BEING IN SOFIA AND WHAT I BROUGHT BACK TO EAST FIRST STREET IN MANHATTAN Part One

For 42 days I was in Bulgaria.
Not for a moment did I miss being in the United States of America. Of course I missed individual people.  
What an awful debilitation to be labeled an American writer.
Would it be ever possible to simply say: I was  born in Brooklyn, New York, 
lived in Patchogue a small village 60 miles from New York City on Long Island,
am in the world.
This has nothing to do with politics.  Every country in the world is as pleasurable, as inviting, as repulsive as the next.  

a hotel in Pula

but I live in Manhattan on East First Street and go on weekends mostly to the house my wife owns in New Jersey.  In many ways I have the best of all possible worlds if one is to be living in Manhattan.  

So the matter is not a dreary disquisition about money or how an individual finds himself.  Rather it is question of how to define myself when I now say I have written three published novels and one of them was recently translated from its original English into Bulgarian.  Do I think of myself as an American writer?  The convention seems to be that either a passport, or a birth certificate determines the adjective that precedes the noun writer.

The Happy Kebabchita, Sofia

THE PAST

I could recite the list of American writers I have read and usually all of their books: Melville, Faulkner, Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe and on and on... but now save for a few novels nothing much remains... but what I am trying to understand how to continue with the writing 

But the pictures are urging another approach.  

The hotel in Pula, now in Croatia but in 1967 it was in Yugoslavia.  I had stayed there on a journey from Dublin  to Milan, to Venice, to Trieste as I was on my way to Turkey to visit friends but when I got off the train at Sofia in September of that year my life changed as I walked up Hristo Botev Boulevard and stopped to ask a question to a girl in a kiosk...

In June of this year that hotel in Pula and the town itself was the subject of a conversation with a writer translator from what is now Croatia who was also a guest of the Literature House in Sofia, Dinko Telecan.  Dinko had translated THE WHITE GODDESS, THE GOLDEN BOUGH of many books and was himself a novelist, traveler and poet. He knew the work of Nicolas Bouvier who is truly great and known only to a few---but that seems always the case in these United States... and after telling me Pula was a dump as was the hotel--- I persisted in the conversation and found a safe island in the work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai... now of course another name...and he knew --as he said--- of course and even I could echo that of course we knew the novels of Miroslav Krleza--didn't everyone--- of course I know I have just lost people thinking what a snob, what a name dropper--but so what::: I found THE RETURN OF PHILIP LATINOWICZ and ON THE EDGE OF REASON in my years in Patchogue... as at one time in even in the United States books by so-called foreign writers got translated and published... and of course he knew that James Joyce had begun his teaching career in Pula before going to Trieste and we both paused for Italo Svevo who in certain worlds is as well known as the name,  James Joyce... 

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What I am trying to suggest is  that once one is  beyond the cold censorious academic and journalistic walls of today's United States of America there is a far brighter world of the literary imagination... that sees  and feels and knows a world that is far more interesting than what passes for a literary culture in the United States... there is not a single contemporary American writer---beyond James McCourt, Madison Smart Bell, Stanley Crawford, Tom Whalen whose new books I am waiting for  and of the dead I find it appalling that Hannah Green's THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE is not seen as essential reading as is Hal Bennett's LORD OF DARK PLACES and his very short autobiography THE VISIBLE MAN which was published in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series Volume 15.  I was one a tiny select few who convinced Jon Rabinowitz to republish both of these books at his Turtle Point Press.  

[][][] That Hal Bennett's novels and stories are not better known than Toni Morrison's tells me too much about what so-called American literature is all about and while not written with the linguistic inventiveness of say a Celine, all of Bennett's  work shares an essential attitude as once said by Celine---"you have to be a little bit dead to be really comic" while Hannah Green's novel and her Little Saint a non-fiction book about her long visits with the painter John Wesley to the small French town on Conques and an essay "Mr. Nabokov" create a small perfect oeuvre sharing the sophisticated enthralling stylistic verve of Nabokov's Speak, Memory.

                                  

WALKING TO THE ANDES THIS MORNING

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                                           TWO.

A GERMAN OFFICER IN OCCUPIED PARIS The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Junger has held me for the last two months because on every page or so they send me to what he is either reading or thinking about reading or remembering having read. 

Of late, because of reading Junger, I have gone back to: William Faulkner’s PYLON,

to Washington Irving’s THE SKETCHBOOK,

to the Book of Esther in the Old Testament,

 to Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament,

to Marcel Jouhandeau’s MARCEL AND ELISE, the only one of his many books in English but  more a small anthology that has been translated into English (of course more of his books should be in English but what stands in his way: he was  homosexual, long married to a woman, a strict Roman Catholic and for a time a very pro-German or at the very least indifferent to the German occupation,

-to Leon Bloy, the French writer Junger turns to frequently and of which I have dipped into his only book available in English PILGRIM OF THE ABSOLUTE—which in an essential book for understanding the appeal of Catholicism--- at the very end of Junger’s  life, when he was well beyond a hundred years old  he would become Catholic--- he was no fool, 

to looking at the art of Cocteau

to chatting with Picasso,

to visiting Braque (I SHOULD PROBABLY QUOTE THE WHOLE OF THIS VISIT but I will  not as it so clearly states  why while here are many good artists in the world--- that is all they are: good and ah, why not: (the few greats) They are like the Andes, whose absolute elevation is divided in half to our sights by the ocean’s surface.  Yet their domain spans the sphere of the condor’s wings down to the measureless reaches of the ocean’s depths

                                          FIVE

Junger also in the diaries details the on-going military situation both in France and his entries detailing a mission to the Russian front is so fierce and disturbing in the felt detailed observations--- equaled only by the work of  Curzio Malaparte--- they re-enforce my personal belief that Junger is the single best writer on what being in combat feels like and I have never really understood why people might think that he is in anyway a war monger when in fact he shows just how awful the experience is and why he wishes it on no one… unlike so much of what passes as anti-war memoirs which always stroke the sentimental for all its worth and thus become a useless form of preaching…

                                         SEVEN

This morning as so many mornings I walk to The Strand Bookstore and often also to Alabaster Books around the corner from that. I always look at the bookstalls on the sidewalk and this morning I found a nice copy of Hannah Green’s LITTLE SAINT and of course the clerk in ALABASTER did not know who Hannah Green was… but no matter as I felt myself to be Leopold Bloom out for his walk  (IN ULYSSES--- please surely you know this) and standing at the bookstalls in the shop near O’Connell Bridge in Dublin looking at a book by Paul de Kock and later thinking about a novel SWEETS OF SIN…

AND JUNGER also goes looking through the bookstalls along the Seine and into many of the tiny bookshops that used to give Paris its special charm even for one like myself who does not speak or read French but who also liked to go grazing through the bookshops of Paris imagining to see one of my books which might have escaped English--- I will have this pleasure in June when in Bulgaria I will go into bookstores there and see my THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV having escaped its English incarnation…

Of course Junger read French and while I do not know for sure I remember while in the trenches in WWI  he  was reading and how appropriate it seemed, TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne… and opposing him in those fields was David Jones whose IN PARENTHESIS is the literary equal of Junger’s STORM OF STEEL.. nothing else compares, really, save only Alan Seeger’s poem I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH--- it is no accident that Seeger was in the same class at Harvard as T. S. Eliot.

NINE

A final quoted passage by Junger after one of the many visits with the very rich American who stayed in Paris all through the war, Florence Gould where here is a conversation with a Marie-Louise Heller of whom it is asked: “Marie-Louise, you are certain you can’t remember your husband’s birthday anymore?”

“Yes, but on the other hand I can never forget his death day.”

This retort is apt for in death that person is permanently linked to us—as I now feel about my father."

SINCERITY IS A GIFT: Green, Niedecker, Wescott, Noll

To begin

there is the possible hint of irony in this photograph… though that popular and ever contemporary  illusion of an alternative to an acceptance that each day is in some sense a constant postponement of a willful end to this thing called living, undermines any possibility of mourning, of regretting, of loving, of hating, of…

and while the tombstone for Hannah Green is self-explanatory, the second photograph is only that, a picture, of the cabin on Blackhawk Island on the Rock River in Wisconsin near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin where Lorine Niedecker lived and wrote her claim upon posterity: a posterity in the forms of a collected poetry/prose works from the University of California Press,  two books of letters to/from Louis Zukofsky and Cid Corman,  a couple of books of selected poems and the resulting:a few studies of her work, a biography,  a room in the Hoard Museum in Fort Atkinson, which contains her writing desk, a few paintings that were in her cabin, a few manuscript pages and copies of manuscripts--- while the local library has her archives.  There is a state marker on the road in front of this house on Blackhawk Island  which is still a private residence.. 

        What one knows of her life: writing poetry, the dreary work of washing floors in the local hospital, other menial work…two years of college at Beloit and leaving to take care of ailing parents and being without money, an abortion of twins fathered by Louis Zukofsky… a correspondence with a few people out in the world… but of course  the poetry is meant to…

From  NORTH CENTRAL

Lake Superior

In every part of every living thing

is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals

of the rock.

OR

From THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green:

  I have tried to write, seemingly, a very real book, which is, in fact, a dream.  I got the idea from life, but I have proceeded from vision.  I have made use in equal parts of memory, record, and imagination.  Members of my family and other people, I have loved, my feelings about them, and theirs about one another and many other things as well, have provided the inspiration, the starting point, for this novel but the characters in this book bear no more relation to their real-life counterparts than the characters in a play bear to the actors when they have left the stage.

 FOUR

At Beloit College, I walked about the campus where I had spent three years (the junior year was in Dublin as I dropped out of Beloit---) a pretty campus looking the way a campus is supposed to look: late 19^th century buildings, lots of trees, the ugly modern science building, all built on a bluff overlooking a debased and broken city, ever trying to come back: riddled with poverty and crime, mixed with natural food stores and cute gift shops… but Beloit was Bink Noll who died in his late 50s… three little books of poetry… and in a letter 8/10/86 to me--- three months before his death--- he wrote:

You are, of course, feverishly bookish, and I love you for it; but as for myself I don’t think books count for much--- esp. “creative” ones. I favor them, too--- read quite a bit, among other things; but all in all I don’t think they  (writing them) are a satisfactory way of generating self-esteem.  I set great store by happiness and see that most famous authors and literary ones, too, are fairly miserable.  I have been spending the summer among strewn corpses, no better for their delusions about craft and talent while they lived.  I prize your happiness.  Keep writing but “without attachment,” treating your stuff,  mine, and everybody else’s as the ephemera and mere amusement that it surely is. 

                                FOUR

To underscore:  ephemera, ephemera ephemera…  the University of Wisconsin bookstore in Madison is a vast t-shirt superstore… there is only one bookstore, Paul’s, on street level on State Street, and that presided over by an elderly woman... there are no independent bookstores in Menasha, Neenah, Appleton or Oshkosh… (home to a branch of the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh and Lawrence University in Appleton). There is a Half Priced bookstore in the mall zone near Walmart and Target.

                                   FOUR
  None of the three librarians I talked to in Neenah and Menasha public libraries had heard of Lorine Niedecker or Glenway Wescott.  This is not unusual as they spend a large part of their days helping people get on the internet.   
In the Neenah library where I had begun a manual search through the microfilm version of the Post Crescent newspaper for a poem I thought I had published there in the early 70s;  another woman was copying obituaries for a newsletter of some sort. 

    Eventually one of the librarians suggested I use an internet search of that paper which they subscribed to.  I did not find the poem but I did find a letter I had published on 19 September 1971  suggesting that the killing of George Jackson--- do you remember who that is?--- was a murder perpetrated by the prison guards. 

                                       FOUR

After this visit to where my parents had lived in exile from 1965-1972 I drove for Milwaukee by way of Kewaskum as that is where Glenway Wescott is from. 

Wescott is another writer who has shaped me.  For a long time  I would argue if we in the US need the great American novel his THE GRANDMOTHERS is a worthy candidate.   

And then I had that his title essay from GOODBYE WISCONSIN is a necessary addition to who he is.  I do know he acquired brief  contemporary fame later on for a short novel THE PILGRIM HAWK and that is how most people today will meet his work.

Jerry Rosco has been a tireless promoter of Wescott with a biography and the editing of two volumes of Wescott’s journals and a book of his short fiction… and while his immediate claim upon the current moment is through his never hidden homosexuality he is of course far more than just that… something the poet Elizabeth Bishop understood in not allowing her work to appear in anthologies devote to “poetry by women” and the same could be said of Hannah Green who was happy with the simple declaration: Hannah Green is a writer.

 Wescott appears in the first year of the first version of Julian Green’s journal and it is to me the closest definition of my whole experience of writing:

19 December 1928:  Lunched yesterday with Wescott.  He told me that it seemed to him impossible for a journal to be written that should be absolutely sincere and bear the stamp of truth.  But sincerity is a gift--- one among others. To wish to be sincere is not enough.

I have often thought Green was “a success” only because of the gift of his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In Goodbye Wisconsin, Wescott writes, 

“By birth the best of these young people are Protestants of some sort; by accident, or thanks to their own efforts, the classic Protestant rules have given way to an almost equally scrupulous open-mindedness.”

Of course now, I would suggest an open mind is an empty mind.  The only minds I find interesting are strewn with nasty dead-ends, uncomplicated urges, irrational beliefs… and simple knowings beyond the necessity of words.

Wescott  gave in to a public amiability, a willingness to please and was unable to find his way back to his early books that still are his claim upon me--- but I will grant him his THE PILGRIM HAWK and possibly it is his A CALENDAR OF SAINTS FOR UNBELIEVERS  with its subtitle: Daily readings for eccentrics heretics revolutionaries and other fallen angels…  which might be his best claim though ironically it can really only be read by believers who are capable of understanding the necessary wit and genius of this book as it makes such uncomfortable in that all belief is always a little comic, a little tragic in the echoing of Unamuno’s: THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE, another self-defining book.

I did try with my limited ability to picture the place where Wescott came from and if only he had remained in some fashion there instead of decorating the American Academy… ironically and in a wonderful final gesture: Julian Green might have been an elected immortal to the French Academy but he had the decency before his death to try to resign…”

An aside:  I think I personally shall fail as doesn't it seem obvious from what I have just recorded.

NOTE::::THIS IS THE FIRST OF TWO PARTS:  here are 

two photographs.  What remains.  

 The first was a postcard from Juneau, Wisconsin with a 

message to Lilia back in Menasha while on  my  drive to 

see Iowa City to see Elliott Anderson 

2 June 1969:

and this photograph from this summer, 2014:

what passes and does...