The Paris Evaluate – Who Was Robert Plunket?

President Harding with pet canine Laddie being photographed in entrance of the White Home. Nationwide Picture Co., Public area, through Wikimedia Commons.

I may not have learn a single actually humorous novel that 12 months if my good friend hadn’t stopped by my Los Angeles porch one afternoon carrying an out-of-print copy of Robert Plunket’s comedian masterpiece, My Seek for Warren Harding.

We have been within the worst of days—the depths of the pre-vaccine pandemic—and our world was on fireplace, each actually and figuratively. The copy of the novel that my good friend, the author Victoria Patterson, handed over to me regarded the best way all of us felt in these days: yellowing, battered, dusty from too lengthy in storage. Tory bellowed by the muffling material of her N95 masks that it was one among her favourite novels—and actually fucking humorous.

I wanted humorous. I opened the ebook a number of weeks later—and regardless of my allergic response to the mould within the version, saved studying for the subsequent 256 pages. After I was carried out, I sat in a sort of silent, centered delight. I held in my arms among the best, and most invigorating books I’d learn in years, and definitely the funniest—and but, how was it out of print? Why had I by no means heard of this novel prior to now? (Later I discovered Tory had really written a wonderful piece about it for Tin Home journal in 2015.) Why had it disappeared so absolutely from the literary panorama? And what did that say about this literary panorama if it might bury a ebook like this? Most intriguingly: Who was Robert Plunket?

The jacket bio for Plunket’s second (and, to date, final) novel, Love Junkie, printed in 1992 and in addition out of print, reads:

Robert Plunket’s first novel, My Seek for Warren Harding, instantly established him as one among America’s most promising novelists. Sadly, the promise quickly pale, and he now lives in a trailer in Sarasota, Florida, the place he ekes out an existence as a gossip columnist, masking the whole lot from gala charity balls to KKK conferences. He has additionally served on the boards of Sarasota AIDS Help and the Humane Society of Sarasota County, and is at the moment operating for election to the Mosquito Management Board, District 6.

A lot for literary fame. There are few interviews with Plunket on-line. In one of many solely I might discover—printed by the Los Angeles Evaluate of Books in 2015—he explains the inspiration for the novel to author Michael Leone.

“Clearly, it’s based mostly on The Aspern Papers,” Plunket explains.

The Aspern Papers, the celebrated novella printed by Henry James in 1888, is ready in nineteenth-century Venice, the place an unnamed narrator seduces a younger lady with a view to achieve entry to her spinster aunt’s trove of letters by her useless poet-lover.

Plunket goes on to say, “It was at all times one among my favorites, however most necessary, it spoke to me in a particular manner. I couldn’t work out why till sooner or later it hit me. The man’s homosexual! After all! Now the ebook made good sense. His relationships with all the ladies characters have been these of a homosexual man. Now, not an brazenly homosexual man or perhaps a consciously homosexual man. However a person who was simply not heterosexual at his core. I don’t assume Henry James realized what he had carried out, or how properly he had carried out it, which made my discovery much more thrilling.”

In Plunket’s retelling of The Aspern Papers, he units his novel in late-seventies Los Angeles. The writer himself was simply rising from that period when he wrote the ebook. It got here out in 1983: the identical 12 months the nationwide craze for Cabbage Patch dolls reached its pinnacle. The identical 12 months Vanessa Williams was topped, then promptly decrowned, the primary Black Miss America. The identical 12 months Ronald Reagan decreed Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a nationwide vacation and Michael Jackson moonwalked for the primary time on nationwide tv. The identical 12 months Reverend Jerry Falwell described AIDS as “the homosexual plague.”

Plunket’s ebook, in different phrases, emerged out of a tradition of contradictions—a world of each hedging progress and conservative backlash, an America of trash and spectacle. Which is possibly why the novel, forty years later, feels so startlingly modern.

***

Sensitivity readers, be warned: the protagonist of this novel, Elliot Weiner, is merciless, racist, fat-phobic, homophobic, and deeply, deeply petty. Within the novel’s opening, we discover Weiner standing on a scenic lookout in Los Angeles along with his good friend Eve Biersdorf staring by binoculars at a big, dilapidated residence within the distance. No matter mischief he’s as much as, he says, “it was Mrs. Biersdorf’s—Eve’s—thought.” Weiner, we quickly be taught, is an East Coast snob and middling historian who has come from New York to Los Angeles on a fellowship. He holds himself in excessive regard, however the extra he brags about his tutorial profession—“Suffice it to say that I educate at each Mercy Faculty and the New College, and I really feel that speaks for itself”—the extra we sense desperation: “Some unlucky feedback have gotten again to me about my ‘{qualifications}.’” Elliot Weiner is hoping to retrieve some misplaced love letters between President Harding, historically ranked because the worst of presidents, and his secret mistress, Rebekah Kinney, the proprietor of the home within the view of their binoculars. Weiner quickly learns that Kinney is alive, however now a cranky octogenarian who wears rhinestone sun shades and spends her days in her crumbling mansion shouting at her Mexican servant from a squeaky wheelchair. Weiner believes the outdated lady nonetheless possesses the love letters and different Harding-related papers, and is hiding her treasure someplace in her crumbling mansion. And he’ll do something to get his mitts on these letters, even “rape and pillage,” as he’s hoping a discovery like this will propel him to tutorial stardom.

Because the novel unfolds, Weiner’s madcap effort to acquire these papers propels the absurd, picaresque plot. He rents out Kinney’s dilapidated pool home and cozies as much as her granddaughter, a naive younger lady named Jonica whose ample flesh disgusts him. However he’s keen to grit his enamel and seduce her if it means attending to her grandmother’s historic smut.

Weiner is merciless about Jonica from the start, describing her as “a fats lady … carrying dishevelled inexperienced paratrooper pants … and lots of plastic bracelets that added to the final din … She talked like an actual California lady, no inflection, plenty of r’s.” Sure, Weiner is unabashedly merciless about harmless Jonica. He despises all she represents—fatness, the West Coast, gullibility—and but he begins to court docket the poor lady, to prey on her neediness. Quickly they’re romantically and sexually concerned—and he’s that a lot nearer to his prize and turning into a famend historian.

The naked bones of a plot is so typically only a skeleton for a novelist to hold up their observations. The extra streamlined and superbly elegant a plot—and within the case of My Seek for Warren Harding, the plot merely boils all the way down to a single character pursuing a single, tantalizing object—the extra tangents the writer can take. And the tangents on this ebook are the whole lot. They allow us to see Plunket—along with his lacerating wit—ship up all the tradition of Los Angeles on the flip of the eighties.

However with each parody of the tradition round him, Weiner is the largest joke of all. One in all Weiner and Jonica’s early dates is to an avant-garde feminist efficiency—an audience-participation play known as All My Sisters Slept in Filth—A Choral Poem, carried out on the LA Girls’s Theatre. “Then, abruptly, individuals began streaming in like they’d simply bought off a bus. Girls principally, with extreme haircuts and aviator glasses. It hit me what an necessary second in feminist vogue it was when Gloria Steinem dropped by her optician’s and mentioned, ‘I’ll take these.’” The satire on this scene is ideal, and we’re conscious, too, that Weiner, who has a sweating downside and is carrying a silk shirt, has strapped cut-up Pampers diapers to his underarms to soak up the sweat. At any time when the writer is vicious concerning the individuals round him, he humiliates Weiner just a little extra. After the date, Weiner expresses his repulsion towards Jonica:

After I bought again, she was nonetheless mendacity on the rug, wanting up at me.

What can I say? You’ll be able to guess what occurred subsequent.

As for her physique, I gained’t go into particulars however will say this: she had lots of dimples. In all places.

And but the reader is aware of Weiner is the one with the soggy Pampers taped below his arms.

In actual fact, Elliot Weiner is depicted as essentially the most deliciously terrible of New York Metropolis neurotic bachelors. For one, he places his rubbish within the fridge so it gained’t stink and entice roaches, whereas the girlfriend he’s left again in New York, Pam, is the consummate beard. “Once we first met, we found we had quite a bit in frequent, together with the truth that our brothers had attended the identical basketball camp though at totally different instances.” They have been clearly meant to be. Pam even indulges his true ardour—which is for “Morris dancing … a sort of outdated English folks dancing, at all times carried out by males. It could get fairly wild, because it entails lots of swinging of golf equipment.”

What’s fantastic about Plunket’s first-person narrator is how far beneath the floor his dishonesty lies. His attraction to males is hinted at superbly, hilariously, however at all times cagily, by no means consummated. He has lied a lot—so profoundly—and for thus lengthy that his attraction leaks out in twisted bromances with straight, working-class males. He leers at them, ingratiates himself towards them, describes their biceps and the size of their shorts, however his need reveals itself sideways. His defenses have been shored behind this unique lie, as he seems to be down on everybody and on Los Angeles itself. Within the gaps between his observations, the silences, the reality about Weiner’s true self emerges. Behind the bluster and vanity he’s a closeted homosexual misanthrope, blind to his personal needs. Whereas Weiner is just not a likable character, the story doesn’t ask you to admire or sympathize with him. Sure, he’s a superficial, boastful, closeted homophobe who refers back to the one homosexual man he encounters as “the faggot.” He goes into lengthy tirades, together with an elaborate racist principle concerning the distinction between Puerto Ricans in New York and Mexicans in LA (he prefers the Mexicans). Fats jokes abound. Nevertheless it’s not empathy we’re right here for.

In his essay “Homosexual Sincerity is Scary,” Paul McAdory calls out the fiction of “homosexual sincerity”—that modern, humanistic, and, above all, earnest homosexual novel that revels in its personal poignancy and tenderness. McAdory cringes within the face of such mawkish, heartfelt quasi-transgressive sentimentality, and asks: “Will we not develop drained, after so many rounds of this sentimental journey to the weepy, fantastical core of human expertise? Would possibly we not have fun as a substitute a extra horizontal outlay of sincerity, mania, irony, horror, meanness, humor, and so on. … In lieu of crying, a author would possibly attempt laughing, cackling, madly monologuing to the pool of cum on one’s tummy, coolly observing it, overanalyzing it for impact, enjoying in it, rejoicing in it …”

My Seek for Warren Harding could be the insincere homosexual novel McAdory has been hoping for. Weiner is a low-key monster. He initiatives his self-loathing outward onto fats girls and brazenly homosexual males. His views are problematic. His complete manner of judging different individuals is reductive and snobby and scathing and unkind. After all all books and artistic endeavors are in some methods a symptom of their instances, and this one has the blind spots and cringeworthy moments that remind us of its 1983 pub date. However for these of us who’re grasping for fashions of literary fiction which are really humorous, hungry for satire that stings, craving work that pricks and prods us awake—fiction that doesn’t bore us—the chance of not studying these uncommon works outweighs the chance of being offended.

And in the long run, I don’t assume you’ll be able to learn Plunket’s work straight-faced. Too typically we nonetheless insist on studying the fiction of so-called “marginalized” authors as thinly veiled autobiography, or worse but, a instrument of self-help. We one way or the other nonetheless imagine the queer novelist or the author of shade should share the ethical underpinnings and opinions of the characters they create on the web page—and when the character says or does mistaken, we convict the writer. However a lot of the actual pleasure of fiction lies within the nonliteral, which means informed slant—in double-talk and mischief and irony, all embedded within the elaborate lie.

First-person narrators are sometimes finest as liars. They’re most attention-grabbing once they misinform the world and so they misinform us and so they particularly misinform themselves. Weiner isn’t any exception. And there’s a explicit pleasure on this novel of witnessing the cracks the place Weiner’s self-delusion runs up towards the fact of his true self.

Weiner learns nothing from his journey. He retains judging, retains mendacity, retains greedy, retains being petty. A part of what’s liberating about writing terrible characters, grotesque characters who do grotesque issues and be taught nothing from their journey, significantly for these of us who’re writing from the margins, is that darkish satirical comedy resists the autobiographical gaze. In writing a perceptive satire—writing monstrous characters on downward spirals that by no means reverse course —we resist the strain to remediate and uplift. We reclaim our proper as artists to easily fuck shit up and stroll away, laughing.

The primary rule of improv is “say sure.” And certainly a part of the perfection of My Seek for Warren Harding, partly, is in how dedicated it stays to its premise and the persona of Elliot Weiner. Plunket says sure to the problematic character and he regularly says sure to the absurd circumstances he places him in. The story retains saying sure to its personal twisted logic and doesn’t ever shrink back from the ugliness or limitations of Weiner’s vantage level.

In the actual world we’re informed we must always empathize and see issues from different individuals’s factors of view. In a novel, the alternative is usually true: the viewpoint is by necessity chauvinistic. It really works most powerfully when restricted by its personal physique and instances and perspective.

My Seek for Warren Harding seems like freedom due to its limitations. In studying a personality so blind and blindsided, so prejudiced and self-absorbed, we’re free of our personal sanctity, our personal vanity. The primary character is a closeted white homosexual man with a narcissist’s insecure vapid heart. In studying Plunket, we’re free of our personal delusion that we aren’t all Weiner. That we aren’t all—one way or the other, someway—within the closet.

His novel anticipated and influenced a lot of what the tradition would start to search out humorous (and possibly what a few of us are nonetheless ready for the world to search out humorous). In our modern humble-bragging world of filtered selfies, advantage signaling, and good optics, we discover rising launch, and comedian reduction, in fictional characters we aren’t requested to admire or envy—in characters so terrible or amoral or vapid that the joke is on them.

The novel was a essential success upon its publication within the eighties. Ann Beattie and Frank Conroy wrote glowing critiques. Plunket, nonetheless, didn’t publish once more for a few years and as a substitute dabbled in performing. His IMDb web page says he’s “finest remembered because the timid homosexual man” in Martin Scorsese’s darkish comedy thriller, After Hours. He went on to get bit components in different motion pictures, then printed a second novel, Love Junkie, in 1992; the rights have been optioned by Madonna. Plunket moved to Florida and didn’t publish one other ebook. Even nonetheless, My Seek for Warren Harding continued to quietly go away its mark—handed round by some sort of comedic-literary whisper community, the place it was adored by a small, choose group of readers that included Amy Sedaris and Larry David.

Rumor has it that Larry David was such a fan of the novel he saved copies of it accessible within the Seinfeld writing room and informed his writers to mimic the tone. It’s clear studying this novel that he even lifted particulars from the ebook, such because the absurd manner that Seinfeld’s Elaine dances—clearly based mostly on the novel’s depiction of how Weiner’s girlfriend Pam dances:

She is a type of individuals who ‘abandon’ themselves to the beat, clapping their arms over their head and emitting little yelps. To make issues worse, she studied trendy dance in school and thus considers herself a Motion Professional. The factor she does—I can solely describe them as Martha Graham routines. Her arms fly out into area, she makes sudden turns, then she half-squats, her head flung again in ecstasy.

After its publication, this novel did what so many nice novels do: it shone briefly on the brand new fiction scene, lengthy sufficient to be pilfered and imitated, lengthy sufficient to be absorbed into the tradition it will affect. After which, like a lot supply materials, it disappeared, just like the writer himself, who retreated to Sarasota, Florida, the place he has lived for thirty-seven years and concerned himself in gossip and actual property writing, rhinestone and quilt amassing, and elevating succulents.

“The literary market is fickle, unforgiving, and sometimes unfair, prone to reward the second-rate,” writes Victoria Patterson in her essay on Plunket. “In counteraction to this miserable actuality, there’s additionally a ravishing and hopeful phenomenon, whereby a deserving ebook survives.”

When Patterson handed me Plunket’s half-forgotten novel that day on my porch, California burning and the world in decay, the out-of-print ebook had already been handed to her years earlier than, pressed upon her by one other author. And I learn it and pressed it upon an excellent good friend at New Instructions and so right here we now have it, a redemption track.

***

In that one uncommon interview within the LARB, Plunket comes off like I’d anticipate: unpretentious, unfiltered, quick-witted, sincere, and fully bullshit-free. He’s deeply literary, loves literature maybe an excessive amount of to sully it with careerism. He talks trash concerning the books which are alleged to be humorous however aren’t: “P. G. Wodehouse means nothing to me. I can’t get previous the primary web page.” He throws shade at Jonathan Franzen: “I discover the characters so caught in middle-class angst that we’re alleged to take severely …” He’s additionally clear concerning the guidelines he tries to comply with with a view to write a very humorous novel. As he says, the humorous novel should embrace a “barely manic, deeply flawed first-person narrator”; it should “take note of rhythm—make the phrases dance,” and may embrace a “punch line each different paragraph.”

Plunket bemoans within the interview that “individuals don’t assume something ‘pleasant’ might be critical. But the pleasant artistic endeavors are precisely those that final, whereas the ‘profundity’ of any age dates rapidly.”

This seems to be true. The cosmic joke of Plunket’s pleasant novel remains to be as contemporary immediately because it was forty years in the past. It’s a present to us—devoted readers of Los Angeles literature, of comedy, of queer literature, and of the literature of self-loathing—that it’s lastly being reissued now. You maintain in your arms the paramount instance of a comic book novel. To all of the grasping readers and writers, benefit from the journey.

From the introduction to My Seek for Warren Harding, to be reissued from New Instructions in June.