On the way back from the AWP (Associate Writing Program’s annual
conference) in Washington, I bought THE RILKE ALPHABET by Ulrich Baer at
Dedalus Book Warehouse because under the letter K: For Kafka and King Lear. In the book Baer writes about the storm Rilke
experienced at Duino on the Adriatic coast that in some way precipitated the
great elegies… and this goes on to the storm Lear experiences in the play long
after he has made the famous demand upon Cordelia…
This lead
me: while I had not been to Duino, I was on the Adriatic coast in August 1967
aware the train had gone by Duino and
having left that train at Trieste (the city of Joyce and Svevo, I knew even
then) I was staying at the youth hostel right on the coast to the east of the
city… I met Michael J. Peters who was on
his way to Lebanon to see The Cedars of… we met two South African girls and went
drinking and missed the curfew and found ourselves locked out and as the rain
came down we found shelter in a cabana back from the beach and all night the
rain on the metal roof… the holding of a damp shivering body and being held in
turn…
In the
morning Michael and I found a windowless
room in a shabby hotel in the city… [I know his name as it is inscribed in an
old address book, neatly block-lettered in his hand] we went up to the cemetery that overlooks
the city… the bright garish decorations… the large mostly deserted official
buildings of a city that had once been important... the parody of the canals of
Venice… we took the ferry to Pula—as I knew even then that it was actually the first place
Joyce lived in Italy… we stayed at a mostly deserted grand hotel… complete with
gambling salons presided over by fellows who seemed to have stepped out of Last Year
at Marienbad… in the early evening we sauntered, to be exact, around the central square with all the
other young people looking at each other… we took the train for Zagreb and then
went our separate ways as Michael was going to Athens--- I have not seen him
since but have a few letters from back then when he had returned and was living in Seattle but I
do not know what became of him--- and I was going to Sofia---to meet as I
didn’t know at that moment Lilia, on Hristo Botev Boulevard within an hour of
leaving the train--- and my life would change and be forever walking in the streets of Sofia.
The year
before in Dublin in a UCD lecture hall I had heard Denis Donoghue lecture on King
Lear and use as the center of his discussion of silence in Shakespeare
the line of Cordelia’s in response to the demand of her father: I cannot heave/
My heart into my mouth
-->
To this day and until I die I will never…
so these books these sentences… my new book’s failure, the absence of readers, my publisher’s failure---none of that
equals the failure I feel in thinking about all of this and writing this as I
wonder as surely any person would do::: to what end does a man buying a book, a
remaindered book at that, have himself back in a storm near Trieste on the
way East to…
