Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972)

This lovable mess is a really good illustration of everything that was delightful and horrible about the absurdist avant-garde of the middle of the last century. The first half of the book bears a vague resemblance to a conventional novel, albeit mostly as a framework for some luscious prose poems which set about explicating the human condition and its relationship with the divine. Its skeletal plot narrates a surreal motorcade across America which features numerous oddballs including Jesus show more and Hitler. The second half of the book brings these characters and their caprices up occasionally, but is increasingly dominated by nonsensical strings of words, sometimes presented as aphorisms, sometimes as just plain lists, and sporadic chapter titles, admittedly very droll, for proposed novels. Some problems which this book may contain for contemporary readers include its considerable length--its modest page count conceals rather fine print and the nonsensical portions especially are pretty slow going. The book is fraught with violence and somewhat misogynistic sex which I found disturbing and which probably will downright offend the politically correct, and the author;s heartfelt but haywire Christianity which will surely offend some, particularly the devout. There are also more than a few literary parlor tricks such as parallel texts running in the margins, an annoyance which I found quite offputting. He chews his cud far too much on old-fashioned antiwar-cum-Marxist rants which are typical of the thirties and forties and which I felt deserved a rest after about the seventeenth time through. I came to this as a longtime admirer of Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, a much superior book which contains all of the sublimity without the logorrhea, anachronistic politics, and nonsense passages. As a young man, I would have loved this wholeheartedly; as an old man I appreciated much of it but wish it hadn't taken me the better part of a month to read. show less

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Disturbing, experimental and brutal, The Journal of Albion Moonlight is a post-apocalyptic novel before such a thing was invented. Patchen doesn't require an invented fantasy apocalypse to tell this story, war is the apocalypse that ends life, morality, and rationality, War is madness. The story is nominally set during World War II but it really takes place in a mind at war. The Journal of Albion Moonlight felt like the pre-cursor to Naked Lunch, perhaps it influenced Burroughs. Patchen show more combines abstraction and cruelty, literary flights of insightful philosophy and unexpected humor. At times, the violence toward women was too much for me. Yet I reminded myself, this is what war does. It makes the book hard to like but as relevant now as it was then. And it squarely lays the blame for war on Capitalism. I can't recommend this avant-garde, brilliant work, but I'm glad that I read it. show less

This book bears some resemblance to a novel, but I personally approach it as a series of prose poems. To the extent that it contains a plot, it revolves around the naive antics of an obscurity who has a genius for recording everything that he encounters in an extremely credulous and literal-minded fashion; at this level it resembles the Grossmith brothers' Diary of a Nobody (or, the publisher insists, Voltaire's Candide). That thread of the book eventually diminishes, though, and for most of show more its length the book serves as a missing link between Gertrude Stein and the Beat poets; disconnected, beautiful language building absurdist dialogues, social criticism and character descriptions, sometimes very funny, often of great vibrancy and beauty, with a sharp left turn toward the mystical toward the end. show less

“Everyone is saying where can we hide when the war comes? No one at all is saying: where can we hide the war?” (35)

A formidable, deeply affecting novel/poem by a master of mixed media. I read “Albion Moonlight” in bits and pieces, binged on it, ignored it for months only to take it up again, shocked by what I remembered and didn’t remember. At several points I thought I’d never finish it. At other points I wanted to read nothing else.

Patchen, a pacifist, self-published “The show more Journal of Albion Moonlight” on the eve of America’s entrance into WWII. In his own words: [http://web.archive.org/web/20110917132751/http://library.ucsc.edu/content/kp-pat....]
"I attempted to write the spiritual account of this summer... [1940]-a summer when all the codes and ethics which men lived by for centuries were subjected to the acid tests of general war and universal disillusionment. I had to recreate that chaos...uncharted horror and suffering and complete loss of heart by most human beings...I have I think kept the reader on his toes-I have made him a participant...To love all things is to understand all things; and that which is understood by any of us becomes a knowledge embedded in all of us...To recognize truth it is only necessary to recognize each other.” show less