The Bar At Twilight is Frederic Tuten’s second collection of stories, but it concludes with a 19-page memoir, “Coda: Some Episodes in the History of My Reading.” Born in the Bronx in 1936, at age 22 Tuten met his early writing hero, Ernest Hemingway. But “a few years ago,” he encountered André Gide’s four-volume Journals at a library book sale – and an entry within it about Georges Simenon whose novels Gide had devoured in serial fashion. In turn, Tuten became addicted to Simenon. He remarks, “No writer – not even Hemingway – opens his books with such economy and unadorned ease as Simenon does. No one draws you in as quickly on the first paragraph and holds you. No one creates or reveals a character in a phrase or a line like he does.”
The fifteen scintillating short stories in The Bar At Twilight, culled from those published between 1997 and 2019, reflect his unceasing drive to hone his craft. The work confirms his reputation as a master of the genre at age 86. As a teenager, his goal was to become a painter and live in Paris, and though he took art classes and went on to write reviews for arts magazines starting in the 1960s, he did not resume drawing until his 60th birthday. He has noted in interviews that Simenon said the French Impressionists were his most profound influence – and Tuten has added, “Painting is very important to me in thinking about writing … [Simenon] was talking about, in his writing, coloration, being economical, giving flesh and body to something without blabbering. The way I think scenically – I see writing as composition in some way.” In addition to concision, Tuten’s work emits a distinct disquietude tinted by existential surrealism.
These qualities are on display in the opening lines of “The Snow on Tompkins Square Park”:
“A man limped into a bar. He folded his stubby hands on the counter. The bartender, Aloysius, a blue horse, said, ‘What will you have?’
‘A glass of water, please.’
‘We serve horses here, and people who look horsey. You aren’t and you don’t.’
“’I’m waiting for my girlfriend, she’s very horsey.’
‘Well, in that case,’ the bartender said, ‘cool your heels.’”
This tone is also apparent in “Winter, 1965” in which a writer’s auspicious beginnings clash with disappointing reality. A 23-year old aspiring fiction writer anxiously anticipates the publication of his first short story in an upcoming issue of Partisan Review. He imagines being welcomed into the inner circle of Manhattan intellectual life and to “be invited to cocktail parties where he, the youngster, and Bellow and Mary McCarthy, Lowell and Delmore would huddle together, getting brilliantly drunk and arguing the future of American literature.” Here is the final paragraph:
“The snow had bullied the streets into silence. The building slept without a snore. Tugboats owlishly hooted in the distance as they felt their way in the blinding snow. He closed his eyes. He stayed that way for several minutes, chilled under his blanket. But then the oven slowly heated, sending him its motherly warmth. He rose and went to the kitchen table and to the gleaming red Olivetti waiting for him there.”
As with many of the stories in the collection, weather, most notably snow, provides an atmospheric and thematic contribution. At the end of the story, he metaphorically wears the mantle of Gogol’s legendary overcoat with resounding echoes of the snowbound closing scene in James Joyce’s monumental “The Dead” reverberating in the background.
There is a catalogue of acts of creative courage in the reverential revery of “Lives of Artists” when in a series of vignettes a critic who claims “all art writing is personal” reflects on Rousseau’s clouds, Monet’s ponds, love among Gauguin’s palm fronds, and Cezanne’s “deconstructing a simple elevated rock into planes, into a revolution in art.” In “Allegory: A Parable,” a painter considers her place in the history of art as a metaphor for life where a painting could “extend itself in the mind’s time” when “something was itself and was something else in addition to it.”
The final “Coda,” first published in Best American Essays, finds Tuten recalling his younger selves searching for models and finding them. When he was ten, books carried him “into the richest worlds of life.” By eleven, Twain swept his adventurous self away from the “cramped world” of his childhood. When an older woman loaned him a copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, he was transfixed by the “passages of intense, mysterious beauty that made [him] tremble.” He admires how she “sidesteps the rules of normative — and predictable — fiction” — and regards her as model for “independence in life and in art.” Later, at Café de Flore in Paris, he is startled to encounter “an elegant woman” reading Nightwood. She becomes the inspiration (rather like a Henry James heroine) for his novel The Green Hour.
Whether in his expansively creative novels (The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; The Green Hour, and others), his memoir of his formative years (My Young Life), or the painterly endowed short story collection (Self Portraits: Fictions), Tuten dazzles like the best of Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and George Saunders. Here, with The Bar at Twilight he is at the pinnacle of his craft. In 2020, his show of paintings at the Planthouse Gallery in Manhattan sold out — so Tuten seems to be running smoothly on all cylinders. That’s his work on the book’s cover.
[Published by Bellevue Literary Press on May 10, 2022, 288 pages, $17.99 paperback]