The Crowded Shroud: Weird, Wonderful, Wicked

The Crowded Shroud: Weird, Wonderful, Wicked

By Florenz Baron

Xlibris Corporation (2000)

pp 208

The Crowded Shroud by Florenz Baron is a weirdly wonderful novel. George Fairhaven is a clever cad who has magical powers. His main squeeze Caroline oozes with carnality, a rare sexiness that would make anyone crazy. George considers Caroline to be a wanton slut, yet he helplessly and happily indulges in her every whim. Caroline has a baby, sired by George, but he wants no part of the child, which Caroline welcomes because she does not want the child to be influenced by George. 

Overdressed snobs come and go in the manner of an English Drawing Room Drama; all of them have a droll sense of humor, often attempting to be wickedly funny. George seduces every woman in the book. Everyone’s fucking one another in a cheeky melee that is always one-on-one and done in conventional heterosexual quickies that are politely insinuated, and never graphic. 

The story does not have a sense of place. The fictitious locales Umtali, Flamsgusta, Tintagel, Ondicherry, Ozambique, and Ioux City could represent the English countryside, cottages by the sea, or a ranch in Wyoming. Angels and coins, Mithraic Sacrifice and George’s mysterious trunk appear, then quickly vanish without ever becoming leitmotifs. It seems that George’s mysterious trunk is full of treats, trinkets and spells that imbue him with magical powers.

The most intriguing aspect of the story is the mounting body count. George is unwittingly able to cast spells on people. A young boy, Gaius, is inexplicably killed. His mother Jocasta laments that “he was a faceless little boy whom she really did not like, and no pictures were ever taken of him.” Kitty Shelmerdine slips on a banana and falls from a steep cliff into the sea. Lally Ambrose is thrown from her horse during an obligatory fox hunt. 

The Crowded Shroud is Absurd Realism at its finest and ought to be celebrated for its literary ambition. Part Joycean, part magical realism, with a smattering of Thomas Pynchon, some of Baron’s sentences are brilliant, and the characters are fascinating, but the story itself has structural flaws and syntax errors that could have been fixed by a good editor. 

The story surrounding Florenz Baron might prove to be more interesting than her book The Crowded Shroud. Born as Florenz Hasratoff in 1919, she spent most of her life living as a bohemian artist in conservative, blue-collar Yonkers. 

From 1947 to 1974, Florenz Baron, together with her husband Oscar Baron, owned the only independent bookstore in Yonkers, The Alicat Bookshop. The Barons hobnobbed with a legion of literary legends and counted among their close friends Anais Nin, Maya Deren, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, and the Harlem Renaissance Artists Beauford Delaney and his younger brother Joseph Delaney.

The Barons also published the “Outcast Series,” limited-editions chapbooks with contributions from Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and William Carlos Williams (Paterson). 

After Oscar Baron died in 1976, Florenz Baron continued to sell books from her home on Ludlow Street in Yonkers. At the age of 80, Florenz Baron self-published The Crowded Shroud, becoming a first-time author. Some say she was also planning to write a memoir. How she developed The Crowded Shroud is as mysterious as George Fairhaven’s magical trunk full of treats, trinkets and spells.

Note: The records and papers of Oscar and Florenz Baron are archived in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00006

Photo of Florenz and Oscar Baron courtesy of Rebecca Alberts.