George Dickerson 1933-2015

    I met George Dickerson in early 2003, at a reception at the old Poets House on Prince St. It was thronged with literary names and wannabees, insiders and outsiders. I noticed George standing slightly aloof, as I certainly was at such an occasion, and began a conversation with him. I had not known his cinematic work (I had seen Blue Velvet and other stuff that he was in, but did not remember him being in those works) so came to him though his poetry. He told a moving story of having started out impressively as a writer, with the support of Robert Penn Warren at Yale, having two stories in The Best American Short Stories, writing regularly for Time as a book reviewer, but then being traumatized after working for the UN in Lebanon in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the civil war, and not being able to express himself in writing for many years In the early 1990s, though the Muse returned, and touched him in a genre in which he had previously dabbled but never centered himself: poetry.

       George’s poetry is one of pure brilliance and pure romanticism. His poems capture beauty, love, and those moments where we represent ourselves at our best. The villanelle can be cloying and overused as a form, but Dickerson comes to it with astonishing freshness:

A Mist of White Horses



Tell me you have not forgotten the rain, 


Close by the Mediterranean Sea,

Promise a mist of white horses again!



In the marshy sedge of the delta’s plain


Where the white horses of Camargue run free,


Tell me you have not forgotten the rain!



The rest of the poem repeat and alternates the closing lines of each stanza above as a refrain, sounding a note of plangent appeal, remembrance, but allowing the beauty of both what is pictured and how it is described to supersede any merely personal emotion for nostalgia. The one place-specific of “Camargue” both located the poem geographically but also tonally in a mood of gossamer Provençal lyricism.   If this poem is a case of braving the full expression of high lyricism in a natural mode now grown somewhat ashamed of it, ‘The Book Of The Dead” sees regret in the anecdotal, sweetness in the unfulfilled, as the speaker meets a former wife or girlfriend of his on the street:

She said my name as a convert might speak

The forbidden name of a toppled god,

With a slight derision and some regret.

I gave her a wink. She offered a nod.

We chattered like palms in a desert breeze,

Uttering some putative pleasantries:

"The Sphinx lost his nose." "Claudius is dead."

"Whatever happened to that awful Fred?"

        The mixture of the archetypal and the banal, utterances the man and woman might have actually said to each other and utterances that are temporally possible: the awful Fred whom we can well picture as much as the Claudius and sphinx that are not there to give the poem mythic depth but to point to how the particulars do not matter, only the ideas of the particulars: and that to these two people their past experience is mythic even if it is not to anyone else. . The rhyme is tight and totally inhabiting the meter, but Dickerson is never a by-the book formalist; when he uses rhyme, it is because rhyme is the only way for the poem to be as intense as it is, the only way the poet and reader can be totally committed to it.

    My favorite poem of George’s—and one which I delighted hearing him read as we chatted over coffee at Camaje or Caffe Vivaldi-is “badinage for Pepper.” Thomas Catterson, nicknamed “Pepper,” was a Vietnam veteran and a poet George met in the 1990s, when, as founder of Rattapallax Press, he scoured New York City for poets of any age of background of verve and lyricism, passion and conviction. This, to my mind, is one of the great elegies of our time, precisely because it does not try to be that: and does not try to sentimentalize Catterson himself, the death that overcome him, or the loss felt by the mourner.

So you've finally gone to seek your severed leg


And end your body's antic quarrel with time.


Terrific!  What's left behind?  Here.  At the still point.


Where the mirthless clowns of midnight

t
Snicker: "Hoo ha!  Hoo ha!  Sweet Pepper's dead,


With Eastern metrics dancing in his head."


This is not so fine, my friend...this hapless end.



      As C. S. Lewis argued in Studies in Words, adjectives like “terrific” and "terrible” have lost their force, gravitated opposite ways so that “terrific: means the equivalent of ‘great!” and “terrible” means the equivalent of “horrible.” Dickerson sue of terrific is an act of what Coleridge termed “desynonimzation,” where words regain their meaning, become redifferentiated, as the sarcasm of “Terrific!” reveals the underlying terror is shares with terrible. If the poet is sarcastic in one way giving a snide “terrific” when he means to express loss—death is even more sarcastic, snickering, without pity, unable to laugh even at its cruel jokes.

You know how absence aches....


You knew before you quit


Your walker's intricate pirouette


The recklessness of wishes and want...


The cost...the haunt... ("Jig! Jig!" the jongleur said.

From his busted bed.)  But to stop short


The syllables of your heart's fierce muttering


So soon is beyond my knack to grieve.

    Alliteration is a powerful tool in English: indeed an atavistic one, hearkening back to Beowulf or Sir Gawain. When it is used strategically, in conjuncture with swings between diction (the Latinate “intricate.” the French “pirouette,” the Germanic: wish,” the Scandinavian ‘want”) and, of course conviction of sentiment is power is heightened until the switch’s setting is on ‘stun.” The internal rhyme between “want” and “haunt,” with the t sound taken up again by ‘short”, can only come from the patient interface of a master of craft, as do the five s words in the stanza’s last three lines which we probably only notice on second or third reading so fluid is the way the language and emotion forge us into understanding the poet’s loss. . The archaism of “jongleur” joins in with the banality of ‘busted bed”; everything is tied, is hammered together in “heart’s fierce muttering.”

Hey! Let's take a jaunty, jocular leave


And screw the wizard of finality.


We'll have another cigarette.  You bet!


And watch the lovely ladies' last late pass,


Then listen for God's gruff guffaw


As you humpety-bump your raggedy ass


Up the steps of heaven.  "Hoo haw!"

     The risk in the last stanza is the pairing of “jaunty” and “jocular” which are potentially too much like, Dickerson gets away with it—and we discussed this many times—because he is deliberately trying to establish a mood, and because the potential prosiness of such international” adjective-s-ones that may try to telegraph the envisioned emotion too broadly too readers—is offset by the colloquialism of ‘screw” and ‘raggedy ass.” The male camaraderie hat evokes affection in jocularity and gruffness (one cannot improve on the poet’s own words here) counters death in its own sentimental idiom, not yielding an inch.

       Though Dickerson had fifteen years to live when he wrote this poem, and did not intend it as an elegy for himself (I never met Thomas Catterson, but I felt I knew him very well through George’s intense conviction that the poem was totally about his friend “Pepper”), his own death inevitably makes me read this poem in a different light. George was a good friend to me: having reviewed black writers in the 1960s for TIME, he read over the first two section of the African-American chapter of my book Theory After Theory and supplied insightful commentary and feedback. Though he was disappointed by the books generally negative take on the New Critics—some of whom, such as Penn Warren, had been among his teachers at Yale—he was always a generous and supportive reader and I was touched when he, at age 77, walked across Greenwich Village to be at my book party for that volume. (Incidentally, George was right I should have been more positive about the New Critics having an axe to grind is not the same as seeing things sub specie aeternitatis). In turn, I read George’s work, particularly his various attempts to tell the story of his years in Lebanon that had been the crucible, breaking point, and in an odd way turning point of his life. Short story, play, screenplay of “The Man Who Loved Butterflies", I read them all, and vicariously lived through a terrifying experience conveyed in taut and unyielding prose.

       George told wonderful stories about famous people he had known: Leonard Cohen, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Arthur Miller. He came to my class at the New School in October 2006, to speak about his friendship with Miller, and one of my students remembering that occasion, wrote to me recently: “He was such an interesting speaker and seemed like a really great man.” I could not agree more. George did not choose the vocation of teaching; but he would have been a superb teacher. When he spoke of acting, and cinematic technique, and the choices of art, he was my teacher. 

   George spoke often of his love for his wife Suzanne and his daughter Erin, and his pride in his Finnish son, Dome Karukoski, whose superb film at the Tribeca Film Festival he encouraged his friends to see. I am really privileged to have known him and to call him a friend. I wish I had been more in touch with him recently, but I always got distracted and thought a phone call and coffee with George would be just around the corner. Last Friday, I saw his book of poetry noon my shelf and thought, I should contact him soon. The next day Suzanne called to tell me of his passing.

On Bittersweet Place

For most of the twentieth century, the historical novel—defined simply by Sir Walter Scott’s subtitle of his first novel in thee genre he made famous, Waverley, as ‘’tis sixty years hence,”—was severely unfashionable. A prestige novel was either a subversive formal experiment like Ulysses—admittedly a novel of the near past, but not a historical novel—or, more frequently, a meticulously wrought novella told from a limited third-arson point-of-view and deliberately excluding contextual arenas such as history Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk being a sterling example. Historical novels (such as Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse) were left for purely popular readership, and garnered sale,s but were not con sired art. By the end of the twentieth century, matters had reversed course entirely, and historical fiction came back with a vengeance, both from the left (postcolonial fiction, feminist fiction, what Linda Hutcheon termed “historiographic metafiction,”) and from more or less the mainstream (Cold Mountain, Possession, Mason & Dixon) that, though without the rewriting history-from-below agenda of the earlier categories, were using the new permissibility of history in fiction to unsettle established truths.

   Just as the modernist exclusion of history contributed to the later stages of modernism being arid and deracinated, so did the postmodern inclusion of history lead to a reductivism, as if history was just a miraculous substrate that could automatically give meaning to a story and make it resonant. Magical realism, with its frequent use of history as a base on with to ground experience and mystery, was an offender in this regard; and, notably, the generation of Latin American novelists the replaced the Boom writers—not all of whom wrote magical realism, but most of whom wrote historical novels—pursued the historical novel as well, but did so in a fashion at once more matter-of-fact and more intimate: as seen in works such as Leonardo Padura's The Man Who Loved Dogs, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory, and Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas.

        A similar development is occurring in US fiction, but from a very different direction. I have previously mentioned Kate Manning’s My Notorious Life and Karolyn Miller’s Under The Red Ribbon as examples of historical fiction by American women writers that is interested in historical settings but do not draw upon history for a source of meaning in itself. Another novel—the best written, in a literary sense of the three--is Ronna Wineberg's On Bittersweet Place. This is s a story of Jewish immigration to the US in the 1920’s from Eastern Europe, but without any of the shtick and stereotypes usually associated with the subject, and also shorn of excessive generalizations about what ‘Europe,” America,” or even “modernity” were at the time. I have a personal stake in this, as my own paternal grandparents made a similar migration from similar circumstances at a similar time, and what little of their experience I was able to talk about with them was very much reflected in the tone and mentality, if not the specific events of Wineberg’s novel.

     Bittersweet Place is not a metaphor, but a real street in Chicago,  “one long block and narrow like a snake, a street that went nowhere,” and this novel works out of this real datum and develops metaphorical implications out of it that are earned and probative—one thinks of Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabiaas another recent book that does this vis a vis its title and a real place. The idea of the bittersweet can, in the wrong hand, become a smarmy, fifty-fifty compromise between positive and negative, but WIneberg does not strive for emotional balance but for a sense of how the heroine does not let her negative experiences erase her positive ones, how she manages, in her emotional accounting, to keep them on separate ledgers. The writing, --austere, elegant, not without a subtext of pain and anger—strengths this by not becoming too emotional even as it touches highly charged ad personal subjects.

   The felicitously named Lena Czernitski is our protagonist and narrator. She is a girl in her early teens whose family has fled Russia after the war (the point is made—pertinently to current circumstances--that the family was fleeing both the new Bolshevik state and the Ukrainian nationalist forces associated with Symon Petliura) and moved to Chicago. Early on in the novel, two traumatic events occur, which I think I can relate without spoiling the entire book, so central are they to the book’s narrative premises. Lena’s uncle, Maurice Roberts (née Moshe Rubolsky, a sour ne’er-do-well who nonetheless is accepted as a member of the extended family, is urged by his sister to be a mensch. This is not remotely in his area of competence, though, and indeed Maurice shows himself to be quite the obverse when he brutally sexually assaults her in a fashion which shocks the reader and makes the entire book more dire and urgent in tone than it otherwise would have been. What is most horrific about Maurice’s violation of Lena is his justification for it. He tells her, “Our people needs secrets to live.” In other words, he is saying that, to survive in a world dominated by hostile Gentiles, Jews need secrets even of their own repugnant making; that in the wake of a religion which clearly does not compel Maurice either theologically or ethically, some other, substitute or ersatz secret, must be concocted, even at the cost of his niece’s integrity and innocence; or that a downtrodden group deprived by his place in the social hierarchy from secrets—elite identities, outsider-excluding institutions like, at the time, the Ivy League colleges—of their own, most forge them by hurting and traumatizing their kin. Maurice s justification is at once so preposterous and so in-character for a particular kind of warped subaltern figure that it puts On Bittersweet Place into a very different moral cockpit than if he had merely offered on justification at all.

      Equally devastating if less immediately traumatic is the death of Lena’s young cousin, Leah Grace, Lena at first sees Leah as the golden child, the one who will be fully American, with an American-sounding name. Leah will be, someone, unlike Lena, ‘cleansed of the old.” But Leah dies as a young child, and it is left to Lena to be the golden one, the cleansed one, or as much of that as she can conjure. This is the opposite issue than if, say, her mother had died, and Lena had to be the leader of the family; she has to instead assume the burden of being the future, being the hope, and while this may seem to open opportunities it is also an additional burden for her to bear on top of those she already has. The death of Leah makes the novel multi-dimensional and bring up an unconventional situation—of a child being affected by the death of a younger relative into becoming a different person—rarely seen in fiction.  Leah’s death is an additional spur; along with the desire to do “penance for Maurice's poor judgment,” that propels her inexorably if remorsefully forward.  Yet there are countervailing forces in the novel as well: Lena’s boyfriend, Max, is from a more cultivated German-Jewish background and their young love is poignantly and affectinglly portrayed with just enough realism to make the prose tingle.  Lena, despite the traumas she has experienced, remains a romantic, and her desire for a “grand love” that would erase ‘awful memory” has something in it of her elder fictional contemporary, Jay Gatsby, and his “romantic readiness.”

      Lena’s family and Max’s family are different, though in that Max's father has what the Czernitskis see as intellectual pretensions. that, as Lena’s father puts it, “we don to belong with them: and that they are not “unsere leite”. Lena pushes back that she happens “to like books” and picture an abstract world of beauty and light. Here we have the conflict between immigrant practicality and American dreaming; but also a highly intra-American conflict between says, pragmatism and transcendentalism.

    One of the most fascinating aspect of On Bittersweet Place is how quickly the Czernitski family and their relatives become Americanized: how they not only take American names but assume American identities. While reading On Bittersweet Place I realized that I had erred in seeing the problems of my paternal grandparents as Jewish problems, European problems, immigrant problems, when in fact, like the family portrayed here, they had speedily assimilated into American life and adopted its character and mannerisms. If America for these people was the goldene medina, the golden country (this made me think of Jennifer Gilmore’s  Golden Country, set in similar circumstances even if at a different emotional pitch) an elasticity which is both a tribute to the resilience of these brave people and the relative pluralism and applicability of American society at the time, even if that pluralism (a word itself coined by an American Jew, Horace Kallen of the New School) was not only limited but, precisely because of this applicability, a bit bland, thin, and superficial. These new Americans, and thoroughly Americans, were yet, though, still outsiders: their problems were American problems compounded by a sense of not totally being in the society’s core group even as, to simplify, they already felt the society’s core feelings, or as much of its core feelings as a polyglot and heterogeneous society such as the US can even have. The problems of Lena and Max, Maurice and William, made me see that I could learn about my paternal grandparents by reading books like Invisible Man, written by an African American, or America Is In The Heart, written by a Filipino-American, as much as books like The Rise of David Levinsky, written obviously by a Jew; that this dual, tantalizing sense of assimilation and alienation that Wineberg’s characters feel was the key to their experience: this is the “narrow bridge” Lena’s father describes the world as being. These people have access to the future, but only along certain limited vectors; and this enabling-disabling paradox frames the course of their lives.

         Ronna Wineberg’s vision is, indeed, pleasingly paradoxical: it does not bind the reader to one way of reasoning, An important touchstone for this is when Lena’s father, trying to improve his English, reads negative review of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: “To me, Theodore Dreiser’s books have no beauty. They are always badly written.” Lena’s father recognizes that this does not mean Dreiser is not worth learning about, that it’s “important to learn about books, even ones you will never read.” This wisdom-reminiscent of a more liberal and inclusive version of E. D.  Hirsch’s 'cultural literacy’, is indicative of how On Bittersweet Place does not insist on its own lyrical, austere intimate approach to history as normative, even as we see in its pages how advantageous, as least at our current moment, this mode might be.

        On Bittersweet Place is an exemplary novel in itself, but also a lesson in how twenty-first century fiction can use both the thematic scope of postmodernism and the asceticism of mainstream modernism to tread its own path, even if, in this case, the path is a bittersweet one.

Irving Malin 1934 to 2014

Irving Malin has died at 80. He was an emeritus professor of literature at CUNY specializing in Jewish American literature and later on in postmodern lit. He was a surrogate father to me in many ways. Without him my POWELL book would never have been published, and possibly my entire book writing career would not have happened. He began to fade by the time THEORY was published but helped me particularly  the queer chapter, which indicates how curious and forward looking he was. He was America's finest literary friend

He was a champion of writers ranging from Joyce Carol Oates to James Purdy, from Jennifer Vanderbes to Douglas Glover, Millicent Dillon to David Foster Wallace, A G Mojtabai to Peter Carey, George Garrett to Grorge Minot. He commanded the literary world from his second floor bedroom in Forest Hills. 

He is survived by his loving and talented wife Ruth who selflessly took care of him for the four years of his illness and shared fifty years of intellectual  and literary companionship with him. 

He rejoiced in the emrgence of critical minds of the next generation like Brian McHale, Steven G Kellman, and Brooke Horvath. 

His loss is a seismic one to all 

Here is the obit in the TIMES. 

Karolyn Miller's Under The Red Ribbon

    I have been highly preoccupied writing a big book about Australia, editing another book about teaching Australian and New Zealand literature, teaching a new set of classes, and traveling to Italy, Serbia, and Bosnia to give lectures, but I wanted to mention a book which came to me utterly fortuitously and which has really caught my imagination—Karolyn Miller’s Under The Red Ribbon. This is a book whose action starts in the Midwest in the 1920s and ends in New York in the 1940s.  The major themes in American society in this era particularly urbanization and the slow rise in women’s empowerment, are there and, surprisingly and fascinatingly, so is a concerted attention to Native American rights and the mistreatment of American indigenous people by white-run schools and institutions. (Not so far from Australia and the ‘Stolen Generations’ after all). The book, though, centers on people and relationships. Much like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light You Cannot See, which rescues itself from potential sentimentality by short, staccato, lyric chapters, Miller's use of subjective point-of-view means not only is the reader kept emotionally involved with action and character development as they happen, but that we are kept guessing, cannot presume the identity of just what we are reading about. But Miller is not hemmed in by formalist susurrations; the book is bouncy and vibrant, not preoccupied with questions of form and voice but using these modalities to transmit to the reader its own affective coin.
   The book starts off with Lucille Kramer’s graduation from high school, where two events that will dominate the novel’s arc occur: she has a romantic outing with a classmate Nick Martin Jr., that goes disastrously awry and she discovers that her recently deceased mother had a secret life and that the terms of her family situation are utterly different from what she has resumed. Lucille is an exceptional sensitive young woman who is nonetheless portrayed realistically and who makes mistakes sin judgment at times The point-of-view characters--Lucille, Nick, Lucile’s father Bill, Lucille’s father’s ‘best friend’ (and there are a couple for reasons that phrase is in inverted commas) Dan, Charlie, the young man Lucille meets when she goes to teach at a school for Native Americans and who she eventually marries, and Nick’s father Nick Sr., relate the doing so a far larger swath of characters, from the father’s next two wives—the very differently tempered Madeleine and Rose—to the Indian students Lucille teaches,  the sadistic Dickensian headmistress of the Indian school where she does this, the people in the Midwestern town where she grows up—redolent of the works of Hamlin Garland, William Maxwell, and Spoon River Anthology. The novel has an epic feel while retaining an intimate tone. The joy of reading it is infectious, the pace gripping and sustained. What I especially like is that characters are not prejudged and relationships are reevaluated, so that who Nick, Madeleine, and Bill, among others are changes as we, the readers, reassess them even as Lucille—the book’s major character—does so within the novel’s frame.

       This book reminds me of a couple of other recent novels—Kate Manning’s My Notorious Life and Ronna Wineberg’s On Bittersweet Place—in being a historical novel of American life in past generations, but not simply retreating into a pseudo-authentic Jazz Age or Victorian milieu—in all these books, the characters are lively and contemporary, people who happen to live in the past rather than people othered, eroticized, by their historical articulation. With this courageous decision not to fetishize the past comes the danger of anachronism, and my one cavil at Miller’s book is that anachronism is not entirely avoided. It is not so much the presence elf issues of sexuality, gender and race in the book--these issues were there in American society then if it has taken recent cultural studies scholarship to demonstrate this. Indeed, par tot the virtue of miller's book is to show us that these issues are not new to us. No, the anachronism lies in some of the literary references, Yes, Rilke’s poetry was available in the 1920s, but I cannot see two American Midwestern teenagers reading it: more likely T. S. Eliot, or Robert Frost (mentioned in the book), even more likely Sara Teasdale or Amy Lowell. Rilke’s poetry is important to he author both in her own aesthetic response to experience and in understanding the throes of modernity and imperiled innocence into which the characters are thrown, so with a bit of license she has a 1920s Midwest high schooler quote him. I just don’t buy it, but I see why the author does it. 

        Under The Red Ribbon is an absorbing book of secrets, growth, and forgiveness. What is remarkable is that, even though it is basically a self published book, to my mind it is as good as any American novel I have read this year—and, even though I have been reading mostly Australian fiction, I have in the course of teaching read ten or so American novels of the past year, including highly laurelled ones.  (I see the same phenomenon with art galleries, where exhibitions by community groups such as the West Side Arts Coalition are as good as shows in elite prestigious Chelsea galleries). That Miller’s book is up there with the heavyweights began the question of why some books are published by big imprints and on t others and whether print-on-demand technology has the potential to be genuinely, radically equalizing, in giving us a full gamut of books to read and not just what the gatekeepers at Knopf and FSG approve…