Preface: HERE
EXACTLY IS WHY 95% of what passes for good writing in the United States is simply impersonal fake
something or other: "The Philosophical prison we all carry within us has
unleashed an assault onto our memories, decreeing unto them the fiction of
chronology. And yet they continue, obstinately, to be our only
freedom."--Juan Jose Saer from THE ONE BEFORE (Open Letter books)
-76-
Start of summer. (21 June)…though it is now
26 July when there are
no longer any children in the house, when one is no longer a child such a
moment no longer matters…on Long Island if one is a city person the summer begins with Memorial Day as that
is when summer rentals begin running until Labor Day…
But but
My wife’s mother grows sad always as
the day reaches its greatest length as her father was arrested on that day in
1941 by the Russians in Estonia to be sent to the Gulag where he would be
murdered… so for her daughter Anna the start of summer was always shadowed by
this both spoken and unspoken fact and while it has dimmed for me over the
years I am aware that the summer brought the fact of my sister getting polio
back in 1950 and I not getting polio… on a summer day when we came back from
the beach near the house on Furman Lane in Patchogue…
-63-
At the moment I am engaged in the
melancholy business of packing up my books and papers in the house in New
Jersey in the getting ready to move as Anna is selling the house she was born
into it… there are a surfeit of these essays some well known, by Walter Benjamin
for instance and while we also continue to live in the city--- where another
collection of books has been established--- but to the vast majority of the
population such a concern is so esoteric as to be almost inconceivable… packing
the books? What books? Most would simply
say. What is the big deal?... Or increasingly you just find shopping bags
with books on the sidewalk that have been discarded when people move or when
people decide to tidy up their lives, in other words live in the prison of the current
moment.
-12-
But being of a certain age books have
filled up my life and I have been surrounded by books as living in New York
City books are very cheap indeed and easily collected… in spite of access to
libraries both academic and public… and then there is the writing of books…
Edward Dahlberg always maintained that before he ventured a line of his own he
had to look at a…I forget the word he used… but his hand would sweep about the
shelved books in their many cases… and I have always known that when the French
writer Lamartine went to the Balkans he traveled with a library in excess of
500 books… of course that is now easily possible with the various electronic
devises at one’s disposal…but for a person of my age, the electronic does not
have the authority of the word printed on the page… but this is now probably a
quaint idea in the light of the current political warfare both foreign and
domestic which is primarily via electronic devices…for better or worse…
So that a writing like this---ironically
to be read on an electronic device and being composed on an electronic device
though I can imagine it only as a small stone on a highway which will only be
of consequence if by some accident it is propelled by another vehicle’s wheel
into hitting the windshield of the car which I am driving and the driver’s
reaction: what bad luck.
-32-
In the moving I moved the three books
of BillHolm which I have: COMING
HOME CRAZY--- based on a time teaching English in China--- THE
HEART CAN BE FILLED ANYWHERE ON EARTH and THE DEAD GET BY WITH EVERYTHING.
According to a search Holm is now
dead… so is there any reason to hold on to his books, to read his books, has he
marked the culture of the Unites States…
some of the books are still in print and others have moved to two cents
plus postage. I had been interested in
his work because of my own GOING TO PATCHOGUE and I guess we both have read Thomas Wolfe
and in particular William Carlos Williams’s PATERSON….the power of
the local and Holms has an essay “Iceland”
which concerns itself with his always
identifying himself as Icelandic and that is another reason I was interested in
him as Iceland was the first foreign country I had visited and the first
foreign woman I ever talked to was Icelandic, Silja Adalsteinsdottir… but for
Holm being Icelandic because of his Icelandic grandparent gave him a way to
avoid being part of the United Sates, avoid being an ordinary American, whatever
that might mean…
Yet, Holm did not write an essential
book… maybe in Minnesota his book exists but beyond these paragraphs I am
writing… will he ever be taken up?
Of course none of this matters to
him, now, dead.
-31-
And the same for another book long
cared for perimeters a book of poetry by Charles Levendosky which came
out from Wesleyan in that distinctive series they had back then which also gave
me James Dickey’s Drowning With Others which I see was autographed by Dickey in
February,1964 but it is the Levendosky book that concerns me as he tries within
the space of a thin book the whole of the United States. One might compare it to Michel Butor’s MOBILE
which also tried to do the same… but Butor
was doing prose while Levendosky was doing poetry as in these lines from near
Yuma: he always talked about/the dunes
as if they were/naked pregnant women/called those wind ripples/stretch
marks/they have been waiting a long time/to birth/unless the reptiles are
theirs.
Amazon
provided what came after and it is mere verse, and Levendosky is dead according
to the internet except for me for this book which will never be reprinted…
-31a-
But I shall save both the Holms and
the Levendosky books, though I doubt I will consult them as I do Hannah Green’s
THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE because they do not possess what she calls vision, a vague word to be sure but let
me be accurate: I got the idea from life, but I have proceeded from vision. And in that I link her with Celine,
Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, Onetti, Saer, Gombrowicz, Kertesz, Nadas…
those writers I constantly go back to: Glenway
Wescott, Julian Green, Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard…
I will not make a listing of the
characteristics of that vision, A reader
who has read these authors knows what I am writing about and if I included the
poets: Eliot, Pound, David Jones, Lorine Neidecker would this vision be
clearer… and possibly adding Thomas Kinsella, and Georgy Ivanov…
But so many others and that is why
one must
have a library.
And for thinking I go to Cioran, to
Shestov, to Valery, to Unamuno, to Ernst Junger.
Is there a difference between vision
and thinking?...
Probably not though these two words
are the twin touchstone one hauls out
when a new book…
Which allows for should this be the
summer of Juan Carlos Onetti--- he of A BRIEF LIFE is there anyone worth
the time of a summer of course he is for the few as nothing is positive,
nothing is exhilarating, nothing is enlightening, all of his work is
imaginative in all the ways of shutting down the possibility of changing the
looking at the world with anything but a turning aside not out disgust but out
of recounting with a knowing that it can only get worse… even with the last
sentence read we know that the next will re-iterate what you have read
the pleasures of insistence, the sole virtue of genius …
To be continued at some
future… or in the past
