Borne of the spirit of its times, Roy C. Lugershotter’s revered and misunderstood novella was first published in the United States on a summer day in 1969, amid the clamor of lunar landings and crazed hippie cult murders. Lugershotter had petitioned his publisher to release his metaphysical jewel on the summer solstice or autumnal equinox of that year, days fitting of the text, but he was quickly rebuffed. Printing and shipping concerns would dictate any book release date, they told him, and not the whim of the unknown author.
The sensation caused by the publication of The Alchemical Tattoo was little vindication for the snub. Years later, in a Dick Cavett interview, Lugershotter revealed how giddy he was to sue the original publishing house for royalty transgressions arising out of subsequent printings that his original contract had carefully predicted. “Premeditated revenge,” he called it.
The simplicity of the story within the book has been eclipsed over time: unnamed protagonist gets slapped by a beautiful stranger in a rust-belt bar. Her name is Ursula Majors and, having learned that he has cut down a tree that she loved (beneath which a now-dead soldier had deflowered her two summers earlier), she assaults him and demands satisfaction. His atonement is genuine and swift, as is their courtship: several hours and scotches later, they fall asleep nestled in his bed. So ends Part I, a mere 60 pages for the reader; a mere six hours for the characters, the duration marked scrupulously by the tick-tock cat clock on the wood paneled wall described in the opening line and the Mickey Mouse watch blurrily gazed upon by our protagonist in the last.
Part II begins at dawn the following day, as “the sun rounds the earth while the moon grins, approving,” and our unnamed protagonist, sobered by sleep, “awakens intertwined with his newly discovered voluptuous constellation, Ursula.” The rhythmic rounding of celestial orbits “annihilate[s] clock-time” as “hours and minutes and seconds give way to eons and moments,” and the author appoints the triad of Sun/Earth/Moon as the central motif of the story. Indeed, the titular alchemy is not concerned with the pouring of mixtures, but with “…the precision of alignments, iris and dawn and penumbra, the monitors of sun and shadow cast upon the warm, waiting earth.” The imminent sexual congress (beginning at the frequently dog-eared page 87) is “no hunter’s conquest.” It is, instead, a “cosmic communion of souls, the fertile commingling of consciousness, rounded, locked, eternal as the Sun and the Earth and the Moon, none superlative, all essential, and as fitting an alchemist’s goal as any.” While Lugershotter’s metaphysical poesy cluttered Part II for most readers drawn to its salacious descriptions of modern intimacy, literary critics and historians tapped its metaphors as touchstones to ancient currents. Lugershotter, himself, admitted that he “borrowed heavily” from unpublished Rosicrucian manuscripts which he had chanced upon in a college library.
The novella’s third and final part, originally titled “Epilogue” in the first edition but subsequently renamed “Part III” in keeping with Lugershotter’s “unearthed Trinitarian ideologies,” finds its hero and heroine back on solid ground, side by side, enduring the simultaneous corporeal stings of ink parlor needles; each commemorates their shared ecstatic journey with complementarily placed tattoos of the sun and the Earth and the moon.
The sensation caused by the publication of The Alchemical Tattoo was little vindication for the snub. Years later, in a Dick Cavett interview, Lugershotter revealed how giddy he was to sue the original publishing house for royalty transgressions arising out of subsequent printings that his original contract had carefully predicted. “Premeditated revenge,” he called it.
The simplicity of the story within the book has been eclipsed over time: unnamed protagonist gets slapped by a beautiful stranger in a rust-belt bar. Her name is Ursula Majors and, having learned that he has cut down a tree that she loved (beneath which a now-dead soldier had deflowered her two summers earlier), she assaults him and demands satisfaction. His atonement is genuine and swift, as is their courtship: several hours and scotches later, they fall asleep nestled in his bed. So ends Part I, a mere 60 pages for the reader; a mere six hours for the characters, the duration marked scrupulously by the tick-tock cat clock on the wood paneled wall described in the opening line and the Mickey Mouse watch blurrily gazed upon by our protagonist in the last.
Part II begins at dawn the following day, as “the sun rounds the earth while the moon grins, approving,” and our unnamed protagonist, sobered by sleep, “awakens intertwined with his newly discovered voluptuous constellation, Ursula.” The rhythmic rounding of celestial orbits “annihilate[s] clock-time” as “hours and minutes and seconds give way to eons and moments,” and the author appoints the triad of Sun/Earth/Moon as the central motif of the story. Indeed, the titular alchemy is not concerned with the pouring of mixtures, but with “…the precision of alignments, iris and dawn and penumbra, the monitors of sun and shadow cast upon the warm, waiting earth.” The imminent sexual congress (beginning at the frequently dog-eared page 87) is “no hunter’s conquest.” It is, instead, a “cosmic communion of souls, the fertile commingling of consciousness, rounded, locked, eternal as the Sun and the Earth and the Moon, none superlative, all essential, and as fitting an alchemist’s goal as any.” While Lugershotter’s metaphysical poesy cluttered Part II for most readers drawn to its salacious descriptions of modern intimacy, literary critics and historians tapped its metaphors as touchstones to ancient currents. Lugershotter, himself, admitted that he “borrowed heavily” from unpublished Rosicrucian manuscripts which he had chanced upon in a college library.
The novella’s third and final part, originally titled “Epilogue” in the first edition but subsequently renamed “Part III” in keeping with Lugershotter’s “unearthed Trinitarian ideologies,” finds its hero and heroine back on solid ground, side by side, enduring the simultaneous corporeal stings of ink parlor needles; each commemorates their shared ecstatic journey with complementarily placed tattoos of the sun and the Earth and the moon.
EDMUND:
ReplyDeleteThis is the excellent foppery of the world,that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing.
King Lear, Act I, Scene II