Spotlight on … Thomas McGuane The Bushwhacked Piano (1971)

‘Thomas McGuane has steadily produced novels, stories and screenplays, and essays on sports and pastimes like fishing and horseback riding. He has been quietly influential and subtly subversive. Coursing through his work is a current of strident silliness—funny names, wacky characters, outsize occurrences—that flows from Mark Twain, picks up Ring Lardner and others early in the twentieth century, and adds Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, post–World War II.

‘In spite of this, McGuane is hard to place. The humor is evident from the start, but there is something stylishly askew. The early novels The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), while full of oddballs in slapstick situations, also feature formalities of diction and syntactical quirks (“Stanton beckoned”; “Little comfort derived from the slumberous heat of the day”) that seem plucked from the Victorians. The Sporting Club’s protagonist even puts himself to sleep reading Thackeray. Complex intellectual formulations pop up, the following (from Ninety-two) occasioned by its narrator’s imagining his “aging lame” father in a whorehouse—horrible thought perhaps, though the narrator wonders if quiescence would be even worse: “A silent man wastes his own swerve of molecules; just as a bee ‘doing its number on the flower’ is as gone to history as if it never was. The thing and its expression are to be found shaking hands at precisely that point where Neverneverland and Illyria collide with the Book of Revelation under that downpour of grackle droppings that is the present at any given time.” One imagines young readers at that time (1973) pausing here to light up, musing, “Like, wow, man.” Early McGuane is full of such moments.

‘Still, McGuane’s work dodges the then-discernible categories. He was not part of the Barth/ Barthelme/ Hawkes wing of mytho-historical realism, though he seems to have been a fan, or at least a reader. Critic Dexter Westrum reports that a friend remembered young McGuane paying a quarter for a “first-edition hardcover of The End of the Road, John Barth’s scarcest title.” And while Richard Brautigan (along with Carlos Castaneda and Baba Ram Dass) gets a mention in McGuane’s 1992 novel Nothing but Blue Skies, McGuane is never fixedly part of the hippie-lit set. Pynchon’s 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, does seem to have some bearing on the case. Pynchon, like McGuane, goes readily to comic extremes, and indulges in similarly trippy intellectualizing. Pynchon’s college pal Richard Fariña, whose campus romp Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me was published soon after Crying and sported a Pynchon blurb, might have come to McGuane’s attention. But Fariña, like Pynchon a student of Nabokov’s at Cornell, comes off as Joyce-struck. Classicisms and interior monologue often get in the way of his tenderly slapsticky, innocently iconoclastic prose. Early McGuane is winnowed clean of modernism’s more oppressive effects. …

‘McGuane is one of the rare contemporary American writers whose characters always do things. They run businesses, put up fences, farm, ranch, guide, fish. They are not people on vacations or grants, they are not professors, critics, writers, or artists—or, when they are, they are artists becoming cattle ranchers, as in Keep the Change (1989). In this way issues of class and money arise naturally, between bosses and workers, and the sense of automatic and persistent injustice is apparent and recurrent. The disadvantaged are abundantly aware of this, even when they themselves are acting badly. There’s a crushing moment at the end of the story “A Skirmish” (To Skin a Cat, 1986) when the dirt-poor father of troubled boys who have been tormenting the story’s narrator nevertheless takes his boys’ side, figuring that in the long run his boys “will go where they’re kicked” while the well-off narrator “will always have something [he] can do.” The hint that the safety net money affords tilts the playing field irreversibly in favor of the upper class gives McGuane’s comedy political heft. As McGuane put it to The Paris Review, “I suppose I am a bit left of Left. America is a dildo that has turned berserkly on its owner.”’ — Mark Kamine, The Believer

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Media

McGuane, Richard Brautigan, a.o. in ‘Tarpon’

Tom McGuane with Richard Powers: the Long and Short of It | 3-6-2018

Excerpt: ‘Missouri Breaks’ (1976), based on TM’s novel

Warren Zevon sings ‘The Overdraft’, co-written with Thomas McGuane

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Further

Thomas McGuane Official Website
‘He’s Left No Stone Unturned’
Video: Sam Lipsyte on Thomas McGuane
‘Thomas McGuane: The lay of the land’
TM interviewed @ Identity Theory
TM’s story ‘Cowboy’ @ The New Yorker
TM’s story ‘The Casserole’ @ The New Yorker
‘Captain Berserko Writes a Better Ending’
‘Thomas McGuane: FR&R;’S Angler of the Year 2010’
‘La leçon de vie de Thomas McGuane’
TM’s ‘Remembering John Updike’
Video: ‘Thomas McGuane in “Trout Grass”’
Buy ‘The Bushwhacked Piano’ @ Amazon

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Interview
from The Paris Review

All five of your books seem to have distinctive stylistic features. Could you talk about the specific evolutions your prose has undergone?

THOMAS McGUANE: I started my career distinctly and single-mindedly with the idea that I wanted to be a comic novelist. I had studied comic literature from Lazarillo de Tormes to the present. The twentieth-century history of comic writing had prepared me to write in the arch, fascist style that I used in The Sporting Club. Then the picaresque approach was something I tried to express in The Bushwhacked Piano, although I’ve now come to feel that the picaresque form is no longer that appropriate for writing; writers are looking for structures other than that episodic, not particularly accumulative form—at least I am. Ninety-Two in the Shade was the first of the books in which I felt I brought my personal sense of epochal crisis to my interest in literature. It’s there that you find this crackpot cross between traditional male literature and The Sid Caesar Show and the preoccupation with process and mechanics and “doingness” that has been a part of American literature from the beginning—it’s part of Moby Dick. The best version of it, for my money, is Life on the Mississippi, which is probably the book I most wish I’d written in American literature. When I got to Ninety-Two I was tired of being amusing; I like my first two books a lot, but I tried to put something like a personal philosophy in Ninety-Two in the Shade. That book also marked the downward progress of my instincts as a comic novelist. Starting with Ninety-Two I felt that to go on writing with as much flash as I had tried to do previously was to betray some of the serious things I had been trying to say. That conflict became one that I tried to work out in different ways subsequently. The most drastic attempt was in Panama, which I wrote in the first person in this sort of blazing confessional style. In terms of feeling my shoulder to the wheel and my mouth to the reader’s ear, I have never been so satisfied as I was when I was writing that book. I didn’t feel that schizophrenia that most writers have when they’re at work. That schizophrenia was in the book instead of between me and the book.

The father-son relationship is constantly a major issue in your fiction. Is some of the tension of these fictional relationships autobiographically based?

TM: This is plainly so. If you’d been around me while I was growing up you’d have clearly seen that my relationship with my father was going to be a major issue in my life. My father was a kid who grew up rather poor (his father had worked for the railroad) and who had a gift for English; he wound up being a scholar-athlete who went to Harvard, where he learned some of the skills that would enable him to go on and become a prosperous businessman, but where he also learned to hate wealth. My father hated people with money and yet he became one of those people. And he was not only an alcoholic but a workaholic, a man who never missed a day of work in his life. He was a passionate man who wanted a close relationship with his family, but he was a child of the Depression and was severely scarred by that, to the point where he really drove himself and didn’t have much time for us. So while he prepared us to believe that parents and children were very important, he just never delivered. And we were all shattered by that: my sister died of a drug overdose in her middle twenties; my brother has been a custodial case since he was thirty; as soon as my mother was given the full reins of her own life, after my dad died, she drank herself to death in thirty-six months. I’m really the only one still walking around, and I came pretty close to being not still walking around. It all goes back to that situation where people are very traditional in their attitudes about the family, a family that was very close (we had this wonderful warm place in Massachusetts where my grandfather umpired baseball games and played checkers at the fire station), but then they move off to the bloody Midwest where they all go crazy. I’ve tried to work some of this out in my writing, and my younger sister tried to work it out in mental institutions. She was the smartest one of us all, an absolute beauty. She died in her twenties.

Nicholas Payne in The Bushwhacked Piano says, “I’ve made silliness a way of life.” Was “pranksterism” part of your own life as a kid?

TM: Yes, it was, but there’s more to it than that. We have chances for turning the kaleidoscope in a very arbitrary way. I wanted to be a military pilot at one time and came that close to joining the Naval Air Corps until I got into Yale, which I didn’t expect to happen. One of the practical things they teach combat fliers is that you can only reason through so much, and therefore in a combat situation if at a certain point you feel you can’t reason through a situation, then the thing you must do is anything, so long as you do something. Even in the Navy, with its expensive equipment and its highly predicated forms of action, you are told to just splash something off and do it! Doing something arbitrary or unexpected is probably the only way you’re going to survive in a combat situation. Game theoreticians have made this an important factor. The first strike is really very close to pranksterism. Pranks, the inexplicability of comedy, and lateral moves at the line of scrimmage can sometimes be the only way you can move forward. In silliness and pranks, there is something very great. It’s in that scene I created in Panama—the decision to jump off the diving board not knowing if there’s water in the pool. Sometimes that’s not a dopey thing to do but a very smart thing. It’s the first strike.

Are there any contemporary American writers you especially admire or feel affinities with?

TM: Nobody very surprising, I suspect: I like Barry Hannah, Raymond Carver, Harry Crews, Don Carpenter, Don DeLillo, Jim Harrison, Joan Didion. DeLillo has categorized a certain kind of fiction in a way that seems absolutely definitive: “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard fiction.” There are a lot of good writers who belong to that group—a lot of recent women writers are in that school, for example, and many of them are tremendously good. At the same time, writers with broad streaks of fancifulness or writers who have trained themselves on Joyce or Gogol, as I did, may feel a little reproached when we compare ourselves to these writers who write about the bitter, grim, domestic aspects of living. You feel, gee, I’m pretty frivolous compared to these serious people. Sometimes this can be a misleading reproach because you may decide that you need to change your subject matter if you’re going to be a serious writer.

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Book

Thomas McGuane The Bushwhacked Piano
Random House

‘As a citizen, Nicholas Payne is not in the least solid. As a boyfriend, he is nothing short of disastrous, and his latest flame, the patrician Ann Fitzgerald, has done a wise thing by dropping him. But Ann isn’t counting on Nicholas’s wild persistence, or on the slapstick lyricism of Thomas McGuane, who in The Bushwhacked Piano sends his hero from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship whose highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and apprenticeship to the inventor of the world’s first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.’ — Random House

‘The work of a writer of the first magnitude. His sheer writing skill is nothing short of amazing. The preternatural force, grace, and self-control of his prose recall Faulkner…. McGuane is a virtuoso.’ — Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review

‘McGuane shares with Celine a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare.’ — The New Yorker

Select sentences and passages

Years ago, a child in a tree with a small caliber rifle bushwhacked a piano through the open summer window of a neighbor’s living room. The child’s name was Nicholas Payne.
Dragged from the tree by the piano’s owner, his rifle smashed up on a rock and flung, he was held by the neck in the living room and obliged to view the piano point blank, to dig into its interior and see the cut strings, the splintered holes that let slender shafts of light ignite small circles of dark inside the piano.
“You have spoiled my piano.”

*

The red Texaco star was not so high against the sky as the Crazy Mountains behind it. What you wanted to be high behind the red Texaco star, thought its owner, was not the Crazy Mountains, or any others, but buildings full of people who owned automobiles that needed fuel and service. Day after day, the small traffic heading for White Sulphur Springs passed the place, already gassed up for the journey. He got only stragglers; and day after day, the same Cokes, Nehis, Hires, Fanta Oranges, Nesbitts and Dr. Peppers stood in the same uninterrupted order in the plastic window of the dispenser. Unless he bought one. Then something else stared out at him, the same; like the candy wrappers in the display case with the sunbleached wrappers; or the missing tools on the peg-board in the garage whose silhouettes described their absence.
That is why when Payne coming at the crack of dawn, rolling a herd of flat tires, pur- suing the stragglers all over the highway, seemed unusual enough that the station owner helplessly moved a few imperceptible steps toward him in greeting, “Nice day.”

*

Later, some entirely theoretical argument with the bartender ensued during which the bartender thrust his face over the bar at Payne to inquire how anybody was going to wage trench warfare on the moon when every time you took a step you jumped forty feet in the air.

*

The man finished and charged Payne three dollars. Payne told him he thought he’d been protecting a dollar and a half’s worth of biness. “Rate went up,” said the man, “with complications of a legal nature.”

*

And California at first sight was the sorry, beautiful Golden West silliness and uproar of simplistic yellow hills with metal wind pumps, impossible highways to the brim of the earth, coastal cities, forests and pretty girls with their tails to the wind. A movie theatre in Sacramento played ‘Mondo Freudo’. In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, “My horse is soiled!” While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

*

We each of us know instinctively that hemorrhoids were unknown before our century. It is the pressure of the times symbolically expressed. Their removal is mere cosmetic surgery.

*

His coordination departed and he made unnecessary noise with his feet. He still bravely managed to get to the edge of the bed and look down at the muzzle of the shotgun bobbing under Missus Fitzgerald’s nose. He had occasion to recall the myriad exquisite ways she had found to make him uncomfortable.

*

You’re going to get a crack at cooling your heels in our admirable county jail,” she said, moving toward him. “Do you know that?”
“I just want my walking papers.”
“No. You’re going to jail you shabby, shabby boy.”

*

When sophisticated or wealthy women get angry, they attempt to make their faces look like skulls. Missus Fitzgerald did this and looked awfully like a jack-o-lantern. She was that fat.

*

She had built, with her share [of Mr. Fitzgerald’s G.M. earnings], a wig bank on Woodward Avenue for the storage of hairpieces in up-to-date, sanitary conditions…. Fitzgerald had visited his wife’s operation, walking through the ultraviolet vaults filled from floor to ceil- ing with disinfected hairpieces. It was not the Mountain West in there. Stunted workmen in pale green uniforms wheeled stainless wagons of billowing human hair down sloping corridors. Prototypes of wig style rested on undetailed plastic heads.

*

“I wonder if you would say ‘oh’ if you were a part-time secretary at the bank if Wy- andotte who had dropped December’s salary on a teased blonde beehive which you had stored all through the summer and broken out for the Fireman’s Ball in November only to find that the expensive article contained a real thriving colony of roaches and weevils; so you spray it with DDT or 2, 4-D or Black Flag or Roach-No-Mo and all the bugs, all the roaches, all the weevils run out and that wig bursts in to flames by spontaneous combustion and the house which you and your hubby—because that’s what they call their husbands, these people: hubbies—burns down around the wig and your nest egg goes up with the mortgage and it’s the end. I wonder then, if you were her and had owned this wig which you had stored privately, I wonder if you would have wondered about a refrigerated fire- proofed wig bank after all? Or not.”
A little voice: “I would have put my wig in the wig bank.”

*

The shadows lay this way and that, the way a tide will carry on a particularly shaped bottom, bulging and deepening and only holding fish in specific places. Or the way six grandmothers will fall when simultaneously struck by lightning.

*

When man tries to devise things for the defeat or alteration of the natural world, usually those things turn out looking like a penis. But the phony phallus here is loaded with renegade sperms in the form of native Florida bats that by nature will not obey the will of man. They cannot be made to devour mosquitos upon man’s orders, just as artificial insemination is often a bust, and cloning is risky business. In addition, under the auspices of Florida, such antics are doomed, ludicrous, and sometimes fatal; so the mosquitos remain to pester, infect, and kill.

*

The bulk of the rest of his time would be used in aimless and pointless research in the natural world, from biology to lunar meditation; all on the principle, the absolute principle, that ripeness was all.

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Technically, they’re not dictionary definition automatons, but yeah, gotcha. Mm, I feel like there was a guest-curated Satie post ages ago, but I’m not sure. If so, I’ll try to resurrect it. If not, I’ll put it amongst my to-dos. Yesterday was John Waters’s birthday! Talk about a high holy day, gay and not! ** Misanthrope, I’m beginning to wonder what doesn’t scare you, ha ha. I remember the F chord being a contortionist nightmare. One phrase alteration in your novel will change everything? That’s pretty amazing. Huh. I don’t understand agents. Never have, never will. Oh, man, warm hugs about your friend’s death. So, so sorry. Death should be illegal. ** Bill, Ah, automatons are amidst your zeitgeist, awesome, and, well, yes, that makes sense. Unproductively busy would describe my week thus far too. Shame we can’t kvetch together over a burrito. Go into the light. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ah, so you’re re: ‘WoO’ like I am re: ‘QaF’. Hooray for outsiders? Wait, there’s new SCAB coming out on Monday?! Is that what you meant? Whoa, if so. Huh, I think the magic jumping beans I had were plastic too now that you mention it. Or … I can’t remember. Do you know what Spanish Fly is? When I was a kid, that’s what other kids called something that was supposed to be a primitive form of Viagra mixed with a date rape drug. I think it was a myth, but the kids I knew were always saying to one another, I’m gonna slip that girl (or boy) a Spanish fly and … I guess do whatever kids thought hot nonconsensual sex consisted of. I’m glad I guessed right about your ground floor. I miss miniature golf, even if it’s almost always more fun in theory than practice. Ha ha: your love. Love like a talking bee with a huge IQ, G. ** Jack Skelley, Car jack! I like when my blog becomes characteristically itself. I’m doing my ‘The Holy Mountain’ imbibe tonight. Well, I’m certainly ultra-curious to hear your wordage about ‘I Love Dick’. Please prepare a soliloquy for Saturday? Glad you’re on board with ‘Mars Attacks!’ Lukas Haas’s speech near the end is one of my favorite things in the world. You have the proofs aka the proof! Imagine my slobber. You wrote the Uber Granny story? No! That’s vast! Next? Uh, a story about ‘I Love Dick’? Too traumatic? ** Steve Erickson, The left and right need to eat a slice of hot boysenberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Tulpas are already itching to be tired. ** Billy, Unambitious teachers and dowling rods are a terrible combination. Exactly, disaster movies are like Buster Keaton on excessively bloated budgets and with non-human Keaton-esque protagonists when they’re lucky. Sounds like heaven. I’ve never been a fan of London, I don’t know why. I mean I like being there okay and dig what it affords, but I find it very alienating, and I hate the tube especially after living with Paris’s sublime-ish metro. But I’m just weird. No, I’ve never been committed to a nuthouse. It’s almost shocking how kind of sane I am. I generally prefer theorist’s fiction to their theory when I have a choice. I like seeing a theorist’s ideas imaginatively laid out. Blanchot is great in general. His novel ‘Death Sentence’ is my all-time favorite novel. So I guess maybe try that? I don’t know John Horne Burns. I must find out about him, obviously. I’ll hunt for his output. Hm, I suppose you’re right about automatons being sort of cavemen gifs. That would explain a few things. I mean a few things that are uninteresting if you’re not me. ** Brian, Hi, Brian! Sometimes all you need is a good shiver, right? I think shivering (not from being cold) is very underrated. Empirical improvement is some sort of satisfaction, albeit vastly undercut by emotional dumpsterdom. Sorry, man. You will manage. Ive gotten to know you well enough to know you’ll more than manage in fact. That warms my heart about your brother. Artists rule. Or can. One hopes. Um, subsequent days have proven less refreshing, but they’ve passed without untoward incident. Do you have relaxing or even mouthwatering weekend plans, I hope? Happy Friday to you too, my friend. ** Okay. I think some of you or even most of you, I don’t know, know that I have a fondness for psychedelia-influenced novels of the late 60s and early 70s, and the book under my spotlight today is a good example. See you tomorrow.