WHEN THE HOST WAS A NOVELIST: 9/10: "Hollywood Before the Mast," a story from the collection, "Gordon Liddy is My Muse," by John Calvin Batchelor. January 1, 1990. Read by the host.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 31 December 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Gordon-Liddy-Muse-Calvin-Batchelor/dp/0671690787
From Publishers Weekly
Posing as hack writer Tommy "Tip" Paine, Batchelor ( The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica ) offers a comic and often provocative look at contemporary America in this episodic "autobiographical" novel. In eight chapters, each self-contained, Tip roams from Moscow to Hollywood to New England to his ultimate destination, G. Gordon Liddy's Firearms Security Academy in Arizona. While in Russia, he watches a boyhood friend progress, over the years, from awed admirer of American western movies to KGB superstar to an official non-person, "disappeared" as part of that nation's changing politics. In Hollywood, despite the warnings of his decidedly offbeat agent, Tip falls into the clutches of a woman who is not what she seems. In New England, together with his "imaginary best friend, McKerr," Tip solves a multiple murder and uncovers what is possibly a relic of American history. Finally, in the Arizona desert, he posits an arguable identity for the still-elusive"Deep Throat" of the Watergate scandal. Other tales in this totally engaging work recount run-ins with famous literary personages, wealthy Texans and restless Vietnam veterans, or suggest a dark and ancient secret hidden in the heart of Germany. This may be Batchelor's breakthrough novel to the wide audience he deserves.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The narrator of this inventive picaresque novel is Tip Paine, formerly a spook for the National Security Agency and now a moderately successful sci-fi/spy writer. In eight exuberant episodes Tip ranges from Moscow to Hollywood. He provides mystery (a tale of murder and mayhem in a small New England town), commentary on international politics (an elegiac account of a Russian KGB agent who falls victim to glasnost), and wickedly funny satire of pomp and foolishness in Texas high society, a university writing workshop, and a desert training academy for mercenaries. By alluding frequently to the classics of American literature (e.g., Moby Dick, The Last of the Mohicans ), Batchelor creates illuminating but highly entertaining commentary on contemporary society.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
1948 Hollywood
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gordon Liddy is my muse, Hollywood Before the Mass. Nine. |
| 0:08.0 | I wish that I'd gone to her and said, |
| 0:10.0 | Kate's, whatever's happening, it's not terrible. I love you and so forth. |
| 0:14.0 | Actually, I approximated this. It's bad dialogue, it can't work. Even make-believe needs a car chase to rescue such bad dialogue. Mostly I wish that what I discovered |
| 0:26.8 | about case was something normally scary like pregnancy. Instead I botched it worse |
| 0:32.2 | than I want to recall. I did everything badly, beginning with a barrage. |
| 0:37.0 | Are you sick? Are you all right now? What happened up there? |
| 0:40.0 | I pestered her at lunch so hard that we didn't go back to skiing and when she wouldn't answer I pestered her in the lobby, in the elevator, in our room until she fled the room, Colorado and me. I've been left before. I've done plenty of leaving, but that way that time was wrong. |
| 0:58.0 | The way she packed was wrong. She didn't flee. She transferred like a seaman to shore in calm silence. I wanted |
| 1:06.9 | hysteria, so I trod provocation, bringing up marriage, then asking if she was pregnant. |
| 1:13.0 | I repeated pregnancy, marriage, pregnancy, wedding, pregnancy, family. |
| 1:17.0 | She returned nothing, not even disgusted looks. |
| 1:21.0 | Truth, there was a faint blossom on her cheeks that on another might have broken |
| 1:27.0 | into a smile. And then she was gone Sunday by dark. Her last words were business. She showed those teeth and said, |
| 1:37.0 | I've had my calls transferred. A generous man might have tried a car chase, might have pursued her back to LA and negotiated |
| 1:45.7 | apologies. I did call her, but not until I got back to Maine, and only because Moosehead Lake |
| 1:51.6 | was noisy with the self-righteousness in my head. |
| 1:55.0 | She refused to come to the phone. |
| 1:58.0 | I abandoned Maine the next day and called her again from New York. |
| 2:01.0 | More refusal. |
| 2:02.0 | I tried a telegram a garrulous letter and then after |
| 2:05.4 | some rest a diplomatic letter. Nothing. In due time I got my letters back from her company, |
... |
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