Spotlight on … W.M. Spackman An Armful of Warm Girl (1982)

 

‘W.M. Spackman is often called the literary heir to F. Scott Fitzgerald—his tense, despairing young men of tarnished Depression-era America serving as the natural next generation to Fitzgerald’s glittery Roaring Twenties youths. The same people, attending the same parties and drinking the same bootleg alcohol, inhabit the Long Island Sound of Gatsby and the brownstone apartments of Spackman’s Princeton cohorts:

Around one or two in the morning, at most parties of that era, the milling company would begin to dwindle, and take on a kind of planetary movement, like an orrery, endlessly tangential and revolving. Constellations of guests would widen or contract, sidereal outlines swaying and loosening and re-forming under the hurtling impact of accretions flung loose from other revolving or decomposing worlds and seeking new orbits to join; a whole galaxy would explode in a sudden surge for drinks all round, to scatter carrying with them to other spheres, in a rain of fiery intellectual matter, the jokes, the topics, the disputes, the ideas, which the parent-star had generated to a white and whirling heat.

‘(Some poets see the universe in a grain of sand. Some see it in a frat party.)

‘The same girls flutter around looking decorative and delicious, the same boys hover near them looking hungry, and all have the same jaded regard for the future, as if living in the moment were the only option. But the guests at Gatsby’s parties think the future is not worth worrying over, while those in Spackman’s world know it has been lost to them before they ever had a chance to seize it.

‘Heyday, like Gatsby, is about a man pursing a girl—each of them planets in their own orbit, each feeling the pull of the other’s gravity. The novel is somewhat awkwardly structured but beautifully told, sliding from one shimmering scene to the next while capturing both the charged hopelessness and the defiant gaiety of a generation robbed of its promise. Within the space of a few pages we hear why each of four men from the Class of ’27 committed suicide, and an account of a crisis at a dinner party where the escort hired to even out the seating turns out, unexpectedly, to be socially connected. Bright language and bitter humor are the hallmarks of Heyday; optimism, less so.

‘Most readers familiar with Spackman’s work discovered him not through his first novel, but his second. Heyday had long been out of print by the time Gordon Lish, editor of Esquire, came across serialized sections of the new book in an issue of Canto and demanded the editors at Knopf (who had rejected it the first time around) look at it again. It wasn’t that they had passed on it because they didn’t like the novel, but because a book about—how did I put it?—a man having a midlife crisis was not thought to be very marketable at the height of the feminist revolution. By 1978, though, the revolution was either over or no longer a threat to book sales, so when Lish brought the manuscript back around Knopf said yes. An Armful of Warm Girl, and its author (now in his 70s), finally found a publishing house to call home.

‘The melancholy tones of Heyday are not to be found in An Armful of Warm Girl. The main character, Nicholas Romney, is one of those Princeton boys from the era of Heyday, now “aged fifty years or as good as.” He’s irascible but charming, and has done well, bearing all the accoutrements of that success—a wife, a country estate with a folly, a wastrel son, a country club membership, a frivolous daughter—with the full sense of entitlement that this is how life should to be. So he is shocked, on returning from one of his golf games, to find that his wife is leaving him for reasons she doesn’t bother to spell out—presumably because they are self-evident. (They are not self-evident to Nicholas.)

‘In a bad temper he goes into town, digs out his 17-year-old little black book, and starts calling old girlfriends. After a few frustrating dead ends, he eventually reaches Victoria (now Mrs. Barclay) and informs her that his marriage is over, so why doesn’t she come have a drink with him?

‘It was at about this point in the novel that I started to feel real sympathy for my friends who were put off by Gatsby or Jane Austen. What a bunch of dithering, useless people!

The thing is, Spackman dithers beautifully:

Here were the rooms they’d made love in, the hallways of what greetings, what partings, the oval stair’s half landing too where once—Had she no memory of their love’s landscapes? or saw him as he, ah how constantly, saw her, coming toward him along some unforgotten perspective, some Roman street that year, a via, a viale, racing toward him waving perhaps, eyes shining

It is hard to stop reading. Every sentence seems to tumble the reader headlong into the next. His style flows seamlessly between Nicholas’s internal monologue and external dialogue, between half-conversations and interrupted thoughts as he pursues his old mistress (she is willing to be pursued) and manage the infatuation of one of his daughter’s friends (but he does not mind being pursued by her, oh no—not at all). It’s all done so smoothly that when the author does toss in a pointed barb it cuts through the language so sharply that you laugh before you even realize what you’ve read.

“[w]ho were all these children? by god they baffled him, this generation, they appeared to think sex was a branch of psychotherapy.”

‘The phrase most often used to describe Spackman’s books is “comedy of manners,” so the Austen comparisons are oddly apropos, given that one writes about marriage and the other about adultery; one author concerned with the qualities of a good character and one whose philosophy of life might be summed up by Nicholas’s own opinion about morality:

What is this business of homilies anyhow but mankind’s fatuous and age-old yearning for the Book of Answers! There never had been answers; never would be; merely a linguistic mistake of Greek philosophy’s we’d taken over, that if the word existed the thing it denoted existed too. Why, the only serious desiderata for a normal Indo-European are a pretty girl within grabbing range, a dazing drink, and somebody to knock down.

— Nicki Leone

 

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Further

Reading W. M. Spackman, by Jeremy M. Davies
An American arcadia: the novels of W. M. Spackman
W. M. Spackman – He has the power to make you believe you are engaged in an important act merely by reading him.
When Style Is Content: A Run-In with the Fiction of W.M. Spackman
On the Decay of Criticism: the Complete Essays of W.M. Spackman
W.M. Spackman: Games of Love and Language
Old Bestsellers: Heyday, by W. M. Spackman
Bafflement And Desire
The man Lish fought for
Words I Have Had To Look Up While Reading “The Complete Fiction Of W.M. Spackman”
Buy ‘Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman’

 

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The manuscript of An Armful of Warm Girl

 

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His others

Ballantine, 1953

Perros-Guirec, 1967

Knopf, 1980

Knopf, 1983

Knopf, 1985

Dalkey Archive Press, 1997

 

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Quotes

“W. M. Spackman has the power to make you believe you are engaged in an important act merely by reading him.” — Jeremy Davies

“The six novels and two short pieces that make up The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman constitute what may be the most graceful and sophisticated erotic comedy ever produced by an American writer. Certainly Spackman belongs on that short list of the country’s greatest prose stylists.” — Newsday

“On finishing A Presence With Secrets, I turned right back to page one and read it again.” — Newsweek

“Everything happens: romance, wit, intelligence, geniality, culture without the politics that spoiled it after 1959, sex without tears, a genuinely lovable character… [Spackman] reminds us that once upon a time there was a civilization.” — New York Times

“These novels and stories are to be read for the entertainment value of their story lines, but more than that, for the breathtaking experiencing of exquisite language.” — Booklist

“The marvelous Spackman dialogue, with its ironic asides, stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and brackets of affection should be patented.” — Washington Post

“Studded with disarming observations and gorgeous, one-of-a-kind sentences, Spackman’s writing is a sensuous delight.” — Publishers Weekly

“Reading [Spackman] is like taking a warm bath in a luxurious prose style . . . This confectionary fiction bound to delight anyone with a taste for sophisticated whimsy.” — Boston Globe

“He has the power to make you believe you are engaged in an important act merely by reading him… It isn’t too much to say that Dalkey Archive Press’s decision to reissue these books in one volume is as distinguished and significant a publishing achievement as the publication in 1946 of The Portable Faulkner.” — Stanley Elkin

“In 1978, Spackman, a Princetonian and a Rhodes scholar and incidentally an entirely senior citizen, produced the novel that I believe to be the most elegant American figment of the genre of frivolity. “Worldly Innocence” is the rubric under which this tiny masterpiece is to be filed, its temper elegiac, its aroma erotic, its observations (“sleek arms tenderly flailing”) primigenial.” — Richard Howard

 

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Obituary

W. M. Spackman, a writer and classicist who in a burst of creativity late in life became the author of five novels, died on Friday at his home in Princeton, N.J.

Mr. Spackman, who was 85 years old, suffered from prostate cancer, said his daughter, Harriet Newell of Carmel, Calif.

William Mode Spackman wrote novels of romance, but they were by no means romance novels. His style, one couched in prose that drew the admiration of critics and comparisons with the work of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, dealt with male-female relationships with sympathy, humor and knowledgeable understanding.

Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine, who was his editor at Alfred A. Knopf, said yesterday, ”Mr. Spackman was a radiant human being and a radiant writer, a writer of great charm and high style, who took as his subject men and women who really liked and enjoyed each other.”

Mr. Spackman’s first novel, ”Heyday,” about the Princeton University class of 1927, of which he was a member, was published in 1953. His second, ”An Armful of Warm Girl,” was issued in 1978, when he was 72 years old. Yet another, ”As I Sauntered Out, on Mid-Century Morning,” is awaiting publication.

The scope of Mr. Spackman’s sweep of literature drew the attention of John Leonard in a review of a Spackman novel in The New York Times in 1980.

” ‘A Presence With Secrets ‘ is every bit as delightful as ‘An Armful of Warm Girl,’ if somewhat less shapely, and just as much a comedy of manners, even if those manners belong more to the 18th century than to the 20th,” Mr. Leonard wrote. ”Perhaps that is one of his points: the 20th century will make its claims, even on artists and lovers; history and absurdity take no prisoners.”

The author, who was born in 1905 in Coatesville, Pa., was removed as editor of Princeton’s Nassau Literary Magazine while an undergraduate. The university president, John Grier Hibben, suppressed an issue that contained what he called the ”most sacrilegious and obscene articles” he had ever seen in print. About Mr. Spackman, he said: ”I understand that he has been reading a good deal of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and T. S. Eliiot and other of the modernists in literature. He has evidently been well soaked in this type of literature and has tried to go the writers one better.”

After graduation, Mr. Spackman became a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. Later he worked as a Rockefeller Fellow in opinion research at Columbia University, as a radio writer, as a public relations executive and a literary critic. He also taught classics at New York University and the University of Colorado. His other novels are ”A Difference in Design,” and ”A Little Decorum.” ”On the Decay of Humanism” is a volume of essays.

In 1984, he received the Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for ”work that merits recognition for the quality of its prose style.”

He is survived by his second wife, Laurice Macksoud Spackman; Mrs. Newell and his son, Peter Spackman of Newton, Mass., his children by his first wife, Mary Ann Matthews Spackman, who died in 1978; eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. — NYT

 

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Book

W.M. Spackman An Armful of Warm Girl
Alfred A. Knopf

‘[Spackman’s] mature fiction offers a series of blithely moneyed, cavalierly attractive (and single) heroes whom one might conjecture to be Spackman unbound—a shining collegian never chastened by reality… As a writer, Spackman sought what Henry James, in The Golden Bowl, nicely termed ‘the convenience of a society so placed that it had only its own sensibility to consider’… [The] fifth [novel of the collection], As I Sauntered Out, One Midcentury Morning, was in the editorial works when death overtook Spackman, who was a notable example of geriatric blooming or of neglected genius, depending on how you look at it… Spackman settled to his subject: men and women doing courtship dances, captured with a [Henry] Greenian precision of fluttering utterance and insistent sensual detail. No more sweating to be a Darwinian Fitzgerald or a patrician Steinbeck: everything is to be oblique, indolent, Watteauesque. In Green’s subtly mandarin style… Spackman found a way to flow, picking up every vary and hesitation of the human voice and bending syntax to imbue descriptive prose with the feathery breath of speech… [H]is fiction comes as a revelation. No American writer was more thoroughly captivated than Spackman.’ — The New Yorker

 

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Excerpts

 

*

What he’d first thought of feeding his Victoria was an early-summer lunch out of Paul Reboux: a cool gazpacho, then a little glazed crème de cervelle (which, as he wouldn’t inform her was cervelle, she’d love), followed by a pink-fleshed lake trout garnished in two shades of green, viz., artichoke hearts and green mayonnaise, and end with a vanilla ice gleaming with slivers of almond and slivers of truffles. But then he remembered she made a tiresome fuss at truffles, which she held were not merely orated but rubbery, so after trying in vain to find frais de bois he had just this cherry tart with a crème aux marrons piped onto it in rococo swags.

That then was what she arrived looking lovely to eat.

 

*

All beyond was in deep darkness, under he saw thick mist above, night-glow from the luminous city around them thrown up saffron against filmy overcast, to be drawn in there, under great lifting curtains and pale coils of cloud, so that light was shed back down too faint anywhere, he hardly made out what this window gave on, below, muffled in black geometries of shadow; a small private square it seemed. And even elegant, a seicento façade over across, arcaded and ornate, the galleria a run of rounded arches all along it, also what must be the shape of a fountain, some spouting nymph he supposed, or riding marble waves a boy and dolphin, anyhow he heard the cold splash of water on stone. Silence again too everywhere, only damp breaths of night-sound rising like exhalations from dark streets and squares, where at last it smelt of spring.

So ecco, he said over his shoulder, in reassurance, and let the long folds of the curtain swing down straight again—there was nothing; had been nothing; late-night passanti scuffling. In any case not that rabble they’d run into, or anything like. But this without looking round at her, for he thought fright, yes, but also the delicate point now was, more likely, how with kindness to get her over what she was so stricken had happened, this helpless shock at herself he supposed: trouble with innocence was historical perspective, it had still to learn what was praxis. So, first, then, deal also with this woebegone nudity. Engaging or not.

There should be the usual toweling vestaglie warming on pipes in the bathroom. Where when he went to look there of course were. So he draped himself in one and brought her the other, saying amiably, here, put this round her pretty shoulders, she couldn’t spend her life under these comic European eiderdowns could she? while he saw to the fire.

On whose incandescent hummocks of ember he took his time shaking from the scuttle dribblings of fresh coal. Culm, it appeared: soft dusts kindled instantly, showering sparks, then soon the whole hearth glowed again, strewing its roses deep into the room’s vaults of shadow, so that when he turned round at last and found great innocent eyes dolefully upon him, those crimsons fluttering in her cheek anyone would have taken for hopeless blushing, so deep among the bed’s canopies of night had the hearth distributed its insubstantial emblems.

And blushing she may have been—helplessly not even he supposed being sure merely what next, or expected to know, for in the fire-fringed shadows she dropped her eyes from his to her cold hands. It seemed she could not speak for misery. Or gêne, for he saw it might be she had no idea what in this situation a girl found—desperately, or even at all—to say. A topic, even. Or, generally, what was, well, expected!

This unforeseen . . . could he label it “threshold-ritual”? anthropologically speaking it had been gone through like an angel, but on from there is not so near second nature. Including light drawing-room conversation if called for.

So, humanely, and still from across the room, imagine, he said to her (as if in complaint), getting caught in another of these pointless Mediterranean revolutions, what a damn’ nuisance. Assuming revolution was actually what it was, for he said genially he hardly thought Italy, Firenze anyhow, was a place any practical-minded Marxist would pick to start one. With their millennial history of total political cynicism? And all the black-marketable antiquities!

But she said in a shamed voice, “I thought we were going to die.”

Yes, well, after a moment he conceded, he supposed it was mostly that ominous lowering sound of a mob coming, like a typhoon. It was daunting; daunted anybody. So in pure primitive reflex people turned and ran. Whereas she’d seen for herself all they’d really needed to do, she and he, was step into the nearest doorway, or a courtyard, or anywhere out of the way. He was appalled he’d frightened her by not doing that on the spot. Instead of haring off first like a fool—luxurious as this pensione (or whatever it was) had in the event turned out to be.

But still it seemed she could not look at him, it was such a hopelessness, only murmuring something downcast about “. . . una condotta di collegio . . .” as if she did not see how, in English, she could possibly ever bring herself to face such a thing.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Cool re: your bro. Thanks for the luck, we definitely, definitely need it. When in doubt, believe in the far-fetched, except when politics are involved. Um, I feel like love, being the omniscient, ultra-connected dude he is, can surely hook you up with those needed supplies. Prepare their storage. I hope you can get started even without his intervention. Love, still equipped with that knife he had the other day, carving a bloody, dripping pentagram in Shawn Mendes’s forehead, G. ** Charalampos, You do know how to serenade a cemetery. What’s left, time-wise, to finish the film will depend on how much funding we have. Ideally, for instance, a month or more for the sound mix, but I very seriously doubt we’ll be able to afford that. Fasolakia: I’ll investigate. I like green beans. Glad ‘Elixir is Nog’ got caught in you. I love Eric Gaffney’s weird songs. ‘As the World Dies, the Eyes of God Grow Bigger’ is up there among my very favorite all-time songs. Garbage bin? Be careful. ** Darby 🐶🩸 ✋, I like encountering things with bare boned contexts. It’s a favorite angle of mine. He was poignant. I should have added that. I was, typically, locked into the formal aspects, weird me. You can mail me anything. I trust your brain. I used to write all my novels and stuff by hand and transcribe them into a doc, but then I figured out how to type my stuff, and now I just make notes and scribble down ‘inspired’ sentences in writing. I use Word. It seems like the easiest or most flexible place. Sometimes TextEdit, but it’s pretty simple. Go for it. What did you choose, and how is it working? I hope your being away for some of this week is due to gloriousness IRL. ** Jack Skelley, Happy TrueBluesday! Dude, I don’t believe in that shit either. I guess I’m open to interpreting weird bodily anomalies as deriving from sources I don’t comprehend maybe. I do, of course, also prefer the experimental in fiction, big time, but I thought the Fama had grace, etc. Struck out? Oh, you mean Benj vs. Elle Nash. Nah, Benj is super particular about how weird sex and fetish should be portrayed, and she didn’t do it his way. That’s all. I think everybody else liked her selection, but Benj’s passion tamped us down. I’m with you, bud. Yes, the sexy selfies with your book were wild. ‘Spasm’, nice, I look forward. I am in fact going to bundle up then combo metro/trundle over to meet LilyLady at their temporary Parisian abode this very afternoon! Expect much ears-burning. Love, me. ** Corey Heiferman, It would probably depend on your degree of soberness. I don’t know Synesthesia Gallery, I don’t think, but it sounds like my kind of place. Anyway, I’m going to indulge in those links/videos once I’m free of p.s.dom, thank you! And thanks much for the alert re: the Vassi books. I’m going to a post about him pronto, and that’s obviously a massive help in that regard. You’re so helpful today. I so appreciate it. ** _Black_Acrylic, They’re the wind beneath Tony Iommi’s wings. Okay, RIP laptop, and onto the brand spanking new one. A new laptop is always kind of exciting for the first few days. Enjoy. Excellent news indeed about the imminent writing class!!!! ** Steve Erickson, Good question. I can’t bear Mandico’s films. I hated ‘The Wild Boys’, and I lasted about ten minutes into ‘After Blue’, and this one I’m gonna skip — hop, skip, and jump even. We actually got a pretty swell multi-hour snowfall yesterday. It didn’t stick, but it was the veritable sight for sore eyes, for sure. God’s dandruff and all of that. Like I said to Charalampos, we ‘pray’ that we’ll get decent time to do the post-production, but until the funds are there — there remain none at this very moment — we also have to prepare for a rush job. Speaking of sound mixing, nail that track! ** seb 🦠, HI You may just have to accept your fate as someone biologically destined for night owlsmanship. It works for a lot of people, hey. Introducing the carrier pigeon to the pigeons that live on the roof near my windows, and they accept the pigeon into their fold despite their slight haughtiness at fraternising with someone from the working classes. And here’s the ‘I got it’ message. ** Right. W.M. Spackman is kind of the epitome of what they call a ‘writer’s writer’. Top notch stylist, quirky story builder, enviable and delightful chops, and little known to the general book reading public. And, in fact, he has become little known even among writer’s writers of late (recent decades) due to … who knows. All of which makes him ripe for my spotlight. Today I light-up his last novel and one of his best. See if it floats whatever boats you have. And I will see you tomorrow.