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HOUSE OF LEAVES

House of Leaves by Mark Z. DanielewskiMark Z. Danielewski
Pantheon ($20)

by Doug Nufer

Things aren't what they seem to be in this "second printing" of a novel that originally appeared in a different form on the Net. Proportions shift through and through, so that even the length of this 700+ page book seems impossibly dense, with an inner narrative layered by footnotes in different styles and fonts (one of which constitutes a major outer narrative), or practically weightless, as portions skim along with one word per page. At times, the dazzling array of book design elements threatens to overtake the writing, but what may seem frivolous or random is deliberate and well-conceived, while matters of the deadliest seriousness find their resolution in pure artifice. One's supernaturally bad architecture is another's fictionally viable malarkey texture.

Essentially or ostensibly, the narrative at the core is the story of a Pulitzer prize-winning photographer, Navidson, and his ex-model girlfriend Karen, who move with their kids into the ultimate house of mystery. Simple measurement glitches widen to become seemingly infinite interior chasms that open and close at the will of some sinister inner universe. Navidson mounts various explorations of the interior, and makes The Navidson Record, a movie documentary of these adventures—a documentary which, only in the context of the next layer of the book, enjoys the celebrity of a household name.

Packed with narrative drive and giddy wonders, this interior story comes via a rather impeachable source. An old blind man named Zampanò has supposedly compiled a rambling annotated manuscript that shares the movie's name as it describes the movie and supplies essays, notes, and commentary from real and apocryphal sources (as well as real sources given phony quotes). When the old man dies, a young hedonist stumbles into the project and becomes the manuscript's editor and, thanks to long and often irritating footnotes, its co-author and de facto subject.

From his ribald Pynchonian sailor-style rambles around L.A. to endless appendices filled with his poetry and letters to him from his mother in an insane asylum, Johnny Truant makes Mark Z. Danielewski's book his book (or vice-versa). Truant, product of the proverbial broken home, seems to have thrown himself into this project as a way to find himself, or, more articulately, a way to find a place for himself. In one respect, this is a daring risk Danielewski takes: Truant is a lot less interesting than the core story about the house, which discusses the nature of space as it's defined by architectural perspective and the physical universe, and disgorges a brilliant range of references to art, science, philosophy, and semiotics. In another way, though, Danielewski's employment of Truant as his protagonist is the kind of pandering to cultural stereotypes you might expect from a book that was a cult hit on the Internet: he works in a tattoo parlor, gets high and/or laid a lot, has a friend named 'Lude.' But then, nowhere does the phrase "the benefit of the doubt" seem more applicable than to the world of House of Leaves. Doubt rules.

Although it's tempting to define this novel by retaliating in kind, i.e., trotting out the references until the cows come home, this can be deluding. Rather than take it for a Lost in the Fun Infinite Jest House Leaves Gravity at the End of the Rainbow kind of thing, you could run with the footnotes and compare it to Pale Fire, but rather than pursue Nabokov's interplay between characters, Danielewski stakes out a different territory. From Derrida to Camille Paglia, Einstein to Leonard Maltin, the notes celebrate wild and often irresponsible connections to the outside world as they delve into a quintessentially hermetic environment. Then there's the book design angle. As in Richard Grossman's The Book of Lazarus (FC2), the publisher (in this case, Pantheon) displays a heroic integrity to follow the author's or designer's practical and effective (if unorthodox) formatting directions. Thanks to the personal computer and the Internet, some authors have found inventive ways to deliver their works and have exploited elements of paratext as well as fundamental design in ways which, paradoxically perhaps, seems to compliment the kind of care that goes into hand-crafted letter-press book making.

And yet, people wonder. There lingers a conservative prejudice against experimentation, against audacity, particularly if the prose comes packaged in what many regard as gimmicks (manipulations of font, leading, title page, copyright page, index, contents, etc.), as if these basic decisions of what goes into a book must be taken for granted rather than put to work by the author intent on making art. But through all of the doubt, delusion, and disorientation of House of Leaves, there emerges a fully realized work, and if it is all the figment of one obnoxious character's imagination, so much the better.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2000 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

Armand Schwerner Part II

Selected Shorter Poems by Armand Schwerner

SELECTED SHORTER POEMS
Armand Schwerner
Junction Press ($16)

by Eric Lorberer

Not so much lyrics as discrete pieces of a larger tapestry, these shorter poems of Armand Schwerner combine the adroit playfulness and formidable erudition of the master architect of The Tablets. When placed beside that volume and his Cantos from Dante's Inferno, this book completes an essential trilogy in the annals of poetry.

As a reader of The Tablets might expect, several works here—mostly those presented in the section "Eskimo and Others"—derive from ethnographic sources, though these poems are also somewhat caged by their contexts. Schwerner's best work ranges over the page in powerful strides, an "endless speaking to voice" in which "it is impossible / to not overhear the endless speaking in all the bodies…" This attention to the infinite rescues Schwerner from being merely contemporary; though the world in which one can read to a friend "in his Datsun / by the Staten Island Ferry" exists in these poems, it exists simultaneously with, or perhaps even within, an intimate understanding of "the grief / of the stegosaurus, pointing / like all long grief / to nothingness."

A collagist of the first degree, Schwerner incorporated into his later poems material from a variety of other sources: fellow like-minded poets (e.g. Robert Kelly, Ted Enslin, George Oppen), but also obituaries, mystic works, philosophical texts, and, in a humorous piece of invention, "from second and third order American and Italian computer generated Shakespearean monkeys." Schwerner's formal range is revealed here to have been equally expansive; the book contains prose-poems, a "crypto-play," compositions by field, list, and aleatory technique, the rending "Bacchae Sonnets," and a group of truly astounding pantoums whose impeccably handled falling lines and rhythms perhaps best illustrate Schwerner's radically intuitive word-smithy.

For those who love language, Schwerner's Selected Shorter Poems will not disappoint. Sensuous, complex, and often elegiac, the body of work here delivers with shamanic force on its promise to be "song and arrow in the unrivalled moment."

Cantos From Dante's Inferno

CANTOS FROM DANTE'S INFERNO
translated by Armand Schwerner
Talisman House ($13.95)

by John Olson

Years ago when I was a student, I had an instructor who announced, with unabashed glee, that he was spending his summer vacation taking an intensive, eight-week course in Italian for the express purpose of being able to read Dante's Divine Comedy. My instructor's enthusiasm was eminently understandable. To read Dante's magnificent poetry in the original Italian was tantamount to cruising the Tuscan hills in a Lamborghini, a luxury of rare endowment, the only true way to engage Dante. To settle for anything else but the actual Italian was to compromise the integrity of the whole experience. Imitations are tacky. The idea of translating Dante's Commedia seems doomed from the start. Yet, paradoxically, the impossibility of matching the power of Dante's language incites more of a challenge than a deterrence. Translations abound. A good many of them ape Dante's original terza rime structure, stuffing the lines with extra padding or straining the meaning to get everything to fit, and end up sounding moldy and forced, a pale approximation.

Not so with Armand Schwerner, whose Cantos From Dante's Inferno stands out as one of the most radical entries into this much traversed realm. Schwerner has jettisoned the terza rime scheme altogether and focused on the real richness of Dante's poem, which is its vocabulary. The uncanny vividness of Dante's inferno--—the reason it draws so many into its labyrinths and bubbling fens—derives directly from the passionate devotion Dante concentrated in choosing his words and adjusting his grammar so that it would depict, as palpably as possible, the scenery and action of Hell. "There is no end to the number of qualities which some people can associate with a given work or kind of word," observed Pound in his ABC Of Reading, "you have to go almost exclusively to Dante's criticism to find a set of OBJECTIVE categories for words. Dante called words ‘buttered' and ‘shaggy' because of the different NOISES they make. Or pexa et hirsuta, combed and unkempt. He also divided them by their different associations."

Schwerner has demonstrated an equal devotion in his exacting choice of words. One of the real assets of this edition are the "Translator's Process Notes" in the back of the book. It is here that we can follow Schwerner's decisions with fascination, as in his translation of e poi se ne rammarca, from Canto VIII, the episode in which Phlegyas, the Boatman of the legendary Styx (which Dante chose to represent as a putrid marsh rather than a river), races toward the two figures thinking to find new souls for torment and howls with rage when he discovers they are not spirits but living, breathing Poets: Qual è colui che grande inganno ascolta / che li sia fatto, e poi se ne rammarca, fecesi Flegiàs ne l'ira accolta. John Ciardi's translation ("Phlegyas, the madman, blew his rage among / those muddy marshes like a cheat deceived, / or like a fool at some imagined wrong") stiffens the syntax with too much starch, whereas Allen Mandelbaum's rendition ("And just as one who hears some great deception / was done to him, and then resents it, so / was Phlegyas when he had to store his anger") devitalizes the energy of the drama with a lusterless literality, creating a storage depot for Phlegyas' unwarranted wrath. Schwerner's translation ("Phlegyas, in his tamped fury, was like / a being who in building vexation hears / he's been taken by a massive swindle") hews close to the complexity of the situation, paying attention to the dynamic force of Dante's vocabulary and devotion to detail. Schwerner explains his choice of phrasing with a keen emphasis on the boatman's psychology. Building vexation, he writes, "combines the relevant ambiguity of vexation accreting with the suggestion that Phlegyas represents the kind of person who to some degree willfully irrigates what may appear to others as spontaneously occurring emotionality." A figure, then, that is simultaneously fierce and comical, an irascible crank wholly unable to keep a lid on his feelings. A cartoonist would draw him with steam coming out of his ears.

Schwerner's translation—from a purely visual standpoint—has a spacious feel to it. Narrative is assigned to the left of the page, speech and oration to the right. "This lineation," writes Michael Heller in the preface, "focuses on the opposition between interior voicing of narration and rumination and the externality of speech, between psychic state and self-presentation." Essentially a work-in-progress (Schwerner's untimely death in 1999 prevented completion) the twelve cantos represented in this book nevertheless offer one of the most vital and revolutionary treatments of Dante's Commedia to date: Dante's rich Italian recast in an Americanized English that pulses with vividness and fresh creation. Indeed, it is not just a translation but a revival and a revelation.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2000 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

CHARLES HENRI FORD

photo by Gerard MalangaCatalyst Among Poets
Interview by Asako Kitaori

Whenever Charles Henri Ford is mentioned, his name evokes the image of one whose creative genius comes in and out of focus: when, where, how and in what context. The name is easily remembered, yet what he's exactly known for has eluded even the most erudite observer. As Jean Cocteau once said of him: "He is a poet in everything he creates."

Charles Henri Ford blazed his way onto the literary scene in the early 1930s with the publication of his poetry in some of the most prestigious periodicals of the day, including Hound and Horn, Transition, New Directions Annual, The New Yorker, and Poetry (Chicago). He is considered by many to be America's first Surrealist poet. His selected poems, Out of the Labyrinth, published by City Lights Books, covers a remarkable six decades.

As a teenager, Ford launched an experimental literary magazine Blues, published in Mississippi, and followed nearly a decade later (1940) with View, a glossy magazine devoted to a cultural avant-garde that sprang up in New York as a conduit for the Surrealist group spearheaded by Andre Breton.

View was the pioneer magazine for the arts in its time, simply because of Mr. Ford's all-encompassing editorial flair and vision as publisher/art director. It would not be surprising to see works by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Dali and Magritte face to face in one issue with the writing of Albert Camus, Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams or Paul Bowles—that is what View was all about: being extraordinary in the subtlest of ways, but with no pulled punches. You simply didn't know what hit you. The 1940s may one day be considered the 20th century's—and especially America's—richest artistic decade.

Then as now, Charles Henri Ford always seemed to be one step ahead in the arts for tapping new talent, arranging gallery shows for Pavel Tchelitchew, and introducing the young poet Gerard Malanga to Andy Warhol in the early 1960s—a meeting that would have indelible influence on the works created at the Warhol Factory for the remainder of that decade. Mr. Ford is regarded as a catalyst—that of a magician who needs no wand.

With an amazing prodigious output in poetry, photography, film and the art of collage, it is ironic, then, that he has never sought out publicity. Let the work speak for itself has been his unspoken credo from the start. And yet his personality continually shines through, shedding light on all aspects of his work, then and now. All the more reason that the impression is one of a virtual recluse, when, in reality, he remains remarkable accessible and active. He's out there, but he also knows when to escape. In this respect, he can be considered an unselfconscious romantic.

It was felicitous, then, to have Gerard Malanga along for guidance and support. In bouncing off Gerard, Mr. Ford's candidness made for easy and immediate rapport.

A light drizzle filled the air as we approached the Dakota on Central Park West. Gerard led the way, quickly turning into the arch-enclosed driveway and up a few steps to the reception desk. Once we were buzzed into a long hallway, the world just a moment ago slipped away. Time receded with the elevator's ascent. Charles Henri Ford and Indra Tamang, his friend of many years, reside in a top-floor aerie with a view—a high-ceilinged studio of approximately 800-square feet, with a small nook-and-cranny bedroom off to one side.

The space is sparsely but comfortably furnished, labeled boxes and files are neatly arranged in piles on the floor, as if waiting to be shipped to some far-off archive. When asked about the conspicuous lack of bookcases, Mr. Ford replies, "Books should be read but not seen," followed by a smile, as if to underscore his sense of humor about those things we take seriously, or take for granted. He is reserved and casual and full of life. His blue eyes sparkle.

The studio is decorated with a couple of portraits of Charles—the "young poet"—by Pavel Tchelitchew along with a scattering of his own artwork, black and white vintage prints of magic milieus in Italy in the 40s. And by its isolation Charles's precision silkscreen op art portrait of Andy Warhol is the focal point in the room.

By now the rain has let up, but the spell continues. Sound engulfed by the silence. A mist fills the air outside. The window facing west is covered with sunlight which projects onto the opposite wall a rectangle of washed light. Indra offers us tea and pastries. Gerard opens up the box containing the fresh apple pie. I can see that Mr. Ford is aglow. It's high tea at the Dakota again.

ASAKO KITAORI: Were you a dreamer at an early age?

CHARLES HENRI FORD: The memory that I have is that you dream even in the womb. That's when you kick your mother. My curiosity was greater than my dreams. In other words, the curiosity led to discovery and dreams are more revelation that discovery.

AK: Why would that be?

CHF: When you're curious you discover. When you dream you're a spectator. Like a movie, it doesn't mean that it's that personal. It's something that is not you but you as an audience. With curiosity you become involved, and when you wake up from a dream you're no longer involved.

AK: And do you think in hindsight the way you're interpreting this, are these the seeds that were planted that caused you to become a poet later on?

CHF: What sparks poetry, I think, is poetry, just as a musician is inspired by the sound of music, he wants to do the same thing. It's difficult to be a poet without having read poetry. It's a double entendre.

AK: So why did you pick up poetry rather than music?

CHF: I wasn't exposed to classical music, and that's what composers are noted for, their receptiveness. I was exposed to blues and jazz, that's why I named my magazine Blues. Now, in the haiku that I'm writing, sometimes the words from the old blues songs come back and get put in.

AK: Does it all fit together?

CHF: Yes. I can pick one out later and show you what I mean.

AK: You have remarked that when you were a teenager you had a vision to become "famous." Was there a set plan at that time?

CHF: No, but I was sort of given an injection by the reading of Marie Bashkirtseff.

AK: Who is she?

CHF: She was a Russian writer who said that she was going to become famous in one year, and she did. When I read that I said to myself, ‘Well, if she can do it, I can do it!'

AK: How old were you at the time when you read her work?

CHF: In my teens, and that's the theme of my book coming out, I Will Be What I Am. That's where the title is derived.

AK: That was the name of her book in Russian?

CHF: No. That's the name of my manuscript.

AK: But it's the same idea.

CHF: It's the same idea. The potential is in you. You already are and you will be what you are, is another way of saying it.

AK: But "famous" is quite an ambiguous idea, so when you say "I will be famous," what was your goal?

CHF: Famous for what? Well, it was poetry. Shortly after, I had a poem accepted by The New Yorker; I was still a teenager. At that time, I had been reading Yeats. From that poem in The New Yorker I can recite one verse:

And when you go, for you will go

I'll buy a scarf to hide

My shoulders white and lips as white

As suicide.

I sent The New Yorker more poems later on but I never got accepted again so I said, well, The New Yorker is not for me. I went on to other magazines. Finally, I broke Poetry (Chicago)—very difficult. The editor at the time was Harriet Monroe. She was hard to bust.

AK: Growing up in Mississippi in the 1920s, so far removed from the art centers of the world, how did you become aware of French Surrealism for it to become a major factor in your writing, or did that come later?

CHF: Somehow I got hold of the Paris magazine, transition, which was publishing the Surrealist, it was transition's editor Eugene Jolas, who was writing his form of Surrealist poetry. I can't remember being turned on by any Surrealist in transition—it was Jolas who gave me the guideline, I suppose. And I sent him poems and they were accepted.

AK: I discovered in my research your first letter Gertrude Stein, dated March 27, 1929, inviting her to contribute to the "Expatriate Number" of your magazine, Blues. What did you feel when you first wrote to her and did she send you something?

CHF: I wondered if she would send me something—she did. It was a very short poem dedicated to Georges Hugnet. I don't know whether I meant what I said, but I was so happy to get something from Gertrude Stein, I wrote her saying, "Thank you for your manuscript—it's one of the best things you've ever written." It was about six lines!

AK: What was your feeling when you got that letter from her with the manuscript?

CHF: Once you're in orbit you feel you're the magnet and if you don't attract something there's no thrill to acknowledge. When it works, it works. That's the way View was too, because I go all these famous artists to do covers, created expressly for View. View couldn't exist like that today, except maybe it can. Somebody wants to revive View. I plan to invite collaborations as I did for the early View. I'm going to ask Red Grooms and Larry Rivers to do special covers—maybe they will—who knows?

AK: How did your friendship with Gertrude Stein develop in the ensuing years?

CHF: Well, if you want to hear about Gertrude, she was famous for taking up and accepting people under her wing, so to speak, and then dropping them because she was made of jealousy. She dropped Tchelitchew when became friends with Edith Sitwell. She dropped me when I became friends with Tchelitchew. I'll tell you how that happened. My first visit to her in the country was when I came back from Morocco on my way to Paris. Then she invited me back again.

AK: When was this?

CHF: It was in the early thirties when my novel The Young and Evil was about to be issued by Obelisk Press. That's the reason why I was returning to Paris. So when I left Tangiers it was Gertrude Stein-Paris. Later I returned to Bilignin for a second visit—that's what she called her house—and Alice [Alice B. Toklas] said to me, "You're looking so healthy, because you were thin when you came from Morocco." I said, "Yes, Tchelitchew's sister is a very good cook." Then Gertrude said, "You've been visiting Tchelitchew?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Well, if I had known that I wouldn't have invited you." But I stayed on ten days and had a very good time!

GERARD MALANGA: She was a control freak.

CHF: Yeah. But one night during that last stay, she was picking out notes on the piano, like words—they didn't mean anything, but she was sitting there in the candlelight. I said, "Oh, Miss Stein, you look so handsome in that light," and she turned to me and said, "Yes, we're both very handsome."

AK: Weren't you in awe of Gertrude Stein?

CHF: No, because I wrote to Parker Tyler, "Have I told you about Gertrude's breasts? They're so big that when she bends over you think they're going to pull her down."

GM: She became incensed by the fact that you sparked a friendship with Tchelitchew…

CHF: . . . and so, I was dropped by her.

GM: Tchelitchew was already dropped by her at the time…

CHF: . . . because she was jealous of Edith Sitwell. Edith met Pavlik at Gertrude's salon and just flipped for him and she arranged his London show.

GM: So there was a real competitive nature about Gertrude Stein.

CHF: Everybody seemed always jealous. Gertrude was jealous of Edith and Edith was jealous of me. Edith and Edward James burned The Young and Evil in the fireplace. But later on we became reconciled and she wrote an introduction to my book of poems, Sleep In A Nest of Flames. I took Cocteau to meet her. They both happened to be in New York at the same time and had never met. Osbert, her brother, was present and they served us whiskey. Edith was saying "…and to think, one had whiskey only for a toothache." But she reached a point where she had it every day. That kept up through her last days. She always had a whiskey.

GM: What was Cocteau's reaction of response from having met Edith Sitwell?

CHF: Cocteau's reaction was making sure everybody know he was Jean Cocteau. He was a firework of speech. Do you know what Diaghilev said to him when they met? "Astonish me." [Etonne moi] I don't know if that happened.

AK: What effect, if any did Gertrude Stein have on your writing?

CHF: She definitely did, I think it shows in The Young and Evil. All these influences—if they don't merge and make a different reality which is you they're hard to trace. The giants in literature, like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein—they all have to have some influence. In her autobiography, she mentions that I'm one of the two younger writers with an "individual sense of words"—what she meant I don't know.

GM: Obviously, the work made an impression on her for her to have said that.

CHF: I remember recommending to her how I admired a young new writer whose first book had just out, called As I Lay Dying. You know who wrote that—William Faulkner. He sent me a short story before Blues closed. It was called "Death in Naples," an echo of "Death in Venice," and later it was published in his collected stories and I'm sorry I missed that one—Blues closed before I could publish it.

AK: Are you aware of any views that Gertrude Stein might have had on the Surrealist circle?

CHF: She welcomed them. I remember meeting Andre Masson, Rene Crevel, two of the major Surrealists. At one time she had Rene Crevel and me for tea and she said to Rene about me, "he has something that you don't have—a sense of history." Nobody knew what she was talking about. [Everybody bursts out laughing] She knew, I'm sure.

GM: It's sort of a put-down on Rene Crevel…

CHF: Her entire writing was autobiographical. If she wasn't autobiographical she identified anyway. She identified with Alice by becoming Alice—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I started another book which I left in Katmandu—and absolute take-off on Gertrude Stein, titled The Autobiography of Indra B. Tamang. I was writing it as though Indra were writing it . . . he was telling his story about Charles in Katmandu and this, that and the other. I don't know if it's something that could ever be finished, but I'll pick it up and see, it's a tour de force.

AK: Do you remember you first impression when you encountered Tchelitchew's paintings in Paris for the first time?

CHF: I wrote back to Parker Tyler in New York about Tchelitchew how I was completely taken. I used a work that other people have used since, but I think it was a mistake, the word "morbid" came in. A lot of people have found some morbidity in his work and Alice Delamar who knew him intimately and who was a great patron and gave us houses to live in, she told me one day, "Well, Pavlakis a mental case." Can you believe it? She gave us one house and Balanchine gave us a Ford. He paid $250 for it—a secondhand Ford. But the next car was a Mercury which we bought. It was a black convertible with red leather seats and a pushbutton top and that's when you could pick up a deluxe can like custom-made. I'd drive through the country, all those filling station attendants would say, "where did that come from?"—nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. That's what prices were. And the same goes for apartments. You know how much we paid for a wonderful penthouse, ninety-foot terrace, high ceilings, eat-in kitchen. A hundred an thirty-five dollars a month—for ten years.

AK: Why did you choose Cocteau as a role model?

CHF: Simply enough…I don't know if I was a multimedia artist then, but I must have felt the idea of being one. Jean's the one I think of most when I think of someone who has done work in so many mediums. He did poetry, novels, painting, plays, cinema—so I coincide in some of those media—poetry, novel, cinema. He used to say—that's when you could use the word poet without blushing—"I am a poet in everything I do. I'm a poet in the novel. I'm a poet in the theater. I'm a poet in the cinema." You name all his works and he considered himself a poet in whatever he did. That sort of sunk in, when I read that. I felt that if he could do it I could do it.

AK: You were thinking of all you work as a poet's work. So your base is that of being a poet first.

CHF: Yes. That defines the activity which one can practice, just as Gerard also is not limited to one medium. What have you done? [Turning to Gerard]

GM: Photography, film, poetry…

AK: . . . dancer . . .

(Gerard laughs)

CHF: Is that as far as it goes?

GM: . . . and editing magazines.

CHF: Oh, yes, editing. Although I don't think Cocteau ever was an editor.

AK: Could you describe the character of Andre Breton?

CHF: Your mean my impression of what he was?

AK: Yeah.

CHF: When I became more and more immersed in Surrealism, naturally he was the model. He also experimented in other forms. He did these little assemblage. Many people found him charismatic. He was always shameless about his anti-homosexuality, but that didn't keep him from saying about me, "This American poet, Charles Henri is le poete prototypique.

GM: …prototypical poet.

CHF: Yeah. That's what he said about me. I gave him the only interview that he ever had in America in View. Going along with him was an open collaboration. It's hard to translate things that he would say. I invited him to the View office one day and I said, "Andre, I would like to publish a book of your poems…" So he looked at me and said, "vous etes malin." Now that's hard to translate. "Malin" means something like I was undercutting him. "You got me by the balls," so to speak. He knew it would be a feather in my cap, but he also knew that he couldn't resist because nobody else had asked him. You see, I didn't twist the rope, I had asked Duchamp to do a cover. It was the Statue of Liberty with Breton's face superimposed. Duchamp turned him into a drag queen. (Everybody laughs) But, anyway, Duchamp had already turned himself into a drag queen, Rrose Selavy, and there he is [pointing to one of his poem-posters tacked up on the closet door]. That's his face, he's in drag—I put him in there as La Papesse Jeanne, the female Pope. Most people never heard of a female pope.

AK: Can you describe the tension of conflict between Breton and Cocteau?

CHF: Chiefly, because of Cocteau's accomplishment as a figure, an artist multi-productive and his homosexuality. I guess I'm one of the few that Breton accepted.

GM: But Breton made himself out to be an island surrounded by a sea of homosexuality. How could he escape the fact that there were so many artists and poets in Paris who were homosexual?

CHF: One in the Surrealist group was Rene Crevel. There was also a veiled bitch, Louis Aragon. It came out after his death. Nobody thought of him as a homosexual in his lifetime. He was living with a woman. He was dropped by Breton because he joined the Communist Party. Anyway, Aragon was very good-looking and always dressed in white. He was just doing a masquerade. Breton didn't live in vain.

GM: But Breton kept this tension going, as Asako says, because he was so authoritarian, wouldn't you say?

CHF: He would try to be dictatorial and ex-communicate. He ex-communicated Matta, you know.

GM: Well, he was always on ceremony.

AK: How about Cocteau himself relating to Breton?

CHF: I'm sure he never expressed himself the way that Breton used to do, because Cocteau was generosity itself and he didn't feel that he had to make enemies because he had so many friends. He didn't have to envy anybody. People envied him.

GM: He was a very good-natured, generous person.

CHF: . . . except, he was not generous in the case of Tchelitchew, because at one time Tchelitchew and Berard had the same gallery, but one of them had to go for some reason or other, and Cocteau was called in and he said, "Keep Berard," and Tchelitchew lost his gallery, so that was a great blow and one reason why Tchelitchew might not have forgiven him but he did somehow, because they were very friendly when we saw Cocteau in Rome years later, as though nothing had happened. I bought from the Rome exhibition a beautiful pastel of a clown—for Ruth and Zachary [Ruth and Zachary Scott, Charles's sister and brother-in-law]. They always gave me money that I would spend for works of art because the works were for them, and it was a hundred-and-sixty-dollars. There was another work of art that they lost out on. I wrote them from Paris that I had found an American painter for them to collect. Ruth rejected Andy because she said, "I don't want Marilyn Monrow on my wall." That painting was two hundred and fifty dollars. Anyway, I found in a big Paris show a painting, and I said look at that. I should write Ruth and Zachary about it. Eight hundred dollars. Two black and white flags, one on top of the other. Jasper Johns. I don't know why they didn't send me the money. His name didn't mean anything to anybody. He was just one of the gang—not where he is today.

GM: That painting would be worth three hundred, four hundred thousand dollars now.

CHF: . . . no, a million! Well, you heard about Andy's horrible Campbell Soup can selling…how much?

GM: Three point two million I think.

CHF: More than three. It was estimated at two million, and sold for three million. Can you believe it? I'm think they're hideous.

(Gerard laughs)

GM: Well, this was one soup can with a torn label.

CHF: It was not just one alone but it was several on the same canvas.

GM: No no no, it was just one.

CHF: Just one?

GM: One big painting. The way it was rendered he made it so the label was torn off the can itself part way.

CHF: Collage?

GM: No, he drew it that way by hand.

CHF: Well, Andy made his mark and took it with him.

(Everybody laughs)

AK: What was your position regarding the tension between Breton and Cocteau?

CHF: I chose Breton because I wanted all the Surrealists for View, and I couldn't publish Cocteau without antagonizing Breton.

GM: So you made a political decision.

CHF: Yeah, but, then, before View stopped I decided to publish Cocteau anyway. Not publish him directly, but I had a brilliant essay on him by Charles Glenn Wallace. Had another View come out, it would have been in. And who did me a cover. I was the first one in America to recognize him—Jean Dubuffet.

GM: But that issue never came out?

CHF: I think the cover must be at Yale. I sent them the entire View archive.

GM: Really. Yale has all the View material?

CHF: I gave it to them like an idiot! It would be worth lots of money now.

GM: …all those covers.

CHF: Oh, no. The covers I kept. It was only the typescripts. Like an idiot I threw in the Jean Dubuffet. When do you kick yourself when you lose money you didn't have to.

GM: When do you kick yourself for losing money you didn't have to?

CHF: For what reason do you ever kick yourself because you lost money you didn't have to lose.

GM: That's true.

AK: The reason Breton hesitated to bring Tchelitchew into his group was because of Tchelitchew's homosexuality. Is that the only reason?

CHF: No, not exactly. He didn't consider Tchelitchew's work surrealist. One day I took Breton to see Tchelitchew's big painting, "Phenomena." He didn't find it surrealist and it isn't.

GM: But there are major elements of surrealism in Tchelitchew's work.

CHF: Here's the distinction that somebody made, that the surrealists painted the dream and neo-romantics painted the dreamer. That has some truth.

AK: What made you come back to New York from Paris?

CHF: I had the definite feeling that everything was beginning to happen in New York and that Paris was phasing out. But to get Tchelitchew to come with me I had to go alone first and I crossed the Atlantic on a freighter. It cost eighty dollars and it took ten days. But I ate at the captain's table and had a cabin of my own.

GM: But Tchelitchew had a lot of paintings to bring over to America with him?

CHF: Yes, because he was going to have a show at the Museum of Modern Art. His friend, Monroe Wheeler, very powerful there, was the curator. They bought "Hide and Seek." Some millionaire patroness bought the painting and donated it to the museum. She just shucked in the large amount of four thousand dollars. Now you can buy a Tchelitchew drawing for that amount.

AK: What made you a surrealist poet?

CHF: What made a surrealist poet was because the Surrealists existed before me. They electrified my output.

AK: You said you came back to New York because nothing was happing in Paris…

CHF: Everything was happing there, but then it faded out. There was Le Boeuf-sur-la-toit, named after Cocteau's play, people would congregate there. It was a nightclub. Everything was exciting at that time because you could live on practically nothing and you could meet everyone. They would gather at different cafes. The queers at Le Select, the Surrealists at Les deux Magots. It was a life that nobody knew in New York. It was exciting to be there if you were an artist. The Montparnasse zone was even a protected zone. The police were instructed "hands off. This is not for you." I gave the last party in Montparnasse. Mayo, who did costumes for Marcel Carne's film, Les enfants du Paradis—Mayo and I took over a deserted building and invited everybody we knew to a bottle party. Everything was lit up by candlelight. Julian Levy arrived with Lee Miller whom I had just seen in Cocteau's Blood of a Poet. Kiki was there. So much noise was made that the neighbors called the police. So the police barged in, with the intention of putting the quietus on this rowdy scene. But when they were told that Kiki was there they joined the party. Kiki happened to be the mistress of the chief of police! Anyway, it really was sort of the last party in Montparnasse.

AK: When you started View magazine, did you already have in mind to focus on French Surrealism as a broad editorial base?

CHF: I didn't already have in mind to start View in that direction, but that became its raison d'être.

AK: Are you aware of Breton's feeling regarding a differing approach with what View and his magazine VVV were advancing as an agenda for Surrealism in America?

CHF: Yes, I was aware of Breton's feelings. One thing about him. He never kept his feelings a secret—not that everybody shared them because most people didn't. He was his own man.

AK: What were Breton's feelings?

CHF: He felt that he wanted to be the director. That's why he wanted to recruit me as the editor of VVV and for me to give up View, so he could be looking over my shoulder and have some control. He was a displaced person in America. He never learned English. He was like one of those holy men who go underground and stay there till they come out. His underground was America.

AK: So you refused.

CHF: I said, "Thank you very much but I think I'll continue with View.

GM: You remember what his reaction was to that decision?

CHF: He was beginning to accept so many things that he didn't want to accept, that he accepted it. In New York, he was at a disadvantage. He didn't speak English, as you know. Well, you know how much pleasure one gets out of being in control. So when I invited him to the office I said, "Andre, I would like to publish a book of your poems." Naturally it was an irresistible invitation. It came out with this wonderful cover by Duchamp. Duchamp made Breton into a drag queen—he stuck his face onto the Statue of Liberty.

AK: How was Breton looking at that?

CHF: He approved of everything that Duchamp did, because Duchamp was really the predecessor. Duchamp got there first and Breton followed.

GM: How many issues did Breton publish of his magazine?

CHF: Just a few. I don't think it lasted but six months, not even a year. View lasted eight years.

GM: So his magazine was very short-lived, but he was here for four or five years.

CHF: But, anyway, that's the story of Surrealism in America. Surrealism outlived its time as a spearheader because when Breton went back to Paris after the end of WWII, Existentialism had taken over.

AK: I'm pretty curious about the position of Duchamp because he was collaborating with you and he was helping Breton with VVV too.

CHF: That's right. VVV. That was one of Duchamp's puns--he was full of puns. Pun was his middle name…

GM: What was your relationship with Duchamp like? Do you have any reminiscences?

CHF: Duchamp was a very open person and when I came along with the idea of a Duchamp number, at that time no monograph had ever been published on Duchamp. So View published the first monograph ever on Duchamp who had been functioning and admired for many years. Apres mois le deluge. Since then, book after book on Duchamp has come out and there still coming out. He's one of the most recognized French artists who ever lived…lived in our time, in any case.

AK: Being an American poet living in New York in the 1940s, did you encounter any resistance from academic circles as to the kind of poetry you stood for?

CHF: Neither resistance nor acclaim. Academic circles didn't encircle Surrealism.

AK: They just didn't care.

CHF: The groves of academe had no surrealist sheep grazing. (Gerard laughs) John Crowe Ransom who was the editor of The Kenyon Review and who was a sort of symbol of academe always rejected my poems, and he always had some excuse but I've forgotten what excuses he had. He rejected the poem that gave the title to my book, The Overturned Lake.

GM: So you would send poems to him from time to time . . .

CHF: . . . not from time to time. When I got his message I stopped. Maybe I just sent one or two. But I think I even got a letter his rejection of The Overturned Lake. It didn't hold water.

(Gerard bursts out laughing)

GM: You had a very close affinity with Rimbaud's writings.

CHF: Rimbaud fired my productions just as he did to surrealism, but for some reason which I forget and don't care to remember, Breton later on rejected him as a precursor.

AK: Why was that?

CHF: Breton was know for irrational rejections, so the irrational was his field. One rejection he made was simply puritanical because he shelved Matta when Matta committed adultery with Arshile Gorky's wife.

GM: So Breton was very conservative in many areas of social life.

CHF: Puritan, puritan, puritan. His stupid anti-homosexuality…

AK: So what made him the head of Surrealist group?

CHF: The French, somebody pointed out recently, they all like to form groups. Breton wanted to do that. He was like honey for the bees.

GM: The interesting thing was that Breton was able to keep a hold on his position. He was able to protect his position. The thing that I find unusual is that because of his extreme puritanical outlook on the various levels of society, that he wasn't overthrown himself and the movement wasn't taken over by someone else.

CHF: A dictatorial mentality. Well, different people tried that I think, but they didn't get organized after—they just became ex-surrealists.

AK: What is the difference between good and bad surrealism?

CHF: Anything may be good or bad, whether it's surrealism or anything else. There are bad abstractionists. There's good and bad in every category.

AK: Breton was saying--because of this I don't like this and it doesn't belong to surrealism.

CHF: Breton rejected what he didn't consider surrealism. I took him to see Tchelitchew's "Phenomena," thinking that he might see some surrealist background, but he didn't. He had his own idea of what surrealism is. I guess he was never surprised.

AK: Who is you favorite surrealist?

CHF: Dali.

AK: Oh, yeah.

GM: Dali was another one who was thrown out of the group.

CHF: "Avida dollars." It's an anagram of Salvador Dali by Breton. So anybody who got out from under the wing of the old hen was an independent chicken.

(Everyone laughs)

GM: My theory about Breton is that if any one member of the group received a lot of publicity for one reason or other, Breton was very jealous of that.

CHF: He felt he was in the shadow of this superstar. He's certainly not a hero of mine. You never want to be like him, in any case. He was not an icon to be emulated.

GM: It's really sad too, because Dali had such a great sense of humor, he was a very warm, generous person in his own way and I just feel that Breton treated Dali very shabbily.

CHF: Well, in a dictatorial way. So many facets to Dali. I'm always writing haiku about Dali. Different thoughts come to me about Dali, and one thought came to me, that Dali used to be very pretty, very good-looking. Garcia-Lorca fell in love with him. When pretty-boy Dali outgrew his pretty-boy looks he became "clown Dali." I'm no longer a pretty boy, I'll be a clown. The waxed mustache. The poses. The outrageous statements. You know his outrageous statement about the minotaur? "The minotaur is the clitoris of the mother!" (Everyone laughs) I think he got it mixed up with the unicorn.

AK: Was he always like that?

CHF: He was so inclined to be shocking that he just said anything that came into his head. He never thought of that before he said it. When I introduced him to W. H. Auden, he said, "Do you speak English?" (Everyone laughs) Dali was loveable because he was surrealist all the way.

AK: What was Gala like?

CHF: Gala was very seductive. Of course, she knew what she was doing when she left Eluard for Salvador.

GM: That probably added to the rift between Breton and Dali.

CHF: Also, Breton and Eluard—there was a rift too.

GM: There was?

CHF: Oh, yes. When Eluard became totally Sovietic, that's when Breton gave him his walking papers.

GM: I was aware of that with Louis Aragon, but I forgot about that aspect between Breton and Eluard.

AK: What was your interest in editing magazines besides being a poet?

CHF: I don't know why but editing was in my impulsive behavior even when I was in grammar school. I used to edit a little typewritten paper and tack it on the wall for the other students and I called it The Brass Monkey.

AK: So that's your nature.

CHF: It's part of my literary nature. Words get through to some people more influentially than they get to others. It works for some people like water on the duck's back.

AK: I know that View magazine is to be revived. Will it continue the focus and editorial program you had envisioned for it back in the 1940's?

CHF: It will, according to the mentality of the new editor. I don't know what Karen Lehrman is going to produce? If I'm recruited as advisory editor I'll advise as time goes by. I couldn't conceive a year's production of View.

GM: Do you have any idea when the first issue is coming out?

CHF: Karen Lehrman wrote me a little note saying she's been out still raising money, so I think View will come out eventually. It's taking a lot of ground-play.

AK: If the new magazine is started, have you got any idea what the content will be like?

CHF: I'm still attuned to what I consider surrealism. For the new View, I have at least two artists that I would like to see on covers. One is Red Grooms and one is Larry Rivers. Others will come as they're encountered. I'll have to get around more to the galleries to see what's being presented that might spark a cover or a page or whatever. The more one gets into it the more one will exercise one's preferences.

AK: With regard to your relationship with both Tchelitchew and Warhol, did you note any similarities inherent in your appreciation of their art?

CHF: No, definitely not. Apropos, I'm always coming up with some thought about Andy which I like to put in haiku:

Andy's portraits?

All painted with silkscreen paint

On silk-screened photographs

You get the dig? He never painted a portrait. It was always a painted photograph. People are confused about that.

GM: What Asako's asking really, there must have been some kind of similarity inherent in your appreciation for their art.

CHF: I cannot think of any affinity.

GM: I don't mean that there was an affinity between the two of them, but your appreciation for Tchelitchew . . .

AK: What was your appreciation for Tchelitchew?

CHF: I remember writing back a letter from Paris to Parker Tyler saying "I have discovered a genius," and I didn't even know how to spell his name, and I used the word "morbid," apropos the effect his paintings had on me, but it wasn't anymore than Dostoyevsky. It was just Russian. My greatest appreciation for Andy was the very first Marilyn Monroe painting, because I considered the technical accidents a witty perversity. But it was actually only an accident. It had nothing to do with Andy's intention. But they're the ones that turned me on the most. The first ones . . .

GM: . . . the paintings with all the mistakes.

CHF: I thought they were intentional—that's why I liked it.

GM: It wasn't intentional, because technically it was a mistake. We just let it go.

CHF: But I didn't know that.

GM: …and Andy accepted those mistakes.

CHF: Well, at the time he probably thought it was presentable just as I liked it for its presentability and I thought that was a witty comment in the painting. It's like Duchamp putting the mustache on the Mona Lisa. But when Andy got more correct I found it more boring. Big regret that I couldn't persuade the Scotts to invest two hundred and fifty dollars. Sister Ruth said, "I don't want Marilyn Monroe on my wall."

GM: That painting would be worth half a million easy today.

CHF: All those outrageous millions on a Campbell soup can. Who wants to look at it?

AK: It is now a well-known historical fact that you introduced Gerard to Warhol. Can you recall where your catalytic instinct may have been an influence in other areas as well?

CHF: Part of my nature as a catalyst I suppose is part of my editorial propensity. One goes through phases. The story of phases can be divided into two parts. Some are phased out and some go on to other fields.

GM: What was your notion at the time when you were hosting high teas at the Dakota?

CHF: Well, it was like an editorial job.

GM: Entertaining, of course.

CHF: If a magazine is not entertaining, what is it? The highest art is entertaining.

AK: You have expressed yourself through different branches of art in the course of your life as artist—poetry, which you are still predominately known for, and also photography, films and collages. Which is the one expression you've been most satisfied with and why?

CHF: The one I was doing at the time. The array, from one to the other. Now it's not poetry definitely, except for the haiku.

AK: So you are always satisfied with what you are using?

CHF: I'm using myself. I'm the dummy of myself. I'm the ventriloquist.

AK: Why did you abandon writing poetry as an expression of the self?

CHF: I did not abandon poetry. As Jean Cocteau put it, "I am a poet in everything I do"

AK: How did you pick up the haiku form as an expression?

CHF: Basho and Issu. I'm magnetized by haiku to this day. Every time I see a book of haiku advertised I get it. Haiku is my favorite form of poetry.

AK: . . . because for me haiku and surrealist poetry are quite different.

CHF: But a haiku can be surrealist.

AK: It's strictly form.

CHF: The thing about the haiku is it's very flexible as to content and the form is fascinating because of its brevity and it can be a very concentrated content. It's the most flexible form of poetry, much more so than the sonnet. I think the first thing that attracted me to the haiku, but it's not what attracts me now particularly, but it ends up being surrealist because of the superimposition—two unrelated things that make a whole which seems to be a collage.

AK: Looking back at your life's work, how would you sum up all that you have accomplished?

CHF: Don't look back—living well is the best revenge.

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Purchase this book at your local independent bookstore.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2000 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

BREAK EVERY RULE

Break Every Rule by Carole MasoEssays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire
Carole Maso
Counterpoint ($25)

by Brian Evenson

For Carole Maso, prose writing is elastic and multiform, and we find in all her books a willingness to slide ecstatically between different generic modes, not only of prose but of other forms as well. "My form is always an odd amalgam—taken from painting, theory, film, music, poetry, dance, mathematics—even fiction sometimes." Maso has never been one to try to restrict form, to argue the shoulds and shouldn'ts of generic straightjackets; indeed, she is much less interested in what prose should be than in what it can be. She is interested in the potential of prose, in the direction it can go next. As she suggests in "Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose," "I love most what the novel might be, and not what it all too often is."

For that reason, the strength of Maso's latest book, Break Every Rule, comes in its desire to enable writers and readers to move forward. In the place of the usual creative writing proscriptions and numbered lists of techniques, Maso poses questions intended to loosen the straps that limit our writing and reading. Asks Maso, in the title essay, originally delivered at Brown University's 1994 Gay and Lesbian Conference,

If the creation of literary texts affords a kind of license, is a kind of freedom, dizzying, giddy—then why do we more often than not fall back on the old orthodoxy, the old ways of seeing and perceiving and recording that perception?

For Maso, avoiding falling back on the "old orthodoxy" is closely tied to an attention to language, a willingness to push language into new channels. Indeed, as with French feminists such as Helene Cixous, she sees cultural definitions and oppressions as being tied up with the structure of language:

If we joyfully violate the language contract, might that not make us braver, stronger, more capable of breaking other oppressive contracts?

Might our pleasure, our delight, our audacity become irresistible
finally?

Would celebrating through the invention of new kinds of texts—ones that insisted on our own takes of the world, our own visions, our own realities—would this finally convince both us and others that we are autonomous, we are not them, not exactly, but we are nonetheless joyful and free? In short we too are complex human beings and cannot be so simply reduced or read.

The ten essays collected in this book offer a wide variety of styles and approaches. Some are memorial, eulogizing the musician Gustave Richter or Gertrude Stein. Others speak directly and frankly about books Maso has written, providing insight into her methods and aims. Others are biographical, or walk a line between biography and other modes. Still others are more broadly aesthetic, with Maso willing to declare in vibrant prose against those who set themselves up as tyrants over literature's possibilities: "Wish: that forms other than those you've invented or sanctioned through your thousands of years of privilege might arise and be celebrated."

The most intense moments of these essays, at least for writers, are those that concern themselves with where writing could go, with coming to understand the possibilities of what Maso calls "lyrical fiction." It is a living fiction that fills the gaps between genres, thriving in the cracks of the old orthodoxy's static generic sidewalk. "Lyrical fiction introduces the conventions of poetry (image, metaphor) into a genre dependent on causation and time. Characters, scenes, plots are turned into patterns, designs of imagery. Life and manners are sensually apprehended and then turned into design." Language is not merely a tool but is, as language, "a profoundly sensual experience. Language is emotion, language is feeling, language is body. It is not merely the sign for something, but rather also a thing in itself." Revelatory in their force, many of the essays' declarations approach what it means to write fiction in ways that I find at once dynamic and transformative. What happens, for instance, if instead of fixating on characters' so-called believability we realize that "characters may be perceived as a light or a force or a pressure, or as an aspect of possibility"? How does the novel change if we consider it as "A place for the random, the accidental, the overheard, the incidental. Precious, disappearing things"? Again, Maso is less interested in answering the question than in posing it, hoping we'll each strive for answers of our own as well as uncovering additional questions that will bring the literature into a new space.

Smart, witty, filled with risk and velocity, Break Every Rule is a strong essay collection, one very useful both to those interested in Maso and to those interested in the possibilities of writing. It proves that Maso remains a writer—one of the very few—who continues to write on her own terms, who is genuinely interested in provoking others to do the same.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2000 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

MISGIVINGS: MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, MYSELF

Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself by C. K. WilliamsC. K. Williams
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($21)

by Elaine Margolin

Whether we admit it or not, we all rehearse our parent's death. We think about what we will do, whom we will call, how we will tell our own children. We believe ourselves to be ready, all grown-up, having had decades to repackage our own pasts into more suitable stories, with most of the harsh edges cut off. Stiff and aching, we rise to face yet another day, our own bodies no longer so reliable.

Poet C.K. Williams was already married with children when his own father became gravely ill with brain cancer. Williams had always had a difficult relationship with his father, full of stops and starts, but lately he believed they had finally worked out something a bit better. He was certain that when his father did die, he would be ready, able to manage. Yet, when his father finds living with cancer intolerable, and takes his own life, Williams is overwrought:

My father dead, I come into the room where he lies and I say aloud, immediately concerned that he might still be able to hear me. What a war we had! To my father's body I say it, still propped up on its pillows, before the men from the funeral home arrive to put him in their horrid zippered green bag to take him away, before his night table is cleared of the empty bottles he wolfed down when he'd finally been allowed to end the indignity of his suffering, and had found the means to do it. Before my mother comes in to lie down beside him.

"What a war we had!" keeps playing over and over again in his head, like an old broken LP record, the needle stuck in his heart. He can't stop thinking it. "What a war we had!" a bittersweet mantra that keeps repeating itself, its emotional force unstoppable.

Seduction is often thought of as a dance between men and women, full of secrets and disguises. A series of chess moves really. But most adults are immune to seduction; they have already learned to be wary, somewhat suspicious, even of their own happiness. Children welcome seduction, however, for it promises the impossible, the improbable, a world they take stock in. They are constantly jumping over boundaries that existed only moments before, like the bike they can suddenly ride, or the roller-blades that transform walking forever. Williams remembers the turbulent roller-coaster ride of growing up with his father, where he often felt unsure if his presence was welcome:

When he was in a benign mood, his pleasure was wonderfully infectious, it was remarkable how he attracted people, how he could make them feel that something uncommon was happening to them when they were in his company. Even his children, even his son; even if you were still scraped raw by whatever abrasion he'd last inflicted on you, you'd feel both relief and an odd sense of fulfillment at being allowed to participate in his good spirits.

When he decided—no one could ever say why he would or wouldn't let his kinder nature be revealed, even his physical presence became welcoming.

Yet, just as quickly, and without warning, he could change and:

there would be a sudden slackening in him that you could sense even in his body: he'd seem to be looking at you from lower in the space than he had been; that gap in his teeth, the stress mark that italicized his good spirits would be concealed again. All at once, when you said something you meant to be amusing, he'd be looking at you with a somber cynicism, as though he didn't understand not only how you could say something so foolish, but how you could think of inflicting your foolishness on him. "Let's go," he would say abruptly to my mother if we were out, or, if we were at their house, he'd say to me, "It's late, you better get going." We'd know then that our audience with that agreeable part of him had come to an end, and so, carefully, warily, hardly daring to look back, we'd leave.

As a young man, his father's erratic fluctuations in temperament upset and irritated him. As a child, perhaps he would just pretend his father had disappeared. What must have puzzled the young Williams was how often others seemed to take to his father, especially in business. Only today are women finding out what men have always known: the giddy pleasures of work outside the home, where goals are specified and camaraderie forms easily, fueled by joint purpose. Williams always sensed his father's thoughts were bound up in business, the family an afterthought. He remembers feeling jealous about his father's alliances with co-workers, noticing how happy he seemed with them, an ease of manner he rarely showed at home. During his father's last days, when he was stricken with aphasia and would mumble incoherently for hours, his speech would suddenly become coherent when one of his business partners visited, and lapse again when his colleague would depart.

Williams was never able to confront his father directly, and when he would look to his mother for solace, she was often distracted, perhaps lost in her own struggle to keep the family together. Instead, he would often argue with his father about politics, taking pleasure in the fact that he was smarter than his dad, and could generally score more points. They would fight for hours about Israel, for example, Williams believing in negotiating with the Palestinians, and his father, like many American Jews of his generation, vehemently opposed to dealing with anyone in the Arab world.

There was always plenty of yelling between them, little resolution, always a nagging sadness. Williams remembers feeling that, even as a young boy, his father seemed to take pleasure in bullying him. William's childhood passion, before girls and sex and writing took over, was for horses. He would spend many a blissful afternoon at the stables riding. One afternoon his father made an unexpected visit to the stables and demanded his son dismount, and hand over the reins. Williams watched in horror as his father mounted the horse, convinced his father's massive frame would smash the vertebrae of the tiny horse. His father said little, rode the horse for a few brief minutes, and left. Decades later, Williams is still uncertain as to why his father visited that day. Was he trying to understand his son's love of horses? Or was he trying to show him that he rules the roost, everywhere?

Williams tries to understand, struggles to forgive his father, but sometimes he wonders why he still cares so much. After all, he reasons, what's the point? His parents are dead now, and have been for quite some time. Anger and self-righteousness no longer seem appropriate. He is no longer certain he has done any better, with his own family, his own children:

I have my mother's tendency to brood on causes, her passion to find reasons, and though I don't like having to say so, her need to lay blame. From my father the urge to despise and dismiss anything that doesn't meet my expectations.

He often fantasizes about what his father's early years were like, before the children came. He knew his father grew up in a different and scary time, where he was sometimes targeted, often unwelcome, usually alone:

I've often wondered about my father's soul, about the cosmos in which he dwelt. What were the ultimate grounds of his beliefs, of his day-to-day confrontations with existence? What meaning did life have for him? Did he believe in a real God? How much had being a Jew in a century of Jewish horror affected him? We never spoke about that, or never seriously: surely it would have had to affect him to realize that it was the purest chance that his and his mother's grandparents had left Poland and Russia when they did, and so it was just as much of a chance that he was still alive at all. If he felt anything like that, though, he kept it to himself, as most Jews of his generation did.

There are still times when Williams, well into his sixties, dreams of his father, and imagines him to be at peace, hovering nearby, a comforting presence. Sometimes, in the dream, his father is trying to tell him something, but his speech is garbled, as it was in his last days. Williams can't quite make it out.

Perhaps he is trying to tell him he loved him.

Williams has written a brilliant memoir about the particular strains of being loved insufficiently, of always wanting more.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2000 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

JOHN CAGE: WRITER

John Cage: WriterSelected Texts
edited by Richard Kostelanetz
Cooper Square Press ($17.95)

by Ramez Qureshi

One evening I heard some modern music: Scriabin, Stravinsky. I also had seen modern painting in Paris.
My reaction to modern painting and modern music was immediate and enthusiastic, but not humble: I decided that if other people could make such things, I could too.

So reveals John Cage in "A Composer's Confessions." One is grateful or rueful for Cage's youthful immodesty (count me in the former company), for 20th-Century-culture has never been the same, jammed with the provocative monkey wrench of John Cage's art, the way a musical composition of his might be jammed with an unorthodox sound that would be the last thing one would expect in music.

One only need read the copious and succinct "Notes on Composition" here to get an idea of just what Cage has done to music. Here is a description of "Concerto Gross for 4 TV Sets and 12 Radios," from 1979:

First Installation: In 1969 at the University if California, Davis, I arranged an event called 33⅓ which consisted of an auditorium with eight sound systems, the sound sources being recordings played on playbacks. Each playback had a technical assistant who did not himself play the records but who was available in case a member of the "audience" had difficulty in doing so. For the audience was the performers. Without them nothing was heard. This piece is in that "tradition." It is assumed, however, that everyone knows how to "play" a television set and how to "play" a radio.

Cage explains the politics behind his music: "I had become interested in writing difficult music, etudes, because of a world situation which often seems to many of us hopeless. I thought that were a musician to give the examples in public of doing the impossible that it would inspire someone who was struck by that performance to change the world, to improve it." But this book purports to show Cage as a writer, as its title indicates, so we have Cage the poet, presenting his innovative mesostics, such as takes on the word "James Joyce," rearranging texts from Finnegan's Wake:

rubyJuby. phook!
no wonder, pipes As kirles, that he sthings like a rheinbok
one bed night he had the delysiuMs
that thEy
were all queenS mobbing him.

John Cage: Writer is mostly about music, though: criticism, notes, autobiographical testimony. And back to the music. It takes ones breath away to come across a harmlessly nestled discreet description of the legendary 4'33", that piece consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, from 1952:

tacet, any instrument or combination of instruments: This is a piece in three movements during all three of which no sounds are intentionally produced. The lengths of time were determined by chance operations but could be any others.

The sound in 4'33" is that of the background, silence, being for Cage, "not acoustic . . . a change of mind, a turning around" as he discovered at Harvard during his famed visit to its acoustics lab in the late '40s when he heard, in a sound vacuum chamber, two sounds: the high pitch of his nervous system and the low pitch of his circulatory system.

Cage's sense of humor is on display here as well. Cage was known for his laughter, and he provokes much of it in his "Synopses" to "Europera," pastiches from operas stitched together through chance operations:

Dressed as an Irish princess, he gives birth; they plot to overthrow the French. He arranges to be kidnapped by her; rejuvenated, they desert: to him she has borne two children. He prays for help. Since they have decided she shall marry no one outside, he has himself crowned emperor. She, told he is dead, begs him to look at her. First, before the young couple come to a climax, he agree. Accidentally she drowns them.

Chance operations, many of which Cage conducted through the I-Ching, are pivotal to his aesthetics, and Cage explains why: "...the I Ching is a discipline of the ego. It facilitates self-alteration and weakens self-expression." The aesthetic of self-expression is out for Cage; instead he seeks a self-disciplining that seems to anticipate Foucault. Such is the producer's side; as for the receiver's, the end is one of an integrated personality free of neurosis, in retreat to the tranquility of "that island that we have grown to think no longer exists to which we might we might have retreated to have escaped the impact of the world."

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LUMINOUS DEBRIS

Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and LanguedocUnknown
Gustaf Sobin
University of California Press ($31.95)

by Robert Baker

In Luminous Debris, expatriate American poet and novelist Gustaf Sobin sifts the remnants of the past for the "mirroring images they might provide" to the present. For Sobin the artifacts of lives lived in the midst of the ongoing allow us the possibility to situate "ourselves in regard to our own evolving." Sobin walks Provence and Languedoc in search of the "luminous debris" that might provide the possibility of a "vertical reading" of the landscape and a "deeper, more arcane set of cognitions." The twenty-six archeological/anthropological essays in this collection span a history of over four-hundred-thousand years, and each is a mirror made of language within which we might recognize ourselves in the reflections of our predecessors and perceive our inseparability from all that has come before us.

Sobin's gifts as a poet make each of these essays rewarding in the same way good poetry is rewarding: no amount of reading can exhaust their richness or their possibilities to offer further suggestion. Consider "West-Southwest," a meditation on Neolithic burial chambers. These massive structures of piled stone "seem to draw, to magnetize unto their assembled masses all the chthonic forces of their immediate surroundings." The dead are placed in these collective sepulchers as if lain in the depths of the vegetal cycle itself, and are made to face the direction of the setting sun in order to be "addressed in the direction of their rebirth." Finally, however, the essay leaves us pondering death and burial as a kind of translation from one plane of existence to another, a discourse addressed in the direction of our own eventual reception. Readers of Sobin's poetry will find here a further reflection on themes from such major works as "The Earth as Air." Poetry and the rituals of death are reiterations of what is in the direction of what we hope will be. "[D]on't we ourselves bury our words, our very language, but only for the sake of their eventual resuscitation? That 'grain' might equal 'grain,' but only as a germinated entity: there on the far, the opposite, the facing side, that is, of the intervening night."

In "Undulant Oblique: A Study of Wave Patterns on Ionico-Massalian Pottery," Sobin discusses a decorative wave motif that appears on Ionian pottery in the sixth century B.C. as a reflection of the energies of an "originating vision." The parallel lines of this undulant script come to represent for Sobin the rhythms of a universe as encountered before "number" and "measure" come to intervene between an evolving humanity and a vision of its own origin in a "harmony of opposing forces." The potter incising these free-flowing, often erratic wave patterns was giving expression to "the vibratory flow of yet unregulated energies. He was, we might call it, expressing . . . in an ontological script, the calligraphy of Logos itself." For Sobin this vision of origin is not limited in time to the remote past; in fact it resurfaces and can be glimpsed in the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger and in the poetry of our own period. Sobin discusses the briefly articulated Ionic vision of Being relative to Olson's view of the poem as a "high-energy construct." "Within that vision, the world (and the works by which that world is made manifest) erupts continuously out of an irrepressible point of origin." This eruption of Being into art provides even contemporary humanity with a potential point of orientation relative to the source of its own emerging.

"Votive Mirrors: A Reflection" examines the tiny mirrors discovered in Gaul that were once offered to Aphrodite or Selene either to ask the favor of the goddess or to thank her for a favor granted. It is here that we find a metaphor for the entire collection of essays and indeed for Sobin's use of the mirror image throughout his entire oeuvre. Mirrors, for Sobin, reflect not only the one gazing into the mirror, but "an otherwise invisible world of hidden realities." A mirror's reflection offers us not only our own image but also access to a mysterious otherness at the heart of reflection itself. That otherness is manifested in the votive mirror as a vision of the goddess in the mirror's reflection. "As her eye came to gaze on its own wobbling likeness, it might have encountered, in its hallucinatory fixation, that long-sought response. Out of the unfathomable depth of that depthless reflection, the divinity herself might have appeared, spoken, proffered her assistance."

The book's final essay is a reading of the Roman aqueduct at Nîmes as "kind of fragmented antique text." We watch the aqueduct through the centuries as it is transformed from a Roman "affirmation of existence itself" to a pile of debris to be scavenged and used out of "all established context," and once again we find ourselves reflected in this remnant of the past. "For how can we help but see—as if mirrored within this particular, historic complex—an image of our own collective breakdown?" The essays in this collection succeed not only in informing us about the past, but also in making us see ourselves as a part of it. The reader comes away from this book knowing that she has been changed through gazing intently at her own reflection in what initially seemed a distant otherness. What Sobin says about an Augustan bridge is true as well of our experiencing of this collection: "Here, in the given image, we might recognize the given reflection; in the 'one' acknowledge the 'other.' And, so doing, in this perfect set of reciprocities, undergo a certain sense of passage ourselves."

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OCLOCK

oclock by Mary Rising HigginsMary Rising Higgins
Potes & Poets Press ($13)

by Patrick F. Durgin

"If the world no longer consists of places, has it become larger because it is no longer a place?" (Andrew Levy, Paper Head Last Lyrics) In our data age, such a question becomes acutely pertinent, particularly in terms of our national ambition to "globalize." Let's think big or, at least, take it another way. Although (or since?) our service providers afford us unlimited access, we can still only count on the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, at best. So, if a life no longer consists in years, has life become longer because it no longer endures? I'm thinking of hackers, viruses, "Coolio," and other inhuman celebrities. Such myths are always aboriginal in a sense, timeless, out-sourced even. Time, however trite the assertion may be, endures with a bristling elegance; were sundials cropping up out west during the recent millennium scare?

midpoint heliogram

nothing to add     helioabyss

Time and space, the bedrock of physics as well as metaphysics, exacts its revenge on virtual reality. The danger of the latter seems to be that of sleeping (or "surfing") in a burning bed.

This present danger, experienced every day as the lodestar of reactionary media anxiety, provides one lens through which to view the radical modernist poetics, or "material text," as represented in Pound, Stein, all the way to the present, "post-language poetry" moment. Pound sought to "make it new," Marx sought "to change it." Which brings us to the current question: define "it." This is some big, if ephemeral, thinking, but that's nothing new. Aristotle spoke of the necessity of imagining the grand scheme of things—as did Christ and Darwin for that matter. There's not a layperson among us; we each became an expert the second we were able, each in our own ways, to distinguish friends from enemies, compassion from disgrace. Luckily, the best of our poets understand the need for small instances; "times" and "places" catch the eye, if they don't always hold it.

nothing times this when no
first hand accounts go there

Mary Rising Higgins's first full-length collection, really a serial poem organized as a book of hours, plays a straight-faced game with time and space and "her" place in them. Churning with the regal but violent machinations of a bell tower, oclock is a meticulously controlled random-text, a jarring but rewarding read. That is, these poems never invite one to nod in easy compliance, though they attempt to command the attention through formal techniques just this side of "cut-up" and "concrete" writing, respectively. Because of the surface tension of errant commas and neologisms "bright with vocabularies [and syntax] of self invention," the lyric finesse of this book appears at those points in which what we expect of the written word breaks down—the result is that "it feels like to go there becomes what is in front of you."

Though harnessing the powerful, diaristic voice of a day-in-the-life, narrative routines are abandoned in favor of a staccato series of harshly fragmented axioms, provocatively though not unmotivatedly juxtaposed images, and peculiarly enlivening thought-rhymes, light and writing being a typical set of tenors: "prism flare the woman's etude marking." As Higgins's method seems to be written in its midst, though oclock is not necessarily writing about writing, we might expect a challenge in pinning down a "subject" from the outset: "Inscape reforms tools or weapons if we agree to start here phonetic resift she thinks from. . . . What she will ask points to one another." That pronominal "woman's etude marking" widens the subjective scope beyond even the sweeping categories of philosophical discourse, though not thereby spilling over into the ambiguities of current political rhetoric. And that "phonetic resift she thinks" sounds like a rich offer to these ears and an unexpected treat to the eye (Higgins's use of strikethroughs and gently sloping margins late in the book provides a "textimony" to poetic possibilities and possible poetics the same). If the sun illuminates the thing (in space) to which we point, does the "helioabyss"—the dark side of the earth, night?—point to itself from within, unable to differentiate? Or does the "one" point to "another" ad infinitum? The author lets the poem testify to such questions "her" self—"she" appears to be the writing. Meanwhile, Higgins's backbeat veers from startling to lulling, self-important to selfless. And between these poles "her" authority becomes something more rewarding than a simple sequence of anecdotes (be they personal, clinical, or mythical). The subject becomes the sum of the writing itself, not a disgruntled and virtual daybook but a difficult song in which:

so many worlds pivot
killdeer    gillnet     button hook     proem
the hematopoiesis of bone marrow

For a glimpse into the deeply-rooted tradition of US American, radical modernist poetry, oclock is a timely, if you will, "textimony."

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BY A THREAD

By a Thread by Molly TenenbaumMolly Tenenbaum
Van West & Company ($14)

by Tim Scannell

In this first collection of thirty-two poems, Molly Tenenbaum illustrates the mastery of poetic eye and delicate fingertip of imagination. One recalls, a generation ago, the felt awe in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, or the more aware sensitivity in The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas. Those traits of the natural world—image and motion, light and color—are fully explored by this poet's skill.

Two poems will easily become exemplars of their kind in the Western Canon: "Every Single Sprout" (we will never again allow our usual abuse of the garden slug); and "The World is the Shape of a Cat" (a hymn to the poet's cat, Nellie-Ivy). A litany of slug-destruction is presented in the first stanza of "Every Single Sprout": the jar of beer, so that "they'll bumble in"; or "diatomaceous earth" to cut their coating "so they leak from themselves," etc. The poet prefers, in dewy morning, to "pick them like fruit":

berries that must
be drawn by the barest of pressures
off the briar that wants
to keep them . . .
. . . one like a plum seed,
but fatter, lines on the sides
like the stripes leading back
from the corner of a kitten's eye;
one with the spotted grace of a leopard,
slender as a salamander, lucent glossy brown.

Even in dry summer, when the slugs do not travel far, the reverent persona will rise "as if theirs is a sweet gift / of silver-trail, of every rescued color—" This crescendo of care for all things great and small emerges, transcendentally, in the passing of the poet's cat, Nellie-Ivy, whose body and spirit are memorialized by "the vault of starry sky, / when every bound leaps you over a tall black hill, / you're high in the hump of her black shoulder . . ."; or, "when you, looking the other way, just glimpse / a cutout on the sill, a stamp / to see through where she used to be, / you're at the sharpened / pupil of her daylight eye."

And so, each plucked string of Tenenbaum's imagination is separately and seen—appreciated; yet the reader may wish for more resonance, a bolder vibration of emotion that is not merely a meditation of things minutely observed, collated, juxtaposed. One is reminded of the anecdote concerning Emily Dickinson, who would only talk—even to her best friends—through the crack of a slightly opened door. Molly Tenenbaum need not be as reticent or cocooned: her poetic voice is mature, finely honed. The structure of her poems, each averaging over two pages in length, build powerfully, wholly aware of development and destination. What would be welcome is a more modulated tone of engagement and speculative encounter, enticingly hinted at in her "Beach Walk and Bad News" (a descriptive meditation on barnacles): "Not tenacious, not clever / to feather supper from the tide, / not foolish or wise to cling or stand— / but at least they're hungry, / curled in salty houses. At least, hard." More salt, please—more bite of tumultuous wave into shore. I am eagerly looking forward to Molly Tenenbaum's next collection.

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JERSEY RAIN

Jersey Rain by Robert PinskyRobert Pinsky
Farrar Straus & Giroux ($21)

by Piotr Gwiazda

Robert Pinsky's sixth poetry collection is not a disappointment to his readers. The book contains a number of apt, solid, and vivid poems, precisely what should be expected from a writer who up to this point has successfully welded tacit autobiography and restrained discursiveness, and with this new volume still continues to do so. Already past the "collected poems" stage (The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-96 appeared in 1996), Pinsky has hordes of admirers and detractors, a fact which didn't prevent him from serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States for three years; during his tenure, he made himself available not only at poetry festivals and readings, but also in unconventional and essentially unpoetic vistas: what can be more disarmingly incongruous than a poet reciting verses about memories, mothers, and money on the News Hour With Jim Lehrer?

Pinsky's efforts to popularize poetry, his across-the-nation conspicuousness and academic prominence (he has a permanent teaching appointment at Boston University), make him a perfect candidate to become somebody this country hasn't had for a long time: a distinguished man of letters. In his desire to create an audience for poetry in the United States, Pinsky inches toward the position once occupied (only half-heartedly, to be sure) by Robert Frost—a national bard, the conscience of American people, a consistent and trustworthy voice reminding us where we came from and where we are going as individuals and as a nation (recall Pinsky's 1980 book-length poem An Explanation of America). What Pinsky is risking in his tendency to take himself seriously as a public figure is the danger of becoming a poet whose presence in literary and public spheres becomes so ubiquitous that his work may lose its ability to surprise. Frost was able to avoid that fate; likewise, Jersey Rain offers no indication that Pinsky is becoming a national bore.

The collection consists of pieces already familiar from Pinsky's public appearances, and of altogether new work. The major poems in the volume belong to the first group: "Ode to Meaning," "Biography," "To Television" and "The Green Piano." "Ode to Meaning" is a superb poem, one of the best Pinsky has ever written, a sober investigation and celebration of the concept that became the twentieth century's most transformation-prone and abuse-provoking myth. Never in fear of abstractions, Pinsky is able to skillfully combine philosophical, personal, and satirical elements in his brooding apostrophe:

Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the torah.
"I'll drown my book" says Shakespeare.

Drowned walker, revenant.
After my mother fell on her head, she became
More than ever your sworn enemy. She spoke
Sometimes like a poet or critic of forty years later.

"Biography" addresses the circularity of events in the poet's life while achieving a fascinating circularity of form. "The Green Piano" is very much like Pinsky's older partly retrospective, partly reflective pieces, while "To Television" pays a reserved though honest homage to the medium so often accused of robbing life of its meaning:

Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick

Hermes is the guiding spirit of this collection; several poems in Jersey Rain invoke or allude to this most busy of all gods in charge of prudence, cunning, fraud, invention, roads, doors, commerce, good luck, sports, games, sacrifice, and (most appropriately in Pinsky's case) eloquence. At times Pinsky's eloquence enables him to see vestiges of life in the inanimate world around him. Years ago poets used to seek life in a mountain or a tree—today they are more likely to find it in a television set or a computer.

Several pieces in this volume deserve to be called Pinsky's worthiest compositions, but there are also few that seem to be mere leftovers, afterthoughts, or distractions, such as his cold depictions of inanimate objects ("Machines") or personal, quasi-poetic reminiscences ("An Alphabet of My Dead"). But this is not to say that the book is uneven. Many readers are familiar with a Pinsky poem: taut, thick, rich, meaningful, resonant, compact, and complete, such a poem has become so unmistakably his own that, regardless of one's individual preferences, one can still grant his work a degree of consistency, plenitude, and sheer logophilia that makes all good poetry possible. When he is at his best, Pinsky offers his audience an intellectual satisfaction that almost verges on a sensual one, like the self-sufficiency of the speaker of "Samurai Song":

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2000 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000