realthog | book #13

"This looks good," said

pds_lit in the dealers' room at Saratoga Springs.

"It does?" said the dealer. He reached across the table with the practised grace of a superbly trained prestidigitator and the bills vanished from my nerveless hand before I could persuade my beloved to change her mind.

And so we became the proud owners of a copy of The Man with Two Bodies (1952) by Ralph E. Fitz-Gibbon, released by Vantage Press (sort of the PublishAmerica of its day). To give pds_lit credit, she went on to read the book. "You'll enjoy this," she said with an evil grin after she'd finished . . . and it's been on my nightstand ever since, silently but insistently asking me if I am man or mouse.

Mouse, until now.

The Man with Two Bodies was apparently (it says here on the back) Fitz-Gibbon's first acknowledged venture into print, although he'd previously ghosted stuff for others, syndicated an advice-column parody and -- oh, look -- started up a college/cooperative to help wannabe writers get their work into print. "He avers," according to the cover bio, "and is proving, that better stories remain unpublished than have ever been printed."

Quite so.

Thompson, our primary narrator, is the private secretary to a rich man called Elton. Elton has two bodies -- one in NYC, another in LA -- and can switch between them. Elton also is prone to propagating scads of wacky philosophy; when he's not there to do so, his servant Bele does it for him. This philosophy, while it might seem to you or me to be poorly digested Buddhism mixed in with a lot of precursive if-it-feels-good-do-it-ism (plus some ideas that perhaps the authors of The Secret plagiarized from here), is according to Thompson so fundamentally revelatory that The World Will Never Be The Same Again. It has as one of its underpinnings the "scientifically proved" notion that our life is of infinite extent in both temporal directions, our various incarnations being merely blips along that infinite route. (If we are infinitely old, where did we incarnate before the earth formed? And what did we incarnate as before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene? Alas, we are not told.)

Also explained by this philosophy is how Elton does his two-body trick. After a while, we discover that, apparently, the philosophy can't manage this entirely on its own, because various vibrations and vibrational planes have to be invoked as a mechanism. After a further while, when even this seems unconvincing, we find out that the true fact of the matter is that Elton is identical-twin brothers who, owing to a childhood accident, can animate (and share) only one of their two bodies at any particular moment. But now they've decided that in future they'll stop switching between the two and make do with just one.

Clear? Here, you'll need this. Yes, it does say "160 proof" on the label.

The writing's execrable -- but then, to be fair, a lot of the writing in books from the immediate postwar years is execrable. The casually accepted racism is extremely hard to take, even though it's clear the author doesn't mean it maliciously and indeed prides himself on being forward-thinking enough to accept, if grudgingly, that the very best of black people might just about be on a par with the average white. (It's a dismal reminder that South Africa wasn't the only country to suffer the cancer of apartheid during the 20th century.)

The plotting of the book is . . . well, there isn't really what you might call a plot, because most of the book's action involves Thompson going on a completely purposeless cross-country trip.

Characterization? What's that?

Romantic interest? Zero . . . except that there's the vaguely unsettling implication, towards the end, of some sort of homoerotic relationship between the twin Eltons, who keep hopping into and out of bed with each other for no perceptible reason except that they enjoy cuddling there. I suppose it could be the ultimate narcissism, or something. I'm not sure if Fitz-Gibbon intended this implication; if he did, then it does indeed mark the book out as an original of its era.

All in all, then, not one of my more treasurable reading experiences.