Maze of Blood at First Things

Having just fished a snow-laden contributor's copy of First Things out of the mailbox, I am pleased to find not only my review of A. M. Juster's St. Aldhelm's Riddles (thank you to Matthew Schmitz for asking), but also an appearance in the year's roundup of 2015. I'm very glad to be among the lucky few included in the essay.

Here's a look, for visitors who don't have a subscription. (The essay will probably up online later on, just as last year's was.) I should clarify that the reference to "who wasn't written for Marly or for me" is a glance back to prior paragraphs, where Claire Vaye Watkins is mentioned, along with her much-read (yes, I read it) essay in Tin House that stabs at a good many targets, especially "white male literati."

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from John Wilson, "Books of 2015," First Things (March 2016)

Jacket art, Clive Hicks-Jenkins;
book design, Mary-Frances Glover Burt

      Marly Youmans's new novel, Maze of Blood, has an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges (who wasn't writing for Marly or for me, but whose books I have read and reread over the years). It's taken from Borges's story "The Garden of the Forking Paths": I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars."
     I hate to give away too much and spoil someone's first reading, but here I will be violating that rule a bit. Maze of Blood is (among other things) a novel about the imagination--"about it" by enacting it. (Coleridge is a tutelary presence throughout.) The protagonist, Conall Weaver, is based on Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Youmans tells us that before the book begins. But it is not a novel "about" Howard. Rather, it takes his experience as a kind of template.
     Howard committed suicide at the age of thirty--stunning, if you consider what he'd already achieved. (Lots of writers today have published very little by the time they are thirty!) Conall Weaver also kills himself--very early in the book. This is a novel told in reverse chronology: In the last section, Conall is a young boy.
     By now, you may be shaking your head--what sort of book is this? "Experimental fiction"? Ugh. Actually, no--though it may not be your cup of tea in any case. If you are willing to trust the writer, you'll soon get the hang of it. Conall Weaver, like Robert E. Howard, grows up in hardscrabble Texas, a setting in which his writing seems out of place. But he's not just alienated from his setting (which he also loves); he feels at odds with his "time." As does Marly Youmans in her "time," which is ours as well. His stories are an act of rebellion and an act of celebration.
     But this isn't simply a Portrait of the Artist--for Artists (or would-be Artists) only. We are all characters in search of an Author, so the Spirit of Story tells Conall:

     For everything inside a story--and know most of all, that the world is a story and began with a word--is made up. And so the tale of a Green Knight with his chopped-off head still holding a knight of the Round Table to promises made is no less true than the tale of a man crammed with secrets who spontaneously combusts and leaves behind only a black, tallowy mark on the floorboards, and his story in turn is no less true than the tale of a Texas sharecropper's wife who has had a miscarriage only ten days before but just this morning was walking behind the mule and guiding the jerking plow.

Midori Snyder on "Maze of Blood"

A pre-pub review pilfered from novelist Midori Snyder's In the Labyrinth, a great place in general, and also a great place to find a review of "Maze of Blood," labyrinths and mazes being kindred... Though near the end of the pre-pub period (pub date is September 1), the book is already available.

February 24, 2015

An Early Review of Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

“In the end, he thought, a neat labyrinth or an untidy maze was a place that was simple. You reached its heart and were devoured by the beast, or you reached its heart and the spot was absolutely bare and pulseless. Maybe the beast and the blankness were the same. Maybe it was the emptiness that had teeth and hollowed you out.”

Marly Youmans' new novel Maze of Blood is a fictionalized biography of a small town writer, based on the life of pulp fiction author Robert E. Howard, noted for his stories of extravagant adventure as well as his suicide at thirty years old, coinciding with the death of his mother. For both Howard and the protagonist Conall in Youmans' novel, it is hard to imagine a more terrible beauty than a writer’s life imploding in a maze of contradictions: to be gifted with boundless imagination but compelled to remain rooted in the dry soil of a Texas oil boom town; to have a mother as muse filling his childhood with a love of poetry and epics, and then emotionally trapping him in the narrative of her own slow dying; to connect via mail to an admiring world of fans and writers, and to be marginalized by local friends disparaging his work as a worthless activity.

Youmans’ evocative prose digs deep into the visceral ache of living perched between sublime poetry and harsh reality, between the refusal to compromise a writer’s prodigious vision and the price paid in isolation and loneliness. The novel is full of mythic moments: Conall believes his imagination was formed at childhood when touched by the luminous fire of a falling meteorite. He is alive to the world when he is creating it, folding in history, poetry, and epics into his story telling. There is something heroic about the way he rejects anything in mundane reality that interferes with that passion. Yet, Youmans also reveals the darker side of compulsions, the siren-song of his mother, calling him to a love of language, but drowning out all other voices save hers that might have influenced his life in a different direction.

Maze of Blood is a difficult story, but one so beautifully crafted by Youmans, unraveling in short chapters like prose poems constructed from spare dialogue, the dusty Texas landscape, a sudden flash of vibrant nature, and the sweep of a starlight sky. The reader can not escape the tragedy of the story, but Youmans weighs it against the more powerful scenes of a gifted storyteller, whose originality and labors transcend the confines of his life, allowing us a chance to celebrate the writer's efforts-- and perhaps because it burned so brightly in such a bleak place, we value it the more.

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans is due out later this Fall from Mercer University Press -- with another handsome cover from Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design from Mary-Frances Glover Burt. Check out the tempting sneak peeks of the art shown above and below.

Oríkì, Maze, King!

Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Detail, jacket for Maze of Blood.

Or, an answer to that frequent question, "What are you working on now?"

Oríkì-inspired poems

Well, I have a rather large quantity of long poems, all written in the past few months. I love it when work comes in a great rush! The poems were inspired by the form and nature of Yoruban oríkì, or oral praise chants. Traditional elements that appear in one, more, or all of the poems are: parallelism, repetition, lists, naming and re-naming, copia or profusion, quotation, disjunction and seeming randomness, contrasting elements, sequences of parallel cases (sometimes concluding in the key case), wide-ranging comparisons (as, say, linking a man with a plant and a river), and concern for lineage. Certain attitudes linked to oríkì appear: the idea that every thing (object or living thing) has its own special qualities that fit and suit, and the related idea of certain tools and techniques as belonging to each mode of work. The idea that birds and animals and fish show evidence of distinguishing cultural acts (like dying the feathers or fur or scales a specific color, for example) and familial lineages like people leads to the conclusion that the whole of Creation is composed of cultural artifacts. Even the idea of what oríkì scholar Karin Barber calls “vertical social inequality” applies to the hierarchies of things and creatures, as well as people. The poems do not attempt to be oríkì, but were inspired and colored by Yoruban praise chant. Many differences appear, and women play a more acknowledged role as figures in story. The poems are much more governed by narrative and by an overarching unity than oríkì.

Maze of Blood

Forthcoming in September, Maze of Blood was inspired by the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard. I like to do something different each time I write a novel, and I had never used a life as a template. I drafted the book at Yaddo (back in 2007) but sat on the novel a long time, knowing something was not quite right. Recently I re-worked the order of the book and added new passages as a kind of frame for the whole story. This gave the book more tightness and also a trajectory that moved toward joy and creation rather than following the pattern of a life toward death. (For those interested in the sources of the book, the accounts that influenced me most were: One Who Walked Alone, by Novalyne Price Ellis; Blood and Thunder, by Mark Finn; and Two-Gun Con: A Centennial Study of Robert E. Howard.) Childhood summer weeks spent on a deep-South sharecropper's farm have been a real gift to me. I know something of the dusty, hardscrabble Southern places in the world, their challenges and culture. And I felt that I knew and had sympathy with a lot of Howard's difficulties as well; he could have been a wayward figure in my own family tree. My protagonist is called Conall Weaver--I certainly did not want any confusion with biography--and the book plays with and embroiders episodes that are often based on incidents in Howard's life. If a book is a kind of sub-creation of the Creation, well, Maze of Blood contains a character who makes characters, and those characters occasionally appear as actors in the story. Here's a page for the book. Gorgeous art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins adorns the cover and acts as section separators. Right now I'd love to make contact with people who want to host some sort of blog feature in support of the book--I'm open to mini-interviews, short essays, etc. I'll be at SIBA (Raleigh) and City Lights (Sylva, North Carolina) in September.

Other plans and books "in the works"

I have a lot of uncollected poems and stories, as well as a novel I wrote for my youngest son, all of which I have been promising for ages to set into order and give a final tweak or two. In addition, The Book of the Red King needs a last spit and polish and will have art by Clive. We're just waiting until he has the free time to do the work.