FIVE
I have been thinking of books, not at least for me an unusual path down
which to wander and of course wonder.
Though mentioning this has an
attending musty odor as I do think books are not much in evidence in the
imaginative life of young people with rare exceptions and it is one of the few
advantages of aging: one will not be
about for the continued and accelerating marginalization and trivialization of
the book.
EIGHT I enjoy the complaints about the so-called
rising inequality in America but the complaints are only that…they fill up the
usual mouths but the reality is that there is nothing to be done about it. There will be much pretend, much huffing and
puffing but until you see say Harvard and Yale opening the Freshman class to
any high school student who can block letter his or her name… or when you see
violent demonstrators trying to bomb and burn out the rich apartment buildings
on Fifth and Park Avenue in New York City…
NINE Enough of a nod to so-called reality
presided over by…
TEN I
have been reading for the longest time it seems
THE WALL by H.G. Adler. This book
together with Adler’s THE JOURNEY and PANORAMA are the first books I have read
of late that can without hesitation to DEATH OF VIRGIL and THE SLEEPWALKERS by Hermann Broch… in the original version I
had allowed myself to be acarried on in comparison to William Faulkner ABSALOM,
ABSALOM and James Joyce’s ULYSSES.. but reconsidered as Adler does not involve
the reader in what can only be described as a realistic place, a place of
so-called real streets, places… which of course both Faulkner and Joyce do so
well though the places they describe really only exist in an imagination
created by the words… there is reality
in Adler but it would be impossible to go to an actual place… and pretend that
this is the place we read about in Joyce in Faulkner…
ELEVEN A muddle as you can see…
THIRTEEN This is not to say that I have only been
reading THE WALL as I have also been
reading THE PHYSICS OF SORROW by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov who
seems to have moved contemporary Bulgarian literature into the modern moment
and he is the only Bulgarian writer one can read along with Peter Nadas or Peter
Esterhazy though one hesitates as one never knows after only three books if his nerve will remain steady… but one
hopes that he has learned well from Jose Camilo Cela’s CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA
and Mati Unt’s BRECHT AT NIGHT and of
course there is Andrei Bitov’s THE SYMMETRY
TEACHER… on whose shores I have failed, have fallen down and while usually the
book is blamed but I do think it is my lousy ability to read that has defeated
me… in the case of Bitov whose PUSHKIN’S HOUSE seemed very accessible and THE
ONE Russian novel that would come right after Mikhail Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA and to date there
has not been a Russian novel to add to these two..
SIXTEEN Now that check… DEREK MAHON
the poet visited Lilia McGonigle in Baggot Street Hospital, Dublin in
October 1968--- 12 days before we were due to go to the United States, having
found no alternative to this desperate move of failure--- she had come down
with appendicitis and the necessary surgery… Mahon arrived at the ward along
with Eugene Lambe and myself. The poet
said this will help you on your way… it was a wonderful warm gesture and
fortunately we had no need of such a great amount of cash as we were setting off
for the then still new world, our hearts filled with a desire… though who the f*** really knows what was in
our heads hearts… to New York and then
to Menasha, Wisconsin to which my father had been exiled by the American Can
Company, an American Siberia, sharing the same climate as …
TWENTY Of course in the present moment (2015) we
have a vast governmental security apparat but that has always been an adjunct
of the myriad smaller kingdoms--- which come and go and sometimes really go as did the American Can Company…
TWENTYTWO But Derek Mahon remembers: in “To Eugene Lambe in Heaven”: Few/will
survive except those, like you, the stuff of myth./ Oft in the stilly night I
remember our wasted youth.
THIRTY How quickly writers are forgotten, but then
everyone is replaceable in a terrible easy forgetfulness… who really cares once
the guy or woman is dead---the relatives dwindle who remember that so and so
wrote books but I confess even to that insane delusion that someday another
young person will be browsing the shelves of the Patchogue public library---
who knows if such will remain--- goes into the Local History room or more likely
happens onto a local history website and finds a name and a book.. such is how
the already forgotten think and they even wonder is it possible to imagine Paul
Auster or Jonathan Franzen taking a pause from contemplating their real estate
and stock portfolios to give a glimmer to such recognition of their
own futures: what happened to D.M. Thomas?... remember when people lined up to buy THE WHITE HOTEL?
FORTY Evidence for previous
section: TODAY’S POETS edited by Chad Walsh published 1964… about the only anthology of its kind to
include GIL ORLOVITZ between Robert Lowell and Lawrence Ferleinghetti and then moving on to Howard Nemerov, Richard
Wilbur Philip Larkin..Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and the eye moves on to
Derek Walcott who Walsh is writing, “He may well become a major poet”… but it
is GIL ORLOVITZ that Walsh really
singles out: “never been included
in a widely distributed anthology (one
might add and never again) and he continues…
writing with a Dionysian frenzy combined with a perfect control of
language that has been equaled by few.. he is one of the few contemporary
masters of the sonnet and the short lyric.
He also has the rare distinction of carrying on a lover’s quarrel with
society without falling into cheap contempt for individual classes of humanity.”
FIFTYONE I was fortunate to know Chad Walsh and he
helped me through Beloit College and beyond.. he had hopes for me and approved
of my books… I can not imagine any young
academic like him today as they all seem prisoners of the conventional of the
expected but then Chad had been a communist, an Episcopal priest, a proofreader
and typesetter when young for Sherwood Anderson's newspaper in Marion
Virginia. Walsh was one of the first to champion C.S. Lewis before
that man was known and famous… and he helped me because when he read my college
application--- as he told me and as happened back then—the faculty picked the
students not some “Admissions Office Committee” which has itemized lists of
required student quotas to fill--- he was
impressed by the fact that I had listed Mein Kampf as the last book read
before filling out the application for Beloit…
later telling me some were appalled
by your book choice but I thought here was a kid who discovered that this guy
Hitler had written a book… you can’t fake such curiosity…
HUNDRED Had my purposes ever been clearer and
so finally expressed as in this phrase from a short piece by Henry James on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister: “a sublime indifference to the reader--- the
indifference of humanity in the aggregate to the individual observer.”
