I’ve been trying to argue lately that Joe R. Lansdale is not merely a purveyor of fine fiction. He certainly is that. I believe he is worthy of higher accolades. I compared the scene of a patriarch of a poor family of coal miners in To The Bright and Shining Sun, to the death scene at the end of Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I believe they stand up to each other very well. Here’s the link to that study if you like. http://stevedmarsh.com/review-burkes-to-the-bright-and-shining-sun/
So, today I thought I’d take a look at two descriptions of like intent and tone with another big prize winner. The first selection is from William Kennedy’s Ironweed, his 1979 novel which ultimately became an excellent 1989 movie with amazing performances by Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep. (And one of the oddest by Tom Waits). The book was a part of a triptych called the Albany Cycle. It was Ironweed which earned Kennedy the Pulizer Prize. The following is Francis, a profoundly alcoholic bum returning to the only place he ever thought of as home and to his wife whom he has not seen in years. The scene begins inside of Francis’s memory.
From Ironweed by William Kennedy.
And then they kissed.
Not just then, but some hours or maybe even days later, Francis compared that kiss to Katrina’s first, and found them as different as cats and dogs. Remembering them both now as he stood looking at Annie’s mouth with its store teeth, he perceived that a kiss is as expressive of a way of life as is a smile, or a scarred hand. Kisses come up from below, or down from above. They come from the brain sometimes, sometimes from the heart, and sometimes just from the crotch. Kisses that taper off after a while come only from the heart and leave the taste of sweetness. Kisses that come from the brain tend to try to work things out inside other folks’ mouths and don’t hardly register. And kisses from the crotch and the brain put together, with maybe a little bit of heart, like Katrina’s, well they are kisses that can send you right around the bend for your whole life.
But then you get one like that first whizzer on Kibbee’s lumber pile, one that comes out of the brain and the heart and the crotch, and out of the hands on your hair, and out of those breasts that are not all the way blowd up yet, and out of the clutch them arms give you, and out of time itself, which keeps track of how long it can go on without you getting even slightly bored the way you got bored years later with kids and almost anybody but Helen, and out of fingers (Katrina had fingers like that) that run themselves around and over your face and down your neck, and out of the grip you take on her shoulders, especially on them bones that come out of the middle of her back like angel wings, and out of them eyes that keep opening and closing to make sure that this is still going on and still real and not just stuff you dream about and when you know it’s real it’s OK to close ‘em again, and outta that tongue, holy shit, that tongue, you got to ask yourself where she learned that because nobody ever did that that good except Katrina who was married and with a kid and had a right to know, but Annie, goddamn, Annie, where’d you pick that up, or maybe you’ve been gidzeyin’ heavy on this lumber pile regular (No, no, no, I know you never, I always knew you never), and so it is natural with a woman like Annie that the kiss come out of every part of her body and more, out of that mouth with them new teeth Francis is now looking at, with the same lips he remembers and doesn’t want to kiss anymore except in memory (though that could be subject to change), and he sees well beyond the mouth into a primal location in the woman’s being, a location that evokes in him not only the memory of years but decades and even more, the memory of epochs, aeons, so that he is sure that no matter where he might have sat with the woman and felt this way, whether it was in some ancient cave or some bogside shanty, or on a North Albany lumber pile, he and she would both know that there was something in each of them that had to stop being one and become two, that had to swear that for ever after there would never be another (and there never has been, quite), and that there would be allegiance and sovereignty and fidelity and other such tomfool horseshit that people destroy their heads with when what they are saying has nothing to do with time’s forevers but everything to do with the simultaneous recognition of an eternal twain, well sir, then both of them, Francis and Annie, or the Francises and Annies of any age, would both know in that same incident that there was something between them that had to stop being two and become one.
Such was the significance of that kiss.
Francis and Annie married a month and a half later.
Katrina, I will love you forever.
However, something has come up.
Wow! I love that kiss. I might have had one like it once in my life. It might just be me adopting this memory as my own.
But now, consider Joe Lansdale’s comments on the same subject. Bear in mind, Joe adds some difficult social stuff in too. The main male character here is called a lot of names, my favorite being Deadwood Dick¬¬—former slave, former dirt farmer, former Buffalo Soldier, current sharpshooter, bouncer and spittoon emptier. He takes a fancy to a woman named Win. It is implied that Win is of no relation to the woman with whom she is traveling, but it seems to be that she is the daughter of a slave and “the madam’s” dead, slave-owner husband. It is just after the Civil War and the West is still trying to figure racial society. But none of that matters in the following paragraphs.
Paradise Sky by Joe R. Lansdale
I dropped down on the cloth, and when I did she grabbed my head and pulled my face to hers and kissed me. It was for me the finest moment in my life. That kiss was like fire. It lit my lips. It lit my head. It lit my heart. It lit my soul. I was ablaze with passion.
That first loving kiss, the one that comes out of you from the source of your personal river, and the one that comes from her that is the same, there’s never another moment like it; never another flame that burns so hard. It can never be that good again, ever. All manner of goodness can come after, but it’s different. And that’s a good thing, because if we burned that hot for too long, we’d be nothing but ash.
What followed some might think was better than that kiss, us taking off our clothes and all, bringing ourselves together with excitement on that picnic cloth, under that blanket with the weather turning cooler and cooler and there being the smell of pine and oncoming snow in the air, but it wasn’t better than that kiss.
Don’t misunderstand me. It was well worth doing, and if I was making me a list, it would be listed second in goodness and something that works better in repetition, but everything in my life from that point on lay under the mountain of that single kiss, and try as I might, I have never climbed that high again.
There, get that guy a gold medal.
