Gulping's Recital

by Russell Edson

Excerpts from Russell Edson's first novel, Gulping's Recital , appeared in The An Anthology of New World Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones at the time) and published by Corinth Books in 1963. That was a year prior to the New Directions publication of Edson's breakthrough collection of prose poems, The Very Thing That Happens . In the "Notes on the Authors" section at the back of The Moderns , it stated "Jonathan Williams' Jargon Press is scheduled to bring out the complete Gulping's Recital ." For reasons unknown, the Jargon Press edition never materialized and it wasn't until 1984 that Gulping's Recital was finally published, by the small press Guignol Books in Rhinebeck, NY.

This first-ever reissue of Gulping's Recital is published with permission from the Estate of Russell Edson.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Poetry

Hardcover

About the author

Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson.

He studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League as a teenager. He began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His honors as a poet include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem," is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson's typical "recipes" for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed--both figuratively and literally--by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment. . . . Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses. . . .

Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press).

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Did I hear someone say this Russell Edson novel is weird? So sorry, Archibald Aardvark - not even close. How about hyperweird? Now you're getting warmer. How about poet Mark Tursi's description, "These narratives are like fairy tales whose characters have slipped into a bad psychedelic hallucination or a madman's dreamscape." Ah, now we're cooking up a mayonnaise coated arrow that hits the bull's bullseye square in the ruby red.

Originally published in 1984 and long out of print, Gulping's Recital is currently available in a new, affordable edition. Thank you, Tough Poets Press.

A word of advice for readers unfamiliar with Russell Edson. Before tackling Russell's novels - Gulping's Recital or The Song of Percival Peacock, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with some of the author's prose poems, as per these two:

THE TREE
They have grafted pieces of an ape with pieces of a dog.
Then, what they have, wants to live in a tree.
No, what they have wants to lift its leg and piss on the tree . . .

FAIRYTALE
Behind every chicken is the story of a broken egg. And behind every broken egg is the story of a matron chicken. And behind every matron is another broken egg . . .

Out of the distance into the foreground they come, Hansels and Gretels dropping egg shells as they come . . .

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Do these preposterous Edson poppers cause your brain cells to fizz and start dancing the rumba right between your ears? If so, join the club! We dedicated Russell Edson fans thrive on his upside down surreal scrambled word eggs. Time to treat yourself to an entire book of Russell Edson prose poems. And then, sure as sapodilla, you'll be all set to take the delicious dive into Gulping's Recital.



As a way of setting the stage and lining up the chairs for this Gulping Edson Recital, below are themes a reader will brush against in the novel's 112 pages. For each theme, I've included a Gulping's Recital direct quote then my brief comment. By the way, when was the last time you performed in a recital? As a kid? Did you take a big gulp?

SENSE OF SELF
"So that someone, anyplace in this world knows that he is himself; none other than he! Awakes from the shouting of angels and the hum of animals thick packed in the earthly regions."

Does your self-identity follow you around like a faithful little dachshund? What makes you, you? Is there a self to be identified with outside of your own self-concepts packed together in the earthy regions of your memory?

VIVID, VISUAL IMAGES
"Suddenly the sun rose like an octopus from the sea, hung red like a parasol of hell. Quick now, I said amid the scream of birds . . .
And the man was rising like a drowned man out of the sea. Rising out of himself. Out of the darkness of himself. the lung of the soul nearly bursting . . . "

Russell Edson frequently likens the sun and moon to such as animals or plants or everyday objects - the bottom of a shoe, the shell of an egg, peas on a plate, the layers of an onion. And what is one thing can slip and slide into another as quickly as a word can change form by a mere switching of a tall or round letter.



COMEDY
"They found a dead man, stabbed in the heart by his penis. HIs hands tied together by their fingers. A woman's voice bleeding softly from his ears . . . "

Russell Edson injects much comedy and humor, fun and funniness. He has told interviewers over the years he's always reminded not to take himself too seriously or even his writing too seriously. On topic, take a gander at what Russell says about the writing process: "Just get something on the page, you have nothing to lose except your life, which you're going to lose anyway. So go with it, enjoy this special moment that brings you to the writing table. Relax into the writing and enjoy the creative bowel movement, remembering all is lost anyway."

SOFT AND RUNNY
"But, in a little, the earth gave way. And falling, I boiled, i seethed. I cried on the rocks. I ran through the wood, tangling my liquid hair in the faggots of the wood.
In a little, I slept again. I entered the earth drowning in the marsh.
Was I ever the same river that started on the mountain?"

We like to think our world possesses solidity and firmness and permanence - and the most permanent member of the world is none other than ourselves. Sorry to say, from a certain angle, our world that appears so rock solid is a Russell Edson marshmallow soft death mill.



VIOLENCE
"The wind is full of girls. Softly they weave my flesh into sperm . . ."

An instance of Russell Edson violence, usually brutal, usually sexual when it isn't cannibalistic - eating other people, nibbling on their wiggling parts or even taking a bite out of oneself. Ouch! As you can see, the above quote has something of Dionysian frenzy about it.

BIZARRE
"In Jumpingtown, where all the men jump, is where the women also jump, and where the children jump. Up and down they jump like rubber balls. Old people just bounce to hell."

In the world of Russell Edson, we don't have the fantastic over here are rationality over there . . . no, no, no - the fantastical runs on to infinity in all directions, splotches of chaos soaking up the entire tablecloth with no rational edge in sight.

MAKING A MOCKERY OF ROLES AND HIERARCHY
"Papa Plume began to play the violent, accompanied by General Moon's organ. And Corporal Jasmine brought out his English Hounds. The Duke of Ambrey began to play with his bum."

Do you hold fast to the rigidity of rank, the pomp of position, the tidiness and order imposed by authority? If so, you are living in a la la land lands away from the universe of Russell Edson.

Oh, yes, Gulping's Recital is most definitely a novel, complete with a story from beginning to end. But to pluck the purple plum of plot, you will have to read for yourself. And the good news about this Tough Poets Press edition - an insightful essay by Mark Tursi is included as well as Mark's in-depth interview with Russell Edson.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A creature pinioned under the night. Crazy with stars that swarm like lice through the eyes, blighting the mind with a crust of fire."

This is a ‘novel’ of dismembered mythologies, disabled fables, tri-forked fairy tales of Freudian sangfroid, heavily spiced with ill logic, illogical dreams, and absurdirty jokes. There are ounces of choice Joyce, buckets of hectic Beckett, burps of blimey Barthelme, fools of Schulz, but all edefying Edson.

The cover, a hunched-head creature flexing while bearing a semi-Cheshire smile, is a wonderfully appropriate illustration doodled by the author himself.

I had thought the ‘recital’ in the title was alluding to a musical performance (though it is a linguistic performance), but the recital is more of a yo-yo string of delusions and allusions, transfusions and contusions. The atmosphere of the novel could still refer to a child blowing into a recorder at school as much as it could refer to the injunction given to Mahound to Recite! Recite! Recite!

"I must clean my lips to blow my lute. My hands for flute. My Adam's fruit most mute."

As the beginning of the penultimate chapter, “The Soldier,” unfolds, I was reminded of the sadomasochism that occurs in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses between Bloom and the brothel-mistress Bella Cohen. It’s not nearly as wild as that scene, but there is a similar sinister mood in Gulping’s Recital when the General refuses to kiss the shiny boots of Captain Mommy and also refuses to let the Corporal’s rat gnaw on his person, but when they rescind their respect for him he then begs and grovels for what he first declined.

"They found a dead man stabbed in the heart by his penis. His hands tied together by their fingers. A woman's voice bleeding softly from his ears..."

The beginning and ending of the novel suggest an ouroboros of indigestive digression, of dueling dualities, of the never-ending throat-clear only to discover that the throat, that animate tunnel, is all and everything, the light at one end but an illusory star to guide us through a constipated and comic cosmos.

(The essay and interview at the end of the book was a nice touch, especially since the novel proper is only about 110 pages, even though the interviewer suffered from some academic neurosis or perhaps just a need to impress the interviewee and the readers. The interviewer, now older, admits to some of this in a new introduction. Which is all a way of saying that the interview is not as good as it could have been. And, somewhat strangely, the book is missing an author bio.)

Thanks to Tough Poets Press for unearthing this gem.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the strangest "novel" I've ever read. More like a 100-page absurd, surreal prose poem, or maybe hundreds of individual prose poems strung together into some semblance of plot, at times hilarious, although at times a bit hard to follow. I will definitely be rereading this. I had read excerpts in The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America edited by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) which can be found here: https://archive.org/details/modernsan... but it took me several months to find a copy of the full book for sale online. It was worth the wait.

[Geoffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

One struggles for comparisons: Barthelme's more opaque stories? A bit of Bruno Schultz' surrealism? Beckett's hermetic novels? But really, this seems pretty unique. Difficult to describe but frequently hilarious and striking; I liked it enough to read it twice back-to-back. Good on Tough Poets for bringing it to our attention.

[edmondegreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible Book