Reviewed by Gavin Caterina ||
Trigger-warning: death, racial trauma, incest, sexualization, more ||
There is next to nothing on the Internet about Hal Bennett. His trace is scanter than the dining accouterments of termites. His Wikipedia biography doesn’t reach a hundred words, and the image chosen for his picture (taken from the jacket of one of his books) features a grown man, shirtless, with a thorough mustache, a receding hairline sheared to millimeters, and big nipples, all rendered in black-and-white. But we do know a few things: he was an American (through and through), was born in 1930, and died on the third anniversary of 9/11. A Black satirist, Hal Bennett won the 1973 William Faulkner Prize for his novel, Wait Until the Evening, a follow-up to one of the most brilliant, haunting, beautiful, unbound, resentful and funny pieces of American fiction, Lord of Dark Places.
Lord of Dark Places, first published in 1974, then reprinted in 1997, then set for another reprinting this next upcoming year (thank God), has been previously described as “a satirical and all but scatological attack on the phallic myth.” Chronologically blistering in 285 pages, the novel tells the uproarious and broken tale of Joe, a Black boy from the American South who eventually becomes an adult and is conjured up by his lame-duck father, Titus, to be a living, breathing deity. In the flesh. Alleged by Titus to have a godlike reproductive organ, Joe spends his childhood as the head of a religious-cult harem, being worshiped repeatedly by faces and bodies he had just met, had just actualized, and who his sycophant father had just introduced. Eventually, Joe escapes, becomes a man on the run, and we exist alongside the entire time lapse of him, his landscape, like a paparazzi hilarious, in a journey that spans swathes of Louisiana, Virginia, and New Jersey; from the First World War to Vietnam. Rimbaudian in its begrudgingness with the unbearable, Ditlevsen-esque in its personal scope, and channeling an absurdity influenced by many of the great masters, Dark Places is a transgressive bildungsroman unto its own, anti-hedonistic self.
The language is marvelous. Bennett, a man with seemingly one distinguishable award to his name, writes in dry, beautiful prose. Take this sublime passage early on in the book:
“Around him, the red dirt hills of Burnside, Virginia, humped like sleeping beasts
in the sunshine. Farther up on the hill, Joe could see his own house, blue wood-
smoke zigzagging from the chimney to mix with the bluer sky. Then he looked
up the creek where the water was clear, and he saw a moccasin about four feet
long coming down the creek toward him. Joe took his time about getting out
of there, because the rocks were sharp and could cut his feet.”
The humor is both easily apparent and satisfyingly subtle. The natural bemusement of Joe watching his step as a venomous snake slithers toward him permeates just enough through the “then he, then he” style of prose that is being deployed here. The adjectives are old, simple, good. Bennett was, among a few things that we can know for sure, an occasional enjoyer of Hemingway and Nelson Algren and his use of the uncommon verb “zigzagging” foreshadows one of the kinks that the postmodernists after him loved. Reading the process of Joe’s life is a lot like sitting at a diner with your grandpa and hearing him tell the Great Tale of his life, as the sun listens in too, coming in through the window with which your grandpa rests his cheek against. That, or like a river, is how this lava-feed of type streams out.
Naturally, there are the ecstatic passages (this is about the phallic myth, after all). Bennett fancies himself for register upgrades, when the tempo of a chapter is temporarily pocketed and, instead, a passage of delirium runs amok. This can most often be witnessed during Joe’s monologues, some of which cover entire pages. The material being discussed forms a mutualistic bond with this ascent in octave. It’s a material that should be discussed here because it is brutal. Almost nothing transgressive is unused in the novel. It makes Crash! and even Tampa, seem tame (Story of the Eye can rest easy, though). One of the most prevalent words in the book is ‘tail,’ which is a Bennett-preferred metonym for a penis. There is rarely a chapter that does not have Joe experience an epiphany that revolves around him becoming a eunuch. It is a phenomenal testament to Bennett’s performance that this book does not read as empty, ruthless shock-smut, but instead something more in line with the cathartic coming-of-ages that have been seen before. I am thinking of, limitedly, the wonderful Invisible Man, or, more universally, Gigi by Colette and even The Sorrows of Young Werther.
It may be difficult, at first, to wonder what the point of the even book is. There isn’t a need for a spectacular demonstration of a phallus. A lot of the incestual episodes could have been forwent, and the story would still play out in a way that passes its respected and prospected constitution. Why? Joe continuously finds himself erect when contemplating the injustices done to his race. Why? There doesn’t particularly need to be a why, other than the simple explication that this book of sex chooses to engage with sex at its most degenerative strain. The struggles of Joe as a Black man are done with sorrowful irony, and the raw humor eventually buoys everything else up. Dark Places reads like playing Operator with a living man, tissues on exhibit, and probing his ligaments elicits not a scream, but a laugh. As well as a whimper, a moan, and prayer.
We like to pigeonhole pieces of work, and thus, their authors, to one shard of genre. Daniil Kharms was an absurdist, Isaac Babel was a modernist, and Kafka was, like, somewhere in the middle but that’s too weak so let’s just label him a modernist, too, man. Dark Places is so damned, percussive, plangent, strange as to almost break from tradition with sheer otherness. I don’t know where exactly it should be placed, what it should be labeled, or whom it should be slotted alongside. I am only aware of its singular proportions in the wide, obese cavern of American letters. I am grateful for its reprinting, and strangely grateful to whoever chose that picture for Bennett’s Wikipedia entry. The enigmatic writer would have surely approved it, too. And disregard the adjective, “enigmatic,” for no creator of a work such as this could have been so. It is better to say what we know about Hal Bennett. He was a fantastically gifted storyteller. He died.
