Writings From the Handy Colony: Read an Excerpt

by John Bowers

We, of course, were never allowed to see each other's work at the Handy Colony. I even felt a little guilty seeing it in print, as when Jerry Tschappat's and Sonny Daly's books came out a short time after I left. A little strange, you might think. You don't know the half of it. The Handy Colony was as far away from Yaddo and MacDowell as the night the day. It was more like—shall I dare say it?—a cult rather than a learning center for the fashioning of prose. At its center was one powerful woman. She drew people to her in a messianic way. She left you never the same again. Her name was Lowney Handy.
Jon Shirota recounts his sending a manuscript to Lowney in high innocent optimism, seeking admission, and its coming back like a rifle shot with "Shit" written on it. This was not unusual. It was Standard Operating Procedure. You were brought down and then you were lifted up, thinking absolutely differently about everything in the process.
Going back and reading these works from the Colony is strange for me. They evoke so much. "V for Victory," by Lowney herself (how weird to see work from someone who used to mark yours up and down!) recreates the atmosphere of WWII and slightly beyond. Vets are returning, a new world is opening up, the old order is about to be brought down. It is not in her voice—you have to go to her letters, some included [in the book], for that, and even there you won't get the full pungent flavor—but it does capture that period and her role in it. Disturbed Vets were returning to small towns that didn't know what to do with them. (James Jones was one in real life.) The narrative has an unfinished quality and it's a little hard to follow, but if you knew her, you get the drift. There's Minnie, who kicks up her heels, has a lover, was "a dictator in the social whirl." There is the older Alfred, a paragon of understanding and patience, and white-haired Jacob, a poor vindictive devil who's been cuckolded. We place a lot of emphasis today on finding one's own voice. It's too bad hers seems filtered through Thomas Uzzell's The Technique of the Novel or some such tract. It's too formal and writerly for the raucous, explosive Lowney that I knew. She had a lot to say and had, pardon the expression, the balls to say it. If she had thrown off constraints and convention the way she urged us to, she might have concocted a masterpiece.
...It is fitting indeed that Jon Shirota's play, "The Last Retreat," should conclude this collection. He was the last survivor, someone left stranded on that Mount Everest we had all, at one time or another, been trying to climb. Our trail maps did not include Chekhov, Joyce, and certainly not James, Henry. We never studied real history or Shakespeare, or the essays of Macaulay or Cyril Connelly. If you said Bloomsbury, we would have thought you were ordering ice cream. We didn't know what we were getting into. All we knew was that someone pointed out a high reach, some great distant spot covered by clouds, and tried to get us there past all endurance, past all reason. Some failed at base camp. Some got up part way. Some had to be carried down. But what a sight, that top of Everest! What a guide we had!

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