Book Review: 'The Brawny Embraces,' Volume 3 Of The Arnold Schnabel Saga

Railroad Train to Heaven was the first and This World Or Any Other World the second volume of excerpts from Arnold Schnabel's sprawling memoir.  Author Dan Leo's genre-hopping gems, published in 2017 and 2018, cover but a single Saturday day and night in the summer of 1963 as middle-aged Arnold, an small poet with a big heart who is on leave from his job as a brakeman on the Reading Railroad, recovers from a mental breakdown in the guest house of his three maiden aunts down the shore (as they say in Arnold's hometown of Philadelphia) in the then-quaint Victorian backwater of Cape May, New Jersey.  Volume Three, the just-published The Brawny Embraces, picks up where the 2017 and 2018 volumes leave off.   

Or so it seems until Arnold awakens in the opening pages of The Brawny Embraces, slowly realizes he's not in his attic lair and it's not the Sunday morning after Saturday's wild escapades.  Further confusing matters, there is a strange woman in bed with him, whose name he eventually screws up the courage to ask.

"Just call me Emily, please."

"Emily." 

"Yes, just Emily.  What about you?  What do you prefer to be called?" 

"Me?"

"Yes, you, Porter.  'Mr. Porter Walker.'  Such a lovely name, a  poet's name."

Arnold, as we soon learn, has been trapped in the pages of Ye Cannot Quench, a romance novel by Gertrude Evans, who also was staying at his aunts' guest house, albeit six years in the future, because it is now 1957.  Arnold is still Arnold to himself, but has become Porter Walker, the novel's handsome young protagonist, to everyone else, while the comely Emily is his editor at a publishing house that is racing to get out his epic poem -- not coincidentally titled The Brawny Embraces -- before a rival house publishes Jack Kerouac's On the Road. 

And Arnold has not merely become Porter.  He is living in Porter's tenement flat on Bleeker Street in bohemian Greenwich Village, where Kerouac and fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs seem to spend more time nursing beers, shots and their huge but fragile egos than stoking their literary fires.  

So much for plot spoilers. 

For the balance of The Brawny Embraces, which is to say pretty much the rest of Leo's prequel, we are introduced and reintroduced to the eclectic friends of the socially inept Arnold-Porter.   These include Josh aka Jesus the Son of God, who smokes Pall Malls and is always in need of a light, and Jack Scratch aka the Devil aka Prince of Darkness, who has spitefully trapped Arnold in Porter's world.   

In tandem, Josh and Jack impart deeper good versus evil meanings into Arnold-Porter's madcap adventures, while there are the mere mortals among his friends who see his waltz with lunacy as brilliance.  His sweet insanity would pass for a sort of refreshing normalcy in the deeply troubled times in which we live, while 1957 -- with its big cars, jukebox hits, exotic cocktails and the unfiltered cigarettes everyone smokes -- seems like a faint echo from a distant solar system in an America led not by a grandfatherly former general and war hero, as it was then, but by a draft-dodging malignant narcissist who is truly insane.  

Among the mortals is the exotic Betsy, who as Elektra is Arnold's future first inamorata, and too many other characters to mention for fear of really spoiling the plot.

"So just how strange are you, Porter?" 

It was amazing to look into those dark eyes, the same eyes I had known six years in the future.  It was so amazing that I neglected to answer her question, but it worked out okay. 

"Good," she said.  "A man who doesn't brag about how strange he is." 

I took a drink of beer.  It tasted good, it tasted really good.  Betsy was looking at me, smiling. Even in this smoky crowded place I could smell one of those unique fragrances she emanated, this one was like the smell of buttered toast with homemade blueberry preserves. 

"But something tells me you're a strange one, Porter, she said.  

At the end of a most amazing day, and The Brawny Embraces chronicles but one day, a Tuesday if you must know, Arnold-Porter and a talking housefly who has befriended him before getting drunk on a maraschino cherry from a manhattan cocktail  ("the fly kept staring at me with his ten thousand anxious little eyes") end up at a strange bar on MacDougal Street where long-dead writers hang out that is appropriately called Valhalla.    

"I had met enough weird people for one night, for one lifetime, for two lifetimes," Arnold-Porter thinks as contemplates, in composing a spur-of-the moment poem which is profound or banal, or perhaps both, how he can escape from the romance novel in which he is trapped and return to his beloved Cape May.

Driving through night-time streets of doom

through this warm and dirty rain

past buildings fraught with gloom

in a car more powerful than pain,

driving through a life filled with death

with a brain filled with madness

with a world filled with the breath

of the forgotten and the hopeless,

I drive through a narrow tunnel reeking

of the stale odor of human piss,

racing into a future I am not seeking

out of a past that no longer exists;

to return to my home was all I wanted

but instead I drive on: haunted, haunted.

As delightful as The Brawny Embraces may be overall, more of more or less the same even with a cleverly written time shift and new characters galore might have made this prequel less interesting. 

The Brawny Embraces is indeed a bit less interesting, with fewer laugh-out-loud moments compared to Volumes One and Two, although the ending is clever and deeply satisfying.    

Sustaining the Arnold Schnabel franchise is going to become more challenging for Dan Leo in the future.   But Leo is nothing if imaginative, and he has been mining Arnold's inexhaustible memoirs to terrific effect for many years at his "goddamn blog," as he calls it, writing with a descriptive richness and whimsy that usually acts as a super-strength literary glue no matter how improbable the plot twists are.   

And you gotta love Arnold.  So worries aside, bring on Volume Four!