailing and knee-knocking of hundreds of monkey-limbed dancers, among them one Winny Wieseler from New York City by way of Heppleville, Illinois. Poor Winny – artist, writer, progressive activist, lover and friend to Jonathan Blashette – had literally danced herself into an early grave.
A postscript: Jonathan vowed never to return to the city that had claimed his two fiancées. He refused even to sell his deodorants there, in retribution. “I hate this town more than any man on the planet, save probably Babe Ruth,” he told a reporter in 1927. “It killed two women who meant the world to me, and murdered my hope for any future happiness. The men of Boston can stink with b.o. till the cows come home!”

One thing this note shows is how easily tragedy can be converted to humor. There was a Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919 when a storage tank burst. Twenty-one people died, and 150 were injured. Yes, it sounds funny, but to those who were in its path, the stuff was no laughing matter.

The collapse of the Pickwick Dance Club was also a tragic reality, killing 44 people. And yes, the Charleston was proposed as a cause by everyone from bible thumpers (who considered the Charleston sinful to begin with and dance clubs dens of iniquity) to Mayor James Curley; Boston shut down two other clubs shortly thereafter, and other cities prohibited the Charleston in dance halls. Reality, however, gave “fire, rain and an excavation next door” as the culprit.

What comes to mind for me in this passage is: what is left that went in the original text of the book? Dunn seems to poke a little fun at himself along these lines:

49. The next morning he entered Pettiville High School. Some would say through the north door, others the south door; there is also a small camp that believes that Jonathan entered the school through the kitchen and nipped a egg cream cup as he passed. Obviously, this is inconsequential. (It is also becoming obvious that this book has been seriously over-researched.)

I must admit, however, that this book is an anomaly in my reading record for a somewhat disreputable reason: I did not finish it. Yes, it turns out there is a gimmick too far, even for me. The randomness of the notes, the constant absurdity: As anyone who’s ever tried to read a joke book knows, things just stop being funny (and they were, initially, very funny indeed) and get boring after a while.

It might, however, be a book worth reading in a unique way:  Start, enjoy the setup and the goofiness of the premise, then scan the rest, perhaps reading a page now and then to recapture the mirth of the initial impression. I might return to it, a page or two at a time, myself.

*If I may include a footnote: the epigraphs – as well as numerous online comments – refer to “footnotes.” The book is, however, in endnotes; that is, notes that appear at the end of the book, rather than at the bottom of the page. Presumably, that’s necessary for their separation and preservation when the main text was destroyed. But it’s almost irresistible to say and write “footnotes” instead. While in casual use it may suffice, there is a difference. I hate end notes, unless they are purely referencing sources; I prefer footnotes, no matter how long. That is all.