A NOTE FROM ESTONIA

No longer that possibility to write as I do not have the connection.

What do I mean?

In every country of the former Soviet Empire from Bulgaria to Estonia there is a word for connection, for that person who will help you in whatever matter is at hand

If a person does not have a connection there is the shaking of the head and the lowering of the voice: it is or was very sad, he or she did not have a connection so it was not possible.

I have come to that moment in writing.

While in memory the pleasure of writing remains… the reality is that I do not have a connection that would allow my words to be read.

Dalkey Archive, Turtle Point, Harper Collins, Arcade, Melville, FSG have found even JUST LIKE THAT my most accessible novel and the one with the easy hook of being a book from the so-called Sixties to be too something or other…

I could delineate the reasons these publishers found for… but what is the point.. I could show the whim that lead them to whatever it was that they actually did publish…

I have no connection… and everyone should understand that publishing is a simple a matter of whim.. just as in the life in Estonia under communism: whim masqueraded as political reasoning…

So…

Even reading becomes difficult.

For two weeks I have been reading the new translation of PORNOGRAFIA by Witold Gombrowicz that Grove will publish in the fall, published only to maintain some connection to the reputation that made that publisher.. but when our hostess in Helsinki falls asleep looking into the poster of a pensive PAUL AUSTER… what hope is there for reading?

Anyone who might think that Paul Auster is a writer is beyond help… even my reading of PORNOGRAFIA is shadowed by the fact that Grove feels it must foreword the book by a popular writer like Sam Lipsyte--- who is supposed to write funny stuff about “losers” though his press agent seems to get him space in popular magazines to look down upon… but the bound galleys are not burdened by his words except for the blank space where the Foreword is supposed to be…

Even mentioning Auster’s name is a victory for Auster…

I wrote a review of NORMANCE by Celine for the Los Angeles Times... it might appear on 12 July... of course I remember and Celine’s words shadow these: you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny…

GOING EAST or NORTH (2)

54

Leaving one’s room to go travelling is probably always a mistake and to go to Europe, to go to the East one cannot avoid committing an injustice, to be not aware enough, to know that one does not know enough…

In FADO, a forthcoming book of travel essays, the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk writes. “To travel is to live. Or in any case to live doubly, triply, multiple times.

I am surprised by Stasiuk’s lack of hesitation in his assertion. Surely memory would assert itself… for to travel is to be killed, to die en route… surely he must be aware of those tiny towns that were set in motion and I am not just thinking of the recent century… but to leave those villages for the new world. It was not an accident of hyperbole that the Irish talked of coffin ships sailing from Europe… did not those from Poland, from Germany… of course many did not die crossing over and I live here on East First Street in Manhattan midst the remains, still of their arrival…

55

This morning, Anna says she had an email: her grandfather was killed on 2 October, 1941 in Kirov. He had been set in motion on 25 June 1941, from Tartu in Estonia. His bag had been packed for weeks… our bags have been packed for three days… Anna did not know her grandfather, Richard Raago’s death day. My mother heard many stories… I think we will learn many things in Estonia… they had come to get him… no one knew where he was taken, there was no one to ask…

32

I would say Eastern Europe began for me in 1960. Bear with me. The year is arbitrary but on Sunday in the Cranbury book store for fifty cents an Avon Original paperback EICHMANN MAN OF SLAUGHTER by John Donovan with the blurb: The murder of 6,000,000 Jews: Hitler demanded it, Himmler ordered it--- ADOLF EICHMANN DID IT!

I am sure I bought this book in 1960 or in 1961. I remembered the photos on the inside of the cover a large hole filled with dead bodies, one body in convict clothes pulled out and lying on the incline leading into the hole filed with dead bodies. Another picture of people getting into a freight car… On the inside of the back cover: a box of wedding rings; the three ovens in a crematoria with human remain; a prisoner pointing his finger at a German soldier wearing a cloth cap while another German soldier wearing a more formal hat looks on…

In those years I had other books: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA… I had sometime later …. THE KNIGHTS OF BOSHIDO but that didn’t have the same impact.

Those years I followed the trial and then the execution of Eichmann… the holocaust had arrived in the Unites States.

89

Until the early 60s World War Two had been in the Pacific for most Americans, I dare say. My grandfather had build airfields in Burma I was told. Other uncles had been in the Marines in the Pacific. In their houses they had picture histories of those island campaigns but did not talk about… one of them had a tattoo on his arm and smoked Camels…

Pearl Harbor and Tokyo Harbor and Douglas MacArthur summed up WW2…

In Europe--- if we thought about it: Hitler and Rommel and little later reading the books of Willi Heinrich: CROSS OF IRON, CRACK OF DOOM and MARK OF SHAME and another because it was about young boys my own age I read many times: THE BRIDGE by Manfred Gregor… I do not think I was atypical…

Why I didn’t I read THE NAKED AND THE DEAD or FROM HERE TO ETERNITY? Maybe they were too long or… and in the case of Heinrich and the Gregor? They were about the other as I would probably be forced to describe them later on.

Because of Eichmann’s capture I bought my first hardcover: Hitler a Study I Tyranny by Allan Bullock and then a copy of Mein Kampf from Ben who ran The Patchogue Book Store, a secondhand book store on Main Street that was owned by Ben a guy who worked on a town sanitation truck and the opened the shop after work. He had thick glasses and sat in his shop in his green sanitation department uniform. John tells me Ben sold everything. It is where people went to get titty magazines… my copy of KAPUTT was bought there. Ben is long dead and the store torn down to be replaced by a court building.

Literature had no appeal for me. How could it? In high school they wanted us to read the novels of Thomas Hardy and SILAS MARNER and plays of Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth… that was literature. The Shakespeare was explained via film clips… now kids are drowned in ethnic literature and surely never read that sort of junk ever again… who wants to learn life lessons from Korean prostitutes as they interact with Hispanic reformed drug dealers who live to support their sisters created by Toni Morrison

48

These paperbacks about Jew killing… that is what one now thought World War Two was all about… what was going on over there in Eastern Europe and would still be going on if there were Jews left to kill.

44

The Hungarian Uprising in 1956 had confused me.… the pictures in LIFE Magazine and I guess at 12 I didn’t understand why the US didn’t help the Hungarians… THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU by James Michener… describe the new travelers who were fleeing the failed uprising… we read of Pal Maleter and Cardinal Mindszenty living on in the American Embassy

23

Do I know anything more about Eastern Europe now?

I have read Tadeusz Borowski: THIS WAY FOR THE GAS LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.. about the famous soccer match and Borowski’s suicide by gas after the war, after a friend had been imprisoned and tortured by the communist regime that now used Auschwitz for its own prisoners much as the Communists re-opened Buchenwald for its own prisoners of the German Democratic Republic…

And I have read KAPUTT of course…

I have read The Gulag Archipelago…

I have read THE FINAL STATION: UMSCHLAGPLATZ by Jaroslav M. Rymkiewicz which describes the limits of being able or not being able to describe the Warsaw ghetto…

No, I will not go on and make a list of books…

I know nothing about life in Eastern Europe.

GOING EAST or NORTH

Is it then that you have reached such a degree of lethargy that you acquiesce in your sickness? If so, let us flee to lands that are analogues of death. I see how it is, poor soul! We shall pack our trunks for Tornio. Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or further still from life, if that is possible…
---Charles Baudelaire

5

At the end of the week I am going East: to Poland and Estonia. There was a time when Cracow was not in the East but that is possibly true only if one reads history though today fewer and fewer read history and then only a history which compliments whichever prejudice is the ruling theme of the contemporary moment.

In Estonia I am going to Tartu which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes as a charming town with numerous Latin inscriptions, a hillside park in the town center, a city that seemed to him to be part of Europe.

A.S. had come to Estonia to escape the constant eye of the KGB in order to work on The Gulag Archipelago and mentions that in the camps of the Gulag he never met a bad Estonian but he knew, “there were some Estonians who helped drive their country into Communism, others had helped keep it there; still others had worked in the early Cheka and some had contributed to the defeat of the Whites at Livny in 1919.”

The detail: numerous Latin inscriptions…

7

To go Cracow is to visit the Cracow castle and see the scene of Curzio Malaparte’s visit in KAPUTT to “I am the King, der Konig,” said Reichsminister Frank, Governor-General of Poland, spreading his arms and gazing upon his guests with proud complacency… I should be the happiest man alive, I should truly be like Gott in Frankreich, if the Poles were grateful to me for all that I am doing for them. But the more I strive to allay their misfortunes and to deal justly with them, the more they despise all I am doing for their country. They are an ungrateful people…”

As they walk about the castle Frank’s wife points out a, “small room with walls that were totally bare and whitewashed. There was not a single piece of furniture, no carpets, no pictures, no books, no flowers--- nothing except a magnificent Pleyal piano and a wooden music stool. Frau Brigitte Frank opened the piano, and leaning her knee on the stool stroked the keyboard with her fat fingers. “Before taking a crucial decision or when he is very weary or depressed, sometimes in the midst of an important meeting, “ said Frau Brigitte Frank, “he(Frank) shuts himself up in this cell and sits before the piano and seeks rest or inspiration from Schumann, Brahms, Chopin or Beethoven. Do you know what I call this cell? I call it is his eagle’s nest.” “He is an extraordinary man, isn’t he? she added gazing at me with a look of proud affection. “He is an artist a great artist with a pure and delicate soul. Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland.”

“Yes,” I said a great artist and it is with this piano that he rules the Polish people.

9

Later in KAPUTT, Malaparte will visit Fischer, the Nazi Governor of Warsaw, and the condition of the children in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, will be discussed, “It’s the children who worry me. (Fischer says) ‘Unfortunately there is little that can be done to reduce the children’s death rate in the ghettos. I should like however to so something to relieve the suffering of those unfortunate children. I should like to train them to love life, I would like to teach them to walk smiling through the ghetto streets.”

“Smiling?” I asked. “Do you wish to teach them to smile? To walk smiling? The Jewish children will never learn to smile, not if you teach then with the whip. Neither will they ever learn to walk. Don’t you know that the Jewish children do not walk. Jewish children have wings.”

REPETITION or insistance

Book Expo the annual publishers show settled down in New York City. In the few weeks before it I had been invited to meet some distinguished authors who would reveal to me what goes on in the mind of an automobile dealer, how a former powerful executive deals with bone cancer, the art and practice of dog fighting and how stones and gardens can heal my mind. There would also be famous “literary” writers and politicians on display: Sherman Alexie would be there.

In 1929 Margaret Anderson decided to close THE LITTLE REVIEW, the magazine she and Jean Heap edited with the sometimes help of Ezra Pound. In the course of 15 years it published the early work of among others: T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Evelyn Scott and Djuana Barnes.

James Joyce serialized “Ulysses” in the magazine.

Anderson wrote in afterword for an anthology of some of the writings that had appeared in the magazine, “In 1929, in Paris, I decided that the time had come to end the Little Review. Our mission was accomplished; contemporary art had “arrived”; and for a hundred years, perhaps, the literary world would produce only: repetition.”

80 years on from the closing of the Little Review can anyone argue with Anderson?

Yes, she missed publishing Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and that is about it, really.

It is known that both Beckett and Faulkner read the Little Review so as to make sure they would not be repeating too much…

20 years from today will there even be books? Will the repetition have come to an end?

Any evidence for that hope is pretty thin, at the moment.

If you doubt the end of the book as we know it today ask yourself the question: when was the last time you used a typewriter?

(homage to G. Stein for those who know the reason)

MEMORIAL DAY READINGS

Remembering on Memorial Day

Published in the Los Angeles Times. 25 May 2009

As recently as the late 1950s, in a small town on Long lsland near New York City, young people in school learned certain poems: Joyce Kilmer’s “Prayer of a Soldier in France,” Alan Seeger’s “ I Have a Rendezvous With Death” and John MacRae’s “In Flanders Field.” Does anyone still remember the fallen this way in classrooms?

This spring, “Dispatches” by Michael Herr appeared in the Everyman Series from Alfred A. Knopf, 40 years after the publication of Herr’s memorable article on Khe Sanh in Esquire (it is also one of the most memorable parts of “Dispatches”). How many literary books are there about the Vietnam War? Some would say Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is at the top of that list, though for many people the experience of Vietnam probably derives mostly from movies, not books — “Apocalypse Now,” of course, or “Platoon,” or “Go Tell the Spartans.”

As the poems above may suggest, World War I seems to have left a deep impression, not to mention some powerful books about that conflict: “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque (still read in many middle schools across the country) and, now and again, Ernst Junger’s “Storm of Steel” (now in a very good translation by Michael Hoffman). “Storm” is probably the single best book ever written about the actual experience of an individual soldier in modern combat.

But for many around the world, is it Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” — with its description of a young man’s experiences of combat on the Italian front in World War I — that has had the most lasting literary impact?

One can’t help but think so, especially in light of Mark Thompson’s new book, "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919" (Basic Books), which throws light on the true horror and sheer futility of that arena of the war. Thompson also points out that two other major world writers, besides Hemingway, were on that front: Robert Musil (“The Man Without Qualities”) in the Austrian army and, in the Italian army, Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose “That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana” is the only Italian novel of the 20th century that is reasonably compared in power and scope to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

But it seems that “A Farewell to Arms” is the book that has given shape and spirit to the way we think about war, how we read Herr’s book and, maybe, even how our view of 19 year so far involvemen or warin Iraq and it will be reflected in books to come. As Hemingway wrote:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. ... I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory... . There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. ... Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The quotation from Hemingway of course is finally echoed in the realty of the Vietnam War monument in Washington.

REPETITION

In the 15 years of its existence THE LITTLE REVIEW edited by Margaret Anderson and Jean Heap with the help of Ezra Pound published among many others: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Evelyn Scott...
It serialized ULYSSES.

Of course the english departments, those depositories of stupidity, ignore this sort of achievement in their adamant hatred of literature as does the vast publishing industry, thankfully shrinking day by day as I am typing this.

In an anthology published many years after of the closing of THE LITTLE REVIEW Margaret Anderson wrote: In 1929, in Paris, I decided that the time had come to end the Little Review. Our mission was accomplished; contemporary art had "arrived"; and for a hundred years, perhaps, the literary world would produce only: repetition.

With 20 years to go it is probably possible to say that Anderson is absolutely correct. She missed out on publishing Finnegans Wake but it is known that Faulkner was reading The Little Review. She missed out on publishing Ernst Junger and E. M. Cioran

95 percent of writers write today as if the last hundred years did not happen.

BOOKS TO READ THIS SUMMER, FALL,WINTER, SPRING

BOOKS I WILL TRY TO READ AS IF REALLY IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE: SUMMER FALL WINTER SPRING

One

Summer seems to be a time when people PLAN to read. The lists are made. The intention is made but then of course…

Two

What I will be reading subject to boredom, distraction and who knows what will show up and even after I made this list I forgotten to include so I stick it in right now THE SIXTH SENSE by Konrad Bayer with the mysterious line: “she wanted my body from me”

--OP OLOOP by Juan Filloy. Argentinian: “Alas, idiotically, I chose to enroll myself in the bitter school of constraint. I’ve turned my psyche into a stop watch of perfect and ineluctable exactitude…”

--THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS by Iliya Troyanov : a recreation or a creation or an alternative yet a life of Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century traveler and translator: from the German of a Bulgarian: “She left behind a smile as small as the folded-down corner of a page in a book.”

--GEORGE LETHAM Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss… Weiss killed himself in Paris as the Germans marched in… had known Hitler in the early 20th century… “How could I, Georg Letham, a physician, a man of scientific training of a certain philosophical aspirations let myself be so far carried away as to commit an offense of the gravest sort, the murder of my wife?”

--THE NECESSARY MARRIAGE by Dumitru Tsepeneag… the third of this Rumanian’s novels to appear in English: “everywhere the smell of damp and mice and”

--MIRACLES OF LIFE by J.G. Ballard… “the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing in the Bubbling Well Road to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole”

--BRECHT AT NIGHT by Mati Unt… Brecht is in Helsinki in 1941 luxuriating while waiting to move to Hollywood while in Estonia the Russian communists and their Estonian fellow travelers are rounding up thousands of Estonians to be murdered including my wife’s grandfather…

--REX by Jose Manuel Prieto… whose NOCTURNAL BUTTERFLIES OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE is one of the greatest titles in all of literature… the final volume of a trilogy of which NOCTURNAL is the first…

--THREE DROPS OF BLOOD by Sadeq Hedayat by the author of THE BLIND OWL… the only world author from what is now IRAQ… THE BLIND OWL is much like STORY OF THE EYE… a singular book on a tiny shelf of such books

--ANONYMOUS CELEBRITY by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao I had read his ZERO a long time ago in an Avon paperback when such books were published as massmarket paperbacks … I love the many typefaces, the fragmented story,: read it in spite of the blurb from a hack and fellow traveller like E.L. Doctorow

--THE TANNERS by Robert Walser… I am not smart enough to understand the complexity of this novel…

--TREADING AIR by Jaan Kross and THE CONSPIRACY AND OTHER STORIES by Jaan Kross Since I am to be in Estonia one can only trust novels when deciding where to go

--NEWS FROM THE EMPIRE by Fernando del Paso.. I am still reading this book, paragraph, sentence by sentence… some books should never be read all the way through… one puts it aside and picks it up… knowing it might out live me…

--THE HALFWAY HOUSE by Guillermo Rosales I will find 300 words… another novel about the consequences of the criminal rule by communist gangsters in Cuba

--LOVE IS LIKE PARK AVENUE by Alvin Levin… the translator of Thomas Bernhard’s poetry recently published by Princeton was respomsible for getting New Directions to bring Levin back to life…

--THE ALLURE OF CHANEL by Paul Morand. Just that. And again: VENICES by Paul Morand… to read them together is to realize once again that all the really interesting writers in Twentieth Century France were on the right: the left produced for the most part apologists for mass murder who never scorned a thug if they could quote Karl Marx

Three

And again THE DEATH OF VIRGIL by Hermann Broch…
and it is time again to be reading Plutrach in preparation for the great novel of Peter Nadas…

four

I will re-read my unpublished books:
ST. PATRICK’S DAY
FORGET THE FUTURE
JUST LIKE THAT
LOSS OF DIGNITY
EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS
TRAVELING WITH THE DAUGHTER TO EUROPE
FRIDAY SATURDAY SUNDAY

All of it a homage to futility though containing a desire to…

The sad consolation of the two published books with the much copied reviews and articles that they provoked will accuse me or be accused by me: THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV, GOING TO PATCHOGUE.

five

Of course I will hear about how times are hard in publishing, for books, for authors and all the rest of it and the amnesia is so apparent: it has always been a hard time…