FLEUR JAEGGY

         On the anticipated publication by New Directions of two new books by FLEUR JAEGGY : THESE POSSIBLE LIVES and  I AM THE BROTHER OF X.X. in July 2017.

           Here is a review that was never published of SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE by Fleur Jaeggy.  New Directions.  I forget why either the Washington Post or Chicago Tribune refused to publish my review back in 1993.

       Sweet Days of Discipline is a masterpiece.  Probably there is no overcoming a reader’s skepticism at reading such a sentence.  Frankly, I was also skeptical about my own initial reading of the book and so to check it I took the advice in the blurb by Joseph Brodsky, “Reading time is approximately four hours.  Remembering time as for the author, the rest of one’s life.”

INTERJECTION:   I wrote this review in 1993... so 24 years later… not a word has to be changed.

        Rereading Jaeggy’s novel I found myself increasingly sadder because the novel is short and the inevitable last page gets closer and closer: I wanted to continue to live in the world of the author’s sensibility and dreading the difficulty of how to convince another to read it…

         Like all truly great works of literature the story can be summed up quite simply.  The un-named narrator is remembering a year, among many years in the 1950’s spent at a boarding school in Switzerland.  But this year was different because it was the year that a new girl, Frederique, was also a student at the same school. The novel traces out the course of that year and the growing friendship between the two girls.

        Every cliché that such a situation might suggest is avoided:  there is no sadistic headmistress, no randy kitchen help, no lesbian sexual encounters.  Instead Jaeggy creates an entire world populated by the children of the high bourgeois of Europe who are destined to be equally comfortable in Zurich, as in Paris, Milan or Munich.

The opening of the novel suggests in the sureness of the language what is to come:

       “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzeel.  This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college.  He died in the snow.  Photographs show his footprints and the position of the body in the snow.  We didn’t know the writer.  And nor did our literature teacher. Sometime I think it might be nice to die like that, after a walk to let yourself drop into a natural grave in the snow of the Appenzeel after almost thirty years of mental hospital in Herisau.  It really was a shame we didn’t know of Walser’s existence, we would have picked a flower for him.  Even Kant, shortly before his death was moved when a women he didn’t know offered him a rose.”

         Upon re-reading this opening paragraph I am again captivated by the tone of elegiac sadness and the author’s ability to both distance and involve the reader.  I am flattered in my knowing who Robert Walser is and having seen those famous photographs of his death steps and I appreciate the apt detail from the life of Kant which avoids the commonplace of the citizen of Koenigsberg setting their clocks to the punctuality of his daily walk through the town.

      Such a paragraph sets the tone and allow the reader to enter Jaeggy’s world by remembering too that he or she has probably had a similar experience of growing up.  Going to grammar school in Patchogue on Long Island I did not know and my teachers did not know that Henry David Thoreau had passed through Patchogue on his way to look for the bones of Margaret Fuller who had drowned off of Fire Island, opposite Patchogue.

         Never have I read such an accurate description of the process by which one attempts to become the friend of another--- knowing that friendship is the near physical absorption of the other.

        “In our lives at school, each of us, if we had a little vanity, would establish a facade,  a kind of double life, affect a way of speaking, walking, looking.  When I saw her writing I couldn’t believe it.  We also most all had the same kind of handwriting, uncertain, childish with round wide ‘o’s. Hers was completely affected. (Twenty years later I saw something similar in a dedication Pierre Jean Jouve had written on a copy of “Kyrie.”)

(LATER: again I was flattered as of course I knew the French writer, didn’t everyone at that moment who really read even only in English)  

Of course I pretended not to be surprised, I barely glanced at it.  But secretly I practiced  And I still write like Frederique today, and people tell me I have beautiful handwriting.”

          And I too remembering a boy who came to my school in four grade in Patchogue who wrote with the left hand and of how I tried to write with my left hand so as to become this friend.  And to think how far away a boarding school in Switzerland is from Patchogue!

       But the novel does not isolate the narrator: she takes walks dislikes her roommate rejects another girl who wants to be her friend.  The narrator suggests a complete world and that is what we demand of an author: invent a world into which we can fall, slide, insinuate our own experience.

       Of course Frederique is not destined for great happiness but for something more interesting: she has taken up residency in the memorial heart of both the narrator and the reader.

         An anthology of epigrammatic items of truth could be culled from this book and to set it in its proper context the reader would have tocall to mind such books as Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles or Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers or Fred Uhlman’s Reunion.

-->

      Years after the year at the school the narrator runs into Frederique at the cinemateque in Paris.  They go back to her attic room, “Frederique was about twenty now.  She dressed as she always had.  A dark zinc grey over body, narrow hips, long neck.  The jugular was pulsing. She had pushed back her hood. The pale oval of her face, legs crossed.  The perfection of school days had taken up residence in this room of hers… She lives, I thought, as if she were in a grave.”

PS  I did not describe  Jaeggy's other books, LAST VANITIES, SS PROLETERKA, THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, I AM THE BROTHER  OF XX... I did not write about Jaeggy's husband Roberto Calasso... I suspect that SS PROLETERKA belongs in the Pantheon of the greatest of modern books... I guess you can say I hold Jaeggy's book in the same imaginary hand that I also hold the books of Hannah Green, ERNST JUNGER, GLENWAY WESCOTT, JULIAN GREEN, JUAN CARLOS ONETTI, JOSE LEZAMA LIMA, PETER NADAS...

trees on the hill ain't talking

        trees on the hill having nothing to say
                                  ---Nick Drake

          -five-

       On a Thursday I went walking out... walking is shedding the recent present moment while in response to what is seen... a bringing back to life that something, that someone, that moment, in the garden between Second and First Avenue...

     
      ---five---

....so along First Street to HOWL HAPPENING  where they had AMPLIFIED SPACE  an installation by Jonnny Detiger.  You could sit in a series of plastic cubicles on a pillow covered cube and listen to versions of disco music.  Howl in a space that tries to capture the ephemeral aspects of the present and the recent past and more ephemeral the better...  the one word that is always avoided: why?...  There are usually nicely printed catalogues that sell for $20+ dollars and written in a language defying criticism or understanding.

And then.

                ---five---

           SPERONE WESTWATER on the Bowery.  I have been going to this gallery since the 80s when they were in SOHO.  Their building is a very functional modern building and the space is made up of three floors.  I often think it is the best gallery in NYC, the most sensual, the most...  and today paintings by KATHERINE BRADFORD  (the photographs do no real justice to her work because  long ago as a result of reading THE ART OF ARTS by Anita Albus who definitively for me anyway showed that any work of art had to be seen for one's self and not to rely on reproductions, no matter the quality. And I was glad to have never taken a art history class with those awful slide shows I had heard about.  There was a reason people went on tours of the grand places in Europe: to see for the self...)

and a second painting

and a third painting

         A certain mystery and a depiction of powerlessness, stasis, a hoping... the unwell in great baths... each isolated within his or her own pain.

        Or not...I guess we are to talk of paint, color,...

----five five---

          And one continues to walk south of Bowery...by the men's shelter... the frantic remodeling....  after saying goodbye to W.H. Auden... which recalls and I even discovered that I have been quoted:

https://books.google.com/books?id=8e6ECgAAQBAJ&pg=PT52&lpg=PT52&dq=%22Goodbye+W.H.+Auden%22+%2B+%22thomas+McGonigle%22+%2B+%22Village+Voice%22&source=bl&ots=5QY-fNmfEk&sig=Yh2DipjkSCWb09c_BB0rtq82dlU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjkhuadrOPRAhWIRyYKHYwGA88Q6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=%22Goodbye%20W.H.%20Auden%22%20%2B%20%22thomas%20McGonigle%22%20%2B%20%22Village%20Voice%22&f=false

       Which was a story I wrote about being at the moment W.H. Auden left NYC... that aftermath took place in a loft opposite the shelter...the woman... a go-go dancer of... a model... living with a dealer and another... years later I ran into this woman who had survived in some fashion...


https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19720504&printsec=frontpage&hl=en


      ---five five---

      Walkartexhibition.com.  Of shoes designed by art students in Israel in the form of a pop-up display of shoes right down from a show of outsider art...complete with a pleasant friendly talkative hostess  who tolerates me going on about shoes in TRASH...the memorable scene of Holly Woodlawn resisting the welfare worker's demand for the shoes she is wearing and I am even talking about my Daughter in the musical Guys and Dolls because there is a shoe dedicated to Lady Gaga, and I am saying my daughter was in the play with the then girl who would become Lady Gaga... of course the photographs were only focused on the daughter rather than on the other girl who was going to be...though Elizabeth is now in this gallery and 

One of the displays saying more than the artist could possibly imagine or am I mistaken

  

---five---

         In another gallery 11R on Christie Street  the truly useless and vulgar and am surprised by my thinking this... a horse peeing by TM DAVY... to what purpose, what wall to bear such a work... the cock lake of Joyce opening..

                        ---five five five---

          Near the end of the walk and the finding myself back again living up MiLady's on the corner of Thompson and Prince in a tiny three room  apartment to which ruth and I moved from the Earle Hotel, back then when the woman who had the apartment was moving to a better one, a garden one at that, for less than what we would be paying $160 a month... and the working as a messenger for Maple Vail and also at New Morning Bookstore on Spring Street... 

....but the reason for being back then was looking at the work of Boris Lurie  that is on display t Westwood Gallery on the Bowery

          I should have taken other pictures of his work as he was doing something that must have caught my eye:  great collages using photographs from  men's magazines and combining them with news clippings... Lurie was a survivor of the Nazi murder camps, lived as bohemian anti-artist in NYC while slowly and very quietly acquiing a vast fortune in penny stocks and slum properties so that his estate is now keeping his work alive... that impulse embedded in the great dadaists of another time... but my own homage I still have and took a picture of part of it...and this hung on the wall of the apartment above MiLady's.  You can see Brezhnev makes an appearance as does Joan Crawford  and Catapult 70 was a construction on the top of the tall building on the southwest corner of Houston and Broadway...I don't remember the name of the guy..but you climbed up this ladder and then further as if to be thrown into space

               ---five---

     A review of a book that still remains of interest.
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/mar/13/books/bk-mcgonigle13

A CONSEQUENCE:  My article in the Village Voice on W.H. Auden followed by another one A SON'S FATHER'S DAY allowed me to believe the delusion that I was a published writer and did not need a second Master's degree, in this case from Columbia..so I didn't bother to type up the pages I had written in the two years I was at Columbia..though being at Columbia I was given among others friends and acquaintances such as Hannah Green, John Wesley, William O'Rourke, Anthony Burgess, Nicanor Parra, Julio Marzan, David Black, Jakov Lind, Nelida Pinon, David Huddle, Richard M. Elman,  Al Levine, Marcia Cebulska, T.E.D. Klein...

NO RESOLUTIONS

                            

End of  the year

A bright sunny day to be alone in NYC waiting for Christmas as in mind I am walking from the youth hostel in Flensburg, Germany in 1964, to the Catholic church for Mass to discover of course it was in German, unlike the Latin of my whole childhood and looking back now one of the unintended consequences of giving up the Latin Mass was a reinforcement of local ethnic and national distinctions all of which were kept imperfectly to be sure, in check in a small way as the common use of Latin in itself was a real way of saying there was something more than that crummy place--- and all are such--- where one comes from

In the new year

This AM sitting in the car for alternate side of the street parking I was missing in a very deep way the late George Kamen who some of you knew was a psychoanalyst and a good friend and best man at my wedding to  Anna Saar.... the provocation to thought: reading Thomas Mann's essay on Freud in which Mann writes, there is no deeper knowledge without experience of disease... but he suggests that freedom or a form of health comes when we remove the walls that are created by age so we can again have the truth within the pangs and anguishes of youth...

                                      PART THREE

                                            ONE         

        Some months ago I published a blog post that opened with the description of the burial of the remains of Pati Hill, the writer and photocopier artist,  in Stonington, CT.  I then went on to reveal prepared slides from a number of my unpublished books: EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS, JUST LIKE THAT, NOTHING DOING... http://abcofreading.blogspot.com/2016/10/a-failure-to-accept-and-to-understand.html

                           TWO
       
       This was probably a futile exercise, an example of the foreboding frustration at what was then becoming apparent: my ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin was destined to fail to find any recognition beyond a long review in the Dublin Review of Books by George O'Brien. http://www.drb.ie/essays/time-gentlemen

      To be more complete: the Irish Echo did run a little article mostly written by myself http://irishecho.com/2016/10/portrait-of-a-young-visitor/

                         THREE        
        
         And there was a short review article by the former owner of the Facsimile Bookstore in NYC--- an Irish bookshop which back then was just off Fifth Avenue on 55th Street :http://www.themillbrookindependent.com/content/literary-underground-crawl

                         FOUR

         The first sections then called of ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974 appeared in the Spring, 1982 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction which was devoted to the work of Douglas Woolf and Wallace Markfield.  There also brief selections from a work of VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY on Andrei Bely and a selection from a novel by KENNETH TINDALL  entitled THE BANKS OF THE SEA.  

       I would hope that anyone who might read these lines would need no introduction to the work of Markfield, Woolf, Tindall and Shklovsky.  Though it is possible Tindall is quite obscure though still among the living.  His first novel GREAT HEADS was the last literary novel published by Grove Press , when Grove Press was the best publisher in the United States ( think, Beckett, Genet, Burroughs, Rechy,  Henry Miller, Kerouac).  After Great Heads came out Tindall found himself in Denmark where he became a mailman and married with children but continued to write and was a translator.  He lived in the Beat Hotel in Paris when the more famous also resided there.
      The Banks of the Sea is a book of great pain and violence mental and physical... it moves about the Lower East Side of Manhattan when there were cargo cults of the desperate young...
       I wonder if anyone else knows Kenneth Tindall?


                                    PART THREE

        SOME books I am liking and hope others might have read them or would want to read them.

        BOSCH & BRUEGEL  by Joseph Leo Koerner. (Princeton University Press) .  A beautiful illustrated study of these two artists free mostly of the art work jargon which allows us to look again closely at these two painters... rare it is that an art writer is able to do this, who allows us to see for ourselves... most art writing draws attention to the writer instead of...

MEDITERRANEAN A Cultural Landscape by Predrag Matvejevic ( University of California Press, 1999).  The book is just that, a meditation on that sea... introduced by the author of DANUBE Claudio Magris who mentions  that Matvejevic writes "being different is not in itself a value." 

FIBRILS  by Michel Leiris (Yale University Press).  Finally book three of Leiris's autobiography RULES OF THE GAME, translated by Lydia Davis...  a bit more problematic as it reveals Leiris as one of those "useful idiots" who the communists so wonderfully used for their own purposes in covering up massacre after massacre...the book opens with Leiris in China and there is nothing worse than the French for celebrating Maoism in its most vile version... and of course if you fly in first class, stay in first class hotels etc... anyplace can seem wonderful... but fortunately the whole book is not given over to this aberrant detour as there is... (more to come in a future post)

KID GLOVES  by Adam Mars-Jones.  Some know his book on Ozu's Late Spring, NORIKO SMILING  which is one of the great evocative books that lets me see this movie and why it went deep into my central nervous system...  Mars-Jones also has book of stories LANTERN LECTURE  which like Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes are about the only two books of fiction published by English writers that can be honorably compared to B.S. Johnson and Alan Burns...as being truly modern books...there is really nothing else in English prose fiction... [but please  I am not forgetting Anthiny Burgess for a moment] but KID GLOVES  is Mars-Jones's detailed beautiful description of his father and the relationship of father/son.  I am totally jealous of his accomplishment. [more also later]  It exists in a beautiful edition from Particular books a imprint of Penguin Books

THE GOLDEN COCKEREL by Juan Rulfo.. finally more from Juan Rulfo 

And then there are those constant standbys as I think of certain modern books:
PARALLEL STORIES by Peter Nadad
"I" by Wolfgang Hilbig
THE WALL by  D.H.  ADLER
PATERSON by William Carlos Williams
Ulysses by James Joyce
and two books by Gregor Von Rezzori  THE ORIENT EXPRESS and ANECDOTAGE

three quotes:  "They strolled through Central Park and on Fifth Avenue.  The steps in front of the Metropolitan  were as usual covered with a motley array of people looking like participants in a pseudo-folklore tramp's ball. What are all these people doing hanging around art treasures, Denise wondered "like beggars in front of a church."  He was about to answer  that this was indeed a kind of church: a temple of culture.  Nowadays on Sunday morning, educated people went to a museum rather than to church" 157-158

"the hectic monotony of the Manhattan every day."

"With nary a pang he departed from Europe, which was already trading in its identity for a tidy chunk of America."

          I am such a lousy typist.  

         I can't go on typing out quotes.... but Von Rezzori has the right sour tone:   

                        even years later 

for the moment today 
when we find ourselves in the United States  with a new president who was voted against by the rich--- who according to those who opposed him--- is actually working only in the interests of the rich to the exclusion of the poor proles who had voted for him... 

though the new president is the first president to attempt to talk directly to the American public via Twitter...  a constant "fireside chat" as one heard FDR made in another dire time... 

but in this day, right now: the atomization of the individual is now nearly complete... see the work of Ernst Junger

that moment we were always warned of.... growing up when facing God at the particular judgement... alone... alone...alone... no witnesses to be called, no commentators, no excuses... only absolutely self-centered even when pretending to be interested in some particular other...

NO CURIOSITY

NO CURIOSITY: the present as the future after a visit to the University of Notre Dame

ST. PATRICK’S DAY another day in Dublin is the 2016 Notre Dame Review Book Prize winner and as such was published by the University of Notre Dame Press.  Additionally, I received $1000.00 and there was to be a reading at the university for which I would receive $500.00, a round trip airplane ticket and, at first, only one night in a motel that was extended to two nights. 

Originally, I had been scheduled to fly out Wednesday (the day after Election Day in November) have a meal with some people from the university, do the reading and then fly back to New York on the 6AM flight Thursday.

Looking back, I guess, I should have stuck with the original plan.  But I suggested it might be nice to meet with students and I had wanted to hear Nuala Ni Dhomnaill read on the Friday as she was a very old friend and been kind enough to be a very early supporter of my book, so my host William O’Rourke offered to put me up in his own house for the third night.

WEDNESDAY.  

Flight from Newark to South Bend is fine.  The room where I am to stay is in an extended stay motel, the perfect setting for slow suicides by solitary drinking or just a quick slash of the wrists in the bathtub: you know the sort of place, re-modeling going on, low ceilings and desk clerks always on the phone…  the place is definitely off-campus…there is a very nice hotel on campus but that is only for big contributing alumni and IMPORTANT PEOPLE (something I was told in a sort of consoling tone of voice)

So quickly to dinner.  A fancy restaurant on campus: French, I guess, expensive… okay, Nuala and her daughter were there, which was nice, the former chair of the creative writing program was there and a recent hire, a war veteran from Princeton… the former chair, Steve Tomasula, was under treatment because of Donald Trump’s victory and has asked to be excused and it is possible other people were asked but…

We had to eat quickly as the reading is coming on…  The veteran bails out before dessert.  I had bought his book WAR PORN [Roy Scranton] and thought it would be interesting to talk about Ernst Junger... but he ate and ran.  The former chair had gone to Columbia a few years after I had gone there.  We probably have at least 50 friends in common as she came from the South and with so many other overlapping interests but she couldn’t come to the reading and no coffee or anything was suggested.  The busy provincial lives, I was thinking.

 [on a break from re-writing this piece I stopped into Mercer Street Books and found a copy of Valery Sayers’ most recent novel THE POWERS. Published by Northwestern in 2012, from the pages inserted: Northwestern University Press got it reviewed by Publishers Weekly and Booklist and it was not done as a print-on-demand book so it at least had the chance of finding an audience, something my own book was denied.  This book buying is an act of curiosity I cannot believe would ever happen with any current student or faculty at Notre Dame]

My host who had given my book the prize took me, Nuala and her daughter to the reading in the bookstore, which is part of a Chicago based chain of college bookstores and Notre Dame stuff was obvious the biggest seller.  We were behind a series of folding screens which separated the reading from at least 25 cash registers just waiting for a footfall weekend… 

Maybe 15 people showed up.  The event was recorded for You Tube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MHAYOXTwo&t=3s //

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRbIFem-zRI&t=44s  //     with a stationary camera…the noise from the bookstore was constant.  

My host made a good introduction and I read and tried to present the book.  

Two people bought books and woman from the press—the only person at the press to have read it as she did the proofreading came and asked me to sign a copy of the book. 

There were no questions.

No one lingered, no one hesitated.

It was over with. 

No one from the creative writing program, no one from the English department as far as I could  tell.

William drove Nuala and her daughter home (a squalid looking Cape Cod house on a dark street that Notre Dame must have gotten in a mortgage default sale) and me to the extended stay motel. 

Later, I ventured out across these wide empty dark streets to the gas station to get some Coke…  the broad deserted roads with only the bright lights of a gas-station.., the eyes of the clerk showed he was glad just an old white man and not a guy with a gun in hand… as was more likely.

So to come this distance to read in a chain-store bookstore and not in a proper academic hall. 

Such is… places like Notre Dame are run by people always alert to the reality of dollars and cents and to nothing that can be claimed as some higher purpose, I guess…

THURSDAY.

The next day I wasn’t invited to the university press to meet the book acquisition editor or the publicity director or anyone. 

I was not invited to any classes and I was not asked to stop by to visit with faculty or the new editor of the Review. 

But a lunch had been arranged so I could meet any interested students who had been told of my reading, told of the lunch and had even been provided with a selection of my writings that I had been asked to supply.

A large not too noisy sports bar on campus.  My host, Nuala, her daughter were there and two students showed up.  I guess free food and drink is no longer a sufficient lure for today’s students.

Two students: the guy sat on my right and the woman on my left. They had not been to the reading, they asked no questions… so I asked what they did… the young man said he was writing a novel about killing a father…I asked really, yes, I kill him 56 times—I might have the number wrong…but that was that… he already had a graduate degree from a university in Kansas and was getting another one from Notre Dame as it was more prestigious, it seems.

           INTERUPTION

           AS can happen after I wrote the post the following was brought to my attention so I take the liberty of here including it

Today, I had the opportunity to have lunch with visiting author Thomas McGonigle; poet and Patrick B. O'Donnell Distinguished Visitor, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; MFA candidate, Bailey Pittenger; and ND's MFA founding director, William O'Rourke. Over the course of the ranging conversations we had, I came to the realization that I don't think a true creative writing education comes from workshops, but from an accumulation of intimate moments between writers.
And I am including the little biographical statement he has on the page of the Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame:
After graduating high school in northern Michigan, Daniel Tharp attended Kirtland Community College for a year before moving half way across the country and graduating from Pittsburg State University with a Bachelors of Arts degree. A Teaching Assistantship, over a hundred students, and two years later, Daniel Tharp graduated from Pittsburg State University with a Masters of Arts degree with emphasis in fiction. His thesis entitled “Home,” which is currently under review for the Distinguish Thesis Award at his Alma Mater, depicts a complex and brutal world where characters struggle not with outside forces but with themselves and what it means to be human. Tharp attends the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program on a Prose Fellowship.

A life story of an atomization so terribly typical of the age we live in...        (back to the original version)
The woman to my left, the same questions… she asked did I know the writer Clarice Lispector?  I said  of course doesn’t everyone?.Did I know of the biography of this woman which had come out?  I did.  It was by a man, she said, so I have decided to write the real stories of this woman, aspects of her  no man could write…  I did not ask if this woman had read Lispector in Portugese, maybe I should have.

I asked if she knew Nelida Pinon? No.  I say, Nelida was Clarice’s last protégé… and then I probably made the mistake of saying I had heard about Clarice from Nelida back in 1971 and knew actually of her work from before then thanks to a book translated by Gregory Rabassa…

I  even went on to mention THE REPUBLIC OF DREAMS by Nelida  as having both a wonderful story and a perfect title for everything we try to do but I guess I was being intimidating as both the woman and the man got away from the lunch as fast as humanly possible.

Am I wrong to think all the students at Notre Dame are so busy, so lacking in even being curious about a book that has at least the minor qualification of getting the designation of the Notre Dame Review Book  Prize… but maybe… who knows? 

All students in the graduate writing program are fully funded as they say so they do not have to work at some disagreeable job in order to eat.

I did run into the distinguished critic and professor, Declan Kiberd in the bookstore of Notre Dame… he has one of the big chairs at the university and I know his books and I mentioned after being introduced that I too had gone to UCD where he had taught--- but I then made what I was told later was a fatal mistake thus triggering BEGRUDGERY--- that I had studied with Denis Donoghue and still visit with Denis who lives in North Carolina…  a provocation that can not go unanswered even though Declan has a very big and lucrative chair at Notre Dame he did not become the Henry James Professor at NYU…

Later that day Bill took me to the Studebaker museum, the art museum at the university and sand dunes up on Lake Michigan… we went to a nice Italian restaurant and talked of the years gone by and how few to come. The last time I had been to the shore of Lake Michigan was in 1968 when I had gone to visit my parents in exile in Menasha, Wisconsin and Lilia and I had to go to see the Lake… but there were no dunes along that shore.

FRIDAY 

I went to Nuala’s reading in a beautiful hall and while not packed, a decent size crowd…  A polite introduction---a recital of her real fame and a listing of the translators (a roll call of all the well known names) as she writes only in Irish and then Nuala read both in Irish and English.  She read from THE FIFTY MINUTE MERMAID.  It is probably the most provocative and emotionally demanding  books in modern Irish poetry, equaled only and then in English by the Peppercanister Poems of Thomas Kinsella.  She was well received.  Questions were asked for and I asked both Nuala and the person introducing her—I think he is the director of the Irish Center---////  It has to be always understood such centers while usually extravagantly funded by Irish Americans have institutionally zero interest in that group known as Irish American or as American Irish--- whose only purpose to is to supply the cash to be spent on THE IRISH(this is not unusual as the same goes for Polish and even in a much more smaller way Estonian centers///    why in the litany--- which it seems like--- of the famous Irish poets who have translated her work into English the name of Michael Hartnett had not been mentioned as he was her first translator… Nuala answered and very  kindly profiled Michael and revealed the reason why but only I knew this is why he was not mentioned:  Michael Hartnett, Nuala said, sadly drank himself to death.

You must understand that such reality is never allowed in any established Irish center—one is never to talk of the consequences of the drink.  The only things more taboo are the high unacknowledged suicide rate and a pervasive criminal underworld in Ireland (north and south) funded by the drug trade in which all the now dormant underground para-military organizations have always been involved.

There was a reception with very good food and drink. 

Declan Kiberd did not talk with me…

I did ask a graduate student what he did?  I am working on Post-colonial Irish and Libyan literature to give it a broader than usual dimension… I felt like bringing up Gaddafi and the IRA but thought better of it…

 No one else approached me or I them---who can blame them—just another old guy--- and since none of them probably knew of my book…who could blame them…everything is so compartmentalized…  why would an English language journal do a book with a title like ST. PATRICK’S… that’s not their territory… 

So, I sat on the sofa and was joined by a woman in the uniform of a domestic worker…. To make longer a story… Nuala a few years before had given this woman  a copy of her book and they had become friends as both were widows…  this woman had been the cleaning lady for the apartment where Nuala has stayed two years ago…  she had seen the signs and came to the reading directly from work… she asked why I was there and she asked after my book so I could say it grew out of the using of the little money from the death of my father to go back to Ireland and we walked about how she and Nuala both being widows knew something and she said it was hard and we both know it.  I am proud Italian woman and my husband was a proud Black man and we had two proud MIXED children… the vehemence of her  voice was so filled with a delicious defiance of a refusal to choose.

         Later, I thought only one person was curious about me and my book and that was a house servant.  Little did she know I was the grandson of two people pushed out of Ireland at age 12 to be servants in New York, and I was still there comfortable really only with this woman…

NEXT MORNING

Up at four A.M. to think and then to get the 6 A.M. flight back to Newark.  It would be useless to remember that more than 50 years before even at a small college like Beloit,  writers like Dickey, Kinnell, Rexroth, Spender, Auden came and had lunch with students and we read their books, sought them out… they seemed to have time… of course people can say: those people are famous but not back then: Dickey and Kinnell were just starting … but the past as L.P. Hartley has it, is foreign country…

My host was very kind but he is retired from Notre Dame so none of this now matters… he has his own books, the memory of his friendship with Edward Dahlberg and I guess the lesson comes from Dahlberg: it takes a long time to understand nothing. And I must, as they say, remember  I was lucky to have 15 students to the reading and those two students were two more than after another reading 20 years before at U of Illinois at Carbondale where no one came to meet me for lunch… after I had read from GOING TO PATCHOGUE.

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And the woman on the couch had a more glowing reality within her life than all the…  she is probably one of the very very few at Notre Dame who can say she is pretty happy with her life… as she knows the sure brevity of all human happiness.