Uknowing Fiction

I will die.  But not yet.  Fiction usually follows such a claim. This fear of death took breaks during the day but then kicked into full gear right after twilight.  I couldn’t drive, couldn’t do anything, certainly couldn’t sleep.  Drinking made it worse.  Exercise gave a temporary chill.  You think you can adjust to most things, even insomnia over a long stretch.  But this isn’t so.  After Claudia left, disappeared, whatever it really was, sleeplessness never adjusted itself to my way of life.  But since I found the boxes and built a special bookshelf to hold only memory fiction, not sleeping and I reached an uneasy, deeply felt truce that allowed of no compromises.  Not sleeping was better than dying.  Anyone would make that choice, were it a choice. 

         Then waiting and not waiting to go to take a piss would pass the time, or pass me rather than time.  Brush teeth, floss, check the iphone, check the weather, scan some news sites, sleep would tip-toe into the darkened room and my lower abdomen would wake further up and ask, now? or if not now, how soon?  When can we get up?  How soon should we get up?  Should we wait some more?  The terrors of dying wrestled with the terrors of the night and the terrors of the bladder staged the events.  One person could get suicidal, another homicidal, mass rioting looked good, finally some semblance of sleep quieted everyone but by then it was too late.  Dawn lightened us all up and we rose into the inevitable exhaustion of dutiful daytime.

         I would wander through the day with scratchy eyelids, acutely jumpy at every noise, clumsy with every task.  I could look back over three years, weary and depleted, enervation dragging my bones through the motions. 

I had moved from New England to Madrid in January 2004 to see if my sunless fears and sleepless dramas could be translated into  more comfortable foreign variations.  On return to Boston that May to sort papers, discard books, clear out my old office, a strange thing happened. 

         Behind some piles books, I came across an unfamiliar stack of small, brown cardboard boxes.  After talking to Carolyn, the department chair, it became clear that they were the unpublished papers, notes and remains of a close friend and former literature teacher of mine in England, Malcolm Lord.  They had been sent without forewarning by his sister from the retirement home in which Malcolm died from a heart attack a year or two before.  Stricken with Parkinsons Disease and attendant and mysterious complications before his time, Malcolm had retired early from his professorship at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.  More students than not had noticed a death wish in Malcolm.  They asked each other about it?  Is he manic? Is he serious?  He would talk about Hemingway’s suicide, Mishima’s suicide, Woolf’s suicide, Plath’s, Berryman’s, as if he had known them, as if, somehow, they had recognized him as one of their own.  Malcolm could be cold and offish, but with death you got the sense it was personal. 

         Later on I tried to contact Malcolm’s sister, Rebecca.  We had met once for a beer at trendy pub in London when I had gone over for a conference.  (“Rhino” or some such name.  Malcolm fancied himself keyed in to the best of what was new).  I had his phone number in Norwich but it no longer worked.  I sent a letter that Royal Mail later returned unopened.  Malcolm was divorced and estranged from his wife, Barbara, after refusing to have children.  Egoist to a fault.  I knew of no other family members.  I was left to figure out why these boxes had been sent to me and what I was supposed to do with them.  Malcolm had a few devoted students who knew him much better than I did.  I always wondered if he had any friends. 

         I went through the boxes, finding in each a jumbled assortment of things.  Each box had a number on the outside, nine in all but then I noticed number 4 was missing.  Malcolm had become devoted to things Jungian and then to the much older typology of personalities known as the Enneagram. 

         In the box marked 5 I found some intriguing notes and journals.  Lectures by Eliade and Eliot, notes from Burgo’s seminars on ethics and theology, a volume of the Philokalia owned by Kathleen Raine, Beckett’s novels in original editions, reading notes on Blanchot, Bataille and Deleuze.  Poetry volumes by Ashbery and Muir.

         To my absolute astonishment, I found the original copies of a triangular correspondence between Ricardo Sanchez, Julian Vicente and Francisco Ayala, which concerned the latter’s visit to El Moral near Salamanca in 1975 to deliver a lecture on “Que es literatura?,” the title of which had always made me laugh.  Never knew why.  Sanchez and Vicente discuss at length what Ayala and his wife might like for breakfast.  She was a younger American, much younger, famously long, dark red hair, a former student (perhaps?) and he loved the traditions of Castille.  They wondered if jamon iberico might satisfy with bread and coffee for a small first breakfast.  Or if good butter and jam would be enough. 

Sanchez, gay but tortured and still closeted, had always wanted Vicente to acknowledge his writing as worthy of attention, so he seemed, in the letters, to be soliciting much more than information about foods and habits.  Vicente gave nothing, could barely come up with any information about Señora Ayala’s domestic tastes and less about Sanchez’s unsubtle mentions of his own work. 

         In the first box I found conventional academic papers, manuscripts of projects, many of which seemed drafts, unfinished .  works, works in progress.  Malcolm had long been obsessed with questions of craft and meaning in the writing of fiction.  His papers circled around these topics, especially the relations of novels to other arts such as music, painting, philosophy, sociology, the whole gamut of the university curriculum.  He admired many books on craft, from James down to Lodge, and the art or arts of fiction writing occupied his thoughts as much as the larger issues of meaning.  He admired Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, but he was determined to work out a Poetics of Fiction or desperate to have someone do it.  He had heard of Burke’s failure to complete his Symbolic of Motives and for a while studied his work, hoping to find a model in it for writing a Symbolic of Fiction.  But Burke, and so many others who wrote on these topics, got too far into sociology or cultural history or poetry proper,  or even, as with Bernhard, into the musicality of the voice telling the tale. 

         Malcolm’s papers kept coming back, text after text, to the poetics of fiction.  He had found Lispector and Pessoa, Valle-Inclán and of course Borges.  With each something was found to be not quite what he was looking for.  Fiction could never be poetry and yet his notes dealt again and again with Eliot, Saint-John Perse, Francis Ponge, he had introduced me to Everson’s “syzergy” River-Root, and, of course, to Lax, who had not yet then been much published.  He had discovered Stevens through Anne (the late poems from “The Rock”) and Rilke’s  “Ninth Duino Elegy” (a commentary on “the angel, not the unsayable”).  Beckett, all of Beckett, The Unnameable, even as he always noted his disappointment and dismay that Beckett had turned from fiction to drama.  These were Malcolm’s fears, essentially, that his inner dissatisfaction with his own writing of fiction would or could dissolve into the mere focus on words of poets or philosophers.  Poetry he knew, with exquisite delicacy, became at once, in an instant, too fragile to deal with reality, and philosophy he showed time and again walked into the house of fiction with juat as inevitable a flat-footed thud on the floorboards. 

         Poetry sees where we are, what things are here.  Particulars being variable.  But---Malcolm--insisted---poetry shows us what is anew.  Under new aspects, each time.  Transmuted.  The variations felt.  Poets sing songs beyond us and yet they show us it is we who are singing.  Things change in the poet’s song, but they are still our ordinary things, things we know.  We hear the poet sing and feel the pressure and the release of reality.  I thought at once that many of these notes could have been published if I could make the effort.  But soon such notions seemed beside the point. 

         Malcolm had followers and devoted readers but lacked the drive for shameless self-promotion that characterizes what writers call fame.  He read every evening until 10 p.m and slept without chemical aides or aides of any other sort through the night.  The sleep of the peripheral man.  When he gave talks he hit upon stretches of brilliance without warning and so often without follow through and they seemed rambling and unfocused.  He even seemed often to lose interest in talking at all. 

         In the box marked “Observer” I found many maps.  Malcolm had somehow obtained an annotated cloth reproduction of the Mappa Mundi from Hereford Cathedral.  This extraordinary object from around 1300 shows the world divided into three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa), with its center in Jerusalem, fashioned as a little keyhole.  Another reproduction featured the Tapestry of Creation from the Cathedral of Girona, Spain.  The needlework panel dates from the 11the century.   The tapestry, of which only the upper part remains, is divided into three cycles:  the Genesis, presided over by the Christ Pantocrator; the cosmic elements; and the Stories of the Holy Cross.  Christ Pantocrator, depicted as a beardless young man, occupies a circle in the center of the tapestry. He is surrounded by a circle whose sectors, aside from the upper one with a dove, symbol of God, show the seven days of the creation, until the creation of Adam and Eve. The two circles include quotes from the Genesis.

The remaining space in the rectangle including the central disk, houses at the corner four representation of Winds, depicted by four young winged men in Roman-like dresses, driving vessels and blowing air into horns. The central upper square is an old man representing the Year, with the Wheel of Time, while at the upper corners are the personifications of the Rivers of Paradise. The other six upper squares depict the Four Seasons, as well as Samson and Abel (or Cain).  I found a series of almost imaginary maps of Australia drawn by French explorers in the mid 1700s.

The two lower corners show the personifications of the Sun (left, symbolizing Sunday) and the Moon (right, much deteriorated, symbolizing Monday), while the side outer squares represent the months (only eight of which survive). At the bottom are incomplete scenes of the discovery of Holy Cross.  There were hand-drawn maps of the estuarial coasts of North Carolina and Virginia, complete with meticulous descriptions of flora and fauna.  Most impressive of all was Malcolm’s own nine by seven map of natural catastrophe, with exhaustive detail on hurricanes in the Gulf, the tornadoes in Texas, Missouri and Indiana, maps of volcanic eruptions from Vesuvius to Kiluea, Copahue and beyond.  There was also a detailed description of the meteorite that fell on the Yucatán Peninsula fifteen million years ago, wiping out all the dinosaurs. 

         In the Peacemaker box, I discovered heavily annotated copies of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” by Borges, Lispector’s novels and stories, and Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet.  (Malcolm was obsessed with a solar cult said to have its roots in the pre-Inca Andean civilization of Tiwanaku.)  Borges, he once told me, as director of the national library in Buenos Aires, had a secret vault of ancient texts, even a lost text from Tiwanaku, showing the cosmology of their mythology and religious practices.  Historians will say they did not develop written culture.  Malcolm knew, he said, this to be false.  He had talked with Borges about these things for hours one strange April day in Orono, Maine.  He avoided direct sun, I noticed, when we traveled in Bolivia and Chile. 

         In “Tamas, inertia,” box 1, I found a short, odd text---handwritten--called “A Sartorial Spirituality.”  It was not signed, but I suspect it was written by Malcolm’s British wife, Vi, who worked for many years in London’s garment world, a job she had trouble combining with her passion for the art of the Pre-Raphaelites.  The result of this ongoing friction was satire and her model was Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, “The Stitcher Re-Stitched.”  She begins:

         What is the human being but a work of raiment and what is             the world but the living robe of God?  If language is the             expressive vestment of thought, then clothes are the                          expressive vestment of the body.  Nature and life itself

         is but one garment woven and ever-weaving from the loom

         of time.  As Carlyle writes, “The whole external universe

         and what holds it together is but clothing and the essence

         of all science lies in the PHILOSOPY OF CLOTHES.”

                  The philosophy of clothes is not some specialized

         sub-study taught in design schools.  It is the key to                            understanding everything.  It is the seed and jewel of all

         spiritual knowing.  The human being is the fabricated                        animal and fashion is the key to understanding the human                 being.  Let me put this in a simple terministic formula:                       Mankind = manikin = mannequin.  Like Plato’s demiurge

         in the Timaeus, the couture designer takes the old rags of                  matter and forms them into something sublime.  God is the                  great fashionist and designers on earth are his prophets, his             priests:  mortal portals to his immortal power. 

Pretty good.  I thought of Adam and Eve discovering their desire for clothing to cover their nakedness.  Before the Fall they were nude, wearing the garment of God’s grace.  After their exit from Paradise, to clothe our shame, we wear harsh skins of animals or the marvelous colors of vain pride.  These are but funereal robes until we put on the white robes of baptism.  I looked at my feet.  Did they go barefoot in Paradise?

         My first job was working as a research assistant to a Hungarian cultural historian, John Lukacs, at La Salle University in Philadelphia.  Lukacs had no relation to the Marxist writer with whom he was often confused.  In addition to many books on Hitler and 20th century Europe, he had also become obsessed with the history of secret societies and needed someone to dig through archives.  It was pretty dull, but I got paid and it led me to theories about the Knights Templars, Schneebaum’s researches in New Guinea and Alain Fournier’s The Lost Estate.  Inspired linkages followed, in hindsight.

         When I was in Philadelphia, I received a handwritten letter from Malcolm telling me that his wife had left him for a Slovenian poet.  She was living somewhere in the Philly area and was having a tough time.  It seems she had fallen in love with the poet at a writing conference in Boulder.  Susan and I had met a few times and had some memorable long walks through Elkins Park, where she lived, usually in a carriage house near one of the mansions.  She could find no one to talk to in the area even if Tyler Art was there and other out-lying posts of other universities in the city.  No cafes to speak of, no one who had even heard of Mrs Dalloway or The Waves.   During the last of these walks, she was clearly pregnant.  I left Philadelphia soon afterwards for my first teaching job and we lost touch.  I think she changed her name.  I often wonder about the child. 

         ----------------

         Nothing could have prepared me for what I found in box 7 marked “Third Eye Chakra.”  Malcolm had written a long work, written near the end of the 60s, on the spiritual abstract in contemporary fiction.  He started with Kandinsky’s famous 1910 treatise on The Spiritual in Art and argued that we could see Kandinsky’s insights being developed in mid-century fiction if we but had the eyes to comprehend it.  He noted that Kenneth Burke’s novel, published in 1932, was a signal event in this development and one that influenced Samuel Beckett’s work in as yet unrealized ways.  He was desperate to do more research into the archives of each writer.  He had discovered that when Burke’s novel was published, one of his friends, Katherine Anne Porter, took five copies with her to Paris to have Sylvia Beach sell them in her Shakespeare & Company bookshop.  Beckett bought one of those copies four or five years later, he was convinced.  And in Burke’s strange and prophetic novel Beckett found further encouragement to strip fiction of the remainder of its traditional markers and renew it spiritually with a voice and manner that culminates in the final work of his trilogy The Unnameable.  In a manner reminiscent of the advice given in the medieval classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, writers eliminated as many of the practices of writing known in the tradition to find an abstract or formal or minimalist voice and telling and in this way, Malcolm argued, real spiritual meaning and illumination shone forth.  Where Modernism at the beginning of the century settled for shock and breaking apart of all the previous cultural norms, for the next generation, the search for the true spiritual depths within art became the goal and practice. 

         Malcolm worked out these ideas in the early 80s.   I first met him then in Cambridge and I was also most interested in how Kandinsky’s ideas had found depth of influence in writing as well as in the visual arts.  We both attended a conference in England at Dartington Hall on spirituality in literature and the arts organized by Kathleen Raine and her Temenos group.  The possibilities and powers for unknowing fiction seemed promising to us.  Of course, given what happened, it is easy to say that now.

         There were notes of various forms of occultism at the Temenos Conference, hints and references in many of the papers to Blavatsky, Theosophy, Hermeticism, ancient wisdom practices such as the construction of memory theaters, and studies of secret patterns of meaning in architecture, temple designs, arts and crafts from many traditions which embody such practices.  I was fascinated by these ideas as had Malcolm been when he had encountered them years earlier in the 60s.  We talked about the importance of the great Renaissance magician, Giordano Bruno, whose theories of an infinite universe and a multiplicity of worlds, combined with his fascination with the Hermetic tradition of magic, memory, symbol and language led to repeated charges of heresy.  Many have speculated on possible connections between the “Giordanisiti” (the followers of Bruno) and the Rosicrucians, the mysterious brotherhood of the Rosy Cross first come to light in Germany in the early 1600s, and with the Freemasons, who first surface in 1646 in England.  The conference we were attending was but a continuation, really, of that ultimate desire for universal language, universal symbolic communion, that becomes convergent in these occult humanist movements in European thought.  The hunger for an ethic and aesthetic of universal love, charity and beauty that would overcome all the differences that tend to war and intolerance and which lead instead to a kind of Rosicrucian effort at a total reformation of man, as in the recurring dream of the imagination, the human become divine, or the human and divine united through imagination.

-------------

         Malcolm’s essay was amazing, probably the best thing he had ever written, and I wondered by he had not published it.  It might have been part of a larger work.  Maybe he moved on, lost interest, something pushed him away from it.  Typical of him.  I wondered too if I would find in other boxes that he had written fiction as well.  I never heard him talk about this but it would not have surprised me.  He once told he wanted to transform the meaning of the word “dilettante,” to raise it up from its negative meaning and restore it to a being a term of honor and value.  “One should be a true amateur, a true dilettante,” he liked to say, “ we should want to embrace the whole of life, everything, preferably all at once.” 

         I had never heard him say, however, that he might try his hand at fiction to see how that might help him find how to live the wholeness of vision. 

–––––––––––––––––––––  

         Ray Philips, one of the university security guards whom I’d known since I was an undergraduate at Maryland, woke me.  It was getting really late and I had a longish drive back to the village I used to stay at on the Pennsylvania line.  I decided to leave the last box, marked Gemini, for tomorrow.  My astrological sign.

         I got back to the little house I rented, Mason Cottage, next to a civil war graveyard that surrounded a plain white 19th century wooden Methodist church.  The nearest grave belonged to one Dolphus Brown, died in 1863.   Who remembers thee?  I took a hot shower and lay on the bed, turning things over in my mind and listening to world forecasts faint on the tv turned down low. 

Thunder showers, fog, reduced vision, westerlies, low 40s, rain over the next two days, polar vortex, clear, sunny skies over the plains, chance of a typhoon in the Philippines. 

         I went to bed.  With the sound of recorded bells from the church tower and the hum of the highway distant, I fell into a profound sleep.  I began to dream, bright colors, vast motions and shapes.  I felt I was a moth in a huge sacred interior like the Byzantine National Shrine in Washington or the gothic cathedral there on the other side of the city.  A gigantic nave, a mashup of every cathedral I had ever visited, including somehow St Peter’s basilica and the cathedral at Atun.    I flew up to the ceiling, hovering among the roof bosses, decorated knobs at the intersections of the arches.  I looked from one end of the cathedral to the other.  Each roof boss depicted an event in the history of the world, from creation through the Fall and expulsion from Eden, the figural precursors of Christ in the Kings of Israel, on through the Nativity, Jesus’s lectures and miracles, crucifixion, death, resurrection, ascension and, finally, Christ triumphant, in majesty framed by a radiant vagina-like mandala.  His beginning is his end. 

         I looked a long time at the rose window, soaking in the ruby-red and lapis lazuli glass hues.  Then I flew abruptly down into the choir, now transformed into an eagle, and circled the lectern and under the stalls.  Each seat featured elaborate carvings symbolizing moments of mercy.    There was an elephant with horse’s feet, a gaping fool with his tongue stuck out, a bear being hanged by geese, a series of Green Men peering out all phallic and menacing, a fox lecturing an audience of ducks, a blacksmith trying to put horseshoes on a dog, endless images of wrestlers, a devil conducting dentistry on a poor open-mouthed soul, birds, a dragon, a pelican feeding its young and finally the image of a lovely mother and child dancing together. 

         Out I floated into the chapter house with stone carvings of three-headed kings, veiled women, fighting lions, and tumblers, directly over the dean’s throne.  There were many, many monkeys and the carving of an enormous serpent eating a rather charming cat.  One vault entered the head of a Green Man and went out through his mouth.  There were mouths everywhere.  Architectural orality.  Fierce eucharistic gluttony.  Eat the bread-body of God and wash it down with his sweet blood--like Leopold Bloom with a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy.  Transubstantiation.  I thought of seedcake. Back I flew into the body of the cathedral and floated there gazing at its cruciform shape, the simple vaulted ceiling and the light pouring in through the clerestory, down into the chapels beneath.  I felt majestic.  Then I was suddenly sucked up into an octagonal wooden lantern where my head burst through the glass into the air faster and faster.  I could see the cathedral’s twin towers receding below me and the vivid green flatness of Pennsylvania around it.  The sky was getting deeper and deeper blue and I couldn’t breathe.  My face smoldered in the intense heat.  I could smell myself burning.  Father can’t you see? 

        

        

        

        

Hotel Courier

Hotel Courier

As soon as I checked into the Hotel D'Angleterre I knew it was a mistake.  I went into the room, put my valise on the desk and lay down on the bed.  I had thought I wanted a room there because the grand, stone building is one of Copenhagen's oldest.  But it has all been remodeled.  Now it is sumptuous, white, gold, classic, fine but too much.  For this project I did not want all this new gilt.  I had a room in the First Hotel Skt Petri and a second in the Blu Royal.  For this third night I needed to find a replacement for the Angleterre.  I went back down to the front desk.  The young man heard me out and suggested a much smaller hotel by the water.   I walked down to the 71 Nyhavn Hotel.  Perfect.  An old warehouse, dark wooden beams, white walls, brick walls.  Being on the water added everything that the gilt at the Angleterre would have removed.  I spent the night there, my third night in Copenhagen.  I was now ready. 

A few years after I had moved my practice from Long Island to Portland, Maine, I had a client who was with me for what I then thought was a long time, about six years.  He told his problems slowly but after a while the stories, about his failures, searches, successes, insecurities, a divorce, some moves, pain, recovery, injury, guilt, all somehow coalesced less for him, I think, than for me.  I wanted to get out altogether, to walk away from all that, to close down shop and if I ever reopened one it would not be as a therapist.  Maybe something else, scrimshaw? copper geegaws, who knew?  But something in that one patient's presence gave me the permission I wanted.  In hindsight it was a gift.  Whether he offered it, I don't know.  Perhaps I simply stole something from him.  I didn't know that either.  Sort of the way therapy usually went, even when patients chose to exit and declared themselves better or ready or over or missed appointments over and over until there were no more.  But I could never be sure it was really this patient.  Perhaps it was Claudia's leaving, disappearance, betrayal, whatever it was, it felt like all of the above.  No matter now.  I was in Copenhagen to put all of that behind me, to close the doors once and for all on that earlier, long chapter of my work life.  I wanted now to become a kind of private emissary, a trusted courier.  I used the three hotels to establish my credibility for this venture.  No one would really ever know why I was living in three hotels at once, or how I did so, or what it involved.  No one would really notice but if anyone did I would still remain beyond their calculations, even if they followed me for three days and established clearly my three-part regime of overnights.  In the first few weeks in the city, my goal was to walk between the three hotels looking like someone who had lived in Copenhagen for years and years, if not for all of his life.  So I practiced each day walking the streets without looking at anything in particular.  I especially never wanted to look like someone new in his environs who was noticing things the way travelers do.  After a night at the Blu I would decide either the next night would be at the warehouse, the Nyhaven, or at the Skt Peter, the First as I called it.  I liked how long and straight Studiestraede was and there I could walk without looking at anything special or being looked at in any special way.  In time each pathway became affectionate to me in special ways, but I worked hard not to show that to myself lest anyone seeing me should discern this.  From First to Nyhaven, "71" I began to call it, was such a clean slice down Landemaerket and right onto Gothersgade.  Then the third day the lovely triangle would complete itself as I walked with slight purpose and slight delay from 71 to the Blue, or Blue, as I liked thinking of it.  Whether coming or going between Blue and 71 I could rarely resist staying on the waterfront as much as possible.  Even so, in the coming weeks, I loved exploring the city as I walked the routes possible within the inscribed triangle. 

I wanted to walk like a native, or at least like someone who has lived in Copenhagen for years.  I knew Americans were always noticed in foreign cities by virtue of the space they took as they walked.  I watched other people on the sidewalks and quietly tried to imitate their posture, their body language, the angles of arms and the tilt of the head.  I walked slowly and deliberately, I walked as if I had a meeting in six minutes.  I practiced aimlessly sauntering, like the fellow on the  opposite side of the street in the dark green jacket who looked as if he were killing time until his girlfriend came up behind him and put her hands across his eyes. 

Crutchstone's Poor Memory

“Sebastian Crutchfield published this novel a short time ago.  Trouble is he rushed it into print, added extraneous material, made superfluous emendations, corrupted the text with sparkly fluff trying to impress readers with his sophistication rather than leading them deeper into the deepest solitude where voices speak to the aloneness that one is.”   N provides the great phrase here “ It is about stripping down to the essentials, the aloneness that one is . . . . “

on Memory Fiction

I am going to have to rewrite it and publish the correct version sometime in the near future.  One thinks of Borges' story "Pierre Menard," but of course the current situation is somewhat different.  

How to talk about the vertical

Finished McGregor’s biography last night.  He maybe rushes through the later years, listing the moments of fame and accolades.  Sweet that Beckett and Lax exchanged books and compliments.  Had not known that Lax published a piece on Beckett in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.  By doing that he succeeds in turning the ordinary literary biography into a genuinely moving, graceful portrait of Lax as spiritual seeker and of himself as devoted younger friend during the final fifteen years of Lax’s life.  It reminds me of when I visited Kenneth Burke at his home in New Jersey.  As the younger writer and admirer the possibility is there one sees to write the life, become the Boswell.  An age-old pattern there.  Why it happens and doesn’t happen is also as age-old.  McGregor has the conviction at the outset when he describes their meeting that Lax apparently saw something in him that he liked and trusted and thus the friendship took root and deepened over the years.  In the final years I wonder if McGregor doesn’t artfully leave out a good deal so as ultimately to protect the friendship from the prying eyes of the crowds that had begun to flock to see Lax, the pilgrims.  He gets in the one juicy anecdote about the American pilgrim who as astonished to meet Lax’s cousin, Marcia, on the beach.  By the end each anecdote like this has the weight of the emblematic, a token illustration of much more that might have been said, that might be said at a later time.  You can’t help but think that McGregor will do a good deal more publishing of Lax and on Lax.  Perhaps.  Surely given the Merton industry now fully renewed as the Merton-Lax industry, a new generation of scholars will want to bring into publication more and more of Lax’s journals and notebooks.  Just as they might be waiting for the Trust to release more of Merton’s massive archives.  I know one retired scholar who might inform me more fully on these matters, especially since they are celebrating this year the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton and of Robert Lax.  Meanwhile McGregor’s new book will get lots of attention and it deserves it. 

I had hurled a mock-curse midway into the book when I felt McGregor didn’t really try hard enough to appreciate the paintings of Ad Reinhardt.  If you understand abstract painting at all, you know that Reinhardt’s black paintings are still far more important to the art world than McGregor seems to have comprehended.  With his devotion to Lax and to Lax’s unique style of formatting his poems, how could McGregor not have understood the place of Reinhardt more deeply? 

My other moment of high umbrage and disbelief came on page 274 of the book when McGregor says Lax’s poem “dribbles” down the left hand side of the otherwise blank page.  Ouch.  “a dribble of words.”  What an ugly and unfortunate choice of wording.  The same word shows up way too soon within the next twenty pages, so perhaps there was some editing and final proofing glitch at work, always a problem in getting any book into production.  But then later I wondered if he had had basketball in mind, the words dribble pointedly down the page like the ball under the commanding palm of the player?  No, that would be a stretch.  I considered synonyms he might have used---the words “flowed,” “processed,” “marched,” “stuttered,” “descended” (like the famous nude), “stained,” “swayed,” even “dropped.”  All terrible.  But “dribble” is still also terrible. 

Inner Gold

Now I’m on page 313 in McGregor.  Maybe it is my imagination but the second part of the book feels so much better than the first half.  McG feels relaxed and confident. He knows the older Lax, that is who he met, and he has little to work on other than mining Lax’s journals, poems, writings of all sorts and he enjoys doing this and does it well.  Lax’s idea of his inner voice, each of us trying to listen to our inner voice, feels like pure gold, the sort of passage we’ve been looking and longing for in this life of Lax.

Cursing the Biographer

Reading more on Lax.  If only McGregor had had someone make him take out the two first paragraphs about the painter Ad Reinhardt on page 219.  They sound like potted opinions couched to apologize to the reader for talking so much about this old-fogey painter friend of Lax’s, now forgotten, unlike our dear hero, Lax himself, a painter of quaint abstract works “emblematic of a bygone era.”  He cites Barbara Rose.  Can you imagine?  Oh the damnation that phrase places anyone under, the lowest depths of the inferno.  “McGregor, by all that is plaid and shamrocky, I hereby curse thee thyself as a biographer, writer, and friend of culture, to become yourself, the sooner and the better, “emblematic of a bygone era.” 

Egotism of the Long Distance Reader

I seem to get only so far in biographies (of writers?) and then lose interest.  Or my own egocentricism kicks in. 

The writer of this book on Lax is twenty years younger than us, so I start to see his "lens" on things.  I was very glad to hear him say that Merton was a brilliant self-promoter all through his career as a writer.  Of course Lax's story is much in the shadow of Merton's story and always has been, so McGregor is trying to give Lax the spotlight as much as possible.  

Now that I am up to Lax at around the age of 30 my interest in his story slows down and my egocentrism kicks in and I want to keep reading but more slowly so as to see the portrait of my own coming of age in the periods the biographer describes.  Lax is exactly the age of my parents, all born in 1914-15.  Leonard Cohen the singer is born in 1934, ten years my senior.  I’m now going to kick in my love of “stereophonic” reading and continue with Lax’s biography alongside the biography of Leonard Cohen which I began reading a few years back and then put aside.  Pick up with both around 1950 when I was starting school at St Mary’s in Cumberland, Maryland.  The bookmark in the Cohen book corrects me and says I dropped it in 1967, so I guess I’ll read more of Lax to catch up to that date. 
 

Robert Lax and Theosophy

Michael N McGregor’s long-awaited biography of Robert Lax yields its secrets.  Young Lax read Theosophical society books brought home by his famous uncle Henry and aunt Marie who had been to India in 1912 to meet Annie Besant. 

McGregor says “Lax seems to have read some of the movement’s literature as well, including an early book by the movement’s protégé, J. Krishnamurti, where he saw a poem in the vertical style he would one day make his own.  57

Reading some of Pappos's short pieces on his blog site made me realize how addicted he is to the either/or.  Does he ever experience a maybe both/and?  Or isn't the whole game of wall street and corporate management based wholly on the "or"--you win or you lose.  Markets are up or down.  Products sell or they don't.  His piece on the bankrupt pride of the Greek soul is perfect for this.  Wonder if he's ever heard of the DeMoulas saga, Greek tragedy, around Boston, especially last summer's climactic battle?

Reading experiences frame one another, as with all of living.  Coming to Pappos right on the heels of finishing Calasso on Baudelaire shapes my sense of what Pappos may or may not have pulled-off.  Calasso is so slow and nuanced, magisterial, breathtaking.  Pappos is nuanced enough but in that high-speed rush way that is not breathtaking even though it may at times take your breath away.

I envy it of course but by the end I wanted most of all to now write a novel that would be as opposite Hotel Living as possible.  Nugget of great disappointment from my expectations as set up by the title.  I wanted a novel that was really about hotel living, a sort of Pico Iyer thing but much better than he's been doing of late.  I don't think this title is really that good for this novel.  Have to laugh at library and publishing cataloging---in that string of tags they list 2. Single-occupancy hotels.  That sure will mislead some researchers someday.  When he gets a movie out of this book, and it could of course happen, it will have a much better title.  Hotel Jerk or whatever.  Hotel Innovation.

One of his best effects is to use the fog of corporate and management jargon with his command of trendy idiom to obscure and advance what people are saying and doing all at the same time.  Maybe even something Nabokovian to give him high marks in that class of immigrant writers who master the language and add something to it, to the literature.
If Hotel Living is literature.  Might be a fine trendy read.  White and Cunningham.  Of course.  But no one will say as was blurbed on Calasso's book "one had thought they didn't write books like this anymore." 

Hotel Living by Ioannis Pappos

@ioannispappos  Secret to how addictive is to read Pappos: "Or."  Hotel L endless rush of Or/Either play-offs chromenos.blogspot.com

July 8 Weds

Started reading Hotel Living, new novel by Iannos Pappos, which caught my eye because of the title, so close to mine.  Wanted to see what he does with it.  Of course the publicity for it talked about the anomie of hotel life as one moves around the high flying hedge fund wild world.  Didn’t mention it is a gay love story.  Or is so far.  Also compared to Gatsby and Bright Lights Big City on the back cover, so who knows how it will keep going.  Very good so far, pointed and fun and acutely observed.  Called the Trollope of the moment.  Of the mba and banking worlds today. 

Nicholas on Facebook “Culture always trumps process. A currency is both but the former is more important than the latter, so should always reflect a shared politics, which the euro does not, so as the article says the drama continues, and the pain redoubles.”

Feeny canceled for tonight. 

I wonder if Nicholas would permit “culture” to be replaced by “history and national character”?  Of course “culture” as a term no doubt assumes both without specifying a political, ideological position on the meaning of those terms. 


Friday morning around 11.  Enjoying Pappos’s novel.  He had first-class editing on it and he writes super-well.  No workers this morning and it is not Nascar race weekend at Loudon.  Not until the 19th. 

Pappos’ book has that rushed, wild feel that makes it a “great read” if that term is still used.  Makes you feel you of all people do not know what the latest and coolest terms are and you never will.  Someone’s business card is in lower case Calibri so of course I have to stop to see if I have Calibri on here and what it looks like lowercase.  I am in Optima now.  Now I am in Calibri.  Here is all lower case calibri.  looks like the Gill sans I used to fancy. 

Here is Calibri.  Here is Gill sans and here is Gill MT.  Line there for my novel:  He couldn’t tell Calibri from Gill sans or Gill MT. 

Thurs July 16

Thurs mid-afternoon.  Just finished Pappos’s Hotel Living.  Damn him!  Amazing finish and doesn’t he just pull if off rather brilliantly!  I went through the longeurs of boredom with the drugs and hollywood, Teresa and Ray and LA, just as he wanted me to, just as he made me do, that Pappos, that Trollope!   The one key blurb on the cover says if Trollope were here he would want to write this book.  Pretty great compliment.  The book is So good that now I have to look up some reviews and get everyone to explain it to me and agree with me. 

Astonishingly beautiful day. Va out by the fountain.  Lunch and walk at Docks, saw Natalie and her friend.  We ate at the deli in the house at the other end.  Two big circular sculptures are gone, probably sold.  New dragonfly in rusty old parts.  ok but not great. 

Flora called from the bank.   Appraiser can’t file the final ok because there is no kitchen in the house.  Flora didn’t know we were already under construction.  Finally we agree that if we wait two weeks Tom from Loon appraisal can come back again and see for himself and for the housing loan regulators that there is a kitchen.  She says it is the regulator level of the process that doesn’t like using Zillow etc--well it’s new federal regulations. 

Cabinets are stacked in the dining room.  6:42 pm  Tyler, Alan and Warren came and carried them in. 

Friday night July 17 

Kitchen floor in, some cabinets in place.  Wow.  Strange feeling of regret and remorse too, or being somehow unworthy, like out house is not up to the grade of upgrade we are having done or something.  What a strange response to it all?  Strangers examining our lives and we’re not up to the level.  Making up some mythos that Alan and crew are more used to working for all the Rusty McLs of the lake district, the Hirschfields and such and we are not meant to be in the company.  Strange notions, where did they come from? 

Some leftover response from Ioannis Pappos’s novel.  I am Stathis and all that.  Can’t find that many reviews of it.?? 

Dream the other night.  I had painted a big painting, five vertical panels divided by straight lines, all one canvas.  Very satisfying gray on gray somehow, minimalist, texture with surface on top of texture.  Probably the granite piece we chose now that I think about it, but this was a lovely painting I had done.  Next scene is the gallery and the anxiety about the fact that the painting had been left out of the show, or left somewhere else, not there, not where it should have been.  Sense of loss.  Anxiety.  And pleasure that the painting was so good. 

Feeny by the way said nothing about the painting I gave him.  Not a visual guy. 

Today lunch at Norwich Inn after a fine early morning swim.  Then look at the Montshire museum and speculation on how much Emma would enjoy it.  Eliot too.  Overdrawn at the bank so came home and call generic tiaa and requested fast withdrawal.  Not here until Tues.  Just the call makes me feel clandestine and dirty somehow.  I did ask Charlie in Dallas, on the line, if this kind of call was the most popular request they get.  Yes, of course.  Nothing unique there.  Need money.  As fast as. 

from Nov 17, 2014

11:43

ONE

Developers had refurbished all the old houses on Bow Street and the agent and I perched in one of the new restaurants there sipping martinis and slurping oysters.  We watched salt being unloaded onto the Portsmouth harborside from a huge Bulgarian tanker flying under a Maltese flag from the port of Valletta.  We laughed as we savored the briney terrors of creatures and spirits unknown to us.  

A few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a good contract with a small but distinguished publishing house based on a story of mine that had appeared in an obscure journal in England.  All I had to do was turn it into a novel.  I sent off a vague proposal for doing so in ways as yet unclear to me and we were eating cod cakes at an overpriced bistro in New England.  Thanks for coming up, I said.  Oh, always enjoyable to get out of the city.  Especially to go to Maine, the agent said.  This is not Maine, that is across the river there.  Well, to me it feels like Maine and is close enough.  Right.  New York has lots of things, I added, but not everything.  She asked if I had offers from other publishers?  No and if any came along I would not be enticed.  How will the novel develop she wondered?

I’ll tie in loose ends that come along as I proceed, I wished I had said.  But if she noticed my hand tremor slightly she gave no sign and I repeated my desire to stay with Frank because his reputation as a publisher I respected more than any inducements another outfit might try to offer.  Besides, I assured her this opening scene would not work in any other sort of story.

+

A miniature flag of the Order of the Knights of Malta stood in the corner of the bookshelf behind the receptionist and tilted against the side of the box in front of it a postcard from Valletta.  They guarded a tightly packed row of books.  Each section of the whole rosewood wall unit was loaded with books and a dusty collection of cards, notes, tiny baskets, ceramic tiles, small bowls, statuettes,  items from a hundred souvenir shops from across the globe.   I thought I would ask the young woman about the Maltese flag, but our attention became absorbed in the paperwork in front of us.  Lara wanted me to have the tests yet again even though I felt fine and we both knew we were satisfying her compulsions.  Since her father had died four years ago, somewhat suddenly of an undiagnosed cancer, she had become obsessed with making sure we both had enough tests to insure against any similar catastrophe.  I managed to keep to one such exam a year.  We waited for close to an hour, the waiting room packed with people mostly our age.  Lara was reading a long book on her iPad these days.  I had forgotten the book I was working on so I leafed through the pile of magazines.  No articles on travel escapes to Malta or any other islands I might be curious to visit.  Beautiful photo spreads of lots of sunny places, sparkling cities, remote beaches and blue depths and expanses.  

Visits to medical centers of any sort trigger thoughts in me that are by now familiar and even consoling.  In large hospitals, in small waiting rooms, we learn to savor our solitude.  Everyone is in the same situation with or without a diagnosis for a specific problem.  Death is taking down someone nearby and we don’t know it, usually, often, and we get attacked by it every so often.  Someone we know dies suddenly or gets a shock of a diagnosis.  If I am symptom free at the moment, for the time being, it makes me delighted and even more on guard as the years add on to each other in my private spinal chord plus enclosing body which it struggles to keep erect.  Hemorrhoids, new eyeglass prescription, indigestion, poor sleep every so often, anxiety attacks, nervous worries, memories of more severe breakdowns, the adolescent depressive states, the short-term hospitalization for mental or nervous problems, lowered cell count, stress-induced insomnia, stomach difficulties, poor appetite, overweight, overeating, underperforming heart rhythms, breathing difficulties, pain in the knees, arthritis that “comes with age.”  Even without a specific crisis, our baggage of health imperfections keeps filling, expanding, getting heavier.  If you’re conscious of time at thirty or forty, you begin a kind of zen reversal once you get past sixty, an aptitude for denial, for ignoring the progressions, for focusing only on the moment at hand and for imagining the next, the upcoming without imagining their worst possibilities.  Algorithms take care of realities, our hearts look for comfort at every turn, in every breath, we become masters at being grateful whether we are really grateful or not.  Our dishonesty with ourselves at what might happen now or later, turns into an unshakeable faith in what is good right now.  Ironies appeal less and less, clever observations fade before the embrace not so much of resignation as of the acceptance of the comfort and security of what is, now.  

I never knew if Lara understood any of this when I tried to say something of it.  She didn’t know, or she did know, that I couldn’t comprehend the grip her obsessions about diagnosis, about the pronouncements of a medical authority, had on her.   These visits to clinics, to doctors and medical centers, became simply entre’acts for other stage of our drama together.  Interludes.  You welcome, eventually, a patience for fulfilling the script at hand that much younger people don’t even have the convolutions in their souls to even imagine.  

I learned this during Olivia’s illness.  Anxiety, terror, depression pushed me to find some glimmer of exaltation somewhere.  When we eventually came out into the other side, it was elation stronger than I had ever felt.  I realized we learn to hover, to oscillate, to compress both feelings into a lifelong devotion to the hum of vitality itself, the faint buzz of consciousness wherein we simultaneously die and live, feel sadly joyful, desperate-ecstatic. 

+

Her concern for my health figured in a larger collaborative relationship we had forged and at this point her self-interest involved wanting my encouragement to go ahead and adopt an older child.  Lara brought up the possibility about a year ago, not long after her forty-eighth birthday.  We were looking at a disturbing, as always, Diane Arbus exhibit one weekday afternoon at the museum which we often visited.  Lara was self-employed, and I, now a writer.  

Lara had been my student, briefly, years before at a time when I thought I wanted to try university teaching.  It was a dull class, I realized soon enough, on contemporary novels.  She was the best student and we had a few coffees.  I went back to practice, our lives diverged.  Years later when I returned to Portland, she said hello to me one day at Whole Foods.  We fell into a friendship that never would have been possible earlier.  She and her boyfriend of years had broken up a few months earlier.  We found  we enjoyed walking around town, the promenades, the boulevard, the port.  We continued, going on six years.  Our close friends knew we enjoyed looking, not at one another, but at views, paintings, movies together.  Lara now felt age was making her face one key question:  why not adopt a child, even an older child?

Great show by Paula Poundstone last Saturday night here at the Flying Monkey in Plymouth, NH.  

In her honor the final paragraph of Eric Chévillard’s wonderful book of meditations, The Crab Nebula:

     And then Crab sank into silence, slowly, inexorably, vertically, he sank in and eventually disappeared from the gaze of the audience.  There was some confusion among the spectators, a moment of uncertainty, of incomprehension, but they quickly settled on the only credible hypothesis:  a trapdoor had opened beneath Crab’s feet--of course, there was a trapdoor concealed in the stage--and by common agreement, this symbolic burial of the character, replacing the fall of the curtain or the sudden blackout that traditionally signifies the end of a show, was in itself worth the price of admission; with one blow it erased the long days of boredom that had preceded it. (Applause.)

Another really good line

this-space.blogspot   Stephen Michelmore says

Recently I suggested the reason why the works of Marcel Proust and Karl Ove Knausgaard maintain a fascination with readers is not due to the extreme length of their books or similarities in subject matter but instead the ambiguity of their genre: both are presented as novels yet are so closely aligned to the reality of the authors' own lives that we read them more aware of everyday mystery and chance than in a traditional memoir, and far more so than in 'gritty' realism.

Good Lines

Dwight Garner in today's NYT

10:04 by Ben Lerner (Faber and Faber). This is an intimate yet oddly grand novel of New York City, . . .  The novel’s narrator, a writer, says he hopes to compose a book that is, on some level, “a long list of things that quicken the heart.” Mr. Lerner has written this sort of book.

The almost offhand intensity of Mr. Knausgaard’s prose is a secular sort of miracle.  on vol 3, Boyhood Island

"a memorable portrait of a man caught between two societies."   Maybe I will have to read this Teju Cole after all.  Did like Open City so much.  

More on Lerner

I'm thinking that in ten or fifteen years Ben Lerner might write a big novel somewhat like the one I just read by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles' ---Where Tigers Are at Home  which won France's 2008 Prix Medicis.  Similar poetic sensibilities at work.  Layerings of various voices and characters and time frames.  More anthropology than Lerner will get into, but he can replace that with his attentions to cultural events and behaviors.  Where Lerner has Whitman for the historial base, Blas de Robles has Athanasius Kircher.  That gives the book a narrative thread around which the contemporary events are embroidered.  

On Ben Lerner's Second Novel

"Harmony was established at last, and only one straggler continues to disrupt it with his anxieties, his shames, his endlessly reiterated adolescences.  Only man was unable to do away with his consciousness".   Eric Chevillard, The Crab Nebula 101

This book has such good lines every page or so.  Nearing the end now.  

Great German movie last night I had read about and Dennis reminded me of.  We get to finish it this evening.  Very funny.  So hard to explain humor.  Schussmacher.  Break Up Manager.  

Sunday night  we even watched a second of his movies--the red baron and started a third before giving up.  Talented and cute young German actor Mattias Schweighöfer.   Beer with Feeny at Fosters.  His GRE scores are nice and high--96 percentile.  He’s ready to get out of here and on to grad school full-time.  

Am I liking Lerner’s second novel as much as I had liked his first?  Don’t think so but that could be because he has matured and grown up more, both the person and the writer.  

Jeff Armstrong.  Fifteen years my senior.  Fascinating in his own right and yet also that appeal of the much older.  Not quite fatherly, too young for that, and yet much older than brotherly.  Senior, authoritative, experienced, wiser than one’s peers or near-peers.  The charm of the older maybe paragon of something or other.  At the same time, responses that still seem very young---the eternal student with his professor,  English majors in the grad student lounge.  

Lerner puts into his novel the story he published in the new yorker after he talked about how it came about.  Cool and yet it gives us the differences in voice and tone and purpose.  Further deepens all the themes he’s already got going.  He is good.  

 1:34 Monday A longed-for day off of sorts and now I don’t know what to do with myself so I will write and be glad all the while that I’m not currently as famous as the young literary lion of Kansas and Manhattan who I am glad as well that I am not.  About two-thirds through his 10:04.  He is now in Marfa, has been there a week or maybe two.  He is over thirty but he is young still and spooked still by his success with New York publishers and agents and the lure of more money than he’d expected to have by this age--two hundred and seventy thousand dollars after fees and stuff.  Probably a 300k advance which maybe has been standard for a while in new york for promising writers of his first and second book stature.  Poor Sebastiano had to be glad to get that measly little check from the writer’s union second or third book fund, was it $7500. ?  And earlier one of his acquaintances from Iowa, she had gotten the big 300k advance for her first book and where is she now?  A name I’ve not heard anything of since, since her story was in the New Yorker and her advance was news for five minutes among her Iowa peers back in, was it 2005, or 06 or 07?  How quickly the famous pass through the veils of fame back into quietude like the rest.  I think of Jamaica Kincaid, the bright light of a few years back,  New Yorker family connections and all.  Where have we heard of her of late?  

Now at this juncture, would I, should I, put this passage into my so-called novel, even the very very bad one I had hoped to write in vague imitation of Lerner’s new book?  Remember how excited I was two months ago to get it?  How much I needed to have it at once just to see it and start it and use it as my essential prompt and template for getting my own work started and finishes.  Now that I am two-thirds through the very book itself I can pause and stand back and wonder what was I thinking?  A kind of mania in and of itself that covers over, stands in for, the absence of genuine motivation, of a genuine pressure of creativity.  

Now the sunshine is super-bright out in the early afternoon backyard.  I’ve caught up on the laundry.  Rick and I took a short walk earlier before lunch.  Heated up fajitas from last night for lunch.  Bad apple pie, for me, but at least not pecan cake or fruit cake.  Believe it or not I am fruit-caked up.  Excess never lets you down.  The palace of wisdom beckons as reliably as ever.

Sweet emails from Nicholas inviting us to be part of his honour at Buckingham Palace on February 6.  Party at the Sloane Club after the palace.  Not sure whether this is his private party or if the palace also throws a number of parites around town to round off the day for everyone.  Have to ask.  

Petie took Willow off swimming early and they planned to go on to Tilton to the Paris nail salon on main street for their beautification rituals centered around the shell-like growths humans have at the ends of their upper and lower extremities.  Nails they call them, as in “as hard as”  those devices they make and use to fasten together pieces of material used to build things, houses, furniture, roof tiles.  

I give a kudo to Lerner for this phrase on page 182 where he enters into a building or house in Marfa where a party is taking place:  “There was a sense of incoherent opulence.”  Yes.  That’s Texas and every art scene therein.  

Page 183 Lerner uses the word “dissect.”  He’s used the word or a variant too many times now, in the whole book.  If he uses it once more in the remaining forty pages I’ll have to take him off all my lists.  

Now 3:16  Nice nap.  Feel sort of sorry for Lerner.  Nervous for him, at this point, as though I’m watching to see if he will complete his assignment(s) or not?  As though we are watching the normally unreported, inside process of someone who is writing a dissertation in order to gain the doctorate. I can guess where that comes from in my own experience analogically, since I wrote such a thing so many years ago and felt the pressures of having to do so.  But all this is there in Lerner’s book and I guess he knows it and has decided to make all of that the book itself.  Now I probably will go back and look at the piece in the NYRB that Phil sent some months ago that had prompted him to rant a bit against Lerner and against which rant I defended Lerner based only on my enjoyment of his first book, a surprise enjoyment, maybe like everyone who had read Lerner’s first book and which skyrocketed him out of the middle of his generation’s first writers into instant stardom within the tiny worlds of big success poets (where is Campbell McGrath when we need him? huh?) when they are young.  Double-checking here---the internet yet another instrument of cruelty in our hands.  On Goodreads, McGrath’s 1996 book had 92 ratings.  Peak, there.  His 2012 book got forty-one ratings.  

But it is time for goûter,  almost 3:30 and perhaps I’m being harsh on both Ben Lerner and other writers.  

Still, what a luxury it is to be home and nothing much to do but nap, wake slightly, and nap a bit more again.  Winter.  

Tuesday  Dec 30  Rick found a Northeastern Huskies mug at the dump which has become his prize souvenir.  Agenda for this bright day is to see the Hobbit movie in Imax 3D at 3:30 in Hooksett.  

Finished Lerner last night and yes I guess if I were reviewing it for a major publication I would give it all the glow it has already gotten and that it deserves.  Lerner let me down by repeating “dissect” yet again and another variant in the remaining third but of course he is doing so on purpose as part of his poetic constructivist license.  Main thing is that by the final few pages you do feel the joy of his having pulled it all off after all.  I picked a few more nits before we got there.  Some phrases that grated on me, but I suspect I was being generationist there and not allowing the youngsters their new vocabularies for old things. 

10:04 risks having the “concept” or concepts overpower everything, all the stuff about time past and future and present and it risks being too clever by half and too precious and too young and too savy---it risks these things and almost loses it as a high-wire act but yes at last it does pull it all together and it is the achievement few manage in their second important literary work.  It does not read as lightly and as exuberantly as Atocha did.  That was just unexpected pleasure.  This is self-conscious and anxious and careful and risky---all those things but not a great pleasure, somehow.  Enjoyable pretty much, but you’re too aware that the book is too aware that so much is at stake here and we’d better not blow it.  The Marfa scenes could have been elided a bit more.  The whacked out college student in his office might have been cut altogether--but both went too well with Whitman and the wounded soldiers to have lost them.  Still, they almost don’t work and maybe one of them doesn’t.  It’s that sort of book.  But after a debut like Atocha how can you do a next.  Now Lerner has to keep it going.  Or invent something further.  Now I can return to vol. 3 of Knausgaard and relax again and enjoy a work that does not raise all these temporary nervousnesses but which carries us through with the desperate confidence of a forty-year old master rather than a thirty year old wannabe who is, for sure, pretty much there already too.  

First began to discuss Lerner on the first of this month.  Fred sent me a query from DC about it, and a link to the review in the New York Review of Books.

I replied at length.  First Fred and then me in what I paste in below:

1. Poetry: Have you ever taught a course on poetry?   If so, what kind of poetry - 20th century or what?

2.  I just sent you a review of the latest novel by Ben Lerner, the author of "Leaving Atocha Station" and a grad of the Brown U MFA program.   I have such a hard time believing that anyone would publish his kind of "post modern" diffident self-absorption.   The reviewer even admits that there is no story.  It's just a collection of vignettes of slightly fictionalized events in Lerner's life.  But then the reviewer, "a senior editor at Harper's" calls Lerner's writing brilliant and not to be missed.   I'm left thinking that Lerner and this reviewer are two NYC bright lights whose families are related.   

The review reminds me of the NYer review of the Turing film.  After panning the script, the NYer reviewer says one should see it for the "acting."   Oh please!!!!   In films, the casting director and director always select "actors" who fit the role, so that the actor does very little, if any, acting.  

So going to a film because of the acting or reading a novel because the author tosses out a few similes is, to me, scraping the bottom of the barrel for reasons to like the work.

Brown is something very different from when I attended.  I'm not saying I liked Brown back then, but ever since it got to be ultra politically correct and produced writers like Lerner, it has become an embarrassment, I think, to anyone who is truly serious. 

Dec 1

to FJ

1. Well, as Clinton and many other guilty parties would say, depends what you mean by "taught," depends what you mean by "poetry," depends what you mean by "a course."  

. . . .

All that said, I liked this review of Lerner's book and I agree with the writer, Harvey, that Lerner has earned himself a place in some yardstick.  Remember twenty years ago the great white 35 year old writers where the American Psycho guy and such.  Cocaine and wild nights in the city.  I really liked Lerner's first book and I've actually read the first ten or so pages of this new one.  

Why?  He's distinguished himself from the run-of-the-mill products of the creative writing schools of his generation.  Franzen is now 45, even close to 50?  So Lerner is younger and you have to allow him those things we allow the kids.  He's so much better than other recents writers of his age group.  I think because of what Nab said about Gogol---Gogol, Nabokov says that Gogol’s plots are unimportant: “The real plot…lies in the style."  Nowadays I think we like to say because of the voice.  Lerner breaks all the so-called rules of the creative writing classes and trusts his voice, the voice he knows he's making up, as voice.  

By the way I've never read Gogol.  Yikes.  I would much rather read Lerner than try to plow through a new novel by Franzen.  I think spending a lot of time with ol' K Burke warped me in these ways too because his books are offbeat and ultra-capacious, he can throw almost the kitchen sink into his later books and has this habit of stopping after one thought seems finished and saying in print to his reader "So, where are we then?" Sort of like "what shall we do next to pass the time?"  Beckett-like, all of this.  

I did stop trying to be excited by contemporary poetry after a while, though, and went back to prose and novels.  The poets seem to go for instant dazzle as shamelessly as French theorists do.  I'd almost say that Leonard Cohen is the best poet of his/our generation.  Forget Ashbery---he's simply at the top of his coterie, or was.  Coterie politics, that's what so much of what we have been fed as "culture" seems to come down to.  

Could well be that Lerner has been "tapped" by friends of his family in some vein of the publicity biz, but I have enjoyed what I've read so far.  It's fresher than what fills the young writers magazines, as far as I can tell.  By the way, have to send you our friend, Ed Schwartz's, book, "Jews that I knew."  Createspace and very short and fast read.  Catskills humor from his childhood growing up there.  Best section are some Shakespeare plays re-told in yiddishesque dialogues.  

Monday  evening  Nov 10

Big day.  

Decided in the pool this morning to imitate Ben Lerner’s new, second novel.  Reviewer in Bookforum gave it a sweet review and even said “this is a beautiful novel.”  Something like that.  “This is a beautiful and original novel.”  Christian Lorentzen, editor of London Review of Books  Decided that was the trigger my creative process was looking for.  I will buy it, even in hardback, and imitate it, paragraph by paragraph, translate it, that is, “translate” it, ok, from age 35 to age 70.  Why the heck not?  Am looking for a winter project, a wintery project, and have always wanted to do this, to copy someone else’s novel. And I like Lerner, liked his first book a lot because he covered so much of living in Spain that I recognized and liked from my own many times of living in Spain, in Madrid.  Wondered if the title is a direct echo of another book but could only come up with “Leaving the Finland Station” but just checked and the real title of Edmund Wilson’s history of socialism is “To the Finland Station.”  Any way, there it is .  Major writing decision, major moment in this writer’s long and storied life.  

In popular music a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a previously recorded, commercially released (or unreleased) song, by someone other than the original artist or composer.

Why don’t writers do covers?

Paste in here Calasso’s passage about plagiarism in writing.  

---------

The entire history of literature--a secret history that no one will ever be able to write except in part, because authors are too skillful at obscuring themselves--can be seen as a sinuous garland of plagiarism.  By this I do not mean functional plagiarism, due to haste and laziness such as Stendhal’s plundering of Lanzi; but the other kind, based on admiration and a process of physiological assimilation that is one of the best protected mysteries of literature.  The two passages that Baudelaire took from Stendhal are perfectly in tune with his prose and come at a crucial point of his argument.  Writing, like eros, is what makes the bulkheads of the ego sway and become porous.  And every style is formed by successive campaigns--with squads of raiders or entire armies--in the territory of others.  

    --Roberto Calasso, La folie Baudelaire 2008  Trans. Alastair McEwen 2012

One of the great small passages in Roché’s novel that could never make it into the movie, any movie:  

“Jim had a private emotional life of his own which was entirely French and which didn’t intersect the field of their friendship; Jules didn’t want to be concerned in it in any way.”  73  Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché

Valeria Luiselli brings St John of the Cross into her rich mix early in the “novel.”  Good for her.  Awesome in fact.  Brilliant.  The book seems to grow steadily, slowly, even slyly, more and more astonishing.  

“That’s the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree.  It’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.”  Luiselli 35

More on Salter.

The early novel, A Sport and Pastime, seems flawless.  And like much afterwards in Salter's work.  I came into Salter through the letters with Robert Phelps and as I finished reading his memoir, Burning the Days, I wished Salter had had Phelps help him edit the book.  I will admit that it did give me me one thing I was looking for---a personal view on the whole of mid-century (20th) of our lives.  He is about twenty years older than me.  He can write passages of great beauty.  A romantic sensibility at work.  And yet a narrowness of vision and focus.  Maybe also a lack of depth and humor.  A day or so after finishing the book, I heard Leonard Cohen singing one of his classics on the Live in London album.  His spoken introduction is wonderful and funny.  He jokes about taking the full gamut of anti-depressants and says he has studied deeply in all the world's great religions.  "But cheerfulness kept breaking through."  Yeah, I thought.  Come on, James Salter, you say you want us to envy your life but you are never as funny or as charming or as deep, really, as Leonard Cohen.  "We are each of us an eventual tragedy." Salter says two pages from the end of his autobiography.  Well, ok, I see what you mean but, geez, put a bit more of a spin on it.  Shakespeare, Leonard Cohen, Beckett, even Bernhard, manage to do so.  

Perhaps enough Salter for a while.  Finished Part I of his memoir, Burning the Days.  Reminds me somehow of Conrad, why not sure.  Probably never thought I would read so much about flying jets during the Korean war.  Someone will have to write a thesis about the military esthetic in Salter's work.  Conrad, Melville, maybe it is the all-male world portrayed.  Jet pilots, sea captains, crews, military hierarchies, alpha anxieties and performances.

july 2014

Tuesday

I was pleased to read this “It was the voice of the writer, he insisted, that was the first and definitive thing. I had, around this time, seen a van-Gogh exhibition, paintings of his and his contemporaries discussed in his own words, and was struck by his saying, in a letter to his brother, What is alive in art, and eternally alive, is in the first place the painter and in the second place the picture.  Phelps would agree.”  344   Phelps-Salter letters Memorable Days

I came to this conviction.  It might be in fact why I came to like travel lit books over thirty years ago---without knowing why.  I liked the voice of the writer, if I did, no matter what events he described, or where she was, or what meaning the trip had for him or for me.  It is the voice we read for.  

so hot and humid not worth trying to do anything but breathe.  Va swam with Kathie this morning.  Barbara Thierry and her son-in-law to be (perhaps) Sam stopped by to look at the garden work Va would like to have done.  Kirsten Land has not been around that we know but I found one of her big tools in the grass.  Wonder what’s going on with her?  

No arrest yet in the Rumney murder.  Strange.  

Weds  night  super hot day.  Put in the air conditioner all by myself.  Don’t seem to have busted a gut.  Eye doctors in the morning for both of us.  

Can I return to Knausgaard after so much Phelps and Salter?  Have they changed my taste forever?  Ordered a bunch of Salter and Phelps and their favorites.  

I read S & P slowly because they pack in so much.  Here is S on Redford and envy:  very rare to hear someone admit to and discuss Envy.  

“One thing I admire very much about you, {Redford} I said, is how dangerously close you stay to the line between what you might have been and what you are.  That interests me, what do you mean by that? he demanded.  That’s all I can say, I told him.  Something there is in me that hates famous men.  Envy is what it is.”  (161-162)  

Hmm, still Salter was on his own way to becoming such, so what would he think some years later on ?  

Thurs late afternoon.  Guess where Sport and Pastime is set?  Atun!   And Paris, of course.  Perfect passage about Atun being nowhere and therefore of the essence.  Le Chezet looks over to Autun.  Cécile’s grandparents said they had never been there.  At least they had not been in forty or so years.  Ten miles away.  

Wonder if I read it years and years ago?  Or does it just seem so perfect and beautiful as to take your breath away?   Almost every page I want to copy out whole paragraphs.  Read most of today’s chunk at the bottom of the stairs in air conditioned comfort in the village bookstore building, between the crafts shop and the quilt shop.  Toy store now in half of the old bookstore which clerks said went through foreclosure this winter.  Other half being remodeled.  Littleton, proclaim the decorative lamp post flags in pale yellow, is Glad Town.  Be Glad!  

Also set in Nancy.  Have to look that location up.  No, by the end of 11 I know I have not read it before.  Sumptuous.  

4th  Mid-way into Salter’s novel and finished reading his Paris Review interview.  He has mentioned envy more often than any one I’ve ever noticed mentioning it before.  Interesting.  Given him enough time for now.  As much as I like the novel, do I like it as much as I want to like it?  Or as I really like it?  

The interview wasn’t as fascinating as I would have wanted.  Might have been Edward Hirsch’s fault.  Or Salter on deep guard.  Or high guard.  No interest in reading his first two novels about the war and the military.  Fighter pilot.  

well, here and we find another Hooray for Salter.  Last summer in the Aspen Sojourner he says 

“When I was young, I was influenced by the American writers of the time, especially Thomas Wolfe. I’ve gone back and read him, even though he hasn’t remained popular. He also influenced Jack Kerouac [who went to Horace Mann ahead of Salter]. The world really was enlarged for me in my forties when I met Robert Phelps, who was a writer and critic with a particular level of taste. He introduced me to Colette and Isaac Babel. He brought to maturity my interest in reading.”

Wonder what they would both think of Knausgaard?  He might serve as a polar opposite to Salter in so many ways.  One or two generations apart too.  But Wolfe was for a while our Knausgaard.  Like much how Salter dismisses Hemingway in the Paris Review interview.  

Here’s another piece, this one from The Guardian---where he says he’s not at all envious of the usual material goods of fame and fortune.  Turns out the New Yorker gave him a snitty profile last year.  This is from last year, 2013

“Luckily, he is not one for envy, at least not when it comes to material things. "I was talking to my son the other day about yachts and money," he says. "We were discussing some stupendously rich man, with a crew of 10 for his boat. My son was telling me how much it cost just to fill its tank. Well, I couldn't possibly write a line on a boat like that. I'm not equipped to live in such a way. My requirements seem to be much smaller." The New Yorker accused him of nostalgia for a way of life now passed (an accusation based on the fact he once asked guests coming to a New Year's Eve dinner to wear black tie). But this is not the case at all. How could it be? "I'm not nostalgic for it because I have it," he says, waving an arm at the books on the shelf, the pictures on the wall (I meet him in Bridgehampton). His view of American culture? "It's got louder, but it's probably not any worse.”  Guardian

Reading now the New Yorker piece by the same Nick Paumgarten who’s piece on techno music in Berlin I did read a few weeks ago and got irritated by because it seemed to veer way away from the scene in Berlin and not really describe what we all wanted to read about it in the first place.  

Anyway---note:  Salter’s parents named George and Mildred !  

And in 1951 $60,000 would be about 500k today (says Paumgarten).  

Paumgarten really does condescend in the piece---about the novel he says “It’s and odd little book.”  And  “The novel is an Alhambra of narcissism and self-erasure.” [For how long did Paumgarten long to use that image, turn of phrase, and where did he invent it? borrow it?  Is it vaguely anti-Arabic?  It sounds so derived, from somewhere/someone.]  

Having had a wee bit of experience with Saul Bellow myself, though of a much different sort, yet, still, at the same time in Bellow’s life and Salter’s, (1970-72ish) I love this detail:  

“For a while, he and Saul Bellow were close, until Salter felt that the deficit in their relative literary stature gave rise to condescension on Bellow’s part, whereupon he let the friendship die.  ‘I don’t like being a wing man,’ Salter said.” page 9 April 15 2013

Now the closing passage of the piece plays right into my observations about Salter and envy.  In fact I was going to say earlier and I wish I had, that even though he downplays the structure of Sport as just a narrative device, it is clear that

the role of the narrator is to envy Philip Dean his affair with Ann and he says explicitly at the outset that he envies the sort of guy he is long before the affair starts.  So envy for Salter is what he desires others to feel for him and here it comes---the final passage

of Paumgarten’s piece:

“ Salter once told his close friend the poet and novelist William Benton that one of the functions of a writer is to create envy in the reader---envy of the life that the writer is living.  His life and his books have been full of fine hotels and meals, entrancing women and singular men, sophisticated friendships, idle moments in marvelous weather.  He records it coolly, like a star forward who does not celebrate scoring goals:  he acts like he’s been there before.  He also conveys the knowledge that it will add up to nothing.  Everyone and everything will be forgotten.  You come away from his work wondering if you should have lived more, even if living more, in his work, often leads to ruin.”   --Paumgarten  page 10

This could well have been about Bellow by the way.  Probably the whole generation of WWII children and survivors?  

“Snitty” is the complaint I think that Salter used to complain about this profile of his life and career.  

maybe the author of the guardian piece uses that word---I can’t quite locate it in the piece

May 11, 2013 - The New Yorker, for instance, chose to call its long and rather snitty profile of him "The Last Book", which was kind of bald. "I suppose it's a fair ...    May 11, 2013 Rachel Cooke 

Paumgarten makes clear he will refuse to envy Salter and lets show that he does resent him and resents having to write this profile about him.  He does this by emphasizing the way Salter “stole” the marriage of his neighbors, the Rosenthals, and stole details of their own lives.  

Now it is Saturday the 5th.  Just read one next paragraph in Pastime.

Wow.  Talk about the killer placement of one sentence, right in another tender description of anal intercourse:  

“. . . The orchestras of the world beat softly.  The muscle in her behind is tight.  It feels like a string around the shaft.  He pushes in slowly and then, at last, plunges, like the bottom dropping out.  Anne-Marie moans, her head buried in her arms.  After he was dead I thought often of these moments, of this one.  Perhaps it is her moan, her face pressing against the sheet.  He can feel her tight around him, like a noose.  He closes her legs and lies there contented, looking out the window, feeling the tender spasms. “

(130)

Yes, she is content, happy.  

‘I thought of this often after he was dead’ ----  ok first mention of Philip Dean being dead.  

Now I can imagine directing some grad student who is doing a dissertation on Envy in the Novels of James Salter.  Or maybe the Seven Sins, and this particular paragraph makes me say “This is straight out of Genet.  Check it out.”

The other source would be the Irwin Shaw story Salter used to write the movie “Three.”  The three-way structure also suggests the movie Jules and Jim, 1962 movie.  [based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship when young with writer Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, whom Hessel married.  Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books at a bookseller along the Seine in Paris. Later he befriended the elderly Roché, who published his first novel at the age of 74. ]

More importantly, perhaps, it reminds me of Bernhard’s The Loser.  Salter might be good but he’s no Thomas Bernhard.  Maybe.  Have to finish reading the novel.