More common
than I suspect: displaying books as
memorials or as reminders of once I…
Today, I
moved the four volumes of MY PAST AND THOUGHTS The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen. I had bought them after seeing them in the small
rooms of Eugene Lambe in Longacre, London above what had been the Bertram Rota
Booksellers.
Eugene has
been dead for many years now and London seems a little emptier, at least for
me.
The Herzen
books were on a small table in front of the wall on which a David Hockey
drawing was displayed. Often he had a small vase with a couple of
tulips and nearby was a wooden sculpture in the shape of tulips. No other books were ever visible.
I had first
met Eugene in Dublin in the 60s--- when for a time he had been studying the law
at Trinity, down he was from The North, and he informs much of my ST. PATRICK’S
DAY Dublin 1974 which is supposed to come from Dlakey Archive in the spring of
2014.
The reason
for moving the Herzen books is that yesterday at Anna’s I was looking into a
few novels by Giles Gordon, who before he became Prince Charles’s literary
agent, before he was a publisher, he was a novelist, whose novels possibly
could have joined B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin and Alan Burns but that was not
really to be though who knows… Ann Quin exists In the Dalkey Archive.
But Giles Gordon
was introduced---- also how association of names works---- to me at a luncheon
club off of Longacre by George Lawson who was the owner of Bertram Rota and
when I asked Lawson who had long been a subject of conversation from Eugene as
in “your man Lawson” could he tell me
about Eugene replied, “O, you mean my servant…”
I will leave
it at that as it is teased out a little in ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974. Eugene was the father of a son Orlando by a
Canadian heiress of the Hudson Bay Trading Company.
One year
when I visited Eugene he had had a heart attack and was saying all the doctors
can tell you is you have had a heart attack and he had another in a gay dancing
place in Covent Garden. At the funeral,
his two brothers were revealed to be generals in the British Army--- one of
them head of British forces in Bosnia--- attending the funeral surrounded by
security. A poem was dedicated to Eugene
years before by Derek Mahon.
As far as I
know there is no grave for Eugene, so he is as disappeared as these words will
eventually be and as he slides from the memory of the few who still know the name…
Another book
that I moved was AZEF by Roman Goul.
Octavian
Cretu--- the best man at my wedding to Ruth--- knew him in some way when we all
lived on the Upper West side in the early 70s when one way aware that the
neighborhood was home to still the many that had escaped from or survived the
horrors of the communism and Nazism. It
gave a certain seriousness even to those of us who frequented the Gold Rail or
Forlini’s or The West End yet who were aware of the ghost of Lorca and Kerouac.
Octavian was
a refugee from Romania and that was the beginning of our friendship as I had
lived in Bulgaria 1967-68 and unlike too
many people at that time I had no illusions about the pleasures of the
communism. Goul published Nabokov and
Brodsky in his journal The New Review but there was about him that feeling of
being excluded as academics at Columbia had no interest in the Russian émigré experience
as there was neither money nor prestige in it.
Of all the
people I have met from the East only Nina Berberova knew of him as he was the first person who
met her when she arrived after the war.
Berberova was more tolerant of my lack of Russian and accepted my
reading of the Russians in English, something Goul was not really interested in
and who could blame him?
Of course
just mentioning both Berberova and Goul I am aware of how deficient our
experience of Russian literature is:
Georgi Ivanov is not known. That
is my reason for writing that. A book of
his poetry has appeared but not his prose which is the singular claim he should
be making on our reading. Without his
books of prose available in English it can be said we know not relaly Russian
literature in the 20th Century and that is why I had AZEF on display.
IMMEDIATE REASON for writing this post today:
In the Aug 5, 2013 The NEW YORKER: “His (David Gilbert) previous novel “The
Normals” veered uneasily between the influences of Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo. His new novel more singly follows the example
of Franzen but lacks the formal coherence and affecting sincerity…”
Need I tell
you this thought is by James Wood?
By reaching for those two names he reveals the impoverished dreary deadened
condition that allows one to say ain’t
much going on in American fiction writing and with poetry missing since the
death of Ronald Johnson in 1998 the country finds itself further bereft of a
single major poet.
Imagine 300
million people and not a single major poet actively writing and publishing.
This last
lurch to avoid thinking of what is not happening today in writing in the
US.
Of course it
will be objected to but I simply ask where is there a novel being written in
the US or recently published in the US that could sit comfortably on the shelf
with Camilo Jose Cela’s CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA or Andrei Bitov’s PUSHKIN HOUSE
or Thomas Bernhard’s CORRECTION or Mati Unt’s BRECH AT NIGHT or Hannah Green’s
THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE?
