Richard Hugo

In conversation, Richard Hugo left me reeling; a sense that I'd become involved with a lyric libretto. In discussion, his anecdotes - about flying in the War, or strange mountain towns in Italy - formed a circle one hadn't noticed was being made. Elements of the intangible world were things to hold in his hands.

from Death Of The Kapowsin Tavern

A damn shame. Now, when the night chill
of the lake gets in a troller's bones
where can the troller go for bad wine
washed down frantically with beer?
And when wise men are in style again
will one recount the two-mile glide of cranes
from dead pines or the nameless yellow
flowers thriving in the useless logs,
or dots of light all night about the far end
of the lake, the dawn arrival of the idiot
with catfish--most of all, above the lake
the temple and our sanctuary there?

Michael Pitt advances American film

Ham-headed marketeers titled Alice Denham's wonderful book disgracefully, but did not altogether obscure a wise remark she makes about the three male foundations of movies in America: Brando (brilliant) was stagy, while Dean (brilliant) and Clift (brilliant) played the character. Michael Pitt cradles a role in his hands and heart, then pours over it essences of Pitt, so that the acting craft is not quite the character and not the actor, but the character trying to conform itself to the contours of Michael Pitt. This vector of energy from the screenwriter's character to the actor reduces to almost nothing the bleak and crippling spectre of intentionality that has so plagued the colossal crusaders' march of American moviemaking.
(And isn't it just like the University of Toronto to take Alice seriously?)

Joyces

This tree in our backyard (in the hills and ravines of Ithaca): stillness.
Forthcoming, an iambic appreciation of Passchendaele and Robert Briffault.
Joyce Kilmer's living went STOP at the Battle of the Marne, in 1918.
There is imagining that at the moment the bullet vaporized his cranialia he wast rewriting the poem of arboria by which he was vaporized by rebuke and doggerel, perhaps to speak of a more carnal form of love; perhaps to think of its eighteen blackbirds.
Gulley Jimson's perishing blows into his wits a blood-pink vision of white walls, carrying into the darkness a last kiss of beginning.
Nora speaketh "yes," because by that point James Joyce had realized that the grammar of Dublin could not be spoken, as so he had hoped, as so in a way he had seen the ways in that city words work to build harmony.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Absinthe-equivalent 'sublime prose' is always so for the person partaking. If everyone spoke well, there would be eternal prosperity. But instead of ‘tell it slant’ and such beautiful expressions, we had ‘bombs away!’ and such nattering. Patrick Leigh Fermor was poised at the most elegant moment of travel writing. Disaffected at school, Fermor walked and pondered deeply from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933-1934. The Time of Gifts. Between the Woods and the Water.

Intramural romances spring up and prosper in places of learning, but some exotic psychological fluke directed my glance beyond the walls and, once more, out of bounds. It was a time when one falls in love hard and often, and my aesthetic notions, entirely formed by Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books, had settled years before on the long-necked, wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite girls in Henry Ford’s illustrations, interchangeable king’s daughters, ice-maidens, goose-girls and water spirits, and my latest wanderings had led me, at the end of a green and sweet-smelling cave set dimly with flowers and multicoloured fruit and vegetation – a greengrocer’s shop, that is, which she tended for her father – to the vision of just such a being. The effect was instantaneous. She was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty and I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent.

Fred Exley, three books

We must, of course, toss Jonathan Yardley our three-quarter wilted bouquet of roses for the only biography of Fred Exley (“Misfit”) we are ever likely to have. We shall assume that his research accurately corroborated the details of Exley’s life that Fred’s sister Frances provided, and that the University of Rochester archivists had cataloged and made available the whole of Exley’s papers. Points of discussion probably should not be known as disputations, but countless readings and long thoughts can’t have been worth nothing to me, and so I venture a quatrain of estimations.
1) Yardley’s adherence to his theorem that Exley wrote only one good book is tenacious to the point one might wonder what is the thing of which he is afraid of admitting to the discourse. At the end of a long telephone conversation with Frances, I hastened to add that I was sorry for us all, that Yardley had despoiled that opinion upon the books, for I was certain that the sorts of elegant phrasings that illuminate so much of A Fan’s Notes are evident enough in the second and third books of the trilogy. Frances somehow managed to suggest a sort of pity for me, that I had had to bear Yardley’s assertion that Pages From a Cold Island, and Last Notes From Home were essentially dismissible, since it seemed to cause me such pain; she assured me that I was not alone, and other reputable readers shared my view.
2) A Fan’s Notes’ previously-unsuspected surfacing is attributed by Yardley to little more than “reading well and practice,” which rather shortchanges a possible discussion that suggests sources more deeply rooted, as in the literature gene that may have coursed through his progenitors’ narratives, and in the innate perfect pitch for harmonies of content and expression that are more usually assigned to such freaks as Mozart. Critics and readers have remarked several themes that draw them to the book in ways that propose the allure of their souls’ magnetic north - by way of not saying cult - (most notably the way in which persons of a certain disposition can identify the inherent and awful way in which they are sanctioned forever to be marginal spectators and eternally immunized against virtuosity), but I read the books as truth and beauty crystallized in the harmony of the perfectly composed English sentence. That is to say: perfect. For we can admit that such a thing is possible in prose, just as no Ride is imaginable more fulfilling or more improved upon than in Die Walküre. Fred stops near the stone house in Talcottville and contemplates the eagle within, but the nature of that hallowing proximity is rather to the dictum from within the house drenching the scene of American writing: lucidity, force, ease.
3) Fiction and memoir: quoth the Yaryardles: ‘good writing doesn’t amount to much unless it says something.’ The latter books are evolved phrasings, usually matured, of the first. Those readers who have been conjugally suborned to paraphrasability and plotlines will feel comfortable with cliché and hackney coaches, but may have lost the ability to deduce the grandeur that derives from exquisite prose.
4) The wound. Remorse permeates many of Exley’s several broken moments, and all are sourced to his confidential original sin. This is Cass McIntyre. The books are retrospective. Time is indefinite. The Watertown lad had glimpsed what English could be. He then realized that Cass in her glory was no means of pertinent transport, and his life fulfilled in such romantic arms was rendered ever afterwards impossible.

The Richard Yates frieze

Many writers have shared my experience: within the first hour (quite literally true) at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, 1969-1971, I correctly foresaw that my mediocrity would be instantly swamped by the gifted and the skilled and the ambitious folk around me. Consequently I had two years to see what being an adequate critic was all about. In the second year I attended Richard Yates' fiction seminar; hours of smoking and coughing, but also the idea of literary reverence I have carried with me since. [Whither those in that room? David Milch, for one. And diverse narratives of grandeur and woe for the rest.] Gatsby was read. Discussions followed that were less tentative than they might have been. Then Yates' spoke, hushing the room with eloquence about the book he dared call the finest in all of literature (a phrase keenly avoided in that setting, where teaseling out the last bit of imperfection was the vernacular); he explained why he'd said that. I remember the room being especially stilled, as if we knew that Yates talking about Fitzgerald was the sort of moment of which we'd have too few in the years to come; now I see that we were witnessing a thing rarely seen: a man in love.
With which compare: attending a Susan Sontag lecture some years later. Four hundred greedies in room with three hundred seats. She first gained favor and applause by denigrating the term "post-modern." (Cheers! We confused and lazy are not alone!) Followed a long long train of coal cars, each a slightly nasty and enlisting remark, the sole purpose of which was to confect a room of temporary acolytes whose eager giggling would drown the truth that she didn't have much to say, really.

Richard Yates