Mrs. October Was Here

by Coleman Dowell

Mrs. Septimus October, a lady of vast wealth whose hobby is revolution descends with her mysterious entourage to stage her great experiment one aimed at ridding the world of hatred by focusing it on one single individual and destroying him. Her strange cadre of agents grows amid surprising, even sinister circumstances. Her bright and terrible revolution, however, takes a turn she had not anticipated, and the novel reveals itself as a ferocious, many-leveled fable.

Genres: American, Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1974

About the author

Born in Kentucky in 1925, Robert Coleman Dowell is one of the great post-war US writers. He is the author of 5 novels including One of the Children is Crying, Island People and Mrs October Was Here.

Coleman Dowell's short stories, as is much of his work, are difficult to contextualize, shatter prior conceptions of what fiction should encompass, and break away from previous fictive forms. Some of the stories include a rich, crafted Gothicism, others a compelling surrealism, and still others an expertly timed lyricism. Dowell's characters are multidimensional, sometimes moving through the stories at metafictional levels. They are always reacting to the alienation of self, attempting to understand flawed beauty, and desperately striving to focus on the numerous splintered fragments of their fractured lives. He died in 1985.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a weird book. The story concerns the fanciful ordinary American town of Tasmania, Ohio, with "ordinary" meaning, to Colmen Dowell's Kentucky-raised, New York-tempered cynicism: entitled, self-assured, and bigoted in all ways. Into this ordinariness is introduced -- by a local celebrity in the home-decoration field, responding to an offer found in the back of a magazine -- a band of career revolutionaries, prepared to bring massive social and political change to everyone in town. The townspeople, essentially ordinary suburbanites, flock to the novelty of the revolution and take up cause easily, but largely without comprehending any of its actual ideals in any real way. Particularly, no one seems to bother including those with an actual cause for revolt, those overlooked and ignored in the town's slums.

The stage is set for incisive socio-political satire, but Dowell, being who he is (see his masterful post-modern ghost auto-bio novel Island People, maybe the best book I read last year), uses post-modern misdirection, intentionally confused rhetoric, and various ambiguous shadings of ideology, to attempt a complete live dissection the heart of America, arguably with far less attention granted its its reconstruction or rehabilitation. Many questions are raised, some are answered, and many of the answers are later contradicted or undermined. And, in perhaps classic post-modern form, he tends to obscure the stakes here behind many episodes of terminal zaniness, so even the tone is hard to get a handle on. As these forces ebb and flow, I found myself intrigued by the first act, totally annoyed by the first half of the second, and then, suddenly, completely gripped as everything fractured further into ambiguous fable, phantasmagoria bordering on the utterly surreal, and finally a complete self-interrogation. Which ended up laying to rest my doubts about how I should feel about any of this (answer: you should never know what to feel with certainty, nothing is so simple), and winning me over. By which I mean that I still don't know what I read, exactly, but that it was highly impressive and will continue to fuel my meandering thoughts for a while.

...

And an example of Dowell's weird antics peppering the proceedings, and which I transcribed for some reason:

Another young women, abrim with confidence in what she termed the modren emphasis on plastics, fell into a decline when a filmy plastic wrapping failed to adhere to the sides of a bowl of leftovers. When found--it was estimated that she had been about her labors for several days because the leftovers had gone bad--she was standing at the kitchen counter surrounded by empty wrap boxes and a measured two miles of shredded wrap, trying with bloodied palms to smooth a by now imaginery plastic covering over a bowl of spoiled victuals.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dowell is not a fan of revolution, or reaction, or much of anything - at least not in this novel.

From the SEP entry on Bergson, whom Mrs. October mourns throughout:
“Philosophy, for Bergson, does not consist in choosing between concepts and in taking sides.”

From a Dalkey interview with Dowell:
“I decided to dislike everything, I, Coleman Dowell, writer. I decided to despise everything I saw, and that would be “my” viewpoint. I COULDN’T allow myself to swerve from that decision because I could so easily go to one side or the other. Having given myself that absolute freedom, I decided to have fun.”

And it was quite fun.

“I was thinking very much about the revolution that was trying to happen in America during the 1960’s and I wondered whether there is any relation between revolution and creativity, where they come together and where revolution becomes the opposite of creative.”

While reading, my mind would occasionally drift to current events, by association more so than inattentiveness. That Revolutionary Spirit has recently been reborn, malformed in your Trumps and your Sanders, your Petersons and your privileged privilege-protesters. It’s no stretch of the imagination to see any or all of them coming for the creatives, and soon.

With its philosophical-political concerns and its lite typographic play, Mrs. October seems an ancestor to books like The Broom of the System (swapping Bergson for Wittgenstein) and You Bright and Risen Angels. There's a cartoonish quality to the outlandishly symbolic characters. They’re the types of folks you only meet in po-mo fiction (thankfully).

Considering the above statement, I’d like to append a sub-designation to Mrs. October’s BURIED status, that of: MISSING=LINK. If you’re investigating the genesis of your Wallaces and Vollmanns, this ain’t a bad garden to scrutinize.

And it’s quite fun.

[Chumbert Squurls · Rating 5 out of 5]

More atmosphere than actual plot, Mrs. October Was Here paints a vivid picture of a small town in Ohio in this off-kilter anti-American novel. The story is more or less about a stranger disrupting the harmony of the town in her revolution of irrationality. Dowell's characters are repulsively memorable. From the suave pedophile living with his beloved dachshund to the immoral young woman exhibiting her senile mother as a freak in her own home, Dowell's portrait of the American nightmare is a masterwork from start to end.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

To find the location of Tasmania on a modern map, turn the map so that the line separating Indiana and Ohio runs parallel to your mouth. With this image, think of a beast crouching upon the map, drinking from Lake Erie at Cleveland – a firewater drinker. Its forepaws rest upon Toledo, its hindfeet – the animal is in bas-relief – lightly touch Springfield. That little round hole, or anus, is Columbus. If you will now make a mark centrally between front and hindfeet, and from there draw a line to about where (it is a female beast) the second pair of teats counting from the hindquarters would hang . . . on the other hand, it might be simpler to take a reading of 83° longitude and 35° latitude . . . or, simpler still, you could go there.

Mrs. October Was Here was the second novel of Coleman Dowell, following One Of The Children Is Crying. Much like One Of The Children Is Crying, the writing here is both superb and nuanced, imbibed with caustic malignancy, all gnashing teeth and hissing breath and flashing claws. But, while One Of The Children Is Crying presented a narrative relatively straightforward in scope, Mrs. October Was Here shows Dowell beginning to stretch his legs a bit and begin exploring more meta-fictional avenues of narrative. In fact, having read his third novel, Island People, prior to this, it’s easy to see how Mrs. October Was Here serves as an transformation touchstone between the fairly accessible One Of The Children Is Crying and the masterwork that is Island People.

Much as he does in Island People, Dowell here is exploring the bounds between standard narrative and meta-narrative – an adroit reader will recognize early on that reliability of the seemingly omniscient third-person narration is considerably more muddy and cryptic than its surface would suggest. The apparently simple third person narrative begins fairly quickly to overlap with a manufactured narrative – the “projections” of Mrs. October, writings that are strangely prescient:

But at the end of all reasoning and excuses and explanations there waited a phenomenon for which there was no rational explanation, and no excuse when it turned out badly:
Her projections were like a person’s shadow thrown upon the ground; when measured, it proved to be a bit larger than life but otherwise as accurate as a slightly enlarged photograph of a thumbprint.

and these projections are further commented upon – through italicized sections – by Mrs. October. But, after the projections are introduced it becomes difficult – as the tone of writing between the two is intentionally identical – to differentiate between the standard narrative and the created “projection” narrative. Through the course of the second section it becomes apparent that the narrative has been usurped by another revolutionary participant in the town of Tasmania, and in doing so Mrs. October’s revolution – and the book as a whole – is co-opted by an other. The narrative structure itself becomes more complicated in the third (and in the final) section of the book.

The book does meander a bit through the second section though – Dowell does a good job of harnessing the absurd, and the odd turns and departures that slowly overwhelm the middle portion of the book are enjoyable, though they do go on a bit too long. Through it all, though, it is always, overwhelmingly, obvious just how talented of a writer Dowell was, and the book - at pretty much all moments – is a joy to read.

In all of its absurdity – and this book does get a bit weird – I think this actually a good entry point for reader’s wishing to get into Coleman Dowell, but are interested in more than just great writing (One Of The Children Is Crying) but also would like some experimentation thrown in the mix. It introduces some of the territory that Dowell will explore more fully in Island People, but yields its secrets considerably easier than that later book.

As with all Coleman Dowell, this is highly recommended.

[Macartney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of this went over my head. I’m either not smart enough for this book or it’s an admirable, clever and inventive clunker.