Here’s how The Literary Encyclopedia’s entry on Tom McHale begins:

In the 1970s, Tom McHale established himself as one of the most promising American novelists of his generation. In a little more than a decade, he produced more than a half-dozen novels that were widely reviewed. Most of those reviews were enthusiastically–sometimes wildly–positive. But even those reviewers who were more guarded in their responses to the individual novels acknowledged the originality of McHale’s darkly comic vision, the engaging energy of his style, and the evidence of a considerable talent in the growing body of his work. Reviewers compared his novels to those of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Updike, Philip Roth, and Bruce Jay Friedman. In 1972, McHale’s second novel, Farragan’s Retreat was named a finalist for the National Book Award, and two years later McHale was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. A New York Times article on the current literary scene placed McHale with Don DeLillo in the vanguard of those novelists who were most influential in terms of the directions that the American novel would take in the 1980s.

I always want to remember Tom McHale as that dashing young guy on the back cover of my much thumbed-through Literary Guild hardcover copy of his second novel Farragan’s Retreat, the one I first read when I was still a teenager. I was blown away by the black humor and Tom’s elegant style.

Here’s how the Time Magazine review from March 1, 1971 begins:

The old motto, “Power perfected becomes grace,” could have been invented to describe Tom McHale’s novels about Irish and Italian Catholics in America. Humor is his forte—not satire but farce. No aberration is too grotesque to be included, no character too minor to be lampooned. McHale’s comedy waves over chaos like luxuriant grass over a grave.

There are many young writers with healthy reserves of rage and chaos, some indeed with little else. What distinguishes McHale is not only the fertility of his invention but the humanity—remarkable in a writer of 28—that penetrates even his crudest caricatures.

After I finished Farragan’s Retreat, I went to the library to find Tom’s first novel, Principato. (Thanks to Matt St. Amand for the review. Matt knows Tom’s work better than just about anyone.) I loved it as well.

Then I read Farragan’s Retreat again. I copied out passages. In the first story I ever wrote for my MFA program, I stole Tom’s description of “the hilltop hulk of the art museum along the Schuykill” for a section where my protagonist, a Penn student, takes her morning jog. (People “jogged” in the 70s.)

Later I’d meet Tom McHale at The Book Group of South Florida, founded in the early 1980s in what was then something of a literary wasteland. I can recall how astonished Tom was when we first met and I could quote his work back to him. I suppose he hadn’t recently encountered people who knew his work.

The last job Tom had before he died was was night assistant at the $1.50 Holiday movie theater in North Miami Beach. He got fired for absenteeism; Tom drank a lot at the end, maybe for years. It never occurred to me that he was an alcoholic, but then I’ve never had a drink im my life and am bad at recognizing drunks.

On Matt St. Amand’s website, he quotes from a rather inartful and self-serving letter from me:

Do you know that after he committed suicide in his sister’s garage about two miles from where I am sitting, I was asked to speak at his memorial service because, the person said, “You were his best friend, weren’t you?” when in reality, I was just an acquaintance of Tom. It was so sad. Tom and I met, I guess around 1981, as part of the Book Group of South Florida. Most of the people there were old ladies who’d been in publishing. Tom was amazed I’d read all his books and could quote lines from Farragan’s Retreat. He’d had a really rough time of it by that time, and he finally had another book coming out. I remember his publication party at the tony Bay Harbor Islands. I always feel uncomfortable at these things, and it was clear to me that most of these people were just society types or people on the make who had no idea who Tom was or his place in American literature. I left early, stopped off for a couple of errands, and then went to a Burger King to get a Whopper. I was shocked to see Tom sitting there alone, just after he’d been the guest of honor at his publication party. I guess at that moment I sensed how lonely he was, and I sat with him, and I guess it was really the only time I really talked to him, and even then, he was pretty stoic and reticent.

He got a horrible review from Ivan Gold, who’d had his own problems with writer’s block and alcohol, in the Sunday NY Times Book Review, and I know that depressed him. But I don’t know what caused him to take his life. His very Catholic family (siblings) were, I suspect, always somewhat uncomfortable with Tom. I never talked to his sister. The newspapers asked me for comments about his death, and I said stupid things. A year later, I had a book reviewed in the NY Times Book Review, also by Ivan Gold, and it was a mostly nice review, but the niceness was spoiled by how Gold’s review had hurt Tom.

We never did have a Book Group memorial service. Tom was 40 when he died, in the garage of his sister’s house in Pembroke Pines.

Here’s how “Portrait of a Writer as a Young Suicide,” a July 4, 1982 Miami Herald article by Cathy Lynn Grossman ends:

Nedda Anders, founder and president of the Book Group and editor-publisher of Andiron Press Inc. in Tamarac, introduced the subject of McHale:

“At the last meeting there was a post-mortem on our lovely party for Tom McHale. Now, this meeting, we have a post-mortem on Tom himself. His sister asked us to do nothing more.”

It was the group’s regular meeting, complete with sandwiches from the deli. They sat on plastic chairs at fake wood tables in the Community Room of a pillbox branch bank building dropped incongruously into the scrub brush along University Drive in Lauderhill. All that could be seen from the windows were cars shimmering in the heat, transplanted trees and transient commerce.

“I know I told you it was a heart attack,” Anders said. “That’s what his sister said. I guess, for reasons of her Catholicism … she told me that and I told you that it was a heart attack, but anyone who commits suicide has had heart failure so I wasn’t really lying.”

They passed around a copy of the paragraph in Time magazine, mentioning the death of the author “by his own hand” and a short obituary from a newspaper. Everyone said,”tsk-tsk.”

Everyone: A retiree who has established himself in Hollywood as a literary consultant. Some delicate older women writing articles for magazines or the story of Davie. A librarian. Several one-person publishing companies producing books on health, astronomy or local memoirs and history. A short-story writer, Richard Grayson, who succeeded the late McHale as the most famous member of the group, which was then planning a party for Grayson’s second book, Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.

People each said how they met McHale, how little they knew him, adding the few facts they had.

“There seemed to be no barriers in Tom,” Anders said. “He was crisp and charming. … We are trying to cope.”

Literary agent Myra Gross remembered that he had landed “a real plum” of a teaching job for next September at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anders interrupted, saying, “He seemed so perfectly equal to life, so absolutely rational. It’s hard to think that somewhere in him was hidden something irrational. … Myra’s son used to call him a ‘cool guy.’ ”

“Cool dude,” Myra Gross corrected her.

During lunch they talked about Mchale’s funny books on guilt, his angry, anti-religious attitudes and the irony of his Catholic funeral in a faith that denies its rituals to suicides.

“It is so terribly difficult to know what drives people, especially writers,” said the author of romances.

“Gee, I wish he’d talked to me,” said the retired consultant.

“His books were getting increasingly less attention,” Grayson said. “Ten years ago you could write literary books and make money. Not now.

“After Tom’s publication party, when I was driving home, I said that I felt luckier than Tom. I know nothing is going to happen with my book. My book is going to sell 20 or 50 copies, and I accept that.”

They talked about art and the bottom line and youth today. They speculated on whether McHale had a contract for a seventh book. Someone said yes.

Publisher Rosemary Jones looked up impatiently.

“It is awful to have this be reduced to gossip,” she said.

A jocular health book publisher who took photos –later lost — of the publishing party said, “Let’s just remember the smiles.”

Later, Myra Gross recalled quiet times with McHale, funny stories he told while monopolizing the conversation. She didn’t mind. A single woman, a working mother, a writer, she knows something of what McHale faced — something about being alone and afraid, about art and rent. Here in these same suburbs she lives on as best she can.

“Maybe I’m more practical,” she says. “Maybe I learned to compromise along the way.”

Just a reminder that you can get your official Save the Litblogs! Maggot Gear at this exclusive online shop. Impress your friends, impress your relatives, make your whole neighborhood jealous. We’ve got clothing, hats, buttons, steins, posters, coasters, stickers, and most importantly, WE HAVE TOTES! So get to shopping!

All proceeds go to the Auto Parts Dealers Literary Guild. A few bucks might be spent on me.

*Not really.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not send me any books to any San Francisco addresses you have for me. I am now in the painful process of ruthlessly scaling down my books to a handful of boxes, feeling a bit like Sophie or Schindler and sobbing to friends on the phone and trying to remind myself that I can get new books.

What are you talking about? That book was purchased at the old Chelsea Books store on Irving Street, and was the subject of a forty-five minute cafe conversation with that girl you briefly dated in 1999. Thus, it has sentimental value! Boy, you thought you were pretty hot shit back then!

Shut up! The past is the past! Why would I read that book again? And what does 1999 have anything to do with it?

Yup, it’s pretty much like that around here these days.

So if I received your book in the last few weeks, I’m sorry. Can’t look at it. Can’t even pack it.

Please use the new Brooklyn address at the right for any and all ARCs or galleys.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to tear my hair out over prioritizing W. Somerset Maugham over Sinclair Lewis.

You never would have done that in 1999!

Shut up, neurotic bastard! Go away and worry about Iran’s nuclear arsenal or something. This is hard enough without your interruptions!

Miranda July, author of the just released No One Belongs Here More Than You, appears in Blonde Redhead’s newest music video. The song is “Top Ranking,” from the band’s 23.

Watch it in: Quicktime [recommended by moi] / YouTube.

One of the writers in my 1979 “Some Young Writers I Admire” article did have a substantial, if offbeat, literary career in Candada, but as his Wikipedia entry notes, he “retired from writing in 1995, and is now self-employed as a day trader.” As he told the Toronto newspaper Eye Weekly in his final interview, “I intend to disappear totally. I already stopped writing two years ago. I will never publish another book–why should I? I’ve produced more literature than this country ever deserved.”

Yet he’s still well-known and admired by those who bought his books directly from the author in the many years he sold his self-published editions on the streets. For example, see the reminiscences of this Greece-based blogger:

Kilodney would stand on the busiest streets in Toronto with a small cardboard sign hanging from his neck. They would read
Pleasant Bedtime Reading
Putrid Scum
Slimy Degenerate Literature
Dull Stories for Average Canadians
Literature for the Brain-Dead
Worst Selling Author — Buy My Books
Rotten Canadian Literature
Albanian Chicken Stories

His face was serious, even forbidding to some people who passed by and happened to make eye contact with him. I don’t remember ever feeling intimidated by him or if I spoke to him much the first time I saw him. Soon enough, however, I knew him well enough to stand around and chat with him whenever I saw him. He would complain about how bad business was and gape stupidly at passers-by who ignored him. I remember him once droning, “Hockey books. Hockey books. Get your hockey books.”

Once, a tough-looking teenager passed by as we were talking and shot him a glance.

“You know,” I said when the kid was about five paces away, “I don’t think he’s going to mention to his friends that he saw you today.”

“Are you kidding?” Crad said. “He’s forgotten me already.”

I first read something by Crad Kilodney when I was an MFA student at Brooklyn College in 1975. The fiction editor of Junction, the literary magazine of BC’s English graduate students, I found an issue in our files that began with a remarkable story, a punning, sly narrative told by a father watching his five-year-old son Dick at the beach as he muses on three topics: crabs, sand and McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz. It ends with the narrator observing “an interesting natural phenomenon” when his child gets hit by a lightning bolt. Five years later that story, its nondescript title changed, would become the title story in Kilodney’s successful 1980 commercially-published collection, Lightning Struck My Dick.

Before that, in the 1970s, I read many of Kilodney’s wonderfully funny, weird, idiosyncratic stories (“The Hardworking Garbagemen of Cleveland,” “The Mentally Disturbed Astronomers of Cincinnati,” “Forget That Grapefruit; Here Come the Midgets”) in many literary magazines, from Rick Peabody’s Gargoyle and Ed Hogan’s Aspect to Tom Whalen’s Lowlands Review, which devoted an entire 1978 issue to a Crad Kilodney chapbook, Mental Cases.

It was through Tom that I learned the real name of Crad Kilodney and we began an intense correspondence, sending long letters back and forth several times a week between Brooklyn and Toronto. I learned that “Crad” (his identity has never been revealed and I will not do so here) was born in 1948 in Jamaica, Queens; raised on Long Island; had a degree in astronomy from the University of Houston; and moved to Canada out of disgust with Watergate and U.S. culture generally. He decided to become a writer and had an early success with the first unsolicited story accepted by The National Lampoon.

While on Long Island after college, he’d worked for a leading vanity publisher, giving him a lifelong affection for and inspiration from the crackpots who paid to have their horrendous novels and bizarre conspiracy theories and weird treatises “published” by Exposition Press. In Canada he’d had a series of miserable jobs in publishing, working as a sales rep for major publishers like McClellan and Stewart and finally ending up doing menial work in book warehouses among colleagues he considered mentally deficient.

At the first of many meetings during his annual summer visit to his grandparents’ house in Jamaica (my mouth still waters thinking of the sweet “Greek goodies” made by his grandmother, who once owned a diner), when we were both about to have short story collections come out from commercial publishers, I learned of Crad’s plan to quit work and begin selling his books on the street.

Having never in my life met such a misanthrope, I wondered why he would subject himself to a public he despised. On the other hand, he was very kind to nearly everyone he met: he spent three weeks with me in Florida one winter and when we traveled to New Orleans to teach at NOCCA in Tom’s writing program, Crad was excellent and much loved by the students. I still recall how they adored his reading of a story with about sixteen false starts, “Jap Scientologists Ate My Grandfather.”

Working on the streets of Toronto for seventeen years — often he’d stand near the Toronto Stock Exchange building — Crad lived a meager existence selling the nearly 30 little books he published under his own Charnel House imprint. (He also occasionally had a commercial book out, like Pork College from Canada’s respected Coach House Press.) His titles were often memorable: Bloodsucking Monkeys from North Tonawanda; Bang Heads Here, Suffering Bastards; Sex Slaves of the Astro-Mutants; Junior Brain Tumors in Action; Suburban Chicken-Strangling Stories; I Chewed Mrs. Ewing’s Raw Guts; Simple Stories for Idiots; Foul Pus from Dead Dogs. Ignored and ridiculed by most of Canada’s literary establishment, Crad nevertheless had for years a secret affair with an older, respected writer (she had won the prestigious Governor General’s Award) that ended only with her death.

As “The Rev. Crad Kilodney” (he was a Universal Life minister), he wrote a monthly advice column for the Canadian porn magazine Rustler, in which he answered mail from people with sexual perversions, all attributed to real-life people who’d crossed him or his friends, like the Minneapolis Tribune reviewer who called my first book “unbelievably bad.” He also had a column in Toronto’s alternative weekly Only Paper Today, “Crad Kilodney’s Vanities,” in which he reviewed horrendously awful vanity press books; later, he got Tom Whalen, me and other writers to join him in creating deliberately terrible short fiction for several volumes of his Worst Canadian Stories.

By the late ’80s, Crad had become a Canadian cult figure, beloved by many who befriended him and championed his works. A film documentary about him premiered at the 1993 Toronto Film Festival. In a 1988 prank, Crad submitted a number of stories by famous writers to the CBC Radio literary competition, many under absurd names. When the stories by Hemingway, Chekhov and others were screened out by the jury, it made a funny news story as Crad said he’d proven that the establishment could not recognize quality literature.

As his Wikipedia entry notes, in 1991 Crad was arrested for selling commercial goods without a license, “making him the only Canadian writer ever arrested for selling his own writing. At various times he kept a tape recorder with him and recorded quite a bit of bizarre byplay between himself and prospective customers; the tapes are extremely rare and are collector’s items (much as original printings of his books are). Several of his stories (such as “Henry”, featured in Girl on the Subway) are also inspired by these experiences.”

Crad and I gradually grew less close over the years. He did not want to get a computer to correspond by email. To me, his stories began to be more scatalogical (one book, a very dark one about his life on the street, was called Excrement) and to some extent racist and xenophobic. I believed he stayed too long on the streets, but what else was there for him to do?

Finally, when his grandmother and then his parents died in the mid-’90s, his inheritance allowed him to retire and concentrate on being an investor — something he’s been very successful at. He specializes in Canadian mining and energy stocks and has become quite well-known in these circles. The Toronto writer Syd Allan has set up some Crad Kilodney web pages which for a while contained monthly columns by Crad. But he’s gone from the literary scene, which has led to blog entries like Whatever happened to Crad Kilodney?

I hope one day that some publisher will revive Crad Kilodney’s literary career and republish his best stories, like “The True Story of My Dentist, Dr. Mark Litvack,” which begins:

You know how it is when you’re a writer. Everyone you know wants you to write about him. One of these days, I’ll put all of those people in one story, give each of them a few good lines to say, and that’ll be that.

However, my dentist, Dr. Mark Litvack of 1500 Bathurst St., Toronto, has finally persuaded me to devote a story to him. The fact that I have a bill outstanding since last year is not the main reason for doing so. When I find a fascinating character, I can’t help but sit down and write about him.

I’ve come to learn quite a lot about Dr. Litvack, or Mark, as I call him since we’re about the same age. He never rushes with me, because he likes to chat. Sometimes he poses questions I cannot adequately respond to when he’s working on me, but I’m sure when I grunt, he knows exactly what I intend to say. That’s the kind of rapport that one only finds between a writer and his dentist.

Before I get down to the story itself — although it’s more of a biographical sketch, I guess — I want to take a moment to tell you that a lot of my success as a writer is due to Dr. Litvack. When you have pain in your mouth or have lost a filling, you just can’t concentrate on writing nice Canadian stories. At least I can’t, and I’ll bet if you’re honest, you’ll admit you can’t either.

So I see him regularly to take care of those cavities before they get big. Usually I don’t have any because I take good care of my teeth. Dr. Litvack showed me how. He took out this giant-size plastic set of teeth and showed me the proper way to brush. I also floss, which a lot of people don’t. A lot of the confidence that comes across in my writing is really the result of good oral hygiene

Crad, we hardly knew you.