SHERWOOD ANDERSON. The first book to buy in 2013

My reading life began at 41 Furman Lane, Patchogue, NY with three authors, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson.  This was before high school ended in 1962.  I did not read or I choose to think I did not read in high school.  Fortunately I was not required to write essays or even do what is now called research papers.  We were prepared for the Regents Exams, a form of state exams and I did rather well on them but even there we were not required, at least back then to write extended essays.  I did well enough to be offered a Regent’s scholarship which I did not use as I went away to Beloit College because that college was a thousand miles from Patchogue. 

No books were required to be read at Patchogue High School or I have put them firmly out of mind.  There were text books and I remember only two authors from that time T. S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy, though I could not be said to have read them.  Shakespeare was certainly presented but it seemed that we watched film strips about the plays.  In no way am I complaining about any of this as my “education” at Patchogue High School did not interfere with my reading life.

My reason for writing these sentences is the Library of America finally publishing a volume devoted to Sherwood Anderson and it is focused on his short stories.  It is edited by a tenured professor of creative writing, but that need not concern us. 

Winesburg Ohio is contained in this volume and that is the book of Sherwood Anderson’s that I read.  I imagine like many readers back then and sadly that is the reality when it comes to Anderson, back then, as the experiences he writes about have been shoved to the side in the multi-ethnicization of American writing, which has led to an incredible provincializing of the United States, a turning inward to the warring kingdoms of double-barreled ethnic writings so that every anthology that might have some use in the schools of the  United States must be balanced out along the ethnic and racial preoccupations of the educational elite so that we have Dominican-American, Mexican-America, Puerto Rican-American, Cuban-American, Chinese-American, Korean-American, Native American, Afro -American, not to leave out Vietnamese-American and and on and and (probably leaving out--- ah, I did the sexual and gender categories that are now also required  while I well know that much of this began with the rise of Jewish American and then Irish American and then Italian American… the result has been a closing off of our world from books from other countries and one of those countries might be the world represented by Sherwood Anderson. 

We have forgotten that there are only writers: good writers and bad writers, great books and lousy books.

Sherwood Anderson’s whole life was dedicated to the word and the word made flesh in what used to be called small town America… it was before Faulkner… the first real step away from New England…

Readers should find  SAMUEL BECKETT’S WAKE AND OTHER UNCOLLECTED PROSE by Edward Dalhberg (Dalkey Archive Press,1989) and there find his essay “Old Masters”, originally published in the New York Times of all places when one thinks of what has happened to the NYTimes!  One of those old masters was Sherwood Anderson and; “the most prodigious mishap of the young American writer is that he has no Master, or an elder of letters to guide him; and so be relies wholly upon himself, a very unrealistic teacher.  I was lucky; I knew Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson”  (for comparison think of the poor saps today who look to Paul Auster or Jonathan Franzen)

FROM THE ESSAY: If a book is not physical, the words are as empty as gourds and dry as the shards in the Mount Sinai Desert we hear of in the Book of Job.

OR:   I cannot repeat too often, choose a seer!  Never mind being the great original.  If you’ve got a dram of talent and are influenced by Erasmus, Gustave Flaubert or Charles Baudelaire you’ll still be yourself, without them you are likely to amount to nothing as an author.”

OR:  Every book is a mistake, just as life is or mine is”

OR:   I remember any number of scullion reviewers  who denounced  Sherwood Anderson for being confused.  Anybody who supposes he has a clear brain has a vacant one.  If the author was not obscure to himself, a glut and flux of nebulous sensations, what urgent necessity would he have to make a clear lucid book?”

OR:  A vile book that exacts some sort of feeling from us is a cony-catcher, and no one cares to be fooled by a friend, a drama or a woman… Let me say once more everybody is a mistake and I am an imperial one.

OR:    Who goes to a book to discover what he already knows?

AND THEN THE SHIFT from another essay:  How Greek or Roman is the American?  We are nobody until we recognize Odysseus, Protesilaus or Aeneas in our selves.  America is Trojan, Greek, Aztec, Mayan, and Indian.  The ghosts in our civilization are being resurrected so that we can see that the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians and our savannahs are corporeal gods.

            

             The books of stories included in the Library of America ANDERSON :  Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, Death in the Woods

             

         THE POST SCIPTUM:  in a recent note to Denis Donoghue  “I was never smart enough to read E.M. Forster or for that matter Thomas Hardy and John Hawkes... my reading began on the ferry going from Glasgow to Dublin  September 1964  trying to read FROM AN ABANDONED WORK by Samuel Beckett...  before that I had only read books by Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson and  James Thomson BV...  this is... outside of what was required...  so very unlike yourself.

                 

          THE POST POST SCRIPTUM:  Anderson invents reality it might be said or… I was told Anderson was the single most requested author for inclusion in the Library of America…  so that is the good news, the sad news, it has taken so long…

A NEW YEAR JUST LIKE LAST YEAR and most likely like next year

Summer 1978 in THE GOREY DETAIL (Ireland)   Francis Stuart writes, All the  best fiction lately, and this will be evident in the future, is a criticism and extension of the novel form.  No good piece of fiction can now be self-contained, it is open to the world outside at both ends.

AND:   Knowledge, as Blake said is love. Knowledge that is not love, and that is almost all contemporary knowledge is illusion.

AND:  The serious novel is negative to popular ideas, is alienated  from the general assumptions of its society, gives an unequivocable ‘No’ to all general ideas and ideals.  Only in the style in which this “No” is annunciated is there a positive glimmer.

One could quote the whole short article but why bother as we live In a culture that has grown only worse from this moment  back when Stuart writes, The real enemy of art is not general indifference or widespread public ignorance.  It is culture, what passes for culture among any of the so-called well-educated.  For them art is an adjunct to their successful lives; it is positive and reassuring, confirming them in their intellectual assumptions. This kind of culture, that incidentally, prefers biographies and even travel books to fiction, is rampant in the literary supplements of the English Sunday papers. 

Of course Stuart if he was still alive would add: this is still  true and maybe even more dire now with the partial disappearance of literary supplements in the United States and the growing importance of  the on-line substitutes such as The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post which are even worse in their sheer knowing ignorant stupidity.  These supplements, these organs of power have made us aware of and popularized the fakery represented by: Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Martin Amis… each of which is an incitement to never admit that one writes or reads as too many consciously think of these as being what is good and drop sad inevitable necessary comparisons, the trying to explain… better give it up! As you will only be thought to pressing sour grapes as opposed to…

The BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart is his authority for what I am quoting  above and my GOING TO PATCHOGUE and THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV is my cliaim upon you to make this post

LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE

 THREE

 BEFORE, BEFORE  never... or well, really, continuing within a belief that has been part of my life for more than 50 years: the printed word allows one to overcome the sureness of the grave, for a while or possibly this idea of...  allows me to keep on but now closer to the inevitable end as I am and I was even then, back there in Patchogue though if Dalkey Archive keeps on they are to publish ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974 possibly in time for that saint's day in 2014 and while JUST LIKE THAT, a book from a beginning and from an end to the so-called 60s, has also been finished as has NOTHING DOING, a book about a man looking for his own grave in the extreme southwest of the United States as he carries on his back a self-exiled Bulgarian psychoanalyst, a defrocked Catholic priest, a man living in Paris who woke up one morning to hear his wife saying she was planning to kill their child and ruin your life, and lastly a man in a wheelchair in the Gadsden Hotel lobby in Douglas Arizona who one day had left New York City...

FOUR

And at the moment from EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS:

Thank you

                         and good morning. добро утро!  G naydin.  Dra dhuit ar maidin. 

At first there was to be the possibility:  Welcome… but that word is even more ominous as there is the silent completion  of the command:  and be gone with you.

FIVE

My review of 

 

         LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE

By Roberto Calasso

Translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen

Farrar Straus and Giroux

339pp., $35.00

   Reviewed by Thomas McGonigle

Charles Baudelaire is more scandalous today than he was over one hundred and fifty years ago.  Then, he was an obscure poet with one partially suppressed book, Flowers of Evil, an art critic when there didn’t seem to be any major artists and the translator/promoter of a marginal foreign writer Edgar Allan Poe.  Today, the scandal is more evident in sentences such as:   “One should always be drunk… Drunk with what?  With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you please.  But get drunk.”(Paris Spleen) or “There are no great men save the poet, the priest, and the soldier.  The man who sings, the man who offers up sacrifice, and the man who sacrifices himself.” (Intimate Journals) or “Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors.”  (Intimate Journals)

And now there is the folly of Baudelaire in La Folie Baudelaire, the latest book from Roberto Calasso, the most riveting and demandingly suggestive critic in the world today , who established this commanding position with:  The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, The Ruins of Kasch, Literature and the Gods, Ka, The Forty-Nine Steps, K  and most recently, Tiepolo Pink. 

The La Folie Baudelaire is no narrow study of the poet’s work or even worse, a birth-to-death biography, but, rather by associating the poet with the prominent writers and artists that he came into contact with, Calasso has created what he calls, “analogical history… an ever-more-urgent desideratum in an intellectually debilitated epoch such as the present.”

                The reader is launched into this mysteriously obscure time, just before the so-called conquest of the  art world by Impressionism, “Baudelaire used to suggest to his mother, Caroline, that they meet surreptitiously at the Louvre:  ‘There isn’t a place in Paris where you can have a better chat, it’s heated you can wait for someone without getting bored and what’s more it’s the most respectable meeting place for a woman,’  the fear of the cold, the terror of boredom, the mother treated like a lover, surreptitiousness and decency conjoined in a the place of art: only Baudelaire could combine these elements…” 

From this clearly audacious beginning Calasso will anchor everything upon what he calls “Baudelaire’s  supreme prose work, The Painter of Modern Life marking it as the single most important article on art ever written for its suggestiveness and courage and for centering it upon, “an unknown, devoid of an academic protection, a reporter of images who could not bear to see his name in print: Constantin Guys. In one stroke, this move… led to the threshold of the new day in the form of a desire forever unfulfilled: a desire for futility, eros, lightness and a life that might be adventurous and even a little shady.”

Baudelaire’s folly was in expecting to be admitted to the French academy and Calasso quotes Sainte-Beuve putting the knife into Baudelaire’s back, ”This singular folly with its marquetry inlays of a planned and composite originality which for some time has drawn the eye toward the extreme point of the Romantic Kamchatka I call Baudelaire’s folly.  The author is content to have done something impossible in a place where it was thought that no one could go.”    However, Calasso’s gloss is prescient:  “this self-sufficient sovereign place, [where] little by little like successive waves of nomads who made their camps in it, there grew up around that folly the essence of that which was to appear since under the name of literature.”

All the well-known artists and writers of the “brothel  museum” are here:  Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Mallarme, Flaubert , even the maybe too familiar Degas nudes appear.  Bbut something startling happens when we consider the allusive implications of Calasso’s description of an early historical painting by  Degas , "These women are things that can be disposed of. We don't know why, and no justification is required. There is no trace of war's fury. The air is frozen, motionless. No one will witness this; no one will ask why. What is being experienced here is a new way of killing for which a certain calm is necessary. The victims form a group but not yet a mass--- and they can make no appeal for help, in the silence of the countryside. An image that is like a new kind of subject for meditation. We do not know if the horsemen are soldiers, criminals or executioners.”

With such glancing hints the deeper purpose of the whole of Calasso’s project can be glimpsed: a subtle enquiry into how a century of startling liberatory artistic promise and vast industrial progress, could give birth to the next century  defined by:  Auschwitz, the Gulag and Hiroshima.

Thomas McGonigle is the author of The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov and Going to Patchogue and the forthcoming ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974

SIX

The version that saw itself into print recently and is likely to be my last published review as there is always the question of money for such and the editor who has read what I have written, as I have worked my way through hinmdreds of reviews for the LATimes, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and the Village Voice and Bookforum... but who knows though I do know one sure thinks like all thinking people

'La Folie Baudelaire's' scandalous subject

The poet is studied by inquisitive literary critic Roberto Calasso, and the result is a questioning assault on received wisdom.

By Thomas McGonigle, Special to the Los Angeles Times
2:00 PM PST, December 6, 2012

---

La Folie Baudelaire
By Roberto Calasso
Translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen
Farrar Straus and Giroux: 339 pp., $35

---

Charles Baudelaire is more scandalous today than he was more than 150 years ago. Then, he was an obscure poet with one partly suppressed book, "Flowers of Evil"; an art critic when there didn't seem to be any major artists; and the translator-promoter of a marginal foreign writer named Edgar Allan Poe. Today, the scandal is evident in sentences such as this one from "Paris Spleen": "One should always be drunk…. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you please. But get drunk."
And now there is yet further proof in "La Folie Baudelaire," the latest book from Roberto Calasso, the most inquisitively suggestive literary critic in the world today, who established this commanding position with "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony," "The Ruin of Kasch" and, most recently, "Tiepolo Pink."
"The La Folie Baudelaire" is no narrow study of the poet's work or, even worse, a birth-to-death biography. Rather, by associating the poet with the prominent writers and artists with whom he came into contact, Calasso has created what he calls "analogical history … an ever-more-urgent desideratum in an intellectually debilitated epoch such as the present." A questioning assault upon the received wisdom, it exposes the hollow triumph of Impressionism and its artists, Renoir, Manet, Monet and Degas, over an implacable academy.
Calasso anchors much upon Baudelaire's prose work "The Painter of Modern Life," marking it as the single most important article on art ever written for its suggestiveness and courage, even though it is not centered on the legendary artists one would expect to find — Renoir et al. — but rather an artist named Constantin Guys: "an unknown, devoid of an academic protection, a reporter of images who could not bear to see his name in print."
All the well-known artists and writers of the "brothel museum" are here in "La Folie Baudelaire": Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Mallarmé, Flaubert, even the maybe too familiar Degas of the nudes appear. But their work, their actual claim upon our attention is always seen from an inquisitorial point of view rather than a podium.
Calasso is not interested in explanations — he has become tired of having things explained to him, exquisitely displayed in the allusive implications of Calasso's description of an early historical painting ("Medieval War Scene") by Degas: "These women are things that can be disposed of. We don't know why, and no justification is required. There is no trace of war's fury. The air is frozen, motionless. No one will witness this; no one will ask why. What is being experienced here is a new way of killing for which a certain calm is necessary. The victims form a group but not yet a mass — and they can make no appeal for help, in the silence of the countryside. An image that is like a new kind of subject for meditation. We do not know if the horsemen are soldiers, criminals or executioners."
With this and many similar descriptive interrogations, the deeper purpose of Calasso's project can be glimpsed: a subtle inquiry into how the 19th century, and the popular description of it as a century of startling liberatory artistic promise and vast industrial progress, could give birth to a next century defined by Auschwitz, the gulag and Hiroshima.

THE INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS and A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE

I have been remiss.  I wrote about LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE by Roberto Calasso for the Los Angeles Times but it has not been published.  I have been reading and reading as… but until this have not been able to over-come the enervating feeling of why…

The INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS (Şeylerin Masumiyeti)  by Orhan Pamuk… (Abrams, NY) I had begun to write this in longhand and as I was now typing I realized innocence is not an aspect of an object--- one assumes a physical aspect--- as innocence and its partner guilty can only be applied to the actions of a human being possessed of the ability to tell right from wrong, good from evil. 

How is that for traditional theology and I assume even philosophy?  Probably something or other…

THE INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS Is a picture book with text describing the establishing and the contents of a museum that was derived from Pamuk’s novel of good recent memory: THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE.. and of course he has done what I can well imagine is the desire of every novelist… to physically incarnate his mental, his dream creations… even Nabokov composed as we all know the screenplay for LOLITA

The book is beautifully produced and is quite faithful to the Turkish original that I purchased on Istiklal Cd. in Istanbul this summer when I was there with my son… however the great cemetery near Eyűp was more enticing than this new museum for this visitor and I prefer to turn the pages of the book then to have visited it…  museums have to age, have to fall apart a little to be really interesting and that is what I liked about the archeology museum near Topkapi…  it had the just right amount of abandonment to invoke past.

The most perfect tour of torment for a soul sent to Purgatory for wanting to be modern and up to date would be to find him or herself condemned to endless have to talk through MOMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim museums in NYC…looking at each and every object over and over again.

Of course Pamuk’s museum has two competitors that I can think of the Watt’s Towers and Howard Finster’s PARADISE GARDEN… and they both have the advantage of actually being built by their creators whereas poor Pamuk had to pay and pay and pay to have his museum built, though since he was spending his own money…

He mentions Sir John Soane’s museum in London but that museum is free.  Mr. Pamuk’s museum charges an admission fee.  Howard Finister’s Paradise is also free as is the Watts Towers.  However if you bring along a copy of THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE you are admitted as if only right and proper.  I do hope there is a gift shop with the necessary t-shirt which I hope is free of a portrait of the author. 

But a book like this finally only works if it recalls memory within the reader or viewer.  Exhibit 24 worked best for me.  “The Engagement Party” and on the opposite page postcards of the Istanbul Hilton…  there on Cumhuriyet Cad…  of fond memory in 1967  when I went to visit Peace Corps friends… no…not that path, right now.  I do remember how Turks dressed up to go there while the Americans went casually as if going home…  we took it all for granted and… now of course there are books about how the international style architecture was a form of cultural imperialism etc… etc...  when I went there in 1985 we only looked it as if had become a little shabby while today  it is where lower ranked salesman are stored when visiting… and beyond whole new developments of the present and the grim future.

                                     NEWS FROM THE FUTURE

From JOHN JORDAN.

“The narrative of modern so-called Irish fiction in English is:  James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Aidan Higgins, Desmond Hogan while slightly in-shore reside three joyfully sullen islands:  Francis Stuart, Ralph Cusack and Thomas McGonigle”

From Frederick von Saar.

'Kaasaegne nunda nimetatud Iiri Ilukirjandus inglise keeles narratiiv on: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Aidan Higgins, Desmond Hogan, kuigi veidi-kaldal elavad kolm rõõmsalt laubal saared: Francis Stuart, Ralph Cusack ja Thomas McGonigle'