HATS AND ATOMIC TESTING in the working life of JOHN WESLEY

for now a few years I have been writing a novel or a book  that as is said revolves around an actual--whatever that might be-- artist: JOHN WESLEY, not to be confused with the founder of Methodism ...  in this section hats are talked about and their connection to atomic testing in Western deserts...  

(another prepared slide appeared in a recent NOTRE DAME REVIEW                              

     A FAR AWAY PLACE

                                                      ***

         Wesley has talked of discovering his dead father and the hat on the hook near the door not to be put on his head ever again and Jack never wore a hat as far as I know… a lifetime summed up in one article… that is how we thought  back then I am telling Jack, I think it was an old Esquire magazine where there was an article how to be successful in college and one of the key points was to put something on the wall and not explain it--- like a dented Maserati hubcap--- but you were allowed to hint as to the nature of the article, the associations of the article with some intimate activity or display of such activity while the weight of these words seem to drive us into a hole, for a moment or three, Jack is saying, as a way to wake the dead from their graves--- but I am not thinking of zombie movies as I never believed in them and maybe you can’t believe in them in Southern California since creatures coming out of the desert seem to have more authenticity and we tried not to think that the atom bomb tests were going off closer than anyone dare think about, always avoiding looking at maps of the western part of the United States as they made it all too clear how close these tests were in Nevada or New Mexico... this was before people went to Las Vegas though they went to Reno for a divorce so Reno didn’t seem to be in Nevada but I knew it was in Nevada and I knew what was going on there… those creatures came out of the desert and we had plenty of desert in California… when I came to New York people talked about getting under your school desk during those air-raid drills as they were called and I guess we worried about Japs as we called them during the war coming into America by way of the ocean but the atom bomb was much closer and then it wasn’t close anymore once I was in New York City and being in France took the atom bomb even further away, if I can say something like that, though the French man who told me the joke about why Chinese people have those narrow eyes was always telling Hannah the weather had changed because of the tests the Americans and Russians had been making with their atom bombs… I don’t think anyone worries about atom bomb tests anymore.

         There is a pause, Jack drinks from the glass of water and is saying, maybe hats went away when people no longer worried about atomic tests… hats were always some sort or protection from as they say the elements and people were always hearing about atomic elements but then people are no longer hearing about atomic elements so hats just went away I guess to be replaced by all the bad stuff people put into their stomachs and how they are supposed to avoid this or that but what I don’t understand: why do people seem to get fatter and fatter when there’s all this talk about the junk you eat and junk inside even the food that is not junk?

                             PART ELEVEN

THE TRADITIONAL NOVEL                                          WHILE EXPECTING                                                        CONSISTENCY AND ORDER IS                                  SOMETIMES AS IT WERE                                             INVADED BY AN ILLUSIVE                                        SECTION THAT IS SKIPPED BY                                 THE NODDING EDITORIAL EYE                                 AND PEN.

         The room behind the room where Wesley sits in his chair is the scene of the food preparation.  He is not provided a menu with pencil to check off his desires.  He is presented with bowls and expected to empty them.  The food seems to be prepared in such a way that either a fork or a  spoon are the only eating instruments Wesley needs when moving the food from bowl to mouth.  Gradually the spoon is likely to come to be the sole instrument of movement and the observer should not be jumping ahead of the inevitable narrative. 

A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS MCGONIGLE

A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS MCGONIGLE

ABOUT HIS FORTHCOMING NOVEL

ST. PATRICK’S DAY: another day in Dublin

OBVIOUSLY ST. PATRICK’S DAY: another day in Dublin, A NOVEL TO BE PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS, IS A CITY NOVEL IN THE TRADITION OF THOSE OTHER IRISH WRITERS OF CITY NOVELS: JOYCE, BECKETT, STUART, O’BRIEN. BUT YOU WERE NOT BORN IN DUBLIN, SO WHY THE CITY?

My grandparents were spit out of County Donegal, Ireland in 1889 at the age of 12 like so much possibly tubercular phlegm.  They became inhabitants of Brooklyn and none of their many children graduated from high school and all of them died of alcoholism or the effects of alcohol. During all my years of living in Ireland I have only gone twice to the countryside.  Jokingly I say pints don’t grow on trees but I knew and know that the countryside is The Famine.  To be Irish and to celebrate the countryside is to celebrate a death of too many sorts but it also seems as thoughtless as a Jewish person celebrating German culture in spite of…. Do I really need to say more?

WHEN AND WHERE DID THE ACTUAL ST. PATRICK’S DAY: another day in Dublin BEGIN?

On the second floor of Patchogue High School in November, 1961 when I saw Melinda Brady and was unable to talk to her or introduce myself to her.  She was two years younger than me and a sophomore to my being a senior.  I decided to write a short story about an American soldier in France who dies in the trenches of WWI on the 6^th of November 1918 with thoughts of a Melinda Bradley in his head.  There was no response and so I wrote a second story but this time from her viewpoint of going down to the train station in Indiana and discovering his death.

THAT SEEMS LIKE A VERY ROUNDABOUT WAY OF TALKING ABOUT…?

Is there any other way of so describing the origin of a novel of the type that I have written and which I am obviously interested in?  I finally did meet Melinda upon my return from Dublin in June of 1965 and I went about with her in Patchogue and into the city for the summer.  But unlike a certain type of Danish movie we are still alive with her living in Northern Maine with her third husband and I am living in New York City with my third wife.

WHAT DOES ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH YOUR BOOK?

I arrived in Dublin in September, 1964 by way of the over-night ferry from Glasgow.  It had been a rough crossing and I along with many others, including infants in their mother’s arms, had thrown up.  I tried to read the first book I had bought in Europe—if Glasgow can be thought of as a part of Europe—Samuel Beckett’s From an Abandoned Work.  I also bought William Burroughs Dead Fingers Talk. The four days in Glasgow, after stopping for a few days in Iceland, the painting of the crucified Christ by Dali, the anarchists in George Square, a performance of the Caucasian Chalk Circle in the Citizens Theatre prepared me for the Dublin I walked that first morning from the quays to along O’Connell Street up to a bed and breakfast down the street from the Joycian school, Belvedere. And a few hours later the walk to the Friends meeting rooms on Eustace Street, a street in which I would live years later again on the top floor of a commercial building now torn down… and then still another walk in the early afternoon across Stephen’s Green to talk with a priest in Newman House about seeing after accommodation while at UCD and he sent me to 5 Orwell Park  where I would spend that first year as a paying guest of the Opperman Family who ran/owned Jurys Hotel. Breakfast was presented to me in my room  every morning and a Sunday lunch was provided.  I was very fortunate when compared to many who found themselves in “digs” with landladies who counted the slices of toast and the minutes in the bath…

IS ALL OF THIS IN YOUR BOOK?

It is not for me to destroy any sort of suspense the reader might have when reading my book.  It does take place on St Patrick’s Day… in Dublin…  though in those years 1964-65 it had not acquired its subtitle, but more about that a bit later. A day starting in a building that will be torn down and ending in another building that will be torn down.  It will be said that only this book remains to remember when…

TELL US ABOUT BULGARIA AND HOW IT IS PART OF YOUR BOOK , WHICH IS SET IN DUBLIN.

The close reader will notice towards the end of the book the reproduction of a check to a Lilia McGonigle for 500,000 pounds from the poet Derek Mahon and a headline FROM DUBLIN TO BULGARIA.  In the so-called time of the novel none of the characters knew that one day both Ireland and Bulgaria would find themselves in the same social club called the European Community.  Lilia arrived at Dun Laoghaire by ferry with me, with the recognized narrator of the novel after coming on the overnight boat train from London and before that Paris, Venice and Sofia… having spent Easter in the French countryside. We were met by Eugene Lambe who presented Lilia with her first grapefruit. Derek Mahon was in near attendance and later would write a poem about Eugene being in heaven though my own last memory of Eugene was our eating oysters together in Longacre in London where he was held hostage in a attic room by a small sculpture by David Hockney and the complete edition of My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Akexander Herzen … however that is not in ST PATRICK’S DAY: another day in Dublin. Lilia and the narrator of the novel happily did not have to avail themselves of the generosity of the poet and the check was saved as reminder of a more lasting treasure we were fortunate to find in Dublin.

COULD YOU EXPLAIN THE SUBTITLE OF THE BOOK?

Happily. It was supplied by Anna Saar who is my third and last wife. Her first language is Estonian and the close reader will have noticed the dedication in the book which is in the Estonian language and I am sure recourse to a handy Irish-Estonian Dictionary will reveal the nature of the precisely worded delight contained in that aspect of the book… a detail even close readers will appreciate as such is not included in a certain book by Mr. James Joyce and thus a significant difference between the two books.

HOW DID ST. PATRICK’S DAY another day in Dublin ARRIVE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS IN SOUTH BEND, INDIANA, AND SOON THE WORLD AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE NOTRE DAME REVIEW PRIZE?

That’s a long question and deserves a short answer.  The angels were on duty. 

THE LONG ANSWER:  The editor of the Notre Dame Review, William O’Rourke had the good well-developed taste to publish two pieces of other books by me: “Then” a prepared slide from Just Like That, a book from the Sixties of the last century, that was involved in part with Anthony Burgess, and “The Beginning of a Traditional Novel for the Twenty-First Century,” a book I am still composing that revolves around the painter John “Jack” Wesley who is not yet dead.  Mr. O’Rourke had heard that ST. PATRICK’S DAY, which had not acquired its subtitle, was available—I will not go into the immediate reason for it being available as it is all too sordid to retell in such a pleasant circumstance as this. Mr. O’Rourke read the manuscript very quickly in the late summer of 2014 and the prize was awarded and here it is.  We share an affection for the writings of Edward Dahlberg and of course take consolation in Dahlberg’s wise words, “It takes a long time to understand nothing.”

AND THE FUTURE? 

Having even a more limited ability to predict the future than the Weatherman or should I say Weatherperson though Weatherwoman sounds more interesting and I have never met a woman who was not far more accurate in her predictions than…. But that is…  I hope the book will find a few readers who are interested in reading a book they have not read many more times before.  Of course Notre Dame seems an ideal place for such a book but then there is also Ireland itself with its native delight in begrudgery and I hope to see the book appear in Estonian, Bulgarian, Japanese, Swedish, Icelandic, Turkish, Russian… of course I worry about what people in Patchogue will think of it and the shades that inhabit Grosvenor Square, in Dublin, and it should be remembered that the duck counters are there as they always are in St Stephen’s Green since they are counting for all of us…

BUT SURELY AFTER THE FUTURE COMES THE PAST?

Yes, a 12 year old boy is always being put on a boat for America having walked from Malin Head, Co. Donegal to… he will give up his name Patrick in Brooklyn and take on Hugh which he will pass to Hugh Jr., my father, whose dying will be financing the opening scene in ST. PATRICK’S DAY: another day in Dublin…

ANY WARNINGS?        

All the sexualities are present in these pages, all the versions of intoxication, all of the versions of reading and being read, all the ways of… not dying… just yet.

Book Information:

St. Patrick's Day

another day in Dublin

Thomas McGonigle

Notre Dame Review Book Prize

ISBN 978-0-268-03538-9

240 pages

$27.00 hardback

Pub date: August 19, 2016

University of Notre Dame Press

Thomas McGonigle is available for interviews.

Contact: Kathryn Pitts, Marketing Manager, University of Notre Dame Press, e: pitts.5@nd.edu, p: 574.631.3267

PUBLICATION AND REALITY

THREE

I hope this can be seen as a forgivable act of... something or other, but here is the cover for the book to appear at end of August or early September from U of Notre Dame Press....

FOUR

And then there was this in the TLS

               Thirlwell is one of those British writers like Tom McCarthy and Martin Amis who seem to afflict themselves upon the world armed with suitable connections, a modicum of talent and a great deal of cunning... none of them will be mourned upon passing except  possibly by relatives... and my evidence:  B.S. Johnson and Anthony Burgess yet there are mumbles: where are the women? and again I can cite three: Anna Kavan, Mary Butts and Jean Rhys which will allow me to add Alan Burns... I know that Amis lurks in Brooklyn and that fact along with Jonathan Safran Foer and Paul Auster also living beasts now there makes me wish not to have been born into a house on Willoughby Avenue--- on top of it...

                                  SIX

             It took a while but I finally got a copy of Ivo Andric's SIGNS BY THE ROADSIDE.  I am sure you all know he is the author of The Bridge on the Drina though I value him even more for his BOSNIA CHRONICLE and the shorter work ZEKO.  Yet, SIGNS is a collection of fragments from journals kept for most of his life.  Foresaking chronology--- that constant temptation to pay attention to the clock of all things--- Andric just arranges the fragments on the page and could do it many other ways... I was going to quote one or two of the longer passages but why?... I am a lousy typist and if you don't find the book....  only 1000 copies printed in English in Beograd...  but here is a tiny fragment:     

I could take as my motto the name of a Canadian ship: I'm Alone.  But I have no motto, either.


             [And thanks to the internet;  I'M ALONE  was an actual ship sank by the US Coast Guard when it was caught smuggling alcohol from Belize into the USA...]

               The book goes on the little shelf with Cioran's THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, a rotating volume of Valery's NOTEBOOKS and Rozanov's SOLITARIA which I came to at the suggestion of Edward Dahlberg who also suggested Shestov's IN JOB'S BALANCES


                              EIGHT

Thinking of these books and these thoughts I even created a hope in myself that someone would invite me to Pula, Beograd and Sofia... aren't books meant to both transport and ...

BUT the reality in a recent ECONOMIST:  in Britain the average sale of a novel written in English is 263 copies while a translated novel sells 531 copies...back in 2001  a novel in English sold on the average 1153 copies and a translate novel sold 482...

SOON ENOUGH

                  a start in some fashion of something on a Tuesday in May

                 SOON ENOUGH

 Saul Bellow wrote two good novels, but come to think of it, really only one: The Dangling Man.  I was going to include Herzog, even taking it down from a dusty top shelf but Bellow’s nerve left him and he had to put in a lot of filler between the letters Herzog is writing…  you know?... there was this guy George Garrett who had plenty of nerve and wrote two books that for me live on: Double Vision and Poison Pen… but it is Poison Pen that’s still jumping and shaking, being mostly letters from either Garrett or a guy he has stand in for him to people who are famous or once were and probably will only survive because they got mentioned in this book… and I won’t bother to mention their names, right now, as you’ll probably tell me how they do actually live on and all the rest of it but I will get to the rest of it soon enough.

But the thing that both Bellow and Garrett has:  each of them was interested in writing about “real” people… of course they made up “characters” and all the rest of it... but as Ginsberg dreamed of Kerouac’s books being published in heaven... for then, a moment, a more plausible place though the accident of being published by a so-called real publisher was actually Kerouac’s death warrant and it was only time before he would bleed to death in a Florida hospital…. like a friend of mine, Charlie Conklin sitting on a chair with a towel filling up with blood wrapped around his crotch, outside Foley’s, over there in the West Village, thanks to the kindness of the bar owner who provided the chair as he didn’t want Charlie to die in his bar since the cops would shut the place for weeks… a dead guy is never good for business…

So I turn to this question: does Europe exist?

DOUBLE VISION by GEORGE GARRETT

                                                                                                                                                                 

I have known Tom Whalen for more than 40 years.  He is one of our best fiction writers, poets and a perceptive and authoritative critic of both literature and movies...  We both miss George Garrett and were recently exchanging notes about his work.  Tom, some years ago, published this review of Garrett's last novel that was sadly not much reviewed.  I hope  this essay will send people to one of those important novels that can change how you think about novel writing and the act of criticism.  In the novel Garrett's quotes from a Thomas McGonigle's article  "A Writer's Life" that Garrett commissioned for the Dictionary of Literary Biography and which is available at the Notre Dame Review website.Whalen has written other essays on Garrett which I will hope to reprint.  

                                                                                                          

             Review of Double Vision by George Garrett

University of Alabama Press, 2004

By Tom Whalen    (whalen.t@gmail.com

            The epigraphs for George Garrett's Double Vision underscore immediately the title's implied dialectical shiftings between fact and fiction: "Anything processed by memory is fiction," says Wright Morris, to which Garrett opposes Naipaul's "I would prefer fact." 

            In the novel's first paragraph we encounter the author, in all but flesh, speaking to us straight up as one George Garrett, recently having undergone an MRI and suffering from myastsemia gravis, a disease characterized by "double vision, drooping eyelids, muscle weakness and fatigue, occasional problems maintaining balance"—in general the body does a sort of slow fade.  Our narrator is at the kitchen window looking for a crow he has heard caw: "most likely a handsome fellow [. . .], a glossy shard of darkness, at this moment far from the fellowship of his black caucus . . ."  There is the sound of the crow, its "[r]eedy, repetitive caw."  There are the nutbrown facts of its location: "He is out there high and all alone in the budding branches of the sweetgum tree next door.  Peter Taylor's sweetgum tree, close by the toothpick fence marking the line between his place and mine."  But we can't see the crow, only hear it, "he is long gone."  As is, the next paragraph tells us, Peter Taylor, to which depends the paragraph (complete): "Death is much on my mind these days." 

            But look again at the novel's apparent straightforwardness and casual clarity, for beneath them lie, as behind any mask, a wealth of deceptive shiftings.  Double Vision is the tale of a writer/professor (retired) named George Garrett writing about, in part, his late next door neighbor, the writer Peter Taylor, their similarities and differences (that divide "between his place and mine") while at the same time in superimposition (double vision) writing about his fictional counterpart, novelist and retired professor Frank Toomer's relationship with his famous-writer neighbor Aubrey Carver.  Both Garrett and Toomer have been given an assignment to write a review of a biography of their respective neighbors.         

            As in his Elizabethan trilogy Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun and his novels set in contemporary time, most recently The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You, Garrett explores the relationship of truth to the "liar's craft" of fiction and the treacheries fame can effect on the self.  Double Vision, besides being a testament to old age and disease ("the crummy and depressing little radiology waiting room full of sweat smell and sad humanity"), is a meditation on fame and its close cousin oblivion.  In it, memory merges with fiction, fact with fantasy, and behind the elegiac tone lies a ghostly, welcoming laughter. 

            The novel's third epigraph comes from Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life and concerns that "Patriarch of shifters," the Elizabethan (and short-lived, 1558-92) "university wit," poet, pamphleteer, playwright, drunkard and poseur Robert Greene: "With Greene we cannot always separate fact from fiction in the fantasies he composed on autobiographical themes, or the legend made of him by his contemporaries."  The crow that caws to the narrator and reader at the beginning and off and on throughout the book, besides a real crow on the page and in the air, wears the feather of allusion.  The first reference to Shakespeare in print can be found in  Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte (1592), when he tweaks that jack-of-all-trades, "upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, [. . .] the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."

            George Garrett's Double Vision is a brilliant, post-modern/Elizabethan marvel, a clear-eyed take on the writing life and its practitioners living and dead.  It's also a tribute to Peter Taylor, a diatribe against America's historical amnesia, a self-interview, a book review ("In a larger sense, I suppose, we can therefore consider this whole piece, fact and fiction tangled together, as a kind of an extended book review."), yet another academic novel ("The 'academic novel' has been kicking around for more than half a century, a well-explored and well-exploited genre, good ones and bad ones and (surprise surprise) mostly mediocre . . ."), a sifting and sorting of the past ("Feeling stronger than I have been, feeling a little more energy, I have decided to try to straighten up my attic office, years out of control."), cultural commentary ("public events, in their edited versions and repeated images, seem to possess the demonic power to trivialize what is best about us and to bring out the worst in almost everybody."), a satire ("Consider: if Jonathan Swift was right, that happiness is 'a state of being well-deceived,' then what do you make of a whole nation and its people being dedicated to 'the pursuit of happiness'?"), a postcard to the world:

Though I have loved you and lost you, times beyond counting, still I write again upon this instant, being in receipt of all your ordinary music, to inform you that I can't live without you.  I intend, by God and hell or high water, rain and sleet and snow and the wild spins of the wheel of fortune, to come back for more of the same.

            Double Vision may seem to have, as Garrett says of his house in Charlottesville, Virginia, a "sense of being all casually cobbled together," but in its structure, development, doubling motifs and bright connections it is anything but casual.  Double Vision gradually shifts from George Garrett reflecting on his life and the lives (and deaths) of other writers (Greene, Taylor, Larry Levis), to his fictional Frank Toomer writing about Aubrey Carver and realizing he cannot write the review of Carver's biography, but instead must think again about writing a novel on Robert Greene.  Then, in a masterful dissolve, we're in the 1590's at the moment Greene is tossed out of the Fighting Cock into a muddy street of London. 

            Damn the rain and the mud and the coarse laughter of strangers at this antic man in his cloak of goose-turd green rising up now from the mud as if he had been buried there and were rising again from among the dead intending to frighten folks out of their wits.  The cloak is all besplattered, his long hair and his pointy beard, naturally red enough to play the part of Judas Iscariot without any color or cosmetic, are covered with the mud and his face as dark as any African Moor's.

            The writer puts on the mask of a writer writing about writing, but the mask finally dissolves, vanishes, and all that's left is fiction, words on the page as present as the "cloud of presences" Garrett felt around him one night.  "I felt the presence and nearness of all my dead, close kinfolk and others too, friends and lovers of long ago and most mostly lost to memory by now."

            Neither we nor Garrett knows what that "something" is that the crow "calls out [. . .] loud and clear."  "A lone crow, a fragment of the night perched up high in a huge old tree, has called out something, a message I cannot decode or translate, and then flown away."  The important thing is that it called us to the window and, though we can't see it, we know it was there. 

                                                                                                -- Tom Whalen

First published in The Texas Review Vol. XXV, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2004.