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| Gary Reilly, The Novel Man |
My friend Gary Reilly passed away a few days back. A damn shame on a personal level, of course—he was brilliant, irascible, funny, and what my mother would have called “peculiar” (a word she always applied with affection). We were always glad to see each other, but never had that warm, unconditional type of friendship that Oprah talks about. Gary operated on his own wavelength, a channel you were welcome to tune in to, but he wasn’t about to change his frequency for your convenience.
Gary’s death is a damn shame on another level. He was a writer—a really good writer. In 1978 his first published short story, “The Biography Man,” appeared in The Iowa Review, whose editors nominated it for a Pushcart Prize, which it won; you can find it volume IV (1979-80 edition) of the venerable Pushcart anthology series, along with fiction by Jane Smiley, John Updike, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Manuel Puig. Gary’s story deals with an itinerant vendor of books—autobiographies, that is, written by the salesman’s company and published for the pleasure of one’s family and friends. I won’t say more—track it down and read it!—except to say that Reilly manages to perform a wedding that joins Sherwood Anderson and Jean Stafford* in disturbing matrimony.
Regarding the publication of that story—well, thereby hangs a tale. I’ll relate it here as accurately as my always unreliable memory allows.
Pushcart IV appeared at the end of a thriving period for U.S. literary publishing. The operation—an expensive labor of love, I imagine—was sustained in significant measure by the fundraising abilities of George Plimpton. It was customary at the time for contributors to attend a party at Plimpton’s mansion, which Gary did. Legend has it that Gary was overwhelmed by that fête, and that afterward he froze up. It wasn’t that he stopped writing, but he stopped submitting. I’ve never been sure if he felt his work wasn’t good enough, or if he was dispirited by the declining market for truly literary work that characterized the Reagan-Bush ’80s and Clinton ’90s, or if he feared that some editorial stooge would try to “improve” his writing. (Gary and I never discussed the Gordon Lishing of Raymond Carver, but I often wondered what he thought about it. Now I’ll never know.) In any case, Gary stopped submitting. But, as I said earlier, he didn’t stop writing. In fact, as one of his closest friends, Joe Nigg (a writer he’d studied with and who became something of a mentor), put it in a recent email, “He just kept on writing novels (more than 20 unpublished, self-bound), right through last year.” Last year being the year when Gary descended into the valley of cancer treatments. He no longer had the focus to write, but he did manage to fulfill one “bucket list” aim by reading the whole of Remembrance of Things Past. (Or did Gary think of it as In Search of Lost TIme? I’ll bet he did.) Gary only allowed me to read one of his many books—a harrowing, untitled novel about an alcoholic American soldier in Vietnam. Nigg says there several of these, and I can only hope that they’ll somehow find their way into print.
There are dozens of other Reilly stories, but I’d rather end with some his own words. Here is a sweet sentence from “The Biography Man,” in which the vendor of vanity autobiographies finishes a phosphate from the nearby drugstore in the small town where he’s come to hawk his wares:
Handing the empty glass to a short-haircut boy who turns to dash back to the drugstore to show the wagon man that he is the fasts runner of any kid in town, he leans back, his head not moving, but always watching, waiting, in the hot summer afternoon of clouds and a cool breeze now and then, no customers yet, but knowing, always knowing what is in the hearts of the people who will come in the night.
And this, from his extraordinary untitled novel—a passage that leaves us with the alcoholic Private Palmer as he anticipates participating in a competition for Soldier of the Month, for which he has been nominated as a result of his decidedly unheroic actions having been misperceived as heroic by his superiors:
He will not drink tonight. He will go to bed now, and in the morning he will get a haircut, and in the afternoon, wearing fatigues smelling of packing crates, and wearing boots with toss polished to an obsidian gleam, he will go across the street to battalion headquarters and wait in line with the other soldier-of-the-month candidates who will be coming from across the Central Highlands to participate in this competition: eager, clean-shaven, starch-pressed troops who will have their shit together. And when the time comes, he will go into the room and stand before the board, and with every question they put to him he will do a thing he cannot recall having done in a long time: without resorting to fraud, or subterfuge, or ingratiating self-deprecation, he will look each one of them in the eye and answer their questions honestly by saying simply: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
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*I mean the Jean Stafford of The Mountain Lion, not Boston Adventure.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
By the way — to all those on this thread — please mark Tuesday, June 5 2012 on your calendars and come to The Tattered Cover in LoDo for the launch of "The Asphalt Warrior," the first of Gary's 10 comic novels about Murph, the Denver taxi driver. It's being published by Running Meter Press in collaboration with Big Earth Publishing. Bring your friends, tell the world. Murph
Thanks for the kind words, Mark. I hope you and Mike can make something happen with all those fine books! Gary deserves to be remembered that way—as a writer, I mean. What a guy….
Very very nice piece! I was priveleged / honored to know Gary for the last several years and he was a tremendous mentor and coach to me. I believe I've read all of Gary's works, at least the ones he told me about. Some 18 books (??) in all. The two Vietnam novels are among the best I've ever read, and I've read quite a few. The Murph comic novels are exquisite. He has two dark
The title of the film, obviously, was "Mail Order Worm"
I met Gary in Joe Nigg's writing class. He was a friend and mentor through many long drinking nights at My Brother's Bar. One small anecdote: Short film Gary was always going to make: "Mail Order Word". Opening shot on mail box on post. Man comes, opens mail box. It's full of dirt. He reaches in. Pulls out worm. The End. For my epitaph, I'll lean on A.E. Housman:<br /
Oooh. Planting a burr under the saddle <i>does</i> work! Great stuff, Joe. He'd love to know we're telling stories about him….
I'd like to add a few Reilly creations to his Spender parody, "Biography Man," and "Soldier of the Month" novella: <i>Beowulf</i> (an early animated film with clay figures and cocktail swords); <i>The Cheese Connection</i> (since I never read it, I don't know if this is the parody of <i>Conan the Barbarian</i> that he sometimes talked about); <i>Worst Weekend</i> (a
"Ubiquitous wit," indeed. Gary sure knew his way around a quip….<br /><br />Great news about the collection, too. Nigg tells me nothing! But now I can just follow your Web site and keep up with the further adventures of Larry….
Joe,<br />On another subject, as you can see I have my own website now (welcome, Larry, to the 20th century). As the other Joe may have told you, a book of my short stories will be published this fall, for which I am truly grateful. For some odd reason I don't seem to be getting any younger. Title of the book is "Rondo and Fugue for Two Pianos." Look for it in your favorite
For more years than I like to think about I've had on a wall of my writing room a photograph that Gary took at a party of writers at Joe Nigg's apartment one night. The photo happens to be of me and Kent Nelson. Beneath the photo I've hung a separate piece of paper on which Gary printed the same photo, smaller, and below that his photo of Joe, smiling, drinking, with thought bubbles
I'm comforted by the career of John Kennedy Toole in this respect, Conrad: even his early suicide didn't keep his <i>Confederacy of Dunces</i> from finding (through the efforts of his indefatigable mother) a publisher, an audience, a Pulitzer Prize—and 31 continuous years of being in print. But the pain and pathos of his situation isn't really diminished by that, is it…
Joseph,<br /><br />my condolences to you on loss of your friend. I see here a moving testimonial to the value of friendship and lament for unappreciated (often disprized) literary talent. This is the tragedy few of us ever like to admit: the terrible uncertainties, discouragements and self-loathings writers are subject to. And the very real likelihood that many of us may spend an entire lifetime