Even Tom Robbins Meets Joe Black

Thoughts on the death of an American literary treasure...

It would have been 1991, I think, when our Engish teacher assigned us Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins. I was not ready. This is back when the only “weird” stuff I read had the labels science fiction, fantasy or mythology. In those genres, I had basic tastes. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land with is libertarian antihero out to protect the secrets of grokking Martian sex from a paternalistic government was a lot for a kid who preferred the robots and logical puzzles of Isaac Asimov and who ranked the combat skills of Lieutenant Commander Worf and Commander Data.

With Cowgirl you got a wayward hitchhiking girl with unnaturally large thumbs, named Sissy. Had her thumbs evolved for the purpose of her hitchhiking or had she chosen her habits to suit her enlarged opposables? Either way, Sissy was Darwin by way of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I just didn’t know enough to know it at the time.

Sissy moves into a hyper- fluid- and pansexualized world of feminine hygiene product moguls and somehow the author of the book shows up in the book (I hadn’t yet read Phillip Roth, and maybe not even Kurt Vonnegut) and boy was I just not ready for it.

Robbins died on February 9th and somehow the obituaries didn’t reach me until four days later. Robbins was 92 and lived an extremely full life of adventure. He was like Ernest Hemingway in almost no respect other than that both of them lived their lives as art in the world and on the page, shunning neither experience nor imagination. The mainstream write-ups cast Robbins as a hippie author whose first novel, 1971’s Another Roadside Attraction, had flopped in hardcover but then taken off as a paperback passed around by the sorts of people who might call a Volkswagen bus home.

To the extent that those death write-ups contextualized Robbins’ work, it was alongside Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. But I remember reading Vonnegut soon after and noticing similarities between the two. My friend put it best by saying that both Robbins and Vonnegut would go off on tangents but that Vonnegut was the kind of writer who would stop while Robbins would follow the tangents for pages, at risk of them taking over the story.

They shared wit, humanism and an appreciation for the absurdity of being alive. Robbins was not afraid to be funny in a literary world that has seldom rewarded humor, relegating it rungs below more substantial art. But Robbins didn’t mind. Why should he be serious, he countered, if the universe refused to play along?

Because one of the other writers I associated him with was Douglas Adams, who also had a thing or two to say about hitchhikers. While Adams kept to more PG-rated stories, they both saw the similarities between humorous quips and philosophical aphorisms. It was possible, they both reminded us, to say profound things while being funny about it. Kind of like why Mel Brooks had himself play a “stand up philosopher” in History of the World, Part One. These were references I could at least apply on my first reading of Robbins, way back then.

Another book that comes to mind, which I’d also been assigned in high school, but this time in a senior humanities class, was Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where the itinerate wanderlust of the hippie America collides with a deep understanding of Plato, whose philosophy came down to us in the artistic form of his dialogues rather than in dense academese. Philosophy, I realized, could come to us in art, too. Give me a break, I was young, hadn’t read Nietzsche and tended, as young learners do, to keep things in their places. Honestly, I don’t think I really started to feel the connections between disparate subjects until college, when I’d read a lot more Robbins, consumed a lot more of everything, learned to start appreciating the strange and began to devise techniques for not making the difficult painful.

Even then, it would take me a long while to connect a Robbins to an older avant garde and ultimately to a writer like Voltaire. I imagine Candide was also passed around more than a few vans. Heck, Terry Southern even modernized and porno-fied it as a novel called Candy that I bet just tickled Robbins.

Ironically, I was going to write this week about Lemon, a novel by Lawrence Krauser published by McSweeney’s 25 years ago. This was meant to be an essay about Krauser’s art, about the McSweeney’s mission and how it sprang from Dave Eggers’ mainstream success with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and how Eggers took on a legacy started by publishers like New Directions, which is now partnering with Fitzcarraldo Editions, a European publisher working to keep books going outside of the mainstream.

That Middlebrow might even have asked the question: what even is a mainstream book, when books aren’t so mainstream anymore?

The irony I referred to is that if I had never been assigned Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, I might not be the kind of person who notices the 25th anniversary of a small print run novel about a lonely man who falls in love with a yellow-rinded fruit. Tom Robbins was my gateway to weirdness.

But that doesn’t mean you can dismiss him as a hippie. He belongs to a much larger, older and important tradition of iconoclasts in life and creativity. So long, Tom.