Applause for Nunez (Photo: Marion Ettlinger)

Terry Castle took a lot of heat for what she wrote about Susan Sontag in “Desperately Seeking Susan.” (The London Review of Books carries the 2005 Sontag anti-memoir here).  Although she had she been invited to Sontag’s memorial service, she was “disinvited the day after this piece came out.” She received a nasty email from Sontag’s son, David Rieff.

So it’s curious to see the respectful reception given to novelist Sigrid Nunez‘s memoir, Sempre Susan, which is getting some good reviews. Nunez had been Rieff’s lover — a threesome in Sontag’s apartment.  The commotion is somewhat surprising, given that no bookstore in Palo Alto seems to have the book yet — not Stanford Bookstore, nor Kepler’s, nor Borders, nor anywhere else I could find — so I figure it must be carried by a handful of bookstores in New York.

One thing is clear: Sempre Susan vindicates every word Terry wrote.

Joseph Epstein, former editor of The American Scholar, uses the occasion of the publication to take Sontag down a notch or two in the the Wall Street Journal: “In her thrall to ideas she resembles the pure type of the intellectual. The difficulty, though, was in the quality of so many of her ideas, most of which cannot be too soon forgot,” he writes, before recapping her political career.

Vindication for Terry

He concludes:

Although Sigrid Nunez appreciates Susan Sontag’s curiosity, wide reading, courage in the face of bad health, and independence, her unreality, her deep and abiding unreality, is the final impression that “Sempre Susan” leaves on the reader. Sontag didn’t mind whose feelings she hurt. Her trips to give talks at universities are strewn with stories of her disregard of her audience and astonishing impudence. No one was allowed to get in the way of her desires or disrupt her sense of her own high seriousness.

At the end of Sempre Susan, Ms. Nunez presents a woman who is filled with regrets, not about her treatment of others but about her own achievement. Still confident of her “worthy contribution to culture and society,” she nonetheless wishes that she had been “more artist and less critic, more author and less activist. . . . No, she was not happy with her life’s work. . . . True greatness had eluded her.” Deluded to the end, Susan Sontag had no notion that not literature but self-promotion was her real métier.

This is far more unjust than anything Terry may have said in her wry and self-mocking piece. While Epstein quotes Camille Paglia‘s assessment of Sontag — that she “made fetishes of depressive European writers” — it’s worth noting that Sontag’s championing of world literature in America did make a dent in American consciousness, which had, at the time of her launch in the 1960s, been a pretty parochial affair.

And despite Epstein’s dismissal of it, it did indeed take courage to face boos and jeering at the 1982 rally (not to mention the nasty aftermath in the press) where she said: “Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or [t]he New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?” Is there anyone outside Nepal who would defend Communism today?

That said, it will take years to figure out Sontag’s legacy — as a writer, and as a role model for a generation of women who were born when the coupon-clipping Mamie Eisenhower was First Lady.

I wrote to Terry to ask her what she thought — of the book, and also of Epstein’s review.  It was several days before she responded — she was swept up in the first week of spring classes. But she finally dashed off a quick email:

“Yes, I devoured the Nunez book as soon as it came out, & also found it pretty good….   The epstein piece made some vivid & nasty & accurate points,  but I don’t think he had any conception of what was great about her too—esp for women of my generation…  It’s all very bittersweet!”

Congratulations ... kind of...

Bookslut asks, “Is Stephen Joyce softening?”  The copyright tyrant who destroyed a generation of James Joyce scholarship by threatening lawsuits and refusing permissions, and whose legal antics tormented Carol Loeb Shloss for two decades before she finally got a verdict in her favor (I wrote about it here), gave permission for singer-songwriter Kate Bush to use his grandfather’s words in a song. The original request was made 20 years ago.  According to The Telegraph:

Reclusive singer Kate Bush has been given the go-ahead to use the text of James Joyce’s Ulysses for a song, more than 20 years after asking.

The singer, who next month returns with her first album for six years, was originally prevented from using the Irish writer’s words, causing her to write a new lyric to the track.

But now she has been able to rework the song after finally being granted permission.

A sudden spurt of generosity?  A change of heart?  Not likely.  James Joyce’s works finally begin migrating into public domain in January 2012.

Meanwhile, Carol is busy editing The Collected Unpublished Letters of James Joyce for Oxford University Press.  We wrote about it here.

"Hurry sickness."

My Kenyon Review piece, “No Other Place, No Other Time” in the spring issue of the Kenyon Review, was selected as  feature-of-the-day in Poetry Daily — it’s here.  And now you can read it for free.

In it, I review two books: Irena Grudzińska Gross’s Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (Yale University Press) and Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, vol. 2, edited by Valentina Polukhina (Academic Studies Press).  I wrote about the piece a few weeks ago here.

Cheese, tires, and poetry

It’s National Poetry Month, and I didn’t even send cards out this year.  Imagine.

I missed Robert Pinsky, too, thanks to some calendar confusion.  He spoke at Bay School of San Francisco on Thursday, March 31 — and though he was one of my nicest contributors for An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz, we’d never actually met face to face.

So it was nice to get the former U.S. poet laureate vicariously, at least, on the Farrar, Straus & Giroux Poetry Blog.  Here he is on National Poetry Month:

I confess that personally I feel maybe it has—as the expression used to go—gotten old. Somebody told me that it is also National Cheese Month and National Tire Month.

We need to remember that the art is large and fundamental—not a mere product. As long as that’s the main idea, there’s no harm in joining cheese and tires.

"One of these things is not like the other..."

The problem is, the descent didn’t stop at cheese and tires.I spent several unfortunate hours at the DMV today, and learned from the rolling banner that it’s also Distracted Driver Awareness Month.  Try making a product of that!  “April is the cruelest month,” as T.S. Eliot observed … though I don’t think he had cheese and tires on his mind.

I’ve always had some reservations about the marketing of poetry, precisely because poetry itself is supposed to be a counterbalance towards society’s steady slope towards advertising, public relations values, and the sound bite. Marketing is to poetry what fast food is to a several course repast (with vodka) in a top-notch restaurant.  The feeling one gets from a very fine poem — “Yes, that’s it — that’s it exactly“; inhabiting the poem, rather than simply reading it — is not the take-away from a snappy slogan on a subway poster, whether it’s from e.e. cummings or The Borgias.

I know some days ago I promised some outtakes from the  Zbigniew Herbert evening at NYC’s Poets House … and it’s coming, it’s coming.  Just give me a moment to come up for air.

One...

So far the events celebrating the Czesław Miłosz centenary have been marked by a special warmth and conviviality, almost like a family reunion – but nowhere was that impression more pronounced than at last Wednesday’s event at Wheeler Hall at the University of California, Berkeley.  No surprise.  Berkeley was the poet’s home for four decades.

Thanks to the notorious Berkeley parking — a university parking lot meter that would not take cards, not take bills, and, once I got about three dozen quarters, wouldn’t take those either (nor return them) – I arrived about 45 minutes late.

Adam Zagajewski was saying “Has he grasped the totality? … Well, yes.”

“It’s in ruins, because totality is in ruins, but it’s still a totality.”  I wasn’t quite sure what the “it” was – the world?  the Nobel laureate’s oeuvre? — nor did I get more than the gist of what he was trying to say, having missed the context, but it was vintage Zagajewski, so I pass it on.

“The world does not belong to any single poet,” said Adam.

Two...

Robert Hass was the emcee for the event, and commented on Miłosz’s stunning memory, and also on the unusual and sometimes dark connections it made.  A singing of “happy birthday” would remind Miłosz of the crematoria at Auschwitz, and crematoria might remind him of strawberry jam.

Berkeley is also the home of the poet’s son, Anthony (or Antoni) Milosz.  I met him once before, several years ago at the San Francisco memorial organized by poet Jane Hirshfield, but the resemblance to his father did not strike me nearly so forcefully then.  On Wednesday evening, it gobsmacked me.

Toni has translated his father’s last poems (Wiersze ostatnie was published by Znak in 2006), to be published with the paperback selected this fall as Selected and Last Poems.

The younger Miłosz said that he was aiming at “sound translation,” and felt too often translations of his father’s poems “intellectual content dominates.”

He noted the rhythm of his father’s work, and that, among musical instruments, Miłosz favored the bass and drum – “though he claimed to like the harpsichord and more refined instruments.”

“My father’s poetry is immensely direct,” he said, adding that directness pits it against current trends.

He read his father’s late poem “In Honor of Father Baka,” which he described as “funky, short-lined” poems in the baroque manner.  It’s wry and mysterious – and I am looking forward to the November 15 publication.

Peter Dale Scott reiterated the claim that Czesław Miłosz was “perhaps the greatest poet of our time,” and called him  “a poet of radical hope” in a way “not seen since Schiller and Mickiewicz.” Miłosz saw poetry as “a home for incorrigible hope” — another feature of his work that was “in marked contrast to the times.”

Peter ranked Miłosz with poets from Dante to Blake, the poets who were “enlarging human consciousness.”  He discussed Miłosz’s poem, “Dante,” which concludes:

“The inborn and the perpetual desire
Del deiformo regno — for a God-like domain,
A realm or a kingdom. There is my home.
I cannot help it. I pray for light,
For the inside of the eternal pearl, L’eterna margarita.”

Miłosz, said Peter, was “obsessed with the need to reach the ‘second space’ – the world of paradise and perfection beyond this world we inhabit.”

Peter called Miłosz a “leading visionary of his time, looking into the open space ahead.”

Jane Hirshfield noted that for Miłosz, “everything was I and Thou, everything was personal.”

Most of the evenings speakers at the front of the room arrived via literature, said journalist Mark Danner. “I come here through real estate.”  (That’s not quite true; he was Miłosz’s friend for several years before he bought the poet’s house on Grizzly Peak.)

He described the roughstone chimney and the roughstone path of the house that has been compared to a cottage from a Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale.  He also remembered “Czesław’s deer.”  “The deer populate the place,” even though Miłosz would chase them away from the garden they viewed as a salad bar.

Bingo! (But it's not Żubrówka...but would you notice by the third round?)

One morning he recalled seeing more deer on the lawn than he had ever seen before – over a dozen, as he recalled.  Bob Hass’s voice was on his answerphone – “Mark, I don’t want to leave a message on a machine…” Miłosz had died in Krakow.

Mark thumbed through a book Miłosz had inscribed to him, and was startled to read the reference he had apparently forgotten, the inscription “in the name of all generations of deer.”

Bob Hass’s wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, recalled the Monday translation sessions Bob shared with Miłosz — sometimes spending the session working on a single line.  Bob recalled Miłosz appearing on their doorstep, with the command, “Vodka, Brenda!”  A bottle was always in the freezer, waiting. I hope it was Żubrówka.

Brenda was, for a time, interested in the knotty issues the Gnostics raised, and asking Miłosz, “What is heaven?  What is it like?”  To which the poet replied:

“Brenda, heaven is the third vodka.”

Storytellers make reality, says Katie

On the plane trip back from New York last week, I thumbed through the flight magazine for Delta.  Whose face should pop out at me but the familiar visage of Katie Orenstein.

Katie is founder and director of the OpEd Project, which I’ve written about here.  In the article, she’s in conversation with Catherine Hardwicke, director of the recently released movie Red Riding Hood. What is the connection between the two women?  Katie is also a “folklorist,” the author of Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale.

Katie’s OpEd project was driven by her recognition of the lack of women’s voices on the editorial pages of America – about 85 percent of the columns are written by men.  The under-representation of women, this time on literary pages, was recently explored over at Books Inq., following a discussion over at the Times Literary Supplement, following a Guardian story, following some Vida research.  Actually, I was too busy writing against deadlines (largely for literary pages) to weigh in on the subject then, but I thought about Katie and her project.

She spoke about it a little in the article:  “A very small section of the world tells most of the stories, and most of that section is very narrow: It’s mostly white, it’s mostly Western and overwhelmingly male.”

Hardwicke's sexy take on an old tale...

“That dramatically shapes the stories that we get. It doesn’t just shape the fairy tales that we get, it shapes the reality that we get, the important conversations of our age. It also affects whose brains we get to hear from. We are missing a huge percentage of the world’s brains and brainpower.”

She continues:

“You know, stories are how we assign meaning to our lives and to the world; we live in this universe, and what does it all mean?  Stories are built to explain and also to inspire and to control a lot of what we see. … But the stories we tell are designed to do all of those things, and whoever tells them ends up writing history and shaping the way we see and understand the world, whether we are talking about mythology or journalism.”

I’ve been more interested lately in the stories we tell ourselves.  Our history, our relationships, our successes and failures are told in different ways, in different moods, with different consequences — to limit us, make us smug, defeat our efforts, or prod us onwards.  The humiliating high school prom becomes farce or tragedy in the retelling 30 years later. The fatal love becomes a crucible or a lifelong regret.

And how do we use our stories to subtly justify our choices?  Where do we begin them?  Where do they lead?