BANNED: a detour and the back

 4-There is only one banned book in the world today and that is Louis Ferdinand Celine’s “Bagatelles pour une Massacre.”  Via the internet a reader can read a translation by Anonymous who has entitled the book Trifles for a Massacre.  The source seems to be in South America. The other two pamphlets of Celine have not been translated. 

5-Of course Maldoror also came out of South America from the imagination of Lautremont.  A detail by an obscurantist, to be sure.

6-I am not naïve as to why this book has never appeared from a conventional publisher while all of Celine’s  other books are  easily and widely available with great blurbs from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut among others. 

7-But is the Bagatelles, like the collected works of de Sade with their detailed descriptions of child rape, torture and murder, a something that is beyond the pale as it were? 

9-De Sade of course is celebrated by liberal academics as being transgressive and given pride of place in Queer Studies programs as a misunderstood pioneer into the unthinkable.

9-The Bagatelles is a nasty book and very very funny in the way that A Modest Proposal by Swift is funny… but it is argued that it is an incitement to murder but the same could be said of the Koran or The Bible. for that matter.

8-So forget those nice little displays of Banned Books which allow people to cluck their tongues at the idiots who take offense at words like nigger, cock, pussy, shit, fuck….

7-The word in Bagattelles that causes offense is Jew and the various derogatory equivalents… and the same is true for a book by  that other complicated writer, Ezra Pound, but his Radio Speeches is easily available and again the word that causes difficulty is the word Jew.

6-Only one writer in the US has written about the Bagatelles:  Alice Kaplan, but she has both tenure and a professorship though when I went to look she is no longer at Duke.  I reviewed long ago (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-02-01/features/9402010105_1_alice-kaplan-french-lessons-french-boy)  her little memoir French Lessons and have followed her career but I missed that she was one of those who rushed to judgment about the Lacrosse players in the famous scandal of recent memory. 

5-You remember that? 

4-A black woman claimed she was raped by some Duke Lacrosse players.  Liberal academics, including Kaplan, and among other s those stalwart guardians of progressive literary thinking,  Frank Lentrecchia and Ariel Dorfman,  rushed to judgment  by signing a petition protesting the racist nature of Duke society and deciding the case before  a jury had  even  heard the case.  

4-I was thinking recently while driving around in North Carolina that those three academics probably wanted to participate in a lynch mob but lacking, thankfully, such opportunities in the real world, took the plunge and signed this petition: imagine the thrill of it, a risk free membership in a lynch mob and while those Lacrosse players were probably not the sort of guys I would want in my house, one still wonders about the men who had been lynched and the smiling faces of the members of the lynch mobs…  

5-Of course driving around in North Carolina thoughts of the Civil War, the War Between the States, the KKK, lynch mobs, Sherman, Lee, Grant.. .no wonder these liberal academics took the plunge.  What could be more transgressive than wondering what it felt like to be a member of a lynch mob and suddenly being given the chance…  as the kids say: go for it!

6-Kaplan is now at Yale.

7-But to come back to the Bagatelles… the book is seriously funny and while a friend has criticized the translation as being rather wooden, I do find the book as being the only book that it is necessary to read if a reader is to think of him or herself as a reader.  It is the equivalent of that mean cartoon in THE REALIST of long ago which depicted an obviously Jewish guy in prison garb pointing his finger at a Nazi guard saying, Wait until the Pope hears about this.

8-Did Celine’s book send a single Jew to be murdered?  Not as far as I know while De Sade’s books with some regularity show up as the favorite readings of particularly gruesome murderers, usually in the British Isles.

9-I was thinking of Celine when I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau…  I wish I had had his satirical flair, his nastiness to describe the museum at Auschwitz, where mass killing is packaged up in a neat parcel for easy consumption… but Celine would have been stopped as I was by Birkenau…  the size, the desolation, the drawings on the wall in the children’s barracks…

9-Beyond the memoir books, beyond the history books, beyond all the explanations one arrives at the Bagatelles pour une Massacre.

8-The only thing that comes a distant second is to read the writings by that famous New York Times correspondent on the “supposed” famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s.  Walter Duranty is a study in not seeing… a characteristic of most journalists to be sure.

7-Celine sees. Celine hates.

6-If you go looking for Celine’s grave in the cemetery in Meudon there are no directions provided. The ship sails on.

5- Even in this day literary tourists come from as far away as Bulgaria looking for the greatest shit house in the world described by Celine in  the Journey to the End of Night as being located near City Hall in New York City... finding it is for those who know where to look.

OSWIECIM

He is not going to write about going to Oswiecim.
I am not going to write about going to Oswiecim.
Being in Krakow, taking a local train.
To and from.
A local train that stops at every station.
It seems to take forever.

Is there any pre-conceived idea of what will be seen?
He thinks since it is June there will be a lot of people about.
There will be signs all about telling a person what to do.
He is both hungry and not hungry and plans to eat when he gets back to Krakow where Piret is working at a conference devoted to ceramics.

There are always directions.

 Krakow is both a living city and a show city.  Much like New York or Paris, even if it is not the capital, there is a "feel" which launches a thousand brochures, so I took the train to Osviewim.

Eating.

Staying/not staying.

Here

 Here.

Eating.

Living.

Living.

 Living

When are you coming back.

 Been there.

Being taken.

Been there.

What I learned today.

 Necessary.

 Waiting.

Waiting.

 Going.

Coming.

Waiting.

 Waiting.

 Waiting

 Waiting.

 How to fill up the time.

 I know I have been there and you know I have been there.

And.

 And.

 and

going to Oswiecim...    
only tourists can see this view,those who came here before would not have been able to see this from where they were enclosed in those boxcars...







Copyright 2011 Thomas McGonigle

BEING CAUGHT UP by the Nazis and the Soviets

BEING CAUGHT UP

8--In Patchogue, growing up, in my experience, remembered, World War Two was mostly in the Pacific, being of the Class of ’44 and thus born in the last year of the war, the memory is of uncles who had been in the Navy and Marines in the Pacific, my mother’s father was a Colonel in the engineers building airfields in Burma and China,

9--Never was the adjective “good” ever attached to the noun war, that was a distortion applied long afterward as a way to make those who had served feel good as they were dying, never once did anyone ever say: it was a good war, they all knew better, the why was unspoken and in the pictures of dead American Japanese in the various blue covered picture histories that were published after the war for an audience of veterans and those who were related to them

10--Of course we all knew about the war in Europe: D-DAY, the Afrika Korps, the Battle of the Bulge, Erwin Rommel , Adolf Hitler, FDR, Eisenhower, Churchill, (I was going to add Stalin but his name was very obscure in memory)

11--What World War Two would almost solely become arrived via: Eugen Kogan’s THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, Lord Russell of Liverpool’s THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA… as now in the early 60’s along with one name: Adolf Eichmann

12--With the knowing about the camps and the killing of millions of Jews there were two disturbing elements in: the Scourge of the Swastika there are photographs of Jews about to be murdered and the pubic hair of one of the women is very evident---as everyone knows pubic hair was relentlessly persecuted in publications in the Unites States until Penthouse broke the taboo many years later—and the second detail is in memory: a short reference in Kogan’s book to a Romanian boy being sent to Buchenwald for being a compulsive masturbater as a favor to the ruler of Romania---i have not read this book now for many years and will stand corrected: though of course it is the memory I am writing about---

13—in the Coram Drive-in with my family we saw A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE. There was probably a second movie but this film has remained with me because of the ending.

13---Later, when I began to use the word film interchangeably with movie, I discovered that this was directed by Douglas Sirk ( as was another film or movie that is permanently lodged in memory TAZA SON OF COCHISE)--- I guess I was getting ready for being able to watch nearly all of the films of Fassbinder many years later---

13--- the ending, the hero of the film, played by John Gavin is on leave from the German army and at home---the love--- goes back to the war on the Eastern Front and the last thing he will see in the film is the muzzle of the rifle pointed at him by a Russian he had previously saved from being killed: that gaping abyss into which his life is being sent.

13--- never having seen in a movie in which the sympathetic lead character is killed was both incredibly upsetting though I was unable to explain why and to this day: of course being the good guy and all the rest of it, so I suppose…
---14 Princeton University Press has added to the complexity of World War Two another tiny element in the letters of a ordinary German soldier sent to the Russian front, RELUCTANT ACCOMPLICE edited by Konrad H. Jarusch, the son of the letter writer of the same name Konrad Jarusch who had been a high school teacher of religion and history and who find himself in charge of a large field kitchen behind the German lines…the very domestic tone of the letters is of real interest and the constant awareness of even as early as the latter part of 1941 with the winter arriving, there is the sense of the fatal consequences of the German invasion of Russia. Konrad will die of typhus on January 27, 1942…

---14, so Konrad served, essentially an older man, what was he to do, he served, he tried to feed the horde of Russian prisoners, he was not heroic, he didn’t place his life in front of… in order to stop any action, he knew the fate of the Jews, he knew that many of the Russia had welcomed the Germans as liberators, he saw their betrayal, a little guy without a sense of humor, another little guy doing what he had to do, but nothing bad--- really--- and he wrote these letters… “we live from that which we have brought from home, and nurture ourselves with what we hear from home. Most of us can only stand it here, because they see their time here as merely a temporary thing. But we don’t make any plans about the future…

---14 reminded that most soldiers just got through the war, to be remembered only by their relatives and when they were gone not even… the fortunate father in having a son who will become a professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not to be forgotten, not a hero, not a victim, not a criminal, not a… just another dead soldier who wrote letters making things complex

---14 complex as when my first boss who had lost his arm in the Battle of Bulge was talking about how he had been spared the job of killing some German prisoners as the sergeant was afraid they would make a noise, and how Jim was glad he didn’t have to lead a German in to the dark and cut his throat form behind, with no bitterness at the loss of his arm, thankful he didn’t have to do that job, but for me hearing it: the complexity of the war, did Americans do such things, that wasn’t part of the story…

---15 Jarusch’s letters joins a tiny tradition of books by those who did not inwardly go along and at time publicly did not go along though remaining in Germany. DIARY OF A MAN IN DESPAIR by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen is one such book, by this Prussian aristocrat who always disdainful of the Nazis and who recounting his contact with Oswald Spengler a writer always beloved of by those who enjoy predicting the decline of the West and a stalwart of the Knopf publishing company for many years it should be remembered… anyway to get a sense of the internal emigration: (Spengler) he was truly the most humorless man I have ever met; in this respect he is surpassed only by Herr Hitler and his Nazis who have ever prospect of dying of a wretchedness compounded by their own deep-rooted humorlessness and the dreary monotony of public life which under their domination has taken on the rigidity of a corpse and is now in its fourth year of suffocating us to death (this is in May, 1936)

Reck-Malleczewen will be murdered in Dachau in February 1945.

There is a wonderful apt entry from 20 July 1944. Maria Olczewska ( an opera star) has come for a visit. We talked about Furtwangler—a subject I hardly want to touch on. There is, evidently, a way of conducting in a “blonde” manner. And the favouring of this shade, whether in fact or as a concept, is something which in itself compromises the man who does it. I can’t help it

---15 Norman Stone who writes an introduction to this book points out that one of the great failures of history was that the Prussian aristocrats did not understand that their natural allies were the ordinary Catholics who according to the most reliable research were more likely to be anti-Nazi or not susceptible to the Nazis unlike their Protestant countrymen… and it is this prejudice that proved fatal to them in the long run though it should be remembered that Von Stauffenberg was a Catholic aristocrat who almost did kill Hitler

---16 and a more obscure though more important book: JOURNAL IN THE NIGHT by Theordore Haeker who it seems was in contact with the Scholl, those young people in White Rose, the few who dared to not remain silent.

Some notes:
1940. (399)In addition to his particular knowledge the historian today needs above all to know his catechism and in addition perhaps a smattering of criminal psychology, That is much more important than a knowledge of German Idealism

1944. (698) The Germans tend by nature to the heresy of Pelagius and of Arius, by nature that is by your own ability that makes them proud and by their own pride that makes the intellectually shallow.

1940 (292) The soul of the man who only has ears for the noise of the times will soon be miserably impoverished. He will soon be found to be deaf to all reasonable language.

1940 (469) I wrote so to speak, because I am a reader and always profit by my writing. But now that you ask me, I have to admit that whoever writes wants to be read, and not only by himself.

1940 (87) It is difficult to know one’s way about in one’s own thoughts; how muh more difficult where one’s feelings are concerned.

1940 (80) To many, war is a satisfactory alibi before the world, even though not before one’s conscience or before God.

16--- the LAST LETTERS FROM STALINGRAD was a little collage of letters published in the US in 1962. It is made up of letters soldiers wrote from besieged Stalingrad when the writers knew that they were lost. Preserved by the propaganda ministry who had wanted to possibly use them as a memorial, the actual content was too sad, too human, too lacking in…

But for me when read in the context of A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE:

---Around me everything is collapsing, a while army is dying, day and night are on fire, and four men busy themselves with daily reports on temperature and cloud ceilings. I don’t know much about war. No human being has died by my hand. I have even fired live ammunition

---Don’t forget me too quickly

---I will not surrender; yesterday, after our infantry had retaken a positinm I saw four men who had been taken prisoner by the Russians. No we shall not go into captivity. When Stalingrad has fallen you'll hear and read it. And then yo;ll know that I shall not come back

---if I could have made it through this war safely, I would have understood for the first time what it means to be a man and wife in is true and deepest sense. I also know it now—now that these last lines are going to you

17---and awkwardly I cut to Wendy Lesser’s book on listening and trying to understand Dmitry Shostakovich’s string quartets, MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES. For myself who am musically illiterate Lesser’s commentary on the quartets is illuminating and foregoing the usual technical language makes accessible the structure and how the quartets work ---the 15th is my favorite, the saddest--- as individual works of art and how the quartets, all 15 of them, seem to take on a life of their own. It is helpful to read the book before and after listening to each quartet.

18---at one time one could hear people saying, the one advantage of the communist regimes was if you were a writer your work got taken seriously if only by the police who read with greater care than any garden variety editor in the West who was only looking for a way to make money. And the same was said about music and Lesser is very good on just how seriously the communist regime was interested in Shostakovich’s work and how he reciprocated that interest and how he sought to create a space to work in his own way. Lesser falters a little when she acknowledges that he was well rewarded, Three Stalin Prizes among them and all the usual materials rewards though of course he was never really free to come and go as he pleased. She tries hard to avoid dealing with what Shostakovich knew or didn’t know about the untold millions who were murdered by the regime he never publically rebuked and she is reduced to finding irony in certain of his public statement and of course his silence is seen as his way of protesting and yet and yet.

Of course if we are to be tolerant of Ezra Pound’s war time speeches, Celine’s pamphlets, Heidegger’s silence, I suppose we can accept Shostakovich into their ranks but I am well aware that this is no real answer.

Tyrants have always had their artists. And the nature of the tyrant is to be arbitrary. It takes a lot of forgetting to listen to Shostakovich just as it does to read Pound, Heidegger, Celine but they did not so thoroughly serve the tyrant and that is what Lesser avoids. Pound, Celine and Heidegger had lapses, while the whole of Shostakovich’s life was given over to support for the tyrant.

THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL: Roland Barthes

56---In the late 20th Century, three French intellectuals---Derrida, Foucault and Barthes destroyed--- via their eager gullible American acolytes--- most English and literature departments of American universities and when they were contemporaneously joined by the feminists, queer study folk and Marxists of various persuasions smart sensitive students departed to science and math if they wanted to preserve any real interest In the reading of literature.

33---Derrida was a huckster of the first order who in reality was your typical Gnostic adept possessed of a specialist vocabulary who initiated disciples into his supposed esoteric wisdom who in turn in a traditional Ponzi scheme recruited unsuspecting students who in turn…

89--Foucault worked the psychology side of the street and poorly read and disciplined set out to undermine supposedly received ideas about madness, incarceration and sex. His life ended in squalor after aggressively infecting young men in San Francisco and other cities with the AIDS virus while on tour in the United States.

67---Barthes launched a thousand students of signs and with the same abstruse language making common a line I heard in Dublin pubs: Who’s reading the telephone directory… the reading of telephone directories becoming equal to reading Shakespeare in many American universities since Barthes had argued that there was no real difference, there is only reading…

99---However, Barthes did create two books that will endure: Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes and A LOVER’S DISCOURSE. Finally the rubbish of what had made him in demand was cleared away and Barthes was able to write about as someone might have said. His real subject: himself.

I have been reading with great pleasure and actual anguish THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL by Barthes published by Columbia University Press. Made up of the notes for the lectures Barthes gave in the College de France in the years just before his death in 1980 they take up the question of what it means to want to write a novel.
At first I didn’t get far as I got bogged down in the prefaces but as I read the first lecture which comes with very good annotations as do all the lectures, I discovered that miraculous moment again… the reading slowed, so that I could read only a paragraph at a sitting… I was moved to the center of my being.

So the question of how to share this and Benjamin at hand: just quote what I have underlined from that lecture of December 2, 1978:

a---Each year, when beginning a new course, I think it apt to recall the pedagogical principle stated programmatically in the “Inaugural Lecture”: “I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year…

b---The subject is not to be suppressed

c---Better the illusions of subjectivity than the impostures of objectivity. Better the Imaginary of the Subject…

d---Dante:”Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Dante was thirty-five. I’m much older

e---Age is a constituent part of the subject who writes

f---I’ve gone far beyond the arithmetical middle of my life, it’s today that I’m experiencing the sensation- certainty of living out the middle-of-the- journey

g--- Having reached a certain age, “our days are numbered”

h---This reference to age is often taken the wrong way, misunderstood—it’s seen as coquetry: “but you’re not old

i---There comes a time what you’ve done , written (past labors and practices) looks like repeated material, doomed to repetition, to the lassitude of repetition

j--- The self-evident truth: “I am mortal” comes with age

k---Foreclosure of anything New (= the definition of “Doing Time”)

l---I have no time left life to try out several different lives: I have to choose my last life, my new life, Vita Nova (Dante)

m---I have to get out of this gloomy state of mind that the wearing effects of repetitive work and mourning have disposed me to, This running aground, this slow entrenching in the quicksand (which isn’t quick!) this drawn out death of staying in the same place

n---So to change, that is to give a content to the “jolt” of the middle of life

o---But to change idea is banal; it’s as natural as breathing

p---From Blanchot: There is a moment in the life of a man--- consequently, in the life of men--- when everything is completed, the books written, the universe silent ...there is left only the task of announcing it

q---Either retreat into silence, rest, retreat

r---Or to start walking in another direction, that is to battle, to invest, to plant with the well known paradox: Building a house makes sense but to start planting

s---Part of a life’s activity should always be set aside for the Ephemeral: what happens only once and vanishes, the necessary share of the Rejected Monument, and therein lies the vocation of the Course

t---The same uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness… a difficult afternoon: the afternoon … I reflect with enough intensity. The beginning of an idea, something like a literary conversion--- it’s those very old words that occur to me to enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I’d never written before to do only that

u---To want to write

v---To say that you want to write--- there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write--- not scientific discourses. This could even serve as am apposite definition of writing (of literature) as opposed to Science

w---The proof that In Search of Lost Time is the narrative of Wanting-to-Write resides in this paradox: the book is supposed to begin at the point when it’s already written

FROM THE WASTES OF TIME: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It

7- Today, given that too many college students in the various colleges of the City University of New York have much difficulty figuring which came first, World War One or World War Two (and I am not putting you on) it is with some trepidation that I mention that in April begins the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with the remembering of the firing upon Fort Sumter.

2--I doubt many college students could make a list of three Civil War battles or even associate Lincoln in some way with the war. These students can go on at some length about the racist nature of American society since they will be reciting in a rather rote fashion the obsessions of their professors and like students in the former Soviet Empire they know what they have to do to get ahead: never argue, never question just repeat after me.

3--I am of an age that I do remember the 100th anniversary of the Civil War as I was working at Francis Bannerman Sons out in Blue Point and that company, you might know had long before bought up 90 % of the war surplus from the Spanish American War and still had in Blue Point and up in the castle on an island in the Hudson River a vast assortment of the necessary parts and other gear to outfit those who were now collecting the various weapons and accouterments. It was a great first job for a 16 year old. (for another day)

4—My own connection to the Civil War was via a picture on a great aunt’s wall in her apartment in Brooklyn where I was told of this man: a great-great uncle who had lost his army at Gettysburg fighting on the Union side. This aunt was from my mother’s side of the family and was a Whitney which lead to the family legend that Eli Whitney was a relative and as I learned incorporated the whole of the Civil War within his biography. Having invented the cotton gin he made cotton profitable and slavery necessary in the South but being cheated out of any profit from his invention went North where he perfected the process of interchangeable parts in the manufacturing of muskets thus giving the North the reason why they would win the Civil War: industrial might of an inexhaustible magnitude. Aunt Marie had met this man and remembered only the pinned-up empty sleeve of his suit jacket.

11--On my father’s side of the family, the Irish side--- was made complex because of the Draft Riots that occurred almost around the corner from where I am typing these lines: recent Irish immigrants unable to buy their way out of Mr. Lincoln’s draft rebelled against being forced to serve in an army that represented a country that saw them as agents of the Vatican. A country where there were plenty of places: dogs and Irish not allowed--- and why should they go off to die to free the coloured people? But the history knowing came only came later since my grandfather had been sent out of Ireland as a 12 year old boy to work as best he could and this was well after the Civil War. Ireland meant, really only a place you left. If you are 12 the history of a new place does not matter.

12--When I think back to reading the 100th anniversary celebration it seems that the war was described by Bruce Catton but which now when read is the sort of official version of Union triumphalism and was blessed by Life Magazine and who was to argue with that authority, then?

15--Times change. THE CIVIL WAR , A NARRATIVE by Shelby Foote was read. Twenty years of writing 3000 pages, one man---not an academic committee, not a gang of indentured student assistants--- the masterful opening as Foote delights in the genius of Lincoln’s calculating the necessity of getting the South to fire first…
Shelby Foote is America’s Edward Gibbon and he provides the grand narrative of the Civil War. There is no need for any other, probably.

15--AND there is great news RIGHT NOW from the Library of America: they have begun to publish a series of books made up of near contemporary writings based upon a chronological account of the war. With a great breadth of sources one hears the actual voices, remembering that this was the first war in which most of the soldiers on both sides were literate and many of them wrote letters home and these letters were preserved. The Library of America book: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told by Those Who Lived it. It is edited by three academics but excusing this I do wonder why one couldn’t have done the job but that would lead to the usual discussion of the decline of education…

34--Since I am writing this toward the end of February: one hundred and fifty years ago Jefferson Davis (February 18, 1861) is giving his Inaugural Address: We have entered upon the career of independence, and it must be inflexibly pursued…As a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation, and henceforth our energies …It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart…

16--Given my own predisposition I did skip ahead and read a letter from a surgeon ( Lunsford P. Yandell Jr) writing about what he saw at the Battle of Belmont in November of 1861: “The gun had exploded into a thousand atoms. One of the men had his right arm torn to pieces, and the ribs on that side pulpified, though the skin was not broken. He breathed half an hour. The other poor fellow received a piece of iron under the chin which passed up into the brain—the blood gushing from his nose and ears. He never breathed afterward…”

"As to the variety of expression depicted upon the faces of the corpses, of which I heard so much I saw nothing of it They all looked pretty much alike---as much alike as dead men from any other cause. Some had their eyes open, some closed, some had their mouths open, and others had them closed. There is a terrible sameness in the appearance of the dead men I have ever seen.

"My friend Captain Billy Jackson was shot in the hip while led a portion of the Russell’s brigade. I think he will recover. I am afraid Jimmy Walker (James’ son) will not recover. I think he is shot through the rectum.

19-- So to Shelby Foote where you can read his eloquent description of this minor battle of the Civil War, a battle that in no way changed the war, no way either shortened it lengthen it: just a brief moment of slaughter… but seen as one of the first steppings of Grant from the obscurity which had been his fate until…

17—The selections in THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT and only my poor typing skill prevents me from making a simple list of all the contributors to this wonderful book so you probably should go to the Library of American website and see for yourself. They do quote from a poem by Hermann Melville written after the Civil War as to his premonition of what as to be come. One line holds me:
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time.

18--Of course as I type I am nearly buried by the waste of time and in that waste I remember walking , six, seven years ago was it, with my wife and son and daughter across the field which Pickett send his men in 1863 at Gettysburg and here we were walking in the hot sun of a similar July and I was asking Lorcan could he imagine what it must have been like for young men not much older than his 12 years of age or his sisters 15 years… but he had not great defining sentence.. and the daughter and wife were there only because after you promised we were then going to the wholesale outlet mall built it seems on the side of a Confederate hospital but Lorcan did mention he would have taken shelter behind the one tree that we could see and I was asking but what about the other hundreds of men would they all lie up behind him, and his silence seems to have born some fruit as he has a remarkable narrative gift when writing on historical events but that is all off the subject which in some way is the problem of the Civil War: how to talk about it, about this something that happened and still resonates in our daily life even if unacknowledged, and that silence evident in all our modern major poets and save for Faulkner all out major prose writers…

20—THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT. What a wonderful title. Maybe someone will find a way to use it in imagination, but it has the practical value of putting the reader really there back then in the waste of time.

AFTER--And I should mention that Madison Smartt Bell has written a provocative novel based on the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest which Pantheon published two years ago, DEVIL’S DREAM. So it can be said that the Civil War still is news. The provocation comes from the fact that Forrest was an early supporter of the Ku Klux Klan but on the other hand Bell is probably the single most interesting writer at the moment in the US based on his more than 2000 page trilogy based on the life of Toussant L’Ouverture and other books now too many to mention… another day, then.

GRADITUDE: Miguel de Unamuno and Elizabeth Bishop

46

At one time, even within my lifetime, all thoughtful persons would have read before they had turned twenty-one, Miguel de Unamuno’s THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE.

And once read it could be said , THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE set me on a course.

Homo sum nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright. For my part I would rather say: Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: I am a man; no other man I deem a stranger. For in my eyes the adjective humanus is no less suspect than its abstract substantive humanitas, humanity. I would choose neither “the human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantive adjective, but the concrete substantive: man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who is born, suffers and dies---above all, who does; the man who eats and drinks ad plays and sleeps and thinks and loves; the man who is seen and heard; one’s brother, the real brother.

As long as one held tightly to this paragraph one was preserved from the murderous illusions of Marxism, fascism and all the other isms that seek to replace a man in the centrality of his nervous system with fascinating plans for the future.

The University of Illinois Press has published in translation an unpublished early work of de Unamuno’s TREATISE ON LOVE OF GOD. Never really finished it prefigures what is to come in his great work and as such is of interest as are the wonderful novels and fictions which can be found in Bollingen Series years ago published by Princeton University Press: novels as innovative as the novels of Joyce Rios, or Schmidt.

The TREATISE is provocative In the best sense of that over-used word:
---Every cultured European of our days is Christian, willingly or not, knowingly or not. Among us one is born Christian and breathes Christianity, and this applies no less to those who most abominate it. The paganism of those that want to oppose Christ is a paganism that would scandalize a pre-Christian pagan, of resurrected and able t see it.

---The originality, the deep truth of Christianity has been to make God a human being, the Human Being, that suffers passion and dies. Such is the madness and the scandal of the Cross (I Corinthians I: 23)

I doubt you will be seeing this book reviewed in the New York Times.

47

Farrar Straus & Giroux have with the publication of two books this season done something that rarely happens in the world of publishing: they have demonstrated loyality, keeping faith, being true.

Both of these books are handsome, beautiful in their plainness: the brightness of the yellow cover of PROSE and the deep blue of POEMS both by Elizabeth Bishop. The poetry is well known and through the years FSG kept faith with Elizabeth Bishop. They kept all her books in print and collected them as needed. She herself avoided the feminist or women’s ghetto by refusing to allow her poetry to appear in anthologies restricted by gender, knowing that such a restriction is always demeaning even if good for the mediocre who huddle together on the basis of gender race or ethnicity in their pursuit of lifetime sinecures in those concentration camps of the intellect: our universities and colleges.

And while I respect Bishop, I personally find myself going with more excitement to the collected poems of Lorine Niedecker whose fate, life and career demonstrate the opposite of Bishop’s. And while finally a Collected Works of Niedecker is available from the University of California Press for most of her life her work appeared from small presses in small editions and they were only sporadically available. Here this woman, washing floors in a hospital in Wisconsin, while writing poetry that can be easily compared to Paul Celan and at the same time conducting correspondences with Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound, a woman who had to work for a living in isolation save for a few supporters... with no sinecures at Harvard or those monies that are always known but not talked about… how different our literary world view would be if otherwise.

In the Bishop PROSE the discovery for me is her text BRAZIL that was written to a Time Life series… and in her letters there is a reference to Nelida Pinon… but that is for another day.

To repeat: celebrate FSG for its faithfulness, a virtue rare indeed today in the world of publishing.. and a few lines from Bishop:

From “Dead” The Winter is her lover now,/A brilliant one and bold;/And sbge has gone away from me,/Estranged and white and cold.

From “Sleeping on the Ceiling” It is so peaceful on the celing!/ It is the Place de la Concorde./The little crystal chandelier/ is off, the fountain is in the dark./Not a soul is in the park./ … We must go under the wallpaper/to meet the insect gladiator,/ to battle with a net and trident,/ and leave the fountain and square./ But oh, that we would sleep up there…

GOING TO PATCHOGUE and ZUKOFSKY

Last night I was in The Strand and noticed on the new books table this fortuitous juxtaposition.

Most likely it will not be there a day later and within the week both books will no longer be "new."

Zukofsky was an early subject of this blog since he was born a few streets south of where I sit.

Zukofsky had a summer bungalow in a town across Long Island from Patchogue.

Zukofsky has gradually found readers.

GOING TO PATCHOGUE has found fewer readers. I did meet once a young man on Fifth Street who stopped me asking if I was who he thought I was and I asked him why he was stopping me: I had been looking for the blood near the police-station on Fifth Street, that you had written about.

Of course I am happy to see GOING TO PATCHOGUE again available but it is a source of an aching sadness as no one has been willing to publish what comes after: FORGET THE FUTURE, NOTHING DOING, JUST LIKE THAT (A Beginning and an End of the so-called 60s) or what I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL