Required Reading, Say I

McGuane: "Swallowing Hot Soup Upside Down"

Here's a piece from Thomas McGuane's Panama, a novel that made a lot more sense for me in 2006 or so than when I first read it back in 1985 or '86, in my mid-forties than in my mid-twenties.

If you know the novel, you just may know what I mean.

I have a lot of respect for how McGuane writes, for how he mixes the verbal gymnastics here with the practical considerations of characters in motion.


She put some music on--Tejas by Z Z Top, I think, something hard--stood up, and slid out of the rest of her duds.  I was transfixed, all my general views gone, everything withering to make room for the present, the furious rifle vision which riddles everything, that madhouse of what seems like a good idea at the time.


I had come with the flowers in addition to my usual maladies, been touched, and now found myself just as addled as thrilled.  My mental focus left like water for her to swim in; and suddenly we were on the floor and she was slipping away and I'm thinking, I can settle this.  And then I thought about Catherine and how it could be when it was with someone you loved.  This was the girl from the storm cellar.


She said, "You've got premature ejaculator written all over you."  I glanced into mid-air.


I felt completely there for it; but the feeling of the inside of her ran up spreading through me like swallowing hot soup upside down.  I looked down, as I do, and thought, as I am afraid I do, that she couldn't get away.  But she had some little movement that ought to be against the law.  And I was grateful, wondering where my old vanity had gone, when it was always my benificence that I thought was on the line, not these glorious collisions.  The earlier theater between Marcelline and me evaporated and it all grew dead serious; and probably, objectively, maybe even a trifle grotesque, as in knotty and wet and uncoordinated.


--from Thomas McGuane's Panama, Penguin Books, 1978: pages 50-51.

Passages: 92 in the Shade

Panama is the Thomas McGuane novel that speaks most acutely these days (to my chagrin, perhaps), but The Sporting Club, Nobody's Angel, and 92 in the Shade have all had their hold at some point in this life of mine. Here's a passage from that latter novel that still seems to matter.

"What about biology? Your old teachers told me you were gifted."

"They said that? Huh. Well, yes, I was good at it. But it needn't have taken me that many years of school to see I just liked salt water, you know, at some really simple phenomenological level. I like fishing better than ichthyology because it's all pointless and intuitive. I mean, there is no value equivalent in biology for the particular combination of noise and sight of blackfin tuna working bait in the Gulf Stream."