Category: Writers

New Orleans adventure | From The Letters of William Gaddis

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 For just about cocktail time (I use it only as a figure of speech, to indicate the hour, for no one thought of such an amenity) we arrived in New Orleans. There the fun started. And it was so consistently folly that I cannot take it from day to day. Enough to say that we slept in the car for a few nights (I have not thought it necessary to mention that it was raining—rain such as Malay gets once in a generation), being low enough on funds to consider selling the car and sailing across the Gulf (until we were told that sailboats bring around 1500$), and other similarly unfelicitous notions. We spent one night in a great house belonging to friends of Bill’s family, who apparently had not been posted on his standing (though one look at either of us should have told them that we were not exactly eligible bachelors). The living room was so big that a grand piano was passed quite unnoticed in one corner; there were, as a matter of fact, two kitchens, abreast of one another for no reason that my modest eating interests could resolve, and a dining room which should have been roped off and ogled at. By this time we had become rather legendary mendicants, with a good part of the city crossing the street when we approached. Fortunately New Orleans has a French Quarter. I was pulling at what was becoming a rather eager mustache and waiting for the time-honoured greeting: “Hello, friend/ Where are you from?”, this being the first step to any southern or western jail on a vagrancy charge, when we were introduced to a young man by a girl who had not the sense to see the desperation in our characters, and pictured us fondly as Bohem . . . This southern gentleman (for he is, or rather was before he became involved with us) found something in us which prompted him to offer an apartment which was kicking around in his hands. And therewith another resolve: sell the automobile, live for a little time in New Orleans, perhaps even work, and then go to Mexico in somewhat less sportive fashion than a Cord car. Oh, the gladsome effect of plans and resolution. We moved out of the car, into the apartment, had the lights and gas turned on, bargained with a passerby to sell the Cord for 300$, I wrote you a letter giving my address and settled state of mind, clothes were taken to be laundered and cleaned, and we drank a quiet glass of absinthe in what was once Jean Lafitte’s blacksmithshop and went ‘home’. As was well to be expected, dawn broke the following morning and so did everything else. The real-estate company appeared with legal forms which practically made us candidates for the penitentiary for our brief tenancy. The man who had made arrangements to buy the car had talked with some evil companion who convinced him that nothing could ruin him so quickly as a Cord (which is something I cannot quite deny flatly at the moment), and once more we were free to blow our brains out in the streets. But even New Orleans has laws against that, so what could we do but take miserable pennies to Lafitte’s and invest them, this time in defeatingly tiny glasses of beer?

The proprietor of Lafitte’s is a man whose name has passed me without ever leaving a mark. He is quiet, pleasant, 42, and believes that everyone should have a quiet little pub of his own, at least fifty yards from his. I approached him modestly simply to ask if he had any sporting friends who thought life had come to such a pass that they would enjoy sporting about the Quarter in a long low and very moderately priced automobile. From there we went on to the intellectual world, bogged through its vagaries for a little while, and after I had proved my metal by reciting a few lines from T S Eliot, he encouraged us with tasteful portions of absinthe and loaned me 10$.

From a letter William Gaddis wrote to his mother Edith Gaddis. The letter is dated 9 March 1947. It is collected in The Letters of William Gaddis. 

My liver, the pain of clear thought, $5.75 for an Absolut on the rocks at the Hotel Dorset, New York City, and other great prices paid by various writers in their careers

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From “Don’t Everybody Talk at Once! (The Esquire Literary Survey).” Published in Esquire, August 1986.

The “article” consists of a ten-question questionnaire Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills sent to around fifty American writers.

What’s the greatest price you’ve paid in your career?

MAX APPLE: Over a career it’s more like a mortgage. You pay it out day by day and keep hoping that the rate will go down and some day you’ll renegotiate from strength.

VANCE BOURJAILY: $722,250—which is the difference between what my first nine books earned and the million dollars I’d have had by then if I’d made movies (if I’d had the ability).

HAROLD BRODKEY: The pain of clear thought.

HARRY CREWS: My liver.

J. P. DONLEAVY: Leaving everyone convinced I was a ruthless bastard.

STANLEY ELKIN: You’re sitting on an airplane, say, or talking to someone at a party, and the guy in the next seat or the person at the party says “And what do you do for a living, sir?” and you gotta say ‘I’m a writer,” and he says “Have you written anything I might have heard of?” This is the price I have paid for my career.

RICHARD FORD: Writers don’t have “careers.” Advertising executives do. The highest price I’ve paid is twenty-five dollars for a pizza Carver and I bought once in Port Angeles, Washington, in 1983.

BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN: Little, if any, time on the playing field.

WILLIAM H. GASS: Ordinary life. We can’t find competent help to do our living for us. Another way of putting it: being an ordinary person in an ordinary world doing an ordinary job. What a waste of life that is.

BARRY HANNAH: Lack of peace of mind, lack of money.

KEN KESEY: Fame—it has made me the observed instead of the observer. Bad for a writer.

JAMES ALAN McPHERSON: I have been known to give up family, friends, and money in order to maintain my sense of personal integrity. I think it is this trait of character, whether or not based on “right” and “wrong,” that is at the basis of my work as a writer and as a teacher.

LEONARD MICHAELS: Marriage.

TONI MORRISON: Good company: that of my children and of friends. Much too little of both.

JOYCE CAROL OATES: ? (Perhaps I haven’t paid it yet.)

TIM O’BRIEN: My health, my golf game, fun.

PADGETT POWELL: You mean all the agony and wheel-racked whimpering before one can utter the good words? Or the booze and fractured homelife and fly-off-the-handle meannesses to the gentle folk around you? Or the loss of self-confidence. All that? Naa. I’ve gone scot-free.

REYNOLDS PRICE: I’ve been paid—thirty years of steady reward.

RICHARD PRICE: Too Much + Too Soon = Arrested Development.

TOM ROBBINS: I ’ve never thought of it as a career. A “careen” is more like it. And it would have been cheap at any price.

JOHN SAYLES: Writing is so much easier than the other jobs I’ve had. I can’t imagine any of it as “paying a price.”

BOB SHACOCHIS: The sacrifice of the artist is a romantic illusion. The possibility of forfeiture and loss is, if anything, democratic. Any person who makes a commitment to the pursuit of something meaningful is at risk.

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN: Circa $5.75 for an Absolut on the rocks at the Hotel Dorset, New York City.

I don’t see what’s being said here at all | William S. Burroughs

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BOCKRIS: William, have you ever written anything out of admiration?

BURROUGHS: I don’t know what this term means. It does seem to me an anemic emotion.

SONTAG: Bill, suppose you agreed, which maybe you couldn’t even conceive of doing, to write about Beckett. Somebody offered you a situation at which you said, yes, I’d like to say what I want to say about Beckett, and my feeling about Beckett is mainly positive. I think that’s harder to get down in a way that’s satisfactory than when you’re attacking something.

BURROUGHS: I don’t see what’s being said here at all.

From With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker by Victor Bockris. The selection is from Bockris’s recording of a 1980 dinner with Susan Sontag, Stewart Meyer, and Gerard Malanga.

The familiar story of virgin birth on December twenty-fifth, mutilation and resurrection | From William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

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His father seemed less than ever interested in what passed around him, once assured Wyatt’s illness was done. Except for the Sunday sermon, public activities in the town concerned him less than ever. Like Pliny, retiring to his Laurentine villa when Saturnalia approached, the Reverend Gwyon avoided the bleak festivities of his congregation whenever they occurred, by retiring to his study. But his disinterest was no longer a dark mantle of preoccupation. A sort of hazardous assurance had taken its place. He approached his Sunday sermons with complaisant audacity, introducing, for instance, druidical reverence for the oak tree as divinely favored because so often singled out to be struck by lightning. Through all of this, even to the sermon on the Aurora Borealis, the Dark Day of May in 1790 whose night moon turned to blood, and the great falling of stars in November 1833, as signs of the Second Advent, Aunt May might well have noted the persistent non-appearance of what she, from that same pulpit, had been shown as the body of Christ. Certainly the present members of the Use-Me Society found many of his references “unnecessary.” It did not seem quite necessary, for instance, to note that Moses had been accused of witchcraft in the Koran; that the hundred thousand converts to Christianity in the first two or three centuries in Rome were “slaves and disreputable people,” that in a town on the Nile there were ten thousand “shaggy monks” and twice that number of “god- dedicated virgins”; that Charlemagne mass-baptized Saxons by driving them through a river being blessed upstream by his bishops, while Saint Olaf made his subjects choose between baptism and death. No soberly tolerated feast day came round, but that Reverend Gwyon managed to herald its grim observation by allusion to some pagan ceremony which sounded uncomfortably like having a good time. Still the gray faces kept peace, precarious though it might be. They had never been treated this way from the pulpit. True, many stirred with indignant discomfort after listening to the familiar story of virgin birth on December twenty-fifth, mutilation and resurrection, to find they had been attending, not Christ, but Bacchus, Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, Adonis, Marduk, Balder, Attis, Amphion, or Quetzalcoatl. They recalled the sad day the sun was darkened; but they did not remember the occasion as being the death of Julius Caesar. And many hurried home to closet themselves with their Bibles after the sermon on the Trinity, which proved to be Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva; as they did after the recital of the Immaculate Conception, where the seed entered in spiritual form, bringing forth, in virginal modesty, Romulus and Remus.

If the mild assuasive tones of the Reverend offended anywhere, it was the proprietary sense of his congregation; and with true Puritan fortitude they resisted any suggestion that their bloody sacraments might have known other voices and other rooms. They could hardly know that the Reverend’s powers of resistance were being taxed more heavily than their own, where he withstood the temptation to tell them details of the Last Supper at the Eleusinian Mysteries, the snake in the Garden of Eden, what early translators of the Bible chose to let the word ‘thigh’ stand for (where ancient Hebrews placed their hands when under oath), the symbolism of the Triune triangle and, in generative counterpart so distressing to early fathers of the Church, the origin of the Cross.

From William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions.

Continuously I receive it but do not accept it | Kafka’s diary, 18 Dec. 1910

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18 December. If it were not absolutely certain that the reason why I permit letters (even those that may be foreseen to have insignificant contents, like this present one) to lie unopened for a time is only weakness and cowardice, which hesitate as much to open a letter as they would hesitate to open the door of a room in which someone, already impatient, perhaps, is waiting for me, then one could explain this allowing of letters to lie even better as thoroughness. That is to say, assuming that I am a thorough person, then I must attempt to protract everything pertaining to the letter to the greatest possible extent. I must open it slowly, read it, slowly and often, consider it for a long time, prepare a clean copy after many drafts, and finally delay even the posting. All this lies within my power, only the sudden receipt of the letter cannot be avoided. Well, I slow even that down in an artificial manner, I do not open it for a long time, it lies on the table before me, it continuously offers itself to me, continuously I receive it but do not accept it.

From Franz Kafka’s diary entry of 18 Dec. 1910. Translated by Joseph Kresh. (I feel the same way about email.)

Thomas Pynchon sells his archive

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At The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler reports that Thomas Pynchon has sold his archive to Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.

The article notes that the “archive includes 48 boxes — 70 linear feet, in archivist-speak — of material dating from the late 1950s to the 2020s” and includes :typescripts and drafts of all his published books”  to date as well as “copious research notes on the many, many subjects (World War II rocketry, postal history, 18th-century surveying) touched on in his encyclopedic novels.” And while the documents include letters related to publishing, it includes “no private letters or other personal material” — and no photographs of Pynchon.

The article also claims that Pynchon’s son Jackson “is described as having ‘compiled and represented the archive.'” (The passive voice there is a bit cryptic, but I guess cryptic is Pynchonian, so.)

The article offers a number of quotes from Sandra Brooke, the director of Huntington Library, including the notion that “‘a really substantial portion of the archive’ would be available in Pynchon’s lifetime.”

I’d love to see that lifetime go on and on, and even offer up a new novel.

JG Ballard Bingo

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“One day is there of the series / Termed Thanksgiving day” — Emily Dickinson

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ED

“Geniuses were not fun, but Mr. Gaddis was fun” | Joy Williams reads a tribute to William Gaddis

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No failed work, only work pending | Hilary Mantel

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It has always been axiomatic that when the dying speak, they cannot lie. I knew a man whose mother told him, as she lay dying, who his real father was: like a woman in a Victorian melodrama. She might as well have climbed out of bed and kicked his feet from under him. The truth was far too late to do him any good, and just in time to plunge him into misery and confusion and the complex grief of a double loss. Some truths have a sell-by date. Some should not be uttered even by the dying. Some cannot be uttered. When a victim of Henry VIII faced the headsman, the standard scaffold speech praised the king: his justice, his mercy. You didn’t mean this, but you had to think about the people left behind: some flattery might help them. Oppressors don’t just want to do their deed, they want to take a bow: they want their victims to sing their praises. This doesn’t change, and it seems there are no new thoughts, no new struggles with censorship and self-censorship, only the old struggles repeating: half-animated corpses of forbidden childhood thoughts crawling out of the psychic trenches we have dug for them, and recurring denials by the great of the truths written on the bodies of the small.

I have 97 notebooks in a wooden box. I do not count them as suppressed volumes. I work on the principle that there is no failed work, only work pending: that there is nothing I won’t say, only what I haven’t said yet. In my novel in progress I have written, “If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?” A notebook written eight years ago says, “I am searching for a place where the truth can be uttered: a place, I mean, that is not an execution ground.”

From Hilary Mantel’s essay “Blot, Erase, Delete,” published in Index on Censorship, Vol. 45, Issue 3, 2016.

A review of Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black

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In Hilary Mantel’s 2005 novel Beyond Black, a fat psychic named Alison endures the harrowing torment of a collective of ghosts she calls the Fiends, the spirits of cruel men from her childhood. When a young, aimless woman named Colette comes into Alison’s life and assumes managerial duties for her career, Alison’s bilious past comes to a head. Colette engineers more and better gigs for Alison (the death of Princess Diana causes a huge spike in business), who, despite her genuine psychic talents, must nonetheless run the kind of scam the “punters” in her audience crave. Colette and Alison soon move in together, buying a new house in a quiet, boring suburb outside of London; their prefab homestead is drawn in sharp contrast to the slums of Aldershot where Alison grew up–the novel’s second setting. As Beyond Black progresses, contemporary suburban Britain increasingly crumbles into Alison’s grim, greasy past in Aldershot. Alison’s chief tormentor is, ironically, her “spirit guide,” a mean little man named Morris, a one-time frequent customer for Alison’s prostitute mother. Alison, like many victims, has suppressed much of her grotesque childhood, but it’s hard to black out everything with psychic baggage like Morris weighing her down. In time, more and more of the Fiends reemerge, forcing Alison to confront her mother and the abuse they both suffered at the hands of those awful men. As the book lurches to its chilling climax, Alison asserts independence, casting out her metaphysical and psychological demons.

At its core, Beyond Black asks what it means to be haunted and how one might survive an abusive past intact. A slim specter of a character named Gloria floats through the book. The Fiends, whose vile antics are sometimes compared to a gypsy circus, have dismembered Gloria with the old saw trick. In Alison’s memory, pieces of Gloria are scattered around her childhood home, parceled out, fed to dogs, transported in boxes at midnight, hidden. Alison’s awful mother frequently alludes to Alison herself being “sawed up,” a metaphor that dances on the literal as we come to realize that the old drunk has pimped out her daughter repeatedly. Mantel’s novel investigates the return of the repressed, and although she gives us something like a happy ending, the book’s central thesis seems to be that pain cannot be abandoned or hidden, but only mitigated through direct confrontation.

The book’s humor does nothing to lighten its grim subject–if anything it exacerbates and confounds the darkness at the heart of Beyond Black. Mantel’s gift for dialogue fleshes out her characters (even the spectral ones), and while the book aims for a satirical tone at times, its characters are too richly drawn to be mere cutouts in a stage production. Mantel’s satire of contemporary English life is sharp and bleak; you laugh a little and then feel bad for laughing and a page later you’re horrified. It’s a successful book in that respect. It’s one real weakness is in the character of Colette, whose voice gives way to Alison’s past by the book’s end. This is actually no problem, as Colette’s narrative life is not nearly as interesting as Alison’s psychic traumas; Colette is, however, catalyst for the changes in Alison’s life. It would’ve been nice to see more resolution here, but I suppose Beyond Black hews closer to real life here, with all its messy loose ends.

I chose to read Beyond Black because I enjoyed Mantel’s recent Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall so much. The books have little in common other than being well-written and tightly paced, and I think that anyone who wanted more Mantel after an introduction via Wolf Hall would do right to pick up Beyond Black. Recommended.

[Ed. note—Biblioklept first published this review in 2010. RIP to Hilary Mantel, who died “suddenly but peacefully” yesterday at 70.]

Three minutes of Cormac McCarthy riffing on Wittgenstein

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Twelve-year-old Cormac McCarthy starred in a 1946 agricultural documentary called Dairying in Tennessee

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Redditor Jarslow posted the short film Dairying in Tennessee today on the Cormac McCarthy Reddit page. The short film was posted on Vimeo by the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound yesterday,  where the organization notes that “A year earlier, McCarthy was on the shortlist to play Jody in Clarence Brown’s film adaptation of “The Yearling.” Of McCarthy’s audition, an MGM representative told a Knoxville Journal reporter, “This boy has personality plus, and he’s done a good job living down jests tossed at him because of his name.” The role ultimately went to Claude Jarman, Jr.”

 

The novel, so unanimously acclaimed, was called Twilight | From Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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The following excerpt of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (in Natasha Wimmer’s translation) is more or less self-contained, or at least as self-contained as anything in that labyrinth. It’s the summary of a character named Ansky’s novel; Hans Reiter (aka Archimboldi) is reading Ansky’s diaries while hiding during the war–

The novel, so unanimously acclaimed, was called Twilight and its plot was very simple: a boy of fourteen abandons his family to join the ranks of the revolution. Soon he’s engaged in combat against Wrangel’s troops. In the midst of battle he’s injured and his comrades leave him for dead. But before the vultures come to feed on the bodies, a spaceship drops onto the battlefield and takes him away, along with some of the other mortally wounded soldiers. Then the spaceship enters the stratosphere and goes into orbit around Earth. All of the men’s wounds are rapidly healed. Then a very thin, very tall creature, more like a strand of seaweed than a human being, asks them a series of questions like: how were the stars created? where does the universe end? where does it begin? Of course, no one knows the answers. One man says God created the stars and the universe begins and ends wherever God wants. He’s tossed out into space. The others sleep. When the boy awakes he finds himself in a shabby room, with a shabby bed and a shabby wardrobe where his shabby clothes hang. When he goes to the window he gazes out in awe at the urban landscape of New York. But the boy finds only misfortune in the great city. He meets a jazz musician who tells him about chickens that talk and probably think.

“The worst of it,” the musician says to him, “is that the governments of the planet know it and that’s why so many people raise chickens.”

The boy objects that the chickens are raised to be eaten. The musician says that’s what the chickens want. And he finishes by saying:

“Fucking masochistic chickens, they have our leaders by the balls.”

He also meets a girl who works as a hypnotist at a burlesque club, and he falls in love. The girl is ten years older than the boy, or in other words twenty-four, and although she has a number of lovers, including the boy, she doesn’t want to fall in love with anyone because she believes that love will use up her powers as a hypnotist. One day the girl disappears and the boy, after searching for her in vain, decides to hire a Mexican detective who was a soldier under Pancho Villa. The detective has a strange theory: he believes in the existence of numerous Earths in parallel universes. Earths that can be reached through hypnosis. The boy thinks the detective is swindling him and decides to accompany him in his investigations. One night they come upon a Russian beggar shouting in an alley. The beggar shouts in Russian and only the boy can understand him. The beggar says: I fought with Wrangel, show some respect, please, I fought in Crimea and I was evacuated from Sevastopol in an English ship. Then the boy asks whether the beggar was at the battle where he fell badly wounded. The beggar looks at him and says yes. I was too, says the boy. Impossible, replies the beggar, that was twenty years ago and you weren’t even born yet.

Then the boy and the Mexican detective set off west in search of the hypnotist. They find her in Kansas City. The boy asks her to hypnotize him and send him back to the battlefield where he should have died, or accept his love and stop fleeing. The hypnotist answers that neither is possible. The Mexican detective shows an interest in the art of hypnosis. As the detective begins to tell the hypnotist a story, the boy leaves the roadside bar and goes walking under the night sky. After a while he stops crying.

He walks for hours. When he’s in the middle of nowhere he sees a figure by the side of the road. It’s the seaweedlike extraterrestrial. They greet each other. They talk. Often, their conversation is unintelligible. The subjects they address are varied: foreign languages, national monuments, the last days of Karl Marx, worker solidarity, the time of the change measured in Earth years and stellar years, the discovery of America as a stage setting, an unfathomable void—as painted by Dore—of masks. Then the boy follows the extraterrestrial away from the road and they walk through a wheat field, cross a stream, climb a hill, cross another field, until they reach a smoldering pasture.

In the next chapter, the boy is no longer a boy but a young man of twenty-five working at a Moscow newspaper where he has become the star reporter. The young man receives the assignment to interview a Communist leader somewhere in China. The trip, he is warned, is extremely difficult, and once he reaches Peking, the situation may be dangerous, since there are lots of people who don’t want any statement by the Chinese leader to get out. Despite these warnings, the young man accepts the job. When, after much hardship, he finally gains access to the cellar where the Chinese leader is hidden, the young man decides that not only will he interview him, he’ll also help him escape the country. The Chinese leader’s face, in the light of a candle, bears a notable resemblance to that of the Mexican detective and former soldier under Pancho Villa. The Chinese leader and the young Russian, meanwhile, come down with the same illness, brought on by the pestilence of the cellar. They shake with fever, they sweat, they talk, they rave, the Chinese leader says he sees dragons flying low over the streets of Peking, the young man says he sees a battle, perhaps just a skirmish, and he shouts hurrah and urges his comrades onward. Then both lie motionless as the dead for a long time, and suffer in silence until the day set for their flight.

Each with a temperature of 102 degrees, the two men cross Peking and escape. Horses and provisions await them in the countryside. The Chinese leader has never ridden before. The young man teaches him how. During the trip they cross a forest and then some enormous mountains. The blazing of the stars in the sky seems supernatural. The Chinese leader asks himself: how were the stars created? where does the universe end? where does it begin? The young man hears him and vaguely recalls a wound in his side whose scar still aches, darkness, a trip. He also remembers the eyes of a hypnotist, although the woman’s features remain hidden, mutable. If I close my eyes, thinks the young man, I’ll see her again. But he doesn’t close them. They make their way across a vast snow-covered plain. The horses sink in the snow. The Chinese leader sings. How were the stars created? Who are we in the middle of the boundless universe? What trace of us will remain?

Suddenly the Chinese leader falls off his horse. The young Russian examines him. The Chinese leader is like a burning doll. The young Russian touches the Chinese leader’s forehead and then his own forehead and understands that the fever is devouring them both. With no little effort he ties the Chinese leader to his mount and sets off again. The silence of the snow-covered plain is absolute. The night and the passage of stars across the vault of the sky show no signs of ever ending. In the distance an enormous black shadow seems to superimpose itself on the darkness. It’s a mountain range. In the young Russian’s mind the certainty takes shape that in the coming hours he will die on that snow-covered plain or as he crosses the mountains. A voice inside begs him to close his eyes, because if he closes them he’ll see the eyes and then the beloved face of the hypnotist. It tells him that if he closes his eyes he’ll see the streets of New York again, he’ll walk again toward the hypnotist’s house, where she sits waiting for him on a chair in the dark. But the Russian doesn’t close his eyes. He rides on.

We’ve gotten used to death | from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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So, wanting the thick feeling and flavor of a long book but committed to so many skinny books, I started listening to the audiobook of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 this week. I’m about twelve hours in (it’s something like forty hours), and it’s activated so many memories and thoughts. I don’t think I’d recommend 2666 as an audiobook on the first read—it helps to know the novel’s abyssal shapes and strategies. I’ve read 2666 three times, including a back-to-back reading, and so much of the novel has stuck with me more than many other novels I’ve read. This morning—early for me—I went for a walk and listened in the baking Florida heat, sun blazing, and, in the book titled “The Part About Fate,” I heard a passage that resonated with me. I pulled my chunky body ‘neath a magnolia’s shade and opened up a note app on my phone to type some of the language, thinking I’d share it on this blog. When I got home I googled the phrases I’d recorded, and realized that I’d shared the passage on this blog eleven years ago.

I’ll put together some thoughts on revising 2666 after a decade, but here’s the passage.

From Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, “The Part About Fate, pages 266-267:

“We’ve gotten used to death,” he heard the young man say.

“It’s always been that way,” said the white-haired man, “always.”

In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn’t want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course, most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he’s afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he’s about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren’t invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it’s because polite society was so small back then. I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn’t tell you.

A hiatus of disinterest | Burroughs meet Beckett (again)

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I recall a personal visit to Beckett. John Calder, my publisher and Beckett’s, was the intermediary for a short, not more than half an hour audience. This was in Berlin. Beckett was there directing one of his new plays. Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and myself were there for a reading. Also present in the visiting party were Fred Jordan and Professor Hoellerer, a professor of English literature at Berlin University.

Beckett was polite and articulate. It was, however, apparent to me at least that he had not the slightest interest in any of us, nor the slightest desire to ever see any of us again. We had been warned to take our own liquor as he would proffer none. So we had brought along a bottle of whisky. Beckett accepted a small drink which he sipped throughout the visit. Asking the various participants first what Beckett said, and what the whole conversation was about seems to elicit quite different responses. Nobody seems to remember at all clearly. It was as if we had entered a hiatus of disinterest. I recall that we did talk about my son’s recent liver transplant and the rejection syndrome. I reminded Beckett of our last meeting in Maurice Girodias’ restaurant On this occasion we had argued about the cut-ups, and I had no wish to renew the argument. So it was just ‘yes’, ‘Maurice’s restaurant’. Allen, I believe, asked Beckett if he had ever given a reading of his work. Beckett said ‘No’.

There was some small talk about the apartment placed at his disposal by the Academy: a sparsely furnished duplex overlooking the Tiergarten. I said the zoo was very good, one of the best, with nocturnal creatures in dioramas, like their natural habitat. They even have flying foxes. Beckett nodded, as if willing to take my word for this. I think there was some discussion of Susan Sontag’s cancer. I looked at my watch. Some one asked Allen or Fred for the time. We got up to go. Beckett shook hands politely.

From William S. Burroughs’ essay “Beckett and Proust.” Collected in The Adding Machine. 

Photographic portrait of Donald Barthelme at his drum kit, taken by his father Donald Barthelme, Sr.

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