a (mostly) objective portrait by David Hughes
"Is there any way to
fully grasp another's story without actually being them?"
- Arlen Ford in "From the Teeth of Angels".
Jonathan Carroll was born in New York City on January 26, 1949. His father, Sidney, was a writer whose film credits include The Hustler (1961), A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966) and the story basis for Gambit (1966); his mother, June (née Sillman), was an actress and lyricist who appeared in numerous Broadway shows and two films: An Angel Comes to Brooklyn (1945) and New Faces (1954). Jonathan would have been twelve years old when his father, together with director Robert Rossen, adapted Walter Tevis's novel The Hustler into a vehicle for Paul Newman; the
following year, their screenplay was among the film's eight Academy Award nominations, though they were beaten by Abby Mann's adaptation of Judgment at Nuremberg. Some years later, Carroll recalls that his father was consoled with an Emmy Award for a documentary he wrote about the Louvre gallery, a fact which Carroll Jr, then at preparatory school, remembers using to impress a girl.
His parents' professions meant that much of his early years were spent between houses on the East and West coasts, and, perhaps predictably, Carroll admits to having reacted against his upbringing by becoming "a kind of juvenile delinquent". According to most sources, this rebellious youth was curtailed when a friend was shot dead by police, and the teenage Carroll was packed off to The Loomis School, "one of those snooty 'Catcher in the Rye' kind of schools in Connecticut." Shortly after graduating cum laude from Rutgers University, he married artist Beverly Schreiner on June 19, 1971. He subsequently studied for his Masters Degree at the University of Virginia, while working as an English teacher, first at the North State Academy in Hickory, North Carolina, and then at St Louis County Day School. A desire to teach English abroad led him to the American International School in Vienna, Austria, although he also received invitations to teach in Tehran and Beirut. He currently lives and writes in Vienna, while his eighteen-year-old son, Ryder Pierce, attends Skidmore College in New York State.
But these are the bones of Jonathan Carroll's life, and to give them flesh, one needs to look beyond his own background and into the history of his writing.
Carroll was still at prep school when he had his first idea for a short story. "It was about an old woman who lives alone in New York, very lonely, and she decides to get a dog," he has said. "And at the end of the story she kills the dog, purposely, because the dog has done something that annoys her." (Carroll readers will doubtlessly delight in the fact that one of the author's beloved canines appears in so early a story, foreshadowing their significant appearance in later works.) He still remembers his English teacher, who was failing him at the time, running through the school grounds, shouting "This is a great story, Carroll!" This, he says, was the turning point: "Give me a pen."
Carroll says that his father did not exactly encourage his son's writing - "It was more 50-50 than his whole hearted support" - although he remembers being told "that it makes no difference what I write, just so long as I continue writing." An essay entitled "Reading My Father's Story", published in the Cimarron Review in October 1973, describes an encounter with his father's work, a short story about Beau Brummel entitled "The Shining Thing". "I gasped when I saw his name and story right there, underneath Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery,'" Carroll, then aged 25, wrote proudly, and the dedication in the front of Carroll's second novel, "Voice of Our Shadow", lifts a quote from "The Shining Thing".
In May 1976, the Transatlantic Review published "The Party at Brenda's House", a short story set in 1968 in Carroll's home town of Dobbs Ferry, New York. Describing the build-up to the eponymous party, the five page story established the semi-autobiographical style Carroll would adopt as his own, blurring the lines between fact and fiction until only the writer knows where one ends and the other begins.
Perhaps the best example of this method came in 1980, with the appearance of Carroll's first published novel, "The Land of Laughs", which describes the efforts of a young schoolteacher who heads to the small town of Galen, Missouri, to research and write a biography of his favourite author, only to discover that the writer has created more than a series of well-loved stories for children, and that the whole place, and all of the people within it, are of his own making. Carroll's conceit in showing glimpses of France's incredibly imaginative stories lead many to wish that the stories really exist, but aside from the power of the writing and extraordinary imagination of the ideas within it, "The Land of Laughs" is notable for its adoption of two devices common to later works: the use of a talking animal to signal entry into the world of the imagination; and the unsatisfactory resolution which appears both to frustrate Carroll's readers (and editors) and, at the same time, endear them to his work.
In 1982, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone magazine published what many recognise as another milestone in the creation of Carroll's patented style. "The Jane Fonda Room" was typical of his subsequent work in that, rather than taking the magazine's formulaic 'twist in the tale' as the dénouement of his story, Carroll uses it at a jumping-off point, detailing a man's damnation as the ultimate wish-fulfillment. 'Be careful what you wish for,' the story implies, 'for it may come true.' It was a theme he would revisit again and again in later works.
Like "The Land of Laughs", Carroll's next novel, "Voice of Our Shadow" (1983), takes a writer as its central figure, but the tone of the narration - in which a man named Joe Lennox, whose conscience has been troubled for years by his older brother's death, is inadvertently responsible for another death - is far darker; indeed, many mistook it for a horror novel, a fact which would haunt Carroll's work for a further decade. More importantly, however, Carroll says that the novel helped to sour his relationship with his father, which became "progressively more unpleasant as the years went on and I became recognised as a novelist."
Carroll published three further short stories - two of them in German - before his third novel appeared in two slightly different versions, in 1987 and 1988. Widely considered to be his breakthrough book, "Bones of the Moon" opens with the arresting line "The Axe Boy lived downstairs" before spiralling into a far-reaching narrative which blurs, juxtaposes and crosses the borders between the real and imagined as it explores the effect of a young woman's guilt over an abortion on her current relationship and subsequent pregnancy. Like "The Land of Laughs", the book contains excerpts from another, more fantastical work - in this case, the heroine's dream-life - but "Bones of the Moon" is in many ways a more measured, mature and ultimately satisfying book which justifiably established Carroll's reputation as a master storyteller, even as its subject matter created controversy, despite being neither pro-choice nor pro-life.
Carroll's next novel, "Sleeping in Flame" (1988), marked the second of what is often referred to as 'The Rondua Trilogy', and was also the first to reprise characters from an earlier work - in this case, the film director Weber Gregston from "Bones" - and introduces the popular figure of Venasque, a sort of shaman whose wisdom guides the protagonists of several subsequent stories. "When I was writing 'Sleeping Flame', there's a point where Walker [the protagonist] gets a call to go to California and make a movie, and he picks up the phone and at that moment I said 'It's Weber Gregston'," Carroll has said. "And that's when I realised this stuff was going to continue, because I like these people - they're my friends." The publication of "Sleeping in Flame" coincided with the short story "Friend's Best Man" winning the World Fantasy Award, and although Carroll was now pigeon holed as a fantasy writer (a marginal improvement on horror writer), his fan base had by this time grown to include such literary heavyweights as Pat Conroy, Stephen King, Michael Moorcock and Thomas Harris.
"A Child Across The Sky", published in 1989, completed the loose 'Rondua' trilogy, following Weber Gregston as he attempts to complete the horror movie his friend and fellow film director left unfinished when he committed suicide. Perhaps Carroll's most emphatically horrific novel, and one which stands least comfortably on its own, "Child" is nevertheless an affecting morality piece which positions itself roughly half way between David Lynch's obscurantism and Wes Craven's post-modernism as it examines the question of screen violence created for its own sake. (Incidentally, the novel was the first of Carroll's to incorporate a previously published short story, in this case, "Mr Fiddlehead".)
Carroll continued to find a home for his short stories in such fantasy, horror and science fiction publications as Weird Tales, Fear and Omni, and his novella "Black Cocktail" was a limited-circulation publication profusely illustrated by Dave McKean, whose appointment as cover artist for British editions of Carroll's books would continue through his next three books. His next major novel, "Outside the Dog Museum" (1991), was an accomplished and widely praised work in which a famous and important - and famously self-important - architect named Harry radcliffe is forced to reassess his own life when he is contracted by a far eastern Sultan to build a billion-dollar structure for the glorification of man's best friend. Another breakthrough of sorts, "Dog Museum" marked the beginning of a more prolific period for Carroll, who was finding his stories in greater demand in anthologies and magazines, though they still tended to appear mainly in genre publications.
Only a year would pass before the publication of his seventh novel, "After Silence", in which an emotionally-scarred cartoonist named Max falls in love with a young woman and her son, only to discover some unpleasant truths about his lady love once the two of them have set up home together. A more marked move towards the mainstream, "After Silence" garnered a number of American reviews which felt the ending to be unsatisfactory, most likely because the fantasy elements it introduces did not sit well with critics who would have accepted it from one of the South American 'magical realists' to whom work Carroll is often compared by his admirers. European reviewers were more forgiving, one describing it as an "enthralling story of a relationship founded on quicksand... with tragedy waiting on the shore."
"From the Teeth of Angels", which followed in 1993, was extrapolated from a short story, "The Moose Church", which appeared two years earlier in a horror anthology. Although it incorporates several characters from earlier works - most notably the TV personality Wyatt and film director Philip Strayhorn - stylistically it could hardly have been more different, and critics were sharply divided over whether the book was "filled with the bitter reek of disillusionment" (London's Time Out) or "a gruelling, cleansing, emotional journey that asks all the big questions" (The Guardian). Either way, Carroll's determination to avoid classification was now finding its way into his books, rather than just the quotes in his interviews.
"The Panic Hand", a long-awaited English language edition of the Frankfurt-based Suhrkamp's 1989 collection of Carroll's short stories, finally appeared in 1995, providing an interlude between his eighth and ninth novels. Featuring one or two stories not included in the German edition, including the novella "Uh-Oh City", and a brand new story, "A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings", the tales of "The Panic Hand" have been described as "an exquisite map of the heart, a unique and astoundingly accurate series of insights into the human condition, told in magic and metaphor."
Although "The Panic Hand" showcased almost the entirety of Carroll's fantasy ouevre, he continued to edge toward the mainstream with "Kissing the Beehive", which, in the absence of a supernatural component, reads more like a classic crime thriller, as it takes both Carroll and his narrator back to their formative years in a suburb of upstate New York - the book's fictional town of Crane's View is closely modelled on Dobbs Ferry. In the story, novelist Sam Bayer takes a trip to his old home town to shake an attack of writer's block, and begins to poke into a twenty-year-old mystery, the murder of a teenage beauty Pauline Ostrova, known to her boyfriend - who was wrongly convicted of the crime - as 'the Beehive'. Like "After Silence", "Kissing the Beehive" is a chilling study of how an excavation of the past can have a tragic effect on the present - and how easily the safety and comfort of the world we inhabit - or at least, think we inhabit, can be torn down and erased forever.
As his sales climb, more steadily than one would imagine, Carroll's readership continues to expand among the great and the good, with such diverse talents as Jane Campion, Juliette Binoche, Sting and the King of Poland - where Carroll says his books sell "like free sex" - now counting themselves among his fans. With the publication of his eleventh novel, "The Marriage of Sticks", shortly before the end of the millennium, Carroll may find his largest readership yet, for the stranger the world around us becomes, the more the twisted reality of Carroll's work seems to fit our own.
Many of the readers who have been along from the beginning find Carroll's books infuriatingly hard to classify - although the need for them to do so is more frustrating for the author. Kierkegaard said, "If you label me, you negate me," and Carroll has something like those feelings towards enforced categorisation of his own work. If he writes fantasy, how does one classify the stories which have no fantastical component? If he writes twentieth century horror stories, why do so many of them feel like 19th century romances? However one describes his work, Carroll's stories almost always invoke an emotional response - what Carroll himself has called "the 'Oh!' reaction, where people come to a certain point in my books and say 'Oh!' like a punch in the stomach." For some, that reaction is where his stories take a turn toward the supernatural. "People often say things like 'He's such a literary writer, and yet he puts in all this fantasy stuff,'" Carroll has said, as though those things have no place in a 'proper' book. "Well, okay," Carroll responds, "but let's talk about the story."
My own opinion, for what it's worth, is that a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne - a writer to whom Carroll is compared least often, yet bears the most comparison - comes closest to summing up what Carroll does best: "Dream strange things and make them look like truth."
(c) 1998 David Hughes. 'Reproduction without the author's express written permission is prohibited' contact David Hughes with comments or reproduction issues..
