The Old Devils

Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis

I was just reading a Huffington Post column about The National Book award, which also mentions the scandalous Publisher’s Weekly “best books of 2009” list that includes no women writers. I can’t comment on that, not having read many new books this year, and none of the winners. But the column goes on to revisit past award missteps, including Kingley Amis’s The Old Devils having been chosen over Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Handmaid’s Tale bored me and I never finished it; The Old Devils is a great book. The characters are a bunch of aging Welsh alcoholics getting ready for a visit from an old friend who’s made it big in the literary world—a sort of modern Dylan Thomas, but less self-destructive. The ones left behind are the ones falling apart.

The humor is dark and relentless; the depiction of drinking is enough to make you weep with laughter. The men drink gin and whisky in the pub; the women drink white wine at home (all day). Everyone smokes. The horrors of aging and the horrors of hangovers blend in a way that makes more sense the older I get; as I have suspected all the time, hangovers are merely bulletins from the front.

Amis’s characters are all rightwing cranks with romantic underbellies, and he spares them nothing. You don’t have to think you could spend five minutes with one of these people in real life to adore them on the page. They’re hobbled and half deaf, forgetful and losing their teeth, selfish, resentful, envious, and deeply nostalgic for youth. They still have desire, and will behave foolishly for it, and they tell you more about dystopia—the dystopia of everyday life—than Atwood will ever know.

Kingsley Amis famously couldn’t finish any of his son’s books. I’ve liked some of Martin’s Amis’s stuff, but I have more patience than Kingsely. It’s always seemed to me that what the father couldn’t stomach was Amis fils pretentiousness. It’s not a killing pretentiousness—Martin Amis has a lot of virtues as a writer—but you can’t ignore it. And there’s nothing a K. Amis books skewers more viciously than pretentiousness.

Of course, being an alcoholic keeps you on the defensive your whole life, no matter how famous you become. When you’re prone to humiliating yourself any night of the week, only a gargantuan sense of humor and an ingrained resistance to human vanity can keep you going.

Alcohol

You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.

Can’t we.

The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.

Do you hear me.

You aren’t all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair . . .

I was always waiting, always here.

Know anyone else who can say that.

My advice to you is think of her for what she is:
one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than
harm, is not abject.”

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,

think of it.

I don’t have to be anywhere.

–Franz Wright

Jewelry Daze

Zebra Jasper , Peruvian Opal and Pink Sponge Coral Necklace

Lost in jewelry making. My sister is having a party for me at her house, and I don’t have enough stock so I am making earrings and bracelets day and night, while the cats climb on the windowsill to watch, and complain at my focus, and I barely get outside, and the rest of the world dissolves like smoke.

A river of beads an inch deep in my cardboard box riverbed (the crutches came in this box; it’s just the right size) with clasps, earring parts and crimp beads lost in the bright clutter; and the tools half hidden; and the cats chewing on string and jewelry wire; feeling alternately stressed at my self-imposed quotas and lost in the endlessness of it, making one thing after another like the junked-out deity we unspooled from those millions of years ago.

These past several days have been like the summers and falls when I’d spend weeks alone in Wallkill. The whole city is here around me, but simply not seen. I hear my neighbor in the hall, catch snatches of conversation, nod to the doormen on the way out, watch the flow of people traffic on the streets: it’s all a backdrop. It’s like trees with birds and squirrels, with spider and ants. I talk on the phone, feed the cats. I miss the old 12th floor gang.

If it were the old days, I’d wander down to Annie’s when I got lonely. Philip would come over or take me to dinner. Now I’m solitary: my friends are all just a little too far away, emotionally, for me to feel part of anything. I keep thinking of whom to see, dinners coffee dates, and they’re all good: but they don’t add up. That’s my fault: what I’ve unraveled.

This happened slowly, one thing after another. Charles moving out, then being so wrapped up in Philip, the perpetual drama. Hard to believe that’s coming to an end: at least the particular drama we were part of. What will happen next is unclear.

It’s strange when all of a sudden a packet of years closes off and you realize: that’s the past now. What was the present for a long time—changing, moving forward, but still somehow all the same present—is gone: there was a bridge, a bend in the road, a jump, a cut-off.

So here I am in the new time, and it feels okay to feel alone. I’ve gotten used to it. I need more networks, social and professional, and have to attend to them (like netting fish?) but not right now. I have too much work. I have to make necklaces, bracelets and earrings. And edit a man’s book. And then, soon, I hope, my own again.

Passion for Solitude

by Cesare Pavese

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.

The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.

Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,

after a short walk, to open fields.

I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows

how many women are eating now. My body is calm:

labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch

the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,

but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.

I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining

among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.

A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life

of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.

A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,

in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,

which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.

All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,

just as I know that blood flows in my veins.

The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,

a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,

lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins

with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky

whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star

struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,

from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,

it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,

my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

The Cat Psychiatrist

Hope in a Prison of Despair, by Evelyn De Morgan (30 August 1855-2 May 1919), British

As I have told you before, and probably will again next week and the week after until we both expire of collegial boredom, my cat refuses to let me sink into gloom. I use that phrase because merely being depressed—but still active—seems to go by him; and lying in bed reading is okay, too (though he prefers active). But lying in bed sunk in gloom is not permitted. He meows, bites, sticks his wet nose in my face.

Is this what I should have done with my father all those years ago? Not tiptoed around his bad moods…not believed adult inner life was sacrosanct, demanding of awe and dread? Should I have just nudged him with my wet nose?

Oh yeah, he wouldn’t have reacted by saying (fondly) “….okay, okay, ya dumb cat, for chrissakes, I’ll get up.” He would have snarled and said something hurtful. I only do that when Fitzroy is being Felix Ungerish neurotic. When I’m sunk in gloom, I’m touched by his distress. And who can say it’s better to sink in gloom than write this blog post, which is fairly useless but doesn’t upset the cat?

I always want to explore the gloom for reasons that once made sense. The metaphors of ‘shining light on’ or ‘cleaning out’ are timeless and seemingly experience-tested, at least until you try them 8 million times. Now it’s all about keeping busy, but the obvious things—doing the work I’m paid for, calling friends—are impossibly distant from the state of gloom. This isn’t. This is the coffee bar in the mental hospital, the one that exists nowhere but in my mind.

My Ideal Mental Hospital: on one side are sunny gardens, mountain views, hot springs, and a library of great poetic and comic works: books, movies and TV shows. Masseurs, yoga teachers and therapists are on call, and at the end of the session, they pay you. Grandmothers (certified grandmothers, older, wider and shorter than all the patients) prepare simple meals with lots of fresh vegetables, meat raised with kindness, home-baked bread and pie. All the bedrooms have big windows and the breeze is warm or cool, scented with the Pacific Ocean, eucalyptus, mountain laurel, autumn leaves or just-mown grass.

On the other side, it’s like a college or boarding school common room, with a stained carpet, ridiculous chairs, and people in pajamas day and night. The coffee is not bad but slopped into ugly gray plastic cups. Sunk in Gloom plays her greatest hits on the jukebox, which eats quarters and often skips or stops in the middle of the song. There’s only one phone and when it rings, it’s always a guy with a sexy voice asking for some girl named Marcy.
On The Meeting Of García Lorca And Hart Crane

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s
been drinking and has no idea who
this curious Andalusian is, unable
even to speak the language of poetry.
The young man who brought them
together knows both Spanish and English,
but he has a headache from jumping
back and forth from one language
to another. For a moment’s relief
he goes to the window to look
down on the East River, darkening
below as the early light comes on.
Something flashes across his sight,
a double vision of such horror
he has to slap both his hands across
his mouth to keep from screaming.
Let’s not be frivolous, let’s
not pretend the two poets gave
each other wisdom or love or
even a good time, let’s not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won’t forget it. The two
greatest poetic geniuses alive
meet, and what happens? A vision
comes to an ordinary man staring
at a filthy river. Have you ever
had a vision? Have you ever shaken
your head to pieces and jerked back
at the image of your young son
falling through open space, not
from the stern of a ship bound
from Vera Cruz to New York but from
the roof of the building he works on?
Have you risen from bed to pace
until dawn to beg a merciless God
to take these pictures away? Oh, yes,
let’s bless the imagination. It gives
us the myths we live by. Let’s bless
the visionary power of the human—
the only animal that’s got it—,
bless the exact image of your father
dead and mine dead, bless the images
that stalk the corners of our sight
and will not let go. The young man
was my cousin, Arthur Lieberman,
then a language student at Columbia,
who told me all this before he died
quietly in his sleep in 1983
in a hotel in Perugia. A good man,
Arthur, he survived graduate school,
later came home to Detroit and sold
pianos right through the Depression.
He loaned my brother a used one
to compose his hideous songs on,
which Arthur thought were genius.
What an imagination Arthur had!

–Philip Levine