Chekhov's Mistress
Interior Monoblogue: Jan 3-4 Gaddis, The Strand, Kleinzahler
I read from The Recognitions out loud last night. I’m not sure why I even started to, because doing so usually annoys my wife. There’s something about vocalizing that’s revealing, particularly rhythm and the sounds of the words. I vividly recall reading Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, which demands, absolutely commands its reader to mimic the voices in the book and read it as if it were a play and you are an actor (but then again, all the world’s a stage). I did this compulsively, reading out-loud to my wife as I sat in the passenger seat on our trip that year to Chicago. The cadence and the emotion of the novel became clear and I don’t think it would have been the same otherwise.
But I wouldn’t have expected the same with The Recognitions. It’s dense, there are a lot of big words and only occasionally a segue, switching from scene to scene like in a film. But as luck would have it, I decided to read aloud just as Wyatt is returning home to his father and we are hearing his thoughts, like a deranged man (that he may be).
Try this paragraph on for size [399]:
Above, another blue day, (upstairs) the room papered with green capped pink-faced dogs, and the button drawer, only apparitions move to perfection, there! Pray the Lord to keep you from lying, there, O spectral stabat mater may I go out and play the violin outside to the town wearing its sinside inside and not a soul in sight. Church bells inspissated the air, dropping it in sharp fragments. He sat down in his place at table, excused by the falling weights of the bells, and motionless when they had done. There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insanside attacks your outsane side as though we weren’t both playing the same game, and gone down Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee.
This is a lot more alliterative than most passages in the book, but I think I happened on something here and it will inform the rest of my reading.
I am a very fast typist, but the above was a difficult paragraph to type out. But fun to read. It’s cheating unless you read it out loud. It seems to be the only way to appreciate it.
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Based on his poetry with which I’m familiar and the great Washington Post review, I bought August Kleinzahler’s Cutty, One Rock today. I dropped by the Strand bookstore and bought a reviewer’s copy for only $8. (nothing makes me happier than cheap hardback books!). The reviewer’s copy often comes with a promotional note from the publisher, I guess to help a potential reviewer to think about how great it must be.
This is the excerpt from the WP review that sold me:
The essay veers from New Jersey to San Francisco (his current home) with frequent layovers in Greenwich Village. In San Francisco, when his parents are visiting him, he introduces them to one of his girlfriends, Melodia, “who chose to be an English duchess, or what she imagined an English duchess to be like from assorted films and novels.” The meeting does not go well; Kleinzahler’s parents are tough customers, especially his mother. After the duchess gushes that August is “the sweetest man in the world,” Mrs. Kleinzahler responds. “There was an extended, ominous pause, and from Mother’s lips came the word ‘dear.’ Father’s head snapped up from the menu. The curtains came abruptly down on my own little reverie. The word ‘dear,’ as Father and I knew only too well, coming out of Mother’s mouth and directed at another female, meant that launch mode was locked in and under way.” After repeating the deadly word three times, she says, “ ‘he’s not sweet,’ nodding in my direction. ‘I’m not sweet,’ emphasizing that last word both by slowness of delivery and uncomfortably thorough elocution, then landing on the ‘t’ with both heels. ‘And do you see that old man seated across the table?’ pointing to Father and then looking at Melodia, who had taken on the aspect of a stunned mullet. ‘He’s not sweet either.’ ”
If you don’t know his work…
Poetry Daily has this 1998 interview.
And here is a well known poem of Kleinzahler’s:
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep
The markets never rest
Always they are somewhere in agitation
Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat
Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons
Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 J mainframes
Across the firmament
Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets
As they make their nightlong journeys
Across the oceans and steppes
Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information
Trembling in the claw of Scorpio
Not an instant, then shooting away
Like an enormous cloud of starlings
Garbage scows move slowly down the estuary
The lights of the airport pulse in morning darkness
Food trucks, propane, tortured hearts
The reticent epistemologist parks
Gets out, checks the curb, reparks
Thunder of jets
Peristalsis of great capitals
How pretty in her tartan scarf
Her ruminative frown
Ambiguity and Reason
Locked in a slow, ferocious tango
Of if not, why not
Poem courtesy of (well I lifted it from) Poetry Daily.
comments
Regarding reading out loud (and perhaps even your Proust on bloggin post that followed),
I’m getting ready to begin a reading group of Lydia Davis’ new translation of Swann’s Way and came upon this passage in the introduction:
Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in print, they were startled by by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections? There were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. To them, the sentences seemed longer when read on the page than they did when they were spoken, in his extraordinary hoarse voice: his voice was punctuating them.
I’ve taken to reading out loud sometimes, too. Most recently: passages of Saramago which sound as if they are in the same mold as Proust’s.
– Tito (01/06 at 03:47 PM)
Tito, I’ll have to watch the progress of your Proust site. Swann’s way is one of my all time favorite books. I was completely drawn in from the moment I read the first sentence. I started reading the second volume and put it down. Hopefully, I’ll get back to it soon.
I have all of the translations and prefer the updated Moncrief, but understand that Davis is quite good and has its own merits.
– Bud Parr (01/06 at 05:19 PM)
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