Sixties Novels, Part 12
TRAVEL NOTES, Stanley Crawford, Simon & Schuster, 1967
Apparently still with us, Crawford
http://www.lannan.org/lf/bios/detail/stanley-crawford/
wrote several Sixties Novels before finding another outlet for his prose, which we'll investigate below.
His most famous, still in print, appears to be GASCOYNE:
http://tinyurl.com/27dh6f
But I'm not sure GASCOYNE could top TRAVEL NOTES, which I will definitely be reading some day, based on its jacket copy [eliipsis sic]:
"A white elephant called Unable, with untranslatable obscenities tattooed on its underbelly, tows a large golden coach from city to city; the toilet in the famous Lake Grand Hotel crumbles under a constipated traveler; a cabinet minister is assassinated by a cherry pie; huge hairy fruits fall like rain from a tropical sky...in TRAVEL NOTES the fantasies of an ordinary man play themselves out among the exotic cities of his private dreamland. Yet the traveler is always aware of the fragile structure of his fancy, and fears and disappointments shadow his dreams: his planes never leave the ground; the room he arrives at again and again is his own bedroom; and the Painted Woman who taunts and pursues him is the wife he loves yet longs to be rid of."
Sounds like a modern-day JURGEN to me.
One of the major trends of the Sixties was the "back to the land" movement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_land
Crawford seems to have exemplified this, staking out his own small territory in New Mexico and later writing popular non-fiction about it.
http://tinyurl.com/2all6x
Looks like the Traveler finally settled down.