The Arcadia in which I folded into my warm and willing arms the unearthing bloom of mescaline and Eros and transfiguring language was a small leafy green village in upstate New York, 1965-1969, yclept Geneseo. It was peopled by numerous wiggling, unidentified phantoms, and by my particular band of allies, a variety of hot house flowers born months after the Second World War, picking up the flavor of the Beats, observing the inchoate affectations of the hippies, and foretasting the dark age of morbid untime that characterized the 1970s, and then the Eighties. And then the decade preceding the millennium, followed by the ten years that found themselves both flatulent and anesthetized subsequent to the millennium.
Before the freeze at Kent State, among us it was compulsory to carry around certain books (though not in backpacks – then how? and ourselves, were we completely unhydrated?). These were to show themselves to be most-evidently outside the curriculum, cool, and to possess or at least imply the grandest (though putative) transpondences. Chief among these were McLuhan, Malcolm X, CALL IT SLEEP, and Robert E. Morrison’s PRIMITIVE EXISTENTIALISM. But it had not been evident to us that professors of literature also carried (in briefcases) certain books from which their serial years of library scholarship precluded a native, and personal, and true excitement. Professor Dante Thomas (yclept, dismayingly, by his colleagues, “Dan,”) was enthralled by and occasionally mentioned Christina Stead’s THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN. That novel had appeared in 1940 and had immediately hidden itself under the bushes of backwaters and remaindered lists. But: in 1955/1965 Randall Jarrell wrote an essay and introduction: Heinrich Schliemann! Lord Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin! Howard Carter!
I had not known that such other deaths had undone so many books I now must remember with diminished affection.
The secret heart of greatness of such books obscured and created my pesky wondering – before I had recognized it as such – about where the novel can be said to be truly located.
It gives me more satisfaction than perhaps it should that I found that this core-place was where I first thought it was, and where any author should put it: in the gently swaying tone that emits from the admixture of the dimmest evocations of diction and lexicography, the heartbeat rhythm of nerves and blood in harmonic bop dancing, and the lullabification effected by senses swooned in the jazzing of bits of many beauties. People fall off bridges or espy assurance in the face of their beloved or behated, but those storylines have never moved me, or ever seemed anything but scriptwriting (monkey-with-typewriter). Flames and bits of light and distant thunders accrue, in paragraphs and sentences and chapters, until half-reading and half-sleeping you feel what Stead was up to, and it rests in your hand like a weightsome brass charm, the thing she has confected: the location of any group’s adhesion is the Apache language. Persons belonging to the one group presented in the book will go on each to join another cluster, or even a sweep of bands, but an author has devised a bit of craft to fix in time and tongue the moving x-ray he or she will title and proffer for kin-readers. The motif-strains of Stead’s literary arrangement dominate characterization, eventualities, time, and bookish notions of actually existing, so beautifully and thoroughly, that one thinks of the most elegant writers of all, recalling that their brilliance usually resides in digressions and an attribution of lyricism. Eschewing the like of Pollitry is an unbreakable code described as if it were our pre-freudian memory, that occurred usually before the age of four, as oceanic feelings of immensity, planets coming together slowly, suppressing all the familiar senses: the oceania of life and death described by oneself and simultaneously by proxy.
Lyricism is the infinite chord left over from the making of the stars. We rhyme with Stardust, a song composed by Hoagy Carmichael with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. As Burgess says in a foreword to TITUS GROAN: context is everything.
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