MAILER, NINA BERBEROVA, PUBLICITY VERSUS LITERATURE, PETER DIMOCK

ONE

The death of Norman Mailer was announced in the newspapers today--- "I thought he was dead a long time ago," a woman was saying this afternoon--- brought to mind a conversation I had with Nina Berberova--- you remember her I trust for her short novels and her magisterial memoir, THE ITALICS ARE MINE,--- a few years before she died. We were talking about well known writers and less known writers and how so much of American literary life is based upon the manipulation of the machinery of publicity. "In Russian," I remember Berberova saying, "we always make the distinction between a history of publicity and the history of literature. We make an absolute distinction between publicists and writers. On one hand you have people like Yevtushenko and certainly Mayakovsky and others I can't be bothered to mention who belong to a history of publicity and on the other hand there are those such as Mandelstam, Khodasevich, Nabokov and Akhmatova who of course belong to the history of literature."

Obviously, Norman Mailer is now a mere mention in a history of publicity as is the recently dead Susan Sontag. I am sure the obituary writers are fine tuning their obits for Tom Wolfe who is part and parcel of that world and come to think of it: isn't it about time that he passed beyond?--- or maybe he is already dead... as surely as are the guys who wrote THE WHITE HOTEL and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP

TWO

Peter Dimock is a writer. Dimock has also been an editor at Knopf and is currently an executive editor at Columbia University Press. Dimock is a writer who wrote one of the very few books to bear re-reading that came out of the experience of the Vietnam War: A SHORT RHETORIC FOR LEAVING THE FAMILY. I mention this because his book gives authority to the warning that he sent me after reading a few of my previous blogs, "It's good to hear your voice in this possible non-air of literature. I hope you don't give in to the temptations of being swept away by this virtual world unless you are sure that's what you want--- how to gauge such a calculation or choice (if it is one), I have no idea. There is probably no reliable language for such a decision."

I have no immediate answer if indeed an answer is possible or needed. I am aware that I began doing this sort of writing within the moment of my own recognition that something was done with... and maybe it has been done with for many years and only now am I getting around to knowing this. I am aware that I can not live beyond my immediate moment.

Read A SHORT RHETORIC FOR LEAVING THE FAMILY by Peter Dimock, published 1998 by Dalkey Archive; probably not available at your local bookstore... but I am sure you can get it from Amazon.

KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGHUE, DISTRACTED STUDENTS, QUALITY OF NOTHING

Denis Donoghue has concluded his two lectures on KING LEAR. He drew this listener's attention to an essay by Sigurd Burckhardt, "The Quality of Nothing" by adding that the author had been a friend and was a suicide. I have not read the article yet. Of course the essay is about the use of the word nothing in the play.

Donoghue also quoted from the famous Auden essay on the fool in Shakespeare. And he again quoted from Kenneth Burke and R. P. Blackmur. I mention these names because Donoghue is the sort of lecturer who is generous in his quotation and I have always found these leads to be productive of thought.
Most of Donoghue's lecture was composed of quotation from the final three acts of the play. It was an almost a perfect act of Walter Benjamin criticism: you will remember that Benjamin argued that the perfect act of criticism was quotation from the text under discussion and by the very quotations the critic's meaning would be made clear....

If I was a better typist I would quote at length in the same way...

I sat in the last row of that converted movie house on 8th Street. I noticed three students about me: the girl sitting next to me did not have the text before her. She took some notes and then stopped. The young man to her left typed on his laptop all through the lecture. He looked to be doing an assignment for another class. He also did not have the text with him. Immediately in front of me was a young lady also hard at work on her laptop scanning through the whole of the 75 minutes site after site... if you say I was not myself paying attention to the lecture by being distracted by these young people you would be wrong.

Now as then I have been thinking about whatever was going on in their heads? I do not know what to make of them. You just remember that no attendance is taken in this class so why do they go along to the class? Surely Donoghue's voice must serve as some sort of distraction... Donoghue is not bothered by this, he says and to be fair to the room at large there are some students who do read along with him and are taking notes...

"Certain things must happen..." Donoghue is saying as he launches into the lecture... "Certain things," I repeat to myself... and I take away the memory of tenderness of Donoghue's voice as he begins to read the passages when Cordelia and Lear are reconciled.

And then as the 75 minutes come to a close Donoghue is reading the last lines of the play when Edgar is saying, "The weight of this sad time, we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest have borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."

and Donoghue adds: "that is that with a minute or two to spare."

KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGUE, W.B. YEATS, ATOMIZATION

I know this is going to read--- as the kids might say, if they are still using this phrase--- a little heavy but please bear with the job of reading this passage from W. B. Yeats. It is from his book Essays and Introductions and is entitled EMOTION OF MULTITUDE.

Denis Donoghue quoted most of it during his first lecture on KING LEAR the other day and as I heard it I realized it was one of those defining texts about to the awful dilemma facing anyone who starts to write a blog, aware in some part of his own imagination that the word blog quite possibly has a surplus L that conceals the real nature of this enterprise. But first Yeats:

I have been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems necessary it one is to succeed on the modern stage. It came into my head the other day that this construction, which all the world has learnt from France, has everything of high literature except THE EMOTION OF MULTITUDE. The Greek drama has got the emotion of the multitude from its chorus, which called up famous sorrows, even all the god and all heroes, to witness as it were, some well-ordered fable, some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus, it has created an art where poetry and imagination, ALWAYS THE CHILDREN OF FAR-OFF MULTITUDINOUS THINGS, must of necessity grow less important than the mere will... The Shakespearian drama gets the EMOTION OF MULTITUDE out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of KING LEAR less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time. Lear's shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful children and the mind goes on IMAGINING OTHER SHADOWS, SHADOW BEYOND SHADOW, TILL IT HAS PICTURED THE WORLD... Indeed all the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich far-wandering many imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it...
(my emphasis, not in the original)

As I heard that I knew that by writing this blog I had fallen ever deeper into the atomization of the self and in turn as I am reading a blog I was falling into another atomized life because these solitary acts portray vividly the death of conversation, of the possibility of community: we are caught in the solitary voice as a fly on flypaper

Donoghue went on in his lecture to talk of the word BOND and how in many ways KING LEAR is an attempt to understand the consequences of bonds being broken and as I added, one can hear the very sentences trying to break the bonds of the very words they are composed of...

An aspect of this atomization can be seen in the proliferation of writing programs across the country and indeed across the world--- even in Ireland and France--- and whether those programs are "creative" or ordinary freshman composition courses is of no matter...

All of these programs fall apart because they all fail to realize that writing can never never be separated from reading and in fact any piece of writing is only finished when it is read by another. In all of these programs reading is an after-thought because it is only learned slowly and over many years--- it can not be neatly packaged into a once or twice a week class or into a 14 or 16 week course... a nation of writers within a nation without readers...

But why continue?...

Answer: it goes on
i leave the pronoun with no noun

ST MARK'S BOOKSHOP, RAYMOND QUENEAU, JULIAN GREEN, VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY

One of the real benefits of living on East First Street in Manhattan is that it is within walking distance of ST MARK'S BOOKSHOP.

It is the BEST bookshop in the United States.

I have not been to Denver or to Portland so until I have seen the bookstores there I am willing to admit that possibly there is a better bookshop than St. Mark's in the US.

One quick test of your local bookshop would be: go in and see if they have up front a copy of the new selection of essays by Raymond Queneau LETTERS NUMBERS FORMS from the University of Illinois Press as did St Mark's on Sunday night.

Of course you know the work of Raymond Queneau: Zazi, The Bark Tree, We Always Treat Women Too Well, The Sunday of Life, Children of Clay

Sunday night I noticed that Queneau has a teasing sort of essay about the diary of Julian Green...

(I always write his first name Julian since I approach him always as an American writer who happens to write in French; I well know that in France he is Julien Green)

And while it will be another day before I write about the necessity of reading Julian Green--- I wanted to acknowledge one of the genuine good reasons to be living on East First Street.

If you can not WALK to a good bookstore--- and I have just defined one above--- you are not living a civilized life. As to why this is true I am going to avoid answering that question beyond saying: as you continue to read these lines if you do so you will come to understand in a way superior to that easy simple answer I could well construct for my question.

Finally further substantiation of the above: a week ago I discovered not up front but on the ordinary shelves at St Mark's Bookshop ENERGY OF DELUSION by Viktor Shklovsky (Dalkey Archive)--- written in Shklovsky's 88th year--- is the best critical book to be published this year for those who like to think in such terms: concerned with the idea of plot in novels... but that title: Shklovsky quotes a letter from Tolstoy who is consoling a friend who has been experiencing difficulty,

"I know this feeling very well-- even now, I have been experiencing it lately; everything seems to be ready for writing--- for the fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion; an earthly, spontaneous energy that's impossible to invent. and it's impossible to begin without it."

Shklovsky is the great formalist critic who makes us aware of novels as novels, stories as stories. He takes them apart and shows how they work as if they were machines made of words and words made into sentences arranged in a particular way. His writing is crystal clear, unburdened by jargon and his authority comes from his own literary works separate from his critical work: ZOO OR LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE and A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY: MEMOIRS, 1917-1922--- just as the authority of T.S. Eliot as a critic comes from THE WASTE LAND and FOUR QUARTETS, just as the authority of Ezra Pound as critic comes from his poetry and THE CANTOS...

KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGHUE, UCD, NYU

Tomorrow I am going along to listen to Denis Donoghue lecture in his Introduction to British Literature class at NYU. He will be talking about KING LEAR.

In 1964-65 Donoghue was a lecturer at University College, Dublin.
I heard him lecture on KING LEAR then and his theme was as I remember how Shakespeare tried to find language for feelings.
He quoted Cordelia's great reply in Act One Scene One: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty/ According to my bond, no more nor less.

I might have it all wrong from back then but I have over all these years used Cordelia's sentence as part of my own refusal to reach for the ready made phrases after my parents died... and it allowed for many a tortured moment with this or that person...

On Thursday as Donoghue was finishing up his second lecture on TWELVE NIGHT he indicated that he was now interested in Shakespeare's use of the word "bond."

I learned from Donoghue the use of the phrase, "to tease out."

I am not very good at "teasing out" much of anything but I can admire someone who does it with the skill that Donoghue bring to this near lost art.

I sit in the back of the theatre where he is talking and notice the students hard at work shopping, messengering, annotating work for other classes, reading The NewYorker, and some are even taking notes with no text in front of them. To be honest there are many who do have the textbooks along with them and read along as Donoghue reads long selections from the various texts and shows how those words work and no other word is possible...

In 1964-65 he lectured in the old Physics theater at UCD there on Earlsford Terrace.

In the front row was the celluloid curtain of nuns and priests while ranged up to the rafters were the hundreds of other students...

Today as then Donoghue lectures from no notes and with only the text in hand speaks out perfectly balanced sentences that remind me of my own failures as a college teacher but also of all that is being thrown away as students are constantly directed away from the reading of the actual words in front of them by the far more fashionable ideologues of gender, class, race who would much prefer to harangue upon the racist, class and gender issues implicit in the yellow pages of the local phone company...

Donoghue began last Tuesday's class by asking if students had seen that film LAST TANGO IN PARIS which featured at that time the depiction of a controversial and unhealthy sexual act involving the use of butter. Only two or three students raised their hands as having seen the film. Donoghue reminded the audience that the Marlon Brando character is saying in the other famous secene in the film in the tango palace, "If music be the food of love, play on,"
Donoghue mentioned that the Brando character should have realized that this was a bit of foreshadowing of his death later in the film because of what comes later in that passage in TWELVE NIGHT...

In January YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS will publish Donoghue's ON ELOQUENCE. In the book he recounts--- among other things--- his own student days at UCD and how he came to lecture there and how inadvertently Donoghue would bring to a close the glory days of UCD by promoting the inclusion of modern writers in the syllabus. It had been the glory of UCD that they did not lecture on any writer from after 1900. It was thought that such writing could be talked about in the pubs... as indeed it was in McDaid's, O'Dwyer's, The Bailey...

that is all for another day

HOUND OF ACCURACY, FRANZ FANON< JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN EDWARD DAHLBERG

Before the hounds of accuracy track me down: I went looking for Ezra Pound in the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
Since torn down.
What went on in the Royal Hibernian Hotel will have to wait for another time involving as it does drinking and taxis...

Out for a constitutional and so to The Strand Bookstore to look at the bound galleys.

FANON by John Edgar Wideman... you know Wideman I am sure--- or as Edward Dahlberg would have said you having heard of him and that is sufficient.
This new "novel" is not due out until next February.
I am sure it will, as they say, be talked about.
A novel celebrating a mostly forgotten guy whose message boiled down to: the most productive thing a black man could do in this life is to kill a white man.
Professor Wideman I am sure is an authority on murder. His brother is a convicted murderer and Mr Wideman's son is a convicted murderer.
Mr Wideman teaches writing--- what else--- at Brown University--- where else?--- the dumbest of the Ivy League schools and his students are probably the dumbest of the lot.
Mr Wideman's first few novels were actually interesting: A Glance Away, Hurry Home, Damballah.. but then he became a voice of something or other...

Also at the Strand the bound galleys of Joyce Carol Oates' The Journals.. when I glanced through the pages.. I have no one to talk to.. sunburn on legs....

Gore Vidal will be remembered for only one line: what are the three saddest words in the English lanaguge: Joyce Carol Oates...

Where to Begin?

For three years, out of key with his time,


He strove to resusitate the dead art


Of poetry; to maintain 'the sublime"


In the old sense. Wrong from the start---





No hardly, but seeing he had been born


In a half savage country, out of date...............





Of course I begin with Ezra Pound... having missed seeing him in early 1965 when he came over to Dublin after the memorial service for T.S.Eliot in London... how long ago all that seems: the going to the Hibernia Hotel and the asking for Mr Pound... is it even possible to imagine ever again such a moment of a seeking out in such a way...



Of course there was another time of going to the cemetery in Meudon looking for the grave of Louis Ferdinand Celine...



Of course there was visiting Julian Green in Paris in his 90th year...



Of course there was being told by Jorges Luis Borges that he himself preferred James Joyce's poetry: those other books are just so much gossip...



And then there was Francis Stuart and Ernst Junger...



But what about Anthony Burgess and Hannah Green and John Jordan and Denis Donoghue and Juan Carlos Onetti and James Liddy and Jack Spicer and T.S.Eliot and David Jones and Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard and Jean Genet and Curzio Malaparte and



you gotta start someplace or no place and that is probably where I am at the moment: finally to quote :



The enemy--- he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
---from Cold Friday by Whittaker Chambers (from the library of Father Flye, James Agee's friend)