William T. Vollmann was totally unknown to me but a review of his multi volume book ‘Rising Up and Rising Down’ seemed to promise an interesting read in that no man’s land between the IGR (intelligent general reader) and the savant. A touch of hands on ontology, a report from harm’s way, written by a man who knows the smell of death. Vinegar and vomit but not as experienced outside the chip shop as a drunk’s technicolor yawn.
Hemingway had a go in ‘For who the Bell tolls’.
“All right, Inglés. Learn. That’s the thing. Learn. All right. After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her, Inglés, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of.”
I’m only beginning to read the first volume so I won’t be able to give a full account of it but the augeries are good. Death is his subject and the anatomy of the grave. There is good Doctor Browneian stuff, the catacombs of Paris, the skulls of Cambodia, blunt force trauma in San Francisco, the corpses delivered for autopsy in an upright position strapped to tall sack trolleys to avoid the hills. Then he smells the coffee in Vienna. There’s a cure in that. He says - I take my meaning where I can find it, when I can’t find it, I invent it.’
He is not as keen to make your flesh creep as the Fat Boy in Dickens who offered to recite ‘The Blood Drinkers Burial’ (in character). Hello darkness my old friend, but there must be a sense of injustice at being compelled to feel guilty over the death of his sister by drowning when he was in charge of her, he being 9 and she 6. Care sears guilt into our bones.
He would concur with that other eschatological doctor Saint Francis de Sales in his Fifth Meditation (Introduction to the Devout Life):
“Consider the universal farewell which your soul will take of this world. It will say farewell to riches, pleasures, and idle companions, to amusements and pastimes, to friends and neighbors, to husband, wife, and child, in short to all creation. And lastly it will say farewell to its own body, which it will leave pale and cold, to become repulsive in decay.”
The writing is good, clear, sober prose with a moderate cadence, no flights. There is no sense of running to meet your inevitable fate, that full stop.
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