A MEANING OF WOODSTOCK, CEMENTON AND SAUGERTIES

                           

1.      Upstate at Saugerties between going to Newfoundland with my father and then going to Mexico City with him in the summer of 1973.

          Hilda would drive passed the house on 9W in her old Chevy, one of the springs in the back was going, looking for me so she could call from the candy store opposite The Exchange Hotel to meet me in Woodstock where I first met her late at night drinking in The Pub: this old blonde woman who was drinking Lowenbrau because she said it’s natural beer and natural things are good for you.

          (you might think this happened a lot but it didn’t)

          She was 39, just like Jack Benny, she says, people always laugh somehow.

          The person I am sitting in that bar is 28 going on 29.

          She says her father sold his farm further upstate, way beyond Hunter or somewhere: it doesn’t matter, you don’t know these places, no one does, just a year before property values went up.  He didn’t get a lot of money for the farm but he couldn’t work it anymore.  Farm work is awful, he didn’t have anybody working for him, morning to night all year round even in the winter.  He died of a broken heart when he gave up his farm living in a trailer… I forget where she says he lived then, though she said he moved into a town.

          I’m married you see and my husband’s family doesn’t approve of me because, you see, I am a Baptist who believes in the one true God as is preached in the Bible.  You see, they live in Kingston and think I’m a sloppy housewife because I go to church on Wednesday and Sundays not like them lazy people with their idea of the Pope and what is all that about?

          Another beer, she asks and this is what is surprising.

          (it is late at night, it seems, time just goes away--- only the bar part of The Pub is open--- a moment or two and realizing this and back to…)

And only if you have natural beer.

          Is it okay to have a Guinness?

          Is it natural?

          They say it is good for you in Ireland--- that’s how they advertise it in Ireland--- and she orders me a Guinness and she orders herself another Lowenbrau.

          Her eyes were blue silver dollars behind thick lenses of spectacles that broadened her face while the frames seemed like they had plastic wings… [no one much will understand this since they don’t make large silver dollar coins anymore but that is the thinking as trying to remember her face even when back in the house on 9W going north out of Saugerties]

          Once she must have been pretty, still has long blonde hair, with no dark roots. There is beauty at the corners of her eyes that were not wrinkled though across her face those thin lines had begun…

          My husband can’t leave his bed and the priest brings a little wafer of bread in a gold box once a week.  I am praying for him as he has helped me when I needed help and people don’t understand: people can’t help getting old and he is only fifty-one but can’t get out of bed much of the time and isn’t it sad I think as he was an active sort of guy... he is now very heavy to get out of the bed and then to sit in a chair, waiting in the same way,  now he needs me and he is alone [I let the words slip away from her for a moment] and she is alone even more alone always, you know, at home and even at Montgomery Ward where [I again begin to record her speaking] I work.  I am alone and the girls there gave me a brooch for my birthday which was very kind of them, so alone, you must not know what it is like, I can tell, what sign are you or maybe you do?

          Scorpio, I say

          A difficult sign to be  and a dangerous person to know too well..

          So dangerous I’ll buy you another beer

          I’ve had too much if you know what I mean

          I’ll buy you a beer tomorrow if you let me.

          I have to work and then I have a prayer circle for a friend is very sick and we have to pray for him to get well but if after you want to after that:  do you like strawberries?

          Yes

          I’ll bring you some they’re good for you and we have a lot this year. 

          I thought only Guinness was good for me

          You’re making fun of me

          Of course not.  You have Swedish hair.

          You’re making fun of me.   Hair is vanity.

          We met the next day. We eat strawberries and I brought a bottle of champagne I said was natural and we sit on these rocks in the middle of a sort of stream outside of town on the way to Hunter Mountain, drinking from paper cups that were left over from the driving to Newfoundland.  I was driving my father’s car as hers was parked in the lot behind The Pub.

          She didn’t want to go into the bar as she had enough to drink but let’s go into my car and talk.  We sat in the back seat and she told me to sit and she would get on top of me.  Her panties she kept on one leg.  You get used to doing this in the country she said.  You’re not a country boy.

          She offers to give me some of her vitamin that she had in big boxes in the trunk and which made the car sag even more. We sat then in my father’s car and she is saying I like going to Catholic Mass and I go to church three times on Sunday once to the Catholic Mass for my husband and then I go to Baptist church two times, I like the Catholic Mass the best as that is a real show but people didn’t seem very happy going to Mass and that is what she likes about Baptist church, you hold hands and people sing all the time, you don’t have to be a good singer.

2.      Another time I went to The White Rabbit bar in Cementon on 9W.  The trees were all covered in grey dust as they manufactured cement in the town.  The guy who owned the bar got it from the money he got after surviving a head-on collision.  They didn’t have any more frozen squirrel meat but he could maybe find some deer meet but it was getting too old.  Squirrel and deer meat don’t cost anything but you get real tired of them after a winter.

3.      A night I  went to the Bar in The Exchange Hotel where Anthony was telling me I have a cousin of mine who has cancer of the brain,  They cut his head open and didn’t put a plate in his skull.  His brain or whatever would swell up like a bowling ball and then shrink back down.  He prayed a lot to die or for someone to come kill him.  I have another cousin who had cancer all over.  The doctor cut the nerves at the back of the neck and she just lay there in the hospital bed knowing she was supposed to feel pain and not being able to feel it.   She’d cry and beg for the pain… to feel something.

COMMENTARY.  One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides  of a garden patio:  and of this house, one spot on the deep, shady veranda facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking-chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly, in capital letters, about Morning in Mexico.  All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, and then looking down at the page of his exercise book.  It is a pity we don’t always remember this.  When books come out with grand titles… this seems to me to be a perfect opening to a book and in this case,  MORNINGS IN MEXICO by D. H. Lawrence.  The truth, sure modesty and deflation of so much crap that is still being written.

TWO:  some people, probably a number fewer than the fingers of one hand know that I very favorably reviewed as I admired it, Thomas Bernhard’s THE VOICE IMITATOR, published in 1997 by the University of Chicago Press.

       One aspect of my admiration, but not revealed because who are you was that it reminded me of my own IN PATCHOGUE, published by Adrift Editions in 1984.

T. S. ELIOT + ESTONIA + ANTS ORAS + MURDER

a--       Gloominess if it can be thought of as such would be easy to ascribe to a reading of the New York Times Book Review or any of the other book reviews in the country at the moment. 

            But not giving into the gloom yet writing into the sparsely populated steppes of this site.

a--       Yale University Press sent me Volume 4 of THE LETTERS OF T.S. Eliot… 1928-1929… but how should a reader describe such a book?  Naturally one reads the letters because Eliot wrote The Waste Land, the single most important poem to come out of the Twentieth Century and it will live on in that select company of The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, The Duino Elegies, Eugene Onegin.  Eliot’s letters are part of the background music to a  life that produced that poem and then had to live on and on in some way.  Of course there are the other poems:  Four Quartets, The Hollow Men, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

a--       Well, how to read a book of letters:  via the index, of course.  I remembered Eliot had published Hermann Hesse in The Criterion and when Anna and I were in Estonia we found the Hesse family plot in the Reopalu cemetery in Paide where Anna’s father’s mother was buried… 

a--       Hesse was in the index but the eye drifted down to the bottom of the page and there, ‘The Hollow Men’ (TSE): Estonian translation.  A Letter to Ants Oras was included in the book  and he did indeed translate The Hollow Men into Estonian and I have here in the house a book by him, in both Estonian and English, ESTONIAN LITERATURE IN EXILE, published in English by the Estonian PEN Club in Lund, Sweden in 1967 with a  bio-bibliographical appendix by Bernard Kangro.

a--       A footnote to the letter includes a quote from Oras’s original letter, “I am quite aware that any attempt to translate your verse is a daring enterprise but I hope some of its style and spirit can be retained in Estonian without deviating too much from the wording of the original poems.  Our language has attained to a considerable degree of flexibility and precision.” 

            The editor tells us that Oras had taken a B.Litt in English from Oxford  and was a lecturer, later a professor at the University of Tartu and wrote The Critical Ideas of T. S. Eliot.

a--       A few weeks after reading this letter we had lunch with Denis Donoghue who had reviewed the Eliot book for The Irish Times.  He had not mentioned Oras and I guess there was no reason for him to do so.  He had heard of Oras and mentioned that he had read a book by Oras in English on the pause patterns in Elizabethan drama.

a--       From Wikipedia one easily learns that Oras was a professor in Tartu from 1934-1943 when he left for Sweden and from where he went to England and then to the US becoming a professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville.  This leaving of Estonia was much ahead of both Anna’s mother and father who didn’t leave Estonia until well into 1944 when things had really turned…

a--       I had mentioned to Anna’s mother my discovery of Ants Oras and she said she remembered the name from her growing up in Tartu as she is 92 and had lived in the part of Tartu that housed many professors at the university and other prominent citizens.  Her own father had been a judge on the Estonian supreme court who was arrested and later murdered by the NKVD in the Gulag in 1941.  She had mentioned Oras’s book about Estonian literature in exile and that the family had it both in Estonian and in English. 

a--       The Critical Ideas of T. S. Eliot by Oras was originally published in German and Russian it seems and then translated into English.  There is a copy in the Hunter College library.

a--       So even in 1929 Eliot  was being read in Estonia.. reminding me that Solzhenitsyn once wrote that for Russians, Estonian was the first European country they came to when leaving the USSR:  the presence of Latin on buildings…

a--       But, but this map hints at what always lurks when the word Estonia is mentioned and while this is not the occasion for that discussion…  the single best book about Estonia and the murder of all of her Jews and gypsies by BOTH the Estonians and Germans see MURDER WITHOUT HATRED by the Estonian writer Anton Weiss-Wendt.

a--       Via the Wikipedia biography I discovered in addition to the two books of literary criticism by Oras another book, BALTIC ECLIPSE and it was also available at the Hunter College library and it is on my desk as I type this. 

a--       Oras born in 1900 was fluent as a result in Estonian, Russian, German and English.  Baltic Eclipse published by Gollancz in London in 1948, is Oras’s memoir of the life during both the Soviet and German occupations of Estonia.   

a--         Not read much, I fear, as it did not appear in the bibliography of Weiss-Wendt’s book it is however still a well written detaling of the life endured by Estonians first under the communism and then under the Nazis.  But I will save that report for another time. 

a--       BALTIC ECLIPSE  fully acknowledge the murder of the Estonian Jewish population though Oras does not  really come to grips with the fact that the main killers of the Estonian Jews were Estonians, with the full approval of their German masters, thus strangely duplicating Estonian history that had long been  a story of the Baltic German nobility telling the Estonians peasants what to do and the Estonians hat in hand sucking up to their German masters. 

  

a--            Oras understands the debilitating role, the destructive presence of the Baltic Germans in Estonian history but while mentioning a few of the Estonians collaborators the murder of the Jews is really only mentioned but not explained.  Oras is very good on just how vile and personally corrupt many of the German soldiers were and how this mirrored the long relationship between Estonians and Germans.

a--       I write of this as Estonia and our relationship with that country is always shadowed by that word: JUDENFREI.

a--       However BALTIC ECLIPSE is still a very important document for understanding what it was like to live in Estonia and has helped me understand a little better the life Anna’s mother and father during the two occupations.

a--       Oras begins his book:  “The lecture was over. Twelve girl students and one man--- the only male student of the English department who had not been forced by the German occupation authorities to enlist with a military or labour unit or had not gone into hiding to evade conscription—had been listening to an attempt to unravel the intricacies of Richard Crashaw’s mind and style, taking careful notes as usual.”

            It is that wonderful tone, detailed and suggestive which is the reality of the book.  Oras will continue on to mention that it is the last day of March 1943.  He will finish the class, go to the Café Werner--- where Anna and I had lunch four years ago--- and meet a friend who will tell him in a few days they are fleeing by boat to Sweden.

             

              Final thought:  at first I thought it was because Estonian was a small country that the revelations contained in MURDER WITHOUT HATRED had really changed our understanding of Estonia and had in some way made it very hard to think of going back to Estonia, even though Anna’s first language is Estonian and she thus has total access to that country right down to an Estonian passport, mirroring my own Irish passport. 

 b--           The smallness and the resulting intimacy of the Estonia and out coming from the vastness of the United States… and the detail about how after the Jewish children had been murdered in Tartu the Estonian killers had distributed their toys and clothing to deserving poor Estonian children… but I felt again the discomfort as I drove across Oklahoma a month or so ago as one passes a series of signs about entering and leaving the various Indian nations.        AGAIN, one of those uncomfortable reminders of the near genocidal campaign against the native peoples of what became the United States. 

b--            I would quickly tell myself well, the Irish part of my blood didn’t get to this country until after the closing of the frontier but the Whitney part of the family had been here since one boat after the Mayflower and what had they been doing, back then…  I am avoiding the Joycian word: nightmare

Final thought:  does any of this lurch to Estonia take anything away from Eliot?  I think not. 

b--            Reading is always a constant re-reading of one’e own history

Final thought:  The Critical Ideas of T. S. Eliot by Ants Oras is of interest as it does not avoid  Eliot’s long interest in the writings of Charles Maurras though to go into that can send the reader right to Action Francaise and what happened to Maurras in France at the end of World War Two…

b--            So I hope I have established the value of reading Volume 4 of THE LETTERS OF T.S. ELIOT while going to Estonia and discovering the Baltic Eclipse by Ants Aoras who died on 21 December 1982 in Gainesville, Florida.  My mother died on 21 December 1972 at Saugerties, New York.

DISPLAYING A BOOK finally not edifying possibly

            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 20^th 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?