September 2021
Lignans. Flaxseed.
Swim and wander day today. Casa Alegre all up and booked. Beautiful morning today.
Phil
Not looking for new digs until estate is settled and this house is mine. Likely not until next year. Until then things are up in the air. And I do have to empty that fucking garage full of packed boxes and deal with my own stuff in a storage locker that is costing me $187.50 a month and will likely go up to $250.
Not anticipating a condo. Think rental would be easier. If something breaks or wears out, just call the landlord. Ownership includes too many possible hassles, although I may look into condos and see if something possibly appeals.
Dining facility would be a big plus. I don't cook; I only microwave. So getting genuinely prepared cooked food at one meal of the day seems desirable.
This morning I was hit especially hard by the idea that Peg was once a person, but at 5:30 pm on June 4 became just a thing. Person-to-thing thought was hard to take.
P
——
Toibin has Thomas Mann saying the same thing about mourning the loss of his mother. I'm getting to enjoy more listening to books on audible. Maybe Toibin writes good bestseller novels. Many more than I'd realized. This one on Mann is better than I'd expected. Now understand that Death in Venice came earlier in his career—-the splash of a young writer's energies, way before Magic Mountain. Which I will have no interest in re-reading even after all these years and even knowing that when I read it I had no idea what it was about.
Super quiet Friday morning. Willow on second swim of the week. Cool, beautiful day. More Toibin on Mann. More Musil: he has so many quotables on every page: "Knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion. At bottom, an impermissible mode of conduct: like diposomania, sex mania, homicidal mania, the compulsion to know forms its own character that is off-balance. It is simply not so that the researcher pursues the truth; it pursues him." 231
By 2 pm today I hope it will be clear that Eloy has been able to drive the VW to Casa Alegre. Will there be a hitch at the dealership? Stay tuned.
"[So] . . . 'until further notice you refuse to be a human being?' . . . 'More or less. It has an unpleasant feeling of dilettantism about it.'" 231
Sunday
20 years since the World Trade Center attack. Emma is now 10, so her birth divides the period perfectly. Eliot 7.
VW owners once more. Nostalgia of sorts no doubt. Car now plugged in and ensconced on the epoxy-floored garage of 3601. Alegre rented for two whole weeks now. Next coming and main week of the Balloons.
stair-climber technician here. full shot of coffee feels way too strong now. Mudwater mushrooms ok but seem muddy and you wonder what they do in the gi tract? Beautiful day. Guess I'll go over to Salt Hill for lunch and walk the Lebanon green again. Finish listening to Toibin's biography of Mann. Now that I've looked at another biography, skimmingly, the one by Hayman, I can get a sense of why Toibin the artist wanted to do what he did. He reads all or some of the biographies available and mainly he pores over Mann's diaries. He had many burned when he died but some survived and have given biographers a rich horde. Toibin can now shape the material into a new art work, correcting and elevating the raw materials of the biographies. What better demonstration of art and life than to re-work the life as told by lower-rung scribblers and chroniclers? And the largest question, shaped by Boswell I suppose but ancients also—-can a biography be a work of art in its own right? Zenith's Pessoa I could propose. Probably Ellmann's Joyce would be nominated.
Caffeine chatter. Email from Nancy Reed. Aunt Zamova will be 91 on the 29th of this month. In a memory care residence in Colorado. Teresa wants to shower her with birthday cards and notes. Guess we could include a recent photo of us just to add to her confusion. Rich mentioned that he remembers things that happened to him when he was seven more clearly than what he had for dinner a day ago. Maybe a photo of faces would spark something in Zamova's memory. Who can tell any of these things?
Tristan the tech. All-ways sold to a corporation NSM. No one is happy about it. Will that outfit close before we no longer need a technician for the Stannah?
Why am I so susceptible to Nicholas's book suggestions? here is the latest on Instagram: "A Theatrical ghost story, an encounter with the anima (Jung thought Priestley his best lay interpreter) and a redeemed new life in the new reprint of Priestley’s novel." At this moment I welcome it to shake me away from Thomas Mann and his biographers—-what a tangle of interpretation that seems to be—the biography rather than or along with the novels. Symbolic of mid-century frustrations? Anyway, would I like Priestley? Have seen his name for years. And if Jung praised him, then he is a must read !!!
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/08/archives/there-really-was-a-super-suicide-society-there-was-a-super-suicide.html
"In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon school came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left." page one of Knowles A Separate Peace
decided I will read all of Knowles and forget about Mann. Profile of Toibin in the New Yorker made me respect him less. He's an artful writer, and assigmentist! or reporter. Musil's essayism helped too. Did I ever know there was a movie made of the book? Clarifying interviews with Knowles made around the time of the movie release, '72. His career never reached the popularity of the first book. Indicative of what might have been, or what maybe usually happens to INFP writers who manage to write and hit it and then miss a lot (just think of how many there are—-the writer down in Keene, name now forgotten, the novelist at La Salle when I was there, no fame whatsoever that I could tell and yet a steady output over years. Knowles born in 1926, exactly a generation before us. He published it when he was thirty-three.
Phil asked about Pessoa after reading the NYRB article.
I said—It was a very gradual process. In '82 or '86 we were in Barcelona for a while and I went to a British bookstore there often. I bought a book of Pessoa's poetry, bi-lingual edition. ButI took little interest in it, put off I think by the long introduction's discussion of the heteronymns. I suppose after that I would see his name here or there. Merton translated a fewof his poems but I learned that much later. I think sometime in the mid-90s I saw reference to The Book of Disquiet and got interested in finding a copy of that. That period waswhen I was consciously looking for translated books, especially Spanish and Latin American. I started to notice the translations of a British woman, Margaret Jull Costa. She's nowrecognized and is even famous for her translations from the Spanish and Portuguese. So I must have made an effort to find the book of Disquiet about then. It blew me away---a failed novel, or a novel in fragments, or not a novel but no one could say what except that it had marks of genius almost hitherto unnoticed in the larger literary world. etc etc Richard Zenith's translation came out in '91 in England. In the late 90s I'd say, more and more people started talking about Pessoa, on blogs I guess. Blogs discussing books were starting up back then. NowI think most have faded. In Disquiet Pessoa voices so well the late 20th C moods of anxiety, emptiness, weariness, pseudo reality, aimlessness that other writers were voicing and thefact that he did it by himself at the start of the century without any recognition made him a kind of lone wolf figure way before Kerouac etc. Just became interesting to find out about.
Passage that gives perspective I was looking for :
"Musil's great novel, The Man Without Qualities, easily challenges The Magic Mountain in boldness of conception and visionary reach. Like Mann, he is a master of the essayistic voice. At his best, he is such a rigorous stylist that after him Kafka may appear immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious, and Walter Benjamin hermetic. We know that he considered Mann and overrated hack, little better than Musil's countryman Stefan Zweig. They seemed to share at most an interest in adolescent sexuality—-Musil's claim that Törless's storyline merely provided the occasion for abstract inquiry can be discounted.
Knowles—-A Separate Peace "“Here the road turned to the left and became dirt. It proceeded along the lower end of the playing fields, and under the pale night glow the playing fields swept away from me in slight frosty undulations which bespoke meanings upon meanings, levels of reality I had never suspected before, a kind of thronging and epic grandeur which my superficial eyes and cluttered mind had been blind to before. They unrolled away impervious to me as though I were a roaming ghost, not only tonight but always, as though I had never played on them a hundred times, as though my feet had never touched them, as though my whole life at Devon had been a dream, or rather that everything at Devon, the playing fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other buildings and all the people there were intensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”
swoon swoon, my kind of moody writing indeed. so hoping that it will be present in at least some of his other books. have order copies of them all!!!
Musil has his essayism and is the greater writer, do doubt. But someone like Knowles writes "for me" as do very few other writers. Would I have loved to have been him, have had a writing career such as he did? Much harder to know that.
Did we read A Separate Peace at LaSalle before you went off to Exeter? Or did I read it after you went? It was published in 1959. Just re-read it. Always paired in my memory with Agee's A Death in the Family. I'd now say S Peace is better. Knowles had that one magic hit, his first book. After a slow start it caught the wave of the times and sales went out of the atmosphere. Gave him a comfortable life with no need to work. Six books followed but none of them ever came close to it. Career very similar in that regard to a writer here in NH. Had a super hit on the first book thereafter not so much. Guess there are plenty like that in lit history. Ellison.
Surprise visit today of Va's sister and husband from Texas. They phone two days ago from Albany saying hey we're coming! We grumbled to ourselves last night that we didn't feel really up to
it---still decompressing from our kids visit. But also good to see them of course. Cooler weather, leaves turning, pumpkins out.
Phil confirms what I had remembered——
I know that I read SP after I had started at Exeter. It could have even been after I graduated. I remember that when I read it I recognized the bridge Knowles used to describe where the "accident" occurred. However, in real life I don't think there was any tree around the bridge. It was in the middle of soccer fields and crossed a river (the Squamscott River??) that one had to cross on the way to the school's football stadium.
The only other thing I remember from the book is the unusual hat that the central character wore and that he lived in NYC. Clothes and NYC were evidently meaningful to young Philip. Other than that, it's a blank. Then again, so is most of my past life these days. I remember some unusual events but little else. For example, I remember getting hit by a car when I was riding my bike in Lavale when I was 8 or so. I turned in front of the car. I was the guilty person, not the car driver. After I got hit I remember looking up at the undercarriage of the car as I lay in the road (old Route 40 on its way to Frostburg) and wondering if I was dead.
So you may have read SP at Lasalle, but I'm pretty sure it was well after I had left for Exeter.
One hit wonders: They certainly exist in the music world, and it's not hard to imagine that a lot of writers have only one thing to say that appeals to others - just like rocknroll singers/bands. I had five things to say, but I don't think those five things interested others very much. Your reviews were very nice.
"Hell is others." I'm willing to bet that Sartre wrote that when he was at least in his 70s. When one is younger, we like others a lot more than we do when we get past 70. Yet, being totally on one's own as I am is no fun. There is a constant feeling of emptiness in every day.
Somewhat cooler here, but it doesn't feel or look like fall yet in this area. Temps usually still hit the 80s at some point during the day. The warm, muggy, sinful south!
Wonder whatever happened to Joe Boyle
P
———
So no one could imagine the impact SP had on me. I easily plugged myself into the narrator and Phil into Finny, especially since he had abandoned me to go off to Exeter, of all places. I never had heard of it and then a year later he was there and I was reading all about it in Knowles novel. Too personal and uncanny for me to take. I found I had a vocation and took up a life of prayer. Not much fasting, but lots of moody praying and meditating and walking. I was abandoned and jealous-envious that Phil had gotten out! The novel spooks me now because of all of this. I had forgotten all about Leper's nervous breakdown. That sort of thing must have been in the air a lot in the sense that '56 being twenty years after '46, many were experiencing PTSD long before we understood much about it, or that it got defined and studied. The novel explores the anxiety of being readied to go off to war in those kids. Brilliantly too. Sensitively. Somehow it almost seems I "ingested" the novel deeply enough to re-live it in the years at Elkins Park, a version of Devon that merged for me the memories of high school with the new experiences of college, formation, monastic militarism, and general anxious cluelessness about everything, especially my emotions, my feelings, my sense of being lost within the secure yet confining bubble of Catholic religious life. All male. A continuation of high school without the softening of family and town roots. Strangers were we all and a bit older, more developed, super-pious and super charged.
—-
Yup, he's always "Rabbit" to me, too.
Just tried to pick some Lasallite at random? Joe had some brains. Did he use them? What did he do for employment. My interest is totally quixotic so I don't want to bother anyone who might mention my question to Joe……P
First to arrive is an old bantam paperback, yellow edges, of Knowles Spreading Fires. next up not bantam but Ballantine
Not surprising at all that this passage floats up, because I knew from the start in SP all that long ago that Knowles knew me:
"Even then he knew what jealousy was. Jealousy was an expression of inadequacy: people are envious because they are deeply frightened, frightened that they don't possess enough to survive by themselves, to flourish with no one to lean on." 17 Such a key meme in SP and I'll bet in all of Knowles's books.
Watched the newer movie of Separate Peace on YouTube. Some added material about the war, some rearrangement of material,
and much removal of ambiguity, of all kinds. Could even say it has been schoolified to go with the twenty years of massive popularity on high school reading lists. Earlier movie stayed more closely to the text. And kept the remembered past as frame. Later version used the mock trial as the lead-in and partial frame. Judgment over ambivalence. And yet I have to admit the one frame that brought me to tears in the second version was when Gene sees their empty dorm room, bare, mattresses rolled up. Something there reminded me greatly of the bare, emptiness of dorms in general when empty, and of Anselm Hall. The death of Finney got re-enacted for me in my abrupt departure from Anselm Hall. Taking the train from Philly to DC and then Cumberland.
28 Dave's birthday. Short visit with him. Emma drew a picture of him with two half-faces in one: Big Daddy Fantastic and Papa.
Short phone call to Jim. Was on his way out to dinner, sounded like his old self.
Phil J says his great grandfather may have helped found the KKK.
Phil H says his father used his law degree to get into the FBI. Ran some family 5&10s with his brother, camp director organist.
Finished Knowles Spreading Fires. 1974. 14 years after Separate. Had I somehow read it before. The whole plot of the crazy Canadian butler in the South of France sounds so familiar, perhaps I did. Hyper Catholic mother controlling Brendan's sense of guilt and sexuality. Hints at more than friendship with Xavier, the unreliable Frenchman. Resonances pinged and then forgotten about. Can underline passages I might have written. Would have written. Good descriptions of waking nightmares, anxiousness, "he knew where he was but he did not really know who he was." 114 "The aching void at the center of his self was now widening, deepening; 115
"Madness: the most contagious disease in the world." 81 Spreading Fires, 1974
—
Story based very loosely on my grandmother who came to Cumberland from Montgomery Alabama with her new husband who had was from Florence, Alabama but had studied medicine in New York City (where he heard about a growing, thriving town named Cumberland). So nothing Appalachian in their backgrounds. She lost a child that she took back to Alabama, but it was her fourth (of 7) child. Nor was she religious so the godliness vs Satanism came from something I probably heard or read somewhere. Her father had been the adjutant to General Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil war. Forrest later founded the KKK and I expect my great grandfather played a role in that, too……….P
Passed down. Because Dad's family was southern family history was important and known, traced back to 1620 or so altthough the Jones name only traced back to some clerk in the Bank of England around 1866. Mom, who was an orphan, knew a little of her biological family's history but not much. Her mother was from Irish-American family (O'brien)and father was from German family (Meuller) that had emigrated from Heidelburg to Philadelphia. And that's about all mom knew. Mom's mother died when Mom was 2. That was in 1910. Her father, Harry Meuller, who had been a peripatetic photographer, disappeared soon thereafter, and Mom never knew what happened to him. The family that adopted her were best friends with Mom's grandmother, also dead. They were Irish Catholic and ran a funeral home in a suburb of Philadelphia. Mom and dad met when she took a job in a lab at the Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia. Dad was a student at that med school.
KKK: No one in the family ever said whether William Ford had helped found the KKK; they would only say that he had been Forrest's adjutant during the war. He later became the postmaster in Montgomery, AL.......... P
Knowles in Esquire 25 years after the publication:
Gene is suspected of having provoked this “accident” out of buried resentment, and sometimes he thinks so himself. One of their group meanwhile goes off to the military service and soon after creeps back to Devon, “psycho.” And then the students stage a mock trial to try Gene, and the book moves on to its climax. It is a schoolboy story and it is also an allegory about the sources of war.
A Separate Peace is one long and abject confession, a mea culpa, a tale of crime—if a crime had been committed—and of no punishment, or only interior punishment.
These responses, of course, are the greatest reward A Separate Peace can bring or ever will bring to me. The book has affected millions of lives, influenced them deeply, modified what they saw and felt in the world about them. The ultimate importance of A Separate Peace is that it has reached out to the readers who need it. "
My short story "Annie Ford's Northern Home" was based very loosely on my grandmother. Her name was Annie Ford and she came from Montgomery, Alabama. She lost a child in Cumberland, which she regarded as a northern town, and took it south for burial. But it wasn't her first child and Annie wasn't particularly religious. So back in the mid-1970s where the hell did I come up with those ideas about Satan in a Pennsylvania coal town?
I really didn't know until I got in a conversation yesterday with a guy from Italy who told me that he liked visiting American state capitol buildings. Bingo! In the 1970s I visited the state capitol buildings of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and I think those visits triggered my foray into god vs the devil.
In Annapolis I was amazed at how modest and open the capitol building was. Dating back to 1772, the building felt very open to the public and modest in size. Its windows were clear glass so people could look from outside the building right into the Assembly and Senate chambers. There was a real Jeffersonian feeling to the building: a meeting place for citizen-politicians who would discuss things openly, in full view of any interested citizens. It was built of red brick with a white wood dome.
In contrast to that. the feeling of modesty and openness in Annapolis, the Pennsylvania state capitol building seemed a massive stone temple that celebrated not citizen involvement, but, rather, the wealth and power of the state when the building was begun in 1902 and opened in 1906. The windows, even the overhead domes, were all stained glass so no one could just look inside, and the dark marble-walled chambers reeked of the state's wealth. Light in the chambers was provided by lamps, not clear windows on all levels and it did have multiple levels.
So I think that's where the Satan vs God aspect of my story came from. To me, there was something Satanic and morgue-like about the huge Pennsylvania capitol building and something fresh, open, and living about the much smaller and simpler Maryland state capitol. I didn't think of the Maryland building as godlike when in Annapolis. I think that connection only came later, when I went through the building in Harrisburg and felt a connection in it to digging deep in the earth and using fire to create power over people. But I'm pretty certain the contrast of the two buildings is what set off those religious ideas that permeate my short story. And I'm pretty sure I would never have remembered that without talking with the Italian guy who brought up state capitol buildings.
Phil
———
30 september Thursday
Who should I see at MB parking lot as we were leaving around 1 pm but Ethan Paquin and his newish wife, Ellen? He had been on my mind the past week or two! Now living in Mississippi where she took a job, and reading books on solo ocean voyaging. Through with all past incarnations!
Hope he will meet for a coffee or lunch but doubtful or he would have
replied to my emails from this afternoon. Very glad to see him, though.
Good quick talk with Jim yesterday too, or Tuesday, around 4.
Knowles, Summer: 28 reaching. That was all he asked for out of life, to be allowed to go toward those elements which gave it meaning and made it full of wonder.
John Knowles, the third of four children of James Myron and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles, was born in Fairmont, West Virginia. He has an older brother and sister who are twins, and a younger sister.
