HOW TO MAKE ART or WRITE…

From an unpublished manuscript by David Jones, “Teach the pupil that first you make one mark on the paper.  Then you make another.  And the significance of these two marks is the relationship between them--- which is a third, invisible mark.”

                        -88-

If I was editing a book section for this week I would start with a memorial notice for Peter Esterhazy by sending you to a long review in which I discussed many of PE’s novels when such reviews were possible in big city newspapers in the US—but of course no longer: http://articles.latimes.com/1998/jun/07/books/bk-57301

And the Los Angeles Times even let me go on again with Esterhazy:

http://articles.latimes.com/2004/mar/14/books/bk-mcgonigle14

I would skip to a line in the most recent  Patrick Modiano  novel LITTLE JEWEL (Yale University Press) to be translated,   “He was still speaking to me of about Persian of the plains. It was like Finnish, he said. It was also a pleasant language to listen to.  You could hear the rustle of wind in the grasses and the murmur of waterfalls.”

       Modiano like Claude Simon is fortunate to have only had one publisher in France, but then both are French and at one time they did things differently there… both writers, so unlike in many ways, live in the constant  confusion of past-present-future…all of their books form a whole as did Kerouac come to think of it…  and while both Modiano and Simon have Nobel prizes in their cases these prizes mean nothing, really--- the prize has allowed more of Modiano to appear in English… for Claude Simon  his Nobel was met by derision in the US summed up by Isaac Singer asking, is Claude a man or a woman… and not joking, sad to say…

The lines I have quoted from Modiano’s novel concerns itself with a woman who has met a man who knows 25 languages… and she has been looking for her mother who years before just disappeared as people tend to do in Modiano’s novels and as they disappear in our own lives… why even tell you more… those sentences tell you, here is a very very good writer and no more need to be said.  

All of Modiano’s novels---how I like the repetition of his books--- are always about looking, looking and wanting to know…

They are remarkable as is Simon in that they mirror my own and how like Thomas Bernhard I hate plotted stories…! Those machines carving the world into beginning middle and end with characters introduced, developed, inter-acting and complications thrown in their way and then THE END

-24-

I was thinking of Bernhard because Laura Lindgren sent me her translation--- that word does not do justice to the beauty of the actual book itself THREE DAYS  (Blast Books)  because I had met her and Ken Swezey in the ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES on Second Street a long time ago where we were all watching THREE DAYS a documentary made by a German showing and recording  Thomas Bernhard sitting on a park bench on three days and talking, just talking.  Lindgren has made a beautifully designed book composed of artfully arranged stills from the movie, nicely printed and with a generous use of blank space to allow the reader to experience the actual said words of Bernhard, as is proper: the words of Bernhard, and it is only because of the words of Bernhard that we go to him…

 I am hardly a cheery author, no storyteller; I basically detest stories.  I am a story destroyer, I am a typical story destroyer. In my work, at the first sign of a story taking form, or if I catch sight of even a trace of a story, rising somewhere in the distance behind a mound of prose, I shoot it down.

-43-

And I would go on and ask someone to read DISPATCHES FROM MOMENTS OF CALM  by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter (Seagull Books)  which is a collaboration between the writer and artist that begins in a new year’s meeting at  Hotel Waldhaus in Sils-Marie…of course the reader and viewer recognize the place and its association with Nietzsche… the nervous words of Kluge moving so easily from Gemany to Lebanon and many other places echo the complexity of Richter who in so many ways is the only painter one can compare to Warhol--- but let me not explain that--- except I am thinking of two shows of Richter I have seen: the retrospective at the Tate years ago and another of the unveiling at MOMA of the complete series of paintings that came out of the violent deaths of Baader and Meinhof, October 18, 1977.

-7-

And I would ask for words on the interview book with  MARGUERITE DURAS  SUSPENDED PASSION by Leopoldina Pallotta delle Torre (SEAULL BOOKS)  and here is an answer to the question And how do you read?

“I read at night, until three or four in the morning.  The darkness around you adds greatly to the absolute passion that developes between you and the book.  Don’t you find hat? In a way daylight dissipates the intensity.”

Which strikes me as the perfect answer to those really stupid articles about “beach reads”, “summer reads” all invitations to mindlessness… whenever I see someone reading a book at the beach I know that is a person I would never want to talk with… newspapers and “quality magazines” are perfect beach readings…

-39-

But how I dislike the idea that a book review in a newspaper is just really as was patiently explained to me a number of times by book section editors as really being only a report of books being published,,. you are writing a book review you are not doing criticism whatever that is... and no newspaper person does criticism and remember of course that books of criticism are the first to be discarded when book collections are being narrowed down along with the biogrpahies of writers and…

-22-

I think I would want people to maybe read about a book by Ernesto Sabato  THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS… so a leap to Argentina and how did Sabato become lost in the shuffle?

                                     -57-

But there should also be books from the past to go against the idea that only the new matters…the Poundian:  news that stays news… making it new is reminding of what was/is… so SAUL’S BOOK by Paul T. Rogers, celebrated for how many times it was turned down by the so-called real publishers and then taken up as the EDITORS’ BOOK AWARD given by Pushcart Press…

The world of homosexuals on the make and I am not talking about two Dads renting a womb to have twins… obviously inspired by both CITY OF NIGHT and LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN, still holds its own and is stillcontroversial as it once was as the repression ever continues about the actual lives as in the novel:  A guy finds a guy in the bathroom of the Port Authority bus station:

….”and let him blow me for a couple of minutes until my dick finally gets hard which is when I pump back and forth like I was cumming and put it out and wipe it off fast  with some shit paper, zip myself back up and tip.  When I close the door he’s still sitting there with his dick in his hand, smiling like something really tremendous happened.  I bet he thinks I came.  Most people don’t know it but guys can fake cumming just like hooers do. All you got to do is while the guy is blowing you, you bring up a little phlegm, pull your dick out of his mouth fast and grab ahold of it and while you’re grabbing it you put the phlegm from your onto your dick head.  The phlegm looks like cum.  I guess it must taste like cum too cause I never had no complaint about it.

When you look up what happened to Rogers, the perfect literary career: only one  book and he was murdered according to the bio in Wikipedia:

On September 22, 1984, Rogers was found dead in his apartment by the superintendent of his apartment building. Two days later on September 24, charges of murder conspiracy and robbery were laid against Christopher Rogers, the author's adopted son, and Nicholas Ondrizek, a drifter who had been staying with them. The pair reportedly beat him to death with a wooden plank, and then stole his wallet and bank card. He was 48 years old at the time of his death, and according to his editor was gravely ill with cancer.

The two pleaded guilty to the charges on October 9, 1985.

A FITTING FOR THE SHROUD

Preface:  HERE EXACTLY IS WHY 95% of what passes for good writing in the United States is simply impersonal fake something or other: "The Philosophical prison we all carry within us has unleashed an assault onto our memories, decreeing unto them the fiction of chronology. And yet they continue, obstinately, to be our only freedom."--Juan Jose Saer from THE ONE BEFORE (Open Letter books)

                               -76-

Start of summer.  (21 June)…though it is now 26 July when there are no longer any children in the house, when one is no longer a child such a moment no longer matters…on Long Island if one is a city person  the summer begins with Memorial Day as that is when summer rentals begin running until Labor Day…

But but

My wife’s mother grows sad always as the day reaches its greatest length as her father was arrested on that day in 1941 by the Russians in Estonia to be sent to the Gulag where he would be murdered… so for her daughter Anna the start of summer was always shadowed by this both spoken and unspoken fact and while it has dimmed for me over the years I am aware that the summer brought the fact of my sister getting polio back in 1950 and I not getting polio… on a summer day when we came back from the beach near the house on Furman Lane in Patchogue…

-63-

At the moment I am engaged in the melancholy business of packing up my books and papers in the house in New Jersey in the getting ready to move as Anna is selling the house she was born into it… there are a surfeit of these essays some well known, by Walter Benjamin for instance and while we also continue to live in the city--- where another collection of books has been established--- but to the vast majority of the population such a concern is so esoteric as to be almost inconceivable… packing the books?  What books? Most would simply say.  What is the big deal?...  Or increasingly you just find shopping bags with books on the sidewalk that have been discarded when people move or when people decide to tidy up their lives, in other words live in the prison of the current moment.

                                    -12-

But being of a certain age books have filled up my life and I have been surrounded by books as living in New York City books are very cheap indeed and easily collected… in spite of access to libraries both academic and public… and then there is the writing of books… Edward Dahlberg always maintained that before he ventured a line of his own he had to look at a…I forget the word he used… but his hand would sweep about the shelved books in their many cases… and I have always known that when the French writer Lamartine went to the Balkans he traveled with a library in excess of 500 books… of course that is now easily possible with the various electronic devises at one’s disposal…but for a person of my age, the electronic does not have the authority of the word printed on the page… but this is now probably a quaint idea in the light of the current political warfare both foreign and domestic which is primarily via electronic devices…for  better or worse…

So that a writing like this---ironically to be read on an electronic device and being composed on an electronic device though I can imagine it only as a small stone on a highway which will only be of consequence if by some accident it is propelled by another vehicle’s wheel into hitting the windshield of the car which I am driving and the driver’s reaction: what bad luck.

                                             -32-

In the moving I moved the three books of BillHolm which I have:  COMING HOME CRAZY--- based on a time teaching English in China--- THE HEART CAN BE FILLED ANYWHERE ON EARTH and THE DEAD GET BY WITH EVERYTHING. 

According to a search Holm is now dead… so is there any reason to hold on to his books, to read his books, has he marked the culture of the Unites States…  some of the books are still in print and others have moved to two cents plus postage.  I had been interested in his work because of my own GOING TO PATCHOGUE  and I guess we both have read Thomas Wolfe and in particular William Carlos Williams’s PATERSON….the power of the local  and Holms has an essay “Iceland”  which concerns itself with his always identifying himself as Icelandic and that is another reason I was interested in him as Iceland was the first foreign country I had visited and the first foreign woman I ever talked to was Icelandic, Silja Adalsteinsdottir… but for Holm being Icelandic because of his Icelandic grandparent gave him a way to avoid being part of the United Sates,  avoid being an ordinary American, whatever that might mean…

Yet, Holm did not write an essential book… maybe in Minnesota his book exists but beyond these paragraphs I am writing… will he ever be taken up?

Of course none of this matters to him, now, dead. 

                                    -31-

And the same for another book long cared for perimeters a book of poetry by Charles Levendosky which came out from Wesleyan in that distinctive series they had back then which also gave me James Dickey’s Drowning With Others which I see was autographed by Dickey in February,1964 but it is the Levendosky book that concerns me as he tries within the space of a thin book the whole of the United States.  One might compare it to Michel Butor’s MOBILE which also tried to do the same…  but Butor was doing prose while Levendosky was doing poetry as in these lines from near Yuma:  he always talked about/the dunes as if they were/naked pregnant women/called those wind ripples/stretch marks/they have been waiting a long time/to birth/unless the reptiles are theirs.

         Amazon provided what came after and it is mere verse, and Levendosky is dead according to the internet except for me for this book which will never be reprinted…

                           -31a-

But I shall save both the Holms and the Levendosky books, though I doubt I will consult them as I do Hannah Green’s THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE because they do not possess what she calls vision, a vague word to be sure but let me be accurate:  I got the idea from life, but I have proceeded from vision.  And in that I link her with Celine, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, Onetti, Saer, Gombrowicz, Kertesz, Nadas… those writers I constantly go back to:  Glenway Wescott, Julian Green, Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard…

I will not make a listing of the characteristics of that vision,  A reader who has read these authors knows what I am writing about and if I included the poets: Eliot, Pound, David Jones, Lorine Neidecker would this vision be clearer… and possibly adding Thomas Kinsella, and Georgy Ivanov…

But so many others and that is why one must have a library. 

And for thinking I go to Cioran, to Shestov, to Valery, to Unamuno, to Ernst Junger.

Is there a difference between vision and thinking?...

Probably not though these two words are the twin touchstone one  hauls out when a new book…

Which allows for should this be the summer of Juan Carlos Onetti--- he of A BRIEF LIFE is there anyone worth the time of a summer of course he is for the few as nothing is positive, nothing is exhilarating, nothing is enlightening, all of his work is imaginative in all the ways of shutting down the possibility of changing the looking at the world with anything but a turning aside not out disgust but out of recounting with a knowing that it can only get worse… even with the last sentence read we know that the next will re-iterate what you  have read  the pleasures of insistence, the sole virtue of genius … 

        To be continued at some future… or in the past

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