Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass AwayBy Frank Stanford |
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Reviewed by Anya Groner
It’s a rare wonder when a story gives me the sensation I have left this world and entered the consciousness of the author, but the tales in Frank Stanford’s collection, Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away, not only dropped me into his dreams but left me there, his words still humming days after I finished the book. Populated by blind men, estranged children, dead wives, and stunning language, this collection collapses dream and memory, offering a lyrical Gothicism in which the past “seep[s] into the present like water in a cracked, earthen crock” and the Southbecomes alternately “a holy vessel of art” and a “land full of monstrosities.” Made up of eleven stories, ten of which are written in first person, this collection is a hallucinatory incantation, a kaleidoscopic fireside visit where voice and image dominate, characters meet, or rather become, their own ghosts, and we’re all taught to “stop dead in [our] tracks [to] hear [our] footsteps go on.”
While Stanford’s audience has continued to grow since his suicide in 1978, many of the essays on him focus on his biography more than his writing. By all accounts he was a brilliant, charismatic man with a complicated love life and a tendency to embellish and mystify his own life story. Known primarily as a poet, Stanford wrote seven books of poetry during his lifetime, including, most famously, “The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You,” a 15,283-line epic poem, before shooting himself three times in the heart at the age of twenty-nine. Three books of poems were published posthumously, and “Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away,” his sole collection of short stories, came out in 1991 and was re-released this year by Lost Roads Publishing, a small press he founded in 1976. C. D. Wright, Stanford’s former lover and the longtime editor of Lost Roads, points out in her “Notes on the Tales,” that the collection does not represent the whole of Stanford’s short stories, just the stories she holds the rights to.
Stanford’s heralded poetic techniques—deceptively simple grammar, vivid imagery, striking metaphors, rural surrealism, and mythic characters that run triumphantly towards death—create narratives that glide into psychic and historical unknowns. As one character describes his own voyage, “I am reminded of the scene in the film by Cocteau where the fragments and shards of the broken mirror flow mysteriously back into themselves to form another mirror, another image.”
This passage, as close to explaining Stanford’s own narrative aesthetic as any in the book, comes from “Ben Fallow’s Tale,” the longest story in the collection at 38 pages. This story begins with Ben Fallow and his dying wife leaving their academic jobs to travel across the country in their pickup and attached trailer. Just five pages later, in a turn typical of Stanford, Fallow’s wife lies dead in their run-about boat and Fallow is breakfasting with the undertaker, preparing to embark on a spiritual scavenger hunt into his wife’s past. Soon, Fallow is driving along a levee, lurching into a sensuous other world, which is revealed to us in vivid detail:
…in the mirror, I noticed the girl in the yellow dress following me, eating my dust. I stopped, she passed by, eating a lime, holding the handlebars with one hand, and only glancing my way. All of a sudden she turned down the slope of the levee and coasted at a terrific speed down to a field where she disappeared.
Because Stanford’s characters are so often outsiders or storytellers, there is a tremendous and glorious amount of observation, not always explicable. This girl in yellow, for instance, never returns in the story, but her presence provokes again the feeling of a dream, a symbol that offers itself for interpretation but disappears before its significance is made clear.
Despite the emphasis on the visual, a number of the characters are blind. Shing, who features in two stories, was born eyeless and wears in his sockets, “two shining orbs, like ball bearings… like looking into bent mirrors.” The son in “Son’s Tale” is also born blind, and Ansar, the main character in “Ansar’s Tale,” lives in a county with an unusually high occurrence of blindness and eventually goes blind himself. When asked about the prevalence of blindness, Ansar responds with a question, inquiring whether the inquisitor has “ever been to a factory or a sawmill and seen workers missing fingers and things.” “It is the same around here…,” Ansar explains, “except nobody works hard at anything but looking, seeing, taking notice. So, they lose their eyes.”
In Stanford’s stories, the blind possess an acute, if warped, vision, an ability to see what the seeing cannot. Shing, for instance, loves the color blue, collects blue bottles, and declares, “If I had eyes, I wished they’d be as blue as dirt dobber wings when they flutter so fast,” and Ansar discovers that in blindness he can “understand the nuances of perspective, and chiaroscuro of [his] childhood.” For nearly all the characters, answers lie within, in the inscrutable images of the subconscious, and the price of truth is often sight and invariably madness. Examine this passage from “The Son’s Tale,” where the son slips from a declaration of a simple memory into dream, then into metaphor, and finally into a psychic explanation of the silence around him:
When I remember the mornings, I only remember the mornings. If I was gathering eggs in the cold in my black coat. If I was teaching the children sleep. If I was dreaming what it is to be a woman. If I was dreaming of a delicate woman, bad and quiet, playing the samisen, looking at me as if I were several plums close together like a cluster within reaching distance on the branch; thinking of the lunar dust of her face, and how her fingers were like feathers, and when I heard the silence of the mill wheel not turning, and the wild turkeys not drinking, and I knew they had hypnotized themselves in the stream, drinking their morning water.
Stanford affirms both intuition and paranoia, writing dream songs about the primacy and inescapability of the mind, the way in which our visions of the world are projections of our own psyches. In the very last story, “Surtees’ Tale,” Surtees discovers that the documentary he thought he was making about his friend Enoch is actually about him. “Hell,” Enoch writes him in a letter, “I guess I should of told you before, hell, but that movie wasn’t ever about me, it was about you.” As with Surtees, Stanford’s stories reveal Stanford as much the characters themselves, the labyrinthine chambers of his consciousness, the luminous caverns of his madness and fear, wit and tenderness.