Land of Twain?

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Just ran into Shelley Fisher Fishkin at, of all places, the manicurist’s.  She was preparing for an upcoming trip to India to talk about Mark Twain. It’s all part of the the much-ballyhooed Twain centenary.  Get this:  Her tour is being funded by the State Department.  Apparently the American government has an investment in making sure Asians have a good grounding in Twain.  She’ll be visiting Hyderabad, Delhi, Lucknow, Calcutta, and I can’t remember where else.  Bon voyage, Shelley.  May Ganesh be with you.

Well, what do you know!  This week’s posts (here and here) on Vikram Seth‘s The Golden Gate elicited this reaction from Kären Nagy:

“I thought you might be interested to learn (if you don’t already know!) that it’s become the basis of a new chamber opera with music by Conrad Cummings.   I learned about this from Shelley Fisher Fishkin several months ago after she had seen the New York City production noted in the blurb I just forwarded to you. Via Shelley, I’ve learned that Cummings is trying to bring the production to San Francisco, and SiCa [Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts] has indicated we’ll try to help with some Stanford programming connections if/when that happens – getting students to the production, perhaps a panel and/or some curricular connections here, etc.  All this just FYI to keep your eyes open for developments in the future!”

Indeed something to look forward to.  The poster she included from American Opera Projects had this to say:

An Opera in Two Acts
Music by Conrad Cummings
Libretto from the novel in verse by Vikram Seth, adapted by the composer

With a libretto adapted from Vikram Seth’s best-selling novel in verse The Golden Gate, five twenty-somethings experience love, life, and loss in the magical and innocent San Francisco of the early 1980’s. John, handsome and successful, will discover too late the price of  his emotional detachment. He has just met Liz through a personals ad placed by his former college girlfriend Jan, a sculptor and punk rock drummer. Meanwhile, John’s best friend from college Phil, reeling from a divorce which has left him the sole single parent of a six-year-old, begins a passionate relationship with the Ed, Liz’s younger brother. Ed is bright, gorgeous, in search of a lover and mentor, and a profoundly conflicted devout Catholic. Couples come apart; new couples form, families are created, friendships are severed. A tragic death leads John, always the outsider, to the promise of a deeper connection and a warmer life.

Kären Nagy tipped me off (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Vikram Seth’s source novel is composed entirely of 690 rhyming tentrameter sonnets and was inspired by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

Leah Garchik at the San Francisco Chronicle explains how it all came about:

“In New York, opera lover and San Francisco Opera aficionado Perry-Lynn Moffitt went to a Brooklyn performance of six scenes from operas workshopped by America Opera Projects. At the end of the evening, the one chosen for further development wasa setting of Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, a novel in sonnet form. The composer, Conrad Cummings, grew up on Masonic in the Upper Haight. Moffitt, who used to live here, too, says it’s a ‘dramatic, moving, lyrical piece with lush vocal writing that deserves to be heard in San Francisco, above all other cities.”

Cummings

Honestly, San Franciscan Cummings himself looks like a character out of The Golden Gate.

Steve Smith writes about the first (semi-staged) production in the New York Times here:

In creating an opera based on Mr. Seth’s novel, the composer Conrad Cummings has fashioned an equally improbable fusion: lithe melodic lines that flow and entwine in the manner of Monteverdi, peppered with musical references to Henry Mancini and the punk band Black Flag.

Mr. Smith may know music but he doesn’t know verse:  he refers to Seth’s “stately sonnets” — heavens, they’re not “stately,” they’re witty, brisk, fleet-footed, and playful!

Oedipus and the Sphinx, long before Freud

We’ve mentioned Robert Conquest‘s new book of limericks, Garden of Erses, and wrote about the poet and historian here and here.  Dave Lull, patron extraordinaire of bloggers, pointed out that a handful of erses were already published in the April edition of Standpoint here.

We’ll cite two of them, to brighten a slow Thursday a bit:

Limerick #1

Said a stammering wit out at Woking,
“Though I like d-d-drinking and smoking
One thing I suppose
I like better than those
Is p-p-p-practical joking.”

Limerick #2

Oedipus said to the Sphinx,
My name’s been perverted by shrinks.
Who’d think that Jocasta’d
Call me a bastard?
I say that psychology stinks.

One question remains:  What’s an “erse”?  My dictionary says:  “Scottish Gaelic, or, less properly, Irish Gaelic.”

Postscript:  In praise of light verse: Frank Wilson at Books Inq alerted me (well, actually, Dave Lull alerted him) to this paean to light verse in The American Scholar:

Parker

During the late 1920s and early ’30s, all of New York’s newspapers carried a daily column of light verse, most famously Franklin P. Adams’s “The Conning Tower” and Don Marquis’s “The Sun Dial.” They encouraged submissions from their readers, and it was in those hospitable columns that many men and women who later made their name as writers and playwrights and wits—Dorothy Parker, Russel Crouse, Dorothy Fields, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley–first saw their name in print. As E. Y. (Yip) Harburg put it, “We lived in an age of literate revelry in the New York daily press, and we wanted to be part of it.”

A few days ago, I wrote about near-forgotten novel-in-verse, The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth — and was surprised to learn that an acquaintance actually bought the book on the strength of my reportage. Such, such is the power of the word.  So let me have another go at it.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ll sell three.

In citing Gore Vidal‘s encomium, however, I somehow neglected the one below it, by his fellow poet, the late James Merrill:  “Mr. Seth’s beautifully conventional characters would self-destruct on the page of any prose fiction.  But his verse sets them glowing from within, and the result is as humanly poignant as it is mechanically reassuring — in short, a cause for rejoicing.”  So true.  And a large reason why I found it, despite its slight and commonplace characters, so much more satisfying than his novels.  The verse sustains them.  Power of the word, etc.

Here’s another strong reason why the 1986 book is so much fun:  Nothing keeps happening.  It brings to mind what Somerset Maugham said about Jane Austen: “Nothing very much happens in her books and yet, when you come to the bottom of a page, you eagerly turn it to learn what will happen next.  Nothing very much does and again you eagerly turn the page. The novelist who has the power to achieve this has the most precious gift a novelist can possess.”

Take this, for example, a random sonnet early in the book, while John waits in a San Francisco Chinese restaurant for his sculptor friend Janet Hayakawa:

John thinks, “It’s not that I’m fastidious. …
I wish they’d turn that music down.  …
It’s gross. That calendar is hideous …
(He stares at a distasteful clown.)
… I’ve waited half an hour, blast her!”
Her hands encased in clay and plaster,
Janet arrives at twelve to two:
“So sorry, John, I had to do
This torso. Yes I tried to hurry.
I’m glad you’ve got yourself a beer.
What’s that? Tsingtao? Don’t look severe.
I didn’t mean for you to worry.
You’ve ordered? No? This place is fun!
What’ll you have? It’s family-run.”

Seth’s miraculous gift for playfulness and delight in meter and rhyme overwhelmed his Stanford class, I’m told.  One participant confided that the kids puzzled over the phrasing in one of his poems, till they realized he had rhymed all the first words in the lines, as well as the last.  One begins to understand how he might be able to write verse at a staggering 600 lines a month for over a year.

In The Golden Gate, his effervescence and ease brims over so thoroughly that he puts his dedication, author’s note, acknowledgments, and even his table of contents into Pushkin’s fleet, four-footed sonnets.  I wonder how many people understand his dedication:

Veracity and vim

So here they are, the chapters ready,
And, half against my will, I’m free
Of this warm enterprise, this heady
Labor that has exhausted me
Through thirteen months, swift and delightful,
Incited by my friends’ insightful
Paring and prodding and appeal.
I pray the gentle hands of Steele
Will once again sift through its pages.
If anything in this should grate,
Ascribe it to its natal state;
If anything in this engages
By verse, veracity, or vim,
You know whom I must credit, Tim.

The mentor he credits is Los Angeles poet Timothy Steele, author of several collections of verse, and a prosody scholar as well, with his Missing Measures and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing.  Tim also edited the Poems of J.V. Cunningham, a kind of homage to the poet who weds emotional intensity to stylistic purity — and who was a major influence for Tim at Stanford.  Tim is also the subject of my third-of-a-book interview, Three Poets in Conversation, where he shares space with Dick Davis and Rachel Hadas (who, incidentally, was a close friend of James Merrill.)  Years earlier, I did a shorter online interview with him for the Cortland Review.

No longer on P.S.T.

Here’s Seth’s author’s note:

The author, Vikram Seth, directed
By Anne Freedgood, his editor,
To draft a vita, has selected
The following salient facts for her:
In ’52, born in Calcutta.
8 lb. 1 oz.  Was heard to utter
First rhymes (“cat,” “mat”) at age of three.
A student of demography
And economics, he has written
From Heaven Lake, a travel book
Based on a journey he once took
Through Sinkiang and Tibet. Unbitten
At last by wanderlust and rhyme,
He keeps Pacific Standard Time.

That last lines lie — when I interviewed him a decade ago, he was dividing his time between London and Calcutta.  Wanderlust had bitten again.

Update: Triumph!  Frank Wilson of Books Inq said this morning he is getting a copy of Golden Gate after what he purports is a vacation out in the hinterlands!  That makes two copies sold.  Any other takers?

Conquest at work (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

His advice to young poets: “Write under a pseudonym, and pretend it’s a translation from the Portuguese.”

Many people were intrigued when I said I was writing an article about Robert Conquest — well here is my piece on Robert Conquest, the poet who doubles as a groundbreaking historian of the Soviet era.  His close friend Christopher Hitchens said his was “the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny.”

He’s just completed a powerful poem, “Getting On.”  The 200-line reflection, forthcoming this fall in the British magazine Standpoint, opens:

Into one’s ninetieth year.
Memory? Yes, but the sheer
Seethe as the half-woken brain’s
Great gray search-engine gains
Traction on all one’s dreamt, seen, felt read,
Loathed, loved …
.                              And on one’s dead.
– Which makes one’s World, one’s Age, appear
Faint wrinkles on the biosphere
Itself the merest speck in some
Corner of the continuum.

As the years spin by, the more I appreciate those who, as life is ebbing (and it is ebbing for all of us), in the face of inevitable mortality and uncertainty, won’t let go of the rock.  There is a certain grace to persistence, when it passes beyond foolishness and becomes a principled position — a way to resolve the mismatch between the unimpeded intellect and the diminished will.  (In which case, I suppose, it becomes will.)  And to accomplish all this with panache … kudos, Mr. Conquest, for not sitting on your considerable laurels.

And yes, Elena, you are right (she commented on an earlier post, “I think he qualifies as one of the underrated writers. He was labeled as anti-Soviet and was lumped with political hacks.”)  Perhaps the training he got in telling the truth when everyone else was lying helped hone his poetic skills — or maybe it was the other way around.

Not that there weren’t a few factoids floating around the Conquest story as well — I use the term “factoid” as Norman Mailer, who invented it, meant it to be used: a lie that is repeated so often it becomes the unchallenged truth.

A couple bits that didn’t make it into the final piece:

1)  From Hitchens:  “A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that was really needed was a ‘United Front Against Bullshit.'”  Expletives were deleted.

2)  When his American publisher asked for the new title for the republication of The Great Terror, he came up with, “I told you so, you fucking f0ols.” The story, Bob Conquest told me, was entirely made up by Kingsley Amis — hence its omission.  I have to quote Ken Kesey on that — “It’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.”

‎“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

— Kurt Vonnegut