Sweet Sunday E-Book

John Lawton

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A tumultuous novel about America's loss of innocence in the late Sixties. Turner Raines is Mr Heartbreak. Everybody leaves him. They walk out, they run away... they die. When his oldest friend Mel Kissing dies with an ice pick through his skull, Raines picks up the thread and sets out to ask 'who?' and 'why?' But this is America in 1969 and one death is just a drop in the ocean. The USA is about to land a man on the moon and the Vietnam War is ripping the country to pieces, setting sons against fathers, fathers against sons. The Woodstock festival is in full swing and Norman Mailer is standing as candidate for Mayor of New York. Against this backdrop, Raines' questions take him back to the childhood home he left in Texas, back to the battered remains of his youth... and as his memory unravels, America unravels with it.

Leseprobe

Also by John Lawton

1963

Black Out

Old Flames

A Little White Death

Riptide

Blue Rondo

Second Violin

A Lily of the Field

Then We Take Berlin

Grove Press UK

First published in 2002 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, England

This paperback edition published in 2014 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright ©John Lawton, 2002, 2014

The moral right of John Lawton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

PB ISBN 978 1 61185 564 7

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 974 4

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

for

Nora York

who

blew in from Winnetka

‘A graceful generation that had to work for men wrapped up in their individual egos, a sin their flesh is not heir to.’

Joe Flaherty, Managing Mailer

‘. . . the best of a generation were being lost—some among the hippies to drugs, some among the radicals to an almost hysterical frenzy of ­alienation.’

I.F. Stone

§

‘It was fun to have that sense of engagement when you jumped on the earth and the earth jumped back.’

Abbie Hoffmann

‘It takes a long time for sentiments to collect into action, and often they never do . . . I wanted to make actions rather than effect sentiments.’

Norman Mailer, Paris Review Interview

§

‘Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with ­nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and ­indifference . . . once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.’

Lyndon Baines Johnson

‘You can’t dig the moon

Until

You dig the earth.’

William Eastlake, from Whitey’s on the Moon Now

§

‘No one was saved.’

Paul McCartney

1994

‘I have but one claim to fame.’ Now, why do people say that? It doesn’t mean what it says. They have no fame to lay claim to. What it really means is that they once met someone who was, or got, famous, which scrap of knowledge somehow enlightens their otherwise interminable obscurity—not even famous for fifteen minutes, just touching fame. OK, I have three ‘claims to fame’. I was in high school with Buddy Holly, class of ’55, in Lubbock, West Texas. I once, when I was fifteen and like Tom Sawyer thought senators must be ten feet tall, shook the hand of Lyndon Baines Johnson—I did not wash the hand for a week. And, I once met Norman Mailer. Well, twice really.

§

The first time I met Mel Kissing I asked him the question everyone asked him sooner or later. How does anyone come to be called Mel Kissing? Mel told the story I heard him tell a hundred times over the years that followed. Back on Ellis Island in the 1900s Immigration asked his grandfather what his name was. ‘Last name first, then your Christian name.’ The old guy spoke slowly, understood slowly, and maybe he was struggling with the idea that any part of him might be Christian and said ‘Kissinger, Melchior’ so slowly the Immigration guy took the ‘er’ for a pause and wrote down Kissing. Mel Kissing was really Melchior Kissinger IV.

§

I thought of Mel today. The day Tricky Dicky died, and TV went apeshit with a Nixathon. Wet April, waiting for spring. I was stuck indoors with the flu bug, hoping for the pleasures of channel surfing till my thumb ached. Instead I got Nixon. The nation got Nixon, and more Nixon, and it was like he’d never happened. The Nixon of the tele-obits was a statesman. Like there were two Richard Milhous Nixons. The dead statesman and the crook, and the dead statesman was somehow not connected to the crook. ‘Only Nixon could go to China.’ I heard that fifty times today. Old film of Tricky telling America there would have been no peace with Vietnam, no arms limitation deal with Russia, ’cept that he went to China. He’s wrong. Only Nixon went to China.Anyone could have gone. Just so happened it was Tricky Dicky. And I defy anyone to point to a democratized China as a result of diplomatic recognition and ‘most favored trading nation’ status. That’s just horsepucky. Why will we never have sanctions against China, whatever China does? Because in six weeks all those Wal-Marts the size of football stadiums that seem to fringe every American city would run out of stuff to sell as half their stock is made in China.

(Good God, am I preaching? Absofuckinlutely, darling—as my late wife would have said.)

§

Mel used to tell me it was people like me who would not vote for Humphrey who let in Nixon. I voted for Herbie ‘Flim-Flam’ McCoy, who ran on the United Fibbers of America ticket. ‘All politicians are liars. The difference between me and them is I know it. Believe me, people. I’ll never tell you the truth.’ I voted for that. Me and about five thousand others. I wouldn’t blame you if you said you’d never noticed Flim-Flam McCoy. He polled less than Frank Zappa. And Flim-Flam didn’t let Nixon in. That was George Wallace. A fraction of Wallace’s southern millions would’ve saved Humphrey’s skin. But fuckit, the man was not worth saving. Mel and I did not go up to New Hampshire in 1968 and root for Gene McCarthy just to see LBJ’s stooge run in his stead. I’d sooner vote for . . . well . . . fuckit . . . I’d’ve voted for Wavy Gravy ifWavy Gravy’d stood. Sheeit—wonder what happened to Wavy Gravy? Hi, Wavy, long time no . . .

I thought of Mel today. I guess it’s just Nixon—symbol of an era. Lots of things could make me think of Mel, but today it was the First Criminal. And I thought about the time in ’69 when I was getting ready to call him and say, ‘You know what today is? Today is exactly one year since LBJ said he wouldn’t run again. March 31st. Let’s go out and get skunk drunk!’

But he called me. Said, ‘Can you come over to Brooklyn tonight? Norman Mailer’s running for Mayor.’

Mel was a hotshot reporter on the Village Voice, Mailer was its founder and still owned a piece of the action. I’d done eighteen months at the