Words Into Skin

Leonard Michaels is a young writer whose work has appeared in many of the more important literary magazines— New American Review, Partisan Review, the Paris Review, and the Evergreen Review among others. Going Places is his first collection.

The key events in his stories— usually holocausts in the lives of his protagonists—are indistinguishable

by Leonard Michaels (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.95)

from the settings in which they occur. Settings are felt to be a physical extension of the agonized victims who inhabit them. I am constantly reminded by Michaels’ emblematic stage sets that no other time and no other place could have fostered precisely the form or quality of torture that strikes the persona dumb, dead, or fiercely awake—excruciatingly alive for the first time: Beckman, mugged and beaten within a millimeter of his life on the back floor of his cab, “begging as they dragged him by his hair over the front seat and onto the floor in back where the mat reeked of whiskey, stale butts, the corruption of lungs, and a million yards of bowel"; Philip, the hilarious nude fugitive encountered at the subway change booth by the Negro attendant guarding the turnstile, “Hey, man, you naked? . . . You’re naked. . . . Scat, mother, go home”: Isaac, the talmudic scholar, discovering his physical deformity— following a fall on the icy street—in a phone booth “like a coffin”; Melanie, raped by the Turk on the “cracking, desiccated leather” front seat of his old Chevrolet, later identifying her hideously diminished self with “an armless, naked manikin” in a store window, and worse yet, “a thalidomide baby, all torso and short-circuited”; the voluptuous Miss Abbe Carlyle, confronted and slowly seduced by the twenty Puerto Rican boys congregated into the shape of a great bird of prey on a banistered front stoop in Spanish Harlem. This is the most imposing and unforgettable emblematic setting in the collection: “Twenty were jammed together on the stoop; tiers of heads made one central head, and the wings rested along the banisters: a raggedy monster of boys studying her approach.” These are not simply locales, settings—traditional background—ever. Life does not merely occur in these machines, edifices; life transfigures the forms that enshrine its daily happening, the forms merging with the bodies they enclose, altering and entering into their life stream.

In “Going Places,” the title story, Michaels realizes a totally plastic, epidermal style. Every sentence is charged with a tactility of phrasing that suggests oddly that words are somehow being alchemized into skin. It is a style that gives new significance, a new literalness, to the expression, he put a skin on everything he said: “His brows showed the puffed ridges of a pug’s discolored, brutalized flesh where a billion capillaries had been mashed and meat-hammered to the consistency of stone. Ugly, but not meaningless . . . memento moris twisted into living flesh reflected in his rear-view mirror.” In this description of cabdriver Beckman’s face following his beating, physical violence of a kind that leaves the victim with permanent scars (“memento moris”) is viewed as a necessary initiation rite, a first step in the painful neverending quest for “absolute physical being.” Beckman’s tragedy unfolds as we slowly realize that his blessing is a curse in disguise. The self-discovery resulting from his being beaten nearly to death enables him to change his life radically for the better, from cabdriver to painter, but it leaves him with an irresistible urge to return to total physical risk —courting suicide—and perhaps to crucify himself into the truth.

In two of the stories, “Crossbones” and “Intimations,” Michaels is perhaps inventing a new genre, which may stand in the same relation to the conventional story as does the story, say, to the novella. The short-short form appropriates the compression and density of lyric poetry and brings them into fiction. Only a couple of pages in length, these stories need to be reread many times, and gradually, they leave the reader feeling the sense of totally apprehending complex human alliances—or misalliances—ordinarily possible only in the longer forms. One gets a marvelous grasp of the total life-network of the characters in Michaels’ short-shorts, as though the essence of a whole novel has been successfully encapsulated in a couple of pages. Michaels’ most impressive device in these stories is the elaboration of a long sinuous “crocodilian” sentence which manipulates syntax to catapult words across gulfs of experience; not unusually, seven or eight transitions—in thought or action—are scaled within a single synchromeshed sentence, a sentence that can shift instantly from high gear to low without friction.

The weaker stories in this volume are the wacky sexual fantasies. In some of them Michaels resorts overmuch to clever stunts. The characters display gimmicky dialogue and quirky personality trappings—nervous tics, limps, mutilations, all manner of Freudian and Reichian hangups—but the varieties of gaminess don’t conceal the hollow characterization or the frayed seams in a story’s overextended structure. These erotic stories are often wildly funny, but the humor is pitched to a scale of laughter that approximates—in its zany crudeness—the cartoons and jokes one finds in Playboy.

In the better stories of this type, “City Boy” and “Fingers and Toes,” Michaels succeeds in burlesqueing the stock responses of slick pornography and achieves erotic satire of unmistakable originality. His surrealistic scenes are always gorgeously physical. People who are essentially crippled and ineffectual in their daily lives are enabled to blossom into absurdly fulfilled beings in their (or the author’s) fleshly fantasies.

Michaels’ language is a created, a freshly discovered, idiom revealing the remarkable plasticity of people who are at once trapped— and fantastically bursting alive—in their bodies. The body is always discovered shockingly anew to be the most grotesquely beautiful and delicate of machines; the body, acted upon by the crowded machinery in close quarters of the overpopulated Manhattan, can re-enact through exquisite sexuality—and thereby translate into personality and spirit—the numbingly complex physical intensities and can transform into a reordering synthesis countless and unrememberable daily physical contortions in autos, elevators, and phone booths. Sexuality in the stories assimilates monstrous mental and physical violations of the partner, but transcends them all in a wisdom of the body which can never be learned in any other way, and which must seem—in the world of these stories—to be worth any price that must be paid.