SO, THIS IS WHERE PEOPLE...

     AFTER a medical procedure the other day,  I was  feeling blessed with the good news and at home now exhausted I opened for no reason in particular Rilke's THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE  and reading the opening and forever seductive opening, "So, this is where people come to live...

     I had no need to continue as I was again walking on West 8th Street in the early morning of a May day in 1966 when I went into the Marlboro Bookstore and bought my first version of this book which I have carried in various editions with me across many countries and all these years.  Together with Thomas Wolfe's LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL it set me on my literary road to....

       That morning I was walking from a modern apartment building--- 416 Lafayette Street--- where I had been the fifth person in a very large bed where I had slept at the edge while these two couples were or were not doing things---though early on I must have thought I would be part of it all--- or at least with Julie--- as I had met these two English girls--- Julie Rowland and Beryl Sayers, who it turns out were waiting for these two guys and we had fallen into a conversation in the English pub on Sixth Avenue near the Waverley Theatre. 

      It was late at night and I had arrived there after my  night shift as a copy boy at The New York Times--- one of the girls was from Yorkshire--- and I had talked with her of having  gone to visit Clive Snape from Hull who I had met at Trinity College in Dublin, in 1965, when I was actually at University College, Dublin--- this guy had been a medical student and lived in rooms as was said in  the college and I was much taken with the idea that he had a servant---they had word for this person which I have forgotten-- who made their beds, cleaned out the fireplace etc...

      I was now working as a copy-boy while waiting to go to the Peace Corps training in Los Angeles for going to Turkey...  this was not to be as in the last week of the training I broke my knee playing soccer so went instead back to Ireland and as many know: on my way later in the following summer to visit friends from that training,  I got off the train in Sofia, Bulgaria in September 1967 and of course as I walked on the Boulevard St Michel with Lilia just before Easter in 1968 I thought of, "So, this is where people come to live...

      Over the years I have thought of that line later with Ruth, the mother of my children--- and yes I have thought of this line even later when walking there with my daughter Elizabeth who was going for a term at the Sacred Heart school in Nantes... I have thought of it while walking along it alone on my way to visit Julian Green...and I have thought of it now and of how the line continues, "...I would have thought it was a city to die in. I have been out.  

I saw hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him and I was spared the rest."

                                                              II
      The day after the procedure I was watching the Errol Morris documentary on the photographer ELSA DORFMAN and as she was flipping through photographs I saw a picture of Hannah Green, from back when I first met her.  The picture was used on the cover for THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE...

       Hannah would approve of this sort of post as she valued Rilke, of course, and knew why I was attached to this book and she might like the being remembered from the time when we had first met each other when I sat in her class at Columbia... 

      Here is the picture and then the description by Elsa Dorfman of the taking of the picture.

Summer 1972 Harvey and I went up to visit Hannah Green and John Wesley in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I took pictures of Hannah in front of the farmhouse, inside the barn, in an open field by the pond; they weren't spectacular. And we wanted one for the jacket of her book, The Dead of the House. So Hannah and John came to Cambridge and we tried some in my backyard. They worked.

When I had my show at Boston City Hall in October 1971, Hannah and John drove all the way down from Peterborough to see it. But unfortunately, three days before, Mayor Kevin White had made me take it down because he was having a banquet for big-city mayors in the gallery where it was hanging. He was trying to impress the mayors, especially Alioto and Lindsay, and the media who would cover The Event, and didn't want them 'to see all the sad faces in those depressing photographs.' When I got furious that he suddenly wanted the whole installation down after all that work, he said, 'You look cute when you're angry, my dear, but it's my city hall. If they were Rembrandts and I wanted them down, they'd come down.' When Hannah and John got there after that long drive, and it was a hot day, all they saw was a huge empty space. 'Elsa Dorfman? Never heard of her,' the guard told them.

A FITTING FOR THE SHROUD

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