For many years I have been an avid fan of the writing of Eugene Walter, the Mobilean who spent WWII in the Aleutian Islands in the Army, then lived in Paris with the “Paris Review” gang, then moved to Rome to translate Italian filmscripts, write fiction and act in a number of movies, most spectacularly “8 1/2.”
I felt I knew his work: the goofy “Monkey Poems,” the clever stories in “The Byzantine Riddle,” and the charming novel “The Untidy Pilgrim.” I realized lately I had never read his “other“ novel, “Love You Good, See You Later.”
Walter talked of this as his “French” novel since he was asked to write it by a French publisher. He said it was translated into French, published there, then published in Britain and then America. It is, as you would suspect, a slightly bawdy novel, racy, but in no way explicit.
Outside Mobile dwells Amelie Bergeron, a grandmother, middle-aged, but by no means post- sexual. She is single, and very lively. She enjoys the company of men, especially younger men, believing intimacy helps keep her young. Amelie invites young Claud, a merchant seaman, out to their run-down country house on Bayou Clair. They had “met“ once before at Mardi Gras.
Claud is astonished by the household. Besides Amelie, there is K.Amelie, the African-American retainer, descended, she insists, from African royalty, Amelie’s granddaughter Margaret, just moving out of adolescence, and two small boys, John and Dunstan.
This family is alive, all the time. Although they have almost no income, they fight “dailyness” every day. When the family quarrel, which is often, several of them are ventriloquists and throw voices into the mix, arguing on one side or the other. At first, Claud doesn’t know this. He feels he is in a madhouse.
Also often present is Uncle Neddy, Eugene’s voice, I believe, in this novel. An older man who believes that all men over fifty are attracted to men in their twenties, whether they admit it or not, Neddy pinches Claud, gives him a kiss and when Claud seems shocked proclaims: “fun’s fun, ain’t it?” Neddy is naughty.
He laments, as Walter used to, “It’s not that so much has become commonplace, predictable, tawdry, and reduced in scale that saddens me now: it’s that everybody urges, desires, prefers, seeks, the boldly second-rate.” He and Amelie agree, there are too many Yankees moving to Mobile. Neddy also has a simmering hatred for the botanist Luther Burbanks, who has hybridized various flowers like the “double nasturtium” into extravagant, unnatural shapes with excessive perfumes.
The Bergerons are in an ongoing fight with developers who want to cut down oak forests and build an ugly resort hotel. The Bergerons love every tree; they are a themselves a force of nature, and the novel ends. “Let’s have another drink. We’re not dead yet.”
