Reading Myself in Exile (1.1)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light?

I’m hoping that my conclusion at the end of this process will be that everyone should write a novel at 19 or 20, lose it, and then re-read it more than forty years later with the distance of time, but without too much horror about the bad writing of a simultaneously pretentious and clueless and almost totally-inexperienced kid. No matter what I find in revisiting these pages, I’m hoping the distance of time will allow me to dismiss the most cringeworthy bits as juvenilia, but maybe I’ll also find a few surprises here that seem like constant themes in my life — things that I’m not totally embarrassed by.

About a year ago, my son handed me a box of LPs and a few other items of mine that he had rescued from my ex-wife’s house before she moved. Among these archaeological treasures was a 220-page manuscript typed on Eaton’s Corrasable Bond (savior of college students looking to avoid retyping but bane of NYC editors) and bound in a Six Star Office Products RS-118 spring binder; the title page reads “EXILE, Rick Mumma, Draft  Two.”  I haven’t been able to get myself to read much farther than that, so I’m going to make it a project to do so, retyping the book one chapter at a time and sharing it in serial form on this blog along with some background and my reactions.

The rules are that I will not change anything, including misspellings and comma placements, and I will not let myself read ahead. I have some memory of the plot, but I hope to be surprised as I type some of these chapters.

So here goes. The time, although I don’t think it’s specified any place in the following pages,  is the summer of 1975. “Draft Two” was probably typed sometime in 1976 or 1977; there’s no sign of Draft One, or of the carbon copies I made of both, so typing these words onto a computer for the first time may be my only chance to preserve them.

EXILE

Rick Mumma

Draft Two

 

PART ONE

“For the snakes are more rudimentary, nearer to the great convulsive powers. Nearer to the nameless sun, more knowing in the slanting tracks of the rain, the pattering of the invisible emissaries to the rain-gods. The snakes lie nearer to the source of potency, the dark, lurking, intense sun at the centre of the earth. For to the cultured animist, and the pueblo Indian is such, the earth’s dark centre holds its dark sun, our source of isolated being, round which our world coils its folds like a great snake. The snake is nearer to the dark sun, and cunning of it.”

 -D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico

 

1

Robin awoke much like every morning. He lay for a long time in that twilight between waking and sleeping where he could linger in his world of dreams and basically escape the reality of his days for a few minutes. On this day, the warmth of the Parisian sun streaming onto his bed held him there a little longer than usual.

Although he tried, he couldn’t find any residue of detail in his memory of the previous night’s dream. Something in the dream had depressed him and left him with an empty, confused feeling. His upcoming visit to Anne’s was on his mind anyway, so he could easily attribute this depression to his feelings toward her. He often purposely thought himself into a depressed state by turning one question over and over in his mind. “Why doesn’t she love me?” The answer had finally come to him that love is a totally arbitrary selection in which even the participants have no real choice. He often cried when he thought of Anne and her rejection of his love. Tears seemed to be the human response to all of Fate’s arbitrary tricks (death, injury, surprises).

These musings led him to random reflections on the arbitrary nature of his whole life. How did he end up with his parents, his friends, his scholastic ability, his love for Anne and the rest of his desires? “My” was the prefix he attached to all these things but he couldn’t see where his role in their selection had taken place. Then there was the thought, (my death). The thought existed in a bubble beneath the level of his conscious mind. It scared him to face it.

There was nothing mystical in Robin’s character. The discovery of his own mortality and the implied equality which it brought with everything else in the universe didn’t awe him or give him that rapture of silent peace common to esoteric realms. He didn’t think of other deaths at all when he felt confronted by his own. He often felt that these strange twists of fate were especially designed for him.

He assumed (but could not prove, even to himself) that no person can sense a pain greater than their own. Robin sensed this first when he was in the eighth grade and a friend’s mother had died suddenly. His friend broke down and cried, “What are we going to do without her?” and “Why did this happen to us?” Tears upset Robin but he could see that his friend was crying for his own loss, not for his mother’s pain. (Just as Robin had been more concerned with his own awkwardness around tears than with his friend’s pain.)

Robin sensed the same thing in himself in high school. He took part in demonstrations against the war and bombings and deaths which were far removed from his day to day concerns. Genocide, however, didn’t upset him as deeply as some of his early sexual worries. His political commitments stood out, but they weren’t quite as powerful as they sometimes seemed. They weren’t quite as powerful as his present love for Anne.

Whenever Robin tried to put these vague thoughts into words, he would be formulating imaginary conversations with Anne. Their relationship was totally a relationship of words from the beginning. The passionate moments of their friendship, aside from a few drunken ones, were their discussions of love in which Anne would be the gentle schoolteacher telling Robin about the pleasures which love would bring to him one day. She was firm enough to tell him that she was not the source of that love. The words he contributed to their relationship came in the form of love poems about her beauty and his failures. The state of mind that she put him in led him to see the saddest lines as the best. He felt deeply that she could only begin to love him if she started feeling sorry for him. He honestly couldn’t picture love springing from strength and desire.

She put a temporary end to their words with a conversation they had earlier in the year. His depression started to catch up with him as they spent a spring afternoon at the shore, because all Anne did was talk about a guy she had met a couple of months before, Ed. (He inspired that painful sting of a familiar, possessive emotion — jealousy.) Ed was the antithesis of everything Robin felt himself to be. He was athletic, strong and seemed to do everything, like falling in love with Anne, without thinking. Anne told Robin that she loved Ed’s air of innocence. Rob thought that he possessed the same air, but he was wrong. He thought everything out too thoroughly and his actions seemed staged — almost artificial. Anne’s rejection of his cautiousness and timidity and her love of Ed’s impetuousness is what led to Robin’s depression during their day on the beach.

“Let’s talk,” Anne suggested in her all-knowing-something-is-wrong voice as they spent the evening in a deserted, red-neck bar near the ocean. Their conversations would always start at her prompting after Robin made it clear that he wanted to receive someone’s comforts.

“There’s nothing left to talk about. You know that I love you and I know that you don’t love me…That’s all there is to it.”

“How can you say you love me? You’ve never shown it to me,” she replied with her usual annoyance at his professions of love.

In his supreme effort to bring her feelings of pity down around him, he’d answer, “How do you expect me to show my love when I don’t have any experiences to guide me? I don’t know how to act around girls. All I know is rejection.”

The only spectator for this conversation was a black cat who must’ve belonged to the bartender. He just sat on the bar and stared at the cheese which they were eating along with their beers. The bar was completely deserted except for the cat, his owner, a couple huddled in the corner, and a comical crewcut Marine who’d bang his private mug against the bar every time he finished another Bud.

Their conversations always reached the same point. She’d always ask, “How can you say you love me?” and follow it immediately with, “What do you love about me?”

“I don’t know,” Rob would say as his voice cracked. “It’s just a feeling.”

“See, that’s the difference between you and me. I can explain my feelings for people and you can’t. You can make words rhyme, but that doesn’t mean shit to me!” She hated this streak in herself sometimes. Robin was a good friend and his attention did mean something, but the line between annoyance and anger in her mind was thin and easily broken.

He thought of a question then, but even in his partially drunken state he couldn’t just ask it. He was an intellectual, or that was the picture he had of himself, and he had to let things steep in his mind for a little while. It was a couple of days later before he phoned and asked, “Anne?…Anne, you said that you can put your feelings about people into words…What’s the difference between me and the guys you have physical relationships with?”

He tried with all his might to make his question sound spontaneous, but it came out sounding like a question to one of his professors. No question that’s been homogenized by continual mental rehashing can sound spontaneous and Anne sensed it. She didn’t answer him for a while either, because she knew she’d only be helping him indulge in his self pity.

After his silent nagging continued for lengthy minutes, she finally had to answer him, “You’re too timid.”

That did it. That depressed him then and it depressed him again by just thinking about it. That was the state of mind in which he met John Matthews.

Robin was staying at a youth hostel in the north of Paris. At 6 francs a night it was the cheapest place in town. It was already late morning when he looked around to see ten empty beds with their sleeping bags rolled down to their feet. “Oh well, time to get up,” was the thought that crossed his mind as he punched the bunk above him and started stretching.

“Watch it,” came the voice of the bunk.

Back in 2017

First impressions of this first chapter after forty years? This seems very static and Robin Jackson still makes me cringe, and at this point I don’t know how long I’ll make it into the book before giving up this experiment, but I hope that the addition of John Matthews in chapter 2 will give these pages more life. The internet made it possible for me to look up the exchange rate between French francs and American dollars in the summer of 1975, so that 6 franc hostel bed was less than a dollar fifty per night. It was possible to travel in Europe for an amazingly small amount of money, especially if one had a Student Railpass (sleeping on an overnight train cost even less than a dollar fifty). Of course there was no internet  (or ability to easily phone home) in 1975, so I had very little access to research materials when writing the first  version of this in a small notebook; the opening quote was from a paperback of D.H. Lawrence’s travel writings, Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places, that I had in my backpack along with a French-language version of Kerouac’s Sur la Route. The opening line of the book was definitely influenced by another novel I had read for a Russian literature (in translation) class, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, whose protagonist is famous for rarely leaving his bed. It may have worked for Goncharov in 19th-century Russia, but keeping one of your main characters in bed (alone) for the entire first chapter may not be the best way to get and keep readers’ attentions in our media-saturated century.

 

Chapter 1.2 has now been posted here.