Daniel Curley's Story

...Curley works "A House Called Magnolia," rewritten, into How Many Angels...

...as one flashback, and once again the narrator's mother visits Magnolia and gets a magnolia...

...It begins with the delicious mysteries in Frank Lavalle's barbershop, continues with a sadistic priest explaining religious mystery in confirmation class, initiates Mike into the most beautiful mystery of all, when he and his father go fishing and Mike catches an enormous pickerel with his father's rod, returns to religious mystery when Mike confesses to a kindly priest, and ends in the ultimate dreadful mystery when Mike's father is killed in a car accident later that night...

...in fact, Mike loves her and will marry her instead of Nancy...

...He is indeed George's ideal farcical father, and he initiates George into the Oedipal mysteries of fat mama...

...The father figure is the old Judge, called Dean Percy in the dream and aged 100...

...while she mocks and insults him with terrible cruelty...

...Nothing he says or does impresses her, but she is overwhelmed by the gift of a magnolia blossom, incarnating all the beauty of the house, from the house's owner...

...and ceaselessly reproaches him with imaginary infidelities, in tirades that crackle with mean wit...

...There are whores galore, all connected with beatings...

...When George puts him to bed drunk after the hotel room scene, George thinks indignantly: "that old hypocrite, liar, sot, lecher, that fraud, that dirty, disgusting whited sepulcher . . . father indeed...

...in fact, "she's too thin...

...In "A House Called Magnolia," the narrator takes his mother to visit a decayed Southern mansion...

...Instead of symbolic father figures, we have a flashback to the real father, Mike's idol...

...As the example of John Updike should make clear, those writers who tell their own story over and over again do so, not because of any want of invention, but because their story is obsessive and compulsive, like the Ancient Mariner's, and because they must tell it to overcome it...

...Later, provoked beyond endurance, George punches Alice between the eyes...

...At the end, of course, George does not shoot Alice...

...Three stories in the book deal with George Fuller, a professor of literature, and his awful wife Alice...

...WRITERS & WRITING Daniel Curley's Story By Stanley Edgar Hyman Daniel Curley is one of the most gifted American writers of my generation, although he has attracted surprisingly little attention...

...He published a volume of stories...

...Nancy is a look at the awful wife in a larval stage...

...With a fine symbolic Tightness, he spends the weekend of the novel sick from her cooking...

...She has memorized Mike's childhood, moved into his mother's house, and threatens to stay and take the teaching job if he docs not...

...the loss of a fat whore to a more virile man, accompanied by the image of a beating...

...Alice now takes on monstrous proportions...

...That important Saturday at the age of 12, which George started to tell Alice about, is fully recounted by Mike to Noreen...

...One of the fascinating things about Curley's work is that he endlessly retells the same story, and in the course of his three books he has evolved from telling it tragically to telling it comically...

...Now, however, the ending openly admits failure: "And that was the last time we spoke for the rest of our wonderful trip...

...Chapters of flashback in the first person alternate with present action in the third person, filling out Mike's earlier life and the choice's complexity...

...He manages to get her clothes off, at which point she throws him over her hip (hurting his poor back) and straddles him on the floor, her lovely breasts in his face, telling him that she must remain virgin for Steven...

...The grave image here is George's old school, now a burned-out basement with a rubble of his memories...

...Curley's story has four principal strands, each with its key image: a failure with a prim nagging mother, curiously symbolized by a magnolia...

...In his night's wanderings in the present, Mike finds himself at a table in a roadhouse with a whore, but he is too sick from his mother's cooking to do anything about it...

...George eventually concludes that Alice's sanctity has masked an endless chain of adulteries, heterosexual and homosexual...

...How Many Angels...

...The beating by the brute finds a similar apotheosis in broad comedy, when George tries to seduce Pratt's girl, a big beautiful physical education teacher...

...In "The Fugitive," George, in his new role as worker, tries to go off with a whore with enormous thighs, but he loses her to a hairy brute who wins her heart by slapping her, and wins her person by knocking George to the floor...

...and the loss of a father figure, with an image of being initiated into mysteries...

...is a novel about Michael Pegnam, a trade paper journalist in New York, visiting his home town near Boston...

...The grave appears in the first of these stories, when George digs a garbage pit, realizes that he could bash Alice with the shovel and bury her in the pit, and decides that that ambiguous pit-grave is his image of marriage...

...a failure with an articulate bitchy wife, expressed in the image of an ambiguous grave...

...Actually, as the reader discovers long before George does, all this is a facade, and it conceals an affair with Steven Pratt, one of George's young instructors, an affair so physically demanding of Pratt that he escapes it by drowning himself in the lake, or at least leaving his clothes on the shore and disappearing from the novel...

...and she is not a whore...

...She habitually addresses George as "pig...

...Shortly afterward Mike witnesses a savage cutting and kneeing, and identifies with the victim...

...in "That Marriage Bed of Procrustes" (a heartbreaking and beautiful story) he fails her in bed, then tries to tell her about something important that happened when he was 12...

...I never thought to find myself saying of an academic novel that it tells the truth, but A Stone Man, Yes is true, as the best caricatures are true, and terribly, terribly funny...

...George's discovery of his cuckolding is the wildest farce: In an official going-through of Pratt's papers after his disappearance, George learns that Pratt had an unidentified married mistress of insatiate passions, realizes that she would now be unemployed, and tries to learn her identity in order to make her his own...

...These motifs first appear in the stories in That Marriage Bed of Procrustes...

...Mike's widowed mother, a school principal, is the prim nagging figure...

...In "To Ask the Hard Question is Easy," she subjects him to a vicious tirade in bed...

...That Marriage Bed of Procrustes, in 1957...

...Instead he becomes reconciled with her in a perfect academic resolution: Alice will take over Pratt's classes for the rest of the year...

...handles Curley's obsessive themes of failure and loss by denying them wishfully...

...Noreen tells Mike that he should have been more of a man, he tells her of the Southern beating (in which he turns out to have been quite a man), and they pop into bed together, with impressive success...

...at the end Mike walks out on her and all that she represents...

...However, just as failure with a dominating mother and wife is presented wishfully as rejecting them in How Many Angels?, so too, losing the whore is wishfully resolved...

...She has become fanatically religious...

...there's no use trying to tell her" anything...

...When he finally realizes that she already is his own, he resolves to shoot her instead...

...Noreen's bedroom "smells like a whorehouse," but she is not fat...

...A Stone Man, Yes confronts these themes by embracing them, exaggerating and caricaturing them, accepting life's miseries in the vocabulary of broad comedy and farce...

...The happy ending makes the book comic, although its tone is never more than wryly funny...

...Nancy wants to eat Mike's life and eat him, but Mike has better sense than George: he realizes in time that she is a replica of his mother, and he walks out on Nancy too...

...George thinks: "nothing had changed but everything was different...

...The motif of losing the fat whore to the brute is easily introduced: Curley simply reprints "The Fugitive," rewritten, as an adventure of George's...

...Curley is far more talented than a number of highly-touted novelists in our time, but he is apparently less talented than they in self-promotion...

...now a second novel, A Stone Man, Yes (Viking, 215 pp., $4.50...

...She and George have separate bedrooms on separate floors, since his marital embrace is odious to her...

...In his final acceptance of Alice's past, George is enlarged, and one suddenly realizes that A Stone Man, Yes is a comic rewriting of Joyce's "The Dead," perhaps a conscious parody, with the same deep humanity...

...then a novel...

...George pretends to be asleep while the other two share her abundance, in an uproarious scene...

...When Mike was in college in the South, the boys had a naked whore in the room, but Mike was too badly injured from a beating received earlier, and too drunk, even to look at her...

...We are back with George and Alice Fuller (now George and Alice Scott), with an older George now chairman of the English department in a miserable college...

...How Many Angels?, in 1958...

...The figure of the mother has merged into the wife who is her replica, and the Freudian magnolia has wilted...

...He is a marvelous old Fat Knight...

...The lost father figure is suggested in "A House Called Magnolia" by a courtly Judge Wilder in whose house the narrator lives...

...Mike ends his night's wandering with a visit to Noreen, the waitress he had dated and loved in his teens but had never dared to proposition...

...in "The Fugitive" he deserts her to work in a can factory...

...She has become an alcoholic...

...The theme is later enlarged into mad farce in George's dream that he, a fellow undergraduate, and the old Judge in whose house they live are in a hotel room with a whore so fat that a hand sinks to the wrist in the folds of her belly...

...The father figure who initiates into mysteries is an old barber, in the story that George tries to tell Alice in bed, and the mysteries are those of sex and excretion...

...How Many Angels...

...He must make the difficult choice between settling there to teach school and marry Nancy Hatcher, or leaving there and losing Nancy...