--WHY--
Around noon on Sunday I was reading Erwin Panofsky's ET IN ARCADIA EGO: Poussin and The Elegiac Tradition because I am going up to see the Poussin exhibit at the Metropolitan next Friday.
In the essay Panofsky traces the way that Latin phrase has been translated down through the years. He begins with Sir Joshua Reynolds showing a new painting to his friend Dr Johnson in which the Latin phrase appears inscribed on a tombstone. Johnson thinks it is nonsensical: "I am in Arcadia." However,Reynolds tells him that it is far from nonsensical and King George III who had seen the painting the day before said, "ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia."
AN ASIDE: those of us who were in Dublin in the early 1960s learned to always understand Dr. Johnson, with Patrick Kavanagh's dismissal, "that English bore."
Panofsky's essay could serve as a wonderful outline for a course of readings... and I will not belabor that or any other aspect of it.
I was taken by the way that Panofsky in clear crisp sentences takes his reader through an understanding of the word Arcady and how this place, "in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born--- a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss. But no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is."
Eventually, Panofsky will get to the two paintings by Poussin that include this inscription. At the Met only the first of these will be on exhibit as the latter one was too fragile to travel from Paris.
In the painting at the Met we will be reminded as Panofsky writes, "The phrase Et in Arcadia ego can still be understood to be voiced by Death personified, and can still be translated as "even in Arcady I, Death hold sway," without being out of harmony with what is visible in the painting itself."
But, when next in Paris there will be the chance to see the second painting and there see the truth embodied in a very beautiful paragraph by Panofsky, "Thus Poussin himself, while making no verbal change in the inscription, invites, almost compels, the beholder to mis-translate it by relating the ego to a dead person instead of to the tomb, by connecting the et with ego instead of with Arcadia, and by supplying the missing verb in the form of a vixi or fui instead of a sum. The development of his pictorial vision had outgrown the significance of the literary formula, and we may say that those who under the impact of the Louvre picture, decided to render the phrase Et in Arcadia ego as "I, too, lived in Arcady," rather than as "Even in Arcady, there am I," did violence to Latin grammar but justice to the new meaning of Poussin's composition."
And the result, "Poussin's Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment."
Panofsky it should also be mentioned will sweep the reader through Waugh, Fragonard, Diderot, Goethe...
--WHY--
The one painting I am looking forward to seeing is LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING which is usually in the National Gallery in London and which I look at every January. It depicts three men on a road: one walking, one resting and another fixing his sandal.
For more than a year I have been writing about those three men. It is the only thing that still holds my interest in European things. I can not imagine such a painting taking place in Arizona, say, south of Tombstone. I have not discovered how to make vivid a tall dark man striding at the end of day towards Tombstone by the side of the road dressed in shredded rags because I can not stop him to pause to adjust the rope that binds his waist.
--WHY--
Later on Sunday, I was waiting in a Walgreen parking lot and read Mary Engelbreit's editorial in MARY ENGELBREIT'S HOME COMPANION magazine. On the cover readers were invited to: HEARTFELT & HANDMADE 47 Ways to put a little love in your rooms
and WOW! our annual artist's studios tour.
The editorial was occasioned by those artist tours, "It's always been one of my favorite quotes: "I don't believe in art," avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp once said. "I believe in artists."
So do we. The idea of "art" itself can all too easily turn into a frozen, abstract, past-tense concept. Art with a capital "A," a fossil that's now safely on ice in a museum, viewed maybe once a year by a bus load of school kids.
Art is kind of like marriage. It loses its zing without a steady infusion of fresh renewable energy from everyone involved. It's energy, supplied by the audience as much as the artist, that can keep a work of art alive long after the museums have crumbled to dust. And it's this energy that we pay tribute to in our annual artists' studios issue."
--WHY--
Yesterday, today, tomorrow--- these are servants' categories. For the idle man, sumptuously settled in the Inconsolable, and whom, every moment torments, past, present, and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease, identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation and monotonous in its persistence.
from A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY by E. M. Cioran
Monday, February 25, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET EST MORT AND THE LIFE OF RILEY
ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET EST MORT.
The headline and front page on the two major French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro.
*
Five years ago I interviewed Robbe-Grillet in Paris. I brought along my friend David Powis who has been living in Paris for almost thirty years and who in his spare time has been translating Celine's great comic BAGATELLES POUR UN MASSACRE for people like myself who do not have a full access to this great literary work, this one book that will never be published (who really knows) in English because it is more shocking, more scandalous than anything that De Sade ever wrote and at one time De Sade was the standard against which all such books were measured. I am not going to tell you what makes Celine's great book unpublishable... but it is equal to Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal...
*
You can read my interview in Bookforum (Spring 2003). I was criticized for supposedly mis-spelling Julian Green's name though it was the copy editors at Bookforum who added an e to his surname, and for mentioning the fact that my daughter was studying at a Sacred Heart boarding school in Nantes... for reasons of space the editors at Bookforum cut the complete exchange with Robbe-Grillet which had elaborated on my experience of taking my daughter out to the boarding school in Nantes and how the conversation with the head-mistress of the school had turned to Mr Robbe-Grillet and though she herself had never read Robbe-Grillet she was sure his books were in the school library, where indeed they were, with their pages un-cut and as innocent then of grubby fingers as on the day they arrived at the school, their purchase subsidized by the French state.
*
Much more of the conversation with Robbe-Grillet was taken up with the simple fact that while his name is known he does not exist as a read author but as name on a list of modern novelists and without the academics he would have no audience... Robbe-Grillet both understood this but was still proud of the moneyhis books earned in the over-seas markets and was doubly pleased with the chateau where his papers were being stored and how he had gotten the French state to set up this permanent reminder of his stalking the planet.
*
The interview had a ritualistic sneer from Robbe-Grillet against Chirac and Bush--- but that is almost required-- he probably imagined, if you wanted to maintain a revenue stream from American academics... and Robbe-Grillet was no dummy when it came to cultivating American revenue streams as he had long watched hucksters like Derrida, Kristeva and all those other French intellectuals con American academics out of big bucks for doing very little actual work... as do the Irish poets and novelists... it is always a delight to hear them go on about the sinking American dollar and how they grub about to be paid in Euros
*
Also, the interview as published couldn't go into the detailed pleasure that Robbe-Grillet took in his sharing of the young girls who has wife would bring back to their luxurious house to satisfy her sexual needs and then as part of the marriage bargain she would pass them along to her husband... and while he was telling this--- I thought this the height of French... do I dare use the word sophistication--- he was also leafing through the pages of novels by the Argentinian novelist Juan Jose Saer to show us how Saer had marked certain passages that were written in homage to the style of Robbe-Grillet and Robbe-Grillet had slipped into talking about himself in the third person which is a particular gift.
*
Some months later, Robbe-Grillet showed up at NYU and my wife went along to a public talk and after, she went up to him and a little flustered introduced herself in English and Robbe-Grillet brushed her aside claiming he would not speak English at which point Anna switched to her very good French and was talking about her husband who had just interviewed you in Paris but she was quickly cut off by, as Anna said, "this stocky old cunt who must have been his NYU handler." By chance she had touched Robbe-Grillet's elbow and Anna said,it reminded her of a skinny chicken bone with loose skin...
*
I tried to console Anna by reminding her that the French department at NYU used to be or for all I know was still run by a guy who named his dog Beckett and who fancies himself a reader of modern literature. That department at NYU is a genuine killing field of literature, of sensitivity, of culture: I once suggested to this guy that they offer a course on the two great mountains of modern French literature Proust and Celine.. and the howl of derision was satisfying--- the only department more fraudulent than the French department might be the German Department or could it be the Dance Department... the choices are endless when it comes to NYU.
*
The most controversial part of the interview was Robbe-Grillet's dismissal of Richard Howard as a translator because of his homosexuality and as a result of how awful are his translations of Baudelaire and other French writers.
I have long suspected that Richard Howard is not that good of a translator and one only has to compare his translation of IN THE LABYRINTH with Christine Brooke- Rose's to see the difference or one can compare Howard's translations of Claude Simon with Helen Lane's versions--- Howard from Cincinnati has a provincial's understanding of French... and while he has been prolific he does not have access to the whole orchestra of the French language... one would almost say he has a limited vocabulary or at least he has access to a smaller vocabulary than did Helen Lane or Christine Brooke-Rose.
However he has been hard working and we have to be grateful in some way for even his imperfect versions of so many French works of literature but it must also be remarked that his very presence--- coupled with publisher's laziness--- discouraged others from competing for the work and of course he had personal financial resources not available to many another translator
*
I shall think of Alain Robbe-Grillet when later today I watch his LA BELLE CAPTIVE. It is truly awful and does feature artwork by Magritte which was on display in his house when David and I went to see him now five years ago.
*
NO, I will not watch the movie. I looked at the trailer... it is too awful... wooden acting, even in those seconds: splattered blood, young female breasts, leering old men, a girl on a motorcycle...
What a revolting development, as Riley would say.
The headline and front page on the two major French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro.
*
Five years ago I interviewed Robbe-Grillet in Paris. I brought along my friend David Powis who has been living in Paris for almost thirty years and who in his spare time has been translating Celine's great comic BAGATELLES POUR UN MASSACRE for people like myself who do not have a full access to this great literary work, this one book that will never be published (who really knows) in English because it is more shocking, more scandalous than anything that De Sade ever wrote and at one time De Sade was the standard against which all such books were measured. I am not going to tell you what makes Celine's great book unpublishable... but it is equal to Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal...
*
You can read my interview in Bookforum (Spring 2003). I was criticized for supposedly mis-spelling Julian Green's name though it was the copy editors at Bookforum who added an e to his surname, and for mentioning the fact that my daughter was studying at a Sacred Heart boarding school in Nantes... for reasons of space the editors at Bookforum cut the complete exchange with Robbe-Grillet which had elaborated on my experience of taking my daughter out to the boarding school in Nantes and how the conversation with the head-mistress of the school had turned to Mr Robbe-Grillet and though she herself had never read Robbe-Grillet she was sure his books were in the school library, where indeed they were, with their pages un-cut and as innocent then of grubby fingers as on the day they arrived at the school, their purchase subsidized by the French state.
*
Much more of the conversation with Robbe-Grillet was taken up with the simple fact that while his name is known he does not exist as a read author but as name on a list of modern novelists and without the academics he would have no audience... Robbe-Grillet both understood this but was still proud of the moneyhis books earned in the over-seas markets and was doubly pleased with the chateau where his papers were being stored and how he had gotten the French state to set up this permanent reminder of his stalking the planet.
*
The interview had a ritualistic sneer from Robbe-Grillet against Chirac and Bush--- but that is almost required-- he probably imagined, if you wanted to maintain a revenue stream from American academics... and Robbe-Grillet was no dummy when it came to cultivating American revenue streams as he had long watched hucksters like Derrida, Kristeva and all those other French intellectuals con American academics out of big bucks for doing very little actual work... as do the Irish poets and novelists... it is always a delight to hear them go on about the sinking American dollar and how they grub about to be paid in Euros
*
Also, the interview as published couldn't go into the detailed pleasure that Robbe-Grillet took in his sharing of the young girls who has wife would bring back to their luxurious house to satisfy her sexual needs and then as part of the marriage bargain she would pass them along to her husband... and while he was telling this--- I thought this the height of French... do I dare use the word sophistication--- he was also leafing through the pages of novels by the Argentinian novelist Juan Jose Saer to show us how Saer had marked certain passages that were written in homage to the style of Robbe-Grillet and Robbe-Grillet had slipped into talking about himself in the third person which is a particular gift.
*
Some months later, Robbe-Grillet showed up at NYU and my wife went along to a public talk and after, she went up to him and a little flustered introduced herself in English and Robbe-Grillet brushed her aside claiming he would not speak English at which point Anna switched to her very good French and was talking about her husband who had just interviewed you in Paris but she was quickly cut off by, as Anna said, "this stocky old cunt who must have been his NYU handler." By chance she had touched Robbe-Grillet's elbow and Anna said,it reminded her of a skinny chicken bone with loose skin...
*
I tried to console Anna by reminding her that the French department at NYU used to be or for all I know was still run by a guy who named his dog Beckett and who fancies himself a reader of modern literature. That department at NYU is a genuine killing field of literature, of sensitivity, of culture: I once suggested to this guy that they offer a course on the two great mountains of modern French literature Proust and Celine.. and the howl of derision was satisfying--- the only department more fraudulent than the French department might be the German Department or could it be the Dance Department... the choices are endless when it comes to NYU.
*
The most controversial part of the interview was Robbe-Grillet's dismissal of Richard Howard as a translator because of his homosexuality and as a result of how awful are his translations of Baudelaire and other French writers.
I have long suspected that Richard Howard is not that good of a translator and one only has to compare his translation of IN THE LABYRINTH with Christine Brooke- Rose's to see the difference or one can compare Howard's translations of Claude Simon with Helen Lane's versions--- Howard from Cincinnati has a provincial's understanding of French... and while he has been prolific he does not have access to the whole orchestra of the French language... one would almost say he has a limited vocabulary or at least he has access to a smaller vocabulary than did Helen Lane or Christine Brooke-Rose.
However he has been hard working and we have to be grateful in some way for even his imperfect versions of so many French works of literature but it must also be remarked that his very presence--- coupled with publisher's laziness--- discouraged others from competing for the work and of course he had personal financial resources not available to many another translator
*
I shall think of Alain Robbe-Grillet when later today I watch his LA BELLE CAPTIVE. It is truly awful and does feature artwork by Magritte which was on display in his house when David and I went to see him now five years ago.
*
NO, I will not watch the movie. I looked at the trailer... it is too awful... wooden acting, even in those seconds: splattered blood, young female breasts, leering old men, a girl on a motorcycle...
What a revolting development, as Riley would say.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
MY FAUST by PAUL VALERY, HARALD WEINRICH, NICOLAS POUSSIN, FERNANDO PESSOA
another
"Whereas before Kant morality was still expressed in terms of virtues (and immorality in terms of vices), Giovanni Della Casa, the Italian author of a conduct manual titled Galateo (1558), translated into French under the title Galatee (1562), had already speculated about the moral status of politeness. Is it proper to count politeness among the classical (theological, cardinal) virtues, and can one brave the authority of Aristotle and Saint Thomas so as to open the canonical catalogue to a new category of virtues that we might today call sociable or even social?" This is the opening of an essay Politeness and Sincerity in a collection of essays by Harald Weinrich entitled THE LINGUISTICS OF LYING. I had come to this book of Weinrich's by way of his LETHE The Art and Critique of Forgetting.
And another
Being in bed after the minor surgery of a few days ago I was struck by how unprepared I am for such a sentence. Like all Americans I did not study philosophy in high school unlike French lycee students who are required to study philosophy through their entire secondary education. Of course in my primary school education at St Francis de Sales School in Patchogue I had religion classes and while they were not formally philosophical they could be seen as my introduction to the discipline of theology and as such can serve as an introduction to all that it is not immediately available. Such classes are looked down upon by many but now they seem to have been the most lasting as they were finally concerned with what philosophy has always been concerned with: what and why.
Weinrich's essay then went on to a discussion of MY FAUST by Paul Valery and that is what I have been reading. Written in 1940 midst the French collapse it is a humourous version of Faust and one in which both Faust and Mephisto are aware of all the previous versions of their appearances on the world's stage and one might suggest they are aware of the versions to come... in this version Faust wants to write a book to end all books: the book in the sense Mallarme used, in the only sense that really matters--- a book that has not been written before and which ends the need to write another book.
but another
If only writers would ask themselves: does anyone really need to read the book I am about to write, hasn't this book been written before, how many books will the book I am writing replace or shove to the side.
In the mail a summer catalogue: celebrity and journalistic efforts by Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Martin Amis, Rick Bragg, David Price, Robert Kagan, David Gutterson, Bill Clinton and Linn Ullmann. And A NOVEL: already an enormous success, an astonishing invention of stunning economy in the most confounding precincts of the human heart returning to the fairways stunningly inventive debut from the slums of Columbia to the still mysterious 1988 plane crash back with a razor sharp novel opens eleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in eight months into the fragmented lives of two sisters a wannabe Texas princess, the fiercely intelligent ambitious MI5 officer in a crowded residential suburb that wreaks havoc widespread havoc of that awful summer and its ultimately unavoidable dangers
and another
I turned from the review in the NY SUN of the new Poussin show at the Met where Lance Esplund reports of a nymph, "In her orgasmic shudder, she rises off the ground to their gaze, as if she were a floating cloud. The satyre's nipple burns red hot..."
to the actual catalogue of the show published by Yale University Press and look again at my favorite Poussin, last seen in the National Gallery in London, LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELERS RESTING--- those three men who I have been writing about while trying to imagine a further place for them in the world
while another
"I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me."
(262 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa)
"Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
(451 Pessoa)
"Whereas before Kant morality was still expressed in terms of virtues (and immorality in terms of vices), Giovanni Della Casa, the Italian author of a conduct manual titled Galateo (1558), translated into French under the title Galatee (1562), had already speculated about the moral status of politeness. Is it proper to count politeness among the classical (theological, cardinal) virtues, and can one brave the authority of Aristotle and Saint Thomas so as to open the canonical catalogue to a new category of virtues that we might today call sociable or even social?" This is the opening of an essay Politeness and Sincerity in a collection of essays by Harald Weinrich entitled THE LINGUISTICS OF LYING. I had come to this book of Weinrich's by way of his LETHE The Art and Critique of Forgetting.
And another
Being in bed after the minor surgery of a few days ago I was struck by how unprepared I am for such a sentence. Like all Americans I did not study philosophy in high school unlike French lycee students who are required to study philosophy through their entire secondary education. Of course in my primary school education at St Francis de Sales School in Patchogue I had religion classes and while they were not formally philosophical they could be seen as my introduction to the discipline of theology and as such can serve as an introduction to all that it is not immediately available. Such classes are looked down upon by many but now they seem to have been the most lasting as they were finally concerned with what philosophy has always been concerned with: what and why.
Weinrich's essay then went on to a discussion of MY FAUST by Paul Valery and that is what I have been reading. Written in 1940 midst the French collapse it is a humourous version of Faust and one in which both Faust and Mephisto are aware of all the previous versions of their appearances on the world's stage and one might suggest they are aware of the versions to come... in this version Faust wants to write a book to end all books: the book in the sense Mallarme used, in the only sense that really matters--- a book that has not been written before and which ends the need to write another book.
but another
If only writers would ask themselves: does anyone really need to read the book I am about to write, hasn't this book been written before, how many books will the book I am writing replace or shove to the side.
In the mail a summer catalogue: celebrity and journalistic efforts by Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Martin Amis, Rick Bragg, David Price, Robert Kagan, David Gutterson, Bill Clinton and Linn Ullmann. And A NOVEL: already an enormous success, an astonishing invention of stunning economy in the most confounding precincts of the human heart returning to the fairways stunningly inventive debut from the slums of Columbia to the still mysterious 1988 plane crash back with a razor sharp novel opens eleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in eight months into the fragmented lives of two sisters a wannabe Texas princess, the fiercely intelligent ambitious MI5 officer in a crowded residential suburb that wreaks havoc widespread havoc of that awful summer and its ultimately unavoidable dangers
and another
I turned from the review in the NY SUN of the new Poussin show at the Met where Lance Esplund reports of a nymph, "In her orgasmic shudder, she rises off the ground to their gaze, as if she were a floating cloud. The satyre's nipple burns red hot..."
to the actual catalogue of the show published by Yale University Press and look again at my favorite Poussin, last seen in the National Gallery in London, LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELERS RESTING--- those three men who I have been writing about while trying to imagine a further place for them in the world
while another
"I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me."
(262 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa)
"Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
(451 Pessoa)
Monday, February 11, 2008
GLENWAY WESCOTT, LARRY WOIWODE, WILLIAM MAXWELL ...THE PERIL OF ... A LONGING FOR CERTAINTY... AN OPERATION... ROBERT PINGET, JULIAN GREEN
FIRST OF TWO PARTS.
I have been reading A STEP FROM DEATH by Larry Woiwode in preparation for a review.
Already I know I will not be allowed to go on about THE GRANDMOTHERS by Glenway Wescott and possibly THE DEATH OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green because there are space considerations which I understand and accept.
For the longest time I have believed that if I had to pick one modern American novel as the best American novel I would say it is THE GRANDMOTHERS. The novel is basically about a Wisconsin family and its dispersal across the country and overseas. The novel is made of a number of voices and the prose is poised and eloquent.
Edward Dahlberg, the severest and most stringent of critics, held Wescott in high esteem and was one of Wescott's few supporters as a literary artist in the long teasing out of his public life...
Wescott did write one more significant novel THE PILGRIM HAWK but his whole career revolved around THE GRANDMOTHERS and the title story for GOODBYE WISCONSIN.
I have mentioned him before as he is cited in the Julian Green's diaries. I remember talking with Green about Wescott who Green still vividly remembered fifty years after they had met for the first time. We talked of Hemingway's great hatred of Wescott which was a dreary mixture of jealousy, envy and sexual incompleteness on Hemingway's part.
All of Wescott's career revolved around the great success of THE GRANDMOTHERS. And it is this sort of success and burden that Larry Woiwode also shares: all of his books both before and after are planets revolving about the great sun of his BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL. Woiwode has not to date been able to find his THE PILGRIM HAWK as he has made other choices in his life.
In my little garden Woiwode nudges Wescott over a little bit...
In A STEP FROM DEATH Woiwode again takes up the decisive role that William Maxwell played in his life. And I would like eventually to write about Maxwell but the Library of America as foolishly published the first of two volumes devoted to Maxwell but are forcing us to wait until September for the second volume.
Hannah Green and I went to the memorial service for Glenway Wescott and we talked with William Maxwell. He too joined us in understanding just how important THE GRANDMOTHERS was to all of us and he shared our dismay thatit seemed to have fallen into a sort of obscurity...
Wescott was a public figure. He was president of one of the American academies... he was "distinguished"... but is as far as I know, in this country at least, the exception to the rule: such figures are usually deeply rotten at the literary core...
SECOND OF TWO PARTS.
In two days I have to have an operation.
One of those walk in walk out things but still I am to be put to sleep for a time.
Do you all remember FERNWOOD TONIGHT when Martin Mull had on the guy with the DRIVE -IN DO IT YOURSELF SURGICAL CLINIC?
It is unclear how many days or weeks of pain afterward.
The sort of operation called routine.
The beginning of old age or just another sure step like a broken tooth--- and I got one of those for tomorrow...
One thinks of not waking up.
Edward Dahlberg thought it normal to think of suicide at least once a day.
Maybe the wife will hit the medical malpractice jackpot.
She won't have to throw out by herself all the literary rubbish I leave behind...
I have to call it that: what else to call unpublished books?
To echo what Lawrence Durrell once told me in 1970 in New York City on West 110th Street: What has posterity ever done for me?
Of course these unpublished books are not rubbish but they will be treated as rubbish...
Enough of me.
Here is a nice bit from THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET (translated by Barbara Wright):
When you think of all the work that must have gone into getting all those papers together, classifying them, numbering them, and the fiddling about with them and rewriting from beginning to end that shatteringly incoherent narrative, those cries of distress, maniac's visions, expressions of anguish, premonitions...
This never-ending old age, while the days are dawning anew, it was no use marking the pages it doesn't apply any more, a book it's impossible to read without suffering disaster.
I have been reading A STEP FROM DEATH by Larry Woiwode in preparation for a review.
Already I know I will not be allowed to go on about THE GRANDMOTHERS by Glenway Wescott and possibly THE DEATH OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green because there are space considerations which I understand and accept.
For the longest time I have believed that if I had to pick one modern American novel as the best American novel I would say it is THE GRANDMOTHERS. The novel is basically about a Wisconsin family and its dispersal across the country and overseas. The novel is made of a number of voices and the prose is poised and eloquent.
Edward Dahlberg, the severest and most stringent of critics, held Wescott in high esteem and was one of Wescott's few supporters as a literary artist in the long teasing out of his public life...
Wescott did write one more significant novel THE PILGRIM HAWK but his whole career revolved around THE GRANDMOTHERS and the title story for GOODBYE WISCONSIN.
I have mentioned him before as he is cited in the Julian Green's diaries. I remember talking with Green about Wescott who Green still vividly remembered fifty years after they had met for the first time. We talked of Hemingway's great hatred of Wescott which was a dreary mixture of jealousy, envy and sexual incompleteness on Hemingway's part.
All of Wescott's career revolved around the great success of THE GRANDMOTHERS. And it is this sort of success and burden that Larry Woiwode also shares: all of his books both before and after are planets revolving about the great sun of his BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL. Woiwode has not to date been able to find his THE PILGRIM HAWK as he has made other choices in his life.
In my little garden Woiwode nudges Wescott over a little bit...
In A STEP FROM DEATH Woiwode again takes up the decisive role that William Maxwell played in his life. And I would like eventually to write about Maxwell but the Library of America as foolishly published the first of two volumes devoted to Maxwell but are forcing us to wait until September for the second volume.
Hannah Green and I went to the memorial service for Glenway Wescott and we talked with William Maxwell. He too joined us in understanding just how important THE GRANDMOTHERS was to all of us and he shared our dismay thatit seemed to have fallen into a sort of obscurity...
Wescott was a public figure. He was president of one of the American academies... he was "distinguished"... but is as far as I know, in this country at least, the exception to the rule: such figures are usually deeply rotten at the literary core...
SECOND OF TWO PARTS.
In two days I have to have an operation.
One of those walk in walk out things but still I am to be put to sleep for a time.
Do you all remember FERNWOOD TONIGHT when Martin Mull had on the guy with the DRIVE -IN DO IT YOURSELF SURGICAL CLINIC?
It is unclear how many days or weeks of pain afterward.
The sort of operation called routine.
The beginning of old age or just another sure step like a broken tooth--- and I got one of those for tomorrow...
One thinks of not waking up.
Edward Dahlberg thought it normal to think of suicide at least once a day.
Maybe the wife will hit the medical malpractice jackpot.
She won't have to throw out by herself all the literary rubbish I leave behind...
I have to call it that: what else to call unpublished books?
To echo what Lawrence Durrell once told me in 1970 in New York City on West 110th Street: What has posterity ever done for me?
Of course these unpublished books are not rubbish but they will be treated as rubbish...
Enough of me.
Here is a nice bit from THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET (translated by Barbara Wright):
When you think of all the work that must have gone into getting all those papers together, classifying them, numbering them, and the fiddling about with them and rewriting from beginning to end that shatteringly incoherent narrative, those cries of distress, maniac's visions, expressions of anguish, premonitions...
This never-ending old age, while the days are dawning anew, it was no use marking the pages it doesn't apply any more, a book it's impossible to read without suffering disaster.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
THERE IS NO POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES. RONALD JOHNSON, LORINE NIEDECKER, BELOIT COLLEGE, DAVID HUDDLE
Preface No.7
The morning after the AWP Associated Writing Programs. Last night went to a reading celebrating Salmon Press at some wretched Bowery bar. The music next door was more compelling. Had a conversation about James Dickey. Even told two Dickey stories to a woman from South Carolina which is how his name is kept alive in the South. Dickey read the poem Falling at Beloit College in the early 1960s when that school did actually then ask good poets to come to the college for short visits. Now they have writers come for longer periods of time and no one remembers their names.
And Beloit College to this day never remembers that Lorine Niedecker from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, one of the great American poets, attended the college. It is all a little embarrassing for them, I suppose. Here was a woman washing hospital floors while writing poetry and corresponding with Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky who both knew she was their equal. All something no college really has the ability to understand or wants to know about and anyway she had to drop out of the college for lack of money.
Back then W.H.Auden came and disgraced himself.
Charles Olson came and gave the Beloit Lectures.
Galway Kinnell came when he was still a modest author of one good poem. He became a "famous" academic poet of still one good poem. He did the illustrations for Pati Hill's`book of poems THE SNOW RABBIT when they had an affair in the early 1960s. She is still the better writer based on her IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS.
Kinnell is now retired, they say, and I suppose still an activist.
How I love that word activist.
And I am sure you do too.
When you hear the word activist you know you are hearing about some sort of crook.
Preface No. 8
It is probably true that there are no interesting living poets under the age of 60 in the United States. I did not place that age limitation on my sweeping judgment because I would not want to include David Slavitt's WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON AND OTHER POEMS however I really think there are no poets in the United States at this moment.
except for...
The last good poet in the United States was Ronald Johnson and he has been dead for ten years.
Find his ARK.
Find his other little books.
His re-write of Paradise Lost, RADI OS and of all things his four cookbooks.
Read the essays by Guy Davenport on Johnson if you don't believe me.
Preface No. 9
But you say: how extreme! You are full of it. What are you talking about?...Okay, I will introduce into evidence one poem by David Huddle.
Just before deciding to do this I had been distracted by reading in "the thoughts" of Gregory Orr in a issue of The American Poetry Review that was given away at the AWP. But to find a poem by Orr is too much of a bother. He is as pathetic now as he was back in the days when he was at Columbia University writing imitations of Mark Strand poems who in turn was imitating God knows who...and of course we all knew that Orr had killed his brother by mistake--- the sensitivity ran like wine and vomit down West End Avenue which by coincidence is where David Huddle lived back then also... but the David Huddle Story is for another time. His poem awaits you and is my evidence for my assertion: there is no poetry in the United States of America in the year 2008:
from the collection GLORY RIVER Poems to be published by Louisiana State University Press in April
1970
That moment in Hair
where the whole cast
gets naked on stage?
Lindsey and I and Jean
and Ellsworth Bahrman
bought tickets, ate grass-
laced brownies and rode
the Broadway Local downtown
to see the show, but we were way
back in the balcony,
I got sleepy, and Lindsey
had to give me an elbow
when it happened. Fact
is, I liked Hair best
the year before, at a party
in Roanoke, Virginia,
when somebody put on the record
(vinyl, of course), and a bunch
of Hollins girls started
to sing along---"I like black boys..."
and do a little footwork
that way you can step into it
when you're twenty years old,
about half-buzzed at a party
and somebody puts on a song
you like. But back to that night
when the lights came up,
and behold, there were the actors
wearing nothing but their bodies---
It was in the fall of 1970, audiences
were getting thinner every week,
and the way I see it now
is that I, David R. Huddle,
your basic twenty-eight-year-old,
moderately stoned, white,
liberal grad student, sat
right at the focal point at the exact
moment when the nation
made its final turn away from love
and generosity and toward greed,
hatred of the poor, bullying
the rest of the world, and pillaging
what's left of paradise. Please
forgive me, all of you lost
Americans. If Instead of nodding off
into a stupor--- I'd just stayed
a little more alert and received
every megabyte, of that vision, I might
have become the single human
being empowered to save
the planet from George W. Bush.
Preface No. 10
I am sure you can hear the knowing smiling applause, even the laughter when David Huddle the poet finishes reading this poem at the University of Vermont, at Bread Loaf and other stops on the usual poetic tour...
This poem is a summation of the state of poetry and indeed of the whole academic world that lives within a similar callow smugness typified by this isolated tenured academic--- You should know there is even a DAVID HUDDLE READER--- who has lived too long among like minded people up there in Vermont and now no longer knows he is living within a poorly understood bad faith, no longer self-aware of anything beyond the immediate smiling applause indicating that they are all they are all oppressed beaten down victims...
Preface No. 11
Is there any evidence out there that I am wrong?
The morning after the AWP Associated Writing Programs. Last night went to a reading celebrating Salmon Press at some wretched Bowery bar. The music next door was more compelling. Had a conversation about James Dickey. Even told two Dickey stories to a woman from South Carolina which is how his name is kept alive in the South. Dickey read the poem Falling at Beloit College in the early 1960s when that school did actually then ask good poets to come to the college for short visits. Now they have writers come for longer periods of time and no one remembers their names.
And Beloit College to this day never remembers that Lorine Niedecker from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, one of the great American poets, attended the college. It is all a little embarrassing for them, I suppose. Here was a woman washing hospital floors while writing poetry and corresponding with Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky who both knew she was their equal. All something no college really has the ability to understand or wants to know about and anyway she had to drop out of the college for lack of money.
Back then W.H.Auden came and disgraced himself.
Charles Olson came and gave the Beloit Lectures.
Galway Kinnell came when he was still a modest author of one good poem. He became a "famous" academic poet of still one good poem. He did the illustrations for Pati Hill's`book of poems THE SNOW RABBIT when they had an affair in the early 1960s. She is still the better writer based on her IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS.
Kinnell is now retired, they say, and I suppose still an activist.
How I love that word activist.
And I am sure you do too.
When you hear the word activist you know you are hearing about some sort of crook.
Preface No. 8
It is probably true that there are no interesting living poets under the age of 60 in the United States. I did not place that age limitation on my sweeping judgment because I would not want to include David Slavitt's WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON AND OTHER POEMS however I really think there are no poets in the United States at this moment.
except for...
The last good poet in the United States was Ronald Johnson and he has been dead for ten years.
Find his ARK.
Find his other little books.
His re-write of Paradise Lost, RADI OS and of all things his four cookbooks.
Read the essays by Guy Davenport on Johnson if you don't believe me.
Preface No. 9
But you say: how extreme! You are full of it. What are you talking about?...Okay, I will introduce into evidence one poem by David Huddle.
Just before deciding to do this I had been distracted by reading in "the thoughts" of Gregory Orr in a issue of The American Poetry Review that was given away at the AWP. But to find a poem by Orr is too much of a bother. He is as pathetic now as he was back in the days when he was at Columbia University writing imitations of Mark Strand poems who in turn was imitating God knows who...and of course we all knew that Orr had killed his brother by mistake--- the sensitivity ran like wine and vomit down West End Avenue which by coincidence is where David Huddle lived back then also... but the David Huddle Story is for another time. His poem awaits you and is my evidence for my assertion: there is no poetry in the United States of America in the year 2008:
from the collection GLORY RIVER Poems to be published by Louisiana State University Press in April
1970
That moment in Hair
where the whole cast
gets naked on stage?
Lindsey and I and Jean
and Ellsworth Bahrman
bought tickets, ate grass-
laced brownies and rode
the Broadway Local downtown
to see the show, but we were way
back in the balcony,
I got sleepy, and Lindsey
had to give me an elbow
when it happened. Fact
is, I liked Hair best
the year before, at a party
in Roanoke, Virginia,
when somebody put on the record
(vinyl, of course), and a bunch
of Hollins girls started
to sing along---"I like black boys..."
and do a little footwork
that way you can step into it
when you're twenty years old,
about half-buzzed at a party
and somebody puts on a song
you like. But back to that night
when the lights came up,
and behold, there were the actors
wearing nothing but their bodies---
It was in the fall of 1970, audiences
were getting thinner every week,
and the way I see it now
is that I, David R. Huddle,
your basic twenty-eight-year-old,
moderately stoned, white,
liberal grad student, sat
right at the focal point at the exact
moment when the nation
made its final turn away from love
and generosity and toward greed,
hatred of the poor, bullying
the rest of the world, and pillaging
what's left of paradise. Please
forgive me, all of you lost
Americans. If Instead of nodding off
into a stupor--- I'd just stayed
a little more alert and received
every megabyte, of that vision, I might
have become the single human
being empowered to save
the planet from George W. Bush.
Preface No. 10
I am sure you can hear the knowing smiling applause, even the laughter when David Huddle the poet finishes reading this poem at the University of Vermont, at Bread Loaf and other stops on the usual poetic tour...
This poem is a summation of the state of poetry and indeed of the whole academic world that lives within a similar callow smugness typified by this isolated tenured academic--- You should know there is even a DAVID HUDDLE READER--- who has lived too long among like minded people up there in Vermont and now no longer knows he is living within a poorly understood bad faith, no longer self-aware of anything beyond the immediate smiling applause indicating that they are all they are all oppressed beaten down victims...
Preface No. 11
Is there any evidence out there that I am wrong?
Saturday, February 2, 2008
STRANDS AND TENDRILS, SILVESTROV, GOMBRICH, MAYROCKER, AWP, DALKEY ARCHIIVE, JUAN EMAR, MACEDONIO FERNANDEZ
Preface No. 1
Please listen--- as I am writing this--- to Valentin Silvestrov's DRAMA just released by Koch...the first cut is Post Scriptum... in the little description of the piece... "a post script to Mozart"... all that is left are the strands and tendrils of what went before; "beautiful ruins" as one commentator referred to it.
Preface No. 2
At day's end I have been reading THE PREFERENCE FOR THE PRIMITIVE by E. H. Gombrich. "This book is about a movement of taste that came to its climax during my lifetime."
Preface No. 3
At day's end and in the afternoon I have been reading brutt, or The Sighing Gardens by Friederike Mayrocker. There are umlauts over the first u and the last o.
First page begins:
step-by-step one foot and then the other leaving the house less and less often walking more and more slowly as if A HOBBLE, A WEIR, A DAM had been built into you, down there, and less and less interested in going out because now seeing less well--- put glasses on take glasses off: both equally bothersome
First page of second section begins four pages later:
oh these are making me happy again, cascading geraniums, and I'm raking out what there is to be raked out, I tell Blum, this old manuscript, once half-gone, I say, now seems to have found new life
The book will continue on like this for 265 pages. Mayrocker is author of more than 50 books of which two others have been translated: NIGHT TRAIN and HEILIGENANSTALT.
She was born in 1924. Her writing is more innovative,refreshing, interesting and simply better than 95 to 98 percent of what I saw this morning at the book fair at the AWP in the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue. Sadly even her publisher in this country Northwestern University Press did not have this their latest book on display.
Preface No. 4
The AWP, Associated Writing Programs annual conference. Thousands of writers and teachers of writing. The proliferation, little imagined by R. V. Cassill and George Garrett all those years ago, probably over a bottle of whiskey as C.D. Wright mentioned--- she of course connected forever to Frank Stanford, who I remember meeting at the Hollins Conference in 1970... not long before his suicide::::: more material for the memoirs and I walked like a ghost through those publishers and programs: now there is even a creative writing program in Camden, New Jersey and at further flung places, Tempe, Arizona, Southern Indiana State, Victoria, Texas, Southampton, Long Island, New York... one can go on beyond the writing factories at NYU, Columbia, Iowa and end up in England where there is a National Association of Writers in Education and something called Center for New Writing at Manchester University which comes complete with Research Fellows and I could not make up this sentence from one of those bios, "Joe is also lead vocalist with "electo death pop band" Performance. And Martin Amis has been appointed Professor of Creative Writing there so I guess it paid him well to get the 60,000 dollars worth of dental implants as was reported on Page Six of the New York Pst
Preface No. 5
Martin Riker at Dalkey Archive gave me the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to the totally unknown JUAN EMAR whose magnum opus UMBRAL is 5,000 pages long and was only published posthumously. We talked of that other unknown MACEDONIO FERNANDEZ of whom Borges wrote, "He lived (more than any other person I have ever known) to think. Every day he abandoned himself to the vicissitudes and surprises of thoughts as a swimmer is borne along by the current of a great river, and that mode of thinking called writing did not cost him the least effort."
(now you see the reason for Preface No.1)
I did not ask Martin about the email I had just sent him about the possibility of doing GOING TO PATCHOGUE in paper which Dalkey Archive had successfully published in hardcover. Everywhere about me people were getting details about submissions, whenand how for journals, books and contests.
Of course the contests are a version of a Ponzi scheme. You have to pay an entrance fee and out of the collected entrance fees the press gets the money to publish the one winning book... you can imagine the fraud--- and now they even offer second third place finishers, a detail to go on the resume.
Preface No. 6
At LES FIGUES PRESS STAN APPS said he remembered briefly sharing an adjunct office with me at John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge. It was nice to be remembered but I did not have the cash in pocket to buy his book as I had bought SNOWED UNDER by Antje Ravic Strubel just before... and now I think I regret buying the Strubel because the blurb by Michael Henry Heim, "If you still harbor a prejudice against those endless and endlessly metaphysical German novels, give..." I should have judged the book better by the cover because the author has her fashion hair thrust into your eyes...
Apps has been on that calvary of academic posts that have taken him from John Jay to a community college in Los Angles to the University of Tampa, if I remember correctly...
Preface No. 7
From a review by Frederick Raphael of a book of Graham Greene letters: smacks of the chilly cheeriness from the man the French were said to pronounce "grim grin."
Please listen--- as I am writing this--- to Valentin Silvestrov's DRAMA just released by Koch...the first cut is Post Scriptum... in the little description of the piece... "a post script to Mozart"... all that is left are the strands and tendrils of what went before; "beautiful ruins" as one commentator referred to it.
Preface No. 2
At day's end I have been reading THE PREFERENCE FOR THE PRIMITIVE by E. H. Gombrich. "This book is about a movement of taste that came to its climax during my lifetime."
Preface No. 3
At day's end and in the afternoon I have been reading brutt, or The Sighing Gardens by Friederike Mayrocker. There are umlauts over the first u and the last o.
First page begins:
step-by-step one foot and then the other leaving the house less and less often walking more and more slowly as if A HOBBLE, A WEIR, A DAM had been built into you, down there, and less and less interested in going out because now seeing less well--- put glasses on take glasses off: both equally bothersome
First page of second section begins four pages later:
oh these are making me happy again, cascading geraniums, and I'm raking out what there is to be raked out, I tell Blum, this old manuscript, once half-gone, I say, now seems to have found new life
The book will continue on like this for 265 pages. Mayrocker is author of more than 50 books of which two others have been translated: NIGHT TRAIN and HEILIGENANSTALT.
She was born in 1924. Her writing is more innovative,refreshing, interesting and simply better than 95 to 98 percent of what I saw this morning at the book fair at the AWP in the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue. Sadly even her publisher in this country Northwestern University Press did not have this their latest book on display.
Preface No. 4
The AWP, Associated Writing Programs annual conference. Thousands of writers and teachers of writing. The proliferation, little imagined by R. V. Cassill and George Garrett all those years ago, probably over a bottle of whiskey as C.D. Wright mentioned--- she of course connected forever to Frank Stanford, who I remember meeting at the Hollins Conference in 1970... not long before his suicide::::: more material for the memoirs and I walked like a ghost through those publishers and programs: now there is even a creative writing program in Camden, New Jersey and at further flung places, Tempe, Arizona, Southern Indiana State, Victoria, Texas, Southampton, Long Island, New York... one can go on beyond the writing factories at NYU, Columbia, Iowa and end up in England where there is a National Association of Writers in Education and something called Center for New Writing at Manchester University which comes complete with Research Fellows and I could not make up this sentence from one of those bios, "Joe is also lead vocalist with "electo death pop band" Performance. And Martin Amis has been appointed Professor of Creative Writing there so I guess it paid him well to get the 60,000 dollars worth of dental implants as was reported on Page Six of the New York Pst
Preface No. 5
Martin Riker at Dalkey Archive gave me the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to the totally unknown JUAN EMAR whose magnum opus UMBRAL is 5,000 pages long and was only published posthumously. We talked of that other unknown MACEDONIO FERNANDEZ of whom Borges wrote, "He lived (more than any other person I have ever known) to think. Every day he abandoned himself to the vicissitudes and surprises of thoughts as a swimmer is borne along by the current of a great river, and that mode of thinking called writing did not cost him the least effort."
(now you see the reason for Preface No.1)
I did not ask Martin about the email I had just sent him about the possibility of doing GOING TO PATCHOGUE in paper which Dalkey Archive had successfully published in hardcover. Everywhere about me people were getting details about submissions, whenand how for journals, books and contests.
Of course the contests are a version of a Ponzi scheme. You have to pay an entrance fee and out of the collected entrance fees the press gets the money to publish the one winning book... you can imagine the fraud--- and now they even offer second third place finishers, a detail to go on the resume.
Preface No. 6
At LES FIGUES PRESS STAN APPS said he remembered briefly sharing an adjunct office with me at John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge. It was nice to be remembered but I did not have the cash in pocket to buy his book as I had bought SNOWED UNDER by Antje Ravic Strubel just before... and now I think I regret buying the Strubel because the blurb by Michael Henry Heim, "If you still harbor a prejudice against those endless and endlessly metaphysical German novels, give..." I should have judged the book better by the cover because the author has her fashion hair thrust into your eyes...
Apps has been on that calvary of academic posts that have taken him from John Jay to a community college in Los Angles to the University of Tampa, if I remember correctly...
Preface No. 7
From a review by Frederick Raphael of a book of Graham Greene letters: smacks of the chilly cheeriness from the man the French were said to pronounce "grim grin."
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