And Then. Donald Breckenridge
This is
A Black Sparrow Book
Published in 2017 by
David R. Godine, Publisher
Post Office Box 450
Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452
Copyright © 2017 by Donald Breckenridge
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Douglas Glover
Cover art copyright © 2017 by Daniel Martin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, 15 Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts 02108
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-57423-229-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-57423-233-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Breckenridge, Donald, author.
Title: And then / by Donald Breckenridge.
Description: Jaffrey, New Hampshire : Black Sparrow Books, 2017.
Identifiers: lccn 2016052960 | isbn 9781574232295 (acid-free paper)
Classification: lcc ps3552.r3619 a85 2017 | ddc 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052960
This book is for my father.
A headache after having drunk too much. Life is not a flower. Shit is. The ragout of orangutan of Rangoon. Rangoon makes the taste of orangutan ragout distasteful. I have burning regrets when, sometimes, I realize that I have tied myself down, that I have bound my hands, put leaden chains on my feet. To be free, to walk, to run, not to crawl anymore.
I have the key to happiness: remember, be profoundly, profoundly, totally conscious that you are. I myself, sorry to say, hardly ever use this key. I keep losing it.
EUGENE IONESCO
from Present Past Past Present Translated from the French by Helen R. Lane
Introduction
DOUGLAS GLOVER
We walk about, amid the destinies of our world-existence, encompassed by dim but ever present Memories of a Destiny more vast-very distant in the bygone time, and infinitely awful.
POE, Eureka
Donald Breckenridge is a pointillist, constructing scene after scene with precise details of dialogue and gesture, each tiny in itself, possibly mundane, but accumulating astonishing power and bleak complexity. His language is matter of fact, the unsentimental plain style used subtly and flexibly, the only apparent artfulness is in the unconventional punctuation and, sometimes, the way the dialogue breaks up the narrative sentences. His settings are Carverish, bleak and constrained; his characters are the stubborn, alienated authors of their own melancholy fates; they persist in a panoply of failed habits and attitudes, gestures of a wounded self they refuse to give up because it is theirs, a refusal that is by turns defiant, sordid, heroic, grotesque, and tragic.
But this novel’s triumph is in its rich architecture, its surprising splicing of genre and quotation, its skillfully fractured chronology, and the deft juxtaposition of alternating story lines. The result of this combinatorial panache is to create an arena of systemic implication, in which the sum is greater than the parts. Nothing here is what you expect; in fact, some of this text is nearly indescribable in terms of genre and form. What do you call a piece of fiction that is a narrative transcription of a real movie that is itself a fiction? Answer: Don’t even try. It’s a logical wormhole. It will turn your brain inside-out like a sock.
I will elucidate: And Then is, like most novels, a story about a character. Let’s say a nondescript loser robs a mom and pop store in some out of the way town and gives the money to his girlfriend so she can escape the mean and derelict provincial life she is destined for. She heads to New York with the cash, finds an apartment share, has a love affair with a photographer, but the police (somewhere) are after her and she falls among bad companions, under the sign of hard drugs, who love her for her money. When that stake runs out, so does her string and she disappears, probably dead, floating in the river.
But Breckenridge, the symphonic composer, takes this narrative theme, his melody, as it were, and works elaborative magic upon it by adding five further structural elements.
1) A second, parallel plot involving a young male student who, a dozen years later, agrees to cat sit for one of his professors away on sabbatical. In the apartment he discovers the photograph of a beautiful woman, his professor’s mysterious former lover and/or roommate, a woman who simply disappeared. The student obsesses on the woman in the photograph, he becomes a sleuth, collecting stray bits of information about her. He finally tracks down the photographer who took the picture. But no one knows what became of her.
These two plots, the young woman plot and the student plot leapfrog each other in the text, fragmented, uncanny. At a certain point the young woman, apparently waking from a drug stupor (only she is dead), finds her way back to the apartment, ascending the stairs just as the young student is descending. At the climactic moment, he feels her ghost passing through him.
2) Cut between the fragmentary paragraphs of the two fictional plots, Breckenridge inserts a brutal, sad memoir of his father dying: stark and beautiful and full of our common humanity; pity, love, kindness, stubbornness, squalor and valor. Here again there are two narratives: one works back and forth over the story of a life, two lives, father and son, and the father’s declining days; the other, more mysterious, follows Breckenridge to a diner, the subway, the train station. We get detailed accounts of conversations with the diner owner. We oscillate between donuts and staph infections, but by the genius of construction and understatement, horror and hopelessness accumulate. The word “love” isn’t thrown around, but the son patiently bandaging dabbing medication on those awful sores tells you more than words. You are fascinated, cannot turn away.
Curiously, embedded in the memoir we find a scene in which Breckenridge tells his father about the suicide of a woman who lived in an apartment above him and how, he is sure, that one day he encountered her ghost in the stairwell. (The reader himself encounters a frisson of what Nabokov’s fictional poet John Shade calls combinatorial delight.)
3) An epigraph from Ionesco’s Present Past Past Present, an important influence for Breckenridge who takes epigraphs for all his novels from this text. The passage presents a character unfree, chained down, but conscious that he has the key to freedom, which he hardly ever uses.
4) An overture, or introductory passage, that consists of a prose transcription/narrative summary of Jean Rouch’s film Gare du Nord (1965, one of six short films by leading New Wave directors under the title Paris Vu Par). The film splits into two parts. The first follows a young married couple quarreling over the dissolution of their relationship; they are tired of each other, disappointed in their mistakes, tired of their lives. In the second half of the film, the wife meets a handsome brooding fellow who offers transcendence, offers her the chance to run away to a life of adventure. But she’s too bourgeois, timid, polite to take him up. His response is to climb the bars of a railway bridge and jump to his death.
But what is going on? A novel disguised as a summary of a film? A quotation, as it were? A meta-commentary,