Tag Archives: Richard Kostelanetz

The Matrix and Eecchhooeess

The Matrix
N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

Eecchhooeess
N. H. Pritchard
DABA ($24)

N. H. Pritchard (1939-1996) was a New York-based artist and writer whose The Matrix Poems 1960-1970, originally published by Doubleday, has the significant distinction of remaining the most innovative one-author collection of poetry ever released by a commercial house in the U.S. It was groundbreaking at the time not only for its typographical and verbal departures, but for its author’s race, as fifty years ago, in the wake of Civil Rights protests in 1968, our commercial publishers became more open to Black authors than they had been before. It is only appropriate that his innovation be honored now in our current time with new reprints of his two major works.

The Matrix’s cover had a knockout black and white photograph of its author with half of his face in shadows, wearing a collared shirt with a tie and jacket. Pritchard looked elegant, much as Ralph Ellison was elegant—but whereas Ellison emerged from a fatherless family, Pritchard’s father was a physician who immigrated to New York City from “the Antilles,” as his son so elegantly put it. Whereas Ellison didn’t finish Tuskegee, Pritchard went to prep schools before taking his B.A. with honors from NYU and continuing with graduate school in art history.

When I first met Pritchard in the early 1970s, soon after The Matrix was published, he greeted me in his darkened studio apartment on Park Avenue. Though only a year older than me, he seemed not just more sophisticated, but unique in all the ways that a creative person can be. Pritchard’s personal letters resembled the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake; to my copies of his books he added not just a personal inscription but a handmade enhancement of colors and lines that I treasure.

The poems in The Matrix appeared in several formats that still look alternative today. Words were crushed together; some were printed upside down. Weighty phrases were repeated within the page. Words both familiar and unfamiliar had extra spaces between the letters. While some pages had just a large single letter, on other pages the print ran to the outside edges, suggesting that it might well have continued beyond it. The Matrix challenged how a writer’s Collected Poems should look.

As for the texts themselves, they approached the limits of semantic comprehension, as Pritchard’s ideal was what he called the “transreal,” a reflection of his awareness of mystical, supernatural modernism in the visual arts. On an opening recto page was this epigraph for himself: “Words are ancillary to content.” Later in the book, the fourth page of “Gyre’s Galax” repeats the phrase “above beneath” from top to bottom, sometimes amended by the words “it” and “in.” Pritchard wanted to take poetry into a domain previously unknown, one that was indeed above beneath.

In 1971 a second Pritchard collection, Eecchhooeess, appeared from New York University Press; it is perhaps the most radical one-author poetry volume ever to appear from an American university press. Repeating many of the same challenges posed by The Matrix, Eecchhooeess is no less brilliant; its eerie sounds and typographical innovations chimed right in with the Black Arts movement of the day (Pritchard was affiliated with the literary collective Umbra).

The most unusual quality of these new reprints of Pritchard’s books is that they appear intact, with their original front covers duplicated, each totally devoid of any new preface or afterword. Not even Pritchard’s biographical note is updated; only the title and copyright pages are different. While contemporary readers might wish for more background on this utterly unique writer, to get such authentic reprinting a whole half-century later is a treat for fans of groundbreaking poetry indeed.

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Rain Taxi Review of Books Volume 26, No. 3 (#103) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

The Mundus

N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

by Richard Kostelanetz

When I reviewed in these pages the reprinting, fifty years later, of two books of N. H. Pritchard’s highly innovative poetry, I assumed that no more books would appear by this Jamaican American author, who died in 1996. I was wrong. Primary Information, which had previously reissued his 1970 collection The Matrix, has published his manuscript of The Mundus, which I would characterize as the first masterpiece of typographic abstract “graphic” fiction. I emphasize abstract because it differs from Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), likewise a typographic fiction and likewise a masterpiece (composed only with words made from the seven letters in its title), but explicitly about love. Considering himself to be a spiritual “transreal” artist, Pritchard regarded aesthetic abstraction as superior to, say, representational portrayals of religious themes.

While the publisher presents The Mundus as a single continuous text, it may also be read as a sequence of shorter narratives, each with its own typographic signature that changes visually from page to page, thus suggesting narrative, before skipping onto a different typographic signature. If this book is “a novel with voices,” as Pritchard reportedly suggested, then it could be read as monologues by several visually distinct visual “voices,” some of whom speak words and pseudo-words, others just certain letters. For instance, the book opens with over forty pages of the letter O—just the letter O—both upper case and lower case, distributed over the page’s entire field, occasionally with the addition of a few short words. Another voice says “sh” in a single horizonal line without spaces continuously over eighteen pages.

As innovative as Pritchard’s narratives still are, what marks this book as belonging to the 20th century, rather than the 21st, is that all the letters are roughly the same size, because they were produced on a typewriter. Had Pritchard survived into this century, he surely would have exploited the enormous typographic opportunities now offered the visual poet composing on a home computer.

This new edition of Pritchard’s magnum opus includes a short afterword by Paul Stephens, a young but already distinguished scholar of avant-garde literature. And now that The Mundus has (re)appeared, one wonders if other extant Pritchard material—work only published in magazines and anthologies or previously unpublished—might be collected and released. Until then, The Mundus must be seen to be read, let alone believed.

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Mixed Genre Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Henry Martin: An Active Ear

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Edited by Emanuele Guidi and Egidio Marzona, with text by Lisa Andreani, Jordan Carter, Luca Cerizza, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Emanuele Guidi, Henry Martin, and Elisabetta Rattalino
Spector Books ($45)

by Richard Kostelanetz

The remarkable African American art critic, curator, and translator Henry Martin, who died at the age of eighty in 2022, finally gets to be the subject of focus in Henry Martin: An Active Ear. Martin, a native of Philadelphia, was an expatriate author; after attending New York University in the mid-1960s, he traveled to Italy and stayed there, marrying visual artist Berty Skuber and settling with her in the mountainous South Tyrol, where other Americans were scarce.

Martin made his living by contributing articles to magazines and translating Italian texts into English. He was a literary man who came late to art writing; the greatest influence on his prose was another Henry, surnamed James, from whom Martin learned the art of composing extended sentences in long paragraphs. The primary source of his enthusiasm for visual art was Marcel Duchamp, whom he discovered as a teenager in 1950s Philadelphia:

Marcel Duchamp first entered my life when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, surely before I was sixteen when I was old enough to drive. He connects directly to the old red bus at the stop on the corner of the road where my family lived, then a transfer to the green municipal bus somewhere inside the city, and finally the trolly through Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a great fake Parthenon atop a great fake Acropolis that stares from a distance towards the center of the city and the statue of William Penn on the summit of City Hall.

Fortunately, one of Martin’s first jobs in Italy was helping the Milanese art historian Arturo Schwarz prepare The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). This immersion explains, perhaps, why the most profound essays in An Active Ear discuss aspects of Duchamp, who became Martin’s principal teacher in modernist aesthetics as well as a touchstone he returned to for decades; with the Italian painter Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), Martin wrote Why Duchamp (McPherson & Co., 1985).

Nearly all the other people whose work is discussed in An Active Ear descend from Duchamp; about pre-20th-century visual art, of which Italy has so much that is excellent, Martin says little. He favors post-Duchamp artists such as Ray Johnson (1927-1995) and George Brecht (1926-2008), not only in discrete essays but in extended probing interviews. Often does Martin reveal that he knows his subjects personally, not to boast but to give his commentary an intimate authority. Only one of his many subjects is African American: Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), who likewise resided for a time in Europe.

Emanuele Guidi has constructed An Active Ear to be an alternative kind of biography; in addition to Martin’s essays and conversations, Guidi includes correspondence between Martin and his favorite subjects as well as occasional informal photographs. Of the last, my favorites appear as endpapers, with Martin holding a white bird (perhaps a dove) on his outstretched hand on the front spread and raising his middle finger beside two white guys on the back spread.

What further makes this book a de facto biography are five appreciations written by people who aren’t artists and a remarkably elegant foreword by John-Daniel Martin, Berty and Henry’s son. The only ungainly thing about the book is its format: the sans serif type and small margins make the reading experience challenging.

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Art Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews

Polymath

The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex

Eric Laursen
AK Press ($34)

by Richard Kostelanetz

As an independent scholar, Eric Laursen spent many years working on Polymath, a thick biography of the protean Alex Comfort (1920–2000), who became famous for his 1972 smash hit The Joy of Sex, an illustrated manual that sold millions of copies worldwide. But before this unexpected bout with celebrity, Comfort was a widely published poet, a novelist, a certified physician, a contributor to anarchist publications in both England and America, a research biologist, a pioneering influence on gerontology (the study of aging), a literary critic, a prolific book reviewer, and a popular BBC broadcaster, even though he spoke much faster than the typical on-air personality. (Bits of his fast-speaking for the Beeb can be heard on YouTube.)

Comfort was also a pacifist whom George Orwell famously dismissed as a Nazi dupe during World War II; their disagreement on the necessity of war was the subject of a 2018 book by Laursen, The Duty to Stand Aside. Courageously inventive as an activist, however, Comfort developed a precursor to pirate radio during the Suez Crisis of 1956. As Laursen tells it, “Working almost entirely in secret, with no collaborators, he broadcast a nightly radio message calling on listeners to protest the invasion and demand that Britain unilaterally scarp its nuclear arsenal.”

Essentially, Comfort was a respected public intellectual, moderately influential in a variety of fields, until he and a sympathetic publisher produced The Joy of Sex—“produced” because so slight was his input that the cover of the initial 1972 edition has it “edited by” him with his degrees of “M.B. and Ph. D.,” as though it were a medical book. Only later did Comfort claim authorial credit, which was given, though the reader can be grateful that the subtitle “A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking” replaced the one in Comfort’s original draft: “Cordon Bleu Lovemaking.”

Joy has three themes, two classic and the other fashionable. The first, reflecting Comfort’s libertarian anarchism, holds that no one has more authority than anyone else to tell you how to do sexual relations. The second, denying religious and other proscriptions, expands this legendary sentence: “Chastity is no more of a virtue than malnutrition.” The third, reflecting its era, opines that sex should be fun, even if “love” doesn’t accompany it. No previous book on the subject so successfully disseminated these themes.

To support his title of Polymath, Laursen intelligently surveys Comfort’s literary and scientific work that appeared in a few dozen books. As a critic, Laursen regards I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (Crown, 1979) as Comfort’s very best book. (Out of print, it can be hard to find in used bookstores and libraries, though scans of the complete text can be found on the internet.) Laursen also takes seriously Comfort’s poetry, though it had more presence in 1940s England than anywhere else or since.

For students of publishing, Polymath is useful for chronicling the calculation and career of a bestseller. Conversely, it documents the obstacles that Comfort encountered in publishing his other books, which, before and even after the success of Joy, appeared primarily from small literary presses, mostly now forgotten, and from specialized scientific outlets.

Comfort moved to Southern California in the wake of Joy, becoming a nouveau American millionaire celebrity. Whereas English media sought his advice on several subjects, here he was asked only about sex, to his annoyance. In Gay Talese’s 1981 book on sexuality in America, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Comfort is memorably portrayed as an overage visitor to swingers’ clubs; other commentators have described his schemes to minimize his personal income taxes. Uncomfortable in the U.S., Comfort moved with his second wife back to England, where he suffered the first of several debilitating strokes at seventy-one and died just after his eightieth birthday (it remains unfortunate that he didn’t get to test his gerontology ideas against his own eighties and nineties). Though he influenced many people in many ways, he did not have protégés; his sole heir and executor was his only son, the journalist Nicholas Comfort. But undoubtedly Alex Comfort led a unique and protean life that Laursen tells well in this nearly 800-page book—it is doubtful that anyone else will ever tell it better.

What some may find odd about Polymath is the absence of any acknowledgment of Comfort’s American analogue, the writer Paul Goodman (1911–1972), who resembled Comfort in many ways. Both were anarchists for life; both were published by Dwight Macdonald in his magazine Politics in the 1940s. Whereas Comfort worked in medicine, Goodman was an unlicensed psychotherapist who co-authored the substantial 1951 text Gestalt Therapy. Just as both published poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction, so both had many publishers, because their work was essentially noncommercial and their interests nonpredictable. Until Goodman published his popular Growing Up Absurd (Random House, 1960), likewise around the age of fifty, his books were little known, but after Absurd went into a second printing, Random House released books of Goodman’s poems, lectures, and much else (until he was dumped). They probably never met as Goodman was too indigent to travel to Europe, while Comfort didn’t often come to the U.S. until the mid-1970s. One radical move for a future writer would be a double consideration of Comfort and Goodman, literally parallel lives; the experience of one libertarian life would surely illuminate the other, even though they never collaborated.

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Book Review, Nonfiction Reviews