It’s time now for Golden Rule Jones Theater.  Today we present a scene loosely adapted from Sam Shepard’s most famous play, True West.  In the dual role of Austin and Lee, the battling brothers of Shepard’s theatrical masterpiece, is your host, me, Sam Jones. The role of Mom is played by the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times.

MOM: Oh, that reminds me.  You boys will probably never guess who’s in town.  Try and guess.

(long pause, brothers stare at her)

AUSTIN: Whatya’ mean, Mom?

MOM: Take a guess.  Somebody very important has come to town.  I read it, coming down on the Greyhound.

LEE: Somebody very important?

MOM: See if you can guess.  You’ll never guess.

AUSTIN: Mom — we’re trying to uh —(points to writing pad)

MOM: Chesterton. (pause)  G. K. Chesterton’s in town. Isn’t that incredible?  March 10th.  He’s signing his new book.

(pause)

AUSTIN: Chesterton’s dead, mom.

[Curtain falls.]

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Patrick Kurp’s recent entry on literary biography prompted me to recall that R. W. Stallman’s 1973 biography of Stephen “Red Badge” Crane included an appendix that should be a required feature of all literary bios: parodies in the style of the subject.  Here’s James Gibbon Huneker’s parody of Crane’s Cuban War dispatches, which appeared in the Musical Courier on August 3, 1898:

The American fleet came redly on like a bunch of waving bandana handkerchiefs.  The air was full of prunes as a plum pudding. … The Spanish met the onslaught with mauve determination. … The two fleets hurtled in a magenta hurtle.  They feinted and thrust with a deep canary-yellow vigor.  The battle looked like two overturned garbage cans on a hot night.  The shells whistled seal-brownly.  The death screams of the Spaniards were full of purplish pink despair.  One Spaniard with a cerise voice like the aftermath of an aurora borealis screamed paintily his desire to kill the Americanos.  Then with a blackish white tremor, strong battleships sank greenly chromely black into the water.  A gauntly greenish smell tore the air.  The whole thing looked like a German pouring dark wine into a dingy funnel.  Admiral Dewey had won.

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No disrespect to Heather McHugh, who no doubt gave a wonderful reading in Evanston last night, but I was disappointed to learn that Gjertrud Schnackenberg would not be serving as poet-in-residence at Northwestern this semester. I never learned what happened there, whether it was a schedule conflict or illness or what. Anyhow, here’s a passage from her 2001 volume The Throne of Labdacus, the beginning of Part Six, “The Alphabet Enters Greece”:

But that was before
The first, tiny alphabet letter

Entered into Greece for the first time
The letter Iota,i,

Like a fragile, fever-laden mosquito
Struck motionless by the divinity;

Struck soundless by the heart
Of barren Greece, where the god touched the letter

Uneasily, awed. Then Delta appeared silently
In the midst of the words, D,

Like the indelible mountain
With an infant king abandoned on top of it;

And Theta, like a human infant’s face
Crossed out, J,

Before Lambda appeared like a lame man
Leaning on a stick, l,

And Omega, like a shining rope
Lowered by Zeus into the midst of things

And ties, by human hands,
Into a noose, W,

Before the slain Sphinx of Psi, Y,
Before the rock throne of Eta, H,

The Greek letters arranged in the Sphinx-poetry
Of their meaningless order,

Reeling across the surface of a metal leaf
Sent to the god as a tribute, or expressing remorse,

From the people of Thebes

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From “Three Letters,” in Chicago Review 52:2/3/4, Autumn 2006:

6 October 1936
R. 1. Box 155
Los Altos. CA

Dear Mr. Rexroth,

I appreciate your offer to give me a place on your program, but cannot accept it. Even if I felt any interest in the congress, which I do not, I could not afford the time necessary to prepare a paper. I have a heavy program ahead of me and am only in marginal health.

The poems, I am sorry to say, simply do not interest me, either in conception or execution. When you say that you are in essential agreement with me, I can only gather from your statement that you misunderstand me almost completely. The first of your two letters to which this is a reply takes exception so irresponsibly and thoughtlessly to my previous statements, that I fear I must simply decline to argue. Either you misunderstand very simple terminology, which I doubt, or you enjoy showing off, which I suspect.

Your reference to the old Chicago group astounds me, however. If you are going into the congress to establish a group of that nature, I can only say that you are taking a very long away around. So far as I am concerned, I can call a congress of the only western writers that interest me whenever I wish, and can seat them in my living room. I do it very seldom, however, for I confess that I am growing very tired.

Sincerely,

Yvor Winters

This is just a laugh, of course, but the “60th Anniversary Issue” of CR, with its terrific Kenneth Rexroth “Centenary Portfolio” edited by John Beer and Max Blechman, is of terrific interest throughout. To mark the anniversary, CR has also put up an archive with highlights from the publication over the past six decades. Check it out. More on all of this in due course …

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Mrs. Jones and I don’t have chirdren, as Mayor Daley pronounces it, but we do like to speculate on names. For example, she or I will say:

“What do you think of ‘Culpepper Jones’?”

And the other will reply:

“We could call him ‘Cully.’”

If you’ve been following me for a while (I mean, if that’s you in the brown macintosh), you may remember my related joke about “Régledor.

Anyhow, lately I’ve thinking about “Rayuela” Jones. We could call her “Ray.” (Though we doesn’t have to.) Aside from the fabulous connection to world literature, the name has a kind of a nice 19th-century feel to it, when it was more common to see male names feminized for female offspring. That’s because people in those days used to name kids after relatives or ancestors, as opposed to the current practice of naming them after celebrity half-wits or luxury automobiles.

Anyhow, long way of leading you to the fact that I’m reading Gregory Rabassa’s If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, and enjoying it immensely. Interesting personality: he actually reminds me a bit of my old friend Smyth. Anyhow (notice we’re now at the second underground level; remember where you park your car), it’s an eccentric little book that is great fun, in part, for Rabassa’s recollections about the great writers whose books he has translated: Garcia Márquez, Lispector, Asturias, Goytisolo, Amado, Donoso, and many others.

Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, née Rayuela, was the first novel Rabassa translated. Here’s a charming anecdote about Cortázar that I came across in the book this morning.

[My daughter] Clara had met Julio and was impressed with his height, comparing him to President Lincoln and calling him “the six-foot-four-man.” In his correspondence there would always be a sketch for her. As can be seen from some of his stories, there is some kind of bond between Cortázar and small children, a mutual recognition and understanding that goes beyond notation. In so many ways he was a great child, large and pure, and children can sense those who are their peers, even when they look them over coldly as one dog does another.

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Like Mark at RSB, I really did “wonder if anyone will bother to concern themselves” with Norman Mailer’s new book.  Imagine my surprise, then, to discover Coetzee’s long review of the book in the February 15 New York Review of Books.  Well, I thought, Mailer’s book is about Hitler, and Coetzee has a well established interest in the subject of evil in our world, so why not.  Then I read the last line here:

The much-maligned domestic tyrant Alois comes across sympathetically as a canny customs officer, a husband proud of his virility despite advancing years, a devoted but luckless amateur beekeeper, a man of little school-learning anxiously climbing the social ladder. The scenes in which Alois struggles not to make a fool of himself during gatherings with fellow small-town notables are worthy of the Flaubert of Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Granted, B&P is not considered Flaubert’s greatest novel, but still I was surprised to see any Mailer work, in whole or in part, described as “worthy of Flaubert.”

Let Mailer alone – there are other surprises in Coetzee’s piece too.  Check out the last line here:

All in all, the adventures of Adolf Hitler in the realm of ideas provide a cautionary tale against letting an impressionable young person loose to pursue his or her education in a state of total freedom. For seven years Hitler lived in a great European city in a time of ferment from which emerged some of the most exciting, most revolutionary thought of the new century. With an unerring eye he picked out not the best but the worst of the ideas around him. Because he was never a student, with lectures to attend and reading lists to follow and fellow students to argue with and assignments to complete and examinations to sit, the half-baked ideas he made his own were never properly challenged. The people he associated with were as ill-educated, volatile, and undisciplined as himself. No one in his circle had the intellectual command to put his chosen authorities in their place as what they were: disreputable and even comical mountebanks.

Normally a society can tolerate, even look benignly upon, a layer of autodidacts and cranks on the fringes of its intellectual institutions.

This is new to me: ”autodidact” as a term of derogation.  But I think there’s something missing.  Editorial error, no doubt.  Surely the line originally read, “autodidacts, cranks, and artists.”

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From Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (1944):

My purpose in jotting these notes on Gogol has, I hope, become perfectly clear.  Bluntly speaking it amounts to the following: if you expect to find out something about Russia, if you are eager to know why the blistered Germans bungled their blitz, if you are interested in “ideas” and “facts” and “messages,” keep away from Gogol.  The awful trouble of learning Russian in order to read him will not be repaid in your kind of hard cash.  Keep away, keep away.  He has nothing to tell you.  Keep off the tracks.  High tension.  Closed for the duration.  Avoid, refrain, don’t.  I would like to have here a full list of all possible interdictions, vetoes and threats.  Hardly necessary of course — as the wrong sort of reader will certainly never get as far as this.  But I do welcome the right sort — my brothers, my doubles.  My brother is playing the organ. My sister is reading.  She is my aunt.  You will first learn the alphabet, the labials, the linguals, the dentals, the letters that buzz, the drone and the bumblebee, and the Tse-tse Fly.  One of the vowels will make you say “Ugh!”  You will feel mentally stiff and bruised after your first declension of personal pronouns.  I see however no other way of getting to Gogol (or to any other great Russian writer for that matter).  His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not of ideas.  “Gaw-gol,” not “Go-gall.”  The final “l” is a soft dissolving “l” which does not exist in English.  One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name.

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