Douglas Woolf

Hardcover, 284 pages ISBN 0-87685-988-0 1996, $26.95 Softcover, 284 pages ISBN 0-87685-987-2 1996, $15.95   Fade Out a novel by Douglas Woolf “A very exciting work, and touching, but full of the cruelty of seeming casual life. You hold your breath in the reading.” — Edward Dorn Fade Out is, in the words of the Village Voice, the "comic masterpiece of one of contemporary America's long-neglected geniuses." First published in 1959, it is a stunning, surreal criticism of American life in the materialistic, youth-and money-crazed 1950s. Its hero is Dick Twombley, a 74-year old retired bank clerk who struggles to retain what remains of his dignity in a world that regards old age as an embarrassment. When he is mistakenly accused of kidnapping two little girls he has befriended, Dick's daughter packs him off to a suburban New York City retirement home. He soon makes his escape with the help of a fellow inmate, and together the two "fugitives from injustice" embark on a cross-country odyssey that lands them in the abandoned hotel of an Arizona ghost town. It's the end of the road, but it's also a new home, and a place of idiosyncratic spiritual rebirth. As Robert Creeley said, “It is [Dick's] sincere acceptance of what he's been given, his fascination with what he can make of it,” that allows him to accept deprivation as happiness, without irony or satire. “Woolf's hero is a [kind of] Don Quixote, who even when defeated still hears the echoes of his transforming dreams.” “He has discipline and a sense of style . . . a comic vision . . . and an independence of approach. If you want to experience America as it might have been seen by a Smollett, a Sterne, a Fielding, or in places even a Cervantes, don't miss Douglas Woolf.” —Los Angeles Times   Softcover,  412 pages ISBN 0-87685-911-2 1993, $17.95   Hypocritic Days & Other Tales by Douglas Woolf Douglas Woolf was a writer's writer: his tales of serene down-and-outers, belated frontiersmen, and cross-country spiritual seekers were much admired by fellow-artists such as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and Paul Mazursky. “He was so gentle,” wrote Creeley shortly after Woolf's death in 1992, “so particular to the ways people live together. It is in his intimate focus, in the unobtrusive detailing of gesture, conversation, place, that his genius is clear.” Woolf's quiet genius is on display in each of the twenty-seven short stories in Hypocritic Days, a career-spanning collection edited by his literary executor, Sandra Braman. Take the title story, for instance: it's a kind of improvised, Laurel-and-Hardy dance between a washed-up Saratoga horse jockey and his large, slow, uncommunicative son, both characters stepping lightly, in tandem, as they negotiate the boy's awkward passage from teenager to young man. Or “Bank Day,” in which Woolf tenderly depicts an impoverished young couple expecting their first child, full of hopeful, high-minded plans for the future even though they subsist on a diet of cat food and cold coffee. None of his characters ever lose hope, despite the horrors and despairs surrounding them, and not because they are fools but because, in the words of Robert Creeley, “they have the talent, and the pleasure, of making in this world a place of their own.”  “Woolf tackles life in painstakingly measured strides, meticulously recording details, such as one woman's 'large green eyes, which fear had made larger and deeper.' Ruminations, not action, are his forte: ignoring current fads, he can make a story out of nothing and then [courageously] take it nowhere. Woolf's work has been available mainly in limited editions and small-press volumes; [one hopes that] with this ample posthumous volume, his audience at last has the chance to catch up with him.” —Publishers Weekly