House of Mirth

I noted yesterday that I couldn't cut my finger without thinking of Randall Jarrell cutting his finger. For better or worse, I seem to be constant (and sometimes reluctant) communion with the books I've read. There's that great line of Milosz's: "[F]or our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will." Interviewing the poet in 2000, I asked him about that very line, and he replied: "When writing [Milosz's ABC's], I tried to be as passive and open as possible to the haphazard appearances of persons who are no longer alive. In other words, I treated myself as an instrument that would serve to mark their existence." This is a little different from what I'm describing--he's allowing the honored dead to use him as a megaphone--but many of those departed voices are writers, so I suppose it comes to the same thing.

In my previous post, for example, I mentioned my father plunging the drain in our shower. It is impossible for me to picture that scene without a passage from Nicholson Baker's A Book of Matches flitting through my brain. The drain in the narrator's shower has clogged. He grabs the nearby plunger and goes to work, with results that are almost sensually gratifying:

It made the most wonderful deep squirting noises--huge sucking, bubbling gulps and gasps and noggin-snorts as several pounds of water were thrust down into the drain and forced up in a foul fountain out the overflow valve higher up on the top. I began working with the water, as if I were rocking a car when it's stuck in the driveway, sucking, pushing, sucking, pushing. At one point the drain seemed even worse, and I found that all the turbulence had caused the drain lid to turn and fall shut. When I opened it again and was more careful to center the plunger over the mouth of the drain, I got real results: after one blast, to which I gave the full might of my arms, a supernova of black fragments came up, God, and then more with a second plunge, and I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move. I held still for a second to listen: yes, the purling of water curving away into the pipes. Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm.

"Noggin-snorts" might be my favorite touch here: a noggin is a person's head, of course, but also a small quantity of booze. It's one of those multiplex metaphors, staggering around with its shirttails out. The drain is a drunk; no, the drain is a drink. I also like the rooting snake and the rainbow--bits of biblical frosting. But why should this scene have stuck in my head, along with the narrator's earlier, shower-related disclosure that he likes to sing "Eight Days A Week" to the drone of the ceiling fan? It's not logical.

Nor is the fact that I've been haunted by the first sentence of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother ever since I read it in 1996: "My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind." The first half, up to the semicolon, is bad and sad. The second half is frightening, both for what it says and how it says it. What I mean is, there's a formal perfection to those words: "bleak" and "black" have an almost familial relationship, very appropriate to the matter at hand, while the rhyme of "back" and "black" seals up the sentence in a kind of sonic casket. None of this would matter if Kincaid hadn't cut right to the heart of a scary, permanent emptiness. Beyond repair. At moments of major or minor desolation, the sentence tends to float into view.

Labels: Czeslaw Milosz, Jamaica Kincaid, Nicholson Baker, plunging

I meant to note some time ago the publication of Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations by the University Press of Mississippi. The book includes a short email interview I conducted with the poet in 2000, when he was living in Krakow and in precarious health. But there are also lengthier conversations with such world-class interlocutors as Adam Michnik and Joseph Brodsky. The latter exchange has never before appeared in English, and has a shaggy, audio-verite charm all its own. Here, for example, Brodsky asks Milosz to list the most valuable writers of the twentieth century:

CM: There are two parts in your question. The first maybe is easier to answer than the second. The first, what kind of literature, what kind of works? I have been developing more and more towards the idea that the measure of literature is the amount of reality caught by words. And after all those abuses, horrible abuses, of the word "realism," it is a daring thing to say such a...

JB: Yes.

CM: But I have been thinking a lot about how relatively little of the reality of our century has been captured by words, and for me it's, hmm, I would measure the literary works by that real presence of objective reality, in poems and novels.

JB: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

CM: So. So this is the first part of the question. The second--what authors?--is much more difficult. I an unable to answer that question because, you know, our readings are often very important for our own subjective reasons--

JB: Yes, but that's the whole point, ya?

CM: Ya. And it's very difficult to have an assessment of twentieth-century literature. Sometimes, you know, it's more or less the way we read. I don't know what your experience is, but very often my best readings were in the bookstore (laughter). Sometimes one page, ya?

Cynthia Haven edited both this book and an earlier collection of conversations with Joseph Brodsky. For a taste of her own criticism, try this essay on Jane Hirshfield, which just appeared on the Poetry Foundation website.

Labels: Czeslaw Milosz