WITOLD GOMBROWICZ. Museums and Books as Cemeteries

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ

Museums and books as cemeteries

PREFACE

Lilia responded the other day to a beautiful black/white photo from Venice which I had put on Facebook of her (age 18) feeding pigeons in San Marco when we had left Sofia in April of 1968, “I remember being happy to leave Bulgaria but the black and white photograph makes me seem like I am dead…”

                                           -SEVEN-

Yale University Press by reprinting in a beautiful fat paperback an up-dated complete edition of the Diaries of WITOLD GOMBROWICZ has done a singular important, essential and remarkable job.  GOMBROWICZ in his diaries contradicts, stands athwart the constant infantilizing of the world.  The Diaries remind us what it is to think, beholding to no power other than the power contained in one human individual brain, a brain that does not forget, that owes nothing to any cause or any party or faction or group.  Free of the temptation of nostalgia in knowing that no time is better than any other time, Gombrowicz is as is said, his own man, “We are not, I said, the direct heirs of past greatness or insignificance, intelligence or stupidity, virtue or sin and each person is responsible only for himself.  Each is himself.”

No one reading this blog is likely to be unfamiliar with WG’s writings…  FERDURKE, PORNOGRAFIA…the plays THE MARRIAGE, OPERETTA… and so much more.  I have long been taken with WG’s idea that when I talk to you and you talk to me I begin to talk to the imagine that I have of you just as you begin to talk to the image I have of you and gradually it is those two images, those two inventions are talking and if one is able to step back one enjoys the comedy…

Here I think is a perfect example from 1953 while he is living in Argentina of what I go to Gombrowicz for:

I do not believe, therefore, that death is man’s real problem or that an art that is entirely permeated by it is completely authentic.  Our real issue is growing old, that aspect of death that we experience daily.  Perhaps not even growing old but the fact that it is so completely, so terribly cut off from beauty.  Our gradual dying does not disturb us, it is rather that the beauty of life becomes inaccessible to us.  At the cemetery I spotted a young boy walking among the graves like a being from another world, mysteriously and abundantly blooming while we looked like paupers.  It struck me, however, that I did not feel our helplessness as something categorically inevitable. 

And I liked this feeling in myself at once.  I hang onto those thoughts and feeling that I like.  I am incapable of feeling or thinking anything that would compete annihilate me.  So that even here I followed this line of thinking which, because it derived from me, created hope.  Was it really impossible to bind old age to life and youth?  That artificiality, to which I am becoming more and more accustomed in man, that idee fixe, which grows so gradually and so reluctantly in me, the thought that the terrifying concreteness of our form is not the only possibility, makes the world supple.  If at one time I had believed that everything had already been said, today I am surrounded by endless combinations of ideas and forms and everything around me becomes fertile (Here I would like to note that I searched for a half hour for the sentence which will appear below because , as always, I am trying to formulate a problem without knowing whether a solution is possible and I did not really think the issue through at the cemetery.)

According to me, youth at the core of its spirit does not like its own beauty and defends itself against it, and that distrust of its own beauty is more beautiful than beauty itself and contains the only possibility of overcoming of the distance that kills.”

                                                       -NINE-

I have been transferring my little pencil markings from my battered hardcover editions of Gombrowicz’s DIARY to this new edition to which have been added  pages and the parts that were slashed in an now mistaken effort to not give offense to the communist bosses in Poland.

                                     

                                                          -TWELVE-

Are Museums cemeteries?  The more I think about this it becomes obvious beyond argument.  I was thinking of the Metropolitan in New York City, The  National Gallery in London, add any of the other big one… those large warehouses…

But then there are The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and probably near you too some variety of a museum devoted to “modern” art.  Also near you if you live in a large city is the Medical Examiner’s Office or the Coroner’s office… truth to say I see little real difference between these guys with their refrigerated shelving and the frigid rooms people hurry through at MOMA for instance in New York .

Recently at the Stein show in New York and one walks through rooms of Picasso and Matisse… and then on to the part of the museum with the 19^th century art that seems not to be “impressionist”

One wishes to lives another two hundred years and to discover that people then decide that Impressionism was just another peculiar episode in the history of art, a history… and just that word: history…

The large international art museums, the Met, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre seem to be always moving the paintings about:  paintings are not fixed to certain walls… of course in the Louvre due to the size of certain paintings this is not the case but still even there paintings move and then there are the constant temporary shows which seem always unnecessary in this age of easy travel.  Why shouldn’t people be required to just go to museums to see works of art rather than having museums mount these shows and show is the exact word… like Broadway show, like the times for showing the movie…

Of course we will hear of what a wonderful benefit it is to everyone to gather for a short period of time many works by a certain artist… or even more curious a curator will decided to stage an idea or a theme… and then gather from many collections…

Jacques Rigaut--- the discover of Lord Patchogue--- when he came to the US in the 1920  announced that he was a museum and preceded to reveal the treasures that he carried in his pockets, stored for safe keeping in match boxes… thus he established the pathetic uselessness of museums…  these vast overcoats if only they knew--- rooms instead of pockets stuffed with art…

All museums seem like supermarkets… but does one really have to go on?

The only movable show  I can approve of is when the Met puts up its Baroque Christmas tree, for that season, there midst looted medieval altar pieces… though I am going to the Met then to visit the memory of going there with my children…

-FIFTEEN-

Picture and word books about obscure places are always interesting, at least to me.  I have never exhausted the Salton Sea, Tombstone, Patchogue, NY, northern Wisconsin and from Nebraska University Press comes LIKE NO OTHER PLACE The Sandhills of Nebraska by David A. Owen.  Like many narratives of such places, there is the accident of arriving, the meeting with people and then the staying or the coming back… a modest book of a modest place--- twenty thousand square miles out there somewhere in Nebraska but then everything is somewhere out there when living in Manhattan, NYC.

The acknowledgments go on for two pages which seems a little much for a book of 145 pages and when I looked at the photographs… mostly pleasant snap shots of people met  but who one can imagine are now aging and some might be dead and others have the book put away somewhere not wanting to be reminded or if reminded… that was when…  but  the pictures of the  emptiness of the land, a land devoid of people  and even of animals, black and white, not posed, not shaped by some academic theory, modest, not done on glossy paper:  clouds and land with the absence of trees.  I would have been happy with just that as Owen goes astray when he takes camera inside and shows us details and in all those acknowledgements no a mention of Wright Morris who discovered and showed us all what he found inside in Nebraska.  But the last words from David A. Owen, “Once you are in Ellsworth, you are almost immediately out of it and back into the bush…”

Of course all places are like no other place.

ON THE SIDEWALK with a necessary postscript

Forty years ago W.H. Auden left his apartment on St. Mark’s Place in New York City to go back to Europe.  One of the reasons was the sight of bodies being taken out of apartments in corpse sacks and loaded into ambulances.  Unlike the suburbs much is played out on the actual streets and sidewalks of New York, Manhattan in particular.

I was thinking about this because as I was walking back from the Strand Bookstore this morning I found a box of books on Sixth Street near Second Avenue… boxes of books, piles of photographs, mattresses heaped on sidewalks always… always take me to: who died and while I know this is not always the case…people move, people pee in beds, clutter becomes too much, who wants to look at or be reminded of him or her?...

But books this time just around the corner from BLOCK drugs---  if you watch films from the 40s 50s you can see their distinctive sign--- if the characters venture downtown.

I would have brought home the whole box because after being sure no dog or human had visited the box in that way  I looked through the books… many unread copies of the Paris Review, the collected stories of Paul Bowles from Black Sparrow… and NEW DIRECTIONS IN PROSE AND POETRY  11.. from 1949 Signed inside by Shirley Stein using the Palmer method it looks like.. this book looks like it was read…  poems by Lorine Niedecker…fragments from Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers… two stories by Robert Lowry… a story by Lloyd Alexander…  I won’t continue as there are many famous writers… who survived their deaths… and there is an unread  THE SONG OF THE WORLD by Jean Giono in the paperback from North Point… 1981… I got a copy of that when it came out as I was a messenger for Maple Vail and they had been the printers--- being a messenger, before I descended to being or ascended to being an adjunct professor---  and a series of copies of a little magazine LONG SHOT, from New Jersey, which I took along as they had poems by Sean Penn, Marianne Faithful and Amiri Baraka and Charles Bukowski… these too  have not been read … and book of poetry by the very quiet and strange Philip Lamantia  MEADOWLARK WEST:  a certain attention to detail/ sight of forgotten life on the wheel (from Fading Letters)

                                                       POSTSCRIPT

in the newspapers  it seems Eileen Myles has received a Guggenheim fellowship.. everyone I am sure remembers two things:  in the movie The Swimming Pool::: an editor says literary prizes are like hemorrhoids, eventually every asshole gets one...  and the little Jack Kerouac poem: fame is a newspaper blowing down Bleecker Street

WHAT OUGHT TO BE ON YOUR READING DESK

A list for the Spring and Summer  2012 or really any season for that matter

--From the Library of America:   

---THE CIVIL WAR The First Year

---THE CIVIL WAR The Second Year

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1950-1962      

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1963-1973

---DAVID GOODIS  Five Noir Novels of the 1940s &50s

And then...

-- STOLEN AIR Selected poems of Osip Mandelstam  translated by Christian Wiman. (Ecco Press)

 --A TIME FOR EVERYTHING by Karl O. Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --MY STRUGGLE by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai  New Directions

 --PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  Farra Straus & Giroux

 --SEX AND TERROR by Pascal Quignard.   Seagull Press

 --THE ROVING SHADOWS by Pascal Quignard.  Seagull Press

 --AS CONSCIOUSESS IS HARNESSED TO FLESH  Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

    by Susan Sontag.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

 --THE HUNGER ARTIST by Herta Muller.  Metropolitan Books

 --TRANSPARENCY by Marek Bienzyk.  Dalkey Archive

 --ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS  by Ernst Junger.  New Directions  (out of print)

 --SONG BOOK.  The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba.  Yale University Press

 --ON THE BORDER OF SNOW AND MELT.  Selected Poems of Georgy Ivanov. Perceval Press

 --JAMES JOYCE.  A New Biography by Gordon Bowker.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

                     NOTICE

The American writers on the this list are all dead.  

Is that saying something? 

More, maybe than I would like to say, really: but does anyone look forward to any American writer’s newest book with the eager anticipation that the announcement of a new translation of a book by THOMAS BERNHARD or ROBERT PINGET or ERNST JUNGER or MICHEL LEIRIS would create?

(there is William T. Vollmann and then...)

50 Years Ago: it begins this writing

ONE

How it began.  Patchogue High School.  My Senior year.  I saw a blonde girl taking books out of a locker on the second floor.  I found out her name, Melinda Brady.  She was two years younger than me.  I could not figure out how to talk to her.  I had been reading about World War One and I had a picture history THE FIRST WORLD WAR edited by Laurence Stallings...

I began to write and a young man dies in France in the trenches on 6 November 1918, though the author recorded that he did have a thought of a girl back home....  

I no longer remember how I came to give the story to Alfred Willis who was the editor of The Red and the Black but I must have and he published it.

I would see Melinda in school and I even danced with her once in gym class, never telling her of the story or what I... but then I thought surely she must have read it and while I added an L to the last name of the girl in the story who does not know what has happened to the young man in France.

TWO

As writers do, I now realize, her silence or the silence of everyone else in the school did not stop me and so the second story, now told from her viewpoint of when this young woman goes down to the train  station in a small Indiana town hoping to meet her returning friend, who of course is not on the train... 

I had seen these small Indiana towns when I had been driven out to Beloit,Wisconsin that previous summer to look at Beloit College and I longed to live in one of those tiny town, no more than one stop light and to be sitting on a porch and now many years later, what I now know, I was thinking of being on that porch alone without my father, drunk in the afternoon yelling at the doctor next door to us on Furman Lane in Patchogue, my drunken father yelling at the MD MD mental deficient mental deficient.   

And of course Melinda would be forever walking across the lawn and I would know and maybe she would know that on one of the maple trees in front of the house I had carved her name and the year 1962.

THREE

The other week I drove by that house on Furman Lane in Patchogue and the tree is gone.  Alfred Willis did not go to college but enlisted in the USMC and served two tours on the front line in Vietnam.  He came back entered the Catholic priesthood and then left.  He lives far away from Patchogue.  Melinda lives in Vermont with her third husband.  I live on East First Street with my wife Anna Saar  with whom I am very happy yet I remain faithful, still, for better or worse, and it is mostly for the worse, as any writer really knows, as the years go by, to that first moment in the second floor corridor of Patchogue High School when unable... I turned to the written word.

FOUR

The inevitable post script.  I did see Melinda when I came back to Patchogue from Dublin for the summer of 1965 just before my parents were sent into exile in northern Wisconsin.  Many years later...how I hate those words---many years later--- as they do not accord with how I hold all of this in my mind Melinda asked me how did you know my birthday? 

I did not know that November 6 was Melinda's birthday but now I guess I know that she had read the story fifty years ago.

THE NAGGING TOMBSTONES: hesitations

Before ONE::::::  on the E train, NYC, 21 February, 2012 around 130PM  not a single newspaper being read.  Electronic gadgets and actual books.  Later talking with Hughes P. Garcia, editor and founder of ARTERY, an electronic journal of art and culture (www.arterynyc.com) who is saying, I remember the day in 2000 when I did not buy the New York Times.  I had been buying and reading it every day since I arrived in New York City in the early 1970s.  Of course I look at it now online.

Before ONE::::  Edward Burns has been showing me some of the letters that he is editing between Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport.  A book to be one of the most important books of letters to be published.  Both authors while not as well known as they should be are superb letter writers… and the book becomes at least for me a shadow reproduction of the time when I was first really reading, learning to read as a so-called adult.  The books and ideas they discuss create  a now written commentary on that time from the late 50s into the 60s,70s,80s…I would justify the genius of the book in one sentence from Kenner to Davenport 9 March 1963:  WHOLE POINT OF A BOOK IS WHAT HAPPENS IN THE FIVE MINUTES AFTER ONE HAS FINSHED READING IT

ONE.  Samuel Beckett to Robert Pinget: Don't lose heart: plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.

TWO.  Found myself again quoting from NOTTURNO by Gabrielle D’Annunzio who you might remember was a romantic flamboyant Italian poet novelist and dramatist at the turn of the century (!900).. the sort now long out of fashion, cut in the mold of Byron.. active in World War One as a pilot…as remote from later Italian poets  such as Montale as one can imagine.. closer to Pasolini in the confusions of his life.  Injured it seems in a propaganda flying mission against the Austrians. D’Annunzio was forced to lie in  bed in a darkened room, forbidden to move so as to prevent the detached retina from fully detaching and blinding him…

But that is just biography and I wasn’t quoting the biography but the lines from NOTTURNO… translated by Stephen Sartarelli.  Published it must be said heroically by Yale University Press in its Margellos World Republic of Letters Books...a rare exception to the usual political correct translations that make up so many of these series…  probably an accident, it must be said.

A meditation on the usual things, death, sight, night, but while occasionally the language gives way to his moment, a  moment before the purifying flame of Ernest Hemingway and TS Eliot changed how we read, but once that is admitted what remains is as gripping…  you must get the picture.  A man confined to bed in a darkened room, his eyes bandaged, told never to move, to refrain from talking… but the lines in no particular order:

Everything is dark.  I am at the bottom of a hypogeum.

 I am in a coffin of painted wood, narrow and fitted to my body like a sheath. 

The other dead are brought fruit and focaccia by their families. 

I, the scribe, am given the tools of  my office by my compassionate daughter

I am thirsty. I ask for a sip of water.

The nurse refuses as I am forbidden to drink.

“You shall quench your thirst with sweat and tears.”

The sheet sticks to my body like the shroud that swathes the salt-speckled drowned man hauled to shore  and left on the sand until someone comes to identify him, to close his frothy lids sand bewail his silence.

I am blindfolded,

I lie supine in bed, my torso immobile, head thrown back, a little lower than mny feet.

I raise my knees slightly, to tilt the board propped up on them, 

I am writing on a narrow strip of paper with space for one line.  In my hand is a soft-leaded pencil.  The thumb and middle finger of my right hand rest on the edges of the paper and it it slide away as each word is written…

The room is devoid of light.  I write in the dark. I trace my signs in the night which lies solid against both thighs like a board nailed in place

Then I remembered the way the sibyls used to write their brief auguries on leaves to be scattered by the winds of fate.

He looks at me from the depths of  a desperate sadness.

THREE.   NOTTURNO is unimaginable in a world of poetry dominated by saps like Galway KInnell, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, C.K. Williams… how many years they have spent teaching kids to write poetry like the poetry they write since these students are supposed to pay the constant flattery of imitation and who then In turn can be imitated and these saps  themselves writing and writing and living in the academic splendor of their uselessness…  and the hordes of lesser names  no better no worse but all of them teaching teaching and living lives of manufactured unease for  finally with tenure… never again a single worry not even a doubt when the collected poems will appear in how many hundreds and hundreds of pages never really to be read like those millions of volumes of the collected writings of the various communist bosses in Eastern Europe… that is what these collected poems feel and are like… pages and pages of poetry… and and

FOUR.   A  secret of Dalkey Archive is contained in 4:46 by Carlos Fuentes Lemus.. the collected poems of Carlos Fuentes’s son who died at 19 of the complications of hemophilia and meningitis and HIV… genetics, plus accident and thus an early death: some poems, scraps of films and photographs all enabled by the fame of his father… but the poems are readable and come with an afterword by Juan Goytisolo… but death is ever present and no matter the connections, the privileged life.. no minimum wage job at McDonalds or at the local supermarket… but the book is a monument and one does not begrudge anyone a monument, even a monument as fragile as a thin book of poems, so one does not envy the marble tombstones or even the plastic flowers that decorate the soon to be swept away graves one sees in southern Arizona where the constant wind becomes the perfect mourner treating each in the same sure way

While his father is well published, respected, honored… but there is about him a perfection  for   he was such a good subject for an interview profile I did once of him for Newsday— every line he said was calculated to make my little job easier so nothing to complain of… or even to be resentful of… and even fond memories of reading TERRA NOSTRA in Istanbul in 1984… in a English paperback… can take away the suspicion that Carlos Fuentes is finally not a very great writer…  as everything is too perfect, too calculated to fulfilling of all the normal expectations.. Carlos Fuentes is the perfect A student, the perfect Summa Cum Laude student, the perfect diplomat… with no secret life.. no daily church going like Queneau  to be revealed at his death.. he is not Juan Carlos Onetti or Juan Rulfo  to take two in contrast… but his books and his fame lend credibility to Dalkey Archive but  his son’s book  has more life in it, strangely,  than all of his father’s heaped up  so-called major works of art

FIVE.   Going along the Arizona and New Mexico border between Douglas, AZ and Columbus NM, one feels very far away…and while I know this is both reality and the product of living on East First Street, in Manhattan in New York, there is no denying that driving from Douglas AZ to Columbus NM.. one drives through a mostly deserted landscape.., but a contested landscape, a place both left behind, a place that people pass through and other people try to stop people passing from south to North…

But books seem very far away…  in a little grocery store and restaurant in Rodeo a few rows of beaten up massmarket paperbacks…  in Douglas a rather good public library...where books rest quite contented not  to be moved too much as I must have been the first  to look through the Arizona history journals for an article about the invention of Boot Hill in Tombstone.. but still many books though the computers are what people seem to treasure though I do know I wish I had a book in that library.. to be in the same room with the best American novel of many many years, CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by  Camilo Jose Cela (Dalkey Archive 2007)… well , American in content as I know primitive provincial people will point out that Cela is Spanish and is dead and writes in Spanish  and even has a Nobel prize--- though that is no  recommendation when you think of Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison and Mikhail Sholokhov and Sinclair Lewis--- but they make mistakes in Sweden and Cela is probably one of them… as was Beckett and Simon; if you get my drift… but Cela’s novel free of plot development, free of character development, free of beginning middle and end.. free of relationships, free of setting the scene… free and yet honed so as to populate one’s imagination with both the actuality of what it means to find one’s self in these United States both in and around Tombstone… is that not what life is:  in and around one’s tombstone.

SIX.    From the Library of America… THE CIVIL WAR  The Second Year Told by Those Who lived it…  like the first volume, It is a book to be opened at random… but then the minutes turn into hours…  that you are there of memory… to the side are   chronology, causes, results etc 

More on this at a future post as I want to write about it in conjunction with the David Goodis and Joe Brainard volumes.  The Library of America is a constant criticism of the present moment. 

And  I have been reading THE LOSS LIBRARY by Ivan Vladislavic, published by Seagull Press, which together with Dalkey Archive and New Directions  and Archipelago might be the last publishing houses in the United States.  Of course people will ask: what about Random House, Penguin.. you know THEM… but does anyone have the sneaky suspicion that their days are numbered as are the days remaining for  Barnes and Nobel.  Is it now just a question of when?   What will remain..that tiny band of independent bookstores who long ago cut their dependence… and the more completely they cut their dependence on the big publishers, the sounder their chances of surviving….