Art Garfunkel’s fascinating mess
The subtitle of Art Garfunkel’s new memoir “Notes From an Underground Man,” echoes Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground” and Richard Wright’s story “The Man Who Lived Underground” — both serious works of literature.
Garfunkel’s book, however, is a splattering of 30-plus years of handwritten thoughts, lists, travel notes, bad poetry, confessions, snarky digs, platitudes and prayers gussied up for publication in different fonts and sizes.
Reading it is like rummaging through a huge junk drawer of the mind. You might find something useful. Garfunkel himself seems doubtful of his endeavour: “Maybe my unusual book does communicate.” Or maybe it doesn’t, which is sad because Garfunkel, the angel-voiced half of Simon and Garfunkel, and a successful solo act, is a talented, educated and seemingly loving man. Unfortunately, the singer — who at age 75 continues to tour — is more successful behind the microphone than he is on the page.
Rock memoirs are often full of sex and snark. Garfunkel’s is no exception. “Paul [Simon] won the writer’s royalties. I got the girls ... Fabulous foxes, slimhipped, B-cup, little Natalie Woods.” His boasting is matched by innuendo. When he and Simon were younger, “We showed each other our versions of masturbations ... (mine used a hand).” Imagine that!
Garfunkel’s writing isn’t all bad, though it hardly follows a chronology. Dates are often vague or nonexistent. Sometimes his use of pronouns is confusing, and we never get one sustained take on his decadeslong and wavering relationship with Paul Simon, though one running joke seems to concern who will speak at the other’s funeral, so even dying is a competition. An avid walker, Garfunkel’s descriptions of his travels through the United States and abroad sometimes give readers a sense of place, both geographic and psychological. We’re moved as he sporadically recollects the difficulties of losing and regaining his voice. In an undated poem he writes that “These days I sing ‘Bridge Over Troubled/Water’/ for a full arena with fear of hernia.”
Garfunkel has given several candid media interviews about his struggles with vocal cord damage and made controversial comments about Paul Simon, but here he addresses these subjects fleetingly, obliquely — or not at all.
Finally, what can one say of a man who announces that first he was Achilles and now he’s Odysseus? For a fan, this might be a forthright assessment. For someone else, it’s one more silly pronouncement from a man who’s anything but underground.