The Scorpions

by Robert Kelly

This classic hallucinatory thriller of the 1960s, newly available, is a book charged with sexual obsession and haunted by the sense that all narrative is itself obsessive and violent.  The Scorpions  is Robert Kelly’s early novel about a psychiatrist who begins to believe one of his patient’s paranoid inventions and searches for hard evidence in a funny, crazy, sometimes dark, even spooky American world that cooperates with what he wants to find in it.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965).Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roychoudhury,with whom he had correspondence,now archived at Kolkata.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time.

Reviews

[Tony]

This was bizarre, but in a good way.

The protagonist in this, this, this -hell, I don't know what this is; the protagonist is a psychiatrist and seems to have a high-end practice and leads a high-end, highly regulated life. He's erudite and has a lot of neat toys, most prominently a Rolls-Royce (named Kelvin) with lots of protective gadgets in it. So he's like James Bond the psychiatrist but more sex-obsessed and without the Walther PPK. Indeed, this Doctor sleeps with virtually ever female he encounters in the book. Except Mrs. Prentergest, one of his patients, who like him is getting messages from the Scorpions. This sends the Doctor, with Kelvin, on a road trip from New York to Fort Lauderdale, with plenty of sex and occasional violence.

The reader is gripped by the story, perhaps without understanding it. An Afterword by the author suggests it's about the end of America, but (still here) I didn't get that.

What I did get though was some highly-crafted writing. Guess what this is about:

Her hands and arms went on making those restrained savage gestures spongy softness demanded, each slice a wrench of white flesh, soft chips of gills spinning slowly out beside the blue enamel pan, flecking the sink. -- (answer below*)

He follows a woman in a grocery store and sees her hide two packaged steaks inside her coat, leaving her shopping cart:

The empty shopping cart stood where she left it, motionless in mid-aisle, pointing at all the dead meat. It had brought her to the appointed place, helped the predatory panther masquerade as suburban housewife, creaked its way under her warm eager hands, indifferent to its own role in crime or commerce.

You know how you can be reading a book, even one as bizarre as this, and wonder if you, the reader, are in it? Well, I got to this: Happy the man for whom flesh suffices. And I pondered that, and then said Nyeah. But then I got to this:

Myopic women have always drawn me. Their eyes (more often blue than brown, more often watery than deep) swim small, frightened, eager to make contact, behind the infinitely receding arcs of light that frame their openings onto the world of color. Female myopia seems to be associated with a number of their physical attributes, besides the more obvious positive correlation of myopia and intelligence:

breadth of shoulder
pallor of skin
breadth of hand
softness of nates.

The moteliste beside me was no exception, though scarcely exemplary in any particular. We rode together on the night with dissimilar pleasures, dissimilar profits.

And I thought, maybe.

Most of the (scant) reviewers of this book want to talk about the ending, which is unique I suppose. Some hated it; at least one thought it made the book. In the afterword, the author** said he wrote the ending first (so it obviously has meaning), and then wrote backwards, adventure by adventure.

But I don't want to talk about the

____________
*Cooking mushrooms.

**My copy of the book has the author as Robert Kelly, but other editions of this book and most other works by this author have him as Robert Kelley. Kind of a ridiculous mistake, whichever is wrong.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"America, long steeped in the thin sour wine of gnosticism, rejects its body, its matter, despises every luxury except cosmology. In these last hours before its inevitable abstraction into a more vigorous people, America reaches for and attains the false wisdom of the Stoa: nothing is except as it seems to us. No event possesses lineaments of its own, only the feel of it we fancy we perceive. Ample Saturn, lord of measure and definition, reeks unpleasantly of exactitude and long division, and is banished from the pantheon; bubbling expansive cancer-eaten Jupiter presides over the cosmological matinee. Gemutlichkeit our nearest approach to melancholy, sickness and death are cardboard jointed skeletons Blue-Crossed away. Nobody believes in them, nobody is afraid. Romeo clutches the putrified carcass of his Giulietta, resolute in hope. America, you have seen atherosclerosis enthroned in high places, you have watched senile President after senile President flap its lips and gibber on your screens of youth and health and destiny. America, you build your simplistic cosmologies, you erect your feigned realities as you put up this so-called Gateway of the West. They will stand as long, and mean as little: this empty arch, this celebration of vacuity and hollow promise, this great Behistun Rock on which our Darius has neglected to carve his message for all generations of men to come."

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ordinarily, when a book is full of unresolved puzzles and loose ends, when its narrator is sexually insinuating without detail or description and when a book fails to end in a conventional way, I hate the book. Much of the OuLiPo literature and the hyper-saturated symbolist literature that “The Scorpions” sometimes resembles is also, as far as I’m concerned, supremely irritating. But I’m a sucker for unconventional detective fiction and lethal, arrogant, philandering eccentrics.

Kelly is also a talented, deliberate and sensitive prose stylist. I enjoyed, “Now no memorial of her act was left besides my own rapidly blurring memory of the open-lipped tension of triumph in her face as she’d taken the steaks under her wing, her quick stiff-kneed sumptuous walk away.” & “Cat fanciers, dog breeders, parakeet tenders, goldfish feeders, little they knew or cared how much of themselves they alienated to the animals in their charge. Beasts crave souls from men, suck those souls.” Kelly’s solid physical humor is a perfect antidote to the potentially eye-glazing details about astrology and numerology, just as the narrator’s libido is an ideal counterbalance to his ritual, cerebralized paganism.

I’m still incredulous that I judge Kelly to be successful in attempting exactly the sort of closure that he describes in the afterword, which is an especially helpful lubricant and apology for the book’s uncompromising end. The shrug of a conclusion is a smashing commentary on all of the novel’s ploys and titillations. It could be taken as a fond dismissal of recently popular forms of over-precious and over-wrought American experimental fiction.

Worth mentioning: it feels, in its oddness and pace, like a Murakami novel with a toxic protagonist.

[Joshua]

Rikki's a fan:

LM: Were you aware of Robert Kelly’s work? Wasn’t he at Bard about the same time?

RD: How interesting that you should mention him! Yes, I met both Bob Coover and Robert Kelly at Bard. I hadn’t thought of Kelly influencing my work before, but I thought Cities was a fascinating piece of work when I first came across it; and you’re right—it did fire my imagination. I also loved his novel: Scorpions.

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conver...

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are so many things to admire about this book, but for me it was the ending, yes, the endi

[Eugene · Rating 3 out of 5]

at first i was very jazzed by kelly's "cult" experimental novel THE SCORPIONS--but then i ended up being disappointed. a book about cartoonish lust (with cartoonish consummation) disguised as a mystery adventure, the book was sometimes entertaining but oddly slighter than it first appeared. at its best moments, it reminded me of harry mathews' THE CONVERSIONS in its artificial and fun entanglements. the narrator's sexism and dated ideas of outre sexuality however get a bit tiresome, as do all the relentless plotting and flat characterization. witty and nerdy bits do come together like a clever jigsaw puzzle--a literary mensa novel maybe, it could be called.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another delightful book from RK. Fortunately, this book was released some years ago.

[Fede · Rating 2 out of 5]

What I should have done when the Amazon guy delivered this book:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyj6RIV...