Tripticks
Ann Quin’s final published novel Tripticks (1972), just reissued by And Other Stories (2022), departs from the restless claustrophobia that suffuses her earlier work. Tripticks takes place in the United States, and at first, the imaginative landscape evokes the undiscovered country that Kafka’s Karl Roßmann encounters in Amerika. A misprision such as Kafka’s opening image of the Statue of Liberty would not be out of place in Quin’s novel. The fiery sword that shuts Adam and Eve out of Eden in Paradise Lost greets the newcomer: “The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her form.” [1] But unlike Kafka, Quin actually had been to America. She knew that the Statue of Liberty holds a torch. [2] And yet, Tripticks feels unreal. The America through which Quin’s characters traipse is unrecognizable, but maybe it’s no more unrecognizable than the Brighton of Berg (1964). Quin maps a geography of language, luxuriating in the folksy artificiality of the American idiom in all its forms—from advertising jargon to pseudo-radical vapidity. Devoid of contempt, the pulpy narrative savors its own send-up of not only the road novel but most of the cultural forms and norms bequeathed to us by the 1960s [3].
Quin’s writing blends sympathy and distance to achieve a sense of wide-eyed but world-weary wonder at what language can wreak. The unnamed narrator, chasing his “X-wife” and her boyfriend across the country, sounds like a mix of Special Agent Dale Cooper and Frank Booth. Like Lynch, Quin allows us to feel anew the profound strangeness of what we take for granted in language. The cloying sense of foreclosed possibility that haunts Quin’s earlier work gives way in Tripticks to an oppressive openness, a fear of freedom figured in words. The question directed at the narrator during a lengthy epistolary section of the novel may be turned around on the story as a whole: “Why is it that you always astoundingly manifest the light side of a Shakespearean clown who has read Reich?” Quin montages our surfeit of experience, driving it to its pathological conclusions. Tripticks revels in the roller coaster ride to hell in a handbasket.
—Austin Carder
from Tripticks
And this ridiculous drama now? Pursuing my first X-wife, or rather being pursued. Who was chasing who I had forgotten. Perhaps I should put a call through and ask them? But I remembered the penalty for making an obscene or harassing call (including those where the caller remains silent) could be as much as a year in the pokey and $1,000 fine. The simplest decisions now meet extensive delays. I believe the record is clear as to which side has gone the extra mile in this drama, now is the time for the other side to respond. A city can be a jungle, giving no hint of the terror stalking in the darkness. Only when a private citizen raises his voice to help the police may light pierce the wall of the wild. He invited her into his motel room in the politest way imaginable — and snuffed out her life while she was still thinking what a great guy he was.
I went outside, and again looked through the keyhole. Inlets of spectacular silver presented an ever-changing vista. I recognized that tight fitting dress. I had bought it for her birthday, soon after her father had preached one of his sermons about his daughters: ‘They’re as solid as those trees out there ‘n they don’t smoke, or drink, and the others at least married fine boys.’ And so on, the usual stuff, a lot of apple pie and motherhood going on to denounce the banks and utilities, and the rich on Wall Street who don’t pay their taxes, and his enemies ‘Who drink tea at the country club with their little fingers stubbed straight up, and never do a darn thing worthwhile.’ While I stood there and scrutinized the floor, hoping I’d find another pin. During one of his interminable speeches I had picked up a pin, and neatly placed it on a little table next to him. I think he actually liked having me around. I gave him an umbrella in which to legitimatize his pathology, act out his problems and be rewarded for it.
Reward? Yes perhaps that’s what was needed right then as I watched my first wife bend like a silver tinsel Christmas tree branch. At no other place was there such a feeling of time displaced. And I wanted her as I had never wanted her before. To enter her from that angle. Haver her then split. A gesture. Some sign. But the only sign at that moment was the growing awareness of myself outside in a hot night rising in majestic isolation. Blood creating large numbers of humming-birds that flocked into my head.
Illustration by Carol Annand from Tripticks.
Now that these dire events have you all shook up how can you resist? Move in on them, judo throw him, rally from blows that would kayo ordinary mortals. Ever in trouble? You bet he is. But he can dish it out as well as take it. As for instance his eerie energies surge out in a flow of furious force. O.K. so don’t spare the horses you know what to do. To the attack! With fists and knuckles, super weapons and raw courage he hurls himself at a foe whose very touch means instant destruction. Does he hesitate? Dilly-dally? Perish forbid. And my first wife — the claw-happy fighter who relishes a bang-up rock-em sock-em rhubarb — would naturally be turned on by my brute force, the display of hitting him so fast and hard that he’d think he was being battered by a human triphammer. So locked in Titanic struggle the two hate-full brutes have been trading battering blows. And her eyes pop out at the sight of her fallen lover, who she steps over and falls sobbing into her X-husband’s arms, submissive to my awesome power.
Seeing him approach the door, I flattened myself against the wall as he emerged. ‘It’s all right honey there’s no one here — who did you think. . .’ The door closed. Low voices. Silence. The heat. The humming-blood turned cold. Exhausted again I went back to my room. Onto the bed.
I dreamed of a lake 500 feet deep where I lost my boots. Convinced that sly fink in the next room had taken them, I hunted him down in a city of flowering magnolias, picturesque lakes and bayons, winding drives, stately ante bellum hoses, and through imposing government buildings that changed into a gracious frame house held together by white oak pegs, where my wife stood, holding the boots, brightly polished, with silver laces, which she handed me, together with an etched-glass candle lamp, and led me first to an awesome round bed with black satin sheet, and to a trapeze, where she swung in voluptuous positions.
Illustration by Carol Annand from Tripticks.
I woke up in a cold sweat. What was real, what wasn’t? All merged into an immense interior region. Somehow, somewhere there ought to be unusual flood-light illumination. My mind was a crucible containing a constantly burning fire. A row of musical stalactites surrounding. Electrically charged. The night. Days were nights. Dreams were reality. Reality seen through a rear-view mirror. No sense of time. Tombs of solid masonry 100 or more feet long and 4 tiers high. Winding stairs and wrought iron balustrade. A dome with many coloured panes of glass through which I saw nothing. Heard nothing. Felt nothing. Similar to when I lay in an operating room. Ventilated by unscreened open windows, but there at least I had seen the entrance of pigeon excreta, even though I felt the pigeon droppings were the last I would see of the world. But kept my cool. Contrary to now when I could so easily flip. No one any the wiser. And death? There is no death. But if you kill yourself you displease the Great Spirits and you may be reincarnated as a worm. Well why not — a worm’s life is better than this. Go back to sleep. Go on with the game. The chase. The kill. Get the gun loaded. Terror spread when a fiend struck silently and then slipped away in the dark. Behind him the bloodthirsty psychopath left a trail of ghastly skulls — a trail that led the police exactly nowhere.
The current lull must be regarded only as a time of repair and rebuilding by the enemy before its next attack. Ah yes certainly no dream that. This. The pit enclosed. All the gore and thunder of a standard western. A welcome relief from the comparatively barren surroundings. Why not admit it. Yes. What is it you’re selling? The process of the game. You can’t get blood out of turnip so stop thinking you are nursing a hot potato. My decision is final, firm and not subject to further consideration. What decision? Take a lie detector test to determine whether these are the facts. What facts — what decision? To weigh, measure, reassess every move. Squeeze out that last ounce of juice? That the future may learn from the past. Bullshit. You’ve met what you consider defeat and you’re on the threshold of disillusionment. Then the worst thing I can do is throw cold water on your expectations.
He sounds like a man in panic.
Don’t be an eyeglass pusher-upper. Non-slide eye-frames. Discover the comfort of glasses that hug your head, stay in place. . . thanks to a new spring hinge that eliminates nagging nose push ups. Bend, shake or nod your head. The no-slide frame never moves. Foam glass insulation. The world coinciding with something inside my ear. A gleaming stainless steel arc. Spanish moss-hung trees. A new system of fluorescent lighting, making everything 325 times brighter than the moon. Two million specimens of multi-coloured insects expanding above and below me. Ranks of finlike formations rear into spires. Semi-arid desires alternate with isolate needs.
Illustration by Carol Annand from Tripticks.
The general orientation and interpretation of the area? A bird without a proper band and life-time number is a nonparticipant, a nothing-bird like a hood whose fingerprints never made the flies of the F.B.I. Then pack your bags, leave a note under their door: Hurry I’m missing you. Please contact me would like to know how you are. Or better still: Greetings to my Fingelheimer, my Sugar Bunny Doonk, my wife — the Rock of Gibraltar, and the dearest of them all, my Mother-in-Law for a wonderful year. Only 118 more to go. May Life Be An Eternal Snowflake. Love — The Boss. Wouldn’t that be artificially elevating the situation? Why don’t I just split right away? In fact get to the border, enver return — what use has this country, I for it, it for me? Don’t go around the barn go directly in. What in the world are you waiting for? How many more tomorrows are you going to wait for the trip you’ve been putting off? And off. And off. Give yourself no more gall stones. Don’t put it off a minute longer, we can have your head in the clouds the day after you make up your mind like maybe tomorrow. Now where exactly is the power centre? The power centre, a man for all crisis was at that moment walking up and down in a motel room, with remarkable ease and sense of blood lust, or was he in fact the tormented victim of a national policy and command system that placed him unprepared in such awful jeopardy? Very well I shall not be responsible for the consequences.
I left no note, and just as I drove out of the car port she opened the door, barefoot and wearing a yellow kimono with Chinese characters, quotations from Chairman Mao. Her eyelashes were still in the drawer, which I noted as being highly unusual, why she wore those just to go to the mailbox. I continued manoeuvering their Buick, while watching her get nearer. What could I do, open the door, drag her in? Confused, undecided I waited. Watch out for that camera she has. The secret agent movie-shot looks likea movie camera turns into a cap firing machine gun. There were several shots as I turned the corner, and the Buick skidded into the soft shoulder. So that’s it she’s really out to kill me! For a change this is a serious situation.
Nude Divorcee and the Camera Clue
A Blonde, A Guy and A Gun
A fatal combination that could spell murder!
They were bearing down on me in the Chevy. She had the window open. I saw her polaroid swinger camera. Evidence needed? Stealing their car? And there he was, leaning over the steering wheel, no doubt imagining he was Lieutenant Colonel Custer in his paywagon. He was wearing one of those very expensive, hand-embroidered Philippine peek-aboo evening shirts. Beneath the pale-peach voile, with its cutouts, was clearly visible a heavy white knit undershirt. What bugged me was that he seemed so typical. I mean it would be different if he’d been one of those always behind-the-eight-ball types, but he was obviously as normal as normal can be. With, no doubt, a Ph.D. in chocolate icecream. And oh how great she looked, half hanging out of the window, her breasts swinging under the camera. Organized womanhood. Women’s Lib Chick. The hand that refuses to rock the cradle. We know she’s good looking — with elegant custom-contoured seat. And a modern floor shift. Plus lots of head, leg, and shoulder, a panoramic front made of laminated safety glass. And a padded dash. And extra large blade drums. Tears were seen welling in his eyes. I think it was sweat — but it was a great feeling — maybe it was tears.
Illustration by Carol Annand from Tripticks.
Tripticks by Ann Quin
is published by And Other Stories and is available now.
NOTES
[1] Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared. Trans. Michael Hofmann. New York: Penguin, 1999, 1.
[2] In 1965, Quin’s then-lover Robert Creeley arranged for her to receive the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship, which brought her to Taos, New Mexico and allowed her to road trip across America. In his biography of Quin (Re:Quin), Robert Buckeye claims that the following lines from Creeley’s Mabel: A Story refer to her: “She can be, variously, the expected demure young lady, or else the barstool swinging drunken broad. . . .It doesn’t really seem to matter that much to her. She is an age hard to determine. Very young, quite probably, five or six, in her own mind, but also markedly old, looking down on it, whatever, some other persons or circumstances, from that abstract wiseness.” (23)
[3] In the introduction, Danielle Dutton quotes Quin in a letter: “simply hating On the Road—what a lot of sentimental rubbish and so tedious how it goes on and on in this phoney pseudo ‘isn’t life crazy but it’s life man’ sort of fashion.” (viii)
