Guy R. Beining | The Silence of my Room / 2017

 

the reluctant surrealist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Guy R. Beining The Silence of My Room (New York: Chintamani Books, 2017)

 

I first encountered the poetry of Guy R. Beining in 1976, when I published his chapbook, City Shingles, as the second book of my Sun & Moon Press. At the time, I described him to myself as one of the “new Surrealists” I had been encountering—a strange categorization to be sure, but one that seemed relevant at the moment. Perhaps it was just his radical shifts in metaphors and syntax. Being attuned to the “Language” poets as I was then, these imaginative disjunctions appealed to me, even if I didn’t perceive them as purely linguistic transitions; they seemed to be coming from some place deeper than the intellectual play of words.

     I’m not at all certain that such a new Surrealist movement within the US ever truly existed. Reading his newest poetry collection, The Silence of My Room, some 41 years later, however, I still sense some of those same qualities present in this volume’s “E(the)real” and “Flickerings” series of poems. The back cover suggests that he has been labeled a “Beat” poet and a “Language” poet, neither of which seems to truly characterize his work.

    Perhaps we need not label Beining at all. The poems of this British-born US poet (son of an aristocratic Russian mother and middle-class Norwegian father) represent an amazing series of shifts of metaphoric imagination, which we might simply admire:

 

                        Let’s scribble

                        on the plates

                        of the rich

                        something like

                        eat the hand

                        that pulls the plug,

                        or let’s break

                        down houses

                        made out of glass

                        & look for

                        the princess of

                        processed images…..

 

                        (poem vii)

 

     Yet, I can’t help feeling that the wild associations Beining makes—“eat the hand / that pulls the plug” or “the princess of processed images”—have more to do with something internal, the process of the subconscious imagination, than engaging the associative play of language or the more Whitmanian jazz-inspired cultural observations of the “Beats.” Throughout Beining’s rather remarkable poetic observations, his poetry, in fact, as the title suggests, celebrates a kind of “muttering,” that creates “a crowd within one,” (poem iii) as if within these poems he is offering something so personal that they simply might not be expressed in logical terms. It’s a question, apparently, of “how do / we wear / the head?” A more linguistically playful writer might have asked the same question with the shift of “the head” to “a head,” thus positing the notion of ahead while pointing to what Beining later describes as “my stinking noggin, / my lost identity… (poem v). But this poet is far more specific about his images, even if they defy normal logic, and this particular poem is about bringing out the “marbles which” the poet uses to “play out / in this back- / ground game.” In short, Beining’s language, despite its stunning shifts of metaphor, still seems grounded in a kind of realist presentation which, nonetheless, defies normal logic.

      Consider, for example, the title poem (poet xxv):

 

                              someone introduced me

                              to the silence

                              of my room

                              by leaving sand-

                              bags all around

                              my desk & one

                              on top of my

                              writing machine

                              that no longer

                              hums.

                              out from leaves

                              the stand in ghosts

                              of winter goes over

                              the spasms of the season

                              & finally etches

                              a dead sheep

                              with a mature countenance.

 

If the poem, at first, appears to be a shifting series of metaphors, it quickly becomes apparent through words like “silence,” “sandbags,” “ghosts of winter,” and “a dead sheep,” to say nothing of his writing machine that no longer hums, that this is a poem very much about aging and the loss of coherent thinking. As deeply disjunctive and associative this poem may initially seem, it is actually a carefully constructed series of images that appears outwardly realist in the manner of such Surrealist figures as Breton, Buñuel, Magritte, and Paul Delvaux. While his fantastical images, “a dead sheep” and the sandbags littered across his room that create pleasure for the reader, at its heart the poem offers a coherent message in his madness.

      This is not at all to demean Beining’s talent. I believe he is what one might describe as “a reluctant Surrealist,” a writer who naturally thinks in highly metaphoric language. Who else might express the idea that the poet has been “under a stone for a decade” and end in describing that decade as “gone deeper / then sad.” His is a poetry of “the head,” of the mind expressed just underneath its own consciousness:

 

                     the shadow of

                     a mammal gets closer.

                     shut the mighty door,

                     shut the mighty head. (poem xxxv)

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2017

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (March 2024).

 

Albert Mobilio | Games & Stunts / 2017

fun and games

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Mobilio Games & Stunts (New York: Black Square Editions, 2017

 

The characters of Albert Mobilio’s new work of fiction, Games & Stunts—Bean, Frank, Sandy, Jess, Doone and Jack—do little else in his work than play games  and speak of “stunts.” Yet the absurd games they play reveal a great deal about their personalities, and the way they behave with and to one another reveals much. Clearly, some of them might like deeper relationships, but basically everything in this fiction is a metaphor acted out in the ridiculous bedroom, bath, and parlor games.

      In a variation of “Bull-in-the-Ring,” the charging bull-man touches a pair of hands, saying “Here I buy.” Reaching a second pair of hands, he shouts “Here I bake.” A third pair is greeted with “Here I make my wedding cake.” But upon reaching the fourth pair of hands, he lunges forward, “Here I break through.” The author describes this as a “blood-sport,” with winners emerging red-mouthed and heaving.”

      In another game, titled “Elimination,” two “equal” groups take to the field, each forming a circle or a square. There are, however, two members, one from each side, outside this group with flyswatters. If they swat one of the other team members, he or she must step aside. The remaining members work together and, often, divide from their group, making the attacks easier. This process continues until everyone has had a chance with the swatter.

      “Pat and Rub” is an old stunt in which the player (in this case Jack) “to pat the top of his head with one hand and simultaneously rub his chest or abdomen with the other.” Complexity might be introduced by reversing hands.

     In “Matching Halves” a group of 20 strangers gather in a school auditorium or a parking lot. Each is given a picture (in this case photographs of anatomical body parts) torn in half, and is ordered the find the person with the other half. Hopefully the person behind “the other half” might be interesting as a temporary date for the night.

 

    Some games are far more dangerous, involving matches, razors, or knives. Others involve a number of balls thrown at the opposing victims. Some, like “I Doubt It,” “Do You Like Your Neighbors” and “Sesquipedalia” involve verbal conundrums. Still others, like “Broom Lever” and “Spoon Photography” involve special skills, real or imagined.

     The rules of the games and stunts represent much of fun of this fiction, but gradually we begin to know the players themselves. The self-assured Frank, their described “leader,” believes in his own powers, including an ability to read minds. Bean fantasizes about having sex with Jess—or anyone for that matter—always spouting words like an adolescent like tit and wank. Sandy, particularly, in her strange use of language, is a kind of born comic (to a comment by Jack—“…up yours. You wouldn’t notice,” Sandy replies, for example, “That hurts just hearing it go in.”).

     These figures seem to have little life together other than playing their games, which reveal not only their skills or lack of talent, but their dreams and desires, as in the game “Where Am I?” which hints at where they might like to travel.

     If by work’s end, these figures still remain simply stereotypes, the simple fact that, again and again, they have dared to take a chance with each other, putting themselves—as Mobilio quotes from Roger Callois’ Man, Play and Games—into a sense of uncertainty and doubt, opening themselves up to one another in a way that represents their vulnerabilities, tells us a great deal. The author, in a grand metaphor, suggests that all of our relationships might actually be thought of as a kind of subtle series of game playing, particularly in our sometimes gentle and at other times hostile gestures, queries, and prodding of one another.

     By giving them a name and wittily ascribing written instructions, Mobilio simply makes apparent what, in our personal relationships with friends and strangers, we often attempt to obscure and dismiss.

     I’d wish to see a drama of some of these some 46 games and stunts, which might make for a wonderful theatrical event. After all, the first part of Edward Albee’s great play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was titled, if you recall, “Fun and Games.”

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2017      

 

João Almino | The Last Twist of the Knife / 2021

diary of an unintentional suicide

by Douglas Messerli

 

João Almino The Last Twist of the Knife, translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe (Dallas/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021)

 

In his 2017 fiction, now translated by Elizabeth Lowe into English as The Last Twist of the Knife, Brazilian writer João Almino established a series of difficult hurdles for himself, almost as if purposely creating near-impossible Oulipo-like challenges. The form of his work is a journal kept by a 70-some year-old narrator whose memory is slowly slipping away and who suddenly, for no  evident reason other than the couple has grown bored of one another, decides to leave his wife Clarice and—despite the long-ago warnings of writers such as Thomas Wolfe—to attempt to “go home” again, in this case the Brazilian backlands of the northwestern plateau where he grew up, where he purchases his old family homestead near the isolated town of Fortaleza.

 

        Our “hero,” who mistakenly still perceives himself as a kind of agèd Don Juan, imagines that he still might fit back into a community in which he and his family were always perceived as outsiders. He makes the purchase through his childhood girlfriend Patrícia, the daughter of the formerly wealthy landowner of the region who is also, somewhat inexplicably, our narrator’s “godfather,” who when the narrator’s own father was killed took him into his home with Patrícia and her brother Miguel to raise him. How, after all these years of absence, he might imagine the two could reignite his one-sided childhood passion, is never explained. Even on the airplane on his way back to his childhood world, our “hero” flirts with the female passenger who is seated next to him and religiously takes her cellphone number as if she might be another female conquest. We realize almost immediately that our narrator has lost all sense of himself in time and space.

       In many respects it is appropriate that the narrator is returning home, for, as Almino reveals, he himself is regressing to the mental capabilities of a child. Although he recalls some incidents in full, most of his narrative is abstractly presented without details, the story consisting primarily of names and vague events. Moreover, we are forced to read his fragmented journal entries in which he often forgets what he has previously written and which are highly contradictory with a strong sense of skepticism and actual distrust. He is the very definition of an unreliable narrator.

      As we slowly build up these entries scattered through a brief period we begin also to perceive truths which he has not yet unraveled, accordingly taking even some of the energy away from what also becomes a kind of slow detective tale, as the narrator attempts to piece back together the fragments he remembers from the past to make sense of his current behavior.

      Although, he was close friends with Miguel as a child—despite their social disparity in a society in which wealth and race determine nearly everything—he now finds the grown businessman, who continues to run his father’s estate, more interested in his married sister Zuleide than in him. The woman he imagined he might resume his childhood love communicates with our “hero” throughout the narrative only by letter, will later not even return his phone calls, and never actually comes into contact with him until a final abbreviated telephone message.

      The “hero’s” own son, Teodoro runs a hotel in Fortaleza; but the son, who is gay and in the narrative about to celebrate a civil marriage ceremony with his lover, seems distant from his obviously womanizing father, and our narrator’s two other sons, living in São Paulo, seem even more estranged, rarely communicating with either with their father or Teodoro.

      The central figure’s plans to farm the old estate which he has purchased with his last remaining funds are vague to say to the least, and he leaves the care of the house and land mostly his closest childhood friend, a black man Arnaldo.

       The narrative, accordingly, is filled with repetitions, gaps of information, clues that are rather obvious to us but seemingly incomprehensible to the narrator, and very little of the rich detail that so enlivens the great South American fictions of the 1960s and 70s. A typical passage reads like this one from May 22:

 

            Arnaldo lives on a little ranch very close to the one I bought; I can’t

            remember if I already mentioned this. It’s been years since I last

            saw him, but now we frequently communicate on WhatsApp. I still

            think of him as my childhood friend, a better companion than

            Miguel, Clarice’s brother, because he used to go everywhere with

            me, and I was always ready to tag along when he his farm chores

            or when he went hunting for tiús and preás. 

 

Yet when he finally arrives at his newly purchased ranch we hardly get another glimpse of Arnaldo, despite the fact that our narrator depends on him to farm his land.

       In short, on the surface the narrative actually says little since the narrator cannot make sense of his own experiences; yet given the clues he strews throughout his confused memories we learn a very great deal; and we ourselves are accordingly required to fill in the details with a far richer narrative that the fictional author himself might be able to provide.

      And slowly we do perceive even before the narrator does that his beloved “godfather” is also his father, having killed his “daddy” when the man demanded more money to keep quiet about the godfather’s relationship with his wife, the narrator’s seemingly saintly mother.

      Almost the moment our foolish narrator blunders back into his childhood territory, he attempts to sue both his “beloved” childhood friends, Miguel and Patrícia, demanding they provide blood samples so that through DNA testing he can prove whether or not he was also the godfather’s son, and therefore an heir to the estate.

      Despite the fact that our narrator has made his living as a lawyer, he quickly loses all of his legal pleas. This is, after all, a region where the local wealthy still maintain power over both social and civil matters. And obviously his legal challenges make any further communication with either of the people whom he thought he loved impossible. But even then our narrator won’t give up, imagining that someday he might be able to communicate fully once more with the beautiful Patrícia, who by this time must be a rather elderly dame.

       Even more disastrously, the narrator’s wife, Clarice, discovering that she has breast cancer, grows ill, is hospitalized, and dies, the narrator returning to Brasília to nurse her and recall the true adventures of his life were with her, not back in Fortaleza.

      By fiction’s end he resells his property to Miguel, who himself has just lost his family business, suggesting that the past which the narrator imagined at the beginning has now entirely collapsed.

      When our not so very bright storyteller finally realizes, as he puts it, “I must admit, it [the past] does not substitute for the present, the inherent difficulties of the unknown or the uncertain promises of the future,” the poor hero has no present and very little future left. 

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2021

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Fall 2021).

Gilbert Sorrentino | The Moon in Its Flight / 2004

runaway moon, or the duchess of lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gilbert Sorrentino The Moon in Its Flight (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004)

 

As a long fiction and short story writer, an essayist, poet, and teacher, Gilbert Sorrentino has several personas; and in his short stories he uses many voices, but there are two opposing voices I’d like briefly to explore.

     In about half the works of The Moon in Its Flight, Sorrentino, creates short linguistically focused tales in which characters are basically, as Martin Riker, writing in The Review of Contemporary Fiction has described them, “wooden puppets whose possibilities of movement and/or choice are confined within their small worlds to the predictable words and gestures available to their narrators.” Indeed, in these works—“The Dignity of Labor,” “The Sea, Caught in Roses,” “A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles,” “Pastilles,” “Sample Writing Sample,” “Lost in the Stars” and others—the emphasis in not on character but rather on language itself organized around definitions, descriptions, lists, and other various structures. “Pastilles,” for example—a satire, in part, on New York School poetry guru Ted Berrigan—is structured around several recurring figures and images: Napolean and his battles, including his defeat by Lord Nelson; optical illusions; and lemons, to name three. “The Dignity of Labor” recounts four incidents between management and employees that reveal the necessary desperation of the latter:

 

“You will discover that the stationery on the shelves is nothing, really, other than good American paper and nothing but; nothing to be in awe of, letterheads or no. And you would do well to ignore the rumors suggesting otherwise. Rumors of all sorts are born and circulate in a large and virtually omnipotent corporation such as this one. They emanate, for the most part, from the “creative” divisions of the firm, the Professional Trash-Fiction Division, the Memoir Division, the Hip-Youth Division, the Sure-Fire Division, the Dim-Bulb Division, the Texas School-Adoption-of-Everything Division, the Devout-Christian Rapture-Mania Division, the Unborn-Child-Series Division, as well as those divisions that support what the company likes to think of as its old soldiers—those editors, publicists, accountants, and lunch-eaters who have made their lives into one long testament to their belief that they have done their best to make real for all humankind the kind of book that is both an exciting read and a contribution to the general culture of regular Americans….”

 

In these pieces, which are so sharply satirical that there is no attempt at mimesis, the author empties his tales of any remnant of humanity, going straight for the jugular vein, or centering his language on Oulipean-like devices that call attention to form over matter. There is no question that these works are tours de force of writing, but ultimately they entertain more than they evoke any substantial emotional response outside of laughter, even though we might recognize ourselves at the periphery or even at the center of the stories themselves.

     I prefer, however, what I’d describe as the “other” Sorrentino, a writer who, despite his often caustic demeanor and hard-boiled attitudes toward life in general, at heart, is a poet who detests while being attracted to sentiment, a kind of wise fool who desires to believe what he himself has determined is not worthy of belief. It is almost as if Sorrentino has never recovered from the recognition that many of his early childhood ideals were revealed to be false, an apparently devastating realization that he summarizes in a poem, “Razzmatazz,” the first the stanza of which reads:

 

“Young and willing to learn (but what?) he was the boy

With the sweaty face the boy of the Daily News

The boy of bananas peanut butter and lemon-lime

Who read Ching Chow waiting for the punch line

Who watched the sun more often than not a bursting rose

Swathe the odd haze and clumps of the far-off shore.”

 

The poem ends, in part, where it began, but the tone has moved from one of possibility to cynicism:

 

“Young and willing to learn (but what?) he was the boy

Who found that the fabled dreams were fabled

In that their meaning was their own blurred being

Who suddenly found his alien body to be the material

From which could be made a gent or even life. Life?

Young and willing to learn oh certainly. But what?”

 

In the long, final story of The Moon in Its Flight, “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” Sorrentino covers similar ground in a beautiful description of the narrator’s Sicilian father—clearly with autobiographical overtones—who, dressed in his white Borsalino suit and snap-brim fedora, bets his fellow ship-cleaning workers that he can walk through a Norwegian freighter—in those days Norwegian ships were known for their filthy conditions—“without getting a spot or smudge or smear of oil or dirt or rust on his clothes or hat.” To his then-young son’s amazement, he puts down a wad of cash and proceeds to walk through the Trondheim without a spot. In the context of a tale in which the narrator presents himself as a self-loathing slave to his lust for his friend Ben’s wife, Clara—so well-known for her sexual escapades with men that the narrator himself describes her as “a duchess of lust”—this dream-like image stands in opposition to what his father might have desired for him but which he, in his own generation, cannot obtain—a kind of sureness of self and grace in living. Cast out of Eden, perfection for the son has no appeal; it is the squalid, “filthy” little lives of his friends and him that drive him forward in what he himself describes as a “dementia.”

       In “In Loveland” the narrator tells the story of his collapsing relationship with his wife, a perfectly petite doll-like figure of a woman, who ultimately has an affair with the husband’s empty-minded former-employer and friend, Charlie, who finishes off their marriage, with the narrator’s wife’s encouragement, by imitating his friend in costume and manner—in short, by becoming and, symbolically, “replacing” him. In the middle of this typical story of failed love, however, Sorrentino posits a stranger, Hawthorne-like tale concerning an accident that occurred to his wife just before their marriage. Falling down a flight of subways steps—accidentally or on purpose—his fiancée is temporarily scarred with a huge scab over one side of face. The appearance of this scab somehow makes her appear almost as a stranger and, accordingly, increases the narrator’s lust for her. Indeed, from the marriage until the healing and disappearance of the scab, he is sexually aroused by her “new” face, so perfect on one side and so flawed on the other. As the “scar” disappears so does his fervor dissipate. Like the narrator of “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” this narrator is more attracted by the flaws of the woman than by the perfection his wife will later seem to represent to other men.

     In some ways Sorrentino is our most “American” writer, cataloguing as he does the psychoses of the child-adults of our society. Like Scott Fitzgerald, Sorrentino seems effortlessly to present a world where men and women merrily delude themselves with art, literature, alcohol, and drugs that they are living “happy” and meaningful lives, while in truth their dreary lives are almost completely empty. The author’s most Fitzgeraldian stories in this volume, “Pyschopathology of Everyday Life” and “Land of Cotton,” clearly present the phenomenon.

     The self-deluded characters of the latter story, Joe Doyle—who transforms his family name for Lionni or Leone to Lee, ultimately claiming he is a descendent of Robert E. Lee—his wife Hope and mistress Helen, whom he ultimately jilts as she lays dying of cancer, are obviously all self-deluded beings seeking a reality to match.

     The first story is representative, once again, of Sorrentino’s fascination with a seemingly Edenic world suddenly revealed as disastrously fallen. The two characters in this fable, Nick and Campbell, represent two aspects of American culture, the ordinary working man represented by Nick and the moneyed WASP, Campbell, living in what appears as an enchanted world. The tale reveals the growing friendship between the two office workers as Nick guides his friend through the lunch-time and after-work dining and drinking establishments of the city, of which Campbell seems to have no prior knowledge and is now fascinated to encounter each day before returning to his Connecticut home or his New York rendevouses at the Plaza, the Pierre, the Blue Angel, or Carnegie Recital Hall.

     The friendship flourishes until one day Campbell invites his friend to visit them in Connecticut, shortly thereafter presenting him with a stack of photographs of himself and his wife Faith, one of her which is nearly pornographic. Nick perceives the photo as a sort of tease, a direct assault upon his sexual desires, and is disgusted by what he senses is the husband’s attempt to use his wife as a lure to bring him to their home. Doubting, however, what he has imagined, he soon forgets it until another photograph, even more pornographic than the first is delivered to him, whereupon he recognizes that he is being encouraged to think of Campbell’s wife as a sexual companion. He is quite obviously aroused by the possibility, but continues to delay his visit until it is finally clear he will not make good on his promise. Campbell is depressed and reveals that, after a fight with his wife, he has met a young man who “sucked him off.” Nick’s decision to take a job in another city drives his friend into further despair which reaches its peak on the day of Nick’s departure, when he reveals his love for Nick and attempts to plant a kiss upon his lips.

     Sorrentino presents a world, in short, where love is not only impermeable and fleeting but is impossible, a world where passion is unfulfilled and even a kiss is potentially a dangerous event. Perhaps none of Sorrentino’s short tales reveal these facts more thoroughly than my favorite story of the book, “The Moon in Its Flight.” Unlike so many of the later works, trapped in a post-Edenic reality, Sorrentino allows this story of a budding love affair between a nineteen-year-old young man and a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, Rebecca, to develop in a “summer romance,” when “The country bowled and spoke of Truman’s grit and spunk,” and the whole nation “softly slid off the edge of civilization.” As in Aberration of Starlight, the author here allows youthful clichés into his work, this time, not just for the purpose of artful satire, but as a support for the lovingly naiveté they reveal:

 

“The first time he touched her breast he cried in his shame and delight. Can this really have taken place in America? The trees rustled for him, as the rain did rain. One day, in New York, he bought her a silver ring, tiny perfect hearts in bas-relief running around it so that the point of one heart nestled in the cleft of another. Innocent symbol that tortured his blood.”

 

And later:

 

“Stars, my friend, great flashing stars fell on Alabama.

 

Reality, nonetheless, will not allow these lovers to exist; they have no place to which they might escape in order to fulfill their desires. In one of the most beautiful narrational intrusions he has uttered, Sorrentino cries out passionately (despite being equally mocking):

 

All you modern lovers, freed by Mick Jagger and the orgasm, give them, for Christ’s sake, for an hour, the use of your really terrific little apartment. They won’t smoke your marijuana nor disturb your Indiana graphics. They won’t borrow your Fanon or Cleaver or Barthelme or Vonnegut. They’ll make the bed before they leave. They whisper good night and dance in the dark.”

 

No apartment is available, and the couple, a mismatch when it comes to their families, drifts apart, only to meet again years later when they are both married to others. Only now can they finally culminate their love in sex, but despite the tears of joy and shame, they will never encounter one another again.

    I don’t think Sorrentino is arguing through these somewhat exasperatingly dreary tales that love is impossible. It is merely the false ideas and notions that surround the vision of oneself and the other that make it so difficult. It is clear that Sorrentino heartily longs for that “spotless” innocence of the past, but that he recognizes, just as surely, that that desire for “innocence” is the cause of the current emptiness and squalidness of his subjects’ lives. It is almost with a cry of despair that Sorrentino asks, “Who will remember // the past is past?” The furious frown he casts upon his characters can be seen as a stern warning to all that is doesn’t help a damn to invoke a childhood vision of innocence: life is not perfect, there is no “dream” to be found, no “rainbow” at its end, no coherent “America” even to be had. It is no wonder his narrators often struggle in their attempts to tell their stories and admit that something is missing in their revelations of the awful truths they find difficult to accept.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2006

Reprinted from Golden Handcuffs Review, No. 8 (Winter-Spring 2007).