Frederick Barthelme | There Must Be Some Mistake / 2014

a thing of chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frederick Barthelme There Must Be Some Mistake (New York: Little, Brown, 2014)

Living in Kemah, Texas at the edge of Forgetful Bay, Wallace Webster suddenly discovers himself overwhelmed by death. Although he is only in his late 50s, Webster has been “let-go” from his job as an advertising designer. And a few years earlier, he divorced his second wife, Diane. His daughter, Morgan, is off to college in nearby Houston, and Webster, often left alone, stays up nights to watch Scandinavian crime dramas on DVD. It probably doesn’t help that he is fascinated by all things decaying and tacky, a world on the underside of the American belly which reveals what used to be called the American Dream in absolute decay. The people who surround him are, for the most part, misplaced individuals, many of whom have come to Forgetful Bay to…well, to forget, yes, but also because they seem to have no place else to go. The not so glamorous views of the Bay, the numerous run-down oyster houses and bars—including the outlandish Velodrome, atop which is attached, like an alien space-ship which crashed into the roof of the concrete monstrosity, a “small Airstream trailer.” The bar and restaurant is owned by Webster’s neighborly condominium owner Chantal, who, along with a former co-worker, Jilly, quickly becomes one of the coterie surrounding the sexually worn-out once-time artist. In short, Webster is suffering from what used to be described as a mid-life crisis, as he now, trying to outwit death, passively goes through the motions of living without much of vision of what might lay ahead.

     If this down-and-out “hero’s” mind is occupied with presages of destruction and death, moreover, it doesn’t help that his condominium has suddenly been hit by a series of inexplicable attacks, violence, and deaths. Chantal has been attacked by a figure attempting to paint her “Yves Klein blue.” Another neighbor, Forest Ng,” dies in a car crash. A man Webster hardly knows, former Homeowner Association president, Duncan Parker, stops by to confess to Webster that he has fallen in love with another woman and is desperate to find a way out of his marriage to his gigantically-framed wife; soon after Parker seemingly commits suicide. Or was it suicide? Some of the condominium members ponder the possibility of murder, particularly when Parker’s giantess wife disappears on a cruise-ship voyage to Canada.

     Meanwhile, Webster’s new friend-lover, Chantal admits she has killed one of her former husbands, but, apparently, has gotten away with the murder; she casually mentions that she also attempted to kill another of her mates. Her daughter, Tinker, suddenly shows up; the heavily tattooed girl, a wannabe performance artist, giggles through lunch with her mother about her punishment of a man who has tried to sexually accost her, who she threatened to expose and from whom she stole his car. Webster, at heart more conventional than he imagines himself to be, is taken aback, and reconsiders his friendship with the life-hardened Chantal, but is unable to imagine an easy way of extracting himself from their relationship. Indeed, if there is one unifying pattern in Webster’s life, it is that he seeks, time and again, the easy way out.

 

    Things become even more complicated and less simple when another homeowner, Oscar Peterson (no relation to the famous jazz pianist) is found dead in a car still parked in his garage. When Chantal admits that she has had a serious relationship with Peterson, everything begins to link up in the hyper-active minds of other condominium owners, particularly the new HOA president, Bernadette Loo, and Jean Darling, a police detective who owns one of the units. And everything goes haywire when, at a meeting of the homeowners held to discuss the events, an elderly attendee has a heart attack!

     As if the “easy-going” Webster needs anything more in his suddenly complex life, his former wife, Diane, threatens to move back to Forgetful Bay with her new lover Cal, who just happens to be Webster’s closest friend, Jilly’s, ex-husband—a shifty character who she’s terrified of again encountering and who has recently been charged for having sex with an underage girl.

      Frederick Barthelme’s fiction, itself a kind of easy-going narrative that rambles through the detritus of semi-urban American life it describes, might be subtitled, “The Woman in My Life,” as the various figures surrounding the narrator gather about him, strangely enough all getting along quite nicely, even if occasionally, they gang up to tease the semi-beloved male at their center. And, in that sense, Barthelme’s work might be described as a kind of middle-aged male fantasy focusing on a self-satisfied persona that seems to share a great deal with its author, who, clearly, loves the kind of sad-sack landscape tarted-up with decorative plastic statues he attributes to Webster’s environment. And although this fiction admittedly is a real joy to read because of its patch-quilt plotting, too often the author seems to take the easy way out.

       Even when Webster seems to get up the energy to confront Chantal about her past life and quit their affair, he stops midway to his voyage, breaking down in the parking lot of Tommy King’s Highway Oasis, after putting his car through a carwash dozens of times—as if the act might literally wash Chantal out of his hair. A call from Diane, who is perhaps just indecisive as her ex-husband, notifies Webster that she is returning to New England and, more importantly, clarifies his confusion with regard to Jilly: “She’s in love with you…. You really ought to do something about that, one way or the other.”

     The news upon his return home that Chantal and her daughter have apparently vanished, saves him, once again, from of any responsibility or confrontation. Acting on Diane’s advice, the now slightly transformed Webster even hints to Jilly that he’s ready, if she is, to commit to marriage. “She’s so easy to be around,” one can almost hear him whisper to himself. Maybe they’ll even move to the nicer, pristine tourist community of Destin, Florida, where early on in this fiction, he checked up condos for sale.

     Slightly pleased with the results of his utter placidity and lack of action, Webster sits out the night upon his deck, with Jilly and daughter Morgan tucked into their beds within. A plane, glimpsed on the horizon, suddenly seems to sputter out and go dead, only to come back to life before sputtering out once again, regaining its engines only to go silent as it appears to head directly toward his apartment. Webster hasn’t even time to wake his loved ones, let alone save them from destruction. All he can do, once more, is to hope, the fiction ending with his absurd affirmation: “I was almost certain that it would recover at the last minute and miss us all.”

    If Webster has survived amidst all the images and realities of death surrounding him, it surely won’t be for long. We know, that, even if he imagines that there must be some mistake, like the plane in its alternating roar and sputters, his life is just on hold, a thing of chance that if not now will one day, soon, come crashing in upon him.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2016

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (January 2016).

Wendy Walker | Blue Fire / 2009

burning blue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wendy Walker Blue Fire (Brooklyn: Proteotypes [Proteus Gowanus], 2009)

 

Sometimes the revenant is discovered because his grave is visible, usually by either a blue fire of blue glow.... The blue glow, in European tradition, is frequently interpreted as the soul, and it is seen as an indicator of buried treasure through much of Europe, apparently because its shows where a body is buried, and bodies were frequently buried with valuable grave goods.

 

—Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality as quoted in Blue Fire

 

Wendy Walker describes her new book, Blue Fire, as "a poetic nonfiction." This book concerns the great 19th century child murder of Savill Kent, which was thought by many at the time to have been committed by his nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, and Savill's father, Samuel, on account of the boy's having awakened during the night and witnessed them in a sexual embrace. The Road Murder, as it was named, was one of the most sensational events in England of the late 19th century, resulting in an explosion of media coverage and inspiring at least two fictions of the day, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and, created out of events revealed at the inquest, Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood; there were also two prose recountings, John Rhode's 1928 book The Case of Constance Kent and Joseph Stapleton's 1861 book The Great Crime of 1860, the latter book attempting to remove any blame from Stapleton's friend, Samuel Kent. Indeed, Walker found the "rhetoric, marked by the easy confidence of an educated man," so repellent that she had difficulty in reading it.

 

    The inquest, which also focused on the possible guilt of Savill's sister, Constance Kent, ended, because of lack of evidence in an investigation that was badly bungled, in the conclusion that Savill had been "murdered by persons unknown."

     After the trial, Constance was sent away to France to the Convent de la Sagesse. In 1863 she returned to England to enter St. Mary's Convent in Brighton as a nurse trainee. There she met and came under the influence of Rev. Arthur D. Wagner, a member of the Oxford Movement, who wanted to return the practices of Anglicanism closer to the Roman Church, and was a particular enthusiast of  confession.

     What occurred between the young woman and her confessor is unknown, but two years later Constance traveled to London in his company to confess to the Road Murder. Her detailed description of how she had committed this crime was, as Walker describes it, "A tissue of fiction, contradicting forensic evidence and important testimony." Yet Constance was tried by a judge who sentenced her to death. For the next twenty years Constance Kent was remanded to penal service in five national prisons: Millbank Prison in London, Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, Brixton, Woking, and Fulham. Her sentence of death having been commuted, in 1885 she was released, moving to Australia under the name Ruth Emilie Kay to live with her brother William. At the age of 46 Constance began nursing studies with a woman who had trained under Florence Nightingale, and over the rest of her life she served in several Hospitals, becoming matron of the Paramatta Industrial School for Girls before serving at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Mittagong and, at the age of 66, opening an old age home for nurses. Constance Kent lived to 100 years of age.

      As anyone who has read the circumstances around this murder has wondered, why did Constance Kent admit to a crime—refusing to deny her testimony for the rest of her life—that she most probably did not commit? How can one come to any understanding of a figure seeking and achieving so much good after, at least her own mind, committing such an atrocious act? The child, after all, was not just smothered, but cut with a knife before its body was thrown into the privy!

     The problem here, as Walker recognizes it, is how to "tell" this story without making further assumptions about the young woman's life or simply throwing a web of one's own imaginative desires across the almost obliterated truth of the circumstances.

      To "trick" herself into reading the biased Stapleton book, Walker employed a method used by John Cage, the mesostic, in which she selected "one word from each line of Stapleton's book, proceeding line by line but never choosing two words that followed consecutively." This she poses as a "poetic" revelation of the now-liberated text on the left-hand side of each page, while on the right she selected extant passages from texts about the murder, including Constance's own "Sydney Document," written in response to Stapleton's book, and selections from other works in the Kent library. Walker also traveled to the houses and graveyards of the Kent family and to churches known to contain mosaic works done by Constance during her imprisonment, representing those visits with photographs.

      The result is an amazing work of erudition that not only asks important questions about Constance and her family, but reveals the cultural context surrounding a young, somewhat bored and occasionally rebellious girl, haunted, perhaps, by the familial relationships between her own mother, who lived in one part of the house, and her father, who lived with the nanny, Mary Pratt (who later became the second Mrs. Kent) in the other. Constance's mother, perhaps always a frail woman—several of her children died in childbirth—was also rumored, mostly by the father, to be mentally unstable.

      As Walker demonstrates, the role of a young English girl of this period was to live out life of such overwhelming sacrifice that it might lead even to invisibility. What women represented was more important than their reality: they were emblems of perfection, even saintliness.

     Constance was none of these. She was an intelligent and highly curious child who was punished, time and again, for the smallest of infractions or inability to learn her school lessons by Pratt. She had seen her mother, moreover, ousted from her own life in a manner not unlike the wife of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre. So unhappy was she that, at one point, she convinced her younger brother to escape with her to sea, with the hope of joining their elder brother, Edward, who had joined the Merchant Marines. She cut her hair, dressing as a young boy, and the two escaped to Bath where they were uncovered by a hotelier and returned to their father.

      By quoting from various reports of the murder (including newspaper clippings of the time, Rhode's and Stapleton's books, and Constance's own writing) and Victorian writings as varied as Dickens, Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Florence Nightingale, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Darwin, and numerous others, the author recreates the tenor of the period  with the reader beginning to comprehend the psychological aura of this young, rather plain-faced, slightly obstinate child. Walker does not "explain" or answer anything, but through her choices of texts conjectures, convincingly it seems to me, that if Constance did not commit the crime, she felt, in her sense of failure and out of her confused emotional responses to family life, that she was nonetheless guilty—guilty of something. Her own disposition was to give of herself, to sacrifice, and the only way she knew how to accomplish that for her own family, whether or not she realized the truth of the situation, was to take on what was perhaps her father's guilt, to become the scapegoat that might salvage the others' beings. Given her outsider role within family life, perhaps she had no other possibility.

     My only quibble with Walker's work—and even that word is perhaps too strong since it is apparent that Walker is purposely bringing up these issues—is the book's subtitle. Blue Fire is indeed "poetic," but not simply because of Walker's application of the mesostic method. As Walker and I have discussed previously, all great fiction writers are also excellent poets. Walker herself has proven that in all of her fictions, and major fiction writer-poets such as Herman Melville,  James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner have often done their best poetry writing in their fiction rather than in their books described as poetry. Walker's word choices in the mesostic construction, lines such as "strides of blood among questions / those consequences of narrative," "insinuation of screen in truth / to conduct criticism," "any English simplicity of negligence can say / reading this after usual murder son feelings / will question truthfulness of women," (I could quote from almost any page) is more emphatically prose-oriented, in that it reveals possible "truths," rather than attending primarily to language. I am not suggesting that these passages are not poetically compelling or linguistically challenging, but positing the idea that, perhaps because of the source material, the mesostic work syntactically suggests a prose coherency.

     Her "non-fiction" passages, on the other hand, although all representing material from extant works, are more fictional in their careful arrangement than some so-called novels. Prose, it seems to me, pretends, at its heart, to a sense of "truthfulness," however slippery we know it to be. Whether the prose writing be autobiographical, historical, philosophical, sociological, political, reportorial, whatever, we expect in reading it to be the truth, even though we recognize that truth in all these fields is a nearly impossible thing. That is why, when we discover a work described as prose such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (touted as prose by Oprah Winfrey) is actually fiction, there is a public outcry.

     But that is just the problem. It is our presumption that there can be an objective reality that falsely separates prose writing from fiction, that misleads us time and again, the reason, in fact, that Walker had such difficulty reading Stapleton's prose. All prose is equally imbued with the writer's desires, imagination, miscomprehensions, and personal views, immediately transforming what is presented as "truth" into a kind of fiction. Perhaps only in a purposeful fiction can we really speak the truth.

     In Blue Fire Walker is less interested in discerning any one "truth," than in questioning the multiple possibilities; and in that sense, it is not directed in the same way as "nonfiction," but represents an extremely artful construction of texts not at all unlike original fiction.

     I read the book, accordingly, by using the mesostic passages as poetically-charged prose that stood alongside and against the reportage and writings of the period, the one overlaying the other ricocheting into new realities. (Indeed, I attempted to do something similar in one of my own works, Along Without, in which I used short passages of other writers' fictions to create the "story" for a film, in which the characters spoke in a highly poeticized diction.)

     Blue Fire uses poetry and prose, but in a manner that is closer to fiction, I would argue, than most works describing themselves as such.  For the soul beating at the heart of Walker's work, is, like blue fire, a hotter evidence of warmth and desire, a buried treasure hidden in the actions of a young girl who gave up her soul in order to enrich others' existences—a truth that was not to be comprehended in Constance's real life.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2009

Reprinted from Or (No. 4, April 2010) and EXPLORINGfictions (December 2009).

 

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard | En Tid for Alt (A Time for Everything) / 2009

extinguishing the fire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard En Tid for Alt, translated from the Norwegian as A Time for Everything by James Anderson (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2009)

 

One of the most interesting books of late 2009 was Karl Knausgaard's A Time for Everything. Generally, books with religious or spiritual themes do not particularly attract me. But this past year I not only reread all the publications of Flannery O'Connor—works immersed in her deep Catholicism—and the Biblical Book of Daniel, but for four weeks buried myself in Knausgaard's profound retellings of Biblical stories from Abel and Cain, Noah and the Flood, Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Ezekiel, and other tales involving angels. I also reread these works in the Bible, rediscovering in the process how significantly this Norwegian author has expanded them, psychologizing his figures, and placing them into an anachronistic setting that would remind one of the novels of Knut Hamsun. Indeed, the Old Testament figures of Knausgaard's versions live a in world of fjords, wooden houses and barns, and changing seasons that resemble his native Norway.

 

     For that reason, of course, most fundamentalists would abhor this religious fiction; in fact even some church liberals might describe the work as heresy. Yet Knausgaard's prolix sentences draw one into to the Biblical stories in a way that helps one to make sense of the spiritual issues of each.

     In this writer's retelling of the Cain and Abel story, for example, Abel is a talented and appealing figure, drawing everyone to him through his singing and storytelling and intense good looks. He is beloved by all, particularly by his Father. Cain is more stolid, less attractive, slow to speak; yet in many respects he is the more loving of the two as he carefully analyzes family relationships, painfully seeking a way to ingratiate himself with both his father and brother. Because he is so gifted, Abel is also often cruel, unable to contain his sometimes destructive curiosity. When a family sheepherder is found dying of wounds inflicted by a bear, the brothers agree that they must kill him so that he no longer suffers. Yet Abel draws out the process in an attempt, so it appears, to explore the body parts; Cain is forced to step in, ending the boy's life quickly by thrusting a rock upon his head.

     Later, Abel tries to reenter Eden in an attempt to find the Tree of Life, and is horribly burned by the Angels. In his deep love for his brother, Cain gently nurses him again to life, yet Abel, thought to be in a coma during his illness, later mocks Cain's gentle musings. Ultimately, Cain's murder of Abel seems almost inevitable, the only way, perhaps, to save Abel from his own self-destruction.

     Similarly, the simple Bible story of Noah is focused less on Noah and his construction of the Arc than on the family he has left behind in the valley, fleshing out their daily activities, their loves, fears, and hates. The God who destroys them indeed is an angry and jealous God, and the dark black visage of Noah and his arc rises up in this telling as a kind of cruel and uncaring force, not unlike the all-white Moby Dick.

     Threading these various tales together is Knausgaard's retelling of the story and writings of the Sixteenth century figure Antinous Bellori, who, after seeing two angels at the age of eleven, spent most of the rest of his life studying and contemplating the lives of the angels, collecting his findings in On the Nature of Angels.

 

                                                         Painting by Susan Bee

    His questions are profound. Why, for example, did God destroy the Earth? Yes mankind had been evil, but how had that evil changed so significantly that God was determined to begin the process over again, to destroy all but a single family? Why did the angels appear infrequently as messengers from God in the early part of the Bible, but appear more often to people in later ages until finally, with the Birth of Christ, they completely disappeared, only to return after Christ's death with increasing frequency, this time as small and bothersome baby-like beings, "tubby little infantile figures" who, as the composer Scarlatti reports, had to be rooted out of the house because of their robbery of food and dirty activities?

     In an attempt to understand these radical changes, Knausgaard, with Bellori's help, explores the changing role of angels, from messengers to beings who sometimes behaved, in the case of the Lot story, more like men. Knausgaard through Bellori believes he can explain the cause of God's anger and his destruction of mankind through apocryphal writings in The Book of Enoch and The Book of the Apocalypse of Baruch which suggest that the angels had taken wives and partners in their mingling with human beings, producing the "giants in the earth," the Nephilim, described in the Bible. According to Enoch, beside their carnal lust, the angels had grown too close to man, sharing with human beings "knowledge about everything from medicine, mining, and weaponry to astronomy, astrology, and alchemy," knowledge that man, apparently, was never meant to have. It was not mankind that had changed, it was the relation of man and the sacred that doomed the human race.

     The various changes of the angels themselves are explained by Bellori in a manner that is strangely similar to Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection. According to Bellori, Christ was not just a symbolic or temporary manifestation of God the Father, but was God himself, the spirit become a carnate being in order to save Man. His death, accordingly, was also the real death of God, and with God's death the angels had nowhere else to go. In order to survive among mankind they transformed themselves from the fiery, fearsome and horrific winged beings who Bellori witnessed as a child and who later may have killed him into more appealing looking figures, resembling human infants. With God's death in Christ, they were forced to extinguish their own inner fire. When that transformation also failed, so Knausgaard seems to suggest, they become, as legend has it, seagulls, the highly intelligent birds of the Lariade family who have small, finger-like appendages under their wings.

     If all this text (452 pages before the "Coda") sounds a bit like heretical nonsense, one might recall that Bellori's writing was labeled as such. But Knausgaard's work is not so much a religious exegesis, but a fictional speculation in the guise of a religious exegesis, a form, I am certain, that will put off many readers. Some English critics (where this book bore the less lyrical title of A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven) criticized the work for its extended arguments and overinflated sentences.

     Yet any attentive reader can realize that Knausgaard is a superb stylist (as is the book's excellent translator, James Anderson), capable as he is also of a more pared-down narrative evident in his "Coda."

     This last section "explains," or perhaps I should say "reveals" those significant changes in the relation of humans to the divine. In Henrik Vankell's isolated and gull-covered island, man is represented as a sinner who has no one to turn to, but is able only, as so much Scandinavian literature and film reiterates, to turn within. We are never told what terrible crimes Vankell (a character who appears in two other Knausgaard fictions) has committed or what awful act of self-destruction his father committed that helped mold Vankell's being. We only know that he has run from human company and finds his only solace in the silence of this barren but beautiful landscape.

     On the day we follow him he does, primarily, what he does every day: walk various routes along the ocean according to set and ritualistic patterns, eat, fish (quite ineffectively), and watch the few islanders move about. But on this day, his mother calls having had bad dreams which she sees as tokens of something about to happen. A ship that inexplicably enters the harbor, terrifies Vankell. Yet there are no other signs that he might accomplish the horrifying self-immolation that by book's end he has achieved. Slowly, without explanation, he cuts himself down his chest and mutilates his arms and face, sitting in a hot tub of water, apparently awaiting death.

     But then who could be telling this first-person story? Despite his self-punishment he has perhaps survived, a survival which may signify that despite this man's immense separation from his spirit, he has found a way of truly forgiving himself, perhaps in the telling of this spiritual story. 

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2009

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2010).

Raymond Federman | Smiles on Washington Square / 1995 || Two Twofold Vibration / 2000

returning to the closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raymond Federman Smiles on Washington Square (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

Raymond Federman The Twofold Vibration (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2000)

Raymond Federman "Reflections on Ways to Improve Death"

 

On Tuesday, October 6, 2009, Raymond Federman died in his San Diego home at the age of 81.

     I published—or more correctly, I republished—two books by Ray, The Twofold Vibration in 2000, a fiction first published in 1982 by Indiana University Press, and, six years earlier on Sun & Moon, Smiles of Washington Square, first published by Thunder's Mouth Press in 1985.

  

      I seem to have known Ray (who preferred to be called Raymond, but who I knew as Ray) forever. Long before I met him, I had read his criticism, Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, and referred to it extensively in my PhD dissertation of 1979. Ray seemed to me one of the few critics of the time who had attempted to do what I myself was trying to accomplish, to define the differences between modernist and non-modernist (narrowly referred as postmodern) fiction. Like Ray, I saw its roots from the beginning of the 20th century, from Gertrude Stein on, and I wanted to create a kind of handbook which would help people see its different approaches to voice, character, place, theme, and, most of all, form.

    I think I must have first met him in the flesh—and the words "in the flesh" are important when describing Ray because he is so very much larger than life—in the early 1980s, when I began distributing Fiction Collective and other small presses along with my own Sun & Moon Press. I had found a small band of independent sales representatives to sell these and my own books across the country, and each season I would meet with them, describing the new titles, in New York.

    Ray, whose important fiction Take It or Leave It was published by the Fiction Collective, was a member of that group, and he and others wanted to meet with my representatives to sell their own titles. The art of describing new works to sales people who have hundreds of books to represent each season is a difficult one, which I felt I had mastered. Accordingly, I tried to dissuade the Fiction Collective authors from coming to speak with my representatives, but they were insistent. Ray, along with Russell Banks and Jonathan Baumbach (yes, the father of Noah Baumbach played by Jeff Daniels in the film The Squid and the Whale)—all sublime egoists, each capable of dominating any conversation—showed up late to the meeting and took so much time describing their three new titles that my reps insisted that they would never see them again! I was, accordingly, put in the difficult position of scolding the three, but two of them, at least, Ray and Russell remained lifetime friends.

     That is not to say that I wasn't a bit taken back by Ray's dynamic personality. Indeed, in his unpredictable enthusiasms, directed mostly toward his own writing projects and, later, his understandable delight with the French and German attention to his writing, along with his winking sexual innuendos about women, sometimes irritated me and even, on occasion, scared me a little. I liked him enormously, but on occasional he was not where you thought he was. As one of his own characters describes "the old man" in The Twofold Vibration (clearly a mirror image of the narrator, Federman):

 

                yes, that's how our old man was, so unpredictable, so changeable,

                and so careless with his own life, despondent one day, hopeful the

                next, always more interested in the process than finalities....not an

                easy man to deal with

 

      And then there was his voice, with a French accent, of course, but seemingly also from another time and place. As French fiction writer Jean Frémon once told me, "When I met Raymond Federman I could not believe what I was hearing. It was a voice from another time. Only a small neighborhood in Paris spoke French that way, the way Maurice Chevalier had spoken and sung, and it has long disappeared. I asked him, my God, where did you get that accent? He told me his story, how as young boy he was hidden away from the Nazis in a closet. And when he finally came out, that was the way he would remain the rest of his life, since by the end of the War he had escaped to the US, joining the Army."

     Federman's family, his mother, father and, sisters were sent to Auschwitz, where they died.

     When I visited SUNY-Buffalo several years later, on tour with fellow poet Rae Armantrout, we dined with Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and the Federmans, Ray and his wife Erica, at a very pleasant Italian restaurant. On our way home, after having left the Federmans and Susan, the two of us chuckled to ourselves about Ray's grandiose manner, I adding my reservations about the man. Charles quickly interrupted, "How else might you expect him to be, given the life he has led, his childhood, the condition of creating several new beings? He had no choice but to become a series of alternating voices."

      I was embarrassed, and realized the truth of what Charles had said. To be fair, moroever, Ray has never denied the forcefulness and energy of his own being. In fact, he celebrates it, just as he celebrates a world in which all the action is placed on something in process without ever coming to fruition. He writes what he calls "pre-texts," texts that exist before any happening; and, in that respect, his work is about potentiality more than plotted events, the writing existing as a potential for changes not only in the future but the past.

      Smiles on Washington Square, for example, is the story of a chance meeting between a poor, immigrant American Moinous (one of Federman's regular stand-ins for himself) and a New England born, slightly order sophisticate, Sucette (who shares some of Erica's qualities). The two meet, but say nothing, only smiling at one another. The rest of the tale is a series of possibilities for their future encounter(s) and relationship, all of which entail a great deal of patient waiting and outright frustration for Moinous. Their relationship, in this non-existent reality (which is, at its heart, what all fiction is about), is a touching, even romantic tale, as these two opposites gradually reveal themselves before the inevitable breakup.

     This work is perhaps Federman's closest in tone to his friend Samuel Beckett. For here, the major character, like many of Beckett's tragic clowns, is an insecure, lonely, and despairing figure who bluffs his way through life. Like Federman, he has lived in the protective closet before sneaking out to enter—barefoot, armored only by an outsized overcoat—a world of excitement and danger, a tyrannical innocent ("A typical bull with his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds who struggles constantly to conquer vanity and indolence") in a world he can never completely comprehend.

      In Federman's futurist fiction, The Twofold Vibration, his friends Moinous and Namredef (Federman spelled backwards) attempt to uncover what "the old man" has done to be sent to the space colonies along with other undesirables on the eve of the new Millennium. To Federman, the writer, they tell the story of their friendship and as much as they know about "the old man's life," but have no clue, in this comic Kafkaesque tale, what his criminal acts have consisted of.

      Like Ray, "the old man" was been hidden in a closet, and to this part of his own story, he adds other tales, how he was later arrested and sent to the camps, escaping from his railway car at the stop to eat potatoes in another train car that had paused alongside them. More stories emerge, an brief involvement in radical politics, a short affair with a Jane Fonda-like movie star, and travels across the US and Europe, including a visit to a concentration camp, encompassing excesses and suffering, boisterous outbursts of philosophical thoughts and deep retreats into fear and doubt. His famed "Voice in the Closet" screed was to have been at the center of this work, but was rejected by Indiana University Press' editors.

     Through it all, Federman is represented to his reading audience as outsized, a being at once affable and slightly embarrassing. Yet his friends—and that might include any sympathetic reader—can find nothing in his past so terrible that it might result in his being sent into outer space for what, most believe, is certain death.

      The search for his unknown crime is played out almost like a mystery tale, but, as usual in Federman's works, no ending seems appropriate. As the thousands of soon-to-be expelled individuals are gathered in a large room, Moinous and Namredef are there to see their friend off. "The old man" appears reposed, even resigned, finally ready for his fate. One by one the names are called, the prisoners taken on board and their families sent off, until only "the old man" remains. The shuttle is about to be sent into space without him! What has happened? his colleagues wonder. "BUT WHAT ABOUT ME, WHAT ABOUT ME," the old man cries out, striking his chest with his hand. He has been put back into the closet a second time. The snake has swallowed its own tail; the past has become the future, a twofold vibration. The survivor without a clue how to survive is left to start his struggle all over again.

     Now, finally, Ray has been removed from that closet, that coffin-like precursor of death, forever. He has joined the dead by giving up his voice. For us still here, still trapped in each of our personal closets, so to speak, we can only, like "the old man," become lonely and forlorn. We miss that larger than life wise fool so very desperately. And, gathering today, we need to speak of our great emptiness, to share it with others. As Ray himself wrote some time before his death, however, in the humorous and profound short essay, "Reflections on Ways to Improve Death":

 

               The fact that Federman cannot say I am dead. The fact of being unable to speak

               one's death is the supreme category which abolishes all the others. It is the ultimate

               category, the category of the unspeakability of death. Whether one dies in bed, dies

               in one's books, dies with one's boots on, dies on the vine, dies in harness, dies

               prematurely or in one's sleep, dies in a gas chamber, dies while making love to

               one's lover, when all is done and said, that is the category of death that has

               reached total improvement because it can no longer be spoken.

 

               Language vanishes into death, and death vanishes into silence. Or is it, death

               vanishes into language, and language into silence?

 

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2010

Reprinted from Sibila [Brazil] (February 2010)