The BURIED Book Club discussion

Robert M. Coates wrote The Eater of Darkness (1926). And some other stuff. Eater's numbers ::

17 Ratings
2 Reviews

amazon lists a recent edition from olympiapress.com (isbn 1608727831) but I can't confirm it's existence. But avoid it (see article linked below). Get the 1959 from Putnam (or so is my info at this time of writing ; honestly, though, who'd not prefer the First?)


"...such as Glas, Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, and Mark Z. Danielewsi’s House of Leaves, alongside Brooke-Rose’s Thru....." [link below]

"On the Trail of The Eater of Darkness"
by Rick Poynor
http://designobserver.com/feature/on-...

The inimitable Stein had a hand in getting this novel to the cemetery.

And of course here's the LIST in which I discovered it ::

"The 1920s saw a surge in experimentation with the form of the novel. In Ulysses (1922), James Joyce used a different style for each chapter, including the play format for the notorious Nighttown episode. Jean Toomer’s “composite novel” Cane (1923) consists of numerous vignettes alternating between prose, poetry, and drama. John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer (1925) abandoned traditional narrative for a collage of individual stories, newspaper clippings, song lyrics, and prose poems. Taking his cue from European Surrealists, Robert M. Coates likewise deployed newspaper clippings, along with footnotes, diagrams, and unusual typography, in The Eater of Darkness (1926). Djuna Barnes’s novel Ryder (1929) includes a variety of genres—poems, plays, parables—and is written in a pastiche of antique prose styles. William Faulkner scrambled chronology and used four distinct narrative voices in The Sound and the Fury (1929), and later even added a narrative appendix. These were all serious novelists who disrupted nineteenth-century narrative form to reflect the discontinuities, upheavals, and fragmentation of the early twentieth century, a time when many new media emerged that would rival and in some quarters supplant the novel in cultural importance and popularity."
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/03...

I dug up a few more bits and pieces in ye olde databases...

Eater of Darkness hilariously panned in The New Republic:

The Eater of Darkness, by Robert M. Coates. Nm/ York: The Macaulay Company. $2,50. Advertised as the first purely Dada novel to be published in English, "The Eater of Darkness" is a melodramatic extravaganza of the most nonsensical sort. The apologue and the epilogue, which alone ask to be taken somewhat seriously, suggest vaguely that the sinister comedy which they frame is either an hallucination of or a fantasy by a young American who has left a girl in Paris desolated by his abrupt departure, and who is about to rejoice her by his return. The writing here and in a few other passages reminds one of a more lucid Gertrude Stein. Indeed, the book is dedicated to her, among others, including the author's parents, Nick Carter, The New York Times, Robert McAlmon, ex-Mayor Hylan and other ill- sssorted persons and institutions. The character of the dedicatees indicates as well as anything could the absurdity of the tale, which satirizes a number of them. Those readers who recall Isidor Schneider's "Dr. Transit" and can imagine the atmosphere of that strange book enveloping a dime novel, concocted by a young man who wears his tongue in his cheek, will have some notion of what the first Dada novel in English is like. But although it has moments of being very funny and moments of being quite exciting, it has also not a few moments of being simp;y tedious, and one wonders, with some impatience, what this clever young man would achieve if he were to take his tongue out of his cheek. (New Republic Sept. 18, 1929)

From Time, not so much a review as a plot synopsis:

"To My Father and Mother, Nick Carter . . . ex-Mayor Hylan, Gertrude Stein . . . Oleg Skrypitzine . . . Gerald Chapman, Harold Loeb, The New York Times . . . and Fantomas this book is affectionately or gratefully dedicated." Author Coates lives in Manhattan's Chelsea at the end of a disconnected telephone-wire, and it is in Chelsea that his story begins. There one Charles Dograr, "a rare and sensitive soul" meets "one night at 5 a. m." a remarkably white-browed, long-handed old gentleman clad in a pair of long green silk stockings. Old Picrolas reveals that he is an eater of darkness. He controls a ray invention, by which he can not only see through distant men's brains but pulverize them as well. Hospitably, Picrolas offers Dograr a share in his ray-murders. Charmed, Dograr accepts. They aim the ray. Soon the city awakes to find Harry Hansen, William Soskin, Heywood Broun, Henry Seidl Canby, Asa Huddleberry and George Jean Nathan all dead. When the old man's hospitality becomes too exacting, Dograr leaves, preferring to have six Weber & Heilbroner shirts "in the Manhattan manner" at $4.40 each (advt.), and an Oriental dancer named Sweet Adeline. At the end Charles is seen walking down Fifth Avenue smoking a cigar (brand not noted: Author Coates advertises everything but cigars}. Significance: Ford Madox Ford calls this "not the first but the best Dada novel." Dadaism is extinct. Fathered by Painter Francis Picabia, mothered by Poet Tristan Tzara, Dadaism was born at the Cabaret Voltaire, Paris, 1916, when Poet Tzara, 20, thus christened it (in verse) : "Dada is not a literary school. . . . Anonymous Society for the Exploitation of Ideas, Dada has 391 different attitudes and colors according to the sex of the president. It transforms itself—affirms—at the same time contradicts—without any importance—cries— goes fishing, Dada is the chameleon of rapid and interested change, Dada is opposed to the future, Dada is dead." Added Andre Gide: "These two syllables [Dada] reached the goal of sonorous inanity." (Time Aug 5 1929)

Finally, some lit crit on the Stein-Coates connection excerpted from an essay by Constance Pierce in Modern Fiction Studies (Vol. 42, No. 3, Fall 1996):

"Robert M(yron) Coates was thought to be too eccentric a writer even when eccentricity enjoyed its most luminous cachet. “Typographically, rhetorically, artistically mad!” one early critic for the Saturday Review of Literature gasped when The Eater of Darkness appeared in New York in 1929, no doubt pleasing the young “experimentalist” immensely. The book had already been published in Paris (in 1926) by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions, one of Stein’s own publishers. The book was really not guilty of the reviewer’s charges—in fact, it was very accomplished, though even its admirers did it no great service. Ford Madox Ford proclaimed it the first Dada novel in English, a well-meant promotional that probably had something to do with making the book eminently dismissible. The elaborate strategies whereby all that Dada signified and suggested could be relegated to the minor leagues is a subject too vast to go into here, but it is worth mentioning that [End Page 610] Stein herself dismissed the Dadaists. We can only speculate that she preferred to ignore or otherwise classify the aspects of The Eater of Darkness which gave Ford’s claim credibility (begging the question of whether such an antiform sentiment as that which Dada encompassed could allow for a novel). Most likely the book appealed to Stein because of the interests it shared with her own work, interests technically addressed in a mode different enough from her own so as not to be perceived as competition, a natural-enough concern in the scramble for individual reputations dictated by the facts of modern literary life.

Stein reportedly loved the book when Coates brought his handmade, illustrated edition to her door in 1925. In writing his introduction to the 1959 reissued edition, Coates credits her with “practically [having] got the book published” (xi), and she is listed among a throng of persons, living and dead, real and fictitious, to whom he dedicates the effort. In many ways, Stein would seem to have been the ideal reader for The Eater of Darkness, since the novel required someone actively interested in what a novel written as a “film” might look like, a reader eager to forego the narcotizing pleasures of immediacy, transparency, plot, and character for the different pleasures of an infant metafiction, done with intelligence and exceptional insight. It required a reader who could be happily disconcerted to find one “Robert Coates” in the text and to find herself there as well, “the reader.” It required a reader attuned to the possibilities of odd sentence structures, eccentric grammar and punctuation, used as constructive matter. Clearly, it required someone like Stein, and that it was also a sort of detective spoof, given Stein’s declared special interest in that genre, must have made it all the more appealing.

Stein singles out and flatters Coates lavishly in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, calling him one of the most impressive young writers she had met in Paris, one “who had an individual rhythm, his words made a sound to the eyes” (244). She recommended him for two Guggenheim fellowships (neither of which he received), and she produced, almost instantly when requested by Scribner’s Magazine, a laudatory essay on Coates’s second novel, Yesterday’s Burdens, an essay that Scribner’s apparently decided not to print. It was “motion” that Stein admired, above all else, in Coates’s work. It was the “movement” in his fiction that made it “modern,” and she compared the total effect to a motorcar with its motor running, a simile of which she was fond. (See, [End Page 611] for instance, Lectures in America 166.) What she must have meant, in other words, was that the inevitable linearity of the Coates narrative progresses (like a moving motorcar), while at the same time there is great motion within (the up-and-down of the “pistons”—the words and syntactical arrangements). Given the fact that Stein plays rather freely with the simile during this period, she was more than likely trying to work out a description that would be helpful in describing a certain kind of modern writing in general, although the motorcar is truly appropriate for Coates’s intriguing way of writing early in his career. But Stein’s use of the car and Coates’s car-like “movement” speak to more than the modernists’ fascination with the mechanical. Stein was indeed fascinated by twentieth-century technology, particularly with conveyances, as the photographs of her sitting seraphically at the wheel of her Ford will confirm. But her metaphoric habit of mind (which might also be called the modern habit of mind) found in the car access to a “literary theory” bearing her inimitable stamp, found in the car an agile metaphor for modern representation, in spite of her own penchant for the abstract. The motorcar with its motor running and the example of Robert Coates give her at least a momentary solution to the problem of how best to evoke the complex of activation that characterized modern life—from machine, to street noise and frantic light, to the moving picture and phonographic sound, to the jumble of advertising, to what was perceived to be a mechanically orchestrated movement of human mass, and to the mental swirls proceeding from psychology, relativity physics, and more to impinge on the ontological, on perception, on epistemology: the inside and the outside, subject and object, and all the ways these can and cannot be separately thought. In short, all the motion of modernity that was, inescapably, modernity. There was really no way to abstract oneself out of it in the end and still be modern. Stein comes, therefore, to her motorcar."

Many thanks!

I've got a copy making its way me=ward.

I just noticed that there are two entries for Mr. Coates, although this topic is technically about the book Eater of Darkness, so maybe not considered a dupe. Nathan, what say you?

See also:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I'll do the fix :: trans'ing the other thread to this one. Thanks!

[housekeeping :: moving a duplicate thread over here]

NR said ::
Robert M. Coates discovered whilst gandering in upon Steven Moore's amazon account where he reviewed (blurbed) Following Strangers: The Life and Literary Works of Robert M. Coates, saying "unfairly neglected American novelist."

His novel The Eater of Darkness is at the top of his gr pile -- 14 ratings, 1 singular review. First pub'd by Robert McAlmon and tied into the Gertrude Stein scene.


And he also said ::
The Eater of Darkness reviewed by Moore @amazon ::
http://www.amazon.com/review/R35NLGZ5...

He says, avoid the Olympia edition (scan'd) and get either the 1929($$$) edition or the affordable 1959 paperback (with intro by Coates).


[and thus ends the housekeeping. thank you for your patience. And thanks to Sean.]

Thank YOU. And here's a link to Nate D's review to further entice readers, keeping in mind that Nate is relatively sparing with his stars...

Jesus, Eater of Darkness is stupid expensive (even the "acceptable" condition pb on Amazon) - guess I'm rolling the dice that my ILL will come through. I'm currently seeing about a 30% success rate on those lately...

Yeah, the library was the only way I managed to get my mitts on this.

I also read The Hour After Westerly, but wasn't really sold -- his stories are much more normal in execution.

Nate D wrote: "Yeah, the library was the only way I managed to get my mitts on this.

I also read The Hour After Westerly, but wasn't really sold -- his stories are much more normal in execution."

Good to know on The Hour After Westerly - I've got enough stuff to read already; I'll keep it in mind, but it's not going to be prioritized any time soon.

Ronald wrote: "Jesus, Eater of Darkness is stupid expensive (even the "acceptable" condition pb on Amazon) - guess I'm rolling the dice that my ILL will come through. I'm currently seeing about a 30% success rate..."

My library kicked ass and got this to me in under a week, which is crazy quick for them!

I liked this a great deal!

I just launched a Kickstarter to help finance a new edition of Coates's second novel, Yesterday's Burdens (8 ratings, 3 reviews):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

"Yesterday's Burdens is certainly one of the most original books of the year. . . . The strange thing is that, despite the confusion, despite stylistic vagaries unequaled since E.E. Cummings's EIMI, Yesterday's Burdens is an enjoyable book."
— The New York Times, December 10, 1933

"An arresting, free, unique work of art which may possibly leave an effect on novel-writing in the next few years."
— Vanity Fair, February 1934

"Not easy reading because it is done in the Dadaistic style but worthwhile as a kaleidoscopic picture of our present kaleidoscopic life. Fine humor and written with distinction."
— Scribner's, February 1934

“The writing in detail is always fresh and frequently excellent; some of the isolated episodes . . . are no less than beautiful.”
— The American Mercury, April 1934

Excellent work, Rick. Good to see this.

Rick wrote: "I just launched a Kickstarter to help finance a new edition of Coates's second novel, Yesterday's Burdens (8 ratings, 3 reviews):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/......"

This is nice but....I'd love if someone republished his "The Eater of Darkness" so that the cheapest paperback and shipping don't cost over 90 $ >>

Nothing against your efforts it's just...this one is so annoyingly out of reach yet people keep talking about it, it's frustrating ;_;

David,

According to Mathilde Roza, who wrote the intro to the new edition of Yesterday's Burdens, a new edition of The Eater of Darkness is in the works. Not sure who the publisher is though.

Rick wrote: "David,

According to Mathilde Roza, who wrote the intro to the new edition of Yesterday's Burdens, a new edition of The Eater of Darkness is in the works. Not sure who the publisher is though."

That's great news, seeing how hard it is to get ahold of. I heard from another source there were copyright issues before.

To bump this somewhat, there will be both a paperback and e-book version of "The Eater of Darkness" released in September

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/194795123...