RENATA ADLER'S NOVELS: unfinished praise

Leopardi the greatest Italian poet in succession to Dante, Petrarch, writes: "There are two truths which most men will never believe: one, that they know nothing, and the other that they are nothing. And there is a third, which proceeds from the second---- that there is nothing to hope for after death." And true to that he was able to write about his own "work": "I never achieved any real work. I have made attempts..." and Finally, "if I were a poet..."

By now most people are familiar with the line from  E. M. Cioran that  each book is a postpone suicide.  He was referring to his own books and of course we want that quality in any book we read so I think that while I would hope my own writing might postpone my suicide, I also am aware reading certain books postpone suicide and that is how I remember originally reading both SAPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK by Renata Adler, both published in hardcover by Knopf in the late 70s and early 80s of the last century. 

Both books are fragmented and have a wonderfully cold distant narrator who assumes the reader is widely read, has seen many movies, listens to music and has traveled. 

Now republished by New York Review Books I am pleased that the books have not dated and still remain the sort of novel I think of as being right in the center of what everyone should read but so rarely find, in particular from American writers published by American publishers. 

The uniqueness of form in the Adler books is what has always held me and I of late have realized that this form comes--- if such can be written--- from Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAY, published as far back as 1970  and while I am sure it is as they say a stretch, I  also seem to detect the voice of Mike Hammer as transcribed by Mickey Spillane in I, THE JURY and VENGEANCE IS MINE.   Didion’s novel was always viewed as flawed because of its Hollywood setting but that is what makes it special as only Nathaniel West has done  justice to that seductive place…. Everything else about Hollywood excepting only the Hollywood pieces by F. Scott Fitzgerald who of course you remember Cioran mentioning that it was with THE CRACK-UP  “in which he (Fitzgerald) describes his failure, his only great success.”

From the opening of SPEEDBOAT:  No one died that year. Nobody prospered.  There were no births or marriages.

From PITCH DARK:  We were running flat out.  The opening was dazzling.  The ending was dazzling.  It was like a steeplechase composed entirely of hurdles.  But that would not be a steeplechase at all.  It would be more like a steep steep climb.

From PLAY IT AS IT LAYS:  What makes Iago evil? Some people ask.  I never ask.

Adler presciently refused, I am told, to allow her novels to appear in paper in the much hyped Vintage Contemporaries  back then so that they could nestle next to  Jay McInerney’s  novels which were the flavor of the month as had been shortly before,  The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas… and I refuse to mention the title of another extinct novel by another once-upon-a-time famous writer John Irving.  McInerney’s novels are today mentioned but not really read… they are tied to their moment and when the moment goes…: at least he has married well a number of times and lives in great comfort which is a fitting purgatory: you remember, he’s the guy who once was…

SPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK have survived because they are written in the moment for that one really existing flesh and blood reader, as Osip Mandelstam mentioned, who lives two hundred years in the future.

There have been no more novels from Adler.  She fell into the law and has written books after getting a law degree.  The heart sinks.  How much more interesting she would have been to be around if she had taken up mathematics as did Paul Valery?  The law is designed for those who want to give the appearance of thinking but really simply want something of…. do I dare use the word relevance… a sad human failing.

Maybe I am mistaken about Adler’s work after these two novels.  Maybe there will be the notebooks as Valery devoted his life to and her thinking of the law, though I doubt it as there is a uniqueness to Valery who writes for instance in volume 4 of the English version of his CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS: 

Crime = the mask falling away.  Social life covers everything in a plaster-cast, and allows only those movements that preserve this artificial character.  Violence of those movement that smash the mask.

                                                OR

Criminals would not be punished if the judge were forced to imagine in the extreme the circumstances in which they had been put and which drove them to commit a crime.  The judge accords criminals a freedom that he himself has, not being what they are, and thus condemns them as not being what they are. 

                                                                   

ARE THEY DEAD YET or is there...

Last night--- though it could be any night--- I had my second taste of the posthumous at St Marks Bookstore when I looked into Dalkey Archive’s publication of Charles Newman’s last novel, IN PARTIAL DISGRACE.  At the back of every Dalkey Archive book is a listing of their books in print and my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had disappeared.  The night before I had also been in the bookstore and looked into Peter Dimock’s new novel GEORGE ANDERSON as I had only read the advance bound galleys and there I had my first taste of the posthumous as my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had not been listed in the back of the book.  In the most recent Dalkey Archive book that I received from them, MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SWISS POETRY, my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had been listed.

Something happened.

The first paragraph is of course mired in vanity, but I hope it is not personal vanity as I well know that there are fewer years in front of me than behind.  It is from a concern for GOING TO PATCHOGUE which had originally been published in hardcover in 1992.  To the publisher’s chagrin (a nice old word) he had to reprint the book as it received very good reviews and unexpected attention.  A full page in the Chicago Tribune and in The Village Voice, good reviews in  The New York Times, Newsday and in the Los Angeles Times.  Both Newsday and The New York Times ran articles about the book and the Newsday profile went on from the cover to two full pages with very flattering photographs of my younger self.

There were discussions of the book is several academic books and then and then… I awaited a paperback version which finally appeared in 2010 from Dalkey Archive.   18 years before and earlier Dalkey usually published their books in hardcover as that was the fashion and expected. 

So GOING TO PATCHOGUE exists and this time there were oonly reviews in the local newspapers on Long Island and follow up on the websites of the papers.  The major newspapers no longer think it newsworthy when a book appears in paperback reprint and even the Los Angeles Times for whom I have written a great deal did not find space on their blog Jacket Copy for a paragraph of mention.

My concern is not for myself but for the sake of GOING TO PATCHOGUE and for my other books.  In 1987, Dalkey Archive published THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV which received a startlingly good review from Andre Codrescu in The New York Times.  After the fall of the communism in Bulgaria the book appeared in translation in the best “thick” journal in Bulgaria, Svremenik and in 2000 Northwestern University Press did a paperback version of the book.  Both the paperback and hardcover editions remain in print.

You will notice that I do not write about the content of these books or what I make of them.  That is not my concern as I know I have not read these books before and I have not read them since…  for my purpose was not t write a book that had been or would have already been read many more times since most of the vast number of books in the world are imitations, echoes, fakes of…

AND I know that next year Dalkey Archive is supposed to be contractually publishing ST. PATRICK‘S DAY Dublin 1974 and my dread, the foreboding as its success might allow for more books to appear--- the one thing every publisher fears…more books from…  but JUST LIKE THAT, NOTHING DOING, EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS, FORGET THE FUTURE…

HOWEVER.

HOWEVER, the word posthumous arrived via hearing it from Edward Dahlberg in 1970 when he was able to say he had been living posthumously for generation. 

While known in Dublin and to a very few discerning…  Dahlberg’s fate always weighs upon me. 

I open his THE CONFESSIONS OF EDWARD DAHLBERG and read the inscription, FOR THOMAS, WHOM I LIKE VERY MUCH AND WHO, I HOPE, WILL BE MY FRIEND.  EDWARD DAHLBERG DEC., 21. ’70 N.Y.C.  The book will be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times by Anthony Burgess and in 1972 Dutton will publish Dahlberg’s anthology of travels, myths and legends of the New World, THE GOLD OF OPHIR.  A few books will appear from some small presses and in 1976 Thomas Crowell (Established 1834) will publish two books THE OLIVE OF MINERVA OR THE COMEDY OF A CUCKOLD and BOTTOM DOGS, FROM FLUSHUBG TO CALVARY, THOSE WHO PERISH AND HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED AND UNCOLLECTED WORKS. 

Both books will be buried, dumped into the grave with hardly any public mention.  Edward himself will soon join those books in the earth.

TED Klein told me of hearing from Leslie Gardiner--- who has gone on to be a powerful agent in London--- of her having seen a memo from within Crowell that nothing was to be done with these books.  They had to be printed and that was it. Dahlberg had been a difficult writer and…

Something had happened.

And most people would find it unbelievable that a publisher would pay for and actually print two books and then as they say, do nothing. 

I too would have joined in that idea except I had known of the case of Michael Breslow who had published with Viking in 1978 a novel LIFE LINE which had wonderful blurbs from both Hannah Green and Anthony Burgess.  Burgess went on to pay a sort of homage to Breslow by naming a character after Michael in the novel EARTHLY POWERS…

Paperback rights had been sold to Bantam and Michael rejected a garish dumb cover and he was told we are going to doom—that is the word they used doom--- your book with a tasteful cover which will only have typeface and no illustration.  Good luck…

So while the posthumous always awaits us, we cling to the dumb hope the books will outlast… though  Lawrence Durrell told me in New York in the spring of 1970 when I asked him if  he ever thought of the future of his books, No, what has posterity done for me?...

When was the last time you read in Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet or that great monument THE AVIGNON QUINTET?

   
Everyday my eye passes from The AVIGNON QUINTET, to THE DEATH OF VERGIL to ULYSSES to ON THE ROAD… and so from Broch inside Vergil:  “He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time an harassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world a lodger in his own life…

AFTER:  my first thought  for  the title of this post: AM I DEAD YET...

SOON ENOUGH: WILL SCHUTT and GREGORY ORR

I have been thinking of the dead writers I have known… but where to begin and how to define “know”… 

I should say these are men and women I had actual contact with… in which they stood before me or sat with me… but to begin in no order, as if I lost the address book and who needs an address anymore when it comes to the dead:  Hannah Green, George Garrett, Chad Walsh, Julian Green, Francis Stuart, Bink Noll, James Liddy, Jakov Lind, W.H. Auden, Patrick Kavanagh, John Jordan, Stephen Spender, Ralph Ellison, John Currier, Malcolm Cowley, Samuel Beckett,  Richard Riordan (the Doctor to the Poets), Carlos Fuentes, Harold Brodkey, Glenway Wescott, Johnny Greene…

And the cemetery keeps growing: Richard M. Elman, Kenneth Burke, Pearse Hutchinson, Robert Pinget, Barbara Wright, Jorge Luis Borges, Frank McShane, Eugenio Montale, Samuel Menashe, David Markson, Uwe Johnson, Mei Savage Brady…

But of course does it matter.  The dead bury the dead.  Maybe it should be the dying bury the dead or cling to the recent dead in some hope that…

                FIVE

But contrary to what experience has taught I even read new books of poetry and find myself taken by WESTERLY by Will Schutt who it turns out is the son of Christine Schutt, but it was the title poem that really caught my reading:  that town in Rhode Island just over from Stonington, just in the name suggestive and concluding lines: off to Westerly,/ Rhode Island, where nirvana is a long time/coming, or untidy, unresolved, the way stupid hope won't shut up.

  

And I read Schutt's Italian translations and the using Leopardi and the biographical fact of a fellowship from the James Merrill House, where I would never be allowed...there in Stonington, as I am not so well connected, though I have stayed in Stonington with Pati Hill and talked with the Jones sisters--- a Fourth of July weekend--- who were reminded hearing my name of how the Irish servants shook out the sheets to welcome Armistice Day in 1918 and Bettina Bergery-- that Bettiina talked of travelling with Gaston (the guy who invented the Popular Front) who was the Vichy ambassador to Moscow, traveling with her pet monkey who...( I am not going to tell you everything in one blog post)  and the Jones sisters talked about "Jimmy" who I knew could not talk to me because I was Catholic and abjured table shaking apparitions though the publisher of my books would publish Merrill's one good novel.  

In Stonington the Irish were always cleaning the rooms, forever having a way with the language and of course the word hope is ever to be associated with Nadeshda Mandelstam  in her first name and in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned and my first residence was in Nadeshda in Sofia on  Ul. Yordan Lutibrodski...

but Will Schutt has the last words: the first two libes of Fragment from a Coptic Tunic:   They draped it over the dead./That's how it survived...

And a final wish:  one hopes that Will Schutt will find honest employment if he needs to do so, and never falls into becoming a professor of Creative Writing for one only has to witness the decay so evident in people like Philip Levine or Galway Kinnell, dead now for so many years though nominally still midst the living, at least according to the census-takers.  To be an honest truck driver! one a gift of self-respect to one's self and talent.

OR

I did look at the latest from Gregory Orr, a professor at the University of Virginia... he is the epitome of everything that is rotten about poetry mostly in the US.. for as long as I have known him, as far back as Columbia Universoty in 1970-1-2 Orr knew how to suck up to and imitate those who themselves had matstered the art of such and in his case  the master himself Mark Strand, both of them oozing opportunistic sensitivity, as Orr had the blessing of the brother killed by accident, which is always a good start and skinny little poems that could mean anything and usually nothing:::::::::: they could be or not be and he kept on and on so that he is now in RIVER INSIDE THE RIVER, that's the fakery in four words or further:  It hadn't occurred/To God/To use words.

Or  here is what is produced by  a six figure salary from the taxpayers of the state of Virginia and the leisure that a tenured professor enjoys:  To Say.  Saying itself was a kind/Of seizing with love./ Eve taught him that---/She for whom prayer/Was praising/What was there---/ The world/Spread out before her/What else should she adore?

OR

All sour sour sour grapes, a pissing on parades for what else to do with the passing parade though from a great height as Celine suggests, always from a great height

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…