A Day In The Life With Hind’s Kidnap

I am posting this in conjunction with an essay I recently contributed to a festschrift in honor of novelist Joseph McElroy, available now from the electronic book review. The Hind's Kidnap referred to repeatedly in what follows is Mr. McElroy's second novel published in 1969. The best synopsis of the novel has been written by it's author, and can be found at his own website. When I first mapped it out, the essay was both much longer and less strictly "academic" in tone. The section from which this excerpt was taken -- which I have been re-working again, after roughly a year's lay-off -- was to have been situated in the very center of the work. Plans change, of course... Consider what follow a gloss on "Re-opening Hind's Kidnap. But also please consider that I make the following available here not simply because it deals with certain sonic phenomena. Specifically, the fatherly "voice" in all its moods, tenses and timbres: scolding, disappointed, advisory, exhausted, authoritarian, enveloping. And I post this here, finally, in tribute to Joseph McElroy, and, more than anyone, my own father, who introduced me to the wonders of music as soon as he could and I was able.

~ Joe Milazzo

I’m sitting in a classroom, its atmosphere mildly indolent with orange sunshine and the sleek brown tones of rubbed, oil-and-sweat-infused wood. Joseph McElroy, a guest, is telling a group of young writers about, as I, only slightly older student of writing, hear it, "big subjects".

Like the rest of us, Joe is touching the central table-top, his palms resting on it in full-view, as if to tell us he has nothing up his sleeve. The young woman next to me is leaning forward to establish eye contact with Joe, who entered the room in mid-speech and sat down without immediately removing his sunglasses; she has rested her chin on her fist, and her elbow on the table top. Other students tap their pens against papers laid out on the table or on the table itself, or drum their fingers, or keep a hand along its rim so they can use the table’s solidity to get what leverage they need to shift their weight in their seats. My legs are crossed and my right knee touches the table’s underside. We’re all bound by a common edge, for the edge to cover enough area to provide us all (9 or so individuals) a point of connection, it has to empty out or displace a sizable center. Earlier, as he was only beginning to speak to us, Joe, stopped himself mid-thought, craned back from the table, and, with one swivel of his head, made sure he caught the attention of those students sitting in a parallel arrangement to him. "I don’t want to obscure myself…" he said. Joe is not a man of unusual height or of great bulk. Once he was satisfied that he was not just a rogue voice cornered on one side of the classroom, he returned to his original posture. "Big things", that is what he has said. Not "big subjects". Verbatim (with some scrubbing):

Realizing also that stories affect readers partly by releasing forces that are in the reader. One way that you release them is by, in your stories, recognizing the archetypal, weird things that are there: a mother figure; a tree; a fish; falling. Big things. Really big things. But you can’t make a story just out of these big symbolic things. (04/07/03; 02:45:17 PM CST)

Big: capacious? inflated? looming? intimidating? major? important? weighty? generous? Or I, still an only slightly older student of writing, understand Joe’s comments, heard as I recollect it over a cold bottled beer as having for a background the noise of class-changing foot traffic, raised and saluting voices vivid as car horns criss-crossing the echoing space of downtown between skyscrapers, to be about the seductions of big subjects, subjects it is necessary to confront in "our" work precisely because their seductiveness, their being written all over already, is basically abhorrent. They exist outside time in a sphere of Lovecraftian cosmic conspiracy, and, as much as they are about us, they are somehow alien to us, these themes, pending, even conspiratorial, structural myths. We know that these are the kinds if subjects that will do as much to us as we do to them. Damn it, but resistance seems the wiser path. As Hind's Kidnap Sylvia says, a rancid smell of growth clings to them. It’s a fair assessment. But Joe and I and my own writing instructor from my days as an undergraduate who fell in love with wanting to write rather than the actual writing itself -- it came too easily back then, what did I know, I wrote in search of an overwhelming, self-abolishing avoidance, but also, as all writers do, to learn about what I was writing about -- we’re all trying to introduce these young people to Joe’s work. Joe cautions us, mention themes, huge binding structures that can contain entire novels or ranges of novels.

Like memory. Growth. Perception. Fathers and sons, more so than family, really. Definitely fathers and sons. There’s a corollary to that as well, one Joe has discussed with admirable elision (often), which is the matter of influence and derivativeness. Harold Bloom and the anxiety of influence. Shakespeare, who may be as much of a "name", historically speaking, as the names in Hind’s Kidnap, as the great father. And the inventor of the 20th Century, so runs the conventional wisdom. It’s a dangerous commonplace that tries, I guess, to be hopeful in fashioning modernity into some eternal verity. But for such a grand thesis, it won’t do as an explanation of all those 20th Century human endeavors that shame those of us who were there. The sins of the father, too, I suppose. Would there have been fascism without Richard III as Shakespeare made him, almost more Satanic than Milton’s more-than-human Satan? The implication that romantic love would not be the same without Montagues and Capulets, balconies, apothecary poisons… I try to imagine a Western world without these cognitive set-pieces, and I come to the conclusion that I’d rather spend my time rereading Shakespeare than by arguing with Bloom and co.’s (adherents and detractors alike) notions. The notions themselves are too prescriptive. Do improvising musicians think while they improvise in terms of quarter-rests and dotted-sixteenths and augmented 5th’s and such? I doubt that vocabulary has much to do with it. Why should writers be told that they are thinking about similar things as they plod around all the other obstacles writing throws in their way? Shakespeare is a great laboratory for the testing of one’s own writerly ideas anyway, if that’s what Bloom means in the context of the benefit of the doubt. Or does he mean something more along the lines of the readings we cannot avoid, texts so infused into the language, the one technology which we really have let loose on the world and have allowed to run amuck, that influence is ingested as helplessly as oxygen is inhaled? Mass we all have, but no weight without gravity. You can lose mass, actually convert it into energy you give to something else, say the track over which you run (friction) or the iron lozenges you set into push-pull, clean-jerk into groaning oscillation, the volleyball spiked up over the net. But you never lose weight first. "Weight" isn’t so much fat, flab; it is how we think, imprecise but somehow true. Weight coming and going like someone we don’t like recurring in our life, looking for a place to bed down or hitting us up for money. See what you put me through.

Sometimes you should try to go too far. (04/07/03; 02:27:48 PM CST)

Fathers and sons indeed. "Father hunger", it was first whispered of in a specific study of African-American community and has since grown into the form of rumor we call "archetype". I wait for the day that there’s a dangerous pill formulated to treat it. Deadbeat dads, the debate now over the deleterious effects of "gender affirmative action", how boys suffer educationally, are penalized for their simple "boy-ishness" in schools where assessment tests dictate literally everything, but especially funding. Robert Bly beating drums and swatting mosquitoes in the wild, defrosted Minnesota night. Maybe it’s a stupid theme, after all, too fraught with the possibility of recovering things that never were, their plausibility an embarrassment. What happened to the daughters? The mothers? But I can’t get around it: fathers and sons, it’s a relationship around which Joe’s fiction has been known to pivot. There are real fathers and sons in his books, I mean not that they are fictionalized real people, but that the relationships themselves are so believable they give life to the characters whom they encompass, perhaps even enclose. And I don’t want to conceive of these fathers and sons as representations, no matter how vibrant they are with theatrical and photographic detail.

We say a good deal else among ourselves that day in the classroom, but Joe’s straight-forward, "frank" advice, perhaps reflexive and easy to dispense if no less valid for that fact, stays with me. For I think too that so little criticism of his work acknowledges these themes. And they have been important to me long before Joe told me, in his own way (without knowing) not to end their importance to me, my readings, that day in that mildly sunny classroom. I regret not talking more to the students there that day, I wonder what they made of it all. Did they really understand the implications of Joe suggesting to them:

But once you get into a story there are so many possibilities that you have, and it is very hard to free yourself to recognize those possibilities. How many students have I heard say, "But this really happened." (04/07/03; 02:53:28 PM CST)

The corollary to this is that, in narrative, we have an opportunity to be more interesting, better persons, and a chance to put a finger to the lips that would utter a discouraging, "But this is how I really am."

I want this piece to be as brave as little stolen Hershey Laurel brandishing his bean bag, as in one of Hind’s visions. At first, the title seemed random, or, at best, something to hold the place of the title I had not yet devised. Or a way of hiding that what so moves me about this story of Joe’s is its ethical drive, the sense I can’t shake -- my pursuer -- that the story itself believes in the fact that art is useful, and can be used up, and, because it can and must be used up, must be applied to a proper end. That, to risk not a homology but a homiletic, that life is art, and art is life. Experience not understood is experience not fully had. And the experiences you lose can never be replaced. Though the chronological relationship of cause and effect, so dear to the detective story, the question of following and leading -- what’s first and what’s last? -- is also a question of "what lasts?" Now the title stuck there ("up" there) like a lit VACANCY sign reads like nothing less (or more) than a prediction. I will tell you of some matters not written about in Hind’s Kidnap, not even on the flyleaf or in the margins of my own copy of the novel. A copy now swelling with sallow yellow, neon burnt orange and hot pink and, naturally, kelly green post-it notes clinging to selected margins. I won’t write in a first edition. As if the volume itself, always in my possession sans d.j. (dust jacket) were in efflorescence, papers as buds, petals, invitations to hairy bee legs and randy winds.

Its contagious in my imagination... memory is like an artist. (04/07/03; 03:11:33 PM CST)

Isn’t the significance of allegory like… can it be compared to the voice of the guardian amniotically engulfing Hind, just out of college, like the caul of one of Hind’s childhood friends, since kept in a jar for luck by the boy’s widowed mother?

You wanted him, you wanted to listen to him talk and talk -- he didn’t quote poems the way he had used to -- you wanted his fluent voice to cover you like a skin, fill your eyes, take total control of the air. (466)

Allegory does diminish us, and though there’s nothing bland about the affections the guardian lavishes on Jack, he transforms the boy, then the man, into the silence Jack would otherwise fill with his own voice. The guardian’s intellect, which seems to be his true birthright (it is never so much a matter of education), is as relentless would like to be in deductive mode, but cannot be. And the guardian’s sometimes stern eloquence is scattered throughout the book, mostly in direct quotes that would seem set off from Hind’s own speech, to others and to himself. But the more we read of Hind, the more we hear of the guardian in his son’s diction, syntax, cadence, self-critical attitude, taste, and, very commonly, through Hind as a negative exemplar. Morton Feldman once wrote:

[W]hy do we fail to see that in art too, the facts and successes of history are allowed to crush all that is subtle, all that is personal, in our work? Yet the artist does not resist. He identifies with this force that can only destroy him. In fact, it has an irresistible attraction for him, in that it offers him known goals, the illusion of safety in his work, the tempting knowledge that nothing succeeds in art -- like someone else’s successes. In a word, because it relieves the anxiety of art. (21)

Feldman could just as well be talking about familial love here. Wait a second -- do I really mean "love"? Or am I talking here about desire more than love? For the guardian’s voice is just another voice, and it can be heard in one’s head -- Hind hears it all the time -- or in papers and letters, most problematically in letters one would not want to find it in -- the letter left to me. Why does Hind find such comfort in it all? I feel guilt at even posing the question, for the answer seems self-evident and would, in other circumstances, cause me to scratch out the words before as soon as they were impressed on paper (assuming I’m writing this longhand; the anecdote is rounded off with more romanticism this way than if I had described the gummed, springy resistance of delete keys and backlit projections of pixels…) I mean, I know what my own life with my father is like.

My father, to whom I owe the simple fact of my existence; my father, to whom I owe whatever basic appreciation of the written word I have. My father, a writer and editor, known to me too in earliest memories through objects that belong to or were handled often by him: use-rippled sheets of wide-, not college-ruled notebook paper covered with handwriting narrow and not upright, listing to the right-hand margin, wavering every time (but in varying degrees) a letter requires its length to be drawn upward (old writing on the backside of the page "X"-ed out with two visibly slow-drawn strokes); books with typewritten review slips tipped into them, the ink of titles and authors on the very old slips slightly purpled and blurry; baseball cards, collated and uncollated, the hard sticks of bubblegum in a mound soon to be thrown away; an old margarine tub of cardboard poker chips rubbed free of their bicentennial colors along the rims; the hothouse of vacuum tubes, their smoky glass and glinting filaments though so solid (heaviest at the base) still somehow orchid-delicate, bulbing out of the slab of stereo equipment tabled out of little reaches in the corner of the living room. My father was struck down with polio as a young boy and has always been a slightly wizened figure, even when his face was at its most full in his mid-thirties. A man whose steps I have never heard across the hardwood floors on my childhood home: could he ever "walk away" from anything he wanted to say the hell with? Unlike Hind, my father could not live on his own, unencumbered or, rather, free to pick and choose his encumbrances, in an upstairs apartment. The isolation -- and fathers do need some of this -- he has needed from us has always been in his mind and in his heart. For all that, my father is fiercely independent, difficult, outspoken, and especially outspoken when he needs assistance, which is more and more often the case. A man too tough to die, so I’ve been told and so I have thought. I am young still, relatively so anyway, and close to these things, looking perhaps for a place to consign them, so I’ll hope you’ll pardon me. But Joseph McElroy -- Joe, my friend, who told me he was honored to know my father -- could never know how this passage would affect me:

Even twenty years ago [Hind’s] limbs had in a way blinded him; from an over-all length of twenty-seven inches at birth, he had by the age of fifteen reached seventy-three... he knew he could never stop his growth, knew he’d add more inches whether he smoked or did nonbreathing handstands or tried to give arms and torso and thighs and calves the compressed fullness of a weight-lifter’s neat body... As the winter solstice approached, indeed all through midwinter, Hind tried to blight his energies; but he grew and grew right down to his animal toes and their vegetable nails. (11-12)

Because Joe could not know that moreover how I would put this passage together with that earlier one about the Guardian's voice. He could not have known that when my father read to me as a five-, six-year old child, I could not sit in his lap, but stood behind him where his wheelchair was braked (literally) at our red dining room table. I could even then reach the floor-lamp in that room more easily than he could, and I would look at the pictures in the little white-bound volume (a crayon streaked across its textured front) of Bible stories from which I often requested he read to me from over his shoulder. My father’s voice did not descend from above like the massive vibrations unleashed from a cathedral organ. Instead, I felt that voice as a rumble, a burring, muffled baritone deep in his chest and the words (Joseph being sold by his brothers) rose and trailed a little behind to reach my ears. But it was never the sound of a voice heard as one walks away, or is walked away from. It was different by virtue of being tethered to the ground of his shoulders, the resonating bars and spokes and the damping leather and rubber of his wheelchair. I could always feel his voice, even its origins in his lungs, through the riveted back of his chair, a feeling like a warmth in motion. A simmering. I too would have blighted my energies, but, unlike Hind, not to be more like the childhood friends who must have treated him differently for his difference, but as a way of giving those energies to my father. To finish, as Hind keeps thinking, what he was never really allowed to begin. What does polio do to the muscles? It looks like atrophy, but really they just never develop. The barrel-chest, the long and sensitive fingers that my grandmother told me were so expert on the piano (my father, father of four, could never afford a piano as an adult), the spindly, pale hairy legs trailing down to the curled, inanimate but frighteningly sensitive toes, always very red just out of the bath. These could be the legs of a malnourished, refuge child as seen in a brochure from a charitable organization. What is it like to be estranged from one’s own body? Is this the meaning of the creatures that populate Hind’s reveries? They are hybrids seemingly most grotesque as they attempt to bridge the gaps that they combine in themselves, as well as cross the gulf of speciation that separates them from all the other mutations that exist in the world. My father sits in his wheelchair, the invisible cyborg. Or some Max Ernst nightmare, metal in crude compensatory design for the infinitely broken (they can never grow together, grow back) parts of the body, part of him only to be thought of as mechanical. No less so as he waits with a firm hand on the telephone, the one spot of light in his extinguished bedroom, waiting after 5 PM for the radiologist's office to call and offer some explanation about the spots -- 12 -- they've seen on his liver. (As of this writing, the information has not been passed to me.) Last year, on a March day that dumped 6 inches of ice across Dallas and Tarrant counties, he lost a leg from the knee down because of a melanoma that grew on the bottom of his foot. And it grew so large that he could no longer fit into his specially-constructed shoe (attached to a brace; post-Salk, few brace-makers in America). There are now "concerns" that a full year's worth of interferon treatments have still not been enough to destroy the cancer. My father, coughing, asks me to stand behind him and lift his shoulders so he can attain a seated position. He is so thin it is painful to look beneath his beard (always scraggly anyway), but he is still heavy in his chest and torso, unnaturally so, as if his bones have gained bulk. I can feel his spine like a petrified vine, knotted round and round by another parasitic, knotting vine, through his white t-shirt. In part -- how else?!? -- my father is a thing, a thing I was taught from an early age required maintenance and machine instructions. Forward, back, pivot; wheels where there should be thighs, knees, calves, ankles; turn, no bend, compress, yoga limbering, hopping, etc. I have a friend who is currently in the early stages of muscular dystrophy. The warning sign, number one warning sign, was numbness in her feet. She would be walking and would trip, even fall. She also experienced difficulty driving. Her body is in rebellion. In an allegory, that which is unclear is particularly monstrous and, if Hind’s Kidnap is a labyrinth, then Hind himself is the minotaur lurking around its corners (the name of the town in which the Laurels lived is Long Corners).

Hind was on his back. He closed his eyes again. He watched his pink, sun-blurred hand save a child’s face from acid that had been intended to clean the face of personal traces. And three drops sank into the back of Hind’s hand and turned it into a claw-wing expertly composed and fuselaged by a film team’s property man, a claw with raised green veins. (17)

I [wife Sylvia] ask, soaping [daughter] May’s golden arms ("Dial-A-Child") and salty hair so easy to bathe because she is charmed by your squatting presence at the tub edge, a hungry monster hesitating to reach into a nest—but one of your several forms and made by my mind, not May’s, who cannot understand your great height except as a grownup’s. (242)

To reach out into the world is to be affected by what one would desire to touch, command, alter outside of one’s self. Assuming there is anything outside one’s self. If there isn’t, allegories would sputter and stall and never achieve anything remotely approaching epic length. It was not until a year ago that my mother told me about the many surgeries my father endured as a boy of what?, 4 or 5 years of age, how his "material reality", his physiology was rearranged, organs shifted, ligaments removed and reinstalled elsewhere, other dark matters. Which meant that, contrary to what my long-time vision of my parent’s affection for one another is / was, they had, years before I had been born, discussed these things. And intimately. Were they whispered; said with eyes cast downward, tearfully, resentfully (after all these years…); over drinks, with cocktail piano and sloshing ice backdrop, on a front porch, in the car, driver and passenger staring utterly ahead, how? My curiosity spins on its axis, orbiting nothing. Does every child eventually grow into the sadness of realizing that their parents have stopped growing themselves? That those adults are grown, and that we missed it, learning that we missed it we are closer to them even as we can’t really recover all that we’ve missed (such is speculation), but at least can re-imagine and thus recover perhaps more than they ever can? That we really will finish what our parents began? I think so, and I feel it in my father’s case so acutely because I have evident before me everyday an outward sign that, yes, such growth stops and becomes something else. We will be the end of them. Recall how your parents, in moments of exasperation, would tell you that you would be the death of them… When parents lose the magic of that allegorical word, Parent, and become only people, flawed, vulnerable, maybe even wizened. So that, though the situation through which it narrates is much closer to m own, Richard Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma has never spoken to me as Hind’s Kidnap has. Something, not what I would call a force, tells me the Powers novel is what I should take my heart. But I don’t, and I know there is a story there that bears upon the stories of the novel I do choose. Joe himself would most likely tell me I should save all this for a novel, by which he would mean a novel of my own making, but I would respond that I have saved them for his novel, this novel, because it is a novel that requires just these operations of multiplication. I warned you the book was about intimacy, didn’t I? I hope I did. "Don’t end it", the last words uttered in Hind's Kidnap… End as surcease? No, as comforting as that would be, I do not think it is not a question of healing, but of being able to receive and to cope with the fear the comes with the knowledge that the boundaries of another person’s life can be so permeable to the imagination, and that the important thing isn’t gaining entry so much as it is not getting lost in the process of finding a way back to yourself.

Hind thinks about these things too:

Hind knew her [Sylvia] just as painfully as she was invisible to him. The dark insides of the body you lived in all your life—the heated, stemming parts; the esoteric heart valves or the pancreas—esoteric because they existed only in the hospital where you had them looked at. (34)

And you thought of the soft mass of Cassia’s [Cassia Meaning, a lame girl with whom Hind was infatuated as an adolescent] insides, unknown to her, and bubbling away, different from the outside skeleton of membranes, hair, crust, and polish, each with untamed intersections of message while behind and below were dark bubbling insides loved but almost never seen. (525)

What is the totality of another person? I’m laying odds, very Jungian odds, that the allegory resonates with us so much because it plays out in its most basic procedures our faith in our own human metaphysical being. The narrative of the allegory is the work’s body; the allegory’s ulterior meanings represent the soul. Yet if contemporary literary theory has taught us anything, it is that we cannot compartmentalize (another pop psychology term…) meaning as much as we may like. Hind's Kidnap: A Pastoral On Familiar Airs: that latter is not just a subtitle. It is also a clue. Like all things titular it is both suspended above and embedded within the actual narrative itself. Titles may not be abstracts or summarizes, especially when one is dealing with fiction, but so often criticism begins the minute an author settles upon a title for their work. So it is important that, as McElroy’s novel nears its conclusion, Hind is writing the story of his guardian’s life, but he has no title for the work. Finally, Hind does devise what could be called a thesis about his father:

This is a man who, possessed by a dream of freedom which he never, hence, possessed, thought himself a shepherd but found himself a tree. (533)

Whether you are in Elysium or not, trees are stationary and thrive despite human intervention. They are indifferent. Well, not really; the movement of trees is so gradual as to be imperceptible, and its movement that is multi-directional. It is mostly cellular movement the “hidden messages” Hind has to reconstruct in his imagination as he thinks about the women he loves. Trees, by virtue of their size and the expanses they penetrate, are never immobile. They vibrate with motion, some contrary, some sympathetic. Trees sway or droop in response to the weather; for those standing underneath them, they soak up rain and draw lightning. At some point, the bend of a tree becomes a snap. If my body were a tree’s body, or as long and broad and multi-limbed as a tree’s trunk, I would have to traverse it with my eyes, and this could take a very long time. When one grows to such proportions, one is much less self-contained, and perhaps it becomes easy to objectify portions of one’s self. And what of the largely unseen yet known symmetry and balance of forces that is a tree? A tree is a stalk with roots and branches raveling into huge fibrous balls at either end. The further down into the soil a tree delves in order to feed and to keep from toppling, the further upward and outward its canopy thrusts, the hardier its trunk, the greener and crisper its leaves, the rounder and heavier its fruit. Tress transform raw materials, they are makers. They drink, they excrete, they host millions of instances of generative division in their most minuscule tissues. Perhaps those roots, thriving in choking opacity where the branches invite in a network of wind and light, can be construed to be like the grander reality represented in the figures of the allegory. The tree’s branches offer us hints about the reality of the roots, hints in terms of resemblance. Roots and branches: two similar but distinct relationships on either end of a resilient and devious continuum. Trees like words, their healthy coloration a reflection of what is not there, chemically, the explanation of which is one of Hind's recurring memories. A tree's grasp of the ground, like a word's grasp of consciousness, is an odd tenacity. We think of a tree as occupying mainly two dimensions, as a vertical thing that occupies spaces high and low normally inhospitable to our occupation – just as we can’t live others lives for them or fully inhabit their experiences. And so that space we don’t take may feel like lost freedom. And trees always embrace us -- if not always tenderly -- when we enter the landscape in which they are situated. Roots below our feet, branches above our head: trees mediate. Breath, unformed words whose air we trade with the photosynthesizers of the earth, is a mutual use we make of one another. We are always climbing trees, really. As often as we are clambering over one another.

Works Cited

Feldman, Morton. Give My Regards To Eighth Street: Collected Writings. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.

McElroy, Joseph. Hind's Kidnap: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

Posted by joe on August 31, 2004 7:39 AM