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company alongside Charles Olson, Robert Duncan,
Denise Levertov, Michael Rumaker, Edward
Dahlberg and William Eastlake. Creeley seems to rate
Woolf. By August 1963 Creeley, in a letter to Paul
Blackburn, describes Woolf as ‘…an exceptional man
in all senses.’
The year moves on and in November
Creeley is corresponding with another English poet
and small press publisher Andrew Crozier. Here
Creeley mentions The Moderns. That book is
published by Corinth and edited by Leroi Jones.
Creeley lists Kerouac, Dorm, Burroughs, Selby
alongside Douglas Woolf.
Fade Out isn’t in any sense a ‘Beat’ novel, far
from it. Yet it deals with the afflictions of 1950s
America in a subtle unassuming
manner. The chief character is a Mr.
Dick Twombly. A man of seventy
four years old. He is a retired bank
worker from Baltimore and he finds
himself living with his daughter Kate
and her less than lovable husband
and daughter. Henry Miller might
have called it an ‘air-conditioned
nightmare.’ Mr. Twombly is a kindly,
reflective man and he tolerates being
patronized by his family with good
grace, they watch his every move.
Mr. Twombly has a friend, an elderly
retired ex boxer, Behemoth Brown,
who lives in similar circumstances
with his own family. After being
falsely accused of abducting two
young children Mr. Twombly’s family
pack him off to a residential home. Somehow he and
Behemoth escape, they actually do have to escape,
and then begins a series of adventures as they
hitchhike to Phoenix in Arizona. Twombly really
looks forward to the sun in Phoenix.
The escapades of Midnight Cowboy spring to
mind and the blurb on the back of my paperback
actually mentions ‘Ratso,’ from that 1970s film. The
innocence of Fade Out certainly echoes that of Dustin
Hoffman and John Voight in their quest to the big
city. Ed Dorn labels him “the nicest ironist since
Swift.” (John Latta – Isola di Rifiuti – 2010)
The Village Voice said of Fade Out, ‘….the
comic masterpiece of one of contemporary America’s long
neglected geniuses.” And the book, on the surface a
simple tale of escape is doubly a satire on the
consumerism of 1950s America. Easy to lampoon
now from a distance of sixty or more years, but then
a state of mind that held a stranglehold over a country
hellbent on that new fridge was rampant. And the way
ahead to luxury.
Ed Dorn said of the book, “A very exciting
work, and touching, but full of the cruelty of seeming
casual life. You hold your breath in the reading.”
Obviously the link with Creeley was strong; Creeley’s
Divers Press had originally published Woolf ’s
Hypocritic Days in 1955. Woolf also appears in Black
Mountain Review No 2. So the pair had history as
they say.
There was another Woolf story, Bank Day, in
The New Writing in the USA edited by Creeley and
Allen and issued by Penguin in 1967. Again he was in
the company of Kerouac, Snyder, Olson, and many
others familiar to readers of Beat
Scene. And there are references to
him in the Ed Dorn and Amiri
Baraka letters from New Mexico
University Press.
Fade Out is partially a tale
of growing old in an America that is
fixated on youth and money. Dick
Twombly and Behemoth Brown
escape the clutches of that
materialistic nightmare and set out
for a free life with dignity. America
may have still had segregation in
many states back then, but there also
existed the ignominy of growing old
in a country that didn’t have any
time for it. Creeley said, “Woolf’s
hero is a Don Quixote, who even
when defeated still hears the echoes of
his transforming dreams.”
Woolf dedicated Fade Out to Creeley. The
book remains in print, it was released by John
Martin’s Black Sparrow Press in 1995. I understand it
is that edition still. Woolf has been rediscovered any
number of times over the years. His talents are
regularly recognized by his peers, respected, praised
and he certainly found a level of commercial and
critical success without ever achieving the profile of
the company he kept in New American Story or The
Moderns. Fade Out is a little gem in Post war
American writing. Douglas Woolf died in 1992 aged
70.
Notes
John Latta’s comments can be found at...http://isola-dirifiuti.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/ed-dorns-douglas-woolf.html
The cover shown here is the 1971 Penguin copy I have on my
shelf here.
Thanks to Jim Burns for input.
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