The Harvesting of Haystacks Kane by Steve Schlam
Reviewed by John Oughton
I found The Harvesting of Haystacks Kane a hard book to finish, and therefore also a challenge to review. Schlam, an American actor, writes some fine prose in his first published novel, and takes risky experiments with the novel’s conception and style. The first 34 pages are a stream-of-conscious blur, with no set-up, framing, or backstory to help the reader figure out what’s going on. Eventually, one pieces together indicators that this is all in the dreaming mind of a professional wrestler, born as Herschel and stage-named Haystacks, who’s had some terrible accident or injury, and is comatose in a hospital bed.
Once I started to read the following chapters, which alternated stories from Haystack’s friends, relatives, and manager with back-to-coma-in-bed, I realized that the structure of the book is a homage to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In that novel, widely regarded as the Mississippi master’s best, the narrative moves forward by shifting from stream-of-consciousness of one character to the next. All have their own dialect and style of speech-thought.
The book offers another homage – this time not to a writer, but to a real pro wrestler: Haystacks Calhoun, active from 1954 to 1980. Legend has it that Calhoun was discovered by a wrestling promoter who saw him lifting cows to move them across a field. Herschel’s size (6’ tall, over 600 lbs.) is close to Calhoun’s, as is his stage costume of good-old-boy overalls and a horseshoe hanging from a necklace. Incidentally, Calhoun’s stage name was inspired by a feat televised on Art Linkletter’s variety show. Calhoun proved his strength by throwing bales of hay from the barn’s floor to its loft. Before researching his life, I had assumed the stage name referred to his body shape.
However, it’s Herschel’s other qualities that make him an intriguing character. Despite his country-boy persona, he’s a Jew from New York. He is gentle, free of ambition, and something of a dreamer. He knows his manager, Maury, cheats him, but doesn’t care. He loves to eat, and his other favourite pastime is maintaining the butterfly collection his father built up, until he abandoned his family. Hershel’s self-doubt reminds me of the old joke – or perhaps Zen koan – about a man who awoke from dreaming he was a butterfly, and then grew troubled about whether he was a man dreaming a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming a man. Other characters in the story mostly find him loveable, and/or frustrating.
I give Schlam (who loves puns and word-play, making me wonder if his surname is a play on “Slam”) credit for researching and depicting the era when pro wrestling became popular entertainment, its oversized heroes and villains serving up Punch and Judy shows on steroids. His descriptions of actual wrestling bouts, and the complicity between the competitors (given the outcome is usually pre-determined), the managers and the referees, are well conveyed. As noted previously, he can write some great lyrical sentences and scenes:
“In a zillion rundown arenas in a zillion decaying little towns that stink of urine and sweat and defeat, of stale cigars and Lysol and loss, of deals gone sour and dreams gone astray, of harsh lights and softly uttered lies, broken promises and shattered bones, ache and rubbing alcohol and pain…”
This is a promising and ambitious first novel. My advice to the author would be to foreground the action more in the opening, and remember that readers’ patience for pages of unpunctuated revery can sometimes be short. I think a skilled editor might have been able to improve the flow here, but the publisher deserves credit for letting Schlam, unproven as a novelist, be as experimental as he wants.
The novel’s big question, of course, is how Herschel-Haystack came to be comatose, and whether he comes out of it. Even this is not fully answered, only alluded to in images, or is at best ambiguous. In one closing section, it seems that the hero is expiring, and hospital staff are working on him, then ready to leave him to the organ-harvesters (to hark back to the title). In another, he is back on the street and on his feet, ready to pick up a friendly prostitute. Which is the dream, and which (within the bounds of fiction) the reality? Or perhaps the author intends us to feel that it doesn’t really matter.
About the Author
STEVE SCHLAM first gained entry to the City of Words through the doors of the public library in Brooklyn, New York, where he was born and spent a good part of his childhood; and has maintained his residency ever since while living in cities and towns across the United States and in Mexico. An actor as well as an author, he has performed on stages in all the places he has called home, and earned a Master's Degree in Creative Writing and English under the tutelage of Joseph Heller, renowned author of "Catch-22." He lives currently in Southern California in a pretty little Craftsman bungalow with orange and lemon trees growing in the backyard, in the company of his wife, Liora. "The Harvesting of Haystacks Kane" is his first published novel.
About the Reviewer
John Oughton lives in Toronto and has retired as a Professor of Learning and Teaching at Centennial College in Toronto. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Universe and All That (Ekstasis Editions), the mystery novel Death by Triangulation, and over 400 articles, reviews and interviews. John’s studies include an MA in English Literature, where his teachers included Irving Layton, Frank Davey, Eli Mandel and Miriam Waddington, and non-credit courses at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he worked with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs and Robert Duncan. John is a long-time member of the Long Dash Poetry Group. He is also a photographer and guitar player. https://joughton.wixsite.com/author
Book Details
Publisher : 8th House Publishing
Publication date : March 4 2024
Language : English
Print length : 348 pages
ISBN-10 : 1926716701
ISBN-13 : 978-1926716701