Mary Beach’s Electric Bananas, a brilliant posthumous collection put together by her daughter Pam Plymell, uncovers a writer who has the kind of filthy wit that belongs in James Joyce’s league. Beach is more dangerous, however, because she is more accessible. She has mastered a style along the lines of Finnegan’s Wake, but simplified it. You can understand it the way you understand one of Joe Orton’s hilariously scatalogical plays.
Electric Bananas is funny and angry at the same time, and it entirely justifies William S. Burroughs’s claim in the introduction that it offers “a unique auditory experience approaching the actual found sounds of language as it mutters.” Or as Thurston Moore puts it in his preface, you will hear “a FEMALE voice ripping sideways.”
Not everything in the collection is written in a Joycean mode. Here, for example, from the opening story (“The Electric Banana”), is that withering, entertaining voice of hers, not obscure in the least — and it is very much the way I recall Mary speaking so long ago:
“How can I sleep in a bed of pure love with wads of chewing-gum & bananas stuck all over the brass frame?” I shouted, but my voice didn’t carry, it was very embarrassing . . . how disgusting can you get? I thought. . . .
“Pretty disgusting, I guess.” Someone retorted, reading my mind.
An iron grey sky puked blue sparks, white hot against the fiery sun.
“Take a hike! Get lost! You’ll never get out of here alive anyway!” Another swig of rotgut. Barroom Gobbledygook.
I’m a woman, see? A female, ya dig? And it’s absolute hell to live in this pocket handkerchief edition of Hades.
And here is a random example of her Joycean mode:
UPANDOWN UPANDOWN humpling sexer sizes [the normull thing aztheysay] are less paynfullthan sidelwaize.
Less paynfull than what?
Enny of thother ways they say there’re 10001 ways to make love!
The real Amurrican gal ain’ teazy to find ennymore: Sellofane-rapt ‘n’ Keenex schnozblowing, now this bloojenes an dirty tresses lokt in horse tail, spectin injexshuns from good ole Doc ortha Burning Boche whose best amigo is Jewish, the kind evrywon has inniz back pocket to pull out enny time attall . . .
Mary Beach was a helluva lot of fun in real life. And so is Electric Bananas. It does her rare justice.
In my experience, writers capable of conflating speech sounds from both traditions – Oral and Written – into their writings, are rare.
Joyce may be the reigning master. Anyone taking this kind of work on and getting it published is doing work to be reckoned with.
Most of us fail at Finnegan’s Wake but Marshall McLuhan seems to have cracked that mysterious safe.
McLuhan read the ‘ Wake aloud, and was able to experience all of the unbundling of fused and layered phonetics and phonology. Marshall’s son, Eric, calls his dad a yegg.
I learned of this well after first reading Mary’s first edition of the text from 1975.
Having just examined the presentation at Amazon, I’m willing to purchase a copy of this edition, and apply what I’ve learned about conflated oral and written tradition kinda writings.
The Introduction by William S. Burroughs makes this book a treasure unto itself.
Thoroughly agree about el señor Joyce, tho I was unaware of McLuhan’s FW read. “Electric Bananas” has considerably different material from the first banana book of Mary’s, altho there is some overlap. I think you’ll get a huge kick out of it.
I’ve been thinking about the later Belle Époque period of Europe and how it led to experiments such as Joyce’s dream language. There was such a rich period of cultural fragmentation between late Romanticism and modernism that it should stand as an epoch in itself. I think of how the Art Nouveau and Jungenstil movements had hints of surrealism and dadism in them. Or how the work of Van Gogh became popular in the 1890s shortly after his death, and the hints of expressionism barely hidden beneath its surface. I think of the headiness and prosperity of colonialism at its height, while some like Joseph Conrad had begun to sense its horrors.
Freudianism and Darwinism began to leak through the fissures of Art Nouveau. Gabriele D’Annunzio and the futurists pushed anti-bourgoise attitudes toward an embrace of masculinism, the power of machinery, the glorification of war, and even the idea that radical evil as a means to transcendence. Jean Genet and Antonin Artaud began to reveal the beastility behind our mannered delusions.
It was in this world that Joyce’s dream language appeared, something so elitist and self-absorbed, so buried in the profounds of mind that language itself collapsed. Burroughs followed in this world, as did Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, perhaps ending with Nelson Algren and Ginsberg. And then something died in us.
How interesting that you touched the end of that era, that you grabbed life by the horns, left NYU and went straight to the artists themselves. Amazing that some of Beach’s unpublished short stories were found in your archives. Anyway, sorry to blather on as usual.
And lets not forget the role the symbolism played in all of this, perhaps the most common link of all. I think of how Beckett moved between the worlds of Proust and Joyce.
Sorry, that should read “the role the symbolists played in all of this…”
Bill — if a posting like this one drew those thoughts from you, it is the kind of compound interest that makes the posting worth more than invested. So thanks. It also reminds me of what a friend (Gerard Bellaart) said to me when I told him I was reading the first volume of Simon Schama’s riveting, mammoth “The Story of the Jews” and sent him an excerpt. He said that Schama writes as though he believes his readers “are on a par with Isaiah Berlin.” It also remimds me of what another friend of mine (Carl Weissner) once said of you, after reading something you had written: “Man, that’s a fecund mind!”
Oh, btw, Schama is easy to read. He’s a terrific storyteller. One of my favorite books is his crime novel “Dead Certainties,” a little jewel.
But to bring us back to Mary Beach, she was a free spirit —- and this posthumous collection shows just how spirited she was.