A Movie. A Book. A Memory. Longing. Forgetting.

A Movie.  A Book.  A Memory.  Longing. Forgetting.

            The other night I was watching the movie THREE COMRADES directed by Frank Borzage, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque and written for the screen by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Toward the end of the movie Robbie has been visiting the love of his life Pat in a sanatorium where she is dying of TB.  They embrace and she objects to the ticking watch.  He hurls the watch to the floor…

          It all came back to me from Patchogue in the summer of 1965 on Robinson Boulevard.

          But first let me quote from the actual novel:

          After a while she grew restless. 

            “What is it, Pat?” I asked. 

            “It ticks so loud,” she whispered.

            “What?  The watch?”

            She nodded, “It’s so threatening---“

            I took the watch off my wrist. 

            She looked anxiously at the second hand, “Throw it away.”

            I took the watch and flung it against the wall.  “There, it’s not ticking any more now.  Now time is standing still.  We’ve torn it in two.  Now only we two are here; we two, you and me and no one else.”

            She looked at me. Her eyes were very big.

            “Darling---“ she whispered.

            I could not bear her glance.  It came from far away and passed through me to some other place beyond.

            “Old Lad,” I murmured, “dear, brave, old lad.”

            She died in the last hour of the night, before morning came.  She died hard and no one could help her…

          From the scrawled inscription of my name I can say I bought the 50 cent Popular Library paperback in my eighteenth year when I was a Freshman at Beloit College.  I would eventually acquire and read all of Remarque’s novels.  As to their quality, I never gave that a thought.  

          When my son Lorcan was in seventh grade at Grace Church School he was required to read ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.  Of course I was pleased but he was very disappointed, “The book was interesting but really sentimental, Dad.  I know it ‘s supposed to be about how awful war is but being so sentimental you don’t believe it.” 

          Of course he was right.  And I admitted the justice of his comment and gave him Ernst Junger’s STORM OF STEEL.  This book renewed my credibility and Lorcan told me Junger was really a good writer and he had written a much better book as it didn’t tell you what to feel in the way Remarque insisted.

 

          But the ticking watch… at the end of June or early July, 1965 I was walking  back from the Patchogue Theatre with Melinda Brady.  We had seen the movie THE TRAIN starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Fred Zinnemann.  It was a long walk from Main Street to Hewlett Avenue where Melinda lived.  We walked by way of the shadows of Robinson Boulevard. We kissed for the first time and I could hear the watch on my wrist ticking.

          I had longed for this moment since sometime in the fall of 1961 when I had first seen her in the second floor hallway of Patchogue High School.  I was a senior and Melinda was a sophomore.

          The ticking watch has an inscription on its face 

               LONG ISLAND PRESS 1 YEAR SERVICE AWARD. 

          I had a newspaper route before working at Francis Bannerman’s  in Blue Point and before going to college out in Wisconsin, before going to Dublin where everything changed or didn’t change.

          

         I wrote two short stories about a Melinda  and a guy named Joey who would die on November 6, 1918 in World War One.  Alfred Willis published them in the high school newspaper THE RED AND THE BLACK in the spring of 1962.  Willis did two tours as a Marine in Vietnam…

           

        In this the one hundredth anniversary of that World War One…

          
        In the fictional moment labeled the present both Melinda and I have been married three times.  She lives far away in a tiny village in Maine and I live on East First Street in Manhattan.  The watch is broken and on a shelf in front of Julian Green, Ernst Junger, James Thomson, Hannah Green, Pati Hill, Louis Ferdinand Celine and Evelyn Scott books… in another part of that present Melinda asked me how I had known her birthday as Joey had died on… but I had not known and…

         

ARE THEY DEAD YET or is there...

Last night--- though it could be any night--- I had my second taste of the posthumous at St Marks Bookstore when I looked into Dalkey Archive’s publication of Charles Newman’s last novel, IN PARTIAL DISGRACE.  At the back of every Dalkey Archive book is a listing of their books in print and my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had disappeared.  The night before I had also been in the bookstore and looked into Peter Dimock’s new novel GEORGE ANDERSON as I had only read the advance bound galleys and there I had my first taste of the posthumous as my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had not been listed in the back of the book.  In the most recent Dalkey Archive book that I received from them, MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SWISS POETRY, my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had been listed.

Something happened.

The first paragraph is of course mired in vanity, but I hope it is not personal vanity as I well know that there are fewer years in front of me than behind.  It is from a concern for GOING TO PATCHOGUE which had originally been published in hardcover in 1992.  To the publisher’s chagrin (a nice old word) he had to reprint the book as it received very good reviews and unexpected attention.  A full page in the Chicago Tribune and in The Village Voice, good reviews in  The New York Times, Newsday and in the Los Angeles Times.  Both Newsday and The New York Times ran articles about the book and the Newsday profile went on from the cover to two full pages with very flattering photographs of my younger self.

There were discussions of the book is several academic books and then and then… I awaited a paperback version which finally appeared in 2010 from Dalkey Archive.   18 years before and earlier Dalkey usually published their books in hardcover as that was the fashion and expected. 

So GOING TO PATCHOGUE exists and this time there were oonly reviews in the local newspapers on Long Island and follow up on the websites of the papers.  The major newspapers no longer think it newsworthy when a book appears in paperback reprint and even the Los Angeles Times for whom I have written a great deal did not find space on their blog Jacket Copy for a paragraph of mention.

My concern is not for myself but for the sake of GOING TO PATCHOGUE and for my other books.  In 1987, Dalkey Archive published THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV which received a startlingly good review from Andre Codrescu in The New York Times.  After the fall of the communism in Bulgaria the book appeared in translation in the best “thick” journal in Bulgaria, Svremenik and in 2000 Northwestern University Press did a paperback version of the book.  Both the paperback and hardcover editions remain in print.

You will notice that I do not write about the content of these books or what I make of them.  That is not my concern as I know I have not read these books before and I have not read them since…  for my purpose was not t write a book that had been or would have already been read many more times since most of the vast number of books in the world are imitations, echoes, fakes of…

AND I know that next year Dalkey Archive is supposed to be contractually publishing ST. PATRICK‘S DAY Dublin 1974 and my dread, the foreboding as its success might allow for more books to appear--- the one thing every publisher fears…more books from…  but JUST LIKE THAT, NOTHING DOING, EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS, FORGET THE FUTURE…

HOWEVER.

HOWEVER, the word posthumous arrived via hearing it from Edward Dahlberg in 1970 when he was able to say he had been living posthumously for generation. 

While known in Dublin and to a very few discerning…  Dahlberg’s fate always weighs upon me. 

I open his THE CONFESSIONS OF EDWARD DAHLBERG and read the inscription, FOR THOMAS, WHOM I LIKE VERY MUCH AND WHO, I HOPE, WILL BE MY FRIEND.  EDWARD DAHLBERG DEC., 21. ’70 N.Y.C.  The book will be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times by Anthony Burgess and in 1972 Dutton will publish Dahlberg’s anthology of travels, myths and legends of the New World, THE GOLD OF OPHIR.  A few books will appear from some small presses and in 1976 Thomas Crowell (Established 1834) will publish two books THE OLIVE OF MINERVA OR THE COMEDY OF A CUCKOLD and BOTTOM DOGS, FROM FLUSHUBG TO CALVARY, THOSE WHO PERISH AND HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED AND UNCOLLECTED WORKS. 

Both books will be buried, dumped into the grave with hardly any public mention.  Edward himself will soon join those books in the earth.

TED Klein told me of hearing from Leslie Gardiner--- who has gone on to be a powerful agent in London--- of her having seen a memo from within Crowell that nothing was to be done with these books.  They had to be printed and that was it. Dahlberg had been a difficult writer and…

Something had happened.

And most people would find it unbelievable that a publisher would pay for and actually print two books and then as they say, do nothing. 

I too would have joined in that idea except I had known of the case of Michael Breslow who had published with Viking in 1978 a novel LIFE LINE which had wonderful blurbs from both Hannah Green and Anthony Burgess.  Burgess went on to pay a sort of homage to Breslow by naming a character after Michael in the novel EARTHLY POWERS…

Paperback rights had been sold to Bantam and Michael rejected a garish dumb cover and he was told we are going to doom—that is the word they used doom--- your book with a tasteful cover which will only have typeface and no illustration.  Good luck…

So while the posthumous always awaits us, we cling to the dumb hope the books will outlast… though  Lawrence Durrell told me in New York in the spring of 1970 when I asked him if  he ever thought of the future of his books, No, what has posterity done for me?...

When was the last time you read in Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet or that great monument THE AVIGNON QUINTET?

   
Everyday my eye passes from The AVIGNON QUINTET, to THE DEATH OF VERGIL to ULYSSES to ON THE ROAD… and so from Broch inside Vergil:  “He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time an harassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world a lodger in his own life…

AFTER:  my first thought  for  the title of this post: AM I DEAD YET...

A NEW YEAR JUST LIKE LAST YEAR and most likely like next year

Summer 1978 in THE GOREY DETAIL (Ireland)   Francis Stuart writes, All the  best fiction lately, and this will be evident in the future, is a criticism and extension of the novel form.  No good piece of fiction can now be self-contained, it is open to the world outside at both ends.

AND:   Knowledge, as Blake said is love. Knowledge that is not love, and that is almost all contemporary knowledge is illusion.

AND:  The serious novel is negative to popular ideas, is alienated  from the general assumptions of its society, gives an unequivocable ‘No’ to all general ideas and ideals.  Only in the style in which this “No” is annunciated is there a positive glimmer.

One could quote the whole short article but why bother as we live In a culture that has grown only worse from this moment  back when Stuart writes, The real enemy of art is not general indifference or widespread public ignorance.  It is culture, what passes for culture among any of the so-called well-educated.  For them art is an adjunct to their successful lives; it is positive and reassuring, confirming them in their intellectual assumptions. This kind of culture, that incidentally, prefers biographies and even travel books to fiction, is rampant in the literary supplements of the English Sunday papers. 

Of course Stuart if he was still alive would add: this is still  true and maybe even more dire now with the partial disappearance of literary supplements in the United States and the growing importance of  the on-line substitutes such as The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post which are even worse in their sheer knowing ignorant stupidity.  These supplements, these organs of power have made us aware of and popularized the fakery represented by: Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Martin Amis… each of which is an incitement to never admit that one writes or reads as too many consciously think of these as being what is good and drop sad inevitable necessary comparisons, the trying to explain… better give it up! As you will only be thought to pressing sour grapes as opposed to…

The BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart is his authority for what I am quoting  above and my GOING TO PATCHOGUE and THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV is my cliaim upon you to make this post

50 Years Ago: it begins this writing

ONE

How it began.  Patchogue High School.  My Senior year.  I saw a blonde girl taking books out of a locker on the second floor.  I found out her name, Melinda Brady.  She was two years younger than me.  I could not figure out how to talk to her.  I had been reading about World War One and I had a picture history THE FIRST WORLD WAR edited by Laurence Stallings...

I began to write and a young man dies in France in the trenches on 6 November 1918, though the author recorded that he did have a thought of a girl back home....  

I no longer remember how I came to give the story to Alfred Willis who was the editor of The Red and the Black but I must have and he published it.

I would see Melinda in school and I even danced with her once in gym class, never telling her of the story or what I... but then I thought surely she must have read it and while I added an L to the last name of the girl in the story who does not know what has happened to the young man in France.

TWO

As writers do, I now realize, her silence or the silence of everyone else in the school did not stop me and so the second story, now told from her viewpoint of when this young woman goes down to the train  station in a small Indiana town hoping to meet her returning friend, who of course is not on the train... 

I had seen these small Indiana towns when I had been driven out to Beloit,Wisconsin that previous summer to look at Beloit College and I longed to live in one of those tiny town, no more than one stop light and to be sitting on a porch and now many years later, what I now know, I was thinking of being on that porch alone without my father, drunk in the afternoon yelling at the doctor next door to us on Furman Lane in Patchogue, my drunken father yelling at the MD MD mental deficient mental deficient.   

And of course Melinda would be forever walking across the lawn and I would know and maybe she would know that on one of the maple trees in front of the house I had carved her name and the year 1962.

THREE

The other week I drove by that house on Furman Lane in Patchogue and the tree is gone.  Alfred Willis did not go to college but enlisted in the USMC and served two tours on the front line in Vietnam.  He came back entered the Catholic priesthood and then left.  He lives far away from Patchogue.  Melinda lives in Vermont with her third husband.  I live on East First Street with my wife Anna Saar  with whom I am very happy yet I remain faithful, still, for better or worse, and it is mostly for the worse, as any writer really knows, as the years go by, to that first moment in the second floor corridor of Patchogue High School when unable... I turned to the written word.

FOUR

The inevitable post script.  I did see Melinda when I came back to Patchogue from Dublin for the summer of 1965 just before my parents were sent into exile in northern Wisconsin.  Many years later...how I hate those words---many years later--- as they do not accord with how I hold all of this in my mind Melinda asked me how did you know my birthday? 

I did not know that November 6 was Melinda's birthday but now I guess I know that she had read the story fifty years ago.

GOING TO PATCHOGUE and ZUKOFSKY

Last night I was in The Strand and noticed on the new books table this fortuitous juxtaposition.

Most likely it will not be there a day later and within the week both books will no longer be "new."

Zukofsky was an early subject of this blog since he was born a few streets south of where I sit.

Zukofsky had a summer bungalow in a town across Long Island from Patchogue.

Zukofsky has gradually found readers.

GOING TO PATCHOGUE has found fewer readers. I did meet once a young man on Fifth Street who stopped me asking if I was who he thought I was and I asked him why he was stopping me: I had been looking for the blood near the police-station on Fifth Street, that you had written about.

Of course I am happy to see GOING TO PATCHOGUE again available but it is a source of an aching sadness as no one has been willing to publish what comes after: FORGET THE FUTURE, NOTHING DOING, JUST LIKE THAT (A Beginning and an End of the so-called 60s) or what I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL

TINY GASPS OF HOPE

Walking around in the snow in the East Village on the last day of the year and soon into the next there are the constants of this time of the year: the lemming-like pursuit of crap and a discussion of crap… and we all know what I am writing about and knowing they and their fans do not care and they sit with the smug confidence that as long as you spell the name right even the most vicious criticism only adds to the ever growing mountain of shit that are as Edward Dahlberg might say: I have heard of him and that is sufficient… another one our well known bad writers…

On the other hand or going into a pleasant room:

58

THE H.D. BOOK by Robert Duncan. University of California Press. Written over many years and now published long after his death: was it so long ago, 1988?, though he was part of the background at least for me since 1962 or 63 or 64 when reading the Donald Allen anthology of the real poets, because actually alive unlike the academics who seem to sadly, have long lives and are still tormenting us by their presence… W.S. Merwin… comes to mind and Galway Kinnell and Philip Levine… Mark Strand… think of their wretched lives, teaching young people to be poets… the sheer fakery of it all and not an honest line in any poem of theirs--- these so-called teacher poets--- even by accident because always paying homage to their tenured futility they dared not not write, dared not give up their sinecures that dulled their pencils…

THE H.D. BOOK in honor of Hilda Doolittle and we are back in the world of Pound and Eliot and Williams… a book to be read or entered at any page and every sentence gives rise to thought as in: “The heart of the poem (The Waste Land) was the unbearable mixing of things.” But against his wishes, “The fame of the poet (Eliot) itself had triumphed over the pain of the poem. Eliot, was not in the outcome stricken but celebrated.”

A book to read slowly, a page a day. A sentence a day, sometimes…

I doubt there will be a better book written about poetry when looking back to 2010 or even looking forward to 2011…

And two perfect sentences from Duncan: “As I write now, I am in the waiting room again. I do not see any more than my eyes saw.”

62

ZONE by MATHIAS ENARD. Open Letter. 517 pages as a man sits on a train going from Milano to Rome, carrying documents and memories of the obscure and familiar horrors of the last century. Each page sent me to look for a further book, to look up some historic event I was unfamiliar with: the war in Morocco in the 1920s for instance or photographers in the Nazi camps both guards and prisoners… Atilla Josef, the Hungarian poet, who lay down on the tracks to be cut in half or the detail about Palestinian suicide bombers who went the belt of explosives went off propelled the head high into the sky… the 517 pages of basically one sentence broken into discrete bits: never for a moment does the reader lose his or her place since we never forget we are on a train inside the voice of an appealing narrator who sent me to…

75

DRIFTING CITIES by STRATIS TSIRKAS, published by Knopf in 1974…703 pages… starting in wartime Jerusalem.. Refugees…echoes of Durrell, again an imagined because real history of the times that shaped me and you: out of Alexandria.. and yet why is this not in paper and easy to find?

Well translated by Kay Cicellis who is till translating Greek books for Dalkey Archive and who even published a novel with Grove Press years ago… the sureness the grandeur of the DRIFTING CITIES.. like I THE SUPREME by Roa Bastos… back when Knopf could publish such books…

Okay, so the opening sentences: “A rustle, a rippling springtime effervescence came in from the window with the pine-scented breeze. And a voice from another age spoke of the perfume of a golden lily unfolding over the river.”

Today an editor would decide that the word effervescence would have to go as it was unlikely that readers of some of the well known bad writers would not know the word or “be comfortable” encountering such a word in the first line of a novel.

77

Alexandria was not mentioned without the purpose of celebrating the publication of SELECTED PROSE WORKS by C.P. CAVAFY by the University of Michigan Press.

Cavafy is probably the only Greek poet anyone reads, really in English with a few who know the work of GEORGE SEFERIS. And there is nothing really terrible about that. There is a Greek guy who sacrificed his talent on the altar of communism and enjoyed a little fame but again there is Cavafy and Seferis but this is a moment for Cavafy and the revelation of his prose: “On the Poet C.P. Cavafy,” (An anonymous piece): “Rare poets like Cavafy will thus secure a primary position in a world that thinks far more than does the world of today.”
Written in 1930… how he flatters us, how he will be mistaken… the purity of whim is never to be over-looked when talking about writers and about the works that endure…

It is probably true that Philip Roth will disappear within ten years of his death and the fact that the Library of America is publishing his collected work before he is dead is my evidence for this assertion. He is dead.

But Cavafy lives on: On Saint Simeon the Stylite : “This great, this wonderful saint is surely an object to be singled out in ecclesiastical history for admiration and study. He had been perhaps, the only man who has dared to be really alone.”

Not by accident is SIMON OF THE DESERT possibly the best film by Luis Bunuel.. well, along with The MILKY WAY.

81

PANORAMA by H.G. Adler. Random House. I have only dipped into this novel… Happily as Nabokov might have remarked I have noticed that it is not a play in disguise. There are no long reported conversations.

Mentioned by W.G. Sebald, Adler has slowly begun to make his appearance in English. Of course his great work on the Nazi camp THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945 is not in English while so much… and it seems that this is his great claim upon out attention…

PANORAMA is an attempt to re-create a childhood; it tries to argue with the opening pages of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man… and that is a worthy ambition.

I will report back on this book as I will on his THE JOURNEY and I feel guilt in not having read THE JOURNEY because how could I have avoids a book that Veza Canetti writes is, “too beautiful for words and too sad.”

83

Dalkey Archive has three books both published and to be published. GOING TO PATCHOGUE by THOMAS MCGONIGLE.

I have established a group on Facebook called Lord Patchogue and people are invited to join…

while that has something to do with GOING TO PATCHOGUE the re-appearance of this book is incredibly sad for me. It came out 18 years ago.

I have written many other books but they have not been seen into print and that will include the one I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL… and just before that I wrote NOTHING DOING…

Both Richard Seaver and Daniel Halpern confessed their powerlessness to publish the more recent books, even Dalkey Archive joined in this group confession and before that there was Sam Vaughan and Alice Quinn and a guy at Norton whose name I have forgotten… they invited my consolation and understanding and how shabby their deaths will be and have been…

GOING TO PATCHOGUE is available but officially from Borders it comes out in April though Amazon and Barnes and Noble have it…

YES, those other Dalkey books: ISLE OF DREAMS by KEIZO HINO made me get a map of Tokyo. That is how good it is. In the same way that one gets a map of Dublin when taking up ULYSSES: a man wants something, but what does he want?:
“He thought of nothing in particular, nor did he reminisce.”

“Though covered with dirt, none of this refuse, including tools and other bits of clothing, appeared the least decayed. Indeed, there was something starkly vivid about it. He was startled to find kindled in him a feeling bordering on the sexual, something which, since the death of his wife, he had thought irrelevant to him.”

AND in April, the cruelest month as Mr Eliot wrote DALKEY ARCHIVE will bring out: SUICIDE by EDOUARD LEVE. A novel about the suicide of a friend of the author. A week after handing in the manuscript the author killed himself. Told in the second person pronoun, that insinuating manner, that refutation of fiction in the death of the actual author, how fortunate for the reader to have a distanced suicide note, a gift to the funeral museum in Vienna, with the author’s death no need to ask if he knew what he was writing about. I do hope Dalkey Archive will publish his four books of writing and…

84

I didn’t write about GOGOL’S ARTISTRY by ANDREI BELY, heroically translated by CHRISTOPHER COLBATH and published by Northwestern University Press. It is the necessary compliment to Nabokov’s little book on Gogol. What I have most liked about the book is Bely’s actual discussion of the sentences of Gogol, right down to diagramming them so as to show how Gogol created his fiction.

I wish there were more books like this. I wish there was one written on Faulkner like this but I can’t imagine any major writer doing this in the United States of this moment.

Bely of course is the author of ST. PETERSBURG, the major Russian novel of the 20th Century, right there with Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA…. can anyone imagine a so-called famous contemporary American writer taking the time to write such a book?

Case rested for the unimportance of you can name them…

(However, Tom Whalen who sadly happily, I can’t make up my mind but surely sadly, almost totally unknown has taken up the task and has written a very fine book on Russell H. Greenan… Dalkey will be bringing that out in the Spring.)

INTENTIONS INTENTIONS

I am going to read THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING by RALPH ELLISON. Since Ellison wrote the best novel by a man who happened to be Black or as he preferred Negro--- though I do think LORD OF DARK PLACES by HAL BENNETT gives him the only real competition in that rather narrow marketing niche… it can’t be avoided, but it is no accident that the schools never urge students to read INVISABLE MAN because the quality of that novel is simply too intimidating by comparison to the crap they shove down students throats in the interests of diversity… and reading THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING allows me to live again in the moment of hearing Ellison read from an early version of this book at Hollins College In the summer of 1970…

And to be a better reader of ORANGES AND SNOW by MILAN DJORDJEVIC. Translated by Charles Simic. Princeton University Press:

My sweet and formless,
Bloodless and colorless,
Best-loved Nothing,
With what eyes shall I look at you
To see you truly
and remember your face forever.

---or---

tonight someone will fuck someone
while statesmen negotiate
untie the knots on neckties long underwear
and tense international situations
while secretly they scratch their balls under the table

---or----

“Garlic”
Or are you the edible miracle that couples
foolishness and depth, like penis and vagina,
in the midst of our electronic Paradise?