Holst, Spencer 1925(?)-2001

PERSONAL: Born c. 1925, in OH; died of a stroke November 23, 2001, in New York, NY; married Beate Wheeler (an artist).

CAREER: Author and artist.

AWARDS, HONORS: Richard Rosenthal Foundation award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1977, for Spencer Holst Stories.

WRITINGS:

Golden Dances the Light in the Glass/ Golden tanzt das Licht im Glas (English and German), Castrum Peregrini Presse (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 1969.

The Language of Cats and Other Stories, McCall Publishing Co. (New York, NY), 1971.

I Thought You Were Writing, Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1976.

Spencer Holst Stories, Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1976.

Something to Read to Someone, Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY), 1980.

The Zebra Storyteller: Collected Stories, illustrated by Beate Wheeler, photography by Norman Saito, Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY), 1993.

Brilliant Silence: Sentences, Paragraphs, and Very, Very Short Stories (with "Axial Stones" by George Quasha), Barrytown Ltd. (Barrytown, NY), 2000.

Also author of Prose for Dancing and Mona Lisa Meets Buddha.

SIDELIGHTS: Spencer Holst was an underground storyteller and writer known for his short fiction. He was born in Ohio but moved to New York City where he told his tales in cafés and other spots to audiences that included such notables as Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, W. S. Merwin, Diane Wakosky, Raymond Mongo, and Muriel Rukeyser. He also conducted readings at St. Peter's Church in Chelsea, Judson Church in Washington Square, St. Adrian Company in Greenwich Village, and Doctor Generosity's on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Holst's ancestors were members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and were among the founders of Windsor, Connecticut; Holst claimed that they spent their first winter on the frozen Connecticut River and survived by eating acorns. The Holst family produced four generations of writers, and Holst himself came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s in New York's Greenwich Village, influenced both by the literary works of authors such as Hart Crane and Jorge Luis Borges and by the kind of whimsical writing that is so often reflected in his own.

Holst's influences can be discerned in The Language of Cats and Other Stories, a collection of twenty tales with "Poe-like echoes," noted a Booklist reviewer, that range in length from a single paragraph to several pages. In one story, killing off Santa Clauses brings an end to war, and in another, a child runs away with bank robbers. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the tales "range from plausible to the fantastic," and have surprise endings that are "brutal, satirical, sinister, amusing." In a Library Journal review, Richard D. Olson commented that these fables "do not work," saying that Holst doesn't have "the necessary lightness of touch, the feeling for fantasy, the sensitivity to language" required for this type of writing.

Robert Stock reviewed the collection in Nation, noting that "like all worthwhile literature, the stories were developed through a combination of mouth and pen, though in Holst's case the emphasis on storytelling is unusually strong. I imagine they were first told to friends, refined by retelling, committed to paper, then retold and rewritten until they attained their final rock-ribbed perfection. Result: beautiful language. Result: a flexible syntax capable of limpid exposition and description, and allowing him such classical amenities as going into and pulling out of digressions without the slightest tailspin."

In reviewing Spencer Holst Stories in the Christian Science Monitor, Nancy Gail Reed described "The Frog" as a "darkly hilarious pseudo-fairy tale," and a Booklist contributor called the fables and vignettes of this collection "products of a wry sense of humor." As a teaser, Holst includes the beginnings of sixty-four stories he never completed. "The Institute for the Foul Ball," a long, unfinished fable about what the institution of baseball could be, was dubbed Holst's "tour de force" by Norman Stock in Library Journal. Stock said that if this collection "doesn't satisfy what Holst calls 'the hunger of the magicians,' nothing will."

The Zebra Storyteller: Collected Stories contains, with the exception of some works for children, every story written by Holst, some published for the first time. In a Review of Contemporary Fiction article, Brooke Horvath said that the new works, such as the four gnomic prose poems comprising "A Chocolate Reptile & 3 Untitled Paragraphs," are among Holst's "most whimsically experimental selections," but added that most of the stories, which are straightforward, reflect the storyteller's "fascination with the continuing power of downscale/downmarket genres—the cautionary tale and the fable, the (fractured) fairy tale and the joke, puzzles and pericopae—his fondness for everything-old-is-new-again devices … and his pleasure in playing with the expectations of readers."

Perry Glasser wrote in North American Review that "The Institute for the Foul Ball" "will keep the most dedicated deconstructionist critic happy for weeks." Glasser noted that Holst's illustrator wife, Beate Wheeler, who provides the accompanying artwork for her husband's text, described his work as being "halfway between Hans Christian Anderson and Franz Kafka." "She's on the button," said Glasser, noting that "Holst is a literary curmudgeon, a rare talent that not only provokes thought but laughter…. We move with less certainty through what we thought was reality. Spencer Holst allows us to see anew."

Entertainment Weekly critic Suzanne Ruta, stated that Holst "writes like a funky James Thurber." "His impish delivery is filled with a childlike delight in talespinning, "wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor," and yet his work is recognized for its inscrutable mysteries."

Armand Schwerner, reviewing The Zebra Storyteller in the American Book Review, wrote that Holst's "translucent narratives have staked out an irreplaceable, idiosyncratic ground that both illuminates and eludes the nets of any systematic parti pris of the last three-and-a-half critically vectored decades; in the estimation of his peers he maintains a singular primacy." Schwerner noted that Holst's prose is often referred to by many as being magical, and said that "they're right: the magus is able. The power of the return of voice is incarnate in Holst's work: no other writer since the sixties so elegantly and imaginatively embodies the revivification of orally tinctured narrative."

Schwerner wrote, "That the knowledge of Holst's work still remains largely within a coterie derives partly from what Tzvetan Todorov identifies as the tendency of scholars and critics to identify certain genres as 'minor'—but nevertheless 'found in all the literatures of the world'; he instances prayers, exhortations, proverbs, riddles, nursery rhymes. Add to this fables, say, allegorical or gnomic narratives, overtly edifying and cautionary tales; the nonnaturalistic chamber music conformation of many of Holst's 'fictions' establishes its own intimate terrain."

Schwerner said that "Holst's readers won't experience the slight regret proper to their experience of the current rejection of certain antique forms and unfortunately leached-out modus operandi: the fairy tale, the fable, the omniscient narrator, the allegory, the coincidence, the surprise ending. Holst's bold, fore-grounded use of such forms and strategies conflates the pleasures afforded by the elegant play of traditional modes with the delights of the irony that informs the contract between the fabulist and his reader."

"Holst's characters have no names, seem to exist allegorically in generic identities," said Schwerner. "But here again, we recognize the storyteller's complex doubleness. The old, one-to-one game of allegory is enriched by colloquial intimacies and hieratic elegances, which in turn receive the antique imprint of the universal. Such are a few of the tests and the visitation crucibles through which Holst calcines his materials, refining ways into his prose. He is the ballet master of the right, askew, word; of the severe, glancing, blow; the celebrant of the quotidian marvelous."

Brilliant Silence: Sentences, Paragraphs, and Very, Very Short Stories is Holst's collection of writings that can be as short as snippets, as in "The houseboat finds new freedom during the flood," and "Notice the seriousness of that vegetable that knows it is to figure in a still life by the artist." "Unpierced Pearls Strung" is subtitled "384 Unconnected Sentences in Six Parts." A reviewer for LiteralMind.com wrote that "no one should be surprised when the sentences don't add up to anything bigger. That's a problem for me, though, as I really do want more."

Holst died in New York following a stroke. He had also been suffering from emphysema.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, June, 1994, Armand Schwerner, review of The Zebra Storyteller: Collected Stories, pp. 26-27.

Booklist, April 1, 1971, review of The Language of Cats and Other Stories, p. 640; June 15, 1976, review of Spencer Holst Stories, p. 1451.

Christian Science Monitor, August 2, 1976, Nancy Gail Reed, review of Spencer Holst Stories, p. 26.

Entertainment Weekly, August 13, 1993, Suzanne Ruta, review of The Zebra Storyteller, p. 69.

Library Journal, December 15, 1970, Richard D. Olson, review of The Language of Cats and Other Stories, p. 4280; June 1, 1976, Norman Stock, review of Spencer Holst Stories, p. 1309.

Nation, May 4, 1974, Robert Stock, review of The Language of Cats and Other Stories, pp. 568-569.

New York Times Book Review, April 4, 1976, review of Spencer Holst Stories, p. 8.

North American Review, March-April, 1994, Perry Glasser, review of The Zebra Storyteller, p. 43.

Publishers Weekly, December 28, 1970, review of The Language of Cats and Other Stories, p. 59; July 5, 1993, review of The Zebra Storyteller, p. 66.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1994, Brooke Horvath, review of The Zebra Storyteller, p. 218.

ONLINE

LiteralMind.com, http://literalmind.com/ (July 29, 2002), review of Brilliant Silence: Sentences, Paragraphs, and Very, Very Short Stories.

OBITUARIES

PERIODICALS

Washington Post, December 8, 2001.