BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS  

What else do I care about

          I saw Sun and Forest by Max Ernst at MOMA in a small show of his work and realized the pity of both time and war NOT doing their fine work in cutting down the number of works by so many of what one has to call modern artists... in particular in the 20th and 21st centuries the amount of art that has survived is unbearable to any thoughtful person.  

         In the world of books  the digital sledgehammer is ever at its destruction of the world of books so that now with books--- except for a few precious ones--- there is hardly any market for used books except through extremely large warehouses or the proliferation of individual sellers on Amazon and similar sites.

        In New York City. the Strand Bookstore  continues in a fashion but it survives by being a destination store for people wanting to buy souvenirs of their visit to New York City.  The second-hand book section is assiduously combed by clerks and books no longer sit on their shelves waiting.  

            Increasingly as I will be doing books are simply put out with the trash... it is not worth one's effort to take them to the shops to sell and the shops if they are possibly interested mostly will not send a truck to collect the books as those books then have to be sorted and most of them will end up on the one and two dollar shelves for a time...   

BUT for now books, books--- a few and I start with H.G. Adler's first book, THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945, The Face of a Coerced Community.

Adler began to save notes for this book when he with his family was sent to this "show-camp" by the Nazis.  Surviving unlike his famy the subsequent deportation to Auschwitz, Adler returned to Czechoslovakia and rescued his notes and after fleeing  that country for England began this massive and really first comprehensive description of A CAMP.  
857 pages.  A book that will endure but few will read as it is very expensive and printed in a small edition by Cambridge University Press.  A book destined for the library YET  the sort of book that should be on the bedside of every thinking person because it is both a reminder of the horror of this camp--- which I trust if you are reading this blog--- are well aware was established by the Germans as a show camp to show how well they were treating the Jews contrary to the common belief  and I will repeat that: a reminder of THIS camp.  Adler concentrates on the experience of being in a camp.  He refuses every opportunity to simplify the story he tells: showing the full range of individual human response to the situation people find themselves in.  Even to site in anyway the details of those described is to needlessly limit the experience...

People avoid and are proud of their avoidance of the great big long books and I always take that this avoidance---every excuse seems so tiny, so mean as not even worth repeating--- as a pathetic need to think of the world as a simple place...Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, Death of Virgil, Parallel Lives


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 THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa (New Directions) Translated by Margaret Jill Costa.   Some, a few, well know Pessoa... the writer who in some way has come to be listed with Proust, Joyce, Musil... Celine when such lists are made---  of course the most obscure and for me to list him thus might seem more eccentric than called for...yet...  there have been many versions of this book done into English in the last 20 plus years...  and everyone knows the story of Pessoa who never wrote in his own name but always wrote in the voices of a myriad of the invented and then there is vast prose book discovered in a large trunk and assembled by a series of editors... each one with a different approach...I had held to Richard Zenith's version published by Penguin but Zenith has complimented Costa for the quality of her translation... and this is physically a beautiful book with no dust jacket and a starling cover...a book of moods, a book to comfort on the sure way to the grave: the consolation is bracing as the English would say:     
       ...to find people who are but a series of marginal notes in the book of life
       ...All pleasure is a vice because seeing pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does
       ...every gesture is but a dead dream
       ...intelligence, a fiction composed solely of surface and error
       ...A Homer or Milton is not more than a comet colliding with the earth
       

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           The house of the title is the large apartment complex in Moscow where the bureaucrats who ran the Soviet regime lived with their families during Stalin's time and after. And while it is a little wrong to compare it to War and Peace and The Gulag Archipelago--- as the blurb writers do--- there is a grandeur to it in the great length and in the detailing of the fates of true believers in Soviet Communism who with few qualms of conscience killed anyone who go in the way of the building of the communism in the Soviet Union and now in their own turn they are to be murdered by the very machinery they had created.  The genius of Slezkine is to individualize the murderers and the murdered... one is taken up by their lives and their inevitable terrible ends even for the few survivors who are  all  contaminated.

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ErichMaria Remarque was the second writer I came to in Patchogue after Thomas Wolfe and over the years I read all of his books that were translated into English as a result of the great success of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN  FRONT.  ---  I am ssure there are others who  followed his career:  THE BLACK OBELISK, THE ROAD BACK, THREE COMRADES...  THE PROMISED LAND did not get published in the United States ...  

AND HERE I STOP FOR NOW AS THIS TYPING HAS AWAITED POSTING TOO LONG...

PAUSED (for reason?)

A  pause in writing about books has come over me as I am struck silent, nearly, by a number of books: PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas, THE WALL by H. G. Adler, LARVA by Julian Rios, a new version of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa (New Directions) and a little aside,  a new edition of THE RUIN IS KASCH by Roberto Calasso coming from FSG in January.

Such is not unusual with a moment’s thought if we remember that in the 1920s those who really read were given THE WASTE LAND by T.S. Eliot, ULYSSES by James Joyce and the volumes by Marcel Proust that would become IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME and in the Thirties: JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT by Louis Ferdinand Celine and THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES…

One is also well aware of the masses who can not live alone in such solitude with a select few so the constant weekly announcements continue to appear of this or that masterpiece which has its moment for a week, a month, a season, a year and then… notice how forlorn THE WHITE HOTEL by D.M.Thomas looks when you see it in the Salvation Army book section or possibly a … (fill in any name you want…)

THE NECESSARY SECOND THOUGHT could be supplied with three names:

 Michel Leiris and his two newly published books that are as if passing ghosts in the US: PHANTOM AFRICA and the third book,  FIBRILS, of his memoir RULES OF THE GAME

and

H.G. ADLER    THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945

and

Fleur Jaeggy has two little books:  THESE POSSIBLE LIVES and I AM THE BROTHER OF XX

A passage from Jaeggy that concerns itself with a photograph of the mother’s audience with the Pope: 

Her daughter, who does not have the depth of the mother has always believed in the surface of things.  And so in beauty.   In appearance.  What does she care about what is inside.  Inside where?  And what is the inside? Anyway the daughter believes more in photographs than in the people portrayed.  A photograph might tell more than a person.  Perhaps.  Naturally perhaps.  No affirmation could lead her to grant total credence to the affirmation itself.

            I would be hard pressed to find any American author who one could imagine writing at this level of thinking and precision.

            To have an audience with the Pope… I imagine I was caught by this as I had been visiting in late August in London a friend  who as a young woman was sent by one of the elderly sisters of the martyred Patrick Pearse  to have a private audience with John XXIII.  The visit was arranged by the Irish ambassador to the Vatican on the orders of someone in Dublin and my friend said she did not know what to say to the Pope after being brought in alone and he could see this so he asked if I had brought anything I would like him to bless.  I had only my glass case in my hand and he  gave that his  blessing sending me on my way.

FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS FROM DEREK MAHON

FIVE  I have been thinking of books, not at least for me an unusual path down which to wander and of course wonder.

Though mentioning this has an attending musty odor as I do think books are not much in evidence in the imaginative life of young people with rare exceptions and it is one of the few advantages of aging:  one will not be about for the continued and accelerating marginalization and trivialization of the book.

         EIGHT  I enjoy the complaints about the so-called rising inequality in America but the complaints are only that…they fill up the usual mouths but the reality is that there is nothing to be done about it.  There will be much pretend, much huffing and puffing but until you see say Harvard and Yale opening the Freshman class to any high school student who can block letter his or her name… or when you see violent demonstrators trying to bomb and burn out the rich apartment buildings on Fifth and Park Avenue in New York City…

         NINE   Enough of a nod to so-called reality presided over by…

          TEN  I have been reading for the longest time it seems  THE WALL by H.G. Adler.  This book together with Adler’s THE JOURNEY and PANORAMA are the first books I have read of late that can without hesitation to DEATH OF VIRGIL and THE SLEEPWALKERS  by Hermann Broch… in the original version I had allowed myself to be acarried on in comparison to William Faulkner ABSALOM, ABSALOM and James Joyce’s ULYSSES.. but reconsidered as Adler does not involve the reader in what can only be described as a realistic place, a place of so-called real streets, places… which of course both Faulkner and Joyce do so well though the places they describe really only exist in an imagination created by the words…  there is reality in Adler but it would be impossible to go to an actual place… and pretend that this is the place we read about in Joyce in Faulkner…

ELEVEN  A muddle as you can see…

THIRTEEN  This is not to say that I have only been reading THE WALL  as I have also been reading THE PHYSICS OF SORROW by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov who seems to have moved contemporary Bulgarian literature into the modern moment and he is the only Bulgarian writer one can read along with Peter Nadas or Peter Esterhazy though one hesitates as one never knows after only three books  if his nerve will remain steady… but one hopes that he has learned well from Jose Camilo Cela’s CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA and Mati Unt’s BRECHT AT NIGHT  and of course there is Andrei Bitov’s  THE SYMMETRY TEACHER… on whose shores I have failed, have fallen down and while usually the book is blamed but I do think it is my lousy ability to read that has defeated me… in the case of Bitov whose PUSHKIN’S HOUSE seemed very accessible and THE ONE Russian novel that would come right after Mikhail Bulgakov’s  THE MASTER AND MARGARITA and to date there has not been a Russian novel to add to these two..

         SIXTEEN   Now that check…  DEREK MAHON  the poet visited Lilia McGonigle in Baggot Street Hospital, Dublin in October 1968--- 12 days before we were due to go to the United States, having found no alternative to this desperate move of failure--- she had come down with appendicitis and the necessary surgery… Mahon arrived at the ward along with Eugene Lambe and myself.   The poet said this will help you on your way… it was a wonderful warm gesture and fortunately we had no need of such a great amount of cash as we were setting off for the then still new world, our hearts filled with a desire…  though who the f*** really knows what was in our heads hearts…  to New York and then to Menasha, Wisconsin to which my father had been exiled by the American Can Company, an American Siberia, sharing the same climate as …

TWENTY    Of course in the present moment (2015) we have a vast governmental security apparat but that has always been an adjunct of the myriad smaller kingdoms--- which come and go and sometimes  really go as did the American Can Company…

TWENTYTWO  But Derek Mahon remembers:  in “To Eugene Lambe in Heaven”:     Few/will survive except those, like you, the stuff of myth./ Oft in the stilly night I remember our wasted youth.

THIRTY  How quickly writers are forgotten, but then everyone is replaceable in a terrible easy forgetfulness… who really cares once the guy or woman is dead---the relatives dwindle who remember that so and so wrote books but I confess even to that insane delusion that someday another young person will be browsing the shelves of the Patchogue public library--- who knows if such will remain--- goes into the Local History room or more likely happens onto a local history website and finds a name and a book.. such is how the already forgotten think and they even wonder is it possible to imagine Paul Auster or Jonathan Franzen taking a pause from contemplating their real estate and stock portfolios to give a glimmer to such recognition of their own futures: what happened to D.M. Thomas?... remember when people lined up to buy THE WHITE HOTEL?

FORTY Evidence for previous section:   TODAY’S POETS  edited by Chad Walsh published 1964…  about the only anthology of its kind to include GIL ORLOVITZ between Robert Lowell and Lawrence Ferleinghetti  and then moving on to Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur Philip Larkin..Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and the eye moves on to Derek Walcott who Walsh is writing, “He may well become a major poet”… but it is GIL ORLOVITZ that Walsh really  singles out:  “never been included in a widely distributed anthology  (one might add and never again) and he continues…   writing with a Dionysian frenzy combined with a perfect control of language that has been equaled by few.. he is one of the few contemporary masters of the sonnet and the short lyric.  He also has the rare distinction of carrying on a lover’s quarrel with society without falling into cheap contempt for individual classes of humanity.”

FIFTYONE  I was fortunate to know Chad Walsh and he helped me through Beloit College and beyond.. he had hopes for me and approved of my books…  I can not imagine any young academic like him today as they all seem prisoners of the conventional of the expected but then Chad had been a communist, an Episcopal priest, a proofreader and typesetter when young for Sherwood Anderson's newspaper in Marion Virginia.  Walsh was  one of the first to champion C.S. Lewis before that man was known and famous… and he helped me because when he read my college application--- as he told me and as happened back then—the faculty picked the students not some “Admissions Office Committee” which has  itemized lists of required student quotas to fill---  he was impressed by the fact that I had listed Mein Kampf as the last book read before filling out the application for Beloit…  later telling me  some were appalled by your book choice but I thought here was a kid who discovered that this guy Hitler had written a book… you can’t fake such curiosity…

HUNDRED   Had my purposes ever been clearer and so  finally expressed as  in this phrase from  a short piece by Henry James on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister:  “a sublime indifference to the reader--- the indifference of humanity in the aggregate to the individual observer.”

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:

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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…

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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?