Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

Where’s Ta

Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.

Fact Two: Two hundred and fifty years after the death of Queen A

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Brita

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple more years before Ta

I don’t know if there was a Latvian Army-in-Exile back in the Sixties. What I do know (or thought I knew) is that there was a Lithuanian Army-in-Exile. It came to my attention sometime in the late fifties, when I was sitting around with a group of people that included Dave Van Ronk and Tom Condit, and someone (Dave? Tom? Someone else?) mentioned a friend or acquaintance who’d found a particularly efficacious way to avoid getting drafted. (We were all preoccupied with avoiding the draft, as if it would cause the flu. It’s hard to remember why. I don’t know that the Army would have had me, and if it had, serving would very likely have done me no harm, and might even have done me some good. That’s hindsight talking, of course; at the time, I dreaded the prospect.)

And how had this worthy escaped military service? Had he (like another legendary genius) smeared himself with filth and reported for his pre-induction physical reeking, only to be summarily dismissed and written off as an ambulatory psychotic? Had he (like other mythical beings) made a strong physical pass at the consulting psychiatrist? Had he cultivated a psychopathic stare and demanded to be given a gun so he could kill the filthy Russians? (And would that really work, or would they just give him a big hug and send him to Officer Candidate School?)

No, he had accepted a commission as an officer in the Lithuanian Army-in-Exile.

“That’ll do it,” someone pointed out. “If you enter into the service of a foreign power, they can’t take you into the U.S. armed forces. Of course, you get stripped of your citizenship.”

That seemed extreme. Suppose one wanted to run for president one day? Which seemed a stretch, admittedly, but still, one did want to keep one’s options open. Still, the idea of marching and saluting and drilling in the Catskills with a batch of Lithuanian patriots had a certain appeal.

And it evidently lingered, because it came to mind when it was time to write a third book about Evan Michael Ta

What I liked about the story was the notion of Ta

Because I started out writing it in New Jersey, where I was living. And then I got involved in a mad affair, overflowing with drink and drama, and I wound up ru

I took a room in a tatty bed-and-breakfast on the north side of Dublin, in Amiens Street, and I rented a typewriter in a shop around the corner in Talbot Street, and I bought some typing paper that was about an inch longer and a half-inch narrower than what I was used to, and within the month I’d finished the book.

I think I had about a third of it written when I was interrupted by life, but I can’t be sure, because when I go back and re-read it, I can’t find the break. My life before and after could hardly have changed more, but the book’s life was somehow uninterrupted. Ta

I should add that there was a stationer in O’Co

About the title: after the general enthusiasm for The Canceled Czech, I wanted a comparable title for the third book. I came up with a few, including The Lettish Tomatoes, which I rather liked, but the publisher chose Ta