Of Ducks, Dinosaurs and Bears

Who is Jim Krusoe? And why are all his early books out of print? Will he ever find a larger audience? And isn’t it about time? When “Blood Lake” came out earlier this year, you couldn’t have called it a blockbuster smash, but readers who knew his work marked the event with quiet joy. Here came those same old themes again: the closeness between man and animal, a lonely man besotted with a narcissistic female gorilla, a bear who talks the reader’s ear off, a parrot named Jimbo--and, of course, the author; the constant narrator here is always “Jim” to you, or “Mr. Krusoe.” Here’s that world where metaphor isn’t just a turn of language, but another, closer, way of looking at the world.

When two guys go out fishing in the title story, it really is a blood lake, and their fishing tackle gets all clotted. And precisely because Krusoe’s metaphors are so literal-minded, you have to wonder: When another character in another story gets lost in the woods, takes shelter with a girl who looks like “a short, swarthy, asymmetrical version of Natalie Wood” and finds himself quickly involved in “such classic and modern acts of sexual congress” as “the Polar Bear, the Suspension Bridge, the Shoemaker and the Elves, Crop Rotation, the Spinning Wheel, the Bumblebee’s Adventure” and nine other variations, when performing the spinning wheel, wouldn’t the blood rush to your head? And wouldn’t you pass out?

As short as “Blood Lake” is, a mere 158 pages, it leaves you dizzy with words, giddy with supposition, vaguely confused about the real nature of the world we live in, but reassured that whatever you’re feeling, it’s worth the time and trouble to pay attention to it. Krusoe’s world is rich beyond our wildest imaginings, but not, of course, beyond his.

Krusoe started off his literary life as a poet, and it must have been clear, even to him, even in his first excited throes of poetic striving, that his career might veer in some “wrong” direction: If every other 20th century poet was playing morose football, he was attempting an amiable one-armed game of Ping-Pong.

He was forming his own definition of the highly advertised, and piously accepted, belief that this century was, as Auden believed, the Age of Anxiety and that the poet was a depressed intellectual whose duty was to see life clearly and whole but not to think much of it. Krusoe didn’t buy into that: If T.S. Eliot saw London as an “[u]nreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many,” Krusoe, several decades later, sees another metropolis in a different light: “Today the great city is covered with sadness / it lies upon the monuments of generals and cars / in a thick and greasy slime--nor do umbrellas / help for its source is everywhere. . . .” But doesn’t let things stay that way:

Now here’s the good news: Somewhere far away

a lone pilot is pulling on his flightsuit to begin

a long journey which will eventually take him

directly over the city--

and when his plane’s doors finally open

out will jump a clown who’ll do his absolute best

to cheer everyone up in the eight or so seconds

before he hits the ground.

FROM “SADNESS” IN “JUNGLE GIRL”

Given the fact that we’ll all be hitting the pavement--that hard and discomforting demarcation between life and death--what should we be doing? How should we spend our time? What if anxiety, depressiveness and scholarship aren’t necessarily the correct paths for a poet during the last third of this century?

While the intellectual world will almost certainly not rise up any time soon with mighty cries against Eliot, Pound, Empson and Auden and rush to embrace an obscure California poet and short story writer, a small band of readers just might, happy not to analyze Krusoe’s work but simply surrender to loving it madly. It’s almost embarrassing, like being so fond of sweet-and-sour pork that you absolutely have to order it in a restaurant even when your friends are going for steamed eel.

Krusoe doesn’t quote foreign languages or try to trick the reader, and he refuses to think lofty thoughts. (If he does, he has the good grace to keep them to himself.) He may be said to be the antithesis of the dark and brooding poet who self-consciously goes to Yale, spends his time in Europe, works assiduously on his resume and his career, and swans about with the Big Boys. He was born in 1942 of working-class parents in Ohio (like Kenneth Patchen, another embarrassingly sweet loner who wore his poetical heart on his sleeve), moved to Eagle Rock when he was in his teens, married, hung out with poets like Bill Mohr and Harry Northup and published in little magazines (which were, themselves, often endangered species) like Bachy, Intermedia, Momentum, Poetry Now, the Smith, Sudden Need, Sunset Palms Hotel and Third Rail. (What is it about the terrible fever that comes over poets from time to time, the longing and need to start up yet another doomed magazine that goes along for two or three issues and then the money runs out, the poets burn out and a couple of other idealists rise up from California Nowhere to take their place?)

Krusoe and others may have created or have begun to create another American school of poetry, West Coast in thought but even more, in feeling, the way that, in the 1950s, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Buddy Collette postulated a smoother, more elegant West Coast jazz to counter the frenzied cerebrations of the East.

This was California, utopian California, where anything was possible, in theory at least. Krusoe composed his early poems cautiously, hopefully. In “Dawn,” he writes: “I’ve dodged the draft, the jobs and idleness: I think / thirty years old--ain’t been caught yet.” What should a Californian, visionary, populist poet write about? There were women, after a first wife, but Krusoe, in a talk on autobiography delivered at Beyond Baroque, remarked that his love life was so dull on the whole that his therapist had to do jumping jacks to keep awake while listening to its details. Krusoe had a girlfriend, another girlfriend and, finally, another wife and a kid of his own. But where was the material, the anguish, the conflict of romantic love? Krusoe decided to try something else in “The History of the World.” “The poets come down from Olympus,” he wrote, not just the famous ones, but all of them: “Burnt-out rock stars, high school yearbook rhymers / wearing their letters, advertising agency men. . . . Artaud is teaching French verbs to Emily Dickinson.” Krusoe wrote about Claude Lorrain painting L.A., making downtown “a peachy pink” and putting in some peasants and some cows. L.A. looks “beautiful” then, but the artist thinks better of it: “Jimmy, Mon Choux, you know that’s not / what art’s supposed to do.”

In 1978 came “Small Pianos” and in 1982 another collection, “Jungle Girl.” By then, he had found his voice and themes. The voice was, by turns, incantatory, colloquial and quaint. He went for the wonder of life, staying away from anything too elaborate. How must it have been for the dinosaurs (he wondered), when they were getting around to becoming extinct? “Once a week for a thousand years / they get postcards to remind them: / your reaction time is still too slow!” And in “Duck Love,” he takes us into another, wetter, world: ducks madly in love. “ ‘You look great’ one’s always shouting to the other / ‘No--you look great!’ the other one says back / . . . ‘and we’re just ducks,’ they say / ‘think of what it must be like for humans.’ ”

If we noticed enough, Krusoe suggests, boredom and melancholy might melt away; self-absorption might melt away. If we woke up, we might give up our sulking, posturing, tinkering, conniving. It’s a simple message, old-fashioned and traditional, the sweet-and-sour pork of literature, with roots in Patchen, Walt Whitman, William Blake, instead of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath. It reminds us of those cosmic eight seconds we’ve got before we hit the pavement.

Krusoe teaches in Santa Monica, lives in Glendale, works out at the YMCA with a gaggle of old guys (whom he uses as oracular devices in his later essays). He employs his consciously ordinary life as a didactic reminder: Under its “dull” surface, there are always those lovesick ducks, bewildered dinosaurs and earnest bears; there’s nothing that can’t be art, and no one too humble to be called to that vocation. What if, he wonders in “Hotel de Dream,” his most recent collection of poems, the roaring MGM lion within the “Ars Gratia Artis” logo was roaring out to him when he was just a clueless kid? If you love the world enough, who’s to say you can’t practice your own brand of art for art’s sake?

And now come the short stories. Besides the literal-minded metaphors--and the much too intimate relationships between animals and humans--there is the sense that beneath this life, there’s another life and, beyond that, still another. In “Remorse,” the narrator sounds, at first, all too boring, a fussy man, a bit of a crank. He’s a pharmacist, and when has a pharmacist ever had an interesting life? This one is a heroin addict, however; a quiet addict with a regular life and a weekly poker game. On a random trip to the zoo, he falls in love with that enticing gorilla. He supplies her with drugs, takes her home to live with him, and then, sadly, is robbed of his furry love by one of his treacherous poker pals. Things go downhill from there: “This whole affair--the so-called crime spree--the chopper crash (which, by the way, has since been shown to be the fault of shoddy maintenance), the hostages, the shootout in the frozen yogurt parlor--all that could have been avoided if only. . . .”

“Blood Lake,” the title story, examines our recent and not so recent past. When a draft card is burned with unexpected results, other things lead inevitably--and why should they not?--to death. We’re drenched in blood as a nation, right down to an ex-milkman who waxes melancholy about his former life’s work: “This was before the days of knowing about cholesterol, naturally, and little did I realize that in this way I was participating in the slow poisoning of whole generations of average American families.” Death is everywhere.

“They keep riding down all the time,” Kenneth Patchen wrote about angels of death, “O which one do you want to ride down for you?”

“Blood Lake’s” narrator, a Vietnam vet, speaks to the ghost of the man who died in the war instead of him. The ghost is too banal for words: “I died,” he says, “so you could be free.” He doesn’t put much heart into it. War, accident, illness--which one do you want to ride down for you? Does it matter, in the long run? In those eight seconds?

In “Another Life,” Tibor, a pensive bear; Ooglik, an enterprising Eskimo; Little Man, a regular guy; and Marnie, a nice woman, share the stories of their lives. True to the Krusoe creed, they all have more adventures than might be good for them: smuggling dope, falling in with gypsies, almost choking to death on a fresh egg. Ooglik inadvertently ends up on Devil’s Island, where he’s tortured by a sadistic warden who plays Edith Piaf records every night. (“Lissen to ziz, you Eskimo.”) Little Man gets mixed up with the Rev. Tony Alamo. Tibor, the bear, gets stuck typing out their stories, working laboriously out of a cage at the National Institute of Animal Narrative. “What can I tell you that you need to know?” he writes. “We grew old. We wished to pull irretrievable moments from the trash heaps of our memories. We wanted others to have them. We thought they were of value. We died.”

So, who, then, is Jim Krusoe? “In the end, he stopped reminding me of anyone,” Martin Amis has written. “Jim Krusoe is an original.” Certainly Amis is right, but let me add: Krusoe is an original from Southern California, where dreams, however bizarre, manifest on a regular basis, and where an ecstatic response to life is more acceptable than in, maybe, Cleveland, the Hague or Ni^mes. Here in L.A., surreptitiously eating clam chowder with a girlfriend where Sunset Boulevard hits the sea, Krusoe can burst out “Oh, Earth! I really do love you. . . . “ and just about get away with it.

****

BLOOD LAKE. By James Krusoe . Boaz Press: 158 pp., $18.50

HISTORY OF THE WORLD. By James Krusoe . Bomb Shelter Press: out of print

SMALL PIANOS. By James Krusoe . Momentum Press: out of print

JUNGLE GIRL. By James Krusoe . Little Caesar Press: out of print

HOTEL DE DREAM. By James Krusoe . Illuminati Press: out of print