Necessary information: for
more than 30 years sections from ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 have been
appearing in journals and magazines both in the
United States and in Ireland. It
was supposed to be published during this coming Spring but I have been told
that publication has been postponed.
In too many ways to mention I find
that my life has been ruined.
Yet.
1- I have been planning to do IF I WAS THE BOOK
SECTION EDITOR and here are the books for this week
2- I got distracted and thought about
the problem of what to do about books that get themselves forgotten as happened
because I found in my books TRAVELING LIGHT by Lionel Mitchell.
3- Coming out in 1980 it was one of those---
as they like to say--- path breaking books that sadly did not break any paths---
not because it was not a path-breaking book--- and while favorably written
about by Stanley Crouch, Mitchell died a
nasty gruesome death from AIDS and not being wildly reviewed in the
so-called mainstream media….
4- Mitchell in some way was a Black or
Negro version of a contrary version of what it meant to be homosexual or even
sexual in the United States and is much like John Rechy who is still thought to
be marginal while in reality having written the single best book, CITY OF
NIGHT, (now in a 50th
Anniversary edition) as to what it felt like to be homosexual in the 50s and
60s USA.
5- What distinguished Mitchell was that
he dared to take up the inevitable question of violence, real physical violence
and he did not make it nice, alluring or respectable
a- Of course there is also Hal
Bennett: I had had the experience of
urging through Turtle Point Press a new edition of Hal Bennett’s LORD OF DARK
PLACES but that also did not get its place in the sun of readers and did not
move over the dead statue of Toni Morrison one inch though Bennett is to my
mind one of the rare truth tellers of American Letters.
b- As is the fate for most truth tellers
Bennett has been ignored and died in a veterans’ hospital in Edison New Jersey,
mourned probably only by myself and his publisher Jon Rabinowitz.
c- Bennett’s short memoir available only
in one of the those Dictionary of Literary Biography collections devoted to
autobiography uniquely details as never
before done, the great chain of beating that lead from the whip of the white
owner to the whip held in the hand of the Black mother or father or other
figure in authority: that peculiar
American experience still nearly impossible to even mention as it is seen to be
too controversial, too disturbing as it might let the beaters off the hook---as
being simply unknowing participants--- so that the silence continues to be
seared by the crying, the crying, the whimpering…
BOOKS TO BE
REVIEWED THIS WEEK.
ONE. 1941 THE YEAR THAT KEEP RETURNING by
Slavko Goldstein. New York Review Books.
The book is in: “I think I can
pinpoint exactly the hour and the day when my childhood ended, Easter Sunday
April 13 1941. On the promenade in front
of Zorin Dom nor far from our house German tanks, armored vehicles and military
kitchens on large wheels with fat tires were neatly lined up…. My father stopped me at the door. “Where are you going?” “Out to play.” “To
play?’ My father looked at me with
surprise. “Well, okay. Go, but don’t be late for lunch.” When I got back my father was no longer at
home. And he was never to return.”
Not just a
holocaust book--- and in no way is that to denigrate or argue against their
proliferation but in so many ways we have come to the point of now re-reading
and sorting--- however the Croatian writer
Slavko Goldstein while describing the
murder of the Jews of Yugoslavia also goes on to explain the incredibly
murderous assault upon the Serbian population by the Croatian fascist
forces. In patient detail and careful
thought one is lead to see how forty years later during the breakup of Yugoslavia,
precipitated by the pre-mature German recognition of Slovenia and then Croatia
would in turn would be unleash a violent war of ethnic violence that defied
explanation until one was reminded of the past Goldstein delineates, something
people like Susan Sontag and Bill Clinton were willfully ignorant of since it did not fit into their preconceived
ideas of who was victim and who was perpetrator even when the evidence was not reducible to the good guys and the bad
guys, unless you wanted to stage Beckett in Sarajevo and claim heroine status
for such an endeavor.
TWO.
AGAINST AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ALBERT MEMMI AND THE PRODUCTION OF THEORY by
Lia Nicole Brozgal. (University of
Nebraska Press) While the book is a
perverse exercise in “theory” and wants us to over-look the autobiographical
nature of Memmi’s great book THE
SCORPION (which came out in English in
1971 from Orion Press then a part of Grossman Publishers and which first great autobiography to come out North
Africa after Augustine’s CONFESSIONS, if truth be told. Brozgal’s book is interesting only if it gets
readers to read Memmi’s THE SCORPION.
They should not be distracted by his so-called serious books of theory
about who and what is a colonizer… all of that is mere sociology and was dated
before it is read.
THE SCORPION
creates what it meant to be a Jewish individual in Tunisia and Memmi by
adapting the very best of the Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon produced a
book equal to their own… but this aspect of his career was lost in the dreary
usual politics and while Brozgal is more enamored of Memmi as a thinker it is
as a novelist, memoir writer that THE SCORPION makes its claim upon a statue in
the garden of the essential.
THREE.
Some years ago I had admired and recommended HOLY BONES HOLY DUST by
Charles Freeman which takes up the question of how relics shaped Medieval history… so I had wished to see WHY CAN THE DEAD DO
SUCH GREAT THINGS by Robert Bartlett
(Princeton University Press) which focuses his discussion on the actual bodies
of the saints and in great detail brings the same years to life in a more
detailed and obsessive manner—marred only by a sadly too small of a type
face. Bartlett is a TV presenter and
knows a good tale if one can ignore the rather condescending attitude towards
what was as opposed to a possibly more rewarding approach which is to delight
in, to respect and to wonder what has really been lost when instead of invoking
a saint to do battle we program a drone in Maryland for a killing in say Yemen.
Of course Robert Calasso might suggest that the gods and I would include
the saints in all of this—are maybe still about as in his LITERATURE AND THE
GODS
FOUR I refuse to forget GLENWAY
WESCOTT. Joining from the University of
Wisconsin’s edition of Wescott’s HEAVEN
OF WORDS Last Journals of 1956-1984 is a selection of the uncollected fiction
of Wescott that adds to the absolute necessity at least for me of his two
earlier books THE GRANDMOTHERS and
GOODYBE, WISCONSIN. One should start
with A Visit to Priapus and realize the sadness of what was not to be as
Wescott found it impossible to discover books within himself beyond the two I
have mentioned and the short novel THE PILGRIM HAWK which while widely praised
and a great delight is still to my mind in the shadow of THE GRANDMOTHERS and
the title story of GOODBYE, WISCONSIN.
The editor Jerry Rosco has done a very good deed for literature with
these two books and his earlier book of Wescott’s journals and writings
CONTINUAL LESSONS and his own biography of Wescott GLENWAY WESCOTT
PERSONALLY. I do wish that Rosco had
included the much longer version of The Smell of Rosemary that had appeared in
Prose but that is another tale and a much lamented journal…
AN ASIDE. Wescott like Julian Green is lost
to America since our attention span for the 20th century seems
stretched between Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Ellison and Kerouac… every other writer is part of a supporting cast:
so be it…
Each
of us should have a few of the others: in my case: Wescott, Julian Green, Edward Dahlberg, Ronald Johnson,
Lorine Niedecker, Hannah Green, Eudora
Welty and that might just be enough…
FIVE. George Steiner mentions that one
of the great failings of modern literary education is the absence of any
discussion of the great modern theologians and the resulting impoverishment
that can be seen in any English department today. That the names of Josef Pieper, Hans Urs von
Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and Romano Guardini are mostly unknown while … I will
not contaminate this sentence with the likely suspects: open the pages of The
New York Review of Books or the New York Times Book review for my evidence
So! THE WAY
Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and their Journal
1925-1940 by Antonine Arjakovsky
(University of Notre Dame Press)
Beautifully written and detailed with inviting descriptions of the fate
of thought in Paris which provides the necessary correction to over-told story
of Paris between the wars… haven’t we all had enough of the Americans in
Paris?...
Am I the
only person who has read Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov? I first heard of
Berdyaev from Chad Walsh at Beloit as being a modern thinker who dealt with the
problem of belief in such a way that it did not ignore Beckett who I had just
discovered and who had a very good understand of just how awful the Russian Revolution
had been from a spiritual point of view and not from a kneejerk rightest
understanding. Shestov, I had read of
from Dahlberg: IN JOB’S BALANCES
PENULTIMATE WORDS and I added ATHENS AND JERUSALEM. And in the index a novel by Nina Berberova--- who I knew late
in her life--- is mentioned Astachev in Paris
and in how fruitful a way the writers discussed in THE WAY, “ insisted
on the necessity of preserving the reality of history from the seduction of
myths that explained everything, They sought to propose an alternative to a purely ethical
existential and finally to affirm that the union of Athens and Jerusalem is not
necessarily synonymous with a betrayal of reason.”
SIX. Even Dalkey Archive Press has a
book that will be over-looked and shouldn’t be:
AN UNWRITTEN NOVEL Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet by Thomas J.
Cousineau. This is the first
actual book I know of about the great central work of Pessoa. Cousineau tries to make a case for the unity within
disunity of this collection of fragments which has been translated into English
in a number of versions based on which edition the translator used: Spanish,
French, Italian edition that had been translated from the Portuguese original
and of course there is at least for this writer, only Richard Zenith’s
version from Penguin…
SEVEN. Again another over-looked
critical book is a collection of essays on Herta Muller. POLITICS AND AESTHETICS edited by Betiina
Brandt and Vaentina Glajar. Of course it
is always good to know that receiving a Nobel prize is no guarantee that your
work will be widely read in the US or in the English speaking world unless it
is trivial work by someone like an Alice Munro or Toni Morrison
mere writers of local interest as hardly do they re-arrange any of the statues
in the great garden unlike Herta Muller’s whose THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS
provides the central imaginative text as to the ordinary life in what was then
called the communist countries or socialist countries as they styled themselves
to be more precise… but boy that’s a long time ago 23 years ago and we were done with it,
right…no hardly… Muller’s Nobel lecture:
EVERY WORD KNOWS SOMETHING OF A VICIOUS CIRCLE is essential reading and
is included in a collection of essays that add to our understanding of Muller
unlike too many of such collections.
EIGHT.
I don’t usually mysteries or so-called
genre books after having read two Ross Macdonad books when younger and getting
what it is all about…which is what is to happen next as opposed to what is
happening right now on the page (stolen
from Nicholas Mosley but a note from New DIrections got me to read THE MONGOLIAN CONSPIRACY by Rafael Bernal..
a nasty novel set in Mexico city
centered by a hired killer who happens to be working for the police.. well I do
admit to having read the first 3 novels of Mickey Spillane and this is like
them but nastier and with more verbal nastiness and slimy behavior… but good
editors of book sections have to have prejudices otherwise…
So to end…. the last words of Muller’s Nobel
address: the acute solitude of a human being.
4 comments:
I always enjoy reading your posts sir. Actually I did read a little of Berdyaev when I was looking for stuff "like Dostoevsky"...also since you mention Ross MacDonald, did you know the odd connection between him and Hugh Kenner...and since I mention Hugh Kenner, I remember that you once wrote about a book of his letters to Davenport coming out and I'm wondering if you've heard any more about it?...In any case, thanks for always pointing me towards new books...
How wonderful to come upon your blog and your thoughts about Lionel Mitchell. Indeed, he died in 1984 of illnesses related to HIV-AIDS. He had developed dementia and was incontinent. He had been evicted from his East Village apartment, and was often wandering the streets, ghost-like compared to his ebullient, obese self. My copy of Traveling Light is nowhere to be found; I remember it as an autobiographical novel of a young man who comes to the East Village from a small town in Louisiana (Lionel's story). It was published in 1980 (?) and the next year won an American Book Award. How I first came to know him, I can no longer recall. He was a fixture in the East Village, but I don't remember him from the bars most frequented at the time (Phoebe's by the theater people), The Bar and later Dick's Bar (mostly gay). Nor can I remember who introduced us, but I imagine it was the painter and actor Bill Rice. At the time, the late-1960s, Lionel was writing for newspapers like The East Village Other (perhaps there were others), and he was writing drama criticism for The Amsterdam News. His criticism was acerbic, but it was grounded in a broad-based cultural knowledge. Looking back now, his female counterpart, for intelligence and wit, was Dorothy Johnson Dean. At what point Lionel and I became "friends" I no longer remember, but your blog jogged my memory--including that he would call me Cadillac. Why, I never new. But "How ya doing Cadillac?" was the greeting. Lionel wrote plays, but I don't know if any of them were ever produced at La Mama, The Old Reliable, or the WPA theaters. I do remember going to a reading of a play he wrote about the Haitian revolution leader Toussaint L'ouverture. I seem to remember that he also adapted the adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin (but this may be a faulty memory). One thing I did find on my book shelf was his contribution to Jesse Kornbluth's 1968 anthology, Notes from the New Underground. Lionel's contribution was a January 1967 article "Look at Down Here," from The East Village Other. In other works Lionel may have written about violence, as you write, but in this article he is the master of the sociological eye as he observes the diverse communities of the East Village, the hippies, the Beats, intermingling with the Hispanics, the Polish, and others. This would be a good starting point to observe Lionel's erudition--the range of his frame of reference--quotations from Oscar Wilde, Mae Tse-tung, de Sade, Gertrude Stein, St. Paul, and others. He was truly unique. One can only hope that in an age where academics spin out gossamers of nonesense, someone might have the time to at least do a bibliography (annotated?) of Lionel's writings. A round of applause to you Tom for "rediscovering him."
Edward Burns is editing the collection of letters between Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport. It is a work in real progress. Reading them will be like sitting in a course on modern literature and what it was like to be alive and reading in the 20th Century and being taught by two of the wittiest, best read, engaging thinkers truly engaged by the highest, the lowest and everything in between.... but at the same time alert to what was happening in all the arts..
I am putting this here again as it elicited a wonderful reply which added information about LIONEL MITCHELL, the author of TRAVELING LIGHT, I wonder if anyone saw LM's plays or read his poetry... that work seems to have disappeared--- an essential gay Black writer (how I loathe those adjectives as his writing is not of interest because of them but convention... and when I add that he died the most awful imaginable death from AIDS I must also add that his writing is more interesting than the sympathy generated by his death.
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