Friday, August 28, 2009

Marguerite Young - Aug 28 1908 - Nov 17 1995

Marguerite Young, a fellow Hoosier, was born in Indianapolis. I first heard of her in 1965 when Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, her novel of some 700,000 words on 1,198 densely printed pages, was published. She got much press at the time; a charming anecdotist, she claimed to have delivered the manuscript, which had taken her some eighteen years to write, in a wheelbarrow from her apartment in Greenwich Village to the mid-town offices of Scribner's, her publisher. The best line I read from any review of the book said that Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was a book that everyone loved but which no one finished.


I was one of those. I set upon it but stopped at page 107. I really was loving it ... it was wacko and crazy and alternately surreal and realistic, but, in my twenties at the time, I didn't have the perserverance that I would, through practice and changes of attitude, acquire later -- or perhaps it was the sheer weight of the book that caused me to set it aside. But, whatever the reason, the fact of her style having failed to lead me all the way through 1198 pages did not diminish my literary crush on Marguerite Young.


Some 30 years later, in a used-book store, I found a two-volume edition of the novel, nicely slip-cased, but I've not gotten to this easier-to-hold version either.


Marguerite Young embraces her manuscript.


In the winter of 1978 I was living on West 74th Street in New York City. One late afternoon I stopped in at the Argo Restaurant on Amsterdam at 72nd, as I often did, it being my neighborhood Greek cheap-eats place. I took one of the little red-leatherette two-seat booths. An abandoned Village Voice was on the empty seat. I scanned through the listing of events, looking for something to do. Bam! Pow! Marguerite Young's creative writing class for the spring term at the New School for Social Research would be meeting for the first time that night. I hopped onto the subway, figuring Marguerite Young would not be the sort to take attendance; she would not notice and would not care that an un-enrolled 38-year-old man was crashing her class.


I took a seat toward the rear of the room and pulled a notebook and pen from my knapsack.


Marguerite Young entered the room. She was wearing a black dress, black pantyhose, and, over her feet, woolen socks and -- despite the fresh deep snow outside -- sandals. A knitted shawl hung from her shoulders. She sat on the desk up front, not at it. Her hair was long and stringy and greasy. She wore fabulous cat-eye glasses from the fifties.


"First of all," she began, "the course outline describes this as a creative writing class. I'm supposed to teach you how to write creatively even though I don't know that this is something that can be taught. But I do have advice aplenty. And perhaps my advice will be helpful. Perhaps not. And I don't even know if that's up to me or up to you. Tonight I'll throw out some advice. Next week you'll all start a writing project. Novel, short story, magazine article ... whatever. You'll begin being creative! And we'll talk about one another's writing and ... who knows? ... perhaps we can all teach one another. At any rate, let us, above all, try to have fun. Even if you say something serious or I say something serious, even seriousness can be fun. The first serious thing I like to tell students is to not hurry your writing. Keep in mind that even the snail gets there."


She paused to light a Pall Mall.


"The worse thing we can do is fear expression," she continued. "I recommend richly endowed characters. Pay attention to everything they do. Pay particular attention to how they dress. Our clothes say a great deal about us."


She took a long puff on her cigarette, cocked her head, and seemed to be staring at the upper pane of a window.


"Rollerina," she said, "looks exactly like Miss MacIntosh. I think you could base a good character on Rollerina."


Rollerina was a legend in the city, a young man who sometimes dressed up in a ballet tutu, sometimes in a tattered wedding dress, sometimes in other striking thrift-shop costumery, and did roller skating spectacles on the streets of New York, usually in front of a crowd of people, such as one that might be waiting for a theater to open. He was beloved, cheered. He was a happening.


"I think Squeaky Fromme is most amusing; she'd be someone to base a character on too," Marguerite added.


Some of the students laughed nervously at this characterization of the woman who, a few years earlier, had, at close range, tried to shoot President Ford. (And who, as I write in 2009, was only recently released from prison.)


"And I like Patty Hearst. I'm rooting for her. And Son of Sam would be a good character. He seemed so sweet ... working at the Post Office and all."


Son of Sam, aka David Berkowitz, was a serial killer whose specialty was shooting couples who were making love in cars parked in secluded places.


Marguerite Young said she preferred the age of repression. She did not specify what she preferred about it, or even exactly what time frame she was referencing, but her remark made me recall the early sixties (I was living in Michigan at the time) when you could drive to Detroit and go to The Unstabled Coffeehouse (operated by an avowed socialist named Edith Canter) where avant garde plays, poetry readings, and such would be performed, and you could be half certain that the police might raid and shut down the place for the night. Unfortunately, by the time I met Edith Canter, she herself had become so disheartened by repression that she was trying to decide whether it was worth the effort to try to keep the coffeehouse open; eventually she decided that, no, she couldn't take any more harrassment from the authorities. (Some of Lily Tomlin's earliest performances had been at The Unstabled.) It was hard for me to imagine a preference for any age of repression, beyond the fetchingly romantic idea of being an outsider.


"Get TV out of your mind forever," Marguerite advised. "Television is the death of fiction. Read, read, and read! I read seven newspapers daily. I don't even mind reading The National Enquirer. And look around! Observe, observe, and observe!"


It felt rich to be in her presence. I observed and observed and observed and one of the things I observed was that it took her seven unfiltered Pall Malls to get through her two-hour lecture.


And I'm reminded that I preferred the age when smoking, including my own, was not repressed, even if I am now the represser.


Wednesday, August 26, 2009

RIP: Senator Kennedy

Photo: Jack Shields

Our flags are to fly at half-mast until sunset Sunday.

The front page of the local newspaper is devoted to our Senator ...

As is the back page ...


... and as are most of the pages in between.  

Monday, August 24, 2009

Bird Lover

Photo: A.J. Golaski

There was a small, delicate-seeming, lovely, somewhat elderly, pleasant-faced, nicely cultured woman in Provincetown in the seventies whose name was Helen Chan; her attire was always attractive and tasteful; her posture admirable; her conversation always interesting; her expressiveness original and charming; her white hair invariably disciplined into a neat chignon. She sometimes stopped to pass the time of day with me on a bench in front of Town Hall, or, a couple of times, joined me at a table in Poyant's Cafe. "My treat!" she once insisted. "I was married to economic royalty ... until the doctor prescribed six weeks in Nevada." One time I encountered her on the sidewalk when I was wearing the t-shirt in the photo above; she said, "Oh, I'm a bird lover too! And how nice to read a t-shirt whose message doesn't cause one to brace oneself and wince!" I don't think she noticed that it was an advertisement for Wild Turkey bourbon; also, I wasn't all that much of a bird lover in those days but, not ever wanting to pass up an opportunity for mendacity, I didn't say as much to Ms. Chan.



Thursday, August 20, 2009

"Swimming in a Sea of Death" by David Rieff

This is an elegant meditation on the author's mother's illnesses and death; his mother being Susan Sontag, the woman who, through one of her essays, introduced me to the alter-ego of my dreams, Walter Benjamin.  If things can be thought of in this way, this book makes up somewhat for the grotesquerie of Annie Liebovitz's photos of the bed-ridden death-approaching Susan Sontag ... photos that David Rieff describes as "carnival images of celebrity death ..."

One of his torments ... a common torment:  When it is practically certain that someone is dying do we let them in on this fact or do we feed them hope?  Note to those who may be around when my last days come:  I don't want to be lied to; I don't want to be fed the emptiness of empty hope.  Some excerpts from Swimming in a Sea of Death:

I know that for her the physical agony she was undergoing -- and I
 am not being even slightly hyperbolic when I use those words --
was only bearable because of this hope and therefore my task had
to be to help her as best I could to go on believing that she would
survive.  For me to have behaved in any other way would have
meant saying to her, in effect, "your sufferings are for nothing: you
gambled everything on a transplant, but you've lost."

There is a Jewish saying, "Just as it is an obligation to tell someone
what is acceptable, it is an obligation not to say what is not accept-
able."  Never for a moment, during the course of my mother's illness,
did I think she could have "heard" that she was dying.  Bedridden in
the aftermath of her bone marrow transplant, her muscles soon so
flaccid and wasted that she was unable even to roll over unaided,
her flesh increasingly ulcerated, and her mouth so cankered that she
was often unable to swallow and sometimes unable even to speak,
she dreamed (and spoke, when she could speak, that is) of what she
could do when she got out of the hospital and once more took up the
reins of her life.

The day before she died, she asked, "Is David here?" ... "Yes, David's
right next to your bed," I remember hearing someone say.  "Yes, I'm
here," I remember hearing myself say.

My mother did not open her eyes, or move her head.  For a moment,
thought that she had fallen back to sleep.  But after a pause, she
said, "I want to tell you ..."

That was all she said.  She gestured vaguely with one emaciated
hand and then let it drop onto the coverlet.  I think she did fall back
to sleep then.  These were the last words my mother spoke to me.

Everyone could write a book about the loss of a loved one; not everyone could do it so movingly, nor as elegantly, as David Rieff.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Charles Bukowski - Aug 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994

My favorite bar in Boston would not be the yukkie yuppie Cheers but Bukowski's on Dalton Street.   (I automatically hate sitcoms, and anyhow Cheers is now a chain and I pretty much automatically hate chains, though it's come to the point in much of the United States that your choice of a place to eat would be this chain or that chain so what the hell you gonna do?)

When Mark's nephew JD, who lives on the west coast, and I happened to be in Boston at the same time a few years back I could hardly wait to surprise him by taking him to a place named after a guy whom he'd said was one of his favorite writers, a guy whom Time magazine once called the "laureate of American lowlife."  JD and I had great burgers and a couple beers at Bukowski's.  (The 1987 film "Barfly" with Mickey Rourke was based on a period of Bukowski's life.)

Bukowski had been championed at some point by the guy who owned Black Sparrow Press and, through a long-lasting loyalty, almost all his 50 or 75 books were published by them; Black Sparrow's books were invariably well-done, good-looking, nice to hold in your hands.

I used to visit Montreal once a year.  There was a bookstore on St. Catherine Street that always carried a good selection of Bukowski.  While my friends Mark, Bob & Sue were shopping I would sit in the bookstore's cafe and read some Bukowski.  Then one year -- pow! -- there was not a single Bukowski on the shelf.  I sought out the floor manager and asked her why they no longer carried Bukowski.  She said his books were "by far the most shop-lifted" and they now kept their stock of him out back.  I thought it a great honor for Bukowski to be the most shop-lifted author, and that this was perhaps an indication that punky non-conformist types made up a large segment of Bukowski's admirers.  I guess I liked the idea that people, in order to get a Bukowski in their hands, were willing to possibly face a judge and a jail.

I regretted that a construction fence adjacent to the bar spoiled my picture.  I also regretted that my crappy skill with a camera cut off part of the neon sign "Dead Authors Club".

Inside the walls are adorned with gigantic pictures of Bukowski and a couple other authors (Anais Nin being the only one I can recall), and big reproductions of posters advertising Bukowski's readings and such, and quotes from his works.

Once my snapshots were printed I mailed them to JD with a note, "Here are the pictures I took in Boston.  Hope you like them.  If not, go fuck yourself."  He liked that.  He'd told me in Bukowski's about a poem he liked (by one of the brothers who made the movie "Fargo") whose last line was: "If not, go fuck yourself." 

Bukowski is buried in Rancho Palas Verdes, California.  The photograph below comes from the wonderful website "Find A Grave" and I need to give credit for the photo to a Gary Goude.  The epitaph, "Don't Try" comes from an answer Bukowski gave to a young person who'd asked him how to become a writer; it doesn't sound kind but was; Bukowski said "Someboy at one of these places ... asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?'  You don't, I told them.  You don't try.  That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality.  You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more.  It's like a bug high on the wall.  You wait for it to come to you.  When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it.  Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it." 



Friday, August 14, 2009

Mini-Memoir: Lucky Guy

In 1993 I moved to New Hampshire from Vermont.  Then I needed to drive back to Vermont to close out some accounts and stuff  like that.  I stopped in the convenience store I'd always used and bought a lottery ticket and probably a pack of smokes.  I tucked the ticket in my wallet and drove back to New Hampshire.  After close to a year I realized I should check that ticket to see if it was a winner because they expire after a year.  My thought was, If I won two bucks I want that two bucks.  I drove over the border into Vermont to have it checked but they had changed all the lottery machines in the state and could not check a ticket as old as mine had become.  So I signed my name to the back of it and mailed it to the Lottery Headquarters in Barre, Vt.  A few days later the phone rang.  A man said, "Is this George Fitzgerald?"  I said I was.  "This is the Vermont Lottery calling.  Did you mail a ticket to us back on 10th?"  I said that, yes, I had.  He said, "You won a hundred thousand dollars."  I said I'd drive up in the morning to pick it up.  

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Philip Larkin: Aug 9 1922 - Dec 2 1985

Philip Larkin's "Church Going" is one of my favorite poems. His Required Writing was my constant and perfect companion on my trip to Provence in May; my other companion, a brother who speaks French, was ideal in almost all ways, but slightly less constant, inasmuch as there were a few afternoons which ended with him napping in the hotel room while I sat in one or another hotel lobby reading Larkin; in other words, without Larkin, I might have had some lonely moments.

When, as a young man at Oxford, Larkin encountered an older poet named Vernon Watkins, Larkin enthused about D.H. Lawrence's poems. Watkins said, "The shape of a poem by Lawrence is the shape of the words on the page; the shape of a poem by Yeats is the shape of the instrument on which the poem is played." Larkin writes: "I saw instantly what he meant and asked him if he thought form so important." "Poetry rhymes all along the lines, not only at the ends," Watkins pointed out. Larkin says that the older poet was never mean in his assessments of other poets: "Even the poets whose work he did not like he never abused, simply seeming to suggest that it was a question of scope, of range. 'Not a final statement, I feel,' would be his typical judgement."

Required Writing included interviews that had been conducted with Larkin. In one with The Observer Larkin said, "Actually, I like to think of myself as quite funny, and I hope this comes through in my writing. But it's unhappiness that provokes a poem. Being happy doesn't provoke a poem. As Montherlant says somewhere, happiness writes white. It's very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable. And I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any -- after all most people are unhappy, don't you think?"

In response to a question about his own childhood Larkin said, "Well, I didn't much like other children. Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realize it was just children I didn't like. Once you started meeting grown-ups life was much pleasanter. Children are very horrible, aren't they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes."

In an interview with The Paris Review he said, "Oh, no, I've never been to America, nor to anywhere else, for that matter. Does that sound very snubbing? It isn't meant to. I suppose I'm pretty unadventurous by nature, party because that isn't the way I earn my living -- reading and lecturing ... and so on. I should hate it. And of course I'm so deaf now that I shouldn't dare. Someone would say, 'What about Ashberry?' and I'd say, 'I'd prefer strawberry'" (Larkin was a lifelong librarian; writing was an avocation.)

"A writer once said to me, if you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: the rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like: where if you help a girl trim the Christmas tree you're regarded as engaged, and her brothers start oiling their shotguns if you don't call on the minister. [This is] a version of pastoral."

From an essay titled "Books" he wrote: "I should never call myself a book lover, any more than a people lover: it all depends what's inside them. Nor am I a book collector: when a don asked me how many books I had, I really couldn't reply, but this didn't matter as all he wanted to tell me was that he had 25,000 or 50,000, or some improbable number. I was too polite to deliver a variant of Samuel Butler's 'I keep my books around the corner, in the British Museum', yet at the same time I felt a wave of pity, as if he had confessed to kleptomania or some other minor psychological compulsion."

I ran across a word I was unfamiliar with in Larkin's book: reminiscential. Isn't it anice word? And so useful to one who, like me, likes to write teensy bits of memoir.

In a review of the 1981 publications of Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, he wrote: "Up until 1959 Plath's poems lack what one looks for in any writer of stature: the individual note or theme by and with which he or she will henceforth be identified. Line by line they are often remarkable: in sum they are unmemorable. But in that year begins:

The day she visited the dissecting room,
They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,
Already half unstrung . . . .

The shock is sudden, and the possibility that she is simply trying on another style is dispelled by the two following pieces, 'Suicide off Egg Rock' and 'The Ravaged Face'. Plath liked them for their 'forthrightness', a word suggesting the abandonment of literary fancy in favor of plainer realism ... she had found her subject matter. It was, variously, neurosis, insanity, disease, death, horror, terror."

(In my own way, I say much the same thing in "Birthday Guy On Azalea Path", a scantily-literary essay I wrote a year and a half ago which has been published in Plath Profiles, a literary journal devoted to Plath, put out under the aegis of Indiana University, Volume II of which is available online at http://www.iun.edu/~plath/vol2/index.shtml -- and I should say here, of course, that Philip Larkin and George Fitzgerald are but two of a countless many who have commented on the drastic change of tone in Plath's poems at a certain point in her life.)

(And, yes, it's fair enough to consider a portion of the above paragraph an unabashedly unashamed advertisement for myself.)

Later in Larkin's review of Plath: "Increasingly divorced from identifiable incident, [the late poems] seem to enter neurosis, or insanity, and exist there in a prolonged high-pitched ecstasy like nothing else in literature. They are impossible to quote meaningfully: they must be read whole."

Here's Larkin's wholly perfect and whole "Church Going":

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.


Philip Larkin lies dead in Cottingham Municipal Cemetery in what is now East Riding, Yorkshire.


Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Colette - Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

Colette's charmingly smooth style makes writing prose seem effortless, but of course no one could do it quite like she could; even Proust admired her. She wrote so many novels. Where does one begin? I began with My Mother's House. I wanted to read all 25 or all 50 or all 100 that she wrote but I haven't at all gotten to them all yet.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Three Women Smoking

Hanging Out in Mentone

That's what one of my nephews named this picture when I used it in my Facebook profile.  I went back home last summer, and that barn in the background has a serious tilt to it now.