I decided to preface these reminders of books
read, to be read and reread with this first poem published in The Patchogue Advance in 1962.
SEVEN
I might even think this is the beginning of a
long memorial address that will go for many pages, in the voice of Johannes
Freumbichler--- the grandfather of Thomas Bernhard who encourage his grandson
in words and as Bernhard writes in A CHILD: "I can still hear my
grandfather saying Everything one writes is nonsense. So how could
he think of writing a thousand pages of nonsense? He always
had the most incredible ideas, but he always felt that these ideas were
the cause of his failure. We all fail, he said time and again. That
is the thought that most occupies my mind too. Naturally, I had no idea
what failure was, what it meant, what it could mean though I myself was
already going through the process of failure, non-stop failure; at school I
failed everything with incredible consistency.'
NINE
Of course the very copying of these
sentences reveal me as...
FOURTEEN
Could one imagine Joyce Carol Oates [the
three saddest words in the English language (Gore Vidal)] or Jonathan Franzen or
Philip Roth or Toni Morrison or Paul Auster or any of our well-known bad
writers---to use Edward Dahlberg's phrase to which he always added: I
have heard of them and that is sufficient--- stepping back.. except as a
strategic marketing move...but they can’t do that... and find themselves within
the sentences of a Thomas Bernhard?
TWENTYONE
From Emerson’s Quotation and Originality: "A great man quotes bravely and will not
draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good."
SIXTEEN
Here
it is a book from the grave of Patrick Leigh Fermor: THE BROKEN ROAD (New
York Review Books)... having set out to walk across Europe, Fermor published in
his lifetime two books---A TIME OF GIFTS and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER---
but it is from the grave that we get to Bulgaria.
Having
set out in 1933 on his walk it is now the fall of 1934 and how I wish the
Bulgaria he describes was still available in Bulgaria though reading
Fermor’s version of Bulgaria still reminds me of what I find attractive in Bulgaria…
“A twist in the valley and a leaf-fringed
glance through a clearing brought my
destination into sight. This was a
fortress-like building, almost a small
towered city, embedded in fold after fold of beech trees and pine The southern ramparts sank into the gorge,
and the five tall walls and tiled roofs formed a lopsided pentagon round the
deep well of a courtyard, lined within by many ascending tiers of a
slender-pillard gallery hoisted on semicircular arches…”
Of course, Fermor has come to Rila Monastery
as did I so many years later.
But driving with a former prime minister of Bulgaria a few years ago form Rila did
not sadly take us through what Fermor saw:
“The way back to Sofia lay through the western foothills of the Rilska
Planina: rolling dun-coloured country
that turned red at sunset with prehistoric wooden ploughs drawn by buffalos or
oxen. In the village, the houses were
looped with festoons of tobacco leaves drying in the sun, the size colour and shape
of kippers. I slept in a rick, the first
night, reached the little town of Dupnitza on the next and got to Radomir the
following dusk. I was drinking a lonely slivo and feeling tired and a bit
depressed when a bus stopped opposite with София inscribed across the top, and a roof laden with a host of roped
baskets and bundles. Inside it was a
Noah’s ark indeed, for, in every inch, not occupied by my kerchiefed and kalpacked
fellow passengers, were trussed chickens and ducks, a turkey and two full-grown lambs that bleated shrilly
form time to time. We rocked and clanked
through the darkness. The half a dozen
passengers next to me sang quietly all the away: sad fluttering patterns of sound
in the minor mode, quite different from the robust strains I had heard so often
lately. I listened entranced. I asked for a particular one over and over again---Zashto to se sirdish liube? (Why are you angry with me, my love?)
The first line ran--- and determined to try and master it later.”
45
years of the communism and the long disastrous hangover from that blight
changed all of this and it goes without saying not for the better.
Yet,
yet I would go to Bulgaria at the drop of a plane ticket as the connection, at
least in my mind is there through THE COPRSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV (one of the
first American books to be translated after the fall of the communism but not
reprinted in book form since as the fear has returned to Bulgaria: to actually remember is now disputed in
Bulgaria which intellectually is still under the heavy thumb of the old
nomenkultura of the previous regime---richer now than ever before, more
mediocre--- and the middle section of GOING TO PATCHOGUE and when it is
published and I hope before I am dead, EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS: this last book pursues the violent awful death of Linda Nelson while happening
in Upstate New York began in Bulgaria…
FORTY
How
can I convince you that THE BROKEN ROAD is one of the best travel books --- right there with
ALBERTO Savinio’s SPEAKING TO CLIO and D.H. Lawrence’s ETRUSCAN PLACES and
MORNINGS IN MEXICO--- they are not up to
date, they are not modern, they are not
looking for bargains, not looking for the very best, not playing that insider’s
card of knowing A SECRET… they know what they are writing about and that
knowing is not designed to put you the reader under their thumb of some sort of
superior connoisseurship, but the knowing is also edged with a certain felt
experience of how fragile all such memories are and as a reader you know it,
whatever it was will not be there when
you get there BUT you might, just might find some tiny reminder of…
SEVENTEEN
A
second version of TRANS-ATLANTYK by
Witold Gombrowicz has been published by Yale University Press. replacing an
earlier version that had been introduced by Stanisław Barańczak--- a once
important critic and poet but now sadly
sidelined by illness.
I
do not read Polish but I do read Gombrowicz and Yale along with minor
contributions by Dalkey Archive, Grove Press and Archipelago have seen to it
that almost all of Gombrowicz is available in English.
One
can think of TRANS-ATLANTYK as the book that gets us from the Poland of
FERDYDURKE , PORNOGRAFIA and COSMOS to
the Argentina of the great DIARY also
available in an essential version from Yale as who can forget the memorable
opening of that diary of his exile in Argentina that begins: 1953 I
Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday
Me. Thursday Me. Friday Josefa Radzyminska has magnanimously
provided me with a dozen or so issues of….get my hands on several issues of
various Polish newspapers…I read these Polish newspaers as if I were reading a
story about someone whom I knew intimately and well who suddenly leaves for
Australia, for example, and there experiences rather strange adventures which
are no longer real because they concern someone different and strange, who can
only be loosely identified with ther person we once knew…”
THIRTY
I
would hold that to be well read a person needs on their shelf the collected
works of E. M. Cioran, Witold Gombrowisz, Thomas Bernhard, Edward Dahlberg,
Ernst Junger, Julian Green. MIguel de Unamuno
All
of these writers have two basic concerns summed up by Unamuno:
ONE
“I would choose neither “the human” nor
“humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective but
the concrete substantive: man, the man
of flesh and blood, the man who is born, suffers, and dies--- above all the man
who dies; the man who eats and drinks an plays and sleeps and thinks and loves;
the man who is seen and heard...
TWO “Memory
is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of
collective personality of a people. We
live in memory and by memory and our spiritual life is simple the effort of our
memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to
transform itself into our future.
Or,
maybe it is all summed up in the titles of two of Cioran’s books THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, THE SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY.
FORTY-ONE
Now
I have said it and quoted it.
SO BE IT, again.
***
SO BE IT, again.
***
WHAT IS LEFT OUT
I
should have written that Patrick Leigh Fermor in THE BROKEN ROAD also goes to
Romania, Greece and Turkey but Iwas stopped by his being in Bulgaria. I also provided no plot summary of
TRANS-ATLANTYK but here is the opening sentence: “I feel the need to convey to my Family, to
my kin and friends, this the beginning of my adventures, now ten years long, in
the….’
I
do not know what is a wellrread reader.
I could have added some more
writers who I live with on a daily basis, Celine, Mandelstam, Broch,
Handke, David Jones, James Joyce, Beckett, Leopardi, James Thomson, Eliot,
Bitov, Nadas… Tom Whalen, George Garrett, Lee Titus Elliott…
