JOHN WESLEY--- THE PAINTER--- DIED 10 FEBRUARY 2022

I am copying this from a post done now it seems in the ancient times of this January 

from WHAT I AM DOING: AND AGAIN CHANGED, JOHN WESLEY

      I have been for a long time writing about the painter John Wesley who was in the first generation of pop artists: a book of memory going back to my first meeting of him in the early 1970s as the husband of the writer Hannah Green (author of THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE and LITTLE SAINT; she was a student of Vladimir Nabokov at Wellesley and published "Mr. Nabokov")... for many years Jack has been unable to leave his apartment on Washington Square and is now at another residence. There have been two great exhibitions of his work: at MOMA's PS 1 in 2000 and in Venice in 2009 a massive exhibition of his work was staged by Fondazione Prada.  A selection of his work is on permanent display at the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

from: WHAT I AM DOING: AND AGAIN CHANGED, JOHN WESLEY

      Hannah still seems to be here.  

    But I can’t sound like those old relatives Hannah always talked about.  I know in Los Angeles you would expect a lot of people to talk about ghosts and voices and spirits and all the rest of those things but it wasn’t the way it was—at least for me--- we were there and they were there and it was all so real, I guess you could say and then someone wasn’t there and that was hard to understand, it is always hard to understand      really understand                how someone isn’t there anymore, Elman isn’t here anymore,  MacShane isn’t here anymore, Hannah isn’t here anymore… but I am not so sure… but I am sure I fell, I really fell not here in this room, did I fall     but in the hall.          I fell in that long hall             I fell..
Here in this room I have fallen, it would be easy to say, it  would be grand to say: here I have fallen, didn’t MacArthur say, I have returned, and he was walking in the surf in the Philippines and I wonder when did he change his trousers and shoes or boots… remember those pictures?... you’ve only seen them in documentaries, but we saw them in newsreels that was in the summer I think and I fell in August and in October.  

Not in this room, really, but in this apartment, I have fallen and I can hear them saying that in a movie, he’s fallen down, he’s down and I felt myself down when I fell in the hall. 

I didn’t hit my head, I knew that was not what you were supposed to do, you are not supposed to hit your head…

Does that make sense?  
People are always talking about hard heads.  Remember when they talked about hard hats… I guess they all went away or something happened to them.  You still see people wearing hard hats but they don’t call those guys hard hats, as far as I know.
Do you ever get the feeling you’re in a hole and some little guys are digging right under your feet and you feel yourself slipping down each day but you’re not really in a hole, you are still right here but you have this feeling in the bottoms of your feet--- you could say it but people will say you’re nuts--- the feet are saying they are going down but the rest of your body is trying to say, no, that ain’t happening and what’s gotten into you and if I was really in a hole I wouldn’t have fallen as all you can do is fall forward like in the movies when the guys went over the top or climbed out of the foxhole, always one of the guys gets it right away and is slipping back into the hole and the other guys just had to keep going though one maybe lingers for a moment and the older gruff know-it-all gives him a yank: he’s done for and then there is always a lull in the movie and someone slips back and finds his friend dead and you don’t see any gore because that only came later, the gore and all the stuff to make it seem believable but they always leave out the feelings so then they had to ladle out the gore as no one really believes this is for real with the slimy red slippery stuff and all you keep wondering if they are using cow guts and gore or if it was a black and white film they used chocolate syrup I was told by a friend who had a friend who worked in one of the studios.  What a mess that must have been but they weren’t allowed to show too much of it so I guess it wasn’t that bad.
I fell.  I don’t want to fall again.  No one wants to fall again after they have fallen once or like me, have fallen twice.  
I have fallen twice and do not want to fall again. Then, it gets too much like Good Friday.  I went along with Hannah, but it was just too distant from me.  Christ falls three times and there are all those women.  Hannah wanted to see the Shroud of Turin, is it… but we had decided for France and that trip to Spain.  MacShane liked Italy but I went where I was taken.  I didn’t know what to say in Italy.  Prada didn’t take me on a gondola and I knew not to buy one of those windup gondolas I saw them selling in San Marco.  You wind it up and it goes up and down as if it was in choppy seas.
Jack had an eye for the windup things… he used to have go down to Chambers Street and there were all these great stores along it filled with stuff.  That’s where he got the bird clock.  
Hannah would take the battery out and I would put it back in.  That was then, I think.
The bird clock is not in the room.  I think it was once and I remember it as being one of those objects, as they say, only Jack could find, a clock that made bird sounds, a different one for every hour.  I don’t know if it did 24 but I know it made 12 and then repeated itself. 12 birds, one for each hour and the hands of the clock should have been some sort of feather design but they weren’t, Hannah knew something about birds and it bothered her that some of the calls weren’t very clear and seemed more like a person imitating what a bird sounded like.  
Jack liked the bird sounds even if they were made by humans as they didn’t toll your hours away and bring your death closer the way a church bell did or the bells ringing out the hours in public buildings…
  Of course, the bells ringing allowed me to quote Anthony Burgess to his knowing when you heard the bells ringing in Christian places of old:  the Mussulmen are coming, the Mussulmen are coming and this is why the bells are not ringing in Turkey because they know what the bells really mean, even if they say they don’t for their own purposes…
There was no reply…
But you should know the room is not sterile, isn’t that the word people sometimes are saying, it’s very sterile in here as if like so many things… how should anyone know what a sterile room is unless they are some sort of medical doctor and anyway have you ever met a doctor who gave a rat’s behind when it came right down to it about germs?
    When I first got to the city they used to have these walk-in doctors and for five dollars they would listen to your symptoms, give you some sort of jar of something or other and a note to the boss… the last one like that was down on Spring Street, when they had factories all over the place…
Things change, they are always saying and they don’t have those doctors anymore.
                                                          ***
Death changes things.  What a cliché.   Yes, people die but no, people is not the exact word:  my father died, my mother died, Hannah died… and I guess it is a good thing we didn’t start with such a sentence. 
Probably better to say, certain people have been forgotten, though their names remain...  but damn:  what do I really know about that person, what can I call up?
I was born, Wesley says.  
Can there be a more obvious statement a human being can make?  If I add in California the statement is surrounded by all the illusions Hollywood so obviously and capably delivers and no one wants to have it contradicted by anything that might take away from the picture a person has formed when they hear: I was born in California and if I revise my sentence to:  I was born in Los Angeles, California, I have been removed from something which I can only tell you about when I tell you about  of all places the Rue Charlemagne in Conques--- what a grand name for a broken cobbled lane--- and Pierre was kicking the wall         not hard as he was a very old man and saying what Hannah translated as : this is here, this is here.  This is real.  I don’t remember the French but I am sure it sounds better in French, everything sounded better in French, I was always thinking, even when people were ordering in the bakery: it was more than just going in to get a loaf of bread when it was being said in French…         
There is nothing to kick when you say, I was born in Los Angeles, California.  Once I heard on the radio, as Bill sometimes had the radio on in the studio.  It was just a line:  Home is…I forgot.  I don’t know who sang it.  Home is…  I forgot.

from WHAT I AM DOING: AND AGAIN CHANGED, JOHN WESLEY

      I have been for a long time writing about the painter John Wesley who was in the first generation of pop artists: a book of memory going back to my first meeting of him in the early 1970s as the husband of the writer Hannah Green (author of THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE and LITTLE SAINT; she was a student of Vladimir Nabokov at Wellesley and published "Mr. Nabokov")... for many years Jack has been unable to leave his apartment on Washington Square and is now at another residence. There have been two great exhibitions of his work: at MOMA's PS 1 in 2000 and in Venice in 2009 a massive exhibition of his work was staged by Fondazione Prada.  A selection of his work is on permanent display at the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

from: WHAT I AM DOING: AND AGAIN CHANGED, JOHN WESLEY

      Hannah still seems to be here.  

    But I can’t sound like those old relatives Hannah always talked about.  I know in Los Angeles you would expect a lot of people to talk about ghosts and voices and spirits and all the rest of those things but it wasn’t the way it was—at least for me--- we were there and they were there and it was all so real, I guess you could say and then someone wasn’t there and that was hard to understand, it is always hard to understand      really understand                how someone isn’t there anymore, Elman isn’t here anymore,  MacShane isn’t here anymore, Hannah isn’t here anymore… but I am not so sure… but I am sure I fell, I really fell not here in this room, did I fall     but in the hall.          I fell in that long hall             I fell..
Here in this room I have fallen, it would be easy to say, it  would be grand to say: here I have fallen, didn’t MacArthur say, I have returned, and he was walking in the surf in the Philippines and I wonder when did he change his trousers and shoes or boots… remember those pictures?... you’ve only seen them in documentaries, but we saw them in newsreels that was in the summer I think and I fell in August and in October.  

Not in this room, really, but in this apartment, I have fallen and I can hear them saying that in a movie, he’s fallen down, he’s down and I felt myself down when I fell in the hall. 

I didn’t hit my head, I knew that was not what you were supposed to do, you are not supposed to hit your head…

Does that make sense?  
People are always talking about hard heads.  Remember when they talked about hard hats… I guess they all went away or something happened to them.  You still see people wearing hard hats but they don’t call those guys hard hats, as far as I know.
Do you ever get the feeling you’re in a hole and some little guys are digging right under your feet and you feel yourself slipping down each day but you’re not really in a hole, you are still right here but you have this feeling in the bottoms of your feet--- you could say it but people will say you’re nuts--- the feet are saying they are going down but the rest of your body is trying to say, no, that ain’t happening and what’s gotten into you and if I was really in a hole I wouldn’t have fallen as all you can do is fall forward like in the movies when the guys went over the top or climbed out of the foxhole, always one of the guys gets it right away and is slipping back into the hole and the other guys just had to keep going though one maybe lingers for a moment and the older gruff know-it-all gives him a yank: he’s done for and then there is always a lull in the movie and someone slips back and finds his friend dead and you don’t see any gore because that only came later, the gore and all the stuff to make it seem believable but they always leave out the feelings so then they had to ladle out the gore as no one really believes this is for real with the slimy red slippery stuff and all you keep wondering if they are using cow guts and gore or if it was a black and white film they used chocolate syrup I was told by a friend who had a friend who worked in one of the studios.  What a mess that must have been but they weren’t allowed to show too much of it so I guess it wasn’t that bad.
I fell.  I don’t want to fall again.  No one wants to fall again after they have fallen once or like me, have fallen twice.  
I have fallen twice and do not want to fall again. Then, it gets too much like Good Friday.  I went along with Hannah, but it was just too distant from me.  Christ falls three times and there are all those women.  Hannah wanted to see the Shroud of Turin, is it… but we had decided for France and that trip to Spain.  MacShane liked Italy but I went where I was taken.  I didn’t know what to say in Italy.  Prada didn’t take me on a gondola and I knew not to buy one of those windup gondolas I saw them selling in San Marco.  You wind it up and it goes up and down as if it was in choppy seas.
Jack had an eye for the windup things… he used to have go down to Chambers Street and there were all these great stores along it filled with stuff.  That’s where he got the bird clock.  
Hannah would take the battery out and I would put it back in.  That was then, I think.
The bird clock is not in the room.  I think it was once and I remember it as being one of those objects, as they say, only Jack could find, a clock that made bird sounds, a different one for every hour.  I don’t know if it did 24 but I know it made 12 and then repeated itself. 12 birds, one for each hour and the hands of the clock should have been some sort of feather design but they weren’t, Hannah knew something about birds and it bothered her that some of the calls weren’t very clear and seemed more like a person imitating what a bird sounded like.  
Jack liked the bird sounds even if they were made by humans as they didn’t toll your hours away and bring your death closer the way a church bell did or the bells ringing out the hours in public buildings…
  Of course, the bells ringing allowed me to quote Anthony Burgess to his knowing when you heard the bells ringing in Christian places of old:  the Mussulmen are coming, the Mussulmen are coming and this is why the bells are not ringing in Turkey because they know what the bells really mean, even if they say they don’t for their own purposes…
There was no reply…
But you should know the room is not sterile, isn’t that the word people sometimes are saying, it’s very sterile in here as if like so many things… how should anyone know what a sterile room is unless they are some sort of medical doctor and anyway have you ever met a doctor who gave a rat’s behind when it came right down to it about germs?
    When I first got to the city they used to have these walk-in doctors and for five dollars they would listen to your symptoms, give you some sort of jar of something or other and a note to the boss… the last one like that was down on Spring Street, when they had factories all over the place…
Things change, they are always saying and they don’t have those doctors anymore.
                                                          ***
Death changes things.  What a cliché.   Yes, people die but no, people is not the exact word:  my father died, my mother died, Hannah died… and I guess it is a good thing we didn’t start with such a sentence. 
Probably better to say, certain people have been forgotten, though their names remain...  but damn:  what do I really know about that person, what can I call up?
I was born, Wesley says.  
Can there be a more obvious statement a human being can make?  If I add in California the statement is surrounded by all the illusions Hollywood so obviously and capably delivers and no one wants to have it contradicted by anything that might take away from the picture a person has formed when they hear: I was born in California and if I revise my sentence to:  I was born in Los Angeles, California, I have been removed from something which I can only tell you about when I tell you about  of all places the Rue Charlemagne in Conques--- what a grand name for a broken cobbled lane--- and Pierre was kicking the wall         not hard as he was a very old man and saying what Hannah translated as : this is here, this is here.  This is real.  I don’t remember the French but I am sure it sounds better in French, everything sounded better in French, I was always thinking, even when people were ordering in the bakery: it was more than just going in to get a loaf of bread when it was being said in French…         
There is nothing to kick when you say, I was born in Los Angeles, California.  Once I heard on the radio, as Bill sometimes had the radio on in the studio.  It was just a line:  Home is…I forgot.  I don’t know who sang it.  Home is…  I forgot.

AN AMERICAN IS A DISEASED SCRAP OF HUMANITY

This novel was written now some time ago and remains unpublished: about a young American who goes from Dublin in the Spring of 1965 to the DDR, or as it was more commonly called: East Germany.  I have long thought of it as A Beginning of the Sixties of the last century...a premature understanding of "an American."  

AN AMERICAN IS A DISEASED SCRAP OF HUMANITY

from JUST LIKE THAT a novel as a beginning of the Sixties of the last century...

The I of the novel has spent much of the night [in the spring of 1965] next to the monument to the Battle of the Nations on the outskirts of Leipzig in what was then called  the German  Democratic Republic (DDR).

 Martin who has been with this "I" all day and now in the late night begins to speak:  

Don't sit there anymore.  The night is done with.  You are an American and you can't deny it. It is written on your face, in the book you carry next to your heart and how you would like to insert that book into your heart if you could.  That little greenish book, the colour of corpses in comic books which the frontier guards will look at and hand back to you as if you were diseased.  Did you feel that as you crossed our country on the way to Berlin?  Surely you did. You are so sensitive, if you say so, as you please.  I know that.  An American is a diseased scrap of humanity who does not what it is: just a creature who will die and before dying will grow old and not all the money, not all the wishes, not all the king's men will be able to step in and put a stop to the lines appearing at the corners of your eyes, at the corners of your mouth that has kissed my lips and which will spot the backs of your hands with those false stigmatas of saintliness: are they not saints for having endured this life--- but in your United States of American, from what I have read, the old are put to the field and turned into manure, the young have not the experience of being around their old people and the aged are left to rot.  But even to  think of death--- what a heresy--- how the stakes must be kept in readiness all across America because death is what denies the ever bigger future and the happiness always around the corner if you work very hard and have the boss's dick up your ass and you don't comment on how small his dick is.

Martin had walked a little way from the monument and I could see him pacing back and forth beyond the low hedge. I sat with the stone of the monument to my back, as I have said, the bullets stitching a death across my chest.  Was I not James Connolly tied to a chair because I was unable to stand to meet the English guns.

(the opening and the ending of this novel were published long ago in THE READING ROOM edited by Barbara Probst Solomon...

MY INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

 Interview: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Author: McGonigle, Thomas

In an interview, novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet discusses his literary style and the publication of his new novel "Repetition." Among other things, he cites the reasons why his ideas are known but his works are forgotten.

Alain Robbe-Grillet occupies that paradoxical position not uncommon to avant-garde writers: He is both famous and obscure; his ideas are well known but his work much less so. Nevertheless, he remains a major figure in the landscape of postwar French letters and film. After publishing The Erasers fifty years ago, he became a fierce advocate for what came to be known as the nouveau roman. In a book of critical essays, Fora New Novel (1963), and by the example of his own now canonical novels The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth (1959), Robbe-Grillet pointed the way toward a fiction that eschewed psychological motivation in favor of pure, almost analytical description of physical reality. His ideas were shared by writers such as Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, and Nathalie Sarraute. A strongly contentious figure, he garnered many enemies as well as advocates. (Vladimir Nabokov was one of his most prominent fans.) In 1984, Robbe-Grillet's autobiography, Ghosts in the Mirror, sparked renewed interest in his work because of its revelations about his life during World War II and his apparent rejection of some of the tenets of the nouveau roman. He has directed six films and is the author of Last Year at Marienbad, the 1961 art-house classic directed by Alain Resnais. A new work of fiction, Repetition, is now appearing in the United States after a twenty-year hiatus of English-language publication. Viewed as a sort of anthology of his previous fiction, Repetition was a great critical and popular success across Europe. Much less intimidating in person than you might expect-judging by photographs and the sometimes dogmatic tack of his critical articles-the eighty-year-old Robbe-Grillet was a little anxious when we met in his well-appointed apartment in the posh Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. His wife of many years, Catherine, was under-going an eye operation that morning, yet he was gently concerned about my comfort as the conversation began.

THOMAS McGONIGLE: How has your reading of The Erasers changed from fifty years ago to now?

ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET: There's a great continuity to the work, yet I do feel like there's a lot of change as well. The earlier books are clarified by the later books. So if you've read The Erasers, you will find it further illuminated by Jealousy. TM: Readers often first encounter your theories of the novel-particularly your ideas about the flatness of characterization. Does this discourage them from reading the fiction?

ARG: That's a big problem.

TM: You wrote For a New Novel, which condemns metaphor entirely, and at almost the same time, you were writing Jealousy, which is a festival of metaphor.

ARG: True. But it was my impression that the reader was reading both For a New Novel and Jealousy. Unfortunately, this was not the case. I just received a Vietnamese translation of For a New Novel, which is the only one of my works that's been translated into that language. So in Vietnam, I will be known as the person who theorizes a new kind of novel, but readers there will not have access to any of my actual novels. As I said, it's a big problem.

TM: As far as your reputation, you are in this strange position-you are both well known and yet, in many quarters, somewhat forgotten.

ARG: Since the publication of Repetition, I've gone to bookstores to sign books and o there's a crowd of only young people. No old people. Let's put it this way: I was once fashionable. And when I was in fashion, nobody read my books. For instance, the first year when I was really in vogue my novel Jealousy sold five hundred copies for the entire year. But Repetition has sold fifty thousand copies. When I started to gather readers, I was already out of fashion. But when I was in style, I couldn't live on my writing. Now I can live on my writing very nicely. Nice apartment here, a chateau in the country. You know, I come from very modest origins.

TM: Academics preserved your name and made possible your current revival.

ARG: I had a dialogue with William Styron at one point when he came here, in a lovely setting, to join a conference about what is literature. Styron picked up the subject of the difference between literature for professors and literature for readers. he said that literature for common readers rises out of your body, that it comes out of your guts. Yet he soon understood that he couldn't last the two-hour program on this subject of what comes out of your guts. So Styron then started to go on somewhat abstractly, sounding like a professor himself. The problem or advantage is that university people, the professors, they have the time to read. Does your average reader have that same kind of time? Time to read and to really think?

TM: I wasn't attacking your academic readers, but rather noting that during the years you weren't publishing novels, the academy, not the marketplace, maintained your reputation.

ARG: Well, it's rather populist to say nasty things about professors. Saying bad things about professors is like agreeing with Le Pen. But my books do sell. In China, I am the most translated French author. Repetition was a best-seller in France and Germany. I live very well. [Leaves the room and returns with a framed poster.] This is what my copyrights have bought me, the Chateau du Mesnil-au-Grain in Normandy. When I die it will go to the state and become a foundation to preserve my papers.

TM: In 1984, your memoir, Ghosts in the Mirror, appeared. You were quoted as saying, "I have never spoken of anything but myself." In light of such a statement, how should we read the novels and theory that made you famous? Are all of your novels disguised autobiography?

ARG: It's true for all writers. Faulkner is in all his novels. So is Flaubert. My novel Jealousy is absolutely autobiographical. I lived in that house. I have photographs of that house. I was one of the three characters in the novel. What's strange is that this was received by critics as a novel without an author, as the most abstract of all novels. The Voyeur is set in Brittany, where I was born. The chief difference is that I did not murder a young girl. Yet the idea of doing such a thing was in me. A very famous psychoanalyst told me, "It's a good thing that you wrote that novel, because it was your psychoanalyst couch. If you hadn't, you might have murdered a young woman."

TM: With the publication of your first novel in twenty years, Repetition, I am reminded of Gertrude Stein's quote, "There is no such thing as repetition, only insistence." What you are insisting upon in this novel?

ARG: The Ghost in the Mirror and Angelique were also...

TM: But Angelique has not been translated into English. We're talking about English.

ARG: I'm sorry; but just because they haven't been translated into English doesn't mean they don't exist. There was supposed to be a conference ten years ago in St. Louis, and the university there announced, "Mr. Robbe-Grillet will speak French." So a minister who is interested in literature calls the university and is told by a professor that I do not speak English. The minister replies, "He could have made an effort to learn English, because God wrote his Bible in English."

TM: Back to my question: Why write another novel? Why write Repetition?

ARG: I don't know. But I do insist on insisting. Literature has survived Hitler and Stalin. It will survive Chirac and Bush. It survives.

TM: Richard Howard, your translator, has said that he thought this new novel was an anthology of all your previous work, with an interlude for fucking a teenage girl.

ARG: Well, Howard is a homosexual. And to him there's nothing more disgusting than women. He even announced twenty years ago that he was going to refuse to translate any books in which there's any sexual activity with women. To dedicate himself entirely to homosexual literature. Even in his translation of Baudelaire, when it gets too sexual, he cuts off Baudelaire's balls. Anyway, the statement is stupid. Because since The Voyeurwas written, there have been thirteen-year-old girls getting fucked in my books.

TM: In publications like the New Yorker or the New York Times, there have been attacks on what is called "difficult" writing, literary writing. Some critics wonder why popular novels like those by James Patterson aren't embraced by literary tastemakers.

ARG: I can't even comment. If you're going to read Repetition, you have to have philosophical training, and it would help to know Kierkegaard. And I'm perfectly aware of the fact that readers without that education can also read it on another level, but my books are especially approachable by people who have some philosophical background.

TM: I ask because you have said that the reason you teach is to encourage young people to believe in high culture. Now they read that, perhaps, James Patterson's novels are the equal or better than, for instance, William Gaddis's.

ARG: What they say is abominable. My job is not to write best-sellers; I hope to write long sellers. Young writers, it seems, are no longer that interested in culture per se. They are interested, instead, in having a career in literature. If you're going to have a career, then you may well not have much else. There's a danger in this disappearance of culture, because it's not only the literary culture that's disappearing; it's also scientific culture. We're going to become a society where the people will know only how to push buttons. My grandfather was a teacher. In his time the idea was to raise someone to become a teacher, not a professor, but an elementary school teacher. The idea then was to raise people up toward the elite. Now, of course, the word "elite" is pejorative. When Pompidou became president, he founded a committee to defend the French language because he saw a threat of homogenization. he needed a general, a priest, and an avant-garde writer, so I ended up part of this committee. We were rather close at the time, and I told him that "Defense of the French Language" was not a good name for this committee. I told Pompidou that the name or idea should be "The Extension of the French Language and Defense of Its Purity." "You're right," he said. "But the purer it stays, the less we can extend it." I answered, "If you want to fight the battle with basic English, you have to have a basic French." I made the choice of French-of pure French and syntax. You'll notice mysteries are complicated, but the syntax is simple. To be a novelist is to see, to look with words, to find the exact words.

TM: In 1966, you said that the erotic photograph had more of a future than the erotic film.

ARG: That's possible. It's not idiotic; it's possible that I said that.

TM: Are you happy with the proliferation of eroticism on video or the Internet?

ARG: I can't say, because I don't use the Internet.

TM: So you've lost interest in the erotic.

ARG: No. I've lost interest in technology. If you have to be connected to the Internet to be interested in eroticism, then you're in trouble.

TM: You chose not to have children. Do you find any advantages to that choice now that you're in your eighties?

ARG: Yes, a lot. When I see all my friends that have children. Parenthood tends to make them sick. Their children take drugs, they don't work at school, all they have is problems.

TM: My daughter is at a Lycee in Nantes to learn French. In my old age, when I'm eating oatmeal, I hope she will read me her translation of Celine's Bagatelles pour un massacre.

ARG: If she agrees, but who knows with the young. I knew Celine, and, like Kafka, he had a great sense humor. He wrote two great books, but after that his stupidity got the best of him.

TM: When I interviewed Julian Greene when he was about ninety-four, I asked him what he had to look forward to, and he said he looked forward to purgatory.

ARG: He was a Christian, and that changes things. I'm not a tarot-card reader. I don't know what the future will bring. By nature, though, I'm optimistic.

TM: Even given the horrors of the last century?

ARG: I think it's a genetic-it's a question of genetics. Maybe they'll find the gene or the chromosome.

TM: But I find that being Celtic, as you are, that I'm constitutionally pessimistic.

ARG: The Celts have a sense of humor, which is more or less like Jewish humor. And you can say there's a sad side to the Jewish spirit too, but the Celts and the Jews are pre-despair.

TM: You mentioned your wife. You have been married for fifty years.

ARG: Well, I had my young mistresses, and she had her young mistresses, and she still does, because she's younger than I am. And when I had, well, rather spectacular young mistresses, because I was directing movies, she remained quite content because she considered them flighty. Still, she shared my pleasure, and now I share hers.

Sidebar

My novels are absolutely autobiographical. The Voyeur is set in Brittany, where I was born. The chief difference is that I did not murder a young girl. Yet the idea of doing such a thing was in me.

SCALPEL OF CHAOS or With Elizabeth

 

(Note: End of August thought of what has not been done, what is to be done or... this book was finished many years ago and I waited and waited, but could never think of who might read it or who might publish it... (the Elizabeth of this book is now happily married and they have their first child, Augustus)

        WITH ELIZABETH.  For want of a better title or maybe this is the best title or it could be called THE STORY OF A DEAD TIME a journey with my daughter.

Begin with what happened after Elizabeth and I came back from Europe during the winter.

      Beginning at the beginning. The best way to go about talking, no, writing, since that is what...

     Now, at this moment in the year 2---, no place where the story or our story could be told: no room, porch, campfire, ocean voyage, rail journey. No setting where such a story could be teased out and then the effort to see this conversation redundantly and artfully fixed to the page, arranged by the Scalpel of Chaos, though we hadn't gone to Zagreb where such an instrument is available in a cafe near the cathedral.

        Neither Elizabeth nor I could suspend our disbelief in order to hear me talking with a stranger on the flight back from London: to hear me retelling what appeared to us as we moved about the English countryside and then to Paris and in one of the near villages painted by Monet: no, not that famous garden, for this was in January, seemingly so long ago as I write in July and soon to be August then September and...

         Or, in Vienna in a taverna near the train station where the Balkans are said to begin, where we were to hear about what Nuala had taken us to see from the hill in Dalkey: the light to be made visible rising up out of the Irish Sea revealing the colour of the winding sheet for the corpse of our dreams as it was sent back into the earth.

          All through the Spring I would take notes of what had happened much as I did even on the flight back when I had been reading Front de 1'est, 1941-1945 from which I copied out what Leon Degrelle writes, "Shaking my hand firmly in his two hands at the moment of my departure. Hitler told me with stirring affection: "If I had a son I would want him to be like you."

          Aware to be sure of the folly of the taking for granted what had happened as being ordinary yet with the possibility it was of interest that a father and his daughter might travel to Europe looking for something that was not there in the still New World.

          But nothing could be as simple as that because life is never so easy as anyone knows who has ever tried to describe even the brief moment of a hand about to reach out to be shaken by... though if what had happened did not happen I would have been complaining in reply: no, nothing much had happened while we were away--- no building fell down as we walked by, no man held a gun to the head of a child demanding the President of the United States get on the line and talk to him, right now, motherfucker, hear me!

         No, nothing had happened to us, I guess, like any of that, but... though taken speechless and afraid of what had happened as I sat in the aisle seat while Elizabeth looked down to the mountains of Greenland, already that far along in the flight back to New York: the mountains of Greenland across which no one has ever walked, I think, or wanted to walk and of waking in the middle of the night trapped on the side of one of those mountains while the plane flies overhead with a girl leaning to see more clearly the figure waving helplessly up to the plane.

FORGET THE FUTURE

          for many years, since 1990 in Oxford, I have been trying to shape the life of James Thomson BV into ...  

               a piece of this prose was published a long time ago in BOMB and had been edited by David Rattray... I discovered James Thomson many year s before that in the title of John Rechy's CITY OF NIGHT.  

                Thomson had gone out to the west in the United States and now he is in Manhattan waiting to sail back to England.  

                It is known that Herman Melville, also adrift at this moment in Manhattan, had read and liked Thomson's work. (another piece appeared in the Crab Orchard Review)

                the shade of Thomson stalks Eliot's The Waste Land

                and upon a time, I had come to describe a moment in your life in London--- you, James Thomson--- in his death’s week you went to visit the poet, Philip Bourke Marston, whose poetry gagged you.  

     Once leaped my heart, then dumb, stood still again— that had been the  room to which she came that day and there came another moment: when you were staying in Manhattan, New York and while I did imagine those days long  after your time in New York City, Manhattan to be exact--- though  is there any difference between my experience and your experience--- though who is the self who is imaging the self who I am finding... if only I knew---   as you are again really in Manhattan if words can be said to be real though what else have I? and your adventures as one of the dead, really forever dead or not as in this moment, no longer three rows over in Highgate Cemetery from where we used to keep Karl Marx--- a borrowed grave: how you enjoyed the humor of that... the original owner of the grave had no use for it as he was still as is said, alive, unlike myself: if I am able to ventriloquize his agreeing to my residence... a residence as comfortable as I have ever been used to but then in the present moment here in a room in East First Street--- the most delicious of all fictions: the present moment which has disappeared as these words were typed.     

      A pause and already this sentence is not much different from Akkadian being looked at by a visitor from so long ago or it could be right now ...the past and the future are always dripping with blood, these moments always consumed by a need for revenge yet here shall we go walking in which country, in which museum... is there any difference between these seconds and 2500 years ago...

      The walls of the Merchant's Hotel will not leak. There is nothing hidden under the floorboards or lurking under the bed.  He does not hear voices and he will not see a face in the window glass even though it is smeared with grey winter grime.  He is waiting.  His mind is no longer in the city and certainly it is not in this room though he can vision the man’s arm as it raises the knife up and up to gain momentum so when, as it plunges down, the blade will be sure to strike home and end the torment of the life that insinuated itself, without invitation, into his biography.

Of course, it can be said, the newspaper has done a better job of inching itself into his mind and he will not argue with those words since they are carefully stated and show no expectation of a reply.

He is also uninterested in these men who rub up against him in public expecting some sort of reply to their fevered observations.  What is it that he is expected to know?  He has accomplished nothing.  His hands do not drip with idleness.  He has not allowed his ship to sail anywhere near the predictable shores of either success or flamboyant failure.

He has tried to get on as best he could.  He had allowed himself to be seized with the proper degrees of enthusiasm: carefully calibrated so as not to frighten off his future employer and he was sent out, in due course, to The West in America and it will happen again, he is sure of that: if he can distill the necessary words.

After all is said and done to death: he is a man of words at the beck and call of the masters with large sheets of paper needing to be full up every week, every day, every month.

At their command, he is by the pence, for the inches that sluggishly spread up and down the columns.  But has not the knack for the saleable anecdote.  He can get cloud, the trees, the stone down on to the paper.

Human beings!!!: that’s another bag of muck he can’t bring himself to turn inside out,

Yet, people want it and he is unable to supply it.  No good calling round next year, things will not have changed.  He has his plate in front of him and there are just some who…

A sort of sun in the sky.  He should get a move on and see some more of this Manhattan place.  He will be asked to... and he will have to fill up the hours with his impressions of foreign places.

As long as they don’t expect words to be knitted into columns of type, he can lie with the best of them or with shrug of shoulder: why must he get things right?  The stories will come out and as long as the cup is refilled:  the evening will not stare him down into silence.  He knows what he must do.  He is not that cut off from the companions who stand about the room, not having gone forth.

However, he must decide or not... whether to talk of his reading or just allow that he saw some interesting sites and was seen by exotic eyes.  People are interested in turns of phrase not too far removed from the effusions gracing greeting cards called up by the passing holidays.  Though, who will actually be interested in his reading or the names of streets he has walked in.

Well, pass the bottle and make sure the glasses are full and the interest will be as intense as any man can bear.

But Thomson is not held by this consideration.  He has been listing the years of his life.  He is making sure he has been alive and it is no mistake his now being in New York City.  He has walked up a staircase, depending on his mood, or he has walked down a staircase or as is more the case he is walking along a long corridor which might also serve to frame his thought or the only truth:  one year follows another until they don't.

THE DEATH OF DENIS DONOGHUE: GRATIFIED ATTENTION

 

    

Already now, May 16, 2021, it seems so long ago that Denis Donoghue died on April 6, 2021

I first heard Denis Donoghue in 1964 when I attended his lectures on silence in Shakespeare while a student at University College, Dublin.  He began with that reply of Cordelia to her father that I need not repeat as anyone reading this will know that sentence... years later we became friends through little notes exchanged and then meals shared: costs carefully split to the penny. He became a not infrequent guest for dinner as it seemed he had time to come to our tiny apartment in the East Village of Manhattan as there were very few people, he said, at NYU who had an actual interest in poems and stories… 

My wife and children always enjoyed his company which in some way is a commentary on then and continuing politically argumentative academic reality.

We remember vividly the time DD described his giving up classical singing--- his arm slashing through the air--- "I gave it up, I could not subject my wife and future children to the uncertain life of a singer; so now, not even singing in the shower."

And of course another time when my son and Denis agreed that Latin prose was quite boring when compared to Latin poetry…. I myself never really got beyond Caesar.

I am sure more distinguished people will write of his   many critical books and the arguments he pursued and was pursued by though nothing dates more than such. 

    Denis Donoghue's true legacy is contained in Warrenpoint.  It is his own story of growing up in a policeman's barracks in Northern Ireland and of how he came to be a very good reader.  The following I would suggest is always the center of that reading: "It did not grieve me that I lacked inventiveness , could not make up a story or imagine a sequence of thought requiring rhyme.  All I wanted to do was to observe a relation between myself and structures I had not invented... Mine was the intelligence that comes after."   

Denis reiterated this once upon a time when he was asked to lecture at the St. Marks Poetry Project in the East Village of Manhattan on the future of poetry.  Someone in the audience asked him what poets should be writing about and in what form?

He declined to prescribe what a poet should write, "All of my work depends on what the poet created or will create."   

On a very personal note: probably the last thing Denis Donoghue wrote was an essay on the Henry James novel “The Sacred Fount” which I had been unable to make sense of even after having been goaded to attempt to read it by the Spanish writer, Julian Rios.  

When Denis was able, last year we talked on the phone and I asked him if he could explain how to read the novel or at least provide an approach to how to read, "After all you are the Henry James Professor" and we both laughed.

He begins his essay by quoting from a letter by Hugh Kenner to Guy Davenport which is from the collected letters of Kenner and Davenport which were edited by a friend of mine Edward Burns whose name I had included with mine---to share the embarrassment, really--- in the asking DD to explain "The Sacred Fount" as Burns also found the James novel impossible...

[Aside Denis reviewed---possibly is last published essay---,  this magnificent annotated collection of letters and over-looked the rather nasty comment on Denis by Hugh Kenner, a mark of the respect DD had for Kenner, I choose to believe]

I will accept and choose to believe that possibly these are near the last lines DD wrote and even if I am corrected, they invite a reader to read: "Reading one of James's later novels is like walking slowly through a gallery of modern art, paying gratified attention if possible to each painting. Many of the paintings distain to be asked what does it mean while issuing a strong invitation to pay attention. When I come to Chapter 8, I am not ready to be ravished, as I am when I read "Among School Children" and "Ash Wednesday," but after a few sentences, I give in."

Sadly, I never got the chance to talk more about this novel with Denis as I received a text message on April 7th from his daughter Emma, "Really sorry to tell you that Denis died in his sleep yesterday (having been unable to keep down much food these last months)."

I so wanted to "tease out" my continued difficulty with the novel, "The Sacred Fount"  and to remind him I  had first read that expression "to tease out" in a note--- in which he had replied to me then in Patchogue, New York back from my year at University College, Dublin--- about that sentence of Cordelia's... 

I have left out all the personal information and/or gossip one acquires in the knowing of a person for a long period of time... of these days I must probably start by retelling when Alastair Reid, the poet and translator, and a woman friend came along with Denis to our small apartment and my wife poured the Irish whiskey for Alastair  as if it was wine: the consequences while not fatal are after all comic... or as my Whitney mother would being say, sounds like you're gonna become an Irish washer-woman...