RESISTING BEING A CRANK

RESISTING BEING A CRANK

    (Typed while listening to Secondhand Daylight by Magazine)

PREFACE ONE

…where he remarked that I was the only person in the world to have the problem of Dalkey Archive Press again not scheduling the book they bought of yours 2 years ago ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974--- who in the world gives a fuck about one more book not appearing?

PREFACE TWO

I would rather be writing about Andrei Bitov’s forthcoming THE SYMMETRY TEACHER or WHY CAN THE DEAD DO SUCH GREAT THINGS? By Robert Bartlett or LA GRANDE by Juan Jose Saer.

PREFACE THREE

From a letter written a few days ago to John O’Brien, owner and publisher of Dalkey Archive Press.::::in  a letter from February, 1982 to Helen and Mike Oldfield in London I mentioned  I was looking forward to the first week in  March when I would receive a copy of the Review of Contemporary Fiction which is to contain the first excerpts of ST. PATRICK'S DAY.

Finally, I have always valued our long personal and professional friendship and hope that Dalkey Archive will see this book into print  (as per the contract you signed on May 20, 2012)or is this the beginning of a certain death spiral for DA given the rather dire economic situation which  (possibly)does not allow for its publication?  The latter consideration grows out of having lived/worked through the deaths of two bookstores here in New York City and witnessed the numerous deaths of various publishing enterprises--- I hope I am very wrong.

        HOW I DIED as an author.  The limitations of the English language are immediately available in trying to understand the differences between an author, a writer, a novelist, a poet, a dramatist, a script writer, a journalist, a publicist, a critic

        I take it that an author is someone who has published a book and that book has been read by someone other than him or herself and the person he or she is sentimentally entangled with. 

        From now on I shall talk in my person as a he.

        An author has been paid by someone for that book or rather someone has paid to read that book.  Freud going against his Hippocratic Oath as a medical doctor insisted on being paid to listen to his patients and if they did not pay that would undermine their ability to get better. 

        It is my understanding a book is completed by the reader.  This step turns a writer a poet a novelist into an author.

        Of course in French this has all been teased out into incomprehensibility.

        My death as an author happened yesterday, 7 May 2014 in the morning when I read the 2014 catalogue for Dalkey Archive and discovered ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 is not scheduled for publication during that season.

        Two years ago on May 20, 2012 the publisher of Dalkey Archive, John O’Brien, and I signed a contract to publish ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974.  The book was to be published within two years of that month. 

        Dalkey Archive published in hardcover in 1987 and 1992 two books of mine THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  Northwestern University Press published a paperback version of THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV in 2000 and in 2010  Dalkey Archive finally published a paperback version of GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  These books remain “in print.”

        Have I become a crank?

        Self-warning.

        The world is full of such people and when I used to go to the The 55  on Christopher Street I was aware this bar collected a large number of ex-winners and people into downward mobility. 

        Of course over the years the bar had been decorated by the appearance of such writers as David Markson and William Gaddis and the most memorable of personages, Jason Holliday  who as you might remember was  Shirley Clarke’s PORTRAIT OF JASON--- Jason would show you the newspaper clipping with the wonderful comment by his good friend, Ingmar Bergman, on that movie… "the most extraordinary film I've seen in my life.”

        And once I was in the Bleecker Street Cinema for a screening of PORTRAIT OF JASON in the late afternoon and discovered down front from where I was sitting, in the nearly empty theater, Jason was there admiring, LOOK at that handsome MAN on the screen, as he was saying out loud to himself.

        I will not go into the fate of Jason, up there living in the Y in Harlem, as he said, among the niggers or visiting   Jason when he was in Bellevue complaining, the niggers are stealing my drugs.

        No.  The temptation is there and must be resisted. 

        Of late I have been visiting an old friend the painter John Wesley who lives on Washington Square Park.  On the opposite corner many years before Marcel Duchamp came and played chess in his later years.  He knew and often talked about--- in the same language and thinking of T. S. Eliot---  that the vast majority of what is called art what is called writing would be and is  swept away, utterly no matter the intentions, the apparent immediate popularity or lack of attention and the most honest answer I have ever recorded was when I asked Julian Green what he looked forward to in his 90^th year  and he replied, To be standing before God and to finally know exactly who I am, free of all the illusions, the little lies knowing I am going to Purgatory.”

A PLACE AGAIN A PLACE MAYBE

FIVE

The reason for opening with these two photographs is that I am reading Yves Bonnefoy's THE ARRIERE-PAYS, published by Seagull Books.  A beautiful book of prose and full colour illustrations.    

A book of meditations for want of a better word  on a place, a place where one discovers the self, the place not known, probably unknowable, yet we receive hints and these hints disappear, a book to go back to and back to and to read and to read...unlike the books that accumulate in beach houses never to be re-read.  But more than that, of course

        Here is Bonnefoy:  "...that is what I dream of, at these crossroads, or a little way beyond them--- and I am haunted by everything that gives credence to the existence of this place, which is and remains other, and yet which suggests itself with some insistence even.  When a road climbs upwards, revealing, in the distance, other paths among the stones, and other villages; when the train travels into a narrow valley, at twilight, passing in front of houses where a window happens to light up; when the boat comes in fairly close to the shore-line, where the sun has caught a distant windowpane (and once it was Caraco where I was told that the paths were long since impassable, smothered by brambles), this very specific emotion seizes hold of me--- I feel I'm getting close, and something tells me to be on the alert.  What are the names of those villages over there?  Why is there a light on that terrace, and who is greeting us, or calling us, as we come alongside.  Of course, the moment I set foot in one of these places, this sense of 'getting warm' fades away.  But not without it intensifying, sometimes for as much as an hour, because the sound of footsteps or a voice rose to my hotel room, reaching me through the closed shutters..."

                                                               TWELVE

Bonnefoy is on a journey, Italy, France, Greece, eventually in memory to Armenia... but the place first took shape in a book read in childhood, long remembered, but now lost... don't we all have these books?

                                                              FOURTEEN


The whole of Bonnefoy’s book is summed up, “I sought my true place, on this strange earth of ours, so prompt to satisfy my desires and yet so mysteriously disappointing.”

But where?: “it is the context of these undisciplined speculations that Italy became a part of the arriere-pays, and the place where I most abandoned myself to the dream.

In truth, I did find it hard going when he takes us into a discussion of dream.  I do not read about dreams.  Someone said once about dreams: that is why a shrink charges so much, nothing more boring than listening to a dream…

However Bonnefoy is aware of this and backs away all the time from dream, “I have resolved nothing , which can explain why I have remained a writer, writing being the wood that piles up as the fire starts to catch, in the smoke.  But one or two things I have understood… it consists in not forgetting the here and now in the dream of elsewhere, in not forgetting time, humble time as it is lived through here among the illusions of the other place, that shade existing out of time.

Yet always mentioning great artist ending in his listing Caravaggio…”and next to these, who have lifted off the tombstone from the imagination, there are others, crreators of great art also, divided within themselves, discouraged but still tenacious, not without the suffering which Baudelaire knew to be the illustre compagne, the noble companion, of the beauty be most prized.."

                                                                    SIXTEEN

Bonnefoy ends his book with an evocation of Armenia based upon black and white photos of Armenian churches he remembered  seeing as a child and this thought about black and white photographs:  "I had the impression I had already  visited these churches, among their mountains, because the black and white  established a continuity with other memories from those ‘profound years’, reminiscences that seem to spring from ‘before we were ourselves.”…

                                                                      SEVENTEEN

The reason, by now you might be asking for those two photographs: taken in Deddington, near Oxford, Sunday afternoon in August, while taking a walk, while visiting the Oldfields... just stopped as Bonnefoy before certain paintings in Italy... a place, not the Mascot Dock in Patchogue, n

not, not, late night  walking across the Galata Bridge in Istanbul... or in Kyoto or in Dublin...  in Dublin...

a picture saturated with memory of after the pubs eating on the way home... now forlorn only because of memory

                                                                    SEVENTEEN

When John O'Brien discovered that I was heading to Cape May, NJ for a week with extended family he sent this message:  

AND IN 10, 15 YEARS, THERE WILL STILL BE THE BEACH, THE ENDLESS WAVES, THE SAND: ANDWE WILL NOT BE... A FADING MEMORY, REDUCED TO LITTLE STORIES, ANECDOTES, SEMI-ACCURATE, TWISTED TO MAKE THEM BETTER ANECDOTES, BUT THEN ABOUT PEOPLE (US) THAT NO ONE REMEMBERS, JUST NAMES IMAGINARY PEOPLE WHO ONCE WERE, STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE WHO NOW THEMSELVES WORRY ABOUT HOW THEY WILL BE FORGOTTEN.

I suspect O'Brien is echoing Sorrentino... but I know when my son was talking about his 20 and 20 and 20 plan...20 years in industry, 20 years in a university and then 20 years teaching in a school like the school he went to Groton...I knew I would be there possibly only for the start of his first 20 year plan...

as when  we were at the beach  in the late afternoon...  that time around four when people are beginning to leave the beach...

                                                                SEVENTEEN

I have with deliberation said nothing about those pictures from Deddington.