IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG WITH OBLIVION?

                    

FIVE

A very good book of essays everyone should read:  NAMEDROPPING Mostly Literary Memoirs by Richard Elman (SUNY Press, 1998)  describes in vivid detail what it was like to be alive as a writer in the years from 1962 to 1992… the end of the Twentieth Century one could say, the end of the time when books still seemed to hold a central place in the so-called contemporary imagination, or at least that part of the population which truly had both an imagination and the intelligence to understand both of those words in some way beyond…  enough.  

                                FIVE

NAMEDROPPING has Elman’s rare and defining essays on William Bronk, Tillie Olson, Richard Price, Matthew Josephson, among others… the essay on Alfred Kreymborg  should be required reading for anyone thinking about making a life in writing and the likely end of that life.

 But personally for whatever obscure reason I am not able to access, One aspect of Elman’s book has lingered in my mind because of an essay describing the fate of one of the not failed yet not remembered writers of that moment: Joel Lieber. 

After writing about Lieber’s novels MOVE (made into a Hollywood movie but unavailable), THE CIRCLE GAME and HOW THE FISHES LIVE he mentioned knowing in some way Lieber as they both lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and he knows Lieber has had some success writing for the movies but it is this passage, that has always stayed with me, his reporting on a phone conversation with Lieber:

“Joel said he was glad to hear I was doing okay.

“Yeah sure,” I told him, even though I wasn’t. Hard to say what I was thinking or what he felt.

The next morning around eleven I was at my writing desk when the phone rang.  A mutual friend had just heard over the news how Joel had jumped from his penthouse apartment killing himself instantly.

As his friends now tell it, his girlfriend and her mother were having coffee out on the terrace when Joel, without a world, walked past them into the air and the sidewalk below.”

These sentences are precise, unsettling and memorable, at least for me.  Earlier in the essay Elman mistakenly assigned Richard Benjamin to the movie MOVE when in fact it was Elliott Gould.  The film is not currently available. 

                        FIVE

What decided me to compose this prose was a brief article found via Google in New York Magazine by Jane “O’Reilly, a friend it seems of Lieber and now a one-time prominent journalist in the late 60’s, 70’s..as they say…  I cannot copy the whole brief notice for what was Joel Lieber’s last published book, the finally roll of the papery dice, the final curtain as there is nothing after this book: TWO-WAY TRAFFIC (Doubleday, 1972 and as far as I know the little note by Elman.

Jane O’Reilly writes upon the publication of TWO-WAY TRAFFIC: …the last two years of his life, drawn almost directly from the notebooks he always kept, obsessively chronicling everything in his mind.  It is in fact a book more noted than written---unrefined, often clumsy….There is the same sense of purpose one feels on reading old love letter.  What happened to the emotion so intensely, so physically felt at the time?…. is not a book about a person who is depressed, it is from one particular person, from inside his closed world, from inside the state of mind which has its own inexorable logic…. I did not know Joel earlier when he was a Wise Side writer, working sixteen hour days… I met Joel in Vermont, where he came with his dogs, a jeep, and Lisa---a woman even more perfect than the book describes…

The article review continues.  It ended on May 5, 1971 when Joel jumped….the note he has left had been written two weeks earlier and had been updated a week before he jumped: I don’t want to live any more,  That’s all.  I suffer too much inside. Too many problems I’ve made for myself.  Money, debts, my despair.  I just can’t stand it any longer.

The article concluded  Joel Lieber was 35 when he died.  I am 35.  This year I realized that I---not them---but me too---will die.  Thirty-five years spent carefully piling up experience, against the future, and is this all?  Is this it?  Life? Outrageous  (April 24, 1972)

                                FIVE

ASIDE:  the final sentences one might say reveal why no one should really mourn or wish they had been alive and living through the so-called Sixties of the last century: the vileness of a generation never more self-centered upon their nothingness, as it turned out.

              FIVE 

      

I have read four of Lieber’s novels.  (I have not read his, Israel on $5 a Day or America the Beautiful) I will quote the first five sentences of each of them. Books live and die because of the sentences they contain.  It seems not unfair to hold up these sentences as evidence.

ONE

HOW THE FISHES LIVE (1967) (paperback reprint as DEEP BLUE. 

Prologue.  The reader will no doubt ask: is this true, did this really happen?  My answer is that it had to happen; it was inevitable.  It has been happening in the way I present it, and in similar ways, for a very long time.  It will probably happen again, although not exactly in the same way.  But in this behind the scenes account of the sea disaster of our times I cannot in all honesty say that the resemblance to any character, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Novelists who say such things are to be viewed with suspicion. 

        375 pages later:  I didn’t call her back, though.  Because when you get right down to it, it just doesn’t make sense.  And yet you know that it must make sense, because we believe in things making sense.

TWO

MOVE (1968).  An eruption of hoofbeats shattered the quiet of the late afternoon.  The young man, preoccupied and day dreaming, cursed.  He called to his flock” “Murphy, Sugar, Gregory. Banjo, Omar, Hans. . C’mon. C’mere.”  Whistling and clapping his hands and afraid the rider might trample one of them, he got five, but Omar, the Saluki, broke for the horse, possibly mistaking the animal for an Arabian gazelle.  The rider reared up, his mount dancing nervously to the right.  Omar’s nose was wrinkled, his teeth threatening the rider’s boots. “Get ‘im on the leash, Jaffe.  Get ‘im on the leash, he yelled.

236 pages later. Then she stopped and he turned around and she moved sideways and hung her head.  He cupped his hands and scooped at the water, spilling it over her.  He thought it was interesting how they were treating each other with great gentleness, as if they were both invalids.  “Hey Dolly, we don’t have any towels.”  “Ssshh.” 

                                THREE

THE CHAIR A Historical Novel (1969)

“I don’t know where it’s all gone.  I shot you a double dose and you shouldn’t be feeling anything.  I’ve had some people who can sit there and take anything short of an extraction. They just don’t feel it.  But there are others--- like you, for example--- with a low tolerance.  Very low pain threshold.  Practically negative.  The least little work and they start squirming out of the chair.  I don’t like to see people suffer needlessly.  I like to think I’m a sperson of some compassion.  When see somebody jerking in the chair like that, the way you do, I just sip and shoot them some more Xylocaine.  No skin off my back.”

        181 pages later. “Hothothot, “ Tommy said.

”I’m going out with Tommy to play in the backyard for a while.  Fill up some more boxes.  And think about the essentials.”

She didn’t say anything. I opened the back door and took my son by the hand.

“C’mon Tommy, Let’s go out and play in the fog.

                                FOUR

THE CIRCLE GAME (1970)  As Hugo Pearlman climbed the last low dune he heard an unfamiliar noise coming from his summer house.  A repetitious, metallic sound, neither that of water pump nor banging hammer, but a little like both of them,  Something like a sawing noise, with more jingle to it, more music.  He stopped beside a patch of beach plum and cocked his head: behind him the gentle breakers, slurping in.  Under his arm the newspaper rustled in the soft breeze, and crackling inside his clenched fist was the letter he had just picked up in town.

348/9 pages later: A nice comfortable room, he thought, a private room at that, sugared and colored with any bouquets of flowers.  A comfortable room, a comfortable life, a comfortable and deserved success.  I would say this, he thought: after all these years, the gentlemen have finally retired to the library for port ad cigars, while the ladies rustled their skirts and compared birthmarks.

(Joel Lieber was 34 years old when this novel was published.)

                        FIVE

TWO-WAY TRAFFIC is billed on the jacket as: Joel Lieber’s Last Novel.  It is illustrated with a black hand and wrist about which a bandage has been wrapped what is apparently leaking blood through the cotton. 

Pages quoted at random: 

“Mrs. Robinson” is playing, a record Paula and I used to fuck to in the summer of 1968.  I feel old.  Shit, why did I fuck up my wrist, my finger, my beard?  I could solve it though.  Because I don’t like feeling like some now-Italo Svevo.  It’s like I am following myself around making notes on me.  Why am I compelled to keep writing this thing? (204-05) 

I am a nice person, and if only people would be nice to me…

Adventures in the Here and the Hereafter, by--- (323)

Ovaltine, honey, cheese, crunchy Granola: eat it a lot.

I spend more time horseback riding than I do writing and fucking combined. (324)

                                    FIVE

The work of Joel Lieber can only be stored in the house of oblivion.   

The evidence seems clear to me.  I had hoped that… thought that--- well, it comes from reading the novels of Thomas Bernhard: herein was to be a figure who could be made into something, who could be taken up, who could be rescued by means of better sentences as are the suicides in the novels of Bernhard, but no… the banality… the lack…the sentences, the pages would never arrive.. 

As a back-up I had been thinking of E. M. Cioran’s essay,  Fitzgerald The Pascalian Experience of an American Novelist: 

"This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, The Last Tycoon: if Fitzgerald had limited himself to those novels, he would present no more than a literary interest.  Fortunately he is also the author of  that text The Crack-Up from which I have just quoted  the opening and in which he describes his failure, his only great success…  it is second-order mind that cannot chose between literature and ‘real dark night of the soul.”

FIVE 

The grandest and the most modest of cemeteries...

Joel Lieber survives only in those sentences of Elman's not in his own work.

THE DESPAIR INSIDE READING

In memory, when I lived on 114^th Street, was the walk down Broadway to Times Square and always stopping at The NEW YORKER Bookstore.  I remember not being able to afford to buy but being jealous of EVERYBODY KNOWS & NOBODY CARES by Mason Smith.  I never read the book but the title and the look of this 1971 Knopf novel was a model of what I wanted.      Eventually, I did find a copy many years later in the Barnes and Noble Annex on Fifth and 18^th in the 49 cent books.  Today the prose reads a little leaden, a little too careful and polite.  There is nothing idiosyncratic about it and ON THE ROAD was there first… so while Kerouac’s novel continues to live Mason’s decorates my past.

        But judge for yourself: 

A pale-blue Toyota driven by a young worker going home from evening shift in Sacramento turns off the Interstate highway at Auburn and pauses to drop a hitchhiker.  A door swings open.  The driver’s hair shines, his eyes are shaded under golden brows.

            “Isn’t your wife worried bout you taking off like this?”  “What do you mean?”  “Oh, you know.”  “No, I don’t.”  “isn’t she afraid some woman will pick you up?”  “No.”  “I mean some woman pick you up and---“  “That stuff doesn’t happen.”  “Oh, come on now, come on.”  Not to me.”  “Why not?”  “Hmm?”  “Why not, you’re a handsome fella.”  “Don’t know.  It just don’t happen.”

The hitchhiker opens the rear door and pulls out his sleeping bag and fishing rod.

        Via Amazon, I discovered Mason Smith went on to write another novel and his note for FLORIDA  (2005) is interesting for what it tells us about the world of writing then and now. 

        (We note the once famous writer, editor, teacher Gordon Lish and the once highly respected literary agent Donadio and the editor Bob Gottlieb probably remembered now for a book on ladies pocketbooks.)

            The National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, and the New York State Council on the Arts awarded fellowships and stipends for the composition of this work.  I am especially grateful to Betsy Folwell who funded the NYSCA fellowship through the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts and brought me back to the area that was always, give or take a hundred miles, my home.  I was generously supported and encouraged at the beginning of a long task by my then publisher, Alfred A. Knopf and my editor Bob Gottlieb.  Pat Ryan at Sports Illustrated and Ted Williams at Gray’s Sporting journal helped keep the wolf from my door with many enjoyable assignments.  Candida Donadio tried her best to sell this book in an earlier form, and Gordon Lish, as an editor at Knopf, tried to buy it.  Joel Ray gave me helpful alerts from two careful readings along the way.  Eventually I was thrown back on my own resources and the immeasurable help of my first wife Anna and my second wife Halie and the refreshing company of our children, Haze, Sean, Rebuen, Alex and Maggie.

        FLORIDA by Mason Smith was published by Xlibris.  We are also see Smith has done two plays, FORCES and  THE ‘LUNGE CAMPAIGN.  These sentences from FLORIDA would not be an unfair representation of the problem of such a book:  “Nellie and Bessie lived a life hardly different from the last century’s; born in it, brought up with values older still, preferring not to change.  Nellie’s husband Rob, the sheep farmer, had been a diehard too, progressive only in letting Cornell showing him how to grow alfalfa on his sandy soil; but the girls had outlasted him and the sheep…

                               

                                        PART SEVEN

        I found my life in WSJ for April 26:   Pinball and skeeball machines won't flash and ding inside Bob Stewart's Carousel Arcade this summer. The machines were ruined by flooding and burned by fires, and there is no habitable building—or boardwalk—to yet call home.

            Mr. Stewart has left the beach life he knew. He travels, from East Rutherford to Delaware, taking carpentry jobs to pay bills. His wife, who managed the arcade, is now a waitress at their son's bar in Seaside Heights.
            This summer, the elder Mr. Stewart hopes to sell parking spots to beachgoers at a lot he owns near the ocean.
            "The arcade is what he loves," said his son, Kevin Stewart. "He's been doing it his entire life. He's 60, and he's a hurt man. He can't get an answer on what his future will be."

                                     PART  FIVE

Four other novels I have carted around for years:  THE SHORT YEAR by Barbra Ward (Putnam’s 1967)  came with a blurb by Anais Nin: “If when you walk through the streets of the Village you see a beautiful girl pass and wonder what she feels and what she thinks of this book will tell you   it has the quick rhythm of youth  It is honest and straight forward.”  The guy in the NY Times writes, “It is very hard to regard with as much gravity as Miss. Ward a heroine as fatuous as this.”  In PW the line was, “the subject is one we’re all hipped on nowadays.”  The word hipped has disappeared.

The opening of The Short Year:   

January, Month of the Thaw.

A clanking, hammering noise awakened me.  I opened one eye.  The sound came from an ancient steam radiator, sending a cloud of hot dusty air into the room.  My mouth was dry.  I tried to focus on the room   Everything was bathed in a gray haze.  Was I back in the “Y”?  I sat up.  A bare window at the end of the long white-walled room showed a piece of dull sky.  On the white kitchen chair next to the bed ticked a dime-store alarm clock, amidst ashtrays, matchbooks, an empty glass and my leather pocketbook.  It showed 8:15.

I groped for a cigarette and suddenly became aware of a figure lying next me completely covered by a sheet.  Memory trickled back:  the Yorkville bar…

I remember, I think being annoyed by the cigarettes and that “figure.”  Obviously, now, I wanted to have been that figure.

I have always wondered who Ward was and have had for many years a copy of her novel  THE SHORT YEAR.  I have long treasured the novel and now I have made this sad discovery... the author photo is by Gunther Stuhlmann. I had often looked at the author photo and the cover etc. and what came after: a sad discovery on a rainy May, 2014 NYC afternoon:

BARBRA WARD

Birth:	May 4, 1940 Presque Isle Aroostook County Maine, USA
Death:	Feb. 10, 2012 Berkshire County Massachusetts, USA
Barbara Stuhlmann 1940 - 2012 Barbara W. Stuhlmann, nee Barbara A Ward, passed away peacefully Friday, Feb. 10, 1012, in her sleep after a long battle with cancer. She was predeceased by her husband, Gunther Stuhlmann of Berlin and Rugen, Germany, who from the age of 16 managed to avoid induction into both the Hitler Youth and German Army. At the war's end, he emigrated to England and then to the U.S. Barbara was born in Presque Isle, Maine, on May 4, 1940, of Anglo/Irish heritage. During school holidays in the summer she picked potatoes. She later graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in English Literature, and moved to Manhattan in the 1962, where she secured a job with the Times of London. She settled in Greenwich Village and had two novels published which were favorably reviewed in the New York City papers and trade journals. She married Gunther and with him acted as authors agents for clients including Anais Nin, Otto Rank, Richard Powers and Thomas M. Coffey among others. In the early 70's, the Stuhlmanns moved to the Berkshires and operated the agency from Massachusetts, while they cleared their land and actively participated in the building of their home. Barbara went back to her country roots and was active with flowers and vegetable gardens, bird watching and star gazing. Recently, she had taken an interest as a spectator in Sports Car Club of America motor racing at Lime Rock Park, Conn. There she got to shake hands with Paul Newman, one of the drivers, once a girlhood idol of hers. She will be sorely missed. FUNERAL NOTICE: Services will be scheduled in the Spring at the convenience of Mother Nature.

I do not know anything about the second novel.

                                PART THE SEVETH

And there is REAL LIFE by Deborah Pease (Norton, 1971).  Again, a story of love affair set in NYC.  The author blurb reported that Pease had published one story in The New Yorker and had gone to Wellesley.  She had lived in Paris and traveled extensively in Europe.  The title of the novel is demanding and assertive.   I guess you can say I had these books because I wanted to know what women thought and felt and they are now testaments to a time when such books were published:  modest novels as evidence of a time period…

Here is the opening:

The First of May

There he was, as simple as that.  He crossed the dance floor, his big shoulders in his white suit lifted forward to accommodate the cigar he held in one hand, the drink held in the other, moving through the crowd of costumed dancers, uncostumed himself.  I saw him from the back.  His hair was longer than I remembered it.  His neck seemed thicker.  Uncostumed too, I merely noted his presence.  He was here.  Al was here.  It didn’t matter much.  I even took a certain pleasure in the disappointment I felt at feeling nothing.

            Headley sat beside me, silent beneath his serious mustache, detached in a new friendly way that made me happy.  After a nearly a year of floundering about…

        Today, it must have been the author photo, a quietly smiling long haired fair girl sitting with head against an oriental carpet, looking at the world, me.

        But with her name in Google one discovers Pease was publisher of The Paris Review from 1982-1992, has a collected poems from Moyer Bell, might be of the living, but living in a world remote from the slums of East First Street in Manhattan… by that I mean the mental slums as there are now million dollar apartments on East First Street… but I am sure so remote from my world, though… from Thrift Books for a few cents plus postage ANOTHER GHOST IN THE DOORWAY dedicated to Niccolo Tucci  “who despite other “you”s has been for 35 years the “cpnstant You.”  I quote Very Short Political Poem. Every word/A poet writes/Is political, occurs/Within the body/Politic of being/Alive.  This poems was published by Mary de Rachewiltz, the daughter of Ezra Pound.

                                        PART THE TENTH

        BOOK THREE of the four I have carried with me for many years  THE CREEP by Jeffrey Frank (1968, FSG).        Some years ago I met Frank at a lunch at the Norwegian consulate and he was not much interested in talking about his first novel and does not list it with his published books though  I do think it might be his only cliam to survive the grave for a while.  Obviously, he would say he has moved beyond that first novel and has written a few popular mid-list novels and is a senior editor at The New Yorker having worked as a journalist for the Washington Post…yet  THE CREEP is for me his claim on  being remembered--- memorable as HUNGER is when one thinks of the novels of Knut Hamsun and why still after all these years and all the hype about Scandinavian mysteries HUNGER is unique towering over all of them, enduring after all these years in its moving readability… but I am going away from THE CREEP… the very subject matter is hard to warm to…  a man so desperate inside his loneliness… it captures who most of us are… and who will remain as such  unless something happens… the pleasure of THE CREEP is that it does not, yet for the central character…  the ending is perfect  the guy gets on the bus to move on, Then he began to look for a seat with one place empty and one place filled with the beautiful girl who would be his. Finding nothing of the kind, he took a place by the window and waited for her to come to him.

LAST of these book I have multiple copies of, all never read by any previous reader:  CONY-CATCHING by Kirby Farrell, (Atheneum, 1971).  That publisher is gone from the scene.  Farrell writes that he wrote the novel while in graduate school and blamed the Vietnam War and the climate in the US for stopping him from continuing on with novels like this one—which in many ways reminded me looking back on what Alexander Theroux would do so well in DARCONVILLE’S CAT…  Farrell wrote what is probably one of the most complex novel in terms of narrative and it would require e better reader than I am to be able to describe the sheer complexity of the novel…  but the opening of the book is so perfectly inviting:

Seagulls, pinwheeling over the whitecaps in the grey dawn. I think of them searching for food over the bay at Picute on Cape Cod, the silence relieved by their outcries.  They were orbiting the sun like two moths around a candle or clowns before a king when Sebastian pointed them out to Clement.  And I am still crouching…

                               

                 PART THE END

I was planning to end on an upbeat note with a description of TALES FROM THE GERONIMO HOTEL  My Seduction by Junk and Desert Dreams  by Scott Frank (Grove Press, 1995) as I have been seduced willingly by the desert and the book is set in Tucson, a little too far north to my taste…but then… curious to see if there had been any further books:

published in the Albuquerque Journal on Wednesday September 01, 2010

W. Scott Frank, 60, local author and singer/songwriter, died peacefully on August 20, 2010, of cancer, in Presbyterian Hospice. He was best known for his book, "Tales From the Geronimo," an atmospheric memoir set in Tucson (Grove Press, 1995), depicting with humor and pathos his life at age 25. He authored numerous short stories and "Blackjack for Winners" (Barricade Books, 1993). Scott leaves behind an unpublished manuscript entitled "Fiction: A Memoir" about his painful childhood. Born in Philadelphia, Scott lived most of his life in Tucson and Albuquerque. In his 20s he attended the University of Arizona. A highly skilled guitarist, he wrote songs with sensitive and cutting lyrics. For some years he lived in NYC and worked for John Cale of "Velvet Underground." His education was completed late in life, as he attained a BA degree in English from University of New Mexico in 2007. He was Editor-In-Chief of UNM's "Best Student Essays" magazine for four issues, 2005-2007. He taught at a writers' workshop, and aspired to a career as a writing teacher. He was knowledgeable about reports of visitations by extraterrestrial species, and about Wold War II and VietNam War history. His most recent job was at "Field and Frame" in Nob Hill. In recent years he traveled to Spain, Thailand, and Nepal, but his dream of living and dying in India was unrealized. His songs will be published posthumously. Scott is survived by his brother, Adam Frank, of Conway, AK; his sister, Liz Frank of Tucson AZ; and his close friend, Beatrice Boles, of Albuquerque and Chiang Mai, Thailand. Condolences (and offers to help with uploading his recordings to the internet) may be sent to: "toolspalette@hotmail.com". Memorial will be held at a future date. Scott's bright, sensitive and gentle spirit will be sorely missed by the many people whose lives he touched. His friends and family wish that he may find a kinder world on the other side.