Reading Seattle: The City in Prose
Edited by Peter Donahue and John Trombold (University of Washington Press, $22.50)
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When a promising young staffer at The New Yorker lit out for literary terra incognita in the 1960s, the godlike editor William Shawn asked him, "Tell me, Mr. —— , are there any writers in Seattle?" That kind of attitude has always raised hackles out here, and every once in a while it irritates the locals into producing a literary anthology. The latest is Peter Donahue and John Trombold's collection of 41 slices of mosstown life in letters. "Seattle has joined New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and New Orleans as one of the nation's great literary cities," insists Donahue, with a cedar chip on his shoulder. "As readers, reviewers, and publishers catch on that Seattle is a city teeming with writers, we also recognize that there is now a genuine and vital Seattle literature."
I wouldn't exactly say "teeming," but the population clearly has increased since Shawn's day. By mostly concentrating on recent decades, Donahue and Trombold manage to field quite a lively team, not only the usual suspects but a few newsier names: the olden goldies Betty MacDonald, Murray Morgan, Roger Sale, Emmett Watson, and Tom Robbins; the inevitable David Guterson, Timothy Egan, Jonathan Raban, and Sherman Alexie; but also Hemingway's feminist confrere Josephine Herbst; Horace R. Cayton, 1920s scion of the first black family on Capitol Hill, and his '60s counterpart Neil Henry, "a drop of color on a field of snow" in Seattle's Uplands subdivision; and Pioneer Square pioneer memoirist Monica Sone and her fiction-writing counterparts John Okada and Lydia Minatoya.
Arranged roughly chronologically, the stories and reminiscences resonate in the company of one another, like revelers at a noisy party. Generations imbibe the heady aroma of vice near Jackson Street, where a gum-snapping burlesque ticket taker "always winked a shiny purple eyelid" at Sone, whose dad owned a Skid Road flophouse, and where the draft-defying hero of Okada's story "No-No Boy" notes, "The street had about it the air of a carnival without quite succeeding at becoming one." A half-century after the heroine of Mary Brinker Post's 1948 Annie Jordan: A Novel of Seattle discovers a huge whale jawbone at "the Old Curiosity Shop," Lynda Barry's heroine in Cruddy confronts a giant whale penis at "Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe." (Barry has drawn an item or two from my life for her fiction, and I wonder if this bit derives from the time Ivar Haglund involved me in his plan to install 11-foot whale wangs in his restaurants.) Her portrait of Donut Shop–era Pike Place Market sleaze is on a par with Kerouac's classic ode to the same scene in the '40s (which unaccountably isn't in the book).
Bad behavior seems a common theme. Herbst's boardinghouse girls scandalously sympathize with the 1919 strikers who shut down Seattle and brazenly puff cigarettes with men. Cayton gets his teenage self arrested for crossing the color line in a Second Avenue theater at the moment the South exported Jim Crow laws to Seattle. Emmett Watson's real-life literary character Rudi Becker points a huge rifle at a rude driver and fires, detonating a noisy air horn that leaves the rudenik "in a pallid state of near seizure." (Rudi did this because "Some people have to be taught to be nice to other people"— a classic example of Seattle's style of angry niceness and reminiscent of the dueling Seattle bumper stickers cited decades later by David Shields: "MEAN PEOPLE SUCK" and "NICE PEOPLE SWALLOW.")
The narrator's sister in Thom Jones' brilliant tale "Cold Snap" lobotomizes herself with her slightly less-crazy brother's squirrel pistol, accidentally curing her mania. In Richard Hugo's white-trash White Center, Old John, the Greek fisherman who'd killed a bear in a wrestling match, "once knocked two thieves senseless, then carried them, one over each shoulder, a quarter of a mile to [where] he called the police." In Walt Crowley's 1960s U District, "Fringies" got busted for smoking crumply cigarettes resembling "a penis after the struggle." Two decades later, Chinese-Norwegian-American writer Paisley Rekdal, a Roosevelt sophomore, repeatedly eludes getting busted while sneaking night after night into Ravenna Park, keeping her virginity yet earning a reputation as a slut, wrestling with boys in cars, and accepting wee-hours rides to Discovery Park from a stranger with knives on his car seat "for cutting away the trim from his new wiper blades."
Some of the pieces are too short to get far, like the excerpt of Matthew Stadler's well-regarded novel Allen Stein; a few others are just snoozy and pointless, like Mary McCarthy's "How I Grew" and Natalia Rachel Singer's "Blurred Vision: How the Eighties Began in One American Household." Singer talks about the era when houses were cheap as dirt after the Boeing layoffs and someone erected the celebrated "Will the Last Person Leaving Seattle Turn Out the Lights" billboard, but it's garrulous, aimless. A fit rebuke to it is Charles D'Ambrosio's "American Bullfrog," set in the same era, but more vividly peopled with drunk punks, some of them from unemployed Boeing families, who swill "green death" (Rainier Ale), smoke hash from bone pipes, and, to avenge the influx of gentrifying gay guys on 15th Avenue in the wake of the layoffs, hunt men in Volunteer Park, which they call "Ball-and-Queer" Park. They talk with hostility about the "fags," but really they're fascinated by the way the guys cruise each other by signaling in code with flashlights. Pretty soon the punks are wrassling in the wet grass like Hugo's Old John with the doomed bear. Even this good story is hampered by shortness: The narrator complains his "dink was still wet and sticky from Finklebien," and bloody, but we don't know who Finklebien is or where the blood came from.
