HERMOSA BEACH, KARL KRAUS, RICHARD NIXON, REAL WIVES OF ORANGE COUNTY

z.

Where I am.

Hermosa Beach. Two streets from:

Alive & Well. Fish World. Flower World. California Sushi Teriyaki. Nancy Nails & Spa. South Bay Soccer. Skooby's. Amigos Tacos. Maui Rose. Rosa's Mexican Restaurant. Town & Country Pizza. Oki Doki Sushi. Just Massage Studio. Skate Surf Smoke. The Gym. South Bat Jiu-Jitsu. The Roth Group Real Estate. Bow Wow Boutique. Discount Cigarettes & Liquors. Triangle Hardware. A & M Auto Repair. Boxing Works. Asian Art Furniture. Nails & Waxing. Fluff and Fold. 7 11. Hermosa Design Center Futones Waterbeds. Poulet de Jour. Domino's Beach Cities Cycle. Hair's the Place. Westside Rentals Where Quality Tenants find a place to live. Cleanrite Cleaners. Royal Nails. Hermosa Saloon. Pacer Darts.

y.

I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to Dana Point and beyond to San Clemente. In a 7 11 I asked the clerk: is this where Richard Nixon lived? While the guy was giving me my change and saying he didn't know who I was talking about another guy had come in and was standing near me. Long time no see, he said. He gestured to the highway, Down there a little bit is Nixon's favorite Mexican restaurant.

When I drove passed it: Dave's Mexican.... though when I asked at the San Clemente Chamber of Commerce the girl said Nixon's house was inside a gated community and could not be seen from the road. She thought his favorite Mexican restuarant was El Mundo in San Juan Capistrano.

x.

I had an address: 22401 Antonio Parkway in Rancho Santa Margarita. I was looking for Coto Insurance Services which is owned by one of the Real Wives of Orange County.
I am sure everyone knows this show on Bravo. Now in its third season--- doesn't that sound like I can speak TV talk?

22401 Antonio Parkway is in the middle of a shopping center. Well, the name over the door says: REALTY EXECUTIVES. Two blond women came to the door of an office off the little lobby: Can we help you? Is this where the woman from Real Wives of Orange County has her office? They rent space from us.

I picked up two local newspapers from the lobby. The Cota de Caza News and the Trabuco Canyon News. The latter newspaper serves communities from Coto de Caza to Walden. Many houses for sale with prices well into the seven figures. Being from Manhattan--- or at least living in Manhattan--- one is really unaware of what wealth looks like when packaged up as a home. All those tall apartment buildings look alike. Of course even on East First Street in Manhattan there is a small building going up in which a small one bedroom condo will sell for more than one million dollars... but who lives around 22401 Antonio Parkway

I must quote 8 lines by Lana Chandler, Society Editor and author of Society Scene Exclusively for the Coto de Caza News:

The 34th annual Candlelight Concert was an amazing, electrifying evening that the guests will always remember. This upscale event, attended by the society elite, was orchestrated by event chair Pat Poss, honorary co-chairs Sally Crockett and Carol Wilken, and devoted committee members. Their efforts raised the bar and stunned the highbrow guests with transforming the Orange County Performing Artscenter Segerstrom Hall into a New York Nightclub Studio 34. The ambiance was perfect for the special performance by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons...
(at a future date I might be forced to quote more of Lana Chandler, Society Editor and author of Society Scene.)

w.

Driving through Long Beach. Jeffrey MacDonald once was a doctor here. For the last 27 years he has been in prison for killing his wife and children. Do I have to say the Green Beret doctor? Fatal Vision?... the most famous son of Patchogue.

We were in Boy Scout together. He is a year older. I remember our father's because of the rain sitting in a car drinking and smoking all night during an overnight camping trip in Yaphank. All the boys were in sleeping bags in tents. The Dads...

I have often thought that he is innocent and though his case has been appealed up and down the ladder and here have been films even by the BBC suggesting serious doubts about the case he will never get out of jail. And now on the internet you can see the autopsy photos of all the parties...

v.

Traveling slows reading down-- which might be a mistake--- for so much of what is written is not designed to be read:

I am sure you have heard the name Karl Kraus, the Austrian writer who wrote savage investigations of the mis-use of language in the Austrian press before, during and after WWI.
Like Ezra Pound, Kraus well knew that the debasement of the language is always necessary to further the bad aims... you might know Kraus for writing that psychoanalysis is a disease that proposes itself as its cure.

Some sentences or phrases that I do not understand:

one of the strongest early stories

powerful, precise and startlingly modern qualities

pushes his characters.

And from Kathryn Harrison: -there's the writing, clean and stark
-sentences feel less written than rendered
-I've fled into a novel
-he friable boundary between fiction and nonfiction.

And it was a pleasure to read the journalist Joe Conason putting on a funny hat for his look into the fortune teller's crystal ball: In the years that follow the second Bush presidency many of us will no doubt continue to ask ourselves...

TOMBSTONE, AJO, INDIO, LUCERNE VALLEY, BARSTOW, ROBERT PINGET

a: Claiming places

b: I was going to write about the battle of books in Tombstone, Arizona--- how unsettled every single historical fact remains--- but as I was driving across and between the Sonora and Mojave deserts I thought of a historical marker in the Tohono O'odham Nation near QUIJOTOA: a Papago word for mountain shaped like a carrying basket--- Near there in 1883, a gold rush and camps grew up: Logan, New Virginia, Virginia City, Brooklyn and eventually formed this city with the name that reminds me of the Spanish knight and at first I did think it was an approximation of it....

c: Nothing at all remains of that city. The desert has done its...

d: Of course one sees all the new housing developments, "communities for active adults" all over the land about Phoenix, Tuscon and every other place... the huge caravan city of Quartzsite where thousands upon thousands of RVs converge and disperse during the year... squatters in Desert Center

e: walked into the desert near Tombstone to see the remaining propped up buildings of Fairbank which had once been the rail station for Tombstone complete with oyster serving terminal hotel...

f: the old people all about, wrung wrung out from their years of hard labor up North or where ever...

g: when they move here have they already made the arrangements as I am reminded of hearing John Montague talking about his last meeting with Samuel Beckett in Paris and saying as if often does, the mind turns and I asked: and the arrangements and Beckett replied: in the ground...

h: do the arrangements come with the new houses?...

i: in AJO by the now abandoned vast open copper mine I met a man who had just come back from Belize to look at where he had come many years before to be a geologist and when he got there--- so many years before when he was young and just out of college--- but they did not then need a geologist so he went away to tend to other businesses but he had now come back here because his daughter had an autistic child and no husband... and Arizona is a good place to raise an autistic child...

j: in the Wal Mart in Indio they keep all the dvd's under lock and key... the freight trains go by all night--- many broken down cars being driven...

k: in LUCERNE VALLEY a guy gets out of a car goes into this combination grocery/liquor store and I hear him say, give me a double... I do not see what he is drinking but I watch him get back into the car and the argument on the wife's face and the sleeping child strapped into a seat in the back...

l: local color,as the say, both the distortion and the accuracy...

m: in a Days Inn on Cool Water Lane, Barstow where the rug looks like it has absorbed lots of blood and vomit

n: in Twentynine Palms three kids dressed up in Statue of Liberty costumes try to attract customers to the Liberty Tax preparing shop... in Barstow one kid is dressed up in a Statue of Liberty costume...

n: in the video store in Twentynine Palms the clerk says there were two movies with the title Twentynine Palms. He hasn't seen either one of them. One of them has subtitles.

0: Twentynine Palms by BRUNO DUMONT is, while fictional, a documentary... there are not a lot of words to read... a film about what can happen... and about the words that are not available

p: in 1994 murals began to appear on the walls of Twentynine Palms buildings as a way to " boost community pride and make out city more inviting." The murals have begun to fade... and the fading is a delight to the eye...

q: "THAT ENDLESS STORY OF SUCCESSIVE DEATHS RECORDED IN THE PAPERS AT DIFFERENT PERIODS IN THE HOPE THAT THE VERY DIVERSITY OF THE DETAILS, WHAT ELSE COULD YOU EXPECT IN THAT DOMAIN, WOULD TESTIFY TO THE COHERENCE OF HIS OBSESSION, AND ELEVATE IT INTO A GUARANTEE OF SALVATION, A STRANGE WAY TO BECOME CONVERTED" from THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET

TOMBSTONE, VENICE, EZRA POUND, MANDELSTAM, JAMES LIDDY, CAMILO JOSE CELA, ROBERT PINGET, ELIZABETH BISHOP, ANTONIO LOBO ANTUNES

1

If the planes work I should be in Tombstone tomorrow evening.


2

Tonight I walked around down to Soho and then to St. Marks Bookshop. I was talking to a guy who works there about tomorrow. He publishes tiny letters occasionally in the TLS. He said, the day after you go to Tombstone I am going to Venice.

Two tomb cities, I replied.

3

ON THE EVE by Ivan TURGENEV was not sadly on the shelf. The guy in the shop did not know that Ezra Pound is buried in Venice. He is taking Ruskin as a guide. I suggested THE CANTOS as the best guide.

4

I regretted, I said, I could not travel with the necessary large library as Lamartine had done when he went to Bulgaria for the first time.

Books are so heavy, the guy said... and I could hear the understanding of the necessity of reading when traveling.

5

JAMES LIDDY sent me to read as I journey his little book of translations from MANDELSTAM... and I thought I won't be able to take with me THE COMPLETE CRITICAL PROSE AND LETTERS by Mandelstam: containing the absolutely essential essay on the addressee in poetry but the thought of Mandelstam lead me to remember that he had interviewed Ho Chi Minh in Moscow in 1923---"(he) breathes culture, not European culture, but perhaps the culture of the future."

6

And then on to my friend Al Willis who was fighting Ho Chi Minh's soldiers in Vietnam 42 years later as a young U.S. Marine from Patchogue... more thought... while in Tombstone where my guide will be CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by CAMILO JOSE CELA... and I will be thinking of George who is dead and who was from Bulgaria, so it is no accident that I know that ON THE EVE has a Bulgarian as a central character and how the novel ends up in Venice as I did both on the way to and on the way back from Bulgaria in 1967-68 and how to make sense of all of this will be through the example of THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET which provides a model for the movement of time through words.

7

I have one errand while I travel: to finish a short notice of THE SINGING REVOLUTION, an Estonian documentary I am doing for Anna which now is crossed in my mind with the news that JAAN KROSS is dead: you might remember that tiny bit in his book of short fictions where he remembers seeing Russian soldiers standing in the National Lbrary in Estonian with axes in hand and chopping up-ended ancient Estonian books as if they were so many logs... in their effort to remove history from Estonia.

8

And two books which I don't know if I will get to them: the new Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop and KNOWLEDGE OF HELL by ANTONIO LOBO ANTUNES. I hope the title of Antunes's novel does not turn out to be an ironic commentary on this journey.

FRANZ KAFKA, EDMUND WILSON, LOUIS FERDINAND CELINE, THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY

86

"The misery of having perpetually to begin, the lack of the illusion that anything is more than, or even as much as, a beginning, the foolishness of those who do not know this, and play football, for example, in order at last "to advance the ball" one's own foolishness buried within one as if in a coffin, the foolishness of those who think they see a real coffin here, hence a coffin that one can transport, open, destroy,exchange

Among the young women up in the park. No envy. Enough imagination to share their happiness, enough judgment to know I am too weak to have such happiness, foolish enough to think I see to the bottom of my own and their situation. Not foolish enough; there is a tiny crack there, the wind whistles through it and spoils the full effect.

Should I greatly yearn to be an athlete, it would probably be the same thing as my yearning to go to heaven and to be permitted to be as despairing there as I am here.

No matter how sorry a constitution I may have, even if-- "given the same circumstances"-- it be the sorriest in the world (particularly in view of my lack of energy), I must do the best I can with it (even in my sense of the word)-- it is hollow sophistry to argue that there is only one thing to be done with such a constitution, which must perforce be its best, and that one thing is to despair.
----FRANZ KAFKA October 16, (1921)Sunday


87

I put the quote from Kafka's Diary there as a way to tell against myself. I have never really "gotten" Kafka. I think I have read myself through almost all of his work. He does not stick. I know that there are many--- Nabokov, Calasso come to mind--- who look to him with...

As far as I know, Edmund Wilson is the only writer to not be taken in by Kafka: "Kafka's reputation and influence have been growing till his figure has been projected on the consciousness of out literary reviews on a scale which gives the illusion that he is a writer of towering stature," "A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka"
July 26, 1947. CLASSIC AND COMMERCIALS.

"If,however, one puts Kafka besides writers with whom he may properly be compared, he still seems unsatisfactory. Gogol and Poe were equally neurotic, in their destinies they were equally unhappy; and if it is true, as Mr Savage says, that there is present in Kafka's world neither personality nor love, there is no love in either Gogol or Poe, and though here are plenty of personalities in Gogol, the actors of Poe, as a rule, are even less characterized than Kafka's. But,though the symbols that these writers generate are just as unpleasant as Kafka's, though,like his,they represent mostly the intense and painful realization of emotional cul-de-sac, yet they have both certain advantages over Kafka --for Gogol was nourished and fortified by his heroic conception of Russia, and Poe, for all his Tory views, is post-Revolutionary American in his challenging , defiant temper, his alert and curious mind. In their ways, they are both tonic. But the denationalized, discouraged, disaffected, disable Kafka, though for the moment he may frighten or amuse us, can in the end only let us down. He is quite true to his time and place, but it is surely a time and place in which few us will want to linger -- whether as stunned an hypnotized helots of totalitarian states or as citizens of freer societies who have relapsed into taking Kafka's stories as evidence that God's law and man's purpose are conceived in terms so different that we may as well give up hope of ever identifying the one with the other."

88

In the title of John Murray Cuddihy's book THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY we probably have everything we need to know about Kafka. The sub-title elaborates: "Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity." Cuddihy is or was a professor of sociology at Hunter College. The question of course: if one is not Jewish why should one care about Kafka?

89

The problem of Kafka is also the key problem in the United States when it comes to the question of what German writers are available. If one is honest, Americans only know two German language writers: Kafka and Remarque. They know Remarque for his sentimental ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT which they read in Junior High School and they read maybe the Metamorphosis by Kafka in college. That is it.

Of course on the positive side by focusing all the reading of German literature on Kafka and Remarque Americans are preserved from Gunter Grass and Christa Wolf.

But the loss: without Ernst Junger, Robert Walser, Uwe Johnson, Arno Schmidt my own life would be far dimmer than it might be. These writers, each so different from the other, combine to provide a way to understand the world, a way to describe the world that enables the thoughtful person to find his or her own way in the world: they do not seek disciples which of course is what reading Kafka produces...

90.

A tonic end, finally, of the year from Louis Ferdinand Celine:

Living, just by itself-- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that terribly exciting--- or he'll come along and nibble your brain. A day that is nothing but a mere round of the twenty-four hours isn't to be borne. It has to be one long, almost unbearable thrill, a twenty-four copulation, willy-nilly.
---JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

JULIEN GRACQ, GLENWAY WESCOTT, JULIAN GREEN, WILLIAM MAXWELL

57

The news arrives of the death of Julien Gracq.

If you were reading the New York Times you learned nothing of who this man was and why--- for those who read--- it is a very sad moment and also a moment when it can finally be said that all the "old ones" are now dead.

(A very good obituary by the translator James Kirkup can be found in The Independent newspaper from London. The last line, "HE and his work are lessons to our expiring humanity."

***

We living in the present--- those of us who claim to write--- are now all alone.

Julian Gracq has now finally joined Ernst Junger, Julian Green, Francis Stuart, Glenway Wescott, E. M. Cioran, Edward Dahlberg, Nina Berberova, Jorge Luis Borges and--- I would add personally though I well know she does not rank in this listing--- Hannah Green, though with her THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE, if she had lived longer and been able to finish her second book, might have been comfortably installed within this group.

To have known these writers, to have read them, to have talked with them, to have seen them is to have been given the gift of participating in literature, in writing and reading as it once was and is now no longer so.

***

In Julian Green's diary, "Lunch 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..."

***

Thanks to Turtle Point Press the reader today can find these books by Julien Gracq:
READING WRITING, THE SHAPE OF A CITY, THE NARROW WATERS, KING COPHETUA. In the shops you might be able to find second hand copies of THE CASTLE OF ARGOL, THE OPPOSING SHORE, THE DARK STRANGER, BALCONY IN THE FOREST. At www.junger.org you can read Gracq's essay on Ernst Junger's ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS which should then lead you to STORM OF STEEL.

So from READING WRITING:

---The creative artist who steps back and tries to understand what he is doing stands before his canvas as before a green and intact prairie: for the writer, the literary material he would like to recapture in its freshness is already similar to what passes from the second to the third stomach of a ruminant.

---At ninety, no writer, if he is still writing, can hope to maintain all the quality of his production. But in painting, Titian and Picasso--- others,too,no doubt--- manage perfectly well. No writer is brilliant until full adolescence at least. But, in music, Mozart--- others,too, no doubt--- was. Which tends to corroborate physiologically the hierarchy of the arts as promulgated by Hegel (which is fine by me). Historical counterproof would provide the same result: of all the arts, literature was last to appear. And one day, no doubt, it will be the first to be eclipsed

---Nine-tenths of the pleasures we owe to art over a lifetime are conveyed not by direct contact with the world but by memory alone. How little we have preoccupied ourselves, however, with the different nature, fidelity, and intensity of forms cloaked in memory, depending on whether it is a painting, a piece of music, or a poem!

58

If you wish to see proof of what I have been writing read carefully all the reviews of the Library of America volume of the works of William Maxwell being published in January. Not a single reviewer will question why this and the second one in the Fall is being published. Not a single review will question why there has not been a volume devoted to the work of Glenway Wescott whose novels permit the emergence of someone like William Maxwell, whose whole literary reputation begins and ends with his connection as fiction editor to The New Yorker magazine. Maxwell was a decent writer and human being, fortunate in those he edited and who claim him as an inspiration but his writing is nothing more than that. It does not re-arrange in any way the statues in the garden. One might thing of his writing as being a bench with a brass plaque attached.

***

This writing on this Christmas morning is finally dedicated to Anna Saar McGonigle who suggested I launch myself into this form of writing

FADE OUT, DOUGLAS WOOLF, GLENWAY WESCOTT

494

FADE OUT seems like a perfect title for what a blog is all about,really, a reflection of the inevitable personal urge toward such an activity, and of the fate of the individual who gives into the urging that comes from a sense of his own slow disappearance which is what such an activity implies

379

However, it is also the title of an early Grove Press novel by Douglas Woolf which I picked up for a dollar in the SOHO Housing Works bookstore--- Housing Works is one of those charities designed to provide well paying jobs for a few people who in turn "help" a designated population--- while I was waiting for another shop to open... the long familiar book: the fading grey cover photo of a cane being held by a man's aged hand and two legs caught in motion, the light blue lettering of the title and author's name: an EVERGREEN ORIGINAL with the original price of $1.75 crossed out with a pencil and on the inside page the reduced price of 39 cent or 3/1.00.. in the hurried penmanship of the guy who was doing this marking for the remainder Marlboro bookstores--- sometime in the late 60s or early 70s which used to be all over New York City... when Grove back then was clearing out its shelves during one of it periodic crisis...

Calling to mind of course that GROVE PRESS along with NEW DIRECTIONS were the most important literary publishers in the latter half of the 20th century and without Grove Press it is very likely that today we would not have known of the work of swriters like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet...I could go on... there is still a Grove Press but it basically exists to sell the re-published editions of such authors as they lost any sense of what it means to be an innovative literary publisher; now publishing more from whim or from a sense of what seems right...

But FADE OUT. Douglas Woolf went on to write ten more books of stories and novels by the time of his death in 1992... two are available--- of course--- from DALKEY ARCHIVE: who else, that successor to Grove and New Directions.

FADE OUT was published in 1959 when Woolf was 37. Dedicated to Robert Creeley. From the cover: FADE OUT is chronicling the experiences of its 74 year-old-hero as he struggles for a life of dignity in a world which treats old age like a dangerous disease.

The opening paragraph brings you right into that world:

Mr.Twombly was awake before Cynthia. Usually they slept only until the sun entered their room, and usually Cynthia woke first, woke him. Not today. Perhaps the sun had grown too weak for her or, hard to believe, would be in the room for too short a period to interest her. Yesterday it had been just twentynine minutes; this morning, although he was too late to time, he knew it would be a few seconds less. And Cynthia lay with her head pillowed by her hands, in sun and unaware. When he scratched her underside with his fingernail she stretched her long neck a little, opened her eyes to blink at him. Mr.Twombly did not really like to tease her, but he did not like to see her sluggish either. Shaking his head he dropped her two breakfast flies. Some days he preferred not to watch her dismember and devour them, so he lay back on the pillow listening her knock her rocks, and listening for Kate's snoring to stop, soon Ben's, little Gloria's. When finally that happened he knew, even more surely than when he felt the sun, that a day was here.
Mr.Twombly had been living with his daughter's family for only four months but in that time he had had ample opportunity to learn the rules of the house.

FADE OUT awaits you. I am sure you noticed that the author has a certain respect for his reader. He is not bothering to tell you what/who Cynthia is or might be...

362

Yet, the personal reason I rescued FADE OUT was because I have been brooding on the appearance of the first of two books from the Library of American devoted to William Maxwell. At some future moment I will write about Maxwell but it is the absence of a Library of American volume or volumes devoted to Glenway Wescott that had me thinking
of the process of fading...

Glenway Wescott wrote THE GRANDMOTHERS, PILGRIM HAWK, GOODBYE WISCONSIN... but in this mood of fading it is hard to work up the energy to rehearse the greatness of GLenway Wescott's achievement or the destruction of that reputation by the inattention of publishers, incompetent editors and a academic world given over to the adulation of hacks beyond number.

Yes, Pilgrim Hawk is available from New York Review Books... but the general unawareness of Wescott and for that matter Douglas Woolf or Edward Dahlberg... to shape it into a question in order to push away the final resolution of such thoughts: what is to be done?

DIANE WILLIAMS, KGB BAR, JOHN (JACK) O'BRIEN, HISTORIC DOCUMENTS II

92

Diane Williams and Alain Arias-Misson read the other night at the KGB bar on East Fourth Street in the East Village.

The obscenity of naming a bar-- known for its literary evenings--- in honour of the KGB requires a trivializing sense of humour that needs to tramp over the memory of Osip Mandelstam to mention only one victim of the KGB.


In my mind I always call it the GESTAPO BAR... but no one even bothers. The millions upon millions of victims of the KGB in the hierarchy of victims in the 20th Century simply do not matter because they were the unfortunate by-product of a progressive left wing movement that made a few mistakes...

Diane Williams, the short story writer, is now published by Dalkey Archive. Listening to her read was as if I was listening to a voice from the grave: as if Gertrude Stein was reading with six feet of earth piled upon her corpse. The words have no connection to any recognizable version of human emotion. Some think this an accomplishment.

Alain Arias-Misson the other reader is the author of CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERER, RAPIST, FASCIST, BOMBER, THIEF OR A YEAR IN THE JOURNAL OF AN ORDINARY AMERICAN... A book I used to have but never read. It looked like a photo-copy of someone's journal.. the writing was designed not to be read. Arias-Misson was introduced to the audience with the assurance that he was writing a transgressive work of fiction. He read from a book just published by Dalkey Archive: Theater of Incest
One sentence made me regret I was literate, "she devoured my genitals."

I had gone to the bar to talk with John (Jack) O'Brien, founder and publisher of Dalkey Archive and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. I had not seen him in 10 years or so. We talked. I realized I missed talking and corresponding with him. Our friendship seemed now like something from the past. It has become an object to talk around and about.

0007

HISTORIC DOCUMENTS II. The Correspondence between Thomas McGonigle and John (Jack) O'Brien.

Third Letter

20 July 1981

120 Thompson Street #10, NY NY 10012

Dear John O'Brien:

Thanks for the magazine subscription to Adrift and YES will come up with some about Higgins.. the challenge.. have you been in touch with Francis Stuart? 2 Highfield Park DUBLIN 14 he and Higgins used to do reviews in tandem for HIBERNIA... Stuart married the daughter of Maude Gonne lived in Germany during the war up shit's creek as a result author of BLACKLIST SECTION H he is the dean of writers at the moment in Ireland--- the voice of rebellion... in a way it would have been the perfect issue of the magazine to do the 2 of them but Eastlake is not much talked about... trouble with Higgins is that in Ireland he is not much about got his reputation abroad and lived there for so long people don't know what to make of him. Do you by chance know James Liddy, poet teaches up at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee once put out ARENA in Dublin? I'll be writing him to see if he has any leads... Celka's name came up when James was in town in June on way to Dublin--- they had met him when they knew Dahlberg in Spain... I have also been in touch with Goytisolo in Paris because I like his writing and his anarchism and wanted him to speak at the Libertarian Book Club, the oldest anarchist group in USA founded back in the late 40's.. possibly he'll be in NYC this Fall for his new book-- though he says he doesn't know...

send 5 copies (Review of Contemporary Fiction) to NEW MORNING BOOKSTORE
169 Spring Street
NY NY 10012 Att: Ron Kolm
Ron says he'll order more when they move and I'll be keeping my eye on them did this on the way back from post officer Friday is my day to walk over to St Marks will chat with those guys then and will stop in at the Gotham tomorrow when I am on my messenger job for Maple Vail which is a book manufacturer... from absolutely cursory reading glance at Review just what we need actually designed to be read!!!
enclosed is a little piece from a long book i did ST. PATRICK'S DAY, DUBLIN, 1974 James Published it up in Milwaukee later in the book there is a tiny mention of Higgins and the Celtic Mews club which is in "Balcony" reason for that I of the novel am married to Bulgarian who worked in the club which during the way was restaurant for English language school where I taught--- very complicated will try to work that out in Piece on Higgins will write later in the week I know a man who says he is Gaddis's best friend a man Malcolm Raphael used to be bartender at the 55 now is doing legal work goes back a long way with Gaddis... do you know him or the bar?
more later...a good week to look forward to with the review in hand.

McGonigle

---------------------------------

---(Aidan) Higgins. See previous annotation. BALCONY OF EUROPE, maybe his best book.

---Francis Stuart. Prolific Irish writer. Later when I asked him why he went to NAzi Germany replied, "It is the obligation of a writer to place himself in the situation of he greatest moral ambiguity possible. He published in ADRIFT one of the best summaries and attacks on the Irish short story under the title, "The Soft Center of Irish Writing" in which he compared the drivel written by Frank O'Connor etc to the mere knitting of sweaters in worn out patterns.

---Eastlake (William) author of The Bowman Family Trilogy, The Bamboo Bed, Castle Keep

---James Liddy poet and editor of ARENA, the best short lived literray magazine to be published in Ireland in the latter part of the 20th Century. He paid me four guineas for a four line poem. I had to buy a round of drinks for a circle of writers in O'Dwyers that Spring of 1965 in Dublin. The poem was "Short Thought on Death." In the circle of drinkers were Brian Lynch, Micheal Hartnett, Brian Higgins, Anthony Cronin, Leland Bardwell...and there were others...

---ST PATRICK'S DAY DUBLIN, 1974 is a long novel by Thomas McGonigle. Sections appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, in The Gorey Detail, a seminal journal from Ireland. The book was to have been published by Dalkey Archive but something happened. Many letters will discuss this book and yet the mystery is still there: why has it not appeared.

---Dahlberg (Edward) BECAUSE I WAS FLESH is one of the very best American autobiographies or memoirs. It can easily sit on the same shelf with the great autobiographical books of Julian Green. In ARENA a few sentences among more from Edward Dahlberg, "Solitude is the virulent disease of our century A man will sit the whole day in his room and gnaw the walls that inter him, and the draperies that shroud his light rather than risk a single encounter."

---Cela (Camilo Jose) you can now finally read a newly translated book, CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA (Dalkey Archive), "I know they say I 've got bugs growing on my body, fleas, lice, crabs, snails, no, but if you want I'll wash myself really clean and put on my other shirt, lots of people would like my Sunday shirt for a shroad..."

---Goytisolo (Juan) author of COUNT JULIAN, JUAN THE LANDLESS... and more recently sadly some trivial books celebrating homosexual Arabic culture--- Jean Genet a far far better writer took pleasure in tormenting him, long ago.

---New Morning Bookstore has been described.

---Ron Kolm a poet, bookstore manager for many years. Famous for publishing the same poem Suburban Ambush in over a hundred little magazines. Published a few slides from Thomas McGonigle's IN PATCHOGUE in an anthology, The Low Tech Manual.

---Gotham Book Mart, a once important bookstore on West 47th street. Famous for never paying its bills, stiffing in particular small literary presses.

---Maple Vail Book Manufacturing Company. THOMAS McGONIGLE worked for more than 20 years as messenger forthis company out of an office on Fifth Avenue. Maple Vail manufactures at two plants the actual books for many major publishers. A long book EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS was written by McGonigle in part involved with his job... another item in a litany of failure and isolation

---Malcolm Raphael. A bartender at The 55, the only straight bar on Christopher Street in the 1970s. One of his wivs was seduced by Lucien Freud. The 55 was one of the 3 memorable bars along with the 602 Club in Madison, Wisconsin and The French Pub in London that was often a pilgrimage route for "those in the know." Champagne drinking with Francis Bacon, the painter, was indulged in by Thomas McGonigle in the French Pub in those years... in the 602 Club far more sordid activities were under-taken... Malcom was famous for getting distracted from his duty of serving up the drinks at the cocktail hour that lasted from 1PM until 9PM at The 55.

---William Gaddis famous for The Recognitions but his best book is JR.


Fourth Letter

120 Thompson Street #10
NY NY 10012

--July 1981

Dear John O'Brien

talked to people at Gotham and St. Marks bookstore they both said they will be ordering if you don't hear from in 2 weeks let me know and I'll get on their case

have you written to Books & Co. up on Madison Ave. that is the other classy place and should be interested in review
All the best

McGonigle

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---Books & Co. an important bookstore for a time next to the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue in New York City. Owned by a heir to the IBM fortune. Long gone now.
Famous for the wall of books: the single most important acknowledgment of a writer's place in the world of literature in the 1980s, early 90s. If an author's books were not on the wall that person did not exist as a writer. There was also a series of landmark readings. Madison Smart Bell read with THOMAS MCGONIGLE once and they were introduced by HANNAH GREEN, author of the visionary, harsh and delicate DEAD OF THE HOUSE