Thoughts on Irving Layton's "Paging Mr. Superman"

The fascinating puzzle to Irving Layton's "Paging Mr. Superman" hinges on the "I" persona. Many dimwitted readers of a particularly knee-jerk, surface-reaction predilection will see the "I" in terms of Layton as Messiah, roll their eyes, and go no further. Others may see the "I" as an everyman just out to stir up trouble among the infinite number of dullards around us each day if for no other reason than to relieve one's own boredom. The poem, then, would seem a catty stick-in-the-ribs, and could then be reduced to a cheap Laytonian squib. I'll argue that both positions are wrong, and that the "I" of the poem is an enlightened intercessor, though nowhere near the promised land himself.

Though the poem is rendered as a dream, fantasy, or phantasmagoria, it also has many images of psychological aptness and real-world imagistic association. This mix of reality and imagination begins with the speaker immediately telling the clerk that the latter's "raw nose/Was part natal umbilicus". This is the kind of dialogue bold dream characters instigate all the time: goofy, but sometimes with a symbolic or at least provocative teasing. Much later in the poem, the clerk "rub[s] the umbilical/Part of his nose that was raw and itchy." In the second-to-last line, the Sheraton is referred to as a "bell-shaped womb". We don't need our umbilical cords immediately after birth; we can breathe on our own. Yet, the clerk's nose is (twice noted) raw, and after the main action -- itchy, denoting a self-consciousness, if not a realization.

Why is the tie-pin "made of the rarest onyx"? And why does the clerk not deny the narrator's request? Ezekiel ch. 28 v. 13: "Thou hast seen in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tablets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created." Not only is the umbilical cord not needed at birth, the glory of the newborn is readily apparent. Divinity is immediate. We aren't born in sin, and suffer no separation between a manufactured God and ourselves. The narrator knows this, but unlike Jesus' hortatory compassion, his paging request is unable to effect change. The humorous irony in the clerk granting the narrator's wish resides with appearances. The tie-pin obviously means the narrator is wearing a tie: he's respectable. And he also doesn't exhibit any outward manifestation of audacity. But the devil is a gentleman, said Shakespeare, and the umbilical provocation, along with the strange request doesn't faze him because the narrator is presentable.

The next character is the even more fascinating call boy. But this is no boy: he's "gray-haired", "one/Of the ignatzes the cities now breed/Reliably and with a more exact/Efficiency than former days." The key word here is "ignatzes". It has multiple associations, but the most obvious and immediate one would have to do with the last two syllables. When you join "Nazis" with "reliably" and "a more exact/Efficiency than former days", it shouldn't take a history PHD to figure out that the SS, and their later offshoots, had to have replaced the brownshirts in order for the party to be more than your typical haphazard internal political thugfest. So what the hell ties the National Socialist German Workers' Party to a fetched call boy at a Sheraton on a sleepy, sunny day in a prosperous, contemporary Western city? Well, what were the exigencies of those soon-to-be Nazis pre-1933? Hitler's party were roundly denounced, laughed at for a decade, even during the barest depressions after the Treaty of Versailles. But power, and a winning team, is an aphrodisiac. And Supermen and Gods live in the darkest recesses of the mind. Note the comical apprehension, later, of the five men and one woman: doubt mixed with hope. The vacillation between the two is always there. But "ignatzes" also has another intriguing association. Ignatz Mouse was one of three central characters in a comic strip extremely popular before and throughout the Nazi regime. Krazy Kat, the carefree, joyous, and naive feline of indeterminate gender was the victim of continuous bricks to the head by the mouse who hated it. To Krazy Kat, this was just the mouse's way of showing affection. Stockholm Syndrome? [edit: No, there's a difference between naivety and masochism. No need to provide the parallel to Krazy Kat in this situation.] But if I'm right, there's also no doubt about the poem's removed and hidden reference to the third main character, Offissa Pupp, the "law" who only occasionally manages to prevent the bricks being thrown. In this sense, the call boy is Ignatz/Schutzstaffel, but Hindenburg and Papen are Offissa Pupp. "He saw/Nothing remarkable in the clerk's request." And why would he? He's not there to reflect, or wonder, or imagine, or wrestle with spiritual dilemmas, or even to question the motive of customers. He's a time-server, more so than the clerk. He fulfills commands. But his voice and imagination were "constructed/In the faraway days of childhood in rooms/Alone with Atlas and the last pages/Of boys' magazines." Meaning, there's a sentimental bone remaining somewhere in his body, even if it's the vestigial tailpiece. But sentiment is the operative word. Sentiment and terror often go hand-in-hand in the banal psychological workings of the evil.

Superman's Kryptonian name "Kal-El" means, in Hebrew, "voice of God". (Superman's co-creators were both Jewish.) And it's impossible to ignore the comic book hero's link to Nietzsche's concept of the Ubermensch. Just as Superman has nothing to do with Nietzsche's conception of the hero (the icon was an upholder of moral norms), so too did Hitler's perverted interpretations of Nietzsche's ideas have nothing to do with Nietzsche's works. As a Nietzschean himself, Layton must have intended this. The complacent middle-class hiding behind social niceties to mask their moral cowardice and lockstep.

But when the hero's name is announced, "all the elevators raced upwards". The aftermath of the action is brilliantly realized, and a reference to "abunas" ("our father", also priest or bishop) is included, thereby linking it with the priestly origins of onyx. But the abunial dead-end of the elevators are a far cry from the valued onyx. Superman flies upward in a conscious choice to meet his foes; the elevators (and the imaginations of those so disposed) fly upward in a feeble hope, a pointless and reactionary one. But there is no Superman, at least not an actual one, but one in the minds of Depression-era creators Siegel and Schuster. It's a comic, after all, a kid's diversionary fantasy. Or is it? Remember that umbilical-nosed clerk. And the magazine-reading call boy. Many people never grow up, even if they discuss complicated schemes during "the cocktail hour when love/Is poured over ice-cubes". Superman vs a Godlike individuality. No wonder the six (and so many more) still wait. And what could be a better conclusion than the curiously ambivalent "ordinary sunshine"?

Irving Layton's "Paging Mr. Superman"

PAGING MR. SUPERMAN
(by Irving Layton)


I myself walked into the Sheraton
And after remarking his raw nose
Was part natal umbilicus I told
The clerk in the loudest voice I could bear:
"Page me Mr. Superman," He looked
Diffidently at me but acceding
My tie-pin, made of the rarest onyx,
Belonged to neither a sour fanatic
Nor one sick in the head from eating
Shrimps canned in the Andes and contraband
Here, he signalled for the call boy who came
Running all spongy with awareness,
His cheeks flapping in the air-conditioned
Air and his white dentures extended in
Warmest greeting. "Page Mr. Superman,"
The uneasy clerk said eyeing my pin
To re-assure himself and in his mind
Recapitulating the small number
Of paid two-week vacations he had had.
Luckily the grey-haired call boy was one
Of the ignatzes the cities now breed
Reliably and with a more exact
Efficiency than former days.
He saw
Nothing remarkable in the clerk's request
And sent his voice through the loudspeaker
Of his imagination constructed
In the faraway days of childhood in rooms
Alone with Atlas and the last pages
Of boys' magazines. I heard the glory
Of it that afternoon like the closing
Chords of Handel's Messiah. "Superman"
It rang out clear across the floor polish.
"Mr. Superman." There was such triumph,
Such wild exultation in his voice,
The pale cigarette girl at the counter
For the first time in her life gave wrong change
And all the elevators raced upwards
As if a pistol shot had startled them;
They did not stop till they had crashed the roof
Where one can see their solemn closed cages
Side by side and standing pigeon-spotted
Like the abunas on the cathedral
Dazed-seeming by the wildest flight of all.

This was the cocktail hour when love
Is poured over ice cubes and executives
Lay their shrewdest plans for the birth of twins
With silver spoons; when one forgets the ships
Aground in fog, the pilot with letters
For mountain peaks and snow; the silent poor;
Or the wife with pre-menstrual tensions;
When Asia is rubbed out with an olive,
A truce ordered to the day's massacres.
I saw only six in the large lobby,
Five men and one solitary woman,
Who hearing Mr. Superman called
Looked up at once from the puddle of their
Lives where they stood at the edges making
Crumbling mud pies out of paper money.
While the stout woman adjusted her bra
And studied the door of the Gents' Room,
The men had risen to their feet watching
Scared and breathless the quick revolving door
As if they expected the flashing blades
To churn him into visible substance.
But no one emerged from either place;
The unusual name was finally
Lost under the carpet where it was found
The next day badly deteriorated.
The condemned six returned to their postures
And the hour rained down the familiar
Wrinkles and the smiles cutting like glass.
The call boy gave it as his verdict
Superman was nowhere in the lobby,
And the tall clerk now regarding my pin
Mistrustfully rubbed the umbilical
Part of his nose that was raw and itchy.
"He has not yet arrived," he said. "Perhaps
You'll return later." For a split second
I thought he was making game of me
But his eyes were steady as if fixed
On a T.V. serial. I thanked him
And smiling amiably in all
Directions of the bell-shaped womb, I walked
Out into the ordinary sunshine.

Peter Darbyshire's The Warhol Gang

Authors of futuristic novels can often have things both ways. For their imaginative worlds, the serious praise of prophecy rightly intuited is highlighted, as is the repeated bows and salutes for creating an alternate reality that mirrors aspects of contemporary society while introducing us to technology, social interaction, and psychological states that boldly go where ... (I know I know, treading on trademarked Gene Roddenberry ground, if he indeed penned it).

Peter Darbyshire's second novel, 2010's The Warhol Gang, is a futuristic proposition, but the time and space perspectives are near and nearby. It therefore has more responsibility to make its world believable for its transition from, and dependency on, today's streets and strophes.

Trotsky (most of the characters' names are cleverly penned as an ironic commentary on revolutionaries) is in need of a job, any job, so, through a career employment agency, is matched with Adsenses, a neuromarketing company which transposes product images in a hologram for its guinea pigs (or canaries) in order to see which areas of its employees' brains light up with excitement and (therefore) buying stimulus. The problem for Trotsky is that the images are so technologically effective, so powerful, that they literally erase great chucks of his memory and create an obsession for him to buy the products he sees in his workpod.

So far, so good. The story follows countless other fictions in which the past is erased, and one is left to negotiate between a shifting reality without moral guidelines or social commonplaces. At first, our troubled hero or anti-hero acquires the goods, but when his "Is that all there is" moment arrives, he goes searching for a deeper meaning through visceral, dramatic ambulance-chasing attempts to bond with the dead and dying. I'm not sure why Trotsky has this powerful impetus when no other fellow employees are stricken so, and especially when his brain has been so reprogrammed and manipulated. It seems that his confusion and amorality (dramatically convincing in paint-by-numbers prose) would set him off as just one more drone who inevitably goes postal after a meaningless existence, accelerated day by day. And in fact, a variant of that (likewise) nihilistic staple is next up. Theft ramps up to destruction and manslaughter, though I won't spoil the plot further.

The biggest problem with The Warhol Gang is in its prophetic course. Without a doubt, Darbyshire makes thoughtful points on the fifteen-seconds-of-fame desires of the mob (everyone? most? and how much is technologically driven, how much a psychological inevitability of human nature?) -- no subtlety, after all, that the gang is named after the proudly unoriginal Campbell's soup displayer -- and he also aces, in many wonderful scenes that go far beyond envy, an obsessive compulsion to become the other person which certainly have roots in consumer manipulation. But a sober look-'round, whether in Vancouver or Virginia, tells us that mall-mania and credit availability are already on the downturn, one that is likely to be long-lasting (perhaps permanent), worldwide, and relentless. There hasn't been a major mall built in the U.S. in a decade, and most of the remaining ones are filled with closed and closing stores; the international financial clusterfuck means credit card companies and banks will be (and are) reducing the number of right-side zeroes on consumer limits. Frivolous goods are still promoted, still bought, still desired, perhaps, in a perverse way, desired now even more so, but it's the desire for extreme experience in a war zone as one last stimulation before death (again, Darbyshire does an excellent job in delineating this). But it's not that people will clamour for ever more sophisticated versions of communications devices or work-easing appliances, it's that the money (i.e. natural resources) to create desires in prospective customers (in a pod or not) won't be there, meaning that it's tentacular grip will relax and sink to the bottom of the sea.

The second problem with the novel is its lack of any positive counterforce. (I don't call the "conflicted" Trotsky a meaningful alternative). Novels can certainly be unrelentingly grim, and some are better for their faithfulness to a monochromatic tone, but The Warhol Gang loses a lot of moral force and social realism by reducing its world to the disaffected inhabitants of a world uniformly compelled to sell it guns and garters.

Carol Shields' Swann

I liked the impetus behind Carol Shields' 1987 novel, Swann. A kid glove satirical jab at silly, pretentious academics who opine on the poetry of an obscure poet brutally murdered by her husband, it had the potential to comment on academic careerism, the ambiguous nature of art, and the vicissitudes of celebrity within the arts community. Unfortunately, though Shields scores a few points from these ideas, the novel's focus is on dull character sketches and unfunny dialogue.

Swann is divided into five chapters. Each of the first four concentrates on one of the main characters; the final chapter, reminiscent of her later Larry's Party, brings these and other characters together in a symposium supposedly shedding light on the life and art of the titular victim, but instead "exposing" the shallow, pompous, petty, and/or narrow-minded attributes of the attendees. The scare quote in the previous sentence is so because the point has been made redundant long before the conference. It still would have been OK if the final scene had provided some laughs, but it doesn't, and the uninteresting subplot "whodunnit" is even less thrilling.

The only parts I enjoyed were most of chapter four in which Frederic Cruzzi, the contrasting sympathetic character, was visited by a pitiable Swann the day before her murder, as well as the subsequent emotional incident with his loved and loving wife. That still doesn't make up for the excruciating chapter three (and parts of the last chapter) wherein a shy, reclusive Rose Hindmarsh is allowed to expansively ruminate on a fascinating life between library and night-reading in her rented suite.

The regularly displayed poetry of Swann is perhaps, in a postmodern smirk, meant to get the reader going on subtlety and genuine emotion vs derivation and cliche, the more heavily invested of us finally realizing we're the butt of the joke. But because academics are frequently made to look silly (when anyone cares to pay attention) doesn't render useless exegesis and evaluation. Shields' novel of "ideas" would have been a lot more interesting if she took a stand on that issue. Better poems would have been a prerequisite for that kind of exploration, though.

Essay and Review

My essay on literary readings has been online at Canadian Notes & Queries for two months:

http://notesandqueries.ca/be-proud-to-linger-a-cnq-web-exclusive/

I also have a review of Grant Buday's memoir, Stranger On A Strange Island, in subTerrain's latest issue, #60.

Rohinton Mistry's Such A Long Journey

Rohinton Mistry spent his first twenty-two years in India before settling in Toronto, long enough, obviously, to remember the colours, sights and sounds of his initial neighbourhood and outlying communities. Such A Long Journey, though, his 1991 novel set in 1971 Bombay, provides the reader with an emotional and moral adventure, not a memoirish curio as a travelogue substitute. In Gustad Noble, Mistry has created a fascinating protagonist, an angry yet loyal man, besieged by working poverty, political danger in a secret plan gone awry, tense relations with his eldest son, the sickness of his daughter, infelicities from his friend and work associate, a permanently damaged hip from saving his son's life many years ago, and the mundane yet soul-grinding daily problems which always arrive as emergencies in his household and compound. Noble's transformation is not only filled with emotional layering (narrated at a leisurely pace, but in tense fashion), it is believable and unpredictable.

I appreciate that Mistry didn't shy away from Indian regional dialect, and that the objects and emotions those words referred to were necessary, enlightening some element of plot or place.

The book is at times repetitive and awkward in tone and phrase, and in this, it reminds me of Theodore Dreiser's great An American Tragedy. It also shares with that classic a powerful narrative drive. Compromising elements of a novel are as nothing when the positive elements are at a high level, and numerous. (Moby-Dick breaks all the boring rules about "tightness of plot", but the novel doesn't thrive as a well-made craft-rectangle in a workshop window.)

The novel's ending is superb. It takes a lot of guts to write about characters earlier depicted as comic fodder in such a vulnerable and sympathetic manner. And the final subplot, or denouement (the fate of the art on the compound wall, and the transient artist who created it) is handled deftly, with classical scope.

Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces

Garnering polarizing responses from its readers, Anne Michaels' 1996 Fugitive Pieces is a Vox Dei novel (the people may as well be from a different universe, novel characters or readers). Precious, obscurely suggestive, hightoned and flatlined: these and many other dismissive adjectives can be applied to the book, but what really made me, by turns, laugh or groan was the unnecessary historical and archaeological detail. Pages of dry sourcebook ruminations on limestone and flora and bioluminescent gardens are included, of course, in an attempt to comment on the protagonist's submerged flickering-light soul struggles. Metaphor has rarely been this ambitious and abstract. The other reason for the geological main hall lectures? Well, after all that background reading, whether from personal interest or from necessary planning from a novel outline, it's tempting to brag to the readership that you've browsed more than a book or two, maybe even thought about its contents. Novel concept!

The instruction isn't always about sea foam and gypsum blossoms, though. Bare names are splashed across the page as if by their solemn intonation alone they conferred upon their author an open-ended gravitas:

"There were many volumes of poetry, more than I remembered, as well as Athos' lessons: Paracelsus, Linnaeus, Lyell, Darwin, Mendeleev. Field guides. Aeschylus, Dante, Solomos."

One character in the entire book -- Alex -- remotely resembled a human being. The others were eidolons, in both main meanings of the word. With that in mind, the sex scenes between Jakob and Michaela were hilarious, unintentionally so, because nothing in this book is meant to be funny, not even the dialogue puns. Body parts are touched in amazement: hands, arms, skull, femurs, sacrum, sternum, ears, feet, forehead, damp hair, hipbone, calves, eyes, wrists, pelvis. But no cock! (This is narrated by a man.) His selflessness is not only unbelievable, it's offensive. Who would want to make love with an out-of-body soul-merger? The foreplay? "I hear her small voice -- long phrases of music and stillness like an oar balanced in its arc above the water, dripping silver."

At least suggestion and self-importance in poetry is over in 90 emaciated pages. It's not as if there's a narrative in Fugitive Pieces that has to be filled in.