The Businessman

These are notes for The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), the first book in Thomas M. Disch's series of fantasy/horror novels now known as Supernatural Minnesota. Set in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the early 1980s, it deals with hauntings, demonic possessions, and the unusual rules of the afterlife.

All notes refer to the 2010 University of Minnesota Press edition, which features an excellent introduction by John Crowley.

Major characters

• Robert Glandier, executive.
• Giselle Glandier, Robert's ex-wife, deceased.
• Joy-Ann Anker, Giselle's mother.
• Bing Anker, Giselle's brother.
• John Berryman, poet, deceased.
• Adah Menken, actor and poet, deceased.

Epigram

The only citation I can find for this alleged Eisenhower quote about "the issue" being spiritual is the 1956 historical work The Crucial Decade, which places it in quotation marks near a mention of Eisenhower, but doesn't clearly indicate whether he said it or in what context.

Chapter 1

spiritual analog of sight

The idea that there are "spiritual senses" corresponding in some way to the physical senses has a long tradition in Catholic mysticism. The Jesuit writer Augustin Poulain discusses this tradition in The Graces of Interior Prayer.

The worms crawl in

"The Worms Crawl In" or "The Hearse Song" is at least as old as World War I. There are many variations, all of which describe processes of bodily decay in comically gruesome detail—as Disch alludes to in chapter 4 ("the liquifying tissues of her dead body ... entered upon some new and more drastic stage of disintegration").

Chapter 2

Glandier

Glandier has never been a common last name in the US. In French, it's an archaic synonym for glandifère, meaning "having glands or bearing fruit", and also the name of a rural area in northwestern France.

Chapter 3

the belted suit from Dayton's

A Minnesota-based chain of department stores.

Chapter 4

Some derelict on Hennepin Avenue

Hennepin runs through many neighborhoods in Minneapolis, so it's unclear where this derelict would be found.

Chapter 5

a corner lot on Calumet Avenue

There's no such street in the Twin Cities, although there are many places called Calumet throughout the Midwest. Joy-Ann's house is later described (in chapter 35) as being on "the corner of Calumet and Carver"; there's no street called Carver either.

The Roman matron who said that her children were her jewels

Cornelia Africana, who is perhaps best known in the Midwest for representing the state of Ohio in public statuary. The reference here is ironic, since Cornelia's statement is normally taken to mean that her children are admirable, not that they're expensive.

I wish they'd wear habits ... And do the mass in Latin again

The use of local languages rather than Latin for the liturgy, and the use of plain clothes by religious orders, became common after the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) in the early 1960s. Reaction against Vatican II gave rise to the Traditionalist Catholic movement; while the movement was mostly driven by theological and political beliefs (and went on to have significant influence in secular right-wing politics in the US), for Joy-Ann as a non-practicing Catholic it seems to be mostly about nostalgia. Disch later depicted a more dramatic fictional schism within the Church in The M.D.

encased in Fabulon

A brand of polyurethane varnish.

Chapter 6

M chalked on the back of his jacket

A reference to Fritz Lang's M, in which this chalk initial is used to identify a serial killer. Glandier does in fact get an M written on his jacket later, in chapter 52.

Chapter 7

The singer, Giselle McKenzie

A misspelling of Gisele MacKenzie. Perhaps not coincidentally, Giselle (with two Ls) is also the name of a 19th century ballet whose dead title character returns as a ghost to protect her unfaithful lover from other, less merciful ghosts.

Chapter 8

And These Thy Gifts by Claire Cullen

Not a real book, probably a parody of some 1980s inspirational literature; described further in chapter 13.

Chapter 9

I've come here to sell you something

During Disch's childhood in Fairmont, Minnesota, he had a similar job selling "MagnaPad magnetic potholders, which I was able to exhibit without even being invited into the kitchen by hanging the potholder right on the screen door"; his sales career ended when he "stopped being a cute little kid who could charm bored housewives and had become a pimply and not-so-charming teenager".

Chapter 10

The fiction of John Norman

John Norman (real name John Lange) wrote 34 Gor novels, which have inspired a specific sub-subculture among BDSM practitioners.

Disch discussed Gor briefly in his critical study The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, arguing that while Norman's work had no great literary value, it might have been taken more seriously if it were simply kinky erotica like The Story of O rather than kinky science fiction erotica—and that this might be considered partly a class issue since Norman's writing, like most pulp, was "addressed to a Budweiser audience" (although conflating class and cultural preference in this way doesn’t really apply to Robert Glandier, who is uncouth but not working-class).

This is one of only two mentions of science fiction—Disch's own main genre—in the Supernatural Minnesota novels, and they're both heavily ironic (for the other, see The Priest). If Norman weren't a real writer, one might suspect he was an author's self-parody along the lines of Kilgore Trout, representing other paths Disch might have taken: both he and Disch were well-read Midwesterners who settled in New York, and were famously cranky and combative about the politics of the SF genre—but Norman is extremely prolific and successful, having found a large following by catering to heterosexual power fantasies. In the satirical cosmology of Disch's Minnesota series, there's (almost) no justice... so of course the only science fiction fan we meet is the worst person ever, and he mostly just reads Gor books.

Chapter 12

I am going to kill you

The self-fulfilling prophecy is a traditional tragic device that Disch also explored in The M.D. Here, although Glandier might well have ended up murdering Giselle some day anyway, the reason that this happens "the next time we meet" is that they don't meet again for some time—since she's been frightened away by this vision.

Chapter 13

my old seventy-eights .... "Black Magic," and then "Blue Skies"

Since almost no 78 RPM albums were produced after 1950, it's likely that Joy-Ann owns two 1940s big-band arrangements: Benny Goodman's recording of "Blue Skies" and Glenn Miller's recording of "That Old Black Magic".

The lyrics of both songs fit with the spiritual action of the book, with "That Old Black Magic" describing a passionate but destructive relationship, and "Blue Skies" a state of ecstatic liberation. Joy-Ann has put them in an order that tells a hopeful story (also, alphabetical order), although Giselle is heading in the opposite direction.

Erle Stanley Gardner

Author of the Perry Mason mysteries.

Chapter 14

she soared upward in her freedom

Disch speculated about the liberating experience of astral travel, as well as its possible dangers, in his later novel On Wings of Song.

Chapter 16

The Gold Diggers of 1980

A joke on the Busby Berkeley musical film Gold Diggers of 1933 (and its several sequels). Disch was fond of this title: in On Wings of Song, there's a mid-21st-century film called Gold-Diggers of 1984.

Chapter 19

elms you used to see shading Calumet Avenue in the days before the blight

Dutch elm disease arrived in Minnesota in the early 1960s and wiped out most of the elm trees in Minneapolis over the next 20 years.

Chapter 21

its cocoon of Munsingwear

A brand of underwear (supposedly extra-warm) manufactured in Minnesota.

Get yourself a bottle of Geritol

Geritol is a vitamin supplement. This jingle (invented by Disch as far as I know) is a parody of "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho".

Chapter 22

Father Windakiewiczowa

While there are plenty of long Polish surnames in the Midwest, this one is a bit unlikely: "-owa" is an old-fashioned suffix used for married women, i.e. "Mrs. Windakiewiczowa" is how you might refer to the wife of Mr. Windakiewicz.

Father Mabbley's nickname ... was Queen Mab

A traditional name for a fairy queen, popularized by Romeo and Juliet.

Chapter 23

Reagan had been elected president ... someone had tried to shoot him

Evidence that the main story takes place in 1981.

Chapter 24

had been, she claimed, a world-famous actress and poet

Adah Menken's self-description is accurate, though she was not exactly famous for her acting and poetry as she implies. She might have been more likely to introduce herself by her stage name, Adah Isaacs Menken, but having changed her name several times already it's plausible that she changed it again after death.

Menken had no connection to Minnesota as far as I know; her role here seems to be largely dictated by Disch's interest in her as a celebrity figure (he wrote briefly about her in his critical work The Castle of Indolence) and by how much she would be likely to annoy John Berryman.

Chapter 27

all the flowers beginning with B

While still alive in Chapter 8, Joy-Ann did a word-search puzzle consisting of these.

"I Dreamt I Dwelt..."

Probably "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls", from the opera The Bohemian Girl.

Luxe ... calme, et volupté

"Luxury, peace, and pleasure"—from Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal.

what Samuel Goldwyn said to me

Goldwyn was credited (sometimes wrongly) with many comic aphorisms. This one seems to be Disch's own invention.

Chapter 31

the Lake Street Bridge

The current concrete version of this bridge dates from 1989; Joy-Ann and Giselle are going over the original wrought-iron bridge.

Chapter 33

The assault on immortality begins

The first lines of an untitled poem published posthumously in Henry's Fate & Other Poems.

entitled (meaninglessly) "Resurgam"

Menken's title means "I will rise again."

whose one well-chosen word is its title, Infelicia

"Unfortunate."

Chapter 42

you and Miss Plath ... and that other one

Assuming "that other one" is a poet who committed suicide at some point prior to 1981, but later than Menken's death in 1868—and even if Menken only had jurisdiction over US writers (no such rule is stated in the book; her section of Paradise does seem America-centric, but in chapter 56 it seems that she's been in charge of "the entire Earth")—the "other one" could still be any one of a dozen people. If Menken has only noticed three suicides in 113 years, she clearly isn't very familiar with the field of poetry. It's also possible that she did notice the rest and originally barred them all from Paradise, but that only three of them refused to praise her writing.

Disch himself joined the ranks of poet-suicides in 2008.

even Brunhilde's horse

John is thinking of Wagner's opera Twilight of the Gods, in which Brünnhilde rides her horse Grane into the flames of Siegfried's funeral pyre where presumably they die. This is Wagner's invention; in the mythology he drew from, Grane was not Brünnhilde's horse and did not meet that fate. The horse is not a major character (and did not really die for love of the Ring so much as for Brünnhilde's broken heart), but would be memorable to opera fans due to the difficulty of staging this final scene.

Chapter 43

she had entered the space ... a pattern of crossed lines

The idea that an incorporeal spirit could be pulled in and trapped by a particular geometric design is a major plot point in On Wings of Song, where any radially symmetrical rotating structure can be a "fairy trap."

Chapter 52

Woodman, spare that tree!

Berryman is quoting from the poem of the same name by George Pope Morris.

Sleep's two gates

Possibly the gates of horn and ivory, although those were said to be gates for dreams, not for the sleepers themselves.

Chapter 55

in the Sheehys' burning home

A final confrontation set in a burning house is a recurring feature of the Supernatural Minnesota books, as well as 334.

Chapter 59

a referendum here some years ago

Bing is referring to the 1978 referendum in St. Paul that re-legalized discrimination based on sexual orientation (by striking down a civil rights law passed in 1974). This was in turn reversed by a similar anti-discrimination law passed in 1990.

Further reading

• University of Minnesota Press page for their edition
• Matthew Davis's page for the book - lists all the known editions and translations
• Review and discussion by Ron Hogan on tor.com