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.

HOW NOTHING CALLS

3---The world is calling is a cliché of what the young experience.  As one gets older increasingly it is the world within that calls and that is finally the only reason that explains how the books pile up about me and I thought this time out to explain how the NEW and the older books arrived here on East First Street at this moment or I might not as I begin to move through them as they are arrayed about me here.

((((music being played as this is being typed   THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR STRING QUARTET  by Ggorgy Kurtag  by the Athena Quartett , from NEOS)))

4--- I placed this comment after David Ulin’s forecasting article in next Sunday’s ( 18 IX 2011) LA TIMES: Thomas McGonigle at 6:31 PM September 15, 2011 

Glad to see that David Ulin mentioned Peter Nadas's PARALLEL STORIES... don't worry about the length and the glib commentary about the sudden coincidence of a few long novels:  PARALLEL STORIES is one of the greatest books that I have had the privilege to read:  it is the most demanding, emotionally, intellectually and dare I say spiritually... in a better world people would be lining up to buy it when it is published in November 2011...I thought Bolano's SAVAGE DETECTIVES was a great book and wrote so in this paper...Nadas is even better... right there with Musil's MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES and Joyce's ULYSSES... and Plutarch would not be insulted...

4--- Two sentences from PARALLEL STORIES are two among the most riveting and revelatory  sentences that both describe a woman in the novel and by implication or inference the reality of life in what used to be called Communist Hungary:  “She had lived in workers’ hostels, abandoned farms; for months she slept on a folding cot in the locker room of a gym, and sometimes, for a single night or a few weeks, she would find shelter in the beds of pitiful, questionable, or revolting characters, about whom no one would ever know.  In those places, her held high, she had to let her hosts ejaculate into her body.

5--- I have been reading--- very slowly--- now that I am old enough: THE INQUISITORY by Robert Pinget.  He had signed it for me back in 1988.  The nice Grove hardcover with the remainder pricing from Marlboro: 59cents//2/&1.00.  Cordialment…

As you know the novel is the questioning of one characters for  400 pages…  he is talking about the streets of a local town and the local newspaper:   the history of these streets and houses that’s so fascinating they’d do far better to run a regular column in the Echo on the Fantoniard instead of those articles by that Lorpailleur woman on the new novel as she calls it her theories dot interest anyone, yes the old streets.

Beckett, to name drop, was a great supporter of Pinget and he had probably the greatest translator from the French Barbara Wright, who translated him nearly without pay as there was no way that anyone could pay someone to translate a writer like Pinget… fortunately the dread Richard Howard only mangled one of Pinget’s books, unlike the savaging that he was allowed to administer to and nearly destroy with Claude Simon. 

I am partial to Pinget’s APOCRYPHA  and the various small books devoted to MONISEUR SONGE.  In 1988 was at a tiny, no longer here, bookshop in the East Village, there were four other people in the shop for the reading and signing.  He and Wright stayed at the Earle Hotel, now the Washington Square Hotel and if I could I would have a plaque on the wall of that establishment attesting to that fact.

6--- Barbara Wright translated a few of Michel Tournier’s books but not THE WIND SPIRIT which has the memorable meditation on a bloody removal of his tonsils:  I have never stopped ruminating on that bloody mishap that left my childhood splattered as thought it had bathed in a huge red sun…Childhood is given to us as confusion, and the rest of life is not time enough to make sense of it or explain to ourselves what happened. 

6--- Tournier also mentioned another mutilation that man is subjected to:  “an anti-erotic mutilation, a symbolic castration, which seriously and irremediably reduces genital sensitivity as a result of keratinization of the epidermis of the glans.  Fellatio becomes impossible or at least so laborious that it loses all its charm.  The prepuce is like the lid of an eye, and the glans of a circumcised male resembles an eye whose lid has been torn off.”

7--- SEAGULL BOOKS  joins DALKEY ARCHIVE and PUSHKIN PRESS to the old reliable NEW DIRECTIONS as the essential publishers of books companies like Knopf, Random House, Penguin, Harpers can no longer afford to do since these so called large publishers are now committed to keeping the shelves of Wal-Mart, Target, Big Lots stocked with books.  Literature is mostly done by accident at these so-called larger publishers. 

7--- Seagull is re-introducing PASCAL QUIGNARD to American and world English readers.  Some might have read his THE SALON IN WURTTENBERG (1991) but that does not prepare for the singular beauty, originality and consoling ability of THE ROVING SHADOWS.  I went down to J and R and purchased the short piano piece by Couperin…  with this book we are back in the familiar--- and to some, like myself--- comforting rooms of Jansenism being talked of…as did Calasso in THE RUINS OF KASCH… years before… the most modern, still, way of remaining within Catholicism, to remain within an orbit of thinking that has never lead to murder… but I probably do violence to THE ROVING SHADOWS:  it is a full orchestral parade of genuine learning, thought, reflection: a moment when the old books are still, really alive.. as indeed they are… when Gibbons is the only text you need to understand the contemporary moment.

7--- More about and by Quignard as the weeks go on…

8---Also, from Seagull two books by AnneMarie Schwaryzenbach:  ALL THE ROADS ARE OPEN An Afghan Journey in June 1939.  Published now for the first time in English a short novel LYRIC NOVELLA… again  I will write about these little books at another time…

9--- UPROOTED  How Breslau Became WROCLAW DURING THE CENTURY OF EXPULSIONS… by GREGOR THUM.  Princeton.  I am a close reader of publishers catalogues and this is the sort of treasure that one finds.

I have always been vaguely aware of these expulsions…  these shoving of one group people out and the putting in of another.  When I had part time library job at Beloit College I remember always checking in a journal published in West Germany about the culture of the Germans who had been expel from Bohemia in what is Czechoslovakia.  So one was ready in some way for complexity when it came to Kafka…a Czech writer who wrote in German or a Jewish writer who wrote in German… of course one sympathized with “poor Czechoslovakia” first victims of the Nazis and the  Communists… but what about those Germans who had once lived in Bohemia.. was the same as Sudetenland?... so now UPROOTED…why was Poland given a slice of Germany… but that brings up the uncomfortable fact of which other country invaded Poland in 1939?  And why did that country get a chunk of Poland after World War Two…

So, UPROOTED is the perfect European history book to be reading, right now, because everyone thinks that all the old questions in Europe were all settled not a long time ago and of course I am not suggesting that something awful is about to descend upon Europe… but the past as Quignard well shows…shadows…

10--- That explaining.  BY WORD OF MOUTH Poems from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams.  Long ago Julio Marzan pointed to that middle of name.  This was back in 1970 or 71 at Columbia when I knew Julio as we sat in classes in the School of the Arts  Columbia.  He like I enjoyed the accident created by Frank MacShane in those days when writers like Borges, Parra, even Neruda were not infrequent visitors to Columbia…  even then I loathed Neruda, that good Stalin Prize winner and sought out Parra who I remember telling me in THE ONLY CHILD on 79^th Street: that to write “I” is not to speak for Nicanor or Thomas as the case may be…so that is why BY WORD OF MOUTH….  I have always been astonished that PATERSON is not a required book for all residents of New Jersey…  in the back of my mind GOING TO PATCHOGUE tries to do what WCW did for Paterson… replaced the so-called real place with a book.

11--- CALLING MR. KING  by Ronald De Feo.  I first found his name in the REVIEW  the journal of Center of Inter-American Relations…  there was a real time when Americans cared about books from South America but that was replaced with rise of ethnic literature in the US  and publishers didn’t have to pay translators… that 99% or more of the Hispanic ethnic US writing was and is junk is not a problem as it serves a purpose--- to provide lousy role modes for  Hispanic surnamed students…  at the moment De Feo’s novel  seems more conventional than might have expected but it is from the Other Press , one of the most consistently disappointing publishers…their books seem interesting--- in particular the translations--- but inevitably the books are committed to a debilitating realism…

12---LUMINOUS AIRPLANES by Paul La Farge… who I sadly see is teaching at Bard College, never a good sign, has made the move to publish a novel that is then continued on-line.  This will be hailed as innovative though the Hungarian novelist Krasznahorkai had been there with his WAR & WAR back in 2006…I will be trying to read his novel… there seems a modesty to his ambition and at least he does not pretend to being socially useful as the dire Russell Banks would claim.

13---Today, as on other days, going to and from places of my employment I have been reading ISLE OF THE DEAD BY Gerhard Meier  that Dalkey Archive will publish in November.  114 pages long.  Two elderly men walk about a Swiss town on November 11, 1977.  Does a novel need more than that?  For instance, Baur is saying to his friend Bindschadler, “At that time the wind still blew through the two elms in the cemetery.  And here was where my father was moldering.  In the meantime he has been cleared off, that is, the gravestone had be leveled.  The grave of Lina, Philipp’s first wife, is also gone…

The epitaph for the book is from Flaubert, “What seems to me beautiful and what I would like to do is a book about nothing.”

PAIN IS BORING: some reading and the opening paragraph from ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974

c--- Pain is boring and for the last six months I have been having pain in my lower right leg.  Seems I fell in the winter and now there will be an operation on the spine:  some have suggested I will end up in a wheelchair with loss of bowel and bladder while others have been more hopeful, including the Xray technician who said Good Luck after taking the final X-rays.

d--- More than forty years ago when I would talk with Edward Dahlberg is in windowless rooms on the Upper West Side of Manhattan he would complain about being posthumous.  He was exaggerating  a little as his Confessions  were about to be published but indeed he knew what he was speaking of because in the obit the NY Times, stupid as always, missed his real claim to the future: BECAUSE I WAS FLESH.

    

--- I have inherited this knowing  from Dahlberg…  and one can feel the stomping feet upon the grave… but I read his inscription: FOR THOMAS, WHOM I LIKE VERY MUCH AND WHO, I HOPE WILL BE MY FRIEND. DEC 21, 1970 NYC.  That friendship endured until the late Spring.  I published excerpts from an interview I did with him in the University Review, a free newspaper distributed on college campuses…I learned that you should not use the same noun twice in one paragraph, that you will always feel that you are be inflicted upon by the well known by writers of the day, and that you should never begin to write without first reading a book by a writer greater than you will ever be since writing should be a constant state of humiliation

---Today,  a list of well known bad writers would have to include Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Safran Foer … and they share the characteristics of all well known bad writers: relevance, imitation, fakery, pseudo profundity

E ---But I have  been reading a little and that is what I wanted to report.

And I will be reading for a long time: PARALLEL STORIES by PETER NADAS.  The bound galleys are more than 1100 pages and require the greatest possible concentration and so far each chapter opens another story and all the while I am aware that parallel lines do not meet except in the highest math… 

--- Finally a book that might nudge over ULYSSES though so far I have not found the classical allusions that stalk Joyce’s book to either a reader’s distraction or delight.

---When PARALLEL STORIES is published in November read carefully the reviews and see who is faking their reading of this book, who has skimmed it, who has copied from the publicity and if you think this won’t happen you should read  FIRE THE BASTARDS by Jack Green (Dalkey Archive) a book that shows exactly how far too many reviewers did not read William Gaddis’s THE RECOGNITIONS and even when copying  the publicity for it could not get that straight.  I have also heard that one of the straws upon the back of David Foster Wallace was his sure knowledge that many of those who had praised his INFINITE JEST had not read it and he well knew Samuel Johnson’s remark, it is better to praise than to read.

---I can only begin to hint at my own reading of PARALLEL STORIES by quoting the chapter title, “Everyone in Their Own Darkness”, as a possible way into the originality of the narrative but remembering as I discovered a quote I had inserted into my ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974, “not to put too fine a print on it, Tolstoy did not believe in people.  The more closely his read characters…are examined, the clearer it becomes that the celebrated moralist was a determinist, a materialist, a behaviorist.  Although his eye for surface variations was so wonderfully acute that there is not a character in all his output who is not apparently unique, all are nothing but flesh, and all flesh is grass.  The flesh may lead to despair, but it is the only form in which fiction can so amply clothe itself…” 

---when I wrote about Nadas’s BOOK OF MEMORIES I mentioned the startling physicality of his characters, how their words were enshrined in a flesh that has so rarely been described and the same must be said for PARALLEL STORIES:  never have I read a description of male body hair to compare…but not in the service of pornography, to be sure…

--- the books of Nadas along with those of Roberto Calasso and the pleasure they give to me as a reader are reasons enough to want to survive this operation… I cannot escape the fact of writing before an operation is inevitably a before and the awaited after looms… Nadas well understands the need for such a sentence as he has also written a painful book about his own heart attack OWN DEATH, but has the mind to distance himself from this by publishing his text midst hundreds of photographs of the same tree on his property as that tree changes with the season…

--- which leads, again, to my assertion that T.S. Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND is the only poem in English to survive the 20^th Century for:  April is the cruelest month

F ---I am also more grimly aware than ever before of the dire fate of the book.  The number of book shelves continues to shrink at St. Marks Bookstore and at the Strand more and more space is given over to non-book items and now the store is just a tourist destination to buy things with the STRAND name on them.  Of course they cannot compete with the used books at Amazon, but what is sadder is that for those of us who walk in the city, there are now fewer and fewer places to walk to… the boulevardier of Baudelaire has now lost his purpose, there is no longer a place for him… even in New York City.

G ---Blogs are an end in themselves, a constant item of frustration and isolation…they really mean that we are now approaching total atomization.. there are no longer public places where one gets together to talk…  one thinks of the great and famous pubs, bars, cafes… all gone no matter where you look in thr world.. all turned into tourist sites with fading pictures of authors… authors of books no one reads.. I am told Beckett’s picture is all over Dublin and it was in the airport in Dublin 20 years ago even, welcoming people to Ireland, to a country that hates its writers and makes a mockery of them by turning them into employees of the state, receiving monthly payments to make sure they never write anything of real significance… remember that was the purpose of the writers unions in the socialist countries:  give the writers so many perks, so many benefits that they would write less and less or they would writer more and more insignificant poetry… nearly every poet you can think of in Ireland now has a collected volume of more than 600 pages in length…  so those monthly checks coming from Aosdana buy the compliant silence and in the US the silence is bought with tenure from colleges and universities where the function of these writers is to turn out more writers who in turn will…

H---the most mysterious book this time around is FROM THE OBSERVATORY (Archipelago)  by Julio Cortazar combining prose and photographs by Cortazar himself of an observatory built in Jaipur by an Indian prince.  I have long been awaiting this English version as I picked up a long time ago in Paris the French version which is far grander with the photographs bled to the edge of the page and some pictures spread over two pages.  The American version is little meaner: the photographs are isolated by wide white frames, diminished in a way, as I do think we are supposed to be swept somewhere by the photographs, swept away from the determinism of the science that is discussed about the habits of eels, but the fragmented text, hallucinated in its rebellion: “that the redheaded night should see us walking with our face to the breeze, favoring the apparition of dream and insomnia figures, that one hand should slowly slip down naked back until coaxing out the moan of love…

---but I am willing to go most anywhere with Cortazar whose HOPSCOTCH, ever young, ever youthful, ever a model for what can be and what is no longer, and happily ARCHIPELAGO also has Cortazar’s  AUTONAUTS OF THE COSMOROUTE, the THE THE perfect book to buy before setting out on any long car trip, as that is what it is, a report on a car trip between Paris and Marseilles, where the rest stops, the accidents of the road become the… I like the dailyness of it, the photographs, the drawings, the accidents, the sadness that both Cortazar and his companion are both dead, this is a perfect memorial, but telling anyone who can read that it is what you are doing right now is of interest, if only you step back, one tiny step…

---I am not prepared to forget that Cortazar had the most repulsive activist political beliefs:  every murderous leftist regime drew his support  but in so much of his writing this did not contaminate his imagination, so in the way that we have learned to read Pound or Celine…

J--- HELDENPLATZ, by Thomas Bernhard (Oberon)  Bernhard’s last play.  A professor has returned to Vienna from Oxford and thrown himself out of the window…realizing  Austria today is no different than it was in 1930s when the Viennese quite happily cheered Hitler and to this day are little changed… familiar to readers of Bernhard but still as fresh as, and the surviving brother of the suicide is saying, “so you won’t think/I’m dead already which I am not on the contrary/the body is finished but the head is newborn/every day/ that’s a terrible situation…

---there is a very funny exchange between two of the servants of the suicided professor talking of his views of his children:  Suddenly one day you discover your own children/are non-humans he said/we think we are raising human beings/and then  they’re just carnivorous cretins/hysterics megalomaniacs  chaotic

---and how we are inflicted upon by actors, actresses, rock stars, do-gooders of every sort:  the whole world nothing but cynicism/megalomaniac actors/ abusing the Sahel-region/perverse Caritas directors/flying first class to Eritrea/posing with starving people/for the world press

---or as any thoughtful person knows every morning should begin with the New York Post and not the New York Times:  The so-called quality papers have always been boring/What we seek in the newspapers/is precisely the scum/I don’t need newspapers as my daily intellectual diet/it’s the absolute primitiveness of the Austrian  gutter press/ that I need every morning/I admit I would rather steep myself in that filth / than in the tasteless culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine (New York Times, right!) 

K ---   a few more books  that I have been reading and which increasingly look to being over-looked:

…BARLEY PATCH by Gerald Murnane.  Some of us discovered Murnane a long time ago when Braziller published THE PLAINS, and discovered finally an Australian writer of prose that could be read… but with the BARLEY PATCH Murnane  becomes a world class writer, someone who does fit into Dalkey Archive’s list with me, with Goytisolo, with Roa Bastos, with Lezama Lima… yeah ,and I threw in my own books because I forget that is my claim upon you my few readers and I wanted you to know the context of my books… along with Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Andrei Bitov.

…Murnane prefaces BARLEY PATCH with a quote from Kerouac’s Doctor Sax--- just in that gesture alone shows we are dealing with a writer of a genuine independent spirit:  The Turf was so complicated it went on forever.”

…the first line of the book is: Must I write?  The second section a few pages later begins: Why had I written?  TO PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

L--- WERT AND THE LIFE WITHOUT END by Claude Ollier (Dalkey Archive).  I asked to review this for the LA TIMES and still might be given the chance but who knows… set within the mind of a soldier who has survived…” Stricken for life, shut away inside themselves, emptied, surrounded by paleness, place shadows, such is the fate of the living who must still live.”

…”All outbursts, fits of temper, and screams banished, permanent silence reigns, a great respect for others, here the meeting  place of the silent ones, the taciturn, the discreet.

In recent years I have had many students who have been in the terrible wars the US has been engaged in for the last 20 years.  In some of these classes the students get a chance to read STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger and discover that they are not alone… they see through the tawdriness of  the well meaning  writing that is cranked out attempting to describe their experiences but once they have read Junger they discover a context, they are not alone.. they are not…

M ---the best memoir books for the Fall: THE LETTERS OF T.S. ELIOT Volume i and Volume 2, far more interesting than any book written about Eliot.

N--- ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974

AFTER  for a while, until discouraged by technology failure I was trying to scan ST PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 so as to make it possible to be read in out new world.  Here is the opening

That spring I was staying at The Russell in the cheapest or as I have been taught to say, the most reasonable available room. The ones in the pubs think I'm loaded and they are almost right:  I am loaded but not always with money and there have been too many times or not enough of those times to put me at perfect ease with the idea of always being loaded and so what? When?  I have sat before the fire in the lobby of the hotel, a cold glass of Carlsberg in hand, realizing a lot of other sons have done and are doing at this moment what I am doing: drinking and travelling out the patrimony, a gift in my case, from all the years of my father's fear of doing anything which would endanger his retirement.

After forty-nine years of work at the American Can Company he survived only two years of doing as he put it: nothing.

Died, he did, alone in a parking lot with strangers looking on at his performance.

I, the son, will have gone through the small sum of money in less than a year.  There is no revealing the exact sum because money together with sex, religion and politics are all things the son was taught not to talk about with strangers because one never knew.

The future holds only watching each and every dollar spent