(urth) Short Stories 104-109: Redwood Coast Roamer/Four Wolves

[Marc Aramini]

Redwood Coast Roamer/Four Wolves

All of these stories were written on a trip Wolfe took via Amtrak to
Seattle, written in the observation car. They appeared in several different
places, but “In The Old Hotel: did not see the light of day until it became
part of the collection *Storeys from the Old Hotel.*

I. MY BOOK

“My Book” first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction stories in May of 1983
and is reprinted in *Endangered Species*.

SUMMARY: A rather eccentric writer prepares to write every day by beginning
with some Mahler on the radio, and he reviews some of the essays and
thoughts that inspired him. Ultimately, he decides on writing his book from
the end to the beginning, starting with the final word, “preface”, and
working backwards. He ends by stating, “And so I have proceeded, step by
laborous (delightful) step, chapter by chapter, until soon, perhaps this
very year, surely before the coronation I will begin the preface.”

COMMENTARY:

Wolfe identifies our author as a madman in his introduction to *Endangered
Species*, and besides the eccentric writing habits and thought processes,
there are a few cryptic details. The pages which he sets out so carefully
in their white glory are ruined when he returns to them, as if a part of
him crumples them up in frustration, a frustration which is then
suppressed. He researches things multiple times over and over but never
seems to write, until he comes upon the most disjointed and inconvenient
method of composition ever, one devoid of all normal and logical
development. The neurosis of composition is stressed, and the literary
allusions below make quite clear that his blockage has become the object of
a particularly perverse negative obsession.

While the narrator might have written chapter after chapter as he claims,
it seems as if the entirety of his book is simply presented from the last
several words: all he has to write about is the process of composition –
there is no depth or meaning to any of his labors. His book might actually
be “My Book” - a three page short story about nothing but delusional
struggles in composition. This stark barrenness is the height of pride and
excess, a kind of neurosis that, though it references everything, never
succeeds in growing beyond itself. The last line is ironic, for while it
seems that he is going to finish his book when he begins the preface, it
could be that for all that sound and fury he never quite begins the book he
wants to write.

Since “My Book” refers to Rahv, Mahler, and Kafka (indirectly), there does
seem to be a slight bias towards Jewish artists in its references, and the
only truly inexplicable detail is the upcoming coronation. Given that it is
probably a contemporary work, the idea that this neurosis is growing in war
time Europe on the cusp of a transition to the modern era is rendered
unsound by the Rex Stout and baseball references. The literary allusions
make the theme of the narrator's insanity much more apparent.

LITERARY ALLUSIONS:

The author claims that his project began with the idea that man only has a
concept of religion as a historical force from a Philip Rahv essay. This
essay may be found as the introduction to *The Selected Short Stories of
Franz Kafka* in which Rahv comments first on Kafka not only as a neurotic
artist but as an artist of neurosis, driven by obsession. The desire of
Kafka to destroy his work completely and the concept found in stories such
as “The Great Wall of China” that explores the vast separation between
authority and the orders to be followed, between a heavenly and corporeal
limited viewpoint, emphasize the piecemeal and haphazard thinking
definitely at work in the narrator of “My Book”

Since “My Book” refers to a fairly late Nero Wolfe novel, *The Father Hunt*,
in quoting, “It was nice to know the next step was obvious, but it would
have been even nicer to know what it was,” we know that the story is set
after 1968 and is possibly contemporary with the time of its composition.
However, the other behaviors of the writer, from listening to Mahler to
being inspired by Rahv, certainly seem a bit more old fashioned. *The
Father Hunt*'s plot (a woman's mother is killed, and she believes her
unknown father has something to do with it) seems to have little relevance
to this particular story besides giving us a Wolfe reference.

The narrator compares his research to Injun Joe's Cave in Twain's *Tom
Sawyer *– a place where he has been lost for some time, unable to move from
repetitive research to meaningful composition.

The most important allusion is quite explicit: Oliver Onion’s “The
Beckoning Fair One”, in which a writer on the cusp of producing what might
be his most significant work becomes gradually obsessed with his new living
place and descends into madness, intermittently determining to scrap all of
his manuscript and working further on it, but accomplishing little.
Eventually, emaciated and demented, his lady friend winds up dead in his
house, killed by his delusions (or possession, as the case may be, as the
previous owner of the house starved himself to death rather oddly).

Ultimately the idea of a man obsessively writing about the composition of
his book, which might be the book itself, seems like one of Borges
self-referential mazes rendered meaninglessness, signifying only itself,
though we have some very interesting quotes about mankind’s experience of
the divine in history.

RELIGIOUS ALLUSIONS:
I wonder if the preponderance of Jewish artists mentioned has anything to
do with the theme of waiting for something so long (the Messiah and
Redemption) and failing to recognize when the moment of validation and
meaning comes, though this could be entirely unintentional (though the Rahv
quote is quite suggestive – especially since the Jewish conception of the
Messiah is so much more secular than most Christian ideas of Christ. The
nebulous nature of the Jewish afterlife, perhaps developed in contrast to
their death-obsessed Egyptian oppressors, is particularly based in the here
and now rather than the later. Our writer wants to create a great
masterpiece but his book will have no meaning beyond the story of its own
composition. The coronation and ascension never comes.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

While our narrator is insane, how is he connected to the coronation? Is it
religious, secular, or an imaginary delusion of grandeur?

“My Book” is extremely brief, and the idea that our narrator has
unconsciously already written his book is clever without seeming earth
shatteringly significant. It is perhaps the most difficult to parse
thematically from all of the stories Wolfe composed on his train trip to
the West Coast.

II. THE RIVER

“The River” first appeared in *Amazing Science Fiction Stories* in May of
1983 and has never been reprinted.

SUMMARY:

The short story begins, “Through all the countries that no map shows there
runs Siith, the Infinite Stream. Some say that in the end, in farthest
places, it runs back upon itself; others that it flows at last into the
gulf. Both are correct.” The rest of the story is a description of the
river – at some places broad, in others narrow, but with no bridges, as
only the current and birds can traverse it, “and the speech of birds is
known only to those who have tasted dragons’ blood.” Once a century or so
the current swirls some scrap of paper from a minor scribe and cities fall
and rise, with temples and churches, and perhaps missiles fly, “but they
are only scraps from the tables of the minor scribes.”Althor-elmil is Lord
of the river, and he takes all the boats built by people, and those who do
not swear to serve him die. He casts feral beasts and those who live by
stealth into the river, and sometimes people see “strange things drawn from
wells, blood drinkers, and hairy men.”

“Of late it has been observed that Althor-elmil builds ships having wins
and rockets, and these are taken by Marhoon, how is Lord of the Air.”

COMMENTARY:

This seems to be one of the literary myths Wolfe speaks of in a few of his
essays and speeches, those things that are the opposite of allegory. He
defines them as follows: an allegory posits that a giant might be despair,
but a literary myth asks something like, “what if love were a woman?” This
story does the same thing – we see the river, and we have to ask ourselves
what symbolic association seems to satisfy this description? Is the river
history, the exploration of the unknown, or is it actually the unknown and
mysterious in life? It would seem to be perhaps exploring the question,
“What if the unknown were a river?”, since only those who have tasted
dragon’s blood can ask the birds what the river is like (fantasists, I
suppose). The inference could be that the river is the border between the
known and unknown. When a scrap of paper drops into the river, progress
happens: buildings and churches go up, missiles and wars occur, but they
still do not have a lasting effect on the river. The story has no concrete
characters besides Althor-elmil and Marhoon, and it is interesting that
they are differentiated between. When humanity seeks to explore and map the
seas and face the unknown, it is still on its home planet, no matter how
hostile and large the seas. Yet these air-ships, to the sky and moon, seem
to representing something else. Now the river no longer seems a symbol of
the unknown – it is the sky.

The Wolfe-wiki states that the river seems to represent the boundary
between reality and fantasy, the known and the unknown, and this seems a
good way of describing it.

Is there a meaning to the name Althor-elmil? Does it imply son of thunder,
the thousand, or should we be looking a more Arabic root?

Marhoon is Arabic for mortgaged or pawned, something given as security for
a loan.

In “The Boy Who Hooked the Sun”, Sith is another name for Kronos, and the
word is also related to the Sidhe, or the Faerie Folk Wolfe employs
frequently.

The scrapes of paper allow cities going up and to occur, as the boundary
between the known and unknown shifts with new ideas and discoveries. Why
should this infinite river suddenly give way to a different lord? Is this a
spiritual statement or merely one dealing with the nature of the unknown as
humanity leaves the earth behind?


 III. AT THE VOLCANO'S LIP

“At the Volcano's Lip” first appeared in the May 1983 issue of Amazing
Science Fiction Stories and is collected in *Storeys from the Old Hotel.*

SUMMARY:

The wife of the narrator complains that his loud talking prevents her from
hearing the roar of the earth, and a planned flight is prevented because
the pilot would not fly with “snow” on the mountain.”

They drive down back roads and see devastation, the wife pointing out here
the volcano’s effects can be seen, but the narrator seeing only “the prim
labor of saws … the tread of trucks” in a national forest.

They buy postcards and a Frisbee with a picture of the mountain. “She had
exploded with the force of five million (or perhaps five billion) tons of
TNT, with the fore of a hydrogen bomb, with a force equal to the combined
forces of all the bombs dropped on Japan, plus that of the test that may
(or may not) have been conducted by the Union of South Africa.” (The story
is probably referring to the Republic of South Africa and the Vela Incident
on September 22, 1979)

They buy a cup fired with a picture of the volcano and see a river of ash,
and the wife repeats that they would have seen it if the husband had not
talked so loud, “drowning the roar of the volcano, the roaring of the
engines. But I love you anyway.” The story ends with the ominous, “The
geologists had seen smoke and scented poisonous vapors, that their
instruments all felt the earth trembling, trembling at the margins of the
missile silos. It may be, I told my wife, that there are louder talkers
coming.”

COMMENTARY:

Clearly designed around the explosion of Mt. St. Helens in the early 1980s,
the narrator notices how commercialized the destruction of the earth is –
the massive force of the land and the volcano serves mostly to create
souvenirs for mankind, and he compares the destruction to what mankind has
done – cutting up national forests, fighting and creating weapons of mass
destruction like the missile silos mentioned at the end. While he may speak
with a loud voice, the idea that louder talkers are coming is a threat of
escalation – whether those talkers be the harbingers of war as the
superpowers arm themselves against each other, or the earth itself, which
trembles in disgust in all its might, ready to descend upon a creature who
has spoken a bit louder than it should have. His wife cannot hear the
natural sounds over him, but the absurdity of this is revealed at the end,
when she implies one man’s shouting would drown out the volcano and the
engines, and for this reason they were kept from witnessing the volcano’s
eruption.

It seems his shouting might be that of someone shouting out for peace,
restraint, and understanding, as well as a considerate treatment to the
environment, since the narrator sees the commercialization and destruction
rampant in the world and feels the looming threat. The title, “At the
Volcano’s Lip” implies that humanity and civilization are at that
precipice, since our couple never gets to approach the lip of the erupting
volcano.

IV. IN THE MOUNTAINS:

“In the Mountains” first appeared in May 1983 in Amazing Science Fiction
Stories and is collected in *Storeys from the Old Hotel.*

SUMMARY: The narrator remarks that it is still snowing even in April. “The
cliffs, the color of anti-rust primer, are dusted with white. Forests of
Christmas trees run up them forever. Elk do not fear our train”. These elks
are now “good members of the Elks Club now” and silenced. He tells his wife
he saw a tree that a bear had just walked around since “it had that look.”

The narrator goes on to tell of a couple who wanted to live in the woods
but her fear of bears kept them in the city, where the harsh chemicals and
pollution ruined their health. “Once I asked his doctor if he would always
cough like that. ‘No,’ his doctor said. ‘Not always.’” He talks of the
sharp blade of the old man’s ax, dulled in color and varnish but unused.

“The wood of the frightful bears are gone now, cut to make houses and
books, or perhaps only to clear the land (Why should land be clear, when
each mirror shows an uglier face?) No doubt the frightful bears are gone
too, perhaps to the high mountains, the mountains of Montana, of
Washington. May they with my heart abide here forever, stalking elk,
dodging clumsily, slyly, around Christmas trees, leaving bear tracks in the
snow.”

COMMENTARY:

This is a conservationist piece that reveals the almost mystical
associations the narrator makes at the beginning, about a tree looking as
if a bear had just walked around it, are tied to real cause and effect: our
narrator noticed the tracks – the wife merely thinks him silly because she
understands neither him nor the natural world. The destruction of the
forest and the loss of the wild frontier are juxtaposed with the story of
fearful “Goldilocks”, who has become gray and ill, her family ruined by
city life, her children not turning out “well”. While mankind desires a
close relationship with the natural world, his fears keep him separated,
constantly eradicating it, to show a world barren of nature, a barrenness
that mirrors an ugly face.

While the Elk Club is not really a hunting organization, it does represent
a fraternal, organized society that has merely adopted the Elk as a symbol
of the American spirit.

While Christmas trees would normally have some kind of symbolic
association, I feel that this story is satisfying in its simple message –
the modern world is much more destructive and dangerous than the
“frightful” bears, who leave tracks and signals that let us know about the
natural world if we know how to look for them – at the beginning, the elk
do not fear the train, but they should. Similarly, we do not fear the city,
but perhaps we should. If there is any religious significance to the tree
in nature, we see it in its living environment stripped of consumer driven
greed; the bear sidesteps it without bothering it, neither resisting nor
destroying it, but existing around the natural world, while the man in the
city has his sharp ax ready to cut down any tree that gets in his way.

V. IN THE OLD HOTEL

“In the Old Hotel” appeared for the first time in *Storeys from the Old
Hotel* in 1988, though it was written with all of these stories.

SUMMARY:

A couple is registered in an old hotel because English friends (unaware of
their presence) are there too, a man and his daughter. The speaker compares
the hotel to an old man resting and gasping for breath, the modern
television out of place in the hotel's antiquity.

“Tomorrow and tomorrow. The old hotel is forever looking to tomorrow,
striving to show it has a place in the future, that it need not be torn
down.”

An old man in the elevator comments on two pretty women that join them to
the narrator: “They get better all the way down.”

“But not for you, old man, I think, lying awake beside my sleeping wife.
Your time with the girls is over. And I fall asleep.”

“The old hotel smiles its tense smile, polishes its dark wood – an old
retainer out to show he does not have to retire so soon, though he may be a
little lame.” The narrator says he would rather see false teeth than false
smiles.

They meet the English friends on the street, and the girl says, “It was
over by noon … I’m fit as fit.”

COMMENTARY: The rustic allure of the old wheezing hotel striving to stay
relevant as time leaves it behind, pushing off its dissolution and death
just a bit longer, seems to be the primary impact of the central
description of the story. Wolfe’s narrative voice is sympathetic with the
genuine honesty of the primitive world rather than the veneer of
artificiality in the modern world. The primary question is a simple one:
why doesn’t the couple want the Englishman and his daughter from Devon to
know that they are registered in the same old hotel?

There is a nice irony in the narrator falling asleep next to his sleeping
wife thinking that the old man’s days with the women are gone – while this
old hotel attempts to look towards tomorrow and still eventually faces
dissolution, the same drive to last in humans when they are young involves
having children, and after that, striving to stay relevant in a changing
world as their reproductive days fade into nothing but a dream and a memory.

If “it” was over by noon, was the girl pregnant? Something else? The
Englishman has white hair, which seems to indicate he could be an
appropriate age for having a grandchild, and since he and the narrator
reside at the top floor of the hotel, and the girls get prettier as one
goes down, it seems that this meeting on the street level would imply that
perhaps there is some kind of new life outside the inevitable acquiescence
of the hotel.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Besides the purpose of the young woman's stay in the hospital (which would
seem thematically to be most probably the birth of a child, or something
related to the life cycle and reproduction), the narrator refers to the
hotel as Kennedy. Is there any significance to this name?

VI. ON THE TRAIN

“On the Train” appeared in *The New Yorker* in 1983 and is reprinted
in *Storeys
from the Old Hotel.*

SUMMARY:
Our narrator glances outside of a train on which he seems to have spent his
entire life and sees an earth become almost liquid, “rushing to flow over a
falls that is always just behind the last car.” The narrative claims the
universe can be contained in three questions – “How long is the train? And
from what station does it originate?” We can assume the third is “Where
does it end?”

The narrator does not remember boarding, but his mother said she recalled
it, though she has now left his compartment. He says he “would go up and
down the cars looking for [the doctor who delivered him] (and [his
mother]), but one cannot look for a doctor without arousing the anxiety of
the other passengers or exciting their suspicions.”

There is a porter named Flip who “was once [the narrator’s] dog, a smooth
fox terrier”, who makes the berths and serves coffee and knows more than
anyone else about the train. If the narrator’s wife and he try to make Flip
stay to answer questions, Flip will call his Uncle, the Dawn Guard.

The narrator speculates that the train is “either very long or very short,
since when it goes around a curve … I cannot see the engine. Possibly it is
infinite – but it may be of a closed as well as an open infinity.” After
thinking that it seems both circular, in a circle going around the earth,
and straight, extending into infinity among the stars, he notes that the
mountains seem to crowd closer, “as if to ram us by night.” He lies in his
berth, “listening to the conductor (so called because he was struck by
lightning once) come down the car checking … tickets in the dark.”

COMMENTARY:

We should mention once again Wolfe’s comments about the story, which relate
that he rode an Amtrak to Seattle and back on which he composed the short
stories that are included in this entry. He states

“Flip was the ruffian clown who woke Little Nemo from his wonderful dreams,
in one of the finest Sunday comics ever. My father gave Flip’s name to the
fox terrier we owned when I was very small: Flip’s barking always woke my
father up. There was no reason for you to care, to be sure, but for both
you readers who have stuck with this until now – The earliest memory I have
of my mother is that of a lovely young woman bending over me as I life abed
on the seat of a railway car. Her eyes are blue. She wears a gray cloche;
from under it peeps a stray lock of auburn hair. Would the year be 1934? I
can’t say for certain, but about that. Now I must stop, lest the afterword
grow longer than the story.

Wolfe has here revealed the symbolic weight of the train: his earliest
memories are on one, and thus its association with the start of life’s
journey, which at times seems a circular entirely earthly trip and at other
times only a journey into an infinity almost incomprehensible, especially
to a sincere dualist. The farthest echoes of his memory summon up that
maternal face and the sound of the train.

The comic strip Little Nemo involves a boy who is summoned into Slumberland
to be the playmate of Morpheus’ daughter, and at first the green and
short-tempered clown Flip is something of an enemy that tries to wake him
up before he gets there, but they become allies. Note that in Wolfe’s
comments, we see how the dog also woke his father from his slumber.

In some ways much of Wolfe’s dream cosmology involves the concept of the
ability to wake from the waking world into something that is perhaps less
bound by the laws of the physical world but is “more” real nonetheless. The
conductor who checks tickets is perhaps symbolic of the power of the gods,
Jove, coursing through the one who drives the train, (which of course could
be a reference to the divine power invested in the form of a man, the
Theoanthropos), though I am not familiar enough with Little Nemo to know if
there is a reference there as well, with its treatment of slumber and myth.

Each family seems to create its own compartment in life, and his children
have now formed compartments of their own, while his mother has left his,
gone to an unknown place.

The Dawn Guard referred to in the dream has an identity in the comics, the
Guardian of the Dawn, who breaks up the images of Slumberland as the sun
rises – in this way, the train trip is certainly a dream image.

The symbolist in Wolfe has created a story where the earliest memory
becomes a metaphor for the entirety of life, which we can certainly expect
to haunt his fiction (my own is watching my grandmother heat up pot after
pot of water on the stove to prepare my bath, since we had no hot water in
our small apartment near Madrid).

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

The flowing river that the objects outside the train appear to become seems
a repetitive motif in Wolfe's fiction for something numinous and
transubstantial, beyond ordinary comprehension. In this story, is that
merely due to the artistic style of the Nemo cartoons?

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORK:

This type of literary myth became increasingly frequent in Wolfe’s writing
in the 1980s and seems an outgrowth of early stories such as “The Green
Wall Said” and “Cues”, but they are closer to “The Old Woman Whose Rolling
Pin is the Sun”, “At the Point of Capricorn”, and even perhaps “Love, Among
the Corridors”, all of which seem allegorical but are a bit more
sophisticated than standard allegories.
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