Hypocritic Days & Other Tales [Limited Lettered Edition]

Douglas Woolf was a writer's his tales of serene down-and-outers, belated frontiersmen, and cross-country spiritual seekers were much admired by fellow-artists 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 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 (1922-1992) has always been a writer's writer, his work available mainly in limited editions. Few moviegoers took note that Harry and Tonto was based on his novel Fade Out. Ignoring current fads, Woolf can make a story out of nothing, then take it nowhere. Opening pages intentionally lead readers astray; often we never learn reasons behind a character's actions. He tackles language in painstakingly measured strides, recording meticulous details, such as his description of a woman's "large green eyes which fear had made larger and deeper." He zeros in on marginal lives, such as a couple expecting their first child who exist on cat food and income from selling their blood. Ruminations, not action, are Woolf's forte; he delights in depicting stagnant relationships. A suburban man still enraptured by his wife's body after 15 years of marriage is described as "uncommon"; and by the end of this brief story the complacency and the marriage are dissolved. "In a world of busy talkers, it seemed to him that he was the only audience left," the narrator of an early novella says. Finally with this ample posthumous volume, Woolf's audience has a chance of catching up with him.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.