Bizarro world

Daniel Pearlman's fantastic fiction

by Bill Rodriguez

Daniel Pearlman laughs when asked what writers have influenced him. "One reviewer called me a mixture of Franz Kafka, Woody Allen and Jonathan Swift," he says. "Which I really appreciated. Those are three major influences in my consciousness." Existential angst, comical absurdity and biting satire. They certainly have taken their toll.

After many years teaching writing and producing four novels, one of them has been published, Black Flames. It was the third novel he wrote. Another is in the hands of the agent who represents Robert Ludlum. Pearlman did a reading recently at a library in Manhattan, where chapter two of a fifth novel, still in the works, was encouragingly received. In 1995, a collection of his science-fiction short stories, The Final Dream & Other Fictions, was published.

A full professor at the University of Rhode Island, the fiction writing teacher and Ezra Pound scholar is finally getting on bookshelves. The novel is a darkly satirical frolic focusing on a colorfully paranoid academic who marches in and out of reality like a one-person phalanx of Alices in Wonderland. Although the tale is "99 percent from my imagination," the protagonist is based on an actual person. Pearlman encountered him, a fast-talking wild man nearing retirement, when the author was chairman of the English department at another university in the early '70s.

"He struck me as such an exaggerated type that he had to be put into fiction," Pearlman recalls, sipping an Arizona Iced Tea at a coffeehouse near the Kingston campus. "He did actually approach me and ask me to use my car to follow his wife!"

Pearlman didn't start drawing from the bizarre encounter for another 10 years or so, because he couldn't crack the technical problem of merging hallucinations with reality. Then he helped a creative writing grad student at URI who had the same difficulty and -- wonder of wonders he had the solution. Why not have his character go off on hallucinatory riffs, sparked by what he sees? This way the dramatic thrust of the story is maintained in the present tense rather than interrupting with flashbacks.

Pearlman thought that he might simply do a little domestic comedy as a short story, maybe a novella. But there were some fascinating elements of the man's life that were too tempting not to delve into, such as his being one of Mussolini's soldiers in the Spanish Civil War and spending three years in a Russian prison camp. As Pearlman researched the war, he found fascinating material. For example, the only time that the Russians could have captured him was at the Battle of Guadalajara, an especially interesting and decisive engagement.

"It was Mussolini's only defeat in the Spanish Civil War. And it was so full of intrigue and betrayal that it fit in beautifully with that theme throughout the entire novel. It became a perfect analog," he says. "So the past became increasingly important to explain the motivations and behavior of my strange character."

The operative word is strange, the gateway to Pearlman's exotic creative imagination.

"I really love to get into the very bizarre and fantastic," is how he puts it. "I include in that the psychologically bizarre. A lot of my science fiction tends to show that quality."

They sure do. His collection of two years ago presents various future worlds: where the dreams of professional "starrytellers" are broadcast to sleeping billions, where police detectives have several alternate reality versions of their cities in which to chase around murderers, where the psychological separation between men and beasts has eroded away. In them, narrative sequence sometimes hop-scotch like human thoughts.

"These crossings of borders, in terms of how I treat past and present in the consciousness of my characters, is a variation on the way I treat reality. I don't respect it!" he declares with a laugh. "Or put it this way: I don't respect the consensual definition of reality."

Neither did Don Quixote in the Cervantes novel, which Pearlman has pored over in Spanish. The tale about the windmill-jousting madman was another strong influence upon his imagination, indicated by the protagonist of Black Flames being an eccentric, elderly idealist. Cervantes, too, kept his readers engaged by presenting a fool who nevertheless deserved some respect. Pearlman wanted the antic professor of his novel to be "more than just a buffoon," to be "somebody who has in a sense become sort of a cross-bearer for the century." Pearlman himself grows animated, using his hands as he speaks about his character's Spanish Civil War experiences giving depth to his craziness. Describing communism and fascism as "two cheeks of the same ass," he shakes his head over our "whole century of ideological craziness."

"If you look at his paranoia, look at the paranoia of every ideological system, the fanaticisms that a man like that had to face and suffer from throughout the main part of the century," Pearlman explains. "So he became a focus for a critique of modern American-European history, basically." He might as well be talking about his academic specialty, Ezra Pound, the brilliant poet and rabid fascist who was convicted of wartime treason and placed in an insane asylum. He died in 1972, but Pearlman's doctoral dissertation on Pound, which was soon to be published, was read to the frail old man the year before his death. Pound responded by inviting the young scholar to Italy and made suggestions for revisions as they traveled about for 10 days.

And Pearlman might as well be talking about himself. It takes an idealist, someone with higher expectations of reality than reality can be expected to provide, to write as he does. As a result, he says that he sees absurdity all around. "Even in my most serious stories, almost everything I've done, even the tragic, there's always somehow a comic element that creeps in," he observes and smiles. "That's the Woody Allen part." n

Pearlman will read from Black Flames on Sunday, June 8 at 2 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 1441 Bald Hill Road, Warwick, and lead a mini-creative writing workshop on Thursday, June 12 at 7 p.m. at Borders, Garden City Center, Cranston.

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A review of Black Flames

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