Tom Robbins, literary prankster-philosopher, dies at 92
NEW YORK (AP) — Tom Robbins, the novelist and prankster-philosopher who charmed and addled millions of readers with such screwball adventures as “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Jitterbug Perfume,” has died. He was 92.
Robbins’ death was confirmed by his friend, the publishing executive Craig Popelars, who said the author died Sunday morning.
Pronouncing himself blessed with “crazy wisdom,” Robbins published eight novels and the memoir “Tibetan Peach Pie” and looked fondly upon his world of deadpan absurdity, authorial commentary and zig zag story lines. No one had a wilder imagination, whether giving us a wayward heroine with elongated thumbs in “Cowgirls” or landing the corpse of Jesus in a makeshift zoo in “Another Roadside Attraction.” And no one told odder jokes on himself: Robbins once described his light, scratchy drawl as sounding “as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear.”
He could fathom almost anything except growing up. People magazine would label Robbins “the perennial flower child and wild blooming Peter Pan of American letters,” who “dips history’s pigtails in weird ink and splatters his graffiti over the face of modern fiction.”
A native of Blowing Rock, North Carolina who moved to Virginia and was named “Most Mischievous Boy” by his high school, Robbins could match any narrative in his books with one about his life. There was the time he had to see a proctologist and showed up wearing a duck mask. (The doctor and Robbins became friends). He liked to recall the food server in Texas who unbuttoned her top and revealed a faded autograph, his autograph.
Or that odd moment in the 1990s when the FBI sought clues to the Unabomber’s identity by reading Robbins’ novel “Still Life with Woodpecker.” Robbins would allege that two federal agents, both attractive women, were sent to interview him.
“The FBI is not stupid!” he liked to say. “They knew my weakness!”
He also managed to meet a few celebrities, thanks in part to the film adaptation of “Even Cowgirls,” which starred Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves, and to appearances in such movies as “Breakfast of Champions” and “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.” He wrote of being Debra Winger’s date to the 1991 Academy Awards ceremony and nearly killing himself at an Oscars after-party when — hoping to impress Al Pacino — he swallowed a glass of cologne. He had happier memories of checking into a hotel and being recognized by a young, pretty clerk, who raved about his work and ignored the man standing next to him, Neil Young.
In Robbins’ novels, the quest was all and he helped capture the wide open spirit of the 1960s in part because he knew the life so well. He dropped acid, hitchhiked coast to coast, traveled from Tanzania to the Himalayas and carried on with friends and strangers in ways he had no right to survive. He didn’t rely on topical references to mark time, but on understanding the era from the inside.
“Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafes, Melville his New England with its tall ships,” he wrote in his memoir, published in 2014. “I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal.”
His path to fiction writing had its own rambling, hallucinatory quality. He was a dropout from Washington and Lee University (Tom Wolfe was a classmate) who joined the Air Force because he didn’t know what else to do. He moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early ’60s and somehow was assigned to review an opera for the Seattle Times, becoming the first classical music critic to liken Rossini to Robert Mitchum. Robbins would soon find himself in a farcical meeting with conductor Milton Katims, making conversation by pretending he was working on his own libretto, “The Gypsy of Issaquah,” named for a Seattle suburb.
“You must admit it had an operatic ring,” Robbins insisted.
By the late 1960s, publishers were hearing about his antics and thought he might have a book in him. A Doubleday editor met with Robbins and agreed to pay $2,500 for what became “Another Roadside Attraction.” Published in 1971, Robbins’ debut novel sold little in hardcover despite praise from Graham Greene and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among others, but became a hit in paperback. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” came out in 1976 and eventually sold more than 1 million copies.
“Read solemnly, with expectations of conventional coherence, ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ will disappoint,” Thomas LeClair wrote in The New York Times. “Entered like a garage sale, poked through and picked over, ‘Cowgirls’ is entertaining and, like the rippled mirror over there by the lawn mower, often instructive. Tom Robbins is one of our best practitioners of high foolishness.”
Domestic stability was another prolonged adventure; one ex-girlfriend complained “The trouble with you, Tom, is that you have too much fun.” He was married and divorced twice, and had three children, before settling down with his third wife, Alexa d’Avalon, who appeared in the film version of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.”
Robbins’ other books included “Half Asleep in Frogs Pajamas,” “Fierce Invalids Home from Home Climates,” “Villa Incognito.” His honors included the Bumbershoot Golden Umbrella Award for Lifetime Achievement and being named by Writer’s Digest as among the 100 best authors of the 20th century. But he cherished no praise more than a letter received from an unnamed woman.
“Your books make me laugh, they make think, they make me horny,” his fan informed him, “and they make me aware of all the wonder in the world.”
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer
