PREFACE TO THE Preface:
Yesterday during lunch with Jon
Rabinowitz, founder of Turtle Point Press, he mentioned he was reading Peter Taylor. I suggested he might be interested in George
Garrett’s DOUBLE VISION as it concerns
itself with Peter Taylor who in both imagination and in reality had been a next
door neighbor of both the real and the fictionalized George Garrett. It was last of Garrett’s novels to be
published and was not reviewed in the New York Times or in many other places…
it is one of his very best and easily joins THE DEATH OF THE FOX, POISON PEN
and the short story Wreath for Garibaldi.
I was introduced to Garrett by Chad
Walsh in 1969 who suggested I go to
Hollins College as George was there and in turn Garrett welcomed me into the MA
program and sent me a year later via a phone call to Frank MacShane at the
Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia… Garrett made it financially
possible for me to come to the University of Tennessee celebration of his life
and work, well knowing as he told me that it was all a trial run for their
hopes to bring Cormac McCarthy to that place… and so while they promised to
publish a book commemorating this event of course that never came to fruition
as the Garrett festival failed in its true intention to lure McCarthy there…
something Garrett knew would be the result but to enjoy seeing and hearing all
those who had been part of his life… and while I didn’t see him much in the
following years I did talk with him just before his death when I was up in
Massachusetts visiting my son, a student at the Groton School, and opening the
pages of DOUBLE VISION I know that on
page 153: “Frank also copies down one
sentence from a piece, “The Writing Life,” by Thomas McGonigle: The dead are always with us.
And while I have published two books and a third on the way from Notre
Dame…this quotation and being quoted in Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek stake a miniscule and probably laughable
point of culpable pride.
PREFACE
ONE
from the 25 March, 2016 TLS: Geoffrey
Hill writes, “In our present condition of oligarchic democracy…”
TWO
In the WSJ for 1 April, 2016 it is stated that 95% of college professors
in the humanities are self-identified as left of center.
There you have the US and the UK in
2016.
Preface Two:
BE WARNED I
HAVE NOT QUOTED FROM THE BOOKS I AM WRITING ABOUT. I AM A LOUSY TYPIST AND JUST CAN’T AT THE
MOMENT FIND THE ENERGY TO TYPE…
Books I am reading and books I think
everyone should read or at least look into:
SEVEN SEVEN….. THE HATRED
OF MUSIC by Pascal Quiginard. (Yale University Press.) A book of fragments, reflections… the huge
mistake of listening to music, all music, from a man who was a classical
musician, who organized a major festival of baroque opera… a life long listener
who stops… understanding we are
surrounded by noise from the time in the womb, noise we have no control over…
he has a very disturbing reflection on the use of music in the Nazi murder
camps where the murders were carried out to a soundtrack of the very best of
classical music…
Quiginard joins at least in my mind
Robert Calasso and E.M. Cioran as being the three essential thinkers of the
current moment. They are the only
individuals who seem to be able to think, to be suggestive, to warn, to be
clearing a way for thinking to continue.
Tied to no dreary political party, no theory, to agenda… with an absence
of jargon and access to all the major world languages : ancient and modern…
Survivors of the so-called Sixties
remember::: :the beating to death of a Black man by the Hells Angels who were
guarding a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont as the band played on…
::: remember Charlie Manson took direction from the Beatles’
White Album when he sent those people out to do some carving in the garbage
dumps as he sang on an album called LIE… just another guy wanting to play
music… right in there with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Doris Day’s son…
ah, the days of LSD and music…
EIGHT EIGHT… I have
been reading Thomas Wolfe again as I did so long ago when I read my first novel,
his first novel LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL…
a book I came to on my own, the only novel I had read before going to college…
but this time YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN…
as I have thought to describe a party I was recently to and remembered that
Wolfe had a very memorable party scene in this his last novel. What I had lost touch with was Wolfe’s
ability to inhabit lives other than his own and his description of the rich
remains as essential today as ever… and it is no wonder that Wolfe was one of
the first American writers that both Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke turned
to… something little known or appreciated as Wolfe’s books were forced to be
forgotten by the creative writing industry in the US…
NINE NINE….I have also been
reading I the Supreme by August Roa Bastos.
The single best description of “a leader” and the immediate delusion
that inhabits such a person. Told in a
startling original manner with no consistent timeless voice, no attempt at re-creation,
no paying homage to the usual blandishments of suspense and plot. A sole reliance on the exact moment each
sentence is read in order to create the person of Franca… who becomes---
because of how carefully the centering of the book upon Franca--- every nasty leader along with usual bunch of
the so-called good guys… to remember a leader is to always dip your fingers in
the blood or another or the many… in the
same way that Joyce in Ulysses tries
to describe a conversation between a father and son that in reality can never
be, no matter how willing or how hopeful the parties might be… by sending
Stephen and Leopold out to eventually meet… on the sure conveyor belt to six feet under…
TEN TEN…I AM TRYING TO READ Laszlo
Krasnahorkai, DESTRUCTION AND SORROW
BENEATH THE HEAVENS.. . (Seagull Books) but it reminds me of SOUL MOUNTAIN by Gao Xingjian, the
Chinese Nobel prize winner and which in turn reminded me that Jack Kerouac’s BIG SUR
or THE DHARMA BUMS which were
both superior to Xingjian and I would suggest that the Chinese guy was trying
to be Kerouac and while pretty good, fails--- at least for me—as I have been on
that journey and to that place before with Jack Kerouac.
ELEVEN ELEVEN…And sadly I was
defeated by Klaus Hoffer’s AMONG THE
BIERESCH (Seagull Books) in which a
young Austrian writer tries to imagine the life and culture of an obscure part
of what was the old Austro-Hungarian empire…which seemed a not very interesting
project though it is said to be popular in Germany… because in English we are
fortunate to have a translation told very much from within the imagine setting
that Hoffer is trying to urge into being…in the form of Gyula Illyes’s PEOPLE OF THE PUSZTA…first published in
1936 but available in English since 1967…
(an
over-looked New Directions book, THE
SINISTRA ZONE by Adam Bodor some years ago took us to one of these
obscure border regions but some of us had read his THE EUPHRATES AT BABYLON…)
The only reason I knew about the
Hoffer book is that it was translated by Isabel Fargo Cole whose essential
translated version of “I” by
Wolfgang Hilbig (SEAGULL BOOKS) and the book of stories THE SLEEP OF THE RIGHTEOUS also by Hilbig introduced me to finally
a German language writer one could read after reading Thomas Bernhard, Peter
Handke, Ernst Junger, Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann…to lay out some names for
context… and Hilbig lead to re-reading his wife, Natascha Wodin whose THE INTERPRETER was published in
English as long ago as 1983 to no reviews…and ONCE I LIVED from
Serpents Tale… also not widely reviewed but if I had the power I would link her
to Jean Rhys… in her ability to present the interior of her women in such a
manner that individualizes them though they are hardly the positive roll models
women have been cajoled into providing and happily do all the way to the bank
and irrelevance… How these two people could be together… not having the German
I cant answer that.. as Hilbig in “I”
has created the perfect example of a man
who is inside the security apparatus of the DDR…and really inside every other
apparatus including the American versions
which have sadly been endlessly romanticized by American writers…
Lastly I should have written about ATLAS OF AN ANXIOUS MAN by Christoph
Ranmayr (Seagull Books) as I had long ago reviewed his THE TERRORS OF ICE AND DARKNESS… but that review is not available
as I wrote it for Newsday day when that was a very good newspaper for books…
The ATLAS is a collection of 70 some
destinations but I have not ventured into it but not from laziness instead
sheer jealousy--- I guess they do things differently in Austria and German where
a good writer—on the basis of his novel THE TERRORS OF ICE AND DARKNESS and THE LAST WORLD--- gets paid to travel…
Such is a moment and then a PS.
THE RECENT DEATH OF A GREAT WRITER… sometimes the Nobel gets it right as with
Claude Simon and I guess we can be happy that Patrick Modiano got it recently—better him than any of the
awful American prospects, Roth Delillo, Oates..who else…
Book
review: 'Fiasco' by Imre Kertész
The second book of the trilogy about a young boy who
survives Nazi concentration camps.
THIS
WAS ALL THE SPACE I WAS ALLOWED AND IT WAS STILL MUCH SHORTENED…
In 1944, a 14-year-old boy, future novelist Imre Kertész, was rounded
up while on an excursion in the countryside near Budapest and sent to
Auschwitz. And then to Buchenwald. Surviving the camps and returning to
Budapest, he was asked, simply, by his surviving family and friends,
"Where have you been?"
In his work, Kertész reflects on how quickly he discovered that no one
really wanted to know what he had experienced. And yet, Kertész's entire
literary life has been an attempt at answering that simple question in the
trilogy of novels, "Fatelessness," "Fiasco" and
"Kaddish for an Unborn Child" — an attempt that earned him the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2002. His other books describe in particular detail his
dreary survival under the communism in Hungary.
Finally published in an English translation, "Fiasco" is
actually the middle book of the trilogy and describes, in the opening third,
the fictionalized experiences Kertész must have had in writing
"Fatelessness" — having it rejected by a publisher as being unsuitable
for publication. "As I now see clearly, to write a novel means to write
for others — among others, for those who reject one," he muses. The later
parts of "Fiasco" follow a writer very much like Kertész who is going
about his life in the tediously circumscribed environment of communist Hungary.
Although
"Fiasco" is outwardly a little off-putting — in Kertész's style, the
reader encounters parenthesis upon parenthesis — the writer also succinctly
explains how he could write about his awful experiences as a child that he
described in "Fatelessness" and still remain faithful to his
14-year-old self's search for adventure and beauty amid the horror of the
concentration camps.
Now, in translator Tim Wilkinson's handling,
"Fiasco" completes the trilogy for English readers, a trilogy that is
one of the best renderings of what it must have been like to survive a Nazi
murder camp. As Kertész writes in "Fiasco," he could not avoid a
responsibility "to transmit, in my own way, according to my own lights; to
transmit the material that was possible for me, my own material, myself.…
however, there was one thing that, perhaps naturally enough, I did not think
of: we are never capable of interpreting for ourselves. I was taken to
Auschwitz not by the train in the novel but by a real one."
POST PREFACE
Probably this is all a self-indictment for… knowing, I am about to
give birth astride a grave in Beckett’s phrase… but then every book is that.
