Sunday, March 15, 2015

FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS FROM DEREK MAHON

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.”