August

 Hesse, Steppenwolf.  Working after Demian even though I thought at first it would not.  Tom Crewe's New Life barely remembered a few weeks later.  News that Lars Iyer has the Weil novel coming out next week.  Will it be better or worse than the Nietzsche book?  New translation of Mann's stories have reignited that spark.  Maybe after Steppenwolf, right now along with.  

Late on a Sunday morning.  Breeze, bright, dry.  Willow out on the swing swatting mosquitoes before our daily stroll on Walhausmann bvd.  

20 August 2023

More of Joe's ms.  Seems I can't forego this scribbling habit.  And the quote from June on the life of the Intuitive so strikes notes and home that I must paste it out and comment on it at length.  Or at least intend to.  

#Jung: "All #intuitives must learn to bear a high degree of emptiness. Otherwise they are not able to grasp something with their #intuition. As soon as their #consciousness is filled with content, intuitions cannot get through or are weakened. Actually it would be better for intuitives to see nothing and hear nothing. Then their perceptions could emerge via the #unconscious and their intuitions could achieve a high degree of accuracy. But then they would immediately be at risk of suffering hubris and inflation, after previously having been tortured by feelings of non-existence, i.e. by the state of emptiness. There is hardly an intuitive who is not familiar with this feeling.

Because it is difficult to withstand the emptiness, intuitives very often have feelings of inferiority. If they realized that the emptiness is fullness, it would be easier to bear. They would not have these feelings of inferiority and accordingly would avoid the compensatory inflation. The emptiness is an unperceived abundance – a fullness – of possibilities. But it creates an unpleasant feeling, and then intuitives often overfill life with activity in order to numb that feeling. They might overeat to compensate for the inner emptiness. Sometimes they have a concrete feeling of physical emptiness. It belongs to this type. When they feel empty, they ought to say to themselves: I float like a lotus blossom on the surface of the water's depths. But they fear the possibilities that lie in the depths. The intuitive is often too afraid of the possibilities."

~C.G. Jung, "Emptiness and Intuition," Reflections on the Life & Dreams of C.G. Jung by Aniela Jaffé

You made me laugh about Jewess. I knew it was a freighted word when I wrote it. I'll probably take it out, but your reaction made me curious. Did you react to the feminine aspect of -ess? Like stewardess or actress? Or was it a reaction to a non-Jew referring to a woman as a Jewess? Truth is, she was kind of a classic Jewesss. I looked it up and found a little round table discussion about it. It's a word that might be coming into vogue again. Take a look: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/is-it-cool-to-say-jewess

And the Bob with one o is too good.

I don't know how you do the whole house full of family thing. I've avoided that like a rash. But Wendy used to fill the house almost every weekend, and I suppose part of me enjoyed it. How funny, btw, to think of Storyland. I haven't heard of kids going there in ages.

I'm still fascinated by writing this silly autobiography. It takes me back to my past in a peculiar way. Maybe one of the gifts of growing old is an ability to time-travel in that way. It's also why no one wants to hear old people's stories. Anyway, I am in Africa these days and I find the whole experience of the Peace Corps was terrifying. It's a wonder we survived. I think from the 20-25 people who went from the U.S., only about 10 did the whole cabbage. Most people got sick or simply left. As a piece of writing it's difficult....just kind of stories from grandpa. But we'll see what it amounts to in the end.

I'm going to be back in NH around Sept 1-10 or so. Let's try to get together. I have a couple doctors' appointments. BTW, reading Edmund Wilson's biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Very good. The next new hot NY book is going to be one my agents represent---the Coworker, by McFadden. Check it out.

Here's more of The Great Work!

he jewess ok piece is ok but I found one last week before I wrote you from a Jerusalem paper that said of course it is not cool because it belongs to that tradition of treating women as exotics or exotiques of various sorts---colonialism I guess.  Or Said's Orientalism---which I think has had its day and is now passé, but I have no claim to know these things. 

I had meant to say also-before reading this latest---what a difference ten years makes, meaning as a younger sprite the book says nothing , Nothing!!, about Vietnam.  That hung over our age group like a sword of damocles---is that a workable phrase?   You are so carefree you can just fall into west Africa like it is a westchester golf club.  

The details are phenomenal, grampy.  Really sharp and amazing, still.  Recall how you used them in the Viper Tree.  And your disclaimer about having no intro at all into writing is also disarming and genuine.  The photo of you costumed as a cro-magnon in brown jeans is priceless too.  Great fun all around.  The heat would have sent me home in one day.  Astonishing how you could survive it.  Youth.  You and Joe Conrad.  

——-

so the author of the hour now is Lawrence Durrell.  Listened to Justine last Tuesday on the rainy day off.  Aciman's Introduction to it gave the imprimatur sought.  Published in 2020 by Faber.  Missed that.  He talks mainly about the city of course but also gives Lawrence the golden palm.  That is saying something given his role earlier as Proust devotee without par.  So slow reading Durrell should take me ten years or so.  I will have nothing else to worry about and I will "float like a lotus blossom on the surface of the water's depths."  

The Black Book is the bible I savor today.  Something to keep me from spinning about the sale of 11 Rogers Street.  Why so involved with that?? 

Inferiority and overeating.  Jung is brilliant.  

21 August Monday Will Larry make for a great imaginary friend?  I have the Black Book, the Letters to Miller, the MacNevin biographical tome, Justine and the two earliest on order. Robert Musil was ok for a while.  Will Larry last longer? 

22 August  Tuesday   almost 6 pm  kids at the beach for the afternoon, gorgeous day at last, cold and bright.  

Durrell:  the first novel arrived and have read the intro and after.  Pied Piper of Lovers.  Like the suggestion of the scholar James A Brigham that all the prose novels constitute one huge work of living and dying into new lives—like the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead.  The Art of Dying and Coming Forth into a New Life.  Durrell our great In-Between author.  In between everything as the British culture is dying, the empire, the European colonial age and so far as literary and art movements go he is after the great early age of modernism and before post-ww2 and so in-between there too.  Between modernism and deconstructionism?  whatever.  I like the idea of following his whole career book by book with the implements at hand to kibbutz and comment and eavesdrop.  My new best friend, my great imaginary possibly best friend.  In books.  All the intuitive empathies of a great reader.

Walsh sees the corpse from Bhutan being carried to the grave, the conch shell blasted to announce the procession.  Daily mass in grade school with the catafalque draped in black, guarded by six huge candlesticks with tall wax candles topped by the brass drip catchers and white flames flickering. Dies Irae being sung by the lone woman at the organ up in the loft of the nearly empty, cavernous church.  

The arrival of Aunt Brenda picks up Durrell's narrative a bit.  Walsh will have more to respond to and expand with.  The young writer Durrell sounds old fashioned British, imitating his models and voicing the colonial hill station far distant and dated culture and at the same time sounds young and uninitiated, groping his way into adult life.  

By the time we're into Book II we can see how sell the book would work for a creative writing class.  It could in fact be the syllabus.  Every twenty pages the assignment could be—now write like this in some way, try out doing what he's doing here.  End of Book I Durrell teaches himself to leave behind narrative rules and drift off into anxiety/dream/disarray/modernism without yet knowing the name of it.  

Note from cousin Nancy that Rick, Teresa's brother, has a brain tumor.

The whole chapter III about Ruth and her brother Gordon just vibrate so splendidly.  Walsh's initiation into No Shame.  In the water and on the cliff overlooking it.  Nearly naked, tanned splendid bodies, dolphin-like joys of being alive.  Being together.  Now I see from the first footnote in the next chapter that Honi soit qui mal y pense shows up.  That is exactly what I had just been thinking to myself about the whole Gordon episode and tale about their family and their father.  And the message about no shame Ruth sent to Walsh.  He is fifteen but feels so excited and honored that Gordon treats him as if they are the same age.  Ruth is seventeen so Gordon must be eighteen or nineteen.  How much we stretch at fourteen to meet and match these admired, idolized, slightly elder kids we meet.  

IV  "competition and training bored him "  Durrell  Loved reading his whole account of first years at school in UK.  Now he is in London, it is gray and dismal, he drinks too much and walks everywhere.  

Posted photo of Charlie McCarthy.  My oldest and bestest friend?  Perfect image of the narcissist notion of friend?  

Eric Johnson's visit yesterday was short and very sweet.  His two girls with him.  He goes back to '98 with me and remembers lots of crazy things.  Also phone Dawson and we said hello to him on the face call.  He got married last summer in Littleton, stateside version so his VT family could meet his bride.  

Short note back from Lars Iyer.  His big new book out today, great article on him in the WaPo.  Great photos too.  He's lean and older.  Says his next book will be about romance.  So far my plan is to stay with Durrell, postpone Weil.  I think I'm not as interested in her as I should be for this book.  But maybe if I try a few pages Iyer will change my mind.  

Still really enjoying Piper—-generic and classic tale of setting up in London among the artists and looking for his vocation to become a writer.  Interesting too to read in tandem, a few pages a week, Joe's autobio about how being the the peace corps got him started writing.  

Wed, Aug 30, 4:05 PM (18 hours ago)

Hi Bob,

Nice to hear from you. Appreciate your moral support in the past. 

I didn't actually get to Patomos (the story is in the novel Dogma), but did live among monks in a house for seven years, in Manchester (in Exodus) On the train back from Manchester now, where I went to visit the old house for the first time in twenty years.

Best,

Lars 

Hi Lars

Ok.  Forgot those details in the earlier books.  I lived with monks for only three years, right after high school.  Joined up with the LaSallian Christian Brothers, exited two years into university via a mild nervous breakdown--anxiety attack it be called today.  Your Nietzsche and now Weil speaking to Moi and some thousands of others.  

Bob 

Ah, so you had three monk years! I have seven among monks, though I didn't join an order. I was a guestmater in an usual house, which I describe in My Weil ...

L

from Dennis  

The day to day doesn't change. Plugging away. Waiting.

Two recent works that went in different directions. I wonder, often, what I would have become if I had great ambition. But I don't and when I try to have it, I retreat further into the reclusive life.