Compost of the Imagination

Stephen Spotte launches The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces with the ill fate of Larry, a guy he’d known growing up in the 1950s coal camps of West Virginia who, after the narrator himself has been tossed from boarding school, joined the Air Force to fly jets. Alas, Larry and some other West Virginia enlistees stationed in the Midwest “had come of age lacking a gene for depth perception, the evolutionary result of generations born and raised against the short vistas of mountainsides.” For our purposes, here’s the long story short: drunk, Larry and pals, doing 80 mph, hit a truck, and Larry is slashed by the windshield.

“It had seemed so far away, that truck did, visible from the top of a gradual rise and moving across them at ninety degrees.”

And we’re off, dispatched to the Spotte universe, a world that’s all about perception, the objects that may be closer than they appear—including people. It’s a world in which the ridiculous is so ridiculous, and so regrettable, that it requires no irony whatsoever. Just the facts, expressed in a beautiful, on-point prose style, will do. “Totaling a car and living to tell about it was a rite of passage.” ’Nuff said there.

“Totaling a car and living to tell about it was a rite of passage.”

Spotte undergoes his early rites in Mallory, a Faulkner-esque camp “twenty miles from Kentucky as measured in a straight line.” “Daddy” is a mining engineer and superintendent, so his family is doing slightly better than the miners indentured to the company store. What we get in this brief reminiscence of the camps is the element in which Spotte will spend his life: water. Kids are sent to a local spring daily for cooking and drinking water; well water is sulfurous. A nearby waterway in which nothing seems to live but “convoys of turds” and “toilet paper veils” is known as Shit Creek.

Aside from water, young Spotte takes up an interest in writing that comes quickly into conflict with life, and an interest in science. “[M]y only qualifications for writing poetry were exceptional drinking capacity and an abiding and unsavory horniness, neither of which actually causes printed words to appear.” Finally he discovers that drinking can actually obstruct the execution of poetry and finds that for science, “[b]rief periods of heavy task-oriented thinking can culminate in results nearly proportionate with effort, unlike art in any form, which requires endless attention and can still leave you deeply empty.” Science has a coal-camp-specific, working-man’s appeal: “At the end of a hard day in the lab or in the field you went home, popped a beer, and flipped on the teevee like anyone else, but better not try this if you hoped to be an artist of any kind.” With this, our hero takes up biology, torturing spiders and identifying flora. The narrator doesn’t point out the obvious, which is that one can be both writer and scientist. “[M]y real love,” setting aside the requisite (for a guy in this day) obsession with Jack Kerouac, “was water and the things living in it.”

Either way, scribbler or lab rat, the thesis of this pieced-out memoir is “[A]lthough the outside world is large and often unnerving, there’s no excuse for living small inside yourself.”

No living small for this guy. The end of high school commences a few years of studying journalism and embarking on summers with manfriends, girlfriends, and mere drinking and swimming buddies on subsistence-level, Jersey shore debaucheries. His closest pals are Cap and Uncle Dirty, huge hearts with huge tolerances for alcohol and a high degree of comfort in brothels. All but bohemians themselves, they meet up with the real deal, Greenwich Villagers emptying out on weekends into Beach Haven, living “life on the drift,” some toting passed-around paperbacks of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse, with notes initialed in the margins...