Part 14 (2/2)

Don's solution? The magazine must stop ”walking softly and carrying a big bouquet.” Instead of interviewing artists and respectfully repeating their ”ideas,” Location Location should ”think up a net for trapping” should ”think up a net for trapping” unspoken unspoken ideas and ”establish a factory for extracting the oil from them.” Perhaps creating a ”lexicon of key ideas” would be a place to start, he said. Maybe this ”would [give us a] way of seeing what these ideas do, where they take the holder of the idea.” ideas and ”establish a factory for extracting the oil from them.” Perhaps creating a ”lexicon of key ideas” would be a place to start, he said. Maybe this ”would [give us a] way of seeing what these ideas do, where they take the holder of the idea.”

Then there was the ”literary problem”: Instead of having Bellow write about form in the novel, why can't we come out and say (if we believe it; I do) that American literature is best and most clearly seen in the extremes represented by Bellow on the one hand and William Burroughs on the other, and that neither of them can deliver a thoroughly satisfactory art-experience....In other words, we have to take a radical position with regard to American literature, admit its minor virtues and announce that it lacks necessity and point out its immense shortcomings.

Very few writers were ”capable of supplying” pieces of the caliber Don sought. The only remedy he could see was a ”more active role in the writing writing of the magazine on the part of the editors.” of the magazine on the part of the editors.”

”For I'm the Boy” appeared in Location Location's second issue. The story was Don's surest means to date of staking out a ”radical position” on American literature. In its formal concerns, it was literary criticism masked as fiction.

Don meant the story to stand on its own, but he was mindful that it would appear in Location Location among certain other pieces, and he tweaked it accordingly. In the magazine, it came after Saul Bellow's dismissal of formal experimentation and Don's ”After Joyce.” ”For I'm the Boy” rebuts Bellow and exemplifies the kind of fiction Don extolled in his essay. Its placement created the kind of fission Don hoped among certain other pieces, and he tweaked it accordingly. In the magazine, it came after Saul Bellow's dismissal of formal experimentation and Don's ”After Joyce.” ”For I'm the Boy” rebuts Bellow and exemplifies the kind of fiction Don extolled in his essay. Its placement created the kind of fission Don hoped Location Location would model. would model.

”For I'm the Boy” concerns a man named Bloomsbury, who has just watched his wife fly away at an airport. She has left him after his repeated flirtations with another woman. Bloomsbury has brought to the airport two ”friends of the family,” Huber and Whittle. Their presence prevents an intimate good-bye, and turns the couple's parting into an awkward public ritual. As the men drive home, Huber and Whittle ply Bloomsbury for details about his marriage-they want a story-but Bloomsbury refuses them.

Now and then, his mind drifts into reveries about his wife and the ”bicycle girl” he has courted: memories presented in mock-Joycean brogue, in contrast to the Jamesian formality of the narrative.

Formally, the story is a war of styles: rigorous content-based paragraphs versus freer-form pa.s.sages in stream-of-consciousness mode. This stylistic war continues the debate begun in the magazine's essays.

Don furnishes a ”ground of positions, att.i.tudes and allusions”-a ”cl.u.s.ter of a.s.sociations”-against which to enact the ”search for his own poetry.” Some of the allusions, such as the Joycean dialect and the name Bloomsbury, with its literary echoes, are obvious.

The story's t.i.tle is a line from the old Irish ballad ”Bold O'Donahue”: For I'm the boy to squeeze her, and I'm the boy to tease herI'm the boy that can please her, ach, and I'll tell you what I'll doI'll court her like an IrishmanWi' me brogue and blarney too is me planWith the holligan, rolligan, swolligan, molligan Bold O'Donahue.

Bloomsbury courts the bicycle girl ”like an Irishman”-but he and the girl are merely sites of linguistic cl.u.s.tering, drawing together high and low art, a popular old ballad and Joyce's Ulysses Ulysses. Art emerges as the story's central concern.

Of course, a gathering of allusions (Bloom buried) does not a story make. More is at stake here.

On closer reading, we discover that Kierkegaard provides one of the story's foundations. In Part Two of Repet.i.tion Repet.i.tion, a young man, devastated over a broken love affair, says no words can capture his ”soul anguish.” The young man can only use others' others' words to approximate his feelings: snippets of poems and quotations. words to approximate his feelings: snippets of poems and quotations.

Then he recalls the biblical story of Job's trials, and the torment caused by his friends, who demand explanations of his anguish.

Bloomsbury is a contemporary version of Job and and of Kierkegaard's young man. He recalls his broken love affairs in a pastiche of others' words (the Irish ballad, traces of Joyce). And like Job, he resists the ”friends of the family,” who seek an accounting of his failures. of Kierkegaard's young man. He recalls his broken love affairs in a pastiche of others' words (the Irish ballad, traces of Joyce). And like Job, he resists the ”friends of the family,” who seek an accounting of his failures.

Bloomsbury knows that words cannot ”explain” feeling. As Sartre wrote, responding to Kierkegaard, ”The only way to determine the value” of a feeling ”is, precisely, to perform an act which confirms and defines it...a mock feeling and a true feeling are almost indistinguishable.”

”Give us the feeling,” Bloomsbury's friends demand. He refuses, saying, ”We can...discuss the meaning but not the feeling.”

Here, the story's center is revealed: the key to the particular allusions its author had gathered. Why the name Bloomsbury? Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard, published the first British edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land The Waste Land, the second section of which, ”A Game of Chess,” is strongly echoed in Don's story in the domestic tension and the playful language.

Duncan Grant, a Bloomsbury artist, once said, ”The artist must...above all retain his private vision.” The character Bloomsbury seeks to do this, against mounting pressure from his friends. Once feelings are put into words, the feelings are betrayed; they have a.s.sumed a ritual posture for public consumption.

Which brings us to art, our most refined public expression of what is private, unreachable, unsayable. Finally, it fails-words cannot do the trick-but it is the best we have: a snippet here, a snippet there.

Rather than content content-an explanation of something-art's value lies in the fact that it offers forms forms for our experiences. for our experiences.

And yet we live in a world that demands explanations. Frustrated (and shaken by their own romantic failings), Bloomsbury's friends beat him with fists, a bottle, and a tire iron until ”at length the hidden feeling emerged, in the form of salt from [Bloomsbury's] eyes and black blood from his ears, and from his mouth, all sorts of words.”

As he had done in ”The Darling Duckling at School,” Don mined his private life to give the story emotional depth. The average reader does not know, and does not need to know, that Don was thinking of his first wife when Bloomsbury's wife rebuffs him with Mallarme. Nor does the average reader know, or need to know, that Don's second marriage was failing as he wrote the story. Helen had taken up flying. Bloomsbury muses, ”[A]fter so many years one could still be surprised by a flyaway wife.”

Still, these hidden ”cl.u.s.ters” lend the story pathos, darkening its tone.

Finally, Don's quarrel with Saul Bellow energizes the piece. Don had in mind not only Bellow's essay in Location Location but also a much-discussed article from five years earlier, ”Deep Readers of the World, Beware,” published in but also a much-discussed article from five years earlier, ”Deep Readers of the World, Beware,” published in The New York Times Book Review The New York Times Book Review. In the article, Bellow mocked existential novelists (taking a swipe at Joyce along the way). He said that in their attempts to be ”deep,” existentialist writers ”contrive somehow to avoid” feelings in their work. They prefer ”meaning to feeling.”

When Bloomsbury tells his friends, ”We can...discuss the meaning but not the feeling,” Don offered Bellow his response.

In the end, ”For I'm the Boy” does not settle at the level of literary debate. Its author celebrates life, as Beckett does, with humor and odd moments of joy: ”Once in a movie house Bloomsbury recalled Tuesday Weld had suddenly turned on the screen, looked him full in the face, and said: You are a good man. You are good, good, good.” Though this memory does not help him escape his friends' violence, he recalls that the ”situation [was] dear to him,” and that he had ”walked out of the theater, gratification singing in his heart.” In Don's fiction, a fine line always exists between irony and genuine sentiment (”a mock feeling and a true feeling are almost indistinguishable”), but the ambiguity, too, is one of life's deep pleasures.

”For I'm the Boy”-so far, Don's most complex demonstration of a radical new fiction-found freshness in paths Joyce had scouted, and showed writers where they might go after Joyce. Nothing like it had ever appeared in American literature.

27.

COME BACK, DR. CALIGARI.

Since childhood, and as a newspaper arts reviewer, Don had been an inveterate moviegoer. Manhattan was movie theaterrich: Among them were the Thalia on the Upper West Side, with its repertory program; the Paris, in Midtown, with lush blue velvet walls; Cinema 1 and 2, across the street from Bloomingdale's; the Beekman, with sleek curtains that opened in a whisper before each feature; the Bleecker Street Cinema, with its resident cat, Breathless, named after the G.o.dard film; and in the Village, the 8th Street Playhouse, located next to the Electric Ladyland recording studios, where Jimi Hendrix did his thing.

In 1929, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu Nosferatu had its American premiere at the 8th Street Playhouse, although the theater was then called the Film Guild Cinema. In the early sixties, the vampire cla.s.sic and other gems of the silent era, surrealist masterpieces such as had its American premiere at the 8th Street Playhouse, although the theater was then called the Film Guild Cinema. In the early sixties, the vampire cla.s.sic and other gems of the silent era, surrealist masterpieces such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, played regularly in Chelsea bas.e.m.e.nts on rickety Bell & Howell projectors, too bright and p.r.o.ne to overheating, rented by impromptu film clubs. The old movies were also screened at the 92nd Street Y, but Don did not have to go there or seek out-of-the-way cubbyholes to watch amazing films. The French New Wave had hit, and New York's screens celebrated the precocious auteurs. As Phillip Lopate has written, ”To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to partic.i.p.ate in what felt like an international youth movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in Paris, London and Rome, where the cinema had moved, for a brief historical moment, to the center of intellectual discourse, in the twilight of existentialism and before the onslaught of structuralism.”

Unique rituals characterized New York's rather insular cinema society. Rudy Franchi, former program director of the Bleecker Street Cinema, remembers that Breathless, the house cat, ”a jet black smallish creature,” would often ”escape from the office area and start to climb the movie screen.” He says, ”I would sometimes get a buzz on the house phone from the projection booth with the terse message 'cat's on the screen.' ” The audience cheered for Breathless to make it to the top, but he never got there before Franchi pulled him down.

The theater sold copies of Cahiers du Cinema Cahiers du Cinema and was ”fanatical about proper projection and proper screen ratio,” Franchi says. and was ”fanatical about proper projection and proper screen ratio,” Franchi says.

For Don, an added draw of the art-house theaters was their architecture. The tilted gla.s.s facade, horizontal orientation, and ribboned windows of the Beekman gave it a touch of the International Style. The auditorium of the Thalia, which was located on West Ninety-fifth Street, sloped upward upward toward the screen. The novelty of this wore off when a tall person sat in front of you. toward the screen. The novelty of this wore off when a tall person sat in front of you.

In the early 1960s, one of the pleasures of many foreign films was their naughtiness, as appealing to cinema buffs as what Lopate has called the movies' ”existential self-pity.” (”Unless I am mistaken,” he wrote, ”suicide was in the air, in the cinematic culture of the early sixties.”) Films like Boccaccio '70 Boccaccio '70, in which a voluptuous woman on a poster comes to life and seduces a puritanical soul (a story sure to lure pale, solitary moviegoers) stirred controversy among those who also worked to ban books such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer Tropic of Cancer.

Scandals were fun, but the richest pleasure was finding a film before it got much press; a private discovery-best seen during an afternoon matinee in a nearly empty auditorium.

Many writers indulged in the guilty joy of sneaking off during the day to catch a flick. Arthur Miller lived just three blocks from the Beekman. George Plimpton also lived nearby, editing The Paris Review The Paris Review in his apartment. Sometimes the two could be seen, each sitting alone, watching an early-bird show. in his apartment. Sometimes the two could be seen, each sitting alone, watching an early-bird show.

In his first two years in New York, Don saw premieres of films by Fellini, Truffaut, G.o.dard, Jean Renoir, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni's breakthrough feature, L'Avventura L'Avventura, opened at the Beekman the year before Don arrived in Manhattan. In September 1963, the first New York Film Festival was held in Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall. Among other films, the festival screened Yasujiro Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon An Autumn Afternoon, Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel The Exterminating Angel, and Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water Knife in the Water.

But it was Antonioni whom everyone kept talking about. More than anyone else at the time (at least on a commercial scale), he took advantage of what his medium had to offer, much the way Jackson Pollock had privileged the drip and de Kooning the brush stroke on canvas. Antonioni's films did what only only films could do. He had a ”way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape,” Lopate wrote. ”With his detachment from the human drama and his tactful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced [viewers] to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique.” films could do. He had a ”way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape,” Lopate wrote. ”With his detachment from the human drama and his tactful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced [viewers] to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique.”

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