In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) (11 page)

I told her, then, of my reading the landscape the way I read the sky when I was a child. Stuck with
logos
from the start, that was me. The world as untranslatable language.

We live in the midst of a black plague, a plague of hatred. This book is an antidote to the epidemic affecting us. Surrealism as a cure for nausea.
The Suicide Academy
is ultimately the book of a poet, which means he flies at an altitude above the storms of destruction, above neutrality, above indifference, and therefore beyond death.

A review of
Miss Macintosh, My Darling,
by Marguerite Young, in
Open City,
Los Angeles, 1 May 1968.

When a writer decides to give us a complete universe, all that he has explored and discovered, it is necessarily vast. No one ever questions the expanse of the ocean, or the size of a mountain. The key to the enjoyment of this amazing book is to abandon one’s self to the detours, wanderings, elliptical and tangential journeys, accepting in return miraculous surprises. This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: “Life is a dream.”

The necessity for the cellular expansion of the book lies in Marguerite Young’s own words: “I just tried to leave pebbles along the road so that no one could get lost.” For the perilous exploration of illusion and reality, the author’s feeling is that if one is to follow the full swelling of the wave of imagination, one must bring back to the shore the wave which carried him. It is in the fullness and completeness of the motion that one achieves understanding.

That is why she is able to sustain, all through, both the rich deep tone and powerful rhythm of the book. This is a feat of patience, accomplished by weaving each connecting cell, with unbroken bridges, from word to word, image to image, phrase to phrase. She is an acrobat of space and symbol but she gives her readers a safety net.

Although she accomplishes for native American folklore the same immortality of the myth that Joyce accomplished for Ireland’s, Joyce was not her inspiration. Her inspiration was America, her middlewestem, down-to-earth America with its powerful orbital dreamers so rarely portrayed, born on native soil, American as Joyce’s characters are Irish, with the American sense of high comedy, extravagance and vividness: the bus driver, the suffragette, the old maid, the composer of unwritten music, the clam digger, the dead gambler, the waitress, the featherweight champion, the hangman, the detective, the stone breaker, the messenger pigeon, the frog, the moose.

The work has a disappearing shore line. It is a submarine world, geographically situated in the unconscious and in the night. “The sea is not harmful if you sleep under it, not over it, best place for keeping pearls,” says one of her characters.

The numerous characters enter one’s own stream of consciousness and cannot be erased because they are part of the American psyche, a psyche, as Marguerite Young says, capable of the wildest fantasy. They are listed only in the Blue Book of the Uncommon. Marguerite Young is an aristocrat among writers, perhaps the precursor of a new era in American literature.

The book is also a canto to obsession. Life is filled with repetitions culminating in variations which indicate the subtlety of man’s reactions to experience.

The characters are tangible, accessible, familiar. But it is the nature of their experience which Marguerite Young questions, its sediments, its echoes and reflections. What is reality? Deep within us it is as elusive as a dream, and we are not sure of anything that happened.

A review of
Angel in the Forest,
by Marguerite Young, in the
Los Angeles Times,
8 May 1966.

For those who had the unique experience of reading Marguerite Young’s
Miss Macintosh, My Darling,
her
Angel in the Forest,
published twenty years earlier, will be a prelude to the vaster work concerned with the exploration of reality and illusion. In
Miss Macintosh, My Darling,
illusion stems from the opium dreams of the mother which had to be disentangled before the narrator could reach the end and purpose of her quest. This is a work of fiction.
Angel in the Forest
is a work of history. It deals with the creation of Utopia, which was America’s first illusion. This is the story of Father Rapp and Robert Owen’s two experiments in social science carried out in Indiana in the nineteenth century. The application of this theme to present-day problems makes it seem contemporary. When a poet chooses to write history, facts gain in power and in dimensions. Marguerite Young is a meticulous scholar, but she illumines every description and every character with the laser light of significance. Her facts radiate wit and irony and are incarnated in human beings.

“Question—what is the nature of experience—what dream among dreams is reality?”

The place, New Harmony, is resurrected as if it had never faded. The title refers to giant footprints, said to have been those of an angel, on a stone which a humble stonecutter saved from total obliteration (or perhaps carved upon the stone himself?). Indiana is Marguerite Young’s native land. With a few vivid lines she can summon up hundreds of its inhabitants, with their human foibles, idiosyncrasies, fallibilities, to show how they sabotage their own idealistic conceptions.

Mr. Pears, the bookkeeper dismissed for an error: “True he had drunk a little on the side now and then, but not enough to cause the dancing of arithmetic.” Mrs. Pears, who thought “nothing so bad as despotism which pretends to be democracy.” Together they show “a gradual waning of their hope for improvement at New Harmony.” Human beings’ own individual fantasies, hungers, obsessions, habits, defeat their own illusions. “Who, finally, was happy in New Harmony, a scene of conflict between individual and still-born collectivism?”

When the book was first printed, during a paper shortage, too few people were privileged to read it. It contains the seeds of the major work to which Marguerite Young gave the next seventeen years. History, she proved, is an aggregate of fictions, and she was to enter totally into the world of fiction where she found many of the sources of mysterious failures.

“William Taylor, in view of his belief in the relativism and subjectivism of happiness, and his distrust of any value but pleasure, proposed that the Owenites gathered around him should hold a funeral for the science of society, all merry drunks to be the mourners.
To build a coffin for the
idea of all mankind, a featureless body, they worked as never before in the whole history of Utopia
.”

The relation of this experiment to the present shows its timelessness. It was necessary to bring out of the oceanic depths of the subconscious the sorcerer’s apprentices who undermined all social experiments. The author’s two books invite us to sit at a giant conference table and parley with them. This conference table is also a banquet table, serving in crystalline style characters whose footprints to our own door Marguerite Young has carved.

From
Perspectives of New Music,
Princeton University Press, Spring Summer 1966.

To recognize the unique value of a man and an artist, most people wait for the perspective of distance and time. But those friends of Edgar Varèse who were aware of how strikingly the personality of the man and his music matched each other, had a more immediate clue to his true stature and unique place in the history of music. He was a man who lived in a vast universe, and because of the height of his antennae he could encompass past, present, and future. I could feel this each time I rang the bell of his home and he opened the door, for if he received me with the warmth he showed to all his friends, at the same time I could hear all around him and flowing out of the house an ocean of sound not created for one person, one room, one house, one street, one city, or one country, but for the cosmos. His large, vivid, blue-green eyes flashed not only with the pleasure of recognition but with a signal welcoming me into a universe of new vibrations, new tones, new effects, new ranges, in which he himself was completely immersed. He led me into his workroom. The piano took most of the space, and on the music stand there was always a piece of musical notations. They were in a state of revision resembling a collage: all fragments, which he had arranged and rearranged and displaced until they achieved a towering construction. I always looked with delight at these fragments, which were also tacked on the board above his worktable and on the walls, because they expressed the very essence of his work and character: they were in a state of flux, mobility, flexibility, always ready to fly into a new metamorphosis, free, obeying no monotonous sequence or order except his own. The tape recorder would be on high volume for open spaces. He wanted one possessed by, absorbed into, its oceanic waves and rhythms. Edgar Varèse would demonstrate a new bell, a new object capable of giving forth a new tonality, new nuance. He was in love with his materials, with an indefatigable curiosity. In his workroom one became another instrument, a container, enclosed in his orbital flights into sound.

When we climbed the small stairway to the living room and dining room to join other friends, greeted by his gentle and gracious wife, Louise, Varèse the composer became Varèse the conversationalist. He radiated in company, he was eloquent, satirical, and witty. There was a harmony between his work and his talk. He had contempt only for clichés in music or in thought. His revolt against the cliché never ceased. He used vivid, pungent language. He retained the revolutionary boldness of youth, but always directed by his intelligence and discrimination, never blind or inaccurate. He never destroyed anything but mediocrity, hypocrisy, and false values. He attacked only what deserved to be attacked, and never in personal, petty or blind anger, as is practiced by some artists today.

Speaking once of an unsavory political character he said, “A faire vomir une bolte a ordure.”

His wars were on a high level; they were waged against the men who always stood in the way of vast original projects because they could neither perceive them nor control them.

The last talk we had together was about the irony of the foundations and universities not giving him a complete electronic workshop to work with. He was filled with concepts he could not carry out for lack of the necessary facilities. He needed the machines which were so easily entrusted to young, unformed musicians. He needed a laboratory for exploration into future sounds. Most of these young men could not feed the machines, only run them, and Varèse could have fed them with endless volcanic richness.

Many musical experts will write about what Varèse composed. I would like to stress what he was not allowed to create, because every artist dreams of being emptied of all his riches before he dies, and when he leaves us, carrying into oblivion untapped treasures, it should arouse our sense of guilt. Varèse knew the blindness which besets most people in the presence of creative giants. I told him the story of a dinner I had attended for members of a famous corporation set up to produce new inventions. After moulding their men to standard forms, disciplining them, inhibiting them, they were trying to find a way to get spontaneous, creative ideas out of them. The men, reduced to automatons, sat at a conference table and someone shouted at them, “Don’t think, say the first thing which comes to your mind, anything,” and this grotesque effort even had a technical name. Naturally, nothing could come from men who had long ago lost their power to create. I suggested they call in the artists I knew who were overfull of ideas, designs, etc. There was a silence. “Oh, yes, we know,” they said, “you mean those mad geniuses who will not wear a clean shirt and a tie, will not come in on time and
cannot be controlled.”
“Controlled” was the revealing word. In music too, everyone turned to the men who could be controlled—disciples, imitators, derivatives. They never dared to consult the source from which creation and invention issued like some great phenomenon of nature, the highest waterfalls, the highest mountains, the deepest canyons, the bottomless lakes. Every artist has known this isolation in which giants are left as if they were dangerous creatures. A more familiar, homelier connection could be made with the innocuous, and the hack printer was easier to deal with than the original painter. It would have required a critic, a listener, a conductor, or a foundation director of equal stature to approach the artist who is, by natural rights of the creator, the dictator in his own province. How frightened we are of a revolutionary force in full eruption.

Varèse was merciless towards the timid, the flabby, and the impotent. He would say: “They have handed the whole business to mechanics. The new machines need composers who can nourish them.” This was the substance of our last talk. It was the first time I noticed that at eighty-one he stooped, but it was from illness. He was wise enough to know men’s fears. He knew they would approach him when they were no longer in danger of being swept into the resonant coils of his sound flights. He is now an archetype, whose potentials were not exploited by the world, but what he left belongs to the same vast cosmology which science is seeking to charter. For every new discovery we need new sounds, and Varèse heard them before the undiscovered spaces were reached. He said gently once: “There is no avant garde. There are only people who are a little late.”

Light travels faster than sound, but in the case of Varèse, sound travelled much faster.

A review of
At a Journal Workshop: The Basic Text and Guide for Using the Intensive Journal,
by Ira Progoff, in the
Los Angeles Times,
19 October 1975.