MY DEAD OF IRELAND

 

This evening I was wondering why Dublin does not come to mind more frequently.  I was in the basement and picked up GIRL ON A BICYCLE a novel by Leland Bardwell.  I had not read it as it was badly printed on paper that turned brown though I  had acquired it from the memory of meeting her in Dublin.  But more vivid in mind was Fintan MacLachlan her companion, boyfriend or what not, now  finally only known as the father of three of her children but when I knew him he was a taxi driver and as a "toucher."  

There is never reason for how names appear in mind, as they simply do...we are always almost unanchored to the present moment

SO to make a list of the dead--- does that account for how Dublin seems to have gone somewhere yet my ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin remains in print in the world--though the National Library of Ireland does not have it in its collection, while University College, Dublin's library has it... 

James Liddy, 

Philip Casey, 

Eugene Lambe, 

Derek Mahon, 

Patrick Kavanagh, 

John Jordan, 

Francis Stuart, 

Liam O'Flaherty, 

Dickie Riordain, 

Dermot Healy, 

John Montague, 

Leland Bardwell, 

J. P. Donleavy,  

Christine Keeler,

Pearse Hutchinson, 

Austin Clarke, 

Jonathan Bardon, 

Ian Whitcomb, 

Tommy Smith, 

Philip Hobsbaum, 

Brian Higgins, 

Michael Hartnett, 

Tim Tollekson, 

Willie and Beatrice Opperman, 

Brian Moore, 

Desmond O'Grady, 

Roger McHugh, 

Jeremiah Hogan, 

Garech Browne, 

Paddy O'Hanlon, 

Jan Kaminski, 

Justin O'Mahony, 

Jim Fitzgerald, 

Stephen and Kathleen Behan, 

Mary Lavin,

But of course Grafton Street remains and St Stephen's Green... I will walk by Ely Place where last I lived...continue on and think of teaching at the Dublin Tuition Center or living in Grosvenor Square...and and and... but no longer tonight

LETTERS SENT INTO THE FUTURE with other things

                                                    76

        There was a PAUSE  in my writing of these pages.  

        The now usual feeling of fatigue and despair as to the future of printed words.  But for some reason that gate has opened.  

        Possibly the news that the complete ANNIVERSARIES by Uwe Johnson will be appearing in the early fall from New York Review Books.  Like many I had read the two book version that Johnson himself had approved but the new version is the complete version of 2000+ pages.  

         A novel unimaginable in American writing yet the novel is set in the US in the year 1968.  The New York Times is a central fixture of the novel as it is read by the woman who is at the center of the novel and as she exists in both New York and in her past in Germany.  More about this... 

         and also in the fall, a biography from the French of Maurice Blanchot...  at one time only some years ago Blanchot was read and read by all those who were really interested in writing...but as the universal dumbness descended thanks to the now totalitarian political correctness in the colleges and the imposiiton of a rule by identity politics such a writer is now impossible to imagine being read... yet a biography is appearing from Fordham University Press...

         while the third push to return is the beginning of the translation and publication of the complete stories of VARLAM SHALAMOV.  Two books of his stories had appeared but they are but a taste of the breadth of this most heroic survivor of the Gulag...  

         Again it is New York Review Books that is doing the complete stories, translated by Donald Rayfield and the first book is now available at over 700 pages.  

         The simple reason that Shalamov is not better known is that he resisted any form of collaboration with the regime that had kept him as a slave in a gold mine in the Gulag for six years and then as a hospital worker so spending more that 15 years in the Gulag.  What makes his work remarkable is that he survived and did not shrink away from the simple awfulness and the fact that nothing is really learned from the experience except that one has survived.  

        A friend George Kamen who was a medical doctor and psychcoanaylst and exile from Bulgaria went back to Bulgaria after "the changes" to interview both the guards and the prisoners and discovered that both groups of people felt a great shame as to what had happened to them.  

          The shame of the guards was understandable to anyone but George did not live long enough to fully understand the shame of the prisoners as it was more than the survivor guilt.  It is this terrible truth that is at the center of Shalamov's work.  

       Rayfield includes in his intrioduction an unpublished fragment by Shalamov with the title:  WHAT I SAW AND UNDERSTOOD IN THE CAMPS...  I will record three of them:  

17:  I understood why people do not live on hope---there isn't any hope.  Nor can they survive by means of free will---what free will is there?  They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal. 

36. I understand the thieves were not human. 

45.  I understood that a writer has to be a foreigner in the questions he is dealing with, and if he knows his material well, he will write in such a way that nobody will understand him.

      Statement 45 I have the feeling describes  my own understanding in some way  of my own books both published and unpublished. 

                                                     79
         A sure sign of incipient crankhood is the writing of letters to the editor.  I have done this over the years and once achieved the feat of two letters within one week in The Irish Times IN (1974).

        I have recently sent 4 letters to the Times Literary Supplement and they have published one of them.  Here they are and I will not pick out the one which was published.

One

          Sir, It was nice to see the review of new edition of a biography of Hans Henny Jahn (June 1) but one must question the assertion "effectively unknown."  I have next to me as I type the Charles Scribner's Sons edition published with a nice spare green dust jacket of The Ship (from 1961) and of course one has from 2012 the Atlas Press edition of the stories mentioned in your review.  I would note that the collected edition, in German it is true, of Jahn was prominently on display in the library of Julian Rios who I interviewed in France once upon a time for The Guardian.  

       It would be better to lament the dreary prejudice of too many publishers for the living when it comes to doing translations into English.  More frequently the dead give better value as they are not celebrating the commonplace cliches of the present.

TWO

       Sir, A certain sadness over here at the news (May 11) that the Pillars of Hercules is boarded up as I recall meeting there on July 27, 2012, the writer (Born in the UK and  Dire Straits) and former editor of Melody Maker, Mike Oldfield to talk about something I have forgotten but then very important.  We were both surprised when we looked up to the TV and realized the Olympics were opening that night in another part of London.  I wonder if any other writers were in there as could one have  had better seats?

THREE

       Sir,  I would like to second the very thoughtful defense of George Steiner by Leslie Chamberlain (Letters 23 March 2018).  He came to a class in the School of the Arts at Columbia University while I was a student  there in the very early 70s to talk about his own fiction.  He admitted that he was a bit jealous of our good fortune to have Anthony Burgess as a professor since he was the only British writer who he thought was really interesting and knowledgeable of world writing both in his own writing and in his criticism.  He also admired the school for having visitors like Jorge Luis Borges, Nadine Gordimer and Nicanor Parra as such revealed what could be done.  He left us with the comment that the only living German language writer he was interested in was Thomas Bernard.  

       Later I wrote to Steiner that the chairman of Alfred A. Knopf, Bernhard's publisher, told me that the first three of Bernhard's books that they had published  had sold less than a 1000 copies  each. Steiner replied that he thought the man was exaggerating given the reality of American literary culture.

FOUR

The review of "The Discovery of Chance" a book by  Aileen M. Kelly (March 3) about the Russian writer Alexander Herzen reminded me of Eugene Lambe, who lived for many years in Long Acre in a top floor flat above what was at first Bertram Rota and then The Gap.  There were three objects in the flat:  a David Hockney print on the wall, a wooden painted flower and the bound hardcover edition of Herzen's My Past and Thoughts.  These objects were never discussed but their meaning was supposed to be obvious.  

Lambe was from Northern Ireland, a one time  law student at Trinity College, Dublin, the dedicatee of poems by Derek Mahon, was claimed as being a servant by the very wealthy property owner George Lawson, was a friend of Peter Ackroyd, J.P. Donleavy and Giles Gordon, a frequenter of The French Pub, the father of a son named Orlando whose mother was an heir of the Hudson Bay Trading Company and after dying of a heart-attack in a gay disco in Covent Garden  among those attending his funeral were his two brothers, high officers  in the British Army, one of whom was in charge of British forces in Bosnia at that time.  

To the writer of this letter Lambe insisted that when visiting the nearby National Gallery  one should never look at more than two paintings  per visit as the third will make you forget the three of them.

DISPLAYING A BOOK finally not edifying possibly

            More common than I suspect:  displaying books as memorials or as reminders of once I…

            Today, I moved the four volumes of MY PAST AND THOUGHTS  The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen.  I had bought them after seeing them in the small rooms of Eugene Lambe in Longacre, London above what had been the Bertram Rota Booksellers. 

            Eugene has been dead for many years now and London seems a little emptier, at least for me. 

            The Herzen books were on a small table in front of the wall on which a David Hockey drawing was  displayed.  Often he had a small vase with a couple of tulips and nearby was a wooden sculpture in the shape of tulips.  No other books were ever visible. 

            I had first met Eugene in Dublin in the 60s--- when for a time he had been studying the law at Trinity, down he was from The North, and he informs much of my ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 which is supposed to come from Dlakey Archive in the spring of 2014.

            The reason for moving the Herzen books is that yesterday at Anna’s I was looking into a few novels by Giles Gordon, who before he became Prince Charles’s literary agent, before he was a publisher, he was a novelist, whose novels possibly could have joined B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin and Alan Burns but that was not really to be though who knows… Ann Quin exists In the Dalkey Archive. 

            But Giles Gordon was introduced---- also how association of names works---- to me at a luncheon club off of Longacre by George Lawson who was the owner of Bertram Rota and when I asked Lawson who had long been a subject of conversation from Eugene as in “your man Lawson”  could he tell me about Eugene replied, “O, you mean my servant…”  

            I will leave it at that as it is teased out a little in ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974.  Eugene was the father of a son Orlando by a Canadian heiress of the Hudson Bay Trading Company. 

            One year when I visited Eugene he had had a heart attack and was saying all the doctors can tell you is you have had a heart attack and he had another in a gay dancing place in Covent Garden.  At the funeral, his two brothers were revealed to be generals in the British Army--- one of them head of British forces in Bosnia--- attending the funeral surrounded by security.  A poem was dedicated to Eugene years before by Derek Mahon. 

            As far as I know there is no grave for Eugene, so he is as disappeared as these words will eventually be and as he slides from the  memory of the few who still know the name…

            Another book that I moved was AZEF  by Roman Goul. 

            Octavian Cretu--- the best man at my wedding to Ruth--- knew him in some way when we all lived on the Upper West side in the early 70s when one way aware that the neighborhood was home to still the many that had escaped from or survived the horrors of the communism and Nazism.  It gave a certain seriousness even to those of us who frequented the Gold Rail or Forlini’s or The West End yet who were aware of the ghost of Lorca and Kerouac. 

            Octavian was a refugee from Romania and that was the beginning of our friendship as I had lived in Bulgaria  1967-68 and unlike too many people at that time I had no illusions about the pleasures of the communism.  Goul published Nabokov and Brodsky in his journal The New Review but there was about him that feeling of being excluded as academics at Columbia had no interest in the Russian émigré experience as there was neither money nor prestige in it. 

            Of all the people I have met from the East only Nina Berberova  knew of him as he was the first person who met her when she arrived after the war.  Berberova was more tolerant of my lack of Russian and accepted my reading of the Russians in English, something Goul was not really interested in and who could blame him?

            Of course just mentioning both Berberova and Goul I am aware of how deficient our experience of Russian literature is:  Georgi Ivanov is not known.  That is my reason for writing that.  A book of his poetry has appeared but not his prose which is the singular claim he should be making on our reading.  Without his books of prose available in English it can be said we know not relaly Russian literature in the 20^th Century and that is why I had  AZEF on display.

IMMEDIATE REASON for writing this post today: 

In the Aug 5, 2013 The NEW YORKER:  “His (David Gilbert) previous novel “The Normals” veered uneasily between the influences of Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo.  His new novel more singly follows the example of Franzen but lacks the formal coherence and affecting sincerity…”

            Need I tell you this thought is by James Wood?  By reaching for those two names  he reveals the impoverished dreary deadened condition  that allows one to say ain’t much going on in American fiction writing and with poetry missing since the death of Ronald Johnson in 1998 the country finds itself further bereft of a single major poet. 

            Imagine 300 million people and not a single major poet actively writing and publishing. 

            This last lurch to avoid thinking of what is not happening today in writing in the US. 

            Of course it will be objected to but I simply ask where is there a novel being written in the US or recently published in the US that could sit comfortably on the shelf with Camilo Jose Cela’s CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA or Andrei Bitov’s PUSHKIN HOUSE or Thomas Bernhard’s CORRECTION or Mati Unt’s BRECH AT NIGHT or Hannah Green’s THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE?

MUSEUMS ARE GARBAGE DUMPS: JACQUES RIGAUT, EUGENE LAMBE, PIERRE DRIEU la ROCHELLE, NICOLAS POUSSIN

---what---

Museums are garbage dumps. They are a little better organized than the rubbish pits beloved of archaeologists...

Of course the claim is made that they contain the best that remains of bygone eras... an assertion rather than the total truth.

A modern art museum is of course an absurdity and always to be avoided.

If anything, a museum is supposed to contain the distant past otherwise I find it hard to distinguish between The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, The Guggenheim and a department store like Macy's or K-Mart.

Of course, how dare you?

Am I the only one to remember that the Guggenheim gave itself over to displaying the work of that "great" modern artist Georgio Armani?

---what---

The only modern art museum I think that can be defended as such was the overcoat that Jacques Rigaut wore when he came to New York in the 1920s. In the pockets of that coat he had match-boxes and inside each of them were the art he declared to be the best modern art.

Rigaut was a poet and prose writer who wrote "Lord Patchogue." He, myself, Henry David Thoreau are the only major writers to have been in Patchogue and to have written about it.

Rigaut is the subject for Louis Malle's film THE FIRE WITHIN based on the novel by one the third, fourth--- but who is counting?--- most important French writers of the 20th Century, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

Drieu came to a sad end in 1944 along with Robert Brasillach but both Paul Morand and Louis Ferdinand Celine escaped.

All that is another story.

One can only hope that someday their antagonist that dreary little toad Jean Paul Sartre--- clinging all the the time to his Aryan certification---, will have truly disappeared. Vladimir Nabokov, as you might remember, joins me in loathing every aspect of this stool.

---what---

I had gone up to the Met to see the Poussin show. I had gone with the hopes of seeing his "Landscape with Travellers Resting." I have always looked at that painting in the National Gallery in London in January. Having gone to Arizona, south of Tombstone, this January I did not see that picture. It was not in New York. I got a lesson in how to read an art show catalogue. Under the details of the picture's size in small type, Bilbao... the painting was there in another version of the show but is not in New York.

The Met tries to be all things to all people but I do go there because one can easily avoid the modern rubbish, all that stuff from after the French Revolution.

These temporary shows of course are probably a mistake. A museum is supposed to have some aspect of permanence to it. These shows undermine that... this constant shipping around of the merchandise--- and you tell me these museums are not like department stores?

---what---

Eugene Lambe who is now mostly no longer remembered beyond appearing in my book ST PATRICK'S DAY, DUBLIN 1974 and as a dedicatee of a poem by Derek Mahon used to always tell people from his attic apartment in Longacre in London that when going to an art museum to always know ahead of time what you are going to look at.

There is no way that something once seen can then be erased from the mind. You have to be careful what you look at.

Eugene well understood that it probably did no harm to people who toured through the museums, as if they were cattle being prodded on by minders and their own need to see everything because they remembered nothing of what they saw. These tours prepared people to go to department stores where everything was for sale unlike museums that still placed some things above sale, temporarily.

One of Eugene's favorite books was a book that described all the so-called works of art that were destroyed during World War One and Two. On a dull day it was the only book that could lift Eugene's spirits. The language of regret in which the book was written could make a sane man laugh out loud, Eugene maintained.

I will write more about Eugene Lambe but for now I can well imagine from beyond there in the grave, he would have been merciless with me, if I had recounted my visit to the Met last Friday. Of course you prepared yourself correctly: to see that one painting and of course it would not be there and I am sure you have found another painting that you did see and please, I don't want to hear about it unless it is the one with that wonderful inscription that Dr. Johnson got wrong, Et in Arcadia Ego.