Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained.

Wallace-Crabbe, Chris

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained by August Kleinzahler, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, $19.00 cloth, ISBN 0374133778.

It can be a curious business when distinguished poets turn to prose. August Kleinzahler, who is a wonderful evoker of the here-and-now, of what Hopkins called haecceitas, has produced a tripartite book of essays, frequently playful, even flip, but with much of the plangency springing from a life enjoyed somewhere inside the text. It sits intriguingly beside his concurrent, prize-winning volume of poetry, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep.

Cutty, One Rock is crafty but transparent enough. It is variously lively, even slangy, with quick-moving prose which can sound like Jarrell for a moment, or even like S. J. Perelman in its catalogue bravuras. Kleinzahler has a strong story to tell in the first three chapters and the final movement of the book, the tale of a bright New Jersey kid who managed to live close to the Mob but turned out to be a poet as well. His mother goes off to "her Shakespeare club, which met on alternate Tuesdays," and his gay brother (this is very gradually revealed) becomes a gambler, boozer, and a crook. The account of this disconcerting alter ego, who "was a great brother, if somewhat elusive," is strongly developed. Unfortunately, Kleinzahler had to make a full-length book out of this and didn't quite have the cloth to cut the full suit.

Some of the metaphors are tucked well back, for instance the rock with which the narrator's brother crowns an assailant late in the book. And in between, we have a monotonous account of a bad film, and some disgraceful comments on a New Zealand Kleinzahler has never taken the trouble to notice. The worst example here of American provincialism comes in a paragraph which boasts that:</p> <pre> More enduring music, painting, and literature came out of the area in New York City encompassing the zip codes 10009 to 10014 than has come out of New Zealand in 150 years. </pre> <p>Without going further, how many short-story writers did the United States produce in the twentieth century as good as Katherine Mansfield? But my point is not to defend that highly literate culture on the wrong side of the world, but rather to indicate where this book is languidly padded out. Even the charming chapter on Eros and poetry could have been put together in a good library one cheerful afternoon, for all its excellent, saucy quotations.

Indeed, there are some solidly sexy fragments among them, their authors ranging from Plato to Mina Loy--via Rochester, of course--and interesting remarks about what our sebaceous glands are up to. But the main drag of this book runs elsewhere, through passages like this, dealing with Frank Sinatra:</p> <pre> Another nice picture shows him with Carlo Gambino, who was the intermediary between Vito Genovese and Joseph Profaci in the Anastasia hit: Frankie-boy is smiling in his dressing room at the Premier Theater in Westchester, New York, next to Carlo and the hit man (later informer) Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno and three other hoods later convicted and sentenced for fraud and skimming the theater's box office. </pre> <p>Yes, there is a poetry in the orchestration of proper names. But the heart of Cutty, One Rock is the nimble way Kleinzahler manages to combine being a fairly gruff inside-dopester with deep affection for his dysfunctional brother. Here is a poet who has looked into the underworld, or at least had a drink there, and trodden its sleazy lanes. And there is narrative persuasion in this.

In part, this is a hymn of variegated praise for New Jersey, which the very style--syncopated, slangy, pained--aims to bespeak. Kleinzahler is obsessed by the contagion of place and seems to have been since the moment recorded in his funniest sentence: "My appearance on the scene was unwelcome enough, but it turned out that I looked like the dog." He writes poignantly about "the smell of grass and wet pavement," about trying to reach his aged parents, and about his good-looking brother's fights. The last chapter (or is it an essay?) traces the nights in which the author followed his deteriorating brother around poker clubs and gay bars. What we are shown or told, against the current of his fate, is that the brother was "fun." You could have real fun when you were out with him.

In the end, this is a mongrel of a book, but its first third and its ending make up a vivacious, affecting memoir. And it reminds us keenly, warmly, that so few autobiographers take any notice of their siblings.