Tom Robbins and the flexibility to endure

When I got the news yesterday that novelist Tom Robbins died last weekend (at age 92; how could he have been that old?), my memory swooped like the long-extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō back, back, back to 1981 or ’82 or so, when I first encountered Robbins’ writings in the form of his novel Still Life With Woodpecker.

A journalism student at the time and steeped in the dreary, staid, humorless learnings of newswriting, I read Still Life as a guilty pleasure. (I’m grateful to my girlfriend at the time who lent me her copy of this book, the perfect antidote to my gloomy, humorless J-school student outlook.) The way Robbins played with the language — even when he was over the top with it, which was often — enthralled me, and for a long time, throughout my college years and beyond, I tried on his writing style to see how it would fit.

The New York Times‘ lengthy obituary (gift link) of Robbins called his novels “cosmically comic,” which is probably accurate. The Associated Press obit called him a “prankster-philosopher,” which is also an apt description. But the way the Times described the appeal of his books truly hit home with me.

His story lines were secondary and hard to explain; one reads a Tom Robbins novel for the verve of a well-wrought sentence, not a taut narrative. His literary currency was exaggeration, irony, bathos and the comic mythopoetic, combined for an effect that was truly his own.

Most of the obits and tributes I’ve read talk about his supposed masterpiece, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It’s a good read. But for my money, nothing beats Still Life With Woodpecker — a love story about a former princess who falls for an outlaw — and I will forever associate Robbins with that book. The playful narrative, the quirky characters, the “well-wrought sentence” everywhere you look — those were the things that stuck with me.

A few examples:

IN THE LAST QUARTER of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat waiting — with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui — for something momentous to occur.

That’s the opening sentence of the book, and to me it paints a picture from a cosmic vantage point of all of us in our seats, waiting for the movie to begin. Blockbuster or dud? Who knew? But something was coming.

A teardrop hung out of each blue eye, like a fat woman leaning out of a tenement window.

I’ve never read such a description of a teardrop, before or since.

When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple. This suggests that it isn’t love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it’s always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still.

The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know:

1. Everything is part of it.
2. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. I can get behind that.

Robbins may never have answered the central question of the book — How do you make love stay? — but another quote from him, published in a LitHub article in 2021, may come close.

What I do is twine ideas and images into big subversive pretzels of life, death, and goofiness on the chance that they might keep the world lively and give it the flexibility to endure.