STEPS TO LITERARY INHUMATION

      Freumbichler writes, what you are about to read is an attempt probably futile to escape the fate explained by the title, but as it would seem the author of this blog is teetering as is often said on the edge of passing into another state though readers of the books of Thomas Bernhard are familiar to similar situations and Freumbichler writing--- as he addresses himself in this manner--- is no accident and while dying in 1949 it is true that  is still no reason not to hear from him since such shadows remain forever within the village limits of Patchogue.

                  
4                                        
 In 1962  my mother typed my first story WAS IT WORTH IT? since she knew how to type and I sent the story off to the Saturday Evening Post, the only magazine other than SIGN MAGAZINE  my family subscribed to.  Of course the story came back with a little printed rejection slip. 

                   5
IN 1970 I asked Lawrence Durrell if he ever thought about his future reputation and he replied, "What has posterity ever done for me?"  
      
                  6
Dalkey Archive Published two of my books: THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  Northwestern University Press did PETKOV in paperback.  
Dalkey Archive two years ago contracted to publish ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974 but have told me it has been postponed.  So one can say it forthcoming... I hope, still.

                   7  
Over the years Richard Seaver, Sam Vaughan Daniel Halpern have all said nice things about manuscripts I have shown them but sadly they are not prepared to predict sufficient sales to convince whoever it is... but I have learned this is all really a matter of accident and whim and these men have not been prepared to give into my sentences in fortune telling as they have been able to do for others.  This is called spilt milk.

8
It is not unusual for writers to talk and write about being posthumous as I first heard of this from Edward Dahlberg now more than 4o years ago and have always known--- in that place--- but I have tried to hold to Durrell's comment even as he has mostly disappeared from the public world of reading...

so, here I am showing you what the backhoe reads like when it comes for the steps a writer takes to self-inhumation in the form of two letters to editors who I thought possibly powerful, possibly might be interested.  They are self-explanatory and to date come with no replies.  I did sent them by that most unconventional means possible today: the United State Postal Service so of course both letters might have been lost in the mail---though Freumbichler writes: no way can you descend to that level of stupidity

                                                                      *****

3 MARCH, 2014

Dear Kate Medina,

                   Toward the end of June 1972 you wrote me a little note after reading “A Son’s Father’s Day” in the Village Voice.  You had asked if I had anything I might show you and I think I did send along something and nothing happened as it was probably not meant to be.  Possibly, Harriet Wasserman who I had met  through Hannah Green and Sam Vaughan,  had been in touch later with you but all of that is so long ago though your little note was very important to me as a writer back then.

          You might know Dalkey Archive published two of my books: THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  PETKOV appeared and is still in paper from Northwestern University Press and PATCHOGUE was eventually finally done in paper by DA two years ago.  They have another novel ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 under contract but I have been told by John O’Brien that he has to postpone it into some dim future time.

          Both books were well reviewed in the New York Times (they even found Andrei Codrescu to review PETKOV) and reviews of PATCHOGUE appeared in Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, The Voice and the LA Times.  I well know that this was all another time and have seen the changes as I have reviewed and written with some frequency for all of the major newspapers here in the US and in The Guardian in London.

          The manuscript I am writing you about is JUST LIKE THAT and I have in mind a long subtitle:  A book from the Sixties of the last century: a beginning to that moment and the end with no distinction between truth and fiction.  The book concludes in the year after you wrote to me.

          The first section, a beginning, has a young man going from Dublin in the Spring of 1965 to the DDR.  The opening of the book finds two young men in bed together in Leipzig  and the question asked by the German, “Are you Jewish?” 

          Of course the place, the question and a poster noted:  HÄNDE WEG VON VIETNAM

          Barbara Probst Solomon, who I am sure you know, published the opening and concluding parts of this section in subsequent issues of her journal THE READING ROOM (2002). 

          The second part of the book:  the end of the Sixties is located on the Upper West Side and is held in place by the death of the narrator’s father Upstate while he is living on 114^th Street. 

          A long section from this part was published by William O’Rourke in the Notre Dame Review in 2012 and is centered on the narrator’s relationship [what a terrible word] with Anthony Burgess and others in the bars near Columbia along with the theatrical recreations of the life and times of Charlie Manson and  the intense racial and sexual goings-on inside the Sullivanian world of those large apartments on Riverside Drive are not missed as is the nightly pilgrimage between The Gold Rail, The West End and Forlini’s along there on Broadway.  (The piece in the Notre Dame Review was listed as a notable essay in The Best Essays of 2013)

          Now the reason for this actual letter:  the manuscript exists as a manuscript.  It was typed on Word Star.  I held on to that program for the longest time.  I have partial versions in more contemporary e-forms but the complete manuscript exists as just that.

          Of late, I did have the pleasure, obscure as all such things are, of discovering that Nadine Gordimer in the 1990s had read my reviews in the LA Times and who remembered I had been in her class at Columbia and she was pleasantly surprised that I had survived my former existence.

          All of this is possibly irrelevant to the actual reading of JUST LIKE THAT.  And my most recent post at abcofreading.blogspot.com (of course the homage to Pound in the name) can serve as a sort of immediate calling card:    http://www.abcofreading.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-remains.html

          Finally, I am enclosing a photocopy of an article George Garrett asked me to do for the last yearbook of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “A Writer’s Life.”

                                                All the best,

                                               

                                                Thomas McGonigle

                                            

                                                                     *****

5 February 2014

Dear Geraldy Howard,

At the end of 2013 we exchanged notes about Malcolm Cowley and I was pleasantly surprised to learn  you also knew him.  When I looked at the notes we exchanged I realized I had misspelled your first name and the ghost of Cowley was there again:  I was a terrible proofreader of my own work which Cowley had read down at Hollins College and he was telling me of why the first editions of Fitzgerald’s books are riddled with spelling error.  Max Perkins believed  an author knew best when it came to his own text, but he did not realize Fitzgerald was a lousy speller and contrary to what people thought  the errors in those early editions were not Scribner’s fault.

But the occasion for this letter which I am sending as a real letter is about my own work and my hope that you might be interested in reading one of my manuscripts.  I prevail upon the fact of having known of you since we were introduced or was  it only that Angela Carter at Keshkerrigan Bookstore told me of you so many years ago at her shop down there in the wilds near Chambers Street? 

You might know Dalkey Archive published two of my books  THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  PETKOV appeared also in paper from Northwestern University Press and PATCHOGUE was eventually finally done in paper by DA two years ago.  They have another novel under contract ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 but I have been told by John O’Brien that he has to postpone it in spite of a contract into some dim future date.

Angela must have introduced us as I published--- to this date--- the only Irish and Irish American literary journal ADRIFT and thought you had shared an interest in such and possibly in particular William Trevor... and while I was interested in Trevor Francis Stuart held my interest as did Ralph Cusack's CADENZA which lead to Gil Sorrentino and Jack O'Brien.  The small world.

          The book is JUST LIKE THAT and I have in mind a long subtitle:  A book from the so-called Sixties of the last century: a beginning to that moment and the end with no distinction between truth and fiction. 

          The first section, a beginning has a young man going from Dublin in the Spring of 1965 to the DDR.  The opening of the book finds two young men in bed together in Leipzig  and the question asked by the German, “Are you Jewish?” 

          Of course the place, the question and a poster noted:  HÄNDE WEG VON VIETNAM

          Barbara Probst Solomon published the opening and the concluding parts of this section in subsequent issues of her journal THE READING ROOM. 

          The second part of the book:  the end of the so-called Sixties is centered on the Upper  West Side and is held in place by the death of the narrator’s father Upstate while he is living on 114^th Street. 

          A long section from this part was published by William O’Rourke in the Notre Dame Review in 2012 and is centered on the  narrator’s relationship [what a terrible word] with Anthony Burgess and others in the bars near Columbia along with the theatrical recreations of the life and times of Charlie Manson, the particular racial and sexual views of Johnny Green of Green County Alabama---  Green will subsequently die of AIDS, but that is another story.  Of course the Sullivanian world of those large aopartments on Riverside Drive are not missed as is the nightly pilgrimage between The Gold Rail, The West End and Forlini’s

          And now the reason for this actual letter.  The manuscript exists as a manuscript.  It was typed on Word Star.  I held on to that for the longest time.  I have partial versions in more contemporary e-forms but the complete manuscript exists as just that.

          Two editors/publishers have read versions of the manuscript, Richard Seaver and Daniel Halpern.  They both decided that they could not make money on it.  Of course I heard a version of that comment when after GOING TO PATCHOGUE came out and even with full page reviews in the Voice, in the Chicago Tribune and long articles in Newsday and the NY Times.. I was told by an agent, I can’t eat lunch off of you. 

          Of course years ago through Hannah Green I had Harriet Wasserman as an back in the early 70s when two little pieces appeared in the Village Voice, Goodbye W. H, Auden and A Son’s Father’s Day.

          So I court that terrible knife edge of age--- I remember that I even had a note from Kate Medina and Sam Vaughan…  though I hope this note is not an elaborate necrologue but as one gets older as I am sure you know…

          I used to review for Newsday, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and for the LaTimes until that paper ran finally out of money.

          Of late, I did have the pleasure, obscure as all such things are, of discovering that Nadine Gordimer had read my reviews in the LA Timea and remembered I had been in a class with her at Columbia.

          All of this is possibly irrelevant to the actual reading of JUST LIKE THAT. And my most recent post at abcofreading  (of course the name form {Pound)  can serve as a sort of immediate calling card:    http://www.abcofreading.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-remains.html

          Finally I am enclosing a photocopy of an article George Garrett asked me to do for the last yearbook of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “A Writer’s Life.”

                                                All the best, 
                                                 Thomas McGonigle

                                              

A MEANING OF WOODSTOCK, CEMENTON AND SAUGERTIES

                           

1.      Upstate at Saugerties between going to Newfoundland with my father and then going to Mexico City with him in the summer of 1973.

          Hilda would drive passed the house on 9W in her old Chevy, one of the springs in the back was going, looking for me so she could call from the candy store opposite The Exchange Hotel to meet me in Woodstock where I first met her late at night drinking in The Pub: this old blonde woman who was drinking Lowenbrau because she said it’s natural beer and natural things are good for you.

          (you might think this happened a lot but it didn’t)

          She was 39, just like Jack Benny, she says, people always laugh somehow.

          The person I am sitting in that bar is 28 going on 29.

          She says her father sold his farm further upstate, way beyond Hunter or somewhere: it doesn’t matter, you don’t know these places, no one does, just a year before property values went up.  He didn’t get a lot of money for the farm but he couldn’t work it anymore.  Farm work is awful, he didn’t have anybody working for him, morning to night all year round even in the winter.  He died of a broken heart when he gave up his farm living in a trailer… I forget where she says he lived then, though she said he moved into a town.

          I’m married you see and my husband’s family doesn’t approve of me because, you see, I am a Baptist who believes in the one true God as is preached in the Bible.  You see, they live in Kingston and think I’m a sloppy housewife because I go to church on Wednesday and Sundays not like them lazy people with their idea of the Pope and what is all that about?

          Another beer, she asks and this is what is surprising.

          (it is late at night, it seems, time just goes away--- only the bar part of The Pub is open--- a moment or two and realizing this and back to…)

And only if you have natural beer.

          Is it okay to have a Guinness?

          Is it natural?

          They say it is good for you in Ireland--- that’s how they advertise it in Ireland--- and she orders me a Guinness and she orders herself another Lowenbrau.

          Her eyes were blue silver dollars behind thick lenses of spectacles that broadened her face while the frames seemed like they had plastic wings… [no one much will understand this since they don’t make large silver dollar coins anymore but that is the thinking as trying to remember her face even when back in the house on 9W going north out of Saugerties]

          Once she must have been pretty, still has long blonde hair, with no dark roots. There is beauty at the corners of her eyes that were not wrinkled though across her face those thin lines had begun…

          My husband can’t leave his bed and the priest brings a little wafer of bread in a gold box once a week.  I am praying for him as he has helped me when I needed help and people don’t understand: people can’t help getting old and he is only fifty-one but can’t get out of bed much of the time and isn’t it sad I think as he was an active sort of guy... he is now very heavy to get out of the bed and then to sit in a chair, waiting in the same way,  now he needs me and he is alone [I let the words slip away from her for a moment] and she is alone even more alone always, you know, at home and even at Montgomery Ward where [I again begin to record her speaking] I work.  I am alone and the girls there gave me a brooch for my birthday which was very kind of them, so alone, you must not know what it is like, I can tell, what sign are you or maybe you do?

          Scorpio, I say

          A difficult sign to be  and a dangerous person to know too well..

          So dangerous I’ll buy you another beer

          I’ve had too much if you know what I mean

          I’ll buy you a beer tomorrow if you let me.

          I have to work and then I have a prayer circle for a friend is very sick and we have to pray for him to get well but if after you want to after that:  do you like strawberries?

          Yes

          I’ll bring you some they’re good for you and we have a lot this year. 

          I thought only Guinness was good for me

          You’re making fun of me

          Of course not.  You have Swedish hair.

          You’re making fun of me.   Hair is vanity.

          We met the next day. We eat strawberries and I brought a bottle of champagne I said was natural and we sit on these rocks in the middle of a sort of stream outside of town on the way to Hunter Mountain, drinking from paper cups that were left over from the driving to Newfoundland.  I was driving my father’s car as hers was parked in the lot behind The Pub.

          She didn’t want to go into the bar as she had enough to drink but let’s go into my car and talk.  We sat in the back seat and she told me to sit and she would get on top of me.  Her panties she kept on one leg.  You get used to doing this in the country she said.  You’re not a country boy.

          She offers to give me some of her vitamin that she had in big boxes in the trunk and which made the car sag even more. We sat then in my father’s car and she is saying I like going to Catholic Mass and I go to church three times on Sunday once to the Catholic Mass for my husband and then I go to Baptist church two times, I like the Catholic Mass the best as that is a real show but people didn’t seem very happy going to Mass and that is what she likes about Baptist church, you hold hands and people sing all the time, you don’t have to be a good singer.

2.      Another time I went to The White Rabbit bar in Cementon on 9W.  The trees were all covered in grey dust as they manufactured cement in the town.  The guy who owned the bar got it from the money he got after surviving a head-on collision.  They didn’t have any more frozen squirrel meat but he could maybe find some deer meet but it was getting too old.  Squirrel and deer meat don’t cost anything but you get real tired of them after a winter.

3.      A night I  went to the Bar in The Exchange Hotel where Anthony was telling me I have a cousin of mine who has cancer of the brain,  They cut his head open and didn’t put a plate in his skull.  His brain or whatever would swell up like a bowling ball and then shrink back down.  He prayed a lot to die or for someone to come kill him.  I have another cousin who had cancer all over.  The doctor cut the nerves at the back of the neck and she just lay there in the hospital bed knowing she was supposed to feel pain and not being able to feel it.   She’d cry and beg for the pain… to feel something.

COMMENTARY.  One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides  of a garden patio:  and of this house, one spot on the deep, shady veranda facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking-chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly, in capital letters, about Morning in Mexico.  All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, and then looking down at the page of his exercise book.  It is a pity we don’t always remember this.  When books come out with grand titles… this seems to me to be a perfect opening to a book and in this case,  MORNINGS IN MEXICO by D. H. Lawrence.  The truth, sure modesty and deflation of so much crap that is still being written.

TWO:  some people, probably a number fewer than the fingers of one hand know that I very favorably reviewed as I admired it, Thomas Bernhard’s THE VOICE IMITATOR, published in 1997 by the University of Chicago Press.

       One aspect of my admiration, but not revealed because who are you was that it reminded me of my own IN PATCHOGUE, published by Adrift Editions in 1984.

MIRCEA CARTARESCU, THOMAS BERNHARD, ERNST JUNGER< JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE CUNY, TRISTRAM SHANDY

The Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu is interviewed and profiled in the latest post at www.signandsight.com, which is the most important culture site in the world. It is based on the best cultural articles from the three major German newspapers and is one of the very very rare sites that seems to be genuinely interested in a real cross-section of political and aesthetic view points. It used to come every morning, five times a week, but now it is only comes twice or so a week.
The site was celebrating Cartarescu's trilogy ORBITOR (Glaring) originally published in 1996, 2002 and now finished in 2007. The site reports that it, "describes a city awash with thrills and nightmares... captures the socialist capital (Bucharest) in the moment of its downfall. His magical realism gives a prefab block--- in reality a celebration of the perpendicular--- on oval window and the socialist years a metaphysical superstructure. Bucharest becomes a mystical city." Cartarescu says of his book, "Sometimes I explain my book as a mystical butterfly or a flying cathedral."

In 2005, I reviewed for the LATimes Cartarescu's first book to be translated into English, NOSTALGIA. (New Directions) I talked in terms of Joyce, Pessoa, Hamsun and could have easily gone on to Faulkner. And if you may forgive the blurb I buried in the review, "NOSTALGIA is gripping, impassioned, unexpected--- the qualities the best in literature possesses."

Earlier in the review I had gone on about reverberating nuance and self-consciousness but I tried to lure readers into the book with: "NOSTALGIA opens with "The Roulette Player, a hypnotic suspenseful prologue in which a man rises to an unimaginable level of success playing Russian roulette and, when no longer facing any challenger, decides to challenge himself by adding bullets to the revolver."


After reading the interview profile of Cartarescu I got in touch with New Directions his American publisher and heard back that it is unlikely that they will be doing any more of his books as NOSTALGIA has sold only around 500 copies.

No reader should think that figure is unusual. Back in 1979/80 I remember talking with the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf after CORRECTION by Thomas Bernhard had been published. This guy reported to me that to date they had sold a combined grand total of around a thousand copies of all three Bernhard books they had published, GARGOYLES, THE LIME WORKS AND CORRECTIONS.
Happily, Knopf was not discouraged by that figure and maybe New Directions will have a change of heart.

I had wanted to talk about my own books but that will have to be for another day.

Before I go, I was also thinking that today in two sections of a freshman composition course at John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY, students were describing their experience of reading Ernst Junger's STORM OF STEEL. I also was re-reading it in preparation for talking about it on Wednesday and found this tiny bit that seems to be a fitting end to this writing.
It is from late in the book in the year 1918:

"I led my three platoons string out in file a cross the terrain, with circling aeroplanes bombing and strafing overhead. When we reached our objective, we dispersed into shell-holes and dug-outs, as occasional shells came lobbing over the road.
I felt so bad that day that I lay down in a little piece of trench and fell asleep right away. When I woke up, I read a few pages of TRISTRAM SHANDY, which I had with me in my map case, and so apathetically, like an invalid, I spent the sunny afternoon."